Andrew Huberman· PhD
Sunlight, Mitochondria, Tool: Infrared Light & Melatonin
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Sunlight, Mitochondria, Tool: Infrared Light & Melatonin
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Infrared light (melatonin production in the mitochondria)
Infrared light also creates melatonin in the mitochondria of every cell of your body- not just your brain.
melatonin is the master antioxidant it's anti-cancer I think everyone agrees with that like that's pretty much not debated very so if infrared light exposure is going to stimulate melatonin production uh you know vastly at the sub cellular level
their whole premise is it's not just about melatonin at night and it's actually maybe even more so about melatonin during the day because that's really what's keeping all of this in check
how interesting that infrared light has an a sun protective factor and again it it kind of all comes back to this ethos that I consistently see occurring in this space that what we have evolved doing is what our bodies are expecting whether it's food or light environment or sleep or circadian rhythms and so of course light is a food in some ways light is a nutrient and I'm sure other people have said this that when we have blue light indoors this is a processed food of light this is a we're essentially I'm eating Cheetos I'm eating light Cheetos right now unfortunately and I try not to I don't eat Cheetos in my normal life but sometimes for you guys to make a podcast I'll eat some light Cheetos but that's a tricky thing for people and so we'll talk in the podcast about how to mitigate that how to create better light environments to get Whole Food light throughout the day so what do we have for spectrum here yeah so you can see and spectrometers are fantastic but they don't cover like how vast the infrared range is I I I need to upgrade but you can at least see we have a very high spike in the blue range like very this is classic LED Spectrum so oh yeah let me I think that caught some of the INF the incandescent oh there is an incandescent there it might be I think so oh wow I didn't notice that we have a really high Spike at 456 nanometers that's like the peak wavelength here and then we have you know a some some of the rest of the visible but then you see as we get to like 700 nomers which is where the infrared starts it's it's pretty much zero it's zero so you can see that we're we're completely deficient can we check these let's check the incandescents because this is part of the solution we're going from you know a vast spectrum of light to where we have all you know what I mentioned 70% of the photons coming from sunlight are infrared and now that's that's zero so and those photons are essential to make a vitamin quote unquote in our bodies melatonin at a subcellular level in the mitochondria and if we don't make that melatonin we're potentially causing harm for our bodies we have an near infrared and infrared deficiency that's wild yeah and those lights are not incandescent because this I don't even know what this is that's that's that's a weird LED kind of combination but you can see it's it's also very artificial and contains absolutely no infrared there's no infrared barely any red and has some weird spikes to it so that's like more of a warmer LED Spectrum whereas these are like cool LEDs which super high in blue so super high in blue here yeah and as you talked about so maybe that's talk about blue light and then we'll go to infrared um so what's the problem with this blue light Tristan
I don't have any of that subcellular mitochondrial melatonin production which is an antioxidant to balance the oxid stress coming from the blue lights that I was just exposed to
And if you've listened to my podcast, you know that we also make melatonin and all of the mitochondria of our whole body when we're exposed to infrared light.
And we also make melatonin and all of the mitochondria of our whole body when we're exposed to infrared light.
I did not know until I talked to him that the mitochondria in our whole body, not just in our eyes or our brain, use infrared light to make melatonin and use that as sort of a systemic store of an antioxidant in our body.
We know that infrared light is used to make melatonin in the mitochondria in every cell in the body. Melatonin acts as a systemic antioxidant. And so I think most people are systemically deficient in melatonin, something that can't necessarily be, you know, counteracted by taking a melatonin supplement.
So, the infrared triggers melatonin production in the mitochondria, and that balances the visible.