The Sunlight Diet: How to be healthy, happy and live longer

By Dr Jenny Livanos Holistic Optometrist

The sun has many benefits – it’s essential for health and wellbeing, allowing us to make vitamin D, set our body clock for sleep and utilise it for key biological processes in our body. Sunlight supports our bone health, helps with our cardiovascular system, boosts the immune system, regulates our mood, reduces inflammation, minimises the risk for infection, relieves pain, helps us relax and feel happy and protects us from cancer, just to name a few!

The lack of adequate sunlight exposure, coupled with increasing overexposure to artificial blue light from digital devices and artificial lighting at night, is contributing to a wide range of chronic and severe health issues at all ages. Blue light from screens suppresses the production of our sleep hormone melatonin and has been linked to obesity, diabetes, heart disease and even cancer. Artificial lighting sources have very different frequencies, intensities and are static, compared to sunlight. The wrong type of light at the wrong time of day can accelerate cell damage, affect our sleep and circadian rhythm and ultimately our physical and mental health.

This book aims to educate about The Sunlight Diet, an easy and free approach to optimise our healthspan and happiness – with simple actions we can take every day. We think about diet and exercise for better health but just as important is our exposure to light every day, through our eyes and skin, indoors and outdoors, daytime and night time. Your health is in your hands!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Jan 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9781982298883

Book preview

Copyright © 2024 Dr Jenny Livanos Holistic Optometrist.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Balboa Press

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN: 978-1-9822-9887-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-9888-3 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 01/03/2024

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CONTENTS

1. LET THERE BE LIGHT

2. THE RHYTHM OF LIGHT

3. THERE’S MORE TO LIGHT THAN MEETS THE EYE

4. IT’S ANCIENT HISTORY

5. MODERN HISTORY

6. THE DARK SIDE OF BLUE LIGHT

7. MELATONIN – OUR SLEEP HORMONE

8. THE DARKER SIDE OF ARTIFICIAL AND NIGHT LIGHTING

9. LET IT SHINE

10. KEEPING AN EYE ON KIDS VISION

11. TO UV OR NOT TO UV

12. THE SUNSHINE VITAMIN

13. THE POWER OF RED AND INFRA-RED LIGHT

14. BIOHACKING – THE NEW SCIENCE

15. RISKY BUSINESS

16. SUNSCREEN – ONE OF THE OTHER ELEPHANTS IN THE ROOM

17. ARE YOU ON THIS LIST?

18. DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

19. THE SUNLIGHT DIET

20. SHINING A LIGHT ON YOUR HEALTH

21. RECOMMENDED READING

22. THE LIGHT IS RIGHT

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INTRODUCTION

I wanted to write an easy-to-read book that gives easy-to-do advice about one of the most important factors affecting your health and happiness: sunlight. It’s not difficult to find the huge volume of research online about the positive impact of adequate and timely sunshine exposure and the negative effects of blue light and ALAN (artificial light at night). Over the last decade I have seen the light!

As a holistic optometrist and nutritionist for more than 25 years, I have always been interested in the way light is processed by our eyes and brain and how it shapes our lives. Shortly after finishing my optometry degree, I came across a book written by an eye specialist called Dr William Bates in 1920, titled Better Eyesight Without Glasses. Impressed by his many success stories, I trained as a vision improvement teacher soon after with Dr Janet Goodrich, a U.S. psychologist, natural therapist and author of the best-selling book Natural Vision Improvement. She used the Bates Method and added her own techniques to throw away her own strong glasses and regain her eyesight and health. I learnt about holistic techniques to improve vision naturally and most importantly became aware that we are responsible for our own eye health.

Dr Goodrich was a staunch advocate for sunlight exposure very early on, despite opposition from the medical field at the time, including whilst being interviewed (almost interrogated) on Australian TV in the early 1990s. She recommended being outdoors under the sun for better eyesight and health. Her sunlight advice has now been validated more and more by ongoing research. How much damage has been done to our general and visual health by the sun-fearing medical profession?

Not so long ago, we were told visual problems were genetic and there was absolutely nothing you could do to help. It’s hard to believe nowadays! Thankfully, we now have access to a lot of research and optometrists are much more aware of the impact of lifestyle and environmental factors on eyesight. We just need to continue passing on this information on to our patients! Sunlight exposure, artificial light, visual habits, stress, nutrition, fitness level, systemic conditions and the balance of these all contribute to our health. We are just beginning to appreciate the effect light has on our eyes and health.

Early on in my career, I was keen to offer a more holistic approach to help my patients improve their vision and eye health. I trained in nutrition, stress management, hypnosis, colour therapy and holistic counselling. At the time the benefits of sunlight weren’t on my radar and home computers were just becoming available! There were no digital devices and mobile phones looked and weighed like bricks – they were strictly for phone calls!

A few years after I started working as an optometrist, I initiated and ran a study group of holistic optometrists. We researched ourselves and discussed natural eye exercises, diet, supplementation, visual habits, posture, emotions and stress and their connection with vision. At the time, there were no formal courses about these (nor about the benefits of sunlight or the issues with artificial light exposure). The internet was just beginning! We held monthly meeting groups and regular seminars, educating ourselves and other optometrists. As interest was unfortunately limited to a small number of optometrists and my workload and family commitments were increasing, I ceased running the group with a view to continuing with a more online presence.

I have noticed, over the last few decades, that there is a growing incidence of eye disease and general health issues at a younger age, even though we should know more about nutrition and lifestyle factors. I believe that our choices around lifestyle and light directly affect us. We all have the ability to improve our health, starting with small tweaks to our daily routine that can eventually become unconscious habits. Consider the nature versus nurture debate: nature gives us our genes, while nurture switches them on or off. How we nurture ourselves with food, exercise, sleep, relationships and our thoughts determines our long-term physical and mental wellbeing.

When I was a child and teenager, we spent a lot more time playing outdoors and at the beach, unlike subsequent generations. My father would make a concoction of olive oil and vinegar so we would develop a tan – very popular at the time! Nowadays, children live more sheltered lifestyle (literally and figuratively), being more sedentary, living mainly indoors, surrounded by digital devices day and night and inadequate and inappropriate lighting. Consequently, there has been a huge increase in short-sightedness (myopia), with a prediction that 50% of the population will be short-sighted by 2050. Not to mention the risk for other eye health, physical and mental health issues!

In Australia we have had a slip, slop, slap policy (slip on clothes, slop on a hat, slap on sunscreen) and since 1981 and in 1988 have added seek and slide (seek shade and slide on sunglasses). This has engendered an inherent fear of sunlight and led to many health issues, including vitamin D deficiency. It’s important to take control of our health and educate ourselves on what is best for our own bodies.

Within the last decade, I have been counselling my patients on the importance of appropriate sunlight exposure at the right time and avoiding blue light exposure from digital device use and artificial lighting, especially at night. I want to help my family, friends and patients improve their physical and mental health. Hopefully I am planting a seed for them to continue with their own research and spread the word!

Having better levels of vitamin D and melatonin and an optimal body clock assists our general wellbeing. Optometrists, as the gatekeepers for healthy vision, are in a key position to advise on the benefits of sunlight and the adverse effects of blue light and artificial light exposure. Such an important role to play in the health and happiness of our patients!

The research is there if you look for it and many cutting-edge health professionals and researchers now understand our relationship with light is just as important—and maybe even more important than food and lifestyle. We need to address this as a priority to maintain good health.

As an optometrist, I was trained to advise the wearing of sunglasses every time a person was outside, which anecdotally I found fed my patients’ photophobia (sensitivity to light). This made even indoor lighting uncomfortable and in many created an inability to not be anytime outdoors without sunglasses. Many still went on to develop cataracts, having worn sunglasses, photochromic lenses or UV filters in their glasses, so I understood there were other more important causes of cataracts. I thought it was more likely to be connected to their nutritional status and lifestyle factors including smoking.

We were also taught to recommend reading in bright artificial light, even at night and adding it during the day for specific tasks. Did we and do we still have it wrong? Is there an epidemic of diseases due to this advice and a lack of sunlight exposure? Is sunlight the elixir for optimal health and longevity?

It was around 10 years ago that I started reading about the hazards of blue light exposure, even before I read about the benefits of sunlight! In our optometrical practice, we started stocking bulky orange lens fit-overs and I started wearing these in the evenings and taking them off just before bedtime. They helped shift my body clock and often I would fall asleep a lot earlier than I normally would. I then designed a similar but smaller fit-over to go over glasses and started at the practice and online in our natural eye care store. I now have a huge collection of blue-light blocking glasses, fitovers, clipons and other lighting products that I have trialled from other suppliers over the last decade!

Around this time I was