The Truth About EMF in Saunas (And Why It Matters)

EMF is one of the most misunderstood topics in the sauna world — and most companies either ignore it or use it as a sales gimmick. In this video, I explain the basics of EMF in saunas, how to test properly, and why understanding it is more important than fearing it. I’ll also show you real examples of a low-EMF sauna done right, and another that’s advertised as low-EMF but doesn’t live up to the claims.

We’ll cover the difference between magnetic and electric fields, how manufacturing shortcuts create problems, and why VOC levels can be just as important (if not more) than EMF. If you’ve ever been confused by marketing claims, this will help you see through the hype and make an informed choice.

Read the transcript >

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Transcript

Well, I’m taking my meters, some of them, and getting a wooden mount that’s basically a non-conductive mount that I can hold meters in an environment and not affect the actual meter reading. So if you hold a meter in your hand, a lot of times the conductivity from your body can react with whatever’s happening in the environment and it will change what you get.

In an effort to perform, you know, some type of a reading in isolation, we use a non-conductive mount. I built this little wooden handheld mount. We just Velcro the meters to it. And then you can basically stick it in somewhere and leave it and not have to hold it.

You can remove yourself from the environment if you want. It’s kind of like the poor man’s testing facility. Like when I go to a spa and I check a sauna that they have there, we don’t know what the controls are in the room, meaning there could be a power panel behind the wall that the sauna is on.

Sauna could be off and it’ll still read high EMF. We know if you’ve tested these things a hundred times, there’s no reason for that to be present. So obviously there’s something in the environment, not the sauna itself. So we’re doing everything that we can to have accurate testing.

And that’s what we’re doing right now. I’m just going to show you the basics of EMF in regards to saunas. So everyone thinks that, you know, this is something that you should be afraid of. It’s really just something to be understood, not necessarily, you know, a sauna is a relatively low exposure limit.

It’s not like you’re sleeping in there. It’d be much more important to test the EMF in your sleeping environment than it would be like a particular sauna. But in this case, a lot of people are super, super worried about this.

the basics. So what is like, what is EMF? EMF basically is you’ve got current and you’ve got draw. Electromagnetic fields, EMF is a plural term.

So a lot of people get upset because they’ll buy a particular low EMF sauna and they’ll check it with something like a tri-field meter. It’ll be low on magnetic fields, but it will be really high on electric fields. Yet the sauna company themselves said, hey, this is a low EMF sauna.

Well, a lot of it’s a bait and switch. A lot of companies don’t mitigate electric fields. You can double check that with body voltage. If you hook yourself up to a volt meter, a lot of times these things are hidden.

You wouldn’t know that unless you understood it or knew how to test for them. So we’ll go through a couple examples. I’ve got a ton of saunas here, so we’ll just do two. I’ll show you a good one and then I’ll show you a bad one and I’ll show you the difference on how that reads on a meter.

So you’ve got voltage and you’ve got draw. So anytime you power something, you have current coming through an electrical line. It’s coming through the power panel from your house, circuit breaker, the lines go through the wall, you plug something into the wall, there’s a draw on that that’s powering the power supply that’s operating the equipment that you’re in.

There’s an associated level of AC magnetic and electric fields usually with that. Most of the newer saunas aren’t really that bad of a culprit like the old ones. The old ones used to have these ceramic style rod heaters and would have thick gauge AC current coming directly to the back of your head, 60, 70, 80 milligauss magnetic fields, which is basically like standing next to a power panel.

Is it going to kill you to sauna for an hour? No. Is it the healthiest thing? Absolutely not.

The biggest issue with it is the sauna companies are taking advantage of people because they’re saying, oh, buy our $6,000 low EMF sauna. It’s better than such and such a company’s non-low EMF sauna that’s high or whatever. But when in fact they were just using that as a sales gimmick.

They weren’t actually mitigating the electric fields or the magnetic fields. They would just do one and then they would be preferential and they would cherry pick with their meter and show you the one that was low. Meanwhile, the other one was sky high. And they’re just using that as a sales tactic to try to get you to buy their stuff versus somebody else’s.

Now, do I think that you should still get a low EMF sauna? Absolutely. It doesn’t cost any more to get a low EMF one than it does a high EMF one. In most cases, if we’re talking about like a class A, you know, top of the line type model, some of the companies focus on it.

Other companies don’t. The bad thing is if you pay money for something and it’s false advertising or that equipment doesn’t live up to the claims, that’s an issue, right? That’s my issue with it. Is it the worst thing on the planet?

No. Do I want it to be, you know, contribute to being a fear monger of EMF? No. EMF should just be understood, not necessarily feared.

Once you understand it, you can work with it. It’s this invisible force field of something that you have a negative belief about that creates fear in people and leaves you with fear. Unless you, you know, take the time to develop the knowledge base or follow people who can assess these types of things.

I think that’s very important so that you sleep well at night, more important than just thinking that everything’s going to harm you because that’s not a good, you know, state to be in, in your body. So in this sauna, this, this sauna has hardly any EMF. This is a radian health sauna.

There’s not much in here. I could take you through really quick if you want to come in. So right now we just, we’re testing magnetic. There’s probably a background in this room of 0.2, maybe 0.2 and a half.

So if we come in here and we come through the seated position in this sauna, there really isn’t going to be any EMF. And there’s also heaters in this bench. So you might get a small spike. There’s wiring and heaters underneath us here.

So if you come through the, this, the seated environment. Now I’m sure there’s a hotspot or two. Like if I took this sauna apart and I saw where the wire connected to the heater on the back of this, there’s going to be a temperature sensor there. I’m sure there’s a spot where I could get it to spike.

If I found that directly.

But for, you know, most of the time, the newer saunas are all going to read pretty low like this. Not all of them are going to be hardly nothing, some will be five or six milligauss. And if we switch to electric, now we’re testing the electric fields, which is a different emanation from the heaters.

Now a lot of saunas have high electric fields. So you would see something like 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, usually just under a thousand. This sauna is mitigated really, really, really well. Again, you could probably find a hotspot if you jammed it in the corner somewhere, or, you know, like there’s heaters under the bench.

Most saunas don’t have heaters and electrical wiring directly under the bench to heat you from below. So the fact that this sauna tests so well really stands out from the crowd. And it’s not, you know, some people say a tri-field meter isn’t reliable. It’s not just the tri-field meter.

I mean, we can test it on all of them if you’d like. You just have a charcuterie board of testers. Here, I just want to show them that it is on. Oh yeah, it’s on.

It’s not super hot, but I can feel my butt getting warm. Like, everything is on. This is a triple-axis gauss meter. So it’s going to take the XYZ axis and try and calculate that.

So it will read a little bit higher on this unless we switch it to one axis. But I run this as a backup to test against all other meters because it’s very, very accurate. This is a cornet, which is not very accurate at all. We just run it as a backup.

And this is known to not play nice with interference. And this is an RF meter. We’re not really checking RF right now, plus we’re filming. So I have Bluetooth and stuff on because I’m wearing the mic.

So this would be going crazy. I’ll just show you. That’s the microphone that is on top of the camera. Wow.

Yeah. Is that bad for you? Nah, I mean, we’re just filming. It’s not like we’re sleeping like this.

It’s just a wireless mic. But it is frequency. So if you want to see what frequency and what output it’s at, this is a meter that will tell you what that is. We use this to test.

Like, in some of the saunas, like a Clearlight Sanctuary, they’re supposed to shut down the Bluetooth or the Wi-Fi module when you plug an MP3 cord in there, but it doesn’t work like they advertise. So, if you put that in your bedroom, it’s like having a Wi-Fi transmitter right next to your bed.

That’s why if you buy a Clearlight Sanctuary, that’s why they’re not on the certified sauna list, only the Clearlight Premier. But if you buy a Clearlight Sanctuary and you put it in your bedroom, you just want to make sure to unplug it when you go to bed at night, so it’s not constantly transmitting right next to you.

But I mean, most people sleep with their phones under their pillow, so is this all just a mood point? I’m not one of those people. I do weird stuff. If there’s Wi-Fi on in the house, I shut it down when I go to bed and I don’t sleep with phones next to me.

I make sure there’s no transmissions and all that stuff. And the reason why is just so that your body has the best chance possible to stay in parasympathetic mode, rest and digest, for as long as possible. And so, people will argue and say, oh, it’s not important, and yada, yada, yada.

But we’re just doing a test. I wouldn’t expect to see anything different on these meters. It’ll basically look like they’re not doing anything in this sauna. Because this sauna is mitigated so well.

This is a Radiant Health EC3H, which is a corner model, and there’s virtually hardly any EMF unless you find a hotspot or unless you shove it in the corner. There are a couple of places in here where if you take the meter and you shove it in a corner where the wires go to the control panel, because there has to be a chase somewhere in the wall.

But it’s pretty far away from the seated position and point of body contact. But I mean, you could test this thing with pretty much every meter that we got and jam it into the heater guard, and you’re not going to find anything. So this is not really great for video, because the sauna is so clean.

So let’s go into one that’s not so clean so that you can actually see them work. Because if you don’t get any readings, it doesn’t really, like it’s kind of like we’re not even doing anything. Do you want to see which one this is? Not particularly.

Whoa, I do like the lights on the… You like that? It’s fun. You like that?

There’s a little party in there. You like the lights? You like the lights? You like the lights, do you?

All right, so in this sauna, this is advertised as a low EMF sauna, I’ve taken it apart, we disassembled it, we figured out why does it read high EMF. Because some parts of it are fine, but during the manufacturing they have poor quality control. So when I took these heaters off the wall, instead of the shielded cabling coming all the way to the temperature sensor and all the way to, they just left an extra two feet in the wall and coiled it up, but they stripped the shielding.

So on the website, when they advertise this sauna as being shielded and low EMF, low EOF, and they show pictures of, oh, we have shielded cabling and all this stuff. Well, they do have shielded cabling, but if it stops up here and the termination point is down here, then this whole side is going to read super high.

So that’s what is taking place in this particular sauna. You’ll have to come in here because the lighting is weird. Is the sauna on? It’s turning on.

Turning on, turning on. I don’t know. Just kidding. Matt lied.

I did. Now you can see it here. Let’s see. So it’ll be 20 milligauss.

Oh shoot, it does jump up. It gets worse somewhere. But again, I mean, this is just one spot. The rest of it is not too terrible.

Seated body position. You’ve got different style heaters in here too. This is not, these are ceramic heaters in the back. So the ceramic heaters will have some output, uh, but they’re not bad.

It’s going to be really hard to see on the camera. It is kind of, we might need to put a light on it, but I don’t want to interfere with this stuff. Okay. There you go.

So in the seated body position, not terrible. You’ll get a blip here and there when you switch to electric fields, like we did in the other.

sauna it’ll be a little different this is probably easier for you to see on the camera I just don’t like to run you know one meter so there’s a sensor back there and there’s also unshielded wiring and then if you switch to so what the sauna company wouldn’t show you is if you switch to electric there’s a decent amount of electric fields in here Wow can you pull back away from the wall real quick sure that we’re probably I don’t know 10 inches away maybe maybe so once you get within well that’s probably 10 inches once you get within see how that affects that absolutely that’s why we use the wooden mount makes sense so actually dampens it well if so if your body comes into contact with the ground watch if I can grab a ground somewhere this will discharge to nothing but the point is shoots way up well it’s just this sauna you know these particular heaters have a grounded heat shield that some bleeds through so you’ll find you know this is an example of you know a sauna that claims to be low EMF but it has a ton of output all over the place so how does this interact with the body body voltage goes up is it gonna kill you no is it what they advertise not exactly then you can replicate this I mean on whatever meter you want to get similar measurements that’s what I do I try to make sure it’s not just one you know particular meter but if you compare this to some of the ones that are lower it looks like the meters aren’t even working

Is it on? That’s why I said I wanted to show them like the sauna is on. Sure. And so if you take the, um, if we take this and turn these all to electric and use the wooden holder so that my body is not influencing them at all.

You can see when it actually starts to emanate from the heater. So you hear the it’s getting closer, closer, closer, closer. Wow. That really ramps up.

Yeah. But you can see it across all of them. So it’s not just this one. It’s that one, that one, that one.

Now keep in mind, we’re jamming the, we’re jamming the meters into the heater point of body contact, you know, it’s going to be less. Yeah. But what if you’re leaning like you’re leaning against, I mean, the fact is that back grate is to be leaned on. So it’s like, sure you can.

But like I said, it’s not going to, this isn’t going to kill anybody right in the past. If you’re somebody who’s super sick, not the wisest idea, but I’d be more worried about super high EMF stuff next to your bed frame or like over your head. The issue with it is, um, these companies charge thousands of dollars and they use this as a marketing tactic.

And so I have an issue with when you don’t get what they advertise, that’s false advertising. When the product doesn’t live up to the claims, you shouldn’t spend more money to be getting that when you’re not actually getting it. And so these are just tools, you know, you have to know how to interpret this stuff.

There is one issue that I see people in the Facebook group doing. Let me turn the power off so that I don’t get high just because it’s high EMF doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. It still gets hot. Um, now there are some people that don’t understand how to test for EMF and so we need to come out with a, an EMF masterclass.

Really the benefit to that is to show people how to test their sleeping environment and in their house, not so much Slanas.

You can use saunas as an easy-to-use, small little enclosure to learn the ins and outs so that you can take that knowledge and then go apply it to your own environment, especially your kids. If you have babies and stuff and you put RF transmitters right next to their head for like a wireless baby monitor or something like that, there’s better solutions.

You can use something called a power line adapter, which is basically ethernet over power lines. A lot of people say that those cause interference and cause transient voltage on the line, which they do, but if that transient voltage is not reaching far enough into the room to affect your body voltage, why does it matter?

These are getting into advanced concepts. They’re not really relevant to sauna, but we can use saunas as a tool to learn these concepts and methodologies and then take them and apply them to your house so you have a healthier home for you and your kids and your family.

The other thing that people want to know is, is it worth buying a sauna or any health equipment for that matter, not just limited to sauna, that is low EMF, low VOC. Now, low VOC is different. Low VOC, I think, is really important. You want to buy from a tier A company where there’s not any adhesives on the back of the heater guard in the sauna when they’re heating up that you’re going to breathe in.

Because you do that, you’re kind of negating the positive health benefits of using the equipment in the first place. Now, it’s hard for me to tell somebody to spend extra money to get a low EMF sauna because it’s unlikely that any of this stuff is going to kill you.

Can it contribute to your ill health? It’s up to you. If you’re a person that’s EMF sensitive, we have a ton of people who are chemically sensitive. We have a ton of people that are EMF sensitive.

They’re seeing functional medicine practitioners. They’re doing heavy metal detoxes. They have theories that mercury deposits from amalgam fillings deposit in fat cells or tissues. And that turns the body into more of an antenna than another person could be contributing to some of their EMF sensitivity just because their body interacts with current or that type of environmental exposure differently than a person that doesn’t have that toxicity.

And so these devices are meant to reduce that toxicity.

And the main reason that you would want to use infrared over like a traditional sauna or something like that is because you get radiant heat really close to the tissues to try and initiate lipolysis and get rid of some of these toxins in the cells. Ideally, you’d want to be in parasympathetic mode as much as possible, which means that the body’s nervous system is not triggered in any negative way.

You don’t have any unnecessary stress other than the heat stress. And so is an AC magnetic field of a hundred milligauss going back to the directly by the back of your brain while you sit in a sauna, not this one. While you sit in a sauna advantageous, if you’re in that condition, probably not.

What I would like to get across to people is the most important aspect of the EMF use saunas as a tool of understanding in my mind to apply these principles to your actual sleeping environment where you are exposed for eight plus hours a night, 365 days a year, where it does make a difference in your children’s lives and your, you know, your family’s life where the principles of having a healing sleep sanctuary do apply.

You know, there’s longterm health benefits to that. And you’ll have the naysayers that say, Oh, EMF doesn’t matter. And it’s not even proven in the World Health Organization and yada, yada, yada. But it’s, you can see it over and over and over again.

People that live by high voltage power lines or, which is totally different than this. I’m just giving you an example where we can see out in the wild, they develop conditions. They just do. Saunas aren’t like that.

There’s also a difference between voltage, the voltage on the lines in a neighborhood versus the voltage on a line that go to a sub power station around the corner from a house. So a substation, that’s extremely different. Those magnetic fields can extend up over half a mile sometimes.

And so I was in an environment in the past where it was four or 500 feet from these lines and they still extend into the house past the house out by the lake, you know, so it’s kind of a big deal. The thing that I would really stress to people, here’s the deal.

This sauna that has hardly any EMF in it.

the beginning of the video, it’s $5,000. That sauna over there that clearly has EMF in it is also $5,000. The saunas that are low EMF, low VOC, high EMF, high VOC don’t cost any more, any less, right? And this is what I’ve failed.

I’ve failed to get this across to people for many, many years. And so people see me ranting and raving and they think that I’m just an EMF lunatic or that I want to be a fear monger or EMF. And I think the worst thing that you can do to people, I’ve left functional medicine groups.

I’ve left all types of teaching methodologies, people that were training me, et cetera, et cetera. If they leave people in fear because one of the worst things for you, for your nervous system is to think that your environment is harming you and you have no way to quantify it because it’s invisible.

You have no way to measure the strength. You don’t possess the knowledge or the detail in order to assess it. And then you’re just left with this unknowing fear of some invisible fucking force that’s supposed to, you know, cause you death. Well, that’s not the case.

What really needs to happen is you need to understand these principles, know how the body interacts with them so that you can bob and weave and move and, and you know, just do the things that actually matter and get rid of the rest, ditch the rest. Just because a sauna has everything that plugs into a wall has some level of EMF.

I’m here to break it to you. Everything. Just because a sauna has some level of EMF doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do it or shouldn’t use it. A lot of cases, the benefits of sauna outweigh the cons.

Even if it’s a high EMF sauna, there are some cases where they have a step down transformer in them. And just because it reads high EMF doesn’t mean that it’s not DC current. Doesn’t mean that it’s not lower voltage. People aren’t trained on meters.

You can stick a meter up to DC current and it’ll read high EMF, but DC current doesn’t interact with the body the same way that AC current does. And so a lot of the older saunas that had ceramic rod style heaters, those are the ones that had 12 gauge wire running right to the back of your spine that had 60, 70, 80 milligauss magnetic fields.

I wouldn’t recommend those more important than that.

I wouldn’t recommend a high VOC sauna. More important than the EMF. If it’s not built with clean chemicals, you’re in a superheated box with the door shut, right? Can you still…

Oh yeah, I have the thing on. So if there’s chemicals in here, or if there’s adhesives in here, or if you have a ceramic rod style EMF heater, and it has a metal heater grate with felt glued to the back of it, that’s going to heat up past the set point of that adhesive, and you’re going to get some off gassing.

You’re going to get some chemicals that you’re breathing in. And so I think that’s really important, especially if your whole family’s going to use the equipment, or you’re health challenged, or your kids are going to use it. Then it really matters. I mean, we’re talking about, do we buy a cheap $2,000 or $3,000 sauna that may have some of these chemicals in them?

Or a more expensive $5,000 or $6,000 sauna? If over the next 10 or 15 years, it helps heal you, it’s well worth the money. If it helps contribute to your illness, it’s obviously not worth the savings. So I hope that makes sense, and I hope we put to bed the fear of EMF, and we cover some principles.

We’re going to have a lot more in this series, and we’ll go in depth and teach you exactly how to do it yourself.