미등록비타민D 생성만이 아니다...우리가 몰랐던 햇빛의 이점 [바이탈사인]

We all know that some amount of sunlight is good for us, so we try to snatch a little here and there in between our time confined to the largely sun-blocking rectangular boxes that are our offices, factories, cars, gyms, buses, and trains. And if we feel we're running low, then we supplement with a little vitamin D and think we've basically covered our bases. But what if vitamin D is just a side benefit to getting sunlight? And by not getting out there in the sun, we're bypassing a much larger health boon. Internal medicine and critical care doctor Roger Schwelt has been championing the tremendous benefits of sunlight for years through his MedCram channel. During the pandemic, he ventured to expose critically ill COVID patients to sunlight, and we'll speak about the results of that today. He's also deeply conversant in the studies done worldwide on the benefits of sunlight, so he's supremely equipped to talk on this subject. It's my honor to welcome him back to Vital Signs today. What are the essential elements of sunlight that make it so vital to our health at the cellular level, and a barrier to disease spanning heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and dementia? And how much sunlight and at what part of the day should we get it to optimize our health? Welcome to Vital Signs, where we learn how to get healthier from all angles, from the biochemical and nutritional to the things we do that nourish our minds and our souls. I'm Brendan Fallon. Dr. Schwelt, it's a pleasure to have you back on Vital Signs again. Thank you so much, Brendan. I appreciate it. I really appreciate, apart from coming with such a tremendous medical expertise background, the fact that you really bring these natural insights into how to boost immunity, which is of increasing importance in everyday life. To start with, I think innately, we're all aware of the benefits of the sun. We know we feel better when we're getting out there, getting out in nature and getting sunlight. We often put this down to mainly vitamin D, but I know that there's something deeper to this, and that's what we're going to get into today. What kind of benefits do you see commonly from people getting sunlight in your medical practice or outside of that? Yeah, so that's a very good question. I recommend to many of my patients, if not all of them, to get out and get sunlight, but there's a few notable examples in my mind that really have nailed home to me the benefits of sunlight exposure. I had a long COVID patient that had been suffering with shortness of breath for a long period of time, for about a year or so after he became infected. His shortness of breath level was about eight out of 10, and we had tried everything. We had looked for blood clots. We had looked at his heart, his lungs with various testing, and I made some recommendations to him to get outside at least 20 to 30 minutes every single day. The other thing I added to it was to make sure that he wasn't eating anything after 5.30. Now, the reason why I said that was because he was having difficulty sleeping, and when people have full stomachs, they can sometimes have gastroesophageal reflux, which is what he had. Within three weeks of starting that regimen of just simply getting outside more and not eating after 5.30, six o'clock in the evening, he came back to me after a year of eight out of 10 shortness of breath, and he said that his shortness of breath had practically gone. He was sleeping much better, and he felt much better. In fact, his shortness of breath was only on a scale of three out of 10, which was barely even noticeable to him. That was a good outpatient example of what I've noticed. In terms of inpatient, I've had patients with COVID almost ready to be intubated, and we were able to get them outside by putting together oxygen tanks that would allow them to be disconnected from the hospital for even a brief period of time, and we were able to take somebody who was almost ready to be intubated to off oxygen completely within five days, which is the fastest that I've ever seen somebody get off of oxygen. Some very hopeful and exceptional examples there, Dr. Seheult. What tipped you off to the potential benefits of sunlight? What prompted you to start experimenting in this way? What it was was we had very clear evidence at the beginning of the pandemic, which is when I was asking a lot of questions, that people with elevated or normal levels of vitamin D did actually fairly well. It was those people that had low levels of vitamin D that were not doing well. They were getting complications, being hospitalized, ending up on the ventilator, and eventually dying. This was seen in study after study after study. Of course, they tell you that correlation does not necessarily mean causation, but nevertheless, it was a very low-risk intervention. We supplemented people with vitamin D, thinking that vitamin D was the root cause of the difference between these two types of people. There were some studies that seemed to indicate that vitamin D was beneficial, and indeed, I do believe that supplementing with vitamin D is something that's worthwhile doing. In fact, I do it myself. We just didn't see the real benefits that we thought we would see from that. I began to wonder whether or not vitamin D was a marker of maybe something else that was happening. Obviously, we know that people who stay outside in the sun more often are going to have higher levels of vitamin D. Well, maybe there was something about the sun that had nothing to do with vitamin D. Maybe it was working in a completely different way that was benefiting the human body, and that was something that was worthwhile investigating. I believe I know what you're leading into here, Dr. Seheult. As a kid, I remember my grandmother having a host of health conditions, and a doctor gave her this particular lamp, which had a peculiar-looking red bulb in it. I don't think it ever got much use, but it harks back perhaps to an understanding just going back 30 years. People were more aware of the benefits of red light and near-infrared radiation, and I'm very interested to hear your view on this. Let's talk about the spectrum of the sun. It's a very, very wide spectrum. If you could think of, for instance, like a piano, a piano has keys on the lower end which are low-sounding and keys on the higher end which are high-sounding, but you can hear all of those notes. In the visual spectrum, it's very similar, except there's keys that are off the piano. You can go higher than the highest note and lower than the lowest note. In fact, you can go so high and so low that the human ear can't even hear those sounds. It's the same thing with the visual spectrum. There are colors of light that go beyond red. In terms of low frequency, we call that infrared, and there are colors that go beyond violet that we cannot see. We call that ultraviolet, and there's plenty of infrared on the other side of the spectrum. In fact, 53% of the photons, the light packets coming from the sun are actually in this infrared spectrum that we can't even see. Because it's a low-frequency light, there are a few properties that are really interesting about this type of light. This type of light is very easily penetrable. There was a paper that was published in 2019, a year before the pandemic started, by Russell Ryder and Scott Zimmerman, really talking about the human body and how the human body itself has optics. In other words, light can penetrate through. It can light up things. There are internal structures that are designed to capture that light. For instance, the skull and the brain and the cerebral spinal fluid around it, and that this infrared light is very instrumental in making sure that the mitochondria in our cells, the powerhouse of our cells, is running smoothly, and just like an engine in your car, the process of burning fuel causes heat to occur in the engine. If that heat is not dealt with, the engine becomes more inefficient, and it can eventually shut down if it overheats. Well, that's similar to what's going on in the powerhouse of our cell, the mitochondria, is that it's producing energy in the form of ATP, which the cell uses. However, in the process of doing that, it produces something called oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is a buildup of radical species of molecules that, if not dealt with with antioxidants and things of that nature, it could actually damage the mitochondria so that it becomes even more inefficient, as it does as it gets older. This is the basis, Brandon, for many of the diseases that we see in the United States. In fact, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, dementia, cancer, long COVID, all of these have at their root the oxidative stress of the mitochondria. If you've had your own experience getting sunlight for health or with other natural ways to boost immunity, we'd love to hear about it. If you're watching on TV, you can find Vital Signs at EpochTV.com to leave a comment. If you're finding this video helpful, please be sure to share it with family and friends by clicking the share arrow below. Just now, we heard how the power plant of our cells, the mitochondria, when it is plagued by oxidative stress, will suffer damage, just as the engine of a car will if left overheating too long. Dr. Schwaltz sees mitochondrial damage influencing a broad spread of diseases from diabetes and obesity to heart disease and cancer. So where does SARS-Coronavirus-2, or SARS-CoV-2, fit into this picture of oxidative stress and mitochondrial damage? And why do we see people with obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other chronic diseases hit harder by COVID? Well, it has to do with the entry point for SARS-CoV-2 into the human cell, that is the ACE2 receptor. The ACE2 receptor is the point on our cell's surface that the SARS-CoV-2 particle binds to to infect the cell. With that said, you'll be intrigued to hear the ACE2 receptor is much more than a virus entry point. It has a crucial role in dealing with oxidative stress, as Dr. Schwaltz explains. This ACE2 receptor is also an enzyme which modulates the oxidative stress of the cell, such to the fact that when the SARS-CoV-2 virus binds the ACE2 receptor, it shuts it off. And so what you have here is it's like you're turning off the cooling system of your engine when you have the SARS-CoV-2 bind. And so essentially here, what you're having is a bunch of cars driving around. There are some cars that are a little bit hotter than others, quite frankly. Those are the ones with diabetes and hypertension. And then when you have this virus that's affecting just about everybody, you've got a situation where everybody's engine is going to run a little bit hotter. Well, those that are running hot already are going to be the ones that shut down or at least become ineffective. And so it was interesting to me that, you know, maybe there was something else in the light. And Scott Zimmerman and Russell Ryder showed in their paper from previous data and review that this infrared light, and here's the key that's really important, infrared light from the sun is proposed to go into the body and actually touch, if you will, or affect many of the cells in the body and specifically cause the production of melatonin, one of the most powerful antioxidants known to man, in the mitochondria itself, which acts as a powerful antioxidant to mitigate oxidative stress. Now, this has a number of effects. Number one, in an acute situation like COVID-19, it could be beneficial at mitigating that heating up of the engine, that oxidative stress for a short-term gain. But there's another aspect to this as well. And people who are involved with longevity, people looking at see how long people live, there's a theory called the mitochondrial theory of aging, which states that as you get older, the amount of energy that's being produced from your mitochondria drops by about 70%. And so a lot of the things that we see related to aging is related to an inefficient mitochondria. And wouldn't it be interesting if we looked at what sunlight does to the mitochondria not only in the acute phase, but over a long period of time in terms of mortality, all cause mortality, cancer mortality, cardiovascular mortality, et cetera. So that's really what got me interested in looking at the non-UV vitamin D aspects of sunlight. And just on that point that mitochondrial function is seen to decline with age, I'm aware that there's a particularly high concentration of mitochondria in the eye. And given the assaults that a person suffers to their mitochondrial health through life, this would explain the kinds of eye problems that people experience as they get older. I know you've spoken about the benefits of sunlight to improving eye function in the elderly. Yes. So Glenn Jeffrey at University College London is really looking into this. And back in 2021, he published a paper where he took older people who had issues with their ability to distinguish color. Now that is a cone issue in the retina of the eye, which by the way, the retina has the highest concentration of mitochondria. And rightfully so, because there's a lot of metabolic activity happening on the surface of the back of the eye. The thing is, as you get older, as we just said, there's less ATP, these things aren't working as well, and it's harder to distinguish color. So they did an experiment where they put red light, this was not infrared light, but 670, which is in terms of the measurement of the wavelength. The longer the wavelength, the more in the infrared spectrum. So this was visible red light in the back of the retina, and they did it for just three minutes in the morning. And that was enough to have a dramatic improvement in the ability of these people to, again, once again, be able to distinguish colors. This lasted for five days. And what's interesting, Brandon, is that this is not a unique effect on just human beings. When Glenn Jeffrey looked at even bees and fruit flies, this type of effect or phenomenon where red light or infrared light is being applied to mitochondria across multiple species, what we're seeing that in all of those species, the mitochondria become more efficient. They are able to produce more ATP and reverse the signs of aging that we had seen at least at the mitochondrial level. Glenn Jeffrey repeated this experiment in a different way just last year and published this in a publication where he took regular subjects that did not have diabetes. And he, again, applied this red light to the back of these subjects in a randomized placebo-controlled way so they didn't know if it was happening. And he gave them a large bolus, if you will, of glucose, so 75 grams of glucose. Now normally what would happen in somebody who takes in glucose is the blood sugar is going to spike and come back down. In those subjects that had red light exposure, the glucose did not go up as high and it signified that the mitochondria was working more efficiently and using up that fuel. To confirm that finding, he checked for exhaled carbon dioxide which is the byproduct of metabolism. And sure enough, in those subjects with the red light, there were higher levels of carbon dioxide exhalation confirming exactly what he had shown. In terms of dealing with COVID-19 or dealing with different infections in general, we hear about so many different potential antioxidants that can be taken to combat this, ranging from things we get in our diets to different supplements that can be purchased. In the range of these things, where would you say the melatonin that's stimulated through sunlight factors in, fits in? It's at the very top. So we've known now for a while that melatonin is sort of the king of antioxidants, so much so, in fact, that it actually itself upregulates other systems of antioxidants. For instance, glutathione is regulated by melatonin. So if you want to have the real maximal benefits of antioxidant therapy, sure, eat your berries. Have all of those things. But realize that melatonin that is produced inside your own body is really the key for having melatonin. I'll just say at this point that people might hear this and go out and run out and buy melatonin and pop melatonin. So there's things that you should understand about supplemental melatonin. Number one is that it's a signal for your body to tell your whole body that it's time to sleep. So really the only time that you should be taking oral melatonin is right before you go to bed. The second thing is that the amount of melatonin that is secreted at night before you go to bed into the bloodstream is a very small amount compared to the amount of melatonin that is made in the mitochondria. So orders of magnitude, higher levels of melatonin have been shown to be produced in the mitochondria itself. The only way to get that melatonin produced in the mitochondria is to have systems in place like we already have, making sure that you're getting plenty of sleep, but to get outside and allow the infrared light to stimulate that production. There's no amount of oral melatonin that's going to take the place of that type of stimulation. If there's one thing we learned from the pandemic, it's to expect the unexpected and not to solely rely on public health service in a crisis. So how do we optimize health for the next pandemic? Here's a quick look. If I start to feel a little itchiness in the back of my throat, if I start to feel some chills, if that happens, the first place I go is to a sauna. There are multiple viruses that infect the human race. Almost every single one of them that actually gets a foothold is able to neutralize a immune factor of the human body. With COVID still seeing surges, why is it important to be looking to natural paths to improving immunity? We have very good evidence that people who go outside into green spaces have many, many health benefits. If you're around a lot of trees, there are chemicals and it enters into our body and goes. It actually activates the innate immune system and these natural remedies. These are just everyday things, very inexpensive lifestyle choices that we can employ to improve our health. Afterward, you can check the top of the comments and also the description below to see if that video has already been published. To get notice of new Vital Signs videos, follow me at VitalSignsBrandon on Instagram and Facebook and at CVitalSigns on X. Dr. Schweda, I want to get into with you shortly some of your recommendations as to how people should specifically get sunlight, how much sunlight they should be getting. First, I just want to go into vitamin D a little bit as perhaps a kind of side benefit to sunlight, subordinate to the near-infrared radiation. What is the benefit of vitamin D and how does sunlight trigger higher vitamin D levels in the body? Yes. Remember we were talking about the different wavelengths. We said that those low energy long wavelengths was infrared. Now, if we go to the other extreme, we go to the upper end of the keyboard, past the highest note, we're now getting into ultraviolet. This is very high energy light. This is the type of energy that is so high it could actually break covalent bonds and restructure the molecules. This is exactly what's happening in the skin when you have ultraviolet B light coming in. It causes the production of vitamin D from cholesterol derivatives. This vitamin D then goes throughout the body, becomes hydroxylated in the liver. Hydroxylated means there's an OH, oxygen and a hydrogen molecule that's put on to the molecule. Then, again, it happens in the kidney and now you have the active form of vitamin D called 125-dihydroxyvitamin D. Very powerful, very highly regulated. It's been shown multiple times not only to have benefits in bone health, but also in our immune system. We have vitamin D receptors throughout our immune system. There's been a number of good studies that have shown that vitamin D supplementation does benefit upper respiratory diseases. There was Martineau who published a big meta analysis about a decade ago and it was published in the British Medical Journal. There is definitely a benefit to vitamin D supplementation. I don't want to just subjugate it to saying it's a marker of sunlight exposure. That would be foolhardy. There are other benefits of ultraviolet light as well. It actually causes the destruction of bacteria that might be pathogenic. For many, many years, about 100 years ago, especially in Switzerland, Austria, there were something called tuberculosis sanatoriums where they would take people up to very high altitude and they noticed that people got better really quickly, probably for two reasons. Number one, they were up very, very high and so there was less oxygen and tuberculosis really needs oxygen to survive, so there was less for it to survive. The number two is that the atmosphere is much thinner up there. As opposed to infrared light, which can penetrate very easily through clothes, through the atmosphere, through your skin, sorry, that's infrared. Ultraviolet light is not able to do so very well. When you go up to very high altitudes, that ultraviolet light can penetrate more clearly and come through the atmosphere more easily. People were encouraged really to go with little clothes as possible in these sanatoriums and they had great benefits from this ultraviolet light coming in as well as infrared, presumably. The cure rates for tuberculosis were near 80%. This was before the era of antibiotics, so this is quite remarkable and it was copied many times and people knew that if you wanted to get over tuberculosis, you needed to be at altitude. It's one of the reasons why here in the United States, the hospitals that deal with tuberculosis are traditionally at high altitudes because they have a tradition of studying these things. One that comes to mind is National Jewish Hospital, which is probably one of the top places in the world for tuberculosis research and it's there in Denver, Colorado. So it's an interesting story about ultraviolet light and infrared light. I believe that when we're talking in terms of the sun, that both of these lights are packaged in an optimal way so that there is the maximum benefit for the human body. Scientists have looked at this in a reductionist way. They have taken ultraviolet light by itself and they have projected it onto the skin and that has caused there to be skin cancer. And so we've naturally come to the conclusion that ultraviolet light, even when it's mixed with near-infrared light, also causes skin cancer. But what we're finding out is that there's something about near-infrared radiation when mixed with ultraviolet light that mitigates this cause. Actually, there's a dermatologist in the UK by the name of Richard Weller who recently published a paper in a major dermatological journal that's really calling into question our demonization of the sun. In fact, the title of his publication in that journal is Sunshine, Time for a Rethink. He goes over this data that I've just mentioned to you and also the fact that we've maybe taken a reductionist standpoint of the light coming from the sun. And as you point out, maybe we ought to be looking at this as a holistic aspect. Infrared mixed with ultraviolet and look at it from that standpoint. Because there's many studies, and he points this out, that show that people who go outside, people who are in a sunlight environment, actually live longer. In a moment, we'll hear about the best way to get the mix of UV and near-infrared rays we need without putting our skin at risk. First though, here's a quick look at my coming interview with Dr. Schwelt on key ways to naturally boost immunity. Many of these workarounds that the virus comes up with can be circumvented itself by simply elevating the temperature. And we've known for a long time that children are able to mount high fevers very easily. But as we get older, we're not able to do that. They are proposing that that in and of itself may be the reason for the reason why we saw so much mortality at the older end of the population. Having a brain tumor and having to have brain surgery certainly tops the list of people's gravest fears. But new technology is enabling the brain to be seen like never before to detect cancer risk and monitor post-surgery recovery, says neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Shalom. Most scary part about brain surgery that you're not going to wake like yourself again. Patients every morning, they look in the mirror, they afraid to go outside to society and they have all the social stigma. And I wanted to really develop skills and to learn how to mitigate those risks. This specific tumor is somnolucent, meaning it can transmit ultrasound waves. We can pretty much identify the location of the tumor to the surrounding structures. And we can really tailor our approach in a way to avoid those certain areas that will cause harm to the patient. What do you see for the future of being able to install these implants? Afterward, find the link to that video at the top of the comments and also in this video's description below. My next interview with Dr. Schweltz will also appear there once published. Just before we were talking about these fascinating benefits that can come through UV light, which is going to be a revelation for many people who, like myself, had this indoctrination that we need to avoid these rays at all costs because they can eventually lead us to skin cancer. So with this new awareness that this can be beneficial to the immune system, I have two questions. One is, what is the best way to get UV rays? Is it a case of just getting out there in the sun and getting to as high an altitude as possible? And given that there are still dangers associated with sunburn, what's the safest way to go about getting it? Yeah. So I want to be clear. I don't think that spending all day out in the sun and getting burned is a good thing. There's still that aspect where too much of something can be dangerous, certainly tanning beds, salons where people are getting pure ultraviolet without the mix near infrared, or even going outside into the sun when the UV index is high, especially in somebody that hasn't gone out there before. I think what we need to do is, I don't want to go to the extreme and say that all sunlight all the time for as much as possible is good, but I believe that in an environment now where we're in, where we spend, at least in the United States, 93% of our lives inside, where we have LED bulbs that give off no infrared light at all, we have windows that on purpose block infrared light coming in, that we are certainly to one extreme of the scale. And so the question is, what should we do to counteract this without getting the negative effects of too much sunlight and not enough protection on our skin? So I would say this, typically at the extremes of the day, so when the sun is rising and when the sun is setting, these are times of the day where we get the most amount of infrared light with respect to ultraviolet light. And I think those are the perfect times for people who have not been going out into the sun to get out into the sun and start to build up the protections in their skin that they will need to have for them to go out at high noon when ultraviolet light is at the highest peak. If we look at a number of studies that have been done, there was a study in Brazil, which used infrared light and COVID-19 had great outcomes. They only exposed them to about 15 minutes of light a day. Glenn Jeffries experiment, about 15 minutes again on their back, the eyes, it was only three minutes. And this is something that's conserved across species, Glenn Jeffries was telling me, is that it doesn't take a lot of light to get that system going. So what I've done is for my patients, I've stuck to about 20 to 30 minutes just to make sure, but if we were to go out intentionally and intentionally get sunlight every day for about 20 to 30 minutes more than we're currently getting, I think that would go a long way to getting some of these health benefits that we're looking to. I don't have a randomized placebo controlled trial to inform me on that number in terms of daylight. But when we look at the studies where photobiomodulation, and that's a term that I use when I say we're giving infrared light in a non-natural way, that seems to be the time period that does most of the beneficial work. One thing that people should understand is that when we give light to people in a artificial way, photobiomodulation, there's something called a biphasic response. What does this mean? It means that when we give it at first, there seems to be a great benefit to it. But the longer we give it, those benefits seem to diminish. I'm not saying that it actually becomes a harm. It just seems that we get less benefit the longer that we're outside. So I think 15, 20 minutes, 30 minutes is probably a sweet spot. For people who are not used to getting outside, I think at the beginning of the day or at the end of the day is probably the best time. For people that are getting skin exposure, and maybe their skin is a little bit darker, maybe in the noontime would be beneficial. You're going to get a little bit more ultraviolet light during that time. Thank you so much for coming on, Dr. Seheult, and illuminating these, unfortunately, largely missed benefits of ways that we can naturally boost our immunity at low cost and to quite powerful effect. I look forward to speaking to you again soon and exploring further natural paths to increasing immunity. Thank you. Thank you so much. And so, there is far more to the benefit of the sun than simply vitamin D. Research shows substantial health benefit from both near-infrared and UV radiation, and going out at dawn or sunset is a good time to get a healthy mix of both. Up next, find out how an acrylic window implanted in the skull is enabling an unprecedented look at the brain. The link to my interview with neuroplastic surgeon, Dr. Ben Shalom, is at the top of the comments and also the description below. What are key ways to naturally boost the immune system in preparation for the next pandemic or just the approaching flu season? My next interview with Dr. Seheult will also be at the top of the comments and in the description once published. And you can subscribe to access these and other news health insights by clicking that big red button below. It's been great to be with you. I'm Brendan Fallon, and this is Vital Signs.