212. Dr. Barbara Sturm: How to Heal the Skin from the Inside Out

Your skin isn’t aging because of time, it’s inflamed, dehydrated, and systemically damaged by the very products marketed to save it. Join me and renowned skincare innovator Dr. Barbara Sturm as we dismantle the conventional dermatology playbook and rebuild skin health from a foundation of anti-inflammatory science. We touch base on the gut-skin connection, how seed oils trigger inflammatory cytokines linked to skin cancer, and why your skincare ingredients matter as much as the food you eat. Join the Ultimate Human VIP community for Gary Brecka's proven wellness protocols!: https://bit.ly/4ai0Xwg Listen to "The Dr. Barbara Sturm Podcast" on all your favorite platforms! Spotify: https://bit.ly/4hk3HwC Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4qemWfc Connect with Dr. Barbara Sturm Website:https://bit.ly/3J07mmR YouTube: https://bit.ly/47aDiwA Instagram: https://bit.ly/42VwEsV TikTok: https://bit.ly/4qoCm0A Facebook: https://bit.ly/48J6Eom X.com: https://bit.ly/4ho8hKh LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/4hog3UI Thank you to our partners H2TABS: “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4hMNdgg BODYHEALTH: “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: http://bit.ly/4e5IjsV BAJA GOLD: "ULTIMATE10" FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/3WSBqUa EIGHT SLEEP: SAVE $350 ON THE POD 4 ULTRA WITH CODE “GARY”: https://bit.ly/3WkLd6E COLD LIFE: THE ULTIMATE HUMAN PLUNGE: https://bit.ly/4eULUKp WHOOP: JOIN AND GET 1 FREE MONTH!: https://bit.ly/3VQ0nzW MASA CHIPS: 20% OFF FIRST ORDER: https://bit.ly/40LVY4y VANDY: “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: https://bit.ly/49Qr7WE AION: “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4h6KHAD A-GAME: “ULTIMATE15” FOR 15% OFF: http://bit.ly/4kek1ij PEPTUAL: “TUH10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4mKxgcn CARAWAY: “ULTIMATE” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/3Q1VmkC HEALF: 10% OFF YOUR ORDER: https://bit.ly/41HJg6S BIOPTIMIZERS: “ULTIMATE” FOR 15% OFF: https://bit.ly/4inFfd7 RHO NUTRITION: “ULTIMATE15” FOR 15% OFF: https://bit.ly/44fFza0 GOPUFF: GET YOUR FAVORITE SNACK!: https://bit.ly/4obIFDC GENETIC TEST: ⁠https://bit.ly/3Yg1Uk9 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 00:15 Barbara & Gary’s Journey 03:39 Inflammation & Skin Health 08:23 Building Skin from the Inside Out 10:20 Amino Acids: Protein Building Blocks 13:54 Signs of Skin Inflammation 19:04 Anti-Inflammatory Diet Basics 20:18 Sunscreen & Skin Cancer Link 23:38 Dangers of Seed Oils 26:07 Simple Skincare Routine 30:52 Travel Skincare Tips 31:34 Sodium Balance & Hydration 36:51 Red Light Therapy Benefits 39:44 Minimizing Hormone Disruption 44:23 Reducing Inflammation 50:10 Gut Microbiome & Skin 53:10 Ingredients to Avoid 54:35 Supplements for ADD/ADHD 57:27 Protecting Eye & Skin Health 1:01:52 Thoughts on Laser Treatments 1:03:28 Using UVA/UVB for Natural Light 1:05:33 Whole Foods for Longevity 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 promotional in nature. 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

  If you look at skin and skincare and dermatology, they give you cortisone, they give you antibiotics, they give you a laser treatment. Not very skin friendly if you think about it. It's more like attacking skin and taking skin layers off.

• 0:12Gary Brecka?

  It's really fascinating too is we think that we damage our skin very often from the outside in, but it gets damaged more often from the inside out.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  You know why everybody says you should use sunscreen? And it comes a lot from dermatologists, right? Use sunscreen 24/7. But that's because whatever they're doing destroys your skin barrier. Of course, they need to tell you use sunscreen 24/7. But someone who has really healthy skin shouldn't just use 24/7 sunscreen, especially when we live in London.

• 0:38Gary Brecka?

  In the U.S., 23 brands of sunscreen have been pulled from the market since 2018 for correlated risk to skin cancer.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  But the law for the filter for sunscreen haven't changed in the U.S. for more than 20 years.

• 0:49Gary Brecka?

  Lots of questions about maintaining your skincare routine while you travel, especially for people that are spending a lot of time on airplanes.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  This is easy, it's for products. But I wanted to give you like a very, very basic, simple and very effective skincare routine.

• 1:15Gary Brecka?

  Welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. In this episode, I sat down live at the Health Experience in London with one of the most influential voices in the entire skincare space, Dr. Barbara Sturm. You know her as a global skincare icon, but today we're talking about something far deeper than that: anti-inflammation. Not artificial intelligence, anti-inflammation. We go down the rabbit hole of how chronic inflammation drives aging, fatigue and disease, and more importantly, how to reverse it through lifestyle, nutrition and recovery. Barbara is a powerhouse in every sense of the word and this conversation is packed with science, passion and practical steps you could take right now. Let's dive into the power of anti-inflammation with Dr. Barbara Sturm.

• 2:00Gary Brecka?

  You know, I've actually known Barbara for years. Should I talk about our journey? Can I like?

• 2:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's so sweet.

• 2:07Gary Brecka?

  Throw it out there?

• 2:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's so sweet.

• 2:09Gary Brecka?

  So...

• 2:10Speaker 00

  Should I say it? Because it was my journey finding you.

• 2:14Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  So I have been obsessed with exosomes since 25 years. And when I created the vampire facial 25 years ago...

• 2:21Gary Brecka?

  She created the vampire facial, by the way.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  The blood facial.

• 2:23Gary Brecka?

  If you know the blood facial.

• 2:25Speaker 00

  I was talking because I was taking the anti-inflammatory proteins from your blood. And my professors would say, one of my professors, "That's amazing what you do, but the future are exosomes." 25 years ago. So I was like, looking for the exosomes. And I knew how to create them out of the blood, but not any other way. And then I created some exo-matic products. Anyways, I found Gary through friends. And he sits in Miami. I was in LA. I was super, super burnt out. And I hardly made it to Miami. My assistant was just dragging me to Miami. I had like a big week in New York, but I made a stop in Miami. I come to Gary's office. And we start geeking out on science.

• 3:10Speaker 00

  And I became a totally different person. He put this IV drip in me with vitamins, whatever, exosomes. But we were talking like for three hours.

• 3:18Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  I swear, I went, I left your office feeling like a newborn. And I had the craziest week in New York. No problem. I mean, seriously, and then I was like, this is my guy. I love him. He's amazing. And you know how amazing he is. But it made such a big difference for me and my life, so I listened to him.

• 3:40Gary Brecka?

  You know, and all we did was, I mean, she came and she was exhausted. And she was like, "I am so completely burnt out." As you know, she's built one of the most iconic skincare brands in the world. Dr. Stern Cosmetics. They're in every major city in the world. And she was just absolutely fried. Had been burning the candle at both ends. And I looked at her methylation and looked at the deficiencies that she's had. And so all we did was put together a vitamin IV drip. If you're familiar with the Myers Cocktail, you know, vitamin C, pyridoxine, riboflavin, thiamine, niacin, panethinic acid, all the B vitamins, a specific kind of B12.

• 4:22Gary Brecka?

  And it hit her bloodstream and the lights came on.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  No, but the exosomes, literally the exosomes.

• 4:29Gary Brecka?

  And then we did an exosome IV. And exosomes are very similar to, I know that we're taking this off topic and we'll get back on topic, but they're very similar to stem cells, but they're about one eighth hundredth the size of a stem cell. And an exosome doesn't carry any DNA, so it's not capable of sending a signal. But it carries something called high molecular weight hyaluronic acid, and it also carries growth factors. And the fascinating thing about exosomes is they can go places in the body that other cells and stem cells, even vitamins and nutrients can't, because it's about the size of a virus. And so it enters, it goes right through the cell wall without asking for permission, and it shuts off the inflammatory cycle.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  Inflammation, anti-inflammation, AI, anti-inflammation.

• 5:12Gary Brecka?

  Which, which brings us to our, so we have a list of the most commonly asked questions here. A lot of this is going to relate to skincare, but a lot of it's just going to relate to to general health. So we took hundreds of questions and the ones that were asked the most frequently, we just put them onto a list here and I'm going to pose them to Barbara and I'll answer them the best that I can, but. What exactly is inflammation? And why is it so critical to understanding inflammation in skin health?

• 5:38Speaker 00

  So inflammation is immune response we need. So when something enters the body, virus or bacteria, we need inflammation to appear to fight those, you know, things that come into our bodies. So we need it, but if inflammation becomes chronic and on a high level, then inflammation can be quite dangerous for us because it degrades our tissues, starts chronic diseases, autoimmune diseases. So inflammation goes together with all the things we don't want. It can cause cancer and regarding our skin, everything we don't like about our skin, redness, impurities like cystic acne, wrinkles, whatever we don't like about our skin goes together with inflammation.

• 6:23Speaker 00

  So it's very important to bring inflammation under control.

• 6:27Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I like to talk about inflammation as a necessary balance to survival. You know, not all inflammation is bad. If you were walking down the street one day and you stepped off a curb and you twisted your right ankle. How does the body know to heal the right ligament and leave the left ligament alone? Well, the way that it knows the tissue is injured is if that ligament received a small tear, you broke a cell in that ligament called a fibroblast. And what that cell will do is it will start signaling into the bloodstream to say, "Hey, I'm hurt. I'm hurt. I'm hurt." That signal is inflammation. These are interleukins and cytokines. And what happens is as that signal enters the bloodstream, a very special cell in your bloodstream called a platelet is listening for that signal.

• 7:12Gary Brecka?

  And as it cruises by in the bloodstream, a platelet bursts and it drops off growth factors. So think of a platelet as a pinata, and the confetti inside the platelet has growth factors. These are the healing power of the human body. How many of you have heard of platelet-rich plasma, PRP injections? The vast majority of you. So all PRP injections are doing is taking the vast healing power of the human body and concentrating it in a single location. You draw your blood, you spin it down, you remove the platelets and the plasma, and you reinject that into your knee, your hip, your shoulder, your rotator cuff, and it actually accelerates healing. You can do the same thing with things like peptides. How many of you have heard of BPC157?

• 7:56Gary Brecka?

  Well, this is a pretty woke audience. I hate that word, woke, but I don't mean woke, but I mean aware of health. But so BPC157 is a peptide. And what this peptide does is it amplifies the signal of inflammation. So that torn ankle that I was talking about, maybe it was sending an inflammatory signal into the bloodstream at a level 2, so it was whispering into the blood that it was injured. If you could make it scream into the blood... Then, as the platelets are cruising by, more platelets will migrate to that region, and they will drop off growth factors and accelerate the wound healing process. One of the reasons why I'm so fascinated by peptides is they capture the body's innate ability to perform its own function.

• 8:41Gary Brecka?

  You can rewind your pituitary to a more youthful level of growth hormone secretion. You can lengthen your telomeres with telomerase-lengthening peptides like enepetalon. You can actually reduce inflammation by putting peptides like BPC157 into the bloodstream, TB500 into the bloodstream, and actually accelerating wound healing.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Gary, this is amazing for any acute injury. So, I want to bring it back to the skin because we're doing on purpose a lot of injuries to our skin. For example, retinol. Who's using retinol? So with retinol, we cause a lot of inflammation on a daily or three times a week basis. So, what's happening with the inflammatory response here? Because you basically start this inflammatory response on a constant basis. What happens to our healing factors? What happens to all the emergency help? Do they exhaust?

• 9:38Gary Brecka?

  Yes, they do get exhausted. I mean, you know, very often, you know, a lot of skincare routines I'll refer to as borrowing from your future. So you get a present return today at a cost tomorrow. Thinning the cell layers, actually removing the protective seven layers of dead skin that are on top of your skin for a reason. Not getting to the root cause of skin degradation, which is a lack of healthy blood flow, what we call angiogenesis. A deconstruction of the skin, which is a reduction of collagen, elastin, and fibrin, the scaffolding that holds the skin together. And so, you know, I'd love for us to talk about building the skin from the inside out and rather than the outside in. So what are some things that people could do?

• 10:24Gary Brecka?

  An anti-inflammatory diet, for example, that would result in better-looking, more youthful appearance.

• 10:31Speaker 00

  But what's happening if you use retinol on a constant basis?

• 10:34Gary Brecka?

  If you use retinol on a constant basis, you're borrowing from your future. You're using an inflammatory response to call blood flow and to call tissue regeneration to that site, but you're dismantling the long-term capacity for the skin to repair itself.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  So if you do it in an acute phase and you use all these peptides and everything your body has to offer, then it's amazing to use that inflammatory response. But if you do it on a regular basis, you kind of run out of your healing factors. You kind of exhaust your system. You always call inflammation back to the site. And that is a little bit of a dangerous situation besides that you constantly destruct your skin barrier, constantly disbalance your microbiome. Yes, we have a microbiome on our skin. So the organ skin is getting harmed every day by skincare ingredients. And this is what we have to think about. Look, we're all sitting here and we're listening to Gary and we love him.

• 11:28Gary Brecka?

  We're listening to you, actually.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  But we want to know.

• 11:31Gary Brecka?

  They're here to see you.

• 11:32Speaker 00

  But we want to know what actually can we learn to stay healthy, to stay young, to stay in good shape? And when we want to hear that, we talk about our organs like heart, liver, kidneys, whatever. Who thinks about the skin? The skin, oh, whatever. Play on for marketing.

• 11:53Gary Brecka?

  Play ground marketing.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  Marketing gives us, you know, we just put it on our skin and let's scrub it off. Let's make it red. And like, oh, have you heard of this machine? And, you know, whatever, you know, makes your skin red and inflamed. That's what we shouldn't be doing.

• 12:08Gary Brecka?

  You know, I think if you really look at the genesis of collagen, elastin and fibrin, you know, these are built from amino acids. We talked earlier about not being able to target direct amino acids. We don't eat our nails to grow our nails. We don't eat our hair to grow our hair. But we do believe that we can eat collagen to grow collagen. And all of those things are patently false, right? I mean, if we want, we can't target direct protein in the human body. There's no certain form of protein that you can eat that will show up as muscle tissue. There's no certain form of protein that you can eat that will show up as collagen, or elastin, or fibrin. What you can do is you can give your body the building blocks of proteins. The building blocks of proteins are amino acids.

• 12:50Gary Brecka?

  When you become amino acid deficient, you lose the capacity to build proteins. And we think of proteins as muscles. But proteins are all of these different systems in the body. Our natural killer cells are made from proteins. How many of you have done a fast, like a three-day water fast? You know what the biggest benefit to fasting is?

• 13:12Gary Brecka?

  Senesence. Stem cells is a big benefit from fasting.

• 13:16Gary Brecka?

  Have you heard of a senescent cells? How many of you have heard of a senescent cell? So, how many of you are not going to raise your hand no matter what I say? At least there's some honest people in here. One person raised their hand, it's like, "I'm not going to answer anything." So, senescent cells are, in effect, cells that are in your body, that are living, that can no longer perform their function. As we get older, the percentage of senescence grows. The percentage of red blood cells that can no longer carry oxygen grows. And, but, now this cell is alive, but it can no longer perform its function. But the body won't replace it until it's gone. You have platelets in your bloodstream that can't carry growth factors. So they're essentially useless, but they're taking up space.

• 13:59Gary Brecka?

  You have, you have natural killer cells, white blood cells, that can't mount an immune defense. So, these are senescent cells. We often call these zombie cells. The body is so incredibly efficient, that if you put yourself into a fasted state, then the first thing the body will do, as a fuel source, is it will digest, it will metabolize senescent cells. It eats the herd from the weakest animal forward, right? It eats from the back to the forefront. So, one of the fascinating things about fasting is you recycle your cellular biology. It's like, if you own a company, and I, I'll use this example, I won't make you raise your hand, but, and you have a company full of lazy employees.

• 14:44Gary Brecka?

  Wouldn't you like to get those employees, get their butt out of that seat?

• 14:47Speaker 00

  Not so easy.

• 14:48Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, it's not so easy. Well, you can't eat them like the immune system does. The immune system eats lazy employees.

• 14:54Speaker 00

  We staff them.

• 14:55Gary Brecka?

  So lazy employees are senescent cells. They're taking up space, they're drawing down on the payroll, but they're not producing anything. If you could get them out of the seat, not by eating them, that's the immune system analogy, and replace them with a productive employee, you'd have a much more efficient organization. And this is how the body organizes itself when you put it into a fasted state. It metabolizes senescent cells. It also dramatically reduces inflammation. You know, one of the fascinating things about cellular biology is that we have ways now of following a white blood cell around the bloodstream and finding out where the inflammation is. And a lot of this ends up in the skin. So I want to keep this on skincare.

• 15:40Gary Brecka?

  And I want to talk about how inflammation can be seen on the skin and the face. What are some manifestations of skin inflammation?

• 15:50Speaker 00

  I mean, whatever we, I just said that, whatever we don't like about our skin, aging goes together with inflammation, redness, psoriasis, aging, whatever it is, acne, cystic acne, perioral dermatitis, everything is a sign of inflammation. So inflammation makes sense to turn around, keep it under control. And we can do this not just with our skincare products that shouldn't be inflammatory, but should be ideally anti-inflammatory. So my whole, you know, philosophy from 25 years of orthopedic research and lots of things.

• 16:29Gary Brecka?

  By the way, she's a doctor, too.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:31Gary Brecka?

  You know, Dr. Barbara Sermon.

• 16:34Speaker 00

  My background is orthopedics and sometimes people say, "Oh, she's an orthopedic doctor, not a dermatologist." And then, you know, lots of things now in the skincare industry come from orthopedics. So exosomes, we used 15 years ago in the orthopedics. I was treating patients with rheumatoid arthritis. I injected their exosomes. They were pain-free for three months. That was mind-blowing. And we only, I maybe only injected like two, three knuckles and the whole body was pain-free for three months. It was unbelievable. There was nothing else working or just really, really horrible medication. And, you know, we want to get away from medication, from the pharma industry if possible. And that was mind-blowing. And so many things come from the orthopedic.

• 17:16Speaker 00

  And my background comes from an anti-inflammatory science background. If you look at skin and skincare and dermatology, if you go to a dermatologist, they give you cortisone, they give you anti-puritans, they give you a laser treatment, an acid peel, they give you retinol glycolic. So not very skin-friendly if you think about, you know? It was, it's more like, you know, attacking skin and, and taking skin layers off. So coming from, from this orthopedic background was probably quite a good idea at the time. I mean, it's like, my, my, my brand started like 15 to 20 years ago. I started with the blood cream, adding my blood to, to the creams and it just changed

• 18:00Speaker 00

  and transformed my skin, transformed my patient's skin. It really has been working for a long time. And so science became like a part of skincare now. But obviously now, science is also being used for marketing. So, you know, it's not just that a brand says "science," "science-based," "science-backed" or "science meets whatever." You know, you always have to do your own research. You have to really dig deeper, ask the right people and follow a little bit your gut feeling, you know, which brand means it and the brand you can trust.

• 18:33Gary Brecka?

  We actually did a clinical study together, about, what, two years ago?

• 18:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:38Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, we should publish that, honestly.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  And we should actually follow through on what you were thinking.

• 18:43Gary Brecka?

  We did the study and we never published it, but we should publish it. But essentially what we did was, we wanted to see if we could suspend an exosomes in a, in a, in a fat-based cream. So she had lipid molecules in her creams and we had exosomes, which usually don't have a very long shelf life at room temperature. And so we retained a lab and they did punch biopsies on a 27-year-old female, 36-year-old female, 57-year-old female, and a 65-year-old female. So they did punch biopsies of the of the skin. And we cultured their skin tissue, what's called their fibroblasts, in a lab. So we actually grew layers of skin in a lab. And we applied a base cream of hers, a Dr. Stern base cream, that we had embedded

• 19:28Gary Brecka?

  exosomes in. And then we did electrophoresis and other studies every 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days to see if the tissue was still viable, if the exosomes were still viable. What we found out was really fascinating. We found out not only a dramatic drop over 90 days in all of the inflammatory markers, these are called interleukins, massive drop in inflammatory markers, but we found the proliferation of not only collagen, but elastin and fibrin, the scaffolding of the skin. And what I thought was really fascinating was around 90 days, this process of angiogenesis began in this tissue in a lab, which meant that it started to begin to sprout new blood vessels.

• 20:12Gary Brecka?

  So angiogenesis is new blood vessel growth.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  Ultimate rejuvenation.

• 20:16Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. And we should have launched a product on the back of that, but we didn't.

• 20:20Speaker 00

  We do it.

• 20:21Gary Brecka?

  I just remembered that. But we are going to publish, we are going to eventually publish that study. But the long and short of it is that these lipid molecules, you might have, there's a lot of products here that are liposomal, if you've seen that term liposomal, it's essentially taking a nutrient and putting it inside of a fat molecule, a liposome, usually so it can survive first-pass metabolism, it can get through the digestive system, make it into the gut where it can actually be absorbed, glutathione and NAD are classic compounds that are used in liposomal delivery systems. But we did it for skincare, and it turned out to be phenomenal experiment. So another huge question was, how do we eat to influence inflammation, both in triggering it and helping calm it?

• 21:06Gary Brecka?

  What does an anti-inflammatory diet look like?

• 21:09Speaker 00

  I mean Harvard did a study which says that anti-inflammatory foods is mostly green leafy vegetables, salmon, mackerel, walnuts, almonds, berries, oranges, cherries, olives, super anti-inflammatory. You know, everybody knows that omega-3 fatty acids are highly anti-inflammatory, so any type of fatty fish is really good. You should stay away from fried food, processed meat, sugars. I mean, you're so educated, you know all this, but it really makes sense to follow through on an anti-inflammatory diet. And you know, when I say it needs to be balanced, you know, it's not like you should never eat

• 21:52Speaker 00

  dessert or should never do this or... But I would stay away from any fast food, any fried, anything that makes you... I've been eating healthy since I'm 16 and I only like healthy food. I really don't like anything else anymore. I feel like it's a habit, you know? If you never eat it, you never crave it. I raised both my children on still water and healthy food. My kid asked for lunch for salad, yeah? She's 11. She doesn't eat fries, she doesn't eat all this because she doesn't get it from me. And she could. I took her once to McDonald's just so she sees it from the inside and we bought some fries and a burger.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  She took one fry and she said, "Mama, thank you for never giving me toxic food." It was so cute.

• 22:41Gary Brecka?

  That's good parenting. Yeah. You know, it's really fascinating too, is we think that we damage our skin very often from the outside in, but it gets damaged more often from the inside out.

• 22:52Speaker 00

  From the inside out.

• 22:53Gary Brecka?

  One of the most fascinating studies that I've seen on skin cancer, and I've talked about this before in other lectures, if you've seen it, it's on my Instagram, where I show you a superimposable chart looking at the parabolic rise in skin cancer from the 1950s through 2022, and it is superimposable with the parabolic use of sunscreen.

• 23:14Gary Brecka?

  And it wouldn't, that doesn't make sense, right? Why, why would we have such a parabolic rise concomitant with the parabolic use of sunscreen?

• 23:20Speaker 00

  You know why everybody says you should use sunscreen? And it comes a lot from dermatologists, right? Every year of your dermatologist, use sunscreen 24/7. But that's because whatever they're doing is highly anti-inflammatory and destroys your skin barrier. So they take your protection tool completely apart. Of course, they need to tell you, use sunscreen 24/7. But if you have a strong skin, a strong outer layer, and I'm not talking about super fair skin or people who have like skin cancer in their history in their family, whatever, we have to be more careful. But someone who has really healthy skin shouldn't, shouldn't just use 24/7 sunscreen, especially when we live in London. It's different when you go on the mountain, close to the sun, or in a desert, or to the Mediterranean in summer.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  You don't go outside without sunscreen. But this 24/7, I don't understand. And how important is the morning sun? I mean, Gary talks about it all the time. And, you know, the sun is so much needed for our vitamin D production, which is important for our bones, our immune system, our respiratory tract, our mental health, name it, our, our blood flow. The sun also produces something called nitric oxide in the skin, which vasodilates, makes the vessels a little more elastic, and then the blood flow is much better. You have way less problems with your heart, way less heart attacks, way less. It's so important to, to get some sun. And there's so much controversial discussion also about sunscreen, especially now in America, yeah.

• 24:49Gary Brecka?

  In the US, you know, 18 or 23 brands of sunscreen have been pulled from the market since 2018 for correlated risk to skin cancer. I really find that fascinating, you know, that we're applying.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  But the law for, for, for the filter for sunscreen haven't changed in the US for more than 20 years.

• 25:06Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. I mean, I use the sunscreen just to tallow with zinc oxide, just a nano zinc on the skin. Very good, you can almost eat this stuff. But what's interesting about the study, and I'm, and I'm happy to up on my Instagram if you want to read it. They found the same pro-inflammatory cytokines in all of these skin cancer conditions. And most of these cytokines were coming from the diet. They were highly linked to seed oils, rancid seed oils. And I get a lot of flak for attacking seed oils and saying we shouldn't be eating seed oils. But the truth is, I'm not attacking the plant. When you take a canola plant, which is also called a rape seed, but it sounds much better to say canola than rape seed.

• 25:49Gary Brecka?

  But when you take a canola plant and you put it in a commercial press and it comes out gummy, and you degum that with hexane, that's a very powerful neurotoxin. And then you take that degummed oil that you've degummed with hexane and you heat it to 405 degrees. That turns it rancid. So now you have a putrefied oil and it smells. And so they deodorize it with sodium hydroxide, which is a very, very powerful carcinogen. So you degum it with a neurotoxin, you deodorize it with a carcinogen, and then generally we will bleach it and then bottle it and then put it on the shelf. Now, if you're in the United States, the American Heart Association will come along and put a heart healthy label on there to help suck you into the shelf.

• 26:31Gary Brecka?

  You know, you ever walk down the aisle of seed oils, wesson oil and canola oils and vegetable oils, and they all have that exact same beautiful, perfect, yellow hue. They're all the same color. Just know that's not how it occurs in nature. It's been bleached to look that way. And so I'm not attacking the plant. I'm not attacking the sunflower, the safflower, the soybean, or the rape seed. I'm attacking the distance from the plant to the table. So highly processed seed oils are one of the worst things you could put in your bodies. You know, I really think that we could only have four oils in our kitchen. You could have a grass-fed butter, a ghee butter, a coconut oil, and a good olive oil. And you could do just about anything with those four oils, maybe even an avocado oil.

• 27:13Gary Brecka?

  But all of these rancid seed oils were actually, those cytokines were actually showing up in the in the skin biopsies of oncology patients. So I just, I thought that was fascinating. Because we have been taught to fear the sun, right? And it's just so necessary for us. She was talking about first light. The first forty-five to fifty minutes of the day is a very, very special type of light. There's no UVA or UVB rays in first light. So if you're worried about skin damage, but you want to expose your skin to light, first light is very beneficial. It's medicine. I mean, it actually resets your cortisol receptors. It resets your melatonin receptors.

• 27:53Gary Brecka?

  First light will do more to restore your circadian rhythm than just about anything. So for someone that's just starting out with skincare routine or is lost in the maze of skincare routine options, what is a good, basic skincare routine? Because there's lots of discussion about exfoliation. There's lots of discussions about what creams work and you have to do a night cream. Some of these are fifteen stages, fifteen steps. I know what's on my wife's counter and going from left to right. I mean, I could only get through that once. My ADHD kicks in at about product six, right?

• 28:30Speaker 00

  What's important for the skin to balance your skin? Anti-inflammation, we just know this now. But what's really important also is hydration. So if you have dry skin or dehydrated skin, we have to fix that. That is what causes all your problems. Broken skin barrier, water leaves the skin, trans-epidermal water loss. Then you get wrinkles. We don't want that. So hydration is the key to healthy, dewy, beautiful, glowy skin. And then something like nutrition for our cells, for our skin cells. But also what I took as the active ingredient in my skincare product is telomerase activation. Gary just talked about telomerase lengths. And this is really the life-limiting factor of a cell.

• 29:13Speaker 00

  When the telomeres shorten, the little caps of the chromosomes, until our hair mutates or dies. And humans have forty to sixty cell divisions. A turtle, for example, has one hundred and ten. The turtle gets to live two hundred and twenty years or two hundred, whatever it is. But two hundred, yeah, two hundred, no?

• 29:30Gary Brecka?

  I don't know. I don't know how long turtles live. I'm a human biologist, for the record.

• 29:35Speaker 00

  No, but absolutely, the cell division, the number of cell division is the absolute proven anti-aging or aging theory. So that's the proof of aging. And the telomeres is so important to keep long, and that's why we added our telomeres activators into the skincare. And then all this nutrition. And when it comes to skin cells, we want, I always compare grapes and raisins. So raisins are the dehydrated skin cells, the grapes are the hydrated skin cells. Two things, the raisins don't really look so great on our skin. You want the plump raisins, but also the raisins have these beautiful osmosis channels to take on active ingredients to go through all their cell divisions.

• 30:16Speaker 00

  So this is important that we keep the cells in our skin extremely hydrated. So for our skincare routine, I always would recommend a cleanser that is hydrating. So our foam cleanser, for example, is extremely hydrating, is Aluvera Urea, beautiful pH because it also matters. If you would wash your face with soap, which is very alkaline, you mess up the pH of your skin, which is slightly acidic. So, and then the microbiome is messed up, then your skin barrier is messed up. So the pH of the product really matters, and that's why like skincare brands should really point out what their pH is. So our cleanser has this beautiful pH. Then twice a week, you use the enzyme cleanser.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  It's the most gentle form of exfoliation, done with peptides, with enzymes, they get activated, the powder get activated with water, and then you mix it in your hands, you wash your face. I have it in the shower, you can use it also, Decolte Arms, Caritosis Pilar, super, super good. And you do this twice a week. And then have a hyaluronic serum, that's the grape maker. The hyaluronic serum is non-negotiable, it's the white t-shirt of your skincare routine. Everybody has to have it morning and night. Grape maker. And then if you have a beautiful face cream that locks everything in and gives the right lipids for your skin barrier, because we always have to support and strengthen our skin barrier. If you have like these four products, you are golden.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  You have glowy, beautiful skin. You have balanced skin. I promise you, your skin will change, it will transform. It's very important that you don't mess with like these crazy ingredients, that you just give the skin what it needs. If you would go on these four products, and you can complain to me if it doesn't work, but I can swear to you and promise that this routine will change your skin. Because it's always easy, you know? It's like you go in a store and you like this brand and this color and then, you know, this marketing and you create your own little routine in the bathroom and look so cute and but, you know, you should decide for one brand you trust and then go with it.

• 32:28Speaker 00

  Because if you curate it, you don't know how they interact, these ingredients and what the one does and the other jeopardizes. So stick to one brand and give it a try or chance. And also, Sturm looks so good in a bathroom, you know? You don't want all these other colors.

• 32:46Gary Brecka?

  So what's, lots of questions about maintaining your skincare routine while you travel, especially for people that are spending a lot of time on airplanes.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  Look, this is easy, it's four products. That is easy. I could give you 10 more products which we don't really want. I would like add the exosomes, definitely, but I wanted to give you like a very, very basic, simple and very effective skincare routine.

• 33:07Gary Brecka?

  So cleanser?

• 33:08Speaker 00

  Cleanser, enzyme cleanser, the hyaluronic serum face cream. Do those. I use the face cream also over my eyes. Obviously, if you're like super into skincare, have your eye serum, your eye cream, you do all this. But I wanted to give you like the simple. And you are on the go, and you can travel, and you have those, you're golden.

• 33:28Gary Brecka?

  Okay. For someone just starting to shift their diet, what are a few simple daily food swaps you recommend to help support an anti-inflammatory lifestyle? I know you're a believer in an active lifestyle. What movement-based activity?

• 33:41Speaker 00

  I love that you read the questions for me.

• 33:43Gary Brecka?

  I'm reading them, yeah.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  I know, I love it.

• 33:46Gary Brecka?

  I'm like, I'm interviewing you, so.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  But I wanted to ask you a question, actually, about

• 33:50Gary Brecka?

  Oh, you want to ask me?

• 33:51Speaker 00

  The periphery.

• 33:54Speaker 00

  Because you said, you know, the microcirculation, the periphery is always a problem. And you know what I do in the morning? I drink my lemon water, and I drink a lot of water first thing in the morning, because I'm really bad at drinking throughout the day. So I get a lot of water in in the morning. And Gary always recommends to take your Celtic salt or mineral salt, or whatever salt it is.

• 34:15Gary Brecka?

  The Baja Gold Salt, right there.

• 34:16Speaker 00

  Yes, and then you rub it on your tongue, and because of the salt, your water also goes into the periphery. Otherwise, it stays in like, on the main road. But we want it like, in all these little, little streets, right?

• 34:32Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, you know, it's interesting, because we've been lied to about sodium, mainly. You know, if any of you right now, if your blood pressure was so high that it became life-threatening, and you called 911, well, you don't call 911 here, what do you call?

• 34:48Gary Brecka?

  999, so you called 999, and the paramedics showed up, and your blood pressure was extraordinarily high. Does anyone know what the first thing they would do is?

• 34:56Speaker 00

  Salt, yeah.

• 34:58Gary Brecka?

  They would actually bag you with saline. They would take a bag of sodium water, and they would squeeze it into your veins to lower your blood pressure. There's a very, very interesting study published in the Wiley Journal of Headaches. This is a journal, a peer-reviewed clinical journal, that is dedicated solely to headaches. And they found an inverse correlation between sodium intake and migraine headaches. There were 8,900 people in this study. Now, why would sodium be inversely correlated to migraine headaches? Meaning, as sodium went down, the incidence of migraines went up. And when sodium went up, the incidence of migraines went down. Well, it starts with where the pain's coming from. If you've ever suffered from a migraine headache, or you've ever had a headache,

• 35:42Gary Brecka?

  all of us have had a headache, we think the headache is coming from our brain. That's actually not possible. Your brain does not have any pain receptors. Your brain is not capable of sending a pain signal. So the pain that you're feeling in your head, no matter where it is, can't be coming from your brain. So the question is, where is that pain coming from? It's actually coming from the covering of the brain. It's called the dura. It's like saran wrap, it's sort of wrapped over the top of your brain. And the dura is fraught with pain receptors. And the dura hates two things. The dura hates being stretched, and it hates being contracted. And what determines whether or not it's stretching or contracting is the sodium gradient. My wife and I cannot even begin to tell you how many thousands of headache and migraine sufferers have come through our clinic system

• 36:26Gary Brecka?

  that we have put into permanent remission by putting them on AHA Gold Meral Salt, an actual sodium sea salt. It's fascinating, because you are not hydrated when you have water in your blood. You're hydrated when you have water in your tissue. And what causes the water to leave the blood and enter the tissue is the sodium gradient. It's called the osmotic gradient. The vast majority of us are sodium deficient. We don't actually have the right sodium balance. So we walk around dehydrated all the time. Not the least of which is our skin. And so...

• 36:57Speaker 00

  I think this is such a, this is such a big topic. This is so important for the skin, but so important for every organ. And you know why we get like under-eye darkness and those bags? There's an issue with microcirculation, the periphery, and the blood is just static there. And then water gets into the tissue, and you get these bags. And then the blood is not oxygenized, and then you get the darkness. So I think this could solve a lot of these issues as well.

• 37:27Gary Brecka?

  I totally agree with you. You know, there's a reason why this room is set up the way that it is. With nine essential amino acids, all 91 essential minerals, and hydrogen water. Because the combination of those three things, if you do those in the morning, if you take in all nine of the essential amino acids, you can build any protein source in the body. If you take in all 91 trace minerals that the body needs, your methylation has the raw material it needs to do its job. And if you had hydrogen gas, which is one of the only true selective antioxidants that you can put into the human body, you will not only reduce inflammation, you will restore the microvascular circulation to normal. I've talked about this in two lectures now. You're probably getting tired of me saying it.

• 38:11Gary Brecka?

  But our heart doesn't circulate all the blood in the body. Seventy percent of our circulation is not done by our heart. There's no pressure in 70% of your circulatory vessels, including in the vasculature in your skin. There's zero pressure in those vessels. So how is that blood circulated? It's circulated by an activity called vasomotor, like a snake swallowing a mouse. So vasomotor and vasomotion are more important to skin health than cardiovascular circulation. And so how can we restore vasomotor? Minerals, hydrogen gas? Red light therapy is excellent for that. In fact, red light therapy is a phenomenal way to improve fine lines and wrinkles in your skin because it is improving circulation to the skin.

• 38:55Gary Brecka?

  How many of you use red light therapy? Oh, wow, it's like the whole room. Yeah, I mean, whole body red light therapy, even red light therapy for the face is phenomenal. And probably for a different reason than you think. Not to get... Most of you are science nerds. So can I get sciency for just one quick second? Inside every cell in your body are these little powerhouses called mitochondria. You have about 110 trillion of these in your body. Aging is a slow, progressive decline in the amount of mitochondria, mitochondrial density. As you lose mitochondria, you age at an accelerated rate. One of the fascinating things about red light is when it passes through the mitochondrial wall, it kicks out a gas called mitochondrial nitric oxide,

• 39:40Gary Brecka?

  and it forces oxygen to dock. Now that doesn't sound like a big deal, until you realize that if oxygen enters a cycle, called the Krebs cycle, your cell has thirty or sixteen times the energy. You produce thirty-two ATP for every revolution versus two ATP. And I'll back out of the science now, but essentially what red light therapy does is it forces energy into your cells by actually forcing gases, like mitochondrial nitric oxide, out of the Krebs cycle. It dissociates it from cytochromic oxidase and forcing oxygen to dock. So imagine by doing nothing other than exposing your skin to red light, you would have a sixteen-fold step-up in cellular energy.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  But I want to say this mask, this LED mask, it's better if you have a whole panel. Obviously, not everybody has space for the big bed, but if you have a panel you can sit in front of, it's better to catch your whole body with the red light and not just like the mask. It's a little gimmick here. I would really recommend investing in something like a panel.

• 40:45Gary Brecka?

  I would totally agree with that. And if you've ever laid in a red light therapy bed for any prolonged period of time, the longer you use red light, the more youthful an appearance you'll take on. Also, the lower your baseline level of inflammation, the better your vasomotor circulation. And all red light is doing is harnessing the best of what Mother Nature gives us. It's deleting the UVA and the UVB, the damaging rays, and using the beneficial rays from the sun to penetrate the skin and give your skin the benefits of light. We are very photovoltaic beings. You know, in fact, I think our dissociation with Mother Nature, we could go down that road another time, but our dissociation from Mother Nature, our lack of connection with Mother Nature is one of the reasons why

• 41:29Gary Brecka?

  we have such a sick and aging population. So...

• 41:36Gary Brecka?

  This was obviously spelled wrong.

• 41:38Speaker 00

  Should we talk about endocrine disruptors? Endocrine disruptors? I think that's also something which is so important.

• 41:44Gary Brecka?

  That's a good one. Let's talk about endocrine disruptors in our skincare.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  With skincare as well, you know, because there's so much horrible things in skincare, but also in hair care. You know, scalp is a skin too. And when we wash our hair, there's so many like silicones and tinsides and fragrances and microplastic, whatever is in shampoos. I think shampoo is one of the worst, worst products in the, in the, in the beauty industry besides makeup. But there's a lot of endocrine disruption and maybe you want to explain it. But for me, it's very important with every product I create to minimize endocrine disruption. So I have shampoos, conditioner.

• 42:25Speaker 00

  I have a shower gel, a V collection for, for the female genitals because that pH in the female genitals is very acidic. And if you wash with a normal shower gel, then the pH becomes alkaline and then we suffer UTIs, canida, all these problems because other bacterium than the one we want there are coming in and disturb our microbiome. So this is something we have to be also very, very careful with. But endocrine disruption is whatever we do, whatever we buy in a supermarket, don't buy plastic wrapped chicken or you have like a whole list of things that.

• 43:04Gary Brecka?

  Well, mainly are what's called phthalates and parabens. And phthalates, parabens, which are found in natural fragrances, natural scents. So phthalates and parabens are, are very aggressive hormone disruptors. We, in, in the previous session, I was, we were talking about female hormone therapy and we were talking about a very specific test that I think all women should do if you think your hormones are off and it's called the Dutch test. And it's a test that's a 24 hour urine test and it looks like, it looks at the actual full cycle of a woman. It looks at your, the ratio of, of hormones to one another because in women especially.

• 43:45Gary Brecka?

  The ratio of hormones is much more important than your levels. If you get a blood test, you get a snapshot of the level of hormone in the body. That tells you nothing about whether or not you're estrogen dominant, estrogen deficient, or whether or not you have the right level of progesterone, pregnenolone, or all of these other factors. A Dutch test is that will look at the ratios through a 24-hour cycle. You will find women that use high amounts of parabens and phthalates actually have very disrupted estrogen cycles. They have severe inability to eliminate estrogen, which means that you cannot get... There's two ways to become estrogen dominant. One is for a woman to overproduce estrogen. Another one is to under eliminate estrogen.

• 44:28Gary Brecka?

  So if you're not getting rid of it, it's just as bad as producing too much. The result is the same. You get a buildup of something called phytoestrogens. You begin to retain water. You start to look puffy all over, and you don't realize that this is actually related to your skincare routine or your cosmetic routine. So phthalates and parabens are especially terrible at hormone disruption because they actually block the elimination of estrogen down a pathway called the E2 pathway. They chemically block that elimination. And so by getting these out of your skincare routine, you can actually improve your hormonal cycle. I don't know if that answered your question, or if I just ate everybody's face.

• 45:07Speaker 00

  No, I think that's great.

• 45:08Gary Brecka?

  Okay, because my wife says I just eat people's face. Like, God forbid you sit next to me on a commercial flight. Because I will eat your face. We just flew from, what, Dallas to... Or Miami to Dallas, and when we sat down, let's tell you a quick story. I sat down in the seat, right, my family sat in the room behind me, and I sit down, and I'm on the aisle seat, and this dude is sitting next to me, and the family's behind me, and I sit down, and I was like, you know, I introduce myself, I'm like, "What do you do for a living?" He goes, "Oh, I'm a family medicine practitioner, I'm a sleep apnea specialist." I go, "Oh, are you?"

• 45:44Gary Brecka?

  And so Sage wedges her face between the seats and she goes, "He's gonna eat your face." And I did. I put the tray table down so he couldn't get out. I had a three-ring binder. I pulled out and I opened the three-ring binder, but ate his face. At the end, though, he wanted to work for us, did he not? That's true. He did. So, what one... This says, just so you know why I paused on this question. It says, "What one rectal, practical, specific tip," and I think it's reliable or relatable, tip,

• 46:19Gary Brecka?

  "would you share that would reduce inflammation in our lives and quickly reap some anti-inflammatory benefits?"

• 46:25Speaker 00

  So I think everybody knows that sleep is one of the most important things when it comes... We just talked about it. You know, because I got woken up this morning at 6:00 to catch a train.

• 46:37Gary Brecka?

  She was cranky when she walked in here, boy.

• 46:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I only had six hours of sleep. That really does a lot to your brain and, you know, your immune system goes down, your inflammation goes up. For me, I cannot live on six-hour sleeps. I just, I'm so energetic and I can run a full day, no problem, but I need my sleep. So sleep is highly important to minimize inflammation. Obviously, your diet, obviously, your stress levels. We don't want cortisol rising in our bloodstream because that causes a lot of inflammation. And then absolutely important, whatever we put on our skin, whatever we wash our hair with, whatever we eat out of plastic, out of whatever it is that touches our body, our clothes. I mean, this stuff is not good on your skin.

• 47:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, you should not wear synthetics, you should not wear polyester. I trained my 11-year-old pepper because she likes these brands 11-year-old like. And then she goes into the stores and then she reads. What's in... Is it really cotton or what is it, you know? And then she's like, "Oh, we cannot buy that." It's just good to look at these things, you know? And just, and obviously, our, you know, workout clothes, it's the worst what we could put on our bodies, but... Nevertheless, we do it sometimes, but then when you're done with your workout, take it off, take a shower, get this stuff off your body.

• 48:03Gary Brecka?

  I don't think we realize, you know, I think everybody knows that sleep is beneficial. Most people don't know why it's so beneficial. You know, we talked in an earlier segment about the difference between deep phases of sleep and REM phases of sleep. Deep sleep is essentially the only time that your brain is eliminating waste. So we have a lymphatic system in our body, but we have a glymphatic system in our brain. And the glymphatic system is the lymph nodes of the brain. And so the brain has a special pathway to eliminate waste, called the glymphatic system. This system is only active during deep sleep. So during deep phases of sleep, your brain actually loses inflammation. It actually does, it de-swells, if you will, and loses inflammation. These channels open up and waste is eliminated from the brain.

• 48:47Gary Brecka?

  The reason why you wake up foggy after not getting a good night's sleep is because you have toxicity and inflammation built up in the brain from a lack of deep sleep. So I think sleep is our human superpower. Whenever I work with an athlete, the very, very first thing I do is I fix their sleep. And then REM phases of sleep is where we're assembling memory. So we take learned memory from the day and we assemble it at night. It becomes actually a learned memory. Our prefrontal cortex and our hippocampus begin to communicate. There's also a really interesting clock in our brain. And this is the master clock. It's called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. And this, this clock runs our entire biological ecosystem. It runs your entire circadian cycle. And there are different clocks in different areas of your body.

• 49:32Gary Brecka?

  Your digestive system runs on a clock. Your sleep-wake cycle runs on a clock. This is why tying yourself to the sleep-wake cycle of the sun can be so important. Waking with the sun, getting sunlight into your eyes first thing in the morning has real benefits to cortisol and hormonal cycles and melatonin cycles. And it's also why, when you throw off your sleep-wake cycle, you also throw off your digestion. One of my, one of my travel tips that I tell everybody, if you travel a lot, and we'll be in 14 cities in 18 days. This is city nine or 10 for us, is I, I, you know, you can't control when you go to bed and when you wake up. Very often when you're traveling, you can control when you eat. And we are much more tied to our digestive cycle than you think.

• 50:17Gary Brecka?

  We're even more tied to our cycle of digestion than we are the sleep-wake cycle of the sun. So I live on the east coast in Miami. I usually go to bed at 10:00 and get up at 6:00 a.m. So this entire time traveling, I will never feed myself between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. east coast time. I will at least control the variables that I can control when I travel. So I'll throw off one of my clocks because my sleep and wake cycle with the sun will be different, but it won't throw all of the clocks off. So if you go to a new destination, you're only there for a few days, you're getting up at a different time, you're going to bed at a different time, and then you start eating when your body thinks you should be sleeping, you will wreck your circadian cycle.

• 50:58Gary Brecka?

  If you preserve your eating window, you will stay on your circadian cycle. So that's just, take that.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  Super interesting.

• 51:06Gary Brecka?

  What do you want to do with it? But that's one of my tips for travel.

• 51:09Speaker 00

  By the way, the skin also has a circadian cycle. The skin, when you fly back from the U.S. to Europe, for example, your skin thinks, you know, it's like, it depends where you're coming from. But the day cycle is different to the night cycle. In the day, the skin is about protecting and, you know, protecting the skin. In the night cycle, it rejuvenates and it gets ready for the day. So when you now, for example, you know, board a plane in New York, come to Europe, and you come out in the morning where you still think it's night, but your skin, you know, your skin thinks it's night, but you're already in the day. The sun hits your skin or the daylight, and your skin is not ready for it.

• 51:53Speaker 00

  So you have to be really careful how you treat your skin. Don't run into the sun, or you have to be really mindful that the skin has the same differences in their circadian.

• 52:04Gary Brecka?

  And, you know, can we talk a minute about the impact of the gut microbiome on the skin and the process of methylation?

• 52:10Speaker 00

  You can explain this so much better than me.

• 52:14Gary Brecka?

  You're the doctor.

• 52:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, but you're the, you're the teacher. You're the one who explains it better than anybody.

• 52:21Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I think, you know, it's fascinating how many skin issues are directly related to our gut microbiome. You know, I really got turned on to the gut microbiome by Dr. Pearl Mutter years ago. He wrote a book called Grain Brain. Wrote another one called Gut Brain Connection. And he directly linked different microbiota in the gut to different skin conditions. You know, I get a lot of questions about eczema and psoriasis. It's fascinating the correlation between two strains of bacteria in the gut and eczema and psoriasis. In nearly all of the patients that suffer from these two waste elimination conditions through the skin, they have the same two class of bacteria missing from their gut.

• 53:05Gary Brecka?

  Abifidobacterium and E. lactobacillus that are missing from their gut. And the absence of these bacteria forces the body, mainly the liver, to use the skin as a secondary route of waste elimination. You know, the skin's not just a barrier, it's a gateway. And so we actually eliminate waste through our skin. This is the reason why we have two types of sweating. We have passive sweating and active sweating. Passive sweating, we sweat to drop body temperature. Active sweating, we sweat to eliminate waste. And we've all experienced this because when you get the flu and you're cold and you're in a cold room and you're freezing, you're sweating. Why are you sweating when your body is freezing? Because you're not passively sweating to reduce your body temperature. You're actively sweating to eliminate waste.

• 53:45Gary Brecka?

  And so a healthy gut microbiome, things like fermented foods. I can't think of anything that is more beneficial for your gut microbiome than fermented foods. Kimchi's, sauerkrauts, I know a lot of you don't like to eat those. Foods that are pickled, pickled in vinegars. Because these foods have something called soluble and insoluble fiber. In soluble fiber forms the bulk that moves through our gut. But the soluble fiber turns into something called free fatty acids. And free fatty acids are some of those anti-inflammatory compounds in the human body. They actually ravage, they're a scavenger for free radical oxidation. So just by changing our diet, especially incorporating fermented foods,

• 54:29Gary Brecka?

  you can actually really repair and heal your gut microbiome. You know, the other thing that I'm such a huge fan of, and I'm a little biased because I have a genetic test that's available for sale at this event, but is fixing your genetic methylation. You know, most of us do not know what we are deficient in because we don't know where our gene breaks are. And certain gene breaks lead to certain deficiencies. And these deficiencies can be supplemented for. So instead of supplementing for the sake of self-hiding, we can supplement for deficiency. So why don't we, why don't we open it for a couple of questions? Is that cool? With you? Anybody have any questions? Yes, ma'am.

• 55:10Speaker 02

  You mentioned a few ingredients that are bad and like cause inflammation in your skin, like retinol. Are there any other ones that we should think about avoiding? I know like acids are very common. Like are there good ones, bad ones? And like what should we avoid and what should we choose to go for?

• 55:27Speaker 00

  Definitely stay away from anything that has fragrances. Fragrances is also a very important endocrine disruptor. And it's totally overused in skincare, shouldn't be in skincare. Shouldn't be also on your skin. So if you like a fragrance from any, any, whatever, by Rita, put it on your t-shirt or your clothes, but not on your skin because it disrupts your skin barrier. But also stay away from mineral oils, for example, high amounts of alcohol. Like those kind of things I would stay away. Then glycolic, then acid peels. Definitely not in your skincare routine. If I have a whole list put together with ingredients,

• 56:10Speaker 00

  I think your team has that, we can send out to you.

• 56:13Gary Brecka?

  Oh, they, yes.

• 56:14Speaker 00

  If anybody's interested, send an email to Gary's team. We did like a whole.

• 56:18Gary Brecka?

  I have a website called theultimatehuman.com and we'll, we'll.

• 56:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:23Gary Brecka?

  Yes, ma'am.

• 56:24Speaker 03

  You touched on ADHD. Are there any supplements or sort of medic sort of ingredients that you would say to focus on alongside good sleep, you know, good diet?

• 56:35Gary Brecka?

  There's no question. You know, first, if you suspect ADHD, I would absolutely do a genetic methylation test. I, again, I think that everyone should do this test once in their lifetime because the genes you're born with are the genes you die with. You will never guess again on what you need to supplement with because you will supplement for deficiency, not just the sake of supplementing. In ADHD and ADD both, which is an overactive mind, it's too many windows opening at the same time. It is not an inability to pay attention. It's an inability to pay attention to so many things. And so this is a big fallacy with ADD and ADHD.

• 57:15Gary Brecka?

  And so when we create thought at a faster rate than we break thought down, we have what's called attention deficit disorder. We have too many thoughts, too many windows open at the same time. It's a fallacy that people with ADD and ADHD cannot focus or concentrate. They actually have a tendency to hyper-focus. It has to be on something that they are interested in. And so the main deficiency in attention deficit disorder is methylfolate. And it is highly tied to a gene mutation called MTHFR. There's seven-fold the increase in ADHD and MTHFR positive variance than in non-positive

• 57:55Gary Brecka?

  variance because the absence of methylfolate does not allow the proper pace of breaking down thought, of dismantling neurotransmitters. And so the mind is racing. Modern medicine's solution is to put amphetamines into the body to race the central nervous system to match the pace of the mind. This is what vibans, Adderall, and Ritalin are. They're amphetamines. So in that case, you are breaking the system that's not working, the central nervous system, to match the system that is broken, which is the poor breakdown of neurotransmitters. So. Two things I would do if you suspect ADHD. One, I would get a genetic methylation test. And secondly, I would get all of the folic acid

• 58:37Gary Brecka?

  out of that person's diet for just one week. And you will have a completely different human being in the car. I mean, if it's a full contact sport to get your kid in the car to go to school in the morning, get the folic acid, which is fortified or enriched foods, out of their diet for one week. Supplement them with 800 micrograms of methylfolate, and you will see a life-changing experience.

• 59:01Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, zinc and magnesium are also major. Okay, one more question. One more question for Barbara, and then she has to go. Okay.

• 59:07Speaker 00

  I have to go? No, it's fine.

• 59:12Speaker 00

  It's fine, I don't have to go anywhere.

• 59:14Gary Brecka?

  All right, two more questions. Yes, ma'am.

• 59:17Speaker 04

  So we know that when we wear sunglasses, our skin doesn't really understand that we are exposing to the sun, so it's less protective towards the sun. So now my question is, since in the back of your space, now we talk about how the lights affect our skin. For example, wearing like blue blocking glasses will help. And also, at sunset time, there's another lens that is simulating the sunset. And then at night, you should wear like the red light. But that's on the eyes, you know? But the skin also read the light as well. So now, wearing those, it will be less effective to the skin to protect, like since Barbara say that there's a circadian rhythm of the light. So once is protecting, and then at night is rejuvenating.

• 1:00:02Speaker 04

  So now my question is, with these glasses, we're doing better or not? Depending on the health of the skin and the eyes, and everything is interconnected. I hope you understand it. My English is not my first language.

• 1:00:14Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, no, I can, well, go ahead. You answer, and I'll take each other.

• 1:00:18Speaker 00

  The eyes is one thing, and it's very good to protect your eyes and engage with your eye health. But for the skin, and I give you this example. If you're now sitting at night in bed and go shopping on Net-a-Porter on your iPad, that's definitely not good for your skin. Or you wake up and you look at your phone, definitely not good for your skin, but also for your circadian rhythm, because you wake up and you think it's day again. Regarding the eyes and the connection between the glasses for your eyes and your skin, that I...

• 1:00:49Gary Brecka?

  So what's interesting about blue light blockers and red light glasses is we're actually trying, what's fascinating is we're just trying to get back to the basics. You know, we're actually trying to circumvent all of this. You know, I have a saying that aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort. Because the more aggressively we pursue comfort, the faster we age. We regulate everything now. We regulate our indoor air temperature, we regulate our lighting. And so if you want to make your bedroom the surface of the sun at 1 o'clock in the morning, you can, you can just crank the lights up. Okay, this is, this throws off our circadian cycle. We're very photovoltaic beings. We used to actually sleep and wake with the cycle of the sun. We don't do that anymore. And so when we have bright lights, especially fluorescent lights and artificial lights,

• 1:01:33Gary Brecka?

  these lights are not constant, they flicker. It's called hertz, how many times the light comes on and off in a second. Those hertz are not natural hertz. So what they are is they're very stimulatory to your brain. So the reason why you would wear red light glasses, you wouldn't need red light glasses if you slept and woke with the sun, or if you used biocentric lighting. But because most of our lighting is artificial, we want to actually protect ourselves from the waking cycle that that light is stimulating us to do. So red light glasses are just a way of us to block the artificial light so that we're not being woken by that light at night. Blue light, especially from our phones, is clinically designed to keep the brain awake. There are also wavelengths in there, believe this or not,

• 1:02:18Gary Brecka?

  that are clinically designed, they're actually augmented to stimulate the dopamine receptors, to actually give you a dopamine reward for staying engaged. So those screens are actually designed to be addictive. They're designed to create awakened state and to create a heightened state of dopamine. So that's what blue light glasses do. I don't wear readers, but I wear blue light glasses a lot. They're in my pocket right now, I wore them on my previous stage talk. So I wear blue light glasses during the day. Sometimes at night I will wear red light glasses if I'm not going to bed early. But it's only a way for us to protect ourselves from artificial light, not from sunlight.

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  By the way, the HEV light, the blue light, penetrates the skin very, very aggressively. It's short wavelengths and can cause same problems like, you know, sun, for example, like pigmentation, premature aging, cancer. So it's same aggressive. And we don't really have like the sunscreen for the HEV light. I created actually a product. Don't know if it's on the market right now because it wasn't so perceived because it was too early. Maybe it's called anti-pollution drops. And those drops were, you know, they were really great to block out the HEV light the same. Like it hydrated, so it really, really engaged with our skin barrier and strengthen it. But at the same time, we could block out the HEV light.

• 1:03:40Speaker 00

  It's a really good product, by the way.

• 1:03:42Gary Brecka?

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:03:43Speaker 05

  I have a question about lasers because we live in time where you have so much, like so many treatments that one can take. Is there any that you would recommend or you would stay away from all of it? And then I have a second question about UV lamps because there are a lot of lamps that have infrared, but you can also have the UV right now. Is that good? Is that bad? Is it worth having?

• 1:04:03Gary Brecka?

  I'll let her answer the question on lasers and I'll handle the question on UV.

• 1:04:06Speaker 00

  So I'm not a big fan of lasers because everything that aggressively targets your skin. It's one thing if you have acne scarring or like a thing you want to get rid of, you know, when you tried everything else and you do it one time, but then your doctor has to give you all the side effects, how it can damage your skin, how your skin, you know, can be infected, can be all kinds of things, how you protect it after the treatment. But lasers are used for anti-aging protocols. And, you know, I personally wouldn't dare to hurt my skin so much because I'm also, I would be scared how it grows back, how it comes back. And, you know, I've seen ladies, they have done many, many laser treatments and then they walk around with these long sleeves and these hats, you know,

• 1:04:51Speaker 00

  and their skin looks totally dead and spotty because, you know, when we constantly get damaged our skin barrier, the sun causes pigmentation and it just kills your skin. And I personally, I would stay away from everything aggressive except when there's an indication where you, you know, have this one-time treatment or something. But I, I'm personally, I like to keep what I got in the best possible shape.

• 1:05:19Gary Brecka?

  So UVA and UVV lights for indoor use are usually designed to replace natural lighting when you don't have access to it. You know, as a population mortality expert, I can tell you that the longest life expectancies on Earth are centered right around the equator. I forget what the exact number was, but for every 20 degrees longitude or latitude that you move away from the equator, there's a precipitous drop in life expectancy until you get to the poles where the shortest life expectancy on Earth exists. A true Eskimo has the shortest life expectancy on Earth. And a lot of the reason why they have shortened life expectancies is, one, they've become cold adaptive. We use cold water therapy to cold shock the body.

• 1:06:03Gary Brecka?

  Those cold plunges back there will cold shock the body. They will not adapt you. Once you become cold adaptive, you actually begin to develop excess adipose tissue in the cell layer in your skin. The second is that when people don't have, they go 24 hours, 48 hours, weeks, sometimes months, without any sunlight exposure. This is very detrimental because there are certain wavelengths of light from the sun that actually cause us to make vitamin D3. We make cholecalciferol in our body, the only vitamin that a human being can make on our own. If I drew the blood of anybody in this room, you would have hundreds of vitamins in your bloodstream. Your body is only capable of making one, and it's vitamin D3.

• 1:06:46Gary Brecka?

  You don't need to eat, you don't need to drink, you just need to expose your skin to sunlight. We make vitamin D3 from sunlight and cholesterol. When cholesterol and sunlight combine, they go through the kidney and there's a little process, we make something called vitamin D3, cholecalciferol. It's arguably the single most important nutrient in the human body. It acts like a vitamin, it acts like a hormone, it acts like a calcium transport molecule. It's fascinating what this nutrient does in the human body, vitamin D3. And about 85% of the world's population is clinically deficient in that nutrient. Awesome. Should we do one more question? One more question. Yes, sir.

• 1:07:25Speaker 06

  First of all, thanks for your time and knowledge. This has been one of the best experiences I've had. And I'm always working away and there's always like chip shops, McDonald's, like bad food places. What snacks and prepackaged foods could I take with me?

• 1:07:41Gary Brecka?

  What snacks and prepackaged foods?

• 1:07:43Speaker 06

  Healthy snacks.

• 1:07:44Gary Brecka?

  Yep, I mean, I personally like dried meat products. I eat a lot of like lineage beef sticks. I'll take Parmesan crisps. I take a lot of stuff on the road with us. Raw goat cheese, nuts are excellent snacks for you to keep around that are actually very filling. So nuts, olives, meat sticks, grass fed, grass finished meat sticks. Those are usually my go tos. Not to plug a brand here, but I'm a big fan of whole foods. Body Health actually makes a whole food bar that is pressed and it is preserved by putting CO2 into the bag and not by adding preservatives. And if you actually flip that, the ingredient list over, you'll recognize everything on there.

• 1:08:29Gary Brecka?

  There are dried fruits, dried vegetables, coconut oil, raw cacao, almonds, coconut oils. These are whole food ingredients and the secret to longevity is eating a whole food diet. It's the absence of processed foods, not the presence of a dogmatic diet that extends life. Carnivore wasn't what extend life. Keto wasn't what extended life. Vegan wasn't what extended life. Vegetarian, paleo, pescatarian, Atkins, they were not dogmatic diets. They were diets completely absent in processed foods. Not a blue zone in the world has the presence of processed foods. And so foods as close to their natural state as possible. You know, what's fascinating is very often it's not even the food.

• 1:09:13Gary Brecka?

  It's the distance from the food to the table. Just like I talked about the seed oil. It's not the sunflower, the safflower or the soybean that's the issue. It's the distance from those to the table. So those would be some of my favorite go tos. Guys, thank you so much for your, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.