Three Possible Pathways to Poorer Health

Exposure to too much artificial light, even seemingly small amounts of stray streetlight filtering into our bedrooms around curtains during the night, makes us vulnerable to illness in three potential ways, if not more – the evidence strongly suggests at least three main possible pathways to chronic health problems from excess light exposure. These three pathways are 1) Metabolic dysfunction – probably proceeding from mitochondrial dysfunction limiting the ATP energy actually available to perform all bodily and cellular functions, 2) Autoimmune and immune dysfunction due to the disruption and foreshortening of nightly immune and autoimmune cycles and/or too much unrepaired microscopic damage which may be confusing the immune and autoimmune systems and 3) Collagen malformation, that is, defects or weakness in the glue which goes in between our cells and holds them together, thus making our bodies, organs, heart and blood vessels weaker and more vulnerable to damage. This last pathway in particular may be secondary to the first causal pathway mentioned, mitochondrial insufficiency, wholly or partly. Let's look at these at least briefly, one at a time. However, note that this doesn't exhaust the many ways in which light can harm us, since literally everything our bodies do takes energy – from the expression of genes (thus blocking the creation of necessary proteins, enzymes, etc), to DNA repair (which if not done could lead to cancer), and on and on.