Gary Brecka: 5 Ways Sitting is Shortening Your Lifespan & 2 Changes to Transform Your Daily Routine

Do you want to know why sitting for a long time shortens your lifespan? Do you want to know how to transform your daily routine? Today, Jay is joined by Gary Brecka, the Co-Founder and Chief Biologist of 10X Health and the founder of The Ultimate Human. With more than 20 years of Bio-Hacking and functional medicine experience, Gary has worked with and everyone from CEOs to professional athletes from the UFC, NFL, Professional Boxing, and entertainment industries. What will you do when there is a possibility to predict how many more years you have left? Jay and Gary ponder on how our daily habits and emotional states impact our overall health and longevity, the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle and emphasizing on the need for regular movement, the benefits of deep, intentional breathing to enhance physical and mental well-being, and the complexities of mental health disorders, shedding light on common misunderstandings and the reasons why some supplements may not deliver their promised benefits. In this interview, you'll learn: How to boost your emotional health with simple daily practices How to reduce health risks by moving more throughout the day How to deepen and lengthen your breaths for better health How to clear your mind by understanding and addressing brain fog This conversation is focused on empowering listeners with knowledge to make healthier lifestyle choices. With Love and Gratitude, Jay Shetty What We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 01:13 Predicting Your Lifespan 09:17 What Is An Emotional State? 12:54 Sedentary Lifestyle Is a Health Hazard 15:37 Why You Need to Breath Deeper and Longer 22:44 Why Mental Health Disorders are Often Misunderstood 32:20 The Some Supplements Don’t Work 36:54 The Science Behind Brain Fog 44:30 Pre and Postpartum Care 48:55 Folic Acid Mutation 50:36 Deficiencies Are Passed Down, Not Diseases 56:01 What’s Wrong with Tap Water? 01:03:02 How Much Chlorine is in Your Water? 01:06:41 Gary on Final Five Episode Resources: Gary Brecka | TikTok Gary Brecka | Instagram Gary Brecka | LinkedIn Gary Brecka | YouTube Gary Brecka | Website The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by Mazda. Confidence isn't something Mazda finds, it's something they practice. That's the thinking behind every Mazda. With proactive safety features designed to help keep you more aware, more connected, and more engaged with the road ahead. It's why Mazda has been named Consumer Reports' safest new car brand and has won more 2026 IIHS Top Safety Pick Plus Awards than any other car brand as of July 2026. Visit www.iihs.org to learn more. A lot can happen when an accident doesn't. Visit MazdaUSA.com to learn more. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. This episode is brought to you by Vinted.

• 1:13Jay Shetty?

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• 1:57Speaker 02

  In the industry that I was previously associated with, which was large life insurance, if the database that I had access to could see the light of day, it would upend modern medicine in a way that would be catastrophic. We could tell the insurance company how long you had to live to the moment.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  Chief human biologist, Gary Brecka.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  He's gonna make you superhuman. We know that sedentary lifestyle is the leading cause of all-cause mortality. You're breathing in that repetitively expired air, dropping that oxidative state. You're making the blood more hospitable to disease.

• 2:27Jay Shetty?

  Hey everyone, I've got some huge news to share with you. In the last 90 days, 79.4% of our audience came from viewers and listeners that are not subscribed to this channel. There's research that shows that if you want to create a habit, make it easy to access. By hitting the subscribe button, you're creating a habit of learning how to be happier, healthier and more healed. This would also mean the absolute world to me and help us make better, bigger, brighter content for you and the world. Subscribe right now.

• 3:11Jay Shetty?

  Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the place you come to to become happier, healthier and more healed. You know that we're dedicated to making sure that you get the insights, the habits, the hacks, the advice that's going to help you uplift your life from wherever you currently are. So if you're someone who wants to live longer, this episode is for you. If you're someone who wants to get healthier, even if you're starting from zero, this episode is for you. And if you're someone who's been hearing about biohacking and longevity and you're kind of confused and you're thinking, I have no idea where to start, this episode is for you. Today's guest is Gary Brecker, the co-founder and chief biologist of 10x Health and the founder of The Ultimate Human.

• 3:54Jay Shetty?

  With more than 20 years of biohacking and functional medicine experience, he is obsessed with the function and performance of the human body and finding innovative ways to help people achieve absolute peak function in their bodies. Please welcome to the show Gary Brecker. Gary, thank you for being here.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  I am so excited to be here at the top of the mountain. On the way up here though, I was kind of like not it on some of these places that are sticking out from the edge of the cliff.

• 4:23Jay Shetty?

  I've been looking forward to this. I'm a huge fan. I've been loving what you've been doing in the industry.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Really? Thank you.

• 4:28Jay Shetty?

  I've been loving watching your interviews. I'm so glad to finally have you here. I remember when I first came across you, I told my team, I was like, we've got to get Gary on.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  Really? Thank you so much, man. I'm super pumped to be here too, man.

• 4:37Jay Shetty?

  Me too. And I'm always trying to learn. I feel like I'm always trying to grow. I'm new in this space in the sense that I got into in the last couple of years and I'm learning from great experts like yourself. And I want to start off by talking about this because you talk about the ability to predict how long someone will live. And that sounds fascinating and crazy at the same time.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  It does.

• 4:59Jay Shetty?

  How is that possible?

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, it's based on large data and it wasn't me just looking at blood work and gene tests and saying, I can tell you how many more months you have left on earth. But if we got in the industry that I was previously associated with, which was large life insurance, if we got 10 years of medical records on you and 10 years of demographic data, we could tell the insurance company how long you had to live to the month. And there are enormous companies that do this. The biggest one is probably a Fasano and Associates. But this is based on very, very large pools of data. And remember that life insurance companies have data that no other financial services enterprise has, no other, you know, bank has.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  CDC doesn't have it. Collegiate universities that are doing longevity studies don't have it. And that is that they know the day, the date, the time, the location and the cause of death for hundreds of millions of lives. And they have blood work on these people. They have, you know, very in-depth analytics on their demographic data. If you've ever applied for a large life insurance company or a large life insurance policy, let's say 5 million, 10 million, $25 million policy. There was at some point, somebody determining not where you were on an actuarial curve, but your specific mortality. And the way that it's done is you start with an actuarial curve, right? So if you're a 35-year-old male, you have a life expectancy of X. If you're a 28-year-old female, you have a life expectancy of Y.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  The question is not where are you on that curve, but what is your specific mortality? And it's incredible how big data trends can actually predict and not only the onset of and the severity of, but how quickly you will succumb to certain disease conditions.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  And what became glaringly apparent to me was that, you know, if the database that I had access to during that 20-plus year career could see the light of day, it would permanently change the face of humanity. It would upend modern medicine in a way that would be catastrophic because they have real data. You know, so if you went to your cardiologist, for example, and he put some heart stents in your heart and you left his office, you may or may not ever see him again. He doesn't know if something happened to you three days later or 30 years later, if you passed because of complications related to the heart stent or just died of happy, ripe old age. But the insurance company know exactly day, date, time, location,

• 7:23Speaker 02

  and cause of death. And you can triangulate that back into the record and you can see where the mistakes were made, either in diagnostics, as we know, medical error is the third leading cause of death. And that doesn't mean that doctors are out to kill people or that the healthcare system is out to kill people. What we know that it's completely overburdened and sometimes medical error occurs. It just happens to occur at a rate that in the United States at least is the third leading cause of death. And if you ever want to question whether or not insurance companies are good at predicting mortality, just look at what happened during the 2008 and 2009 financial services crisis. We had 364 banks fail. You didn't have a single life insurance company fail. In the United States, a valid death

• 8:07Speaker 02

  claim in America has never failed to have been paid. Now, that's an impressive statistic, but you also have to realize that only 2% of life insurance policies ever pay a death claim. 98% of all life insurance policies lapse. So I guess I really belabor that point, but the science of mortality is some of the most accurate science in the world. And if you really boil it down to the sum of its components, you find that It's predicting where processes in the body that are running on parallel tracks will finally converge, right? What we call comorbidities.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  When that happens, there is a parabolic rise in the ability to predict the eternal end of somebody's life. We know that, for example, all human beings leave this earth the same way. We actually all die of the same thing. It's called hypoxia, lack of oxygen to the brain. So we can no longer sustain enough oxygen to the brain, you know, in brain function, that's essentially the definition of death. And we think of it as an event, like a gunshot wound, a heart attack, a bust, a stroke, you know, some other kind of event. But the truth is that this is a predictable curve. We used to use an underlying, what we call the hypoxic curve. How well is this person managing oxygen, or how poorly are

• 9:29Speaker 02

  they managing oxygen? And once we were able to predict that, looking at red blood cell counts, hemoglobin levels, hormone levels, nutrient deficiencies, you can very accurately discern whether or not somebody has a fighting chance of getting out of their condition, or of that condition, you know, resulting in their demise. And, you know, two things were very trying for me in that industry. One was that, you know, I really began to realize that it wasn't just data. There were human beings on the other side of these spreadsheets. But the second immensely obvious point that came out of 20 years in that career was that the majority of the reason why people are not living healthier, happier,

• 10:11Speaker 02

  longer, more fulfilling lives is, were because of things that we called modifiable risk factors. Just simple changes that they could have made to their daily routine that would have materially changed the trajectory of their life. In most cases, they had to do with simple, basic nutrients that were missing from their body that were causing the expression of disease. And, you know, anemias, D3 deficiencies, hormone imbalance, not because of their endocrine system had a particular disease or pathology, but because it was nutrient deficient. And it became so obvious to me that if I had just been able to pick up the phone and call any number of these people, you know, I could have, could have dramatically changed the trajectory of their life.

• 10:53Jay Shetty?

  Wow. I mean, when I'm hearing you talk about oxygen to the brain, which sounds so...

• 11:01Jay Shetty?

  Obvious, but it's something that is rarely articulated.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Oxygen to the brain is not just gas entering the brain. You know, if you, if you look at the molecular structure of a lot of the states in the brain that we talk about, like if, if you were to say to me, what is a mood? What is an emotional state? Well, it's a collection of neurotransmitters in most cases bound to oxygen. If you look at the molecular structure of some of these activated, deactivated neurotransmitters, or some of these, the differences between different moods, elevated emotional states, passion, elation, joy, arousal, or suppressed emotional states, anger, you know, vengeance,

• 11:46Speaker 02

  despair, you'd find that a large reason, a large difference between these two emotional states is the presence of oxygen. You know, one, one of the reasons why no human being has ever woken up laughing is because you don't have the oxidative state to experience laughter. But can you wake up angry? Very easily. Lower tier emotional states do not require the presence of oxygen. And so when, you know, if you want to do a fun experiment tonight, just, just pinch your wife while she's in a deep sleep, she will instantly wake up angry. Right? I actually don't suggest that.

• 12:18Jay Shetty?

  And then I may laugh.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  But if you wanted her to laugh, right? If you wanted her to be joyous, if you wanted her to be elated, aroused, you, you would have to, you know, wake her up, improve the oxidative state, and then allow those emotions to come in, to play. And, and so, you know, I have a saying that the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease. And so we know, and you know very well, because you're, you're, you're in this space, that we feel emotion in an area of the brain called the amygdala, right? Little two little almonds. And the fascinating thing about this area of the brain where we experience every emotional state that we, we can experience, if you're angry, you're angry in the amygdala, if you're,

• 13:04Speaker 02

  you're, you're elated, you're elated in the amygdala area of the brain, is that it is, according to MIT, the sole gateway to the hippocampus, which is where our memory is stored. And so when you start thinking about that from a physiological standpoint, like, well, the sole gateway to the hippocampus is through the amygdala. But when you start thinking from a practical standpoint, then the sole gateway to our memory is through our current emotional state. And if that's how we access memory, and memory is what we draw upon, our prefrontal cortex and our consciousness, our future draws from our memories, then if the amygdala is what accesses the hippocampus part of the brain and taps into our memory,

• 13:45Speaker 02

  and then our conscious pulls from our memory, then this essentially means that your current emotional state determines your future. And I just feel like if we could improve the capacity for people to experience elevated emotional states for prolonged periods of time, not like a heart monitor, right? Because you find so many people that are not in good physiological condition, that are trying to become in better emotional condition, right? Better mood. And they are only able to reach these emotional states for short periods of time, like a heart monitor. So, and they do all the right things. They wake up, they journal, they read self-help motivational books, they go to the right seminars, they

• 14:29Speaker 02

  try to express gratitude, even fake their way through it. But as soon as they're done, that intentional focus, it drops back down into the state where they most comfortably exist. And I believe a lot of this has to do with the oxidative state in the brain, and also has to do with nutrient deficiencies, right? I mean, every emotion that we can feel, every mood that we can experience is a collection of neurotransmitters. As we have imbalances and deficiencies in these, then we cannot manufacture the moods and the emotional states that we really want to experience. And then we're told we have a mood disorder, or a mental illness. And I think very often, we just have a lack of mental fitness. And so

• 15:13Speaker 02

  when you realize, like, that the happiest people are the people that are moving the most, that have

• 15:23Speaker 02

  The greatest sense of purpose and that they're not necessarily the world's greatest biohackers, but they're eating whole foods. They're moving their body a lot. They have a sense of purpose. You look at the blue zones and some of the things that actually extend life. You know, we would see this in the medical record. Um, yeah, were those people actually having some alcohol? Yeah. Were those people actually having a little bit of elevated LDL cholesterol? Sure. Um, did those people eat sweets once in a while? Yeah, they sure did. Um, but they moved on a consistent basis and they had relationships and they had a sense of purpose. And for the most part, they ate whole foods and not any particular type of whole food, not any particular type of diet, wasn't a carnivore diet that extended their life.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  It wasn't the keto diet that extended their life. It wasn't the raw food vegan diet that extended their life. It was the whole food diet, you know, just eating real whole foods. Um, so I kind of diverted there for a second.

• 16:18Jay Shetty?

  No, no, no, I get where you're going. Yeah.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  Sometimes my wife is like, you just eat people's face.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  Government used it next to me on like a commercial flight or something.

• 16:27Jay Shetty?

  Oh, yeah. I love it. I love it. How do we, how do we, how do we do that though? Like, how do we get more oxygen to our brain? Like, what does that mean? What does that look like?

• 16:35Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, we know that sedentary lifestyle is the leading cause of all-cause mortality, right? And why is sedentary lifestyle the leading cause of all-cause mortality? We know that sitting is the new smoking. Well, we know why smoking was bad for you, right? It's stored the lungs. Um, but, uh, and you know, that nicotine caused permanent lung damage. And, but it wasn't the, really the nicotine, it was the reduction in the oxidative state. And when the body doesn't have oxygen and can't really defend itself. I mean, if you actually were to go in through the wall of a cell, go through the cytoplasm and, and, and find the little organelles floating around in there called the mitochondria, which there's probably a thousand or so per cell and 32 trillion cells.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  So it's estimated we have 110 trillion mitochondria, about 10% of your body weight are these little mitochondria. These are, this is the True energy source for human beings. And when cells become metabolically sick, it usually begins in the mitochondria, including the genesis of cancer and forms of all kinds of different pathologies. So when the mitochondria does not have the right oxidative state, you have a 16-fold step down in its production of energy. And what happens when you take, you know, a 16-fold step down in the energetic state of a cell is now that cell can no longer eliminate waste, repair, to toxify, regenerate. And so you're becoming metabolically sick,

• 18:01Speaker 02

  mainly because of the deficiency in oxygen. It's not that linear, but that is the main component. And sedentary lifestyle means that we have prolonged periods where our respiratory rate is very shallow. When our respiratory rate is very shallow, the majority of the air that we breathe in and out is high in carbon dioxide. It's expelled air. I mean, right now, every time you let out a breath, from the tip of your nose and the front of your lips, all the way down your esophagus, through the back of your pharynx, and all the way down and out to the bronchioles and in your lungs, this is all expired air. So when you breathe in and out, if it's very shallow, you're breathing in that repetitively expired air and you're dropping that oxidative state in the blood. You're making the blood more acidic.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  You're making it more hospitable to disease, not alkaline and less hospitable and not full of oxygen, which is energetic. And so what are ways to get more oxygen? Obviously, things like breath work, just simply moving your body.

• 18:58Jay Shetty?

  Give us, give us one that. So I love what you're saying here because it's so fascinating to understand that the reason a shallow breath is reducing our lifespan is because of this idea of just how much can get stuck and lost in there.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  Changing in the gases.

• 19:12Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and so. What are some breathwork practices? Because I think what we don't realize today is with everyone dealing with anxiety, dealing with stress, dealing with pressure, we're all subconsciously breathing far more shallower. And we're breathing quicker. And you've got these shorter, quicker breaths. And I think sometimes we're doing it without knowing at all. What are some great breathwork practices that you stand by?

• 19:33Speaker 02

  So, you know, I don't have a breathwork practice that I that I take credit for. I use a Wim Hof style of breathwork. I mean, you could spend a lifetime going and I encourage people to do so. I mean, the lifetime going down the just the breathwork avenue. There's breathwork to wake up, there's breathwork to go to sleep. But I think it's important, you know, as a part of a really daily health practice, longevity practice. So you're just taking a deep breath now?

• 19:57Jay Shetty?

  Now I'm like, yeah.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  The timer's suggesting, he's like.

• 19:59Jay Shetty?

  That's what I'm saying, yeah, I'm like, yeah, let's get really clear.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  He's like, I'm not dying anytime soon. I'm not going, I'm not going down.

• 20:05Jay Shetty?

  I hope everyone listening and watching is taking a breath right now, too. Everyone's like, everyone's doing the same thing I'm doing.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  They're doing it right now.

• 20:11Jay Shetty?

  Everyone's like counting how long their breath is right now.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  The truth is, you know, it's better to breathe deeper and longer and less frequently than it is to breathe more shallow and less frequently. In fact, Wim Hof, in some of his teachings, will do a very simple exercise where he'll say, I just want you to look down at your watch and I want you to count the number of times that you breathe in and out in the next minute. And people will just, they don't know that they're actually being tricked. And and what he's showing is that the majority of people are breathing 15, 18, sometimes 20 breaths in 60 seconds. And what this is showing you is if you're breathing that frequently, you're breathing that frequently because of the very little amount of oxygen that you're getting.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  And so you're breathing shallow and your brother buddy is trying to get more oxygen. Then he says, okay, count the number of breaths. In the next minute, I want you to only take four breaths for the entire minute, one every 15 seconds. And you're gonna breathe in.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  And you're gonna pause and you're gonna breathe out.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  And so essentially what he's trying to demonstrate is that in that same minute, four breaths actually was equivalent to 15 or 18 or 20 breaths in the same period of time, but there were four deep breaths. As we age, I read a statistic, I don't know if there's any valid science behind this or not, I actually got hassled online for repeating this, but I read a statistic that after age 30, less than 95% of people will ever sprint again. I don't know how much truth there is to that, but as I kind of just meander my way through the world, I have a tendency to think that it's fairly close, and if it's not 95% of

• 22:00Speaker 02

  people, maybe it's 70% of people, but after age 30, and this means that we're not using our auxiliary muscles of respiration, we're not using our inner costals, we're not using our diaphragm to massage our intestines, we're not correcting our posture and getting, you know, air down into the lobes of our lungs and out of the apex of our lungs. And, and so what Wim Hof talks about is, is I do three rounds of 30 breaths every morning, takes about eight minutes, that is the one thing that I do that I never, ever, ever, ever miss.

• 22:31Jay Shetty?

  Three rounds of 30 breaths, that are every minute you're only taking four breaths?

• 22:34Speaker 02

  No, no, so it's three rounds of 30 breaths. So the, the one minute of four breaths was just a way of showing you how you're actually hyperventilating yourself. You're actually, you know, if you're taking 20 breaths in a minute or 15 breaths in a minute, those are really short breaths, and which means you're not drawing in a lot of oxygen. And you made it through the next minute breathing less than a quarter of the, the amount of time. And it just shows you that it's because during those 15 or 18 breaths, you use the apex of your lungs. During those four breaths, you use the lobes of your lungs, where two thirds of the storage capacity is. And so it's just demonstrating the, the fact that getting oxygen deep into the lobes of our lungs and into our bloodstream is a very, very healthy thing. And it not only elevates your mood and your emotional state, but it

• 23:19Speaker 02

  is the antithesis of disease. It can actually even alkalize the blood. So I do three rounds of 30 breaths, obnoxiously deep breaths, and then exhale.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  And then on your 30th breath, you exhale and you hold as long as you can. When you start, you might be holding your breath for 15 seconds, 20 seconds. After several months of doing it, because the oxygen tension will change, the storage capacity changes. You'll be up to, I'm up to almost four minutes now. So I can hold my breath for four minutes between rounds. And you want, on that exhale, you want to build carbon dioxide. You, that's the main vasodilator in the human body. It's not nitric oxide, it's carbon dioxide. The reason why we get vascular during exercise is because of the carbon dioxide traveling back to the lungs. Not necessarily because of the pressure. So we want the carbon dioxide to build up. We want that vasodilation and then post vasodilation, we take a nice obnoxiously deep breath in.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  We let that air out and we start again. It's like my coffee, my caffeine, my, my double espresso in the morning. I call it my drug of choice because my body craves it like a rat to cheese. So within 30 minutes of waking every day, I'm finding a spot to do 30 minutes of breath work. And the, and the great thing about it is number one, it's free. Number two, it's portable. You do it in a hotel, you sound a little weird doing it in the hotel room or in airplane bathroom. You know, when I'm on long flights, I go, I go in the restroom and do it. God only knows what they think I'm doing in there.

• 24:45Jay Shetty?

  Why wouldn't you do it in your seat?

• 24:47Speaker 02

  Well, um, because like everybody out there.

• 24:50Jay Shetty?

  Maybe you're stressing out, yeah.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  They ring the flight attendant call button and, but I was actually on a long flight from Dubai back to New York. And, and actually a few times ago, when I was in LA, I went LA to Dubai on Emirates. And, and they got a big bathroom in the, in the front of the plane there. And I just went in there and had at it, you know? I would do like 25 air squats and then I would do 25 deep breaths, 25 air squats, 25 deep breaths. And I, I could see the looks on people's face when I came out of the bathroom. I'm like, I feel great.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  And then every hour on the hour is going back in and doing the same thing. I know they were thinking, God, just give it a break. Give it a break, guy.

• 25:29Jay Shetty?

  They need a gym on planes.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, we need to normalize gyms on planes. Somebody was actually talking to me about that. My friend Mikey Wang was talking to me about that the other day, how he wants to put gyms on planes. Take out the bar.

• 25:41Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  Even if you just put like some TRX bands or something, you know, I can't, I can't imagine a squat rack with some, you know, free weights, but, but what a cool thing it would be if, if the business class section in the back, like in Emirates, it's a bar back there with a, you know, with a cool TV and little lounge seats. But I'd love for him to put some eyelids around and just throw up some TRX bands. I would be back there doing it. In fact, I had a whole group of people in the back of the planes, about 12 or 13 of us last time on my way to Dubai. And it convinced everybody to do breath work. And we all sat in a big circle on the back of that Airbus and did breath work for like 20 minutes.

• 26:21Jay Shetty?

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• 27:01Jay Shetty?

  at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This episode is brought to you by Orange Theory Fitness. One of the best investments you can make is in your own strength. The choices you make today can help shape how you feel for years to come. Orange Theory Fitness provides a one hour workout to build strength, burn fat, and build muscle with an expert coach guiding you every step of the way. Head to orangetheory.com/onpurpose to learn more and get your first class free. Orange Theory Fitness, helping people live longer, more vibrant lives. Terms and conditions apply. See webpage in studio for details.

• 27:45Jay Shetty?

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• 28:26Speaker 02

  It's amazing.

• 28:27Jay Shetty?

  Gary, what's the, I want to go back to something you said earlier. What's the relationship between mental health and vitamin deficiencies?

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Well, if you look at.

• 28:36Jay Shetty?

  I don't think this is talked about enough.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  I don't think it's talked about enough either. You know, when we talk about mental health, a lack of mental fitness, you know, so many mental health disorders are, in my opinion, poorly understood. They are defined one way and treated a different way. I just had Dr. Palmer from Harvard on my podcast. It was fascinating how he was treating, and he's a board certified psychiatrist, an M D, and a Harvard professor, and he's treating some of the most drug resistant psychiatric illnesses. And I'm talking about the most awful of psychiatric illnesses, you know, paranoid schizophrenia, the conditions where people are literally tortured inside their own head, voices, what have you.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  And they're drug resistant and he treated them with supplements and ketogenic diets. And again, I'm not trying to oversimplify, you know, mental health by any means and saying if you're suffering from severe depression, just get on the ketogenic diet. It's not at all what I'm saying. But if you look at the, if you keep digging in and you say, okay, what is a mood? What is an emotional state? These are collections of neurotransmitters. They're recipes, right? What is anxiety? It's an excess, it's an elevation of a category of neurotransmitters called catecholamines. So if catecholamines rise in your brain, you will feel fearful. You will actually feel the presence of a fear without the presence of a fear. And when we understand that the brain can play tricks on us because it truly doesn't know

• 30:01Speaker 02

  the difference between perception and reality. You know, I use the example that if you drove home tonight and you got out of your car and somebody was standing in front of you with a knife, very real fear, right? You would begin to have a fight or flight response. Pupils would dilate, heart rate would increase, your extremities would flood with blood. But you could also be in your place here, and we're very high on the mountain in LA, and you could be laying in your bed tonight and you could start thinking about getting eaten by a shark. You know that the chances of a shark getting out of the Pacific Ocean and making it up there, right, that, you're ill, even if you had an Uber, are virtually zero. But you could have the exact same reaction. How is it that I could have the same reaction to the presence of a real fear as an entirely imagined fear?

• 30:44Speaker 02

  Because at their core, at the hub where all these spokes meet, it's the same thing. It's a rise in catecholamines. So if we know fear can be born from a rise in catecholamines, then we know anxiety and anxiousness can be from a rise in catecholamines. This is why so many people that have anxiety or experience anxiousness very often will say, "I've had it on and off throughout my entire lifetime and I cannot point to the specific trigger that causes it." They could be sitting on a podcast like we are right now, very calm, their staff around, nothing to be afraid of, and all of a sudden become overwhelmed with anxiety. So, and then we take it a step further and we say, "Well, where do these neurotransmitters come from? How do we make neurotransmitters?"

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Well, the majority of these are made in the gut. Serotonin, for example, is methylated in the gut. We take a simple amino acid called tryptophan, we methylate it into the neurotransmitter serotonin, it travels up the vagus nerve and it creates a mood. We take phenylalanine and tyrosine and we turn those into dopamine, the main driver of behavior. So if we know that mood and behavior... Driven by neurotransmitters that are derived from amino acids, then why isn't it possible that deficiencies in amino acids could give rise to deficiencies in neurotransmitters, which could then be interpreted as a mental illness? And again, I'm not trying to oversimplify mental illness by any, by any means. I believe in therapy. I also believe that, you know, meds do work in many cases.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  But why wouldn't we start first? If we define, for example, depression as an inadequate supply of serotonin, then why are we not trying to raise the level of serotonin? If we define some addictive tendencies as an inadequate supply of dopamine, the absence of dopamine is the presence of addiction. One of the reasons why addiction has a tendency to shift is because we never treat the dopamine deficiency. We only treat the physical addiction, right? So these are why drug addicts become alcoholics, alcoholics become work alcoholics, work alcoholics become workaholics. You know, you shift one addiction for another because that deficiency in dopamine drives you to feel, want to feel normal. And this is where I believe most addiction starts, is the search for normalcy, not the

• 32:57Speaker 02

  search for a high, right? I don't believe that most, most addicts woke up one day and said, I want to get really banged up. They woke up one day and said, I want to feel normal.

• 33:06Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, or numb.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Or numb.

• 33:08Jay Shetty?

  Numb, yeah.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. And in this search for that numbness, or the search for that normalcy, whether it was alcohol, or nicotine, or promiscuity, or what have you, they felt that, that either that numbness or that sense of normalcy. And then the addiction grew from that. And so they, they were then running from a low, not running towards a high. And this is one of the reasons why I have so much empathy for people that are trapped in the cycle of addiction. And I think that more addictive therapy needs to address these dopamine deficiencies. But now we're getting down to the, the possibility that nutrient deficiencies could give rise to neurotransmitter deficiencies, that could give rise to states of mental instability. And then we label this a mental illness.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  You have ADD, ADHD, you have OCD, you have manic depression, you have bipolar, you have schizophrenia, you have generalized anxiety, you have generalized depression, which I personally think are nonsense. Again, I'm not attacking the mental health profession. When you deprive the human body of certain raw materials, you get the expression of disease. And we accept this in so many different areas of medicine, but we don't really accept it in mental illness, right? I mean, how, how is a leading PhD from Harvard having success treating drug resistant mental illness with diet? Because it's not the diets, the nutrients that they were deficient in. And how is it that people that experience high

• 34:36Speaker 02

  rates of anxiety and anxiousness and attention deficit disorder, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, can sometimes do something as simple as take a methylated multivitamin and experience a dramatic reduction in their symptoms? Because nutrients matter. The human being such a, the human body is such a fascinating machine. You know, it's, the more you, you study human physiology, the more you, you believe in God, because there's no way that this was just assembled by accident or by chance over time, right? You'll never, I don't care how much time you give two bacteria in a mud puddle, you're never going to get a human being out of it. And the intelligence with which it's designed, how

• 35:19Speaker 02

  one raw material enters a cycle, it gets used, it creates waste, and then that waste is, is accepted and taken into another cycle and it's, and it's utilized. And it's like one man's trash is another man's treasure. And cellular metabolism is so fascinating because one amino acid enters a cycle and it gets converted into something completely different. Homocysteine gets metabolized into methionine. Homocysteine then can be one of the most inflammatory compounds in the human body. This gets metabolized into methionine, which then goes up into the mind and quiets the mind by, by dismantling, by, by essentially down regulating catecholamines, these fight or flight neurotransmitters. So puts people into a calm state of being calm. So then you start to understand, well, the

• 36:02Speaker 02

  majority of people that have sleep disturbance have one or two types of sleep patterns. They are either lay down to go to sleep, body tired. And they are mind awake.

• 36:12Jay Shetty?

  Mm hmm.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  So when their environment quiets, their mind wakes up. Why does the mind wake up when the environment quiets? Because you have excess catecholamines in the brain. There's a, there's a gene mutation called COMT. C O M T. Catecholomethyltransferase. It's a fancy way of saying the, the gene that codes for the enzyme that, that breaks down this class of neurotransmitters that down regulates them. Well, let's say that this gene mutation, you have this and, and, and you have an imperability to down regulate catecholamines. That doesn't sound like a big deal until you realize that catecholamines create a waken state in the brain. And so this waken state usually happens at night and somebody will lay there and they would just think about the most innocuous little thoughts while they are exhausted.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  They're just like, did I get everything on my grocery list? Did my belt match my shoes? We changed the Junie label to fuchsia from dark blue, you know? And you're like, why am I thinking about this at 2:30 in the morning? Right? Or you get up to use the restroom and you go back to bed and you lay there and your mind's awake. And so you don't have a sleep disorder. You don't have a mental disorder. You don't have generalized anxiety. You don't have a mood disorder. You have excess catecholamines in the brain. And very often these can be down regulated very simply with complexes of B vitamins, methylated B12, methylfolate, the raw material that the body needs to down regulate these. And by, by not giving the body the raw material, we get this expression of disease and then

• 37:43Speaker 02

  we say this person has this condition. You know, I, I tell the same story all the time, a lot about when I was in grad school and I took these, these plant botany courses, which, which I didn't like to take because I wanted to get a human biology degree and I had to study algae. Which wasn't, wasn't super, wasn't super interesting to me.

• 38:03Jay Shetty?

  That's what was so interesting about biology growing up. I remember there's so many subjects now where I'm like, if I knew that neuroscience was a part of, you know, looking at biology and so many other things, I would have been fascinated by it.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 38:14Jay Shetty?

  But we were learning about plant biology. I didn't care.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, me too. I really could have cared less about plant biology. But, and then, you know, then you have to study rock stratas and, and, you know, fossil lineages and all this other kind of stuff. And I'm like, who, who makes a career out of this?

• 38:28Jay Shetty?

  I know, I know.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  But, but you can actually get a degree, a degree in traffic management too. So I guess that, that I'd rather study rocks than traffic.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  No offense to the traffic experts out there. You guys are killing it. But, um, uh, but you know, when you, when you start to realize that.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  I'm just gonna laugh. We cut that out. Cause I'm gonna be like, what an asshole.

• 38:58Speaker 02

  Just lost half your audience right there. Like, don't, don't offend the traffic guys, dude. Somebody's gotta figure out when these lights go on and off. Go on. Sorry.

• 39:09Speaker 02

  I'm just having a good time. I'm having a good time too, but I don't know how we got down that road, but in any case, you know, when you, when, when you're studying plants.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  All right, go ahead. Go. I don't know why that's so funny. Hopefully, hopefully your listeners think it's so funny, but when you're studying plants and you, we'll cut it. Maybe we should leave it in actually. Kinda like it. Um, you, you don't think you have a lot of traffic experts that listen to the podcast? No, probably, probably a very low, you, you probably lose two followers on that one. It's worth it. You know, if, if you have a leaf that's rotting in the top of your palm tree and you call a true arborist, a true botanist down to your house. And you know, they'll look at that leaf and they won't touch the leaf. They won't even touch the tree. They'll cortes the soil. And they'll say, um, you know what, Jay? There's no nitrogen in this soil. And they'll add nitrogen to the soil and the leaf will heal.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  We stop thinking about human beings this way. We go very quickly to chemicals and synthetics, pharmaceuticals as a way to solve potential nutrient deficiencies in the human body. And we're fascinating machines like plants. And when, if you didn't add nitrogen to that soil, all of the things that were good for that plant, um, would have done nothing, right? You're like, well, maybe we should water it. Water is great for plants. Well, when you put water on there and nothing happens. Maybe we should add sulfur. Sulfur is great for plants and you, and you put sulfur, you put peat moss on there and you're like, peat moss is great for plants. And this happens in human beings too. We don't get data, so we actually never find the nitrogen. We never find the raw material that's actually missing, that's causing the expression of disease.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  And this is how most people wander their way through their supplement routine. They, they get. They get lost in the myriad of great supplements. And they start supplementing for the sake of supplementing. Well, is NMN good? Yeah, it's great. It raises NAD levels. Um, is resveratrol good? Yeah, it can lengthen telomeres. Is St. John's Wort good? Is ashwagandha good? Is supplemental good? Should I take CoQ10? I mean, you, you can make an argument for all of these different things that we could supplement with. But like the missing raw material, like the missing nitrogen in the soil. If you don't find the deficiency, none of that matters. And that's why I tell people that they should get data on their body. You know, there's 74 biomarkers that I look at in the blood. They're right up on my Instagram.

• 41:30Speaker 02

  If anybody wants to take those biomarkers off my Instagram, take them to your doctor, your, your healthcare practitioner and say, hey, will you look at these in my blood? And have your doctor interpret those? That's a great place to start. I put the, the genes that I think are the most impactful for mental health and for gut health and for mood and for anxiety and for quieting the mind. And for the research that I've, I've been able to uncover on ADD and ADHD and poor sleep, um, and poor focus and concentration. And you could take those five genes and you can, um, you know, find a genetic methylation counselor or find a place to get a genetic methylation test and get data. So that you go, you know, like you were telling me, but when we sat down before the podcast, you were telling me where you go to get your blood work done. That's great because you're getting data.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  You're not just aimlessly wandering around going, I don't know if I feel good. I don't know if I feel normal. I don't know if I could feel better. I don't know if maybe some of the little nagging things that are going on in my life. And I don't know if you have any, but

• 42:27Jay Shetty?

  Of course.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm not sleeping as good as I could. And I'm working out and I don't have a response to exercise like I wanted. I feel like my focus is off, you know, like my waking energy is a little

• 42:37Jay Shetty?

  I was going to ask you actually about that because I think a lot of people feel, and, and I want to talk about some of the symptoms that I hear from our community, our audience, what people feel. And to get your take on how to combat that. So one of the biggest things I hear from people is, gee, I'm just feeling brain fog. All right. I'm just feeling like I have no clarity, like I struggle to make decisions. I'm feeling a sense of low energy and so like I'm lethargic. Like these are very common things. So with brain fog, what's going on there?

• 43:05Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, everything that you, um, feel about energy, like when you say, I don't have, I'm low on energy. Physiologically, what you're saying is I'm low on oxygen in my blood. Because everything that you perceive about energy is nothing more than oxygen in your blood. So if oxygen equals energy, which it does, then if I want to raise your energy level, I need to improve the oxidative state. And how do I do that? Well, one of the ways, and I'm not saying this is the only way, but one of the physiologic pathways is if we know energy equals oxygen, then we take it a step further and we say, well, what carries oxygen around the human body? Well, red blood cell carries oxygen inside of a fluid, and I'm simplifying for you ultra work biohackers, but the, you know, the red blood cell carries

• 43:49Speaker 02

  oxygen inside of a fluid called hemoglobin. So if I'm low on red blood cells, right? I'm low on vehicles to carry oxygen. If those red blood cells are further deficient in hemoglobin, then the few cells that I have that are able to carry oxygen have less fluid to carry oxygen, therefore I'm hypoxic and it hides in plain sight. So then the question becomes where are red blood cells and hemoglobin made? Well, they're made in the bone marrow. So how do I get the bone marrow to make more red blood cells and hemoglobin? I go to the bone marrow's boss, which is the hormone testosterone. In men and women, one of the, one of the roles of testosterone is urethropoesis, to put pressure on the bone

• 44:29Speaker 02

  marrow to make new red blood cells. And in nearly every case where we see clinically deficient levels of this hormone, testosterone, free testosterone, we see red blood cells and hemoglobin towards the low end of the range. And then you look at, well, what is testosterone made from? Well, I mean, it's made from several things, but largely from DHEA. So if I'm deficient in DHEA, I should get that fixed. And, and what is the next macronutrient below DHEA, vitamin D3? So you go oxygen, red blood cells, bone marrow, hormone testosterone, DHEA, D3. So if you start in the root and you raise your D3 level to the optimal functional range, which I think most practitioners would agree is between

• 45:13Speaker 02

  60 and 80, and then you raise your DHEA into the optimal range and you wait to see if your hormones respond.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  And if your testosterone rises, especially your free testosterone rises, your red blood cell count and hemoglobin will go up. As your red blood cell count and hemoglobin level rise, the amount of oxygen that you transport in your blood will rise, and you will perceive that as more energy. You will perceive that as improved focus and concentration, and your sleep will deepen. Why? Because in low respiratory states, when our respiratory rate gets very shallow, we want our blood to be very good at carrying oxygen. Because if you're already poorly transporting oxygen, and then you try to get into a deep sleep, and your respiratory rate drops, and you get to where you are hypoxic, your brain will wake you up. It will wake you up by pulsing cortisol.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  And so, people that are exhausted, sleep the worst. And ask a physician sometime, why is it that people that are the most exhausted sleep the worst? They very rarely connect the fact that they're low on oxygen, which is why they're tired and have brain fog. And they're low on oxygen, which is why they're not sleeping, because their brain is waking them up. And then they do the worst thing. They go to their doctor, and they go, "I can't sleep." And so then the doctor suggests something like azolepedom nitrate, diazepam, donestan ambi, and essentially, they tranquilize you. And what's happening when you take a lot of these sleep medications, not all of them, but when you take a lot of these sleep medications is, you're in a low oxidative state. So your brain's trying to save your life and wake you up.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  And then you take a sleep medication, and you block the brain's view of blood oxygen. So now the brain isn't able to try to save your life and wake you up. And so now you get into a deep sleep, and then you wake up the next morning, you go, "Man, I hate taking Tylenol PM, because I am so groggy." It's still in my system the next morning. It's actually not true. That drug's been out of your system for hours. You're feeling the effects of having suffocated for six hours. And so suffocating yourself to sleep and then, and then now you've slept, but you get up from the sleep medication and you are still exhausted and you still have brain fog.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  So there are other potential causes, but, but you know, that is the one, the one, the one nice thing about the clinics that we have is, you know, we see 20,000 new, new gene test patients a month. We see thousands of new blood test patients a month. So we do, we do have voluminous pools of data. And some might say, well, it's, it's never been put through a randomized clinical trial, but it's, and it's anecdotal, but it's actually not anecdotal. When you see pools of data as large as we see them, um, you know, you can say, listen, if you have, if you are clinically deficient in free testosterone, you are very likely to have low red blood cell count. The reason why people feel so good when they get on hormones

• 48:13Speaker 02

  or when they supplement and their hormones return to the normal range is because the effect of those hormones returning to the normal range reoxidizes the, the, the blood, for, for, for lack of better words. Brain fog is, has to do with access. You know, it's like in, in, in, in the disease Alzheimer's, you know, it's, it's not so much that people are losing their memory, it's that they're losing access to their memory. Right. Um, and in the early stages, access can be restored. There's a significant difference between the memory actually fading, which it does in the later stages, and access to the memory fading. So the oxidative state of the body is very important, which is why I, I think people really need to get data.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  If your hormones are in the optimal range, you're, you're, you're not nutrient deficient. You're not insulin resistant. I'm not saying that your blood labs need to be perfect, but by dialing in a few markers in your, your hormone levels and your nutrient levels, you can live a dramatically different life. And in the majority of cases, probably 70% of the cases, people that qualify to be on hormone therapy don't even need hormones. They need the nutrients to make hormones. And that to me is really exciting. You mean, I could just be deficient in something like DHEA, like D3. I could have an elevated protein like SHPG and I could, I could take something simple like Boron and, and lower that and raise my hormones and feel a lot better. Yes.

• 49:39Speaker 02

  I'm not saying that you have to go and get on hormone injections by any means.

• 49:42Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 49:42Speaker 02

  But I am saying that you need to get data on the deficiency so that you can drive a state of being optimal. Because so many people that I work with will call me like, you know, weeks into our journey and say, oh, my God, Gary, I feel amazing. Including like Dana White. I'm like, you know, you really don't feel amazing. They're like, what? I say, you feel normal, right? That's how normal is supposed to feel.

• 50:07Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  You're really supposed to feel that good, right?

• 50:11Jay Shetty?

  This wasn't. We're not used to that, though.

• 50:12Speaker 02

  We're not used to that.

• 50:13Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. I was gonna ask you, what does it feel like? Have you worked in your clinics with women preparing to give birth and then post giving birth?

• 50:21Speaker 02

  Yes, quite a bit. In fact, our clinic director is a board certified OB GYN. She's a gynecological surgeon. She's got a double masters.

• 50:29Jay Shetty?

  Because I feel like that journey, we still don't talk enough about how challenging it is on the human biology.

• 50:35Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, it's very challenging. If you look at a woman's, you know, what happens during a woman's menstrual cycle and you look at what happens when she becomes pregnant. It's perfectly normal during regular cyclical periods of her cycle for her estrogen to be as high as, you know, in the 400s, perfectly normal for it to be in the teens. So it has a very large frequency, you know, rise and fall depending on where she is in the cycle. Soon she becomes pregnant, you know, estrogen goes into the 4000s. Mainly because, you know, one of estrogen's primary role is to retain water, to pad the uterus and protect the fetus, has other roles, but it retains water. But postpartum, you don't want to be estrogen dominant.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  And, you know, it's not necessarily for women, especially the level of hormone. It is the ratio of hormones in their body. And, you know, Dr. Sartis, who's our OB GYN is. Phenomenal about pre and postpartum care. She's an enormous believer that certain gene mutations like MTHFR, which increase the frequency of miscarriage. She delivered 9,000 babies, so she's very qualified to speak on that. That the gene mutation that is one of the most common gene mutations in the world, the MTHFR. What does it do? It stands for methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase. It is the gene that codes for the conversion of folic acid

• 52:02Speaker 02

  and its derivatives like folate into the usable form called methylfolate. And this is what I mean. And we have a process in the body called methylation, which is where we take one raw material, which is useless, folic acid, for example, entirely useless in human bodies. Folic acid does not prevent neural tube defects. It doesn't prevent anything until it is converted into methylfolate. So what if your body can't make this conversion? Well, it might not sound like a big deal until you realize that, number one, it's the most common gene mutation in the world. And number two, folic acid is the most prevalent nutrient in the human diet in the United States. So if you have an issue converting the most prevalent nutrient

• 52:44Speaker 02

  in the human diet into the form that your body can use, you have a significant deficiency. And the expression of this deficiency is increase in the number of miscarriages, infertility, a difficulty in getting pregnant. I'm just talking about in the female cycle. Postpartum depression, which can actually begin before the pregnancy ends. We call it postpartum depression, but very often it begins during the pregnancy. And women that have this MTHFR gene mutation, the first thing they're told when they get pregnant by their OB-GYN is to take high doses of folic acid. Well, if you put 1,400 or 1,800% of the daily allowance of folic acid into somebody, a woman like that, who has that gene mutation

• 53:28Speaker 02

  and cannot process it, that is a disaster. And she develops postpartum depression before the pregnancy ends. And eventually, when the pregnancy ends, she stops taking the prenatal vitamin and the symptoms go away. And so she blames it on the pregnancy, not on the vitamin. And this is another pandemic that we see is that pregnant women, all of them could use methylfolate. Less than 60% of them can use. Folic acid. So why don't we just give women methylfolate? Why don't we actually just give them the form that would, um, that their, that their body can use? By the way, folic acid also is a manmade chemical. You can't find folic acid anywhere on the surface of the earth. It does not occur naturally in nature.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  So someone convinced me how, you know, a synthetic chemical that we make in a laboratory is somehow necessary for optimal health.

• 54:20Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, it's, it's bizarre, isn't it?

• 54:22Speaker 02

  It can't be.

• 54:23Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 54:23Speaker 02

  You know, it wasn't even around, I don't think, until 1993 or so. What did we do before that? Just suffer? So I'm a huge believer that, um, you know, getting back to the basics is really the gateway to optimal health.

• 54:39Jay Shetty?

  How do you know if you have that mutation and what do you do?

• 54:42Speaker 02

  You do a genetic cheek swab. So there's a cheek swab test. You, you swab your cheek, you usually put it in a test tube, you send it to the lab and they'll send you back the results. Even 23andMe, I do, I do genetic tests at 10xhealth. You do not have to do the test through me, but you know, we do 20,000 of these a month. I'm sure 23andMe does something similar to that, but you also get a lot, depending on the type of genetic test you do, you, you, you'll get a lot of, um, the non-actionable data, right? I mean, like, if I pulled your entire genetic code, I could see that you have dark olive skin, you have green eyes, you have brown hair, you have detached ear lobes, but there's nothing you can do with that genetic information. You want, you want to look at the genes responsible for converting raw material,

• 55:28Speaker 02

  vitamins, minerals, amino acids, into the usable form. I, I, I always use the analogy that we, we pull crude oil out of the ground, right? But you cannot put crude oil into your gas tank. The car doesn't understand that fuel source. Crude oil has to be refined into gasoline. Now the car can run. Human beings are no different. We put vitamins, minerals, amino acids, nutrients, proteins into the body, which are useless in that state until they are converted into the gasoline, into the form that the body can use. And this is governed by several of our genes and they're very easy to look at. And you only do that test once in your life.

• 56:05Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by Amtrak. You know that feeling when you're already tired and you haven't even gotten there yet? That's where Amtrak comes in. Leave the driving behind and settle into a comfortable seat with plenty of room to stretch out. Catch up on work with wifi, grab a snack at the cafe car, or just sit back and enjoy your favourite podcast. Choose a cellar or North East Regional and get there without the stress of getting there. Visit amtrak.com to plan your next trip. This episode is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. If you're talking about quality food, you can't forget Whole Foods Market, who've been holding themselves to the highest standards since they opened in 1980.

• 56:48Jay Shetty?

  That means you'll see thousands of organic products across their stores, from the produce department to the aisles. It also means you'll never see certain ingredients. They've banned artificial sweeteners and colours, high fructose corn syrup and more, so you can shop with peace of mind. Shop Whole Foods Market in-store or online. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. We talk a lot about intentional decision-making, and that extends to the practical stuff too, like making sure your coverage actually works for your life. State Farm is there to meet you where you are, and they know how sweet it is to feel good about your decisions. Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbour, State Farm is there.

• 57:33Jay Shetty?

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• 57:43Speaker 02

  Good time.

• 57:43Jay Shetty?

  That's fantastic. Thank you for that. I think that's going to help a lot of people listening or watching because I feel like when we're thinking about people are planning for kids or have had kids and they're struggling. And again, I think we all do this and that's why I'm so glad we're talking about this because I think the first thing we blame is our mind. That's the first thing we all do is we judge ourselves and we go, I'm not strong enough. I'm too weak. I'm mentally not there. I'm not figuring it out. There's something wrong with me.

• 58:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 58:09Jay Shetty?

  But we're not looking at the fact that, let me actually take a look at what is wrong and which part of it and where has it gone wrong.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, you know what I think we try to do, I mean, just naturally, instinctively, is When we don't feel good, or something seems to be going wrong in our bodies, we're anxious, we're worried, we're depressed. Or there's something more physical, we're bloated, we're constipated, we're irritable, we've got cramps, we're fatigued, we begin to look at our outside environment, right? We look at what's called a cluster of symptoms. And a cluster of symptoms is very often nonsense. We diagnosed Abraham Lincoln with a depression 150 years ago with a cluster of symptoms. We do the same kind of diagnostic, we use the similar diagnostic tools today. What if you consider that it's not something happening to you, it's something happening within you, right?

• 58:58Speaker 02

  Like, that leaf that was rotting in the palm tree, nothing happened to it. Something happened within the soil that then caused something to happen within the tree, which translated to that leaf. And I always use that example because it starts people thinking that, you know what? Maybe I'm not as sick, or pathological, or diseased, or mentally ill as I think. You know, people very often that suffer from gut issues, I mean, we see this thousands and thousands of times, so they're like, they get gas, or bloating, or diarrhea, or constipation, or irritability, or cramping. And they are always trying to relate it to what they last ate. Because that makes sense, right? I ate something, and now I blew up like a tick. It must have been what I ate.

• 59:39Speaker 02

  But you may not be considering that if you're deficient in methylfolate, for example, very simple nutrient, that the peristaltic activity of the gut is off. So the pace of the gut is off. You can think of the human intestinal tract as a 30-foot-long conveyor belt. You put contents on it at one end, and as it traverses to the other end, from the stomach to the rectum, there's a very specific sequence of events that needs to occur. There's acidic bacteria in the proximal end of the small intestine, there's alkaline bacteria in the distal end, near the rectum. What if you just changed the pace of that conveyor belt? What if you went into any factory in America that works on a conveyor belt system and doubled the speed of the conveyor belt? The whole line would break down.

• 1:00:21Speaker 02

  What if you went into any factory in America and reversed the speed of the conveyor belt? The whole line would break down. But there's nothing wrong with a conveyor belt. And so- You know, it sends people down the wrong road because they're like, well, should I get my gut bacteria checked? Should I get my gut biome looked at? Should I start taking probiotics? Should I maybe take antibiotics and maybe may I have SIBO? Should I change up my diet? And nothing really seems to work because they think it's something happening to them rather than something happening within them. And this happens very often with anxiety with, you know, people that suffer from anxiety generally have the same three characteristics.

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  Generally, if you'll ask them, have you had it on and off throughout your entire lifetime? They'll say, yes. Can you point to the specific, the trigger that causes it? No. Have any anxiety medications helped you? No, they just make me feel like a zombie. Those are very commonly the same sequence of answers. So that's, that is not something happening to you. That's something happening within you. If I ask you if you have anxiety and you go, yes, I'm afraid of heights. And every time I walk to the edge of a 30 floor balcony, I freak out. Yes, I'm claustrophobic. When I step on a crowded elevator, I really get anxious. But if you say, yes, okay, well, what causes it? I don't know. What makes it come and go? Pretty much anything. You know, have you had it on and off throughout your lifetime?

• 1:01:48Speaker 02

  Yes. Then this is a sign that this is a genetic mutation that's led to a deficiency that's causing the expression of that condition. We very rarely pass disease from generation to generation. We do pass deficiency. We pass these genes that, that are either broken or operating. And when they're broken, for lack of better words, these gene snips, the body has an inability to convert a certain raw material into the useful form, which means that this deficiency is passed from generation to generation. Right? So a deficiency in the ability to down regulate homocysteine means that you get the expression of hypertension.

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  So you see that hypertension runs in these families, even though there's not a hypertension gene. You see that the inability to convert thyroid hormone T4 into thyroid hormone T3, which is a deiodinization process in the liver and the gut and the periphery, that this process is impaired. So people have hypothyroid, but the hypothyroid runs in families. So but there's no specific hypothyroid gene and you could go through dozens and dozens, dozens of cases like this. We accept that things are inherited or familial because they run in our

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  family, not because we consider that the deficiency may run in our family and the deficiency can be fixed.

• 1:03:19Jay Shetty?

  Two more things I want to ask you, Gary. I want to get your thoughts on this. Tap water, what is wrong with tap water and what is wrong with plastic bottles?

• 1:03:28Speaker 02

  We'll start with tap water. I mean, there are two or three things that I think that everybody should get out of their life, permanently out of their life. Tap water is definitely one of them. And the reason for this is that it contains, you know, high amounts of fluoride, contains high amounts of chlorine. It also contains microplastics. Very often now it contains high levels of glyphosate and even pharmaceuticals, which are very hard to filter out of the water. And, you know, we have to decide if we want to filter things before they get to the temple.

• 1:04:00Jay Shetty?

  Or the temple is doing the filter.

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  Let the temple be the filter. And what's astounding to me is if you ask just about anyone, what's the most important thing to you, your business or your health? They'll always say their health. What's more important to you, money or your health? It's always their health. But when you just take one step further, and I do this with entrepreneurs all the time. I was actually at a, an event this week with Damon John and it was high level.

• 1:04:27Jay Shetty?

  Tuesday night?

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:28Jay Shetty?

  I was going to be there.

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  Oh, you were?

• 1:04:30Jay Shetty?

  I was traveling. Yeah.

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. And this isn't to pick on Damon. He's a very good friend of mine. I love Damon. He's done a lot for me and he's, and he's just an incredible entrepreneur and he's been a very, very good friend to me. But we were in a room with, you know, entrepreneurs. And if you went around that room and we asked several of them, what's more important to you, your business or your health? And they'd say, my health. But then you bring them up and you say, well, you know, how much money did your business make last month? $628,000. What was your net income? 142,400. How many employees do you have? 17. What's

• 1:05:11Speaker 02

  your hemoglobin A1C like? Right? What is your, what are your testosterone levels like? Right? So we, our intention is to put our health first, but our activity is, is, is very different. Right? And, and I could have asked them 15 more questions about their income statement, their balance sheet, their P and L, the best marketing strategy, where they're getting the ROI, what their, you know, what their best return is on Facebook ads or any number of other things. And they would have hit every one of those metrics. Don't know if they have a clinical deficiency in vitamin D3 or not. They don't even have the most basic of information. And so this goes back to, you know, we, we, we need to

• 1:05:54Speaker 02

  put up an imaginary fence around ourselves and start filtering things before they make it to the temple. Just consciously being intentional about what we're letting into the temple. It's very easy for me to look at food and say, are you going to serve me? Or are you going to steal from me? Because if you're going to steal from me, I'm not going to let you into the temple. You wouldn't knowingly let a thief into your house. Right? And so tap water is one of these things. You know, there are fluoride, which we know is neurotoxic. And if you don't believe fluoride is neurotoxic, just find a, you know, just find a, you know, a fluoride toothpaste label in your house of years in Crest or Colgate or any toothpaste with fluoride and flip it over and look at the back because there's

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  a required FDA warning on there. And it says, if more than an amount used for brushing is swallowed, contact poison control immediately. It also says, keep out of reach of children under six years of age. And it also says, do not use more than a pea-sized amount. So if you swallow more than a pea-sized amount of fluoride toothpaste, you are supposed to contact Poison Control immediately. You will get four times that amount of fluoride in six, eight-ounce glasses of water. So why wouldn't I call Poison Control at the end of every day when I'm drinking six, eight-ounce glasses of water? I mean, according to the previous disclosure, I should call Poison Control at the end of every day and let them know I've been micro-poisoned. There is an interesting study that was published by the National Toxicology Program in March

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  of 2023, and they were able to pull this data from the CDC through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. And what it found was in 52 of the 54 studies that they reviewed, and in nearly every municipality in America that had fluoridated water, they found an inverse relationship between IQ and fluoride. So in other words, as fluoride went up, IQ went down. So the more fluoride in the water, the lower the prepubescent IQ. And if that's not enough data, we have to ask ourselves, where does fluoride come from? Well, fluoride is fluorosilic acid. Fluorosilic acid is a byproduct of phosphate fertilizer production. It's also a byproduct of aluminum production, but the majority of the fluoride that we

• 1:08:08Speaker 02

  use in municipal water supplies comes from phosphate fertilizer production. It is the waste from phosphate fertilizer production, because if we leave it in phosphate fertilizer, it burns the root of plant. And actually, so we can't keep it in because it kills the plant. So we take it out, and we have a big stockpile of fluorosilic acid. So what are we going to do with it? Well, let's dump it into the municipal water supply, because there is marginal, and I would call it weak, evidence that we can re-mineralize the enamel.

• 1:08:39Speaker 02

  With fluoride and stop to decay, which you can also do with hydroxy appetite and other things that are safe. And so we dumped this into the water supply, but now the evidence is clear that this neurotoxin in small doses over time, it's not the dosage determining the poison, it is the cumulative dosage determining the poison. And one of the challenges that I find with a lot of governmental regulatory guidelines is that there are safe levels of mercury, right? There are safe levels of fluoride, there are safe levels of cyanide. But our bodies clear these at different levels. Nobody got mercury poisoning from one piece of tuna fish, right? They got mercury poisoning because they ate, you know, small doses of mercury over a prolonged period of time. So fluoride is one of those things. Tap water

• 1:09:24Speaker 02

  is definitely one of those things to permanently get out of your life. I use something called an echo water filter. And it's a four stage RO filter and then it actually adds hydrogen to the water on the way out. And because the water is demineralized, I just re mineralize it with a with a salt called Baja Gold Salt, but you could also use Celtic sea salt. I like this Baja Gold because it has all 91 trace minerals and they test it for microplastics and whatnot, but it just about every grocery store chain in the world has Celtic salt. So you get four stage RO filter your water, add Celtic or Baja Gold sea salt to your water to re mineralize it. And you're covering the basis of of not missing one of the 91

• 1:10:09Speaker 02

  nutrients, 16 of which are essential for human function.

• 1:10:12Jay Shetty?

  Amazing. What a great answer. I'm hoping no one, please stop drinking tap water.

• 1:10:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, please. It is the worst thing in the world.

• 1:10:19Jay Shetty?

  Daily call to the, you know.

• 1:10:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, daily call to poison control.

• 1:10:23Jay Shetty?

  Poison control. I mean, that is like, you know, you just think about just these things that we're so conditioned to do on a daily basis. And we're like, oh, this doesn't matter. I don't feel any different. And then it just adds up and accumulates.

• 1:10:33Speaker 02

  Why would I want to put something into my mouth consciously that if I swallow it, I have to call it poison control center for it? And then you think, well, how much is being absorbed through my gums? How much, you know, the thinnest skin in your body is on the floor of your mouth and it is fraught with blood vessels. One of the best delivery mechanisms besides. The, you know, oral, the first pass metabolism is sublingual.

• 1:10:54Speaker 02

  So, so now I'm drinking tap water all day and then I'm sublingually. And then, you know, the second thing that's in there is chlorine. And I did a really interesting video on my Instagram the other day and people, it really made an impact, ripple effect. I went to the faucet and I filled up two glasses with tap water, clear glasses of tap water, and just set them on my counter. And I had my, um, one of my heads of production just take four fingers and hold them down in one of the glasses. And he held them there for about a minute. And he took his fingers out. And by the way, you can do this. The kit to do this, you can order on Amazon for six bucks. And then I took a chlorine testing kit and I put drops of chlorine in one glass and I put drops or drops of the chlorine tester in the other glass.

• 1:11:38Speaker 02

  One of them tested very high for chlorine. One of them tested as having no chlorine. And so the question is, where did the chlorine go? Well, it was absorbed into his skin in just that 60 second period.

• 1:11:51Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 1:11:51Speaker 02

  And so that's how good the, that, that transdermal, it will absorb that chlorine. And you can do that, you can get a chlorine testing kit for about six bucks on Amazon. Just try it. Take your tap water, you'll never drink it again. Take two glasses of tap water, fill it up, put it on your counter, put your fingers down in one glass of tap water for 60 seconds. Take them out and test both for chlorine. You'll find whatever glass you put your fingers in tests for no chlorine. Now imagine that's fluoride, microplastics and other things. And, and, you know, when we talk about plastic bottles and microplastics, you know, BPAs, the bisphenols, um, these, these BPAs were, um, until the sixties, they were used as a synthetic estrogen. So it was used in female hormone therapy, labor induction, um, um,

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  and other forms of female hormone therapy. Now, how some scientists with way too much time on his hands realized that if you actually mix a petroleum based product with this synthetic estrogen, this bisphenol, this BPA, that you'll make the surface of the plastic more viscous. And therefore, you know, like oils and waters and fluids and things won't stick to it. How they figured that out, I'm not sure. I'm not sure how that combination occurred, but make no mistakes. The BPAs are synthetic estrogens. And there is. Some indications that there is enough BPA inside of the lining of a non-BPA free can of like tomato paste, for example, which acidic foods leach it out, heat leaches it

• 1:13:20Speaker 02

  out, to actually shift a woman's menstrual cycle. So from ovulation to utero, follicular to ovulation. So imagine that you could actually just be eating a food with enough bisphenols in it that, not disclosed on the label, that you don't know are in there because it's leaching from the plastic, to actually shift your menstrual cycle. That is astounding to me. And so, yeah, plastic bottles is one that I would try to get out as much as you can to.

• 1:13:50Jay Shetty?

  Gary, I love, we've covered so much great ground today that we've never covered on the show before. So I want to say a big thank you to you.

• 1:13:56Speaker 02

  Super welcome.

• 1:13:57Jay Shetty?

  There are so many things that I know that everyone's going to be listening. There's so many actionable things I know that people can practice. Straight after this episode, we end every episode of On Purpose with a final five, and these questions have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum.

• 1:14:11Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:14:11Jay Shetty?

  So Gary Brack, these are your final.

• 1:14:14Speaker 02

  Why didn't you tell me about this? So I could have had like a really cool answer.

• 1:14:17Jay Shetty?

  All right. So question one, what is the best advice you've ever heard or received?

• 1:14:24Speaker 02

  The best advice I've ever heard or received is if you want to shrink your problems, grow your purpose.

• 1:14:32Jay Shetty?

  Beautiful. Very aligned. Second question. Next time you come on the show, we're going to talk about that because you have to come back. This is amazing.

• 1:14:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:41Jay Shetty?

  Second question, what is the worst advice you've ever heard or received?

• 1:14:46Speaker 02

  You're perfect the way you are.

• 1:14:50Jay Shetty?

  Question number three, what is something that you used to value, but you don't anymore?

• 1:14:57Speaker 02

  Wealth.

• 1:14:59Jay Shetty?

  Question number four, how would you define your current purpose in life?

• 1:15:05Speaker 02

  I would define it as God given.

• 1:15:08Jay Shetty?

  And fifth and final, if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?

• 1:15:17Speaker 02

  To pause before you speak.

• 1:15:19Jay Shetty?

  Hmm, that's great. Gary Brecka, everyone, if you don't already follow the Ultimate Human Podcast, subscribe online, follow him on Instagram, make sure you share your greatest takeaways with us both, tag us both, whether you're using X or Instagram or TikTok, whatever it may be. I want to see what you're playing around with, what you're testing, what you're experimenting, and what you're applying to your life. If you've listened to this episode, I want you to choose one thing that resonates with you, just one habit, just one practice, and I want you for the next seven days to commit to yourself, promise to yourself that you're just gonna do it, just as it is for seven days, experiment with it, and then tell me and Gary what it was like. Gary, thank you so much.

• 1:15:57Speaker 02

  Super welcome. I really enjoyed this.

• 1:15:59Jay Shetty?

  On purpose. You are fantastic at what you do, and I'm so grateful to spend time with you, man. Thank you.

• 1:16:03Speaker 02

  Thank you, brother. Appreciate you.

• 1:16:05Jay Shetty?

  If this year you're trying to live longer, live happier, live healthier, go and check out my conversation with the world's biggest longevity doctor, Peter Attia, on how to slow down aging and why your emotional health is directly impacting your physical health.

• 1:16:22Speaker 04

  Acknowledge that there is surprisingly little known about the relationship between nutrition and health, and people are gonna be shocked to hear that, because I think most people think the exact opposite.

• 1:16:32Speaker 05

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• 1:17:02Speaker 06

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