Dhru Purohit Show
Can Sunlight Add Years to Your Life? Here's What the Science Says About the Sun’s Ability to Radically Improve Your Health with Jonathan Jarecki
14 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the importance of sunlight for health and longevity?
One of the top nutrients that people are most deficient in, and this might shock you, is the sun, specifically infrared light. And on today's podcast, we have Jonathan Jarecki here with us to talk about this deficiency and most importantly, how it's wreaking havoc on our health and longevity in all sorts of surprising ways.
And because it's a new year, Jonathan has also put together a 2026 21 day light challenge that anyone can do to start improving their health ASAP. But first, to help people understand how important the sun is and how problematic it is for all of us that we're getting less and less of it as the years go on. We want to start off with a study that you sent me, Jonathan.
And then I saw floating around on social media as well, too, that kind of blew my mind. And it's this shocking Swiss study. Let's dive into it. What did it show us?
Yeah, so really fascinating study. The southern Sweden cohort study, right?
Chapter 2: How does infrared light impact metabolic health?
Basically, what these researchers did was they took women in southern Sweden, almost 30,000 women. They tracked these women over a 20-year period, and they looked at their light exposure habits, so how much sunlight they got. they had three sort of groups of women, right?
The woman who got the least amount of sun, the woman who got a little bit more, right, right in the middle, and then the woman who got the most amount of sun exposure. They did this from a survey, right? So they surveyed these women, gauged their average amount of sun exposure, and then they looked at their health outcomes throughout their lives.
And what they showed was that the woman who had the most amount of sun exposure had the longest lifespan. So they had the longer lifespan compared to the woman who had the least amount of sun exposure. And the data there was they lived two times longer lives than the woman who had the least amount of sun exposure. This is a correlational study, right? So we can't conclude causation from that.
But what's really interesting is that they showed what's called a dose-dependent curve. In correlational studies, if you have a dose-dependent curve, meaning that if you increase the dose of something, right, you increase, let's say, a medication, or you increase, in this case, sun exposure, you have a increase in whatever that outcome is, right? In this study, it was mortality.
So what they saw was that as you increase sun exposure, as you go from the least amount of sun exposure to the middle, to the most, right? You had an increase in longevity, right? You had a decrease in mortality. These women were living longer lives. And that dose-dependent curve doesn't prove causation, right? But it does validate the correlation that we see a little more.
We have that really interesting study that these women, right, who are getting more sun exposure are dying less frequently than those with the least amount of sun exposure. And they also looked at smoking habits of these women.
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Chapter 3: What is the 2026 Beginner Light Challenge?
Yeah, this was wild, by the way. When you talked about this, this was kind of crazy.
Yeah, this is crazy. What they showed is that those women who got the most amount of sun exposure but also smoked had the same mortality as those women who didn't get sun exposure but smoked.
So those women who got the most amount of sun exposure and did not smoke died at the same rate as those women who didn't get sun exposure but smoked, showing that basically sun exposure habits are on the same playing field
Chapter 4: How can sunlight exposure reprogram your biology during lunch breaks?
as smoking right so it's pretty mind-blowing right when we look at smoking right we we it's pretty well known that smoking causes lung cancer right but we don't actually have a randomized placebo-controlled trial of women who smoke and who don't smoke we can't just tell all right you you group you go smoke and then you guys don't smoke and let's see your outcomes right we don't have that because let's follow you for like 50 years and let's see what happens we don't actually have that data
We don't have that data. That's unethical, right? What we have is correlational studies. And the correlation is so strong, right? We have a dose-dependent curve. We have a very strong correlation. Then we also have, you know, animal models and more in vitro cell models. And we see the same outcomes, right? But even with smoking, right? We don't have a causal...
a randomized placebo-controlled trial study of smoking causes lung cancer, but we say it causes it because we have such a strong correlation. Same thing with this correlational southern Sweden cohort study, right, with sun exposure and mortality. Now, what's really great, so this was 30,000 women, a researcher by the name of Dr. Richard Weller. He is a dermatologist out of the UK.
He looked at the study and dermatologists, right?
Chapter 5: Why is evening sunlight exposure crucial for well-being?
Most dermatologists, you know, tell you, avoid the sun as much as possible. And he's actually doing some really great research. He's actually looking over these recommendations from these dermatologists and sort of questioning this stuff and really digging into the research that is out there. Him and his team, they replicated this Sweden study in the UK.
with 400,000 individuals and they saw the exact same results. So the people who got more sun exposure had longer lives. They died less from all causes.
Chapter 6: What phone settings can protect your brain from artificial light at night?
So all cause mortality, dying from any cause, whether that be cardiovascular disease, cancer, things like that. And so this should shock a lot of people. You know, for me, perhaps you as well, I mean, it sort of is common sense, right? When we look at our evolutionary history, we lived out in the sun. We were outdoors 24-7. A lot of things were different back then.
Chapter 7: How much sunlight do you actually need each day?
We were, you know, living healthier lives out in the sun. That clearly is showing up in the literature, right?
Chapter 8: What are the advanced strategies for optimizing light exposure?
There's actually not a study out there showing that more sun exposure increases mortality. So more sun exposure decreases longevity. There's not a study out there. All the studies show more sun exposure increases longevity, increases your lifespan.
Yeah, that's so powerful. And I think already our audience can pick up on the fact that you are so passionate about this topic. And that's why we reached out to you. You know, it's a first that we have a student. You are a pre-medical student at Davidson College, beautiful university, great university. And I have come across your viral content on social media doing exactly what you're doing here.
You're breaking things down and you're just showcasing the studies. Some of these studies have been out for a little bit, maybe even a couple of years, but they're just not getting attention. And why that's so important is that So many people look at the sun and they think of it, the topic of sun and getting sunlight. They're like, it's a nice bonus.
And okay, yeah, we know, we think we know because of education that's out there. I'm putting that in air quotes. We think we know like, don't get too much sun because it's bad for you because you'll get skin cancer. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But it's not really a major health intervention. And really what you've been doing with your content over the last year
is you've been showing people like, this is so important. This actually might be one of the most underrated areas of health that can help you actually achieve so many of the health goals that we are all shooting for, like improved longevity, improved metabolic health, reduction of all cause mortality, improved mood, improved vision.
And so this is why I asked you on the podcast, because we're here to break some of that down. And as I mentioned earlier, talk about this 2026 21 day light challenge. You have a beginner mode and an advanced mode. We'll get into that in a second. If you're open to it, let's go into a couple other, you know, papers that are out there and studies highlighting the power of the sun specifically.
This one was interesting. It was a little bit smaller, but this was one of the papers that you sent over and it was around how red light, near infrared light can actually reduce the stay of people who are in the ICU. And this was a triple blinded study. Can you talk about that? I use protein powder pretty much every single day because it's an easy way to get to my protein goals that I have.
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