Does Red Light Therapy Work? Sleep, Skin and Hair Benefits

Scott: Part of the reason why I wound up where I am is that I had really bad insomnia in my 20s and 30s. It was terrible. It really just demolishes your quality of life, at least for me, because if I don't get a good night's sleep, I'm kind of worthless. And then I figured out that it was really just this bright light. I grew up with a television in my bedroom. I just had really bad sleep hygiene habits. Once I started wearing blue-blocking glasses and dimming the lights in the rooms at sunset, my sleep has been great ever since. It's just so crazy to me that I struggled for that long, and it was something so simple.

Nikkiey: What's going on, everybody? Hey, you guys. Welcome back to another episode of The WarriorBabe Show. Today I'm super excited for the guest that I have here with us. I'm sitting down with Scott. He is the founder and CEO of Mito Red Light. He's one of the leading names in red light therapy, and it's a brand that I've talked about before on this podcast, and I'm an owner of the product as well. Scott is on a mission to make clinical-grade light therapy more accessible to people. In this conversation, we're going to dive into how red light supports energy and recovery, and we'll dabble a little bit in hormones and long-term health. Scott, welcome to the show. I'm excited that you're here.

Scott: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Nikkiey: Cool. Before we dive into all of the science and applications, everyone listening, I'm going to dive into different buckets with Scott here. We'll dive into why red light matters, mitochondria and stress, the central nervous system and nervous system regulation, hormones and sleep. But before all of that, Scott, what first got you interested in red light therapy, and what made you decide to dedicate your life's work to helping people understand this type of technology?

Scott: It kind of goes back. I would say I've been a biohacker at heart since I was a teenager, really super interested in health and wellness. As a teenager I had bad acne, and I struggled with it pretty much into my late 20s. I just have a genetic predisposition, but I also now know that some of my lifestyle and diet habits were contributing to that. Even going back to my teenage years, I was trying to solve my own health issues, which were acne.

Then into my 20s, I had really bad insomnia. When you have challenges, you go looking for solutions. So I would say for decades I've been interested and largely self-taught. Then in 2016, my two-year-old son was diagnosed with cancer, and that was just a total nightmare. Anybody that's ever been through something like that is familiar with something called caregiver fatigue or caregiver exhaustion, and just the stress and the anxiety around that whole situation.

I was in bad shape, and I was looking for things that I could do to just feel a little bit better and sleep a little bit better. I stumbled upon red light in 2017, about a year in. I just bought a panel and started using it, and I noticed that it helped a little bit with my mood and a little bit with my sleep. Just having that 10 minutes of self-care time, getting away from the storm that we were living, made a huge difference. So I was an avid user.

Then in probably early 2018, I wanted to buy more red lights, because when you have a panel, you spin around, you've got to do upper body, lower body, front, back. I spent a lot of time that I didn't have trying to shine the light on my body. So I went out into the market to buy more, and I actually got sticker shock at how expensive they were. That was really when I wondered if I could build these myself and just have something more accessible. It turns out that we could. I prototyped for six months, and we launched in early 2019 with very, very simple products.

For me it was: I know that I want red and near-infrared light, I know that I want a certain amount of it, how can I do that as inexpensively as possible? So we had very no-frills products in the beginning. They didn't even have timers; they had mechanical switches. Very basic. Now we're seven-plus years in, our product portfolio has grown, and we've definitely added a lot more bells and whistles. But we still have very entry-level products price-wise, because again, I want everybody to have a red light in their home.

I think eventually we will get there. I think it's going to be a mainstay in homes throughout the world, and we want to make it as accessible as possible. So we've got very simple, well-designed products that are still relatively inexpensive compared to some of the other products out there.

Nikkiey: Yeah, you guys definitely do. It's very easy and accessible. The one that I have comes up to about waist high, so I sit in front of it, and that's great. It's easy, and you can move it around to different locations.

I want to get one of the big panels where you can just stand in front of it. That's the ideal. But I definitely agree with you that it's going to be a staple in people's households in years to come, and you guys are on the right track. It's really cool what you've done. It's also really cool to hear that you started off just being interested in it, you had your own experience making things better for you, and then you got the opportunity to really dive into it when that hardship came into your life with your child. I can resonate with you on the caregiver side of things, because I had to take care of my grandmother when she was sick.

So I get that. And look what you're doing now. You felt firsthand what it feels like to be a user of red light, and now you're trying to get everybody else to buy into why this is so effective and so useful. It's going to be a staple for sure. For anyone that's new to red light therapy, can you talk about what it is and how it actually works?

Scott: Sure. Zooming back, we've evolved with sunlight for millions or billions of years. When we think about the solar spectrum, it's divided into three main components, and we talk about wavelengths of light. There's ultraviolet light, which is 200 nanometers to 400 nanometers. A nanometer is just a billionth of a meter, so that's the wavelength. Then you've got visible light, which is 400 to 700 nanometers. If you remember high school physics, it's Roy G. Biv, but in the direction we're going it's violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red.

When you get up to 700 nanometers, that's red. And then we have infrared light, which is 700 nanometers up to, let's just say, 3,000 to 5,000 nanometers, and that's divided into near, mid and far. Those are the main parts of the solar spectrum. Different parts of the spectrum have different bioactive properties; they do different things to our biology. Most folks are familiar with ultraviolet light, UVB light, being needed for vitamin D, for example.

Most folks are becoming aware of blue light and its impact on our circadian biology, and trying to avoid blue light specifically after sunset so that you don't disrupt your circadian rhythm. And then red and infrared, particularly near infrared, are actually very interesting. They have unique bioactive properties where they are able to penetrate into the body and essentially act on the mitochondria. Hence the name of our company, Mito Red Light. Mito is short for mitochondria, because I'm a very literal person.

It's fascinating, because the shorter wavelengths of light can't penetrate into the body. They get absorbed by melanin. The longer wavelengths of infrared can get in, but they get absorbed by water and turned into heat. That's why mid and far infrared are used in saunas, because in an infrared sauna you want that heat generation. But there's a window of red and near-infrared light, roughly 600 nanometers up to about 1,000 nanometers, where you don't get that thermal effect and you don't get absorption by some of the other chromophores.

So that energy can get into the body and act on the mitochondria. The short explanation of what it's doing is that it's helping the mitochondria make energy. The mitochondria are the power plants of the cells, and they basically harness this electromagnetic energy to make ATP. ATP is adenosine triphosphate; it's essentially cellular energy. I can get into the mechanism real quick. It's amazing that we know all this stuff, because mitochondria are quite small.

What happens is these wavelengths of light go in and get absorbed by a chromophore called cytochrome c oxidase. Cytochrome c oxidase is bouncing around in the mitochondria, and it's going to bind with either nitric oxide or oxygen. When it binds with oxygen, it finishes making ATP; it's the fourth phase of cellular energy production. But if it's bound to nitric oxide, it can't finish making ATP. So what we think happens is that the light goes in, gets absorbed by cytochrome c oxidase, and literally vibrates it apart from nitric oxide.

That way there's more free-floating cytochrome c oxidase to bind with oxygen and finish making ATP. We observe this when we study it in the lab: we see an increase in ATP, and we also see an increase in nitric oxide, so that would make sense. The bottom line is that the more ATP, the more energy available to your cells, the better they can do their jobs, in simple terms. And so we see photobiomodulation, particularly red and near-infrared light therapy, studied for so many different things.

In theory, if cells contain mitochondria, which is pretty much every cell in your body except red blood cells, they can benefit from exposure to these wavelengths of light.

Nikkiey: I appreciate that scientific breakdown, and also the simpler terms: basically, at a cellular level, it's helping our mitochondria keep producing energy and giving us energy, essentially.

Scott: Right, exactly. And essentially being more efficient in doing so.

Nikkiey: Stemming off of that and keeping it on what it actually does, what are some of the most common benefits you've seen people report back when they start using red light therapy consistently?

Scott: There are so many different things. Gosh, it's been such a crazy 10 years for me, but I remember when I first learned about it, I was so skeptical. I'm an Ivy League grad, so maybe my ego gets in my way, or at least it used to when I was younger. I used to be so skeptical and think it was so much BS and that I was so much smarter than everybody. But I've been humbled, and I've learned that I was actually an idiot.

It's just a red light, how can it do anything? That was where I was coming from. But it's interesting to understand how it was first discovered, because the initial discovery drove the initial research. There was a Hungarian scientist, and the laser had just been invented. The first lasers were red, and he was curious if a laser he had would do anything to cancer. He studied skin cancer in mice. He shaved the mice, implanted skin cancer tumors, and then tried to ablate the tumors with the red laser that he had.

It was a very low-powered laser, so it didn't do anything to the tumors, but he observed that the mice that got the laser had their wounds heal faster, because he literally wounded them while he was implanting these tumors, and also their hair grew back faster. So it's been very well known and very well established for wound healing and for hair growth, because a lot of the early research was around those, since that's what the initial observations were. And now we know skin health for sure.

So I would say skin, which has been very well studied and used for decades, hair growth and wound healing would be the top use cases that are very well studied. And then anecdotally, from our own customers, we hear better sleep a lot, which is also very interesting to me. I don't know that there's scientific consensus on exactly why, but there are some strong hypotheses about why it helps you sleep better that go beyond just circadian signaling.

We think it could be increasing melatonin production. I can get into that too, if you're curious.

Nikkiey: I want to save that for the bucket that I have around sleep. We'll definitely dive into that a little bit later. When I was talking to you shortly before we hit record, I was saying the biggest things I'm noticing are that my skin is a lot clearer, and my hair. A lot of the listeners know this, but I'll fill you in: last year I had to chop my hair because my hair was thinning. It had to do with hormones and stress. I've had this Mito Red Light for, I think, two or three years now, but I specifically started sitting in front of it more often than I was.

I noticed that my hair was getting stronger just by sitting in front of it for 10 minutes a day.

Scott: I love it. That's super cool.

Nikkiey: Going off of that, have you seen red light affect people differently based on their age, their activity level or their hormone state? Or does that not matter?

Scott: Yes and no. In the studies we do observe differences in different populations, and there are various factors for that. Some of it would be conjecture on my part, or informed hypotheses, because I don't know that we definitively know exactly why.

A few things. One is that red light specifically does get absorbed by melanin. So one way it differs is that if somebody has more melanin than, say, me, and I'm pretty pale, the melanin will absorb the shorter wavelengths of red light and they'll experience red light differently than me. They'll actually feel more heat in their skin. It's very similar to UV light, because it's the exact same thing that happens with UV light.

Darker-skinned folks need more UV because it's absorbed by melanin, so they tend to have lower vitamin D levels, because they just need more relative to somebody whose ancestors are from Scandinavia. It's pretty much a similar effect with respect to red light. Also, if it's getting absorbed by melanin, it's not penetrating as deep into the body. So on balance, it could be that folks with darker skin would benefit from less red and more near infrared.

The melanin absorption is less as you get into near infrared. That's actually one of the things we tried to do. We designed the MitoADAPT, and I don't know which device you have, but the MitoADAPT has 11 modes. What I was trying to do there was give folks flexibility in the combination of wavelengths they could use. We also collect intake information, so Fitzpatrick skin type, age and some other things, and then we ask them for subjective feedback about how it's going.

I'm trying to correlate whether certain wavelengths potentially work better for certain populations, because we don't know exactly, so we're trying to gather data. That's in the works, but I need tens of thousands of data points before I can really start deciphering that. So I'm working on it. I think about this a lot in terms of non-responders, because we do get a fair amount of non-responders, and I have some hypotheses about why that might be, and even some of the literature. We just did a deal with Auston Matthews.

He's a phenomenal hockey player and just a really top-tier athlete. I was writing a blog article about performance, so I was doing more research about performance. In a lot of the performance research, red light really seems to move the needle if you're an elite athlete or if you're not an athlete at all. But for the moderate exercise people, it doesn't move the needle as much, which I find very interesting.

Before really doing a deep dive into that particular research, I would have guessed that the elite athletes would have been the hardest to see an effect in, because they're already elite and already performing at such a high level. In my opinion it's so much harder to move the needle once you're at an Olympian level. But that's not the case, at least in the research. So if you're an elite athlete or if you're sedentary, you get more of a net benefit than if you're in the middle, at least with respect to performance and recovery.

I'm not exactly sure why, but that's what the research says at the moment. Another hypothesis I have for non-responders is mitochondrial dysfunction earlier in the electron transport chain. To zoom back, a very simple way to think about this is that there are four steps to making energy, which we describe as complex one, two, three and four. Red light therapy works at complex four. We actually just came out with skincare products, and one of the ingredients is methylene blue, because methylene blue helps complex one and three.

So in theory, anything that improves the efficiency or function of complex one, two or three would be synergistic with red light, because you have to get to complex four before you can actually realize the benefit. One of my hypotheses, a very simple idea, is that if you have mitochondrial dysfunction and you're struggling to even get your mitochondria to the fourth step, then you're not in a position to benefit as much from the red light, because you have to get to that fourth step before red light can do its thing. So I'm really interested in thinking about what we can do to synergize with red light.

There are a few things, like antioxidants, and I think mitochondrial support at complex one, two and three is a pretty logical way to synergize with red light.

Nikkiey: Ladies, are you feeling frustrated with the body changes you're experiencing during menopause? It's time to take control. If you're between 45 and 65 years old and tired of struggling with body fat and muscle loss, WarriorBabe is here for you.

At WarriorBabe, we've helped over 18,000 women just like you lose body fat, build toned muscle and understand their bodies better with personalized plans based on hormone and thyroid testing and more. Imagine knowing exactly what your body needs to see real results, and results that last. Don't wait anymore. Take charge of your health and join our community of strong, empowered women. Visit warriorbabe.com/apply today to start your transformation. That's warriorbabe.com/apply. All right, let's get back to the show.

That's pretty cool that you're diving into this research and developing more around non-responders, or however you termed it, getting a better understanding of how it can work with that group, plus all the other research you're doing. It's really cool.

Scott: Yeah, it's fun. We're doing a study in Poland right now, just because it's less expensive to do studies in Poland. We designed a skincare product, so we're doing a split-face study. We just kicked it off, and I'm super excited. They're putting the skin serum we designed on half the face, and then they're illuminating the entire face five times a week for 12 weeks. What we're hoping to see is that the side that just gets the red light sees improvements in skin quality, and we've got five different metrics we're measuring. But on the side where we precondition with the serum, which is designed to synergize with the red light, we're hoping to see more of a net benefit.

So stay tuned for that. We've got about three or four months before we get the results.

Nikkiey: That's super cool. It's really cool to be inside your brain and hear and unpack what you're working on and the depths you're getting to. I appreciate that, as the owner and CEO of a company, you really care about what you're working on, not just for you but for the people you're selling the products to, and you want to get more answers so that you can serve more people.

Scott: I honestly am just a super curious person, and I love this stuff. Development is the most fun part of my job. Certainly operations and being organized is not the most fun part of my job, and I'm not good at that. But I like tinkering with things. If you come into our office, we've got all sorts of gadgets around. I'm not really even an inventor type, but I'm pretty good at understanding the current state and then trying to think of ways to make improvements.

And I'm also just super curious for my own benefit, because I want to look and feel young as long as I can.

Nikkiey: Love that. Okay, I want to dive into blue light, which you mentioned earlier. I know it's a cause of problems for a lot of people, being around blue light after sunset. For example, I have all Philips Hue lights in my space, so at night I turn them to orange light to get rid of the blue light.

I want to pick your brain on how artificial light and blue light contribute to mitochondrial dysfunction. How does that stuff affect our mitochondria?

Scott: This is kind of an emerging area of research, and something I'm also very curious about and working on solutions for. Again, I had my own issues. Part of the reason why I wound up where I am is that, as I mentioned earlier, I had really bad insomnia in my 20s and 30s. It was terrible.

I don't know about anybody else that's really struggled with it, but it really just demolishes your quality of life, at least for me, because if I don't get a good night's sleep, I'm kind of worthless. And that was happening on a regular basis. Then you get into this self-talk: oh no, it's going to be another one of those nights where I can't fall asleep. It's just a bad place to be. And then I figured out that it was really just this bright light. I grew up with a television in my bedroom; I just had really bad sleep hygiene habits. Once I started wearing blue-blocking glasses and dimming the lights in the rooms at sunset, my sleep has been great ever since.

It's just so crazy to me that I struggled for that long and it was something so simple that solved it. So I've lived that, and I'm a huge fan of dimming the lights at sunset. There are different levels. Going orange or red is good, and by nature they're dim, and obviously they don't have the blue. But I don't think it's just about getting rid of the blue; I also think it's about lowering the intensity of the light. And if you really want to up your game, I would suggest having the lights down on the ground instead of overhead, which is kind of an ancestral thing.

We also know that the receptors for this are at the bottom back of the eyeball, so they're primed to receive the light from the sun when it's high up in the sky midday. So another way to optimize it is to have the light lower and on the ground, the way a campfire would be on the ground. I've been doing this dim light thing for something like 15 years. I'd have friends come over, and my whole house turns red at night, and it's kind of weird.

If you don't know why, it's strange. People walking by outside are like, why is his house red? But that's how we roll in the Chaverri house. So there's that element of circadian signaling, and most folks are understanding this, and there are plenty of great options for low blue light. You can put things on your screen, like f.lux, or Iris, which is what I use, to change the composition of the light depending on the time of day. That way you're not getting it from the screen, because the screen is a horrible source of blue light and flickering light.

But then there's the ambient light too, which I think we need to start talking more about. LEDs get a bad rap, and our products are LEDs, so sometimes people get confused. The reason LEDs deserve a bad rap is really the white LEDs used for lighting. And really you should put white in quotes, because it's really blue light. Typically, the way these white LEDs are made, it's a blue LED shining through what's called yellow phosphor, which is basically just a yellow coating.

Yellow and blue make green. So the blue light goes through the yellow phosphor and makes this spectral curve, which is primarily green, but you get a little bit of yellow and red. Your eyes have receptors, rods and cones, I always get them confused, but there are red, green and blue receptors. If you light up enough of the red, green and blue, you perceive that as white. So we've got these LEDs with a spectral composition that is foreign to our biology: essentially blue, a little bit of green, and just enough yellow and red to light up enough of the red receptors that our brain perceives it as white light.

But it is very fake white light, and it is devoid of most of the visible light spectrum. It's missing cyan, for instance, and it's pretty much missing yellow, orange and red. And it's completely missing infrared. That is very foreign to our biology. Anytime you're getting light, period, in nature, you're getting infrared, whether it's from sunlight or from fire. So I would argue that this very short-wavelength, high-energy light, which is devoid of red and near infrared, is not good for our biology.

We need to start having a conversation about that and trying to find solutions where we can have our energy-efficiency cake and eat our beneficial near-infrared exposure too. I probably didn't phrase that as well as I could have, but hopefully you get my point. And I'm working on that too. I've got some ideas on how we can have energy-efficient light that is also more full spectrum and has infrared.

Nikkiey: I love that. You've got a lot in the works. Quick break. If you're finding this episode helpful so far, it would mean a lot if you could hit pause for just a second, leave a quick rating or review, or share it with someone who could benefit from it. Your support helps more women discover these tools to build muscle, lose fat and feel confident. Thank you so much for being a part of this journey with me.

Let's dive back into that sleep comment. You mentioned that red light therapy seems to have a huge effect on sleep quality. Can you explain, from what you know and understand, more specifically how it helps the circadian rhythm and melatonin production?

Scott: It's really interesting. There's a study I love, with an interesting cohort. It was done in elite Chinese female basketball players. The athletes got exposed to 30 minutes of red light in the early evening. Since they were athletes, I think they were measuring their performance and recovery, but they also happened to do subjective sleep quality scores.

And they also happened to measure their melatonin. What they noticed in the athletes is that their subjective sleep quality scores went way up, but they also noticed that their melatonin went up 67%. And it's like, whoa, that's interesting. Why? Most of the time when we're talking about melatonin, we're talking about dim light melatonin onset. Basically, the sun sets, things get dark, and that starts a cascade of signaling for the pineal gland to start making melatonin.

Then we get sleepy and we want to go to sleep. That whole process and that whole cascade is why you don't want to jack it up by putting bright lights on and messing up that whole natural daily rhythm. But I think the melatonin story is much bigger than the pineal gland. The leading theory is this: take a step back to how we talked earlier about red and near-infrared light going into the cells and increasing mitochondrial ATP production.

The way I describe it, there's no free lunch in biological systems. There's always a cost. So it's not just more energy; you also have an increase in oxidative stress within the mitochondria and within the cells. Nitric oxide is a pro-oxidant; it is an oxidative stressor. It tends to get lumped in as being good for blood pressure and things like that, and for a pump at the gym or in the bedroom, but it's also an oxidative stressor. So it makes sense that we see this increase in ATP and an increase in oxidative stress.

What happens is there's signaling from the mitochondria back to the nucleus of the cell, which is like: hey, we've got more oxidative stress, there's a fire going on here, we should bring the fire trucks and increase our anti-inflammatory and antioxidant production and signaling. What is thought is that the main antioxidant and anti-inflammatory that gets produced is melatonin.

And it kind of makes sense. If you've got a power plant, you would want the coolant built into the reactor, just from a design standpoint. So it wouldn't surprise me that when the power plants are running hotter, melatonin is produced locally right there to put out the fire, if you will. The thought is that if you're getting a good amount of red and near-infrared light during the day, you're building a reservoir of extrapineal melatonin. It's not the melatonin made by the pineal gland; it's melatonin made inside the cells.

You build this reservoir of melatonin during the day, and that helps the dim light onset melatonin be spared to help you sleep better. There are a couple of good papers on it by Russel Reiter and Scott Zimmerman, where they do a much better job of explaining it than I do. But that is the leading thought on how it works. And I know subjectively that anytime I spend a good amount of time outside, I sleep better. I think we've all experienced that, and I think it's that infrared light increasing melatonin production in the cells.

Nikkiey: Absolutely. Think about summer days when you're out with your family on the beach or something like that, and think about summer naps later in the day. You sleep much better after being outside.

Scott: Yeah, it makes total sense.

Nikkiey: What is a good, effective dose during the day, like a minimum effective dose? What would you recommend as a sweet spot in terms of duration and frequency?

Scott: Based on the literature, it depends on what it is. We measure in joules, and a joule is, I think, watts per second. One of the things when you're looking for a device is that you want to make sure the manufacturer can tell you, with independent lab data and proper measuring equipment, what the fluence is.

Fluence is just joules per square centimeter. Generally speaking, you want somewhere between 6 joules and 60 joules. Six joules might be something like the eyes. It's very interesting; they're studying red and near-infrared light for eye health. Eyes are obviously super sensitive to light, so it makes sense that the dose would be quite low; you don't need a lot. And they're also loaded with mitochondria. We usually recommend wearing the goggles or the glasses, because our lights are quite bright.

But if somebody was going to use it for eye health, basically a minute or so would be plenty, maybe two minutes. The reason I say that is our devices at 12 inches put out about 3 joules per square centimeter. So 6 joules would be about two minutes, up to about 60 joules, which would be about 20 minutes. That's for deep tissue or maybe an injury, an acute problem; I might suggest doing a higher dose. A couple of years ago I was putting my daughter's tricycle together on Christmas, used very bad posture, and hurt my back really badly.

So I was doing 30 minutes, a very, very long light session, trying to get my back back to normal. But that's not what I would recommend for regular use. For daily maintenance, with devices like ours, about 10 minutes, about 30 joules, which again is right in that range, is probably pretty good. And we also recommend strategically taking a day off each week.

Nikkiey: Cool. That's good to know. I'll have to check my joules and make sure I'm at the right joules. Okay, I want to dive a little bit into your perspective on hormone health, specifically thyroid function, cortisol and testosterone. How does red light influence those, like your thyroid function, your cortisol, your stress? How does it help?

Scott: Hormones are super complicated, because you can't really look at them in isolation. There are all these feedback loops. DHT is made from testosterone. Estrogen is made from testosterone.

So you can't really look at them in isolation, and I'm not an endocrinologist, but I think you really need to look at the whole picture and try to understand what's happening with the whole tapestry of your biochemistry. I would say generally that we've gotten some really good anecdotal feedback about thyroid health. When I looked at the research, the thyroid seems to be quite sensitive to red and near-infrared light, so from what I've been able to tell in the research, you don't need a lot to move the needle there.

We've had some anecdotes of folks who had an underactive thyroid and were on medication who were able to get off the medication, which is incredible. Again, those are anecdotes and I can't make any medical claims; this is a customer testimonial. I remember this one going back, gosh, six years. The guy was so happy, and I was just so humbled. I always feel so humbled when I get that type of feedback, because I just sell lights. But it does seem to really help people.

Nikkiey: You just sell lights. That's such a humbling response.

Scott: Now, testosterone is an interesting one. I was going through significant caregiver fatigue, but I'd also just crossed 40, and I was interested in what I could do for my testosterone. That was one of the reasons I tried red light, because I read an article from a famous biohacker in Men's Health saying that he shined a red light on his crown jewels and it helped with testosterone.

I will say, for me, I didn't notice anything, maybe because I was already in a normal range. But we've had a few anecdotes of guys who actually had testing done where they were very low, and they said they used the light for six to eight weeks and got into normal. Again, hormones are complicated. At the end of the day, what would be the hypothesis for how that's helping? If your testicular function is somehow compromised and the light is helping your testes function better and make more testosterone, great. But if that's not the reason you have low testosterone, then maybe the light's not going to do anything.

There are a lot of other reasons for low testosterone, whether it's microplastics or who knows. Low testosterone is kind of an epidemic, and I don't know that we know exactly what's driving all that. There are also interesting studies on fertility. It's pretty fascinating. There was a study in Japan where they just used the light on the back of the head, I believe, and they saw improvements in fertility in the women who were not in the control group. That's really fascinating to me, because you would think you'd want to shine the light on the reproductive organs.

But for some reason, everything's connected. I don't like to use the word machine, because I think it sells the body short, but for lack of a better term, the body is an amazing machine. It's so amazingly complex and so beautifully designed, by God or evolution, depending on your belief system. It's just fun to learn these things and see. So I guess that's kind of a long-winded answer.

As far as hormone health, there are a lot of areas of study. Generally speaking, get a light and use it on a regular basis, even if it just helps you sleep better. There are these cascading downstream benefits from sleeping better, and I don't think there's a lot of downside. I would also just suggest trying to get outside more and get more sunlight. I think everybody's sunlight deficient. So even if you don't want to buy a light, if you could change your lifestyle to spend more time outside, I think you'd probably be better off.

Nikkiey: Love that answer. What you mentioned about getting a light and seeing what you're struggling with personally, it's going to be a very individualized approach to why people use these lights. What are you struggling with? For me personally, it was hair, and you just see it. Maybe it's sleep for some people, or other things they want to improve upon. They get a light and they see what changes for themselves.

Scott: Right, and it may be something unexpected. Actually, I would say oftentimes it is. There are some things people are dealing with where the light may not move the needle. But sleep is the number one piece of feedback we get.

So even if that's all it did, and obviously I believe it has the potential to do a lot more, I think that could be incredibly profound in terms of your quality of life. I say that as someone who had insomnia for a long time and terrible sleep, and I know how much that negatively impacted my quality of life.

Nikkiey: I want you to talk about Mito Red Light right now, because this industry is starting to get very flooded. The market's exploding with red light. I know you've made it very affordable and accessible for people, but how can people know what to look for when they're looking for a quality red light device?

Scott: It's a little bit of a self-serving comment, but go with a company that's been around for a while and has a bit of a track record. We've been doing this for seven years, so we know how to build good devices at this point. Boy, if I didn't figure it out by now, I should go do something else. I really believe we have really high-quality devices, and it's one of those things you have to pick up and feel. Anytime somebody picks up our 300X, they say you can just tell this thing is built well and meant to be rugged and last.

You've had yours for several years, and I anticipate that if you continue to leave it in a room-temperature room and don't throw it in the bathtub or something, it's going to last several more years. So really it is an investment, and you want a device that is well built, because they should last many, many years. That's the nice thing about LED tech: the LED chips really last a long time, partially because they're so efficient and there's minimal heat generated, which is kind of my next tip.

For panels, the state of the art today is that any panel that's going to put out a reasonable amount of light needs some sort of active cooling so that those LEDs can be pushed to deliver that light. So I would be skeptical of devices that don't have some sort of active cooling system. The cooling system has multiple parts to it. We use heat sinks under the LEDs, which are basically little fins that help dissipate heat from the LED through convection. But there are also fans running to keep airflow. When you turn your device on, the fans kick on, and we want to keep those LEDs as cool as we can because, A, they're more efficient, since as LEDs heat up they actually get less efficient.

B, they're going to last a lot longer. And C, that's the only way to really do it properly if you want what, in my view, is a therapeutic amount of light. Non-actively cooled devices, I think, are generally going to be too low powered, so they would need to be used right up against the body and for a much longer time, and the penetration won't be as deep. To me, panels are the way to go for durability, versatility and the power you get, so that the light can penetrate pretty deep.

Nikkiey: Good response. Everyone listening right now can feel Scott's brain and passion for these products in the way we've been chatting throughout this entire conversation. I totally agree with you about going with a reputable brand, because you're constantly working, improving and getting better, and you've been around for a long time. I can speak firsthand: the products are great. Where can people find you and get the products? Say your website here, and I'll put it in the description as well.

Scott: Sure. Our website is Mito, M-I-T-O, again short for mitochondria: mitoredlight.com is our main site. If you're curious to learn more, there's a great book that just came out, which I'll plug.

I didn't write this, but my friend Ari Whitten did. I just got it yesterday, and because I'm a geek, I read about two-thirds of it yesterday. I'm not usually the type to sit down and crank through a book, but I was super interested in what was in this book, and I have to say it was really well done. So Ari, kudos to you, great job. If you want to learn more about red light, go on Amazon and buy Ari Whitten's The Ultimate Guide to Red Light Therapy; the second edition just came out. Also go to our blog at mitoredlight.com.

You can go to the Learn section, and we've got articles on all sorts of topics. We've been building this reservoir and trying to update it and stay up to date with the science. It's always fun for me to think about. First of all, I can't believe it's been seven years. But when I started this, there were about 4,000 studies in photobiomodulation, and now there are almost 9,000. So in just seven years, we've gone from 4,000 to 9,000. I always get excited about the rapid pace of human knowledge, because there are so many amazing scientists out there doing amazing work.

And now with AI on top of that, you can get excited that we might really be able to start solving some big problems. But from my vantage point, just the amount of studies that have happened in the seven years I've been doing this is crazy.

Nikkiey: That's very cool. If you guys are interested, it's really cool to see that there are so many more studies and research that you're continuing to delve into to make these products even better for people. Scott, thank you first and foremost for being here and having this conversation. It's been really cool to dive into your brain, pick your brain and break things down at a high, scientific level and at a very simple, practical level for people listening.

If you're new to red light or maybe already using it, I hope Scott's knowledge and what he shared with us today helps you think differently about the way you're supporting your body, even on a deeper level. And check out the products too; I highly recommend them. Scott, thanks for being here. I appreciate your time.

Scott: Thank you so much.

Nikkiey: Real quick: if this episode resonated with you or gave you the push you needed, I'd love for you to pay it forward. Drop a quick rating and review, share the podcast with someone who might need it, and help me keep spreading the word. Your feedback not only helps the show grow, but it might just be the nudge someone else needs to kickstart their transformation. Thank you so, so, so much for your support.