Stu: This week, I'm excited to welcome Matt Maruca to the podcast. Matt Maruca is an entrepreneur, educator and founder of Ra Optics, a company at the forefront of blue light blocking eyewear solutions. He joins us to unpack the science behind how light drives mitochondrial function and circadian rhythms. Some questions asked during this episode:
This week I'm excited to welcome Matt Maruca to the podcast. Matt is an entrepreneur, educator, and founder of Ra Optics, a company at the forefront of blue light blocking eyewear solutions that eliminate wavelengths of light that can ultimately compromise our health. In this conversation, we discuss the issues associated with blue light exposure and dig deep into how addressing this can lead to more quality restorative sleep. Over to Matt. Hey, guys, this is Stu from 180Nutrition and I am delighted to welcome Matt Maruca to the podcast. Matt, how are you, buddy?
Matthew
(01:05)
I'm doing really well. Thank you, Stu.
Stu
(01:07)
No, it's great. Very, very interested to talk to you on this topic today. And for our listeners, it's going to be very focused on blue light, so something that affects us all. But before we get into the conversation, and first up, for all of our listeners that may not be familiar with you or your work or your company, I'd love it if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself, please.
Matthew
(01:28)
Yeah. Well my name's Matt Maruca. I'm from the United States, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And I got into the health and wellness world at a pretty young age. I'm 23 years old now, but I started when I was basically 13, basically a decade ago, researching health, because I had some challenges of my own. I spent my entire high school years in the classroom, but mentally not in the classroom, reading all the books I could about nutrition and health. And I got into the paleo diet and primal nutrition and all that stuff. Chris Kresser, Rob Wolf, Marxist, and Ben Greenfield in 2014 when it was still really paleo. There's no restaurant menus with paleo. Now I'm in Bali at the moment and every restaurant has a paleo menu or something like that, more or less. But back then you were kind of like, paleo, what's that like the Stone Age?
(02:27) It was a different kind of thing. And so, I was just trying to improve my own symptoms, which were mostly just gut-ish, gut discomfort, headaches, allergies, and these types of things. And this whole journey led me to a really cool subject of light and how light affects our health. I came across a really niche group of people, doctors, neurosurgeons, bloggers, talking about light and mitochondria and how it affects everything in our body. And particularly, this idea that struck me was the idea that we're so much more complex than just calories in, calories out, than just our food making up who we are. The idea you are what you eat. Well, there's some truth to that. But at the end of the day, if our metabolism isn't working optimally, for example, for a number of reasons, we could be eating the most perfect diet, but it wouldn't necessarily lead to perfect health.
(03:32) And the thing about light that interested me in this, in mitochondria, which are cellular engines, for those who don't know, and we could talk a little bit about them, but it was that the entire metabolism is primarily governed by light. So, for example, the metabolism's more active during the day. Well, why is that? Because that's when the sun is active and we have power for digestion. And the metabolism's basically turned off at night while we're sleeping. Well, why is that? Because there's no sun, there's no power. And so, we don't have the ability to break down things. And so, there's even studies showing out of variety of labs and researchers that when we eat a really, you could feed an animal in tests they've done a healthy meal at the wrong time of day and it's actually worse for their system than an unhealthy meal at the right time of day.
(04:25) So, it's imagine, you put fuel or some kind of harmful substance into an engine that's barely running, it could clog it all up. But you put something that's saying substance into an engine that's cranking it full gear and it might be able to burn through it a little faster. That's a way people can kind of visualize it. So, it doesn't mean we should eat bad food. Obviously, nutrition's critical, but the way we're doing it is really important as well. And the timing and the light we're exposed to. So, this was the kind of stuff I was looking at when I was like 15, 16. And I knew this was big even then. So, when I graduated from school, I started a business making blue light protection eyewear, because I learned that blue light, this part of the manmade light spectrum can disrupt our body's rhythm, our circadian rhythm.
(05:16) And it's a buzzword now, circadian rhythms, but back then it was pretty advanced science. And that's how I got into this. It was a bit of a progression and things have evolved quite a lot. That was over five years ago now that I started the business. And I'm grateful and honored that we've had a big impact on the space, because a lot of other companies followed suit. People thought in the beginning, no one's going to wear colored lenses. It's just weird. But we were the ones, I said, well, I know I need this from me and I know there's this niche community who needs this, so I'm going to make it. I don't care if the rest of the world wants it or not. And we're going to make them look good. Because in the beginning, people were wearing these ugly safety goggles. Maybe you remember that. For full interview and transcript: https://180nutrition.com.au/180-tv/matthew-maruca-interview/