Infrared Light and Heart Health: Biology, Blood Flow, and Disease Risk
How Infrared and Near-Infrared Light Influence Blood Flow, Mitochondrial Function, and Cardiovascular Risk
Kendall Toerner
Published: November 26, 2025
Light controls our bodyâs ability to prevent heart disease and strokes. Infrared light interacts with our artery wall lining, preventing plaque accumulation.
Heart disease and strokes are leading causes of death in the modern world.
Most strokes and heart disease cases occur due to an accumulation of plaque in arteries, as well as blood that clots too easily.
The key to preventing these diseases is preventing plaque accumulation, as well as preventing red blood cells from sticking to each other. This means both adding infrared light exposure and avoiding polyunsaturated fats in your diet.
How does infrared light influence heart disease?
Infrared light has been shown to maximize a property of water called the âexclusion zoneâ near the 800-1500nm frequency range. [1]
This property of water creates a barrier in places where water touches your cells and blood vessels (hydrophilic, or water-loving surfaces). This zone, when strong enough, âexcludesâ anything larger than the size of a hydrogen atom, including plaque.
This protective barrier gets up to 10x larger when exposed to strong infrared light.
There are countless studies showing that sauna use [2] and hot baths or showers [3] drastically reduce heart disease and stroke risk.
Saunas and hot water immersion expose your body to a large amount of infrared light, because of the temperature of the source.
This is why sunlight is high in infrared light, and has been shown to drastically reduce stroke and heart disease risk due to nearly half of the light being infrared. [4]
Prevention of Stroke and Heart Disease with Infrared Light
Increasing infrared light to lower your risk of stroke and heart disease comes down to a few simple methods:
- Get more sunlight Sunlight is almost 50% infrared light, and much of this light falls in the exclusion zone boosting range around 800-1500nm.
- Get hot Using saunas (like a Saunaspace infrared sauna), hot baths, and strong sunlight will all increase the infrared light interacting with your body and being absorbed by your biology. Exercise can do this as well, but this can deplete your biology in other areas when done in the wrong environment (indoors under artificial light) or done for too long (over 60 minutes high intensity per day).
- Get cold When your body gets cold, this causes your mitochondria in your cells to make heat (infrared light) to warm you up. The colder mitochondria get, the faster they can run, and the more infrared light will be produced as a result. This works the same way as cooling down an engine or your computer to make it run more efficiently.
- Use a light therapy panel
Using products like an EMR-TEK red light (infrared) therapy lamp can deliver powerful infrared light with targeted frequencies deep into your body. Infrared light can pass easily through your body and into your deep tissues and organs because of itâs lower frequency.
What to avoid
There are a few key things to avoid if you want to prevent heart disease and strokes
- Indoor living A lack of sunlight is the primary cause of infrared light deficiency
- Rarely being hot or cold A lack of heat or cold prevents you from being exposed to infrared light from either your environment or created by your mitochondria
- Seed oils Aside from creating an optimal exclusion zone in your arteries, you should avoid oxidizing your cholesterol so it canât clog easily in the first place. Cholesterol is made from a combination of fat and protein. Eating fragile fats, like omega 6 polyunsaturated fats found in seed oils, means easy oxidation and plaque formation. [5]
Saturated fats have been wrongly villainized in their role in heart disease and stroke. The real culprit are seed oils due to their easy oxidization. Plaque in stroke and heart attack patients is full of oxidized cholesterol, not normal cholesterol. Of course, increasing infrared light exposure avoids the issue all together.
Conclusion
The infrared light in sunlight is available at all times of day. At night, cooler temperatures would force our cells to make infrared light to stay warm.
In modern society, we keep everything at perfect comfortable temperatures, eliminating hot or cold exposure, both of which provide us with strong infrared light.
Most people live indoors for over 90% of their day, whether in a building or in a car. Additionally, modern windows block half or more of the infrared light coming from the sun.
If we want to avoid the increasing risk of heart disease and strokes, we must look to the new science of biophysics to understand what is truly happening within the human body in disease states.
Relevant Products
EMR-TEK Red Light Therapy Panels
Book: Understanding the Heart by Stephen Hussey
References
- https://www.pollacklab.org/research
- Laukkanen T, Khan H, Zaccardi F, Laukkanen JA. Association between sauna bathing and fatal cardiovascular and all-cause mortality events. JAMA Intern Med. 2015 Apr;175(4):542-8. doi: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2014.8187. PMID: 25705824.
- Kohara K, Tabara Y, Ochi M, Okada Y, Ohara M, Nagai T, Ohyagi Y, Igase M. Habitual hot water bathing protects cardiovascular function in middle-aged to elderly Japanese subjects. Sci Rep. 2018 Jun 21;8(1):8687. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-26908-1. PMID: 29930309; PMCID: PMC6013438.
- Weller RB. Sunlight Has Cardiovascular Benefits Independently of Vitamin D. Blood Purif. 2016;41(1-3):130-4. doi: 10.1159/000441266. Epub 2016 Jan 15. PMID: 26766556.
- DiNicolantonio JJ, O'Keefe JH. Omega-6 vegetable oils as a driver of coronary heart disease: the oxidized linoleic acid hypothesis. Open Heart. 2018 Sep 26;5(2):e000898. doi: 10.1136/openhrt-2018-000898. PMID: 30364556; PMCID: PMC6196963.
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