Lose weight, improve gut health, and sleep better with light management with Andy Mant

Hey, guys. Crippen Gavin from the Gut Health Gurus podcast. And I'm here with my colleague James Shadrach. We have a very, very special guest today. Andy. Matt. How you going, Andy?

Hey. I'm good. How are you guys?

Really good. Andy, we thought we'd start off by just introducing yourself to our audience who's primarily interested in digestive health, gut health. But today we're going to talk about light because you seem to be the man who knows a lot about light. So how about we introduce yourself and then let's delve into light. The way we run our podcast is really free flowing. We go into many different rabbit holes. There's no structure. Well, let's explore.

Sure, sounds good. Well, firstly, thank you so much for having me on. It's an honor to be speaking to you guys. My name is Andy Mant. I'm the founder and CEO of Blueblocks. Blueblocks is a company that specializes in creating advanced light filtering eyewear. And I'll come on a little bit later on in the show to tell you exactly what that means and what that's doing for us. But yeah, I found a niche through my sort of nutrition and scientific journey into light. I was happy with the results of sorting out my nutrition many years ago, but I felt that I could optimize my life and my well being a lot better if I manage my lighting environment. So that led me to really delve into the scientific literature, start researching sort of the effects of natural and artificial light on our health and well being. And when you actually start delve down the rabbit hole of light, you realize that we're not actually that dissimilar from other species on this planet. So animals and plants in so much that we use light in different ways to regulate our health and wellness.

I mean, light has been something of interest and really interesting story just to kick things off, feeling like I've caught a cold during the week and feeling really terrible. So I do apologize to my audience. My voice is not 100% today, but it was around Wednesday where just through stress, I felt really stressed out. It was about three or so in the morning. I woke up. I literally could not get back to sleep. And so I did an hour of work from about 3 to 4 and then woke up my normal time. So my sleep was just rat for that day and then kind of spiraled out of control there. I wasn't doing all my kind of regular routines and I ended up getting sick. So that was pretty much really a lack of sleep. And so this is the thing from our research that we've done with the little microbiome. We know that sleep significantly influences the type of bacteria in the gut, specifically varicomicrobia. And a lot of people know this group as Akkermansia, the species Akkermansia municinifeli. So we know that sleep impacts the gut in terms of the types of bacteria. But sleep in itself has a huge amount to do with light and circadian rhythms. So this really piqued my interest in light and why I really wanted to discuss light and how to optimize the light that we're getting. And so one of the routines that I typically do in the morning to set my circadian rhythm is to get exposure to early morning light. So the first thing that I do in the morning is, aside from having a large amount of water, just to flush out the body, is to go out into my garden and actually just spend some time in light. So it just could be simple things like just sweeping my garden, because I know at that same time I'm getting some movement or watering the garden, but the goal is really there, is to get light. So, Andy, I'm a novice in this space compared to you, so why is light so important to us?

Okay, make some really good points there. And I think it's worth sort of taking a step back just to sort of explain how the human circadian system works. So we all have biological rhythms. So you'll hear these referred to as a body clock, as a circadian rhythm, as a biological rhythm, for instance. So circadian is Latin. It means circa, about D and day. So around about a day. And these are cycles that are in every living thing on this planet. So whether it be trees, whether it be, you know, a snake, a mouse, a human, elephant, whatever, everyone has this circadian circadian rhythm. The reason they have this rhythm is because it's all. Basically, our biology is intertwined with the rotation of the Earth. So it takes 24 hours for the Earth to do the rotation, which is the same as our biological rhythms. Now, within our body, we have the master clock. Okay, so the master clock is located in the supracharismatic nucleus in the brain, and it's entrained by light, and it's also entrained by dark. So the way we evolved ancestrally was that we would get up with the sun. The sun would basically tell our body, tell our pineal glands and supracharismatic nucleus to suppress melatonin, start releasing different hormones and make us feel really alert in the Mornings, which would lead us to be diurel animals to go out and hunt. We would then progress throughout our day during the light. And then when the sun set, we would be left in either darkness or only in the presence of orange or red light from, say, a campfire. And what happens in this situation when it's dark is our body clock. Basically, we can start releasing melatonin. Now, melatonin is a, an antioxidant and a sleep hormone, which puts our body into, into a deep restorative sleep and also allows melatonin, which is, you know, the world's most powerful antioxidant, to start repairing damaged cells. So that's basically how, in a very, very brief terms, how human circadian biology works. Now, when you take a little bit deeper and we can talk about this later on, I'll just touch on it now. All of our cells in our body have their own clocks. So your gut microbiome will have its own clock. Even your microbes within your microbiome will have their own body clocks. Every cell, every organ will have its own clock. And they're all entrained by different things, whether it be light, whether it be food, or whether it be exercise. But light is the most important thing because it's the entrainer of your master clock. And if your master clock isn't sinking correctly, and your peripheral clocks within your cells and microbiomes, etcetera, Won't also be functioning well at all. So what we're doing is we're creating a functioning circadian rhythm by what you're doing is you're going out in the morning, you're seeing the sunrise, and that is going through your eyes and it's entraining your body clock. So what that means is it's setting that clock on the correct time. So basically, when you speak point of view, it basically means all your hormones can be secreted at the correct time of day. So when it comes to nutrition, a lot of people have it wrong in so much as they only talk about eating macro or micronutrients. They never talk about the timing of food and when you should be eating as well. And if you've got a dysfunctional body clock, that also won't matter, because if you're exposing yourself to light at the wrong times of the day, and you've got the wrong kind of hormone being released at that time of the day, then actually how you store that food will be influenced by light as well. So there's a lot more to it than just from a food and Nutrition point of view, a lot more to it than just eating a specific set of macronutrients. To be optimal, light comes to play. And when we talk about the circadian rhythms, they have to be properly succinct to the spin of the earth and to the light dark cycles in order for us to be optimal.

That's fascinating because I would say my nutrition has been pretty good for the last few years. Heavily focused on making sure my gut is 100% functioning correctly. But I must say the light is probably being the missing piece that's really taking my game to the next level. Because I can really feel now by having this focus, of course, getting all the other simple things right in terms of nutrition, exercise, sleep, by introducing this focus on light, it's almost like the next level for me. I think I'm noticing that now I feel leaner, I feel stronger, and it's just this missing element that I've added in. Another thing that I've been regularly doing now for the last few months is red light therapy. So I first came and became aware of this through joovv and the work that they've been doing. So I got myself a joovv unit and I have noticed the difference. I don't fully understand how it works, but it does feel like it's doing something good. So can you explain something about how does Rev Life Therapy work and is it something that's worthwhile for people looking at?

Yeah, absolutely. And red light is probably slightly different to what my company is all about, which is blue light and green light. But I can talk a little bit about red light, how it works, red light. It's all about frequencies, like everything. Even with blue blocks and our blue light glasses, it's specific frequencies of light that are actually going to provide benefits or negative effects depending on the time of day that you utilize them. So if we talk about natural red light to start with. So when the sun rises in the morning, there's a lot of infrared light within that spectrum. So that's an invisible spectrum of light, but also classifies as a red light. And also when it comes to sunsets, when you actually look at the sky, you're going to see sort of reds and oranges. Now, they're very soothing colors. Okay. So very relaxing. They help the body unwind de stress. That's why if you go out camping and you put on a campfire, sit around with no sort of artificial blue light present as well, you're going to feel very at ease and your wellness is going to be very Much heightened. Now, the reason that works is when you go higher up in the spectrum of light. So you start with a low spectrum of high energy dense light, which is your blues and your greens, which is great for feeling alert and awake, but not very good after dark. When you go further down the spectrum and you're hitting the sort of reds and orange lights, those penetrate really deeply into the, you know, through the skin and actually into the muscle. Whereas when you have, say, a blue or a green light, it really only sort of affects the surface of the skin or through the, or enters through the eyes and then gets translated through something called melanopsin, which again, we'll talk about later on. And also what red light will do is it will, you know, really improve that exclusion zone within your cells and mitochondria and actually also favorably influence heteroplasmic rates as well. So it makes much more efficient. So if you say in the gym and you're lifting a lot of weights and you want to come back and you're feeling stiff the next day, when you actually utilize, say like a JOOV or JIMBA Red, which is a red light therapy device, that red light and that near infrared light that it contains is actually penetrating deeply in the skin and having favorable effects on cell and mitochondria efficiency, which is actually helping that muscle and the cells within that muscle repair. So, you know, in essence, that's, that's how it would work. And you know, I've trialed red light panels myself as well. And, you know, you can, you can halve your recovery time when you've had a really sort of intense session in the gym or lifting weights, or even if you're sore from, say, running or walking, it really does help. And there's literature out there as well for your female listeners or vain people like myself that actually, like when you, when you put red light close to your skin in the correct wavelengths, it actually reduces the appearance of wrinkles. And, you know, there's a lot of therapy out there now in salons where you can actually go and, you know, get this kind of treatment, that sort of infrared therapy for, you know, that sort of tightening of the face, making it appear less wrinkly and reducing the, you know, the fine lines and wrinkles that women don't like so much. So, yeah, I utilize it quite a lot. I find it very useful in the wintertime as well because it gets dark earlier in Australia and, well, in any location. So the use of artificial LED lights after dark then becomes a problem. I will utilize, you Know, either red light bulbs or, you know, the near infrared and red light panels like Joovv and Jember red, to create that sense of what our ancestors had after dark, which was just mimicking, say, a fire, which was the red and the orange lights. So what I touched on there as well is that we've spoken about circadian rhythms and how we entrain our body clock so we get the light in the morning, which is a balanced spectrum of reds and blues, which raises cortisol, cortisol levels raise, which makes us feel really alert, aware, and feeling good about the day. A lot of people wrongly criticize cortisol as being a stress hormone, but I'll come on to that at the end of this section about why that can actually be a problem and how light causes that to be a problem. But also, when we're out in the morning getting our morning sunlight, we're also creating something called serotonin. And serotonin is needed to make you feel good, but it's also very important in so much that after dark, or in physiological darkness, serotonin is actually turned into melatonin. So you could be wearing blue light blocking glasses in the evening, you could be having a lot of red light in your house after dark. But if you're not getting your morning sunlight and you're not building up stores of serotonin, you're going to have a hard time creating optimal amounts of melatonin, which is needed for sleep. So this is why it's always important to get out in the day. Now after dark, what we've done is we know that light passes through our eyes in the morning from the sun, and it raises cortisol, increases serotonin, and tells us that it's the daytime. So what do you think would happen if you come home, work when the sun set, and you switch on an LED light? It gives that same message to the brain. It tells your brain it's daytime and I can raise cortisol levels again. And then you get a state of chronic cortisol in your body. And we all know what that would lead to. Chronic exposure to any one hormone will lead to either resistance of that hormone or it will lead to diseases such as stress, anxiety, depression, that could even lead to suicidal thoughts. That gets really extreme as well. Just flicking on a light after dark is really messing up our circadian biology. And when our whole body, including our cells, our skeletal muscle, our brain, all runs on a light and dark cycle, you know, we've created a society where we are living in constant light you know, even when we come home from work and we switch on the tv, blue lights coming from that. We play on our phones, blue lights coming from that. We switch on a light in the house, blue lights coming from that. We go to bed at night and we don't have blackout curtains on our, on our windows. And we have car headlights and street lamps shining through. Blue light. We get up in the night to go to the toilet, what do we have? Blue light. So all it takes is that flash of blue light in the eye and your cortisol levels are going to be through the roof. This is why we've got such an epidemic at the moment of depression and anxiety, not just amongst people that maybe are at a later stage in their life where historically we would have seen this, but we're seeing teens today, and even small children suffer from depression and anxiety. And from what we're looking at, a lot of it comes down to the environment they're living in. And a huge contributor to all three of those diseases, stress, anxiety and depression, is the overexposure that we're putting our bodies through of artificial blue and green light. And other contributors like food and work and social media are all factors. But light is a huge, huge importance here. And it's very, very clear in the literature that, you know, this type of light and inappropriate light at the wrong times of day is really messing up your hormonal system and leading to all sorts of circadian diseases.

It is a huge issue. It's a massive, massive problem.

You mentioned a little earlier on about the circadian rhythms. Now, I think when you should or shouldn't eat in relation to light, I was just wondering what's an example of when you shouldn't eat in relation to light and circadian rhythm? Yeah, absolutely. So if we think about it, first of all, from an ancestral standpoint, I think that will give sort of a really clear basic understanding of our human biology. So, as we mentioned earlier, we evolved under the sun and we evolved to be creatures of the day. Okay. So during that period of time, during sunlight, we were at our most active and we would go out, hunt and gather. Now, the way you look at, I guess it really depends on what camp you sit in, in what humans were. I believe that, you know, yes, we did hunt and we did eat meat. Some people might not believe that, but I also believe that we were very opportunistic. So we would hunt and we would eat almost, almost immediately. We would perhaps bring some food back for other people within the, in the camp and eat, eat There. But you know, ultimately when you observe, I guess hunter gatherer societies in the modern day, now a lot of them go out hunt and gather and they eat during daylight hours. Now we were talking, I guess about the circadian rhythm regulating hormones. And when you actually start to look at it from an evidence based standpoint, when you should eat should actually be when the hormonal sort of balance within your body is right for digestion. So you've got your sort of selection of peptides and hormones like ghrelin, leptin, that are all involved in sort of the eating process and digesting process need to be sort of at their highest or lowest, depending on how you know how well it will digest. And when you actually look at someone with a properly functioning circadian rhythm, all those hormones are a really ripe time to eat during the morning. Now the reason this makes complete sense as well, that aside from the studies, is that when train our body clock to start ticking and that's first thing at first light. And it just so happens that all the hormones in a properly functioning circadian human are right for eating at this time as well. So it would make sense that you want to entrain all these clocks at the same time. So they're all running on the same program. So when you actually dive even deeper into it and you look at the skeletal muscle clock, you find that, and a lot of people will say this, you find that exercising in the morning is actually the most beneficial for weight loss. And that's because everything is primed for morning exercise again. So everything is front loaded in terms of you should be eating at first light, you should be exercising at first light, and you should be looking at that first light. So when you actually go throughout the day and it starts to get dark, your hormone profile will start to change. Melatonin will start to be produced in a properly functioning person and your body is starting to go into a sort of growth and repair stage. So your body doesn't want to be digesting food after dark. Your sleep is going to be important because it's going to be clearing out adenosine in the brain, it's going to be growing and repairing your muscles. It's going to be making sure your microbiome is healthy and well regulated. So the last thing you want to be doing is eating food at this time of the day. Now what's really important to understand as well is that there's two studies out there that I can link to you guys afterwards if your viewers are interested. And it's on insulin resistance. And light. So for people that are actually exposed to artificial light whilst they sleep or before they go to sleep, they're actually more resistant to. I guess if they were to eat a high carbohydrate meal in the evening, they would be more likely to store that as body fat because insulin levels will be a lot higher if you're eating under artificial light and also whilst you sleep. Really interesting study. I think it was 50% increase in insulin resistance for someone that was just exposed to, I think, 30 seconds of artificial light whilst they slept. So that could be car headlights or a street lamp or it could be getting up to go to the toilet in the night. So sort of going back to your original question, it's a really old adage that really there's always many a truth in these types of sayings and that you should be eating breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper. So, you know, a lot of people say to me, oh, what about the benefits of intermittent fasting and completely missing the point that why do you have to fast in the morning to complete a fasting period? You can fast after dark. You know, I'm taking away from any of the benefits of fasting. I think it's a fantastic thing for autophagy and apoptosis and longevity at the end of the day. But why do people seem to think that you should fast in the morning? Is it because they find it easier? They can't eat a big meal at breakfast? There's a huge body of evidence as well that suggests that leptin levels are also favorable for not eating a big meal in the morning. And that's fine. You know, you eat what you can in that morning period. No one's saying, you know, eat until, you know, past satiety or anything like that, but then throughout that morning, continue to eat until it starts to get dark. And it's really interesting because I've run some personal N1 experiments where I actually utilize this, which is an aura ring. So this is from my friends over, in, over in Finland, luckily enough, given one to trial for them. So, yeah, basically when I eat a big meal after dark, I will lose probably 60 to 70% of my. When I actually drop a meal and I finish my last meal about 4 o' clock in the afternoon, my sleep is significantly, much better than it is when I, when I eat after dark. And, you know, you only have to look at your heart rate when you do that as well. And the fact that you've got an OURA ring as well, is give it a try, eat a massive meal, or just eat any meal at like seven, eight o' clock at night, and then try the next day of eating a meal, your final meal, let's say three, four o' clock in the afternoon, and just see the difference. It's absolutely fascinating that just one meal when you eat has a huge impact on your sleep. And a lot of people that are getting such bad sleep, it's always going to be a combination of things. Like, ultimately, light is huge, huge influencer of actually getting a good night's sleep. But you know, when you look at meal timing as well, that's actually disrupting your sleep as well. If you're doing what 99.9% of the population does, which is have your biggest meal at dinner time, when you sit down with the family, you know you're unwittingly destroying your health through lack of sleep. You're not getting that growth and repair you need. You're not clearing adenosine out for the brain. If you're not doing that, you're going to see diseases like dementia and Alzheimer's and Ms. All start to increase. And guess what's happening? They're all starting to increase. So we need to be really cognizant to the fact that even when we eat can influence our sleep. And I mentioned as well, just then, I mentioned it a couple of times, adenosine. So I'm going to talk a little bit about adenosine for people as well. So there's two types of sleep that the human body goes through, or two types of ways to get to sleep. The first one is, we've spoken about it, it's governed by light and dark cycles and it's called circadian. So when it's light, light tells us certain hormones keep us awake and alert after dark. When in the absence of blue and green light, the opposite will happen. It will make us feel sleepy and want us to go into growth and repair mode. But we also have another method of sleep which will eventually lead to obviously falling asleep. Whether the quality of sleep will be good or not is dependent on light. However, when we run metabolic processes in our body, we use a system and it's all ATP driven, so adenosine triphosphate driven. So that's created in mitochondria, pumps out energy, it can be formed from light, reform from food, different macronutrients, you eat. So what happens is when our heart's beating, when we're exercising, when we're breathing and doing all these metabolic processes, the byproduct of adenosine triphosphate is adenosine. And where that accumulates, it's like a waste product. So it's like starts to accumulate in the brain. And then what happens is, over the course of the day, when you're running these processes and when you're exercising, the more and more adenosine builds up and it's referred to as sleep pressure. So sleep pressure is the need to sleep. It is that need of there's so much waste product and adenosine built up in your brain and cells that the body needs to go into a sleep mode to repair and clear out all that adenosine. So you can see now the issue is if you're running all these metabolic processes throughout the day, whichever, you end up clearing that out when you sleep. But if you're not getting good sleep through overexposing yourself to blue and green light after dark, or eating a big meal after dark, you're not going to get a proper clear out of that waste product in the brain. And this is one of the reasons, I think, that we've got a real sort of increase in neurological diseases at the moment, because we're not getting good sleep and we're just leaving a lot of faulty dead cells in our body. And we're also leaving a lot of adenosine in our body, which is a toxin at the end of the day. And one of the biggest things that actually clears out adenosine from the literature as well is an antioxidant. And the antioxidant that has the most powerful effect on clearing adenosine is melatonin. How do we create melatonin? Morning sunlight from serotonin. Physiological darkness after dark creates melatonin. Why would you not want more of this? A lot of people would say, oh, I sleep fine. I don't need blue blocking glasses, or I can watch TV to fall asleep. But, yeah, we can all fall asleep because of sleep pressure. But are we optimizing the processes of waste clearance in the brain and cell apoptosis and autophagy by doing that? And the answer is no. And you can see that quite clearly by, you know, running tests using your oura ring, or even just literally wearing red lens, blue block of glasses after dark and actually seeing how fresh you feel after wearing those. And, you know, I'm a firm believer in avoidance of caffeine as well. And the reason I'm a firm believer of the avoidance of caffeine is that it is the most potent blocker of adenosine. So what Coffee does is it actually turns off your adenosine receptors for anywhere between two and six hours, depending on the individual, whereby you'll continue to build up a lot of adenosine in the brain. But because you don't have the receptors functioning properly, you don't actually feel sleepy at the correct time. So I haven't drunk caffeine for about two or three years now and that's really helped my anxiety. And I believe that that has a lot to do with the fact that it's probably improved my gut health, as you guys would probably suggest. But it's so it's meant that my cortisol levels and the hormones are actually well balanced because I'm not blocking adenosine if I need to go to bed. My body, if I have a really, really busy, I walked 30, 40,000 steps or I've been in the gym pumping away and I need to be in bed at 8 o' clock at night because my brain is telling me that I will go to bed at that time. Whereas what we find in society today is that people are drinking copious amounts of coffee, for instance, with caffeine in it in the afternoo. And you know what that's doing is you're still building up all that adenosine in your brain, but it's not telling your body that you need to sleep. So you're not actually going to get a good quality of sleep because you're going to be disrupting your circadian biology by doing this. If people have to have coffee, I believe it's an addiction, caffeine, if I'm being honest. But if people are addicted and need to have that, have it first thing in the morning when you're in training, all your other clocks and then you probably won't have too much of an issue. But for me, I don't think there's any issue in not having it. I think that people that will argue that it's full of antioxidants, a missing antioxidant known to man. Fact is melatonin and I'll be focusing on that rather than a plant.

Yeah, 100% agree with your sentiment, Andy. Melatonin and glutathione, probably the two key ones. I think there's a lot of link what you're talking about with melatonin and also with gut health, because when you're sleeping, this is when the repair process happens to that gut lining. So that gut lining is really only a cell level thick, so it's extremely thin and fragile. So if we're not getting enough sleep, we're never going to get this repair happening to an optimal level. So it's so important that all this stuff is all linked sleep, melatonin, gut health, there's no one fix. I think the key to optimal health is to look at all these different areas and really 100% agree on caffeine. I wouldn't be having any caffeine after 12pm, especially slow metabolizer like myself. Don't get me wrong, I love coffee, but if I'm going to have coffee, I'll have that in the morning because I know it's going to take me hours and hours to process this caffeine. And the last thing I want is to have a high level of caffeine in my blood when I'm trying to prepare myself for sleep. And to produce melatonin, as you're talking about, I want to underscore a point that you raised around, I guess, serotonin production and melatonin. So serotonin and melatonin are both producing from tryptophan. So tryptophan will get pretty much from a diet. And one product that is really rich in tryptophan is kefir. So kefir, fermented milk product, very high in tryptophan, that's going to assist in the production of serotonin, which is happening primarily in the gut. 80, 90% is produced in the gut with a combination of the gut cells themselves and having the right type of gut bacteria. And then you mentioned having an elevated level of serotonin. The feeling of being you're feeling good, it helps you to feel good. And then a missing link that you've brilliantly highlighted is then serotonin being converted into melatonin, which is your sleep hormone. So that's a great missing link to kind of sum everything up together.

Yeah, absolutely.

And what I really like, what you're talking about, Andy, is that this artificial society or construct, we've moved away from the campfire back in the older days. Now we've moved towards artificial environments, artificial light. So I'm not suggesting we go back to campfire, but it's the great work that people like yourself are doing to educate people on how important this light exposure actually is and trying to move not only our diets back to ancestral means, but also implementing some strategies through the day to actually mimic how our ancestors used to live. Because this is how our body is actually primed.

Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. Yeah, it's spot on. And you know you get the odd extreme person out there that wants to go and live in a cabin in the middle of the woods. And, you know, if they want to do that, then brillian, they're probably going to be optimal and whatever. But we're realists here and we understand that. And I absolutely love the technological revolution. I love the fact that I've got an iPhone, I love the fact that we're talking to each other over the Internet, et cetera. And we wouldn't have got where we are as mankind today without the use of artificial lighting. But what we've got to do is we've got to make sure we biohack our environments and make sure some changes to our lifestyle just to manage and adapt in the environment that we're in now. For instance, there's a few hacks that you can do to really improve your environment and actually improve your circadian rhythms. And the very first one is what you do cribbing, which is as soon as that sun rises, get out of bed and get outside as little on as possible. Because a lot of melanopsin, which is your photoreceptor, which is sensitive to blue light, is actually found in your skin as well. So expose as much as you can to the light. I know people are on schedules. Five, ten minutes is fine. The longer the better, obviously. And that will start to entrain your clock. What you can also do during the day is a lot of us will work in an office or use a computer. So you want to download something called Flux or Iris for your computer. Now what that does is that actually takes out a lot of the blue light from your monitors. Not all of it. You don't want all of it out. And that will actually help with reducing down some of the damaging blue light. Because during the day, overexposure to artificial blue light is going to cause things like digital eye strain, macular degeneration, dry itchy eyes, headaches. Now, I wear these glasses, this is one that my company makes, that actually uses a special blue light lens, which filters out the most harmful wavelengths of blue light that are coming from computers, your smartphone, because at the end of the day as well, you can have these applications on your computer for during the day, like that, or from appliances. So you still need to be wearing your blue light filtering glasses as the day goes on. You want to be getting outside as much as possible now, because they've got it right, they get to go outside and have a smoke every half an hour or however addicted they are. So, you know, utilize that with your employer as well. Like, why do they get to go out? I want to go out for just, just two minutes for the sun. And if you can do that four or five times a day, just the one to two minutes just to get that natural light for your eyes, it's going to be sending that message to the brain on what time of day it actually is and how and what amount of hormone to release. So that's really important too. You know, you can get as much morning sun as you want and sit in an office all day. When it comes to after dark, if you can see the sunset, brilliant. Because the colors of light in a sunset are always going to be reds and oranges, deep sort of high wavelength colors. And it's those types of colors that actually make you feel relaxed and calm and de stress as we spoke about earlier about heteroplasmic and redox potential. And that really gets you ready. It tells the body that, ah, the sun is going down. It's time to now start creating melatonin and start unwinding and relaxing.

Take a step back. You mentioned this word. I actually never heard about that of this concept before.

So hexa heteroplasmic rates. Yeah. So in a nutshell, very basic terms is it's the distance. So it's all about electron chain transport. So how electrons are transferred throughout a cell and the heteroplasmic rates are, if it's greatly reduced, you're going to have huge amounts of gaps between how the electrons are transported, which actually makes the cell less efficient. Whereas you want to shorten them so they're closer together. Which actually means that when electrons are transported throughout the cell, it's much more efficient process. So you're actually creating more efficiency in the cells, which makes you obviously, obviously create more energy, burn more energy, lose more weight, feel better, wellness, all those kind of good things. So that's the very basic sort of terminology of what it is, heteroplasmic rates.

You're starting to sound like Jack Cruz is like.

Yeah, yeah, I know, been.

In those circles too long and he's so smart. So how do we utilize this question for the layperson that has no idea what it actually means? In very simple terms, how do we optimize this process that's happening in the body? So what's the, I guess the downflow effects of optimizing it and how do we actually optimize it?

Yeah. So if you have a really suboptimal heteroplasmic rate, you are not going to utilize energy that you're taking in either from light or from food efficiently. So you will start to lose a lot of that energy that was specifically going to be used for metabolic processes and store that in other ways, such as subcutaneous fat or within the adipose tissue. Or it could just make you more and more hungry because you need more fuel to run the processes that you want to run. So you're just going to eat more and more and more. So it's more of a sort of really, sort of way out there, sort of theory of, I guess, why we, why we fatten sometimes. Because, you know, if you're running a really inefficient, really inefficient system, you're going to be losing a lot of that energy into places that you don't want to use it. I guess if you look at, if you look at it from an eating standpoint, if you were to, say, have a car and it wasn't very efficient, it was a very old car, it's probably an old Hummer that gets like nine miles to the gallon and you're filling a load of petrol in it and you're only getting a certain amount of distance out of it. If you improve your heteroplasmic rates within the human cells, you're going to be making that car more efficient. So instead of the Hummer getting nine miles to the gallon, you're going to be getting 25 miles to the gallon for the same amount of food. So. So it's how that energy is utilized. So you want to be using that energy to increase endurance and performance. Whereas if your heteroplasmic rates are malfunctioning, a lot of that energy is going to be either stored in bad ways, it's going to not be used for processes that we're designed to actually use them for. And it also works really well in growth and repair as well. So when the cells are looking to repair and grow, the better the heteroplasmic rate, the more efficient and more quickly you can actually repair those cel. And, you know, if you've got really negative and bad heteroplasmy rates where, you know, it's taking a long, long time to repair a cell, you know, stuff can get missed. Autophagy, apoptosis may not be as efficient within those types of cells. So you could be left with mutant or, you know, sort of dead cells within the body, which really isn't good for, you know, sort of health and wellness and, you know, causes a lot of sickness.

So the precursor for cancerous cells that you're talking about.

Exactly that. Yeah.

Cells clearing out. Yep. Sorry. Sorry for interrupting. Keep going.

That's it. Yeah, that was, that's basically what I was going to say. So, you know, you want to be improving those greatly and you can, you can do that by, you know, correcting circadian rhythms, but also by drinking, you know, really good, high quality water as well. That really helps. You know, you're clogging up a lot of your drinking water that's containing fluoride and chlorine and things like that that's damaging heteroplasmic rates. You've got a very. Again, we're going into something completely different here. But when it comes to ATP, you have something called the ATPase, which is a very small spinning head within cell that runs off hydrogen and oxygen in the form of water. So your H2. But when you actually start drinking water from say the tap or a water source that is very high deuterium content, you're going to get an extra hydrogen atom actually found within that water source, which is actually going to cause the ATPase to spin less efficiently, which will then negative affects your heteroplasmic rates, which will then not produce as much energy as the know you would want in an efficient system. So a lot of energy is lost from the system, which is really explains why, you know, calories in, calories out is always been out there in terms of like it doesn't work in such a complex human system. And this is just another way, I guess, of saying, you know, this is another part to it that actually if it's not correct and not functioning properly, your heteroplasmic rates, then you're going to lose energy to the system very easily.

And how do you measure this heteroplasmic rate?

I probably have to get back to you. I don't know the scientific way of actually doing it, but I guess from an N equals one perspective you will just feel like, you know, once you've taken steps to actually correct that, you know, after say several weeks, you will actually feel like you have so much energy during the day, it'll be the same sort of side effects, like positive side effects that you would have from correcting your circadian rhythm. So both come hand in hand. If you're doing the things that we're talking about, like getting your morning sun, blocking blue light, not exposing yourself to not wearing sunglasses, that type of thing which we can talk about, you're going to improve heteroplasmic rates. Make sure you're drinking really good quality water source. I drink an Icelandic glacial water. If people have specific questions on deuterium or heteroplasmic rates, I'll be more than happy to answer those offline. For people, it's quite a complex and new topic as well. But ultimately, if you correct your circadian rhythm, you're going to improve heteroplasmy rates and you're going to feel like you've got a whole lot more energy and you're just going to wake up feeling great as well. So that's probably it in layman terms.

So what we'll do is we'll perhaps link in the show notes if people want to kind of go down that rabbit hole. So I just want to underscore one thing, Andy. So you mentioned water. So I think a lot of our community understands how important water is. To make sure we're taking the chloride out, we're trying to take out the fluoride as well. So you're not damaging the gut microbiome by using essentially antimicrobial agents. Now, one thing that I'm getting more and more interested in is restructured water. So what's your thoughts on? So you mentioned about this extra hydrogen that almost sounds like a heavy water. Is that what you talk about? So if we go down one step further, do you think there's any benefits to actually restructuring water?

Yeah, I think there is. And I think that to talk about it very briefly from a light perspective, one of the most powerful things you can do with your water, once you've chosen your water source, is actually expose it to infrared light. And that works in a way that it would actually prime the water for what's called the cells, which is that sort of zone where water is going to be drawn in from other cells and then utilized to help power cells. And when you actually start exposing your light to infrared light, which makes complete and utter sense when you actually think ancestrally that we would have drunk from streams that would have been exposed to infrared light from the sun. What you're finding today is your water source is taken and then it's just stored in pipes. It's not seeing any light. It's been pumped full of chemicals to actually treat it, apparently for microbes and things like that. But when you actually correct your gut microbiome and you can actually start drinking food from natural sort of glacial ice water sources or from streams and rivers, you can actually all the negative bacteria is going to be killed by the infrared light anyway. A lot of people will obviously go back and boil that water, which is probably the safest thing to do. But one of the biggest movements out there at the moment is findaspring.com where a lot of people are actually going on, finding springs near them with potable drinking water and getting that sort of really healthy water that hasn't been touched by chemicals and humankind and being able to get that in that body, which is obviously going to help the exclusion zone. And it's not going to be full of deuterium and full of chlorine and fluoride, your tap water and a lot of bottled water out there that perhaps isn't as well sourced as some of the more premium brands can do. So, yeah, water is a big thing. Good quality water, good quality sleep and good quality food are three very important factors in human longevity.

Absolutely. And what we'll do is we'll link to Find a Spring. I absolutely love the work that Daniel Vitalis has done. I think it first came to my radar quite a few years ago and I actually used Find a Spring and I was really fortunate. There's an amazing spring in Melbourne in the the Donald Blaine area, which is just past Warburton, and you can access the most amazing spring water on this planet. We're so lucky. And so what I typically do is I drive up with my family, it takes about a couple hours to get up there and we literally fill up in spring water and light 60 liters of spring water back to our house to use it. And you do feel the difference, Andy? I mean, the water does matter. I think we tend to oversimplify things like water and just take it for granted. But it is very different types of water that impact the body either beneficially or not so beneficial. And one thing that we really find with water where you can see substantial effects is when you're actually making fermented foods now, things like kefir, the water that you use, because they're essentially a culture of many different types of bacteria which is almost mimicking what's happening in the body. It's like the body is like this symbiotic culture of bacteria as well. So you will find if the water is not right, the cultures die. Again, it's an N equals one type experiment. There's no scientific rigor to what I'm saying, but most. My hypothesis is that the water actually influences whether certain types of bacteria, yeast, can thrive or not. And it's the same thing that I hypothesize is happening in the gut when we're having the wrong types of water.

I mean, the way you got to look at it, okay. Is what do you do to a swimming pool to kill bacteria and make it safe for people to swim? Swimming. You put chlorine in it?

Yes.

What's in our water? Chlorine. So what's that going to do to microbes that are within our gut? It's going to kill them or it's going to create the wrong sort of microbes that you need in that. So at the end of the day, you know, you're drinking water from a tap, you're dropping a nuclear bomb into your gut. It's just really, it's. Yeah, it's not even a hypothesis. It's, it's, it's got to be. It's got to be fact. You know, we know what chlorine does. It's been used in the world wars to kill people in form of mustard gas. And, you know, it's been used in swimming pools to kill basically every inch of bacteria to make it safe for people to swim in. So, yeah, I think it's a very plausible theory.

Absolutely. When you think about it, like in Victoria especially, I think the ppm level is around 5 ppm of chlorine. So it's almost this antibiotic product that is being forced upon a whole population which is substantially damaging the gut microbiome. So absolutely huge. Let's segue onto, I guess your product Blue Box, which I'm really excited about. I'm just about to get my first pair to give it a test run. So super excited. Andy, how about you tell our audience about Blue Box as a product.

And.

Why is it beneficial for people to consider using it?

You've got three different types of. Three different types of blue light glasses. Okay? So you don't want to be wearing the wrong pair of blue light glasses at the wrong time of the day. Now, what differentiates blue blocks from our competitors is that we are completely evidence based. And Crippen and I were talking about this earlier that we want to be able to not have just use anecdotal evidence. We want to use actually what's out there in the literature. And we've got some really good articles that are on our website, actually link to all the studies that are out there on blocking blue light at specific times of the day and how much we have to block to be optimal. So we started Blue Box because we knew that all the blue light blocking glasses out there were just not optimal. They either had a blanket approach where they blocked everything, or they had an approach where they didn't block a enough. And the fact of the matter is like after dark, you have to block at a minimum 100% of blue light. And unfortunately many of the major brands out there don't. They're at like 98, 90, 80%, that kind of thing. And just even a little bit of blue going for you, it's going to impact your sleep. So if we start sort of from the beginning, these that I'm wearing Now, because it's 11:00am Here in Australia, I'm sat by a really well lit window and see all the natural light coming through and I've got flux on my Mac here when I'm talking to you. So my blue light from here is really reduced down. I've got natural light coming in. But the apps aren't, you know, they aren't optimal. So what have in them is they have a special material rather than a tin that we've impregnated into the glasses. You can probably see as I tilt them there, there that the blue purple you can see off them. So that's reflecting off the excess blue. And you can see even with flux on my computer that there's still a lot of blue light coming off it. So what these do is they target the 440 to 460 nanometer range of blue light, which is the real big spike in an LED light, a backlit device also in your house lights as well. And they also filter down parts of the other blue spectrum as well in line with what it needs to be. So what these do during the day is that when you wear them like in the office, they've got a clear appearance on the lens so you're not looking silly and people like drawing attention to yourself. But what they're doing is by filtering the blue light from your screens and from the office is reducing the headache you'll get from doing a lot of work on the computer. It's reducing eye strain and also protecting your eyes from macular degeneration, which is when you go like short sighted and you need to wear prescription glasses. It's actually quite funny. I've had a few customers have actually messaged me. We've given them basically a light prescription in their glasses because we do prescription as well, by the way. We can do any prescription, we do reading glasses in any color. So we gave them a lesser prescription and they come back and ordered three times because each time they're wearing these, their eyes are getting better and they're actually needing less and less, less of a prescription, which is crazy. I mean, I'm not, I haven't seen any science behind this. But you know, anecdotally speaking, that, that was fascinating to see. So everyone that's, that's basically anyone will use a digital device during the day or be in an office. These are essential. These daytime blue light glasses are essential. So what you can do is some of us actually don't work in an environment where we get a lot of natural light or we might work, say in a hospital on a night shift, which is really bad for your circadian rhythms. But we need to take steps to obviously help protect. And a lot of people like myself, I was one of them, a big sufferer of anxiety as well, and depression and stress. And that's caused in part by overexposure to artificial blue light throughout the day. This is why we created these. These are yellow lenses and they're for the daytime as well or for night shift workers. And what these do is they block 100% of blue light from 400 to 450 nanometers. So it leaves everything post 450, which is half the blue spectrum, and then into green, yellow and all that alone. Because you need some blue light during the day, obviously to keep you alert and awake. But these actually Summer glow they're called, they actually have been proven in the literature. This specific tint that we've developed, it's actually in the literature to actually improve people that have seasonal affective disorder, stress, depression and anxiety. So what it does is when you put it on, it makes everything really bright, but it also filters out the blue. So the blues aren't as bright, but they come through as sort of a more sort of greeny type color. Because I guess if you mix blue with yellow you're going to get that sort of green come through. So it makes you, it really helps you. If you're in a really dim lit room, you're on a computer, you're working night shifts and it helps reduce cortisol levels down where perhaps you've got excess cortisol running through you and it's causing stress and anxiety. These are great. If I'm basically sat in this office and it's gray and cloudy outside or I'm feeling a little bit down, or I've got a long amount of computer work to do, I'll stick these on and they're fantastic. But majority of the people would benefit more during the day from these just because they don't draw attention to yourself and they do a job. You can see them blocking the blue there. The Most important ones are after dark. So a lot of people will go out and buy something called UVECs, which are like safety goggles. They block, you know, enough of the blue to sort of have a partial effect. But when you actually start to look at the literature on what you need to block after dark, it's actually all of the blue and half of the green spectrum. So it all goes up to 400. So the blue spectrum of light is from 400 to 495 nanometers. You have to block it all. So these block 100% of that. You also have to block 100% of green light from 496 to 550 nanometers. And that's what these do. Now, you'll see from this hold against the white background that these are like a red lens. So a lot of people wear amber lens. Blue blockers. They're not blocking enough. To be optimal, you need to have red lenses. So we developed a tint called Sleep plus, which blocks 100% all blue and half of the green spectrum, or 100% of it up to 550. Green runs to 570. And these are the most optimal. So what you do is you put these on literally after the sun has set. And because we're not like some brands out there, block everything up to about 600 nanometers. Totally irrelevant, totally pointless to do, because what you're doing is you're taking out all the colors, like your yellows, some of your deeper greens, your oranges, which don't actually impact melatonin. So we want to be real. People want to go and watch their favorite soaps. They want to go home, watch Home and Away After Dark or whatever they watch here. And, you know, you don't be watching it and everything's red. So these actually, you can still see, like, you know, the deeper greens, the blues come through as black. And you can actually do a test with your blue blocking glasses. And I'll send this to you guys, like, remind me afterwards. There's these, There's a strip test and the circle test. So you got the blue, the greens. And then in the middle of the circle, if you're seeing anything but black, your blue, blue light glasses aren't working. Okay. So it's always worth. If people have got blue light glasses now from another brand, they need to test them right away. If they're working, brilliant, well done. Keep them. If they're not, then you need to be upgrading to blue blocks. It's the fact of the matter. If you can see what the test is, which I'll send you, then you've got a big problem. So a lot of people also one big common question is some brands out there have wrap around glass. Okay. And the reason some companies started to produce wraparound glasses was because of peripheral light. People thought that peripheral light sneaking through the sides of your glasses was actually going to disrupt melatonin. And it's actually a really good extract from a study that's actually out there about peripheral light. And the photoreceptors in your eye are called intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells. Okay. Don't need to write it down. Not important. Basically it's the photoreceptor and they're located in the inner retina. So they're not on the surface of your eye, they're in the inner retina. Okay. So any minor light that's basically sides of your blue block of glasses actually isn't enough for your pupillary light reflex to actually photo transduct to any great degree. And then people say, well, what about light bouncing off your. Bouncing off the blue blockers and then back into your eye? And it's just absurd to even think that. It's not even worth answering that that's going to happen. So you've got to actually take, you know what people say about peripheral light with a pinch of salt. You don't need Oakley wraparound glasses. The more major concern for me outside of wearing eyeglasses is actually with the skin. So there's melanopsin is the blue light photosensitive translator that's actually located in your IP and that is actually also found in your skin as well. So you can wear blue blocker glasses, but if you sat with your shirt off with blue light shining on you, then you've got a bit of an issue there as well. So a lot of the time is take out your light bulbs and put in red bulbs. It's such a good hack to do on top of wearing your blue block of glasses. I could go on all day about it, but this is basically in a nutshell, the products we offer, I would say, you know, take the Pepsi Coke test straight away when I send you the circles. And if your blue light glasses aren't blocking in line with those circles, then you know you've got a problem and you need to upgrade. So we want to bring, yeah, bring optimal to the world.

Is that a link that we can put in the show notes that people can go on and look on the Internet and put their glasses on?

Yeah, I can dig that out. Yeah, I can send a link that will come to it.

Yeah, perfect. Well, Andy, it's been such a pleasure to talk to you today. You've blown me away with your level of knowledge. Understanding the scientific evidence based approach that you take to your products is just stellar. I guess the takeaway for me is that augmenting our modern lifestyle with some approaches that we used to in the past is going to be critical to addressing a lot of chronic disease that we're experiencing at the moment. And whilst we can focus on gut health, things like these blue blocking glasses which are going to greatly assist in melatonin production and things like that then have a downfall effect on improving your gut health. So this is a practice that I will definitely be encouraging our audience. So any parting words, James?

I just think that was amazing. I've learned so much. I'm just ready to start implementing this stuff. So thank you.

Andy, if there is one thing you could recommend to our audience to improve their gut health, what would you say would be the number one?

I would say just correct your circadian rhythms, get better sleep and, you know, one bit of advice I would give people that, a bit of free advice is watch the sunrise every morning. Right.

Thank you so much, Andy.

No worries. Thanks guys. Really appreciate it.