Red Light, LED Lighting and Mitochondrial Function

That long wavelength light is not the light that burns your skin.

It's not the wavelength of

light, and it was present in incandescent

bulbs. So incandescents are...

You know, even if you see a white incandescent bulb,

it's got short wavelength, so it's got blue, it's got green,

it's got yellows, all

the way out to red, and in some cases, even infrared.

That infrared and

red, we'll just call it long wavelengths.

Believe it or not, beautiful

data on this from Glen Jeffery's

lab, University

College London, it can go into and through your body,

and it actually helps, this is a loose term as I'm using it, charge

your mitochondria. The mitochondria, there's water in that area, and the water

absorbs the red light. If you've ever gone swimming

and you've gone down, you know,

snorkeling or something below a certain depth,

you lose the reds, okay?

Because the reds get absorbed.

Oh.

So your mitochondria function better, you increase ATP

production, your metabolism increases in the presence

of red li-

long wavelength light to the skin. This study has been done.

Shine li- long wavelength light on somebody,

watch blood glucose levels in a blood

glucose test, and it's blunted. Now,

the LED lights that are commonly

used now are most everywhere. They

are truncated so that it's

all short wavelength and medium wavelength light, and

that short wavelength

light in the absence of long wavelength

light has been shown to damage the

mitochondria. There's a

kind of a niche group online,

different from the, from

the butthole sunners,

so that are very bullish about this

idea that the switch from incandescents,

um, to LEDs,

and not just screens, but general lighting, is causing

disruptions in mitochondrial function.

This used to be considered crazy