Photo Induced Degeneration of Hormones

Vitamin C to the Rescue

Red Light Therapy proponents often recommend “not too much, not too little”. Sooner or later, I’m planning to write a technical article about red light therapy, but related to this I want to discuss what nutrients might enable you to gain more benefit from more red light therapy.

Vitamin C has been a miracle nutrient for so long that it’s generally overlooked as “ho hum, old news” in the world of nutrition.

Long ago, scientists realized that hormones transfer electrons and looked into using Vitamin C to donate electrons to regenerate the hormones: progesterone, testosterone and estrone. This was stimulated with light at a wavelength of 250 nm.

Various different frequencies (244 nm and 180 nm) of light were used to degrade the hormones.

They found that vitamin C (combined with light – 250 nm) could regenerate 59% of testosterone, 91% of estrone and 53% of progesterone.

Scientists would be horrified by my jump from this information to the idea that vitamin C might enable red light therapy to be used at higher doses for more benefit, but I lack the funding to be able to conduct such an experiment.

You might think “My hormones are fine, why do I care?”. Keep in mind that degraded forms of hormones are associated with increased rates of cancer.

For more details read the paper at PMID: 21814301