Light and Health
What You Need to Know About Blue Light and Health - Jason Lauritzen
Light is a ubiquitous health variable that few understand and many dismiss. Why does light deserve our attention? Consider this: every cell in your body is tied to CLOCK genes. The name fits these genes — they act like little cellular clocks, keeping track of the time of the day. Their primary environmental time cue is light.
Your body has trillions of cells, which means it has trillions of clocks. They communicate with one another to keep track of your circadian rhythm, which ultimately governs every aspect of your biology, from body temperature to hormone regulation to cell regeneration.
The master timekeeper of these trillions of clocks that keeps everything in sync is a mass of 20,000 nerve cells in the hypothalamus of your brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN).
Light is a ubiquitous health variable that few understand and many dismiss. Why does light deserve our attention? Consider this: every cell in your body is tied to CLOCK genes. The name fits these genes — they act like little cellular clocks, keeping track of the time of the day. Their primary environmental time cue is light.
Your body has trillions of cells, which means it has trillions of clocks. They communicate with one another to keep track of your circadian rhythm, which ultimately governs every aspect of your biology, from body temperature to hormone regulation to cell regeneration.
The master timekeeper of these trillions of clocks that keeps everything in sync is a mass of 20,000 nerve cells in the hypothalamus of your brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN).
