Jonathan Jarecki

When it reaches the mitochondria, it gets absorbed by a protein in the mitochondria called cytochrome C oxidase.

You have this electron transport chain, which is what produces ATP.

And in the electron transportane, you have cytochrome C oxidase.

When infrared light interacts with cytochrome C oxidase, cytochrome C oxidase releases what's called nitric oxide.

People may have heard about nitric oxide for cardiovascular benefits, right?

It dilates your blood vessels, improves blood flow.

But this nitric oxide is being produced in the mitochondria, and through that production,

and then through a bunch of other chemical pathways, which if people really want to get all into this, I have a 30 minute YouTube video on my YouTube diving into the entire chemical pathway.

But through a series of chemical reactions, that nitric oxide gets converted into melatonin.

And this melatonin in the mitochondria acts as basically an on-site antioxidant.

So your mitochondria, not only do they produce ATP, but in that process, they also produce what's called reactive oxygen species, ROS.

ROS are these reactive molecules that, you know,

in high amounts are damaging.

And in our current modern life, being under artificially lit environments all day long and eating bad food and all these different things, right?

Our bodies are producing high amounts of reactive oxygen species and amounts that we generally don't want.

And so when melatonin is being produced in the mitochondria, it is able to basically protect you against these reactive oxygen species.

It acts as an antioxidant.

And what's really fascinating, and Russell Ryder published this, so one of the first papers that I was aware of was, it's a paper titled Melatonin and the Optics of the Human Body by Scott Zimmerman, who's an optics person, and then Russell Ryder.

And basically what they show is that melatonin is a far stronger antioxidant than even things like glutathione, vitamin C. These are the strong antioxidants that we think of when we think of antioxidants.

Melatonin actually upregulates glutathione.