The Health Conspiracy No One Talks About: Life Insurance, Big Data & Aging | Gary Brecka

What if I told you life insurance companies can predict, almost to the month, when you’re going to die? That’s exactly what Gary Brecka, a human biologist and former mortality expert, used to do—until he uncovered something shocking. After years of analyzing blood work and medical records, he realized that the biggest predictors of disease and early death aren’t genetic—they’re modifiable. Now, he’s using that knowledge to help people optimize their health and extend their lifespan. In this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show, we discuss: How insurance companies use hidden health data to predict life expectancy with stunning accuracy. The biggest factors that shorten lifespan—and why most of them are within our control. Why vitamin deficiencies, especially vitamin D, are quietly fueling chronic disease. How the right biohacking tools, like red light therapy and oxygen optimization, can reverse aging. What you can do today to take control of your health and longevity. This conversation will change the way you think about your own health. View Show Notes From This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal This episode is brought to you by BON CHARGE, Timeline Nutrition, Paleo Valley, and Big Bold Health. Order BON CHARGE’s Max Red Light Therapy device today and get 15% off. Visit boncharge.com and use code DRMARK for 15% off. Support essential mitochondrial health and save 10% on Mitopure. Visit timeline.com/drhyman to get 10% off today. Get nutrient-dense, whole foods. Head to paleovalley.com/hyman for 15% off your first purchase. Try Big Bold Health’s HTB Rejuvenate and get 25% off by going to bigboldhealth.com and use code DRMARK25 at checkout.

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

• 0:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show. You could tell them most of the month when someone's gonna die.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  To the month. Yeah, and it was, it's a very accurate model. The reason why we were table rating a lot of these and the reason why we were shortening the life expectancy was because of the intervention of chemicals, synthetics and pharmaceuticals. The more pharmaceuticals you were on, the easier it was for us to predict your life expectancy.

• 0:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The more you were on, the more likely you were to die sooner.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  The more you're on, the more likely you were to die sooner and the more predictable.

• 0:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Now, before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights. And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, well, check out my membership community, Dr. Hyman Plus. And if you're looking for curated trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website, drhyman.com for my website store and a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products.

• 1:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, Gary, it's so great to have you on the podcast. It's been a long time coming.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's been a long time coming. I think I've been chasing you longer than you've been chasing me.

• 1:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But here I am in Miami, in your studio, in your house.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is good.

• 1:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's awesome. And we just took this extraordinary tour through your house, which has me seething with jealousy about all the tools and gizmos and gadgets you have to upgrade your health. We're gonna get into all that. I'm just so excited about.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  I always say like, we end up running a podcast before the podcast.

• 1:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We saw your hydrogen machines, your ozone sauna, your whole biohacking suite, the red light therapy. It's quite interesting. But, you know, maybe people know or don't know about you, but the thing that I find interesting is you came at this through the lens of sort of understanding why people die, not through the lens of longevity, which is sort of like you were trying to like, help companies save money by understanding what was causing death and mortality and trying to help them navigate that. So can you tell us about your background, how you got like, the insights about the nature of our chronic epidemic, what's going on, why these insurance companies have all this data, what they've learned and why it matters to us?

• 2:18Speaker 01

  So for the better part of my career, I was a mortality expert, which essentially means that we studied mortality, the variable basic tables, not just putting people on an actuarial curve, right? I mean, we're all on one, right? If you're a 54-year-old male, you have a life expectancy of X. If you're a 34-year-old female, you have a life expectancy of Y. You're lumped into a massive pool of mortality. But when a life insurance company is getting ready to put 25 million or 50 million dollars worth of risk on your life, or an annuity company is getting ready to issue you a SPEA, what's called a single premium immediate annuity, where you give them a lump sum of cash and they guarantee you an income stream for life, or you're getting ready to do what's called a reverse mortgage, which means you get to live in your house, but you sell it while you're

• 3:03Speaker 01

  still alive. All of these are based on mortality. The only thing that matters in those financial services instruments is how many more months does this person have left on earth?

• 3:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  So they don't really care where you are on an actuarial curve, right? They want to know your-

• 3:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They don't adjust the prices to match when you're going to die, so they don't lose money.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Exactly. And insurance is priced like that. You have super preferred, preferred, standard, and you have what's called table ratings.

• 3:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So what did you learn as you sort of started to look at the data and the lab data for people who were in the pool? Because these companies actually get your blood.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. They get your blood, they can take genes, they get all of your medical records, they have all your demographic data, they know, I mean, it's a proctology exam. I mean, if you've ever tried for-

• 3:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Maybe a full colonoscope.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't think you get as much information from a colonoscope as you do a full-blown life insurance application. Now, I'm not talking about term life insurance, I'm talking about real whole life, you know, permanent, universal life insurance, where people are putting 10 million, 25 million, 50 million of risk on a single life. What happens in those cases is they take not only a deep dive into your demographic data, but I mean, they get everything, your divorce decrees, your trust accounts, your bank statements, your brokerage statements, your, you know, your work history, and all of your medical records. And then before they actually issue the policy, they will essentially send a nurse to your house and they will pull whatever biomarker they-

• 4:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So you got to like have an inside view of what that is.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Real inside view, you know, my, I'm, first of all, I'm not a physician. I'm a, I'm a human biologist. My undergraduate degrees are in biology. Uh, my postgraduate degrees are in human biology. And so I spent eight years in formal education just studying human physiology. And they wanted someone like that on the team with the, with the rest of, you know, the M Ds and an actuarial scientist. Because, um, we were trying to really build a model that was very accurate, probabilistic model that was accurate. What really emerged from this big data, um, I always say that if this database could see the light of day, it would permanently change the face of humanity.

• 5:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  It would.

• 5:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Spill the beans, Gary.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Let's go.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Well, I wish I had like secretly downloaded it, you know, like one of those government conspiracies and I had it on a flash drive. You know, cause trust me, I would put it in the public domain. Um, probably go to prison for the rest of my life, but I would, I would get it out there. So I do, I do my best to get it out there with what I've got in my head. But, um, the very unpopular information that emerged from this, um, or I shouldn't say unpopular. I should say anti mainstream was that, uh, the reason why, uh, the majority of people are not living healthier, happier, longer, more fulfilling lives were because of what we called modifiable risk factors. Right. There were the non-modifiable factors and then there were the modifiable factors. You could have a restricted range of motion from a massive injury or surgical procedure.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  That's not modifiable. You, you have, you know, spinal rods in your, in your back. Those are not modifiable risk factors. Modifiable risk factors were diet, lifestyle, supplementation, exercise, mobility. And, and in my case, I would add to that significant changes in your blood biomarkers.

• 6:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  And so what we noticed was that the reason why we were table rating a lot of these, and the reason why we were shortening the life expectancy was because of the intervention of chemicals, synthetics and pharmaceuticals. And the more pharmaceuticals you were on, the easier it was for us to predict your life expectancy.

• 6:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The more you were on, the more likely you were to die sooner.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  The more you're on, the more likely you were to die sooner and the more predictable. Because not only could we predict the onset of other conditions, but we could predict the severity of and how quickly you would succumb to them. And so we

• 6:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You can tell them most of the month when someone's gonna die based on the data?

• 6:49Speaker 01

  To the month. Yeah, and it was it's it's a very accurate model. And I get a lot of flack for that because people say, well, if you could predict life expectancy to the month, which I don't do anymore, and that, you know, you would be Jesus, or you would have won a Nobel Prize. And I never won a Nobel Prize, and I'm not Jesus. I believe in Jesus. But and the reason why, you know, they say that is because they don't realize how accurate this science is. But if you but if you want to know how accurate life insurance companies are, annuity companies are predicting death, just look at what happened during the 2008, 2009 financial services crisis. We had 364 banks fail. You didn't have a single life insurance company fail. In fact, some of the largest institutions, AIG, whose credit derivatives division was taking the company under, were bailed out by the life insurance.

• 7:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  They are some of the most solvent institutions on the planet. They're some of the highest rated financial institutions on the planet.

• 7:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They know shit.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  They know shit. They're really

• 7:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They know how to manage the risk because they understand the biology. So the things that came up were modifiable things, and they were things you could see on blood work that you could see by their

• 7:48Speaker 01

  You could absolutely see it on blood work. So so things like

• 7:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What were you looking at?

• 7:52Speaker 01

  So we we looked at three main areas. And when we would look through your blood work, we would look at glycemic control, how well you controlled your blood sugar over a lifetime, because we saw that hyperinsulinemia, elevated hemoglobin A1C, and poor glycemic control was a a risk factor. It was what we called a comorbidity.

• 8:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So where are the insurance companies measuring insulin?

• 8:14Speaker 01

  They were measuring insulin, glucose, and hemoglobin A1C.

• 8:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's amazing, because Gary, less than 1% of all lab tests in America done by physicians include an insulin level, which is probably one of the most important biomarkers for longevity and risk. And it's something we use as a core part of function health in our offerings. A company I co-founded to help people understand their own lab data because it's so critical. And it's amazing to me that the people who know how to manage risk are actually measuring it and not doctors.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  What's interesting is you would get 15, 18, or 20 years of medical records on someone. And you would see the atherosclerotic, the atherosclerotic issues. You would see the cardiovascular disease. You'd see the very, very, very low levels of statin controlled LDL cholesterol.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  But you would see extreme proliferation in cardiovascular disease. You would see early mortality in these groups because of what they called non-correlated events, hormonal events, what our scientific team drew back to, cell wall, so membrane dysfunction, early onset, not just early onset dementia or Alzheimer's, but all forms of cognitive decline. You know, we knew, for example, that LDL cholesterol, for example, was not a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease.

• 9:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's a big statement.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that is a material fact, by the way.

• 9:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Because the insurance companies are not selling statins, so they're not actually, they're actually looking at what data is the most relevant. And LDL is a factor, but it's not by itself the factor. It's really metabolic health, which you measure by looking at insulin and blood sugar and A1C and.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  We wanted to see, you know, what was the chance that this person would have LDL cholesterol called to the arterial wall, not in what was the presence of LDL cholesterol. You know, if they were hyperinsulinemic, then they had significantly higher incidence of blacking, scarring, narrowing, and other forms of cardiovascular disease. But the centenarians, not once in my entire career, and I don't know that this, I'm not saying this is a blanket statement, but in my career, we processed death claims too, and we didn't see a single death claim on a centenarian, someone that lived to age 100. At that time, many of the policies would do what they call endowed at age 100. So at age 100, the policy would just pay out. It would pay the death claim. So if you're lucky enough to live to 100,

• 10:37Speaker 01

  you get through your kids. I just got my $20 million life insurance.

• 10:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The person who's still alive gets his life insurance.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  The person that's still alive.

• 10:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's pretty cool.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there are other things called accelerated death claims, you know, where they would actually accelerate the payout while the person was alive, if they had a terminal illness. But what was really interesting is I didn't process a single death claim on a centenarian, not one, who lived over age 100, that did not have clinically elevated levels of LDL cholesterol at the time of their death. Because very often, we had blood work on these people. They'd be in sick care, living facilities, or other kind of facilities, and we would actually have the data. And due to that, for things like, you know, we followed trends in calcium supplementation in the elderly, and really, the fact that they weren't really impacting. They weren't impacting bone density and so osteopenic patients that were put on high doses of calcium still became osteoporotic.

• 11:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's right.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  And.

• 11:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's the vitamin D.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, vitamin D and K2 like, I mean, that was another one, you know, we, we, it was 2016.

• 11:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Did you measure nutrient levels in these populations?

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Um, we didn't measure nutrient levels and, and you know, if I had known then what I know now, um, I think we probably would have measured nutrient levels, but you could, you could surmise from the data because you could see their diet, their lifestyle, alcohol consumption, the medications that they were on, and you could actually follow certain clinical deficiencies, like vitamin D3 was a big one for us. We would see clinical deficiencies in vitamin D3 and I'm talking like single digit, low double digit D3, not, not.

• 12:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's bad.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. And you would be.

• 12:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's common.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Surprised how many people have that level of deficiency in, in, in D3. Um, so they would have these long running clinical deficiencies in vitamin D3. Let's say, um, nanogram per deciliter between seven and 25, you know, even below the lowest threshold for most labs, which will be 30 to 100. Um, and I still think 30 is clinically deficient.

• 12:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Definitely.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Um, yeah. Um, but, um, you would see these, these very low levels of vitamin D3 for years and years and years in the medical record. And then eventually the, the, the patient would present to a primary care physician with rheumatoid arthritis like symptoms. And I make sure that I say that correctly because they didn't have rheumatoid arthritis. You know, very often, we know that, you know, medical error is the third leading cause of death. Um, there's a great study, 2016 study by Harvard. I think it was actually repeated by Hopkins and got worse in 2019, if you want to look up the study, but, um.

• 13:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, there was a National Academy of Science report on that too.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, looking at all the ICD9, ICD10, 11 codes, you know, that, that medical error was the third leading cause of death. And we saw this repeatedly in our, in our insurance actuarial underwriting because, so take this patient that had clinical deficiency in vitamin D3 and they present to their primary care and they start describing the symptoms, you know, my, my soles of my feet are sore and achy when I get out of bed in the morning, walk to the bathroom and take my first pee, my ankles just ache, takes me 45 minutes to get the motor going, you know, and over the last few years, it's moved from my knees now to my hips and low back, really stiff across the shoulders and, and, and lately it's, you know, been hard for me to make up. A fist, like a tight fist. You would be shocked how many primary carers would just say, you know, Mark, you've got rheumatoid arthritis.

• 13:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And take this $50,000 a year drug.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, no RA factors, no sed rates, no, no diagnostic work.

• 13:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They call it sero-negative rheumatoid arthritis.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's what they call it.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  I'm adopting that saying now.

• 14:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No, it's a, it's a well-known.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  It's an actually thing?

• 14:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Okay, so, uh, so we.

• 14:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Check it out.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  We knew about it, we just didn't know the name of it then. And so they would, they would say, you know, we're just, the good news for you is we're going to put you on something called a corticosteroid. You're going to take this oral steroid and everything's going to be fine. And, uh, so methotrexate, whatever, whatever the corticosteroid was. And what we realized in the record, um, because we were looking at, uh, hundreds of thousands of patient records was that if you started a corticosteroid, you had six years and one day until you were having a joint replacement. Because initially they, they.

• 14:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Steroids definitely are not good. They cause osteoporosis, they degrade your bones, they can cause avascular necrosis of the hip. I mean, they, they're pretty bad.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, and avascular necrosis of the hip is what's leading to the hip fractures, the femoral head fractures.

• 14:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Basically means the blood just flow stops at the hip and then hip.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, that artery that goes in the femoral head is, is compromised. Um, and, and now you get no blood flow and then you get that osteoporotic condition in, in one of the highest load areas of the body.

• 15:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  And, and, you know, most people think that grandma fell and broke her hip, but her hip broke and then she fell.

• 15:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  It's an important distinction, right?

• 15:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It definitely can happen for sure.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  The fracture causing the fall, rather than the fall causing the fracture.

• 15:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  And that was one of the reasons, we called that the triad of death, and I know you're really familiar with that. Hip fractures and their propensity to accelerate mortality, but it's, it wasn't the hip fracture that accelerated.

• 15:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So all this amazing stuff you did with this, sort of learning about how the insurance companies look at death, mortality, risk factors, it taught you a lot about what to think about in terms of how we create a healthy human. The opposite.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So you went from like managing death to managing life.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, because.

• 15:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Can you talk about like what now kind of you switched to in terms of your thinking and how, how it kind of started your journey and what you're doing? Because what you're doing is really extraordinary. You're, you're basically kind of synthesizing and collating and putting together a lot of different modalities and strategies to help upgrade people's biology.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  No doubt.

• 15:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's something we never learned in medical school, which is how do you create a healthy human? Like, it's not a course, and it doesn't get taught, and there's no understanding of what is health.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's not just the absence of disease.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Most would say it's the absence of disease.

• 16:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's not. It's something else. And when you have it, you know it, you feel awesome, your brain's clear, you have energy, you sleep great. You can do whatever you want to do. You know, you could basically be free from the burdens of a lot of the suffering that many people struggle with, even if it's not a disease. I joke, and I said, there's this really terrible thing that most Americans suffer from called FLC syndrome. It's when you feel like crap.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a lot of FLC going around.

• 16:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's so bad. I mean, we just launched a 10-day detox program, which I wrote a book about 10 years ago. In 10 days, you know, people have up to a 70% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases by just a simple set of lifestyle changes in a week.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Believable. I wholly believe that and subscribe to that because, you know, in these modifiable risk factors, you know, first of all, I was prohibited by law from having any contact with the patient or the treating physician. So even if I saw a life-threatening drug interaction, I couldn't pick up the phone and warn the physician. And sometimes the MIB wouldn't catch these, right? These thrombolytic combinations of different pharmaceuticals, and you'd want to contact the physician, because it wasn't done on purpose, it was by error. And the system's very good at catching things like narcotic surfers and things like that, but it's not very good at catching contraindications. And just to finish the D3 example, so here's a nutrient deficiency, clinical deficiency in this. Now they're on a corticosteroid.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  It was so accurate that I would advance your age, artificially advance your age, six years and one day, and I would schedule the joint replacement for you. And then as soon as I scheduled the joint replacement, I would begin to reduce your, at that age, I would begin to reduce your ambulatory profile, how well you ambulate. And as you reduced ambulation, what we realized was, as you reduced mobility, you would bring in all of the diseases that begin to exacerbate.

• 18:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Less exercise, more disease, yeah.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  It's a direct correlation, and...

• 18:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I always say, if you don't move, you won't.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  That's a good one. I say aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort, but you know, the more aggressively we pursue comfort, the faster we age. And so, you know, even, even as I was leaving-

• 18:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  These shoes are pretty comfortable, Gary. I don't know.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. But we're not going to stay here, brother. We're not going to stay here. We're going to put on a weighted vest and go do some pull-ups after this.

• 18:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Okay.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  And you're getting in the hydrogen bath because I'm excited to hear how that works.

• 18:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You just want to see how I look without my shirt on. I know what's up.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's going all over the internet, guys. www.ultiminhuman.com to see Mark have his shirt off. But so now they have this clinical deficiency in D3. They've been put on corticosteroid. I've advanced their age artificially, six years and one day. I've reduced their ambulatory profile. And now I bring in, you know, our algorithm would start to bring in all the diseases that exacerbate with reduced mobility. And then what you would see is, we could predict not only the onset of, but the severity of, and how quickly you would succumb to a condition. So when you start to rewind that back, this person died early of a disease that they never should have had because of mobility that was reduced

• 19:19Speaker 01

  because of an operation that wasn't, was not necessary, because of medication that wasn't required, because of a condition that didn't exist.

• 19:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Had they taken five or 9,000 IUs, 10,000 IUs of vitamin D3 daily with a little K2, and applied a load to their bones, that trajectory would have been completely different. Something as simple as that.

• 19:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's true. I mean, I'm thinking we had vaccine mandates. I think we should have vitamin D mandates.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  I totally agree.

• 19:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I think, yeah.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  I totally agree.

• 19:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Because I actually shared this data with some people during the administration around how serious it was for COVID if you had low vitamin D.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Second leading cause of morbidity in COVID.

• 20:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, you would get more likely to end up in the hospital and die if you had low vitamin D. And from the Israeli data, if your vitamin D was over 50, and the reference range is 20 to 30, depending on the lab, if it was over 50, there was nobody who died.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  I was actually just going to say that because I was looking at big data, you know, reporting during that timeframe too. And- But in functional ranges of 60 to 80 nanograms, there was not a single death.

• 20:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, that's that's extraordinary because vaccines don't even do that, right?

• 20:28Speaker 01

  No, they don't prevent the infection or the spread. I mean, that's that's a whole nother issue. But you know, and if and if you want to really see the impact of vaccines, just follow the life insurance companies. Right? So people tell me all the time, oh, well, you know, they don't they don't factor in whether or not you've been vaccinated. I go, you don't think that they factor in whether or not you've been vaccinated? Why do you? Why do you not think that? And they say, well, they don't ask the question on the application? Like, they don't have to ask.

• 20:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They can see from your blood.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  They get it from your medical record. It's just like if you told if you answered on the, you know, on your application, I'm a non smoker. Have you ever smoked? No. You know, have you ever, you know, vaped or?

• 21:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, they check your urine, your blood for.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  If you show up with nicotine in your blood, I'm going to table rate you as a smoker. You know, it's just like if you tell, you know, there's that section on alcohol. How many drinks a week? One to two, two to five, five to seven? We never believed what they said. If you had liver cirrhosis, we we table rate you as an alcoholic.

• 21:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Underestimate how much they they eat and overestimate how much they exercise when you ask them.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's very true. So we just went off the data.

• 21:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The other data and that and that led you kind of thinking about how to create a different approach to helping people gain health, right? And that's where you sort of led to your path. And you're kind of known as this sort of this biohacking genius. And I think most people may not even know what biohacking is. When I first kind of heard the term like, what is that? And I don't quite get it. And I was thinking about it. And really, as I as I've sort of come to understand what it is, it's really the application of tools and technologies and approaches to life that that actually create health, that are not disease treatments per se, but that work by activating the body's own healing reparative mechanisms.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  No question.

• 22:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And and so in a sense, that's what functional medicine is. For me, it's the ability to understand how we deviate from health and how to create health by removing the bad stuff, putting in the good stuff. And a lot of the technology and tools we looked at as we toured your apartment was basically tools that helped up regulate different biological systems, whether it was mitochondria, reducing oxidative stress, reducing inflammation.

• 22:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  These are all things that are fundamental to creating health that we don't learn about in medical school that we don't know how to apply. But you you've actually come up with an approach that includes all these modalities. So I'd like you to sort of talk about, you know, how do you think of biohacking? What is it?

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Who's what are the most important aspects of it that we should be focused on? Because there's a million things out there, right?

• 22:51Speaker 01

  There's a million things out there.

• 22:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You probably have 95% of them.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Or maybe 98. I don't know. So, you know, how do you separate the wheat from the chaff?

• 23:01Speaker 01

  You know, here's here's my, you know, my big first line rule is that the best biohacking devices, best biohacking modalities, you know, equipment, what have you,

• 23:12Speaker 01

  mimic what we get from other nature. And so, for example, you know, we get three things from Mother Nature, mainly we get oxygen from the air, we get light from the sun, we get magnetism from the earth. And the further we get away from those basics, you know, the sicker we become. And the truth is that we are so disconnected from nature now. We're disconnected from each other, too. I mean, deep, meaningful relationships, sense of purpose, sense of community. You know, there were a lot of mortality factors that we would study that actually when when an elderly person lost their sense of community, their loss of spouse, loss of family, or became isolated, which is the fastest way to accelerate all-cause mortality.

• 23:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, loneliness is like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day in terms of its mortality risk.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  I don't know that that's true, but I would totally agree with that off the cuff, because we saw it in the data, you know, we, we, we call it broken heart syndrome.

• 24:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Essentially, you know, spouses that were, and it wasn't so much the loss of the spouse, it was being thrust into immediate isolation, right? Because, you know, mom and dad live, you know, five states away, and the kids are busy, and they're raising kids, and they see them on Christmas and Easter and New Years, like most families. And then one spouse falls ill and passes, and now the other spouse is totally isolated. And that isolation, we know that in all forms of animal species and human beings, isolation, you know, reduces your lifespan.

• 24:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So biohacking is having a friend?

• 24:39Speaker 01

  So, so back to biohacking, I would say the best devices are the ones that mimic Mother Nature, right? So, so things like mineral salts, amino acids, nutrients that you would find in nutrient-dense soils. You know, you wouldn't believe the physiologic impact you can have on people just by putting them on a complex of B vitamins, vitamin B12, some methylfolate, which are, which are basic core nutrients required for the process of methylation. And when they're deficient, they become like the hub of the wheel. They, they have all of these spokes, and people think that they have an autoimmune disease, and they have a mental illness, and they have a weight gain issue, and they have sleep disruption, and they have anxiety, or they have ADD or ADHD. And the truth is, they very often have nutrient deficiencies. And so if I was to say, you know, what are the

• 25:23Speaker 01

  best biohacking devices? Those are the devices that mimic Mother Nature. And so if you didn't have the budget to spend on those, you should be able to duplicate those by committing time, you know, in, in nature, exposing your skin to sunlight, getting first light in the morning, learning to do basic breath work, touching the surface of the earth, grounding, earthing, which is a very real thing.

• 25:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They're all super expensive things to do, right?

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, they're exactly the same. I think, in fact, this morning, I, I, just as, you know, as, as sort of a joke, I, I said, you know, I'm taking my morning antidepressant, and, um, you know, and I was out on the balcony getting sunlight and just doing some breathwork, and I, and I listed the side effects of enhanced mood, increased focus and concentration. And then I said, um, you know, don't, don't, don't, you know, forget your, your mood enhancer, the, you know, the best neurotropic, and I just did a round of breathwork, um, and got into cold plunge.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Now we have these devices, cold plunges, which is essentially mimicking hormetic stresses that we might have, you know, found just in our normal, ancestral lifestyle.

• 26:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I remember we didn't have a thermostat in our houses, in our, in our, in our TPs.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and our bodies react very well to certain stresses. You know, we gotta stop thinking about stress as a, as a negative. You know, very often, it can, it can be what makes you resilient. The body very often strengthens in response to stress. I know, I know that you know this, but, so when, when we talk about biohacking devices, you know, my favorite would be, you know, PEMF mats, pulse electromagnetic field. These mimic the low gauss current of the earth. So if you don't have time to earth or ground, come in contact with Mother Earth, you can use a PEMF mat. Probably my favorite device is a red light therapy bed, full body red light therapy. And red light therapy, I mean, the science is in on red light therapy. It's very hard to overdose on it if you dose it 10 to 20 minutes a day.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Even if you're using very powerful nanometer, I mean, milliwatts of irradiance and you're using the right nanometer wavelengths of therapeutic light. Because you emit the portions of the light spectrum that are damaging. And you concentrate the portions of the light spectrum that you would get from the sun that are very healthy. And we're very photovoltaic beings. I mean, light is a very important component to health.

• 27:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It really regulates our mitochondria, inflammation.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, certain wavelengths of light, for example, in the mitochondria will actually, in the Krebs cycle, you'll see that cytochrome c oxidase will bind with a gas called mitochondrial nitric oxide. And when it's bound to mitochondrial nitric oxide, it's sort of like a one armed man. It can either shake hands with nitric oxide, or it can shake hands with oxygen. But it can't do both. So in order to bind oxygen and upstage the mitochondria, you know, to have this aerobic cycle, which is roughly 16 times more efficient than the anaerobic cycle, it has to let go of mitochondrial nitric oxide. And one way to do this is to pass red light through the skin and through the wall of the mitochondria. It will literally kick nitric oxide out of the mitochondria.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  You can measure this in the serum of the blood. You can actually do nitric oxide testing pre and post red light therapy and measure the impact of this release of mitochondrial nitric oxide, which will cause a temporary vasodilation. And then it will force oxygen to dock. Well, now, if you're forcing oxygen into the mitochondria, I mean, that's arguably, that's the tip of the root, right? That's as deep as you get in the soil. Everything improves from there.

• 28:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Literally, everything.

• 28:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's what your mitochondria do. They take oxygen and food and they combust them and run them down an assembly line to create energy. And energy is the key to health and life and everything else.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think a lot of times, we gloss over that a little bit, you know, like, well, the cell has a lot of energy. But what happens when a cell has energy? Well, it can eliminate waste, it can repair, it can detoxify, it can regenerate. And so, I would make a bold enough statement, you know, and I'll make it in front of you so you take issue with this if you feel it's inaccurate, but. Nearly every form of pathology and disease known to mankind is a shift in metabolism. It's a shift in the metabolism, basically, in the mitochondria. The sicker the mitochondria become, the sicker the host will become, and the more fertile you are for all forms of pathology and disease. These are not things that are happening to us.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  They are things that are happening within us. And so if I was to say, what's your favorite biohacking device would be a red light therapy bed? And then you can add things like exercise with oxygen therapy, Ewatt. I mean, we know that athletes that would train at altitude would have a prolifer-

• 30:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Perform better.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, perform better. Why? Because you get, you know, enhance-

• 30:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It enhances your mitochondria.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, erythrom癖sis, but you essentially are upgrading the mitochondria.

• 30:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  And you're adding red blood cells to the bloodstream, so you have more taxis to shuttle oxygen.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  And so these are the kinds of devices. You know, I have an EMF tent around my bed, and people are like, wow, you're getting crazy about EMS. Well, you know, ancestrally, we didn't really come in contact with a lot of EMFs, and I think that the jury is still out on the implications of 5G and Wi-Fi.

• 30:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Better safe than sorry. You have a tent over your bed. We think it's not actually helpful for your body to have this exposure constantly to EMFs and Wi-Fi and 5G, but by putting this tent over your bed, you block it at night and it improves your sleep and you feel different.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, and if you look at things as they occur naturally in nature, like if you were to take a cup and scoop it out of a running stream, and you were to analyze what's in that water, you would find high mineral content, first of all, and not just potassium and magnesium and sodium, the big ones that are in most electrolyte supplements. You would find all of the other trace minerals, boron, zinc, selenium, manganese, molybdenum. You find all of these, they're not the sort of headline minerals that most people think about, but if you back that up and you say, well, what if you become mineral deficient? Well, you need 12 essential minerals to build bone. You know, you don't just need calcium. Calcium combines with phosphorus to form hydroxyapatite, which really makes our bones dense, but in order for that to occur, you need these 12 minerals.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  And so if you're not getting the 12 minerals, you need to biohack that. You need to add a mineral salt to your morning routine. Maybe it's a Celtic salt, maybe it's a Baja Gold tea salt, which is my favorite. But just adding the right raw materials back to the human body, it is astounding what you you see happen in human beings when you give their body the raw material. It needs to do its job. You know, my other favorite device would probably be hydrogen water and certainly filtering your water. I mean, I mean, I think people should get tap water permanently out of their life. We know that it's, you know, it's got neurotoxins in it like.

• 32:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So many contaminants. That's incredible.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  It really is. I mean, it is mind. I actually just did a post of of backwashing the filter, the four-stage RO filter in my house into my bathtub. And Miami is considered, you know, really healthy water. The municipal water supply is like, it's generally accepted as safe, the grass. And but it's very high in PFAs and and and polyalkyl phenols.

• 32:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Forever chemicals.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, forever chemicals. And so it's it's not voodoo science, you know, to to start biohacking yourself, it doesn't even need, you don't even need a big budget. You know, I tell people they're starting out with cold plunging just to take ice, put it in a top, I mean, take water, put it in a Tupperware and stack it in your freezer and throw the big cubes of ice in. And when you wake up in the morning, doss it in there and 30 minutes later, get in a cold plunge. Yeah. Expose your body to these hormetic stresses, you know, mineralize the body, hydrate the body. I mean, I, you know, before we got on here, I was showing you the oxidative reduction potential of hydrogen water. I think if you have a choice between drinking regular water or hydrogen water, you should be drinking hydrogen water. If you have a choice between drinking tap water or filter

• 33:25Speaker 01

  water, there's you should be filtering your your water supply. So I think biohacking is is a way of getting us back to the basics. If you're not getting sunlight, you need to be supplementing with, you know, vitamin D3. It's probably the most pandemic deficiency in the world.

• 33:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It is. So so basically, what you're talking about are these things that have been used by humans forever, such as being on the earth, walking on the dirt with your feet, being in sunlight.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's.

• 33:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Getting clean, getting water from the river that's. Of minerals. I mean, these are really sort of simple things and then breath work, you know, sunlight and exercise. These are all biohacking techniques. So I think the hacking people get confused. I think it's to me, it's really just what is the science of creating health?

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And functional medicine is sort of the medical version of that.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But there's so much that we can do on our own to upgrade our biology and to actually activate these healing systems in our body that that are

• 34:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  why we get these chronic illnesses.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  No question. And and we saw these and then and then we would have these, you know, in the mortality space, we'd have these things called comorbidities, right? So.

• 34:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I don't believe in that.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  You don't?

• 34:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No, because because they're not comorbidities because they're all connected underlying by the same mechanisms. So hypertension, heart failure, diabetes, high heart disease, you know, these are things.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're not independent.

• 34:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No, kidney failure, fatty liver. These are all comorbidities.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But they're all have the same root cause. You fix the cause and everything gets better.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  I could not agree more with you.

• 34:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They're not just like random events. Oh, this person happened to get five different chronic diseases. No, they're all the same problem. They're just called different things at their end stage, but they're caused by insulin resistance most of the time.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  First of all, I would I would wholly agree with you. We would see things like insulin resistance being the worst. You know, we looked at glycemic control, hormone balance, even though even though hormones weren't being therapeutically tested or measured, we would look at hormone balance and then we would look at certain nutrient deficiencies. Vitamin D three, B 12, you know, major nutrients in the body.

• 35:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  As part of the insurance screening?

• 35:35Speaker 01

  As part of the insurance screening for the underlying because one of the things we wanted to do was assess the chance that this person would correct their behavior. And because the last thing you wanted to do was issue a policy at one level and then they correct it and.

• 35:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, it's interesting, like I'm working with John Hancock and they're all in on helping their policyholders improve their health and they have a whole vitality program. They're offering wellness services. They're offering even cancer screening with a multi cancer detection test gallery.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Do you know why?

• 36:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Because it makes saves them money.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Yes, because if I. Issue a policy now and then I can improve your health and you live longer. I collect more premiums.

• 36:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's right.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  You will notice that the annuity companies don't do that because the annuity companies, their risk is that you live too long.

• 36:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Not that you die early.

• 36:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Insurance, a life insurance company doesn't want you to die too soon because they want to collect.

• 36:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You want to be aligned with life insurance.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't want to be aligned with the annuity companies and probably going to get.

• 36:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But it's fascinating. It's fascinating that they, you know, this is a financial incentive for them to actually get people healthier. Because it saves them money.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Yes, and it's, and it's done after the policy is issued because if I can issue you a standard policy and that can turn you into a super preferred.

• 36:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  Then that's, that's a win because I issue the policy with a 26 year life expectancy and if I can get your life expectancy to 37 years more. Then that's a major win. On the other hand, if you're an annuity company and I take a payment from you. And I'm going to guarantee you an income stream for life, the shorter your life, the larger my return.

• 37:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  And so, in fact, there was a lot of arbitrage, financial services, instruments, and during my day that have been outlawed since where people would buy life insurance and annuities and pair the two. Because one was the risk of early death, one was the risk of late death. But, but, so, you know, back to what we were saying, you know, there would be underlying issues like much to what you're saying. We would see people that were clinically deficient in testosterone, for example, men and women. And so this urethral poetic pressure on the bone marrow to create new red blood cells would go down and they would be borderline anemic for decades. Right? They would just, they would just, they didn't have classic anemia, right? But their RBC count would be very, very low. Their hemoglobin would be very, very low.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  Their, their, their mean corpuscular volumes and mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentrations would be very, very low. The red cell distribution width would be very high. So what would happen is they, their, their, their bodies were carrying oxygen very poorly. They were essentially suffocating to death. And in almost all of these cases, we would see this progression of events. So the hormone levels would decline. As the hormone levels would decline, the blood counts would decline. As the blood counts would decline, they would become increasingly more hypoxic. As they became more hypoxic, their blood would become more acidic. As they became more acidic, they were more fertile to other forms of pathology and disease. And along this way, almost all of these patients would become sleep deprived. You know, they would have major sleep disruption.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Because when you become really hypoxic, the brain wakes you up by

• 38:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, yeah. When you go to altitude, you can't sleep well.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  People like fly to Aspen and whatever.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Cause you're hypoxic, so it doesn't let you get into deep or REM sleep. And you start, once you hit the sleep cycle, that's the end of the road. You know, I mean, I think sleep is our human superpower.

• 38:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, and I was in Bolivia this year and we went to like 16,000 feet to this.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  16,000?

• 39:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Or maybe it was 14. It was really high.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  14 or 16 is high.

• 39:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It was really high. I mean, you land in La Paz and the airport's at 13,000 feet.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you like get off the plane and you're like, whoa. But we got up to this hotel in the middle of nowhere. We were going to the Salas and we were crossing over to, I think Chile. And I got really hypoxic. Like I checked my O2 sat and they were like in the 60s.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Wow. Not your pulse ox, your O2 sat?

• 39:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No, no, no. My oxygen saturation, which usually as a doctor, you're like intubated in the ICU at that level.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I said to my wife, I said, hey, can you go tell the guy that I need the oxygen tank? They brought it in and I put it on. And he was like, we'll just take it back in a few minutes. I'm like, no, you're going to leave with me and somebody else needs it? You can go get it in the middle of the night, but oh, come on. And I was pretty frightening and my wife stayed up a whole night watching me because she was worried I was going to die.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But, you know, yeah, hypoxia is a real thing. But it's also a hormetic stress in the right dose, right? So it's really about the dose, right? If you stay up at altitude too long, you're going to die. But if you do it for short bursts, it's actually activates your healing system. So a lot of the technologies that, you know, Are involved that are

• 40:16Speaker 01

  Biohacking, for example, E watt exercises with oxygen therapy is melting that hyperoxic hypoxic state and

• 40:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And there's a lot of gizmos and equipment and people can buy those things too, but I think the basics are also biohacking. Eating well is biohacking.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  No question.

• 40:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Phyto hormesis, which is taking a lot of these plant compounds that upregulate these various longevity pathways.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Is biohacking, having your nutrient status optimized is biohacking.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Exercise, breath works.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Eating whole foods, getting into a routine.

• 40:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Relationships, having your nutrients that upregulate all the biochemical reactions in your body. All that I'd say is mostly free and is available to all of us. And you know, even hot and cold therapies, you know, you can take a hot bath and a cold bath. I mean, it's just like.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  And most of us don't want to do that. That's why I say aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort. We would see the more, the more aggressively people pursue comfort, the faster they age. Right? We gotta just stop telling grandma not to go outside. It's too hot.

• 41:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's like my mother. It's like, she's like, Mark, every time I get the urge to exercise, I lie down till it goes away.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  That's not a good plan.

• 41:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No, but it was interesting. She, you know, she came back from the hospital once. My, my sister had died and her husband, my stepfather died and you know, she lived near me. But she couldn't really live on her own. So I moved her into my house after she had a episode of heart failure. And you know, she was just overweight. She didn't really eat great. She didn't, obviously didn't listen to me.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And I mean,

• 41:46Speaker 01

  No one wants to listen to their son.

• 41:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I even,

• 41:48Speaker 01

  You're like the best functional medicine doc on the planet.

• 41:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Meals for like, you know, three weeks to just get her started. She didn't eat anything. And I took her to my house. I literally locked her up like I, she had no car. There was no Uber. There was no delivery where we live in the Massachusetts. So she had to eat what I fed her. I made her get on an exercise bike with oxygen because she was hypoxic. I got her nutrient status up, made her take her vitamins. I did basically just treated her because I had her captive. And she got off the oxygen. She was able to live alone again. She was able to recover from her heart failure. It was, it was quite amazing to see how quickly she lost a ton of weight.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you know, I had her, I had her locked up in a kind of a hymen prison.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  You know, there was a Nobel laureate prize winner for, for multi-step oxygen therapy. It was Otto Warburg's, wasn't Otto Warburg, um, he also won a Nobel prize, but Otto Warburg's.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Cohort that actually did the majority of this work on on multi-step oxygen therapy. It's just fascinating. You know, even taking deconditioned elderly patients, they really can't exercise and even exposing them to heat to elevate their blood, I mean, to elevate their heart rate a little bit and then and then running a nasal cannulas of oxygen and looking at how fast the mitochondria begin to come back.

• 43:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  To recover, yeah.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  They sputter and they it's like, you know, starting an old motorcycle and fires and backfires and then all of a sudden you see these things come back.

• 43:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, so so we kind of understand the basic foundations of creating health, which is so we all kind of agree on. But all these new technologies, I think there's some just sort of curiosity I have about red light therapy and hydrogen water and some of these tools. Can we dive a little bit more into the light therapy? Because I think as people talk about it, there's all these red light devices, everybody's using them, but I don't think most people understand the science behind it and the biology of what it does. You mentioned briefly how it affects, you know, an extra oxide in the cells and gets rid of it and allows oxygen to come in and activate the mitochondria. But can you talk about, you know, one, what is the science behind how this works? Two, you know, what what does it do in terms of improving health and and why should people be using it?

• 44:04Speaker 01

  So so basic, you know, basic overview of light, first of all, is is light can be damaging and light can be therapeutic and we have visible light and we have invisible light. So light sort of follow doesn't sort of it follows this spectrum. You have X-ray, which is a light, right, which is a can be very damaging. Then you have ultraviolet and these are non-visible spectrums. You have ultraviolet, UVA, UVB, which are the, you know, rays from the sun that cause skin's cancer and burn your skin. These are also non-visible. And then you have a very narrow sliver of light, which is the visible spectrum, the red, orange, green, blue, yellow, indigo, violet. You have this very narrow spectrum of light and within that is the red light spectrum. And I'll come back to that in a second.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  And then above that, you have infrared and near-infrared and and not all infrared and near-infrared are the same as you get higher in the Wavelengths, you excite different chromophores in the body.

• 44:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What's a chromophore?

• 44:59Speaker 01

  So like water is a chromophore. And so an infrared sauna, if you lay in an infrared light bed, you don't get hot and you don't sweat. Why is that? That's because that's a lower wavelength of light. So it's not actually causing the water chromophore to vibrate, create friction, which creates heat and causes you to sweat. So in an infrared sauna, which is a very high wavelength, usually over 1100 nanometers or higher, you're going to create heat and you're going to sweat. Below that, you're still in the infrared spectrum, but you're not creating wavelengths that cause friction and create heat. So something very special happens in the red light and near infrared and infrared spectrum.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  This slice of light is very therapeutic to human beings. We know that it improves collagen, elastin, fibrin. We also know that.

• 45:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's all your connective tissue.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  That's your connective tissue.

• 45:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Which is often very inflamed and that causes pain or dysfunction.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, it's not just how our skin appears, right? I mean, we all want our skin to look better and, you know, red light even have some FDA authorizations for for skin. I mean, we know that it can. And depending on the severity of hair loss, it's it's very good for hair follicles. It can restore some hair growth. It's very good for your skin, for for the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles. I mean, there's lots of studies on the proliferation of collagen, elastin and fibrin. And also this process of angiogenesis, which is this new capillary formation, new arterial formulation, formation that causes arteries to branch and sprout and actually can, you know, supply more oxygen to tissues, namely the skin.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  So the red light, the visible red light is a very shallow light, right? It doesn't penetrate very deeply. And so there are lots of red light devices out there, masks, you know, little masks you can wear, devices you can wear on your wrist, mats that you can lay on. But to get into the infrared and near infrared and the real therapeutic spectrums, this takes a lot of power to mimic this spectrum. And by power, I mean specifically something called milliwatts of irradiance. So you, light's measured a couple of different ways. You have the nanometer wavelengths, which is what is the wavelength of this light? Is it 640? Is it 810? Is it, you know, 1100?

• 47:28Speaker 01

  And light essentially does the same thing, just at different depths. So if you use red light, you're just getting very superficial effects. You might have some pleasing effects on the skin, like, you know, improved collagen, elastin, fibrin in the surface of your skin. You might have some reduction of fine lines and wrinkles. You could wear one of those hair devices and get some mild improvement in hair density. But if you really want the therapeutic wavelengths, you need power to drive these. So in my opinion, if you're looking at a red light device, especially a red light bed, if it plugs into a regular 110 outlet, it's not powerful enough to create the therapeutic wavelengths that you want. I would wait until you can afford one that, that actually plugs into like a 220.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  It uses real power. It's drawing down real power. You'll see that as you lower the milliwatts of irradiance, you decrease the penetration of that light and you essentially decrease its effectiveness. The sun is very powerful, right? If we're going to mimic the beneficial wavelengths for the sun, we actually need to draw a lot of power. And then we need to force it through as, as, as many diodes as possible that are as close together as they possibly can be. We want-

• 48:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And that's what you're seeing those red light beds, all those little-

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, you see very small diodes. Generally, the larger the bulb, the less therapeutic it is, the more superficial. The smaller the bulb, the more therapeutic and the, and the deeper the penetration. You also shouldn't look for red light devices that have a high amount of visible red light. That's the least effective spectrum. You want red light devices that actually have a high percentage of non-visible light because that is the therapeutic spectrum. So for example, if you look at the red light bed that I have, when you turn it on, it looks like most of the- Rows of lights are burned out. That's because they're infrared or near infrared. Those are the real therapeutic wavelengths.

• 49:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I noticed that. It was like there was red and there was all this. Here's where I was like, oh, is it just, does need to be turned on?

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. That's what everybody says. They're like, I paid all this money and only half the lights work. That's exactly what you want. But manufacturers will, you know, build these red light walls and then all of the bulbs are visible. Already you know that's non therapeutic. Okay, you're just, you're just seeing the red light. And to the consumer, they're like, well, there's more red lights on on this one. And fewer on this one, the one that probably looks like some of the lights are off is probably the best device. Because you're in the invisible spectrum and so now.

• 49:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And what do those do biologically?

• 49:55Speaker 01

  So the, the, the main thing, well, so first of all, they, they're very good for vasomotor circulation. And a lot of, a lot of folks are unaware that about 70% of our circulatory system, circulation throughout our body is actually not done by the heart. I mean, none of us has a heart that's strong enough to pump blood from our chest to the tip of our toes, through all of the arteries and capillaries in our brain, to the back of the eye. And through our liver, lungs, pancreas and our kidneys. The, you know, we're about 14% arteries, we're about 11 and a half percent veins. The majority of our circulation is microvascular.

• 50:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Small vessels.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, small blood vessels and capillaries. That's about 70% of our circulatory system. That's actually not powered by the heart. It's powered by an activity called vasomotor. It's, uh, it's similar to a snake swallowing a mouse. It's almost like a peristaltic activity.

• 50:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Little smooth muscle fibers and the blood vessels that sort of move the blood along.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Exactly. I mean, you know, arteries are, are smooth muscle, right? There's the, the, the three types of muscle in the body. We have the cardiac, which is confined to the heart and you have skeletal, which is the muscle everybody knows about. And then you have the smooth muscle. It's sort of this differentiating, um, overlapping, um, layers of muscle that when they contract, they create a wave like motion. Again, like a, like a snake swallowing a mouse. Right? So arteries can dilate, they can constrict. But the most important thing that they do is this vasomotor.

• 51:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And the red light helps that?

• 51:19Speaker 01

  And the red light is tremendous for vasomotor activity. Like when people start using red light therapy, they'll report things like they stopped wearing readers. Like I'm 54 years old, I don't wear readers. Perfect eyesight. And, and the reason why eyesight begins to degrade in your 50s is not because of. You know, something happening to the rods, the cones, the macula, it's not a degenerate, degenerate process, it's a lack of microvascular circulation. So if you restore the vasomotor to the back of the eye, you restore the eyesight. You know, so like Joe Rogan, I was on his podcast a few months ago, he bought a red light bed while he was on the podcast and he texted me five weeks later, and he's like, holy shit, bro, I'm not, I'm not wearing readers anymore.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  Like, literally, my eyesight's improved. Everybody notices the improvement in their skin. But when you start to improve vasomotor activity, now you're talking about microvascular circulation. So, so think about all of the compromised areas in the body that receive microvascular circulation. This is all of our joints, our ligaments, our tendons, our musculoskeletal insertions. And this is the, this is the, inside the erector spinae group in the, in the spine, all the microvascular circulation in the brain. These are all enhanced by red light. And so if we can restore vasomotor activity, if we can kick out mitochondrial nitric oxide, the gas that is binding to cytochrome C oxidase that's competing for

• 52:40Speaker 01

  oxygen, right, because, and, and keeping that cycle anaerobic rather than aerobic, and we can put oxygen into that cycle. Now you're talking about one device that upstages the mitochondria, that improves collagen elastin and fibrin in the skin, that improves angiogenesis, the formation of new blood vessels beneath the skin and other areas of the body, and improves microvascular circulation. So all these compromised areas of the body, like our knees, hips, shoulders, rotator cuff, low back, these all get the benefit of improved microvascular circulation, and all of a sudden, people's back pain goes away, or their knee pain goes away. Now, yeah, but deformity, or cartilaginous erosion, or some other kind

• 53:20Speaker 01

  of osteotic condition going on in the joint, it's not going to improve that. But you, so you see reduction in pain, improvement in energy levels, balancing of mood, increased circulation, and all of the benefits that come from that. It's like what you were talking about, you know, where people don't have all of these conditions, they generally have one condition, or one state, that's causing all of these spokes.

• 53:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, I agree with you that, you know, when you look at mitochondria, and the importance of mitochondria, and the fact that red light actually works primarily through its effect on mitochondria.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 53:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You understand how it has its broad effects because when you look at all the chronic diseases we have, whether it's heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia, obesity, you know, mental illness, these are all mitochondrial diseases.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  They're all mitochondrial diseases. They're all shifts in metabolism.

• 54:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  This is not just kind of a wacky, like crazy kind of alternative concept. I mean, leading scientists like Suzanne Gove, who had on the podcast Harvard trained, London, trained in Oxford, I mean, just brilliant physician, pediatric neurologist, studied the mitochondrial function of autistic kids and saw that their brains had super low energy levels.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, and very high levels of lactic oxide, by the way.

• 54:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. And so mitochondrial therapies actually help these kids. And she treats them using mitochondrial cofactors and nutrients. So this is not just a fringe idea, but it's central, whether it's Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. And the impact you can have on by treating mitochondria is so important. And it's one of those hallmarks of aging that we talked about, I wrote about my book, Young Forever, that is actually central to so much of what goes wrong. If your mitochondria are messed up, you're in bad shape.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Yes, you're right.

• 55:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And it causes long COVID, fatigue, chronic fatigue syndrome, you know, all the sort of chronic illnesses that we're suffering from are primarily mitochondrial. So it's kind of cool to see that there's tools, in addition to exercise and supplementation, that can actually start to help regenerate and renew and optimize mitochondria.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  No doubt. I mean, I think, you know, red light therapy, in my opinion, is probably the most, has the most single, as a single device, prolific impact on mitochondrial function.

• 55:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So you're like doubling down on red light therapy.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  I really am. I mean, I hate.

• 55:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you have to pay a million dollars.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  I'm not even trying to sell a red light bed. I'm just saying.

• 55:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Can you do it for a reasonable cost? Because some of these things are really expensive.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Yes, you can. You can do it for a reasonable cost. There are lots of clinics that allow people to go into memberships to the really powerful beds. But there are lots of walls that you can hang on the back of a door, you can sit in front of. Proximity to the panels really matters.

• 55:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  To be close to it.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  You want to be very close to it, right? You want the light to spread in the skin. You don't want the light to spread before it hits the skin. Right, because the skin is actually a barrier too. If you actually looked at red light passing through the skin, it doesn't just penetrate it like a laser. It hits it and spreads. So the closer you are to the diode of light, the more likely that light is to spread inside of the tissue. If you look at cadaver studies, where they bury light meters and cadavers and they look at penetration of depths. You know, proximity to the light matters. So if you have one of those red light devices, the ones for the, you know, the masks for the face are great for collagen and elastin in your skin, fibrin in your skin. But if you really want therapeutic wavelengths, you should use a, you know, red light panel that has some, some density. And look for wavelengths between 680 and 910.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  In that, in that range, you're going to capture most of the real therapeutic wavelengths. And then if you do want to step up and get a red light bed, make sure it's a red light bed that actually has a commercial outlet. You know, you usually have to have, you know, a 220 outlet.

• 56:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Like you need for your washing machine.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  Washer dryer, yeah, yeah. I mean, you want to, if you're going to spend that kind of money, get, get, get the power.

• 57:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's who needs the power to.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  So, you know, those are the kinds of biohacking devices. But, you know, truthfully, people that actually get regular micro doses of sun exposure, it's the same benefit.

• 57:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  You know, so I really encourage people to.

• 57:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Get in nature, get outside.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  The first 45 minutes of the day during first light, well, there isn't any UVA or UVB rays. Right? So you don't have a lot of the damaging rays in the first 45 minutes. That's why.

• 57:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Sunrise.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, sunrise. First light is so important. I was out there, I mean, I flew, I spent 32 hours on a plane and 38 hours on the ground in the last four days.

• 57:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I'm crazy.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  I left Thursday and came home Sunday to Dubai, right? So it was 15 and a half hours over there. I think it was like 17 hours back. So it was like 32 hours in the air. All I did was just tap into some of the quote biohacking mechanisms that I can. And I just posted my sleep score, 99% sleep score. My, I was showing you deep and REM. And I didn't drug myself to sleep. I just bookended my sleep. I made sure that I do the same routine every single night. I have the same sleep hygiene routine every night. I have the same sleep hygiene routine every morning. My body knows that if we're doing.

• 58:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Sleep is again the ultimate biohacking tool. I think if you can get your sleep sorted, it corrects so much, right?

• 58:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And so many millions, 70 million Americans have sleep issues.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  It's terrible. And you know, and when we talk about these, you know, these people that have, you know, following this sort of stage of consequences that we would see in the medical record, and I'll come, come back to my sleep routine in a second. You know, we would see these people that had, especially in their 50s, 60s, 70s, as their hormonal levels would plummet, especially the hormone testosterone.

• 58:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Testosterone, yeah.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  Because it's, it's one of the main hormones that's putting pressure on the bone marrow to, to make.

• 58:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Make red blood cells and to build bone and to build muscle and everything else.

• 58:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does so many things.

• 58:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's an anabolic hormone, meaning it helps to build.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think sadly, we think of it as a male hormone. You know, so we think, you know, women think of testosterone, a lot of women, I'm not saying all women, but women will think of testosterone as a very, you know, deep voice aggression, facial hair, muscles.

• 59:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  But that's actually really not true.

• 59:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's important for women too, especially for sex drive and libido and.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you show me a woman with a testosterone level, you know, less than three and point two, point three on free testosterone. There's no sex drive there. And their libido's out the window. And then, you know, of course, when libido leaves a marriage, you know, the, the opposite spouse will think that love and attraction has left the marriage. They're very different things. Libido's in motion, love and, you know, you can love your spouse and be very attracted to them and have no sex drive.

• 59:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  And as soon as you put the sex drive back, you know, all the magic starts again. But, you know, when we, we would see these patients applying for policies and you would see this just long hypoxia just hiding in plain sight. You know, this low riblet count, low hemoglobin levels.

• 59:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  Inevitably, all of them would be on sleep medication.

• 59:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Interesting.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  Because, and, and this is an interesting.

• 1:00:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Kind of makes sense, right? Cause if you go to altitude, you have low oxygen, you don't sleep so great, right?

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't sleep great.

• 1:00:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Kind of at low, you're, you're at like high altitude at sea level because you have low red blood cell count.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  But it's a really a double edged sword. Because if you ask most physicians, why do people that are the most exhausted sleep the worst? Their face will go blank. They'll go, well, if you're the most exhausted, it's probably the only thing you do well is sleep. But it's actually the opposite because you're exhausted because you're hypoxic. But you're also not sleeping because you're hypoxic. So the people that are the most exhausted actually sleep the worst. And then what happens is they go to their doctor and they say, look, doc, I'm tired all the time and I just can't sleep. And so then they do the worst thing. They put them on some kind of tranquillitic sleep medication. And what this does is this actually prevents your brain from waking

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  you up. Right? So your brain is actually trying to save you when it when it keeps you in from going into deep sleep when you're hypoxic because your respiratory rate gets so shallow that you become severely hypoxic. These people will actually gasp at night. If you're sleeping next to them, you'll hear them, you know, you'll actually hear them gasp at night. It's severe hypoxia. And so what happens is trazodone and zolipidam nitrate, diazepam, a lot of these will actually block the brain's view of blood oxygen, essentially shut off the monitoring system. And then it allows them to get into a deep sleep, but they're not actually sleeping. They're suffocating. And so what happens is these people will wake up in the morning, oh, God, man, I really hate taking Tylenol PM because it makes me

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  so drowsy the next day. That medication has been out of your system for hours. You're not feeling the effects of the Tylenol PM. You're feeling the effects of having suffocated for six hours. And so you take a hypoxic person, put them on sleep medication and force them into severe hypoxia. And that's when the real magic begins. Now you start to see all cause mortality begin begin to rise.

• 1:02:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So you're saying hormone therapy can help people increase their oxygenation by increasing the red cell count, which helps their sleep.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  No question.

• 1:02:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But doesn't mean everybody should be on testosterone therapy.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Doesn't mean that everybody should be on testosterone.

• 1:02:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But you can raise your testosterone with a lot of different approaches.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I'll be the first one to tell you that 70% of the clients that I see that qualify for hormone therapy are not on hormones. So when I say qualify for hormone therapy, based on their levels, you know, you see a male come in at 262 or 315 on testosterone and the free testosterone is between four and a half and seven, you know, really low levels of free testosterone. It doesn't necessarily mean that their testicular production of testosterone has stopped. It could mean a whole host of things, you know, very often the signaling hormones are low, luteinizing hormone, follicle signaling hormone, those are easy pathways to mimic. Very often they're deficient in the raw material that's used to make testosterone.

• 1:02:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's true.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was just gonna say, there's the big bellwether.

• 1:03:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Actually saturated fat is amazing and jacks up cholesterol.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And I mean, it jacks up your testosterone.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  But no one, I will tell you right now, when I started preaching about this 10 years ago, people thought it was a complete charlatan for saying the people that are on statins, that get their, that are on heavy statins, that took their LDL cholesterol from 180, which they put them on a statin for, down to 57. We would see this every, not want to say every single time, but the majority of time in the medical records, they collapse in their hormone function. And as soon as their hormones collapse, now they're hypoxic, they're exhausted, they don't sleep well, the erectile dysfunction, the memory loss, the confusion, the short-term recall issues, the all kinds of cognitive impairments.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  And if you look at the number of cognitive impairments, you know, Alzheimer's, dementia, you know, memory loss, all of the cognitive impairments that start earlier than they should, in almost every case, what we saw was because they had clinically deficient, in my opinion, levels of testosterone, I mean, of LDL cholesterol. So you restore the cholesterol, you can restore the hormones. Very often you restore the DHEA level, you restore the hormones. Very often you get sex hormone binding protein out of the way by taking a mineral called boron. You get the sex hormone binding proteins that are actually lowering your free testosterone. You get these things out of the blood or back into normal ranges.

• 1:04:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  By taking boron.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  If you have high SHBG.

• 1:04:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  And you want to lower sex hormone binding globulin, boron is.

• 1:04:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Which basically binds all the testosterone and lets some free in the blood to do the work, but if you have too much of it, it basically doesn't allow you to have enough free hormones. Hormone, do the actual work.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  So people have low hormonal levels and they immediately go on hormone therapy. When, you know, if we look at the cause of the majority of low hormone.

• 1:04:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's really important question.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  There are really three main causes that that we have seen. Number one is clinically low levels of LDL cholesterol. And the second one are what I would put in the nutrient deficiency categories. Vitamin D three.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  And high SHBG or low DHEA. Those three are are critical to having healthy levels of testosterone. So if you see somebody that has low double digit levels of DHEA, right? And high.

• 1:05:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Which is actually usually caused by stress, right?

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very often caused by stress. It's an easy supplement to take.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  You supplement them with DHEA and then all of a sudden the hormone production starts again. Or you see low signaling from the pituitary, the the luteinizing and follicle stimulating hormones, which are essentially your your volume knob, right? For turning up or turning down testosterone, they do to do other things. But so very often we're deficient in the level of the hormone because the signal has been turned down.

• 1:05:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  Right? I mean, when we can't hear the music walking into a room, we don't mess with the speakers.

• 1:05:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But part of the main reason you didn't mention that causes testosterone plummet is sugar.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Well, yeah.

• 1:06:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  When you get insulin resistance and you get belly fat, you get low testosterone.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  Very true.

• 1:06:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yes, especially if you're a guy. If you're a woman, it's a little different, but it really is a big factor. So you can almost kind of inversely relate your size of your belly with your testosterone level. A lot bigger your belly, the lower your testosterone.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  And your estrogen levels get to.

• 1:06:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And your estrogen level goes up, which you, you know, causes feminization.

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  Water retention and feminization.

• 1:06:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  Think you and I are very aligned philosophically that very often we are. Even even the hormone therapy clinics are just treating the hormone.

• 1:06:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Gotta treat the cause.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  Always ask, why is this low?

• 1:06:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  I mean, there is true testicular hypofunction, but that's very rare.

• 1:06:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  You know, primary hypogonadism is pretty, pretty rare, but we treat all low hormones as primary hypogonadism and we just put people on hormones. And, and it doesn't make them, it temporarily makes them feel better, but they're still bathing their cellular biology in the toxic soup. And so they end up going right back to where they were.

• 1:07:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, that's the other problem. You mentioned toxic soup, but a lot of the environmental toxins are estrogenic and they do actually affect hormone function. And I think it's a big role in a lot of what's going on in our society with hormone dysregulation, change in fertility rates, change in, you know, birth rates between men and women. I mean, there's a whole bunch of things that are happening that are quite frightening. They have to do with environmental chemicals, which, which is probably why you filter your water.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I, I filter everything. I filter my water, I filter my air. When, when we're done the podcast, I'll take you out and show you my air filtration. So this is surgically clean air in this house. So it goes through.

• 1:07:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It feels like it.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  It, it, you know, people that come in here say the air feels different in here. And it is different because, you know, I filter it through a HEPA filter, then through a carbon filter, and then essentially it goes into a chamber and goes through a high dose UVA, UVB and blue and infrared light. And then it gets sucked up into the, into the chamber in the house. So that's how you, you know, you avoid the mold, the mycotoxins and all, all the other nonsense that's coming through our ventilation systems because we're in the mold capital of the world here in Miami.

• 1:08:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Definitely.

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, we won, we won the mold lottery. But just to bring the, the hormone thing full, full circle, there's, there's also a genetic predisposition that women need to watch out for called COMT. C O M T.

• 1:08:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yep.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  If you've ever actually seen a Dutch test, a female hormone test, which is. In my opinion, probably the most accurate way to measure, especially cycling in women, because a blood test will only take a snapshot in time, but a Dutch test will actually show you the cycling. And to make sure that they're monophasic, so they're moving from follicular to ovulation to luteal, you know.

• 1:08:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  If you're a menstruating woman, yeah.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you're a menstruating woman. And, you know, postmenopausal women still have a cycle, it's just the amplitude's very, very low, right? But they still have somewhat of a cycle. But there is, if you look at a Dutch test, and this just flies by a lot of OB-GYNs, you will see an area, you will actually see this gene mutation, catecholomethyltransferase COMT, it's right on the Dutch test. And essentially, what this is doing is in the elimination pathway of estrogen, sending it down the E2 pathway, so actually getting estrogen out of the bloodstream and putting it into a form where it can actually be eliminated from the blood and not build up in the blood. You know, this gene mutation is...

• 1:09:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's a variation, right?

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  It's a gene variation. It's essentially responsible for the breakdown of catecholamines, the norepinephrine, the epinephrine, the dopamine, adrenaline.

• 1:09:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Surprise, surprise, it needs nutrients to operate.

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  And it needs nutrients to operate. That's what's so exciting, is like, all this stuff can go wrong, and all you need are nutrients to fix it.

• 1:09:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you know this, Gary, but, you know, the original sort of hypothesis around nutrient therapy and functional medicine came from this guy, Abram Hofer, who was a psychiatrist in Canada who was treating schizophrenia.

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  Well, I love him, and I want to read his book.

• 1:09:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You know, he was studying schizophrenics and using high doses of niacin and zinc and magnesium and B vitamins and B6 to actually help treat these patients. And he became friends with Linus Pauling. And Linus Pauling wrote an article in Science Magazine in 1969 called Orthomolecular Psychiatry, ortho means to straighten, molecular means to straighten molecules, and essentially talked about using nutrients in high doses to push enzymatic reactions, which were stuck, basically, which is making, kind of greasing the wheels of your biochemical pathways. And, you know, what's really even more amazing is the discovery of how so many... Our genes code for enzymes and Bruce Ames wrote a beautiful paper. He just died. He's one of the, I mean, you've learned about mitochondria. You can't miss Bruce Ames work.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:10:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Giant and mitochondrial renewal and therapy as you get older as a way of sort of mitigating the effects of aging. He just died sadly, but very old, but he was an amazing guy who basically wrote this paper. I think with the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that said that one third of our entire DNA codes for enzymes. And every enzyme.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  So true.

• 1:10:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Requires cofactors and one of the cofactors, there are nutrients, there are vitamins and minerals. So all and each mineral and vitamin doesn't just affect one pathway. It can affect hundreds and hundreds of pathways.

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:11:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And so that's why nutrition is so important and, and, you know, you were mentioning earlier, seeing nutrient deficiencies in these populations. And I think that, that there is so much subclinical nutritional deficiencies that people just are not aware of. And I, and I was just at an event where I had a chance to talk to Bill Gates about this and I was talking about the work he was doing with putting bullion cubes and with vitamins into the food supply in the developing world to help with really significant vitamin deficiencies. Like zinc and vitamin A and I mean, they have real deficiencies there. And I said, there's a lot of deficiencies in the U.S. He's like, oh, there is not. There's no way. We're all eating healthy and we plenty of protein and food and there's no nutrient deficiencies. But he's wrong because first the N H A N S data, which is our national health and nutrition examination survey is documented that yes, when you check blood on Americans, they're deficient.

• 1:11:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But in function health, where now we've had over 10 million, probably 15 million biomarkers we've checked.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:12:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We have 100,000 members. We see the, and this is a health forward population. And, and we see at the reference ranges from the lab, not what you and I would think would be optimal, right? Like vitamin D over 50, like vitamin D 30 or less. 67% of people we test are deficient in one or more nutrients at this minimum level. Elevated homocysteine, methylbutylic acid, which is B vitamins, which is very important for these pathways like CMT, vitamin D, iron. Zinc, I mean, it's staggering.

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  How these are so common and they are affecting so much of our biology that makes us eventually have what Robert Heaney, who was an incredible vitamin D scientist, called long latency deficiency diseases. So if you're vitamin D deficient and it's cute, you'll get rickets. But if you get vitamin D deficiency over a long period of time or insufficiency, you'll get osteoporosis, you'll get heart disease, you'll get dementia.

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you are so singing my tune. What is amazing, too, is the profound change that happens when you just give the body the raw material it needs to do its job. You know, one of the most common.

• 1:13:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Whether it's light, or water, or oxygen, or air, or sleep, or exercise, or nutrients.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  Like, I keep on saying, we're not as diseased or as pathological or as sick as we think we are. We're nutrient deficient. I mean, we should always start there. We should, we should ask ourselves, what's missing from this biome that could be causing this to happen?

• 1:13:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So what are the, in your experiences, you've sort of done all this work and treated so many people and had all this experience with the data. What are the most important nutrients that we're missing? And what are the supplements that we should be taking?

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  Okay, so, so, you know, when you call something essential, that means it's necessary for life, right? So if you, we have two essential fatty acids, you know, if you don't get these fatty acids, they're essential for life.

• 1:13:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Omega threes.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, omega threes, omega three fatty acids, EPAs, DHAs. There are eight essential amino acids. You would be shocked how many people are amino acid deficient. People think that amino acids are proteins. They're not. They're the building blocks of proteins. And so if you're deficient in the building blocks of proteins, then you can't assemble proteins, which is not just skeletal muscle. I mean, this is our natural killer cells, collagen, elastin, fibrin in our skin. A lot of marketing gimmicks have allowed us to think that we can target direct protein, like we can eat collagen and it shows up as collagen in our skin. You know, it's like, this is patently false. I mean, collagen, I don't have anything against collagen, but it's an incomplete protein. You can't build muscle from it. But, but, you know, we don't, we don't eat our nails to grow our nails, and we don't eat our hair to grow our hair.

• 1:14:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Although we do eat muscle to grow muscle.

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  We think, well, we think we can eat collagen to grow collagen. But yeah, you can eat muscle, but you, the reason why you eat muscle. Muscle is to get to the amino acids.

• 1:14:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yes.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  To build the muscle.

• 1:14:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's right.

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  It's not to, you know, that protein is useless until it's broken into amino acids.

• 1:14:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's broken down. It's not like you just get like you eat a steak and that steak becomes your muscle. Now it gets broken down.

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so all protein, you know, if we oversimplify it for a second, just becomes the same thing. Right. It becomes amino acids and then those amino acids go out and build whatever structure is necessary. We can build muscle, certainly, and we can also build natural killer cells and we can build collagen in our skin. And we can build connective tissue and all kinds of things. So, so I think the three.

• 1:15:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Fatty acids, amino acids.

• 1:15:17Speaker 01

  Fatty acids, amino acids and minerals. So.

• 1:15:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And by the way, just so people know, we're talking about fat and protein. There are no essential carbohydrates. There's no such thing.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  There is no such thing as a carbohydrate.

• 1:15:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We can eat them. We can process them. We use them. We use them for fuel. But there, if you never had a carbohydrate in your life, you would be fine.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  You would be fine. Yeah. Which is why we should be the most judicious with our carbohydrate choices.

• 1:15:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  Right. It's not.

• 1:15:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But I'll, but I'll also say the carbohydrates are the most important thing for your longevity because what, when you eat broccoli, that's a carbohydrate.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  When you have a vegetable.

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  Sweet potato.

• 1:15:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  With the phytochemicals, those are carbohydrates. So those are low calorie, nutrient dense, phytochemically rich. Condition, I would say conditionally essential nutrients that we need to optimize our health. So I kind of make a joke about it.

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  I would agree with that.

• 1:16:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I make a joke about it because people like, you know, they all eat a low carb diet. But you know, you want to actually bite volume, a very high carb diet, which is like a lot of colorful plant foods. And those, I'm not plant based. I don't think that's good for our health.

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But I, but I, but I do think that including a lot of the phytochemically rich molecules in your diet is critical. And, and I think, you know, we talk about these essential amino acids, essential fatty acids, essential minerals. But I, I think there's also a whole class of compounds that I call conditionally essential. That there, you know, you won't get a deficiency disease, but you might get a chronic disease.

• 1:16:38Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, no doubt.

• 1:16:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  If you don't have enough sulforaphane or glucosinolates or, you know, phytochemicals that upregulate various pathways. Like your lithin A or other things that we're, we're finding out now have such powerful impact on our biology. Like you're going to get sick and die faster.

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, I, I, I don't even think that we. Have chronic disease in this country. I think that we have a a chronic expression of nutrient deficiency.

• 1:17:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So amino acids, fatty acids, minerals.

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  An essential amino acid, I take one called Perfect Aminos. It's all the eight essential amino acids. It's non-caloric, won't even break a fast. It has all eight of the essential amino acids. Because remember, as soon as you get deficient in one of those eight amino acids, there's a high likelihood that that's converting to fat or into sugar, right? So it's incomplete protein. So I take something called Perfect Amino. I take a mineral salt every morning. I take one called Baja Gold Sea Salt, but a mineral salt like a Celtic salt or a Baja Gold.

• 1:17:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Could you use electrolytes? Is that?

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  I use that as my electrolyte. And then I take a, I take a black seed oil. I prefer the black seed oil, the omega three version from Black Seed, but you can also get it from fish sources on omega three fatty acid. And then I think.

• 1:17:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You mean black cumin?

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  Black cumin, yeah. I think that's a great source.

• 1:17:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Which by the way, has incredible antiviral properties and had some evidence that it might even help for COVID as a sort of support to help prevent.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  I didn't know that, but now, now, now it's even, it's even better. So I take that every morning and I also take a methylated multivitamin. And the reason why I say methylated multivitamin is because it's the, it is the vitamins in their already methylated form. So instead of taking folic acid, which 44% of the population can't even process, and is contrary to popular belief, not a natural nutrient. We make it in a laboratory. It doesn't exist anywhere on the surface of the earth. You can't find folic acid anywhere naturally in nature. It doesn't exist. Folate exists naturally in nature. But folate and folic acid follow the exact same physiologic pathway. There are about 10 enzymatic reductions that need to happen before.

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

  That folic acid or folate can be converted by the gene MTHFR into the active form called methylfolate. And there's some really interesting research about methylfolate deficiency and whether or not it can be fixed by taking folic acid and folate. And the truth is that it can't. When we started spraying our entire grain supply, all flour, all grains, all rice, all pasta in the United States are sprayed with the chemical folic acid, right? We call this fortified or enriched.

• 1:19:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I would say, why do we have to enrich food? It's because we've impoverished it in the first place by how we process it.

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  It's like, you know, I think I heard Max Lugavere say the other day, if your grocery store has a health food section, what does that tell you about the rest of the store?

• 1:19:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Similar, I say, if there's a health claim on the label, don't eat it.

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:19:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It says low fat, high fiber, low sugar. It's usually something bad. It's masking something bad. I mean, an egg doesn't have a label on it and broccoli doesn't have a ingredient list, right?

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  Steak, yeah, exactly. So I take a methylated multivitamin. I mean, people see profound and immediate effects when they start taking methylated nutrients, you know, the methyl form of cabalamine, I mean, of methylated form of B12, B6, B9.

• 1:19:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And by the way, Kerry, those are the things we're finding deficiencies in significant rates in the cohort of function, which sort of is surprising to me.

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  It leads to hyperhomeostinemia.

• 1:20:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And what's interesting is the homocysteine level that the lab uses is not where I would say would be optimal. I would say six to eight is optimal. And they're like, you know, 13, 14. And even at that level,

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, 14.9 is the high end.

• 1:20:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We're seeing significant deficiencies. And we know that, for example, if your level of homocysteine, which is a blood test that is better than just checking your folate in your blood, is if your folate's over 14, you increase your risk of dementia by 50%. So these are just simple things you can do to actually.

• 1:20:38Speaker 01

  So true. And if you have, if you have hyperhomeostinemia, you know, we've, and I'm preparing to publish this data. So we have about 150,000 patients that have, that we've done. Um, blood work on seventy, seventy, uh, four biomarkers and then also done a methylated genetic test. Looking at the main markers of methylation, COMT, MTRR, MTR, AHCY and, and MTHFR. And contrary to popular belief, if you have MTHFR, you need to avoid folic acid like to plague. And you have to supplement with methylfolate, five methylfolate. And the, the, the, the proof in what's called S phase arrest, which is essentially when the DNA is replicating.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  And, and copying itself, or even when it's making a transcription, an mRNA message. Something called S phase arrest, which is designed to stop the passing of genetic mutations. When, when this, when the cell goes into S phase arrest, because it's efficient in methylfolate. There's significant clinical evidence, and I'll give you the link to the, to the study that you can actually restart. You can arrest S phase arrest and actually restart the replicatory process. By adding methylfolate.

• 1:21:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. And methylation is such a key hub of our biochemistry for people don't know what that is. It's like if you took a big metabolic chart with all the thousands and thousands of biochemical reactions that happen in the body. At the center is this process of methylation and sulfation, which are totally like tied together that regulate everything from your DNA. And, and how your DNA is run and prescribed, your epigenome, mood chemicals, mitochondrial function, detoxification. I mean, just you name it, fertility, everything.

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Is regulated by these core pathways. And when we're seeing is pretty significant deficiencies because sixty percent of our diet is ultra-processed food. And it doesn't have any of that in there.

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And it has maybe some of the wrong forms in there if they fortify it.

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. And so you, you have a, you have an excess of, of folic acid and a deficiency of methylfolate. So if you get the folic acid out of the diet and you supplement with methylfolate and magic happens, you see peristaltic activity restored to the gut. You see the, the normal pace of the gut restore, which, which in my opinion is one of the most overlooked things in all of modern medicine because.

• 1:22:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Pooping regularly?

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, pooping regularly. Right. Just being regular, you know?

• 1:22:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I had a patient, I said, so I happen to go to the bathroom. She says, I'm pretty regular. I said, how often? She goes, once a week. I said, that's not regular. She goes, regular for me, I go every week. I'm like, no.

• 1:23:06Speaker 01

  I'm within 20 minutes of waking up. I mean, I need to be on a commute. But, you know, methylfolate of all of the single, and I don't like to say, you know, it all comes down to one nutrient. But if it came down to one or two nutrients, D3 and K2 would be up there. Methylfolate would be right at the absolute top of the chart for me. Because if you look at the number of physiologic pathways and enzymatic pathways that methylfolate is directly responsible for. It's downstream from homocysteine regulation and hyperhomocystanemia. We know now is it can lead to idiopathic hypertension because of the vaso spasm that occurs. At least all kinds of other issues. I agree with you. It should be.

• 1:23:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Cancer, heart disease, dementia, depression, ADD, I mean, you name it.

• 1:23:51Speaker 01

  Why would it lead to cancer, heart disease, dementia? You know, I've never really fully gotten to express this. But, you know, when you start to affect vasomotor activity, microvascular circulation, the amount of organ systems that this impacts. Right? You affect vasomotor activity to the back of the eye, you're eyesight dimmish. You affect vasomotor activity in the brain, microcirculation in the brain. This is the definition of poor short term recall and cognitive decline. And this hyperhomocystanemia, I mean, 85% of all of the essential hypertension diagnoses in America are idiopathic. They're of unknown origin.

• 1:24:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We call it essential hypertension because essentially we have no idea what causes it.

• 1:24:28Speaker 01

  And, and, and again.

• 1:24:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But we do, we do. If we actually took it to science, it's insulin resistance, sleep apnea, it's nutrient deficiencies. It's lead, heavy metals, toxins. We, we actually can identify what these things are and get rid of them.

• 1:24:41Speaker 01

  I can tell you the best way to lower homocysteine is 500 milligrams daily in a capsule form of trimethylglycine. TMG. Lots of great manufacturers that make it out there. I make one, symbiotica makes it, thorn, pure encapsulations. It's not an expensive nutrient. If you have hyperhomocystanemia, that's a, that's a must have supplement. The majority of us will benefit from methylated multivitamin. So methylated multivitamins on omega fatty acid. Minerals in the morning and amino acid. And that will cover your bases because if you are missing the basics, and then I would add probably to that a vitamin D3 or K2.

• 1:25:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I'm with you on that.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  If you're, if you're missing the basics, then nothing else matters. It's like, if you're not sleeping, nothing else matters. If I can't fix your sleep, I really can't help you become metabolically healthy.

• 1:25:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And people don't understand that every single biochemical reaction in your body requires these nutrients. And if you don't have them, things just don't work.

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then what happens is we start chasing the expression of disease, you know?

• 1:25:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  You know, when you start blaming organs for crimes they're not committing, you know, when you blame cholesterol, which is like a fireman, for showing up to put the fire out, and you come up with the hypothesis that if we had less firemen, we'd have fewer fires, you know, you're just going down the wrong path. You know, when you realize that the majority of our thyroid hormones that are actually responsible for thyroid diagnoses, like low T3 being diagnosed as hypothyroid, the majority of that's not even made by the thyroid. It's deiodenized in the liver and it's in the periphery and in the gut. And so very often, we're blaming, you know, you want to talk about a pandemic.

• 1:26:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And selenium.

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  Selenium, thiamine, and, you know, to help this, this, this outer ring deiodenize in the liver, which is where two thirds of it comes from, and the balance is in the gut and a little bit in the periphery. But the point is that a nutrient deficiency can lead to a hormone deficiency that gets diagnosed as a, as organ malfunction. And now we're, now we're pounding a perfectly healthy organ for a crime it didn't commit.

• 1:26:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right, right.

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  You know, when, when at best, it's only going to change your level by 20%. And we do this with, we do this with the heart, we do it with the liver, with the lungs, with the pancreas, with the kidneys, with the thyroid, with all kinds of conditions. And if we would just take a step back and say, you know, I wish, I wish we would force physicians to study the expression of nutrient deficiency, right? Like, like a botanist or an arborist studies soil nutrients. You know, if you, if you have a leaf rotting in a palm tree, and you call the true arborist, the true botanist out to your house, they don't touch the leaf. They cortisone the soil.

• 1:27:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Soil, right.

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  And they go, you know what?

• 1:27:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's sort of what functional medicine is, is treating the soil, not the plant.

• 1:27:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. There's no nitrogen in this soil, Mark, and you add nitrogen in the soil, and then boom, the leaf heals. And you go, wow, how did that happen? You know, we want to cut the leaves, spray poison on it, trim it, skin it.

• 1:27:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's exactly right.

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  Replace it.

• 1:27:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Exactly. Traditional medicine, sort of like industrial agriculture, we, we spray chemicals and do all kinds of stuff.

• 1:27:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And now we're like, well, now the bark's falling off. Well, and put some more poison on the bark. And now, now the roots are rotting. And, and so I think, you know, your message, my message is, is a message of hope, because it's a message that we are not as sick or diseased or as pathological.

• 1:27:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No, people don't have to suffer like they, they need, they do. There's so much that they can do, simple things that people can do for themselves at home. I mean, what you're talking about is pretty basic. I mean, yeah, maybe your bed light bed is expensive or a nose and machine. Or those are kind of fun things.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:28:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But most of the basic things are either free or basically what you're doing already, or maybe a little extra, and they make profound differences. And you and I have seen this with thousands of patients. And it's for, I know I'm frustrated, imagine you're frustrated that, you know, Americans just don't know about this, they're not hearing about it. And your work's so important because you're sort of getting out there and sharing about this. And you're providing resources and tools and programs. I think it's very cool. I mean, I, I like, I feel like, you know, this is part one. You have to come to Austin because we have to do part two.

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Because I feel like we barely scratched the surface. I want to go into hydrogen water. I want to go into all those other tools and gizmos you got. But I think, you know, for, for someone like you who's sort of looked at, you know, the data around why we get sick and what's happening in the insurance industry is so fascinating because you're right, they, they kind of have this secret code of what to know to make a lot of money based on our health.

• 1:28:57Speaker 01

  They do.

• 1:28:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And so they got to know, it's, it's, it's, it's hits them in the wallet. So that, that's kind of revealed a lot of things that you've understood and you've been able to translate those things into tools and techniques and approaches that really help up level people's health and create the ultimate human.

• 1:29:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So it's pretty awesome, Gary. I, you're, I can't wait to kind of spend more time with you, kind of do a lot of the gizmos you got here.

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  Same.

• 1:29:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I want to kind of get your advice on what I should bring to my house in Austin that I built, but this is, this is really awesome.

• 1:29:25Speaker 01

  I'm putting you in the hydrogen bath before you leave.

• 1:29:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Okay, I'm doing that. I'm going to down, I'm down. So thanks so much, Gary, for being on the podcast. Everybody can check out your work. Tell them where they can find more about you and what you're doing and what they want.

• 1:29:37Speaker 01

  I mean, you can find me on social media, just my first and last name at Gary Brecka, B R E C K A. I also run a podcast called The Ultimate Human, which is in the health and wellness space.

• 1:29:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Which I'm coming on soon.

• 1:29:50Speaker 01

  You're, you're going to be on there in a few minutes. The Ultimate Human, it's a media platform that I use to just try to message without the expectation of receipt, you know, about things that are working in my life and, you know, great.

• 1:30:04Speaker 01

  Thought leaders like yourself who are my heroes and I just try to help get their message out. So you can find that at the ultimate human.

• 1:30:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Amazing. Well, thanks, Gary. Thanks for all you do to make the world a better place. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health, where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only

• 1:30:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at ultrawellnesscenter.com, and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public. So I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors. When it comes to supplements, you only want the best for your body, the kind with

• 1:31:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  the highest quality, cleanest, and most potent ingredients you can get. That's exactly what you'll find at my supplement store, where I've hand-selected each and every product to meet the most rigorous standards for safety, purity, and effectiveness. These are the only supplements I recommend to my patients, and they're also what I use myself. Whether you want to optimize longevity or reduce your disease risk, or you're looking to improve your sleep, blood sugar, metabolism, gut health, you name it, drhyman.com has the world's best selection of top-quality, premium supplements, all backed by science and expertly vetted by me, Dr. Mark Hyman. So check out drhyman.com, because when it comes to your health, nothing less than the very best will do. That's drhyman.com, D-R-H-Y-M-A-N.com.