Harmful Modern Lights – The Fight to Bring Back Incandescent Bulbs
Sunlight is one of the most important things for our health (e.g., it halves our risk of dying or getting cancer), yet all we ever hear is how important it is to avoid it.
•While the importance of vitamin D is generally recognized, many of the other critical functions of light within plants, animals and human beings remain almost completely unknown, and hence are the focus of this article.
•One of the defining characteristics of modern life is continual exposure to unnatural light (particularly from energy efficient light bulbs). This is viewed as relatively benign, but decades of forgotten research (and a growing body of new research) show it is a root cause of a myriad of inexplicable physical and behavioral illnesses.
•Cells communicate with each other through faint emissions of ultraviolet light. This was once one of the most active fields in biology (yielding over 700 papers, 11 Nobel nominations, and a blood test which detected cancer with over 95% accuracy) before it was abandoned for political reasons and forgotten.
•The eyes and the blood conduct light throughout the body. When this process is disrupted (e.g., by glasses with lenses that filter out critical parts of the spectrum), a variety of significant illnesses can develop.
•In 2022, the federal government effectively banned the incandescent bulb because most of its output is “wasted” infrared rather than visible light, despite our bodies using that infrared for a myriad of essential processes. Senate Energy Chairman Mike Lee introduced a bill to bring those bulbs back, which yesterday received its first hearing, and with public support, can free us from the unhealthy bulbs that have been forced upon us.
Over the years, I have become convinced sunlight is one of the most essential nutrients for the body. For example, as human beings moved further and further north from Africa and had increasingly lower sun exposure, their skin became progressively lighter, something which argues the human body needs light and that the whitening of human skin in the higher latitudes was a protecting mechanism designed to ensure enough of the remaining sunlight could get inside the body.
Note: an explanation of how the darker parts of the skin prevent UV from entering the body can be found here.
Unfortunately (outside of very specific patentable applications), since no one has a financial interest in promoting sunlight it hence has no lobbyists, almost everything we hear about instead focuses on why it’s terrible for us (as sunlight prevents many diseases other industries profit from). For example:
•As discussed in a previous article, dermatology was one of the least desirable professions in medicine. They then transformed themselves into one of the most sought after ones by rebranding themselves as cancer fighters and convincing everyone to get regular skin cancer exams where any potential cancer could be quickly removed, often for thousands of dollars apiece, quickly making dermatology into one of the highest paying specialties.
A centerpiece of this rebranding was making benign cancers be labeled as deadly ones and claiming sunlight caused skin cancer (which while true, omitted to mention that that a lack of sunlight is what causes fatal skin cancers). Because of this, a lot of dermatology morphed into scaring people senseless about the sun, and despite billions being spent each year on skin cancer, the total death rate from skin cancer remains almost entirely unchanged (instead we simply diagnose and “treat” far more of it).
Note: in this article, I will attempt to explain why unnatural light causes skin cancer.
•While many factors contribute to cancer, the focus is often on sunlight and smoking as the primary culprits. I believe this emphasis explains why cancer rates continue to rise, as the true causes of cancer remain underexplored. Industries with vested interests lobby to keep these causes off-limits, diverting attention from potentially significant contributors to cancer.
The Importance of Sunlight
Prior to dermatology’s disastrous war on the sun, the value of sunlight was widely recognized in medicine. For example, in the early 1900s, heliotherapy (sunbathing) was used with great success for treating many (otherwise incurable) conditions, such as the 1918 influenza, tuberculosis, and many other diseases.
The existing data, in turn, shows that sunlight provides an immense degree of benefit. For example:
•Sunlight is critical for mental health. This is most well appreciated with depression (e.g., seasonal affective disorder). Sadly, many workers (especially night shift workers such as those in hospitals) do not get that essential light exposure and suffer immensely. For example, consider this study of Chinese operating room nurses which found their mental health was significantly worse than the general population and that this decline was correlated to their lack of sunlight exposure (which I would argue does not benefit the patients they care for).
Note: I really got this point once, where after a long period of hospital night shifts under fluorescent lights, noticed I was becoming clinically depressed (which has never otherwise happened to me and led to another physician I was close to offering to prescribe antidepressants). I decided to do an experiment and stuck with it for a few more days, then went home and bathed under an Ott full spectrum bulb I’d been able to obtain, at which point I almost instantly felt better.
•Many different studies have found sunlight exposure dramatically reduces one’s risk of cancer (e.g., this large study found high solar UVB exposure halved one’s risk of breast and prostate cancer).
•An excellent 20-year study of 29,518 women found that avoiding the sun made one 60% more likely to die (a 130% difference compared to those who had the most significant amount of sun exposure), and the most considerable benefit from regular sunlight exposure was reducing one’s risk of dying from heart disease.
Note: that study also found a variety of other common diseases were much less likely to affect those with adequate sun exposure.
•In a 2024 analysis of the UK Biobank, both measures of UV exposure that were examined (sunbed use and how much solar radiation reached the participant’s home) were associated with a lower risk of dying from any cause, from cardiovascular disease and from cancer. Likewise, when 88,905 Biobank participants wore light sensors for a week, those with brighter days and those with darker nights were each less likely to die over the following 8 years.
•Normal sunlight is critical for facilitating the circadian rhythm our body’s depend upon to rest and repair themselves. In turn, a major cause of the modern insomnia epidemic (and the profound health consequences it entails—which are discussed further here) are artificial light exposures, while one of the most useful treatments for it is to simply start your day with a full sunlight exposure.
Typically, sunlight’s benefits are thought to be due to producing vitamin D (a critical nutrient) within the body. However, I have long suspected that many of the benefits of vitamin D are not due to the vitamin itself but rather that its elevation serves as an indicator that the body is having regular sunlight exposure and hence is experiencing the myriad of benefits sunlight provides.
For example, when 24 healthy volunteers were exposed to UVA (which does not produce vitamin D) at a dose equivalent to about 30 minutes of summer sun, their arteries dilated and their blood pressure dropped, as nitric oxide stored in the skin was released into the circulation. The dermatologist behind that work, has since argued (e.g., in this review) his specialty’s position on sunlight needs to be rethought. Similarly, a meta-analysis found that spending an hour or more a day in the summer sun was associated with a 16% lower risk of breast cancer, whereas simply living somewhere with more ambient UV was not.
Note: that being said, vitamin D supplementation can often be very beneficial. However, in almost all cases, elevating your vitamin D levels through appropriate sunlight exposure provides significantly greater benefits than supplementation.
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