World No. 1 Biohacking Expert: "I Tested 100,000 People's DNA. This Diet Will Kill You!". Fix This Hormone And You'll Fix Your Anxiety! - Gary Brecka

His old job was to know when you would die, his passion is to extend and improve people’s lives Gary Brecka is the co-founder of 10X Health System and is one of the world’s leading experts in human biology and biohacking. He has worked with CEOs, models, to athletes from the UFC, NFL, and professional boxers. Gary is also the host of the ‘Ultimate Human’ podcast. In this conversation Gary and Steven discuss topics such as, the common supplement mistakes that people make, the vitamin that most people are deficient in, how we are in a pre-diabetic epidemic, and the impact of loneliness at a cellular level. You can listen to the ‘Ultimate Human’ podcast and purchase Gary’s products here: https://bit.ly/3w2m8mr Follow Gary: Instagram - http://bit.ly/3IVf6Dw Twitter - http://bit.ly/41w492P YouTube - https://bit.ly/4aLbmA7 Studies mentioned: 1. https://academic.oup.com/ajh/article/28/7/943/2743393 2.https://headachejournal.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/head.12792#:~:text=This%20study%20is%20the%20first,sodium%20concentrations%20and%20neuronal%20excitability Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/3kxINCANKsb My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://smarturl.it/DOACbook Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo 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?

  No one really tells people that have anxiety what it is. And this is why very often people don't have a specific trigger they can point to. So they're trying to pin it on their outside environment. But the truth is that they're deficient, usually.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Gary Brecka.

• 0:16Speaker 02

  He's a human biologist.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  He's spent 20 years working in life insurance predicting when people are going to die to the nearest month. And now he's on a mission to extend your life.

• 0:26Steven Bartlett?

  A couple of days ago, someone did a swab inside of my mouth. What was that test and why did I do it?

• 0:31Gary Brecka?

  You did it to look at whether your parents gave you a gene mutation. And it's one of the most overlooked things in all of our medicine because it's this deficiency that leads to some of the most common ailments that we suffer from. Mental illness, ADHD, OCD, manic depression, bipolar, sleep disorders, very severe gut issues. I mean, there are so many that don't seem to be fixable with conventional therapies or dietary changes because very often disease is not happening to us, it's happening within us. And I'm not going to stop getting the message out to the masses. Because I just think about all the times I could have made a real material change in somebody's life and I didn't have the opportunity to do it. And felt like I was, you know, sitting behind a thick glass wall just watching blind people walk into traffic.

• 1:18Gary Brecka?

  Now I got a chance to make a difference.

• 1:21Steven Bartlett?

  So what are like the simple things that we can be doing to prevent us even getting these chronic diseases?

• 1:26Gary Brecka?

  So there's five things that I would commit to doing on a regular basis. Number one is upon waking, I would.

• 1:34Steven Bartlett?

  I wanted to invite in Dr. Kari Sada, who's going to give me those results of my test. I want to know if there's any sort of health implications that I should be aware of.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  Okay, so that right there is an issue.

• 1:49Steven Bartlett?

  Gary.

• 1:51Gary Brecka?

  Steven.

• 1:52Steven Bartlett?

  Good to see you back. They threw me off.

• 1:55Gary Brecka?

  It's good, I know. I know I threw your game off there. Steven. Great to be back, man. It really is.

• 2:03Steven Bartlett?

  If someone's just clicked on this podcast and they're wondering why they should stay and listen, you're going to direct the conversation. I'm going to go where you want to go. I'm going to follow my curiosity and ask questions. But what are they going to get from this conversation today if you are at the driving wheel?

• 2:16Gary Brecka?

  I'm just stayed on how to live a healthier, happier, longer life and maybe answers to some of the most pesky health-related challenges that they're having. And when I say pesky health-related challenges, I mean, everybody has these little tiny anchors off their stern, right? Weight gain, water retention, brain fog, lack of focus and concentration, poor waking energy, lack of deep sleep. It's shocking how many of these conditions have a common repository, like the hub of the wheel, where they all meet, all these individual spokes to come together to common hub of methylation. And methylation is essentially nutrient deficiencies in the human body. And I don't usually start off with this analogy,

• 2:59Gary Brecka?

  but I'll start off with an analogy. When I was in grad school, first of all, I'm a human biologist, I'm not a physician. My undergraduate degrees are in biology. My postgraduate degrees are in human biology. But when I was in my second four years of grad school, getting a human biology degree, I had to take all these plant botany courses, which I hated because I was like, I wanted to study anatomy and physiology and human beings, but I'm studying algae. But the one thing that stood out to me about plant physiology was, let's say you have a palm leaf that's rotting in a palm tree and you call a true arborist, a true botanist out to your house and they see that that leaf is rotting in the tree. They won't touch that leaf. They will cortex the soil. And then they'll say, you know what, Steven? There's no nitrogen in this soil.

• 3:43Gary Brecka?

  And they'll add nitrogen to the soil and the leaf will heal. Only we've stopped thinking about human beings this way. We've lost a lot of faith in humanity and mankind, the body's ability for this to heal this. And we believe very often, and this is true in some cases, that disease and pathology are happening to us, not something that happens within us. And if you go back to the tree analogy, you know, you could put anything you wanted on that soil, right? You could supplement for the sake of supplementing. And I think a lot of people get lost in this realm where, well, I heard NMN is good, and resveratrol is good, and CoQ10, and St. John's Wort, and ashwagandha, and vitamin C, and I should take a multivitamin. You know, and pretty soon, you have this paralysis of analysis because you're supplementing for the sake of supplementing.

• 4:27Gary Brecka?

  And in the tree's case, if you didn't find the nitrogen, the leaf never would have healed. And the reason why most of us supplement for the sake of supplementing is that we don't have data. We just don't get data on our bodies. You know, when I bring, and you run into a lot of, a lot more young entrepreneurs than I do, but when I run into them and I'll bring them up sometimes when I'm doing a stage talk, and you can question them about their priorities, like, what's the most important thing to you? My health. How important is health to you? Oh, it's the number one priority I have. And I say, well, come on up here and let's, let's talk about, you know, how much you're, you're prioritizing your health. And you say, you know, what kind of business do you have, a marketing agency? What is your business earned on a monthly basis? $148,000 a month.

• 5:11Gary Brecka?

  What's your net income? $38,250 a month. How many employees do you have? 16. What's your hemoglobin A1C? Blank. Right? Where are your testosterone levels? How about your triglycerides? Do you ever look at your C-reactive protein? And their face is just blank. We have more data on our businesses than we do on our temple. And, you know, I actually saw you on a stage talk, I believe it was, and you talked about how you could take anything away from me and my life. You referred to your dog and your girlfriend.

• 5:50Gary Brecka?

  Hopefully you still have the dog and the girlfriend, but you said, you know, if you took my girlfriend away, you took my dog away, I don't want, I don't want to get you in a fight with your girlfriend, so let's talk about the dog. So you took my dog away, I still have my business, I still have my life, right? But if you took away my health... I'd lose everything, right? And I think most of us don't realize the importance of it until it is taken away. And so recognizing that the temple is the most important vehicle that we have, I just really encourage people to get data, basic data, on their body. So they have some kind of roadmap. So they are supplementing for deficiency, not just the sake of supplementing, and that they're getting the most out of their body because that's what they're gonna get. That's how they're gonna get the most out of their business. You know what I mean?

• 6:34Gary Brecka?

  Just picking up these little tiny anchors that are nibbling away at productivity. You know, people that suffer from ADD and ADHD don't really realize that ADD and ADHD very often are not attention deficit disorders or attention deficit hyperactivity disorders. They're actually attention overload disorders. And we characterize people that have ADD as not being able to pay attention. But the truth is, they don't lack the ability to pay attention. They lack the ability to pay attention to so many things. And if we understand that this is an overactive mind, not a mind that's trying to pay attention to too many things, then we can go about quieting the mind and not stimulating the

• 7:17Gary Brecka?

  central nervous system to match that pace of the mind, which is kind of what Adderall and five ans and amphetamines do when you take them for ADD and ADHD. So if we understood that as normal or as good as we think we feel, we have no idea how good normal feels until we find the missing raw material in our body and we put it back. You wanna see magic happen in human beings? Find the raw material that's missing and put it back in their body. And by raw material, I mean simple things. You know, I mean, depending on who you talk to, there's 72 minerals. I think 16 of those are essential minerals. There are two essential fatty acids. There are eight essential amino acids.

• 7:58Gary Brecka?

  It is astounding how many people are clinically deficient in some of those basics. And then they go searching and all of the esoteric super supplements and red light therapy and, and NAD boosting supplements. And they're actually just missing that one of those raw materials. Basic essential amino acids, basic fatty acids and basic minerals. And that's where all human beings should start. And then from there, we should do some testing biomarkers in the blood. In my opinion, every human being should do a genetic methylation test, the very same test that you did, whether they do it through me or not. A genetic methylation test is a test you'll do once in your lifetime.

• 8:39Gary Brecka?

  And it will tell you exactly what raw materials your body can convert into the usable form and what it can't. Because in human beings, just like in that tree analogy, when you have a deficiency, you get the expression of disease.

• 8:54Steven Bartlett?

  You know, when we, you talk about deficiencies. It brings me back to something I think we talked about briefly last time, which is, it makes me feel like humans are being born broken. Is that true? Because if I've got, if I'm deficient in something that my body needs, then does that not mean that my body was born broken?

• 9:10Gary Brecka?

  It's not that it's born broken. It's just not functioning optimally. Right? And, and all of us have genetic SNPs. We have these, the single nucleotide polymorphs. We have these, our genes, which are coding for enzymes to conduct these different activities in the body. And what is astounding about human beings is, is how beautifully intricate the human body is. We take one raw material, we put it into a physiologic process, and then we take the waste product from that process and we feed another process and on and on. So for example, we'll take folate from green leafy vegetables. We'll convert that into methylfolate. Methylfolate becomes one of the most prevalent nutrients in the human body.

• 9:53Gary Brecka?

  It helps to down regulate an inflammatory amino acid called homocysteine, which then turns into something called methionine, which then goes up to the brain and helps to quiet the mind. So you start with this green leafy vegetable and it winds its way all the way up to helping you sleep. And it's not that the spinach leaf is helping you sleep. It's what the spinach leaf has become that's helping you sleep. And this sequence of events is called methylation. And what's astounding about methylation is that in many cases, when it's broken.

• 10:24Gary Brecka?

  While we can't fix the gene, we can just supplement for its function. So the most common gene mutation in the world, which we talked about last time on your podcast, MTHFR, affectionately called the motherfucker gene. Forty-four percent of the population has this gene mutation. I talk about it all the time. And it's a simple inability to convert folic acid and its derivatives, folate, into the usable form called methylfolate. Well, it's very easy to supplement with methylfolate and very inexpensive, I might add, to supplement with methylfolate. And deficiencies in methylfolate are linked to all kinds of conditions, including neural tube defects, because it's not folic acid that prevents neural tube defects. It's methylfolate that prevents neural tube defects.

• 11:07Gary Brecka?

  It's what the body converts it into, the usable form. And so when we look at methylation in the human body, we get an exact roadmap of what we need to supplement with, so that we're not wandering around just supplementing for the sake of just supplementing.

• 11:23Steven Bartlett?

  You mentioned the entrepreneurs that you meet, that you bring up on stage, and you ask them various questions, and then you ask them about biomarkers in their body. What are the simple biomarkers you think that everyone needs to understand? Because, listen, I'm not a chemist, I'm not going to be a biologist. So if there's a couple of them, I can probably get my head around them and stay on top of them. But I can't stay on top of everything.

• 11:42Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, so there are, I would say, three. Number one is what's called glycemic profile, which is a check of how well your insulin and sugar metabolism is. And it has three markers: glucose, hemoglobin A1C, three-month average of your blood sugar, and insulin. So definitely your glycemic profile, because blood sugar, I promise you, is the root of all evil. So first, I would do your glycemic profile. Second, I would do your hormones.

• 12:11Steven Bartlett?

  Can I just check on the glycemic profile? That's basically my relationship with... Sugar.

• 12:16Gary Brecka?

  That's your relationship with sugar. And it's also your relationship with insulin. Because, you know, very often, even people that don't eat high amounts of refined sugar in Ben & Jerry's ice cream every night have issues with insulin sensitivity. And so, as insulin rises, it causes a whole myriad of conditions. It's one of the hallmarks of something called metabolic syndrome, which we're seeing in younger and younger populations. And it's generally easy to catch early on. You have three markers that look at how well you're regulating your blood sugar. Glucose, which is a measure of the amount of sugar in your blood right now. Hemoglobin A1C, which is essentially a three-month average of your blood sugar. And then you have your insulin. And the higher your insulin relative to your blood sugar, the more insulin resistant you are.

• 13:01Gary Brecka?

  Right? So the more insulin it takes to drop your blood sugar, the more resistant you are to insulin. And this is an early warning sign of metabolic syndrome. But it's not just the metabolic syndrome. It's that when insulin rises, there's a whole downstream cascade of events. Because insulin's not just responsible for helping us metabolize sugar, it's also responsible for blocking other forms of energy use in the body, one of which is fatty acid metabolism. And so generally, people that have very high insulin have very high blood triglycerides. They have high blood fat. And high blood fat and elevated cholesterol are other markers for cardiovascular disease. So by actually bringing down one biomarker, you have a positive effect all the way downstream.

• 13:43Gary Brecka?

  And I would say, if you're only going to look at three things, I would look at your glycemic profile, your blood sugar, and your insulin, and your hemoglobin A1C hormone panel.

• 13:53Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 13:54Gary Brecka?

  So looking at your hormones, and then specifically, looking at what contributes to healthy hormone production, DHEA, and a protein called SHBG. And then I would look at basic nutrient deficiencies. Vitamin D3, magnesium, potassium, and vitamin B12, which are on most blood panels. And that is a great place to start, to get the basics. How am I regulating my blood sugar? Are my hormones balanced? What nutrient deficiencies do I have? And then the second piece of information I would get, which you only do once in your entire lifetime, is a methylation test. And these are widely available, you know, all over the world. I'm sure they're very easy to get in the UK. And you want to look at five genes. MTHFR, MTR, MTRR.

• 14:42Gary Brecka?

  A H C Y and C O M T.

• 14:45Steven Bartlett?

  And just to be clear, so I can dumb this down for myself here. Those five genes relate to how my body processes the things that I put into it at different stages in that sort of processing line.

• 14:57Gary Brecka?

  Yes, I mean, so to take, for example, that gene at the top, C O M T. If you look at what C O M T does, it stands for catecholomethyltransferase. So it's a fancy way of saying it transfers a methyl group from the category of neurotransmitters called catecholamines. And that's a huge mouthful, but essentially what this means is these four neurotransmitters that are called catecholamines are responsible for our fight or flight response. So, for example, if you drove home tonight and you got out of your car and somebody was standing in front of you with a knife, you would instantly have a fight or flight response. Your pupils would dilate, your heart rate would increase, your extremities would flood with blood. You would begin to have a fight or flight response based on that stimulus. But you could also be laying in your bed at night

• 15:41Gary Brecka?

  and you could start thinking about getting eaten by a shark. And you could have the exact same response. Because the brain doesn't really know the difference between perception and reality. The similarity between these two events, a very real fear and a reaction to it, and an imagined fear, is they both meet at catecholamines. It's a rise in the same class of neurotransmitters. So now, some people are very slow to break these down. And what are the consequences of this? Well, if you've ever had anxiety or know somebody that suffered from anxiety, no one really tells people that have anxiety what it is. They describe the feeling. So they say it's a fear of the future. It's a sense of impending doom.

• 16:26Gary Brecka?

  It's a sense of anxiousness. But what is it? Physiologically, what's going on in the body? Well, very often, it is a rise in catecholamines, the same class of neurotransmitters that are involved in a fight or flight response. And this is why very often, people that suffer from anxiety don't have a specific trigger they can point to. They could be on a podcast like you and I are doing right now, and all of a sudden, as those catecholamines rise, they get that sensation. of anxiety and they're trying to pin it on their outside environment. They're trying to look for a cluster of symptoms outside their body. But this is because they are deficient usually in a complex of B vitamins. A very specific form of B12 called methylcobalamin, methylfolate.

• 17:08Gary Brecka?

  These methylated nutrients that that down regulate these catecholamines.

• 17:13Steven Bartlett?

  What else could it be?

• 17:14Gary Brecka?

  Well, I mean, there are true anxiety disorders, right? And generally, people that have true anxiety actually know what the trigger is. They're afraid of heights, they walk to the edge of a 30th floor balcony, they have an anxiety. Attack, they have a fear of flights.

• 17:27Steven Bartlett?

  Is this different from, so someone's been through a trauma in their life. So they had an early trauma and then certain things in their adult life end up triggering that. This is, that's very different from what you're saying here.

• 17:37Gary Brecka?

  So some people that have trauma and they wake up, for example, consistently in the past, right? Their first thought of the day is about the pain that they are already suffering from. Well, these thoughts, fight or flight thoughts, these, these thoughts have a tendency to be worst case scenario because they are also highly related to catecholamines. In fact, people that have that gene mutation fall into one of two categories. Think about it this way, if catecholamines rise very fast, you're a worrier. And the nickname for that gene is either a worrier or a warrior. Because as those catecholamines, they call it fast comt or slow comt. So just looking at this one gene mutation, if you're slow to break these catecholamines down and they rise,

• 18:22Gary Brecka?

  what are the consequences of that? I lay down to go to sleep at night and I'm body tired, but I'm mind awake. Right, my mind is just clicking through the day, thinking about the most innocuous little thoughts. I have a tendency when I consider scenarios to go straight to worst case scenario. I'm an over thinker. I, I am prone to anxiousness and anxiety. I walk around at a six instead of walking around at a two. So things that would only move somebody from a zero to a two, take me from a six to an eight. Very often, people in their surrounding environment will say the punishment doesn't fit the crime. The way that they react to certain situations. So this means that the mind is in awakened. A heightened state of alertness. Think about a fight or flight response.

• 19:06Gary Brecka?

  But not quite to that level, but they're in a heightened state of alertness. And this gives you that that feeling of anxiety. Now, what's driving the catecholamines can have different drivers. It could be this gene mutation, it could be trauma, it could be the presence of a real fear. It could be that you're claustrophobic and stepping on a crowded elevator. But for people that have not isolated trauma in their life, and they have a tendency to consider worst case scenario. They find that their mind is very active at night, interrupts their sleep. Or if they get up to go to sleep at night and they go back to bed and they can't fall asleep because their mind is awake, thinking about the most innocuous little thoughts. They have a tendency to be anxious, they have a tendency to be a worrier. They have a tendency to have feelings of anxiety that are not tied to their outside environment.

• 19:51Gary Brecka?

  Those are all hallmarks of that gene mutation.

• 19:54Steven Bartlett?

  So can I view this as a predisposition? I, you know, I often wonder why we can all be in the same situation, but we can have entirely different experiences. In the case of anxiety, some people, as you report, just for some reason, they're just more anxious in the in the modern world than some other people aren't. The modern world has changed, we use screens and we have notifications, we have all this stimuli. They're struggling more in the modern world than others. What you're suggesting is that they could have a predisposition to worry more because of these catecholamines?

• 20:25Gary Brecka?

  Because of the catecholamines, yes. Because of these catecholamines. Noradrenaline, epinephrine, ephedrine, dopamine, one of those we also call adrenaline. And so you have the main driver of behavior and you have catecholamines. And we all know that adrenaline does in the body. So when these four neurotransmitters are not downregulated, right, then our mind is awake and it is very often fearful. Think about somebody who has a sensation of impending doom or anxiety without any, any trigger. And, and, and the other hallmark is they will have had it on and off throughout their entire lifetime. Even when they were a child, when they were a child, they might have understood the complex sensation of anxiety. But they had that sensation.

• 21:09Gary Brecka?

  And then as they grew to be an adult, they understood that this is anxiety. I mean, when you, when you're, when you're a child, you're just fearful, right? I mean, you don't know how to explain to your mom, hey, I'm worried about something that is. Might happen in the future that's probably not likely to happen, that's never happened, but I'm still afraid it's gonna happen. It's a very complex emotion, right? So they've had it on and off their entire lifetime. It's very hard for them to point to the specific trigger that causes it. The majority of the time, if they try the anti-anxiety medications, they don't work. They just make them feel like a zombie. So this is time to look inside and make sure the body has the raw material it needs to do its job, which is the complex of B vitamins to dismantle catecholamines.

• 21:50Steven Bartlett?

  So if we went out into the street now and I pulled in 100 people just off the street that were walking past, and we did these three tests on them to look at their glycemic profile, their hormone panel, their nutrient deficiencies. What are some of the most popular things that a random group of people off the street would be missing that are central to their high performance?

• 22:10Gary Brecka?

  So let's take men and then we'll take women, so we can be specific about hormones. So in 50% of that population, you would see a clinical deficiency in vitamin D3.

• 22:20Steven Bartlett?

  I have to say, you've actually run a lot of tests every single month.

• 22:23Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 22:24Steven Bartlett?

  Tens of thousands.

• 22:25Gary Brecka?

  We run 20,000 a month. We do about 20,000 gene tests a month. I mean, so one of the unique things about the perspective that I come from is we have voluminous amounts of data. You know, we see 20,000 of these new patients a month, testing for genetic methylation. And on a lot of these patients, we also have blood work. So we have a full, what's called a CBC, comprehensive metabolic panel, lipid panel, hormone profile, a full thyroid panel. We have their nutrient deficiencies that I'm speaking of. We have cholesterol triglycerides. So we have a pretty, we have about 74 biomarkers on them. Then we also get this genetic test. And then we look at what happens to certain biomarkers, on average, when you simply supplement

• 23:10Gary Brecka?

  for deficiency. So for example, I'm not saying that every person that has high blood pressure or hypertension has this gene mutation, but two of these genes are highly linked to poor homocysteine metabolism. And there have been plenty of peer-reviewed studies. We can put the link to the one below in the Journal of Hypertension, which linked higher levels of urinary catecholamines and urinary homocysteine to cardiovascular disease. Because what happens is, when you have a certain amino acid, in particular, rise in the blood called homocysteine. As this amino acid rises, it has a tendency to cause the vascular system to constrict. And if we make the pipes smaller in a fixed system, pressure goes up. But there's nothing wrong with heart. Right?

• 23:54Gary Brecka?

  And so, think about the fact that 85% of all diagnosis of hypertension is idiopathic. It's of unknown origin. Well, of unknown origin means we can't find anything wrong with the heart. We've tested the heart, EKGs, EEGs, stress tests, dye contrast studies, cardiac cath, what have you. But we haven't looked at the vascular system. We haven't looked to see, was there a simple nutrient deficiency keeping this person from breaking down homocysteine, which caused the vascular system to constrict? Because we know that there's a correlation between this amino acid, homocysteine, and its elevated nature and increased risk of cardiovascular disease. So, before we actually went the routes of chemicals and synthetics and pharmaceuticals,

• 24:35Gary Brecka?

  why wouldn't we just test to see if we have an issue dismantling this amino acid, you know, breaking this amino acid down into something called methionine? And why don't we supplement for that deficiency? And see if by putting that raw material back into the body and bringing homocysteine metabolism into normal, we can normalize this person? So, back to your question about the people in the street, you would see that 50% of them are clinically deficient in vitamin D3, cholecalciferol, you know, the sunshine vitamin. The darker their complexion, the higher the risk that they would be clinically deficient in vitamin D3. And if you put that vitamin D3 at the center of a hub, of a wheel, and looked at all of the different spokes, it's one of the only vitamins that human beings make on our own.

• 25:19Gary Brecka?

  I have argued and people have counter argued, but I take the position that it's arguably one of the most, if not the most important nutrient in the human body. You need a lot of essential nutrients, but if you really start isolating them, you know, vitamin D3 is the only vitamin that human beings make on our own. Every cell in the body has a receptor site for vitamin D3. When we're deficient in this vitamin, this nutrient acts like a hormone sometimes, it acts like a vitamin other times. We make it from sunlight and cholesterol. When it's deficient, we have a compromised immune system. We know that it leads to osteopenia, osteoporosis. There are all kinds of consequences that you wouldn't think stem from a simple nutrient deficiency, but they do.

• 26:00Steven Bartlett?

  One that we get from going outside in the sun.

• 26:02Gary Brecka?

  We get it from going outside in the sun. We make it from sunlight and cholesterol. And you know, if you look at COVID statistics, it was the second leading cause of morbidity in COVID. And so first you would see that they're D3 deficient. The majority of them are also B12 deficient. If you look at the vitamin B12, you'd see it's less than 500. The higher end of B12 is around 1,250. And then you would see 25 to 40% of that population would be hormone deficient. Meaning that their hormones would be out of the optimal range. But not because they have an endocrine system issue per se. Generally because they have, especially in younger ages, nutrient deficiencies.

• 26:45Gary Brecka?

  Things like elevated SHBG, sex hormone binding globulin. Deficiencies in DHEA, raw materials that the body needs to manufacture hormones. So a good hormone panel will tell you not only what your hormone levels are, but what some of the nutrients are that your body's using to make those hormones. And again, by putting some of these raw materials, very often DHEA, not all the time, but very often putting DHEA and vitamin D3 alone back into men with deficient levels of testosterone, or deficient levels of free testosterone, or looking at a protein that interrupts the conversion of testosterone into free testosterone, called SHBG. By actually just addressing these, you see that the hormone levels rise back to the normal range.

• 27:29Gary Brecka?

  They don't need to take hormones from outside the body and shut their production down. They need to put nutrients and raw materials back into the body so their body can produce hormones on their own. And then if you looked at their glycemic control, you would see a shockingly high percentage of people that are prediabetic. It is an absolute pandemic right now because the amount of processed foods. We think that the prediabetes is only because people that are eating a ton of sugar. So they must be drinking soda and eating chocolate cake and Ben and Jerry's every night. But that's actually not true when we overload the body with high glycemic carbohydrates, even if they ate a lot of white flour. White rice, white bread, white pasta, white potatoes and fruit.

• 28:13Gary Brecka?

  You know, they, I'm not saying any of those things are going to kill you, but when we eat diets high in refined carbohydrates, even things that we don't consider to be sweets, it overpowers our pancreas and our blood sugar gets out of control. But wouldn't you want to know that? Wouldn't you want to know that, um, do I have some of these nutrient deficiencies or hormone imbalances or poor blood sugar control that could be nibbling away at my performance? Am I maybe one raw material, one methylated multivitamin away or an amino acid away from being in a state of being optimal? Maybe even not having to deal with little things like, um, intermittent feelings of anxiousness and anxiety or poor focus and concentration or even mild states of mood numbness.

• 28:58Gary Brecka?

  Remember that nutrients, amino acids, for example, in our gut become neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters form the basis of all mood. They drive our emotions. They, they, um, they govern our behavior. And so is it possible that an amino acid like tryptophan or phenylalanine or tyrosine, which becomes serotonin and dopamine, that deficiencies in these amino acids could lead to deficiencies in hormones, which could actually lead to deficiencies in neurotransmitters that would be labeled a mental illness? Yes. So again, I feel, I feel like I'm eating your face a little bit, but, but what I, what I really mean to say is that, you know, if, if we would get basic information, basic

• 29:43Gary Brecka?

  data on the body, hormone balance, um, glycemic control, nutrient deficiencies, if we would actually look at what our body can convert into the usable form and what it can't and supplement for that deficiency, you would see your body begin to thrive in ways you never thought possible.

• 29:58Steven Bartlett?

  You work with a lot of high-profile individuals as well.

• 30:01Gary Brecka?

  I do.

• 30:02Steven Bartlett?

  What are some of the high-profile names that you're, you have permission to share?

• 30:06Gary Brecka?

  Well, clearly anyone that's shared their, their journey with me on, on, on the podcast. Um, there's a great hit piece on me in, in the Daily Mail that had listed, listed a lot of them. But Dana White, um, Steve Harvey, Stephen A. Smith, um, Steve Aoki.

• 30:25Gary Brecka?

  Kendall Jenner and I were on a, one of her Hulu specials together, running some IVs. There are a few others that will be public here very shortly that have got on podcasts with me and it's, I don't necessarily want to be known as like a celebrity biologist or working with, just working with professional athletes and A-listers. It's, my message is for, is actually for the non-woke biohacker. I don't feel like my job is to sit here and impress you with how smart I am. I feel like my job is to put information out to the masses that, that is educational enough to inspire them to make a change. And, and I think all

• 31:06Gary Brecka?

  too often, you know, we're, we're all competing for eyeballs in this, in this space and we're trying to become the biggest influencer and we, we really forget about the mission of speaking to the masses and we just start speaking to each other. Like, we, we want to get on podcasts and stage talks and interviews and impress people with how much we know about the carboxylic acid cycle or, you know, electron transport chain or something going on inside of the mitochondria. And, and those minute nuances are not what's going to impact humanity.

• 31:34Steven Bartlett?

  A lot has changed since we last sat down in your life.

• 31:37Gary Brecka?

  It has. Yeah, it really has. I feel like, I feel like I live somebody else's life. I really do.

• 31:43Steven Bartlett?

  What's, what's changed? I mean, when I, when I first reached out to you, it was because I saw a clip on YouTube which had 20,000 views and that clip on YouTube I found really interesting. So I think, I personally sent you a DM and said, "Hey Gary, do you want to come on my show?" Which I, to be honest, never personally send a DM.

• 32:00Gary Brecka?

  Really?

• 32:01Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, because my team, the way our system works here is that they understand what I'm interested in and curious about right now. So they'll go out into the market and try and find people for me. They'll bring those people, those people to me as a pitch. They'll pitch the individuals to me and then I have the say whether I'm curious enough to sit down and have the conversation right now.

• 32:18Gary Brecka?

  I met it twice. Alright, awesome.

• 32:20Steven Bartlett?

  So in this case, it was, I've seen something you'd done online, I don't know, more than a year ago now it feels like. And it was really compelling to me. So I wanted to sit down with you. Since then, I've observed you're, you've kind of had this sort of meteoric rise on loads of different podcasts and social media and your business has exploded. There is something different about you.

• 32:39Gary Brecka?

  Hmm.

• 32:40Steven Bartlett?

  And the thing that's different about you that strikes me is You strike me as a man that has been through some shit.

• 32:49Gary Brecka?

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:50Steven Bartlett?

  Frankly.

• 32:51Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 32:52Steven Bartlett?

  Because the Gary that I met the first time versus this Gary, slightly different. And it's the type of thing when someone's been through some shit. And with all good things come the opposite.

• 33:02Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 33:03Steven Bartlett?

  It's unavoidable.

• 33:04Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I mean, you go under a level of scrutiny. You know, you start off, you're like so excited, you're like, I'm gonna get the message out. And God's blessed me with the ability to take ultra complicated information, distill it down, and get it to the masses. And then you realize that there are people that are watching your videos, like a three-hour podcast, and they're looking for the one gotcha moment. Right? He said sodium chloride, not sodium hydroxide, scammers, charlatan. You know, he pretends to be a doctor. He's not a doctor. I've never pretended to be a doctor. You will not find a video, a stage talk, a podcast, anything in the media where I've ever represented that I'm a doctor. I go out of my way to say that I'm not licensed to practice medicine. So, yeah, I have become a little more gun shy and a little more guarded with what I say. It's an effort to be more precise with what I'm saying.

• 33:52Gary Brecka?

  But I'm not going to stop getting the message out to the masses because I know that this is God's calling for me. I know that. Because I spent so many years of my life not in service to humanity.

• 34:09Gary Brecka?

  And I think a lot of people find their purpose in their pleasure, and I found my purpose from my pain.

• 34:18Steven Bartlett?

  What pain?

• 34:21Gary Brecka?

  You know, when I was doing life expectancies and mortality predictions, we were sort of brainwashed to believe that this was just data. Right? You weren't responsible for it. You didn't have anything to do with this person. I was on a mortality team, and we were charged with predicting the life expectancy of people for large life insurance and investment companies. So when you apply for a large life insurance policy, you know, everybody's on an actuarial curve. Right? So you're on one, I'm on one, everybody listening to this podcast is on an actuarial curve.

• 35:02Gary Brecka?

  What happens is when a life insurance company is getting ready to put 10 million, or 20 million, or 50 million dollars worth of risk on your life, only one thing matters. How many more months do you have left on earth? And the science of predicting that mortality is very accurate science. I get a lot of flack about it, but if you want to know how accurate life insurance companies are at predicting death, just look at what happened during the 2008, 2009 financial services crisis. We had, we had 364 banks fail. Not a single life insurance company failed. A valid death claim in the United States has never failed to have been paid. They are some of the most solvent institutions in the world. There's not another financial services enterprise anywhere on the planet

• 35:46Gary Brecka?

  that would take that level of risk on one variable. I mean, you have an investment fund. You wouldn't put that level of risk on a single variable, right? How many more months does this person have left on earth? And they have data that no other medical enterprise has. They have data that no other collegiate university has, not even the government has. They know the day, the date, the time, the location, and the cause of death for millions and millions of lives. So they know what leads to early mortality. And so

• 36:15Steven Bartlett?

  How do they get your sort of health biomarkers to overlap that with?

• 36:19Gary Brecka?

  Well, first of all, they do a blood test on you. So if you've ever had a large life, I'm not talking about term life insurance where you get $100,000, $200,000, or even a million dollar term life insurance policy. I'm talking about permanent universal life or whole life, life insurance. Also annuities. When, when you, there's something in the States called a SPIA, a Single Premium Immediate Annuity, where you give the insurance company, for example, a check for a million dollars. They guarantee you an income stream for life. Well, how do you think they're determining that income stream? They're predicting how many more months you have left on earth. And they, they use morbidity factors and comorbidity factors. And yes, they factor into your recreational profile, your demographic profile. It's not as simple as a blood test or a gene test.

• 37:03Gary Brecka?

  But essentially what you do is you start on a curve in a pool of 1,000 lives that are similar to yours. And, and your life expectancy is the dead center of that curve. So if your life expectancy is 200 months, that means in 200 months, you have the exact same chance of being dead as you do of being alive. Now, what determines your increased probability of death? Are your mortality factors? Are you obese, diabetic, anemic? You have cognitive decline? Are you compliant with your medication? You know, there are all of these different debits. And then there are certain debits that we called comorbidities. Right? So if you're hypertensive, that was a debit. If you were diabetic, that was a debit. If you were obese, that was a debit.

• 37:47Gary Brecka?

  But if you were hypertensive, diabetic and obese, it wasn't one plus one plus one. It was one plus one plus one equal 10. Right? These were massive comorbidity factors. My job was to read the medical record and do the medical record extraction. And we had incredible data on these people. You saw their trust and you saw their wills, their trust, their divorce decrees. You knew that they were treating their children differently in their estate, bank accounts, brokerage accounts, tax returns and their medical records. And you have recent blood work on them. But when you read a medical record on somebody, there's more than just their height, weight and blood pressure and the medications that they're on.

• 38:30Gary Brecka?

  You really start to get a profile for a lot for the person. And a lot of times I felt like I was really getting to know these people oddly because I had so much personal information on them. And, you know, a lot of these people came alive to me. I know that sounds very strange, but when you're reading about their repeated, you know, visits to the doctor and they're constantly talking about, you know, their grandchildren. And then all of a sudden you see in the medical record where the husband passed away. And then you see the antidepressants creeping in and you see their waking, their body mass index change. And you actually, as you're going through years of their medical record,

• 39:15Gary Brecka?

  you really get a real profile for them. And I started to realize that there were human beings on the other side of these spreadsheets. And there were cases where I knew that if I could have picked up the phone and just contacted that patient, I could have completely changed the trajectory of their life. And I was prohibited from doing so by law.

• 39:43Gary Brecka?

  Even at one point in my career, I was threatened with prosecution for threatening to call a patient and warn them about a life-threatening, potential life-threatening drug interaction that I'd spotted in the medical record between two physicians that had written contraindicated scripts and something called the MIB, the Medical Information Bureau, hadn't picked it up. And the data that I had said that this was going to lead to a thrombolytic event, like a blood clot, a stroke, you know, a heart attack and embolism. And I remember calling the Human Resources Director and just, you know, basically saying that I'm going to contact this patient and being threatened with prosecution. And I think about it a lot.

• 40:27Gary Brecka?

  And I just think about all the times I could have picked up the phone and just made a real material change in somebody's life, and I didn't have the opportunity to do it. And a big part of my career felt like I was, you know, sitting behind a thick glass wall just watching blind people walk into traffic. And so I wasn't in service to humanity. All I wanted to do was be wealthy. I was very unauthentic. And then I just woke up one day and said, what the hell am I doing? I mean, I have so much information. I'm a human biologist, and I have, I've been studying this database for 20 years. I could help people live healthier, happier, longer lives. And I quit my career, and I went home and

• 41:12Gary Brecka?

  told my fiance at the time, now my wife, that I wanted to start a wellness firm. And that was the genesis of my firm's streamline and part of the trajectory that I'm on. And so-

• 41:26Steven Bartlett?

  It still sits with you?

• 41:28Gary Brecka?

  Every day.

• 41:29Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 41:30Gary Brecka?

  Oh, dude, it's, it's, well, it sits with me in a good way because, you know, whereas before, it's really hard to imagine, you know, somebody coming into your office and going, hey, you know, Gary, oh my God, remember the, you know, the Mrs. Smith life expectancy? We did 13 years ago, you know, you did this life expectancy, it was 188 months, you predict 188 months, she died in 184 months. Oh my God, you did a great job. It's amazing. That claim just paid. And I'm like, is it really amazing? You know?

• 42:07Gary Brecka?

  When you start to realize that was somebody's, you know, it's like somebody's sister, or somebody's daughter, or somebody's mother, you start to realize that I allow myself to be brainwashed and just think that it was data and forget that there was human beings on the other side of the spreadsheet. And so now, I'm sorry, I'm getting emotional, but, but, um, you know, now I wake up every day and I like open my eyes and I go, fuck yeah, you know, I got a chance to, to make a difference. And, and I talk about the research and the fact patterns that we saw in predicting death, and I want to counter those so that we can extend life, so we can help people live longer, healthier, happier lives.

• 42:52Steven Bartlett?

  So the counter arguments that you've experienced, you know, you use the word counter argument in hippies, what do those sort of counter arguments tend to center on as it relates to your work? Obviously, you talked about the doctor thing.

• 43:05Gary Brecka?

  I definitely made some mistakes. You know, I made the mistake earlier in my career of quoting articles and not, and not research, which I regret. And I, and I've made some of those mistakes. I think very often what I try to do is simplify the message. I talked, for example, about a 2018 study, we should put the link to this, which was in the Journal of Headaches and Face Pain. There's a journal of headaches and face pain. I want to say it was 2018. There were 8,819 participants in this meta-analysis, so a very large analysis. And they found a direct inverse relationship between sodium intake

• 43:46Gary Brecka?

  and migraine headaches. And meaning that as sodium levels went up, migraine headaches went down. Now, by no means am I telling everybody that has a migraine headache that you need to take a little bit of salt and you're going to be fine. What I'm saying is on your, on your comprehensive metabolic panel, you can see your sodium level. When your sodium level gets to a critically low level, which believe it or not, quite a few people have, people that regularly sauna, people that exercise and don't re mineralize with electrolytes, people that drink filtered bottled water in an effort to filter out fluoride and microplastics, but don't re mineralize their water, get nutrient deficient sodium. And, you know, remembering that the brain actually doesn't have any pain receptors, but the covering of the brain does, you know, something called the Dura.

• 44:28Gary Brecka?

  And the Dura hates two things. It hates being stretched and hates being contracted. And what determines whether or not it's stretching or contracting is something called the osmotic gradient, the movement of water across the membrane. And yes, it can be as simple as supplementing with sodium. My preference would be Baja Gold sea salt or Celtic salt, so that you get all of the other trace minerals as well, to permanently put migraine headaches into remission. And then, you know, I'll come all of the physicians saying, there's no evidence of that, well, there are clinical trials on that. And the other, the other tool that I have in my chest is for 20 years, I worked with one of the largest databases in the world. And we're at the point now where we see 20,000 new gene tests a month. I don't know many clinics that are that busy.

• 45:12Gary Brecka?

  So we have voluminous amounts of data. We see what happens when you have a high homocysteine and you put them on, you put a patient on amino acid called trimethylglycine and the homocysteine comes down and then they go to their doctor and their blood pressure is normalized. Not once, not twice, not anecdotally thousands and thousands of times. You see what happens to people when you bring their hemoglobin A1C and their insulin back down into the optimal level and their triglycerides return to normal and their risk for cardiovascular disease declines. You see what happens to C-reactive proteins when people take the simple things like silica clays and activated charcoals. And so I want to keep getting the message out

• 45:54Gary Brecka?

  that very often, disease is not happening to us, it's happening within us. And very often, it's happening because of deficiencies in the human body, not pathology in the human body. And, you know, in the United States, we're by far the largest spender on healthcare. You know, we spend four and a half trillion dollars a year on healthcare in the US. We have the highest infant mortality rate. We have the highest maternal mortality rate. Even though we lead the world in flu vaccinations and breast screening, and breast cancer screening, colorectal screening, we also lead the world in cancer. We're ranked 52nd in life expectancy. We're ranked 39th in healthcare delivery. We're one of the most obese nations on the planet,

• 46:37Gary Brecka?

  twice the rate of obesity of any other civilized nation. And yet, modern medicine being, you know, medical era being the third leading cause of death. Is where we're going to get information on how we extend our life. And I watched in medical records, I've probably read thousands of times more medical records than most physicians, because I read medical records all day, every day, six days a week for almost 20 years. And I would see what would happen when simple deficiencies would be mistaken as a pathological condition. And I've talked about these a lot. Like clinical deficiencies in vitamin D3 for prolonged periods of time eventually

• 47:18Gary Brecka?

  present as rheumatoid arthritis-like symptoms. People get joint aches and pains and stiff and sore ankles and they have a hard time making a fist. And, you know, when you're speaking to the wrong physician, very often a doctor will diagnose you based on your medical history. Not before they do SED rates and rheumatoid arthritis, you know, actual blood checks. They'll say, you know what, Stephen, you've got rheumatoid arthritis. And they put you on, on things like corticosteroids. And in the mortality space, we had data. So we had data on all of these pharmaceuticals. So we knew the trajectory of hormones and cell walls and cell membranes and production of vitamin D3 when somebody took a statin and reduced cholesterol.

• 48:01Gary Brecka?

  And we looked at, you know, they, the studies will look at cholesterol in a complete vacuum. So LDL cholesterol high, so that's bad. Let's bring LDL cholesterol down with a statin so we decrease the risk of cardiovascular disease. But then you have a concomitant outcome where you, you're reducing the ability for the body to make hormones and cell walls and cell membranes. And so you buy yourself a consequence downstream. When really, if we go back to just studying the physiology of the human body, when we, you know, in the mortality space, I don't think I saw a single centenarian once, and we processed hundreds of these death claims. I don't think I saw a single centenarian that at the time of death did not have clinically elevated levels of LDL cholesterol.

• 48:42Gary Brecka?

  So begs the question is, simply having high LDL cholesterol on marker for longevity? Or is it a marker for cardiovascular disease that needs to be intervened with a chemical or synthetic? And, and these corticosteroids that people are put on, you know, very often they, they're, they're anti-inflammatory in the beginning, but then they eat the joint like a termite. And, and so these were resulting in voluminous amounts of joint replacements so accurately that we would. We were able to predict that the course of some of these medications would result in a joint replacement in roughly six years. And so we would artificially advance people's age six years and we would actually schedule the joint replacement for them.

• 49:27Gary Brecka?

  And then we would reduce what's called their ambulatory profile, how well they ambulated, how well they moved. And as we reduced their mobility, we could bring in all of these diseases that exacerbated with reduced mobility. And in my mind, I'm just watching all this happen, go, I wanted to call this, these people and say, I'm not qualified to do that because I'm not licensed to practice medicine, but I, I wanted to call them and just say, Mrs. Jones, stop taking the corticosteroid, start supplementing with vitamin D3, get your B12 level to here. Let's fix your hormones because this is killing your red blood cell count and this is what's leading you to be so exhausted. And, and no one was looking at, at these basic nutrient deficiencies that we would see run

• 50:06Gary Brecka?

  in blood work that would cause all of these diseases to exacerbate and people were succumbing much earlier to death or to the loss of their health span.

• 50:18Steven Bartlett?

  How many records do you think you saw in your time where you saw the full picture?

• 50:22Gary Brecka?

  I would be working on two or three of these, four of these cases at a time. Some were shorter cases, some were longer cases, thousands. I mean thousands. And in the tail end of my career, I started to manipulate the record artificially just to see what would happen to the life expectancy. I would never submit that as a report, but I would say, what if I fixed the anemia? What if I actually just corrected the D3 deficiency? What if, you know, and I was able to take out the prediabetic condition or reduce their hemoglobin A1C and you would see the life expectancy jump. Right? And so these are modifiable risk factors. And I think how many times, you know, I would be reading a medical record and I go, well, I know what this is going to happen.

• 51:04Gary Brecka?

  This is just going to get worse because this patient has anemia. Like the classic treatment for some anemias is folic acid, B12 and iron. And they would give them folic acid, B12 and iron and it wouldn't correct. And they give them folic acid, B12 and iron, they wouldn't correct. Folic acid, B12 and iron wouldn't correct. And they wouldn't realize that, um, that person can't process folic acid. If they gave them methylfolate, methylcobalamin and iron bisglycinate.

• 51:30Gary Brecka?

  The NEMI would correct.

• 51:31Steven Bartlett?

  But these are all sort of symptoms of further upstream issues, right? Like something that a decision that someone has made in their life typically, typically, that has caused them to develop these conditions, which far down the stream, like the tree you talked about with the bad leaf, doctors then point at the leaf and go, we need to fix the leaf. But it's down in the roots somewhere. So what are the societal and individual level things that we can be doing to prevent us even getting these chronic diseases? Like the simple, simple things.

• 52:03Gary Brecka?

  I'll tell you the simplest thing that we can do. First, we should think about having an invisible fence around us, right? Like a little force field. And we should filter things before they make it to the temple. Because either we can filter things for the temple or we can let the temple be the filter. So you can drink tap water. And if you drink tap water, your body will filter out the fluoride, the chlorine, the microplastics, the pharmaceuticals. Or you can filter your water before you drink it, right? And take one toxic load off your body. So what I would say is probably five things that I would commit to doing on a regular basis. Number one is upon waking, I would, I would drink a mineral, mineralized water.

• 52:47Gary Brecka?

  I would take 10 ounces of water and I would add either a Celtic sea salt or a Baja Gold salt to my water. The reason for that is that most of us are deficient in some or several of the trace minerals in our body. The boring ones, boron, manganese, molybdenum, selenium. And stir it up and just whack it back. And the second thing I would do is-

• 53:06Steven Bartlett?

  You're not talking about table salt here?

• 53:08Gary Brecka?

  No, no, no, not sodium chloride. No, I'm talking about Baja Gold sea salt. That's probably the best salt that you can put in the human body because it has all 91 trace minerals. It's tested down to 250 parts per billion for microplastics and glyphosate. Only about 75% of that sodium crystals. Actually sodium, the rest of them is all of these trace minerals. You can get very close to that with Celtic salt. Right? And if you can't get Celtic salt, then you could move to a pink Himalayan sea salt. The problem with pink Himalayan sea salt recently is that a lot of it has heavy metals because it's coming out of China. So I would say the best salt is Baja Gold. A great salt is Celtic salt and a decent salt is pink Himalayan sea salt. Forget table

• 53:53Gary Brecka?

  salt. I would just get that permanently out of your life.

• 53:55Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so number one, I have my Baja.

• 53:57Gary Brecka?

  Mineralize, mineralize. And then number two, I would, I would take a DHEA, EPA fish oil supplement or a fatty acid supplement with DHEA or EPA oil, an MCT oil. I would take a fatty acid oil in the morning.

• 54:15Steven Bartlett?

  An omega supplement.

• 54:16Gary Brecka?

  An omega.

• 54:17Steven Bartlett?

  Omega three.

• 54:18Gary Brecka?

  An omega three supplement. And then I would develop a morning routine that included the basics from Mother Nature. Sunlight, grounding, breath work, cold shower.

• 54:27Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so I wanted to zoom in here on grounding.

• 54:30Gary Brecka?

  Mm hmm. I'm a huge fan of grounding.

• 54:32Steven Bartlett?

  My girlfriend grounds. And again, listen, my girlfriend's much smarter than I am, it transpires, because everything she says, I think I said this to you last time, everything she says to me, eventually I sit here with like a neuroscientist a year later and turns out she was absolutely right. And I thought she was a little bit cuckoo for thinking that getting outside in the morning and putting her feet on the ground were at all beneficial. But I've been told time and time again, it is. What is grounding and why does it help?

• 54:56Gary Brecka?

  So we get three things from Mother Nature, right? We get magnetism from the earth, we get oxygen from the air, we get light from the sun. The further we get away from those things, the sicker we become.

• 55:06Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 55:07Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 55:08Steven Bartlett?

  So the magnetism piece, it sounds like, like a spiritual cuckoo stuff.

• 55:12Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I mean, probably 10,000 years ago, they probably thought the same thing about gravity, you know, but, but the earth has a low Gauss current, right? I mean, we were meant to spend 85% of our time outside. We spend 97% of our time indoors now. The truth is, most of us are not getting enough sun. We're not getting too much sun. We're not getting enough sun. And, you know, because of the way we eat and seed oils and everything that are oxidizing in our skin, our cancer rates are exploding, but not because of our sun exposures, because of our diet, and we could talk about that later. But when you touch the surface of the earth, when bare feet touch bare soil, grass, sand, we discharge into the earth. And by that, I mean, you actually change the polarity in the body, and this is measurable.

• 55:55Gary Brecka?

  In fact, if you want to do a little experiment, find somebody that has a microscope, a basic microscope, and get a slide, and just take a prick, prick your finger, and take a drop of your blood, and put it on that slide, spear it around, and look at it under the microscope. I think I have a video of this on my Instagram. And what you'll see when you look at your blood in real time is you'll see most of your red blood cells are stuck together and clumped up. Not clotted, but they're attracted to each other. Because when cells have the same charge, they repel. When they repel, it increases the amount of surface area that that cell has to contact the outside environment. So now it can exchange waste, it can eliminate waste, detoxify, repair, can regenerate. So imagine that you have bloodstream full of

• 56:36Gary Brecka?

  red blood cells, and they start to get opposite charges. So they attract. And when they attract, they touch, and everywhere that they touch, that cell loses surface area to exchange with the outside environment. When you touch the surface of the earth for a few minutes, you will repolarize those. Prick your finger, 10 minutes after you come inside, put it back on that same slide, look at your blood, it's gonna look like eggs slithering around in a bowl of oil. They will bump into each other, and they'll be sliding around, but they will not be clumped together and stuck.

• 57:07Steven Bartlett?

  So what's going on then? May I ask, what, coming through my feet? The charge coming through my feet?

• 57:11Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, so you're actually discharging into the earth. You know, you're exchanging ions. It's a low gauss current. So like a magnet, you're exchanging ions with the earth, and you're discharging, you're grounding.

• 57:22Steven Bartlett?

  What if I live on the ground floor, do I still have to go outside?

• 57:25Gary Brecka?

  Yes, you gotta touch bare dirt, soil, grass, sand.

• 57:29Steven Bartlett?

  Why can't I, if I live on the ground floor, why doesn't the floor in the lower floor of the house?

• 57:33Gary Brecka?

  Because that insulates you from the earth's magnetic field. There's usually steel, concrete, wood, there's other barriers, tile, asphalt. There are things that actually prevent you from actually contacting the surface of the earth. You know, there are grounding mattresses that you plug into the ground wire, and then that ground wire, if you look at how you know, grounding a circuit occurs, at some point is running directly into the ground. There will be a pole in the ground that is connected, usually by copper, to that wire and connected to your outlet to ground that outlet.

• 58:05Steven Bartlett?

  Can't I just get some kind of mat that has the same charge?

• 58:08Gary Brecka?

  Yes, you could get a PEMF mat. But again, you know, one of the things I get a lot of flack of is saying that you have to buy all this expensive equipment. So there's two ways to do it. You can buy a pulse electromagnetic field mat, PEMF mat. I have one. They cost about five grand. So if you've got five grand lying around, it's one of the best investments you can make. You put it in your bed, you go to sleep on it, you run a low gauss current at night, it will help get you into a deep sleep. You'll wake up alkaline every morning. It will push the electrosmog right out of your body, because PEMF gets rid of electrosmog, 5G Wi-Fi.

• 58:42Steven Bartlett?

  When you say you'll wake up alkaline every morning?

• 58:45Gary Brecka?

  So when you change the, so the pH of the blood is a pretty narrow range. It's about, it's about five tenths of a point, it's about half a point. And it's a complete fallacy that you can change the pH of the blood by drinking alkaline water. Alkaline water will not actually change the pH of your blood. If you want to change the pH of your blood, amongst other things, you apply a low gauss current. pH stands for potential hydrogen, it's a charge. And so by running a low gauss current through the body, or touching the surface of the earth, you actually can move the pH of the blood slightly.

• 59:17Steven Bartlett?

  And that does?

• 59:18Gary Brecka?

  An alkaline state is a disease-free state. The more acidic we get, the sicker we become. And so, um, and so if we want to move the pH of, of the blood slightly, if we want to wake up alkaline, if we want to run a low gauss current through our body, we can either touch the surface of the earth or we're by a PEMF mat.

• 59:36Steven Bartlett?

  So they've done tests where someone lays on a PEMF mat for a certain amount of time, they then do a blood test and they find that their blood is more alkaline.

• 59:43Gary Brecka?

  Yes, yes, and that, that separation of blood cells, you can see instantly on getting off of a PEMF mat. Again, I've got videos of me doing this to my production manager on, um, you know, in my house, breaking his finger, putting it on the, on a slide, putting on the, uh, the PEMF and actually looking at it afterwards. The second thing I would do is I would learn to do breath work. I use something called a HyperMax, which is based on, um, Dr. Van Arden and Dr. Otto Warburg's, um, Nobel Prize winning work. And that is the, it's called multi-step oxygen therapy, where you actually take an oxygen concentrator, you fill up a bag full of 900 liters of 95% O2, and you actually just breathe that 95% O2 for 10 to 12 minutes while you're active on a treadmill. But if you don't want

• 1:00:26Gary Brecka?

  to have an E-WAT, exercise with oxygen therapy machine, you can learn to do breath work, engage the auxiliary muscles of respiration, get oxygen down into the lobes of your lungs and out of the apex of your lungs. One of the, one of the articles that I quoted that turned out not to be a study, and I still can't find the reference for it, was that after age 35, 90% of people will never sprint again. And again, I haven't been able to find if that came from a clinical study or if it was in an article, but whether or not that's true, the vast majority of people stop engaging their auxiliary muscles of respiration, you know, really exercising our diaphragm, using the intercostal muscles

• 1:01:09Gary Brecka?

  between our ribs, pushing air down into lobes of our body. And as our posture collapses and our CO2 rises, you know, if you think about the expired air in your body, from the tip of your nose, the tip of your mouth, all the way down your esophagus, out your bronchioles, into the farthest reaches of your lungs, that's all expired air. Until you get the oxygen all the way down and out to the edges of the lung, you're not getting oxygen into the bloodstream. So as we age and our posture collapses, our respiratory rate gets more and more shallow, we're essentially hyperventilating carbon dioxide. Right, and which is accelerating aging. I mean, aging is, the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease. And so by just learning how to do breath work, so one, I would ground,

• 1:01:51Gary Brecka?

  two, I would, I would learn to do breath work. I do a Wim Hof style of breath work. I do three rounds of thirty breaths with an extended breath hold every single morning. It is the one thing that I never, ever, ever, ever miss.

• 1:02:05Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 1:02:06Gary Brecka?

  Ever. Because I make little promises to myself and I try to keep them. And I find that I lose confidence in myself when I consistently break really small promises to myself. And I think a lot of people do this. And our bodies crave consistency. And so

• 1:02:26Steven Bartlett?

  You lose confidence in yourself.

• 1:02:28Gary Brecka?

  You say, you know, I'm gonna go to bed at, you know, ten thirty tonight, and you go to bed at one AM, you know, and then you say, I'm gonna work out and first thing in the morning, and you actually don't work out. Or you get up in the morning, you say, I listened to that podcast, I'm gonna do what Gary said, I'm gonna ground and get some sunlight, and I'm gonna do some breath work. And then you actually don't do it. So the little internal promises that you make to yourself. And I feel like a lot of people break these little promises to themselves. They're not making them to their spouse, or to their kids, or to their partners, or, you know, they're not the big promises that everybody knows about. And I think it nibbles away at our self-confidence and our own ability to trust ourselves. And

• 1:03:08Gary Brecka?

  so I am a morning routine. I'm very consistent with it. But the one thing that is portable for me is the ability to get outside and ground and do breath work. And I never, ever, ever miss. I can't even tell you how many years I've gone without missing a single morning of breath work. The other thing that it does for me, because, you know, human beings crave consistency. So if within thirty minutes of waking every day, no matter what time zone you're in, you're doing three rounds of thirty breaths, your body begins to zero in on that, and it begins to understand that that's the morning. This is go time. And so simple to do. You know, when I'm here, I wake up, I might be at a different time, because I'm usually on the East Coast, so I wake up earlier here. But I go, I open the door, I go out

• 1:03:53Gary Brecka?

  on the balcony, I sit on the chair, it's nice and cool outside, I face the sun, and I do three rounds of thirty breaths. Every single day.

• 1:04:00Steven Bartlett?

  My partner brought me one of those big red light panels for Christmas, it was my Christmas present. And funnily enough, guess what my Christmas present to her was as well? Yeah.

• 1:04:12Gary Brecka?

  You get a bed or did you get the panels?

• 1:04:13Steven Bartlett?

  The panels.

• 1:04:14Gary Brecka?

  Would you get like Juve XO or what?

• 1:04:16Steven Bartlett?

  I have no idea.

• 1:04:17Gary Brecka?

  What'd you get? Okay.

• 1:04:18Steven Bartlett?

  I have no idea the brand, but she brought me one. It's like a small one. And then I was like, babe, open your present. And then I opened them. She opened hers and hers was like a big one. She's like literally half the size of me. So it's quite, so we swapped. But we now both use it. It's a bit of a routine in the morning. We wake up.

• 1:04:34Gary Brecka?

  Amazing.

• 1:04:34Steven Bartlett?

  We go and sit down by it and I'm not really sure what it's doing. I've just had a lot of positive things. I've done a little bit of my own research on it. And how to use it to make sure I'm not like killing myself somehow. But what is it doing and why should everyone consider getting one?

• 1:04:50Gary Brecka?

  So it's referred to in the literature. It's photobiomodulation. Photobiomodulation. So if you want to look up any of the clinical studies, put photobiomodulation and then put and dementia and Alzheimer's and skin and inflammation. And the studies will come up. But basically different nanometers of light have different effects in the body. And so they are well researched and publicized to reduce inflammation, increase microvascular circulation. So the smallest of the capillaries in our body are affected by light.

• 1:05:29Gary Brecka?

  They have a very specific effect in the mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell. So if you actually went through the wall of a cell and into the cytoplasm and found the mitochondria and you went into the mitochondria, you'd see that there's a motor in there that's spinning around. It's called the Krebs cycle. And this motor, when it spits out energy called ATP, you know, essentially it has two choices every time it makes a revolution, right? It can either create two units of energy or it creates 36 units of energy. It's either 16 times more efficient or 16 times less efficient. And what determines that is whether or not oxygen enters that cycle. So one of the things that red light does is it goes through the wall of the mitochondria

• 1:06:09Gary Brecka?

  and it kicks out a gas called mitochondrial nitric oxide and forces oxygen to dock. So when you get into a red light therapy bed or use red light therapy panels, one of the things that's happening is you're essentially forcing oxygen into the mitochondria. You're forcing the oxygen to use mitochondria and release a gas called mitochondrial nitric oxide. This is also measurable, by the way. You can get saliva nitric oxide strips, you can put it in your mouth. And before you got in a red light therapy bed, you could look at the saliva, the amount of nitric oxide in your saliva and you'd see it's like a pale kind of yellowish pink. Then you get in one of those red light therapy beds for 20 minutes and about 10 minutes after you get out, test it again, you'll see that your nitric oxide levels are through the roof. That's a positive sign that the mitochondria has thrown this gas out and brought oxygen

• 1:06:54Gary Brecka?

  in. And just imagine what happens in a cell when you give it 16 times the amount of energy. So imagine upstaging trillions of cells to allow them to eliminate waste, repair, detoxify, regenerate, just by using light. It also has a very positive effect on collagen, elastin, fibrin. It's known to improve angiogenesis, the new blood vessel formation. I was on the Joe Rogan's podcast a few months ago and he ended up buying one of these red light beds from me and we installed it in his house and he told me about four or five weeks ago that he's no longer wearing readers anymore. Like his eyesight has improved that much. And he said he's starting to really notice the changes in his skin.

• 1:07:39Gary Brecka?

  So photobiomodulation is very real and it absolutely works, but you know, without people having to think that they have to spend that kind of money on a red light therapy bed, you can also just expose your skin to sunlight, especially during first light, the first 45 minutes of the day, when there's no UVA, there's no UVB, there's high amounts of healthy blue light, you can still generate vitamin D3.

• 1:07:59Steven Bartlett?

  Let me just run that back so I'm clear. On the point about Rogan's eyesight, I did some, I was looking through some research about the impact of red light on eyesight and it said that it's good for eyesight.

• 1:08:10Gary Brecka?

  Incredibly good for eyesight.

• 1:08:13Steven Bartlett?

  Because I was wondering whether I should be looking at this thing while it's on.

• 1:08:15Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 1:08:16Steven Bartlett?

  And then I went online, Googled it, had a rummage around, and it said you can look at it, you can stare at it.

• 1:08:20Gary Brecka?

  You can.

• 1:08:21Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:22Gary Brecka?

  You can. Because remember, there's no UVA, there's no UVB. And some of the marginal information that comes out about red light being damaging to you, you have to remember that red light is a spectrum. Infrared, for example, is a spectrum. Most red light therapy beds run from 600 nanometers to about 1,000 nanometers wavelength of light. As you get above that, you're in the infrared spectrum, but you're going all the way to 1,100, maybe even above. So in other words, when you say infrared light, this is a non-visible spectrum of light. But there's a broad number of wavelengths, right? So an infrared red light bed will have infrared light, but it will be very low in the spectrum.

• 1:09:07Gary Brecka?

  So it doesn't create heat, doesn't excite a chromophore that creates vibration and makes you sweat. When you get in an infrared sauna, you're getting very high into those wavelengths. You're exciting a different chromophore in the body, in your water, to be specific, and it vibrates and creates heat, and you start to sweat. So you don't sweat in a red light therapy bed, even though it's infrared, low in the spectrum. But you do sweat in an infrared sauna, even though it's infrared light, it's high in the spectrum. So the infrared light and the red light that comes from red light beds and red light panels and face masks is incredibly beneficial for you. I mean, I would be scared to even tell you all the positive outcomes that we see in people that regularly use red light therapy.

• 1:09:51Gary Brecka?

  Because you can't really make medical claims around them, but I can tell you firsthand that we have seen just astounding things that people would probably consider miracles with red light therapy.

• 1:10:02Steven Bartlett?

  You mentioned the first 45 minutes of sunlight.

• 1:10:04Gary Brecka?

  Mm-hmm, first light.

• 1:10:05Steven Bartlett?

  Because I always try and figure out the sort of evolutionary backstory to red light and where it came from in nature and why it was good for us as humans and why we've lost it. Those are the three sort of questions.

• 1:10:17Gary Brecka?

  Well, we're really photovoltaic beings. I mean, we're very tied to the circadian cycle of the sun. I mean, light causes the body to behave in very special ways. I mean, you know, you've probably heard that getting first light can actually reset your circadian cycle and do more for you to sleep that night than probably just about any other sleep habit. So your sleep routine really starts with your morning routine. And it has an effect on cortisol receptors. It has effect on dopamine, I mean, on melatonin receptors. Remember, cortisol is a hormone that responds to light. Right? I mean, when our light, when our eyes are closed and light is passing through our eyelids, it has a tendency to raise our cortisol levels, which is why they tell you not to use blue light at night. Right? You're stimulating cortisol and you're stimulating a waking hormone when you're actually trying to go to sleep.

• 1:11:01Gary Brecka?

  So by getting first light, you're, you're, you're telling the body that it's, that it's morning. You know, you're, you're raising cortisol, you're down regulating your melatonin receptors, you're getting healthy blue light into your eyes, you're getting healthy light onto your skin, there's no UVA, there's no UVB, none of the damaging rays of, of the sun. And in 15 or 20 minutes, if, if you stack them all together, you can ground, do breathwork and get sunlight. I mean, just try it for seven days.

• 1:11:30Steven Bartlett?

  What if I have the red light at nighttime? Is that gonna drag my body into thinking it's the morning?

• 1:11:34Gary Brecka?

  No. The red light won't, won't do that. It's a completely different, it's not the, it's not the blue light spectrum that we're talking about.

• 1:11:40Steven Bartlett?

  So I can have red light any time of day?

• 1:11:42Gary Brecka?

  You can have red light any time. In fact, red light, I find it very relaxing. I sometimes will do my, um, my red light bed right before bed, sleep like a baby.

• 1:11:49Steven Bartlett?

  We've been doing that as well at home, so I was just checking.

• 1:11:52Gary Brecka?

  Awesome.

• 1:11:52Steven Bartlett?

  I did Google to, to see if it was something that would wake me up, but no, you're right, blue light is the thing that wakes us. Bit of a tangent, but I just saw you have a gulp of that water. What is in that water?

• 1:12:05Gary Brecka?

  Hydrogen water.

• 1:12:06Steven Bartlett?

  Why hydrogen water?

• 1:12:08Gary Brecka?

  This is a little hydrogen generator again. I don't know if you can still see that, but there's, um, what it's doing, there's a, there's a little.

• 1:12:15Steven Bartlett?

  Pick it up and you'll be able to see it in the camera?

• 1:12:17Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, a little electrolysis pump down there and it's, and it's basically adding hydrogen gas to the water. There's not much left in there, but if you, if you fill it with water, you can see that. I mean, it is fascinating. I am so convinced that hydrogen water is the best water that you can put in the human body and.

• 1:12:34Gary Brecka?

  There's a website called hydrogenstudies.com that has about 1,350 studies on the site. You can go to hydrogenstudies.com. When you get to that site, you can actually search by human clinical trials or animal clinical trials. So you could sort out and look at human clinical trials and look at all of the ways that hydrogen gas is used in therapeutic treatments, reducing inflammation, improving the absorption of supplements, improving athletic performance, delaying, addressing delayed onset muscle soreness, reducing neural inflammation. I mean, there are so many clinical trials proving the efficacy of hydrogen gas in the body. And people do hydrogen gas through a nasal cannulas, through ear cannulas, through

• 1:13:19Gary Brecka?

  eye cannulas. You can breathe hydrogen gas, but by drinking hydrogen water, you have a very positive effect on inflammation in the body.

• 1:13:26Steven Bartlett?

  When you pump the hydrogen into there, doesn't it just come out the top?

• 1:13:29Gary Brecka?

  No, it's sealed. So it's under pressure. So what it does is it forces the gas back into the liquid.

• 1:13:35Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:13:35Gary Brecka?

  And so the liquid actually gets, has a high part per million concentration of hydrogen gas. The colder the liquid, the more gas you can dissolve. So it takes about five hours for it to dissipate from that. Some people use hydrogen in H2 tablets. I just use this hydrogen bottle and I take it literally everywhere I go. I notice when I don't have it.

• 1:13:58Steven Bartlett?

  One of the subjects that's been really sort of pertinent in culture at the moment is this subject of Ozempic. You know, since we spoke, it's got even more popular and it's everywhere. I looked yesterday at the company that makes Ozempic, and I believe if my Apple stock app wasn't deceiving me, the company's worth trillions now.

• 1:14:16Gary Brecka?

  Oh, I'm sure. Yeah, Ozempic. And so Ozempic is a peptide called semaglutide, GLP-1 inhibitor. There's another one called tirzepatide, which actually did better in side-by-side clinical trials than semaglutide. And that's the wagovi version, or the monjaro version. Semaglutide, I think, is Ozempic and wagovi. But These are great for for people that have that are type 2 diabetics or that are morbidly obese and have issues with cravings and that have that have either diabetes or

• 1:14:55Gary Brecka?

  significant obesity. I think that they've become drugs for vanity. And what people are realizing now is all of the issues with gastric emptying, paralytic gut, the fact that when you start to

• 1:15:10Steven Bartlett?

  Paralytic gut.

• 1:15:11Gary Brecka?

  Paralytic gut, which is where you actually get paralysis in the gut. Because one of the things that they slow is gastric emptying. And so if you slow the rate of gastric emptying, very often contents can putrefy in the gut. And it's not that I'm totally against these peptides. If you use these peptides, you have to be in a weight training program. So you have to be doing resistance training, because a third of the weight that you lose, as much as half of the weight that you lose in some in some of the studies, is lean body mass. So if you're taking a semaglutide or trisepotide, you want to make sure that you're also on a, our clinical team would put you on a peptide,

• 1:15:52Gary Brecka?

  a growth hormone peptide like sermorlin, hypermorlin, to muscle protect, and then also make sure that you're on a good strength training regimen. Because just taking these, you don't get to spot remove fat. And so what happens is you start to aggressively mobilize and metabolize fat, very often from the cheeks and from the face. And people are getting semaglutide face, or rogovy face, they're saying now, where like their cheeks get really sunken in, their eyes, the fat pads beneath their eyes are metabolized, their eyes start to look like they're sunken in. So if you're morbidly obese, or have a significant amount of weight to lose, you struggle with cravings, you have, you're either severely prediabetic, or you're diabetic, I mean, they can be life changing. But for

• 1:16:37Gary Brecka?

  vanity purposes, I don't, I think there are a lot better peptides and a lot better ways to do it.

• 1:16:43Steven Bartlett?

  What's your life like these days?

• 1:16:44Gary Brecka?

  It's amazing. You know, I, I think I was telling you before I got on the show today, that I feel like I live somebody else's life. I really do. I I can't believe that I found something that I would like otherwise do for free and somehow monetized it. And you must feel the same way, you know, when you're, when you're doing a podcast and, you know, your, your message starts to resonate to caliber, caliber of people that it attracts. I mean, the rooms that you get to get in. And for me, I have an insatiable level of intellectual curiosity. Like, I'm super, super curious. And the fact that I get to sit down with people like yourself, but some of the greatest

• 1:17:27Gary Brecka?

  minds, um, you know, in, in the, in the world that are studying longevity, anti-aging, biohacking, um, cancer, mortality, um, sports performance, it's, it's just, I pinch myself. I really do.

• 1:17:44Steven Bartlett?

  With our privilege comes our pain.

• 1:17:46Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:47Steven Bartlett?

  What's the pain?

• 1:17:50Gary Brecka?

  Um.

• 1:17:50Steven Bartlett?

  You need to be honest with me here, because this is why we did start this podcast many years ago.

• 1:17:56Gary Brecka?

  You know, for me, um, the pain is, as I've, as I've become more popular, I guess, um, and as the message has resonated, I've become a little more distant from the, the folks that I initially sought to serve and support. I had a lot more individual reaction, I mean, uh, interaction in the beginning. And now I just simply can't interact with a number of people that would like me to, that actually do need me. And I've turned my attention to trying to train and support the training of as many

• 1:18:40Gary Brecka?

  qualified people as I can, so we can really touch the masses. And... I had no idea how much the message would resonate. And it resonated in a way that overpowered my company. And, you know, one of the worst things is kind of collapsing under the weight of your own success. And that didn't quite happen, but, you know, the, the message began to resonate and there were so many people coming to take our tests and seek our services that really, really needed us and I felt the burden of, of that need. We were for a period of time unable to respond. We were overwhelmed and that turned to vitriol in some cases.

• 1:19:24Gary Brecka?

  That's stabilized now, but, um, you know, it's kind of the, it's kind of be careful what you ask for because you might get it, but by the same token, I wouldn't, I wouldn't change a thing. I feel like the most blessed person in the world.

• 1:19:40Steven Bartlett?

  What about the family impact because you've got kids and, and all that?

• 1:19:44Gary Brecka?

  You know, that is the greatest blessing for me. My, my kids are landing at LAX and, and within a few hours, they're in the air right now. So I've got three children and the oldest two work for me full-time. And my daughter just graduated from nursing school. She's starting her PhD in nursing. My son's about 14 weeks behind her, so they're both going for their, their PhDs in nursing. So they'll both have their doctorate in nursing. And that is the greatest blessing in life is when you're, you see that your kids have a passion, because I feel like you can teach your kids anything, but you can't give them a passion.

• 1:20:25Gary Brecka?

  And, and the fact that they think enough about me and what I'm doing to want to follow in my footsteps is, that is beyond anything I can even put into words. Because I travel with my kids, I, I see clients with my, my, my kids and my wife is also in, in the business. And I think the pace of our life would be a lot more difficult if I didn't have my family around. I saw Dr. Peter Attia talking on a podcast once and he, I'm paraphrasing, so I don't know if I'm getting it right, but he said, you get 19 years with your kids. The first 18 is from when they're born to when they're 18 years old. And then they're gone.

• 1:21:09Gary Brecka?

  The last year is spread out over the entirety of the rest of their lifetime. And I thought, how sad. Because I spend more time with my kids now than I did almost since the day they were born. And they're just becoming these adults that really inspire me. And so I think that of all the blessings that God has given me, that's the biggest one.

• 1:21:34Steven Bartlett?

  There are a couple of other things that I was really curious about when I know I was going to speak to you today. One of them was kind of what we were talking about there with your family, which is just like the role of community, which we're clearly in a bit of a loneliness epidemic. And I-

• 1:21:50Gary Brecka?

  Well, you know, we knew in the, in the life expectancy space, and this is a material fact, that if you wanted to cut somebody's life expectancy in half at any age, put them in isolation. So if you put a human being in isolation, you will cut their life expectancy in half.

• 1:22:07Steven Bartlett?

  How could you see that in the data?

• 1:22:08Gary Brecka?

  Because you would, there, there was something we called a broken heart syndrome or caregiver syndrome. And it's, it's well documented in the elderly. You know, when you have a companion that you've been with for 40 or 50 or 60 years and that companion passes, very shortly thereafter, the second companion goes. And-

• 1:22:30Steven Bartlett?

  I always thought that was a myth, like a nice tale of heartbreak and love.

• 1:22:33Gary Brecka?

  Well, we call it the broken heart syndrome, was nothing to do with a broken heart. But I mean, the, the emotional state, I mean, the frequency in their body changes. And when this surrenders, this surrenders.

• 1:22:46Steven Bartlett?

  The mind and the body.

• 1:22:47Gary Brecka?

  When the mind surrenders, the body surrenders. There's a lot of emerging body of evidence to, that's actually putting some science behind the, the theory that emotions can make us sick. And, and I think everyone believes that and that, and that stress can actually lead to pathology and lead to disease. But, um, so you know that when we isolate human beings, it's hard to completely isolate them, but we know when we isolate human beings that, that it has dramatic effect on life expectancy, some of the worst- Science that we and research that we do is when we study components of the body or cells from the human body in isolation. You take a cell out and you put it in a Petri dish and you look how it behaves in vitro. And then you assume when you put that cell back into the body that it's going to behave that way.

• 1:23:32Gary Brecka?

  Because cells exist in communities too. They exchange with their outside environment, they eliminate waste, they repair, they detoxify. They're they're a very active community. And so, you know, the impact you have community has a meaning all the way down to a cellular level.

• 1:23:50Steven Bartlett?

  They do animal studies on this kind of thing, right?

• 1:23:52Gary Brecka?

  Oh, yeah, no question.

• 1:23:53Steven Bartlett?

  On loneliness and.

• 1:23:55Gary Brecka?

  On loneliness and isolation. And it has a dramatic effect on life expectancy. It's been a while since I've read an animal study, but we knew that isolation had a dramatic effect on mortality. So if when when a loved one got moved into an assisted care living facility, or we looked at the proximity of family members to a mother or a father that had just lost a grandmother or grandfather that had just lost one or the other spouse. And you knew that the family wasn't going to visit frequently. And then now that person was in isolation. And when I mean isolation, not completely isolated, but they were isolated from

• 1:24:38Gary Brecka?

  daily activity that had dramatic effect on life expectancy. It was it was a comorbidity factor that we used. And mainly the elderly, but it would happen in younger ages as well. So I I think that community is increasingly important for me. You know, I remember when I sold my company, my my partner Grant Cardone at the time told me, he said, your sphere is about to get a lot smaller. And I was like, that doesn't make sense. My sphere is about to get a lot larger. And it was true. What he said was very true. You know, my. I spend the majority of my time with my kids. They're working for me full time. We travel together. We see clients together. We're in the hunt together.

• 1:25:23Gary Brecka?

  They're big supporters of the business. They caught the bug there in school together. You know, my youngest still still lives with me. So my circle has gotten so much smaller, even though you see me out there with like Dana White and, you know, and celebrities and athletes and those are, those are the flashbulb moments. But in my day to day and week to week and month to month, I'm intensely surrounded by my family and a very small team that I have a high level of trust in, that is really helping me continue to be in service, you know, to, to the clients that I'm working with.

• 1:25:58Steven Bartlett?

  What about retirement then and purpose and the role that plays in our longevity?

• 1:26:02Gary Brecka?

  It's been a while since I, I used to have the VBT, the variable basic table memorized, but there is a probabilistic factor for retirement and communal interaction. And I forget exactly what that, the level of impact was, but we had, we had a probabilistic model where we would use this demographic data. But there is no question that mortality accelerates post-retirement. I don't know that I've delved enough into the science to really accurately comment on it, but it must have something to do with the loss of the sense of purpose. When you look at blue zones and, and centenarians, you know, one of the, one of the key themes, even beyond the diet, because, you know, the diets were very different.

• 1:26:46Gary Brecka?

  You know, Singapore has one of the longest life expectancies on earth. They eat the highest amount of meat. Sardinia has very long life expectancies. They eat, they eat high amounts of bread, pasta and flour. You know, the Mediterranean blue zones eat high amounts of oils, fish and fats. But what was a common theme between all of them was mobility into older ages and a sense of purpose. And there was no such thing as assisted care living facilities. Where you assisted care was when grandma and grandpa moved back in with their kids and live with the kids until the day that they died. And maybe her purpose was just to get vegetables that night for for dinner. And grandpa's purpose was maybe to continue to make belts for the a leather smith down the road, but they they had a sense of purpose.

• 1:27:31Steven Bartlett?

  When you think back to your your job in life insurance and the role that you had, is there any parts of it that you look back on now and you think about the industry that are unethical? Because you can't reach out because of law and privacy to these people, as you've said. That would be a violation of a variety of different sort of policies and stuff. But is there anything else within the the practice of it that you find unethical?

• 1:27:54Gary Brecka?

  Just the fact that, you know, I wasn't allowed to have any contact with the patient or the training physician. And I understand for good reason, because most of the people that are doing this work are not licensed to practice medicine. They don't want them jumping into the practice of medicine. But when you notice things that are obvious and then maybe you know that a doctor would have appreciated that phone call. Oh, my gosh, I didn't know that she was on that other script. Thank you for calling me. I mean, it wasn't to besmirch them or or take over their practice of medicine. But I really wish that the database would see the light of day. The databases that are used in predicting mortality, in my opinion, could change the face of humanity.

• 1:28:36Gary Brecka?

  I know why they won't, because it would upend modern medicine in a way, in my opinion, that would be catastrophic.

• 1:28:42Steven Bartlett?

  Destroy their business as well, wouldn't it? Because they need people to die, really. They do, because they don't want to be paying out.

• 1:28:50Gary Brecka?

  Well, you know, annuities need people to die. Life insurance wants people to to live a little bit longer.

• 1:28:57Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. Oh, yeah, because the longer they live, the more they pay.

• 1:29:00Gary Brecka?

  Longer they live, the more they pay.

• 1:29:01Steven Bartlett?

  But annuities want.

• 1:29:02Gary Brecka?

  But annuities.

• 1:29:03Steven Bartlett?

  You've put down a deposit, basically, so they want that deposit.

• 1:29:05Gary Brecka?

  Guarantee me an income stream for life.

• 1:29:07Steven Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 1:29:08Gary Brecka?

  So if you could kindly expire tomorrow, that would be good for me.

• 1:29:12Steven Bartlett?

  And the same companies do both.

• 1:29:13Gary Brecka?

  Same companies do both.

• 1:29:15Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:29:15Gary Brecka?

  There's something called a life insurance life annuity contract, a L I L A C, where you actually put an annuity in a life insurance policy on the same life, and you can't lose.

• 1:29:24Steven Bartlett?

  I did a genetic test with 10x.

• 1:29:27Gary Brecka?

  You did?

• 1:29:28Steven Bartlett?

  I did. And like you said, you're not able to give me the results of my test. But I wanted to invite in Dr. Carrie Sada, who's going to give me those results now. And she's going to explain a little bit to me about my results and also what the test is and what it means for me. So I'm very excited to see the results.

• 1:29:43Gary Brecka?

  I'm excited for you to see them.

• 1:29:44Steven Bartlett?

  Let's get her in. A couple of days ago, I had someone come to my studio and they did a swab inside of my mouth for something called the 10x genetic methylation test, I believe. What was that test and why did I do it?

• 1:29:58Gary Brecka?

  You did it to look at the five major genes of methylation. So remember that if we pulled your entire genetic code, we would get a lot of non-actionable information. I could see that you have dark olive skin, you have dark eyes, you have detached tear lobes. But there's nothing you can do with that genetic information. We want genetic information that's actionable. So while you can't go in and fix the gene, you can very often supplement for its function. And the genes of methylation are very special because they code for the process of converting one raw material into the usable form. So in other words, we take in folic acid or its derivatives, but we convert it into a usable form called methylfolate. And so this process is called methylation.

• 1:30:41Gary Brecka?

  It's the most important process that human beings go through. We do it 300 billion times a day. And when you have breaks in certain genes, this means that your body is not converting one raw material into the usable form. And this causes a deficiency. And very often, it's this deficiency that leads to some of the most common ailments that we suffer from.

• 1:31:04Steven Bartlett?

  Dr. Carrie Sada.

• 1:31:07Speaker 02

  Hello. Thanks for having me.

• 1:31:10Steven Bartlett?

  Could you give us a little bit of your bio and your background?

• 1:31:13Speaker 02

  Sure. My original training was surgical. It was obstetrical and gynecology. I just found that more chronic disease was happening and people weren't really getting better. And so my specialized training has been in functional medicine, kind of a more holistic approach. I have two master's degrees in this and met up with Mr. Brecka.

• 1:31:40Gary Brecka?

  Eight years ago now.

• 1:31:42Speaker 02

  Eight years ago.

• 1:31:43Gary Brecka?

  It's been a while.

• 1:31:44Speaker 02

  And in a small room and we started up looking at these genetic tests and reasons that people were not getting better.

• 1:31:52Steven Bartlett?

  So I've got my test results here, which, full disclosure, I'm yet to see. So Jack over here has put them on my iPad and told me that I can swipe up and look at them. So what am I looking at here and what does it tell me?

• 1:32:04Speaker 02

  Okay, so with your permission that we can share that, of course, because that's important.

• 1:32:08Steven Bartlett?

  Only if it's good.

• 1:32:09Speaker 02

  Well, I do want to tell you, your parents did you a solid.

• 1:32:14Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, they did. You won the genetic lottery.

• 1:32:16Speaker 02

  So remember that in genetics, I think people get confused. Genes are like blueprints. So your mother writes half of that blueprint and your father writes the other half. And you're born with that, you'll take that to your grave. So when you do have something that isn't quite exactly what you want it to be, variant is the term that we tend to use, when that does happen, we want to find out ways to work around that. How we color code this to make it understandable is if you have a kind of a normal copy and a normal copy from each parent, that's green. And if you have one copy from a parent that is normal, but one copy that is not, we're going to color that yellow. And you have one of

• 1:32:58Speaker 02

  those. And if you have both copies are not normal, that's red. And you don't have any of those, which is great. And the significance to that is the green genes will code 100%. You're good to go. Yellow genes. About 40%. Red genes, 10 or less. And kind of think of it like putting spokes in a wheel. It's just kind of clogging it up because these genes do follow a pathway. It's the methylation pathway. I like to think of methylation as activation. Like we talked about, taking something raw, bring it in and allowing your cells to convert it to what it can use. So if you have any glitches in the pathway, you're not going to be as efficient.

• 1:33:42Speaker 02

  So you would want to correct for your one variant gene there. So you come in nicely with that first gene. That's probably the most common one, and that's the real popular one. We kind of take it next level. We follow the pathway all the way up. And the reason why this even matters is because it affects everything on you. It affects how you sleep. It affects ultimately down the road at a deeper level, how you sleep, how your thyroid functions, how your gut functions, your moods, how you detox, especially heavy metals, how you detox. It affects your inflammation in your body, how well you can fight for your radicals. Those are all important things.

• 1:34:24Speaker 02

  And that's why this is more than just data. It's real data. So if you do not correct your one yellow, you're not going to be as good at doing all those things, detoxing, fighting inflammation, your gut movement, those kinds of things. And it's a pretty simple fix for you. If you don't activate or activate those nutrients, then let's give you activated nutrients. For example, you most likely have trouble activating B12. That's probably an issue that you are not as efficient at. Of course, you do it, but you're not as efficient at it because it wasn't green.

• 1:35:05Speaker 02

  So you would want to therefore take the activated B12 form, the methylated B12 form. So by doing that every day, I kind of liken it to the road is broken, but you've built a bridge over it. So that's how you can compensate for that gene variant or that gene break. We like to kind of lovingly call them.

• 1:35:28Steven Bartlett?

  On my results, it says one parent passed on a gene mutation. Which one was it?

• 1:35:34Speaker 02

  So that's

• 1:35:34Steven Bartlett?

  He wants to know who to blame.

• 1:35:36Speaker 02

  So that's the thing. Unless you tested your parents, you're not going to really know who gave you what.

• 1:35:42Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:35:42Speaker 02

  You do know that you had one that gave you a normal gene and one that gave you a variant, and that's why it's yellow.

• 1:35:49Steven Bartlett?

  What else does this mean for me on a practical level? Does this mean that I'm gonna like, you know, I want to know if there's any sort of health implications that I should be aware of?

• 1:35:57Speaker 02

  So anytime you have any kind of variant in your methylation, especially in the lower pathway, you have to understand that it is going to affect it all the way up. So when, so effects can be all the way from simple sleep issues to all the way to not being able to sleep at all, can be mood, gut issues.

• 1:36:19Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:36:19Gary Brecka?

  But you can take it out of the loop with the supplement?

• 1:36:23Steven Bartlett?

  Are you able to tell me about the worst sort of profile you've seen and the sort of real world consequences of that when all five markers of their?

• 1:36:31Gary Brecka?

  Are interrupted. Yeah, we've seen them where there's a heavy mix of red and green.

• 1:36:35Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:36:36Gary Brecka?

  And this is where you see significant personality alteration, significant, what we would refer to as mental illness, severe ADD, ADHD, OCD, manic depression, bipolar. You see very high propensities for addiction because of the depleted level of dopamine. You see significant sleep disorders, very severe gut issues, gas, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, irritability, cramping that don't seem to be fixable with conventional therapies or dietary changes. Those are amazing cases to watch the clinical team work with because by getting methylation

• 1:37:20Gary Brecka?

  right, I have seen those cases solved by our clinical team and, and, and many of those symptoms become fully remissive. And we get a lot of chances to make good people great, but when you can materially change somebody's life, my fixing those gene mutations.

• 1:37:40Gary Brecka?

  That's when you're really making an impact.

• 1:37:42Steven Bartlett?

  There's these five acronyms here. Comp, and then it says mind. A H C Y, then it says mind. M T R R, then it says upper gut. M T R, that says lower gut. That's the one that I have this yellow one on. And then there's the motherfucker one. I shouldn't say that. The M T H F R, which is mind and gut. These are the five sort of factors for methylation, which is really about how I process the ingredients I put in my body.

• 1:38:07Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 1:38:08Steven Bartlett?

  And I'm guessing that these are at different stages in my body. So the ones that say mind are in my head. The one that says upper gut is sort of higher up in my gut. The one that says lower up is in my lower gut. And then this M T H F R that says mind and gut.

• 1:38:21Gary Brecka?

  Yes. And the reason is that, remember, these are sequential. Okay. So I always use the analogy that think of it like a sandbag pass. Right? So you have a bunch of guys lined up. You have one guy that's taking the sandbags off the truck and passing it to the next guy. And he passes it to the next guy and so on. Well, if, if early in that chain, he was supposed to take 10 sandbags off the truck, but he dropped four. The best the rest of the line could do is six. So in other words, if an early gene like M T H F R, which is early in the methylation cycle, is impaired, it impairs the entire downstream. And if several gene snips later, you have another major gene snip, it will impair things further downstream.

• 1:39:05Gary Brecka?

  And so the reason why M T H F R is one of the worst to have, but the easiest to fix, is because it's the earliest in the methylation cycle.

• 1:39:12Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, it's first.

• 1:39:13Gary Brecka?

  Right? It's first. So if that's red, meaning both parents gave you that gene mutation, you could have consequences through the entire methylation cycle.

• 1:39:21Steven Bartlett?

  So is that what you tend to see if someone has the?

• 1:39:23Gary Brecka?

  Yes. This is why if you Google consequences of M T H F R or M T H F R and miscarriages, M T H F R and A D D, M T H F R and A D H D, M T H F R and anxiety, you're going to see hordes of articles and, and clinical studies linking that gene mutation to what seems like a vast myriad of consequences. Well, that vast myriad of consequences is actually related to the Gene SNPs that are further downstream, but they're affected because they're not getting the raw material they need to do their job. And in my opinion, it's one of the most overlooked things in all of modern medicine. As simple as this test is, and as easily and widely available as it is, I'm surprised that more frontline clinics do not do this because

• 1:40:07Gary Brecka?

  people do it once in their lifetime and they supplement for deficiency. And sometimes you see miraculous changes in their life.

• 1:40:18Steven Bartlett?

  Gary, thank you. I'm going to put this, these results, my results, in the description of this episode below, exactly as it is here in front of me, so everyone can see. And the details of how I got the test done, et cetera, will all be available there for you guys to, to check out. As you know, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. And the question that has been left for you is this one.

• 1:40:40Gary Brecka?

  I wish I knew who your last guest was.

• 1:40:44Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. So they said, they're quoting someone and it says, Gundalini said, be the change that you want to see in the world. What is the change you want to see?

• 1:41:03Gary Brecka?

  God, it looks like Gudelini.

• 1:41:06Steven Bartlett?

  Gudelini. You try to read this.

• 1:41:09Gary Brecka?

  Gandhi.

• 1:41:10Steven Bartlett?

  Gandhi said, be the change you want to see in the world. What is the change you want to see? And how will you be it?

• 1:41:20Gary Brecka?

  Well, well, I want to see people live healthier, happier, longer lives, more fulfilling lives. And I will be that by continuing to get the message out. And that's why I'm here. And that's what I wake up and do every day. And I can't hold a candle to Gandhi. But I will spend the balance of my adult lifetime continuing to get the message out.

• 1:41:45Steven Bartlett?

  Gary, thank you so much. Having, getting to know you on and off camera, you're such a genuine, true lovely human. Thank you. And your intent and your intentions are so clear to me and so pure. So, you know, I've had loads of people reach out to me since our last conversation and speak to the value that your advice has had on their lives. Oh, man. Thousands and thousands of people, I mean. Dude, that makes me. I mean, I looked at the last conversation, I looked at my emails around that time, I searched your name and when I say thousands, I mean thousands and thousands of people that are reporting to have better lives, happier lives because they listened to that conversation. That's so awesome. They probably won't be able to reach you, so on behalf of those people, I wanted to say thank you so much for doing what you do because it's very important. Oh, man. It's not always easy. Yeah. But, you know, it's an occupational hazard. Yeah, it is. Putting yourself out there in the world, as I would know. It is.

• 1:42:30Steven Bartlett?

  So, thank you so much, Gary, I appreciate your time. Super welcome.