How Human Health Is Being Destroyed By Artificial Lights
We live in a profoundly artificial world. Our food arrives from factories rather than farms, and much of it is engineered in laboratories before it ever reaches a kitchen
We have traded soil for synthetics, and the substitution has been so gradual that few of us have noticed.
We spend the bulk of our waking hours immersed in the synthetic glow of computers, phones, televisions, and other devices, our eyes fixed on screens that mediate nearly everything we see, say, and buy.
Even the light by which we read those screens, and by which we live our lives after dark, is no longer the light our bodies evolved to expect.
This artificiality has crept into nearly every corner of modern life—and in few places is it as quietly destructive as on our plates. The modern diet is a triumph of industrial chemistry: shelf-stable, hyper-palatable, endlessly profitable, and profoundly unnatural.
The result is a health crisis hiding in plain sight: ultra-processed foods.
Ultra-Processed Foods: What, Exactly, Have We Been Eating?
In wealthy countries like the US, Canada, and the UK, ultra-processed foods already supply over half of all dietary energy. In middle-income countries such as Brazil, Mexico, and Chile, they account for one-fifth to one-third.
Sales of these products are growing about one percent per year in high-income countries—but up to 10 percent per year in middle-income ones.
“Ultra-processed foods are not ‘real food’. As stated, they are formulations of food substances often modified by chemical processes and then assembled into ready-to-consume hyper-palatable food and drink products using flavours, colours, emulsifiers and a myriad of other cosmetic additives. Most are made and promoted by transnational and other giant corporations. Their ultra-processing makes them highly profitable, intensely appealing, and intrinsically unhealthy.”[4]
The evidence of harm is hard to ignore. Published online by The BMJ on February 28, 2024, the findings come from a review of 45 analyses from the past three years, covering about 10 million people.
After grading the evidence, scientists found the most convincing links between diets high in ultra-processed foods and higher risks of premature death, cardiovascular disease, mental health disorders, diabetes, obesity, and sleep problems.[5]
A pooled analysis of available evidence, published in 2026 in the open-access journal Family Medicine and Community Health, finds that eating more ultra-processed food (UPF) is linked to a higher risk of several major chronic health problems—including digestive diseases, high blood pressure, and metabolic syndrome/diabetes—as well as death.
“Eating a lot of ultra-processed foods was associated with higher risks of cardiovascular events (24 percent), cancer (12 percent), obesity/overweight (23 percent), metabolic syndrome/diabetes (24 percent), depression/anxiety (27 percent), digestive diseases (31 percent), high blood pressure (11 percent), and death from any cause (18 percent).”[6]
Read those numbers again. An 18 percent higher risk of death. Cardiovascular events—heart attacks—up 24 percent. Metabolic syndrome and diabetes, the conditions now driving the Ozempic boom, up 24 percent. Depression and anxiety up 27 percent.
If a virus or a terrorist attack produced those figures, the media coverage would be wall-to-wall, and people would be in the streets. Panic would be beyond imagining. Instead, the response is barely above a cricket chirp.
The ultra-processed food health disaster is shocking and growing, yet it continues on. Tens of thousands of products such as Coca-Cola, Doritos, Oreo, Cheerios, Lunchables, Kit Kat, Sour Patch Kids, Bagel Bites, Kool-Aid, Froot Loops, Slim Jims, and Hot Pockets remain staples of the American diet.[7]
Today, they make up 70 percent of the American food supply, and 55 percent of its calorie consumption. The firms San Francisco is suing in the first government-led lawsuit against ultra-processed foods are Kraft Heinz Company, Mondelēz International, Post Holdings, the Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, General Mills, Nestlé, Kellogg, Mars, and Conagra Brands.[8]
Yet despite the attention and the devastating health effects, ultra-processed foods have been woven into the very fabric of our societies. Most of us seem oblivious that large corporations—with tacit government approval—allow this to continue.
As a culture, we continue to commit slow suicide, and because of these deeply embedded products and massive profits, the carnage continues.
And there is something else…
A relatively new health threat may have escaped your attention—let’s call it ultra-processed light. If the phrase sounds absurd, that is precisely the point: we have been conditioned to accept that light, like food, can be manufactured, optimized, and sold—without pausing to ask what has been stripped away in the process.
Ultra-Processed Lights: What Has Been Lost?
Ultra-processed lights?
On the face of it, that sounds ridiculous. Light is light. How could it be “ultra-processed”?
And yet the light that fills our homes, offices, and stores is no more natural than a Twinkie. We have largely accepted eating food engineered in a lab and stripped of its original composition, and sadly we have accepted, almost without discussion, a light source engineered in a factory and stripped of the frequencies our bodies have always known.
For quite a while, I’ve known that fluorescent and LED lights negatively affect human health, but it really hit home when, several months ago, my wife passed out on a grocery store floor.
At first, we didn’t know what happened, but through personal experiments and analysis, we determined these lights were definitely a trigger—a big trigger. I knew artificial lights weren’t good, but how bad were they?
That question sent me down a path of reading, pondering, and testing that I never expected to take, and the answers turned out to be far stranger—and far more consequential—than I imagined.
First, it’s important to understand what light is. Sunlight emits ultraviolet, visible, and infrared wavelengths (frequencies) that we can measure in nanometers (nm). This is the electromagnetic spectrum—the same physical phenomenon whether it comes from the sun, a filament, or a diode, but not every source fills it in the same way.
Wavelength Ranges
- Ultraviolet C (UVC): 100–280 nm (blocked by the atmosphere; also blocked by glass)
- Ultraviolet B (UVB): 280–315 nm (makes vitamin D; causes sunburn; blocked by glass)
- Ultraviolet A (UVA): 315–400 nm (ages skin; immediate tanning, not sunburn; no vitamin D)
- Visible (VIS): 380–750 nm (what your eyes see)
- Near-Infrared (NIR / IR-A): 750–1,400 nm (heat you feel; penetrates skin)
- Short-Wave Infrared (SWIR / IR-B): 1,400–3,000 nm
- Mid-Wave Infrared (MWIR): 3,000–8,000 nm (sun and incandescent output fading)
- Long-Wave Infrared (LWIR): 8,000–15,000 nm (blocked by glass; Earth’s thermal emission)
- Far-Infrared (FIR): 15,000–1,000,000 nm
We can see this more easily in the following diagrams. Sunlight (in blue) starts in the ultraviolet and fades out over IR-A and IR-B.
Incandescent light (old Edison light bulbs in red) starts at the low end of the visible spectrum but shifts more toward the red end of the scale and fades out much like sunlight over IR-A and IR-B.
Over 90 percent of its energy is emitted as invisible infrared heat. Only about 10 percent is visible, and that visible portion is heavily weighted toward red and orange—which is why it looks “warm” or yellowish.
LED lights (in orange) are almost entirely in the visible spectrum, with about 90 percent of all other light frequencies absent.
As you can see with this blue line on the graph, sunlight has a very broad spectrum. Humans enjoyed that spectrum even into the late 1800s and through the invention of the incandescent light bulb.
As you can see with this red line on the graph, it shows the spectrum of light from an incandescent light bulb.
Both the sun and the old incandescent bulb are thermal emitters, and their energy is concentrated at wavelengths well below 8,000 nm—visible and near-infrared for the sun, mostly near-infrared for the filament.
Beyond 8,000 nm, their output drops off sharply. This is what makes LEDs attractive from an energy-saving perspective, because most of the energy of incandescent lights is spent in the non-visible, heat-generating end of the spectrum.
Recent changes in the United States and around the world have driven LED bulb production. These bulbs are more efficient because they produce no light in the infrared spectrum. This is considered “wasted light” since we cannot see it.
As you can see, all of the light that an LED bulb produces is in the visible spectrum. So, for the first time on Earth, what we’re seeing is light that’s coming into the eyes without any accompanying infrared light.
That sentence deserves to be read twice. For virtually all of human evolution, light arrived with infrared attached—from the sun, from fire, from any glowing object.
The LED severed that pairing, and we did it not because the infrared was harmful, but because it was inconvenient to generate.
This is taken from a long document, read the rest here substack.com