The Power of Red Light Therapy For Enhanced Energy

Ari Whitten, MS

Hey, Laura.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I am so excited for this. We are going to help everyone boost their brainpower, energy, resiliency, and longevity. And, Ari, we could not produce a mitochondria summit without having you co-host this. Thank you so much.

Ari Whitten, MS

Thank you. I am honored that you asked and it is absolutely a pleasure to be co-hosting this with you.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It is wonderful. We have a lot of magic in store for our viewers. You and I have created something extraordinary here. And we are going to kick it off with this talk today about red light therapy. And we are going to do a really, really educational presentation. And help people really understand the ins and outs of red light, why it is important, why it is relevant, how to use it properly, how to dose it, what you should look for in a red light device, all of it. And for people who do not know who you are, let me give an introduction to you. Ari, you are the Founder of the Energy Blueprint System. It is a comprehensive lifestyle and supplement program. 

And you have helped more than 2 million people and counting. I mean, it is probably even higher than that by now. But you help people get optimal health, better performance, and more energy. And what is really relevant for this discussion today is you are the Bestselling Author of this book, “The Ultimate Guide to Red Light Therapy” which is the most popular book ever written on the subject of red light therapy. And you can see my copy is well-worn with all my dog tags on here, my dog ears, sorry, my dog ears, and my colorful tags. Because when my clients ask me how to dose red light, what to do with it, what to use, I just reference your book. Thank you for writing this book.

Ari Whitten, MS

My pleasure. I, it is, actually, at this point, it is slightly outdated in terms of some of the recommendations because it came out in 2018 which feels ancient at this point. I am about to do an update. It is really interesting, actually, because I just reached out to all the men, I do not want to get too detailed in the story, but the gist of it is there is a whole bunch of manufacturers that have emerged since 2018 producing red light devices, the industry has expanded thirty-fold. And unfortunately, there were lots of manufacturers making claims that were not very accurate. I went out and asked all of these manufacturers to submit their lights to a third-party lab in Pennsylvania. That is a specialty.

One of the only labs in the world that does specialty light testing. They have all sorts of million-dollar equipment that does all this fancy sophisticated testing on different aspects and nuances of devices that emit light, and the wavelengths, and the spectrum and the spread of the light and all kinds of other dimensions. Anyway, the short version of it is, I am also involved in helping to clean up the industry. I am about to publish a new version of my book, a 2023 version of my book with a whole bunch of third-party lab data to clean up a lot of the misinformation that is out there from manufacturers that have been lying to some extent about the different aspects of the light output of their devices. It is a wonderful book and I thank you for the kind words. And I am about to make it quite a bit better by updating it with that third-party data and all the research that is been done in the last five years since I wrote that book.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

You know, Ari, this is why I love you and trust you so much. And this is why I feel really confident when I am having my own community. And my own clients take your recommendations and follow you and buy your products because you are the first person to raise your hand and say, “I created this thing”. And it is really amazing. And I sold a bunch of copies of it, and it is helped a lot of people but we can make it better, there are updates to it. And a lot of people are really lazy to go back to go make something better once they have already crushed it. I mean, you crushed it, why do you have to go make this better? Because you care, because your legacy that you are leaving on this planet is really to help people. And I just acknowledge you for that because a lot of people would not go back and put in the work to do this.

Ari Whitten, MS

Well, thank you. I appreciate that. And I feel some responsibility to do that because there was one thing in that book that I got wrong which was I used a little home device to measure the light output of certain of these light devices. And I should say that a whole bunch of other people in the industry started using the same device or type of device to measure their lights and putting out numbers based on that. And it actually turns out, believe it or not, that those devices are across the board inaccurate in terms of measuring these kinds of light devices. And anyway, the numbers get very inflated and the true numbers are different. When you actually go to a third-party lab that specializes in this area you get the real numbers and they are quite a bit different. They are on average 30 to 40% lower. And anyway, I got something wrong in that book which is a mistake I made. I feel the need to correct it. And a whole bunch of other people got things wrong based on following what I did in that way. And I should also say, when I email all these different manufacturers in this industry asking them to submit their lights to this third-party lab, I got so many emails back from these people saying I started my business because of you, because of your book. And I do not want to take too much credit here because there are some companies that did not start because of my work necessarily. But it is the case that to some extent I almost spawned an industry here with the work that I did. And I feel some responsibility to make sure that it is putting out good quality information that is accurate and truthful.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Well, again, that is why we love you because you are so honest and responsible. What we have created here for our audience today is nothing short of spectacular. We are going to go through the devices, what works, how to use them, the reasons you would want to use them, and what symptoms they support. And in a moment, you are going to share your screen and walk people through a wonderful presentation. Everyone viewing, get ready, put on your running shoes, get ready to run a marathon with us so to speak and get your pen and paper handy because we are going to share a lot of information with you today. Do you want to talk about these devices behind me before I have you share your screen and explain? Because people are probably can see them over my shoulder.

Ari Whitten, MS

Yeah.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I will get up and you can talk about these.

Ari Whitten, MS

I kind of jumped a little ahead of myself talking about the book and all the third party lab data and all of these details. But let me jump back that for people that are unfamiliar with this area and just say this technology, red light therapy, near-infrared light therapy is profoundly beneficial for human health and for mitochondrial function specifically. And mitochondria, as it turns out, are really at the core of human health, at the core of energy levels, at the core of resiliency, at the core of brain function, at the core of mood, at the core of the rate of aging and the risk of many, many different diseases, chronic diseases of nutrition and lifestyle, environmental factors which are 80 plus percent of the chronic disease burden. Mitochondrial health is at the core of that. And this technology, red and near-infrared light therapy is one of the most profoundly beneficial things that you can do to support your mitochondrial health. With that said. And I am going to tell you a whole bunch of science in this presentation to back up that assertion. Now, with that said, ultimately, this is very simple, what we are actually doing. You get yourself one or two light panels like the kind that are.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I am gonna turn this on while you are talking, okay? I am gonna show them what they will do.

Ari Whitten, MS

Go for it. It is literally this simple, folks. You get yourself one or two of these LED light panels, like what Laura has there, and you flip the switch to turn them on just like that and you let the light shine on you. And depending on your goal or what you are after. And this can be many different things from skin anti-aging to. Yeah.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I think our audience could not see it because you were talking. Here, let me talk for a second. The camera needs to be, so they can see me standing in this now. I flip them on and I feel like a beautiful warmth going over my whole body. Now they can see what these are like and what the experience is like. Okay, now, go. Keep talking.

Ari Whitten, MS

Okay. It is literally this simple. You walk over to the lights, one or two of these LED panels, you flip them on and you sit or stand next to it. And that is literally it. And it is going to be the neighborhood of three to 10 minutes, most likely in a maximum, maybe 20 minutes. But really in the neighborhood of three to 10 minutes is all that is needed depending on the goal, you are going to either move closer or further away from it, you are going to shine it on different parts of your body, depending on exactly what you are after. 

There are many different things. Everything from skin anti-aging to wound healing, to anti-aging mechanisms, to fighting autoimmune conditions, to supporting fat loss, to supporting muscle gain recovery after exercise. Many different things you might be trying to do with these lights. And that will adjust the specifics. But basically, the gist of it is to get one of these lights, flip it on, and be next to it for a few minutes per day. And that is literally all it takes. And as simple as that sounds, we have literally over 6000 studies now on this subject showing absolutely profound benefits to human health and mitochondrial function in particular.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Wow. You can see them still on behind me. I am going to shut these off in a moment as we go through this together. There is a link on the page where you are watching this video for Red Therapy Company or Red Therapy Co. And Ari before we switched your presentation, it is my understanding that this company built their lights to your exact specifications. And this is one of the companies that took your advice to go back and correct things. And these lights were made to your connections and specifications. If you could have any light you wanted this is what the founder of the company, Red Therapy Company created for you was the light you wanted.

Ari Whitten, MS

So as luck would have it. And the founder of this company was smart enough to actually reach out to me personally and say, “Hey, I would like to hire you to help me build the best light on the market and what would you do?” And he paid me as a consultant to help guide the process of building these lights. Everything from the wavelength to many different aspects of the design, to the IMF blocking technology, to the pulsing aspect of the light, and numerous other aspects of what is going on with this, even the fact that you have to set up in the way that you do right there was my idea. Basically, he was the guy who was smart enough to say, hey, alright, let me go, not only just start my business but let me hire the author of this book to be my consultant to guide me to build these lights. 

Now, I will say in full transparency to everybody listening. I am an affiliate for many different red light companies, essentially all of them, I am an affiliate for. And I am also in the interest of just sharing the raw third-party lab data which I am about to come out with the updated version of my book that does that. I do not only have an alliance with only one company. I have had companies that have tried to do that and say, “You can only promote our light but you can not talk about or promote anybody else’s light,” and I said, no, and if you want me to sign that kind of deal then I refuse. I am interested in just sharing the truth about these lights but this is the one company that I actually had a hand in a role in the design process to make them the way that I wanted to make them. 

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So good. Okay. Why do not we jump into our presentation, Ari? I will let you share your screen as you are getting that set up. This is Red Therapy Company that Ari is referring to. These are the lights behind me. And if you click the link on the page here you will find it on all the Summit pages. You will get access to this. They do have a coupon code for you, it is Energy 23, it will take off anywhere from 25 to 50 dollars off the unit depending on what size unit you buy. Now, you can not see it right now because it is right behind me but there is a smaller unit here. And Ari, we can talk about this one also at some point during this presentation but that is the coupon will work for any of those units. You are not quite sharing your screen yet.

Ari Whitten, MS

Let us do it.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay.

Ari Whitten, MS

Okay. How is that?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Perfect. I see you. I see this beautiful woman with red light down on her face.

Ari Whitten, MS

Okay. Here is what I want to suggest to you. I want to get this point across maybe above all else. Think if there was a prescription drug that was proven to have powerful anti-aging effects on the skin to combat neurological disease, to fight depression and anxiety, to speed up fat loss, to enhance recovery from exercise, to increase strength and endurance in response to exercise, to combat certain autoimmune conditions like hypothyroidism, autoimmune hypothyroidism, to fight hair loss and to speed healing from injury, all of which without side effects. And if you think of a drug that had all of these different kinds of effects, even if it just had to, let us say it fought depression and anxiety and combat neurological disease, or let us say it just enhanced the effects of exercise. It increased fat loss and it increased muscle gain and endurance, and endurance. It sped up your recovery from exercise. Let us say it just had anti-aging effects, even just one of those things but let us imagine all of them and all of those benefits with basically no side effects. If there were a drug that could do this it would be essentially the best-selling drug of all time.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I prescribed a lot of drugs in my time, Ari.

Ari Whitten, MS

And you ever seen a drug that can do all of these things or even several of them without side effects?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Not even close. And this is why I cannot understand why every household in developed countries does not have a red light. I mean, I am putting my teenage daughter in front of it. She is an athlete. She has acne, she has hormonal stuff. I am putting her in front of these red lights. My husband is a landscape contractor. He does heavy labor his whole life. His muscles, his joints, and everything are stressed to the max every day. I am putting him in front of these lights for 10 minutes a day to help with the pain that he feels at the end of the day. I mean, his body’s getting older. He is done a lot of heavy labor. And I want support for his gallbladder and liver because we are dealing with saving his gallbladder right now. I mean, I am in front of it because I am 50 years old. And I want to stay looking youthful for as long as I possibly can I want to look like this. And I want the internal benefits to my body as well. And I am always on some kind of detox protocol of some kind trying to remove toxins that I am exposed to in beautiful San Diego. And it is helping me detox. I mean, so many benefits.

Ari Whitten, MS

Exactly. Basically, again, if there were a drug that could do all of this with no side effects this would be the best-selling drug of all time. The whole world would be going crazy for it, it would be all over the media, it would be all over newspapers, it would be, the doctors would prescribe it to everyone on the planet. Your doctor would look at you like you are absolutely mentally insane if you do not take it. And again, this is literally the case, it would be this way if all of this treatment were encapsulated in a physical drug because that is the culture, that is the paradigm that we live in. Now, here is what I want to get across to you. This drug, as you just implied, Laura, exists. It is just in the form of red light therapy it is not in the form of a prescription drug from a pharmaceutical company but the drug exists, it is in the form of those LED panels sitting behind Laura right now. Now, here is the paradigm that I want you to get the context for understanding what this is all about because it might seem weird. This seems like a weird thing, again, because of our cultural narratives. The paradigms were brought up and it is like, no, health comes in a bottle. If I am in the conventional paradigm, I take my drugs and that is what is going to keep me from dying and having lots of diseases. And if I am of a more natural paradigm, well, maybe I take lots of supplements. Well, I want you to understand this concept of Mal-illumination and it is the equivalent of malnutrition. We all know what malnutrition is. Typically that word is associated with really poor diets, cassava-only diets, and really horrific diets, protein-deficient diets in Africa, and things like that. You see little kids with big swollen bellies and that is kind of what we think of with malnutrition. But malnutrition is basically we need certain nutrients from our diet. And if we are not getting those nutrients in adequate amounts or we could also say if we are getting certain nutrients or certain things that are not great for us in too large of amounts in the form of processed food, and things of that nature, and sugar, and refined oils, and trans fats, and things like that. If we are getting too much of bad stuff or we are not getting or deficient in the nutrients we need we have malnutrition. 

Now, It is also the case that humans, believe it or not, and this is not well known by most people require certain nutrients from light. We do not call them nutrients and most people are unaware that light interacts with human physiology in the way that it actually does. But essentially there are many different components of natural sunlight and those different wavelengths, those different parts of the light spectrum you can think of them as light nutrients. And they have different physiological functions in our bodies. They are used by our bodies in different ways. They interact with our physiology and they help keep us healthy. And if we are not getting enough of those light nutrients or if we are toxic in certain light nutrients which maybe I will talk a bit about, we are suffering from Mal- illumination. And a majority of humans, especially those living in the Western world right now are suffering from Mal-illumination.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Did you make up this word, Ari? Is mal illumination something that you created or is that a technical diagnosis?

Ari Whitten, MS

It is not a technical diagnosis and it is not my original word. It is a word from a guy named Jonathan Ott. Who is not well known. Who wrote a book which I actually have on the bookshelf next to me, called Light and Disease. And he was the first researcher to really look at the connections between light and human disease. And doing experiments with lab rats, either in natural sunlight or under artificial lighting, in indoors separate from natural light, from window light, and that sort of thing. And he looked at the health effects of these different kinds of light. And he is the one who coined this term Mal-illumination.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It is a brilliant term. And basically, what you just said was just like we have malnutrition and nutrients missing. We have light missing from our healing from our health, from our bodies. It looks like here you are going to break down the types of light.

Ari Whitten, MS

Exactly. These are the five different bioactive wavelengths of light. Actually, one quick little aside that is interesting. I bought that guy’s book “Health and Light” I think it is what it is called. I bought his book a few years ago. And just last year my dad was going through his old books that he is had for many decades since he was a kid and he pulls out this old tiny little book that is like beat to hell. And he found this book that he did not even remember that he had from the 1950s or 60s. And he knows that I am interested in light, so he thought to give it to me, and it was that book. And it was the original book literally from the 1950s or sixties from this guy. And my dad had it somewhere in his bookshelf. That was pretty cool.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

The irony is that you actually grew up with this book in your house and were literally there all along.

Ari Whitten, MS

Exactly. The different wavelengths that interact with human physiology, we have blue light which primarily acts on the circadian rhythm. We have these photons of blue light. Think when you look at a blue sky, this is blue light entering your eyes and that blue light feeds through your eyes into receptors and then feeds as nerve single signals into a part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus which regulates our circadian rhythm which impacts on many different neurotransmitters and hormones that impact basically all of our physiology, our mood, our energy level, our wakefulness, our sleep cycle, our libido, pretty much everything, thyroid hormones, sex hormone, cortisol, stress hormones. It is impacting our entirety of our physiology, blue light. Now and again, deficiencies and toxicities. Most people have a deficiency of natural outdoor light during the day and a toxicity in blue light in the evening before bed. We are getting way too much blue light from indoor or fluorescent LED lighting, TV screens, phone screens, and computer screens. And this has a profound impact in a particular hormone called melatonin which everyone’s heard of but most people do not really know the full story about something that we talk more about in this presentation.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Hey, Ari. Well, we have two amazing presentations on this summit on blue light, excuse me, on melatonin, I meant to say melatonin. Jason Prall did a whole talk on high-dose melatonin. And

then John Lieurance is here on this summit also. And he also alluded to high-dose melatonin dosing. Make sure you catch those interviews.

Ari Whitten, MS

Okay. Well, here is what I want to say to everyone listening. High-dose melatonin, in my opinion, has a context. it has an appropriate context where there is plenty of research to support that It has amazing benefits. And that context is for the most part is specific disease states. And there is pretty amazing research in that context. However, here is what people do not know, most people do not know including most practitioners and experts. As I am going to tell you about in this presentation, one of the absolute most profound ways to elevate melatonin at the cellular level which is itself a new scientific discovery most people do not know about is red light therapy which I am going to tell you about. Okay. And again, 99.99999% of even the most cutting-edge functional medicine practitioners do not know this layer to the story, we will get there. But blue light is really important. Blue light also has other effects that is recently been shown to act directly on fat cells and liberating fat from fat cells. There are lots of layers to the story of how light interacts with human physiology. 

UV light is the part of the story that most people know at least a little bit about. They know the vitamin D story. Most people think, sunlight, vitamin D, I do not really need sunlight, I can just pop this vitamin D pill and that is a replacement for sunlight, no, we get way more from the sun than just vitamin D. Vitamin D is only a small part of the story of what we get from sunlight. Obviously, I just mentioned blue light. But even with that just UV light part of the story there are other layers to that story, especially with nitric oxide which there are experiments in rats, for example, where they do UV light irradiation in rats that are genetic knockout mice, meaning they can not synthesize vitamin D in response to UV light exposure. 

And we still see that UV light exposure has a hugely protective effect against cardiovascular disease and other diseases irrespective of vitamin D. We get a lot from sunlight beyond vitamin D. But not to minimize vitamin D, it is also a huge benefit of UV light exposure. Then we have far infrared which is essentially heat. When you go into a sauna that is called an infrared sauna, it is far infrared energy, it is wavelengths, invisible wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum which is also part of the sun’s energy that we feel as heat and that heat up our body and generally cause us to sweat. And then we have a red light and near-infrared light. And red and near-infrared light act on the same mechanisms which I am going to tell you about. And the gist of what they do is these are this is really the only type of light that penetrates deeply into the human body. And when you were a kid and shined a flashlight up against your hand in the dark the only light that comes out the other side of your hand is red light and near-infrared light which the human eye can not see.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

We have all done that little experiment as kids always.

Ari Whitten, MS

Yeah. And all the other colors and all the other wavelengths of light are absorbed in the skin or near the skin surface. Red and near-infrared light penetrates deeply into the human body. And here is the important part, it is not just photons of light that are inert that penetrate in there and do not do anything, it turns out they do all kinds of things in the human body. We, humans, think, yeah, light interacts with plants, plants use light to do this whole photosynthesis process. But most humans do not realize light also impacts their cell function in a profound way. And light is bioactive. And especially red and near-infrared light is hugely bioactive and does a whole lot in human physiology which I am going to tell you about. This is what Mal-illumination looks like. I want you to get this context. 

Our ancestors did not have to worry about getting Mal-illumination and having to use technology to deal with this state of Mal-illumination. They existed in a mostly outdoor lifestyle. They got lots and lots of sun exposure. And hey, if you live that kind of lifestyle where you are getting lots of sun exposure on a daily basis, the truth is red light therapy is probably not that necessary for you. But if you are like most modern humans and you are not living like hunter-gatherers live with lots of hours of daily sun exposure this is a necessity for you, this is hugely important, it is pretty much a guarantee that you have now illumination. And what we are learning about here and what Laura has right behind her, these light panels are the correction for this, it is the main way that you can fix it, a very easy and simple way to fix it.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

And I know, Ari, that I have Mal-illumination because even though I am sitting in front of a big window in front of me that you can not see the sun is shining directly on me, plus the sun coming through the glass is not the same as being out in the sun and I spend the majority of all daylight hours right here at this desk working. And that is critical for me to get in front of these panels every day.

Ari Whitten, MS

Yep, I agree. I live in Costa Rica. I spend usually at least a couple hours a day in the sun between surfing, and tennis, and going for walks with my dogs, and things like that and I still use this technology. It is amazingly beneficial even for someone living the way I live. Okay. Diseases linked with sunlight deficiency, just to emphasize this point, neurodegenerative diseases, dozens of types of cancer, obesity, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, many other diseases, heart disease, are hugely linked with it. Now, most important is what is called all-cause mortality, the risk of dying from any cause. And we have this study from Sweden on almost 30,000 Swedish women showing that avoiding sun exposure is a risk factor for all-cause mortality that is on par with smoking a pack of cigarettes per day. That is how big of a risk factor it is to avoid sun exposure. They actually quantified it in this way. They looked at different categories of women as far as their, whether they got lots of sun exposure or whether they were avoiding sun exposure and got very little. And they found that the women avoiding sun exposure had the same risk of death, and died at essentially the same ages compared to women who were chronic smokers who smoked a pack a day.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

This is really scary for women who are avoiding the sun for anti-aging reasons to keep their skin youthful. And I also see the title of this study has to do with Melanoma. What I am hearing is, well, our Western dermatologists are saying to stay out of the sun to prevent Melanoma. If you stay out of the sun you actually have a higher risk, you are at higher risk of Melanoma.

Ari Whitten, MS

Yeah. And I do not want to go too deep into this but to just briefly talk about this. The reason that all-cause mortality is very important is, let us just imagine as a thought experiment, a drug that is highly effective in lowering your risk of Alzheimer’s disease, just as an example. Okay. And it takes your chances, let us say your chances of getting Alzheimer’s disease just to make up numbers were 50%, you had a 50% chance of developing Alzheimer’s and if you take this drug every day from the time you are age 50 and beyond then it will reduce your chances of getting Alzheimer’s from 50% down to 5%. Okay. And you might think, wow, that is amazing, what an incredible thing. And if you just look at the only data you are examining, the only output that you are examining is a risk of Alzheimer’s there is no question that this is an amazingly beneficial thing to do. But let us say you expand the outcomes that you are you are examining and you find out that while that drug is highly effective in reducing your risk of Alzheimer’s it increases your risk of a dozen types of cancer by 90%, and it increases your risk of diabetes by 70%, and it predisposes you to fat gain, your risk of obesity goes up by 130% and so on and so forth. Okay. 

Now the big picture of what that drug is doing is, is it beneficial or is it harmful? Right. If we look at things in a very myopic way we might conclude something is beneficial. The avoidance of sun exposure is very important because it reduces your risk of this type of skin cancer. Okay. Maybe that is true. And I have looked at the data extensively on Melanoma, by the way, and it is actually not true for Melanoma. Indoor office workers have higher rates of Melanoma compared to outdoor workers who get ten times more sun. The short version of that story, without getting too detailed, is actually intermittent sun exposure is what is most dangerous not chronic sun exposure. Intermittent sun exposure where you do not get sun normally and then occasionally you get lots of sun and then you get burns, you get way more sun than your skin is capable of tolerating, you get burned, you get DNA damage that predisposes to Melanoma. But chronic regular outdoor time and sun exposure actually does not increase the risk of Melanoma it decreases it. Outdoor workers have a lower risk of Melanoma than indoor workers. 

But let us just say as a thought experiment, sun exposure increased your risk of Melanoma. And then one may conclude, oh, well, I do not want to get Melanoma, I got to avoid the sun. But if you expand the full picture of what you are looking at to all diseases and the risk of dying from anything that is what actually matters and that is what all-cause mortality is. And we know that all-cause mortality in terms of that, avoidance of sun exposure is equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. That is how much it increases your risk of dying from any cause from all causes. Not a good idea.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Not.

Ari Whitten, MS

Get your sun exposure is the bottom line here.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I am glad we went down this little rabbit hole, Ari. Because I know in my own practice lots of people are confused about Melanomas. I think that was a worthwhile rabbit hole.

Ari Whitten, MS

Yeah, I think so too. I think it is important to the context. Okay. There is another type of light deficiency other than this story of vitamin D that most people are unaware of and it is near-infrared and red light deficiency. For people to understand this, the electromagnetic spectrum consists of everything from gamma rays and x-rays to ultraviolet spectrum to the visible light spectrum which is just this tiny little sliver here which is ROYGBIV the colors of the rainbow that the human eye and brain visual system is capable of seeing, then we get back into stuff that the human eye and brain can not see, the infrared part of the spectrum and then we get into things like radio waves, radar waves and things like that. This is the electromagnetic magnetic spectrum. What we are talking about here is this very small sliver in the red and infrared part of the spectrum. Only part of the infrared part of the spectrum, it is red and near-infrared.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So crazy that a tiny spectrum is so important. With all the wavelengths of light, when we focus on this narrow range right here you can have so much benefit.

Ari Whitten, MS

Exactly. And it is this. I just want to show this really quick. It is this specific part of the spectrum from 600 nanometers to, you could say to about a thousand but really in the 900 nanometers. And as I said to you before, with the flashlight thing when were a kid, it is specifically these wavelengths, this part of the light spectrum, red and near-infrared that penetrates deeply into human tissue. The other parts of the wavelengths get absorbed very much in the surface tissue, the blue and the ultraviolet they are getting absorbed very much in the surface layers. When you get into orange-amber wavelengths it starts to penetrate a bit deeper. And then you get into red and you are infrared, now it can actually go inches deep into the human body. What can it actually do? What is this? What is this part of the light spectrum? How is it that humans have co-evolved for millions of years in the sun on the planet Earth such that this part of the spectrum has all these profound effects on human physiology? And this is what it actually does. 

And we have over 6000 studies showing these wavelengths in this part of the light spectrum have anti-aging effects in the skin, lowers inflammation, enhance fat loss, improve hormones, sex hormones like testosterone, has a beneficial impact on the brain in terms of cognitive decline, and neurodegenerative disease, and depression and anxiety, enhances fertility, improves oral health, improves wound healing, improves skin anti-aging effects, enhances recovery on and on and on, so many amazing effects. And I am going to show you the science. This is a quote from Michael Hamblin, who is a Harvard professor. He is the author of the most popular textbook, a clinical textbook for practitioners and clinicians using this technology. I am the author of the most popular book on the subject of laypeople. He is the author of this 500 page. Trying to see if I have it next to me, I do not at the moment, I do not want to go search for it. It is probably a five or 600-page clinical textbook for practitioners, that textbook of photo medicine or something like that. But he is the most prolific researcher. I think he is got over a thousand studies that he is done on this subject. 

And what he says on red and near-infrared light therapy is also called low-level light therapy or photo bio modulation. Photo is light, bio is biology and modulation is change. It is using light to change your biology. He says this is more than an alternative kind of medical treatment. It is a whole new method to control cellular processes and modulate living organisms by precise alterations in the chemistry of biomolecules. 

Okay. How does this work? Let us talk about mechanisms. How is this interacting with our physiology? Again, I mentioned blue light before going into our eyes, feeding back into the circadian clock, the suprachiasmatic nucleus in our brain, all these different neurotransmitters and hormones are affected. UV light hits our skin and leads to the synthesis of a hormone that we call vitamin D which has an impact and influence on over 2000 genes in our body as involved in immune health, musculoskeletal health, and many other aspects of our physiology. How does this red and near-infrared light thing work? Well, here is a list. If you go into the textbook written by Michael Hamblin, you will find a list like this of 50 different mechanisms that we know are affected by red light. The ERK, Fox M1 pathway, the PPAR Gamma, the RUNX2 pathway, and the transforming growth factor pathway, and the hypoxia-inducible factor, on and on and on. And all of this sounds very overwhelming. I am going to simplify this for you.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay. Good. Thank you. Because I know all of that. That is not the slide to take a picture of, that is not what matters. Matters is what Ari going to break down for you.

Ari Whitten, MS

Here is what it boils down to. There are three primary mechanisms that you need to understand as far as how this works. The first one is the photons are out in your infrared light directly interact with our mitochondria and stimulate mitochondrial energy production. Okay. There is a very direct, very simple way. Light photons, literally, and physically the photons are interacting with part of the mitochondria, enhancing the ability of the mitochondria to produce energy. Number two is hormetic stress. And this is something that you are going to hear from me in many of the interviews that I do in the summit, in particular, the one that I do with Datis Kharrazian and it is something that we emphasize there. And hormetic stress is basically transient metabolic stress, beneficial stress that stimulates adaptations that make us stronger.  Exercise is the classic hormetic stressor. But also things like intermittent fasting, heat exposure like sauna, cold exposure like cold plunging, breath-holding practices, certain phytochemicals, certain other chemicals, and red and near-infrared light therapy are hormetic stressors. It is a transient low-level beneficial stress that stimulates adaptations that make you stronger and more resilient. And a lot of that has to do with how the mitochondria respond. And the third one also involves mitochondria and it is something called retrograde signaling. For a long time in biology, the central dogma of biology was that DNA was the big boss. DNA controls everything else. DNA, your genes give the instructions for what proteins are made and how your biology behaves. And we now know that whole paradigm got upended by the discovery of the field of epigenetics. And the realization that actually our genes are responding which genes get turned on and which get turned off is a function of the inputs from the environment. And what is a huge factor in sensing those inputs from the environment and then translating those messages back to the nucleus of the cell that contains our DNA and deciding which genes get turned on and which genes get turned off is our mitochondria. 

Our mitochondria are sending signals, are sensing things, sensing the environment, and then sending signals back to the nucleus of the cell. It is actually in large part what is going on at the mitochondrial level that is deciding which genes get expressed or not expressed. And red and near-infrared light therapy is a way that we send signals to our mitochondria to beneficially modulate gene expression literally your DNA, what genes are getting turned on and off. The first mechanism just stimulating ATP production at the level of the mitochondria. These photons of light are directly interacting with our mitochondria in a way that stimulates mitochondrial energy production. This is a paper from Michael Hamblin. That is the same Harvard researcher I mentioned before, Harvard professor. He said, “Several pieces of evidence suggest that mitochondria are responsible for the cellular response to red visible and near-infrared light”. And he goes on to describe the different experiments. This is basically what is going on. We have these different complexes on the respiratory chain or the electron transport chain in our mitochondria, complex one, two, three, four, and five. And these red and near-infrared light photons act on a part of these complexes in our electron transport chain called cytochrome c oxidase. And it is literally like a receptor for photons of light. It is put there, it is in our biology, it is designed in such a way to accept photons of light, specifically in the red and near-infrared spectrum, and that facilitates our mitochondria being able to efficiently produce ATP. Another way of saying this.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Literally, we were not engineered to be inside and out of the sun. What I am hearing you say is we are engineered to accept light as a way to help us make energy. Sorry, I interrupted you. But that is what I am hearing here.

Ari Whitten, MS

That is exactly what I was going to say. You said exactly what I wanted people to get from it. Thank you.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay. Good.

Ari Whitten, MS

Okay. And this just emphasizes it. When we look at the absorption of light by the cytochrome c oxidase it is specifically only in the red part of the spectrum, 600 to 700 nanometers, and the near-infrared part of the spectrum that cytochrome c oxidase. This part of the mitochondria absorbs light. It is only those parts of the light spectrum that activate the mitochondria in this way. Okay. The way that this works is nitric oxide largely due to various kinds of stressors that can build up in the mitochondria. And nitric oxide competes with oxygen for entry into the electron transport chain in mitochondria to help facilitate energy production. When you get red and near-infrared light exposure in there it boots out the nitric oxide and allows oxygen in to facilitate healthy energy production at the mitochondrial level. 

Again, you can think of this as a required essential nutrient. In the same way we think about food we have certain essential nutrients that our body needs to function properly. Red and near-infrared light is an essential light nutrient for your mitochondria to produce energy efficiently. Okay. Mechanism number two or hormetic stress. Again, this is transient metabolic stress that by stressing us out temporarily stimulates our body to make adaptations that ultimately make it stronger literally in response to exercise, to heat, to cold, to red an near-infrared light it increases autophagy, it increases the robustness of the internal antioxidant system, so the next time that we are exposed to oxidative stress that internal antioxidants system can neutralize that stress more efficiently. There are many other mechanisms heat shock proteins, FOXO3, there are several other mechanisms that are involved in building up the armor that protects us against damage from future exposures to stress. But this is basically how it works. In the same way that challenging your bicep muscle by lifting a heavyweight stimulates that muscle to grow bigger and stronger we do the exact same thing internally at the cellular level and at the mitochondrial level, we turn challenges into strength. Okay. And human biology is designed to respond in highly beneficial ways to certain types of biological challenges, certain types of hormetic stressors, exercise, fasting, heat, cold, red and near-infrared light, and breath holding practices are the main ones. 

And as we build these things up basically we become, just as a muscle grows stronger in response to challenge we become stronger internally at the mitochondrial level. And in terms of our oxidant free radical neutralization system, we become more strong and more robust in our ability to prevent damage upon exposure to future stressors. Red near-infrared light is a way that we do that. Number three, as I mentioned before, is retrograde signaling. When we have red and near-infrared light exposure it interacts with our mitochondria which then send signals back to the nucleus of the cell that contains our DNA that influences which genes get turned on and off. It influences the proteins that are made which ultimately dictates, is the cell functioning in a healthy or unhealthy way. 

We can literally influence very directly whether we are expressing healthy or unhealthy genes by using red and near-infrared light. Mechanism number four, and this is what I was alluding to earlier about melatonin. This is a new discovery. New scientific discovery really just in the last year or two. It used to be thought that melatonin was produced by the pineal gland. We have the pineal gland in the brain. And the primary thing that is influencing it is blue light entering the eyes again, feeding back into the circadian clock in the brain. And that blue light signal, and specifically that blue light suppresses melatonin levels from the pineal gland. And then the absence of blue light, when the sun goes down, when we have darkness, the pineal gland starts producing more melatonin. And that is been the whole story about melatonin. It is produced by the pineal gland in the brain. It is involved in sleep. It is a sleep hormone. That is the melatonin story as it existed. Now, several years ago it was discovered that melatonin, it turns out, is the most important mitochondrial antioxidant in existence. And that our cells, our mitochondria throughout our whole body need to be bathed, are designed to be bathed in mitochondria every single night.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Mitochondria need to be bathed.

Ari Whitten, MS

Mitochondria are designed to be bathed in melatonin single night. And that melatonin acts as a direct antioxidant which helps protect mitochondria and it interacts with our internal antioxidant defense system, things like glutathione, and superoxide dismutase, and catalase, and heme oxygenates. These very powerful antioxidant and detoxification enzymes inside of our cells, inside of our mitochondria that ultimately protect ourselves from damage and aging. And melatonin recharges that system every night. And that is how the story was talked about. And we knew that artificial light at night when you get too much blue light from indoor lighting in screens, computers, phones, and things like that, that it suppresses the melatonin production from the pineal gland massively. Okay. Now what is new. And largely thanks to the work of a  legendary melatonin researcher named Russell Reiter. Who is been doing melatonin research for decades. They did experiments a few years ago on mice where they removed the pineal gland and then they measured levels of melatonin at the mitochondrial level in cells throughout the body. And they found that mice that had no pineal gland had the same levels of melatonin at the level of mitochondria throughout their body as mice with a pineal gland. That removing the pineal gland source of melatonin did not influence how much melatonin was actually in their body. And what they then discovered after that is that melatonin is such an important molecule for mitochondrial health that millions and millions of years ago, melatonin, mitochondria, I should say, evolved the ability to produce their own supply of melatonin. Okay. All of the mitochondria throughout our whole body, in our brain, in our muscles, in our bones, in our liver, in our intestines, they all produce melatonin. It does not only come from the pineal gland, it is coming from the mitochondria throughout our whole body. Guess what, Laura, guess what? The number one thing is that stimulates those mitochondria to produce melatonin.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Red light.

Ari Whitten, MS

You got it. That is the big discovery. Interestingly, it turns out actually exercise and several other types of automatic stress actually cause the mitochondria to produce a lot more melatonin but red and near-infrared light stimulated very strongly. And this is quite an amazing discovery. There is lots going on with melatonin. We have other people in the summit that are speaking about this. But melatonin has a very profound effect on protecting mitochondria and preventing some of the processes that drive cellular aging, senescence, impaired autophagy, accumulation of cellular damage, loss of healthy protein folding, and so on. And melatonin is directly fighting those processes. Again, it is also interacting with our internal antioxidant defense system, the glutathione system in particular, and recharging that system every night while we sleep. Again, the big shift in thinking is to realize that this does not only come from our pineal gland at night while we sleep and it does not only come from taking melatonin supplements. I would actually argue that the most important source and the most powerful source and the one that is most likely to be regulated in a balanced way without side effects is by using red and near-infrared light to stimulate your own cellular mitochondrial supply of melatonin.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So powerful. This may be the single most critical point that people can get out of this presentation today. Ari, in the 10 minutes or so that we left, believe it or not, we have been talking for nearly an hour already. But in the time we have left I want to make sure we covered dosing and whatever other high points you want. I just want to have you thinking in your.

Ari Whitten, MS

You got to give me more than 10 minutes and I will skim the rest. Okay. I want to emphasize this because again, this is a new discovery. I think it is going to turn out that melatonin is playing a way bigger role in human physiology and human health and disease prevention and aging and then people realize. And I think that red and near-infrared light and sunlight are way more important than people realize. That humans need sunlight and we need red and near-infrared light. It is a big aspect of slowing down the aging process and preventing disease at the cellular level. Okay. There are other potential mechanisms that I could talk about here. I am going to skip over this EZ water, Gerald Pollack’s work. It turns out red and near-infrared light. Also, influence essentially the health and the structure of the water in our cells. And there is research is suggesting this also relates to how efficiently mitochondria work. 

There are other more theoretical mechanisms at play including how light specifically red light interacts with chlorophyll metabolites. We get certain compounds from our diet. This can interact with light and it turns out that this also influences energy production and mitochondrial function at the cellular level. And ultimately what this is doing is translating into increases in cell energy production, decreased inflammation, speeding up wound healing, boosting fat loss, and so on and so forth. Okay. Some of the benefits, reversing skin aging. And I would not go over all the studies. But you can see some of the studies. And maybe after I get through this, Laura, you can ask me any questions and I can show you some studies if you like.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

And I just want to say, I know you are coming out with the updated version of this book, but here is the beauty about Ari’s work is in the back of this book are all of the studies that you reference, I mean, literally, it is all in here, everything. I mean, your books are very complete.

Ari Whitten, MS

Yeah. As far as reversing skin aging, it has been shown to reduce signs of damage, DNA damage, and reducing wrinkles, reducing color patches and hyperpigmentation, enhancing collagen synthesis and fibroblast production of collagen. It is been shown to combat other skin conditions like acne, keloids, vitiligo, burns, and psoriasis, and so on, speeding up, wound healing, etc. In the same vein, it is been shown to reduce cellulite really through the same mechanisms of supporting healthy collagen and skin health more broadly. Collagen and elastin boost blood circulation and blood vessel health.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

This whole cellulite thing is huge. I mean, do you know how many women want to know how do I get rid of cellulite?

Ari Whitten, MS

Totally. And it is supporting healthy skin more than anything. Okay. Skipping over studies. Hair loss and regrowing hair, basically, there are three phases that hair goes through the antigen telogen and catagen phases. And one is new growth and one is stalling and dying off. And basically, red and near-infrared light supports the growth phase and the maintenance phase and minimizes the amount of hair follicles that are dying.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Can I pause you? I know we are hurrying but I really want to spend one second on hair loss. There are different types of hair loss. There is hair loss that is just part of as we age our hair thins. Then there is autoimmune hair loss. Are there studies that show even people with an autoimmune condition causing their hair loss can benefit from this?

Ari Whitten, MS

I do not know. That is a good question. I am not aware of any studies on autoimmune hair loss. Just based on the mechanisms I would suspect that it would help at least a little bit. But if it is driven by autoimmunity, I do not know how much it is going to impact that. Now, what I will show you in a second here relating to autoimmunity.It can also slow down autoimmune processes. Let me get there in a second. Again, by supporting collagen production it is also going to speed up wound healing. And we have lots and lots of evidence supporting that various kinds of wounds, everything from cuts to diabetic, ulcers to athletic injuries and sprained ankles, everything heals faster. There are studies in athletes with sprained ankles where they go with no red light therapy or with red light therapy and the ones that do red light therapy get back on the field literally twice as fast, instead of being out for six weeks they are out for three weeks. And it is very consistent in its ability to essentially double the rate of healing, of injuries, of various kinds.

And it works in all tissues, it works in skin, it works in tendons, it works in bone, it works in muscle. Okay. And the reason why it has all of these different effects, everything from skin effects to supporting hair follicles to lots and lots of other areas that I am going to tell you about. It sounds almost like snake oil that it could affect all these different physiological systems. But the reason why is very simple. Virtually all of the energy that virtually all of that the trillions of cells in our body run on from our brain to our thyroid gland, to our muscles, to our skin, to our bone. They are running, they are doing their jobs based on the energy produced by mitochondria. If the energy supply is better, if those cells are producing energy in greater abundance and more efficiently those cells work more efficiently. They do their job better, if their brain cells they do their brain cell job better, if their thyroid gland cells they produce thyroid gland, thyroid hormone better, if they are muscle cells they produce strength and energy better to support muscle function better. Everything works better when the energy supply to those cells is better. And this is one of the essential nutrients to support the energy supply of your cells. That is why it affects essentially everything in a beneficial way.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

That is such a good explanation. Ari, that is such a good explanation. I mean, everybody has been in a situation where the electricity was cut off at your house and nothing works. Do not open the fridge, you do not want to lose the cold air in the fridge, you can not run your TV anymore, you can not run air conditioning or heating in some cases, if it is not again, I mean, it is no different, right? You shut off the energy in your body it is not going to run, you boost the energy in your body everything runs.

Ari Whitten, MS

That is right. It is also been shown in the context of chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia to reduce pain symptoms and to increase energy levels. And again, you are supporting energy production at the cellular level. Enhance quality of life, decrease pain, decreased muscle spasm, decreased morning stiffness, decreased total tender point number in fibromyalgia cases on and on and on. Hashimoto’s hypothyroidism there is several amazing studies here where in one study from 2010, 47% of the Hypothyroid patients who just received ten sessions of red light therapy maintained normal thyroid hormones without thyroid medication at the end of the nine-month follow-up, 47% of people were able to do that. 

They also noticed a decline in TPO antibodies by 39% and there is there are several other studies where. Where is the one I am looking for? Okay. In this one from 2003 in the Ukraine, they found 50 to 75% of people who had post-surgical hypothyroidism were able to decrease their medication requirements by using red light therapy. And there are several other studies where they have shown that a huge proportion of people are either able to reduce or completely eliminate their thyroid hormone medication as a result of doing red light therapy. Cancer, I am going to skip over this one. Do not use red light therapy direct on cancer tumors themselves. But when it is used systemically it is been shown to enhance cancer survival in cancer patients of various kinds.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

What you are saying is do not put it right over cancer. If it is an internal cancer you would not use it in some kind of. It is okay on the outside of your body if you have cancer to use red light.

Ari Whitten, MS

Basically do not use it directly on tumors. Just to err on the side of caution. It actually has not been studied, we do not know yet. But just to err on the side of caution, basically, researchers in that field maybe are saying, if you have got a tumor here on your arm do not do red light therapy direct on the tumor do it on other parts of your body to enhance overall immune function to help your immune system better fight off that cancer. Okay. Other types of autoimmune conditions have also been shown to benefit from this rheumatoid arthritis. For example, there are new studies that have come out very recently showing improvements in eHealth using red light therapy, depression, and anxiety, several studies here showing it combats depression and anxiety in a very significant way. This is seven out of ten achieved remission based on the, six out of ten achieved the score of remission and depression based on the Ham-D scale, the Hamilton depression score, and in terms of anxiety, seven out of ten achieved remission on the Hamilton anxiety score. Powerful effects there by using this on your brain. 

And again, because this light penetrates deep into the tissues of the body it actually has the capacity to penetrate not only through the skin, not only through layers of fat but also even through the human skull, so that you get photons of light directly into the brain. Improving cognitive performance again for the same reason, and combating neurological disease, improving fertility. And let me show you some of my favorite benefits here. One that is relevant to a lot of people is combating osteoarthritis and reducing pain. This is a huge thing for a lot of people and it is very effective for that. Oral health and fighting gum disease in particular, improving gum health is another major one. And let me skip ahead here since I know we are running short on time. Actually, I do want to mention this one, stem cells. Actually, this is a bit of a deeper discussion, maybe I will just do a very short version.

The short version is this, there is a lot of research to show that even, our whole focus of the health care paradigm right now as it stands, especially the conventional medical paradigm, even to a large extent to the alternative and functional medicine paradigm is about disease, it is focused on disease and it is focused on understanding disease and reversing disease. And we all grew up in a cultural narrative where we think, if only we had a cure for heart disease, if only we had a cure for cancer then everything would be so much better, we would be so much healthier, healthier, we would live so much longer. Here is the reality, there is a lot of research that exists, very few people are aware of it, but there is research that exists that shows that even if we, tomorrow completely cured all cancers it actually would have a very minimal impact on overall lifespan of our population, even if we had a cure for all heart disease which is the number one killer in our society it would have a minimal impact on our overall lifespan, one or two years at the most and on and on for every other major killer neurological disease, whatever other types of major diseases that you want to, metabolic syndrome and obesity and things of this nature. And the reason why is that, let us say you cured all cancers tomorrow, well, if you did not die from cancer at age 79, now you are dying at heart disease at age 80 and if you did not die from heart disease at age 80, now you are dying it neurological disease at age 81. And it turns out that actually, even if we cured all of those diseases lifespans would not extend very much because most people are still dying of quote-unquote old age which is multi-organ system failure by about age 85 on average. 

Okay. This whole pursuit of if only we cured this disease and if only we cured that disease is very misguided for this reason because the main thing that is actually dictating whether we live closer to 120 or 85, 120 being that genetically maximal human lifespan is actually the rate of cellular aging. Again, the focus should not be about reversing this or that disease, it should be about optimizing cellular health and mitochondrial health so that you slow the overall rate of aging. And red light therapy and near-infrared light therapy do this in multiple different ways through the mechanisms I have described so far. In particular, I think melatonin is going to be a big part of that story. Another way that they do this is actually by supporting stem cell production and proliferation in our body. 

When we produce our own supply of stem cells in abundance we repair the damaged cells. And by repairing the damaged cells we accumulate much less damage, and we slow the rate of aging. This is another way that, forgive me for the lengthy explanation there, but I think it is important for people to understand that if you want to live longer and you want to be healthier, you want to not only have a longer lifespan but a longer health span, slowing the rate of cellular aging is really where it is at. And things like optimizing mitochondrial health, mitochondrial biogenesis through hormetic stress and supporting melatonin levels at the cellular level, mitochondrial production of melatonin, and stem cell proliferation, these are some of the most powerful ways that we can do that.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Thank you, Ari, for taking a moment to break that down because that was profound, it truly was. We are so fixated on solving disease rather than enhancing cellular health. It is true.

Ari Whitten, MS

100%. Okay. There is some research on neurological disease. I want to get to this because this is some of my favorite aspects of how red and near-infrared light work. Fat gain, fat loss, I should say, and muscle gain, strength, endurance, and recovery, basically, red in near-infrared light pair synergistically with exercise in an amazing way. There is research showing depending on which outcome you measure that red light therapy essentially amplifies oftentimes by about double whatever specific benefit you are looking at when it comes to exercise. This is Michael Hamblin again saying, “Sports medicine will benefit from photobiomodulation, red light therapy because both professional and amateur athletes can better recover from intense exercise and the process also AIDS training regimens. In the near future sports agencies must deal with laser doping by at least openly discussing it because the aforementioned beneficial effects and the preconditioning achieved by laser and LED irradiation will highly improve athletic performance,” basically saying athletes will perform much better and recover much faster as a result of this technology. Let me just show you a couple of visuals to get this. There are many different mechanisms by which this supports optimal performance and enhances recovery from exercise. This is doing LED exposure and then having them do exercise. Showing that there was a 27% increase in the amount of work that was able to be done with just one to two minutes of red light therapy exposure on the muscle groups that were being used and a significant reduction in the amount of lactate produced by the muscles. The muscles are doing more work and producing less lactic acid as a byproduct.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

This is pre-workout. You are getting the red light exposure pre-workout.

Ari Whitten, MS

Yeah. And I recommend doing it pre-workout and post-workout. I had a discussion with Michael Hamblin several years ago and I said, there is all this research some of it does it pre-workout to enhance performance other research does it apply to it after the workout to enhance recovery or enhance adaptations to the exercise, I am like, I am so confused, what do I do? Do I use it before or after? He is like, “Use it both”.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah. And I just want to put this in a context for people viewing who might not be athletes because the majority of our viewers are not professional athletes. And yeah, Ari’s showing studies that were done on athletes because there are obvious reasons we do studies on that group of people. But this is going to benefit even somebody who has a non-aggressive workout routine compared to an athlete.

Ari Whitten, MS

Yeah. And actually, a lot of the studies that have been done in this area are not necessarily done on athletes they are done on regular people who are just performing exercise. This was a study where they had a control group which is this bar in blue here, the training group, and then the training group plus light exposure in addition to the training. And you can see this is muscle size, you can see significant gains above training alone, sometimes close to double, 60 to 80 to 100% improvement over just exercise alone by doing light therapy in addition to the exercise. This in terms of the muscle size gains and this is in terms of performance you can see in terms of peak torque generated how strong the muscles were, it is improving that as well. Improving fat loss, I want to say a caveat here which is I want to be clear that red light therapy will not be super effective for fat loss in the absence of nutrition and lifestyle, and exercise regimen that is supportive of fat loss.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah.

Ari Whitten, MS

If you are just expecting to use light therapy and have fat melt off without being in the overall context of a diet and lifestyle that is supporting fat loss it will not work very well but it pairs very well. Again, showing you these graphs here to give you a sense of this. In the control group that did not do any exercise, there was really no benefit, no improvements in muscle size. Okay. If you add exercise now, you have got a nice effect, you are boosting muscle size and if you add light on top of that now, you have an even better effect. And a similar thing exists with fat loss. You got to have the base stimulus of exercise and diet to support fat loss but if you add light therapy into it, it amplifies that greatly. And I will show you. And there are studies where they show inches of fat lost off different parts of the body. And they have low-level laser therapy, low-level light therapy, and body contouring, you can go to clinics and get this done but can do it at home with LED panels. And this is.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

When you say LED panels that is exactly what is behind me is LED panels.

Ari Whitten, MS

That is exactly what I am talking about. In terms of fat mass loss, this is exercise alone and this is an exercise with light therapy. Instead of a six percent loss of body fat, you had an 11% almost double by adding light therapy. In terms of insulin levels, the exercise-only group had a 19% reduction. The exercise-plus-light therapy had a 38% reduction double in terms of insulin sensitivity and improved by 22% in the exercise-only group, almost double 40% in the exercise-plus-light therapy group. You can see literally it is acting on mechanisms including insulin and insulin sensitivity to modulate fat loss. Okay. Now real quick, dosing, there is lots of complexity that we could talk about and I could take you through the formulas to calculate dosing but since we are simplifying it here. And I do not need to take you through navigating all the different lights on the market and the different light outputs. Some lights are very weak, some lights are very strong. 

The dosing here is very simple. If you get lights from red therapy CO it basically just boils down to this. If you are using it for superficial issues like skin anti-aging or wound healing on the surface, you are looking at using it for somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 seconds to five minutes. Really two to five minutes I would say is what is going to be optimal for that. Two to five minutes on any area that you are trying to get skin anti-aging effects. Most likely the face two to five-minute treatment, you are done, that is all you need for the day. You could do it every day or you could do it four times a week, something like that. For deeper tissues, you need longer times because you are trying to get more of those light photons beneath the layer of the skin into those deeper tissues. You want to use the light from closer up, more like three or six inches away. 

And you want to be doing it more in the neighborhood of 5 to 10 minutes on each area that you are trying to treat. Let us say you have got a shoulder injury, you want to treat that, or you got a knee injury, or a hip injury, or something like that, or you want to use it on your leg muscles since you just did a hard leg workout or your back muscles if you did a hardback workout, right after your workout you go and you do a five or 10 minutes on the area that you just exercise and you are going to notice you are much less sore, you are going to recover way faster, you are going to feel good and strong again, you are going to recover your energy way faster and you are going to actually amplify the strength and the muscle gains or the endurance effects of the exercise depending on what kind of exercise you are doing. You are going to enhance all of that dramatically while you recover faster and feel better quicker.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I have a question here. If you go back to this 20 minutes, you go back to the last slide, you suggest no more than 20 minutes total treatment time. Here is the deal with what happens to me. My body craves this so much. I love it so much. And this is my me time. I am a person who likes to habit stock. What can I do while I am doing red light that is also filling me up? And I will read. And I am also getting it into my eyes, I do not put eye covers on,  my eyes are open, I am reading during this time and I find myself wanting to stay in there for 30, 40. I literally have to force myself to be like, okay, treatment is done, it is addicting treatments done, I need to stop now.

Ari Whitten, MS

Yeah. Look, here is the bottom line. There is something called the biphasic dose response. And it is also called the Arndt-Schultz Law by the two physiologists who were credited.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

They must be Germans.

Ari Whitten, MS

Yeah. Who are credited with discovering this? But basically, it is a principle that extends to almost everything including exercise and including sun exposure, and including. The general principle even applies to something as simple as water consumption or food consumption. And the principle is this, when it comes to exercise or red light therapy if you do not do any or you do very little you do not get any benefits and if you do way too much you create more harm than good. If you are if you go out and you are not a very fit person and you decide tomorrow, I think I am going to go for an ultramarathon 50-mile race, you are not doing yourself any favors you are just creating a lot of harm in your body and it is not beneficial for you to do that amount of exercise. The same as I mentioned in the context of Melanoma and sun exposure. 

If your skin is not conditioned for sun exposure and you have not built a good base layer of a tan, melanin which is your body’s own protective mechanism to minimize DNA damage, it is like an internal sunscreen and then you go out and get go on a vacation to Hawaii and get eight hours of sun you have now caused yourself a whole bunch of DNA damage. That does not mean sun is bad, it does not mean exercise is bad, it means you did way too much relative to what your body is conditioned to handle. Okay. And this principle of a biphasic dose response is also true. Everything becomes toxic if you do way too much of it. If you drink two gallons of water in the next 10 minutes, pure great pristine spring water, if you drink two gallons of it in the next 10 minutes you can cause yourself permanent brain damage and put yourself into a coma and maybe die. It is legitimate. Look it up, okay? If you eat too much food you put on body fat, you become insulin resistant, and that itself is toxic to your cells and toxic to your mitochondria. Even if it is healthy food if you ate way too much of it, it becomes toxic. Exercise becomes toxic, sun becomes toxic, and everything is toxic if you do way too much. The same is true, of course, with red and near-infrared light therapy, if you were to do hours and hours of this every day it would create more harm than good. And what we need to do is, like everything else, you get the dose right. And if you do enough to get the benefits and you do not way overdo it to create harm then you are in what is called the goldilocks zone which is what we need to be in with food, what we need to be in with water, with exercise, with sun exposure, with everything else in our life. And if you are in that goldilocks zone you get the benefits with no harm. 

And every specific thing has how easy it is to overdo it and end up in the toxic zone. And actually, relative to something like exercise it is way harder to overdo red in near-infrared light. It is way easier for a person, especially a person who is not very well who has a chronic illness to overdo exercise to the point where they feel really bad. And it is actually much harder to do that with red in your infrared light. It is possible if you do enough hours of it you can certainly do that, you can

certainly make yourself feel bad. But yeah. The dosage here is conservative. And I will say also that I have had a discussion with Michael Hamblin about this. And he is even less cautious than this. He would say you could go up to 30, 40 minutes an hour and you are probably not even going to be overdoing it if you double or triple the recommendations that I have laid out here. My recommendations here are fairly cautious in that regard.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Thank you for explaining that.

Ari Whitten, MS

With all of that in mind, if you want to do this very simply, we have set an ability to get a discount from Red Therapy CO on the two lights that I personally had a hand in designing. As I said, Eric, the founder of Red Therapy CO consulted me and asked me exactly how to build the lights, the wavelengths, the spectrum, and the pulsing. And pulsing, unlike most manufacturers, pulsing is built into this. This is another thing that we did not have time to talk about. But basically, light can either be emitted constantly or it can be pulsing. And there is a number of studies that have shown that pulsed light output as opposed to continuous wave output, constant light output, the pulsing actually increases the effectiveness. Somewhere in the neighborhood of probably 15 to 30% improvements in the effectiveness. 

He is built that into the system. He is also built in an iron-based internal shield to massively reduce the EMFs from these devices which is also something that I had a hand in. And ultimately I think these are the best lights on the market when all things considered. And of course, I would think that I am biased since I had a hand in designing them. But they are amazing lights. And I know I am the only person in the world right now that knows all the third-party lab data on all the different companies out there that have submitted to this third-party lab. And this is right at the top tier. There are two or three companies that have the highest light output of any different devices and this is one of them. And this one has pulsing built into it and it has very strong EMF protection built into it. I can not recommend this device more highly to you. The Pulse 800 or the Pulse 400 are the ones we recommend. Laura has two pulsed eight hundred.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

They are pulse 840s. Just there is no confusion, it is a pulse 840 behind me and then there is a pulse 840 max which is even more powerful. And that is all be shown on the website just so people do not get confused about what they are looking at. And then the little guy is right here on the floor to next me and this is the 400, you can see it right here. And it says here on your slide, new for 22, that is because it came out in 22. You could say these 840s are new for 23 because he just had them put out on the market. And the other thing I want to share is price is much more affordable with red therapy code than any other company out there. His whole thing was I want to do twice the strength for half the price. That is why we love Eric so much, he is really putting out product that is exceptionally ahead of everyone else and affordable too.

Ari Whitten, MS

You guys can get a discount on this 25 off the pulse, $450 off the pulse 840. Thank you for correcting me on that, Laura. And that he is brought the newest 2023 versions to the market. The discount code to get it is Energy 23. And again, I just want to emphasize. If I were to summarize everything that I have gone over in this presentation, this is not just some weird technology that like, hey, this LED light is this crazy has this crazy weird hack thing, and manipulates your physiology to do these weird things that. It is actually the case that human beings require adequate amounts of red and near-infrared light. We require it for our cells to function normally. It is an essential nutrient for our cells to express normal health. 

And we know that it affects everything from brain health to skin health, to healing of all the tissues of our body, to muscular performance and recovery and adaptations, to exercise and fat loss and muscle gain and so much more to our mood, to our energy levels. Really this is a reset for your mitochondria. And again, emphasizing what I said in the context of anti-aging, this is one of the most powerful technologies available for optimizing your mitochondrial health and the regenerative mechanisms including stem cells that slow down aging at a cellular level that are ultimately your most powerful weapon in your arsenal to live a long life and have a long health span. Do not count on modern medicine to cure this or that disease with a drug. Do the work now to optimize your cellular and mitochondrial health to prevent those diseases and to extend your lifespan.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So good. That is a perfect way to end this presentation. Hey, Ari, if you want to stop sharing screen, I just have a couple of questions for you. And my first question is, what is the benefit of doing this with two lights simultaneously? This is one things you have asked, you wanted Eric to create the stability for people, so Red Therapy Co we are talking about, it is important to have two units, why?

Ari Whitten, MS

Why do not you back up and show people? You go back there, flip on both your lights and then I will talk through it and we can literally show people the visual of what I am talking about.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay.

Ari Whitten, MS

Okay. Now fave one of them. Yeah, just face one of them. Okay. And talk, so we make sure that people are seeing you now.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay. You can hear me okay? You can see okay?

Ari Whitten, MS

Okay. She is got it shining, the one she is facing right now let us imagine only that one was there. Well, she is now only doing that side of her body, her face, her in the front, her belly, her chest, and the front of her legs. Okay. And then if she wanted to also do her backside, she is got to now double the treatment time. Having two of these lights basically makes you way more efficient where you can now do your whole body in half the time as it would take you to do with only one light. That is the main benefit is it is essentially the equivalent of one of the light beds that exist there. For example, there is a company called, I forget the company name, but the light bed is called NovoThor. And there are lots of clinics around the world that have this light bed. It is like a tanning bed but it is red and near-infrared light therapy. And you lay down in it and it is got lights on on your top side and your bottom side, it does your whole body at once. And it is amazing. Here is the big problem with it. It is over a hundred thousand dollars. It is the cost of a fancy sports car to get one of those light therapy beds. And this is the few thousand dollars. What is the cost of this? It is $3,000 or something like that. Anyway, it is one twenty-fifth or one thirtieth the cost of one of those light beds. And it is essentially, for the most part, the same thing. You are just not in a laying down position but you are getting the same basic benefit of one of those light therapy beds for, again one twenty-fifth or one thirtieth of the cost for a very small amount of money instead of a small fortune.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

And that cost you just quoted is if you buy two, so you could go the route of get one and just spend 10 minutes front, 10 minutes back. My other question is these panels behind me are stronger than the smaller one that I have right next to me on the floor here, so this guy is the 400 and these guys back here, the 840s, what does that mean to people?

Ari Whitten, MS

Basically, what we are ultimately talking about is just how much of your total body can you do at one time. And the main thing here is just efficiency of time. And I think that this is an important issue just because of ease more than anything, like ease, how easy and time efficient it is to do something will greatly influence how likely you are to actually do it regularly.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Totally. 

Ari Whitten, MS

And if you know something takes half an hour to do and, it takes 10 minutes to set the thing up and I have got to move it around and I have got to set a timer in this position and then a timer in this position, all of those dimensions to it make it way less likely that you will actually do it on a regular basis. If something’s easy and quick and it takes five minutes if you can do five minutes and you have got your whole body covered. And every time I go do my workout I go and flip my red light therapy units on like the ones you have, five minutes after workout, done, super easy. If I have a smaller light it is still totally possible to do it. And if you are on a budget get the smaller light because get what you can afford basically is the short version. If you can afford a larger light, if you can afford multiple lights, do that. If you can not, no big deal, you still get all the same benefits from the smaller light it is just a question of it takes longer to use it and that is it. You just got to use it for a longer of time. Use it on this part of your body then on this part of your body and so on. You can not do your full body, both sides all at once in five minutes. That is all it amounts to. But you still get all the same benefits with a smaller light. And if that is all you can afford do not feel bad at all, that is still an absolutely great option. I would not recommend the really small lights because you get to a point where it is just too inefficient, they are too weak, and they are covering too small of an area to really be meaningful. But the 400 is an awesome thing and will still work exceptionally well. How big is it, Laura? Can you maybe hold it up so people can see it?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It is right here.

Ari Whitten, MS

Yeah. People can see it is like two feet tall.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

If I put it on my head, you can see it hits.

Ari Whitten, MS

Yeah. From 12 inches away it will cover basically your whole frontal torso. It would not cover your legs but it will cover from your head to your belly button or so. 

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I started out with this one and this is the only one I had, I would sit in front of it cross-legged and sit in front of it so I could get the majority of my body and then turn and get the back of my body. But I still could not get my whole body, it was still, yeah, there are still parts missing.

Ari Whitten, MS

Yeah. The gist of it is again, anything from the 400 to the larger 840 panels or to two 840 panels, essentially again, it is just how much of your body can you cover at once, how easy and quick can the process be. But the 400, as you just showed is plenty big. It is going to cover half your body at one time, and it is still fairly efficient to do it that way. Again, I would not recommend the really tiny lights that a lot of companies are selling now that are portable for travel, for small of your body. Just get at least the 400 size and you will have a very efficient, very powerful anti-aging tool in your arsenal.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Excellent. For everyone wanting to grab this Red Therapy CO has a link on the page where you are watching this interview. It is on all the pages of the summit to make it easy for you to get access to this clearly as Ari has demonstrated throughout this presentation as a company that he has had a hand in helping develop their products. We know they are safe, we know they are effective, we know they are honest, all those important things. And you can get yours. And we would love to hear back from you and hear how it goes too, so be sure to connect with us and let us know how you feel. I mean just those few minutes that I was demonstrating this in front of you I felt my whole body shift. It feels so good. It is really addicting, it is a healthy addiction. Thank you so much, Ari, for bringing your brilliance and expertise to this and making such a usable presentation that people can really understand so simply.Thank you so much.

Ari Whitten, MS

Yeah, it always feels to me like I am doing a disservice to the overall body of evidence. Because like I said there are over 6000 studies now on this and for literally dozens and dozens of conditions and uses that I did not even get to mention here. The research is just so robust. And again, it works on all these different systems of the body, from the skin to the brain, to the muscles, to supporting fat loss, all these different benefits because fundamentally it is just optimizing mitochondrial energy production and making your cells work better whether it is thyroid cells, or brain cells, or muscle cells, or skin cells, they work better when you give them the nutrients, the food nutrients and the light nutrients that they require to express optimal health.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Thank you so much, Ari. We will end on that note. Until next time, everyone. Take good care. Bye now.