A fascinating lecture by neurosurgeon Dr. Jack Kruse about the impact of light on our health, how artificial blue light has a negative effect on us, and how we can help ourselves.
Original video published in 2017
Transcript:
Light was able to create chemicals in us that weren’t there before. When I saw that, I immediately realized that everything in medicine is completely upside down. And no one told you why. I’m telling you why right now. Because blue light is toxic to you. Blue light makes you fat. Did I tell you my profession? I’m a neurosurgeon. The alpha wave in the human brain is 7.83 hertz, exactly the same. You have this direct loop that goes to the pineal gland, but the energy comes here.
This energy has to be balanced, blue and red. What does it do first? It turns on your pituitary gland. That’s why I stopped operating at 7 in the morning. You have to question everything. You’re looking at a man talking to you who doesn’t believe that almost anything he learned in medical school can be taken as truth. The answers are right there in front of you. Even though the answers are right in front of us, if you have low dopamine, you won’t see the truth right in front of you.
Energy and matter are exactly the same thing. The only difference is the environment that each side of the equation is in. The pupil is a perfect black box of a light source. What does that mean? That light can go in and out. How did I know immediately that UV light had passed through? Buy a UV flashlight, point it at the retina, and you’ll see the fluorescence coming back. Every time the eye doctors… when I gave a lecture three months ago and I showed them this, they couldn’t believe it.
I brought a UV flashlight, shone it in everyone’s eyes, and said, What did you see? Explain. That shut them up pretty quickly. Because you don’t need a lot of photons to see the effect. Anyone in this room can do this. When you go to the eye doctor, you can say, I don’t believe what you’re saying. But here’s the key. You’ve heard from all your food gurus about tryptophan, about tyrosine, about phenylalanine, and about histidine. But you know what you don’t know about aromatic amino acids? They all absorb UV light. Did you know that?
I didn’t know that 12 years ago. But the key thing is that the eye is loaded with these very amino acids. So that begs the question. Why is that? Well, I learned from physics that the benzene ring that’s in every aromatic amino acid is a photon trap. And they absorb all frequencies of UV light. That means that light between 250 and 380 nanometers is absorbed by it.
That’s why we don’t see it, because it’s designed for something else. There’s something that Pollock’s book, which came out in 2014, started with. There are two researchers named Del Giudice and Preparata. In 2000, they discovered the EZ form is what’s called a coherent domain. 13% of the exclusion zone in water, when sunlight hits water, forms something called a coherent domain, which allows 1 million free electrons to delocalize to power all the biochemical programs. Does anyone know how many biochemical programs run per second in a cell? It’s 100,000.
Guess what controls these enzymatic flows? If you ask any PhD or any nutritionist, the answer is that they don’t know the answer. It turns out that light frequencies can control all of them through a phenomenon called molecular resonance. And that’s how biochemistry works. This is for McKissick’s lecture. Everything she told you is on this slide. If you want to learn how light works, here it is. This is a protein that is hit by UV light.
This is a light antenna. It’s surrounded by water. Light is an electromagnetic wave that is converted into an electromechanical wave. This is called sound, which is collected in water. And now the most interesting thing. Water is a magnetic dipole. That means hydrogen and oxygen – positive and negative. That’s why it’s associated with magnetism. The first time we discovered that magnetism controls sound was at Ohio State University – acoustic phonons 2014. When light hits here, it’s absorbed by the water, which changes the hydrogen bond networks. What is this physical change? The physical change is the density of the water.
This is how it works. Basically quantum mechanically. And now here’s an interesting thing. Mitochondria create cytosolic water, which surrounds everything in the cytosol, including the nucleus and mitochondria. Where is this connection? Well, for those of you who don’t know, the Schumann resonance comes from the interaction of sunlight on the ionosphere of the Earth. That’s why people call it the heartbeat of the Earth, but it’s an electrical voltage that’s created between the solar plasma and the atmosphere that generates 7.83 Hertz. Why do you need to know about this?
I’m a neurosurgeon, right? The alpha wave in the human brain is 7.83 Hertz – exactly the same. The solar system trains you to these solar systems as they approach the Earth. That’s how it works. Why is it important? It generates the alpha wave. So when you live in today’s environment, you don’t have as many alpha waves. Because what is the main effect of the non-native electromagnetic field? It dehydrates your cells because it lowers your redox potential in the mitochondria. In other words, you can’t generate as much water from your own mitochondria.
That’s where dehydration comes from. And for the ladies in the room or the guys in the room who aren’t big scientists, a simple home biohack, take a piece of steak, throw it in the microwave, taste it. How does it taste? Shoe leather. Why? What do microwaves do? They vibrate and spin the water fast. It heats up and dries out the meat. It’s happening right here in Vermont. It’s happening to all of us because we have those damn lights. Let’s get back to the topic – the eye, the SCN is a big center of attention.
In medicine, a lot of attention is focused on the camera. That’s why old people go to the eye doctor and he sends them for cataract surgery. Does anyone know what they put in their eyes after cataract surgery? An implanted lens, and guess what that lens blocks? UVA, UVB 100%, and these days, 50% of blue light, in case you didn’t know. That’s a change since 2009. People don’t realize that 42% of the sunlight that hits the Earth is infrared A light. That’s balanced out by blue light all the time.
Especially when the sun is rising. This is a side view of the eyeball. What you need to know, and we’re going back to physics. Blue light is bent the most by gravitational lensing. That’s important in the eye because when blue light comes through, it falls in front of the retina. That’s why when you use a computer screen or you use those awful lights up here, you get a blurring of vision.
In other words, your vision gets worse. It causes your eyeball to lengthen. When your eyeball lengthens, you get myopia. The next step is retinal detachment. What’s the end result? Acute macular degeneration. Does anyone know anyone who has it? Yeah, a lot of people. Guess what causes cataracts? Blue light toxicity. Why? The brain is trying to protect itself from the light that’s coming at it. So the lens clouds up to prevent that from happening. But why is it important for mitochondria?
Around 2003, 2004, and 2009, we had some really great scientists who discovered that there’s another opsin in the eye. This opsin works with the retinal ganglion cells, and it’s called melanopsin. Melanopsin is a hormone that controls the central retinal pathways in the eye. It turns out that they’re really important at night, and they’re related to melatonin, but not in the way that most people think. The fovea is where the rest of the light spectrum of vision falls, and it falls right here. Why? That’s sharp vision. That’s the focus of your camera. That’s what all eye doctors pay attention to. That’s what they don’t pay attention to.
The only eye doctors who do this are the Japanese, who are the ones I spoke to three months ago. They figured it out much faster than our American colleagues. But here’s the key. Now I’m going to make a very controversial statement to a lot of people in this room. The central retinal pathway powers everything that’s distant from it. I’m going to explain. It basically turns on your pituitary gland and turns on everything that’s further away in the human brain, and I’m going to show you how. This article, or I should say this gentleman, is called Fritz Hollwich.
He was an amazing doctor. He was an eye doctor in Germany. He was born in the 1920s. He happened to live in a time when we didn’t have intraocular lenses. One of the things he noticed was that when he saw people with cataracts, he would cut them out so they could see. And for those of you who don’t know, that’s what happened to Vincent van Gogh when he painted haystacks. He painted them in different colors because when you take out the cataracts and don’t put in the lenses, you see UV radiation. So that’s why haystacks have all these different shades, because he saw them in so many different colors as the light changed. Well, it turns out that this doctor was actually practicing medicine at a time that we could never recapitulate today.
So sometimes it’s good to look back. And I started looking really far back. As a neurosurgeon, these people, especially Cajal in 1891, are the fathers of modern neuroanatomy. I started finding papers on this energy pathway that has a huge impact on growth and metabolism through the eye. You didn’t hear me say gut. You didn’t hear me say food. It turns out that Hollwich did something pretty remarkable and he wrote about it here in that 1979 book.
Nobody in this room had ever read it. If you think Weston A. Price’s book is huge, you should read this one, because it’s incredible what he did. He basically took out cataracts in people and then watched them and saw that their growth and metabolism improved tremendously. They started losing weight. They started feeling better. They started sleeping better. And he documented all of that. He didn’t just do it on people. He did it on all kinds of animals.
And he documented the color changes that animals had after the cataracts were removed. How their fur changed, how their skin changed, how they behaved on the farm. That was how important it was. And he went even further. He checked their urine, and you know what he found? He found that there were hormone metabolites in it that appeared after he removed their cataracts that weren’t there before. In other words, light was able to create chemicals in us that weren’t there before. Doesn’t that sound a lot like the equation E = MC squared?
How did light get turned into things with structure? Do you really think you need all that from diet and exercise? There’s another way. Most of the ophthalmologists I talked to three months ago didn’t even know about Fritz Hollwich. And he was an ophthalmologist, and he was well-published. The crazy thing is, there was another guy named John Ott. And you know what he was famous for? He was an animator for Walt Disney who did time-lapse photography.
It turns out he did some key investigative footage for Disney and let it go. But then he went to medical boards and various doctors and they let it go. He found that when he took plants and put them in different light, the chloroplast molecules would spin faster than they would without it. Then he decided to do it in animals and he found that one of the cells in the eye, which is called the retinopigment epithelium, at the base of the eye, has melanin granules that absorb UV light because it’s made of these things that we talked about… it rotates faster and creates what Ruben was talking about, a direct current in the eye. That means you can regenerate tissue when you have a high direct current. Didn’t Becker tell us that? Hmm, isn’t that interesting?
He went even further, and this is probably one of the most contradictory things I’m going to tell you. This is a picture of the pituitary glands of people who are blind and who can see. What did he do? He went even further. That’s what I want you to focus on. The light slows down, the energy is lost, the pituitary gland gets bigger. When I saw that, I immediately realized that everything in medicine is completely reversed.
Why? Why did I tell you that? Everyone in this room except for the people who heard me speak last year believes that people get fat because they eat too much. It turns out that it’s the exact opposite. When you twist your ankle, does your ankle get bigger or smaller? Okay, when you have heart failure, does your heart get bigger or smaller? You say it gets bigger. Here’s the third one, when a star in the sky dies, does it get bigger or smaller? It becomes a red giant. So everything in the universe that loses energy gets bigger. What did Hollwich tell us?
Hollwich showed that when light slows down, the pituitary gland gets bigger. Do you know why it gets bigger? Because light gets changed into chemicals that you call hormones, which go into the nuclear DNA and change it. Guess what that means. That means that light has the ability to change DNA. That also means that light has the ability to potentially reverse my previous problem. Which means that if you’re obese, maybe your main problem is that you’re not getting enough sunlight, and it has nothing to do with food.
What do you think? That’s what Fritz Hollwich taught me. I didn’t believe any of this, and most of you may not know this, but I went to medical school at LSU, and there’s a very famous ophthalmology researcher there named Nicolas Bazan, who’s done incredible work, and you know what he’s been working on? DHA. He’s kind of the world’s expert on DHA, and I learned about it from ’95 to ’99 when I was there.
He taught me a lot of nonsense and nonsense that I thought was nonsense because it wasn’t important for neurosurgery, but 12 years ago it became extremely important to me. And the number one effect right here in that central retinal pathway between the clock and the hypothalamus, you have two loops in the eye. One loop is called the short loop. The other is called the long loop, and it’s constantly recycling DHA as light passes through it. But the key thing is that this central retinal pathway and the retina has more DHA in it than any other part of the brain, and that seemed bizarre to me. Then I realized why.
When I started learning about physics… remember the guys who came up with the GPS devices, the Garmin devices? It turns out that the clock here has to run faster than all the other clocks in the rest of the body. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t work. So if you have an iPhone and you go to a restaurant here in Vermont, the clock up there in the sky has to be running 38 microseconds faster than the clock in your iPhone.
Otherwise, you’d be a hundred miles away. You’d end up in New Hampshire. The exact same thing is happening in your eye, and the reason why DHA is important in the eye is because this direct current of electricity runs faster than any other part of your body. When you have too much blue light, because blue light is the antidote to vitamin A and to DHA. Do you know why? What kind of light does vitamin A make? You’ve heard someone talk about this before. Blue light makes vitamin A. What’s the complementary color to blue? Yellow. And guess what? Vitamin A is yellow… isn’t that shocking? That’s the connection. The frequency of light controls the level of vitamin A in the eye, and also every opsin in the body is bound to retinol, to vitamin A.
There’s not an opsin in the human body that isn’t bound to it. That’s why… and Chris is here to verify this. He wrote a really nice post about how there’s data from NHANES that if you’re vitamin A deficient, it’s associated with obesity, and nobody told you why. I’ll tell you why. Because blue light is toxic to you. You get fat from blue light. You get fat a lot… and it starts right here. The reason it’s not the same is because the evolution of light doesn’t equal the evolution of the anatomy of our retina.
I started putting it together pretty quickly. Then I started looking at sunrise and sunset. At sunrise, you have visible light and infrared light. You don’t have UV light at first, but guess what happens next at that time? You don’t need rods in the morning, and you don’t need melanopsin. When do they regenerate? They regenerate in the morning. Guess what happens next? In the morning, your eye actually makes melatonin.
The darkness hormone is first produced in the human body in the eye. In the morning, when you have a combination of UVA and infrared light A. The reason for this is what I told you earlier about the aromatic amino acid that absorbs it… you see, the UVA light doesn’t show up here. So for the person who last night, I don’t know who you are, but ask yourself, how do I fix my life as an executive? This is the key. You have to reconstruct your morning to fix your real problem.
And that’s what I had to do with my operating schedule. That’s why I stopped operating at 7 in the morning and started all my cases at 8:30. That’s also why I moved to the 28th parallel from where I lived, because that’s where the UVA light shows up. For those of you who live in Vermont, I have bad news for you. If you have mitochondrial disease, which is most diseases, you need that UVA light, and it shows up later here than it does in New Orleans.
This means that you need more control over your life in the morning than you do at other times. This is practical advice. These are not Jack Crusoe rules. These are the rules of the sun. Sunset. This is the time when you don’t need color vision. This is the camera… it regenerates at night. There’s another opsin that you might not know about. It’s called neuropsin. It’s in the cornea of your eye and it’s in your skin. It’s a UVA detector. Melatonin is considered the hormone of darkness. Remember those photon traps I told you about? That neuropsin tells the brain that UVA light is present, and it can start making melatonin from sunlight.
What are all the effects? Here’s the quantum paradox. It’s a nighttime hormone, because functional medicine doctors in my profession have told you so, and it’s true, because that’s when it’s active, but it’s only active when there’s no light, but it’s transformed first in the eye and then generalized throughout the brain. Another key thing I’m going to point out here. This should be an eye-opener for everyone. It reduces energy production in the mitochondria. UVA radiation reduces energy production. And why is that important? The fourth cytochrome is cytochrome C oxidase in the mitochondria of all of us. Anyone want to guess what kind of light turns it on? Red light. UV light turns it off.
And the reason why? What does UV light do in the skin or in the eye? Nitric oxide. That’s why UV light lowers blood pressure because it causes 40 to 60 percent of skin pools and helps your heart. But what people don’t realize is that its effect is that it turns off your ability to make ATP from electrons from food. You have this direct loop that goes to the pineal gland, but the energy comes here. This energy has to be balanced blue and red. What does it do first? It turns on your pituitary gland.
That’s why the question that Ruben was asked earlier is extremely important. Blue light balanced with red is what turns on hormone production. If you look at the circadian mechanism, all hormones are produced usually from 6 to 10 according to almost every medical textbook. They assume you live around the 30th parallel. That’s not true. It varies from place to place, but it’s key.
What turns off hormone production? UVA light on the skin. UV light turns it off in the blood plasma. That’s the key. Artificial blue light absolutely destroys us and affects the way your mitochondria can process electrons from food. That’s the story with food, because the more those respiratory proteins stretch out, it doesn’t matter what you eat. You’re going to have a problem. You have to shrink those respiratory proteins closer together so they can do what they do. The laws of nature are not subject to human belief. They’re not subject to human experimentation. That’s a pretty strong statement. And you might think that’s, let’s say, disgusting.
I don’t think it’s based on what I’ve shown you. Because now there are scientists who are showing you that it really starts in the eye, in the skin. So leptin and all of this is connected and the great thing about it is… my recipe doesn’t cost you a dime. And what did Einstein say? In the end, the answer is always going to be pretty simple. So what do you take from this? Ground yourself… take off as much clothing as possible.
For the ladies in the audience… there’s a company in the UK called Kiniki, they make swimsuits that let UV light through so you can be naked without taking your clothes off. And I can tell you, coming from the South, that’s my biggest problem. I think up here in Vermont you’re a little more hippie and weird, so that would probably work, but you don’t have a great quantum yield here.
So the reason I mentioned this to you is that anything you can do to help yourself… and infrared light can work in a lot of different ways. You can use a sauna, you can use geothermal units like you see in Iceland. That’s why the Finns and the Scandinavians always use heated pools. Because they get some of the sunlight that they don’t get through heating. The heat is infrared light, and we don’t realize it.
