Natural Light is An Essential Nutrient
Decades of Forgotten Research Show How Much Modern Lighting Has Harmed Human Health
Story at a Glance:
•Sunlight is one of the most important things for our health (e.g., it halves our risk of dying or getting cancer), yet all we ever hear is how important it is to avoid it.
•While the importance of vitamin D is generally recognized, many of the other critical functions of light within plants, animals and human beings remain almost completely unknown (and hence will be the focus of this article.
•One of the defining characteristics of modern life is the continual exposure to unnatural light. While this is viewed as being relatively benign, in reality, forgotten research demonstrated that it is a root cause of a myriad of inexplicable modern physical and behavioral illnesses.
•One of the keys functions of blood is to conduct light throughout the body. In turn, when this process is disrupted (e.g., by wearing glasses with lenses which eliminate critical parts of the electromagnetic spectrum) a variety of significant illnesses can develop.
Over the years, I have become convinced sunlight is one of the most essential nutrients for the body. For example, as human beings moved further and further north from Africa and had increasingly lower sun exposure, their skin became progressively lighter, something which argues the human body needs light and that the whitening of human skin in the higher latitudes was a protecting mechanism designed to ensure enough of the remaining sunlight could get inside the body.
Note: an explanation of how the darker parts of the skin prevent UV from entering the body can be found here.
Unfortunately (outside of very specific patentable applications), since no one has a financial interest in promoting sunlight, almost everything we hear about instead focuses on why it’s terrible for us. For example:
•As discussed in a recent article, dermatology was one of the least desirable professions in medicine. They then transformed themselves into one of the sought after ones by rebranding themselves as cancer fighters and convincing everyone to get regular skin cancer exams where any potential cancer could be quickly removed, often for thousands of dollars apiece, quickly making dermatology into one of the highest paying specialties. A centerpiece of this rebranding was making benign cancers be labeled as deadly ones and claiming sunlight caused skin cancer (which while true, omitted to mention that that a lack of sunlight is what causes fatal skin cancers). Because of this, a lot of dermatology morphed into scaring people senseless about the sun, and despite billions being spent each year on skin cancer, the total death rate from skin cancer remains almost entirely unchanged (instead we simply diagnose and “treat” far more of it).
Note: in this article, I will attempt to explain why unnatural light causes skin cancer.
•While many factors contribute to cancer, the focus is often on sunlight and smoking as the primary culprits. I believe this emphasis explains why cancer rates continue to rise, as the true causes of cancer remain underexplored. Industries with vested interests lobby to keep these causes off-limits, diverting attention from potentially significant contributors to cancer.
Note: in a recent article, I discussed analogously how the FDA waged a 10-year crusade against a miraculous sleep aid (which had it remained legal would have destroyed the disastrous sleeping pill industry because of how much more effective and life-changing it was for its users). Since GHB was produced naturally within the body and found in foods, the FDA’s initial attempts to persecute those providing it were eventually deemed unlawful by the courts. The FDA then pivoted to associating GHB with the existing concerns about Rohypnol (Roofies) being used as a date rape drug, and created a hysteria over GHB, even though unlike Rohypnol, it was not being used in this way, it couldn’t be used in that way (as it was easy to taste), and by and large the primary date rape drug was alcohol. This campaign was successful, and GHB was outlawed through a variety of anti-date rape laws. There are now millions of people suffering from chronic incurable illnesses who need but cannot get GHB due to it being a Schedule I drug (which hence carries very high penalties for being distributed).
What I found remarkable about this was that the pharmaceutical company which made Rohypnol was able to use its lobbyists to get it (the actual problematic drug) removed from those anti-date rape laws. At the same time, the pharmaceutical manufacturer of GHB was able to get a dual scheduling created (schedule I and III) and then sell the exact same (simple to produce) compound as an FDA approved schedule III drug to a limited market for an extravagant price (60,000-100,000.00 per year), something patients are willing to pay due to how profoundly GHB improves their lives. One of the most absurd things about this dual scheduling is that by definition, a drug can only be a Schedule I substance if there is “no currently accepted medical use for it.”
•Because sunlight is free and has such a profound benefit on so many aspects of human health, any industry that relies upon widespread illness to find customers has an inherent self-interest against letting something that effectively treats illness be widely available to the public. In essence, I would argue this is also what happened to GHB as so many illnesses (beyond just insomnia) are linked to poor sleep that it justified a ten year crusade by the FDA to get it outlawed.
In this article, I will present some of the forgotten knowledge on the incredible importance of light. In addition to exposing that knowledge, my specific goals in writing this is to share my theory that blood conducts light (as this changes a lot about how you look at the body) and provide the context for introducing one of the most remarkable medical therapies that the American Medical Association largely erased from history.
The Importance of Sunlight
Prior to dermatology’s disastrous war on the sun, the value of sunlight was widely recognized in medicine. For example, in the early 1900s, heliotherapy (sunbathing) was used with great success for treating many (otherwise incurable) conditions, such as the 1918 influenza, tuberculosis, and many other diseases.
The existing data, in turn, shows that sunlight provides an immense degree of benefit. For example:
•Sunlight is critical for mental health. This is most well appreciated with depression (e.g., seasonal affective disorder). Sadly, many workers (especially night shift workers such as those in hospitals) do not get that essential light exposure and suffer immensely. For example, consider this study of Chinese operating room nurses which found their mental health was significantly worse than the general population and that this decline was correlated to their lack of sunlight exposure (which I would argue does not benefit the patients they care for).
Note: I really got this point during my medical internship, where after a long period of night shifts under fluorescent lights, noticed I was becoming clinically depressed (which has never otherwise happened to me and led to a co-resident I was close to offering to prescribe antidepressants). I decided to do an experiment and stuck with it for a few more days, then went home and bathed under an Ott full spectrum bulb, at which point I almost instantly felt better.
•Many different studies have found sunlight exposure dramatically reduces one's risk of cancer (e.g., this large study found high solar UVB exposure halved one’s risk of breast and prostate cancer).
•An excellent 20-year study of 29,518 women found that avoiding the sun made one 60% more likely to die (a 130% difference compared to those who had the most significant amount of sun exposure), and the most considerable benefit from regular sunlight exposure was reducing one’s risk of dying from heart disease.
Note: that study also found a variety of other common diseases were much less likely to affect those with adequate sun exposure.
•Normal sunlight is critical for facilitating the circadian rhythm our body’s depend upon to rest and repair themselves. In turn, a major cause of the modern insomnia epidemic (and the profound health consequences it entails—which are discussed further here) are artificial light exposures, while one of the most useful treatments for it is to simply start your day with a full sunlight exposure.
Typically, sunlight's benefits are thought to be due to producing vitamin D (a critical nutrient) within the body. However, I have long suspected that many of the benefits of vitamin D are not due to the vitamin itself but rather that its elevation serves as an indicator that the body is having regular sunlight exposure and hence is experiencing the myriad of benefits sunlight provides.
Note: that being said, vitamin D supplementation can often be very beneficial. However, in almost all cases, elevating your vitamin D levels through sunlight exposure provides significantly greater benefits than supplementation.
What is Light?
Waves, by definition have a few fundamental properties:
•They require a medium to travel through. For example, the medium for waves at the beach is the ocean, whereas the medium for sound is the air.
•They travel at specific speeds.
•They have a specific wavelength and frequency (which are inversely related to each other).
•Their strength is determined by how many waves elapse in a second (a higher frequency correlates to a higher total energy) and how greatly each individual wave disrupts its medium (e.g., a small wave at the beach has much less energy than a tsunami and as does a loud sound compared to a quiet one).
By far, the most common wave in our lives is electromagnetic radiation, which is defined as a wave that travels at the speed of light and, unlike all other waves, does not have a medium it travels through (which is why EMR can travel through space and many objects). “Light, for instance, is one type of EMR.
Note: why light travels at the speed it does and why it seemingly does not have a medium, are two of the greatest mysteries in physics.
Since there is an inverse relationship between a wave’s wavelength and frequency, a variety of different types of EMR exist depending upon their wavelength. For example, visible light comprises the EMR with a wavelength between 380nm-700nm, as this is the EMR the eye can “see.” At the same time, depending on the wavelength of the EMR, its properties (e.g., color) vary immensely.
Likewise, many other types of EMR also exist (e.g., Gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet, visible light, infrared, microwaves, and radiowaves) which each have different properties. However, despite that EMR is one of the fundamental constructs of our reality, much of its biological significance is still not recognized. For example, I feel some of the biggest misunderstandings about EMR are as follows:
•Natural light tends to have a fairly wide range of frequencies present within it (e.g., this is why sunlight splits into a rainbow once it passes through a prism). In contrast, artificial light tends to have a much narrower range of frequencies present within it which differs greatly from what biology evolved to handle.
•The label “ultraviolet” is given to the EMR that lies between visible light and x-rays. This implies all UV is the same, when in reality, each type of UV (UV-A, UV-B, and UV-C behave very differently) and are present in very different amounts (e.g., the atmosphere blocks most UV-C from reaching the surface of the Earth).
•Infrared penetrates much deeper into the body than UV (5-40mm vs. 0.02-0.15mm). Additionally, standard glass (for the most part) blocks UV from traveling through it.
•Conventional science typically describes the adverse effects of EMR as being a property of how much energy the EMR has and if that energy is sufficient to break molecular bonds (termed ionizing energy). For example, gamma rays (which are released by nuclear weapons) are so dangerous because their ionization energy is so powerful they shred the molecular structures of the body (e.g., DNA) apart. Conversely, microwaves (which are instead on the low energy end of the electromagnetic spectrum) are deemed to not be dangerous because they contain too little energy to ionize molecular bonds.
•The previous point is not entirely correct because while EMR typically passes through whatever it contacts, if it instead “matches” that medium, it will store inside it and have a dramatically greater effect on it (e.g., this describes the concept of a resonance frequency). This is important because a wide number of critical living structures (e.g., mitochondria) evolved to have a resonance for a specific type of EMR and then respond to them while everything around them is largely unaffected by that specific type of EMR. Unfortunately, this aspect of science has been largely glossed over by our scientific apparatus, something I believe is due to the fact biophysics opens the doors to creating a variety of un-patentable medical therapies, and because it implicates a lot of the EMR we are now saturated in (e.g., the microwaves cell phones and Wifi use) as a cause of poor health.
For example, radar works by sending out a large pulse of microwave energy in each direction (through the unit spinning around), and then using the reflections it receives from any radar pulse into the atmosphere to indicate the presence of an object being there. I personally think radar is far from benign as I’ve read numerous stories of soldiers stationed next to radar units (where the microwaves are exponentially stronger) becoming severely ill, I know many EMF sensitive people can tell if far away radar units are firing, and I personally can feel something when I am at an airport each time a radar sweeps by. While that seems abstract, I recently saw a brief video by John Ott that perfectly demonstrates the reality of this phenomenon:
Try to keep the above points in mind as you read through this article.
Biophotons and Mitogenic Radiation
Note: this is an abridged version of an article I wrote on this critical subject and how it underlies many of the therapies now used in regenerative medicine.
A fundamental principle within biophysics is that cells emit very faint photons (predominantly within the ultraviolet spectrum) they use to control growth and communicate with other cells and that when biophoton transmissions go awry, disease results (leading to abnormal photon emissions from tissue being seen in many disease states). For example, cancers have abnormal biophoton emissions, and (when studied) carcinogenic substances significantly disrupt the wavelength of these photons (whereas similar compounds that do not disrupt those biophotons are not carcinogenic).
Note: one of the most interesting observations made within biophotonics was that the cytopathic changes caused in a cell by viral infections or toxin exposures could be “transferred” to another cell in the immediate vicinity when the cells had no physical connection but were optically connected through a UV transmitting window.
Alexander Gurwitsch, one of the earliest researchers who studied this (in 1923), beginning with his discovery that living cells (of both animals and plants) emitted extremely faint emissions, which triggered cells around them to leave their lag phase, enter mitosis and divide—leading to him naming it mitogenic radiation [MGR]. After realizing that ordinary glass but not quartz glass blocked it, he concluded that MGR was a type of ultraviolet light (as this is how UV behaves), and much later, it was indeed determined to be that (as it had a wavelength between 190-350 nm).
Note: MGR is very faint (making it difficult to detect), and its emission from biological systems typically requires the system to be illuminated with light (which makes the faint mitogenic emissions much more difficult to spot). Eventually, roughly a decade after Gurwitsch’s death, researchers were able to capture this radiation with sensitive photomultiplier devices.
After studying it in detail, Gurwitsch realized that MGR required a very specific dosing and pattern (e.g., through being pulsed) to achieve its optimal effects, which was very challenging to do artificially, and hence that the value of MGR was primarily in what it facilitated the diagnosis of (e.g., blood typically emitted MGR, but if someone had cancer it did not, and as a result, with a high degree of accuracy, the hospital he worked at was able to determine if someone had a cancer purely by assessing if MGR had disappeared from their blood). Gurwitsch also found that:
•Once many biological substances (e.g., blood) were exposed to MGR, they would then emit MGR, which was termed “secondary MGR.” In many cases, secondary MGR was able to precisely match the frequencies and duration of MGR that were necessary for the best response to it in tissue throughout the body.
•Injuring or killing cells would cause them to release a brief flash of MGR (which I suspect comes from exosomes being released from the cell).
•Certain parts of the body (brain tissue, the cornea of the eye, active muscles, and blood) had much greater emissions of MGR.
•Blood vessel walls were found to not block the transmission of mitogenic radiation, and within the blood vessel, MGR was best conducted when the vessel itself was energized, a quality likely imparted into the blood by the electrical charge of the heart. Similarly, a dissected optic nerve was found to radiate mitogenic radiation throughout the optic tract when the eye was exposed to unfiltered sunlight.
•As tissue goes through different developmental stages its MGR changes. For example, as people age, their blood emits less and less MGR, and this may account for why their bodies have more difficulty healing from injuries.
Note: in the 1930s, researchers determined that partially restoring the MGR of an older person’s blood improved senility.
Sadly, while the subject of MGR has an immense number of important implications for biology, very few know of the topic now. One of the things I have always found the most interesting about this subject is the fact that many meditation schools believe that when one reaches an advanced level of perception and skill, they will often discover there is an immense amount of light within their body, and that biophoton researchers (once they got sufficiently sensitive instrumentation), were able to prove that the body does indeed emits light.
John Nash Ott
Note: most of this section is a summary of Ott’s book Health and Light.
As plants move quite slowly, it is typically not possible to see their movement (although exceptions do exist such as plants that reflexively contract like Venus fly traps or if one is in areas where nature has an unusual abundance of vitality, with careful observation, it’s sometimes possible to see rhythmic movements in the periphery of a tree).
Time-lapse photography (where shots taken far away from each other are turned into frames for a motion picture) made it possible to accelerate this microscopic movement of plants and hence make it visible. One of the pioneers of time-lapse photography was John Nash Ott, who began working on it in 1927 (while in high school) and because of the popularity of newfound art, got a lot of business. For example, this is some of the footage in a Disney motion picture Ott was hired for:
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