Meredith Oke: All right, Scott Zimmerman, welcome back to the QVC podcast.

Really lovely to see you again.

Scott Zimmerman: Yeah.

Beautiful warm day here.

Sun's coming through.

Meredith Oke: Beautiful.

Where are you again?

Remind me.

Scott Zimmerman: New Jersey.

We had 13 Saturdays of rain.

Meredith Oke: Oh, I was gonna say, I have a beautiful warm day here.

I'm just across.

I'm just across the river in New York.

We're right near the Tappan Zee.

Scott Zimmerman: Ah.

Meredith Oke: So I have your weather.

It is gorgeous.

And yeah, it's the rain.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah.

So sun's out.

We're in a good mood.

Scott Zimmerman: Yeah.

Meredith Oke: All right, so I, I'm really happy to have you back.

I love how you explain things and your energy and your dedication to, like, all this craziness that we're all trying to understand.

So, as I mentioned, I was.

I want to start with this post that you wrote recently.

And I know it's part of something bigger which you can tell me about, but it was.

There's some very.

There's some sentences in here that I'd love to unpack with you.

I think they're just like, super helpful.

So.

Okay, so I'm just going to start reading.

This is what you wrote on LinkedIn.

There are, there are dozens.

There are dozens of ways to quantify sunlight.

And it matters how we present the data because it can mislead, hide, or enlighten.

The impact of sunlight on the rapid increases in metabolic diseases is best illustrated using photons per second per area, per energy unit.

Scott Zimmerman: You know.

Meredith Oke: Tell me, tell the English major what we're talking about here.

Scott Zimmerman: Well, you know, you can, you can put, you have a bunch of things and you can put them in different bins and depending on how big the bin is, the number they'll go in and how.

So you, you have this way.

And so we present data are the solar spectrum in a certain way, usually in watts per meter squared per degree per nanometer, the irradiation as a function of wavelength that makes this nice little peak where right in the visible.

And everybody looks at it.

And then you see the infrared, it goes way down and it looks like it's almost trivial.

Now I can take that exact same solar spectrum and I can reorient it or re bin it into what matters to the body, which is how much energy, how many photons are in a particular energy band.

Okay, Think about it like a solar cell.

You know, a solar cell.

The solar cell guys have these.

Build these cells that have band gaps.

So within the band gap, photons that have that energy can do generate an electron.

Okay.

Photons that don't have that energy, don't generate an electron.

Well, a similar type thing's going on in the body.

We have all these enzymes and activations and barrier energy barriers that are used to regulate how the body works.

You know, it's not like you have this.

Everything's just a wide open wild west and everybody's everything.

Every chemical reaction is happening time.

We have very controlled ways that we go through various.

Whether it be the electron transport chain, whether it be immune response, all these things are controlled using enzymes and various other things and light to essentially make us live and be healthy.

When we start getting things out of whack is when we are unhealthy.

And so all I was trying to show was is that if you put it in terms of electron volt energy, which we call electron volt, that's the amount of energy it takes to move an electron through one volt of potential.

And you know, it has a certain amount of energy.

If we reorient or re.

Graph.

These are, these are not really graph.

These are hit what they call histograms.

Okay.

And I'm sorry, it's getting a little deep, but bottom line is you can put it in the right bins that matter to the body, which is in, like I say, photons per second.

You know, when you talk about quantum, we always talk about photons.

Well, now you need to also talk about electrons.

And that's in electron volts.

So these photons are, if we show it in a manner that is more applicable to mitochondria, all of a sudden you get this peak at 0.75 electron volts, which is about 1600 nanometers.

Now I was talking, I found this from the solar cell guys.

And I was talking to Bob and I said, bob, what's this peak?

And Bob says, well, everybody knows what that peak is.

That's the hydrogen minus ion opacity window in the sun.

And I said, not all of us knew that that was what was going on.

But it turns out that there is a particular energy band coming from the sun that in that band there are more photons released by the sun because they're allowed to escape from deeper in the atmosphere of the Sun.

And this is well known to astronomers, but not well known to me and not well known to any biologist that I know of.

But it turns out that it is an opportunity.

And it appears based on how the body has adapted over billions of years and life forms have adapted, that that's an optimum region that where most of the activation energies associated with biology actually occur.

Is it a coincidence?

Maybe it's a coincidence, but it looks like it's actually intentional.

So essentially there's this region in the infrared where that aligns very well with what is going on on a biological level as far as the amount of energy it takes to get you to move an electron in the electron transport chain or any of these other biological processes.

And to see that changes your, in my opinion, changes your entire perspective as to what's important in sunlight.

You know, it doesn't mean that you don't need sunlight to see, it doesn't mean you don't need UV to do, to make vitamin D and all the steroids.

But in the infrared, and this is not the near infrared, this is farther out in the infrared, there's a kind of like this merger or this coincidence of what sun provides and what we need biologically as far as energy levels.

And when we talk about quantum, then you get into this issue of.

It's very well understood that photosynthesis and electron transport chain is a quantum process.

Okay.

What happens is, is the electron, there are a series of barriers in the electron transport chain.

And either through enzymes or just general mobility of the molecules or sunlight, that that electron is allowed to jump that barrier, generate some protons that help that, and goes through a series of these steps.

Those steps are all in this region as far as energy levels.

And so it appears that from everything we're looking at, that literally sunlight doing a process called, and you can look it up as photon assisted quantum tunneling is essentially allowing us to be more likely for that electron to jump and therefore generate a little bit more ATP, more efficiently generate ATP, which is, agrees with Glenn's data, where he's shining some longer wavelength light.

And it doesn't have to be any particular wavelength, it can be a lot of different wavelengths.

And all of a sudden the ATP production efficiency goes up, CO2 levels drop, are increase as well.

So we know that that is, so we have done something with light to enhance the efficiency of, of the electron transport chain.

Meredith Oke: Wow.

Okay, so.

Oh, so cool.

Okay, so cool.

So I've a couple of things.

One, I'm hearing that what you're talking about is a framework for looking at sunlight as an energy source for biology as opposed to the traditional way of looking at it.

Scott Zimmerman: Excellent assessment.

Yeah, better than I do.

I appreciate that.

Meredith Oke: And then second of all, if we lack, if our biology lacks exposure to this specific bandwidth that you're talking about, we, we can't live.

Scott Zimmerman: Well, I wouldn't say you can't live.

I mean, that's what's so beautiful about how you got energy from the sun coming in from this direction.

Higher energy, lower energy, you've got our basic surroundings.

Our body is sitting here at a temperature and our surroundings are at a temperature that's enough to where it kind of gets into the same region.

But it appears based on looking at it now from this different perspective, that there is a huge advantage associated with bringing in these lower energy photons.

Because bear in mind, you know, if you're looking at the electron transfer chain, it's a less than a volt or electron volt or the energy level is fairly low and they do a series of hopping in order to get from, from one potential level down to another potential level and generate the protons.

So and those protons then drive the ATP production.

But it is pretty clear from what we're looking at is that there is a role that sunlight plays in enhancing the efficiency of which you make ATP and therefore taking that away and only putting us in these dark environments.

The modern cave that we have where it's all high energy photons in perspective, we're talking about 0.75 electron volts in down here where we're talking about going on with the electron transfer chain.

We're talking about, when we look visually it's three to two, two to three electron volts.

So much higher energy.

So if they come in and they get involved in the process they generate, they, they can definitely kick the electron up over the barrier.

But they also, the excess generates a lot of reactive oxygen species.

So.

Meredith Oke: Okay, and when that is happening, when we, our, our light sources are mostly artificial and inside and we're not outside enough or is that.

Scott Zimmerman: Well, no, it's happening when you're outside.

But what it, what it appears to be happening is, is that the higher energy photons are being used for important features.

You need the, the uv, which is about three to four electron volts to generate the things we need for vitamin D, for steroids, for cortisol, all these things.

So we need that to happen.

But that process is very energetic and damaging.

You can get sunburned, you can get all this kind of stuff, then you drop down into the visible and we need that to be able to see.

But again it has enough energy to break bonds and do things that are negative.

And then you get into the near infrared and you start to see beneficial versus harmful.

Still need these functions to go on up here, but they're in.

The farther we get down, closer we get to the energy levels that are being used in things like the electron transport chain, the more, the less reactive oxygen species being generated and the more efficient we are at generating ATP and other things.

Meredith Oke: Okay, so how does that translate into what we should do like optimally so to expose ourselves to this window that all the astronomers knew about with the peak and the energy cell, the solar cell guys know about with the peak, but the biologists have no idea, even though what you're saying is that it's of crucial for optimal functioning of biology.

So when is that?

Scott Zimmerman: Well, I guess what I'd say is when we're at the body is obviously designed under the assumption that we're exposed to a broadband emitter.

Okay, okay.

Meredith Oke: What do you mean by broadband emitter?

Scott Zimmerman: Broadband sunlight, moonlight fire, incandescents, things like our light bulbs, you know, those type of things.

Even the thermal vents down in the bottom of the ocean are broadband thermal emitters.

And they follow more like a Planckian type response.

Okay.

Which means, not to be fancy, it just means that it's a large number of wavelengths.

Everything from UV all the way down into the far infrared.

Okay, okay.

Meredith Oke: So we're getting across the spectrum.

Scott Zimmerman: Across the spectrum.

Meredith Oke: All right.

And that's what we need.

Scott Zimmerman: And that's what we need.

That's what the bodies are developed for.

When you start parceling it up and you start.

There is no place in nature other than, as Bob would say, well, the auroras are narrow band.

Well, yeah, they're pretty, but they're not the main thing that bother us all.

But every other light source that we are exposed to has emitter is broadband.

I mean, when I say broadband, it goes from UV all the way out to the far infrared.

And so what appears, based on the stuff we're seeing, is that, you know, we need these higher energies to do things like crack the cholesterol down to where we can make the stuff we need for vitamin D.

Have to have that.

But it's a process that is very energetic.

And as you know, you can get a sunburn fairly easily, especially you and me.

So the point is, is that the other part, the longer wavelengths are there to deal with the fact that we have these, have to have these other higher energy photons involved in the process, you know, and if you don't, then you get more like what we're seeing now, the astronauts, the submariners.

I mean, if you look at some of the hostages that were held down in tunnels for a year without any sunlight, you see what's happening.

It's degrades you know, we need the spectrum, the characteristics of sunlight to be healthy.

And unfortunately, that's becoming less and less a part of our lives.

You know, people will sit in, in dark rooms with the TV blaring away.

That's just providing them with visible light, the incandescent lighting, the window, blocking all the things we're doing for blocking energy, then the air, infrared from coming into houses are all degrading the balance that nature provides.

And it's very clear, you know, I'm still totally on the near infrared, but I'm saying that what we're.

Every time we move out a little further in the spectrum to longer and longer wavelengths, we're finding out that the body has a lot of stuff that it's doing with it that we don't even understand.

And one of the problems, the fundamental problem to start the whole process is we keep on showing the solar spectrum in terms, in the wrong terms, units of measure.

And as soon as you do that, and I don't know if, you know, I don't think you have the graph to put up, but what Bob did is he showed it and showed the relationship between when you start putting in an electron volts and how that kind of just perfectly marries up with what we see as the average activation energy of biological processes.

And so to me, it's the most fundamental, amazing thing I've ever seen.

As far as, you know, it's clear that over billions of years our biology was moving closer and closer to this peak that had a little extra energy.

And it provides, it provides that extra energy in the form that we feel alive during the day, we get sleepy at night when it goes away.

You know, it's not that complicated.

I don't think.

It's just, you know, convincing everybody that they need to get outside a little bit and go to bed when it's dark, you know?

Meredith Oke: Yeah, no, the practical application is incredibly simple.

Yeah, go outside in the day, open a window, have lighting that's as close to broadband emitter as possible, and sleep in the dark when it gets dark.

Scott Zimmerman: I mean, it used to be that was the norm.

And people, you know, would go off to sanitariums to get more light and get more fresh air and get more, you know, good food.

And now we've kind of created this about the opposite environment where you can't have this.

You're not providing the full spectrum to the.

And I would argue that, that it's, it's even worse than that because we're talking about two very different balancing act that's going on in the body.

It needs these to counter the other when you introduce just one.

I did some bio sweat sensor measurements and we were looking at cortisol and it was amazing that you could sit in a dark room with a TV on 10 lux, just a basic sitting in front of TV and the cortisol was spiking all through that time.

Melatonin was kind of suppressed all through that time.

So I think that, you know, there's an argument to be made that it's not just that we should do this because it's more healthy, we should get rid of what we're doing or at least try and add some, some infrared back in to everything, because not having it is creating harm.

And that's my biggest concern.

With all the metabolic diseases.

One of the reasons that we're doing what we're doing is that metabolic diseases are all linked into the electron transport chain and the ATP production.

And it's very clear that the longer wavelengths are a positive reinforcement of that, making it more efficient.

More efficient.

The ATP is the healthier you basically are.

And you know, so.

So I think that getting it in the right terms and looking at how biology and sunlight are mixing together, we're.

I guess one of the analogies that's used is that we're kind of like this battery system and we charge up and that gets the, you know, as Glenn shown with his experiments, you know, just as short exposures can have a beneficial effect over a longer time frame because you're essentially making the ATP, the electron transport chain, more efficient and maybe even adding in more units into the, into it to where it's just operating at a better level, taking it away.

Meredith Oke: With that in that infrared exposure.

Scott Zimmerman: Right.

Okay.

Meredith Oke: And just to touch what you were saying earlier about how UV is, on the one hand, extremely UV exposure is necessary and important.

On the other hand, it does cause damage.

So on a sort of like a practical basis, you know, what I notice personally is if it's.

I'm outside on a hot summer day, direct sunlight on my body feels really good for, I don't know, let's say 20, 25 minutes, and then I kind of get, I get the inclination to go in the shade.

Scott Zimmerman: Yeah.

Meredith Oke: And that's.

Is that sort of what we're talking about, like just keeping that balance and even the shade and being outside is still having all those positive effects you described, especially on the body's optimization of ATP production.

That's still happening.

Scott Zimmerman: Yeah, I mean, I think that.

And we're going to find more and more of these biological processes that affect the immune system, that affect neurological.

I mean, you feel, you said, I feel.

Well, yeah, because your brain is basically having some response to making you feel a particular way.

I mean, and, you know, we started this out just doing the optics of looking at where light goes in the body.

But now what we're finding is, is that, you know, it's not just where it goes, it's also what it, you know, a number of the wavelengths have very localized, are absorbed very strongly.

There's a picture I put in the link at Lincoln Post here at least recently, where, you know, we all have black skin and white hair in the longer wavelengths.

And that means that the body is trying to absorb those photons preferentially and using them for something in particular.

It looks like immune as a pathogen barrier is one possibility, but, you know, in general, you need all the different components working together in unison rather than.

We have this tendency as a scientist to do reductionist experiments even.

Glenn's experiment was done at 670 nanometers.

Another one's at 1064.

That's not what's happening in the body.

When we're outdoors, we're getting all those wavelengths together.

Some are going deeper in the body, some are localized on the surface.

And as we move into shade, then it shifts it to more into the infrared, then the visible and the UV gets absorbed more strongly by the leaves and our surroundings.

So there's a shift in that general balance, but there's always something to counter the other.

Unfortunately, that's not what we do now.

I mean, we have said, okay, we only need from 400 to 650nm to see, to read, therefore.

Meredith Oke: So that's.

Oh, that's what our light bulbs were like.

Just that?

Scott Zimmerman: Just that.

Meredith Oke: But our biology was designed for, as you said, the broadband emissions, all of.

Scott Zimmerman: It, 250 out to 6,000 nanometers.

I mean, we are talking less than 10% of the spectral content of.

Is what we expose our children to every day.

And they don't get out getting what the wire.

You know, especially in urban areas, it's very difficult.

I understand it is.

I mean, if you're in prison, you got.

They got real problems.

And you know, and hospitals are terrible.

I mean, they're probably about the worst place you could go as far as this aspect of life.

But we know very strongly that ATP efficiency and ATP production is a very good marker of health.

I mean, if you have, if you're operating at a high level of ATP production and health or and efficiency, then it's a beneficial condition as far as our health is concerned.

And all I'm saying is is that we started out, you know, just to give you a framework.

UV starts here around 280 nanometers, goes down to about 400 some odd nanometers for when we start to see.

650 is what we mostly cut off for the LEDs.

Near infrared runs from 650 out to about 1100 or 1000 nanometers.

This other infrared, the shortwave infrared and minute infrared runs out to 6,000 nanometers.

And while the energy level of the photons may be less, less at the longer wavelengths, they appear to be more appropriate to do things with biology because those are the energy levels that we, that the body is using to regulate all our processes.

You know, other than seeing and generating, like I say, the uv, the majority of our bodily processes, the entire electron transport chain has a series of barriers that are less than an electron volt, are pretty close to electron volt, which is, you know, very small amount of energy.

You can come in with a big, heavy, big high energy boost and you'll have an effect, but you're going to also generate some level of damage associated with it.

So, you know, like I say, and we've only gone to six that we still don't quite understand, even the longer wavelengths than that.

And really, it's almost like a fundamental problem with science.

If you can't measure it, it's hard to understand it, you know, and.

Meredith Oke: Yeah, well, it's almost like if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist.

Scott Zimmerman: Yeah, well, I mean, kind of what.

Meredith Oke: The sense I get from, from the measures.

Yeah, the people who measure.

Scott Zimmerman: Yeah, that, that, that is what the, the problem we ran into.

When you look at light, sunlight, the solar spectrum in terms of watts, then it looks like there's nothing useful going on down at the bottom.

And so what do we do?

We use that as, okay, that doesn't matter.

It's just heat.

We're going to only make 400 to 650 nanometers.

Now what's happening?

Everybody's getting these little spectrometers and they're, they're silicon spectrometers.

Well, they only measure out to about 900.

And yet people look at and say, oh, look at this, I got some, some, some power out here at the 900 nanometers.

Yeah, well, what about 2000?

What about 6000?

What?

And, and, but people have their meter and they read their meter and you say, okay, put it up to an incandescent light bulb.

Well, it does.

This goes down.

No, it didn't.

Incandescents go up all the way out to about 2 to 2000 nanometers.

But, you know, but their meter, but.

Meredith Oke: The instrument of measurement has no capacity.

So it just looks like it goes down.

Scott Zimmerman: Yeah, I mean, look.

And so.

So people make a judgment.

Oh, we added near infrared.

No, you really didn't add that much near infrared.

You know, if you're outside and you're in the shade, for every watt of optical watt of visible, there's three or four times that in the infrared, and that's the balance.

So, you know, in our light sources, we design them to have three to one because of some of the work I did.

But that's in.

Meredith Oke: In the light bulbs that you make.

Scott Zimmerman: Yeah, because, you know, the point was, is that people who have very dark skin in particular, need more near infrared content.

In my opinion, children need more near infrared content because that's kind of the good stuff.

And we got rid of the good stuff and put it in with the bad stuff.

And then we're surprised that all of a sudden there's some issue.

And how bad is it?

You know, 10, 20 years from now?

You'll figure that all out, unfortunately.

But we do know that, I think we have been going through a grand experiment where we have taken away all the incandescents, blocked all the near infrared from coming in, and we have these metabolic diseases.

I know they want to talk about processed food, they want to talk about a lot of other things, but sunlight has always been the largest energy input into the body forever.

And, you know, the fact that we have now filtered that down to such a narrow portion that it's not causing a problem, I think is absurd.

I mean, you know, I would say that the high, though, there's a much higher likelihood that the effect of our lighting systems and our architecture is bigger than any food, processed food.

There's tons of different diets out there.

You know, people eat all kinds of things and survive just fine.

But this is almost like on a global basis, we're having this huge shift, and it's so the antithesis of what we really know from a logic standpoint.

You know, 1800s, people were going into sanitariums and places like that to get over TB and other diseases, because what they do, they got in more sunlight, got in more fresh air, got in higher altitude, breathing better.

You know, the idea that sunlight isn't a primary factor in what we're seeing for all these Modern society, diseases.

I mean, all we're doing is, is going and showing.

Hey, there's a mechanism.

Yes.

You know, here's a mechanism and that makes.

I love your cat, by the way.

Meredith Oke: That's Puck.

Scott Zimmerman: Yeah.

Meredith Oke: We call it the infidel.

Yes.

So the mechanism.

Scott Zimmerman: Yeah, yeah.

I mean that's, that's really the, the.

If you can show a mechanism, then people can start to quantify it.

And you know, I'm hopeful that what's going to happen is once we get some more of these biosensors out there, that people are going to start looking for themselves and finding out whether or not, you know, how much in the sun they need to be in order to really feel good about themselves.

Meredith Oke: Right.

Which is where measuring is very helpful because when people see that data like, oh, I'm in front of my TV and my blood sugar plummets and oh, I go outside and things stabilize.

I just one quick thing on the, on the processed food.

Yeah, what I, what I, here's my.

I, here's my ideal near future vision.

Is that the, the way that we are understanding processed food right now and the huge push, especially in the United States, it's been going on other place in Europe for longer to really get the general population to understand how bad it is to eat ultra processed food as the mainstay of your diet.

If we can then translate that understanding into a paradigm shift that sees light as an equal input into our body on like on par with food, maybe we have a chance of reframing.

And as, as you were talking about earlier, we need to reframe the way we think about the sun with the way we measure the outputs of the sun.

If we can reframe the way we think about light from just something that we need to see to an essential life source, food source for our body, just in a different form.

Scott Zimmerman: Yeah, I mean, I think that that's a good way to do it.

I mean, essentially, you know, the ability, our ability to operate optimally is under attack at the present time.

You know, and I, we, it's not just the emitters that we've done.

It's also a lifestyle shift that we've made where, you know, kids don't go outside and play.

Meredith Oke: Yeah.

Scott Zimmerman: Kids don't go to.

Everything is a more of a organized indoors under artificial lighting, you know, and the kids last thing the kid sees is before he goes to bed is a screen that has no infrared content.

So over time, like I say, all we're trying to do is highlight the different mechanisms and it's been this progression of, we started out invisible, added some near infrared.

Then we got to the point we figured out that there's now this longer wavelength stuff going on and we still have half the solar spectrum to go.

Basically we're really seeing stuff at, you know, we got out to 3,000 nanometers, we gotta get out to six before we actually include all the stuff that's going on from sunlight.

And the idea that nature hasn't optimized to take advantage of of all those different energy sources is just counterintuitive.

You know, that's what nature does because that's called survival.

The entity that can actually take advantage of something and get an advantage over another one is going to win the battle.

And you know, and I just find it really fascinating that it's not something that we have the biologists over here, as you were talking about silos, it's an enzyme, it's a chemical reaction, it's all this other stuff.

The optics guys are over here saying, oh, we're changing, you know, this, that and the other, you know, biology thing.

They're not talking to each other hardly at all.

You know, and the more we find out.

All I was trying to show is that, you know, we've got this huge amount of energy associated with sunlight that can be good or bad for biological processes.

And then you've got the normal biology guys coming together and they're meeting at this, just happened to be meeting at this point.

75 EV.

That is a unique situation associated with the sun itself.

And I just think it's fascinating and fundamental in what's going on and, but you need both sides of the parties to give a little so that we can get, to get to the truth, I guess is what I'd say.

Meredith Oke: Yeah, you know, it's such a, like, it's just so fascinating from a civilizational perspective that, you know, we can have these incredible human intelligences hyper focused in a certain area and be so incredibly well versed and deeply understand that little area, but be still completely missing the bigger picture.

And we seem to lack any kind of society level framework for pulling out and linking all these things together.

Even recently the magazine Scientific American had a cover, the Sunlight Cure.

It was all about how sunlight is good for us and UV light is good for us.

And then they'd have this one paragraph where the scientists were like, yeah, but we don't understand the mechanisms yet.

And I'm like, you guys gotta go talk to Scott.

There are people who understand the mechanisms.

Go talk to Dr.

Frederick Guy.

But they hadn't looked yet.

So as far as they were concerned, the mechanism is not understood.

Scott Zimmerman: Yeah, and it's a shame because we do know a lot.

We know an awful lot.

And it's such a perfect opportunity.

This is like the watershed moment, in my opinion, from the standpoint of the biologists and the quantum biologists to get together, because this is coming down to quantum levels and it is.

And people get scared by that.

But I mean, a simple thing is to go back to the unit measure rather than talking about Watts, talk about photons per second.

It's now a quantized event.

And it matters how many of those photons, what energy level they are and what the density of them in the body is being absorbed and how that is coupling into our biological processes.

It doesn't have to be coherence and all this other stuff.

In my opinion, it will start out with something simple.

I got a chunk of energy, it goes here in the body, and it helps this process work better or doesn't help this process work better.

And you know that those mechanisms we can do, we can model them, we can put them together.

And what I put in that, the equation, the one, the simple little equation in there on photon assisted quantum or quantum tunneling, you know, it sounds really spooky, but at some level there is a probability that small little things like electrons, and this is what I think is just so cool, is that the mass of the particle determines and the barrier and the width of the barrier all determine the probability of an electron moving through a barrier.

Now, we use barriers in our biology to time when things happen and how big of an event they are.

Now, the fact that we can provide a photon to that region and add in a little bit more energy so that the electron can jump that barrier and a little bit more efficiently, efficiently generate a proton, which then makes the turbine spin, you know, is all occurring on these scales that you have to start talking about quantum effects.

And they're not that great.

It doesn't have to be that complicated.

You know, literally, there's a great paper done out of the Guy Foundation.

Nathan, I forget his last.

I think Booth, I'm not sure.

Anyway, showing water molecules, and he's modeling what happens when an electron hits that water molecule.

And what it show was able to show is that he could actually it affected the molecule beside, it made it a little bit more excited.

It then made this one over here a little bit more excited.

And before long, the electron popped out on the other side, you know, and so we know that water is doing all these amazing things in the body.

We keep it, you know, we came out of the ocean and we carried our water with us, essentially.

And in this region that we're now looking at, Bob and I are now looking at, water is the main absorber.

It is the chromophore.

It is actually what's doing, absorbing the photon and moving it around, making things work.

And it's.

You think about like a.

A whole big, you know, one of those plague again gyms where they got all the balls in them, you know.

Meredith Oke: Yeah.

Scott Zimmerman: And the kid jumps into the, into the thing and, and the balls move, but they.

Some of them move quite a ways away from them because it depends on how they all interact.

So, I mean, what sunlight is really doing, in my opinion, is taking and charging up the battery a little bit, but really generating an environment where electron generated by the food we eat, whatever is more likely to jump the barrier and get a proton generated to generate a little bit more ATP and do that with the least amount of the most efficient way, I guess I'd say so that, that's kind of what I think of it.

But I guess I also like play gyms, so.

And trampoline.

Meredith Oke: The ball pits are always.

Yeah, I love it.

And yes, I think, you know, when you explain it like that, it, it just makes it so obvious that we need to be talking about biology on that level, on that, that quantum biologic level and not just the biochemical level or what.

Whatever else we've been doing.

It gets just so clear.

It.

Yeah, we just need you.

We need all you guys to have like, megaphones.

Scott Zimmerman: No, you know, it's why, it's why, why, you know, it's like Glenn, he's started out and he was doing the.

All the experiments on the bees and the insects.

And, you know, that's the other thing that I wish people would really understand.

Get rid of your LED lights.

Outdoors, we are doing a number on insects in particular, because if you look at optically, all the energy going into the insects are so small that they are essentially exposed to all the wavelengths at once.

You know, we got kind of, we're big enough to where some of the near infrared gets down in deeper, but we kind of have this outer shell type thing going on where most of the energy is absorbed on the outer surface skin.

Why our skin replaces every 21 days, blah, blah, blah.

But insects are so much the canary in the coal mine on this whole thing.

And I think that we're totally underestimating the impact we're having on our health by the standpoint of what we're doing to the insect population.

I grew up in Kansas.

You know, when I was growing up, you drove.

Drive down the road, you got grasshopper all, you know, clean the windshields.

All that hardly ever happens anymore around here, it seems like, you know, I was watching fireflies last night out there, and there's not near as many as I remember some of the other places.

So I.

You know, it's just.

I think that we need to get a little bit more serious about what we're doing to the environment.

But in general, what Glenn's been doing is he started out with the insects, then he went into looking at cells, and then he's moved his way up into mice.

And now he's doing basically all his experiments on humans and exposing them to various things and seeing, you know, his latest.

Some of his latest stuff is that, you know, he took and replaced the LED with an incandescent.

And then he also did an 850 nanometer type exposure.

And he was looking at color contrast in the eye.

And this was just.

There's still LEDs up here on the ceiling.

There's just an incandescent desk lamp there where people are working and all that other stuff.

And in less than a week, he was able to Show a significant 20% degradation in their color contrast, ability to differentiate colors, which is.

Glenn's.

One of the world's experts on these things.

Meredith Oke: Okay, sorry, walk me through this again.

So this is Glenn Jeffries.

So he started.

He.

He looked at the impact of narrow.

The narrow spectrum on insects.

Now he's moved to humans.

And so he found that people's ability to differentiate color was degraded by working under LEDs in a matter of weeks.

Maybe in a matter of weeks now doesn't mean.

Scott Zimmerman: Yeah, I mean, all we're doing here is generating all these different biomarkers.

You know, it's.

You know, the body is dealing with thousands and thousands of different reactions at the same time simultaneously.

So what do we do?

We run an experiment.

Glenn's running an experiment.

What he showed is that there is a huge difference, even the 850, while it helped a little bit on some of the color contrast, it was really the incandescent that he saw, the big change.

And I would argue if he could actually do a controlled experiment with sunlight, you would actually see improvement even further.

Meredith Oke: So when an incandescent bulb was added, even though the led, the ceiling lights were still on, there was an improvement?

Scott Zimmerman: Yeah, the biggest improvement that he measured.

Meredith Oke: Wow.

So LEDS alone.

People's eyesight got worse.

Scott Zimmerman: Yep.

Meredith Oke: Almost immediately you add in an incandescent bulb and it got better.

Scott Zimmerman: Yeah.

And you know, like I say, crazy.

Meredith Oke: Yeah, this is crazy.

No one knows this and that.

Scott Zimmerman: The thing is, is that's one experiment with one biomarker.

Meredith Oke: Yeah.

Scott Zimmerman: We could, if we could pull up.

I mean I'm sitting here and I'm showing that cortisol levels are, are spiking on a couple minute intervals.

I mean one of the things I'm going to be another, another thing that's coming out in this, what I'm doing is I'm doing a series of four part session on Bob's work and some of my work that we're going to be posting that I posted two of them on so far LinkedIn, there's been some more.

But literally everybody thinks of circadian and the effect of light on their health as being this kind of gradual.

You know, in the morning you have high cortisol, low melatonin, then you go down, in the evening you should have low cortisol, high melatonin and that's.

It does that in general.

But again it's another measurement thing.

The sensor I have measures every three minutes.

Okay.

Everybody else is measuring every four hours or a day or whatever.

Just picking a pot.

When you start doing, looking at it, at it at a high sampling frequency in minutes, what you find is that cortisol spikes when we eat, when we do vacation, when we do exercise, when we watch tv, you have this huge spike.

Well, melatonin actually has a spike too in response.

If the cortisol gets too high, all of a sudden out of nowhere you see this huge spike in melatonin and a drop in TNF alpha, which is a cancer marker.

So you know, because the melatonin is essentially suppressing that cancer marker.

So there's so many different mechanisms that are being affected by our exposure to light, what we eat.

I mean it's all coming together.

You know I, we were, my wife and I went out to a Mexican restaurant and using and I had the sensor on and you know, you don't see it at the time.

That's one of the intentions is you don't want to actually in got to trick the data or whatever.

But literally you could see the appetizer, then you could see the main course, then you can see it going up and I had a time.

Meredith Oke: I don't know if I want that level.

Scott Zimmerman: What.

Meredith Oke: Did you have dessert?

Scott Zimmerman: No, I didn't, I didn't show up either.

But you Know, but then all of a sudden you get this very narrow 10 minute window of melatonin spiking up and the cortisol drops because melatonin suppresses cortisol.

So we've got.

Meredith Oke: So what's, what's triggering the melatonin?

Scott Zimmerman: Good question.

I have no idea.

It's, it's part of our control system.

There are, there's.

Meredith Oke: So it just is like, I got it.

The melatonin's like, I gotta pop up and compensate for this cortisol situation.

Okay.

Scott Zimmerman: Yeah.

And, you know, maybe it's coming out of the gut, maybe it's coming out of.

Who knows?

Same similar thing happens with exercise.

You do, you know, everybody's measuring at all these hormones at such long time spells.

It's kind of like, take a tennis ball, take a picture, throw it up in the air, catch the tennis ball, take another picture, ball didn't move.

That's what's going on.

And now with the higher frequency sampling capability we're getting, and same was true as Glenn.

Glenn was monitoring every five to 10 minutes.

So he could see the change.

If he waited two hours, there'd been no change.

You know, but that's not what's going on.

There is a clearly a long diurnal time constant, but there's also all these transient response and you think about just makes sense, you know, we go do something, you go, you.

All of a sudden I'm going to run around the block.

Number one, I'd have a heart attack.

But number two, you know, essentially all my all everything's going to come up and something has to respond on a timescale of minutes that's not circadian, it's something else.

And it contributes to circadian and probably is much more important in a lot of ways than these diurnal things.

That's just kind of like a baseline type thing.

Meredith Oke: Yeah.

That's like the overview.

But then minute to minute, there's all of these other things happening.

Scott Zimmerman: Yeah.

And to my knowledge, I don't think anybody's ever really shown that.

I mean, they've known that cortisol was kind of a pulse, but I think this is the first time we've shown melatonin is actually doing the same thing on a, on a time scale of minutes.

Meredith Oke: Wow.

And so how are you measuring this?

Is this a new technology that's enabling these measurements?

Scott Zimmerman: Yeah, it's a sweat sensor that's under development by a company called Cordy.

Meredith Oke: Okay.

Scott Zimmerman: Are in license, I guess is what it got.

Meredith Oke: So everyone's going to Email me, like, being like, where do I get one?

Scott Zimmerman: Can they get one available right yet?

Meredith Oke: Okay.

Scott Zimmerman: But no, I mean, it comes back to this whole question of what units we measure, how we measure, and we've been kind of.

What we're finding is that the deeper, the quicker or the more accurately you measure things in the body, the more complex the whole process is.

And you think about it has to be, you know, if you let cortisol run rampant in your body, then you're essentially going to be in a constant state of agitation.

So what is melatonin doing?

Melatonin doing is squashing it.

But melatonin only is.

It's.

It's got its own set of controls on it, you know?

Meredith Oke: Yeah.

And would you need to have enough melatonin produced in your body to be able to do this?

So if you were in a.

If I'm just thinking through, like, if I am living an indoor lifestyle and looking at screens before bed and there's streetlight coming through my room, would I even have enough melatonin to.

For these processes to work properly?

Scott Zimmerman: I would argue no, because I think that you have to look at melatonin as a consumable, you know, it is used.

What does it mainly do?

It mainly suppresses reactive oxygen species and its metabolite, after it gets oxidized does the same thing.

There's about 10 different metabolites below.

This is what you started with.

So that's why it's such an effective scavenger of a reactive oxygen species.

So every time you do something you are depleting, you are using melatonin or you're depleting the melatonin reserve.

When we're outdoors, I would argue that, you know, you're essentially pumping it up and that that's giving you a storage of it.

And these are during the day type things.

This is not, you know, this is not from the pineal gland.

Meredith Oke: Unless this is not the sleeping melatonin.

Scott Zimmerman: This is, this is, this is a.

I got.

I gotta deal with the fact that I'm generating tons of reactive oxygen species in my muscles when I'm going exercise.

And those cells themselves are generating melatonin.

There's no doubt in my mind about that, you know, but the quantity consumed is huge when you think about it.

You know, it has to be.

So we are generating melatonin throughout the day and during the night, when there's low cellular activity and less likely to generate melatonin, then you still have the brain operating at a high capacity.

Pineal gland dumps A bunch of melatonin in to help protect the brain and any cells that are kind of damaged.

At least that's the mentality that I propose.

So.

And, and it seems the data is backing me up.

I mean, that's what I think is really cool.

Meredith Oke: I would also add that the actual experience of people is backing you up.

We work, you know, we deal with, you know, I work with health practitioners and health coaches, and when they have clients who are compliant with going outside, they feel better.

You know, I'm not saying it's like a cure all for everything, but it.

Like there has not.

There are very few people who don't feel better from sleeping in the dark and going outside more during the day.

That's just what happens.

Scott Zimmerman: Well, and you think about it, I mean, in this scenario, if the melatonin is being generated in all our cells.

The what?

The exercise data that we have shows that the melatonin within 10 to 20 minutes goes up and plateaus at some level.

If you're doing a certain level of exercise continuously, the cortisol does exactly the same thing.

But then what happens?

Cortisol starts to fall off after a few 10, 20 minutes of exercise, but the melatonin doesn't.

So it appears that the body is always trying to generate an excess of melatonin.

So what happens?

You go to the beach.

How many people say, I went to the beach and I just feel tired afterwards?

Meredith Oke: Yeah, I got sleepy.

Scott Zimmerman: I did a really great run and I feel a little tired afterwards.

I did a cold water immersion.

I feel a little tired afterwards.

I think those are all indications that you brought your melatonin levels up and, you know, they're part of this.

It's eventually getting back down to baseline.

But the transient on transient response, you're getting a jump in your melatonin levels.

And like I say, I mean, when I saw the data for the TNF alpha, how it felt, how much it was affected, I mean, we're talking about spike downward.

Meredith Oke: Okay.

And the TNF alpha is the bad stuff?

Scott Zimmerman: No, it's not really.

It's a, it's a, it's a marker associated with cancers.

Meredith Oke: So I call that that stuff.

Scott Zimmerman: Well, I mean, I'm sure that there are people that know it much better than I, that can explain it.

All I'm showing is the data.

Yeah, the data shows that when that melatonin spikes.

Meredith Oke: So the marker for cancer goes down when the melatonin goes up.

Scott Zimmerman: Yeah, and that's, that's supported by a number of different studies that showed that Melatonin suppresses tumor growth, things of that nature.

So I mean, at the end of the day, what I guess I'm saying is we're now moving from these, oh, go do something and a day or two later, test it for this to into a timescale of minutes.

And once you start doing that, you see that there's all these different processes going on responding.

And you think about it, you have to, I mean, I, I chopped off my arm or something, you know, some major event type thing or even a small event, you got a burn or whatever, the body can't wait four hours to respond, you know, and how's it going to do that?

And what the sweat monitoring is really showing, I think is that there's an entirely different control system that is operating on minute time scales that are pumping, they're responding to a variety of different processes are stressors that we're exposing ourselves to.

Meredith Oke: Right.

And the more daytime exposure to broadband emitters, the better.

Scott Zimmerman: I think so, yeah.

I mean, I keep on saying be, you know, optical, you know, wear a hat.

I mean, don't slather yourself up with a bunch of sunscreen, you know, you know, wear a hat, stay, enjoy the shade.

There's a reason you like the shade.

You know, it's got a lot more good stuff than bad stuff.

And you know, that, that, that guesses my point about the whole thing.

Meredith Oke: Well, Scott, thank you so much for coming back.

You really are gifted at talking about this and I think playing a really crucial role as a bridge from the scientists doing their lab work to the rest of us who really want to know and understand this as well as creating a product that is helpful.

So just for people to know, they can get your lights.

It's Silas.

Scott Zimmerman: It's nairalighting.com nairalighting.com okay, yeah.

Meredith Oke: N I R A and if I lighting all1word.com.

Scott Zimmerman: If I could convince anybody to do anything, we have a DC version that's just a little plugs in, has a lamp or you can buy a conversion kit that if you got a lamp that takes a screw in bulb, we can send you those a conversion kit.

It's going to last you.

Basically we give a lifetime warranty on the bulb because it's designed to last basically forever.

It's set to have two positions a day and a night.

And you know, so make it very simple and you know, I think it's the right way to go.

If I could just convince people to put these kind of desk lamps on by their laptop or Workstation and just get the full spectrum.

It's not going to hurt you, you know, and it's designed to be as close as match to.

To sunlight as we could.

Even more than an incandescent, because it's got the.

Some of the.

During the day, it gives you some of the blue and greens that you don't get from incandescent that are in sunlight.

So I'm a big guy on ratios and balance, and that's what I like.

If I could sell everybody on those, I'd be a very happy camper.

Meredith Oke: Yeah.

And it is so simple.

At the end of the day, as you were saying, the complexity of the science is basically infinite, but the actual practical application, it's like go outside more and adds some light bulbs like yours that balance out that.

Understand that we need more of a spectrum than just the tiny little portion coming out.

Scott Zimmerman: Well, especially with children, because a higher percentage of their cells are absorbing, are getting exposed to sunlight, you know, especially in the near infrared and other areas.

But, you know, I guess what I would like is that you don't need.

I mean, I guess I'll put it this way.

I believe at this point that we have shown there's enough mechanisms and information out there that what we're doing now with LEDs is wrong and harmful.

And, you know, is it going to make your kid die tomorrow or whatever?

No, but why spend all this money on all these other things, but for some reason, getting a good exposure to your child outside?

You know, I had a really interesting conversation, just briefly, about a gentleman who was trying to help battered women in Chicago, I think it was.

And, you know, he said, you know, women in those conditions are afraid to go outside, and we need to find ways to get that kind of.

Those are the people in particular, because it's, you know, that need to be exposed to sunlight on a regular basis, both for their physical health and for their neurological health.

So, you know, we were talking about maybe putting conservatories up on top of buildings in some of the urban areas or whatever, planting more trees, things of that nature, having safe areas where people can just go and, you know, get a little bit.

And from Glenn's work, you don't have to do it every day.

You can do it on just.

It needs to be consistent.

And, you know, like I say, children are the most susceptible to it.

And I think we have a responsibility to do something about that.

I would ban street lighting the way they've got it now, but how are you going to convince the government to do that?

I don't know.

Anyway, thank you.

Meredith Oke: Thank you.

The streetlights, that would be a fantastic project.

Well, Scott, we'll have to do this again soon.

It's really fun, and you bring such a helpful perspective and the science and all of the things.

Thank you so much for coming back.

I look forward to our next chat.

Scott Zimmerman: All right.

Thank you, Meredith.