Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science -based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
My guest today is Dr.
Roger Schwelt. Dr. Roger Schwelt is a board -certified medical doctor in pulmonology, which is the understanding and treatment of conditions that impact the respiratory system, such as colds, flus, and other viruses, mold infections, asthma, and more.
Dr. Schwelt is also board certified in sleep medicine.
He does his clinical work in the intensive care unit at Loma Linda University, and he is actively involved in medical and public health education through his terrific online channel called MedCram.
Today we discuss how to avoid getting colds, flus, and other viruses, and how to treat them to minimize discomfort, accelerate healing, and avoid long -term consequences.
During today's episode, we discuss long COVID, as well as the use of sun and red light to stimulate mitochondrial and therefore metabolic health across the entire brain and body.
That opens up a broader discussion about phototherapy, which is the use of light to control health, and temperature and other levers for improving brain and bodily function.
Dr. Schwell emphasizes that sun and red light therapy have a long and well -established medical history and their mechanisms of action are known, and therefore it's not just biohacking as many people think.
We also discussed the sometimes controversial topic of the flu shot and if and when you should get one.
Dr. Schwelt, as you'll soon hear, is world -class at making medical concepts and the actionable items related to health exceptionally clear.
As a consequence, I'm certain that you'll truly appreciate the knowledge that he shares in your efforts to be and stay healthy at any age.
In fact, by the end of today's episode, you'll be armed with the real knowledge on how to best get over nasty infections of the sinuses, lungs, and throat faster, should you happen to get one, and even better, how to avoid them altogether.
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero -cost to consumer information about science and science -related tools to the general public.
In keeping with that theme, this episode does include sponsors.
And now for my discussion with Dr.
Roger Schwelt. Dr. Roger Schwelt, welcome.
Thank you so much, Andrew, for having me.
I discovered you because you were putting out and continue to put out incredible information about how to stay healthy amidst infectious diseases, airborne infectious diseases, skin contact -based infectious diseases, and on and on.
And nobody likes to be sick.
And you've provided me tremendously valuable information about how to avoid getting sick and in many cases, how to accelerate the progression from sick to healthy again.
It's been tremendously helpful for getting me back into life, as it were.
Let's talk about some of the things that one can do to avoid getting sick when in the presence of airborne viruses, in particular, colds and flus and other viruses, as it were.
If you were to think about the major pillars of remaining healthy, especially when one is exposed to colds and flus from kids for in your case also in the intensive care unit where people are coming in specifically because they're sick often with infections like colds and flus or worse you need to take
specific precautions to avoid getting sick what do you think of as the fundamental layer of keeping a healthy immune system to avoid getting sick?
And then we'll talk about how to get over and move through being sick more quickly.
Yes. Well, the question is, how do you avoid getting sick in terms of infectious diseases?
And as it turns out, the answer to that is actually the same in terms of avoiding getting sick for anything.
And it sort of goes to the pillars, as you call it.
In my mind, there's actually a physician that I know very well just outside of Stanford, actually, in a place called Weimar, Weimar University, Dr.
Neil Nedley. And he's actually coined this mnemonic called New Start.
And each of those letters to me in my mind is something that I go to when I want to improve health in people in general.
So the N starts for nutrition.
And we can talk about nutrition and what that does to the human body, obviously, you know, as natural as possible, staying away from processed foods.
That's something there.
Exercise is E. And when I'm talking about exercise, I'm talking about the understanding that we have regarding exercise, not to build muscle, necessarily be stronger.
I'm talking about exercise in terms of health, and that has more of a J -hook type of picture.
What I mean by J -hook is if you're not doing any exercise, you're going to have higher levels of inflammation.
As soon as you start to do some exercise, even mild to moderate exercise, the amount of inflammation in your body starts to come down.
But as you start to do more and more exercise, you do have to be careful in terms of your general health.
This is exactly what happens with athletes.
They have to be very careful that when they're doing that type of elite athletic exercise, that they're not sick on the day of performance.
And so that's an issue.
So I'm referring to just mild to moderate exercise is good.
The next one would be W, water.
So this is something that's really interesting.
Obviously, it seems pretty obvious, but not only the use of internal water, but external water.
So in that area, we can talk about sauna, cold plunge, things of that nature that can actually help with our immune system.
That's a whole interesting area of discussion.
It involves the innate immune system.
It involves interferon.
There's a lot of history and data that goes back over 100 years on how that's been used.
Start, S -T -A -R -T. So S is sunlight.
I've been a real proponent of getting people outside into the sun, and we can talk a lot about that.
There's a lot of interesting research, not only in terms of sunlight, in terms of influenza, but also COVID, and just about any natural disease.
A lot of interesting information there.
T, T stands for the old term called temperance, which you may recall is a term that we use to prevent us from taking in toxins into our body.
That's a whole other discussion.
So staying away from things that would make you sick.
A is air. And when I talk about air, it's not just what we focus on, which is keeping bad things out of the air, so having fresh air.
But there's a whole discussion to be had in terms of air that has good qualities in it.
So there's a whole area of research that looks at, for instance, phytencides, which are chemicals that come off of trees.
You may have heard of forest bathing.
They've done a lot of research in Japan on this, and getting out into nature, there are actual chemicals that are in the air that you can breathe that actually have an impact on your innate immune system.
Finally, R, and we'll get into R and T at the end.
R is rest. Now, this goes without saying, but people who have good sleep habits are going to have much better immune systems.
Whether you're talking about the antibody response after a vaccine versus just the number of times per year you're sick, there's very good data, very good research that shows that getting seven, eight hours of sleep a night is going to be very beneficial for your immune system.
It has to do with cortisol and beta receptors and all sorts of things.
And the last T, which is trust, And for some, it is trust in a higher power, trust in God.
These are the sorts of things that can help us relieve stress.
If someone else is helping you, if someone else is there, T would also include community, people that are around you.
These are some of the less tangible ways of measuring it.
But when someone asks me a question, what can I do to avoid getting sick?
And as you just asked me in terms of influenza, there's a lot of specific things we can talk about.
But that's where I start out with the pillars of health.
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Let's start off with one of my favorite topics would be the S in New START.
Let's talk about sunlight.
Listeners of this podcast or anyone that's heard me on social media know that I'm, you know, as big a proponent of getting morning sunlight in one's eyes as one could possibly be without repeating himself 10 million times per year.
It's a daily activity that we just know has such an outsized positive effect on the whole setting of the circadian rhythm and thereby improved daytime mood focus and alertness and nighttime sleep.
But the way you described sunlight, it goes beyond just getting morning sunlight in one's eyes.
So if we want to parse this S, sunlight, in New Start, how are you thinking about sunlight?
Is it sunlight on the skin?
Is it also midday light, not just morning sunlight?
Is it a certain amount of sunlight?
And then maybe we can also talk about some of the underlying mechanisms.
Yeah, exactly. So when you talk about sunlight, and I'm a big believer, I'm board certified in sleep medicine, And I'm cheering you on when you talk about these things because it's so important that light into the retina does have an effect on the circadian rhythm, suprachiasmatic nucleus.
It does have an effect on mood.
It goes to the perihabneular nucleus in the brain and has an effect there.
Those are well -known and very important.
What I'm talking about when I'm talking about sunlight is an aspect of light that is not very well -known in terms of its visible effects.
So, we know about the visible effects of light.
These are photons that are coming into the eyes that we can see.
What I'm discussing and what I'm talking about is the effect of sunlight on the human body, the skin penetrating into the human body.
Now, this at first sounds kind of woo -woo, I guess we could say, but the point that I want to make here is understanding that when we look at the sun, we are seeing about 38 percent of that energy coming from the sun is in the visible spectrum.
There's a whole nother 52 % of the photons coming from the sun in the infrared spectrum.
And on the other end, on the ultraviolet side, this is the part we have no problem understanding because we know that ultraviolet B light comes into our skin and it's high energy, so it's able to actually move the bonds on these cholesterol derivatives in order to make vitamin D.
So we know that. So now what do we say?
When I say, hey, I want to go outside to get some vitamin D, We know that we're going outside to get this light that we can't see that's very imperative to giving us something called vitamin D, which is a hormone in our body, and it's very, very important.
On the other side of that, though, on the infrared side, is something that there's new science, new data that is coming out that is showing that it's actually very, very important.
And to that, I would point to an article that really changed my thinking on this and really opened my eyes, no pun intended.
There was an article that was published in 2019 in Melatonin Research by Scott Zimmerman and Russell Ryder.
And then the name of that article was Melatonin, Optics of the Human Body, the Optics of the Human Body.
And what Scott Zimmerman and Russell Ryder set out to show is that, in fact, infrared light, because of its very long wavelength, it can penetrate through into the skin actually very deep.
And we're not talking about how long a path length goes through.
You have to remember that this type of long wavelength can scatter.
And it can scatter throughout up to, they say, up to 8 centimeters, according to this data.
A single photon. A single photon can bounce around.
It's a very low energy photon.
But low energy photons, because they're very long in wavelength, can penetrate very deeply.
A good way of thinking about this is, you know, you pull up to a stop sign and a car pulls up next to you.
and they're playing this really loud music, right?
What do you hear in your car?
It's very low frequency sound.
And the reason why that's what you hear is because low frequency sound is the only kind of sound coming out of that guy's radio that's able to penetrate not only his car, but go into your car and shake the steering wheel on your car.
It's the same thing, like, for instance, if you were to go to the Grand Canyon and there's a storm coming, storm very far away, what's the first thing that you're gonna hear?
It's low rumbling. It's because that low frequency energy is able to penetrate very deeply.
There's an astrophysicist in Europe, in England, actually, Bob Fosbury.
He sent me a photograph of his hand in front of a infrared light source.
And it was almost like the first guy who took an x -ray of his hand, Rhodigen, I guess is his name.
And he said, he looked at his hand, he says, I almost like saw my own death, because he could see the bones in his hand through the x -ray.
Well, Bob Fosbury, who's at the European Space Agency and as well tuned into this type of understanding, he put his hand in front of a infrared light sensor or infrared light source and took a infrared light photograph.
And the light comes through the hand.
It illuminates the entire hand.
And this is, of course, a lot more than a few millimeters.
