Every Function of Your Body is Continually Responding to Nature. Learn about the Power of Full Spectrum Sunlight with Dr. Jacob Liberman

Ginny: Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. We have a very special guest today all the way from Hawaii, Dr. Jacob Lieberman, author of many fantastic books that have really impacted our personal family and are continuing to impact our family as we sort out our days and get outside. So, Dr. Lieberman, thank you for being here. 

Dr. Jacob Liberman: It's an absolute pleasure. 

Ginny: It would be neat if you were outside. We could see that Hawaii background. 

Dr. Jacob Liberman: I’m actually looking outside at a rainbow right now. 

Ginny: Oh, good for you. Let me read a little bit of your bio here. Dr. Jacob. Israel Lieberman is a pioneer in the field of light, fields of light, vision and consciousness, and the author of four books. So I have them actually. I'm going to hold them up. 

So the first one that I read of yours is Light Medicine of the Future. So that's one of the books. There's Wisdom From an Empty Mind. I love that one. Our dog got a hold of that. Another one is Take Off Your Glasses and See. And then Luminous Life. I’ll hold this one up here, too, so people can see this Luminous Life, How the science of light unlocks the art of living.

So it says here that you've helped countless individuals recover their eyesight. I mean, you have so many credentials here, a doctorate of optometry from Southern College of Optometry, a Ph.D. in vision science. Awarded an honorary doctorate of science from the Open International University for Complementary Medicine. This is just such important work that you're doing and there’s so much time you put into this. So thank you for taking this hour to be with us. What a gift for us. Thank you. 

Dr. Jacob Liberman: You know, the only thing I could just think about was when you said your dog got a hold of Wisdom from an Empty Mind and he said, “Oh, that's called food for thought.” 

Ginny: I got it back but it has bad teeth marks. 

Well, let me tell you my path to you, Dr. Lieberman, I have this movement. It's called 1000 Hours Outside, and it's just about bringing balance back to childhood. Kids are on screens for four to seven hours a day. They're playing outside in a free play environment, four to seven minutes a day. Those are the current stats.

And outside time changed our family dynamic. It helped me be a more present mom. I was really struggling being a mom with young children until nature really changed our course.

And my midwife, when my kids are really small, she would always tell me. She would say, you have to get your kids outside before noon. My midwife always had these things she said and I'm always constantly coming back to the things and the wisdom that she taught. This went in one ear and out the other, we were getting outside a lot. But I wasn't prioritizing the morning time. And then when everything shut down last March, we've got five young kids. We were stuck home. Everyone was really struggling with not having social outlets and things. And so we tried to add this rhythm to the day. And that was one of the things I remembered. I thought, well, let's try and expose ourselves to morning sunlight. 

So we did it all the way through the month of March, and I was astounded at how different we felt, our moods and our sleep and just prioritizing getting outside in the morning, no matter the weather, we got out and it was so impactful. And so I needed to find out more about this. And it led me to you and the first book of yours I read, which I just think every parent should read, is Light Medicine of the Future. 

So I think that to know how powerful, simple sunlight exposure is is life changing for parents and for families. So I'm hoping I think people are going to learn a lot today. So I have my first question here is the pineal gland. Did I say that right? 

Dr. Jacob Liberman: Yes, you did. 

Ginny: The body's light meter and so you talk in your book about how light, which this should be obvious, but I had never thought about it. Light guides us through the days and the seasons and you talk about how our eyes are the entry point. And that sunlight has a impact on the regulation of our human physiological and emotional functioning, the development of our consciousness. So can we start there? Can we start with this pineal gland? What is it? 

Dr. Jacob Liberman: We can start anywhere you'd like more there. If you give me carte blanche I will attempt to answer all the questions you have yet not asked me. OK, and try to lay it out in a simple way that your listeners get the message you're trying to share with them. 

Ginny: It sounds like a perfect idea.

Dr. Jacob Liberman: That sound good to you? 

Ginny: Sounds perfect. I'm ready. 

Dr. Jacob Liberman: OK, so let's start from the beginning. 

Somewhere back in the biblical times. It says in the beginning, let there be light. Now most people think, oh, the light went on, but it then said, God created the sun, moon and the stars on the fourth day. So it allows you to realize that light is being expressed in two different ways, one as a creative force and two, as something that we perceptually experience through sun, moon and stars. So that's the first thing. 

People in the spiritual traditions for thousands of years have also spoken of light as the creative force and making it synonymous with the word consciousness. If you look at science, the most accurate scientific theory in history is the theory of quantum mechanics, quantum physics, which is the science of light and basically that is responsible for over 50% of all the technology we use today. It is based on the theory of quantum mechanics, which makes it the most accurate theory in history by far. Quantum mechanics tells you that the underlying source of energy from where all of life emerges is the energy of light. 

So on a religious basis they say, “God is light” and they say whatever we call God is all seeing, all knowing everywhere at the same time. The physicists say the creative force is light and they describe the light in exactly the same way, they notice that the behavior of light acts as if it is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent.

Why am I sharing this? Because whether you look at this from a scientific perspective, a religious perspective or a spiritual perspective, you end up at the same intersection. We're all saying the same thing in slightly different words. 

Now, let's take it from there. Nothing can live without life. Every physiological function is light dependent, every part of your body depends on light as its energy source to function.

And you say, well, wait a minute, why do we eat? Because we need the energy from food. The energy derived from food, which is actually frozen light, only makes up one third of the energy we use to function. Two thirds of the energy come directly from the sun. And so the question is, how does that occur? And let's take it a little further. In 2017, the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology was awarded to three US scientists that discovered the molecular mechanism by which our cells utilize light to optimize wellness and that occurs whether it's a plant and animal or a human being. 

The cells of plants, animals and humans are continually utilizing light to modify their function so that we are living harmoniously with Mother Nature. In other words, our health and wellness is dependent on one basic thing. That we are dancing harmoniously with Mother Nature. 

You're in Michigan and let's say you and your family decide to travel to Italy. Well, you get to Italy and you feel out of sorts for some reason or other. You're waking up when you should be sleeping, you're sleeping when you should be awake. Normally, you might go to the bathroom in the morning. Now you're doing it in the afternoon. What's going on here? Oh, jet lag. What is jet lag? The timing of my biology is different than the timing of Mother Nature. It takes days, days, days for that synchronicity to occur. We know how out of phase we feel when we're jet lagged.

Most people are suffering from jet lag and have never gotten on a plane because the way we live is not in congruity with the laws of nature. In fact, everything you're doing is to try to remind people through direct experience what happens to your health, your wellness, your mood state and so on. Just being out in Mother Nature. Yeah, so this is what's really, really important. 

We have rhythms in the body. There are rhythms that occur every 24 hours. We call them circadian rhythms. Those are the rhythms that govern our physiology when we're hungry, when we sleep, when your hormones release, when we get more insulin, less insulin, when our heart rate speeds up or slows down. Then we have monthly rhythms, women are very aware of those. Sometimes a woman speaks of her menses as her Moon time and those are circumlunar. In other words, they have to do with the rhythms of the moon. And then we have rhythms that occur over a year and then we have rhythms of a lifetime.

Essentially what their circadian rhythms are, which are cycling over a twenty four hour period. What that basically says is that every function of your body is continually responding and then responding is really important to the signals from nature all day and all night. And this is really important. We are human beings. And yet when you look at our behavior, you would swear that we're actually human doings because we've been led to believe that we have to do do do in order to accomplish.

What I want to share with you is that there's no basis in truth. Every single part of our physiology is designed to respond. None of it is designed to initiate action. In other words, we're not here to do. We're here to respond. What are we responding to? We're responding to the continual changes in light, not only light in darkness, but all the different spectral characteristics that occur throughout the day and night.

During the day we have sunlight. During the night, we have reflected sunlight off the moon and we have star light. It's a slightly different spectrum, but it’s also impacting our physiology at night, because our physiology doesn't go to sleep at night, it's still functioning. How does this occur?

When we think of light we think, oh, it's outside, somebody turned the light on, but light is invisible. I mean, it is totally invisible, you can never see light, what we experience is brightness. Brightness is a perceptual phenomenon. Why is that important? Because when we think of light, we think of the eyes, why the eyes are the body's only transparent biological windows designed to interact with light. And so we think of light and we think of seeing but the seeing mechanism only uses twenty five percent of the light that enters the eye.

Seventy five percent of the light goes to the chairman of the board of your brain. And that part of your brain, your hypothalamus is the part of the brain that controls all your life sustaining functions, it controls your nervous system, it controls your endocrine system, it's the major collecting station for information throughout the body. It collects your emotions. It is the initiator of our stress response. And that's where light goes. 

And then that portion of the brain interprets what Mother Nature is telling it, and then every cell in the body at the same period of time receives that message and then orchestrates its internal function so that it is synchronized or at one or in harmony with Mother Nature. So light through the eyes is primarily to guide your physiology and secondarily to guide your vision. 

Ginny: That's huge statement. 

Dr. Jacob Liberman: Now, let's take it a little step further. Of course, we all know that our eyes are designed for seeing. But your listeners are probably not aware that we have about one hundred trillion cells in our body. And these cells all have eyes just like the eyes in our head. They are photosensitive cells that are designed to detect and respond to light. Keep in mind, light is invisible. Why is that key right now? All of our cells are continually responding to an energy. 

When we look out and we see a tree. We think that's what life is, but most of what we're responding to is formless. It is literally the energy from which all matter arises. So our cells, all of them are receiving invisible signals throughout the day and throughout the night that are telling them what has yet, what is yet not visible to us so that our cells can meet life in each moment rather than something happening.And then you saying, oh, I'm not quite ready.

So you live in Michigan. And I imagine if you go out into the forest, maybe you'll see a creature like a deer or like a bear. Well we know that as the light changes, as we're approaching winter time. The creatures, their skin naturally thickens because the light is telling them to do that. They naturally grow more hair. And then when winter comes, the bear begins to hibernate. And when all of a sudden spring comes back and or excuse me, and when when winter comes, the bear doesn't wake up on the first day and say, oh, my God, I forgot to get my overcoat from Costco. It is already ready for that change.

So what I'm sharing with you is that our physiology is psychic. It's always reading what has yet not occurred, so that when it occurs, we're right there, we're not behind the eight ball, we're not ahead of the eight ball. We are right there meeting it in each moment. That process is called presence. Presence. Presence is not something you do. Presence is what occurs when we naturally are dancing with life in a harmonious manner.

So why is it so important to get outside, as you say, three thousand hours or a thousand hours? Well, I mentioned about light interacting with the eye for the process of vision and light interacting with the eye to basically run our physiology. What I didn't mention to you is that when the light impacts the skin. It literally triggers a reaction in each of our cells that causes our cells to produce energy. Now, why does it do that?

I mentioned before that some of the energy for cellular function, cellular repair, new DNA and all of that is from the food we eat. But most of it is from the light we ingest. So the cells all have an engine and that engine gets its fuel from light. So when light interacts sunlight specifically with the skin, a portion of its rays trigger a reaction in the cells. And literally there's a jumpstarting of our energy. And that energy is used for everything that the cells do. And that engine of the cell is called mitochondria. Now, why is that so important?

Because almost every disease that is associated with aging and so on is related to mitochondrial dysfunction. What does that mean? Our mitochondria is not able to take in the light and to create more energy. Why isn't it able to take in the light? Because we become an indoor culture and we spend our days playing with our weapons of mass distraction.

So why is your 1000 Hours Outside work so important? Because when the kids and the parents go outside and if they're able to wear a T-shirt or something that isn't fully covering them, what happens is that light triggers the mitochondria to produce the energy the mitochondria needs to heal us, to regenerate the tissue continually so that old cells are sloughed off and new strong cells develop. And so this is a sort of an overview of what's happening with sunlight. 

Now, sunlight is made up of different portions of the spectrum or different vibrations, which is what we perceive as color. So you look at the rainbow and the rainbow is showing you what's contained in the light, at least the portion that we can appreciate. Why is that so important? What I've discovered in the last 40 plus years in working with light is that people respond differently to color and I always wondered why is that?

And of course, the textbooks all tell you something similar. Red is excitatory and blue is a native and green is balancing. But when you actually have people look at color or visualize a color, even just seeing it in their mind's eye, all of them respond in a unique way. The color that makes you comfortable might make me uncomfortable and vice versa. What I've come to see is that the colors we're comfortable with relate to the portions of our life experience that we are able to easily embrace. The colors that we recoil from it, we say, oh, I don't like that. Those colors are basically the vibrations that underlie the life experiences that we're not yet able to embrace, perhaps something unresolved most of the time. We never know exactly what it is because these patterns have been passed on for tens of thousands, if not millions of years, like our parents, our grandparents, and on and on and on. 

So what I have found interesting is that when I do a color analysis with someone it not only tells me which colors represent the life experiences that triggers stress in their life. Why is that so important? 90 percent of all disease is caused by stress. 

Now, what is stress? Stress is when we encounter something in life that we're allergic to. We all know what it's like if we sweep up against poison ivy or poison oak and we get a big rash. That's an allergic reaction. But all of us have allergic reactions to people we don't like. All of us have allergic reactions to situations that may be so traumatic to us. So my work with light, it's about helping people to desensitize from the habitual psycho emotional triggers in their life that create stress. 

What is stress? Something that transports us from ease to dis-ease. And so wellness is really about getting comfortable with what used to be uncomfortable. 

So your work with 1000 Hours Outside is very, very foundational. You came across, you came upon something that most everyone has forgotten, which is we're not only here to live. We're here to have fun. And the reason kids know how to have fun is we let them run around outside. 

When I went to school, of course, you had physical education. You were outside a lot. You know, prior to 1900, 90% of the public worked outdoors. So everyone got their minimum daily requirement of light. Now everybody's suffering from malillumination, which is like malnutrition because over 90% of the population is working indoors where their field of vision is confined to their monitors and the light spectrum from the monitor, which is so drastically different from sunlight.

So people need to get outside at least 30 minutes a day. I recommend to people if the weather is good to play outside, maybe with a bathing suit or whatever, feels comfortable and start out with a minute on the front of your body, a minute on the back of your body and build up a minute each day. And I suggest doing that unless you're supersensitive to light without sunscreens, you do it very gradually so you don't burn yourself, but you basically amp up your vitamin D production.

Why is that so important? Every disease of modern times: cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer's and so on are all related to vitamin D deficiency because we are spending our days indoors. So you get outside, you get more light, you get fresh air, you get someplace where there's no confinement for your vision. Your eyes can look away. Not only do you save your eyesight this way, because we now know that eyesight deterioration, which is the biggest health epidemic in the world, is related to two things: spending your day reading or working on computers and not getting enough sunlight and being outside.

So your work and the message you're sharing with people with 1000 Hours Outside is absolutely imperative today. We must have it so. I hope that that started our conversation and maybe you have some other questions. I don't want to take up all the time there. 

Ginny: Well, I mean, I think these are fascinating things, Dr. Lieberman, and I think, like you said, we've sort of lost our way in these matters. One of the things that I learned from your book, even though we've been spending time outside for a long time, I never thought about it, is that you say not all light is created equal and that inside light is for our vision primarily. And that outside light, the sunlight, the full spectrum is for our whole bodies. And so one of the things you talk about that I never hear anybody talk about is the lights. And also you talk in your book about the different types of light, like the fluorescent light and kind of the incandescent bulb does not have any blue light in it. And you have this quote that says, “We frequently overlook the organic needs of children.” I think in relation to the light you are putting in fluorescent light all day, you know that school without recess and without any breaks from it. So for people who may not know, can you tell us a little bit more about indoor versus outdoor light? 

Dr. Jacob Liberman: I think the best way I can put it is really simply. The light for the inside of your house that is closest to natural light are halogens or incandescent. Now, can incandescents have less blue than red but they have a continuous spectrum whereas fluorescents have what's called the mercury emission lines, which can be toxic, of course.

When that book was written we had different information than we have now. But the most important thing for your listeners is that the best lights inside are halogens and incandescents, not LEDs, even though everyone wants to sell you on LEDs because they're highly efficient and they're eliminating a lot of the incandescents from the market. LEDs hopefully will be the trend of the future. And at some point we'll probably simulate sunlight. But they're not there yet. The LEDs are very heavy and the blue end of the spectrum. That's what's primarily coming off of your monitors, your cell phones, and you've heard a lot about what happens when you have too much blue light in relation to the amount of red light. The sun has an immense amount of blue light, but it also has an immense amount of red light. So they balance each other. 

Blue light essentially suppresses the flow of melatonin, which is the hormone created by the pineal. Why is that important? Melatonin is what signals our body to sleep, but it's much more than that because when we sleep, we go into restoration. During our waking hours, we are utilizing energy. During our sleeping hours, we are rejuvenating, restoring our energy, repairing. So the release of melatonin puts us to sleep so Mother Nature can heal us. If we are looking at our handheld phones or our computers late at night or have LEDs on in the house or have equipment on at night with little blue lights in it, cover all that stuff up because even a small amount of it will disrupt your circadian rhythms and will literally impact every facet of your physiology. And it can lead to everything from obesity to many other kinds of things. So it is really critical stuff. 

Ginny: No one knows about it, I know, I 

Dr. Jacob Liberman: I know, but you know what? It's so simple to learn it. You know, even if you don't have an alarm clock, when the light goes up in the morning, your body knows to wake up. And that not only wakes up your body, but it wakes up the mechanism that says I'm hungry. It wakes up the mechanism that says I have to go to the bathroom. It sets the rhythms for the day.

Then as we approach the late afternoon, the colors in the sky change, the light levels go down. We begin to feel more relaxed. We start to yawn at a certain point, and then we go to sleep. If we don't honor those and those, that's basically it. We don't have to do anything. Mother Nature will let us know when we're asleep, when we need to wake up. There is no doing involved. Yeah, it's just responding. 

Ginny: I remember reading that part in your book about how the sunrise and the flowers open and the energetic brightness of light infuses life into all living things. You know, the day is conceived and represented by the yellow of the sun, the blue of the sky, the green of the earth. Then you say as the day goes on, the environmental colors change, you know, but we're missing that. Then it's the dark blue of light. And I thought, oh, if we only knew this one thing, it's like, of course, we're supposed to be outside. We're supposed to be experiencing this change of colors. And so I wrote that one down because I just thought I thought, well, then that's so obvious. Right? That's so obvious that we're supposed... 

Dr. Jacob Liberman: It's all obvious. You see, that's my brand of science. Common sense. Just common sense. You don't have to understand chemistry or physics to understand what I'm saying. Mother Nature makes it evident. And when we try to fight with it, when you try to sleep during the day or stay awake at night, your body doesn't feel good. Why? It's not supposed to do that when it's functioning in accordance to Mother Nature's prescribed rhythms. We feel good and we like to feel good. Health and wellness is everything we're looking for. 

Ginny: I love that statement. We do like to feel good. Right? That's important. OK, so there's something I found in your book that totally intrigued me. It says, “It has been calculated that the entire volume of blood pumped by the heart circulates through the eyes every two hours, the eyes are the only part of the body where light can enter through the transparent biological windows” that you talked about. And you said it allows the energy of light to directly stimulate the eyes and the blood. And so I thought that was fascinating. If we're outside for basically two hours, all of our blood is going to be exposed to light.

Dr. Jacob Liberman: What's important about that is this. Everything that we put into our mouths has a maximum wavelength absorption characteristic, forget that term. What that means is everything we take into our mouth, which goes into our bloodstream, requires a certain portion of the light spectrum to turn on the metabolic functions. So that when we're eating broccoli or whatever it is, can get broken down and used by our body. The way that occurs primarily is the light going into the eye, interacting with the blood, moving through the blood vessels on the retina. 

So a major part of our metabolic function is occurring with the interaction of light entering the eyes. If you're not outside, I don't care how organic or pure your food is, you're not going to be getting the biggest bang for your buck.

If you are outside and you're wearing sunglasses all the time, you're going to alter that as well. I'm not suggesting sunglasses are bad. What I'm suggesting is sunglasses should only be used to reduce the intensity of light. Maybe when you're driving into the sun late in the day, maybe you're skiing, maybe you're on the ocean. Most people who wear sunglasses a lot are artificially hypersensitive to light because they're wearing sunglasses a lot more. If they start to reduce the amount of time, replace the sunglasses with a hat with a visor. After a while, you start to get the more potent benefits of light entering the eyes rather than cutting that out all the time. 

Ginny: People do ask about sunglasses a lot. And so I think that that's very helpful.

Dr. Jacob Liberman: I think I'm with them. Yeah. 

Ginny:  We have some families that do a 1000 Hours Outside and their children are blind. Families will send me messages. How does that affect them? 

Dr. Jacob Liberman: 85% of people that are considered blind still have light perception. They may not see form, but the body is able to read the light entering the eyes. So they should also be outside and get the benefits of natural light. In fact, for them it is even more important. 

Ginny: Right, right. That makes sense when that will be really helpful. OK, a couple of topics. One is fertility. So, you know, that's always a big, big topic for people. You talk about how there are seasons of fertility and, you know, for example, in Finland, more children are conceived during the months of June and July. And you can talk about fertility with both animals. And so can we talk about light and fertility?

Dr. Jacob Liberman: Do you know where we started noticing this? If you go into the far north latitudes, you'll notice certain creatures like elephant seals when it's time to procreate they all show up at the same time. They all procreate at about the same time. And because when you have harsh environmental conditions like whether that's a hundred degrees below zero, the timing of your rhythms with Mother Nature must be exact. And so when you create those kids and when they're born is absolutely critical to whether the offspring will actually live.

There was a wonderful documentary called March of the Penguins many years ago where they literally filmed the penguins from all over, I think it was Antarctica at a certain time of the year. They would all come out of the ocean and they would walk. In exact steps, their steps were synchronized like soldiers, they would walk 70 miles to come. To a place none of them have a GPS from all over the island and they all come out of the ocean at the same time, they all meet in the same place at about the same time.

They look around until they connect with the love of their life. They connect just like human beings, they procreate right there. The mother gives birth to an egg that she hands off to the father, the mother then takes a 70 mile trek back to the ocean to get food to feed the young. And the timing of this is precise, precise.

The same thing is true for humans. We have a certain time when all of this is designed to work naturally. For instance, you know, you said something about the month of June. We'll think about that. Spring starts around March, April. Things are just waking up in nature. All of a sudden the summer comes and all the kids are out of school playing. Why was it just designed that way? That's when, you know, life is starting again. Then in the fall, everything begins to slow down. And then in the winter, it's designed to stop. So if you think of our own rhythms, life has it set up, so there's a natural time for in terms of our fertility and so on, where it's at its highest level. Now, I realize that people are born throughout the year. My sense is that if you look at those people, you may notice something specific in their makeup that is related to when they're born.

Ginny: It's interesting. It's interesting, too, because we have five children. And so this caught my attention, too, because we have two children that were born in March, two that were born in June and one that was born in October. And it has fantastically easier for the ones born in the spring. I mean, it makes a world of difference because then by the summer they're out of that newborn stage or able to get out and about with them easily. And then by the time the next summer rolls around, they're walking well. And so it's interesting that you say if our fertility peaks in the summer, that would be a spring baby. And having had them in all different seasons, it is a complete difference to have a spring baby. It is just a lot easier. That's fascinating. 

Dr. Jacob Liberman: Yeah, this whole area is very, very important. It's very, very important if you want to know the importance of, like I say, stand just outside the front door of a big office building and just record the sounds that people are making when they come out at lunchtime. And if you listen carefully, you'll continually hear the moment they get outside in the sun, you'll hear, oh, wow, a sigh of relief, because unbeknownst to them, they have been deprived of light for the last four hours or so. Yeah. So this is very important stuff you're talking about here. 

Ginny: Ah, we don't have much time left. Can we touch on cavities? Because I also thought that was really interesting. You talked about how kids have less cavities at the end of the summer, you know, or during the summer months, more sunlight, less cavities. 

Dr. Jacob Liberman: Well, that work was initially done by one of my mentors, John Ott. I won't spend a lot of time about John right now, but essentially one of the things that he found is he went into a classroom, a typical classroom, and he found that there were a lot of hyperactive kids. He changed the lighting in the classroom without anyone knowing it, and they set up cameras and when they put in lighting that was closer to sunlight, a lot of the hyperactivity slowed down while learning capacity improved, and they also noticed there was a very significant drop in the number of dental cavities. So again, our physiology is inseparable from light. 

Ginny: Yeah, this is such an important message for parents. I want to read one one short passage from your book. You say, “A series of exposures to some might well produce decreases in resting heart rate, decreases in blood pressure, respiratory weight, blood sugar and lactic acid in the blood following exercise and increases in energy, strength, endurance, tolerance to stress and the ability of the blood to absorb and carry oxygen.” I mean, that's just one sentence from this book. 

Dr. Jacob Liberman: It lowers cholesterol dramatically. The point is, people want to exercise, but most people are exercising inside. If you do the exact same exercise outside, you double the amount of calories that you burn. You double the amount of calories that you burn if you do the same thing outside in the sunlight as you do inside. So if you're riding a bike, put it on your deck and ride it outside. You know, if you're taking a walk, don't walk in the mall, walk on a nice road. Yeah, these things are really, really critical and so simple.

Ginny: So simple. But I think that we're missing them. 

And so I just want to say from the bottom of my heart, thank you for your books. Like I said, they have been so influential for me. And I mean, we just I would say we just scratched the surface. I mean, you offer so much. You've got Light, Future of Medicine, Luminous Life, Take off Your Glasses and See, and Wisdom from an Empty Mind. I mean, there is so much here. If people would like to find out more about you, if they'd like to find out more about your books, do you have a good place for them to go? 

Dr. Jacob Liberman: They can visit our website, which is https://www.jacobliberman.org/ . It's not a marketing site. It's a site to share knowledge, to share things that we think are helpful. People can also find me on Facebook and things like that where we're posting different scientific papers that come up, but written in a way that a layperson can understand them or they can go to YouTube or Google. There's so many different videos that they might enjoy. And that's essentially it. 

Ginny: And the books are great, Dr. Lieberman. We always end with a favorite outdoor child memory of yours. So could you share a favorite outside memory from your childhood? 

Dr. Jacob Liberman: I was a runner and I just loved being outside and in fact I used to sell newspapers on the corner of Twenty Seventh Avenue and Calaway in Miami, Florida. I was 11 years old and I used to go to sell my newspaper with my little shorts on, no shirt and a little pair of thong sandals. And the guy that would bring the paper used to call me Nature Boy. That's cool, nature boy. So some part of me always knew about the benefits of light. I spent all my early life outdoors and I'm outdoors most of the time, in fact, my home, it's almost all windows. So nothing is obstructing my view. Natural light is continually coming in.

Ginny: Well, Dr. Lieberman, thank you. Thank you. Thank you again. I really have enjoyed this. And I know that our listeners will as well. 

Dr. Jacob Liberman:  My pleasure. Have a wonderful day and many blessings on you and your family. And thank you for doing such important work.