253. Dr. Jessica Shepherd: On Menopause, HRT, and Longevity Tips for Women

Most women spend years dismissing their own symptoms: brain fog, frozen shoulder, mood crashes, vanishing libido, never realizing these aren’t signs of aging, they’re signals of a hormonal shift that begins nearly a decade before menopause hits. Today, I’m with board-certified OB-GYN and menopause expert Dr. Jessica Shepherd to dismantle the myths that have kept millions of women unnecessarily suffering, including the misrepresented WHI study that put hormone therapy off the table for a generation. CLICK HERE TO BECOME GARYS VIP!: ⁠https://bit.ly/4ai0Xwg⁠ Listen to “The Hers Podcast” on all your favorite platforms! YouTube: ⁠https://bit.ly/4shfwbQ⁠ Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://bit.ly/4doq3x2⁠ Get Dr. Jessica Shepherd’s book, “Generation M: Living Well in Perimenopause and Menopause” here: ⁠https://bit.ly/3NGDjmn⁠ Connect with Dr. Jessica Shepherd Website: ⁠https://bit.ly/3Pf6ZHG⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://bit.ly/47La74k⁠ Instagram: ⁠https://bit.ly/3NG17Xu⁠ TikTok: ⁠https://bit.ly/416VYLb⁠ Facebook: ⁠https://bit.ly/4ryjyeE⁠ X.com: ⁠https://bit.ly/4192QaQ⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://bit.ly/3Nhrm6x⁠ Thank you to our partners A-GAME: “ULTIMATE15” FOR 15% OFF: ⁠http://bit.ly/4kek1ij⁠ AION: “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: ⁠https://bit.ly/4h6KHAD⁠ AIRES: "ULTIMATE20 " FOR 20% OFF: ⁠https://bit.ly/4a3Duze⁠ BAJA GOLD: "ULTIMATE10" FOR 10% OFF: ⁠https://bit.ly/3WSBqUa⁠ BODYHEALTH: “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: ⁠http://bit.ly/4e5IjsV⁠ CARAWAY: “ULTIMATE” FOR 10% OFF: ⁠https://bit.ly/3Q1VmkC⁠ COLD LIFE: THE ULTIMATE HUMAN PLUNGE: ⁠https://bit.ly/4eULUKp⁠ GENETIC METHYLATION TEST (UK ONLY): ⁠https://bit.ly/48QJJrk⁠ GENETIC TEST (USA ONLY): ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3Yg1Uk9⁠ GOPUFF: GET YOUR FAVORITE SNACK!: ⁠https://bit.ly/4obIFDC⁠ H2TABS: “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: ⁠https://bit.ly/4hMNdgg⁠ HEALF: 10% OFF YOUR ORDER: ⁠https://bit.ly/41HJg6S⁠ PEPTUAL: “TUH10” FOR 10% OFF: ⁠https://bit.ly/4mKxgcn⁠ RHO NUTRITION: “ULTIMATE15” FOR 15% OFF: ⁠https://bit.ly/44fFza0⁠ SNOOZE: LET’S GET TO SLEEP!: ⁠https://bit.ly/4pt1T6V⁠ WHOOP: JOIN & GET 1 FREE MONTH!: ⁠https://bit.ly/3VQ0nzW⁠ Watch the “Ultimate Human Podcast” every Tuesday & Thursday at 9AM EST: YouTube: ⁠https://bit.ly/3RPQYX8⁠ Podcasts: ⁠https://bit.ly/3RQftU0⁠ Connect with Gary Brecka Instagram: ⁠https://bit.ly/3RPpnFs⁠ TikTok: ⁠https://bit.ly/4coJ8fo⁠ X: ⁠https://bit.ly/3Opc8tf⁠ Facebook: ⁠https://bit.ly/464VA1H⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://bit.ly/4hH7Ri2⁠ Website: ⁠https://bit.ly/4eLDbdU⁠ Merch: ⁠https://bit.ly/4aBpOM1⁠ Newsletter: ⁠https://bit.ly/47ejrws⁠ Ask Gary: ⁠https://bit.ly/3PEAJuG⁠ Timestamps 00:00 Intro of Show 04:20 Dr. Jessica Shepherd’s Background 08:03 Perimenopause: Earlier Than You Think 11:35 Early Signs of Menopause 15:24 Dutch Test and Hormone Replacement Therapy 24:06 Ideal Timeframe for Hormone Therapy 26:33 The Invisible Hormone Disruptors 27:23 The Caregiver Syndrome 28:35 Why Autoimmune Disease Targets Women 30:40 What Does a Healthy Immune System Look Like? 34:38 Blood Sugar Monitoring: HbA1c and CGM 41:50 How to Strengthen Women’s Immune System 47:42 Black Maternal Mortality and Systemic Health Gaps 57:23 Dr. Shepherd’s Message to the Administration 58:43 Role of AI in Healthcare 1:01:40 Generation M: The Book Every Woman Needs 1:03:39 Weight Training as a Longevity Non-Negotiable 1:06:10 Dr. Shepherd’s Morning Routine 1:08:13 Creatine for Muscle and Brain Health 1:12:28 Real-World Recovery: Movement, Nutrition, and Supplements 1:17:14 Connect with Dr. Shepherd 1:21:01 What does it mean to you to be an Ultimate Human? Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not provide medical advice. It is not intended for diagnosing or treating any health condition. Always consult a licensed healthcare professional before making health or wellness decisions. 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

  We've always idealized medicine as direction in order to give someone what they need to do in order to be their best health. So why is it that we have the best of research and the best of resources? And we're not applying it in the way that people can actually live longer and live well?

• 0:15Gary Brecka?

  The system is very expensive. And by shifting some of that healthcare spending to the preventative care, it's almost keeping people out of the system.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  We're classically trained as humans to ignore what your body is telling you until it tells you something where it's catastrophic.

• 0:32Gary Brecka?

  This is why there is such a prevalence of autoimmune disease in women. Because where does autoimmune prey? It preys on the weak.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  I am really trying to capture women before they hit menopause to give them the best building blocks so that at 60, 70, and 80, they are optimized instead of waiting for it to be a catastrophic fall off the cliff.

• 0:52Gary Brecka?

  Especially for the women and for the men that are listening, where do they start?

• 0:55Speaker 00

  You know, Gary, that is the million dollar question. Well, I do have several answers. One is

• 1:12Gary Brecka?

  What if I told you that 50 million women have unnecessarily suffered for decades because of one misquoted study? Today's guest is someone I've been trying to get on this podcast for months because my wife, my team, and this entire community have been demanding it. Dr. Jessica Shepherd is a board certified OB-GYN, menopause expert, minimally invasive gynecologic surgeon, and the founder of Modern Meno, a global community empowering women through midlife and beyond. But here's what makes her different. She didn't stay in the system. She could have kept her head down, made a great living, and played by the rules. Instead, she chose to blow the whistle on how women's health has been catastrophically mismanaged. And she's rewriting the playbook. In this episode, we're tearing down the myths around

• 1:55Gary Brecka?

  hormone therapy. We're talking about autoimmune disease and how it attacks women at epidemic rates, and why perimenopause starts in the 30s, not in the 50s, and what the hell happened with that FDA black box warning that terrified an entire generation of women. We're also diving into the frozen shoulder mystery, the maternal mortality crisis, and why muscle is your metabolic currency, and how creatine isn't just for bodybuilders anymore, it's for brain health. This is one of the most important conversations we've ever had on this podcast. And if you're a woman, or you love a woman, you need to hear this. So, welcome to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecka. And today, we're going to go down the road of everything women's health, menopause, longevity,

• 2:37Gary Brecka?

  and the science that will change your life. Let's go. Hey, guys. Welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecka, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. Today is one of those extraordinarily special podcasts. I have been wrangling to get this guest on the podcast for a while, because my wife, my staff, and my community are huge fans of hers. So today, welcome to the podcast, Dr. Jessica Shepherd.

• 3:06Speaker 00

  I am so excited to be here. We've been meaning to do this for some

• 3:09Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah. We, you know, it's funny, we've been together in other places, like in Saudi, but then didn't happen in Saudi. And you're from Texas, Miami. So eventually, we wrangled it here in Miami.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  We did it.

• 3:19Gary Brecka?

  So, you know, by way of background, you know, for my audience, I say this a lot, there's, there's a theme that kind of runs through a lot of my podcast guests, whether they're a soccer mom that solved the problem, an addict to fix their addiction, but they're the most impactful and passionate, purpose-driven people in the world. And I know that you're a classically trained physician.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:45Gary Brecka?

  But at some point, there was a shift in your career and your career choices. And I'm always fascinated by that because Comfort would dictate that you just stay in the system.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:58Gary Brecka?

  Do what the system tells you. You make a good living. Kind of keep your mouth shut.

• 4:04Gary Brecka?

  Don't, don't, don't raise your hand. But I wonder if there was, what, what preempted that shift?

• 4:11Speaker 00

  You know, there are really pivotal moments in your life where you, everyone gets choice. And to decide what they want to do with that moment. And my background, a little behind the scenes about me is I got my undergraduate degree in kinesiology, exercise physiology. So I really understood what the body could do, what it could adapt to when it's optimized. So I feel that the beginning of my medical career was in the best of, the best of what the body can do. And so going into medicine, obviously, we know how to fix train wrecks. We deal in illness and disease, which is great. We do need that side to society.

• 4:54Speaker 00

  So now practicing 15 years of seeing the worst and fixing disease and operating. I did a fellowship in minimally invasive gynecology. So I was a high volume surgeon. But what I really started to understand is the story. The story behind the scenes of all these women that I would see in the exam room. And I knew deep down, I was like, there's something else going on. And that something else is all the behind the scenes thing that allow people to show up with disease. Whether that's with nutrition, exercise, stress, emotional issues that are going on actually feed into how we present in chronic disease as well. And so I think that that was the pivotal moment that I said to myself, I have to do something different.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  And that's when I ventured more into looking at root cause, looking at lifestyle, being able to actually educate while empowering women about their life, especially in midlife.

• 5:50Gary Brecka?

  And I think that's like, probably as a category, the most underserved in this whole biohacking longevity space. Because, and I say that with absolute conviction because, you know, my wife and I went on her journey. We did it as a couple, you know, through menopause. And what I learned by going on that journey with her was, number one, the paucity of good information that is out there for women to cling to. I think recently, when the FDA removed the black box warning from female hormone therapy, I think that was a sort of the shock heard around the nation that, wow, maybe we've got this all wrong. And maybe hormone therapy is not as detrimental for women.

• 6:33Gary Brecka?

  And I would certainly love to spend some time, and I want to delve into cortisol, and I want to delve into why autoimmune disease is found 82% of the time in females. Because it's certainly not sex selective, so why is it selecting women? What makes them fall prey to the vast majority of autoimmune? But also, you know, the pre-peri and menopausal phases for women. Because what, in my own personal journey with my wife, I was surprised how early in life this can start for women. I think most say, I still have a period, I can't be in that phase.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think we affix a period or a menstrual cycle to functionality in the sense of nothing's wrong, right? Or nothing is changing. And that's really not even biologically how our bodies work. Nothing shifts overnight. It all is a process. And so when we think of peri-menopause starting in our latter 30s, all the way through our 40s, I think it's very astounding. Even when I tell my patients that that is really the duration of what happens, they sit and think about it. It's like you see the light bulb go off because one, either they're going through it and have been for years. Or two, really sitting to say, oh, my body is going through a transition that took years. That's how the cells work. That's how we see changes in the body.

• 7:51Speaker 00

  And especially with hormones, when we see the flux between estrogen and progesterone, whether they're, you know, counteracting each other in the way they didn't before or on a decline, that takes years.

• 8:02Gary Brecka?

  And you know, I think if there was just one way to torture a woman, it would be like the estrogen lever, right?

• 8:08Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:08Gary Brecka?

  Oh, saggy skin, mood disorders, libido leave in the building, poor sleep, brain fog, you know, crushing fatigue. All with one little lever.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:16Gary Brecka?

  And, and, and, you know, testing for it, I think, is also something that's really poorly understood. I think most people will do blood tests that are snapshot in time. And I can't tell you how many women came through our functional clinics. And their blood work was quote unquote, fine. You know, within normal limits.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  And that's what you'll typically find is that you're just fine. I, you know, classically trained as a physician, that's what we were taught is we're really looking for abnormalities. And I said that before, is we live in the world of illness and disease. So we're always looking for something that is really wrong. When really what we should be looking at as the human body is at transitions for both men and women. But, you know, for now, women is even in the moment of it looks within normal range. How are you feeling? So we have not kind of brought the experiential part of perimenopause onto the actual fundamental science behind it. And that's where we are now is being willing to hear women when they say, I feel A, B, C, D. May not show up in a lab.

• 9:18Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  As a hormone malfunction or dysfunction, it actually is experientially what the receptors to the hormones are experiencing, which gives them the symptom. So we just have to listen more.

• 9:29Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  Imagine that.

• 9:30Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  Listening more.

• 9:32Gary Brecka?

  We're, we're, men are classically trained to not do that.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:35Gary Brecka?

  Um, halfway through your sentence, we're getting out the toolbox and we're going like, let me tell you how to fix that.

• 9:40Speaker 00

  Right. So imagine that laundry list that you were talking about of sleep, of anxiety, of periods changing, of hot flashes nights. That list is pretty hefty. So imagine going through that list when you're in a doctor's office, but there's nothing on a lab to say, yeah, I, I understand what you're saying.

• 9:55Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. You know, and, and when we really started peeling back the layers for my wife, it really began years before, whatever you want to call it, she hit the wall.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:06Gary Brecka?

  And I would say hitting the wall was like the obvious hot flashes. And I was like, oh, you're in menopause. Okay. So now I know what to do. She also had frozen shoulder, which was pretty wild. She had adhesive capsulitis and, and she had actually an orthopedic that wanted to do manipulation under anesthesia, put her to sleep and basically, you know, break these, uh, you know.

• 10:26Speaker 00

  Adhesions up, down.

• 10:28Gary Brecka?

  And, and we saw them on an MRI. So they were there never in a million years. Did I ever correlate that back to menopause?

• 10:36Speaker 00

  I didn't even correlate that to menopause for a long time until, you know, recently, maybe in the last three years at looking at the data and the science, but now connecting it to what experiential, when women were like, my shoulder, my shoulder hurts, right?

• 10:48Gary Brecka?

  That's just a coincidence, right? Yeah, I mean, and hers, she couldn't get it above here and it was so painful. Like she could ski like a crazy person. She's probably would have been a professional skier if she was born in steamboat. But then, you know, leaning down to like unbuckle her boot would take her to the ground.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:10Gary Brecka?

  And, and then we started really talking about, you know, like brain fog and like, you know, for, for almost a year, she just couldn't wake up in the mornings. Like she just could not get out of first gear and we couldn't figure it out. I'm like, you really slept, your sleep score is decent. You know, we're tracking everything and like, I'm always looking at like the data, never linked it back to menopause. So I wonder if we could just back up and for, especially for the women and for the men that are listening, where do they start? Like, what are some of the early warning signs? Is it mood changes? Is it weight gain, water retention? Is it all of the above?

• 11:49Speaker 00

  It is, it's really all of the above. I say that, you know, every woman who enters this midlife phase is really a moment for them to be more self-aware. Self-aware in the sense that I'm actually going to pay attention to me. Imagine that, right? So pay attention to what's going on in my body because guess what? The story is going to be different for the next one beside you and thereafter. And so that can come in the brain fog. I would say even for me, my journey, it was brain fog. So imagine this, I'm a board certified OB-GYN, menopause expert, wrote a book and my first symptom was that brain fog, that executive functioning, clarity, memory. And it took me roughly about six months to put the pieces together. Right?

• 12:33Speaker 00

  Cause there's also denial that goes with this, right?

• 12:35Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The plumber always has a leaky faucet, right?

• 12:37Speaker 00

  You know, there's nothing really going on or you attribute it to something else. I'm stressed, this, that, this. And finally I was like, holy hell, Jessica. You know, you are perimenopausal age and you are having symptoms. The good thing is that I had the kind of the self-awareness to kind of put the pieces together, but I also had the tools and the resources. So immediately I was like, well, hormone therapy is what I'm going to choose. But for women who maybe don't have that luxury of knowing everything, and I'm sure we'll dive into that, is the symptoms that start are very subtle. But in that is the consistency behind it, right? Symptomatology usually is based on not a one-off or something that happens and you never experience it again is now it's coming,

• 13:22Speaker 00

  maybe not as frequent, but I noticed that it's there. And so not to dismiss those feelings of what you're feeling and then finding someone to discuss that with you. Someone who again is going to put the experiential part of hormone changes in midlife onto you are actually going through it. So that can start anywhere from latter 30s, 38. I'm never going to put an age out there, but latter 30s. And going all the way up until you actually hit, like you said before, that wall of menopause, which is where your estrogen now is like flatlined. It's like, we're not here anymore. But all before that is the fluctuation. It's high, it's low. It's like, I'm going to stay steady here. Now I'm going to go lower. So all that time is when you're going to start to feel these symptoms either start,

• 14:05Speaker 00

  become more frequent, more intense, or more severe.

• 14:08Gary Brecka?

  And you know, it's so, I'm so glad that you say that because that's exactly what we experienced. You know, she, she sort of no longer became a morning person. And then she's, you know, we started our business together and she's intensely organized. She's a list taker, she's a list checker, like super, super organized, you know, financially and the, and the operations of the business. And I was teasing her about like, did you just leave your brain at, at home? Like, and

• 14:36Speaker 00

  So did she, did she attack you then or later?

• 14:39Gary Brecka?

  Oh, no, every day. I, I basically just woke up every morning and apologized. Good morning, babe, I'm sorry. And what, for what? I don't know. I just want you to know.

• 14:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:48Gary Brecka?

  And I'm sorry. And And she wasn't going crazy, but you know, it was, it was, you know, the, the lack of libido.

• 14:56Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 14:56Gary Brecka?

  Um, it was the brain fog, which she never had, um, you know, and then it was, um, she's, she's very thin and, and she just started noticing dramatic changes in her skin. She's always had beautiful skin and like around her jowls, like seemingly all of a sudden. And I wasn't linking any of this back to, you know, um, uh, menopause and, and till the frozen shoulder and the night sweats. That was like, you know, and I think everyone knows that the night sweats are classic.

• 15:24Gary Brecka?

  But what did your journey and what do you recommend for women who are starting that journey and like, wow, that sounds like me. Where does the test start? What does the testing look like? Cause you hear people say, we can get it all from a blood test. We did one called the Dutch test, which actually gave us a lot of information. I was, I was fascinated by how accurate that was and how the results mapped directly to the symptoms that she was having. There wasn't almost a single ailment that wasn't unanswerable by those results. So if, if, if a woman came to see you in this, in this phase, what would that sort of transition look like testing and what have you?

• 16:01Speaker 00

  The transition, so testing is a little tricky because again, the estrogen and progesterone are still there if you have a cycle. Right? So we know in menopause, you do not have a cycle anymore, which states that the ovaries are not eliciting enough estrogen release to give you a cycle. So while you're still having a cycle, whether it's infrequent, if it's irregular or regular in the perimenopausal phase, we know that estrogen and progesterone are giving off enough to give you a cycle. Just not enough where the rest of your target organs, your brain, your muscle, how your fat is just, uh, distributed are now actually responding to that flux. So the goal is in testing is not necessarily to tell you, am I perimenopausal?

• 16:45Speaker 00

  It's a good starting ground for a conversation because what at the end of the day is the most important? The experience of what you're doing. So I can come on the back end and saying, I still think you're worthy of hormone therapy. If that's what you choose, this is where we're going to start. Now, the Dutch test, I think, is good for looking at metabolites or variations of your estradiol and your progesterone and what they're actually doing, right? It's a good follow through to see exactly where the peaks are, where it's maybe going down a little bit. That is more extensive. But if someone's just basically trying to see where am I? I always say, yes, your estrogen and progesterone, your FSH is good to look at, but also things like cortisol, thyroid, also your vitamin D.

• 17:30Speaker 00

  Because now you're going to start to see deficiencies in other parts of your body because you're going through this transition. In medicine, what we typically do, like I said, we are good at disease. I am really trying to capture women before they hit menopause to give them the best building blocks so that at 60, 70, and 80, they are optimized instead of waiting for it to be a catastrophic fall off the cliff. That's really what we're trying to do when we think of longevity, looking at hormone therapy in mid-age is really that opportunity, that chapter to say, my next chapter is coming. Forty percent of our lives are spent in the post-menopausal phase. What do I want this chapter to look like? Let's start mixing up the recipe a little bit.

• 18:11Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. You know, and I think it's important to note that these are not things that jump out of the labs, right?

• 18:16Speaker 00

  Do not.

• 18:16Gary Brecka?

  And I think we always want it to be so black and white. Okay, hemoglobin A1, C6.4.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  That's what we've told women.

• 18:21Gary Brecka?

  Biotic, yeah. This is independent. It's not that clear. It's the, it's the whole picture. And I love how you are talking about the symptomology, the subjective part of the health history that says, this is how I feel, this is how I wake up, this is how I think, this is my mood, my emotions, my libido, my energy levels. I mean, those are all classic signs. And I think just as adults, I mean, men and women, we We intentionally try to sometimes ignore these.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  Oh, we are classically trained as men and women, as humans, to

• 18:53Gary Brecka?

  Humans, yeah.

• 18:54Speaker 00

  ignore what your body is telling you until it tells you something where it's catastrophic. And that's when we say, I may need to take care of that. So it's trying to kind of front end that with being like, let's pay attention to our bodies so much that the moment something is changing, we can start the conversation and not wait till it's a train wreck.

• 19:15Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. And I think so the, the blood panel testing, I will say that three weeks, almost to the day after my wife started hormone therapy, complete game changer.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  Isn't it? And you were seeing this like firsthand?

• 19:32Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. I mean, libido came back.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:36Gary Brecka?

  And, and I think sadly, in a lot of, a lot of marriages and relationships, you know, when libido leaves the building, you know, they're, you know, they think that love and attraction has left the building and it starts to create a lot of unnecessary friction in a relationship. So libido came back, her sleep almost immediately in that period deepened. The frozen shoulder went away and after the three week period, probably 10 days after that.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  That's amazing.

• 20:01Gary Brecka?

  I mean, she went from here to just being able to put her hand straight up in no pain. And these were adhesions.

• 20:06Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 20:06Gary Brecka?

  So, and I've been down the rabbit hole of, you know, what, what, what is the mechanism of that? Because I just thought I never made, you know, drew, drew that correlation. And, and then I think, like we talked about, when the FDA,

• 20:19Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 20:20Gary Brecka?

  you know, removed the black box warning from female hormone therapy and the chairman of the FDA came out and said, Hey, 50 million women have unnecessarily suffered because this study was misquoted and the mainstream media loves, loves controversy.

• 20:36Speaker 00

  Oh, they love sensationalizing.

• 20:37Gary Brecka?

  This is gonna kill you and they're gonna die. And, and I think so many women, millions and millions of them, just completely hormone therapy was off the table. Because of.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  I think we look for, you know, in general, direction, especially when it comes to your health. That's what we've always idealized medicine as, direction in order to give someone what they need to do in order to be their best health. So when the WHOI, you know, kind of came out with this kind of catastrophic message, it really did, one, misalign what providers thought, you know, we do no harm. And if we're thinking, oh, my goodness, I gave something that may be of substantial harm to a patient, the first thing we'll do is saying, I'm not doing that anymore. So now you have kind of the director of this relationship between physician and patients being like, I can't give that to you. And

• 21:31Speaker 00

  then patients also seeing it on their level because it was brought in the media way that it was brought was to everybody, right? So now the public is like, oh, my God, now I've done something to harm myself. And so that really annihilated the benefits, which we now know and have known for years of what hormones can really offer you, not only for symptoms. And that's, you know, something that we can discuss is hormone therapy. Yes, there are symptoms that we've discussed over and over again now, but also longevity. What does it do for preventing chronic disease? What does it do for brain health or bone health later on in life? Those are the conversations that we really should have focused on when looking at the benefit of hormone therapy.

• 22:11Gary Brecka?

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

• 22:56Gary Brecka?

  Exclusive, you're getting my personal protocols, the exact tools I use for water fasting, gut optimization and morning routines that have taken me decades to perfect. This isn't theory. This is what works in the real world. The community launches challenges throughout the year where you get direct access to me and my network of experts. It's like having a personal health advisory board for less than a hundred dollars a month. Your health is your wealth and this investment pays dividends for life. Join the VIP community at theultimatehuman.com/vip and step into your ultimate potential. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. I think a lot of women, you know, they're, they're, they're getting into this too late. And I've heard you talk about target timeframes.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:37Gary Brecka?

  Where like there's a good, better, best, right? There's never a time where there's no hope, but there's a, there's a time where it's good, a time where it's better and a time where it's best. And relative to hormone therapy, what does that look like for, for women?

• 23:51Speaker 00

  That was one of the things that the W H I did get wrong in the study because the ideal fundamental of the study was cardiovascular risk. And what can we do to decrease cardiovascular risk because heart disease is the number one killer of women? So that, you know, when we're looking at a study, we're like, this is, this is good. We're going to look at something that has great outcome. Unfortunately, who they used hormone therapy in, in the study were not the best. And we're talking about good, better, best of who we should have been using. These were women who were on the average older than menopausal age. So they were way in their elder 50s into 60s, smokers, people who had history of heart disease. So again, that's not ideally who you want to start hormone therapy in.

• 24:33Speaker 00

  Who you do want to, for anyone who's listening, is in that late perimenopause into early menopause transition, which could mean if you wanted to put a tag on it on the age, maybe 45 through 55. And that is when we start to see the flux in hormones and perimenopause, you're still having your cycle. Into that early timeframe, probably within the first five to 10 years of not having a cycle is the ideal time. Do you want to know why? I think you want to know why.

• 25:01Gary Brecka?

  I always want to know why. And my audience wants to know why.

• 25:04Speaker 00

  But we're dealing with symptoms, so we're minimizing and resolving some of those symptoms, which can make a woman's life very frustrating. But the other part and benefit of estrogen and progesterone and testosterone is that it has such stark relationships that are beneficial when we think of glucose metabolism, brain health, decreasing inflammation. Estrogen really is one of those robust hormones that is an anti-inflammatory, right? We know that inflammation is one of the main causes of disease.

• 25:34Gary Brecka?

  Root of all evil, yeah.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  But it is. And then we talk about glucose, right? So sugar, like, how is it manifesting in a way where it's going to control your glucose better? And then the last thing is, your organs need estrogen. There are estrogen receptors all over, so we're losing muscle mass. So when estrogen is lost, we're not able to kind of get our lean muscle mass that we like. Our gut health, gut health is imperative for future and disease prevention, but also heart muscle and brain, so bones even. So I could go on and on about the receptors that are needing estrogen. So when you lose it, your body is like, what do I do now?

• 26:09Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  So I really think that timing is important, that 45 through 55. And that's loose numbers. That's not saying if you start after the age of 55, that you're not going to get the benefit.

• 26:19Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 26:20Speaker 00

  But we want to get you before the body starts to have the inflammatory response. Now you've been exposed to your heart muscle not being optimal, so you're increasing atherosclerosis and things that are going to cause heart disease.

• 26:31Gary Brecka?

  You know, I think too, it's important to talk about the impacts on hormones that are not directly related to hormones. Things like stress, like, and we're going to get into diet and lifestyle choices, but hormone mimetics, you know, cosmetics, microplastics. I mean, these things that don't make their way into the mainstream discussion in mainstream academia, but we've seen mold and mycotoxin infections, severe heavy metal toxicity, and just the overburden of mycotoxins, you know, between the glyphosate and the paraquat and the microplastics.

• 27:14Gary Brecka?

  Individually, maybe individually, these things are not catastrophic on their own, but at some point, you're just overstressing the system.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:22Gary Brecka?

  And women, I, I think in general, have a tendency to develop things like caregiver syndrome, where they, they put the needs of everybody else before the needs of themselves. You know, they're used to raising a family, or taking care of a spouse, or kids, or coworkers, or their career, or their, you know, any number of things. And they sort of start slowly putting themselves into the backseat.

• 27:45Speaker 00

  They are usually at the bottom of the list.

• 27:47Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  And the back of the line. And that's why I was saying earlier, this timeframe to focus on you is very hard. For someone who's put everything else ahead of them or in front of them, is to now being like, what? I have to pay attention to me and pay attention to my symptoms and what's really bothering me?

• 28:06Gary Brecka?

  Feel selfish for a lot of women.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  And say it to someone is actually a leap from what they have done for so long. So that, there's a little bit of like uncomfortableness with kind of guiding women in the sense of, I actually want you to pay attention to you. And actually then come back and be able to tell me how you're feeling. And they're like, say what?

• 28:27Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 28:28Speaker 00

  Like you get to be selfish.

• 28:30Gary Brecka?

  You need to talk to my husband. Tell him, write me a script for this.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 28:34Gary Brecka?

  Because, and I think this is why it starts to give us, shed some light into why there is such a prevalence of autoimmune disease in women. Because where, where does autoimmune prey? It preys on the weak. And what makes you more susceptible? You know, anything that degrades the immune system, chronic stress, being in a sympathetic state for too long. I think women very often don't feel safe in their own bodies. That makes sense.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  They are taught that, not to feel safe in their own bodies. And this is where I go on like my emotional kind of like landscape.

• 29:10Gary Brecka?

  Dude, rip it. Let's go.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  My woo woo MD version is.

• 29:16Speaker 00

  We have been taught that, but also the chronic stress we absorb, we're emotional absorbers of everyone else around us. And that actually wreaks havoc internally, increases inflammation, the body keeps score. If there's traumas that they've endured early in their life, how we socialize women to think is a big part of that as well. But you know, Dr. Gabor Maté, he is an MD, but he is a psychiatrist and focuses on trauma and what trauma holds in the body. But he also understands that the trauma can then reveal itself externally as autoimmune disease. So you know, it's all linked and how our bodies are responding internally, which sometimes we don't see externally, which is hard to capture, is that it manifests

• 30:01Speaker 00

  as autoimmune disease. But also estrogen is a potent anti-inflammatory. So it only makes sense that you start to see autoimmune diseases impacting women or the diagnosis of in their 40s and 50s.

• 30:14Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 30:14Speaker 00

  And so that is everything together.

• 30:16Gary Brecka?

  Parabolic spike. Yeah, there's a parabolic spike. And you know, what's interesting is now you bring that up is I was looking at epidemiological data and a men analyses and men and women track very closely until that sort of mid 40s timeframe. Then there's this sort of parabolic spike and they start to depart. They, you know, men and autoimmune disease. So if we were to go back into lifestyle choices, diet, sleep, exercise, hormetic stresses. So for the women that are listening to this, what does a low inflammatory, prohormone, if you will, healthy immune system lifestyle look like? What are, what are some of the

• 31:00Gary Brecka?

  interventions that you do that are not hormone related or supplement related?

• 31:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that goes down into gut health. And this is where I think this is imperative that we do a better job at. Creating an infrastructure where gut health is very important because the gut also has estrogen receptors. And so the ability for the gut to have less permeability rather than more, which is what happens with aging alone, but also with estrogen decline, we do see that the gut takes a very big hit in what it actually allows for it to come out, which is the things that should stay in and vice versa. And so what we need to do is focus on anti-inflammatory ways to heal our gut or keep our gut safe as possible through anti-inflammatory foods.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  But also, this is where you start to see more deficiencies in vitamins as well because of what our gut is kind of pushing out, which really shouldn't be pushed out. So I always say that the way to best treat the gut is to decrease, obviously, your processed foods. It sounds easy, but when you actually look at diet of most Americans and in the westernized population, processed food is still a very big part of what we consume. And then the other thing is more whole foods and protein. Yeah. And whole foods in the sense of make your plate the rainbow. Yeah. Incorporating more less cooked, less processed foods. And then protein, we have not established for women especially, how important protein

• 32:30Speaker 00

  is for our diet in order to sustain lean muscle mass, but also it helps with our brain, with our brain health too. So our gut talks to our brain. Oh, yeah. And so when we were talking about brain fog. It does. And clarity, a lot has to do with what we're putting into our bodies. I would say, even though it's considered supplementation, I do find a space for supplementation. The best way to get your vitamins and your nutrients is through your whole foods, what you consume. Great. But we usually are lower than we should be. So I would say, people always ask me, what's your top three? I usually say it's very individualized and personalized because when I have people come to me and I read through their labs, everyone will have a different story.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  But most women will have a deficiency in vitamin D, in vitamin B12. Catastrophic. And fiber and protein are the other two that I feel need to be kind of heightened when we think of what we need to do with our diet, but really looking at things that are gonna help decrease inflammation, but also substantiating the parts of our body that is like, we are really at a deficit right now, how can you help me? Yeah, and I think that.

• 33:35Gary Brecka?

  Protein, you know, consumption by women is woefully inadequate.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:40Gary Brecka?

  Thought leaders like you, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, you know, talk about this a lot. And, and hey, thankfully, we just flipped the food pyramid upside down.

• 33:46Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 33:47Gary Brecka?

  I mean, literally, we pulled it over the ground.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  Turn it upside down.

• 33:51Gary Brecka?

  Set it back down again. And people went crazy, but we, you know, when I say we, because I'm aligned with

• 33:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:58Gary Brecka?

  Maha action, Bobby Kennedy's Maha action. And, and by doing this, we, we ended the war on saturated fat. And we ended the war on protein. And we really began the discussion about how much of our caloric intake is just coming from high glycemic carbohydrates. Um, you know, so many people being insulin resistant and the impact that that has on your, on your hormones, because, you know, I feel like, uh, it's very rare in human beings for multiple systems to just break down all at once. You know, there's usually an early domino that starts to fall.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  It's just like that one that like tips the line.

• 34:35Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  Right.

• 34:36Gary Brecka?

  And, and, you know, I think blood sugar is one of those.

• 34:41Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh. It is like, I don't even know if it's a slight tip. When the glucose goes out of control.

• 34:46Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  I mean, those dominos are like going down.

• 34:48Gary Brecka?

  So how important is it for women, um, to meet their protein equivalent and to control their blood sugar? And if they don't know what their blood sugar looks like, what does a lab test look like for them to get the data that they need?

• 34:59Speaker 00

  I love, so I, I think that blood glucose is definitely something that we are good at in labs, right? And so we're good at, what is that? When we usually draw a glucose, people be like, my glucose was great. I'm like, but that was at the time, at the time that I drew your lab, that's what your glucose is, is showing me. So whether you had something that had high glycemic index before or not, that's what it's showing me. One of the best ways that we can do that is a hemoglobin A1C, which is our glycosylated hemoglobin, which really shows us retrospective analysis of what your body does in order to manage glucose. Because it's really the management of it.

• 35:35Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  And what your body has in reserve versus what your organs are able to shuttle glucose as a fuel into it, especially your muscle and your brain. And when we look at a hemoglobin A1C, it's really giving us a three month kind of picture of where your body is and how it metabolizes glucose. That really is the best way for us to say, this is where you are. We don't want you to go into prediabetic phase. We don't want you to be a diabetic. But if you're close to that number, here's what we can do to kind of offset that. Another way to watch your hemoglobin A1C. I really like a CGM.

• 36:11Gary Brecka?

  Constant glucose monitor.

• 36:13Speaker 00

  Continuous glucose monitor. And the reason why that's important is because you and I will have different responses because of gender, but also maybe movement, maybe lifestyle of how we utilize glucose. Foods also in response to how our bodies do that is quite different as well. So I have people who just ethnically are going to be able to metabolize rice better than some other. And so if you don't know that information, then you are going to go by a template of what is good for you.

• 36:43Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 36:44Speaker 00

  And sometimes that's not the best way to feature how nutrition is being implemented into your body and your body is able to utilize that glucose in the best way.

• 36:52Gary Brecka?

  If you want protein to build lean muscle, but without the caloric impact or need to cut, you need perfect amino. It's pure essential amino acids, the building blocks of proteins in a precise form and ratio that allows for near 100% utilization in building lean muscle and no caloric impact. So we build protein six times as much as weight, but without the excess body fat we normally get during bulking. This is the new era of protein supplementation and it's real. If you want to build lean muscle without having to cut, you need perfect amino. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. And so, and once we have this, this information, you start to, I, I think the CGM is a, is a great idea because I wore one for a while

• 37:37Gary Brecka?

  and I was surprised by a lot of things.

• 37:39Speaker 00

  I did too.

• 37:40Gary Brecka?

  Really surprised.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  I was fascinated. There's one thing, I love telling the story. What your body does in response to lifestyle. I had a CGM on and I just, I did mine for just two weeks.

• 37:50Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, that's.

• 37:51Speaker 00

  I'm not the one who like wears it 12 months, a year.

• 37:53Gary Brecka?

  It's, it's like a, it can sometimes be paralysis of analysis.

• 37:56Speaker 00

  I know, I know. I'm like, take it off.

• 37:58Gary Brecka?

  I had a good night's sleep. No, you didn't.

• 38:01Speaker 00

  It's like you're on the line of like looking too much at it.

• 38:04Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  I had a CGM on and I did a cold plunge. And it went down within, it brought my glucose down significantly after doing a cold plunge. So imagine if we know, yes, your body was responding to that stressor in the best way possible. So imagine we had that data in order to know not only the food that I'm intaking, but maybe if I take that 10 minute walk after I eat a big meal, what if I'm able to do sauna and cold plunge every day? What is that going to do to my glucose? So I think it's just a great way to see how you can instill every part of your lifestyle and nutrition into what's keeping your glucose maintained at the level that you needed to.

• 38:42Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I think, you know, I had a group of people that put these on for a couple of weeks. And I think most people were astounded that after fasting all night and sleeping, getting up in the morning, they would start to move around and all of a sudden their blood sugar would start to rise. They're like, how's this possible?

• 38:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 38:57Gary Brecka?

  I haven't even eaten. I'm like, well, that's your liver, actually.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:00Gary Brecka?

  You know, going to work, this is a good sign. You know, it's taking the glycogen, the stored sugar and creating glucose.

• 39:05Speaker 00

  Cause they needed it. They're like, don't pass out.

• 39:08Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're, it's fascinating.

• 39:11Speaker 00

  The body's a beautiful machine.

• 39:12Gary Brecka?

  It's such a beautiful machine.

• 39:13Speaker 00

  If we treat it right.

• 39:14Gary Brecka?

  The more I study it, the more I believe in God too, because I just don't think this whole thing happened by chance.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  I don't think you and I, or even, you know, as many thought leaders in the world could have put it together better than.

• 39:25Gary Brecka?

  You could, the greatest team of engineers, give it all the AI you want to give it. You're still not going to figure it out. I mean, this is such a beautiful design, so architected, so incredibly. But, you know, I was very surprised by that. And I think the group that I was doing this with was really surprised by that. And then also, like you said, you know, looking at higher fat, higher protein, high fiber meals versus high glycemic meals and the duration of the elevation for a lot of these timeframes after meals. It just gives people a really good way of saying, I'm, I now have a roadmap for how I can, how I should be eating and the positive impact that just a 15 minute walk after, after a meal.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  Do you know how? Key this is, what you're saying right now to when we would bring people in and give them diabetic counseling, right? So now it's on paper with some messed up, you know, food pyramid that is not even relevant anymore. And I'm trying to explain in an educational way, like this is why we need your glucose, that glycemic diet does this to it. But it was never a picture of what they're actually doing in real time.

• 40:34Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  So now for someone to see it is only incentivizing them to be like, oh, I want to keep it there.

• 40:40Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  I want to keep it at that good level.

• 40:42Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, you kind of gamify it.

• 40:43Speaker 00

  And that is the best way for me as a like high, you know, research evidence based physician to bring something to someone and being like, this is you at its finest. What do we do from here?

• 40:53Gary Brecka?

  So I want to, I want to bring it back to the autoimmune discussion because it's such a, it's, it's such a prevalent

• 41:01Speaker 00

  Very relevant.

• 41:02Gary Brecka?

  challenge in society. And a lot of times when I do stage talks or lectures and I've got a big audience out there, I'll say, raise your hand if you or someone you love has been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. Seventy-five, eighty percent of the hands go up. I'll say, raise your hand if you or someone you love has been diagnosed with more than one autoimmune disease. That's the part that really astounds me. At least half the hands that went up go up again. And it's purely anecdotal and subjective, but I've done this all over the world in, in, in very large audiences and it's, it is astounding to me. I didn't go three, four, five, but you know, how many people have compounded chronic conditions?

• 41:45Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 41:46Gary Brecka?

  And I think that one of the areas where there's a lot of paucity of information is what does a lifestyle or a morning routine look like that really empowers the immune system? Like how, how do we, women especially, strengthen our immune system? How do they feel safe in, in their body? What are some of the like lifestyle practices that they can engage in?

• 42:06Speaker 00

  Oh, I love this question because I think, and, and not to kind of throw shade at male biohackers.

• 42:13Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, don't. Well, you're on a male biohacking podcast, so be careful.

• 42:17Speaker 00

  But for, I know, right? But for females, like we said before, they're

• 42:19Gary Brecka?

  Cut this part right out.

• 42:20Speaker 00

  You're like, and cut.

• 42:22Gary Brecka?

  Thank you for coming, Jessica.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  And we're done. But they take on so much that sometimes they don't find the time for themselves. So going back to that, that really was, that really was the point I was making is teaching women to take time for themselves, even if it's just 10 to 20 minutes a day. These small implementations in their daily life can do outstanding work. So some of those things are, I'm a firm believer in some form of meditation. So good. Because when you have mind, body, if we think about autoimmune in general, it is literally the body cells attacking its own, right? Yeah, yeah. So we know that there's inflammation. We know that there's some type of attack going on. So when we think of mind, body medicine as really regulating the mind in order to

• 43:07Speaker 00

  kind of tell the body what to do, the body is just a vehicle of what is going on in the mind. So true. And so if we look at it, just like if someone could just take a step back, whoever's listening and saying, wow, I never thought about it that way, that your body is literally just doing what the mind is telling it. So if we can find a way to quiet the mind, there is a lot of data that shows that meditation in some form of mindfulness can actually help with disease process. Wow. Decreasing chronic progression of a disease. So starting with that, firm believer in that. And it can just be 10 minutes, 15 minutes a day. The other part is what you put in your body. Yeah. Really taking a good look at food log, right? What have I done? I challenge my patients to do this. I'm like, just give me two weeks

• 43:49Speaker 00

  of what you're eating. Don't try and eat the healthiest thing for two weeks. Just give me like raw data. I just need to know what's going on. From that, I can make adjustments to being like, this is not serving your body well as far as inflammation, because that's the fuel for autoimmune diseases is like inflammation. If it's got it, it's like, I'm on. Yeah. Fire is lit. Something called the immune system there, right? So there's diet and one of the best things that you can do in the morning is because that's when your cortisol is really high, is not to create more cortisol, right? And so what are the things that you can do? I think that having something as simple as water with lemon is a way to kind of neutralize and get your body ready for what you're going to put into it for the rest of the day. And not eating a high glycemic thing first thing in the morning.

• 44:33Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  So we're really trying to keep inflammation down.

• 44:36Gary Brecka?

  We agree with that.

• 44:36Speaker 00

  And you can have more sustainability throughout the day with energy if you start with protein. And the last thing I would say is always exercise, right? So however that can look, it does not need to be a full out hour. A lot of people don't have time for that. So I always appeal to, I say this even in medicine, if we're talking about disease progression, is if you can take care of the person who has the least resources, then you're reaching everybody.

• 45:02Gary Brecka?

  I completely agree.

• 45:03Speaker 00

  So I can't always, great, I want, I want all the gadgets and all the things, but I gotta go to work. Unfortunately, I still gotta go to work. So I'm like, if I can take care of someone who has all of these responsibilities and taking care of all these people, then I know I've reached everybody. So that could be, again, it could be jumping rope, right? It could be taking a walk for 10 minutes. Imagine if you did that routine for every day, getting up a little bit earlier in order to give yourself this 30 minutes, 45 minutes of self-care, you will show up a better person at 70, 80, and 90. And that's what we're trying to accomplish.

• 45:41Gary Brecka?

  You'll not only show up as, you know, a better person then, you'll show up as a better person almost right away. You know, I, I made a choice about six years ago that I would schedule all of my meetings and travel around sleep and exercise. And there's exceptions to this sometimes.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  I like that.

• 45:58Gary Brecka?

  Scheduling wise, but I mean, if you open my phone right now,

• 46:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:01Gary Brecka?

  you will see, I mean, my morning is, is blocked in there. And I will make exceptions to this, but by and large, I mean, you could go three months out of my schedule right now and see, okay, well, if I'm in London, the, the meetings don't start before then. If, if I'm traveling, rather than take the red eye, I spend the night and leave the next morning at a reasonable hour. Just that small little shift and realizing that self-care is not selfish. It's actually the best way to be selfless because. You can, you take this time for yourself and then give the rest of your day away.

• 46:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can, you can give so much more when you are filling your reserve. We were even talking about that earlier. When someone falls ill or is sick or is not feeling their best, a lot of it, you can't ever evade that. Right. But the goal is, what have I invested in myself or given back in self-care? That when these things happen, I have reserve and I have recovery.

• 46:57Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 46:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:58Gary Brecka?

  You know, being affiliated with this Maha Committee, we, we, we looked at some of the broad statistics of healthcare spending pushing about $5 trillion a year. Healthcare outcomes, we essentially lead the world in morbid obesity, type 2 diabetes.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  Which is, isn't that weird?

• 47:14Gary Brecka?

  It's, it's incredible.

• 47:15Speaker 00

  It's really fascinating that that's, that's our, we're number one in that. Like, that's not what we're trying to be number one in, but somehow we've gone there.

• 47:22Gary Brecka?

  But, and then there's a lot of evidence that, you know, we lead the civilized world in infant and maternal mortality. That one brought me to a full stop.

• 47:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:35Gary Brecka?

  Right. Because all you have to do is walk around Disney World to realize why we're leading the world in morbid obesity.

• 47:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:40Gary Brecka?

  But, and, and I've heard you talk about the crisis in, in black women.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 47:47Gary Brecka?

  Um, which are three to four times more likely to die at childbirth, which is astounding to me. You know, and when we look at when disease and pathology seems to be selective, like autoimmune disease in women. We have to take a step back and say, okay, what is, what is happening there? Because these, you know, mortality is not sexually selective either. Um, and it's also, I wouldn't assume racially selective. So what, what is the impetus? What is the backstory?

• 48:16Speaker 00

  You know, Gary, that is the million dollar question. Well, I do have several answers. One is a black woman myself, but also an OBGYN. So this is something that I'm seeing like every day in my training and seeing where we're missing the mark and such the gap. And I said it earlier, unless everyone takes a step back, and I'm glad you framed it that way. That it should be surprising.

• 48:36Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  And it should cause pause in everyone. It's not just only the people who are involved that it should cause pause in. Cause until we take care of a community that has the least resources and access, then everyone's not okay. So until we choose to make choice, everyone has choice, but make that choice where we're invested in people who don't have as much or as much access. Then we're not taking care of everybody. And so the reasons that that happened is it's systemic. I mean, I think that, you know, I always just like to say it like it is because I don't think it's offensive. And the more that we can talk about it, the less people will be offended. Is there systemic racism?

• 49:14Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 49:14Speaker 00

  It is what it is. I see it, I've lived it. So, once we understand that there's that and we can be like, huh, what do I need to do as an individual, an organization, an institution to address that? Then we're actually going to get somewhere. Instead of us kind of like being like, oh, that's not me or I'm offended. Or, oh, I don't want to talk about it's too dicey. No, just say what it is. And then how do we make change? The other part of that is, again, going to diet. Typically, what you'll find in communities that have lack of access and resources are the foods that are not the best.

• 49:48Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  And so when you have increase in inflammation, then you're going to have increase in diabetes, which just gestational diabetes is a big part, but also cardiovascular disease. So when we think of pre-eclampsia, which is a number, another reason why we see these morbidity and mortality rates that high. It's a vascular issue, which is because we have increased risk of heart disease. So all of these things, it's the domino effect. Once you kind of start the domino moving, then everything else is going to fall. So I think we need to all take a step back and say, where do we start with this discussion? Because the discussion that we've been having is not getting us anywhere. And so I think the discussion needs to change between all. Stakeholders.

• 50:32Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 50:32Speaker 00

  It's all stakeholder conversation, not just one.

• 50:35Gary Brecka?

  I think you have now, some of our governmental elites, I'll say in a positive way, I believe are well intentioned about this Maha movement.

• 50:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:45Gary Brecka?

  Like, how do we get, you know, the toxins out of our food supply?

• 50:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 50:50Gary Brecka?

  How do we improve the nutritional foundation for our children, especially our public school programs? And I think the, you know, women's health in general is where there's a lack of understanding of kind of what to do. But I will tell you emphatically, I know these statistics are making their way into the right ears.

• 51:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:11Gary Brecka?

  What?

• 51:12Speaker 00

  As long as we make sure that the people who need to understand, or are being impacted by it, rather, understand what's being done and changed. So we have to make sure that the message is going all the way downstream to the people who really, really need it.

• 51:27Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. What would you say, you know, to the administration, HHS, CDC, FDA, NIH? If they're listening, and they're very likely they are. So, they're probably listening, we don't even know it.

• 51:42Speaker 00

  Without us even knowing, right?

• 51:45Gary Brecka?

  What would you say, you know, in broad context? Here's some of the changes I would really love to see at that level to address things like 3, 4x increase in black female mortality over the general population.

• 51:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, coming from someone like me who's been in the industry of women's health for so long, is I think we need more representation. Representation with more women at the table, but also people of color. I think that that's imperative, because you never really can understand or know the journey of a group of people if you're not them.

• 52:20Gary Brecka?

  I know.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  That's just inherently what it is. Yeah.

• 52:23Gary Brecka?

  Sort of debate that, yeah.

• 52:24Speaker 00

  And then the other thing that I would say is make sure that what's being provided is understood. By the group that it's impacting as well. And I can even say this for myself, you know, trained as a physician, when a lot of patients come in and see me, doesn't matter what they're coming in for, I speak to them in doctor talk. And they're like, what the hell are you talking about? And so it's my responsibility, actually, to ensure that whoever is in my office is walking out, understanding what I said.

• 52:53Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 52:53Speaker 00

  It's not their responsibility. They can ask me questions. But if I'm just talking above their head with stuff that they're like, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm not doing anything, essentially. So I would say that making sure that whatever we're changing, or whatever messaging, or whatever resources are being improved, that the people who it's for actually know.

• 53:15Gary Brecka?

  You know, I'm all about optimizing performance. And lately, I've been using the Ion Weighted Vest during my workouts, and it's been a game changer. It isn't your average weighted vest. It's designed to fit like a second skin, activating your core, improving blood flow, and even helping you with recovery while you train. What I love most is that the weight is perfectly distributed. It doesn't pull on your shoulders or throw off your alignment. Whether I'm doing strength training, or cardio, or just taking a walk, I'm burning more calories, building muscle, and pushing my endurance even further. If you're serious about leveling up your training and unlocking your full potential, check out the Ion Weighted Vest at iongear.com. That's A-I-O-N gear dot com. And you can use code ULTIMATE for 10% off

• 53:59Gary Brecka?

  and start training smarter today. Now, let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. You even talked about insurance coverage.

• 54:07Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 54:07Gary Brecka?

  And workplace environments for, like, menopausal women. Because I can tell you, as someone who is deeply embedded in the industry, nobody is having that conversation in the workplace. And I don't think that we are addressing for women, you know, the need for management of menopausal symptoms, you know, at that level. And, and, you know, women, when they're reaching these, the upper echelon of, you know, at least the socioeconomic echelon of, of, you know, the corporate hierarchy, and then they're...

• 54:46Gary Brecka?

  Hit with menopause, you know, it makes things infinitely more more difficult. What did what did you mean by we need to have this conversation around insurance coverage and and workplace awareness for?

• 55:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think when we think of women's health, we have seen even even outside of maternal mortality and morbidity is when we were just to look at midlife stage of women in menopause. There are so many women who actually leave the job force because of a menopausal symptom that they're just unable to kind of

• 55:22Gary Brecka?

  cope.

• 55:22Speaker 00

  cope with, factor into their their work life, their family life, and they're like this, I have to give this up. And many of them don't necessarily want to give it up. So obviously, the conversation is not being, again, held by the person who's being impacted. And the person or the organization who can say, huh, what do I need to do as the responsible party in this relationship in order to meet women where they are? And women's health in general has not been researched, you know, women in general have not been placed in research for a very long time. We're very new to that. We have suddenly realized that women are not little men. And so we're like, oh, let's actually include them.

• 56:01Gary Brecka?

  Fifty years to figure that out, actually.

• 56:02Speaker 00

  Let's put them into research.

• 56:03Gary Brecka?

  I call punch, you call punch. Intermittent fasting, you intermittent fasting.

• 56:06Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 56:07Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 56:08Speaker 00

  And so now that we've finally gotten there, we're like, yes, women are not little men, and we'll put them in research, is actually saying, okay, with these outcomes and these data, especially in menopause, and I know that now it's impacting brain health. Now I know that it's impacting the ability for them to not sit at a desk or a meeting and, you know, self combust with heat for hot flashes.

• 56:30Gary Brecka?

  Self combust.

• 56:31Speaker 00

  Right? Literally, how do I make room for this? Because it was only maybe 10, 15 years ago that we made actionable items in the workforce to accommodate lactating mothers.

• 56:43Speaker 00

  Right? So now we're at the stage where we need to approach midlife in the same way of finding ways to have coverage in insurance for whether that's getting labs, whether that's getting menopausal care, like actually making a package that is adjusted to women in mid age and providing for them in ways where they're like, I now can safely go to the doctor to talk to them about it because I also know I'm being supported.

• 57:09Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 57:10Speaker 00

  Through my insurance and my workplace.

• 57:12Gary Brecka?

  And I think selfishly, this is a, this will have dramatic positive financial impact because, you know, it's, it's almost keeping people out of the system, right? The system is very expensive and once you get into that system with a chronic disease and you start that management process and you've got thyroid and hypertension and, and, or diabetes or autoimmune, I mean, these are extraordinarily expensive.

• 57:39Speaker 00

  Costly.

• 57:40Gary Brecka?

  And if we did some preventative care and sunk some of the funds into preventative care, dietary, lifestyle, which you're talking about, all of these subjective factors and actually found a way to compensate physicians for making these kinds of recommendations.

• 57:54Speaker 00

  You're speaking my language now, Gary.

• 57:55Gary Brecka?

  Good.

• 57:57Speaker 00

  Dude, but you see how it came back to?

• 57:59Gary Brecka?

  We can change this.

• 58:00Speaker 00

  How do we, how do we prevent chronic disease? I don't think that it's that difficult to do.

• 58:07Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 58:07Speaker 00

  I think what we have been messaged in society as what is, what life is, what the outcomes and expectations are, is actually not a fairy tale. I don't want to necessarily just get old and then I can't do anything. So basically what we're seeing now is people are getting to retirement, but then they can't do anything after because they're frail, they've broken a hip, they have a chronic disease and they have to carry around an oxygen tank. So why is it that we have the best of research and the best of resources and we're not applying it in the way that people can actually live longer and live well?

• 58:43Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. And I think from a purely, just purely black and white capitalistic perspective. It would be the best thing.

• 58:50Speaker 00

  It would be the best thing.

• 58:51Gary Brecka?

  This is the largest, I mean, five trillion dollars a year is, last time I checked, that's a lot of money.

• 58:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:56Gary Brecka?

  And, um, and, and it encapsulates like the next six or seven countries combined. And we have these kinds of outcomes and by shifting some of that healthcare spending to these screenings and preventative care and, you know, I, I, I think the jury's still out on AI. My feeling is it's going to be positive for medicine.

• 59:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, you know, how I have come to think of AI is it's an extension of. When AI, you know, kind of first appeared on the scene wide scale, I would say about four or five years ago. I was scared as a physician, I'm like, it's coming for my job.

• 59:31Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 59:31Speaker 00

  I gotta watch my job.

• 59:33Gary Brecka?

  Hell with those robots.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  You know, what I've seen is there's always going to be that scare of something that's very new and unsettling. But what I have seen is the ability to be, to make physicians more efficient.

• 59:44Gary Brecka?

  I totally think so.

• 59:44Speaker 00

  With their time, but also with the wide scale of research and data that we have. Now it's helping me accomplish something better for the patient in a shorter amount of time. And I think that the more that we're able to do that, the more that I can give back to patients and also help myself not overwhelm myself and burn myself out.

• 1:00:04Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I think that, you know, the ability to take potentially trillions of pieces of independent data and create an actionable result, I think that's fascinating. I mean, I think you combine artificial intelligence, early detection.

• 1:00:18Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:00:18Gary Brecka?

  And big data, we start to see, wow, look at these patterns that are emerging. And I think it'd have a really positive impact on healthcare.

• 1:00:27Speaker 00

  You know what I love about it too, now that as you're, you know, kind of putting it into that package is personalization. Personalization of how we look at longevity and functional medicine, quite frankly, is outside of the data sets that we have that traditional medicine uses and is, for the, for the greater part of it, really good.

• 1:00:45Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  But we still have an N of one at some times where we're like, how do we make that? Applicable to you as an individual.

• 1:00:52Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  I think that that's what the AI has the, has a capability to do and I'm, and I'm fascinated at what it's, what I'm seeing now.

• 1:00:59Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I do too. I think it's good for my audience to know too. You, you published a book.

• 1:01:04Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:01:04Gary Brecka?

  Generation M.

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:01:06Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:06Speaker 00

  I did.

• 1:01:07Gary Brecka?

  Congratulations.

• 1:01:07Speaker 00

  In my spare time.

• 1:01:08Gary Brecka?

  I, I, dude, I know how hard it is to write a book. I've been writing a book for three years.

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  Isn't it like?

• 1:01:12Gary Brecka?

  And it's just because you want it to be perfect.

• 1:01:14Speaker 00

  It sounds so exciting.

• 1:01:15Gary Brecka?

  And at some point.

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:01:17Gary Brecka?

  You know, I, I, I know some granular PhD is gonna go, ah, look at that.

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:01:22Gary Brecka?

  Excited this, uh, you know, and the.

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  It's a very humbling experience, I would say too.

• 1:01:27Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:28Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, because you're very, you know, vulnerable, I guess, when you, you know, because this is your work and then you put it out there and then you know it's just gonna be scrutinized.

• 1:01:36Speaker 00

  I know, to the highest degree.

• 1:01:37Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, but it's been, it's been very well received and I know you've done a massive book tour, 2024.

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:01:44Gary Brecka?

  Watched the book.

• 1:01:46Gary Brecka?

  What, what can women, um, expect from that?

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

  Generation M was really a love letter.

• 1:01:52Gary Brecka?

  I didn't know there was a generation M, by the way.

• 1:01:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a generation X.

• 1:01:56Gary Brecka?

  But.

• 1:01:56Speaker 00

  There's generation M and every woman gets to be in it because at some point they're gonna reach that M, right? So every woman is either in generation M or is aspiring.

• 1:02:04Gary Brecka?

  You're heading there.

• 1:02:05Speaker 00

  I say it. I said you're aspiring.

• 1:02:07Gary Brecka?

  Even if you're not aspiring here.

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  See, I, see what I did there?

• 1:02:09Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:10Speaker 00

  Aspiring to be in generation M. But it really was a love letter from me to my patients, myself, my friends who were going through this, and I wanted it to be something that they would relate to. There's a lot of kind of patient stories in there. So I think community, when women think of like what they're going through, community is very important, but also something tangible, something of, I can do this. I can accomplish this. This is not overwhelming. We have really cast menopause into this light of dread.

• 1:02:42Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 1:02:42Speaker 00

  In a horror story. And I said, what better ways to change the script and the narrative into something where someone's like, I'm gonna, this is a comedic love story rather than a horror movie.

• 1:02:53Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:53Speaker 00

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna fall back and, I'm gonna fall back in love with myself and there may be some funny moments along the way.

• 1:02:59Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:00Speaker 00

  By golly, I can do this.

• 1:03:01Gary Brecka?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:03:02Speaker 00

  And that's how it's written because it approaches libido. We talk about sex. We talk about muscle. We talk about brain. We talk about meditation and also hormones. That's a big part of the book. But it isn't just always about hormones. I feel that once we create an infrastructure or framework in the daily lifestyle and kind of understanding who we are and how we're going to go through this life, hormones is kind of the, I'm also going to create this kind of framework and provide the best ways for each of those pillars to do it. But if we don't have those pillars, we're not doing anything.

• 1:03:37Gary Brecka?

  I totally agree. I mean, I think, you know, physicians like you, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon have really reframed the importance of weight bearing exercise and weight training and how muscle is our metabolic currency. So for the women that are listening, I mean, how important is strength training, especially midlife and later in life? How important is strength training? Is it a non-negotiable? Is it a luxury item? How and where does it fit in your sort of scope of what women should be doing too?

• 1:04:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. In the toolbox of women's lives and health and longevity, it is a non-negotiable.

• 1:04:17Gary Brecka?

  Lovely.

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  I feel that it is something that you can choose to ignore, but what will happen in the end is it will come back to bite you in the ass.

• 1:04:25Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, it surely will because muscle is our currency of longevity because that's what not only fuels our body and allows it for strength, it really is kind of pushing against our glucose metabolism.

• 1:04:41Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, it's a sponge.

• 1:04:42Speaker 00

  It is a sponge. It's one of the largest absorbers in addition to the brain of glucose. And we already lose muscle mass. That's an aging phenomenon that occurs, but what happens after menopause, after the loss of estrogen, is it compounds?

• 1:04:54Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 1:04:54Speaker 00

  So now we're losing muscle even more. So what are those ways that we can push back on that is through resistance and weight training and not small weight, it's heavy weight. Our bodies, don't underestimate it.

• 1:05:05Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:06Speaker 00

  Your body is able to adapt to things. Granted, you want to do it safely and adjust it over time, but never think that you were just here as a woman to lose muscle and not build that muscle back. And if you're going to do it with lightweight, that is, that is not the category that we should be living in.

• 1:05:24Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:24Speaker 00

  And so when I see women that are older, And even looking at the generation behind us, you know, or before me, rather, is it's kind of like you have this view of what women are doing and it's not all their fault. I'm not blaming them. I'm just saying that they weren't given the tools.

• 1:05:39Gary Brecka?

  They don't want to get bulky.

• 1:05:40Speaker 00

  They don't want to get bulky. And that's not, that's not even what happens when you, when you, when you lift weights. It really is, I am now giving back to my body and also my bone and my brain, right? So muscle, building your muscle mass back, one prevents you from frailty, improves your strength, but also impacts your brain health and also your bone health. So you are getting more than bang for your buck when you do weight training. So for me, it's a non-negotiable.

• 1:06:10Gary Brecka?

  So what does a morning routine for you look like? Cause my, my audience loves the tips and tricks. I'm going to ask you about supplementation, I'm going to ask you about morning routine. Maybe even, maybe even some of your travel tips.

• 1:06:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:24Gary Brecka?

  Cause talking to you about your schedule before the podcast, I was like, I travel a lot.

• 1:06:29Speaker 00

  There's a lot of travel in there. No, I love, I love showcasing. I definitely believe if I'm going to talk the talk, I need to walk the walk. And so weight training is a very big part of my daily regimen. Wake up and I definitely do mindfulness meditation. I say,

• 1:06:45Gary Brecka?

  And what does that look like?

• 1:06:46Speaker 00

  So I do guided because I'm not an expert at meditation. So I use guided. I do 10 to 15 minutes. It is, it is a muscle that you need to build as far as meditation.

• 1:06:55Gary Brecka?

  Like an app, your phone?

• 1:06:56Speaker 00

  I use an app. Calm is a good app that I use. I have kind of a meditation, I guess you could say, instructor. So I use those guided meditations, right? And I think that there's enough out there that people can really look, look on your Spotify and literally take in meditation and find one that's good for you. The other thing is I say, this may sound funny, but I say hello to the sun every morning.

• 1:07:19Gary Brecka?

  I do too.

• 1:07:20Speaker 00

  I literally say hello to it. My kids now do it too. They're like, good morning, sun. It is always there for you. It shows up every day.

• 1:07:27Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27Speaker 00

  And you get some vitamin D with that as well. So I do think it's important. That's a part of my routine. And then weight training. I am a person who, if I don't get it in, in the morning, typically my day is so busy, I don't find time later. So I self-care, will go to the gym and I have implemented more weight training that I have in the past. I used to be runner and now I am very big on weight training. I still do cardio, but I maximize most of my time in weight training. It does not need to be an hour workout. I am the queen of a 30, 35 minute workout because I'm focal, I'm intentional. And I'm like, I'm here to get something done.

• 1:08:04Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. And, and, and it doesn't have to take up all of your day. It doesn't have to be inconvenient. So I've, I've got to ask you about some big, big topics.

• 1:08:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:12Gary Brecka?

  Uh, you know, topping the headlines in, in women's health. Um, one of them is creatine.

• 1:08:17Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:18Gary Brecka?

  Um, and I've completely, I've, I've always been a fan of creatine. I too, even as a biohacker, I lean towards it being a, you know, muscle building supplement. Um, I think when I was in high school, I was taking it because I needed creatine to build big muscles. Now the data seems to be emerging about crossing the blood brain barrier. Um, you know, uh, brain health, cognitive function, inflammation, maintaining muscle mass. Where do you fall in, uh, the creatine supplementation for, especially for women?

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  I always like to start with the concern because most people come to me as a physician being like, I don't think I can do this, I've heard this. I've, so I'm like, let's dispel that first. People confuse it with creatinine, which is kidney function.

• 1:09:01Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:02Speaker 00

  Um, and so I like to dispel that first is that that's something different.

• 1:09:05Gary Brecka?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:06Speaker 00

  People who, uh, cannot or should not take creatine as a supplement are people who have really, really chronic, uh, kidney disease. Okay. So outside of that, right? Outside of that, most people are completely fine to take, um, creatine. The reason why I think it's imperative that we do that is we do need help. Our body always needs help, right? So that can come in the form of nutrition supplements. Um, and when we think of creatine, in order to help muscle, right? I always think that amino acids and supplementation and proteins in order to help the muscle build, that's what you're going to find in creatine. And taking dosage, right? So five grams is where I like to sit every day. Some people, I start them out at two, see how they kind of adjust to that, go to five.

• 1:09:51Speaker 00

  When we think of brain health now coming into data sets.

• 1:09:55Gary Brecka?

  Interesting, yeah.

• 1:09:56Speaker 00

  Of seeing how it's impacting clarity, how it's impacting mental capacity. This is the beauty of why we do research and studies. So now that we have a brain health kind of additive added to that, that's when we start to see taking maybe 10 grams.

• 1:10:10Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 1:10:11Speaker 00

  And improving brain health. So you are having something that's implementing kind of all body. That's why I like that is one of the top things that you can take in your supplementation kind of toolbox. But I am, I do take creatine and I think it's important that people understand what your body needs in order to have those optimal outcomes is it does need help. And so that's one of the ways that I think that you can do that.

• 1:10:34Gary Brecka?

  You know, it's interesting, I have a partner of mine that owns a chain of assisted care living in memory care facilities and these are usually, you know, inpatient resident.

• 1:10:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:45Gary Brecka?

  And they've just done some very simple, call them longevity hacks and are gathering massive amounts of data. And I would say, you know, they are exposing them several days a week to red light therapy, sometimes even transcranial red light with the helmet on. They've added the food being farmed to table and all whole foods. So they've gotten every ounce of processed food out of these assisted care and memory care facilities and creatine. And those simple changes, now a lot of these people are on hordes of medications and osteopenias to process.

• 1:11:28Gary Brecka?

  The, and this is subjective so far, but.

• 1:11:33Gary Brecka?

  The improvement that they are seeing rapidly in such a short period of time. They also have them getting regular sunlight.

• 1:11:42Speaker 00

  I knew you were gonna say that, yeah.

• 1:11:43Gary Brecka?

  Small little gardens.

• 1:11:44Speaker 00

  It's not like they're going anywhere.

• 1:11:46Gary Brecka?

  No.

• 1:11:46Speaker 00

  Put them in the sun.

• 1:11:47Gary Brecka?

  Exactly, exactly. Put them in the sun. And I mean, in wheelchairs and everything, and it's, man, it's so enlightening and so exciting because, you know, these are not like massive interventions, some red light, some transcranial red light, supplementation with creatine, absolutely fixing the food supply. No more peel off applesauce, you know, with high fructose corn syrup in it.

• 1:12:09Speaker 00

  That makes my heart happy to hear that.

• 1:12:10Gary Brecka?

  It makes mine happy, too.

• 1:12:12Speaker 00

  Because even in that, one, we're addressing a population that needs it. But how inspirational is that for someone to say, with these little steps, I could get that outcome? One, it's never too late to start, but the goal is, when can we start? So we may potentially not get there.

• 1:12:27Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:28Speaker 00

  But even in a population that was clearly having these detrimental defaults, that you can see change in small, little steps every day. I'm telling you, lifestyle is everything.

• 1:12:39Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, lifestyle is everything. You know, my, my, my mother, Judy, had, she's 78 now. And she had, years ago, she had bilateral knee replacement. And she went into a post-surgical rehab facility, an inpatient rehab facility, because my father couldn't take care of her, you know, after this. And they get you up and they get you moving right away. And what happened was, they left her in bed. One of her knees got infected, so they were gonna have to replace the prosthetic. And this facility left her in bed for 45 days. Did not get her out of bed in 45 days.

• 1:13:21Gary Brecka?

  What was absolutely astounding to me was, I flew up there with the family, all three of my kids, my wife. We flew up to surprise her and it was on Halloween and we had like Halloween gear and balloons and everything. And so I walk into her room and we come around the corner and you know, we were gonna do the big surprise, mom. And I'm an only child and my mother barely recognized me.

• 1:13:44Speaker 00

  Oh my god.

• 1:13:45Gary Brecka?

  And she thought she was being held against her will, very confused about where she was, about what she was doing in there.

• 1:13:52Speaker 00

  So dementia had set in.

• 1:13:53Gary Brecka?

  And, and I'm telling you, the rate of cognitive decline as soon as she was immobile, I mean, how I handled this with this facility, it's a whole mother story, my, my head exploded. But the, the positive side of this was, I mean, she was absolutely frightened and scared, didn't know why all of us were in the room, didn't even really kind of recognize the grandkids. And for me, the only child of her not recognizing me was a huge issue. And over the next 10 weeks, not only did I mandate that she was up twice a day, five days a week, which they immediately implemented, they were very embarrassed and to go into a whole story about why this happened.

• 1:14:36Gary Brecka?

  But, um, which, which made me realize a lot of times, you know, we put our parents in these facilities, and this was an Emma's sister care, memory care, this was just for, for post-operative rehab. It made me really start thinking about that next phase of life about sister care and, and memory care. But in 10 weeks, um, the first thing we did, I completely dramatically shifted her diet, um, focused again on fats and proteins, put her on a low glycemic diet, had relatively little intervention, creatine, I actually put her on a peptide called cerebrolysin, um, got her mobile, got her hydrated, um, made sure she was out of bed at least twice a day, doing occupational and physical therapy.

• 1:15:21Gary Brecka?

  In 10 weeks.

• 1:15:22Speaker 00

  Oh, okay.

• 1:15:23Gary Brecka?

  She was a completely different.

• 1:15:25Speaker 00

  Different person.

• 1:15:26Gary Brecka?

  I think she was better than when, before she had the knee surgery. Because my dad called me and he was like, your mom wants to redecorate the whole house. She doesn't like any of the artwork. He was like, can you just like dial her back a little bit?

• 1:15:36Speaker 00

  What a positive story.

• 1:15:37Gary Brecka?

  She just bounced right back.

• 1:15:39Speaker 00

  Hearing that, you know, my mind immediately went to, oh, my gosh, like it couldn't have gotten better. Right?

• 1:15:45Gary Brecka?

  Oh, it got.

• 1:15:46Speaker 00

  And imagine just implementing movement and sunlight and food.

• 1:15:52Gary Brecka?

  Sunlight was another big one we did. Movement, sunlight, food, nutrition, four or five supplements.

• 1:15:58Speaker 00

  So anyone who's listening can see that, one, it's never too late, but we're trying to get you to start before it's, you know, too late. But also what the body can do when it's given the right tools.

• 1:16:09Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:10Gary Brecka?

  So true. You know, so I, and I love hearing from mainstream academia. I put you in the mainstream academia bucket that there is starting to become a greater awareness of, of this. I mean, you know, I think 20 years ago, stress, mindset, mood, emotion, those were never any things that had any impact on your.

• 1:16:32Speaker 00

  Not at all.

• 1:16:32Gary Brecka?

  Health at all. In fact, you shouldn't even talk about those and certainly you shouldn't bring them up to your doctor. And now we're realizing the impact that stress, cortisol and, you know, our, our nervous system being trapped in this, this sympathetic state. And I saw that with, with my own wife because, you know, when she was going through this menopausal time, it was really stressful. She's like, I'm not myself. Like she would, she would just break down.

• 1:16:53Speaker 00

  It's frustrating.

• 1:16:54Gary Brecka?

  And just be so frustrated because it, it, you know, I, I stopped teasing her, man, but you know, she was very frustrated. Well, I can't find my keys, my wallet and did I bring my passport to the airport? I mean, things that would just so.

• 1:17:06Speaker 00

  That weren't even thoughts in her head before because she knew that she could.

• 1:17:09Gary Brecka?

  On her game.

• 1:17:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17:10Gary Brecka?

  But now, now, now all that's corrected. So, you know, for my audience that would like to know more about you or how they can find you,

• 1:17:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17:19Gary Brecka?

  Where can they find you?

• 1:17:20Speaker 00

  So I am on social media. I'm Jessica Shepherd, M D S H E P H E R D. But one thing that I've done from last year into this year, especially from the book and how well received it was, was community. And so whenever I travel,

• 1:17:36Gary Brecka?

  Love that.

• 1:17:36Speaker 00

  We travel all over the world is women really thrive on community. And so Modern Meno, M E N O. So I didn't want to use the whole word of menopause, but Modern Meno.

• 1:17:48Gary Brecka?

  No one wants to be in a Modern Menopause group anyway.

• 1:17:50Speaker 00

  No, because everyone's like, I don't want to be in that group. There's still that, there's still that like little bit of like, I don't know if I want to be in that group. So I'm modernizing it with Modern Meno is the community that I developed that women can come in and learn from other women. Hearing other people's stories makes you feel like you're not alone.

• 1:18:08Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:08Speaker 00

  You're like, I'm not the only one in this. But also for me to be able to distribute information, having webinars. And then for those who want to see me, you know, through my practice, there's a way that they can do that as well. So but the the main goal through Modern Meno is to say, what can I do for myself that I can inch into it? Or I can get the information that I need? Or if I feel embarrassed to ask a question, how can I ask the question? Because from the W H I and seeing the reversal that we saw, you know, late last year, is that there's still, it's still not widespread. You and I know it because that's what we live, eat and breathe. But for a lot of women globally, and especially in the U S, don't know that one, maybe that happened.

• 1:18:51Speaker 00

  Two, are still very fearful of hormones, but also doctors. Doctors may not have gotten the memo quite yet, or don't know how to manage hormones and hormone therapy.

• 1:19:00Gary Brecka?

  Even if they want to, there's this.

• 1:19:01Speaker 00

  Even if they want to. So we're still at some time out before everyone will either get it on the consumer side. And then for physicians to be like, oh, I know how to manage this. So we still have a gap. And the goal with Modern Meno is to kind of create community to fill that gap.

• 1:19:16Gary Brecka?

  That's amazing. Okay, so I'm going to link all of that in the show notes so you guys know how to, how to find the Modern Meno. I have a V I P community too, that's, you know, they're the only ones that I tell who's coming on the podcast before they come on the podcast. I got to tell you, I got it right here. The, I mean, the list of questions, we have never had a response.

• 1:19:37Speaker 00

  Did you hear that? They've never had this many questions.

• 1:19:41Gary Brecka?

  We've never had a response like this in our VIP community to a guest coming on. I mean, and we've had some very prominent, you know, guests on, but they got a lot of questions. We, we actually broke them into categories, hormone basics, perimenopause, menopause, BHRT, HRT. And, and so we're going to go into that VIP community and, and, and get these questions answered. If you're interested in becoming a VIP, just go over to theultimatehuman.com/vip. You can sign up to be a VIP and very similar to your community. We do Q and A's and life challenges and creating a sense of community. But I think doing it for women, I think, is especially good because there's such a paucity of places that they can go to find that, that kind of community.

• 1:20:25Gary Brecka?

  And, you know, interestingly, in, in, in these big data and blue zone studies, we don't talk about it a lot, but sense of community and purpose were non-negotiables in all of these

• 1:20:36Speaker 00

  Mechanisms of safety.

• 1:20:37Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, it wasn't specific diet or specific geographical region.

• 1:20:42Speaker 00

  It was community.

• 1:20:43Gary Brecka?

  Community and connection. And I think we're so disconnected from, from just humanity, right? That, you know, we think connection comes through our electronic devices and it comes from doing things just like this. So I wind down all of my podcasts by asking my guests the same question. So if you've been watching my podcast, you know that it's coming.

• 1:21:03Speaker 00

  It's coming.

• 1:21:04Gary Brecka?

  Here it comes. I'll send it up in the air. I think you're going to smack it out of the park, Jessica. But what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

• 1:21:13Speaker 00

  Ooh, I love that question. To be an ultimate human is to look at all aspects of your life and ensure that you're tending to it in the best way where you can serve yourself and be the best version of yourself.

• 1:21:28Gary Brecka?

  Show up for everyone else.

• 1:21:29Speaker 00

  Show up for yourself.

• 1:21:30Gary Brecka?

  Well, guys, I hope you enjoyed this podcast as much as I did. VIPs, we'll see you in a few minutes inside the VIP community. For the rest of you, everything that we talked about, I will link into the show notes, copy of her book, her community for, for women and a lot of her work and her social media contacts. Until next time, that's just science.