The B.rad Podcast Matt Maruca: An Incredibly Young Journey Toward (Or Rather Away!) From The Light
What an amazing experience to catch up with Matt Maruca, a wondrous young expert in all things ancestral health. Matt has focused his efforts particularly on the wide-ranging harmful effects of blue light exposure and how you can mitigate it starting right now.
Only 20 years old, Matt has been on a six-year obsession to reclaim his health, which started to decline in middle school with routine diet-related suffering such as digestive pain/gas/bloating, acne, and recurring migraine headaches. You will be inspired to learn how a member of the younger generation has leveraged the power of the digital age to overcome the hazards of the digital age amongst today’s youth and instead go deep into self-exploration, progressive health practices and even starting a thriving virtual business that he operates amidst his frequent global travels.
I caught up with Matt at his most recent home base of Tulum, Mexico, tee’d him up and turned him loose. If you have young folks in your life that you can urge to listen to a podcast about health, choose this one. Matt puts some amazing pieces together starting with trying to cure himself after striking out with mainstream medical approaches; making some important intuitive observations about people with less technology and more natural health practices in Bosnia-Herzegovina (hint: the women have more attractive figures, especially breasts); and exhausting his attempts to optimize diet and then turning his attention to blue light exposure as the missing element of healthy mitochondrial function.
Early in the show, Matt offers an important insight that really stuck with me: if something is wrong with your mitochondrial function, you won’t burn fat well, and you’ll default back to a carbohydrate dependency diet. Mitochondrial function is believed by many progressive experts to be the essence of health and longevity, or alternatively the origin of your demise. Hence, beyond diet we must investigate all ways to optimize mitochondrial function, especially becoming more closely aligned with our natural circadian rhythm. Simple takeaways from Matt’s message:
- Follow your own passions and honor your own voice; the traditional path of industrialized education is not for everyone.
- Align with your circadian rhythm by getting direct sun in the morning, not too much artificial indoor light during the workday, strict protection from excess blue light in the evening, and honoring digestive circadian rhythm by not eating too much at night time.
Matt’s company is called RA Optics - named after the Egyptian god of sunlight, RA (pronounced “Rah”). Check out the stylish pairs of both daytime blue light blockers and evening blue light blockers, including prescription options! I just started using RAOptics evening blue blockers with my computer vision prescription and the experience is exquisite. Previously, I’ve tried to be devoted to using inexpensive orange or yellow tinted UV lenses after dark, but the cheap lenses cause a bit of distortion - tough to use with a computer! With my RA Optics prescription computer lenses, I have more compliance with my goal of using evening eyewear, and can enjoy a mellow computer use experience early in the evening and not disturb my melatonin production later. Visit RAOptics.com to learn more about his unique daytime and nighttime blue light blocking eyewear, and use the discount code “Brad” for 15% off your order!
TIMESTAMPS:
Matt shares his struggles as a very young person with health issues and talks about his early journey into using natural solutions to solve his health problems. [07:15]
When he was doing the paleo diet, in just one week of trying to clear up his acne, he actually had a complete elimination of his gut issues, allergies, and headaches. [09:55]
As a young man who was running 20 miles a week, he had to learn to slow down. [14:04]
Looking for a cure of his acne, led him to his discoveries for his other physical ailments. [19:04]
While fixing his diet, he learned about the artificial light exposure problem. [21:42]
It is not easy to do this switching over, even when you try very hard. [25:28]
Some people don’t even know what good health feels like. [27:13]
Mitochondria are the cellular engines and play a more important part than we realize in your health. [28:29]
Sleep disruption and artificial light are the main drivers behind sleep disruption. [35:18]
When Matt was living in Bosnia and eating their cultural food, he realized he wasn’t having gas and bloating. [39:27]
Women with healthy bodies are not only more attractive, they are in better able to have healthy pregnancies. [42:38]
By Matt’s senior year of high school, he was able to have a start-up for optics. [46:53]
So just by being exposed to artificial light after the sun goes down or not being exposed to sunlight in the morning, we're completely disrupting this against circadian rhythm. [50:52]
The time of day that you eat your meals is affecting your circadian rhythm. [57:12]
The RAoptic lenses are blocking the blue and green component. [01:00:38]
Spending time under fluorescent lights and LED is stressful. [01:08:45]
Light drives the function of our cellular engines. [01:14:49]
LINKS:
- RAoptics.com
- Mark’s Daily Apple
- Epigenitics: the science that says your environment turns off and on certain genes.
- Rob Wolf
- Chris Kresser
- Dr.Jack Kruse
- Dr. Douglas Wallace
- Dr. Sanjay Panda
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