Light Rx: Red Light Therapy for Youthful Skin, Faster Recovery, & Brain Health
with Andy Mant
Dr. Wendy Myers
Welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. On the show, we talk about everything related to heavy metals, chemical toxicity, and the health issues caused by toxins. We touch on anti-aging, bioenergetics, and more advanced topics on health that you will not hear on other shows. Today, we have Andy Mant on the show, and he’s going to be talking about blue light and red light therapy and how that can help with younger skin, muscle recovery, bone repair, injury, wound healing, neurological health as well as hair regrowth. It is a really interesting show if you love biohacking. Some of the things we talk about on the show today are how blue light from modern devices can disrupt our circadian rhythms and melatonin production impacting sleep quality. So, it is really important to be aware of what things in your environment are emitting blue light.
We’ll talk about how modern LED lighting and devices emit high levels of blue light mimicking daylight signals to the body so that it’s communicating that the sun is in your eyes. The body starts to produce cortisol. We’ll talk about how blue and green light in the 400 and 550 nanometers spectrum suppresses melatonin and disrupts sleep cycles as well. We’ll talk about Andy’s company, Bon Charge, and how he makes blue light glasses that block the spectrum to create physiological darkness in the evening hours, which is really important to do after the sun goes down. Bon Charge also makes light bulbs that you can switch to red and orange hues in the evening to stop cortisol production produced by most LED light bulbs. We’ll also talk about red light therapy, which I personally love, and how red light stimulates cellular energy production and repair with benefits for the skin, muscle recovery, injury, wound healing, neurological health, hair regrowth, et cetera.
We also talk about how this red light works by increasing oxygen availability in ATP production cells. It increases that repair process. Studies also show that there’s a 20% increase in fat loss when you combine red light therapy with exercise, that is when you do it for 20 minutes or do a session on a red light pad, following exercise, so sign me up for that. Bon Charge also makes a red light face mask, which I’ve been using. It stimulates collagen and reduces wrinkles. They also make a full-body red light blanket that’s brilliant for exercise recovery, overall wellness, body, and skin.
Andy Mant is the founder and CEO of Bon Charge, a company specializing in evidence-based products that help your sleep, well-being, and recovery. Andy started Bon Charge after becoming dissatisfied with the quality and standards of blue light-blocking glasses available and set out to design lenses that match the evidence in the academic literature. Andy was born in the UK and moved to Australia in 2011 and after being there for a couple of years, he gained a lot of weight, became chronically fatigued, lacked energy, and tried a bunch of different things. He forged a passion and niche understanding of all things biohacking on that journey. Today, Andy is a leading figure in biohacking to improve health, sleep, and wellness. You can learn more about his work and his biohacking line of products at boncharge.com. Andy, thank you so much for joining the show.
Andy Mant
Thank you so much for having me, Wendy. It’s been a long time, but we’ve been in touch for many years and it’s great to be back talking to you.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into health?
Andy Mant
Well, my name’s Andy Mant. I’m the founder of Bon Charge, formerly Blue Blocks as a lot of your followers will probably remember us from when we last had a conversation many moons ago. My journey into health and wellness began like 10 years ago. I was really overweight and couldn’t lose weight with the traditional method. So, I went on a ketogenic diet all those years ago, lost a lot of body fat and got my health back. I started working out a lot more basically. I didn’t like conventional methods because they just weren’t working for me. Whatever the doctor said, it didn’t work. Whatever the internet was saying, it didn’t work. So, I just did my own research, read the studies, and found that that worked for me. I’m a little bit more flexible with my diet now. I have all the different food groups, which is great, but it was a great starting point and really got me started on my journey. As I started to lose weight and get healthier, I started to think about other things that could impact my health.
I stumbled across blue light being an impactor of sleep and that’s how I really got into the biohacking space. I stumbled across a guy called Jack Cruz in relevant forums who I’m sure a lot of people have heard of and tried to understand what he was saying and it took me a while because he’s a very complex guy. He came and he explained things, but I found that blue light was impacting my sleep and I’ve never slept well. I found blue light-blocking glasses were great for that. They filter out blue and green light and allow melatonin to be produced, which is fantastic for better rem and deep sleep. That’s how my company was founded actually on the back of blue light.
I found that all the glasses that were out there seven years ago weren’t blocking what the academic literature was saying, which was confusing to me. So, I invented a pair of glasses under the name of Blue Blocks, which blocked blue and green light because it’s green light as well as blue that was impacting sleep. That was how the company started and we just went on this amazing journey with blue blocks to a point where we were like, well, light impacts your skin. We saw studies showing that light blue light when it hits your skin will also disrupt melatonin. We found that red light was very healing and restorative, and that was another way light could be used to help us from a holistic wellness standpoint. Then we found that invisible frequencies of light, like far infrared, were great for sauna and detoxification and purification and de-stressing. So, we started to implement new products online. We’ve come up with this overarching holistic wellness, biohacking, and beauty brand, which aims to harness the power of light and anything on the EMF spectrum to optimize our well-being.
We changed our name to Bon Charge, which means good energy. Blue Blocks didn’t serve us anymore because it wasn’t just about blue light, and all our products give people good energy and remove the bad energy, like the bad EMS from things to create this incredible overall and overarching holistic wellness and beauty brand.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I interviewed you many, many moons ago about Blue Blocks, the blue light-blocking glasses, and it’s so important because so many people have trouble sleeping and they don’t make the connection with basically staring at the sun, also known as their phone and the havoc that wrecks on our evolutionary biology and our circadian rhythms to produce bad sleep. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Andy Mant
Well, all evolved millions of years ago, and we had something that developed, which was called a circadian rhythm. Some people know it as a body clock, your biological rhythms. It’s a little tiny clock that’s located in the center of your brain. We were outdoor humans of outdoor existence. We would get up with the sunrise and the cues from the sunrise would send a message to the clock in our body saying it’s morning. Let’s release cortisol, serotonin, and dopamine. Let’s go out on a hunt. Let’s go out to gather or whatever it is they did in the mornings. During the day, the spectrum of the sun changes. Those light messages that pass through the eyes and the skin would keep telling your internal system what time of day it was. So, different hormones could be released, neurotransmitters could be released and suppressed and so forward to make you optimal through the day, basically keeping you awake.
As the sun set in the evening that would send messages to the brain and to the body clock that right, we can drop the cortisol levels now. We don’t need to be alert and awake. We need to start producing sleep hormones like melatonin. And it would signal that to the body clock. They would have the campfire on that gives out orange and red lights, very relaxing and calming. And then we’d go to bed in those eras and we would wake up again with the rising sun and we would be in sync with the day-night cycles of the earth. Big problems happened when we started to invent modern-day lighting. It wasn’t so much of an issue back in Thomas Edison’s time when he invented the light bulb because it was all incandescent. So, there wasn’t very much blue light present. It was still the hues of orange and red, like the campfires. We didn’t really have too much of an impact on cortisol levels or hormone levels.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, because those are the incandescent or full spectrum. I went to the light bulb store maybe a few years ago and I was like, where are the incandescent bulbs? I didn’t realize they had been banned in the US or they weren’t making them anymore, but they’re coming back. I’m really thrilled about that.
Andy Mant
I hear this. RFK’s going to do you guys a world of good over now. I think he’s going to be bringing those back, so I’m excited about that. The real problem came and we started to look at energy efficiency. We changed from this incandescent to this LED light source. We switched it from a DC current to an AC current. So it was constantly pulsing, and in order to have the energy efficiency, they removed a lot of the energy- hungry frequencies of red and orange lights, those higher spectrums, and went for the more tightly packed energy-dense blue spectrum. So, you got this real horrible, harsh blue light. We put these in our homes and then it’s basically sending the same message to our ancient clock system that it’s solar noon all the time. So, cortisol levels have to be jacked up and we can’t then sleep because we don’t produce melatonin as efficiently when there’s blue light around us.
Some people might be listening to this and go, well, I fall asleep fine looking at my phone or watching TV or having the lights on. Yeah, you can probably fall asleep okay, but are you getting good sleep quality? You have to track that. Are you getting the REM sleep, the deep sleep? That’s the restorative forms of sleep that are clearing out all the dead dying damaged cells and keeping you very healthy from a metabolic standpoint. This problem occurred maybe in the late eighties onwards, but then we started to invent technology, computers, smartphones, fridge lights, the overhead lighting in our houses, and street lamps. They all contain these LED lights. We’re living in this perpetual daytime and that’s what the internal systems in our body are interpreting the outside world as being because it has to interpret the outside world through cues, and light is one of those. It’s very detrimental that we’ve now brought all these artificial suns into our home and our ancient body clock is now all out of whack, which then puts our hormone system out of whack, which can lead to very stressful people during the day because cortisol cycles are out. But then that can impact your sleep as well because you’re not producing enough sleep hormones.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
It’s so important to be paying attention to this, and it’s so easy to remedy this. It’s so simple. I went through my whole house. All the lights I use at night have a little nightlight. It’s an orange nightlight motion sensor. For my bedroom, I put an orange light in my living room. I put an orange light on, and it’s made a huge difference. I track my sleep with my AA ring. I live and die by my aura ring, just testing different things. I use the red light glasses also, or the blue light blocking glasses or the orange or red colored glasses when the sun starts to go down and it totally reduces your stress levels and you are able to go to sleep faster, have better quality of sleep. You have bulbs as well, don’t you at Bon Charge?
Andy Mant
We do, and they were really interesting because we found a couple of issues with bulbs not just being the fact that they contain copious amounts of blue light and like you mentioned earlier, correctly, the incandescent bulbs being very much full spectrum. We wanted to keep the LED but also bring in the full spectrum back. So, we’ve got full spectrum light bulbs that admit various frequencies of light during the day so you can change them. You just change them by flicking on and off, because we don’t want Bluetooth or Wifi. That’s detrimental for your health as well. You can have like the night mode, which only admits orange and red light. You can have the morning mode, which is quite intense in the blue light when the sun’s rising, but the red’s still in there as well. And then during the day, you can have the afternoon setting, which is this complete balance spectrum of blue, yellow, green, red, orange, et cetera.
We also found there was an issue when they went to the energy saving aspect of LED lighting. They switched from the DC to AC current. The AC current saves energy by pulsing energy. The light is actually pulsing but so you can’t see it with the naked eye. Sometimes you can if it’s really bad. That’s a whole different question, but it’s invisible to the naked eye. So, if you film your house lights or LED lights or TV or something like that on your smartphone in slow mo and then watch the video back, you’ll see this pulsing and it’s almost like a spectrum. You can have people with photo sensitive epilepsy that could have epileptic fits all the way down to people that will be on a screen all day or under artificial lighting, watching TV in a very sore and dry eyes. You can fit somewhere in between that. So, what we did was we removed the flicker by putting a bit of circuit technology within the bulb that then has the AC current coming from the mains into the bulb, and then it switches it to a DC current and stops the pulsing of the light. It’s a much healthier light for your eyes and your nervous system. That’s what we did alongside the issues of the too much blue light in the LEDs.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I’ve seen research where children in school are under the fluorescent bulbs that do have that flap to them that when that’s removed, without the better lighting is installed, they have less behavioral issues, less attention issues, and less disruptive behavior. It dramatically affects their behavior. To us this light just is very stressful and people just have no idea. Can you talk about how your blue light blocking glasses work exactly and how those are so important?
Andy Mant
When I looked at the studies that were out there, I looked at maybe 20, 21 studies there. There are quite a few on blue light, but those were the key cornerstone studies for me. It was 21 studies and there was very specific banding of light that showed melatonin disruption. Melatonin is your sleep hormone. It was between 400 nanometers, which is the very start of the blue spectrum, all the way up to 550 nanometers, which is the middle of the green light spectrum. Light is measured in nanometers. You have blue that goes from 400 to 495 nanometers.
Then you have green that goes from around 500 up to about 580 nanometers. Then you have the yellows, oranges, and reds and so forth. There was a very distinct band, like 400 to five 50 nanometers, and it showed in these studies this curve of melatonin disruption. It was like a bell curve. It started at 400. Then it went up at the roundabout, that 460 to 480, then it slowly dropped down and tapered off at 550. So, within that band, if your eyes and skin were to see light or fill the light in that banding, it would have a varying impact on your sleep hormone production. It’s very minimal at the beginning and end, but very high in the middle.
We wanted to eradicate this entire band of melatonin-disrupting light to create something called physiological darkness. It’s tricking the body clock into saying it’s dark, even if you’re watching tv or have your house lights on and so forth. We created this lens that was a really dark amber, sort of red in color, and then we tested it through spectrometers to make sure it brought a hundred percent in that range and that took quite a few months to master. But once we got it and got the formula right, we could then just tint the lenses of glasses to be able to create this physiological darkness. Now the way they work is that when the sun sets in ancestral times, we would’ve seen the reds and oranges of the campfire and nothing much else. You’d have a bit of ambient, low lux moonlight and starlight that doesn’t impact your daily circadian rhythm. That only really impacts monthly cycles with humans. So that was no issue.
I wanted to replicate the red and orange light, move the blue, and that’s what these glasses did. So, as the sun sets in a modern world, you would put on this pair of blue light blocking glasses, and it would basically take your body clock back to how it would’ve interacted ancestrally living in the outside world around that campfire. You could still have your modern conveniences like preparing your dinner, opening your fridge, getting your food out, watching your tv, scrolling your phone, or whatever it may be. That’s what we did with those glasses. You shouldn’t wear them during the day because if you wear them during the day, you’re going to disrupt your body clock because that’s not the right time. You need a lot of blue light during the day. That’s what keeps us alert and awake. So, that’s how the blue light blocking glasses with the orange and red lens works.
There’s also a lot of misconception that clear lenses block blue light and they don’t. They’re good if you want to reduce eye strain and headaches when you’re looking at a screen because they filter down a little bit of the blue light during the daytime so it’s not as intense on your eyes. But if you actually want to get better sleep, you must be blocking artificial blue and green light between 405 415 nanometers at least two to three hours before you can go to bed.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Let’s switch gears and talk about red light therapy because that’s something I’ve been using for years. I’m a huge fan. I’ve used red lights in many different ways for many things I’m trying to remedy. So, let’s talk about what red light therapy is exactly.
Andy Mant
It’s a great question because blue lights, like we said, there’s all this damage and it’s not great for you, but blue lights are a double-edged sword. Blue light is good during the day and not good in artificial sources or after dark. Now the reason it’s not good in artificial sources during the day is that it’s isolated. So blue light is very much on its own. Blue light causes you to feel awake and alert. It stimulates dopamine and serotonin, which are fantastic hormonal responses, but it also damages you at a cellular level because it’s tightly bundled high energy frequency of light. Now, nature’s very clever because it doesn’t want to give you something that’s beneficial but also damage you. So, sunlight contains red light as well. It contains near infrared and far infrared lights all in there. Those frequencies of light are what restores the damage caused by the blue light.
When you’re outside, more blue light causes damage, red light repairs it. You don’t have to think about it. It just goes amongst your day, and that’s what it is. But the fact of the matter is, we’re inside all the time now, so we’re pummeled by blue light during the day and red light. The antidote has been stripped out of all the LED devices we use, like our smartphones, house lights, laptops, and TVs. So we’re not getting any of that restoration. That’s where red light therapy comes in. It’s like a modern-day biohack that you would stand in front of or sit in front of one of these panels, or you’d wear one of these red light face masks or red light ones, those types of products, and it would restore any of the damage at that surface level.
Now that’s the red side of red light therapy, the near infrared, which is the invisible frequencies that are in the red light therapy devices that you can buy that penetrate deep into the muscles, into the bones and the joints, and help restore and repair at a cellular level. That’s really important to use as well if you’ve got those aches and pains you want to recover after the gym. On the red light side, if you’ve got the fine lines and wrinkles, you want to boost complexion, uplift to get that skin appearance back, that’s where red light therapy is used as well. It can also be used for things like wound healing. If you’ve got a scratch outside or inside and then you put red light therapy on it, it can help the healing process with that. It can aid with that. That’s in basic terms what red light therapy is and how it can be used.
The other aspect of it is a lot of people say to me like, can I just not sit in front of a red light bulb? And it’s not the same thing. It all comes down to something called a radiance, and that’s the power density, how the LEDs med light therapy is packaged up to deliver the red light therapy to you. You want a higher radiance, over that 50 milliwatts per centimeter squared. Ideally up to that hundred mark and maybe more because it’s just that high intensity that stimulates the cellular activity in the mitochondria in the cells to be able to do that growth and repair. If you’ve got a red light bulb, you probably have to sit in front of it for about a year to get the same benefit as a red light therapy device would give you at higher radiance for say five or 10 minutes.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Let’s talk about skin because that’s my primary interest in the red light device. There are a lot of devices out there. You have a red light therapy mask that I absolutely love. I’ve been using that a few times a week. It’s only 10 minutes a day before you go to bed or whenever you want. It’s very simple to use. So, how is that improving your skin?
Andy Mant
It’s another great question. The way it works is the red light specifically has to be at a certain banding of frequency. It has to be between 630 and 660 nanometers. It has to be within there. They’re the areas that have been studied and show very specifically that improve skin at a surface level. Now the way it works is it stimulates more energy in the electron chain transport system in the body. That system produces energy, something called adenosine tri phosphates, A-P-T-A-T-P. Now what happens is when we have inflammation in our bodies, the nitric oxide levels are raised within this pathway, and that gobbles up all the oxygen that’s then used to create energy. That’s not what we want for an efficient energy system. Growth and repair become a lot harder. We may start to accelerate aging. We may start to not be able to repair our sore muscles after the gym or whatever it may be. What red light does specifically at 630 to 660 nanometers, it seems to free up more oxygen within this electron change transport phase, specifically at the fourth phase where something called cytochrome C oxidase comes in and it frees up much more oxygen for cytochrome C oxidase to produce more energy and energy more efficiently.
Let’s say that happens when you put the red light on your face, that frees up more energy to boost certain processes. One of those processes is the proposition and creation of more fibroblasts in the skin. Fibroblasts are super important when it comes to firming the skin and reducing the signs of wrinkles and aging because it’s the precursor to collagen production. The more of these fibroblasts you have in your skin, the more collagen you potentially can produce, um, in your face. It’s what then firms, uplifts and smooths out your skin. That’s how red light therapy at that 630 to 660 millimeters works to really reverse the signs of aging.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I need all the help I can get over here.
Andy Mant
Oh, well you look great. You’re obviously using it a lot because you have very good skin.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Thank you. Well I work at it. I definitely work at it and I have the red light mask sitting right here by my desk. It’s fantastic. It’s just very easy to use. It’s very healing. Before I started using your red light mask on my face, I was using a red light pad on my lower back. I was plagued with lower back injuries for a few years and off and on. I had a bulging disc and if I didn’t use my red light pad, which had red and near infrared LEDs in it, I’d have pain. But if I used it, I wouldn’t have pain. I would take it traveling with me. I was surprised by how well it can heal injuries and reduce inflammation and therefore reduce pain. I recently sprained my wrist lifting weights because I’m such an athlete and it really rapidly increases healing. It’s really amazing.
Andy Mant
There are over 4,000 studies done on red light therapy, peer reviewed, and there’s over 400, maybe 420 last time I checked on the gold standard and double-blind placebo type trials. And you’re right, there are trials in there and studies that have shown the impact of higher radiance red light therapy on muscle injuries, joint pain, skin concerns, and weight loss as well. They had this really interesting study that I sent to a friend of mine the other week, Thomas D Law, who’s doing a lot of on red light therapy and fat loss. This study was super important. I had to send it to him. It tested two groups of people that were walking on a treadmill, weren’t running, just walking on a treadmill 20 minutes a day. And then they took one group and said, right, you just do your 20 minutes a day, and follow the same diet. Both groups have the same diet. Go and rest, sit down, chill after your walk.
The other group then did 10 minutes of red light therapy after they did the treadmill rather than just sitting and doing whatever they would normally do. They found that there was a 20% increase in fat loss for the group that then went and did red light therapy just for 10 minutes after walking on the treadmill after a six-week trial. It’s just fascinating though. These kinds of studies are just mindblowing to me that something as easy as just sitting in front of a panel after walking on a treadmill and accelerate fat loss, weight loss, if that’s part of your weight management goals. It’s incredible to me. There are so many studies out there that are showing that elite athletes are using it to just gain a little bit more rapid recovery time so they can get back out there and do things quicker. And that goes back to what you were saying about that sore lower back you had, it’s not just for athletes.
Red light therapy, like a saw back is going to put you at suboptimal for what you want to do in your life and just getting you back quicker by using red light therapy for like 10 to 20 minutes, three, four times a week or every day, however much you want incorporate it in, puts you back to your best quicker. You start doing the things you love, start playing with the kids, the grandkids start, tending to the garden, doing your exercise, or whatever it may be. This simple, affordable way of treating those situations is just mind blowing to me that it’s just so easy to do. Few people are yet to understand and it’s really interesting because the likes of you and I, Wendy would’ve understood red light therapy many years ago from the muscle and joint recovery standpoint. And then it moved into the beauty space and people using it for that complexion skin side of things. It’s funny because when we start talking to people in that beauty setting, they’ve never heard of red light therapy for anything but the skin level.
There’s a lot of education that’s needed that red light therapy isn’t just for that skin level. It isn’t just a face mask you put on your face, even though that’s fantastic. Don’t get me wrong. It’s amazing. Incredible. But it goes further as well, like if you’ve got those muscle and joint aches, it’s fantastic for that as well. That’s where it began as a treatment protocol.
Dr. Wendy Myers
You have a whole red light pad as well that you can lay your whole body on, correct? I think that could be so amazing, especially if you’re older and you wake up, you consistently are stiff and achy. This would be a great way to just warm the body up, get that circulation going, get that red light therapy, and such an amazing way to start your day, in addition to having the weight loss benefits, if you do it after exercise.
Andy Mant
Yeah, absolutely. It is a pad, but it comes in a blanket form. It can separate into two pads. For the red light therapy blanket, you could have one side and your partner would have one side. The reason we truly invented it was we found that you stand in front of the panel. Then what about the back? If you want to do a full body treatment, you then have to turn around and do the back. We’re all about simplifying wellness at Bon Charge. So, we were like, what happens if we make it like a sleeping bag? People can get into it and then do the complete 360 treatment of red light therapy in the same amount of time. That’s why we invented that one. It’s super convenient. I love it. It’s easily wiped down. It doesn’t get hot either. You just slip into that for 10, 20 minutes, watch the tv, read your book, scroll your phone, magazine, or whatever you do to unwind or meditate. It’s just such an easy way to do things.
The big philosophy at Bon Charge is simplifying wellness. No one’s got time to go to a salon, sit there with a red light face mask on for 20 minutes, or sit in front of a panel or do an infrared sauna. We want people to be able to do their red light therapy, put their mask on, do their cooking, watch tv, lie in the red light therapy blanket or the infrared sauna blanket, watch TV or read your book or meditate. It’s all about something called habit stacking, and that’s what our philosophy is, making sure people can get wellness into their busy, hectic lives without having to sacrifice something else. That’s been a key mantra to us as well.
One thing I also wanted to touch upon that we get quite a lot as well, and I’m sure you get this a lot as well, is the difference between foreign infrared, near infrared and red. People come to us and say, oh, I don’t need red light therapy because I’ve got an infrared sauna in my gym. And it’s very different, right? Infrared saunas use something called far infrared light. Far infrared light is very good for heating. It warms the body. It boosts metabolism and the heart rate gets better. It’s great for detoxifying through sweating. Purification helps with weight loss because you’ve got the water loss in there, which helps to shed out any of the toxins through the day. It’s also great for your complexion because it increases circulation, things like that. That’s far infrared light and it’s invisible. So, those saunas you go into at the gym, infrared saunas as they call them, they just drop the word far. We have a sauna blanket, which is an infrared sauna blanket and it does the same thing. You just get into it like a burrito and cook yourself for 10 to 20 minutes and get the same benefits.
Near infrared light and red light, that’s red light therapy. Near infrared light is invisible as well, but it doesn’t heat as hard as far infrared light. What it does, like we were saying earlier, is it penetrates the skin, goes right into the muscles and joints, increases cellular energy, and helps repair and restore muscles and joints and the red light. The correct radiance helps you at the skin level, wound or scar healing, boosting fibroblasts for the complexions, and reducing fine lines and wrinkles. Red light therapy isn’t a far infrared sauna, that’s an infrared sauna, very different. Red light therapy has to be near infrared light and red light.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I can see where the red light therapy blanket is so key, especially people hitting their forties, fifties, sixties. They want to keep working out but tend to be more prone to injuries. Getting into the red light therapy blanket after you work out, would be an amazing way to prevent injuries, recover quicker and get that boost to your skin as well. It’s just totally invaluable. Like I said, I have a pad that I use and any place I get injured and it’s unbelievable how much faster it heals and it at least doubles the recovery time or, or cuts it in half rather. It really continues to blow my mind. A girlfriend of mine that had a concussion. I gave her a red light therapy pad, and she was able to heal her concussion with that. She had double vision. I gave her magnesium also, but definitely the red light was really key in reducing that inflammation. Some of the issues that she had, she went to the doctor, they just said, oh, go home and, and just relax. There was just nothing that they were going to do for her. But the red light therapy has shown to help with neurological issues as well.
Andy Mant
Literally the list is endless on what it can do. It’s fascinating. The more and more studies that come out, even though there’s a ton anyway, just makes it so much more interesting the amount of people that have got these amazing stories and all these studies that are supporting their amazing stories as well. One thing that really interests me that I think you know a little bit more than me on this is the red light therapy for the hair thickening, hair growth and those types of treatments. I’d be keen to understand a little bit more about that because it’s something that really interests us at Bon Charge and we’re researching at the moment to try and bring a product to market that can help with that.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I think that’s going to be really exciting for so many women and men, especially those that have hair loss. For the Minoxidil and the Rogans and those types of products, stop using them because all the hair falls out and there are side effects and problems there. There is unbelievable research showing that red light helps with hair regrowth. So that’d be really exciting because you said you were coming out with a cap that had a red light in it eventually. So that’d be another addition to all the other goodies that you have. I’ve also heard red light can help with bone healing as well.
Andy Mant
Yeah, absolutely. It’s near infrared. The red light wouldn’t help too much with that. That’s, again, more surface level. But yeah, the bone healing can definitely be attributed to near infrared light as well, specifically at 850 nanometers. Near infrared light runs from around about 800 up to near a thousand, then it goes into that far infrared range. It’s all very specific red light therapy. You could go, oh, right, I’ve got near infrared light 920 nanometers and it would do nothing for bone healing yet. 850 nanometers seem to be that sweet spot that’s been shown in the studies to help with accelerating the body’s natural healing process when it comes to fractures and broken bones. We’ve actually seen in studies that it can accelerate the fusing back together of the bones as well, because when they’re looking to repair themselves, the natural healing process and the body is fantastic. It’s just utilizing the catalyst to be able to put more energy efficiency into that process. By shining the red light therapy on the region that you want to help with the bone restoration, it will act as a catalyst to speed up that process because if it gives more oxygen to that electron change of transport mechanism, which then provides more energy for the growth and repair.
It’s almost like saying you’re building a house, or say you’re repairing a house. Say someone knocks down the wall of a house and you want to repair it, and you bring two builders in and they’re repairing it. It might take them a few months to repair it. Then all of a sudden, red light therapy comes along, which is a van full of maybe 25 other builders, and they start helping and building the structure back together again. It’s going to be done quicker, and you’re going to be back on your feet quicker and doing things and living in your house quicker. So, I always like to do those types of analogies. It’s almost like that’s what red light therapy does. It brings more people in to help fix the problem in a quicker timeframe. It’s not doing anything magical in terms of magical healing. Your body’s natural healing process is still happening, and it will still fix the problem. It will just take longer whereas with red light therapy, it catalyzes those processes and speeds them up so you can just get back to doing what you want.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Andy, why don’t you tell us what your website is and where we can get the products that you mentioned on the show today?
Andy Mant
It’s bon charge.com, B-O-N-C-H-A-R-G e.com. That’s where all the products can be found. We’ve also got some incredible, medically reviewed blogs on there as well, so people can read all about the different impacts of red light therapy, blue light, EMF, anything that that takes their fancy, and we have a whole host of products on there, starting from the light bulbs that are maybe like 20 bucks to buy all the way up to huge sauna domes that maybe three, $4,000 and everything in between. I always like to say, see these things as an investment. For instance, the red light face mask costs 350 US dollars, but to go to the salon for one treatment its, probably 80 to a hundred dollars. So, four or five uses, which basically is a week, you’ll be able to get your money back and use it indefinitely. That’s what I always see as investment. You use this every day. Maybe you get to the salon once a week. If you’re lucky, you can then use these devices every single day and there’s some great free advice out there as well.
I never wanna pressure people to have to buy anything if they don’t want to. If they’re starting out on their journey, watch the sunrise every morning. Wear blue light glasses before bed. Watch the sunset. Go outside for breaks outside. Salt lamps are also fantastic. They’re great. They give off orange light. Use them after dark. Maybe power down your devices an hour before bed. For a lot of people, those things are difficult, even though they’re free to do because they’re giving up things that people like to do. Like on a Saturday or a Sunday, you might want to watch your TV up until you go to bed, and this is where Bon Charge comes in. You don’t have to give up any of those modern conveniences. You can just biohack yourself by using the red light face mask to help with your skin.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Thank you for giving that special offer to my listeners. So, go to boncharge.com and use the coupon code Wendy. It is really easy to remember and I highly recommend the light mask. I highly recommend the Red Light Therapy Mask. It’s awesome. I’ve been using it for about a month, but I’m really excited to see my results using it over time. I’ve been reading about these for years and I just never used the pad that I had on my face. It’s just much easier to have the mask, and then have it secure on your head. It’s just hands-free and you’re not attached to anything. You can just do your thing or you can leave there and relax. I really love that. I highly recommend it, but also the red light blanket. I think for so many people it would be so helpful on so many levels. We need to use every tool we can get, especially as we get older. Recovery is slower than injury. Your people are more injury-prone. It is a brilliant addition to whatever you’re doing for your health. Andy, thanks so much for coming on the show, and again, I love having you on. I think you’re a great guest, so knowledgeable as well. You explained everything so clearly. So, thanks for coming on.
Andy Mant
Oh, thank you so much for having me. It’s a real honor. I hope some people get some good takeaways from this. Thank you again, Wendy. I really appreciate it.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Everyone, I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Thanks for tuning into the Myers Detox podcast, where I bring you guests every week to help you elevate your health. I want you to feel good. You deserve to feel good. I want to give you those little distinctions and those little tips to help you just upgrade your life. So, thanks for tuning in.
Disclaimer
The Myers Detox Podcast is created and hosted by Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Wendy Myers and the producers, disclaims responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of the information contained herein. The opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.
