Moment 132: Triple Your Life Expectancy With These 3 Health Hacks! (Verified By Dana White): Gary Brecka

In this moment, Human Biologist and Biohacker, Gary Brecka discusses how he tripled Dana White’s life expectancy, and how you can increase yours. Gary describes the President of the UFC, Dana White, as just one more example of someone who had given up on their ability to thrive. This included carrying too much weight, waking up sore and being over medicated. Starting from a life threatening alert on Dana’s blood work, in 10 weeks Gary was able to change Dana’s life around, and by the end of 5 months he was off every medication, lost 40 pounds and said that he had no idea that he could feel as good as he did. Gary says that you can copy these amazing results with 3 simple steps: breath work, connecting to the surface of the earth, and become comfortable with being uncomfortable. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/pneohSrZZDb Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Gary: https://www.garybrecka.com https://www.instagram.com/garybrecka/ 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.

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  The reason why I came across your work is because of a clip that, you know, involved Dana White and I'm sure you, I know you get this a lot because I've seen you be asked about this in interviews, but for context for anybody listening, I don't know where I was or ah, no, I know what happened. My friend sent into a WhatsApp group, a clip of Dana White talking about you. And that's the clip that made me go down the rabbit hole. I watched that clip. I then did some research. I then watched a series of videos of you online talking about health and I watched you asking audience members to stand up and name the, you know, the health issue they were suffering and you on the spot told them what was missing from their, their life, their diet, whatever it might have been. You kind of diagnosed them in a way of,

• 0:49Steven Bartlett?

  and then I reached out to you on Instagram and that's why you're here. But if we go back to the start of that, it was that story that Dana White told that had me so compelled to reach out to you. For anybody that doesn't know, and there will be some people that don't know, Dana White is the president of the UFC, which is the, the, the big fighting tournament where everybody kicks each other's heads in. So what's your take on the Dana White story?

• 1:11Gary Brecka?

  So Dana White is a, an example, I mean, he's just a celebrity example, but he is a shining example of the vast number of people, you know, men and women in his age category that have given up on the capacity to thrive. They've accepted that they have hypothyroid, hypertension, they wake up sore and achy in the mornings, that they don't have a response to exercise, they have a little bit of spare tire, their brain foggy, they're on three or four medications. In his case, he was on seven medications at the time, three of which were for blood pressure. He was on, you know, I think a thyroid medication was also on, he's been very public about this,

• 1:53Gary Brecka?

  by the way. And, and again, I have to say, I'm not licensed to practice medicine. So it was my clinical team that, that came up with the diagnosis and I communicated it to Dana. I do train physicians to read blood work and genetic testing, but I can't practice medicine. But the, the point is that when I met Dana, All he wanted to do was for me to predict his life expectancy. And I hadn't done that in almost seven years. I left that industry for a reason. I don't do it anymore. The test that I do does not predict life expectancy. The genetic test and the blood work that I do will not tell you how long you're going to live. I have no interest in predicting death anymore. I only have an interest in extending life. And, you know, when Dana was only interested in me predicting his death.

• 2:36Gary Brecka?

  So I said, okay, for Dana White, I'll come out. I'll meet with you. I'll do a blood test on you, a gene test on you. I'll pull all your medical records and I'll give you your life expectancy. But what I did was we went out and got his blood work and his gene test. And I was actually in bed at 1:30 in the morning when the lab was running his blood work. And I've had seven life threatening alert calls in the middle of the night. Because when you drop blood work off at the lab, the lab runs it through the night. If they find a life threatening alert, they call the account holder. Right? So I owned a company. I was on the account. So LabCorp calls us at 1 o'clock, 1:30 in the morning and says, hey, we have a life threatening alert on a patient. I was like, whoa. What's the patient's name?

• 3:21Gary Brecka?

  They said, last name's White. I said, Dana White? And they said, yeah. And I go, wow, what's the life threatening alert? And they said triglycerides are almost 800. Now triglycerides are a measure of blood fat. Okay, it shouldn't be above 149. At 200 or 300, this is a cataclysmic level in the blood, especially in a fasted state. Okay, we pulled his blood in a fasted state. They weren't 400, they weren't 500, they weren't 600, they weren't 700, they were like 768. So they were, I mean, this is an enormous number. And so I said, okay, I need to get the blood work over to, you know, to the doctor.

• 4:01Gary Brecka?

  And when they sent the blood work into the portal, I then saw that he was insulin resistant. He was hyperinsulinemic. He was prediabetic. He had skyrocketing levels of cholesterol. He had, he was hypertriglyceridemic. He was hyperhomocystinemic. This homocysteine that I told you elevates and causes the blood vessels to constrict. I mean, he had all of these conditions. I literally at that moment booked a flight for 7:30 or 8:30 in the morning.

• 4:32Gary Brecka?

  To head out and see him and because I said I need to go see him in person. And I remember, I think his assistant called me and I was at the airport and she said, hey, Dana wants to know if his life expectancy is in. I go, well, I'm on my way to see him, you know. And she goes, oh, God, is it like that? I said, yeah, it's like that. And so I flew out to see him and I sat down with Dana. And when we talked about the blood work, I didn't even explain the levels. I explained the symptom. I did not know that he was on a CPAP machine, but I said, I am surprised that you can actually sleep through the night because he was so hypoxic. Red blood cell count, hemoglobin levels.

• 5:14Gary Brecka?

  I'm surprised you can even sleep through the night without like just waking up choking, gagging. He's like, dude, I'm on CPAP machine. I wake up every night, I throw up in the middle of the night. I throw up so much, I'm losing my voice. And I said, this level of claudication triglycerides in the bloodstream, I'm surprised you can even bend down and tie your shoes, that's not painful to tie your shoes. Not that it's not restrictive to tie your shoes, it's not painful, like it doesn't feel like the skin's going to peel off your legs. And he went, what the? I mean, he slammed his hand down. He was like, how did you, you know, how did you know that? And I said, Dana, your level of brain fog and fatigue right now has got to be at a crushing level of fatigue. I don't know how, the only thing getting you through the day is your own stubborn willpower. And I'm surprised you can remember anything from one minute to the next. And his whole staff was like, dude, he's so forgetful.

• 5:59Gary Brecka?

  He passes out in meetings, he's sleeping in the planes, he's gagging, snoring. These were not things I necessarily knew about him. So I began to describe all the outcomes of these kinds of conditions. And I said, look, if, if you don't do what we're going to ask you to do for the next 10 weeks, you know, based on this blood work and the medical records that we pulled for the previous 10 years and the demographic data we pulled for 10 years, you have a life expectancy of 10.4 years. You know, for a 52 year old man to realize that he's not going to make it out of his 60s, a big realization. And he flicked a switch, a level of discipline that, you know, I haven't seen in a patient in a long time. He goes, dude, I'll do whatever you tell me to do.

• 6:44Gary Brecka?

  So we wrote a prescription ketogenic diet. I'm a fan of the keto diet. I don't think everybody needs to be on the keto diet, but by prescription ketogenic diet, we wrote a keto diet right down to the grocery list, keto reset diet. And I said, if it's literally, if it's not on here, you can't eat it, Dana. This is your grocery list. You go to the store, you buy this, you send your chef to the store to buy this, you make this. If it's not this recipe, if it's not on here, you literally can't eat it. Your only leeway is water and the supplements. And, and we started a process of balancing hormones, controlling his glycemic index, of using amino acids to bring down his level of homocysteine, to actually try to fix the insulin resistance, to reduce his triglycerides. And in 10 weeks, he had

• 7:29Gary Brecka?

  such a material change in his blood work. I forget how much weight he had lost. I think he had lost almost 28 or 30 pounds. He's over 40 pounds now. By the end of the fifth month, he was completely off of every prescription medication he was on. He's down 44 pounds. He lost the, you know, he's no longer using the CPAP machine. He no longer is prediabetic. He no longer has insulin resistance. He no longer has life threatening levels of triglyceride. In fact, they're normal. His kidney function improved. His liver function improved. His immune system strengthened. He feels like a 35 year old man again. His skin tone all improved. His blood pressure returned to normal. He's not on any blood pressure medication. So his blood pressure returned to normal. And he was like, dude, I had no idea I could

• 8:14Gary Brecka?

  feel this good. I feel fricking amazing.

• 8:17Steven Bartlett?

  And his life expectancy?

• 8:19Gary Brecka?

  Almost tripled.

• 8:21Steven Bartlett?

  Almost tripled?

• 8:22Gary Brecka?

  Almost tripled. Just under 30 years.

• 8:25Steven Bartlett?

  When I heard the story about Dana White, and I saw he had gone from respectfully being a man that had a little bit of weight to having this, these six pack abs on Instagram. Of course, the six pack isn't the, the outcome. It's, as you've said, it's the stuff going on inside him. That's really the transformation. It left me with the question like, okay, I heard the keto bit, but what can someone who's just heard that at home, where do they start with getting extending their life by triple and getting the?

• 8:51Gary Brecka?

  So, you know, he also started something called the superhuman protocol and superhuman protocol is using magnetism, oxygen and light, right? So the only things that we really get from other nature, the big benefit we get from other nature is we get magnetism from the earth, we get oxygen from the air, we get light from the sun. The truth is, most of us are not contacting the surface of the earth that much anymore. So he bought $150,000 worth of equipment, a PMF mat, an oxygen, what's called a hypermax oxygen to do exercise with oxygen therapy and a red light therapy bed. And I had him use that equipment every single day, seven days a week.

• 9:31Gary Brecka?

  But if your listeners want to do it for free, you can take off your shoes and contact the surface of the earth. And I'm talking about bare feet on soil, dirt, grass, sand, because earthing and grounding is a very real thing. We actually discharge into the earth. We actually, human beings build up a charge. Do you know that pH, the acid alkaline scale, pH stands for potential hydrogen? It's a charge. It's a complete fallacy that you can get alkaline by drinking alkaline water. That's the biggest marketing myth ever sold to the public. But you can get alkaline by contacting the surface of the earth. So if you don't have 150 grand, which I don't expect anybody listening to this podcast to spend 150 grand, but he did. I said, you need a PMF mat so that you can be alkaline.

• 10:14Gary Brecka?

  You need to spend 10 minutes a day breathing 95% O2 under mild exercise and you need to lay in a red light therapy bed. So in the absence of the superhuman protocol, you can become superhuman by contacting the earth and by learning to do breath work.

• 10:30Steven Bartlett?

  Let's talk about breath work.

• 10:32Gary Brecka?

  I spend eight minutes every day doing a very specific series of breath work and I'll teach it to you now. You said your wife has certified him?

• 10:39Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, my partner, she's a breath work practitioner. I've done breathwork with I've done breathwork with a few people, but no one's ever had the profound impact on me through breathwork that she has. I've never shouted her out before, so I probably should. Her Instagram is at M E L O A I for anybody that's interested in breathwork.

• 10:57Gary Brecka?

  People do not realize the power of something that is so accessible, so free and so easy to do, right? They they want things to be more complicated, but it's not. And when I said the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease, it's absolutely true. Remember that every elevated emotional state that a human being can experience actually has in its molecular structure, oxygen is a component of that emotion. So if you look at the difference between passion, elation, joy, arousal, libido, and anger, for example, it's usually only one neurotransmitter and the presence of oxygen. The reason why no human being has ever woken up laughing is because you don't have the oxidative state to experience laughter right out of deep sleep. But can you wake up angry? Yes, because anger

• 11:42Gary Brecka?

  doesn't require oxygen. So every morning, contact the surface of the earth and then spend eight minutes doing I do a Wim Hof style of breathwork. I give credit where credit's due. He's the father of breathwork as far as I'm concerned. So I do three rounds of 30 deep breaths, like obnoxiously deep breaths. And I start by trying to take my belly button and pull my belly button out towards the wall. Imagine there's a string pulling your belly button towards the wall. And then you you fill from the lobes of the lung to the apex of the lung, and then you exhale and just relax.

• 12:23Gary Brecka?

  God knows what they think we're doing out there. Right outside this podcast. They're like, a bunch of freak. I knew it was a cult. I knew he was a cult leader. But um, so you do three rounds of 30 breaths. On the 30th breath, you exhale and you hold, allow the carbohydrate receptor to reset. When you don't feel you can hold anymore, you take a deep breath in, you hold again, and then you let it out slow.

• 12:48Gary Brecka?

  And you start again. I would suggest that you start with three rounds of five breaths, then work to 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30. If you get lightheaded, this is a good sign that the oxygen tension is changing in your brain. If your fingers and toes get tingly, this is a good sign that you're changing the oxygen tension. If you feel some kind of heat, temperature change in your neck, these are all great signs. You will get to the point where you can actually hold your breath for two or three minutes, sometimes four minutes, between rounds of breath work. And then the last thing is to expose yourself to natural sunlight. First thing in the morning, the first 45 minutes of the day, God gives us a very, very special type of light. It's called first light. There's no UVA, there's no UVB rays in this light, so that it's not the damaging rays from the sun. It still

• 13:33Gary Brecka?

  generates vitamin D3. It has a positive effect on cortisol, on vitamin D3. First light is the best way to reset your circadian rhythm. So by contacting the surface of the earth, doing breath work, and getting first light, you can get to the same place that Dana White did with 150 grand in equipment.

• 13:50Steven Bartlett?

  What about oxygen masks? Because I'll be honest, when I read about the Dana story, I went on Amazon soon after and I was like, "I'm just gonna buy an oxygen canister." Good idea, bad idea?

• 14:00Gary Brecka?

  So what you want to do is, you know, you get an oxygen concentrator, which takes 21% oxygen from, which is what the concentration at sea level. It turns it into 95% O2 and it fills this bag. And it can refill this bag over and over and over again. Okay, I use one called the HyperMax. You can see it on my Instagram. And you plug it in, you turn it on, it fills this bag. And then you go in, you put an oxygen mask on, and you exercise for 10 minutes, only 10 minutes. Cycle for three minutes, sprint for 30 seconds, cycle for three minutes, sprint for 30 seconds, cycle three minutes, sprint 30 seconds, and you're done. And what this does is it raises something called the partial pressure, the storage of oxygen in your blood. The only two-time Nobel laureate prize winner in medicine, Dr. Otto Warburg,

• 14:45Gary Brecka?

  won both of his Nobel Prizes for his work in exercise with oxygen therapy. You want to be a superhuman, do mild exercise every day while breathing 95% O2. It's important that you're exercising. And then after that, you move into a red light therapy bed, photobiomodulation. So, you know, if you don't have access to a Hypermax oxygen machine, just do the breath work. Get the breath in, you know, exchange the oxygen tension in the tissues and expose yourself to first light. What about cold, cold water plunging? So I'm a huge fan of cold water plunging, but probably not for the reasons why you think. You know, I also sit on the board of the NFL Alumni Association Athletica as a health service director. You know, there was a time when we used to think that putting athletes in cold water after exercise was good because of its anti-inflammatory effects.

• 15:30Gary Brecka?

  We know now that that's only about 15% of the benefit. The majority of the benefit comes from something called a cold shock protein. If you really want to be fascinated, Google cold shock proteins. These are reserve proteins that are in your liver. They're dumped into the bloodstream in an effort to save your life when you put yourself in cold water. They scour the body of free radical oxidation. They increase the rate of protein synthesis, muscle repair. They are free. You get them when you put yourself in cold water. I don't know what the Celsius conversion is, but I use 50 degrees for three minutes. Minimum, six minutes maximum. Cold? Yes. It's actually not that cold. I mean, you know, I see people getting in 37, 38 degree water. There's no evidence that I've read that shows that colder is better.

• 16:12Gary Brecka?

  You get a peripheral vasoconstriction, so it forces all the oxygen into the core and up to the brain. And you get an activation of something called brown fat, right? Thermogenesis comes from brown fat. And for the women that are listening, for some reason, I seem to ensnare the women when I say this. Remember that the definition of a calorie is a measure of heat, right? I mean, the definition of a calorie is the amount of energy it takes to raise one cubic centimeter of water, one degree centigrade. So if a calorie is a measure of heat, then this means that when heat's leaving your body, calories are leaving your body. So if there is nothing, nothing, no amount of exercise hits cardio, no type of cardiovascular or weight training that comes anywhere close

• 16:54Gary Brecka?

  to immersing yourself in cold water in terms of what will strip fat off your body fast. If you want to strip fat off your body, get in cold water three to six minutes a day.

• 17:05Steven Bartlett?

  That's fascinating. Because the oxygen rushes to my head, that's why it has a really profound impact on mood.

• 17:10Gary Brecka?

  That's why it has a very profound impact on mood. Because if you think about it, what's the reason why we need deep sleep? What happens in deep sleep that's so special? There's a secondary oxygen transfer. We transfer oxygen from the periphery, from the extremities, to the brain. Remember, the brain's a non-metabolic organ. So in other words, it's unlike a muscle. If I pick up a weight and start to work out my muscle, my arm, my body will send more blood, more amino acids, more oxygen to that muscle because it's working. Well, if I'm sitting at my computer and I'm watching reruns of The Simpsons, or I'm sitting at my computer and I'm solving the most complex joint venture agreement, partnership agreement with all kinds of mathematical equations, my brain gets the same amount of nutrients, same amount of blood flow, same amount of oxygen. So it eats the same meal, whether or not it's in a dead sprint

• 17:54Gary Brecka?

  or whether or not it's just chilling on the couch. Except in deep sleep and when you're in cold water, because it's forcing the oxygen up to the brain.

• 18:04Steven Bartlett?

  You said earlier about comfort.

• 18:07Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 18:08Steven Bartlett?

  I was speaking to someone yesterday about this thing called, he referred to it as the comfort crisis and how, you know, as we've become more, I would say civilized, but I don't know if that's the right terminology. As we've become more advanced technologically as humans, we can make our lives increasingly more comfortable.

• 18:22Gary Brecka?

  Correct.

• 18:23Steven Bartlett?

  Sounds like a good thing.

• 18:25Gary Brecka?

  Terrible. It accelerates aging in every form. I mean, aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort. We have got to stop telling grandma not to go outside, it's too hot, not to go outside, it's too cold, just to lay down, just to relax, to eat at the very first pang of hunger. This is collapsing all of our own natural defense mechanisms. You know, if we don't load our bones, they don't strengthen. If you don't tear a muscle, it doesn't grow. If you don't challenge the immune system, it weakens. And so, stress is very often very good for the body. Thermal stress, you know, weight-bearing exercise, breath work, these things put stressors into the body that are very, that have a very positive effect. It's strengthening you. We want to regulate everything now. We regulate our temperature.

• 19:09Gary Brecka?

  We go from a, you know, a temperature-controlled office to a temperature-controlled car, to a temperature-controlled home. You know, we don't, we don't thermo-regulate anymore. I mean, you know, usually when you, when I ask people to start taking cold showers, they take their first cold shower, they never do it again. Why? Because they don't want to be uncomfortable. And so, when you learn to deal and become comfortable with being uncomfortable, this is like a metaphor for life. It's almost like yoga, if you've ever done really intense yoga, and you're holding a yoga pose, and you're trying to remain calm and focus on your breath while your body's in intense pain. Now, you're not in any risk, but your ass feels like it's gonna peel off your legs, and your hamstrings are firing, and you're sweating, and you're shaking, and you're doing this thing that's called the candlestick,

• 19:52Gary Brecka?

  but it's really painful. And if you can maintain calm and breathe through a situation like that, what happens four hours later when you get a nasty Instagram message? Nothing. Doesn't shift your mood. And if we don't learn to control our emotional state, we will never control our future. You know, MIT did an incredible clinical study that showed that the amygdala of the brain, which is where we experience emotion, is the sole gateway to an area of the brain called the hippocampus, which is where we hold our memories. So just imagine that the emotional center of the brain is the sole gateway to the memory of the brain. This is why if you've ever had an argument with your spouse,

• 20:35Gary Brecka?

  you can always recall with incredible accuracy every other time they've made you feel this way. You did this on September 21st. You did this when we were on the boat with my boys. You did this at, you know, our Christmas holiday party four Christmases ago. Because that emotion is linked to that memory, so you can recall that memory very accurately. Well, our memory, our hippocampus, is what projects into the prefrontal cortex. It determines our future. It's our conscience. So this means if emotion is the only gateway to memory, and memory projects to our conscience, which is our future, this means that your current emotional state determines your future. That's a biophysiological fact. So like, for example, if you had an argument with your spouse on the way to work,

• 21:18Gary Brecka?

  and you get out of the car, and you slam the door, and you walk into the office, when you break the plane to the door of that office, the only memories you can recall about the office at that moment are negative. You're gonna walk through the door of the office, and you'll be like, "They don't respect me around here. I'm gonna have a stern talk in the management today. You know, my office better not, you know, nobody better be at my desk. And you know what? Mary better not run into me today, because she doesn't respect me." You can just start going through all the negative things about the office. The office didn't do anything to you. How do I prevent that? You learn to control your emotion. How? Well, first, you start by putting the right nutrients into the body that allows you to achieve elevated emotional states. And you learn to do things like when you feel like you are beginning to lose control of your emotional state, you actually break that cycle.

• 22:03Gary Brecka?

  I usually do it with breath work. And so, you know, first, it begins by having the right raw materials, but this is just taking you back to the cold plunge. If you can start your day in an elevated emotional state, if anybody listening to this has ever really done a cold plunge, tell me if you were ever in a bad mood getting out of a cold plunge. Just try to be in a bad mood getting out of a cold plunge. They say if you want to cure depression, push somebody in cold water. You know? And it's so true. You're in such an elevated emotional state, you're like, wow! Now, you go cruising into the day and get a little negative, you know, Instagram message and your, you know, spouse calls you and tells you she forgot what you wanted to get at the grocery store and you get to work and you got a little problem at the office. These things roll off your back instead of shifting your state, which now shifts your memory, which now changes the trajectory of your prefrontal cortex, which affects your future.