265. Tyler LeBaron: Hydrogen Water, Mitochondrial Health, Selective Antioxidants, & Longevity

Could the smallest molecule in the universe be one of the most powerful tools for your health? I brought Dr. Tyler LeBaron, the world’s leading molecular hydrogen researcher, onto the Ultimate Human Podcast to break down what hydrogen water actually does inside your body, why it’s nothing like alkaline water, and what the clinical research really says about recovery, cognitive function, metabolic health, and more. CLICK HERE TO BECOME GARY’S VIP!: https://bit.ly/4ai0Xwg Access Tyler LeBaron’s research studies here: https://bit.ly/3Q8mth8 Read the “New Breakthrough Study Identifies First Molecular Target of Hydrogen in Human Cells” study here: https://bit.ly/3QBGPzo InhaleH₂ delivers precision hydrogen inhalation therapy. Get $250 OFF: https://bit.ly/4uDQfcm Listen to "The MHI Podcast" here: https://bit.ly/4cHxM8G Connect with Tyler LeBaron Website: https://bit.ly/4gUYltr YouTube: https://bit.ly/48v7a8u Instagram: https://bit.ly/4ekV7hK Facebook: https://bit.ly/47W7qxg X: https://bit.ly/4tcQH1b LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/4cmXAG1 Thank you to our partners A-GAME: “ULTIMATE15” FOR 15% OFF: http://bit.ly/4kek1ij AION: “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4h6KHAD AIRES: "ULTIMATE20 " FOR 20% OFF: https://bit.ly/4a3Duze BAJA GOLD: "ULTIMATE10" FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/3WSBqUa BODYHEALTH: “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: http://bit.ly/4e5IjsV COLD LIFE: THE ULTIMATE HUMAN PLUNGE: https://bit.ly/4eULUKp CYMBIOTIKA: "ULTIMATE10" FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4tjyluP GENETIC METHYLATION TEST (UK ONLY): https://bit.ly/48QJJrk GENETIC TEST (USA ONLY): ⁠https://bit.ly/3Yg1Uk9 GOPUFF: GET YOUR FAVORITE SNACK!: https://bit.ly/4obIFDC H2TABS: “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4hMNdgg HEALF: 10% OFF YOUR ORDER: https://bit.ly/41HJg6S PEPTUAL: “TUH10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4mKxgcn SNOOZE: LET’S GET TO SLEEP!: https://bit.ly/4pt1T6V WHOOP: JOIN & GET 1 FREE MONTH!: https://bit.ly/3VQ0nzW Watch the “Ultimate Human Podcast” every Tuesday & Thursday at 9AM EST: YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RPQYX8 Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3RQftU0 Connect with Gary Brecka Instagram: https://bit.ly/3RPpnFs TikTok: https://bit.ly/4coJ8fo X: https://bit.ly/3Opc8tf Facebook: https://bit.ly/464VA1H LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/4hH7Ri2 Website: https://bit.ly/4eLDbdU Merch: https://bit.ly/4aBpOM1 Newsletter: https://bit.ly/47ejrws Ask Gary: https://bit.ly/3PEAJuG Timestamps 00:00 ​Intro of Show 06:33 Research on Hydrogen 12:30 Different Hydrogen Forms 16:26 Affiliation with Research Institutions 27:33 Hydrogen as a Selective Antioxidant 32:41 Redox Homeostasis Definition 40:46 Hydrogen Regulating Natural Antioxidants 55:31 Hydrogen for Athletic Performance 1:10:24 Hydrogen’s Impact on Women’s Hormones 1:12:40 Metabolic Syndrome and Hydrogen 1:20:24 Healthy Microbiome Producing Hydrogen Gas 1:23:41 How to Start with Hydrogen Tablets? 1:27:02 Other Benefits of Hydrogen 1:38:46 Hydrogen in Post-Cardiac Arrest Syndrome Patients’ Survival 1:48:59 Connect with Tyler 1:43:23 Safety of Taking Hydrogen Tablets 1:49:53 What does it mean to you to be an Ultimate Human? Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not provide medical advice. It is not intended for diagnosing or treating any health condition. Always consult a licensed healthcare professional before making health or wellness decisions. Gary Brecka is the owner of Ultimate Human, LLC which operates The Ultimate Human podcast and promotes certain third-party products used by Gary Brecka in his personal health and wellness protocols and daily life and for which Ultimate Human LLC and / or Gary Brecka directly or indirectly holds an economic interest or receives compensation. Accordingly, statements made by Gary Brecka and others (including on The Ultimate Human podcast) may be considered. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Alkaline water alone is not going to provide benefits. Even if you subscribe to the benefits that we need to maintain an alkaline body, you can't do with alkaline water.

• 0:08Gary Brecka?

  Everyone thinks that it's the pH, it's the alkalinity driving the benefit. So many people are paying so much extra money to get 8.8, 10.4 pH water.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Molecular hydrogen is the key to any of the benefits to alkaline ionized water.

• 0:22Gary Brecka?

  The mechanism that hydrogen uses to leave the body's production of necessary free radicals alone, reduce the harmful free radicals that we don't need and allow the cellular homeostasis to return.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Hydrogen acts as a therapeutic selective antioxidant. It doesn't change anything with the water. It's just the water becomes the carrier of those substances.

• 0:44Gary Brecka?

  So for somebody that's new to hydrogen water, what's the entry point to start consuming hydrogen water?

• 0:48Speaker 00

  First, I would just consume it daily. When you drink hydrogen water, you'll...

• 1:05Gary Brecka?

  If you've ever spent money on alkaline water, I need you to hear this episode because Dr. Tyler LeBaron, the world's leading molecular hydrogen scientist, author of over 50 peer reviewed publications, is about to blow up everything you thought you knew. Here's the truth. Alkaline water's benefits have nothing to do with pH, nothing. The clinical research shows that when you remove the dissolved hydrogen gas from alkaline water, every single benefit disappears. It was never the alkalinity. It was always the hydrogen. And what Tyler reveals in this conversation is stunning. In a Japanese clinical trial, adding hydrogen gas to standard treatment improved cardiac arrest survival from 61% to 85%. We're talking about 24 additional lives saved per 100 patients.

• 1:50Gary Brecka?

  Tyler explains how hydrogen works as a selective antioxidant, a redox adaptogen that targets only the harmful free radicals while preserving the beneficial oxidative signals that your mitochondria need. This is the science everyone is sleeping on. Don't skip this episode. Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, Human. Biologist Gary Brecka, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And every time I have a guest on the show, I get excited to talk to them about their subject area of expertise. And today's guest is someone I have been really dying to have

• 2:30Gary Brecka?

  on the podcast. He is probably solely responsible for my foray into hydrogen water, hydrogen bathing, hydrogen inhalation, all things hydrogen. I have the deepest level of respect for this guest. He is probably the world's leading molecular hydrogen scientist. I would, I would argue that. He has published numerous papers in quality peer-reviewed journals. He holds a PhD in this area of science and we are absolutely blessed to have Dr. Tyler the Baron on the podcast today. And I will say, he's also become a good friend. And he was teaching me how to arm wrestle this morning, fully random sidebar, but we had a great workout this morning. And, and he was giving out, he's, he's a professional arm wrestler, which is,

• 3:14Gary Brecka?

  you know, that's banging a 90-degree turn from hydrogen studies. And so he was teaching Zach Efron and my son and I and all the guys how to arm wrestle this morning. So maybe before the podcast is over, we'll throw in some arm wrestling tips. It's all in the wrist.

• 3:29Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 3:31Gary Brecka?

  I've just heard that. I don't know if that's true or not. So that's all, I've just given you all my arm wrestling knowledge in one sentence. But Tyler, I'm, I'm so excited to have you on because I think people, when it comes to hydrogen water, hydrogen tablets, bathing in hydrogen, inhaling hydrogen, I think they fall into one of two camps, in my opinion. There are the hardcore skeptics, and then there are the people that have actually gotten familiar with the science. And so I would love for you to just give my audience some background, you know, your, your personal story about how you got into this space. Because It is kind of random, right?

• 4:14Gary Brecka?

  Have a PhD and spend your time researching this smallest, lightest element in the universe and going so deep into that science, but you've done it, you know? And so I'd love to hear the backstory of, you know, what got you interested?

• 4:31Speaker 00

  Well, again, thank you for having me on your show. I really appreciate the opportunity to educate and it's something I'm very passionate about. I'm honored that you think so much of me.

• 4:42Gary Brecka?

  I do, I really do, man.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  I really stand on the heads of, shoulders of giants. I mean, there's a lot of other researchers that are much more expert in their fields than I am. I've just been at this for 16 years and I am really grateful for my mentors who, and I go to these conferences in Asia and Europe and meet with other researchers and I'm just really grateful for them. And I have a lot of interests, like arm wrestling. I'm a wanted professional, I compete competitively, but there's again, a lot of people who are a lot better than me and I'm just grateful that I can be on this journey. And with that journey though, yeah, you know, I came across this whole hydrogen concept back in 2009. And I learned about it because you've probably heard of alkaline ionized water.

• 5:27Gary Brecka?

  Yes, everybody's drinking alkaline water now.

• 5:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, and which is unfortunate and we'll get to that. But see, I learned about this and this is, I was always interested in science and just health, but this was before I had, you know, any real science training or knowledge. And, but there were some papers on this alkaline ionized water and I was like, this is interesting, but I want to understand. I was asking, you know, the different people, like, how does this work? And all the answers were kind of contradicting each other. And then I went to the university and asked my professors, well, how does alkaline water work, you know, why would this help? And they explained to me that it's not going to help.

• 6:04Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  And it wasn't just, you know, making fun of me per se, but explaining logically the reasons why it's alkaline water alone is not going to provide benefits. And that raised the question then, how is it possible that this water could have any benefits? Which also raises The question first, before we try to figure out how something works, we first need to figure out if it works.

• 6:26Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  And so that was my very first forte or foray into into research is I did a little study. It's a pilot study and I found that drinking alkaline ionized water that was fresh could provide some some exercise benefits. Basically, I had during lactate thresholds running and

• 6:45Gary Brecka?

  Delayed onset muscle soreness.

• 6:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, that that area, lactate threshold, and they could exercise a little bit longer. And anyways, this gave me some, I guess, some push that I should want to research this more and try to understand why. But it was in this investigations and reading more of the literature that I came across this article published in Nature Medicine on hydrogen gas being therapeutic. Now, I didn't understand the significance of that at the time. But when I was talking to one of my professors, a biochemistry professor, he had printed that article off and he handed and I went to his office. I went to his office all the time. We're always talking about different things and he had printed that off. And he, because he said, and I was really thinking about this whole alkaline ionized water thing.

• 7:29Speaker 00

  And in your write up, you cited this paper, pulled it off and had it to me. And he says, you know, Tyler, I think there's something here.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  And when he said that, I just, I felt something inside of me saying, this is really interesting. This is something I want to research. I want to understand this because hydrogen gas is so easy to get. It's it's it's all over the place.

• 7:57Gary Brecka?

  It's the most prevalent element in the universe, right?

• 7:59Speaker 00

  It is.

• 8:00Gary Brecka?

  It's smallest, the lightest, it's highest on the periodic table. Right. It's 10% of our body weight is hydrogen.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, a different form of hydrogen. Yes, that's actually a good point because we want to talk about and separate between hydrogen gas and the different types of hydrogen.

• 8:13Gary Brecka?

  Like hydrogen ion versus H2.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  Yes, or the hydrogen that's in compounds. And but let me let

• 8:20Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, let me unpack this.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, why don't we unpack that first? And then I want to talk about this nature medicine paper. So we can understand why this is so significant. Right?

• 8:28Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 8:28Speaker 00

  And and throughout this podcast, I just want to say through the outset, you know, I am really happy to be here to educate because it's something I'm passionate about with my research. And it's exciting to see this field emerging. But but often some of the marketing or excitement outpaces the actual evidence.

• 8:45Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  And, you know, but if I'm if I don't come and educate, well, then who's going to do the education? They might be talking about things that aren't necessarily true. Or, you know, the hydrogen is going to alkalize your cells or something. And that's, that's not how it works. Right? So I'm really going to try to do my best to to stick to the science and help us understand how it's supposed to work. What does the research actually say? And just people can kind of get grounded a little bit more. Right?

• 9:11Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  Because I think that the preliminary evidence is interesting enough that it gives it should give us possibly think about it. Right?

• 9:19Gary Brecka?

  And so this nature article, I don't mean to cut you off. What was the what was the subject of the nature article?

• 9:25Speaker 00

  OK, yeah.

• 9:27Gary Brecka?

  Because that is a very serious, for those of you that are not familiar with that journal, that is a very significant, highly regarded peer reviewed journal.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 9:35Gary Brecka?

  You don't just throw papers into nature.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. OK, so basically it was with ischemia, reperfusion injury. This was specifically in a stroke model. So they did, they took these rats and they induced a stroke model. It's called a middle cerebral artery occlusion. So they cut the blood supply to the brain and that's going to cause damage.

• 9:53Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  Because you have no oxygen rich blood going to the brain.

• 9:55Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  And then when you let the blood go back to the brain, well, now that blood is oxygen rich and that oxygen rich blood goes to the brain and it causes what's known as a reperfusion injury. So you have ischemia and reperfusion. And this or an IR injury. And this is a major problem with strokes or anytime you're cutting the blood supply like that. Well, they they used hydrogen gas and they only used 2% hydrogen gas, which is important because above 4% hydrogen gas is explosive.

• 10:27Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  But if you keep it below that, then it's not explosive and it still had these therapeutic effects. Now, you could probably add this in the show notes and you can look at the figure and you can see the this white portion of the of the brain, the rat brain, and that the white area is the dead area of the brain and that's when no hydrogen gas was given. Or helium gas was also administered and there was no effect. But when only 2% hydrogen gas was given, it dramatically prevented the brain damage from this stroke model. I mean, it's just, you don't have to be a scientist to look at, to look and see. You can see the difference right there.

• 11:06Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 11:06Speaker 00

  And then they, what they did then is they, to figure out a mechanism, is they dissolved the hydrogen gas into cell culture media. Okay, so remember, it's just a gas, it's dissolved in the cell culture media and then they added some mitochondria toxins and things that would create a lot of free radicals, because that's what happens during an ischemia, reperfusion injury is free radical damage. So they added some toxins in there, create more free radicals, and they found that hydrogen gas also was able to reduce the oxidative stress that was going on.

• 11:34Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 11:34Speaker 00

  So the article, of this paper was entitled that hydrogen acts as a therapeutic selective antioxidant.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  And it was, and able to help prevent this brain damage from this stroke study.

• 11:50Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  So, so going back to my story, when my professor, you know, had this paper to me and he felt, hey, there's really something here, that was very exciting to me. And seeing how the study basically ignited the interest in hydrogen research. I went and I, I looked at all the, the studies and everything I could find at the time and there were only 50 or so publications on hydrogen.

• 12:15Gary Brecka?

  It's like 1,500 now.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Around 1,500 studies of maybe over 3,000 publications in total. I mean, I have, I have authored over 50 publications on hydrogen, you know, now, you know, compared to back in 2009. But, but maybe we should, we should just break down again the, the different forms of hydrogen, just so we can make sure everyone's on the same page.

• 12:36Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 12:36Speaker 00

  Would that be helpful?

• 12:37Gary Brecka?

  That'd be very helpful.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  I just, I think when we think about water, for example, we, we already know water is H2O. So water already has hydrogen in it.

• 12:47Gary Brecka?

  And, and that's the biggest blowback that I get when I tell people that, you know, I drink hydrogen-rich water every day and they're like, that doesn't make any sense. Water's hydrogen's already in water. But those, those molecules are spoken for, right? I mean, they're already bound. So this is like H2O plus H2, H2, H2, H2, H2, right?

• 13:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, and it doesn't change the chemistry of the water. So if we, we can actually, um, we can actually say there's, there's several different species or forms of hydrogen exists. Now, let's just go through them briefly. If you go to the periodic table of elements, you'll see that hydrogen is number one, right? That's elementary school, hydrogen's number one. That hydrogen has one proton and one electron, and it's all by itself. That's atomic hydrogen. But if it's just a single electron, doesn't want to stay by itself. That hydrogen atom is going to want to react with pretty much anything. If it reacts with nitrogen, you can form things like amino acids or like ammonia, right? And hydrogen, nitrogen compounds. It can react with carbon to form hydrocarbons like carbohydrates, gasoline, right? All of these types of, these are hydrocarbons.

• 13:49Speaker 00

  It could react with oxygen to form things like water, H2O. And like what you talked, you used to mention how these other atoms are spoken for. So you look at the water molecule, there's the oxygen and then hydrogen is a, hydrogen is attached to the oxygen. So it looks like Mickey Mouse. There's oxygen, then to hydrogen's are attached that oxygen molecule, so they're kind of tied up, right? So again, hydrogen can react with, you know, nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, or it could react with another hydrogen atom. And if it did, it would make a hydrogen atom here, a hydrogen atom here, it would make a molecule of hydrogen. So instead of a water molecule, it would make a molecule of hydrogen. We call that molecular hydrogen.

• 14:28Gary Brecka?

  Great.

• 14:28Speaker 00

  And this is the diatomic gas. This is what we're talking about. It's odorless, it's tasteless, it's soluble, above 4%. This is the gas, and when you take this gas and you dissolve it into water, you don't change the pH, you don't change the structure of the water or anything. So pH, people get confused because when they hear pH, it stands for, in their mind, potential hydrogen.

• 14:51Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  But what form of hydrogen? That hydrogen and pH is the hydrogen ion. It's the H plus ion. So if you took, look at that table of elements again, and you have the hydrogen atom, has a proton and electron. If you take away that electron, you just have a proton.

• 15:09Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 15:10Speaker 00

  That is the hydrogen ion. That's what makes acid-base.

• 15:14Gary Brecka?

  Okay. And everyone thinks that it's the, it's the pH, it's the alkalinity driving the benefit. But it sounds like you're gonna make the argument that it's the hydrogen driving the benefit.

• 15:23Speaker 00

  Yes, it's a hydrogen gas. Yeah, hydrogen gas is totally different than alkaline pH. They're totally different concepts. There's, there's, there's no similarity, other than we're using the word hydrogen. But the hydrogen ion is just a proton. The hydrogen gas we're talking about is two protons, two electrons, bound together in a covalent bond. That is a strong covalent bond. So if you dissolve hydrogen gas into water, it's not going to dissociate into protons and electrons.

• 15:50Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 15:51Speaker 00

  It stays always hydrogen gas. It also doesn't, you know, like, structure the water, or do any changes to the water. It's just the water becomes the carrier of that hydrogen gas. So if you take, I see you have like, some supplements here, like Perfect Aminos, or, you know, electrolyte powder, let's say.

• 16:07Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  If you were to dissolve those, as you do, into water, it doesn't change anything with the water. It's just the water becomes the carrier of those substances. In the same way, you can take the hydrogen gas, you dissolve it into the water, you drink the water, the water becomes the carrier of that hydrogen gas into the body.

• 16:22Gary Brecka?

  Okay. That makes a lot of sense. So, so this article initially got you interested. And then you went on this foray overseas, and you started looking at different research institutions, reading about different peer-reviewed papers. You eventually decided to affiliate with one of those.

• 16:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:41Gary Brecka?

  And, and start doing some of your own research. And, and I've read most of what you've published. I've also read other publications, you know, on traumatic brain injuries, and post-concussive injuries, comparing hydrogen, soaking limbs in hydrogen immediately after a traumatic event, versus the current protocol, which is like, the RICE protocol, rest, ice. compress and elevate. And, you know, some of these were very small trials. Some of them were even N of one. But what seems fascinating to me is the number of applications across the so many different categories, athletic performance, you know,

• 17:23Gary Brecka?

  brain health, inflammation, selective antioxidants, PCOS, hormone balance, cardiovascular conditions. I mean, and I want to get into some of those. But so you then affiliate with some of these research institutions overseas.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  This is because, so I was majoring in biochemistry. And for one of the degree requirements, we had to complete an internship. And so I thought, where do I want to do my internship? I want to do an hydrogen gas. That'd be amazing. There were a couple of places in the USA doing things. There's some place in Pittsburgh, also Loma Linda University. But most of the research was out of Japan. And I got some favorable place. Actually, NASA was also interested in hydrogen therapy because of radio protective effects. So I actually had some email correspondence with all these groups. And they were all, you know, willing to work something out, but they weren't doing a lot of active research. So I realized, I realized, I really need to go to Japan. And I chose at Nagoya University, where Professor Ono, who I consider a great mentor of mine,

• 18:23Speaker 00

  was there. And I researched it, yeah, at Nagoya University in neurogenetics. And we took hydrogen gas and dissolved it into cell culture media and looked at the effects of hydrogen gas on various cell signaling pathways. And that's when I was able to meet a lot of other researchers, I mean, top experts in the field, like Dr. Ocho, for example, is a mitochondrial expert.

• 18:45Gary Brecka?

  And that is the foundation of human optimization, human performance, longevity, anti-aging, wellness, whatever you want to call it. I mean, most of the really, I would say, sound research that I think is going to move the needle is already inside the mitochondria. 110 trillion of these in our body. Another 10% of our body weight is mitochondria. I think few people really understand the significance of mitochondrial metabolism and its links to all forms of disease and pathology. At some point, I can't think of a disease etiological pathway that does not operate by either directly or indirectly interrupting mitochondrial.

• 19:26Gary Brecka?

  Metabolism.

• 19:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, the mitochondria is very important. And we know when we make our energy, for example, we make ATP, the adenosine triphosphate, right? That's the energy currency of the cell. And the mitochondria make up like 90% of all that ATP. And you need about as much ATP as you weigh per day. So if you're 150 pounds, you need 150 pounds of ATP, you know, turnover cycling. So your mitochondria has to turn this out, just recycling very, very quickly. And so it's, it's a core organ now that's not just for energy production, but sensing so many different areas of redox homeostasis. And that involves an inflammatory response. And that helps understand actually a lot of the reasons why molecular hydrogen has any biological effect or therapeutic effects that we're seeing in some of these studies.

• 20:12Gary Brecka?

  So, so you go over to Japan and because I know that you actually authored the paper on looking at alkaline water benefits versus the benefits of hydrogen.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  Yes, that's, that's a key.

• 20:26Gary Brecka?

  That's the one that blew my mind.

• 20:28Speaker 00

  This one is a very important one because it's not just a study, but it was, it's actually a comprehensive review article of all the studies that were published at the time on alkaline ionized water, including a paper that I was involved in. And so many groups demonstrated that when you simply remove the hydrogen gas from alkaline ionized water, the benefits are eliminated.

• 20:53Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 20:53Speaker 00

  And, and, and that blows a hole in some of the claims that the benefits are alkaline pH.

• 20:59Gary Brecka?

  I hope you guys are listening to this. Alkaline water is garbage. And I, and I think so many people are paying so much extra money to get 8.8, 10.4, you know, pH water. If your energy is low during the day, the problem usually started the night before. Sleep affects focus, mood, metabolism, literally everything. And most people never learn how to properly support it. Our Free Sleep Challenge is April 29th and 30th, and it's designed to teach the basics of better sleep in a way that's realistic and easy to apply. If learning how to sleep better feels like the right place to start, we'd love to have you join our challenge on April 29th. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  Now, now, and I think there's this correlations. There's no benefit to an alkaline pH itself, but it depends on why it's alkaline. Because if you were to get certain minerals water, for example, a lot of times mineral water is alkaline because it has minerals in them and are on our balance with say bicarbonate ions. But it ends up being those minerals like some more magnesium, some calcium, some, you know, manganese, you know, and other trace minerals.

• 22:05Gary Brecka?

  I add mineral salts.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's, that's good for you, right? But it's not, again, to your point, it's not because of the pH. And, and like our body already buffers the pH very well. And in fact, when you-

• 22:17Gary Brecka?

  And the range is very narrow.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 22:19Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 22:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, 7.35, 7.45 is kind of what we say. And you know that when you just hold your breath, for example, that urge to breathe, it actually comes because you start to build up acidity. You start to build hydrogen ions. And so you wanna, you wanna exhale out because people can try this. Take, take a straw, for example, and, and blow into water with pH drops. And you can see that the pH starts to go down because CO2 dissolves in the blood to create carbonic acid. And that makes hydrogen ions. So in the same way, like when you exercise, you break down your, your carbohydrates and fats into CO2. The CO2 dissolves into your blood and lowers the pH. So by you exhaling, you remove that CO2 and the pH is able to help to maintain.

• 23:04Speaker 00

  That's also why sometimes when you're in shock, for example, people will start to hyperventilate.

• 23:08Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  And you, you exhale so much CO2, the blood pH starts to go up a little bit too high. And now people can start actually like tweaking their arms or going like these contortions. You start to raise the pH so high that you start to ionize various proteins and that now that the cell membrane potential gets, reaches threshold easier. For example, you start to make, get muscle contractions, the alpha motor neurons, you know, activate your, your skeletal muscles. So you get these, these contractions, for example.

• 23:36Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 23:36Speaker 00

  And just those small changes in pH-

• 23:37Gary Brecka?

  Is that why they have you breathe into a bag?

• 23:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Cause you breathe in the bag, then it's you're reabsorbing the CO2. You're, you're keeping that CO2 level so you don't raise that up higher.

• 23:45Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  So, point is, even if you subscribe to the benefits that we need to maintain an alkaline body- Or something you can't do with alkaline water. You breathing is much more effective, right? Or and even when you look at like, say, pH of 10. The pH of 10 is although it's alkaline, it's not really a buffer. That's why just a drop or two of lemon juice brings the pH right down. In contrast to say baking soda, which is a pH of 8.1. That could neutralize thousands of liters of alkaline of acidic water. But it would take thousands of liters of alkaline water to neutralize the same amount of acid.

• 24:19Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  Because of the buffering effect.

• 24:21Gary Brecka?

  Right, okay, so. So then you you the first paper that you were involved in. Was this the paper that was looking at alkaline water?

• 24:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's one of the first, yeah, well, that's one of the early ones. We actually looked at it was an animal study in NAFLD. And we found we found that we first did an experiment where we're using alkaline ionized water. This is a collaboration that I was doing out of a with some group out of Israel. And there was no benefit and they were surprised. And I was like, well, what's the hydrogen gas concentration? And like, we got to figure out how to do that. So they measured the concentration and it was pretty low. It was like 0.3 milligram per liter or so. And it's like, I think the concentration needs to be higher because the other studies were using higher concentration. So then now they can measure hydrogen. It took a long time to do this. This is like several year experiment that we were involved in. Increase the concentration of hydrogen using different methods.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  And then we're able to do two different groups where we could do a higher and a lower concentration. The low concentration, again, no benefits at all. Even though it had like a negative ORP, it was an alkaline pH, all the same properties, no benefits. The higher concentration did have obvious benefits. So that was that was published back in 2018, 2019 or so. But we worked on it since like 2014 is, you know, been for quite a while, actually earlier than that. But but the but the main article is this comprehensive review articles. You can look it up. It's called electrolyte reduced water review one. And there's two reviews. There's review one and review two. And there's just comprehensive review to go through any question or any thought you've ever had about this area.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  It goes through the water micro clustering claims, alkaline pH, negative ORP aspects. It just systematically goes through every one of them. And it conclusively demonstrates that molecular hydrogen is the key to any of the benefits. If there are any to alkaline ionized water.

• 26:15Gary Brecka?

  Right, so. You also authored a paper, I think, which may be, in my opinion, the most impactful paper that you've ever authored or co-authored, and that was understanding the exact mechanism by which hydrogen acts inside the mitochondria. And I think it's, I don't think most people absorb what it means to be a selective antioxidant versus an antioxidant. So maybe we could talk about what makes something an antioxidant. You know, what is oxidative stress? And why do you not want to oversuppress it? You know, and why could that be dangerous? And what's unique about hydrogen? That it restores this redox homeostasis versus just oversuppressing oxidative free acid?

• 27:00Speaker 00

  So let's do this. Let's go through some history, okay?

• 27:02Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  We're gonna go start with that Nature Medicine publication, and then we're going to talk about the benefits and problems with antioxidants in general, and that'll lead us to this target of hydrogen that we recently published, and that explains everything.

• 27:14Gary Brecka?

  I can tell you're so proud of it, you smile when you say it, dude. You're proud of that one. I write it too, it's very, very well authored.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  Well, and again, I'm just, I'm just one of the authors. I was happy to be involved with that paper, but really, the harder research, it belongs to the other authors, and I was just grateful to be part of it. Because when I was in Japan, back in 2013, is when I proposed this concept, and we stayed in communication, you know, talking about it and working on it for a long time. That's why I'm happy, because it's over 10 years of work. A lot of effort went into this. But let's talk about some background information to understand why this is so important. If you remember with that Nature Medicine publication, it talked about how hydrogen acts as a selective antioxidant, and that's a key word about that selectivity, because

• 28:04Speaker 00

  we don't want just more antioxidants, because antioxidants...

• 28:10Speaker 00

  Aren't necessarily a good thing. And the research has shown that over and over again. And that's because it turns out, we actually need free radicals. All right. So just break this down, maybe a step back. We know that if you, too much oxidation is bad. So if you take like an apple and you cut it in half, it's going to turn brown, right? An avocado turns brown, you have rusting. All that is literally oxidation, right? We are breathing right now. And that oxygen going into our bodies is oxidizing. It's oxidizing our cells. It's also what's driving life. That's how our metabolism works. It's oxygen work as at the complex four of the electron transport chain, literally consuming the electrons from our foods, making metabolic water. That process oxidation.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  But see, sometimes during that process and electron transport chain, that oxygen gets consumed prematurely by electrons. It gets electrons prematurely and that creates free radicals.

• 29:05Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 29:05Speaker 00

  Okay, this is going to be really important. So I just want to set this up a little bit more in the mitochondria. This is where we're at. We're going deep into the cell, into the mitochondria. And you have what's called as the electron transport chain, right? And there's four main complexes. Complex one, two, three, and four. And basically you get electrons that are passed from complex one. And then that, those get passed to CoQ10, actually, ubiquinol. And then they go to complex three. Electrons from complex two go, also go there, they go to complex three. So complex two is very important. There's even all these electrons. Okay, we're going to come back to it. It's going to be important. So remember, complex two is very important.

• 29:41Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  Then the electrons go from complex three, one electron at a time, a little bit dangerous. One electron at a time, through cytochrome C, go to complex four. At complex four, those electrons typically will combine with oxygen and two hydrogen ions and you make water.

• 29:58Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 29:58Speaker 00

  Okay, so you make water.

• 30:00Gary Brecka?

  Intracellular water.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  Exactly, right? During this process, you make what's known as a proton gradient, hydrogen ion gradient. So in the inner, in the, in a, in the inner membrane space of the mitochondria, you put a whole bunch of protons there, it's pumping against its concentration gradient. And then those hydrogen ions have to go through the ATP synthase enzyme, some of the called complex five. But it goes through this enzyme and it makes ATP. Turns out lots of ATP. Now, as I said, oxygen is a strong oxidizer. So you inhale, the oxygen is gonna bind onto your hemoglobin. It has some of the iron, right, on your hemoglobin, so it can bind there. And that's important because you wanna kinda sequester oxygen as much as you can in the blood. You don't wanna have a whole bunch of oxygen floating freely all over the place all the time. The hemoglobin goes down, goes into lysine muscle cells,

• 30:47Speaker 00

  and the pH is lower, which is actually gonna cause the hemoglobin to slightly shift its conformation. It's gonna allow oxygen to leave the hemoglobin easier. As soon as the oxygen diffuses out, it's immediately gets sucked up by the mitochondria and complex four and converts into water. That way, there's like hardly any oxygen at any time in the cells. Cause that oxygen, if it goes in the cell membranes, it's gonna cause oxidation. It's gonna cause, in a cytosol, oxidation, free radicals, damage, right? As it goes in the mitochondria, there's electrons in the electron transport chain get, right, are being transported. But sometimes that oxygen could actually consume those electrons, say, at complex one, or sometimes at complex three, or through the semiquinone radical that was created,

• 31:30Speaker 00

  CoQ10, that enzyme, ubiquinol. It can be a ubiquinol radical, for example. And you can, oxygen can get reduced, receive an electron. When oxygen gets one electron reduction, it's called a superoxide anion radical. Now, that radical, it turns out, it's beneficial and harmful.

• 31:51Gary Brecka?

  So beneficial to a certain level, harmful at a certain level. Like a lot of species, hydrogen peroxide, same way. Very necessary, but it can also be very damaging.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  What happens, cause hydrogen peroxide comes next. What happens is it's actually a certain signaling effect that superoxide can do. And then this enzyme, superoxide dismutase, can convert superoxide to hydrogen peroxide, let's say, or to water. And then hydrogen peroxide also has certain signaling effects it can do. And then there's even a specific aquaporin or protein channel for aquaporin to transverse to do further signaling. And then, say, like catalase, so glutathion peroxidase can get rid of that. So these free radicals are literally produced.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  induced for specific signaling effects that our bodies literally need in order to have normal mitochondrial function. So the mitochondria regulates our entire like redox homeostasis. That's the that's the main area. There's other enzymes like the NADPH oxidase or these NOX enzymes and number of the enzymes that make free radicals, but the but the mitochondria is is very crucial and and plays the largest role in making free radicals. But see, our body has developed in ways to create a small amount of free radicals when needed and to do specific signaling. So when we exercise, we're breathing more oxygen, we're using more oxygen.

• 33:11Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  So what happens to the free radicals? They increase. That increase in free radicals in turn signals our body to make more mitochondria, to make our muscles work better, to do a whole bunch of signaling effects.

• 33:25Gary Brecka?

  That hormetic stress.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  It's a hormetic stress. Exactly.

• 33:28Gary Brecka?

  You have a positive response. So is it fair to say that we actually don't want to oversuppress?

• 33:33Speaker 00

  That's that's the point. That's exactly right.

• 33:36Gary Brecka?

  You've used this term redox homeostasis. I want to pause on that for a second because redox homeostasis is this balance between oxidation and reduction, right? And it's and and ideally, we want it to be in balance. We don't want to oversuppress oxidation. We also don't want to over, we don't have too much inflammation or or oxidation either. And with with antioxidants, you really don't know if you're oversuppressing it, or if you maybe you just inadvertently hit the target. But you know, if you're piling a bunch of vitamin C or beta carotene or something like that into the body, yes, it's an antioxidant. But I think there's a there is a prevailing thought that, well, oxidation's bad, more antioxidants must be good.

• 34:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, you you hit the nail on the head. And and the only technicality is technically, we don't really want to balance. We want homeostasis. And the difference is that balance would mean they're equal. And that's that's dead, right? So we can't say that oxidation is just bad. In the same way, can't say reduction is just bad. You need to have both of them. And that's why I like the term redox, because redox means oxidation and Reduction.

• 34:43Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 34:44Speaker 00

  And you want to have that homeostasis. So our body, I was going through the whole, that whole transport chain because we want to see that we are designed to make free radicals, to do certain signaling effects, and then they get, our body naturally gets rid of them through our body's natural antioxidants.

• 35:00Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  Now, what happens though with aging, with environmental toxins and whatever you, what have you, or just-

• 35:07Gary Brecka?

  Exercise, yeah.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, or if you're not exercising, inactivity, then your natural body's ability to produce antioxidants goes down, your mitochondria become dysfunctional as well, you start to increase more free radicals. You increase free radicals to the point you are now suffering from oxidative stress, right? That's, that's, that's a bad thing. You don't want the stress. You want a hormetic type of effect, but not an excessive amount. And so maintaining, again, maintaining a redox homeostasis is why it's so important. So our body contains our own antioxidants, right? Glutathione, we mentioned these, right? There's, there's a whole bunch of them. And, and if you have, and, and all plants do the same thing. That's why if you have like your apples, for example, if they're on the tree, they're not turning brown because they

• 35:52Speaker 00

  also have antioxidants in them. And that's why when we eat, say, the apples or the carrots or what have you, we get those antioxidants inside of us, those, these are polyphenols that can scavenge some of these antioxidants, or some of the oxidants, right? Now, it turns out though, that when you, you, you basically isolate these potent antioxidants, all of the cells, or you have synthetic forms, and you just ingest high amounts of them, well, that can be problematic, kind of what you pointed out, because now we're potentially blunting those free radicals that our body specifically produced, so that we could have improved mitochondrial function and mitochondrial biogenesis.

• 36:28Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 36:28Speaker 00

  So when we look at these studies, we can clearly see that if you're eating a healthy diet of fruits and vegetables and so on, then you have, your, your antioxidant, your homeostasis, your redox homeostasis, everything is, is good. It's, it's healthy. But when you start to perturb that, either by doing things that are very oxidatively harmful, like say smoking, or just environmental toxins, or you have low physical activity, because low physical activity will result in lower levels of your body's natural antioxidants, okay? Then you have oxidative stress.

• 37:02Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  Also, if you start taking high doses of, say, synthetic antioxidants, then you start to cause a disequilibrium.

• 37:10Gary Brecka?

  Blunting, yeah.

• 37:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, you blunt those benefits. So you can actually see a number of, especially in animal studies, but clinical studies as well, a number of them have actually shown that antioxidants might actually blunt exercise training adaptations.

• 37:23Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 37:24Speaker 00

  So you don't get mitochondrial biogenesis. You don't get improved, say, insulin sensitivity. Or if you're blunting the inflammatory response, right? We need these things. We need to maintain the homeostasis. And so that's why we don't want to just take a bunch of antioxidants. And it's why hydrogen is so different than any other antioxidant. And I want to talk about this for just a second. This is just basic chemistry, actually. But the reason why it's selective is because hydrogen gas does not react with the beneficial free radicals. It only reacts with the harmful ones.

• 37:58Gary Brecka?

  That is so incredible that it's, that word selective means it's reacting with the harmful free radicals, like the hydroxyl free radical.

• 38:06Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 38:07Gary Brecka?

  And not interacting with the beneficial free radicals and allowing the body to just perform that function on its own. Because I mean, there's nothing more intelligent than our own innate, you know, system. You know, that electron transport chain was designed for a reason. It innately knows what it's doing.

• 38:24Speaker 00

  And it's right there in that Same Nature Medicine publication. Again, that's why it's such a landmark paper.

• 38:29Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 38:29Speaker 00

  They took, say, nitric oxide, superoxide, hydrogen peroxide, and hydroxyl radical formation through the Fenton reaction. And they added vitamin C or hydrogen gas. And you can see that vitamin C neutralized everything. The good, the bad, everything.

• 38:45Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  So vitamin C is great. It's going to get rid of the bad, but high amounts could also get rid of the good.

• 38:50Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  Okay. Hydrogen gas, when you put that with, say, superoxide or these other free radicals, there was no reaction.

• 38:58Gary Brecka?

  That's so awesome.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  It's thermodynamically possible, but it's kinetically infeasible based upon these rate constants. See, the hydroxyl radical is so reactive that it'll react with anything.

• 39:09Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  Anything that's in its vicinity.

• 39:10Gary Brecka?

  And that's really the only free radical that I'm aware of that has no known benefit in the body.

• 39:15Speaker 00

  Pretty much.

• 39:16Gary Brecka?

  Right, I mean, it's, I mean.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  Maybe by accident.

• 39:19Gary Brecka?

  Okay, because ostensibly, we'd want to take that. As close to zero as possible.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 39:24Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 39:25Speaker 00

  It's just because it reacts so quickly with with anything and that's going to cause your DNA damage and all sorts of problems. All the other ones can kind of be regulated and your body have a natural detoxification systems for that, like the super oxidase mutase enzyme, right? And all the other ones. So in this, so we're going through some of this history. We first see the hydrogen is selected because it can only react with the most oxidative or strongest radicals and most most harmful ones, right? And it's small enough, it can actually get into the mitochondria.

• 39:56Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 39:56Speaker 00

  Whereas again, these other larger antioxidants, maybe like vitamin E, which is more, it's larger, but it's also more lipophilic. So maybe it can't, you know, easily transfuse into into the cytosol and then go into the mitochondria or different areas. Hydrogen gas can do that. Where vitamin C is more, more water soluble. So it's going to have a harder time going through the cell membrane. It has to have to go through a transporter protein. Hydrogen gas, again, there's no problem. It can diffuse very easily into the mitochondria. And there it can help with this, with these free radicals and act selective antioxidant. There are three ways that hydrogen is helping with this antioxidant process. And that's one of them is it's only going to react with the most toxic hydroxyl radicals

• 40:41Speaker 00

  if it reacts with them at all.

• 40:43Gary Brecka?

  I hope people are picking up on the fact that that, you know, how profound that is because it is the only selective antioxidant that I've ever been able to find in any kind of research, you know, you know, antioxidants are, you know, abundant, but selective antioxidants, the mechanism that hydrogen uses to leave the body's production of free radicals, necessary free radicals alone, reduce the harmful free radicals that we don't need and allow this, this cellular homeostasis to return. I mean, you just can't over emphasize how unique hydrogen is in that, in that way.

• 41:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. And that's actually, as cool as that is, that's a minor mechanism by which it exerts these antioxidant effects.

• 41:32Gary Brecka?

  Really?

• 41:32Speaker 00

  The other big one is because it's able to regulate your body's innate or natural antioxidant defense mechanisms.

• 41:41Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 41:41Speaker 00

  Because.

• 41:41Gary Brecka?

  So it can even bring redox up?

• 41:43Speaker 00

  That's right, yeah. So you have like your natural antioxidants, right? Glutathione, superoxidase mutase. These are all regulated by this transcription factor, the NRF2 pathway. The NRF2 keep one pathway. What happens, this is a protein, this is a cytosol. And when you get oxidative stress that's happening, then you get oxidation of this keep one factor, basically, and then the NRF2 can diffuse into the nucleus, they're biased to the DNA, and then you get this, basically just transcription of your body's natural antioxidants.

• 42:15Gary Brecka?

  So it's trying to protect itself.

• 42:16Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 42:17Gary Brecka?

  Catalase, glutathione.

• 42:18Speaker 00

  They all start to increase.

• 42:19Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 42:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, NRF2 regulates over 200 different cytoprotective proteins and enzymes.

• 42:23Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  And this is the other cool thing.

• 42:26Gary Brecka?

  So intelligent, this mind, I mean.

• 42:27Speaker 00

  Hydrogen is only going to upregulate NRF2 when the cell needs it. So if you have a cell, and we've published studies on this, demonstrating that hydrogen can upregulate NRF2, but only if there was a stress.

• 42:44Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  So if the cell is, if you take hydrogen gas, you put it in a cell culture, and you measure NRF2 levels from a healthy cell, you don't see any NRF2 protein changes. You might see some change in mRNA, but just because you see some of the mRNA doesn't mean it's actually at the protein level. But in general, you don't see any, you don't see any real changes at the protein level. But if you were to add, say, environmental toxin, some stressor or something that would normally cause oxidative damage in the cell, and then you administer hydrogen gas, that's when you see the rescuing effect of hydrogen.

• 43:17Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 43:18Speaker 00

  So hydrogen is able to go to the individual cells, knock on the door and say, okay, how are you doing? How's your redox homeostasis? What do you need? Do you need the NRF2 upregulated or not? And so it's only going to basically upregulate the NRF2 pathway in the cells that are suffering from not having enough NRF2, where you want to bring those, say, glutathione levels up higher.

• 43:38Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  So this is a key mechanism because, again, yes. Superoxide, hydrogen peroxide, these are all good, but again, only if you have it at the right concentration and the right location for the right duration. If you start making too many of these because you have a hyperactivated, say, NOX enzyme system or certain complexes of the mitochondria, that's when it becomes problematic. Hydrogen is able to regulate our body's natural antioxidants, so our body can naturally detoxify these oxidants before they get too high and to help clear them.

• 44:12Gary Brecka?

  It's actually using the innate intelligence of the DNA to regulate that system instead of circumventing the DNA and just suppressing it on its own.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. It's regulating everything.

• 44:25Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 44:26Speaker 00

  And then there's a third way. I said there's three ways. We've talked about two so far. The third way is that hydrogen, because it's signaling effects, it can actually help to suppress excess oxidation that's occurring. It's more of a modulator because in some cases, hydrogen is able to, if there's an excessive amount of free radical that are being produced, like say a complex of the mitochondria, or NADPH oxidase enzymes, these NOX enzymes,

• 44:59Speaker 00

  or neuronal nitric oxide synthase, where you're getting too much nitric oxide in the brain, it's causing night静ative stress.

• 45:06Gary Brecka?

  It happens in Alzheimer's patients. It happens in autistic patients ostensibly because of gut dysbiosis, but you see very high levels of nitric oxide, which most people think is, you know, just has a vasodilation effect, which it does, but it can also be a toxic gas.

• 45:24Speaker 00

  Yes, it is a free radical. It can be very toxic when you have dysregulation. And that's another key area that hydrogen helps to regulate. See, hydrogen gas doesn't react.

• 45:32Gary Brecka?

  I take hydrogen water every day, dude. If you're not convinced like halfway through this podcast, like I'm gonna take some right now.

• 45:38Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, the mechanisms are very interesting, but we're still looking at the clinical evidence on this and it's very, the preliminary evidence looks very exciting. But the nitric oxide one is very interesting because again, nitric oxide hydrogen gas don't react, but hydrogen gas can regulate its production.

• 45:56Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  And so these different enzymes, if they get too high, like for example, you have superoxide that's produced from the NOx enzyme and you have high levels of nitric oxide. If they, if those levels get high, they immediately react. I mean, the only thing that slows the reaction is the rate of diffusion. And when they do react, you form peroxide nitrite, which is a strong oxidative molecule. So hydrogen essentially preventing that, that formation because it's able to decrease the amount of free radicals that were produced in the first place.

• 46:26Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 46:26Speaker 00

  So you have prevention. But it's not more than just prevention because as I said earlier, our bodies need free radicals. So sometimes the cells need a little boost. And so in a number of studies, including our own that we'll talk about here in just a second, we can see that hydrogen gas can transiently increase small levels of free radicals. So it can increase, say, superoxide production for just a little bit. It's a small transient level. It's kind of a hormetic stressor. My point is, is think about hydrogen's gonna do. Go to this cell, and this is not really accurate, but I'm just trying to explain this kind of a layman idea because we can look at the cell culture studies on this.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  So hydrogen gas goes to this cell, oh, you're not producing enough free radicals to have the hormetic stress, right?

• 47:13Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  So we increase your superoxide production. Now that could in turn activate Nrf2 and now you can have higher levels of endogenous antioxidant self-defense system.

• 47:23Gary Brecka?

  Like glutathione catalyze all these others.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  So that's that cell.

• 47:27Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 47:27Speaker 00

  The same body, we're talking about the same human.

• 47:29Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  And now we go to the other cell, the other, different organ or an adjacent cell, who knows? And, and this one says, oh, you know what? You are suffering from oxidative stress. I'm going to decrease the amount of oxidation that's occurring. I'm going to help suppress or down-regulate NADPH oxidative system. I'm gonna help decrease the amount of free radicals that are being produced.

• 47:50Gary Brecka?

  Hmm.

• 47:50Speaker 00

  All right? And, and then it can go to another cell and it can say, oh, you know, I'm going to... Modulate your entire free radical production so you have a better homeostasis, right? Or maybe it's going to go into another cell and it's just going crazy. A ischemia profusion, you have hydroxyl radicals being produced just like crazy. And hydrogen gases, if it's there, it can react with the hydroxyl radicals and form water.

• 48:14Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  So you have-

• 48:16Gary Brecka?

  Completely neutralizing the worst free radical in the body. Wow. I mean, it's, I hope mechanistically people are really grasping how incredibly unique that is. It's almost like an intelligent molecule, right? I mean, it sort of arrives and then assesses and can shift its impact based on really what that redox homeostatic environment needs. An improvement in redox, a reduction in oxidation. And that's just so fascinating because I think very often we just have, you know, take these blanket approaches, and I did for years too.

• 48:55Gary Brecka?

  I just thought, man, more vitamin C IVs, more, you know, more antioxidants, less free radicals. That's a good thing. But really, years ago, when I started stumbling upon a lot of your research, talking to you, getting to know you, really going down the rabbit hole of how unique hydrogen is. It's not only a part of my routine every day. I mean, I take it either immediately before or right after I do every hyperbaric session because, you know, I realized that in hyperbarics, you know, that excess oxygen, that oxygen singlet could be creating oxidative stress.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it does. And that's how H-Bot tends to work. You literally create a hormetic stressor, just like exercise. And you want to get the benefits and negate some of the negative effects. So taking hydrogen therapy, there's some research on this, at least in cell culture studies, some very interesting research, helping prevent oxygen toxicity. So you're able to get some of these benefits. Oxygen is a much stronger molecule, you know, like ozone therapy that people do, or hydrogen peroxide. There's a number of things out there that are pretty strong and have serious side effects potentially. Like H-Bot, you know, going too high, going for too long. And the oxygen toxicity is a very well-known thing.

• 50:09Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 50:09Speaker 00

  Hydrogen seems to help negate, or not negate is probably a strong word, but help to reduce some of those excess side effects. So you can still get those benefits. Because to your point, you need to have this, this, I want to say balance colically, but really this homeostasis of oxidation and reduction. And so that's really where the research is, I would say, converging in terms of, you know, aging and disease conditions and so on. It's not about oxidative stress or the free radical theory of aging. It's all about redox dysregulation. And as you get older, as you age, as you have environmental toxins and so on, you get a redox dysregulation.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  And the problem is that redox dysregulation can happen not only in the same individual, but even in the same, in the same organ, even in the same cell.

• 51:01Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 51:01Speaker 00

  So you can have like one portion of your cell, say the Sadosol, that is suffering from an oxidative stress, or say in the mitochondria, oxidative stress that's going on, there's too many free radicals being produced. But yet another area, you're actually lacking reductive potential. Where, say like in the endoplasmic reticulum or something, you're not able to forge your proteins correctly. If you can't do that, then you can't, you know, protein structure dictates function, right? You need to have the correct redox homeostasis. And so you can imagine if, if, if the cell itself is suffering from a redox dysregulation, how would it be possible that taking a conventional antioxidant?

• 51:42Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 51:43Speaker 00

  That only is unidirectional, it's just an electron donor, basically, is going to help that?

• 51:47Gary Brecka?

  Well, there have actually been cancer studies with like beta-carotene, I think where they showed that it went the opposite direction.

• 51:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, unfortunately, that's exactly right. Then they found people who smoked a lot when they ate carrots, they tended to, there's a correlation, they tended to maybe live longer and be better. And it just makes sense. Well, yeah, because smoking causes a lot of free radicals, carrots a lot of beta-carotene, that's an antioxidant, so it's going to neutralize those. But when they decided to do the study, hey, let's really determine this. They found that those taking the beta carotene started dying faster and getting cancer faster than those on the placebo group.

• 52:24Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 52:25Speaker 00

  And, and maybe, we could talk about the mechanisms quite a bit, but, but maybe, maybe it's because, again, you're not able to directly address the redox homeostasis, the dysregulation, right?

• 52:36Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 52:36Speaker 00

  Because you're just providing a bunch of antioxidants, but you could still be suffering from reductive stress in different areas.

• 52:42Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 52:42Speaker 00

  Whereas hydrogen is totally different. You don't have that, that same concern. And, but, but that study actually, it's, it's, it's another, maybe, critical thing for us to think about just logically as well, because on the surface, it can make total sense mechanistically, like, hey, carrots rich in beta carotene, antioxidants, smoking, oxidative stress, we should, we should take it. And that's why we have to be careful when we focus too much on mechanisms, like, oh, oh, this, this mechanism, this is the mechanism, that. Because, just because we can find a mechanism to support something, doesn't necessarily mean that, that that's going to be the clinical outcome.

• 53:20Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 53:20Speaker 00

  Because the clinical outcome is going to be a summation of a whole bunch of the mechanisms all together.

• 53:25Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, cells live in communities. It's, you know, I think some of the worst research we do is when we study things in isolation. We look how something, you know, behaves in a laboratory, and we assume when we put it back into the human body, it's going to behave the same way.

• 53:36Speaker 00

  Right.

• 53:37Gary Brecka?

  And very often, nothing could be further from the truth.

• 53:40Speaker 00

  That's exactly right. And that's, and that's also some of my skepticism, even with, with this area of hydrogen research. Like, I'm, I'm talking about this because I'm passionate about this, this area, but, and, and the mechanisms are, I love biochemistry, I love this area.

• 53:53Gary Brecka?

  Clearly, you love biochemistry, yeah. I'm going to pull this out of the weeds here in a second, because I want to, I, I want to, I, I want to get into some of the more practical applications.

• 54:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:02Gary Brecka?

  Right? I mean.

• 54:03Speaker 00

  Which I know is what people want to hear.

• 54:05Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  And we'll do our best to do that, but it goes to my saying, I'm also have to be cautious because I don't want to be the hypocrite, like, oh, this is all the things happen in the cell.

• 54:13Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  And then, what, what, but we really want to know, okay, what's the endpoint? What do the clinical studies actually show?

• 54:20Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 54:20Speaker 00

  Right? That's really what matters.

• 54:22Gary Brecka?

  If you want protein to build lean muscle, but with Without the caloric impact or need to cut, you need Perfect Amino. It's pure essential amino acids, the building blocks of proteins in a precise form and ratio that allows for near 100% utilization in building lean muscle and no caloric impact. So we build protein six times as much as weight, but without the excess body fat we normally get during bulking. This is the new era of protein supplementation and it's real. If you want to build lean muscle without having to cut, you need Perfect Amino. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. Because, you know, anecdotally and observationally,

• 55:02Gary Brecka?

  what I have seen from bathing clients of mine in hydrogen gas, by using hydrogen gas myself during intense exercise, like what we did this morning, trying to keep up with my son, his performance in distance racing, you know, he just did 100 mile race. I truly believe if he wasn't powered by hydrogen water, he wouldn't have completed the seven marathons, seven continents in seven days. Cause he had never run a marathon. You know, I've read some of the published research on delayed onset muscle soreness, on lactate thresholds. And again, mechanistically it makes sense, but also practically in the host, it's also, it's also making sense.

• 55:46Gary Brecka?

  So maybe we, eventually I want to get to, how should people take it? How much should they take? Is it safe for everybody to take, you know, hydrogen tablets? Safe first thing in the morning, maybe another one in the afternoon, or take, take additional hydrogen if you're, if you're exercising intensely. Certainly if you're using hyperbarics.

• 56:07Gary Brecka?

  But where are the broad applications? You know, does hydrogen water help with hormones and women's health specifically? And how does hydrogen water impact athletic performance?

• 56:22Speaker 00

  So, so I want to, I want to finish the mitochondria story briefly because I'm going to refer back to that as I just all of these things. And, and the summation of everything is back to the mitochondria, the mech, the mechanism and to that paper that you mentioned. We published a paper in Redux Biology with my collaborators in Japan. Again, they're, they're the real researchers behind this. I'm just happy that I was involved since 2013, actually, on this project. But this, Redux Biology is a top journal, but what we found was that hydrogen specifically targets a specific protein in complex three of the mitochondria. So remember with electron transport chain?

• 57:01Gary Brecka?

  Mm-hmm.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  In complexity, there's a specific protein called the RISK A iron sulfur protein, or the RISP protein. And it transfers an electron, one electron at a time. Ubiquinol comes in, gives an electron, then the RISK A, one goes to RISK A iron sulfur protein, a pathway. When hydrogen gas targets this protein, it actually stops it from working, basically. It causes a change in this protein, it stops from working. This is a stress. This, because you're not able to transfer the proteins. The mitochondria quickly recognizes this stress, and you start to see increases in some superoxide levels. So a slight transient increase in superoxide production. You have an initial drop in ATP levels.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  That quickly causes the mitochondria to respond, to regenerate and rejuvenate its mitochondrial function. And then the RISP, or the RISK A iron sulfur protein levels, they come back up, even higher than they were. ATP levels go back. Follow that with exercise. As soon as you start exercising, what's the first thing that happens? You start producing free radicals.

• 58:08Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 58:09Speaker 00

  Your ATP levels drop immediately, just very quickly, because creatine phosphate kicks in very quickly, right? All these similar things start happening, and then later, you start having an increase in everything. So you get the mitochondrial biogenesis, right? So one of the main targets of hydrogen gas seems to be this RISK A iron sulfur protein in complex three of the mitochondria. So mitochondria is a prime target of hydrogen. And based upon that, we can understand why hydrogen is able to regulate redox homeostasis, produce some free radicals when needed, suppress free radicals in other cases, activate the Nrf2 pathway, increase mitochondrial regeneration, rejuvenation, ATP production, all the cellular things that are needed, right there in the mitochondria.

• 58:53Speaker 00

  And now we have one of the mechanisms of how hydrogen specifically does this.

• 58:58Gary Brecka?

  Wow. Wow.

• 58:59Speaker 00

  So now, let's go to these practical applications because I want to refer back to this, that, that target and we can understand how hydrogen gas would be doing some of this based upon understanding of the mechanism.

• 59:11Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, so, so maybe we start with athletic performance.

• 59:13Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 59:14Gary Brecka?

  Right, because, you know, vast majority of my audience is exercising on a regular basis and they're either taking hydrogen water or they're not.

• 59:22Speaker 00

  I take hydrogen for all my exercise.

• 59:24Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, so do I. And I absolutely unequivocally notice a benefit. And so does my son and so does every athlete that I work with.

• 59:33Speaker 00

  So, so there's a couple of points. The first one I want to point out is when it comes to athletic performance, we call it an ergogenic effect, okay? We first, whatever we do, we first don't want to make things worse.

• 59:48Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 59:48Speaker 00

  And that is a major concern that a lot of new emerging technologies, supplements, fad concepts come in where they could potentially negate some of the exercise benefits. We talked about earlier how in some studies show that taking antioxidants can actually blunt exercise performance because you're, maybe you're bunting those free radicals that you need. Taking NSAIDs, anti-inflammatories, same thing, that could potentially blunt exercise benefits.

• 1:00:18Gary Brecka?

  Cold water immersion immediately after strength training.

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  That's another good one. Yep, exactly.

• 1:00:21Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:22Speaker 00

  So, when it comes to hydrogen therapy, we, we can very confidently say actually that hydrogen at least does not negate exercise benefits. It doesn't impair exercise performance. So that's, that's number one.

• 1:00:37Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:00:37Speaker 00

  If there, if there's a question, maybe you should really be cautious before you try to do any intervention.

• 1:00:42Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  Hydrogen doesn't do that and we can think about the mechanisms. It doesn't react with other free radicals at all. It can't do it. It's only going to regulate the NR2 pathway when there's a serious problem going on. It actually can increase superoxide production so much to exercise. And then we look at the studies, if we look at the, the animal studies, for example, with exercise, so combinational studies, we actually see that during the control, of course, there's no increase. Mitochondrial biogenesis, we look at a marker PG C1 alpha. This is a paroxysome proliferator, active receptor, co-activator 1 alpha.

• 1:01:17Gary Brecka?

  It was a mouthful. There's gonna be a test on this later, so I hope that everybody got that.

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  But this is the master target we want to activate. Things like AMPK can activate this, which AMPK gets activated when you break ATP down. You get some AMP levels, AMP can activate AMPK. Calcium is another one that can activate this. But we want to activate PG C1 alpha and exercise does that really well. PG C1 alpha in turn can increase things like mitochondrial biogenesis and vascular growth factor and a number of other things. So hydrogen, when you do exercise and you combine it with hydrogen, you see PG C1 alpha levels increase. Actually, they increase even more than exercise alone.

• 1:01:59Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  When you do the same exercise with vitamin C, you see PG C1 alpha levels decrease.

• 1:02:05Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, it's nuts.

• 1:02:07Speaker 00

  This is critical to understand. This means that hydrogen is not impairing exercise performance. And if anything, it might act as an exercise memetic to help to improve exercise performance, especially over the long run, because you see increases in PG C1 alpha.

• 1:02:23Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:02:24Speaker 00

  So this is animal studies and it makes mechanistic sense based upon the mechanisms I just talked about in these in vitro studies, so culture. Now we look at the clinical studies. There's a breadth of studies on exercise performance.

• 1:02:38Gary Brecka?

  And I've read them in swimmers, elite swimmers. I want to say another one in elite soccer players.

• 1:02:45Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:02:46Gary Brecka?

  So I've read some of this research and it more discussed like delayed onset muscle soreness, but it also discussed performance, recovery. I don't remember if we went into specific mechanisms, but I mean, I don't. I don't know that I have read a negative research publication on hydrogen. I'll just put it that way.

• 1:03:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, it depends on the definition of negative. There are a number of papers that show there are no benefit. We published an article, one of my first articles, actually, when I was doing my masters is we, there's a lot of people are saying that their VO2 max was increasing when they're taking hydrogen water. And, you know, it was a simple study because we know exactly how to measure VO2 max. It's a little more complicated. We'll say VO2 peak for those who are exercise physiologists. But we looked at this and we found that there was no increase in the VO2 peak of following acute supplementation with hydrogen. And mechanistically, that wouldn't be expected. But in that case, it'd be a negative study.

• 1:03:47Speaker 00

  However, we did a sub-analysis of some of the, like, they actually looked at the exercise in heart rate at lower exercise intensities. We could see that the heart rate was a little bit lower. And there's changes like in the respiratory quotient or the respiratory exchange ratio and the number of other changes. And other people have reported on this too, showing that actually hydrogen, even an acute dose of hydrogen water, might be able to help with some of the athletic performance, whether hydrogen water or hydrogen inhalation.

• 1:04:19Gary Brecka?

  It did in swimmers and it did in soccer players.

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. And some of the soccer players, they took it for like a week and then, but they was not at a VO2 max, was on a max effort. So we're probably not going to see a change if you just take one dose of hydrogen and you go for a peak performance.

• 1:04:35Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:04:36Speaker 00

  But you might see even just one dose of hydrogen and you can see at like kind of a lactate threshold, a pretty high intensity. You can maybe exercise for a longer period of time, maybe do more bouts of exercise. And probably those benefits are going to be more significant when you do a longer dosing protocol. Because again, just like exercise, it takes time to activate mitochondrial biogenesis. So by taking hydrogen water, you want to recover quickly. Because that's like the number one thing that comes to athletes is you want to recover fast. Why? So you can train again, right? It's volume dependent. And the volume is limited by how quickly you can recover. And so by taking hydrogen water, if we can improve the inflammatory response,

• 1:05:19Speaker 00

  we actually can see that an acute dose of hydrogen often will increase superoxy production and inflammatory markers like interleukin-6, for example. And then it goes back to baseline faster and lowers that chronic low-grade inflammation, lowers that chronic oxygen distress.

• 1:05:35Gary Brecka?

  Which is why it has a positive effect on delayed onset muscle soreness.

• 1:05:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, that, yeah, there's a number, that was, there's a lot of potential mechanisms that could be going on with that. And more research needs to be done because a lot of the studies are still pretty small, right? But, but we can see though, in, in the studies that have been done, where hydrogen does seem to exert like an anti-fatigue effect, right? They're able to exercise, let's say.

• 1:06:00Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, there was a scale where they rated the.

• 1:06:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, the Borg's effect or the RPE.

• 1:06:03Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah, where they rated the actual level of intensity, level of perceived effort.

• 1:06:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, the perceived exertion.

• 1:06:10Gary Brecka?

  Perceived exertion, yeah, the level of perceived exertion. And in, in nearly all of those cases, their, their level of perceived exertion for the same bout of exercise was lower.

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:06:20Gary Brecka?

  So I mean, that's clearly something that would, in my opinion, improve athletic performance.

• 1:06:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can push yourself harder, yeah, you can do it again. And, but those are also correlated with changes, let's say, lactate levels. Those, those levels are also lower.

• 1:06:32Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:06:32Speaker 00

  Which, you know, the reason you make lactate in the first place is because there's a, there's a mismatch between the, how, how fast do you need ATP and how quickly your mitochondria can make ATP. So if you need ATP fast enough, or faster than what your mitochondria can provide, you have to go through glycolysis, you start producing lactate.

• 1:06:50Gary Brecka?

  Instead of using oxygen, right?

• 1:06:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, not, it's not the carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is only produced during the, during the TCA cycle, the citric acid cycle. Glycolysis doesn't use oxygen or anything. It just breaks down your glucose molecule and you, and in order to continue driving, the end part of glycolysis is this molecule called pyruvate. And then pyruvate normally enters into the citric acid cycle and then gets converted to acetyl-CoA and then citrate, you do the whole citric acid cycle. Then you make NADH molecules, then you go to the lactate. Transport chain, complex one, two, there's three.

• 1:07:25Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:25Speaker 00

  Complex three, right? There's a whole process takes quite a bit, makes a lot of ATP. One glucose molecule can make thirty or thirty-two ATP molecules. You even use oxidative phosphorylation. But glycolysis only makes like two net ATP. But it's a lot faster, like, like, like, you know, it's, I don't give you numbers, but it's a lot faster. So if you can't oxidize pyruvate fast enough, then you convert pyruvate to lactate. And that's important because lactate production allows glycolysis to continue going. So lactate production actually delays fatigue. It allows you to continue exercising. It prevents or delays acidosis, for example.

• 1:08:07Speaker 00

  Because you, the whole purpose of lactate production is you're actually regenerating a molecule that you're familiar with. NAD plus.

• 1:08:13Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:14Speaker 00

  NAD plus drives glycolysis. And if you convert all your NAD plus to NADH, you can't do glycolysis anymore. So by converting pyruvate to lactate, you convert NADH to NAD plus. And then NAD plus can drive from glycolysis three phosphate. That can cause that, that oxidation to, to bisfossil glycerate. So you get NAD plus being produced. So in these studies where lactate levels are lower, there's a couple of potential things that are going on. Number one, maybe because you have, this exercise intensity, you need X amount of ATP. And so maybe what's happening is your, the hydrogen helps your mitochondria function better.

• 1:08:54Speaker 00

  So you can provide the amount of ATP you need through, via oxidative phosphorylation through your mitochondria as opposed to anaerobic glycolysis.

• 1:09:04Gary Brecka?

  So, so in other words, it's just, again, to pull us out of the weeds.

• 1:09:09Gary Brecka?

  It's allowing you to exercise at the same intensity for a longer period of time.

• 1:09:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Either because of improving.

• 1:09:14Gary Brecka?

  That's anecdotally what I noticed.

• 1:09:16Speaker 00

  That, that's right.

• 1:09:17Gary Brecka?

  And my son and every athlete that I put it on. I mean, I bathe them in hydrogen water. I have them consume hydrogen rich water. And I, and I have. Hundreds of clients that by bathing and consuming it have both reduced their pain, improved their recovery, and increased the duration that they can exercise at a high level of intensity. And this has been in a number of UFC fighters and a number of professional athletes that most people watching this podcast would know that perform at a very high level, and now they would swear by it.

• 1:09:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's amazing. And the research is still ongoing with that. And I think we'll start to see some of the differences in the mechanism, because when you drink hydrogen water, actually, a lot of the hydrogen gas is expelled out of your lungs. So a lot of that doesn't actually reach the muscles, yet we still see these direct benefits versus, say, inhalation of hydrogen gas, that's going to have some different effects as well. But they both have very, you know, obviously, benefits that we see when you look at the clinical studies.

• 1:10:15Gary Brecka?

  So let's go through some, again, I want to pull this out of the weeds. So now you know the mechanism. I want to pull this out of the weeds. But, you know, I want to talk about women's hormones and women's health, PCOS, and hydrogen-rich water. We touched on athletic performance. There was also a really interesting article published in the Journal of Experimental Gerontology. And in this article, it was, I think it was a six-month study, they broke these gerontology patients into two categories. One drank hydrogen-rich

• 1:10:54Gary Brecka?

  water, one did not. They used tattoo markers for methylation. They used, they measured like sit-stand ratios. They also measured, you know, different cognitive scoring, short-term recall, learned memory. There were different, a number of different measurements for cognitive function. And it seemed to universally improve the hydrogen-rich water.

• 1:11:24Gary Brecka?

  Side is significantly across all of these markers. That was another one that really piqued my interest in hydrogen water because, you know, a lot of studies are in young athletes, you know, like 22 year old soccer players, you know, 25 year old, you know, competitive swimmers. But here you have a population that's deconditioned. You know, they're not out there sprinting. And part of their protocol wasn't to change their exercise regimen, yet they had exercise benefits.

• 1:11:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:55Gary Brecka?

  They actually, I'm calling it sit stand ratio. There's another term for it, but. And that was another study that really drew my interest to hydrogen rich water because that was the only intervention that they made for that six month period of time.

• 1:12:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I'm familiar with that study. It wasn't, it wasn't one of the ones that I participated in, but I know the, I know the authors, the researchers. And yeah, it was a very powerful study because to your point, this was number one, it was a longer study. They're using the hydrogen producing tablets. And so you get a pretty high dose of hydrogen, which is important because sometimes some of these studies, they use, use hydrogen water, but the concentration, you know, it, it, it may have found a more effective benefits if it was a higher dose. It is one of the potential trends. We found this in metabolic syndrome study, for example, maybe we can talk about later. But that study showed, you know, some of these potential benefits that you, you already mentioned.

• 1:12:50Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:50Speaker 00

  And it was, you know, like six months, it was a pretty good duration.

• 1:12:53Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:53Speaker 00

  And that makes sense when you think about the mechanisms. Hydrogen is not a super powerful molecule and that's what makes it largely safe as well.

• 1:13:01Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:02Speaker 00

  And so it's going to go in and it has these, these effects in the mitochondria and in the cell. And it's this long-term benefits that we start to see. So that's why going longer, like for six months, you might still see more of these benefits.

• 1:13:15Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:13:15Speaker 00

  And, and also that's why it gets me excited because yes, I'm very interested in the mechanisms of biochemistry, just because I like to see how things, things work.

• 1:13:23Gary Brecka?

  Clearly you are.

• 1:13:24Speaker 00

  But, but we want to know that those clinical endpoints. And here we're showing that it's translation, it's, it's being translated, right? It's translatable between the cell culture to animal studies, and then finally to the human studies, right? And, and like, I know you mentioned with the, with the women with that PMS and, you know, you know.

• 1:13:42Gary Brecka?

  PCOS.

• 1:13:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, PCOS as well. You know. More research needs to be done on this. I was involved, I helped author one of those studies, but it was more of a subjective type thing that we looked at, and it does show favorable effects. So I wouldn't say hydrogen is like a hormone or necessarily mimics those things.

• 1:14:02Gary Brecka?

  Of course.

• 1:14:03Speaker 00

  But again, by helping to improve the terrain, the cellular terrain, and how the inflammatory process and oxidative stress, you can start to help maybe regulate things that are really outside of homeostasis. So really think about hydrogen as a homeostatic adaptogenic regulator.

• 1:14:21Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah. You know, you also are in the 24-week metabolic syndrome.

• 1:14:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was the one.

• 1:14:27Gary Brecka?

  This I find fascinating because the vast majority of Americans with chronic disease have metabolic syndrome, and the vast majority of my deconditioned clients have metabolic syndrome. Forty-one percent of children have metabolic syndrome.

• 1:14:44Speaker 00

  That's very sad.

• 1:14:45Gary Brecka?

  Fifty-two percent of adults. I mean, you know, we've become the sickest, fattest, most disease-ridden nation in the world, despite the fact that we spend $5 trillion a year on healthcare, largely because of metabolic syndrome. And, you know, metabolic syndrome is a combination of things, you know, hypertension, high triglycerides, poor insulin sensitivity, or insulin resistance, obesity. And that was another one that was very fascinating to me. Can you talk about what happened to those patients, what changed, and what, if anything, surprised you? And what does this mean to hundreds of millions of Americans that are suffering from metabolic syndrome?

• 1:15:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, this was, it was a six-month study. It was conducted in India with some of my colleagues there, and it was, it was a pretty big undertaking. We used the hydrogen-producing tablets in the study because we could provide a high, consistent dose of hydrogen.

• 1:15:35Gary Brecka?

  Which, by the way, is why I'm not a proponent of the hydrogen bottles any longer. I used to be a big proponent of the hydrogen bottles. I'm not a believer in those anymore. You know, I noticed that the proton exchange membranes would break down over time, the seals would break down over time. A lot of these would, you know, if you didn't clean it regularly, you would get, almost like mold. In the bottom. And then because there were so many Chinese fakes on the market, you know, I had clients that actually had these things explode on them. And to get a relatively low dose of hydrogen versus getting like 12 parts per million to 13 parts per million from an elemental magnesium tablet, I mean, it's apples and oranges,

• 1:16:17Gary Brecka?

  even cost wise. And I hadn't seen any studies using hydrogen bottles. I'd had them, I'd seen them with hydrogen inhalation, hydrogen tablets. Maybe there were some with hydrogen water bottles that I'm unaware of, but I haven't.

• 1:16:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, the bottles can work, but there are a number of caveats. I think you mentioned all of those, right? There's some bottles that are okay, but then the longevity of those. The nice thing about the tablets, just for research purposes, is it's a lot easier to give a client a bottle of tablets and teach them exactly how to use it. And we know they're getting at least a minimum.

• 1:16:51Gary Brecka?

  Same.

• 1:16:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, even if it's not exactly the same, that we know they're at least getting a certain amount of hydrogen in order for it to be clinically relevant.

• 1:16:58Gary Brecka?

  A minimum threshold, okay.

• 1:16:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, hitting that threshold.

• 1:17:01Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. So can you talk a little bit about the metabolic syndrome?

• 1:17:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, so all those, yeah, so this paper, it was actually, it was both surprising, but also expected because there were a number of other studies already on the metabolic syndrome area, but we were using a higher concentration of hydrogen and a longer duration. And what we found was we found improvements in triglycerides and cholesterol levels in the ratio, for example. We found decreases in some of the inflammatory markers and oxidative stress. Maybe something that was surprising was there was, the BMI was lower, which specifically because of weight loss, although it seemed to be a more just fat loss in the hydrogen water group. And

• 1:17:46Gary Brecka?

  You just converted half my audience, right?

• 1:17:50Gary Brecka?

  Really? Better fat loss?

• 1:17:52Speaker 00

  Well, it wasn't a primary endpoint, but it's something that was observed. And this has actually been shown in a number of studies where there seems to just be some modest weight loss, specifically from fat mass and potentially an increase in lean body mass. And it's interesting, so there was a, you'll probably like this, this is really interesting, but there was an animal study, it was published in Journal of Obesity, I believe, was a Nature Publishing Group also, or it used to be, but. This, in this study, they used a leptin deficient mice. So leptin deficient, leptin is a hormone that makes you feel full.

• 1:18:29Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:18:29Speaker 00

  And so if you don't feel full, you want to keep on eating.

• 1:18:31Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:31Speaker 00

  And so these mice would overeat and they're fed a high fat diet.

• 1:18:34Gary Brecka?

  But they were blunt leptin, so they wouldn't have a satiation response.

• 1:18:37Speaker 00

  Exactly. So just keep on eating.

• 1:18:38Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:39Speaker 00

  Well, those given the hydrogen water, they, they like were so much thinner than the other, other rodents were. It was just, I mean, those pictures in the, in the article, you can just visibly tell the difference. In fact, the drinking of hydrogen rich water in this case was equivalent to like a 20% caloric restriction.

• 1:18:58Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:18:59Speaker 00

  And mechanistically, they found that hydrogen increased FG of 21 or fibroblast growth factor 21, which increases energy expenditure, which is again, something that happens in the mitochondria.

• 1:19:09Gary Brecka?

  So metabolism improves metabolism. And wasn't there recently a paper, I mean, you might've been involved in it, comparing it to GLP-1s?

• 1:19:18Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, there was a study on that. I wasn't involved with that paper, but that was interesting because hydrogen seemed to have, have some, some benefits in terms of basically helping restore some of the, the loss sense that can happen with like obesity or whatever. And so you can have basically the right levels that you would otherwise, you're supposed to have. And maybe that's helping to regulate your, somebody's weight or their satiety or just their perception, their desire. There's a lot of, hydrogen is very multifactorial because of what it's doing to the brain, what it's doing to the gut and what that in turn is going to do to the brain. And then if that's going to change, then you're going to have your, your dietary habits will change.

• 1:19:59Speaker 00

  That's further going to change your gut microbiome. And then you might feel like exercising, you have more energy because it's improving the mitochondria. And now if you start to exercise, and we see that in some of these studies of people where they're taking hydrogen water and like I, and write down in the journal, I feel like exercising more, I walked more.

• 1:20:14Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:14Speaker 00

  Which is kind of a confound, but it's also, that's very interesting that people are wanting to just move more and do things more. And that's, that's very important for overall health.

• 1:20:23Gary Brecka?

  Well, you know, there's, there's also a link between the reduction of fiber in our diets over time and the reduction of this production of hydrogen gas.

• 1:20:35Speaker 00

  Oh, that's a very interesting correlation. And, and yes, basically if you have a healthy diet. If you have a healthy microbiome.

• 1:20:44Gary Brecka?

  High fiber, healthy microbiome.

• 1:20:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, if you have, all these are healthy and good. You naturally produce a lot of hydrogen gas. Actually, you can produce up to, you know, I don't know, maybe, you know, over 10, even 13 liters of hydrogen gas a day, you know, just by, by having a microbiome with a lot of fiber. Right? Now, a lot of that hydrogen gas is not, is going to be consumed by other bacteria. It's going to be lost in flatulence. So you don't actually get a lot of.

• 1:21:12Gary Brecka?

  Lost in flatulence? I love the scientific term for it.

• 1:21:16Speaker 00

  And it's explosive.

• 1:21:17Gary Brecka?

  It's bustin' ass. Yeah. And it's explosive.

• 1:21:21Speaker 00

  Cause it's above 4%.

• 1:21:22Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:21:25Speaker 00

  But, you know, it is interesting when you look at some of these studies, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, a lot of neurological conditions, they tend to have lower hydrogen gas in their air, in their exhaled air, their breath, hydrogen gas is lower. And when you look at my, my, my collaborators at the Goodyear University, they, they looked at a proximity of patients and in their, the bacteria in their fecal matter was actually had less hydrogen producing bacteria than those who don't have those diseases. So again, a very strong correlation. Again, correlation does not equal causation, of course, but these are important correlations that, that you would expect to be exist, that would exist if there were a causative factor going on, right?

• 1:22:05Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:22:05Speaker 00

  Same thing with the Japanese centenarians, right? Those who are, become centenarians, they have higher exhaled hydrogen gas levels than, than, you know, younger people who, you know, don't, don't end up living as long, basically.

• 1:22:20Gary Brecka?

  Listen, there's what I share on this podcast, and then there's what I share with my inner circle. If you've been following me for a while, you know how I hold nothing back here. But my VIP community, that's where the real magic happens. Picture this, you're struggling with energy crashes, brain fog, or just feeling like you're not operating at your peak, and you don't know where to get real answers. But here's what really sets this apart. You're not just getting my insights. When I have incredible guests on the podcast, VIP members get to submit questions for a private podcast segment. So that world renowned expert. We just interviewed, you get exclusive access to their knowledge tailored to your specific situation. This section is under the private podcast section in the ultimate human community. And speaking of exclusive, you're getting my personal protocols, the exact tools

• 1:23:05Gary Brecka?

  I use for water fasting, gut optimization and morning routines that have taken me decades to perfect. This isn't theory. This is what works in the real world. The community launches challenges throughout the year where you get direct access to me and my network of experts. It's like having a personal health advisory board for less than a hundred dollars a month. Your health is your wealth and this investment pays dividends for life. Join the VIP community at theultimatehuman.com/vip and step into your ultimate potential. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. So, so for somebody that's new to hydrogen water, what is their entry point? What's the entry point to start consuming hydrogen water if they're, if they've never consumed it before? Well, it's, I guess it's pretty simple. One hydrogen tablet a day,

• 1:23:50Gary Brecka?

  started in the morning, take it with food, take it without food, take it before exercise. How would you, how would you tell somebody who's compelled, maybe after listening to this podcast?

• 1:24:02Speaker 00

  If they want, and that's kind of my first thought is first, you know, what does the research say? Like, well, what is your situation and circumstance at, right? Because, you know, hydrogen is not proven. That's kind of anti-science is also like, we don't prove anything. We, in science, we tried to prove things are false. And if we can't prove their faults, then it increases the probability that they're probably true. But we never really know if it's true, right? And so I guess at first, I'm just saying, we don't want to, I don't want to misrepresent, like the emergent studies is like, yeah, 200 human studies, but they're kind of all over the place from universities all over the world, not like just a focused look at this specific primary endpoint. So we can make this specific claim or whatever, right? So we, there needs

• 1:24:47Speaker 00

  to be more research to really categorically say, yes, if you do hydrogen, you will have this benefit. This is what it is. Instead, I think that people should have an informed consent. They should understand, hey, this is an emerging area. The safety is very high. The research looks Promising, especially animal research, but the number of clinical studies look good. And if you have the the the funds, the discretionary means to try, then by all means, you you can try it because I believe the safety is high enough that that you can do that, right? And so if you if that's you and you do want to try, then I guess if you're gonna try the hydrogen tablets, for example, then yeah, you actually only need one. In fact, most of the research, just one tablet will provide you more hydrogen than the majority of all the clinical publications.

• 1:25:32Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:25:33Speaker 00

  Because most, most of them did not use hydrogen tablets. But that's starting to change because the hydrogen tablets have been now used in clinical research.

• 1:25:39Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I've seen that, yeah.

• 1:25:40Speaker 00

  Because they're just, they're convenient and you provide very high dose. And now there's looking at some of these studies that potentially dose dependent effect. And if you also look at the translational effects, so at animals, they drink a lot more water compared to us. I mean, like, like, we'd have to be drinking like over a gallon of water a day, you know, and to to to drink the equivalent to what an animal would, a rodent. So they're getting a lot more hydrogen. And so maybe one of the reasons that they are more responsive to the benefits of hydrogen is they're also getting a higher dose. There's a lot of other metabolic factors as well. But but there's some trending in some cases when the higher doses is is beneficial, which is why a lot of researchers are choosing to use hydrogen tablets.

• 1:26:23Speaker 00

  But but and there are some studies that that there are some studies that show that a high concentration is not more effective than a low concentration in that specific area.

• 1:26:31Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:32Speaker 00

  But there are other studies showing that a higher concentration is more effective in those specific areas. But there are no studies for hydrogen water. There are no studies where a higher concentration is less effective than a lower concentration.

• 1:26:46Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 1:26:46Speaker 00

  Now, that's not true for inhalation of hydrogen gas.

• 1:26:48Gary Brecka?

  So if you're gonna do it, yeah, that's two to four percent. But so if you're gonna do it, you you taking a tablet that's 12 parts per million. And when would you consume it? First thing in the morning?

• 1:27:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, first I would just consume it daily.

• 1:27:04Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:04Speaker 00

  Like, we just think about what's the easiest thing, just consume it daily. And then if you wanna be, okay, figure out some regimen, whatever, we don't have enough research. To really say this is gonna be the most effective.

• 1:27:14Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:27:15Speaker 00

  For example, you can take it fasted. There's IEDs if you take it fasted. Well, then maybe you don't have any noise in your blood or whatever. And then hydrogen gas can directly cause a signaling. And you can get those benefits. Take it before you exercise. But you could also argue.

• 1:27:28Gary Brecka?

  I take it before I exercise every time.

• 1:27:30Speaker 00

  Yes, and that makes total sense.

• 1:27:32Gary Brecka?

  Is that when you take it or?

• 1:27:33Speaker 00

  In general, I feel like I do hydrogen water before I exercise. And I do like inhalation of hydrogen gas like after like a post exercise. But you can do, there's arguments both ways. And we just need more clinical research to see if there's really any difference.

• 1:27:48Gary Brecka?

  So you're just saying, just take it daily?

• 1:27:49Speaker 00

  Just take it because it's not like caffeine. If you're gonna, if you want the benefits of caffeine to help you exercise, you actually do take it before you exercise, right? That's not true with hydrogen. Hydrogen is going to provide a benefit that kind of stacks on top of itself over time. And because we start to change gene expression, we start to change the function of mitochondria. So we start seeing changes over time and they become more and more. Consistency is the most important. And now, if you're really thinking about something important to you, then yeah, take the hydrogen before you exercise. But for that matter, take the hydrogen after you exercise also. So you can safely take, you know, a number of these, say, tablets. There's no safety concern when it comes to hydrogen gas itself, just pure hydrogen.

• 1:28:34Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:28:34Speaker 00

  There's really no safety concerns. They've been using hydrogen gas to prevent, say, decompression sickness since the 1940s.

• 1:28:40Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:40Speaker 00

  At orders of magnitude higher than what you would ever talk about therapeutically, you know, dissolving a gas in water and then drinking that.

• 1:28:46Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:28:47Speaker 00

  So there's not a concern there. You just start running up against, you know, how much magnesium can one tolerate? For example, so you can probably take.

• 1:28:54Gary Brecka?

  Cause there is a trace amount of elemental magnesium that's remains after it ever passes.

• 1:28:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:58Gary Brecka?

  Right. It's not a therapeutic dose of magnesium either, but it's.

• 1:29:01Speaker 00

  Well, not necessarily because most people, see, most people are only getting around three, 400 milligrams of magnesium. Most people are deficient in magnesium. So simply by taking one to two tablets a day, you're literally no longer being deficient. And that's, that can literally move the needle, just not being deficient in magnesium.

• 1:29:20Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:29:20Speaker 00

  And I would suggest that the research. indicates, at least my interpretation, that taking closer to around 700 milligrams of magnesium is probably better for you. So taking several tablets a day, you guess you get the benefits of hydrogen, but I'm just saying you also are getting some of that magnesium as well.

• 1:29:37Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:29:37Speaker 00

  And that could help move that needle a little bit more because magnesium, we know, has a lot of benefits to it.

• 1:29:45Gary Brecka?

  Now, what is really exciting you about the research in the hydrogen? Because as I've poked around the research, I've seen it in concussive injuries, comparing it to the standard protocol for concussive recovery and being magnitudes better than the standard protocol. I've seen it used to soak limbs immediately after injury compared to the RICE protocol, RICE Rest Ice Compress Elevate. There seems to be significant indications in cognitive studies that the Journal of Experimental Gerontology,

• 1:30:25Gary Brecka?

  there seems to be significant impact for delayed onset muscle soreness and maybe blunting the lactate threshold for athletic performance.

• 1:30:34Gary Brecka?

  I certainly think that making it a part of your daily routine, definitely not going to have any negative side effects. And there's this whole host of selective antioxidant benefits that you're not getting from your regular ingestion of antioxidants. I will say that, again, anecdotally, I have seen the greatest impacts from people that are bathing in it in terms of immediate benefits. Sage, my wife, has an L5S1 fusion. And so when her back acts up, it travels right up her spine and she literally just cannot sleep.

• 1:31:17Gary Brecka?

  It locks up. When I rub her back, it's as hard as a rock. But if she gets in a 25 minute hydrogen bath right before bed, she'll sleep seven hours. And I put Navy SEALs in there, I put Sean Ryan in there. He called me the next day and was like, dude, this is the first time I got eight hours sleep in 15 years. The first time I woke up in no pain in 15 years. And it maybe lasted 48 hours. I put arthritic patients in, in these tubs, bathed them in hydrogen 25, 35 minutes. No one's ever gotten out of there and said, I feel the same or feel worse, almost without exception, related to inflammatory conditions, knees,

• 1:31:54Gary Brecka?

  hips, shoulders, rotator cuff, low back. There seems to be an immediate benefit for people and pain, inflammation, like, you know, range of motion. And I have seen this so many times and so consistently that I'm absolutely convinced. And so what are your, what are your thoughts on?

• 1:32:19Speaker 00

  Well, that's exciting. I mean, you know, it's interesting because

• 1:32:21Gary Brecka?

  That's exciting.

• 1:32:23Speaker 00

  Well,

• 1:32:24Gary Brecka?

  Super exciting.

• 1:32:25Speaker 00

  Well, it's interesting though, because what you're talking about is your, your experience.

• 1:32:29Gary Brecka?

  Yes. Yeah. And I want to be cautious to say exactly that.

• 1:32:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. And these, these, I guess we could term it, you know, anecdotal evidence, which is not something we just throw away, but it's anecdotal, but it's still a form of evidence.

• 1:32:40Gary Brecka?

  By the way, eczema and psoriasis too.

• 1:32:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:42Gary Brecka?

  So in front of my eyes.

• 1:32:45Speaker 00

  And there are actually some case studies on those areas also, right? So, so there, there can be some mechanistic sense to some of these things. And so, but, but bathing is, doesn't have as much research as say drinking hydrogen water or inhalation.

• 1:33:00Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:00Speaker 00

  So I had to be a little bit more cautious on what I can say, what, what we see clinically. Mechanistically, I could see how some of these examples make sense. You know, you get in the, in the water and immediately hydrogen gas, the smallest molecule. I mean, it can penetrate this, the skin and it can actually get into those areas.

• 1:33:17Gary Brecka?

  Almost like it's not there, right? I mean, it's transdermal.

• 1:33:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. It goes to transdermal. I mean, it's still. We don't want to go into some of the Brownian diffusion aspects.

• 1:33:27Gary Brecka?

  No, please don't.

• 1:33:29Gary Brecka?

  Just kidding.

• 1:33:31Speaker 00

  But it can get to those areas. And we can see effects. Like in our research, we found that hydrogen influenced the mitochondria within as little as two minutes. So we can see effects immediately. And when you drink hydrogen water, you're influencing the microbiome and you see excelled hydrogen gas within just a couple of minutes also. So hydrogen gases go into the body. But again, the concentration is probably not very high, if at all, in say, your knee or something, after you drink hydrogen water. So the benefits to the knee come through other mechanisms, other second messengers, other things that are happening versus if you were to bathe directly there, or if you were to inhale hydrogen gas. Now that hydrogen gas is getting fed into the blood and getting into those joints specifically.

• 1:34:16Speaker 00

  So those are different mechanisms and they can be supported by mechanisms, actually.

• 1:34:22Gary Brecka?

  I mean, I've seen it so consistently.

• 1:34:26Speaker 00

  Which is why I think you can't necessarily, what's better? Bathing or drinking or inhalation?

• 1:34:31Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:34:32Speaker 00

  You know, really, if you can, you should do all of them. I would say most of the research is on hydrogen water and inhalation. And bathing is starting to emerge. And that's becoming maybe more popular. But mechanistically, we understand how hydrogen gas works at the mitochondria level, its effects on signaling, calcium signaling, for example. So some of these can start to make sense.

• 1:34:57Gary Brecka?

  Probably is why some of the exercise benefits. So let's talk about inhalation. Because hydrogen is amazingly effective at very low doses. I mean, concentrations. Two to 4%.

• 1:35:12Speaker 00

  Yes. And we don't want to get confused because the concentration is in water is very different than inhalation. Because we want to reach at a certain micromolar level, several micromolars in the bloodstream. When you drink hydrogen water, you only have, let's say you're going to drink this, you're going to get around three to four milligrams of hydrogen gas dissolved in the water. You drink that, it's going to be diluted by your body. By the time it gets into those areas in your, like a portal vein and your liver, you're going to be around five to 30 micromolar concentration.

• 1:35:47Speaker 00

  When you inhale hydrogen gas, based on Henry's law, between 1 to 4%, you also get around 5 to 30 micromolar concentration.

• 1:35:58Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:35:58Speaker 00

  And that's, and that's what we see in, in, in, in the research, in the animal studies. So that Nature Medicine publication, again, that was 2% hydrogen gas. Now, this is some of the most, most powerful and interesting area of research. I'm going to get to some research going on in Japan right now with, with, with hydrogen gas. That Nature Medicine publication was 2% hydrogen gas. Then they looked at stroke, so an actual clinical study, because that was an animal study of stroke. They used actual hemat studies and 10 years later in 2017. And they did a safety study and a comparison to see how effective hydrogen gas was. Again, about 2% hydrogen gas.

• 1:36:37Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 1:36:37Speaker 00

  And in this study, they found that inhalation of hydrogen gas compared to standard treatment, a standard drug, hydrogen gas was more effective at improving the, the, the National Institutes of Radiance Scores of, of the stroke and a number of other parameters. I'll go back and look at the study, but it was essentially more effective in all those parameters.

• 1:36:56Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:36:56Speaker 00

  So again, this ischemic reperfusion injury, free radicals, oxidative damage, right? Inflammation.

• 1:37:01Gary Brecka?

  And lungs are an excellent delivery mechanism directly into the blood, too.

• 1:37:04Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah. And that's important clarification too, because hydrogen gas, unlike oxygen, does not bind onto the hemoglobin. It doesn't get carried through a specific protein. It just dissolves into...

• 1:37:13Gary Brecka?

  Stays into the serum of the blood.

• 1:37:15Speaker 00

  It dissolves in the blood. And then, then, then as it's dissolved, that, you know, 5 to 20 micromolar concentration, it reaches the target organs, has its effect. When you stop inhalation or stop administration, then it goes back to baseline within an hour. So like when you drink hydrogen water, all the hydrogen gas is gone after an hour.

• 1:37:33Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:37:33Speaker 00

  The benefits remain for like 24 hours.

• 1:37:35Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:37:36Speaker 00

  Or potentially longer if you were constantly doing hydrogen water.

• 1:37:39Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:37:39Speaker 00

  So same with inhalation, it's gone after an hour or so, but those benefits remain. So they, they also looked at in animal studies, in post-cardiac arrest syndrome in the animal studies, and they found that the 24 hours survival, in, in 24 hours in the control group, about 43% survived. When you do the normal therapy, which is targeted temperature management, so basically cool the body down like a therapeutic hypothermia, then you have 77% survived.

• 1:38:09Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:38:09Speaker 00

  That's, that's why that's a normal treatment. When you did hydrogen and gas, 92% survival.

• 1:38:15Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:38:15Speaker 00

  When you combine the two, 100% survival at 24 hours.

• 1:38:19Gary Brecka?

  You're kidding.

• 1:38:19Speaker 00

  That's huge.

• 1:38:21Gary Brecka?

  Why isn't everybody talking about that?

• 1:38:23Speaker 00

  Well, it was an animal study. It was an animal study, okay, but this was enough. That was enough to get the Japanese government to approve hydrogen as a class 2B medicine for the, for the study of hydrogen in post cardiac arrest syndrome patients in hospitals.

• 1:38:39Gary Brecka?

  When, when do you think that study will be?

• 1:38:40Speaker 00

  That's already been done. I'm going to tell you the results.

• 1:38:42Gary Brecka?

  Okay, good.

• 1:38:42Speaker 00

  That, that, that.

• 1:38:44Gary Brecka?

  This is exciting, dude. We waited the whole podcast for this. We should've talked about this minute one. Messing around with the free radical, you know, stage four of that, you know, electron.

• 1:38:55Gary Brecka?

  This is the meat.

• 1:38:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is, but understanding those mechanisms helps, helps us understand these observations, right? So, and so the Japanese approved this so they could do a study. And, and it's not, it's not approval like now they're going to use it in the hospitals or whatever. It's just they can actually do a study because you have to make sure this is safe. You're talking about people who are coming in comatose, who, who are already on the verge of death and then you're going to do some other radical therapy. You've got to get approval for that.

• 1:39:19Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:39:20Speaker 00

  All right, so they gave this approval. There's a, is major study undertaking 15 different hospitals that were involved. But then COVID happened.

• 1:39:28Gary Brecka?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:39:29Speaker 00

  So unfortunately, the study got truncated and so it wasn't.

• 1:39:33Gary Brecka?

  And they all died because they were vaccinated.

• 1:39:36Speaker 00

  They're, they're what, but they didn't go as long as they wanted to. But, but we do have some of those results.

• 1:39:42Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:39:42Speaker 00

  And basically the, the, um, the couple of endpoints, so they used 2% hydrogen gas, all right? Again, this was not with a nasal cannula, where like, you know, so many milliliters of flow rate. This was like with a face mask, a tank of exact, precise concentration of hydrogen. Because remember, 2% seemed to be more effective than 4%. So you really need to control everything and you can't have it be fummable. It has to be below 4% or else you can't do the study.

• 1:40:07Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:08Speaker 00

  Okay, so in the study though. They, they looked at a couple of things, but I was gonna give you two main results. The 90 day survival, because typically after post cardiac arrest syndrome, you know, yeah, you're able to resuscitate the person, but then the survival is not very high because it has so much damage, they end up dying, you know, several days, weeks later.

• 1:40:27Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:40:27Speaker 00

  They looked at the 90 day survival and in the hydrogen, no, in the control group, the control group, I think this, I think there were about 77 patients. It was gonna be like 380 or something patients, but it got truncated. But there was like, in the, in this study, there was a 61% survival in the standard treatment group.

• 1:40:51Gary Brecka?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:40:52Speaker 00

  And in the hydrogen group, it was an 85% survival.

• 1:40:56Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:40:57Speaker 00

  So, so if you had 100 subjects, 61% survived with standard treatment, 85 lived. It's like, what, 24, you know?

• 1:41:05Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:41:05Speaker 00

  I mean, that's, that's a pretty significant.

• 1:41:08Gary Brecka?

  Significant, yeah.

• 1:41:08Speaker 00

  This is people's lives. This is an actual study.

• 1:41:10Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:11Speaker 00

  The, so, so they, these people are alive.

• 1:41:15Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:41:16Speaker 00

  Because of hydrogen gas.

• 1:41:17Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:41:18Speaker 00

  And then the primary endpoint was improvements in neurological scores that they were looking at. And in the standard treatment, it was a 39% improved neurological scores.

• 1:41:31Gary Brecka?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:41:32Speaker 00

  And in the hydrogen treatment, it went up to 56%. So, still a pretty big difference. Now, because the sample size is a little bit smaller, this statistically did not reach statistical significance, but still, 39% improvement versus 56% improvement was, is a pretty big.

• 1:41:50Gary Brecka?

  That's a massive.

• 1:41:51Speaker 00

  Especially when you consider that there was, the, the survival increase from, from 61% to 85% was more. So more people who are maybe on the verge, who would have died anyways, they also survived. And yet you still saw an increase in the neurological improvements.

• 1:42:08Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:42:09Speaker 00

  So, this, this really has grabbed a lot of people's attention. And so there's a lot more research that's being going on in this area. And, and then that's, these are comatose patients. I mean, they're, they're, they're inhaling hydrogen gas, right?

• 1:42:23Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:42:23Speaker 00

  Now, More research, of course, is going on in this area. And but it's trending because I believe that, you know, there's a lot of corruption and problems with like the FDA and like all this kind of stuff.

• 1:42:37Gary Brecka?

  No.

• 1:42:37Speaker 00

  Everything. But but that corruption is everywhere. It's not just with these organizations, right? But I do believe, and maybe I'm just too optimistic, but I believe that if we had true, good, concrete evidence with clear primary endpoints, then hydrogen therapy could be a standard care. Like, but in order to get that approval, we have to have that evidence.

• 1:43:02Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:43:02Speaker 00

  And how do we have that evidence unless we do the clinical studies? Why are the clinical studies going to happen unless we educate people about it?

• 1:43:09Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:43:09Speaker 00

  And that's really what I'm here today for.

• 1:43:11Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:43:12Speaker 00

  I want to educate people about what's going on, allow people to have their informed consent. We can raise the awareness about this. This is going to allow for more research to happen. And if hydrogen really can radically revolutionize healthcare, wouldn't you want to know? Wouldn't we want to use it? Again, something so safe, so simple, that's affordable to anybody.

• 1:43:33Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:43:33Speaker 00

  And that's precisely why we're working on this education, right? And that's that's also why, as you know, I helped to invent that inhale H2 unit. The entire purpose is not because we know this is going to cure every disease known to man, it's because we want to do clinical research. We care, like, I care about you working on educating this, everyone about it. Well, we want to do clinical research, and now we can do that without tanks of this this gas and everything. Explosive. Explosive, and we can model the concentration, make sure it's therapeutic. And so that's the whole idea behind, you know, inhale H2 is initially, it was for clinical research. And then with Alex is like, people actually want the, you know, there are people right now, today, who would want to use this.

• 1:44:18Gary Brecka?

  100%.

• 1:44:18Speaker 00

  And and so.

• 1:44:19Gary Brecka?

  Everyone listening to this podcast probably wants to.

• 1:44:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, because you get hydrogen water, which we see those benefits, and we have inhalation. So really nice combination. And I but I believe people should understand the limitations and the preliminary evidence. That that's how you overcome. Skepticism because being skeptic is so important.

• 1:44:37Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:37Speaker 00

  That's how you prevent falling, falling victim to a scam.

• 1:44:41Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:44:41Speaker 00

  Being skeptic means that you are open minded, not so open that your brain falls out.

• 1:44:46Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:44:46Speaker 00

  I think that's Obergeiss dictum or something, but, but you, but you, you, but that means specifically that you do not reject the information without first evaluating the evidence. And you don't accept the information without first evaluating the evidence. You do both.

• 1:45:00Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:00Speaker 00

  Right. And so I want people to know what the evidence is. And we're not claiming that it's going to cure a disease. We have all this evidence that's proven to do this. That's the antithesis of science. Now we're just saying, hey, this is what's shown in the animal studies, the emerging clinical studies.

• 1:45:15Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:15Speaker 00

  If it makes sense to you, if you have the desire and the monetary means, well, then you can give it a try. And now you have options available.

• 1:45:23Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:24Speaker 00

  You know, and I was doing my research and doing a PhD. I was, I remember seeing some of the results.

• 1:45:29Gary Brecka?

  And you were like, damn, I wish I had one of these.

• 1:45:30Speaker 00

  No, I totally.

• 1:45:31Gary Brecka?

  I want to get into this study.

• 1:45:33Speaker 00

  I, we, we had to take a medical grade hydrogen gas with exact percentage. And I'm thinking, why not?

• 1:45:42Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I inhale that stuff, you know? And I, I want this, I say the same thing with making hydrogen water. I would make hydrogen water in the, in the laboratory. And, and so I read these papers, I look at the research and I'm like, we know this is safe. Maybe, maybe it's can, it can help me. And so I want to try it. And so I would use it. So now there are like these tablets or this inhale H2 machine. People can use it and they can get clinically relevant doses that we use in the clinical studies. If, if you want to do that, right?

• 1:46:11Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:12Speaker 00

  But I would not say that, I would not say the evidence is so compelling that you should do hydrogen therapy instead of say, go to the gym. Like if you have the choice to go to the gym or just drink hydrogen water.

• 1:46:24Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:24Speaker 00

  Dude, come on.

• 1:46:25Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:26Speaker 00

  Go to the gym, right? But, but if you're not able to exercise at all, for whatever reason, you're, you're so busy and you have the discretionary funds, why not try hydrogen water? Which acts as an exercise mimetic, according to some of these animal and early studies, right? If, if you, again, if you have the choice to.

• 1:46:42Gary Brecka?

  Or do both if you're going to, that's what I do. I don't have a single client that I don't recommend take hydrogen water. And that's, that's why I'm so glad that you're here to sort of return. You know, the noise to the balance of, you know, what are the claims that, you know, we could make based on the research today? And then where does the research look like it's, it's heading? And I think the nicest thing is that the research indicates that it's extraordinarily safe and offers plethora of benefits, even though there's additional research.

• 1:47:13Speaker 00

  It doesn't impair performance.

• 1:47:15Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:15Speaker 00

  It doesn't make things worse. The emerging evidence in, in animal studies is very promising. The emerging evidence in clinical studies is very promising. It makes mechanistic sense, but, but of course I would not say that you should, that hydrogen therapy is more important or there's more evidence than getting your sleep right or exercising or, or maybe sauna.

• 1:47:35Gary Brecka?

  Sleep, whole food diet and exercise.

• 1:47:37Speaker 00

  Those are, those are the foundations. But if you can do both of them, if you can do all of them and you have the discretionary means to do so, I, I believe that people should have, should be able to make their own choice to do that. And luckily we, there are good products on the market now.

• 1:47:51Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:52Speaker 00

  Where people can make that informed choice.

• 1:47:54Gary Brecka?

  Right. I agree. Tyler, this has been amazing, dude. You know, I know it was very granular for a lot of folks, for my, for my super nerds, which is probably half of my audience, they're going to love this. For the Andrew Huberman's out there that really want to know the mechanism. They're, they're going to really enjoy this. I've been a huge proponent of your research. I've been a huge proponent of, of hydrogen water. My family drinks it. My parents drink it. After that experimental gerontology, clinical study, I put both of my parents on it. They've been on it, you know, that entire time since I read that study. I think that was published in 2018, November 2018.

• 1:48:34Gary Brecka?

  But I'm really deeply appreciative of this because even though we went very granular on the science, I think people understand now why this is such a unique molecule. Maybe they understand what the difference is between an antioxidant and a selective antioxidant, which makes hydrogen so unique. It's almost like this miracle molecule with how it reacts in the body.

• 1:48:59Gary Brecka?

  So if my audience wants to find you, like where can they find out more about you? Are you on Instagram?

• 1:49:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, you can find me on Tyler LeBaron on all channels.

• 1:49:09Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 1:49:09Speaker 00

  So Tyler LeBaron.

• 1:49:11Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. And I'll link your research to, you know, in the show notes. I'll link your hydrogen inhalation machine in the show notes. But I always wind down all my podcasts by asking my guests the same question. So you probably know that this question's coming.

• 1:49:26Speaker 00

  Oh, no, I'm not for worry.

• 1:49:27Gary Brecka?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. No, everybody gets the same question. There's no right or wrong answer to it, so.

• 1:49:31Speaker 00

  But before you do, I want to end with this.

• 1:49:33Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 1:49:34Speaker 00

  Hydrogen, think of it as a redox adaptogen that benefits the mitochondria. I want to change the narrative that hydrogen is not just this antioxidant. There's a buttload of antioxidants out there.

• 1:49:46Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:46Speaker 00

  Think of it as a redox adaptogen that benefits the mitochondria.

• 1:49:50Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, that's a great way to frame it. So what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

• 1:49:58Speaker 00

  That's a great question.

• 1:50:01Speaker 00

  I think a lot of that comes from within, something divine aspect about that. To be the ultimate human means you are reaching your full potential. It has nothing to do with being better than anybody. It's just, are you making changes? Are you being better today than you were yesterday? And that is in all aspects of your life. How do you treat your neighbors? How do you, are you making the world a better place? Are you improving this gift that we have of our body? Are we, you know, we say if knowledge is our power, then learning is our superpower. Are we learning?

• 1:50:46Speaker 00

  Are we doing these things? I think to be the ultimate human, we have a balanced life where we're trying to become the ultimate, to reach that potential and all those things. And it's not necessarily that we reach our potential, but we're striving for that. We're just making these small changes, just like hydrogen, a small molecule, but it's constantly there, just slowly getting better and better and better. It's not trying to brag or anything. It's just always there. And that's really kind of what we should do. I think, I think, I think if I were to sum it up, it's just. Being incrementally better in all the aspects that we can on a daily basis.

• 1:51:24Gary Brecka?

  Man, phenomenal. We're going to head over into my VIP group now. The VIPs are the only ones I tell who's coming on the podcast before they come on the podcast. And so I let them know you were coming. They were super excited. There's a whole host of questions for you. If you guys are interested in becoming an Ultimate Human VIP, just go over to theultimatehuman.com/vip. Would love to see you in there. Private podcasts, one-on-ones with me, ask Gary anything. There is a 10-month course on becoming the ultimate human version of yourself. It's entirely free. It's all inside of the VIP community. So I hope you enjoyed this podcast. We're going to have Tyler back again for sure. As you continue your journey on hydrogen, I want to keep people up to date on your research and the emerging research and some of the new findings. Would love to see if

• 1:52:09Gary Brecka?

  this study in Japan ever gets completed.

• 1:52:12Speaker 00

  That one is completed.

• 1:52:13Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I mean, oh, the one before COVID.

• 1:52:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it's done. Yeah, published in E clinical medicine.

• 1:52:18Gary Brecka?

  I'm going to link that one.

• 1:52:19Speaker 00

  So we'll link that one, yeah.

• 1:52:21Gary Brecka?

  And until next time, guys. That's just science.