Welcome to The Rise – your weekly dose of circadian sunshine, decentralised health wisdom, and actionable tips to help you live healthier, stronger, and more empowered.

This week, discover why eating breakfast after 9 am could spike your diabetes risk by 59%, how LED lighting is creating an “infrared nutrient deficiency”, why retailers are banning melatonin gummies for kids, and why the Daylight computer is the healthiest computer on the planet!

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Much love and sunshine, ☀️
Sandy xx

 

Issue #84 • 7 September, 2025

🌅 Rise Report

Your Breakfast Schedule May Predict Your Diabetes Risk

Think timing doesn’t matter when it comes to meals? Tell that to your pancreas. A seven-year French study tracking over 103,000 adults found that people who ate breakfast after 9 am had a whopping 59% higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes compared to those who ate breakfast before 8 am.

The research gets even more fascinating: late dinners after 10 pm seemed to increase diabetes risk, while prolonged overnight fasting only proved beneficial when paired with early meals: breakfast before 8 am AND dinner before 7 pm.

This isn’t just about convenience or habit. Your body’s glucose control, lipid processing, and insulin sensitivity all follow your circadian clock. When you eat breakfast at 9:30 am, you’re essentially asking your metabolism to perform at peak efficiency during its off-hours.

The takeaway?  Breakfast isn’t just fuel – it’s the wake up call for your metabolism all day.

Fatty Liver Isn’t Just About Fat—It’s About When You Eat

Speaking of meal timing and metabolic health, here’s another fascinating study: fatty liver disease might have less to do with what you eat and everything to do with when you eat it.

Mice fed a high-fat diet with unrestricted access ate frequently throughout day and night, developing obesity and hepatic steatosis. But when researchers restricted the same high-fat diet to just 8 hours during their active phase, mice consumed equivalent calories yet were completely protected against fatty liver.

The magic wasn’t in cutting calories or changing food quality—it was all about circadian alignment.

The takeaway? Your liver operates on ancient rhythms that expect periods of feeding followed by fasting. When you eat late into the night, you’re asking your liver to store fat when it should be burning it. Sometimes the most powerful medicine is simply giving your metabolism the rhythm it evolved to expect.

Retailer Suspends Melatonin Gummy Sales in Australia After Child Overdose Spike

A major US retailer has just suspended melatonin gummy sales to Australia after a spike in childhood overdose calls to poison hotlines. With up to one in four children having sleep difficulties, we’re trying to solve a light problem with a pill.

Studies show melatonin levels in over-the-counter supplements range from practically zero to four times the stated amount. Some even contained unlisted serotonin.

Most kids don’t need synthetic hormones—they need their natural melatonin production switched back on. The solution isn’t in a bottle: it’s found in bright natural light during the day and minimal blue light at night. Your child’s sleep problems likely stem from modern lighting confusing their biological clock. Morning sunshine, dimmed evening lights, and screen-free bedtime routines often work better than any supplement – without the overdose risks or creating a habit and reliance on drugs.

P.S – This applies to adults too!

Melatonin overdoses in Australia raise questions over its safety

 

 

❤️ What’s Hot

The Daylight Computer: Finally, A Blue Light-Free Device

Meet the Daylight Computer:  the first computer designed with your biology in mind. Its paper-like display emits zero blue light, is flicker-free, and is even readable in full sun (hello outdoor office!). Sleep better, work smarter, and finally use tech without wrecking your circadian rhythm. Save 3% of your Daylight Computer when you use code; SANDY

Buy daylight computer

🤓 Smarty Pants

Leptin: Your Body’s Master Hunger Controller

Meet leptin—the hormone that’s supposed to be your appetite’s off switch, but for many people, it’s gone completely silent. Produced by your fat cells, leptin acts like a fuel gauge, sending “I’m full, stop eating” signals to your brain.

Here’s how it should work: as your fat stores increase, leptin levels rise, telling your brain “we’ve got enough energy stored, dial down the appetite.” But here’s the twist—most people with weight problems actually have high leptin levels, yet they’re still hungry all the time. Why? Leptin resistance.

Think of it like shouting into a crowded room where everyone’s wearing noise-cancelling headphones. Your fat cells are screaming “we’re full!” through leptin, but your brain can’t hear the message. This broken communication creates a vicious cycle: your brain thinks you’re starving (even when you’re not), so it cranks up hunger, slows metabolism, and encourages fat storage.

The good news? Unlike insulin resistance, leptin sensitivity can often be restored through circadian rhythm optimisation, quality sleep, and reducing inflammatory foods.

🔥 Deep Dive: TL;DL

How Modern Lighting Is Harming Your Health

When we think about nutrient deficiencies, we think about vitamins B, C and D, or making sure we eat our leafy greens for folate and magnesium. But what if the “nutrient” you were most deficient in was actually infrared light? This is what Tristan Scott and Dr Paul Saladino explore in this week’s TL;DL: how modern lighting is damaging your health.

Your Body’s Built-In Protective Mechanism

First things first, and straight up. Over 90% of your melatonin isn’t made in your pineal gland at night—it’s manufactured by your mitochondria during the day, triggered specifically by infrared light. Melatonin isn’t just your sleep hormone; it’s your master cellular antioxidant. More potent than vitamin C or vitamin E, it upregulates glutathione production and has profound anti-cancer properties. Your mitochondria churn out this cellular protection all day long, but only when they receive the infrared signal to do so.

The Evolutionary Mismatch

For millions of years, humans never experienced light without infrared. Sunlight is 70% infrared photons. Fire—our only artificial light source until 150 years ago—produces ten times more infrared than visible light. We evolved where high-energy blue light always came packaged with protective infrared. Everything was balanced.

Then we invented LEDs. These “energy-efficient” lights produce zero infrared while flooding us with isolated blue wavelengths. As Tristan put it: light is food and we’re eating “light Cheetos”—processed, stripped-down light toxins that’s harmful to our biology.

The Office Worker’s Dilemma

Your body has an inbuilt damage repair system to deal with free radicals, however in needs a crucial component—infrared light. When you’re spending 8 hours a day indoors, and under office lighting, your repair system can’t be activated. This isn’t just about feeling tired and zapped of energy, this is cellular damage without repair mechanisms – leading to accelerated aging, increased cancer risk, and metabolic dysfunction.

Tristan Scott and Paul Saladino Modern Light Making Us Sick

The Glass Trap

Making matters worse, glass in our windows, cars, and buildings filters out infrared wavelengths. That natural light streaming through your office window has been stripped of its most healing frequencies. You’re sitting in what looks like sunlight but receiving none of its benefits.

The Tungsten Solution

Incandescent bulbs are basically fire in a bottle. They produce full spectrum light (heavy on infrared) and unlike LEDs, are flicker-free. According to IEEE standards, flicker is linked to eye strain, migraines, anxiety, and even seizure risk. Tristan believes this constant flicker keeps our nervous systems on high alert.

The Bottom Line

We’re essentially the first generation to live primarily under isolated blue light. The consequences: epidemic sleep disorders, metabolic disease, and premature aging. Get outside when possible, replace LED bulbs with incandescent where you can, and remember your relationship with light is as crucial as your relationship with food.

5 Actionable Tips:

1. Replace LEDs with Incandescent Bulbs Switch to incandescent lighting, especially for desk work. Tristan uses a 250-watt “chicken lamp” next to his work setup to add infrared back into his environment. These bulbs produce the full spectrum your biology expects, including the infrared wavelengths that stimulate cellular melatonin production.

2. Open Your Windows (Even Just a Crack) Glass filters out crucial infrared wavelengths beyond 750 nanometers. Opening windows allows the full spectrum of sunlight to enter. Even a small gap makes a significant difference because light behaves as a wave and can spread through tiny openings.

3. Get Morning Sunlight Within the First Hour Spend 5-10 minutes outside within the first hour of sunrise (clear day) or 10-15 minutes (cloudy day). This sets your circadian rhythm and gives you the blue light your body needs, balanced with infrared.

4. Ditch Your Sunglasses  Sunglasses confuse your body’s natural sun protection mechanisms by blocking UV signals to your eyes, at the same time, your skin is receiving high-energy visible light, creating a circadian mismatch. Reserve them only for extreme conditions like snow, water reflection, or driving for safety.

5. Add Some Infrared During Indoor Work If you work under artificial lighting, balance it with infrared exposure. This could be incandescent desk lamps, brief outdoor breaks, or even positioning yourself near open windows and doors during the day.

☀️ Sandy’s Sunshine

From Fire to LEDs: How We Lost Our Way with Light

Here’s something to think about: every time you look at your phone, laptop, or tablet, you’re exposing yourself to alien light that’s never existed in human history. Those high blue light-emitting LEDs in our devices? They’ve only been around since the 1990s—a mere blink in our evolutionary timeline.

Since creation, humans and all life on Earth evolved with natural light sources. Fire kept us warm and illuminated our caves. Candles guided us through the dark. Incandescent bulbs brought us into the modern age. All of these were full-spectrum lights that worked with our biology, not against it.

Then suddenly—in what amounts to a nanosecond of human existence—we shifted to harsh, blue-heavy LED screens that tell our bodies it’s perpetual midday – even at 9 o’clock at night!

From fire to LED lights. No wonder we're sick

We Can’t Escape Tech – But We Can Choose Better

I’m not suggesting we all go back to candlelit caves (though the idea has its charm!). Technology is here to stay, and I know it makes our lives easier in many ways. But just like we’ve learned to choose organic over processed food, grass-fed over grain-fed, and filtered over tap water—it’s time we applied the same wisdom to our tech choices.

Meet the World’s First Health-First Computer

Enter the Daylight Computer. This is the first device designed from the ground up with your health in mind. This isn’t just another screen with a filter slapped on. It’s completely blue light-free, flicker-free, and here’s a big bonus—you can actually use it outside in full daylight. Hello outdoor office, without squinting at a black mirror!

No more worrying about what late-night screen time is doing to your circadian rhythm, your melatonin production, or your kids’ developing hormones. This is technology that works with your biology, not against it.

My Real-World Experience

I’ve had my Daylight Computer for about 12 months now, and honestly, I love it. It did take a little adjustment in that the overstimulating colours and graphics weren’t there. My mind and body were calmer and “underwhelmed”, which was odd to begin with—but in the best possible way.

So if I need to catch up on reading, writing, or research at night (or perhaps some online shopping)—I do this now worry-free.

And for those of us with teenagers? It’s pure peace of mind knowing I’m not inadvertently messing with their sleep and hormone development every time they need to check something out too.

As a Daylight Computer ambassador, I’m super proud to support a company that is genuinely fighting the good fight and creating technology that serves humanity rather than harming it.

🔢 Number Crunch

37.2 trillion — Estimated number of cells in the human body, each one with mitochondria that “listen” to your light, water, magnetism, food, and movement signals every nano-second of the day.

 

“We cannot hold a torch to light another’s path without brightening our own.” 

Ben Sweetland

The information in this newsletter is for educational purposes only and not intended as medical advice. Always consult with a healthcare professional for personal health decisions. This post may contain affiliate links for Daylight computer, and I may earn a small commission if you make a purchase, at no extra cost to you.