Brian Richards isn't just making the case for sauna. He's making the case for a specific kind of sauna — incandescent near-infrared, the kind his company SaunaSpace builds. The core claim is that incandescent light bulbs, which emit a broad spectrum including near-infrared wavelengths, do something that traditional Finnish saunas don't: they stimulate mitochondrial function directly, at the cellular level, through photobiomodulation. Heat plus light, not heat alone.
That's a meaningful distinction. And it's worth sitting with before accepting or dismissing it.
The sauna benefits Richards describes — cardiovascular improvement, reduced chronic illness risk, detoxification, sleep improvement — are well-documented in the epidemiological literature. The Laukkanen studies out of Finland tracked nearly 2,300 men over decades and found dose-dependent reductions in cardiovascular mortality, dementia risk, and all-cause mortality. Rhonda Patrick has synthesized this work compellingly. Those findings are solid.
The near-infrared light claim sits on a different evidence base. Photobiomodulation — the use of specific light wavelengths to influence cellular function — is a legitimate field of research. There's reasonable evidence that near-infrared light penetrates tissue and interacts with cytochrome c oxidase in the mitochondria, influencing ATP production and cellular repair. That's not fringe science.
What's less established is whether combining near-infrared light with heat in a single session produces synergistic benefits beyond what either modality achieves alone. That research is still thin. Richards is ahead of the data here, and he knows it — which is why he leans on Dr. Kellogg's 130-year safety record and 200,000 documented sessions rather than randomized controlled trials.
The honest tension here is between product advocacy and peer-reviewed science. Richards is both a researcher and a founder selling near-infrared sauna systems. That doesn't make him wrong — founders often know their domain deeply — but it should calibrate how you weigh his claims against the broader literature.
The photobiomodulation research is genuinely promising, particularly for wound healing, skin health, and mitochondrial support. But most of that research uses targeted, clinical-grade devices, not ambient incandescent bulbs in a sauna cabinet. The leap from "near-infrared light has therapeutic effects" to "incandescent sauna is therefore superior" involves assumptions that haven't been rigorously tested head-to-head.
If you have access to any sauna — traditional Finnish, steam, infrared — use it. The evidence for consistent sauna practice is overwhelming and doesn't depend on the type. Four to seven sessions per week, 20 minutes each, transforms your cardiovascular health, cognitive resilience, and stress physiology. Start there.
If you're curious about near-infrared specifically, Richards' morning protocol is worth experimenting with. Morning light exposure — even artificial near-infrared — aligns with your circadian biology in a way that evening heat sessions don't. The light dose in the morning, heat to raise core temperature, then the natural cool-down. There's a logic to it that matches what we know about circadian biology and thermal regulation.
What I find most compelling in Richards' work isn't the sauna hardware — it's the light environment argument. He makes the point that modern humans live under artificial light spectra that don't match our evolutionary biology. LEDs and fluorescents are efficient but narrow. Incandescent bulbs, like fire and sunlight, emit a broad spectrum that our cells have evolved to respond to.
This isn't just a sauna argument. It's an argument about the entire built environment we've created. We've optimized for lux and efficiency, but our mitochondria care about spectrum and timing. The sauna becomes almost incidental — a forcing function for spending time in light that more closely resembles what our biology expects. That idea, that we're "beings of light" in a literal mitochondrial sense, is the thread worth pulling.