Defending your health seems like a good idea, doesn’t it? This is a much taller task when you’re constantly bathed non-native energies from modern technology. Millimeter wave radiofrequencies (i.e., 5G) are just the latest modern assault undermining your health. They comprise just one component of an unstoppable onslaught of human-made electromagnetic energy fields that first appeared more than 150 years ago. Is there something you can do for defending your health against them? You bet!
HEADS UP #1: This post, like the previous one (COVID-19 and 5G Wireless – What’s the Link?), is a bit longish. I know that’s a challenge. The bigger challenge in this article is the assignments I give you to do something for your own benefit. Conceptually, that isn’t very difficult. The work you put in to making changes in your lifestyle has great rewards – specifically, better health and a longer lifespan. There’s a lot you can do. A LOT.
Do whatever you can.
I’ll do my best to stay on task and not get off too far on tangents. You know, like I do. If you notice I’m heading down a tube with no cheese, just skip ahead until you find something you think is more applicable.
My previous post linking COVID-19 and 5G wireless simply put bullets in the smoking gun shooting microwave and millimeter wave holes in our health. Health issues surrounding wireless communications are just part of a bigger topic – i.e., the health effects of non-native electromagnetic fields (nnEMFs).
The key for you is, what can you do to be healthy in spite of constant exposure to nnEMFs?
We have many strategies for doing so. They depend on which nnEMFs we are talking about. Although damage by 5G and other wireless frequencies is increasing, this post begins the ‘what to do’ steps to take against the oldest and most damaging one of all.
Technology’s Slippery Slope
We’re a pretty bright species, maybe the smartest on the planet. (Alternatives presented by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide the Galaxy notwithstanding.) We’ve managed to invent some breathtaking technologies.
To keep things simple in this post, I’ll focus on one of the “Big Three” that have changed modern life for better and for worse. These are Thomas Edisons’s electric light bulb, Nicola Tesla’s alternating current (AC) electricity, and Guglielmo Marconi’s radiofrequency communications (based on ideas probably stolen from Tesla).
These are the foundational inventions for countless derivative technologies. They are also foundational for modern health epidemics of the Diseases of Modern Civilization.
Yup, we’re pretty smart, alright. Unfortunately, within just a few generations we’ve also managed to create advanced technologies that undermine how we evolved to live on Earth. And we’re taking the whole planet down the rabbit hole with us.
The core issue entails how technology disrupts Earth’s native electromagnetic fields, which are sunshine, geomagnetic field, and oscillating magnetic fields.
HEADS UP #2: My strongest recommendation is for you to adopt an approach to defending your health as a continuing effort. Make it like a hobby if you have to. Your incentive is to be healthy, or to return to health if you’ve already got one or more of those Diseases of Civilization (which is pretty much all disease).
Your goal is to set yourself up to avoid acquiring any of the Top 10 Causes of Death according the CDC. (By the way, the CDC list omits the #3 cause – iatrogenic (treatment) disorders. If you’re healthy enough, you won’t need treatment as often. Or maybe not at all.)
How you deal with technology is the key to avoiding modern disease, including infectious diseases such as COVID-19.
Before You Get Started
It goes without saying that good health is your best defense. All damage from technology will be worse if you aren’t healthy to start with. If you have any kind of disorder, small or large, it will put you at a disadvantage. If you’re taking prescription or over-the-counter drugs for any kind of health issue, they (and the underlying conditions[s] they are meant to treat) will put you at a disadvantage.
Fortunately for you, your best healer is – drumroll – YOU!
Assess where you are and what you do on a daily basis. Make whatever obvious changes you can make. Work with a health professional who’s about health and healing, not modern medicine.
I know this vague set of recommendations is unsatisfying. You may have a lot to learn and a lot to do. Just take whatever action you can, as soon as you can.
Remember:
Then when you know better, do better.
― Maya Angelou –
Okay, that’s enough of my introductory blather. Let’s get to it.
The #1 Tech Violation Against Your Health
Light.
That’s it.
Well, maybe I should clarify – artificial light.
We’ll get to the wi-fi issue soon enough. For now, know that artificial lighting is your greatest health challenge. You’ve no doubt unknowingly been subjected to this challenge your entire life.
It has two main components, each with its own set of action steps to ameliorate its effects.
1) Circadian Mismatch
To be brief, we evolved in a more or less 24-hour day-night cycle, called our circadian rhythm.
Virtually everything your body needs to do for keeping you healthy depends on rising in the morning after a good night’s sleep in the dark, being active all day, then getting to sleep again after sunset.
Pretty simple, huh? Except that electric lighting gave us the wherewithal to live and work deep into the night, even all night. In other words, artificial lighting became the first technology for disrupting our circadian rhythm in a big way.
This technology was – and still is – too convenient to resist. It now occupies a position at the head of the class for violating our evolutionary history – and, as a consequence, for undermining our health in countless ways.
What happens when you don’t adhere to this cycle? This is where we look for indicator groups to see how circadian disruptions affect health. One of the most common circadian-mismatched groups that we can evaluate healthwise is shift workers.
Hundreds of research articles are available on this topic. I’ve chosen the following two examples for their emotional appeal – one on breast cancer and one on prostate cancer. (These two cancers are linked by their origin from the same type of embryonic tissues, so they have a lot in common.)
Have you ever heard about the greater risk of cancer in shift workers? Probably not. Cancer, however, is just the tip of the iceberg of consequences for violating our circadian rhythm.
That’s just the beginning.
If you want to know the whole story, you can take a look at the list of nearly 35,000 articles about shift work on PubMed. This is an epic health issue.
As that list shows, one of the most commonly and easily studied groups of shift workers is nurses. They represent the leading canary in the coal mine for all shift workers. And for everyone who lives outside of our evolutionarily programmed day-night cycle.
Some of the main characteristics of shift work include:
- Little or no sleep at night (a hardcore circadian mismatch)
- Artificially lit indoor work places from sundown to sunrise
- Constant use of wireless technologies
Now, think about how closely your life mimics our canaries. If you’re typical, your indoor lighting is on all evening, most likely with fluorescents, CFLs, or LEDs. So are one or more brightly lit wireless tech devices (smart TV, notebook/iPad, cell phone, etc.).
Even if you go to bed at a reasonable hour, this tehnology has already completely disrupted your melatonin levels. Light destroys this so-called ‘sleep hormone’. That may be the most dire health consequence of artificial lighting.
Melatonin is much more than a sleep hormone.
Chew on this for a moment: Melatonin is also crucial for a nightly brain cleanup that keeps wayward proteins and other neuro-garbage from building up in your brain. (E.g., beta-amyloid plaque and tau entanglements associated with Alzheimer’s Disease – doesn’t THAT get your attention?)
Ruining your brain health is a big nudge that pushes your overall health off a cliff. It starts with undermining your circadian rhythm and continues until every aspect of your health is at risk.
ACTION STEPS: Live according to a proper day-night cycle. If you can live without turning on the lights after sundown, by all means do so. If this isn’t convenient (which it won’t be), then at least get a good night’s sleep in as dark a room as you can make it.
What about that destruction of melatonin? There’s one more aspect of artificial lighting that you should know about. This is the #2 problem with artificial lights at night.
This one particular feature of artificial lighting makes everything much, much worse.
Much worse!
This second component is …
2) Blue Light Toxicity
Most of the concern about recent types of artificial lighting focuses on the blue part of the visible spectrum. The relatively new phrase “blue light toxicity” was coined to denote this concern.
Yup – blue light is toxic when it is more abundant than it is in the light spectrum of sunshine. For comparison, take a look at the image below to see what I mean.
What’s not shown here is the high-blue lighting from virtually all tech devices invented since the 1980s. What’s also missing is the development of newer, ultra-high-blue lighting.
We’ve always had ultra-high-blue lighting. Mercury vapor lamps in street lights and stadiums were common. (Street lamps have been replaced in many cities with yellowish sodium vapor lamps to combat light pollution.)
Newer high-blue lights, called High Intensity (xenon) Discharge (HID) lamps, are becoming more widespread. You undoubtedly see them every time you drive at night.
High blue lights are so harsh as to be painful to look at. At least they are for me. Likely the same for most of us.
They’re so bright I have to glance away from them in oncoming traffic – probably not a good thing.
All high blue artificial lights – from tech devices (cell phones, TVs, etc.) to the latest HIDs – comprise a growing level of blue light pollution.
If you’re really interested in this topic, a fairly simple overview for the public is provided at this website: Blue Light Exposed. It’s a good place to start, without getting bogged down in too much science-y stuff (like my post here). (Regarding that website, ignore the comment at the top of the page about protecting your eyes from the “sun’s harmful UV rays.” I’ll address that simple-minded advice in a future post.)
A couple of things are important to note about blue light toxicity. One is that “high blue” is the problem. This means more blue than the full spectrum of sunlight that’s been hitting the Earth over its multibillion-year history.
The main issue with artificial lights, particularly high blue, is they are missing parts of the sun’s spectrum that balance it out. We do, indeed, benefit from blue – only if it is accompanied by the other colors of full spectrum sunshine!.
Our daily internal clocks are set by the blue/violet to infrared colors that enter our eyes at the dawn of each day. This fact leads to one of the simplest things you can do to get your day started in the healthiest way possible: just stand in the morning sunlight, looking toward the sun (not at it directly) for a few minutes, wearing as little clothing as you can get away with. (Skin has a crucial role in light sensing, too.)
One more thing – which recently turned out to be a real shocker to the medical community. The eye system for using light to set our daily internal clocks isn’t our only one. We also have one in our skin. This means that high blue lighting impacts eyes and skin. In other words, skin exposure to high blue light also disrupts light sensing.
Among other things, excessive blue light starts a downward health spiral by …
- Destroying a key fatty acid, DHA, your retinas need for light signaling from your eyes to your brain
- Inactivating electron tunneling at a mitochondrial protein called cytochrome c
Oops, got a little too geeky there. In English, this means your body clock gets short-circuited (i.e., circadian disruption) and that the uptake of oxygen during cellular energy generation in mitochondria slows down.
SIDENOTE: Hypoxia – the reduced use of oxygen – is a hallmark of COVID-19. Obviously, blue light toxicity adds to this trouble when mitochondrial oxygen uptake gets reduced.
Here’s another interesting tidbit: Your eyes actually have a defensive reaction to blue light toxicity. They will create a blue light filter by condensing proteins in the lenses. These filters are better known as cataracts. Dang!
ACTION STEPS: Avoiding artificial lighting is once again the key action step. If you can do so by not using such lighting at all, so much the better. Or going anywhere that’s artificially lit. Or driving at night. Et cetera.
Since none of that’s really practical, you can still do certain things to reduce your exposure. For example, you can wear blue blocking glasses. At this time I use goggles that fit over my prescription glasses when I watch TV at night. I also use clip-ons over my reading glasses when I’m using my laptop. (For that matter, I also use software called f.lux that reduces blue emission from my computer screen. It’s free and super easy to set up.)
Just do what you can.
All such glasses/goggles are available from multiple online stores. Just be sure they actually do block blue light. Some don’t. The key is their color. Only orange and yellow block blue well.
I’m due for a new prescription soon, so I’ll be getting my new glasses coated with blue-blocking tint from Ra Optics.
One more thing, if you really want to take it to the next level and still use lights at night, then change out all of your high-blue lights to either yellow lights (good) or red lights (best). My bedside reading lamp, for example, is a yellow bug light from the hardware store.
All of these action steps address reducing eye exposure to high-blue lighting. Keep in mind that your skin also responds to blue light toxicity. Covering up will help here.
Ready for a bombshell yet? Here’s one: Although I’ve focused on artificial lights at night, constant exposure all day long is also highly damaging. This means that THE key issue is working and living indoors.
If you’re afraid of the sun, you’re suffering from modern day medical brainwashing. I wrote a little post about this fear a while ago, which should get your interest up for some old-fashioned health truths: Heliophobia Makes Modern Disease for One and All.
Blue Light Toxicity – A Sad Commentary
We adults are supposed to do better when we know better, right? Everything in this post so far gives you the ammo you need for making better decisions about your health.
Unfortunately, ignorance of circadian disruptions and blue light toxicity is the rule of the day. Without this knowledge, adults making decisions for children are leading the way behind the worst epidemic of children’s neurological disorders in human history. Things got headed down the wrong path with TV. Now everything has accelerated with modern blue-lit technology.
More than ever, children are burying their faces in blue-lit devices. One modern conundrum is the development of online teaching for replacing in-person classrooms for the sake of safety against COVID-19. It means even more screen time for young people.
When I refer to children, this means all who haven’t yet become fully developed neurologically. That development continues until about age 25!
Infants, toddlers, pre-teens, teenagers, and young adults are more exposed to blue light toxicity than ever. Five-year-olds have their own tablets and even cell phones. Video games keep them indoors more than ever. You can see where all this is headed.
The use of these tech devices goes well beyond mainstream medicine’s concern about eye health. Autism, for example, has risen from 1 in 2,500 children in the 1960s to 1 in 42 boys and 1 in 189 girls at the present time. This rise has no end in sight.
Couple that with the rising incidence of Alzheimer’s Disease, in increasingly younger adults, and we have a monster pot of mental health trouble that’s about to boil over.
This is a very sad commentary about our reliance on technology.
High blue lighting isn’t the only technology that’s sending us back to the Dark Ages healthwise.
I’ll address other technologies and action steps for defending your health against them in my next post. Even though blue light toxicity is the oldest and worst of the technologies ruining our health, wireless technologies are catching up.
Meanwhile, do something different for your health against this tech assault, starting today.
All the best in natural health,
Dr. D
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