Are Blue Light-Blocking Glasses Really A SCAM?

Most people are seated all day long when they're indoors. So spiking their cortisol level and raising their blood sugar is not actually going to be desirable. For example, high blood pressure. It can actually be a contraindication to use blue enriched light. It can cause them to be more stressed which leads to increased risks of all disease.

All right folks, this is a fun one with my buddy. He came all the way out to Idaho. He had Thanksgiving dinner with me and my family. The next day we recorded a podcast all about blue light. He is the goat when it comes to all things blue. Light blockers. Blue light circadian rhythmicity, Melatonin. Matt Maruca from Raw Optics. All the shownotes are@BenGreenfieldLife.com Blue Light Truth. Let's go. Dude. How many times have you been on the podcast?

I believe this is the second time.

All right, cool. So you're the CEO, you're the co founder of Raw Optics. The super sexy glasses that I'm assuming you're wearing. I know I'm wearing them.

Yeah, I am. As well as they came from your.

Company and it's a blue light blocking glasses company and you probably travel more than I do. I think you're one of my few friends that lives on a plane more than I do. So what's the latest? Where have you been gallivanting?

I've been spending a lot of time in Bali, so it's a really, really nice island in India.

Because there's no blue light in Bali.

There's a lot of blue light. Actually there's a lot more blue light than most places just because the sun is so strong. But it's a really nice place. There's great activities, you know, there's great surfing, lots of sports, tennis, lots of young people doing all sorts of cool things. I spent a lot of time in Europe, so I love to travel around. Italy, for example. Albania is one of my favorite countries in Europe. Albania, it's very under discovered, let's say. But it's a former communist country.

I was going to say it sounds like Transylvania.

It was cut off from the world for a long time, like North Korea. But it had beautiful beaches, really nice people, great food. So it's a really nice place to go as well.

And you're, you're like. Last time I talked with you on the phone you were like going to all these tennis tournaments because you have tennis players wearing the glasses now.

Yeah, yeah. In 2024, in January, Andre Rublev went to the Australian Open wearing our glasses. And lots of people, you know, sent me videos. They saw of him saying, hey, this guy's wearing your glasses.

Was he wearing while he was playing or.

No, just before and after to kind of wind down and chill out and so on. Because the glasses, although they're generally designed for indoor screens conditions or at night to help sleep better, some people just wear them outside because they also help to calm you down and they're very relaxing. And so that was his experience. And then I connected with him and his team because, you know, they were interested in maybe a partnership. And this frame is actually a frame we designed with Andre, so it has on the temple too. Yeah, cool.

By the way, those of you watching the video, it's BenGreenfieldLife.com BlueLight Truths these are cool.

Kind of.

Kind of a little more cartoonish than.

The ones I'm wearing. This is the same frame, but with a green color, which is probably.

I have worn your glasses. You have one that's a little different than the one that I'm wearing. This is a little bit more like wraparound ish. And I've worn that in evening tennis league sometimes because the overhead lights are so bright. And tennis league for me in the past is sometimes ended at like 9pm and then last night we watched a movie. Children of Men was a crazy movie. And you were wearing the yellows because you told me, like, sometimes the red. It's almost like too much if you. Because I don't know about you, but I will get tired if I'm watching a movie at night, which is pretty rare anyways, but I will get tired if I've got the red on. And that's a situation where I kind of want to break the rules. Like, I am going to be up past my bedtime watching a movie. So I do the yellows with the movie.

Yeah, this is a good idea. Generally speaking. So when we look at the blue blocking lenses we have, there are two primary types, not just of our products, but on the market. There are these daytime lenses and then there are nighttime lenses. We call the daytime ones daylight and the nighttime ones sunset. And they all. So there are two parts of the blue light spectrum which are worth knowing about. There's the short wavelength blue light, so below around 460nm, which is generally considered more bad blue light, it has very little benefit, but it has risk of damage, you know, causing damage to the retina, for example. It's been shown to cause damage to. To retinal tissue and so on through reactive oxygen.

That's what you get from like backlit screens and overhead LED lighting, also from.

The sun, but yes, from modern LED lights. There's a huge amount of.

That's going to freak out a lot of people that you get that from the sun.

Yeah, well, it's true. You get it.

And you still live in Bali.

Well, yeah, I mean, sometimes, not always. But the thing is, in the solar spectrum, there's a broad spectrum which contains a lot of the healing and regenerative near infrared, which is kind of the counterbalance for the more harmful effects of short wavelength light. You kind of have the antidote in sunlight with artificial LED lights because of the whole energy efficiency craze. They've removed the near infrared and far infrared because it was considered wasted electricity because you don't see it visibly, because.

You can only get that from incandescent lamps now to the blue light at 450 in sunlight, potentially being harmful but balanced out by the infrared that you also get from sunlight is something that I've heard called the sun callous, meaning that if you get some early morning sun like sunrise or walk outside and you get some evening sunset or evening light exposure, that causes some kind of a skin response that reduces some of the potential reactive oxygen species and inflammation that you get from the blue light in the middle of the day.

Yeah, there's definitely something to this when we talk about the sun callous that more often refers to the layers of skin which build up throughout the spring in preparation for summer sun. So that's more of a UV induced effect. Like basically another term for a sun tan would be a solar callus or sun callus. But this is more like a sort of preconditioning. And there are a few mechanisms that at least could be at play here. One is the near infrared and red enriched morning sunlight has this effect of structuring water in our cells, as per the work of Gerald Pollock and the fourth phase of water. That's one huge effect. Because near the morning sunlight is so enriched with near infrared and red wavelengths compared to the shorter wavelengths which are more damaging. So kind of like a red light panel treatment, but from the sun can prepare the cells, prepare the water so that they can kind of hold more energy. Let's say additionally this, this light, it induces the production of melatonin in cells in mitochondria and so on. So even during the day, even when we're awake, it's, it's serving an antioxidant protective role just by being exposed to this red light, which can also counteract Sort of preemptively or proactively the sun damage, which could come later on from ultraviolet. So there is something to this? Absolutely. There's also effects from the circadian rhythm. As I've worked, as I mentioned, with Dr. Wunsch more closely, the top German expert in this field is Dr. Woonch Wundsch. Yeah. Integrative photobiology is what he likes to call the discipline. You know, bringing it all together in a way that's not just in an ivory tower in a lab, but in a way that's holistic for our body. So I've learned from him that the way our body reacts to blue light in the morning is really a. It's primarily a preparation for sunlight. In other words, sunlight is a significant environmental stressor. As much as it has all sorts of health benefits, it historically evolutionarily is a threat. Like simple celled organisms die when they're exposed to sunlight, like bacteria and archaea, you know, that's why.

Because of the uva.

Yeah, because of uv. Exactly. And so our cells had to become much more robust and resilient to be able to handle UVA and uvb. And he explains that when we, for example, get the blue light in the morning in our retina and the retinal ganglion cells, they speak to the master clock in the brain. The SCN and cortisol and a bunch of other stress hormones act as a sort of cascade, preparing our body for sunlight. For example, cortisol helps to dampen inflamma. There's mineral corticoids which help to modulate fluid balance in our body. All of which are mechanisms to be able to handle sunlight appropriately. Just like plants have inbuilt mechanisms where they shift water balance, for example, or they open or close in certain ways. So our circadian rhythm is largely a sun protection system which has all sorts of other, you know, adaptive health effects in the end.

That is super cool. I've never really thought of it that way. Would that mean that. That it would be a good idea to get really good sunlight exposure within the first, like, hour of waking? Or how do you balance that with the idea that if you get massive amounts of blue light when you first wake up, there's kind of this theory that you might increase the cortisol awakening response. You kind of ease yourself into the day, starting with red light and then eventually get to the bright sunlight?

Yeah, I would say if we look at nature, just following that is probably the best procedure, because that's what we've already adapted to. So when the sun rises there is at sunrise, a very high proportion of longer wavelength light, so the red and near infrared. But within 10, 15, 20 minutes, there's already a significant amount of blue light. So that's probably the optimal dose is to get sunrise. And that's kind of consistently echoed among the people speaking about this. Now, like even, you know, Huberman, he's been really focused on the data which show that, you know, 10 to 15 minutes of low angle light as early as possible has all of these health benefits.

What's low angle?

Just when the sun rises over the horizon, it's considered a very low angle relative to being higher up.

Right.

You know, for example, two or three hours after sunrise, it's a much higher angle of light. And the low angle light has a spectral balance which is shifted again towards the longer wavelengths, the more healing and regenerative part of the spectrum. But as it rises in those early morning hours, there's a significant shift in the spectrum which is signaling to the brain daytime. So I can bring this back to the conversation of the good and the bad blue light. So there's the, let's say bad blue below 460nm, which induces more oxidative damage and is generally like Uva, especially something we would want to protect from in general. You know, a little bit of UV can be good, especially UVB for vitamin D synthesis. That's more midday. Anyway, so the good blue light has a peak around 480 nanometers. So we could say from around 460 to 500 nanometers. This good blue light is the part of the spectrum that regulates our body's rhythm. It's the part that signals to our brain it's time to wake up, produce cortisol and all these other downstream effects of the circadian rhythm that many people are now familiar with at regulating the sleeping and waking cycle. So the good blue light is really good in the morning and throughout daytime. It's really not so good, for example, in the evening, because then it's tricking the brain to continue to produce cortisol and not produce melatonin. So I think it's really important for people to understand that the blue light spectrum has different elements to it, part of which we want and part of which we don't. And back to the glasses which you were asking about before, in reference to the movie, for the daylight lenses we have, they are designed to block effectively 100% of the bad blue light, as are the sunset lenses, the more red orange lenses you mentioned earlier. But the Difference is that the daylight lenses reduce the melanopic light. So the part of the light that affects melanopsin, in other words our body clock, or the good blue light, a few different names for it, by about 50%. So you're gonna get a reduction if you're working in an office all day under a bright led, which is blue enriched light light, which is overstimulating to the hormonal system because it has an unbalanced spectrum compared to the solar spectrum. It's kind of like simulating noontime sun all day long. So these daylight lenses basically allow people to take their power back in the sense that you can reduce that overstimulation and reduce the increased stress response, which isn't desirable for many people. And then in doing so, what that means is a lot of people find that they're calmer, they can focus better, they can be more productive. And that's why the daylight lenses are great, for example, in the office. But if you're watching a movie in the evening, that trade off of only reducing the stimulating wavelengths by about 50% rather than nearly 100%, which is what the sunset lenses do, mean that you also get a significantly higher color perception, color rendering index. So that's the trade off. So when you wear the yellow lenses, you're not having quite the same degree of sleep and melatonin preservation, but you're gonna see a lot more colors that are red.

If you're having dinner, you can kinda like see the food better.

Exactly.

And that's why I also like having dinner with the really red ones.

I never do that. I don't. If I eat a late meal when it's dark outside, I'm not gonna wear the red lenses these days aren't so.

Great through rose colored glasses.

I'm sorry. It's true. And it's important to see the color of your food for digestion, just like it is to feel. That's a good point, you know.

So I don't recommend that some kind of stress mechanism when the food is off color, red color just doesn't make sense to the brain. Of course, that's also interesting, what you said about Dr. Pollack at university of Washington and his research into how light alters water to kind of like structure water, including water in the cell, when your skin gets exposed to that light. Because I interviewed this guy named Dr. Stephen Hussey about the heart and about heart health, and he made a pretty compelling case for infrared light. Infrared, sauna, sunlight, et cetera actually being good for cardiovascular health. And one of the reasons for that was because of reduced friction to blood flow through the vasculature and better efficiency of the contraction, the muscular contraction of the heart to get blood throughout the body and all the tiny capillaries and that you could actually see an improvement in blood flow, flow and vascularity along with the nitric oxide production if you have regular exposure to infrared. So there's all sorts of little tendrils of health that it spills into.

Yeah, absolutely. Working with Dr. Wunsch has enlightened me, for lack of a better term. It's a good one in this case about all of these nuances. So for example, when we speak about red light therapy, one of the things I didn't know, I had read about red light therapy in the studies. But on a molecular level, the red light causes water molecules to jiggle in a certain way to kind of oscillate more than they would without the red light stimulation. And what that means is in the areas, you know, the kind of extremities in our hands and toes and so on and really all over the body, jiggling the water molecules increases metabolic activity, for example. So when the water molecules can, when they're jiggling, there's more crossing of nutrients and things across the membranes just by this increased activity going on. So just by standing in front of a red light panel or being in sunlight, there's a natural increase of metabolic processes, you know, transfer of, again, transfer of nutrients and waste products and so on, just through the action of red light at a physical level on our cells.

Wow. Jiggle. Doesn't sound very scientific, but we'll roll with it.

Aw, slate, let's say.

So this is interesting because I've been wanting to pick your brain about this at least half a dozen people in the past month. So it's very timely that you're here. Have sent me this documentary on YouTube that is based. I don't remember what it's called, like blue light blockers or bs, something along those lines. I sent you the link to it. Do you remember what it's called? The name of the.

I don't remember the exact name, but I think it was like blue. Like a billion dollar scam exposure, basically.

Billion dollar scam. These things don't do anything to help out with your sleep. Multiple studies showing that when you wear them before bed, there's no effect, that they don't block anything that's harmful. I know that you're probably biased because you own a blue light blocking glasses company, but you're also one of the most informed guys that I know in this realm. I also know that not all blue light blocking glasses are created equal. We've done a whole podcast on that, how the lens technology varies widely, and yours are good. But let's say that the lens technology is good, right? So setting aside all the pieces of crap, blue light blockers that are out there, if someone's using good blue light blocking glasses, does that documentary make any kind of compelling case that they really aren't doing anything for you?

I would say no. I would say if anything, it only strengthens the case. So after you sent this to me, as I mentioned, I had my team review it and I reviewed it myself and we looked through every single claim they made to try to understand is there substance to this? So I actually prepared a bit of a review. But just going off of what really struck me from the beginning, they cited a study which looked from 2005, which looks at how blue light blockers work or whether they preserve melatonin. They found that the glasses do preserve melatonin. However, in that study, the subjective sleepiness reported by the wearers was not tremendously significant. I think it had something like 18 participants. So there weren't that many people. But so basically they took this study and said, well, this basically proves that blue blockers don't work because the people wearing them didn't report significant increases in their sleepiness. So in the case of this study, we would say that there's not necessarily enough evidence, it's not statistically significant enough to debunk, quote, unquote, the effects of blue light blocking glasses, just because some people didn't report significant increases in sleepiness. However, what they fully ignored is that the study did show preservation of melatonin, which. And so in disregarding the other part of the significant finding of the study, which is that blue blockers preserve melatonin, they basically threw out all of the other benefits that have been shown of melatonin, which is, for example, cancer prevention, sleep is antioxidant. Exactly. A lot of other things.

I have a huge podcast. I'll put a link in the show notes@bengreenfieldlife.com BlueLightTruth I interviewed Deanna Minick for like over an hour on. On all the benefits of melatonin. So, yeah, that's a good point. It's like they're even. Whether or not people were rating their sleep as better, there was an improvement in a pretty darn important health molecule with the glasses on versus not.

Yeah, exactly. So it was interesting though, is then in another study, there were participants, there was, let's say, a significant reporting of the participants that they did have an increase in their sleepiness, but in that case they threw it out saying, oh, the sample size isn't large enough and it's subjective. So in science we call this confirmation bias when you're literally cherry picking the data to support the claim that you're trying to make rather than objectively evaluating it. So in the case where the subjective sleepiness sort of supported their hypothesis, which sounded like a very loaded hypothesis going into it, they used it as strong evidence that blue blockers don't work. But when the subjective sleep data disagreed with their hypothesis, which almost seemed like more of a predetermined conclusion, given their, their confirmation here, confirmation bias, they would, they would disregard this sort of subjective sleepiness data when it supported blue light blocking glasses. So this is an interesting issue. Another one is this idea. They treat no statistical significance as no effect. So basically they say one of the main studies they focus on had 13 participants. So it's underpowered by definition, according to science, because it isn't that large of a study. And they're saying, okay, this study shows that the people aren't, how do I say this? They're not reporting significant improvements in their sleep. So therefore blue light blocking glasses don't work. It's, it's confusing, a lack of statistical significance for definitive proof of no effect.

Right.

So I can admit, you know, kind of going to your point earlier on, yes, in a way I'd say I'm kind of, of course I have to be a little bit biased because I've started, I have a blue light blocking glasses company. However, the reason I started the company, which we discussed in a previous episode, I believe, is that I had spent so many years trying so many things to improve my own health. And I came to this significant body of evidence indicating that light is such an important factor in health. And I realized that there is strong mechanistic evidence, not necessarily studies, but very strong mechanistic evidence that melatonin is critical for sleep and cellular repair. And that blue light at night, artificial light at night, disrupts the body's natural release of melatonin. And so it made sense that blue light blocking glasses could have an effect on this. And when I started using them, I felt myself sleeping better. And I knew all these other people in the community of quantum biology and health and wellness were also feeling similar effects. And so that's when I started to become convinced. So just speaking from my own experience, that's why I was interested in this. And I actually remember not. I remember thinking that I would never want to start a glasses company when some other person had started. When I was like, thank God they're going to do it right finally, so that I don't have to and I can focus on something else, like healthy lighting. But in the end, the quality of this other company that came out in around 2016 was very low and they ended up going out of business. So it was only when I started going on podcasts and I met Luke Story, this one podcaster, and he was formerly a fashion stylist. And he was saying, yeah, so he was saying, how did you get those cool blue blockers? And I said, well, I had them custom made. Here's how you do it. And then it was a whole process. And I realized I could actually do the production process for him, the tinting. And so that's how the company started. So, yes, although it might seem like I'm biased, I would say I'm only biased to the extent that my experience and the experience of the people around me. And now over 100,000 customers have shown significant effects from these lenses. Like, for example, again, these are anecdotal pieces of evidence, but I think they're worth sharing. We have two very significant stories. Well, there are many more, but two worth sharing right now, about our sunset lenses designed to help with sleep, which is really what the documentary is mainly focusing on. So we had one woman who came in with a review saying that she had been addicted to sleeping pills for 25 years, and after trying nearly everything to wean herself off, she was able to successfully wean herself off with our sunset lenses. So that's, I'd say, a very powerful anecdote that somebody who's addicted to sleeping pills can wean themselves off. And then, similarly, there was a child. The parents left this review. Their child had had some kind of childhood cancer. And so when Covid came around, they were terrified that their kid was more susceptible to the virus, being immunocompromised and the like. And so they. They saw some early evidence that melatonin could be protective against the. This virus, the COVID virus. And so they started dosing their child and then he or she became hooked. I don't know if it was a boy or girl, but they became hooked on melatonin and couldn't sleep without increasing doses of melatonin. And the parents, they kind of tried everything they could to help their child sleep, and they were able to again we them off with the sunset lenses. So, and these are not the only two stories we've heard like this. We've heard and seen dozens of reviews at, you know, this kind of impressive level, people who tried everything to sleep better. So it's very hard for me now even, and I think your audience can generally understand this. There's no like, pharmaceutical level company yet funding highly powered studies on blue light protection glasses. But when the mechanistic evidence is so strong that blue light suppresses melatonin and these lenses are designed specifically to block blue light, I mean, we can physically test it. And then we see all of this anecdotal evidence showing that people are sleeping better and feeling better, I think it's pretty logical to say, okay, well, one plus one equals two. These work. But I'm happy to keep going through some of the other issues of this documentary. So, for example, they made a lot of false claims. They referenced a study Harvard did on iPads and their effects on sleep and so on. And they basically were saying things like, for example, they were referring to posture. The posture in the study wasn't controlled. So that's a confounding variable. When it was. They're saying the study wasn't replicated. It was. They said it didn't directly test blue light, like blue light wavelengths, but the study was using iPads which actually simulate a more. So this was a study which supported blue light blocking glasses. So they were finding. Trying to find ways to. You mean not. You mean like they were using iPads and then using blue light blocking glasses to filter. Yes. So, so basically the. They also claimed in the documentary, they claimed that this study didn't directly test blue light, but it was actually testing a form of blue light that's much more realistic for people to be exposed to, which is the light from an iPad or a computer. But so the documentary was kind of throwing out the study saying, oh, they didn't test blue light like a blue flashlight or something, they're testing an iPad. But that's the kind of source that most people are getting blue light from. And the blue light makes up a significant amount, especially on that spectrum. Yes, exactly. And then, you know, the documentary claimed that the lab environment was kind of unrealistic, but this is how controlled science works. So even the authors of that study said our results likely underestimate the real world impact of what iPads are doing to sleep and whatnot, and how blue light blocking glasses can help. So there are a lot of omissions made. Another, for example, they misused a 2017 systematic review saying that there's no evidence blue light blocking glasses reduce eye strain. Based on this study, they claim this when the review actually says there's a lack of high quality evidence. And that's a very different thing. So saying that there's no evidence and saying that there's a lack of high quality evidence is very different. I can admit, as the owner of a blue light blocking glasses company, that there is a lack of high quality evidence. And one of the things we're thinking about and looking into is how we can fund really high quality, well powered studies. You know, for example, partnering with a company like Aura, who we've worked with in the past to get the sleep tracking devices and working with independent scientists and getting significant sample sizes. This is something that I would say is in the card for the next two or three years. But to do it properly is no small task. So we'll do it when it's right. So anyway, another note to make is that they ignored this, what's called the dose dependent biology of light. So basically light is dose dependent, meaning intensity plays a role, duration of exposure plays a role, wavelength specific range of light plays a role. So whether, you know, for example, you're going to have a different biological effect if you are exposed to a red light panel versus if you're exposed to a white light source which has a lot more blue light and timing. So the time of the day. And several of the studies which have, which they're using to claim that blue light blocking glasses don't work, we're using low intensities of light, short exposures and like not enough, basically. And so, so basically.

So it's like they wouldn't have an effect. It wasn't that powerful anyways.

Yeah, yeah. And basically it's, it's like saying sugar doesn't spike insulin, for example, if you just have a single gram of sugar. So basically there are a lot of issues in the documentary. That's, that's the gist of it, I would say that don't hold up to, I would say rigorous scientific scrutiny.

I kind of did get the perspective that they were like going after like what seemed to be the overhyped commercialization of blue light blocking glasses. They're throwing like Dave Asprey and James Swanik and Andrew Huberman and all these people under the bus because they're like advertising them with. I have nothing against, like, that's how podcasters like bring in revenue, is people advertise on the show. And yeah, I think it does introduce a potential for, lack of, or potential for bias. But I think the long story short is that as you've noted, not only is there some pretty big flaws with a lot of the studies that they focused on a bit myopically, pun intended, I guess. And then a couple other things is that a, as far as I could tell, all the stuff that they were citing was just from screens. They didn't talk about walking through a mall or an airport or overhead lighting or any of these other sources of light that we get exposed to. And then there's just a lot of anecdotal evidence you brought up too. And I think somebody sees that documentary should just try for themselves, right? Just like wear a pair of, of blue light blocking glasses with the red lens the next time you're watching a movie at night and you tell me if you get sleepy halfway through the movie.

Yeah, I mean, I, I, whether or not you want to, I think this is a great approach because, you know, I'm not sitting here telling everybody that they have to wear blue light blocking glasses or that, you know they're gonna die if they don't or something like this.

Yeah, you are, you're gonna starve if people don't wear.

I'll be fine, you know, I'll be fine. So, so, so people have to do what they deem best for their health, right? People have to do their own research and make their own conclusions. But there is a significant amount again of the mechanistic evidence is very simple. In fact, I think it's worth just walking through it. I often, like, sometimes I get lost mentally when I start going through all the studies which are underpowered and looking at all the sample sizes and the different variables and everything, it starts to get, I would say, bit not exactly overwhelming, but it's a lot of information to process and it's hard for me to make conclusions when again, there's not really strong evidence. So they're using really limited science to try to make really strong claims. And I'd say that's the fundamental mistake of the documentary. And again, when the evidence, when the subjective evidence supports their predetermined outcome that blue blockers don't work, they cite it very strongly like this is the truth. But when the subjective evidence doesn't support their claims, they ignore it as unscientific or underpowered. So again, it's textbook confirmation bias. And actually when you share this with me, I realized that there are several other videos discussing blue light blocking glasses not working. And we didn't even get into this. But we haven't discussed clear lenses. So there was a very large Cochrane review.

Clear lenses, like lenses aren't yellow or red, correct?

Yes. That's one of the other biggest misconceptions about blue light blocking glasses. So this, I have a lens actually right here. I took it out of frame. I bought in one of a traditional optical store. But this is considered a blue light blocking lens. It has a coating on it which if you shine it against the light in the right way, you can see this sort of slight reflection reflective coating.

Okay.

And it has what's called a UV420 coating in the optical industry, which means it blocks UV light and short wavelength blue light up to 420 nanometers.

Oh.

Now the thing is that as I mentioned before, the bad blue light range that's physically damaging to the eye goes up to around 460nm. So if a lens blocks even 100% up to 420, but no significant amount.

They'Re still missing some.

They're missing the vast majority back home for eye cancer. So the problem is that several of the largest studies as well in, in the world of blue light glasses studied these clear lenses. And they claim that blue light blocking glasses don't work when the studies are using clear lenses, which we know don't work. So the people, the companies, not just my company, Raw Optics, but other companies in the space and other experts in the space talking about blue light protection pretty much are all aware that clear lenses are a big scam pushed by the optical industry to probably squeeze extra dollars out of consumers who are getting prescription glasses because most commonly they're applied as an additional coating. For example, $50 upcharge for a prescription eyewear. And I've met people all over the world who say, oh yeah, I have the blue light coating on my lens and I hate to break it to them every single time. That the clear coating you have on your lens really isn't doing anything to protect your eye.

FC has marketed a lot of. I'm gonna go out of the scene of the camera here for a second because I totally forgot I've got these on my desk. I don't think we talked about these in the last podcast. I wear these in the morning and these are like, I'll hold them up if you're watching the video version@BenGreenfieldLife.com BlueLightTruth they're like blue. What do these ones do?

That's a whole different story. So while the, while the yellow lenses.

Might Be up all night.

If I put them in the exact. No, you won't be. They will stimulate your eyes.

They'll really brighten stuff.

Yeah, so. So while.

Is that what those are too?

Yeah, same lens. Yeah, same lens.

Okay.

So while the yellow lenses are designed to reduce eye strain, headaches and fatigue during the day, for example, on screens in an office, and still allow enough of the stimulating light through to kind of keep you awake. And the sunset lenses, the red lenses are designed to help wind people down in the evening by blocking all of the stimulating light. The blue lens, it was. I should give a little background. Dr. Wunsch, when he and I began working together, he said, what if we were to create a lens that transmits nearly 100% of the stimulating blue? So again, these yellow lenses block the stimulating blue, the good blue, by about 50%. Because again, during the day in an office, if you're sitting especially, you don't need more cortisol, which is a glucocorticoid hormone which helps to move sugar into muscles. We don't need more. More cortisol production when we're sitting all day, when we're not using our body, which is a big. One of the big issues with modern indoor lighting. It says that the belief in modern artificial lighting is. It's called human centric lighting. This new concept, it's not actually human centric. It's that more blue light, more of the stimulating blue light is always going to be a good thing during the day. There's two main flaws with that. One is that again, most people are seated all day long when they're indoors. So spiking their cortisol level and raising their blood sugar is not actually going to be desirable for a lot of people, especially people with, for example, high blood pressure. It can actually be a contraindication to use blue enriched light. It can cause them to be more stressed, which leads to increased risks of all disease. So that's why we want to filter this blue light in general when we're sitting inside. For most people, bio individuality plays a big role. The other risk of the indoor artificial lighting is that it has enough of the short wavelength bad blue to damage the eyes. But that's a separate, separate point here. So basically, the yellow lenses allow you to reduce your stress level and kind of create balance when you're in artificial light for extended hours. So you can reduce that unnatural overstimulation of the stress hormone system or the hormonal system in general, while indoors. Now, some people will benefit from more cortisol and will feel better. So comparing a young healthy 20 some year old or even 50 some year old with somebody who is unhealthy and has high blood pressure, the person with high blood pressure or high stress probably doesn't want the excess blue light to be kind of jacking up their stress hormones. But somebody who is young and healthy or even old and healthy might feel better to have a boost in cortisol. So the Blue sync lens was Dr. Wunsch's idea to create a lens which gives protection from the bad blue light, the short wavelength blue light, while maximum transmitting the good blue light to add more stimulus.

I thought it was like concentrating all blue light, but that's so I could like wear these like in the gym for alertness. I've just been putting them on in the morning and frankly when I travel and I'm in a different time zone putting them on in the morning, I feel like, you know how there's These companies like IO and Re Timer and they make actual glasses. I've got some over there that you push a little button and they make blue light. This just basically takes what's already in the environment, concentrates it, but cuts out the bad stuff.

Exactly. The best part, the problem with those is they, they work by adding more blue light, which Dr. Wunsch was fundamentally opposed to. Because what that means is over time you will cause more degradation to the retina. So when you add more light to.

Get the stimulus, it's gonna wake you up, but there's gonna be long term impact.

Long term impact. If you use it every day, it will cause more degradation of the retina. So with Blue Sync, we're actually providing an increase in the circadian and stimulus while reducing the damaging effects of the light exposure. So for example, the way he put it is that given the, the increase in melanopic lux, so the wavelengths that stimulate the circadian rhythm, 40 minutes wearing blue Sync outdoors would be equivalent to approximately 60 minutes of unfiltered daylight exposure. But with the damage of only 20 minutes of unfiltered daylight exposure.

These weren't playing pickleball tonight.

Yes. So they do sharpen you up. They can be used in the morning to energize whether you're indoors or outdoors. They're especially effective in bright light conditions because of course there's more light coming in.

Yeah, you pull more of the blue light out.

Precisely. But they're gonna increase energy, focus and productivity. And we even have elderly customers who, their bodies are more challenged. Let's say they feel We've gotten reports of significant increases in the feeling of physical fitness. And in fact, The German doctor, Dr. Wundschut, who invented this lens technology, one of his German counterparts, a friend and colleague, they wanted to name the lens Blue Sync because of his pardon? Blue Fit. We call it Blue Sync now. He wanted to name it Blue Fit because just like the term fitness in German, fit also means to be healthy and active. And they felt like Blue fit, at least in the German language. Be careful.

You don't want to get biohackers. Another reason not to work out. Yeah, shortcuts already. You have this funky contraption over here. I've seen this because it's like. This is like a light meter, right?

Spectrometer.

Yeah, spectrometer.

Brings back to the clear lenses scam. I can prove it right now.

Okay. All right, all right.

So you guys will cut to this. Just tell me if you can see it. All right, cool. So basically what I'm going to do is I'm going to point this to either of these white LEDs. So this is a blank screen, so I'm just going to point this. And then you might just have to focus the camera, but we'll see a cold white LED spectrum. So I'll show this to Ben first.

You see huge bikes just a little bit below 450.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's actually peaked right around 400.

Show the camera.

So right around 450 nanometers.

Yeah.

Is that focused up? All right. All right, cool. And then you have very little lights.

You gotta shine on us while we're podcasting.

Very little near infrared, which is, you know, 700 nanometers. So past that red line is supposed to be the healing, regenerative part of the spectrum, which sunlight has tons of. But unfortunately, there's very little here. So now this lens is supposed to be protecting from blue light. So what I do is I literally. And Ben can verify. I cover the sensor completely and I point it at the light source.

Let's go, baby. Shields activated.

Boom. And you see, there's virtually no change in the blue light. So basically, here, shoot. You know, at most it's reducing this spectrum by about 5%. All right.

Those bastards.

Yeah, that's basically. And this is a lens from a company called Hoya, which is one of the leading lens manufacturers. So Zeiss, Essilor, Hoya, they're all selling probably this is the billion dollar scam which this documentary should be focusing on, because that would be a truthful and effective documentary. But if I were to just Demonstrate now with for example, the, the raw optics daylight lenses. I can show you the kind of difference in effect if I cover this again the same exact way I did and I point it straight over there, shields activated, so you can see.

Behold. Whoa.

The blue light's gone.

Like none of the blue.

And that's why the lenses are yellow, because when you take out the blue light. Yeah.

What happens if you do the red one?

Well, I'll show you in a sec. But that's basically what happens here. So you see all that, the blue light is gone. There's still a bit of the longer wavelength blue light. So here, for example, you can see this range still has an effect on the circuit stimulus.

That's because you're doing the yellow ones.

Yeah. And that's desirable that leaving in that green and a little bit of tiny bit of blue. That's going to allow us to stay alert and awake without falling asleep during the day, for example. Now if I use the red ones, that's when you're going to have a very different kind of result. Got to make sure it's covered properly for no bias.

That's right. Highly controlled experiment.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, here we go.

All right, so see, now you see just like the green lights effectively all annihilated as well. So basically, yeah, all that's really coming through at this point is the yellow, orange. Now this is the thing, meter. Speaking about the, the mechanisms that I was getting at earlier, that doesn't necessarily mean that blue light blocking glasses improve sleep. But we know that we have a clock in our brain.

Yeah.

You know, the circadian rhythm. That's. There's this sensor in our eye called melanopsin. It's a pigment in these intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells which were discovered in somewhere in the 90s they found this third type of photoreceptor. There's the rods and the cones, which. The rods are low light vision, you know, when you're in evening or early morning conditions. For low light vision, we have the rods. They comprise the majority of photoreceptors because there needs to be a lot of them to pick up the very small amount of light present. For example, in the edges of the day when it's dark. And that's also when we're most susceptible to being attacked. So it's very important to have some degree of visibility. Then we have the cones, which are our high definition color vision for daytime when the sun's out. And then they discovered this third type of photoreceptor they gave it a very long and convenient name. Intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells. And these cells contain a pigment called melanopsin. And melanopsin was originally known to be on the skin of frogs as some kind of environmental sensor. So they were very confused, why do we have this frog skin pigment in our eye? But they discovered that it has this direct connection to the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which is the part of the hypothalamus, the part of the brain which regulates metabolism and so on, which is specifically considered the master clock. And so this melanopsin has a peak sensitivity at 480 nanometers, which means blue light from around 460 to 500 is stimulating this pigment in these cells, communicating directly to the master clock in the brain and setting the body clock, which directs all of the circadian rhythms. Melatonin rhythm, cortisol rhythm, digestive system rhythm, hunger, thirst, and all of these other processes which follow the circadian rhythm. So by having that go good blue light, let's say, from the sun in the morning, we strengthen our body's circadian rhythm. And throughout the day, and then by blocking it at night, we basically turn the light switch off. In other words, we allow the system to release melatonin as it's designed. So the mechanistic evidence is very strong. The mechanisms are very sound. We need stronger studies to show the skeptics that this product works.

It says more than 12 or 18 subjects.

Yeah.

For example, so you were telling me last night because, like, my house is pretty. I'm pretty proud of my lighting. My house is pretty tricked out with all these like, blue light bulbs that you flip the switch on once people have seen if they watch the podcast for a while. Daylight, and you flip it on again to twilight, you flip it on again, does evening, which kind of sucks the blue light out of the bulb. And you're like, dude, someday we gotta, like, replace these with the next technology that's coming down the pipeline. So give people, like the 40,000 foot overview of, like, what the perfect light bulb would be in your book. Not that mine suck, but you said.

No, yours are pretty good. I could like. But so. So I actually still have yet to test yours, but I have a strong feeling they lack near infrared. So near infrared is always.

Because Brian Hoyer has one of those little doohickeys and he measured it. And most of the rooms don't have the near infrared until you go in the main room, where we have inconsistent Incandescent.

Exactly.

Light bulbs.

Yeah. There's no near infection. So that's it. So I just tested them.

These are pretty good bulbs, but they're not give. Like that means they're not giving me everything I get from sunlight.

They're not giving you. Yeah, you don't necessarily. So you don't necessarily want everything you get from sunlight. My view, in Dr. Woonch's view, is that we, for example, don't want ultraviolet light in general in our indoor spaces. You can go outside and you can sunbathe to get vitamin D and all these different effects of the full spectrum of sunlight. But when we're indoors, you know, we don't want to. We want hormonal neutrality or what we call it hormonally neutral lighting. So we want light that doesn't jack up cortisol levels during the day or increase cortisol levels during the day, and that doesn't suppress the release of melatonin in the evening. Any environment with UV light and then the kind of corresponding blue light during the day will create a stress response in the brain and the body. And that's not something that we find desirable. So one is that the best light has near infrared.

Okay.

The best lighting is also hormonally neutral. Another effect is that for this, and I kind of just mentioned this, but we want to not have an. Any, any significant amount of the, the bad blue, as we call it, the damaging blue, because this is going to, over time cause both physical damage to the retina, which is highly sensitive and susceptible, but also it can damage skin. You know, it. The thing is, people think, oh, artificial light is so much dimmer than sunlight. I mean, it's a 50th of the intensity, even sometimes less. How could it possibly have any effect on the body, on the cells, on the eyes? This is one of the common arguments, not in the health and wellness world, but among more traditional, for example, scientists or the lighting industry, that artificial indoor lighting is so much dimmer than sunlight or so much lower in its intensity that it couldn't affect biology. For example, indoor artificial lighting is typically around 500 lux, even less. This is 175 lux right now. And that's. Well, that was pointing up so that it wasn't catching much of this. But anyway, daylight on a, on a sunny day is, can be 30 to 50,000 to even 75 to 100,000 lux, depending on the conditions. So we're talking 100 times or even 200 times stronger. Yeah, so that, that is used to discount the possible biological effects of artificial lighting. Why that isn't exactly true is one, when we're indoors under artificial lights for 10 hours, there is an effect of cumulative exposure. If you do the math, you can see that 10 hours under, for example, 500 lux can start to compare with, you know, shorter duration exposures outside. Another reason is that the eyes and the body's sensors are working often on a relative basis. So if the proportion of blue light in the indoor environment is significantly higher, it can still trigger the stress response even at a significantly lower overall intensity. Another reason is that in the sunlight conditions outside, there's so much near infrared. Again, it's nearly 40% of all daylight. Some, some measurements say Even more than 40% of daylight is just near infrared, which is this healing regenerative part of the spectrum. And so when we're indoors we lack the near infrared. So we have a completely different spectral environment where even though the intensities are so much lower, we don't have this protective aspect where when we're, you know, when we're outside, yes, we're getting the more damaging effects of short wavelength light, but we're also having a significant increase in mitochondrial energy production and melatonin and antioxidants production at the same time. When we're indoors we're just getting oftentimes blue enriched light with the stress hormone production and reactive oxygen species production with none of that protective near infrared, which then can all of a sudden make significantly dimmer light still damaging.

And I was talking last night, you're trying to like invent a light bulb that does near infrared and like basically. So instead of having like have some cans with OLED or LED and some cans with incandescent, you're just going to.

Put all in one bulb. Yeah. So we'll have near infrared, we'll have hormonal neutrality, will have a basically total elimination of the damaging bad blue light. We will have. The light source is, should be flicker free. So I would, I would hope these lights are flicker free. Yeah, so that's, that's a very good one. Yeah, yeah, Flicker. So Flickr, just for people who aren't familiar, it's this, it's due to lighting manufacturers being cheap. So it doesn't cost much more money. It costs a bit more to invest in higher quality circuitry basically in the leds to get rid of the flicker from the electrical powers source in the house. So the power in the US is, or I should say the, the frequency, it's 50 hertz in Europe and 60 hertz in the United States. And that just means basically with alternating current, the lights turning on and off that many times per second. Little imperceptible, like your retina, but. Exactly. And the brain does perceive it and has to filter it out, which also uses energy. And there are also some limited studies. There's limited evidence, but still evidence to indicate that this flickering light, beyond the mechanistic evidence, the mechanisms themselves that this flickering light causes, for example migraines and stress, and even potential neurological eyes are.

Better with flicker free disorders. Wearing something like this. I'm under the flicker. So how long before this newfangled light bulb comes out?

Probably January 2026 approximately, or February. So it's coming soon. One more point that's worth mentioning is color rendering index. So cri, Color rendering index has two. There's two reasons we focus on it primarily. One is that when you sit under low color rendering index light people generally look pale and slightly sickly and not optimal. And similarly, you can't see the full color of the food on your plate. You can't see the full color of a painting. I just met a painter a few weeks ago and she was telling me that she uses a super bright, high powered, some kind of like halogen light. Maybe it's LED based, but it's a very special type of light that offers nearly 100 CRI, which is the reference, that's the color rendering index of sunlight, fire and, and incandescent lights. There are a hundred. Because color rendering index basically means how well a light source renders the colors present relative to sunlight, which is the perfect reference. So the solar spectrum, which people can imagine on the spectrometer that I just measured, we don't have daylight available right now, so we can't show it right now. But it's a kind of continuous spectrum from ultraviolet, B, a violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red. So I just said the rainbow in reverse, basically. But it's this continuous spectrum and then near infrared and far infrared. But from in the visible spectrum it means that if you look at a painting with all these pigments, most many pigments and oil paints and so on are naturally derived. If you look at a painting under the full spectrum of sunlight, you'll see all the colors that are present. But if you look at it under a fluorescent lamp or an led, you can't see all the colors because the light isn't there to be absorbed by the pigments and then re emitted. So it's impossible. For example, like if you go into a room that's monochrome Red, all red. You can't see blue, you can't see green because the only wavelengths there that can be rendered are reds. So basically we want to have high color rendering index lighting because it makes people feel better about themselves, which is very important for psychological. Psychological well being. Especially in the Instagram world where everyone's comparing themselves. I think everybody's probably had the experience where they go into a bathroom and look at themselves in a mirror and there's a beautiful warm, incandescent light above and you see yourself, you're like, I look pretty good. You know, we want people to see themselves. You see the blush on the cheeks, cheeks better because of the high enriched red content of the light source. You see this natural.

How cool. You're producing the world's first narcissistic.

Also just color rendering index. Also just. It's sort of a proxy for a broad spectrum which contains all of the wavelengths. So our bulb will be near infrared containing hormonally neutral, which means you can. One of our bulbs will have the option to stimulate your system during the day with what we call a sky function with the good blue. And it's the first circadian stimulating daytime blue light, which has the good blue but not the bad blue. Because most of them use the range of blue lights, which is the cheapest right in the middle. But that means you're gonna have some of the good blue, but also some of the bad blue. So then we'll have flicker free and high color rendering as well. And that's basically the gist of the best light ever.

What else are you working on in the Secret Raw Batman?

We have some other lenses in mind. There's some other lenses we'd like to release over the next couple of years. But for me, one of the most interesting topics is color therapy. So a lot of companies are using red light therapy, but nobody, I shouldn't say nobody. Very few are using color therapy. I know you have a really cool device in the other room, which I understand does leverage different ways.

Of course.

Yes.

I should call my photo biomodulation phototherapy.

Yes, exactly. Bed we're interested in. And we are working on some light therapy devices like this that leverage not just red light, but also other colors because other colors have the power to have significant impacts on health.

I know that one out there is like 10 wavelengths, for example.

Yeah. So this is very interesting for me and you know, making that something that could be portable for people.

Cool.

Because the power of colored light is very, very underestimated and the world needs light Therapy, in my view. Cool.

I like it. I like it. You and I were working on a little secret project a few months ago. Any updates on that? Are we able or allowed to talk about that?

Of course, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

What's the update on the.

So I can kind of give people an overview. We've been working with some really cool people, as I mentioned earlier, like Andrew Rublev, the professional tennis player, to create these kind of collaborative frame projects where we believe that style matters. And for somebody to have a frame that they feel good about for their personality and their energy allows you, for example, to wear it with an even greater level of confidence. Right. One of the most important, one of the, the fundamental principles of my company, Rawptix, is making products that people feel great about wearing. Not just good, but they're actually excited about wearing. Because in any medical treatment, any doctor knows that the most significant element leading to any sort of result is compliance. Because if you're not compliant, you're not going to get the result.

I told you I wanted to have like the Air Jordan.

Exactly. And you know this because you're, you're a co. I mean, you work with tons of people. If they don't, if they don't do what you tell them to do, there's a 0% chance that they're gonna get the result. Right. If they do it, they might have a 60. This is.

Right now, this is the coolest prior. And this is made by you?

Yeah, this is made by as well. But you know, we're gonna make a really. And I really like your, your design. So we're working on a collab with Ben. That's the secret. And it's, it's a really cool kind of, I would say, vintage retro style frame with some really cool, like, I want to say I wanted these to.

Be the blue lock blockers that like Brad Pitt would.

Yeah, precisely. That's exactly right. Like Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt kind of energy look I was going for. It's a combination frame using both acetate.

Probably just because I'm an old white American male who wants to look cool.

I mean, it's a really cool frame. So right now we're still going through the prototyping phases. I believe we have the prototypes in production. So as far as launch dates, I'm unable to give an exact timeline, but we're looking most likely at spring 2026 somewhere around there, which is a great time. And, and we even. We need to do some color selection. So that's one, one element I've Been.

Enjoying the collab process. I can't wait to show them to people once they're ready.

So whenever you have some time, you know, we can go. But we need to pick. We need to pick the color. You want the metal to be like more of a kind of gold. You know, you have kind of an antique gold on the frame you're currently wearing.

Or more.

More of like a silver or gunmetal kind of colored in the metal parts. And then based on that, that'll help inform the acetate. You know, do you do want kind of tortoise shell brown? So that's.

Yeah, I'll have to see how gold and gunmetal look with the, with the actual design. The shape that we have. You do like mock ups?

Yeah, I do. I can actually show it on the phone. Yep, I got you.

Should we show it to the camera?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So it's. It's a very, very cool stuff. I know.

Folks, we got to wrap up pretty soon. We gotta show this.

All right, here we go. The moment of truth. So this, the style, which we've pretty much gone for, looks something like this. So we've actually, we've actually imposed it on your face. These are just the front. People have to keep in mind this is not a totally realistic rendering. It's a very early kind of sketch. But there's a common. And the temples are really cool. We have some really, really cool temple designs as well. So for example, you know, this is just. I'll just show people. But you know, the temples are going to have some really cool details to them. And yeah, it's quite an exciting process. So we need to pick the colors. Do we want kind of silver or gold here? And then do you want an olive or a tortoise shell or a brown kind of like we have here? And there's this. Yeah. So there's a lot of beautiful detail, but that way people can look like, like you and Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt when they're wearing their blue blouse put together.

Yeah, yeah. Matt Marucca from Raw Optics, folks. He's done two other shows with me, so you got to tune into both of those. I will link to them@BenGreenfieldLife.com Blue Light Truth. Thanks for watching. Do you want free access to comprehensive show notes, My weekly or roundup newsletter, cutting edge research and articles, top recommendations from me for everything that you need to hack your life and a whole lot more. Check out BenGreenfieldLife.com it's all there. BenGreenfieldLife.com. see you over there. Most of you who listen don't subscribe, like or rate this show. If you're one of those people who do, then huge thank you. But here's why it's important to subscribe, like and or rate this show. If you do that, that means we get more eyeballs, we get higher rankings, and the bigger the Ben Greenfield Life show gets, the bigger and better the guest get and the better the content I'm able to deliver to you. So hit subscribe, leave a ranking, leave a review. If you got a little extra time, it means way more than you might think. Thank you so much.