EP 129 WTH?!? The Doctor's Chat: Blue Light with Daniel Ebbett

Hello everyone. Welcome back to what the help. This is Dr. Jonathan Nadal over at Nature Cures Clinic in Portland, Oregon and we have a very special guest here today. It's going to be some interesting talk on light, a little bit of biophysics I imagine, and a whole lot of just new approaches on how you may be thinking of blue light and anything related. So we have here Daniel Ebbett, please take the floor. Go ahead.

Hey Jonathan. Yeah, nice, nice to be here and yeah, really keen to, to share, share some, some knowledge on all topics of light and how it affects our health.

Yeah, it's, it's a lot. I mean I feel like especially the last few years, people becoming a lot more aware of like EMFs and, and all the towers and, and good light, bad light. What is it? Even on our own front, like some of these laser therapies that we're getting into, there's a lot, there's a lot of moving parts and, and it's, it's going fast. So it's excellent to have someone like you to shed some light on the matter. Right.

No. No pun intended. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well it's interesting because you know, light is light. Light is can, is very powerful in the biological effects it can have on our body. So that good and bad, that's the thing. So you've got, you know, certainly ways that it can harm our health and there's certain ways with therapies that it can actually provide benefits to our health. So yeah, it's a, it's, yeah, it's an interesting topic and it's a lot of people are not aware of, of how it can be beneficial and how it can be harmful. So yeah, I really like to, to dive into all that and really, really explain, you know, how it does affect us.

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, but before, before we get to the fun science stuff, how about you give us a little bit about, about your story, like kind of what, what brought you here? What inspired you to, to get into this?

Yeah, yeah, so, so for me it's been a bit of a journey. It started about eight years ago and so I've always kind of been into health and wellness and, and getting the most out of my physical and mental performance. And I started my career in it. That's what I trained and studied at university. And what happened at the start of that is I significantly changed the environment that I work in. So I was quite used to just being outdoors quite a lot and not being in an office or being on screens all day. And that very quickly transformed to working in an office under fluorescent lighting all day on multiple screens around me. And then, so, and then I'd actually go from the office and then go straight into the gym, you know, at 6pm at night, and then train and then come home and then work on a screen again. So I was literally bouncing around just all these artificial light environments and not getting any natural light or any like, any, any of that sort of light exposure we should be getting at all. And very quickly my, my health took a, took a turn and I got quite severe insomnia and, and a lot of migraines and headaches during the day as well. And the issue was that over time that really started to impact other aspects of my health as well. My hormonal health really started to take a dive and my energy levels and it, and it was, it was quite a, like a downward spiral from there. And back then, you know, I had no idea about light at all or how it affected us. I just, and, and it was quite, it was quite frustrating because I felt like I was doing everything right to be healthy, right? But I was like completely, I was becoming completely the opposite. So I, I went down there, what most people would do, and I went to my GP and I, you know, you know, said I'm having all these health problems and I can't sleep. And unfortunately they just prescribed a whole cocktail of different off label prescription drugs. We're talking antipsychotics, antidepressants, I might even know what some of these things were. But essentially what they were trying to do is tranquilize me so I could sleep. And unfortunately tranquilizing someone and making them pass out versus getting restorative sleep, they're very, very different things. And ultimately that made me feel a hell of a lot worse because it just tanked. Not only how I felt during the day, I felt, I felt tranquilized during the day as well. And so, and it just even made the thing like made it spiral down even worse. And so I got to the point where one day I was just like, you know what, like I'm, I'm going to fire my GP here. And you know, what I do in my job is problem solve, right? So I'm going to problem solve this and work out how what's going on here from being like someone who's like fit, healthy. I was, I'm competing at the elite level in powerlifting in Australia at the start of this and by the end of it I wasn't even in the gym sort of thing. So I just really took A step back and was like, well, what changed when all this started to happen? And, and I was just like, well, yeah, like, I've gone to working in these, this office all day and then part of the job is working at 11pm at night and doing changes out of hours on screens. And so I just thought. I just started like trawling a bit of the Internet and searching and then I stumbled across a neurosurgeon in the, in the US called Dr. Jack Cruz. And then this was eight years ago and I'd never heard of the guy or. And he had some really interesting concepts on light and, and certainly. And how it interacts and interfaces in with all of our biological systems. And, and I found it really fascinating and I just took a huge, deep, deep dive into it. And a lot of his work is very complex and the average. I really struggled to understand it. And so I continued to listen. Again, he did some, he had some talks on YouTube where he was trying to break things down. Really, really, really tried to understand it all. And what I came away from that was like, like, light is so powerful. And there's a huge quote that, that stuck with me this whole time. It was like, health is about light, not food. Because, because he really hates. Well, he doesn't say hates, but, you know, everyone's so focused on the latest diet or this or that. Like, you know, what food. And it's like, none of that matters if you're not getting the right types of light in your environment. Because actually it's, it's just so, you know, you, you could be keto or low fat or this or that. And if you're just bathed in toxic light, you will not be healthy. And like. And I was. And, and that kind of really disrupted my thought patterns because I was in that. I was like, oh, I need. I'm not doing them. I'm not doing dieting enough. Like, I'm not doing this. I'm not ex. Like, you know, it was like. But it's like more of the same thing wasn't fixing me, right? So I was like, really open to this. And so what I actually ended up doing was like, okay, I kind of understand that potentially I'm getting way too much of artificial light exposure and not enough natural light exposure. So what I did is just an experiment is I ordered a set of like these big welding safety glasses off Amazon and they had to buy them from the US Couldn't find anything in Australia or anywhere around me. And I, I got them and I started wearing them like People were just like giving me the strangest looks, like, what are you doing? Sort of thing. And I was like, all in the name of health. Right. And. And it's had such a profound impact on, on me like within. Well, I wouldn't say like instantly, but within a week or so, I could really see things turning around. And then within three months, like, you know, everything was really, really back to normal. So from that point, I felt like I couldn't not share this with the world. That was kind of my thing. I was like, I don't want other people to go through the pain, suffering I went through to probably ultimately never come out of that because they don't ever find a solution. Right. They end up just bouncing from one prescription drug to the next to this, to that sort of thing or to the. You need to cope with it sort of. And I was like, well, no, like. So I literally just started importing those glasses and just selling them. Like, I was just like, cool. I'm just, I'm going to continue doing my job and building my career, but I'm just going to try and help people on the side as much as I can. Yeah. And it's just ever since then. So, you know, and that was really when technology was quite. It wasn't as, as evolved as it is today. I think it was like the iPhone2 back then and there wasn't all these big LED screens and LED lights went in the homes yet and everything. So I've watched this technology evolve over that time from when I was very aware of it to where we are today. It's just, it's crazy, the advancements of IT and what it's actually doing to our health. So what I've done during that time is just being like, oh, like I need. It just makes me want to help more because it's really, really hard now to interface with technology and it not impact your health. Yeah.

And it's, it's not slowing down anytime soon. So.

No. No. Yeah. So what I do to. What I do today is literally I've throwing the IT career away. I did that for eight years and became really senior in it. But I got to the point where I was like, it was quite conflicting in my mind because I had all this knowledge even around EMFs and I'm literally deploying huge WI FI deployments and doing. Yeah. And just working in all these like really toxic light environments. I was like, it doesn't, it doesn't fit my values anymore. So I've literally shifted, created a whole business around Innovating different lighting solutions, different glasses, different everything to help with the light problem. So whether that's introducing more beneficial light, we're trying to filter and remove some of the harmful spectrums. Pretty much that's, that's who I am, what I do. And that's incredible.

And so addressing both sides of it, like how can we optimize better natural light or just good light therapies and reduce the negative ones. And you started off kind of more. Well, let me, let me reduce the negative lights that are coming in. Let's start.

Yeah.

Yeah. Wow. Okay. That's a lot. That's, that's so. And you're right, there's so many health trends, diet trends, nutrition supplements all day, every day. And the field that I'm in, I mean, we definitely have to keep a pulse on that and it has its place. But this is new, this is exciting and this is directly relevant because we know between the, the from toxins in the environment and, and everything that that entails, guess what these are, let's call this kind of the toxins or the things that we can't see that are impacting us at a cellular level. Right?

Yeah.

So I mean, with that, you know, because there's questions I have on like invisible flicker and things like this, you know, whether you're at the gym or working all day in front of a screen. So what should the layperson or just what should we understand about how significantly these things are impacting our health?

Yeah, I think the easiest way to start with that, to break that down is to look at the types of light we should be exposed to and the types of light that we typically get exposed to. So. Because ultimately, like in today's world, a lot of people like villainize blue light, right? They're like, oh, blue light's bad, or I've heard it's bad, or. But that's actually not the truth. Right. Like we've like outdoors, like the most prevalent wavelengths to during the day, it is blue light. Right. We get it from the sun. But the difference is outdoor light is full spectrum light. And what that means is it's very balanced with all frequencies of light and relatively equal amounts. So you've got blue, green, yellow, orange and red, all kind of imbalance. But then you've also got the infrared spectrum and the UV spectrum, which are the invisible spectrums, but they also make up full spectrum light. And each different frequency of light has different impacts, biological impacts, when it's absorbed in our eyes and ourselves. And so that's great. Everything in nature is normally imbalanced. Right. And so what we do in our indoor lifestyles or our modern lifestyles, we come indoors and we don't really get that full spectrum light. So we typically, from our screens, which most of us are working on during the day, all the LED lighting in our home, which is because of the traditional incandescent lighting, is kind of been outlawed and it's, it's really not available anymore is the issue with that type of lighting. It's very, very, very high in a narrow bandwidth of blue lights, got a huge big spike and blue light at around the 455 nanometer mark. So nanometers is a way you measure different wavelengths of light. So blue light ranges from 400 to 500 nanometers.

Right.

In that 455, there's a huge big spike in it. And then it doesn't really. Most of your screens and lighting doesn't really have any of the, the reds, the oranges and the yellows in it, which are all the restorative frequencies of light, which is when it's imbalanced. Right. So when you think blue light, you're thinking shorter wavelength light, higher energy, oxidative stress, stress damaging when it's in isolation. Right. And so when you're getting that from a screen and all the lights, fluorescent lighting or LED lighting, you're not getting all the restorative wavelengths, you're getting all the high energy damaging wavelengths. And so what that means is cortisol levels rise. So blue light will make your cortisol rise, which is good when it's in balance because it makes cortisol, makes you feel awake, alert, motivated. But when you get too much of it, it spikes your cortisol too high. That causes anxiety, feeling of tired, but wired, anxious, the whole fight or flight. Yeah, yep. So you're pushing it, pushing it too far. And then what that's doing into the eyes specifically is it's causing damage into the retina. So eye strain, headaches, eventually macular degeneration are caused by too much artificial blue light, not enough full spectrum light. So that, that's one of the, one of the biggest differences between nature versus indoor lifestyles. And this is really only talking about during the daytime. Right. And the nighttime is a whole different problem. But if we're just talking about. Because obviously daytime there's light outside night time, the sun is set, Right. So when you look at the sun, so that's producing lots of blue light. Blue light in the eyes is a signal into the brain of wakefulness so cortisol, adrenaline, wakefulness, hormones are elevated. Now when the sun sets, the blue light frequencies are removed from the environment. All those hormone levels should drop and melatonin levels should rise. However, because of the sunsets, what do we all do? We turn on all our lights in the home, LED lights all come on, we probably watch tv, we look at our phones pretty much we sit there and just bathe in artificial light sources in the evening. Now our brain isn't smart enough to understand the frequencies of blue light from the screen and not the sun. So it's just doing what it's designed to do. The sun is up. I should be awake, alert, I shouldn't be sleepy. So it keeps all those, your cortisol and adrenaline elevated and it suppresses your melatonin. So essentially your brain is just continuously thinking it's middle of the day and it can't function on its 24 hour cycle. So it's designed to understand light cycles in a 24 hour or circadian rhythm and that gets completely disrupted because of our essentially a continuous bathing in artificial light.

Very, very, very well said. I mean you, you put it together. Well, it's true. And it's, it's so sad, you know, I mean, so we do a lot of different hormone panels and, and, and tests that check cortisol levels and dha, like throughout the day, you know, assess for diurnal and nocturnal patterns, which is, is huge. We get a much better read. And you're absolutely right. I mean there's a lot of people's cortisol rather than having this beautiful rhythm or in the morning it's in a healthy way nice and high and then it kind of tapers off throughout the day. If anything it's flipped, you know, it's, it's low, it's tank in the morning because in the evening it's super high. And of course indirectly that's going to interfere with melatonin. But when cortisol is dysregulated, we know it leads to blood sugar issues, you know, increased pain and inflammation. You even mentioned the, the age related macular degeneration with like that's one of the leading causes of blindness in the aging population too. So there's a whole so many issues with this and yet we're just constantly surrounded in it. Not enough people are talking about it.

Yeah, I just, I love how you brought out the blood sugar issue because that's like a big one. It's like the link between blue light exposure and obesity. Right. Like there is a There is a link. And people were just like, that's crazy. What are you talking about? Like, and it's there, right? It's like, if you understand the pathways of how cortisol has affected your blood sugar and how blue light's affecting your cortisol. There you go. And it's like you can kind of like make these, these links everywhere. It's like. So like another one is like blue light exposure and cancer. Right. So blue light exposure at night lowers your melatonin significantly. So your melatonin will be suppressed by as little as 80% from blue light exposure in the evening. So melatonin we know is a sleep hormone. We're known as the sleep hormone is so much more than a sleep hormone. It's like one of the master antioxidants in the body. So while you're sleeping, it's going around and cleaning up and. And so when you disrupt that. Right. That allows, like cancers to perforate in the night because it's not able to do the reparative and restorative work it's supposed to do. And there's studies done on this literally showing, like, increases of the blue light exposure. Here is it. And like, if you follow that pathway, you understand why it's leading to these chronic diseases on the other end.

Yeah.

So it's not just as simple as, like, blue light. You know, the screen time is giving me headaches and the screen time's disrupting my sleep. It's quite, you know, it's a much bigger problem to a lot. And I'm not saying it's the only thing causing these diseases, but it's a big piece of the puzzle to unlock that. Hey, if we were doing all these other interventions to help potentially solve all these other chronic health conditions, but we're not looking at our light exposure. Yeah, it's going to be. It's going to be a very big uphill battle to get to a state of health again.

Definitely, definitely. And then, so that being said, though, we've mentioned a few. But like, even just some common sources of blue light that we're exposed to every day, like you mentioned, like TVs, phones, computers, you know, what can we do about it? You know, I know that I've. I've bought some little screens to put on the computer before. There are some glasses. I feel like they're probably not as good as some of the ones that you've described before, but what can we do about it? If I have to work with a computer, you know, like.

Yeah, yeah, so that's what I'm big on is like, first of all, understanding the science and then developing the products to align with the science to essentially bring ourselves into a state of more optimal or more natural light. So. And like, the, the issue is like, yeah, our modern lifestyles doesn't like, the ultimate thing is like, oh, just go live outside. Right. Don't ever like. But like, it's just not practical in today's world. And some people were like saying that. I'm like, that is not going to work. Like, we all have to have jobs. A lot of those jobs are on screens. A lot of jobs are in offices where we can't even control the types of lights. So the first thing is, yeah, is especially on screens, there's a couple things to do on your screen. So one is a really good set of glasses. But when we're looking for a set of blue light glasses, it's. It comes down to they're not all created equal. And I'm not saying we're the only ones that create them. There are certainly other. But there's, there's some, there's some key things to look at when you're, when you're trying to get a ps. If we're talking particularly around the daytime and working. So what, what the goal is with a set of glasses during the daytime is to reduce the blue light exposure down, not eliminate it. Because. Because if you eliminate it during the daytime, no blue light coming into your eyes would tell your brain it's nighttime. So then you have completely flipped your circadian rhythm. It's just a complete mess. Now it's like, well, hold on a minute. It was like midday and now it's nighttime. So now it would start to lower your cortisol, increase your melatonin. You would feel pretty tired, unmotivated in the middle of the day. So you don't want to wear a set of like 100% blockers during, during the day. What you want is a pair that will filter down the frequencies of blue light that are too high and just bring them down to a more, more natural level. And so when we look at what I alluded to earlier, when you look at the frequency output from a screen, there's only a very short bandwidth of blue light at 455nm and a little bit either side. So you're looking for a pair of glasses that will reduce that spike down. The issue within the industry is there's a lot of glasses that will just. They're cheap, they're on Amazon they're 20 bucks, 30 bucks or it could even be more. But there's a lot of these cheap ones. They unfortunately don't look at the different frequencies of blue light. They'll just put a basic little reflective coating on the outside and call them blue light glasses. And when we've got like spectrometers and stuff, and we actually have done a lot of tests with these things and they will only bring down blue light probably up to about 430nm, and they'll bring it down by maybe 20%, but they won't actually remove any at 455, where the biggest problem is. So that's like a real key thing to look for is the company you're buying them off. Do they have a spectral analysis of the lens to show you all the different frequencies of light and how much it's reducing the blue light by? The company can't provide you with that. They don't probably know themselves. And that should be like a red flag straight away that it's more than likely that they're not using the right technology in the lenses to actually bring down those right frequencies of light. Very, very particular type of technology you need to use. So most of the basic glasses are got a reflective coating. So blue light comes in, it hits the lens and it bounces off. So that type of technology can only, like I said, get up to about 430Nm. So to get more from the 430 onwards, instead of trying to reflect it off the lens when it's passing through the lens, these special pigments inside the lens that will actually absorb those frequencies of light as it passes through the lens. So when it comes out the other side, it's. Those frequencies have been absorbed by particular types of pigments inside the lens, special pigment. So that's actually a completely different technology and what you're supposed. And that's what you're kind of looking out for to help during the daytime. So it can be a little bit tricky and it can be a bit of the Wild west out there when you're trying to find a pair. But yeah, that's, that's one of the easiest ways. You just ask for a spectral analysis from the company. Can they give it? And if it's yes, well, then you actually need to look at it and see what, how much it's filtering at about 450. If it's around 50%, that's a really good product. You can't unfortunately filter More than 50% without the lens altering color. So you can go further down, you can get. You can get right up to 70%. But then the lens color turns like a yellow, which is fine. You can wear that during the day as well, a yellow lens. But yeah, those are the kind of things you're wanting to look out for. So that's the first thing you do is get a really, really good set of glasses, ask those questions from the company, making sure that they can, you can kind of evaluate and making sure it's actually reducing the right frequencies of blue light that we've been exposed to through lights and screens and devices. The next thing you can do, and this is actually a free, free thing you can do is on your, on your computer, you can install a piece of software called, well, there's one free one called Flux or if Lux. And you can install that piece of software on the computer. And what that does is it will reduce the blue light exposure down and you can allow it to then change the amount of blue light based on the time of the day. It's a great tool. The issue with that is it certainly helps, but it's got its shortfalls. So we've done a bit of a research and looking at how that technology works is unfortunately, you're trying to solve a hardware problem with a piece of software. So I've got an IT background and I'm trying to understand how we're solving the issue of the screens with a piece of software. And ultimately it alters it, but LEDs themselves will still produce what they call LED bleed. So it still actually produces a bit of blue light that comes through it and it's not able to be accurately controlled through that piece of software. So I always run it like I love running it, but I also use the glasses because I kind of have insurances based on. I know these glasses are made to these exact specifications to reduce blue light by this exact amount. But I'd always run the piece of software as well because it's a great way. If you didn't have your glasses with you or you just want another layer of protection as well, the glasses will always be needed because of the overhead lighting in the office or at home. That. That's very difficult to control. We can talk about lighting as well. Like that is a piece. We. We do have all. A whole piece of lighting solutions that we do to change out the lights in your home as well. We kind of had a bit of a, like a, had a bit of a, like a light bulb moment a few years into it, right where you know, we were producing the glasses. And, and I sort of thought to myself was like, it kind of seems like a bit of a, like a band aid to a bigger problem. I'm like, we're putting on these glasses to filter out all this harmful light. I was like, how. What happens if we didn't have there was no harmful light to filter out? Like, how about we stop it at the source? Right, That's. And so the screens is a bigger problem that we can't. We're not going to start manufacturing computer screens or anything like that. So. But we looked at the biggest exposure most people get isn't screens, it's all the lights in their home. If you think about how many lights you have in your home and when you turn them, there's a lot of lights. Right. We don't, no one lives in the dark. They all turn all these lights on. So we thought how can we produce lights that aren't harmful to us? And so that's another big area where you'll still need the glasses for the screens, but when you're not on the screens and if you can have all the lights in your house that are producing beneficial frequencies to you, then it's a long way there to solving a big piece of the light equation.

Well, that sounds promising. Good. I mean, I know there's a lot of excitement with like, you know, I guess Google and lights and like how you can just voice command, change the colors and make it even pulse to, to music that you're playing. So that, that's this whole other thing. I mean, do you see, do you see yourself kind of merging or like being able to modify that? Is this something that we can go in and actually change what those lights are doing or this has to be own separate thing that you guys provide.

So the issue I've got, yeah, so obviously the, you know, some mainstream lighting companies have some kind of solution similar to what you said. You know, Google controlling your lights, colors, all that. The problem with them is they don't, they're not creating them for health. Then they're not health companies and they don't care about your health, unfortunately. So, and there's a, there's a lot of problems with those types of lights. So for example, the Philips Hue is one that's kind of mainstream, very expensive, but nowhere on the packaging or advertising or anything does it talk about how it's better for your health. It's like better for creating a different mood in your home or doing this or doing that or being able to control it from your smartphone. But none of it's to do with your health. And so we've looked at them and there's so many problems with them when people actually are investing in them because they think they're healthy a lot. And so the issue with them is a lot of them are smart controlled. So what that does increases the RF or radio frequency transmission in your home significantly. Where instead of having like just a WI fi router and a few phones to connect into and a few devices, now you've got every single light bulb in your house is now a WI fi transmitter, which is probably put like, you know, there's, there is a lot of, probably don't need to go down the route of EMFs and stuff. But there is a lot of science on EMF exposure and what it's doing to our health. This is amplifying it significantly just through your light bulbs. So that's one thing. The next thing with them is unfortunately like a red light or an amber light or a colored light doesn't necessarily mean it has blue light removed. So you can create red light with blue in it, or you can create pure red light with no blue light in it and just red light in it. So these lighting technologies like that, they are not eliminating certain frequencies of light, they're just making a colored light. You see. So when you actually look at the output of the different wavelengths, it has still the wakefulness blue and green and other frequencies in it instead. So when the lighting is designed for health in the evening, if it's an orange light or red light, it's pure orange or it's pure red. And it's based on not just trying to create a different mood or an ambient look to the light. So that's one thing. The next thing is, which you touched on or you said we could talk about, which was like the invisible flicker. So flicker is in most LED lighting, including Philips Hue and most of them out there. And this comes down to a case of if you can't see it, it's, you know, it's not there sort of thing. And, and like that's kind of the, the approach a lot of lighting manufacturers have taken with lighting. They don't produce their lighting to remove flicker. So what flicker is, is it, it's the light turning off and on very, very quickly. So LED lighting is a digital light source. So it's, it's either receiving power and it's on or it's not receiving it and it's off. And so the light, the power coming into our homes is a pulsing current. So it's AC or alternating current and so it's pulsing at 100 times a second. So your light turns on and off 100 times a second. Now this didn't used to be a problem with the oldest style heat source lighting, like incandescent or halogen, because that was a filament that was being heated up and producing the light source. So the pulsing electricity coming in and out, the whole filament can't completely cool down and turn off within that time. So it kind of was somewhat immune to the, to the flicker problem. Now when we brought in LEDs, the digital light source is turning off and on, off and on, off and on. What that's doing is your eyes can't see it, but your brain is sitting there trying to, yeah. Process a flickering light source on and off. And that's just, it's overworking the brain and essentially causing neurological stress on the brain. And what that, what that shows is headaches, eye strain, just feeling tired, exhausted, overworked. And so they're very similar symptoms to overexposure to blue light as well. So you combine them, it's like a, they both, they both work in together to produce these really bad symptoms. Right. So you could have a perfect light source that has no blue light in it, but it has the flicker still and you're still going to get that. You're probably still going to get eye strains and headaches. An easy way to actually, you can actually kind of see flicker. Not all, it's not a foolproof way, but if you grab a smartphone and you turn it onto the slow motion camera and you film an LED light and then play the slow motion back, you'll normally see it doing a flicker or, and some people will normally see it when like someone's filming with a camera and then the screens in the distance and you see the screen kind of doing a weird thing on the camera. Well, that's this, that's the camera being able to pick up the flicker that your eyes can't see. Now it is possible to produce LED lights without flicker, but it costs a lot more money. So, and this is what I mean when I say they don't have your health in mind because you can't see it. So that manufacturer of lighting is like, well, hey, well, the flicker's there but no one can see it. So it's not a problem. And we're not going to look into the health effects of it. That's not, we're not, that's not what we do. So they're Just looking at how they can manufacture the lights as cheap as possible to make more profit. But ultimately to produce something that's flicker free, which is exactly what we do, you need to use very special internal componentry inside it which will take the alternating pulsing current and convert it into a DC or direct current. So the actual light source is just getting a constant stream of electricity to supply to the diodes that light up. And so that's what we do. So we produce flicker free lighting and then we also look at the frequency output of it as well. And then we also make sure we don't introduce additional EMFs into it. So EMFs are not only the radio frequencies that we talked about from like smart bulbs, but you've also got like electric fields and magnetic fields which are present in most electrical things. They're a, they're a more powerful field. It doesn't expand as far as an RF field, but it certainly has the same oxidative stress on our cells that other MFs do. And a lot of light sources will, will emit really far or bad EMFs from the electric and the magnetic field sort of point of view. So again, that's another thing to consider with lighting as well. And it's a little bit harder to measure. Like you probably need to have it like a building biologist who comes in and does home assessments and looks at all that stuff. But they will now start looking at your lighting and looking at the types of fields that are being emitted from them as well. So that's just another element of the healthy light source puzzle that we, we look at as well. And just make sure we've covered off the spectral, the spectrum of it and the blue light emissions, the, the flicker and then the emf. So those are like the three elements to look for in a healthy light source.

That's huge. That's huge. It begs to what, like why. So between AC to dc, is it just, is it harder to make like I imagine these things? One would think that maybe it crossed the minds of previous companies that developed these lights. So why did they bother sticking with the AC versus the DC for instance? It was just harder or just technology that wasn't around yet, you know.

Right. So I'm not an electrical engineer, but I've got a basic understanding of that. So AC current is, is like mains power. The main power that comes in your house. And I believe the reason it's is AC is it allows it to travel further on the line. Right. So because it's got to come from the power station to Your home, and they pulse it down the line. So DC current is more commonly found in like battery sources, like solar setups and stuff, because the battery sources right there now. So light bulb manufacturers will go, well, it's AC current in the home. So we're just going to create the lights to be running on that type of power. We're going to make it completely compatible with that. So what we're doing instead is going, well, we don't want AC current, so we need to convert it inside the bulb into DC current for the light source itself. So it's. Yeah, like, like I said, the light bulb manufacturers are just, just playing off. Exactly. Based on what they're being supplied. They don't care about or really have looked into what that flickering means in terms of how it's impacting our health. And I guess, like, I'm sure it'd be a problem if you could physically, literally see the light string, then that would be a problem that they would resolve and essentially do the same thing we're doing, which would then cost them more. But again, you can't see it. It doesn't exist. So let's just, let's just move on. That's kind of, I think.

Because it makes you think of like even, I mean, I could think a couple days ago, like some. An old light bulb, like just starting to flicker and it's very annoying. Right. Like once it starts. But if that's going on, you know, a hundred times a second and it's, it's the opposite. It's not like a blatant thing that you can see and it's annoying. You know, it's more at a micro nanosecond speed and it is frying your brain essentially then, I mean, yeah, I just. Sign me up. I, I don't want any more AC lights. It just sounds horrible.

Yeah, yeah. And so it comes down to like, again, like, what do we get in nature from light? We never get. There's no such thing as flickering light in nature. The sun is a direct current light source. It's constantly burning and producing light. So again, flickering light is completely unnatural for us to be exposed to. Yeah, Most things that are unnatural in a way will cause stress on the brain. Yeah, yeah.

That's a pretty good general statement overall. But then, so as far as apps and devices, I just want some of our patients to like, have things so the F dot looks solid. You know, I've even changed, you know, my email and a lot of the screens. So it's like the difference. So it's like a black background or like white light.

Yeah. Dark mode. It, it helps a little bit. Not much unfortunately. It's, it's, it's good. Flux is good. There's another piece of software called Iris Tech. So Iris Tech is a little bit better than Flux. It costs a little bit of money, might be like five or ten dollars, but it's worth it. So they, they interface a little bit more into the hardware and they can actually help with, help a little bit with the flicker as well. So they can help the screens not eliminate it. But I know the guy who creates it, he's very, very technically minded and health minded and he's worked out a way that it can actually help change the frequency of the flicker in the screen. So that is a good, that is it. If someone you know is wanting to go from the, the free flux to something a bit better. It's, it's Iris Tech as the piece of software for the, for the computer.

Okay. Neat. I mean and then based on everything we've talked about what are, and we've already talked I guess about some actionable steps but you know, just some, some take home messages from, from you. I mean I see beautiful natural lighting in your home. I, I feel, you know, because I do have a lot of not natural lighting coming in here. But that's going to change as soon as we're off this. But yeah, just some actual steps, you know, even just to get more information on you and your company and like what, what sort of products are available out there on the market, where to get them and even just day to day things that we can do.

Yeah, yeah. I'll start with some actual steps and the first one is one of the biggest ones and it's free, which is great. It's get outside in the morning. So like when you get up, get outside and get some natural light exposure, what that does is it actually starts to anchor your circadian rhythm. It tells your brain it's daytime. It will tell your brain to start releasing that cortisol to wake you up. A lot of us feel real tired and drowsy in the morning and want and run for the cup of coffee. Just get outside, get that light exposure. It's going to wake you up. It's going to help first of all kickstart that circadian rhythm. And then the next thing is during the day just trying to get regular breaks and get outside because what you're wanting is you're wanting to get as much full spectrum light exposure. It's got all the infrared spectrum in there as well. What that does is that increases your, your dopamine and your serotonin levels, which are your, which are neurotransmitters in your brain. They heavily regulate your energy levels and your mood, which, which, which is very, very important. And that's heavily governed through natural light exposure. But what that also does is when you increase your serotonin levels is serotonin is what actually converts into melatonin at nighttime in the absence of blue light. So you can be doing everything perfect at night. You could block all the blue light at night and have all the lights and the glasses and do everything perfect. But if you have actually don't have very good serotonin levels, well, there's no raw material to then actually convert into melatonin. So you'll still have terrible sleep. So you've got to, you've got to do them. It's twofold. It's ensuring you're maintaining healthy levels of serotonin, which you do through natural light exposure during the day and ultimately will lead to when you block the blue light at night, allow you to convert that into having healthy or high levels of melatonin. So that's another important thing. So just getting outside during the day, I'm not talking like going and staying outside for hours on end because that's not practical. It's about, you know, just going out for morning tea, having it outside, even if it's raining, it doesn't matter. Like it, it doesn't have to be a sunny day, just getting outside that all those frequencies still exist in the environment. Another one I like is like, you know, people like will take a smoke break. We'll just go tell your boss you're taking like a light break. You're just going outside to get some light. You know, if you don't smoke, like, like you're doing something good for your health, not like detrimental. So like, so those are, those are two free things that you can do from there. Yeah, it's about like now looking at other tools and things we can bring into to help assist things further. And that's kind of where we come in. So our website, blockbluelight.com we've got a whole host of different products, different glasses to wear during the daytime to different glasses to wear at nighttime to completely eliminate it and help with sleep. We do a series of different lighting products, not only light bulbs for the home, but we've looked at other ways that you want to use lighting in your house. So things like a book light just to be able to read a book at night. It's completely wireless. We've got motion night lights, we've got desk lamps, we've got all sorts of different lighting products, strip lighting, everything. We thought of it to really help like deck out your home so you can kind of really create a, you know, a biologically appropriate type of light both day and night. So we've also created full spectrum lighting for the day as well. So we've. So when we talked about having all those colors in balance, we've actually created a bulb that has more balanced level that you can use during the day. So if you don't have lots of natural light like I do, you can use these types of lights in the areas where there's not enough natural light. That's it's, it's trying to replicate it as much as we can. I'm not going to say it's complete replacement for natural light, but it does it. The best job we can do with an artificial light source to actually bring it pretty close to what would get outside to keep those serotonin and dopamine levels raised. Doesn't have UV in it and doesn't have the infrared in it. Those are still required and we should get them. But certainly if we can get, bring in full spectrum light during the day and then we can eliminate it with a more amber or red light at night, it's really going to help modulate the light exposure to what we should be getting in nature. Because if you think about nature before the advent about electricity when the sun sets, we didn't all just go to bed. They used fire. What color is fire? It's orange, yellow and red. There's no blue or green in it. So we can, we can, we can replicate that same type of light with artificial light done right. And that's what we're really doing with, with everything we do. Other resources. We have a whole host of blogs on our, on our website as well. So and you know, blockbluelight.com and then you go to our learn. We've got probably about 80 different blog articles where we're breaking down all different things about light and health and how it affects all different sorts of things. So there's heaps of information there. Another thing is sign up to our email list. We love to, to educate and you know, produce or when we find different articles or studies on like different things about blue light or how things are impacting our house, we'd love to, to break down that study and email our subscribers and kind of Just give us the synopsis for what we think about that and, and try to, to allow it to be more digestible to the, to the end user and the actionable steps they should be taking. Those sort of things as well.

Yes. Brilliant. Brilliant. Daniel. This was, this was amazing. This is good. It's outstanding. I mean you are, you are in many ways bringing natural light and sunlight it back into people's homes for those who. Yeah. And you know, out here in Portland, I mean it's a thing. It's a thing. We need all, all the light we can get especially during the summer and not the summer during the fall and the winter when it's raining a bunch.

Yep, yep. That's, that's when it's even more important. Like SAD or seasonal affective disorder. It's a depression that's 100 governed by light exposure. It's one depressive disorder that completely. And it's becoming very prevalent especially now like because we're living more modern lifestyles and you know, pile winter on top of that where light. The days are shorter, people aren't going outside. Becomes more important to start introducing full spectrum light into the home as well. And we've got. Yeah, that's, that's where we're quite big on that. And looking at, and looking at sad and looking at how we can actually. Yeah. Really try and counteract that with things like just like light bulbs. It's so simple but like it's a, you know, it's like with. We've made such a simple problem so complex to solve but it's really not when you understand it and understand. Yeah. The different types of light and how it's impacting us.

Absolutely. And I'd like to think that we did that for a lot of our friends and patients and colleagues today. So thank you so much for being on the what the Health podcast. Any last minute ideas or. I mean it was fabulous to have you on. Thank you for taking the time.

No worries. Yeah. And just. Yeah, if anyone's got any questions, like we've got a really, really good support team. I even jump in there sometimes. So like fire questions at us. If you're trying to work out like what you need, like what glasses or lights or whatever, you just, you just send us either on the chat or an email and yeah, we're always happy to try and help out and really understand your situation and try and provide recommendations that are going to help you the best.

Excellent. Well, there you have it everyone. Daniel Levitt from Block Blue Light. Again, thank you so much. Feel free to reach out to us too. If you have any questions or comments. Just stay tuned for next time. Daniel, thanks again.

Thanks a lot. Cheers.

Cheers.