287. Live at the Southern Utah Holistic Health Summit 2026

For 22 years, I predicted death for life insurance companies. One pattern showed up in file after file: most "genetic" conditions have no gene behind them. Ask your doctor which gene causes your blood pressure, your autoimmune condition, or your ADHD, and most can't answer, because it doesn't exist. What actually runs in your family is a nutrient deficiency, not a disease, and once your body gets what it's missing, the disease often clears on its own. This isn't medical advice, so bring this to your own doctor before you assume anything is permanent. CLICK HERE TO BECOME GARYS VIP!: https://bit.ly/4ai0Xwg Thank you to our partners A-GAME: “ULTIMATE15” FOR 15% OFF: http://bit.ly/4kek1ij AION: “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4h6KHAD AIRES: "ULTIMATE20 " FOR 20% OFF: https://bit.ly/4a3Duze BAJA GOLD: "ULTIMATE10" FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/3WSBqUa BODYHEALTH: “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: http://bit.ly/4e5IjsV COLD LIFE: THE ULTIMATE HUMAN PLUNGE: https://bit.ly/4eULUKp CYMBIOTIKA: "ULTIMATE20" FOR 20% OFF: https://bit.ly/4tjyluP GENETIC METHYLATION TEST (UK ONLY): https://bit.ly/48QJJrk GENETIC TEST (USA ONLY): ⁠https://bit.ly/3Yg1Uk9 GOPUFF: GET YOUR FAVORITE SNACK!: https://bit.ly/4obIFDC H2TABS: “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4hMNdgg HEALF: 10% OFF YOUR ORDER: https://bit.ly/41HJg6S PEPTUAL: “TUH10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4mKxgcn SNOOZE: LET’S GET TO SLEEP!: https://bit.ly/4pt1T6V WHOOP: JOIN & GET 1 FREE MONTH!: https://bit.ly/3VQ0nzW Watch the “Ultimate Human Podcast” every Tuesday & Thursday at 9AM EST: YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RPQYX8 Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3RQftU0 Connect with Gary Brecka Instagram: https://bit.ly/3RPpnFs TikTok: https://bit.ly/4coJ8foX: https://bit.ly/3Opc8tf Facebook: https://bit.ly/464VA1H LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/4hH7Ri2 Website: https://bit.ly/4eLDbdU Merch: https://bit.ly/4aBpOM1 Newsletter: https://bit.ly/47ejrws Ask Gary: https://bit.ly/3PEAJuG Timestamps 00:00 - Intro of Show 01:57 - 22 Years Predicting Mortality 03:00 - Medical Error and Misdiagnosis 07:40 - Idiopathic Hypertension Explained 09:59 - Autoimmune of Unknown Origin 11:00 - Presence of Oxygen, Two Promises 14:07 - The Methylation Pathways Map 16:00 - Attention Overload, Not Deficit 19:00 - MTHFR Gene and Folic Acid 22:00 - What Anxiety Actually Is 26:50 - COMT Gene and B12 Forms 29:00 - Serotonin and the SSRI Problem 33:00 - Dana White's Blood Pressure Story 37:00 - Circulation, Homocysteine, and TMG 43:00 - Blood Sugar and Insulin Resistance 57:15 - The Truth About LDL Cholesterol 59:00 - The Only Diet Rule That Matters 01:01:31 - Community and Faith as Medicine 01:04:00 - Molecular Hydrogen Explained 01:08:00 - Morning Routine: Sun and Breath 01:13:37 - Q&A: Thyroid and Selenium 01:18:51 - Q&A: Autoimmune and Heavy Metals 01:22:00 - Q&A: Neuropathy and Circulation Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not provide medical advice. It is not intended for diagnosing or treating any health condition. Always consult a licensed healthcare professional before making health or wellness decisions. Gary Brecka is the owner of Ultimate Human, LLC which operates The Ultimate Human podcast and promotes certain third-party products used by Gary Brecka in his personal health and wellness protocols and daily life and for which Ultimate Human LLC and / or Gary Brecka directly or indirectly holds an economic interest or receives compensation. Accordingly, statements made by Gary Brecka and others (including on The Ultimate Human podcast) may be considered promotional in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Gary Brecka?

  Only cancer and cardiovascular disease kill more people in America than modern medicine. Medical error kills more people than morbid obesity and type 2 diabetes combined. You know, we would very often see common nutrient deficiencies diagnosed as chronic disease. The system was built to manage disease and maintain symptoms and not to go to root cause and to put things permanently into people's rearview mirror. You died of a condition that you never should have had because of a drug that wasn't required, because of a surgery that wasn't necessary, because a nutrient deficiency was misdiagnosed as a chronic disease. You see, we need to shift back to the belief of more of what God gave us and less of what man makes us.

• 0:43Gary Brecka?

  You want to see magic happen in human beings, you give their body the raw material it needs to do its job. The secret to extending your life is the...

• 1:04Gary Brecka?

  All right, awesome. What's up, Utah? What a great crowd. Wow, I guess standing ovation at the beginning? Thank you, that was great, I appreciate it. That's all I needed was the standing ovation, now I can go home. Wow, what a pleasure it is to see all of you guys. My name is Gary Brecka, I'm a human biologist, biohacker, researcher. You know, for the better part of 22 years, I was a mortality researcher for large life insurance companies. And during that career, we were charged with building a model that could predict mortality to the month. And so by the end of that career, if we got 10 years of medical records on you and 10 years of demographic data, we could tell the insurance company how long you had to live to the month.

• 1:50Gary Brecka?

  And I get a lot of flack for saying that, but the truth is, it's some of the most accurate science in the world. You see, if the database that I used to have access to could ever see the light of day, and unfortunately it won't, but if it could, it would upend modern medicine in a way that would be catastrophic. I always said that that database could change the face of humanity because it contained big data that humanity needed to hear. And if I was to boil that entire career down to just a few sentences, it would be this: The reason why the vast majority of humanity is not living healthier, happier, longer, more fulfilling lives is for what we called modifiable risk factors. Mainly dietary and lifestyle and spiritual changes that if people would make, would

• 2:35Gary Brecka?

  have added on average seven years, not just to the lifespan, but to the health span of all of these patients that we were processing. The sad thing was during that career, I was not allowed to have any contact with the patient, I was not allowed to have any contact with the treating physician. So even if I saw life-threatening drug interactions in your record, I was not allowed to contact you to warn you. And during the tail end of my career, I started to, before I would produce these reports, I started to manipulate parts of the record for my own avocation. And I would go into big data. You see, these life insurance companies, they have data that no other financial services enterprise has, no collegiate university has it, the CDC doesn't have it, the FDA

• 3:18Gary Brecka?

  doesn't have it, Health and Human Services doesn't have it. They know the day, the date, the time, the location, and the cause of death for 371 million lives. So when you pull that back into the record, you start to see certain patterns. And so during the tail end of my career, I started to manipulate the record. I said, what would happen if I just took this woman's hemoglobin A1C, the three-month average of her blood sugar, and over the last 10 years, I was just to normalize that? So instead of her having been in the prediabetic range for the last decade, what would happen if I just made her blood sugar low end of normal, 5.1, 5.2? What would... And you would see dramatic jumps in life expectancy.

• 4:02Gary Brecka?

  What would happen if I took this single-digit vitamin D3, what's called 25D hydroxy or cholecalciferol, the sunshine vitamin? What if I normalized or put that level into the optimal end of the range? You'd see all forms of disease and pathology exacerbate from their future. And then sadly, what I would see is very often in modern medicine, you know, the third leading cause of death, does anybody know what the third leading cause of death is for human beings? What is it? Medical error. That's right. Only cancer and cardiovascular disease kill more people in America than modern medicine. In fact, medical error kills more people than morbid obesity and type 2 diabetes combined.

• 4:44Gary Brecka?

  And this isn't medical malpractice, this is medical error. You know, we would very often see common nutrient deficiencies diagnosed as chronic disease. I'll give you a perfect example, hundreds of times during my career, I would see histories of people walking to their primary care physician and start giving their medical history and they'd say, you know, doc, soles of my feet are sore and achy every morning when I get out of bed to just walk to the bathroom and taste, take my first pee. I wake up sore and achy like I had a workout the night before when I haven't. It's moved into my hips and my low back lately. And just recently, it's been really hard for me to make a tight fist. And right then and there, with no diagnostics, no said rates, no rheumatoid factors, the

• 5:26Gary Brecka?

  doctor would go, you've got rheumatoid arthritis, so I'm going to write you a script for something called a corticosteroid. Methotrexate, cortisone, methylprednisone, prednisone. And they would put them on a corticosteroid, but we knew in the record that if you started taking a corticosteroid, you had six years and one day until you're having a joint replacement. You see, these drugs were initially anti-inflammatory, but then they ate the joint like a termite. It was so predictive that if you were a 60-year-old female and I saw that you were misdiagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, I would artificially advance your age, six years and one day, I would schedule the joint replacement for you. And then after the joint replacement, I would start to reduce what we called the ambulatory

• 6:10Gary Brecka?

  profile, which is how well you ambulate, how well you move. And as I reduced ambulation, I could bring in all of the diseases that exacerbated with reduced mobility. And I could predict not only the onset of, but the severity of, and how quickly you would succumb to that disease. So if we start to rewind that back, you died of a condition that you never should have had because of a drug that wasn't required, because of a surgery that wasn't necessary, because a nutrient deficiency was misdiagnosed as a chronic disease. And then I started to zoom out.

• 6:47Gary Brecka?

  And I was like, look at the percentage of these reports where their pathology is idiopathic, meaning of unknown origin. 85% of the time, someone is diagnosed with high blood pressure, hypertension, it is idiopathic hypertension, hypertension of an unknown origin. They did a cardiac workup, EKG was normal, EEG was normal, heart sounds normal, lung sounds normal, cardiac cath was normal, dye contrast study was normal. They couldn't find anything wrong with the heart. So you know what they do? Medicate the heart anyway. Medicate it for a crime that we can't prove it's committing. Or even worse, they start to look at your family history.

• 7:30Gary Brecka?

  But look at that, your father's brother has high blood pressure, your mother has high blood pressure, you have familial hypertension, you have what we call genetically inherited hypertension. Only no one took that one step further and said, if I inherited this from my ancestor, what gene did they pass on to me that caused this condition to exist? You see, that gene doesn't exist. That's why they can't answer that question. And if that gene doesn't exist, that means that that condition does not exist. That disease does not exist. And this is a hard concept for people to get their arms around, I'm going to go deep into it today. But this is true with drug and alcohol addiction, type 2 diabetes, this is true with hypothyroid,

• 8:14Gary Brecka?

  this is true with depression and anxiety, with hypertension. These things run in families, but they are not genetic. Because if I can get you to subscribe to the fact that you have a genetically inherited disease, I can easily get you to subscribe to a lifetime of medication. And sadly, what was glaringly apparent to me was that the system was built to manage disease and maintain symptoms and not to go to root cause and to put things in permanently into people's rearview mirror. And I can go through ailment after ailment, and disease and pathology after disease and pathology, and we have widely accepted this in modern medicine and it's patently false. And the same is true in autoimmune.

• 8:57Gary Brecka?

  If you look at the entire category of autoimmune, you have Crohn's disease because your immune system's manufacturing antibodies to your colon, or you have Hashimoto's because it's manufacturing antibodies to your thyroid, or you have chagrin's because it's after the lacrimal gland in your eye, or the myelin sheath in your nerves, you have multiple sclerosis. The entire category of autoimmune disease, 85% of the time, is idiopathic. It's of unknown origin. You're just led to believe that you woke up one day and the immune system went haywire and just began to attack you for no random reason at all. You lost the luck of the draw. I'm here to tell you that is patently false. And so every time that I take the stage, I give this quote, "The presence of oxygen is the absence of disease."

• 9:41Gary Brecka?

  I think this may be the most powerful statement that you will hear for the balance of your lifetime that helps determine how many more years you have left on earth. Your waking energy, your cognitive function, your short-term recall, your response to exercise, your mood, your emotional state. We did not find a single disease ideological pathway, not one, that did not have its roots in the absence of oxygen or was not exacerbated by the absence of oxygen. And I'll give some more detail on that in a second. And then I make two bold promises every time I take the stage. One is that if you do what I ask you to do today, it will add on average seven years, not just to the lifespan, but to the health span of every person in this room.

• 10:25Gary Brecka?

  And the second is, at the tail end of my presentation, I'm going to open the floor to questions. And I will take any ailment that you or a loved one suffers from, could be ADD, ADHD, OCD, manic depression, bipolar, autoimmune. And I will tell you what raw material is missing from their body that is causing that condition to exist. You see, we need to shift back to the belief of more of what God gave us and less of what man makes us. We have developed... Woo, I got a woo!

• 10:59Gary Brecka?

  You know, it is fascinating, the more I study the human body, the more I believe in God. You will never convince me that this happened by random chance. You know, true.

• 11:11Gary Brecka?

  Two billion years, two bacteria, made love in a mud puddle, a lizard crawled out, eventually we had primates, and boom, here we are, right? There are about 400 million years missing from the fossil record to prove any of that, but that's a whole nother discussion. But it is such a fascinating and unique machine, and we are only barely beginning to understand it. And the more we believe in what man makes us, and the less we believe in what God gave us, the sicker we become. Which is why we spend $5 trillion a year on healthcare in the United States, and yet we are the sickest, fattest, most disease-ridden nation in the world. We lead the world in five categories: morbid obesity, type 2 diabetes, multiple chronic disease in a single biome,

• 11:54Gary Brecka?

  infant mortality, and maternal mortality. Spending doesn't equate to outcomes. And so what I find fascinating about the whole movement, the revolution of anti-aging and longevity and wellness, is that this is now a populist movement. This is actually coming from the people. It's coming from the ground up. You know, I chair Bobby Kennedy's Maha Action Committee, and there's some very faith-based, passionate, purpose-driven people that are in some of our institutions now. But this momentum is coming from us. It's coming from people just like you and I. And I'm awesome. No, I'm not stupid enough to think I can change the world by myself, but I am smart enough to believe that I can do it with all of you.

• 12:37Gary Brecka?

  So, you ready to get to work? Okay, great. First thing I want you to do, memorize this. Just commit that to memory. There's a quiz at the end of my talk. I like to start here because this is an exact map, and no, you don't need to memorize it. This is an exact map of what is going on inside of every cell in your body 300 billion times a day inside of every human being sitting in this room. It is a complicated maze of transactions and interactions that's going on. It's called your methylation pathways. The reason why I show this chart is because if I continue to zoom in on this chart,

• 13:21Gary Brecka?

  nearly every person in this room would recognize everything on that chart. There are common vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and nutrients. And what happens if I go into this chart, and I just start to pluck things out of here? If I start to delete certain amino acids, certain nutrients, certain vitamins, certain minerals, certain raw materials, if I just start to take them out of the chart, you get the expression of disease. You see, we believe this in plant physiology. If you had a leaf rotting in one of these... Well, you don't have palm trees out of here. What do you have, cacti? What else do they have? It's pretty sparse on the... But if you had a leaf rotting in a palm tree,

• 14:03Gary Brecka?

  and you called a true arborist, a true botanist, out to look at that leaf, they wouldn't even touch the leaf. They would courtress the soil. And they would say, "You know what? There's no nitrogen in this soil." They would add nitrogen to the soil, and the leaf would heal. I promise you, human beings are no different. You want to see magic happen in human beings, you give their body the raw material it needs to do its job. Full stop. Most of the ailments that we suffer from today are not consequences of aging, or pathology, or disease. They are absent raw materials in the human body. And we wonder why it's dysfunctional. And so, you know, how many of you are in here

• 14:45Gary Brecka?

  either have or know somebody that has ADHD or ADD? Okay, the true people with it are not paying attention and not raising their hand. They're on their phone, so... So the reason why I like to start with this one is I was actually diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity disorder, and impulse control disorder at a very young age. I was in a special needs program at the University of Maryland in College Park for hyperactivity and attention deficit disorder. Turns out I have a hyper-developed area in my brain that makes me clinically photographic, which is excellent for science. I don't forget anything that I see. But as my wife will keenly tell you, I forget everything that I'm told.

• 15:27Gary Brecka?

  So there's a good and a bad side to this. So, attention deficit disorder is actually not an attention deficit at all. It's actually an attention overload disorder. It's too many windows open at the same time. You see, in the human mind, we don't just create thought. We also break thought down. We dismantle thought. And if you create thought at a faster rate than you break it down, then the mind gets very clouded. You're thinking about a job you're working on, and your friend walks up. And you're thinking about a job, you start talking to your friend. While you're talking to your friend, you notice the logo on their jacket, and that reminds you of a vacation you want to take. So now you're thinking about a job, talking to your friend,

• 16:10Gary Brecka?

  looking at the logo, thinking about a vacation you want to take. All at the same time. And then your friend's like, "Hey, you know, my grandmother passed away on Sunday." And you're like, "Oh, that's a great idea." And then you snap back into reality. So, if you have attention deficit disorder, you don't lack the ability to pay attention. You lack the ability to pay attention to too many things. And so, the onus should be on quieting the mind, not racing the central nervous system to match the pace of the mind. So modern medicine came in and said, "Okay, well, if the mind is racing, let's put amphetamines into the body to race the central nervous system to match the pace of the mind."

• 16:56Gary Brecka?

  So let's take the system that's not broken, the central nervous system, let's break it and match the system that is. And for a short period of time, that works. But maybe the next time you get a flat tire, I want you to get out of your car and slash your other three tires. Just create equilibrium. And then call your husband, because no guy would do this. Men would not do that. But I want you to call your husband and say, "Hey, I'm on the side of the road. Everything's cool. I've created equilibrium." And when they say "how?", see how the rest of that conversation goes. So, when we understand, you know, in pathology and disease and medicine and diagnosis, one of the hallmarks of what we do

• 17:37Gary Brecka?

  is we scantily define what it actually is. So, if the mind is racing because there are too many catecholamines in the brain, and you're going from thought to thought to thought to thought, the question should be like, how do we quiet the mind? How do we break thought down? Because when we're actually breaking thought down at the right rate, now the mind's not clouded anymore. And so, if I were to go into this chart and look at attention deficit disorder, or also anxiety, and I'm going to explain that one here in a second because I know many people in my family have suffered from anxiety. I've put it permanently into their rearview mirror.

• 18:20Gary Brecka?

  Some of what I've been popularized about with Dana White and the Kardashians was just getting anxiety out of their life. And first, you have to define what it is before you can decide how to treat it. But in this human mind, when we're creating these neurotransmitters, and we're not breaking them down, the question is, what in that chart breaks down these neurotransmitters? Well, that specific complex of B vitamins, a very specific form of B12 called methylcobalamin, and a refined form of folate called methylfolate. 46% of this room has a gene mutation called MTHFR. I will not tell you what the nickname is for that gene from the stage.

• 19:05Gary Brecka?

  If you write it down, you can figure it out. And it doesn't stand for that, you dirty birds. It stands for methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase. But essentially, half of this room has a gene mutation that impairs your ability to turn folic acid, or folate, into the form your body can use called methylfolate. And that doesn't sound like a big deal, "I'm deficient in methylfolate", until you understand that folic acid is the most prevalent nutrient in the human diet. So you now can't break down the most prevalent nutrient in the human diet until you understand that folic acid is a completely man-made chemical. It does not occur anywhere naturally in nature. You cannot find folic acid anywhere on the surface of the earth. Somehow, we have convinced women that are pregnant

• 19:50Gary Brecka?

  that it is a necessary nutrient for a pregnancy, even though we didn't discover it until the 1940s, and we didn't start to put it in the food supply until the 1990s. Somehow, you can't complete a healthy pregnancy without this synthetic chemical.

• 20:04Gary Brecka?

  And then what happens is we put this synthetic chemical into pregnant women. We skyrocket the rates of postpartum depression, which usually onsets when you begin to take this synthetic chemical. And then eventually, when the pregnancy ends and they stop taking the prenatal vitamin, the symptoms go away and they blame it on the pregnancy, not on the vitamin. There's zero evidence anywhere in the peer-reviewed literature, anywhere, linking elevated pregnancy hormones to postpartum depression. Yet we still blame it on the pregnancy and not on the synthetic nutrient that we put into their bodies. And so, when we talk about things like anxiety, how many of you suffer from or know somebody who suffers from anxiety? Wow, it's a very anxious state.

• 20:47Gary Brecka?

  How many of you are not going to raise your hand no matter what I say? One honest dude in the back of the room back there. Can we give him a gift bag or something? So if you suffer from anxiety, I'm going to give you three characteristics. And if you match all three of these characteristics, it is not coming from your outside environment. It is not a pathology or a disease. It's a nutrient deficiency. And I'll tell you how you figure that out. The first question is, have you had it on and off throughout your entire lifetime? Most people with anxiety will say yes. The second question is, can you point to the specific trigger that causes it? The vast majority of the time, people will say no. Anxiety can kind of come and go without a trigger. I can be sitting at dinner with my family in a perfectly safe environment

• 21:32Gary Brecka?

  and I can all of a sudden be kind of overwhelmed with anxiety. And the third is, if you've tried anti-anxiety medications, did they work or did they just make you feel like a zombie? Did they just make you feel like you were tranquilized? And if you answered all three of those questions, then this is an indication that this is coming from a nutrient deficiency that you have had at birth and it is genetically inherited. But since it is a nutrient deficiency, it's something that we can fix. You see, the vast majority of people that have anxiety also have other characteristics. When they lay down to go to sleep at night, as their environment quiets, their mind wakes up. And they'll lay there in bed and they'll just ruminate on things. And they will ruminate on the most innocuous nonsense.

• 22:17Gary Brecka?

  Like if you're solving world peace or trying to figure out what's going on in Iran or solving the Russia-Ukraine war, great. But you are trying to figure out if your belt matched your shoes, if you got everything on your grocery list, if you responded to an email, and if you were to have a Thanksgiving dinner, should you use green dishes? Right? That's the kind of stuff that she was right there. She's like, "Yep, I thought about that last night and we're going to use green dishes." So this is called rumination. And rumination and anxiety are inexorably linked. So what is it? Can anyone tell me what anxiety is? Very specifically, if you've suffered from it, can anyone tell me what it is? Yes, ma'am.

• 23:00Gary Brecka?

  Worried about the future. Fear. It's a sensation of fear, without the presence of a fear. These are all the characteristics of anxiety. But what is causing it? Anxiety, and if you have it, you may want to write this down because this could permanently change your life. Anxiety is very specifically this. Anxiety is a rise in catecholamines. Full stop. Catecholamines. It is a rise in four neurotransmitters in the brain.

• 23:39Gary Brecka?

  And you do not need the presence of a fear for these neurotransmitters to rise. The inability to break down catecholamines runs in families, which is why you worry like your mother does. You have a temper like your father had. You get angry like your uncle does. The run in families, because the inability to break these down runs in families, but the fix is easy. First, we have to understand that we do not need the presence of a fear to feel fear. If you were to walk out of this event today and when you walked outside, as soon as you stepped outside, somebody was standing in front of you with a knife. Very real threat. Your pupils would dilate, your heart rate would increase, your extremities would flood with blood.

• 24:24Gary Brecka?

  You would start to have a fight or flight response. What happened? How did your body just instantly dilate your pupils, make your hearing more acute, increase your heart rate, flood your extremities with blood, make your palms sweaty? What happened was your brain dumped catecholamines. Your heart responded, your vascular system responded, your mood responded, your pupils responded. But what if you were laying in your bed tonight, right here in Utah, and you just started thinking about getting eaten by a shark? I think it's pretty safe to say that a shark making it out of, what's the closest ocean? Gulf of America? Like how I tossed that in there? Pacific Ocean? With shark making its way to Utah,

• 25:09Gary Brecka?

  pressing the elevator button, making it up to your room and biting you in your bed. You could reason to yourself that that would not happen, but you could still have the exact same response. How do you have the same response to the presence of a real fear as to an entirely imagined fear? Because neurophysiologically, they are exactly the same thing. They are a rise in catecholamines. So now that we know what it is, now we can treat it. Instead of tranquilizing you so that you don't feel catecholamines, why don't we put the nutrients into your body to break down catecholamines

• 25:52Gary Brecka?

  so you have normal levels of these neurotransmitters and you don't feel fear? It is perfectly normal for people with a gene mutation called COMT, C-O-M-T, to walk around at a six, slightly anxious and barely easily triggered into anxiety. And you do not need the presence of a fear to feel that fear. And the worst thing you can do to somebody who feels anxiety or experiences anxiety is try to reason them out of it. There's no reason for you to feel that way. There's nothing for you to be afraid of. Why do you choose to act like that? Because it's not a choice. That fear is very present. And it happens in children and it causes misbehavior.

• 26:36Gary Brecka?

  And we want to tranquilize children or we want to speed up their nervous system with Ritalin or Vivans or Adderall. And in order to solve, which is what we call a chemical imbalance, which is a nutrient deficiency. The vast majority of people with that gene mutation need a very specific form of B12. You may want to write this down, called hydroxycobalamin. It's a form of B12. The most popular form of B12, by the way, is one called cyanocobalamin. Does anyone know what that's made from? Hydrogen cyanide. Yes, it's legal in the United States to take the waste product from human sewage treatment plants called sludge, which is pure hydrogen cyanide.

• 27:19Gary Brecka?

  Take that hydrogen cyanide, bind it to a metal called the cobalt metal and make cyanocobalamin. B12 is a metal. We bind it to other molecules. Methylcobalamin is the one the body uses. Cyanocobalamin is one we generally make synthetically. It's very cheap. A lot of it does come from human sewage. Happy to show you the patents. Happy to take you to the National Library of Medicine at the National Institute of Health and let you read it for yourself. But those forms of B12 exacerbate anxiety. So hydroxycobalamin, the entire complex of B vitamins that I showed you right here, a specific form of folate called methylfolate or folic acid.

• 28:01Gary Brecka?

  In fact, the US FDA just approved the first nutrient as a prescription. It's called leukophorin. It is folic acid, a raw material, a nutrient for cerebrofolate deficiency, autism and neurodevelopmental disorders. So now it's FDA-approved and all it is is a nutrient because they couldn't find something that worked better for this cerebrofolate deficiency. And so if you have anxiety and you want to break down those catecholamines, those waking neurotransmitters, if you have trouble going to sleep at night because you ruminate, those are very likely your nutrient deficiencies. And fixing those in addition with zinc, specific form of zinc called,

• 28:46Gary Brecka?

  or magnesium called magnesium 3 and 8 and zinc, will help to quiet the mind. See, we're not as sick or diseased or as pathological as we think we are. Very often, we are nutrient deficient. Do you know in the United States, until about 11 months ago, the physicians' desk reference, we defined depression as an inadequate supply of serotonin. It was called the serotonin hypothesis of depression. So essentially, if you were depressed or you exhibited the signs of depression, you were low on serotonin. So you would think if we defined depression as low serotonin, that the fix would be to raise serotonin. I mean, that makes sense, right? But that's not what we do. We take people that are low on serotonin

• 29:31Gary Brecka?

  and we put them on something called an SSRI. It's a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. So what does this do? What it does is it blocks receptors and it rations what little serotonin you have so you don't go off a cliff. So by its own definition, it does not raise serotonin. So by its own definition, it doesn't end depression. I've had, Sage and I have had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of patients come into our clinic and I will sit across the table from them and say, "Well, how long have you been on an antidepressant?" And they'll say, "15, 18 years." I go, "Great, when did you think it was going to kick in?" "Should we just run this for another two years and see how it goes?" Because that's not what's raising serotonin.

• 30:15Gary Brecka?

  Does anyone know where serotonin's made in the human body? Yeah, in the gut, 90% of the serotonin in your entire body is right here. If you don't have it here, you can't have it here. Depression may begin in your external environment. It is always continued in your internal environment. The serotonin factory is right here. And it's either under production or under migration. Right? It moves right up the vagus nerve, populates the brain, creates mood, and creates our emotional state. So if you're low on that raw material, you now have a mood disorder, a mental illness. There are 38,000 categories for disease and pathology. There are none for nutrient deficiencies.

• 30:59Gary Brecka?

  There are no ICD 9, 10, or 11 codes for nutrient deficiencies. There are 38,000 for pathology and disease. And so, if we want to turn the factory back on that makes serotonin, we have to go back into the gut. And how do we make serotonin? Well, we take an amino acid called tryptophan, you know, the one that's famous for making you sleepy on Thanksgiving dinner. And we methylate it into the neurotransmitter serotonin. And if that process is broken, which is usually broken because of a deficiency in tryptophan or a lack of complex vitamins, then you can't convert tryptophan into serotonin. You now have low serotonin, and now you have a mood disorder or a mental illness.

• 31:41Gary Brecka?

  And we could just keep going through hypothyroid, autoimmune, migraines. We could just continue, and I'm going to do this when we open the floor to questions later. You can ask about any of those conditions. But first, we need to ask ourselves, does the body have the raw material it needs to do its job? Does this tree have the nitrogen that the leaf needs to heal? And if not, before I spray poison on the leaf, let me put the fertilizer back into the soil. And I can tell you this from experience the last 10 years, putting thousands and thousands and thousands of people fully into remission with attention deficit disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorders, with depressive disorders, migraine headaches.

• 32:23Gary Brecka?

  You know, my famous journey with Dana White, how many of you saw the journey that I had with Dana White? He's the current CEO of the UFC. And Dana, in fact, I'll give you a very specific example here. Dana had what we call brittle hypertension. All I'm doing is going into that chart. So he had brittle, he was a brittle hypertensive. He was on a beta blocker, what's called a calcium channel blocker, and something called an ACE inhibitor. And they could not get his blood pressure down. It was life-threateningly high, and this had gone on for years. So they put him on very, very powerful diuretics. And these diuretics would strip the potassium out of his body. By the way, this is all in the public domain.

• 33:08Gary Brecka?

  I'm not disclosing his medical records without his permission. And because it was not a potassium-sparing diuretic, he would end up in the emergency room once or twice a year with hypopetacemia, which is very, very low potassium, which caused him to be tachycardic, caused a regular heartbeat. And so, when I met Dana and I was introduced to him, he had no interest in me doing his blood work or his gene testing. He just wanted me to tell him how many more months he had left on Earth. He was like, I just want to know how long I have left, so I can just run this clock out. You know, with my foot as hard on the gas as I can. And so I got blood work, and I got a gene test on him. And I pulled 10 years of medical records on him.

• 33:51Gary Brecka?

  And I said, Dana, I don't think you have hypertension. He goes, what the heck do you mean? I've been on meds for almost 15 years. I've got the top cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, about to do a heart ablation on me to lower my blood pressure. I think I've got that covered. And I go, well, when I look at your medical records, you've never had an abnormal EKG. You've never had an abnormal EEG. You've never had abnormal heart sounds. You've never had abnormal lung sounds. In fact, you've had the most advanced cardiac diagnostics in the world. You had a cardiac catheterization, you had dye contrast studies, you had a clearly exam. All of your cardiac workup was normal. And he goes, well, then why the heck am I on all these meds?

• 34:35Gary Brecka?

  And I'm paraphrasing because he said it a lot more vile than that. I'm going to use heck, shucks, and darn in replace for some very colorful Dana White language. But he said, why in the shucks am I on all these meds? And I said, well, darn it, Dana. So I said, he goes, you know, I inherited it, this runs in my family. I go, that's my favorite one. I go, why don't we get the cardiologist on the phone and ask him what gene you inherited from your family member that caused this condition to exist? And so, what I found was that in Dana's family, a very specific gene mutation called MTRR.

• 35:20Gary Brecka?

  This gene mutation ran in his family. What this gene does, in combination with a gene mutation called MTHFR, was it impairs your ability to break down an amino acid that is in the blood of everyone in this room, called homocysteine. And when I told Dana that he had high homocysteine, he looked me straight in the eye and said, I'm not a homo. I said, no, this is an amino acid. This is a true conversation, by the way, I'm not making any of this up. I said, Ben, you got really high homocysteine. And he said, I'm not a homo, because it's not a homo gene, it's homocysteine. So we had to walk our way out of that, because he was very offended by that statement. So this amino acid is in everyone's blood in this room.

• 36:04Gary Brecka?

  As that amino acid rises and it's cruising by the inside lining of your arteries, it irritates the artery. And if you irritate an artery, it will clamp down. And if you make the pipes smaller in a fixed system, the pressure goes up. Any apprentice plumber knows, if you want to increase the pressure, you decrease the pipes. Make the pipes smaller, pressure goes up. By the way, does anyone know what percentage of the blood in our body is circulated by our heart? Does anyone know? She's thinking. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Four? We'd all be dead. Thirty? Sixty?

• 36:49Gary Brecka?

  Random stabs in the dark now. Seventy-nine? Thirty percent. Your heart is only responsible for 30% of your circulation. 70% of your circulation is not done by your heart. It is done by an activity called vasomotor. I want you to think of a snake swallowing a mouse. There is no pressure in 70% of your vessels, because the heart is not pushing the blood. The blood is being moved around by this vasomotor. We never examine the 70% of our circulatory system. We look at the 30% that the heart is responsible for circulating. You have about 63,000 miles of blood vessel in your body.

• 37:31Gary Brecka?

  Nobody in this room has a left ventricle that with one contraction can push blood 63,000 miles. It is done by this activity called vasomotor. Vasomotor is very sensitive to high homocysteine. And so, you don't need much arterial narrowing in 63,000 miles to drive pressure up. So as that homocysteine rose and his vascular system contracted, his pressure went up, which is why he was non-responsive to medication, which is why 85% of the time the diagnosis of high blood pressure is idiopathic. Google it, ask ChatGPT, what percentage of primary hypertension is idiopathic? 85%. Percentage of autoimmune is idiopathic, 85%. These things don't happen randomly and by accident.

• 38:16Gary Brecka?

  And so, instead of putting Dana on medication, I put him on an amino acid. And if you have high blood pressure, you may want to write this one down. It is called TMG, trimethylglycine. You can get it over the counter. I don't even sell it. So, trimethylglycine. Trimethylglycine will help homocysteine to be metabolized back into something called methionine. And the important point here is that this nutrient deficiency, which leads to high homocysteine deficiency in TMG, leads to high homocysteine, causes vascular constriction, drives pressure up. We call that hypertension that runs in families that is not genetic.

• 39:01Gary Brecka?

  And again, I could just keep going and going and going, but my wife says I eat people's face, so I don't want to eat your face. But I could stand here up all day, we could talk about hypothyroid, we could talk about migraine headaches, we could talk about neuropathy, all kinds of conditions that first, we just don't define them, and second, we never think they could be as simple as a nutrient deficiency causing the exacerbation of disease. So I put him on something called trimethylglycine, and over the next 21 weeks, as his hypostatin fell, his vascular system began to relax. As his vascular system began to relax, his pressure returned to normal. In fact, I'll never forget the call that I got from him one day, and he was like, he called me in the morning and he was like, "Gary, something's wrong." And I was like, "Oh, what's going on?"

• 39:46Gary Brecka?

  He goes, "Every day for the last few days when I walk into the gym, as soon as I pick up a weight or I step on a treadmill, I get immediately lightheaded." I go, "That's a great sign." He's like, "What the heck are you talking about? What in the darn are you talking about? What in the shucks by golly do you mean?" And he said something very different. And I said, "Dana, when your blood pressure is high, your blood pressure will make your pressure normal. When your blood pressure is normal, it will make you hypostatic. It will actually push your blood pressure down." This was the sign that I was looking for to talk to your cardiologist about titrating you off of your medication. How do you think that conversation went? So cardiologist wanted no part of it, so I brought in another physician to titrate him off his meds,

• 40:31Gary Brecka?

  and at 21 weeks, he was off all of his blood pressure medication for the first time in 15 years. That was almost three years ago today, and he is still, to this day, normal blood pressure, never had heart ablation, and is on no medication for blood pressure. So, woo, I got a woo for that one too. So, the reason why I keep going through these cycles is because we're just tracing this back into the soil, right? So first, do we have everything that God gave us that we need in order to function? If not, I'm not going to assume that anything is wrong with you. Before I label you with a diagnosis, I'm going to first see if your body has the raw material it needs to do its job.

• 41:13Gary Brecka?

  And then after that, get out of its way and watch it recover. And then if it doesn't recover, then we go looking for pathology and disease. I'm not saying that it doesn't exist, it just does not exist nearly at the scale. God specifically designed the human genome to not pass on disease. It is specifically engineered to not pass on disease. Yes, it malfunctions and things slip by, but none of us would be sitting in this room if genetically inherited disease was something that we promulgated in the human genome, right? We would all not be here. And so, you know, we had a saying in the mortality space because we saw it so often,

• 41:57Gary Brecka?

  that the absence of dopamine was the presence of addiction. It was literally a saying we had around the office, "The absence of dopamine was the presence of addiction." Because dopamine, this valuable neurotransmitter, is the driver of behavior. So if I was able to stick a magic syringe in anybody's shoulder here and just pull the dopamine out of your body, as soon as I suck that neurotransmitter out of your body, you would immediately begin to engage in dopamine-seeking behavior. Promiscuity, thrill-seeking, workaholic work, alcoholic, drugs, alcohol, you know, all of these different chemicals or stimulants that actually would give us a normal level of dopamine. Addiction, if you've ever actually been an addict or you've known a true addict,

• 42:42Gary Brecka?

  addiction has a few characteristics. Number one, it has a tendency to shift and never really go away because we don't treat the dopamine deficiency. Drug addicts become alcoholics, alcoholics become workaholics, workaholics become workalcoholics. The addiction shifts from one thing to another. Why? Because we don't fix the dopamine deficiency. We don't fix the driver of behavior. And so, you know, addicts, and I have given hordes of my time to drug and alcohol treatment and addiction treatment centers, rarely does an addict or did an addict just wake up one morning and go, "I want to get really banged up." They woke up one morning and said, "I want to feel normal."

• 43:26Gary Brecka?

  It was the search for normalcy where they developed an addiction. And usually, they are running from a low. They're actually not running towards a high. They don't even like how they feel when they're on that drug or that alcohol or they're engaged in that activity. It just makes them feel normal. And so, if we would understand that deficiencies in dopamine drive behavior, why wouldn't we go back in and fix the dopamine pump? You know that we make dopamine from something called phenylalanine and tyrosine? We make it from basic amino acids that are methylated in our gut into dopamine. Having that deficiency drives dopamine-seeking behavior. When I was a triathlete years ago for a period of time,

• 44:09Gary Brecka?

  I bet 45, almost 50% of the guys that I raced with were recovering alcoholics. This was their new addiction, was workalcoholic, because they hadn't addressed the dopamine deficiency. And again, we could just keep going on and on and on. These are the main genes, that genetically inherited genes that drive most of the conditions that I just discussed. They are very common. They are passed in families, which is why things like drug and alcohol addiction, depression, anxiety, hypothyroid, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, these things do run in families even though they are not carried on the genome.

• 44:54Gary Brecka?

  Because the deficiency leads to the disease, not the disease being carried on the genome. And so, I wish that we would go back into human physiology and really study how human beings were architected before we brought in chemicals, synthetics, and pharmaceuticals. And so, if you have, for example, this COMT gene, you're very likely to be a neat freak. You're also likely to be a neat freak that ruminates at night, that has a hard time falling asleep because your mind is awake. Or you're a very light sleeper and your spouse gets out of bed, and when they come back into bed, you're awake, your mind turns on, you can't get back to sleep. You're also a worrier, not a warrior.

• 45:39Gary Brecka?

  Everything scares you. When you actually think about things at night, you take them right to worst-case scenario. "I have a job interview tomorrow, there's no chance I'm getting hired. I suck and they hate me." And, you know, so it's just, and then you wake up in the morning, you're like, "Okay, I really took that for a ride," you know? Always worst-case scenario. What's fascinating about these conditions is that fact patterns and reality don't shift their mindset. So you think something bad's going to happen on your way to the office, you think when you get to the office, something bad's going to happen. You go 101 days straight, go into the office, nothing went wrong. On the 102nd day, you think something bad's going to happen, right? So reality doesn't matter, right?

• 46:23Gary Brecka?

  And so, we learn to live with these. We call them consequences of aging, or we're just, "I'm just a warrior, I'm just a bad sleeper, I have brain fog, weight gain, water retention, poor focus, poor concentration, I don't respond to exercise." None of those things are a consequence of aging. They are consequences of nutrient deficiencies. And a lot of them actually have to do with basic amino acids. So many of us are deficient in the category of amino acids that we call essential amino acids, what the body uses to build all kinds of structures. Proteins, I mean, amino acids are not proteins, by the way. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. So when we get amino acids into the body, especially essential amino acids, we build muscle, we build connective tissue, we build collagen, elastin, fibrin.

• 47:08Gary Brecka?

  We also build natural killer cells. We build so many things. The reason why there is a protein equivalent is not to get enough protein. Protein is useless when you put it in the body until it is converted into amino acids. The target is the amino acid equivalent. And by the way, sadly, guys, we cannot target direct protein in the human body. We do not eat our nails to grow our nails. We don't eat our hair to grow our hair. You cannot eat collagen to grow collagen. You can take collagen, it's great, it's a great protein, it's an incomplete protein, can't build muscle from it, but you cannot say, "I'm going to take collagen from here and it's going to show up as collagen in my skin." That's not true. It's no different than eating a piece of steak and showing up as collagen. It will show up as amino acids,

• 47:53Gary Brecka?

  and amino acids will go build collagen, elastin, fibrin, muscles, skin, all of these structures, natural killer cells. So getting the right amino acid equivalent is as important, if not more important, than getting to a protein equivalent. And sometimes it's very hard for women, especially, to reach their protein equivalent without going way over their macros. They don't like to eat a 14-ounce ribeye and half a dozen eggs every day. So that's one of the reasons why I take an amino acid supplement. Doesn't break a fast. It's the equivalent to eating 29 grams of whey protein, and you get all of the essential amino acids that your body needs. So as you go through here, a lot of these also have to do with nutrient deficiencies

• 48:37Gary Brecka?

  that are related to motility in our gut. So I can't tell you how many clients and patients I've had that have had gut dysbiosis or irritable bowel syndrome, and they've had every food sensitivity and food allergy and gut microbiome test, but the most overlooked thing in all of bariatric medicine is not the contents of the gut. It is the pace of the gut. And rarely, if ever, do I talk to bariatric specialists to even think about the pace of the gut. You have to think about your gut as a 30-foot-long conveyor belt. Okay, so if we were to stretch it all out, it's 30 feet long.

• 49:20Gary Brecka?

  So we drop contents on it at one end as they exit the stomach, 30 feet later, they exit the rectum. The speed of that conveyor belt is more important than the contents. So if you walked into any factory in the world that worked on a conveyor belt system, and you just walked into that factory and you doubled the speed of the conveyor belt, the whole line would break down. If you stopped the conveyor belt, the whole line would break down. If you slowed it, it would break down the whole line. Too fast, diarrhea. Too slow, constipation. Pausing, bloating, irritability, cramping, dysbiosis, diverticuitis, ulcerative colitis.

• 50:03Gary Brecka?

  And if contents begin to leak, as in leaky gut, then the immune system will get called to that location. And it will stay there until the condition goes away, or it will persist and pervert into what we call Crohn's disease, an autoimmune disease. The immune system didn't just show up and randomly attack your colon. It showed up to protect you from contents that were exiting the luminal area of your gut and getting into your blood. It showed up to protect you, and now we're going to hold the immune system responsible and just put you on powerful corticosteroids, anti-inflammatories, and possibly even immunosuppressants. So restoring the pace of the gut, and this is in the vast majority of these cases, is

• 50:45Gary Brecka?

  a deficiency in methylfolate. If you are deficient in methylfolate, you have impaired gut motility. And then what happens when you have impaired gut motility? You have impaired serotonin synthesis. And now you have anxiety. This is why not a single one of you that raised your hand and said you suffered from anxiety doesn't also have gut issues. I have never, in a quarter of a million patients, met a single person suffering from chronic anxiety that did not also have gut issues. Not once. Raise your hand if you have rampant anxiety and you don't have gut issues. There you go. Forty percent of the room raised their hand for anxiety.

• 51:28Gary Brecka?

  See, so we sometimes just have to zoom out, really identify these things, and identify who the villain is. And once we identify the villain, then we can go about treating it. You know, my wife and I were in Saudi Arabia. I spoke at this conference called the Xenos Health Summit. Very traditional medical system over there, excellent medical care. I didn't realize it, but I had happened to land on a room full of psychiatrists and psychiatric specialists. Not a lot of them like me, so. And at the end of my talk, I asked if there were any questions, and this lady stood up. Do you remember this? Babe, where's my wife? She remembers. Oh, she left? She left?

• 52:13Gary Brecka?

  Tell her to get back in here and listen to her husband. Okay? When she comes back in the room, we are all going to stare at her and shame her for leaving my presentation. I want her to feel the heat. So we were standing there, and this lady stands up, and I mean, she went apoplectic. She said, Gary, it's a great offense to what you're saying. I think you are leading people astray. You're not a doctor. And she said, I have helped thousands of patients, including kids, for years with Adderall, Vyvanse, Ritalin, and I've successfully helped them manage this disease. And I said, okay, well, since you said you've helped thousands of kids with Vyvanse, Ritalin,

• 52:57Gary Brecka?

  and Adderall, what were you using that to treat? And she said, ADHD. I said, what was the last patient that you diagnosed with ADHD? She said it was a pubescent child that had attention deficit disorder. I go, what was the actual diagnosis that you made? She said idiopathic attention deficit disorder. I go, great. So now we have a disorder of unknown origin. And what did you use to treat them? And she said, Ritalin. I said, have you ever read the package insert for Ritalin? Because the first line on the third paragraph for Ritalin's Vyvan and Adderall, read exactly this. The mechanism of action of this medication is unknown. So you can't tell me that you know the mechanism, because the manufacturer doesn't know the mechanism.

• 53:42Gary Brecka?

  So you have a diagnosis of unknown origin and a medication of unknown action, yet you're certain that's the solution? What I'm telling you is this is human physiology. This is absolute. It works the exact same way in every single cell, in every single human being, whether you're male or female, you're black or white, Republican or Democrat, whether you're Middle Eastern or Saudi Arabian, or you're from Southern Texas. It is human physiology. And so if we would obey those laws first, we would find our pathway to so many cures for root causes in the human body. And I'm hell bent on getting that message out. The other thing that I realized, and I just use this as an example.

• 54:26Gary Brecka?

  The other thing that we realized in the mortality space was that rarely, if ever, do multiple systems fail in a human being at the same time. You will never convince me that someone has more than one autoimmune disease. You will never convince me that someone has more than one mood disorder or mental illness. Because what happens is multiple systems do not fail at the same time. One domino falls that causes everything. And if you can start standing them back up and find out where that first domino is, you will find the root cause. Yes, they may have been diagnosed with multiple autoimmune. They may have been diagnosed with all kinds of mood and mental illnesses, or mood and

• 55:10Gary Brecka?

  mental illnesses and autoimmune and other dysbiotic diagnoses. But you will not be able to show me that all of those systems failed at one time. One domino falls that causes everything. And this happens in so many, and we knew this in the mortality space. If I saw that you had rampantly uncontrolled blood sugar, I will promise you, blood sugar is the root of all evil. I'm working on amending the Bible. It's not the love of money, it's blood sugar. That's a joke, especially in this graph. But we should say the love of money, parentheses, and blood sugar are the root of all evil, because they are the root of all evil.

• 55:52Gary Brecka?

  You know, insulin resistance is such a consequential domino in such a myriad of ailments. It's unbelievable. In fact, we would actually tie it to early onset Alzheimer's, dementia, and neurocognitive decline. There are some studies, if you Google it, that Alzheimer's is type 3 diabetes. It's insulin resistance in the brain. We blame cholesterol for its oxidative process, which happens from high insulin. Right? Cholesterol itself, in fact, no one in this room could give me any shred of evidence anywhere in the published peer-reviewed clinical literature that links elevated LDL cholesterol on its own to cardiovascular disease.

• 56:34Gary Brecka?

  Yet if your LDL cholesterol is even slightly elevated, we're going to put you on a statin. What we didn't look at, that we saw in the mortality space, was this molecule, which is manufactured by the liver, only about 15% of it comes from diet, but about 85% of this nasty compound LDL cholesterol is in your blood, is manufactured by the liver. But it's not a fuel source, so what does the body use it for? It's a construction material. We use it to build every cell wall, every cell membrane. We make hormones from cholesterol. We make vitamin D3, cholecalciferol, the only vitamin that human beings make on our own. How important do you think vitamin D is to human beings?

• 57:16Gary Brecka?

  If God only gave us the ability to make one vitamin, we don't need to eat, we don't need to breathe, we don't need to drink, all we need to do is expose our skin to sunlight and have cholesterol in our blood, and we make vitamin D3. How important do you think that is to human function? In fact, the second leading cause of morbidity in COVID was a clinical deficiency in vitamin D3. Leading risk factor was morbid obesity and type 2 diabetes, and the second was clinical deficiency in vitamin D3. And so when we start to rewind a lot of these myths, you know, we built a trillion-dollar industry on keeping LDL cholesterol below 99, when the truth is, in 22 years in the

• 58:01Gary Brecka?

  mortality space, we didn't process a single death claim on a centenarian, someone over the age of 100, that did not have clinically elevated levels of LDL cholesterol at the time of their death. Right? Cholesterol is not the answer. Oxidized cholesterol and some of the other lipoproteins are the villain. If you had low triglycerides and high LDL cholesterol, we would extend your life expectancy. Why? Because that's what the data said. And sometimes we have to apply common sense and mass data to what we do in medicine and how we treat human beings. In fact, if you apply a data, you know, large data studies, and this is about to happen at scale because of artificial intelligence and big data.

• 58:46Gary Brecka?

  If you look at diet or exercise, and you start looking at what are all the big meta-analyses and the big data studies and all the blue zone studies, where all of them line up? Well, they will tell you that there's no argument for dogmatic dieting. The secret to extending your life is not carnivore, paleo, pescatarian, vegan, vegetarian, raw food. The secret to extending your life is the absence of processed food. Full stop. Right? Oh, Bill, I love this audience. Usually by now, I've chopped the audience right in half. Yep. They don't talk about politics, don't talk about science, don't talk about religion.

• 59:29Gary Brecka?

  We talked about Jesus a little bit, or we haven't talked about politics. We'll get into that. But well, now I'll just stick to biology. But the secret to the right diet is the absence of processed foods. Because you can take any region in the world, you can go to Sidinya, highest carbohydrate consumption in the world, one of the longest life expectancies. But in Singapore, it's the highest meat consumption per capita, very long life expectancy. You go to the Mediterranean, very high in fatty fish and fatty oils, almost a liter of olive oil per person per week. If you told your cardiologist like that, their head would explode. Very long life expectancies. And then the French, the heck with the French, because they screwed up the whole model because they're smoking cigarettes, drinking wine, eating cheese, living to 100. Right?

• 1:00:14Gary Brecka?

  The secret to a long life is the absence of processed food. What no one rarely talks about, if ever, is the need for community and connection and faith.

• 1:00:27Gary Brecka?

  And, thank you. Because we just don't think about faith as medicine, and community as medicine, and connection as medicine. But I talked about this a little last night. We knew in the mortality space that if you wanted to cut a human being's life expectancy in half, and I mean in half, at any age, you put them in isolation. Isolation is the most detrimental thing to our physiology. If you have faith, you're never isolated. If you have good, deep familial connections, you are not isolated. Human beings were meant to do what we're doing right now, be in the proximity of other human beings. That's why I like these events, because there's no replacement for community and for connection.

• 1:01:11Gary Brecka?

  You know, we know this because every one of us has known a relative that has, or a friend's relative that's died of broken heart syndrome. Right? I mean, a couple that's married 40, 50, 60 years, one spouse passes, what happens to the other spouse? It's usually very quickly. And why is that? That's the first time that that person has been in isolation in maybe half a century. They were just immediately isolated. When you look at some of the most horrific crimes that you see all over the news, who were they committed by? Oh, the loner. The kid that's in isolation, that didn't come out of his bedroom, that didn't have a friend group. So, community, connection, faith, these are medicine. And so, you know, the answers are sometimes a lot more simple than what we think. The reason why I showed this chart

• 1:01:56Gary Brecka?

  was just to show the, some of the consequences of insulin resistance, because in modern medicine, we chase all of these spokes of the wheel and not the actual hub. I did want to, before I opened it to questions, I wanted to talk about molecular hydrogen, just shift gears here for a second. Probably the world's leading PhD in molecular hydrogen is sitting right there, Dr. Tyler LaBaron. So, I'm not gonna do it justice. I believe, in the supplement and nutritional space, the discovery of the role of hydrogen gas in the human body, not the discovery of hydrogen gas, it's the lightest, most prevalent element in the universe,

• 1:02:40Gary Brecka?

  the role that it plays in human physiology as a supplemental treatment, in my opinion, is the greatest discovery of our millennia. Because we know that, well, hydrogen is about 10% of your body weight is hydrogen. We know that this gas is harmless to human beings. But we, what we're discovering now, and it is well-reviewed in the literature, Dr. LaBaron has published a lot of this research. You know, so much so that hydrogen is a part of something that I do every single day. But hydrogen gas has some very, very unique properties when you put it into the human body. First of all, it acts as a selective antioxidant. Vitamin C, and blueberries, and elderberry,

• 1:03:25Gary Brecka?

  and quercetin are all great antioxidants. But they're not selective. What does that mean? Well, we know that oxidative stress, and free radical oxidation, and inflammation, you know, these are, these have consequences in the human body. They degrade cell membranes, they impair the healing process, they disrupt the immune system. But the challenge is knowing, if you have oxidative stress, how much antioxidant do you take so that you don't over-suppress oxidation? That can be just as dangerous as having too much oxidative stress. So, for you science nerds in here, like me, what we want in the human body is something called redox homeostasis.

• 1:04:07Gary Brecka?

  We want a balance between oxidation and reduction, between inflammation and too much inflammation. If not, the body doesn't heal the way that it should. If you're walking down the street and you step off the curb and twist your right ankle, how does the body know to heal the right ankle and leave the left ankle alone? It's the inflammatory process, right? The fibroblastic signaling, the inflammatory process. Why peptides are so good. Without that process, we wouldn't be able to heal. Hydrogen, when it enters the cell, it enters through a unique pathway called the Nrf2 pathway. When it enters this pathway, what it does is it restores, it brings oxidative stress to neutrality and stops.

• 1:04:50Gary Brecka?

  It can also increase oxidation if needed. Because there's a lot of things that have dual roles in the human body, like superoxide. Not having it is detrimental, having too much is detrimental. Hydrogen peroxide, not having it is detrimental, having too much is detrimental. With the exception of something called a hydroxyl radical, which I don't think is any known benefit in the human body. So, hydrogen gas will neutralize the hydroxyl free radical and restore the other free radicals to neutrality. It is very inexpensive. You can drink it, you can bathe in it, you can breathe it. Every single one of you, I'm gonna give you molecular hydrogen tablets before you leave. I brought thousands of them. You just drop them in your water.

• 1:05:35Gary Brecka?

  It's elemental magnesium, it becomes hydrogen gas. You drink the hydrogen gas, you tell me how you feel. It is not a stimulant, it helps to reduce inflammation and turn the lights on. So, I'm not gonna bore you to tears with all of the clinical studies. This one I found fascinating because most of the time when they do research on supplementation and sports rehabilitative research, they do it on young, healthy individuals. This was actually a study that was published in the Journal of Experimental Gerontology. I found this because I am going through this issue with my parents right now. I have one parent whose body is failing and his mind is very sharp. And I have another parent whose body is very strong and her mind is failing.

• 1:06:20Gary Brecka?

  And I can tell you that in both cases, hydrogen gas has been a material part of their recovery. I'm documenting this right now and I'm gonna publish it on Instagram. Everything from the brain scan studies to the gold standard memory test that I did on my mother. And I'm gonna show you how in 21 weeks I can take an 82-year-old, forgotten, disoriented female and bring her back to the kind of sharp acuity that she had in her 40s. It's already starting to happen. My dad is already telling me she's driving him crazy. At first, she was asking him the same question all the time and now she wants to redecorate the whole house and change all the carpets and switch out the artwork. And he's like, hey, can you just dial her back a little bit? I'm like, that, it's one or the other. You know, either she mumbles like an idiot

• 1:07:04Gary Brecka?

  and asks you the same question every 15 minutes, or she's redecorating the house. But there's no, there's no like six or seven. It's a 10 or a 1. You choose. So, again, I won't bore you with all of the research. I'll talk to you about it at the booth. That's the product that I take. It's just called H2 Tab. It is a molecular hydrogen tablet. I drop it every, every morning into water and I drink the gas from that. I also spend a lot of time on airplanes and that will mitigate all of the effects of travel. Low barometric pressure, high static electricity, high radiation, dry air, what have you. This is probably the most common question I get asked, what's your morning routine? So, there it is. If you wanna just take a picture of it, it's pretty simple.

• 1:07:48Gary Brecka?

  It's exactly what I did this morning. What's amazing is, you know, I find that things that are free, like touching the surface of the earth, getting sunlight onto your skin, and learning to do a round of breath work, they are so simple, they're free, they're so accessible, and they're portable. People did not give them the credence that it deserves. When I, you know, I regularly hold sleep challenges. Have any of you ever done one of my sleep challenges? Couple of you, two of you? I'm doing really good in this room. This is awesome. Three, three, great, okay. Could you raise your hands out of sympathy for me? So, I'm not embarrassed, thank you. Another honest dude. But, you know, these are, you know, we're circadian creatures. Our bodies crave routine.

• 1:08:33Gary Brecka?

  We actually have a biological cycle in our body. We have an area of our brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. Very complicated name, very simple task. What it does is it regulates the secretion of hormones. It regulates our digestion. And if we don't have any normalcy that our body can tie into, then this whole system gets dysregulated. One of the best things you can do to have a good night's sleep tomorrow is get sunlight in your eyes this morning. Very simple. Allow sunlight to, you know, touch your skin. We have to stop being afraid of the sun. We've been taught to fear the sun. The truth is, most of us are not getting enough sunlight, not getting too much sunlight. You know what's fascinating to me? 18 brands, or sorry, 23 brands of sunscreen

• 1:09:17Gary Brecka?

  have been pulled from the market since 2018 for directly or indirectly causing skin cancer. And, you know, I used to have a chart that I would give at my stage talks showing the parabolic rise in skin cancer since the late 1980s. And it's superimposable with the parabolic use of sunscreen. Sun's not our enemy. It's okay to spend a few minutes in sunlight in the morning, naturally into your eyes to reset your circadian rhythm. I do a style of breath work called Wim Hof. There are hundreds of valid styles of breath work. I'm by no means saying that that's the best one. I do three rounds of 30 breaths, obnoxiously deep breaths, followed by exhaling through a straw. And at the end of each round of 30 breaths, I hold my breath as long as I can, allow CO2 to build up in my bloodstream,

• 1:10:02Gary Brecka?

  dilate my blood vessels, and I do it again. They are free, they are portable, and they tell your body what time it is. It's time to go to bed, it's time to wake up. So, a very common thing that happens after I leave stage talks is people want to get in touch with me, they want to ask me questions. I'm really, really proud of this. I spent the last two and a half years building an artificial intelligence app that I have never once let crawl the web. I have fed it every stage talk, podcast, lecture, interview, it's read every book I've ever written, it's read all of the white papers. I selectively will feed it research if I think that it is valid, and it's done on human beings,

• 1:10:42Gary Brecka?

  and it doesn't have a bias. You can ask it anything. It's like having me in your pocket. You could ask it about supplements, your blood work, it will read your genetic testing, it will read your labs, it will give you responses to your autoimmune disease, it will actually tell you how much hydration or minerals you need. So, if you want to join the VIP community, I would love to have you. Are there any of my VIPs in here right now? Right there? Can I just tell a few stories, since I have some witnesses in the room? So, you're welcome to talk to these people, they're part of my VIP community. Since you've been a part of my VIP community, have you seen people heal from any pathologies

• 1:11:22Gary Brecka?

  or disease? Yeah. We have people come on all the time that have autoimmune Hashimoto's. And what I'll do is I'll spotlight them, and I'll bring them up onto an artificial stage, and they'll let me be transparent with their medical records and their treatments in front of... There's tens of thousands, there's actually, almost 10,000, members in this VIP community. And right in front of everyone, over the course of 10 to 12 weeks, we will permanently put that condition into remission. And they will come on every month and talk about their journey, and it's just so inspiring. Talk to one... I did not know they were here, I didn't plant these people in the audience, just talk to them about the journeys that happen in this VIP group. Because I am trying to build a community

• 1:12:06Gary Brecka?

  of like-minded people like you to go change the world. And we're going to do it from the bottom up, you know, not the top down. So, thank you. All right. I have a few minutes to get to questions. I can't understand this clock. Do I have 15 minutes and 45 seconds left, or have I talked 15 minutes too long?

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we're like right, probably, at ending, but let's take just a couple of questions real quick. So, raise your hand and you'll walk to you.

• 1:12:36Gary Brecka?

  Yes, ma'am. Said you sprung out of your seat, and like...

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  That's my mom for you.

• 1:12:41Gary Brecka?

  Knocked the woman over next door.

• 1:12:42Speaker 02

  What about Addison's disease? I have a son that's 48, he was diagnosed at 13. And when he was diagnosed, I asked the doctor, "Well, is there anything you can do to rebuild his adrenals?" And they go, "No."

• 1:12:58Gary Brecka?

  And what do you...

• 1:12:59Speaker 02

  So, for 35 years, he's been on levothyroxine, synthroid, and fluorine.

• 1:13:03Gary Brecka?

  Okay. So, let's talk about Addison's disease. I also want to talk about Graves' disease and Hashimoto's at the same time, just all things thyroid for a moment. So, really quickly, how many of you either have or know somebody that has hypothyroid? Holy cow. Okay. So, when you're diagnosed with hypothyroid, you're usually diagnosed with hypothyroid because you have low T3 hormone. Can you just write that down if you have hypothyroid? You have low T3. That is, the vast majority of hypothyroid is low T3 hormone. So, the thyroid sits right here in your neck, and it produces these two hormones, T4 and

• 1:13:41Gary Brecka?

  T3. If T3 gets low, that's called hypothyroid. Only, the little-known fact about the thyroid is it only produces 20% of the T3 in your blood. Which means, if your T3 is low, there's an 80% chance it's not the thyroid. Yet, in 100% of the cases, we medicate the thyroid for a crime it's not committing. So, the question is, where does the other 80% of the T3 come from? Does anyone know? Okay. It is methylated from T4 into T3, and that happens in the liver. So, 80% of

• 1:14:24Gary Brecka?

  your thyroid hormone is not coming from your thyroid, your T3 hormone, it is coming from your liver. Yes, some, for you guys that are science nerds, a very small amount in the periphery, and some in the gut. But the vast majority of that is coming from the liver. We methylate T4 into T3. In order to convert T4 into T3, you need several nutrients, one of which is iodine. Most people are not iodine deficient. But one of the critical nutrients, and this deficiency runs in families, this deficiency is genetically inherited, not hypothyroid. You inherit a selenium conversion deficiency. Selenium is a nutrient converted

• 1:15:09Gary Brecka?

  into something called selenium methionine, and that enters the liver and helps this process, this conversion process. Selenium methionine and selenium cystine helps this conversion process. If you have a gene mutation that causes poor conversion of that raw material into the material your body needs, you have a deficiency. That deficiency impairs the conversion of T4 into T3, making T3 low, and you're diagnosed with hypothyroid. And then we medicate the thyroid for a crime it's not committing. So, I would really investigate

• 1:15:48Gary Brecka?

  a deficiency in selenium or selenium methionine, because the absence of those methylated nutrients are the catalyst the liver needs to deiodenize thyroid hormone T4, what's called outer ring to inner ring thyroid deiodenization. And so, without boring you to complete tears, the nutrient deficiency is inherited, the disease is not. There is no gene for hypothyroid. It runs in families, and you got it from your ancestor, but you didn't inherit the disease. The second thing is, and this is true with autoimmune... Can somebody take the top off of one of those water bottles? Can I have the top off that one? Thank you.

• 1:16:30Gary Brecka?

  All right. So, with Addison's, Hashimoto's, I'm going to teach you what most endocrinologists don't know about autoimmune disease here in 90 seconds. If this was a mold spore, a mycotoxin, a parasite, a virus, or a heavy metal, this thing right here, and this was a healthy cell, this does not hide like this. It hides like this. That is the most important distinction I can make. Mold, mycotoxin, parasite, virus, heavy metal. Healthy cell. Hides like this. Now, the immune system is hyper vigilant. It wants to get to the perpetrator.

• 1:17:15Gary Brecka?

  Just like if somebody robbed the bank across the street, and ran in this room, and barricaded themselves in this room, the police would bust down that door to get to the perpetrator. They're not trying to break the door, they're trying to get to the perpetrator. The immune system is after the villain. And the villain is hiding, very often, intracellularly, inside of your cell. Do you know what happens when the immune system reaches the door? How does it bust down the door? It manufactures an antibody. It's manufacturing an antibody to a cell that's containing a villain, not randomly manufacturing antibodies to your own tissue. It is after the perpetrator. And we hold the immune system responsible, and say, "The

• 1:17:57Gary Brecka?

  immune system has gone haywire." You know, in the vast majority of Hashimoto's patients that we have put into remission, and yes, we put them into remission, because my VIPs have seen that in real time in my VIP group, it is because of toxic heavy metals embedded in thyroid. The thyroid has an affinity for heavy metals. Mercury, arsenic, palladium, lead have an affinity for the thyroid. When they migrate to the thyroid, the immune system shows up at that location, and it wages war. And instead of actually helping them rid the toxin, we actually go after the immune system. I will promise you this, if you have an autoimmune disease, I'm not saying this is the source of all autoimmune disease,

• 1:18:39Gary Brecka?

  but if you or a loved one has an autoimmune disease right now, these are the five major villains you need to look for. Mold, mycotoxin, parasite, virus, heavy metal. If you just hit those categories and got them out of the body, this is called subtractive medicine, you would very often see the immune system completely calm down. Because you don't have an autoimmune disease, you have a pathological infection. And so, we just think these incidences are random. The immune system just doesn't show up places and bust it... If no bank robber ran in here, the police would never bust down that door. Right? If your house didn't catch fire, the firemen would never show up. They don't just randomly stop by

• 1:19:22Gary Brecka?

  with a hose. Right? Something called them to that location. We should always ask ourselves, you know, the first, in our mind, when you have one of these conditions, an autoimmune condition, the first thing is, "Hey, guys, God didn't make a mistake. I don't think He made a mistake. I think the immune system is acting properly, we just have to find out why it's here." Instead of immediately getting off on the other fork, immune system's made a mistake, and now we're down this bandwagon of autoimmune. Instead of saying, "What could have called it to this location? Why did it show up?" We do the same thing with cholesterol. Cholesterol just doesn't jump out of the bloodstream, stick to the blood vessel, right? And stick to the arterial wall, to the endothelium. Something called it to the endothelium,

• 1:20:06Gary Brecka?

  usually inflammation and damage, or oxidation. So, and I'll be happy to talk to you about what supplements I might recommend as soon as I get off the stage. One more question, maybe, because I'm over my time. Yes, ma'am.

• 1:20:26Gary Brecka?

  2025, you went through a cancer journey, and it's left you...

• 1:20:43Gary Brecka?

  Okay, so she went on a cancer journey. Clearly, it was a successful journey, so God bless you for that. And now, post-recovery, you have neuropathy. So, you know, here are my feelings on neuropathy. So first, what is neuropathy? Generally, it is poor circulation in proximity to the nerves. So if I wanted to give anyone in this room peripheral neuropathy right now, I would just put a tourniquet on your forearm. In three minutes, five minutes, you would have peripheral neuropathy in these fingers. Right? In about 10 minutes, I could pinch the top of your hand as hard as I could, and you wouldn't even feel it.

• 1:21:27Gary Brecka?

  The most important point is, nothing is wrong with those nerves. What would happen when I took the tourniquet off? All that feeling would come back, right? So peripheral neuropathy, very often, and neuropathic disorders are not pathology of the nerve. They are pathology of the circulatory system. Remember I said that the heart doesn't circulate 70% of our blood? That vasomotor circulation is happening in the microvasculature. Some of these vessels are a fraction of the size of a human hair. Under a microscope, red blood cells are literally leaping over each other and leaping back from the tissue. Very, very small vasculature. This is why biologics very often don't work in neuropathic patients.

• 1:22:10Gary Brecka?

  The molecular size is too big to get to the target tissue. In medicine, and in inflammation, and in biologics, and tissue biologics, proximity doesn't matter. If you're having a heart attack on the floor, and the paramedics are locked right outside your door, does it matter that they got really, really close to you? Okay, so we have to obey certain laws of physiology. These are circulatory. So I would be focusing on how do I improve microvascular circulation? So if we identify the villain as circulation, vasomotor, microvascular, what can I do for that? Red light therapy is probably the single biggest, best intervention that you can do. The reason why is because certain wavelengths of red light

• 1:22:55Gary Brecka?

  will literally pass through the skin and pass through the arterial walls. Without getting too complicated, it dissociates a gas called mitochondrial nitric oxide, which causes a vasodilation and hammers oxygen into the mitochondria. It kickstarts the mitochondria. The second is, I would be taking a form of resveratrol called PICIED. P-I-C-I-E-D, resveratrol. I take one called Vinyal, but there are lots of great brands out there. I have no association with them, but I take Vinyal resveratrol. And the third thing I would be doing is I would be taking a vascular endothelial repair supplement. Something like Endocalyx or Revasca to actually repair and heal the endothelium of that microvascular.

• 1:23:40Gary Brecka?

  You restore the circulation, you restore the nerve function. Most neurological decline in the brain is due to poor circulation from trapped inflammatory compounds, trapped histamines. The big fallacy in a lot of these neurological disorders, Alzheimer's, dementia, early-onset cognitive decline, is that these patients are losing their memory. That is not true. Alzheimer's patients are not losing their memory. They are losing access to their memory. And access can be restored. So it can be restored in your case, too. Guys, thank you so much for your time. I hope that you got value out of this. God bless you. I really, really appreciate it.

• 1:24:25Gary Brecka?

  I will be back. Thank you.