After COVID-19 , people spend more time indoors than before, and less time outdoors and enjoying sunlight. This is an unhealthy lifestyle, and people are gradually realizing the benefits of sunbathing.
After COVID-19 , people spend more time indoors than before, and less time outdoors and enjoying sunlight. This is an unhealthy lifestyle, and people are gradually realizing the benefits of sunbathing. It can be said bluntly that people spend the whole day under artificial light instead of in the sun, which is absolutely a tragedy for human health.
Some studies have shown that people today get almost 1,000 times less sunlight than their ancestors, who spent their days bathing in the sun and gathering around red bonfires at night. But today, with the widespread use of artificial light and the increase in indoor activities, especially during the COVID-19, people are forced to stay at home, and healthy sunlight has become less available to them.
Sunlight is the healthiest light. Human scientists have been recognizing, understanding, analyzing and applying sunlight for thousands of years, and the establishment of the wave-particle duality theory also confirms the in-depth research of human scientists on sunlight. Light is biologically active and can actually enter cells and affect mitochondrial function. The longer the wavelength of light, the deeper it can penetrate into cells.Light is composed of electromagnetic waves. From this perspective, it makes sense that light can penetrate cells, because it is similar to X-rays and other radiation.
Sunlight has a very rich spectrum, and each type of spectrum has its unique health effect, such as red light on the construction of the liver, green light on the balance of the human body, blue light on the calming of the human body, yellow light on the stimulation of muscles, purple light on the suppression of pain, ultraviolet light on bone growth, infrared light on the supply of heat... Humans were born, evolved, grew and became stronger under the illumination of sunlight, and the health of the human body has long been closely related to sunlight.
In today's artificial light sources, people have noticed the adverse effects of blue light and the sterilization and disinfection of ultraviolet rays, but have neglected the health effects of red light. In our daily lighting, the red light component is seriously missing. This is because the lighting sources used in daily life are artificial light sources, and currently they are mainly LED light sources. The spectra of many light sources are incomplete and not full, lacking red light components, which leads to various symptoms in people who work and live under such light sources for a long time. In fact, modern medicine has long proved that the impact of red light on human health is not trivial.
Research conducted by Professor He Mingguang and his team at the Sun Yat-sen University Eye Center showed that repeated low-intensity red light therapy can effectively control the progression of myopia in children aged 8-13 years. As a new alternative therapy, red light therapy has good user acceptance and no functional and structural damage was observed.
Research by Professor Pan Jiyang, director of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychology at the First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University, and his team shows that a sunny environment has a good effect on the prevention and treatment of depression, and the red light component in the spectrum can effectively control the progression of depression. A foreign study in 2019 showed that red light and near-infrared light could reverse depression in 6/10 participants in just 4 weeks of treatment.
Red light also has the effect of reversing skin aging. Red light stimulates the production of collagen and elasticity, which can make the skin look younger and help heal the damage that accumulates with age. In addition, 650nm red light has been shown to promote hair growth in men with androgenic alopecia. Even foreign studies have shown that red light and near-infrared light therapy are effective in improving fertility in both men and women. This extraordinary study showed that red light/near-infrared light therapy enabled 22% of severely infertile women to successfully become pregnant, with a live birth success rate of 50%. Men's gonads also like red light. In a study of sperm, 830nm near-infrared light therapy significantly improved sperm motility.
At the 10th National Laser Biology Academic Conference of the Chinese Genetics Society, He Yanyan's team from the State Key Laboratory of Laser Technology at Huazhong University of Science and Technology reported that they used a red LED with a wavelength of 650 nm to irradiate the human liver cancer cell line HepG2 for different periods of time. The results showed that low-dose, low-intensity red LEDs can promote tumor cell proliferation, while high-dose, low-intensity red LEDs can inhibit cell growth. In other words, red light has a certain effect on the treatment of liver diseases.
Michael Richard Hamblin, a professor at Harvard Medical School in the United States, is an expert in the field of photodynamic therapy. He believes that when our cells are hit by stress, as they are today, nitric oxide can actually bind to CCO and replace oxygen. This ultimately hinders the production of ATP. Red light/near infrared spectrum can separate NO from the enzyme and allow oxygen to bind to it again, actually enhancing the production of ATP.
Red light is considered as the spectrum of life, because red light waves can easily penetrate the human body and reach the germs directly, reducing inflammation and sterilizing the affected area, improving protein solidification, promoting blood circulation, enhancing immunity and metabolism, etc. In human cells, mitochondria absorb red light the most. After being irradiated by red light, the catalase activity of mitochondria increases, promoting metabolism, increasing glycogen content, increasing protein synthesis and increasing adenosine triphosphate decomposition, thereby strengthening cell regeneration and promoting the healing of wounds and ulcers. At the same time, it also increases the phagocytosis of white blood cells and improves the body's immune function. Therefore, red light plays a very important role in human health.