Decades of forgotten research show natural light is an essential nutrient our bodies are being starved of

A Midwestern Doctor Sep 18

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Story at a Glance:

•Sunlight is one of the most important things for our health (e.g., it halves our risk of dying or getting cancer), yet all we ever hear is how important it is to avoid it.

•While the importance of vitamin D is generally recognized, many of the other critical functions of light within plants, animals and human beings remain almost completely unknown, and hence are the focus of this article.

•One of the defining characteristics of modern life is continual exposure to unnatural light (particularly from energy efficient light bulbs). This is viewed as relatively benign, but decades of forgotten research (and a growing body of new research) show it is a root cause of a myriad of inexplicable physical and behavioral illnesses.

•Cells communicate with each other through faint emissions of ultraviolet light. This was once one of the most active fields in biology (yielding over 700 papers, 11 Nobel nominations, and a blood test which detected cancer with over 95% accuracy) before it was abandoned for political reasons and forgotten.

•The eyes and the blood conduct light throughout the body. When this process is disrupted (e.g., by glasses with lenses that filter out critical parts of the spectrum), a variety of significant illnesses can develop.

•In 2022, the federal government effectively banned the incandescent bulb because most of its output is “wasted” infrared rather than visible light, despite our bodies using that infrared for a myriad of essential processes. Senate Energy Chairman Mike Lee introduced a bill to bring those bulbs back, which yesterday received its first hearing, and with public support, can free us from the unhealthy bulbs that have been forced upon us.

Over the years, I have become convinced sunlight is one of the most essential nutrients for the body. For example, as human beings moved further and further north from Africa and had increasingly lower sun exposure, their skin became progressively lighter, something which argues the human body needs light and that the whitening of human skin in the higher latitudes was a protecting mechanism designed to ensure enough of the remaining sunlight could get inside the body.
Note: an explanation of how the darker parts of the skin prevent UV from entering the body can be found here.

Unfortunately (outside of very specific patentable applications), since no one has a financial interest in promoting sunlight it hence has no lobbyists, almost everything we hear about instead focuses on why it’s terrible for us (as sunlight prevents many diseases other industries profit from). For example:

•As discussed in a previous article, dermatology was one of the least desirable professions in medicine. They then transformed themselves into one of the most sought after ones by rebranding themselves as cancer fighters and convincing everyone to get regular skin cancer exams where any potential cancer could be quickly removed, often for thousands of dollars apiece, quickly making dermatology into one of the highest paying specialties. A centerpiece of this rebranding was making benign cancers be labeled as deadly ones and claiming sunlight caused skin cancer (which while true, omitted to mention that that a lack of sunlight is what causes fatal skin cancers). Because of this, a lot of dermatology morphed into scaring people senseless about the sun, and despite billions being spent each year on skin cancer, the total death rate from skin cancer remains almost entirely unchanged (instead we simply diagnose and “treat” far more of it).
Note: in this article, I will attempt to explain why unnatural light causes skin cancer.

•While many factors contribute to cancer, the focus is often on sunlight and smoking as the primary culprits. I believe this emphasis explains why cancer rates continue to rise, as the true causes of cancer remain underexplored. Industries with vested interests lobby to keep these causes off-limits, diverting attention from potentially significant contributors to cancer.

In this article, I will present some of the forgotten knowledge on the incredible importance of light.

The Importance of Sunlight

Prior to dermatology’s disastrous war on the sun, the value of sunlight was widely recognized in medicine. For example, in the early 1900s, heliotherapy (sunbathing) was used with great success for treating many (otherwise incurable) conditions, such as the 1918 influenza, tuberculosis, and many other diseases.

The existing data, in turn, shows that sunlight provides an immense degree of benefit. For example:

•Sunlight is critical for mental health. This is most well appreciated with depression (e.g., seasonal affective disorder). Sadly, many workers (especially night shift workers such as those in hospitals) do not get that essential light exposure and suffer immensely. For example, consider this study of Chinese operating room nurses which found their mental health was significantly worse than the general population and that this decline was correlated to their lack of sunlight exposure (which I would argue does not benefit the patients they care for).

Note: I really got this point once, where after a long period of hospital night shifts under fluorescent lights, noticed I was becoming clinically depressed (which has never otherwise happened to me and led to another physician I was close to offering to prescribe antidepressants). I decided to do an experiment and stuck with it for a few more days, then went home and bathed under an Ott full spectrum bulb I’d been able to obtain, at which point I almost instantly felt better.

•Many different studies have found sunlight exposure dramatically reduces one's risk of cancer (e.g., this large study found high solar UVB exposure halved one’s risk of breast and prostate cancer).

•An excellent 20-year study of 29,518 women found that avoiding the sun made one 60% more likely to die (a 130% difference compared to those who had the most significant amount of sun exposure), and the most considerable benefit from regular sunlight exposure was reducing one’s risk of dying from heart disease.
Note: that study also found a variety of other common diseases were much less likely to affect those with adequate sun exposure.

•In a 2024 analysis of the UK Biobank, both measures of UV exposure that were examined (sunbed use and how much solar radiation reached the participant’s home) were associated with a lower risk of dying from any cause, from cardiovascular disease and from cancer. Likewise, when 88,905 Biobank participants wore light sensors for a week, those with brighter days and those with darker nights were each less likely to die over the following 8 years.

•Normal sunlight is critical for facilitating the circadian rhythm our body’s depend upon to rest and repair themselves. In turn, a major cause of the modern insomnia epidemic (and the profound health consequences it entails—which are discussed further here) are artificial light exposures, while one of the most useful treatments for it is to simply start your day with a full sunlight exposure.

Typically, sunlight's benefits are thought to be due to producing vitamin D (a critical nutrient) within the body. However, I have long suspected that many of the benefits of vitamin D are not due to the vitamin itself but rather that its elevation serves as an indicator that the body is having regular sunlight exposure and hence is experiencing the myriad of benefits sunlight provides. For example, when 24 healthy volunteers were exposed to UVA (which does not produce vitamin D) at a dose equivalent to about 30 minutes of summer sun, their arteries dilated and their blood pressure dropped, as nitric oxide stored in the skin was released into the circulation. The dermatologist behind that work, has since argued (e.g., in this review) his specialty’s position on sunlight needs to be rethought. Similarly, a meta-analysis found that spending an hour or more a day in the summer sun was associated with a 16% lower risk of breast cancer, whereas simply living somewhere with more ambient UV was not.

Note: that being said, vitamin D supplementation can often be very beneficial. However, in almost all cases, elevating your vitamin D levels through appropriate sunlight exposure provides significantly greater benefits than supplementation.

What is Light?

Waves, by definition have a few fundamental properties:

•They require a medium to travel through. For example, the medium for waves at the beach is the ocean, whereas the medium for sound is the air.

•They travel at specific speeds.

•They have a specific wavelength and frequency (which are inversely related to each other).

•Their strength is determined by how many waves elapse in a second (a higher frequency correlates to a higher total energy) and how greatly each individual wave disrupts its medium (e.g., a small wave at the beach has much less energy than a tsunami as does a loud sound compared to a quiet one).

By far, the most common wave in our lives is electromagnetic radiation, which is defined as a wave that travels at the speed of light and, unlike all other waves, does not have a medium it travels through (which is why EMR can travel through space and many objects). “Light,” for instance, is one type of EMR.

Since there is an inverse relationship between a wave’s wavelength and frequency, a variety of different types of EMR exist depending upon their wavelength. For example, visible light comprises the EMR with a wavelength between 380nm-700nm, as this is the EMR the eye can “see.” At the same time, depending on the wavelength of the EMR, its properties (e.g., color) vary immensely.

Likewise, many other types of EMR also exist (e.g., Gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet, visible light, infrared, microwaves, and radiowaves) which each have different properties. However, despite EMR being one of the fundamental constructs of our reality, much of its biological significance is still not recognized. For example, I feel some of the biggest misunderstandings about EMR are as follows:

•Natural light tends to have a fairly wide range of frequencies present within it (e.g., this is why sunlight splits into a rainbow once it passes through a prism). In contrast, artificial light tends to have a much narrower range of frequencies present within it which differs greatly from what biology evolved to handle.

•This is easiest to see by comparing bulbs. A standard white LED emits a sharp spike of blue at around 450nm, a broader hump of yellow, and almost nothing past 700nm. An incandescent bulb, like the sun, emits a smooth curve that keeps rising through the red and continues past 2000nm, so most of what it produces is infrared we cannot see.¹
Note: since the government grades bulbs on visible light per watt, that infrared was scored as “waste,” which is how the incandescent bulb came to be banned.

•The label “ultraviolet” is given to the EMR that lies between visible light and x-rays. This implies all UV is the same, when in reality, each type of UV (UV-A, UV-B, and UV-C behave very differently) and are present in very different amounts (e.g., the atmosphere blocks most UV-C from reaching the surface of the Earth).

•Infrared penetrates much deeper into the body than UV (5-40mm vs. 0.02-0.15mm) and in 2025, researchers at University College London were able to measure the infrared in sunlight after it had passed through the human body and found that it created systemic effects. Additionally, standard glass (for the most part) blocks UV from traveling through it.

•Conventional science typically describes the adverse effects of EMR as being a property of how much energy the EMR has and if that energy is sufficient to break molecular bonds (termed ionizing energy). For example, gamma rays (which are released by nuclear weapons) are so dangerous because their ionization energy is so powerful they shred the molecular structures of the body (e.g., DNA) apart. Conversely, microwaves (which are instead on the low energy end of the electromagnetic spectrum) are deemed to not be dangerous because they contain too little energy to ionize molecular bonds.

•The previous point is not entirely correct because while EMR typically passes through whatever it contacts, if it instead “matches” that medium, it will store inside it and have a dramatically greater effect on it (e.g., this describes the concept of a resonance frequency). This is important because a wide number of critical living structures (e.g., mitochondria) evolved to have a resonance for a specific type of EMR and then respond to them while everything around them is largely unaffected by that specific type of EMR. Unfortunately, this aspect of science has been largely glossed over by our scientific apparatus, something I believe is due to the fact biophysics opens the doors to creating a variety of un-patentable medical therapies, and because it implicates a lot of the EMR we are now saturated in (e.g., the microwaves cell phones bluetooth and Wifi use) as a cause of poor health.

For example, radar works by sending out a large pulse of microwave energy in each direction (through the unit spinning around), and then using the reflections it receives from any radar pulse into the atmosphere to indicate the presence of an object being there. I personally think radar is far from benign as I’ve read numerous stories of soldiers stationed next to radar units (where the microwaves are exponentially stronger) becoming severely ill, I know many EMF sensitive people can tell if far away radar units are firing, and I personally can feel something when I am at an airport each time a radar sweeps by. While that seems abstract, I recently saw a brief video by John Ott that perfectly demonstrates the reality of this phenomenon:

Biophotons and Mitogenic Radiation

Note: in another article I wrote on this critical subject I highlighted how it underlies many of the therapies now used in regenerative medicine.

A fundamental principle within biophysics is that cells emit very faint photons (predominantly within the ultraviolet spectrum) they use to control growth and communicate with other cells and that when biophoton transmissions go awry, disease results (leading to abnormal photon emissions from tissue being seen in many disease states). For example, cancers have abnormal biophoton emissions, and (when studied) carcinogenic substances significantly disrupt the wavelength of these photons, whereas similar compounds that do not disrupt those biophotons are not carcinogenic (an observation which led Fritz-Albert Popp to create the discipline of biophotonics).

One of the most interesting observations made within biophotonics was that the cytopathic changes caused in a cell by viral infections or toxin exposures could be “transferred” to another cell in the immediate vicinity when the cells had no physical connection but were optically connected through a UV transmitting window, while conversely (as this Russian study shows), cells injured by radiation could be healed by being placed by healthy ones.
Note: when cells are irradiated, nearby unirradiated cells can also show radiation-like injury (known as the bystander effect). Recently, evidence has accumulated that ultra-weak biophoton emission contributes to the bystander effect.^1,2,3

Likewise, in health, biophoton emissions cycle with the circadian rhythm (e.g., when a Japanese team imaged the light coming off the human body, it peaked in the late afternoon and stayed low overnight, even in volunteers kept awake under constant light¹), whereas in chronic illness, Robert Naviaux (the researcher who pioneered studying the cell danger response) mapped each stage of the cell danger response to a characteristic level of emission the body becomes stuck at.¹

Alexander Gurwitsch was one of the earliest researchers to study this. In 1923, he discovered that living cells (of both animals and plants) gave off extremely faint emissions which triggered the cells around them to leave their lag phase, enter mitosis and divide, leading him to name it mitogenic radiation [MGR]. After realizing that ordinary glass but not quartz glass blocked it, he concluded that MGR was a type of ultraviolet light (as this is how UV behaves), and much later, it was confirmed to be exactly that (with a wavelength between 190-350 nm).

Note: MGR is very faint (making it difficult to detect), and its emission from biological systems typically requires the system to be illuminated with light (which makes the faint mitogenic emissions much more difficult to spot). Eventually, roughly a decade after Gurwitsch’s death, researchers were able to capture this radiation with sensitive photomultiplier devices.

After studying it in detail, Gurwitsch realized that MGR required a very specific dosing and pattern (e.g., through being pulsed) to achieve its optimal effects, and that too much quickly became counterproductive (e.g., light UV exposure stimulated the growth of yeasts, while stronger UV exposure killed them). For example, light interrupted 100-800 times a second produced the effect in 13 seconds (versus 6-8 minutes for continuous light), while yeast responded to the UV from living tissue at intensities orders of magnitude lower than they did to UV from a lamp, and responded far better to a lamp emitting a mix of wavelengths than to one emitting a single spectral line.¹

As this was very challenging to do artificially, the value of MGR was primarily in what it facilitated the diagnosis of (e.g., blood typically emitted MGR, but if someone had cancer it did not, and as a result, with a high degree of accuracy, the hospital he worked at was able to determine if someone had a cancer purely by assessing if MGR had disappeared from their blood). This was eventually traced to a peptide which appeared in the blood of cancer patients and quenched its UV emission (termed the “cancer quencher”), whereas in the other states where blood stopped radiating (e.g., fatigue, starvation, old age, diabetes or sepsis), this was instead due to metabolic byproducts which absorbed the UV, a difference the test could distinguish. In animals, the quencher appeared long before a tumor could be felt (e.g., in rats, 9-12 days after tumor cells were implanted versus 28-32 days) and disappeared within days of the tumor being successfully removed (while its persistence predicted a recurrence). Likewise, in the clinics which used it to screen newly admitted patients, both its sensitivity and specificity exceeded 95%, roughly thirty years before the first conventional blood tumor marker (alpha-fetoprotein) was discovered.¹

Additionally, Gurwitsch and those who followed him (many of whom also were within the Soviet Union) found that:

•Both living tissue and enzymatic reactions (e.g., the synthesis of amino acids) emit MGR, while MGR (and UV light) can catalyze the synthesis of biochemical molecules.

•Once many biological substances (e.g., blood) were exposed to MGR, they would then emit MGR, which was termed “secondary MGR.” In many cases, secondary MGR was able to precisely match the frequencies and duration of MGR that were necessary for the best response to it in tissue throughout the body, and could significantly exceed the energy that had initially been received. I suspect this is why ultraviolet blood irradiation creates significant systemic effects but only works when a small portion of the blood is irradiated.

•Injuring or killing cells would cause them to release an intense flash of MGR which lasts for minutes, has a very different spectrum from typical MGR, and cannot be triggered again until the cell has recovered. Most recently, in 2025, physicists at the University of Calgary used cameras capable of detecting single photons to image the light coming off living things, and found it rose wherever a plant’s leaf had been injured, while in mice it dropped markedly once they died.

Note: I suspect the flash comes from exosomes being released from the cell (while conversely, it is recognized that biophoton signaling will cause cells to release exosomes¹,²). Likewise, I suspect you often see such rapid systemic changes after therapeutic exosome infusions is because of the regulatory photons they release into the body.

•Faster-growing cells tended to be mitogenic while slow-growing ones were not, with the primary exception being cancer cells.

•Certain parts of the body (brain tissue, the cornea of the eye, active muscles, and blood) had much greater emissions of MGR (and muscles from frogs freshly taken from the wild emitted far more than those from frogs kept for months in an aquarium¹).

•A dissected optic nerve was found to radiate mitogenic radiation throughout the optic tract when the eye was exposed to unfiltered sunlight.
Note: recent research supports this. When freshly isolated rat eyes (and separately their lens, vitreous humor and retina) were exposed to visible light, each re-emitted photons afterwards,¹ while when light of various colors was shone on one end of a rat spinal nerve root, photon activity significantly increased at the other end, something a nerve conduction blocker (procaine) or metabolic inhibitors prevented.¹ Likewise, the Müller cells of the retina are already known to guide light, and physicists at the University of Calgary have shown that the myelin sheath surrounding nerve fibers could allow them to function as optical waveguides.¹

•Blood vessel walls were found to not block the transmission of mitogenic radiation, and within the blood vessel, MGR was best conducted when the vessel itself was energized, a quality likely imparted into the blood by the electrical charge of the heart.

-As tissue goes through different developmental stages its MGR changes (which suggests MGR helps guide growth and differentiation, something no biochemical mechanism has been able to explain). For example, as people age, their blood emits less and less MGR (and it temporarily declines after stress or exertion), and this may account for why their bodies have more difficulty healing from injuries.

Note: in the 1930s, researchers determined that partially restoring the MGR of an older person’s blood improved senility.

Another Forgotten Side of Medicine

Within 25 years of Gurwitsch’s discovery, over 700 papers had been published on it by more than a hundred researchers around the world (fewer than 3% of which failed to find the effect), Gurwitsch had been nominated for the Nobel Prize 11 times, and a future Nobel laureate (Dennis Gabor) had been among those who confirmed the radiation was ultraviolet. The research then stopped, as it was interrupted in Europe by World War II, increasingly dismissed in the West as “Soviet science,” and in 1948 persecuted within the USSR alongside genetics.¹

It was never seriously resumed, even though physical instruments later confirmed the emissions his school had detected biologically (e.g., from onion roots, embryos, yeast, excited nerves, the working heart and malignant tumors)_,¹ the author of a 1967 paper in Nature declaring MGR disproven went on to improve his equipment, detect it, and spend the next twenty years confirming the UV emission’s intensity, wavelength and timing matched what had been reported in the 1930s,¹ and a physical basis for how such faint light could trigger cell division has recently being proposed.¹

Sadly, while the subject of MGR has an immense number of important implications for biology, very few know of the topic now (even within disciplines like regenerative medicine where MGR modulating therapies significantly improve clinical outcomes), as like many other forgotten sides of medicine, the vast body of literature behind this unpatentable therapy could not keep it from being swept away in the sands of time.
Note: I consider one of the most important discoveries made by these researchers was that the eyes conducted MGR into the body.

John Nash Ott

Note: most of this section is a summary of Ott’s book Health and Light.

As plants move quite slowly, it is typically not possible to see their movement (although exceptions do exist such as plants that reflexively contract like Venus fly traps or if one is in areas where nature has an unusual abundance of vitality, with careful observation, it’s sometimes possible to see rhythmic movements in the periphery of a tree).

Time-lapse photography (where shots taken far away from each other are turned into frames for a motion picture) made it possible to accelerate this microscopic movement of plants and hence make it visible. One of the pioneers of time-lapse photography was John Nash Ott, who began working on it in 1927 (while in high school) and because of the popularity of newfound art, got a lot of business. For example, this is some of the footage in a Disney motion picture Ott was hired for: