LIGHT is medicine. (Literally.) Stop for a minute and think about it.

LIGHT is medicine. (Literally.) Stop for a minute and think about it. Hold on with me for a second here. I need to give you a short background information before I get to the actionable steps. Our eyes have special cells that when packed with melanopsin which absorb blue centered around 480 nm light. They’re called ipRGCs. Funnily enough, they don’t contribute to our vision. Their purpose is simply to inform our brain WHAT TIME IT IS. Directly to our suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). Which tells every peripheral clock how to timestamp the day; the gut clock, the liver clock, the pancreas clock, your immune system. 20 minutes of morning light advances our whole circadian phase. Suppresses melatonin, initiates cortisol awakening response. If we missed that and we’ve begun our day chronically jet-lagged. Then we go home at night and do the opposite. We sit under 80 melanopic EDI- lux at 10 PM right in our living rooms. Current recommendations from the top researchers in circadian medicine, like Brown et al 2022, are less than 10 EDI after 8pm. Vitamin D deficiency is real but most of us are light deficient. And supplements aren’t the fix. Face to sky for 20min. Before your day begins. Read my April column for ORTHO Magazine and IHCAN magazine, if you want to go deeper into it. You can find on my website on the "Media" page. Save for weekend reading. 📗 And if there’s someone you know that still thinks light is brightness. Send it their way. They’ll thank you. #LightIsMedicine #CircadianRhythm #Melanopsin # ipRGCs #MelanopicEDI #MorningLight #SleepScience #ChronoNutrition #TheCircadianNutritionist #CircadianMatrix Research references: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1559493/. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001571 https://doi.org/10.11 52/physrev.00013.2009 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11818-019-00215-x