Is Artificial Light Secretly Ruining Your Health?

We've all heard about the effects of computers and TV at night and blue light disturbing our sleep, our concentration, our health, our weight, everything. We've heard it, but what do we actually do about it? Is it as simple as just putting our electronics away at night? Is it as simple as just not watching tv? What about if we work night shifts? What about if we can't help? We've got to meet a deadline, we've got to work at night. What happens if we're not getting adequate sunlight during the day? How do we counter these effects? And how much do we need to be really paying attention to what blue light is doing to our health and our bodies, especially when it comes to midlife? Today I've got a very special guest on Rudy Nassif. He's the co founder of Viva Rays and I wanted to have him on because I had seen in my circle lots of people wearing these fun red glasses. Sometimes they're yellow, sometimes they're orange. And I thought, what is going on here? What's happening? Why are they wearing this especially? I've noticed it in the biohacking space, in the age optimizing space in that area. I see a guy at my gym wearing them. I see people walking outside with them. I've seen people driving with them. I've even seen people on interviews that I've been doing with podcasts with them. So I wanted to have them on. I want to understand what's going on. Where did these come from? How important are they? What do we need to know? So thank you so much, Rudy, for being here today.

Yeah, thanks for your curiosity and for having me today.

So thank you, Rudy, so much for being here. I want to back up. Where did you even get into this topic? Tell me a little bit of background about you and where this came from.

Yeah, so a little bit about me. To be honest, I'm constantly, like, grateful and blown away. Today I'm speaking to thousands and thousands of health seekers and doctors and educating about this topic, leading as the CEO of vivarays and feeling more vital, vibrant and alive than ever before. And one funny fact about me is that all of my friends are constantly amazed when they ask me, Rudy, like, what kind of adaptogens, what kind of supplements, what kind of herbs are you on right now? And I tell them, none at the moment. None.

None.

Yes, yes. But it wasn't always that way, to be honest. So let me take you back. It's. It's January 2017. So picture me like laying in bed, staring at the ceiling and my body feels really heavy and I'm feeling completely drained, like a dark cloud hanging over my head. And my former partner, who I just met a few weeks ago, is already up, up and about, getting ready for university and work. And here I am, sitting there, barely opening my eyes, pretending that I'm sleeping and hoping that she doesn't see me. I'm hiding my depression from this feeling, like deep guilt, deep shame, and wishing that life could swallow me in that moment. Eventually she sees me and she leans forward and she says, good morning habibi. And I mumbled back, barely able to speak Good morning. And I was literally, I'm in a new country in Canada, barely speaking any English, on a tourist visa, hoping I can find my way to become a Canadian resident. But the truth is that this wasn't the true cause of my pain. I've been feeling unwell and like garbage for many, many years. And it all started in Lebanon. Picture me as a kid, feeling restless and agitated all the time. I'm not fitting at school and my teachers call me out loud the ADHD kid who can't focus. And as I grew older, I turned into a night owl, staying up late until 2am every night, constantly feeling tired, low on energy and unmotivated during the day. So I kept pushing. And here I am, graduating as an engineer and working in Africa for three years. And Natalie. On the outside, everything looked great. A young, fit, muscular engineer. But on the inside, I was drowning, distracted, exhausted and completely lost. It literally all fell apart when I was fired from my job. And not because I wasn't smart enough, but because I couldn't focus. I didn't have any motivation, I didn't have any energy and my health was spiraling and I lost all sense of purpose. Now, determined to change my life, I threw myself back into martial arts, seeking focus and energy. I even climbed the freezing mountains of Sneska with Wim Hof the Iceman, wearing shorts and minus 20 degrees. And I felt alive for the first time in years. But the thing is, it didn't last. And I was working so hard like. Like intense experiences just to catch these small moments of energy, only for them to slip away again. So committed to getting well. Here I am in Canada in this basement, next to my partner on the bed. And I have one plan. Getting healthy. And my diet is perfect. I'm taking the best adaptogens for sleep, brain function and energy, and the best herbs on earth. But here I am in this basement, waking up late, having no rhythm, feeling exhausted and tired and having no energy. So I started to wonder, oh, my God, like, have I tried everything? Am I not trying hard enough? And I'm thinking to myself, whoa, I may be stuck in this. Nothing is helping. No one understand me. And it's funny, because in those moments, we humans tend to think that you just need to push harder, take more stuff, buy more gadgets, make more effort. Then unexpectedly, one night, I'm laying in bed, and it was like 1am in the morning, and I stumbled across a video by Dr. Jack Cruz. He's a neurosurgeon from the US and the video of the YouTube was called Artificial Light Is Killing Us. And I'm there, squeezing my brain, trying to understand what he's talking about. And it was very hard to be honest. But there was one sentence that stuck with me and kept flashing into my mind the next morning, and it said, you can't get healthy in the same light environment that made you sick. So I literally rushed to my partner, and I'm like, this is it. This is why I've been feeling so unwell for so long.

Boom.

Changing my light environment. And my partner was so puzzled. But as she digested this, and within a matter of few weeks, she surprised me. One day she said, rudy, pack your stuff. We're going to volunteer and camp on a rural farm in northern Quebec for six weeks. It was through a problem called Woofing Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farm. And to be honest, I resisted at first. I was like, how is that going to help me become healthier? I couldn't. But then here I am, driving for seven hours from Ontario to Quebec, and I arrive on this farm, and I'm now living in a tent for six weeks, exposed only to natural sunlight during the day and fire and candlelight during the evening. And within a matter of three days only, something miraculous happened. My body begins to reset, and my night owl, who always stayed up late, is now naturally falling asleep shortly after the sunset. And then I'm waking up with the sun with no alarm clock, feeling rested, energized, and exhilarated with a sense of joy that I never felt before. And that moment, one morning, I'm working with the earth, and I see the farmer coming over, and he walks over and he places his hand over my shoulder, and I remember he says, wow, Rudy, what a powerful focus you got. I've never seen anything like this. And oh, my God, that moment, it shatters me open because I realized that everything I thought I knew about myself, my adhd, my depression, my chronic fatigue, my sleepless nights Wasn't because I was inherently like bad or there was something wrong with me. It was that the physical environment I was living in was not supporting my biology. And that's where it started clicking. Because when I went back from the farm to the city, and within a matter of few weeks, I lost the energy and great sleep and all the things that I accessed on the farm. And this led me to start investigating how light impacts our biology. And what I learned is something very simple. I learned that light is information. It's literally flowing into our system, telling our bodies what time of the day it is and which hormone to secrete at which time. And when our body secretes the right hormones at the right time, it manifests as order and as health and vitality. However, when we secrete the wrong hormones at the wrong time because of the wrong light information, it becomes chaos. And no matter how much we're trying to do, it just makes everything more complicated. So it's like those simple things, right? It's like the 20% effort that gets you 80% of the results.

So many light bulb moments from what you're saying here. I'm saying light bulb moments, not. No pun intended, but, you know, I think Back to. I'm 53 and a lot of my audience is close to my age range. I remember in the 70s and 80s, ADD and distraction was not nearly as common or diagnosed as it is now. That's one thing. But I also know that growing up, we had very different color light bulbs. We had the yellow amber lights, and you didn't have them overhead. You had a few of them. We would use firelight, candlelight, and all of our lights were that orangey yellow light bulb. Now the trend for more modern homes is these brig white daylight bulbs. They're like the LED white daylight bulbs. So I think about houses now, and majority, most of my friends, even our house, those lights are those daylight bright white light bulbs. So I'm starting to connect the dots with what you're saying. That even though just the lights in our home, not even talking about electronics, that has changed dramatically over the years and doesn't mimic nature as much. And then you add, even looking at like a TV right now, people have these big, huge LED TVs and computer screens. When I was little, we had a black and white tv. There was no appealing light coming out of it. It was like a black and white tv. And then it was not what they are now. So I'm starting to think about what you're saying and then also knowing that when you go camping or you go on a vacation, or you're without your phone, you're without your laptop, you're without the artificial lights, you're outside more. How we seem to do things better in our life or have better focus, better sleep, better all that. Was it the vacation or the beach, or the. Or was it that we weren't around all of this light?

Yeah, absolutely. This is such a great reflection. And it wasn't until then that I start realizing that light is actually the most powerful force that shapes and molds every aspect of our biology. And as an engineer, I've been familiar with the e =mc^2 by Albert Einstein. But I have never interpreted it in the way I was able to interpret it when I start understanding how light as a physical force shapes life and shapes our biology. But if you think about it, e =mc squared is telling us that energy and matter are exactly the same thing. They're interchangeable, right? And when light changes form, it actually slows down and it becomes us, literally. Because we have a substance in our eye called the vitreous edi. It's composed of water, collagen and acid. And when sunlight enter our eyes, this light slows down as it hits the vitreous cdi. And we're able to convert that light energy into electricity that programs all of the neurotransmitters and hormones that control the way we think, the way we feel and the way we act. So if you think about it, light creates reality and light is information. So I want to invite everybody listening to question themselves. What kind of information am I allowing into my system every day? I think we all agree that when we are listening to information from podcast, there's two type of information. Sometimes we listen to news, we feel low, we feel scared, we feel a lot of fear creeping, and we want to protect our psyche from this bad information. And other times we listen to a motivational speaker and an inspirational speaker and our spirit lifts up and we feel energized. We feel we want to make changes in our life. So in the same way we protect our minds from junk information, I think it's very important that we protect our eyes from junk light. Because light literally is a double edged sword. It can either elevate us, leading to moments of inspiration and realization that could completely change our life. And that happens to me over and over as I'm watching the sunrise. This is my moment of meditation that changes my day. And this moment, as I allow the sun to enter my eyes, philosophically, it elevates my spirit, but on a physical level, it's actually producing all of the hormones and neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, even cortisol, which is known as the stress hormone. But we need cortisol first thing in the morning so that we can feel awake, alert and energized and ready for the day. And when we replace nature's light with junk light coming from LED bulbs and screens, it actually messes up with that hormone with the hormonal production. And on the other side also, throughout evolution, all of our ancestors have been exposed to sunlight during the day and darkness at night. And that signal of darkness after the sunset is what tell our nervous system that day is ending. And therefore the body stop preparing and making the space and the environment to produce the right hormone so that we can repair, heal, rejuvenate, sleep deep, and wake up feeling rested and energized. And the tragedy of today's world, the chaos, is that all of us with constantly exposed to artificial lighting after the sunset, not only from our phones, not only from our televisions, but also from the LED bulbs that are in our kitchen, in our bedroom, down the street, down the mall. And these lights enter our eyes and completely disrupt our rhythm and lead our body to secrete the wrong hormone at the wrong time, completely sabotaging our ability to hear, repair and rejuvenate at night, and also deprive us from having deep, restful night's sleep.

So I want to make sure I'm understanding and hearing what you're explaining here. So in an ideal world, in an ideal situation, you would be waking up with the sunrise and going to winding down with the sunset, and you would not be creating artificial light to counter these things, which, if I'm hearing correctly, that means when you are waking up with the sunrise and you're getting early morning light, you would not want to block that, meaning not want to wear sunglasses, not want to stop that. Because if you stop that light from coming in, you are messing with your body's natural cortisol production. Is that, did I hear you correctly on that? Was that accurate?

Absolutely. We are messing with nature's way to provide our system with the information that we need to thrive.

So what some people are doing is they're getting up and they're, you know, waking up to an alarm, and then they're putting caffeine in their body to start, start getting their cortisol going and then they're going outside, rushing and putting sunglasses on. So if I'm hearing you correctly, we Are basically interrupting what nature has already designed for us by the sunglasses and then now the caffeine. We're like not letting our body actually produce the right cortisol because cortisol is not bad. It's good at certain times. We want that at certain times. And then at night what's happening is the sun's setting and instead of being in that sunset light and understand we're putting on daylight, LED lights and bright light and we're disrupting our body's wind down time of producing melatonin naturally. So now we're wondering why we can't fall asleep. So we then turn to electronics, our phone, our TVs, what our computer, whatever else. And we're adding even more artificial light in. So we're disrupting that. Am I saying all this correct? Did I, Do I understand that? Okay, so how does this. And I, I want to explain from your. How you'll explain it. How is this affecting our hormones? Because cortisol, that is all related to hormones. What is this creating and why is that messing up our sleep and everything?

Yeah, absolutely. So there's a German scientist, his name is Fritz Hallwaysch. Back in the 1970s he published many studies showing how sitting under artificial blue light increases our cortisol and adrenaline in abnormal ways. So how does this relate to our life today? So imagine yourself at 7pm at night. Naturally at this time, if you were to watch the sunset and come back home and light up some candles, the body will naturally start producing the sleep hormone melatonin which is the most powerful signaling molecule that signal to all of our body that it's time to start repairing and rejuvenating. It activates programs in our cells called mitophagy apoptosis and mitophagan apoptosis. And those are programs that allow us to replace the old cells with new ones so that we can have more energy and an ability to wake up feeling rested. Now what actually happens is the moment we expose ourselves to artificial light at night, we completely suppress melatonin production and the body start producing cortisol and adrenaline which are the stress hormones. And those are hormones that are not supposed to be in the body at night. Number one, they're going to make us feel wired and stimulated. They're going to make us feel anxious. We may fall into the illusion that we need to do things and get active at the wrong time of the day. That's right. Cortisol increases our blood. Like when blue light enter your eyes at night and cortisol spikes. It activates Gluconeogenesis, which is the production of sugar from your liver without eating any foods. Literally, you're.

So you're raising your blood sugar. You're raising your blood sugar at night from this.

You're raising your blood sugar without eating any food. Most people try to regulate their blood sugar by controlling their lights, their food all the time. The truth is, is no matter how much you try to control your food, if you are in the wrong light environment and blue light is entering your eyes at the wrong time, no matter how much you try to cut on sugar, you're actually, your body is starting to produce sugar without you eating anything.

It's interesting.

Yes.

So is that. So when people say cortisol spiking their blood sugar, it's a combination. It's the cortisol in your body, but it's also this light coming in. So there's a combination going on that's spiking that blood sugar. And this is very common with midlife women. Their A1C is creeping up, their blood sugar numbers are creeping up. And. And they might say, I'm eating perfect. But are you watching this with the light and the cortisol?

Yes. There's a client. Her name is Sarah. She was really struggling from emotional eating at night. No matter how much she tried to control and use her willpower and discipline, not eating at night, she shared with me, Rudy. I would be watching a Netflix movie, and within an hour, I find myself in front of the fridge eating all these different carbs and sugars, and she would fall into a cycle of guilt and blaming herself. But what I explained to Sarah is like, you can't blame yourself there because you are actually fighting against your biological evolution. And what's happening there is, as blue light is entering her eyes, cortisol is spiking, blood glucose is spiking, and then blood glucose goes up and down, and then we feel this intense urge to go eat. And also, it's very interesting how it actually acts on insulin, because in this case, you can become insulin resistant because your body is secret. The pancreas is secreting a lot of insulin, but cortisol is high in the body, and cortisol actually block the insulin effect. So blue light is entering the eyes, cortisol is going high, insulin is being released, and cortisol is stopping the insulin effect. So people. That's the fastest way for someone to become insulin resistant.

This is a big one that people are not paying attention to because we've been told that you're getting insulin resistant from not Eating correctly specifically or being keto too long. There's like all these reasons diet related. And this is new news that we're not, we haven't been considering here. So that this is what's creating that. Now. How is this light affecting our mood? You talked earlier about depression and what's happening there. Why is this changing our mood by getting. Having too much of this white light at the wrong time?

So yeah, that's a great question. There's a study by a circadian biologist, his, his name is Samir Hitar and he published few papers showing how very little amount of blue and green light, which are very rich in LED bulbs and screens entering our eyes after the sunset, they actually activate an area in the brain called the habinula, which is known as the disappointment center. And it has been shown also that people wake up the second morning with much less dopamine in their system, which completely decreases their cognition and their memory. And they're much more likely to be feeling unsatisfied and unmotivated first thing in the morning. And dopamine is this miraculous molecule that allow us to think outside of the box, to sit down and pay attention and to have the motivation to go after what we really want in life. So I don't know about you, Natalie, but in today's world and even myself five years ago, the one thing I struggled with is the lack of attention. I was constantly distracted and I was constantly struggling to find motivation in my life. I had no idea that all this artificial light that I was exposing myself to after the sunset was completely destroying my dopamine, my motivation and my ability to focus on.

Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so I want to talk about what we can do about all this because you invented some glasses to actually really help with this. And I want to talk about the glasses, but I also want to talk about people that don't have the glasses. What are things that we could do? I know I shared recently, I did some funny videos on Instagram with, you know, you know, her, Anna Kabeca, Dr. Anna Kabeca. And we, one of the videos we did was we were talking about things that happen in menopause and things that we need to change. And we, we had, did this where I was putting on sunglasses to walk outside and she was removing them. And there was a whole comment thread of people saying, wait, what do you mean? Why no sunglasses? Because I have, you know, my eye doctor told me to wear sunglasses or I, I squint without. Can we talk about the sunglass situation first?

Yes, Absolutely. So I, I was gonna also like share some graphs. Maybe after that you can share. Yeah, maybe after that. Let's talk first about sunglasses. So basically, one of the major problem with sunglasses is that they not only block a lot of the visible frequencies of light, which are the color of the rainbow, ranging from blue light to red light, but they also block absolutely important frequencies of invisible light like uva, UVB and infrared. And I know like the word UV still triggers a lot of fear. And many people may be thinking, I've heard UV is really bad and it causes cancer and cataracts. And perhaps your dermatologist or clinician recommended that you block all UV by wearing sunglasses and putting sunscreen. So if that's the case, I want you to ask yourself a very simple question. How is it possible that sunlight, the most powerful nutrient that nourishes all life, can be dangerous? It's somehow like, are we thinking that God or the universe somehow made a mistake? I don't think so. And there's like hundreds of quality peer reviewed studies done on the health benefits of UV light. However, somehow the conventional medicine is still operating on an old belief about UV and has not caught up yet with the new understanding of how powerful and important UV light is and driving our biology. And technically, a lot of the fear around UV light comes from studies that date back to the 1980s that created a lot of fear. And the main one was done on monkeys at the College of Virginia in the late 1800s. And the result of this study were highly questionable because they literally don't pertain to reality. Here's what they did. They opened the eyelids of the monkey with clamps which fully dilated their pupils and they were not able to blink. Okay. And now blinking is the natural mechanism that we all use to adjust to different brightness of light and protect the retina if the light is very intense. So what they did, they shown an intense bright light with extremely high levels of uv. And beside the abuse, the amount of UV light that they shone into their eyes were abnormal. They did not represent the balance trace of UV light that we get from sunlight. For example, when we are exposed to sunlight, we are never exposed to UV without its polar opposite, infrared light. And those they are symbiotic, they come together in nature and they balance each other out. Whereas in this study they only shown high amount of uv, even uvc, which doesn't reach the earth, with no infrared and with no other symbiotic colors that balance out the uv. And of course they burnt the eyes of the Monkeys. But this is not true science. You know, like Dr. John Odd, he's a revolutionary when it comes to light and health. He uses a beautiful analogy. He says giving too much oxygen at birth can blind the baby. However, it would be foolish to think that we need to avoid oxygen at all costs. In the same way, shining a lot of UV light into our eyes will burn our eyes. But it will also be foolish to think that we need to avoid UV light at all times. And I just want to bring up some of the benefits of uv. Uv, for instance, is known to lower blood pressure. There's one study show how people who were exposed to UV light experienced a dramatic lowering in their blood pressure. And I think the effects lasted something like six days after exposure. And UV light also increases the efficiency of the heart. It drops our resting heart rate, and it makes you calmer and less anxious because it also triggers the production of nitric oxide, which dilate our vessels and, and increase blood flow. And there are studies showing how UV light makes you lose weight. It actually stimulates your thyroid glands, and it increases fat burning and metabolism, and it increases sex hormones by 120%. So it's crazy that we in today's world wear sunglasses that block 100% of UVA and UVB and completely disrupt those frequencies of light to enter our eyes.

So I'm going to throw a monkey in this a little bit. Not to use a different analogy because you just talk about monkeys. But I think that there's a happy medium here because speaking as someone who's had basal cell carcinoma twice, once when I was in my 20s, someone who definitely has a lot of brown age spots on my skin from sun and who is 53 and getting fine lines. I don't necessarily want to bake in the sun and be out in the sun all day long for those reasons. A lot of it's cosmetic, a lot of it's, I don't want basil, I don't want more skin cancer. So I don't want to have like an argument here. I want to have a discussion because I think there's a midd ground here. I think everything you're saying there is a huge benefit from the sun. And I don't think you need to be in it all day long either to get these benefits. And I think there's extremes both ways. So there's an extreme of like, I'm never going to wear a hat. I'm never going to wear mineral sunblock. I'm never going to. And I'm just Going to be in the sun all day. And you can do that, but you still might create leathery skin. So. So. And then there's this extreme of I need to block it at all costs for even a few seconds. So I think there's a middle ground there. That's just my opinion. And I understand there's the studies and there's the two trains of thought and your dermatologist will not agree with the biohacker you follow. And there's different trains of thought on this. I can tell you personally, for me, what I've decided is I don't wear sunglasses all the time anymore because I want the natural light. If I am on a long hike and I want to wear sunglasses, I just do for comfort. But it's not an all the time thing. I try to get that morning sun without it. I also will say I don't freak out about 10 minutes in the sun without sunblock. I also don't wear chemical sunblock anywhere. I wear mineral base. So it's. At least I know I'm not putting more chemicals on my skin. And I'm also avoiding seed oils, which is a whole other topic we can get into later. But seed oils are a known contributor to skin cancer and rapidly aging skin and how that interacts with heat. So there's a whole train of thoughts there. So I wanted to put that out there because I don't want people to take what you said and go to that one extreme when everyone has to do what's right for them. There's. But I think either extreme can be troubling. I know because I've definitely followed some accounts on social that are shaming people for wearing a hat or for not. And then, you know, there's the people that really have a high rate of skin cancer. So, like, there's a middle ground. I think there's a middle ground.

Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you for bringing this up because it could be easily misinterpreted and taken to an extreme that causes damage. Also, when we speak about sunlight, what we need to understand, we need to acknowledge where we are today and who we are as a human being. What kind of lifestyle do we have? Because if we look back at our ancestors, for instance, they weren't suddenly exposed to high intense UV light of summer like we are today. Most of us spend 12 to 16 hours indoors under artificial light. And then we are not attuned to the seasons. The body doesn't even know whether it's summer or winter because we're. We're constantly in regulated temperature, and we're not exposed to the natural shortening and lengthening of the day that signal to the body that it's winter or summertime versus our ancestors during the winter time. Their body knew exactly that it was wintertime because the day has shortened for them, whereas for us it never shortens because of artificial light exposure. Also, their bodies were attuned to the change in temperature and as they went into spring. The spring is a very important season that actually prepare us to be able to absorb summer sunlight without burning. Because gradually in the spring, UV start increasing slowly, a little bit at a time. And that allows us to build our solar callus and our melanin gradually, so that by the summertime we're able to take on a more intense fight without burning. Now, another very important thing to mention is in the same way as seasons prepare us, like the spring season prepare us for the summer season, also, in a given day, morning sunlight prepares us for later noon sunlight. And most of us today, we skip that morning sunlight. When the sun is rising off the horizon, there's no UV whatsoever. It's very rich in red, orange, and infrared. And those are colors that sit on the opposite spectrum of uv. And due to the nature of that, these are polar opposites that interchange in balance. And if you think about it, there's never UV without infrared. Okay, There's a symbiotic relationship between them. But when infrared rises first thing in the morning, it prepares our skins and our eyes to absorb more UV later in the day without burning. So all of this combination will really determine how much sunlight we can handle, whether we need to use natural sunscreens or not, when we need to use sunglasses or not. All of these are very important factors that will deter our behavior.

Makes sense. Makes sense. I can tell you, living right now in Phoenix area with the super strong sun, I'm not going to go for a long hike without sunglasses. I'm just not going to. But I do try in the morning to get that natural sunlight in. So I love how you just explore explained all of this. And I know you said you had a graph you wanted to show us. Do you want to show that right now?

Yes. Also to add one thing before I show the graphs is again, if we come back to nature, nature is composed of polar opposites that interchange imbalance. Think of masculine and feminine, think of inhalation and exhalation. Think of positive and negative, yin and yang, light and darkness. And we are as capable as absorbing light as we are soaking in the darkness. And in today's world, nobody is soaking in the darkness. We're all exposed to a lot of artificial light after the sunset. That increases reactive oxygen species and inflammation in our mitochondria during a time when we are actually supposed to get rid of inflammation.

Wow.

And what happened is inflammation continuously on a rise. And eventually when we wake up the second day, our bodies are not prepared to absorb that high photonic sunlight because we're highly inflamed. So that's another reason why I do think that artificial light highly contribute to skin cancer. And there's some data showing that, you know, before the 1800s, most of us spent most of our days outdoors and melanoma was merely almost non, non existent.

Wow.

And as the workload shifted indoors after that and all the farmers start working indoors, you could see that the melanoma was on an intense rise. So like, if you connect the dots there, that's when we start using a lot more artificial light. And we were not exposed to a lot of darkness after the sunset.

And I believe in my generation a lot of the skin cancers were tanning beds, which was also artificial light. I know for me in my teens and my early 20s, I was using tanning beds. So I pretty confident that my skin cancers came from that could also be.

That it's always like this symbiotic relationship that we miss that is always present in nature because nature provides a very balanced and symbiotic spectrum of light that is always also balanced with an equal amount of darkness. But when we start messing up with things and creating different technologies that do not relate to that balanced spectrum of nature, that lack of balance is actually what causes those balance flood our body with toxins. So I'm going to share my screen here, so let me know if you can see my screen.

I can see it.

So here we're looking at three different spectral curves. We're looking at sunlight on the left. Natural sunlight is full. You have a lot of blue light on the left side. And as you can see, the blue light is balanced and proportionate with the orange, yellow and red lights. And the spectrum is very balanced. Now the problem in today's words, is the graph that we're looking at in the middle. As you can see, the graph in the middle is completely unbalanced and unproportionate. We have this very narrow spike in blue light at 455 nanometer that is dominating the spectrum. And this blue light is not balanced and proportionate with the other frequencies of colors like yellow, orange and red light. And there's Many studies showing that this blue light in isolation increases reactive oxygen species and inflammation and decreases mitochondrial functioning, which. Our eyes, for instance, our brain and a lot of our organs are highly rich in mitochondria, those little engine that burn the food into energy. And the one thing that mitochondria rely on is good quality lighting during the day and darkness at night so that they can undergo mitophagy, which is the process where mitochondria get rid of the old ones that are no longer functioning properly and replace them with new fresh mitochondria that are powerful and able to generate energy. Now, how can we solve this? Maybe you've heard about black blocking glasses. Maybe you heard that that is being repeated a lot. And, and, and so you broke up.

A little bit there, but. You broke up a little bit there, but you said, maybe we've heard about blue light blockers. Is that what you were saying? Yes.

Yeah. So. So maybe we've heard that blue light is bad. Maybe we heard that.

Oh, I, yeah, we have heard blue light. It's like a one size fits all. Just block the blue light.

Yes, exactly. So this is a very unbalanced approach. Again, just like thinking, oh, too much oxygen burn the eyes of the babies, let's not use oxygen. Or too much UV burns the eyes, let's eliminate uv. Blue light is not bad. There's nothing in nature that is bad. Everything is relative. And the effect of blue light will depend on two main things. One, blue light needs to be balanced with its, with its polar opposite. So it needs to be symbiotically balanced with the other frequencies, like in sunlight here, when it's not balanced, like, like in the case of the second graph, this is when blue light becomes bad.

Okay, now the issue is, and that's what's happening. Like that, that graph right there is literally like me sitting in front of my. Right now, I'm talking to you on my computer with three LED lights behind the computer. So that's where that's creating that imbalance.

Absolutely. Now you're, you're flooded. You're flooding your system with this unbalanced frequency.

So I'm just going to slide these on while we're talking because now I understand. Okay, go on.

Exactly.

Now.

Now the thing is, so people start saying, oh, blue light is not good from the screens. We need to eliminate it. No. Why? Big no. Because if we eliminate it, the brain is going to think it's afternoon or nighttime. It's going to suppress our energy level and we're going to start Feeling tired and exhausted at the wrong time.

So everyone hear that? If you just block the blue light, we're creating another problem, which is where we're going to get tired in the afternoon. That hurt you? I got it. Okay. So that's wrong when we're just wearing blue light blockers all day long.

Yes. So the glasses that you and I are wearing right now, they're not blue blockers. They're blue harmonizers. And this is exactly what they're doing. The third graph on the right side, you can see that what we've done, we've taken this inflammatory frequency at 455 nanometer, we decreased its sharpness, and we spread it across the spectrum. So now you're getting more green, yellow, and orange light to balance out that blue light.

Wow.

It's more symbiotic, it's more balanced, and it's more proportionate.

And so it's similar to what you would have be if you were outside.

It's not 100% similar because you will still see, like we're missing a lot on the deep red, but it's also still a big step towards balance because this blue is no longer dominating the spectrum. We decrease its sharpness. It's still present so that the brain knows it's daytime. But now we. We've spread a lot of that blue across the spectrum. So we're getting more of the green, yellow, and orange light to balance out that blue light.

Got it. Okay, that makes sense. Now I'm clear. So I will wear these glasses now when I'm sitting.

And these glasses are to be worn only indoors when. During the day. So anytime during the day, we are exposed to screens. We are exposed to any form of LED lights. When you're walking down the mall, when you're in the airport. All of these places that have intense artificial lighting, those are the perfect glasses to harmonize the unbalanced inflammatory frequency.

So not. So when I see you walking outside with these, you're wearing them wrong.

Absolutely. You. You. You don't want to be wearing anything outside. Ideally outside if it's really intense, and if you're still in a stage where you're building your solar callus and you're improving your melanin. The best approach I usually recommend is a hat. A hat is an amazing thing because it's going to decrease the level of brightness that is arriving in the eyes.

Makes sense.

Okay, so now after the sunset, the equation completely changes. Why is that? Because we spoke about light is in formation. Right. So we need that Blue light during the day to inform our brain that it's daytime. However, as the sun is setting, the blue and green lights start slowly fading away until the environment becomes dark in nature. And that signal and inform our nervous system and our brain that the day is ending so that we can start secreting the sleep hormone and so that our cells get the right signaling to start preparing for repair, rejuvenation, and healing. As we sleep at night, the issue is that we are exposed to the second sun from all the LED lights at our homes. And this is when you actually need to eliminate blue lights because it's not present in nature at that time. We don't want it. We don't need it. And the orange lenses, they're strategically designed and engineered to eliminate all of the blue and the highest frequency green and to keep enough green so that we can still function and do our evening tasks without feeling very sleepy. And those literally, they mimic the exact color temperature of the bonfire at 1600 Galvans. Because I don't know about you, Natalie. Have you been around a bonfire? So. So in my experience on the farm, when I was gathering around the bonfire, I would instantly feel like I would wind down and my nervous system completely calms down, yet I will still have the energy to dance, cook, socialize, and talk to my friends around. So that's. That's the concept of the evening lenses.

Makes sense.

And the last one is the nighttime lenses. So just to clarify, the evening lenses, you will wear this after the sunset. You keep it on until one hour before bedtime. One hour before bedtime.

Oh, just one hour. Okay. And then the red. Okay, so I shouldn't be. You shouldn't be wearing the red for three, four hours?

No, I usually wear this 30 minutes to an hour max. And what I notice is, like, within 30 minutes, I get, like, intense yawning, and I can't even open my eyes, and I want to be in bed.

Okay, so I was definitely doing that wrong. I'm glad I'm interviewing you. Okay.

Yeah. So. So for me, 30 minutes is the sweet spot. Some people is one hour, especially if they're struggling with insomnia and things like this. But what the nighttime lenses are doing, they're eliminating all of the blue and all of the green as well. And they're decreasing the brightness by 15 times. And that literally tells the brain that it's nighttime and allowing us to have a restful night's sleep and waking up feeling rested and energized.

Got it. Okay, so let's talk about these glasses for a minute because this is brilliant what you did here. So I don't know if you guys are watching us on video here, but look, so. So what he's got is this solution because I did never understood the blue light. Just wearing blue light blockers all day long. So now you've explained that to me, so thank you for that. And I also know it's not realistic for me to block out all light all the time either. So I like the convenience of this. So what he did is he created these glasses. So if you guys are watching a video, you can see this. So they're yellow, a little bit of a yellow tint. So I can see everything totally clearly. But what it's doing is it's harmonizing now I understand that, which is amazing. And then what he did is he created. It's like a magnetic hold where you can put these other ones that will literally stick right on. So like I put the orange right over and that sticks on. Or then I can change that and put the red right over like that. So it changes all of the things like this. So very easily, Very easily. So I love that. I love that.

I think I was seeing also the popping up.

So I love that these glasses that you can just literally interchange it like this, which is amazing. It's brilliant. It's brilliant.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the best thing about it is right now you have a system to control the light that is entering your eyes no matter where you are. Because I don't know about you, Natalie, but like in my home, for instance, I have very amazing like light environment at night and I use candles and Himalayan salt lamp. So I don't necessarily need the glasses. But when I go outside, it's challenging because I cannot just tell people turn off the lights. So the glasses allow me to maintain that consistency. And what most people don't realize about circadian biology is that our circadian clock is awaiting regularity and consistency in two main signals. One, morning sunlight. So getting that morning sunlight every day at the same time, consistency and with regularity, this is what is going to make the difference. And the second thing, blocking artificial light after the sunset consistently and with regularity at the same time every day. This is literally what is going to make all the difference. And some people think, oh, I could do it three days on, four days off. It doesn't work that way because technically, let's say you've been doing it for three days. Your body has risa now. Your body is preparing for the right, for a good Night's sleep at the exact right time. You're waking up at the right time. Your digestion is amazing. Your energy level is high. Your motivation is speaking on the fourth day. Supposing that you go out with friends and you don't wear the glasses and artificial light is entering your eyes. One hour of exposure to LED light will throw off your rhythm by two to three hours every single night. So that puts you on a roller coaster. It completely disrupts your hormonal production and it will take away all the good work that you've done for the past three days.

Wow. Well, gosh, Rudy, I love what you created here. I think it's brilliant. Now I understand. So thank you. Because I see, I saw a lot of my friends with the glasses. I saw people wearing them. I didn't understand what they were. So I actually, this is not a sponsored episode. Rudy did not ask reach out to me. I asked to be connected to him because I was like, I need to understand what these are. So I first got the glasses, not really understanding them, and I did it all wrong. I was putting the red ones on all night long. So when I like trying to watch TV with the red one, it was not easy and I didn't understand. So now I'm. That's why I wanted to have you on. So thank you for explaining. This is super clear. One of the things I want, I'm really committed to is I just want to help people navigate midlife. All these things that are changing, especially with our health. And we hear these, like, hard rules, like no blue light, no this, no. And it's very confusing. So thank you for explaining a lot of this to us because to me, I didn't fully understand it. And my mission with any of you listening is I just want us all to be able to make better informed choices. So when we hear something, or you see that biohacker on Instagram, or somebody's telling you, like, don't wear sunglasses or you must wear this, or do your own understanding and digging and research to understand. Does this make sense for me? I choose to live in this not black and white state, but somewhere in the middle and understand. And I think we can all do a little bit better in all these areas. So I can say for me, am I going to wear the glasses 24 7? Probably not. That's not going to be me. Sometimes I just want to look cute. Rudy. I'm just being honest and I don't know that I want to wear the glasses. Sometimes I want to wear the glasses. So I don't know. And they are kind of cute. They're not bad glasses. I like them. They're kind of trendy, but I think there's a happy medium. Just like the sunglass conversation. Wear them if your eyes are really bothering you. But can you practice not wearing them all the time? So I like the middle ground. I, I love what you've done here. What's really cool about his glasses to y' all is it's you can have one pair and interchange with the different lenses. He also has it where you can have your prescription done in them. So if you want to go and see what we're talking about here, if you go to vivarays.com, v I V A R A Y S.com forward slash Natalie Jill so that way they know you came from me. Vivarays.com Natalie Jill Go there. You can learn all about these. You can buy a pair, you can buy a pair with a different lenses. You can do prescription. I love what you've done here, Rudy. Oh, and by the way, if you use, I think there's a, Is it a discount if they use the code Natalie Jill or what does that do? I know that you said give us a code.

Yes. There's a 10% discount.

A 10% discount. So. Okay, got it. So 10% discount if you use the code Natalie Jill Anything else I'm missing there, Rudy, that you want to make sure that I'm saying and sharing.

I just wanted to clarify one thing for people who wear prescription because I, I really care about this topic.

Okay.

I've done a lot of work particularly to solve that issue. We spoke about the importance of UV light and how UV provides the energy to help us to produce dopamine, serotonin, but the endorphins, a lot of important hormones and thyroid hormones. So the issue is with people who are wearing prescription. When you go and you make your prescription lenses at an optometrist office, they put all kind of different dents. One, like there's this marketing gimmick called clear blocking glasses, which they put on the prescription lenses. And technically, clear blue blockers do not work. Why? Because they block blue purple light up to 420 nanometer. And if you remember the graph that I showed you, LED lights start their emission at 430 nanometer, so they don't emit any blue purple light. So they're completely useless. But the issue with that is if you put those on your prescription lenses, they're going to block blue purple light from sunlight, which is Very important. Also, all prescription lenses block 100% of UVA and UVB, which is very terrible. So what I did, I came up with a system called the 4 in 1 specifically for people who wear prescription. They'll have their base frame and prescription and their prescription will allow 50 to 60% more UVA and UVB and all of the blue purple light. So that when they are outdoors in the sun, they can still subconsciously, without needing to think about it, get that healthy light from the sun, especially when doing different activities that require vision. And when they come indoors, they have the three clips, daytime, evening and nighttime. So they'll have the yellow one, the orange and the red to protect from artificial lighting.

Makes sense. Well, thank you so much, Rudy. This was super informative today. I so appreciate you. I will link all of this up in the show notes you want to find out if you're watching on YouTube, it'll be down below. But viva rays.com for slash Natalie Jill can also use coupon Natalie Jill to save 10%. I just literally learned all the details about this as you were learning about it. I have heard about blue light like you have. I'm curious your thoughts. If you'll try out blocking some of this artificial light, you'll start trying to get in more of that sunlight. I'm curious your thoughts, your feedback around this. And I love what you created, Rudy. I'm sure a lot of people are going to be trying to copy you. It's brilliant what you came up with here. So thank you so much for being here today and explaining to us.

Yeah, thanks for being a great host.