How Modern Lighting Can Destroy Your Sleep, Your Eyes & Your Health (& What You Can Do About It).

Hey, everybody, what's up? It's me, Ben Greenfield. Fittingly enough, I am actually sitting in a tiny little hotel room. Well, it's not that tiny. It's big enough for me. My lanky 6 foot 2 frame and I'm wearing my aviator sunglasses. It's night. I'm wearing my sunglasses at night. I'm wearing aviators, fittingly enough, because I'm trying to block all the nasty cancer causing blue light coming from all areas of the hotel and I forgot my blue light blocking glasses. So, yeah, I'm the dude in his undies wearing aviators in his hotel room. Recording this for you in this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

For this reason, we are insensitive. We cannot perceive the differences which are presented to us by modern technology. The near infrared light helps our system on the level of mitochondria, on the level of blood circulation, on the energetic level, on the antioxidant level to compensate for the stress which is caused by the short wavelength.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And as you probably know, light kind of sort of impacts things like your sleep and your exercise and your health. And in today's show, we're going to delve into a specific form of light that you find all over the place, something called light emitting diodes or led. And frankly, most folks are completely unaware of the hidden dangers of LED lights. I mean, we're talking like cataracts and blindness and macular degeneration and mitochondrial dysfunction and disrupted circadian biology, sleep, in some cases, increased risk for cancer. And the weird thing is that LEDs are found all over the place, like traffic lights and traffic signals and aircraft cockpits. We find them in things like night vision goggles, in glow sticks, in many cases, in like, autumn headlamps and advertising signs and camera flashes and lighted wallpaper and a lot of these new forms of lighting that people are using in their homes. It's all over the place. And my guest on today's show knows a lot about it. His name is Dr. Alexander Woonsch, and he's a physician, he's a researcher, he's a lecturer, and he specifically is extremely well versed in light medicine and in photobiology and in the impact of light on the human body, whether that's solar radiat radiation or artificial light or LED light or any of the things that we will be delving into today. So he has a private medical practice in Heidelberg. And you will know in just a moment that he is in Heidelberg because he has a wonderful accent. Wonderful. It's a German accent, right, Dr. Woontsch?

Yes, you are right, Ben.

Okay, good. Well, I'm sure that if we have any trouble, I will jump in because I speak German fluently. No, I'm just kidding. I'll just make sure that I turn up the gain on your sound really loud so everybody can understand everything you say. But anyways, Dr. Woonsch in his medical practice in Heidelberg actually uses therapeutic light in combination with some other treatments for medical purposes. So he uses light for healing and doesn't just believe that all light is bad or that you should just walk around with a giant candle or torch all the time. He presents all over the world on this stuff. He's a consultant for federal authorities, for media, for the general industry when it comes to lighting and some of the health associated topics in lighting that we're gonna dive into today. So Dr. Woonsch, welcome to the show, man.

Hi, I'm glad to be here.

Yeah, I'm glad you're here because I have a ton of questions for you about light. And really the main thing I wanted to delve into today was like LED light, because that's one that I know can be a huge issue when it comes to health. And so my first question for you is what, like, how do you define LED light? Like, what makes a light an LED light?

So in principle we have two different qualities of light in our environment. I make the division between so called thermal light sources where the light comes out of heat, and the non thermal light sources where the light is not a side effect of heat, but it's emitted or produced in a different manner. And all the natural light sources are thermal light sources. And the light sources we invented during the last century, like fluorescent lighting or the LED lights, they just represent a small part of the full spectrum we normally get from the natural light sources. So the LEDs you are confronted with nowadays, again split up into two classes. The colored LEDs on one hand and the fluorescent LEDs, the white light LEDs on the other hand. The principle of light generation in the white light LEDs is that you have the blue light LED or violet light LED inside and fluorescent layer, phosphorus layer, comparable to what you have in fluorescent lighting. And the fluorescent layer transforms parts of the short wavelength light into longer wavelengths like green or yellow or orange. And this combines with the primary light source with the blue light to kind of whitish light wavelengths present in comparison to what we normally have in our sunlight, for example, or also in light emitted by incandescent lamps.

Okay, so let's see if I understand this correctly. So we've got LED lamps as basically a digital form of light that's non thermal. So if you look at like a, like an incandescent light bulb or a halogen light bulb, those would be like analog lights, not digital and heat based thermal light sources, but then for an LED light because they're, they're like a digital form of light that's a non thermal form of light, they tend to operate in a different way. And correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this why like old, old TVs used to flicker like, like the old school TVs, like LED lights or like old monitors or even new monitors, now they flicker because LED lighting in order to be perceived by the eyes has to be constantly switching between like these red and green and blue forms that.

You just highlighted on the discrimination. Analogous versus digital lighting is another issue. I just was talking about the spectral composition, but in a way you also could say it's an analogous composition in natural light sources because all the spectral wavelengths are present. So you have no sharp rise or decay of certain wavelengths like you as you have it. For example, in the, in fluorescent lamps or some LED lamps, The digital properties, they come from the electrical ballasts you need in order to operate the LEDs. An LED is a very swift photon emitter, which means you can switch it on immediately and can switch it off immediately. When you think of the filament in an incandescent lamp, it's kind of lazy. If you switch it on, it will take a short while until it produces the full intensity. And after you switched it off, there will be kind of afterglow in the tungsten filament. So there is a kind of dampening in the incandescent lamp and in the led, you have no delay. So if you are using dirty electricity, as we do, when we use the electricity from the mains grid, we have frequencies hidden in the electricity. 60 hertz in the United States, 50 hertz in Europe. And these frequencies, they will show up in the photon stream of your light source. But there will only be a weak modulation when we talk about incandescent lamps due to the laziness of the tungsten filament. But there will probably very sharp rises and decays in case of a solid state light source like an led. So the digital aspect comes or enters the stage when we talk about dimming, for example, because LEDs are dimmed in a different way compared to the incandescent lamps, for example. So we have two aspects of unnatural behavior in case of LEDs. One is the chopped or uneven or unharmonious spectral distribution. And the other thing is how they are driven electronically and how are they dimmed?

Okay, got it. So basically the LEDs, in order to fully switch on and fully switch off, they're actually doing that over and over and over again when they're, when they're on. And that's, that's the frequency that even if we're like staring at an LED based screen, our eyes might not be able to actually consciously see. Like, we don't notice the screen flicker unless we're like kind of like filming a screen with an iPhone camera or something like that. But our bodies are still able to perceive that flicker. And it's the flicker that tends to be the flicker along with the hertz, Right? I believe you said it's like a 40 to 60 hertz, almost like a form of dirty electricity that these LEDs produce that tend to be the two biggest issues.

Right. And this is when, when you, you were mentioning the TV set. If we think about the cathode ray TVs from 15 years ago or so, they were kind of flicker, they represented kind of flicker machines because this electron ray was kind of moving swiftly over the surface of the TV screen and activating fluorescent dots so they would illuminate or would light up. And this happened in older TV sets with a frequency of 60 hertz. And this made these older TV sets flicker massively. But after a while, people would not be aware of it anymore because our system, our brain adapts to this flicker activity. And when you have to sit in front of an old cathode ray computer display nowadays, you will immediately feel the flicker. You will become aware of it, because in the meantime, sitting in front of the modern displays, your system removed the filters which had been built up before. As long as you had to work on this bad cathode ray displays. And this is the problem that we have a kind of automatic filter adaptation flicker incidents. It will become unconscious. But our brain has to work constantly to remove this flicker from the vision field, from what you become aware of. And this is an additional threat.

Now what about those of us who don't have, you know, the old TVs that you'd find, you know, in homes with the little rabbit antennas on top of them? I mean, obviously people have like smart TVs now and you know, in many cases, like flicker free TVs, like how, what, what kind of things in people's homes right now, like living in this modern era, are the biggest sources of.

LED lighting, the general lighting sources. In the meantime, I think it's, it's unfashionable to use fluorescent lights, fluorescent lamps anymore because they contain toxic substances like mercury as an example. And in the meantime, in Europe, for example, the incandescent lamps are banned. You can purchase them only via ebay, but you cannot get them in a store. So people have to use the LEDs and general lighting purposes. LEDs, the white light LEDs, the replacement LEDs, which can be used instead of incandescent lamps, They, a lot of them will flicker massively. So I think these are the main sources.

What about things that we look at, from phones to Kindles to monitors to televisions, Are any of these using LEDs?

I measured my tablet PC, for example. I measured my smartphone. There are brands which provide a flicker free display and other brands, they have the tendency to flicker as well. And a lot of models talking about TV sets, talking about computer screens, they still flicker, especially when they are dimmed. You reduce the brightness. Some of a lot of these appliances start to flicker.

That's the problem. That's the problem. I think with. Sorry to interrupt, but a lot of these programs people are using, like the Flux app to reduce the blue light on a screen or reducing the brightness on your computer monitor on your television so that you don't get as much blue light produced or even turning down the brightness level on your iPhone, a lot of this actually increases, from what I understand, Flickr, unless it's done in a different way. I interviewed a guy on my podcast a few months ago about how our computer monitors are kind of slowly killing our eyes. And I'll put a link to that, by the way. For those of you who are listening. This is all over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com LightHealth that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Lighthealth and in that podcast, Dr. Woonsch, we talked about, for example, like one piece of software called Iris Tech. And that's what I have on my, you know, I bought one of these flicker free monitors, but then I also have the Iris tech on it to actually reduce the temperature and the brightness without introducing the flicker. But it sounds to me like what you're saying is that some of these, some of these LED based light bulbs as well as some of the monitors, etc. That you can decrease brightness on. What you're doing is decreasing the brightness and you're increasing the flickering. And I want to ask you about, in a little bit about, you know, light bulbs and options that don't do that. But why is the flickering such an issue?

I kind of mentioned it already. Your brain has to filter it out and this takes some processor activity. Talking in computer language. If you have in the background processes which have nothing to do with your outer environment, then it takes calculation power from your system. And filtering out the flicker from a light source is hard work for the brain. To keep the picture stable is hard work for the brain. And it's a stressor. It's an unnecessary, unnatural stressor which is introduced by these modern devices.

Has that ever been proven by science that flicker is actually damaging from a biological standpoint?

There is a scientific discussion since more than 60 years about that. And the industry on one hand would like to have no regulation of Flickr and even tries to eliminate any standardization with regards to Flickr. On the other hand, we have medical reports, there is a good number of papers around which have been published since many years. And for example, for the working committee of the International Society for Lighting there is a recommendation to use frequencies above 1600 Hertz or better, 2 kilohertz or 2000 Hertz in order to avoid all the negative effects on vision. For example, we know from the thick building syndrome that some of the symptoms, headache, eye strain, even muscular strain in the neck and shoulder area can result from flicker. Because when you, your system automatically tries to eliminate this from your awareness. And there are different strategies to do that depending on the frequency which has to be eliminated. For example, if you're able to move your eyeball very fast and swiftly, then you can see so called phantom array effect. If you are looking at a flickering light source from small dimension, maybe you have seen this from the. On the backlighting of at night some of the backlight LEDs and they are pulsed LEDs and if you are moving your eyeball very swiftly, you will see some copies of one and the same light source in the moment you are moving your eyeball and you see that where, for example, in cars. The backlights of cars.

Oh yeah. Like the brake lights of cars or. And from what I understand, like the headlights of cars and also traffic lights, you tend to see a lot of this. Right?

You can see it in headlights, LED headlights in the meantime as well.

And I think that's why, that's why blue light blocking glasses are actually discouraged for driving because you actually produce more of your natural melatonin. You get less of that kind of like eye stimulus, and you get sleepy and fatigued if you're driving. I don't know if you've ever tried this, Dr. Woonch. Like driving with blue light blocking glasses on, they seem to actually reduce a lot of that glare and almost like that headache in the back of your eyes you can get when driving around LA after the sun has set, when there's just thousands and thousands of these LED lights coming at you from all directions.

Yeah, here you're talking about the spectrum again. And this, this is another important issue with regard to automotive lighting at the moment. But the, the flicker, the phantom array effect, is kind of different. If you look swiftly from your car up and down, then you sometimes can see it. And this multiplication of the object of the light source is called phantom array effect. And in order to avoid this, people tend to stop moving their eyeballs and they start moving their head instead, because the head cannot be moved as quickly or as swiftly as the eyeballs can be moved. And if you move slower, this phantom array effect disappears, kind of disappears. So this is one of the reasons why people can suffer from neck and shoulder strain in their muscular system, because due to the flickering light, they change their habits with regard to vision.

Right. So this would be kind of like the effect of, like, if you go to a rave, not that everybody listening in is like taking copious amounts of ecstasy and hanging out in Las Vegas nightclubs, but let's just say you were at a rave and there were like glow sticks all over the place. When the glow sticks are held all by themselves, it's like a solid color. But once you start to wave the glow sticks all over the place, they produce like this, almost like a blur when you wave them about in motion. And by the way, glow sticks are LED based, from what I understand. And so what you were saying is as, as our heads have to work so hard and our eyes have to work so hard to detect the flicker at those rates, something kind of similar is happening when we're driving in our cars or we're looking at traffic lights or we're seeing the flicker on a screen or something like that. It's kind of like a subconscious, a subconscious overworking of a lot of the head and the neck muscles. Because the eyes simply can't keep up with that rapid rate of flickering.

One strategy can, can be to set some filters up to the frequency of 250Hz, for example. Our brain is able to filter out the flicker from your visual awareness, which does not mean that the flicker is not there anymore. But our brain behaves somewhat like the camera of your smartphone. The camera of your smartphone has an algorithm which detects the frequency of flickering light and then changes to a different shutter frequency for the camera so that you that it eliminates the stripes moving through the picture. Normally, if you're in some films, you can see if you are filming a display. If you're filming a TV set, you see some stripes moving through the picture. And you can reproduce this. When you have a definitely flickering light source and you get close with your, with the camera of your smartphone, you will see an effect which shows you that the light source is flickering. But when you remove the camera, if you increase the distance to the light source so that you have other objects in the scene as well, the camera algorithm detects the frequency of the flicker and changes the shutter frequency in order to avoid these optical interferences. So the camera always tries to give you a steady picture. And our brain does the same. Our brain makes an automatic white balance procedure calibration. Our brain, our eye does exactly the same. The camera tries to remove an unsteady picture. Our brain does exactly the same. And so we cannot rely on our brain and on our eyes with regards to flicker or spectral distribution differences between the artificial light sources and the natural light sources. Because during the course of evolution, our organism always tried to save calculation power to be maximally efficient. So during the course of evolution, it was absolutely sufficient for our system for the human body to extrapolate with regard to the color from the three different types of cones. One cone for the red on the long wavelength part of the spectrum, One cone type on the short wavelength part of the spectrum for the blue and the violet, and one type of cone for the medium wavelength.

Those are the three type of cones that we have in our eyes.

And these are the, the cones we have for the trichromatic vision. And this was enough. We didn't need any more cones because our eye was able to to reproduce or to give us the impression of the full rainbow spectrum. But we didn't have these kind of light sources in the past. We only had continuous light sources. So our system could rely on the fact that if you had a certain intensity in the green, this would automatically be linked to a certain intensity between green and red, for example. So there was a natural logic which was hidden in the natural light sources. And our system adapted to this natural logic. And therefore we are, for this reason we are insensitive. We cannot perceive the differences which are presented to us by modern technology.

Now go ahead and finish up what you were saying.

And so we have the problem that the industrial products are cheating our systems in a way that they tell our system one thing, but they cannot fulfill what they are promising. On the other hand, because all these natural light sources, the non thermal light sources, rely on our inability to make a discrimination between the different qualities of.

Light that makes sense. There's this idea too, from what I understand behind specifically the blue light in the LEDs, and what I wanted to ask you about when it comes to the blue light, because we've talked a lot about the flicker. And this flicker effect is how the blue light is, from what I understand, more concentrated when it comes to LEDs. Can you explain why it is that blue light would be something that is a bigger issue when it comes to LED sources. And then if you can, I'd also be curious if you could explain why it is that that would actually cause damage. From what I understand, it has something to do with reactive oxygen species or damage to the retina. But can you help us to understand it? Why does the LEDs produce more blue light and what the blue light's actually doing?

So the first question, why do LEDs produce more blue light? Because the primary light source in white light, LEDs, is a blue LED. And maybe you know that there are different appearances in white. We have warm white, we have neutral white, we have cold white light. And the difference comes from different amounts of short wavelengths in the spectrum. And when we look at natural light sources, then we have two basic types of natural light source. One is the sunlight and the other is fire. And fire is shifted. The spectral balance of fire is shifted to the red. The spectral balance of sunlight is more or less in the middle of the spectrum around green. But when we look at the color of the sky, then the spectrum is definitely shifted to the blue part, the short wavelength part of the spectrum. And our organism has learned throughout the course of evolution that there are different, basically different physiological effects to expect from daylight and nighttime, daytime and nighttime illumination. For example, when I would ask you which kind of natural light quality this is a higher risk in terms of cardiovascular activity, in terms of metabolic activity, in your organism and all the vital functions of your organism, would it be the sunlight or would it be the fire?

I would imagine when it comes to the potential for deleterious effects, long term it would be the sunlight. If excessively. If you're excessively exposed.

Yeah, not only long term, just imagine you were talking about Las Vegas, didn't you?

Yeah.

And some rave parties there. If you would have to leave the hotel there, maybe even naked during noontime.

To just walk down the streets of Las Vegas naked at noontime, that you actually would not get any strange glances at all.

This is not what I would recommend. But if you're driving down to the Hoover Dam and step aside from the road, then you would experience that very quickly. Deleterious situation would come up if you would have no protection from sunlight.

Right. So you're not saying sunlight is bad. What you're saying is excessive exposure to sunlight. Let's say if we were to stay out in Las Vegas from like, you know, on the heat of the sun from 10am until 4pm just staring at the sun and laying out in the sun, we'd get exposed to the same amount of reactive oxygen species that we'd get from say, the concentrated amounts of blue light in something like LED lights. And the issue is that LED lights, in many cases we're getting exposed to those all over the place, even out after sunset.

I'm saying that blue light is the main signal for our vision and non vision system to find out if it's day or night.

Right.

Because under natural conditions, blue light during the day, and the more blue light is there, the more sunlight comes along. So blue light is an indicator for the amount of sunlight under natural conditions. And the light we had in our caves or we had at night did never contain any blue, significant amounts of blue. We had fire for hundreds of thousands of years during the nighttime. And the problem is that we are able to produce artificial light with significant amounts of blue, which signal our system that it's middle of the day, but not nighttime situation.

Right.

So the blue light plays an outstanding role in terms of circadian signaling.

Yeah, it's what we would call you call it, I guess this, this would be a word you'd use over in Germany. Right, as a zeitgeist. Right. It's like exercise and food. What'd you call it?

Zeitgeber?

Yeah, Zeitgeber. Exercise and food and movement and then light. Like I just, at 2:00am last night, I just in from Los Angeles and this morning prior to our podcast interview, because it's in the morning. I was actually using pretty intense blue light, and in one case, an LED headset, both in my ears using something called a human charger, and in my eyes using something called a retimer. And those are certainly not anything I'd go near in the evening. Unless, of course, I wanted to stay up really late and was trying to, you know, hack my ability to be able to, like, stay out late at a function or a party or a social event. But ultimately, yeah, the blue light. You're not saying all blue light is bad. What you're saying is that blue light is something that is used as a cue for daytime or nighttime, and that LED can completely disrupt that function due to the very concentrated amounts of blue light it's capable of producing.

But there's another issue with the LEDs. If you have high amounts of blue light from sunlight or the sky in nature, then you also have other parts in the spectrum. The invisible part in the near infrared, which is the spectral part, longer wavelength than red. Near infrared is always present in daylight in sunlight. It makes up to 43% of the total amount of radiation energy in sunlight. And you were talking about the reactive oxygen species, the oxidative effects of the short wavelengths already. And in natural light, we have compensating part which is always present, and this is the red and the near infrared. So the blue light under the sun is never a solitary event. It's always combined with the radiation part, which is restoring and regenerative. And if you are using high intensities of blue light from an led, the problem is not that it would have the same intensity compared to sunlight, but there is no compensation radiation contained in the blue light from an LED, because.

The LEDs don't produce any light from the. From the near infrared. Yeah, that thermal spectrum that you were talking about early on in the podcast. So near infrared is totally missing in a non thermal artificial light source like the led. And that's one of the biggest issues with the infrared not being there. From a biological standpoint, is it that infrared is somehow protecting us from some of the effects of blue light? Is there some kind of mitochondrial effect of the exposure to infrared? Or what is it about the infrared being present that makes the blue light when the infrared is around less of an issue?

It acts as a primer. When. When you look at the natural cause of spectral variation, daylight, the first radiation which is present during the sunrise is red and near infrared. And this is able to help mitochondria to build up antioxidant Substances which are needed when the shorter wavelengths add to the spectrum when the sun gets up. So the near infrared light helps our system on the level of mitochondria, on the level of blood circulation, on the energetic level, on the antioxidant level, to compensate for the stress which is caused by the short wavelength that makes so much.

It's so crazy how nature works like that. So basically, if the sun were only emitting blue light, as an LED would, that blue light wave spectrum would cause the production of reactive oxygen species and some amount of damage to both the eyes, as well as, if I understand correctly, other tissues in the body, including the mitochondria. But when you pair that with near infrared, which the sun also makes, then what you get is the ability to be able to buffer those reactive oxygen species and even produce additional. From what I understand, when it comes to infrared, you actually target that molecule in the mitochondria, your cytochrome C oxidase molecule involved with energy production and ATP production. And so you're not only protecting yourself when you include near infrared, but you're also activating more energy production and mitochondria health when you have infrared accompanying those lights from the blue light wave spectrum.

Right, exactly.

Okay, gotcha. So if somebody is unable to get out in the sunlight, for example, right now it is dark gray outside for me. But I did use like an LED headset this morning to jumpstart my circadian rhythm. And I also used bright light, like a blue greenish light therapy on the eyes, this set of eyewear called the retimer. What you're saying is if I were to do something like that and I didn't have access to sunlight, I could use something like a near infrared lamp or an infrared sauna or something like that to at least ensure that I'm mitigating any damage that might be caused by just doing the blue light all by itself.

I would recommend to look into an incandescent lamp while you are wearing this headset, because it's important that the infrared radiation comes from the same direction or nearly the same. At least nearly the same direction.

Okay, you know what? I have one of those. It's in my office. I use it when I work in the evenings because in my office I have a bunch of light bulbs called awake and alert bulbs. They're made by this company called Lighting Science. Have you heard of this company?

No.

Okay, so Lighting Science makes bulbs that either have very concentrated amounts of light from either the. The blue light spectrum, or in the case of like their. Their sleepy Time bulbs for like a baby's bedroom or for like your bedroom, nighttime bulbs that eliminate more of the light from, from the blue light wave spectrum. But in my office, I actually have these, these lighting science light bulbs for being awake and alert but at night. Exactly what you've just described is what I used. I have a. It's a near infrared incandescent bulb. It's called a ruby lux. I just have it in a little cheapo desk lamp hanging off my desk. So if I go into my office at night to write, if the muse strikes at night and you can buy it on Amazon, I want to say it's a few bucks on Amazon, I just plug it into a light bulb. But that's what I use. What you're saying is in the morning, if I am doing something like, let's say, like blue light wave therapy, I should ensure that at the same time kind of coming at me from the same direction. Let's say if I'm working on my computer, I should have something like this ruby lux or some other form of near infrared incandescent light shining on me at the same time.

Yeah, if you want to act as, as you would if you were in nature. In nature, we always have the near infrared and we sometimes have blue in addition. And so it's a good idea, if you have blue, you always should add near infrared. And if you have no blue, you're still advised in a positive way to have the near infrared, because under natural conditions, the near infrared is always there.

Okay.

And it helps in our retina, for example, to keep up the metabolism not only via the mitochondria, but also via the water molecules which make, which make a lot of substance in our organism and especially in the retina. It's an issue that the transport between the photoreceptors and the capillary vessels has to bridge a long distance. And if you activate the water molecules in this space, in this area, you increase the diffusion processes, you increase the metabolical exchange of substances, which is crucial for optimal function in this area of your, of your body.

Now, are there healthy forms of LED light bulbs like it? Like if you did have LED in your house and you were going to go out and buy LEDs, is there some kind of, like, healthier LED version? Like there are things, other things or standards or temperatures or anything like that we should look for in an LED bulb if we want it to be a healthy LED bulb?

Yeah. 2 answers to that question. Of course there are healthy forms of LED. For example, amber broadband, amber LEDs for lighting the space during nighttime. There are LEDs in use for low level light therapy or for so called photobiomodulation. This is more in the medical part.

Yeah. I actually have a photobiomodulation headset that I wear. It's called the Neuro. It's made by a company called Vielight and I actually wear it on my head at night because it's been shown to do things like increase nitric oxide and alpha brainwave production and even be used for example for blood flow and activation of that thing we talked about earlier, the cytochrome C oxidase in mitochondria. So I certainly use that. But I don't have them hanging around in my house as like a light bulb. It's just something I wear on my head at night. But as far as like light bulbs. Oh, go ahead.

If you want to talk about general lighting appliances.

Yeah.

Then indeed there are different qualities around. We have so called filament LEDs in the meantime which resemble the outer appearance of a classical incandescent lamp. Some of them flicker awfully, others do not flicker at all. So it's important to make a choice in favor of the non flickering types. And you can look at the color rendering index or cri which gives you a coarse idea about the quality of the light source in the long wavelength part of the spectrum. I only would recommend to use warm tone LEDs with 2700 Kelvin color temperature or less. And I would recommend to go for I values of 95 or even higher. For example, the company which is, it's an Asian company, I think in China it's called Civilite C I V I Light, City light. They provide LED retrofit types with the color rendering index above 97.

And those are called. Did you say C I V I.

Light or C R I CB Light, the company's name.

Okay, cool. I see it looks like they've got lights on Amazon. So they make these light bulbs that are. I see. Yeah. The 2700K is listed for example as the temperature on that bulb. So that would be an example. Oh, that's like $2.99. So that would be an example of an acceptable bulb.

Look at the CRI value first because they also offer 80 cri, 80 models. But you should go for the highest CRI you can get.

Okay. So CRI stands for color rendering index and most light bulbs will have that listed somewhere. Or you could contact the company and find out what we're looking for. For is a CRI of. You said somewhere around 90, 97, 95 or above. 95 or above. So that'll get us as close as possible to natural light with an LED light bulb. So we want a color temperature of somewhere in the range of like 2700ish and then a CRI of around 95 or higher. Yeah, okay, gotcha. And you like those CV lights, I think those bulbs that I mentioned, by the way, because they call them. I'd love for you to take a look at them when you get a chance and let me know what you think. But they're called biological LED lights. Like that's what's all over in my house are these biological lights. And they're made by this company, Lighting Science, not the CV lights. But they, from what I understand, fall into the spectrum you've just described and also do not produce the flicker. Now granted they're expensive. You know, it's like 20 to 25 bucks for each of these light bulbs. So I've got them in the main, you know, I have them like in the gym and the office for the awake and alert ones and then for the nighttime ones I've got them primarily in the bedroom and the master bathroom and my kids room for example. But I think they fall, they fall into that range. They're not dimmable like these CV lights that you talked about. But those are the two main things to look at, huh? The CRI and the temperature.

Yeah, this is what you can look at if you have no chance to measure the spectrum and to measure the spectral distribution in the long wavelength part. Okay, but the higher the CRI means, the better the color rendering, also in the red. And this gives you an idea. It's just an estimation, it's not guarantee, but it gives you an idea that you have higher amounts in the restorative range of the spectrum.

And do you think that people should be using LED light bulbs rather than other forms of light bulbs?

So in my house I have, I can count the LEDs with one hand. I'm using for general lighting purposes. I try to use, and I do use the incandescent lamps for task lighting, for example, when I read. When I need artificial light, I use incandescent lamp light. And I try to avoid the LEDs because none of them, even with the highest color rendering index, offer near infrared radiation at the moment. So it's one thing to reduce the part, the aggressive part, which is the fact or which is the case for the signal light. For example, there is another company which I could recommend, this is Sora. How do you Say that as O R A, A.

Okay.

But for Sora, it's important to to operate the low voltage Mr.16 replacement lamps on a DC transformer. Otherwise those I measured would flicker massively.

Okay. Which would be an issue. Those so raw. Those are led, correct?

Led. And it's a special technology. They use gallium nitrate nitride on gallium nitride substrate for the production of not blue but violet light. And this using violet instead of blue light leads to kind of broader spectrum and also a very good color rendering index. And they also provide some significant amounts of radiation above 630Nm which is kind of orange red. And so they reach into the deeper red and have. They are using radiation which is less aggressive to the retina.

How do you operate them on DC rather than on ac? Is there like a switch on the actual light bulb or do you need to talk to your electrician in your house?

You have to use a transformer for the 12 volt halogen lamps and for 12 volt replacement. LED halogen replacement types equipped with LEDs. And the low voltage technology in lighting operates on 12 volts. And there are two types of transformers, AC transformers and DC transformers. The AC transformer has an input of 120 volts 60 hertz mains voltage and it has an output of 12 volt 60 hertz. So there is alternating current on the secondary side of the transformer. And the DC transformer transforms the AC120 volt 60 hertz into 12 volt, but no alternation. It's a plus and minus which does not change. Okay, so you have zero hertz in this case and the zero hertz zero flicker.

And you would install these low voltage lighting transformers. Let's say you were gonna, you wanted to switch, you said it's best to go with D.C. and I assume that's especially with these incandescent light bulbs because they produce a lot of, from what I understand, like dirty electricity and they use up a high amount of energy. When you switch them to dc, you don't get a lot of that. But in terms of the DC transformers, would you put the DC transformer in each individual lighting outlet in your home or do you have some other method that you're using with these DC transformers or do you, do you literally have to just like go to every single outlet in your home and switch it to a DC transformer?

It depends on the type of installation. You might know these ropes where you attach the light sources. And these systems can be modified easily because they are delivered with an AC transformer and you just can replace the AC transformer by a DC transformer and you made a significant change from bad to the best.

Okay, cool. Yeah, I have recessed cans for a lot of the lights in my home. So some of those I might not be able to do the transformers, although I'm using some of the forms of LED light bulbs that you talked about earlier. You know, aside from this little like incandescent bulb that I have in my office. So I might not do a huge modification over and above the lighting science bulbs that I have. But in someone who wasn't going to use, for example, the Civilites or the Sora light bulbs, which are the LED light bulbs that you discuss if they're going to go for incandescent, instead you're just recommending that if they go for incandescent, they ensure that they are operating those incandescent lights on a DC current so that you're not getting all the dirty electricity you would produce if you were operating an incandescent light on an AC current.

Right.

Okay.

But it's, the electricity is not an issue of, of incandescent light. It's, it's an issue of all artificial light sources, including the led.

Okay, so, but incandescent produce, it produces a larger amount, don't they? I was on the, I was under the impression the incandescents were just like energy hogs.

They, they produce a lot of dirty electricity if you're using low voltage AC driven lamps. But an LED can produce even more dirty electricity because it transforms the sinus wave AC into a digital ac, which has a lot of overtones, a lot of higher frequencies. It's like a sender of electromagnetic waves besides the business part of the spectrum. So it's difficult to issue a general rule on that. You have to measure these things. And all electrically driven light sources which use AC current are prone to also produce invisible radiation which can be declared as dirty electricity. And it's not particular problem of incandescent, it's even more a problem of all those lamps which need electrical ballasts or switch switching transformers to operate them.

Okay, got it. Well, in the show notes what I'm going to do is I'll link in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com light health some of these solutions that we've been talking about, but ultimately, long story short, is that what you're looking for is either an incandescent light or one of these approved LED lights that you talked about that could be operating on dc. So you're going to use an AC to DC transformer.

Yeah. And you can get this. Amazon, for example. Mean. Well, transformers are very good. They have a high quality.

What'd you call them? Meanwell.

Meanwell is the company.

Okay.

And you always should try to use transformers which are connected with three contacts, so they should be earth linked or grounded. For example, my Apple laptop comes with the transformer with the small plug which is good for traveling, but it only has two poles. And this will result in a high amount of electromagnetic activity in my laptop as long as it's connected to the transformer. As soon as I change this two pole plug into the three pole cable which is also contained in the package, the electromagnetic activity decreases massively because the transformer then is earth linked or grounded. And this will reduce the dirty electricity significantly.

You can also get laptop grounding cables. I know there's one company called Low Blue Lights that does like a grounding cable you can, can use if your laptop has two prongs instead of three. You know my laptop has three prongs, so I'm grounded with my MacBook. But if you have one of the two prong cables for your laptop, you can use it. It's like a USB based grounding cable. And I know that can help out a little bit, but it sounds like you're just using, you're using a transformer. Huh?

You are using the transformer as well, don't you?

I'm. If you have a laptop, I'm not using the charge. Yeah, my laptop charging cable for me it's got three prongs on it. So I don't. I'm not using a transformer. I do have a dirty electricity filter.

The charging cable. I'm talking about the charging cable transformer.

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about is the charging cable. Like, like your Apple has two prongs, mine has three, so.

No, each apple comes with a traveling plug with two prongs and the cable.

You're right. The traveling plug does have two prongs, I guess. You know what? I don't use the traveling plug ever. It's.

Yeah, it's a good idea not to use, not to use it because if you use the three prong version, then you have. With the same electrical circuitry or electronic circuitry, you have very good result or you have a very bad result depending on the number of prongs with the same device.

Yeah, I have it plugged in. Either way, I have everything in my office plugged into these greenwave dirty electricity filters. Like I've got those all over my house and in the outlets just to cut down a little bit on the electrical pollution as well. So I've got one other question that I wanted to ask you and that would be like, when it comes to screens, what kind of computer screen do you use? Because I did a lot of research on computer screens and wound up using for example, that Iris tech software that I talked about which reduces the brightness and the temperature without increasing the flicker of the screen. And then I got, let's see, the make of my monitor is, it's a Flex Scan, a Flex Scan made by a company called Izo E I Z O and it's like a flicker free monitor, relatively flicker free monitor. But I'm curious if you have computer monitor monitor suggestions for people when it comes to like what you would use.

Personally, I use Apple products because I measure the flicker before I buy a device. And it was from the very beginning when Apple started to use LED displays, they had versions which did not flicker in the low frequency part of the, of the audio spectrum. So they, they had a kind of flicker above 10,000 hertz or 15,000 hertz. But this is not a problem.

So if you have, if you have an Apple computer and it's like a newer Apple computer, it's not going to flicker.

Yes, this will not flicker even if you reduce the intensity.

That's good to know.

It will flicker in a very, very high frequency. But this is not a problem for the visual system.

You don't use an external monitor at all. Because when I talk about using an ISO, that's what I mean. Like in my office I have an external monitor.

I have a 24 inch cinema display which does not flicker as well.

Who makes that cinema display that you got? Like did you get it specifically because it doesn't flicker?

I wouldn't have bought it if it would have.

Okay. Oh, that's the cinema displays. Those are Apple, right?

Yeah.

Oh, okay, cool. All right. So just because it's made by Apple, you're getting that. What about the Apple TVs, is it similar? Are they low flicker even when you've got the brightness down?

The Apple TVs, I'm not aware of them. It always depends on the problem with the flicker in TV sets, TV screens is that you have, in the meantime you have a variety of settings for sports events or theater or other situations. And it can happen that the display will flicker in the sports event setting and will not flicker or flicker less in some other setting. So this is something I always try to measure. I do not rely on any numbers or properties which are parameters which are provided by the companies I always measure because I found out that this is essential. And even, for example, the TV, TV sets with a repetition rate, frame rate of 1200 hertz or so. This does not guarantee that there is not another level where you have low frequency flicker still present in the display.

Okay, cool. That's good to know. I've been taking copious notes as we've been talking about everything from light bulbs to monitors to some of these other resources that we've discussed during the show, along with my podcast that I did with this guy about the computer monitor software and a lot more. So if you're listening in right now, you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com LightHealth that's BenGreenfeldFitness.com Lighthouse Health if you want to access the show notes. And Dr. Woonsch, do you have a blog or a website or have you written a book or anything like that that would be useful for people to take a look at? Because we didn't even get into how you're using things like infrared for actually healing tissue. You know, we talked a lot about damage and stuff, but I know you've got a lot of other things that you're up to. So what would be the best way for people to access some of your information or your research?

My Vimeo account would be a good way to access information. I have I think 50 or so videos online which can be accessed for free and a number of them are in English. So this would be a starter. And when I have a photon block, but I do not maintain it on a regular basis. But there appear some entries in English as well.

Okay, it's just vimeo.com Alexander Woonch. That's your channel.

Yes.

Okay.

Exactly. And there is Alexander Wunsch, slash Alexander Wunsch in English or so. But I could, I could provide the link so that interested guys would come directly to this area where they find the English presentation.

Okay. I'll link to all this in the show notes for those of you listening in. Again, it's going to be at BenGreenfieldFitness.com LightHealth Dr. Woonsch, this is fascinating. I definitely have a to do list of a few little things I'm going to do around my house when it comes to my lighting practices. And I know that folks might have questions, comments, et cetera. If you're one of those people, then go to the show notes@BenGreenfieldFitness.com LightHealth and leave any questions that you have and either myself or Dr. Woonch or somebody will hop in and reply to you. And I always love to see the type of comments that you have when shows like this get released as you scramble around your house replacing all the light bulbs and driving your spouse and your loved ones crazy because all of a sudden you're obsessing about the TV and the light and your health, your longevity, your biology. This stuff's important. So, Dr. Woonsch, thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing this stuff with us, man.

Thank you very much. It was a great pleasure.

All right, folks, well, until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Dr. Alexander Woonch signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

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