Improving Eyesight with Light with Glen Jeffery

This week on the Less Stressed Life, we’re talking vision, mitochondria, and light with ophthalmologist and UCL researcher Glen Jeffery. We explore why the retina is so energy hungry and how simple exposure to long wavelength light and even plain incandescent lighting can measurably support aging eyes.

We dig into wavelength and dose, why morning timing matters most, what makes incandescent bulbs uniquely powerful, and practical ways to protect your eyes from modern indoor lighting.

If you’ve ever battled screen related eye strain, worried about declining vision, or felt lost in the red light maze, this conversation brings clarity and simple next steps.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:
• Morning light best activates mitochondria and supports eye health
• Just three minutes of red or long wavelength light can boost color vision
• Benefits fade after about five days without continued exposure
• Incandescent bulbs outperform LEDs for vision and energy support
• Blue light and LEDs can drain mitochondrial function
• Avoid lasers; low intensity LEDs or sunlight are safest
• Daily natural light is the simplest, most effective therapy

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ABOUT GUEST:
Dr. Glen Jeffery is a Professor of Neuroscience at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology. His research focuses on how aging and light exposure affect the retina and mitochondrial function. He has pioneered studies showing how specific wavelengths of light, including red and infrared, can improve visual performance and support healthy aging of the eye. His work bridges neuroscience, ophthalmology, and environmental health, emphasizing practical, light-based approaches to protect and restore vision. 

WHERE TO FIND:
Email:  [email protected]

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Podcast Instagram: @lessstressedlife
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lessstressedlife

NUTRITION PHILOSOPHY OF LESS STRESSED LIFE:
🍽️ Over restriction is dead
🥑 Whole food is soul food and fed is best
🔄 Sustainable, synergistic nutrition is in (the opposite of whack-a-mole supplementation & supplement graveyards)
🤝 You don’t have to figure it out alone
❤️ Do your best and leave the rest

SPONSOR:
Thanks to Jigsaw Health for sponsoring this episode! Looking for a clean, tasty way to stay hydrated this summer? Their Electrolyte Supreme is a go-to for energy, minerals, and daily hydration support. Use code LESSSTRESSED10 at JigsawHealth.com for 10% off—unlimited use!

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TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Glen Jeffery: many of the beneficial effects we get with LED lighting that is long wavelength lighting, deep red lighting, they're great, they're there, but they're not as good as incandescent lighting and they're not as sustained.

[00:00:15] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm your host Christa Biegler, and I'm going to guess we have at least one thing in common that we're both in pursuit of a less stressed life. On the show, I'll be interviewing experts and sharing clinical pearls from my years of practice to support high performing health savvy women in pursuit of abundance and a less stressed life.

One of my beliefs is that we always have options for getting the results we want. So let's see what's out there together.

Alright. Today on the Less Stressed Life, I'm joined by Dr. Glenn Jeffery, an ophthalmologist and researcher at the University College of London, who studies how aging impacts the eye and vision. We're gonna talk about his groundbreaking work on mitochondria, the tiny batteries that power ourselves, and how simple red light exposure might be helpful in recharging them, improving aging vision, and even in slowing diseases like macular degeneration.

Welcome to the show, Dr. Glen Jeffery. Yeah, so I was just sharing with him, it was such a delight to see him on the calendar and to get into research and start listening to different interviews he'd done because he is a researcher, and I had mentioned that this is the, I love podcasts because they can offer such a beautiful nuance and shine a light on the work.

And so when talking about that in general, this kind of work, I feel that Dr. Jeffery in general has taken a somewhat a path that not everyone travels with his work. And I'm curious how you got into this field of research around specifically light and mitochondria, et cetera.

[00:02:08] Glen Jeffery: It's a long story. I started life as my first degree is in experimental psychology. And my doctorate was in vision in an experimental psychology department. So there's always been a background of I, vision brain. I but this particular path kind of crept up on me, first of all, because I had a big project working in the Arctic looking at how animals deal with winter and summer light.

In winter there's no light. In summer there's far too much light, and so light got on the agenda. And then I started to see some papers coming out that I didn't really understand, showing that certain colors of light could improve things like calm \your outcome well, animals outcomes in brain damage, and.

Things like that. And I just looked at this and I thought, this is beyond me. I've got absolutely no idea why this is happening. But the point was the data were good. The data were good, the story was good. The picture frame I wasn't sure about. And unless you've got a good picture frame, you can't really sell a story.

You can't get people to believe in it. So we then spent a very long period of time looking at the picture frame, why was this happening? And it took me into kind of areas I know absolutely nothing about. 'cause I don't have a strong biology background. But it took us to this point where we realized there's something that is paying attention to light, it's signaling messages all around the body and it has the.

Capacity to do good or bad. So we get ourselves into a situation where we've found that some longer wavelengths, some of them are so long, far into the infrared, you can't see them and other ones that are shorter wavelengths very deep blues that can be damaging. And that was how the story started to unroll.

And that's why i'm doing what I'm doing now.

[00:04:01] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. What year was it when you ended up doing more light research? 

[00:04:05] Glen Jeffery: So I kinda, a lot of the Arctic work was done around, oh, 2013, 2015. And then we started to roll into this thing about mitochondria and batteries and I think things just took off because there was so much low hanging fruit in terms of questions.

[00:04:27] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. 

[00:04:28] Glen Jeffery: When scientists follow their career, very often they, they'll do one little thing and they go down this rabbit hole and they go further down this rabbit hole and further down this rabbit hole. And in the end, all their relatives are sick and tired of talking to them. The only one thing they do, and for me, this was going down a rabbit hole and coming out in another field.

And so that was, that was great for me because it just meant change field do something slightly different. This is a completely new story. And, put it dramatically, it was a bit of a lifesaver. 

So for me, it certainly reengaged me. 

[00:05:00] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. It, even if I would just judge, based on even your education path, you seem like a person who would have diverse interests.

And for some of us that want to look at more than one thing, right? Your story has been beautiful, but also maybe to some, a little unconventional, right? In research. 'cause sometimes in research, you can spend so long in one area. And in terms of, I'm glad I asked you about the year because in research terms, it's been a short timeline, right?

Not much more than 10 years. It's probably gone by in the blink of an eye. I don't usually have so many puns, but gosh, today we're just full of puns, shining alive, blink of an eye, so well. 

[00:05:36] Glen Jeffery: I think when you move into an area that other people haven't been into before it's very easy to move relatively quickly.

And it's relatively easy. And the other thing is, for me, it's relatively easy to move relatively quickly in a picture that people will understand. It's not you go home, you sit and talk to your family and you talk about, I've just looked at this little biochemical little thing here, and and suddenly no one gets you.

The nice thing is that it's been something that I can talk to my kids about. Yeah. And they don't automatically go, why the hell are you doing that? So yeah it's been a bit of a lifesaver. 

[00:06:15] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Let's talk about the juicy part and then we'll go into some of the science.

Sometimes we do it in reverse, I was looking at this article that you were the, I believe the lead author on in approximately 2021, at least. That's when your university published a brief on it. And here's the headline. Essentially that morning exposure to deep red light improves declining eyesight.

Now we're all interested, right? So just three minutes of exposure to deep red light once a week when delivered in the morning can significantly improve declining eyesight. And so of course there's a lot here and I have lots of questions about dose, et cetera. But maybe this opens up how. This work happened.

Tell us about how this story came to be. Maybe this is where, maybe however you wanna unwrap it. If you wanna tell us a little bit about the results you found, or if you wanna go from the beginning about mitochondria and the eye, et cetera, and why we have aging in the eye, because we're all really interested me, especially on preserving our eyesight, 

[00:07:10] Glen Jeffery: so well.

Where'd you start? I think we were doing a lot of work on flies and mice. And we were getting the same result in a fly and the same result in a mouse. So whatever we were doing was very highly conserved. In terms of evolution. It's affecting it. So at that point I said look, why don't we just translate this to humans?

We want impact. At the end of the day, what we'd like to do is we'd like to roll over in bed and say, what I did today might benefit people rather than what I did today. Help my ego a little bit. And also actually doing this research on humans is a hell of a lot cheaper than doing it on mice.

So that was the point of translation. So we'd already got a lot of groundwork done so that by the time we started to deal with humans, we knew exact, we titrated the question, we knew what we were doing. So I knew then that it would only take three minutes of lying. I knew I had, I had had it relatively sorted out, we did it because we titrated it so much in animals. We got a hit, we got a hit. First time we did it, we got a hit with the first placement person. We did. And what we did with these people is one of the things that consumes a your retina consumes more energy than any other part of your body, more than your liver, more than your heart, more than your brain.

[00:08:35] Christa Biegler, RD: That was really surprising to me. Okay. 

[00:08:37] Glen Jeffery: And if you consume a lot of energy, you age faster. Okay. So my analogy is always if you consume a lot of energy, you're like a sports car. Open the garage. Bang at it goes, moves really quickly. But it needs to be serviced on a lot more regular basis than say your standard family vehicle.

That is the problem that the retina faces. It's got this enormous metabolic demand. And if you've got an enormous metabolic demand, you have enormous number of mitochondria 'cause they're supplying you with the energy, but it burns out. And by the time you reach, you don't notice this, but by the time you reach 70, you've lost a lot of cells in your retina.

Your vision has declined really significantly. So that's a really good playing ground for me. I've got a tool, which is I was measuring how well you see colors. I was doing it in people at progressive ages and getting better effects on people that the older they were and I was managing to improve vision in a quite significantly, they didn't always notice it, but when I dragged them back and tested them, I said, your color vision's better.

It's better than it was three hours ago. And that was a great result. It was a very consistent result. 

I should say, here's Glen. He's playing with red light in the retina. Glen's got people standing around him. So I had a really great colleague John Metis and he was playing with red light in people with Parkinson's disease.

He was getting the same kind of results that I was getting. So people playing in different areas, different parts of the body, different parts of the brain, all getting rather similar results. That's really makes you feel secure. You're not, you're not walking off the end of the pier when others are getting the same result.

So that was that paper. But if you look at that paper, it has a history of a lot of working flies. Lot of work in mice. It's not just vision. So our old flies that we gave red light to, they moved better. They climbed up tubes a hell of a lot quicker. So there was a very general effect.

Yeah. 

[00:10:45] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, I wanna get into some of the science behind the scenes, but first I think I wanna unpack a few details around the study. So when you were recruiting participants, did they have specifics around issues with their eyes already? So were they having macular degeneration or more myopia or nearsightedness?

Was there any specific context of the research subjects? First of all, 

[00:11:02] Glen Jeffery: no. The key thing was they were healthy. 

[00:11:04] Christa Biegler, RD: Okay. 

[00:11:05] Glen Jeffery: Keeping was they were healthy. If you get this result out in healthy individuals with no adverse effects, then you can take it into a clinical direction, which lots of people have.

Yeah. 

[00:11:14] Christa Biegler, RD: And the more unhealthy, so to speak, quote unquote, people are usually the longer something might take sometimes to make impact, I would say. But that's how I feel about it. And so it makes sense that they would be healthy. Now the next part, and I think there's a couple parts here when we talk about red light and dosing, et cetera.

So there's context of red light, right? Not, we wouldn't sit in front of a. It should be of a rhythm, right? And so this is where you bring up the morning. And so I wanna hear about the importance of the morning, and that'll probably take us down that rabbit hole of more of the overall science.

Maybe this first I wanna hear about the dose of the red light, like the nanometers. So it was three minutes in the morning, so that's the dose, but the nanometers. And so one of the real questions here is that a lot of red light, products say, don't shine this in your eyes. And so there's the nuance of, do you hear a soundbite here?

Or do we need to unpack the nuance of like where are we careful to not cross danger lines? Because also as I'm looking at the article and I'm seeing images maybe in presentations, I see like this light being shined right in the eye, which is different than how I think of it when I sit in front of my red light panel when I'm working out in the morning and trying to look at my red light panel before the sun comes up.

So I wanna talk about dosage and nanometers and safety of red light because I feel like that's an instant wall for people. Like we want the benefits and we also need to understand the context of it. 

[00:12:39] Glen Jeffery: Yeah. So big problem that we've got is that if you go on the web, you're gonna find thousands of red light devices and many of those red light devices, they've been made by manufacturers who have a very limited understanding of even putting a lighting device together, let alone what is safe and what is not safe.

So I get emails all the time saying, I bought this, what should I do with it? And I sadly respond to everybody and say, unless I've tested it, I cannot tell you anything. Okay? So what did we do? We had to go to great lengths to demonstrate that what we were doing was safe. But here's a key point.

If you look at red light, it's in solar light, it's in sunlight. So it's not a laser, it's not a big kick. We are using LEDs, we are using levels of light that may be, are two or three times greater than you get when you walk outside on a sunny day. So whenever I put this forward through a, to an ethics committee and this has included ethics committees where I've been trying to get I've found approval from them for giving it to kids that are debilitated.

The ethics committees have gone fine, this is not an issue. So I can save for the devices we've used in our studies not only do I have confidence, they're safe, people around me have that confidence. And I would say to you, which I've said on many occasions, I have two aged aunts that I've been giving this to for years, and they're still with me.

Safety, why the morning is desperately important because. When you wake up in the morning, you are in a very different physiological state than you are at any other time of the day. The argument is you are vulnerable. Okay, let's take you back to an early evolutionary stage.

You are waking up. Something could have been watching you, something could have been looking at you for breakfast. So that's why when you wake up in the mornings, you are in a very different state. Your blood sugars peak naturally in the mornings, and your mitochondria, which are making your a TP, your energy, they're pumping energy into you.

You've actually got a lot of energy flowing into you first thing in the morning. Now, when you're mitochondria of doing that, I can play with them. I can actually, but then when they're in a dynamic state, I can play with them in the afternoon. I think they do other things goes, they're doing something else.

They're not making energy all the time, and if they're doing other things, they're not gonna pay attention to the light. So light works incredibly inefficiently after about 11 o'clock in the morning. 

Light really works just before sunrise so your body knows when it is gonna be just before sunrise and your mitochondria switch on and start making a lot of energy for you to get up and be able to move.

So that's why the morning, the safety is absolutely clear. What sort of doses? It takes very little. So we now dose for three minutes. If we do less than a minute and a half, we don't get any effects at all. It's a switch. You can sit in front of one of these lights for an hour and it is no better than three minutes.

So you just don't need that if you sit in front of it too long. So let's say an hour plus, everything just doesn't work very well. The red light becomes relatively ineffective. Now, a lot of these metrics I just don't know about I can't tell you why it's this very low dose.

So we work in units of energy. We don't work in lux and things like that. So we work in units only. And we were originally working at 20 or 30 of these units of energy at milliwatts. And then one of the research assistants who was actually doing part was working on a clinical trial came back and we tested, we always test the lights as they go out.

We test the lights when we come in and we went, oh crikey, you were down to just over one. And she said, yeah, but it was working, wasn't it? And I went. I was going, I don't get this just, but maybe the story is that you can reduce the energy very to a very low level if there's no other light going into the eye.

So we've got, go back to this idea, which is very crude, which is, red is good, blue is bad. If you're only putting red light in, there's no blue. There's nothing to undermine your efforts. So I think that's why we can get down as low as we can. For me, when we have people, I just got a little bit over the top side use, instead of one unit, we use five to eight.

I tell people to use it for three minutes, even though one and a half might do, just so we're in a safe zone. It, it subjects for me are very valuable assets. I don't get that many of them, so I can't afford to waste them, by just taking to the cliff edge whether it's gonna work or not work lots of things, I don't know. But we do know it's safe if you use it at that energy level. To be honest, if you pump enough red light into you, it will damage you because there's a limit to how much energy the body can actually have. From radiant light. But we are well in safe zone.

And that's why we've got to be able to use it in kids as well. Yeah. And 

[00:18:01] Christa Biegler, RD: I wanna ask you a little bit about the kids, but first, just to understand, because this will be the biggest concern or issue, for people listening to this is, oh, how do I apply this maybe in my own life and the way you're describing the units, not lux, but the units is different than I usually understand red light. Because usually most devices on the market describe, they say it's at this much nanometer, so was it 670 nanometer? Can we use that reference as well? 

[00:18:26] Glen Jeffery: Okay, so there's two metrics. One is the wavelength. So in this case it was six.

We've used a lot of 670 nanometers. And then there's the energy at which that wavelength of light is applied. We, as I said, we are now using say, five to eight milliwatts centimeter squared. So there's the color of the light, the wavelength, and there's the energy. So you could imagine this, you've got a red light and you can turn it up or turn it down.

So in both those cases, the six 70 nanometers looks like a demish bicycle light. That's roughly what it looks like. But as we move forward, we realize perhaps there's nothing special about 670 nanometers. It could be a longer wave length or something completely in the infrared.

And why that is important is because if I come into your world. And I give you a red light, you're not gonna be able to do much else. You've got this red light that tracker, if I take it out beyond your range of visual sensitivity, you don't even see it. But it's doing something. So that's one of the things that's important for translating our research into the work environment.

Yeah. So we're working quite a lot with architects now and lighting engineers, and we want to be able to turn lights on that don't disturb you and have a biological effect. So I'm moving away from six 70 and I'm moving to deeper wavelengths, but people should, shouldn't be desperately concerned as long as it's above 6, 6 70 or above, it's gonna have therapeutic value.

[00:20:03] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, I just haven't heard it described in those units before, so I'm gonna have to go look at the specs for my red lights outta curiosity. Now, danger wise, I've heard you say this on another presentation, if something's ever marketed as a laser, which I do have somewhere a red light laser that was used for scar therapy and that is actually dangerous, right?

For eyes like that is the one that we're always like, be careful shining on thyroid eyes, et cetera, or will you expand upon that? 

[00:20:27] Glen Jeffery: The thing about lasers, okay, first of all, I don't think you should ever use a laser on the eye unless there is a clinical need. 

[00:20:35] Christa Biegler, RD: Now, what is the definition of a laser versus a light?

[00:20:38] Glen Jeffery: Okay, so the laser is called coherent light. All the wavelengths of the light are jumping along at exactly the same, in the same way. So that's why punch is quite hard. Whereas in LED light, the wavelengths of light are outta sync with one another. Now, many manufacturers, let's say I produce a, a product forward at five milliwatts percent meter squared.

The laser person comes along and says I'll do it at five milliwatts percent squared as well. So it's safe, but it's not, there's a real big difference. And the difference is in the way laser like scatters lED light. Scatters in a fairly wide and relatively uniform way. Laser light doesn't, it does something called caustics.

When you shine a laser light onto some surfaces, you get little speckles. Now those little speckles are where the light is separating into little areas, and some areas it doubles up and triples up and quadruples up. And in other areas it's devoid of the light. So you get little, even though you've got an energy source that might be, say, five or eight milliwatts centimeter squared when it hits the tissue, particularly when it's tissue like the retina you find, you get these speckles and those speckles are telling you're delivering a hell of a lot more energy.

So I cannot see a reason. Clinically or scientifically why we have to deliver laser light. It's inherently less safe even when it's used at the same energy as an LED. So beware on that, that's a discussion which is coming up quite a lot at the moment with using lights for kids with myopia where laser lights have been developed for this in China.

And there are arguments coming out that some of these children that have been exposed to these laser lights are getting the myopias a bit better. But there has been retinal damage. So people who are going at buying devices think really hard before you want that laser because it's giving you nothing that an LED can't give you.

[00:22:53] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Super interesting. And I feel like a lot of research around eyes comes out of China. That's my understanding. Lots of it. 

[00:23:00] Glen Jeffery: China has a vast research platform. It's vast. And, half the things that we walk around in our home, they've been made in China. 

Yeah. And China has a very far east has a very specific problem with myopia, so it's not surprising they're starting to do this.

But we're only just, so when we're doing red light, for a MD for other clinical conditions, okay. We're on that road. We're only starting on the road to think about using red light for myopia. And so we're a lot more naive. We're a lot, we've got far less data behind us, but there's no reason to use a laser on a child.

[00:23:39] Christa Biegler, RD: Okay. I wanna ask a little bit more about timing and so you've made an argument about morning light that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And let's say, and we know that during the day is not optimal, but there are. Is red light in the evening. And so is it possible that there could be an argument for utilizing the red light in the evening as well?

Or have you tested that and not seen benefit? 

[00:24:00] Glen Jeffery: I've not seen benefit. Yeah. I've just thought it there are so many things I don't know. Maybe if you are facing west, standing on one leg not eaten that day, it may have a benefit. There are too many variables. But if doing the straight testing of red light later in the day in humans, I don't get any effect. 

[00:24:21] Christa Biegler, RD: Okay. Got really don't. So let's talk about, with this initial study and then as you've progressed, it sounds like you said you could see a clinical, when you did your own measurements, you could see a clinical improvement in one treatment.

Was that it even, what were some of the results that you overall saw and how long do you usually, we know that the time is about three minutes, but then how long do people do this therapy? How many maybe days, weeks would they do this therapy and then once they stop, do they regress? Imagine 

[00:24:51] Glen Jeffery: you would.

Yes. I think some of this might depend on the wavelength that you use. And we've been using very fixed wavelengths at the moment. We say to many elderly people use it daily because they can remember that. Now, in reality, you only need to do it twice a week. But, even I suffer.

I go, is it Tuesday or is it Wednesday? When did I use it last? So we say, okay, use it. Use it daily. If you stop using it, everything starts to come apart five days later. So five days later, quite sharply the improvements that you've got, stop. Now, that doesn't mean you can't on the sixth day pump them back up again.

Yes, you can. And with that stop start process, we've never found that there's been a problem. There's no detrimental effect. 

But the story changes and the story has got quite complicated because we now for effect. We now work a lot in architectural environments. The architects are very interested in this because they're interested in healthy buildings.

And they have LED lights and the LED lights have got no infrared in them. And they have windows. And the windows block infrared so that you can control the temperature in the building. So we just finished an experiment where we went into one of these environments with actually no light.

It was part of the university's department where they build architectural models. So it was big, had a lot of space. And they all had horrible LED lights. And we moved, all we did was we moved in and we gave each of the person, each person in that environment, a little angle, poised lamp, and we put a 60 watt incandescent light bulb in.

And then we came back and tested them. The first thing that happened was their vision improved much more than it did when we gave them the six 70 LED much more. 

[00:26:53] Christa Biegler, RD: Okay. I wanna clarify that. You gave them an incandescent light, which was the original light bulb that had become much harder to find. I don't even know if we're having in the United States anymore, if they're even being made instead of the LED.

'cause the LED was degrading. And the point is that the incandescent light, which you can, if you'll define for us, was better than the six 70 red light. 

[00:27:12] Glen Jeffery: Yes. The incandescent light is a heat source. You know that because when you used to put your hand on the light bulb, it was hot. Very hot. 

But the spectrum of light that comes out of an incandescent or a halogen bulb is highly similar to daylight. It's a heat source. Governments around the world are closing down on this because it generates lots of energy we can't see, and that's heat and that's wasted. So first of all, their vision improved enormously.

The second thing which was really surprising is, okay, so you test their vision, you give 'em the light bulb, and then you test them again, and then you take the light bulb away. Okay. So in our minds, we're thinking, take the light bulb away. Five days later, this is all gonna vanish. It stayed up for two months.

Wow. And the only reason that experiment stopped was two months we hit Christmas and everybody cleared off. 

So two things we can say about the incandescent light bulb, which is not one wavelength, it's the whole spectrum. Of daylight is that it has a much greater effect on improving vision and also the effect lasts much longer.

So the research in my lab is going through 90 degrees and we're now spending a lot of time looking at LEDs a lot of time. And, I can say to you I be because of this, because of the, my concern about LEDs and the blue light they've got in them. I can't give that blue light to people.

I just can't. It's morally not right. But we do know that if you give people a lot of blue light, similar wavelengths to LEDs, they become pre-diabetic. We're slowing their mitochondria down. If you give it to mice, they get fat. They get fat because their mitochondria are not consuming glucose outta their blood, which is what they need to keep them going.

And a story much told the astronauts on the International Space Station under hard white LEDs, the very extended periods of time these fit people are becoming pre-diabetic. They're also showing signs of premature aging. And NASA came clean and NASA published in a very high profile journal an article with a statement saying, we have a mitochondrial problem with our astronauts.

So a long story, but the point is that many of the beneficial effects we get with LED lighting that is long wavelength lighting, deep red lighting, they're great, they're there, but they're not as good as incandescent lighting and they're not as sustained. Now, I know that in the states legislation is going through to get rid of incandescent light bulbs for all, in many sense, for the right reasons.

When people had the knowledge that they had a few years ago in the UK and Europe, we're following a similar pathway, but we are behind you. We're a couple of years behind you, but always keep this thing, keep this idea around. They can't take it away from you completely because your oven lights, if you put an LED in an oven, it melts.

You have to have incandescent lights and they can be quite small lights that actually are heat resistant. So they're out there, you can still get them and you don't need a lot of light from these things to be effective. But having said that, I'm doing nothing. Experimentally probably that you can't get from going outside in sunlight and just going for a walk.

[00:31:07] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah.

I wanna talk about, this, I am pretty convinced that looking at my computer all day every day is probably destroying my eyeballs. Although I was super intrigued that the retina uses the most energy, because I always thought it was really the heart and the brain that would use the most energy.

And so I wanna talk about, why is the Retin and this kind of takes us back, we're doing it in a little bit of reverse. It's tell me the results of your studies, and now let's talk a little bit more about the science and unpack that just a little bit more, if you don't mind.

So what makes our retina so darn energy hungry overall?

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[00:32:55] Glen Jeffery: Okay. It's actually, the answer is relatively simple. So you can stretch out on a bed and then get up and start running, and you can increase your heart rate. I don't know, 50%, 70%, let's say. You can do things with your muscles and you can increase what they're doing by a certain percentage.

The thing about the retina that you don't notice is it's got this phenomenal ability to still allow you to see things, even though you are going through environments where the light level is changing enormously. So it's almost 10 log units, we're getting on for a range of sensitivity, around a million.

So you go out from a darkish room, you go into a bright room, and you go, oh, for a few seconds, and then the retina gets you there. Now it's a bit more difficult when you go the other way because if you go from a very bright room to a very dark room, then it takes you a little while. But all the time it's making that changes.

It is demanding energy to make these changes rapidly and quickly, consumes vast amounts of energy, and that's one of the reasons why it's got so many mitochondria and it consumes that vast amounts of energy. It's the fact that it can chop and change so quickly without you knowing about it.

[00:34:24] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Tell us a little bit about, I know you use the analogy of batteries a lot when talking about. Mitochondria, will you talk, will you describe and give us some analogies around mitochondria in general? Mitochondria is I love talking about mitochondria and we're talking about it in perspective of light.

I'm usually thinking about it in perspective of nutrients and we often don't think about light as a nutrient like we should, we can put it as one of the overall nutrients, but Will you use, yeah. Will you tell us a little bit more about how mi mitochondria are batteries. 

[00:34:53] Glen Jeffery: Okay. They are batteries and if you were to stick a, an electrode across them, you'd find they've got a charge.

They have got electrical charge across them. And that electrical charge is partly regulated by light, but that electrical charge goes down as you get older, very obviously goes down as you get older. It goes down when you're sick, even if it's not a mitochondrial. If you've got COVID, your mitochondria are really suffering.

And there's. Hundreds of sometimes up to a thousand in each cell, and they're super smart and they don't act on their own. So the mitochondria in my left big toe has a form of communication with my hand, right? They talk to one another and no one does anything really on their own that makes them super, super interesting and super powerful.

So they're a battery, they've got a charge. They work as a community across your body. And when you've got flu, your mitochondria are really suffering. Now, the mitochondria also have this incredible kind of final kind of pack of cards, which is when they've had enough. They're the ones that tell you to die.

They're the ones that they say, my battery's run down, my battery's beaten to death, and it tells the cell to die. So they're incredibly powerful and if we went back 20 years, 30 years, and we talk about mitochondria, nothing much would be, nothing much would be happening. You talk about mitochondria now, and people's ears prick up.

Scientists are super interested in mitochondria and we think about batteries, that's, it's a bit like you describe your unco as a car mechanic. Actually, okay. He's a car mechanic, but he also happens to be an unbelievable heavy metal fan. He does woodwork, he's great at cooking, he does all the, and he's a great parent.

They do all these different things and part of our problem is that we see them just in one light. And that's why maybe we can't get 'em to work in the afternoons. We really need to appreciate all the things they do, particularly how they talk to one another and how they talk to other parts of your body.

We really don't understand. So there are certain cells in your body that you call on when you've got an issue. They're called macrophages. And the macrophages can move around your body and they can deposit in places. They can do arrangements, but macrophages were the first ones that we actually found.

The macrophages can actually go up to a cell and they can actually transfer their mitochondria into that cell. So think about, maybe this is the lifeboat. Maybe when things are really bad, mitochondria get transferred between cells. When mitochondria is suffering in one particular place, I'd love to know what are all the roots of communication.

We've got one of them. We found that cytokines, these messages in the blood, there's inflammatory markers. We find that they're one, you'd be stupid to think it's just one of them. There's loads of forms of communication. 

[00:38:01] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. 

[00:38:02] Glen Jeffery: Yeah. 

[00:38:03] Christa Biegler, RD: Super interesting. Okay, so we're talking generally big picture about light as a nutrient for mitochondria.

Maybe you wouldn't have called it a nutrient, and in short, just to make sure we're highlighting the part, the red light your clinical experience or your research experience until now you're getting to this incandescent was previously focused on red light being a charger, recharging the, this, these, the mitochondria and the re specifically and now you're looking at incandescent maybe may do as, would you call it the same thing, it may charge the mitochondria even more effectively, whereas the blue light drains it.

Would that be correct in saying, just to summarize those. 

[00:38:41] Glen Jeffery: That's my prejudice. I hadn't done that particular experiment. Sure. But the context of what we're talking is why am I getting these great results? Yeah. Why are other people getting these great results I think if we went back to 1990, I wouldn't be getting any of these results.

I'm getting these results because we are spending far too much time in the built environment illuminated by LEDs.

[00:39:05] Christa Biegler, RD: Which is blue light, which is destroying the mitochondria. Yeah. 

[00:39:07] Glen Jeffery: Which is undermining them. So my success to the extent that there is success has come because something is happening in the realm of public health.

Yeah. That is causing big problems. I turn on the radio in the morning and I was listening to the news program and there's news programs that say, massive events have happened and there's a little fillets, and I remember it was a public health inspector from Birmingham, which is the second biggest city, I think it's the second biggest city in the uk.

And he was talking about these problems, public health. And he said something along the lines of, but there's something in the office that's developing in the office environment and it's unhealthy and I don't know what it is. And we all came in to work and say, did you hear that? Did you hear that?

And I didn't catch his name. And I said, did you catch that guy? No, I didn't catch that guy's name either. But it just fitted with the moment. The problem that we've got, I now firmly believe is the LED light. Why am I getting such great results within incandescent lights? Because we're bringing sunlight back into the environment.

So as I say, if we went back to 1990, I don't think I'd get these results. I might get them in a few people who were severely debilitated people that sit on the edge. So we've had great success in getting traction with critical care units in hospitals where people really are on the edge, but I don't think we'd get it with the ordinary public.

[00:40:37] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. What about fluorescent bulbs? They were always around for a long time. Were they also blue light undermining the mitochondria as well? 

[00:40:46] Glen Jeffery: Sunlight, an incandescent light has got a smooth spectrum that takes you all the way deep into the reds that we can't see. 

LEDs have only got light in them.

You can see. And they've got big blue spike 

Fluorescent tubes, which people generally really hate. A whole series of little spikes. So that they themselves have almost no infrared in them. In fact, they have no infrared in them. But what they don't have is they don't have that killer blue spike.

But generally people really don't like working under them and as far as I'm concerned, that's a good enough reason to move them on. 

[00:41:20] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. This makes me think about people that I've encountered over time that are really triggered to migraines and headaches due to light. And I remember a couple specific people who sought out specific computers, specific iPhones that did not have this pulse wave something.

What would you say, I think you have some background right around this kind of neuro impact. Do you think that some of the same science we're talking about here translates into the cause of those migraines or headaches, or is it slightly different mechanism? 

[00:41:50] Glen Jeffery: We don't know, but I'm very minded to think there's something similar going on.

One of the architects we dealt with they were refurbishing a major building and they had a problem in that building with people with migraines. And they have suggested changing everything over to at least wide spectrum, very wide spectrum LEDs. I'm pretty sure that the first thing is if you've got someone sitting in a work environment and they don't like the lighting, they say, I don't like this lighting.

Pay attention to them. Pay attention. Because if nothing else, that person is much more likely to take a day off sick. So you can measure, when you go to a company, you can say to 'em, they're more likely to take a day off sick. That's gonna cost you money. So think about it that way.

Many people have got very different sensitivities. So some people are super sensitive to flick. And some LEDs do flicker. It's very hard to actually see it, but I think there is something responding in people, which does detect the uncomfortableness of flicker. If you go to a visual scientist, they'll say, you can't see that flicker.

It's far too fast. However, the point is that people are responding to it, so somehow they're picking it up. There is definitely a link there, and from a humanitarian point of view, why don't we just give people lights that they're really comfortable and working under. When I walk in and I put an incandescent light in an angle, poise in front of someone, they go, yeah, that's absolutely fine.

Really no one whinges about the lighting anymore. 

[00:43:22] Christa Biegler, RD: Do you think that there is a lot of research? When we think about something that kind of hurts my heart and brain and soul a little bit is that I can take control over my environment right here and I spend a lot of time in my environment here where I am.

But there are people that are in environments where we're trying to promote health and school in hospitals, in long-term care facilities, et cetera. And I think often, you know about people hospitalized and what in. Absolute atrocity on the senses, the circadian rhythm. I was just spent a few days with my dad in the hospital post heart surgery a month or two ago, and I remember just thinking what a crisis on my senses this life.

[00:44:00] Glen Jeffery: Yeah. Oh God. 

[00:44:02] Christa Biegler, RD: That's true. Such a, I think something I see a lot is teachers that are very amazing that try to take some action. I don't know if it works, people sometimes cover the harshness of the lights in those classrooms. I don't know if you can use simple things and actually filter that light in a meaningful way if that actually works.

Do you know what I'm talking about? They'll use some kind of great paper over the lights. I don't know if that actually works or not. What are our opportunities here? And I bring this up because. It's not only those, it's not only those light exposures, but it's also there's another version that you already said.

I just wanna highlight it, that people will say I see the sun on my way to work through the windshield or through the windows. And that's a little you really need to crack the window. You've gotta open the window because we've got energy efficiency, right? Where it's filtering the light in a way you can't see.

And that's an interesting thing about light, right? We're tangible humans, so we like what we can see. Yeah. And there's also stuff we cannot see. Yeah. So will you just talk about this a little bit and what you're thinking related to it? And maybe, I don't know when these things shifted completely, right?

They're still shifting a little bit, but I feel like the light in hospitals has been. Harsh forever, probably 'cause of Fluor. It 

[00:45:07] Glen Jeffery: has, because when you put up a building, I suddenly learn bits about architecture, which I never knew before. When you put up a building, you start with the foundations and you overspend on the foundations by 3%.

Then you put up the walls and you overspend on the walls by 2%. Then you put on the floors and you overspend by 1% there. What's the last thing that goes into a building? It's the lighting and then the architect turns around and says, we've overspent on everything up to here. We are cutting your budget.

So then what happens is you get these horrible, hard white LEDs. What can we do about it? It's interesting. I work in a research institute next to Morefield Eye Hospital, which supposedly people tell me is the biggest eye hospital in the world. And they've got the world's worst lighting.

It's awful. We are putting up a brand new hospital. We're all gonna move in two years time. What are they doing? They're putting in the world's worst lighting. Okay. Absolute killer. Now, it's not the case. There is a growing awareness, but there's only a growing awareness in hospitals when it comes to real killer issues like critical care, which I mentioned that are taking an interest, but quite interesting. The Mayo Clinic in the States are about to put up this super big hospital. I think it's in upstate New York, and they have told the architects concerns that this who build in glass, they've told them that this hospital has to have super good light and it has to have super good air.

The architects then turn up at my door 'cause they dunno what super good light means. They think light is light, okay. So they are all very much aware of it when it comes to schools. I had this great advantage when I was at primary school. I went to a school which was built in about 1870 and had these vast gothic windows facing south, big windows.

And that was the pattern really until about the 1940s. Come the 1940s, we closed the windows down again, really saving on energy so that we can control the temperature. Schools and lighting are terribly important. There was a great guy who sadly, I think died about 20 years ago, love to meet him.

Guy called Otten and he worked for Kodak and he did a lot of time-lapse photography and he got really interested in the light in time-lapse photography and he then started wandering around and he went to schools and he filmed them and he started finding all these things like clusters of diseases in schools when curtains were drawn across windows.

So the reliant was restricted. He looked at the mobility, the hyperactivity of kids that weren't getting daylight. He looked at the fact of how easy was it to reform some prisoners depending on what they did. And he found that it was actually the people that went out and did loads of gardening that actually were the easiest group of people to reform.

And he's dead. I wish I could find this guy and have a chat with him. So scores are terribly important. We've got the issue of myopia. I think we have other things sitting in there as well. But no one cares really about myopia because if you've got myopia, we can give you a different pair of glasses. But then you carry on, and let's say you've got a 12 diopter correction.

You hit 45 55, your retina is gonna be in a very poor condition and you are gonna start to get a form of macular degeneration. But that is not this government's problem because this government will only be in for four or five years, someone else's problem in the future. And the consequence of that is it doesn't get the attention it needs.

[00:48:54] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I take it as my problem because I've already had eye surgery to correct myopia and I've already on my second one eye because of degrading, because of light and look at me not wearing any kind of safety glasses on my computer right now. But, and that's a thing I haven't highlighted.

And hopefully everyone's picked up on that anyway or already knows that. We're looking at screens, so we're looking at blue lights, but this brings up my comment about filters. If someone was going to put a filtering paper, would they put red light over it? Can they, does it matter what color?

For sure. I would assume it needs to be red. What are some practical things that we can do to our environment to start to shift things? Because the thing is that the light exposure is quite vast. It's quite long during the day. Yeah. And I want, and all I wanna talk about, nutrients here in a moment from a different perspective, but we have to always think about something I'm really interested in is barefoot shoes because of the strength of the muscles in your feet. Because you're walking in your shoes so much throughout the day, just like you're exposed to light so much throughout the day. So what little shift can you make? So it's automatic in your life? So what are some practical things we could do to start to shift and improve our blue light exposure?

Maybe reduce our blue light exposure that's degrading our mitochondria and also even our hormone production, to be honest, right? Because if mitochondria aren't happy, then our cells are gonna produce less energy, less hormones, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, including, insulin, which can infect blood sugar.

So most of the problems that we have could probably trace back to light exposure as well. And that's just an area I'm super interested in right now. But what practical things could we do? Okay. And what practical things have you done for you 

[00:50:27] Glen Jeffery: in your life? Okay. I'm gonna keep shouting about the same thing, which is go outside.

Okay? Go outside, just go out, get a dog, go outside, practical things. I was very interested in filters, desperately interested in filters, and so come it makes so much sense that if you use a yellow filter for instance, you are gonna block a lot of the really nasty short wavelength light that we can see.

I did it everybody walking around for absolutely ages with bits of yellow tape across their glasses. It's very funny. The British are quite peculiar. They can do, you can do something really silly and everybody can see it. No one asks you why you've got this yellow strip across your face.

[00:51:09] Christa Biegler, RD: They're just thinking about it on the inside. They don't wanna talk about it. 

[00:51:11] Glen Jeffery: Interestingly, I didn't get an effect. Really. So then as we started talking as a group, you did 

[00:51:17] Christa Biegler, RD: some testing 

[00:51:18] Glen Jeffery: as well? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. We did testing before, testing after son of a gun. I and a number of others, spent whole morning staring at blue computer screens, and we didn't get a result.

Now, 

[00:51:31] Christa Biegler, RD: son of a gun. 

[00:51:32] Glen Jeffery: I then started talking to other people that are doing it and they said we didn't get a result. And then there was a radio program on the BBC specifically addressing this matter. And he interviewed loads of people, didn't interview me, but that's fine. And everybody said we didn't get a result.

Now we've either got the wrong question or we're going about this the wrong way. But certainly I would say when your optometrist says an extra $120, and I'll give you a filter in your a blue filter in your lenses. Think twice. Think twice. It should be the case. Taking all, we know that if we block the blue.

We should get an improvement. But we're not getting that. 

[00:52:18] Christa Biegler, RD: It makes me wonder though. I'm just thinking out loud, right? As you start to like, why isn't that working? And it makes me wonder if, I don't know it needs to be on the device. 'cause we think about how we're getting light input from all over the place.

And of course it's gonna come in the side typically. Yeah. Yeah. Around the glasses. So I'm just thinking about, you need a variety of exposure as well. It's this is why nuance is always important. 'cause you can't just park a red light on your desk all day long. It doesn't work. And you talked about that as well.

The benefits are like gonna plummet after about 11:00 AM And so my morning routine most of the time is to turn on my red light while I'm working out as my light, in case it's before sunrise or whatever. Keeps the lights off. Yeah. But I put in the wrong lights in the basement and I'm thinking, I'm trying to like, just impact that space.

So I, I think it's just interesting. It's okay, we tried, we tested this. What are some of the things that you're measuring that you're able to test as a researcher? To see what the differences are? Oh, 

[00:53:11] Glen Jeffery: really? Bog standard things like acuity, you've gotta do a lot to change acuity.

So color perception that, which is an area which particularly interests me and my lab has got the ability to really pull that apart very hard. I because commu mitochondria community, I spread it out a little bit. So I say to people, I get people to stand on one foot with their eyes closed, and I say, how long can you do that for?

Because that's about muscles. It's about vestibular control and balance, which is really important in old people. So we do a number of things, but let me go back to. The question you asked you about me. Okay. Yeah. What do I do? Okay, so I'm gonna say I'm lucky. I'm not particularly lucky. So now in the uk it's getting dark at it got dark about half an hour ago.

So generally means I go home in the dark. 

But I cycle to work and I cycle home. And when I cycle to work, that's about 35 minutes. As I'm getting older, it's getting closer to 40. But that is, a in the mornings I'm getting a burst of light. For me, every day I tend to buy what I'm eating each day, which means I go out at lunchtime, I have a 20 minute walk down to the shops.

I buy something, I come back, I get a relatively good burst of light. Now I went down yesterday to recruit a couple of people to do some tests on. I said, tell me about your life. Tell me about your lifestyle. What time did you get up? What'd you do? Five minute walk to the underground, to the tube.

Tube, darkness, horrible lights, takes you to a station, three or four minutes walk from where I am now. They spend all their time inside in rooms with LEDs without windows, and then they're going home maybe six o'clock at night. Very limited light. So I, in my life, I make sure I get plenty of light. At weekends, I'm out all the time.

I, the amount of time I spend in my house at weekends is pretty limited. Now, that's a lifestyle choice. I cycle everywhere. So I'm directly exposed to light and that. I live a pretty healthy life. Because I think that ultimately my vision is also contingent on probably what I eat to some extent.

And, how I maintain my life. But I'm active. It's daylight. It's daylight. It's a boring kind of thing to keep saying, but it's that broad spectrum daylight. Now, I must admit, in my office I do have a red light device which when I get in very early in the mornings, I sometimes give myself a burst of eight 15 nanometer light.

I don't, it's 

[00:55:45] Christa Biegler, RD: a nice small one, by the way. My device is, my machines are all ginormous. 

[00:55:49] Glen Jeffery: You don't need a big one. Yeah, you do not need a big one at all. This one is and some of the things that we I'm just looking up, I don't have it here. You can get the same effect with a very small halogen lamp.

I have it here in winter months. I don't, certainly don't use it in summer months. Just no part, we just live a little bit too far north. I dunno what time it gets dark. Where you are in South Dakota 

[00:56:12] Christa Biegler, RD: right now. By 7:00 PM and it will get darker and darker, and I feel like we always need to be reminded of these basic things.

I've got a light for the winter in my closet, and I will say that sometimes if the, if it things have been really dark and gloomy for a week, I start to notice a shift, not surprisingly in my energy after about a week. You saw the same thing. And I'm like, what is wrong with me? And then I'm like, oh, I haven't had any light exposure hardly because it's negative 30 degrees or it's been whatever.

And I will say the thing about light also, another thing that comes up is you can still go outside when it's cloudy and you'll still get those rays from the sun. Yes. Despite the cloudiness. You'll, and how about with glasses and contact lenses? How about, are contact lenses distorting the light coming into the eyes?

Do we need to take any consideration of that when we're trying to get our light exposure? 

[00:56:57] Glen Jeffery: Not if they are. Optically clear lenses, they shouldn't have any effect at all. Now talking of lenses, when you have your cataracts done they your cornea and your lens do naturally block a lot of blue light.

And you 

[00:57:16] Christa Biegler, RD: mean the original? 

[00:57:18] Glen Jeffery: The original, yeah, the original. So why is it that we are the only animal who gets snow blindness? We get snow blindness because we block the blue light in our lens and our cornea, and it gets it's sunburned, it's simply no other animal does that. 

[00:57:39] Christa Biegler, RD: So weird. Why is that?

[00:57:43] Glen Jeffery: I'm not actually sure, but I stood in the Arctic with my. Brown glasses on to block the uv. And a very large Norwegian kind of said to me why don't I need that for my dogs? Because dogs are sitting there quite happy. I dunno we, our visual systems evolved in a very different way for others, primates have, partly because our acuity is so high, we hold things very close to our face a lot of the time.

And blue light scatters and it would blur the image to some extent. I think that's it. But, let me take you back one step. When they put the, yeah. First lenses in, artificial lenses in people, they didn't block the blue light and everybody went, wow. Isn't, aren't things very sparkly?

So the same thing happens with a very transitory with older people. And because your lens goes brown with age and it blocks a lot of the blue light, it just, it, the lens cooks and surgeons love doing cataract operations because they generally do them under local anesthetic and people are gonna go up and go, whoa, isn't the world bright?

Because they've got a clear lens now instead of a brown one. 

[00:58:56] Christa Biegler, RD: So are the lenses that they're putting in for cataract surgery, do they have blue light blocking impact now? Most 

[00:59:01] Glen Jeffery: of them have yet nearly I think all of them will have blue light blocking to a greater or lesser extent. 

[00:59:06] Christa Biegler, RD: I appreciate you bringing up cataracts.

Something that really bothers me is why do we need cataracts? Like, what is wrong with us that we have evolved to need did? Was that how we were when we, at the beginning of time no, what is the deal here? What is the problem? What, what is happening to us? 

[00:59:22] Glen Jeffery: The deal's a real, real difficult one.

It is, you are living too long. All my problems with the retina, you are in the evolutionary terms. You'd probably, the average kind of person would probably live to 35 or 40. You will get people who make it to 70 without any kind of support or care that modern societies have. But back in, the Middle Ages people didn't get dementia because they didn't live that long.

The retina didn't start to become, it didn't lose that many cells because you were dead by the time you were 40. Life was pretty miserable as well. So as we have an aging population, we face many different types of problems. We need support. And one of the key ones here is a life spent without sunlight.

That's gonna be expensive in terms what it costs us at the end of the day. Yeah. 

[01:00:17] Christa Biegler, RD: Super interesting. I could wrap up here, but I've got a few more questions. You brought up that you were researching children with mitochondrial disease. What are the specific conditions that some of them have, and then what are you seeing in some of those, in that 

[01:00:29] Glen Jeffery: population?

This was, is a terribly interesting story. Mitochondrial disease is a disease that very often if it hits children hard their life expectancy is very short. Also, the quality of their life is unbelievable, can be unbelievably poor. They lack energy. They have a whole range of problems.

So when I publish papers saying things like improved mitochondrial function, parents around the world say hang on, that's what my kid's got. This kid has got mitochondrial disease. And I said, I don't have ethics to do that. Experiment. I don't have ethics for that clinical trial. Then there were a few children who were given red light by their parents, and there were two children who, I must admit it was a Lazarus event.

It was transforming. And I, there were, we're not 

[01:01:24] Christa Biegler, RD: all the same,

[01:01:24] Glen Jeffery: no. There were two transforming things in my life 

[01:01:28] Christa Biegler, RD: where 

[01:01:28] Glen Jeffery: I achieved something. The first time was, I think about the age of 22. I put a central heating system in, pushed the button, and it worked, and I couldn't believe it.

The second thing that we did was see how a child changed. And I've said it before I went to the toilet and cried. Couldn't believe that we'd had anything to do with that. So we still have a clinical trial clicking away. The trouble is with it, is that some of these children are in such a poor condition.

Sure. That doesn't matter what we do.

[01:02:01] Christa Biegler, RD: You need maybe more than one intervention. You know which one? 

[01:02:03] Glen Jeffery: I think we've gotta catch them super early. And some of them we just don't ca and all we are asking, we were asking for, we were looking at their posis, which is their inability to open their eyes properly.

So heavy lids and we got on the first few children we got so much more than that. We've got improvements in mobility. Member mitochondria population, they talked to one. Yeah. And then this is a very rare condition and we just so we are struggling to get the kids for it. And of course this is a clinical trial.

Really. They've gotta be in the uk. We can't pick them up internationally. We were bringing them down from other parts of England and putting them up overnight. And, but I can see that this might fail simply for the reason we can't get the proper number of kids in this trial. What's my final comment on that? So I do say to the parents, just try changing your light bulbs. Just see if that makes any difference over a few. It costs you almost nothing. Absolutely safe go. Yeah. That's 

[01:03:02] Christa Biegler, RD: something we could all do.

[01:03:03] Glen Jeffery: That's what I want. If you're gonna sit in your office, that's what I want.

In a particularly winter, I want you to change your light bulbs. 

[01:03:09] Christa Biegler, RD: I know. And I'm one of those people who just hates the lights being on for no reason. Love windows and I hate the lights being on. So what is that? And it's an app. I appreciate this thing about, my husband comes down, turns the TV onm like, please stop that.

Shut the lights off. Do not want the lights on right now. I think, you know what I enjoy this topic. I always love that some of the best things that we can do for our health can be free, can be low cost. Yes. It's just a matter of how do we want to, and I think we all have, we can ask ourselves expansive questions like what are some things I can do?

And I think sometimes we get, it's a mindset on, maybe we are limited in some ways in that, oh, we are in this school building or this office building. How can I change my environment there and how can I get three doses of light for at least a few minutes? In the day at the starting point, right?

[01:03:57] Glen Jeffery: Yeah. 

[01:03:57] Christa Biegler, RD: Even if it's cold, maybe sometimes weather does allow you to skip, but not for very long. Like how can I dose that in? There is something I think about because I, for the longest time with my background, I've supported mitochondria with nutrients that have, we do talk about circadian rhythm, but I do, I just appreciate this topic so much.

Like the opportunity, the I love both breath and light from a perspective of if we're more intentional, our outcomes can be exponential. So in that vein, if you had unlimited fun as a researcher, as someone who has curiosity, wants to solve problems and has this beautiful opportunity to do so and able to even move agile like with some, a little bit more speedy than some research, which would be the thing that would drive me crazy, as you said at the very beginning.

So if you had unlimited funding, what's, another question or a research question about aging and vision you'd want to try to solve for now. 

[01:04:54] Glen Jeffery: Now, the general issue of aging is what I'd love to be able to do, the trouble is we can't really do it with humans because, I dunno, maybe I've got 20 years left.

That's not enough to do the project that I would really want to do. I would really want to just change the light bulbs and see if we extend health span as well as lifespan in the way that we do in a fly now. I don't bet. But if I did bet I'd say that was a really good bet to do that. We just got this massive problem with mitochondria and with aging and if we can just bring that a little bit under control.

I don't necessarily want you to the, I think the average life expectancy in Western Europe's about 82. I actually don't particularly care if you make 92. What I do want is between 72 and 82 for you to have a life that's worth living. Yeah. I want you to be pleased to get up in the morning. I want you to have a quality of life and mitochondria are controlling that, yeah. They can't control your marriage, they can't control your car, but they can control how you feel when you get up in the morning. 

[01:06:04] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I agree. I agree. Okay. Last thing. I think people are going to, I think this will save a lot of emails and help people and I think, I heard you say. And this is how I feel.

If someone comes to me and they're like, what do you think of this supplement? I'm like, how could I possibly know without vetting it personally? But I usually have some criteria around you kinda have to like, look into the company. You kinda have to know that they're ethical and blah, blah, blah.

And maybe you do it differently, but what would you say to someone who's looking for, and here's the deal. Do we have any concerns about incandescent lights or maybe not legitimate incandescent lights? First of all, before we get into red light, because red light is a totally different expense, incandescent light, which we're seeing more, which you're seeing even more success with, is a very low cost change, right?

There's some heat, turn the light off when you're done, but it's a low cost change. Whereas if someone's shopping for a red light, do you have any kind of parameters you want to offer to them to support their shopping endeavors? 

[01:07:01] Glen Jeffery: Yeah. I have I just can't, okay, so I felt it was wrong for me to talk about red light and not say, that there are some good ones out there. So I thought, okay, I can't do that with one company. I'll do it with two companies. So we tested two companies with whom I have no financial financial reward. The sad thing is one company was in Australia and the guy was very successful and he was a decent bloke and he was doing it and he said, I'm 78, I've had it.

I just wanna retire. So he pulled out that left one company in which is a UK, very small UK company. I can't advertise their products. Because that's not really what I should be doing. But I do think I hint at some, when people do write to me, I say, I'm using these in my research.

And I'm prepared to do that. I would say to anybody, don't buy something which is big and powerful. Don't think that more is better. It is not. Very often, it's less that's actually gonna be as good, should cost very little. Again, I've said this a number of times, little lady, she was in her eighties.

We rejected her from a clinical trial, couldn't get her in, so was my health issue. She vanished and she came back later, knocked at the door unannounced and said, will this work? And she had a little LED and she had a battery and she joined them with her finger and she stuck it right in front of her eye.

And I was appalled. And she said, will it work? And I went, honey, huh? But she'd come up 20 or 30 miles on public transport. So I gave her a cup of tea and said to someone, can you go and test this, please? He came back and said, yeah, that'll work. So think about it, when someone wants to charge you hundreds of dollars for something think twice.

You do not need that. You wanna be a little bit more adventurous. Go and buy an oven light. Go. And it's all you really need. People send me things and I think, they ask me are asking me to improve them. I've got these big kind of like gravestones in, in part of the office.

And I'm thinking, what do we do with them? I'm not spending three days testing that. That's so 

[01:09:14] Christa Biegler, RD: funny. 

[01:09:15] Glen Jeffery: Yeah, 

[01:09:16] Christa Biegler, RD: I know. It's tricky. It is. It's tricky. It's everyone's trying to maintain like what would be ethical, et cetera. So I appreciate your integrity around that. So there's not really a place people can find you online.

So if you could leave people with one, and it might be just reiterating something you've already said, but if you could leave them with one takeaway about improving their vision, we're all, I'm here to improve my vision as well. What would you wanna tell people? What's the takeaway that you want listeners to hear today?

Sunlight. 

[01:09:40] Glen Jeffery: Sunlight. And also, look I have stupidly said and I feel I have to maintain it. I do tend to try and respond to people's emails. If you it is unreasonable of someone to come like me to come along and make all these kind of statements. And then, we've got a relatively isolated person living in the outer Heide in Scotland who gets all worried and concerned.

It's really unfair of me then to say go off on your own and find out. So I do try and catch up on emails. It sometimes takes me a few weeks, but I do try and catch up on emails 

[01:10:18] Christa Biegler, RD: and my 

[01:10:18] Glen Jeffery: email is very easy to find at University College London. 

[01:10:22] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Bless your soul for those emails.

That is always my, the vein of my ex. I really like to reply in my head and not in real life 

[01:10:31] Glen Jeffery: sitting down. They overwhelm me sometimes, but I get through most of them. 

[01:10:35] Christa Biegler, RD: Yes. Thank you so much for coming on today and for sharing about your research and your passion and your legacy. I think it's just so fun.

And actually one more thing about any thought leaders, and when I see the conversation of cells as battery as I always think of Dr. Jerry Tenet, so I'm not sure if you're familiar with his work, but who are some of the thought leaders you've look to in your 

[01:10:56] Glen Jeffery: research? Oh Glen looks up at his bookshelf and he says Nick Lane.

Nice. Definitely. And Roger Sch Welt. Okay. Roger is a, he's got a podcast called Med Cam. People get onto, he's just put a med cam on about paracetamol and pregnant women. He's clever, he's thorough, he's totally decent, and he's a critical care doctor in LA who started wheeling people out into sunlight when they're on the point of death.

Oh, that's great. And Roger and his med crams are very critical analyses of this type of problem. And I've never met him, but we've talked on, on, on the internet. I've never met him. I'm going to break a leg to try and meet him because he's the physician that I think is doing the big things in this area.

[01:11:55] Christa Biegler, RD: Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing. Thanks so much for coming on today. 

[01:11:57] Glen Jeffery: Nah, I to you are really important to me. I can do the science. You have to disseminate it. 

[01:12:03] Christa Biegler, RD: Oh, I'm happy to do it. If I can have a job asking smart people questions, I will just, I'll never retire at the end. Okay, great.