74. Amazing Effect of Red Light on Metabolic Health & Mitochondria | Glen Jeffrey, PhD

This groundbreaking interview we discuss the remarkable finding that red light significantly lowers blood glucose level in humans by stimulating mitochondrial function, and the implications this has for individual and global health.

Glen Geffrey, PhD is a Professor of Neuroscience at University College, London researching the effects of light on biology and mitochondria in animal models and humans. 

He is a close collaborator with previous podcast guest and Optics engineer Scott Zimmerman and astronomer & astrophysicist Bob Fosbury, all of whom are raising awareness of infrared light deficiency & blue light excess of modern indoor environments.

Read the publication 'Light stimulation of mitochondria reduces blood glucose levels' 
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38378043/

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#redlight #photobiomodulation #diabetes

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

okay, welcome back to the regenerative health podcast. Today is a very special episode. I'm joined by professor glenn jeffrey, who is a professor of neuroscience at the university of college london in the uk. Now we're going to talk about a range of topics, but Professor Jeffrey was one of the authors on a very, very exciting randomized control trial that showed the profound effect of red light in lowering blood glucose and, as someone who's interested in metabolic health and improving everyone's metabolic health, I think this is an absolutely pivotal trial. So, professor Jeffrey, thank you for joining me on the podcast.

Speaker 2: 0:45

Pleasure.

Speaker 1: 0:47

So tell us about your background briefly and how you got here.

Speaker 2: 0:52

Okay, my first degree was in experimental psychology, at a time when experimental psychology was basically physiology and maths and not much else, but it had a big neuroscience bend and I did that at University of Sussex. Then I did a doctorate at Oxford in neuroscience and postdoc in Chicago and then after that long period in Oxford, before coming to University College London where I've spent the majority of my professional career.

Speaker 1: 1:25

Great, and let's just launch straight into this trial that you've done that I alluded to earlier. What did you do to these subjects and what was the finding?

Speaker 2: 1:54

Okay. So the core of my research is really mitochondria. You know, mitochondria provide the energy for all the things you do in life and mitochondria they make fuel, which is called ATP, and they make your body weight in fuel every day. So it's a massive, massive machine and we know that we can influence mitochondria to slow them down or speed them up. But the critical thing is, if you speed them up, they need fuel themselves and their fuel is sugar, sugar and oxygen. So if we work mitochondria hard, which we can do with lights they draw more sugar from your blood.

Speaker 2: 2:24

So we've been working on light and mitochondria for ages, and actually it was a colleague of mine, mike Pounder, said when we were driving to a meeting. He said you know, if we shine red light onto people and make their mitochondria work harder, we should lower their blood sugars. And it was so obvious that we hadn't thought about it. So, to be honest, what we did first? We did exactly that experiment with bees, because bees are cheap and easy to organize and we got a really, really super good result. You shine red light on a bee and its blood glucose goes down.

Speaker 2: 2:59

So we did exactly the same on a group of subjects healthy subjects. We took them and we gave them a standard blood glucose tolerance test. And that is where you drink a disgusting amount of glucose, really horrible. That sends your blood glucose up. And then we prick your finger every few minutes and test your blood glucose. It's a super, super simple experiment test your blood glucose. It's a super, super simple experiment. So we did the controls first and we found that their blood glucose peaked at about oh, around an hour after they drank the glucose. And then, in the experimental subjects, we gave them a burst of red light and then we initiate the experiment, got them to drink the glucose, prick their fingers and we found that their blood glucose levels just didn't peak in the same way. They were significantly reduced. So we worked their mitochondria really hard. The mitochondria pulled that glucose, that excess glucose, out of your blood, and so we created a situation in which we lowered blood glucose. Conceptually it's very, very simple, and the experiment was pretty simple as well.

Speaker 1: 4:12

And you measured carbon dioxide, and that is, I think, an important point to make. Can you explain the purposes of that and what you found?

Speaker 2: 4:20

Yes. So mitochondria when they're working, they need glucose and they need oxygen. If you're burning oxygen, you're producing more carbon dioxide. So these poor people who we sat down, forced them to drink a lot of sugar water, pricked their finger every few minutes. We also put a tube up their nose and we measured the amount of CO2 they produced and the amount of carbon dioxide they produced went up, and when we gave them a burst of red light, as with the blood sugars, we corrected the situation. So we had two independent metrics and I should say we did this study between an experimental group and a control group that weren't exposed, but then the experimental group. We went back to them and we retested them without the red light. So we actually got two facets to it and the data were very firm, rock solid. I was extremely pleased rock solid.

Speaker 1: 5:27

I was extremely pleased. This is so exciting to me because the clinical implication of, or the clinical focus of, improving metabolic health in lifestyle medicine is very much focused on diet. It's low carbohydrate, carnivore diet, which is an effective intervention. But and there is no talk about light from those quarters, whereas previous guests that I've had on this podcast, particularly Dr Jack Cruz, has been saying for quite a long time that it's actually the light that is the most important factor in affecting metabolism via pathways such as this. So can you give us an idea about the magnitude of that blood glucose decrease, just so that we can get an idea.

Speaker 2: 6:11

It varied between people, but it was around 17%. I mean, you know, that's not marginal. And I would add on to this we haven't published this yet, but we're three-quarters of the way through a study on diabetic people with type 2 diabetes. We've got exactly the same result, absolutely the same result. So, um, we wanted to pilot it in normal subjects first, because it was easier to get the ethics and we had people all around us but um, it's, this is translatable.

Speaker 2: 6:42

um, it is, it is is translatable, it is fully translatable. There are a number of other things around this domain that are worth paying attention to. So if you look at epidemiological studies, you find that people who spend much more time in daylight have much better regulation of their blood glucose than people who spend their time in an office environment. Than people who spend their time in an office environment.

Speaker 2: 7:05

Light is key because it's the spectrum of light. So we give red light, we work mitochondria harder. They eat glucose. We can slow mitochondria down as well. So if we give blue light, that slows mitochondria down, down. And then when we do a blood glucose test we haven't done this on humans, we've done it on animals um, we give them blue light, we give them a blood glucose test and their blood glucose peaks very high.

Speaker 2: 7:36

So light is influencing metabolism systemically, and one of the issues we have in society now is that we're spending a lot of time indoors. We're also spending a lot of time under LED lighting, and LED lighting it may not be obvious to people when they look at it has a very big blue component and no red component whatsoever. So if you go out in daylight, there is actually a natural balance between blue and red, although you can't see most of the red because it's beyond your region of sensitivity. Our vision really stops around 750 nanometers when we're on the border of infrared. But infrared light goes on to 2,000, 2,500 nanometers and you can't see it. But it's having a big effect on your metabolism.

Speaker 1: 8:29

So you drag people indoors, you change their lighting and metabolism shifts, and that is only just beginning to be appreciated topic I've talked about at length on my podcast, which is this modern environment of these hermetically sealed indoor chambers, uh with uh, infrared blocking glass. So, and we've, we've subtracted the entire natural um emf spectrum, solar emf spectrum, and then put in a non-native emf spectrum which is isolated blue, completely devoidoid of UV and infrared, and then you know watch what happens. I mean, it's like a giant experiment really, isn't it?

Speaker 2: 9:10

Yeah, completely. It must have been about a year and a half ago. All of us were kind of in our houses getting ready to come to work. It's about 7.30 in the morning.

Speaker 2: 9:20

We all tend to listen to BBC News and someone came on public health inspector, I think, one of the big cities and he was talking about the nation and its state of public health and he was going yeah, we're on top of this. And he ended it and he had a pause and he said there's something I don't understand. None of the public health inspectors understand. There's something unhealthy about the the environment in the office and we don't know what it is. And I think, and I think we all rushed into work.

Speaker 2: 9:55

Hey, did you hear that podcast? Did you hear that on the news? Yeah, we all. Yeah, yeah, and the trouble is we all got so excited about it we forgot the bloke's name. Um, but the point was very clear and it's not surprising and I must say, as a scientist, the one group of people who are walking through the door in a very open-minded manner are the architects and the lighting engineers. So you know, some major architects foster associates. They make massive buildings in glass. The glass doesn't let any infrared light through and all the lighting is LED. You could describe that as a killer environment metabolically, really really poor.

Speaker 1: 10:39

Well, we know that shift work is a carcinogenic risk, it's a workplace hazard, it increases risks of hormone sensitive cancers, um, breast, prostate, um, etc. And and that is a light at night phenomenon and that's because we're, in part, extinguishing melatonin production and that has a profound, um protective and anti-cancer effect. Yeah so, and it makes, uh, it's obvious to me, and that a light, artificial light during the day is similarly creating a workplace hazard for probably a billion people or more.

Speaker 2: 11:13

Yeah. So one thing that's quite interesting is one of my colleagues, bob Fosbury, who actually is very good at coming up with phrases that kind of capture it all, and he describes the current situation as a modern-day case of scurvy. Now, in the case of scurvy, which was killer, sailors would go to sea and they had no vitamin C and the consequence something was taken away from them. So they were crunching apples and whatever when they were on land and then they went to sea and, of course, all the fruit went rotten and they had no vitamin C c. Something was taken away from them. And that is very similar to what what's happening with light someone has taken away the infrared.

Speaker 2: 11:53

Um, you know, scott zimmerman said someone's robbed it yeah um, and, and they didn't have a right to do that, and I think that's that's absolutely right. You know, something has been taken away from us millions of years. You've evolved over, you know, you've evolved in sunlight, and it's it's established our immunity, it's established our metabolism. And then, in the late 1990s, the led was invented and no one realized the unbelievable effect that that potentially could have.

Speaker 1: 12:27

And I'm going to say something that might be a bit controversial, but your government is actually in part responsible for this metabolic consequences of blue light because they are mandating. They have mandated the removal of halogen, the so-called thermal lighting, which has both visible and non-visible spectrum, because we did have, in days of incandescence and halogens, a degree of infrared, so we were getting some of this balance between blue visible and the longer wavelength visible and non-visible light. But since your government decided it was a good idea to make every last saving of energy and mandate this lumens per watt requirement, now all these workplaces are now creating these diabetic light environments.

Speaker 2: 13:15

You're not being controversial. You're stating a fact and I'm 100% behind you. The American government is going exactly the same way. There's a few characters in America who are putting up a fight about this, but we're going to lose it as we've lost it here. The question is can we get it back so I can still buy incandescent lights and in my office I'm sitting around here in incandescent lights, my lab's in incandescent lights, incandescent lights, my, my lab sitting incandescent lights. Um, they're going to get harder to get. Is it the answer?

Speaker 2: 13:50

the answer is simple change the light bulb, yeah, you know. Or even better, much better, go outside. Yeah, just go outside. Another thing that people don't appreciate is that greenery, foliage, leaves, reflect infrared. No leaf will absorb infrared because the plant will get hot. When you touch a plant, it's not hot. So, as bob fosbury says, go for a walk in the park and sit under a tree and you're getting a maximum amount of infrared light, and it's it's natural infrared light and it's where you evolved, and that is terribly important. If we look at the incidences of certain um, neurodegenerative diseases, which is what we're facing an explosion of in terms of an aging population, what do we do with people that have neurodegenerative diseases? We tend to put them into homes, where you know they sit for, because it's very expensive keeping people in a home, so no one's wheeling you in and out and making sure that you're getting daylight and we're just making the situation worse. Aging populations, increasing neurodegenerative and metabolic diseases it's not a good prospect. I'm close to retirement age. It worries me.

Speaker 1: 15:03

Yeah, it's a massive problem and the point about the infrared light being concentrated by leaves and the effect of chlorophyll to essentially reflect those longer wavelengths. Isaac Newton sat under an apple tree when he had, I believe, one of his brightest ideas. So there's something to it and we haven't mentioned it. But one of the mechanisms by which infrared light is having an effect beneficial effect is through the production of melatonin in the mitochondria, and that is the work of Scott Zimmerman and Russell Ryder, and I think that's a paradigm shift in understanding that it's not actually the pineal gland that is pumping out most of the melatonin in the body. It's actually during the day, in all your cells on exposure to infrared light.

Speaker 2: 15:49

Yeah, and what a shock. That paper was An absolute shock. It can't be a pineal gland because you know, as you age, your pineal gland tends to calcify anyway. You use it as a landmark, sometimes on an x-ray. So the idea that your mitochondria are packed with melatonin is a game changer. Why is it there? What is it doing? We think it's probably buffering and protecting, but it's in the cell, it's not floating around and it's not coming from the brain. That is a very, very important paper. It shocked us in the field.

Speaker 1: 16:30

I don't think it sunk in with people, really no, I was going to make that exact point, glenn, which is I don't think people have realized the implication of that paper. It's called Melatonin and the Optics of the Human Body. It's like one of those albums the music albums that gets released and no one really realized it, and then, two decades later, everyone starts playing it. Uh, that's how, how important it is, I think yeah, I, I completely agree it's going to take.

Speaker 2: 16:57

When you come out with a paper that doesn't fit with the, the current kind of philosophy of science, it gets shelved. Later on people start to realize actually there's something in this and it just doesn't fit with paradigms at the moment. So one of the interesting things about paradigms is that all the architects who are they're turning around the corner and they're really listening, but they're all obsessed with the circadian lighting. Yes, you know that circadian lighting is significant and it is important, but the magnitude of the circadian lighting and the magnitude of the other end of the spectrum and what they're doing to the human body there's a big difference between the two there is very big, there is, and I I spoke, sorry, just to mention quickly.

Speaker 1: 17:42

I spoke to dr dr martin moreed, who is a big researcher in the circadian field, and he has innovated visible lights that lack a melanopic stimulation. So they are of benefit from a circadian point of view, but they they aren't adding in any infrared and and I I mentioned that to him I think that that's the missing. That's the missing piece for any kind of full spectrum lighting is we need to be having some degree of infrared added back in as well.

Speaker 2: 18:08

Yeah, and the architects are not very happy and the lighting engineers are not very happy about the circadian bit, because I'm not a lighting engineer. Apparently, to get these right wavelengths of blue light in actually involves quite a bit of work. So when they come to me and they say, well, you know how much work is it to make the changes you want, I say go to Ikea, buy a cheap angle poised lamp, you know for $15, and screw in an incandescent light bulb. You don't have to do anything else, you really don't. And they find that quite easy to live with. I'm also trying to say to them you've got to think about changing your glass. In big buildings all the glass is infrared blocking. Can we find a compromise here? Because you need to block the infrared if you're going to control the temperature in the environment.

Speaker 2: 18:59

But you know we've been talking to some very big architect companies and they're listening. They're thinking how can we do this? Can we use the light that's coming in in the infrared range? Can we recycle that so that we can use that in heating? Can we use it in something else? They're a lot more. They're quite creative in their thought processes. Because the other thing about the architects and the lighting engineers, which you know forces them into activity, is, some people have pointed out. Well, if you build that, if you design and build that building, and then I get to work in it and I get sick, are you? Are you legally responsible for my sickness?

Speaker 2: 19:41

Yeah, you know, that that then people listen, it's going to cost them a lot of money. So if we do find uh which there's no doubt we are going to find um that that they put up buildings and people start becoming pre-diabetic, um, that's an issue. And where is diabetes at its highest levels? It's in places like the Arabian Peninsula, because people stay in air-conned buildings with thick infrared blocking glass. They never go out, they go from their building to an air-conned car and then into their air-conned home. And you know, I mean I'm sure there are other factors that are influencing this, but diabetes in the Arabic Peninsula is a big issue.

Speaker 1: 20:28

Yes, and they obviously have cultural reasons to cover up their skin. So they're getting no well. I mean, bob would tell us that you can get infrared, and that's true. You can get some penetration through cotton of the longer wavelength light, but they're kind of as you mentioned, they're really indoors the whole time.

Speaker 2: 20:48

Yeah, the penetration of light through the body is terribly interesting. We finished a range of experiments a few weeks ago and even on a cloudy day I can stand you outside and I can measure longer wavelength passing through your body. So I don't get much out the other side, maybe two or three percent. But if I'm getting two or three percent out, that means 98 of those wavelengths have been dumped in your body. Right, they are in there. If they're in there, then that energy will be used. It will cat catalyze a whole series of reactions. I mean, the wavelengths that come out are, you know, 850, 900 nanometers. They're the real deep penetrating ones. But the very fact you can get light through your body, you know there's a shadow, there's an infrared shadow behind you when you're walking down the street I think that's fascinating.

Speaker 1: 21:43

It's incredible.

Speaker 2: 21:44

Yeah, yeah, you know, we're talking Star Trek here, really aren't we?

Speaker 1: 21:53

A quick point to make before we, because I actually want to go back and we'll talk about the mechanisms of these findings. But to really sum up this kind of societal madness that we're walking towards, it was actually Neil deGrasse Tyson who presumptively and quite arrogantly declared that this infrared light is unnecessary and therefore energy-saving light bulbs are a human advancement. I mean the arrogance and the hubris. It's not the first time in science, medicine or technology where we've declared triumphantly that X, y or Z is unnecessary or just not needed and completely wrong. Because he has no idea about the effects that we've mentioned to do with this longer wavelength light and the fact that it's a critical light nutrient that our bodies need. And these are the people that are making influencing policies definitely, definitely.

Speaker 2: 22:51

The um british government had a house of lords committee looking into the factors about the importance of light and it was uh, it was over a year ago and you know we just hadn't got the head of steam at that point to to break through on that um, but it is very I mean it's pleasantly surprising after all these years. I'm getting five to ten emails a day and they know they're from people I uh they're also from. They're from architects practices. So traction is there. I mean, many, many years ago, when I was more liberal, I did actually say I'd answer every email, and I'm still answering every email, but it rubs out my Sundays completely. But I'll carry on doing that because I think it's really important that we have a line of information that is just pure information, factual information that we know you can stand up, you can stand behind that one, that is true yes, yeah, and that's the effort behind this podcast as well.

Speaker 1: 23:55

Is is to spread the word and information in a very decentralized way, because it's not anything you're going to hear from uh any conventional doctor. I mean uh, dr roger schwelt in in the us is is is aware of this and he's educating through medcram, his, his channel, and actually implementing heliotherapy in the acute treatment of viral pneumonia in one or two clinical cases, but beyond that it's a very few number of people, but hopefully it's going to grow.

Speaker 2: 24:25

Yeah, roger is superb, absolutely superb. You may be kind of, maybe the style of delivery is a little bit different or whatever, but the point is, roger delivers the facts, and he delivers the facts without any, without any um any bias. I have learned lots of things from watching Roger's podcasts and they, yeah, he's a very, very understated human being and I, yeah, I've learned a lot. He's absolutely great. We need lots of things that you're doing now. How do we spread that word? How do we get it through to the physician in some small, you know, district general hospital who may have the ability, by doing something very, very simple, to improve general health and, in some cases, you know, stop people from?

Speaker 1: 25:23

dying. Yeah, I think that's quite clear. And again, roger's case with his acute. He's actually a patient with COVID and the patient he put him outside for 20 minutes maybe I think it was only even once a day and he showed time to discharge was improved massively. He came off of supplemental oxygen very, very much quicker than expected. So in part because of full-spect sunlight and and what's going on is is the infrared is definitely playing a role in, in, in everything that that improvement through melatonin production most likely you know I I what I do is I offer a sticking plaster on a problem.

Speaker 2: 26:07

there's a plaster that works. I give people a burst of red light. But you know the sorts of things we do. They get great effect. As long as I deliver light in the mornings, I can deliver bursts of red light of only three minutes and the effect of that lasts five days. Five days Now. It doesn't matter if you're a fly, a mouse or a human being. That metric is absolutely identical A burst of red light in one of our papers, three minutes and we improve retinal function for five days. And then it went.

Speaker 2: 26:45

Now that mechanism and it doesn't quite matter how much it's a switch there's no dose-response curve. That confuses people, it confuses biologists, it confuses clinicians, but there is no dose-response curve. You keep giving loads and loads of it and you suddenly reach a point where it says it just doesn't work anymore. You know you're overcharging something. I've never found a case yet where we've done any harm. But if we want to be really effective, you don't have to give a lot of light. Now there's a big difference between what I do, which is giving a burst of light which is of a specific wavelength range, and going and walking outside. So I don't know whether walking outside for three minutes works, but the point is, as with kind of Rogers patients, they don't have to be in daylight all the time. You know, the exposure to the light can be quite, can be relatively brief. I mean, look at our blood sugars. We didn't expose them to very much light and we only exposed a very limited area of the body.

Speaker 1: 27:50

So there's a lot there that we don't know that was going to be my next question. I really want to. Let's go back. Let's go back and talk about what is actually happening on a mechanistic level. So in your randomized trial, you used 670 nanometer red light, which is in the deep red, and you exposed a small area on the back for 15 minutes. Is that correct? That's correct, yeah, and then you were able to see this attenuation, essentially, of the curve of that area under the curve of that glucose excursion. That curve was attenuated by this red light treatment. So tell us what is actually happening. What is this light doing? Where is it being absorbed? I have a lot of listeners who are actually interested in the, in the nitty-gritty. So, um, please, please, go into the nitty-gritty, okay.

Speaker 2: 28:41

So the first thing, which I think is very important, is that in the literature for a long period of time, although people didn't pay attention to it, it has been known that if you affect mitochondria in one part of the body, that mitochondria in another part of that body click into, click into that change.

Speaker 2: 29:01

It's called the abscopal effect and some radiologists are very aware of it, because if you radiate, irradiate a primary tumor focally, you find that very often the secondary tumors will stall. Something happens, they stall. They don't get rid of them, but they stall. So there is a communication across the body, mitochondria talking to one another. That is very first shown in a great paper in Cell, which is a very high-profile journal, and people didn't really pay too much attention to it. What's the signal? What is the signal that's going on? One of the things that we found which surprised us was that when we exposed mice to red light, their cytokines in their serum changed. Now cytokines are generally associated with increasing cytokines in their serum changed. Now cytokines are generally associated with. You know, increasing cytokines is associated with disease, inflammation. But it's much more complicated than that, because a small increase in a cytokine can be highly protective. The body's saying get ready, something could be going wrong. And the shifts in the cytokines were extremely complicated. You test 50 cytokines and they're all moving up and down as a consequence of this red light. You know you need a mathematician, you just need a mathematician. So we find we found this on a couple of times. So that's why I think we can irradiate a small region of your back and then, literally within a few hours later, all the mitochondria are going. I need more sugar. You know I'm increasing my metabolism. So that is really important. I don't think necessarily cytokines are the absolute answer. There are thousands of options for what it could be and I don't have enough heartbeats left in my body to go down that pathway. I just don't, you know. But someone will. Someone will go down that pathway and someone will find it. And now we can do. You know big metabolomics where we can get thousands and thousands of bits of information. That's the pathway you need to go down, with a mathematician holding your hand. So that's one important mechanism.

Speaker 2: 31:15

The other important mechanism is how is this happening? What is light doing that results in a change in mitochondria? Well, there's a number of schools of thought Interesting. The first people that played with this was a Russian lady, tina Karou, back in the 60s and 70s, and she said that the light was being absorbed by, really, cytochrome C oxidase in the mitochondrial respiratory chain. She didn't really say you know, she was saying it was being absorbed and that was the mechanism. Well, okay, there's a lot that needs to be built around that and her work is fundamental and, as with great pieces of science, very often science that comes out of Russia is ignored, but the quality of some areas of science in Russia is superb. So that's one theory.

Speaker 2: 32:13

The other theory that came out was that mitochondria are produced in a pump, a rotary pump that goes round and round and round, and the rotary pump sits in quite viscous nanowater and it was thought that the light is being absorbed by this viscous water and it reduces its viscosity, the pump spins faster and as the pump spins faster, it improves more ATP and mitochondria become more efficient. Both of these points have got compelling issues. Bob Fosbury has another idea, and I think this idea is extremely appealing, but I have trouble with it in the sense that you really do need to be a biophysicist to understand it, and that is that the light is being absorbed by oxygen molecules, and the oxygen molecules are then being absorbed into the respiratory chain, the chain of events that produces ATP. Now I think, I think that's the one that's going to stick to the wall quite hard. So the biophysics looks, looks pretty good, pretty good.

Speaker 2: 33:30

There's another colleague of mine who's been looking at bacteria Bacteria are very often thought to be the primordial mitochondria and he's showing that red light has an effect on bacteria as long as those bacteria are heavily dependent on oxygen. Now, some bacteria are not heavily dependent on oxygen. Now, some bacteria are not heavily dependent on oxygen and, interestingly, those guys don't respond to red light anywhere near as well. So, first of all, it is likely to be the case that there is no single mechanism. There perhaps are multiple mechanisms, which would make a lot of sense in evolution.

Speaker 2: 34:08

If you have multiple mechanisms for this kind of thing, um, and I think that all of the mechanisms proposed have some value in them, but I suspect, at the end of the day, it's going to be a biophysicist who walks in and actually cracks it with the oxygen uh interpretation, which is very much bob clodbury's line, and I'm hoping that works, because you don't get taken seriously when you've got a result, unless you've got a pretty solid theory as to why it's happening, and that has been a big issue with a lot of medics. How's this happening? Give me the mechanism and I'll believe you. Don't give me the mechanism and and you know you can part the red sea. I'm not going to believe it. So I think we're getting there.

Speaker 1: 34:53

Are you familiar with the work of Gerald Pollack and how he's shown the effects of infrared light on essentially changing the biophysical properties of water? Have you followed his work at all?

Speaker 2: 35:04

Yeah, I'm aware of it. But there again, I have to confess to you I'm not a biophysicist and so I have to take things very much at face value. But water and light have got some very interesting properties. You know, as I say, you go above 900 nanometers and most of the light is just going to be absorbed by water. So water and oxygen, I think, are the two things we have to pay attention to in relation to the mechanism and and it's a, it's a topic that I actually went in depth with.

Speaker 1: 35:36

I'm not sure if you're familiar with the work of dr jack cruz, but he is, uh, I he calls it. He's been referred to as a theoretical quantum biologist. Um, that's one of the title, one of the ways he's described himself, but, and really putting together these interactions between light and water and particularly to do with this structuring or change of phase of water on exposure to sunlight. And, yeah, that's one mechanism that I think is probably playing a role. And, as you mentioned, these electron transport chain, these complexes are chromophores and they're absorbing different wavelengths of light, and that's definitely. You know, uh, that's, that's definitely, um, you know one thing, that's, that's going on, and so so, uh, parsing this out now, and I know I think um, professor guide, uh, guy of the guy foundation, is also looking into that. Have you, have you talked to him at all? And he's in England.

Speaker 2: 36:30

Yeah, no, we've talked to him quite extensively because, um, whatever, however, we're thinking about this, we need to enter the domain of quantum biology, right? Quantum biology is very, very few people in quantum biology, in fact, you know. If you said, ask me, you know what was quantum biology? Five years ago, I would have said to you, well, I have absolutely no idea. Um, quantum biology there are. Ago. I would have said to you, well, I have absolutely no idea, quantum biology, there are worlds that never meet. Light and biology, outside plants and eyes do not meet, right, so there's no understanding. Likewise, quantum physics and biology don't meet.

Speaker 2: 37:09

Now, the Guy Foundation are doing actually a pretty good job at trying to weld these two. Now he has set up a foundation. He's got some speakers that have come online. It's a really good investment. It's a really good investment and it's not just a good investment for the sorts of things I do. It's a really good investment because quantum biology is going to answer a lot of questions which we are ignoring at the moment, and we're ignoring them to the extent that I don't even know what those questions are that are going to be resolved.

Speaker 2: 37:43

But it's like having a toolkit having no standards in it. You need people who understand theoretical quantum events, because so many events in the body are quantum events. Yeah, I don't think it's going to probably happen long before my time. We've got a guy in the UK called Al Khalidi and he does radio programs and things's a. He's a, he does radio programs and things, but he's a quantum physicist and it's interesting that when he moves into biology, um, the questions get honed in a very different way, and one of the problems that we have with questions we can't answer is we sometimes don't turn them over and look at them in another way, and other people that come into the field turn them over and look at them another way way, and other people that come into the field turn them over and look at them another way, and that is really important.

Speaker 1: 38:36

It's really important in disease, because very often in disease we think straight down an alleyway, we don't look left or right and we need other people to come in and plus comment, and I think that's been the value of both Scott Zimmerman as an optics engineer and Bob Fosbury as an astrophysicist in really adding novel input into these problems, because it's just such an orthogonal viewpoint and perspective I want to talk about the effect of blue light and really I think what we've discussed up till now and you've alluded to is that there's almost this oppositional effect on blood glucose with blue and red light.

Speaker 1: 39:16

And can you speculate or explain how is blue light, having this opposite effect and to actually raise blood glucose, causing this hyperglycemic light, this hyperinsulinemic light, so to speak?

Speaker 2: 39:32

this hyper-intilineamic light, so to speak. Okay, this morning I've been sitting down in a dark room having blue light shone on my arm for 20 nanometres and watching in real time the respiration of my mitochondria. And you know, you turn the blue light on and respiration changes within about two to three seconds. It is really an incredibly strong effect. Now there's a germ, a study done between a german group and the university of surrey, where they cannulated some people and then they exposed them to 450 nanometers. There was an almost instantaneous change in heart rate and blood pressure Study. Really nice study, really published in a really great journal. Does anyone pay any attention to it? No, I don't know why. It doesn't fit within the mode of the thought processes.

Speaker 2: 40:25

Blue light. When we say blue light we have to be careful. What we're talking about 420 nanometers is very specifically absorbed by mitochondria. We struggle to find absorbance points, even for red light in mitochondria, but we think that's because this red light is bouncing around for quite a while until it finds an absorber Blue light. The effect is almost instantaneous Respiration slows. Now in the vast majority of cases there's recovery.

Speaker 2: 41:02

Um, we think the light is absorbed by porphyrin and we think that that is result and that is producing our reactive oxygen species. But no one's proved that. But the effect of blue light is very dramatic. So NASA published a very interesting paper in Cell showing that the astronauts on the International Space Station are, firstly, becoming pre-diabetic fit people, super fit people, and they're showing signs of premature aging. Now they came to the conclusion that they've got a problem with mitochondria. They have got a problem with mitochondria. And then you look at the International Space Station, you've got all the images. It's hard white LEDs. So the simple answer to their problem is to take a tungsten filament bulb and just put it in there, right, just a really, really simple thing.

Speaker 2: 41:59

So everyone knows that blue light is damaging. We have very little idea why. We know that blue light is very specifically absorbed by mitochondria and very likely by porphyrin in mitochondria. And of course we've got porphyrin in lots of other parts of our body as well. Bob was the one that showed. Bob Fosbury was the one that showed a very specific absorbance of 420 nanometers. You know, there's this great conservation of mitochondrial function.

Speaker 2: 42:32

You know again, if you give blue light to flies, bees, mice, humans, you get very, very similar results. Flies slow down, they don't move as much their blood sugars go up because their mitochondria aren't working very well. Now, blue and red light are not symmetric because their mechanisms, I think, are very, very different. One's fast, one's a little bit slower, but in but they are symmetric in what they're doing to over all metabolism. So if you put mice under blue light which is a colleague of mine just submitted a paper on this if you give mice blue light not vast amounts of it, at 420 nanometers, within two weeks they become statistically significantly fatter. Right, and they carry on getting fatter until they're they're like balloons. Why? Because they're not taking glucose out of their blood, they're getting fat and they end up having. I mean, it's a bit difficult to test them for diabetes because the liver's always trying to buffer it, but certainly their blood glucose levels are highly unstable.

Speaker 2: 43:46

Now I think that's a great study. It's a great study. Even better, that study also shows that these animals become nervous. So they put them in an open field environment, and mice in an open field environment will generally wander around, but when they become nervous they always stick to the walls. They never go anywhere else. So what also makes people nervous and uncomfortable is systemic inflammation. These mice are showing signs of systemic inflammation, and it's trickling all the way down to their behavior. It's a lovely study.

Speaker 1: 44:23

Absolutely lovely. And that reminds me of two findings that I'll mention briefly. One was a mouse study that looked at essentially mimicked shift work and two groups of mouse fed the same diet, but one was on this blue, blue enriched shift work mimicking schedule and they got um, they essentially got uh, visceral and subcutaneous fat depositions. The fat became fibrotic and inflamed and they became insulin resistant. So that was on the same diet. So again really a mouse study showing how harmful the blue light is on metabolism. And then the second finding that that I just thought about when you um mentioned the anxiety, is that the, the melanopsin, that this blue light sensitive, uh, sensitive um, intrinsically photosensitive ganglion cells. They synapse. One synapse is in the suprachiasmatic nucleus to to, obviously, the circadian rhythm. The other one is in herbenular nucleus which is involved in mood regulation. So that makes complete sense to me. That why those mice would have gotten anxious, and the same reason why people, if you put them in a, make them blue light toxic, you'll induce anxiety and depression pretty reliably as well.

Speaker 2: 45:29

Yeah, yeah, completely agree with you. So we're squeezing all our people into buildings with a lot of blue light and they're not going out in sunlight. It is pretty disastrous within the framework of an aging population, population that's how we've got to see it in an aging and now I don't know, I don't know. There's lots and lots of caveats here, but there is great data showing increase in life expectancy over over the years since you know, 1930s, and it is. It is a curve that goes, literally goes up every year, apart from wars, covid although the covid thing is not as big as people think it is but then you look at from the very early 2000s onwards, that is not going up anymore.

Speaker 2: 46:26

Right, that is leveling off. Um, it's leveling off and the curve is now actually starting to go down. Have we got an issue? Are these in some way related to one another? I don't know, it wasn't my original idea, it was a colleague who pointed this out, and there are lots of things that change in the world. But the fact that for the first time, you know, in many, many years, life expectancy is not gradually increasing, that should be a topic for concern. That should be a topic for concern generally, whether red and blue light have got anything to do with it whatsoever.

Speaker 1: 47:25

I suspect that red starvation and blue saturation are issues that are involved in that Because, again revisiting Dr Cruz, his mechanism of what is going on is that blue light is essentially differentially cleaving up POMC in the skin to produce ACTH, which will drive up cortisol and then therefore increase glycemia, and then also another cleavage peptide called CLIP, and I'm not sure if you've heard of CLIP at all, but apparently and again the literature doesn't seem to be consistent on this or I couldn't find a lot is that it's an insulin secretor goal. So apparently that is a double mechanism by which you can induce high blood glucose and high insulin. But I'd be amazed if you could measure CLIP in some of your experiments, because that could piece together a lot, I think, in this puzzle.

Speaker 2: 48:17

Yeah, it could do it. The other kind of issue here is I'm neither a biophysicist nor I'm a biochemist and I have to pick the fruit off the tree that I can deal with, and so I haven't heard a clip. But I just need people to hold my hands, I need to, I need to go to people and I need to have got this, this and this. What light can you throw on it? I the my. The saving grace I have at the moment is I've got I've got an astronomer behind me who I never thought I had no idea an astronomer was going to teach me so much about atmospheric light. And you know, we've got Scott Zimmerman around as well and we talk every week. But yeah, I can't really pass comment on that. I can't.

Speaker 2: 49:06

I'm going, I'll be absolutely brutal. I'm going for where we can impact big time. So, architects, I'm going where we can impact big time. So, architects, I'm going where we can impact big time. Clinically, we've had some very marked success with kids with mitochondrial disease, where they can't produce ATP, and again, very, very simply just by changing the light environments. And that's where I'm going to have to's, that's where I'm gonna that's understandable, that's completely.

Speaker 1: 49:35

we've only only got so much time and resources and maybe I really want to talk about these, these, these kids with the mitochondrial issues, and also I want to talk about the retina. Um, briefly, but before we do, can you speculate on the, the evolutionary biology or the evolutionary reasons why we're having this opposing effect on blood glucose from different wavelengths and the observation that in natural sunlight, blue and short wavelength blue light and ultraviolet light is always balanced by red and infrared?

Speaker 2: 50:12

I don't think I can pass any comment on it, you know, because it's that the only comment we've evolved under, that we've adapted to that and I think we've adapted to it so seriously. We've got very, very little room for change. We've got very, very little room for maneuver and what we are doing is we're making massive changes. So I think what you just said is just an obvious statement, you know, and I can't pass any further comment on it. Really, okay, very interesting.

Speaker 1: 50:42

I'm sure someone listening might be able to. Yeah. And this is like the crowdsourced scientific method really I think. So there's definitely value in other smart people chiming in.

Speaker 2: 50:54

Oh yeah, Walk through my door and tell me I'm wrong.

Speaker 1: 50:58

I love you. Talk about the retina because I talk about the brain and the heart as having some of the highest mitochondrial densities in the body, but the retina, I believe, is actually the highest, if I'm not wrong.

Speaker 2: 51:11

It is. It has the highest metabolic rate in the retina. It has the highest metabolic rate in the retina. Uh has the highest metabolic rate in the body. That's why it ages so fast. That was why it was my primary target for red light. And within the retina, the system that really gets crippled early is your blue system, your cone photoreceptors that are responsible for mediating blue. They go early in aging, they go early in diabetes. They go early in macular degeneration. So you've got this sports car, the retina, compared to other organs in your body. But if you move fast, you age fast and I'm lucky the retina was my home, so it was very, very easy for me to take red light into that environment Very easy. And the great thing about the retina is I can do something to your retina. I can change it by giving you light and I walk you into a room and I can test your retinal function with you know, fairly complex high-end screens with asking you to identify things. I can test it.

Speaker 1: 52:15

I can test it easily, more easily than I can any other modality and what is going wrong, so to speak, in terms of these diseases that you mentioned? Are we getting just loss of, are we getting apoptosis of these photoreceptor cells, like what? Obviously the pathology dependent.

Speaker 2: 52:37

Yeah. So, first of all, you burn fast, you live short periods. Second thing is mitochondria. Critically, they are the things that tell you to die. So mitochondria control the apoptotic process. And if we look at your retina, by the time you're 70, you've lost 30% of your central photoreceptors. That's an enormous loss. You don't notice it because you're constantly adapting to it, but the point is that cell loss in the retina is phenomenal.

Speaker 2: 53:10

Now, I reckon no one's going to argue about this one. If we take people to 120 years of age, everyone's going to have macular degeneration, everybody's going to have central retinal blindness. And it's just because of it's just because of the burn rate. Um, and red light here is really it's very, very impressive. We can give people a burst of red light. Here is really it's very, very impressive. We can give people a burst of red light actually for less than three minutes and in under three hours if they're 40 or 50, we've got a measured improvement in the retina because we provided these flagging cells with more energy. It's as simple as that. It's not a difficult concept. They might have conjured, in a poor state, cells with more energy. It's as simple as that, it's not a difficult concept. The mitochondria in a poor state.

Speaker 1: 53:55

We pick them up for a period of time and we can test their visual function and it improves, and we have studies showing that morning morning light is also beneficial for a range of these eye pathologies. And that makes sense because it's so enriched in red and infrared yeah so.

Speaker 2: 54:13

So all our stuff only works in the mornings. And again, if you're a fly or a bee, it only works in the mornings. But what happens in the morning is you're in a very, very different metabolic state. Your hormones are different, your blood sugars are peaking. I think it's because you know in evolutionary terms, you were waking up and you were in a very vulnerable position. You've been still and asleep for five, six hours. You are very vulnerable. You need to wake up and make sure that you're not being stalked or being attacked. As daylight comes and the hunters come out, you must make sure that you've got the ability to move. So mitochondria are peaking, atp is peaking and your ability to influence those mitochondria peaks. Give red light as much as you want. At 5 o'clock in the afternoon, very little happens.

Speaker 1: 54:59

Let's talk about kids now, and on the topic of retina and light, kids these days are actually holding an iPad about 10 to probably 20 centimeters away from their eyes for hours on end. What is your take on that? What is your take on the possible pathology they're giving themselves at such a young age?

Speaker 2: 55:22

Well, I think the key one which we've not talked about is myopia. Myopia is a growing problem where kids and we know myopia is being induced by close work. That's the first thing. We now know that red light is reducing the incidence of myopia. But I have to put my hand on my heart, I don't know why I've got. I can understand the mechanisms behind, uh, blood glucose issues. I cannot understand the mechanism behind myopia. Um, it's there, shown in a big chinese study. It's that chinese study is flawed in other ways, but it's not flawed in the fundamental point that if you give people red light, give kids red light, it reduces the rate of myopia. Myopia is a hidden disease. Um, and of course, if you are in the uh, if you're in the far east, myopia is a really big problem, very big problem. So you've got a lot of people that as they age their eyes too long, it stretches the retina and central retina degenerates.

Speaker 1: 56:28

I believe there is a mechanism to do with dopamine and the influence of dopamine on on on that process, and so maybe that that that's that's what's what's happening but I still can't see the relationship between dopamine and mitochondria.

Speaker 2: 56:42

I'm struggling with it. I'm strike someone will walk through the door and they'll get it, but like I haven't got it so well, I'm mindful that you've got a hard stop.

Speaker 1: 56:50

Maybe, um, if you do, we can talk quickly about the, the children with mitochondrial diseases.

Speaker 2: 56:55

Otherwise we might postpone, yeah I can let me fill you in on that one, because it is quite an interesting one I I had. I'm publishing papers saying improve mitochondrial function that's in the titles, and then I'm, starting it contract, contacted by people um saying, um, my kid's got mitochondrial disease. They can't move very well, they can't open their eyes, what can I do about it? And I say I don't have ethics for this one. You know, it's children. This is a big issue. Um, and they started treating with red light and the results, the results, they threw me into a spin. These, some of these, some of these children, within a week, are opening their eyes properly. Um, these children that are relatively immobile have got improved mobility. So we have got a, we have got ethics for it.

Speaker 2: 57:51

Now we have got a clinical trial in place. We are treating kids with red light and the effect is very impressive. Now, theoretically, it all makes sense. My lab said to me of course it will work, of course it will work. And I said this is a big leap. This is a big leap and it did work. And you know, I will confess, confess to you, when I saw the photographs of the first child, um, I, I was very emotional, very emotional um, and it's carried on now. It's a very rare disease, but it's a killer disease. Most of these children do not make 25. They tend to go into heart failure. But if that's the one thing I can do, then as far as I'm concerned that's a success.

Speaker 1: 58:42

Definitely.

Speaker 2: 58:47

You know kids who the first child and the others are following in exactly the same time course probably could walk 30 to 50 metres. That first child she's now walking a couple of hundred meters to school and she's having swimming lessons. Um, you know, even if it was that one child I'll be over the moon. But we've got a whole collection of them now slowly moving forward. They're all very variable, they're all very different. My first target was the ability to open their eyes. That that's working, and then all these other things are coming along. Their mobility is improving. They very often, because they can't control their eye muscles, they've got double vision. These kids don't have double vision anymore. If they stop the red light, things drift back, but then we can always pick them up again. So sometimes they get infections because they're complex. It's a complex disease process and things then start falling apart and then you bring them back with a red light and they're okay.

Speaker 1: 59:45

What disease?

Speaker 2: 59:46

specifically is it? Well, it's a mitochondrial disease where there are typing errors in their mitochondrial disease, where there are typing errors in their mitochondrial dna, so they're very inefficient at producing atp. The what we're doing is we're turning the gain up on that, we're increasing that atp. Where we've got an engine that isn't working very well, it's got some components that aren't fitting properly, but we're tuning all the other ones up to make to make to make the difference. It is again, it is not a cure but it's a very, very good sticking are you giving total body?

Speaker 1: 1:00:24

how are you delivering the red light?

Speaker 2: 1:00:28

at first we were delivering the red light at the eye and and then we were getting systemic effects, which we should do because mitochondria talk to one another. And then what I said to them is you know, just get one of these big red lights for the room. You know about $100. Get one of these big red lights for the room, turn it on for a few minutes in the morning when the child is getting dressed. Just, you know and bang.

Speaker 1: 1:00:54

You know and bang, you know, um, it does everything, does everything it's done in other animals, uh, but it is superbly rewarding, unbelievably rewarding, amazing, well, uh, maybe, maybe we could get you on another time to to go in depth in, and and a bunch of other topics that we haven't managed to talk about, but I I'm mindful of your, your time, glenn. So, yeah, thank you very much for your time. It was been a great conversation.

Speaker 2: 1:01:23

It's a pleasure and come grab me any other time you want and I'm really happy to talk and I really also appreciate the fact that you do these podcasts. So we get a story out there. Right, we're going to get the story out there. We're going to get people walking out in sunlight and we want to have an effect on public health.

Speaker 1: 1:01:38

Yes, that's why we're both in this game. So, yeah, 100% Great. Have a great day, thank you. Thanks, glenn. Bye-bye, what did you guys think of that podcast?

Speaker 1: 1:01:50

I think the work of Professor Jeffrey is absolutely groundbreaking, and he is providing mechanistic and experimental support for a lot of what Dr Jack Cruz has been saying for a very, very long time. So it's very interesting to have these observations to back up the theory behind the influence of light on metabolism. Now, there were a range of topics that I didn't get to ask Glenn about. He has animal model data that is showing an improvement in health span and, essentially, longevity in the various animal models exposed to red light. There's a whole background of work there, as well as this ongoing research that he's doing, and particularly with the type 2 diabetics. I think a point that needs to be made is that we accept or a drug, a pharmaceutical drug, gets funded to lower blood glucose, and if it were on the magnitude of red light, it would be a blockbuster. So we've got this free intervention that could potentially improve the metabolic health of billions of people.