Dr. Martin Moore-Ede
Appearances
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
Yes. And the secret about this is, I mean, number one, you know, people like a little bit of light to avoid trips and falls and things like that in the bedroom. Okay. But if you direct the light down at the floor, not at your eyes, and if you make that light an amber-orange light that has no blue in it, You can have potentially a little bit of light there.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
But yes, the typical bedroom lights and these days, anything you buy, the TVs pump out this blue rich light. Any light bulb you buy is mostly 98, 99% of them are blue rich. And that's going to change. There are now the solutions are out there. The solutions with... that we can use are out there.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
But essentially, it is something, I think it's largely related to people's anxiety and they like the lights on. In fact, you know, here I am, sort of expert on this whole thing. And I go on trips and speaking trips and conferences and all the rest of it. And I'm talking to my wife the other day and I said, what do you do when I'm out of town? She said, oh, I always speak with the lights on.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
I was horrified. And so I'm preaching to her as much as everyone else, right? And now I think she understands that you've got to have those lights off at night.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
That's right. And if you've got a clock in the bedroom, make sure it's a red clock, a red LED clock, not a white or blue LED clock. So yeah, all those things.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
Absolutely. The critical or second part of the story, it's the one side you've got excess light, excess blue rich light during the nighttime hours. But the equally important part of it is our lack of exposure to bright blue rich daylight. Now, we spend over 90% of our time indoors these days. And when we're indoors, we're living in light levels that are typically 300, 500 lux.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
That's a measure of how bright light is. Now, take 500 lux, which is the brightest indoor light we normally see, and you walk outside the door and you go outside. On a dim day, you're getting 10,000 lux. On a cloudy day, 10,000 lux. And if it's a bright sunny day, you're getting 50,000, even 100,000 lux of light. So the amount of light we're seeing is incredibly small.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
So one of the most immediate things everyone needs to be advised is get out in the daytime. And people who get out in the daytime and don't stay indoors all day live longer, are healthier, have less heart disease, less diabetes and so forth. So it's a very strong effect. The other interesting feature of that is that it's actually the time of day matters.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
And a fascinating studies have gone on looking at because one of the conditions we haven't talked about is psychiatric illness, depression, anxiety, PTSD, all the whole cluster of illnesses that are 30% higher in people who are exposed to light at night. and 30% lowering people who get outdoors regularly. But take the classic case. This is a really mind-blowing study.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
If you look at people who admitted to a psychiatric ward because they've got severe anxiety, depression,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
and you put them in a hospital, and half of the rooms in the hospital are facing south and east, in other words, they see the morning sun, and the other half are facing, windows are facing north and west, those that get in the rooms, same pharmacological treatments, same physicians, same therapy, get out of hospital half the time when they see the morning sunlight.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
as opposed to not getting the morning sunlight because they're in those west and north facing rooms. Staggering finding, and that's just light coming in through the windows, that's not even light getting outdoors. So there is something very fundamental we've lost by going indoors.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
Well, the fascinating thing about that study that was done in Sweden by Professor Lindquist and his team, fascinating part of it is they never were intending to look at, they had an assumption. And the best studies is when you start out with an assumption that proves to be totally wrong.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
They thought they were going to study how much more malignant melanomas were developing Swedish women who spent time outdoors as opposed to those who were indoors. They were going to track that, and they found, indeed, there were more melanomas and other skin cancers in those women who were spending time outdoors, but they lived far longer. staggering thing. And they were healthier.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
And this actually goes back to explain some rather curious findings from years ago, where they looked at sailors in the US Navy. Now, if you're a sailor out in the US Navy, you've got a lot of exposure to sunlight out on those ships. And they looked at them, and gosh, those sailors developed eight times more melanomas than the average population.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
But they all lived longer than the average population. So basically, yes, skin cancer is a problem. And yes, there are people die of malignant melanoma. But far bigger risk is staying away from the sun and staying away from daylight. Now, One of the key things here is where the light is coming. For these biological effects, a lot of it can be done through the eyes.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
You don't have to expose your whole body and risk your skin all over being melanomated. It's getting out and your eyes being exposed to bright light that does most of the trick. But it's fascinating because it sort of turns upside down some assumptions.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
And so it's really a very interesting part of this whole thing that we now understand how potently positive is daylight and sunlight during the day in a way that we've sort of, you know, rather dismissed with our modern live-indoors society.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
Yeah, and the key thing is the morning matters, and before the sun reaches its zenith, the peak in the middle of the day, If you want to go out in the morning and relatively early in the morning, you know, in your day, that provides the strongest circadian clock resetting signal that keeps your body in sync most effectively. And it's probably about an hour or so of light that you need ideally.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
You don't have to be out for hours and hours, but that is hugely important. So, get out for that walk. You know, get a dog if you can't find an excuse to get out. Take your dog for a walk. But getting outside every day in the morning, regular time, and regularity is also one of the key things in terms of health too, and particularly exposure to light.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
I wouldn't go that far because the problem is that then the resetting of our biological clocks are most sensitive in the mornings. But if you take that too much to the extreme, particularly during summer hours, you'll be nudging yourself towards Europe time if you're living in the States. by early morning light exposure, you get yourself out of sync.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
So I think you can have breakfast first and then go out. I don't think you have to get out in the very first 30 minutes because otherwise you will actually be resetting yourself in an eastward direction and you're going to end up in mid-Atlantic time or somewhere in Europe.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
That's right. And a good brisk walk or a run is, you know, helps your health. And, you know, one of the interesting anecdotes is that golfers live longer. You might say the non-golfers. And you could say, well, you know, maybe that's part of it. You know, if you get around a golf course, that's going to take you an hour or two. That's a way of getting a heavy dose of natural light.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
Well, we've done a lot of looking at the literature, and we've also done a lot of studies now, both in the lab, but also in the workplace. And what's really interesting is when you look at people who are under blue rich, that means standard LED, standard fluorescent lighting at night, They are, number one, they have more hunger. They have a higher appetite.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
They actually snack in the workplace twice as many snacks on the night shift than if you give them light that doesn't have any blue in it. So there's an appetite part of the problem.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
Then there is the fact that if you look at the insulin glucose axis, in other words, metabolic measures, and you test like a glucose tolerance test, for example, where the standard test for diabetes, where you drink a bottle of sugar water, and then every half hour or so, the doctor takes a blood sample, and they track how the
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
insulin glucose and insulin levels rise and then they fall back down if you are healthy, back to normal levels by the end of two hours. If you've got diabetes, those levels climb higher and stay higher. We find that when people are on the regular LED lights, the standard LED lights, conventional lights that you buy in the store,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
that they get pre-diabetic, even the first perfectly healthy person in the first night of exposure. And so by the morning, they've got an abnormal diabetic type glucose tolerance test. And so we're adjusting, we're having big effects, therefore, on the fundamental methods of not only snacking, but also how substances are metabolized in the body.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
And you're creating this metabolic syndrome in real time just by being exposed to blue-rich electric lights.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
The circadian rhythms of our body are all those functions of the body that go up and down with the time of day. So cortisol peaks, for example, just before dawn. Melatonin peaks at 2 a.m. in the morning. Other rhythms, growth hormone peaks just when you go to sleep. There are all these rhythmic patterns of body temperature goes up and down. They're all called circadian rhythms.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
They are not products just simply of our environment and what we're doing on outside and what we're doing. They're actually driven by a master clock in the brain and then lots of clocks, millions of clocks in every cell and tissue of our bodies. Now, that was first of all, you know, studied in animals.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
But when I came, when I first started in the field, it was assumed, in fact, the leading scientists at the time thought that humans did not have a master clock. It's called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, by the way, SCN for short. The acronyms are useful because of the mouthful. And the suprachiasmatic nucleus It was found in various animals.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
It was found in 1972 in rats and then in hamsters, but no one could see it in the human brain. And one of the things our team did was one of my postdocs actually realized that when you're looking at atlases of the human brain, that they are showing you every 50th slice of the brain and throwing out 49 slices in between.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
So you're only getting a sort of a snapshot of one slice through the brain and they slice it through systematically and show it as a map. But if there's a small entity like this suprachiasmatic nucleus, then you're going to miss it. So Ralph Leidig, my postdoc, went back and looked at all the 49 slices in between.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
And lo and behold, consistently, there was this same structure that was seen in rats and hamsters and monkeys and elsewhere. So yes, humans did have a suprachiasmatic clock wired in the same way with a pathway coming back from the eye, from the back of the eye, from the retina, through a so-called retinohypothalamic tract, which led direct pathway into this suprachiasmatic nucleus.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
And given that that clock is the fundamental thing that keeps everything in timing, that's a really fundamental part of the system. Now, I've mentioned millions of other clocks.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
The problem is if the master clock is not being adequately synchronized by bright blue light during the daytime and absence at night, then it gets out of sync and the signal becomes weak and the various functions of the body all start getting out of time with each other. And I've likened it to a discordant orchestra.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
If the conductor is not guiding the orchestra, the conductor being the SDN clock, then, of course, you get this really discordant sound. For the body to be harmonious and to be healthy, everything needs to be tightly in sync and with a robust amplitude, in other words, a strong beat to this system.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
And you only get that if you're exposed to bright daylight during the day and pitch darkness at night. And that gives you this strong beat. And that is the thing that keeps your body healthy, gives you a long, healthy lifespan, boosts your immune system, protects you against viruses and COVID and everything else.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
All those things are elements of a key element of health that we've too often neglected just because of comfort of sitting indoors in a comfy situation and working half the time in front of a computer screen.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
Great question. One of my colleagues said it pretty well. He says, the problem is the scientists in this field just talk to each other. They don't talk to their neighbors. So this is well-known science. In fact, I did a consensus study with 248 of the world's leading scientists in this field recently. just to make sure we were all on the same conclusions.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
And indeed, we came out with some very solid conclusions, consensus among these scientists. The blue light was the key. It's detected by melanopsin, this pigment in the eye. It synchronizes the circadian rhythms that diabetes, that cancers, and everything else are related to disruptions of this system. All that is well-known, established science,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
But it just is staggering to me and others in the field that this has not yet penetrated the public consciousness. And it should because this is, we're talking about environmental pollutant, the blue light at night. Yet it's the simplest of all the environmental pollutants you can think of.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
You know, we talk about PFAS chemicals and we talk about microplastics and we talk about all these things, horrendous problems to clean up. This is pretty simple. Just change the darn light bulb. It's actually a pretty simple solution. And yet, there is a lot of, and you might say, why is that? Well, there's a lot of embedded interest in their commercial interest in the industry.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
They built these lights. That's what they sell. It's a $150 billion industry that's like an aircraft carrier. It's hard to turn it around sometimes. It is a industry that is being regulated by the Department of Energy, which has put its head, quite frankly, in the sand about this issue.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
And, you know, they have refused to accept and understand that this is a real issue because their focus, their mandate is to reduce emissions. the lumens, or at least to maximize the lumens per watt efficiency. And let me explain that a little bit. Lumens is a measure of the amount of light, but it's not the measure of the amount of light per se, it is the measure of brightness of light.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
And because of the way the eyes process light, it is actually looking only at the green and yellow wavelengths of light. It's not looking at the blue, which is essential for circadian health. It's not looking at the red wavelengths in light, which is essential for healing and a lot of important health issues around red light. They purely measure this brightness of light.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
And so they're actually not measuring the healthiness of light, they're measuring a convenient standard that the engineers can get their head around. You know, let's just make this lumens per watt standard as high as possible. And that way, we force out and now are banning, effectively, all incandescent light bulbs. Those are the standard old light bulbs. We banned all halogen light bulbs.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
We're banning all fluorescents. And now we're forcing the consumer to only have these LED lights and the LED lights that are pumping out this energy efficient light, which is rich in blue, because that's the way you can get the most efficient conversion of electricity into lumens. So we've got ourselves into a sort of situation where we are harming ourselves.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
And you might say, you know, okay, it's all about the good of the climate, good of the planet. And we all recognize the importance of global warming and curtailing that. We all recognize the electricity consumption is part of that. We all recognize the problem of greenhouse gases. But
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
You cannot fix that by creating a huge human health problem, which is far bigger in its effect right now than the current effects of climate change. So it's really a matter of getting the balance right. And this is a huge issue. But as I say, these forces are there and also the inertia of the market. If the consumer doesn't understand it,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
and isn't asking for blue-free, zero blue light at night, then the lighting companies won't build it. And the lighting companies say, well, let's have the consumer ask for it, but the consumers don't know. And the energy people are trying to regulate it so you can't get low blue, I mean, incandescents are relatively low in blue light, you can't get them anymore.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
So we got ourselves in this situation. One of the reasons I'm writing the book is trying to break through this logjam of misconception, inertia, and quite frankly, misinformation in some cases.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
Absolutely. Yeah, this is the problem. The hospital lighting is typically and historically, it's all been blue rich fluorescent lighting. That's what I, when I was a surgeon in training, that's what I worked under 24-7. But also now more and more LED lights.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
It's all about meeting, you know, energy efficiency standards and, you know, having certifications like so-called LEED certifications that they can boast about, about how climate conscious they are. But amazingly, they haven't got it yet. And it is a hard sell to get people to start to change. So yes, healthcare is one thing. And yet the evidence is being very strong.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
I mean, in other words, in Europe, they're rather far ahead. There's companies in Europe that are putting lights into nursing homes, circadian lighting, which is free of blue at night and rich and blue during the day, in nursing homes, in hospitals, showing a lot of beneficial end results. but it is slow to catch on.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Science Behind When To Eat and Other Top Lessons On Circadian Biology
And, you know, as I say, that's part of the reason of getting the book out is to try to get this breakthrough here. We've got to get to the tipping point where when people start demanding it, then these lights get in because then people need to know what to ask for specifically so they can't have placebo lighting passed off on them.