Sunlight Can Help You Lose Weight And Get Healthier Than Ever With Randy Lee

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We pay so much attention to diet and exercise, as we pursue a healthy, ancestral lifestyle, that most of us tend to overlook the role of natural light in our health. Randy Lee, the author of The Mitochondriac Manifesto, reminds us today of how pivotal its role is in our wellbeing. He goes over the science related to how light controls our biology, along with the role of melanin and the conditions that favor longevity and photobiomodulation. In sum, Randy reveals how sunlight may be the key, not only to weight loss, but to optimal health.

 

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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Randy Lee.

We know that ultra-processed food is not good for us. What if ultra-processed light, man-made light, is not good for us either? This is episode 556, and our guest is Randy Lee. He is also known as the Mito Man. Randy is a citizen scientist and the author of The Mitochondriac Manifesto. Randy sheds light, no pun intended, on the importance of light to our well-being.

He discusses how light controls our biology. He covers the purpose of melanin and how its role is much more than just a sunscreen or sun protector. He also reviews the benefits of UV light. Yes, this is the light spectrum that we have been told to avoid most of our lives. He explains the science behind just how pivotal natural light is for our health, including our POMC, a protein precursor that impacts our hormonal function related to appetite and stress.

Before we get into the conversation, if you did not make it to our Wise Traditions Conference, it is okay. We have got a way for you to hear every single lecture. You can still enjoy every amazing speaker and their presentations. All you have to do is go to Fleetwood Onsite, and you can order the recordings of your choice with Drs. Mark and Samantha Bailey, or Adam and Josh Bigelsen, Dr. Bill Schindler, Sally Fallon-Morrell, and Dr. Tom Cowan. The list is long. Again, go to Fleetwood Onsight to order your recordings now.

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Welcome to the show, Randy.

I’m glad to be here, Hilda.

Light, Water, Magnetism: Mind-Blowing New Discoveries For Optimal Health

Your book, The Mitochondriac Manifesto, edition number one, blew my mind. It helped me understand the power of light, water, and magnetism and how that relates to our well-being. Your second edition includes information that was not in the first one, which is mind-blowing and deep. I was like, “Let us go for it, Randy.” Talk to us a little bit about some of the latest discoveries in this area of light, water, and magnetism, and the implications of them for our health.

First, I wanted to put the entire book into perspective because it can be confusing if you just jump in randomly and you do not know where it is coming from. I am representing the health consumer, and I am also talking to the health practitioner at the same time, which is a pretty extraordinary amount of work that has gone into this to try to make it somewhat understandable and yet detailed enough to talk to both parties at once.

A lot of this will fly over the heads of some people, but I am trying to include enough information so both parties can get a lot of value out of that. In some cases, I may even misspeak because this information is so far ahead of its time. You have got to remember that things like nuclear physics and quantum physics, the groundwork was laid out a hundred plus years ago. Some of this material from Jack Kruse’s new material about POMC, melanin, UV biophotons, and your internal semiconductors is about 25 to 50 years ahead of its time.

We will not hear about this in mainstream medicine for quite some time. It is literally, in some cases, 150 years ahead of its time. How much technological advancement will occur in 150 years? That is what we are talking about. It is that far ahead of its time. I am one of everyone, all the audience members and followers of Jack’s, who I am following behind him as if he were hacking his way through a jungle with a machete, trying to keep up with him. He continues to make progress and talk about all this cool stuff, the new story.

We are right behind you, and you are right behind Jack, and he has got that machete. What do we need to know first? Assuming our audience understands the importance of the right light environment for our health. I am going to assume that because we have done interviews with Thaddeus Owen, Dewey Layman, Brian Hoyer, and other people who have talked about the problem with an unhealthy artificial light environment, the importance of looking at our light as nutrients and nutrition. What is the next thing we need to know, Randy?

The foundation that you need to have, as far as understanding, is that light controls your biology. What that means specifically is that it starts the cell cycle. Mitosis, where the cell starts dividing, is controlled by UV biophotons that initiate the cell cycle. Light specifically frequencies that you do not see, UV and IR. UV controls metabolism. It controls which path the cell goes down, whether it is the old, ancient pathways, glycolysis, gluconeogenesis, and other ones like PPP and the urea cycle, or it goes to the newer pathways, relatively speaking, like the TCA cycle. Oxidative phosphorylation is actually one of the newer pathways. UV light controls which pathway is more active in your body.

UV controls metabolism; it controls which path the cell goes down.

Stop Avoiding UV Light: Why Midday Sun Is Crucial For Your Metabolism

Before you go on, let me just make sure I got this. UV light is actually in the spectrum of the sunlight that we receive. It is usually at the peak of the day, like midday, what is it, 12:00 to 3:00 or something like that? We have been told to avoid that spectrum of light. If I am hearing you correctly, you are saying it is actually good for us.

That is pure misinformation. It is incorrect to say that we need to avoid UV light. What actually happens is that during midday, you get more direct sun exposure. The UV light encounters fewer moisture molecules than anything else in the atmosphere, and it gets through with its native frequency, and it is absorbed into the skin. It powers different things in our bodies.

The other thing you need to know is that, what happens in winter months or when there is very minimal sun exposure, your body is supposed to be colder. The cold exposure produces internal heat, and the heat that is released from the mitochondria actually produces UV biophotons in there. Heat is IR, or they are extremely similar. If you never let your body get cold, that is a problem because that is meant to be nature’s way of making up for a lack of sunlight in the winter.

Hold on, let me wrap my head around this concept. If we are comfortable all winter long in our warmly heated houses and we are drinking our hot cocoa, we are not giving the body a chance to make what it needs to make its own source of UV light that is so healing and helpful.

Correct. There is a lot of stuff that is run in the body as we may continue along that thought train of UV biophotons. Did you want to get into that?

Yeah, let us do it.

It’s pure misinformation to say we need to avoid UV light.

The rest of it. Metabolism is run by UV light. Autophagy and apoptosis are also run by light. That is the recycling and cell death as well. The entire cell cycle is run by UV light. IR powers up the ATP synthase. It powers up our metabolism to produce more ATP, which obviously powers a lot of stuff in the body as well. That is an overview of why UV light is so important and light in general, and why you need to get exposure on your eyes, your skin, and absorb just as much as you can in a natural way, not from artificial sources.

The Hidden Power Of Food: Why Light Is More Foundational Than Diet

This is so fascinating. There are so many people, you know as well as I do, Randy, who are struggling with issues like insulin resistance and cancer and tumors and fatigue. They think the answer is in a good diet. Of course, here at the Weston A. Price Foundation, we know that diet is foundational. Yet what we sometimes overlook is the light piece. We are actually getting light from the food that we are ingesting. That is just as critical and may even trump our understanding of food as foundational. What do you think about all that?

You are referring to the fact that while a plant is growing, it is absorbing light from its environment. The sugars and the fiber in the plant absorb photons from the environment. It retains those photons until your mitochondria reverse that process. Through digestion and metabolism, it is releasing those photons back into your body. This actually programs your body, or it tells your body how to metabolize that food for your seasonal cycle. For example, if you eat foods in winter that were grown in summer, like in Mexico or near the equator, it wants to produce more instant energy and less fat.

Yeah, if I am eating berries, mangoes.

Things with high sugar are going to produce, it is more than just the sugar. It changes your metabolism to encourage your body to put on more fat. That is one of the reasons why we tend to gain weight in the winter and late fall. It is not your imagination. It is not just more Thanksgiving dinners and stuff like that. Your metabolism is producing more free radicals, and it is running on an inefficient system that is not made for your current environment, your current season that you are living in.

I am tracking with you so far. We have got a better understanding of how light informs our health, our metabolism, our hormonal function, our mitochondrial health, and so forth. Help me understand some of these new terms you were throwing out at the beginning. For example, is it a PCOM?

POMC, pro-opiomelanocortin.

What is that? How does that come into the picture here?

The entire cell cycle is regulated by UV and IR light, which powers ATP synthase and drives metabolism, producing the ATP that fuels the body.

That is a really big story. POMC is made by a gene in your body, and it is a big combo molecule with a bunch of different pieces in it that are all made by one gene. It is an efficient way for the body to make multiple things, including factors that produce melanin. POMC controls the absorption of light. It controls melanocytes, which produce melanin.

Melanin, for example, is one of the reasons it is important is it mediates the five senses. Melanin sheets absorb energy. Melanin is in the skin, it is in the eye, it is in the ear, it is in the tongue with your taste buds, and it is in the gut. When you are in an adverse electromagnetic environment, you are ruining the melanin sheets. That can cause a lot of different problems, from digestion to hearing or poor taste, or in the eye, it is particularly damaging.

Melanin Is A Solar Panel: The True Role Of Pigment In All Five Senses

That is so fascinating. I generally have thought of melanin, I guess, as most people do, as a protective mechanism or something almost secreted to protect the skin from burning. The brain gets a signal about what time of day it is, and so it signals to the skin to develop this melanin for protection. It is in a part of every sense in the body, sounds like.

That belief that you just described is a little bit of a half-truth. It is a misnomer. One of melanin’s primary purposes is to protect you from sunburn, but it is actually for harvesting. It is not shielding you from UV and light in general. It is actually harvesting it for the body. It is absorbing it, and that is why when you are out in the sun for the first time in a season for 5 to 10 minutes, and your skin starts to darken a little, that is the body’s effort to harvest more of it.

Indeed, the interior of your body has melanocytes too. It is trying to harvest, and it is transferring light all over in different areas of the brain and your internal organs and stuff like that, and the five senses like we just described. Melanin is a way bigger deal than people think. It is not just the sunscreen.

That is so fascinating. It is actually a welcome mat, if you will, like, “The sun is welcome here. We are trying to take advantage of it and get as much out of it as we can for the body.”

It is a solar panel. One of the newer understandings that I have had is that melanin needs to be hydrated. When it is hydrated properly, it actually takes the current that is from the environment. It steps it down into one trillionth of an amp to start the cell cycle. That is what can de-differentiate cells like red blood cells into stem cells. They can re-differentiate and start the cell cycle.

 

If you do not get an appropriate amount, let us say, when you are in a poor electromagnetic environment, it could dehydrate you, and then that melanin interaction I just described will not be able to start healing as well. That will be deficient. That is one of the reasons why microwave exposure is bad for you, because you will not be able to hydrate as well, and then your melanin will not work as well, and then your healing will not work as well.

To put it in layman’s terms, the non-native electromagnetic frequencies that we are exposed to from our Wi-Fi, from probably the electricity and our walls, to cell towers, only so many miles from our home, all of this is drying us out. The less hydrated we are, the less well everything in the body works, right?

Yeah. The reason why mitochondria say light, water, and magnetism is important, the water aspect of is that water envelops the proteins. What it does is charge separation when it is touching a hydrophilic surface. When you charge separate water, that is producing electricity. It is producing an electric potential. You have essentially created a battery when you do that.

It also changes the conformational shape of the proteins, which they rely on. If the proteins were not hydrated, they would not go on to shift and change shapes, and that would reduce pumping functions. It will just mess everything up. Circulation has a lot to do with charge separation of water. The blood depends on separating the water into what I call electron zone water, or E-zone. It is a negative charge on the blood vessel wall and then a positive charge in the blood to knit these cells together so the red blood cells all flow as a unit, and that helps circulation.

The bottom line is that blood needs charge to circulate effectively. If you do not have that, the body tries to compensate by enlarging the heart in a congestive heart failure type of situation. It makes all kinds of compensations for the lack of flexibility in the blood vessels and stuff. The water and particularly the charge separation of the water is essential to the charge or the redox potential of the entire body and proteins, and a lot of stuff that goes on.

How can we make sure our blood has the right charge and that we have the right POMC so that the melanin sheets are not compromised? What are some things we can do?

The same old advice is to get back to nature, get out of microwave environments, especially when you are asleep. When you are sleeping, you need to reduce your electromagnetic exposure, drink better quality water, and eat a seasonal diet. Stay out of bipolar magnetic fields.

Where are those located? I do want to stay away from that.

Those are exceptionally bad. Those are like if you have a breaker panel or a smart meter or something that is really close by your sleeping space, that can be really bad. It can interfere with your sleep, and it can dehydrate you. Anytime there is a current flowing through a wire, it is also producing a magnetic field. In particular, a bipolar magnetic field is really bad for you. If you are sleeping and you have circuits or an outlet close to your head, that is bad, actually.

That is such good advice to stay away from this.

You might talk to a building biologist, or a guy like Brian Hoyer can help you figure some of those things out and shield your space or rearrange your furniture, your bed, and stuff to avoid the worst of it.

Since we are always about practical tips here, you have given us a few, which I am thankful for. I want to ask you about methylene blue. There has been some controversy in health spaces. Some people say, “That was an aquarium dye, and it was made by pharmaceutical companies, and you should avoid it at all costs.” I have other friends saying it is helpful to take it as you do a sauna experience or other such thing to help you detox. What is your take on it, Randy?

Methylene blue can do both. It actually is very skilled at flipping back and forth between oxidation and reduction. It can help at certain dosage levels. If you take too much or you take it too often, it might accumulate in certain tissues and not others. That can be really dangerous. Here is an example. Your body gets rid of it. It does not metabolize it like normal foods. It uses it up and excretes it at its own pace.

It can accumulate in the bladder and produce a highly oxidative condition. It can cause burning when you get too much of it, and the body cannot get rid of it fast enough. It is incredibly powerful at replacing a broken-down TCA cycle or the electron transport chain. When there are defects in it, let us say you have a stroke or some occlusion in your vessels, it can supplement that. The electrons have to go somewhere, so it can help you augment that supply, usage, until blood flow is restored.

 

At the same time, if you take too much, it can grab electrons out of the electron transport chain where they are not supposed to, like in inappropriate places. It can actually reduce the efficiency. You can really hurt yourself if you take too much and too often. Generally speaking, it is better to have less of it and take it on a chronic basis very carefully. I do not have specific recommendations because it is so varied.

You almost have to read my description of when it is hurting because it is accumulating in some tissues and not others. Certain situations, like you could all of a sudden increase your need for it in the moment, or you could sit down on a couch, do nothing, and then maybe you need less of it, and then it becomes toxic. People like to give blanket statements. I try it all the time, and it is great for me. Never mind the fact that it could be toxic or lethal advice they are giving to people.

It is sometimes a more nuanced conversation. It is also important to take into account, as you were suggesting, the bioidividuality of each individual. I am a petite person, so what might be too little for you could be too much for me. Talking in simplistic terms, but you know.

They have done some studies where some of the lower dosage levels help, and then it levels off. It is a biphasic dose response. You can take a little bit more, and it gets to be a little bit more effective, improves, and then levels out, and then goes back down, and then it can drop precipitously. Methylene boost is fascinating because it was the original drug that inspired the medical establishment to create the field of pharmaceuticals. After all, it was so potent at what it did.

It was started as a dye for blue jeans, and they discovered it had unusual properties as they used it as a stain in microscopy work. They discovered, it does some amazing stuff to supplement and correct temporary defects in the TCA or electron transport chain. They go, “We should create drugs. We should find other ones that do things like this.” The entire pharmaceutical industry came from methylene blue. It was the original drug. Now, because it is not patentable, it is not protectable. Now they want to dismiss it and ignore it. It flip-flops there.

The Sunscreen Conspiracy: Why Conventional Medicine Discredits Natural Sunlight

Speaking of flip flops, why do governments and the conventional medical field always go down on the sun? Why are they always saying, “We need to hide from it? It is cancer-causing. We need to protect ourselves.” Where did that come from? Do you know?

Any opportunity to ignore and dismiss, and critique other alternative therapies, and any opportunity they get to sell the pharmaceutical chemical route, they are going to take it. We do not even need to get into that. Everyone knows about that. The thing is, they have kept the exposures of light, water, and magnetism. They have discredited it as best they can. It is still emerging. For example, red light therapies, just within the last five years or so, it has become so commonly used and people are showing great results. There are so many studies coming out that they cannot suppress that information.

Let’s talk about that a bit, as I’d like to know your thoughts on red light therapy versus saunas. They are not necessarily the same, or are they?

I like the near-infrared sauna. The community really likes the sauna space. I love them too. They do contain an element of red light therapy because they focus on the frequencies that we get most in our terrestrial experience. The bulk of our exposure is near infrared, and we just get a very small minority of mid and far-infrared.

It is the exposures that we have historically gotten the most of that our bodies are most adapted to absorb and use as energy, and some information. The red light basically can bypass the outer layers of blood and water to be absorbed directly into the mitochondria, into the cytochromes. You can produce more ATP with no food exposure at all. It just spits out more ATP because it is making your ATP synthase more efficient at producing energy.

I wonder if this is one reason I have seen statistics about how people who sauna more often are less likely to have heart attacks, and are more likely to live longer. Is it because, as you were saying, the body craves those waves, those infrared in particular, the near infrared, and it is healing on a very profound level?

The important point there is that we are meant to get sun exposure without clothes, directly on our skin and our eyes. We are meant to be charging our bodies up routinely. Modern living is shielding us from those natural waves that power up our bodies. What happens is we have more carbs, and we feel compelled to get an auxiliary form of electrons in food.

If anyone is concerned about either weight or metabolic issues like diabetes, get more sun exposure, and you will not need to eat as much food. You will not have the free radical burden, the metabolic burden with insulin, and stuff like that. That is one of the ways that we can alleviate one of the modern illnesses that a huge percentage of our population has come down with.

It is like we think we are hungry for some Takis or snacks or something, but we are really hungry for light.

A way to demonstrate that we are supposed to get good sun exposure is that the body is naturally made to be addicted to the sun. Your body produces endorphins, beta endorphin, when you are out in the sun, particularly at midday. That is why you feel like a mild high when you get out into the sun. People think it is just, “I am getting away from work or it is a less stressful environment.”

The mechanism is that it is actually producing beta endorphin, and it is powering up the POMC cycle. Another fascinating aspect of POMC is that UV light is powering up. UV light helps you produce more POMC. It activates that system. It activates your satiety and your metabolic set point, so to speak. It makes you more satiated. It can produce enormous pressure on your metabolic systems to not eat as much because you just feel fuller.

You do not have a craving to eat more food. A natural way to suppress your appetite is to get more sun. You will not need Ozempic, or you will not need GLP-1 drugs and stuff like that. We are just now starting to see the lawsuits and stuff like that pop up in the courts and the news. You do not need that artificial stuff. You can do just fine on the way nature designed the entire system to work.

One thing that occurs to me as I have heard it said that it is important to actually, as you said, get as much sunshine as possible throughout the day, but also to take our meals outside because the light aids our digestion and the assimilation of the nutrients. Is that true as well?

It will help you set the metabolic program correctly. Two sources come from. When you are eating food, it is the light that you are absorbing directly into your eyes and skin, and then the light that is being released from your food. It is absorbed into the enterocytes. The cells of the gut lining are receiving that light information and helping to program which metabolic program to run.

The Mito Man’s #1 Action To Transform Your Health Today

It is like if you get the opportunity when you go out to eat, and they are like, “Do you want to sit inside or outside?” I vote outside every time, right to get that light information. Of course, we can have picnics, we can have breakfast, lunch, dinner, all the meals outside, especially when the weather is cooperating. Randy, I feel like you have brought so many good insights. I know you have so much more to share, but our time is elapsing. I want to ask you the question I love to pose at the end. If the listener could just do one thing, Randy, to improve their health, what would you recommend that they do?

As a meta recommendation, it would be to follow nature’s rules. Be skeptical of anything that man invented and technology, all these whiz-bang new supplements or regimes and stuff like that. They almost always come with side effects, downsides, expense, and inconvenience. Just do what nature would have done.

In almost every case, you will be running a better program, more consistent. You will not have to experience all those hidden side effects. You will get hidden benefits in most cases. Go, “I am out in the sun, and I feel good.” You just naturally do not have as large an appetite. You will reduce your insulin usage, and your insulin sensitivity will improve, and all sorts of different fringe benefits that you will get from doing what nature does.

That reminds me so much of Dr. Price’s famous quote, where he said, “Life in all its fullness is mother nature obeyed.” That is a great note to end on. Randy Lee, thank you so much. On behalf of the Westin A Price Foundation, it has been a pleasure.

Thanks for having me, Hilda.

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Our guest was Randy Lee. Check out his website, The Mito Man, to learn more. For the transcript for this episode, visit our website, Weston A. Price, and click on the podcast page. Now for the show’s review. Ray of Sunshine 36 said this, “Love, this is one of my favorite podcasts.” I love that, Ray. It is short and sweet. You can leave us a review, too. Go to Apple Podcasts, click on ratings and reviews, give us a bunch of stars, and tell the world why they should listen, or just tell me why you love the show. Thank you so much for tuning in, my friend. Stay well and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

 

 

About Randy Lee

Randy (The Mito Man) is a citizen scientist, author, and entrepreneur. His past work includes Gut-Brain Secrets, which is all about the many factors that go into corruption of the gut microbiome, which then affects a person’s mental and physical state – including attention deficit disorder, autism and OCD. His current work, The Mitochondriac Manifesto (2), aims to overturn our old beliefs about where health or sickness comes from, in light of what we now know about mitochondria, seasonal cycles, and energies in and around the body. His upcoming book, Blood Secrets Revealed, explains how blood delivers life to the body when operating efficiently… or poor circulation chokes the life out of organs and tissues through clustering, clotting and constricted vessels.

 

Important Links

• Randy Lee
• The Mitochondriac Manifesto
• Thaddeus Owen – Interview with Thaddeus Owen Biohacking Our Health – Previous Episode
• Dewey Layman – Eating Light with Dewey Layman – Previous Episode
• Brian Hoyer – Get The Right Light with Brian Hoyer – Previous Episode
• Weston A. Price Foundation
• Wise Traditions on Apple Podcasts

 

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• Harvest Right
• Sirius Nutrition

 

 

 

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