An argument for the sun

Summary

Unexplainable – "An Argument for the Sun" (July 27, 2026)

Episode Overview

In this episode of Unexplainable, co-host Sally Helm interviews Rowan Jacobson, author of the book In Kinds of Sunlight, about the fascinating and sometimes misunderstood effects of the sun on our bodies and minds. The conversation traverses the history of human attitudes toward sunlight, scientific discoveries about its benefits and risks, the pitfalls of public health messaging, and the ongoing mysteries about how sunlight interacts with our biology. The tone is curious, open-minded, and sometimes lightly humorous, aiming to both inform and provoke deeper thought on what we really know about our closest star.

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Main Topics & Key Insights

The Sun: More Bizarre Than We Think

• Opening Reflection: Quick exchange about personal associations with the sun, landing on the idea that sunlight is universally associated with warmth and happiness but also has mysterious, underexplored effects on our bodies.

  “People don't realize all the light that surrounds us is actually being absorbed by our molecules. So I started seeing light as this physical force that's interacting with my body in a lot of different ways.” (Rowan Jacobson, 02:41)

• Jacobson notes that all the energy in our bodies was once sunlight, transformed through plants and the food chain.

Heliotherapy: The Historical Love Affair with Sun

• Timeline: In the late 19th/early 20th centuries, diseases like tuberculosis and rickets were treated by exposing patients to sunlight—a practice called heliotherapy.
  • Vitamin D synthesis (for rickets) and tuberculosis skin infection treatment were key successes.
  • Cultural shifts: California marketed itself as "the sanitarium to the world."
  • Memorable Quote: “Companies like General Electric made these UV lamps. You could get sunburned in the comfort of your own home. And everyone bought these lights. They would hang them over their kids’ cribs. Right. For health.” (Jacobson, 06:42)

The Sun Becomes Dangerous

• The Pendulum Swings: Discovery that UV light causes skin cancer (1930s+) led to radical caution.
  • By 1980, the focus of sunscreens shifts from deeper tanning to actual skin protection.
  • Memorable public health movement: Australia’s “Slip-Slop-Slap” campaign.
  • Quote: “Before that, sunscreens...weren’t even called sunscreens. They were called suntan lotions. That was the focus in the ‘60s and ‘70s.” (Jacobson, 09:09)

The Mystery of Sun’s Health Benefits Beyond Vitamin D

• Swedish Blood Clot Study (Pelle Lindqvist, 2000s): Women with the most sunlight exposure had lower inflammation, fewer blood clots, and even lower all-cause mortality—outperforming the vitamin D correlation.

  “The sun avoiders were twice as likely to die from any cause as the sun seekers.” (Jacobson, 12:23)

• Lindqvist’s notorious finding: “Sun avoidance seems to be a risk factor for mortality, a par with smoking.” (12:23)

Mechanisms Beyond Vitamin D: Nitric Oxide and Light’s Mysteries

• Unique Sun Pathways: Discovery that sunlight hitting skin causes production of nitric oxide, which dilates blood vessels and reduces blood pressure—a major cardiovascular benefit.
  • Anecdote from Robert Furchgott about rabbit aortas dilating spontaneously under sunlight, coining "photorelaxation."

  “The more sunlight that hits your skin, the more nitric oxide will be released into your bloodstream, the more blood pressure goes down.” (Jacobson, 16:02)

• Tradeoffs: While sun increases skin cancer risk, its cardiovascular benefits may outweigh those risks due to cardiovascular disease being the #1 killer globally.

Vitamin D Supplements: Why the Pill Doesn’t Work

• Initial belief: higher vitamin D levels = lower disease risk.
• Large trials show supplements don’t deliver the benefits—possibly because vitamin D is just a marker for sun exposure, not the direct cause.

  “D was just a marker for sun exposure, and D is a really, really accurate marker for sun exposure...there's something different when you're taking it orally.” (Jacobson, 19:45)

Sunlight’s Subtle Energies: Light Quality and Mitochondria

• “Light Diets”: The quality and spectrum of light (natural sunlight vs. artificial indoor light) affect our bodies in still-mysterious ways.
  • Red and infrared light (big in sunlight) may “scrub” mitochondria, helping them function better.

  “It looks like red and especially infrared light when it hits mitochondria...they make energy more efficiently after those red and infrared photons hit them and actually knock off the rust in a sense.” (Jacobson, 24:34)

Sun and Public Messaging Today

• Swing back toward sun embrace among “health influencers” and online groups (e.g., the “Maha movement”)—but with risk of repeating old mistakes, such as overgeneralization and anti-sunscreen rhetoric.
  • Jacobson’s nuanced stance: Sunscreen is a helpful tool, but the science never supported all-day, every-day sunscreen for everyone. Short, unburning exposures are probably beneficial.

  “The safe thing to say from all this research that's been done is that it looks like indoor life is really unhealthy for us...you really don't want to burn. Never burn. Burn's bad. But I think those little garden variety quick hits of sun exposure that we tend to get, if we're just going about our day, those are going to come to be seen as a good thing.” (Jacobson, 26:40)

Cosmic Perspective and Closing Thoughts

• Jacobson reflects on how learning about sunlight has changed his consciousness—feeling more connected to the universe and to the flow of energy that animates all life.

  “We are lumps of mud animated by light and having a conscious experience of the universe.” (28:04)

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• Cosmic Energy
  “All the energy in our bodies was once light. All that energy was sunlight, came from the sun, came to earth, usually got absorbed by a plant, and then made its way to us...Our entire consciousness is basically this flow of light transformed into different types of energy.”
  — Rowan Jacobson (03:08)

• Sunburns for Health (Early 20th Century) “They would purposefully get sunburns. Companies like General Electric made these UV lamps. You could get sunburned in the comfort of your own home...They would hang them over their kids cribs. Right. For health.”
  — Rowan Jacobson (06:42)

• Skin Cancer Discovery and Messaging “Before that, the sunscreens that were out on the market were really not there to protect you from skin cancer. They were there to help you get a great tan. Right. They weren’t even called sunscreens. They were called suntan lotions.”
  — Rowan Jacobson (09:09)

• Swedish Sun Study “The sun avoiders were twice as likely to die from any cause as the sun seekers...sun avoidance seems to be a risk factor for mortality, a par with smoking.”
  — Rowan Jacobson (12:23)

• Nitric Oxide and Sunlight “The more sunlight that hits your skin, the more nitric oxide will be released into your bloodstream, the more blood pressure goes down.”
  — Rowan Jacobson (16:02)

• Sunscreen Nuance “I think probably like the push for wear sunscreen every day, you know, 24 7, 365... that was never really supported by any science. It was more of like a...just a public messaging thing. And most of the researchers I've spoken with, their message was, you really don't want to burn. Never burn. Burn's bad. But I think those little, garden variety quick hits of sun exposure that we tend to get, if we're just going about our day, those are going to come to be seen as a good thing.”
  — Rowan Jacobson (26:40)

• Cosmic Final Thought “We are lumps of mud animated by light and having a conscious experience of the universe.”
  — Rowan Jacobson (28:04)

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Key Timestamps

• 02:26–03:49: Jacobson’s cosmic perspective on sunlight and energy in the body.
• 04:10–07:56: History of heliotherapy, tuberculosis, rickets, and sunburn mania.
• 08:15–10:33: Discovery of UV-caused skin cancer and evolution in sun protection.
• 11:10–13:39: Swedish studies on sunlight, vitamin D, and mortality risk.
• 14:28–17:27: Nitric oxide discovery, cardiovascular impacts of sunlight.
• 18:01–20:42: Why vitamin D supplements don’t work—the sunlight link.
• 23:02–24:34: How different light spectra affect biology—red light, artificial vs. natural.
• 25:26–27:36: Modern sun philosophies, social swings, and sunscreen skepticism.
• 28:04–29:00: Cosmic reflection on energy, consciousness, and connection.

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Conclusion

Rather than reducing sunlight’s role to simple “good” or “bad,” this episode unpacks the complex, nuanced science and history behind our relationship with the sun. From early medical sun-worship to modern over-correction and emerging research, listeners are invited to reconsider the role sunlight plays in our health—and our place in the universe. The ultimate takeaway: moderate, non-burning sunlight seems beneficial, the story is far from simple, and the mysteries of light and life remain deeply intertwined.

Transcript

[A]

Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start. Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to. Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin or what that clunking sound from your dryer is. With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one. You can hire top rated pros, see price estimates and read reviews all on the app. Download today Monday.com AI agents took over my work and I absolutely love it. Chasing deadlines, writing status reports, updating stakeholders. Agents handle the daily grind. Now I stay in the loop only when it matters. Create your own AI agent in minutes on Monday dot com. All right, Sally Nom Helm Noam co host of Unexplainable what do you got today? What are you working on?

[B]

Okay, well, first I want to ask you a question. When you think of the sun, what do you feel?

[A]

I immediately go to Teletubbies.

[B]

Is that weird? That's not what I expected.

[A]

You know the baby sun that like, wakes up in the morning and it's like, really creepy. Okay, so I feel good. Warm. Right.

[B]

Totally classic effect of the sun. Yeah.

[A]

Makes me happy.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah, the sun is good. This feels like a simple question.

[B]

Well, okay, I'm gonna just let you know that I read a whole book about sun and its effects on our bodies. And I learned from reading this book that the sun has just like all of these mysterious effects on our body. And there's a lot that we still don't understand. I mean, if you think about it, it's more bizarre than we give it credit for. It' Photons of light hitting us and ricocheting around.

[A]

Photons of light from 93 million miles away.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That somehow make us happy when we

[B]

go outside, among many other things. So I really, I wanted to get into all this with the author of that book, In Kinds of Sunlight. His name is Rowan Jacobson, and I have that interview for us today.

[A]

Amazing. Are you gonna explain the sun?

[B]

I'm gonna explain the sun totally and completely. And you'll never have any questions about it again.

[A]

Okay, I wanna.

[B]

Can.

[A]

Can I hear it?

[B]

You can now, now, now. Rowan Jacobson, welcome to the show.

[A]

Thanks, Sally. Good to be here.

[B]

All right, we're going to go deep down the rabbit hole together here. I want to. First, though, can you just give me a little bit of a hint of the ending here? Tell me, after doing all this research, how have you changed the way that you relate to the sun?

[A]

I think totally differently. About sunlight and about light in general. People don't realize all the light that surrounds us is actually being absorbed by our molecules. So I started seeing light as this, you know, physical force that's interacting with my body in a lot of different ways. And, like, what does that mean? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it both? But then, if you want to get really cosmic for a moment here.

[B]

I do. Please.

[A]

Well, so all of the energy in our bodies was once light. All that energy was sunlight, came from the sun, came to Earth, usually got absorbed by a plant, and then made its way to us. So it's just sunlight taking different forms. And our entire consciousness is basically this flow of light transformed into different types of energy that is just moving through our bodies all the time. Over the past few decades, we've all been kind of trained to feel a little guilty when sunlight hits us. And that went away for me once I'd done this research, and it fixed my relationship with the sun in a sense, you know.

[B]

Yeah, let's talk about the history of that a little bit, because you're right. I think a lot of us feel guilty about the sun because of skin damage, which we will get into. But you do in your book. You take us back to a time when heliotherapy was actually all the rage. So tell us about that. Like, starting in the 1800s, peaking in the 1920s. What did that look like?

[A]

We are in a bit of a historical anomaly with this idea that sunlight is bad for us. That would have been a strange notion to most peoples throughout history, but especially this era, the heliotherapy era, which started in the early 1900s in both Europe and the US and was really a reaction to two diseases that were rampant, tuberculosis and rickets. And both those diseases can be treated with sunlight. Rickets is a lack of vitamin D, and vitamin D is produced in the skin with the help of sunlight. And one of the things that vitamin D does is it helps to get calcium into your bones so your bones get hard. Kids in the Industrial revolution who were never seeing the sun had almost no vitamin D in their bodies. And they were all getting rickets so they had soft bones. It's really bad disease. Even bigger was tuberculosis, which, you know, back in the 1800s was responsible for, like, one out of every four deaths in Europe and parts of the US and it can be a pulmonary kind that infects your lungs. And that's kind of like the classic consumption that we think of as, you know, like John Keats dying of consumption. But it can also infect the skin, it's like this flesh eating bacteria, basically.

[B]

Oh, God.

[A]

But that one can be fixed by sunlight.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Once scientists figured out that both rickets and tuberculosis could be solved by light, they didn't quite understand why at the time, but they're kind of like, maybe light's good for other stuff too. And it actually, it got a little out of hand where they started believing that light was probably good for everything. So, you know, we're familiar with this whole sanitarium era where people would go up to the sanitariums in the Alps to take the fresh air.

[B]

Totally. Or I've heard of people going to the Southwest. I do feel like I have a sense that back in the olden days, they were just getting sent off to take the. Take the outdoor cure kind of thing.

[A]

Exactly. The outdoor cure. First it was the Alps, and then California was advertising itself as early as like 1870 as the Sanitarium to the world. Right. Like, that's my home. Come to California.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Cure all your ills.

[B]

Totally. I believe it.

[A]

Well, that's the question. Like, did it help? Maybe it did help in some ways. Like, they were definitely kooks at a certain level.

[B]

What did that look like? What were some of the kooky things they did?

[A]

The kooky thing was they went too far. So they would purposefully get sunburns. Companies like General Electric made these UV lamps. You could get sunburned in the comfort of your own home. And everyone bought these lights. They would hang them over their kids cribs. Right. For health.

[B]

Oh, no.

[A]

So irradiating children as they slept. So it was truly, truly kooky.

[B]

I mean, were they onto something in that early era? It sounds like there is some truth to the idea that it helped with rickets, certainly, and possibly tuberculosis too. Like, were they right? Were they wrong? A mix.

[A]

The doctors who were running these heliotherapy clinics up in the Alps, they were noticing that all these patients, not only did their tuberculosis go away, but they just got healthier in general. They seemed more robust, they had more energy. And we now know the reasons behind a lot of those factors. Like a moderate dose of sunlight will reduce inflammation throughout the body. It'll lower your blood pressure, it'll generally improve your metabolism. So there's these sort of like low level general effects on the body that are positive in almost every way, but that only requires a moderate amount of light. So they were going too far when doctors started realizing, wait a minute, we actually think that ultraviolet light might be a cause of skin cancer. The pendulum Swung hard in the other direction. The messaging sort of got stronger and stronger and stronger after World War II, like, stop frying yourself, you know, in the sun.

[B]

Right, Fair enough.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

It does sound, though, like part of what was going on might be that they didn't know that UV light would cause skin cancer, which, of course, is something that we now think about. You know, it's very top of mind when we think about the sun. Tell me, how did that discovery unfold and how did it change the way that people relate to the sun?

[A]

The researchers just started to realize it in the 1930s, kind of in the same era. And that was, I think, part of the issue is the exact same era that people were like, let's lie out in the sun for 10 hours for our health. They were doing tests with UV and mice and realizing that ultraviolet light was looking like one of the major, if not the major, cause of skin cancer, and suddenly worrying that all these people were getting way too much exposure in their lives.

[B]

I mean, doctors start to realize that sun is affecting people's risk of skin cancer, Then they see the rates go up. I assume this must be the time when the public messaging that I'm really familiar with is born, when dermatologists do start to get the word out that we should protect ourselves from the sun. But tell me about that. How does that message get shaped, and how does it take hold?

[A]

Really? Like, 1980 is the sort of pivot point. And before that, the sunscreens that were out on the market were really not there to protect you from skin cancer. They were there to help you get a great tan. Right. They weren't even called sunscreens. They were called suntan lotions. That was the focus in the 60s and 70s is sunscreen that blocked UVB, the rays that caused burning, so that you could stay out in the sun longer to get more tan. Right. It did not block uva, which at the time, they didn't think was a cause of skin cancer, but it would make you nice and tan. So then skin cancer rates are still going through the roof, especially in Australia, which is one of the sunniest places on Earth. So 1980, Australia starts its slip, slop, slap campaign, which with Sid the seagull doing the public messaging. Slop, slap, slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen, and slap on a hat.

[B]

Okay, I love it. I love sit the seagull. I'm obsessed with him. I mean, does this work? Do people slip, slop, slap, and problem solved.

[A]

It was super successful. So then that pretty much got copied around the world, variations on that and sunscreens also changed. So the broad spectrum sunscreens hit in the 1990s mostly that blocked both UVB and UVA and those are much more successful.

[B]

And it does feel like somewhere along that trajectory the tide really did change. And we did land in a place where the message that sun can be dangerous got out there. I think it's really, really out there.

[A]

Oh yeah.

[B]

But as that was happening, there was some other stuff happening too. Some other corners of science where the benefits of sunlight were becoming clearer and clearer. So let's dive into that a bit. And I want to start with a scientist that you talk about in your book, Pele Linkvist. He is an obstetrician in Sweden and it's back in the 2000s. He's investigating a strange pattern that he had noticed among his patients. So tell me about that. What did he find?

[A]

Yeah, Pelle Lindqvist is an obstetrician in Sweden and one of his specialties is blood clots. And blood clots tend to be more common in women when they're pregnant and right after they've been given birth. He had noticed that less inflammation meant less blood clots. And he had a hunch that that was because of vitamin D. And he found this great data set called the Melanoma in Southern Sweden study, which had tracked like 40,000 Swedish women for like 20 years. It tracked all their health metrics, including how much sunlight they got because the focus was melanoma. So they were trying to figure out what raised your risk of melanoma. So they asked, they tracked all of their sun seeking behaviors, I think is what they called it.

[B]

Okay, that sounds perfect. What did they find?

[A]

So we look at the data and it turned out it was true. Like the women who spent the most time in the sunlight had higher vitamin D, lower risk of inflammation and fewer blood clots.

[B]

Wow. More sunlight, fewer blood clots.

[A]

More sunlight, fewer blood clots. So then he started looking at other factors and it turned out it wasn't vitamin D. Like the connection with actual sun exposure was stronger than the connection with the vitamin D levels.

[B]

Okay, so there's something going on that's not just vitamin D. Something mysterious in the sunlight.

[A]

Right. And he had no idea what it was, but he noticed it for blood clots, then he noticed it for diabetes. And so then he looked at the same data set just for all cause mortality. And the sun seekers had significantly less mortality than the sun avoiders. The sun avoiders were twice as likely to die from any Cause as the sun seekers. So he published a study, and there's sort of like a notorious line in there now where he says, sun avoidance seems to be a risk factor for mortality, a par with smoking, which upset everybody. But he's. He wasn't even looking to make a statement. He was just, like, laying out the data.

[B]

Why did it upset people?

[A]

Well, the implication that avoiding the sun was as bad as smoking for your health was not the message that the powers that be had been pushing for several decades at that time. And to this day, the official advice is do not ever expose yourself to sunlight without protection. So sunscreen or clothing, the proper amount of sun exposure of UV in particular, to get, is zero.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So this was one of the first papers that really sort of flew in the face of that recommendation.

[B]

Yeah, so it sounds like we're kind of tracing some swings here. We had the heliotherapy era, where everyone started to feel like as much sun as possible is good. Then we swung in another direction where the public health message became largely, the sun's dangerous. Stay out of it. Make sure you protect yourself from it. And now there's, like, some cracks in that, and some people beginning to suggest that maybe there's a middle ground, something. Something sort of more in a gray area in terms of whether the sun is good or bad for us. What hints do we have that there are benefits of the sun that we didn't really understand that science hadn't explained?

[A]

So that was sort of the next stage in this story. There had been a guy named Robert Furchgott. He was working with rabid aortas because, you know, why wouldn't you.

[B]

This is. He just had some. He happened to have some in his lab.

[A]

He was trying to figure out what. Yeah, like what made blood vessels contract and dilate.

[B]

Okay, fair enough.

[A]

He had a jar of rabbit aortas on the windowsill in his lab, and it had been a cloudy day. And then suddenly the clouds cleared, and the sunlight hit the jar with the rabbit aortas in it, and the blood vessels dilated. And he thought, what the heck? And then some clouds came and they contracted, and he called the effect photorelaxation. There were a lot of nitric oxide researchers out there trying to figure out how it worked, because it seems like if you could master that, you could, like, really improve cardiovascular health.

[B]

Nitric oxide. Okay, what is that? What does that mean?

[A]

Nitric oxide is a very simple compound. It's just, you know, a nitrogen and an oxygen put together. But it dilates blood vessels. It Tells the muscle and the blood

[B]

vessel to relax, which, I mean, that's good, right? That lowers blood pressure.

[A]

Lowers blood pressure, which is. And cardiovascular disease, number one cause of death in the world by far. It's the biggie. So anything that lowers cardiovascular disease is a huge win for public health.

[B]

Like what hints do we have that there are benefits of the sun that we didn't really understand that science hadn't explained?

[A]

So that was sort of the next stage in this story. It's after Pele Lindqvist's papers. A dermatologist in Scotland named Richard Weller and some other colleagues of his discovered was that the skin actually produces a bunch of nitric oxide when hit by sunlight. The more sunlight that hits your skin, the more nitric oxide will be released into your bloodstream, the more blood pressure goes down.

[B]

Wow. So he's discovered a way that standing in the sun can improve your heart health, which again, it's kind of a surprising finding to me, the idea that light is doing all that. And I mean this has huge implications. Right? What are the implications of that for our health?

[A]

Huge. Because as we were talking about, cardiovascular disease is the number one killer. So if you could reduce blood pressure even modestly, you could save millions of lives. And skin cancer, and this is surprising to a lot of people, it doesn't kill very many people. It's not a big killer. It's not one of like the top 40 causes of death. Cardiovascular is number one. If you took that research seriously, then you had to sort of ask the question of trade offs. Like, yes, sunlight raises your risk of skin cancer, but if it lowers your risk of heart disease, then how do we, how do we pick?

[B]

Right, so we've now talked about ways that sunlight can affect your heart health. We've seen some evidence that it might affect all cause mortality. So it might just make you healthier in general. But, but we still haven't really talked about the theory that I would have had coming into this conversation about what sunlight is doing for you. That's good. Which is vitamin D, which I've heard so much about. Vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin. Being in the sun gives you vitamin D. I've seen and taken vitamin D supplements, which I did learn is not actually a vitamin. What is it?

[A]

It's not a vitamin. It got misnamed back when they discovered it in the 20s. It's a hormone and it's used in tons of different ways by the body. We used it to 20 years ago think it was like the magic bullet. That was like the Wonder drug that could cure everything, or it could at least prevent disease across the board. And that was because when we looked at levels of vitamin D in people's blood, the ones who were deficient in vitamin D had higher levels of every disease you can think of. Cancers, heart disease, autoimmune diseases, depression, diabetes, dementia, you name it. Raise vitamin D, and you should have lower levels of all those things. The easiest way to do that would be to tell people to go out in the sun. But we didn't want to do that because we didn't want to raise people's risk of skin cancer. So instead, the advice was stay out of the sun, but take vitamin D supplements. But there's been huge clinical trials to prove that worked, and they have, across the board, failed to show that these vitamin D supplements fix any condition whatsoever.

[B]

Wow. What did science feel when those results came out? It sounds like a real upending of the conventional wisdom.

[A]

It was. Except it turns out conventional wisdom is really hard to upend. You can upend it in practice or in theory, but in practice, it's really hard. But that was another big mystery. Like, how could that be? If people with naturally high levels of D have lower rates of all these diseases, then how come raising that D artificially with pills makes no difference?

[B]

And how come? What do you think?

[A]

Any guesses?

[B]

I mean, my guess is that it has to do with sunlight.

[A]

My guess is that, you know, so D was just a marker for sun exposure, and D is a really, really accurate marker for sun exposure. You get more sun, you're going to have higher levels of D. So that D readout in people was really just saying these people with lower diseases are getting more sunlight. So probably D is part of the reason for the beneficial properties of sunlight. But it seems like it's gotta happen through your skin for some reason. There's something different when you're taking it orally. We tend to do this where we learn a little bit about something and we boil it down to one very simple formula, like, oh, D, good. Take D pill, you'll be good. And then we get surprised when it turns out the body works in incredibly more complicated ways than that. So this seems to be one of those cases.

[B]

What do we still not know about how sun is affecting our bodies? What are the big mysteries that remain?

[A]

I think we are probably just scratching the surface.

[B]

After the break, Rowan and I go further down the rabbit hole here and deeper into the science of light itself.

[C]

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[B]

Light, you may recall, comes in different wavelengths carrying different amounts of energy.

[A]

As we talked about at the beginning, different wavelengths of light penetrate different depths into the body. But some of those wavelengths in sunlight, those photons of light are bouncing around your body like, you know, pinballs until they finally meet a molecule and get absorbed. And we know that those interactions are really important. But certainly if you change your light diet, what I like to think of as a light diet, it's going to change that. Like, if you're indoors, you are getting a completely different dose of photons, kinds of photons and amount of photons than if you're outdoors. So what the heck is all that doing to our bodies and to our minds?

[B]

Yeah, you have some kind of cool charts in the book that show the different wavelengths of different kinds of light. And the compact fluorescent light is weird. It's like this spiky, strange graph and something like fire has this sort of beautiful gradual going up and including lots of red light in it. But I do want to ask you about that red light because this is something I'VE like, seen out there in the world is people with those red light masks on their face or different red light devices who seem to feel like they're trying to correct this imbalance that you're talking about. Right. They're trying to get a different new kind of photon that comes specifically from red light. What do we know about that? What do we know about red light therapy or infrared light and how it affects us?

[A]

Yeah, red light therapy, huge. Now you see it in every clinic. Even dentists are using it. It seems like it improves mitochondrial function. Mitochondria, big word, tiny little things that are in each of our cells. There's hundreds to thousands of them in each of our cells, and they're what create energy for the cell. And it looks like red and especially infrared light when it hits mitochondria. It's kind of like scrubbing them clean. They make energy more efficiently after those red and infrared photons hit them and actually knock off the rust in a sense. But the interesting thing is that everyone's doing the red light therapy. They're putting the crazy hockey masks on their faces. But red and especially infrared is a big part of the solar spectrum. So more than 50% of sunlight is in the infrared.

[B]

I mean, I do feel like I'm hearing people actually in the Maha movement talk about getting more and more sunlight and how important that is. I know that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, he tweeted about, like, ending the war on sunshine.

[A]

Hi, I'm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Your HH secretary. And I try to hike every day because the sunlight has met its and give you vitamin D in your body.

[B]

Where do you think we are right now? In the back and forth swing of our relationship with sun. Like, what's happening in this moment?

[A]

Some of the Maha crowd seems to be some of the first ones to really discover, you know, discover the sun as a rallying cry. But one concern that I have is that rather than doing the 300 page book that explores the nuances, you get the, you know, the quick tweet. You know, sunscreen causes skin cancer, the sun heals everything. You should go out in the sun again. It's kind of like here we go again with heliotherapy.

[B]

I mean, you did mention sunscreen there. And I'm curious, where'd you land on the question of whether sunscreen's important and how to think about it in your own life?

[A]

I think sunscreen actually can be a great tool for helping people get outside more. The safe thing to say from all this research that's been done is that it looks like indoor life is really unhealthy for us. I think probably like the push for wear sunscreen every day, you know, 24 7, 365. Doesn't matter if it's summer or winter, doesn't matter what your skin tone is, doesn't matter what you're going to be doing that day. Even if you're going to be just at your desk all day, you gotta wear sunscreen to reapply all day long. That was never really supported by any science. It was more of like a. Just a public messaging thing. And most of the researchers I've spoken with, their message was, you really don't want to burn. Never burn. Burn's bad. But I think those little garden variety quick hits of sun exposure that we tend to get, if we're just going about our day, those are going to come to be seen as a good thing.

[B]

You were saying at the beginning, Rowan, that stepping out in the sun now, you can almost feel it on a different level now that you know that the energy is bouncing around inside you. And you have actually a beautiful line in the book. You say we are lumps of mud animated by light and having a conscious experience of the universe. Tell me a little bit more about how all of this has changed your conscious experience of the universe.

[A]

I like the way you put that, because it really is. It's about the universe. And once you start thinking about light and how it enters you or how it affects you, then you think about energy, because light is just pure energy, no mass at all. And one of the rules about energy is that it's never created or destroyed. It's just transformed. So since the Big Bang, no one knows how it arrived with the Big Bang, but since then, it's just been knocking around, transforming into this and that. And so everything that we are is some of that energy that goes back through the sun all the way to the Big Bang. And we are just like this iteration of it on its journey to wherever. So I do think about that whenever I'm walking around and aware of the way that light is flowing through me. And it sort of helps connect you to the rest of everything.

[B]

I think that's a really nice place to end. Rowan, thank you so much for joining us on Unexplainable.

[A]

Thanks for such a great conversation.

[B]

If you would like to watch this episode, you can find our show Unexplainable on Netflix. This episode was produced by Valerie Shankman and me, Sally Helm. It was edited by Alex Coles and story edited by Joanna Solotaroff Fact checking by Colleen Barrett Mixing and sound design by Christian Ayala Meredith Hodnot runs the show, Noam Hassenfeld and Karim Karea are rays of sunshine and Bert Pinkerton shouted the guitar. I completely forgot about it. Also, this beak beeper is really driving me nuts. Anything you can do about that? Flapton took the batteries out of the beeper and he got to work on Platy's guitar. Thanks as always to Brian Resnick for co creating the show along with Bird and Noem. If you have thoughts about the show, send us an email. We are@ unexplainableox.com you are also welcome to leave us a rating or a review wherever you listen. That would be so nice and helpful of you. And if you are into supporting the show and all of Vox in general, join our membership program. You can go to vox.commembers to sign up. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast network and we'll be back soon with another episode about everything we do not yet know.

[C]

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[B]

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