Tapping Into The Power Of Sunlight And Practical Tips On Reducing Junk Light From Your Life With Alexis Cowan, PhD

This episode focuses on the significant impact of "junk light" on health and explores practical strategies to minimize exposure to artificial light while increasing beneficial sunlight exposure.

1. Junk Light's Impact: Junk light, primarily from blue light sources like LEDs, disrupts circadian rhythms and contributes to various health issues.
2. Importance of Sunlight: Sunlight provides essential wavelengths not found in artificial lighting, crucial for metabolic and mental health.
3. Practical Adjustments: Strategies for reducing junk light exposure include using red light at night and maximizing daylight exposure.
4. Health Improvements: Adjusting light exposure can significantly improve sleep quality, mood, and overall health.
5. Technological Innovations: Advances in lighting technology may soon provide healthier indoor environments that mimic natural light.

1: Introduction to Junk Light

Dr. Cowan discusses the unrecognized hazards of junk light, its ubiquitous presence, and initial steps to mitigate its effects. Alexis Cowan: "We need to recognize artificial light's profound impacts and adjust our environments accordingly."

2: Biological Impacts of Light

Detailed examination of how different light types affect biological functions, emphasizing the unique benefits of sunlight. Alexis Cowan: "Natural light plays an irreplaceable role in regulating our biological systems, which artificial lights fail to mimic."

3: Practical Tips for Light Management

Cowan provides actionable advice for integrating healthy lighting practices into daily life, including the use of specific types of light at different times of day. Alexis Cowan: "Incorporating red light at night can significantly improve your evening routine."

4: Future of Lighting Technology

Exploration of emerging technologies aimed at creating light environments that support health and well-being. Alexis Cowan: "Innovative lighting solutions are on the horizon, aiming to reduce the health risks associated with current artificial lights."

1. Replace evening blue light with red light bulbs to enhance sleep quality.
2. Utilize daylight as much as possible, especially in the morning to reset the circadian rhythm.
3. Consider using blue light-blocking glasses during screen time.
4. Incorporate breaks every hour during screen time to reduce eye strain and exposure.
5. Engage with natural environments to enhance light intake and support mental health.

This episode is brought to you by Lumebox and AquaTru.

Numerous experts have explored the myriad factors associated with chronic disease. However, our guest today sheds light on an often overlooked factor: junk light. Our modern lifestyles frequently experience diminished exposure to natural sunlight and constant exposure to blue light emitted by phones, devices, and indoor workspaces. Dr. Alexis Cowan emphasizes the importance of minimizing our exposure to junk light and maximizing sunlight for our health.

Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Dr. Alexis Cowan to discuss the impact of junk light on our well-being and longevity. Dr. Cowan explains how exposure to junk light can alter our circadian rhythm and hormone levels, disrupting our sleep patterns and eating behaviors. Additionally, she underscores the significance of sunlight exposure for weight management, mood regulation, and daily motivation. Dr. Cowan offers practical tips to minimize blue light exposure and incorporate red light therapy for those unable to attain optimal sun exposure in their daily routines.

Dr. Alexis Cowan is a Princeton-trained PhD in molecular biology who operates at the interface of physiology and metabolism. She specializes in circadian biology, microbiome-host interactions, and the metabolic effects of nutritional and exercise modalities. Dr. Alexis teaches coursework on topics in health, translational science, and scientific literacy. She also sees highly motivated clients in a one-on-one capacity.

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Alexis Cowan, PhD

Content Warnings:

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Dhru Purohit
Doctor Alexis Cohen. Welcome to the podcast. You know, you shared something pretty mind blowing that I think a lot of individuals, this might be new for them, even the ones that have been listening to my podcast for a long time. You shared that junk light is, in your view, one of the biggest contributors to chronic disease here in America. Can you expand on that and tell our audience why you feel that way?

Alexis Cowan
Yeah, absolutely. So I actually recently put a post about this on my instagram saying that, you know, junk light, not junk food, is the biggest issue that we have in America and trying to be kind, provocative on purpose, because there's so much talk about diet and exercise in our culture and within the space of health, and yet people are getting sicker and fatter every year, and we're not really getting to the point of, like, what's actually fundamentally going on from a metabolic, from a physiologic level, and also from like, a willpower level. Like, why are people struggling to execute on these things? So I recently, within the past twelve months, actually about a year ago, exactly, really got involved in the area of circadian and light biology and just completely changed my entire approach to health and life, which was already kind of charted out pretty extensively. I lost 100 pounds about 13 years ago, and I really went down the diet and exercise path.

I actually developed an eating disorder after losing that weight and also IB's, and so had a lot of health challenges to figure out for myself. And yet still, light wasn't on my radar, even throughout my time at Princeton, where I completed my PhD and the Rabinowitz lab studying metabolism. And I really was interested in the microbiome at that point, too. I thought the microbiome was like the foundational thing that we were missing, and yet still light wasn't on my radar. And then after graduation, I came across Doctor Jack Cruz's work.

This was last April. And completely just, it changed my outlook on health. And so the major things that I want to kind of impress on people when it comes to junk light and just understanding the impact of light on our bodies is that we need to kind of zoom out and look at the evolutionary trajectory of our species. So if we think about, you know, our modern human species has been around for about 300,000 years, up until 1893. So millennia, we did not have artificial light in the home.

1893, world's fair. That's when kind of the grid electricity was rolled out and people started actually electrifying their homes. Before that, we were really relying on the sun as the primary source of light in our environments. Of course, there were some firelight, some candlelight, moon, stars. These are all sources of light, but they're dwarfed by the actual total output of sunlight that comes from the sun.

There's just so much brightness. And that light from the sun is not just important as it relates to our wakefulness, which people might think of and people might understand some aspects of circadian biology as it relates to light. But there's actually specific wavelengths of light in the sun that our bodies adapted to see. So most people know about the visible light spectrum. Roy G.

Biv we also have our infrared light, which is outside of the visible realm. It's in the non visible light, and we also have our ultraviolet light, which people also may have heard of, and it's often demonized. But we're going to talk about today a lot of the important aspects of uv light as well. But this whole spectrum of light that's present in the sun, which also varies depending on the day and varies depending on the latitude of where you're living and the season, etcetera, the body essentially evolved to see this very specific spectrum of light and not other sources of light. So if we compare the indoor artificial light sources to the spectrum of the sun, we see dramatic differences.

In particular, if we look at fluorescent or led lights or screens, our tablets, our phones, tvs, etcetera, we see light that is highly devoid in red and infrared light, and we see light that's highly enriched in blue light. And as it turns out, evolution chose blue light as one of the primary signals that our environment's sending us in order to regulate our body's understanding of what time of day it is. So there's this blue light sensor that's present in a whole bunch of tissues of the body called melanopsin. And melanopsin basically detects blue light in the environment, and it sends a signal, especially in the retina, sends a signal to the master clock of the brain that's called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or the SCN. And that tells the master clock of the brain that it's the middle of the day, and there are certain bodily functions that are corresponding to middle of the daytime context.

And so the circadian clock and the circadian rhythmicity set by that master clock in response to blue light is dictating a lot of things, including our digestive capacity, our ability to synthesize specific hormones, our wakefulness, our cognition, our mood, our memory, just basic cellular functions as well. Because outside of that blue light window, we're not meant to encounter blue light, which is totally antithetical to what we're experiencing today. So a lot of people are on devices late at night. They're exposed to a lot of artificial light at night, which is, again, sending that signal to the body. It's the middle of the day.

So we're never actually getting into that rest and regenerate phase. Because the signal of pure darkness is not actually being sent to our bodies. And so just to make sure that the audience really understands it. So that background was fantastic and so clearly spoken. You're saying that junk light is what, just so everybody can follow along?

Yes. So junk light would be our artificial light sources. Primarily the light sources that are enriched in blue light and devoid in red and infrared light, which would include our fluorescent lights, our led lights. And I'm specifically talking about, like, white light. So you can buy red leds, and they're not going to necessarily have blue in them.

But with regards to white light, our white leds and fluorescents, and also our devices, which include our phones, tablets, tvs, computers, these would be the sources of junk light that the vast majority of people have replaced the sun with in their lives. So these technologies are basically the new sun. And it's totally unprecedented within the context of our species. Because it's essentially akin to having an alien sun in our environments, where we're getting a completely different spectrum than our biology is actually expecting. And we did not evolve.

You can't evolve in 100 some odd years to this new light. So it's clashing with our internal biological processes and regulatory mechanisms. And it's, I believe, at the root of a lot of the issues. Almost all of the issues, I would say, that we're experiencing today with regards to chronic health. So let's talk about some of those issues.

Dhru Purohit
What are the implications of having too much artificial light, too much junk light? You and I are recording on a computer right now. You're sitting outside. I'm sitting inside. You know, you're not telling people to not have a computer or a phone or a laptop or other things.

We're talking about too much junk light in our lives. And not enough natural light that would be coming from the main source of light, which would be the sun. What are the implications of that in our lives? This episode is brought to you by Loombox. Red light therapy with Loombox is a part of my daily practice.

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That's over 40% off. Just go to theloombox.com drew to get your device. That's the lumebox.com comma, the loombox.com dashru to start stimulating your mitochondria today. Yeah, so it's kind of two fold. On the one hand, the absence of red and infrared light is among the most deleterious of the effects from artificial light.

Alexis Cowan
So red and infrared light is really interesting and important. It's present all the way from sunrise through sunset. Even midday sun is around 50% red and infrared light. And red and infrared light is what's known as long wavelength light, which means that it actually has a pretty high penetrance. It's able to penetrate through the skin into the body, where it can actually directly stimulate the activity of this molecular complex called cytochrome c oxidase, which is also known as complex four of the mitochondrial respiratory chain.

And this is a step right before ATP synthase, which is the step in the mitochondrial metabolism that synthesizes ATP and produces that chemical energy that all of our cells need in order to thrive, regenerate, you know, perform their functions. And so the absence of the retina, infrared light, on one hand, is extremely damaging to metabolism because we're not getting that impetus from the environment, from the light environment to support our metabolic processes and our mitochondrial function. Then, on the other hand, we also have the enrichment in blue light. So we have both the absence of red and infrared and the enrichment in blue. So the blue light is very important signal for our biology.

As I mentioned before, it's the primary signal that's sent to our brain in order to tell the brain what time of day it is. And then as a result, the knock on effects of that are for all the molecular clocks in the body to have their time set essentially by this master clock in the brain. And so we're both getting dysregulation in those clock timekeeping mechanisms when we're being exposed to blue light inappropriately. But on the other hand, we also have different effects of blue light on mitochondria compared to red and infrared. So whereas red and infrared are supportive and stimulatory to mitochondrial metabolism, blue light actually has inhibitory effects on mitochondrial metabolism also at that complex four of that respiratory chain.

The only difference there is that blue light doesn't actually penetrate deeply into the body. It kind of gets stopped somewhere past the epidermis, doesn't really get very deep, but that doesn't mean that it's not having meaningful effects on our bodies. So blue light can then directly affect the mitochondria in the skin. It can also directly affect the mitochondria in the retina and the proximal brain regions. The retina and the retinohypothalamic tract is what communicates with that master clock in the brain.

So if you're getting an excess of blue light, that's going to be directly damaging to mitochondria in the retina, which actually can, over time, break down those mechanisms and that kind of chain of command that sends the signals to the brain about what time of day it is. So you can imagine that an abundance of blue light in your environment can also lead to circadian disruption outside of, like, improper timing of blue light, but also by breaking down the physical chain of command that leads to the signal being sent from the environment to the master clock of the brain. You know, to connect the dots there on what you're on, what you're sharing. Give us a few things that people struggle with today. You know, you have a private coaching practice, you work with individuals.

Dhru Purohit
What do you see? Some things, right. We can't maybe attribute everything there to, you know, junk life, but some things could be made worse. What are some of those examples of things that you see people struggling more with when they have too much and an abundance of this junk light? What are some examples?

Alexis Cowan
Yeah, so I really want to highlight here that it's not only the junk light that's the problem. I would argue that the bigger problem is the absence of sunlight, and specifically the absence of uv light in the environment. Because we should. Maybe we can talk about this now then, like uv light is extremely important. And if you're living an indoor lifestyle, you're going to be deficient in uv light.

I like to think of different wavelengths of light as essential nutrients. And I think it's helpful because then we can think about each wavelength of light in the sun or in our environment. So we can say, are we getting too much of this, too little of this, etcetera. So if you're living an indoor lifestyle, and even if you're getting natural light through windows, the glass in normal windows blocks 100% of uv light and about 40% of near infrared light. So just by the very nature of living an indoor lifestyle, you're going to be deficient in UV light, which includes both UVA and UVB.

And you're also going to be deficient in that near infrared light, which is very supportive to mitochondria. So this is really important when it comes to very fundamental aspects of health, because uv light, specifically uvb light, it's not only the impetus for vitamin D production, which people generally know is very important. I think of vitamin D personally as a biomarker of uv light exposure, not as this marker that we need to optimize through supplementation. And if you look at the literature, that actually tracks pretty closely with what I just said, because the literature on vitamin D supplementation for health outcomes is little to no effect. Meanwhile, the effect sizes of vitamin D status on a whole host of diseases is very large.

And so essentially what that's telling us is that vitamin D is a biomarker for the time you spend outside. And spending time outside is protective against a whole host of diseases. But outside of the vitamin D story, uvb light is also the stimulus for the production of this pro hormone molecule called pro opiomelanocortin, or palm C. Palm C is produced in the skin and in the brain in response to uvb light exposure specifically. And the important part about this is that when Pom C is produced, it's cleaved into ten distinct hormonal product hormonal products, three of which include alpha, beta and gamma.

Endorphins. So many people may have heard of endorphins. Endorphins are endogenous opioid molecules. They make you feel good, but outside of that, they're boosting mood, but they're also improving cognition. They're decreasing anxiety, they're overall improving your baseline dopamine status so that you actually have more resources on board to actually critically think and approach your life with like a more keen eye.

And so one of the biggest knock on effects of living an indoor, artificially lit lifestyle, in my mind, is actually the absence of this signal to produce these endorphins endogenously that are so supportive to our baseline dopamine levels. Because in the absence of that stimulus, we're going to be reaching for the junk food, we're going to be reaching for the junk media, we're going to be reaching for substances, we're going to have addictions, we're going to have a poor critical thought. We're not going to be approaching life with our best foot forward because we're operating from a deficit. Our dopamine systems are not engaged to the level that they would be if we're living an outdoor lifestyle. And so instead of just cruising along, like feeling good and being able to approach life with a clear mind, we're now instead reaching for these quick dopamine hits that are just kind of giving us a boost in the moment.

But then they leave us more depleted than we were when we even started the behavior. And so this is like one of the biggest things that I think about in the context of chronic disease as it relates to poor decision making, not only as it relates to, like, lifestyle behaviors, but also relational dynamics and engaging in work that you enjoy, and then choosing the diets and choosing better foods for you, and not engaging in unhealthy behaviors, you're gonna be inclined to engage in these unhealthy behaviors if you're operating from a deficit. And so whatever we can do to increase that baseline, get you outside, get you under some uv light, middle of the day, that's balanced perfectly by the red and infrared light from the sun that we were evolved to encounter. It's going to improve every aspect of your life as a knock on effect simply by boosting your baseline dopamine status. Let's get some context here before we pull on some of these threads that you mentioned.

Dhru Purohit
How much sun, now that you've gone through and you've dug through a lot of the weeds and the latest science on this, how much sun are you advocating and telling your clients and the individuals that are listening to this podcast to be getting during the day? Great question. So this is one of the reasons why I really like thinking about vitamin D as a biomarker. So, thinking about vitamin D as a biomarker also accounts for differences in skin tone and latitude, etcetera, because individuals who have darker skin are going to need more sunlight in order to stimulate the vitamin D production. And this is also just thinking about ancestry.

Alexis Cowan
If you have ancestors that came from equatorial regions, you're going to need more sunlight because your ancestors encountered more intense, higher quality sun environments. And so they adapted to that by having more melanin in their skin. And that melanin absorbs all frequencies of light, including uv light. So that means it's basically kind of slurping up that uv light and not allowing that uv light to stimulate vitamin D production as easily. So you need a higher dose of sun in order to optimize your vitamin D levels versus somebody who has more heritage from more northern regions.

These individuals are going to need less total sunlight in order to optimize their vitamin D levels, because they have lighter skin, less melanin, and more of that uv light is going to be interacting with their skin cholesterol in order to synthesize vitamin D. So optimal vitamin D levels, as far as I'm concerned, as it relates to the literature, would be between 60 and 80 nanograms per milliliter. This kind of flies in the face of, like, the generalized recommendations, which say that anything greater than 30 nanograms per milliliter is fine. I think that's totally suboptimal. And if we're going to be living a more outdoor lifestyle, we would optimize to between 60 and 80 nanograms per milliliter.

And at the very least, suppression of parathyroid hormone, which occurs when vitamin D status is optimal, occurs only at levels 40 nanograms per mil or higher. So in order to get that full suppression of parathyroid hormone, we want to make sure we're at least at 40 nanograms per milliliter. But I think that optimal is over 60. We can use an app like Dminder, for example. Dminder is really cool because you put in your location, so it calculates your latitude, and then you put in how much cloud cover there is on that day.

You put how much clothes you're wearing, how much skin is exposed, and then you can start a timer, and it will tell you how much vitamin D you're making each second. And so it kind of gamifies it in a way, which makes it a little bit fun. You can also put in your baseline vitamin D levels from, you know, get a. You can get mail order vitamin d tests at this point, or you can use on your labs, you can ask your doctor to order it for you. You can get your baseline vitamin D.

You can plug it into the app, and it will tell you how much sun you need, you know, per week in order to get that level to the level that you set it at, which would be, in my opinion, greater than 60 nanograms per milliliter. And then you can, you know, use that app to help you optimize your levels, and then you can check them again in, you know, three, four months or whatever. And that's a really easy way to start to just incorporate more sun into your life. What I will say, though, that's important, is that if you're somebody that's prone to burning, and there's a lot of reasons why that might be that we should talk about that, it would be great for you to think about building a solar callus, which is what doctor Jack Cruz calls it, which basically means that you build up your sun exposure over time. You don't go zero to 100, you just build it up gradually, day by day.

You can also leverage things like red and infrared light, which helps to prevent burning of skin. So that could be something as simple as going out during sunrise, going out during sunset, which are completely enriched in red and infrared light and devoid in uv light to get that red and infrared light therapy. Or if you have a device at home, you can use that as well. I personally recommend leveraging the sunrise and sunset because it's also important from a circadian perspective. And you're kind of getting like you're killing many birds with 1 st.

So that would be something important to leverage for people who burn. Also, there's a dietary impact of nutritions coming in, and also the effects on your skin's ability or susceptibility to burning. So if your diet is very enriched in a lot of processed foods, processed oils, and also if you're eating at the wrong times of day, that can also lead to susceptibility to burn. So, for example, there's this. There's this clock gene in the skin that essentially turns on when you eat, as it turns out.

And so if you're eating late at night, your skin doesn't actually go into that recovery mode, and it makes it more susceptible to burning subsequently. But also if you're eating a lot of these processed oils, which are enriched in these oxidized omega six fats, which can be prone to inflammatory. They're a precursor to this inflammatory mediator called arachidonic acid. And they also out compete the machinery that your body needs to convert omega three s from plants into long chain omega three s, EPA and DHA. So an overconsumption of these omega six fats can both set the stage for inflammation and also set the stage for vitamin.

Sorry, not vitamin omega three deficiency as well. And also can weaken skin cell membranes. So it can make your skin cell membranes essentially more fluid and more susceptible to being damaged from the sun. So with regards to light, with regards to diet, we can leverage these effects to help you to prevent burning. And then again, if you feel like you're burning while you're in the sun, I don't recommend putting on sunscreen.

I recommend going into the shade. If you look at animals in nature, when they get enough sun, they go into the shade. That's just what, you know, nature does. There's no sunscreen. And evolutionary environment, we didn't rely on these types of things.

So, of course, there could be one off times where you have no choice but to use sunscreen. But my recommendation would be to seek shade or to put on some light clothing, because uv light cannot penetrate clothing. So that's another way to block uv light. If you do feel like you're burning. Let'S go a little bit further down that rabbit hole of the sun and its quote, unquote, damaging effects that a lot of people feel like they've heard about from dermatologists and public health experts.

Dhru Purohit
So take it one step further and talk about the data that's out there about the sun and skin cancer. Yeah, I would love to. So, I mean, first of all, vitamin D deficiency is highly linked with melanomas and also generally with skin cancers. Generally. So that's one area that's just like, there's some cognitive dissonance there, because we know in the evolutionary landscape, the sun is the primary source of vitamin D in our bodies.

Alexis Cowan
It's not coming from the diet. There certainly weren't any supplements back in the day. So how do we square that? That's number one. So that's the first point.

The second point would be, if the sun is causing skin cancer, then why is it, especially with melanomas, then why is it that indoor workers are more prone to getting melanomas than outdoor workers and that pale people are more prone to getting skin cancers and specifically melanoma than tans? People with tans. So those are some interesting kind of paradoxes that exist within the literature that tell me essentially that the sun isn't necessarily causal in any way in this story, that it's more likely to be another factor in our environment that we're not taking into account. And I think this largely points to the shift to an indoor lifestyle that we've experienced as a species over the past few hundred years. I mean, even if you look back at ancient Egypt, there were some interesting autopsies done of the elites, let's say the pharaohs, etcetera, and their mummies, like the mummified bodies, they were getting cancers and such, and they were living indoor lifestyles and they were eating a lot of grains.

And then the outdoor workers weren't getting those same diseases, but they were considered a lower class. There's something that happens to our bodies when we're taking ourselves away from the sun. And then also, I mean, engaging in the eating grains is a whole kind of other can of worms. But I think we can tolerate eating a lot of carbohydrates, essentially, if we're getting sunlight. And that's also consistent with the evolutionary environment.

If you come from equatorial regions, then you're going to be encountering more carbohydrate rich foods in your environment because there's plenty of sunlight to actually support the growth of those plant foods. If you come from more polar regions where the ground freezes, you're only going to have access to animal based foods, essentially for many months out of the year. And so you're really only meant to eat carbohydrate foods, carbohydrate containing foods if you're encountering a more high quality, light environment. And so that's just something else I like to think about because there's this whole idea or, like, confusion around what food should I eat, what's a healthy food, what's an unhealthy food? Carbs are bad, carbs are good, etcetera.

And I really think, ideally for our species, eating a more seasonally appropriate diet for your region is going to be the diet that's going to best support your body's ability to adapt to the local environment. And so, you know, I'm in New Jersey, so that might look like more meats and fats in the winter. And then as this time of year rolls around, I'm eating more fresh produce. I'm also still eating animal proteins, but diversified plant foods as well because they're now available in my area. What are your thoughts about a healthy level of sun that you're recommending?

Dhru Purohit
Does that still age the skin? But that's normal. It's just that we're not used to skin aging that way today. And I ask also just for, for personal reasons, I've been on a extremely clean diet for the last probably, like, you know, 2015 years. And I don't eat a lot of seed oils outside of occasionally going to a restaurant and not being able to control, you know, what kind of things are there?

That's my own personal preference that's there. I feel like I work outside. I work out outside. I notice myself that when I would go in for these different skin measuring age tools with different dermatologists that I might go see at various times for just like a facial, like, just like a regular facial. If I wanted my skin to look a little bit nicer before an event or something like that, or if I'm accompanying my wife and she's like, hey, you should get a facial done.

I was being told that, hey, listen there. This is some of the damaging, or this is some of the aging impact that's there on my face, in particular from not wearing sunscreen. Is there any. I'm not asking, is there any truth to that? The way that I.

I'm asking, what's your sort of perspective on that situation, even for somebody like me, who lives a pretty healthy lifestyle? This episode is brought to you by Aquatru. I've talked to so many experts about the importance of clean water as a foundation for great health, and this makes total sense because our bodies are mostly made up of water. So if we don't get enough, they literally, our cells literally can't function. Right?

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Dash h I t.com filter and get $100 off when you try aqua true for yourself today. Yeah, so, I mean, there's quite a bit of literature showing that blue light causes hyperpigmentation, wrinkles, and skin damage. So I would argue that in the modern environment, the excess of blue light and our excess screen time is actually one of the primary drivers of skin aging and also potentially driving melanomas and skin cancers, too. I would not be surprised because we know cancer is essentially stemming from mitochondrial dysfunction and mitochondrial damage on some level. There's also can be a genetic component, but I think largely the metabolic derangement that happens first is probably what's creating this kind of environment that's leading to genetic changes to happen, that kind of spitballs and leads to malignancy down the line.

Alexis Cowan
So I really think the blue light, which is completely novel to our environments, if you think about it as well, because whenever we encounter blue light in nature, it's always in the context of an abundance of red and infrared light and also some uv light. We're not meant to encounter this completely alien light source that's highly enriched in blue light almost, you know, alone. Like, if you look at the spectra for an led bulb, fluorescent bulb, or your devices, the peak of blue is huge. And then there's like some, you know, tails on each side where you're getting some other color light, but the blue is really predominating. And so I think the more we can either filter our screens and change our lights to being more warmer hues or red lights, and using something like iris on our computers.

And you can use native filters on your phones to just help put an amber filter or red filter on to help filter out that blue light. Iris also removes flicker. So I highly recommend that for people who work on computers often. So using those things can be really helpful for eliminating blue light exposure, especially on the face, which is constantly encountering this blue light when we're glued to a screen. And outside of that, I think the aging and the skin aging conversation really boils down to largely mitochondrial function again, and also just the way that our cells are becoming dehydrated in response to living life.

So in the modern environment, we have these very dehydrating effects from things like non native emfs, from also blue light, which is basically preventing the production of metabolic water in the mitochondria, which is made right after that complex four step of the respiratory chain metabolic water is the product of that reaction that's coupled to ATP production. And so if mitochondria aren't functioning to the level that they should be, then we're going to be depleting our metabolic water. We're going to be losing cellular plumpness, essentially. We're going to be dehydrating our cells, and that metabolic water is inherently deuterium depleted, and we could potentially go down the deuterium rabbit hole. I would be down.

But that deuterium depleted water is really, really important for also supporting the mitochondria function. So deuterium depleted water and deuterium content of cells is both a reflection of mitochondrial health, and it also contributes to mitochondrial health or dysfunction. And so anything we can do to support the hydration of our skin and of our bodies at, like, a cellular level is going to be inherently anti aging. That's great. So it's not that my skin maybe wasn't aging in some ways, but there's the misunderstanding that the feeling that it's, you know, just or only the sun, it's actually more of a lot of this blue light sitting in front of the computer all freaking day, as a lot of us do.

Dhru Purohit
And I've done for, you know, 25 years of my life, being an entrepreneur and getting started early, which is why some of the. You see this recommendation sometimes on TikTok and Instagram, you now have dermatologists telling people to wear sunscreen indoors because they're starting to get on this idea that also understanding that blue light causes this damage that's there. And obviously, we know your thoughts about sunscreen, but, yeah, super interesting. Thank you for that breakdown. Let's go a little bit further.

You had mentioned to me once previously, and I'd like to just double click on this a little bit. You said that on this topic of the sun and cancer and melanoma, you said sun exposure is inversely correlated with melanoma risk. Can you expand on that? Yeah, essentially, for melanoma specifically, there is some relationship between sunburn frequency and, like, squamous cell carcinomas, which is another type of skin cancer. But for melanoma specifically, getting more sun is actually inversely correlated with melanoma incidence.

Alexis Cowan
And also, as it relates to vitamin D, having higher vitamin D levels is shown to be highly protective against melanomas as well. And so I really, you know, I kind of am super interested in Doctor Jack Cruz's take on this, which is basically that, like the melanocytes, if they're not receiving uv light from their environment, they will go looking for it. And essentially, they're kind of like, coming up to the skin in this, like, point, basically as a way to seek out uv light when you're deficient in it. And melanocytes are actually really interesting, too, because they're highly mobile. They can move throughout the body.

And this is kind of, like, nerdy, but they're neuroectodermal in origin. The same with immune cells, same with the brain and all of the palm c producing tissues. And actually, you reminded me that I really want to circle back also to some of the other products of propiol, melanocortin, or palm C cleavage, because it relates highly to human health outcomes, especially as it relates to the obesity epidemic. So unless. Do you want me to expand on that a little more?

Should I go into that? Sure, please. Okay. Yeah. Great.

So two of the other cleavage products of palm C are alpha and beta Msh. And alpha MSH has been known for a long time to be highly associated with obesity, and yet we still haven't come to the conclusion that, you know, we can actually leverage our environments and our lights, specifically the sun, in order to produce more of this alpha MSH molecule. So alpha and beta MSH are both really important for stimulating melanocytes to produce melanin. So that's basically helping you tan in response to getting sun. And so something I didn't mention before, but if you're wearing sunglasses when you're getting sun outdoors, that's also going to make you more prone to burning, because you're not getting the brain production of palm C.

That then leads to the production of this alpha and beta msh, which stimulates the skin to make melanin. So wearing sunglasses, wearing contacts, wearing prescription lenses, they're all going to make you more prone to burning, and they're going to reduce the production of that palm C in the brain, which also affects your dopamine status as well, because now you're not getting that impetus for the endorphin production either. So the best thing that I can recommend with regards to contacts, glasses, sunglasses, like, for example, I wear contacts. What I typically do is I wear my glasses in the morning. So when I wake up, I go outside, I'm getting my grounding, I'm getting early morning sun, and I just pop my glasses off while I'm doing that.

I keep my glasses on through the middle of the day because I'm going to go out again and get midday sun, obviously, weather pending. But I try to get out regardless because you can still get a decent amount of light, even if it's cloudy. And then after I get my midday sun for however long that was, then I'll typically pop in my contacts and I'll be doing more work on the computer. I try to work outside whenever possible, just so I can also get that full spectrum light you can see here. I have, like, an umbrella, so if there's a lot of sun and glare, I can kind of mitigate that with some shade.

And then I'm wearing my contacts during that time. And then when I go out again around sunset, I'll put my glasses back on, essentially, so I can take them off. And if I go for walks during the day, if I'm walking the dog, I usually wear my glasses. I usually take. Take them off and just, like, walk around blind.

And it's actually pretty interesting. But I decreased my prescription in both eyes by a whole point since I stopped wearing my glasses and contacts as much. And I know there's some evidence of people improving their nearsightedness through, like, training their eye muscles, essentially, to work better, because the more you rely on prescription lenses to fix your vision, the lazier and weaker those eye muscles get. And those eye muscles literally, like, change the shape of your eye by pulling on the eye. And so I think there may be other benefits outside of just getting proper light into your eyes to kind of going without your prescription lenses sometimes.

And it's weird at first, but you get used to it, and there's lots of benefits to it, like we just described. And so that's kind of what I do. I don't recommend LasIk. I'd recommend either. You know, if you're somebody who's not working from home, maybe just carry around your contact case so you can pop them out when you're going outside.

If you take your lunch break outside, you can just pop them out, or you can opt to wear your glasses so you can easily take them on and off. So those will be some tips that I have with regards to getting natural light in your eyes. Circling back, though, to the alpha MSH story, because I want to make sure that I get to that. So when you're producing alpha and beta MSH, the effects aren't only on stimulating melanin production, but also on appetite regulation and energy expenditure directly in the brain. So a lot of people don't know, but the brain, specifically the hypothalamus, is kind of what's responsible for setting the metabolic rate of your entire body.

Alpha and beta MSH actually work to help boost resting metabolic rate while simultaneously decreasing appetite. So you can see how powerful that would be from, like, a weight loss perspective, because you're simultaneously not going to be as hungry, so you're going to eat less, and then you're also maintaining a higher basal metabolic rate, which is often a challenge, especially in a caloric deficit, because you typically have these compensatory, compensatory mechanisms that kick in to basically make you more hungry and to decrease your basal metabolic rate in response to a diet, because your body's trying to maintain homeostasis and maintain weight. And so leveraging the sun in order to produce alpha and beta MSH can be extremely powerful when it comes to helping you lose weight and lose weight in a healthy way. And then outside of that, we're also getting support of mitochondrial function directly from that red and infrared light in the sun. So, together, the uv light and the red and infrared serve as a real powerhouse for helping to support healthy weight loss, weight maintenance, and also muscle function.

So you mentioned working out outside earlier. I also try to work outside as much as I can, and that's also extremely beneficial because you're getting that direct support of ATP production in the muscle mitochondria from the red and infrared light. You're also getting the boosting of your dopamine levels from the endorphin production from uv light, which is also going to help you, actually to have better movement quality. So a lot of people don't necessarily link dopamine with movement, but if you look at Parkinson's disease, which is essentially degeneration of the dopamine producing neurons in the brain, we get these tremors that lead to issues with quality movement that's directly related to basically a poor dopamine status. And so if we're supporting our dopamine levels, we're actually going to have better muscle recruitment, better postural muscle activation, better agility, um, just, you know, just be able to be more athletic.

And so that's something that people can leverage if they want to improve their athleticism and also just get a better pump in a better workout. And getting your workouts in outside, especially if you can be barefoot and grounded while you're doing it as a source of free electrons, which is like, essentially free energy from the earth, is going to be an absolute game changer. You know, one of the things we talked about before we recorded today is that I was sharing that I'd like to present my audience with a little bit of a good, you know, better, best type framework when it comes into an area of their life that maybe they haven't been paying attention to. So taking some of your recommendations that you talk about with first, you know, of course, minimizing junk light, but more importantly, number two is getting, you know, the appropriate amount of sun that's there to be able to not only support the vitamin D levels, but really to support your entire circadian rhythm, circadian biology. Um, what are some tips if we follow those, uh, three modalities?

Dhru Purohit
Good. Uh, you know, better for some people that are getting some level of sun and then best in terms of what you might be working with some of your clients that are looking to dial it into the optimal category. Yeah. So with regards to, uh, circadian health in general or specifically with exercise, uh. Specifically with circadian health in general and the inclusion of, of really light as a, as a healing tool in our bodies.

Alexis Cowan
Yeah, great. Yeah, great. So the easiest things, lowest hanging fruit would be to mitigate blue light exposure indoors. So that would include, you know, switching to like amber light bulbs or red light bulbs in your home. So for example, when it's around sunset here, my entire house, including my porch lights are all red.

You can get red led bulbs on Amazon. You can also get color changing led bulbs on Amazon, which are pretty cool. They can have like a remote, there's also Wi Fi controlled ones. But if you want to turn your Wi Fi off at night while you're sleeping, then the remote controlled ones are great. So you can change them to red at night.

You can put them on like a brighter white or a yellow color during the day. And so that's a great option for people who are looking to mitigate their indoor blue light exposure. I also mentioned the iris app which you can use to filter both blue light and also remove flicker from light which is very activated to the sympathetic nervous system. Blue light is also very activating to the sympathetic nervous system. So anybody who's struggling with anxiety and nervous system dysregulation in general is going to immensely benefit immediately from mitigating their blue light exposure.

And so you can use the iris, there's also on your Apple devices, you can natively filter blue light out of your screens by putting an amber filter or a red filter on your computers or your phones. There's an app called Flux that you can use, I believe, on Android devices, Android phones that will do something similar for you. And for tvs, I just recommend, you know, there are some like screen covers you can get which are kind of pretty hardcore. So I would recommend just getting a pair of blue blocking glasses that you if you're going to watch tv at night, pop those on. The nighttime blue blocking glasses will block 99% of blue light.

There's also daytime blue blocking glasses that if you're going to be on a lot of screens during the day, that will block about 60% of blue light. So you're reducing a little bit of that load. Of course, we still want some blue light during the day because it's that very important signal to our brains about what time of day it is. But ideally, we can get that from the sun in the presence of red and infrared light. And then having said that, another thing that we can do to help improve our indoor light environments is to add back red and infrared light, which is absent largely within the modern indoor lifestyle.

So, as I mentioned before, the indoor lights and devices, they're all devoid of red and infrared light, primarily because they're considered, like, energy efficient, because infrared light is just another word for heat. So heat is seen as this waste product, and it's not recognized as this very important light source that actually supports our mitochondrial function. So adding back red and infrared light into the environment can be great. You can use a red and infrared light panel, just have it running in the background. If you're on a computer or watching tv, it's good to just have it on.

It can even be in the distance and have to be super up close. But anywhere is fine. If you're going to try to use it therapeutically for, like, wound healing or injury remediation, then you want it to have a little bit closer. But if you're just trying to get the benefit for your eyes and in general, to support the total light environment of the space, then you can just have it kind of running in the background. So those would be some major things that you can do with regards to improving your indoor light environment.

And then even if you can only get out for, you know, a couple minutes in the morning, like ten minutes in the afternoon, or 15 minutes on your lunch break, and then, you know, pop out for sunset and eat your meals outside if you can, is going to make a huge difference. And there's even recent research that shows that if you eat carbohydrate containing foods in the presence of red and infrared light, that you get less of a blood sugar spike. And that's literally because that red and infrared light is directly supporting mitochondrial energy production and the clearance of excess glucose from the bloodstream. So something as simple as taking your meals outside, especially if they contain carbohydrates, is going to be a huge win. With regards to your metabolic health and your glucose regulation, that's fantastic.

Dhru Purohit
And if somebody is listening today and they're like, hey, look, I do a lot of the evening stuff. I have the red lights, or I use the blue light blocking glasses that are there, you know, I feel like I get a good amount of. I go out in the morning, whether I follow the Huberman protocol or somebody else's, I get some sun in the evening that's there as well. I try to spend some time outside is using red light devices, and there's a whole bunch of them that are out there. Is that something that can be brought into in a therapeutic way?

Support energy, cognition, other stuff? How are you using those? And when would you be recommending those? Yeah, so I think if you have a home gym space and you maybe don't have space to work out outside, using the red and infrared light panels while you're working out can be a huge win. I've personally noticed in my own life that if I work out in front of those panels, I do not get sore.

Alexis Cowan
Similarly, with working out outside, I don't get sore. And my gym membership, I have a lifetime membership. And we recently went back, like, a couple weeks ago because it unfroze. I had it frozen for a while, and I did a pretty standard workout for myself. It wasn't anything crazy.

And I was crippled for, like, four days. And it just really blew my mind. And I was just connecting the dots, and I was like, yeah, I mean, we're under these, like, very harsh led lights in there. We're not getting any of the red and infrared light to help support your muscles function in response to that exercise and the muscle muscular contraction and the energy production that's required to facilitate that. And so it makes sense, honestly, from, like, an efficiency standpoint, that if you can be working out and moving your body under red and infrared light in some way, whether that's the sun or indoors, that's going to be a win.

So that's one use for those panels. I also think that if you're somebody that's prone to sunburn, like I mentioned earlier, you can leverage those panels to kind of prep your skin both before and after sun exposure to help reduce burn. And outside of that, if you have any injuries or specific areas of your body that, you know, maybe have some mitochondrial issues, let's say you have thyroid problems, or, you know, that you're exposed to mold, for example, which is essentially like, these mitochondrial toxins that you would encounter from mold toxin, and then maybe you have like a broken ankle or, you know, some injury, then you can also channel the red and infrared light. Use those devices specifically on areas of concern. I think sun would first and foremost be the most powerful source of red and infrared light for injury, remediation and healing.

But using the red and infrared light panels inside is going to be way better than not doing anything at all. The biggest difference is that from these red and infrared light panels, you're really only getting about four or five wavelengths of red and infrared light in the sun. You're getting like this broad spectrum of different wavelengths of light that were probably just scratching the surface on the benefits of each. So I think leveraging what nature gives us is probably going to be the biggest win. But you're absolutely still going to get a benefit using these panels indoors for specific areas of concern.

Dhru Purohit
The beginning of the podcast, just taking a little pivot. You mentioned your story, talk about your story here in the context of how your awakening and your moment of understanding how important circadian biology was shifted your story and helped you continue your journey of trying to shoot for optimal health. Yeah, I mean, so I'm somebody who's always learning and always looking for new information. I would never consider myself an expert in anything because I literally am just absorbing new information practically every day. And so I always reserve the right to change my opinions and my takes on anything.

Alexis Cowan
But like I mentioned when I was at Princeton, so I was studying metabolism in the Rabinowitz lab, which is top metabolism research lab in the world. And I was largely studying the effects of ketogenic diet and high carbohydrate diets, and fasting on tissue metabolism, and how tissues are basically changing in response to each, which was super interesting. And also during that time, I discovered Joel Green's work in the immunity code and really got obsessed with the microbiome, especially because I had dealt with that IB's that I mentioned. And then I also had a really terrible dairy intolerance, dairy allergy situation that arose following that IB's just to backtrack. I found that dairy was like the major trigger food for me.

And when I removed it from my diet, all of my symptoms went away. And so I had not eaten dairy, even butter, like completely, strictly removed dairy for about five years. And when I reintroduced it, I had a pretty severe response to it, like in a severe inflammatory response to it. And so I got really interested in the microbiome because of this idea that you can train the microbiome to digest foods for you and also modulating the microbiome can help to improve gut permeability. So reducing gut permeability and improving the integrity of tight junctions overall reducing inflammatory burden not only in the gut, but the whole body.

And so I thought, you know, the microbiome was just super interesting. And then I also love this topic because it tied really nicely in with, once I started going down the light rabbit hole, I learned about this gut skin axis that exists so that when uvb light hits your skin, it directly modulates your microbiome to increase microbial diversity. And so it felt like a full circle moment for me, where it's like, yes, the microbiome is so important. And again, it still comes back to sun because that's also a major regulator of microbiome composition. And it really has kind of made clear to me that the reason that diet has become such an important input to shape the microbiome in modern society is because we've removed all the other inputs.

We've removed nature. We've removed the sun, which, you know, nature is full of, you know, trillions of microbes, viruses, fungi that we're being exposed to and that are training our immune systems to be tolerant and adapted to our environments. And so removing ourselves from that natural environment into like a semi sterile indoor environment, removing ourselves from the sun, that completely strip away that gut skin axis that's activated by sunlight and helps to shape and stabilize a more diverse microbiome. Now, diet is really the last thing coming into the body that's influencing microbes. It's kind of like the final frontier.

And so no wonder it's having such a big impact on microbial composition in the modern day. But I think if we're leveraging the full spectrum, like the kind of the trio, the nature, the sun and the diet, then that's when we're going to get the, like these really meaningful and prominent shifts in our microbiome. They're going to help us to reduce our inflammatory burden, improve our digestive health, improve food allergies and sensitivities. I completely reversed my dairy issues through microbiome training and optimizing for bifidobacteria and achromancia. And now also leveraging sunlight to help activate that skin gut axis and help to stabilize those healthy microbe communities so that they're less labile and less likely to change in response to changes in the environment.

I really think about my journey and how it's kind of come full circle in a way, but it just keeps expanding upon itself. And so I'm always just so excited to acquire new tools and new ways to help people and to help myself. And so, yeah, light has kind of been a very fundamental kind of glue that puts everything together that I had learned previously and puts it within a. New context just because you mentioned it. Would you mind expanding on a little bit about why your focus on, like, how did you even get to the place to understand that bifidobacterium and, um, and Ackermansia were things that you needed to go further down the rabbit hole on to help you?

Dhru Purohit
Um, and it's also something that you work with clients as well, who have gut issues. Uh, why would, why were those two things so key? Based on all your research and you working in this lab, how did you come to that conclusion? Yeah, so when I was at Princeton, microbiome research was really starting to take off, and I was involved in a couple projects in the lab surrounding this topic, and I really learned about the importance of these two key groups of bacteria, the bifido and the Ackermansia, from, like I mentioned, Joel Green's book, the immunity Code. And he's kind of a citizen scientist.

Alexis Cowan
And I, you know, I really looked up to him in that way because he's very thorough and did a great job compiling literature and really synthesizing the literature and coming to the conclusion that if you focus on bifidobacteria and ackermansia as it relates to the microbiome, then you actually end up, as a result, improving and optimizing the microbiome as a whole. Because bifidobacteria plays this crucial role in producing metabolites that feed other key species of microbes in the gut. And so if you're supporting bifidobacteria, you're going to automatically be supporting these other groups of microbes, which are specifically called, like, the butyrate producing microbes that help to produce this butyrate molecule, which is a short chain fatty acid that feeds the colon cells, helps to decrease gut permeability, helps to reduce inflammation, helps to train and tune the immune system into a more anti inflammatory state. So you're going to get all of those benefits by looking upstream at the role of bifidobacteria, which produces these metabolites that go on to feed other microbes. So they serve as this, like, incredible group of microbes that serve such an important role starting from literally the day we're born.

So the infant microbiota is about 90% or more bifidobacteria because the primary food source after birth is breast milk. And human breast milk contains these molecules called human milk oligosaccharides, which feed bifidobacteria specifically. They're like a really good food source for them, the HMo's. And so these hmo's grow up, these bifido. And that bifidobacteria is responsible for training the newborn's immune system and helping the newborn's immune system to identify what's self, what's other, what's inside, what's outside, what's good, what's bad.

And that training set, that data set is what actually informs immune system for the rest of that individual's lifetime. And so that's another reason why, you know, breastfed infants have much less incidence of inflammatory issues, asthma, allergies, and that also c section babies are more susceptible to getting allergic and inflammatory conditions later in life as well. It's because of this microbiome link. And so by supporting bifidobacteria, even if you were formula fed and you were a C section baby, and maybe you were on a lot of antibiotics as a kid, you still have the opportunity to support your microbiome as an adult by focusing on bifidobacteria. And the Ackermansia, part of the story really comes into play with regards to gut permeability.

So there's a lot of insults in the modern environment, whether it's emulsifiers and processed foods and antibiotics and other chemicals that we're encountering in our environments that increase gut permeability and make our guts more leaky. Achromancia lives in the mucus lining and helps to essentially train the gut to be a little more like scrupulous, let's say, with what's coming in and what's coming out. So it helps to increase tight junction integrity so that we're not letting as much stuff from the lumen actually get across into the bloodstream, let's say. And so that's also highly associated with, like, obesity and diabetes. If you have a, you know, a hyper permeable gut and you're deficient in Ackermansia, you're much more likely to be obese and diabetic.

And they've also shown in the research that if you can improve ackermancia levels, you can improve glycemia, and you can help to reduce body fatness as well. And so there's this really incredible link between Ackermansia and metabolic health, let's say. And then also the bifidobacteria story as it relates to inflammatory health, as that also relates to mitochondrial function and whole body inflammatory status and also cognition. There's a link with the brain. The gut brain axis is a very, very real thing that can help to regulate your neurotransmitter levels and directly can impact the way that you're feeling in your body on a day to day basis.

These are all just the incredible benefits that you can get from taking a bifido and akromancia centric approach. And when you leverage your light environment and the sun exposure, you can expedite your results even more, because you're going to help to kind of concretize and stabilize that beneficial microbiome that you're working on cultivating. Not to mention that the red and infrared light also directly supports anti inflammation within the gut. And keeping a low inflammatory burden in the gut is really important if we want to cultivate these beneficial microbes, because these microbes thrive in low oxygen environments. And whenever there's inflammation, there's blood flow, and essentially, there's more oxygen coming in.

So we need to make sure that inflammation levels are low, that we're optimizing the microbiome through food, through light, through natural exposures in nature, and that together, over the course of it, depends on how serious people's problems are. But it could be, over the course of a few weeks, few months, a year or two, you can get some serious improvements in symptoms, and I would argue, complete remission of illnesses as well as I've experienced. I want to come back to this one idea. We chatted about it a little bit earlier, but I really feel like to connect the dots a little bit further, because I've seen you talk about this. One of the things that I've seen you share is that when you don't have the presence of light, in particular in the way that we're defining it, having light from the sun and not relying on all this junk light that's there, when you don't have those things and they're not dialed in, it actually makes all of your habits and your view harder to stick to.

Dhru Purohit
It makes it harder to actually stay away from junk food. It makes it harder to actually want to be motivated for things. It makes it harder to have the sort of energy to want to work out. Did I get that correctly? That's correct.

Alexis Cowan
And that's all thanks to the uv portion and specifically the uvb portion of sunlight, which is the most demonized portion. We didn't talk about uva. It also plays a really important role in general, in health. I mean, it's a major stimulus for nitric oxide production. Nitric oxide is crucial for vasodilation, essentially widening and infiltration of the blood vessels into the tissues for nutrient and oxygen delivery purposes.

So anybody who's dealing with heart disease or cardiovascular issues, sun is an absolute game changer. And there's plenty of literature that supports that as well. I should also mention that sun exposure is highly associated with decreased prevalence of a whole host of diseases, including autoimmune diseases, many types of cancers, diabetes, to name a few. And then as it relates to the motivation and the mood and the willpower, that's absolutely. It's not just a muscle.

Like, on one hand, the more you engage it, the better you can get. But still, it's a finite resource. But you can actually improve your total capacity of willpower by optimizing that light environment, improving your baseline dopamine status, which is literally going to change the way that you view life, view the world. It's going to increase your inherent motivational levels so that you can goal set better, you can achieve your goals more efficiently. You also just get more of a wide panoramic view of life, and you're able to see the bigger picture.

Something a lot of people suffer with in the modern day lifestyle is nervous system dysregulation. And just kind of getting stuck in this sympathetic state, which can be directly attributed to that junk light environment and that blue light exposure, which is always turning our nervous system on and like, burning us out. So that blue light without the balancing effects of the uv and the red, which help to just make our nervous systems more flexible and. And increase our HRV to basically increase the ability of our nervous system to go from parasympathetic to sympathetic more easily. It's going to have many knock on effects, not only to your mood stability and just your, you know, overall feelings of well being, but also your digestive health as it kind of comes full circle there, because we need to be getting parasympathetic in order to actually digest our foods appropriately.

And how many people are, you know, eating on the go? They're eating while they're super stressed out. They're not chewing their food appropriately. They're eating while they're in front of screens. All of these things, all these behaviors are pushing you into a sympathetic state while you're simultaneously asking your body to get parasympathetic while you're eating.

And so, you know, making just some mindful choices around our light exposure, especially around meal times, but just also in general is going to improve the quality and the flexibility of our nervous systems tremendously. And that just has so many knock on effects to every aspect of our life because it's going to change the way that we're making decisions. It's going to change the people that we surround ourselves with. It's going to change the quality of our relationships. It's going to change the depth of our relationships.

It's going to change the depth of our relationship with ourselves as well. So I think in my personal experience and my work with clients, so much can improve when we start to even dial in our light environments, even 1015 percent, it doesn't have to be everything at once, but just little bits, a few minutes here and there when you can, is going to make a big difference and it's going to make you want to do more. That's fantastic. Doctor Cohen, on this topic of light, you're a wealth of knowledge and you've been posting a lot about it. And you have all these great studies that you've collected that you share on Instagram or breakdowns or your sort of, uh, you know, connecting the dots for individuals.

Dhru Purohit
Anything else in this topic of light that you feel that we didn't get a chance to go into that you feel is super important for the audience to, uh, learn about here, especially as we are winding down on the interview. Yeah, so, I mean, what I'll say is that I just like to really think about connection with nature in general as this very important aspect of health that's, um, just not really thought about. Especially through the modern lens. I think we take a lot of it for granted. And obviously within a generation, we only know what's normal for us.

Alexis Cowan
But just what's normal for us isn't normal at the evolutionary scale of things. And we can't really subvert nature's rules. We can try to get around them, but it ends up creating a lot of suffering for us. And so the quicker that we can come to terms with the fact that what we're doing and how we're living is not suitable for our biology, the more quickly we can just come up with new solutions. So the worst part about this entire story is the level of gaslighting that occurs from the powers that be and the status quo systems.

That none of this stuff matters. Blue light doesn't matter. That there's just no discussion about the harms of these things within the mainstream environment. And it's frustrating because as soon as we can just acknowledge that this is happening, we can just make better tech that's not going to harm us to this extent, and it's going to be more supportive to our function. And so it really comes back to just identifying and understanding the importance of light and specific wavelengths of light as it relates to how they're interacting with our bodies and regulating our metabolism and physiology and neurochemistry and endocrinology and all of these things.

And once we can just understand and acknowledge that, then it's only a matter of time before really cool tech can be developed. Like daylight company is making these new tablets and laptops that are completely absent of blue light. So that's going to be changing the game in that department. There's so much that can be done once we get to a point of just being honest about it. And so I just always urge everybody to just kind of do an honest survey of your life.

Most people know that screens aren't great for them. Most people feel really crappy after being on screens for long periods of time. This isn't like a revelation, but just kind of getting back in touch with the natural cues that our body's sending us and. And just kind of following those instead of constantly overriding our endogenous signals and intellectualizing everything. Sometimes it's like the answer is really simple and we've known it for a while, but we've just been ignoring it or numbing it.

Whether it's a symptom of an issue or just feelings of burnout, or whatever it is, resentment, whatever it is, if we can just follow those threads of intuition that our body's telling us, then we can kind of come to solutions and answers more quickly and reduce our level of suffering. Just being honest in general, whether it's with technology or with ourselves, I think, you know, just ends up making a huge, huge difference in the quality of our life. So that's what I would say about that. I'm really excited for the future. I'm really excited about this area of light biology and quantum biology.

I think it's going to be a real game changer as it comes to human health, and I'm really excited to contribute even a small amount to that project. Great. How can our audience follow along? And also, if you wouldn't mention, if you wouldn't mind mentioning you also have a podcast of your own as well. Yeah, yeah.

So my podcast is called undoctrinate yourself. I started it last October. I'm really excited about it. I actually had Doctor Jack Cruz on in January, so he was obviously a major influence for me on my circadian biology and light biology journey. So that was a real honor.

And I've had a lot of interesting guests. So I've had about 20 episodes so far. So you guys can go check it out. It's on Spotify and YouTube. And I also have my business.

I don't do too much one on one work anymore, but I do offer a lot of coursework. And I have a live program that's starting actually this week on Thursday that's relating to redox and detox. So redox being basically your mitochondrial function and mitochondrial health, and detox basically being supporting your cellular and systems level, detoxification levels, so that you can properly engage with your environment in a way that's not leading to stagnation and accumulation of whether it's metabolic waste or environmental toxins, et cetera. So that's kicking off. It's going to be a 90 day program that starts this Thursday.

I also had a 21 day reset program that taught all about circadian light biology, mitochondrial health, and metabolic health that people can take now as like a self guided course. And then I also have three courses through my business. There was a health optimization bootcamp I did that basically walks through a lot of the protocols I use in my practice. And then I had a scientific literacy intensive course that teaches people how to engage with scientific literature and be able to kind of dissect it and understand the anatomy of a paper and understand what's a good study and what's a bad study, and also just like the hierarchy of evidence and being able to critically assess literature. So that was another course that I had that's all self guided now.

And then my third course was metabolic mastery mentorship, which was an eight module course that basically unpacked metabolic health as it relates to every organ system and also the circadian link as well. So those are all self guided now. I like doing live courses, so that's something I'm probably going to consistently show up with for the foreseeable future. So those are some of the ways that people can find me. I'm primarily active on Instagram, otralexisjasmin, and yeah, I answer almost all my DM's at this point.

So if anybody has questions, I can feel free to reach out and I'd be happy to assist. Amazing. Well, we'll link to all that, including your podcast, your Instagram, your courses in the show, notes below. This has been fantastic. You've definitely gotten me since the first time that we connected, got me more excited about getting more sun in my life, in a way that's healthy for me.

Dhru Purohit
And so I want to acknowledge you for that. Doctor Cohen, thank you again for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. Actually, I will add one more thing I just thought of that's important with regards to an actionable perspective. If you're getting midday sun, the biggest bang for your buck, areas of your body to expose are your abdomen and your calves, because there's nerves under the skin of the abdomen and the calf area that are extremely primary palm seed producers.

Alexis Cowan
So that means that you can kind of make the most palm c get the biggest bang for your buck, let's say, by exposing those regions of your body to uv light from the sun. And so if you only have a short period of time to get some sun midday, I would recommend exposing your belly and your legs and kind of, you know, getting the most out of that session that you can. So I just wanted to add that because it's super actionable and pretty easy for people to accomplish if they have, you know, even, like, a small private area somewhere in, like, a balcony or backyard or whatever. But even if not, they can just wear a crop top and, like, shorts, and you're good to go.

Dhru Purohit
That's awesome. Yeah. And just to. Just to clarify for you, you're not talking about. We're not.

When we're talking about sun exposure, and I don't think anybody would have this idea. We're not talking about telling people to tan the way that you saw, like, tanning back in the day. Right. We're talking about just even. Just even a little bit of sun exposure throughout the day makes a huge difference, especially if people are getting nothing.

And then you build your sort of your tolerance up your callus, your sun callous, up to the point that your body can be able to tolerate. But we're not talking about tanning in the traditional sense. Is that accurate? Well, so the solar callus is actually melanin production. So you are, if you're doing it right, you're gonna get tan, um, not burned, which is a good thing, because I mentioned earlier melanin.

Alexis Cowan
Those melanocytes are actually very mobile. And as it turns out, there's, like, really important areas of, like, deep in the body that are enriched in melanin, which, you know, not only includes deep brain regions, but also in the heart, the blood vessels, et cetera. And because these melanocytes can move around, there's some evidence that essentially, if you're developing a tan on your skin, your body can actually pull that melanin into itself and use it to support these functions of these organs deep in your body and these tissues. So I think there is a major benefit to developing melanin on your surface because your body can then repurpose that in other areas. It doesn't mean you have to go crazy.

I mean, you don't need to look like an orange and leathery by the end of the summer. But developing some of a tan, I think, is going to be beneficial, especially as it relates to, like, then going through the wintertime, especially if you live in a northern latitude, that melanin can then actually be repurposed in a productive way within the body. No, that's great. You made the distinction between burning and tanning. And I think, yeah, realizing it, I was talking probably about burning the way that people would burn on the beach.

Oh, yeah. You know, traditionally in the past. But thank you for that distinction. That's super helpful. And thank you again for being on the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. This was fun.

Dhru Purohit
Hi, everyone. Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already subscribed, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app.

And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share with a friend. Share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter, and it's called try this.

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