Health Viewpoints

Chemicals and radiation aren’t likely something you’d think would be essential to your health. That’s because these words conjure the modern industrial versions of chemicals and radiation, rather than their original, organic, life-giving natures.

Nearly everything is a chemical, which is just a stable form of matter. Gold is a chemical element, water is a chemical compound. And radiation is simply waves of energy or particles. Sound is a kind of acoustic radiation while sunlight is a form of electromagnetic radiation.

Everyone readily acknowledges that we need natural chemicals to survive, things like vitamins, minerals, oxygen, and so on, but fewer people acknowledge the importance of natural radiation.

Organic Radiation

Life on this planet is created from the energy delivered from the sun, particularly infrared, visible light, and ultraviolet.

Ultraviolet, being blamed for skin cancer, gets a bad rap these days, though the science supporting that claim is dynamic, complex, and fraught with controversy. Sunlight may increase skin cancer, but it also decreases other cancers, for example.

Ultraviolet is what our skin converts to vitamin D, an anti-inflammatory, antioxidant hormone critical for the immune system, muscles, bones, and brain.

“Multiple studies show that vitamin D has a host of roles across multiple processes and organs. Most cells have a specific receptor for vitamin D, and when the vitamin D molecule binds to its receptor, it can activate about 2,000 genes in the body,” reports Epoch Times health reporter Marina Zhang.

Vitamin D is now being explored as a treatment for everything from asthma to Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis.

Radiation Supplements

Most people know that plants “eat” sunlight, converting it to energy through the chlorophyll that lends them their green hue, but fewer people know that humans do something very similar.

Our cells absorb red and near-infrared light as well, and doing so “enhances mitochondrial ATP [adenosine triphosphate] production, cell signaling, and growth factor synthesis, and attenuates oxidative stress,” notes a research review published in Aesthetic Surgery Journal in 2021.

Researchers are now studying this effect for treating everything from acne to inflammation to Alzheimer’s by deploying red and near infrared light in a form of treatment most commonly known as photobiomodulation. Two of the articles below give details illuminating the breakdown of the science and practices involved.

Infrared isn’t the only radiation being used. NASA has developed a device that uses pulsed electromagnetic frequencies (PEMF) to treat injuries, promising that their “pulsed electromagnetic field device can restore life to damaged joints.”

Pulsed electromagnetic frequencies, or PEMF “is a type of energy medicine that directs pulsed magnetic fields toward the body to optimize cellular function and stimulate the body’s innate healing capabilities,” reports Epoch Times health reporter Emma Suttie.

PEMF devices are currently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use on non-union fractures and more.

Industrial Radiation

While there are clear benefits to some forms of radiation, especially those that are naturally occurring and essential to human survival, other forms of radiation are notably toxic, including the helpful forms we use to carry cat videos to our cell phones.

So why is one form of radiation therapeutic and another not? In the terms of physicists, it has to do with radioactivity, frequencies, and the like, but a metaphor may be helpful because the lesson of radiation is the lesson of adulteration.

Just as a cob of corn is life-giving, the same constituent chemicals in that corn can become disease-causing when they are extracted, concentrated, and reformulated in the dozens of derivatives—including high fructose corn syrup—found in processed food. Modern humans have become so good with chemistry and manipulating molecules that we’ve managed to turn produce into poison. Thankfully, it’s a problem more people are recognizing and refuting with their preference for natural products.