How Red Light Therapy Boosts Metabolism and Energy Production

Is light a nutrient? Can light penetrate your body, hit receptors on your cells outside your eyeballs, and change your metabolism? In this video, I'm going to make the case that the answers to these questions are yes. I'm going to show you how light therapy can supercharge your cells and enhance energy production. I'm going to start by diving with you into the cell to to the mitochondrial level, and then together we're going to zoom out and talk about a human randomized controlled trial on red light therapy and exercise performance. And if you stick around, I'm going to tease an n=1 experiment I will perform with red light therapy on myself. Actually, an experiment you can try too if you're compelled by what you hear. But now let's start with some high-level facts that will boggle your brain. And get you warmed up. Did you know you actually have light receptors all over your body, not just in your eyeballs? For example, you have literal cell surface receptors on your fat tissue, for example, opsin 3, that when struck by light can alter fat metabolism by regulating signaling pathways within cells. It's super cool, and actually, this is established science, at least from a physiological perspective. Although it's understudied science as well as far as clinical implications go. In fact, a point I really want to hammer home in this video is less that we can unequivocally prove that X phototherapy has Y clinical outcome, but rather that the light metabolism connection is understudied and very likely underestimated with respect to its importance on our health. We will need more research in future to illuminate the full clinical impact of different light therapies. But for now, let's get back to our biology, and then I'll return to my commentary on the structure of the science in future, or maybe just in a future video. Anyway, I mentioned that there are receptors, or conventional receptors, for light analogous to those that sit on cells elsewhere in the body, bind ligands, For example, say thyroid-stimulating hormone. It binds to a G-protein-coupled receptor, just like the opsins in your fat tissue, and it stimulates the production of thyroid hormone. And, you know, signaling cascades ensue from the binding of the ligand at the cell surface. But what's even cooler about light is it has what I could call unconventional receptors at the mitochondrial level. Now, what do I mean by this? Let's unpack it together. Recall that mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell— nostalgia to 8th grade biology, I know. They generate energy, and the better and more efficiently mitochondria generate energy, the better your metabolism runs. That's obviously a simplification, but I think it's a reasonable heuristic for our purposes. Now, the really cool thing about light, especially red light and infrared light, is that its long wavelengths can penetrate deeper into the body and thus strike elements of your mitochondria, even in deeper tissues like deep muscle tissues, to change energy production. Now let's get specific, get into the nitty-gritty. Mitochondria produce energy using something called the electron transport chain, or ETC for short, where electrons are passed between complexes in the inner mitochondrial membrane to harvest energy to pump protons across that membrane. And this accumulation of protons across the inner mitochondrial membrane creates a gradient of stored potential energy that can then flow back through a rotor called ATP synthase, kind of like a waterfall powering a turbine, in order to generate ATP, the energy currency of the cell. And interestingly, research shows that the fourth complex in the mitochondrial electron transport chain, so-called cytochrome c oxidase, is incredibly good at absorbing red light, and in doing so, it gets powered up. I kind of think of it like Bruce Banner being struck by gamma rays, turning into the Hulk, or I guess the Red Hulk, leading to enhancement of membrane potential and downstream enhanced energy production by mitochondria, which is super, super cool, at least I think it is. But what's more, this is gonna blow your mind, water itself absorbs red light energy. It's what's called a red light chromophore. Thus, red light can change the nature of water inside the mitochondria, potentially altering production dynamics, energy production dynamics by mitochondria. Now, this is still speculative and controversial exactly how it works, but one way to think about it is it changes the viscosity of water surrounding the ATP rotor, as was shown, or as was supported by data published in Scientific Reports in 2015. Actually, drawing from the paper, the authors write, "It is now tempting to assume that the nanomotor efficiency ATP productivity can be tuned with biologically tolerated intensities of red to near-infrared light. 670 nanometer laser light increased both proliferation and ATP production of cells. We believe that the cause which gives the extra ATP is a reduction of interfacial viscosity and/or around the mitochondrial nanomotor. ATP synthase. So to boil this down to a really simplistic analogy, by analogy, it's as if you were to go from trying to spin bike wheels in molasses to spinning bike wheels in free air. The latter situation is a lot more efficient and easier, so you end up with more ATP, more energy. Now I want to clarify exactly how this works and the direct biological relevance of each mechanism is at the frontier of our knowledge, but to me and maybe to you too if you're like me, this makes it all the more exciting. Now, moving on, if you can supercharge energy production in this way and it's biologically relevant, you might expect to see functional results. And indeed you do. For example, in this human double-blinded randomized controlled trial, red light therapy pretreatment before an exercise test on a treadmill increased endurance time to exhaustion, and VO2 max significantly. And the effect was thought to be due, in part, to actually another effect of red light therapy that we haven't even talked about yet, which is the reduction in damaging levels of oxidative stress, reactive oxygen species, which is thought to contribute to muscle fatigue. So, any way you slice it, the results look promising. And similar results to this human double-blinded RCT have been found by other independent groups, arguing for the biological relevance and the clinical utility of red light therapy even just with respect to muscle charging, which is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the importance of light on our health. Now granted, not all results are positive, but that's very likely because of variation in the protocols and doses of exposure. Bottom line, you can't cheap out on light therapy just like you don't want to cheap out on a mattress or running shoes. They're important. The wavelength, the power, the flicker rate, etc. are all rather important in maximizing your chances of a therapeutic effect. Now, a little disclosure, changing gears a little bit, I'm really new to this area of light metabolism. I'm neonatal in it, you could say. And I am not ashamed of that. I'm excited about it. Truth be told, it's actually a topic which I think I may have been intentionally ignorant of or remaining intentionally ignorant by virtue of the fact that being a PhD researcher and medical student in Boston, My geography and the draws on my time have really made it very, very difficult for me to prioritize getting morning sunlight and optimizing my circadian rhythm and just valuing light in my health routine. Now, I'm not saying, I am not saying now light is more important to my biology. I'm just being truthful with you that it's something that has historically been really difficult for me to implement in real life for practical reasons. I hope you can understand that. But I'm looking forward to actively trying to change that, by reading more about this really cool topic and exploring the clinical relevance of red light therapy in myself. So, with that said, over the next month, I'm going to be doing an n=1 experiment by using EMRtech's Inferno device. I'm going to be getting labs measured and wearing a continuous glucose monitor. Now, the exact protocol is still in the works, but it will involve monitoring my lipids and other lab markers, assessing my glucose control, my mood, and I'll be seeking input from experts in light biology to design the protocol. But I'm really optimistic. And if you want to use any of EMRTECH's devices, which I selected because they are top of the line, you can use NICK20 as a discount code. And if you do get a device, and you do conduct an n=1 experiment on yourself, I would love to hear what happened. As another disclosure, colleagues and I are really planning on scaling up our n=1 initiatives and making it so our audience can participate in safe, responsible n=1 studies with respect to their metabolic health. I'm in the process of collecting a series of tools to help you conduct such n=1 experiments, which you can check out below by following the links. But in the meantime, stay curious and stay excited.