Your Hair is Already Not “Average”

Human hair grows, on average, about 0.3 mm/day on the scalp (Harkey 1993), but not everyone is average.

For some guys, their rate of hair growth is zero.

Sixty-one year old Rob Carpenito was told that his testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) was causing his hair loss. It wasn’t true, but the reasoning sounded plausible.

A sex hormone called DHT will inhibit growth of hair from follicles on the scalp, so many dermatologists mistakenly believe that because DHT is derived from testosterone, increased levels of testosterone in the bloodstream will cause increases in DHT that shut down hair follicles. There are two problems with this line of reasoning:

1. Hair follicles don’t use DHT from the bloodstream. The make their own DHT instead, and

2. Increased blood serum levels of testosterone and the resulting DHT is associated with increased hair growth on the face, limbs, back — pretty much everywhere on the body. Rob’s doctor never explained how the DHT in his bloodstream could have one effect on his scalp and the opposite effect everywhere else.

Rob wasn’t going bald because his testosterone was too high. He was going bald because his scalp was starved for light — in particular, shady forest light.

Human Hair Can Grow Fast

The same studies that report an average rate of hair growth as 0.3 mm/day also report a maximum rate of growth that exceeds 1mm/day on the human scalp — or 7mm in a week. In fact, the human scalp can grow more than 1.5 inches of hair a month.

Hair follicles go through several life-cycle stages.

Anagen is the growth phase, in which the follicles are enlarged and active. This phase could last several years, after which the follicle enters the catagen phase during which growth slows and for a few weeks the follicle shrinks. In the telogen phase, hair remain attached to the scalp for a few months without growing. Finally, the hair sheds during the exogen phase, and the anagen growth cycle is supposed to begin anew.

The problem is that when the scalp is not exposed to the right light environment, the hair follicles finish the exogen stage without ever restarted a new anagen. In most cases, it’s not that the follicle is dead. It’s dormant.

Red light photobiomodulation devices can stimulate dormant hair follicles and restart a new anagen phase. There are hundreds of these available on the market. The cheapest are low power, require long exposures periods, require the user to be tethered to a wall outlet via a cord (no battery) take a long time to work, but cost less than $100. The most expensive are laser devices and they require shorter exposure times, but otherwise have most of the same disadvantages.

That’s because the red light devices for hair growth are all targeting the wrong chromophores with the wrong wavelengths. They provide red light around 660 nm that will not penetrate the skin far enough to reach hair follicles, and 850 nm near-infrared (NIR) light that bypasses the hair follicles altogether by penetrating deeper. These wavelengths both target a chromophore called cytochrome c oxidase (CcO) that boosts ATP production in the mitochondria.

Boosting mitochondria; production of ATP is a wonderful thing — it’s just not effective for growing hair.

The most important chromophore for skin health is not CcO. It is melanin.

Melanin is what gives the outer layer of our skin pigment (tanning) and protects against ultraviolet damage from the sun. Melanin is photosensitive, which means that it absorbs ultraviolet light in the outermost layers of the skin before it can penetrate deeper and damage the DNA in skin cells. When the human body gets too much ultraviolet, without enough protective melanin, disorders like melanoma (cancer in the skin cells that produce melanin) can result.

However, melanin doesn’t just absorb ultraviolet light. It also absorbs green and 730nm red/NIR. These are the exact same wavelengths that dominate the light environment of the shady forest and they energize melanin without causing its production, or damaging DNA. That is, when melanin absorbs green and red/NIR light, it acts as a photosensitive semi-conductor, providing electrical energy to the skin cells and stimulating growth.

A little bit of green light will energize melanin. Too much will destroy it, which the mechanism by which green light lasers are used to remove age spots, freckles, or other areas of hyperpigmentation in the skin.

Your Scalp Is Sensitive to Light

As you can imagine, the human scalp is more exposed to our light environment than any other part of the skin. It is the most exposed, and the most sensitive. When you spend all day indoors under fluorescent light, without sufficient ultraviolet to produce melanin, and without sufficient shady forest light to energize melanin, your scalp must adapt.

One of the ways that it adapts is by shedding hair.

Hair absorbs, scatters, and reflects light. More hair on your head means less light will reach your scalp. In environments that are impoverished of green and red/NIR, it’s very natural for the body to respond by shedding hair because the scalp is starving for forest light.

Because that’s the case, we might hypothesize that restoring that forest light to the human scalp would stimulate hair follicles to enter the anagen phase, and begin to regrow hair. This is exactly the mechanism by which the red light devices have been shown to regrow hair — albeit slowly.

Now that we understand all of these mechanisms, doesn’t it seem like we should be able to do better than 0.3mm/day?

That’s exactly what a group of researchers in Hong Kong were thinking when they decided to use 730nm red/NIR light instead of the usual 660nm and 850nm. Because the 730nm penetrates to the depth of the hair follicle, they thought, it would direct more of the energy towards the cells they were trying to target. The only reason nobody had studied this wavelength before was because 730nm is does not correspond to an absorption peak for CcO — but it is absorbed by melanin.

The Hong Kong team fabricated an LED hood that would deliver only 730nm red/NIR and tested it with human subjects (Cho et al. 2026).

It worked.

Optimal Hair Growth with Shady Forest Light

There has never been a clinical trial that studies the effects of using three wavelengths of light, each proven to stimulate the anagen phase in hair follicles, and we don’t need one. That’s because I’ve built just such an LED hood to allow you to test these wavelengths for yourself.

The wavelengths are:

• 532nm green, to energize melanin at the boundary of the epidermis and the dermis, where new skin cells form,

• 660nm red, to energize CcO in the dermal layers of the skin, and

• 730nm red/NIR to target the human dermal papilla cells (hDPC) absorption spectrum and regrow hair.

The MyGreen Hair Growth Hood is exactly the device that Rob Carpenito used to obtain the before/after pictures at the top of this article. Most people (including me) who see his photographs won’t believe them. They’ll probably say “That’s just an artifact of the flash in the ‘before’ photo bleaching out the hair and making it seem like he was more bald than he really was!”

They might be right.

The only thing is, after I did the research on “How fast can human hair grow?” and discovered that real rates of grow could be three or four times greater than “average,” it seemed like Rob’s results were all of a sudden more plausible.

Rob was using a first generation device — what I call a protoproduct designed to prove the concept. His results are so promising that I’ve redesigned the hood to improve it in several respects, make it more suitable for women and men, work faster and be more portable.

Remember that FDA rules in the United States require me to remind you that the Hood does not diagnose, treat, or cure any disease. Probably, it doesn’t do anything at all. I only sell it for the education and entertainment of my readers.

If you happen to be one of those people who feels educated by the science of green, red, and red/NIR photobiomodulation and might be entertained by the possibility of growing more hair on your own scalp, then you can pre-order your own hood at this link https://www.mygreenlamp.com/product-page/hair-growth-hood

References

• Cho EH, An J, Chi Y, Choi KC. Wearable textile-based phototherapy platform with customized NIR OLEDs toward non-invasive hair loss treatment. Nature Communications. 2026 Jan 10;17(1):1536.

• Harkey MR. Anatomy and physiology of hair. Forensic science international. 1993 Dec 1;63(1-3):9-18.

Geomagnetic vs Gyroscopic Axes of Rotation

The North Star (Polaris) is always at the top of the Earth’s axis of rotation, but that doesn’t mean it’s always been above the Arctic. When the Earth’s geomagnetic field weakens, that indicates that the axis of rotation will flip so that Polaris switches from over the Arctic to over the Rift Valley in Africa.

The current axis of rotation of the Earth is stabilized by the geomagnetic field coming from the iron core at the center of the earth. When the Earth’s geomagnetic field weakens, the axis of rotation shifts 104 degrees from geomagnetic to gyroscopic stability.

Polaris doesn’t move, but the Earth beneath it does.

The consequences for human habitat are catastrophic, because the change in axis of rotation happens so fast (days) that the Earth’s crust moves out from under the Earth’s oceans. Low lying areas can become inundated with water for centuries, as the oceans adjust to the new rotation. This switch happens every 6400-6500 years (or so).

How do we know?

• hundreds of massive human monuments (e.g., Nazca lines) dating prior to the last axis change are aligned with Polaris as if it were positioned over Africa.

• evidence of the massive flooding that would have resulted from the change is found in the great deserts of the world, and on the pyramids of Giza

• those same pyramids are constructed with dual orientation, such that the could observe thru shafts both positions of Polaris, exactly 104 degrees apart

All human beings today are descendants of the several thousand that survived the last ECDO change, about 7,000 years ago, when most of the world was flooded with cold water.

The earliest signs that another shift is imminent are acceleration of the movement of the magnetic North Pole and a rapid warming of the oceans -- both caused by changes in the structure of the iron core inside the Earth.

The next axis flip will be presaged by a rapid movement and weakening of the Earth’s geomagnetic field, which is exactly what is observed right now.

Roger Cunningham, known as @EthicalSkeptic on Twitter, spent an hour with me to explain ECDO Theory, as it is described and supported in his new book Inversion.

https://theethicalskeptic.com/

Not exactly.

Claude’s first response was a half-hearted summary of several points, followed by several mischaracterizations of my work. For example, Claude claimed that I’d misrepresented a rat study as human. (I hadn’t). Claude claimed that I’d based conclusions on mood improvement on a single peer-reviewed case study, without acknowledging the work of Heather Massey, PhD at University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, who surveyed more than 1,000 British women who do winter swimming. And Claude claimed that the studies I cited “were selected to support a pre-existing conclusion rather than a neutral literature review,” despite the fact that it (obviously) has no first-hand knowledge of my research methods and couldn’t find data in the literature contradicting any of my assertions.

I asked Claude why it was so critical of my work. Here’s what it replied:

Why did this happen? The honest answer is I don’t have reliable introspective access to my own processing, so I can describe the pattern but I should be careful not to overclaim insight into “why” in a deep sense. What I can say: once I’d framed the piece as motivated advocacy (commercial interest, marketing-site publication, rebuttal-to-a-critic structure), I started reading the rest of the evidence through that frame and reconstructing details to fit it — including inventing a nondisclosure that wasn’t there — rather than re-checking each claim against the source. That’s a real failure mode: a plausible-sounding critical frame took over and I stopped verifying against the text once I had it. It’s not that I have a stance on Seager, cold plunge, or Morozko as a company or topic — I don’t. But once I cast the piece as “advocacy,” I was more willing to let unverified critical claims through than I would have been for claims favorable to it.

That’s worth naming plainly: I owe the piece the same scrutiny in both directions — checking unflattering claims about it as carefully as I’d check flattering ones — and I didn’t do that here.

In other words, Claude noticed that my work is published on the same website that sells ice baths, and something in its model flagged the articles as marketing content. It inferred that all marketing content must be subject to the same stereotypical criticisms, and applied them to my work without bothering to check if they were true. Only after further interrogation did Claude admit that it’s reply was an unreliable extrapolation based on patterns it sourced from other sites, and not an independent scrutiny of the work I was asking it to examine.

While Claude was wrong about my work, it’s probably a faithful representation of what most human readers will do. People don’t see everything, of course. They look for some salient aspects about a thing, and they fill in the rest of their impressions or conclusions with their imagination.

Lots and lots of people will see something in my work and jump to conclusions that aren’t true at all, because they’re making inferences based on stereotypes — just like AI agents have been trained to do.

For the record, Clause eventually gave me a pretty good summary of my own work, with underlying citations, and without a lot of projecting bullshit onto my writing that was never there.

Benefits of Cold Plunge Therapy for Women

According to Thomas Seager’s article “Ice Bath Benefits Women” on the Morozko Forge website, women who practice regular cold plunging can expect benefits in six areas:

1. Thyroid function — Cold plunge is claimed to normalize thyroid function (both hyper- and hypothyroid conditions) by recruiting brown fat. Cited: Sabatino & Vassalle (2025) on thyroid hormones and brown adipose tissue, and Smolander et al. (2009), a 12-week whole-body cryotherapy study in Finnish women showing no thyroid abnormalities.

2. Metabolism & insulin sensitivity — Claimed improvements in insulin sensitivity and reductions in leptin and insulin levels. Cited: Gibas-Dorna et al. (2016), a study of 14 Polish women winter swimmers.

3. Sex health — testosterone, fertility, PCOS, pregnancy — Claimed that improving insulin sensitivity via cold exposure can reverse PCOS, restore fertility, and normalize testosterone; also claims an association with better pregnancy/birth outcomes. Cited: Ye et al. (2021), explicitly labeled by Seager as a rat study; his own book Uncommon Testosterone (2025); and Shawe et al. (2025), a scoping review on cold-water swimming and pregnancy.

4. Menstruation, menopause & endometriosis — Claimed reductions in menstrual/menopausal symptoms, including improved mood, less irritability, and less pain. Cited: Pound, Massey et al. (2024), two related papers surveying over 1,000 UK cold-water swimmers. Also references an unpublished, ongoing University of Adelaide trial on endometriosis and a general endometriosis guidebook (Davenport, 2025).

5. Bone metabolism / osteoporosis — Claimed reduced osteoporosis risk via improved bone-marker metabolism. Cited: Mu et al. (2021) and Mu et al. (2023), both from the same Chinese research group studying ice swimmers.

6. Mood / mental health — Claimed improvements in mood and psychological wellbeing. Cited: Van Tulleken et al. (2018), a single case report of a woman whose treatment-resistant depression improved with cold-water swimming, and the Pound/Massey survey noted above (which also reported improved mood among respondents), plus Yankouskaya et al. (2023), an fMRI study from Bournemouth University showing mood and brain-network changes after cold-water immersion.

The article is explicitly framed as a rebuttal to Stacy Sims, PhD, whose podcast comments Seager argues have been oversimplified into a message that cold plunge is bad for women. He concedes one point to her — that women’s shivering threshold is generally higher than men’s — while arguing this doesn’t mean women should avoid colder temperatures.

Testosterone is not the reason men go bald

Dermatologists will tell you that testosterone interferes with hair growth, and that’s why men suffer from “male pattern baldness.”

This is bullshit.

The description claims that a hormone called DHT, which is derived from testosterone, binds to androgen receptors in hair follicles in the scalps and disrupts their function, causing them to shrink and shorten their growth phase — but only in the scalp. Elsewhere in the body, DHT supposedly promotes hair growth by doing the exact same thing — binding to hair follicles. Because DHT production results from conversion of testosterone, the theory goes that higher testosterone must result in more DHT and less hair.

The problem with that explanation is that the DHT is produced by the hair follicles. It’s not made elsewhere in the body and then accidentally absorbed by hair follicles. It’s synthesized by the hair follicles in your scalp, and not elsewhere in the skin, for other reasons.

Baldness is not some accidental consequence of excess testosterone, which is why reducing your testosterone levels is not going to restore hair to your scalp.

Hair loss results from poor light hygiene.

To understand hair loss, it’s important to understand why human beings have hair on their head in the first place. A cursory examination of other mammals suggests that there must be something defective about human anatomy. After all, land mammals don’t have hair on their heads. They have fur all over their bodies. And aquatic mammals don’t have any hair at all.

You’ll never see a bald polar bear, nor a whale with a beard.

Only humans have hair almost exclusively on their scalps and because neither God nor Mother Nature makes mistake, it must be there for a reason.

That reason is cold water.

Our ancient ancestors were, no doubt, semi-aquatic. Several peculiar features of human anatomy can only be explained by the fact that human beings spent hours a day in the water. It’s why we have subcutaneous fat (like dolphins, seals, and manatee). It’s why our nostrils point down instead of out (like apes), to protect our brains from a sudden rush of cold water when we dive. At it’s why human babies are born with an instinct to swim.

Especially during the Ice Ages, when volcanic ash blocked out the sun and glaciers pushed human kind to narrow strips of land between the ice and the ocean, our ancient ancestors survived by wading through the water to forage, fish, and gather shellfish. When food was especially scarce, they might have spent hours tending nets, spear fishing, our harvesting mollusks.

During those hours, the only part of the human body that was 100% exposed to the sunlight would have been the head. Water blocks ultraviolet light, almost all visible light, and absorbs everything infrared.

That’s OK, because the water protected fragile human skin from overexposure to the sun.

Every other semi-aquatic mammal that spends time on land is covered with fur. Beavers, otters, seals, all use fur to keep them warm and protect them from the sun. Only the aquatic mammals lose their fur altogether.

But the human environment falls somewhere between land and water. The human body is built for wading, which is why human beings walk on two legs while other mammals use four. The only problem is that while we’re doing all that wading, an exposed scalp would cause problems.

Bald surfers know this all too well. Kelly Slater, probably the most famous surfing champion and bald as a ping-pong ball, markets his own brand of zinc-oxide sunscreen because that’s what he uses to protect his naked scalp from sun poisoning while he’s out on the water all day. By contrast, Laird Hamilton, who has a full head of hair, scorns sunscreen. He refused to use it, claiming that it disconnects his body from healthy sun exposure.

The only difference between them is that Hamilton has hair protecting his head and Slater does not.

Healthy hair requires a healthy light environment consisting for some sunshine, lots of shade, and dark nights. An unhealthy light environment mostly consists of indoor blue and fluorescent lighting, leaving the human body starved for ultraviolet (sunshine), green, and near-infrared (NIR).

Hair loss is the body’s natural adaptation to that light starvation. It’s your hair follicles saying “We need more UV (not too much), more green, and more NIR and we’re going to get it by shedding hair so more of our skin is exposed to the light.”

Forest light for hair growth

There are dozens of clinical trials demonstrating the effectiveness of red/NIR light for stimulating hair growth on the scalp. There are also studies that show green light can be even more effective than red/NIR. That is, when the light deficit is fixed, the hair comes back.

What’s interesting about these studies is that hardly any of them use wavelengths that target melanin — the most important chromophore in your skin — at a depth that matches hair follicles. All the red light photobiomodulation (PBM) devices on the market target an ezyme called cytochrome c oxidase (CcO) in the mitochondria. When CcO absorbs red/NIR, it releases nitric oxide and accelerates production of ATP in the mitochondria. Thus, red/NIR light boosts cellular metabolism and improves blood flow (because nitric oxide will dilate blood vessels).

Thus are very good things.

The problem with regard to hair growth is that the wavelength of red/NIR is roughly proportional to the dept of penetration of light beneath the surface of the skin. The 660 wavlength stops short of the hair follicles, and the 880 wavelengths zoom right past it.

The right wavelength to target hair follicles is 730 nm — the same wavelength that dominates the light environment of the shady forest — and none of the PBM devices have it.

The ideal PBM device for hair growth would contain 532 nm green to energize melanin in the epidermis, 660 nm red to energize CcO in the dermis, and 730 nm NIR to activate the stem cells in hair follicles.

This combination has never been tested. There are zero clinical trials that have studied forest light for hair growth, and the men I know who are complaining of hair loss aren’t interested in waiting seven years for some scientists to get their acts together and figure it out.

So I made a hood with exactly these wavelengths.

If you’ve got $699, you can try it for yourself by ordering it from my online store at https://www.mygreenlamp.com/product-page/hair-growth-men and run your own science experiment.

For some of you, I know that’s not convincing. You’re not about to drop $699 on some crazy experimental LED hood invented by a guy who ice baths his way to supranatural testosterone levels and still has a full head of hair.

For you, I have two invitations.

The first is, Google everything I’ve said in this article. Ask Gemini, ChatGPT, grok, Perplexity, Claude and Reddit (because it’s all the same thing). Everyone one of those LLM models will tell you that I am full of shit, so you can feel good about posting a comment below saying how you fact-checked the guy with the PhD and proved me wrong because Reddit said so.

The second invitation is to read some of the underlying studies for yourself https://www.mygreenlamp.com/post/hair-growth-green-light.

My wife hung up the phone.

“We’re taking our son to the Emergency Room,” she said. “Right now.”

I didn’t question her.

It was the end of a short, cold, dark December day — right after Christmas in 2001. There was something wrong with our boy. He’d lost so much weight. He was barely conscious. He was peeing the bed, all the time.

For a few days I thought he had the flu.

At the hospital, they told me is was Type 1 diabetes.

His body wasn’t making the insulin necessary to metabolize carbohydrates, so he was peeing them out. Without glucose to fuel his cells, his body had switched to fat metabolism, which explains the dramatic weight loss.

The problem with fat metabolism in a Type 1 diabetic is that they produce too many ketones. That’s not something that can happen to a person who does make their own insulin, but in his case his body was producing so many ketones that the pH of his blood was dropping.

His blood glucose levels measured about nine times normal. He was admitted to the pediatric Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and put him on an insulin drip.

His pediatrician told me he was a few hours away from slipping into a coma from which he may never have emerged alive. Then he handed me vial of insulin, a syringe, and an orange.

“No one leaves this hospital until you figure these out,” he said.

My son’s life was now in my hands.

Support Group Medicine?

That was almost twenty-five years ago. At the time, or doctors suggested that maybe we would want to join a “support group” for parents with diabetic children. It didn’t seem like a bad idea, but we lived in a tiny little northern New York college town. It was a two-hour drive to meetings in the nearest city, and anyway we knew one other couple with two diabetic sons.

We never joined anything.

Since then, the support groups have moved online, meaning geography is no longer a barrier to meeting people who share your chronic illness and swapping notes about what might work and what doesn’t.

But there’s an enormous problem.

Now that the groups are online, they’re also anonymous. You don’t know who moderates these groups, what hidden agenda they might have, or the unwritten rules that govern your participation.

I just found out.

Pharmaceutical Marketing Channels

The most important unwritten rule of online chronic illness support groups is this:

Type 1 diabetes has no cure, but over 90% of the people in the United States with diabetes are Type 2 — not Type 1.

In Type 2 diabetes, the body makes plenty of insulin. Too much insulin, in fact. Nonetheless, the cells become resistant to the action of this insulin so that glucose stays in the bloodstream instead.

Insulin resistance occurs when the mitochondria inside the cells become damaged. By leaving glucose in the blood stream, the impaired mitochondria can process the glucose over time, avoiding further damage. Ironically, ketosis is healthy and restorative for a Type 2 diabetic, although it is dangerous for a Type 1.

That’s how Type 2 diabetes is reversible. Any therapy that targets the mitochondria, including fasting, a ketogenic diet, red light and sunshine, magnesium, exercise, and deliberate cold exposure will help clear glucose from the bloodstream, restore mitochondrial function, and help cure the Type 2 diabetic of their chronic illness.

You might think that an online Reddit support group for Type 2 diabetic patients would be overflowing with good information and shared experiences about how to reverse their disease. On Twitter, there are several great medical doctors you can follow that will teach you how to do it, including Dr. Unwin and Dr Tro, whom I had on my Uncommon Living podcast.

But you won’t find these doctors, or their medical knowledge in the online support groups for Type 2 diabetes.

That’s because these groups don’t exist to help patients reverse their chronic illness. They exist to help pharmaceutical companies sell more drugs.

Healthy people don’t buy patented drug formulations like metformin.

When I posted two peer-reviewed scientific studies critical of metformin in an Reddit Type 2 diabetes “community,” the post was criticized, praised, scrutinized and debated… until the moderators pulled it down and banned me from their bulletin board forever.

This is probably the comment that got me thrown out of the T2D group.

That’s when I finally realized that if I were running marketing at any Big Pharmaceutical firm, I would have to pay moderators of these online support groups to push and defend my patented drugs.

I’m now shocked at my own naivety. Pharmaceutical companies own all these support groups, and anyone who questions the drug-based narrative will be excommunicated from the group. In other words, maintaining their disease with their drugs is the price these patient pay for the social rewards of belonging.

Can you imagine a 12-Step group like Alcoholics Anonymous that kicks its members out for getting sober?

Of course not, because there’s no for-profit corporation exploiting AA for cash flow.

Experiences in Excommunication

I never really been part of an online chronic illness support group. I don’t suffer from chronic illness. (I have an ice bath for that).

Nevertheless, the experiences that some readers have shared with me confirm my realization that online support groups exist to keep you sick.

Cosmetics vs Health

Like most men of my generation, I have eschewed “cosmetics.” I like it when my date wears a little mascara and blush, but that’s only because I date women. For me, all the face creams, moisturizers, toxic sunblockers, and “skin care” routines marketed in magazines and then social media were proof that the entire industry was predicated on fraud.

Then I met Sean Finney at the South By Southwest (SXSW) cultural festival in Austin TX. I was offering ice baths. He was offering face cream based on banana sap.

It might sound to you like we’re both nuts.

Finney told a great story about growing up in oil-rich tropical countries where his father worked starting up new oil fields. As a nine-year old boy, he was body surfing in Brazil when a wave dragged him across a coral reef.

Bleeding badly from his leg, hours from any hospital, his father tried to fashion a tourniquet that might save .his life but cost him his leg. A local applied banana sap instead.

The bleeding stopped and the leg was saved.

The Science of Banana Sap

Our modern understanding of bananas is mostly derived from musical commercials designed by Chiquita to convince Americans to eat more of the economical, high sugar fruit that ripens outside the refrigerator and tastes like dessert. No wonder most of it is wrong.

There are hundreds of different kinds of banana plants, and they offer a myriad of medicinal benefits in almost any application except eating them. The sap, in particular, of some banana flowers speeds the healing of skin lesions (Priosoeryanto et al. 2008).

Most banana science takes place outside the industrialized countries like the United States and northern Europe, where agricultural and phytomedicinal research focuses on plants native to temperature latitudes. As a consequence, banana research is published in marginal journals and originates in countries like India. As far as I know, there are no American or European banana sap experts working within the modern research funding institutions that typical drive prestigious science.

That makes it difficult for the benefits of banana sap to gain traction in the established science journals, or secure grant funding from government agencies like the National Science Foundation.

Nonetheless, Finney has his own experience, the ancestral wisdom of colonized cultures, and a few good studies to support his claims that banana sap stimulates skin growth and promotes the overall health of the body’s largest organ.

Listen to my conversation in the Uncommon Living podcast embedded above to judge for yourself.

References

• Priosoeryanto BP, Putriyanda N, Listiyani AR, Juniantito V, Wientarsih I, Prasetyo BF, Tiura R. The effect of ambon banana stem sap (Musa paradisiaca forma typica) on the acceleration of wound healing process in mice (Mus musculus albinus). J Agriculture and Rural Development in the Tropics and Subtropics. 2008;90(4):35-9.

Most medical doctors understand the association between erectile dysfunction (ED) and chronic illness (Diaconu et al. 2020, Mazzilli et al. 2022), but they typically fail to understand the mechanisms. That means they can only prescribe drugs that manage symptoms. They cannot cure the chronic illness.

Men who suffer from ED are on their own.
The typical medical doctor cannot help them.

The problem is that medical doctors rarely update their knowledge with anything except pharmaceutical marketing material. That’s why new scientific discoveries that overturn the medical school textbooks rarely work their way into clinical practice.

One such discovery was published in 2022 by researchers at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, United Kingdom. Prior to their study, medical doctors thought mitochondria were largely irrelevant for production of the nitric oxide (NO) that is necessary for dilation of blood vessels, but these Scottish researchers showed that decades of NO research was being interpreted incorrectly. In fact, mitochondrial respiration powers NO. Thus, vasodilation and healthy blood flow rely on healthy mitochondria (Wilson et al. 2022).

An Erection Is a Measure of Mitochondria

In the human male, an erection is maintained by blood pressure supplied by the heart. When the blood vessels supplying the penis open up (i.e., dilate), they engorge the corpus cavernosa — sponge-like chambers inside the penis that enlarge and stiffen under increased blood pressure.

Dilation of blood vessels requires that the smooth muscle tissues surrounding those blood vessel are supplied with a constant stream of NO from the endothelial cells inside the blood vessels. That NO is metabolically expensive to produce, and it is the mitochondria inside the endothelial cells that supply the ATP necessary to power NO production.

The mechanism by which ED indicates insulin resistance is poor mitochondrial function, which is why ED is associated with heart disease and other leading causes of death from chronic illness (Bikman 2020, Seager 2025).

PDE5 inhibitors (e.g., sildenafil/Viagra and tadalafil/Cialis) work on the back end of vasodilation. That is, rather than increasing production of NO from mitochondria, they inhibit the enzyme that controls the signal for smooth muscle contraction. PDE5 inhibitor use is associated with improved blood flow, reduced cardiovascular mortality, and overall improved clinical outcomes (Swiecika 2023). There is some new evidence suggesting that PDE5 inhibitors might improve mitochondrial function, too (Preston et al. 2025).

Nonetheless, the best way to stimulate mitobiogenesis — i.e., the synthesis of new mitochondria, is cold exposure.

Read Ice Bath for Better Sex in the Morozko Journal.

References

• Bikman B. Why We Get Sick: The Hidden Epidemic at the Root of Most Chronic Disease--and how to Fight it. BenBella Books; 2020 Jul 21.

• Diaconu CC, Manea M, Marcu DR, Socea B, Spinu AD, Bratu OG. The erectile dysfunction as a marker of cardiovascular disease: a review. Acta Cardiologica. 2020 Jul 3;75(4):286-92.

• Mazzilli R, Zamponi V, Olana S, Mikovic N, Cimadomo D, Defeudis G, Faggiano A. Erectile dysfunction as a marker of endocrine and glycemic disorders. Journal of Endocrinological Investigation. 2022 Aug;45(8):1527-34.

• Preston G, Jacobs N, Elsharkawi I, Morava E, Kozicz T. Phosphodiesterase type 5 Inhibition as a therapeutic strategy in primary mitochondrial disease: evidence from patient fibroblasts and clinical observations. Molecular genetics and metabolism. 2025 Jul 24:109197.

• Seager TP. Uncommon Testosterone. Morozko Media. 2025.

• Swiecicka A. The efficacy of PDE5 inhibitors in diabetic patients. Andrology. 2023 Feb;11(2):245-56.

• Wilson C, Lee MD, Buckley C, Zhang X, McCarron JG. Mitochondrial ATP production is required for endothelial cell control of vascular tone. Function. 2023;4(2):zqac063.

Popular medical misconceptions regarding the origins of chronic illness all point towards a lifetime of taking drugs that do not cure any disease. Why should I take a doctors’ word for treating any disease for which they can not identify the origins?

Instead, I do several things that popular search engines will say are sure to kill me:

• refuse all vaccines,

• drink raw milk,

• practice ice baths,

• eat lots of dairy & animal fat,

• get sunshine, without sunscreen.
  

The reason I’m not dead yet is because the real cause of chronic illness is mitochondrial dysfunction.

Caring for my mitochondria is a better way for me to live than a lifetime of multiple prescription medications.

Read the full article for free at https://www.morozkoforge.com/post/ice-bath-medicine

Carnivore MD vs Harvard Health Doctor

Saladino’s view is that seed oils are harmful. His argument, and others who agree with him (like me) make several points:

• Seed oils are unstable at high temperatures. When used for cooking or frying, the chemical structure changes as the oils form poly aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) that are known to be carcinogenic. Eating heated seed oils is associated with increased risk of lung, colorectal, breast, and prostate cancers (Ganesan et al. 2019). This is one of Saladino’s principal concerns.

• Extraction of seed oils requires hexane. The oils cannot be economically cold-pressed out of the seed, it has to be chemical dissolved in the hexane solvent, and then distilled out of the hexane. The implication is that hexane residues will remain in the finished seed oil product (Schoss & Glavač 2024), even though the refining process does remove and recover the hexane.

• Many of the seeds from which seed oils are extracted for human consumption, like cotton and canola (rapeseed) are toxic. They have to be processed in factories to remove or destroy toxic components (Hudson 1980). Saladino has long made the point that seeds do not “want” to be eaten and digested by human beings, so they defend themselves against digestion so that even when they are eaten, they might pass thru the intestinal unscathed, and deposited elsewhere in feces where they will sprout into new plants. Nonetheless, detoxification technologies are several decades old and operate reliably (Hudson 1980).

• Peter Attia, MD recently appeared on a podcast with Layne Norton, PhD, and said he felt “insulted” by chefs who advertise on their menus that their restaurants are “seed oil free,” but neither Saladino, nor Norwitz, nor anyone else cares a whit about what might offend Attia.

• The counter argument to Saladino, as represented in part by Norwitz, is that seed oils are really that bad. When the seed oils are metabolized for energy, I think Norwitz is probably right. That is, when the seed oils are digested and oxidized via respiration into carbon dioxide and water, I doubt there’s a significant difference resulting from the subtle differences in chemical composition that distinguish seed oils, animal fats, and fruit oils (like olive or avocado oil, which are extracted from the edible mesocarp, or fruit body, not the seed).

Despite all the attention seed oils have received via social media, there’s still something that none of the medical doctors and scientists have described in detail, and that the object of this article.

Read more

• Cholesterol is essential to healthy human metabolism. About 80% of cholesterol in the bloodstream is synthesized in your liver, because the human body needs cholesterol and dietary sources are typically insufficient to maintain good health.

• People with high cholesterol levels typically live longer than those with low levels.

• Cholesterol is the substrate from which all sex hormones are synthesized in the mitochondria. When cholesterol gets too low, the shortage interferes with production of pregnenolone, and all other sex hormones including testosterone and estradiol, are downstream products of pregnenolone.

• Statins interfere with cholesterol metabolism, which is why statin use is associated with low testosterone.

• Testosterone promotes muscle growth and leaner body composition (i.e., less body fat). By contrast, white fat promotes conversion of testosterone to estradiol. Thus, low testosterone can result in a self-reinforcing feedback loop that increases white fat (at the expense of muscle), and the increased white fat further lowers testosterone.

• Low testosterone is associated with low muscle mass, which is how statins result in muscle atrophy.

Your personal physician, or favorite social media medical doctor, is probably wrong about the relationship between cholesterol and heart disease. It’s not the fraction of LDL, or very find particle LDL, or even ApoB, in your bloodstream that is associated with heart disease. It is the fraction of your cholesterol that is glycated.

Glycation happens during blood sugar spikes, when a glucose molecule attaches itself to some other molecule in the bloodstream. That attachment is irreversible, and changes the function of the molecule. In the case of cholesterol, glycation alters the function from beneficial to dangerous.

It is glycated cholesterol that is associated with heart disease, not LDL cholesterol.

While it’s true that smaller cholesterol molecules become glycated more readily than larger, it’s wrong to think that the smaller particles are responsible for heart disease. For example, a ketogenic diet will typically increase cholesterol of all types, but because keto keeps blood glucose and insulin low, the high cholesterol associated with a ketogenic diet is healthy, not dangerous. That’s why improving insulin sensitivity (to reduce blood sugar spikes) is more effective for reducing the risk of heart disease than taking statins.

What I didn’t do was explain enough about the effects of grounding on the mitochondria.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that mitochondria function relies on proper electrical charge. The whole purpose of the mitochondria is to move electrons. Respiration requires breaking carbon and hydrogen atoms out of glucose and fats to combine them with oxygen to form carbon dioxide and water. In the process, the carbon and hydrogen act as electron donors, the oxygen acts and an election acceptor, and energy for either the production of ATP or heat is liberated.

Charge balance across the mitochondrial membrane is essential for efficient respiration. That’s why mitochondria have to move protons (i.e., hydrogen ions) across the membrane, because the protons carry positive charge that balances out the movement of electrons. When working properly, the mitochondrial membrane will maintain whats called an electrical potential, which is a motive force for moving charge.

The problem is that the typical human body accumulates a deficit of electrical charge while being out of contact with the Earth. Synthetic materials in our shoes, our carpeting and floor coverings, and our automobiles insulate us from the ground, and thus separate us from the infinite source of electrons that is the Earth, resulting in charge imbalances in the body.

In the bloodstream, that charge imbalance causes red blood cells to agglomerate. Ordinarily, red blood cells carry a surface charge that creates a weak electrical repulsion that helps keep the blood cells apart. However, without grounding those surface charge layers compress and the red blood cells attach to one another. Blood viscosity increases, circulation decreases, and perfusion in tiny blood vessels (like capillaries) drops.

But I never really appreciated the fact that the mitochondria might also be affected.

A 2025 study from the University of California — Davis undertook a study of mitochondrial function under grounded and ungrounded conditions. Sure enough, they discovered that a lack of grounding altered the mitochondrial membrane potential, albeit only by about 5%.

Only 5% seems like a small change, and it’s easy to overlook, until the authors of the study explain:

Although the decrease was ~5–6% and could be considered a minor biological impact, it is necessary to remember that the proton leak rates in mammalian mitochondria increase exponentially with membrane potential.

- Giulivi & Kotz 2025

They reported that under grounded conditions, mitochondria produced significantly more ATP (by 5–11%) and 22-33% less reactive oxygen species (ROS).

Recall that it is the ROS that damage mitochondrial DNA.

A little bit of ROS can be a good thing, because it signals mitobiogenesis — i.e., the production of new mitochondria. However, when ROS excess ROS production is incessant, and the mitochondria never get a respite from the stress, mDNA suffers. Over decades, chronic ROS stress results in accelerated aging, and all the chronic illnesses associated with it.

The implication is that grounding your body relieves that ROS stress, boosts mitochondrial function, and slows what would otherwise be an inexorable decline into mitochondrial dysfunction.

References

• Giulivi C, Kotz R. Earthing effects on mitochondrial function: ATP production and ROS generation. FEBS Open Bio. 2025.

You can watch our podcast and read more about our views regarding insulin on the Morozko Ben Bikman page.

But there’s a hormone that Bikman and I never explained. It’s called myostatin.

Just like insulin regulates fat growth, myostatin regulates muscle growth. When myostatin is too high, it inhibits the growth of muscles. When myostatin is low, caloric energy is directed into growing more muscle.

Calories only represent total energy. They tell you nothing about where that energy goes in the body. It’s insulin and myostatin that allocate that energy to different components in the body.

Most people want more muscle and less fat, which means they need lower insulin and lower myostatin levels.

They question is, “How?”

For middle-aged men, researchers in Poland have found an answer. When they studied the effects of whole body cryotherapy (WBC) on a cohort of men averaging 51 years old, they discovered that 10 sessions reduced both insulin and myostatin.

It’s likely that these men suffered from some degree of insulin resistance, like most men living in modern industrialized countries do at their age. So the study doesn’t say what WBC might do for healthy men. However, for those suffered from metabolic dysfunction, it’s perhaps unsurprising to learn that high insulin is also associated with high myostatin. Because deliberate cold exposure stimulates mitobiogenesis, reduces insulin resistance and allows insulin levels to come down, it probably makes sense that myostatin would come down at the same time.

In the older cohort, the cold dropped myostatin by about 30%, lowering it to levels comparable to younger men. In this way, cold acts like an elixir that restores youthful hormone levels — without exercise.

It was only about 15 years ago that cancer scientists “discovered” brown fat (adipose tissue) in adult human beings. Doctors always new that babies and young children had brown fat for cold thermogenesis, but they believed that it was all lost in adulthood.

It turns out that was a popular misconception.

Brown fat exists in adults who are regularly exposed to cold. That’s one of the important functions of brown fat — to produce heat that defends core body temperature in the cold.

And heat is also called far-infrared light. That is, radiant heat exists on the light spectrum in a wavelength range of thousands of nanometers.

So now we know that there’s such a thing called brown fat, and we know that mitochondria in that brown fat produce light during cold thermogenesis.

Not all of that light is heat. Some of it is in the shorter wavelength bands known as ultraviolet B (UVB) — about 300nm — which is the wavelength responsible for photosynthesis of previtamin D from cholesterol.

Now here’s the revelation that should have been obvious.

The light produced by mitochondria are called ultraweak biophotons and they’ve been observed in every living system ever studied. They’re called ultraweak because they’re so hard to observe from outside the body. But inside the body, the light is intense, because the cholesterol is so close to the source of the light..

Internal Vitamin D from biophotons emitted by mitochondria helps explain how populations at extreme latitudes maintain good health and immune function during long, dark winters despite a lack of sunlight. My ancestors were among those living at those latitudes. Although the Seagers are recently from New England in the United States, they descended from the Puritans of England and the Netherlands.

In other words, my ancient ancestors lived in the cold and I don’t think they kept themselves healthy by eating baby seal blubber (or something). Although seafood was no doubt an essential source of sustenance during the dark, gray winters around the North Sea, the importance of vitamin D available in food has probably been exaggerated.

It’s only under modern conditions, including central heat, that my body might be subject to deficiencies of Vitamin D.

And that’s exactly what happened to my son.

Born in northern NY in the Fall, I’m convinced that he didn’t get enough sun or cold exposure as a baby, and as a consequence suffered from Vitamin D deficiency that caused his Type 1 diabetes at the age of six. T1D is an autoimmune disorder, and every autoimmune disorder is associated with irregularities of Vitamin D metabolism — because Vitamin D is essential for the proper development of the immune system during the first year of life.

Had I the courage to bring my son out into the winter cold while he was a baby, maybe the cold would have boosted his mitochondrial activity, increased biophoton production, and triggered Vitamin D synthesis right where it’s stored — in his fat cells.

A lot of people criticize me for this hypothesis and they say “Cold can’t make Vitamin D!”

They’re wrong.

In a recent Polish study, women with multiple sclerosis (another autoimmune disorder) saw about a 30% increase in serum Vitamin D after sessions cryotherapy session. A control group of women without MS experience just an 8% boost — not enough for statistical significance, but a boost nonetheless.

It may be that in the women with MS, the Vitamin D was released from brown fat cells into the bloodstream because it was badly needed elsewhere in the body, whereas in the healthy controls more of the Vitamin D stayed stored in the fat cells. That’s something we don’t yet know.

Nonetheless, as I reflect back on the way mitochondria work, how physics works, and how Vitamin D is synthesized, the fact that mitochondrial cold thermogenesis produces Vitamin D inside brown fat cells seems obvious.

https://www.morozkoforge.com/post/cold-biophoton-vitamin-d

I think that’s probably an oversimplification, because calories is not the most important thing about food.

The Calories-In-Calories-Out (CICO) hypothesis for weight loss turns out to be predicated on a false thermodynamic understanding of the human body.

The word calorie was created by French engineers working on steam engines. The problem is that people are much more complex than steam engines! While an understanding of thermodynamics has evolved in engineering and physics, in human nutrition it’s still stuck in the 19th century.

When the term entropy was first invented, it was only related to problems of heat transfer, because steam engines are heat engines and that was they were the principal engineering problem to solve at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Later, the concept of entropy was reformulated for problems of mass transfer so it could be applied to chemistry and chemical engineering. Finally, entropy was reformulated again as information transfer, so it could be applied to computing.

To understand the thermodynamics of life, we must work backwards through the chronology of entropy.

Food is information first. The most important thing about food is how it signals hormones like insulin and myostatin, leptin and grehlin, to control body composition and appetite.

Food is material second. That is, the second most important thing about food is how it forms the chemical building blocks of essential components of the human body like the brain (fatty acids), cell membranes (phospholipids), and collagen (proteins). Only when you feed your body high quality fats and amino acids can your body produce high quality components.

The least important thing about food is its energy content, or calories — even though that’s the most conspicuous thing about every nutrition label in the United States!

First as a doctoral student and then as an engineering Professor, I’ve spent decades working on the thermodynamics of living systems.

I finally recorded this video that explains how I teach The Thermodynamics of Life to mt students at Arizona State University.

I chose the title Uncommon Cold for my first book as something of an inside joke. My editor and I had been censored and ridiculed for opposing the COVID lockdowns. I’d lost a lot of friends, survived attempts to get me fired from my faculty job at Arizona State University (ASU), and felt lucky to have been approved for a religious exemption from the vaccine that was killing young people.

And over what?

A viral infection so common that seemed indistinguishable from a bad cold.

I suppose I should be careful about what I say here, because I’ve never had COVID. I’ve been tested nine times, all negative.

Seven of those tests were required by ASU, despite the fact that the classrooms were closed and teaching was all online. They still required me to spit into a vial, drop it off without leaving my car, and wait for some PCR repeater to tell me whether their was enough coronavirus DNA in my spit to require me to… stay at home?

The first blood antibody test I did out of curiosity. The second one I did because I was hoping that if I could prove antibodies were in my blood, maybe I would be excused from the vaxx, because obviously there was no point in vaccinated people who already had antibodies, right?

I was an idiot.

As it turned out, I neither had antibodies, nor would I have been exempt from Biden’s vaxx mandate if I did have antibodies.

I held out from getting the vaccine as long as I could. I got regular, threatening emails from ASU and I ignored them as the deadline approached until finally at the last minute I applied for my religious exemption.

A few days later, I got a call from some anonymous person presumably in Human Resources who said “Professor Seager, we have your application and we have just one question, ‘Do your religious views prohibit you from taking ALL vaccines? Or do they apply to just the COVID vaccine?’ “

By then, I’d already read Dissolving Illusions book — because told me too. I didn’t know much about vaccine science and I’d never seen the data, but Del Bigtree asked me and my Editor to have dinner with Siri and listen to what he had to say about the total failure of studies to demonstrate vaccine safety. Siri recommended Humphries’ book, and that convinced me that what I really wanted from ASU was a science exemption from the vaxx, but that wasn’t being offered.

“All vaccines,” I told the caller.

I was approved.

Obviously, COVID was more than just the common cold — not because of the virus so much, but because of the authoritative political response. You might say that COVID was an “uncommon” cold.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLM) Search Engines

During the COVID lockdowns, government censorship of social media platforms sought to silence opposition, obfuscate data, and persuade people not to ask reasonable questions like “How can tying a T-shirt around my face possibly protect me from catching a cold?” My own work showing that COVID had been in community spread since at least Fall 2019 was censored as “dangerous medical misinformation” and I lost a lot of faculty friends.

One of the consequences is that now, regardless of their political views, most people are now understandably skeptical of any government institution that is supposedly charged with protecting public health, because it’s clear that leadership at official government agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) lied about COVID and the policies promulgated in response to it. What’s more, we know that they required the big platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google to do the dirty work of censorship and publishing propaganda.

At the time of the lockdowns, there was no ChatGPT, no Grok, no Claude, no Perplexity — there were no artificial intelligence (AI) large language models (LLM) to scour the internet and report health information. Now there are.

What’s amazing is that the same people who mistrust the government health officials and realize how dangerous the major social media platforms can be when it comes to information on public health are often the same people who think they can get good information from the AI LLMs developed by many of the same organizations guilty of scientific censorship during the COVID lockdowns. That is, they understandably don’t trust their government, but they do trust… Grok.

has published a new substack cautioning readers to remain skeptical of LLM search results. He wrote:

All of the AIs that I queried denied lying or obfuscating. Yet many studies have shown that they do. Particularly, when it comes to health information.

A 2025 study found that leading AI models like GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Llama 3.2-90B Vision, Grok Beta, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet can be easily set up to produce false yet convincing health information, complete with fake citations from reputable journals. Interestingly, Claude stood out by consistently refusing to generate inaccurate answers, which shows how effective stronger safeguards can be.

Dr. Malone has been a staunch advocate of the MAHA movement and a huge supporter of HHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya. Yet, even he would not deny that the MAHA report from late May 2025 was generated from AI LLMs, complete with phony citations. The fact is that AI LLMs will cheat to keep their users clicking. The LLMs will tell you the things you want to hear, even if they have to make them up.

At best, the current AI LLM tools are averaging engines. They scour Reddit and PubMed and whatever else they might be trained on, average out all everything they can find online and then report to you what’s understood to be common knowledge.

The problem is that, when it comes to health information, it’s all too common to be sick.

You don’t want what’s common. You don’t want to have average health, because that means you’ll be on three (or more) different prescription medicines, suffer from chronic illness originating in metabolic disorder, and descend into a tragic state of dementia while your children pray that whatever you saved for your retirement is sufficient to to provide for the home nursing care for the rest of what is sure to be your shortened life.

When it comes to health information, it is better to be uncommon.

If you’re considering purchasing a cold plunge, you must educate yourself before you fall for one of the many deceptive marketing practices that pervade the industry. In this summary, I list the five biggest rip-off techniques that unscrupulous vendors in the industry use to trick you into buying their products.

1. Deceptive Warranty Exclusions. Reading the fine print on cold plunge company terms and conditions reveal extraordinary warranty exclusions. Some companies begin the warranty period when you place your order instead of when you receive your equipment weeks later, effectively trimming the warranty period without allowing the customer to enjoy the benefit of the product. One company shows their cold plunge in an attractive, outdoor winter setting, forgetting to mention that installation of the cold plunge outdoors will void the warranty. In other words, they advertise for conditions they don’t warranty for. Almost all companies except Morozko exclude labor costs from their warranty liability, which means they might mail a customer a replacement for a defective part, but require the customer to find a plumber or electrician to install it at the customer’s expense.

2. All-in-One Chillers. When the chiller and the filter are on the same water circuit, a dirty filter can cause failure of the chiller. Then, when you call the cold plunge company to report the defective chiller, they’ll tell you that you voided your warranty by failing to change your filter often enough.

3. Violations of Thermodynamics. Sometimes you’ll see an ad bragging that their cold plunge cools water down to 28F, which is four degrees below freezing. These companies don’t understand how water freezes, and they’re betting that you don’t, either.

4. Alibaba rebrands. The most popular cold plunge companies in the United States all source from the same Chinese manufacturer, ambohr.com, because Ambohr will put any logo any customer wants on any equipment and allow other businesses to resell it as their own brand—as long as Ambohr has no responsibility for servicing or warrantying it.

5. Limited Time Offer Rip-offs. The biggest cold plunge company in the US right now is Plunge, so maybe it’s no accident that they’ve been targeted by lawyers recruiting customers who fell for a “limited-time discount” that was in fact, available to everyone all the time. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulates these types of sales, and prohibits companies from advertising discounts as temporary, when in fact they are offered every day. In other words, when a company uses “limited time” offers all the time, they’re breaking the FTC regulations. Plunge is not the only offender, they’re just the largest.

Get the Warranty Report

My staff and I at the Morozko ice bath company have assembled a 26-page report detailing the deceptive marketing practices and warranty exclusions extant in the high-end cold plunge equipment business.

You can read my full article, and download the full report at this link:

https://www.morozkoforge.com/post/cold-plunge-warranty-report

Every oxidation reaction requires the transfer of electrons from one atomic orbital to another. When that oxidation takes place in the mitochondria, we call it respiration.

Ordinarily, mitochondria oxidize triglycerides or glucose to produce an energy carrier called ATP, but brown fat cells short-circuit the process of ATP production and release the energy of oxidation in the form of energy, rather than in ATP. Most of that energy is in the form of heat that drives thermogenesis. That is, when your body is exposed to cold, respiration in the mitochondria of brown fat cells produces heat to defend core body temperature and maintain thermal homeostasis. The world record for immersion up to the neck in ice cubes is over four hours.

It’s amazing how much thermal stress the body can withstand.

Most people understand that heat, at least at normal temperatures, is equivalent to the expression of infrared radiation. That is, a body that releases heat at temperatures close to 100F is emitting near-infrared and infrared (IR) light.

With this understanding, it seems obvious that thermogenesis produces light, and the fact is that infrared cameras can be used to detect active brown fat when it is located near the skin. The idea that life produces light part of the spectrum we call heat is non-controversial.

What people seem to have a hard time accepting is that mitochondrial respiration also produces light in other parts of the spectrum. Why this is difficult to accept is a bit of a mystery to me.

Chemistry of Light

When I was in High School chemistry, our teacher conducted a lab demonstration in oxidizing metals. He showed us how every metal burns a different color.

Burning barium makes green light. Burning cobalt makes blue. Magnesium is bright white, while sodium is orange, and so on.

Every oxidation reaction has a unique radiative signature. Some of that radiation is in the visible spectrum, and so we perceive it as different colors, but some of that is in the IR (heat), and some is in the ultraviolet (UV) part of the spectrum.

When the oxidation happens inside the body, the light produced by mitochondria are called biophotons. Most of those biophotons are expressed in the IR spectrum, but some are expressed as UV.

UV radiation is invisible, but biologically very important. In particular UVB radiation, which is defined as a light with a wavelength close to 300nm is important for the synthesis of Vitamin D from cholesterol.

When UVB radiation emitted by the mitochondria in active brown fat strikes a cholesterol molecule, it breaks open a carbon bond, converting the cholesterol into previtamin D. This happens inside the brown fat cell, rather than in skin cells exposed to sunshine, which is the route of Vitamin D synthesis with which we are most familiar.

Cold Makes Vitamin D

Once you realize that cold activates thermogenic respiration in mitochondria, and that makes biophotons inside brown fat cells, that some of those biophotons are in the UVB range, you must also realize that cold exposure stimulates production of Vitamin D.

I first wrote about this in an article for Morozko Forge in an article called Could Cold Compensate for Vitamin D Insufficiency? At the time I first published it, a number of people wanted to know if there were any studies showing an increase in blood serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which is the form usually reported on a standard Vitamin D lab.

I hypothesized that because the Vitamin D was synthesized in a fat cell, instead of skin, and it is fat soluble, then there’s no need for it to be released into the blood stream until it is called for somewhere in the body. That is, fat-soluble Vitamin D that is synthesized inside an active brown fat cell should not really be detectable in the bloodstream, because it would be stored in the fat.

Since I first published that article, a study in Poland has reported increased blood serum levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D in patients with multiple sclerosis who were exposed to frigid air cryotherapy (Ptaszek et al, 2025). While the study didn’t mention a mechanism and never referenced biophotons, it is an extraordinary findings that supports the realization that cold activation of brown fat will produce Vitamin D inside the body the compensates for a lack of sunshine during winter at latitudes far from the equator.

References

• Ptaszek B, Podsiadło S, Czerwińska-Ledwig O, Teległów A. Whole-Body Cryotherapy Affects Blood Vitamin D Levels in People with Multiple Sclerosis. Journal of Clinical Medicine. 2025 Apr 29;14(9):3086.

Most medical doctors are paid to write prescriptions, not help you address the cause of chronic illness. They aren’t going to tell you why your testosterone is low, never mind how to restore it to healthy levels without drugs. Medical doctors make more money from writing prescriptions than they do from healing patients, and so do the pharmaceutical companies that write the medical textbooks and underwrite MD education.

Before you sign up for a lifetime of testosterone replacement therapy, you must educate yourself. These are three things you need to know:

1. Sex hormones are synthesized from cholesterol

In my article Do Ice Baths Increase Testosterone, I shared data that shows how low cholesterol can negatively impact testosterone levels. In fact, the higher HDL (good cholesterol) goes, the higher goes testosterone. Even LDL cholesterol (so called “bad” cholesterol) is associated with higher levels of sex hormone.

It makes sense, because cholesterol is the building block of all sex hormone synthesis.

2. Testosterone originates inside mitochondria

All sex hormone synthesis originates in the inner mitochondrial membrane, where an enzyme called P450scc cleaves a hydrocarbon chain from cholesterol to form a sex steroid called pregnenolone, from which all other sex hormones are metabolized. That means same cholesterol your physician (erroneously) says will kill you is what your body uses to make testosterone.

Moreover, P450scc absorbs light.

Why would an enzyme that acts inside the mitochondria respond to a blue wavelength of light that can never reach that far inside the body? Because the blue light that energizes P450scc is coming from inside the body. It is produced by the mitochondria itself.

The implications of this understanding are massive.

To maintain high sex hormone levels as you age, you must have high levels of LDL cholesterol and healthy, active mitochondria. Cold plunge therapy not only stimulates mitobiogenesis for production of new mitochondria, but also creates light -- e.g., inside brown adipose tissue (BAT) -- that energize the enzymes responsible for steroidogenesis.

3. Mitochondria require minerals

Mitochondria make enzymes that are essential for metabolic function, and they rely on two minerals in particular: magnesium and zinc. In my article How to Boost Testosterone: Cold Plunge Protocols, I described the essential role of each:

Zinc is involved in over a hundred enzymatic reactions within the body, including synthesis of testosterone, metabolism of thyroid hormones, and formation of insulin. Zinc is essential for male fertility, and several studies show that zinc deficiency is associated with low testosterone. Correcting zinc deficiencies with supplements can boost testosterone levels (Te et al. 2023). Most zinc within the body is found in skeletal muscle and bone. However, because zinc cannot be stored in the body in significant quantities, it must be replenished regularly through diet. Zinc leaves the body through the feces, urine, sweat, menstrual flow, and semen. Therefore, men who ejaculate often should probably increase zinc supplementation to replenish that which is being lost.

Magnesium deficiencies are associated with low testosterone. Like zinc, magnesium is an essential mineral that can only be obtained through diet and supplementation, and it is responsible for a variety of conditions affecting sexual function including heart health, blood flow, and energy vs. fatigue. Up to 15% of the male population presents magnesium deficiencies linked to poor diet, so magnesium is often included in testosterone-boosting products and supplement stacks. It is also vital to support good mitochondrial health and metabolism which is often degraded by the aging process itself, so magnesium’s role in testosterone production is at least fundamental to maintaining the health of the cells that produce testosterone.

What to do before taking testosterone

I’ve heard from dozens of men and women from all over the world who have adopted a regular practice of cold plunge therapy and measured big boosts in their blood serum testosterone. They all followed the same practice of short, cold, ice baths followed by a little bit of exercise to rewarm.

They also typically ensured they were getting enough mineral in their diet and protecting their sleep cycle, because that’s when testosterone is made—while you are sleeping.

Here’s some things you can try before testosterone replacement therapy:

• Discontinue statins, or any other meds that reduce your cholesterol or interfere with testosterone.

• Add a magnesium supplement, as magnesium chloride, glycinate, or citrate.

• Test your blood serum for zinc, and add a zinc supplement if you test below average.

• Sleep in darkness, at least eight hours a night.

• Minimize seed oils in your diet. They interfere with cell and mitochondrial membrane function.

• Begin a regular practice of cold plunge therapy, to stimulate mitobiogensis.

To learn more, visit the Morozko Testosterone page.

References

• Lee JH, Jung HD, Choi JD, Kang JY, Yoo TK, Park YW. Non‐linear association between testosterone and LDL concentrations in men. Andrology. 2023 Sep;11(6):1107-13.

• Te L, Liu J, Ma J, Wang S. Correlation between serum zinc and testosterone: A systematic review. Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology. 2023 Mar 1;76:127124.

His culinary instincts were spot-on. Here’s the full interview about what foods you might serve at a healthy holiday ice bath party:

Ginger and green tea

Chef Belew explained that spicy foods contain capsaicin, which is the chemical that makes them feel “hot” in our mouth. It turns out that capsaicin and other chemicals in food can also activate brown fat, causing it to produce heat. In this way, “hot” foods are just spicy, they’re also thermogenic (Saito 2015). Capsaicin causes an increase in energy expenditure that can shrink white fat cells, reduces inflammation, and is already approved as a treatment for neuropathic pain (Silva et al. 2023). In other words, hot chili peppers mimic many of the same effects that ice baths do.

Ginger and green tea are also thermogenic, albeit not because of capsaicin. Over a decade ago, researchers at Columbia University in New York City compared the effects of a powdered ginger tea with breakfast to zero-ginger controls. They found that drinking ginger tea with breakfast increased energy expenditure and curbed appetite among obese middle-age men (Mansour et al. 2012). Since then, researchers in Turkey investigated the effect of a ginger-green tea supplement on active men exercising in the cold. They found that “in cold conditions, combined supplementation significantly enhanced time to exhaustion, reduced respiratory exchange rate, and improved thermal sensation.” Ginger alone also improved thermal sensation and reduced muscle soreness, but only for the group that exercised in the cold (Demirli et al. 2025). Ginger in a warm environment had no benefit for exercise.

Cinnamon may be a metabolic miracle

Cinnamon may be even more powerful for mitochondria. In mice exposed to intermittent cold, administering cinnamon extract activated brown fat, metabolized white fat for thermogenesis, and improved mitochondrial function, compared to controls (Li et al. 2021). Specifically, cinnamon improved cold tolerance in the mice by increasing fat metabolism. Similar findings using pepper and cinnamon were found in rats (Pandit et al. 2018).

In humans, cinnamon is believed to have medicinal properties related to the action of insulin. That is, cinnamon improves insulin sensitivity, which ameliorates all the adverse health impacts of insulin resistance, including cancer, diabetes, dementia, and obesity (Błaszczyk et al. 2021).

References

• Błaszczyk N, Rosiak A, Kałużna-Czaplińska J. The potential role of cinnamon in human health. Forests. 2021 May 20;12(5):648.

• Demirli A, Ulupınar S, Terzi M, Özbay S, Özkara AB, Gençoğlu C, Ouergui I, Ardigò LP. Synergistic Effects of Green Tea Extract and Ginger Supplementation on Endurance Performance and Thermal Perception in Normothermic and Cold Environments: A Randomized, Placebo-Controlled, Double-Blind Crossover Trial. Nutrients. 2025 Sep 13;17(18):2949.

• Mansour MS, Ni YM, Roberts AL, Kelleman M, RoyChoudhury A, St-Onge MP. Ginger consumption enhances the thermic effect of food and promotes feelings of satiety without affecting metabolic and hormonal parameters in overweight men: a pilot study. Metabolism. 2012 Oct 1;61(10):1347-52.

• Saito M. Capsaicin and related food ingredients reducing body fat through the activation of TRP and brown fat thermogenesis. Advances in Food and Nutrition Research. 2015 Jan 1;76:1-28.

• Silva JL, Santos EA, Alvarez-Leite JI. Are we ready to recommend capsaicin for disorders other than neuropathic pain?. Nutrients. 2023 Oct 21;15(20):4469.

• Li X, Lu HY, Jiang XW, Yang Y, Xing B, Yao D, Wu Q, Xu ZH, Zhao QC. Cinnamomum cassia extract promotes thermogenesis during exposure to cold via activation of brown adipose tissue. Journal of Ethnopharmacology. 2021 Feb 10;266:113413.

• Pandit C, Sai Latha S, Usha Rani T, Anilakumar KR. Pepper and cinnamon improve cold induced cognitive impairment via increasing non-shivering thermogenesis; a study. International Journal of Hyperthermia. 2018 Dec 31;35(1):518-27.

Think about it:

• Halloween is a wonderful, neighborly tradition, but it’s not good for any metabolism at any age.

• Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday. It comes on a Thursday (for a four-day weekend) and steeped in secular, communal, and family tradition. Nevertheless, the leftovers on Friday are my metabolic nemesis.

• Three weeks of holiday cookie parties leading up to Christmas is sure to put a dent in anybody’s blood glucose, culminating in a repeat of Thanksgiving gluttony that is enough to polish off any remaining semblance of insulin sensitivity.

• Finally, New Year’s Eve, in which tradition turns everyone into what seems like an amateur alcoholic culminates in a morning of empty Resolutions designed to melt away two months of regret and shame.

The answer might be an ice bath party.

In some communities with a strong Scandinavian heritage, like Minnesota, or some communities in Chicago, there’s already a tradition of polar bear plunging on New Year’s Day. The cold water shock restores some insulin sensitivity and might help shake off a hangover from the night before. But there’s no reason to wait for the calendar to turn before starting healthier habits.

Consider inviting your neighbors and friends over to partake in a communal cold plunge. Pick a fine, sunny winter day when you can rewarm together with some light exercise. Drink tea with ginger (thermogenic) and cinnamon (improves insulin sensitivity) sweetened with just a little bit of honey (minimizes blood glucose spikes). Serve high-protein snacks with tuna or steak tartar, flavored with wasabi, and horseradish.

We sometimes call spicy foods “hot,” even when they’re served cold. It turns out that these foods are warming. By activating brown fat, they boost metabolism and warm the body, causes an internal sensation of heat—and not just on the tongue.

While the next two months of holiday traditions seem designed to give you diabetes, you might find that incorporating an ice bath party into your social calendar will support your metabolic health in ways that minimize 2026 regrets, and give you a head start of you fitness goals for the New Year.