The Light Doctor – by Dr. Martin Moore-Ede

We (health-conscious people, at least) tend to think a lot about what we eat, what we drink, how we exercise, how we sleep, maybe even what kind of air we breathe.

It’s less common to think much about what kind of light we see, beyond perhaps a general idea that when it is bedtime, maybe the bright screen with all the information in the world (and also everyone we know) is not what will lull us peacefully to sleep.

Dr. Moore-Ede was a surgeon who, after letting a retractor slip during surgery after a year of 36-hour shifts, hung up his MD life and went back to Harvard to do a PhD on the topic of the woes of circadian rhythm disruption.

40 years later, he’s become one of the world’s leading figures in that field (perhaps we could say “luminary”?) and in this book, he brings to us the distilled essence of that learning in its most practical form.

One of the biggest problems, he argues, is lighting that has been optimized for cheapness of production, rather than for health. His preferred solution is (expensive!) lighting that switches between blue-rich white light during the day, to blue-depleted light in the evening, but for those not springing for that, there are sensible workarounds, he does give us the rundown of various kinds of lighting, since not every “energy-efficient lightbulb” is the same technology, and some are much better/worse for general health than others, in various ways, which he describes in detail.

The style is a little sensationalist for this reviewer’s tastes, but informationally there’s a lot in here to make it worthwhile, and as you might expect, there’s a lot of science and a reassuringly extensive bibliography.

Bottom line: this book will help guide you through kitting out your life with lighting that will promote good health rather than drain it.

Click here to check out The Light Doctor, and see your life in a different light!