261102 – The Effect of Light on the Body

November 2, 2026 Leave a comment

What Our Light Is Doing to Us

· @Thomas Lee Abshier, ND

An essay on the argument made by the physician who writes as “A Midwestern Doctor” in The Forgotten Side of Medicine, in light of the primary research.

I stand on the side of this proposition: light is a nutrient, not merely a means of seeing, and the indoor light most Americans now live under is a deficient diet. The body was built under the sun, and it uses far more of the sun’s spectrum than the eye uses to read a page. When we replaced that spectrum with a narrow, blue-peaked slice chosen for energy efficiency, we changed what the body is fed without asking what the body needs.

The Midwestern Doctor makes this case in a recent essay, “What Modern Light Bulbs Are Doing to Us” (October 29, 2026). His argument runs on three tracks. First, sunlight protects health in ways that go well beyond vitamin D. Second, the energy-efficient bulbs now mandated by federal rule deliver too much blue at night and almost none of the red and infrared the body uses by day. Third, a body of older research, much of it forgotten, suggests that light acts inside the body far more than medicine now assumes.

The essay arrives at a political moment. On September 30, 2026, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted to send the LIT Act (S. 1568), which would repeal the federal incandescent-bulb rules, to the full Senate. This article weighs the Midwestern Doctor’s argument piece by piece, grades the evidence behind each piece, and says where it is strong, where it is suggestive, and where it is still a frontier.

The Question Under the Question

The public fight is about light bulbs: cost, lifespan, the grid, domestic manufacturing. The question under it is older and larger. Who decided what the human body would be bathed in for sixteen waking hours a day, and on what measure did he decide it?

The answer is that it was decided by an engineering unit, the lumen, which counts only what the daytime eye perceives as brightness. Nobody set out to starve the body of red and infrared or to flood the evening with blue. Those outcomes were simply invisible to the metric. That is the real concern behind the bulb debate: a technical standard, adopted for a narrow purpose, quietly became a biological policy for the whole population.

The same pattern runs through the Midwestern Doctor’s wider argument about sunlight. A single risk, skin cancer, came to define public messaging about the sun. The sun’s benefits had no agency or industry to speak for them, so they dropped out of the conversation. Whether or not every detail of his case holds, that pattern is real, and it is worth naming.

Sunlight and Survival: What the Epidemiology Shows

The strongest population evidence supports the Midwestern Doctor’s first claim: people who get more sun, and more daylight, die less often over the following years.

  • The Swedish women’s cohort. Lindqvist and colleagues followed 29,518 Swedish women for 20 years, starting in 1990–1992. All-cause mortality fell as sun exposure rose. Women who avoided the sun died at roughly twice the rate of the highest-exposure group, with an estimated 3% of all deaths attributable to sun avoidance. The authors concluded that very restrictive sun advice in low-sunlight countries may harm women’s health. (The Midwestern Doctor cites a “60% more likely to die” figure; the original 2014 paper’s headline comparison is roughly twofold. The direction is the same.)
  • Wrist light sensors in 88,905 people. In the UK Biobank, participants wore light sensors for a week and were followed for about eight years (Windred et al., PNAS, 2024). Those with the brightest days had a 10–34% lower risk of death than those with the dimmest. Those with the brightest nights had a 15–34% higher risk. The effects were strongest for heart and metabolic deaths.
  • A mechanism beyond vitamin D. In 24 healthy volunteers, UVA light on the skin, which produces no vitamin D, dilated arteries and lowered blood pressure by releasing nitric oxide stored in the skin. Heat alone, delivered under a foil blanket, did not.

Grade: strong observational evidence, consistent across large cohorts, with a plausible mechanism shown in controlled experiments. The weakness of all observational data is that sun-seekers may also be more active and healthier in ways a questionnaire cannot capture; the Swedish authors said so themselves. But the UK Biobank result is harder to explain away, because it measured light directly and found the night signal running opposite to the day signal. Exercise does not explain why bright nights predict death.

A correction on skin cancer. The Midwestern Doctor says the death rate from skin cancer has remained almost unchanged despite decades of sun-avoidance campaigns. That is no longer accurate. U.S. melanoma mortality rose about 7.5% from 1986 to 2013, then fell about 18% from 2013 to 2016 (National Cancer Institute). But the researchers attributed the drop to new immunotherapy and targeted drugs, not to prevention, and melanoma incidence more than doubled over the same period. So his underlying point survives in a narrower form: the decline in melanoma deaths came from treatment, not from teaching people to avoid the sun.

The Lumen Problem and the Bulb Rules

The federal rules judged bulbs by a measure that cannot see most of what the body uses. That is the Midwestern Doctor’s central point about the ban, and it correctly describes the metric.

What the rules did. A 2007 law directed the Department of Energy to require general service bulbs to meet a minimum efficiency, measured in lumens per watt. In 2022, the Department set a floor of 45 lumens per watt; in April 2024, it finalized a rule raising the floor past 120 lumens per watt, with compliance required from July 25, 2028 (Federal Register, April 19, 2024). A standard 60-watt incandescent yields roughly 13 lumens per watt, so it fails. The 2028 floor will leave little but LEDs on the shelf.

What a lumen counts. A lumen weighs each wavelength by how bright it looks to the daytime eye. Green and yellow count most. Deep red counts little, and infrared and ultraviolet count for essentially nothing. By that measure, an incandescent bulb wastes most of its energy, because most of its output is infrared. A white LED, by contrast, is a blue chip coated with a yellow phosphor: it emits a sharp blue peak near 450 nm, a broad yellow hump, and almost nothing beyond about 700 nm. It is efficient precisely because it makes only what the eye registers as light.

The flaw is not that the engineers lied. It is that the lumen was adopted in 1924, decades before the discovery of the retinal cells that set the body’s clock. Those cells respond most strongly to blue light near 480 nm, which the lumen discounts. So a standard built for visibility ended up rewarding exactly the spectrum that most disturbs the body’s clock at night, and penalizing the spectrum the body may most need by day.

The other side’s case. The Department of Energy projected that the 2022 rules would save consumers nearly $3 billion a year on utility bills. Those savings are real for households and businesses that light large spaces for long hours, and LEDs last far longer. The manufacturers’ trade group, NEMA, opposes repeal; it says its members no longer make incandescent bulbs and warns of low-quality imports. Those are legitimate economic considerations. But neither the savings estimate nor the trade group’s objection addresses the biological question at all, and that silence is the point. Notably, the Department’s 2024 rule includes sections on “health impacts” and a definition of “circadian-friendly” LED lamps, so the issue was raised during rulemaking; it simply did not govern the outcome.

Where the bill stands. Senator Mike Lee introduced the LIT Act (S. 1568) on May 1, 2025. It would remove general service bulbs from the efficiency program and void the 2022 and 2024 rules. The Department of Energy itself testified in support at the September 16, 2026 hearing. The committee ordered the bill reported on September 30; trade press reports the vote as 11 to 9 along party lines, though the committee had not posted a tally as of early October. It still needs a floor vote, likely 60 votes in the Senate, and action in the House on its companion, H.R. 3341. It is not law.

Blue Light at Night

That blue-rich light at night disturbs the body’s clock and suppresses melatonin is the best-established part of the Midwestern Doctor’s argument. It is mainstream circadian science.

The 2023 consensus. In a survey published in Frontiers in Photonics (Moore-Ede et al., 2023), 248 scientists who had together published 2,697 papers on light and circadian rhythms reached consensus on 25 statements. Over 90% agreed that the body’s clock is most sensitive to blue light near 480 nm, that brighter indoor light at night disrupts circadian rhythms and suppresses melatonin, and that disrupting those rhythms can cause ill health. The group also endorsed warning labels saying that blue-enriched LEDs may be harmful if used at night. Two limits deserve mention: only about one in five invited scientists answered, and the threshold for “consensus” was set at two-thirds agreement. The lead author’s center is also tied to the circadian-lighting business. Even so, the high-agreement statements reflect what the circadian field has shown for twenty years.

Bulb by bulb. A 2026 study in Scientific Reports (PMC12827953) measured the spectra of 52 household bulbs and calculated how strongly each would suppress melatonin per unit of light:

Bulb type Estimated melatonin suppression
Cool white LED 12.3%
Cool white compact fluorescent 12.1%
Warm white LED 3.6%
Warm white compact fluorescent 2.6%
Incandescent 1.5%

Tunable LEDs fell from about 10% at a cool 5700 K setting to 0.1% at a warm 2100 K setting. These are calculated estimates from each bulb’s spectrum, not melatonin measured in people, but they rest on well-validated response curves.

Grade: strong. The practical lesson is clear and does not depend on the fate of any bill: the color of evening light matters, cool white is the worst choice after dark, and incandescent remains the gentlest common source. The study also shows that a well-chosen warm or tunable LED can come close. That is a fair point for the other side: the problem at night is less “LED” as such than cool, bright light at the wrong hour.

Red and Infrared: The Missing Half of the Spectrum

The newest and most important part of the argument concerns what LEDs leave out. Glen Jeffery’s group at University College London has spent years testing the idea that deep red and near-infrared light (roughly 650–900 nm) boosts the energy output of mitochondria, the cell’s power plants. Their human studies now point in one direction.

  • Blood sugar. In 30 healthy adults, a single 15-minute exposure of the back to 670 nm red light, given 45 minutes before a glucose drink, reduced the total rise in blood sugar over two hours by 27.7% and the peak by 7.5% (Powner and Jeffery, Journal of Biophotonics, 2024). The light never touched the abdomen or the eyes.
  • Light through the body. In 2025, the group showed that infrared from sunlight can be measured after it passes through the human chest, even through clothing, and that 15 minutes of 830–860 nm light on the chest improved color vision 24 hours later, even with the eyes shielded (Jeffery et al., Scientific Reports, 2025).
  • The incandescent desk lamp study. In an LED-lit London office, 11 workers had ordinary 60-watt clear incandescent desk lamps placed around their benches for two weeks, while 11 others did not. Every worker with a lamp improved on a color-contrast vision test, by about 25%, and the gains persisted at four and six weeks after the lamps were removed. The controls did not change (Barrett and Jeffery, Scientific Reports, 2026). A companion study found that adding 850 nm infrared to LED desk lamps also improved color discrimination (Robinson et al., PLoS One, 2026), though the authors had less success reproducing the full incandescent effect with infrared LEDs alone.

Jeffery’s own summary is blunt: indoor environments under LEDs are “red-starved,” and long exposure to blue without red may harm physiology over time.

Grade: promising and consistent, but early. The studies are small, the vision tests are sensitive measures rather than disease outcomes, and the desk-lamp study rests on 22 people in one winter. No one has yet shown that years under LED lighting shortens life or causes diabetes in humans. What the work has shown is that the spectrum the efficiency rules discard is biologically active in people, that its effects reach beyond the spot where the light lands, and that ordinary incandescent bulbs supply it. That is enough to say the efficiency standard was written without knowledge it should have had.

Violet Light, Glasses, and the Legacy of John Ott

The Midwestern Doctor’s claim that ordinary glasses and windows deprive the eyes of light they need sounds fringe. In one specific form, ophthalmology now takes it seriously.

Violet light and nearsightedness. Children who spend more time outdoors develop less nearsightedness; that much is settled. A Keio University group led by Kazuo Tsubota proposed in 2017 that violet light (360–400 nm), abundant outdoors and nearly absent indoors, may help explain it (Torii et al., EBioMedicine, 2017). In chicks, violet light slowed the eye elongation that produces myopia. In a retrospective look at nearsighted children, those wearing violet-transmitting contact lenses progressed least, and those wearing ordinary eyeglasses, which block violet, progressed most. A 2021 mouse study in PNAS traced the effect to a violet-sensitive retinal pigment, neuropsin (OPN5). Window glass, UV-blocking spectacles, and LED and fluorescent lighting all remove most of this band.

Grade: solid animal evidence and a plausible mechanism; human evidence is still mostly retrospective, and clinical trials are under way. It vindicates a narrow version of the old claim: what the lens of a pair of glasses filters out can matter biologically.

John Ott. Ott was a pioneer of time-lapse photography who noticed that the plants he filmed responded to the light he filmed them under. From the 1950s to the 1980s, he reported striking effects of light spectrum on plants, animal fertility and lifespan, children’s classroom behavior, and his own arthritis, which he said improved after his glasses broke. He coined the term “full-spectrum” lighting.

Ott deserves credit as an early observer who asked the right question. But his evidence was mostly observational, small, and uncontrolled, and later controlled work did not confirm his more dramatic claims. A 2001 review of full-spectrum fluorescent lighting in Psychological Medicine (McColl and Veitch) found no dramatic effects on health or behavior; a 1988 controlled test found no effect of fluorescent spectrum on muscle strength, contrary to one of his public demonstrations. His specific numbers on litter sizes, leukemia clusters, and cavities should be treated as leads that were never properly followed up, not as established findings.

There is a fair caveat in Ott’s favor. The “full-spectrum” fluorescent tubes those reviews tested were not sunlight; they mimicked the visible spectrum and some ultraviolet but carried almost none of the infrared that Jeffery’s work now suggests matters. A test of the wrong lamp cannot settle whether the right spectrum matters.

The Frontier: Light Inside the Body

The most ambitious part of the Midwestern Doctor’s argument is that cells communicate with light, and that blood carries light through the body. Here the evidence thins, and the reader should know where the line falls.

Mitogenic radiation. In 1923, the Russian biologist Alexander Gurwitsch reported that an onion root tip aimed at a second root increased cell division in it, through quartz (which passes ultraviolet) but not through ordinary glass (which blocks it). He called the effect mitogenic radiation. More than 700 papers followed over two decades, and the vast majority reported the effect. The research then faded after a handful of negative studies in the late 1930s, the war, and the Soviet Union’s political suppression of biology.

A careful 2015 review in Frontiers in Physiology by Volodyaev and Beloussov of Moscow State University reached a split verdict. Living cells do emit extremely faint light, including an ultraviolet fraction; that is now established and is studied under the name ultraweak photon emission, or “biophotons.” But whether those photons actually stimulate cell division in neighboring cells remains hard to reproduce. The physical phenomenon is real; its biological role is unproven. The Midwestern Doctor’s report of a cancer-related “quencher” in blood with over 95% diagnostic accuracy comes from older Soviet literature and, to my knowledge, has not been confirmed by modern methods.

Blood conducting light. The Midwestern Doctor reports that during ultraviolet blood irradiation, patients responded within seconds once a continuous column of blood connected the lamp to the IV site, and he infers that blood conducts light. This is a clinical observation by an experienced practitioner, and I treat it as a lead worth testing, not a finding. It has not been tested blind, and patients who know a treatment has started can respond for many reasons. The supporting mechanisms he names (light-absorbing porphyrins such as heme, Gerald Pollack’s structured water) are real subjects of research, but none has yet been shown to carry light through the circulation in the way he describes.

What is established, and should not be lost in the skepticism, is the narrower fact Jeffery’s group has demonstrated: light applied to one part of the body changes function elsewhere. Red light on the back lowers blood sugar; infrared on the chest improves vision. The how is unsettled. The that is now on record.

Grade: a genuine frontier. Faint light emission by cells is real; long-distance signaling by that light, and light conduction by blood, are hypotheses with intriguing support and no confirmation.

Why the Concern Remains Plausible

Even where the evidence is incomplete, there are good reasons to take the Midwestern Doctor’s central concern seriously rather than wait for proof.

The body was built for the sun. Every human ancestor lived under a broad, smooth spectrum by day and darkness or firelight by night. Fire, like an incandescent bulb, is a warm, infrared-rich source. The modern indoor environment, blue-peaked by day and evening alike, infrared-poor, filtered through glass, is a departure of only a few decades. When an organism is moved abruptly out of the conditions it was designed for, the burden of proof rightly falls on the change, not on the organism. Many people sense this without any data: they report that fluorescent and harsh LED light simply feels wrong to be under. That intuition is not proof, but it is a reasonable signal that something has been taken away.

The measure was blind by construction. The lumen could not have detected a biological cost even if one existed, because it does not count the wavelengths in question. A policy built on a measure that cannot see a harm cannot claim to have ruled that harm out.

The incentives all run one way. No company profits from sunlight, and none sells darkness. Lighting manufacturers have invested heavily in LEDs and openly prefer a market without incandescent competition. Utilities and efficiency programs are judged on kilowatt-hours saved. Public-health messaging about the sun has been shaped mainly by the specialty that treats skin cancer. None of this proves bad faith. It does mean that the benefits of natural light have had no organized advocate, and an unrepresented interest tends to be underweighted.

The pieces fit together. Blue-heavy light at night disturbs the clock and is linked to metabolic disease. Red and infrared light improve mitochondrial function and lower blood sugar. Brighter days and darker nights predict longer life. Each finding came from a different research group, and each points the same way: the body uses the full spectrum, on a daily rhythm, and modern lighting distorts both.

What You Can Do

Most of what follows costs little or nothing, and none of it waits on Congress.

  1. Get morning light outdoors. Early-daylight anchors the body’s clock and is one of the most useful measures for poor sleep. Even an overcast sky outdoors is many times brighter than a lit room.
  2. Spend time outside without glass in the way. Windows, windshields, and most eyeglasses and sunglasses filter the ultraviolet and violet bands. Spend some daylight time outdoors without sunglasses. If you need corrective lenses to see safely, keep wearing them; ask your eye doctor whether violet-transmitting lenses are an option, especially for a nearsighted child.
  3. Take sun on the skin sensibly. Expose skin to midday sun for short periods and stop before it reddens. Build tolerance gradually. People with a history of skin cancer, or who take medications that increase sun sensitivity, should work this out with their physician.
  4. Make evenings warm and dim. After sunset, use warm light (2700 K or lower) and less of it. Switch phones and screens to their warmest night setting. Avoid cool white bulbs in bedrooms and bathrooms.
  5. Keep incandescents where you spend your evenings. Federal rules restrict the manufacture and sale of new general-service incandescent bulbs, not the use of bulbs you already own. Reserve them for reading lamps and bedside lights. Where you must use LEDs, choose warm, high color-rendering (CRI 90 or above), or tunable bulbs.
  6. Consider adding red and infrared light during the day. A desk lamp with an incandescent bulb, time outdoors, or a quality red/near-infrared light device can restore part of the missing spectrum. The evidence here is early, but the risk is low.
  7. Darken the bedroom. Brighter nights predicted higher mortality in the UK Biobank study. Use blackout curtains, cover indicator lights, and keep night lights dim and amber.

If you want to weigh in on the LIT Act, S. 1568 is the Senate bill and H.R. 3341 is its House companion. Whatever your view, the biological question deserves a fuller hearing than, by the Midwestern Doctor’s account, it received in committee.

Sources and Their Limits

This article leans on the published, peer-reviewed record and on government documents. That record has limits a reader should keep in view. Lighting research is funded largely with efficiency and cost in mind, and long-term human studies of indoor spectrum are expensive and nobody’s commercial priority, so the absence of such studies is not evidence of safety. Much of the older work on light and health (Ott, Gurwitsch, Soviet blood-emission studies) was dropped rather than refuted, and some of it survives mainly in secondary accounts. Interested parties sit on every side: lighting manufacturers and efficiency advocates on one, circadian-lighting firms and natural-health writers on the other. Official statements, including Department of Energy savings estimates and trade-group warnings, are treated here as testimony from interested parties, not as settled fact. Firsthand clinical reports, including the Midwestern Doctor’s own, are treated as leads.

The essay under review

Sunlight and mortality

The bulb rules and the LIT Act

Circadian light

Red and infrared light

Violet light and myopia

Ott, full-spectrum lighting, and biophotons

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *