Shining Light on MAHA: (Make America Healthy Again)

Healthy circadian lighting is a highly effective way to address MAHA's goals

Like it or not, MAHA will guide US Health Policy over the next 4 years. So as we strategize how to protect and promote healthy lighting we need to take MAHA into account.

What is MAHA?

Robert F Kennedy coined the slogan “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) when he threw his support behind the Trump campaign’s MAGA movement in August 2024. While MAHA has attracted political baggage and some dubious claims, its core mission to address the causes of the substantial chronic disease burden in America is admirable.

On February 13th, 2025, the day when RF Kennedy's nomination as Secretary of Health and Human Services was approved by the Senate, President Trump issued an Executive Order which stated:

“It shall be the policy of the federal government to aggressively combat the critical health challenges facing our citizens, including the rising rates of mental health disorders, obesity, diabetes, and other chronic diseases.¹”

Whatever your personal political persuasion, I believe we should capitalize on the energy and political momentum behind the MAHA movement to promote healthy lighting as a scientifically substantiated solution that addresses the chronic disease burdens of our time.

Healthy Light is Missing from the MAHA Equation

While ultra-processed foods, food additives, and agricultural pesticides are targeted by MAHA initiatives, unhealthy artificial light has so far not been part of the agenda. Just like junk food is harmful, so is junk light. America has moved indoors under narrow-spectrum artificial LED lights and screens, which do not support health during the day and actively promote chronic diseases due to their high content of blue wavelengths during evening and nighttime hours.

Blue-rich LED lights were introduced into the general lighting market in 2014, at a time when the science was already clear that blue-rich light at night had widespread adverse effects on human health. Since then, conventional blue-rich LEDs have grown from 1% market share to over 90% market share today.

Some of the documented ill effects, such as breast or prostate cancer, take years to become apparent. But others can be seen in just a few hours.

A Simple Demonstration of the Ill-Effects of Blue-Rich LEDs

When our team at the Circadian Light Research Center took a group of perfectly healthy young adults into a room lit with conventional blue-rich LED lights at 8:00 PM in the evening, we could demonstrate the adverse effects on glucose metabolism within a few hours. Indices of pre-diabetes, such as significantly elevated glucose levels and insulin resistance after a meal, were observed. However, when the same subjects sat in the same room on another night, illuminated by blue-free LED lights, their insulin and glucose levels were normalized. The brightness of the light was the same (50 foot candles or 540 lux at desktop), but the effects on the individual's health were radically different.

In the same few hours, the exposure to the blue-rich light induced a state of hunger for food, which was not seen when these same people were under blue-free light. In subsequent studies, we found that people ate twice as many snacks when working the night shift under conventional blue-rich light, as compared to when working under zero-blue light.

Regular exposure to these blue-rich LED lights in the evening leads to a substantial increase in obesity, diabetes, and other metabolic disorders

This is just one small example of the widespread effects of blue-rich light at night, which also include increased risks of heart disease, immunological impairment, psychiatric disorders, and several forms of endocrine-sensitive cancers such as breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer.

In addition we are now realizing the health benefits of the incandescent light bulbs that were banned in 2023. Like sunlight, they emitted infrared wavelengths which are critical for healing and mitochondrial energy production in our cells. Now other more energy efficient methods for providing these infrared wavelengths have been developed.

The good news, as I discuss in detail in my book THE LIGHT DOCTOR, is that these healthy lighting solutions are now scientifically proven and available for use. Controlling the spectral content and intensity of the light to which we are exposed across the day-night cycle prevents the ill-effects of light and radically improves human health and well-being.

Healthy Lighting is an Effective way to Address MAHA’s goals

Over the next few years, the goals of MAHA will drive US health policy. The target is the huge health burden of chronic disease in America that creates chronic ill health and shortens life expectancy. To address this, MAHA aims to provide “fresh thinking on nutrition, physical activity, healthy lifestyles, over reliance on medication and treatments, the effects of new technology habits, environmental impacts and food and drug quality and safety.” They also argue for the restoration of “the integrity of the scientific process for prescribing, for protecting expert recommendations from inappropriate influence, and increasing transparency regarding existing data to ensure our healthcare system promotes health rather than just managing disease.”

Healthy lighting should be made a key goal of MAHA. The solutions are fully scientifically validated in a published literature of over 10,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers. Furthermore, 248 of the world’s leading scientists working on light and health recently reached a consensus that all lights should be circadian, providing blue-rich light during the day and blue-depleted light at night².

These healthy lighting technologies have been developed and scientifically validated, and healthy lighting products for home and commercial use are ready for widespread adoption. What is missing is a clear government policy that promotes healthy lighting and protects this technology.

MAHA Can Provide the Political Will to Remove Harmful Regulations

In a misguided attempt to save energy, the US Department of Energy (DOE) under the Biden administration progressively ramped up the minimum Lumens per Watt requirements for light bulbs (referred to as General Service Lamps “GSLs”). First, they introduced a 45 lumens per watt minimum in 2023 that effectively banned all incandescent and halogen light bulbs.

Then, in 2024, the DOE increased the minimum to 125 Lumens per Watt for a typical A-19 light bulb. This rule, which goes into effect in June 25 2028, will effectively ban all light bulbs unless they can meet the elevated lumens per watt minimum rating. The problem is lights which remove blue at night, or provide the health benefits of far red and near infrared light cannot meet this arbitrary standard and will be banned.

Conventional static blue-pump LEDs, which comprise over 90% of light bulb sales, can easily meet this new 125 lumens per watt standard. However, these conventional LED light bulbs deliver “junk light”, as dangerous to our health as “junk food”, with a narrow artificial spectrum with no violet, a blue spike night and day, and low levels of red content, and no infrared.

If we don’t correct this problem, we will all be forced to live day and night inside our homes and offices under the harmful rays of blue-rich narrow-spectrum LED light bulbs that interfere with our body’s circadian rhythm and provide zero near-infrared light.

President Trump’s Executive Order on Light Bulbs Does Not Solve the Problem

President Trump issued an Executive Order giving the American consumer freedom over the light bulbs they buy³. But the problem with Executive Orders is that while they can pause regulatory enforcement, they do not abolish the underlying regulations. The next President, in January 2029, can simply reverse the Executive Order with a stroke of a pen and the existing regulations which ban healthy light bubs will immediately come back into effect.

Unfortunately, these light bulb regulations were based on a law enacted by Congress in 2007. That law makes it impossible for the Department of Energy (DOE) to repeal an energy standard, even if it makes a mistake in writing it.

We are advised that the best way forward is to request that the DOE create a new product class for healthy light bulbs that has its own set of rules that make sense. This will protect innovative new solutions for healthy lighting.

The Petition Has Been Filed

On March 31, 2025, over 200 Americans submitted a formal petition for rulemaking to the US Department of Energy (DOE) to create a protected class of "General Wellness Light Bulbs" (including circadian-friendly, infrared, & full spectrum) that is exempt from the 125 lumens per watt rule. These healthy light bulbs would still be subject to the 45 lumens per watt energy efficiency rule (and law) in effect today.

Harnessing MAHA

The MAHA initiative at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) can provide a critical incentive to fix the light bulbs regulations by working with DOE to create the new product class of healthy light bulbs. As I discussed above, Executive Orders do not solve this problem, it will take regulatory actions to ensure that American have the benefit of healthy light at home and in the workplace, schools and hospitals.

Furthermore, by promoting healthy lighting, MAHA will increase its effectiveness in reducing chronic disease and ill health in the American population

Further Resources

For more remarkable insights into what we have done to ourselves by moving indoors and switching on narrow spectrum blue-rich LED lights, see my book THE LIGHT DOCTOR.

Remember the light we see is as important our health as the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe.

Sources

1. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/establishing-the-presidents-make-america-healthy-again-commission/

2. Moore-Ede M et al (2023) Lights should support circadian rhythms: evidence-based scientific consensus. Front. Photon 4: https://doi.org/10.3389/fphot.2023.1272934

3. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/unleashing-american-energy/