Dr. Roger Seheult
Appearances
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
I completely agree with you. The one thing I was going to add to that, too, are the windows. So you're aware, of course, in California, we need efficiency, and we have these windows called low-E glass, and they're specifically designed to filter out infrared light. So the way you can tell whether or not your window is filtering that out is just stand in it when the sun is on it.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
If you can feel the warmth of that sun, then you know that it's one of the old windows that's allowing that to come in. If you don't feel it, that's a low E glass. And so what we've done is we've created this environment inside. We've gotten rid of the incandescent bulbs. We have LED bulbs. We've gotten rid of the regular window. It's all for energy efficiency, which is a reasonable thing to do.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
We need energy efficiency. But no one's asked what the human collateral damage is to this type of – efficiency.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Oh, I haven't seen them, but I know that in new constructions, they're not even putting in sockets. They're putting in receptacles that can only be replaced with other LEDs. So in new constructions, that's what's going on. We'll see what happens. I believe there is a movement right now based on the new administration to see if we can change some of those rules and maybe get some rule changes.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
I believe it's with the Department of Energy.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Why that's important is because of the effect of this type of infrared light has on mitochondria. And that's really the mind-blowing aspect of this, is that mitochondria are like engines in your cells, right? They're like engines in your car. The engine in your car burns fuel, makes locomotion, and in the process of making that locomotion, it creates heat.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Long COVID is defined as having symptoms of a number of different types of symptoms. Typically, it's fatigue, could be headaches, could be all sorts of things, even loss of taste and smell for more than 12 weeks after the infection. So we're talking a good three months.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
The thing about long COVID, in my experience and what I've seen, is that it's very heterogeneous and it can be due to many different things. So it's been very difficult to put together exactly what the issue is. But I'll tell you, as a physician, as a pulmonologist, one of the cardinal symptoms of long COVID is shortness of breath.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And so because I'm a lung doctor and people believe that shortness of breath always has to do with the lungs, I get a lot of consults for people who have shortness of breath, long COVID after they were infected months ago. And so a lot of these people came to me. And one of the things I had to do is research this topic. And as it turns out,
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
one of the, not for everybody, but for many people with long COVID, guess what's at the center of long COVID? And actually we have research to show this, mitochondrial dysfunction. The thing that gets them COVID is the thing that keeps them actually having long COVID. So there was a study that was done looking at metabolism.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And that heat, if not dealt with, can shut down your engine. Well, in the mitochondria, you've got this process occurring, making ATP, which is basically the currency of energy in the cell. And in the process of doing this, it makes oxidative stress, reactive oxygen species. If you don't deal with those reactive oxygen species, that could shut down the mitochondria.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And they showed it was one of these plots where they looked at upregulation and downregulation of metabolism in the mitochondria. And they looked at the enzymes of glycolysis, if you can remember back all those enzymes, and they looked at the enzymes of beta-oxidation, so fatty acid, basically oxidation.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And it was pretty well shown that there was a significant downregulation in people with long COVID versus people who had COVID that didn't have long COVID. that had a downregulation in beta-oxidation. So they were not able to very well utilize and metabolize fatty acids in the mitochondria. Why is this the case?
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Well, based on what we talked about earlier, certainly one of the possibilities here is that they were infected with COVID. It downregulated for many of the systems in their body oxidative stress mechanisms. cause damage to their mitochondria. And we don't know why, but perhaps the areas of the mitochondria that were damaged most had to do with beta oxidation and fatty acids.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So you'll talk to people who have been infected with COVID and they said, we gain weight after we're infected with COVID and I have all these symptoms. First of all, when someone comes to you like that as a physician, you have to make sure that you're ruling out all of the obvious things. So I'm getting an echocardiogram to make sure they didn't have some sort of cardiac issue.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
I'm getting pulmonary function tests to make sure they didn't get scarring in their lungs and to have restrictive lung disease. So I'm ruling out all of these things. About a month or two later, I've got all these tests back and I'm going over it.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And for the ones where everything is negative, because there were some where I actually discovered they had blood clots and we had to treat them for that. But for people who have everything negative and they're still complaining, I remember one gentleman in particular, he had eight out of 10 shortness of breath and he couldn't sleep very well. And this had been going on for over a year.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And we ruled out pulmonary embolism. We ruled out congestive heart failure. We ruled out interstitial lung disease with all of the tests. And it was about this time that I was coming onto this idea about light and looking at these studies about the mitochondria. And I had this idea because there was nothing else left.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
I had this idea that if there was some way we could regenerate the mitochondria, but instead of it being damaged, because you know when you have damaged mitochondria, that creates just more oxidative stress and damages it even more. So in other words, we have to basically get his body into a situation where he was generating new mitochondria so we could get rid of these issues with metabolism.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So I had this idea, and I don't know if it worked this way, but I actually got him to do intermittent fasting. This whole idea about how intermittent fasting allows the body to generate things at night because you're now – the body knows what it needs to downregulate and break up. You just have to give it the opportunity. This is how I understood it.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
The innate immune system looking at pathological molecular patterns and also damaged – molecular pattern. So PAMPs and DAMPs, D-A-M-P. If we were to allow the immune system to do what it needs to do, it would find these areas that are not working well, tear them down, destroy those cells, and then allow regeneration of new cells with hopefully brand new virgin mitochondria.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So that was the first thing I did. He vowed that he would never eat after 5.30 after I explained all this to him. I took a clinic visit and we explained all of this. The other thing I did was told him to get out in the Now, this may sound dismissive.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Can you imagine you've got long COVID, you've been suffering, and you go to a physician and they tell you, well, I want you to stop eating after 5.30. I want you to get outside more. Is he taking me seriously? Does he really believe that I have a condition? But I took the time to explain why I was thinking about these things and going through the studies. So he did it.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And I saw him back a month later. He was amazed. I was amazed. He said that his gastroesophageal reflex disease completely went away after he stopped eating after 5.30. his shortness of breath went from an eight out of 10 to a three out of 10. And he said it doesn't even bother him anymore. This is after a year of having this type of symptoms. So that really took me a pause.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And quite truly, just about every single chronic disease that we have in this country, whether it's diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, dementia, all of those, they all have at the root of them mitochondrial dysfunction. And this goes to a much bigger picture of... The mitochondrial theory of aging. We know that after 40 years, the output of mitochondria, which is ATP, drops by about 70%. 7-0?
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Now, I'll tell you the first thing, that doesn't happen to all of my patients with long COVID, but it tells me that when you're dealing with long COVID, you're dealing with people who have had an infection that has caused damage to the system. And some of the studies from what I've reviewed, sometimes people have residual virus still in the system.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
There was a study that was done looking at to see whether vaccination of COVID-19 would work after patients with long COVID. There was some benefit. It wasn't big, but it was some. And it may be that you're just stimulating the immune system again to fight off this remaining virus that's still in the system.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
But we have data that shows that the type of inflammation that we get with spike protein, it's actually a toll-like receptor 4 type of inflammation. There's a study that looked at this.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And they were actually able to show and demonstrate that infrared light, coming back to that again, can actually mitigate the inflammation from toll-like receptor-mediated inflammation, which is exactly the inflammation mediated in COVID-19.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So short answer to your question, or that's a long answer, but the short answer is yes, I do believe that long COVID is something, and I believe people are suffering with it. It's a very heterogeneous disease, and it's hard to just pin one thing on everything and have it work for everything. That being said, I don't see a lot of downside in instituting some of these things that we think may work.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Sunlight is being one of those things. People who are sick with COVID and long COVID tend to be sick and they stay indoors. And so there may be an exacerbation of the process. The last thing they want to do is to get outside. But it may actually be beneficial.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
right yeah as i recall from the um from the and this is actually kind of interesting about uh olfactory is that the nurse cells that are next to those neurons in the olfactory are the ones that have a lot of ace2 receptors and and that's so what happened is these nurse supporting cells that were helping with the you know whatever they do to support the neurons were dying off and that's why they were losing a sense of smell and so when
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
The nerve cells came back and replenished. People didn't smell exactly the same because it wasn't exactly in the same – didn't come back in the same way. There was – and this has been used for years in air nose and throat circles is something as – this sounds kind of silly but smelling sticks.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
There's actually a protocol that is used to these markers that are manufactured in Europe where they have a different... Orange, lemon, chocolate. Exactly. And smelling these things actually over... There's a randomized crossover placebo-controlled trial that actually showed that they were able to regain their sense of smell by training their sense of smell with these sticks.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
7-0. Can you imagine being in your house and somehow the energy production to your house drops by 70%? Can you imagine what an impact that would have on just about every function that goes on in your house? This is exactly what's happening in the cell. And so what does this have to do with sunlight? Well, here's what they've shown.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
This is like the fifth cranial nerve, isn't it, that does that?
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
That's right. It bypasses the thalamus.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
It is a real thing. And mold is a substance that can have multiple different effects on the body. Let me give you an example. There's a fungus called aspergillus. And there's two ways that aspergillus can affect the human body. One is if it just sets up shop. in your lungs and it doesn't invade, you could become allergic to it. And so the symptoms are allergic.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Actually, there's a condition called allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis. So it's kind of like an autoimmune situation. Exactly. And so you have symptoms of asthma. You have symptoms of inability to breathe. And the primary treatment, ironically, there is steroids because you need to reduce the inflammation, but also antifungals to get rid of the thing that's inciting in the first place.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
That's as opposed to invasive aspergillosis. That's where the fungus comes in. and starts to invade and create a cavitary lesion, usually with a fungus ball sitting in the middle of it. Oh, yeah, it's pretty bad. Sometimes it's so bad that you actually have to do surgery to cut out that thing because you can't cure it. The way that this often happens is mold and fungus are in the air all the time.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
that the mitochondria actually make on-site melatonin in orders of magnitude higher concentration that is made in the pineal gland. Really? Yes. So they've actually done the work where they have serotonin. They are actually labeling the carbons in serotonin and showing that melatonin in orders of magnitude higher concentration are being made on-site in the mitochondria.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So here's this understanding of there's germ theory and there is terrain theory. And today, and I almost hate to even get into it, but people think it's one or the other. And I can tell you as a physician, it's both.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
There are certain diseases, it doesn't matter what your terrain is, like Neisseria meningitidis, if you get that, it's going to cause a bad meningitis, no matter how healthy you are, okay? There was just a, I remember reading about a young Japanese star who, I think, or Taiwanese star just recently here that died of influenza, 48 years old, no medical problems.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So it's possible no matter how good your terrain is, you could get a bad bug, a bad germ, and it could kill you. On the other hand, there are certain bugs that are just sitting out there and they will go in and your immune system will just kick it out like it's nothing. Why? Because your terrain is good. So I can talk about different types of infections that could do that.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So that's where we are with molds. So typically, you're breathing in all sorts of molds and fungus spores all the time. But if your immune system is good, it'll just kick it out and won't have a chance to survive. Where you have a problem is if you have a situation where your immune system is compromised.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
To give you an example of that practically, there are some biological medications that people get when they have rheumatoid arthritis. If we get to that point where you have rheumatitis so bad that we have to put you on a biologic, that means there's an antibody there that's suppressing the immune system so that you don't have the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
That's actually suppressing your immune system. In those patients, we'll always check them for tuberculosis. Because certain people walking in the population will have an inactivated tuberculosis. They're infected, but their immune system has walled it off. Then we put them on a biologic and the tuberculosis pops up.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So all of that to say that, yes, it is possible if you have mold in your house versus if you don't have mold in your house. That just increases the burden of mold that you're inhaling and to the degree that it's going to match against – your immune system, you know, that could depend on whether or not it jumps in and actually causes a problem.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So, you know, we're coming up, this is the time of year where we're coming up to the Super Bowl. So it's the question about terrain theory versus germ theory. And the question is, whoever wins the Super Bowl, did they win the Super Bowl or did the other team lose the Super Bowl? And that's, who knows? So this is where this thing, it's not or, it's and.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And really what determines whether or not you get infected is how good is your immune system and how virulent is the burden of a pathogen that's going in.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yes, it does. If someone came to me with mold, with a mold complaint or thinking they had mold, there are a number of tests that you can do to see whether or not there's antibodies to those things. And you can see whether or not that may or may not be there. It's not definitive. But if somebody actually truly has mold growing in their lungs, we should be able to see that on a CAT scan.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
We should be able to identify it. We should be able to go and biopsy it. We should be able to go and collect it. And if that's exactly what grows out on the culture after we take a biopsy or a culture, then we can tailor antifungals for that particular thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
In the sense, though, that someone may be having symptoms of some sort of infection or something and there's nothing on the CAT scan, it's harder to really isolate exactly which one it would be and what would be the right treatment. Although there are some syndromes known as RADs or reactive airways disease, where you can have an exposure to something that's so egregious
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
that even though you don't get exposed to that thing again, it can still cause persistent difficulty with breathing. It's very similar, by the way, to asthma. So for instance, let's say someone's working in a vat, and there's a chemical that's spilled, and they get an incredible amount of inhalation of that chemical.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
It's well known that these people can go on and have these types of problems, even though their lungs may image correctly, and they may never be exposed to that chemical again.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah, they do. Some of the times, sometimes they don't. We can't help that, but you do the best that we can. No, it does help quite a bit. So people who have a a network, people that have faith, people that have community, have that strength that allows them to get through those very difficult times. There's been a number of studies that have looked at this.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
You'd think that this area is kind of nebulous and hard to study. No, there's actually some pretty good data on this. And I think back to a number of studies that have been done and where they looked at thankfulness and the mind-body connection. People who are more thankful have less somatic complaints, for instance, than those that are not.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So they actually did an experiment where they had people write out letters. They thought about some mentors in their past and they wrote out letters to thank them. And it was interesting because not all of the people that wrote the letters were able to actually deliver those letters to those recipients. But it didn't matter.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
What they found in the study was just simply the thought of writing out those letters actually had a change in the endpoints in those studies. There was another study that was done that was very telling to me. It was a survey that was done of 1,500 people. It was published out of Texas. In this particular case, they wanted to limit the population of the recipients.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So these were just Christians in this case, just because of the heterogeneity. They wanted to see if they can get an endpoint. And what they did was they asked people in this survey, how do you forgive? Forgiveness has to do a little bit about faith and trust as well. And there was basically two major types of forgiveness.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
There was forgiveness that was conditional, and there was forgiveness that was unconditional. And what I mean by that is that people that would forgive conditionally would be if someone did something to somebody, they might forgive them if they came back and apologized or they showed some sort of remorse. Those are the people that forgave conditionally.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
The other people who forgave unconditionally were the ones that would just forgive regardless of what that other person would do. They would just forgive them, and it would be off their mind. They would just go on their way. What they found was really interesting between those two populations.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Now, this was an associative study, but they found that when they looked at anxiety at the end of life, in terms of anxiety in terms of dying, well-being, somatosensory complaints, all sorts of, a whole list of different things, they found that people who forgave conditionally, the ones that would wait for someone to come back to them, had higher marks in those cases.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
In other words, they had more anxiety. They had more somatic complaints. They were less feeling of well-being. And so they found that that was really interesting. Well, they didn't stop there. They wanted to figure out what was going on. And they asked the question, okay, well, what is the biggest determinant that determines whether or not somebody forgives conditionally versus unconditionally?
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And I think the odds ratio on this statement was like a two or three, which is getting up there. It's almost you could say that the likelihood ratios are high enough to say causation, but not quite. But it was high. And it came down to this statement. And the statement was, do you feel like you have been forgiven by God?
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
If they felt like they were forgiven by God, they were much more likely to forgive unconditionally. If they had ever felt that they were forgiven by God. If they feel like they were forgiven by God, yes, for whatever it was that they had done. So this was really interesting to me because oftentimes – I will have patients in my intensive care unit who are very anxious.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
I mean, anybody who gets admitted to the hospital starts to think about the mortality. Just imagine if you get admitted to the intensive care unit. A lot of my patients are not able to communicate. They're mentally out. But there are a few that can. And those, you can tell, become very anxious.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So this is an area that I have to sort of delicately ask about, because you don't know people's faith structure. You don't know who they are. I'm a graduate of Loma Linda University, and our motto—and it's a Christian institution—is to make man whole. And part of that is not just the physical, not just the mental, but also the spiritual aspect of that. So we make no excuses about that.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
But it's important to also understand that not everybody wants to have a spiritual component to their care. So you have to approach it in a way that you're almost, do you give me permission to do this? And you have to watch for things. It's not an easy thing to do, but you want to help if someone wants to be helped. So oftentimes I will talk to them about this very issue and I will say,
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
You know, is there something on your mind that you need to get off your chest? You would be surprised about how many times people have this issue. It's because they've done something to somebody in their past and they don't feel like they're forgiven.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And if you have the opportunity to do that, to actually give them that ability in their belief structure to tell them that they are forgiven, there's a world of difference. And it's quite, actually, it's quite amazing.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Not only some listeners, but some physicians as well.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
No, this is excellent. This is an excellent question. Some of the things you can control, some of the things you can't control. Getting a bed is just completely out of your control. If you're in the emergency room, you can ask when you're going to go upstairs. You're going to get a bed when there's going to be a bed. And sometimes I can't even get patients upstairs.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Is that how it works? Okay. Potentially.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
I think in terms of where you are in the hospital and the care that you're going to get, I believe that the number one thing that you can do to make sure that you're getting the appropriate care is to, in as many ways as possible, communicate to the physician, usually not directly, that you are familiar with the disease that the patient is being admitted for and you're going to ask some tough questions.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yelling at the nurse is not going to help you. Saying insulting things to the nurse or the doctor or the staff is not going to help. It's going to make things worse. I think the number one way – I can tell you that in terms of me as a physician. If I'm speaking to a patient and we have a family member that is asking me intelligent questions about something, that's going to put me up on my game.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Absolutely. Okay. Absolutely. So the mitochondria make melatonin on site. This is not being secreted into the blood. It's being used on site. So this is not being used as a secondary messenger to tell the body anything about circadian rhythm. This is an extremely powerful, as you know, extremely powerful antioxidant. It's actually one of the most powerful antioxidants in the human body.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
That's going to make sure that I know I'm going to be ready for rounds because you're not going to be glossing over things. They're going to be asking some tough questions. I've got to know what I'm doing. And that's kind of what I've been doing for the last 10 years, 12 years in terms of the teaching that I do. We have a website called MedCram.com where we put up –
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
You go to your doctor and you get a CBC back, right? How do you interpret that CBC? Can you explain CBC to people? CBC is a complete blood count, and it's the blood test that you get back when you get your blood test. There's a metabolic panel that you get back. How do you know what's going on with those things? What about an EKG?
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
You have these smartwatches that can actually measure your heart rate. How can you interpret what's going on there? We've put courses together to educate people. We even have courses on diseases. Congestive heart failure, what kind of questions do you need to ask in congestive heart failure? What are the things that you need to watch out for? What are the medicines that could put you on?
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
What are the side effects of those medicines? I think if, and you don't have to be that educated actually, or even know that much, but if you can show that you're asking the right questions to a physician, They're going to ask you, are you in the medical field? You're like, no, I just know about this disease. And I have these questions about when are you going to start to do this?
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
When are you going to start to do this? When is this happening? And when's the next? I think that more than anything puts those people who are taking care of you on alert to know that you're intelligent. You're going to be asking some questions. And they're going to make sure that they focus on answering those questions effectively. I think that's the number one thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
It actually upregulates the glutathione system. by regulation. So what this melatonin does is it's able to mop up these reactive oxygen species. Let's back up a little bit there. Reactive oxygen species, what are they? So let's get nerdy. Let's get into the details. In the mitochondria, the way it works is that you burn fuels. You burn carbohydrates, proteins, and fats.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And as a result of that, you make these very reduced agents, NADH, FADH2. They go to the electron transport chain. And just as the Colorado River, as it goes down through various different dams and then dumps out into the Gulf of California, the same thing happens with these very highly charged and electronegative electrons.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
As they start to fall down and get transferred from one enzyme to another, they cause the outflow. production or the out transfer of protons into the inner membrane space. The problem is, though, is when you finally get done with these electrons, they've been completely spent. There's nothing else to accept them.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And the only thing that can actually do that is something so electronegative that it would actually take these electrons, and that's oxygen. And that's the reason why we breathe oxygen. It's because we need an electron acceptor for these spent electrons. It's very near and dear to my heart as a pulmonologist and critical care specialist. We need to have oxygen.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
If you don't have oxygen, things shut down very quickly.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Thank you so much, Andrew, for having me.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So let's think of this dichotomy. The mitochondria always needs to have antioxidants. Otherwise, it's going to become damaged. Like if these free radicals are produced, the very next molecule that they bump into, it's going to change it. And if that's the mitochondria, the mitochondria is going to be damaged. So it needs a cooling system.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Just like your car has a cooling system for heat, the mitochondria needs a cooling system for oxidative stress. What's the cooling system during the day? Sunlight comes in, activates these, it upregulates melatonin, which does that. Well, when there is no sunlight, what is the cooling system then? It's the system that we've always known about.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And the reason why we've always known about it is because we can draw blood samples. It's much easier to detect melatonin in the blood because we've developed techniques first to detect things in the blood. But what we're talking about now is how do we detect things, not only intracellular, but intraorganelle. That's much more sophisticated, yet now we do have the technology to show.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And the amount of melatonin we're talking about is 20 times higher than we're picking up in the blood. So at night, the system is melatonin is secreted from the pineal gland. It goes into the blood, diffuses into the cell, diffuses into the mitochondria, and does the job.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Correct. Cloud cover because it's water vapor, and water vapor does absorb infrared. It will be substantially less, but much more than being inside.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
It does. And so the increase in melatonin from infrared radiation going into the mitochondria is one aspect. There's a whole host of other aspects that occur. There is cytochrome 4 oxidase. Again, one of those enzymes in the electron transport chain can absorb infrared light. There's nitric oxide.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
What the whole effect of this is, and the bottom line is, is that when you have red light to near infrared light getting in that deep, there is a increase in the efficiency of the mitochondria.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So this is the key point because if, in fact, with the theory of mitochondrial aging, that we're having a decrease in the efficiency of the mitochondria as we get older, if there is something that we can do to reverse that or to at least prevent that from happening, that can have a tremendous impact in our health overall. So two points. One point about... infrared light and its characteristic.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And then number two, let's actually get to some data because we're saying a bunch of things, but what we really need is evidence-based stuff. Okay, so the first thing, there's one other thing that I should mention about the effect of infrared light, especially in nature. And that is that not only can it penetrate through clothes.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
You may remember the Sony Cam night vision thing back in the 90s where Sony came up with a night vision camera that you could take pictures at night. And some enterprising youth, probably a man, figured out that you could use it during the day and you could see through clothes. And presumably they took that off the market. They took it off the market pretty quick, yes.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
But there's one other thing that's really important to understand too, and that is that, believe it or not, but the leaves on trees and grass, anything with chlorophyll, is highly reflective of infrared light.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
What that means is that if you go out outside on a sunny day versus going outside on a sunny day surrounded by green spaces, you're going to get probably two, three, four times more infrared light in that environment. than you would without that environment. You can check this out.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
You go to Google and just type in infrared photography and click images, and you will see any kind of infrared filtered light. When it shows a tree or grass, it looks like it's lit up, like it's got snow on it. It's bright white. It's very reflective. On a hot summer day, if you go outside and touch some object that's in the sun, it's gonna be extremely hot. Touch a leaf. It's not hot at all.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
It's because it's reflecting that light. In fact, the coolest place in a garden on a hot summer day is where? It's under a tree because all of that infrared light is being reflected off. And just to jump ahead here, but we know from years and decades of data that people who live in green spaces have reduced diabetes, reduced hypertension, reduced mortality. just living in green spaces.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So getting onto that, there was a study that was just done in Louisville, Kentucky. Four square miles. they measured everybody in that four square miles HSCRP. What's HSCRP? It's basically, it's a surrogate marker for inflammation in the body. And then they did this. They did something incredible.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
They brought in 8,000 plus trees, mature trees, and they planted those trees in that four square mile area. Took them about a year. Two to three years later, they went out Nothing – the income of these people living in this four-square-mile area did not change. Presumably, they did not do any exercise programs in this area. Everything was the same. The only thing they did was plant trees.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And they went out and they rechecked everybody's highly sensitive CRP levels. They dropped by 13 percent. Wow. And that's about on the order – almost on the order of doing exercise three times a week.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah. So let's actually look at some data. So we've talked about, you know, any astute person listening to this is like, okay, so you talked about a lot of observational stuff. Is there any interventional stuff? So I turned to Glenn Jeffrey, who's in the Department of Ophthalmology. You know him well, actually, at UCF. University College London.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And he's done some really interesting experiments in the last two to three years looking at red light. One of them was, the first one he did was he took older subjects who had difficulty with color sensitivity in their vision, and he exposed them to 670 nanometer, which is red, it's visible, light for just three minutes and in the morning.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
It only worked in the morning in this case, which is interesting. And he showed that there was a 17% increase in color sensitivity that lasted for days. Now, why would that be? Again, you should know that the retina is the one tissue in the human body that has the highest concentration of mitochondria.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And if you understand what's going on in light, and I know you do, but our audience might not, is when you have visible light coming in to the retina, it is causing a photochemical reaction that requires a tremendous amount of energy. Vesicles budding off, things diffusing, electrical conductions. And it has to happen very, very quickly. Otherwise, what you see is going to be there as a blur.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So this is constantly being updated. So it's no surprise that mitochondria is so concentrated there. So what's actually going on there? What we believe is going on is that this red light is actually stimulating these mitochondria to produce more ATP, and it's improving the sensitivity. But the cours de gras or the piece de la resistance was his next study, which he did, where he took 30 subjects.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
He gave them 75 grams of glucose. And in a blinded way, so they couldn't tell if the light was on or off, he exposed their backs to the same 670 nanometer light. And he monitored their glucose over time, over the next two hours, basically, multiple points. And what did he find? He found that those that were exposed to red light and didn't know it had lower glucose concentrations.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So he surmised that the mitochondria were working more efficiently. They were using up more energy. And this is the reason why the glucose didn't peak as high. But he couldn't be sure unless he also monitored for the output of metabolism. So what happens when the mitochondria is working? It's making carbon dioxide. So he also measured carbon dioxide.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And sure enough, those subjects that had the intervention of the red light had statistically significantly higher carbon dioxide levels on exhalation.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So here we have basically, this is a randomized controlled intervention trial, which showed that red light's doing this. And there's a whole host of other trials that show the same thing. So when I started to see this in my patients, and what caused me to even do this, you might ask, what's a pulmonary critical care doc talking about mitochondria in the eye?
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
What really spurred me on to look at this was when I was in the middle of something called the COVID pandemic, and I was seeing patients in my ICU that were dying. And what were they dying of? COVID. But what were they in there for? They had things like diabetes, hypertension, dementia. all of these things which have at the root of them mitochondrial dysfunction.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So what we have is an epidemic, I believe, of mitochondrial dysfunction. And how are we going to repair that? I think sunlight is one of the ways to do it. So I started looking around at the evidence. There was a study that was done, Oxford and the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, where they looked at about 10,000 subjects.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
They just drew their blood and they said, let's just check triglycerides and insulin sensitivity. And then what they did was they looked over the previous 10 days at the weather report. And they were able to show that by the hour, the more sunlight that there was in the previous seven days, that actually predicted an improvement in insulin sensitivity and a reduction in triglycerides.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
That fast over a seven-day period of time. There was another study that was done. This was in Sweden. So this was an epidemiological study, but maybe actually showed some causation. They looked at Swedish women. It was about 30,000 Swedish women living in Sweden at the time, of course. And they divided them into three groups, those that avoided the sun, those that got moderate sun exposure.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
and those that got a lot of sun exposure. And what they showed after following them for 20 years, so a long period of time, was that those women that were out in the sun not only had lower all-cause mortality, but they also had lower cardiovascular mortality. And what's really interesting is they had lower cancer mortality.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yes. Well, the question is, how do you avoid getting sick in terms of infectious diseases? And as it turns out, the answer to that is actually the same in terms of avoiding getting sick for anything. And it sort of goes to the pillars, as you call it.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And it was in a dose-response curve, which suggests, Bradford Hill criteria, that there was maybe some causation here. What was really interesting about that study is that they looked at smoking. So what was the difference here? It wasn't a small difference.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
It was actually such a large difference that the sunlight made that they were able to show that those women in Sweden who were in this study who went out into the sun avidly and smoked had the same mortality as those women who avoided the sun and didn't smoke. The first thing that hit my mind was, is what do we do to people here in this country that want to smoke? We tell them to go outside.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
I mean, certainly, smoking would be under the T for temperance. That would be where I would put a new start. We would not want to do that. But that same study was repeated basically, again, University of Edinburgh. They did a biobank study, 10 times the amount of people, 400,000. repeated the study, showed exactly the same, both men and women, except this time they actually measured UVA.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So they used ultraviolet A radiation as a surrogate for infrared and for sunlight in general. They found exactly the same thing, reduction in mortality. Such so is the evidence that even dermatologists are starting to rethink. There was an article that was published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology by Richard Weller And the name of that article was published last year.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
It was titled, Sunlight, Time for a Rethink. And he said, look, there are societies that are seeing this and they're already saying that there's a potential benefit for getting out into the sun.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
In my mind, there's actually a physician that I know very well just outside of Stanford, actually, in a place called Weimar, Weimar University, Dr. Neil Nedley. And he's actually coined this mnemonic, called New Start. And each of those letters to me in my mind is something that I go to when I want to improve health in people in general. So the N starts for nutrition.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah, and I even take it a step further because we know that a single layer of clothing can actually – is pretty good at blocking ultraviolet lights, right? But remember what we talked about infrared. Infrared can penetrate through. So if someone is fair skin and they're concerned about getting skin damage, wear a broad-rimmed hat.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Put a long-sleeved shirt on but get outside because that's where the infrared – especially if you're around green – green shrubs and leaves and things because those will get a lot of infrared light. We know that green spaces are beneficial in terms of that. And we've talked about, you know, Louisville, Kentucky, that there's a benefit there just by putting the tree there. I love those data.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And we can talk about nutrition and what that does to the human body. Obviously, you know, as natural as possible, staying away from processed foods. That's something there. Exercise is E. And when I'm talking about exercise, I'm talking about the understanding that we have regarding exercise not to build muscle necessarily to be stronger. I'm talking about exercise in terms of health.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
In terms of your original question, which is getting back to influenza or flus or things. So there's a great study that I always love to talk about in terms of this. And it was actually done by Harvard. It was a Harvard Kennedy School, which is not the medical school. This is the public policy politics school. And what they did was they looked at this very question.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
of influenza and why do we always get it in the wintertime and what's potentially beneficial for it. And the problem is, is that we always have this influenza season, which is in the wintertime. We can talk about why that might be. I would suggest to you that it's because that's when we have the shortest day of the year. But we also have other things that happen at that time, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
What else is happening? We're having parties at that time. There's Thanksgiving, there's New Year's, it's cold. Does the temperature have anything to do with it? We're also inside because it's cold. So what is it that's actually doing it? Well, 2009 was a banner year because 2009 was the year that we had the H1N1 pandemic. And that was a boon for us.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
The reason is because, not because of the deaths that we had, but from a scientific standpoint, this epidemic actually peaked in the summertime. and it was in areas where the humidity was sometimes high, and sometimes it was low, and sometimes the temperature was high, sometimes the temperature was low, sometimes the sun was out, sometimes it was cloudy. In other words, we uncoupled
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
the influenza virus in 2009 from it being in the wintertime and all of those things that were associated. So now we have all of these data points. And so Harvard went to work at looking at all these data points. They looked at solar radiation data at that time, and they were actually able to look specifically where that person came from and what was the solar radiation in that particular area.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And what they came up with was, absolutely. They said, quote, sunlight strongly protects against getting influenza. It was an amazing study. I'm reminded of a study that was published in COVID. This was published in 2021. And it was looking at this very question. Is it temperature? Is it humidity? Or is it sunlight?
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So what they did was they looked at the autumn surge of COVID in the wintertime in Europe, in autumn, actually. And they asked this question. When there was the surge date in this country, whatever country it was in Europe, when did it happen? And what were the things that caused it to happen? So they put all the data out there for temperature, and it was a flat line.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Temperature did not predict which country, how the country got COVID-19 when the surge started to happen. They did the same thing for humidity, flat line. When they got to latitude, it was a perfect correlation. In other words, as the sun in the wintertime started to peel back off of the northern hemisphere. It started to sink below the equator.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And when there was a critical period of time that the day shortened to the point where at first Finland got the shortest day or a short enough day, and then and then Germany, and then further on. What it showed was latitude actually perfectly predicted when the surge dates would happen, starting off with Finland and ending up with Greece at the bottom.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
You do see certainly influenza at the equator, but what's really interesting about that is that if you look at, for instance, the influenza mortality in the United States, obviously in the Northern Hemisphere, what you will see is you will see it peak generally one to three weeks after the shortest day of the year, which is around now in December and January. Now, if you look at Australia,
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And that has more of a J-hook type of picture. What I mean by J-hook is If you're not doing any exercise, you're going to have higher levels of inflammation. As soon as you start to do some exercise, even mild to moderate exercise, the amount of inflammation in your body starts to come down. But as you start to do more and more exercise, you do have to be careful in terms of your general health.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
what do you think you'd see? The inverse. Exactly. It's actually, in Australia, the influenza season peaks late June, early July. So if you now go look at something like Singapore. Singapore is, I think, within 100 miles of the equator. You will see that in Singapore, there is influenza peaks and troughs, but it's not seasonal. It's just almost random.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
I'm smiling because you're absolutely correct. You're absolutely correct. And as I started to go through this and look at this, I started saying to myself, we need to get people out in the sun. And then I realized, not only am I not the only one saying this, but certainly this was being done 100 years ago, 150 years ago.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
I think it has to do with scientific reductionism. And what I mean to say by that is we've had a lot of data that shows that ultraviolet light can cause cancer. And so we've assumed that anything that has ultraviolet light can cause cancer. There's this complete dismissal of the fact that this ultraviolet light is packaged for the entire existence of human nature along with infrared light.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And it's a beautiful thing when you start to look at this because you start to realize that the infrared, we never get blue light or ultraviolet light ever without the presence of infrared light.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Excellent question. And you've hit on exactly the issue. Based on Glenn Jeffrey's studies, based on another study that was actually done in Brazil, it was actually an interventional study in COVID that showed that just 15 minutes a day for seven days was enough to actually get people with COVID out of the hospital faster.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
This was a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blinded, amazing study, 940 nanometers. So when I talked to Glen Jeffery about this, he says, He sees it in humans. He sees it in bees. He sees it in insects. It's all the same. The mitochondria behave exactly the same.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
This is exactly what happens with athletes. They have to be very careful that when they're doing that type of elite athletic exercise that they're not sick on the day of performance. And so that's an issue. So I'm referring to just mild to moderate exercise is good. The next one would be W, water. So this is something that's really interesting.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah, that was 940. It was actually very low. It was about 2.9 milliwatts per square centimeter. So lower energy.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Exactly. And this is what I'm trying to say. It's like, this is not like some powerful laser that they were using. This is 2.9 milliwatts. I mean, sunlight, all sunlight is about... 100 milliwatts per centimeter squared. By time it reaches? Through the atmosphere. Through the atmosphere. Yeah, so 130 when it hits the atmosphere. By the time it hits you, it's about 100.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
If you're looking at just infrared light, we're talking about 20 milliwatts per square centimeter. And so this was 2.9 at a very specific wavelength. So something that's completely doable, okay? And so what they did, it was 15 minutes a day. For seven days.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And what Glenn Jeffrey was telling me is that, Roger, he says, Roger, it doesn't matter if it's in insects, if it's in bees, if it's in humans. Once you hit a certain point, 15, 20 minutes, diminishing marginal utility. The improvement after that point is so minimal. that you only need about 15 to 20 minutes.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
That's why he was able to do his experiment in the eye for three minutes was all that was necessary.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
I don't think it matters. I don't really think it matters. I think what would matter is if there's a lot of ultraviolet light, which would be when the sun is high. And for people who are skin sensitive, that could be an issue. But if you're covering up, it doesn't matter. And here's the issue. The issue is that when you need it the most in the wintertime is when it's the hardest to get.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So you really have to make a concerted effort. And for a lot of people—and this is what happens probably right after November— And probably going through to mid-January is this is what happens. People get up in the morning. They go to their car. They get into their car. They drive to work. The sun's not up yet. They get to their work. The sun comes up, but they're inside.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Then what happens is they get done with work. The sun is already down. They come home from work. And so there literally is weeks on end that occur where they're not even getting 15 minutes of sunlight. And I think this is the reason why. We have the influenza surge at this time. If you look to see, the EPA did a study and they looked at Americans. 93% of our time is spent inside.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
86% inside a building, 6% to 7% inside of a vehicle.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Obviously, it seems pretty obvious, but not only the use of internal water, but external water. So in that area, we can talk about sauna, cold plunge, things of that nature that can actually help with our immune system. That's a whole interesting area of discussion. It involves the innate immune system. It involves interferon.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Absolutely. So my recommendation, which is what the original question was, is take your lunch break outside. It's something as simple as getting outside, even if it's at lunchtime. Yes, the ultraviolet is probably the highest at that point. But if that's the only time that you're going to get sunlight, Take it. Now, for some—you know, we can say this. I can say this. I live in Southern California.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
I'm blessed by 300 and some odd days of sunlight every year. What do you do when you're in Boston? What do you do if you're in New York? What do you do if you're in England, in Sweden, in these places where there isn't a lot of light? Well, there's a study that was done looking at infrared lamps, right? So you've got to be careful there because—
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
If the infrared lamps are too high in amplitude, this result from infrared light in the body is something known as a biphasic response. And that's really important to understand. Don't come into this if you're going to get a red light therapy and think that more is better. because more may not be better. You actually could do detriment if you have the red light at too high of a level.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So I would match it to what we're getting from the sun. As you said, the sunlight is your best infrared or red lamp. So there was a study that was done looking at well-being And they did a red lamp, red light lamp, infrared light. So it was coupled with 850, I think, was the nanometer. So that is definitely in the infrared spectrum. Yeah, you can't see that. Cannot see it.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And they had it set up at a desk that some guy was sitting in front of for four hours a day for eight weeks. And they did this study, and they did it in the summertime, and they did it in the wintertime. And this is really telling. There was no effect on the subject when they looked at those that had it in the summertime.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
I would say probably because they were getting plenty of infrared light elsewhere. They only showed a statistically significant effect in the wintertime. And so if you look at influenza, I would even go beyond that. Look at a chart of the United States throughout the entire year. and look at all of the natural causes of death, not just influenza and pneumonia. Look at cardiac disease.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Look at kidney disease, Alzheimer's disease. All of those deaths go up all at the same time, and they all go up about one to three weeks after the shortest day of the year. And they all come down, and they all are at the nadir about one to three weeks after the longest day of the year.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
When you see that and you just start to just digest what you're seeing there and then you start to understand that infrared light from the sun, which we have filtered out with LEDs and all this, we can get to that. All of that's gone, that we're spending 93% of our time indoors.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
There's a lot of history and data that goes back over 100 years on how that's been used. Start. S-T-A-R-T. So S is sunlight. I've been a real proponent of getting people outside into the sun, and we can talk a lot about that. There's a lot of interesting research, not only in terms of sunlight, in terms of influenza, but also COVID, and just about any natural disease.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Put that all together and the fact that infrared light helps the mitochondria and the fact that the mitochondria is at the sort of the core of all of these chronic diseases that we're battling.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
it really wakes you up and you start to realize that maybe the lowest hanging fruit that we can do right now today for literally no money is simply to just work on getting more sun exposure in the wintertime.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess another way of asking the question is at what level would I be really surprised? If it was 50%, I would be surprised. Same. Yeah. If it was 20% to 30%, I think that would probably be where it is, but that's significant. That's still significant.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah. There was a study that was done looking at just this, except they actually used watches that was able to detect how much light. It wasn't infrared light, but just total light. And the name of the study was basically, you know, dark days and bright nights. And that is associated with higher mortality. We know, of course, about bright nights not being good.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
A lot of interesting information there. T. T stands for the old term called temperance, which you may recall is a term that we use to prevent us from taking in toxins into our body. That's a whole other discussion. So staying away from things that would make you sick. A is air.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So not having a dark room to sleep in. These are things that can impair melatonin. That's associated with all sorts of bad things. But the dark days was something that we really had not seen. And it was very interesting. They actually could show by the hour. that if you were having light coming in, exactly what that did to your mortality.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And mortality went up dramatically as you were still in daylight about midnight, right around 7 o'clock in the morning, 8 o'clock in the morning. If you were out there and you're getting light now, instead of light being a liability, it was now a benefit, and it dropped dramatically.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah, and if there is, we have to work on that. To your point about it being primitive, I was looking at the history of this, and it was actually very interesting to me. We used to have tuberculosis sanitariums at very high altitude, and part of that treatment was getting out into the sun at very high altitude.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
you have less atmosphere, more ultraviolet light coming in, more light in general coming in. And when I started to look at this, I found it was very interesting what people started to say and what these people were actually saying at the time about sunlight.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
You know, in terms of these people, these physicians and these healthcare providers back in the 1800s, they didn't have all of the scientific accoutrements that we have today. They didn't have x-rays and things of that nature. But one thing that they were very, very good at, probably better than we are good at, is their power of observation.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And when I talk about air, it's not just what we focus on, which is keeping bad things out of the air, so having fresh air. But there's a whole discussion to be had in terms of air that has good qualities in it. So there's a whole area of research that looks at, for instance, phytoncides, which are chemicals that come off of trees. You may have heard of forest bathing.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
They were able to get a stethoscope, put it on the chest, listen to the space between the second heart sound and the opening snap, and be able to say, this person's got severe mitral stenosis. This is the one you need to operate on. And they would do that.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And sure enough, when they opened it up, sure enough, this is the one that had... So the power of observation was probably better back in the 1800s. So what do you have? You have people like Florence Nightingale, who is the founder of modern nursing. And she was there during the Crimean War taking care of British soldiers. And she wrote down – I'm paraphrasing basically what she said.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
She said, look – when it comes to treating the whole patient, the one thing that more than anything else is beneficial for these soldiers to recover is fresh air. But, she said, a very close second is direct sunlight, getting them out into sunshine, getting them out into direct sunlight. When I was looking at the Smithsonian Institute a couple years ago, a few years ago, put out their top 100
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Most influential Americans of all time. One of them was this lady. She's the most translated female author in the world. Her name is Ellen G. White, and she had a third grade education, but she was also very interested in health reform. And she wrote at that time in the 1800s. that we ought to be getting out into the sunlight, that that makes a big difference.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Interestingly, something else that she said that I found really amazing, and they're writing this before we understand circadian rhythm, before we understand melatonin. She wrote down, she's like, hey, this idea of keeping the lights on after 9 o'clock, it's a wretched health-destroying habit. Every light should be extinguished, she said, after 9 o'clock.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So I know about her sayings a little bit because she was the founder of Loma Linda University, which is where I went to school. But just we had this knowledge. As you said, we had hospitals that were designed specifically to get people out of the hospital and into the sunlight. You could see the architecture was designed for this. Why don't we do this today?
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
I think we ought to, but I kind of have a sense. You asked the question, why don't we do this today? I have patients that I take care of now that I understand this. I have patients that I have in the intensive care unit that I want to get outside in the sunlight. I actually try to get them out. It's difficult to do. These people are critical.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
The people that we admit to the hospitals today are far sicker than the people that we admitted to sanitariums and hospitals in the 1800s. You have to make sure that they don't desaturate. You got to take the oxygen tank out there with them. You've got to make sure that they don't have a code. I mean, you're outside, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So you're outside of the bowels of the hospital where your support system is. It's a little bit of a risk to get those patients out there. Nevertheless, I've convinced some of my hospital staff to do that. And I've had a number of success stories where we've had patients that were ready to be intubated.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
They've done a lot of research in Japan on this. And getting out into nature, there are actual chemicals that are in the air that you can breathe that actually have an impact on your innate immune system. Finally, R, and we'll get into R and T at the end. R is rest.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And we got them outside in the sunlight, and they steadily improved dramatically after days of getting worse. And they got better. There was a lady that actually contacted me. Her name is Amy Honmeyer, H-O-N-M-Y-H-R, if you want to look her up. She's on social media. Her son, this is a really amazing story. Her son basically at the age of 15 got leukemia. got put on chemotherapy.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And this was in Minnesota. Fortunately, it was in the summertime. And he got admitted to the hospital with what they call neutropenic fever. Very high fevers, very low white counts as a result of the chemotherapy. And his immune system was completely shot. And unfortunately, he developed a very severe fungal infection in his lung called mucor.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
It just basically eats up the lung, goes right to the blood vessels. He got so bad that there was only one solution that they had at the time, and that was to take out the left lung. So they took out the left lung, and he continued to get worse. The right lung became infected. He started to get worse, had higher fevers. They had a meeting with the family, 15 years old, completely with it.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
realizing that he's dying and they have to tell him that he's dying so they made him what they call no code or dnr and uh the staff came to him and you can imagine and i've been in this position before where you're trying to do everything you possibly can and you just you can't do anything else so they came to him the 15 year old and they said you know this is it do you have any basically last wishes and you know amy his mom told me that he'd like to play outside so he told them
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Without any knowledge about what we've just been talking about. This is his dying wish. Take me outside. I just want to go outside. And you know that nursing staff will move heaven and earth to do something that the patient requests to do. even though it's not going to benefit them. This is dying wish. They're going to do it. So they hooked up oxygen tanks.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
They got this 15-year-old boy in a hospital bed outside on BiPAP with oxygen tanks for five hours a day. His mom was telling me they were also using something called a Firefly device where they were just basically shining lights onto him to see if it would work. You know how this story ends. He did not die in two days like they told him. He got better. His fever went away.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Now, this goes without saying, but people who have good sleep habits are going to have much better immune systems, whether you're talking about the antibody response after a vaccine versus just the number of times per year you're sick. There's very good data, very good research that shows that getting seven, eight hours of sleep a night is going to be very beneficial for your immune system.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
His oxygen requirements came down. And I'm not telling you this as a proof that this is what happens, but you have to realize that he was in the hospital for six weeks. underneath, you know, LED lighting. And as soon as he got outside, fever went away. And make a long story short, after five days, he came back inside. They repeated the CT scan. And she sent me the CT scans. I've seen them.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
We actually did a little thing on our MedCram channel on it. And the disease was almost gone. There's no explanation. To this day, they don't have an explanation. He's still alive today? He's still alive. He's getting chemotherapy. Mm-hmm. He went from basically, of course, he's missing a lung, but he still has that lung. He's getting the antifungal medication.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
There's no sign of the fungus anywhere. So this is an anecdotal story. It doesn't prove anything. And I don't present it as proof. The things that I present as proof is randomized controlled trials, epidemiological trials with dose response curves. These are things that we could actually show the science with.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
The reason why I bring it up is because it shows what is it that we would need to do to get this type of treatment. It's not easy to do, but if there is a will, there's a way to do it.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
It has to do with cortisol and beta receptors and all sorts of things. And the last T, which is trust. And for some, it is trust in a higher power, trust in God. These are the sorts of things that can help us relieve stress. If someone else is helping you, if someone else is there, T would also include community, people that are around you. These are some of the less tangible ways of measuring it.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And like, forgive me, but like, what the hell is going on? Exactly. So I can tell you that not only do you have less likely to get this type of ICU psychosis, but the data actually shows that people who are in a two-bed room that are next to the window actually discharge from the hospital faster. And you say, ah, well, maybe that's the reason.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Well, it's interesting because the financial incentives with hospitals is not monolithic. Some hospitals and their relationship to the insurance companies are in a situation where when a patient comes into the hospital and the physician diagnoses them, the insurance will pay the hospital a certain amount of money for that diagnosis and that's that.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
But when someone asks me a question, what can I do to avoid getting sick. And as you just asked me in terms of influenza, there's a lot of specific things we can talk about, but that's where I start out with the pillars of health.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And also there's something called subcapitative arrangements where the hospital has a contract with an insurance company to take care of 30,000 people per member per month. And if that patient gets admitted to the hospital, that hospital has to take care of that patient, whatever the costs are. So it basically takes the risk now and puts it from the insurance company onto the health care provider.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So in those situations, you'll see a hospital having an army of case managers. They come down every day. What are we doing for this patient? What do we need to do to get this patient out of the hospital? So they're motivated to get people out.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And so when I say that, I'm even more bewildered than when you said at the beginning, well, if we have good data that shows that light therapy and light getting people out into the sun actually can improve the discharge. We had that, as I said, that study from Brazil.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
where there was a randomized controlled trial and they used 15 minutes of... They actually made this jacket that they put on the patients and they flipped it on with some patients and they didn't flip it on with others. The jacket was a light jacket? It was an LED jacket that was giving light out at 940 nanometers, infrared light. So you can't even tell if it's on.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And as I said, the milliwatts per square centimeter was like 2.9. So you wouldn't even feel it. But yet... These patients, when they were done, seven days, 15 minutes a day, they had better oxygen saturation. They could take deeper breaths, longer breaths. Their heart rates, their respiratory rates improved. Even their lymphocytes.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
improved, the ones that are very important for fighting off COVID-19. And so at the very end of all of this, the average length of stay in the control group was 12 days, about 12 days. In the intervention group, it was eight days. how much does it cost to spend four days in a hospital? It can be outrageously expensive. It's outrageous. And it's potentially possible.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And this is why I think really people need to understand it's not just people who are wanting for their own care, but people who are in charge of hospitals, people who are in charge of healthcare in this country, is understanding that I believe
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
why I'm happy to talk about this, is I think that the lowest hanging fruit potentially, after you look at that graph of deaths throughout the year, is encouraging sunlight in people, especially in those that are hospitalized and sick. Absolutely.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
I don't know why, but I think if somebody were to pick up the baton and decide to do a very simple study where you'd have to hire some nurses that would actually, I've actually thought about doing this study myself, is having a unit outside in the sun where people go for literally 20 to 30 minutes and they come back.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
You have a whole bunch of nurses there with monitoring so that you can make sure the patients are stable. And then you send them right back up. We send people down at the CAT scanner all the time. It takes 15 to 20 minutes. This is not something that we don't do. The difference is you're just sending them outside. Hopefully it's warm. It's not too cold. There's nothing bad that happens.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And you send them right back up. That would be a very easy study to do. You could randomize them and then see what happens to their length of stay. In my experience, and it's only anecdotal, I have not done the study, it's a world of difference.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah, that is the same question and the same problem that I have with people that do night shift because they go home and they're supposed to sleep and it's bright, it's this daylight outside. So what do you do? You know, that's where you get the aluminum foil around the windows. That's where you, you know, you basically have to block out all of that light.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And then the eye patch, of course, is a nice thing to do as well. Realizing though that even when you close your eyes, if there's a light source in the room, people think, well, I'll just close my eyes. Those photons can go through the eyes, just like we talked about with infrared light, can go through the skin.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And I don't know if this is true or not, but I've heard even one or two photons of light hitting the back of the retina can— cause enough signal to go to the suprachiasmatic nucleus that shut down melatonin production, or at least impair it in some way.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Well, I remember a podcast that you had probably a couple of years ago where you had someone, I forgot his name, but he said his house was very dark at night and people would be afraid to go over because he'd be tripping all over.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And Glenn Jeffrey's work has made me think in my mind, because of the presence of light in that study and the fact that the glucose was less, it makes me wonder whether or not we really shouldn't be eating only when the sun is up.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And I would say the other thing is too is making sure that these rules that we're coming up with here based on physiology aren't laws so that we get so anxious about following them that they actually become a detriment. There's a point where we just have to do well enough and then move on to the next day and try to do it the next day.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah, it's a good question. I think it's – and the approach that I take is the approach that I take with any intervention in medicine. Every intervention in medicine has a benefit and every intervention has a risk no matter what it is. So for me, because I work in an intensive care unit around sick patients all the time, I'm exposed to a lot of flu.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
I mean you literally walk in and the next day they say, oh, by the way, that guy, he had the flu. So you find out after the fact. So for me, I've always, since I've been a physician, I've always gotten the flu shot every single year. Do you get it multiple times per season? No, just once.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah. Interesting. The way that they try to figure out or guess the way it is, because that's what it is, it's a guess, is they look six months earlier to see what happened in the southern hemisphere. Mm-hmm. And they see what was circulating there, and then they believe that's what's going to be circulating in the northern hemisphere. And they do the same in the south.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
They look and see what's circulating up here, and they try to figure out what is going to be there. So there's usually about three or four different ones that they try to put in there. Ever since 2009, they've tried to put one in there about 2009 because that was a really bad year. We mentioned that in terms of that study on sunlight.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
But in terms of the side effects as a result of that, it's been pretty bad. I mean, to give you an example, I had a patient recently in the intensive care unit. This patient came in, very poorly controlled diabetes, hemoglobin A1C of like 16, 17. It was a very bad patient. And she developed, she got the flu and her immune system was not well.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
She actually also got a very bad fungal infection that was near fatal. And so that's the typical patient that we're gonna see who's gonna have that type of a bad reaction to the flu. People who are immunocompromised, people who are not metabolically healthy, these are the ones that are wide open. And so a flu virus is going to do a lot of damage there. So what does the flu vaccine do?
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
It gives the immune system an advanced notice of what this antigen is, and that has two effects. What a lot of people believe is that it's going to protect you from ever getting infected. That's not the case. You can still get infected, but what happens is that the symptomatology or the side effects of that infection will be greatly diminished.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So instead of you being hospitalized, perhaps, maybe you're only coming down with the flu and you stay at home. A lot of people would say, I got the flu shot and it didn't help. I got the flu anyway. What we don't know is how severe that infection would have been in the first place. So that's why for people who are immunocompromised, I generally recommend it to get the flu shot.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah, we give them the flu shot as well. It's more because they're the kids of doctors who might bring home the flu and more than anything else. But there was a point where we were not doing it. When they're in their teenage years, that's when we start actually giving them the flu shot. That was just a personal opinion, even though I know it's approved up down to six months of age, I believe.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah, yeah. I remember one year, our son, Ryan, he got some virus. I don't know what it was, but he had very bad diarrhea. And we had to take him to the emergency room to actually get an IV and get fluids into him. He was very dehydrated. I don't know what that was. I don't know if it was rotavirus, but something was going around that year. And he's perfectly healthy.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So this is something that can happen. And you just have to look at the risks and benefits. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
I think irresponsible is probably too strong of a word. The way I look at things is through what I call the Swiss cheese model. I don't know if you ever heard of the Swiss cheese model. I love Swiss cheese. Okay. So the Swiss cheese model says this. If I cut up a bunch of pieces of Swiss cheese, you'll know that every piece has a hole in it, right? Or maybe a couple of holes.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And if you line up those pieces of Swiss cheese, those holes might be in different places. So if you are—let's say you're on one end of those multiple slices of Swiss cheese and little particles are coming through. If you have enough pieces of those Swiss cheese, no particles are going to get through. And that's really what we look at in medicine.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
We don't just depend on one slice of Swiss cheese, like in the operating room, for instance. Right. We don't want to have infections. So what do we do? We sterilize the instruments. But we don't just leave it there, right? We sterilize the skin that we're going to incise. We make sure that the room is the right temperature, the right humidity, because that has an effect.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
We make sure it's under positive pressure. The surgeon is wearing a mask. He's also wearing sterile gloves. So we go through, we try to do everything that we can possibly do so that if there is a breakdown in one place, we still have a bunch of other Swiss cheese slices in place. It's the same thing with the flu. and New Start. So nutrition, exercise, water, all of those things.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And then at the end, when you've done that for yourself, if you want to have extra protection, you want to add on another piece of Swiss cheese, then you, well, you can talk to your doctor, see what the risks and the benefits are, and then make that decision if that's something that's right for you.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah, well, definitely there are risks in terms of allergies. So they should be asking you when you get it, have you ever been allergic to the flu shot before? I mean, you can have anaphylactic shock. That's one possibility. Of course, you can have that with anything, right? But specifically to the flu,
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
There was actually, interestingly, one year, and I can't remember which year it was, but there was a, I think it was in Europe, and we actually never got it in the United States, but there was a rash of narcolepsy. that was occurring.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So something about the flu vaccine was causing a reaction that was causing an autoimmune response and the antibodies they believe were acting against where hypocretin is made in the brain, hypothalamus. And so they noticed that there was an association. I don't know if they actually determined that it was causal, but they stopped that brand.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah, there was one particular strain. We'd never seen it before, never seen it since. And so, yeah, there are these one-offs, right? But, you know, everything has risks. Sure. And so the example that I give is, look, I'm in the ICU all day, and I'm seeing people with, you know, occasionally with head bleeds, right? And they're on a blood thinner.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
But I don't go back to my clinic in the pulmonary office and then take everybody off of blood thinners because we know that blood thinners epidemiologically in the long run actually save lives because they prevent strokes, heart attacks, things of that nature. So what we try to do is figure out what's the right individual for this medication or what's the right medicine for this type of situation.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And that requires training and that requires, sometimes you have calculators that can figure out these risks.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah. So the regular surgical masks are very good at preventing things from coming out of your mouth and going to other people. or coming onto your mouth if you happen to have one on. So in our clinic where we work, we actually look at the flu incidents, and then we see if it's rising, everybody that comes into that place, physicians, patients, everybody puts a mask on to reduce that.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
N95s are a little different in that they don't... prevent viruses from coming out of somebody. You may notice when you put an N95 mask on, they may even have a valve that pops open and gas can come out, respiratory air can come out or comes out the sides. It's when you take a breath in and it seals
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
now it's filtering that air so n95s are very good for people who don't want to get infection and don't have respiratory issues because you're now having to to breathe air in through a filter that takes a little bit more work if someone has copd or you know or which is an obstructive lung disease or other lung diseases that might not be the best thing to have in those situations so
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah, I do wear a mask. I was very careful. I know I was coming on your show this winter time, and I was like, there's no way I want to get the flu and miss getting on to see you. So, yeah, I wore a mask.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
You know, it's a good question. I think it probably comes down to some of the studies are probably not good data or heterogeneous enough to do a meta-analysis. But what's really interesting is how many times a day, if you were to watch yourself, that you touch your nose, you touch your face. And these are the portals for viruses to come into your body. Eyes, nose, mouth. That's where they come.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And we touch them all the time. You touch handles. I mean, if you think about it, it's almost... I don't know, creepy. And flu. It is creepy.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
I have to look up the numbers, but it's longer than you might think. I know that when we looked at COVID, I know we went crazy at the beginning of the COVID pandemic about wiping things down. And really, that's not the way it seems to spread for COVID and more airborne things. But for influenza droplets, that is rotavirus, C. diff, that's a clostridium difficile infection of the bowel.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
That's the primary way that it actually spreads.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah. Let's talk about water. So the most obvious one is the internal use of water. And what's interesting about that is that we actually can do a blood test on people, and it's called the sodium concentration. One of the first things you learn as a medical student is that the sodium concentration in somebody has very little to do with how much sodium they take into their body.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
It has much more to do with how much water they take into their body. So the more water they take in, the lower the sodium concentration goes, but it's very well regulated. There's a study that was done a number of years ago that looked at the chances of death, so mortality, and sodium concentration. And as sodium concentration went up, so did the chances of dying.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So it's important to drink water. How much water? You know, there's this old eight glasses of water thing. It's probably not that much, but it certainly is important. So internal use of water is well known. I mean, it's a substrate that allows your kidneys to dump toxins, and you need to flush those things out. And you sweat, especially if you're exercising.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
You're going to need to take more water in because you're sweating. You're breathing faster. You have something called insensible losses of water. But I think the other part of water that I'd like to talk about is not the internal use of water, which is pretty obvious and the data's there, but the external use of water.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And the reason why I bring that up is in the context of what we're talking about, which is illnesses and flus and viruses. One of the properties of water that is very, very important is its high enthalpy. What does that mean? It means it takes a lot of energy to raise water, the substance, one degree Celsius. And the opposite is also true.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So if you put warm water on someone, it can transfer a lot of energy into that person without losing temperature. Why is that important? If you want to increase someone's body temperature, water is a very good way of doing it. If you've ever gone into a sauna, and it's a dry sauna. You haven't yet put the little ladle onto the heating. You can tolerate 170, 180 degree sauna pretty well.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
As soon as you put that water on, the heat just starts to come down on you. And that's because water is such a very good way of transmitting that heat. So why is that important? Let's put that away for a little bit and I'll explain why that's important. Let's switch gears and talk about viruses in the immune system.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So your immune system is divided into two components, an innate immune system and an adaptive immune system. The adaptive immune system is what we've all learned about in terms of vaccines and antibodies and all the things, the discussion that we've had the last four or five years. You see something very specific, your immune system does, and it makes an antibody directly against that.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
If it's slightly different, the antibody response is not going to be as effective. So it's very highly tuned, very specific. That's the adaptive immune system. The innate immune system, on the other hand, is the one that goes out first. gobbles things up and presents it to the adaptive immune system.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
But there's also something else in the innate immune system that's very important, and that is the system that has to do with recognizing damaged molecules and recognizing pathological molecules. There are certain pathological patterns, PAMPs, pathological associated molecular patterns, that the innate immune system recognizes without ever having seen it. and it can take those things out.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And the greatest tool that the innate immune system has to take those things out is something called interferon. Interferon is an extremely important molecule. It has a very wide ranging ability to take out viruses.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Something that's important to understand is that with all of the variants that we've been talking about with COVID, with all of the different strains that we have of influenza, none of that matters with interferon. Interferon has very wide, and that's why it's such an important molecule. It's been said that the immune system is so well-designed
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
that there are no viruses that can infect it unless they have countermeasures. And that is absolutely true. This was first seen when SARS-CoV-2 came out. They looked at SARS-CoV-1, the original one that came out in 2002. And sure enough, that virus, SARS-CoV-1, if you want to call it that, or just SARS, had a mechanism contained within it to neutralize and to suppress the secretion of interferon.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
They did some searching and they looked at SARS-CoV-2, and sure enough, MAC1, which is a gene in SARS-CoV-2, is a gene that is specifically, I don't want to say designed, but it's there to get around interferon. That should tell you how important interferon is. So with that in mind, let's go back to our talk about water and temperature.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
there was a number of studies that had been done looking at temperature, interferon, and what they showed. This was an in vitro study where they took lymphocytes, they put it into a medium, and they bathed it in LPS. LPS is basically a molecule that is seen in bacteria that usually sets off the immune system.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So you have lymphocytes, you have LPS, and then what they did was they slowly increased the temperature and they measured interferon. Once it hit 39 degrees Celsius, there was a tenfold increase in interferon secretion from the lymphocytes. 39 degrees for those who are on the Fahrenheit system, that's about 102.2. Okay? Slight fever. Slight fever, yeah. Or a good fever. Yeah. Yeah, a good fever.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Okay. What does this mean? This means that—and this gets into the whole discussion philosophically about fevers in general. Should you block them? Exactly. And I'll tell you, in the hospital, I'll get so many calls, hey, doctor, this patient has a fever. And the idea is that the fever is part of the problem, and we need to fix the fever because it's part of the problem.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
By the way, that was the same thought process in the 1918 epidemic. Spanish flu pandemic that we had. Aspirin had just been discovered, Bayer Aspirin, 1899. And it was great, it seemed, because aspirin took away fever, it took away the body aches, it took away the pain, and all of that was subscribed to the virus that was going on. They didn't even know it was a virus, just the influenza disease.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And so it was being used almost excessively. In fact, in many cases, probably toxically. In these army hospitals in 1918, people were coming in with the flu. Young people were coming in with the flu, and they were getting high doses of aspirin. They thought this was the way to treat it. And the mortality rate, the case fatality rate was like 6%. It might have been even higher than that.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So getting back to water, external use of water. Here is a way to – deliver large amounts of energy that can be stored in water as a substance to the patient to elevate, to actually help elevate body temperature, to see whether or not we can improve the innate immune system to actually help out in that type of a situation. So we're talking about hot baths? Hot baths, sauna. Hot shower?
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Hot showers. Probably the most effective... way of doing it is in the old term and again something that was used 100 years ago is hydrotherapy or hot fomentations is the term that you'll find if you look at the old literature this is where they would get hot towels linen towels they would soak it in water they would heat it up usually in a stove but you could do the same thing in a microwave
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
The big thing is that you have to make sure you don't burn yourself. Or the house down. Exactly. And so you would put a protective layer of batting or cloth on the patient, and this would go on top of them. And you would basically cover them up until you started to see them sweat. And you do that for about 20 minutes.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Once you start to see them sweat, you know that you're elevating the body temperature above the set point. And what that's supposed to do is to activate the immune system to secrete interferon. Look, we have studies. There was a study that was published a couple of years ago looking at COVID, giving exogenous interferon to people with COVID-19 reduced hospitalizations by 50%.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
It's an infusion. You would digest it in the stomach. So this was an infusion that they gave to patients.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
You can. This was actually published in the New England Journal of Medicine. It was interferon lambda, I believe. It was a phase three trial looking at getting FDA approval. I think probably because of the fact that we weren't having as many hospitalized patients, it probably hasn't gone through. But in that study, it reduced hospitalizations by 50%.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Isn't it interesting? So I'll tell you what the protocol was. There was... And actually, this is quite interesting. Historically, there were a number of sanitariums in the Northeast of the United States back at that time of the century. And there were run by the Adventist Church. And their way of dealing with the pandemic was different. They were not using drug medications.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
They were using hydrotherapy and sunlight, some of the things that we've been talking about here. And there was a guy by the name of Wells Rubel, who was the medical director of the New England Sanitarium. And he said, let's just take a look and see what's going on here.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Let's look at, let's pool the 10 sanitariums in this area, see what's gone on in terms of the way we treat the patients, and then look at the published data from the army hospitals. And there was a stark difference. He divided it into two sections. The first phase of influenza is the early phase. And the major endpoint of that early phase was did they get pneumonia? Okay. Okay.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And then from pneumonia, the second endpoint after that was the second phase. And that was the question was, did they die? So where the sanitarium seemed to do a much better job than in the army hospitals was in that first phase. They had one sixth of the people actually go to the pneumonia phase. So what were they doing? Immediately they were doing hydrotherapy.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Immediately they were doing, which was basically increasing body temperature, doing fever types of treatments, getting them out into the sunlight. You can remember maybe in your mind's eye, these photographs of these army hospital or these army camps and the tents were outside because they didn't have any place to put them in some of these cases.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So the sunlight was good, but the thing that they weren't doing was the hydrotherapy. Once they got to the pneumonia stage, There was no difference between what the sanitariums were doing and the army hospitals. The mortality was 50%. Remember, this is prior to penicillin. This is 1918. This is before 1928 when we discovered penicillin. So once you hit pneumonia, it was really difficult to treat.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So he actually wrote this up. And I actually found it in a – someone directed it to me. They actually showed it to me. It was in a – it wasn't even in a scientific journal that he published it. It was some sort of periodical called Life and Health. May 1st, 1919. I still remember it in my head. And he says, hey, this is what we did. This is what they did.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
They had one sixth of the mortality in their institution. And this was repeated multiple times. This is not done in isolation. Let's lead you up to the big thing here. There was a Nobel Prize that was given for this. In 1927, Jules Wagner Jurek was a Austrian psychiatrist who noticed that in his patients that had neurosyphilis, that when they had a fever, their symptoms improved.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah, exactly. So when you talk about sunlight, and I'm a big believer, I'm board certified in sleep medicine, and I'm cheering you on when you talk about these things because it's so important that light into the retina does have an effect on the circadian rhythm, suprachiasmatic nucleus. It does have an effect on mood. It goes to the perihabenular nucleus in the brain and has an effect there.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So this is, again, prior to penicillin. He actually took patients with malaria and he took the blood from these patients and carefully infected his neurosyphilis patients with malaria. And of course, you know that malaria causes very, very high fevers. He cured neurosyphilis by causing fevers from malaria. Wild. And all he really had to do was heat them up, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
There was many ways of doing it at the time, heat closets. Sometimes they would inject foreign proteins to create a fever. This was another way of doing it with malaria. Of course, at the time, they had the treatment for malaria, right? Quinine.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So in my mind, anthropologically, I'm wondering, those cultures that don't have access to the sunlight that we have here, maybe they use this as a way of supplementing that. Because we don't see... In winter. In winter, right. So we don't see that. We don't see a lot of sauna use near the equator in any kind of culture.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
If you look at probably the biggest purveyor of this type of therapy that we're talking about, hydrotherapy, was at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. And they had whole protocols for this. And when I looked it up, the general protocol for this was 20 minutes.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
of hot followed by a very very short probably a minute of cold that involves some sort of physical rubbing or or sort of um abrasion on the chest okay and and when i saw that it's like i immediately thought of what they do in finland and where they where they hit themselves with yeah
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Those are well known and very important. What I'm talking about when I'm talking about sunlight is an aspect of light that is not very well known in terms of its visible effects. So we know about the visible effects of light. These are photons that are coming into the eyes that we can see.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
My understanding from what I've heard and read is that obviously the heat part is to heat up the core body temperature, and that has a whole host of responses, which I'll touch on after this.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
that i read a recent article that was just amazing but the the whole part of it is going to cause vasoconstriction and we know this in medicine we're actually taught this in medical school that a cold shower vasoconstriction causes demargination of the white blood cells that are actually attached to the inside of your blood vessels and it knocks them into circulation
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So if you think about this, what is it that you're doing? When you're doing the heat aspect and the fever goes up and the temperature is basically a non-hormonal signal to the entire body to start up regulation and transcription, And then the very last thing is the cold. Now, what does that do? Number one, it knocks those cells into circulation to go wherever they need to go. That's number one.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And number two, vasoconstriction peripherally, which is what you will see, prevents that heat that you've just built up from going out to the periphery and being lost. So it kind of locks the heat in, in a sense, allowing that heat to last longer.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah. So when you have – imagine a tube that's lined with white blood cells. They all have little podocytes, little things that attach. And what happens when you have vasoconstriction is it causes vasoconstriction. It shrinks down because of the smooth muscle in the wall. And you have release of these white blood cells into the circulation. And that's called demargination.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So after a cold shower, you will actually be able to see – and this is kind of a trick question. Does one's white blood cell count go up after a cold shower? The answer is technically you have the same number of white cells, but now there are just more of them in the circulation. So, yes, the number that you get back on the lab test shows that it's gone up.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And the white blood cells, for those that aren't familiar, they essentially go out and… Yeah, these are the macrophages, the neutrophils. These are all… different branches, if you will, of the armed forces of your body that go out to try to find things and neutralize them. And this is part of the innate immune response. Yes.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
What I'm discussing and what I'm talking about is the effect of sunlight on the human body, the skin penetrating into the human body. Now, this at first sounds kind of woo-woo, I guess we could say. But the point that I want to make here is understanding that when we look at the sun, we are seeing about 38% of that energy coming from the sun is in the visible spectrum.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
It is. And it also may seem to be mechanical in terms of locking that heat in. So one of the things that I always was puzzled about is I don't know how many people are able to really get their core body temperature up to 102.2. I mean, it's possible. You'd have to really try to do it. And then I came across a paper that was incredible.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And this was a paper where they actually looked at mice, which, by the way, I looked this up. They actually have the same target temperatures that humans have. and also hamsters. And again, the same target temperature. And what they showed in this, they looked at the innate immune system and the signaling that's required for the secretion of interferon. And they looked at STAT and JAK.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
These were the two areas or signaling. And what they showed was essentially that, whereas before I had told you that you had to go up to 39 degrees Celsius to get a tenfold increase in interferon secretion, What they did was they looked at 36, 37, 38, and 39, and they saw a jump going from 37 to 38.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So in other words, at 38 degrees, which is only 100.4 Fahrenheit, there was a dramatic increase in the signaling in probably six or seven different areas of the STAT and the JAK system signaling. When they did further analysis, they said, what's going on here? Is it the lack of breakdown of mRNA? What's actually happening?
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
This is the conclusion that they came to after they did all the molecular studies. It was simply just the increase in temperature that was causing an increase in transcription in the nucleus. Transcription of? Of the proteins. Leading to more interferon. Correct. So we're talking about not the transcription of the protein interferon, but the transcription of the factors that regulates.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
The increase in interferon. Yeah. So it was basically transcription in the nucleus is actually upregulated itself by nothing else other than temperature.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
There's a whole nother 52% of the photons coming from the sun in the infrared spectrum. And on the other end, on the ultraviolet side, this is the part we have no problem understanding because we know that ultraviolet B light comes into our skin, and it's high energy, so it's able to actually move the bonds on these cholesterol derivatives in order to make vitamin D. So we know that.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So that's interesting because I've seen some old photographs of when they used to do this like in mass in the big hospitals back East 100 years ago. And there was these treatment rooms and each of the treatment rooms had a little hole, not a little hole, but a hole enough to put your head. And so it was kind of funny because you see this long hallway
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And all of these humans' heads kind of sticking out of a hole while the treatment was going on inside the room, their heads were outside the room.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And people from all over the world in different cultures have talked to me in Asia, in the Middle East. And they say, you know what? My grandmother, my mother, they used to do this to us all the time. They put us in the hot sand. I remember someone telling me from Iraq. They said if we were sick, they would put us into the hot sand to heat us up.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And then you talk to somebody from the 1950s, grandma would say, oh, they put us to bed and make sure we're all warm with the covers. Hot water bottle? Hot water bottle, exactly. I mean, in Asia, they would do something different. I've heard them tell it.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
It's interesting to me how all of these cultures that really haven't connected necessarily have come up with the same answers for a lot of these things.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah, so the, and I sometimes say anacetylcysteine. It may be just my Canadian accent coming through.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
No, I think you are correct because people have corrected me. So I think if I say it, it'll slip up. That's what happens, so.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So probably the most obvious one to start with is the one that's actually we use all the time in the hospital for, And it's for Tylenol overdose. And that's because Tylenol, the metabolism of Tylenol depletes the liver of these reducing agents, glutathione, things of that nature. So anacetylcysteine is going to replace that. And that's one of the things that's well known.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So now what do we say? When I say, hey, I want to go outside, to get some vitamin D. We know that we're going outside to get this light that we can't see that's very imperative to giving us something called vitamin D, which is a hormone in our body, and it's very, very important.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
We actually have dosing protocols. We have nomograms to tell us when we should use it, when we shouldn't use it. And it's very well documented. So it supports liver metabolism. It supports liver metabolism and prevents the liver from going into failure. So people could literally die if we didn't give them this medication.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
That's an excellent question. I would say if you asked me that question 20 to 25 years ago, I would have said no, there's no evidence. But now if you talk to some GI specialists, they'll say, yeah, there's some data that it actually may be beneficial. It's certainly not going to hurt.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And so in patients who have liver failure from one thing or another, they may actually recommend using that medication as well, N-acetylcysteine.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
It is one that it's recharging. So if you want to think about it in terms of redox, this is a good way to think about it, is think about a sulfur element with a hydrogen attached to it. That is the reduced form because it can donate that proton off and it'll be in a reduced situation. So it can reduce something that was oxidized.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
However, when it reduces something that was oxidized and it does that in a good way, it itself becomes oxidized. And instead of having an SH, it's now SS. So now it's oxidized. That's really important in a lot of places because of that SS bond. So you'll know that the SS bonds occurs in amino acids. It's the reason why you can perm your hair.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
You may not know that, but the way your hair is is because of SS bonds. And then what you do is you reduce all of those SS bonds. In other words, basically disconnecting them. And then you can curl it however you want. And then when you take it away, those SS bonds clamp down and you have a perm.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
That's the reason why when you go to get a perm, that stuff smells like rotten eggs. It's because that's the sulfur group, yeah. So that's also, by the way, the same reason why, and this gets into a little bit other discussion about why I think NAC may be, I'll just call it NAC, is used in other areas, is this is also the main reason why we get thrombosis of platelets. So pulmonary artery.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
On the other side of that, though, on the infrared side, is something that there's new science, new data that is coming out that is showing that it's actually very, very important. And to that, I would point to an article that really changed my thinking on this and really opened my eyes, no pun intended.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
If you have the endothelial lining, which makes sure that the red blood cells as they're going through the pulmonary artery are not causing clots. If that endothelial lining would become damaged, it would release underneath it and expose a huge collection of something called von Willebrand's factor. Von Willebrand's factor is a monomer, but it quickly becomes a polymer.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And the way it does that is in forming SS bonds. So that's a quick polymerization. Then, of course, the next step that happens is that these polymers will then trap platelets and cause them to clump, and you will get something called a white clot.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
They would be, yeah. So imagine now, if you will, the pulmonary artery in somebody who becomes infected with either influenza or COVID-19, and that causes an oxidative stress – situation where you have the cell having more oxidative stress than it should, causes dysfunction of the cell, the cell becomes damaged.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
peels back, releases some of the von Willebrand's factor, and now you have clots in the pulmonary artery. This is something actually that we did see with COVID. When they did the autopsies, they found many times more of these specific white clots in these patients. And so I don't know if that's the mechanism that's occurring in influenza, but there was a lot of papers that were published in COVID.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And the interesting thing about that was, is that, do you remember when they published, they had a paper that was published looking at blood types and COVID, and they said, you know what, what we're finding is is that those with type O blood are just slightly less susceptible to getting COVID. They have a slightly less mortality. Yeah, that was a relief to me because I'm O blood. Okay. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Well, the interesting thing about that is well known is that people with type O blood have slightly less von Willebrand's factor. So does that mean in general that we clot less? If that clotting is related to von Willebrand's factor in platelets, then yes. There's other ways of causing clot down the clotting cascade, but yes. So I found it really interesting.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
There was kind of two independent points that sort of connected each other. The other thing that was actually really interesting about this, and this will lead to the conversation about NAC and why I was using it in actually patients with COVID-19 and influenza, and we'll talk about that study too, is ACE2. So ACE2 is the receptor for the spike protein for SARS-CoV-2. True.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
There was an article that was published in 2019 in Melatonin Research by Scott Zimmerman and Russell Ryder. And the name of that article was Melatonin, Optics of the Human Body, the Optics of the Human Body. And what Scott Zimmerman and Russell Ryder set out to show is that, in fact, infrared light – because of its very long wavelength, it can penetrate through into the skin actually very deep.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
But let's take it one step further. That ACE2, what is it actually there for? Why is it even there? It's not there to be a receptor for spike protein. The actual job that ACE2 does is it converts angiotensin 2, which is a pro-oxidant, into angiotensin 1,7, which is an antioxidant. So let's go back to the beginning of our discussion again. Here's the mitochondria.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Here's the mitochondria is doing what it needs to do, and it's producing oxidative stress. And it's got all these different enzymes that are there to lessen the heat from that engine. Catalase, glutathione peroxidase, superoxide dismutase, melatonin, as we discussed at the beginning, and angiotensin 1,7. So now what happens, you've got these patients that have obesity.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
You have these patients that have cancer, heart disease, dementia. These are people whose engines are running hot. They're barely making it because of all of the oxidative stress damage that has occurred. Now what happens, this virus comes in, spike protein, hits the ACE2 receptor.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And now that thing that was in balance is now out of balance because you're no longer taking a pro-oxidant and making an antioxidant. So now the analogy is that you're in a car and your car, the heat in the engine's barely, I mean, it's coming up, right? And you're barely making it. And now you approach a hill called COVID-19. and you're going up that hill, you're gonna burn out.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Your engine's gonna overheat. And that's what was happening with these patients. Remember they were coming in happy hypoxics, they were calling them? They were there, they looked, they were fine, but they were severely hypoxic. What I believe what was happening, and there's some data to show this is the case, is that as the virus went into the lungs, And I believe this also happens with influenza.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
The virus was getting into the pulmonary circulation. And as it was going down, it was binding to the very rich ACE2 receptors and all of these pulmonary endothelial cells. And it was causing these enzymes to stop working. And now the oxidative balance was being knocked out. These cells were becoming damaged. They were peeling off.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Von Willebrand's factor was coming into circulation, and this polymerization was occurring, and these white clots were occurring, and that was leading to hypoxemia. How do we stop that from happening? Well, certainly one way of doing it is to make sure that the redox balance in these cells are maintained. And one way of doing that is light and melatonin and all the things that we just talked about.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
But another way of doing it, in addition, would potentially be in preventing those sulfide bonds from forming. and causing polymerization. And that's where you have NAC, which is basically, it would go through to those SS bonds that are causing the polymerization and break them off.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yes, because mucus, again, the reason why mucus is so thick is because of those SS bonds. So when you put NAC in there, it breaks it off, and now it's liquidy.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Well, not necessarily contracting it, but certainly having the symptoms of it. So this is like the best study you could ever imagine, right? So this is a multicentered double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial, right? So you're eliminating a lot of the confounders.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And what they did was in a winter season, so I think it was over three to six months, people were taking 600 milligrams of NAC twice a day. And what they did was they looked to see how many people got infected and what their symptoms were. And while it did not reduce the number of infections from influenza, there was a significant reduction in the symptoms of influenza.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And we're not talking about how long a path length goes through. You have to remember that this type of long wavelength can scatter. and it can scatter throughout up to, they say, up to eight centimeters, according to this data.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So infections, no, it doesn't reduce, but symptoms dramatically. And which symptoms specifically? It's the most annoying symptoms. So the one that dropped the most was the runny nose and the sore throat. That was what it was best at reducing. There's been some question about NAC because it's so good for cells, right? Because it replenishes.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
There are some studies in vitro in cells that are designed to be models for cancer that NAC can actually cause the propensity for some of these cells to grow and expand. I think that probably needs to be taken with a little bit of grain of salt because these were in models that are designed for cancer cells to grow.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So the same thing would happen if you were to give nutrition to cancer cells on a petri dish, right? That doesn't necessarily mean that nutrition causes cancer.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
continuously given your job or do you do you increase your your dosage when you are you know you're coming into contact with flu patients i do uh i do exactly as this paper was doing in the winter season when i know that things are going to be elevated and high and i'm going to be seeing a lot of influenza patients i do take 600 milligrams twice a day but i try not to do it for more than three months i don't know the long-term effects but i think three months is probably good enough
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
A single photon can bounce around. It's a very low-energy photon, but low-energy photons, because they're very long in wavelength, can penetrate very deeply. A good way of thinking about this is you pull up to a stop sign and a car pulls up next to you, and they're playing this really loud music, right? What do you hear in your car? It's very low-frequency sound.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah. I mean, there's so many redundancies that are built into the system. But in this situation, I don't know what the mechanism is, but I believe that with influenza, there is a tilting of the scale toward oxidative stress. And NAC in that sense can be very helpful.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah, so that's about a 50% absolute risk reduction, which if you do the math, it's a number needed to treat of two, which is extremely low and very amazing.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
I think there is actually good data for zinc. Some people might disagree, but I think
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
the studies that i've seen seem to show that that zinc supplementation can be beneficial the theoretical of course and i'm sure you're familiar with it is is the copper deficiency and if you're checking that then that's fine the recommendations that i have seen is 40 milligrams of elemental zinc so you have to be careful when you look up zinc on your on your bottles tell you how many milligrams but it's the entire molecule that they're measuring so you've got it'll also say how many milligrams of elemental zinc that is equivalent to
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And the recommendation that I've heard from people is 40 milligrams. But if you're checking your copper levels, then you should be fine. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Blood deficiencies and things of that nature. Yeah. Okay. I'll get my copper levels checked.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah. Liver, I believe, also is involved with copper as well. So what is zinc doing to improve immune system function? There's a couple of enzymes that use zinc as a cofactor, and I believe that that's what it's related to. I can't remember exactly which ones they are, but zinc is used as a cofactor in some of the enzymatic reactions of the immune system.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Actually, they are looking at that. When I was researching this for the intravenous interferon, I remember seeing something about interferon in terms of a nasal spray. I haven't seen that yet, though. Someone out there who's industrious can— Yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
can um create one it doesn't make you feel very nice okay i mean uh when when these patients for instance uh well this might be uh material to understand too for many years we had hepatitis c that was incurable and um interferon actually is the is the cure there was a point where we was used to give uh infusions of interferon to cure people with hepatitis c
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And the reason why that's what you hear is because low frequency sound is the only kind of sound coming out of that guy's radio that's able to penetrate not only his car but go into your car and shake the steering wheel on your car. It's the same thing like, for instance, if you were to go to the Grand Canyon and there's a storm coming, storm very far away.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
But when we gave them the treatment, they felt horrible. It felt like they had the flu. And it's for good reasons because when you have high levels of interferon, you do have the flu. It feels like that.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Exactly. Nobody likes congestion. So, you know, I don't mind treating that. But I think out of all of those symptoms that you mentioned there, the one that I think is probably the most beneficial to keep is the fever.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
No, it's not completely worthless. So let's talk about the science. Let's talk about the actual data. I don't have a randomized controlled trial to give you like I did with light, but there was a study that was done.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And the reason why they were looking at this was a bunch of oncologists that were looking to see if there was something that could improve the immune system when people were getting chemotherapy. And they did an in vitro study. So this is in vitro, but they were able to show that just a very small amount of eucalyptus oil had a tremendous impact on phagocytosis on the innate immune system.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah, exactly. So they had these beads. And the paper showed that these beads and they were fluorescent. And you could see in the cells that had not yet gotten the eucalyptus oil that there was a number of beads outside. And these cells were just kind of moseying around. And they had both light microscopy and electron microscopy. And a few of these beads had gotten eaten up inside.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And then they showed the next slide. It was like a transformation with the eucalyptus oil. So instead of these nice rounded cells, they were like all of these things just coming out, like little podocytes, like reaching for things. And then a few hours later, it showed all of the beads that were outside were now inside.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So there was something in the eucalyptus oil itself that was stimulating the innate immune system to gobble this stuff up. Again, we go back to the folksy type of old stuff. The main ingredient in Vicks VapoRub is eucalyptus oil.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
What's the first thing that you're going to hear? It's low rumbling. It's because that low frequency energy is able to penetrate very deeply. There's an astrophysicist in Europe, in England actually, Bob Fosbury. He sent me a photograph of his hand in front of an infrared light source. And it was almost like the first guy who took an X-ray of his hand, Rotigen, I guess is his name.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
It could very well be. In that line of discussion, it's very imperative to understand that eucalyptus oil is never recommended to be taken internally. There's actually been reported deaths from taking too much eucalyptus oil. So I've just put that out there that people think that it's gonna work and more is better. Usually the way it's used and the way it has been used historically
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And for instance, in hydrotherapy, they would put maybe a few drops of that or rub it onto the skin and allow it to sink in. It's extremely potent. If you go online to buy eucalyptus essential oil, that should not really be taken internally. It's not designed for that. It's extremely potent. And putting it maybe— Sometimes I'll do that and put it on the upper lip so I'm inhaling it.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
It actually can be actually very soothing. In fact, one of the things that I found very soothing, and there are actually some data in the literature on this, is if you get a cold and you're congested, it's just – heating up some hot water on the stove, putting a towel over your head and just inhaling that steam. It tends to open things up and decrease the congestion.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And I've been known to put a couple of drops of eucalyptus oil into that. And that's actually been beneficial as well. Great.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah, that's very possible. So let's talk about air, 30,000 foot level. First of all, don't inhale anything that's not either a medicine designed for your lungs or air itself. So it goes without saying, but smoking, Cigar smoking, vaping, exactly.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
No. Right before COVID hit, I can't tell you how many young kids were being admitted to my ICU on ventilators. It was a little different at that time because it was so expansive that people were making vitamin E oil to cut the nicotine in, and they were making basically garage—out of their garage brand vapes and selling it. And these kids were ending up in the ICU.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
This is totally unrelated to COVID. This is totally unrelated to COVID. Okay. And to be fair, totally unrelated to the brand of—
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
of vaping the brand names so this is off-label stuff people making their own thing and selling it it was crazy but let's talk about you know briefly the brand so yeah we're starting to understand now that um vaping doesn't have as many toxins that smoking does but it's it's not uh It's not a healthy choice. And contrary to the thought process is that it really doesn't get people off of nicotine.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
In fact, there's higher concentrations of nicotine in the vape than in regular cigarettes, very high concentrations.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And he said – he looked at his hand. He says, I almost like saw my own death because he could see the bones in his hand through the X-ray. Well, Bob Fosbury, who's at the European Space Agency and is well tuned into this type of understanding, he put his hand in front of an infrared light sensor or infrared light source and took an infrared light photograph. And the light comes through the hand.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
I use it all the time in my patients who I'm trying to get off of smoking. And that's a safer alternative, especially for the lungs, right? Because they're not irritants that are going into the lungs. So no problem with that, especially if it's used to get them off of smoking. It's something that we use all the time.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
do you use nicotine no no yeah there's a massive expansion the number of people taking nicotine pouches now yeah and it's it's something that affects the brain as you know if it affects the um pregnant women um affects a number of aspects of the nervous system we have receptors called nicotinic receptors for a reason because that's the neurotransmitter so um yeah it has an effect
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah. I'm not familiar with that data, but certainly something to look into.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So in terms of air, we've talked about what should not be in the air, but there's actually some data that's really surprising that I found during the pandemic that was interesting to me. that should be in there that maybe isn't in there, and that's fresh air associated with going outside. So what is out there in the air? What should be out there? Obviously, clean air.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
People who live next to freeways and pollution, those are bad things. We've talked about that. But the Japanese seem to have a corner on this research. It's really interesting stuff. You've heard of forest bathing. So there was a number of studies where they've taken the CEOs in Tokyo and they took them up to the Hinoki Cypress forests. Sounds beautiful. It is.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And what they found was they did actually very controlled research where they checked blood levels and they did blood tests and they had them walk around for three days in the forest. forest bathing. And they actually took air samples and they found that there's these substances called phytoncides, which are given off by the trees, not just Hinoki cypress trees, but just about any kind of tree.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So fir trees, oak trees, all sorts of pine trees. And that these substances interact with our bodies and specifically, again, the innate immune system. They were actually able to look at chromogranin A, which is a substance that's in some of these white blood cells that are, you know, fighting white blood cells that fight infections.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And they were able to show that when they were in that environment, there were definite changes in the immune system toward the positive and that these changes lasted for seven days. So they did another aspect to this study. So there was multiple publications that this group in Japan did. They took these same guys and they took them down to a hotel in Tokyo out of the Honoki cypress forests.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
It illuminates the entire hand. And this is, of course, a lot more than a few millimeters. And the mind-blowing thing about it was you could not see any bones. It was either penetrating through the bone or it was going around the bone. And very clearly you could see that infrared light is able to go much more than just skin deep. It penetrates through your clothes.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And they infused these same phytoncides from these Honoki cypress trees. They basically took the oil from these trees and infused it in the hotel room. And they found very similar results to what they were getting out there when they were walking in the forest. So that would seem to indicate that there was something that this was what was being made responsible.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
The one difference, which was interesting, between when they were up there walking around in the forest and when they were down in Tokyo in the hotel room with the infuser is the urinary cortisol levels were lower when they were walking in the forest than when they were in the hotel. And that's, as you know, a symbol of basically stress. Okay.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
So there is something that there is a je ne sais quoi, I guess the French would say, there's something gestalt about walking in the forest that's different than just infusing the Hinoki cypress. But I thought that was an interesting thing. And it kind of goes along again with what we were talking about at the beginning.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
When you're out there in nature, in the forestry, in the green, walking green spaces, we have this evidence that These leaves reflect a lot of infrared light, which we've already talked about. But there's also something else in the equation as well. And it kind of leads just a bigger picture and a bigger philosophy of life. And that's the reductionism of science.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
We're always trying to reduce something to an active ingredient to try to figure out what it is. But there is actually something to be said for getting these things in the environment that we would normally be getting them in.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Yeah, and I can't help but think of some studies that have been done in the past where this has really highlighted it. There was some evidence they believed that people with lung cancer would do better if they had – because they noticed that people with lung cancer did better when they had diets that were rich in vitamin E and vitamin A derivatives. So they said, oh, reductionist science.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Let's go ahead and get vitamin E, vitamin A. Let's package it. Let's give them in high doses. Maybe this will solve lung cancer or help lung cancer. They had to stop the study early because they did worse than the control subjects.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And we didn't discuss it directly, but we kind of alluded to it with light and indoor light and artificial light. So what do we get? The human body... since its existence, has always had blue light in the presence of red light and altogether the entire biological spectrum. And now what we've done is we've essentially created an indoor environment where we have
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
You can actually test this out on a summer day or even on a winter day if the sun is out. wear a few layers of clothing, go outside, close your eyes, and move around and see if you can feel where the sun is. You can. And the reason is, is because it's that infrared radiation that's able to penetrate through the clothes, penetrate through your skin, actually activate the heat sensors in your body.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Efficient lights, which are supposed to be – more efficient would imply that it's equivalent. But realize that LED lights or the LED lights that are commercially available for us to buy are energy efficient because they're not broadcasting, if you will, in the infrared or in the ultraviolet. It's a very specific narrow range of visible light. We alluded to this.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Since you asked it that way, I'm gonna try to guess the other direction and say it like 50.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
Absolutely. And then the other aspect of it, and I actually, I think I learned this from you, is that the photoreceptors are in the lower portion of our retina. Right. Sorry, the lower portion of our retina. And so the type of light that's going to affect your circadian rhythm is going to be much more likely to do that if it's coming from up above or at the same level than down below. That's right.
Huberman Lab
How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult
And actually go much deeper than that. That's actually in a straight line. After it does that, it hits something and then it bounces around a couple of more times, maybe a few hundred more times. And so the point of that paper, the optics of the human body, is that we have this understanding or this idea that light simply hits our skin and that's where it ends. And that's not the case.