Welcome to the VP Lab Podcast, the show
where we bring you actionable health
advice from leading minds.
I'm your host, Rob, and
our guest today is Dr.
Damian Downing.
Arguably one of the pioneers of
functional and
integrated medicine in the UK, Dr.
Downing joins me for a conversation today
about all things light.
Expect to learn what the role of light
really is in the human body, why morning
sunlight is needed to help us get quality
sleep, and what mal-illumination is and
how we can avoid it.
Now, on to the conversation with Dr.
Damian Downing.
Good morning, Dr.
Downing.
It's great to finally
have you on the podcast.
I think this one's been almost a year in
the making, so I'm pretty chucked that
we're able to finally make it happen.
I know today's conversation is going to
be enlightening, and yes,
that was a terrible pun.
I'm sorry, I just had
to get it out of the way.
Anyway, before we dive in, would you mind
just giving us an intro, who you are, how
you got in the world as ecological and
functional medicine?
So obviously, I'm a doctor.
Way back in the early 80s, I discovered
about nutrition, basically,
and then about food allergy.
And I set up a laboratory doing food
allergy testing, the
first one in Britain.
And then a few of us got together and
founded a society which is now the
British Society for Ecological Medicine,
which I'm currently the president.
We describe ecological medicine as being
a systems approach to health, looking at
the interactions between the individual
and the environment.
So inputs from the environment are things
like nutrition, obviously, toxins,
increasingly environmental pollution, of
course, and also general lifestyles,
stresses, and so on.
OK,
then in the middle of the 80s, I
discovered the work of John Ott,
who's the guy who discovered, described
the problem of malillumination.
That's a fascinating sort of story, Dr.
Darning, and I'd definitely like to chat
to you a bit more about the food allergy
testing a little later on, maybe.
OK, so we've obviously
worked together in the past.
Well, I mean, you've kindly listened and
I've talked about the
chemistry that nobody cares about.
However, I think maybe what drew me to
you as a practitioner was your MO, your
your modus operandi.
You have a very systems-based approach to
medicine, which
you've already alluded to,
even within the sort of the functional
and integrated space.
And by that, I mean, again, as you've
alluded to, you really do start with the
basics, focusing on nutrition,
mitochondria, lifestyle and, well,
today's conversation, which
is which is really about life.
Now, of course, we're here to discuss
what these photons of energy are and why
we need them in their natural state, of
course, to be healthy.
However, I'd like to quickly rabbit-holt
that's OK and discuss your your
forthcoming book, which
which I think which you very kindly sent
me the some notes on in
preparation for this podcast.
Again, maybe it's just the
the want to be author in me.
And it's but it's also
a question I asked Dr.
Jenny Goodman earlier on the year.
But what drove you to write it?
And why in particular did you choose to
focus on light as a topic?
OK, so way back in the 80s, I wrote a
book called Daylight Robbery, The
Importance of Sunlight to Health.
And that was really based
on the work of John Ott,
who's the guy who made time lapse films
of plants flowering and that kind of
thing for Walt Disney.
And you can still see some of
his work on the Disney Channel.
And the story goes that this
back in the late 50s, really,
he was getting a bit, you
know, rickety and arthritic.
And so he used an old bicycle to go down
the bottom of the garden
and that kind of thing.
And then one day he broke his glasses and
didn't have a spare pair.
So it was without for a few days.
After a few days, he suddenly noticed
that his arthritis had gone.
And so he's so excited, he rushed
upstairs, we hadn't been able to do for
several years and told his wife.
And from then on, he went on to look at
the effects of light in all
sorts of things on people,
on diseases and people, on animals,
described a lot of things with animals.
I think the most remarkable one was that
some animals who normally in captivity,
they could be very aggressive, like male
rabbits, for instance, and also minks,
minks were undertaken notoriously nasty.
But he put them in the right light, which
then they come from a, you know, a cold
northern place, is quite a blue light,
and they become friendly little animals
and won't savage your fingers at all.
So it's clear that there was an influence
there of light, a very big one.
And what he figured out is firstly that
we're all deprived of
light because we moved indoors.
And obviously, light is the
environment we evolved in.
But we deprived ourselves of it.
And secondly, he figured out that we're
getting bad light, bad
vibes from our devices.
This is before we even
invented the smartphone.
But he got clearly thinking he saw
problems coming from lighting
installations in the ceiling, from
cordless phones and from TVs.
Fair enough.
And obviously, that's what they
introduced to write the book.
Yeah, I do like the sort of
the thoughts about rabbits.
I grew up with rabbits
as sort of family pets.
And yeah, and I, yeah, I often think, to
quote BX-Trix Potter, that Mr.
McGregor had a ride.
They're probably best found in pies.
They are vicious, nasty creatures, at
least from my experience of them.
And I'm surprised I
haven't ended up with tularemia.
I'll tell my mother that she's got to
sort of stick her rabbits into his
sunlight when she brings them in at all
something to that extent.
Yeah,
anyway,
yeah, no, it's definitely something I'm
looking forward to reading
and for the book, of course.
And yeah, I think maybe we could jump
into light specifically now.
Now, the way I understand it, half the
sun's energy is non visible.
And then sort of infrared light makes up
sort of the other 10% ish.
Well, excuse me, infrared light is, I
think I've got this
right, just half the light.
Infrared, you know, rough figures, 50%.
And then depends on your climate.
Yeah.
And then 10% is coming from ultraviolet.
I think that's correct.
Yeah.
And the rest visible, which is just 40%.
Yeah.
Can you explain how these frequencies
interact with our bodies at a cellular
level, and why they're important in the
context of this conversation?
Yeah.
Okay.
So in terms of, okay, that's what hits
the earth from the sun.
The next thing you need to know is that
green stuff, green spaces, plants,
leaves, that kind of thing reflects the
near infrared in quite a big way.
To the extent that if you're in a park or
a forest or whatever, and it's probably
why forest bathing is good for you.
The light coming into your eyes, there'll
be five times as much infrared,
near infrared, in
particular, as there is visible.
But obviously, you don't see it and you
don't really feel it.
So presumably, that is why, you know,
green stuff is good for us,
and we like it, and so forth.
And then the infrared also
has some special properties.
The first is that it
penetrates very well into our bodies.
And we can,
things like the cerebrospinal fluid in
our brain, and the amniotic fluid in a
pregnant uterus, they
transmit that infrared very well.
And lots of other things transmitted
around so that we got our
numbers wrong on infrared.
And in fact, it seems that about 70% of
your cells, if you're an adult, will be
receiving some of that near infrared.
And if you're a child, and therefore
smaller and so forth,
it's 100% of your cells.
Okay.
And then when it gets there, the next
thing is that infrared has some
particular properties,
has a particular resonance.
The one that everybody knows about, which
is thought to be, well, thought by some
people, to be the way that infrared light
works, is that it interacts with complex
four of the electron
transport chain in the mitochondria.
So it's a key part of energy production
in every cell in the body.
And that does seem to be
true that that happens.
But there is also an interaction or
several interactions
with water in the body.
And since 99.9% of the molecules in your
body are by number are water molecules,
there's a lot of scope for that kind of
interaction could go on everywhere.
Would that ends with where light works at
complex four, would that be working on
cytochrome C oxidase?
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
Okay.
And that's the enzyme that then helps to
produce energy in the form of oxidative
phosphorylation or ATP.
Is that correct?
Yes, it is.
Okay.
I think, Dr.
Darning, I'd love to also dig into a bit
about how light specifically helps to
regulate our circadian rhythms, because I
do feel that's often
overlooked by a lot of people.
It's taken for granted that we need
sunlight, but how and why is light
important for regulating our circadian
rhythms, especially in the morning?
And then how does that then play a role
in the way our bodies operate?
Right, okay.
I have to go back a bit.
And we have to talk about melatonin.
Ah, yes.
Okay, can we do it that way?
Okay, perfect.
Yes, definitely.
Got a few questions there.
Okay,
so we thought that when I wrote Denite
Robbery, we thought that melatonin was
stuff that was produced
by the pineal at night.
And some of it got into the brain and
helped you to sleep.
And maybe it was also an antioxidant.
Now we've had to completely reframe that
because melatonin is as old as oxygen.
This is old as
mitochondria, in fact, really.
And it's been, as they say, it's been
evolutionarily conserved,
you know, we obviously need it.
Clearly, its main purpose
is to, is as an antioxidant.
And particularly in the mitochondria,
because what are the costs of the,
like, mitochondria, use oxygen and
produce ATP, is that there's a bit of a
percent, it's not perfect.
So there's a bit of
percentage fallout from it.
So we always produce some oxidative
radical oxidizing radicals
by that process.
Those being reactive
oxygen species, is that correct?
Yeah, correct.
Yeah. And so the amazing thing is that
melatonin is produced when it's needed,
where it's needed, which is predominantly
in the mitochondria.
And just the fact of producing the ATP
will trigger the production of melatonin.
It's a kind of an
automatic process there.
Right.
So
when we need that most for the whole
body, we need it when we're active.
And so the way it's supposed to work, in
the morning, bright light, particularly
blue light, or high energy visible, as we
call it, blue and green, hitting the
eyes, sends a signal to the brain.
This is the suprachiasmatic nucleus we
don't need to get
into the technicalities.
Sends a signal to the brain, it's wake up
time, time to do some activity.
And so that switches off the brain cycle
of melatonin, which we'll come to in a
moment, and switches on
the whole body activity.
And you can make that work even better by
some reasonably vigorous exercise for
something like 20 minutes in the morning,
because that will activate your whole
body production of melatonin.
And we can record that from
the blood level of melatonin.
But the stuff in the
blood is the spillover.
It's the stuff that's left over.
I mean, it may be a good idea that it
goes around everywhere in the body.
It's the stuff that hasn't been used in
the cells, and particularly in the
mitochondria, to mop up free radicals.
Now, the brain is different.
Because the brain is about 2% of body
weight, but it uses about
20% of the energy molecules,
it is so intensive that it has to have a
special system for this.
And basically, that
happens when you sleep.
So what happens when you sleep is that
your body is effectively paralyzed,
except for all the bits
like breathing, of course.
And that prevents you,
you know, burning up,
doing adrenaline driven stuff.
And in the brain, the pineal switches on,
and it pumps melatonin right into the
third ventricle in the
middle of the brain there.
And from there, it diffuses all around in
the cerebrospinal fluid, and
then into the brain tissue.
And at that point, it also it connects
with what we call the glymphatic system,
right, which is the kind of the lymphatic
system of the brain.
And what happens with that is that, at
this point, synchronized
with the melatonin delivery,
you start pumping fluid and toxins and so
forth, waste products, out of the cells
into the extracellular fluid there, and
particularly into these glymphatics,
which are paravascular.
So every vein, every artery in the brain
there has an outer tube around it.
And there's a flow
through that of the water.
And also there's an in, but it is around
the arteries as well.
And so the flow there is pumped by the
contraction of, by the pressure wave
going through the artery, or when it also
pumps the stuff outside there.
And that, of course, is the problem with,
you know, if your blood pressure goes up,
so is all the time your blood pressure is
high, there's less room
for pressure variation.
So the pumping action is impaired.
But so the are the para arterial vessels
pump cerebrospinal fluid, rich in
melatonin at that point into the brain
and melatonin acts as does, or
does ever, as an antioxidant.
And then the output circle is that the
the paravascular, paravenus
glymphatic system pumps a load of fluid
with no toxins and so
forth out of the brain.
And then it connects with the main
lymphatic system of the
body, but only when it comes out.
A lot of that goes through the nose here
and connects with the tonsils, which are
reasonably described as the the toilet of
the brain, or the drain
of the brain, if you like.
And so that's sending the because one of
the points of the lymphatic system is not
only does a there's a route for bad stuff
to go out, but it delivers that bad
stuff, the cells and the molecules to the
lymphatic system to lymph nodes here and
everywhere in the body.
That's where the immune system gets this
information about what
it's got to deal with
and can get activated
appropriately as necessary.
So all that stuff comes out.
So it's a beautifully coordinated system.
And it happens naturally when you sleep
and particularly deep sleep, level four.
So that is why you can't detox your brain
and think or do stuff at the same time.
Yeah, that's fascinating.
And it sort of it does just show the
importance of getting that of why it's
important to get that natural light first
in the morning to sort of well to start
that system going, I suppose.
I mean, what's your saying?
A good night's sleep
starts the morning before.
Dr.
Darling, yeah, what are your thoughts on
supplemental melatonin?
I mean, everyone and their uncle has an
opinion of this, obviously.
I fall into the camp where I don't
necessarily think it's a bad thing.
And I definitely utilized it and found
that there's really no
detriment, at least for me.
I don't notice that there's any sort of
negative feedback loop that seems to sort
of exist, again, subjectively.
And I do find, yeah, that it definitely
helps recovery in terms of aches and
pains and far more so than playing around
with things like lapisarcoma glutathione,
which I think most people associate with
being the body's master antioxidant.
Obviously, there's definitely, as I
mentioned, there's some controversy
around it, especially in the UK, where
it's not available over the counter.
And, but yeah, do you think that
supplemental melatonin is something that
should be looked at more
freely or is it an issue?
Well, it's a slightly
complicated question.
Firstly,
you can boost your own melatonin
production with red near infrared light.
And that clearly is
the that clearly works.
Now, it's been shown to work.
We don't have enough studies yet to say
how good how much so
forth you need to do.
But I mean, you could just, well,
actually, let's start from your point
there that first thing you
need is a good night's sleep.
Second thing you need or that can help is
sunlight and or red light to boost your
own production of melatonin.
And the paper that showed this was a
study on young athletes,
and they gave them a red light, one of
those whole body red light maps,
and take half an hour of
that late in the evening.
And then after a couple of weeks, they
measured their
melatonin levels in the morning.
So we don't know exactly what was
happening in that one.
But we can see that there was an effect
that melatonin came up, their sleep
improved, and their athletic performance
improved, compared to controls.
So it obviously works.
We just don't know all
the parameters properly yet.
But I as to taking the supplements of
melatonin, well, it's clear that small
doses like, you know, three, four
milligrams, that kind of thing can have a
definite effect taken last thing at night
and help with sleep and so forth.
But it's also interesting that people
with cancers seem to tolerate a huge
amount more of melatonin without
completely zonking out.
And presumably that is because there's a
lot of justification for melatonin.
There's a lot of stuff there that
melatonin can help to mop up.
So people have given people with cancer
10s, 40, 50 milligrams several times a
day and got benefits with it.
But what they don't do is don't give it
at night, because then it's going to, if
you, you know, dim
your attention to body,
you want it all to be directed there.
So I don't think that, you know, I
haven't yet seen, I
suppose, I haven't yet seen
a real bad effect from taking
supplemental melatonin.
But in a way, it's not fixing the the
real problem, is it?
No, of course.
Yeah.
It's, again, just
another patch to sort of, well,
I do find, yeah, again, anecdotally,
that's quite effective.
What about as we get older?
I know this starts to sound a bit woo and
a bit out there, but it definitely does
seem to be something, at least from my
view of the literature, that as we age,
there's some
calcification of that pineal gland.
Do you think there's a case to be made
that as we get older, and our 50s, 60s,
70s, 80s, etc., that maybe a low dose of
melatonin, even if it's just a dose that
is equivalent to what's produced in the
body, so sort of 0.3 to 0.5 milligrams,
is that maybe an effective strategy that
people should maybe think about,
especially from a
controlling oxidative stress?
Well, if it's brain you're after, you
know, brain where the problem is, then,
yes, and I mean, if you're thinking about
pineal, but remember, the pineal doesn't
really have much to do with whole body
melatonin, so if it's non-brain, then I
don't see the point.
I've often given it, when I've
put it on a longish term basis, I've
always told people to leave it off for a
couple of days, and like, for instance,
take it Monday to Friday, leave it off at
weekends, and that seems to allow the
dial to reset, so you don't become
tolerant of it, you know,
you don't get used to it.
Yeah, that makes sense, and I suppose it
almost sort of starts to talk to a bigger
question about sort of calcification of
the pineal gland, and why we exclude,
well, not maybe historically, but I think
there's been an interest in recent years
about sort of getting rid of all phytic
acid in the diet, and to the point where
we are, yeah, I mean, ask any carnivore
going, and they'll sit there and sort of
preach the values of never ingesting any
form of phytic acid, but I do find it
interesting that, yeah, that by getting
rid of these, I suppose what we would
call these natural additions to our
appetite, that we actually may be doing
some level of damage to cells, to organs,
and our bodies like the pineal gland,
where maybe it's becoming, they're
becoming calcified, because we're not
getting enough phytic acid in our diets.
No, you have a point there.
I mean, I have to say, I still got to say
that, you know, we wouldn't start, for
many things, with phytic acid, you have
to start with sugar.
Sugar?
Like, sugar is the thing that is most bad
for you, most destructive of immune
systems and health in general.
Oh, okay, from that perspective, yeah,
no, there's an interesting, I don't know
how much of the online dietary
space you follow, but there's
slowly a shift happening to following a
very high sugar, a very low fat diets, I
think one of them is
called the snake diet.
And the idea is that by increasing, not
just carbohydrates, but sugar intake, in
its entirety, you can lose a lot of
weight purely because you are able to get
the, you're able to bypass a lot of the
dysfunction that we see in, in
mitochondria today, where there's this
sort of elevated CER response in the sort
of an inability to burn fat.
And a lot of people are now utilizing
very high sugar intakes to just improve
energy intake and to improve weight loss
because you aren't being met by this sort
of inability to burn fatty acids.
Mechanistically, it does make sense.
But then, as you pointed out,
you're going to end up with a lot of
inflammatory signaling further down,
increased levels of AGEs, increased
levels of oxidative stress.
And so, yeah, not to mention the issues
that would arise with gut issues.
Quite.
So, yeah.
You've made my case for me.
Yeah, no.
The whole diet thing I
do go forth and back on.
Where do you, a bit of a tangent maybe,
but where do you currently stand on
ketogenic diets and their
efficacy with long term use?
Well, I would say with the large majority
of people, it is beneficial to move
somewhat in the ketogenic direction.
But I mean, the thing that people have
said about diets for ages is that you
shouldn't, it shouldn't be a diet that
you go on until you've lost
the weight or lost it, whatever,
and then you abandon.
It should be a lifestyle change.
And you see, that's the thing you have to
bear in mind that our
lives have changed so much.
There used to be that we
had basic healthy food,
some meat, a lot of veg and hardly any
grains and so forth.
Now we've got huge amounts of ultra
processed food and so on and so forth.
You need to readjust that balance.
And I think it's the same with sunlight.
We become so deprived of natural sunlight
and so exposed to unnatural light and
electromagnetic fields, wavelength,
particularly, you know, all
these devices around us here,
and so forth.
You've got to, you know, you've got to
reset that first before
you can get anywhere else.
How was that for a segue?
That's perfect.
And it brings us straight back on track.
Thank you.
I was I was just
about to get there myself.
So yeah, no, I couldn't
really put it any better myself.
I think, just to close that point up,
it's interesting when you follow people
in the online space that most of them
start with an extreme view, whether
eating just vegetables or just meat.
Then at the end of the day, they always
slowly start to come back to center and
then sort of follow fairly well
structured omnivorous diet.
We'll have to have the carbohydrate
discussion another day.
Yeah, I think, yeah, let's get back to
light and this
concept of mal-illumination.
To start off with, and I know we touched
on where it was first coined and where
John Ott came into the picture.
With this artificial light side of
things, do you think it's the excess blue
light that's creating the issue?
Or is it the absence of natural light
that's maybe the primary driver there?
Yeah, no, you're right.
I mean, it is logical that blue light,
particularly at night and so forth, where
it's designed to be a wake up trigger in
the morning, if you're getting it at
night, there's a pretty good chance that
it will disturb your sleep.
But it isn't really, it certainly isn't
that blue light is
essentially harmful for us.
It is that blue light is meant to be
balanced with that much
larger amount of the infrared.
And it just isn't.
People like Russell Wright, who's big in
the melatonin field, makes the point that
as we moved indoors and come to depend on
electric light, we've deprived ourselves
of visible light a lot, but much more
we've deprived ourselves of the infrared.
And for a start, you remember the old
light balm, so we can't use it.
In-condescence, yeah.
Yeah,
the reason why you can now get a three
watt or whatever bulb that does the work,
that used to need a 60 watt one, is that
all that extra energy was
going to heat to infrared.
And so we were getting from the lights
and so forth, we were getting infrared.
And probably also he's right, in a way we
were kind of designed
to sit around a campfire.
In the main thing, you know, you are all
facing a campfire, around a circle,
around the campfire, you're all facing
the fire, you're all got your chest and
your heart and so on, particularly it's
open to the campfire.
There's a nice bit of vagal
stimulus from the infrared there.
And then if you start doing a bit of
communal singing or
whatever, it gets even better.
You know, it's perfect,
vagal work, shall we say.
And we've lost that as well.
Yeah, that's an interesting point.
And I'll quickly before I
forget, there is some data from
Yugi Nakashima.
He's an engineer and I think he's worked,
obviously out of Japan with a name like
that, but he's worked at Caltech.
And he's done some initial
experimentation looking in, well, he's
done a few studies actually, and we can
link them in the show notes in the
podcast showing that high levels of blue
light does seem to have a negative effect
on the skin and that it can increase,
well, oxidative stress in the dermis and
drive up ROS and that there's obviously,
from that point onwards, a negative
association between, well, obviously that
blue light and then various skin
conditions, excuse me,
and obviously people with psoriasis,
eczema, according to his research anyway,
may benefit from just
less blue light exposure.
Yeah, but they also benefit as, you know,
every cosmetic doc you come across has a
room full of different red, infrared
masks and things like that
for the face because they work.
Yeah, so again, you can fix that not by
depriving yourself of blue light so much
as by giving yourself decent infrared.
Get it from the sun, get it from a green
space, possibly just as good.
Yeah, no, it just proves the fact that I
think ultimately we just need
to get out into the sunlight.
You raised an interesting point, which
is, I suppose, the topic of this whole
conversation, get out into the sunlight.
You raised an interesting point earlier
about the vagus nerve and light and I
know you work a lot with light in your
practice, having visited you myself and I
know that you, excuse me, I know that you
also talk a lot about calming the nervous
system down and we've discussed things
like stellate ganglion blocks in the past
and looking at ways to regulate the
nervous system in that respect.
Now, would you be open to elaborating on
how light can help to get you into more,
get this right, parasympathetic state?
I think it's got to do with the stellate
ganglion, but I'm maybe incorrect.
That's a bit of a one-off, the stellate,
but it's an interesting story.
The stellate ganglion is really just a
collection of bundles and nerves in the
sympathetic immune system, the
sympathetic nervous system that basically
runs all runs down here.
And so it's a fusion of the sympathetic
nerves coming out of the
fifth and sixth cervical.
And
20% of people don't even have one.
But you're telling me that.
There's a technique that they've used for
years, that amesotis use and so forth.
If you pump local anaesthetic into the
sympathetic nervous system via the
stellate ganglion, you can treat things
like excessive sweating and also
tachyaglutamism, you know, heart running
too fast and bad rhythm.
Which is kind of quite surprising in
itself, but it does work.
But it has also been shown now that you
can do the same thing with red light.
So all you need to do is put it there,
put the red light there,
and you get the same effect.
Presumably because you're dealing there
with kind of unhealthy
cells of the nervous system
in general.
And what we do know that rare infrared
does, it just makes
everything work that bit better.
Probably biocidochromacy oxidase and also
the virus effects on water and a whole
bunch of other stuff too.
What also strikes me about that is if you
put a mark there, yeah you can get the
stellate ganglion, which is around here,
but the vagus nerve is
going down there as well.
So you can probably get that.
And if you irradiate both the vagus and
the sympathetic, then presumably they'll
both work better and you'll be in a
better kind of harmony.
At the same time, what
else is here is the thyroid.
I was about to say exactly that, yeah.
And there's several studies showing that
with not very much irradiation with near
infrared and red of the thyroid, you can
improve the production of thyroid hormone
and you can actually treat Hashimoto's
thyroiditis, which is the commonest
autoimmune disease there is, and which is
the cause of 95% of
underactive thyroid production.
You can improve that.
You can even damp down the antibody
levels and the benefit lasts for months.
So take that on.
I mean how much else could you treat with
autoimmune diseases and so forth?
But stick a light on there.
I mean fantastic effects.
Yeah, no, it's definitely a modality that
more people need to be aware of.
And like you said, you don't
need fancy bits of equipment.
A simple basic red
light panel will suffice.
Have you looked into
these red light IVs at all?
They're definitely popping up and...
IVs?
Yes, have you come across them at all?
Yeah, I do use IV
lasers of all colors, really.
Okay, intervene directly.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, that's interesting.
Is that light actually, I mean obviously
that there are photons of light, but is
that sort of moving through circulation
beyond just the point to which it's being
introduced to the body?
Oh yes, yeah.
I mean, just do it straight and it
certainly is picked up by the molecules
in the blood and transported all around.
You can even do that with...
Oh, I've got one on here, this thing.
And what we used to call the laser watch,
which just shines
light into the veins here.
And that carries it all around the body.
And that certainly
has a beneficial effect.
If you want to get more power,
more impact, you can use
photoactivator molecules.
The most popularly safest ones are
riboflavin, vinvinibitu and curcumin.
And you can probably have...
We talked now about this as antimicrobial
photodynamic therapy.
And you can get
results on all sorts of it.
The guys, they published some papers
showing that this can work really well on
infections like COVID.
There's slightly different techniques
with COVID, but I think really most
infections can respond to this and
they can't become resistant.
This is a problem.
So, I mean, what I'm
looking at now, this is,
not stuff for people to
do themselves, obviously.
I'm looking at things like Lyme disease,
Borrelia and the other bugs there, which
people end up on antibiotics for weeks,
which is not a great thing.
And so you can combine the antibiotic
therapy with the photodynamic therapy.
I think you can achieve
the same result much better.
Well, there's evidence that you can.
Yeah, I think there's
antibiotic therapies.
Obviously, they have their place.
But when people start to run them for
months, if not years on end, you're
ultimately going to end up with, God
knows how many other issues, all sorts of
bad fungal infections
developing, et cetera.
Obviously, we can't have a conversation
about photodynamic substances and
photoelectric substances without touching
on methylene blue, which is definitely in
vogue at the moment.
Now, I think that it is an
incredibly useful compound.
I think that there is something to be
said about it causing disruptions in
people with already healthy functioning
electron transport chains.
And that has probably been used a bit too
willy-nilly to be blunt about it.
However, as a tool, I think it's
incredibly effective.
I do, again, especially at the doses that
some people are starting to take it out,
worry that you start to inhibit certain
enzymes like MAO, which can maybe create
issues with histamine and
other similar reactions.
What do you think about methylene blue at
the moment, just broadly speaking?
It took me a while to be persuaded of the
merits of methylene blue,
but I did come around to it.
And I pretty much agree with all you say.
I mean, it's the first
ever synthetic drug, really.
And it's not a naturally
occurring thing in the body.
So it's not, it's not also
molecular in the strict term.
But nonetheless, it does have some
remarkable properties.
And of course,
red light and lasers would activate
methylene blue as well, vice versa.
And there are a lot of circumstances in
which it may be beneficial to shift more
electrons around the body.
But actually, it's a case of, as the
Irish say, if I was going there, I
wouldn't start from here.
What you should be starting with is the
sunlight, having its interaction with
structured water and enabling the general
flow of electrons around the body and the
zeta potential, the negative charge that
keeps our blood cells apart.
That's a perfect answer.
And again, you're setting
up my segues for me today.
The next thing I want
to talk about is water.
Now, I know there's this synergy between
light and water,
specifically structured water.
And I think most people would likely
agree with this, at least from an
intuitive standpoint.
Before we sort of dig into this a bit
more, though, would you mind helping me
and the audience to understand what
exactly structured or easy waters it's
sometimes also called actually is?
And then why specifically that's so
critical to our health?
Right.
Okay, so I have the struggle now, because
the guy who isolated vitamin C, Albert
Schenk-Yorgy, I have no idea how to
pronounce it, I still don't know.
Anyway, 60 years ago, he got very
interested in water.
And he remarked that
there are a number of
references stating that all sorts of
liquids, not just water,
can become more structured
when they're in contact
with a suitable surface.
But let's take the water
because it's more clear there.
Water is all to do
with charge and things.
If it was something to be water soluble,
it needs a bit of charge.
They're either positive or negative.
And what we now understand is that if you
put water in contact with a surface that
has a little bit of
charge there, doesn't it?
It could be negative or positive, quite
honestly, it will take on a shape.
And it will become what various people
have called liquid ice
and that kind of thing.
And Schenk-Yorgy remarked that there are
two melting points for water.
One is
zero degrees centigrade
where solid ice becomes liquid.
And the other is somewhere between 30 and
40 degrees, so somewhere around our body
temperature, where this liquid ice will
melt and become water.
But you don't go
outside these parameters.
Water in contact with a surface will form
just a monolayer, just one layer of
molecules of water
taking on a hexagonal shape.
Ordinary solid ice has a hexagonal shape,
but it has it in three dimensions.
Liquid ice has a hexagonal shape, but
only in two dimensions, right?
So the successive
layers don't bind together.
And what happens when you do that is that
the ratio of hydrogen into oxygen becomes
different because of the hexagonal shape.
So it chucks protons out.
So that's the first reason why it's
called EZ, exclusion zone water.
And so the surface on the surface there,
it has a negative charge and the bulk
water, as they call it
outside that, has a positive charge.
Now, what can then happen is that
infrared light in particular
will cause more layers of
structured water to build up.
And you can even get from that, you can
get a flow of the
protons and so forth outside.
You get flow in the bulk water,
spontaneously get flow.
But you'll also in the hexagonal water,
you'll get a flow of both
electrons and protons along it.
It's a very good conducting system.
And it seems that if you like, I call it
an electron superhighway.
And that enables communication everywhere
throughout the body.
And when you think about it,
because there's so much surface inside
the body, we're kind
of all surface, really.
And so all these surfaces, the cells and
the molecules, you know, big proteins and
so forth have a lot, can accommodate a
lot of structured water around them.
And the whole interstitium, the bit
outside the actual cells, is full of
molecules that will do that.
And some of them, of course, are
collagen, the thing, the
stuff that holds us together.
And without collagen,
we become a blob really.
And so this is a super conducting system.
And this actually makes a lot of things
work better, including the mitochondria
and their energy production.
Yeah, no, I can imagine if you've got
electrons that are flowing more easily
through a medium, you're going to have
improved cellular communication, you're
going to have improved
mitochondrial function.
And as I recently spoke to, as you know,
Jillian Kralth, and she was talking
specifically about the other roles that
mitochondria play beyond just energy
production in the body in
the spruce production of ATP.
So no, it makes complete total sense.
And thank you for bringing up that point
about superconductors.
I know that's something that Jack Cruz,
bless him, goes on about a lot when I
actually understand a
word of what man's saying.
That was great.
Thank you very much, Dr.
Darling.
I'll admit I may have to re-listen to
some of that, but I got the gist.
So thank you.
I'd like to move on to this concept of
zeta potential, which I know sort of
underlies a lot of what you've just said.
Now, again, I'm to quote A.A.
Milne, a bearer of very little brain.
So I don't understand the
concept, it's an instant parity.
But what I do understand is that it's
essentially a negative charge that keeps
cells separate and flowing.
Maybe beyond this point, though, I sort
of fall into the I'm
a bit dense category.
So I don't understand it entirely.
But could you help us to understand what
zeta potential is, and how this
combination of light and water then I
suppose makes life possible?
Yeah, if you've come
across live blood microscopy,
dark field microscopy.
So to one or the first, if you're sick
and you go and somebody takes a sample of
blood and looks at a microscope that way,
one of the first things they're likely to
say is, oh, look, all your red blood
cells are clumping together.
Now,
you've got positive
charges, negative charges.
Like charges repel each
other, opposite charges attract.
Right.
So the zeta potential is the negative
charge on the surface of the red blood
cells that keeps them apart, stops them
clumping, and therefore
makes them flow much better.
I mean, there's a load more to that, but
that's basically it.
And where it comes from is the
the structured water on the surface,
which is is negatively charged and the
positive charge goes away from that.
And that is obviously helped by infrared
light, building up the
layers of the structured water.
But it's also helped by ultraviolet,
which increases the
negative charge in those layers.
And of course, there's Stephanie Seneff,
this is at MIT, isn't she?
She's a brilliant writer and thinker
about these sorts of things.
She reckons that one of the main purposes
of cholesterol is to provide the sulfate.
Because cholesterol is a
lipid, it's oil soluble,
typically it's in the
membrane of the cells.
And typically the thing
is called lipid rafts.
On there, it doesn't
wander off in through the water.
Right.
Well, if it's there on the surface of the
cell, the membrane of a cell, then the
sulfate charge it brings with it will
provide a negative charge to the to the
cell as well will boost
negative charge if you like.
So that makes everything flow better and
improve the oxygenation and everything.
Right.
And so, I mean, that's all about
providing electrons.
And you see the ultraviolet has a role
there as well as the infrared.
And, you know, the biochemists say that
we need they say that we pH.
So we urinate out hydrogen ions, protons,
positive charges.
And also they make the point that
we need all of these things.
We produce water by
mitochondrial activity.
And that water is guys pure water and
it's some what we could
call deuterium depleted water.
So it doesn't have the deuterium the
message that messes
up with the whole ATP.
Deuterium, which is a
double hydrogen molecule,
it makes the structured water layer
there, particularly around the
mitochondria more viscous.
So it slows down the energy production.
I think Stephanie was at
Senate that you mentioned.
I think she's done a lot of
works directly into this idea of
deuterium depletion as well.
And I know we're getting off
on a bit of a tangent there.
But yeah, how if you were just to
elaborate on what you were just saying,
why is a deuterium such an issue when it
starts when it comes down to the sort of
flow of electrons and mitochondrial
function in general?
What mitochondria do is using this
electro, the complex is the big molecules
of the electron transport chain.
They build up protons, positive charges
in the inter-membrane space.
They have a double
layer thing on top of them.
And inside there, they build up protons.
So it's exactly like a battery.
I mean, it is a battery.
Right.
And then those protons go back into the
inside of the mitochondria through this
molecule called ATP synthase, which has a
three-way symmetry if you like.
It rotates.
Every time a proton is pushed through
that, it rotates the head of
the molecule by 120 degrees.
And that
upgrades one molecule of ADP,
adenodiphosphate to ATP, triphosphate.
That's our main energy currency.
So this is a very small thing.
I've still got a video that somebody in
Japan actually managed to put a
fluorescent marker on it and film it
going around by 120 degrees at time.
It was a wonderful thing.
But this is very, very small.
It's the opposite of stuff
that's visible from space.
It's barely visible at all.
And it is therefore easily clogged up by
stuff getting in there, like deuterium,
which is just a molecule that's just that
bit too big for the whole process.
So it slows down the rotary action.
Yeah, I think there's a case to be made
again about why reducing carbohydrate
consumption can be an effective tool to
help reduce deuterium as well.
As I understand it, following a lower
carbohydrate actually diet actually helps
to reduce the
deuterium levels in the body.
Dr.
Darling, I know we've only really
scratched the surface today, but I also
know that you probably have patients in a
life beyond just keeping me and the
audience entertained.
So I'd like to pivot to maybe talking
about what we can do to optimize our
lighting environments and
subsequently our health.
Now, I know there are a
lot of parallels here.
And of course, we've got to touch on the
piece about EMS because they obviously
are going to play a
large role in it as well.
But if you would be open to providing a
framework that the audience could maybe
use to optimize the environments in which
they live, they operate, I think that
would be very helpful.
Obviously light being the focus.
And again, I know there are many moving
pieces, but when working with patients,
how do you counsel them in this regard
and tell them to see
the width of the trees?
Okay.
So the first thing you need to understand
is that it's not an absolute, it's not a
binary, a black and white thing that you
have to get all the devices, RID or
whatever, and be totally free of EMFs.
You can't really do that
in the real world anyway.
And actually, you don't need to because
it turns out every bit helps.
One of the most interesting studies in
this regard was one that Trevor Marshall
did about 10 years ago, where he gave
people a hood that screams out
electromagnetic fields, or at least some
of them, it partially screams in her.
And he asked them to wear this for four
hours sleeping and four
hours waking in the 24.
So that's one third of the
time they were using this thing.
These were people with active, they were
on treatment for autoimmune diseases,
cold assortment of them.
Right. And so they did this for three weeks.
And 90% of them experienced an effect.
Now that
is really surprising to me that, I mean,
the best that can have done
is to reduce their EMF exposure by 25%.
And yet it has an effect.
And it is not surprising to me that it
wasn't always a good effect, because
we've learned this about electro
sensitive people, certainly, that you
have to be very careful
about switching it off.
You know, every body's
just got adapted to it.
Maybe it's like food allergy is the, you
know, the other side of
food allergy is an addiction.
Quickly on that one, do you think that's
having a sort of an immuno that's
obviously driving an
immunological response then?
Would that be correct?
There's people who are electro
magnetically sensitive?
Well,
certainly an inflammatory response.
Yeah, that was it.
Sorry, I was just trying to maybe
understand and paint a picture for the
audience as to what happens when people
are electro magnetically sensitive, that
that's sort of upregulating many of the
immunological processes
that then drive inflammation.
Okay, perfect.
Yeah, sorry to interrupt you.
No, no, no, it's okay.
So I think that what you need to do, that
we should all do, is at least try and
limit EMF exposure, get less bad vibes.
And, you know, the way to start that
obviously would be your sleeping area,
you know, no phones, no anything there
that's emitting whatever, Wi-Fi, if you
have to have it far, far away.
And so forth.
So there you're getting, you should be
getting, you know, maybe eight hours
of relatively free things.
And the other thing you should be doing
is getting more sunlight.
And ideally, first thing in the morning,
when you activate the adrenal, the
adrenaline driven sympathetic system, and
with some exercise, you can bring your
melatonin level up nicely.
Yeah, back to the melatonin piece again.
That's very sort of sound advice.
And I think there's definitely some tips
and tricks there with
regards to EMF exposure too.
And I think maybe utilizing things like
magnesium supplementation in the evening
to sort of help offset that, that those
calcium, those calcium voltage channels
are, are good ideas.
And yeah,
we don't have time to go into that.
There are a long list of things here that
things that can help in this regard.
And he has absolutely right magnesium and
vitamin D, of course, still important.
Just because we have discovered this
other stuff about light doesn't mean that
vitamin D went away.
So this is one of the hood type things that you can put on.
I'm not going to put it on because it
completely mess up the earphones and the
glasses and so forth.
But it covers the whole, you can get
beanie hats that do the same thing, but I
don't see the sense of that.
We don't want to just scream the top
third of your brain, do you?
And also, a good point,
you know, let's get the, while we're
getting good light to the stelaganglin
and the vagus nerve and so forth in the
neck, let's also screen
some EMF's away from the neck.
That makes sense.
That's what's good.
Take the thyroid as well.
Yeah.
The other thing I
wanted to show you is this,
which is a space blanket.
Which is a space blanket, you know, sort
of thing they give you
at the end of a marathon.
Okay.
And there's a guy online called Peter
Vito who figured this out.
He published a thing saying,
maybe this is the second best light
therapy device there is.
The first one being the sun, obviously.
So what he worked out is this thing will
reflect EMF's, photons,
whatever, back into you.
And we're all producing biophotons, as
they call it, all the time on UWEs,
ultra-weak photon emissions,
they also call it.
And they range from ultraviolet to
infrared, with something
of a peak in the yellow.
But normally you can't see them because
it's much more light around.
But you can reflect them back in.
So use this and just wrap it around
yourself outside like clothing.
You don't want to put it next to the skin
or the metal will just conduct the heat
away from your body.
But you put it outside, I think, or just
under or above the top sheet or under the
bottom sheet or something like that.
It will work fine that way.
I mean, he says if you do it under the
under sheet, then get some earplugs as
well, because it keeps doing
sort of sound.
But he got some benefit from it.
He said that, you know,
it's a strange effect.
It's not like just being warm.
There is a definite effect there.
I now started using it with patients.
I got one guy who was not only
electro-sensitive, but actually
photo-sensitive, light-sensitive.
And so he hadn't been out for months
because he seemed to react to the light.
He started using this for seconds.
He began with, I think, 20 seconds a day,
built up gradually day by day until he
was doing it for 75
minutes several times a day.
At which point he said, you're going to
have to move on from here, otherwise
you're not going to
have time to have a life.
And so he started going outdoors as well.
And lo and behold, he tolerated just for
a few seconds to begin with, but
gradually more and more and more.
And so last thing I heard from him, this
is a year after starting this project
with the space blanket, is that the
sunlight is having, sunlight is starting
to have a profound
effect on my energy levels.
And I think this is going
to be a real breakthrough.
That's incredible.
I was just doing a quick Google while you
were talking and looking into sort of how
space blankets were made, because
embarrassingly I didn't know.
And I wonder if there wouldn't be all
some sort of Faraday effect with, by
using them to potentially, if you're sort
of sleeping at night.
And if you're sort of trying to offset
that EMF exposure in the evening, maybe
it would be a useful
tool in that regard too.
I was looking at some day to the other
day on Faraday cages and they were
started to talk about why they may be
detrimental from the point of view of you
actually offsetting all electromagnetic
frequencies, including the Schumann
residence, which as you know, all too
well is rather
beneficial when it comes to life.
So there may be some issues there, but I
mean, that is a
discussion for another day.
The whole discussion around
electromagnetic sensitivities beyond just
WiFi and all these electric magnetic
fields, excuse me, that are just so
profoundly affect our health, both
positively and negatively.
Excuse me.
That's a very good thing
with that, the Faraday issue.
I hadn't thought about that.
It's a very good idea.
Well, I'm glad I was able
to be of some value today.
Little brain still working.
Dr.
Darling, I'd love to end off with just
asking a few rapid fire
questions, if that's okay.
Okay, so your thoughts on structured
walkthrough devices, are they a bit
gimmicky or they have potential?
I have yet to be convinced that the
devices will work, but I have to say that
I no longer regard it
as absolutely impossible
that they work.
So I honestly don't know,
ask me in a year or something.
Yeah.
Perfect.
From a clinical standpoint, what's the
one light based therapy or tool that you
use that you feel moves the needle the
most for most people?
Well, for me, it would be the endo light,
the laser watch thing.
But if you look around, the most widely
used one, and presumably it hasn't be
because it works, is the
cosmetic infrared masks.
Yeah, that's a good point.
If you'd asked me that question, I would
have just said bog
standard red light panels.
But yeah, I suppose the
masks also are a good option.
Yeah.
But either of those are a better entry
level thing than doing one of these.
So if you're not spend too much, you can
get the small infrared light mats for, I
don't know, 60 quid these days.
Yeah, no, they definitely have come down
in price and they're not nearly as
expensive as they previously were.
Okay, two more.
What do you think about blue blocking
glasses and their use in the evenings?
Well, it's all right.
But you could also use
infrared light to balance it out.
Yeah.
This is true.
Yeah.
Replace all your bulb
with incandescent options.
And I use one like the full spectrum
light I've got up here,
so I can't really show you.
Just don't tell a green piece.
Right.
Yeah, I'm afraid so.
Okay.
And the final one, maybe this is a
complete dual topic and
just something of an opinion.
What do you think about all this
engineering that's
currently going through the news?
Glad you asked.
I've done a submission for the ultimate
news service on this and with colleagues
I have and also for BSCM.
The best measure is this.
Firstly,
it's not doing the work that we
absolutely have to do in reducing climate
change and so forth,
even turning it back.
Even if it works on climate change, it's
just a fix and who knows how long it
will, you know, would be of any benefit
to in terms of global warming.
Secondly, of course, there's the law of
unintended consequences.
You know, stuff will happen
that we never thought about home.
So who do you think of that?
Like, I mean, the obvious example of that
is microplastics going on.
But most importantly, there's good
evidence that sunlight
is essential to health.
That I mean, we've known for 100 years,
at least, that the nearer the equator you
are, the less your
chance of getting cancer.
And we know that ultraviolet light
exposure is basically good for you.
They say that depriving yourself, living
up in northern places like this,
depriving yourself of
sunlight is as bad as smoking
for your health and your life expectancy.
And so you can fix that.
So it's a very bad idea.
Yeah,
no, I'm glad you, that's your view.
I definitely share
your views there as well.
Dr.
Downing, if people would like to work
with you, or if you view your books,
where's the best place they can find you?
Oh, well, the,
I'm on land, it's drdaneandowning.com.
But the book will be out later this year,
and I think it's going to
be called Coherent Health,
The Power of Light and Water.
Just look for Coherent Health.
A bit later on, you'll get that.
Now, the book is about stuff that you can
do for yourself and
should do for yourself.
I'm not trying to sell my services.
Okay, that's perfect.
Well, we'll be sure to link to all of
that in the show notes.
And thank you so much for your time.
It's been a pleasure to pick your brain
and to learn a little
more about light and water.
Yeah, great.
Thank you very much.
I've enjoyed it.