949: Light Masterclass: How to Transform Light From Health Sabotaging to Your Greatest Superpower With Roudy Nassif

Child: Welcome to my mommy’s podcast!

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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com, and this episode is truly a masterclass in all things light. This is a topic I thought I knew a lot about, and one, I have researched passionately for a while, and I learned a tremendous amount in this episode. I know it’s a long one.

I would highly encourage you to listen to the whole thing because there is so much practical information in this episode as well as a deep understanding of why this is so important. And truly might be the missing link for you when it comes to so many aspects of health, hormones, circadian biology, inflammation, and so much more.

And I’m here with Roudy Nassif, who is at the cutting edge of circadian health, as you will definitely hear in this episode. He is a renowned engineer, a wellness entrepreneur, a martial artist, and a light expert. He has been educating thousands of health practitioners and doctors about the quantum biological effects of light and helping them optimize their personal and patient’s wellbeing.
And he, as you will hear, learned this lesson the hard way coming from his own past with ADHD, Depression and chronic fatigue. And his journey took him through an unexpected turn when he accidentally discovered the power of light and darkness on health by living in a place with no artificial light. And this led to his deep understanding that you’ll hear today.
And to create something called Viva Rays, which I will link to in the show notes, which is a company on a mission to help people flourish and experience vitality by living in alignment with nature’s light and dark cycles. He engineered the world’s first circadian glasses to filter out the bad effects of artificial light, and he explains why these work differently than the others on the market.
This episode is one of the deepest dives I’ve ever done. Like I said, I learned a tremendous amount, and you might be blown away at just how drastically your light environment is impacting your health. We talk about everything from inflammation to cancer risk, to how it impacts your sleep, your cellular health, your mitochondria, why melanin has gotten an unfairly bad rap, and seven steps that are.
Almost entirely free to optimize your light exposure in ways that might dramatically change your health. Like I said, I learned a tremendous amount in this episode. I know that you will as well. I hope you will stick with me through the whole episode and I would love to hear what you think. So without any further wait, let take this masterclass and learn all about light. Roudy, welcome! Thank you so much for being here.

Roudy: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Katie.

Katie: I feel like today’s topic is one that truly can benefit everybody listening, and one that we might all have some big blind spots or misconceptions about, or certainly things that we can optimize that we may not have considered. And that topic is the broad topic of light.

This will be a masterclass in understanding light and how to use it to our advantage, as well as how it might be sabotaging our health without us realizing it when we don’t get it dialed in. And we’re going to go super deep on this topic, but before we do, I have a note from researching you for this episode that you, like me, are kind of an introverted person.

You call yourself even a caveman, but it said if you drink cacao after 6 p. m., you turn into the most crazy extroverted party animal. And I want to hear this hack because I’m also shy and don’t drink, so I would love to hear your secrets.

Roudy: Yeah, essentially, I do spend a lot of time alone at the house. I find a lot of inspiration from being on my own. I love being in nature as well. And I love tuning into the rhythms of nature. And something super interesting about me is because I spend a lot of time alone. Anytime I go out, I’m super energetic, and I have a lot of energy. And if you add in, on top of this, a little bit of cacao, I become absolutely crazy and essentially my friends never want to ride with me in the car or even on the bike if I’m drinking after 6 p.m. because it energizes me so, so, so, so well and I become almost super high, and with a lot of energy. And, uh, if you find me on a dance floor and you give me cacao, Oh my God, is, is, is going to be like really intense. Like I’m going to be spinning people around.
Katie: I love that. And that’s something I’ve recently been exploring more. It’s just dance and learning how to move my body intuitively after not really doing that for most of my life. So I love that. I’m going to try the cacao tip next time I have to be out somewhere at night because I tend to love my early bedtime and my blue light blockers and my nighttime routine. So I’m going to try this trick and let you know how it goes.

Roudy: Yeah. In fact, when it comes to dance, one of my favorite times to dance is essentially first thing in the morning during sunrise. I like to put up some really nice music and dance alone, sometimes inviting some friends, but it’s super energizing. And I love, I love starting my day with a nice dance.

Katie: I love that tip as well and for today’s topic, I’m most excited to learn from you about all things light, because over the last 10 years, I’ve become more and more convinced that this is actually probably the most important factor when it comes to our health and it does not get enough attention.

Because it obviously contributes to our circadian rhythm, but also to our digestion, to our skin health, to so many things people don’t realize. And we’re going to dive into all of that today, especially debunking some myths, hopefully about artificial light and about sunlight, especially. So to kind of jump into this or tiptoe into this topic, I would love to hear, I know you have a personal journey related to how this became such an important factor in your life and that you had quite the experience from my understanding of living with no artificial light. So I would love to hear your journey and how it led to your understanding you now have.

Roudy: Yeah, absolutely. So I’d love to bring you with me to this moment. It’s 1 a.m. March, 2017. And I’m laying down in bed next to my former partner in our dark basement in Canada, scrolling through my phone. The blue light is shining on my face and my eyes are burning and I’m feeling super drained mentally, physically, and emotionally, but I’m wired I can’t stop scrolling. Suddenly a video popped up on my feed and I almost skipped it, but then I clicked and it says, artificial light is killing us.
And here I am squeezing my brain, trying to understand what Dr. Jack Ruth is saying. But then I wake up the second day. there’s this one sentence that keeps echoing in my consciousness. You can’t get healthy in the same light environment that made you sick. And in this moment, I ask myself, Whoa, could this be the reason for everything I’ve been going through? The lack of energy, the constant fatigue, the depression. Could this be it?

And from this moment on and for over the last seven or eight years, I’ve been studying the light problem extensively and I even founded a company to solve it and I could confidently say today that the quality of our life is entirely dependent on the quality of light that enter our eyes.
And I experienced that firsthand through my own journey and as a child, uh, Katie, I was Lebanon in the Middle East. And, I was the definition of ADHD kids who can’t focus. And to be honest, the classroom left me extremely drained and it felt like a prison cell to me. I never wanted to be there. So my only escape from that prison is becoming a troublemaker.

And I, I did crazy things like I’d strategically positioned bottle of inks on the edge of the teacher’s desk, waiting in anticipation for when he’s going to get angry and slam the desk and gets splashed with the ink. And by the time I was 17 years old, I had been asked to leave seven different schools. I mean, in retrospect, it’s kind of funny. I always wanted to leave the classroom and be outside. And now I know it’s because of the lights.

And then as I got older, I became a night owl and I would stay up late until 2 or 3 am. And then waking up constantly feeling tired, low on energy and unmotivated all day long. Somehow I managed to make it to engineering school and despite looking like a fit, young, muscular engineer on the outside, on the inside, I was literally drowning. I, I lost my health. I lost my job and my sense of purpose. And no matter what I tried, martial arts, biomechanics, climbing freezing mountains with Iceman, the Wim Hof in shorts at minus 20 degrees. Nothing was lasting and I literally tried every diet imaginable. I cut down on sugar and processed food. I then turned a vegan and that did not work. And then I became a keto and then carnivore and ancestral diet. And taking the best adaptogens and supplements for sleep and brain function, but wtill, somehow I felt the same.

So I decided to leave my career as an engineer and to travel to Canada on a tourist visa to start a fresh new beginning. And uh, three months later, I’d already moved in with my former partner in the dark basement, the same place I watched that video about artificial lights. And during that time, I was experiencing a cultural shock. I was already depressed, so my depression became a lot more intense. And I was living in this cold and dark basement, mopping around all day, doing nothing, because I was on a tourist visa, I couldn’t work. At the time, in 2017, I did not speak any English. And my partner was very busy studying and working.

So my only escape was smoking cannabis in the evening and I’d be high and basking in artificial light. And suddenly I’ll get like a burst of dopamine and I’d start studying all different health topics, psychology, uh, getting excited, convinced to myself that I want to change myself and change the world. But then of course, I’ll wake up the second day with no energy whatsoever. And I’d already forgotten what I’ve studied the night before. So it was a vicious cycle and it wasn’t until my partner comes to me because I was really in a bad place she says, okay, Roudy, pack your stuff now. We’re going to volunteer on an organic farm in Northern Quebec.

And in this moment, literally like my face turns pale yellow line of worries appear on my front. And I’m thinking to myself, Oh my God, going to a farm, like how is this going to help me? But then here we are driving for seven hours from Ontario to Quebec and the car is literally bouncing on this dirt road. The lights of the cities are disappearing in the background and then we arrived to this farm at night around 9 p.m.

There’s no electricity No artificial lights just open pristine skies. We set up our tent for six weeks, sleeping under the twinkling stars and the only light after the sunset is coming from the fire flickering in front of us. Now it’s day one on I believe May 2017 and I wake up feeling exhausted, Katie. My body is so heavy. It’s resisting and I’m feeling so depressed. Like I don’t want to be outside. I don’t want to be around people. Like the last thing I want is to see somebody and to talk to them. So it’s painful.

But, but then on day three, something completely unexpected happens. I wake up with no alarm clock. And for the first time in my life, I feel like a surge of sustainable energy in my body. Like literally my body feels alive, completely rested and overflowing with joy. I’m like looking at my partner. And as if I’m seeing her for the first time, I couldn’t help but smile. This is new. This is different.

I step outside of the tent and I look around and the world around me is glowing the magical light of the dawn. The birds are singing. It’s mesmerizing. And all of this has been happening around me all the time, but I couldn’t see it. And in this moment, I realized, Oh my God, I feel it like a deep sense of connectedness to everything around me. I’m like, wow, I’m awake. I’m alive. And the most fascinating part, Katie, is that the night owl in me, who stayed up late until 2am, is now falling asleep shortly after the sunset naturally. And one morning, as I was crouched over the ground withing the crops, like, like every day for six weeks, literally the farmer walks over to me, he places his hand on my shoulder and he says to me, he used this word, he said like, wow, Roudy, what a powerful focus you got. I’ve never seen anything like it.

And oh my God, like this moment, like, like chills traveling up and down my spine up to up to now, like when I remember this moment, I go into this deep void, a moment of silence and a deep realization that everything I thought was wrong with me, ADHD, my depression, my chronic fatigue. It was never about me. It was my light environment.

Fascinating. But then you wouldn’t believe what happened next. The most unexpected thing. I, I returned to the city. And within a matter of few weeks, it all comes crashing back at me. The fog, the night owl tendencies, the exhaustion. And in this moment, I stood up and I’m like, No, I’m not going back there. And I realized I really need to go deeper. And I literally turned into a mad scientist.
But the only difference is that the farm became my laboratory. So for over four years, I kept traveling back between the city and the farm seeking experiences where I’m living with indigenous people up in Northern Canada in a way that is in complete alignment with nature’s light and dark cycles. Over those years, I was documenting every shift in my sleep, in my energy, in my mood.

And I start diving into the research, devouring books, studies, anything that I could find on the science of light I can find, so I can solve the light problem. And it was during that period that I discovered blue light blocking glasses. And, uh, I remember that moment very well. I got really excited. I heard about those clear blue blocking glasses and I bought three pairs for my sister, my former partner and I, and we were really excited and naively thinking to ourselves that we just cracked the code for solving the light problem, but nothing, no magic, no change.

They did not work. And I could share about this a little bit later, essentially I kept trying all these different brands, yellow lenses, orange lenses, red lenses, and it wasn’t until I tried a safety glasses called Dewalt. It was extremely ugly hideous, yet somehow it worked. And in that moment, the engineer in me had like a thousand different questions.

Like, why is it that all these different brands did not work? And what made the Dewalt glasses somehow more effective? And is there a room for improvement? So. In this moment, I decided to purchase a spectral color mirror to measure what the lenses were doing. And what I learned was extremely shocking because almost all of the lenses that I tried and that I tested did not do what they advertised to do. And then I could see also why the Dewalts were more effective and I saw a massive room for improvement.

So shortly after that, Katie, I met an optical engineer from Florida, a very scientific, rational person. And he got super intrigued about my story. And he said like, I don’t know about what you’re talking about, but let’s see. And he agreed to help me. So, it was a long process of trial and error and him and I were trying to perfect the right melanin pigmentation dye so that we can filter the right amount of artificial light at different times of the day. And that was a pretty fun period because I’m like literally in my garage wearing gloves, face mask on, hunched over manually tinting lenses from morning till night and reporting back to my friend in Florida.

And after nine months of failing over and over again, bum success, the, the, the first pair of circadian lenses that actually worked. And for the first time, I finally had a tool that could help me protect my hormones while I’m in the city. And, in this moment, I realized that all of my friends and all of my loved ones that I was meeting while I’m traveling, had a light problem. So I made about 30 pairs and I start handing them over to them and sharing with them what I now call the seven steps for harnessing the power of light, which I’d be more than happy also to share on this podcast.
And it blew my mind because each one of them began to heal and reverse their issues very quickly. Once they solved the light problem. For example, my mom had been battling with insomnia for over eight years literally after solving her light problem, she starts sleeping for eight hours single night. My sister who had been struggling with acne, chronic fatigue and digestive issues now has glowing skin, one of the most energetic entrepreneurs that I know. And, um, she’s cleared her digestive issues without changing her diet. So it was really fascinating. And I realized that wasn’t only about me, it was about others.

So I decided to leave the form and go on this journey of ignoring the light revolution, with this one goal in mind to by 2030, hopefully our goal is to help 1 million people to start living in rhythm with nature’s light and dark cycle.

Katie: That’s incredible. And I feel like you said so many important things in that one response. And I resonate deeply with so many of them in that I used to be very much a night owl. And that was my work time was after my kids went to bed. I would be up till two in the morning working, looking at a screen, of course.

And I also like you eventually found those safety glasses that there’s a picture of me somewhere on the internet. They’re definitely not attractive, but that was the first one that I found that kind of helped, also. I still had to learn some circadian health around not working until two in the morning, but I feel like this is such a relevant and timely conversation because many people are experiencing that kind of longer days of spring and summer.

I see so many memes floating around about how, you know, not to be dramatic, but the sun came out and it solved 99 percent of my problems. And people talking about this, like, feelings of euphoria they feel when they’re getting natural light again. And to me, that really just is the tip of the iceberg to understand how important light is.

And so I, like you, I would guess there’s many people who maybe are doing all the supplement things right. Or they have their diet dialed in and they’re still not seeing the results that they want and I think a big part of it is probably this very piece that we’re talking about with light environment and I think of your experience on the farm and what they call the camping study where people camped for a period of a few days to a week and just weren’t removed from artificial light. Nothing else changed and they saw dramatic changes in their sleep and their hormones, their labs changed. Like it was drastic and fast.

And not that all of us, you know, have the option, like as a mom, I can’t really like, unfortunately go off into the woods alone for seven days, even though that sounds incredible. But I think that illustrates how important light is and how, if we understand it, we can really use it to be this tremendous tool in our health.

And you touched on protecting your hormones by being aware of your light environment and how things shifted for you. I would love to delve into what’s happening on a cellular level in our body when we get exposed to different types of light, and how can we use it to our advantage to protect our cellular health, our hormone health. Like I said, I think this is truly like the missing piece for a lot of people, and I would love to really understand at a biological level like what’s happening in our body when we’re exposed to different wavelengths of light or different types of light.

Roudy: Yeah, absolutely. So big misconception in today’s world is that light is something superficial that makes vision possible. We turn it on and off. And it’s been taken for granted. And what we don’t realize is that light is literally the language that is spoken by every living thing on earth, from the smallest bacteria to the largest mammals. It’s light that has shaped evolution for billions of years, guiding the growth of the plants, the movement of the animals, the rhythm of the day and the night.

So it’s the language literally that nature speak to us, which shape and mold every aspect of our endocrine system. There’s no system in our body that does not receive light information in order to produce all of the neurotransmitters and hormones that control every aspect of our well-being.
So with that in mind, light is not merely that allow us to see the beauty around us. Light is information. And I think just like the information that we allow into our minds can either trap us in fear or empower us. What I would like people to start understanding is light is also a double-edged sword. It can either elevate every aspect of your life, and it could equally make you sick. Like, that moment of turning the wrong light at the wrong time has a tremendous negative impact on every aspect of your being. It even changes the way you think, the way you feel, and it changes your behavior. We’ll talk more about how light changes our reality and our behavior, but I’d like to start more from a cellular level, light literally impact us on a cellular level and more specifically the mitochondria.

And those are the tiny little engine within every cell that are responsible for producing the energy that fuels literally everything that we do, my ability to speak to you right now or to think for myself or to move in space or to create anything is impacted and fueled by the energy that is being produced by mitochondria. And, mitochondria, in the science, in the book of, in the conventional book of biology, we know that mitochondria break down the food that we eat into ATP, into energy, and then the story ends there.

But, in reality, mitochondria is actually breaking down the food into subatomic light particles called electrons and protons. And then the mitochondria is driving those electrons in the electron transport chain of the mitochondria in order to produce ATP and depleted water, which also play an absolutely essential role in our ability to transfer life force energy from the environment, the better we have hydrated water in, in our cell, the greater our ability to transfer life force through our breath, through the sun that we get through the food that we eat.

So in 2017, Dr. Douglas Wallace from the University of Washington, he won an award for a groundbreaking discovery that 95 percent of or more of modern chronic diseases, which include anxiety, depression, loss of productivity, diabetes, cancer, etc. They’re not originating in the nucleus genome, like so many of us thought.

They’re actually originating the mitochondria losing their efficiency. And one big reason the mitochondria lose their efficiency is lack of sunlight. It turns out that mitochondria is an extremely powerful environmental sensor. And one of the fundamental things that is continuously paying attention to and listening to is actually the light information that we are gathering from our environment.
So how does this work? It fascinates me that this all ties very well with Albert Einstein’s photoelectric effect, which literally show us that light excite electrons and generate electricity. And if you think about it, this is how plants photosynthesize and how solar panel works.
Here’s the fascinating part. It’s how your body and my body and humans work as well. Uh, there’s a scientist, his name is Albert Sangiordi. He won a Nobel prize for his discovery of vitamin C, I believe, but he also spoke about how sunlight excites the electrons in the electron transport chain of the mitochondria and literally create that spin in the motor of the mitochondria and creates the electricity of life that the mitochondria need in order to break down that food into energy.
In fact, it’s now scientifically known that about one third of the energy that we got come directly from food and two thirds comes from the sun. And there’s also very interesting research by two scientists under the name of Martinek and Berezin. I think they published their studies back in 1979 and they took this a step further by showing that specific frequencies of sunlight make the enzymes that speed up digestion, energy production and cellular repair up to 500 percent more effective. Imagine that becoming 500 percent better at absorbing nutrients from every meal in a producing energy and repairing yourself.

I mean, for the health seeker out there, how will that impact your journey, your recovery, your overall health. And for the health seeker out there, I want you to think about how much more you could get from what you’re already doing while putting less effort and about how much money you’d save. And on food, on supplements, even how much time you’d save on continuously eating back when I was still struggling, I used to eat 7 to 8 meals, never feeling satisfied, always and constantly dragging myself through the day as if I’m wearing a backpack full of rocks.

Today I do eat one or two meals per day and I feel stronger, more energetic and more alive than ever before. So, light literally decreases our reliability on food, but also enhances our digestion ability and our ability to absorb and assimilate nutrients into our bloodstream.
And another example of this is, for example, in the mitochondria, the key enzyme, cytochrome C oxidase, respond particularly well to red and near infrared that brought up. a whole industry of red and infrared panels that blew up, right? But for the, for the user and for the health seeker out there, I want you to remember that every enzymes in our body, literally every enzyme respond to a very different frequency of light. They have a different wavelength absorption characteristic, meaning that these thousands of enzymes are attuned and are in resonance with different frequencies of light across the full spectrum of sunlight.

Meaning that we need the full spectrum of the sun to activate all of these different enzymes, just like we need the full spectrum of vitamins and minerals in order to live the healthiest version of ourselves. Now, another food for thought, just like over consuming a mineral or a vitamin actually becomes toxic, toxify you and flood your body with toxins, make you sick. In the same way, overconsumption of that narrow frequency of blue light coming from LEDs is making all of us sick and we are not designed to live our lives under a fraction of the spectrum of sunlight that has allowed us to evolve and to become the conscious being that we are and by continuously putting ourselves in boxes with very limited light, nutrition and nano nutrients of light, we are actually causing our own devolution.

Katie: This is so good and so fascinating. And I love that you call light the language of nature and how it speaks to us. I think that like, it just shows the, the symphony that happens in nature and the parts that we’re missing. I know there’s a lot of talk of, essentially, we are having like a nature deficit disorder.

And that even if we’re doing all these other things right, that one piece can make such a difference. I joke sometimes online that I’m solar powered, but really it’s not a joke when you understand everything you just explained and the body electric. I read that book years ago and it kind of shifted the way I thought about how our body communicates with itself, with our environment, and I feel like you just united some pieces for me personally, in that for years, I’ve been saying I had this sort of nutrient theory of health, which goes beyond just calories and food. But that our body will keep craving food until it gets the nutrients it needs, not just the calories it needs.
And to your point, if light can impact so drastically how many nutrients we’re getting from our food, this might be a piece directly related to our nutrition that we may have never thought to connect.
And I would love to also understand more deeply some of the components related to, of course, light and its impact on our sleep, on our wakefulness, and in our circadian health. I would guess listeners have probably heard me before talk about how morning sunlight drastically changed my life when that became a non-negotiable habit of getting natural light outside, preferably barefoot, first thing in the morning.

My energy levels drastically changed. And from there I went on to understand how midday sun is also so important. Watching the sunrise and the sunset is like a vitamin. It’s like the best closest to a silver bullet you can get. But I think there’s still not even a full understanding of how drastically light impacts our circadian rhythm, which of course, by impacting our sleep, impacts literally every hormone, and I know we’ll get into that part too. Um, but can you walk us through the direct ways that that light exposure drastically impacts our circadian health?

Roudy: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great question. And I love what you said about nature deficiency deficit. That’s so true. And I think it’s also like a mindset deficiency by continuously thinking that is like something outside of us, that is an isolation from our existence rather than realizing that nature is our nature and that we are part of it and we are an organism in it that gives to it and is re-given from nature.

And there’s this cycle of love of continuously giving ourselves and being re-given equally to that which we give. I love that. And by the way, I could see that you are solely repowered. And many people today talk about the sun, but you look at them and like their pale yellow and their melanin is not built very well. And I could tell that you are practicing what you’re preaching literally by looking at your quality of melanin, which is glowing. And it’s so amazing. I mean, one of the things about melanin, I don’t want to go so deep down that rabbit hole, but melanin essentially is nature’s sunlight, nature’s sunscreen allow us to absorb more light without burning.

It builds up our tan increases our libido. It decreases inflammation and there’s amazing science showing how melanin actually protect us from mold and from parasite. It’s antiparasitic and anti-mold and anytime sunlight strikes the water underneath the skin, there is a production of hydrogen water for free that happens via melanin.

So, many health seekers today are becoming extremely obsessed about drinking hydrogen water. And what many of us don’t realize is, when we are out in the sun, and we have a good relationship with what we eat and we’re not eating toxic oils that cause us to burn, we’re pretty well hydrated. Anytime sunlight strikes melanin on our skin, we actually produce, endogenous hydrogen water in our body.
Shifting to light and wakefulness and sleep, it’s a very important topic because today there’s a lot of generic advice that we hear online of like experts talking about the importance of wearing, you know, cheap blue light blocking glasses during the day and avoiding screens one hour before bedtime. And that’s as deep as it goes when, when we start speaking about light. Some people are stuck in starting to talk about the benefit of sunrise, which is amazing. But with all of that, we’re just scratching the surface.

And this advice of doing this only is not enough because our mitochondria and every cell in our body rely on a very specific sequence of light information coming from nature. So you can think of it as a specific code is given by nature on a day to day basis to unlock the door for waking up, feeling energized, alert, and being focused throughout the day, and then accessing deep, restful night’s sleep at night.

And inside of each of us, we have trillions of cells and mitochondria. each of those, they have a clock sitting in front of them. And all of these trillions of clocks are synchronized together. And attuned to one central clock in the brain called the circadian clock, which you could think of it as a conductor of a musical symphony, where the conductor is reading the musical notes and queuing the musician to create harmonious music in the same way this circadian clock is reading the signals from the sun, think of, think of those as the musical notes, and it’s guiding the musicians ourselves, our organs, our mitochondria, when to work and be perfectly alert and when to rest, repair and rejuvenate.
So it’s the timing and it essentially controls when we sleep, when we wake up, how well we sleep and how deeply rested we feel when we wake up. And it does this by controlling the timing every hormone in our body. And put it in simple ways, it’s as simple as this. When we produce the right hormone at the right time, the body as an entity produces harmonious music called optimal health.

On the other side, when we produce the wrong hormone at the wrong time, or if the body fails to produce the right hormone at the right time, then we start producing dissonant music that we call chronic disease. And the circadian clock, this conductor of the musical symphony relies really on two main cues in order to stay healthy. Number one is sunlight first thing in the morning and periodically throughout the day. And number two is a consistent signal of darkness after the sunset.
Now I really want to highlight and write in cap the word consistent signal of darkness after the sunset. That is an absolute key because our circadian biology rely on consistency of timing and it receives that consistency of timing through light and darkness signals.

So if one day the sun is setting at seven and then we’re all good and we’re wearing our blue blockers. we’re getting the right signal. If the second following day we decide to skip, then the mere act of getting blue and green light in our eyes for half an hour to an hour is going to shift our circadian biology for an hour and a half to two hours. Every single time we do this, which put us on a roller coaster, literally.

And the impact of this is literally like being jet lagged. You could, it could like, could be like, uh, 6 a.m. in nature and your body is still registering 4 a.m. Meaning the day has started and you’re supposed to have that cortisone spike and adrenaline that tells you to start feeling alert, energized, and focused. But your body is missing this because it’s still thinking it’s 4am in the morning and it’s not ready to start the day.

So to put it in a practical aspect, this is how this process works. At sunrise, the light is very soft and warm. And it’s rich in the reds and the oranges and as the sun start going higher over the horizon, the blue and green lights start increasing and then soon UV light is added to that blend. And UV is an invisible frequency that we can’t see in our eyes, but has a tremendous impact on our metabolism, mood, and endocrine system.

So again, I want to bring you back to the idea that light is not just illumination. It’s information, and it’s this sequence of light that is actually informing our mitochondria that the day is starting so that we can increase our metabolism and energy production. And then, as the day turns into evening, the blue and green light start fading away. The sky flips slowly into darkness, and that is a signal to our nervous system. Hey, buddy, the day is ending. Start winding down. Let’s prepare for all the hormones that will allow us to rest.

And the absence of the frequencies of blue and green at that time. Is what triggered the release of the hormone melatonin, which many, many people today are familiar with melatonin as the sleep hormone. In reality, it’s also the highest antioxidant in nature, it activates the body’s cleaning crew, autophagy, apoptosis, and mitophagy, which are all the mechanisms that allow us to replace the old cells with new cells. The old mitochondria with new mitochondria. And I don’t know if you know this, Katie, but in highly metabolic organs, like, say, the eyes, the brain, the heart, the liver, the gut, the body is supposed to replace 20 percent of its old mitochondria a process called mitophagy every single night.

Now, do the math, meaning that. The body could replace all of its mitochondria and those highly metabolic organs in about a week. So we could be completely refreshed and revitalized when we start getting the right amount of light at the right time of the day. And when we start skipping artificial light after the sunset, and I think this literally explains why I was able to experience that transformation on the farm in as short as three days. And why also there’s many scientific studies showing that when we take people out camping, they’re getting proper sunlight during the day. They’re avoiding artificial light at night. Every aspect of their well-being is improved. Their sleep, their alertness, their focus, their productivity, their motivation.

Katie: Oh, this is so fascinating to me, and I love the point you made about melanin. I feel like it got an unfairly bad rap, especially when people were told by dermatologists, you know, any tan is bad, and it’s skin damage, and it’s gonna cause you know, long term harm to your skin. I think we overlooked this part that you talked about, like melanin is actually incredible and it’s this sort of like master antioxidant role in the body. And it’s very protective. And when we kind of threw out melanin, we threw out some really important benefits of it.

And to touch on what you said and give a personal example, I, my background is Irish Scottish largely. And so I used to burn if I looked at the sun wrong, sun wrong, and now I don’t burn at all pretty much ever, even living at the beach and being in the sun a whole lot. And that came from taking into account my light environment and also from, to your point, making sure that I cleaned up my diet. There weren’t inflammatory oils and foods in my diet. And it’s been drastic how much that’s changed and also how incredible I feel when I get the right amount of sunlight.

Like, I truly think this is an incredible superpower when we get this part right, and to your point, light can go from being something that’s sabotaging every aspect of our health to being truly a superpower when we get it dialed in. And you touched on it some already, but I would love to go even deeper on how light impacts the way we think and feel and act, because I feel like when we get that response, that feedback loop from our body, we keep, we want to keep doing it because we feel incredible, like your story illustrates and how, I believe earlier you even said, you know, light creates our reality, which is a big statement, but I would love to dive deep on that because I think it really points to just how much this is really the big lever we can pull that can drastically change everything.

Roudy: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for sharing that personal story about sunlight and how you start feeling when you built your melanin. In fact, this happens over and over again when some of my friends come visit me here in Mexico, they arrive and, you know, they know a thing or two about light. They’ve been told to wear those cheap blue blockers during the day, they avoid screen one hour before bedtime. They’re doing all the things that they’ve been told to do, but then essentially, they haven’t dived into all of the nuances of how light impact our well-being and luckily when they’re here with me and they’re hanging out with me, they’ll get to be educated about all these different nuances.
But more importantly than being educated, they get to practice and to arrive to an embodiment of what it feels to actually master those different steps to harnessing the power of light. And just to name a few, like my last roommate from Australia, her name is Alice. She arrived to our place and she knew a thing or two about light. She was blocking artificial light after the sunset using cheap Amazon glasses, which I tested for her and they weren’t doing what they promised to do.

But essentially she had almost a zero relationship with sunlight and she was still wearing sunglasses, putting sunscreen on. And after she arrived here and I start educating her about the topic. Her and I would go out surfing and of course, as somebody who’s coming from Australia and she’s originally a Northern European with a very pale skin, I was very careful on how I was introducing her to sunlight.
So we started essentially doing different protocols to build her melanin slowly. And that started by maximizing morning sunlight first thing, and then around sunset, and then introducing five minutes at a time of high UV light exposure around solar noon. And then we implemented also cold exposure because essentially when you’re cold is when your skin becomes cold, your body is able to absorb more light.
And that makes sense because during the wintertime when the sun is scorched, there’s a physiological mechanism that happens in our body that improves our ability to absorb more sunlight. So we incorporated all these different things and sure enough within within two weeks, Alice is an absolutely different woman. She is less inflamed. She lost weight. Her thinking is more clear. And most importantly, she was experiencing high level of exaltation, happiness and internal drive and connection with herself that she said she’s never experienced before. And she couldn’t explain where that fountain of joy is coming from.

And with her own words, she said she thinks that that has always been there and that joy is has been eternally within herself, but has been blocked by all the distraction and the noise and the chaos and by being in a light environment that wasn’t conducive to allowing that joy to flourish and to radiate out. So yes, light does create our own reality.

And Albert Einstein, he talked also about E equals mc squared, energy, m is matter, c is speed. I think this formula reveals a very profound truth about the universe. Light and matter are interchangeable, literally, meaning that light becomes matter. So, think about photosynthesis, how light turns into sugar, turns into matter.

Sugar turns into leaves, leaves turn into branches and then eventually a tree and matter is re-given back to nature in the form of light. And think about your cozy fireplace. When you’re burning that wood, it releases a huge amount of light and infrared heat in the form of light. So we are light beings and everything around us. And in this physical world, is but light that is given to matter and then re given from matter back to the ether or to space.

And this concept is not just a theory. It literally controls our reality and well-being. And it happens through the way of the eyes for us human beings. When light enters our eyes, it’s fascinating. Instead of traveling at the speed of light across the universe, across the ether, it essentially slows down because it passes through a substance called the vitreous in the eye, composed of water, collagen, and acid.

And this is where the magic happens, in the same way turns into sugar create photosynthesis in the plants. This light energy is literally being transformed into the neurotransmitters and hormones shape the way we think, the way we feel. And the way we act. Now, most conscious health seekers today are familiar with the saying we become what we think and what we act on. So sunlight is literally impacting the level of your thinking and it’s impacting your behavior.

We spoke about how sunlight entering the eye turn into cortisol. It makes you feel alert, energized, and ready for the day. It changes how you behave. Sunlight turns into dopamine. Now think of dopamine as this miraculous molecule that allows you to think outside of the box. To see the bigger picture in life, to set up and pay attention and to have the motivation to pursue your deepest goals.
So light is impacting dopamine system and it could does it in two ways. It could either empower you to achieve what you want in life. And to have a level of attention that is unmatched, a level of focus that is unmatched, that will allow you to focus your energy on what you want to achieve and where your attention goes, energy flows. But at the same time, sadly, light could be used. a harmful tool, completely disrupt your dopamine pathway in the brain, making you a weak link, addicting, a weak link addict, who is continuously looking for the next big hit from a social media like or from scrolling or from relying on carbs and sugar to get that spike of dopamine or starting to watch porn.
All of which are things I fell a victim for, but I felt a victim for not because I was a victim. Because simply I was putting myself in the wrong light environment that was completely depleting my ability to think for myself and to connect to that which truly matter to me so that I could have the motivation and the drive and the force to move forward in the world from a place of service and all of us, all of us, when we disconnect to the inner drive, inner voice that is continuously whispering to us about why we’re here for and what we’re meant to give the word in this lifetime. When there’s this disconnect, when there’s so much noise that is blocking us from hearing that voice, all of us become depressed, become anxious. That’s a natural effect of disconnecting from the voice of the soul and light plays a major role in either helping us to connect to that.

Because remember that light coming from sunlight and from nature is not necessarily something, something outside of you. I think we are one unit with all of that. And we’re either living symbiotically with it. And then being able to receive those information and those messages that are continuously there for us, or when we disconnect ourselves from that rhythm, we ourselves move and alienate ourselves from being able to receive and being able to heal and to tap into the wonderful source of energy.

Now, this is only a very small sample of what light becomes in our eyes. It also becomes serotonin, which controls our ability to feel good in this moment with what we are now and what we have in this moment, which I call gratitude. And a moment of gratitude could shift all your biochemistry could shift all of your path. You could, you could, you could receive bad news bad things happen in life. We cannot stop bad things from happening, but it’s, it’s the way we respond to bad things. And literally when you are in the right light environment and you are neuro chemically balanced, you’re more likely to respond to your environment in a more balanced way. Also light becomes better endorphin, which is your body’s natural painkiller and natural opioid. So literally like there’s an epidemic of Opioid addiction in the U. S.

But essentially, sunlight builds our natural opioid system and talking about melanin, the precursor to melanin is alpha beta and gamma M.C. H. and alpha M. C. H. Specifically has been shown to help regulate our appetites. People with disrupted alpha MCH because they’re wearing their sunglasses all the time, they are much more likely to eat a lot of food and there’s a link between obesity and low alpha MCH levels. Also, it boosts our libido, reduces inflammation, enhances our tan, make us radiant, that level of attraction. When you look, when I look at you, Katie, you’re radiant. It’s your melanin, it’s that light that you’re storing in you that is radiating out to the world.

Katie: So many interesting points within what you just said. I feel like every answer you give could be its own whole podcast. There’s so much information embedded in it. And I love that just to touch on that point of, you know, presence and gratitude in the present moment. I think so much in our life shifts to the degree that we can be truly present and have gratitude in each moment.

And that’s what I think a lot about these days, especially like nurturing that gratitude, which definitely feels easier when I’m outdoors getting sunlight as well. And also to your point. I know there’s so much talk right now of people using GLPs and I feel like a lot of people don’t realize that point that you just made with that connection to obesity and how when we get the right amount of sunlight, we actually naturally produce more of those same things people are injecting without needing to do something exogenously by nurturing our body’s own endogenous production of those things.
So you’ve touched on so many things, but truly 99 percent of our problems might be greatly affected by getting this light piece right. I also want to delve into a couple things that you touched on and kind of maybe dispel some myths because you mentioned sunglasses. I would love to talk about how things like sunglasses and sunscreen impact our relationship with light and the beneficial information we might get or not get from the sunlight.

And after that, we’ll get to artificial light because I also want to dispel some myths and make some points around artificial light. But, um, what’s your take on sunglasses and sunscreen and how they impact our body’s interaction with light?

Roudy: Yeah, that’s a great point. So we can start with sunglasses. I think if you think about it from a perspective of a plant, if you were to cover a plant with a black type that is like sunglasses, the plant will end up dying within a few days. And now, I hope that I have triggered your thinking enough to start realizing that we as humans, we actually photosynthesize and we do photosynthesize at a deeper level than plants do.

In fact, plants have what we call chlorophyll, which has, uh, a magnesium atom X amount of electrons for us, human beings, we have hemoglobin in our blood and hemoglobin and chlorophyll implants have a very similar structure, like they’re almost identical, but the only difference is that the hemoglobin has an iron atom, At its core. And if you look at the structure of the atom of magnesium and iron, what you’ll notice is the iron has almost double the amount of electrons than magnesium. And taking it back to the photoelectric effect by Albert Einstein, the light actually interacts with electrons to generate the electricity of life and having the double amount of electrons compared to plants, ee as humans, we are designed to interact with light at a much more profound level.

In fact, we are able to store light energy in ourselves. And that is what allow us to be more tolerant to less of an ideal light environment. Because if you put a tarp that is sunglasses like on a plant, the plant will end up dying pretty quick because plants have less capacity to absorb, store and make use of light energy over the long run.

Whereas we human beings, we have a greater capacity to do so, which make us more resilient to less of an ideal light environment. However, why would we be, why would we want to put ourself in a less of an ideal light environment? Why would we want to block our eyes from the main source of information that nourishes all biological beings on earth?

So with that being said, sunglasses is literally blocking that flow of information that every aspect of our nervous system and endocrine system is relying on in order to use those different frequencies to activate different enzymes, enhancing our digestion, activating different neurotransmitters and hormones, enhancing our mood, our ability to think clearly, also helping us produce the very hormones that we need at night in order to access a deep restful night’s sleep at night.

And anytime we’re putting sunglasses, we’re completely disconnecting ourself from all these important light information that the body needs. There could be a better version of sunglasses, hopefully in the next few years in the future, somebody will come up with an innovation where we can make sunglasses that full spectrum sunlight, including UV and infrared. And then the role of sunglasses in that case is simply to decrease brightness, which would be exactly what a hat would do, but in a more effective way.

But due to the fact that sunglasses are designed to eliminate frequencies that are absolutely essential coming from sunlight. In fact, I have measured many sunglasses with my spectra color meter and the effect when you see it with your eyes, how the full spectrum of sunlight that nourishing nano light frequencies that we rely on shrink and become absolutely like a fraction of what we’re meant to get. It’s very sad to see this.

And I’m actually wanting to publish a video about this because human beings rely on our senses. And when we see something, we’re more likely to be impacted by, Oh, wow. Like literally like sunglasses are actually shrinking that full spectrum sunlight and it a fraction of what we are meant to get. And we touch a little bit on melanin, but essentially light is information and say I’m here in Mexico at 11a.m. UV light is entering my eyes is going to stimulate the production of Alpha melanocytes stimulating hormone, but, uh, and gamma as well. And that will send a signal to my skin to produce melanocytes and, uh, in the form and turn and which turn into melanin. And essentially that is what is going to protect my skin from burning. and melanin is essentially the superpower. It’s one of the darkest substance in the universe, meaning that melanin acts like a black body radiator, meaning that it’s able to absorb all frequencies of light. It’s an absorber of light frequencies.

So the more melanin you have in your skin, the more you build up your melanin, the more of an absorber of light frequencies or the more of an efficient and effective absorber of light frequencies you are, meaning that your body is able to absorb, store, and make use of this light energy in order to do cellular work. And when you are putting sunglasses, you’re blocking the signal to produce melanin, meaning you are more likely to burn out in the sun and cause yourself cellular damage on a DNA level that is extremely harsh.

And I would argue that this is actually one of the causes of correlation of all sunlight causes cancer. Then we ask people to put those sunscreens on their skin, which are full of phototoxic chemicals. Now, what is a phototoxic chemical? You will be shocked to know the sunscreens are embedded in chemicals that when they receive light, release a tremendous amount of toxins into your bloodstream and into your endocrine system. So it’s definitely a no, no. If you’re somebody who’s been living an indoor lifestyle, I also don’t advise you listening to all this amazing information about sunlight and then going outside and frying yourself in the sun without having a good strategy. You need to have a proper strategy to build your melanin in a way that is sustainable and in a way that is respectful to your lifestyle as well.

And remembering that you’ve been living an indoor lifestyle for so many years, you can’t just go outside and fry yourself out of a sudden. Also remembering that in today’s world, we are bombarded by artificial light everywhere. And when we have a disrupted connection with darkness that also disrupt our connection with light, meaning that during the time when it’s dark, that’s actually the time when our body is supposed to undergo deep healing and rejuvenation and where the cells are supposed to clean all the inflammation from within so that we can wake up the second day and we are ready to absorb more sunlight and we are ready to be exposed to UV.

Sadly. you are in an environment where you’re exposed to LED lights all the time, then your body has no chance to clean off this inflammation, meaning that inflammation is increasing, and then less likely to be able to absorb sunlight the second day, and you’re more likely to burn when you’re exposed to artificial light the night before.

Katie: Yeah, I feel like this is the perfect segue into jumping into even deeper the potential downfalls of too much artificial light exposure, even if we are getting the sunlight piece dialed in. Because I feel like you’ve given us such a beautiful explanation of how important sunlight is. And the other piece of this seems to be balancing out our artificial light exposure and being very aware of that, because I feel like a lot of people don’t realize, like how you just explained, if you wear sunglasses, you’re blocking your body signaling mechanisms that tell you to produce melanin and actually protect you.And in the same way, like this artificial light exposure is cellularly communicating with you. And I suspect that wrapped into this topic as well, we can touch on things like melanoma and skin cancer, which is, I know a big reason a lot of people are scared of the sun is the fear of melanoma.

And I wanted to make sure I got these stats right. So I wrote them down, but based on the data, it seems indoor workers have a higher incidence in mortality from melanoma than outdoor workers. So that, to me, makes me question, is the sun the culprit at all? And that melanoma often occurs more often in areas that don’t get sunlight than areas that do, which is another kind of, I feel like, indicator that perhaps sunlight is not the actual story.

And that there’s also a connection with vitamin D and full spectrum light. And of course, there’s dietary factors that come into play here as well. But I feel like the overlooked part of the conversation, especially when we villainize the sun is looking at how is artificial light impacting us cellularly.

And if we understand based on your beautiful explanation, how the sunlight is positively affecting us cellularly, how is artificial light or how might it negatively impact us when it comes to inflammation and weight gain, and we’re hearing a lot about insulin resistance and blood sugar issues and most Americans being metabolically unhealthy, as well as I would guess this also could have a negative effect on all the other things you mentioned, like dopamine and attention and motivation and like all of that wrapped into one.

So can you tackle melanoma and skin cancer as well as artificial light and what we need to know about its downsides?

Roudy: Yeah, absolutely. Those are great statistics. And also it’s interesting to look at the fact that before the life force have shifted from an outdoor existence to an indoor existence, melanoma was almost nonexistent. So how could it be that? When we start working 95 percent of our time indoors under junk artificial lights, that melanoma has rose tremendously.
And how could it be that the source of that melanoma is exposure to sunlight when we’re continuously burying ourself in indoor environments where we’re not getting any sunlight? So that’s, uh, another great question to ask ourselves when, when we speak about, uh, melanoma and those led lights and screens that we are bathing in 12 to 16 hours every single day. They emit a very narrow spike of blue light at 455 nanometer. And this frequency in isolation is not like the full spectrum blue light that we get from the sun.

If you look at the spectral curve of sunlight, it’s composed of full spectrum blue light. And This degenerative blue light is always balanced with the regenerative yellow, orange, red, and infrared. In a way, they’ve always came together symbiotically. And throughout evolution, we’re designed to be exposed to blue light only when there’s these other symbiotic colors and frequencies that come with it. But never ever in evolution, we’ve been exposed to a form of narrow spike of blue light and isolation from all these different colors.

So there’s many studies showing that this isolated spike of blue light a reactive oxygen species in our mitochondria, leading to inflammation, oxidative stress, and cellular damage. Dr. Douglas Wallace already spoke about how 95 percent or more of modern chronic diseases, including cancer is originating from the mitochondria losing their efficiency. Also there is research showing how that spike of blue light at 455 nanometer disrupts the mitochondria from going through its natural flow, which mitochondria, they’re meant to split and then fuse back together to continue to renew themselves and stay strong and functional.

And the interesting thing is we’ve seen that when somebody is continuously bathing under the 455 nanometer frequency, the mitochondria continues to deviate, to divide. But they stopped fusing back together, and this breaks down and weakens the mitochondria. And essentially, people start feeling it in a form of like eye strain, fatigue, headaches. But when we are chronically in that environment, this is when we’re causing a tragedy of completely disrupting our mitochondrial health, which could easily manifest in a form of melanoma or a skin cancer or any other form of cancers really.
Now the damage at night even much greater because essentially when we view any form of artificial light at night, the body starts secreting the wrong hormone at the wrong time. If you measure the bloodstream of modern human beings in cities after sunset, you’ll realize that all of them will have an enormous amount of cortisol flooded in their bloodstream.

And that is nonexistent to how we’ve evolved with nature. Never ever in nature, we’ve had cortisol flooding in our system after the sunset. Cortisol is very helpful first thing in the morning because it’s going to wake you up. It’s going to make you focus. It’s going to make you alert. But at night it leaves you feeling wired, anxious, and overly stimulated. And I think it’s why most people today, uh, think that, Oh, I’m a night owl, but the truth is. You don’t have a night owl problem, you have, you have a massive light problem and the body also when it has cortisol at night, it’s going to destroy mitophagy, autophagy and apoptosis.

So every night when we sleep, 50 to 70 billion cells in our bodies are meant to die through a process called apoptosis. And the beautiful thing, every cell that dies, a new and healthier one is meant to be reborn. And this is how we’re meant to continue renewing ourselves. The person that I think I am as identity as Roudy or like the person I’m looking at right now as Katie literally not the same person on a cellular level tomorrow. We are continuously living and dying. Living and dying from day to day and the quality of this rebirth is really programmed by whether we are getting enough sunlight during the day and whether we are giving the body the proper signals of darkness when the body continue to miss that signal of darkness day after day, while completely disrupting the abilities of the cells to renew themselves and to clean the old and replace it with the new. And that is one of the fundamental reasons why we put ourselves at risk of skin cancer and other type of cancers.

Also, one of the cortisol’s role, uh, throughout evolution is to give us glucose and sugar, so that we can run away from, say, if you are in nature and there’s a predator in front of you, like in that moment, cortisol is absolutely purposeful because it’s going to give you all the sugar that you need so that you can run and fight and flight. And the interesting thing is Dr. Fritz Hallwisch from Germany back in the 1970s, he demonstrated that in today’s world, LEDs fluorescents are actually that predator. We are, we are no longer running into tigers and lions and other predators in nature, but there’s a continuous psychological predator that is actually causing us to release a tremendous amount of cortisol. And that happens when we are thinking out of balance, where we are continuously worrying when we are continuously anxious.

But also interestingly enough, it happens when we are sitting under the wrong light environment. And this literally spikes our blood glucose level. without you eating a single bite. So if you know somebody who is constantly measuring their blood glucose, obsessing about every bite that they eat and observing their blood glucose is being influenced by that, that’s amazing. It’s great to monitor your blood glucose because essentially your blood glucose impact. Your thinking, your decision making, your cravings, and when your blood glucose is messed up, you start having more cravings for sugar and carbs.

But what I want you to know is, the wrong light environment messes up with your blood glucose without you eating a single bite. So, no matter how much you’re trying to control your food intake, if you are sitting under the wrong light, you are trying to swim upstream against the river flow. And, this artificial light at night literally make you gain weight.

And this is because, number one, it messes up with your blood glucose, it increases your cravings. You’re more likely to eat at night. It also increases ghrelin, the hunger hormone. And it suppresses leptin, the satiety hormone that tells your brain that you’re feeling full. And this makes you hungry at night. And it’s why you get those sudden cravings as soon as you start watching the Netflix series. And also, when leptin is suppressed by artificial light at night, there’s a relationship between melatonin and leptin. So essentially, when our melatonin rises in response to darkness, leptin travels from underneath the skin up to the hypothalamus in the brain to upregulate our thyroid hormone and our pituitary gland. And then essentially it increases our ability to burn fat at night. While we sleep and artificial light disrupt that pathway.

Now, one more last one I add to this is, there’s a very interesting research showing a link between, obesity and vitamin A deficiency. And this is the real twist. Blue light, it turns out from LEDs, because it’s isolated, it depletes vitamin E and make us gain weight. And this may sound like, whoa, like how does that happen? But essentially vitamin A is a fat metabolism soluble. And it’s, it’s, it’s actually a yellow fat-soluble nutrients. And here’s where physics kicks in because essentially in the coloring theory, blue and yellow are complimentary colors, meaning that they cancel each other out. So when we are chronically exposed to that blue light from LEDS and screens. It literally destroys the vitamin A and disrupt our metabolism.

Katie: This is so incredible, and I think you made such a really strong case for why getting your light environment in balance is so, so important. And really, like I said in the beginning, I believe this is one of the biggest missing pieces and strongest levers that we have when it comes to health. And it’s unfortunately not one that I think people consider first, even though Like you just explained, it literally impacts every other area of health in either a positive or a negative way.
And you mentioned in the beginning, your seven steps to solve the light problem that I would love to now get really practical and give people tools for understanding all of that and how light comes into play with our hormones and our sleep, and even our glucose and our cortisol and everything. What are the most impactful steps we can take to help light become our superpower and to undo some of this health sabotaging that can happen when we don’t get it right?

Roudy: Yeah, absolutely. So the seven steps I shared these steps with like thousands of people so far in many health summits on podcast with many influential thought leaders who have also shared them with their audiences. And everyone who implement those steps will see phenomenal results. And for the most part, these steps are pretty much for free. All they require your commitment to practicing them. I’ve seen this over and over again.

When people practice those steps within a matter of few weeks, they don’t need me, they don’t need you Katie, they don’t need anybody to tell them or to remind them to practice those steps. Because I think what happened is that the pleasure of practicing those steps becomes greater than the pain of what it takes to practice them. And when you hit that point where you know in your inner self that what you’re getting from those steps. And the pleasure and the that you’re accessing from them is much greater than the resistance to doing them. Then you’re in a very great place and I really wish that you hit that place.

Now, step number one is waking up first thing in the morning, going outside and getting sunlight in your eyes at sunrise for at least 20 minutes. If you are in an environment where it’s often cloudy, the sun is still there. It’s behind the clouds. All you need to do is to extend that time outside so that you’re accumulating enough photons to reset your circadian clock first thing in the morning.
Generally speaking, if it’s cloudy, perhaps 30 minutes if it’s overcast, 45 minutes to an hour. Again, as a reminder, no sunglasses when you are outside the If you, if it’s really bright and I wouldn’t imagine it’s going to be bright first thing in the morning, but I’m talking later in the day and you’re not used to it yet, yu could use hats as a way to create natural shade and it’s going to decrease that brightness. And for maximum benefit, I like to always watch the sunrise while I’m barefoot. In fact, I’m In Mexico, barefoot most of the time, even when I lived in Canada and during the wintertime, I would do a winter hikes barefoot. I know this sounds a little bit crazy, but essentially we are designed to be connected to mother earth through, through our feet.

And that’s, that’s how we discharge excessive oxidative stress. And also, I like to, for people to think about passive ways they can implement those steps. So be creative. And the invitation there is make this part of your lifestyle. Make it part of what works for you. For example, for me. I have changed my habits and my lifestyle in such a way that I deliberately chosen sports mean that I will be exercising outside. So I have chosen surfing, surf skating. I like running on the beach, all of the sports that I engage with, I do them outside. And that allows me to harness the benefit of both exercising and natural light at the same time.

Now for the parents who are listening, your kids to school instead of driving them to school. And if the school is very far, you could park your car 15 minutes away from school, and then you could walk with them to school so that both of you are getting that morning sunlight. For professional and entrepreneurs listening. You know, you, you may wake up and you have an early meeting. Why don’t you take that meeting outside? If you really need to respond to emails, grab your phone, go with it outside, get that natural light and do your, do your emails outside while you’re getting that natural light. So there’s so many creative, passive way to implement those steps so that you’re maximizing your time.

Step number two. About an hour after the sunrise, that’s when UVA arise. And I’m so grateful that many experts today are starting to speak about the benefits of morning sunlight, very few out there understand the importance of UVA and UVB. So step number two is about UVA and when UVA reaches our eye, it activates a photosensitive protein in the eye called Neuropsin that absorbs UVA. And that’s actually what converts the amino acid tryptophan and tyrosine into dopamine, serotonin, and melatonin. So UVA and UVB activate POMC production, propriomelanocortein, is a protein that is composed of 242 amino acids. It is the raw material for so many absolutely important peptides and hormones. It becomes better endorphins. It becomes alpha MCH, but MCH and gamma MCH, all of which are absolutely important.
For people who are exercising a lot, a natural effect of exercising, you may feel, you know, some, uh, joint pain or, you know, muscle soreness, all of which are decreased improved when you are in UVA light due to better endorphin due to nitric oxide production, which essentially dilate our blood vessels and enhance circulation and healing, delivering more oxygen, to the blood and to the brain.
Also a very important thing to mention about UV, not only UV, but also red and infrared. They actually allow us to produce exclusive zone water, intracellular water, that’s very different than the water that we get from the tap. It’s, it’s water that is essentially present in nature, around holophobic areas, which are areas that attract water, like rocks, like natural rock, rock formation. But our cells actually, uh, similar to those natural rock formation. They attract water. And when light strikes the water in our body. catalyzes a split in the water molecule, the positive charge from the negative discharge. And that literally creates a battery that Dr. Gerald Pollack showed that he could light up a bulb in his lab using the electric potential.

And it’s this electric DC current that our cells also use in order to do work and do cellular regeneration and repair and drive energy. So that is tied to UV. And since UVA appears around one hour after sunrise, it’s absolutely golden if you could combine step one and step number two, and if you really can’t and you had to choose one, I always let people go for the UVA given that you’ve, you are at a stage where you’ve already built your melanin and, and you’re able to tolerate more UV, uh, during the day.

Step number three, taking some breaks every two to three hours, essentially exposing your eyes and as much of your skin as possible to sunlight. Now, the duration of exposure will really depend on your skin type, on your history. And if you are a newbie to this topic or not, will also affect how long you could be out in the sun when UVB is strong. If you are a super newbie, with sunrises and sunset, maximize on red and infrared during this, this time, and then slowly introduce UVA and UVB, and you could start with a minute, two minute at a time. And then use your intuition to start adding 30 seconds to a minute at a time until you’ve built your melanin enough and you built your solar colors enough so that you can absorb more sunlight without burning.

But essentially it’s during that time after 11am, when UVB is present and UVB is what allow us to produce vitamin D, supporting our bone, our immune health, our digestion. I think there’s no area in health that is not touched by vitamin D production or it’s in hormone actually. So that’s why I highly don’t recommend that you take it from pills.

It’s meant to be produced endogenously when you are exposed to UVB from sunlight. Also we spoke about melanin, which happens in the presence of UVB cardiovascular health improvement happen when we are in UVB sunlight. UVB has been shown to lower blood pressure. Um, so a lot of different benefits that we can access from UVB.

Step number four, when you are inside exposed to artificial light, whether it’s your LED lights or your screens, remember artificial light is not only coming from your screens. It’s in every corner of your life. It’s in the light of your fridge. It’s in the light of your living room, down the streets, in the malls, in the airports.

So, when you are exposed to this light during the day, I recommend wearing the Viva Ray Circadian Daytime Lenses. And those do not block blue light. They harmonize it, which is a massive difference compared to other yellow tinted glasses in the market, which are advised to be used during the day. But the issue with those yellow tinted blue blockers is that they eliminate the 455 nanometer frequency completely. And in the process of doing that, they also wipe out all of the blue turquoise at 480 nanometer, which is the frequency that the protein in the eye melanopsin is most sensitive to. And melanopsin is the protein that signal to our brain, whether it’s daytime or nighttime. So by eliminating that frequency, we could experience or eliminate eye strain, headaches, et cetera.
But the downside of that is that we shut down energy production and we disrupt our circadian rhythm because the brain is thinking that it’s afternoon when it’s actually daytime.

Step number five, watching the sunset directly or indirectly. And the key there is light is information. Remember that please. And information flows subconsciously into your system. It tells your nervous system the day is ending so that you start subconsciously without you needing to make an effort simple as how your heartbeat its own work on its own. This is meant to happen in the same way.
And your nervous system start winding down your body, start preparing for the right hormones so that you could access deep restful healing night’s sleep.

Step number six, turning off overhead lights. when you come back home, and then I’m a big fan of creating an environment that is conducive to relaxation using warm light, I like using crystal, crystal lamps. It could be the Himalayan salt lamps or other form of crystal lamps, where you could put an incandescent light bulb in them distribute them all across your house. Now, given the fact that this is something new, the tendency for you is going to be turning on overhead lights because it’s the easiest and the thing that you’re most used to.

So you need to be taking a step ahead of the curve and preparing. And in order to do this, I advise you that before it gets dark, prepare the crystal lamps, distribute them all over your house so that by the time it’s dark, they’re already there for you. They’re going to support your nervous system. You’re not going to freak out. Your cortisol is not going to go up. You’re going to stay in a calm, relaxed state. You’re able to think clearly.

And that’s a phenomenal time during the evening to connect with family, to talk about, things that truly matter, like to get to know your family, to, to relate to them at an intimate, deep level, to understand and connect with where they want to go, what their goal is, what they’re dreaming about, how their day was. It’s a very intimate time to connect with yourself, to connect with your family, to meditate, to imagine, to create mentally and without being overly stimulated by all these artificial lights that completely destroy your ability to feel calm and relaxed.

Last step, step number seven. So after the sunset, wearing the Viva Rays evening lenses. So, essentially, we have the three in one system where you, all you need to do is you clip the evening lens on top of the base frame. And those are designed to mimic the exact color temperature of the bonfire 1700 Kelvins, and they eliminate all of the blue and the highest frequency green, telling your brain that the day is ending.

And then one hour before bedtime, you switch to the nighttime lenses. And those are essentially, you could think of them as the end of the bonfire when the wood turns into amber coil. And that’s when you’re ready to go to bed and they eliminate all blue, a hundred percent of the green. They decrease the brightness by 10 times and all of which. maximizes melatonin production and growth hormone at nights when you are sleeping.

Katie: I feel like that was truly a masterclass. I like, I felt like this was a topic I already was passionate about and knew a lot about, and I learned so many new things, especially about all the cellular and hormonal aspects, and truly it seems like this is kind of our master switch and that this might be the piece that really shifts things for a lot of people listening.

And I’ve been taking notes this whole time. There are so many notes in the show notes as well as links to more resources to learn more about some of the things we’ve talked about. You mentioned your company in passing, but I would love to make sure we also highlight that and I will of course also link to that in the show notes. But where can people find the glasses?

Roudy: Our website is vivarays.com. The seven steps that I spoke about, I have created a resource that is completely free, where I dive a little bit deeper about those seven steps. And I’m happy to share that with your audience as well so that they can download that resource. The advice is to read it a few times so that it moves from merely being information that is imprinted on your brain to becoming more absorbed into your consciousness so that you can embody those steps and that those steps become a part of who you are and only then they will be useful to you.

You may hear them right now and get excited and think that they are useful but until you actually implement them and start living by them, they’re not going to be useful. So, in the Resource, I include guidance on how you can reduce screen time, etc. Anytime we are starting something new, there’s a lot of resistance, but we tend to forget because the habit is not wired yet.
So it’s a really cool app to remind people and to act as the circadian coach in pocket. Uh, other than this, yeah, I think that’s, that would be the website, the ebooklet and the resources in it.
Katie: I will make sure those are both linked in the show notes for any of you listening on the go. Those will be at wellnessmama.com. Hopefully you’re taking a walk in the sunlight while listening to this. And if not, I hope you’ll consider making that a habit based on all the things we’ve gotten to share today.

And I truly hope that we have inspired and educated people to consider spending much more time outside in the symphony of the sun and to audit artificial light exposure and to get those things in balance. I feel like you so beautifully explained that not that any of those are inherently in and of themselves bad, but seeing the broad picture and understanding the balance, gives us a whole new lens through ways to support our body and our sleep and our hormones and our aging process and truly everything across the board. Um, before we wrap up for today, do you have any parting thoughts for the listeners or anything we didn’t get to touch on?

Roudy: I don’t think so. To be honest, I think we touched on a lot. And my advice is that this is new information and just like any new information, it may seem complicated. It may fly over your head, the more you listen to it and the more you live by it and then you start implementing. You start wondering within, within your being, how did I live all of my life, not doing what’s most common sense to do.
It’s so wired in our biology and our system that once we start doing it, we realize it right away and we know it. We have an inner deep knowing that this is right. This is, this is. This is how I’m meant to, to live my life. And it’s always beautiful to see people coming to that realization. So I hope that all the listeners get to a point where they move beyond the information that we shared and they get to embody it.

Katie: Amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time. I truly have learned a lot. This has been an absolute joy and I am deeply grateful for you spending so much time and getting to go so deep on this topic today. I truly think it will help so many people. I’m deeply grateful for your work. Thank you so much.

Roudy: Absolutely. My pleasure.

Katie: And thank you as always for sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.