Dr Jack Kruse on Light and the Microbiome

Hey, guys. Welcome to another episode of the Gut Health Gurus podcast. I'm Criben Govender. I have a background in food science. My colleague next to me is all things psychology with a background in psychology. And today I have a very special guest. This man is inspiring me so much. He's probably one of the guys that I listen to and follow very closely what he says on a daily basis, because there are some bombs being dropped daily through his Facebook, through his blog, his Patreon. And I'm very honored to introduce Dr. Jack Cruz. Jack, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks. I appreciate being here, Jack.

What I like to do is typically set the scene for my audience. So the question I always ask is, who is Dr. Jack Cruz?

To make it short, to the point. Jack Cruz day job as a neurosurgeon. His. His passion is based around studying quantum biology, getting to the foundations of truly how we work. Pretty much everything that you'll hear from me is really not my opinion. It's really based on light, water, and magnetism and the equations that you've probably learned about as a little boy that are the laws of nature, specifically the three laws of thermodynamics. You may even add in the fourth law that was added in by another Nobel Prize winner later and equals MC squared by Einstein and the photoelectric effect. Therefore, I've taken this path as a neurosurgeon because I believe when people begin to understand how nature really works and they understand that the opinions that I have really are based on this. If I'm wrong, I've got good company. I'm trying to really explain where these disease epidemics are coming from, not only in my country, but globally. My focus is not on the United States. My focus really is global in terms of where the disease processes are going, because you'll see in different countries, there's different issues that are developing, but they always funnel back to defects in light, water, and magnetism.

And what I wanted to do is to start the podcast is just to explore the moment, because my research on your background, Dr. Cruz, you did struggle with, I guess, being overweight, having some form of weight crisis in your life. Now, what was the moment that you. You had that Eureka, Einstein moment that, wow, it's not the diet paradigm that's really impacting you, but there's something else.

Yeah, well, I was in Birmingham, Alabama, around 2004, 2005, giving a talk on minimally invasive spine surgery, and I was in front of a bunch of orthopedic surgeons and neurosurgeons who do spine surgery. Because I was presenting a paper about this instrument that I had designed and I stood up and I immediately tore my nemas because I didn't know that. But I had a lot of orthopedic surgeons in the room and they told me that that happened. And one thing led to another and one of the I had to have help to the podium. I just couldn't believe standing up would cause this problem. But one of the ladies in the audience was a wife of one of the orthopedic surgeons and she happened to work for a big biotechnology company that you may have heard of called Amgen. And she says, jack, I think I can explain this happen to you. I'd like to send you a book and six papers. Long story short, what she was trying to tell me is the company that she was working for was cooking the books. And I took it a completely different way. I read the book in the papers and I'm like, is she trying to tell me that actually what's in this book that's a fable is actually really possible and that is what lit me on fire. That's when I started to realize that food was not the dominant issue to my obesity at the time. I was 6 foot 2, 360 pounds. I had never had any injuries, you know, to my knees before, even though I was a football player and baseball player in college. And this opened my eyes to a completely different world. A world that I was never taught about either in medical school, in dental school, because I used to be a dentist too, and an oral surgeon. And it kind of blew me away, to be quite Frank with you, 18 months of learning about this, I started to realize that most of the things that I was taught in medical school were half truths or absolute lies. And I started to realize the most dominant thing in nature that we miss, especially in medicine, is actually how dominant light is and how complex light is. You know, people, when we talk about light, we think about, you know, the light we're around. We don't realize that what we evolved from for 4.6 billion years is the light of the star in the sky. And the problem is 99% of people in the world today no longer live under that light. And it turns out most of the chronic disease paradigms almost always involve light at some level. And it turned out my obesity, I realized, was tied to both blue light at night and a lack of sunlight during the day. It turned out a lot of non native EMF because of my job. Why? As a neurosurgeon most people get hurt after the sun sets, and that's why I have to stay up late at night operating on them. And it turned out for probably almost 20 years of my life, through all my training, I had been creating a huge circadian mismatch on my own life. And that's what drove the process. It was the dominant factor. And when I realized that, it was kind of stunning. And it was actually more than ironic to me because here I am, the smart neurosurgeon. I should know a lot about the circadian mechanism. And to be quite frank with you, back then, I didn't know shit from shinola, you know, compared to where I am now. And the reason it was cool for me is because, you know, there's nothing like unlearning to relearn. And that was the big issue for me as a physician because, you know, in neurosurgery I felt like, you know, I had dominated in school the whole time I was growing up. And to realize in that 18 months that I really didn't know anything about my own problem made me realize, well, how does the public feel about their own diseases? And it gave me a completely new perspective on how to approach this. So I had some really cool docs that were in my hospital and some of them read some of my initial work and they were the impetus for me to put it on the Internet and not put it in a journal. Because they, like me, realize that the paradigm in power is not really interested in the truth. They're interested in furthering the paradigm's beliefs, so to speak. And so I took their advice and that's how the process began. And that was 15 years ago. And here we are now talking to you guys in Australia with me in New Orleans.

Absolutely. It's a beautiful thing. And I think the weight issue was definitely like a good starter for you. For me, it was pretty much depression and anxiety that started my journey. And I'm really fascinated because I've been reading a few of your, I guess, your posts online and you speak on a few occasions about, I think even recently about the mind, depression, anxiety. And it's linked to Lights of James. I think you'd be pretty fascinated with that, 100%.

Yeah. Well, I mean, it really begins. The story begins. If you look at this chronic disease epidemic with depression and suicide. Most of you guys know that in the United States right now we've got a big time depression, suicide and opiate problem. What most people don't realize is that this problem all links Back to a chemical that's made in your eye and goes into your brain. The chemicals called pomc. You can look it up, it's spelled pomc. And this chemical is made in the brain and it basically breaks down to six different chemicals. One of the chemicals that's in there is a chemical named beta endorphin, which you've probably heard it works on the Mu receptor. The interesting thing is when you realize that am sunlight makes this chemical naturally. What does that really functionally mean? Means that nature has addicted us to, to sunlight. And the thing is, when you actually have this idea, you begin to realize why all the ancient civilizations worship the sun. Why the Egyptians had Ra, why the Aztecs had their gods, why the Incas had their gods. It begins to make sense. And then you realize, is this the reason why they built the Sphinx, looking to the east with all four extremities to the ground? The answer is yes. See, they didn't know quantum physics, but it turned out they knew that the sun was a powerful stimulus for biology. And it turns out when you're a neurosurgeon like me, our biases to evidence based medicine that we learned in medical school, and I realized when I found out about PoMC in detail that our cognitive bias as a human species actually is towards the sun. There's other chemicals that are made in here, but one of the big ones for, for depression is actually we make two really big chemicals in our eye initially that link to this story. So if you're not getting AM sunlight, and I mean AM sunlight from sunrise to about 10am, you're chronically deficient in it. You have an alteration in melatonin and dopamine. And it turns out depression is very associated with dopamine. What people don't understand about dopamine is dopamine is created from the aromatic amino acid tyrosine and phenylalanine in humans. And the reason why I use the word aromatic is not to confuse the audiences. So the audience knows the benzene ring is a photon trap. And it turns out it's a photon trap for UV light. Because most people who come upon this information always think that melatonin is a nighttime hormone. Most people do not realize that the benzene ring has to be programmed by AM light in order to work. And it turns out it's even more interesting than that because it brings up the gut brain access. Why? Because serotonin is also made in the same fashion. So is melatonin. And that's made from another aromatic amino acid called tryptophan. And tryptophan also makes cytochrome one in the mitochondria. So when you begin to see that these aromatic amino acids are photon traps for this AM light, it turns out that melatonin has to first be programmed by AM light. But it doesn't act. It doesn't act in the brain or the gut until light is gone at night for about four hours. So this is the reason why there's a brain gut axis. The other big issue that people really, I think, in your. In your field with the microbiome, people know that the largest store of serotonin in the gut, I should say in the body, is in the gut. And it turns out that that's the storage house for tryptophan that will eventually become melatonin. Now, you know that my tribe is called Black Swan mitochondriacs. Why is this tied to this story? Well, it turns out, Doug Wallace, who's probably the lead researcher in the World on Mitochondrial biology foundation, about 25 years ago, that melatonin also controls both autophagy and apoptosis in mitochondria. So in other words, it controls the stolen prokaryote that we have in our body that delivers energy. When you begin to realize this, you start to see how melatonin, dopamine, serotonin, and cytochrome 1, which is made out of NAD positive and NADH, they all work together in this very, very unusual quantum dance where the brain and the gut has to work together in order, in order for the physiology of the gut and the brain to allow a human to converse, like we're doing right now. In other words, where we're not sick, we don't have problems. It turns out that blue light exposure, especially at night, and I have a name for that. I call it Allen. It stands for artificial light at night. Allen is deadly for both the gut and for the brain. And the reason for that is blue light. And sunlight is contained in the seven colors of the spectrum. The control arm for blue light happens to be red light. The secondary control arm happens to be UVA and UVB light, which is ultraviolet A and B. Those control arms are not present everywhere we are on the planet. It means that this variation that you see in your world in the microbiome is tied to actually how the microbiome can be sculpted. Because one of the things we now know definitively, we believed in the last five or six years that the microbiome is really affected by food. And we're starting to find out that that's not really true. It turns out that it's really sculpted by the latitude and the light that you get the sense on. And where does that light come from? It comes from your eye, it comes from your skin, it comes from the gut surface itself. And that's what sculpts the microbiome. And that sculpting that goes on in the gut is also sculpted in the brain to marry up with the story about POMC in the eye, the story about dopamine, the story about beta endorphin, the story about the endocannabinoids that are made from pomc, also Alpha msh. And it turns out Alpha MSH controls your appetite. Here you begin to see the connection between this whole area. When you really understand the eye well, especially if you're a gut person, you need to understand how the eye and the gut really link. It turns out the central retinal pathways. When you first get light in there, where do they end? They end in the leptin receptor. Here's the irony. Where is leptin in the human body? It turns out it's in subcutaneous fat. You start to ask yourself, why in the hell would God or nature put the key hormone in our body in our sub Q fat, if it acts in the hypothalamus? It turns out, here's the reason. Because light on your skin and your eye is what activates or deactivates the whole process. So if you do not get that stimulus properly, like Jack didn't, being a neurosurgeon for 25 years eventually could lead some collateral effects down the road. And it turned out the collateral effect for me was becoming a fat ass. And then one of the things that I realized is the blue light exposure was the cause of the problem. And when I put this story together back when you guys asked me earlier about the whole leptin story, I knew back in 2005, 2006, and 2007 that there had to be another chromophore that means a receptor somewhere in the skin that was a blue light receptor. And if I'm being honest with you guys, back then I guessed that that receptor would be rhodopsin. And it turned out I was wrong. And I figured out I was wrong right around 2014. That's when a paper came out that showed us that melanopsin, which we found in the eye in the early, or I should say the late 90s and early 2000s, we found out it's also in the blood vessels of humans, specifically the arterioles of the skin. And that's when I started to realize, oh, my. This is the other side, the leptin story. Well, you guys know, being microbiome guys, that when we eat, 40 to 60% of our blood volume goes through the mesenteric plexus of our gut. And that means that massive amounts of blood are delivered through those arteries. Those arteries also have melanopsin receptors in it. And here's the crazier part. The microbiome is made out of prokaryotes. You know that all bacteria are prokaryotes. Here's what you may not know. Prokaryotes are known to release 5,000 times more light than eukaryotic cells. Now, remember, we're made out of eukaryotic cells, okay? Bacteria release a ton more light. It turns out there's a physicist named Fritz Pach who discovered about 20 to 25 years ago that every single cell on the planet, whether it's animal or plant, releases a very interesting frequency of light. And it's called extreme low frequency UV light. To this day, nobody knows what the spectrum of that light is, but we know every single cell that's ever been tested releases this light. So I started to realize immediately that the microbiome, its main function is a light meteor. And the way I like to think about it is I look at the microbiome as a projector in a movie theater, and the enterocyte, or the surface of the gut, as the screen. It turns out that the black swan, mitochondria, is most interested not in the projector or the screen. All the information that's buried in the light is actually what we need to know about how the microbiome is working. It turns out that the light that's emitted from the different species of bacteria are absolutely critical in the quantum biology of the human gut. And this is the reason why people in biology and in gut health really don't truly understand it, you know, better than most that we have found. You know, we think certain floors are simplified when we eat certain diets. You know, one of my heroes in this, because I've been a salmon swimming upstream in the microbiome world. And you know that because I've been saying that light sculpts the microbiome for a really long time. And I didn't have a lot of good data to back me up on this. But Jeff Leach, who's a microbiome researcher that published in Science magazine last year, he found that when he gave the Hasda, who are an equatorial people basically fed them shit on a shingle, gave them antibiotics, American candy bars, Coca Cola, Fanta, you name it, he gave them anything. When he checked their microbiome, nothing changed. When he published this paper, I had the biggest smile on my face because I knew that was right. Last year I went to Vermont and Jeff also talked at Vermont. And when he presented this paper from the stage, I told everybody there that just paper was the single most important paper that's come out in microbiome research, in my opinion. Why? Because it definitively showed that when you put people in nature under the power of sun, their microbiome doesn't change with diet. And this paradigm that you guys know exists in your world must change. It's not changed yet, but it's coming. And there's so many papers now that are beginning to show that just migration alone changes, you know, the microbiome. Well, why would migration change it? Because the latitude changes. That means diurnal variation of the light change. What people don't realize is that the equatorial region, there is no diurnal change in light. It's the same 12 hours day from the sun up, sun down. As we move away from the equator, what happens? The day shortens, you know, and it lengthens in the summer. But the key is the diurnal variation also changes. This has to be correlated with species chains in the gut. And once you begin to realize that these things are linked, that's how I think we're going to get people to understand how the gut microbiome really is sculpted utilizing light, water and magnetism in ways that would probably blow their mind. And, you know, I told you before we came on the podcast that today I released the blog called CPC Number 42, and I was supposed to go to Vermont this year to talk about this topic, and I'm instead, I'm going to Europe to go to Poland and to Germany. So I decided four months early that I would release what I was going to say on Vermont about the counterintuitive connection between the gut and the brain today on Patreon. So some of the things that I just described to you guys, all the little nasty details about actually how light, water and magnetism do this sculpting, is actually contained in that blog. And when you see this, I think you guys, as microbiome guys, are going to look at this and go, oh my goodness, we need to do a lot of work. And I'll be honest, one of the things I'd like to see change, I'd like to See, people who do microbiome research, take the microbiome out, put it in a photo multiplier, and then do the spectrum analysis on the light that's emitted. Because guess what? Then I think you're going to understand why we have all the species that we do and why they vary because they're varying based on the light that's outside. And what most people don't understand is UV light is toxic to most prokaryotes. It turns out that blue, green and red light is what most bacteria really like. And it turns out the bacteria that we stole called the Mitochondria 650 million years ago actually is built to like UV light. That's what makes it different than every other bacteria on the planet. It's the only bacteria that I know of that can tolerate UV light to a great degree. And the reason for that is cytochrome one, which is goes back to the story that we started with. Is made out of a fluorophore protein. What does that mean? It's a protein that works with UV light. Most of you have heard of it. It's called NAD positive or nadh. It's an electron acceptor that passes it to the second cytochrome, which is made out of a flavin dihydrogenase. That's a blue light detector. It turns out that NAD is made out of niacin, which is a vitamin B3. Where does niacin come from? Tryptophan. What did we just say before about tryptophan? It's an aromatic amino acid that absorbs between 200 and 400 nanometer light. So we now know that niacin in NAD absorbs 340 nanometer light. Why is that important for your work? And the microbiome researchers work all carbohydrate electrons enter the mitochondria through cytochrome one. So highly powered electrons made from the sun via photosynthesis. Remember through Einstein's equation called the photoelectric effect, photons only interact with electrons. That excites them. Well, what Cytochrome 1 is really doing is taking those excited electrons and capturing the light in there as it falls back to the ground state. And that energy is being utilized in the cell. It turns out the signal from the environment is not only coming from the eye, it's coming from the skin. But for you guys, it's also coming from the gut. Meaning that light show between the projector and the enterocyte is where the action is, because these things need to be yoked together. And when you begin to see the pieces and parts moving together. You begin to realize that what we're really doing in microbiome research right now is we're not even in the first inning. We're in like, there's the first batters up and the count is three and two. And I know you guys are Aussies, but it'd be like the beginning of a cricket game. And the thing is, I want to make sure that the audience understands that where we are now, I think people really think definitively that we know a lot more than we do. I'm going to tell you, I believe with the gut and the microbiome, we know very little.

Yes.

And the reason why I personally believe the microbiome and the gut, the most counterintuitive quantum biologic tissue that's in the human body. And if you've read anything that I've written, that's a mouthful, considering what I've said about the brain and the eye already. I find the gut extremely interesting because most, some of the most interesting quantum biologic processes begin there. And, you know, there's many diseases. You know, especially the functional medicine guys, they're always out there telling people that autoimmunity and obesity, everything begins in the gut. Turns out that's not really true. It actually begins on the skin and the eye, and that's what changes things in the gut. But the gut does sculpt the brain in ways that we don't yet realize. And it uses red blood cells, it uses changes, biophysical changes in the blood in both the portal and the mesenteric system that affect the hydrogen bonding networks of csf, actually affects the blood brain barrier, affects the cervical spinal cord barrier. That's why many, many diseases that we now don't have an answer for in medicine. When you see it through this perspective, you begin to realize why some of the problems with them exist. And it's the reason why people who do have depression do tend to have a lot of gut complaints and why they also have serious issues in their brain with other things. So my perspective is based on these things that I shared with you here. You know, I know that was a loaded answer to the question, but hopefully it gives the people an idea of kind of how I tackle this problem, because it is, to me, very, very interesting. I'm very interested in. In how nature thinks and how nature does things. I'm not really interested in man's opinion of what they think is going on.

Exactly. And that's what I love about you, Jack, is you call it as it is. And I have a huge amount of respect for someone that puts themselves in the limelight. And sometimes you can attract some, I guess, some naysayers. But I firmly believe in the, the connection between light and the microbiome for sure. Let's dig in a little bit deeper into I guess, some of the metabolites that bacteria produce, like methane or.

Well, that's a good one to start with because I'll tell you why I think what we should do, because you guys both know that there's a lot of different things that the microbiome produces. But I think what we should talk about tied to methane is something that is so foundational to understanding how the microbiome really works that you can generalize it and then you'll understand about beta hydroxybutyrate, short chain fatty acids and things like that, because that's a whole topic in and of itself. But methane actually how bacteria handle hydrogen. In other words, it's the hydrogen store. So what do I want to share with you guys that you may not know? Do you know that the human microbiome is designed to make about 1 liter of hydrogen a day for us to use?

Wow.

And what does it work with? Well, it works with a lot of different things. But what's the number one thing that's made? It turns out the amount of hydrogen made is quantized to the light that comes through the skin and the eye. That's the number one thing. And it turns out that the amount of hydrogen actually links to sulfur containing bacteria in the gut to make a chemical that I'm sure you guys have heard of called hydrogen sulfide. That's symbol H2S. What many people don't realize is that H2S is a gas transmitter. What does that mean? It's a gas that's a neurotransmitter that has direct effects on the mitochondria. And what are those effects? Those effects are linked to the action of nitric oxide both in the gut and in the blood. And what does nitric oxide and H2S functionally do? Inhibits electron chain transport. It slows it down. And it does this because it interacts with cytochrome 4, which is known as cytochrome C oxidase, or CCO for short in mitochondriac lingo. Now, when you slow electron chain transport down, that has dramatic effects on the ATPase, which is cytochrome 5 distal to it. That means the spin rate closes. So here's the key. If you don't get any Sun. Do you know what spins the ATPase by itself with no electrons in it? The light that's behind me right now. Red light. In the video that you guys are doing, you can see that I'm talking to you inside in my house. So right now there's sun outside here in New Orleans. But why do I have the red light in here? 40 to 50% of the glass is blocking the red light from the sun. So what does Jack do? He adds it there because it turns out the ATPase has red light chromophores all around it that allow it to spin at 100% efficient rate. See, we have no engines by technology that run at a quantum yield of 100%. But it turns out the ATPase in humans moves hydrogen at 100% efficient rate. So when you begin to understand this, H2S made from the gut and nitric oxide made from the gut, slow electron chain down. That's exactly what calorie restriction does. But the difference is calorie restriction only works when you're in full spectrum sunlight. And this is the big thing that's missing in that research. The reason for that is UVA light makes nitric oxide. I just told you that the microbiome is making the hydrogen with the sulfated bacteria that's in your gut. These things are all quantized, and they're quantized in ways that most people don't understand. But what is the key factor for the microbiome in making hydrogen? It turns out your microbiome is germane critical mission important to sulfating everything in your body.

Wow.

Here's where we get into some really cool science. Sulfation is humongously important because it turns out sulfur and phosphorus act as quantum dots in your blood. Now, remember I told you before that when the eye gets hit with sunlight, 40 to 60% increase goes through the ophthalmic artery. I told you, when you eat, the same thing happens in your gut. Turns out when your skin is hit by sunlight, the exact same thing happens. What happens? The blood vessels are raised to the surface so that they can absorb light. What does hemoglobin absorb? 250 to 600 nanometer light. So red blood cells are fairy boats. For them to work operationally, they have to be sulfated. What else do you do in your body that has to be sulfated? Most people never talk about cholesterol and vitamin D. Do you know that vitamin D is made from cholesterol? There's only one hydrogen difference and a little bond that's not there. And 312 nanometer light, which is UVB light, does this. But once that is connected, it also has to be sulfated. Guess what sulfates it? Things that are going on in your gut. The key is if you can't sulfate your cholesterol, and there's something called cholesterol sulfate, it means you can't sulfate your vitamin D. If you can't sulfate your vitamin D, you know what happens? It doesn't do anything to calcium. Everybody believes that vitamin D is linked to calcium homeostasis in the gut. It turns out that sulfated vitamin D and unsulfated vitamin D have different physiologic benefits. This is how a small little way how this works. What else is sulfated? Every bit of your platelets in your blood that's floating in there is sulfated. What else? Your white blood cells. Your white blood cells are able to make sulfate directly from H2S made from your microbiome with no enzymatic machinery needed, provided you can sulfate the blood from your gut or your skin. The microbiome is the backup system for your skin. When you don't have your skin in the game. And it turns out your gut absolutely also needs to be in the game. Because what people don't realize is that red light is the one part of sunlight that penetrates directly through your skin all the way to every part of your gut. And it penetrates 10 to 30 centimeters. So that means that every bit of red light from the sun, which is the dominant frequency in sunlight, for those of you don't know, in terrestrial sunlight, 42% is infrared, a light. That is what mitochondria are interested in. And every single mitochondria in your gut is looking for that. Turns out the microbiome is also interested in that red light. Now, blue light does penetrate us, but it only penetrates about 3-6 cm. So for the gut, it's usually not that big a deal. But where do we get the blue light information? We tend to get it from our red blood cells through our skin and our eye. It also does happen in the gut. But how does it happen in the gut? Here's where the counterintuitive story comes. Well, when things get sulfated, there's two big things that go on in your liver. You've probably heard about methylation and detoxification. Those things are heavily dependent on sulfating proteins in your body. For example, the accumulation of metals in your body. Many of the functional medicine doctors are out there telling people when you eat things through your gut, like for example, the thing that drives me crazy, they tell people if you eat too much tuna, you're going to get mercury, which is total bullshit. But the real problem happens if your microbiome is off. Your methionine cycles off. Your methionine cycle needs the sulfation to clear heavy metals. So you know what that means. You don't even need to eat a lot of things with methylmercury in it at all. Because guess what? If the sulfation process is broken in your microbiome over your life, you will become a net collector and can't get rid of the heavy metals. Guess what else happens if you're not sulfated? You'll actually develop methylation defects. See, the dominant paradigm out there right now from the functional medicine guys is that methylation defects come from what a problem with your SNPs that you get on a 23andMe test. Turns out it's not true. How do we know that? I'm going to tell you. There's another B vitamin in the gut that's really important. It's called riboflavin. Riboflavin is B2. Guess what? B2 is a cofactor in all these sulfation pathways that we're talking about. Do you know what kind of chromophore riboflavin is? Remember I gave you a clue before, I said cytochrome two. FADH two is a flavin. All flavins are what? Blue light chromophores. Why? Now I'm going to give you some homology. You look at a chloroplast, it has four nitrogens around magnesium. If you look at hemoglobin has four nitrogens around iron. The difference between magnesium and iron is the amount of electrons it has on the periodic table. That means it can absorb more light. We're more complex than plants, therefore we have 14 more electrons. That's why we use iron. Riboflavin, when you look at it, also has a photon trap. It has three benzene rings. But guess what it has that's very similar to the chloroplast and hemoglobin. It's got nitrogen in its rings. That's the reason why it's a blue light detector. And guess what? The microbiome likes to release lots of blue light. So guess what turns on this riboflavin context to help methylation, detoxification and also clearance of heavy metals through the methionine cycle, that process. So when that process in the microbiome is broken, this whole Thing starts to fall apart. And what is the phenotype of patients or the public that's going to listen to this podcast that we'll start to see? People who live in a tech world that have blue light, who don't go in the sun, they'll begin to start having depression, they'll get fatter, they'll start accumulating metals, they'll have methylation defects. Does that sound like some of the dominant diseases that we have that are out there?

Absolutely.

It all starts from the surface changes. And that's why one of the counterintuitive things that you've probably heard me say over time is that with time, I believe it will be proven that what happens in our surfaces, meaning the skin, the eye, the gut, and the lung, is going to determine the biochemistry that occurs below. What I'm telling you is the biochemistry that's going on in the gut is radically different depending on the incident. Light emf, because it has to do with the free radical signal that's made. It turns out that you have to turn on riboflavin if riboflavin is not in your diet. Why? Because blue light will destroy it. That's one of the causes of leptin resistance. Then it turns out that your microbiome simplifies. That's how Jack got fat. And I realized that this was a big issue. The problem I never knew is I didn't know the link to melanopsin until about. Truly about 2014. That's when everything fell into place. And then in 2017, probably the key paper came out in December of 2017 that we found melanopsin is now in the subcutaneous fat and arteries of the skin. And I was like, oh, my goodness. So now we now know that in the mesenteric plexus of the gut, it's also in the visceral fat. It's also in all the arteries of the fat. So now the story is complete. Now we've got all the missing pieces, what our job is. Hopefully doing podcasts like this. When people who are into microbiome research in the microbiome itself, they begin to realize that this story is not just about species. It's about the light these species release. And it's about the emf. And when I say emf, I'm talking about solar versus non native. It's what simplifies the gut. It turns out that blue light by itself, without all its other frequencies, is the single biggest thing that simplifies the gut. And that's when we get the obesity flora that everybody talks about in the literature. They have not figured out yet what really sculpts the microbiome. And the guy that's given us the biggest clue is Jeff Leach.

Jack, we're pretty much coming up to time. If you wouldn't mind. I just, just want to explore a little bit further for a couple of minutes now just with, with microbiome and scalping. That's the kind of the, the train of thought. You finished with what would be your recommendations to. And I get it, it's a difficult question to ask. We're so new in terms of the science. We're up to the first inning really. But what's your recommendations for scoping, for scalping a microbiome that's going to be the most beneficial for our health?

Yeah. I'm going to give you something that'll surprise you. I think it's very simple. And the first number one thing I want you to make like the sphinx every single day the rest of your life. You need to face the east as the sun rises, whether it's cloudy or not, and see that sunrise. I want you to see it though, with your eyes, your skin and your gut. I'd like your gut exposed. You know, you guys, you can do that. I can do that. But there's probably somebody going to be listening to this in Edmonton, Canada right now going, Jack, it's minus 25 Celsius. But guess what? The stimulus doesn't have to be really long when you do it correctly. Here's the greatest thing about Einstein's photoelectric effect. The effect happens instantaneously. So the sicker you are, the longer you must do it, the more healthy you are. You just have to be chronic in your ability. So I tell people, 80% of your ability to get better is to do just that. It's not as hard as we all think now, where it gets tougher. If you're not a quantum clinician or you're not a quantum patient, you don't have this perspective. I'm going to tell you just because we started talking about some of the reactions between say sulfation, hydrogen creation and say riboflavin. The thing I would tell you is you know that my book is called the Epipaleo Rx. If you seasonal diet for your latitude and location and you add seafood and some organ meats, you have solved your problem. And that's all one needs to do. See, I make, I get very controversial online because I tell people food doesn't matter. Food matters. But it's like fifth on the list. And you know that this creates a huge problem when I talk to people who are food gurus or nutritionists or guys like you who are big into the microbiome. But I look at you guys as a little bit more progressive because I've seen some of the things that you guys have written, you know, on social media. And I think, you know that there's another side to this coin that we need to look at. And that's the side of the coin that Jack spends most of his time on because I find it fascinating and we're learning way more about how we really work going forward. That's my take home in terms of what someone needs to do. If you eat a seasonal diet for your location on the planet and you see the sun with your services every day, I believe eventually you can fix it. Now, the diseases you have, this may take a lot longer than you want to know. Like if you've got ms, if you got sibo, if you got IBS, or say your condition, depression, you need to do more than just, you know, that instantaneous time that we mentioned before. Those are people that I would say 30, 40, 50 minutes from sunrise there when in the beginning, 15 years ago, that's what I did. I spent sometimes three, four, five hours outside before I went to work. From the time the sunrise, I changed everything about my life these days. I don't have to do that. Now, where I am now, 15 years later, I am probably 30 to 40 pounds heavier than I was at my thinnest weight. But I would tell both of you, since your microbiome guys, how often do you think it is someone can go from 360 pounds and maintain 100 pound weight loss for greater than 15 years and not do anything? I can tell you the answer from my gastroenterology friends. It never happens unless you have your gut cut by an operation. I'm telling you that it's possible when you really understand light, water and magnetism. The key problem is my day job that you guys asked me out earlier puts me at risk. Jack for 15 years has tried to change his day job to get a stability of light in my life. And when Jack can't get a stability in his life, he puts a red light on behind him or he goes out like after I finish with you guys, it's four o' clock in the afternoon here. Jack will be outside with his shirt off in his kinecky shorts doing the things that I just told you that we need to consider doing. And I think if we can get people back to nature eating a natural seasonal diet for food that grows under the power of photosynthesis in that location, my friends, I think this is the kind of medicine we all can get behind.

That's some sound advice. And just a quick question. That red light behind you, is that an incandescent bulb that's coated with red.

It's an LED light that's got infrared A, infrared B and infrared C. But it also has the flicker effect limited.

What's the brand, if you wouldn't mind me asking?

Well, the brand is actually through my, my, my farm. I have a cruise longevity farm. And I do not sell the lights until someone comes to see me as a patient and they get taught exactly how to do it based on their workup at the farm. So the answer is you can't buy it unless you come see me. Eventually. We do think it'll be available, but the reason, and I'm glad you asked me this, because I think publicly, because you're the first guys that I'm going to tell this to. I believe the biggest mistake that people make is utilizing photobiomodulation or red light from the Internet and not having an appropriate quantum context to use it. You need to know how to use it when you're trying to get better. Not everybody who's got Sibo, IBS or Crohn's disease needs to use red light all the same way. Everybody's process is different. Why? Because you have to understand how mitochondria and the microbiome are working inside of you to get this effect. And that's the reason why I'm a stickler about these details. I think in four or five years, I think the lights will be available. But you and I, us three, just talked about some of the quirkiness about how the gut really works. And I think you guys could probably appreciate putting any red light on the market equivalent to like putting any drug in a pharmacy or putting any drug for over the counter use. And you know that there's many over the counter drugs that considered safe, but they still have effects. My personal belief right now is on the Internet, it's the Wild west when it comes to light. And most people don't understand light as well as I do. Therefore, I have felt, this is my own personal opinion, that I'm not comfortable telling anybody really how I want them to use light until I know more about their personal context.

Sure, I respect that it's almost treating light as a form of medicine so has to Be.

I will tell you this if you don't know. One of the world's research experts in red light is a Russian scientist named Tina Karou. You spell her name, K U R U. You'll be very interested in this. Maybe in your show notes you can link this. She wrote a paper that said, is red light therapy, drug therapy. And the answer, when you read the paper, the answer is yes. I want you to think about the power of that. People don't realize that the chemical bonds between carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, do you know where the energy of those bonds come from? The sun. That's what we don't realize. And these little quantum effects, they have massive, massive implications for the clinical diseases we treat and the phenotypes of our patients. Hopefully when people listen to this podcast and they go out, maybe they'll understand why Jack is a stickler for details and why I'm kind of diligent on what I do because I don't think on social media most people really understand how deep I try to go with this science. You do know that it's, it's very difficult to teach people quantum physics in terms of how it links to biology. But I think podcasts like this, when people listen to this, this is decidedly a different perspective than you're gonna get from anybody else that you interview. And I am on the edge of what's published in the science. I'm not interested in yesterday's science. I'm interested in why don't we really understand the microbiome right now? I'm telling you guys, my belief, based on the state of my knowledge in 2019 in on March, is that it ties to light, water and magnetism. And until we get that right, I think we have a duty to tell everybody that we're trying to educate. This is the state of our knowledge. The Dunning Kruger effect is massive in the microbiome research. And we need to keep going forward, paying attention to everything that's out there to see how these things affect things. And I think if you do that, my opinion is the gut brain access is going to be one of the most exciting places to be in the future of medicine. But I do give people a cautionary detail. I think allopathic gastroenterology, I think the microbiome researchers and I think functional medicine paradigm is woefully inaccurate where it is right now in some cases, especially in functional medicine, I believe that it's creating more problems than it's solving. And that won't probably warm the cockles of many people who listen to this. But it's a warning that I'm given, and I hope people begin to understand why. I have the belief that I do. It's because of some of the science that, you know, I laid out to you guys. And I think the more we talk about this going forward, I think the better it will be because I'm sure next year we'll talk about something different or the year after that, because the data is being published now for us to read, decipher, and figure out how it fits the things that we already know. And I guarantee you there's going to be things that come out in the next year that we learn about the microbiome that are going to blow our mind in terms of how it sculpts mitochondrial biology, how it changes mitophagy, how it changes autophagy, even how fasting affects the light release from the microbiome. I think, look, anytime you change the nutrient density to a bacteria, it has massive effects on the light that it releases. And the thing, the mindset that I like people to really get is when it comes to the microbiome, I want you to remember the analogy we used an hour ago, the projector and the screen. The projector is the microbiome, the screen is the enterocyte surface. I want you to pay attention to the light there because all that information is really what we're all interested in.

Absolutely. I'm a firm believer that, following your work, Dr. Cruz, that light does have a substantial impact. And I hope there's researchers, microbiome guys out there that really start to take heed. I was actually saying the same thing to a colleague a couple of weeks ago, that it'd be a really interesting study to see what types of frequencies of light that bacteria, different species actually produce. So let's hope that someone listens to.

This and starts, I can tell you it's being done. People are now starting to look at bacteria multipliers. But here's the interesting thing. Just when you examine the bacteria, say in a petri dish and a photomultiplier, it changes the frequency compared to what it is in the small intestine. Remember, it's a totally different environment, so we need to be aware of that as well. But the one thing I guess I'll end with that you'll be interested in. When I talked to Jeff last year, I gave him the idea. I said, jeff, because you're the only microbiome researcher that I know that's stuttering humans in an equatorial environment with no Diurnal change. How about if you take the hosta who live in equatorial zone and bring them to Austin, Texas where you live, feed them the same shit and see what the effect microbiome is there. I said, I will be willing to bet you that their microbiome becomes more like the fat people in Texas. And he looked at me, that's a great idea. And guess what? From what I've heard, that's exactly what he's doing right now.

I'd be very interested to see the outcomes of that study, that's for sure. Well, Jack, we're going to wrap now. James, did you have any parting words? That was just amazing, Jackson. Amazing. And what we typically like to finish is. I think you've covered this. But what we like to finish is if there was one thing that our audience could do for their gut health today, what would it be?

I think that's very simple too. I think they need to read to understand. They need to unlearn, to relearn. So one of the books that I would tell everybody, I think that you need to get to understand this perspective. It's called Light Sculpting Life. It's written by a gentleman named Roland Van Wyk. If you didn't know that every cell in your microbiome releases extreme low frequency UV light, you must read this book. It takes you back to the history, all the way back to 1800s, to where we are today and how this really works. And when you understand the difference between prokaryotes and eukaryotes, I promise you, you'll have a new perspective, truly what's going on with nature's laws and those prokaryotes in your gut. And that will be the first time that you'll understand that taking exogenous things may actually be making you worse. It may be the reason you're not getting better. And it may be the impetus for you to stop doing something that you've been told by everybody on the Internet or in the medical clinics, oh, no, you should take probiotics. You should do this, you should do that. You may say, you know, let me take a couple of steps back here and try looking at the sun every morning with my eyes, my skin and my gut and see what happens to your brain and your gut. You might be shocked. And here's the best news, guys. You both know that what I just told you is free. In other words, that doesn't need to sell you some crazy probiotic that has no clinical data like restore. We have, you know, a doctor here in Virginia that tries to sell this to everybody. It's just pure nonsense. But because he can give you a cogent story and a marketing spiel and a talk, people buy. What is Jack saying? I'm not selling you a damn thing. I'm selling you on one. Cognitive bias. Jack has nature, okay? And when you begin to understand this, you start to go, well, you know, I've tried everything else. Nothing's worked. How about I try this? And I think you might be shocked.

Jack, thank you so much for taking the time to come into the podcast with a huge amount of gratitude, appreciation, and you have yourself a great day.

I appreciate you guys inviting me. Thank you.

My pleasure.