About Our Guest- Brian Richards – Incandescent Sauna Therapy
Brian Richards fully healed his toxin-related acne, brain fog, adrenal fatigue and more with the power of the incandescent sauna therapy: full-spectrum near-infrared light & heat therapy. His personal journey to optimal health inspired him to create SaunaSpace’s Incandescent Sauna product line, in order to help others discover the pathway to natural healing, which now includes the world’s first Faraday-Cage Sauna.
Tools mentioned by Brian:
Faraday red light (sauna.space/products/faraday-sauna): Escape to your very own EMF-free ancestral space inside the world’s 1st Faraday Cage Sauna.Featuring our custom-made stainless-steel 5G-rated RF shielding system, 3rd-party tested up to 40 GHz to deliver up to 69x more effective shielding protection.Near Infrared Therapy (sauna.space/pages/saunaspace-incandescent-therapy): LEDs are all the rage now in the Biohacker and Light Therapy community right now, so it’s important to say that fads come and go quickly. LED Light Therapy is a fad, only a few decades old. Incandescent Light is as old as the universe and has nourished all life on Earth for millions of years. We’ve relied on the incandescent lamp to grow our food and heal our bodies for over 100 years. It is the closest mimicker of incandescent sunlight, of ALL man-made light technologies.
Full Podcast Transcription
Brian Richards 00:00
He ran through his incandescent, or his electric incandescent light sauna, over 200,000 sessions and this was in like 1903 and 1904. And he reported all this in a book he wrote called light therapeutics in 1910. Boom! Light therapy! 1910.
Diva Nagula 00:24
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of From Doctor to Patient. Today we have Brian Richards with SaunaSpace. Brian fully healed his toxin related acne, brain fog, adrenal fatigue, and more with the power of the incandescent sauna therapy, full spectrum near infrared light and heat therapy. His personal journey to optimal health inspired him to create sauna spaces, incandescent sauna product line in order to help others discover the pathway to natural healing, which now includes the world’s first Faraday cage sauna. Brian, thanks for joining us today. How are you?
Brian Richards 01:18
I’m Excellent. Thank you for having me Diva.
Diva Nagula 01:20
It’s interesting, I was just using your product before we came on the show. And I feel amazing right now. I had a good sweat. And I feel like the toxins were removed from my body. And I feel energetic and alive. And it’s 4pm my time. So hopefully, I’ll be able to sleep tonight because I really feel energetic right now.
Brian Richards 01:42
Yeah, I also came from using it this morning myself as I usually use it, in the morning before work, and every time I use it, it gives me a subtle brain focus boost that it puts you in a little bit of a flow state or wherever you want to call it, we know that you have cognitive and functioning benefits over time with light therapy and heat therapy. But for me, I get immediately in one sauna session. If I do that, and then have a nice carb free breakfast like fat coffee, or something then I’m very much at 100% even more in brain function and attitude and mood, and focus. And I can definitely, even if I have a good night asleep, if I don’t do my sauna in the morning, I just lose that edge a little bit.
Diva Nagula 02:31
Yeah, I totally can see that. I don’t use it daily, just because I get so dehydrated, and I don’t bring the water in with me. But that’s what I need to start doing. In fact, that’s what I did earlier. But anyway, we can get into more of how we use it individually. You have an interesting story and how you came up with light therapy and it actually segwayed into your business. And how did you discover light therapy personally? And what did it help you heal?
Brian Richards 02:59
What you mentioned, the beginning is essentially what happened to me at the end of my college career. I was dealing with what you listed insomnia, mind racing, kind of just lethargy and negativity and my mood and attitude even though I’m generally considered myself to be a positive person. I also had this odd acne that was only on my torso kind of in the midsection. And so if you met me on the street, I didn’t look like I had any problems with me. And you might say, well, what are you complaining about but in the inside, I have this kind of array of symptoms that I self diagnose. Six months after I discovered Near Infrared Sauna therapy as adrenal fatigue, but I just didn’t feel good. And I didn’t want to take drugs, I got recommended to take Accutane for the acne. And that was a huge red flag for me. That’s what shocked me into thinking, I can do this better myself. Or maybe that was just my ego talking. But I got online to do my own research. And through that substantial research, I kept coming back to sauna. I kept coming back to sauna and toxicity and the more general idea that the body is a is a really sophisticated system that if you have any poisons of any kind inside anything that’s foreign of any kind, you’re going to have less than optimal functioning. And it’s quite a gradient but that’s what eventually leads to disease as the body ages and D optimizes and it gets more poisoned by the environment. And the modern poisons are, what we’re exposed to is so much greater. I think what I was dealing with was common, and in the middle of the end of the research I discovered the incandescent sauna, which has been popularized nowadays by Dr. Lawrence Wilson. He’s a physician based in Arizona I believe, he has a sauna book that we we sell and so I’m grateful for him to for mentioning this and describing it in his book. And it when I poured more into the research I realized hey, it actually started with Dr. John Kellogg, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg of Mr. Kellogg’s cornflakes. He had a famous sanitarium, like a spa in the early 20th century in Battle Creek, Michigan, where he was doing some things that are now considered to be kooky. But he also did some things were very avant garde like light therapy. And so really interesting, quick story. light bulbs, the incandescent light bulb was invented in 1887. Three years later, Dr. Kellogg came on and said, hey, let’s use these light bulbs to power sauna it’s going to make a better sauna than a regular sauna. It’s something special about this light. So he invented and designed and actually built what he called the electric incandescent light bath. And it’s this big Victorian style wooden cabinet where you stand up inside of it. And there’s a large array of light bulbs surrounding you on all sides like, and he had over 50,000 invalids, as people with chronic disease used to be called the he ran through his incandescent, or this electric incandescent light sauna, over 200,000 sessions. And this was in like 1903 and 1904. And he reported all this in a book he wrote called light therapeutics in 1910. Boom, light therapy 1910. And there are others, too, that were working almost 100 years ago, and using light therapy to great effect on dealing with a wide array of ailments. And so this kind of blew my mind. And I was like, okay, so I’ll build my own. I build my own incandescent sauna, very brief goulash version. And in one session, my insomnia got a lot better, rone session, I felt like that, wow. The second session, the next night before bed, I slept like a baby. And I woke up and I was like, there is something special here. How could that have affected me so dramatically, so quickly. So I subsequently committed to doing like, four or five days a week long, 40 minute sessions or more for about six months. And at the end of that, that’s when I realized all this stuff. All of a sudden, I realized, not just as my acne gone, and I can sleep better. I have a lot the lethargy is gone., my mood has gone, my irascibility was dramatically reduced. The patience that I have with all people, even with my mother was dramatically. It was just a fundamental qualitative change. And so how do you put value on those types of intractable symptoms that really, conventional medicine pretty much just has pain management meds for they don’t have any good curative approaches, you have to try it for yourself. It’s much more of a peaceful, like being back in the womb, it’s just like a very comforting feeling inside of our sauna. The light therapy is a huge aspect of that of how light, certain wavelengths of light make you feel good.
Diva Nagula 07:52
Yeah, let’s let’s actually segue into that, if you don’t mind, Brian. Why are these certain wavelengths of light beneficial? I mean, I guess that’s kind of goes into the definition of photo bio modulation. So could you explain that?
Brian Richards 08:04
Yeah, let’s break it down photo bio modulation means light controlling biology. So to have a photo biological effect, the light has to hit some part of your biology and be activated by the wavelength of light itself directly. And that’s called photobiology, or light therapy, or red light therapy, or many other names for it. Now, we do have light receptors for various wavelengths of light. But when we’re talking about photobiomodulation, we’re pretty much exclusively talking about a very special band of light that stimulates mitochondrial response, the little batteries in the cell, and they make a lot of energy for us, and what’s kind of what makes our cells animal cells and allows us locomotion. But it turns out those little batteries as little power plants are, that’s their most simple base role. They’re much more important higher role is as a reoptimize. And repairing actor in the cell, they’re fixing things where the cell will go into all the things they do. But what’s super fascinating about this is, how does light activate it? Every mitochondria has this special light receptor protein called the cytochrome-c. It’s one of the proteins involved in cellular respiration. And it has a very special configuration where it has absorption bands only for this really special narrow band of light. And evolutionarily, where does this light come from? Well, it comes from the sun. In fact, people think of sunlight they think ultraviolet tanning, vitamin D. That’s actually a small portion of sunlight. If we look at the largest plurality of the sun’s emission, you take all of it what gets to us 43% is near infrared. So almost half of all the light we get, of the dose of light we get, of this great light source in the sky that nurses all life on Earth, half of it is near infrared portion. And a big chunk of that near infrared is doing the light therapy we just described. This is like food. Light is like food, we are light eaters. And light is the ultimate nutrient. And in fact, near infrared light, shining it on your cells actually satisfies your caloric requirement in part, there’s even cults that are called the frequent they’re called, like light eater cults. They have them in India and other Eastern traditions where they sit outside for like two weeks at a time and don’t eat anything and drink very little water. But their photobiomodulating all day long. It’s another you know, you can keep going with this. Like there’s an anthropological argument that we are hairless, unlike our apes, because we’re leveraging as much as possible energy from the sun, and these healing effects from the sun.
Diva Nagula 10:53
What’s interesting is that you were talking about the specific wavelength that’s optimal for mitochondrial stimulation and for the body’s reaction to the near infrared light. What happens if you were exposed to far infrared light? There’s a lot of manufacturers and commercial saunas that exist. And a lot of people have memberships to these saunas, and they figure okay, well, I’m getting red light therapy, and I’m getting into a sauna that’s got heat. So I’m getting the benefits of red light therapy, but it seems like it’s incorrect because they’re not focusing on nears.
Brian Richards 11:28
No, people are completely confused. So just think about the sun go back to the sun. What part of the sun heats you. So we got red light we talked about that stimulates the mitochondria. It doesn’t heat you. We got blue light ultraviolet, it’s not heating you. Uh, what about infrared? Well, we already talked about the higher energy portion, the near infrared, the 700,000 nanometre portion that stimulates the mitochondria. Does that heat you up? Actually, no, it doesn’t really what how does how does light heat you up, light heats you up by the water in your body absorbing the wavelength of light and increasing the temperature or the vibration of the water, which heats you up. So when you lay in front of the sun, it’s the wavelengths of infrared that heats you are the ones that are absorbed by water. Water has its own water absorption spectrum that starts at 980 nanometers. So right there where photobiomodulation ends, in the near infrared band, water absorption begins. So the near infrared wavelengths from 980 nanometers to 1500 nanometers. The lower end portion of near infrared is not stimulating your mitochondria really at all. But it is heating you with this radiant heat because it’s getting in quantum mechanically, on average is getting in very many inches into the body very deep. So it’s eating you radially. And that’s how near infared sauna makes you sweat so much faster. We’re heating the body radially as you can speak, I think yourself, to your particular sessions.
Diva Nagula 13:01
Now, is there any benefit of stacking, say your near infrared light therapy device with a regular steam sauna? So you’re able to get the benefits of the mitochondrial stimulation with the near. And then you’re able to sweat passively, which you can get rid of the toxins in your body and you could actually benefit as well with the healing effects of the red light therapy?
Brian Richards 13:29
Yeah. To answer that, I would say yes, we’ve already done that that’s incandescent sauna, directly stacked whole body hyperthermic therapy on top of photobiomodulation therapy. It’s not like near infrared sauna. The heat therapy aspect is different than a regular sauna. What is the point of the two of them? The point of the two of them is to raise core temperature by three degrees for a period of minutes. Because if you do that, you get the Heat Shock Protein response, which leads to the result of detox the protein repurposing, the essence of heat therapy is a Heat Shock Protein response, the nucleus begins to produce Heat Shock proteins that make cell detox more efficient. And they also have a more important role, I would say of refolding protein, so they’re doing protein re ]optimization, they’re fixing misfolded and malfunctioning proteins in the body. That’s absolutely like a regenerative restoring effect. So it’s both cleansing you and it’s rebuilding you. And it’s that cellular state of heating up the cell for a period of minutes, three degrees that does that. And the question is then well, how do I want to heat the body? I could achieve similar results in a hot tub. I don’t need a sauna to do hyperthermic therapy. I just need to heat the body up in a sustained fashion for enough time. What I say is if you want to heat up the body by three degrees. The most efficient way to do so is to use deeply penetrating near infrared light. You will do so in 20 minutes at 110 degrees in the air without any preheating. versus a far infrared sauna it will take twice as that that time. And a wood finish sauna will as well. Typically, if you look at a core temperature increase studies in saunas, usually it’s about a 30 minute mark for wood sauna or a far infrared sauna even longer. There’s no question I’ve tested myself, I’ve had a lot of people in the field tested to I hit a three degree temperature increase in like 15 minutes in the sauna. So to just sum all that up. We already stacking it. All we’re saying at SaunaSpace. Is that this is a more efficient way to heat biological tissue. The Finnish wet, the traditional sauna guys will say no, no, no, look at the sauna studies. Look at Dr. Rhonda Patrick’s amazing studies. These are studies where they use 170 degree minimum heat chamber and then they saw Heat Shock Protein response. And I’m saying yeah, but it’s not heating up the air directly that does anything biologically, it’s heating up the body, the relevant variable here is, is the core body temperature rising, not the temperature around you. And that’s our success is we’re able to achieve the same core body temperature increase at a much lower more tolerable air temperature much quicker.
Diva Nagula 16:01
Exactly. I’d love to dig a little deep dive in terms of the benefits of red light therapy. And I know we talked about some of this with your own personal experiences and in terms of helping with clearing up the skin help increasing the amounts of sleep. And I understand is that the red light therapy effects asleep because it actually increases the melatonin production in the pineal gland. And I think that’s one of the reasons why you’re able to sleep so much better in the evening time and nighttime, because you have so much more melatonin production during the day. But there’s such a huge benefit of other of red light therapy. People are using it for exercise recovery, exercise gains, and there’s tons of biohackers that are really into red light therapy because the perceived benefits of it. Can you go into some of the other benefits that I haven’t even mentioned?
Brian Richards 17:15
There’s over 5000 light therapy studies in the published literature now. So you can really cherry pick any symptom, any disease, anything, and it’s pretty much been studied. And the reason for the ubiquitous application of light therapy across all these different symptom categories and disease types is because it’s triggering a mitochondrial system in the mitochondria in every cell of the body, including nerve cells, by the way, we’re seeing regeneration and inflammation reduction and gene repair, which is an anti aging like epigenetic repair, repair repairing the 3d state of the DNA, so it’s expressing itself better. We’re seeing these types of benefits in all cell types. So let’s just pick a few. Near Infrared light therapy has been shown to reduce neuropathy or ameliorate neuropathy in an increased recovery of heart attacks, strokes. A heart attack is a stroke of the heart. And so you have tissue death. And then they the conventional medicine says, well for that for those things, you’re kind of stuck with what you get whatever dies, dies, and you’re left with what’s left. But it turns out in the earlier use light therapy, the better but you can actually mitigate the permanent damage and produce pretty astonishing recoveries of people who’ve had a stroke and also have TBI, which also conventional medicine says hey, six months or so after your TBI event, whatever neuro logical recovery you had is as far as you’re gonna get. And that’s not the case. We’re seeing very impressive traumatic brain injury recoveries in human studies using only light therapy. Very, very fast. And there’s one in particular is a veteran study and there’s a youth concussion victim study where they just had really amazing results. So that’s one example but people are also getting chronic pain relief and you can imagine inflammation reduction feels good. That you apply that to your joints, maybe apply that to your your gut, and so many other things. So the best thing to do, if you love to research and read the white papers is just look at LLLT, low level light therapy, in the research. Those of you who want more neighbor next door type of stories and experiences are on sauna.space you have over 1000 customer reviews and you’ll see in there, people coming from just a wide array of issues seeing benefit that really parallels with what we see in the literature. People are using this for gut issues, for auto immune issues, for skin issues, one of the most widely studied, for reducing alopecia or psoriasis, for eczema, people are using it for mood, people are using it to combat depression. And that’s not medically prescribed as my understanding, conventional medicine usually prescribes SAD lamps. So they’re flickering fluorescent blue light lamps. And I think that’s the wrong way to go about it. I don’t think people need more sympathetic stimulus, and more like stress, they need a parasympathetic stimulus, which is the red light. And I think when the winner when you’re not getting enough sunlight, and you feel depressed in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s not blue light, you’re missing. It’s the near infrared light and the regenerative cellular healing effects that make you feel good that make you feel happy.
Diva Nagula 20:59
Let’s go back a little bit. And in terms of what you were talking about, with the blue light lamps that people are prescribed, and why that is a bad thing to use? You were talking about the electromagnetic frequency stress that it can apply. So why would that be such an issue for people? I mean, we obviously are under a lot of EMF stress as it is.
Brian Richards 21:22
What’s up with blue light? I mean, you have blue light in the sun. The sun’s not bad, right? Well, the sun is not bad. The sun is amazing, but it has absolutely a high energy wavelength
component that is killing you. ultraviolet is easy for people to understand, it directly causes DNA damage and causes mutations because it’s ionizing radiation. Blue Light is right next to it, it’s not quite ionizing radiation. But through basically oxidative stress pathways it indirectly leads to the same kind of oxidative, the DNA damage that you get from ionizing radiation. In mainstream industry. It’s called sometimes high energy, visible light. And you see products for it. So glasses, you can buy blue blockers for screens have have different modes, you can put them in to reduce the amount of blue light emitted by the LEDs on the video screen. iPhones have the night shift mode. These are all recognition that this stuff is damaging to us. And so why is it damaging to us? It’s because blue light, which is what we get pretty much entirely from fluorescent lights and LEDs and all digital screens causes free radical formation that leads to DNA damage, and in general it’s a stress, and so the sun is killing you with ultraviolet and blue. But don’t forget, it’s regenerating and healing you simultaneously with this huge, larger component of near infrared, as a percentage, and red too. So you’re getting at least that instant repair. Now go indoors, and stand underneath your brand new artificial LED lights you put in and your fluorescent lights, those are all blue, almost entirely blue, and no near infrared, and no red. So they have the damaging component of sunlight, and none of the healing components. So it’s all stressed, it’s all bad. And on top of that they’re typically pulsing light sources due to the nature of alternating current and the source of the being electricity. That’s also undesirable, for various reasons, artificial light, the indoor light that we use to light our homes now in our offices is all artificial at all has an unnaturally I would say astonishingly large blue light component. And so we have this all day long stress under this blue only light and none of that healing component we used to get and it does wear us down. That’s why it’s not fun to work at a computer for many, many hours. There are documented effects of strobing light, like people have migraine issues and other uncomfortability mood issues. And so the problem is our modern lifestyle has incorporated, with the attempted goal of you know, increasing energy efficiency and using electricity, we’ve removed this beneficial healthy component of the normal lighting we’re using in our lives. And unfortunately, that has a lot of deleterious effects to our health. And in the Western world, show me someone who doesn’t interact with a screen anymore, you can’t replace it. So what we need to do is understand that red and near infrared are the antidote to blue. And this is what we see in the in the low level light, the light therapy research that when you get hit with red and near infrared, particularly if you wake up in the morning, don’t look at your computer. Don’t grab your phone immediately. Go and see if you can watch the sunrise because that’s what ancestral humans did. It’s not just a meditative thing. It’s actually galvanizing your body, preparing you for the onslaught of blue that’s coming at sunrise, you get basically almost all red, near infrared, very little blue or ultraviolet, you get a nice dose to start you off. And that galvanizes you and provides you with an antidote to the blue, the blues starts to get to you all day long, with maximal blue exposure midday. But at midday, you’re resting under the shade of the tree. Back then humans certainly didn’t tan at 1pm, at the beach, naked, because you’re getting a lot of blue light as well. But they understood hey, this red light near this near infrared protects us. So watch the sunrise, watch the sunset, don’t get too much sunlight in the middle of the day. And that’s the ancestral relationship with light. And it kept us healthy. It has all these healing benefits, these mood benefits, these regenerative benefits, and other benefits as well. And when we’re not getting this most ultimate, most important nutrient in a daily dose, like we used to, we suffer, we suffer a lot. And you can look at, I think 1000s of indications or symptoms in our culture, like MS, the highest incidence of MS in the world is in the Northern Hemisphere.
Diva Nagula 26:22 Yep, that’s true
Brian Richards 26:24
And other things like that. But we’re seeing a really positive impact with just this really simple, extremely low risk, high benefit exercise of sitting in a sealed, closed chamber with incandescent lights in front of you.
Diva Nagula 26:43
And we’re talking only about 20 minutes a day. So it’s not something that is stressful on the body. And it doesn’t require a lot of consumption of your time. And we know everyone’s time is precious.
Brian Richards 26:53
I would say too, people are thinking on top of that, hey, well, what about exercise? It’s really important, right? It is, but if I have 20 minutes to do one or the other, I need to be doing the SaunaSpace, the sauna and that’s not just me being salesy. That’s me saying what is the luxury in life? What is the rarity that most Westerners don’t have in their life? They don’t have rest. A lot of people they work full time jobs, they’re kicking butt, they got families, they’re doing well, they’re going to the gym working out, but they’re not taking that time to rest, repair, restore and regenerate, and people are burning out and they’re getting a lot of disease even though they’re you know exercising.
Diva Nagula 27:33
Well the other issue is that when you are working out you’re sweating but it’s a different type of sweat when you’re sitting under the near infrared light bulb, it’s passive versus active and when we’re doing sweat when we’re sweating in an active session, our body’s blood flow is diverted to main organs. So we’re not getting the benefits of sweating from areas that need to get the toxins out because our blood flow is diverted to pump up blood in our heart, get the blood flow into our lungs and get blood flow into our extremities that we’re working out but when we’re in a seated position in a resting position and we’re in a more of a parasympathetic state, we’re able to really get an even distribution of that light and have the toxins evenly exit our body through sweat.
Brian Richards 28:26
Yeah, I mean basically if you’re on the treadmill, you’ve just hit the nail on the head I’ve been on the treadmill it’s like you’re the cells of your body being at war, you’re creating all this all these tanks and whatever jeeps and this is a terrible analogy but you’re creating all these weapons to fight this battle of locomotion all the energy all the effort is going towards providing energy. Blood to the vital organs and the muscles and giving energy to the muscles so they can move this body it’s incredibly energy intensive. The body is not, the cells the little workers in this, are not prioritizing healing themselves at all. And so we have all this energy that we’re making and you get increased, you get your adrenaline pumping and you get more energy going, more tissue oxygenation you get growth hormone is getting created but it’s all being used to escape the proverbial Tiger in the room that’s not really there. When you when you do it passively just cellularly we get a lot of different experience and then there’s a lot of debate with this to Diva there’s a lot of people will say well, no, there’s no difference between the the toxin concentration, detoxing on the treadmill versus detoxing the sauna. There was a National Geographic article that kind of, quote unquote debunked this, but it was very problematic because they’re measuring the sweat of someone running on the treadmill. They’re saying, see when you sweat, detoxification through sweating is it’s a bunch of BS, it’s not very effective. But then if you point over instead of their cherry pick study and look at like the 9/11 worker study where they did Finnish wet sauna combined with niacin twice a day, long sessions with the 9/11 workers that were exposed to incredible amounts of chemicals. And they saw incredible reductions in the blood oxygen levels. I’ve mentioned that I think that’s on our site, but on top of that people don’t have a time where they have a break from all the oversaturation of artificial light, artificial sound, way too much stress, maybe way too much work, and then EMF stress on top of that, that’s 24 hours a day.
Diva Nagula 30:40
That’s a good segue. And the last thing that I really want to discuss was that your competitors have, they promote red light therapy in a different way you use the incandescent light bulb and then your competitors use LED lights. And talk about the differences in the two and why obviously, you’ve been talking about the incandescent lights whole podcast session that we’ve been on
Brian Richards 32:03
The whole podcast I’m talking about incandescent light, and that’s the incandescent bulb it derives from the word incandescence, this is the light of nature when things incandescent nature at all it means is that you heat it up a material in nature hot enough, it begins to emit light naturally in this in this pattern that we can predict with physics laws, and we predict it using this fancy law called Planck’s law in physics. And then you can measure all the wavelengths of sunlight and the curve perfectly matches. So we know an incandescent light is full spectrum broad spectrum light, which is all the wavelengths. But in this very natural distribution, power distribution of these wavelengths, where we have this big primary chunk that’s near infrared. The sun does that, the fireplace, the bonfire, a tungsten thermal light bulb that we use in our sauna, these are all incandescent light sources. And that turns out, it’s the most natural light. And we’d like that the best in terms of manmade photobiomodulation, like light therapy devices, incandescent stands aside by itself. And that’s one approach I’ve just described that. The next approach, which is probably more widely used, actually is the LED approach. LEDs don’t produce light by heating up and doing incandescence as we find a nature LED is a computer chip that you run electricity through it, and it creases a gas through the electrical charge connection on the computer chip, and fluoresces. So you’re creating light not through incandescence, but through fluorescence. And so what is the emission, the emission of the light is very different. And let’s take an LED a red light therapy panel, for example, just for simplicity, they are typically, the entire spectrum is 10 nanometers wide, centered on 660 nanometers or so. So you have this really, really high concentration of a very narrow band, they choose 660, because 660 and then near infared 830 are the most stimulating wavelengths, but all of the wavelengths stimulate from 600 to 1000 to varying degrees. Yes, there are low points, yes, there are high points, but you do get stimulation. And when you got photobiomodulation stimulation in nature, ancestrally, we got all the wavelengths at the same time in the natural power distribution in the natural curve. With an LED light therapy. We’re saying, oh, no, forget all that. We don’t want the orange. We don’t want the synergy the natural form. We’re gonna make some synthetic vitamin C, we’re gonna give you them, we’re gonna say, okay, 660 nanometers, the most stimulating, that’s all you really need to provoke this light therapy effects. So let’s just give you that and let’s give you a ton of that. So it’s not full spectrum, natural light, which I would call analog light, where it’s messy. It’s These wavelengths in this curve, it’s a LED light is a digital depthwise light that I would call unnatural. And there’s definitely a role. You know, the I think the vitamin C analogy is great. There’s a role for vitamin C, it’s very powerful. But your day to day is not consuming vitamin C powder, your daily maintenance consumption for your health is the orange.
Diva Nagula 35:27
And a couple of questions before we end our session here. But I wanted to ask in regards to the incandescent light and penetration, we’ll definitely get the benefits in terms of the photo bio modulation and having it stimulate the mitochondria. But do we have to necessarily sweat to see the benefits of reduction and elimination of toxins?
Brian Richards 35:54
Great question like, Can I just like one bulb? Or can I use four bulbs in the middle of my living room? Like why do you need the chamber? Why do you need the enclosure? And the answer is you need the chamber because you need to sweat and why do you need to sweat? Well, if your whole body is not heated up for three degrees for a sustained period of time, then you’re doing more local heat therapy. And when you heat up the cells and you heat up the gut or whatever pick an area, if you heat it up, you do get a Heat Shock Protein response, which is absolutely causing a cell detox. But then what happens. So the the toxins are unlocked from the cells, and then they go through the pathways of elimination. And normally all day long, we’re using our kidneys, liver, and and, and basically our stool to excrete, and our urine to excrete our toxins. But the skin actually is the ultimate detoxifier. It’s the least energetic means of getting the stuff out of us. And so we need to be sweating so that when the heat therapy unlocks the toxins from the cells and they get into the bloodstream, they’re being conveyed as quickly and as efficiently as possible, out of the body with sweating, if we don’t sweat and we just heat up the body. Like if you lay on a hot mat, there’s different mats you can lay out there were warms, you need to get a good feeling it feels great. But any toxins you unlock, are being processed by your elimination organs that are being overworked. And you’re not leveraging your most powerful, most effective detoxifier. So the sweating is very important. And that’s why you need an enclosure or some sort of situation wherein you heat the whole body up, and you get a sweat response. And Dr. Klinghardt says, I think it’s Dr. Klinghardt, maybe I’m misquoting but, only five minutes a strong sweating is good enough. Some people will say more. But I like to say that whatever sauna you’re doing, you need to have that five minutes of strong active sweating, where you start to drip. If you achieve that you’ve achieved the goal, and you’re not achieving that if you don’t sweat. In fact, I think in some ways, you’re causing more stress for these elimination organs that already kind of overworked the liver and the kidneys and stuff. So I think it’s very important to sweat and I don’t think you get nearly as much benefit if you don’t sweat.
Diva Nagula 38:27
And the last question that I had for you is we in terms of, say, if I’m sitting at my desk and I want to get the benefits of red light therapy. And I stick a red light incandescent bulb, three feet or four feet away from me, am I going to get some of the benefits of the red light therapy, even though it’s three feet away? And i
Brian Richards 38:52
So yeah, let’s unpack that clothing other than very light, white cotton does block near infrared. So you want direct skin exposure, or whatever you’re doing. Number two, it’s all a question of a radiance. We’re going for between 10 and 100 milliwatts per centimeter squared is what the literature is indicating, so in general it’s a wattage issue. And as you know, the farther away you get from a bulb, the cooler it is, right? aAnd the less light you get. So there’s a range, there’s a distance range from the front of that bowl, that’s a sweet spot. There’s a maximum distance where you get the minimum light therapy that we would call acceptable. And then there’s also a minimum distance where you get, you’re too close to the ball. So what’s the money spot it really depends on the light source. We have a unique, handmade lightbulb that has the custom a filament inside that runs hotter. So our thermal light bulbs you can be about three feet away. If you’re talking about a incandescent bowl, that’s 60 watts, even if it was red, you’d have to be really close to it and you can measure this with a meter that cost 200 bucks, but are you getting benefit? I know that when you use our products, in terms of a large wattage a 250 watt red glass incandescent bulb, you absolutely are getting benefit. Even if you are clothed you’re getting some benefit on your face. And that’s another use of our photon product, our product has one bulb, it’s not a sauna. People use it for local symptom relief. But more and more people are using it for naturalism make that indoor light environment less artificial, more naturalistic, because doing that, because it’s combating the flickering effect of the fluorescent LED light all around you. And it’s kind of providing an antidote to all the blue light around you similar to the fireplace, we need to have the fireplace on. And you’re not really close to it, you don’t really feel the heat, right? But you feel the ambiance you feel something that’s hard to describe, it does make you feel good and make you feel better. And I think you do get benefit. And the fact you can just have a bulb there passively. And just be doing your work all day long, or do what you would normally do. Why not? That’s actually what I do all day long. And this is the ideal thing. I think, of course what I do, but you can do a lot of other cool hacks like introducing, even if it’s led based, introducing red light into your cubicle, and reducing the amount of blue light exposure from your screens and there’s various other things you can do. And that does benefit you. And I think people need to look at those small changes. Because wherever you’re at eight hours a day, that’s the environment that you want to make changes in.
Diva Nagula 41:41
That’s a good point. Do you find that having the red light, maybe three feet away at your workstation, whether it’s far enough or close enough, where you can get the melatonin stimulation because I find it but if I’m sitting there my desk and I’m using the red light therapy around me all day, and I just started this about two weeks ago, like I literally feel around in the evening time 6, 7, 8 o’clock, I’m wiped more so than before. And the only thing that’s changed is because the application the red light.
Brian Richards 42:14
Interesting, well, it’s complicated, you could be finally shifting your body into more of a natural light cycle. So during the day, you need blue light, because your pineal gland produces melatonin during the day. But to sleep correctly and for our sleep cycle to work right you need blue light stimulus to end after the sun sets. And then melatonin gets released and it tells your body to kind of go to sleep. And so I think that was my experience. Like I’ve used my Sauna and I wanted to go to sleep and I was almost crawling to bed. And I think it especially someone’s who’s a physician, a researcher, a smart guy, you’ve probably had many days and many times up late studying using the computer. And you get used to that I think people get used to our lifestyles, there’s such strong constitution As humans, we can take a lot of stress, we can kind of just deal with it. But it slowly shifts our homeostasis it shifts. One day, we look back and we’re like, wow, I totally changed. How did I get to this point. And so I think when you start to introduce red light and near infrared light, particularly into your life, where you haven’t had it a lot, or normally, it shifts you into a healing state, which for you, maybe it’s just wants you to go to bed and your body wants to sleep more so it can recover. Yeah, people have the opposite effect. By the way, some people will use the sauna right before bed. And they’ll have a very simple parasympathetic response after the session, but it leads to some spiritual and emotional healing that leads to introspection and reflection that can keep you up.
Diva Nagula 44:08
It’s interesting. And I wonder if their dream states improved to or changed as a result of that state. That’s really interesting. And also, for me, I like to pair my sessions with a really cold shower. And that just kind of like wakes me up. And then it also has some benefits in terms of healing and optimizing my fight or flight response whenever it’s needed. That’s how I pair the two together and it’s challenging, but I don’t want to take up too much of your time. I know we need to wrap up but I just want to give you an opportunity to tell our listeners exactly where to find you and all about your your company.
Brian Richards 44:48
Yea, thank you, everything’s on sauna.space and you can read many articles I’ve written with in-depth analysis. If you liked the inline citation you want to read the white papers. If you want a more basic understanding or more digestible understanding of things, I’ve done a lot of recordings and podcasts out there and so forth. But I think one of the most interesting things is to go to sauna.space and read some of the customer reviews on our Illuminati product or some of our other products, I think you’ll find something that is relevant to you. We’re just really, I think offering a value point that is incomparable and I urge you to try it out. It’s something where the proof is in the feeling of it. So we do a 100 day trial, we let people try things out. If you don’t like it, just send it back. But you might find that this is the best 20 minutes you could possibly spend on your health and it’s also something where it’s a ritual, I think sometimes a little bit we’ve lost rituals as we’ve become modern, we become detached from our traditions, and we don’t have healing rituals necessarily anymore. And it’s a time on top of all the other healing stuff we talked about it’s time to be with yourself and meditate or just concentrate for a little bit, which is also luxury, because it’s so rare. When did you actually get time for yourself? So I’ve tried to create that experience and kind of like middle of your high stress environment, your big city, but if you want to see more and check out more and read customer stories or you can also listen to us live now. Everything’s on sauna.space and I do a live Instagram every twice a week. So you can join us on there and ask questions live and, and so forth.
Diva Nagula 46:45
What’s your handle on Instagram?
Brian Richards 46:47 SaunaSpace
Diva Nagula 46:50
I appreciate it. Brian, thanks for this awesome illuminating session that we’re having on our
podcast today. And I look forward to meeting you in person soon.
Brian Richards 47:02
Yeah, thank you for having me Diva. I’m grateful to help people understand a little bit and bring a little bit awareness. It’s fascinating stuff. And we only touched a portion of it, but we got some good stuff.
Diva Nagula 47:17
We sure did. Well, thanks again, Brian.
Brian Richards 47:20
Yes, thank you, Diva, Take care.
Diva Nagula 47:21 Take care.