Paul Héroux: Electromagnetic Energy as a Threat to Life

Paul Héroux, PhD, is a physicist and toxicologist with particular interest in the biological effects of electromagnetic energy. He is an Associate Professor at McGill University's Faculty of Medicine and also Medical Scientist in the Department of Surgery of the McGill University Health Center. Paul has spoken eloquently on the fallacies perpetuated within the scientific community surrounding biological effects relating to man-made electromagnetic energy, namely that (1) non-ionizing radiation is biologically inert, (2) that the energy supplied is insufficient to overcome thermal energy, (3) that these exposures cannot cause sufficient heating within tissue. These claims ignore basic principles of physics and are scientifically indefensible. Paul’s work also focuses on public health, bringing more awareness to the unchecked advancement of the telecommunications and energy industries, and the threat they pose to all life on Earth. His in vitro work has clearly demonstrated that ELF radiation such as powerlines induces broad changes in basic physiological processes; the consequences of which are yet to be appreciated.

Timestamps

00:00:00 - Introduction

00:02:23 - Paul's Background

00:06:03 - Water's Influence on Charge

00:10:40 - How Industry Shaped Public Perceptions on EMF

00:13:25 - How EMF Induces Biological Effects

00:22:50 - How Different Frequencies Impact Biological Systems

00:26:37 - Water's Absorption Spectrum

00:31:56 - Perturbation of Mitochondrial Dynamics by EMF

00:34:57 - Electrohypersensitivity

00:37:29 - EMF & Reproductive Health

00:42:47 - Earth's Static Magnetic Field vs. AC Fields

00:49:14 - Quantum Tunneling in Mitochondria

00:51:09 - Native EMF

00:53:19 - Biological Antennas

00:55:47 - Water & the Biofield

00:58:49 - Protection Measures

01:01:52 - Non-Linear Dynamics of EMF

01:04:25 - Meters

01:08:31 - Outro

Transcript
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it makes no sense at all it hasn't made sense from the start people who were Specialists of microwave ovens could focus so much the discussion of something so complex as biological effects of electromagnetic radiation generally on something so restricted as heat with such ridiculous arguments challenges the imagination you are required to circulate electron currents and proton currents both of these are charges that go through essentially water if you have these currents circulating these fluids are conductors if they are conductors they will be sensitive to electromagnetic radiation if it penetrates within the body we know that many types of radiation penetrate into the body welcome to the Richie flow nutrition podcast my name is Cameron Borg on this episode I had the pleasure of speaking with Paul Haru Paul is a physicist and toxicologist with particular interest in the biological effects of electromagnetic energy he is an associate professor at McGill University's faculty of medicine and also a medical scientist in the department of surgery of the McGill University Health Center Paul has spoken eloquently on the fallacies perpetuated within the scientific Community surrounding the biological effects relating to man-made electromagnetic energy namely that one non-ionizing radiation is biologically inert two that the energy supplied is insufficient to overcome thermal energy and three that these exposures cannot cause sufficient heating within the tissue these claims ignore basic principles of physics and are scientifically indefensible Paul's work also focuses on public health bringing more awareness to the unchecked advancement of the Telecommunications and energy Industries and the threat they pose to all life on Earth his invitro work has clearly demonstrated that extreme low frequency radiation such as power lines induced broad changes in basic physiological processes the consequences of which are yet to be appreciated before we start please consider subscribing to my substack where I share further insights into these podcast topics and provide a depth of information not possible here this is the best way to support myself and the podcast with all this being said I hope you enjoy the episode Paul thanks so much for giving me some of your time today I've really been looking forward to getting the chance to speak with you we met briefly at the Water conference last year and I thought your talk was one of my favorites at the whole conference because you laid out so many things that uh made so much sense to me with regard to how electromagnetic energy can have biological effects and the way you laid it out uh made it very easy to understand uh which I really appreciated but before we get to that I guess I want to know a little bit about your background and how you first got the inkling that perhaps these man-made electromagnetic energy might be having biological effects well I was trained originally in physics uh but after getting absc in physics I did Graduate Studies um with a university University Quebec in Montreal which is an outfit that was associated with a research institute uh with power lines a power utility Research Institute so I got a whiff of engineering there and as I was studying engineering I realized that there were biological effects concerns uh lurking around the utility that they were not very comfortable looking at and actually uh e The Institute in which I did my Graduate Studies had a very very uh open view of uh training their scientists and I got hired there and they allowed me to go to the faculty of medicine at University of Montreal to U so to speak widen my horizons and to uh follow courses by mail in biology and all these things I also followed courses in biology at University of Montreal supported actually by the utility and all of this set me up for a project that the power industry had on electrical Burns you know they wanted to know if they could help the uh utility victims and of course the uh uh the public victims of electrical Burns so I sort of got interested in this subject that connected me with the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal where I got very very interested in the subject and I guess uh intellectually what really hooked me was the work of sikna and Kev in Russia where they determined that weak magnetic field altered the structure of water and this is not something that is very well uh promoted when the utility is I mean it seems to be beside the point but it's something very fundamental because it relates to the motion of protons from one molecule of water to another and uh these effects uh that they detected on pure water I detect experimentally at the Royal Victoria Hospital on all human cancer cells in other words comparable thresholds of exposure yielded biological changes that corresponded to changes in the ability of protons to move from one molecule of water to another so I thought looking at this work that I had something that was solid from the physics point of view and my interest in this area increased afterwards when you're talking about the movement of protons um in water molecules what is this called and and when does it happen in biological systems well in pure water it's called the grotus mechanism which means that uh in pure water water molecules decompose and recompose about 2,000 times per second uh in living systems the motion of protons is of enormous importance first uh there is only the primary structure of protein that is determined by the sequence of amino acids the secondary tertiary and quary structure of proteins if you know what these are how you pack these uh these linear uh Assemblies of nucleic acids uh how you do it well that is all determined by hydrogen bonding hydrogen bonding is essentially the transfer of protons from one molecule to another so if you weaken that or you interfere with that such as magnetic fields can do even at very very low intensities down to 20 nanotesla then you have something that is very very powerful the second reason is that in oxidative phosphorilation you are producing adenosine triphosphate on the basis of the flow flow of protons through complex four otherwise known as ATP synthes ATP synthes is a protonic motor analogous to an electric motor except that it has protons flowing through it and the alpha channel of that component is very very strange in that even at 30° Centigrade it has the same structure as ice it is the water in the Nano channel is confined to have the same structure as ice which presumably is a way for nature to make the the the transfer of protons through this channel as efficient as possible so I was always F fascinated by the fact that if you impair can impair the motion of protons through bulk water probably you can do it even more effectively through a nanoconfined water channel that is specifically designed for transparency so I still believe that this particular aspect is uh influential as is of course the influence of electric fields on the electron transport chain within within oxidative phosphorilation of course electrons are lighter they can be moved by much smaller Fields but the the situation of protons and this circuit is very very interesting I suspect when you're talking about the ability of these fields to change the composition of water the structure of water this is uh somewhat analogous to what Jerry Pollock and a lot of the other people at this conference were talking about with these various structural changes Jerry emphasizes this charge separation event is this the sort of thing that we're talking about with electromagnetic energy uh or is it the opposite I think uh what Jerry is studying and what I have been studying in relation to the fields are very very tightly grouped of course in science there's many way ways to look at the same thing so he's looking at it uh more from the point of view of uh interfacial effects but even in relation to the health effects of electromagnetic fields it seems clear to me that the uh opacity of the stern layer that is occurring on the inner membrane of mitochondria as a result of the polarization of protons by the membrane is a very important aspect that leads to the Easy Flow of protons from complexes one and three uh to complex five so of course uh all of these aspects of polarization of membranes and proton Mobility have a lot in common a lot of things to uh uncover there what I found really interesting about your talk was you sort of took the biggest um you know subtractive uh things as far as uh the effects of electromagnetic fields uh in the literature there's this idea that these fields are nonionizing they are too weak um to overcome thermal um energies and there are no mechanisms to explain how they would have any effects and you went through and sort of explained the fact that these are quite erroneous uh in such a simple and elegant way and I was wondering if you could sort of recapitulate a little bit of that no no no no that's not what I want to do I want you to explain to me how such gross Concepts could be uh could survive for so long in uh in the public sphere and in the Public's mind because when you really get down to it these ideas are so wrong that it is I guess we have to have respect for the people promoting uh these wrong things that they did this very very artfully because it makes no sense at all it hasn't made sense from the start that people who were Specialists of microwave oven could focus so much the discussion of something so complex as biological effects of electromagnetic radiation generally on something so restricted as heat which s with such ridiculous arguments challenges the imagination I think there is a lot to be said about the incestuous nature of science and industry uh in this conversation yes you know the fact that there is sort of this liability shield with as far as the Telecommunications um industry uh and the effects of their Technologies um on the health of the public uh you know these are clearly uh conflicts of interest uh and certainly not looking out for for human health so you can kind of see why there is such a strong push to uphold these uh Antiquated ideas that yeah you you know how could you possibly think we could understand something as complex as the interaction between novel electromagnetic fields and life in general it sounds on the face of it to be um a ridiculous thing to posit that we completely understand it and as long as there's no ionization or no heat or insufficient heat um that there couldn't possibly be any effects um so from your perspective what are the mechanisms that do not require ionization energy and do not require excessive heat uh in order to induce biological effects well it's very very simple really what you have to see the body as the body is not simply dipoles that you can heat with microwaves as happens in a microwave oven the body if it is alive has has to circulate electrons and protons in order to maintain ATP which is basically the currency of life without ATP your cells die the organism the tissue everything dies so you are required if you are alive to circulate continuously electron currents and proton currents both of these are char es that go through essentially water or if you will uh biological fluids if you have these currents circulating through these fluids these fluids are conductors right if they have currents there if they are conductors they will be sensitive to electromagnetic radiation if it penetrates within the body we know that many types of radiation pen penetrate into the body the magnetic fields of Power Systems penetrate the body almost unchanged so there's complete penetration and in the case of the radio frequencies although the thermal component might not go very very deep it might in the case for example of 5G be limited to a millimeter or so the uh modulation components of the signal can penetrate deeper so uh I would say the agenda of the discussions has been controlled by industry uh restricting essentially the area of discussion to things that they wanted to discuss and you have to see it from their point of view industry is not interested in biology in industry is not interested in human health they're interested in Commerce in you know selling stuff and in providing power and for them to go into subjects like public health and biology it's really very very daunting to them they wanted to restrict the discussion as much as they could and what they were looking for is not an answer to the effects of electromagnetic radiation on hell they were looking for a simplification of the problem that would allow them to deal with the situation with their own tools and with their own people and so this is what they did but I think there is something wrong uh morally with what was done I couldn't agree more and you know my lack of physics background might catch up with me here but it seems like a very very basic um principle in physics is that when you apply a field to charged particles um that are moving it's going to affect the way that they move is that sort of the general idea of of how fields are affecting um moving um charges it's not the general idea it's exactly the idea in the sense that this is called the principle of superposition if you have a field that is moving charges and you apply another field the effect will be superimposed and so we know from the structure of metabolism that all living systems and this is very extensive there is no living system that does not depend on the flow of electrons and protons all living systems if you suppress these currents the tissue is dead so this is what defines life in a functional way of course you have genetic definitions of life as well but in terms of active life it is electric current and protonic current together in all living living systems that Define life so if you have this requirement it is incredibly gross to uh to uh put forward the idea that electromagnetic fields on living systems will not be of importance unless they are at the thermal level it makes no sense I think that just highlights how absurd it is because we're talking about one of the most basic physics principles um you know highlighting how you know clear it is that uh man-made fields are going to affect the movement of charges throughout the body and I I think there you might even be able to argue that the movement of charges is what defines life in some sense so uh you know it really shows how absurd this idea is that there couldn't possibly be any biological effects when by definition when you apply them to the very thing that defines life it is going to alter the way that that works so you know I can see I can see and you know you you highlighted it so well in your talk and it just made me realize um how how incestuous that that relationship between industry and the and the science that's coming up must be in order to uphold like you said how is something like this held on for so long um I I think it is starting to turn around I think if you ask the average person on the street if you hold your phone up and have a conversation on your mobile phone is that a good thing that probably say you probably shouldn't do it all the time which is an acknowledgment that there's some sort of effect going on but you know perhaps the severity of that effect uh particularly at a population level might not be well understood yeah the the is that the idea that electromagnetic radiation interferes with living systems can be can be justified on basic principles of physics and our knowledge of biology so we talked already about the principle of superposition which comes out of the structure of Maxwell's equations highly respected in physics and engineering and and the uh existence of free radicals within biological systems is a requirement of the second law of Thermodynamics which is an equally respected principle of physics so basically uh if industry had studied the uh the problem in a serious way outside their parochial interests they would have come to the conclusion and maybe they did that these effects were inevitable but although the effects are inevitable they avoided the discussion of how to deal with them to ensure that the public is not harmed so in my opinion we have been living to at least a 100 Years of exposure to this radiation initially at low frequencies and then at increasingly large frequencies uh sustaining the consequences to our health because I believe that the rates of various diseases that we have at the moment are influenced by this Progressive uh decay of of environment of our environment using what we call in general the non-natural electromagnetic radiation and uh you could argue that well will uh create a new environment and life will just have to adapt to it after all as some people in Industry would say this is the cost of doing business but unfortunately the cost is primarily paid by increases in various diseases that uh humans uh are the victims of as a result of this environment and Engineering is capable of reducing non-natural electromagnetic fields if it has the will to do so it cannot do so overnight but it can engineering is nothing if not flexible it's just that they have been allowed to run free without any supervision by government or serious investigative uh science and although there are many people who warned them about this they were never taken seriously what's the relationship between the various parts of the spectrum I know we've got you know radio frequencies microwaves uh and we' also got this other uh element in this data compaction strategy that that is you know increasingly a problem as we move from generation four to five and inevitably to six what is the relationship between the different spectral components and what different effects they might have on biological systems okay so the electromagnetic uh Spectrum covers a wide range of frequencies we have had about billion years to accustom ourselves to the radiation from the Sun that is uh on Earth so we can deal apparently with the static field of the earth we can deal with the radiation from the Sun but in my opinion this is an adaptation I think that all living systems are um reluctant to receive energy inputs from outside because biological systems are organizations that are based on chemistry and if you disturb chemistry well you have the potential to do something that is disturbing or negative so we have over billions of years adapted ourselves mostly to the radiation from the Sun but you notice that we're not completely uh adapted to the ultraviolet comp components that come from the Sun this is ionizing radiation and if you do experiments uh on the effects of various light frequencies on biological systems they're not the same at at these various frequencies so there is a complexity in there that needs to be studied understood and unraveled so indeed as you point out uh it seems that the lower frequencies are potent in terms of disturbing biological processes because biological processes in general do not happen at gigahertz frequencies they're not incredibly fast although you will still see effects at those frequencies the lower frequencies which are contained within the modulation of telecommunication signals seem to be more powerful but in my opinion all radiation be it ionizing radiation as particles or electromagnetic radiation or even sound all of these things are disturbances to uh living systems and should be taken seriously in terms of potential negative effects The Genius of life is that we have designed C chloroplasts that can use the radiation that is fundamentally hostile to fuel ourselves and in fact to benefit ourselves a lot of people believe that the fact that our Windows Shield us from uh red light is something that is negative because red light apparently stimulates complex four but you know we are beginning to understand all these things but there's a lot of research to be to be done not least of which because there's a therapeutic pendant to electromagnetic radiation so a bio electr magnetics Department in University would study both the bad effects of radiation and the therapeutic effects of radiation you point out in your or you pointed out in your talk that you don't think it's a coincidence that the absorption minimum um in water it corresponds exactly to the visible solar Spectrum um what are the implications of the fact that water absorbs strongly past uh the inv visible portion of the sun and the fact that now we're getting bombarded we're swimming in uh electromagnetic energy that is uh strongly absorbed or relatively strongly absorbed by water this is a very brave hypothesis that I put forward because you have water water is the same probability throughout the Universe water has a lot of transparency in the visible part of the spectrum and tends to absorb energ almost everywhere else that means that with the Sun that we have water is particularly quiescent it's a very calm environment and if you believe that this calm environment of a solvent was really important in generating life on our planet you may uh put forward the hypothesis that this spectrum is necessary for life to evolve in a very complete and sophisticated way so that would mean that the Drake equation that determines the probability of U life appearing on a planet could be restricted to uh planets that Circle Suns that are relatively comparable to our own if you have a very very red Sun or a very white sun it it wouldn't work as well because there is more absorption of this radiation in the water Matrix within which life is trying to organize so uh this is basically uh an interesting coincidence that our sun matches the transparency of water isn't it I I thought it was a really interesting idea and you know I've spoken to a lot of people who Focus their interests on the of near infrared and infrared light uh on on biology and I've been shown a lot of graphs about the absorption spectrum of water and how the uh wavelengths of light that appear to be very uh biologically active correspond exactly to those that generate reactive oxygen species probably as a result of improving metabolism so it was something that made a lot of sense to me intuitively having known that you know the absorption spectra of water is very interesting when you go past um the visible light now would you like an even more provocative hypothesis please yes okay do you know of the FY Paradox I do I've heard a few very interesting ideas uh to try and explain it uh to do with hormesis okay so the reason why when we point or radio telescopes to the heavens we do not perceive any artificial signal it's not that there isn't any life out there it's not that there aren't any civilizations out there it's that the life that is in the universe is either too primitive to produce this radiation or to advance their so Advanced that they know not to use it in broadcasting because it is deleterious to to health so you could see our Epoch at this time as a brief moment in time when we are naive enough to impair our environment using this type of telecommunications smart people would use optical fiber you know and perhaps lifi for Mobility they would use microwaves because they know physics better than we did you know when the it set its standards that's uh that's very brave indeed but I I'm I'm really glad you shared that because that's a very uh thought-provoking idea and uh yeah I mean it seems to make sense that um it's it's kind of like the idea that um the reason you know we haven't been visited by super intelligent uh life is because um you know they by the time they get um by the time they get intelligent enough to make themselves comfortable uh the hortic stresses that keep them healthy go away and then they they they die so um yeah I I really like these ideas about the FY Paradox because they I feel like they can explain quite a bit about you know life and and where we're at as well um I wanted to ask you about mitochondria uh in your slides you mentioned that we probably have somewhere up to 18 to the power of 18 0 pasas in in our bodies which is quite I mean it's beyond what you can really imagine you can't really conceptualize a number that large but it just makes you realize that these charges that are moving in our body are are quite you know it's quite serious it's not negligible in any in any sense and is the en hypothesis that when we're exposed to things like you know let's say we're sitting next to a Wi-Fi router is the general hypothesis that the that the smoothness of the movement of those charges through the respiratory complexes is perturbed to some degree basically slowing down the flux of uh charge through the mitochondria well you could say that you're slowing them down in one mitochondrian or uh circuit and accelerate in it in in another but whether it's slowing down or accelerating it's a perturbation in other words you are uh taking a physiological system and you're moving it in a different uh field environment and so the result will not be the same so you can't cannot expect that application of an external field on a uh an array of all such currents will be neutral you know it is a perturbation so you would you would take all of these mitochondria at the same time outside their normal operating range whether it's positive or negative so this is what we see and what we observe uh actually uh in populations is the fact that the most obvious effect of this uh these radiation exposures are with people who are electrosensitive and the nervous system is the system that depends on mitochondria in the most AC cute and uh quantitatively the most the the nervous system needs more ATP more rapidly than any other tissue so electromagnetic radiation will have impacts on all tissues but most acutely on the nervous system and this is why we have people called electrosensitive who react to these fields uh more visibly than the rest of us for the rest of us the effects are more chronic and one more thing to worry about is if we continue to do this over centuries What will What impact will it have on epigenetics and even on genetics themselves because when you alter the efficiency of oxidative phosphorilation you are tinkering with a system that is absolutely basic to all life forms what I Electro hyper sensitivity like I'm living in Sweden which I believe at the moment is the only country to recognize it as an actual condition but you know I I've seen some hypothesis about you know what makes some individuals more susceptible to others um but do we do we have an idea uh about where where this might lie and how people might be able to tell what's going on well uh dalala has done some studies on the true sensitive populations and he's found that uh some uh some mutations and glut uh genetics uh the fact that you have uh absence of these tools within cells that are able to remove reactive oxygen species the people who are electrosensitive are more likely to have these mutations in their bodies and I think this is dead on I think that there are genetic variations among Among Us they are not classified as mutations because these changes in the genetic structure happen commonly enough that we classify them as variations so there are there is a subpopulation of humans that is more susceptible because they are less able to deal with reactive oxygen species and then there is the immune aspect or understanding of immunity and of uh all the the cells that surround it is very very sketchy so in hypers sensitive people it's probable that this lack of controlling reactive oxygen species gets detected by the immune system and elicits a reaction that can amplify over time this is not different from uh people who are exposed to chemicals uh who develop hyp sensitivity and if it's not they're not protected they can be completely disabled they have to change jobs because they can't be exposed to isocyanates anymore this is something that we know very very well as an outof control reaction of immunity probably the same thing happens in the people who are Electro sensitive to the extreme they can barely uh tolerate one microwatt per square meter something that I think is becoming more well accepted is this idea that uh you know putting your phone in your pocket is impairing your reproductive uh health and it seems quite clear that um that type of radiation from your phone does impact things like sperm motility and you know I guess the real question is how is this happening and and are there sex differences between um the same type of exposure oh uh the the uh impairment of fertility is is equally uh possible in women but the real question is why have we been ignoring this for so long because the defile on a connection between sperm health and electromagnetic radiation is quite quite quite substantial and fertility worldwide has been declining all the time the only explanation why electromagnetic fields are not taken into account is that there is a mass of research and attention focused on chemicals at this point in history and it's very very difficult to wrestle these resources for research away from the people who have them right now so people who are studying uh chemical aspects of reproductive failure want to continue to do this and they don't know anything about electromagnetic fields and they don't know the literature and they will not be uh with diverted from their uh from from what they're used to unless something dramatic happens are they damaging sperm through you know the the generation of reactive oxygen species or is there something intrinsic to um the morphology of of the sperm that makes them susceptible to these fields like what is it that actually impairs them well uh any system that divides rapidly you know is vulnerable to electromagnetic radiation in some ways and you know that sperm of course in terms of their Mobility there's a small number of mitochondrian in them and if you impair uh the the function of these mitochondria you will obviously impair their motility and then there is the fabrication the spermatogenesis that is a very active process cells uh that divide are in danger fundamentally so if you are generating uh spermatozoa over a couple months or something you will indeed uh create some that are that are defective this is not something and in fact if you look at the early literature even on EF radiation ver Heimer has documented the fact that these magnetic fields could have impacts on embryology on you know on malformations and things like that so when uh cells are dividing more rapidly as cancer cells are they are more likely to be uh victims of environmental agents I have shown that uh all cancer cells are sensitive to very low levels of magnetic fields they're kype changes which is already something very very important I guess the fact that um sperm cells are so uh vulnerable let's say U perhaps because of their low number of mitochondria relative to other cell types it sort of the canary and the coal mine telling us that there are genuine effects going on here and they just happen you just happen to see it more in them because they have fewer mitochondria to rely on is that does that make sense or yes it makes sense and you have to realize also that uh uh epidemiology is very good at detecting U I would say biological effects of various agents once they know more or less how it happens if it's just I would say uh very wide screening it's not very very easy to detect effects unless they are very very strong with very high specificity in the case of electromagnetic radiation you are dealing with General disturbances in many body systems I have pointed out oxidative phosphorilation as something very vulnerable but I'm sure there's many other mechanisms underlying these effects so as we uncover them we'll realize that effects are generalized on possibly most of the diseases that we know now some disease might either even be reduced by the exposure to radiation but if experience serves when you introduce a non-natural agent you know to a species usually the problems over overshadow the uh the advantages I've seen some work coming out of Wendy beans lab uh looking at the impact of uh magnetic fields on reactive oxygen species signaling and and behavior and it does seem that you know when you change the magnetic field uh you can change the way that reactive oxygen species behave and that I guess that kind of makes sense from a physics point of view these are um you know part uh these are you know things with unpaired electrons and they're going to behave differently in different magnetic field strengths and I wonder how this might apply to the importance of reactive reactive oxygen species in their roles in signaling uh particularly in signaling for apoptosis and so forth yes well apoptosis can be triggered indeed by you know either fast you know molecules external to the cell or by an imbalance in reactive oxygen species within you have to realize that the five complexes that uh underly oxidative phosphorilation are a adaptive in the sense that if you apply a magnetic field to them the distance between these complexes can change they optimize themselves according to the environment in which they live so if you change suddenly the environment well all of these uh systems have to realign and it takes weeks or at least days to do so so if you have varying level of magnetic fields Expo field exposures these systems will not be able to follow the exposure and you will have a misadjustment of the best distance between complex one and three and three and five and you will have more R being generated uh as a result do you think that the magnetic field strength can change enough to impact that system whether you're living on the ground floor or whether you're in an apartment building on the sixth floor is that enough to change the magnetic field strength where you are you're talking about the static field or the AC the Earth's static field the static magnetic uh magnetic field well the Earth's field is something that we fundamentally must have a tolerance to right because these magnetic reversals that we experience on the planet are not something that happens very very frequently and so consequently we have to have some re resistance to them so they're not these variations in magnetic fields are not static magnetic fields are not as important from the point of view of disturbing physiology as the AC field although uh some people are able to demonstrate uh effects on cardiac instability with very low levels of changes in static Fields so static fields are biologically active but we must have learned how to handle with how to handle them and since we have been using iron we have had in our environment perturbations of these fields that are quite substantial if you use a gas meter and if you go near your sink probably you will see that there is a significant variation in the magnetic field levels so this is a far cry from claiming that your whole magnetic environment changes it is something that's momentary but I believe that static magnetic fields are much less influential on physiology than AC fields that are completely new to our environment there is a difference in the Earth's magnetic field depending on where you are on the planet uh and I think this that gradient shifts basically from the equator to the poles there are other GE geological differences in there as well but basically it's weaker on the equator it's stronger at the poles do you think this is well the European space agency has published a detailed map of this and uh it also changes with the motion of oceans you know over time so it's quite a dynamic environment and maybe if you go from one city to another that is part of the uh of the uh disturbance that you experience you know of the jet lag that you experience well I I think that's you know that's exactly I was trying to get to I I imagine that there are things uh that sort of yoke with this magnetic field whether it's you know temperature or uh availability of different wavelengths of light you know at the equator you're getting much more UV uh at the poles you're getting much less and perhaps having this magnetic field uh difference from the earth is actually shaping the way that these respiratory proteins are spaced out in a way that makes them match the environment much better is that something that seems logical to you yes I think that uh in relation in particular to the Natural Fields uh you know there's a static field electric field of the earth as well that changes according to whether it's stormy or not and the body is influenced by all of these phenomena but those are more difficult to measure than the uh artificial Fields purely because of instrumentation uh you know considerations for example the number of ions that you have in the air requires much more delicate instruments uh ground currents you know that circulate in the ground as a result of the Power Systems are also difficult to measure so there's many things that could be influential in our lives that are less acceptable accessible simply because they are less convenient to study and I think what you just mentioned is is one of those we don't appreciate how electrical we are as human beings and the variables that are difficult to measure are simply left out of our uh Consciousness speaking of things that are difficult to measure you had a slide in your talk talking about uh tunneling in things like complex one in the respiratory chain uh and you you mentioned a couple of studies studies that sort of show these these um sort of reaction points within the complex uh that are hypothetically places where electrons can tunnel you know Quantum coherence in biological systems is something that a lot of people find difficult to wrap their heads around and for good reason but it does seem very very well you know it seems more than possible that this is happening everywhere these Quantum type events and you know I suspect this is you know just thinking logically I would suspect that exposure to man-made Fields would impact the quantum coherence inside the body and thus impact where and and how tunneling uh can occur yes you know tunneling is a phenomenon that can be explained uh as a derivative of Maxwell's equations which the this demonstration is called IM evanescent waves so tunneling is very sensitive to applied Fields basically because they are sensitive to fields at a fundamental level and also because slight variations in distance between the uh in and out of a t tunneling event have huge impacts on the probability and the delay uh within which tunneling occurs so tunneling is sensitive to electromagnetic radiation in my opinion so in a sense uh the uh Quantum aspect is quite compatible with the observations that we we have let's say we were able to eliminate all of the man-made electromagnetic um energy that we have sort of erected over the last 120 so years we're left with uh things like the Shuman frequency and like you said the Earth's you know static magnetic fields and electric Fields what are these native Fields contributing to biology how are they helping us I I guess sort of regulate uh ourselves well the only thing that we can guarantee is that hopefully we have grown resistant to them but as we see with the chloroplasts we know that living systems sometimes use the environment even if it is hostile to their advantage so living systems at a fundamental level from the second law of Thermodynamics they need to have reactive oxygen species they need to have instability so living systems are not intolerant to instability completely it's just that certain types of instabilities are less tolerable than others so my opinion is that all of these feels that are natural are probably uh very acceptable from the point of view of Public Health except for being struck by lightning if you will so uh my impression is that we are compatible with our environment and in principle we can be compatible with any environment that we create but the time that it would take to be compatible especially with an environment the environment that we live with now which evolves and changes continuously is is uh much longer than the time that technology has to change in other words every few years the electromagnetic environment changes while it would take us a couple of centuries or more to adapt to this new environment can you maybe unpack the idea of an antenna for me someone who doesn't have a a background in physics and what relevance biological antennas might have well the fact that you portray the human body as an antenna means that you will be uh subject and sensitive to uh small electromagnetic fields in the environment which should open our eyes to uh possible consequences from certainly non-natural electromagnetic field but also to the Natural electromagnetic fields the ions that we have in the air and so on and so forth so probably a lot of the uh reasons why you feel not so good uh according to weather or you feel better according to weather relates to these aspects of the environment that are actually invisible to us but are actually there are there any things in the body or even I know uh is it FM I think uh FM radio waves are roughly they can be seen as a our bodies can be seen as an antenna for those because of the the average length of the body are there smaller sort of molecular size antennas um that might be interacting with specific man-made uh electromagnetic energy oh the size of the antenna un relates to the efficiency uh with which you captured the fields any size of antenna will react in a sense to any field it's just that the uh the uh transfer of power from the field to the uh to the biological process will not be as large but it doesn't mean that these effects don't occur so uh the antennas that you have in your mitochondria are hundreds of nanometers long so they they will probably not resonate very very strongly at that particular frequency it is the fact that your body is so filled with them that gives your body the property of being an antenna if there was just one or two of these antennas in your whole body we you have very much to worry about this might be a bit more of an esoteric question but what does you know the atpa spins at I think somewhere around 7,800 RPM which is quite fast and there are lots of mobile chargers moving very very quickly and all of this is surrounded by water what is the impact of all of this these electrical features in the mitochondria what are they doing to the water in that specific region are they ordering the water like um like Jerry would suggest that they're creating some sort of charge separation um are the structural components of water in that um in that uh milu important for energy Generation Well what is important I think is the interaction between a proton movement and the structure of the water within an ATP molecule and uh basic what I basically what I am working on now is to try to find whether there are some inhibitory fields that could allow you to uh stop current flow through uh this particular uh this particular structure this would mean that you would have a way to suppress uh life essentially uh by interacting with the free protons that are moving to U the alpha channel so am I correct in thinking that the structure of the water in that atpa is actually important for the uh how well the protons can can be channeled through there is that is that correct yeah you're right but I will say no further give no further details on this I appreciate that um now I know you've spoken to um Robert F Kennedy Jr on his podcast and I'm sort of wondering from a political standpoint where are things going to go as far as you know protecting uh people from the potential dangers of you know the ever increasing amount of electromagnetic fields that exposed to uh will we see you know class action start to come up in the next decade uh and and how will these be handled this is an incredibly difficult question because in our world it doesn't seem that that many things depend purely on science it depends on whether individuals in position take up these causes or not so uh scientifically uh there is ground to ask for better protection from the public I think this is obvious but whether the public and the electrosensitive will obtain this protection depends on politics right and politics is very difficult to predict that's a very diplomatic answer of you and I guess the logical followup would be for people who want to take as many steps as they can to protect themselves and to minimize the risks um that their electromagnetic environment might be um presenting them what from your perspective should be done for people who are listening to this uh to protect themselves you know what are what are the things that they need to keep in mind well one of the things that you can do is uh be aware of the electromagnetic environment and the best way to do this is to purchase a small instrument that measures both EF and radio frequency Fields this way you can uh monitor for yourself what your environment is like we call this making the invisible visible because indeed we are not aware that these fields are around us so for example if you're a mother and you have a child you would not expose your child to high levels of low frequency magnetic fields because there is substantial literature that says that you'll increase the leukemia risk in that child and so those are Elementary precautions that can be taken the from the point of view of radio frequencies the environment is increasing all the time but it is clear that the most acute and intense exposure that you have to radio frequencies is from your own cell phone so don't put the cell phone against your head please and if you can buy a cell phone that has a low rating in other words that is known to emit in a uh in a reasonable way uh the phones by Apple are renowned to irradiate to the extreme so those uh I would not recommend and find out what the rating of your phone is without you before you buy it and use it in a speaker phone mode instead of it against your head personally I have I have a cell phone here I think but uh I barely keep it charged and I barely take it with me un unless I know I'm going to need it I know practically everybody else in the Civilized World cannot go out of their home without their cell phone and in fact can barely be separated from them even for minutes I asked my students during the break uh would you be willing to leave your cell phones on your desk and go relax outside of the classroom and most of them don't want to do it they just don't want to we have been programmed to believe that we cannot live without one I can assure you I live perfectly comfortably without a cell phone is it generally the idea that the lower the exposure the better it's going to be because I think in Arthur firstenberg book The Invisible rainbow He suggests that there may be cases where um less uh intensity in in the in the field strength can actually elicit you know less favorable outcomes um I I'd love to hear your your comments on that because I would like to think that it's sort of a linear relationship with the the more the energy the higher the readout on your uh on your device the worse it's going to be is that you know what what are your thinking what's your thinking here look we have a long tradition of believing that there is sort of a linear dose response between exposure and health consequences this is primarily based on our experience with chemical uh my impression is that in the case of electromagnetic radiation it's probably more complex I favor a view in which you have a threshold and Beyond this threshold the increase is relatively slow so what this would mean is that the time that you spend above a certain level of radiation is possibly more important than the level itself but for example in the case of uh low frequencies we know that there are Cancers associated with the proximately to power lines because their feel is in general very sustained it's more difficult to um find associations with use of specific devices because their use is often Limited in time so there the whole issue of how long does it take for the effect to take hold and to become stabilized uh in various circumstances and in various Fields so this is a complicated question but in the absence of better data we can assume that less exposure means less effect and electrosensitive people are telling us that some people go around with uh clothing that Shield them from the radiation and they feel perfectly comfortable in various environments as long as the field inside their suits does not go beyond a certain level and of course their tolerance is also dictated by how long they stay in the fields do you have any specific specific recommendations about meters that are reliable and give accurate measurements well meters they're all very different from one another some have extended frequency ranges they're telling you that whatever G's will come in the future will be able to detect them but it's relatively rare most most of the time meters follow the deployment of new frequencies uh in a given Market uh the thing is that the meters are so different they have different strengths some are good better from Elf some are better from RF some are more omnidirectional uh some have more data Gathering capability since I have sort of an engineering background I'm very fond of uh the GQ EMF 390 because it has a big memory and you can monitor all the fields continuously for each second for 24 hours and so this is the advice of a man who loves massive data in order to analyze things but a person who wants to go around with a meter for Pure protection wants to see a single number so that's a very different uh requirement you might use a cornet there's so many of them on the market that uh that are able to do a decent job as long as you know their characteristics before you buy them are there any specific thresholds that people should look out for if they don't have a good idea about what's you know what's a very high level of electromagnetic radiation and what's a what's an acceptable level well uh as you know there are people who feel these fields and they know what their threshold field is sometimes not every electrosensitive person is aware that they have a Fe Beyond which they feel uncomfortable uncomfortable they are mostly simply avoiding specific structures because this is less quantitative and much more easy to see avoid the proximity to towers and so on so it's relatively rare that you meet electrosensitive people who know exactly what their threshold is in terms of what intensity they can tolerate for a given amount of time and of course you have the complexity of the various sources you know you have uh 2.5 gahz you have 5 gahz you have this you have that there's a very complex uh I would say environment out there and it's increasingly difficult for electrosensitive people to defend themselves often they have to move often they have to spend all of their money trying to uh Shield their their oppon department or by specialized equipment so it's very difficult for them so it seems seems to me that two of the big takeaways from this is that electromagnetic fields man-made electromagnetic fields can alter the structure of water and we are mostly water in our bodies and they can change the way that charge particles move within our body and and this is directly related to oxida phosphorilation and and the respiratory uh the electron train chain transport in the mitochondria which are both of those are so broad reaching that you know we really need to start paying attention to them and I'm so grateful that you are bringing attention to them uh simultaneously and uh putting this research on such a solid uh Foundation uh I I'm really glad um that I have had the opportunity to speak with you and um I'm sure lots of people will uh have learned a lot from this so thank you so much thank you it was a stellar salery that you just made thank you so much for listening I really hope you enjoyed this episode I've left some links to some of Paul's work below if you'd like to learn more about his research I've also left all of my links in the episode notes so please feel free to subscribe and engage as there will be much more content like this to come again if you'd like to support my work please consider subscribing to my substack as it is where I share most of my thoughts and insights that go beyond this podcast the support what really helps me keep this going thanks again for listening everyone take care.