📍 Hi, Dr Moore-Ede how are you doing?

 

Very good, thank you. Good to see you, Mark.

 

Same here. Thank you for joining the show. You are the author of the book, The Light Doctor, where you're talking about how to use light to boost health, improve sleep, and live longer. Before we dive deep into it, tell us a little bit about how you came upon this topic.

 

It's right from my earliest days, I trained in medicine and then in surgery and 36 hour shifts under bright hospital fluorescent lights back in those days. And I found I got really intrigued with the subject because I was so fatigued, my sleep was disrupted, I was making nodding off in the operating room, writing prescriptions didn't make sense.

 

The next day. And so I really delved into this and actually did a detour out of surgery to go to Harvard Medical School and do a PhD in a very new area of science at that time, which is the science of circadian clocks, the clocks in your head and your brain, that time, sleep, and your hormones, melatonin at night, cortisol in the morning.

 

Everything in the body is on a 24 hour schedule or a near 24 hour schedule, and all of it is synchronized by the light we see.

 

By the light we see. So we're just biologically designed to follow the natural light patterns? Is that what it is?

 

That's right. We are synchronized. Now, we, it turns out the clocks in our brains keep us on a near 24 hour schedule, but we'll drift if we don't see light and dark.

 

And the problem is that when things drift, it's a bit like jet lag. Our body gets out of whack. We're very precisely time machines, the human body. Getting exposed, as most of human history, people were in bright, blue rich daylight during the daytime hours, and slept in the dark at night. But we've made the transition now, so we spend more than 90 percent of our time indoors in roughly twilight levels of lighting, and then we have the lights on in the evening so we're really messing up this circadian clocks, our biological timing with that, because we've lost those natural time cues.

 

And it's particularly bad with the modern LED lights, they're favored and the regulators actually ban incandescents and halogens recently to concentrate us on these LED lights. So the trouble is. They get energy efficient because they have so much blue in them, which is fine during the daytime, but it's immensely harmful at night.

 

That's one of the problems. The light bulbs we use, the light fixtures we use, the screens we use, are actually sending our brains and our bodies the wrong message. They're telling us it's still daytime when we're using them in the evenings or any time at night.

 

Interesting. Increasingly, I'm noticing in my life and lives of other people's I work with clients, listeners, they can also relate to this that getting good sleep at night is becoming increasing difficult.

 

We're relying more and more on melatonin pills and magnesium glycinate pills, but you were saying that perhaps just merely adjusting the light sources at night, we could drastically improve the quality of sleep.

 

Yeah, and that's really been proven. It's not just sleep. Sleep is one of the most obvious things, but whether our tendency to get overweight or to start developing things like diabetes or heart disease or even cancers.

 

Are actually related to whether or not you are your body is in sync with the natural world. And when it gets out of sync with the use of these LED lights, particularly in the evening hours, nighttime hours, then in fact, a lot of ill health results and we now know why we know exactly. It turns out it's not all blue light.

 

It's in the light spectrum. In other words, in regular white light that we see as white or yellowish light, all the colors of the rainbow exist. And that is true for sunlight, but when we use artificial LED lights, they emphasize they have a big spike of blue, because that's how they're energy efficient.

 

We can't see it, can't judge it by looking at it, but that blue in the lights is actually disrupting our circadian clocks. So it's a fundamental problem. We've got a very convenient technology. We take the light switch on the wall for granted. We assume just light is light. But in fact, the light through your eyes is as important as the food that goes into your stomach.

 

The air we breathe into our lungs or the water we drink it's just as important for our health to manage the light as all these other things that we're used to focusing on, but people just don't realize that light is key, and yet it's a very simple thing to address. By getting the right lights at the right time.

 

Yeah, now that you mentioned it, there's so much information out there, so much documentaries out there, about what food to eat and what not to eat and what is clean and what is not. I have never watched a documentary or come across any content that kind of put it like how you put it, that the light we see is just as important as the food we consume.

 

Yeah, I think it's, that's absolutely true, Mark. me. I was looking at publishers, the big publishing houses like Penguin Random House. They've got about 1, 900, 1, 900 books on various types of diets and nutrition. And only one book on light, and that was written back in 2013 before these LED lights came along.

 

It's crazy. People are so totally focused there. I've been on Oprah and she's so focused on diets and nutrition. Very hard to get her attention. on other things like light. Interesting.

 

So just to delve a little bit deeper, you talked about how these blue lights are messing with the circadian rhythm, which makes sense as to why it's affecting our sleep.

 

But then you also said it's affecting obesity and heart disease. Are those things just trickle down effects of lack of sleep or is the blue light affecting them directly as well?

 

It's really affecting them directly. And what we know, for example, is the blueness in light, the blue part of the light spectrum, the white light spectrum, the blue part of it, is number one, it makes us hungry.

 

And so people who are in LED light at night tend to snack more. In fact, people working night shifts eat twice as many snacks when they're under blue rich light as opposed to light that is still white, but has no blue in it. We know that a very common test of how our bodies responded. In fact, diagnostic tests for diabetes is the so called glucose tolerance test.

 

That's the one where you fast overnight, they give you a bottle of sugar water to drink. And then every half hour or so they take a blood sample and they track as insulin and Glucose levels rise, and then normal person fall again before the end of two hours. In a diabetic, it rises still further and then stays up.

 

That's the diagnosis of diabetes. I can put you as a perfectly healthy person, Mark, and I can put you in a room full of LED lights overnight, and I can render you diabetic by the morning, or pre diabetic. In other words, you will fail that glucose tolerance test. Again, that's something that's acting on what's called insulin resistance, a fundamental part of the body.

 

So it's actually far more than sleep. Sleep is just one outcome, but it's your metabolism that's really affected. It's how you gain weight. It's how the body suppresses cancer cells and melatonin is suppressed by this blue light. And one of the key things about melatonin is it stops cancer cells growing.

 

So people who are working under light at night or sleeping under light at night, that's very important. It's not just night shift workers, it's many people sleep with the lights on. It's amazing. I hadn't realized quite how large it was, but it's more like 40 percent of the population and over 50 percent of the older population is sleeping with their lights on at night.

 

And the trouble is that's having the same effect as working the night shift, and it's causing these increase double the rate of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancers. In people who sleep with the lights on. In fact, it affects lifespan. People who are sleeping with the lights on at night actually die sooner.

 

And the effect is as big as smoking or not smoking. It's that type of scale of effect. So it's really something we're doing that. And the good news, it's so addressable. In other words, if you think about all the environmental pollutants out there that we worry about, the PFAS forever chemicals, the microplastics, all the other nasty stuff, asbestos and other chemicals in the environment, they're very hard to get rid of.

 

Very hard. But this is so simple. All you need to do is change the light bulb.

 

So obviously. First question is what type of light bulbs to use and let's talk about situations which are under our control. For example, light bulbs at our house, as long as we know what to get, we can replace them. But then also let's talk about situations that are not under our control.

 

For example, if you're going to work, and you have a late night shift. You can't control the bulbs they use, what to do in situations like that as well.

 

Exactly. There are two things. And in my book, The Light Doctor, I talk about a whole chapter about when you don't control the space, which is exactly what you're talking about.

 

First of all educating people, and my book is for that very purpose, educating people on this issue, and particularly people who control lighting decisions, your boss at work, the person who manages, a space have enough people start speaking up and educating, then we can get things changed.

 

And we've got a lot of companies around, a lot of Fortune 500 companies have actually put in lights that are zero blue overnight and have blue during the day. So that's happening. Secondly another alternative is to use so called blue blocking glasses, but they're beware because a lot of blue blocking glasses block the wrong blue.

 

They're really just placebos. So if they block the sort of violet blues and the indigo blues and the royal blues, they're not really doing much good because they're not actually blocking the key blue, which is a sky blue color of the clear blue sky. That's the blue that's in the rainbow light spectrum.

 

That every light is made up of and if you get glasses that do that, they tend to yellow orange type of glass. They tend to look like, but that is a solution. And that's a solution people can use in front of their computer screens as well, because that's another source of light, both of us right now looking at computer screens.

 

Okay, we're doing it during the daytime. No problem. But if we did this podcast at nine o'clock at night, for example, we'll be dosing ourselves from that computer screen, but the wrong type of blue. You can use these blue blocking glasses. At that time and now what's coming out will be very shortly announced, are computer screens that automatically do it for you.

 

There's no reason that computer screens have to be blasting blue light at you. When you see the white light of a computer screen, it's actually made a lot of blue. You can still get a pretty white light. Removing all the blue and that's a very exciting breakthrough now. So that will soon become, those will become available as well.

 

So let's go a point by point. First one where we talked about, we are going to work and we want to be able to talk to our supervisor and spread the education regarding how blue light is affecting everybody, as a person who knows very little about it, how do I even determine if my, the office light is the correct light?

 

Because they all look white. How do I know if the company is actually using the light or not?

 

That's exactly the problem, Mark. Just the human eye you just see it as white or yellowish white light. And it is hard to tell. Now, it is, number one, it is measurable. So there is a device called a spectrometer.

 

It's the size of my Cell phone that you can put in the light and it will actually tell you can also use there are special glasses that are available. That you actually we've got. I can demonstrate another time, but simple classes that refract the light and you can see what all the colors of the spectrum and the light by looking at it and tell whether it has blue in it or not.

 

I think that's a very exciting simple way. The other is quite frankly. Asking the manufacturer and the manufacturer should provide the light spectrum. In other words, what's the rainbow makeup of any light? And that's something that most manufacturers or many manufacturers do do provide.

 

Again, it's a matter of education. So in my book, I talk about how do you judge lights? It's not the color. People often go by something called the color temperature of the light. Also coordinated color temperature or CCT. That's on the, sometimes on the label. The trouble with that is it doesn't, low color temperatures or high color temperatures doesn't actually guarantee what you're seeing.

 

Yes, it is a little tricky, but there are ways to measure it and their information should be available for the manufacturer. Our rule of thumb is you want to see lights that have less than 2% Of the blue in them out of all the colors of the rainbow. So if all the visible light if it's only 2 percent less than 2 percent blue, then it's safe to use in the evenings.

 

If it and during the day, you want light that's more than 20 percent blue. If you can. Now, there are other things you can do to solve the problem. One is that you should always try to get out in the mornings and get exposed to blue. Blue, rich sunlight, daylight, because that is many times more intense, 100 to 1000 times more intense than the light inside.

 

And that, particularly in the morning hours, is very healthy and sets your clock and makes you sleep better. People who get out in the morning sleep better. They also, people who have, working near windows, where morning sunlight comes in sleep better and do better. And interestingly, patients admitted to a hospital, psychiatric patients admitted to a hospital with depression and severe depression, anxiety.

 

If they're admitted to rooms facing south and east to see the morning sun, they will get out of hospital in half the time as compared to those Who are in rooms facing north and west. In other words, they don't see the morning sun. So the morning sun, get out in the sun. You can walk, jog, even sit, you can do whatever as long as you're out there.

 

That's a big different rain or shine, because even when it's a dark, cloudy day, there's 10, 000 blocks of light coming in as compared to only 300 that we see indoors. Of course, on a sunny day, you're getting 50, 000, 100, 000 lux of light, measurement of light. That's one rule. The second rule is make sure you sleep in the dark.

 

We're amazingly sensitive to even small amounts of light at night. People who and give you an example, just having one or two candles in the room, just to give you an example of, if you have a couple of candles in the room, that even that amount of light. will actually increase your risk of diabetes by 30%.

 

So you have to keep it very dim in there or very dark in there. Those are the principles. Regain what we had from Mother Nature. And we have to work indoors and live indoors. That's when you need electric lights to be high in blue during the daytime, and obviously zero blue or very low blue at night.

 

Interestingly our ancestors, they used wood fires, they used candles, those have virtually no blue in them. So they never had this problem. It's only when we invented electric lights that we got into this problem. And especially the rates of breast cancer and other diseases escalated after the introduction of fluorescent lights, because they were blue rich, and even worse.

 

With our modern introduction of LEDs, which is now basically everything on the shelves today that you can buy on these blue rich LEDs. So we've got a real problem. We're trying to save the planet. We're trying to address global warming. But we're harming ourselves when we use the wrong, it's a wrong solution to use lights intensely blue. Human health is quite frankly just as important, not more important than the long term health of the planet. You've got to do both, of course. But that's the challenge we face.

 

Yeah, beautiful, flourishing planet that has no humans to live in. It's useless. Yeah,

 

it is pretty useless. That's right.

 

So going back to again, practical tips. If you're going to war and not many people might have the courage to go to war. or the interest to even look up the manufacturer or use those devices. Would you see a practical way to protect yourself from this is to just buy these glasses that you talked about when you're going to work and not really sure about the quality of light you're receiving?

 

Yeah. Remember during the daytime, if you're working during the daytime, you want light. So you actually want to try to work if you can. The worst thing is one of those office cubicles and a big, Big building with relatively dim lighting and or led lighting. That's not good for you at all.

 

You can work near windows or get outside during the day. Sometimes that's good. That's why the move to work at home makes enables us. To get more natural exposure like that. That's one side of it. The other side is, as I say, the blue blocking glasses are really for the evening hours only.

 

That's what we've got to get rid of. And that's not during the daytime. You're actually going in the wrong direction. You want to see all the blue you can during the daytime. So do not wear those glasses during the day. But in the evening hours, particularly for the last three hours before bedtime, that's when you try to find lights that are low in bulbs of blue.

 

You can use red lights, you can use yellow, orange lights, or you can use some of these modern lights now that I was involved in inventing that look pretty good in terms of color, but they're not. But they don't have any, they have zero blue content in them.

 

Interesting. So that brings me to my second question.

 

As someone who has, I'm very partial towards daylight. I like the daylight bulbs, right? When I'm going to H E B, or Home Depot or somewhere to buy my bulbs, I'll be honest, I'm looking for the maximum wattage for the cheapest price. Now I learned that from you that's not the best idea.

 

Perhaps the reason why I'm not getting good sleep for the last decade. As a consumer, now, when I go into a store like that, I understand in theory you talked about as little blue light as possible. What exactly am I looking for that is available on these commercial bulb boxes that's going to help me determine which to buy and which not to buy?

 

That's tough because they don't label them properly half the time. You can go on the web and search for, on Amazon or wherever, and search for zero blue. For example, A company called Sora, S O R A, produces a zero blue bulb, right? And and it's, they've got an Amazon store and all the rest of it, and they've got these zero blue bulbs.

 

There are other manufacturers who do it, but if you look at no blue or zero blue bulbs, that's the ideal one. Just low, changing the CCT, That's something you will see on the box, the color, coordinate, temperature, but that is, you need to get to very low CCTs to be effective. You need to get down 2000 Kelvin or below.

 

So the scale on the CCT, the typical lights we I used to having a between 3, 000 Kelvin. But now these LEDs are going up to 5, 000 or 6, 000 Kelvin. Sometimes they become harsh and bluish as you get up there. But the trouble is just a 2700 Kelvin, which is you can find these down the shelves. still there's 8 percent blue content.

 

Remember, you want to get to less than 2 percent blue content to be effective. So it is a challenge. And as I say, my book, The Light Doctor, and I've got a website called circadianlight. org will steer you in the direction of where do you find these solutions.

 

Yeah, absolutely. I think those are invaluable resources because I'm thinking for myself, and as someone who understands this concept now, I wouldn't even know where to go and find these bulbs.

 

But if there's a resource like that, especially even our listeners can go and navigate themselves there and find it. If I do buy these zero blue bulbs from the resources you mentioned, and they're all over my house, and in the evening I'm just relaxing and watching television. Television is still emitting the blue light.

 

So would you recommend I still have those blue glasses when I'm watching TV?

 

Yeah, I think it'd be better you did, yes, especially as you get, close to bedtime or the hour or two before bedtime, you want to try to get all the blue light out of your world. Now, for example in a recent study done by Harvard, by the McLean Hospital of Harvard, looked at a whole group of teenagers in school, and they gave them blue blocking classes in the evening, and they gave them a light box that produced blue light in the morning.

 

So they got the. Remove no blue in the evenings, and they got enhanced blue in the mornings. And those teenagers slept better, felt better, but also their math scores went up. Very interesting. And they did all sorts of MRI, brain tests of brain connectivity and so forth. And those showed great improvement.

 

Yeah, it's very much provable that this works. And but it's much more general than sleep. Sleep is one part of it, but it's not, as we've discussed, it's not a simple effect of whether you're, sleep deprived or not. It's much bigger than that. It affects many other systems of the body.

 

But it is addressable. And if you and you do that regularly, it can make a big difference.

 

Yeah, definitely. There's much bigger impact on the human health other than just lack of sleep. I think lack of sleep is the one that is most easily recognized by somebody. Whereas, them becoming slowly obese over time, it might be hard to determine if it's because of the McDonald's happy menu or the light that you're consuming at night.

 

I know that was certainly a problem for me, but maybe there was light going on there as well. So my next question is, We talked about darkness and being able to sleep in darkness and how some people are leaving lights on and that's not a good idea. What are some solutions to be able to sleep in darkness?

 

We know about dark blinds, blackout curtains. I use, eye patches at night, like eye masks. Are those good? They give me complete darkness or is there something else going on with it?

 

No, those are good. Those are very good. So you've got the right principles darken out that we want to get extraneous light from the outside world, particularly if you live in an urban situation city environment with streetlights.

 

You want to try to block that out as much as you can. Eye masks is a good solution. Very, very clear. Science shows that those eye masks improve sleep and improve, the circ your circadian health. Also, when you do you have any light in the bedroom, you need to sometimes a little bit of light so you don't fall over things on the way to the bathroom, then use these yellow orange light type lights and have them down near the floor.

 

So because the light that's biggest effect on you is light that comes from eye level and above. And because the Part of the eye is that detects this blue or not, is actually in the part of the eye that's looking upwards and looking forwards, not the part of the eye that's looking downwards. So again, if you can light the floor with yellow, yellowish light, then and these things are readily available.

 

If anything looks really yellow, orange, then it's probably pretty safe.

 

Yeah, and I guess it's not only true for those who, who want to wake up in the middle of the night and use the restroom, but also people who do need the light to be on at night. I know people sometimes they're scared of darkness and they just need some light to be on.

 

And sometimes kids who might be scared of being in the bedroom by themselves, perhaps these types of yellowish orange lights dim towards the floor. That's a good thing. Medium, for them to get good sleep. That's

 

a solution if you do want lights in the bedroom. It just is but it's just amazing how much light there is and the effects on lifespan are enormous.

 

As I say, the people, both on our psychiatric health, the instance of depression and anxiety. 30 percent higher when people don't get outside in the day and get daylight when they sleep in the with the lights on at night. The instance of their lifespan years on effect on their healthy lifespan.

 

So it's really pretty important to follow those rules. And what all we're doing really is going back to our natural world we had before electric light, natural light is hugely convenient. It's an incredible luxury, but we can't afford that luxury if we let it inadvertently harm our health.

 

Absolutely. Especially in a world where, there are so many pollutants in so many different forms, and we are finding increasing rates of obesity and heart disease and all these things, and we're trying to control the variables. This is an unknown variable, and I think that's where my next question is.

 

Having done so much research, having dedicated a considerable amount of life, professional life and personal life, promoting this and talking about this, What is your personal take on Why this is not as popular a topic, as opposed to a special diet that you can follow to live longer life?

 

You talked about, how we all know about sleep and sleep deprivation.

 

In my early days, I did a lot of work on sleep deprivation and those things and fatigue, and people weren't taking fatigue seriously at all. I think the fact that you take that for granted now means I was successful in the first part of my career. in educating people about the issues of sleep and fatigue, people are much more aware of that.

 

The issue here is the science is already developed, but there is always a challenge getting people's awareness, getting people's attention. I'd like to say, remind people that you've heard inventions, people talking invention. Oh, it's the best thing since sliced bread. I may have heard that phrase.

 

It took 10 years between the invention of the bread slicing machine and it actually becoming popular. It's an education and that's the whole reason for writing my book and trying to get it out there, trying to get people aware, because quite frankly, you meet the guy on the street or your friends or anybody else, they haven't got a clue.

 

The scientists know about it. The scientists talk about it. In fact, it's so well known in the science community, but as someone pointed out, scientists only speak to each other. But they don't speak to their neighbors. And so part of what I'm trying to do is get out and speak to those neighbors, speak to everyone, and I really appreciate Mark being on your show because this is the way to do it is to get those conversations going, get people aware, get them looking, getting them reading the book, and it's written in a very readable way.

 

It's designed not for a scientist to read. It's really designed to help educate people. That's the message. Get the book out there and share it. And share it with your friends.

 

Absolutely. Absolutely. When it comes to the commercial end of things, are the zero blue bulbs significantly more expensive than the commercial bulbs that are available out there?

 

Yes, that's always true with anything that's new, as in this world, everything that's mass produced is, the price comes can come down as you're adopting a new technology. It's always more expensive. Unfortunately, the choice is out there to get cheap. White LED lights.

 

They're getting very cheap, mass produced in Asia very cheap and produced by the billions, right? And, or, which are going to harm your health, and then if you get, overweight, you get some diabetes you start having to take a Zempic or one of these other medications cost you 600, 800 a month.

 

The price of a light bulb, spending 25, 30 bucks on one of these light bulbs as opposed to three bucks. Sounds expensive, but not compared to what you do when you are treat yourself with cheap junk light. And I always like to say this is junk light is just like junk food. It's cheap and attractive and easy to use.

 

Oh, but oh my gosh, doesn't it do you harm?

 

Absolutely. And that makes more sense, right? There is more financial incentive for businesses to push the cheap light bulbs because they can mass produce and make a lot of money. But at the end of the day, it's up to the consumer to understand the importance of spending a couple extra dollars, but essentially improving their lifespan.

 

And the listeners of this podcast, we believe in the components of good life to be health, wealth, and happiness. And without health, there is no wealth. And without health, there is no happiness. If we are going to live in a world where we're going to eat organic food, non gmo food, non processed food, and we're going to go to that extent.

 

By, a 40 piece of steak, as opposed to a 10 piece of steak. Why not also buy these bulbs that can not only improve the seed quality and help us short term, but also help us avoid heart disease, obesity, And potentially make our lifespans longer.

 

Yeah, it's a one time cost, too. In other words, these LED light bulbs are not like your incandescents which used to burn out after a few weeks or a month.

 

These last years. So it's really, if you had to spend 30 bucks on a light bulb and it lasts you three years, it's really incredibly small expense as compared to other things you do. That steak you buy, that only lasts a few minutes once it's on your plate. Yeah, no, this is something where. It's just a matter of awareness and the prices will come down as the volume goes up.

 

It's a classic problem. Manufacturers won't build things unless people are buying them. People won't buy them unless they're aware of them and are, and looking for them. So you get trapped in this thing. And we're just, now the key is getting that breakthrough, getting past the tipping point.

 

And soon every light will be circadian friendly because why would you buy lights that either harm your health makes no sense at all. Absolutely.

 

Absolutely. I love it. So would you say that is your ultimate vision to be able to see a world where it's the zero blue light lights are the only lights that are being used.

 

Is that what you would want your life's work to be about.

 

Absolutely. We're on the way there and there will be a time when we look back and say, why on earth will we have light that harms us? Why would you do that? And yes, every light should be effectively circadian friendly. In other words, if it's in rooms that you only use during the daytime, they need to be, blue rich lights.

 

But if the rooms that you use in the evenings or at night, they need to be zero blue. And that will become the message. And the invention's been made. The science has been done. This is now something just ready for uptake. And it always starts things start off slowly at first, and they're early adopters, but we just, and there are people using these lights and enthusiastic about them.

 

We've put them in over 65 Fortune 500 companies. Showed big effects in terms of improved sleep, reduced gastrointestinal and other disorders improved alertness, safety, and so forth. We've proven that now over the last five years that the science has been done. The lights are proven. The question is now getting the people to start asking for them.

 

And they won't ask for them unless they understand why And as I say, that's the purpose of the Lighthouse. I urge everyone to go. It's a 33 percent discount on Amazon right now. And if you've got people who want to buy 10 or more books I can get a, I can get it even better prices than the Amazon price for you to spread the word around.

 

I love it. I love every bit of it. Thank you so much. You are, you're absolutely right. First, we have to educate and then some have to adopt and then they have to inspire others to adopt. I remember when the seatbelts were first introduced, people didn't want to wear them because they thought it would, hinder their freedom.

 

But now after so many years we can't even think about driving without seatbelt because it saves life. So I hope that In a couple of years, we get to a point where we realize the importance of light as not just something that we used to see things in the house but the right amount of light so that it can actually save lives and improve human life and quality.

 

Absolutely. Right on.

 

Thank you so much for being on the show. I will for our listeners here, I'm going to put Dr. Martin's website on their link to the books there. So I highly encourage you to check out the book and start the journey. Changing the light bulbs in the house to the ones that can bring us better quality of life.

 

Absolutely. And thank you, Mark.