About this episode
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: What's the big deal with blue light? Is there an optimal time to start blocking this out? What can we do to ensure that we stay asleep during the night? https://180nutrition.com.au/ 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
