If you support people dealing with fatigue, poor sleep, metabolic dysfunction, chronic stress, inflammation, or declining resilience, this conversation will give you a deeper understanding of the environmental signals that shape health every day.
Nathan Siles is the Co Founder of BioSpectral Systems, a company dedicated to restoring human health by improving the light environments people live and work in every day. Through education and practical products, BioSpectral helps people better support sleep, energy, eye and brain health, recovery, and long term performance by bringing indoor living back into closer alignment with how human biology is designed to function.
A two time cancer survivor, including childhood brain cancer, Nathan brings deep lived experience to his work, alongside more than a decade spent helping clients improve their health through a foundational approach. He is also the Co Creator of the BioTra Approach and the founder of It’s Now You Health Consulting. His work centers on the core foundations of health, including light, water, magnetism, mitochondria, thermoregulation, and circadian biology, showing how these often invisible forces shape biology, performance, resilience, and longevity in the modern world. Having worked internationally with CEOs, executives, entrepreneurs, professional athletes across multiple leagues, and chronically ill individuals, Nathan’s mission is to help people understand how visible and invisible light, circadian biology, and the modern environment influence vitality, clarity, and the ability to perform at a high level in business and life.
Dr Ritamarie
What if some of the signals affecting sleep, energy, brain function, hormones, and metabolism aren’t even coming from food at all. As health practitioners, we spend a lot of time thinking about nutrients and blood sugar and gut health and hormones, toxins, exercise, and even stress, but our biology is also responding every single day to something we don’t talk nearly as much about, which is our environment and the light we’re exposed to, the darkness we may or may not be getting, and the timing of all those signals.
The electromagnetic environment surrounding us, which is a very controversial topic to talk about these days, is where it gets really interesting, because blue light, for example, isn’t inherently bad, like it’s said to be. We actually need blue spectrum light at the right time. Sunlight isn’t simply something that we protect ourselves from, from sunscreen and cover-ups, and the powers that we want. Different wavelengths of light act as different biological signals, and it influences our rhythms, our hormones, and everything else in the body.
It’s not about light is good or bad. Are we getting the right light at the right time and in the right amounts? What happens to us when modern life exposes us to signals that are way, way different than the ones our biology evolved with? That’s what we’re exploring today.
Today’s guest is going to help us look at health through a lens that many practitioners may not have considered or at least looked into in much depth. Let me tell you about Nathan Siles. He’s the co-founder of BioSpectral Systems and has spent more than a decade exploring how light, circadian biology, electromagnetic fields, mitochondria, and other environmental signals influence human health and performance. He’s also a two-time cancer survivor, including childhood brain cancer, and that personal experience has helped shape his deep interest in understanding some of the more foundational influences that the world has on human biology.
His work today focuses on what he calls the biophysical foundations of health, including light, water, magnesium, magnetism, mitochondria, thermal regulation, circadian biology, and more.
Nathan, welcome to ReInvent Healthcare. I am so happy to have you here, and I’m looking forward to our conversation.
Nathan Siles (03:07
Me too, Doctor Ritamarie. I appreciate it. I’m excited.
Dr Ritamarie (03:11)
I am too, because we had a private conversation a few weeks back, and it just got me all jazzed about some of the things that you’ve been working on and exploring that I wanted to share with our practitioner audience. We have a mixed audience, but the podcast is geared towards health and wellness practitioners who are looking for root cause type of analyses, not just slap another something on a symptom.
I want to start with a big picture, because I think the concept is new to some practitioners, not so new to others, confusing to a lot of practitioners.
Let’s talk about biophysics as a foundation of health, because you talk about that a lot in your writings and in your work. Tell me exactly what that means, biophysics.
Nathan Siles (03:57)
Biophysics is the flow of energy and the information it carries with it. It is the physics, the energy flows and information flows inside the living system, the biology. That’s biophysics. We usually associate physics with astrophysics or movements of planets and sun and celestial bodies, but when we talk about biophysics, we’re talking about how do the electrons and protons move inside your cells, inside the atoms within your cells, which are inside the molecules, which are the arrows in biochemistry that move from one chemical reaction to the other.
Dr Ritamarie (04:34)
Hmm, from one to another. Why is this so important for us as health practitioners? Why, though? Tell us more, because it’s not something we learn in medical school. It’s not something that’s just commonly thought about.
Nathan Siles (04:47)
Light specifically, visible and invisible light, and that’s just a more common term used for electromagnetism. I could talk in more complex terms, but let’s just talk about light. Most people think it’s just visible light, but there’s invisible light everywhere, and this light weaves the tapestry of the way we view living systems and the environment around us. We exist as beings of light, walking around with light stored inside our water, inside our biology that proteins sit on top of and express.
We look around us, and we look at all these incredible pigments and proteins and all these things around us that we see. Underneath there, we have energy, we have information, we have coordinated negentropy systems, systems that create order from chaos. So intelligent.
Dr Ritamarie (05:35)
Hmm. You called that negentropy.
Nathan Siles (05:38)
Entropy is the concept of everything moving towards chaos, but we are a negative entropic system, meaning that we create order from chaos. We go by the atomic physics nature of the way that the body then stacks on as a system, and it expresses itself.
This light, this visible and invisible light, weaves together the tapestry of life, and that life that we see is much deeper and rich in information and energy. We have to decipher what environments give us certain information and what environments give us certain energy levels. Then, we can decide what biochemistry and what other physical modalities and things we do once we have the foundation of the energy and information in the environment.
Dr Ritamarie (06:28)
Mm, so you’re talking about biophysics, this energy and this light being foundational even before we start looking at biochemistry, nutrition.
Okay, so tell us a little bit about how they interact, because as practitioners, we’re always talking about hormones and blood sugar balance and gut and microbiome and things like that. We talk about light and that so many people are aware of blue light and doing blue light blockers at night and things like that, but I don’t think it goes very deep in terms of our understanding and how that really affects our hormones.
I mean, think about melatonin. I think about melatonin in light, because that is a hormone that is dependent on light or lack of light to do what it’s supposed to do, but other hormones, we don’t think in terms of light.
Tell us more about that interaction.
Nathan Siles (07:16)
Absolutely. First we have to understand light spans from X-rays, gamma rays, cosmic rays on the short wavelength side through to ultraviolet rays. Then, we have UVA C B A, and then from there, we have the seven colors of the rainbow, and I’m making the wavelengths longer.
This is just a photon moving at slightly different energy potentials, carrying different information. They’re all the same. The photon’s exactly the same, no matter where it is on the light spectrum. It’s just vibrating and moving and spinning at a different rate.
After the seven colors of the rainbow, we have this broadband infrared range. After that, we have radio frequency, microwaves, magnetic waves, gravitational waves, and things getting down to the very, very long wavelength light.
The human living system and even the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom, the eukaryotic kingdom on planet Earth, utilizes this beautiful wedge from infrared through the seven colors of the rainbow to ultraviolet, and we turn all of those beautiful balanced wavelengths when it comes from Mother Nature into signals that activate, regulate, and build new proteins, new hormones, new pigments, new things in the body.
When we decipher the language that’s coded into these frequencies, we can understand how thyroid hormones are built. We can understand how serotonin is built. We can understand all these different things. They come from the energy and information inside the light that’s buried within those chemicals.
You mentioned melatonin. Melatonin actually has key absorption spectrums from the ultraviolet and the infrared, both sides. Same as leptin. Leptin happens to be one of the key hormones for human biology. It has a peak absorption peak in 220 nanometers, that’s UVC, and 727 nanometers, that’s infrared A.
When we go all the way through the whole periodic table, and we look at all the different elements, and we look at the compositions of these hormones and molecules from these elements, we can see which wavelengths are actually inside each of these hormones and biomolecules.
Melatonin’s a great one, because melatonin actually covers, it actually talks about, governing cancer, because melatonin governs apoptosis and autophagy and so this is a really, really interesting one, because when we have apoptosis inhibited, we have uncontrolled growth. Now if that happens in a placenta, if that happens in a pregnant mom or a baby that’s normal, that’s called having a baby, that’s called the
pregnancy. If that continues and that placental growth and that baby growth continues beyond when the baby comes out, we call that abnormal.
What we have with cancer cells is we have this abnormal growth of these cells, and that’s when apoptosis is inhibited, and we have a big problem there. Melatonin is one of the signals that actually governs that system so that we can have optimal cell growth, and we can have a mitigation of continual cancer cell growth.
We have activation, and we have movement energies. These are the biochemistry that sort of sits on top of the energy flows. All of the other things, the hormones, the neurotransmitters, the peptides, all these things, the exosomes, they all emerge from a particular energetic basis. That’s why decoding the full spectrum from ultraviolet, seven colors of the rainbow, and broadband infrared down into biology is so pivotal to understand the root cause underneath all of these things.
Eventually you get it to such a science where you actually can go, okay, this person’s got thyroid issues, they miss the first two hours of the day too regularly. Okay, this person’s got cancer issues, they miss the two middle hours of the day regularly. This person’s got melatonin issues, they miss the last two hours of the day regularly.
You can eventually get it down to these particular points. You can also say this person does too much red light therapy if they’re having these particular issues. You could say these people are not doing enough broadband infrared light therapy, and they’re doing too narrow infrared light therapy.
When we get into all of this, you can understand it all, but really the foundation of this is light first interacts with water, water chemistry.
That’s your H2O, your D2O, your tritium, and oxygen, which we don’t have anything in our systems, but there are some in the oceans. How does light interact with water? Okay, that’s step one.
Step two, how does that light and water interact with biochemistry? That is where truly the magic happens, in the infrared range, all the way down at about 1650 nanometers, right where that’s the highest photon density per second that comes through the ionosphere down onto Earth’s surface. It is right about to activate the movement energy in order to move electrons through the mitochondrial respiratory proteins to actually tunnel that towards oxygen to make carbon dioxide, energy, ATP, water, reactive oxygen species, peptides, sex hormones, all the things. We need that light.
We need that broadband infrared, and right now, the highest wavelengths that we’re testing in photobiomodulation research, right around 1064 nanometers, which has been shown to stimulate the immune system in the brain. There’s just been a new discovery at the University of Washington, which has shown the brain has its own independent lymphatic immune system in the bone marrow of the actual skull. We’re seeing these being activated from the longer wavelengths of light through the hair into the skull. That’s independent of the innate and adaptive immune systems through the rest of the body, actually helping clear out the brain, the misfolded proteins, circulate the fluids, and allow the lymphatic network to work properly, and the T cells to work locally, and the B cells to work locally as well.
We’re seeing that that’s okay, but we haven’t explored that more, longer wavelength infrared light, which is actually where the magic is really happening for setting up all of the biology and the biochemistry to actually then add the extra activation energy of the ultraviolet and the blue side of the spectrum to then go and create catalyzation of ionic bonds and to be able to really take a decent amount of energy into the living system without hurting it.
You need to have the vibration of the infrared to allow the shorter wavelengths to not hurt the biological system. Which is why Mother Nature always designed blue, purple, and ultraviolet to be accompanied by broadband infrared. Always.
Dr Ritamarie (14:16)
Hmm. Okay, so I feel like I just stepped into a whole new world of understanding of how the body works. I know my biochemistry and anatomy and physiology, like the back of my hand, except for new new things that are being developed, or discovered. We’re not really being developed. We’re kind of just discovering what’s really here, so it’s like a new discovery here.
I wanted to go back to something you said at the beginning of this, which was the timing. You were saying these two hours thyroid, these two hours melatonin, these two hours whatever the other one was. Tell me more about what you really were talking about there, because I lost that somewhere in the translation.
Nathan Siles (15:07)
The first thing we do, we’re designed to wake up prior to sunrise. It’s just how we always did it. The most successful humans that passed on their genes more effectively found food very quickly. We’re designed to eat very soon after sunrise, the soonest we can.
Then, you build that nourishment. Now, the first people that found food, they would eat it raw, they would eat the organs, they would eat the eyeballs, they would eat the skin, and they would suck the bone marrow. We’re talking about this as the winners of life throughout all of human history. They really engulfed in the first early morning light.
They were exposed, and they often hunted early and ate early. As a result of that, when that light comes through the eye, it’s already helping that cortisol to come up, but it’s also helping the melatonin to come up. We think when we wake up, melatonin’s starting to decline, but it’s not. When we start moving and exercising, melatonin goes up as well as cortisol. When we start seeing that infrared from the environment, especially a chlorophyll-rich environment, we get that infrared on our skin and our eyes, that’s raising melatonin naturally.
We have this beautiful balancing of cortisol and melatonin and that allows our biochemistry to find this non-stressed, non-sympathetic, out-of-balance state, so we’re able to focus, and we don’t shake when we’re hunting. We don’t feel these tremors or feel any of this negative activation.
At the same time, if you’re moving, and you’re quenching that glucocorticoid, the cortisol, then you’re actually metabolizing any downside effect of having high cortisol at the same time. Melatonin being your number one antioxidant system is helping the system.
The other thing to add on to that is when that light goes through your eye, that morning sunrise, people are like, it’s red.
Look at the sky, it’s blue. It’s totally blue. There’s a huge blue hue from the Rayleigh scattering. That blue is actually very activating for our thyroid. Thyroid is the accelerator of the body. When you press that accelerator down, you allow metabolism to go, and as long as you’ve had a good enough sleep, you want that accelerator to be pushed down a little bit.
That blue light from the morning sunrise, especially in a chlorophyll-rich environment, which means the blue is balanced by the infrared, allows that thyroid to turn on, and what I call the compound pharmacy in your head, which is the hypothalamus and the pituitary, turning all of those biochemicals on, and they get secreted, all the signals go down to the adrenals, the signals go down to the liver for digestion, for cortisol production, all the things.
The thyroid turns on, and everything happens at that time. You need that morning light through the eye in order for that to happen.
Now, people who are sleeping through this pre-sunrise, 30 minutes before sunrise, and they’re sleeping through that sunrise period where they don’t see that beautiful light blue hue in the sky before the sun comes up, they’re missing out on proper thyroid metabolic activation. As a result of that, if they do that for long enough, they will have thyroid dysfunction, because it’s not being turned on at the right time.
Dr Ritamarie (18:29)
Interesting. So, it’s not just important that I would tell people to get the morning light in your eyes within the first half hour, fifteen minutes, half hour, even up to two hours of waking. You’re saying it’s even more important to get it half an hour before sunrise. Interesting.
Nathan Siles (18:48)
You got it. If you’ve got the opportunity to do that, usually when the morning’s very, very quiet, if you can find a way to go to bed at a reasonable hour so you can get up and have a minimum of five and a half hours of sleep, ideally six at a very minimum. You don’t want to sleep more than nine and a half hours regularly. In that window is a nice window.
If you can do that, you can get up and utilize that 30 minutes pre-sunrise to go take your bare feet, walk on the grass. It probably has a bit of condensation. You’re grounding, high-quality grounding, and then if you can expose as much skin as possible. I know a lot of people are in the wintertime, it’s the snow. I get it.
Do the best you can. Roll up your sleeves, let your face expose, take your glasses off, take your contacts out. You don’t need to see anything really special in the morning. Just go out there, let the sun bathe your naked corneas and your naked skin as much as you can expose, and that will give a stronger signal to your thyroid, to the rest of your compound pharmacy to turn on your biology.
Dr Ritamarie (19:51)
Interesting. When you say bathe and all that, how long are you talking about? Five minutes, ten minutes, an hour, half hour?
Nathan Siles (20:01)
We’re designed to be connected to nature twenty-four seven. We’re literally designed to sleep on the earth. Whatever people can do.
Dr Ritamarie (20:07)
Yes, and we don’t. Given that we’re not going to do that, what would be the minimum that would have even any effect? Because to get me out of bed before the sun comes up is going to be a feat of nature. If there’s a good reason, and I know I can do that and then get on with it or go back to sleep.
Nathan Siles (20:28)
Absolutely. I think this is really important for people who aren’t dialed in. If you’re drinking a coffee as your first or second drink in the morning, water with a pinch of salt or some lemon should be your first warm drink. Then, obviously going to whatever else you have to do. If you’re having a coffee, if you’re taking some nicotine, if you need a stimulant, if you need a cold shower to wake up or whatever you need, generally this is for you. This is the protocol for you.
Go outside ideally 30 minutes before sunrise, face east, feet on the earth, as soon as that sun rises. Ideally, if you can stay out another half an hour, grab your dinner leftovers from the night before, heat them up on the stove, bring them out in a little glass container, and eat them outside. As soon as you finish your food, five, ten minutes to gently digest, you’re out of the woods for a little bit of that key digestion. Make sure you chew properly, and then you can go inside and get on with your day. Wake the kids up, get on with your work.
An hour for yourself in the morning is your primal time to be able to reconnect and welcome your biology into the day.
Dr Ritamarie (21:36)
It’s interesting, because I’m a health nut, and I teach people to go gluten-free, dairy free, sugar free, eating whole foods, being out in nature, all that stuff. That’s a peace cake. Getting up half an hour before sunrise and spending an hour outdoors, regardless of how warm or cold it is out there, to me is like torture.
Nathan Siles (21:59)
And guess what? You guess what? You can’t take your phone either. You’re not allowed to.
Dr Ritamarie (22:05)
Right. That sounds like I mean for me, I know what to teach people. I know how to identify imbalances, and I do get people doing the early morning sunlight, not quite as extreme as that. From my perspective, compliance is the biggest problem we have. I can figure out what they need and what nutrients are out of balance, what foods are not connecting right, what their activities are, but it’s getting people to do it.
I’m here. I am talking to you about this stuff, and for me, health is the most important thing. Let’s just do it. I’m going ugh. It’s an interesting perspective that I will think about. If you just relate it to it’s going to help you be healthier, to me, it’s like so what? I’m already pretty healthy. Do I need to do that? Do I need to jump in a cold plunge in order to be healthy? I’m doing all these other things.
When you connect it to a particular organ system, that’s going to benefit from that. Then I’m like oh!
Thyroid didn’t used to be so pandemic and epidemic and endemic. Everybody and their brother and sister and cousin, whatever, and mother and whatever is somehow having thyroid dysfunction these days. It makes me wonder how much of that is our indoor lifestyle that is creating that.
Nathan Siles (23:33)
I would argue it’s probably the most significant effect is the indoor lifestyle. It’s one of those things to tackle that work from where you’re at. Most people will struggle with focusing on that pre-sunrise part. Don’t focus on the pre-sunrise, focus on when you go to bed. Focus on trying to make time for yourself throughout the day, so you don’t have to use that last hour before you go to bed as “me time.”
Your “me time” now shifts to the morning. Your “me time” is now your brainstorming, your ideation, your optimism time. This is where you mentally, spiritually, emotionally, plan your next several hours of your day. It’s the most beautiful time if you decide to spend it with yourself and spend it with a pet, spend it with a diary, spend it with a pen and pad, spend it communing with the other organisms around you, the birds, maybe the insects, the other things waking up.
When you connect to that great, divine, beautiful, beauty of life around you, your life will awaken inside you. That truly is something that I’ve felt in autistic kids who have gone through this protocol, and they’ve gone and went to the beach.
The first day they came to the beach in Mexico with me, they were all over the place. They’re scattered. They don’t know where they are. They’re not able to observe nature. Within three weeks, these kids are looking around them, pointing out the pelicans. They’re looking at the water, seeing how it glistens. They’re looking at the palm trees and seeing which way the wind is blowing. They’re noticing things in their environment. After about six months, they start noticing their own biology. They start looking at their mothers and fathers for the first time properly. You start to see this awakening of the human soul and spirit.
It has to do with your connection to nature. The more you have that, and the more you nourish that, even if it’s 20 minutes, even if you can get up five minutes before sunrise, I hate to say it, but I do 30 minutes four days a week. I do about 15 minutes the rest of the days a week. Even if you do it five, five minutes before sunrise, two or three days a week, I’m telling you, those days, you are going to get into a routine, and it is going to be such a beautiful thing for your biology.
Dr Ritamarie (25:48)
I like that concept, because that’s how I teach people in terms of food or in terms of if they’re going to need supplementation, it’s low and slow. Just start with a little bit, just start with a little bit and gradually add to it. I could think that five minutes before sunrise, two days a week, that I can handle half an hour and then another half hour spent outside, even if it’s cold out. That part is like I can’t do it.
I think when as practitioners, when we’re speaking to people, when we give them little bite-sized pieces that just push them a little bit, a little bit into their discomfort and then a little bit further, it’s much better than trying to go for the gold, so to speak. It’s better than, okay, this is how you have to do it. People say, “I can’t do all that., so screw it. Give me the Coke and donuts, and I’m just going to have my breakfast and leave me alone. I’m going to watch TV and watch the news, because I can’t do that. I can’t do that extreme, but I can do this little bit, and I can increase it, and I can increase it.”
I think that’s a good lesson for us, no matter what we’re doing, whether we’re looking at the light, or we’re looking at the food, or we’re looking at movement or outdoor time. That’s incredible that so many people don’t have outdoor time. Do you speak to that? You said you’re a nature guy. You like to be out there.
Tell me what impact does it have that people get up, look at their phones, go to the kitchen, make their coffee, and if they work at home, they just get on the computer and go. Or if they don’t, they get in the car, they drive to work, and they’re not communing with nature on a regular basis. Tell us the downsides.
Nathan Siles (27:26)
Dr. Ritamarie, it’s biological chaos, and it’s crazy to see the diversity of chaos and outcomes that we see in patients. Some can get overweight, and they can have insulin resistance. Some will have completely hypothyroid symptoms. Some may develop autoimmune conditions. Some may develop eczema, acne, and melasma.
Some may develop dry eye and irritations of brain fog and other conditions like that. Some may have completely flat hormones and not want to spend time connecting with other humans, which is such a primal basic need of ours.
When you when you scan these, and you diagnose these, and you get MRIs or you get EEGs or EKGs, or you test bloods, or you do all these different diagnostic tests, the people who wake up, they look at their phone, they make their coffee, they eat their processed foods in the breakfast in the morning, or they have a little protein based smoothie, and they don’t actually have any bioavailable protein, and then they go in their car, disconnected from the earth, they go into a white LED lit office, this is going to show up in one person as a totally wrecked, alpha wave on the EEG.
In others, it will show up as a completely depleted hormone panel. For some, it will show up as way too high cholesterol, because that cholesterol is there to try and buffer the stress in their life, but it’s also there as fuel for steroid hormones, and they’re not getting the signal from Mother Nature to build those steroid hormones in the mitochondria, to turn that that LDL cholesterol or the cholesterol in general into testosterone or progesterone or vitamin D or whatever it is.
It’s a biological catastrophe to start your day with a narrow band blue light spectrum from your phone, because it instantly puts you into fat conservation mode. It puts you straight into blood glucose spiking and then that makes you more open to addiction, to cravings, to short attention spans, to all the behaviors that your behavioral psychologist or your therapist or whoever else is trying to help you manage and get out of, or your nutritionist or weight management coach is trying to help you get out of, and they don’t realize that that first spike of blue light through the retina and through the skin on the face is going to dysregulate melanopsin, completely dysregulate leptin, and turn you into fat storage mode without you even eating.
You think you’re fasting, you think you’re burning fat throughout that moving period, but you’re not.
Dr Ritamarie (30:04)
There’s a lot to think about. We talk to people, as practitioners, functional health practitioners, nutritional endocrinology practitioners, we talk to people about that first thing like get some warm lemon water, like you said, or something like that. I talk about it all the time, the blue light and the phone,
That’s the first thing I do when I wake up. I pick it up and go, what time is it? Let me go to the bathroom. Let me do my meditation. Let me do whatever, but that’s the first thing. I’m eating really well, and I’m exercising, and I’m meditating. I’m doing all these things, but how much does that counter? Certainly it’s going to be a little spoke in the wheel for somebody who has ultra-processed foods and all that.
How much does that actually harm someone who in all other aspects is doing all the things?
Nathan Siles (31:02)
It’s so much bigger than people think. The body, when it’s healthy, doesn’t need much input in order to continue its beautiful, frictionless, energy efficient state.
The most amazing thing I see is when people manage their light environment, their light hygiene, their darkness, they create a sleep sanctuary, their house is EMF mitigated, and then they decide to eat during daylight hours and no processed foods. It doesn’t really matter what else they do, their biology still starts to be frictionless. They can skip meals, they can spend more time inside, they can do all these things, and they can last.
As soon as they get on a flight, a three-hour flight, or as soon as they have a dinner party where their neighbors come over, and they have a glass of wine or something happens, instantly their body is struggling uphill. I think what people need to understand is, your body, give it an inch, it’ll take a mile.
Do the best you can, but if you’re struggling on a particular day, just like your Oura ring or your Whoop or whatever has been programmed to say through algorithms, take it easy that day. What does “take it easy” that day mean? It means less blue light, less Wi-Fi.
Make sure you have a connection to nature, more grounding, at least 30 minutes a day. It means spending that little bit more time eating your breakfast outside, eating your lunch outside, eating your dinner maybe outside, or in front of a fire. I never say eat dinner after sunset, because it’s just such a big no-no from a circadian mismatch. If you have to, do it in front of a broadband infrared light source, like a fire or an incandescent chicken bulb.
Dr Ritamarie (32:40)
Okay. Versus in front of your computer or your TV.
Nathan Siles (32:43)
Totally, absolutely. These are little things that people can do, but just be aware of where your status is at. If you can start banking some really good night’s sleep, and you can start banking some high quality full spectrum light into your water body, buried within there, and you can mitigate some of those light poisons and light toxins, I’m telling you, you’re going to see HRV improvements up to 70s, 80s, 90s on average through your night. That’s going to help you operate at a higher level that you have never even thought capable of.
You would think it’s relegated to professional athletes or to longevity olympics people or whatever, but it’s not. It’s available. It just depends if you want to get there, and if you’re okay with a happy medium and take a bite and a chunk out of every little bit, then that’s fine. Settle for that. It’s not a big deal as long as you don’t have that rate of injury over the rate of repair. That’s when disease manifests.
Dr Ritamarie (33:36)
That’s when it happens, and that’s where most of us as practitioners see people. We see the occasional person who says, I feel good, but I want to optimize it. Those are the fun ones, but we usually see people who are, “I’m doing all this, and I’m exhausted. I’m doing all this, and I’m not losing weight. I’m doing all this, and my brain fog is getting worse.” It’s like they don’t want to hear, or they interpret, you have to do this, or I can’t be perfect.
Social media has programmed, and modern medicine has programmed people to ask “What can I take?” Whether they’re going to take a drug or whether they’re going to take a peptide or whether they’re going to take some sort of supplement or herb, regardless, and all those things are good in the right context, but if we don’t have the right hygiene down below, it’s less effective.
Nathan Siles (34:28)
Every peptide that people are going to take, you can make from sunlight. BPC 157, Ipamorelin, like growth hormone peptides, like take your pick, it’s all available there for free from nature if you want your body to actually produce them naturally. Rather than from a Chinese lab where you can’t control the quality, why not get your mitochondria, your cells, to actually make these peptides?
You said that the case is, people come in, and they’re like, “I’m struggling. What can I do? I’m doing everything.” It’s okay. Do less. In fact, pull back. The first thing that I say to people is, what have you learned? I’m going to rip all of those things away. I’m going to take all those supplements away. I’m going to take all these strict diet plans away. I’m going to bring you back to what do you actually want to do? Let’s build it around that, then let’s get your light right. Let’s make sure you’re getting up at the right time. Anything you’re eating. You can have mostly as many healthy things as possible, but try to keep it seasonal, try to keep it local, try to keep it natural as much as possible, and do that during daylight hours, and then don’t eat after sunset. Stop.
I’ve seen patients who for 35 years could not lose weight. They just couldn’t, but they skipped breakfast for 35 years. They’ve done fasts their whole life, they’ve tried all these different things. All I had to do was shift their day around, so they eat breakfast, and they skip dinner, and suddenly, in a month, they lose twenty five, thirty pounds. I mean, you just shift the time. It’s really important.
I know you probably talk about this with your audience and your practitioners, but food is light in storage. It’s really important to look at food through a light lens, because that food does not exist without light. Look at the conditions in which that food grows, look at the seasonality, look at the light that is stored inside the water in those hydrocarbons, and then you’ll know what light is being unpacked into the gut from when you digest that food. You want that to be the same light.
Dr Ritamarie (36:38)
What do you mean by look at it? How do we look at it? How do we look at that?
Nathan Siles (36:33)
Well, you can look at it through well, Whole Foods looks at it through photomultipliers. That’s how they tell if food is fresh or if it’s off. You can actually put it on these particular scales, and they can see what biophotons the food’s releasing. Pretty much all the food in Whole Foods as an example, they don’t put it on the shelves unless it has enough biophotons in there to be able to be eaten.
Dr Ritamarie (36:54)
Interesting, but the average person doesn’t have that equipment at home. How do I know? If I’m going to eat this apple, how do I know what the energy is in it?
Nathan Siles (37:03)
The number one test is where did it grow? If you see anything in your environment. Let’s say you’re in Wisconsin, and you see a banana, and it comes from Brazil, that’s got Brazilian light in it. If it’s the summertime in Brazil, which it would be when bananas grow, and you’re in Wisconsin in the wintertime, that means you should not be eating that high amount of blue light that’s in that banana. You can become blue light toxic in your gut from eating a banana out of season. The same with mangoes. Same as other tropical foods. If it doesn’t grow in your farmer’s market, it hasn’t got the right light inside it.
Dr Ritamarie (37:39)
Interesting. So, we shouldn’t be eating mangoes in the winter in Wisconsin.
Nathan Siles (37:44)
No, it doesn’t matter what nutrients are in there. If your nutritionist says, look, all the vitamin E or the potassium, or potassium is really important for vortexing the blood. Potassium’s incredible for allowing the the three vortices from the mitochondria, from the heart, and from that cerebral spinal fluid in the brain. We’ve got these three sort of vortexing spaces inside the body. Potassium is essential for that, but the potassium that comes from a banana from Brazil doesn’t line up with the same potassium that comes from a local source in your environment in the wintertime, from let’s say seafood. Not all nutrients are equal either. They come from different places.
Dr Ritamarie (38:25)
Interesting. Okay, this is really mind-boggling. Give me an idea for the person who’s listening as a practitioner, and they want to really help people to break the cycle of I’m doing everything right, or I’m doing this or that. What would a day look like? I know it’s going to be different from person to person, and there’s no protocols. I do that all. I talk about that all the time, but what would some of those activities beyond get out before sunrise be? I’ve got that one already.
Get out before sunrise and spend it, half an hour ideally, and spend an hour outside and eat your breakfast outside. Don’t look at any screens. Okay. you mentioned, and that will help thyroid hormone, as well, according to what you said. Then, you mentioned two other times where specific hormones are impacted.
What does the rest of the day look like?
Nathan Siles (39:20)
For sure. In most places on Earth, you’ve got about an hour and a half from sunrise until the UVA shows up. So that means you’ve got the visible spectrum and broadband infrared emitted from the sun directly. That’s a time for your hormones. That’s also a time for progesterone, for testosterone, for pregnenolone, and for DHEA. These are really important hormones. We make them when we have that first hour and a half of morning sunlight.
Dr Ritamarie (39:48)
Interesting. Cheaper than bioidentical hormone supplementation.
Nathan Siles (39:52)
You got it. People who have bioidentical hormone supplementation are generally missing the first hour and a half of signaling.
If you’re supplementing that for patients, and I know that’s important to have a baby, to also avoid lots of different symptoms and things, just add that protocol as a first-line treatment with the hormones. Add that treatment, and then you’ll be more likely to have to lower the dose and then have less side effects or any other issues down the line. Now it’s probably not economic, but it’s the right thing to do.
After that happens, you get UVA coming in, and that’s when nitric oxide starts getting boosted. It’s also when melatonin starts to regenerate for that following night’s sleep. If you have any circulatory issues, if you have blood pressure issues, if you have, for men, erectile dysfunction, if you have other other issues, then this nitric oxide is something that you really need.
The funny thing about the UVA is, it’s blocked very easily by clothing, and it’s blocked in the shade, so by trees and things like that. You actually need to be in direct contact with the sun in the particular tissue that you want to stimulate.
Dr Ritamarie (41:05)
Now that’s a suggestion I will follow, because I love being in the sun, but the reason I interrupted here was because so many people are told how bad the sun is and cover up and wear sunscreen and wear clothing and address that, address that fear that people have of skin cancer, but they don’t have the fear of all these other imbalances from lack of sun.
Nathan Siles (41:30)
You got it. A lot of people say it’s a trade-off. They say, all right, do I want to look like Brian Johnson, or do I look like a doll, and I’m 30? I look 30 years younger than what I actually am? Or do I want to have a healthy life? Because that guy’s not healthy. I’m sorry.
We’ve got this trade-off between, okay, maybe there’s a tiny amount of skin aging later in life that you may experience, but you also lower all cause mortality dramatically, and every single condition goes lower with the more sunlight you get, as long as you don’t burn yourself.
People think I don’t need to worry about nitric oxide from the sun. I can just get it from eating beets and eating beetroot and other things. Well, okay.
A little bit, you can do a little bit from that, but you still need that UVA. That’s a really big one, and that also turns off a lot of the synthesis of sex hormones.
We know that testosterone, as an example, peaks around 8, 9 a.m. That’s right when that UVA kind of comes in, and it turns off that excess production of testosterone, so it can regulate your hormones. The sun, not only does it build, but it regulates. It means you don’t get toxicity from over-producing any particular hormone.
This is where if you understand and dissect particular areas of the sun, particular times of the wavelength spectral mix, then you can go, okay, you can accentuate that first hour and a half for people with hormone dysfunction, and then, they can avoid that UVA for a little period of time if you want to try and move that needle up on those hormones. You kind of don’t give it the off switch. You don’t give it, and it keeps ticking up.
Otherwise, if you’re trying to, just like with working out, do you give someone who’s got a weak bicep on the left side like just left curls? No, you give them both.
I always prescribe full spectrum sunlight as much as you can get, but I’m trying to help you dissect the different elements of the day. When we get to that middle part of the day, when your shadow is taller than you are on the ground, that’s 30 degrees to the horizon, that’s when UVB comes in. UVB, as we know, stimulates vitamin D production. That’s obviously really important and then we go through the rest of the day and the UVB goes away around three or four PM. The UVA goes away and then you’re back to your hour and a half of hormone time again for testosterone, for DHEA, for progesterone, for thyroid hormone, all those areas.
The more green-rich chlorophyll you’re around, the more infrared you’ll get. That also helps not only produce those hormones, but it helps structure your water to make it viscous, exclusion zone, gel crystal water in your biology. That is your extra mitochondrial energy system. It’s in your water, and it’s in the infrared light, buried inside the water.
To lay on top of that, one more thing, the UV stimulates melanin production. Melanin is that dark, beautiful pigment that we have in our skin, our hair, the irises of our eyes. We have it on the retinas. We have literally melanin on the retinas of the eye, and they say UV light is bad for our eyes. It’s in the retinas. It’s meant to receive UV light. We have melanin inside the cochlea in the ear, so it actually helps transduce sound into DC electric current, so we can actually hear.
Melanin, what’s incredible, works with water to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Molecular hydrogen, molecular oxygen. What does that do? That feeds the mitochondria. What does a mitochondria take in? Hydrogen and oxygen, and that’s how it moves the electrons, and that’s how it creates ATP, and that’s how it creates water. Melanin, water, UV light, infrared light, helps fuel mitochondrial metabolism. Huge. Such a big thing.
The more green spaces you’re in and the more of that UV light you can capture without burning, the better your metabolism will be.
Dr Ritamarie (45:46)
All right, so my impetus to go to the beach and spend the winter in Costa Rica and get up and run on the beach every morning, first thing, healthy thing, right? Okay. I love it. Now, for the average person. A lot of people live in the northern hemisphere. A lot of people live in the northern part. You mentioned Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois, whatever, whatever. Those people don’t have the opportunity to easily get up and capture that early morning sun and get out in the sun and have it on their body, because you’re going to be freezing if it’s zero degrees outside, especially Canadians, pour things up there.
What do we do? How can we as practitioners help design a plan for someone that takes advantage of helping them balance the light without freezing their butts off and them saying, screw you, I’m going to forget it. Am I going to do this?
Nathan Siles (46:48)
This, I believe, is the second biggest cause of disease right now, besides disconnection from nature, is actually not having a true winter. We deprive ourselves and our patients of a true winter, meaning we do not acclimate to nature during fall or during spring. As a result, what I mean by that is we don’t wear T-shirts and shorts. We don’t walk around barefoot. If we did when winter starts at the end of fall, we’d be able to go, okay, I’m only going to put one sweater on, or I’m going to still wear shorts for a couple weeks, or whatever it is.
My goal for people is to go, okay, literally we’re just coming out of summertime in the northern hemisphere. You have three months to be able to prepare yourself for the winter, so you wear one less jacket, you wear one less set of mittens, you wear one less set of socks.
You go outside just that little bit more. You decide to open that window when you’re sitting inside drinking a cup of tea and reading a book just to let a little bit more of that natural light in. If you do that or migrate to an area outside where maybe you’ve got a little heater, and you’re outside undercover, and you can still be outside breathing the fresh air, getting the natural indirect light on your skin. Any of these steps to move yourself into an environment where your biology is set up for success is a win.
Going into personalized medicine, it’s challenging, because we have to get to know everyone’s situation and most doctors only have 10, 20, 30, 40 minutes with a patient. The critical questions you can ask are where in your day do you feel you can find a way to connect with nature just a little bit? That means as simple as opening the window. Find out what that is and work from there. Now, if people are really sick, I’m sorry, you’re going to have to go outside, because otherwise, you’re fighting an uphill battle, and you’re going to spend way more on medicines and food than you absolutely need to. Your body is not going to get the right signals to kick back into healing mode.
Take a step from where you are, find out what works for you, and just learn that literally, full spectrum light is free. If that was a drug, people would pay billions and trillions of dollars, because of the benefits you get from exposing yourself to this stuff.
Know that that’s first line treatment and know that opening a window is good enough for someone who’s immobile and can’t get wheeled outside. If you can reach a window, do it. Imagine you’re in a completely dark room. You crack that window just a tiny bit to let some light in, you can now see the whole room. Light scatters, it reflects, and all you need is just a little bit, start with that, then start with a little bit more, start with a little bit more. Eventually, you’ll be like it’s kind of a fresh breeze. It’s kind of nice, and so you go outside.
One of the things that when I say people don’t experience a true winter, the real downside of this is that when the body gets cold, we make our own biophotons at an accelerated rate. We are photon enhancers inside our body.
When we get cold on our surfaces, we can release huge amounts of ultraviolet light inside the body, and we can make our own vitamin D. We can activate our own aromatic amino acids like tryptophan, tyrosine, histidine. We can make our own serotonin in our gut when we get cold on our surfaces in the wintertime. You don’t need to supplement all these different vitamin D drugs and all these other things. Getting cold enhances your own endogenous system. That’s where it’s difficult for some people, because obviously, we’ve got to manage the thermal management.
People have poor circulation, and no one’s used to having that little bit of a shower that’s cold or whatever it is. That’s why one of the things I love doing, and I think it’s the best shortcut ever, is if you want to truly adapt to a cold environment, the best as you’re leading into the fall and into the wintertime, start doing cold face plunges. Grab yourself a $3 snorkel from Amazon just for your mouth, fill up a little three-gallon bucket of water.
Put a tray of ice in there and dunk your face in up to the front of your ear and then move your face gently around. What that’ll do is, it’ll activate the trigeminal nerve, the three branches, it’ll hit the trigeminal ganglion in Meckel’s cave. It’ll vibrate the cerebral spinal fluid, it’ll detoxify deuterium and glymphatic flow out of the brain, it’ll hit the vagus nerve, send you into a parasympathetic tunnel. It’ll hit bradycardia, so your heart rate drops, oxygen conservation increases, and suddenly your entire brain is releasing full spectrum biophotons, which are then generating all these neurotransmitters, taking you away further from depression, further from seasonal affective disorder, further from all these different mental challenges that we’ve got, and probably activating a whole lot of other things such as leptin at 220 nanometers, which is helping control your fat mass.
You can still lose weight in the wintertime just from face plunging. I mean, the benefits are incredible. If you can’t deal with the cold on your body and all those things, this is a great place to start.
Dr Ritamarie (52:26)
I love hearing that, because I’m not a cold plunger. I did a cold plunge once, jumped into the swimming pool in winter at 42 degrees, jumped right out and said never again, because it is very uncomfortable for me. The face? I can gradually get used to doing that, and if it does have all those benefits, it might be worthwhile.
These are little tools and tips that people can hear here and pick one, right? Pick one and just start working on it.
Wow, this is fascinating. We can talk for hours and hours and hours, I think, about this, because I am so ignorant about so much of this. I’m learning a lot here, and I appreciate it.
What I want to do is just switch a little bit into the EMF thing, because I know that’s a big part of it, because it’s not outdoors. I love outdoors. I hate air conditioning. I’m standing here in an air-conditioned room hating it and looking out that window over there, because I don’t generally have curtains on my windows, none of them, except for these two here, to be able to record without light, without ambient light.
Anyway, I’m going I want to be out there. I open my windows whether it’s winter, whether it’s summer. Whether it’s 98 degrees out or whether it’s 14 degrees out, I open the windows, because I like the air. I do have a lot of those positive effects. I’m going to see what I can do to work in some of these others.
In the meantime, so many people are talking about EMFs and how that is, and there’s others who poo-poo it. There’s the “powers that be” that poo-poo that all this stuff is not good, but a lot of folks are saying how important it is to turn off the Wi-Fi at night, so it’s not on while you’re sleeping. I’d love to hear just a little bit about that, bluetooth and some of our devices use Bluetooth. The benefits, the pros, the cons, and how do we evaluate if it is worth it to wear something that has a Bluetooth signal or not for the benefits that it gives. Go on, please.
Nathan Siles (54:27)
It’s a wonderful question, and I think what people need to understand initially is the regulators have set the standards based on the highest possible threshold for specific absorption ratings for a six foot-five male. If it heats the tissue, it’s harmful, but if it doesn’t actually cause a significant thermal response, then it’s not harmful.
That’s basically saying if you put something in the microwave for ten seconds, and it doesn’t heat the food yet, then it’s not harmful, but it’s been in there for ten seconds. Okay, cool.
Then the microwave is 2.45 gigahertz. It’s the exact same frequency they use for Wi-Fi and for Bluetooth. Why? Because it’s unregulated. You can just create a device, and you can just layer it on that band and go to town and open up your business and do whatever you want with Bluetooth or Wi-Fi in those bands.
When we put something in the microwave, it heats the water molecules, it cooks it, and then it denatures the proteins. You’ve heard people say when you microwave food, you nuke your food. Well, this is what we’re doing when we use Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
As an example, this specific absorption rate for a particular device, just one device, and then most people in America have 25 wireless devices in the average home. 25 rated to the top level that it possibly can be rated to, and now we’ve got children in this environment. We’ve got mothers who are in this environment who are breastfeeding. We’ve got smaller adults who are in these environments. We’re starting to see a big problem.
Now all we have to do is take a step out of America and look at Russia, their standards are a hundred times lower, literally, one hundred times lower for their radio frequency. Why?
Because, they decided to do the research. They looked at astronauts, and their astronauts were going into space, and they were being biologically affected by these levels, and so they thought, okay, well, we should probably not kill our citizens. Let’s go and reduce that exposure when they’re out and about just going to the city, commuting to their job and going to school.
Unfortunately, we haven’t got a regulator that’s looked at that in that same way to have our backs. We have to take this upon ourselves to realize, okay, it’s our time to now figure out how we can empower ourselves.
Now, what most people are asking, is there a golden bullet for EMF? Is there something I can wear, do, or be for mitigating all of these fields, because it’s too much effort, and I don’t want to buy a meter, and I don’t want to pay thousands of dollars to have a building biologist come in and test, yet.
There’s one solution, and it’s not a pendant, and it’s not something you wear. It’s not a sticker you put on the back of your phone. I’m not going to mention brands, but it’s not a necklace. It’s not all these things. It mitigates from unplugging things at the source. Turn your phone off or put it in a Faraday bag. Turn your Wi-Fi off.
Dr Ritamarie (57:24)
What’s a Faraday bag?
Nathan Siles (57:26)
A Faraday bag is a silver woven pouch that you put your phone inside, and all the signals are completely dead. It doesn’t matter whether it’s on aeroplane mode or whether it’s not, the police can’t track you, GPS is gone, the near field scanner, if you want to try and pay with it, it’s gone. Your phone becomes an electric brick inside this Faraday bag. We sell them at Biospectral. There’s simple little things you can take around with you anytime, and you can do that.
You turn off your Wi-Fi completely and then start using fiber optic cables. I mean, these things are like 20 bucks. USB C from a fiber optic cable. This goes straight into the phone, bang, USB-C into the phone. On the other side, all this goes all the way down to the router, and all it has is a little box that converts fiber to Ethernet. You plug that into your router, and suddenly you’re wired connected.
Dr Ritamarie (58:22)
So that’s different from an Ethernet cable. I have hardwired right here at my desk.
Nathan Siles (58:26)
Ethernet’s fine. It still carries an electric field, but fiber optic, it’s light. There’s no electric field across this entire wire. There’s just a small field at the connector, but you can use your phone, you can use your tablet, you can use your computer, your kids can play on all those things completely on airplane mode when you have these devices, these little adapters plugged in. Then you don’t need Wi-Fi at all. Completely eliminate it from your home.
Now, people will say, but I can already detect 25 Wi-Fi’s from my neighbors. Well, so is your neighbor doing other bad things? Does that mean you should do them as well? No, let’s control the stuff that’s local. People say, should I be worried about that cell tower that’s 400 yards away? Or should I worry about my Wi-Fi? Which one’s worse? Your Wi-Fi. You can’t control that cell tower.
You can turn your Wi Fi off. Proximity is huge. AirPods, AirPods headphones, Bluetooth headphones, you need to go sell them on the Facebook marketplace, make some money from them, and buy some Biospectral air tube headsets.
Dr Ritamarie (59:39)
I’ve been using air tubes for the last twenty years. They don’t last as long. This one in particular is not, but it’s just for short periods of time when I’m standing here. For my phone I always use the air tube.
Nathan Siles (59:53)
Totally. To bring it back to biology briefly, because people need to understand that oxidative stress is what gets caused prior to the tissue heating up. We have good oxidative stress, which is hormetic, which is the release of triplet oxygen that goes and signals the cell to all these beautiful positive things.
Then, we have singlet oxygen, which are superoxide singlet radicals, which means they have an up and a down spin in biophysics. I won’t get into the details, we can save that for another conversation offline. The singlet oxygen radicals that get created when radio frequency hits your skin, your cell membranes, your eyes, these radicals will then damage tissue. They will steal what’s called electrons from every molecule they can possibly grab it from. That’s why it’s oxidizing, it’s stealing electrons.
That means the light you captured that day and that morning, guess what? If you’re using Wi-Fi, it’s getting stolen. The food that you’ve just eaten from your backyard, the beautiful herbs and spices and eggs that your chickens have hatched, you’re eating those. You’re capturing the electrons from there. If you’re eating it while you’re watching your phone on 4G LTE, you’re getting that nutrient stolen from you. Literally, it’s being stolen. This is where focusing on the things you can do to not have all of that hard work and effort that you’re putting in taken away from you.
Stop the poisoning. Number one, stop the EMF, turn your Wi-Fi off, get rid of anything Bluetooth, even bluetooth speakers at yoga. I still pull my hair. I literally do not go to yoga classes when they have Bluetooth speakers that are sitting there, because I know I’m getting completely pulsed while I’m trying to have a spiritual experience. Just get wired.
Go on Amazon for two hundred and twenty dollars. There’s a Bose speaker that has an auxiliary cable, and there’s no Bluetooth in it. You can just plug your phone in with a cable. Sorry, I know it’s ancient, but you can still play music. There’s solutions for everything. There’s fiber for the Wi Fi, there’s Faraday bags for your phone, there’s turning the power off to your bedroom at nighttime with a little circuit cutoff switch. You could just literally press a button.
Dr Ritamarie (1:02:07)
You mean like the power, the electricity that runs the lights in it? Really?
Nathan Siles (1:02:11)
The electricity. All the electricity, you just literally go to the circuit breakers, you get an electrician, pay him 150 bucks. He puts a little brain on the circuit breakers, connects it to an infrared remote. You press that infrared remote before you go to bed, boom, power to your bedroom’s completely off. You’ve got a battery, portable battery charger for your phone while it’s plugged into its Faraday bag, so you can charge it away from the bed, so you still have the alarm on. You’ve got little bedside lamps that are DC battery operated that you just touch to turn on if you have to get up in the middle of the night. We sell all these at Biospectral.
You can set up your sleep sanctuary so that you’re truly regenerating. If you’ve got that AC 60 hertz pulsing field on your body, that’s 120 times per second. That AC field is pushing against your cell membranes, and if you’ve got dirty electricity on your circuits, such as from coffee machines, from refrigerators, smart TVs, from anything else, those act like lightning bolts on top of that 120 times per second, and that drives voltage and current into the body, through the cell membranes, and literally electrocutes you while you’re sleeping.
Try and regenerate when you have electric fields, dirty electricity, let alone your phone pulsing, and it’s not on airplane mode. That’s a whole other 2.4 billion cycles per second pulsing your biology, driving voltage and current.
All these fields, if you can mitigate that, your brain can get into delta waves, one to three cycles per second. Now you’re sleeping. If your heart doesn’t go down below 50 beats per minute on average, your heart isn’t sleeping. Your circulatory system’s not sleeping. You have to drop that as well, and that is dramatically affected by the EMFs in your bedroom as well.
There are simple little things that we can do to clean up one step at a time. Stop your partner from charging their phone next to your bed head. Unplug your bedside lamps. Do those things first, then work to pay an electrician 120 bucks to put a brain on your circuits. Work to buy some fiber optic cables or Ethernet cables to turn your Wi Fi off. Get a Faraday bag, get your air tube earbuds. Just the story goes on. Do the best you can.
Dr Ritamarie (1:04:28)
Absolutely. There’s so many things that I want to ask you. It’s two more questions. One is why are some people so much more sensitive to EMFs than others? I have people who just can’t even go near a phone, and they’ll turn on their cell phone at the other end of the room, use it for a couple of seconds and then turn it off. Like why?
Nathan Siles (1:04:47)
There’s two primary reasons. Number one, I believe these people have superpowers.
I truly believe these people are sensitive souls, and they are literally environmental antennas, and they’re designed to sense environmental signals. Just like we had with a lot of people in tribes, we had people who are good for different roles and different things. I think there may be something in the modern world that may be tampering with creating more of these people, because most people don’t have clean EMF pregnancies, EMF mitigated pregnancies.
There may be some toxicity there. I’ve seen so many mums over the years that I’ve run up to and almost yelled at for balancing their phones on their belly with the baby inside while they’re watching something on their phone. There may be sensitivities like that, but I also think it’s superpowers.
The second thing I would find is generally these people have comorbidities, they have other challenges metabolically, or they have other issues. Now, you often find MCAS, you find ME/CFS and other other diagnoses, mold toxicities, Lyme, these types of things tend to go coupled with EHS, electrohypersensitivity.
When you clean up the system so it’s not, excuse my bad words, but really, I’ve seen some of these patients, their brain is like a toilet. There are toxins so heavily accumulating in the brain, and that’s a permeable blood-brain barrier from EMF issues, from other things.
That’s just an accumulation of whatever’s going through the blood, and it’s not being deposited in the fat tissue or whatever it is. The brain needs to be cleared out. The lymphatic system, the immune system in the brain, needs to be moving and getting rid of that.
You are going to be sensitive to any additional stressor, man-made, anthropogenic stressor, when your brain is a toilet. This is one thing that it’s not a detox protocol that’s needed. It’s a redox protocol. You need to redox, before you detox. That means add energy and information coherently from Mother Nature to the system, stop the poisoning, and your body will detox itself daily. This is the process.
Look, we’re designed to be sensitive to blue light. We’re designed to be sensitive to EMF. We’re designed to be sensitive to mold and toxins and things. No, not mold from nature, but mold that’s absorbed formaldehyde from the paint and furniture, and then it’s spawned off different things. Mold in nature is the cleanup crew. It’s great, it’s awesome.
Not all mold is made equal. It’s just in the built environment that it’s a big problem.
Dr Ritamarie (1:07:39)
Wow, so much to think about. My last question, I mean, it’s not my last question, but it’s the last one that we’re going to do today. It has to do with the quality. How do we choose? People are doing blue light blockers. You can go on Amazon and buy them for 10 bucks. You can go to some of these fancy schmancy companies and buy them for 500 bucks. How do you know the difference? How do you figure out which ones are working properly and are actually going to protect you?
Nathan Siles (1:08:03)
It’s a good question. For full disclosure, my company, Biospectral Systems, makes these blue blockers. They’re melanin-infused lenses. The reason we use melanin is because it has an incredible transmission and blocking curve that we can optimize the frequencies to get into the brain. When you’re a decent scientist like myself and you know light as intimately as I do, you want to be able to use precision biochemistry built by nature and backed by science into creating something for human biology.
You’ve got melanin in the iris of the eye. You’ve got melanin in the retina. We always want to put melanin between you and the environment. Most of these other cheap dyes and tints and dips that most other companies use, they’re made of these very strange chemicals. They obviously don’t use any type of natural melanin like we use. Usually what they do is they coat the lenses in this material, so when you coat this cheap dye on top of a lens over a period of time between six months and two years, it always gets eaten away and changed. You can’t control the spectrum that goes through. You think you’re being protected, but you’re not.
What we did with ours is we infused the lenses with this natural melanin polymer and an anti-aggregant. The melanin doesn’t aggregate, so you can still see through it. We put that in the actual infuse lens manufacturing process. They’re the best lenses in the world. What we also did was we realized we needed to put some coatings on, anti-scratch, anti-reflective, oleophobic, meaning oil doesn’t stick to it. Hydrophobic meaning water doesn’t stick, stay on it, like condensation, so you can wear them in the sauna.
You won’t find any other lens that will do the exact same as what we’ve got from a spectrometer standpoint, a light spectrum, and also from a coating standpoint. We use Italian Mazzelli acetate frames. These are the highest quality acetate in the world, handmade in Italy, and they’re premium frames. We sell them for a reasonable price. They’re only 150 bucks.
We find people come to us all the time, and they’re like, we’ve tried all the big brands and then we’ve come to you, and something’s different about it. We feel different, the dry eye is gone, the sleep’s better, all these different things start to happen.
Now, when we find people who come from the $15 or $30 Amazon pair or whatever, these people, the frames are like absolutely terrible material. They bend so easily, the hinges are not aerospace grade titanium like ours. They’re totally like plastic hinges sometimes, and so you end up spending thirty dollars every three months, because the spectrum wears away, the frame breaks, and you end up spending 150 bucks over a two, three year period. You may as well get a good pair.
I’ve had these for ten years. Literally ten years. They’re just the same.
Dr Ritamarie (01:11:01)
Okay. Well that’s good to know. The thing is when to wear them. Some people are wearing them all day long, and I don’t think that’s a good idea. Some people are just wearing them after dark. Is there an optimal time frame?
Nathan Siles (01:0:11:17)
Yep. So be the devil’s advocate, you blink less when you wear glasses. This is not just blue blockers, this is like regular glasses, too. Be conscious of blinking.
Rule number two is always get natural light whenever you can. Take a two-minute fresh air break every two to three hours if that’s the length of time that you have to go, concentrate, and you’ve only got that period of time to go break.
I take five minutes every hour if I’m ever inside. I work outside, I set up my desk outside under a little overhead, under a covered area. I literally, the only times I’m inside is like now when I’ve got to create a controlled environment for podcasting, or I’m sleeping. Get as much outdoor light exposure as you possibly can, meaning don’t just wear your blue blockers for eight hours straight. That’s not good for anyone. You’re getting the same spectrum all the way through.
Okay, so with those two caveats, you wear your yellow lenses during the day anytime you’re indoors, under LEDs or fluorescence, or using screens. You use your orange lenses after sunset, but like 40 minutes after sunset, because that blue hue in the sky is still really powerful for your wind-down routine of your biochemistry. Don’t just see the sunset and put the blue blockers on straight away. You still need that blue light.
After sunset, 40 minutes goes by, it’s now a black sky. Put on your orange lenses. You don’t need red lenses. A lot of companies make really dark red lenses. They are just not practical. People walk into walls. You can’t do anything with them. You can’t make eye contact with your loved ones. I mean, it totally takes away the pleasure of life. Our orange lenses are perfectly enough. They block all of the blue and the green that activates melanopsin, which is your wakefulness signal.
Put the oranges on after sunset, and you keep them on all the way until bedtime. Ideally you have 10, 20, 30 minutes of complete darkness so that you can truly go into that deep rest. That wind down routine is really pivotal for people. There’s companies.
Dr Ritamarie (01:13:17)
Would you wear them outside as well in the evening if you’re outside? Why why? I mean, because I would think you’re going to do it in front of screens, but why?
Nathan Siles (01:13:26)
After sunset, it’s like forty minutes after sunset, you put them on no matter what you’re doing. If you’re out at dinner, if you’re out at a friend’s house, if you’re walking down the street, all of that. All of these LEDs and all these fluorescent lights that are around, every single one of them will have some blue light wavelength in it. Unless it’s an incandescent, and it’s just a red or a fire.
You don’t want any blue signal after sunset. That’s just not what your biology wants. It’s going to suppress your melatonin, stimulate cortisol production, add glucose to your blood, deplete your insulin, and make you fat. You become leptin resistant and fat if you see blue light after sunset, after that 40 minutes of sunset of that blue hue in the sky. No one wants to do that unless you’re anorexic. I sometimes tell my anorexic patients to eat dinner late and look at a little bit of blue light just for a week, and they put on weight like no one’s business. They’re like, I didn’t even eat any more.
There’s certain situations where you can strategically look at biophysics.
There’s one more thing I want to address, which is a lot of people who are out there at the moment, they say blue light is there to set your circadian rhythm, and they don’t distinguish between natural blue light from nature from the blue sky or the sun, or an LED screen.
A lot of companies out there are now putting very light yellow or near-clear lenses in their day lens glasses. This is a big problem, because it’s polarized light from your computer screen that you’re now allowing through to hit melanopsin and cause this cascade of oxidative stress. What we did with our day lenses is we made them so they blocked 100% of the blue light hazard, which is that hazard that the lighter yellow lenses and the clear lenses do not block.
When we block that light, it means you’re not getting a very strong daylight signal through your eye, but you’re still getting that blue light from your LED screen on your skin. You’re still getting the green light on your skin and in your eye. That’s enough to regulate your wakefulness signal during the day.
Don’t be afraid of wearing the Biospectral yellow lenses that block 100% of the blue light hazard during the day and think you’re going to lose concentration or go to sleep. You don’t do that. You will still be awake. It’s still a wakefulness signal to have green and blue on your skin. You want to protect your eyes from polarized LED blue light at all times, unbalanced from the full spectrum from a tech screen. You never want to see that blue light no matter if it’s day or night.
Dr Ritamarie (01:16:00)
I was distinguishing between sitting in front of a screen versus if you are outdoors after sunset, and you’re just sitting around and enjoying being outdoors. Is that a problem? Would you wear the lenses then?
Nathan Siles (01:16:15)
If people are outdoors, you know what you do? You put a beeswax candle on or you put an infrared incandescent light on and enjoy the starlight.
Dr Ritamarie (01:16:31)
Distinguish between incandescent and LED for those of us who are not so smart about that.
Nathan Siles (01:16:36)
Incandescent light is a fire. It’s basically a tungsten filament that’s burning. You’re running DC electricity or AC electricity through a filament that’s burning, and it’s creating a broadband infrared spectrum as well as red and yellow.
An LED has a peak wavelength about one nanometer, and it has five nanometers either side, so it’s a very narrow band of light that you can generate, not quite a laser. A laser is literally one nanometer. An LED is about 10 nanometers of light.
Then, an incandescent is this beautiful broadband natural spectrum that we’ve had for two million years from a fire that we always experience.
Literally, there’s almost no use for any LEDs. If you’ve got LED light bulbs, change them. If you’ve got LED tech screens, filter them with your blockers, use Iris. It’s a beautiful software package that changes the LEDs to at least red and makes that a little better. You still want to add infrared to that light.
Infrared accompanies all light. Remember that as a baseline. Any light you ever see, you want infrared with it. Broadband infrared. That’s 700 nanometers out to 5- 6,000 nanometers. If you’re missing that, you’re missing the whole light story.
Dr Ritamarie (01:18:02)
Well, mind blowing. Lots of great information here. Lots to think about, lots to consider. I really appreciate you spending the time with us and getting us started at least on exploring this conversation. For those of us who are functional type practitioners interested in helping people really heal from the inside out.
I appreciate your time, and for everybody watching out there and listening out there, I hope that this conversation has you thinking differently about the environment and light and the quality and the timing of the light.
I thought that was really fascinating about the timing of the light, and its influence on hormones. When somebody’s not sleeping well, or they have thyroid issues, or they’re struggling with all kinds of issues, we really do need to look at what is their light exposure and where we can step in and help them to shift that.
I thank you so much for all of you for being here and for listening in and for being part of this movement to reinvent healthcare. So until next time, thank you to Nathan for being here and until next time, shine on.
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