#2516 - Rowan Jacobsen

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Very nice to meet you man. You too. Thank you. And thanks for doing this work because you want to talk about a subject that's confused so many people.

Is the sun good for you? Is the sun killing you? Why does it give you vitamin D? If it's bad for you?

Why do people get skin cancer if it's good for you? Yeah, it's super complicated and the messaging has not sort of admitted that and that was a big impetus for the book. When, what was your opinion of sun exposure before you started writing this? So I had inherited the conventional wisdom from the institutions that was really bad.

At the same time, I'll admit that my instincts were that maybe it wasn't as bad as they were leading me to believe because whenever I was in the sun, I felt good and I live in Vermont. At the time, winter was reaching like month six, I felt bad, right? So it's like there's more here than we're being told. Yeah, that was my wife's opinion.

It's like, the sun can't be bad. It always feels good when you go out there. I'm like, I don't know. It's a little more complicated than that, but that is a, the instinct.

Like it feels great when you're in the sun. Like, it's like your body wants it. Your body wants it. I mean, we now know that it literally triggers the release of opiates in the brain.

So you're body wants it and your body rewards you when you get it. So what is the issue? Well, let's go back to the beginning. So you had this idea that sun exposure is probably giving people cancer and sunscreens.

Good. You need to wear sunscreens. That other suns. So when you started going into the research, what made you shift your opinion?

So it really started for me, like seven or eight years ago, I was on this science journalism fellowship. So I was just doing research and some of those studies hit, the one about opiate release in the brain, other studies showing that when light hits skin, cognition actually improves. Like your metabolism cranks up a little bit when the body feels sunlight coming in. And I thought, that's interesting.

That's all good stuff. Then I came across a couple of other studies that seemed to indicate that some lower blood pressure, which was really interesting. So then I still have the sense sunlight bad. So then I remember just googling, like, so how much does sunlight shorten your lifespan?

And the punchline is sunlight seems to extend your lifespan. So when I hit that, I was like, why are we not hearing this? So that was the beginning. And so then what is the problem?

What is the issue with sunlight? Like when you think about skin cancer, what are the confounding factors that lead to skin cancer? Are you really aware of that? It's more complicated than we thought.

So sunlight does increase your risk of skin cancer. But depending on the type of skin cancer you're talking about, it's not necessarily like a linear relationship. So yes, in general, too much on increases your risk of skin cancer. But yeah, the question is, what are the confounding factors?

How important is skin cancer compared to these other things? If sunlight reduces your risk of other diseases, how does that weigh against the risk of skin cancer? So it's not the type of thing that can be done in a 30 second PSA. Right.

So sun cancer that does cause skin cancer, or excuse me, sun exposure that does cause skin cancer, what is causing it? Why is it happening? So ultraviolet light, which is the most energy intense part of the solar spectrum, when those photons of light hit your skin, they go inside. We absorb all wavelengths of light to a greater, lesser degree.

And that's super high energy ultraviolet light. If it hits a DNA molecule, it can mess up the DNA molecule. And then that can lead to mutations and skin cancer. And then it can also indirectly cause skin cancer by creating what are called reactive oxygen species, which are free radicals, basically.

So it energizes these atoms that start to steal electrons from other atoms and cause a little chain reaction, which is what free radical is. So ultraviolet light can increase your free radicals and it can directly damage DNA. So that's why it could cause skin cancer. So it was basically that, learning that one fact back in the 40s and 50s that made scientists start to say, uh oh, light, skin cancer, maybe we should think about how much sun we're getting.

But this wasn't universally accepted, right? There were some people that even back then thought that sun exposure was very healthy for you. Like when did we figure out that sun causes the body to produce vitamin D? Yeah, that was an important part and it's a big part of the story, I think, because that was really back in the 20s that we figured that out.

And then even a little earlier, we realized that sun light could prevent rickets. So rickets is a soft bone disease. Like if you don't get enough calcium in your bones when you're a kid, when you're a baby, you get soft bones, you get rickets, really bad disease. And it was in the Desser Revolution kids starting getting rickets, starting getting rickets.

Farm kids never got rickets. Then suddenly kids are working factories, they're living in cities that are choked with colesmog, they're living in tenement buildings, they're never seeing the sun and they all start getting rickets late, late 1800s. Nutrition of factor in that? Vitamin D, it was all vitamin D.

At first they thought maybe it was vitamin A, but it turned out that how vitamin D was discovered was doctors figured out that it could solve rickets and kids and then they figured out that if sun hits skin, that's how we made vitamin D. Then they figured out- How did they figure that out? They tested, they tested some tests on dogs. Actually, one of the guys figured it out, he had a hunch that that's what it was.

They noticed that kids in the country wouldn't get rickets, some kids in the city did get rickets. They were like, I wonder if it's sunlight. Then a guy took dogs and this is the back of Scotland, stuck them in a- they actually thought it was dietary. He stuck them inside in this little warehouse and fed them oatmeal, which is whatever in Scotland A at the time.

The dogs got rickets and he thought it was the oatmeal. He's like, okay, so something about diet. Then he got lucky because he deprived the dogs of sunlight and that's why they got rickets. Then eventually they realized that light hitting cholesterol molecules in the skin actually converts to the molecules to vitamin D.

It's like downstream of cholesterol, but it takes that same ultraviolet light that can scrub your DNA. It actually breaks a bond in the cholesterol molecule, which allows it, it gives it some movement and it flips around into a new form that's vitamin D. So once they figured that out, then they're like, sounds really good for you. So we had this era in the 20s, 30s, and into the 40s when everyone thought sun would cure everything and they went after it hard.

Really? Yeah, like parents would send their kids up into the Alps in the 20s to institutes for heliotherapy. Kids would ski around their underwear. They'd classes in their underwear.

There's awesome photos from this era. Like the instructors are in their underwear in the mountains outside in Switzerland, teaching the kids and everyone looks really healthy, right? So there's kind of like this idea that you couldn't get too much light. So people are literally burning themselves on purpose for health.

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Flip. Or that. And enjoy the rail. Love the way.

Is that the issue is burning the giant part of the issue? Yeah. So to give it away, now it looks like for melanoma, which is the most dangerous type of skin cancer. It's associated with burning strongly, but not with like gentle, moderate, everyday sun exposure.

So how much of a factor is skin type? Like people that are pale or have freckles and red hair or blonde hair. How much of a factor is that in skin cancer? And can they mitigate that by like gentle slow exposure?

Like a little bit here, a little bit there and slowly build up? Yeah, huge. Skin type is kind of everything. People have really dark skin.

Basically don't get sun-induced skin cancer. Almost never. And the authorities don't tend to talk about that because they want these one size with all recommendations. But those recommendations to basically always avoid the sun are written for the super fair people, especially if you have red hair, orange ruffles, then you actually have a mutation in your melanin gene that makes you super susceptible to skin cancer from sunlight.

So if you've got that phenotype, lots of moles, red hair, freckles, you do have to be really careful. And you can only do so much. Like you're not going to tan that much anyway. Your melanin's just different.

Everybody else, yeah, you're much less susceptible and you can tan, you know, you can make more melanin pretty easily if you're tanning. I wonder what, if any effect, have you ever heard of that? I can't remember the name of the peptide, but there's a peptide that people are taking now that causes their body to generate melanin and they get really dark. Yeah, yeah.

It's really weird. Yeah, and I don't know what's going on there exactly. It seems like that peptide is maybe making you, there's things called photosensitizers that make your skin super sensitive, like you just absorb solar radiation really well then but not necessarily in a good way. And that can make you make tons of melanin to try to compensate.

So I wonder that peptide might be triggering melanin as a compensation mechanism for extra production from sunlight or maybe it's just making melanin happen like independently of sunlight. Did you put it into perplexity? Oh, here it is. Melon, melonotan, melonotan, synthetic peptide analog of the naturally occurring hormone, a melon, melano site, stimulating hormone stimulates the bodies of melanocytes to produce melanin resulting in a dark tan.

It's largely unread, excuse me, unregulated illegal in many regions for cosmetic purposes and carry significant health risks. What's the risks? It's not approved by the FDA for cosmetic use and unregulated market means purity. Okay, but that's unregulated.

Notable risks include dermatological issues, rapid and uneven darkening of existing moles, the emergence of new moles and hyperpigmentation concerns that could mask or accelerate the development of melanoma. What is this? Potentially damaging erections. What?

Right. That's right. This apparently gives people raging erections. Why?

Prolong, painful and potentially damaging, damaging. Imagine you get an erection that goes so hard you red line the penis. Medical and dermatological organizations strongly advise against the use of melonotan, melanotan because it's unapproved. They're no clinically established safe dosages.

Well, because alpha-MSH, the thing that it is mimicking is that's how your body makes melonin. That's how you're supposed to do that. You guys see the before and afters because they're bonkers. I've seen some people get super, well, the problem is it's Instagram.

You never know what's real. That's that guy got a little tan. Let's see if there's any, okay, look how pale that, see that's not how do we know if that's real. Just like there's like a light on him.

Right. And then he's in a fucking dark closet in the last picture. It's before and after photos I've seen. Is there that one right there?

The low, the one, yeah that one. Look at that guy. Well, you know, it's a look. It's an interesting look.

He injected himself with unregulated tanning peptide, melanotan, melanotan 2. Click on that. It seems like a joke. No, no, this guy, this is the guy that I saw online.

This guy's, he's the test rabbit. This dude went hard. Did he get out in a direction too? Yeah, he died from that.

I don't know. So his before and afters. So let's see what is, he just, okay, yeah, he just got darker and darker and darker. But I wonder if like, I understand it's unregulated, but if it was regulated and this is something they're trying to work with right now with peptides and make them right.

See, that's the photos dark though. I mean, that's like a shitty iPhone one camera. That's crazy. If that's like, this is nuts.

There's something going on there. Like, you know what it looks like? It looks like those bodybuilder guys who use that ink, that dye on their skin to make themselves darker so their muscles pop out more. So here's better tanning log photos.

These are better photos. That's crazy. But I wonder if that offers skin protection. It would definitely offer skin protection.

I mean, if it is melanotan, definitely, I mean, that guy can probably be outside all day. Yeah. So it's not available to someone who's pale. Like, and if someone is pale, see if you can find an example of someone who's pale who took it?

Because he would think like, oh, well, maybe that maybe just we need to do studies and figure out what the dosage is and figure out how to activate that aspect of it. Melon clearly protects you from skin cancer. Like if you have super dark skin, like, you know, African ancestry, you're blocking, like your melanin is absorbing like 97, 98% of the UV rays. It's super effective.

But didn't Bob Marley die from skin cancer? He did. That's pretty crazy. Okay, this is one.

Wow. Same old. Yeah, it looks like the same old. That looks pretty good.

But I would just also wouldn't if you were trying to sell some of the stuff and maybe in a various ways, this would be an easy one to market tough and, you know, definitely. This is part of the unregulated market problem is we don't know. And also, you know, you're getting 99% bro science on this stuff. You know, like, what screams bro science screams it from the top of the hills?

What legitimate scientists is out there injecting himself with melanotan. But the other thing is if you do it naturally, right? If you just get a little sun every day and slowly build up, you're not just making melan and you're also increasing your body's damage repair system. You have all these like nucleotide excision repair, things like fix your DNA and fix cells that have gotten screwed up.

And that will also ramp up every day. And it's not just sunlight, like exercise, same thing. Anything that stresses the body a little bit, like amoesis, right? So all those things are going to cause your damage repair system to crank up and be ready.

So you probably want those to, like the melan and the damage repair to go up together. Right. So if let's say studies were done, let's say we found what the effective and safe doses and how to administer it, you would want to do it along with sun exposure slowly to try to ramp up your body's ability. I had a note on this.

This happened 14 years ago. Wow. Which is strange. Here's some of the side effects he said, but he also said he's pretty much impervious to UV at this point.

Increasing libido didn't see that one much either. He said he didn't get it. Okay. Sides are decreased appetite, very mild nausea, more for some, none for me.

Decreased libido, increased libido. He said it didn't see that one much either. Some get facial flushing, like a niacin dose. Never got that either.

And the most strange things that it feels really good to stretch, like when you first wake up. Interesting. Huh. Did you do it for the skin?

Yes, I did for skin coloring. I'm pretty much impervious to UV at this point. I have faded about 25% since returning from Florida January 35th. We'll be dosing again probably March.

Is this guy still alive? That's not good. That's not good. 14 years.

Click on that link where his profile. Let's see if the homeboy is alive. He's dead. Is this Reddit?

Say a year ago he's commenting. I never did it subtle. Okay. So a year ago he's still alive or someone has taken over his account.

In theory you could use an old school court's tanning lamp. Okay, so you could tan with it. He's going to stop looking. Why?

I mean this is not for the show but he's not weird. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. That's a problem.

Well only crazy people were willing to try something like that. Like do you remember that there was a guy, I think it was on Oprah or one of those shows where he was taking, was it silver? Yeah, quite a silver. That's right.

Colloidal silver. And his whole skin turned blue permanently. Yeah. Like a smurf.

Yeah. Poor guy. Yeah. And he wound up dying.

Yeah. That's on boy. Not good. Yeah, that's just not a good look at it.

You would think you'd start tanning a little blue and you'd go, hey, maybe I need to back off this colloidal silver. I'm not the sort of guy. Yeah. I mean what the fuck dude?

That guy. I mean maybe he could have gotten some Lannitan and even that out. It's just been a nice chocolate. You know, like a bluish chocolate.

I mean he looks delicious. I'll say that. Yeah, this is Argria, Argria, Argria, the rare disease of trans people blue. Cause by buildup of silver in the body, which discolours the skin.

Wow. 2013. He died from unrelated causes. Whatever that means.

I mean anybody's taking that much colloidal silver. You're probably making a lot of other mistakes. I mean, yeah. You're a risky dude.

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He did dive skin cancer and that confuses a lot of people. He had melanoma on his toe. And that was a kind of melanoma that's not caused by the sun. And everybody gets it, no matter what race you are, everybody gets it at the same rate, which is quite uncommon.

They know it's not caused by the sun. But it complicates things for people because people are like, I got melanoma at my toe and they think it's from the sun. And they're like, how did that happen? Right?

Like, what's melanoma doing on there? But so it does not all melanomas are caused by the sun. There's most probably are, but it gets really weird with melanoma. It's associated with burning with intermittent sun exposure.

You work in an office all year and then you go to kenku and get fried. That's a pretty good recipe for melanoma. History sunburns also will double your risk. Chronic exposure where you have an outdoor job every day, lower than average risk of melanoma.

Really? Yeah, so it gets weird. So outdoor workers have fewer, have a lower incidence of melanoma than office workers. Wow.

And we don't hear that. No, no. I mean, I was looking at Instagram the other day and some poor guy had this, I don't know what happened to his face, but he had some sort of skin cancer and they had to take a graft and it was on his nose. So it was like a flap of skin was like almost covering over his eye and you know, his message was wear sunscreen.

That's what happened to me. Yeah. Well, so I mean, yeah, so I don't want to downplay skin cancer because it sucks. You know, they have to cut off like honky your ear or something.

That doesn't suck. Even if it's not life threatening sucks. Yeah. But, and so yeah, like, but that's generally from overexposure like burning burning.

All the experts I was talking with said don't burn. Right. Burning is the one that people always say that it's not just burning. It's burning causes damage that starts to appear years later.

Yeah. And there's there's dialing in on that more and more. It can start like burns during childhood is actually the highest association from melanoma. Really?

Don't burn when your kids that we're all screwed. Oh, that sucks. That sucks because I fucking cook myself as a kid. I mean, I grew up in Florida.

Right. Well, when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, you know, you wanted to get a tan. Well, you know, especially when I lived in Boston, it was cold as shit in the winter when it got warm, you know, you're a Vermont car. Yeah.

You got out there like, ah, put baby oil on with fried. Totally. I was just looking at some of those Johnson baby little ads from like the 60s and 70s. Oh my God.

Yeah. Yeah. It was basically the cooking lube. Totally.

Yeah. It just helped helped you cook better. But you remember George Hamilton, like the actor, Mr. Tan?

Yeah. He was all about that. I was like, how's he doing? 87 and ridiculously healthy right now.

Really? Yeah. He's going strong. Yeah.

I met that guy. He did an episode of news radio once. Yeah. He was Tana's fuck.

Yeah. That was his thing. That was his thing. Like, pull up photo of George Hamilton.

I mean, great for an 87 year old. Yeah. Look at him. Still tan.

How does he? He's kind of shiny. What a weird thing to be known for. He's the guy who gets tan.

You know what I'm saying? I mean, try to remember a role that he played. That's true. I think he was Dracula in some bad 1970s comedy.

Look at that. That's a tan right there. Right. So how was he getting it though?

Like, I remember when I was a kid in Boston, a lot of people use tanning beds, especially in the winter time. And they still do. Like those are actually like on the rise and they do. They seem to raise your risk of melanoma for sure.

There you go. Look, he's got to reflect a tan thing. So he's just out there getting sunlight all the time. And he didn't look bad.

That's a weird one, right? He claims he's never had skin cancer. Well, he probably was doing it so often that his body was prepared for it, right? Look at that photo of him with that lady in the corner.

Yeah, look at that. That's nuts. See, that's the thing. I think like if you're getting that regular dosage, your body is producing all these compounds whose entire job is to make sure your cells don't turn cancerous because, you know, living things have been working on this for 500 million years.

Like they've been getting hammered by this on every day and they've got to deal with it. So it's when it seems like when your skin is totally unprepared and you shock it with a massive dose that it's not ready for, then you're in trouble. That's the kind of thing that triggers trouble. Was there any pushback on this research?

Like when you first started examining this and realizing that sun exposure has a lot of benefits? Were any dermatologists saying, hey, this is dangerous information? You shouldn't say this? Oh, yeah.

I've been denounced multiple times. Really? They send an official letter when I write an article and they say nobody should be getting any sun exposure. That's their opinion.

No one should be getting any sun exposure regardless of the benefits, the vitamin D, the no sun exposure without protection from either sunscreen or clothing. Wow. And if that makes you vitamin D deficient, take a pill. So that's what needs to change because those pills haven't panned out in tests.

They don't work like natural D does for whatever reason. Really? Yeah, they don't work at all. What do you mean?

So everyone thought like back in like the 80s, 90s, everyone started noticing, scientists started noticing that people who naturally had lower amounts of vitamin D in their blood had higher rates of all like the classic chronic diseases. So they started thinking, okay, vitamin D, it's like a magic pill. Almost it'll cure. It'll reduce everyone's risk of all these diseases if we raise their rates of D.

So they started recommending vitamin D pills, which I think are still like the number one supplement in the world. I take it. So then they did all these clinical trials to prove that it would help huge, huge clinical trials, tens of thousands of people follow up so they went for many years. None of them showed a benefit.

No benefit in terms of your immune response? No benefit for any condition. Now did they take vitamin D along with vitamin K2 and with magnesium because that's what's recommended. So I mean, there are a bunch of different.

Apparently vitamin D by itself is not effective. You need vitamin D with K2 and magnesium. And I think there might be another one. Let's see, put that into perplexity, please.

See what it says, like what are the benefits of vitamin D and what should it be taken with? Because I think magnesium and K2 are the big ones and that together they have a sort of a synergistic effect. Yeah, that could be like I'd be curious. Yeah, I think vitamin D by itself, the body has a problem absorbing it.

It's like, there's a lot of things like that. Like zinc is like that. You need an ionophore to absorb zinc. So you take it with chorosetin.

Yeah. Well, one thing, D, you know, the way it naturally comes into the skin and it comes in with a whole bunch of related compounds. Right. And so yeah, I do think there's sort of a synergistic effect when it's combined with the right thing.

But D from the sun has always been known as the best way to get it. For sure. The best way to get vitamin D, the most effective, the healthiest way is through the sun exposure. Yeah, like that's how the design's supposed to work.

perplexity says vitamin D helps your body absorb calcium, builds strong bones and teeth support muscles and nerves, plays a key role in immune function. It's best absorbed and taken with a meal or a snack that contains some fat and offered and paired with calcium for bone health. So please put in what are the benefits of vitamin D taken with K2 and magnesium? See what it says that.

Because this is what my doctor who is a vitamin specialist recommends. Benefits when taken with K2 and magnesium. Okay. Taking vitamin D together with vitamin K2 and magnesium can make each of them work more effectively, especially for bones and heart, as long as the doses are appropriate for you.

The trio mainly improves how your body handles calcium. Interesting. Soil morbid, magnesium helps activate D and K2 helps send calcium into bones instead of arteries. D increases calcium absorption from your gut and supports bone, muscle and immune function.

Magnesium required to activate vitamin D, low magnesium can blunt vitamin D's effect and also directly support bone structure and many enzymes. K2 activates proteins that move calcium into bones and teeth and keep it out of the arteries and soft tissues, helping bone and cardiovascular health. Potential benefits of the combo, better bone support, heart and artery protection, more efficient vitamin D use. Okay.

So maybe that's the problem. So these people were taking it with low magnesium, low calcium, didn't have K2. Yeah. I'd be curious if there was an effect on disease incidence for that combination.

I don't know. Because the D on its own, yeah, it didn't show any effect, but sun exposure. Let's put that in. Does vitamin D taken on its own have any health benefits?

Let's see what it says to that. Because I never heard that. That D on its own was not effective at all. I just heard that it was minimally effective, that you had to take it with other...

It seems like it only helps people who are really deficient. Like if you're super low below like 16 nanograms per milliliter, then probably a good idea. But like for people who already had at least 20 nanograms per milliliter, it didn't seem to have any of these benefits that they were seeing and people who naturally had high rates of your structure. This is yes vitamin D on its own is several well proven health benefits, especially for bones, muscles and immunity.

Just a general answer. Huh. Bones, strengthen, fracture, prevention, muscle function, adequate... I didn't add on, sorry.

What's that? I missed the word on it. On its own. The answer was weird.

Clear, proven benefits, especially for bones, muscles and correcting deficiency. Yeah. That's going to be for people who obviously have low levels. Preventing rickets.

There it is. Yeah. They had thought that it might reduce instance of all these other diseases based on what they're seeing for people who naturally have high levels of sun exposure. It didn't.

People who had high levels through sun exposure. Your natural level of vitamin D is a direct meter of how much it's going to be. Right. But this is natural level.

You're not talking about supplementation. Right. Right. So that was why people who had high levels of D without supplementation have lower rates of all, like every disease you can think.

The hope was that raising everyone's D to those levels would have the same effect. And doing on journal medicine actually did an editorial in 2022 saying stop describing D doesn't work. Which is sad. God, that seems incorrect though.

Because if you're taking it with magnesium and K2, it seems that they do work synergistically and there seems to be proven health benefits. One of the problems I think is like, I think people generally want to avoid recommending supplementation for some reason. It's kind of a weird thing. They wanted to dismiss it.

I had a doctor once that told me, don't bother taking vitamins. Just eat a balanced diet. And I was like, look at you. I looked at you.

I looked at you. It didn't look as good as you. It looked terrible. I was like, yeah, I'm amazed how poor health they generally seem to be.

I can't take it. I mean, it's so hard to take seriously a guy with a gut when, well, just look terrible. Yeah. And he was telling me that I just need a healthy diet.

And I'm like, okay, I do have a healthy diet. But also, I feel different when I take vitamins and my blood work reflects that. Yeah. I noticed that when I was, I started going to all the conferences of the sun researchers.

And they're all in like the basements of hotels. And those guys are as tasty as a guest. Like, do none of you guys practice what you preach? How strange is it that human beings with all of our knowledge, with, I mean, obviously, just much more to learn?

We're still confused about how we interact with our environment. Yeah, absolutely. 100%. With sun.

Which seems to be like, it's there. It's everywhere. It's like you're always in the sun in the normal world environment where you're outside of cities and all that stuff. It seems like we would have an understanding of what happens when you're interacting with sun.

Yeah. And light, period. Like light of all kinds. The sense in biology that light didn't matter is just ephemeral.

Which the quantum physicists 100 years ago understood that light and matter are just like two halves of the same coin. And that light totally affects the behavior of molecules. We're made of molecules. Light's going to matter.

So I actually think that's where I eventually got to with the book. It's like we need to think about our light diets and our lightscapes that we're surrounding ourselves with more seriously than we have. Well, it seems like your work is based entirely on the data. So what did these dermatologists have to say about the data if they're denouncing you?

And they're saying that this guy should not be listening to. Things are saying are dangerous. But you're talking about data. So I don't understand how they can just make those flat statements like that.

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Love the way. Right. And I think we just need to have a conversation about the data. And there's no right answer ahead of time.

But they don't. Like their job is to rent skin cancer. So if that's your only job, you're going to tell people to stay out of sunlight. Forever.

Forever. Right. And no one can call you on that. No one can say, hey, I got skin cancer.

And exposure improved cardiovascular health and lower blood pressure. And isn't cardiovascular disease a far more dangerous problem than skin cancer in terms of numbers? It's number one. 20 million does the year.

Cardio. So anything that moves the needle on that is awesome. And it does. And it seems to you.

Like all the studies show it does. And they're all observational studies. Right? You look at populations.

You're like, oh, these people have more sun exposure, lower blood pressure, lower rates of cardiovascular disease. But then, you know, the other side will say, you know, correlation does not prove causation. Like prove, show us that it's, you know, do your giant clinical study where you stick with the people in the sunlight and they live longer. Which is not going to happen.

Right. Yeah. But it's like, are they willing to have a conversation with you? They're not willing to, they don't want to look outside of the sun and skin cancer question.

Like they're not willing to entertain any of the other benefits that are outside their field. So there's got to be somebody out there who can be the generalist who can think about it holistically. That seems so ignorant. It's the day of science now.

Like the science is, you know, like a field of micro specialties. You know, I'll take a little bit of it when you're pouring it. It's also a very shiny press. Cheers, sir.

Cheers. Coffee good for you. Coffee is shocking. Talk to me.

Let's go. It's, it is fucking crazy. I'll get coffee for you. I've been like startled by the power of the evidence.

Yeah. I've read both. I've read it's bad for you and I just missed it because I'm biased. I love coffee.

And I just, it just tastes too good. It feels too good. I like it. It's, but I've read a lot of benefits about it.

I think it's the best possible supplement. Really? You think it's a supplement? It's the best.

And I think it's all due to mitochondrial function. I think it makes your mitochondria just spin, you know. And it's particularly because of caffeine or coffee itself. Is the coffee bean?

You know, I mean, caffeine, I think it's caffeine, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's other stuff in coffee that's contributing. Because, you know, like tea doesn't seem to quite like deliver the goods like coffee does. No. But caffeine is actually, the plants are making it to kill bugs.

Right? Because it makes the bugs mitochondria run out of control and they basically like blow up. It does that to us, but we have these other like governors that come in and slow down that ramp up. So we get the nice ramp up without the explosion.

So it's good. So it makes, you know, we produce energy more efficiently with less wear and tear. That's all I need to hear. Oh, man.

I just love coffee. I'm not giving it up. But I've heard many people say that Michael Pollan had a really interesting anecdote. He laid off coffee for, I think, three or four months as an experiment.

And then he had a cup of coffee and he said it was like taking a psychedelic. He said, I just felt so amazing. The effect was so profound. He said, I really wanted to do it only that way where I only take it, you know, very rarely, because but then I fell right back.

He went right back. Yeah. I remember that article. It was great.

And also he said none of the like the caffeine researchers touched the stuff. It's not good. But yeah, he went right back to it. And I think he's a proud coffee drinker.

Yeah, he is. He went right back to it. But so have you had any conversations with these dermatologists that are denouncing you? No, but I'd like to actually.

I think. Are they willing or have they avoided them? They have so far really avoided it. They just say, you know, we're not ready to look at any of that research.

It's so weird. I think it's going to change. I think actually, like I said, I think light medicine is actually going to become very important in the next 10, 20 years. And dermatologists are kind of positioned to be like the leaders on that stuff because skin is the primary like interface with light for our bodies.

And you know, they should be experts on all this, you know, red light therapy is a big thing now. And dermatologist doing that, even though the evidence isn't great for that. But I think there's probably something there. But they should basically, I think they need to be thinking more about all these different wavelengths of light as healing modalities and how to, you know, work them into like regular like programs.

I've talked about this before, so I apologize to anybody listening. But I've essentially completely stopped my macular degeneration with red light therapy. Wow. Yeah.

Not just stopped it, but reversed it. Like I don't need reading glasses anymore. I've been using a red light bed for about two years now. And from the time I started using it within about a month, I started seeing benefits.

And so Gary Bracko was on the podcast and explaining it to me. And so I went out and bought one of these really expensive. It's like a tanning bed. This is the thing you lie in.

And I do it three times a week for 20 minutes. So all over? Yep. You'd make it slide down in there.

And I went to a tanning bed once, not a tanning bed. A red light bed once at a health clinic and they were like, I wear these goggles and make sure you close your eyes before the light goes on. I was like, OK, I did all that. And apparently there's some benefit that even when blindfolded, it increases your vision.

Yeah, for sure. And I think I think the mitochondria are part of that answer. There's a guy at University College London, Glenn Jeffery, who, this is his whole field, optometry and red light. And he has shown in multiple different animals, including humans, that red light improves mitochondrial function and improves vision.

Yeah. I mean, I'm 58. And for me to be 56 and saying, I had these fucking things everywhere. I had these reading glasses.

I had them all over my house. I'd gotten up to 3X. These are the cheap Amazon ones. I had a nice pair, but I keep losing them.

So I just went on butt cheap ones. They seemed to work. And it was just fine for looking at a computer, reading my emails, reading my phone. And I needed them to read my phone.

I don't need them anymore. Like at all. I don't use them anymore. My vision's not perfect.

It's not as good as it was when I was 20, but it's way better than it was when I was 56. And I think so the mitochondria and the eyes have to fire. The eyes have to fire faster than any mitochondria anywhere else in the body. The eyes burn through energy like no other cells.

Because it's kind of the toughest task. They got to go super fast. So those mitochondria need to be on top of their game. And it seems like red light benefits that in particular.

It seems so close minded that these dermatologists aren't willing to say, maybe we're looking at this insufficient amount of data. Maybe we're looking at this wrong. Maybe the whole thing is much more nuanced. And maybe there's benefits if it's done correctly.

I just don't understand why they're not. If there's all this data, which clearly you show in your book, that there's a tremendous amount of data. Why? You know, so there's this saying attributed to Max Planck, who's this like quant physicist.

Science advances one funeral at a time. I think we got to let the old guard die off a little bit. But I guarantee there's a young generation coming in and he's going to be really interested in how they can use it. Certainly.

Well, I think there's so many conversations available online now from actual researchers and people who have put in the time and put in the work and explored things from this position that maybe the old guard are not correct. And the data seems to show that that's true. Yeah. And it's fun.

Like, this is a way you can make your world a little bit richer is starting to think about this stuff. Well, it's also like don't you want to be informed. And if we do understand that it has an effect on monochondria and there is all this evidence that red light seems to have some benefits, like I just don't understand how someone could be an expert in skin and ignore that. Well, I think that they won't object to the red.

There's something they're using red light therapy because there's no risk of skin cancer. Red is only the UV and maybe a little bit of the blue that contributes to skin cancer. So it's the UV where they get a little wigged out. Yeah.