{"id":20080,"date":"2023-12-29T03:05:03","date_gmt":"2023-12-29T02:05:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/youngbychoice.com\/transcript-pain-killing-without-pharmaceuticals-is-this-the-most-powerful-wearable-red-light-therapy-that-exists-the-kineon-move-with-forrest-smith-ben-greenfield-life\/"},"modified":"2024-03-17T16:15:05","modified_gmt":"2024-03-17T15:15:05","slug":"transcript-pain-killing-without-pharmaceuticals-is-this-the-most-powerful-wearable-red-light-therapy-that-exists-the-kineon-move-with-forrest-smith-ben-greenfield-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/youngbychoice.com\/transcript-pain-killing-without-pharmaceuticals-is-this-the-most-powerful-wearable-red-light-therapy-that-exists-the-kineon-move-with-forrest-smith-ben-greenfield-life\/","title":{"rendered":"[Transcript] – Pain-Killing Without Pharmaceuticals: Is This The Most Powerful Wearable Red Light Therapy That Exists? The Kineon Move+ With Forrest Smith. – Ben Greenfield Life"},"content":{"rendered":"
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December 28, 2023<\/p>\n
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From podcast: https:\/\/bengreenfieldlife.com\/podcast\/forrest-smith-podcast\/<\/p>\n
[00:00:00] Introduction<\/span><\/p>\n [00:00:48] Forrest’s background in fitness and transition into technology<\/span><\/p>\n [00:03:32] The benefits to living in Mexico<\/span><\/p>\n [00:06:54] How Forrest initially became interested in red light therapy<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n [00:15:33] What Forrest discovered could be changed or optimized with red light therapy<\/span><\/p>\n [00:21:36] What are photoacceptors and how do they interact with light?<\/span><\/p>\n [00:28:36] The proper dosing of Kineon’s Red Light Therapy devices and the affects<\/span><\/p>\n [00:33:47] The proper dosing of Kineon’s Red Light Therapy devices and the affects<\/span><\/p>\n [00:38:21] Red Light Therapy in comparison to Cold Therapy<\/span><\/p>\n [00:41:58] On Spectroscopy Products<\/span><\/p>\n [00:53:39] Kineon as alternative to NSAIDs<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n [00:58:48] Full-body flush using red light therapy<\/span><\/p>\n [01:00:31] Closing the Podcast<\/span><\/p>\n [01:03:26] End of Podcast<\/span><\/p>\n [01:03:49] Legal Disclaimer<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0My name is Ben Greenfield. And, on this episode of the <\/span>Ben Greenfield Life podcast<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:\u00a0 <\/b>For<\/span> photobiomodulation, the key is the dosing. The key is how are we delivering these photons to these photoacceptors. It’s kind of like pharmaceuticals in that way. We are using photons to add energy into molecules where that’s going to trigger a downstream signaling effect. And, to do that, you have to be very specific and direct in how you’re adding these different molecules.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0Fitness, nutrition, biohacking, longevity, life optimization, spirituality, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the <\/span>Ben Greenfield Life Show<\/span><\/a>. Are you ready to hack your life? Let’s do this.<\/span><\/p>\n Well, folks, I’m pretty stoked about my guests on today’s show. We had dinner on a rooftop in Mexico several months, almost a year ago in San Miguel de Allende, beautiful city. His name is Forrest Smith<\/a>. And, Forrest is a former pretty extreme athlete, rugby player, CrossFitter, and wound up getting into some pretty interesting technology that he studied up on in China and beyond. And, I’m just going to leave that there as a big mystery that he and I are going to get a chance to talk about later on because I love the stuff that he actually brings to the world in the realm of, what’s called, photobiomodulation. Oh, yeah, photobiomodulation, a mouthful.<\/span><\/p>\n Anyways, as you listen in, everything that we talk about, including more information on this <\/span>Kineon<\/span><\/a> technology that Forrest has brought to the world, you can find at <\/span>BenGreenfieldLife.com\/KineonPodcast<\/span><\/a>. And, Kineon is spelled K-I-N-E-O-N. So, BenGreenfieldLife.com\/KineonPodcast. Forrest, welcome to the show, man.<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 Thank you so much. It’s great to see you again and super excited to talk to you today.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0Yeah, yeah. It’s been a little while. Do you remember the name of that restaurant we had dinner at in San Miguel de Allende?<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 I’ll have to look it back up actually, but it was very good. Really good.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0Excellent. One of the best meals I had there. Yeah, yeah. How long have you lived in Mexico, by the way?<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 I’ve been in Mexico for about three years now. And, this is going to sound funny, but I typically live in China. I left China. I’ve been in China for almost 20 years building innovative hardware and technology companies and manufacturing, basically because it was the middle of the supply chain and I speak and read and write fluent Chinese. But, when COVID kicked off, it seemed a little bit unsettling, so I took my family. It looked like they were going to lock the country down. And so, before they could, I took my family, my two boys and my wife and started traveling. And, when we did the assumption was we’d be traveling for a couple of months and then come back to China to our normal life and house and dog. And, what happened in reality was the borders were shut, our visas were canceled, the flights were canceled, and we had to find a new place to live almost overnight. And so, having just been in Mexico to visit, we picked out six cities in Mexico to try out and ended up settling down here.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0Man, I know you have a pretty interesting history of how you got into China in the first place, but how far are you from San Miguel de Allende where we met up for dinner?<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 Between 45 minutes and an hour depending on traffic.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0I was talking with a guy who’s actually pretty well known in the health sector. I won’t drop his name right now because I don’t know if he wants to be busted for this or not, but he believes that there is going to be a pretty big recessionary event in America and honestly beyond, and I asked him, we were walking on the beach, I asked him this question, I said, \u201cWell, if you could go anywhere in the world to live in the safest place possible with the most amount of freedom possible, if there were some kind of a global or even national recession, where would you go?\u201d And, he said Mexico. He said it’s just super easy to get a Visa or even an alternate citizenship that it is very, very friendly as far as a place for taxes, for business, et cetera. But, what are your thoughts on that?<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 I’ve loved it. I was in China for almost 20 years and I spent a lot of time kind of traveling around Asia for work. And, I did not anticipate that getting to Mexico I was going to be able to find a good place to set up and do the same level of business that we were doing from China. The world’s a lot smaller now and Mexico is super friendly. It’s been great for my training. I’m up at Central Mexico. Many of the cities are above 7,000 feet up. So, if you’re doing cardiovascular training, I’ve got my <\/span>AssaultBike<\/span><\/a> and my Echo Bike<\/a> here in the house that I do kind of aerobic, anaerobic training on. And so, if you’re training at some level like this, it’s really helpful from the elevation up.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n From a business standpoint, it’s been great. The schools are really good. I’ve got two boys, 8 and 4 and they’re loving the schools here. They actually shifted from fluent Chinese to fluent Spanish now, which is it’s amazing to see those small changes in day-to-day life. But, from a lifestyle and work standpoint, it’s been amazing, and I think it’s going to get more and more. So, because you’re seeing a large shift from China being a huge supply chain center for the world to people finding that there’s a lot of uncertainty around China and Asia right now relative to that and trying to find a space to be able to supplement their supply chain. And, I think Mexico’s benefited by that quite a lot. The dollars been very strong but the currency here is actually outpacing the dollar.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0No kidding?<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 And, I think it’s reflective of what’s happening with the growth with the country.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0Wow, interesting. By the way, you mentioned two bikes, the AssaultBike, which I’m familiar with. Was the other one, you said, the Echo Bike?<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 That’s right, that’s right. So, the AssaultBike, I started on with my CrossFit training. The Echo Bike is made by Rogue who’s a big kind of barbells and plates and lifting equipment racks, et cetera, manufacturer. And, they made their own heavy-duty, it’s actually a band. So, there’s a chain like a normal bike chain driving the AssaultBike. There’s a belt driving the Echo Bike. And, because of that, it’s a little bit quieter, it’s more difficult from a calorie standpoint. So, if you’re comparing one to one on a calories, I find that it’s a little bit slower to take over those calories, but it’s really a well-constructed bike.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben:<\/b>\u00a0 Interesting. I also look it up, the Echo Bike, and that’s by Rogue you said?<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 That’s right.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0Okay, got it.<\/span><\/p>\n Now, you originally, speaking of fitness, were big into to, was it rugby or CrossFit that you got into first?<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 So, I got into CrossFit by way of rugby. I was about 37 or 38 and my neighbor was the president and kind of head of the local rugby club in South China in Guangzhou, the city [00:07:15] _____. And, I’d played American football growing up and I missed the contact, but I hadn’t played a contact sport in 15 or 20 years but he got me back out there with rugby and it just ignited something. It’s a great sport. The social side of it is amazing and it really plugs you in with a lot of people who are doing fun and interesting things. And so, by way of getting back into rugby, I realized I had to get back into better shape. The rugby team was training CrossFit and so I came to CrossFit, both rugby and CrossFit in my late 30s.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0Oh, wow. But, leading up to that point, you hadn’t been doing a lot besides playing football early on?<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 That’s right. Actually, I had done some type of almost BroScience, Bro Splits type gym lifting back and biceps one day and kind of legs the next day or something like this. Trying to stay in a little bit of shape, but I hadn’t really done any metabolic conditioning in some time. That was really kind of more down to the fact that I’ve always been building startups. And, as part of that, time is limited. You’re always kind of working seven days a week, and it’s a little bit more stressful. And, what it’s come to find or come to turn into over time has been the metabolic training has become a bit of a stress relief or mitigation strategy for me. And, it’s been introduced by way of CrossFit.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But now, with different types of training modalities around this, there’s kind of functional bodybuilding and a number of different types of programming that you can find. But, for me, the main thing was keeping the metabolic training has become more and more important to offset kind of age-related injuries and really kind of buy-in for the cognitive benefits of this because I do see a lot of the neurocognitive benefits from this in the literature but also just from a daily basis you feel that much better from an affect and mood standpoint.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0You mean when you’re doing the metabolic training?<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 That’s right.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0Okay. Yeah, I agree, I have a great deal of evolution as far as what I’ve experienced in my own fitness routine. This morning’s workout was about three 15-minute yoga flow sessions in the sauna with a five-minute cold plunge in between each under the red light. So, I basically was just doing red light, heat, and cold. And, for me, that’s actually pretty metabolically stimulating and honestly somewhat demanding workout if you’re holding yoga poses and doing kind of isometrics with an elevated heart rate and then hitting the cold and going back and forth. But, of course, a big part of that for me as far as my longevity in fitness and the way my joints feel is the red light component. And, you and I geeked out on that when we met up in Mexico because you use red light quite a bit, right?<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 That’s right. That’s right. I have an old MCL and meniscus tear in my left knee, and one of the things that we’ve seen as we’ve been in this kind of red light and laser therapy space for a little bit now with developing products and getting them out for people is that inflammation that you see generated from old injuries that you might trigger, so I might be doing box jumps or doing double unders or something like this as part of my normal training and trigger inflammation in this old injury. This tissue, if you don’t treat it and this inflammation if you don’t treat it, doesn’t stay local. And, it’s really dangerous long term from a cardiovascular standpoint because it does things like decrease the sheer strength that your cardiovascular endothelial tissue can manage. And, that’s really highly correlated with things like severe cardiovascular events and all-cause mortality, being one of those things that’s driven by, just it’s better to deal with these things faster and in the near term as you can.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We’ve done some measurements actually with NFL players relative to their cardiovascular oxygen delivery for regional impairment as an example. So, if you see a guy who’s had an ACL tear, even eight or 10 years later after he’s gone back to playing full-time competitive impact sports like the NFL, his quad above his injured knee will be 1 to 2 degrees cooler than the healthy.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0Really?<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 And, that’s because of the cardiovascular system being impaired. It’s one of those things that’s really coming out in the literature over the past two to five years where this inflammation from that local injury is spreading through the body and it’s not happening overnight, it’s something that takes time but you see the regional impairment being cardiovascular delivery and you’re seeing things like this inflammation mediating stiffening of the cardiovascular endothelial or your blood vessel walls. What they call shear strength is a good measure for this, which is basically you’re measuring how much pressure that the blood flow going through these blood vessels puts on them. There’s a friction kind of shear strength is what they call that for how much pressure it’s putting on it kind of from a perpendicular standpoint. And, that’s substantially stiffened and lowers your sheer strength resistance for your cardiovascular endothelial tissue. When you have chronic inflammation that could be a knee, it could be a shoulder, it could be an old injury in your lower back, it impacts you both, again, kind of locally, regionally but also systemically.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0This is really interesting. This is actually the first time I’ve ever heard that regional inflammation from something like an injury or a chronic condition could, in a way, spread systemically and affect endothelial tissue or the cardiovascular system in other areas of the body. It’s been in the past year that I’ve become very aware of the endothelial glycocalyx. I interviewed a couple folks from a cardiovascular supplement company called Calroy<\/a> about this. And, I’ll put a link to that in the shownotes because we geeked out on this endothelial glycocalyx quite a bit in that episode. But, I learned that you can support the endothelial glycocalyx with things red light, minerals and most notably during that interview, sulfur-based compounds: glutathione, n-acetylcysteine, various seaweed derivatives, et cetera. And so, it’s really interesting now that you’re talking about managing the hypoxia, the inflammation and the cytokine production in these areas that might have been injured as a way to support more global endothelial tissue. That’s super interesting.<\/span><\/p>\n Now, have you come across, Forrest, any information that might indicate that not properly managing or allowing chronic inflammation to continue in an injured or beat-up area of the body could also result in any type of elevated calcium scan scores, plaque deposition, anything like that in the heart?<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 Right now, we’re drawing lines from correlations to correlations, but there has recently been a couple of studies digging into these mediating factors. So, we see these really high correlations between local inflammation and this cardiovascular endothelial stiffening. And, with that stiffening, there’s a high correlation to these plaque deposits. And so, you’re kind of making logical leaps to that. So, I don’t want to say that we’ve seen these mediating factors, we have found the mediating factors for inflammation where we found the correlation with the endothelial tissue stiffening. I haven’t seen as far as my research a smoking gun for these mediating factors from that to the plex, but there is a very high correlation between this stiffening and the plaque deposition.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0Yeah, the mechanism of action would certainly make sense.<\/span><\/p>\n Now, stepping back big picture when it comes to this idea of using red light therapy on an injury, like you said, I think you had for your knee, I believe, is this something that you initially got into as a part of your involvement with CrossFit and rugby or were you interested in red light therapy prior to that?<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 Oddly enough, my mother brought this to my attention. She finds a lot of kind of ahead-of-the-curve-type things. And, in my previous role, I founded a LED lighting and controls business, and we spent a lot of time in the supply chain going to different fabs and kind of upstream providers of these technology pieces of that business, and spent a lot of time in really understanding how the core technology works. And, as an expert in that space, my mother was interested to understand, is this red light therapy something that is real or is this just snake oil that somebody’s out there pedaling. And, my first reaction was, this has got to be snake oil because it’s claiming the ability to treat a number of different pathologies that would be difficult. How do all these pathologies share a similar kind of mechanistic foundation? But, one of the things that we found is that there are a few different signaling molecules that are triggered in the body.<\/span><\/p>\n So, long story short, I went in and I couldn’t find something that proved this was a snake oil, which was annoying to me. And so, I spent more and more time digging back through the medical literature trying to understand what the mechanisms were. And, this was years ago and the medical literature has expanded out since then, but we’ve started and our team contribute to an ongoing database of photobiomodulation or light therapy studies that’s up in the 7000s now, where different studies are tracking different aspects of the treatment, of the different pathologies, of the mechanisms of mediation of these effects, of these outcomes. What we found though is that we trigger a few different photoacceptors in the body. And, those photoacceptors can be triggered by different wavelengths and are optimally triggered at different frequencies and at different powers.<\/span><\/p>\n And so, at Kineon, that’s one of the things we spend a lot of our time on in the tens of thousands of hours at this point is modeling how light distributes through tissue. And, I think this is something that’s very unique about our team and our approach is most photobiomodulation companies that we’ve seen have really focused on what we consider engineering dose measurements or metrics. And, as an example, that would be things like joules per centimeter squared. You’re looking at things like your radiance and power density, which is essentially how much light is coming out of a device or an emitter, and how much light is going into a tissue. What we found is a better way to approach this and has allowed us to build a much more effective dosing model is start backwards. Start from the results that you want to implement. And, what we’ve done with that is said, okay, we know these photoacceptors exist within this depth of tissue, in this general volume, how do we model how the light and the photons that we’re delivering reach and optimally trigger these signaling molecules that we’re targeting in the body?<\/span><\/p>\n And, there were some existing models. One of them is called a Lambert-Beer that we’ve used from our modeling internally and upgraded, kind of standing on the shoulders of giants as it were. But, these models essentially show how photons distribute through tissue. And, with our understanding that we have now for where these photoacceptors exist and where these reservoirs of them are, and at what scale they exist at these depths of tissue, we’ve now modeled what’s optimal for delivering photons to these.\u00a0 And, what was important for us to do at the back end of this to be able to make sure that we’re not just kind of doing mathematical models in the building castles, in the clouds as it were, is putting in feedback loops, so positive feedback loops from measuring the physiology in real time. And, there’s some people in this space that I have to mention here that have been doing some great work: Evan Peikon<\/a> over at NNOXX<\/a>. We’re using their devices from a serum nitric oxide measurement standpoint to help us baseline. If our model says this is what we should\u2013so, as an example, one of the things that we’re targeting inside the body is hemoglobin.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0Okay.<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 When we interact with hemoglobin, with near-infrared light, we reduce the affinity of nitric oxide for that hemoglobin, and it dumps a bunch of nitric oxide in the blood. We can now measure that with devices like the NNOXX. And, that gives us a feedback loop to say we are expecting this level of nitric oxide in the blood. And, here’s what we found, our model is broken somehow. So, our mathematical abstracts that we’ve been building are not reality-based. And so, we use those to baseline, what we were doing from a modeling standpoint. They’ve really helped us dial in a powerful dosing model<\/a>, again, that we feel is very different from anything we’ve seen either on the clinical or the commercial side with photobiomodulation.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0Yeah. I haven’t mentioned it yet on this podcast, but this Kineon, that’s your company that you developed is a currently a wraparound red light therapy device that is used on joints. At least that’s the current model that exists. That’s how it’s used. I have a couple of them. I put them on my knees sometimes in the morning, used them on my elbows before a tennis tournament last week. I know that you probably don’t like it when I say this, but I put it around my neck sometimes to radiate all the blood going through my body when I want a full-body red light treatment without actually turning on a full panel.<\/span><\/p>\n And so, it’s an interesting device, but in terms of what you learned as far as nitric oxide production from this NNOXX, and you did say there was one other person you’re going to mention so I want to make sure you get a chance to if you still want to. But, as far as what you found in terms of tissue penetration of red light and the activation of these so-called photoacceptors, which I assume is the cytochrome complex, you can correct me if I’m wrong on that, and nitric oxide production, what did you actually find that needed to be altered or changed or optimized as far as the way that people get exposed to red light or the way that people use red light or the form of red light that they use?<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 What we’ve really tried to do or what we found from these measurements is that targeting internal tissue, there’s a certain amount that you can do with targeting kind of surface level tissue. And so, if you’re finding devices out there with LEDs versus lasers and panels as an example, it’s great for things like increasing type 2 collagen, reducing wrinkles and wound healing, things at the surface level of the tissue. What we found by being able to treat more internally by using lasers and kind of these next-generation VCSEL lasers<\/a> in specific is that the dosing that you can target for this is much more optimized and you’re working on the 3D version of the treatment model versus kind of this 2D surface version. And, just to kind of give a little bit of context that, lasers emit light in a very direct and what they call columnated manner. LEDs emit in a Lambertian pattern. And, the Lambertian pattern initially means that these LED chips emit in 360 degrees. But, what you’ll see from an electronics part is that those LED chips are packaged in a cup of a surface mount package that usually limits these to about 120 degrees, which is still extremely broad.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben:\u00a0 <\/b>Okay.<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b> For photobiomodulation, the key is the dosing. The key is how are we delivering these photons to these photoacceptors. It’s kind of like pharmaceuticals in that way. With that said, if you can’t measure or you can’t model how you’re delivering that, then you can’t really promise outcomes because the outcomes are basically a sine wave. And so, it’s called the Arndt-Schulz curve<\/a> or the biphasic dose curve where as it increases, as you increase the dose level, the beneficial outcomes increase until you hit a peak. And then, beyond that point, it goes back down. And so, if you don’t know how you’re delivering or if you can’t measure how you’re delivering these photons effectively, then you don’t know you’re at the top of this peak, you could be anywhere on there. I don’t particularly like to bag other people’s products, but with LED panels as an example\u2013<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0I don’t mind, man. Nobody’s listening except you and me anyways, so go for it.<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 Alright. It’s extraordinarily hard to model or to understand what your dosing is because if you move 2 inches forward or 2 inches back, there’s the inverse square law, which means that by moving 2 inches forward or back, you’re making a massive dosing difference, particularly for internal tissue.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0Okay, interesting.<\/span><\/p>\n Now, I have a few questions, Forrest. When you say photoacceptors, what are you referring to?<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 Molecules. We use lasers, we don’t use ablative and we don’t we use nonionizing lasers, which means that we’re not heating up the tissue. Ablative typically is using lasers like you’d see lasers on sharks for doctor. Lasers to cut things typically. But, heating up tissue is what ablative lasers do. Ionizing radiation is something where you’re moving electrons around kind of knocking them out of place. And, that’s what you see with things like UV and kind of these shorter wavelength radiation emissions, gamma radiation, these type of things.<\/span><\/p>\n What we’re doing is we are using photons to add energy into molecules where that’s going to trigger a downstream signaling effect. And, to do that, you have to be very specific and direct in how you’re adding that energy into these different molecules. There are certain molecules, so cytochrome c oxidase that you mentioned in the electron transport chain is one of these. Hemoglobin is one of these. Hemoglobin, it’s interesting. I didn’t really know this until we started working on these type of products, and photobiomodulation is a technology, but hemoglobin is really close to chlorophyll and its chemical makeup. But, all that to say, there are these existing molecules that we can target and that we know the specific wavelengths and that we’re dialing in better over time the dosing that they need from a light energy interaction to be able to trigger downstream signaling.<\/span><\/p>\n And so, what do I mean by downstream signaling? When we’re triggering cytochrome c oxidase, for example, in the electron transport chain, there’s a number of impacts with that. So, electron transport chain kind of feeds into oxidative phosphorylation from an energy generation standpoint. And, there’s kind of four phases of this electron transport chain. The cytochrome c oxidase piece of this can be a bottleneck for the amount of energy that your cells can generate essentially. When you can generate more energy, it’s not just the ATP and energy that you’re generating at an increased level, there are\u2013because your cells and the cellular functions are so interlocked, the signaling that happens when you increase that energy production means that you’re also reducing reactive oxygen species and oxidative stress<\/a> as an example. So, there’s a number of knock-on effects to anything that you do from a molecular level in the signaling in your cells. And, very similar for nitric oxide released both within the cell but also extracellular nitric oxide that really has some beneficial effects for your cardiovascular tissue<\/a>. And so, that’s kind of what we’re talking about with the interaction with those photoacceptors triggering signaling downstream.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0And, when you talk about the benefits peaking after a certain treatment time or level of exposure to LED lasers or both, when you say there’s a drop-off or a parabolic curve or inverse you when it comes to the benefits, do you mean that it would be excess stimulation of some of these photoacceptors that would result in almost a spillover free radical production effect with too much nitric oxide, too much ATP produced, et cetera?<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 That’s right. And so, there’s a cap for how much you can trigger from these signals. But, what we find the other side is hot spotting as an example. And, we get questions quite often, \u201cWhy aren’t you guys using class three or class four lasers?\u201d A lot of our job is education, and so we’re using class 1 lasers. We were planning on actually using class 2 lasers in our commercial and home use devices. Those are those are easy enough to get through FDA. And, we actually down the process of getting them through the FDA from a clearance standpoint when we did some internal testing that showed really unequivocally that the dosing that we were providing through one\u2013and, this is going to be kind of rough order of magnitude. So, it won’t be exact. But, roughly one 200 milliwatt part from a laser standpoint was less effective than that same 200 milliwatts broken between five different emitters.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0Wow.<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 And so, that triggered us to go back and relook at the model and it makes sense when you actually look at how the light distributes through the tissue. So, what we see a lot is when people have a class three or class four or even the class 2 devices is that a lot of the issue that they’re trying to dose effectively is being overdosed. And, one nice thing about photobiomodulation is there’s not really an overdose where you go back down below zero. Basically, what it does is when you overdose with the light, you just don’t get the results that you’re expecting. It’s not doing anything damaging, you’re not getting the benefits that you would like to. But, what we found is with this light distribution is that there’s a balance we had for the power. It’s not just the most powerful lasers are going to provide the best results, it really is almost a communication mechanism with these molecular-level photoacceptors in the body.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0Okay, this is interesting.<\/span><\/p>\n Now, what about if you have\u2013because I’ve talked about this before on the podcast after reading a fascinating book about melanin in the skin and this pigment that can be in the body and its interaction with photobiomodulation or photons of light. Upon reading that, even though that was focused on a dark blackish compound similar to what you’d find in shilajit, I’ve also seen some evidence that photocyanins like the blue greens that you get from algae like spirulina and chlorella<\/a>, for example, or even as you’re probably aware of because a lot of people are doing this now, methylene blue<\/a> could increase the activity of the electron transport chain in response to red light therapy potentially also while reducing endothelial and nitric oxide synthase, so excessive nitric oxide production. Have you messed around with that at all like used your devices in conjunction with methylene blue or shilajit<\/a> or blue green algae or anything like that that you’d consume orally?<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 Only with methylene blue to date. And, I think that was, and there have been a couple of studies on that in in the last two years I believe, essentially with light we’re targeting. One of the targets we have from a photoacceptor standpoint is that third phase of the four phases of electron transport chain with methylene blue. And, what you see with that is if we remove this third phase of electron transport chain as a bottleneck, then the bottleneck moves somewhere else. And, often what you’ll see is it moved that fourth phase, and the fourth phase is impacted by methylene blue. So, what you’ll look at is these synergistic impacts that you can have by removing multiple bottleneck from this energy production system.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0Well, for example, I used a methylene blue product. I think the one I used was called <\/span>BioBlue<\/span><\/a> this morning before I did red light therapy mixed with cold and I’ve always felt that I have more energy, and even it seems a little bit of a clearer head, and arguably even though this is difficult to measure acutely better mitochondrial response when I’m using one of those compounds or all three of them in conjunction with red light. So, yeah, I would recommend if you get a chance, you should mess around with the shilajit or the blue green algae as well because they seem to produce a similar effect. And, research is a little scant on this idea of humans being able to photosynthesize plants in response to red light, especially with certain nutrients in the body. But, I think it’s just a very interesting area to experiment with and explore.<\/span><\/p>\n So, you were talking about this law of diminishing returns and the fact that you reach a certain point where you don’t really get any additional benefit and may get diminished returns. But, what would be a treatment time like with your wraparound device, how long would you put it on to actually get that beneficial dose or that ideal dose?<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 So, essentially, we’ve dosed this around 15-minute, and you can do that twice a day; morning and evening if you have a very serious tissue damage, some kind of acute issue from an inflammation standpoint, or if you’ve had a long-term kind of tissue damage. So, for me, again, this goes back to my torn meniscus that still generates inflammation in my knees, particularly when it’s triggered from training. And so, whenever it’s triggered, I’ll use it twice a day, 15 minutes. If it’s not triggered, one of the things that the light therapy does very well is helps you grow healthier soft tissue. So, increasing the rate of chondroblast proliferation increasing type 2 collagen and increasing the rate of growth for your soft tissue like cartilage and ligaments. We also get a lot of questions about that. And, the literature is fairly specific about how that operates because it sounds like an incredible claim that we’re going to increase the rate of growth for cartilage.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But, just to kind of provide a little context for that, typically what we see is there’s a homeostasis in your joints for production of cartilage and then degradation of cartilage. And, when you have increased levels of inflammation, it reduces the cartilage production and increases the degradation rates. And so, you’re just out of balance. This isn’t magically making cartilage appear, what it’s doing is reducing that inflammation so that your degradation rates slow and your proliferation rates for these chondroblasts increase. And, this from an expectation standpoint is a month-scale process. So, it’s something that you’d want to continue doing regardless of how the inflammation and pain have been reduced, continue doing this to help kind of remodeling your soft tissue in the near term.<\/span><\/p>\n Ben: <\/b>\u00a0I didn’t know there was a dosing effect. That’s interesting. That’s actually really good to know. I’ve been using mine every day. Of course, I also do some infrared sauna and we’ll use these red light panels in the morning sometimes. But, the Kineon, I’ve been using on at least one joint every day.<\/span><\/p>\n When you talk about the inflammation effect though, it might sound kind of paradoxical to people for us because you mentioned the drop in tissue temperature in the quad muscle above the knee that could result from a knee injury or chronic inflammation in the knee. And then, you talk about the use of something that could theoretically heat tissue like LED and perhaps more notably lasers, and that reducing inflammation, but a lot of people think ice to reduce inflammation and then associate inflammation with heated tissue, but it sounds like that’s not the case.<\/span><\/p>\n Forrest:<\/b>\u00a0 Yes. So, inflammation, just to draw a couple of delineation points there, there’s acute inflammation which typically is bringing kind of positive factors to the area to help repair tissue damage. There’s also chronic inflammation, and one of the things that we’ve seen is that although we’ve been kind of told RICE, rest, ice, compression, elevation<\/a>, we were younger in sports and things like this, it actually doesn’t work. And, the doctor who actually invented or coined the term RICE has kind of recanted it and come out with a lot better data. And, to his credit, he didn’t have that data at the time that they were trying to roll this out as a gold standard treatment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n