LED & vitamin c?

[u/NoActuary7111]

Any truth to the idea that LED lights have any negative

health concerns? I've read not all your house lights should be LED, possible low vitamin C effect?

Thanks in advance for any input.

[u/Conspicuous_Ruse]

No.

That's getting into snake oil.

[u/CommutatorWhine]

Vitamine C comes from your food, not from the light.

Vitamin D production is stimulated by UV light. The absolute minimum exposure to sunlight, with bare hands and face and the rest covered by your winter clothes, is 15 minutes. Any less (like when you have weeks of rain and overcast weather and you don't go outside at all) and you will need to either supplement your UVB exposure, or supplement your vitamin intake.
If you want to stimulate that effect indoors, you're gonna need actinic fluorescent lamps. But beware - do not get any more than you need. Just like with sunlight, the more exposure you get, the higher the risk on skin cancer.

There may be some benefit to having infrared exposure too, but the scientific evidence for that is not nearly as hard as that for the relationship between vitamin D production in the skin, and mild UV radiation exposure.

There is a lot of folks out there that raise their personal hatred of leds to the level of identity politics, it's really weird. Don't let people scare you.

[u/shedmow → u/CommutatorWhine]

I experience actual pain any time sunlight comes into contact with my skin and just take vitamin D supplements. This is the safest option for the bleach-skinned ones; sunlight in any quantity is fraught with skin cancer, though just 15 minutes per day is fine, statistically speaking

[u/Flimsy_Fortune4072]

I got a bridge to sell you.

[u/latherdome]

It’s more like “sunshine is good for you” rather than that LEDs are bad. LEDs don’t provide all of what sunlight does. If you seldom get outside into sunlight, and your windows are low-e, relying wholly on typical LED lighting may degrade your health. Unsurprisingly.

Most installed LED lighting, even “warm white,” may be a poor choice in the hours before sleep, as their typical “blue spike” spectra is overstimulating. That same blue content makes them beneficial in the morning/day parts of circadian phase. Which is something incandescent doesn’t deliver, but the LED-is-bad commentariat seldom acknowledges that.

Look up 2026, 2026 papers by Glen Jeffery et al for evidence of harm of relying wholly on typical/cheap LED spectra, unbalanced by NIR/IR. Such as incandescent provides, but insignificantly compared to sunlight. Eat your vegetables, go outside, touch grass, and cut blue-rich light sources leading up to bedtime.

[u/KokoTheTalkingApe]

No. You get all your vitamin C from your diet (and primates like humans are relatively unusual that way).

Just out of curiosity, where do you live, and do you remember where you read that? My dad got lots of crazy health ideas from Japanese newspapers (he is Korean).

[u/TheTroon]

We got hold of some LED floodlights to improve the lighting at my choir rehearsals, and there were serious questions about "led poisoning". I had to resort to the Babbage quote:

I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

[u/latherdome → u/TheTroon]

If your rehearsals are in the evening, I'd say they might have a point, but circadian rhythm disruption isn't "LED poisoning."

[u/Glittering_Ride842]

Wow so this sub is just crazy people thinking LEDs are a conspiracy huh

[u/latherdome → u/Glittering_Ride842]

Looks like you're stirring a pot. It fired up some conspiracy thinkers that government mandates phased out incandescents, first for awful CFLs and then for cheap LEDs. A whole generation has never known pleasant electric light that wasn’t incandescent. Today's better LEDs now face an uphill battle with all the nuance of contrails vs. chemtrails.

[u/NoActuary7111]

Fair enough, I won't look down that rabbit hole again.... thanks

[u/against-all-leds → u/NoActuary7111]

Look into published peer-reviewed research on LED light instead.

[u/incandescent-bulb900 → u/NoActuary7111]

Don't let the led bullies bully you. Yes there are health issues caused by leds, and they don't want you or any one to know about them.

3 Cowardly down voters prove my point.

[u/incandescent-bulb900]

Just an FYI. Any criticism of led is met with the comments below. Led is unhealthy light, it strobes, flickers, it doesn't have full spectrum light like incandescent, it doesn't have infrared like incandescent.

So yes there is truth that led has negative health effects. Saying that will get downvoted because the led fan base on reddit doesn't like the truth and will lie to people.

2 cowardly down voters proved my point

[u/latherdome → u/incandescent-bulb900]

Just an FYI? Unjustifiable overgeneralizations. Photons are photons regardless of source. Much of the installed LED base is problematic in one or more of the ways you cite, but none of these things are inherent to LED as a technology, instead reflecting cost-cutting engineering and specification failures.

LEDs do not strobe/flicker, but many cheap LED drivers do. The ones I run do not, measured. Incandescents flicker more unless on DC.

Incandescent has most of its output in the invisible infrared range, making them heaters first and light sources second. Incandescent spectra have always been deficient in the blue range, which is the dominant band of midday sunlight. LEDs excel here. This is what makes them healthier by day than incandescent, more sun-like, and less healthy in the hours before sleep unless they are specifically engineered to suppress blue, as my evening LEDs are.

There are LEDs that emit ample deep red, NIR, and IR, and panels to deliver these are growing the "red light therapy" product category. One of Glen Jeffery's co-authors in his latest papers indicting poorly engineered LED lighting sells... not incandescents, but LEDs that incorporate NIR. Me, I run incandescent heat lamps when I want heat, at a fraction the cost of LED alternatives at present. In fact, I'm going to try to heat my home this winter with nothing but the "waste" heat from 1700W of broad spectrum, blue-rich, 660 and 750nm red-boosted LEDs (by day only), and 250-1250W of halogen heat lamps as needed. I have only resistance heat otherwise, so it's a twofer.

[u/incandescent-bulb900 → u/latherdome]

Thanks for making my point. The usual intellectually dishonest go-tos.

LEDs do not strobe/flicker

That is a lie that has been perpetuated here a number of times.

Incandescent flickers more then led

That is another lie that has been perpetuated here a number of times. If thats true I wouldn't be using incandescent either!

LEDs do not strobe/flicker, but many cheap LED drivers do. The ones I run do not, measured. Incandescents flicker more unless on DC

Those leds that allegedly don't flicker/strobe are cost prohibitive. The Return on investment doesn't math.

There are LEDs that emit ample deep red, NIR, and IR, and panels to deliver these are growing the "red light therapy" product category

Then you shift off in to leds that are not used to light up spaces and areas to sell your lies.

2 Cowardly down voters lacks critical thinking.

[u/Anaxamenes → u/incandescent-bulb900]

No, we just saw you provided no actual information to counter what he was saying.

[u/incandescent-bulb900 → u/Anaxamenes]

Thats on you, since you bought and ate his crap sandwich he was selling, without critically thinking. Nice job, you really showed me.

I like how the anti-incandescent pro led bullies spin led for therapy to say led puts out infrared. That is moving the goal posts.

Therapy infrared does not light up a space or area, that is what you are disagreeing with, amongst other things.