You might actually need to sit down for this one. You might want to take some notes. I need you to hear me out on something because this genuinely changed how myself and my friends actually thought about red light therapy. Your cells make their own light. This is not a metaphor. Okay, this is not energy in a loose sense. Like your mitochondria make actual photons. Like faint particles of light that are emitted from inside your cells. Scientists call these biophotons. Okay, and your mitochondria appear to be the main source. Now, where everything sort of flips on its head is that there's growing evidence that red light therapy isn't just dumping energy into your cells like we thought. It actually is working by talking to a light-based system that your body is already running. Now, if I don't sound crazy enough yet, just just wait cuz I'm going to sound like a complete lunatic. I need to be up front with you on this stuff. Like a lot of this stuff is very cutting-edge emerging science and some of it is even in preprint, right? So, some of it is in a Petri dish, some of it is like where scientists are still debating what it all means, but I still want to share it with you. So, this isn't all about a protocol. This is about where things are going. And I'm here because this is some of the most fascinating frontier research that we've come across and you deserve to hear it. First, the biophoton idea. Okay, we're going to talk about the notion that your cells communicate with light and what researchers just found when they actually shined red light on stressed cells. Then we're going to come back and ground this all with like the solid accepted science of how red light is interacting with the mitochondria so you can see why the new stuff is plausible. And then the frontier. We're going to talk about a 2025 discovery that's getting flushed out even more now about how red light rebuilds tissue in a way that your body can't really do on its own, right? So, this one's an interesting journey. So, we're going to go ahead and dive right into it. So, let's start with the part that kind of sounds like science fiction in a way. Okay, so for decades researchers have known that living cells emit like an ultra weak glow. Okay, it's like a light that's so faint that you'd never see it, but when we're looking with sensitive scientific instruments, you can count the individual photons coming off of cells. These are called biophotons, right? So, the leading thinking is that your mitochondria, which are energy factories in your cells, are the primary source of them, right? So, some researchers go a little bit further. They hypothesize that these cells might actually use this light as a signal, right? So, like a way of communicating about their own health. Almost like a language made out of light that runs underneath all the signaling we already know about. So, it's like the mitochondria have a way of communicating that we don't even understand, right? So, red light therapy collides with this because we start looking at a 2025 study that explored what happens to these biophoton emissions when you start treating the cells with red light and near-infrared light. They found something very interesting because when the cells were healthy and at rest, the red light didn't really do much to their like light emissions. But, when the cells were stressed, like they were hit with a toxin or they were struggling, there was high oxidative stress, that's when the red light changed the biophoton output. What that implies is actually huge because it implies that red light may not be a blunt tool that sort of just revs up all our cells equally, it's actually context-dependent. So, it's doing very little to a healthy cell, but it's stepping in specifically when a cell's in trouble. So, think about how different that is from how we usually talk about this because the mitochondria knows it can't just overspin ATP synthase and rev up like a maniac. You can't just shine red light on a healthy mitochondria and become superhuman, okay? We tend to treat red light like flipping a switch. More light equals more energy everywhere, right? But, this research is hinting at something smarter and it's that the effect shows up where there's actual dysfunction. So, where the mitochondria are struggling and we see that in the biophoton release. So, it's less like hitting a gas pedal and more like just a responding system, really. So, if the cells are really using like light to signal their state, then shining the right wavelength of light on them in a very real way is like joining a conversation that they're already having. Does that make sense? Like, you're almost like encouraging this communication between the mitochondria, which is such an interesting way to reframe the mitochondria and red light. And again, this is all being flushed out. Like, it's being debated. It's being communicated. But, it's so interesting that we're here. And when you look at even the science of where like red light therapies are going, it gets really interesting, too. Because now we're starting to see like, okay, we have red light skin exposure. We have red light hair exposure. We have red light in the teeth and gums. Like, all these places that have mitochondria. There's a company, I put a link for them down below that's called Kineon. I've talked to the founder there. Like, he's literally like a light specialist. Where they're using red light in lasers. Like, so you actually wear it on your back or you wear it on your knees. Taking a red light laser so it can penetrate deeper than normal red light therapy and get into the chondrocytes, get into the cartilage. And very interesting cuz we have evidence on that. I'm actually going to talk about specific cartilage evidence in a little bit because it's particularly fascinating. So, I put a link for them down below because this is something the reason that I've talked about them before is because I have used it specifically on my low back. Because you can use it on your knee or back. I don't have knee issues, but when I put this thing on my back and the laser penetrates the vertebrae in the back, it's a very, very noticeable effect on inflammation for me. So, I can notice the back feels better. And I mean, they're full of testimonials, right? This is a very legit company. So, it's called Kineon. Anyway, that link is down below. That's for a special discount if you want to try their move plus. Okay, so their move item, that's the one that you like put on a joint. Very interesting. And I think it might be something that you'd get some benefit out of cuz for me it was within the first use and that's kind of what they claim too. So it's very real. So that link down below for Kinnian red light lasers that are penetrating. So very very different. So that link's down below. Now that's just part of the frontier. I want to get into like what we already know really quick and kind of ground all of this because the reason that scientists are taking the biophoton idea so seriously is because the established mechanisms of red light are very established, very centered on the mitochondria, and were also questioned about 10 or 15 years ago. Nobody thought it was real, but now it's extremely well documented, okay? So this is not speculative. When red and infrared light hits your cells, the main thing absorbing them is cytochrome c oxidase. It's an enzyme deep in your mitochondria. So it's a key part of the electron transport chain. It's basically what collects the electron to ultimately make ATP. So what the light seems to do is under stress, there's a molecule that's called nitric oxide. This can gum up this whole enzyme, basically jamming this whole assembly line and choking off energy production. Red light knocks off that nitric oxide. So it frees the enzyme back up. So electron flow resumes and energy production can climb back up. Now on top of that, we see the light triggering a brief, like small burst of reactive oxygen species. This little bit of stress, little bit of oxidative stress, actually acts as a signal that switches on your cells' antioxidant repair pathways, which is why when we get into the the chondrocyte cartilage research, you'll see what I mean because it's very fascinating stuff. So the generally accepted story is already like a mitochondrial thing. Light goes in, the energy machinery works better, cells' repair systems get activated. Okay. But now we look at how this is neatly connecting to this whole biophoton research that we're seeing now. Like along with the Nobel Prize in 2025 in physics being won on proton tunneling and quantum tunneling. Like we're seeing this in the mitochondria where like protons actually tunnel across the might like these are quantum engines, quantum machines. They're not just these little like energy manufacturing facilities. So if a healthy cell already has like a smoothly running electron transport chain, there's not much for the light to fix, right? So not much changes. That's what's interesting is it's like adaptogenic. So when our mitochondria or cells are stressed with jammed enzymes and struggling mitochondria, the light makes it so that there's like an exchange because there's room to actually respond. So the established science and the cutting-edge biophoton work are pointing at the same thing now. So the red light is doing most of its meaningful work when the mitochondria are damaged or under stressed, which is why people with metabolic dysfunction seem to benefit the most from it. It's why I keep coming back there, right? They're not just an energy factory, okay? They're like an antenna. They're also a beacon. They're also a quantum engine. So if red light works at the level of a struggling mitochondria, I have to ask like what can it actually push a cell to do? And how can it push a cell to rebuild in a different way? And there was a study at the end of 2025 that made this kind of come to life. So researchers in this case, they took cartilage cells, chondrocytes. This was a petri dish stuff. It's still interesting. So these are the cells that are responsible for maintaining cartilage in the joints. Cartilage is it's famously like one of the hardest tissues in your body to repair, okay? That's why people go and get like shark cartilage injections and they do all kinds of crazy things, right? There's almost no blood supply and the cells in cartilage barely divide. Compare that to like the gut, right? The gut replenishes new cells all the time, like constantly, really, really fast. In the cartilage, barely at all. So once it's worn down, without stem cells, without potential growth hormone, like these things don't come back, right? Or they don't come back really slow. So that's why joint cartilage like it's a it's a big business, right? Because there's a lot of money to be made there in terms of like surgeries and whatnot. So in this study, they shine specific wavelengths of near-infrared light on human cartilage cells, and basically with the right settings, in this case it was like 940 nm light, the cells ramped up production of the exact building blocks of healthy cartilage. So it collagen type 2, aggrecan, also glycosaminoglycans, which are like all part of forming collagen. So in simple terms, the light pushed these like barely dividing cells to start rebuilding cartilage matrix. Okay? There's another little thing though, okay? When cartilage cells are grown outside the body, they tend to drift and kind of lose identity, right? So the light actually helped them hold on to their cartilage binding phenotype instead of degrading. So it's kind of one thing where like in a Petri dish, it actually helped them even function better because in a Petri dish this is something that we would expect to happen, which makes it very hard to even track. In this case, it got rid of that problem okay? Now honestly, we can't like go over sell all this, like this again it's in vitro stuff, it's isolated cells, it's not in a living human joint. Okay? But it is fascinating stuff and we see where the science is going. So I'm not saying that a red light is going to magically regrow your knees, but what I am telling you is that the direction is insanely cool and we are at a very similar spot that we were 15 years ago with mitochondria when we didn't really think about red light impacting the way it does now. You know, the San Francisco 49ers use red light, right? It's like widespread across the NFL. I think the 9ers were like the first team to start using red light. Like using non-invasive light is a pretty low hanging fruit and low risk way to improve things. So the direction we're going is remarkable. Like this is seriously like taking some of the least repairable tissues and making it potentially repairable. So if we step back and we look at this whole picture, it's like we see red light creates more energy, but now we see that our cells are emitting light and using it to signal their own health. So like an unhealthy mitochondria might signal to mitochondria in other places of the body be like, "Hey, we're having issues over here in the right thumb. Like, you know, signal whatever communication needs to happen, right?" So we're starting to see that red light is this more like a signal. And at the frontier, like it's helping us actually nudge our body into better repair. And we're starting to see the same thing with the sunlight, too, right? We're starting to see, "Wait a minute, those photons are doing something more than just getting us a tan and keeping us warm." So I did another video that breaks down some of the quantum stuff with proton tunneling and all this quantum energy stuff we're seeing with ATP synthase at the mitochondrial level. If you want to really nerd out and go deep into the science. I know there's probably you and about 11 other people that are interested in the whole world with this whole stuff, but it's fascinating and it goes far beyond proteins, fats, and carbs, and calories. I'll tell you that much. So that video is right here. I'll link out to it and I'll see you tomorrow.