Light, Water & Magnetism: How To Biohack The Fundamentals That Really Matter
Ruben Salinas
Ruben Salinas (USA)
Medical Technology Entrepreneur, Inventor @ Quantlet
Ruben Salinas is an award-winning medical technology entrepreneur, inventor, and angel investor. Since graduating with an MBA from Harvard Business School, he has acquired and successfully sold two medical equipment companies, and started 3 others in the health and wellness space. As an engineer, he has a proven track record of innovative product development in the areas of spectroscopy, medical devices and diagnostics, and is the named inventor of multiple patent applications. As an avid biohacker, he has recently been featured in the upcoming documentary film “Supercharged“. Working on hacking his brain since 1998 through his involvement in the OpenEEG project, owner of BinauralBeat.com and BrainwaveEntrainment.com since 2004, and is member of MENSA, the world-renowned high IQ society. Ruben is also an Executive Coach certified as a Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming and is currently authoring his 2nd book “The Science of Limitless”, which is being adapted into a full-length feature film.
Ruben Salinas, an engineer and CEO, shares his practical, data-driven
If you don't own your own wellness, it's not going to happen. Nobody is going to come to your rescue; you have to take matters into your own hands and take ownership of your own biology.
Summary
- Focus on optimizing mitochondria rather than genetics. Strengthening the electron transport chain through light, water, and magnetism is the most effective way to reverse disease and age.
- Prioritize circadian rhythm and light hygiene. Natural sunlight acts as a biological drug, while artificial blue light from LEDs should be blocked to prevent mitochondrial disruption.
- Maintain the body’s "mammalian battery" using water and DHA. Drink alkaline spring water and eat seafood rich in SN2-position DHA to support the fourth phase of water and cellular communication.
- Reduce exposure to non-native EMFs and practice grounding. Use air tubes for phones and sleep on grounded or magnetic surfaces to align the body with the Earth's natural magnetic field.
- Apply engineering principles like Six Sigma to biohacking. Define goals and use reproducible, repeatable measurements to ensure that lifestyle interventions are effectively improving biology.
Article
Biohacking The Mammalian Battery
Light, Water, And Magnetism Took Centre Stage In London
At the Biohacker Summit 2016 London, held on 21 May 2016 in London, Ruben Salinas offered a talk with a title that sounded, at first glance, like a manifesto from the edge of modern wellness: *Light, Water & Magnetism: How To Biohack The Fundamentals That Really Matter*. Yet what unfolded was less a flight into futurism than a fiercely argued case that health, performance and ageing were governed by forces far more basic than the supplement economy had led many to believe.
Salinas, a US medical technology entrepreneur, inventor and executive coach, spoke with the urgency of a convert and the discipline of an engineer. He described his own turn to biohacking after years of overwork, weight gain and rising blood pressure. The body he had once treated as a machine to be driven harder, he said, had forced a reckoning. The answer, in his view, was not hidden in novelty but in fundamentals.
His thesis was simple, if sweeping. Human biology, he argued, was best understood through mitochondria, those tiny cellular engines whose function shaped energy, resilience and disease risk. “If you can fix your mitochondria, you can become superhuman,” Salinas said. “It is the flow of electrons that drives biology, and if you get that right, everything else starts taking care of itself.”
A Rebellion Against The Pill Bottle
There was a quiet provocation in the way Salinas framed the subject. Biohacking, in many circles, had become synonymous with stacks of capsules, elaborate coffee rituals and a consumerist faith in optimisation. He rejected none of that outright, but he treated it as secondary, even distracting.
The core of the work, he said, lay elsewhere: circadian rhythm, sunlight, water quality, magnetic environment, seafood-derived DHA, cold exposure, fasting and measurable feedback loops. The body, in his formulation, was a “mammalian battery” that could be charged, depleted or corrupted by the environment around it.
That language might have sounded grandiose in another room. Here, Salinas tethered it to method. Drawing on Six Sigma principles from his engineering career, he argued that biohacking should begin not with enthusiasm but with disciplined measurement. Define the problem, measure the baseline, analyse the signals, improve the system, then control the outcome. The critique was pointed. Many people, he suggested, claimed to biohack without proving that anything had changed.
The First Battle Was Over Light
If Salinas had a hierarchy of health, light sat firmly at the top. Before diet, before supplements, before almost anything else, he said, people had to repair their relationship with the sun and with artificial illumination.
He described sunlight as a biological drug, one capable of entraining circadian rhythms and influencing inflammation, energy production and hormonal timing. By contrast, he cast artificial blue-heavy light from LEDs and screens as profoundly disruptive, particularly when delivered to the eyes late in the day. He wore blue-blocking lenses on stage as both prop and proof of practice.
“You cannot correct fundamental issues in your environment if you do not first fix the light around you,” he said. “If you get your light right, you are eighty percent of the way toward your goals.”
That claim was among the strongest of the session, and it gave the talk its emotional centre. Salinas was asking his audience to reimagine health not as an endless sequence of interventions but as an ecological alignment. The body, he implied, had not failed people nearly as often as the modern environment had failed the body.
Water As Charge, Not Just Hydration
From light, Salinas moved to water, though not in the ordinary language of hydration. He spoke instead about the “fourth phase” of water, a structured, gel-like form said to exist along hydrophilic surfaces in the body and to help maintain charge at the cellular level. Sunlight, especially ultraviolet and infrared frequencies, was presented as one of the forces that strengthened this internal state.
He made a forceful case for mineral-rich spring water over purified or reverse-osmosis water, arguing that the latter lacked the structure and mineral content needed to support biological charge. He pointed to tools such as bioimpedance measurements to track intracellular and extracellular water status, insisting that biology should be monitored, not guessed at.
The underlying claim was that water was not merely something the body contained. It was part of the electrical architecture of life.
Seafood, DHA, And The Architecture Of Communication
Salinas also returned repeatedly to DHA, the omega-3 fatty acid found in seafood, presenting it as indispensable for cellular and neural communication. He emphasised whole seafood rather than capsules, arguing that nutrients delivered in their natural context, with DHA in the SN2 position and iodine intact, were more biologically useful than many extracted supplements.
For Salinas, this was not nutritional fine-tuning. It was infrastructure. If light helped set the rhythm and water held the charge, DHA helped the system communicate.
The message landed with the certainty of someone who had grown impatient with half measures. Genetics, he said, mattered less than many people believed. “Your genetics are a loaded gun, but someone has to pull the trigger,” he told the audience. “There is very little you cannot control if you manage your mitochondria, even if you are genetically predisposed.”
Magnetism, EMFs, And A New Domestic Anxiety
The most arresting portion of the talk came when Salinas turned to magnetism and electromagnetic pollution. If his earlier arguments drew from familiar anxieties around screens and modern overstimulation, this section widened the concern to include Wi-Fi, mobile phones, household electrical fields and the broader invisible architecture of contemporary life.
He spoke about grounding, hardwiring internet connections, using air-tube headsets, mapping antenna locations, installing shutoff switches in sleeping areas and even sleeping on magnetic surfaces to better align the body with the Earth’s field. The goal, he said, was not paranoia but mitigation: to reduce non-native electromagnetic inputs that might burden mitochondrial function.
There was a palpable intensity to this section because it touched a recognisable modern fear. The hazards Salinas described were largely ambient, woven into ordinary life, difficult to see and harder still to escape. In that sense, his prescription was radical not because it required gadgets, but because it required a person to treat the home itself as a biological intervention.
Cold, Fasting, And The Discipline Of Stress
Salinas was at his most compelling when he framed stress not as an enemy but as a tool, provided it was applied with intelligence. Cold thermogenesis, he said, was one such tool, especially full-body immersion rather than superficial methods. Fasting was another, valuable for encouraging the body to eliminate weaker mitochondria and build more efficient ones. Neurofeedback, body work and natural movement also belonged in the same toolkit, each helping to reduce wasted energy and improve system coherence.
The language here shifted subtly from optimisation to training. Salinas was not merely talking about living longer. He was talking about becoming harder to destabilise.
That idea extended beyond biology into psychology. Near the close of the session, he offered a line that cut through the technical density of the talk. “The best way to deal with fear is absolutely to do what scares you every day,” he said. “Write down what scares you and do it, because nothing limits a person more than their own fears and beliefs.”
The Promise And The Mood Of The Movement
There was, woven through the presentation, the larger emotional mood of the biohacking world in 2016: a deep dissatisfaction with passive medicine, a hunger for agency, and a belief that performance, healing and even identity could be rebuilt through disciplined experimentation.
Salinas embodied that impulse. His biography, spanning medical technology, entrepreneurship, diagnostics, neuro-linguistic programming and brainwave experimentation, gave him the profile of a modern polymath shaped by both corporate systems and personal reinvention. On stage at Biohacker Summit 2016 London, he cast biohacking not as indulgence but as responsibility.
“We are powerful creators who have the capacity to make decisions and form whatever reality we want,” he said. “Abundance is the baseline of this existence, provided you do not mistake your survival-focused brain for your true self.”
It was a line that might have seemed almost mystical had the talk not spent so much time in the language of metrics, hardware and cellular energetics. That tension, between spiritual ambition and engineering mentality, was precisely what made the session memorable.
A Theory Of Health Rooted In Environment
What Salinas offered in London was not a modest framework. It was a theory of health that placed environment above inheritance, electrons above symptoms, and daily habits above pharmaceutical rescue. Its claims were broad, at times audacious, and certain to divide listeners along lines of evidence, temperament and belief.
But whatever one made of the programme itself, the force of the argument was undeniable. In Salinas’s account, the modern person was not merely undernourished or overworked. They were overlit, under-sunned, improperly hydrated, electrically burdened, rhythmically disrupted and biologically disconnected from the conditions under which human life had evolved.
His answer was to go back to first principles and then forward with measurement.
In a summit built around self-experimentation and human enhancement, Ruben Salinas’s talk stood out because it suggested that the future of health might depend less on finding the next miracle technology than on relearning how to live inside the oldest ones: light, water and magnetism.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2016 London