From Sleepless Nights to Cancer Insights: Understanding the Junk Light Connection

In this special solo episode, I'd like to tackle a critical yet underestimated part of health: our sleep quality. The reparative power of sleep and its integral role in overall well-being is undeniable. From a thought-provoking study published on PubMed, I discuss the concerning effects of junk light on our circadian rhythm and melatonin levels. This groundbreaking research prompts a reevaluation of the potential health risks associated with night shift work, which can even increase the likelihood of breast cancer in women.

As we navigate through the hazards of poor sleep, I talk about practical tips for achieving optimal sleep through hacks such as blackout curtains, red lights, and creating a sanctuary for your sleeping area.

Tune in to hear more about how embracing good sleep hygiene practices will not only enhance the quality of rest but also contribute to an increased number of healthy, fulfilling years in life.

Episode Highlights

[2:30] The Repairing Power of Sleep
[3:00] Unpacking an Insightful Study on Sleep
[5:25] The Dangers of Night Shift
[7:42] Advice for Anyone Going Through Cancer Treatment
[10:10] Creating a Sanctuary for Sleep

Resources Mentioned

Circadian and melatonin disruption by exposure to light at night:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25062775/
UBlockout: [https://www.ublockout.com/ultimate-blackout-shade.html?affiliate=BEAUTIFULLYBROKEN]
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Marion Institute BioMed Course: biologicalmedicine.org
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AquaCure Machine + Molecular Hydrogen
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My Favorite Sauna: Therasage https://bit.ly/39mTxwY
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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@freddiekimmel

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Freddie Kimmel (00:02.706)
Welcome to the Beautifully Broken podcast. I'm your host, Freddie Kimmel, and on the show, we explore the survivor's journey, practitioners making a difference, and the therapeutic treatments and transformational technology that allow the body to heal itself. Witness the inspiration we gain by navigating the human experience with grace, humility, and a healthy dose of mistakes. Because part of being human is being beautifully broken.

Freddie Kimmel (00:35.022)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Beautifully Broken Podcast. I love you so much, but even more, I love these solo episodes. We'll get right into it. So when we choose to live outside the natural laws that govern the body's rhythms, there's always a cost. There is a definitive cost associated to how much Netflix I view and the ambient light that's absorbed through my skin and my eyes, and it's activating these photoreceptors.

Exposure to junk light, especially in the workplace, is incredibly harmful in environments such as hospitals, shift work, areas with fluorescent bulbs. It affects the brain as well as our hormonal system. So this risk that let's frame it as a risk, it's like compound interest in the stock market. It accumulates over time. So it's the combination of junk light and porcelain hygiene.

and microplastics in our water and glyphosate and your mold in your air. It's all a mitochondrial debt and the debt is repaid through a diminished quality of life or I should say the debt is expressed through a diminished quality of life. Reducing energy levels could be metabolic resistance, impaired insulin sensitivity, you can't fit in your favorite jeans that you love, I could go on. My aim with junk light and the conversation today is not to put you in a state of fear.

It's to inspire you to deeper know your body and make a change. I firmly believe we cannot get better from our current situation and improve our state of health when we live in a state of fear and everything is going to hurt us, be it the gluten, be it the Cheerios, be it the environmental radiation, be it, dot, dot, dot, you fill in the blank. I'm not going to delve into why we think sleep is good. I need us to all assume for this

short podcast and it'll keep it shorter if we agree that sleep is where we repair tissue, soft tissue damage, optimize our immune system, flush the drainage system to the brain, right? We'll just do a couple. I just need us to agree on that. But I want to talk about junk light and I specifically want to talk about the Tulane study on melatonin and its role in breast cancer treatment. So if anybody out here wants to look at a deep dive on the study, it's

Freddie Kimmel (02:54.83)
PubMedID PMID 27780004. So published in the Cancer Research Articles, this study is titled, Circadian and Melatonin Disruption by Exposure to Light at Night, Driving Intrinsic Resistance to Tamoxifen Therapy in Breast Cancer. This article explores how exposure to dim light, very dim light, disrupts our circadian rhythm.

The disruption is going to lead to, you guessed it, lower melatonin production, which is a hormone that raises in the dark, and it's crucial, my friends, for inhibiting breast cancer growth. The big words I want you to hold from this statement are intrinsic resistance to a viable breast cancer therapy. Now, this is not whether I think this therapy is good or bad. It's evidence of outside world impacting inside pathways.

So under a controlled exposure circumstance, they looked at one lux of monochromatic light, which significantly suppressed nocturnal melatonin. For context, the brightness from my TV could be 500 lux. On a high -end TV, an LED or an OLED, at peak viewing experience, it could be a thousand lux. So this is very dim light. So what the study looked at is at high levels of melatonin at night.

put a breast cancer cell essentially to sleep by turning off growth mechanisms. And what it does is it makes it very vulnerable to the tamoxifen. But when the lights are on and melatonin is suppressed, remember our reference range is one lux, breast cancer cells wake up. They become more resistant to the tamoxifen. It's worth saying that 60 to 75 % of breast cancers express

estrogen receptors making them candidates for the therapy. So when we look at this information, my question to you in the audience, and I'd love if you gave me this, what is your answer? Hit me in an Instagram DM. Whose responsibility is it to stay current with this information? Is it yours? Is it your oncologist? Is your oncologist negligent for not mentioning a lifestyle change that would impact

Freddie Kimmel (05:20.302)
the outcomes of a drug they are prescribing. You tell me. Another area we can look at with junk light is obviously shift work. So working night shifts can significantly increase a woman's risk of developing breast cancer. The risk is much more notable for those who work night shifts over an extended period of time or they're qualified as intense. In fact, the WHO, the World Health Organization has classified shift work as a...

probable carcinogen. So the overall risk, women who work night shifts have about a 108 % chance higher, more than double of getting breast cancer compared to those who don't work night shifts. When the shift work is regular, when there is an intensity, I'm air quoting that, the risk is 134%. I want to also give you a real life example. Somebody out there might read the Huffington Post. So,

This is a real life example that underscores the consequences of living outside the body's natural rhythm. So Ariana Huffington, she is the co -founder, editor and chief of the Huffington Post. In 2011, she had an extreme wake up call about the importance in the body's natural rhythms associated with sleep. She was working 18 hour days to build her media company and she went through a phase of extreme sleep deprivation.

But her turning point came when she collapsed at work from exhaustion. She fell and she shattered her cheekbone. This incident is a direct result of her pushing her body beyond what is humanly possible. You have to ask yourself, risk versus reward, and to what end? For what? This is very Americana. This is the gold star. This is the quarterback. This is...

you feeling value, you feeling worthy of love when you've achieved something. Believe me, I get it and I can relate, but I want it. What I want to do is I want to give you some quick steps, just if you're inspired to hear this out. And what a great reminder of outside worlds impact on how my body performs, be it cognitive, be it balance, be it the body's ability to manage cancer. So I think

Freddie Kimmel (07:43.054)
If you are inspired or you know somebody going through breast cancer treatment or any cancer, invite them to make these lifestyle adjustments and sleep hygiene practices that could add years to their life and increase the quality of their experience in this one body. We get this one body. So number one, I always tell people use a blue light filter. The blue light from your smartphone, your tablet, your computer can definitively.

disrupt your circadian rhythm and make it harder to fall asleep. So there are apps that will take out the blue light in a direct timing by your time zone when the sun is going down and the screen will get predominantly a little more dark and a little more red and will bring out those intensities. That's an easy one to add, right? In the home, dimming the lights and avoiding your screen before bed. Now this is a tough one.

So avoiding the use of an electromagnetic device with a screen, smartphone, tablet, TV, at least an hour before bedtime, right? It's tough. The content and the blue light emitted from the screen can definitively interfere with your sleep. And I say the content because the story that you're watching. This is why sometimes when I watch TV, I'll do short episodic that comes to a close. Friends, storyline 30 minutes. If you finish a movie,

and you get three quarters of the way through and you don't quite get there, but you know you should go to bed, your brain is still playing out that story. So keep that in mind if you do choose to consume content. The other thing that I would say is using a red light or an amber light throughout the house. If you need illumination during the night, you can use red or amber lights in your bedroom, in a hallway, in the kitchen. I have friends that have gone so extreme to change out the lights in their refrigerator to red lights.

I have all the bulbs in my bedroom as red. And though it looks like a very famous district in Amsterdam, I get less exposure to junk light and I sleep better. And really, I want to just comment on the refrigerator. Ideally, we want to stop eating when the sun goes down. You know, we could go into food and why our largest meal maybe shouldn't be the last meal of the day. But if you do need to go in there, think about the light that's coming from your fridge.

Freddie Kimmel (10:08.046)
The other thing I'd say is that think about the sleeping area of your home as a sanctuary. How are you going to build that sanctuary? So I have a lot of ambient light outside my bedroom, which is why I've just invested in a complete block out system, but anything like a light blocking curtain to create this black hole. Light blocking curtains or shades or whatever you may find can help block out external sources of light. Street lights.

allowing you to sleep deeper in a darker environment. Remember, one lux impacted a Latona production. Just keep that in your mind. So how dark can you make your bedroom? Maybe we'll have a contest. Send me pictures of the darkest room. That would be very funny. You could just send me a blackout picture. The other thing I want to mention is just spending time outdoors during the day and being consistent. So exposure to the natural daylight, right? Right when we get up, right when we wake.

During the daytime, that is going to help regulate that rhythm, that circadian rhythm. It's going to be easier to fall asleep at night. So getting that first 30 minutes of sunlight, team, this is so hard for me. I go back and forth while I crush it for two months. And then I get back into a phase of, God, this bed feels good. I don't want to get up. But I always feel better when I do it. And I've been much better at being an early riser. So the experiment is on.

The information is there. The knowledge, if you choose to accept it and go forward. I will put it in the show notes, but the upgrades I'm doing to my bedroom are obviously the red light bulbs, but I am going to be doing a complete blackout blockout system for my bedroom windows. And they're actually arriving today, hopefully be installing them, called U -Blockout. And I'm so stoked. U -Blockout was right next to

my booth at A4M, the Longevity Medicine Conference in Vegas in 2023. So I got to see that these are blackout shades that are, I'm actually mounting them on the outside, inside the room, but on the outside of the frame. And they're motorized and literally you would go in this test room they had set up and it went to complete blackness. So because I track HRV, because I look at my health metrics, I will be able to see.

Freddie Kimmel (12:32.334)
you know what the change is in sleep quality. So I'm excited. I'll put that link in the show notes. You can use code beautifullybroken for you block out. Go check them out. And I really, I really, it's just such low hanging fruit. What's your relationship with light? What's your relationship with dark? It's like, it's like the story is all this time. I love you guys. I'll talk to you soon. Bye. Ladies and gentlemen, if you know anything about me and my Instagram, you know I love.

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wavelengths of light because those are the most researched and the most powerful in the human body. This panel pulses between 1 and 9999 Hertz and every purchase comes with a phone consultation so you can best know how to use it. Light Path LED is the panel that I've used since I got into wellness. They are tried and tested. They are a fan favorite and I am telling you,

If you shop around it, you look at one of these panels next to the industry standard, you will be blown away and you will not be sorry. You can use code beautifully broken for a discount to start using red light therapy in your home today. So let's jump on in and let's shine the light.

I love you. I'm your host, Freddie Kimmel. Big love.