How Sunlight Supports Weight Loss, Appetite Regulation, & Disease Prevention - With Dr. Alexis Cowan

29:23So there were specific byproducts of the oil industry that they were like, basically, how can we make money off these things? Well, let's we can actually make some drugs and sell them. And, you know, if we then educate the doctors to make them think that they need to sell these drugs and that they're benefiting people, well, then, you know, the more the merrier. And so that's a whole history lesson that I won't get into right now. but there's a lot of wisdom packed into reconnecting with nature and people can experience it for themselves for example my father-in-law was in the hospital with in like a hypertensive crisis last year around this time I don't remember I told the story last time he was on like three different blood pressure meds his blood pressure would not come down it was a beautiful day out we're like hey you're clearly not improving where you're at check yourself out of there go home sit in a lawn chair in the sun and let us know what happens and within an hour of doing that his blood pressure was back to normal like it's almost malpractice the state of affairs when we have such powerful and potent inputs at our disposal for free from nature and yet they're the last things that get recommended it's just i could rant all day this

30:34Shawn Stevenson:is why this is why i have you here and i'm so grateful and we're all so blessed to be able to talk to you and to learn from you because it's just again reminding us of what's most important in these high leverage activities you know again it's it's so incredibly simple that's part of the genius in masking all this stuff and i really want to today to really spark a movement in the way that we're doing things and how we're approaching our lives day to day. Because as you know, right now, humans, for the most part, you mentioned this, the 90 % of time indoors statistic, which again is, it depends on where people live also.

31:20Shawn Stevenson:But in many instances, it's more than 90%. And then add to that enclosed vehicles, you know, that's another five or 6%. It's like, we are barely outdoors anymore. And as a result of that, modern humans are now living in a state of eternal winter, basically. And the question is, and what you're already unpacking for us, what are the ramifications of this when we evolved like incredibly different from this? And what this is doing is driving biological scarcity programs within our cells, within our tissues, within our organ systems. We are perpetual hibernating bear, right? For the most part in our society.

32:03Shawn Stevenson:We're carrying all of this excess and our energy is low. And that is just, that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's so many downstream ramifications with this eternal winter. And so thank you for, you know, helping to open our eyes about this. And speaking of eyes, this is one of those primary inputs for light and for regulating this system. And earlier you mentioned, of course, yes, obviously sunglasses are going to be, you know, we're out, maybe we're out in the sun or we're out in the daytime, but we're wearing sunglasses. Something we don't think about that I have never thought about until you said it today was contacts, wearing contact lenses because it's going to distort the light that's getting in and helping to, you know, regulate this system.

32:53Shawn Stevenson:I've never even thought about that before. Yeah. At least with glasses, they're easy to pop out on pop on and off rather um with contacts i've obviously it's a bit more of a commitment you're putting them in you're probably not going to pop them in and out all day uh there are some brands that are better than others so the ones that i wear are called dailies total one and they're in the purple and white box and they don't have added uv blocking um and so you're going to get a pretty high fidelity signal of the sunlight spectrum when you're wearing those obviously it's better to not wear them at all.

33:27So when I'm like laying out, for example, or if I'm getting morning sun or midday sun, I just go with naked eyes. And there's actually benefits to doing that as well. So for example, in my case, over the past couple of years, I've improved my prescription in both eyes by almost one entire point, just by engaging with unadulterated sun exposure onto my eyes regularly every single day. And blocking blue light at night is the other thing as well. reducing screen time, because whenever you're focusing your eyes on something that's close to your face for extended periods of time, it's kind of like a use it or lose it thing.

34:03Like, yeah, your distance is going to suffer if all you ever do is focus on things that are close to your face. The fine motor skills of the muscles that contract the pupil and dilate the pupil are going to be impaired if you're not using them effectively. They're going to get weak. They're going to get lazy. And so it's important to take breaks if you're going to be working on screens or at anything close up to your face, even reading a book, to take breaks, looking at a distance, at the horizon, gazing. We really don't gaze as humans anymore. Everything we do is hyper-focused. And it turns out when you focus your eyes on a point close to your face, it also naturally engages the sympathetic nervous system.

34:48And so it's just another way that we are kind of contributing to our nervous system dysregulation and our lack of parasympathetics is the way that we are using our eyeballs and the kind of activities that we're engaging in. So trying to take breaks every hour to just go outside, ideally get the natural light and look at something in the distance for even just a couple minutes can make quite a big difference when it comes to eye health, when it comes to nervous system regulation. And obviously, if you're getting the full spectrum sun as well, you're getting all of the benefits to circadian and quantum biology health in doing so as well.

35:25Shawn Stevenson:All right. I'm about to give you the tea on longevity. There's one beverage that has been found and scientifically proven to contribute to longevity far better than anything else. A phenomenal peer reviewed study published in The Lancet just last year found that people who regularly drink tea age slower than everyone else. Using clinical biomarkers to determine biological age and following thousands of participants for up to four and a half years, the researchers found that number one, transitioning from not drinking tea to tea drinking was associated with a decrease in biological aging versus people who remained non-tea drinkers.

36:06Shawn Stevenson:That's the tea. Number two, even stronger associations were found in consistent tea drinkers. And number three, the research suggests that drinking around three cups of tea per day had the most anti-aging benefits. Now, there are so many varieties of teas to choose from, and they're teeming with different benefits, from green tea to herbal teas like Roboist tea. But there's one tea, if we're speaking about anti-aging, that you need to know about. It's been found to have anti-aging and anti-obesity effects. This is according to a study published in the journal Clinical Interventions in Aging. that found that the renowned science-backed T called Pu-erh makes a notable difference in weight loss in this double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial.

36:49Shawn Stevenson:The researchers stated, quote, Consumption of Pu-erh was associated with statistically significant weight loss when compared to a placebo. Fat loss was seen for the arms, legs, and the hip and belly regions, unquote. The participants who utilized Pu-erh lost more overall body fat, and what was especially remarkable was they maintained their muscle mass during their weight loss. This is that major component of longevity. There's only one Pu-erh that I drink and this is my favorite tea. I've been drinking Pu-erh for years and it's from the incredible team at Peak Life. Go to peaklife.com forward slash model.

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38:06Shawn Stevenson:That's P-I-Q-U-E-L-I-F-E.com forward slash model. Take advantage. That is the T. Now back to the show. You know, this is also one of the greatest points that you've made today. And I'm leaning into more intentionally. Thanks to our conversation that we had last time. is getting as many data points for sun inputs. And what I mean by that is having more of our skin exposed when we are getting sun access whenever we can. This is the value of these times of year when you could wear less. And, you know, we have this moniker in our culture, suns out, guns out, right? Or suns out, buns out. And we want to upgrade that to back and chest out, brings your best out.

38:56Hey, let's go. Come on. I just did that. Come on. I see a t-shirt. Actually, no, make it one of the mesh t-shirts at least. So the light comes through.

39:07Shawn Stevenson:Come on. And those are stylish, you know, but again, so if we can to be able to have our shirt off and or, you know, like a little, you know, cami or whatever the case might be, something that allows more of your skin to be exposed when we have this opportunity. And so again, this is really just helping with all of those clocks getting synchronized and giving you more metabolic, mental health, cardiovascular, the list goes on and on, benefits. But this brings us to an important part of this conversation that I still, there are so many people who are listening today don't know about because of the prevailing narrative about sun exposure causing cancer.

39:49Shawn Stevenson:and if you could can you talk a little bit about that and that concern and also pair that pair that up with what about the diseases that sunlight dramatically reduces the risk of those things so is there a trade-off with this whole thing and you know number one first and foremost, can you address our fears around sunlight? Should we be afraid of getting skin cancer if we're out there in the sun? Yeah, thanks for asking. Because the data on this is actually way more complex than we're led to believe in the mainstream. And if you actually look at the dermatology literature, it becomes very clear.

40:38So there are three different types of skin cancers we need to think about if we're going to have this conversation. So there's basal cell carcinomas, squamous cell carcinomas, and melanomas. Melanomas being by far the most lethal and problematic. The literature on this is actually pretty surprising. So let me talk about some of the trends that are seen within the data. So with regards to melanomas, which are the ones that people tend to worry the most about. Low vitamin D is a risk factor for developing melanoma. And if you have a melanoma and you have high vitamin D, you're more likely to have a better outcome.

41:19Essentially, the melanoma is less likely to be aggressive. You're more likely to fully get into remission. So that's one thing. Obviously, vitamin D is made from UVB light in the skin. When it comes to supplementation, we don't have any strong data to suggest that supplementing with vitamin D is going to give you any benefits outside of if you have rickets, essentially. If your levels are like 10 nanograms per mil or less, you probably need to supplement in the short term just to get up to sufficiency from a calcium homeostasis perspective because that's what vitamin D does at that level. Outside of that, optimizing vitamin D levels to at least 45 nanograms per mil, but ideally between 60 and 80 nanograms per mil via sun exposure is where we see the most benefits with regards to protection against things like all cause mortality, neurodegeneration, metabolic disease, obesity, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, cardiovascular disease, dot, dot, dot.

42:18So when you kind of introduce this conversation, the thing that really kind of grinds my gears about it is that there's never the risk cost, the risk-benefit analysis is not ever really portrayed, honestly. It's always stay out of the sun, you're going to get skin cancer, and it's never get out into the sun, you're going to protect against all of the top 10 killers in our country, including types of cancers, including colon cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, blood cancers, are all protected against with chronic daily regular sun exposure. But back to the skin cancer conversation. So there's a vitamin D kind of corollary that's interesting.

42:59The other kind of interesting observations that have been made include that indoor workers are more likely to get melanoma diagnoses than outdoor workers, that melanomas are often on parts of the body that are not exposed to sun regularly. These are kind of two observations that are, I think, very interesting and compelling, and alongside of the vitamin D observation really is pointing to the fact that melanomas do not seem to be caused by the sun per se. And with regards to the dermatology literature, there could be an argument made that some basal cell carcinomas could be caused by sun exposure.

43:36However, I would make the argument that it's likely completely preventable. And what do I mean by that? So if you're going outside, like never, let's say you work an office job and you're indoors all day long every day and then you go on vacation in the summer to the caribbean and you blast yourself for a week and you get burned to a crisp and you're blistering uh this is a problem and this is also like completely avoidable if you are building a solar callus as dr jack cruz would say where you're constantly getting sun exposure every day and if you're somebody who has a low fitzpatrick status one two three you're building up that that base tan essentially so that you can tolerate more and more sun, you're going to be less likely to burn.

44:21The burning is a sign of inflammation within the skin. It's a sign that you've overwhelmed your body's capacity to assimilate the photonic energy load from the sun. And so it's a sign you either did too much too fast or that you're living a lifestyle that is not congruent with your body's biophysical ability to harness that photonic load, which could include excess exposure to lots of non-native EMFs, to a lot of blue light indoors. Essentially, both of these inputs onto the skin increase inflammation in the skin and make it more likely that you're going to burn. Eating a diet that's enriched in processed foods and a lot of linoleic acid, seed oils, also likely influencing the fatty acid composition of skin cell membranes, making skin cells more vulnerable to essentially burning to inflammation.

45:14Eating at night. So regardless of what you're eating, if you're eating late at night, there is some evidence to suggest that eating late at night can also increase your burn risk on subsequent days because the clocks that are present within the gut are linked and yoked to the clocks that are in the skin. All of our barrier tissues are coordinated with one another. The lungs, the skin, the gut, the blood-brain barrier, they're all essentially the same tissue in different fractal layers. All of them are essentially responsible for maintaining the boundary between the inside world and the outside world.

45:48And so as a result, they are all coordinated with one another. So when you eat late at night, you're sending the signal to your gut clocks that it's actually the daytime. It's creating a lack of coherence in the timing mechanism and the timing signal with the gut and the skin. And so essentially, your skin clocks can now be thrown off as well. And the skin clocks in the melanocytes are important for making sure that your body and your melanocytes can make new melanin in response to sun exposure. So circadian health, super important if you want to mitigate burn risk. Also, just a total deficiency of red and infrared light is a problem when it comes to burning.

46:30So getting out and seeing morning sun and getting morning sun on your body is a great way to prime your skin's mitochondria to be able to make new melanin and absorb that photonic load when you go out again in midday sun. And this is especially true for people who have much fairer skin. This conversation is like almost not entirely irrelevant, but for anybody who's melanated, black and brown individuals, our bodies are meant to be receiving intense sunlight like essentially year-round our skin is evolved for more equatorial solar exposure patterns that's why we have the melanin it's not simply for protection it allows your body to harness that photonic energy and use it productively like i kind of teased earlier in the conversation um that it's actually absorbing that photonic load and I made a post about this yesterday on Instagram, how melanin is a piezoelectric semiconductor that is actually harnessing photonic energy and electronic energy to not only, you know, support your bioenergetic system, but also every single one of our sense organs, taste, sound, sight, smell, deep parts of our brain, they all contain melanin.

47:47and that melanin actually plays an absolutely indisposable role for how those sense organs work. Without melanin, you cannot have a perception of reality. It is so fundamental in how our biology works. And that's whether you have fair skin or the darkest skin in the world, it doesn't matter. Melanin plays the absolute most important role in that context. Now, the melanin that's on our skin is adaptive to the environment that our biology is expecting to receive and interface with. And so for anybody who has melanated skin, you need more midday sun than somebody with fair skin. And that's because melanin serving as this sponge for light, essentially you need more light to overcome that kind of sponge effect to get all of the beneficial cascades from vitamin D to POMC.

48:39You need more UV light to overcome that sponge barrier, essentially, that melanin is serving as, to then make the vitamin D, to make the POMC and get all those benefits. And when you begin to understand this, it becomes no surprise that black and brown communities, especially at northern latitudes here in the States, suffer disproportionately with regards to certain metabolic diseases, chronic diseases, cardiovascular disease, hypertension. This is really a story about UV light and different needs for midday sun exposure across different racial populations, essentially. But this conversation is just apparently not one that's ready to be had.

49:22Like highlighting any differences between races is super taboo for whatever reason, even though we have very discreet and obvious differences in how our physiology is being run at like a physics level. And so I'll kind of pause there and see if you have any questions, but I could go on forever.

49:40Shawn Stevenson:What you just shared, and that's okay that we have these differences. You know, there are a ton of things obviously that unite us and that we have consistency with, but one of these things with interacting with our environment and our cells being able to pick up data, it's different depending on the melanin in your body. And that's okay. I'm thinking about, so this past weekend, we went to, we had brunch in Santa Monica. And then we popped down to the beach. It was myself, my wife, and my youngest son, Braden, who's 14. And so this is like, people are doing all the fitness stuff in Santa Monica.

50:24Shawn Stevenson:There's all these cool contraptions and slack lining and, you know, some people climbing up on stuff like Spider-Man and, you know. But we went down by the water and where we were kind of camped out, hanging out, you know, just chopping it up, having a good time. There were a couple of people who were close to us that had thongs on. All right. So shout out to Cisco. One of them was probably, I'm guessing, a Persian woman. And she was laying there on her stomach for probably, you know, we were there for like 45 minutes. All right. And didn't move. And she didn't look like she was being impacted in any way, like not getting burnt or anything like that.

51:08Shawn Stevenson:Then maybe 20 feet from her was a guy wearing a thong. And my son pointed him out because I didn't I didn't see him. He was like, hey, dad, look at him. Cause he, he, he, he was up on his knees, spraying himself with some stuff. His skin was so white. It was reflecting sunlight off of him. You know, it was just like, like I can't even, I can't even describe it. I want to say like the movie Powder, but not that white. It was more just kind of like reflective. And you know, he was hairless, all right. From head to head to toe, but he had this little thong on. And I was wondering just like, what is he spraying?

51:48Shawn Stevenson:because he's out here, you know, apparently trying to soak up some rays, but he might've been wearing some kind of, you know, highfalutin sunscreen as well. And so it just got me thinking about, and this is my question back to you. And again, shout out to Cisco. In keeping all this in context, what are some best practices? So you mentioned people with darker skin needing more midday sun. So can you give us some best practices when it comes to our sun exposure. And I want to ask you this because we are moving into the summer months as of this recording. Is it possible for us to kind of store up some of this sun exposure, some of this light data once the fall comes and we get less access to sun?

52:36Shawn Stevenson:Like, is this a time for us to bank, intelligently bank some UV light? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So great questions. With regards to best practices, I would say, depending on your Fitzpatrick status, so if you're super fair skin, you really want to get out in the morning. Everybody should get out in the morning from a circadian perspective anyways, but from a burn protection standpoint perspective, you're definitely going to want to bathe your skin in red and infrared light from sunrise, ideally. You can also, if for whatever reason you can't make it outside for sunrise, which I highly recommend prioritizing, obviously it's quite early this time of year, but it is a really incredible way to upgrade your health in so many different ways, really anchor in those clocks throughout the tissues of their body, supercharge your mitochondria so that you're protected against a whole host of chronic diseases that are caused by mitochondrial dysfunction, which is basically all of them.

53:36um that's one really important thing also before you go outside midday if you're somebody with fair skin you can also use a red and infrared light panel if you want to you can there's actually some research showing that it will protect against burning um so maybe 10-15 minutes front and back uh before you go and lay out can help and also doing it afterwards as well there's some data that would suggest that could help as well um catching sunset would be another way to do that because sunset and sunrise are both highly enriched in the infrared and red components. That's why it looks red shifted in the sky when you look at the sky at those times of day.

54:15With regards to banking sun, I would say you absolutely can. And one of the readouts for that is your vitamin D status. So when it comes to getting enough sun for your individual biology, that's why I really like tracking vitamin D as a biomarker. If you're not supplementing with vitamin D and the vitamin D being made is purely through sun exposure, you can use that 25 hydroxy vitamin D, the storage form in the bloodstream as a biomarker for whether or not you're getting enough sun for your biology. And again, I mentioned 45 minimum nanograms per mil, but ideally greater than 60. And that may sound like a lot to people, but I have many clients and dark skin, fair skin throughout the country, throughout the world, to be honest.

54:59And it is absolutely possible. People are actually pushing 100 with just the sun alone. It can be done. The more melanated your skin, the more sun you're going to need, again, to overcome that melanin barrier to make the vitamin D and the POMC and all the other great things that you need to make from UV light. But we're talking about vitamin D as our biomarker. That's why I'm just focusing on it right here. With regards to burn mitigation, again, avoiding processed foods is a big one. Avoiding late night eating is another one. mitigating your non-native EMF exposure. So trying to switch to ethernet when possible.

55:34I'm doing this interview from outside. I have an ethernet cable running out my window back there. People might be able to see it. My internet's faster than using Wi-Fi, using ethernet, and you don't have to deal with the essentially the non-native radio frequencies that come from Wi-Fi. So switch to ethernet when you can. At the very least, try to turn your Wi-Fi off at night, maybe put it on a timer so that it turns off automatically between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. or whatever, so that you're protecting that sleeping window at the very least, because that will set you up for success with regards to lower inflammation and better health in general.

56:12The sleep is super important. Obviously, sleep is also a circadian phenomenon. So when we're talking about protecting against burning and optimizing our sleep, we're also talking about blocking blue light at night. So as soon as the sun goes down, opting for red light bulbs, ideally red incandescent bulbs. If you're going to be on screens, try to put a filter on the screen. So depending on what screen you're on, phones and computers, you can easily put a red filter or red shift or amber shift on the screen. For TVs, some TVs have settings where you can do an RGB mode so you can turn the screen red.

56:47If you're somewhere where you cannot control the lights, that's when you want to pop on a pair of blue blocking glasses. Nighttime ones should have a dark orange or red tinted lens. Those are the ones that are going to be blocking roughly all of blue light between 400 and 550. So 550 is like blue green, which still has an effect on circadian biology. So nighttime blue blockers, if you're going to be wearing them because you can't control your light environment, they should be blocking between 400 and 550. Again, the light coming in through the eyes is very, very important from a circadian standpoint, which plays an important role in making sure that you can produce melanin effectively during the day because those melanocyte clocks are looking for signals from the master clock as well.

57:28So those would be some of the main things to help mitigate burning. If you engage in those practices and those behaviors, you're going to be less likely to burn, more likely to develop a tan. The other thing that I'll say with regards to making melanin is that UVA light can change how melanin granules sit in the skin and basically how diffuse they are. So the immediate tanning effect that you get from laying out in midday sun is not actually new melanin being made. It's existing melanin being pulled towards the surface. New melanin is only made from UVB light via the POMC mechanism or from UVC light that is made endogenously in the form of our biophotons from mitochondria, but also our nuclear DNA emits UVC biophotons as well, interestingly enough.

58:15and so that's also why cold water immersion is very powerful from a internal melanin perspective because when you get cold it ramps up mitochondrial metabolism and those mitochondria give off way more uvc photons which can help to build the melanin internally because remember i mentioned all of our sense organs and the deep parts of our brain like the substantia nigra that are jam-packed with melanin, those parts of the body, they can be supported and stimulated melanin-wise through things like cold water immersion. And that's why in particular, I do most of my cold water immersion during the summertime.

58:55I have a Morosco Forge behind me here. I actually have to get it ready for the season. But what I like to do is cold plunge midday and then lay out in the sun right afterwards because the cold stimulates all that internal UV biophoton production. and it also primes all of the semiconductors in your body including melanin but also including collagen to actually work better so that when you lay out in the sun your body's able to absorb more of that photonic load and again be less likely to burn and you're just like essentially harnessing that energy more effectively and it's going to be used more productively to support how your body's working at a physics level um so those would be some things that i would say that people can leverage and used to avoid burning.

59:41And with regards to people with dark skin, I think the colonialist brain rot propaganda just goes super deep, but there's literally a brand of sunscreen called Black Girl Sunscreen, and it makes me want to just scream because your melanin is your built in sunscreen, but it's not just that. It's actually, again, it's using that UV light productively. It's allowing your body to harness it and support your physiology, your metabolism, your mitochondrial function, your bioenergetic system. And yet you need to actually be exposed to that UV light in order to receive the benefit. The last thing that melanated individuals need in North America is sunscreen.

1:00:25Our biology is already being starved of UV light just from simply being at a higher latitude than our biology is expecting to be existing in. And so we really need to be harnessing it full force, especially if you have super, super dark Fitzpatrick skin. You're really meant to be living near the equator, if not on the equator. And so getting out unadulterated sun, you're not going to burn most likely. I think it's actually a very, very bad sign if somebody with dark skin is burning at some you know in america essentially it's a sign of severe dysfunction within the skin essentially like a severe inflammatory status within the skin um and so anyway we talked about all the ways that you can help to mitigate that and reverse that with regards to the food timing and the circadian health and the non-native emfs the blue light um and so those are all things that i would recommend doing for everybody but especially if you have fair skin and you know you're super prone to burning those are things that need to be prioritized and otherwise you know get outside and enjoy it and your body will naturally tell you if you're getting overheated or you're getting too much you then take breaks shade is nature sunscreen use it leverage it i'm sitting in the shade right now um you're getting a lot of benefits from sitting in the shade especially if there's green plants around green implants reflect a ton of near-infrared light.

1:01:52And so you're being bathed in very healing frequencies by simply sitting outside, even if you are in the shade. And so if you feel like you're burning, never be afraid to like pop up an umbrella or even put a hat on or put some light linen clothing on or something like this. Those are all totally acceptable ways to mitigate your sun exposure. Sunscreen is not because sunscreen is changing the wavelength distribution of the light that's reaching your body. And so it's changing the signal, which is changing and messing with the timing mechanism once again. And so if we're going to block sun, we want to do it in a way that's consistent with a more ancestral approach, which would be, again, leveraging shade, leveraging clothing.

1:02:34Shawn Stevenson:Incredible. Thank you for these insights. And again, we need to change the paradigm regardless of as of today we spend the vast majority of our time indoors and then we suddenly out of nowhere for as far as our biology is concerned we go on vacation and we spend hours at the beach and wonder why problems might arise and so again it's building up it's like an exercise right for our our skin and building up as you mentioned like a building a tan a solar Supercallus and building that up over time so that you're not abruptly throwing yourself into these conditions to where, yeah, you might want to slather up with whatever the case might be if you have fair skin and you haven't been in the sun all year and then you go on a two-week vacation.

1:03:26It's context that we got to keep in mind as well.

1:03:30Shawn Stevenson:And so what's more abnormal, that phenomenon or not getting access to sun exposure, especially when we have access, and building up time, right? So I was just out in the sun. When I text you a couple of days ago, I was outside working out, but again, I might've spent 30, 40, an hour in the sun each day, midday, for the last couple of months. And so I could be out there for hours at this point, but I'm not gonna do that just overnight, even for myself having fairer skin. And so, again, we have to be more intelligent. We have to take back control of our own biology and understand there isn't a cookie cutter way for us to go about this.

1:04:17Shawn Stevenson:We have to monitor ourselves, but we do know what our bodies need. We need UV exposure and it's controlling so much of our biology. And also I want to circle back really quickly because you mentioned how this system can get really thrown off even with evening light exposure. And there's a study in this, the title of the study is Light Exposure During Sleep Impairs Cardiometabolic Function. This was conducted by researchers at UC San Francisco. And this was just published a couple of years ago. There's so much emerging data on these light exposures at night, disrupting our metabolism, disrupting our circadian clocks, throwing off our ability to properly metabolize sunlight.

1:05:04Shawn Stevenson:And the list goes on and on and on. So in this study, it was just like the equivalent, and you share this as well, of like having a television on while you're sleeping. And also they looked at before bed as well. So it wasn't just during sleep, but also an hour prior to sleep and having this artificial blue light exposure. And it really is disrupting so much leading into the next day and beyond. This could possibly be two days of ramification. And so great, you've already provided us some great kind of safety measures when it comes to this, if we can't control the environment. So before I let you go, shout out to Blackstreet.

1:05:42Shawn Stevenson:I want to ask you about, and just to get some confirmation on this idea about, is it possible for us to store light? And, or, and again, I know that this is a really interesting perspective on it, the metabolic compounds or the result of our sun exposure, is it something that we can kind of store up for those darker, shorter days? And so for us to prioritize, is that even possible?

1:06:18So I think it's an interesting question. I'll kind of come at it from two different directions so we talked about how important UV light is as an input our biology is very intelligent and has ways of dealing with winter months let's say and I kind of alluded to this earlier when I mentioned that when you get cold it stimulates UV biophoton production internally it also stimulates infrared light production as well that's why if you take an infrared camera you can look at somebody on it because we're generating heat. We're endotherms, right? So we're warm-blooded. When you get cold, it stimulates the internal production of UV and infrared light.

1:07:00So what is that telling us? It's essentially telling us that in nature, if there is not UV and IR light abundant from the sun, aka if it's not summertime and it's wintertime and it's cold and it's dark and it's kind of barren, getting cold and allowing our bodies to actually feel that cold and experience that cold allows our biology to produce the light that it needs to sustain itself. And we actually have some really cool data, I believe, out of, it was somewhere in Europe, maybe Finland, showing that getting cold actually can help to buffer vitamin D status. And I don't know if it's because the UV photons can actually generate new vitamin D, like the internally made biophotons.

1:07:48Or it could be that when you get cold regularly, it helps to increase levels of vitamin D binding protein in the bloodstream, which helps to buffer the loss of vitamin D that happens over the wintertime. In either case, what seems to be the case is you would certainly want to optimize your vitamin D levels during the summer when UV light is abundant. So get them over 60 nanograms per milliliter so that when it starts, when that UV light starts dwindling, and you can, again, think about vitamin D as kind of this readout for UV light availability and UV light exposure. So that as UV light starts dwindling and your vitamin D levels start coming down, number one, they're coming down from a higher point.

1:08:33So they're not going to reach as much of a trough as they otherwise would have. And if you couple that with getting cold, like going for winter walks during the winter time. I personally don't do a lot of cold water immersion in the winter. It just, it's very brutal in my opinion. I love doing it in the summer though. It feels great. But in the winter, I love going on like winter walks, even just exposing the face. The face has a lot of temperature receptors that have systemic effects on the body. And so going on those winter walks can help to potentially buffer your vitamin D levels as well, perhaps through this vitamin D binding protein mechanism, or perhaps even through de novo vitamin D production in small amounts from your UV biophotons coming online from the cold and having a lot of the effects that they do internally, including making melanin internally and supporting those melanin depots, including they're doing a lot of work as well at like a quantum biologic level.

1:09:37And this is a kind of a very important area of interest. And that is that there's a lot of UV absorbing metabolites in our system. So all of the aromatic amino acids absorb in the UV range. And from the work of Fritz Popp and Roland Van Wick, their research suggests that in order for metabolism to actually even function as intended, the enzymes and metabolites being worked upon, they need to be stimulated by specific frequencies of light in order for them to even do the thing that they're meant to do. And it's a very kind of compelling and very interesting area of research, but things like tryptophan, phenylalanine, tyrosine, these aromatic amino acids are all absorbing in the UV range.

1:10:24And presumably they have to absorb UV photons in order to actually engage in the things that they need to do, whether it's making proteins or making small molecules, things like this. So anyways, I don't know if that answered your question, but.

1:10:40Shawn Stevenson:It does. Absolutely, it does. Again, we have all these incredibly intelligent systems that are, honestly, I mean, they're beyond our comprehension, but it's as simple as just going outside and being a part of our environment more frequently. of course, doing this intelligently and not chalking this up to something that is like a nice little treat, but something that is required, right? Our genes expect us to do these things. And when we're not doing them, we're going to get gene expression for programs that we might not necessarily want. And so let's make this a mandate. Everybody listening, everybody watching, to proactively get outside more frequently, take advantage of all of these very, very powerful metabolic benefits.

1:11:37Shawn Stevenson:Again, we have this emerging paradigm, even more so looking at this pharmaceutical model of targeting our metabolism through these means. And as you mentioned getting incomplete data or getting false data. And we don't know the long-term ramifications of this. When we know that when we're deficient in the things that our genes expect, getting these natural light inputs, moving our bodies, eating real food, and then we see the side effects of those things. And then we go down that pharmaceutical model and it just becomes this vicious circle. And so it's great we have access and innovation when it comes to those things, when they're needed.

1:12:21Shawn Stevenson:But for many of us, we simply need to take our ass outside. And so I appreciate you so much for coming to hang out with us today. Can you tell people where they can connect with you, follow you and get more information? Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. This was really fun. I'm mostly active on Instagram, Dr. Alexis Jasmine, J-A-Z-M-Y-N. uh i'm currently teaching a course that i actually started in october uh and it's i i don't know how long we're gonna go to be honest probably a full year uh but basically we're building a kind of like a bachelor's in biochem degree from scratch so we started with like intro bio gen chem we did organic chemistry we're in biochem now we're doing physics we're doing calc we're doing all the fun stuff and we're gonna kind of culminate in our advanced lectures in quantum circadian and mitochondrial biology.

1:13:11And I've just been having such a blast with it. And it's been really cool to also revisit a lot of these subjects that I learned many moons ago in undergrad with like a new set of eyes because I didn't really have the nature-based decentralized perspective at all when I was going through school. And so it's really awesome to be able to revisit these topics and actually see everything kind of for the first time with like these new eyes. And so I've just been having so much fun with it. So if people want to come and hang out with us, um, you know, it's kind of open enrollment and there's like, you know, everybody gets access to the recording so you can go at your own pace and whatnot.

1:13:47Um, so that's where people can find me. That's what I'm working on right now. I also have a book club called the incubator. We're currently reading a new science of heaven by Robert temple. It's a book about plasma essentially. Um, and like plasma science, it's actually quite interesting. Um, and we only just started that one. Uh, Other than that, if people want like one-on-one time with me, I have brain rentals available. You can rent my brain for an hour and we can chat about whatever is on your heart and mind. And yeah, people can find out about all that and more on my Instagram. I post a lot of free content.

1:14:19I've got some eBooks, got a couple of new eBooks coming down the line as well. So that's where people can find me.

1:14:26Shawn Stevenson:Amazing. Amazing. I'm grateful that I get to rent your brain for a little bit. Anytime. And to share all these incredible insights, you know, it truly is amazing. And yeah, I just, I'm so grateful that you are here and you're doing this work. And most importantly, you're about that life. You truly are. You're living what you talk about and it is just shining through you. And so I appreciate you so much. Thank you so much. Let's do it again sometime. It's already done. It's already done. All right, everybody. Thank you for tuning in. The one and only Dr. Alexis Cowan, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today.

1:15:07Shawn Stevenson:I hope that you got a lot of value out of this. Listen, get outside. Take advantage of the power of the very thing that allows us to have life here on planet Earth. We need sun exposure deeply on so many different profound levels. And of course, we went to practice safe exposure, but we've been miseducated. Shout out to Lauryn Hill. We've been miseducated and the fear mongering around sun exposure, basically being out to kill us, the sun is trying to kill us is just utterly ridiculous. And we got to stop this nonsense. We need sunlight deeply. It is the number one regulator of our entire circadian timing system, which is determining when everything in our bodies are happening.

1:16:02Shawn Stevenson:When this system gets dysregulated, we experience what we refer to as dysfunction or disease. And so getting things synced up, getting sun exposure is like the quick way to get everything in our bodies in more alignment. And so, again, this is one of those episodes where you've really got to take action and practice this because it's just silly to rob ourselves of this very powerful epigenetic controller. I appreciate you so much for tuning in today. If you got a lot of value out of this, please share this out with somebody that you care about. Keep this conversation going. It's very, very important.

1:16:47Shawn Stevenson:And we've got some incredible masterclasses and world-leading experts coming your way very, very soon. So make sure to stay tuned. Take care. Have an amazing day. And I'll talk with you soon.