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The entropy machine
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エッチLight starvation
The plot of many a thriller has hinged on the fact that the best place to hide something is where it is obvious. Our eyes are accustomed to noticing changes, movements and details, and rapidly come to ignore the things that we know are there and are unchanging. Our ears soon stop hearing the roar of traffic and focus on the conversation to which we want to listen. In dealing with health it is easy to see the immediate effects that a drug like aspirin has on pain and on temperature, but not so easy to appreciate the slow and subtle effects of diet on health. Indeed, it is little thanks to the medical profession that we are now becoming aware of dietary factors. Yet there is one factor so obvious, so all-pervading, that we appear to have missed it completely. That factor is sunlight.
The fact that we are now becoming aware of the enormous power of sunlight to improve our health is largely due to the life's work of one man - Dr John Ott. He is neither a scientist nor a doctor of medicine; perhaps this is why he lacked the blinkers of medical science and was able to see the obvious.
Throughout history, and particularly since the industrial revolution, man has been spending more and more of his time indoors. In other words, he has been progressively screening himself from the sunlight. Nowadays, it is possible to wake indoors, to travel to work in a car or train indoors, to work throughout the day indoors, to lunch and to return home by the same method to spend the hours of leisure indoors. Walking from car to work, and from work to lunch may be done between tall buildings where the sun hardly ever reaches. The only time when we see the sun is when we follow outdoor pursuits such as sport or gardening, or go on holiday. Is it only the strenuous exertion of sport which makes us feel better? Is it merely a coincidence that squash, which is a vigorous game played entirely indoors, has such a high risk of problems such as heart attacks associated with it? I shall describe how sunlight alone can have the same beneficial effect as exercise, and how the two of them together are even better.
Many degenerative diseases (heart disease, hardening of the arteries, blood pressure, pre-senile dementia, multiple sclerosis), as well as depression and other psychiatric problems, are much more common in Western society. Is this simply due to our poor diet, or is it also due to the fact that we live in temperate climates, with low levels of sunlight to begin with, and then spend most of our time indoors away from the sun?
And yet, you may say, we all know that sunlight causes skin cancer. This is not correct. Regular doses of sunlight appear to help in preventing most cancers. It is sun-burning, not sun-tanning, that may cause skin cancer. To live all year indoors and then to fry on holiday is comparable to taking all of one's yearly intake of alcohol in a fortnight. (Many people on the Costa Brava appear to be doing that too!)
Take as an example the case of Mrs A. In 1980 her periods stopped, and she started putting on weight. She gained three stones in two years. Then she developed pins and needles in her extremities, and had difficulty with walking. She was diagnosed as suffering from multiple sclerosis. When I asked her whether she could think of any events or changes in her lifestyle immediately preceding the start of her symptoms, she at first said no. A month later she told me that it had occurred to her that everything started when she began a new job, working in a modern health centre, in an entirely windowless room. She worked there until her symptoms became so bad that she had to stop work.
Take also Miss Y. When she came to see me she was twenty-two. Since the age of fourteen she had developed symptoms every year, at around Christmas-time, of lack of concentration, difficulty focusing, fuzzy-headedness, fatigue, generally feeling unwell, fluid retention and swelling, constipation, vomiting, purple discolouration of the extremities, a rash, and loss of the ability to taste and smell. These symptoms gradually worsened for two months, and then improved in the spring, clearing up by April. One year she spent a fortnight in the South of France in the autumn, and didn't become ill that winter. After this she found that she felt much better for having a course on a sunbed, but even better for having a holiday in the sun.
Both of these patients are made worse by lack of sunlight, and better by exposure to it. If we had not become aware of this fact, Mrs A. would have been diagnosed and treated as a case of multiple sclerosis, and Miss Y. would probably have been diagnosed as suffering from depression. How many thousands more people are suffering from lack of sunlight, without knowing it?
How many, indeed, know that January is their worst month, and try to arrange to spend it elsewhere than in this country? During the first two months of the year, the Canary Islands, our nearest winter hot spot, are full of people who know that they need a dose of sunlight.
Mr B. is a hairdresser; every winter, as well as feeling increasingly fatigued as the months went by, he developed a succession of colds and sore throats. He knew that the chemicals used in hairdressing (which may be the most toxic trade that exists in the 1980s) made his sore throat and all his other symptoms worse. But he also knew that he reacted more to them in winter than in summer. When I saw him in mid-january, he had already booked his week in Lanzarote, and was leaving the next day. 'It's the only thing that keeps me going in the winter,' he said.
Between 1900 and the start of World War II there were many scientific studies done on the benefits of sunlight. With the impetus provided by wartime needs, first antibiotics, then cortisone and steroids, then the major tranquillisers such as chlorpromazine were discovered. The drug industry was born. Today drug companies are among the largest of the great multinationals, and the vast bulk of medical research is oriented towards the effect of chemicals on disease. Sunlight has been forgotten.
In 1985 the three biggest selling antihypertensives (drugs to control blood pressure) had worldwide sales of 1.2 billion dollars [1]. Nobody was prescribed sunlight for their blood pressure, yet a single dose of sunlight can lower blood pressure for up to a week at no cost to the taxpayer. The higher your blood pressure, the greater the benefit you can derive from sunlight. No one has ever disproved the studies on the effect of sunlight that were done before the war. The medical community simply lost interest in them because of the more profitable effects of drugs. Subsequent chapters will discuss evidence that sunlight can help diseases ranging from athiete's foot and acne through heart disease and depression to senile dementia. It can improve hyperactivity, infertility, cancer, obesity, diabetes, bone fractures in old age, respiratory infections, and perhaps most pervasive of all, stress.
John Ott's fascination with time-lapse photography grew till he had a greenhouse and potting shed entirely devoted to growing plants and photographing them. He became a well-known TV personality in Chicago, with his Sunday afternoon botanical half-hour, and he made a number of films for Walt Disney. These are probably the best known of any time-lapse sequences in the world.
But there were a number of problems with getting the plants to grow when and how he wanted them to. Ears of corn, for instance, when grown in a glass greenhouse, were spindly and small. If he grew them outdoors they developed into normal healthy ears, but it is impossible to do time-lapse photography with a plant that is waving in the breeze. At this time, plastic sheeting was lust coming on the market, and he found that his corn plants grew much better under plastic than under glass. It was only later that he realised the difference between them - plastic transmits ultraviolet light, but glass does not.
When growing flowers and plants in cold frames, it appears that nurserymen have always known that they would grow better if the glass was removed from the frame completely during the day. In fact, until World War II there was an ultraviolet-transmitting glass made in this country, largely for the greenhouse trade.
If the plant was allowed to grow outdoors, of course, it naturally developed into a healthy, normal, bisexual pumpkin. But by this time things were getting desperate; he had spent two years unsuccessfully trying to film the life cycle of a pumpkin, he had only female flowers, and the season was drawing to a close.
He telephoned several friends in agricultural colleges and centres, but to no avail. He then tried further south, in Florida. The friend he called mentioned the problem to a reporter, and soon newspapers and TV across America were searching for a male pumpkin; the 'Cinderella pumpkin' was national news. Finally a lady in Florida called in to say that she had a male that was in flower. An airline offered to fly the plant straight up to Chicago, and Dr Ott rushed to the airport to collect his prize. The passengers were held up on the plane while 'Prince Pumpkin' was escorted off, to the popping of flash bulbs, and taken directly to his laboratory. In the nick of time, Dr Ott got his film sequence completed.
Another of Dr Ott's ambitious ventures was to build a complete mini-studio around an apple. He tells the story of this in his first book, My Ivory Cellar. [2] Looking rather like a birdwatcher's hide on wooden stilts, this had a glass window in the top, with shutters that would close to keep out the sun and protect the high-speed film necessary. It had three cameras, photographic lights, two thermostats and a fan. The tree itself was elaborately lashed so that it would not be moved by the wind.
The project went very well from March until late summer. Then all the other apples turned red and fell, but those inside the box remained green and continued to get bigger. Various gardening chemicals that were supposed to encourage fruit to ripen had no effect, and it was not until, in a subsequent year, be replaced the glass top with plastic that he finally managed to film a ripening apple turning red.
The same effect was obtained with chinchillas and minks, and since then with a number of laboratory animals. It seems clear that the full spectrum of daylight is necessary for normal reproduction in mammals.
Dr Ott naturally then started to ask whether these effects might not apply to humans also. One of his earliest experiences in this direction was with his own health. He had worn glasses since childhood, and had been spending much of his life indoors under photographic lights. By middle age he was going bald, felt generally run down and suffered from frequent colds and respiratory infections, and had X-ray evidence of arthritis in his hip. This became so severe that he used a walking stick and an old bicycle to get from his house to the shed where the cameras were housed. Having heard that the Florida weather was reputed to be very beneficial to health, and that many people retired there for that reason, he spent a holiday on the beach there, sunbathing and relaxing, but experienced absolutely no benefit. During this time he always protected his eyes with sunglasses, or at least used his own spectacles.
Back in Chicago, and feeling no better, be happened to break his glasses. The spare pair were unwearable, so he was outside in the sun for several days without spectacles. All of a sudden, he noticed that he didn't seem to need the cane any more, and that his joints were generally much looser and easier. He walked cautiously up and down the drive, and then literally ran upstairs, for the first time in years, to tell his wife.
Deducing that sunlight was the factor, and that it was blocked by glasses, just as it had been blocked from the apple by the glass roof of the box, he went back to Florida for one week. During this time he never wore glasses, he tried to avoid driving in cars, and spent as much time as possible sitting out of doors in the shade. By the end of the week his arthritis had definitely improved, and he felt much fitter.
Thirty years later, Dr Ott is a fit, elderly gentleman who still lives in the town in Florida which he visited for that holiday. He continues his research, uses glasses only for small print, and even has a good head of grey hair. The regained years have not been wasted; Dr Ott has asked more piercing questions and stirred up more scientific controversy in his life than many of us can ever hope to read about.
He has established that exposing animals to daylight, or to full-spectrum lighting that closely mimics daylight, causes animals ranging from chickens to rabbits to produce more babies, and healthier ones too. As ever, he was quick to apply this finding to humans, and he now appears to have been successful in helping a number of couples with infertility, simply by telling them to sunbathe. Clearly this is the appropriate recommendation for Mrs A., whose periods stopped when she worked in an internal room. In Chapter 14 we shall see how sunlight stimulates the sexual hormones in both men and women.
Remarkably, Dr Ott also showed that when rabbits are reared in daylight rather than artificial light, their behaviour is much better. Usually, laboratory rabbits - and especially the malesm are notoriously aggressive, even towards their own offspring. The males have to be separated from the litters, as they have a tendency to cannibalism. When they are reared under daylight, on the other hand, they are far from aggressive; the male rabbit actually helps to care for the litter, particularly when the mother is absent. He becomes a model parent. Serious food for thought in these days of child abuse.
Dr Ott showed that a strain of mice prone to fatal tumours lived twice as long on average in daylight as they did under pink fluorescent lighting. He later instigated a study of the effects of sunlight on cancer in humans - a study which was beginning to show exciting beneficial effects when it was suppressed by the medical establishment because they knew it couldn't be true. In Chapter 6 we shall discuss some new evidence that goes some way towards explaining how sunlight may help to cure cancer.
He also showed quite clearly that the radiation from a television screen was able to cause normal, healthy rats to become hyperactive and aggressive for about the first three to ten days, after which they became increasingly lethargic. This effect was screened out ' by the use of a lead sheet between the animals and the TV. Plants exposed in the same way behaved similarly; they grew rapidly at first, reaching abnormal heights, but then becoming unhealthy and deformed. These studies sparked off a national health investigation in the USA, which led to new regulations regarding the permissible levels of radiation from TVs. [3] We are only now starting to question the safety of televisions and VDUs, particularly for pregnant women.
Following on from these experiments he showed that artificial lighting could produce hyperactivity and disturbed behaviour in children - of which more later. Before World War II it was generally accepted, by the medical profession as much as by anyone, that sunlight was essential to the healthy development of children's bodies and minds. Parents were advised that exercise in the fresh air and sunlight were important, and children in hospital were taken out of doors in their cots to enjoy the sun. But nowadays we imagine that development will happen of its own accord and any problems can be dealt with by drugs. The critical parts played by sunlight and diet have been forgotten.
From romantic candles to third-degree interrogations, lighting has always been used for its psychological impact. But we now appreciate that it can have an even greater physiological effect. Most of this comes from the invisible component of daylight and of full-spectrum lighting - the ultraviolet. Ordinary electric lights have a very limited spectrum of light, but full-spectrum lighting attempts to reproduce sunlight as closely as possible.
It does this either by using a fluorescent tube which has a wider spectrum of emission, reaching into the ultraviolet and taking in the blue end of visible on the way, or else - as in the most recent models, which Dr Ott now recommends - by combining a tube which produces all of the visible spectrum with a small ultraviolet tube. Most full-spectrum lights now have devices to block other potentially toxic radiations which might leak out.
Throughout more than half a century of pioneering research, Dr Ott has clearly demonstrated that full-spectrum lighting is beneficial. He has instigated or participated in many research projects on the health effects of light, and has published several books. He has been, rewarded with a number of honorary doctorates and other academic awards. But he makes no pretence of being a scientist; if he were, he might not have had the vision and courage to ask the questions that he did.
Degrees and doctorates notwithstanding, his greatest reward has to be the gratitude of untold numbers of people, now and in the future, who will be helped by his ideas. Without his genius, this book would never have been imagined, still less written. I believe that his ideas, and the discoveries and inventions they have led to, will change the way we live - and to save and improve millions of lives.
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Go to Chapter 2
The entropy machine