Comment by boxed
14 hours ago
It seems like a pretty extraordinary claim to me.
Considering the percentage of live mitochondria that are exposed to external light in a human this seems like an enormous effect. The effect we'd expect from publication bias though is already pretty big. I'm going to go with the latter until we've got some replication, and a plausible mechanism (like.. why wouldn't whales be badly sick if this was a thing?).
I don't know about the mitochondria bit, but it is plausible that work performance is affected by light spectrum. The n=22 is too small, but replication or larger studies is an obvious next step. Let's hope the researchers in this field use pre registration.
The article mentions that unlike visible light, which is mostly absorbed by the skin, near infrared light penetrates deep into the body and the lowest frequencies of the Solar spectrum pass through the entire body.
This explains why most mitochondria are exposed to infrared light, even those deep in the body.
The article also mentions an inhibiting effect of blue and violet light upon mitochondria. For that it should be valid what you say, that this effect can happen only in the superficial layer of the body, because both skin and blood strongly absorb such light.
Even if that is true, we humans tend to have clothes on, and keep indoors. Considering that the sun is WAY brighter (several orders of magnitude) than fluorescent bulbs are, this still sounds implausible, if you compare it to just going outside for a while.