Transcript of Episode 151: The Dark Side of Blue Light
With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra, and Dr. Jack Kruse
Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is Episode number 151. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line, of course, and today we welcome special guest Dr. Jack Kruse. Have a lot of exciting stuff to talk about today. Before we jump in, let me tell you a little bit more about Dr. Kruse.
Dr. Jack Kruse is a respected neurosurgeon and CEO of Optimized Life, a health and wellness company dedicated to helping patients avoid the healthcare burdens we typically encounter as we age. He is currently in private practice in the Gulf South, straight in live from Bourbon Street. Love that. As a neurosurgeon, Dr. Kruse’s research has been published in respected dental and medical journals. His popular blog, drjackkruse.com, gets over 250,000 unique worldwide visitors per month from countries like Australia, Germany, Russia, and Zambia, Africa. Welcome, Dr. Kruse, to Cellular Healing TV. We’re so excited to have you on the show.
Dr. Kruse:
Thank you. Appreciate it.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. Hey, Jack, I love this topic, and I think a lot of our viewers and listeners really haven’t heard a lot about this topic. One of the things that struck me in one of your video interviews or maybe it was something I read, you said something that—you said as years of doing neurosurgery, you were killing people, and your goal now is to save people. I mean, I don’t know how you got into this arena of talking about the dangers of blue light or the positive effects of red light, which we’re going to discuss in this episode, so folks, hang in there. If you have unexplainable illnesses, this man could have a very, very unique reason why you’re not burning fat, why you don’t have the energy, or why you have brain fog, etc. Stay tuned, very informative show. Jack, how did you get into this? I mean, you said you were killing people and now this. Tell us your story.
Dr. Kruse:
I mean, to cut it to the chase, I’d love to tell you it was altruistic. It wasn’t. It was actually my own illness that I got and didn’t really think about it as an illness. I was giving a spine talk in Birmingham, Alabama about 12 years ago on some instruments that I had designed to do minimally invasive spine surgeon to a group of neurosurgeons and orthopedic surgeons who happened to do what I do. When I stood up to give the talk, I immediately felt a really bad pain in my right knee, and I actually had to have help to get to the podium to give the talk. Long story short, I found out that I had torn my knee meniscus from one of the orthopedic guys that were there that diagnosed it.
The most fortuitous part of the whole story was one of the orthopedic surgeons who was there whose wife was present. She worked for one of the big biotechnology companies in California. She said to me, she goes, “Look, my husband says you’re a pretty smart guy.” She goes, “I think I know why this happened to you, and I’d like to send you some information about this.” Of course, I looked at her like she was crazy, and I said, “Sure.” She goes, “You’ll have it probably next week.”
I got home back to Nashville. I got a FedEx package. The craziest part of the story was it was a book with paper stuffed in it, and she gave me direction. She goes, “You need to read this book, and then you need to read these six papers.” She says, “Don’t go out of alignment with this,” so I did. I started to read the book, and the book is a fable. It wasn’t a scientific book by any stretch of the imagination. A book called The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari by Robin Sharma.
That story in there was about a very famous lawyer from New York City who had a heart attack during court session. Basically, quit his job right there on the spot, sold everything in his life, and basically went to the top of the Himalayan Mountains. Came back tan, 100 pounds less. In the book, they talk about the guy being an asshole, which I think I probably could’ve been characterized pretty well 10 to 12 years ago. Everybody knew that he was a different kind of cat when he came back. I read the book, and I actually enjoyed the book, didn’t see the point of it.
Then I started on the trek of reading the papers. I got to about the third paper, and I had this weird idea in my head. I said she’s trying to tell me that what’s in the book is for real? That’s not what she was trying to tell me. She was actually trying to tell me something else that was probably a little bit more sinister. The company that she was working for had made a drug called synthetic leptin. It was basically being used for people with anorexia, obesity, and things like that, and they had a lot of success. The funny thing about it is they shelved the trial. The reason why they shelved the trial is because they realized that if people understood the fundamentals behind how leptin worked, there would be no reason for the drug.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.
Dr. Kruse:
The most impressive thing that Amgen did is, as soon as they shelved the trial, they went out and then patented all their medications that could work on cold receptors in the body. That’s really what she was trying to tell me, but unfortunately, I decided to jump down a far bigger rabbit hole. Once I did, it took me awhile to put this all together, but where my come-to-Jesus moment occurred was when I was in Italy at the foot of Michelangelo statute. Everybody’s looking at him from the front. Not from the back. I was standing behind him, and I was looking up at his behind. I was going what’s the difference between perfection and my fat ass?
The craziest thing happened. If you know where the statute is now situated—they put it inside after 1973 because it was getting worn, but it’s a beautiful dome place. It’s all white marble. There’s a glass dome right above him, so the light is phenomenal. I looked up, and the light was coming in. There was a bird on a ledge, like a cornice, and immediately, that was my eureka moment. I realized what the difference was is that Michelangelo lived at a—I should say Michelangelo and David lived at a time—because let’s face it. David is a picture of what life was like to Michelangelo 500 years ago.
It dawned on me right away. I said the life that they were living 500 years ago isn’t the life that we’re living now. In fact, everything about now is artificial, starting with light. Then it dawned on me further. I said wait a minute. The other big issue is that we now control the environment. They had to live by their environment like a wild animal do. That means that circadian biology is the issue.
Then the last real kick in the shorts was when I was walking out of the museum. The bird didn’t tie two and two together, but I firmly believe this to this day that, if I hadn’t read The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, I wouldn’t have made this link. Birds, from an evolutionary standpoint, come from theropod dinosaurs. Theropod dinosaurs were flying dinosaurs. What was important about them? They were the one dinosaur that made it through the last extinction event 65 million years ago. The belief is the reason why they did is because they had large mitochondrial capacity.
Then I thought about David and thought about myself. I said guess what? I come from eutherian mammals, the other animals that made it through that extinction event. The reason why we made it through is because our deep ancestors used to hibernate underneath the ground, connected to the ground, outside of the sun with no food, and they also had mitochondrial capacity. Right there, I realized the key point that I needed to study a whole bunch more was how circadian biology and mitochondria clashed, and that’s probably the genesis of Jack Kruse.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Learning then we’re under these artificial lights that produce something called blue light. We’re staring into our computers, our phones, getting this blue light. Affecting certain receptors in the eyes that I’m sure you’ll speak about. We’re not getting the outside light anymore. Matter of fact, everyone’s slathering sunscreen, covering up, and running from it because, God forbid, it can cause cancer, and now we’re realizing that we’ve actually caused disease.
Here’s a question for you, Jack. Okay. You understand the benefits of certain foods or eating certain foods. What’s more important, light or the food that we put in our body?
Dr. Kruse:
Oh, that’s pretty simple. It’s light. Anybody who says it’s food immediately announces to me that they don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.
Dr. Pompa:
On this show we talk a lot about the mitochondria, as far as this is really why people are getting sick. We’re looking at cancer. We just interviewed Thomas Seyfried who’s saying, hey, look, cancer has nothing to do with the DNA.
Dr. Kruse:
That’s right.
Dr. Pompa:
We know that. Yeah, right. It’s a mitochondrial issue, right? I mean, all the way back, Warburg, turn of the century, spoke about it. How is light affecting the mitochondria; therefore, the energy that we produce; therefore, basically every cellular function? Explain to our listeners and viewers how this bad light affects it. Also, how does good light affect it? Start there.
Dr. Kruse:
You have to go way further back than asking that kind of question. I can’t assume that, (A), you know what you need to know in order to make the jumps that you need to make. I could give you the short course, but you do need a little course of evolutionary history.
Dr. Pompa:
Go for it then.
Dr. Kruse:
This history goes back 650 million years ago. On this planet at that time, there was only two kingdoms of life. One was Archaea. The other one was Bacteria. Most people are familiar with that. Eukaryotes hadn’t come on the planet. Okay?
One of the interesting things that occurred only twice in evolutionary history is that we stole the symbiont bacteria. The first kingdom that did it was plants, and they did it 650 million years ago. Why is this important? This is where all the food gurus go off the rails right away. The basis in all the food webs on this planet are tied to photosynthesis. If you don’t understand where photosynthesis came from, how it works, in my opinion, you have no idea how a mitochondria works in a eukaryote because these are the big steps that evolutionary biology took a long time ago.
It turns out that Bacteria have been collaborating and competing amongst themselves with the Archaea for about 3.8 billion years. They’ve done this through a process call lateral gene transfer. Nature only came up with the idea of eukaryotic cells once in both the Animal Kingdom and the Plant Kingdom. The interesting thing that drove it was viruses that grew in the sea under the power of sunlight. Many people don’t realize that in seawater every day, as soon as the sun hits it, you create trillions on tops of trillions of viruses at the surface floating zone, and those viruses do some pretty amazing things. They have the force—they have the ability to force bacteria to do things that the virus wants it to do based upon the environment that the virus senses.
Viruses we know today are capable of changing bacterial cells and eukaryotic cells massively. I mean, anybody who’s a clinician knows that. If somebody comes down with CMV, they can get really sick really fast, but the problem is we ignore this evolutionary trick at our peril today in terms of understanding truly how mitochondria work. What did this viral science teach me? It taught me everything I need to know about food. I found out that dead viral hosts can still make a virus that’s living, and a dead virus can also make more virus to change more hosts. It also means that viruses are extremely unique in biology because it points out why the enemy of an enemy is often our friend in biology, but we miss that all the time.
Now, I have a deep sense that this was part of the equation that formed for the mitochondrial nuclear partnership 650 million years ago that occurred in plant chloroplast because the chloroplast is actually a symbiont bacteria that a plant stole. For 50 million years in the water, the sun interacted with those bacteria and algae to eventually make something called DHA and oxygen. Remember, the exhaust of the photosynthetic pathway is oxygen and DHA. That DHA in algae is eventually what fish came to eat. Then along comes, 600 million years ago, something called the Cambrian explosion. If people don’t know what it is, they can Google it and learn about it.
Literally overnight, every single phyla—32 phyla showed up on this planet overnight at that time. This is when we began to see this amazing endosymbiotic event that we’re now a part of ourselves going forward, and it turns out that mitochondria work under a very special part of the electromagnetic spectrum from sun, which drove the changes by pushing the viral agenda. For those people who are listening to this that don’t know this and this is very important, the human genome, in fact, every genome on this planet has been found to be made up of viral parts. It’s called the HERV1 and 2 oncogenes; 97.8% of the nuclear genome is made out of these viral components. This gets buried. In fact, I don’t think I’ve talked about this on any podcasts because nobody ever wants to talk about the beginnings, but that’s where it begins.
It turns out, what happened over the last 600 million years, we had to develop a communication system that’s based on light and water to allow the nucleus, where the viral parts are, to talk to the mitochondrial DNA. How that happened? We slowly deleted many of the genes in the mitochondria to force it to do things we want to do. I told you the way we did that. The way this process occurs is by lateral gene transfer, the same thing that happens in a petri dish when an infectious disease doctor gets you to spit into a petri dish. It’s no different. The interesting thing is, the direction that we went, we deleted our mitochondrial genes down to 37. Thirteen of the 37 are critical for the respiratory proteins that we all learned about in biochemistry when we went to our educational training.
It turns out now, for the last 600 million years, we’re the last animals that have evolved through this whole pathway. We’re supposed to be the most complex, but when you understand the story, you begin to realize that two systems coexist in every cell of our body. They’re mitochondria and nuclear genomes. One is bacterial, and one is virally based. They sit in every single one of your cells, 100 trillion, with the exception of 1. Here’s where it becomes really interesting, Dan.
The one cell there’s no mitochondria is red blood cells. I tell everybody at this point when I talk to them; I want you to pull out a picture of hemoglobin and a picture of chlorophyll and look at them side by side. You know what you’re going to notice? They’re almost exactly the same. The only difference is the metal atom in the middle for chlorophyll is magnesium. The metal atom in the middle of hemoglobin is iron. The difference between those two metals are the number of electrons, and the reason why this becomes important is the number of electrons tell you how something can work with sunlight.
There’s this famous guy, you may have heard of him, named Albert Einstein. He won the Nobel Prize in 1922 for something called the photoelectric effect. The photoelectric effect is the statistical effect that tells us how sunlight interacts with electrons. People don’t realize this. Sunlight can only interact with electrons in a cell. The more electrons you have, the more probable chance you will be able to harness the energy of sunlight in order to build complexity, and it turns out we’re the most complex animals on the planet. What happens in a chloroplast actually happens in us, but there’s a little bit different pathway. In a chloroplast, for those of you who don’t know, you have the reaction center, all the photosynthetic abilities right there, and their endosymbiotic bacteria is inside that cell. In us, we collect the light via hemoglobin, and we bring it to cells where mitochondria are. What’s the conduit? The conduit is blood plasma, which is made up of 93% water, and that’s where water comes into the story.
The other interesting thing that I want your readers to know, you have to understand the differences between chloroplast and mitochondria. Here’s the main one that you need to focus in on if you’re a food guru and not a quantum biologist. When you look at the overall process of making food from light, which is photosynthesis, you basically have to take CO2 and you take oxygen. You combine them and burn them to make actually glucose. That’s the entire process that you really need to know. You don’t need to really go into all the 39 quantized steps.
Here’s the interesting thing. If you look at what a mitochondria does, mitochondria reverses that process. It releases CO2, and the release is water. The big part that most of the food gurus miss is that release of water from oxidative phosphorylation is the key. When you have poor mitochondrial function, the quantum biologist like I am wants to know what your BUN and creatinine ratio is. We want to know if you’re dehydrated or not. We want to look at all measures of the redox potential in your body because that tells us how efficient the system is in you, and it’s a little bit different from plants.
When you begin to understand how these parts are together and how they work together, you begin to see that inside of you, what a mitochondria functionally is, is 100 trillion organisms. It’s actually more than that because there’s about 3600 mitochondria in every neuron. Basically, you have a colony of bacteria that live inside of you, and that colony of bacteria has a totally independent life, independent evolutionary history, and it has its own objectives, even within your cell, and that colony has to interact with those viral genes. When this happens, you begin to say is it they or we? Is it we or I? You begin to realize that it’s really all a big elusion. All these processes result in how a cell generates energy and how we use energy. It turns out how we make and use energy comes down to light.
Getting back to your original question, you are designed to work with full-spectrum sunlight. What is full-spectrum sunlight on Earth? It goes from 260 nanometers to about 700 nanometers. That’s it. It turns out, if you look at the redox couple of cytochrome 1, which is the NAD+, NADH, the fluorescent absorption of those chemicals are 340 nanometers. That’s decidedly in the UVA range. You begin to realize that all foods, basically, are a collection. If you think about a tomato in your head right now as I talk to you, I want you to—the paleo gurus, the food guys, the ancestral guys, they look at food as carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. I look at all foods as electrons and protons.
When you realize that all foods get broken down to electrons—because what’s the input to mitochondria called, electron chain transport? When those electrons come in, they are excited by sunlight via the photoelectric effect. What is the redox couples? What do those cytochromes really do? They measure. They’re the observers of the effect, and they’re measuring how much sunlight is affecting each electron, and then they order how that process goes from cytochrome 1 to cytochrome 5. Cytochrome 5 is what you probably all remember learning in biochemistry. That’s called the ATPase.
The ATPase has a spinning head. What do you know about spinning things in science? Anything that spins basically makes a magnetic field. Where is most of the magnetic pulses in the human body generated? Everybody who’s listening to this, they may think I’m talking over their head, but you guys know this stuff. It’s not uncommon. Every time the doctor puts EKG leads on you, what do we see (squiggles on there)? It tells us a little bit about electric and magnetic deflections. Okay? That’s the electric current from the mitochondria across your inner mitochondrial membrane. That’s basically what you’re measuring.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s the definition. I mean, that’s really life, Jack, right? I mean, what’s moving from cytochrome 1…
Dr. Kruse:
I think I lost you. Hello?
Meredith:
All right, yeah. It looks like he’s frozen there. Oh, shoot. He had a good point he was making too. Oh, man. Okay.
Dr. Kruse:
It must be that Park City weather.
Meredith:
It is. It is, all righty, well, if you want to continue with your discourse there.
Dr. Kruse:
I could do that. What I was saying is that—and what Dan was saying. Dan was saying that’s what all life’s about. It’s true. When we interrupt electron chain transport for any reason at all, whether we do it with drugs or we do it from bad decisions we make, it slows the flow. There’s two things. When I talk about flow, we’re not talking about guys like Steven Kotler. Flow, for me, is how electrons move across the inner mitochondrial membrane. The faster they move, the faster the ATPase spins, the higher the magnetic field is, the more life you live. Not only that, that life is healthy.
When the electric current drops and the ATPase stops spinning, you get sick. What we now know from Doug Wallace’s work, who is probably the next guy up to win a Nobel Prize from all this science, is that all diseases—and I don’t want to say all. It’s a bad time to use the word all or never. About 80% of diseases linked to mitochondrial energy flux dropping. That’s the reason why obesity, type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, their train stops based upon the loss of voltage and the decreased spinning. In medicine, we’ve been taught to believe that all diseases are genetically based in the nuclear genome, and that’s what causes it.
It turns out Dr. Wallace—he’s the Head of Mitochondrial Medicine for those of you who don’t know at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He’s the world expert in mitochondrial medicine. If you don’t know anything about him, I strongly recommend you read and look at his videos on YouTube. He has made the case that just about every Neolithic disease on this planet comes from a mitochondria with the exception of the 20% that are truly genetic, which are inborn aneurysm, metabolism. Things like that. Those are not the diseases that are killing most of the people globally today.
My focus has been on mitochondrial medicine since that time. The best way, I guess, I’ve been described, I think, on social media is that I’m a mitochondriac. My entire focus, the biohacks that I create, the things that I construct, the way I biohack patients by what they tell me and what they post on my form, I look at things completely through this optic that I discussed with Dan earlier about the evolutionary history of how mitochondria and chloroplast are linked together. I really want people to understand that I have respect for food gurus. When they can sit down and explain to me how an exciton is formed in a chloroplast. Then I can say this is a food guru that I’m going to listen to. I haven’t seen that yet, and I’m still waiting. I hold out hope. This is isn’t a contest for who’s right or who’s wrong. It’s really a contest for all of us to get what’s right and what’s wrong.
Fundamentally, we’re all in this for the same reason. We all want to help our patients. We all want to help people who follow us on social media get the story right. Dan asked me before he froze up; he goes, “Jack, tell me a little bit about how light affects this.” The interesting thing about the inner mitochondrial membrane is we have those cytochromes. Cytochrome 3, 4, and 5 turn out to be what we call red light chromophores. That means they work specifically with red light frequencies. That’s between about the 550 and 700 nanometer range. It turns out the one that most people are interested in now is the cytochrome c oxidase because almost all the literature, about 1.5 million articles about photobiomodulation or LLLT, that’s all red light therapy, is based on how red light photons interact with cytochrome c oxidase and nitric oxide, and things like that.
The thing that I want to bring home here so your guys understand the other part of the equation that very few people talk about but I spend a lot of time talking to my members about is cytochrome 1. Cytochrome 1 is where almost all the diseases manifest. The reason for that is—I told you before that, the electrons that come in here, they’re highly excited. That means all carbohydrate electrons enter in at cytochrome 1. Why is that? Carbohydrates only grow on this planet on long light cycles.
Now, we have screwed that prescription up. Why? Today, we just passed the winter solstice. Technically, I can buy papaya fruit from Chile in the city I’m in now. Just because I can buy it doesn’t mean I should eat it. Why? That is giving information. Meaning light information to cytochrome 1 that something is present in the environment that shouldn’t be there. That’s what we call a circadian mismatch.
When most people think about circadian mismatches, they think about the eye. I’m actually talking about the eye when I mention this about food. Why? When I go outside in the street right now, my eye is sensing the frequencies that’s present in the light. For example, since we’re using the papaya and December 23, today, many people may not know this. I’m at the 28th latitude. My eye right now is seeing 13% of the total sunlight on Bourbon Street is blue light. Okay? On June 21, it’s about 26%, so if I eat a papaya—papayas only grow when it’s that 26%. That means that cytochrome 1 is seeing a huge mismatch.
What happens when cytochrome 1 sees that mismatch? It begins to spread. It’s got a complex of proteins that make cytochrome 1. Okay? There’s about, I think, 32 subunits in cytochrome 1. When those proteins begin to spread apart, here’s where the quantum magic comes. We start to make abnormal signals, meaning free radicals, and those free radicals sit right next to the mitochondrial DNA at cytochrome 1. Those free radicals ruin the mitochondrial DNA.
Something else happens that’s very important for you to understand. Cytochrome 1 has another component that most of you know about. It’s called Coenzyme Q10 or the Q cycle. The Q cycle is extremely important. What it does, it takes electrons from cytochrome 1 and shuttles them to cytochrome 3, 4, and 5. It does this through a very elaborate quantum process. Okay?
The other thing that it does and many people don’t know this, that 340 nanometer light is purple light. I’m sure you can see this. This is a UV LED purple light. The Q cycle acts as a frequency shifter of light, and turns purple light into lower frequency light, specifically red. What does it do? It takes the sun’s light and turns the powerful short frequency light, both purple and blue, into red light for the cytochrome 3, 4, and 5 for it to do its magic. Now, cytochrome 2 is extremely important because that’s where mostly protein and fat electrons come in. That is a totally different—I should say a totally different system, and it does not use the Q cycle to do this.
The reason I bring the Q cycle point up is this is where you have to know a little bit about quantum biology, and the way electrons move on that inner mitochondrial membrane is called quantum tunneling. That is, in effect, tied back to quantum electrodynamic theory that was made famous initially be Einstein and then brought forward by people like Feynman, and Murray Gell-Mann, and all those famous physicists, but this is what you need to know. Quantum tunneling of either electrons or proteins becomes extremely efficient the closer things are together. Remember before when I told you that you—say you live in a blue light environment. Okay? You have blue light all around you. What happens is those respiratory proteins in cytochrome 1 begin to spread apart. When they spread apart, the electrons can’t get close enough together.
When they can’t get close enough together, guess what? Your Q cycle is like a deli slicer for sunlight. That means you can’t make the proper red light frequencies. What does it do? It decreases the quantum efficiency of cytochrome 3, 4, and 5. There’s something else that happens. The inner mitochondrial membrane begins to spread out. When the inner mitochondrial membrane spreads out, then you’re increasing the angstrom difference. What functionally blue light does, blue light expands the respiratory proteins to decrease electron tunneling. It makes you energy inefficient.
For those of you who think this is too much science, I’ll give you the Jack Kruse analogy. Like putting a lightbulb in the socket back here, and putting it on a dimmer switch and dimming it down. You’ll see the light goes up and down. That’s effectively what mitochondrial heteroplasmy rate is. The higher it goes up, the lower your energy is, the more diseases you get. Until you fix that problem, you’re never going to get better.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I mean, we have these receptors in our eyes to, obviously, the light. The blue light is electric smog, right? I mean, specifically for our listeners…
Dr. Kruse:
Hold on. I don’t think that’s fair. I know where you’re going, and you want to jump down that rabbit hole. Let’s be extremely accurate here.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay.
Dr. Kruse:
Blue light is extremely important from natural sunlight in order to turn on the pituitary gland every morning. What we’re talking about is manmade blue light, like the blue light behind me. I don’t want to throw either one of you guys under the bus, but I noticed, as soon as we came on—you see I have BluTech Lenses on. Both of you are talking to me over a blue light device, and neither one of you have blue light protection.
Dr. Pompa:
Put yours on, Meredith. Meredith has them. Right there in front of her.
Meredith:
Yeah. They’re in my bedroom. I tend to just use them in the evening.
Dr. Kruse:
Meredith, Meredith, let me ask you a question. How good are they if they’re in your bedroom? You need them when you’re in front of this LED screen. Why? This brings the point that Dan just asked me. Sunlight, when it rises in the morning, has a color temperature of 1800 kelvin. Do you know what that screen in front of each one of us has, between 6500 and almost 11,000 kelvin?
This gets to Dan’s point. What’s the real problem that all of us have since we now live in a wired microwave world? We’ve got huge color temperature that’s basically telling our eyeball and brain it’s always summertime. That information not only gets codified in the mitochondria of a special cell in your eye called the retinal pigment epithelium, but then it gets generalized into all different parts of the central nervous system. Here’s the crazy part. That information goes to those trillions of mitochondria all over your body. That is how we develop circadian mismatch disease. That’s how mitochondria heteroplasmy begins.
We have to major ways that we get this light frequency information to our system. That’s through our skin and through our eyes. There’s two others, both the gut and the lung system, but the one that I think most people like to focus in on—because the one in the eye is extremely complex. That receptor in our eye is called melanopsin. Melanopsin is coupled to the vitamin A cycle in your brain. If those two things aren’t yoked, you’re guaranteed to get circadian diseases. For your listeners, so they understand, the reason why astronauts and cosmonauts get sick when they go in space is because melanopsin and the vitamin A cycle decouple. That’s the reason why they get osteoporosis in a year. That’s the reason why they come back and they have degenerative disc disease. It’s the reason why Neil Armstrong came back from the moon and basically was infertile the rest of his life.
People don’t understand that the energies in space are in the cosmic level. The interesting thing for me and my members, I use those examples to explain to you how your cellphone, how the phone in front of you, or the material around Dan and the stuff around Miss Dykstra is actually affecting us. If you do this every day in your life, what are you doing? You’re actually ruining this wireless system that’s built into your cells to work with sunlight. As Dan rightly pointed out earlier, light is the key. We evolved for 4.5 billion years under sunlight. The crap behind me, we didn’t—we’re not designed to work around that light.
Can we? Yeah. You know why we get away with it, Dan? It goes back to the story that I told you in the beginning. We have huge mitochondrial capacity as humans. Guess what? If you don’t, you’ll get sicker. That’s the reason why small dogs who are your pets, if you leave them in the same environment you will, they’ll die sooner, and they’ll get sick quicker, and you’ll have higher vet bills. People don’t get it that that’s a canary in the coal mine for your own environment.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow. Listen, I mean, we—let’s talk about solutions here because you brought up the glasses. Meredith, I love yours because you can’t even tell.
Dr. Kruse:
Just so you know, these are the ones that I use when I’m talking to patients, or I’m working on our electronic medical record, or when I do podcasts. Now, I did bring these because I figured you were going to talk about it. These are the ones that I actually where at nighttime, and they go right over. These block everything between 5 and 600. Just so you know, you can buy these for 15 bucks off of Google or Amazon. The ones I use in surgery have the exact same frames as this except they have BluTech Lenses, but I also put a tint over them called the BPI tint. I use those in surgery.
For example, this morning I was in surgery. Last night I was in surgery. I protect my eyes, and I protect all my skin when I’m in surgery. I’m still getting screwed by the non-native EMF from all the materials that are around me, but do I do things to offset those risks? Yes. You need to.
The worst your environment is, the more you have to get right. The less your environment is trashed, the less you have to do. Functionally, where this comes down, it goes back to the story about why I was so bad 12 years ago. I was completely ignorant of all of this, and that’s the reason why at 40 years old I was getting way sicker than I am now at 52 years old.
Dr. Pompa:
Right. Look, let’s talk about it. Obviously, getting natural sunlight is part of the solution. Avoiding the blue light from all the false light we’re around is part of the solution. Jack, what about people that live in areas that don’t get a lot of sunlight? I mean, I know that DHA plays a big role in these receptors in the eyes. Blue light, the more blue light you’re exposed to, the more DHA you need because it depletes the blue light and affects the melatonin, etc. Answer that.
Dr. Kruse:
Okay, this one, a little history. Not too much. The retina to the leptin receptor because that’s—if any of your listeners go on my site, where I got famous on the internet was from The Leptin Rx and The Cold Thermogenesis Protocol. You need to realize that DHA, which is fish oil, is—the highest concentration in your body is in your retina and the central retinal hypothalamic track that connects to the leptin receptor in the hypothalamus. If you have too much blue light, say you’re on the computer all the time or you’re a trader in Chicago, you have a higher need for DHA because blue light destroys DHA in that track. The key thing for circadian biology—for me, I love talking about this stuff. I don’t know if a lot of other people like listening about it, but we have a really cool system that is tied to this story right here on the internet and the cellphone.
You guys know that we have Garmin devices in our phones so that if I came to Park City and Dan told me where he was, I could navigate to him, and get there no problem. What people don’t realize is we have the same system set up in every cell in our body, and it starts with our eye. The way a GPS system works is that the clock that’s up top has to run faster than all the clocks below it. Okay? In the phone, the Garmin device here, 30,000 kilometers above the surface right now there is an orbiting satellite that’s basically controlling light from the sun using an atomic clock, and it runs 38 microseconds faster than the clocks on the surface. That way, when I try to go find Dan in Park City, I don’t get lost. If it was off, I’d be off by a fact of 10 kilometers on the surface of the earth. That would not be good for Garmin, and it would not be good for me meeting Dan.
It turns out the same physical relationship—because remember, the laws of physics scale go from macro to micro. It turns out the same issue—hey, can you stop all that noise? Thanks. It’s my wife. She’s getting ready to do some stuff. You don’t really need to do this do you?
Dr. Pompa:
Bring her on. Let’s meet her.
Dr. Kruse:
The key thing in the eye is that the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which I think most people know is the main body clock for circadian biology, has to run faster than every other peripheral clock in the rest of our body. Most people don’t know this.
Dr. Pompa:
I did not know that.
Dr. Kruse:
I’ve been shocked that even some of my neurosurgeon colleagues didn’t know this. In front of every mammalian eukaryotic gene is a peripheral clock gene, and it takes its lead from this. Let me give you a for example. If you take your laptop and put the laptop on your lap, effectively, what I’ve told people, Dan, is that—if it’s a lady, it’s akin to NuvaRing. It’s actually no different. Why? How those IUDs work, they have metal in them. What they do is they spin that peripheral clock much faster than this clock here, and that’s the reason why ovulation is blocked.
When you put a laptop on your lap or a cellphone in your pocket, you’re running the clock genes in that area much faster than this one here, and that creates a mismatch. The key to DHA is you need to know that you need more of it in the eye to run this clock faster. What does DHA fundamentally do? It turns sunlight into a DC electric current. When you got blocked before, we had a long discussion about that whole electric potential that goes on in the mitochondria. That electric potential is the key to life. It’s the big time key in this system here between the retina and the leptin receptor, and that whole key is the retinal hypothalamic track.
For those listeners who want to learn more about how incredibly important it is to know about this, there is a famous guy who used to be Walt Disney’s time-lapse photographer. His name is John Ott. He’s actually down close to Joe Mercola in Sarasota when he was alive. You need to read his book called Health and Light. This guy was incredible. He wasn’t a scientist, but he was an observer. I always tell people that humans are really good to see, but they’re not good observers. This guy was unbelievable in his observations utilizing time-lapse photography. He actually postulated that the problem with most diseases came from this defect in the central retinal pathway, and he brought this information to several different doctors. Some of them listened to him, but of course, the bigwigs in ophthalmology, they thought he was completely crazy.
It turns out he’s been now vindicated. Almost every journal you pick up now about chronobiology talks about the central retinal pathway. Guess what the central retinal pathway connects to, Dan, in the retina (the melanopsin receptor, which runs 435 to 465 in the retina)? That’s strongly in the blue range. If any of your members want to really see the true devastating effect of light, I would tell you go look at my Ubiquitination 24 blog post. I put three spectra up of incandescence, that’s the bulb behind me, and fluorescents, and LEDS.
You’ll notice that fluorescents have a huge spike right at 465. You’ll also know that LEDs have a huge spike there. The key thing is they have no red. Incandescence mimic the sun the closest. Now, is it close enough to keep you extremely healthy? In my opinion, no. Did it do a way better job for the first 65 to 70 years in the 20th century? Absolutely and that’s the reason why Neolithic disease didn’t begin to explode until 1960 and 1970.
What did we do? The key thing is, when you subtract out the UV purple and the IR red, what is the bulb called? It’s called energy efficient. Why? You do. You use less electricity, and it goes to the story that you just asked me, Dan, about DHA. The key is you need the shorter frequency lights to run this clock faster, and DHA is the chemical that does it.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. Maybe that’s an explanation for these people that live—the Eskimos, right? I mean, they’re getting less light. However, I would argue they’re definitely getting more DHA, right?
Dr. Kruse:
No. Not only that, but guess what? There’s another fact that everybody forgets about the Eskimos prior to 1950. They all lived a connected life. What do I mean by that? Their connection was to the earth. A lot of people don’t spend a lot of time talking about grounding. When we talk about light assimilation, especially since we’re getting into this kind of deep, can you assimilate as much light?
You mentioned to me before we came on that you lived in Park City at 6500 feet. For UV light, that’s awesome, anything above 5,000 feet, but here’s the key. If you’re not connected to Earth, Dan, if you have rubber sole shoes on, that connection isn’t as great as you think it is. Guess what? The Eskimos, prior to 1950, everything that they put on their feet was made from animal skin, animal wool, all that actually transmits the magnetic flux from the magnetic dynamo. For those of your friends that don’t or the listeners who don’t know this, that process has now been described physically—in physics, it’s called the inverse Hall magnetic spin effect. What does that effect do? It takes magnetic flux from the earth’s dynamo and turns it into a DC electric current. What’s the photoelectric effect? The opposite. It turns sunlight into DC electric current.
What did Robert O. Becker teach us in the 1960s and 70s? The reason I cut my teeth on this guy, he was an orthopedic surgeon, a spine surgeon. He worked with bone. He taught tons of stuff, but this is the number one thing. The higher the DC electric current is, the more you regenerate. That’s the key. What did Becker really teach us? That redox is the most important thing in the world, and redox is a function of how well we’re able to turn the two forms of energy on this planet to a DC electric current.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. It’s unbelievable. I mean, obviously, I would love for you to show your shoes because, again, you just gave another solution, right?
Dr. Kruse:
Here, every pair of shoes I have, animal soles. Just so you know, I don’t wear any socks. It drives my wife crazy, even when I’m in seeing my patients. The reason I don’t do it with my patients, Dan, is because it always stimulates discussion. They always want to know why I’m doing things. The longer they’re a patient of mine, the more peculiar things they see.
Sometimes I’ll even bring them into my office. When they’re pretty far down the path and they’ve really started to do really well listening to what I’m telling them to do, I go and show them the pictures on my wall. The first thing they notice, no lights are on. In fact, the lights have not been turned on in four years in my office. All the pictures up there are pictures of different things looking at light. Even some of them there say no shoes. I say just look. Do you see what the trend is? As you walk out my door, right above it is an abstract art where it looks like the sun spinning out UV and red light because that’s the key to life.
When you understand how to use purple and red light, that’s when your life changes. That’s when my life changed. The really cool thing from my perspective is when we have a—you invite me on to do a podcast like this. We jump down the rabbit hole, and we can discuss all the quantum effects and the detailed science, but here’s the best part. How hard is it for a patient? It’s not hard at all. You know why? All I do with my ladies in the South that come to me with osteoporosis, so when you’re out having your coffee in the morning, I just want you to take your shoes off. Sit on the porch, and make like the Sphinx. Look to the east, and keep all four of your extremities grounded.
They look at me like that’s it? I say yeah. If you don’t mind, when you make your coffee, make sure it’s not done with fluorinated water. Very few of them ask me why, but the ones that do, usually they’ve been a patient for a while. I tell them why. What does fluoride fundamentally do to water? It decreases the amount of DC electric current that you make from sunlight. Why? Fluoride is a dielectric blocker in water. Everything always scales to the same three things, Dan, light, water and magnetism.
That’s what a mitochondriac spends most of their time studying, and that’s part of the reason what makes me a little bit controversial. If you want to talk proteins, carbohydrates, and fats—I mean, just think about it. We’ve been talking about for close to an hour. How many times have I mentioned fat?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. That’ why light’s more important, right? Here’s the thing. Okay. What about wool socks? Could you wear a natural wool?
Dr. Kruse:
Yeah. Wool works and so does cotton. In fact, I tell people—I wrote a blog post called The Jet Lag Rx. You want to ground when you’re in the plane. You can do that because Boeing has to ground all the avionics, so you have these metal stanchions that sit right in front of your feet. Just take your shoes off. Put your foot right on that, and you’re technically grounding when you’re flying.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, that’s great. That’s good to know. Leather bottom shoes, if your—hey, this is what the old Italian shoes are. The good shoes are still leather bottom shoes.
Dr. Kruse:
See, I’m lucky. Down in New Orleans, we just take them to the cobbler on Magazine Street, and they switch them all out.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s it. Yeah. Get rid of the rubber, man. You might fall more. Hey, that could be a benefit too. Yeah. The glasses, we got to get into the real sun, no doubt, a lot of solutions. Okay, one last question, Meredith. Then I’m going to turn it to you.
Dr. Kruse:
This one too. Don’t forget this; good water.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No doubt about it. No doubt. We preach it. What about if you had—what about the saunas? If you had a full-spectrum sauna from near infrared to far. Obviously, the far is going to be good for detox, but the near infrared is what you love for the mitochondria. Am I right?
Dr. Kruse:
I think infrared sauna has to be used properly. In other words, here’s where—when you become a mitochondriac, you begin to realize that everything is an N = 1 gain. Meaning, when I say that, that your respiratory protein angstrom difference tells me whether the sauna would be good for you or not. I’ll try to give you a good for example. Someone with grade 4 heart failure who has fibromyalgia, I would not put in that situation. Why? That’s a person with high heteroplasmy rates. Everything’s stretched out. Now, somebody who, say, was relatively healthy, 50 years old, on no meds, I think the sauna is a great thing to do. Their heteroplasmy rate isn’t great, and what you’re technically doing is trying to optimize mitochondrial function.
I’m a big fan of sauna. I really am a big fan. I will tell you, full-spectrum sauna, not so much a big fan of. Me and one of my good friends, who’s a former GE light executive and engineer, we worked on a project together. We really believe that you need to focus more on the far infrared and, actually, the near infrared in your sauna. If you really want to upgrade your sauna, one of the things that we recommend is to get gold foil, and put the gold foil around where you are, where the light’s shining on you. The reason for that—many people don’t know this, but infrared light, the prefect reflector is gold. Now, I don’t expect you to go out and use gold bars unless you’ve got unlimited resources, but you can get gold foil to do this. There’s a teaching here, Dan, that you may not know that’s from the ancients. You know the top of the pyramids?
Dr. Pompa:
Uh-huh.
Dr. Kruse:
The top of the pyramids were lined with gold foil. Do you know why?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Dr. Kruse:
When they looked at it, they were getting more red light, and that’s how they knew they’d regenerate. They had no idea how it worked. That’s the reason why they were all lined with gold foil. They knew that there was something healing about that red light. Here’s the interesting part that a lot of people don’t know. In sunlight, full-spectrum sunlight, 42% of sunlight that falls to the earth is infrared A, so it’s the most important part.
It turns out, when you look at the respiratory proteins as we mentioned earlier when we were doing the deeper dive in mitochondria, cytochrome 3, 4, and 5 all have red light chromophores in it. When you look at hemoglobin, hemoglobin the same way, hemoglobin’s got a huge cut off. It works all the way from the UV, but it stops at 600 nanometers. That’s firmly in the red. You have to realize that red blood cells are effectively ferry boats of UV and IR light. That’s the way I look at them.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow. All right, Meredith, I could continue to ask Jack questions. Yeah. My curiosity is just blooming right now. We’re almost at the top of the hour. Meredith?
Meredith:
Thanks, Dr. Pompa, and as is mine. Thank you, Dr. Kruse. What a wealth of knowledge and might have to have you back for a part two because I have so many questions. Something that really struck me, I thought it was so interesting when you were talking about food as information as we know. If we eat foods that aren’t naturally in our environment, that it’s a circadian mismatch. I’m thinking, okay, I’m here in Pittsburgh, and I’m…
Dr. Kruse:
Don’t eat any bananas.
Meredith:
Right. I don’t do bananas because of the sugar content typically. I’m thinking, well, I just ate…
Dr. Kruse:
That’s not the reason why. See, here’s the thing. I’m glad you brought this up. I don’t mean to interrupt you, but when you say this, I think this is going to be a huge benefit for people. I got to get you past. I now you just said you had Seyfried on. Here’s where him and I differ. Sugar’s not the problem. You know why sugar’s the problem? You’re designed to eat sugar when there’s UV light in your environment.
Guess what? If you live in an environment where there’s no UV light, then sugar is a problem. Guess what? We have a lot of data from people that live around the equator that they can eat sugar, and it doesn’t cause problems that it causes us. Guess what? Pittsburgh’s at the 42nd latitude. On December 23, my dear, you’re only going to see about 8 to 8½ hours of sunlight, and the only time you’re going to get even a wisp of UV is right around solar noon, which in your place is around 12:50 to 1 o’clock right now. Guess what? You have no business eating very much carbohydrates at this time because of your latitude.
To take this further back, I want you to think about the Inuit’s because that’s the one tribe that lives even north of you. The only carbohydrates they ate is usually when they grew locally. See, the problem is we control our environment now, and just because it is available in whole foods in Pittsburgh doesn’t mean you should eat it. Why? What’s the other part of the system? The other part of the system is that we spent a lot of time talking about was the eye, and how it’s sampling the sunlight. The gut surface also needs to be yoked to that, and it is.
See, many of these alternative practitioners talk about leaky gut. They drive me nuts because they fundamentally don’t realize that circadian mismatches are the cause of leaky gut, and it’s not by most of the stuff that they believe. When you eat a banana in Pittsburgh, you effectively cause a leaky gut because of a circadian mismatch.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow, fascinating. It’s funny, Jack. I was just in Wyoming, and I was doing all of this research on the Indians that lived in Wyoming because there’s so much access to great info there. It was amazing because they talked about their diet. Of course, they were fat adapted, in ketosis in the winter. Then they talked about their summer diet, higher in berries and root vegetables, much higher in carbohydrates. I found this thing. It said that they believe, the key to the diet variation, the sunlight allowed them to be more insulin sensitive, and therefore, tolerate the higher carbohydrates. Today, the American Indians are developing massive diabetes, alcoholism, and they’re saying it’s this disrupt in the circadian rhythm and their circadian diet rhythm.
Dr. Kruse:
It’s lack of sunlight. There’s no doubt.
Dr. Pompa:
Interesting right?
Dr. Kruse:
There’s no doubt. No. There’s no doubt because people don’t—look, people aren’t up on what they’re not down with, Dan. Here’s the problem for me. I can actually sit down with somebody if they have an open mind and explain to them why the nonsense that we’re getting told by the alternative health practitioners about that sugar is bad. It’s part of the reason why I have an issue with Dr. Seyfried. I know what his message is, but here’s the problem that people really need to understand. When we talk about fat adaptation—because Dan just brought it up and it just—it fired off a neuron in my head, and I’m glad he did. Fat adaptation has nothing to do with the fuel that you put in. You know what fat adaptation has to do with?
Dr. Pompa:
Red light.
Dr. Kruse:
No. The respiratory proteins stretched out. Guess who taught us that, (Doug Wallace)? Here’s the key that we need to understand. When you get somebody—say one of my patients in the office has brain cancer. It doesn’t mean that eating sugar is what caused this problem. It means eating sugar right now for that patient is a real problem. To demonize sugar is the wrong thing.
You know what the problem is? That person has mitochondria that is senescent. Meaning they’re stretched out. Their respiratory proteins are at 60 angstroms. They’re no longer at 36. Even when you give them the proper fuels, they can’t use it, so they’re a Nissan Sentra blowing black smoke. They’re not fat adapted. What did Wallace teach us? Fat adaptation occurs when the inner mitochondrial membrane oscillates at 100 hertz. Guess what? That means that all cancers are situations where your mitochondria cannot oscillate at 100 hertz, and that’s the real problem.
The key thing is is to take those senescent mitochondria and fix them. In other words, here’s the beautiful thing. We come with change programs in our body. We need to teach people how to engage autophagy, apoptosis, mitochondrial biogenesis, or what we call mitophagy, and then we can get to the business of fixing. Where Seyfried is right is it is a mitochondrial problem. Not a nuclear problem. For that issue, I am always on his train, but when he starts down this glucose is bad thing, I’m sorry. If glucose was bad, everybody that lives on the equator should be dead, and that’s not true.
The reason it’s not true is because they have huge quantum yield from their environment. The problem is where he is at Pittsburgh, where Meredith is, those people eat bananas at the 42nd latitude, and they do get brain cancer. People who don’t think deep enough blame sugar instead of realizing there’s other things that are causing this problem. That’s how we’re going to solve the problem.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. It’s interesting. Meredith, I didn’t have this conversation with you about—this is a whole other light on diet variation how in our environment, including the sunlight, really drives when to eat what and how many times. It’s so funny because I’m writing an article on that based on my interview. You wait for the thing. I did a video in front of the buffalo herd. I heard the buffalo were coming out of Yellowstone. I said let’s go find them, and then there they were. I did my video there, and I talked about this. I talked about becoming more insulin sensitive because of the sunlight, and therefore, driving diet variation, which we’re a big fan of.
Dr. Kruse:
Think about this. The reason this happens is because vitamin D, which is made from UVB sunlight. That’s the reason why. I want to bring it back further to how we started the podcast. I want you to—I want to bring you full circle. How are foods made?
Dr. Pompa:
Sun.
Dr. Kruse:
Photosynthesis.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, photosynthesis.
Dr. Kruse:
That’s the link. It goes all the way back to that. That’s the reason why, when I’m talking to you now and you’re saying this, I want you to get full circle, and say, god, now I’m starting to see how this really links. The entire system is yoked to what happens in the chloroplast. You have to realize the brother from another mother is the mitochondria in every cell. Once you begin to understand that quantum connection, dude, everything changes. I mean, you start to go, man, this really is starting to make sense, and that’s the beauty of nature. That’s the beauty in my message is that it’s really not that hard. The problem is we have this really smart thing in our head that allows us to do things that break nature’s laws. That’s the circadian mismatch, and that’s what causes the problem.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, great stuff, Jack. We’re going to have to have you on again. Meredith, wrap us up, man, or Jack and I, we could go all day. You’ve got your wife there. Thanks for coming on, Jack. What a wealth of knowledge. What great information. It’s funny that my brain was going down these routes, and then it’s just—here it is confirmed even hearing you today. Thank you.
Dr. Kruse:
No problem, anytime.
Meredith:
Thank you so much, Dr. Kruse. I wonder if you could just do a super quick answer because I know I’m going to get this question all the time. What do you think about vitamin D supplementation, just rapid fire, if you can have a quick answer for us who are not in sunlight this time of year?
Dr. Kruse:
I wrote a blog, Time 11. Read it.
Meredith:
All right, check out your blog, all right, everybody. Give me your website one time again. It’s jackkruse.com?
Dr. Kruse:
Jackkruse.com and if you want to know the vitamin D answer, I promise you, I take it and explode it. It’s the Time 11 blog; Can You Supplement Sunlight? You read that. Maybe the next time you have me on we’ll talk about that.
Dr. Pompa:
I would say the answer’s no.
Dr. Kruse:
No.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. The next question is can you supplement DHA? I think the answer may be no.
Dr. Kruse:
Listen. You can but you shouldn’t.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay. See, Meredith? Him and I, we’re—I get outcasted for that message right there alone. I’m not a big fan. Anyways, hey, Jack, this is great stuff, man. Thank you so much.
Dr. Kruse:
No problem.
Dr. Pompa:
I love the conversation. Yeah.
Dr. Kruse:
Take care. It was good meeting you guys.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely. We’ll talk more. No doubt. Thanks, Jack.
Dr. Kruse:
All right, bye-bye.
Meredith:
Awesome. Thanks so much, Dr. Kruse, awesome to connect today, amazing show. Thank you, Dr. Pompa, as always. Everybody have an awesome weekend, and we will see you next time. Bye-bye.
