Biology Collective podcast where we break down

the practical applications of this emerging

science, starting with healthy life habits and

going wherever the quantum superhighway takes us.

This is your host, executive and life coach

Meredith Oak, with a quick reminder that podcasts

are conversations, not consultations. But if

you're looking for one of those, do check out our

free practitioner

directory@quantumbiologycollective.org My guest

today wrote a book on the importance of sunlight

to health called daylight robbery in 1988. Dr.

Downing has been practicing ecological medicine

ever since then, which is a systems approach to

health that considers interactions between

individuals and the environment and their health

consequences. So ecological medicine is a term

that is widely used in the United Kingdom, not so

much in North America and other parts of the

world. But I think it's a beautiful way to to

explain natural health and a nice alternative to

functional medicine, which has sort of become

synonymous with just supplements. Dr. Downing is

president of the British Society for Ecological

Medicine and was for 20 years editor of the

Journal of Nutritional and Environmental

Medicine. He serves on the editorial board of the

Ortho molecular news service. Dr. Downing and I

had a lovely conversation where I was able to

learn from his decades of wisdom working in

alternative health and in natural health and as

somebody who understood deeply and early the

implications of our changing light environment

and our changing EMF environment. So I hope you

enjoy my chat with Dr. Downing. I certainly did.

He is a fountain of knowledge that goes back many

years and he is working on a new book and

continues to be an active practitioner in London.

So if you live in that area, do look him up. He's

sees patience and continues to practice his

wisdom to this very day. Enjoy. And before we get

into it, please do consider your infrared light

exposure this winter and really anytime in the

summer months and in warm places, it's obviously

easier to get it full body infrared light

exposure when you're outside in the sunshine.

However, if you're not able to be outside in the

sunshine and also to help with detox, an infrared

sauna is really my top recommendation for feeling

good in the winter. It's something that I added

to my routine a couple of years ago when I moved

back to a cold place after living in places that

weren't so cold. And I really, really noticed a

huge difference in how I felt getting through the

winter months, I should say, I'm sorry, enjoying

and thriving through the winter months. I

appreciate winter so much more now that I know

how to properly take care of myself when it's

cold and when we're in that time of year. And one

of those things is making sure we get lots of

infrared light, which you can get from light

panels. And infrared saunas are especially good

because you have the heat as well, which is a

helpful detox. So I recommend if you need any of

those things to visit boncharge.com bcharge.com

they have a very nice little infrared sauna

blanket that you can just cozy up under while you

are, you know, watching a movie with your blue

blockers on. Of course. All right, enjoy my

conversation with Dr. Downing. He is a delightful

British gentleman. Have fun. Bye. Dr. Damian

Downing, welcome to the QVC podcast. Such a

pleasure to have you.

Dr. Damien Downing: Thank you. It's great to be here.

So you work in what is called ecological

medicine. Could you tell us a little bit about

your long career in that field and how you define

it? Because it's not a word that's used as

commonly in North America.

Dr. Damien Downing: No. Right. Well, it all started in, really in

about 1979. That's before I came into the field.

One of the founders was Professor Ronnie Finn,

who was the guy that did the definitive paper in

the Lancet Journal showing that food allergy was

a real thing and that you could cut it out and so

forth. And he and a few others, including Alan

Grant, who did the paper that clearly showed that

migraine could be caused by food intolerances.

They set up a society. I've got the notes from

the. The agenda from the. The original meeting

there. And there's a meeting to consider setting

up a society for clinical ecology is what they

called it back then. And it's an 11 o'clock

Sherry. It starts, and then at 12 o'clock they

start talking, something like that. So those days

are gone, including pretty much everybody who's

there is now gone. But then in about 1983, we set

up what was then called the British Society for

Nutritional Medicine. And then it kind of added

bits in and allergy came in and all sorts of

other stuff came in. And eventually all those

societies end up merging. And we called it

ecological medicine, echoing what was said way

back then. It. So ecological medicine is kind of

a systems approach, is looking at the

interactions between you and the environment. And

obviously the, the whole sunlight factor, or you

know, what John Ott called mal illumination is,

is a key part of that. And my God, we didn't

realize back then, didn't realize nearly as much

as we do now because of all the evidence coming

from photobiomodulation and so on and so forth,

and our understanding of mitochondria it's mind

blowing. It's really got so exciting these days.

It really has. And it's interesting because, you

know, along with the food, our light environment

has got, you know, our, our food sources and food

production have gone off the rails. And at the

same time the light that we're surrounded by in

our environment has become worse and worse. While

in parallel, the research showing how important

real food and natural light are is also mounting

weight. Yeah, we seem to be in a state of

complete imbalance there. What are your, what are

your thoughts on how, how that happened? Because

you wrote a book on the importance of sunlight to

Health in 1988.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah.

And so to, you know, as you, as you were saying

about the foundation of the ecological field of

medicine, this was, scientists and doctors were

aware of the importance of our environment and

yet somehow the innovation of the technology and

the processing of our food just went on

completely unchecked. Could you sort of speak to

that a little bit?

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah, it's always been, in all of this field,

it's always been more of a patient driven

progress than driven by doctors or even

scientists know, and that the British Society of

Dermatologists reviewed it and said it's a load

of rubbish, basically. And the British Naturist

Society, you know, people who like to be naked in

the fresh air, they reviewed and said, oh, it was

the most important medical book of the decade.

So the dermatologist said your sunlight book was

rubbish and the, the naturalists said it was

brilliant. Yeah. Okay, that tracks right.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah. And in America, of course, I mean, I was,

I'm not the expert on all this, but I understand

the, the dermatologists launched a two million

dollar campaign in about 1982, whatever, to,

well, to demonize sunlight and get everybody, you

know, looking themselves for, for cancers. And

that kind of made dermatology quite lucrative,

which it wasn't before. So there are inevitably

vested interests in this sort of thing, aren't

they? You know, you're not going to get away from

that. But it's interesting writing now because

I'm writing. Well, I don't know if it's a sequel

or whatever, but a successor to the Daylight

Robbery. It's interesting to look at how it, you

know, I completely lost my train of thought

there. Maybe you can cut this bit out and I.

Sure, yeah, go back and think. So.

We were talking, yeah, we were talking about the,

the progress of the research on light and food

compared to the, you know, what's happening in

society and technology.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah, well, so it's interesting to look at what

happens with these trends, because in writing the

sequel to Daylight Robbery is. I've been struck

by how long it takes for these things to actually

be adopted. Somebody does the original science,

you know, I mean, Albert Einstein did the AMC

squared in 1920. Something got the Nobel Prize

and so forth, but it was decades before it was

really applied. Shent Giorgi. I don't know how to

pronounce it. I'm not sure anybody does, but, you

know, the guy. I mean, yeah, guy isolated vitamin

C and so forth and also wrote a lovely little

book called bioenergetics in 1957. And he said,

he talked about this queer substance, water. And

he said that not just water, but almost any

liquid where it's in contact with a solid surface

tends to structure from the. The surface

outwards. So that was what, more than 60 years

ago this was known about. And it's only just now

with Gerald Pollock's work and so forth. They

were saying, oh, my God, structured water. And it

is, it's. I mean, it's. It's crucial. It's

brilliant. But I'm not surprised at how long

these things take. And I don't think it's just,

you know, people making a profit out of it not

being recognized. And so I think it's just, well,

doctors tend to think that what, you know, they

learned in medical school is it and so forth, and

if they didn't learn about it, then it can't be

real. And of course, they didn't learn about

nutrition in medical school, and they certainly

didn't learn about sunlight and its benefits.

Yeah, absolutely. So true. I just saw a post

yesterday from a woman who was diagnosed with

ulcerative colitis by her md this was in the

United States. And she said to him, okay, how

should I change my diet now that I have this

diagnosis? And he said to her, it doesn't matter

what you eat. This was like a year ago. So she

left and got a new doctor. But it just was a

reminder to me that physicians are still saying

that about food, never mind getting to the light

piece of it.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah, yeah, we used to call it. When we started

up the journal in 1990, we used to call them

nutritional flat earthers who still believe the

earth is flat. Nutrition isn't important. How can

it not be important?

So you've had a major focus on gut health and

food allergies. Could you explain to us a little

bit, sort of, after all of your. Your decades

working with patients and doing research and

giving presentations and running the ecological

Journal. Where, where are you at with explaining

how food and light and digestion all and. Or

health and health overall? I would say all work

together.

Dr. Damien Downing: Oh wow. You want a short answer to that one?

I've got an hour, so just talk as long as you

want.

Dr. Damien Downing: So it's interesting, when I came into this game

back in 1980, 1881, there were people saying

that, you know, food allergy had kind of just

been invented. Invented by. There was a guy

called Richard Mc who wrote a book called not all

in the Mind. I don't know if it made it big in

America. I don't know, it certainly did over

here. He basically showed not only from

practical, practicing doctors viewpoint, he

showed the food allergies were real, chemical

sensitivities were real. He remember he described

some lady who used to use a lot of hairspray and

it gave her terrible neurological symptoms and

fixed it just by cutting it out. The interesting

thing is that he wrote that In, I think 66, 10

years earlier, he wrote a book called Eat Fat and

Grow Slim saying that, you know, you needed a low

carbohydrate, high fat diet. And now that's

become an essential part of what we. And you

know, anybody, well, anybody in integrated

medicine does that took a few decades as well.

But back then people used to say, oh, I wonder if

it's the food upset me. And then all of a sudden

there were people saying, oh, I've got total

allergy syndrome. And we did an awful lot of

desensitizing back then. And then people started

getting multiple chemical sensitivity, you know,

started figuring. And this is all, well,

practically all people figuring it out for

themselves. You know, there's not going to their

doctor who's saying, oh, you've got multiple

chemicals and chemical sensitivity. Usually the

doctor's saying, oh, there's no such thing and

diet doesn't matter. And then of course, more

recently electrosensitivity has come into the

picture. You know, it's true that the, what they

call it, the gateway drug to all this is just

basic allergies, I inhaled allergies, hay fever

and so forth, or food intolerances. And you carry

that being severe for long enough, you then move

on to the next level and get multiple chemical

sensitivity. And after a few years you move on to

the next level. But it's also, you know, you have

to be integrated out now because it always has

been true that toxicity is part of the problem.

And it was John Ott that described that in the

light context. You know, his mal illumination was

a combination of not enough sunlight and too much

of this thing. I was thinking about how I could

do a zoom without a screen, but since you need

the video, I. I guess I'll have to stay here for

this.

Sorry. We'll keep it. We'll keep it brief and

then go for walks outside after.

Dr. Damien Downing: All right. Yeah. So then now, of course,

everybody's saying, oh, I think I've got MCAs.

Mast cell activation syndrome. I'm not even sure

that that's a real disease. I think it's just a

different way of looking at. Which opens a lot of

possibilities. There's a list of drugs and of

other treatments that may make a difference to

histamine release or whatever it is that's

driving your. Your MCAs. But, I mean, it's

always. It is all. It's all part of the same

thing. And with the toxicity, again, we should

have realized a long. Well, we. To some extent,

we did realize long time ago. When I started in

this, it was. There had been one or two papers.

It was kind of regarded as a given that aluminum

probably had something to do with Alzheimer's.

But that was 40 years ago, and we're still

arguing about it now. And, you know, papers

coming out saying, no, no, it doesn't work. Yes,

it does. You know.

Yeah, it's. It's interesting. I mean, what I'm

really hearing, speaking with you is how, you

know, what you were just saying earlier, like,

how long it takes for these new ideas to get

traction. And it doesn't seem to be related to

how true they are. There seems to be other

factors at play. So we had, you know, John Ott,

decades ago, talking about doing all the light

research, and Georgia, you mentioned, and so many

other researchers. I know. And anyway, it's just

interesting to me, right, because we all. We're

all like, oh, this is this. All this new stuff.

And it's like. It's not new. It's just kind of

hiding or being ignored or being pushed to the

periphery, and it's taking all of us. You know,

we have to go looking for it. But it. The. The

research is there and the evidence is there, and

it's been there for a long time, and you've

created it. You know, you and your colleagues

have created a entire field around it.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah. Yeah.

So walk me through that. Oh, read. I'm sorry,

what do you read me?

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah, yeah. First sentence of Daylight Robbery,

1988, goes. The plot of many a thriller has

hinged on the fact that the best place to hide

something is where it is obvious. I think that

applies. Oh, absolutely, in space, to the

sunlight thing. You know, you say, how, how would

we m. How did we miss it? Because it was always

there. We never thought, we never realized that

we were systematically depriving ourselves of it.

Even though, I mean, what's, what's the real

punishment in a, in a prison or a dungeon? Let's

be true. It's depriving you of sunlight. That's

why they talk about a prison term, you know,

sheet white people. You know, you see somebody

like that, I think they've probably been inside.

Yeah, yeah, sorry, go on.

No, it's just, it's so true. And, you know, I

think back to the years of my life where I was

completely bought into the idea that, that the

sun was bad for me. And I was, I was a good girl

and I was going to follow the rules and I put on

my SPF 9000 every time I went out in the sun.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah, I know.

And I feel, I feel a little betrayed, I have to

say.

Dr. Damien Downing: What, what turned it for you?

The first moment was actually from a woman who

did cosmetic. Like she, she was doing stuff for

my skin. I was in my 20s and she had been trained

in Hungary. She was probably in her 60s, so 60

something Hungarian woman. And she was looking at

my skin and she said, you don't go out in the sun

enough. And I was like, what? And she said, the

sun is life. And she said it with such force and

such conviction that it actually broke through my

false paradigm and stayed with me. And I didn't.

It was a long time before I understood it the way

I do now. But it was enough that I stopped being

so crazy about, about putting on SPF and started

to think like, oh, that actually makes sense. The

sun is life. Like, you know, you can tell

something is true by how it feels when it, you

know, how it feels in your body. And I was like,

God, how are you? Do you find that when you have

been working with people or when people come to

you and you broach the subject, are they open to

it? The idea of sunlight, I mean, you.

Dr. Damien Downing: Know, way back, nobody really thought about it,

you know, but sometimes you get dramatic changes

in people. But then you think, we didn't, we

didn't have nearly as many screens back then. You

know, you were pretty advanced if you had a

computer.

Yeah.

Dr. Damien Downing: And smartphones hadn't been invented, you know,

so the, the situation was not as bad really. It's

got a lot worse over the decades. Firstly,

because we're even more out of natural light. And

in toxic light, if you like, we're mal

illuminated more and more. Secondly, because

other forms of toxicity are just getting worse

and worse all the time. You know, there's a, a

principle that I keep thinking about. I'm not

sure to how, to what extent it works. The

principle is that natural light, good light, will

protect you from the effects of bad light. Now,

there are a few instances where it clearly is

true, but the good light, you have to have the

good light exposure first, and that may be near

infrared or whatever, but the extent to which you

can then fix the damage of bad light and so forth

by good light, I'm not sure. Yeah, well, we're

not sure, but I mean, it is obviously it's the

fabric of the universe that we're dealing with

here. This whole. Especially once you bring

structured water in. You know, there's the

smallest things, electrons, photons, protons and

so forth, you know, and it's. Suddenly you start

to realize, my God, it's on our side. He always

was on our side. You know, there's a paper I've

just been looking at that somebody linked me to

by some Korean guys about magnetic sense, you

know, that birds navigate by magnetic sense and

so forth. And some of it happens in the eyes and

other bits of it happen with magnetic granules or

whatever, somewhere in the brain. And it turns

out that humans can do this to a certain extent,

but it's only men, really. And it's own by this

method anyway. And it's only slightly over 50% of

them. But that could be just because all the

rubbish EMFs that we're exposed to. So it's only

men, it's only when they're hungry, and it's only

when they're exposed to blue light. So if you're

a hunter gatherer and you wake up hungry, well,

obviously this is a real advantage, isn't it?

You know, and this is the, the ability to

navigate by magic, by the.

Dr. Damien Downing: Magnetic field, to know where true north is or,

you know, which is a, a reasonable, fascinating

pie Mason, isn't it?

It really is.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah. But so it's the, the principle. This is the

environment we're involved in, where there is

blue light in the mornings and there is a

magnetic field that we can navigate by.

When you talk about the fabric of the universe,

how do you, how do you think about that and where

we fit into it and where our mitochondria and our

cells and our bodies fit.

Dr. Damien Downing: Into it, Mitochondria, wherever they came from,

you know, that melatonin is Basically as old as

mitochondria.

We did not.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah. And it's the. Probably the best antioxidant

going. I'm not sure that, you know, it makes much

sense to have a league table of antioxidants, but

it's a powerful antioxidant and it's probably,

they say, about five times as potent and

antioxidant as vitamin C. Really? Yeah. I don't

know how they figured that out. What is said. And

you know that it's produced in the night in order

to help you sleep. No, that's wrong. Is that it

is produced in the night by the pineal gland and

the pine. We used to think it going around the

bloodstream. You know, you could measure the PI,

the melatonin there. And it was on its way to the

brain. No, the pineal pumps it into the

ventricles of the brain, which circulate it

through the. You know about the glymphatic system.

Tell us.

Dr. Damien Downing: Okay. The brain doesn't have an ordinary

lymphatic drainage like the rest of the body. The

rest of the body has lymphatic ducts that run

away from the tissues and take the things to the

regional lymph glands, you know, the ones in your

neck here, the ones in your armpit and so forth.

And what they're taking there is firstly, waste

and secondly, inflammation. And that's the same

stuff, you know, because the immune system needs

to know what it's going to have to handle. And

that's how it gets that information. And that's

how it activates the lymphocytes and so forth to

do it. But we always thought that there wasn't a

system like that in the brain, although it was

just a tiny bit of it and so forth. Turns out the

brain has a better system. It's got what you

would call a paravascular system. So that there

are spaces around the vessels that are to some

extent driven by the pulsing in the vessels. And

they carry a load of other stuff that isn't in

the blood, for instance, in the brain. The other

thing about the brain is that that's got an

inward and an outward direction of travel for

this glymphatic or paravascular system. Right.

The inward takes the stuff from the ventricle

into the tissue of the brain, and the outer one

takes it from the tissue of the brain and the

interstitium, if you like, of the brain out and

connects to the lymphatics around the back here,

and more particularly through the nose and the

structures around Here. And so another

interesting fact about that is that when you suck

and chew and, you know, adjust the pressure in

your mouth, there's a certain amount of pumping

action going on on this stuff coming from brain.

Why do comforters work on children? Probably for

that reason. It calms the brain physically and

literally.

Like a soother. You mean like a pacifier when the

baby.

Dr. Damien Downing: Exactly.

That sucking motion. Oh, okay. Makes sense.

Dr. Damien Downing: And the melatonins produced by the pineal goes

straight into the ventricles, and from that it

goes by the paravascular route into the brain,

timed to happen when the glymphatic system is

activated, which is when you are asleep and

particularly in deep sleep. So it goes in there

and all the. Helps to mop up all the antioxidant,

all the oxidative stress and toxins, and also it

activates some of the other molecules like

superoxide dismutase and so on. And then all the

gump is taken out and delivered to, actually to

the. The lymph nodes around here in due course,

including the ones in here, the tonsils. So all

this stuff is. Is so in the brain. But that's one

half of the story, because. And again, it's. It

happened a long time ago. 1972, there was a paper

where they took the pineal gland out of little

furry animals, rats or whatever, and measured

their circulating melatonin, and it obviously

went down, but only by about 80%. So there must

have been melatonin coming from elsewhere. And

where it's coming from is every cell in the body

and particularly the mitochondria of every cell,

because that's where it's needed. Because when

you produce energy, the electron. I think, not

quite sure who said it, but I will find out

eventually. The electron transport chain, you

know, the cytochromes in the mitochondrial wall,

is less than perfect. So every, you know, few

thousand times, whatever, it drops a free radical

there instead of using it constructively. And so

you. When you exercise, when you produce ATP,

you. You build up oxidative stress, and you also

produce the melatonin to. To deal with it, and

you produce it locally and not much of it gets

out. So it's hard to know quite what circulating

levels of melatonin need mean. Sorry, it's hard

to know what they mean because it's the overflow.

It's not like it's being delivered somewhere.

It's the stuff that spilled over from the

mitochondria and, you know, during the night from

the brain.

So the melatonin has spilled over from where it's

produced and then is used by the rest of the body

for all kinds of important things, presumably.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yes, but I mean, if you get a paper, there is a

paper, for instance, that says you can get a

boost to your circulating melatonin level from

eating two bananas. Well, I'm sure it's true, but

what does it mean in real life? Because if it's

there circulating, it's not necessarily getting

into the mitochondria, which is where it's really

needed.

So what is the best way to ensure sufficient

melatonin production?

Dr. Damien Downing: Good circadian rhythm with, you know, decent

sleep at night for a reasonable period. And

probably I. Well, either use, you know, Andrew

Huberman's thing about getting outside in the

first hour of waking, get outside for five

minutes and look up at the blue sky and so forth.

Well, I tell you, it doesn't work here, but it is

miserable and cold out there and it's dark. But,

yeah, that's a good principle. And better still,

do some exercise, because exercise causes you a

high spike in circulating melatonin, so it must

be causing even bigger a spike in the melatonin

where it's needed in the mitochondria, presumably

in your muscles. So I think those are really kind

of the two elements of the circadian rhythm that

you first need most important.

Morning sunlight and morning movement.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah.

And night sleep and sleeping well at night.

Right. With ideally not a lot of artificial light

exposure before bed.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah.

Or while you're sleeping.

Dr. Damien Downing: Well, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, yes. I

mean, it's. How much is enough to disrupt. Not

much, really. There's. There is a study,

actually, if you gave me a couple minutes, I

could probably find. But we talked about it back

then, A daylight robbery showed that using a. A

single blue light bulb, which is not very bright

at all, an incandescent bulb by the bed, and

having it on and off in a cycle would. It would

entrain women's menstrual cycles. So that's an

effect coming from really not much extra light of

that color.

Coming in, but it's still enough to completely

change our hormone cycle. Yeah, yeah. So we

really need to be mindful of this because most

people. I mean, where I live, most people have,

you know, gets dark outside, they flip on the

overhead LEDs, the widest, brightest light. They

probably have that light bulb next to their bed

to read before they go to sleep. If they're not

reading on their phone or their iPad and it's

just considered normal. Nobody even thinks about

it.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah, no, no, that's right, it's, it's, you know,

well, it's in plain sight, so we're missing it.

Right. So what prompted you to write Daylight

Robbery? What was going on that led you to write

an entire book on the health benefits of

sunlight? What were you seeing? What was

happening in the world? How did, how did that

happen?

Dr. Damien Downing: Well, really it was meeting John Ott. I mean,

obviously I was already doing nutrition and

things like that. I came into this stuff really

originally by training in acupuncture. But then

when I started up practicing it, set up a clinic,

a couple of people came to me and said, oh, I

think I might have a food allergy if you read

this book by Richard McAnus. And so I started

doing, you know, more and more of that. And then

I read something about John Art and I got

interested now as an extension of the whole

nutrition thing and went over to see John Ott. He

was a lovely guy living in Florida and he showed

me his special glass in his windows and the, the

way he'd adapted his TV so it lay on the floor in

a, in a box pointing upwards. Then he had a, an a

mirror at this angle above it so that it came out

there. But hopefully harmful rays were going

straight up the ceiling.

Oh my goodness. I've never heard that. Yeah, so

he, he invented his own defense kind of

mitigation technology.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah.

So these things are possible. We don't have to

be. I mean if he could just do that in his living

room, I'm sure all these brilliant engineers

could figure this out if they wanted to.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah, yeah, that's right. And I've got a

colleague who's quite influential in the whole

electro, well not just electro sensitivity, but

harm from electromagnetic fields and so forth.

And you know, I mean, you understand that we

have, we now have billion in certain frequencies.

There are a billion times as much electromagnetic

fields waves about now as they were 50 years ago.

And of course it's harmful. One of the people

who's quite influential in that has the problem

herself and has been shown in a double blinded,

blinded experiment to react to mobile phone

things and so forth. But she manages to use a

computer and so forth, just has them solid wired

and necessary insulate stuff, you know, and you

can get a bit of tin foil and put it around the,

the connectors or whatever. It's better than

putting it around your food.

Yes, that's true. So we can, we buy the tin foil

but we use it to wrap our, our wires, not our

food. Okay. This is, yeah, we're, we're

definitely not, not looking like the basic

normies out there anymore. Okay, so you were

talking about meeting John Ott.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah.

And then that led to writing Daylight Robbery.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah, well, I led to doing a, a bit more research

and so forth. And I mean, it wasn't just going on

the Internet those days. I don't know if, you

know, you had to, had to write off to the British

Library, fill these little forms in for the

paper, and a couple of weeks later they sent it

to you. I've still got a few of those hanging

around. But, you know, things emerged like the,

the cancer connection with lack of sunlight. The

basic principle is that. Well, not the principle,

the rule of thumb, if you like, is that the

further north or south from the equator you go,

the more cancer there is, the greater your

chances of developing cancer. And the figure kind

of comes out with is two and a half times, if you

live in, I don't know, Oslo or somewhere way up

north or possibly Edmonton even, you've got

around two and a half times the probability of

developing cancer as you have in the, in let's

say in Florida. And that, that paper goes back to

like the 20s, you know, so some of this is a

hundred years old now. And of course that's got

worse because of a whole bunch of things like the

actual ionizing radiation. What we haven't really

appreciated is that firstly, an event like

Chernobyl or Fukushima, which is still going on.

All right, firstly, they're not the, you know,

the hundred ones in 100 years events. The

Chernobyl was a succession of the, the light

latest in the succession of events and there have

been several since nuclear. If you've got all

this nuclear stuff, you know it's going to go

wrong sometimes inevitably, and it does. The

second principle is that that radiation doesn't

just stay there where it is, it goes all around

the world. So we're all exposed to a greater

background level of radiation than we were. And

with Chernobyl, there's the amazing story of the,

the Pripyat marshes, which are all around the

exclusion zone in, around the reactor in

Chernobyl. And every couple of times a year,

different berries, the locals go into the marshes

and they into the woods there and gather up

berries to different times at berries at

different times a year. And then they bring them

out to the roads and there are merchants there

with stores on the roads and they weigh the, the

berries and so forth and they run a Geiger

counter over them. If the Geiger counter sounds

off high, they still buy the stuff, they just pay

the guys less. And then it goes into the, into

the international system. Could be in your jam at

breakfast right now. Really.

The radiated berries.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah.

Oh, all right, so we have the background of the

really bad ionizing radiation and then we also

have the non ionizing radiation that we surround

ourselves by with our mobile phones, our wi fi,

cell towers, 5G. All of these things.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah, all of this that just keeps getting worse

all the time.

Have you noticed, I mean, you talked about the

electromagnetic, the electrosensitivity. Have you

noticed in your patients symptoms becoming more

complex and symptoms arising in, in younger

people? I know here in the United States there's

an epidemic of combination of autoimmune and mood

disorders and all kinds of things happening in,

in very young people, you know, adolescents,

teenagers, and often even children. Young

children.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah, that. I mean, that has been going on for a

long time. Still is going on. And you know, it's

not as well. There are. Okay, there's one

interesting surprise that we just noticed, but

generally, you know, we. It's been kind of

predicted for a long time the things are going to

go on getting worse like that. And my colleague

of mine, Stephen Davis, described what he called

the nutrient toxin interface. Quite simply, the

more toxins you're exposed to and you know, let's

include toxic stress in this and AMS and

everything else. The more toxins you're exposed

to, the more nutrients you need to deal with

them. Simple as that. So why would we not take

supplements these days? The one interesting one

that I just realized I'd experience is I was

talking about kids with this strep reaction

called pandas, which is an autoimmune disease

triggered by strep infection. And I realized that

both of them had had shingles in childhood. So

shingles is a reaction to the. Well, it's a

reactivation of the chickenpox virus. Right, but

that's only supposed to happen decades later.

Yeah, I always thought shingles, you got

chickenpox, I mean, this was back before they

vaccinated the crap out of everyone. But you got

chickenpox as a child and shingles as an adult.

If you were unlucky enough not to have the

chickenpox as a child or if it came back and the

shingles were way worse.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

So you're saying there now children were having

shingles.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah, that's right.

Okay, so that's a new development, new.

Dr. Damien Downing: To everybody, I think.

Yeah, yeah. And so what's. This is just another

symptom of, well, immune systems Being destroyed.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah, I guess so. By all sorts of factors

together, including the mal illumination and the.

The crap in the food and so forth. It isn't just

to do with, you know, the COVID vaccine or

anything like that. It. Because it. These two

predated both that.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting where you're saying,

you know, we need to have a nutrient load. You

know, the nutrient load needs to be greater than

the toxic load or the. The restorative inputs

need to be greater than the assault inputs. And

decade by decade, we've been adding assault over

assault over assault.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah.

And with the light piece, I think not even

understanding. I think the food piece, we kind of

knew. We just didn't do anything about it. But

with the light piece, it's like, what do you.

People are sort of still surprised? What are you

talking about? What do you mean?

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah, yeah.

And I'm curious. You mentioned earlier when you

were talking about the. The glymphatic system in

the brain, you mentioned the tonsils. And I want

to ask you something. I have met two children, I

live in the northeast of the United States, and I

have. I have met two children in the last year

whose pediatricians recommended they have their

tonsils removed, and they did. And I'm just

wondering what your thoughts are on that. It was

my understanding that that's not necessarily

something that is recommended these days. But I

was surprised. I mean, to know personally know

two people.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah, yeah.

Should we as parents be cautious about that

procedure?

Dr. Damien Downing: I think you should, yes. I mean, it is true that

you do get kids who have recurrent tonsillitis,

and so they're sick, they're off school, they're,

you know, their learning suffers and that kind of

thing. They're unwell a lot of the time. But I

mean, what's our response to that? We give them

loads of antibiotics, which trashes the

microbiome for pretty much the rest of their

life, and then we vaccinate them. And there's

good evidence that having things like measles

infection, I mean, gives you some defense against

allergies and that kind of thing. So that's part

of the story of the explosion of the. The

epidemic of allergies, whatever that we're

seeing. And I mean, allergies, autoimmunity is

just like the armed wing of allergy, really. And

in fact, now that we understand more about

autoimmunity, we realize that these just mistakes

in a language that our immune system is speaking

all the time. 70% of the immune system is

involved in not reacting to things, only 30% is

involved in reacting. And so you need a balance

of all of these things. You need the activators

and the regulators. And it's the same for

allergies, autoimmunity and for cancer. You know,

they're all to do with imbalance, disruption of

the immune system. And having a good circadian

rhythm is obviously a key factor in all of that.

So, I mean, these days, you ask me what's the

first thing I should do about all that. Get a

good circadian rhythm.

Yeah, it's comforting to hear you say that

because I think the bad news is so many people

have terrible light inputs and don't think about

it. But the good news is it's not that

complicated to fix.

Dr. Damien Downing: No, no.

It's just changing a few light bulbs, you know,

putting some filters on your screen, you know

that there are ways to going outside. It's not

hard stuff.

Dr. Damien Downing: No, and I don't really. It's another. This is

things like the, you know, cutting, doing,

auditing your environment for electromagnetic

fields and so forth. There isn't an absolute

threshold that you've got to get over for this to

do you any good. I mean, every move in the right

direction is going to be beneficial to you.

Right.

Dr. Damien Downing: You know. Yeah, I had. When I started thinking

about the, the screen stuff, I started getting

floaters in the eye. And I went to the big eye

hospital here in Moorfield and they say, yeah,

well, it's floaters. They might go away, might

not, may come back again. So I said, what can I

do about it? Nothing really. They've got no

treatments for it. But I fixed it, I fixed it. I

recommend two things. One is hydration and

particularly, you know, zeta based hydration.

What do you mean by that?

Dr. Damien Downing: Oh, okay. The zeta potential is the charge on

cells and other surfaces. So, you know, opposite

poles attract, positive and negative attract to

each other, like poles repel. So the zeta

potential is the negative potential on the

surface of red blood cells. And most obviously

that keeps them apart, keeps them separated. And

if you do dark field microscopy on somebody else,

I don't. You know, the first thing they always

say is, oh, look, your red cells are clumping.

That's why they're clumping is because they

haven't got enough negative charge to keep them

apart. And so because they're actually larger

than some of the capillaries, they have to go

down, they have to be a part. If they're clumped,

it's deadly. You're not going to get nearly

enough blood Oxygen, all the other nutrients to

your tissues. So zeta potential is one of. Now, I

think one of the most fundamental things you can

do. And of course, it's coming from the

structured water.

The zeta potential is coming from the structured

water. So when you say hydrating yourself, zeta

hydration, is that a particular type of water or.

Dr. Damien Downing: Well, it's pure water, really. I mean, I

certainly wouldn't use London tap water. I don't

know about where you are.

No. There's fluoride, right.

Dr. Damien Downing: Oh, God, no. That's awful. That's really bad.

I've got a great big filter under my sink,

kitchen sink, and it's got a vortexer, a swirler.

So that's. So then you just need to add pure

vortex water. Yeah.

And then you add. Do you add minerals? Do you

add. What do you do to it?

Dr. Damien Downing: You add electrolytes. I mean, to be honest, they

all work, I reckon, really. There probably are

some that are distinctly better than others, but

all the. The stuff, the, you know, potassium and

magnesium and so forth, that they would. They

would probably give you if you had diarrhea, but

without the crap.

Right.

Dr. Damien Downing: Well, yeah, in the. I think they all work, you

know.

Yeah. The elect electrolyte combinations. So v.

So pure water, vortex electrolytes. Okay. So we

were talking about you, how you cured your

floaters. Okay. So that was the first piece. Well

hydrated with water that can keep our zeta

potential in a good place.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah.

All right.

Dr. Damien Downing: And the other input that I did was the infrared.

But actually, these days I think it's clear that

you could. You need the UV as well as the

infrared. The effect of these wavelengths on the

structured water is infrared, particularly 8, 10

nanometers is the best penetrating one. Builds up

the layers, more and more layers of the

structured water. And the impact of the UV is to

build up the depth of the negative charge in

there. So, you know, both together is a perfect

combination.

Can you explain that a little more? I haven't

heard it put quite like that. It's interesting.

Dr. Damien Downing: Oh, okay. We assume the, you know, people

listening to this will know about structured

water.

Yeah, more or less. Yes.

Dr. Damien Downing: Right. Okay.

But, I mean, but if you have. If you have a quick

overview of that, please give it. I always like

to have ever. You know, I learned something new

from the way people explain things just in their

own special way. Yeah.

Dr. Damien Downing: Structured water. Well, shank. Your. The

unpronounceable one said that this happens, you

know, 60 years ago, that lots of liquids, not

just water, in contact with the surface, they

form a sort of A structure. And he said water has

two melting points. One, when solid ice melts

into water, and the second, which is in the 30s

centigrade, somewhere quite near our body

temperature, where the liquid ice, which is the

structured water, melts. And he speculated that

this gives our bodies the ability to destroy and

reform structured water kind of at our will. That

was, presumably, is something to do with what

running a temperature does. You know, whether

it's making the environment less friendly to

infect the Asians or they're not quite sure yet,

but that certainly happens. So structured water

forms when it's in touch with a surface that has

a bit of charge on it, and it doesn't take much,

so it tends to have a kind of a hexagonal form.

It's a layer. First it's a monolayer, then it's

multiple layers. And it's been calculated that

inside us, because there's no empty space inside

us, it's all stuff, you know, it's all molecules.

And a lot of the molecules that are at the

interstitium, like the glycosaminide, glycans and

so forth, they really like water. And so the

water on top of those will be structured water,

which. And also on collagen, which is like a.

It's like rope. It's. There's, you know, long

strings, the small filaments and so forth. So

electricity travels better through structured

water because it doesn't have to try going

everywhere. It's got a kind of Australia. It's

like providing it with a wire, but slightly flat

wire. And so this is kind of key to a lot of

life. This is the bit where the universe is on

our side, you know. So I think, honestly, without

this sort of stuff, life probably would never

have happened, but it did. And presumably these

rules must be the same everywhere in the

universe. So, you know, maybe the SETI search for

extraterrestrial intelligence will finally find

something. We shall see. But the structured water

happens naturally just because it's in contact

with the surface. And then kind of all light, to

a greater or lesser extent, encourages it to. To

build up more and more layers of structured

water. But the best at doing it is the infrared.

And in fact, it's in sort of middle infrared,

where you're talking thousands of nanometers. But

the problem with that is that not much reaches

the surface of the Earth because it's absorbed by

the water in the atmosphere. So the most useful

one is the near infrared, when there's a lot more

reaches us. And also it seems to be the

wavelength with the best penetration. So it goes,

you know, way deep into us. And things like the

cerebral spinal fluid are pretty good conductors

of that sort of electricity. You know, when you

do ultrasound examination, fluids, watery fluids,

look black. There's no reflection from in there.

The stuff goes straight through easily. And I

think if you were to do it with light, it would

be the same. Certainly with the infrared light,

it's carried well through cerebral spirit and of

course, through the amniotic fluid. So the baby's

getting a nice dose. Especially if you take your

bump out into the sun, Baby gets a really good

dose. And so the infrared does that, and the

ultraviolet, which we need for a variety of

reasons. This is one of the reasons why it's

beneficial to us because it helps to build up the

depth of the charge right next to the. The cell

or the molecule or whatever, which keeps

everything moving and. And flowing. So whether

that is why UVA and blue light, high energy,

visible, if you, like, make the magnetic sense,

were. Don't know yet. You know, there's a lot to

be figured out about that.

Wow. So it really. I mean, we really are getting

charged up.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah.

We're like the. Where these little sort of liquid

crystal matrices getting charged up by the. The

light that we surround ourselves by. Or depleted,

as the case may be.

Dr. Damien Downing: Well, yes. Quiet. Yeah.

Wow. So I. I just love hearing about this. It

really. I mean, there's almost. Almost a

spiritual aspect to it when you think of how

exquisite it all is.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah, I agree. Yeah. We're in touch with the

fundamentals of the universe. Yeah.

Just by existing.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah. Yeah. Is what I kind of say is it's in the

nature of things. All of this stuff is in the

nature of things. In the nature of the universe

is how the universe works. If we let it, we seem

to do our worst best to prevent it.

Oh, there's the key. There's the key, Dr.

Downing. If we let it. And that's a great. That's

a beautiful way to put it, because that is all.

We only have to. We just need to allow it. We

don't actually have to do anything except get the

stuff out of the way. That's. That's disallowing

it.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah, absolutely.

Beautiful. So tell us before we wrap, tell us

about your next book. Is it. Is it building on

daylight robbery and the benefits of sunlight?

What can we expect?

Dr. Damien Downing: It is, but I mean, it's had to be completely

rewritten. I couldn't just do an update. Back in

the 80s, we figured the bit about cancer, we

Figured that it was that light was good for the

heart. We didn't really understand why, but I, I

mean, that's much better these days. We

understand a lot more about lipids and about

mitochondria. And there were observations that

athletes could improve their performance by

exposing to sunlight and so forth. Very clear

evidence back then, but we didn't really

understand how that was happening. We're only

speculating. Obviously knew about vitamin D and,

you know, cancer and rickets and so on and so

forth. But now that we understand about

mitochondria, we understand that there's a

wavelength, the 8, 10 nanometers, the penetrates

that goes straight into the mitochondria. And

there was a big argument, I guess it still goes

on saying is what's happening there? That it's

cytochrome C oxidase, one of the elements, the,

the mitochondrial electron transport chain,

because that resonates the right frequency. And

then there's a bunch of people saying, no, that's

silly. It's really structured water. And now we

have. You know, it certainly would work by

structured water. I. It may be the structure of

water is not the only thing, but it's definitely

got to be part of it, you know, so all kind of

all of a sudden, except, you know, there seems to

be this latency period, about 50 years for all of

it. We've got. Oh, God, it all fits together. So

that's why the. The magnetic center spear is

downs, really. So I call this another way it all

fits together that.

Right. All the pieces of the puzzle are.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah.

Are falling into place. So it started out with

observing the effect. Like we can clearly see

sunlight helps with this. And now we've gotten to

the explanation of the causative mechanisms of

how.

Dr. Damien Downing: Yeah, yeah. Mind you, I'd be very careful about

saying, oh, we've got all the answers now.

Oh, absolutely. Yes. That is so true. We are at

the beginning of the beginning of the beginning,

most likely in. Of a new paradigm of

understanding. And, you know, it's thanks to

people like you for, for working in this field

and researching it and bringing it to your

patients. So thank you.

Dr. Damien Downing: Okay. It's my pleasure. My delight.

Well, I appreciate you sharing and yeah, I would

love to do this again. I think there's lots more

that we could talk about. And thank you and thank

you for your. To the world.

Dr. Damien Downing: Right. Okay. Thank you very much.

This has been the Quantum Biology Collective

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