When Peter Cowan measured electromagnetic field levels near the San Francisco 49ers’ practice facility in November, he wasn’t chasing clicks. The board-certified clinician had a Gauss meter, a theory, and a detour on the way to the airport.

What happened next? Over a million views on social media, a shoutout from 49ers wide receiver Kendrick Bourne in a press conference, and a firestorm of debate about whether a nearby electrical substation could be contributing to the 49ers’ decade-long injury curse.

Cowan spent years treating patients with mast cell activation syndrome and other complex conditions tied to collagen breakdown. These are the same soft tissue issues now plaguing tight end George Kittle, who went down with a non-contact Achilles injury in the Wild Card game against the Philadelphia Eagles.

Cowan sat down with EssentiallySports’ Tim Wood for an exclusive interview to discuss the science behind his claims and what players can do right now to protect themselves. He’s not asking anyone to prove him wrong. He’s asking why so few are even curious enough to ask questions.

Peter, you have written a fascinating series of articles surrounding the NFL and emissions. Can you give the elevator pitch in terms of what this is all about?

“So the elevator pitch is that the 49ers are statistically one of the most injured teams over the past decade. The fans call it the curse of Levi’s Stadium. I’m not a very close NFL follower these days, but I am a fan. I did grow up in the Bay.”

“They won so much in the 80s and 90s, and the fans have been frustrated for the past decade. So, there are a lot of theories as to why their injury rates are so high, and none of them really panned out because other teams have those things too. And the only thing that I could find that was different was this electrical substation that sits right behind their facilities and likely emits a very strong AC magnetic field. And they’re in those facilities six days a week, I believe, during the season and most of the year, except for maybe two or three months in the summer, based on the research that I did. So it’s a lot of exposure.”

Kendrick Bourne gave you a shout-out in the press conference. You’ve gotten some heat in terms of this from the conspiracy theorists out there. I just wanted to give you the platform first of all to debunk that a little bit.

“People joke about things that they’re not allowed to talk about seriously. You can get away with joking about anything. But if a player were to say, “Hey, I think this substation is a problem.” That’s going to be a problem. So, I don’t know what his motives were, but the fact that he was joking about it to me is a good sign. I was so happy to hear that.”

“But just regarding the conspiracy theory, anybody who actually read my article knows that I did not imply any conspiracy whatsoever. I laid out scientific mechanisms, and this is actually the result of my clinical work that I was doing last year with clients who suffered from a condition called MCAS, which is mass cell activation syndrome, and it comes often in a triad with two other conditions. One is called EDS (Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome), and the other is POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome).”

“It has to do with blood pressure issues when you stand up, and you get heart palpitations and such, and they’re all tied together, and the common explanation is that EDS, which is a hypermobility condition, is genetic and that people get the other two because of that. But my research showed me that actually MCAS breaks down collagen and leads to non-genetic forms of EDS which has gone up so much in the past 20 years.”

“So there’s no conspiracy whatsoever. I might be wrong, but I did clinical work with clients who suffer from this condition, and a lot of them got better. It’s very hard to treat. But then I immediately recognized it in the 49ers, who suffer from soft tissue injuries. Not only are they soft tissue, they’re primarily non-contact soft tissue injuries, which is exactly what happened to Kittle last night. And it’s such a bummer. So tragic. I really hope that he heals quickly.”

But you are not blaming the 49ers in all this?

“I don’t think the 49ers have done anything wrong at all. The substation was there; they didn’t put it there. The substation is legally compliant, and that doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be a lawsuit or something, but they did nothing wrong.”

The guidelines that are there for the substation in the first place, how do those guidelines miss the real risk?

“The guidelines emerged after World War II. I’m not an expert on it, but I did some research when people working with radar were actually burning themselves from the heat of these electromagnetic fields. And so levels were determined, basically a cut-off at a certain power level. You’re not going to burn yourself, then it’s not going to be a problem.”

“So the regulations were built around the idea that electromagnetic radiation is a spectrum. Right in the middle is light. On one side is ionizing radiation, and that’s things like X-rays and Gamma rays, and we all know that you don’t want to get messed with that because it’s going to damage your tissue directly. The nonionizing radiation does not damage it directly. So it was assumed that it was safe, and so we wrote regulations around that.” 

“Which is not to say that there weren’t legal battles around this, because in the 60s and 70s, when we were building out our power infrastructure and creating these high voltage electrical lines, there were huge legal battles around it. The primary scientists who fought against this were Dr. Robert Becker and Andrew Marino, who was a biophysicist. Becker was an orthopedic surgeon, and he eventually went on 60 Minutes regarding another electromagnetic health issue and basically said the Navy is going to install this massive antenna in Wisconsin, and it’s going to cause health problems to everybody who lives there. And the federal government pulled all of his contracts and basically canceled him overnight. And he would have probably been a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. So they canceled him, and the regulations have stayed the same ever since.”

This kind of discussion reminds me a lot of the early days of concussion discussion when it comes to the NFL.

“I think there are some similarities to this. I think there are some important distinctions, though, because the conditions that the NFL players are subject to is actually the conditions that all of us in the world are now subject to, primarily in modern high-income countries with really advanced infrastructure.”

“It’s not just the EMF from the substation. I read that the Niners just did a $200 million upgrade to their wireless in their facilities, and it got millimeter wave and C-band wave. It’s all over the bleachers. People want their connectivity. It’s the blue light from the LEDs messing with people’s circadian rhythms, which I actually think is probably the biggest factor, and that the EMS from the substation would be just like the straw that broke the camel’s back on top of that, because these soft tissue injuries are happening across all sports league,s and it’s not just the 49ers. They just happen to have it worse.”

From a symptom setting here, what do you start seeing happening when issues start popping up?

“The problem is that the effects are nonlinear. So they’re not going to affect everybody the same way at all. So it really depends on where your weak point is. For me, it was a lot of fatigue, brain fog, and just having trouble sleeping. And then I started having heart palpitations when I did any sort of exercise, and pain in my soft tissue. Those are the main ones. Immune issues, too, like getting sick all the time. For other people, though, you might see weight gain, you might see more soft tissue injuries, obviously.”

It also reminds me a lot of an Erin Brockovich situation. Nobody wants to own it, but the reality is that these things are happening.

“I think that’s a good one. And I think another good one is the cigarette-causing cancer issue. We knew it for decades. Everybody knew it. And was it a conspiracy? No. It took getting those lawsuits to go through, and the liability to cost more than the alternative. So there’s some interesting stuff around that with the telecom companies. It’s my understanding that the insurance companies will not insure them for this kind of suit, but that’s something I haven’t looked into myself. It’s something I’ve heard from people that I trust. So, I would say verify that one.”

“But there have been some promising lawsuits, and I think RFK, before he was with the current administration, won a pretty significant suit having to do with the rollout of 5G. So there has been some progress, but I personally don’t see it going away because, unlike cigarettes, everybody’s addicted to their devices and they love them, and our economy is built on it. And cigarettes, a lot of people loved them, but it wasn’t the foundation of our economy.”

When we were talking about the soft tissue part of this, you brought it up in terms of a microwave. Can you explain that a little bit?

“You’re basically getting dehydrated. So, if you ever put a steak or something with a lot of moisture in the microwave, you warm it up, but it gets kind of hard and dry. So it’s a similar effect. Our bodies are like 60 to 70% water by weight, but by molecular count, it’s 99 or more percent. And collagen specifically is 99.6% water by molecular count, and the water is an essential part of the structure of the collagen.”

“It’s not just there for hydration. We have mitochondria in our cells, which create energy, and they create water. And if they’re disturbed, instead of creating water, they create something called a free radical, which leads to damage to the cells, and it leads to less water. So, we get a double whammy there.”

“Have you ever left a rubber band in the sun? It goes from being nice and bendy to – it just snaps immediately. It’s the same thing. The collagen is an incredibly strong substance when it’s cross-linked correctly, and it’s hydrated. It’s insanely strong. But if it gets compromised, it can’t really handle those loads.”

We talked about Kendrick Bourne shouting out the power plant and pretty much referencing the article. Are any other former players, league insiders, or anybody else reaching out behind the scenes looking for more information from you on this?

“The closest I’ve got is a couple follows. John Feliciano is following me. I think Will Compton is. He also reposted me and said, “This should have a billion views,” yesterday. And I think that really jacked up the exposure a lot. But other than that, nobody in any official capacity has gotten in touch. And I think it’s unfortunate because I’m actually a board-certified clinician. If anybody does talk to me, the conversation is going to be covered by HIPAA law, and I’m legally not allowed to share anything they say. So they can come to me safely, and it’s not a problem.”

You’re wanting to talk about this. That’s why you’re doing this. You didn’t put this out there for clicks. You put this out there because of research that you did.

“I had no idea it was going to take off like this. I was visiting family in the Bay Area for Thanksgiving, and I had seen Chase Senior’s post in October about the substation. And I remembered I went to a Niners game a couple years ago with my daughter, my father-in-law, and my nephew. And I remember seeing the facilities and thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting. Why would they put that here?”

“And so, when I saw that post from Chase Senior, I was like, “you know what? I know a lot about this issue.” I got a Gauss meter, I’m just going to go measure it. So, my dad was driving me to the airport; it’s right by the airport. So we got to the stadium, and I had a plan of where I was going to go, and it didn’t work out, so we had to go behind the stadium. I finally found a place where I could do the measuring, and right when I did, my dad started having some heart palpitations, so I had to take him to the doctor, and so it was just kind of a side thing that I did, and then I wrote the article in December.”

“Ended up having a conversation with my mentor, and she’s like, “This is a great article. You should publish it.” And so after the holidays, I just put it out there. And the timing was impeccable because they had those three injuries in that game against the [Seattle] Seahawks, where they lost a player for the postseason. And [Brock] Purdy had that shoulder injury. So, I think the timing was right.”

Is there anything that the players themselves can do to protect themselves from these emissions?

“Yeah, I think in the third part of my essay, I mentioned that the NFL is actually ahead of the curve on some of this stuff. I don’t know if they have the same theory behind why they’re doing this stuff, but they’re on the right track. And certainly, like the Niners have a contract with Joove, which is a red light panel manufacturer, and they have a whole red light room. And red light makes the mitochondria produce more water. So there are a lot of things that we can do to both reduce our exposure to these emissions and to kind of mitigate the harm if we can’t reduce our exposure.”

If this is ignored, what do you think the long-term costs will be to the players, to the franchises that face these issues?

“I’m not a doctor, and I don’t follow these kinds of injuries too closely, but I did a little research, and that kind of Achilles tear that Kittle went through can be a career-ending injury. I don’t think in this case it probably will be, but just looking at shorter careers and long-term pain. I think about myself, everything that I went through when I was sick. That’s not any way you want to live. It’s not a good quality of life.”

“In a way, I was lucky, and somebody who has a soft tissue injury is lucky because they have an acute injury that they can address and realize that “Hey, there’s something going on here that I need to fix.” Whereas someone else is going to be 45-50 and have a stroke or a heart attack, and they’re just going to be gone, and they never knew there was an issue.”

“I just think long-term, it’s all of us. It’s not just the athletes. And I’m really glad this came up because I think athletic organizations are really ahead of the curve on taking care of people’s health. I know players get injured, and there are issues too, but they’re really doing their best to keep their players healthy for the economic necessity of their team.”

We’re talking about five billion dollar valuations, and these players with hundreds of million-dollar contracts, they are commodities now. How do you address the critics who say that this is fringe or unsupported?

“I almost just don’t even want to address them because I think the more interesting question is: why are they so quick to dismiss without any curiosity? I think there are a lot of reasons why they might be so quick to dismiss. There’s a lot of money in this stuff, and a lot of people have just a stake in another view of how things work. And then other people are just threatened by anything that’s outside of the very mainstream scientific consensus.”

“But when I say scientific consensus, I’m talking about institutional science consensus because my paper is full of citations to peer-reviewed literature that tell a different story. I can’t read other people’s minds, but I do think it’s really interesting that it’s just been dismissed without curiosity by so many in the mainstream media.”

And you’re not out here saying the typical sort of prove me wrong statement? You’re saying I’ve done the research there. Here’s what the science is behind the numbers that I’ve been able to gather, and do with it what you will.

“Right. Also, just to add, I’ve done clinical work with people and helped them get better, and myself. The amazing thing is if anybody just wanted to ask me what we can do to make things better, most of the things they can do are going to be good for them, regardless if the EMF thing is an issue or not.”

“So even if I’m wrong, the things that I would recommend would just be better for them in general. So it’s a very low-risk thing. It’s pretty much no risk. But the risks that they happen to see are the ones of, well, “what if we validate this crackpot and our doctors are saying something different and the government and blah blah blah and we don’t we don’t want to rock the boat.” And I get that. It’s understandable.”

“Which is why I think it’s more likely that a player would reach out on their own, and that’s why I’m kind of saying, I’m HIPAA compliant. I can’t say a thing if you talk to me. It’s not going on X. It’s not going anywhere public.”

But you’re available to talk?

“I am. People can find my phone number online if they want.”

Is the damage already done in terms of what these guys, the ‘26 49ers went through? Can these sorts of things be reversed or improved?

“I should have given you a picture of me in 2019 of how unhealthy I was. Yeah, you can. Healing is always possible. And there are multiple routes for healing. I’m not saying I’m the only one that knows how to do anything. It’s not the case. But no, it’s never too late.”

Where can people find you online, on Substack, on X, on TikTok, on Instagram?

“So, my main is X. It’s @living_energy. And that’s actually my local wellness business that I run. And then after that is Instagram, @sunlightis.life, and Substack is peteranthonycowan@substack.com, and TikTok’s sunlightis.life.”

“Everything I post goes through X. And then you can go to my website sunlightislife.com, and that’s where my platform is. I’ve got some apps coming up. I’ve got a lot of things coming up, and I hope to be able to share them with more people. There’s a lot of people who are not doing well in this world, and they could use some help getting better, and I’m trying to give them the tools to do that.”