People think they need food for energy, but they don’t.
You may have heard of “Breatharians”, a movement that believes humans can live on air and sunlight, or prana, and either very little food or water, or even none at all. Nicolas Pilartz, a prominent breatharian, claims he only needs sunlight, water, and one meal per week. Other breatharians, like Akahi Ricardo and Camila Castello, believe that food and water are not necessary at all and that humans can be sustained solely by the energy of the universe.
This may sound like a flight of fancy, but sometimes reality turns out to be stranger than any fiction.
We now know for a scientific fact that humans can make energy from just light and water (I’ll explain how shortly so hang in there).
Admittedly food is still necessary (as far as we know!) for building materials like amino acids and carbon. But you don’t need nearly as much of these building blocks as you think you do (our bodies are masterful at maintenance and recycling).
This is not to say you can’t use food for energy. You can, and do, especially if you don’t get enough sunlight. But when you do get enough sunlight your body appropriately inhibits your appetite to the point where you’re using food as it’s meant to be used. Not so much as energy, but as information and raw material.
To best harness as much energy as you can from sunlight and water you need a tan, i.e. you need melanin in your skin.
Now an important caveat. Every locale provides what humans need for optimal health. If you live in Northern Europe you don’t need as much sun as someone who lives in Africa. It’s not complicated, you just need to get yourself outside as often as possible, expose yourself to the seasonal variations in temperature, e.g. get cold adapted in the winters and heat adapted in the summers, eat local and seasonal, wake and sleep with the sun. But if you’re of Northern European descent in the tropics, you’re not going to be optimally healthy without getting yourself a tan.
Safely Getting Tan
I know some people think they can’t get tan. They’re wrong. They just aren’t doing it right. Even for Fitzpatrick I skin types who have been told from the time they were toddlers that they had to lather on three layers of sunscreen every time they stepped outside.
First of all if you’re lily white and burn when you even think of the sun, you will have to work up to it. Second of all you can’t just get UV-B midday. What you’ve been told ad nauseum has an element of truth in it. UV-B will burn you. What they don’t tell you is that the other “photobiomodulating” anti-inflammatory wavelengths of light (UV-A, NIR and IR) that are more concentrated in the early morning and late afternoon sun will both protect from damage and heal any that occurs.
Exposing skin and unshielded eyes (no glasses or contacts) to morning sunlight, which is rich in UV-A, IR, and NIR and lacks significant amounts of UV-B light, helps build what’s been termed a “solar callus” that helps the skin resist the harm of tanning UV-B rays later in the day (don’t worry it does not resemble an actual callus, it’s an invisible change).
Aside from non specific anti-inflammatory effects, the IR-A light also stimulates the production of filaggrin, a protein in the skin that enhances its protective barrier and ability to handle subsequent UV exposure. Filaggrin breakdown products, such as urocanic acid, also play a role in protecting the skin from UV damage by acting as a natural sunscreen by absorbing UV radiation and reducing harmful ROS (reactive oxygen species) formation.
Any time you get sunlight it’s important to expose not just the non-visual photoreceptors in your skin to the full spectrum, but also the visual and non-visual photoreceptors in your eyes too (no sunglasses, or contacts, and if there are intra-ocular lens implants that block UV, I would replace them with ones that don’t block anything if possible). That’s because your brain may be involved in the feedback loops that protect your skin from burning.
Midday, during high UV-B times, when you get to the point where you need to go inside your skin will release histidine and create some redness and flushing as a warning that you’re exceeding your threshold of resistance to the damaging effects of UV-B. Theoretically this warning sign may not occur if there are micmatching signals on your skin and in your brain, because the brain detects it has not yet received sufficient UV-B to stimulate it’s own critical processes that depend on that wavelength including wakefulness, mood regulation, emotional processing, and memory consolidation.
Nutritional Support for White Lilies
Avoid high PUFA (polyunsaturated fat) vegetable seed oils completely. You need saturated fat. PUFAs from seed oils are already oxidized (essentially rancid) to begin with due to their heavy processing. This makes them highly inflammatory and they will make you less resilient to UV-B exposure than if you have a good amount of saturated fats in your cell walls and the right amount of safe PUFAs from eating fatty fish that make it into your body undamaged (fish oils can also be damaged and become inflammatory during extraction).
Chitin, Iodine, and Carotenoids: The exoskeleton of shellfish is rich in chitin, iodine, and carotenoids. These compounds help build a solar callus by improving the skin’s ability to assimilate light and protect against blue light and UV damage. Carotenoids, such as astaxanthin, lutein, and zeaxanthin, are particularly important for their antioxidant properties and ability to quench inflammatory ROS.
Astaxanthin: This carotenoid acts as an "edible sunscreen" not only for the skin but also for the eyes (which are also protected by UV-A, IR and NIR) because of its antioxidant properties and ability to penetrate the blood-retinal barrier.
Even before you’ve got your nutrition squared away you can begin getting early morning and late afternoon sun. Aim for 30 minutes each. Then you can start slowly working on your midday sun exposure and a healthy tan.
Ditch the Sunscreen and Sunglasses
Finally in case you’re wondering, sunglasses and sunscreen that block UV-B are not safe. The underlying assumption behind the belief that they are necessary is that either evolution did a poor job, or God did. Without that basic assumption of error, scientists and doctors would look at fatally flawed research suggesting UV-B is harmful with a much more critical eye.
Nature isn’t so error prone. In fact it doesn’t make mistakes at all. Everything that’s there is there for good reason. What this means is that far from being harmful the sun and all of it’s wavelengths are necessary nutrients, signals and energies, both on your eyes and your skin.
POMC is an absolutely crucial precursor for the production of 12 hormones that regulate human immunity, metabolism, light seeking behavior, stress responses, pain tolerance, and melanocyte functions. Production of POMC requires the very same UV-B radiation from sunlight that dermatologists and PCPs love to hate.
So How Do You Make Energy From Water?
Once you have a tan, sunlight hits the melanin and the melanin, just like the chlorophyll in a plant, can separate water into hydrogen, oxygen and electrons. These are the essential fuels used by your mitochondria to produce the chemical energy in your body called ATP. You can get just the hydrogen and electrons from food, the electrons alone from grounding, and the oxygen alone from air, or you can get all 3 at once from sun and water by using the not so simple pigment melanin.
Sunlight also adds energy and efficiencies in other ways by structuring water and giving it quantum coherent domains, which store electromagnetic energy like biological batteries and allow quantum effects to persist at biological temperatures.
Both “4th-phase” structuring and quantum coherent domains (water molecules vibrating in unison) are necessary for ATP synthesis, protein synthesis and conformation, metabolic processes and enzyme activity, as well as blood flow, which happens spontaneously within the natural electromagnetic field of the planet due to these effects on water, even without the pumping activity of the heart (as shown in embryos with blood circulation before the heart begins pumping).
The Second Law of thermodynamics isn’t broken by anyone except those who assume the only calories you need are the ones you eat.
In fact you can’t eat enough calories to replace light.
The Unrealistic Energy Requirements of Life
“The energy provided by ATP hydrolysis is far less than what is required to maintain the myriad of cellular activities. This discrepancy suggests that there must be another source of energy or an overlooked mechanism that facilitates cellular functions” (Ling, G.N. A Revolution in the Physiology of the Living Cell).
If you don’t get enough light you just slowly start to whither away, things that should happen just don’t happen because there is not the energy or information or structure necessary to make them happen.
Trying to live without sunlight is like trying to live in a country that doesn’t invest in rehabbing its roads, bridges and other public infrastructure. Things don’t grind to a halt on day one, but I wouldn’t want to be using those bridges 50 years later.
To explain why we have to explore just a tiny bit more about quantum mechanics, light and water.
Light is Life
Quantum tunneling of protons is an effect used by your mitochondria to produce the chemical energy molecule ATP. Quantum tunneling means the proton can pass through an otherwise impenetrable barrier. It’s like throwing a ball at a solid brick wall and somehow the ball magically passes through it without breaking the wall.
Quantum effects like this are only seen in life at normal temperatures, they are not present at everyday temperatures in any inanimate object. They can be induced in non-living materials at extremely low temperatures and otherwise very highly controlled environments. Living systems have been shown to somehow maintain a highly controlled and coherent environment conducive to maintaining these miraculous-seeming quantum effects and utilizing them to do things that would otherwise be energetically and physically impossible.
Living systems are unbelievably advanced quantum biological information processors that take instructions from the internal and external environment and produce the appropriate effects to sustain life.
One crucial way living systems maintain coherent structure is by the effect of natural light on water. Light energy structures water and therefore all tissues, which are 50-70% water depending on age, in such a way as to allow quantum effects to occur.
Another truly incredible example of this in biology relates in a way to the traveling salesman problem of computer science: what is the most efficient route for a salesman to take between multiple stops? As the number of stops increases the problem becomes exponentially more difficult as the square of the number of cities, eventually becoming too difficult to be certain of the solution using normal methods. The best way to solve it rigorously would be with some kind of quantum computer that can travel all possible paths simultaneously and report back the best answer in one go.
Incredibly such a computer exists and it has existed for a couple billion years now. It’s called chlorophyll. The chlorophyll molecule is almost exactly the same as our own hemoglobin (which also absorbs light), the primary difference being the atom at it’s core is magnesium and our hemoglobin holds iron.
What chlorophyll does with electrons is more like solving a constantly changing maze than solving the traveling salesman problem, but the way in which it solves the maze on the first try every time would be capable of solving the traveling salesman problem if we could generalize the process.
Chlorophyll (quantum) magically allows light to travel every possible path simultaneously during photosynthesis, and then the one that goes fastest is what actually happens. It sounds bizarre and it is. Quantum effects don’t make sense to us, but they form the foundation of life. Meaning life itself is utterly miraculous at it’s very core compared to the way we conceive of reality.
The Miracle of Photosynthesis
The details of photosynthesis are worth briefly exploring. Chlorophyll molecules in plants absorb photons (light particles), which excite electrons to higher energy states. This energy needs to be transferred to a reaction center where it can be used to convert carbon dioxide and water into glucose (the plant starches we eat) and oxygen that we breathe.
Quantum coherence here refers to the phenomenon where particles such as electrons or photons exist in a superposition of states, allowing them to take multiple paths simultaneously. In the context of photosynthesis, it means that the excited electrons can explore all possible pathways through the chlorophyll network at once. This means that the energy transfer process can dynamically find the most efficient route at any given moment.
The cellular environment is subject to constant fluctuations in temperature, pH, and other factors. These changes can influence the most efficient pathway that energy takes through the chlorophyll network (think of a traveling salesman faced with constantly varying traffic, breakdowns, and road closures complicating the situation).
Because of the dynamic nature of the environment, the most efficient pathway for energy transfer is constantly changing. The quantum computing chlorophyll system continuously adapts to find the most efficient route in response to these changes.
Food is Information
Food is also information. It helps tell your body what to do (along with day/night and seasonal temperature cycles) and gives it the appropriate building blocks it needs to do it.
If it grows in the summer it contains information and molecules help you store more energy for the lean winter months, work harder during the longer days and sleep less during the short summer nights.
If it grows in the winter it helps you burn more energy to create more heat and sleep longer during the long winter nights.
Summer Foods: Foods that grow in summer, such as fruits and vegetables, are typically high in carbohydrates and water content. These foods provide quick energy and hydration, supporting higher activity levels and longer days. The increased carbohydrate intake can lead to increased insulin production, promoting the storage of energy in the forms of glycogen and fat. This storage is essential for preparing the body for the leaner winter months (in a natural context).
Winter Foods: Winter foods, like root vegetables and animal products, are often higher in fats and proteins. These nutrients support a higher metabolic rate necessary for generating body heat. They also promote longer sleep cycles, aligning with the longer nights of winter. The increased fat intake can enhance thermogenesis, helping the body maintain its temperature in colder climates.
Natural systems work optimally when they aren’t perturbed. Follow the rhythms of mother nature and you’l be healthy. Another way of looking at it if you believe God created the universe and everything in it is that He creates signs for you to tell you what to do.
Some of the signs are so obvious no one could miss them, and yet they do. For example a truly gigantic flaming ball of fire rising in the morning and filling the entire world with bright light is a pretty unmistakable sign that it’s time to rise and shine.
Other signs are more subtle at least for modern people who are so thoroughly disconnected from their natural environments. These include seasonal variations in foods.
But it pays to seek out the signs in Nature, because they tell you what you need to do if you want to survive and thrive.
Thank you for this essay. I like to sit in the early morning sun and read, but I need glasses to do that. It sounds like it might be better for mento ditch the glasses for these sessions?
Though this is true on an esoteric level, most people would have problems getting their bodies to tolerate little or no eating. Esoterically, the being (Spirit) is fully capable of keeping the body alive, even a biological body. It is also the ultimate source of growth and healing.
But I would be happy with a broader awareness that we are spiritual beings. Recovering our spiritual abilities is a process that more people should go through, but for most it will take more than just more sun or a change of diet.