150. Alex Tarnava: Unlocking Longevity with Hydrogen Water - Anti-Aging, Increased Energy & Reducing Inflammation

What if a single molecule could rewrite your health story, slashing inflammation, supercharging your energy, and maybe even adding years to your life? I just went deep into the science in this episode with Alex Tarnava, the genius behind H2Tab. We unpack how hydrogen water benefits your body in ways you never imagined. This isn’t just another biohacking fad—it’s a game-changer backed by cutting-edge research, and it’s so simple you’ll wonder why you haven’t tried it yet! What’s stopping you from unlocking your potential—could it be as simple as a glass of water? Join the Ultimate Human VIP community and gain exclusive access to Gary Brecka's proven wellness protocols today!: https://bit.ly/4ai0Xwg Connect with Alex Tarnava: Website: https://bit.ly/4bHBqxo Instagram: https://bit.ly/4iECIeN LinkedIn:https://bit.ly/4hiaLbL Thank you to our partners: H2TABS - USE CODE “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4hMNdgg BODYHEALTH - USE CODE “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: http://bit.ly/4e5IjsV BAJA GOLD - USE CODE "ULTIMATE10" FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/3WSBqUa EIGHT SLEEP - SAVE $350 ON THE POD 4 ULTRA WITH CODE “GARY”: https://bit.ly/3WkLd6E COLD LIFE - THE ULTIMATE HUMAN PLUNGE: https://bit.ly/4eULUKp WHOOP - GET 1 FREE MONTH WHEN YOU JOIN!: https://bit.ly/3VQ0nzW MASA CHIPS - GET 20% OFF YOUR FIRST ORDER: https://bit.ly/40LVY4y VANDY - USE CODE “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: https://bit.ly/49Qr7WE PARKER PASTURES - PREMIUM GRASS-FED MEATS: https://bit.ly/4hHcbhc AION - USE CODE “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4h6KHAD HAPBEE - FEEL BETTER & PERFORM AT YOUR BEST: https://bit.ly/4a6glfo CARAWAY - USE CODE “ULTIMATE” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/3Q1VmkC HEALF - GET 10% OFF YOUR ORDER: https://bit.ly/41HJg6S BIOPTIMIZERS - USE CODE “ULTIMATE” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4inFfd7 RHO NUTRITION - USE CODE “ULTIMATE15” FOR 15% OFF: https://bit.ly/44fFza0 Watch the “Ultimate Human Podcast” every Tuesday & Thursday at 9AM EST: YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RPQYX8 Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3RQftU0 Connect with Gary Brecka: Instagram: https://bit.ly/3RPpnFs TikTok: https://bit.ly/4coJ8fo X.com: https://bit.ly/3Opc8tf Facebook: https://bit.ly/464VA1H LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/4hH7Ri2 Website: https://bit.ly/4eLDbdU Merch: https://bit.ly/4aBpOM1 Newsletter: https://bit.ly/47ejrws Ask Gary: https://bit.ly/3PEAJuG Timestamps: 00:00 ​Intro of Show 00:03:00 - Alex’s Personal Journey Begins 00:06:05 - Inflammation Marker Explained 0:08:08 - Early Hydrogen Experiments 00:11:38 - Developing H2Tab 00:12:28 - Magnesium Bioavailability Bonus 00:14:16 - Partnering with Dr. Richard Holland 00:18:49 - Hydrogen vs. Caffeine Studies 00:19:56 - Anti-Aging Research (Journal of Experimental Gerontology) 00:25:33 - Mechanisms of Hydrogen in the Body 00:31:31 - Hydrogen for Sports Performance 00:34:42 - Anti-Inflammatory Mechanism 00:37:08 - Hydrogen Baths Anecdote 00:48:12 - Gut Health Benefits 0:50:56 - How to Use H2Tab 00:54:12 - Pre-Exercise Hydrogen “Bomb” 00:55:45 - Olympic Athlete Study 00:57:38 - Gender-Specific Benefits 00:59:50 ​“What does it mean to you to be an Ultimate Human?” Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not provide medical advice. It is not intended for diagnosing or treating any health condition. Always consult a licensed healthcare professional before making health or wellness decisions. Gary Brecka is the owner of Ultimate Human, LLC which operates The Ultimate Human podcast and promotes certain third-party products used by Gary Brecka in his personal health and wellness protocols and daily life and for which Ultimate Human LLC and / or Gary Brecka directly or indirectly holds an economic interest or receives compensation. Accordingly, statements made by Gary Brecka and others (including on The Ultimate Human podcast) may be considered promotional in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Our last universal common ancestor, the single cell organism that spawned all life on this planet, actually consumed hydrogen as its fuel source.

• 0:07Gary Brecka?

  When I talk about hydrogen in the water, their reaction is, well, doesn't the gas just flow to the top, go out into the atmosphere? How are you able to ingest the hydrogen gas and have it create its therapeutic effect in the body?

• 0:18Speaker 00

  Hydrogen water gets into the gut a lot better than inhalation. They elevate different tissues in different capacities. It's better for a lot of these metabolic conditions.

• 0:26Gary Brecka?

  There is a significant improvement in mental alertness. Almost replaced caffeine with hydrogen. I feel the difference. You don't feel stimulated, but you just feel more clean and clear in a way. There are a lot of people that poop the hydrogen tablets as a therapeutic measure for reducing inflammation.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  Hydrogen is in fact a weak antioxidant in vitro, and it's only driving towards homeostasis. And this is actually critically important because...

• 1:00Gary Brecka?

  Hey, guys. Welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecka, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And as most of you guys know, I am way down the rabbit hole and a big, big proponent of hydrogen gas, hydrogen water as a way to reduce inflammation, improve our circulation, as a way to actually just make this a part of our health and wellness journey. And I am so excited for today's guest because we are going to go deep down the rabbit hole of the science behind hydrogen gas and how this gas, this simple gas, can change the trajectory of your health journey. And I've been using hydrogen water for years now.

• 1:45Gary Brecka?

  I was a big proponent of using it for exercise, for improving performance. But now we have the scientifically validated research to really support some of the claims. And we probably have the world's most renowned expert on the podcast today. He developed and patented the first clinically valid hydrogen tablet, which I use every day, H2 Tabs. But I really want to... Go down the rabbit hole of the research into how can hydrogen gas be simply incorporated into your life and make a major improvement on your health journey. So, welcome to the podcast, Alex Tarnava. Tarnava. Tarnava. You know, there's a common theme and my viewers hear me talk about

• 2:27Gary Brecka?

  this all the time that runs through most of my podcasts. And that is that I feel like the people that are the most passionate, the most purpose driven, that are making the biggest change in the world are people that have solved a problem in their life. And you have a really interesting story about what led you to hyper-focus on hydrogen gas and elemental magnesium. I wonder if you might share that story and then let's get into the science.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. So, I'll be as brief as possible so you can focus on the good stuff. But as we were talking about earlier, I mean, up until this event in my life, I would research, learn about something for a few months and then get bored and move on. And so, I was kind of a generalist. I had an encyclopedia of knowledge on a million different things, but wasn't really close to an expert on anything.

• 3:15Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 3:15Speaker 00

  And fast forward to when I was 29, I was running a successful business in a completely different industry on an innovation I'd had there. But that business was giving me a lot of free time. I was on the road like a week out of the month. And when I was at home, I was working like an hour a day, two hours a day. So, I was basically training as if I was a professional athlete, even though I wasn't. I was training four to six hours a day, five days a week, six days a week, and having an active recovery day once or twice a week.

• 3:49Gary Brecka?

  And this was like Muay Thai, Jiu-Jitsu?

• 3:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, various martial arts, CrossFit. I did some CrossFit competitions at the time, too. And I was in, by far, the best shape of my life, right? And all of a sudden, I got really sick. And they never were able to figure out what happened, but it's most probable I had some sort of virus that caused an autoimmune reaction. So, basically overnight, I developed sudden onset narcolepsy. You know, if I'd sit down and wasn't engaged for a minute or two, I'd fall asleep.

• 4:24Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  I was sleeping like 16 hours a day. I had

• 4:29Gary Brecka?

  Crushing fatigue.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, crushing fatigue. I had also central nervous system fatigue. So basically, um, I went from being able to do like 20 bar muscle ups unbroken to I couldn't do a chest bar. Or a 54 inch plyometric box jump to I couldn't get airtime. I couldn't jump an inch off the ground with both feet.

• 4:48Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  And I couldn't sprint, do anything that was explosive and reactive. But my slower movements, like my deadlift, my squat, my bench press were completely unaffected. My strength was normal.

• 5:00Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  Right. Um, in addition, I, I had, uh, um, very high markers of inflammation. So my

• 5:08Gary Brecka?

  C reactive protein.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  My C reactive proteins were about a hundred and hundred times abnormal.

• 5:12Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  You know, uh, 34 milligrams a liter.

• 5:15Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  At its peak. So.

• 5:18Gary Brecka?

  By the way, C reactive protein should be less than three. It actually technically be less than one.

• 5:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:24Gary Brecka?

  If you're If you want to have a really low risk of cardiovascular

• 5:27Speaker 00

  I mean, usually you might spike to, yeah, one to three when you're sick, when you have a cold or the flu or something.

• 5:33Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  Most healthy people are below point five.

• 5:36Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Right. Like if you're metabolically healthy.

• 5:39Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 5:39Speaker 00

  You know, if you have chronic inflammation, you start trending up. But for a 29 year olds in the shape I was in, I should have been below point five, below point three.

• 5:47Gary Brecka?

  And for people that are not familiar with C reactive protein, it's a nonspecific marker of inflammation, doesn't tell you exactly what's causing it. But it tells you that something is going on in your body. The liver is reacting, creating this protein that is an indicator of, of inflammation. Could be in the brain, could be in the liver, the lungs, the pancreas, the kidneys and the blood. Could be coming from just about anywhere, but when it gets really, really high, like what you're explaining, this is cause for an investigation. So. So you have this elevated C reactive protein, you know, you're crushing fatigue, which is by the way, classic viral.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And my roommate got really sick at the time too, and it hit him different. He actually had to go to the hospital a couple of times, um, with pneumonia. Right. And this was a guy who was, you know, top threeing in triathlons and Spartan races. So again, he was a super fit, healthy 29 year old that

• 6:34Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 6:34Speaker 00

  Got taken out by, by whatever hit us.

• 6:36Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 6:36Speaker 00

  It just, he didn't get the auto immune response like I did.

• 6:39Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  But this lasted a couple of months and when the dust settled, I was left with polyarthritis. So I developed osteoarthritis in 11 joints. The worst of which is my left shoulder, which this is as high as it goes now. It's bone on bone, but also my hip was quite bad, my, my hands and, you know, basically anywhere I'd had an injury in sports throughout my long life of contact and combat sports.

• 7:03Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  I was told I had to quit working out, right? Period. You cannot exercise more. You can't lift weights, just walk, right? Maybe do like some swimming, just like with, you know, breast stroke or something that doesn't need the shoulder. And they put me on a thousand milligrams of naproxen a day.

• 7:23Gary Brecka?

  Oh, wow.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  Think like super leave, like a leave is naproxen, but you might get 200 milligrams. So I was on five times that dose and I was taking cortisone injections.

• 7:31Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  And I just knew that none of this was how I wanted the rest of my life to go. And it wasn't a long-term solution. It was going to lead to long-term side effects. So the time I'd spent exercising, I just dove into PubMed. And I just started reading any study I could find on regulating inflammatory response and any sort of therapeutic. Started a ton of different bio hacks from going to cryosanas and normal saunas and, you know.

• 8:03Gary Brecka?

  Trying to get this out of you, whatever it was.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  Get it. And at the time I found some research on hydrogen water. And this, the industry was very nascent at the time. There's only, you know, 40, 50 studies, but I found a couple of clinical trials. And I bought a machine for like $5,000, this.

• 8:21Gary Brecka?

  They made hydrogen gas?

• 8:23Speaker 00

  Purportedly.

• 8:25Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 8:26Speaker 00

  So I went on my merry way and didn't know if, what, if anything was working because I was still taking the naproxen and the cortisone injections and.

• 8:37Speaker 00

  Trying to get back into exercise and eight or nine months later, I fainted a few times in the gym. So I developed multiple ulcers from the naproxen and I had to abruptly stop, right? So basically, as I stopped the naproxen, I hadn't had a cortisone shot in a while, all my joints froze within a few days.

• 8:58Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 8:58Speaker 00

  So I realized that nothing I was doing was really helping, like going to the sauna and the cryo. It would help for a few hours or the rest of the day, but then I'd wake up.

• 9:08Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  Rough again and you just.

• 9:10Gary Brecka?

  Stiff as a board.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  Exactly, right? I couldn't put on socks without sitting down or lying down. I couldn't put on jackets and some shirts. Like it was rough and I went back to PubMed and I just started reading more and more. And in this nine month period, I found some new research on hydrogen water. And at first it pissed me off because I had this $5,000 paperweight that wasn't helping.

• 9:36Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  But then it just dawned on me, I took the salesman's word for it, that this made hydrogen water. How do I know there's hydrogen gas in here and what doses needed? So I started buying the full studies to read the material and methods. And I found that not a single one of them at the time were using a machine like what I'd bought. They were making the hydrogen water in labs in various ways, like bubbling gas or using magnesium under pressure. So then I found a reagent to test for hydrogen gas in water and I ordered it. And the first test, it detected no hydrogen. I had to over triple the input to reduce a single drop, putting it out.

• 10:17Gary Brecka?

  Is that the methylene blue test?

• 10:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Putting it at like 0.03 parts per million.

• 10:22Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 10:23Speaker 00

  Which is well below the lowest ever observed, you know.

• 10:28Gary Brecka?

  Any kind of therapeutic dose.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  Any type of physiological effect on the body, like.

• 10:31Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 10:32Speaker 00

  You know, one thirtieth of the lowest observed minimum threshold to do anything.

• 10:38Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  So that gave me a bit of hope and I went about trying to source magnesium, which was going to be the easiest way for me to do it. And first I sourced some rods and then I had some concerns that with magnesium rods, I don't know how much magnesium I'm getting and I didn't want to get hypermagnesia. And so then I was sort of thinking I need a powder so I can control the dose. Quickly realized it's very hard to get elemental magnesium powder. Like in the United States, it's controlled by the State Department and DOD. You have to go through background checks and everything. So I sourced some from Eastern Europe and some from China at first and they arrived saying like silver paint coloring.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  I'm like, okay, this is a little bit sketchy, but I tried anyways. I figured the powder floats, so I was able to make the hydrogen water and I'm going to need to compress this. So that's where the tablet idea came.

• 11:36Gary Brecka?

  You eventually ended up patenting this. Because, I mean, I take your tabs, your H2 tabs every day. I travel with them now. They're super easy to use. You know, I either use the hydrogen water bottle or I use these tablets. And interestingly, you know, a lot of my audience is like, listen, I don't have 250 bucks or 275 bucks for a hydrogen water bottle, but these tablets are inexpensive. But the elemental magnesium, is this what's effervescing into the hydrogen gas?

• 12:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, so basically the elemental magnesium and the organic acids we're using are reacting with the water and it's breaking that bond between the H2 and the oxygen, right? And that's what creates these small nano bubbles that you see in the water. So you can drink down the hydrogen water. Now, basically the magnesium in a couple of complex reactions, goes from the elemental magnesium to just free magnesium ions, Mg2+, which is exactly what our body needs. So it doubles as a highly bioavailable magnesium supplement.

• 12:35Gary Brecka?

  And so many of us are so deficient in this like essential, essential metal. We really are.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, we are like, I think 80 to 90% of the US population.

• 12:46Gary Brecka?

  Overnight by adding magnesium.

• 12:49Speaker 00

  And you likely know, there's big bioavailability concerns with a lot of the magnesium supplements on the market. Someone might go buy a magnesium oxide, that's on average four or five percent bioavailable.

• 13:00Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  So we're delivering it in the exact form your body needs. Your stomach doesn't have to liberate it off of another compound. It just freely goes into your system.

• 13:10Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  So it's completely bioavailable because of the way we're delivering it. But so, yeah, when I started developing these tablets, I quickly started feeling better.

• 13:22Gary Brecka?

  Now, were you drinking them? Were you bathing them?

• 13:24Speaker 00

  I was drinking, so I was drinking several liters a day. And I was getting at first to about three parts per million, sealing them under pressure. And my joints loosened, I felt better, I'm like, wow, there's something here. But then I had a bit of a sober second thought. I didn't want to win a Darwin Award.

• 13:42Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  You know, like.

• 13:43Gary Brecka?

  Blow yourself up.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  Blow myself up in my kitchen with hydrogen gas.

• 13:47Gary Brecka?

  By the way, elemental magnesium is flammable and it burns at a very high temperature.

• 13:51Speaker 00

  5800 degrees Fahrenheit, right? It's the whiten fireworks, right? Which is why it's so tightly controlled and I had to go through background checks and everything like that.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  But also too, like I wanted to test for heavy metals and the contaminants. And is there any dangerous side reaction that's happening? Like, I understood enough about the basic chemistry, but I'm not a chemist, right?

• 14:11Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 14:11Speaker 00

  So I found my founding partner, you know, Dr. Richard Holland. He's a PhD in organic chemistry, he works in the pharmaceutical industry. So he designed small molecules for different therapeutic targets. And I found him, he was doing consulting work, offering it. And I told him about my project and he said, this is the worst pseudoscience I've ever heard in my life.

• 14:37Gary Brecka?

  Not what you wanted to hear.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, he gave me a list of reasons why it wouldn't work, why you like hydrogen has no role in the body. And even if it did, you should inhale it and not drink it because of the low saturation point. And if you'd like, we can get into that later. The pharmacokinetics of inhalation and water are actually completely different. So they hit different organs in different ways. But because I'd read every study to date on hydrogen as a therapeutic like at that time, I was able to rebut all of his responses with peer reviewed evidence. And he came back to me and said, like, I'm actually in shock, right? I still don't really believe it, but there's enough that I can help you out. Sure. Right? So he starts tweaking

• 15:22Speaker 00

  my formula. I'm sending him a new publication every day just to pique his interest because I'm really excited about the project. And he calls me for lunch. And serendipitously, I sent him this clinical trial on a certain disease state. And it was a decent size. And it was using a high concentration at the time, about five parts per million over a liter a day. And it found pretty good results in this group, in this population.

• 15:50Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  And I was not aware, but his current job was developing small molecules for this exact disease.

• 15:58Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  And he said, you know, with the other studies you've sent, I'm not a subject matter expert, right? So I just have to trust the findings, look at the, you know, methodology and trust the researchers. But with this, I am. And unless this is fraud, this works. And it works better than the molecules I'm developing. Right? Are you interested in commercializing this? Right? So I thought long and hard about it. I had no expertise in this area. And I was just doing this as a do it yourself project for my own health. But I figured, why not? What do I have to lose? I can learn as I go. Let's do this. Right? So I proceeded forward and it only took a few weeks to refine.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  There wasn't much changes to my formulation to get it to work in a mortar and pestle. But then the hard work started. We quickly realized that doing this en masse, making millions of tablets at high speed is dramatically different for safety, for getting the reaction right, everything, than making 20 in a mortar and pestle, mixing by hand and then hand pressing. It took us a year, over 2,000 iterative adjustments and 15 failed scale up attempts at manufacturing to get our first production ready tablet.

• 17:13Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  Since then, we've stopped counting at version 5,000. But we're probably at 10,000 iterative adjustments in the R and D process to get to where we are.

• 17:23Gary Brecka?

  To where you can take elemental magnesium, compress it, have it sink to the bottom of a glass and ever vest it into the water.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  And get in this open cup and get these small nano bubbles in the 10 to 30 nanometer in range, which is critically important so that in, say, half a liter of water or 16.8 ounces, we're getting over 12 parts per million.

• 17:41Gary Brecka?

  That's incredible. I mean, that's really incredible. And I think a lot of people, you know, when I talk about hydrogen gas in the water, their first reaction is, well, doesn't the gas just float to the top and then, you know, go out into the atmosphere? You know, how are you able to ingest the hydrogen gas and have it, you know, create its therapeutic effect in the body? I can tell you that I feel the difference. I've almost replaced caffeine with hydrogen.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  And I know I told you, we have a couple of clinical trials head to head against caffeine after acute sleep deprivation. So in the first study, we showed equivalent improvement in the attention network test to caffeine, but they affected different domains of attention, right? Caffeine affects alerting and the hydrogen affected orienting. So we did a bigger, better controlled study with four groups and it was a, you know, crossover design also. So everyone did all therapies. So it was a it was a quadruple crossover.

• 18:41Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  Design. So there was placebo placebo, hydrogen placebo, caffeine placebo and caffeine plus hydrogen. And it found that the hydrogen groups with or without caffeine had a substantially more robust improvement in brain metabolism. So choline to creatine ratios in the brain than the caffeine alone. So hydrogen was basically it's as your brain metabolism slows due to the acute stress of sleep deprivation. Hydrogen is temporarily restoring it back to proper function.

• 19:13Gary Brecka?

  I've noticed that truly when I travel and sometimes I do my best to schedule meetings and travel around sleep and exercise. But sometimes flights happen when flights happen, meetings happen when they happen. Or you're just in a different time zone and there is a significant improvement. I notice in mental alertness and just my general sense of, I would say cognitive energy.

• 19:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:38Gary Brecka?

  Right. You don't feel stimulated, but you just feel more clean and clear and awake and focused. Interestingly, I read a study, I think it was actually with your tablets. And I'll put the links in the in the study notes below. It was in the Journal of Experimental Gerontology. And it was in November of 2021.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 19:57Gary Brecka?

  And what I found really fascinating, because I've been not down the road of developing hydrogen tablets or hydrogen water bottles, but of researching the hydrogen gas. Because I think it's one of those things that in my opinion will be as common as a multivitamin in 10 years because the evidence is so strong.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  I think so, yeah.

• 20:14Gary Brecka?

  But what I read in this Journal of Experimental Gerontology was that they were 70 year olds and older.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  Seventy and up.

• 20:22Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  I think 77 or 78 was the average age.

• 20:25Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. Okay, so then you're obviously very familiar with it. And I might paraphrase it wrong, but. They, this was a six month study and it was, it was double blind, it was placebo controlled. And so one group was drinking hydrogen water. I forget what the parts per million were, the other group was not. But they measured telomere lengths, which improved. They measured.

• 20:47Speaker 00

  De-amylophylation, yeah.

• 20:48Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, they got measured cognitive scoring, which improved. They measured sleep. So they actually were looking at stages of sleep, deep and REM sleep. They measured their sit-stand ratio, which I thought was really interesting. I mean, that there might be some effect on sarcopenia, like age, age-related muscle wasting. They measured different factors in the frontal lobe of the brain. Their reaction times and across the board. And all of these metrics improved. And they even used a marker, TET2, I think.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  TET2.

• 21:23Gary Brecka?

  To measure the methylation.

• 21:24Speaker 00

  Well, that's linked to young blood. So anyone who's seen the research where they take an aged mouse and they take the blood of a young mouse and, you know, swap it out like an oil change and it revitalizes.

• 21:38Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  The old mouse. Their skeletal tissue anyways. That's linked to TET2, so we doubled that in the blood.

• 21:43Gary Brecka?

  I saw that.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  Which.

• 21:44Gary Brecka?

  It's also a marker of methylation, which I'm very interested in because I think that when the body's able to take compounds and convert them into the usable form.

• 21:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:52Gary Brecka?

  You know, you're improving the cellular metabolism and you're making that cell less susceptible to all forms of disease and, and, and sickness. Because it can eliminate waste and it can repair, it can detoxify, it can regenerate. But I thought it was fascinating that they actually were measuring markers of methylation in 70-plus year olds.

• 22:11Speaker 00

  So TET2 was my idea.

• 22:13Gary Brecka?

  Was it?

• 22:13Speaker 00

  Actually in that study. So. That's, I can bring it in, like, research is, is very important to me. When I decided to go down this road. As we all know, there's so many snake oil salesmen in the health industry and supplements. And I wanted to do something that I could look at myself in the mirror and go to bed happy. Feel like I'm having a purpose in life and I'm doing something good, not just out there to make money.

• 22:38Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 22:39Speaker 00

  Right? So as we were getting ready to launch, I did a bunch of research on what the regulatory requirements are. So we have GRAS status and new dietary ingredient status with the FDA. Actually, now we have 21 validated structure function claims to FTC standards through, through an expert panel that reviewed all our research. But I wanted to make sure that my hunch that the higher concentration and dose we're delivering was actually gonna have an effect and wasn't gonna have a harm. Because that's very important with any molecule. Every molecule works on a dose-dependent and sometimes concentration-dependent response. And increasing the dose can increase efficacy, but there could be side effects.

• 23:22Speaker 00

  And I really wanted to explore this to make sure I was delivering something that was safe and effective for people. So before we launched, as we were doing our first production run, I emailed every single first and corresponding author on every single clinical trial in hydrogen and preclinical in mice. And I offered free product, free placebo, and to donate funds, no questions asked. So I don't believe in silencing science.

• 23:53Gary Brecka?

  If the research came out not in favor of what you were doing, you still wanted to publish it.

• 23:59Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 23:59Gary Brecka?

  Love that.

• 24:00Speaker 00

  We cannot understand this world better if we're not publishing negative data. Wow. As we've talked about before, the big problem there is a law passed in the 1920s called shareholder supremacy. So corporations have to do what's best for their shareholders. And if they don't, their breaking the law can be sued, right? So that's why I've kept my company private so that I can make my own decisions. And be like, this is what is true and ethical and moral. This is how I'm gonna do it. And that's why I've resisted all venture capitalists who have tried to invest in my companies. So I got some bites. And that's why now, just in the last six, seven years since we've been doing research,

• 24:44Speaker 00

  we actually have more clinical and preclinical research than all other commercial hydrogen water products combined.

• 24:50Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 24:53Gary Brecka?

  And we have way more that that's, you know, we have like over 20 human studies now. We have.

• 24:59Speaker 00

  I've read a lot of them.

• 25:00Gary Brecka?

  We have ankle injuries, CTEs, traumatic brain injuries, inflammatory compounds. And I actually want to do that. I want to go down sort of the road of hydrogen gas and its implication in a bunch of different categories.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  And we can, we can actually even talk about it from the very beginning, why it's important from evolution and why we're not getting it. So what we're realizing is first, we realize that hydrogen is having this impact on the body. Right? Then the question is, what's the mechanism? How is it having this impact? And we've now been able to identify there, there's a few different mechanisms it's working. So throughout the whole body, it's acting as something called a mitohormetic effector. So that's hormesis of the mitochondria. So hormesis is anything like a stress that's mild enough that we get stronger from and adapt.

• 25:54Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 25:55Speaker 00

  So exercise, cold exposure, sauna.

• 25:58Gary Brecka?

  Sunlight.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  Even, yeah, radiation in certain amounts like sunlight, even ethanol at the right dose. Right? And timing, it's just with hormetic agents, they all operate on like a reverse U or a reverse J. When you don't get it at all, you start here. If you get the right dose and timing, you improve your health. And then if you go too high, it goes either back to baseline or a lot worse. Like with alcohol, it's a very tight reverse J. Which is why we can't really recommend alcohol for anyone at any dose because every person would find a benefit at a different dose. And every day, so we just don't have the science there to make advice.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  But so we're, we're acting kind of like exercise for the mitochondria, which is improving the health and the number of the mitochondria. In addition, hydrogen is interacting with our microbiome. It's improving gut health. And in a yet to be fully understood mechanism, we know we're partially metabolizing it in the liver and it's driving liver homeostasis. So there's a few. Ways that hydrogen's helping. And now, why is hydrogen doing this in our body? What role did it have? We actually have to go back to the very beginning of evolution. So, our last universal common ancestor, the single-cell organism that spawned all life on this planet, actually consumed hydrogen as its fuel source. Right?

• 27:22Speaker 00

  And then, our first mitochondria came from eukaryotes. And those eukaryotes, was a symbiotic relationship between organelle, one of which expelled hydrogen as a waste product.

• 27:34Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  And now, we've actually carried that throughout all of evolution. And there's other factors too. At times in evolution, a couple billion years ago, there was a lot more hydrogen in the air and water.

• 27:43Gary Brecka?

  Exposure to hydrogen gas. And obviously, it's a necessary element. But I mean, you know, I would say that, what are we, 60 or 67% water by weight?

• 27:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:53Gary Brecka?

  So, obviously, we have a lot of hydrogen.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  Molecular hydrogen is the first molecule in the universe too. Right? So, it seems obvious in retrospect that it has a role in our life and our body. And we actually, we evolved to produce a tremendous amount of hydrogen gas internally, endogenously. We do this by fermenting fiber. Now, the big problem here is, throughout the majority of human evolution, we were consuming 100 to 150 grams of dietary fiber a day. Now, the average person in the Western world consumes 10 to 15 grams of dietary fiber a day. But the average person on a standard American diet is only consuming 1 to 3 grams of fiber a day.

• 28:32Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  So, we're not getting the fuel to produce hydrogen. And the bacteria that are breaking down fiber in this process and releasing H2 gas, they're like any living thing. If you stop feeding them, they die. And that is one of the reasons we're getting this dysbiosis of the microbiome. You know, these hydrogen-producing bacteria are dying out. They're being replaced by methane-producing bacteria.

• 28:57Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  So, actually, when we do studies, we can look at a high percentage of middle-aged and older metabolic impaired people. We give them a hydrogen breath test after lactose, and they produce more methane than hydrogen, or no hydrogen at all.

• 29:12Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 29:13Speaker 00

  And this is critically important because we know that methane is strongly correlated with basically every disease outcome. It's correlated with mortality. And we also know that hydrogen is correlated with longevity. So a study in centenarians, so people over 100 in Okinawa, found that these centenarians had higher breath hydrogen than the average young person.

• 29:38Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  So their lifestyle had carried.

• 29:39Gary Brecka?

  Which meant they had the healthy microbiome.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:41Gary Brecka?

  To produce the hydrogen gas.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. And as we know with a lot of the gut dysbiosis, some of the bacteria doesn't come back.

• 29:49Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  Right? So for a lot of people that have not lived a perfect lifestyle, which who has, you can maybe only get your hydrogen at the right dose exogenously.

• 30:02Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  Through hydrogen water or hydrogen inhalation or.

• 30:05Gary Brecka?

  Hydrogen gas. Yeah. Hi guys, Gary here. I want to take a few minutes of your time to invite you to my ultimate human VIP community. This is a private community with front row seats to my most advanced health protocols, exclusive monthly Q and A calls, a private podcast where you can ask my guests and me your most pressing questions and my own personal wellness blueprints and everything you need to optimize your health. You'll connect with like-minded folks in this community. You'll get firsthand access to cutting edge insights and enjoy special discounts on products that I trust the most. And here's the best part. Membership is just 97 bucks a month, a fraction of the cost my private clients pay for the same deep dive guidance. If you're ready to supercharge your wellness and skip the guesswork, I'd love for you to

• 30:50Gary Brecka?

  join us. Head to theultimatehuman.com/vip. That's theultimatehuman.com/vip right now to become one of my ultimate human VIPs. This is your fast pass to better health. So don't miss it. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. It's fascinating to me because I think it has so many implications. You know, it's a part of my daily life. But there are a lot of people that poo-poo the hydrogen water bottles, or poo-poo hydrogen tablets, or just hydrogen gas as a therapeutic measure for reducing inflammation, for improving circulation. We now have clinical evidence to support that. But I want to kind of break down the different categories, because there's several areas

• 31:33Gary Brecka?

  where I'm hyper-interested in what hydrogen gas can do for sports performance, what it can do for cognitive function. Both my parents drinking hydrogen gas water, you know, every day. I can tell you, I have emphatically noticed the difference in their acuteness and their memory, their recall. My father says it about my mother all the time. So, let's just break down, once we get this hydrogen gas into the body. First of all, how is it getting through the stomach? Once it gets through the stomach and enters the small intestine, or perfuses through the blood-brain barrier, what is it doing? How is it, how is hydrogen gas an anti-inflammatory?

• 32:16Gary Brecka?

  You know, we can measure its ORP, I've got an ORP meter right here. We can measure its oxidative reduction potential, it's highly negative, which is great. But explain that mechanism a little bit.

• 32:25Speaker 00

  This is actually where it gets kind of interesting, and makes hydrogen a lot more profound than just a standard anti-inflammatory or an antioxidant. So, hydrogen is in fact a weak antioxidant in vitro, right? So, outside of a living body, in a test tube or a cell culture, which is why we can get a negative ORP from it. But how it's actually working as an antioxidant in vivo is similar to how exercise works. It's actually acutely an oxidative stress in the mitochondria. That's what's actually triggering Nrf2 reaction, you know, activation.

• 33:02Gary Brecka?

  Nrf2.

• 33:03Speaker 00

  Which, exactly, which we produce more glutathione, catalase, superoxide dismutase. So, we're producing more of our endogenous antioxidants, and it's only driving towards homeostasis. And this is actually critically important, because there are a lot of deleterious effects. From taking too high of antioxidants.

• 33:21Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 33:21Speaker 00

  Right? You can go into reductive stress, which is as harmful as being.

• 33:28Gary Brecka?

  Oxidatively stressed, yeah.

• 33:30Speaker 00

  So hydrogen just drives towards redox homeostasis. It's getting this harmony back between the yang and yang of our reductive molecules and.

• 33:40Gary Brecka?

  Cause you're behind the body's physiological process to create homeostasis rather than imposing it upon.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  Exactly. And it's doing the same thing with inflammation. So it can actually acutely spike inflammation, just like exercising. Exercise will release interleukin six, which is one of the nastiest pro-inflammatory cytokines. But it's such a low amount from skeletal tissue that it's a myokine role. And hydrogen does the same thing, which drives this harmonious inflammatory response. And a lot of people just think of inflammation as a bad word.

• 34:13Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  It's only bad when it's not behaving how it's supposed to. Inflammation is critically important to our physiology. It's part of our. Exactly.

• 34:24Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 34:24Speaker 00

  And.

• 34:25Gary Brecka?

  Nothing in the body would heal without the inflammatory response.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  Right? It's part of our immune system to fight off viruses. Actually, that was one of the big issues with COVID-19 is a lot of people's bodies weren't recognizing it was a threat. So they didn't have sufficient inflammatory response at the beginning. And then, once the virus started taking over, their body would panic and they go into cytokine storm.

• 34:46Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  Having this healthy, harmonious inflammatory response is incredibly important and hydrogen drives that. And it does that for a lot of other processes too, like autophagy. You know, it's all the rage and anti-aging with autophagy.

• 34:59Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  And a lot of people think, oh, I want to always be activating autophagy, but no, you want to intermittently activate autophagy. And in a lot of research, hydrogen has shown to actually activate autophagy, but in some important studies, it's shown to inhibit autophagy, like after heart failure and drowning resuscitation, when you absolutely don't want that to happen.

• 35:19Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 35:19Speaker 00

  So in a way, it can, it's kind of, we'll explain hydrogen, kind of like a supervisor.

• 35:25Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 35:26Speaker 00

  In our cell.

• 35:26Gary Brecka?

  It's sort of a selective. Antioxidant, if you will, meaning that, you know, it's if we can get behind our own cellular physiology, our own cellular biology to create homeostasis, reduce the inflammatory response when it's not needed, and not inhibit the inflammatory response where it is. Like, I've started taking it before hyperbaric sessions, because I know that, you know, these oxidative species, you know, high amounts of oxygen under pressure can actually have negative effects, like you can positive effects. And I can mitigate some of those by taking the hydrogen.

• 35:58Speaker 00

  But actually potentiate the stress acutely. And we've talked about this before. So there's really cool research on hydrogen with other hormetic stresses, you know, whether it be heat exposure, cold exposure, or exercise, that acutely hydrogen is actually increasing the stress response. But then, after the stress finishes, it's driving back to homeostasis faster. So like with exercise, that's as if you worked out harder and recovered quicker. Because it's spiking the inflammation and oxidative stress higher, and then dropping back down to homeostasis faster.

• 36:30Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, and you know, I noticed in athletes, I've introduced several very dominant athletes, like Michael Chandler, or John Jones, other athletes that I can't name because they're publicly, public about their work with me. When I introduce hydrogen water, it seems to close that last five yards for them. It reduces the amount of pain that they wake up in in the morning, like knees, hips, shoulders, rotator cuff. I've seen firsthand what happens to people when I put them in a hydrogen bath. You know, I was getting ready to invest almost $100,000 in this electrolysis unit that made oxygen water.

• 37:09Gary Brecka?

  And I got this hydrogen generating machine and started to use it in my bathtub. And what I've seen get in and out of that bathtub is nothing short of miraculous. I don't even talk about it online because so many people would say you're a charlatan because you can't put somebody in a hydrogen bath that has crippled with arthritis, and then they just walk out of your unit like they won the lottery, but I've seen it.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  We have a couple clinical trials using, you know.

• 37:34Gary Brecka?

  Well, I can't wait for those to devaluate it.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, these H2 tabs, you know, in bathing.

• 37:40Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  And anecdotally, like, as we talked about, I love martial arts. I'm a lifetime martial artist. A buddy of mine is a former UFC fighter. And during one of his camps, he cracked his rib, right? Like, and he was a, I gave him a ton of H2 tabs, right? And he was taking daily baths. And he was able to continue training every day and make his fight.

• 38:06Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 38:06Speaker 00

  Six weeks later when he cracked his rib.

• 38:08Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 38:08Speaker 00

  So really cool anecdotes like that.

• 38:11Gary Brecka?

  Well, I read the study that you published on, it was a lateral ankle injury. And it was recovery after, you know, acute injury. And what I thought was fascinating was it reduced the inflammatory process, but didn't reduce the inflammation. And I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but, you know, ICE creates this vasoconstriction. And what you were doing was comparing the RICE method, you know, rest, rest ice compress, elevate, to the use of hydrogen. And hydrogen wasn't creating this constrictive effect, which was reducing the presence of inflammation. It was actually reducing the inflammatory response, but improving the circulation.

• 38:51Speaker 00

  So there's cool research on that, that, you know, cold exposure reduces blood plasma flow.

• 38:57Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 38:57Speaker 00

  So you're not getting healing to where you've injured.

• 39:00Gary Brecka?

  Right, because the plasma has the platelets and the platelets carry the growth factors, which causes the healing.

• 39:04Speaker 00

  Hydrogen is regulating the inflammatory response, but it's actually increasing blood plasma flow. So this was an acute study and I wish we'd recruited more people. I think it was only like 12 participants.

• 39:15Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 39:16Speaker 00

  And we were equivalent to RICE protocol. But in four very important markers, we were, had strong trends to be better after this single session than RICE protocol.

• 39:27Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  I think the professor told me if we'd recruited like three more people, it would have been significantly better than RICE protocol.

• 39:36Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  In lowering inflammation and improving.

• 39:41Speaker 00

  range of motion and decreasing the visual analog score for pain. And there was another, I can't, oh circumference.

• 39:50Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, the, the, I read another one of your studies. I've read a lot of your studies, by the way. You know, that was looking at CTE and traumatic brain injury and immediately post concussion using H2 tabs in the buccal fold. Just putting it there and letting high amounts of hydrogen gas get into the body. So that you could reduce the inflammatory response post concussion. I don't want to misquote it because it was your study, but I want to say that, you know, there, the way that concussions are evaluated. You use the standard concussion evaluation protocol. And there are a number of categories that qualify you for having a discussion, having a concussion. And he had, I want to say 13 of 24.

• 40:35Gary Brecka?

  They, next day that was cut in half. And then the severity score, how they, they rate the severity of these different. Measurements was also cut in half. In fact, it was cut by more than 70%. And I remember reading this, I was so blown away that I was like, why not immediately after concussion? Are we not just giving hydrogen gas?

• 40:55Speaker 00

  I think in the future we might and, you know, we have a rat study that came out of Stony Brook in New York. For a post-stroke recovery that found some synergy between hydrogen and minocycline. Right to improve the post-stroke recovery. And Stony Brook actually has a clinical trial underway on post-stroke recovery.

• 41:18Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 41:18Speaker 00

  So there's a lot of cool research that's coming down the pipe here. As I mentioned, we've got over 20 human studies. I think we have five more that are. Either finishing up peer review or in press that about to publish. And 15, 20 more that are in the planning stages underway. So the research isn't stopping. And actually because of my devotion to.

• 41:42Speaker 00

  Advancing the research on hydrogen therapy. The Dr. Laberan from the Molecular Hydrogen Institute just invited me and I accepted to be-

• 41:52Gary Brecka?

  Smartest guy I've ever spoken to about hydrogen. That guy will spin your beanie.

• 41:56Speaker 00

  If we're gonna go into, say, the biochemistry of hydrogen, he is the top in the world. He understands, you know, the biochemistry of what hydrogen does in the body better than anyone. Where the only thing I'd say that I have an advantage of him on is I have a better memory and I've read more papers than him, so-

• 42:17Gary Brecka?

  It's not a contest, sorry Tyler.

• 42:18Speaker 00

  No, no, no, but I mean, he's exponentially more knowledgeable than me in the biochemistry, like exponentially, right? So I'm taking a sliver here, but he's invited me to be the first chairman of the hydrogen research committee under the MHI. So it's a volunteer position. And basically what I'll be doing is I'll be working with the MHI and working with the public in industry. So Dr. Laberan has hired another PhD, Dr. Grace Russell from the UK, who's published a lot of research on hydrogen and I know her personally. She's gonna be helping research teams fill in NIH grants, right? To get more funding for hydrogen research in the United States.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  And I'm gonna be working with the public in industry to get more funding, to fund this research, in addition to supplement the NIH grants, and also to do outreach with the universities, because that was one of the first things I did. I emailed, like I said, every first and corresponding author on every study that I could find. So we're gonna be doing that and saying, hey, this is where the evidence is. We can help these NIH grants, we can connect with industry to get future, like, further funding. And then, at the end of the day, once we get partners that have all agreed, Dr. Laberan and I are going to review the protocols to make sure that the targets make sense, the methodology makes sense, the dosing makes sense.

• 43:47Gary Brecka?

  This is amazing. I mean, you know, first of all, I think it's an- It's an area that's vastly understudied. I think it's also because of the trouble that industry has with, you know, patent protection and copyright protection, trademark protection around this, you know, element, which you've patented, but around this element and its impact on physiology. I want to bring this down to a practical standpoint, like some actionable steps that people that are watching this podcast might take away. How do they incorporate hydrogen gas into their daily routine? And why would they want to do that? And what can they expect in terms of absorption for their vitamins, minerals, amino acids, nutrients, gut health?

• 44:31Speaker 00

  I think we should touch on a few areas. We can touch on metabolic, the anti-aging aspect.

• 44:35Gary Brecka?

  You know, they estimate as high as 80% of Americans have some form of metabolic syndrome.

• 44:40Speaker 00

  And we've reversed metabolic syndrome, you know, in a double-blind placebo-controlled trial with 60 people over six months.

• 44:47Gary Brecka?

  By the way, I'm going to link all these studies into the show notes below.

• 44:49Speaker 00

  I think it was 21 of 23 measured outcomes. We had a significant, clinical and statistically significant impact.

• 44:56Gary Brecka?

  Just by adding H2 tabs to drinking water?

• 44:58Speaker 00

  It was three H2 tabs a day and 12 ounces of water in these people, middle-aged and older.

• 45:04Gary Brecka?

  That would cost you less than three bucks.

• 45:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. So we reversed metabolic syndrome. We've shown weight loss in, weight loss or improved body comp in, I think it's six studies now.

• 45:15Gary Brecka?

  Now, how would the gas improve body composition or weight loss?

• 45:18Speaker 00

  So it could improve muscle mass by improving exercise recovery and energy output and everything like that. And we're actually finding some cool research. Some of this is not published yet, but I have an author on some of it. I'll touch on it briefly. But we're regulating appetite.

• 45:35Gary Brecka?

  So GLP-1?

• 45:37Speaker 00

  GLP-1. So we do have a study in my center peer review right now that we regulated GLP-1. We had an effect. And we have a clinical study, 12-week, I think it was, and a 40, 40-participate double-blind placebo control in obese metabolicly impaired people where we increased GLP-1, right?

• 45:55Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  In addition, we regulated ghrelin already in a clinical trial.

• 46:01Speaker 00

  overweight people and and ghrelin is often called in pop culture like the the the hunger hormone yeah but it actually has a lot of other roles it regulates our insulin response glucose homeostasis it has a lot of neuroprotective effects and what is poorly understood by the general population and e- even some physicians is that we actually want to peak in valley of ghrelin so we want ghrelin to be very high when we're on an empty stomach and crash to nothing right and in obese people it becomes impaired so there's no peaks and valleys it's just kind of in the middle all the time which is why they're always snacking they're never really hungry but hungry yeah and and hungry but also they're never really as hungry

• 46:46Speaker 00

  as a healthy person they're just kind of hungry and snacky all the time so we actually showed to restore that fasting peak and valley and we're working on some more research in there and we had another study where we improved and modulated the brain chemistry involved in satiety right so there's some interesting stuff there we're actually planning several other large you know clinical trials on metabolic outcomes with hydrogen some of them are currently enrolling others are in the planning stages set to kick off in March we're doing two of them in Serbia one in Russia and one in Australia right now

• 47:29Gary Brecka?

  to say that right now molecular hydrogen hydrogen gas has a positive effect on metabolism and when we say metabolism somewhere we throw that word around a lot you know a metabolic syndrome is a complex of a bunch of different variables that probably the most impactful would be insulin resistance you know that is the root of a lot of evils but also you know elevated triglycerides you know hyper triglyceridemia hypertension abdominal fat elevated cholesterol and and restoring homeostasis and restoring the gut barrier that that single cell barrier that protects our

• 48:11Gary Brecka?

  Inside world from our outside world. You know, if I had a penny for every ailment that was a byproduct of gut dysbiosis, I would be a very wealthy man. And I have, in the last 10 years, become very interested and fascinated by ways that we can properly heal and seal and restore function to the gut because it's the genesis of a lot of autoimmune, if not all autoimmune, disease. It's the genesis of a lot of pro-inflammatory conditions, not the least of which is elevated C-reactive protein. There are just so many downsides to not having a properly regulated gut. And very often, it's not just a matter of taking probiotics, or even in some cases, eating, you know, switching your diet to eat the right foods.

• 48:56Gary Brecka?

  Because if you wipe these bacteria out, you need to restore the gas that the bacteria that are now gone would have otherwise produced.

• 49:04Speaker 00

  That's very important because there are certain bacteria that can come back within a few days or a week. There's others that might take months or years. And there's bacteria strains that we've identified by looking at like tribal peoples that we've discovered in the Amazon or South Asia where could be generational, right? They might never come back once we've lost them. Now, in that same study where we regulate ghrelin, we reduce calprotectin, so a marker of inflammation in the stomach. And we improved a couple of short-chain fatty acids, propionic and butyric acid.

• 49:35Gary Brecka?

  Oh, wow.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  Right?

• 49:36Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 49:37Speaker 00

  There's some definite gut links. And actually, hydrogen water uniquely gets into the gut a lot better than inhalation, obviously, is going to your lungs. So that's why I was mentioning hydrogen water and hydrogen inhalation have different pharmacokinetics. They elevate different tissues in different capacities. So hydrogen water interacts with the gut better. It gets to the liver at a higher concentration and some of the internal organs, which is why it's perhaps better for a lot of these metabolic conditions.

• 50:06Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  Whereas inhalation, it's getting obviously to your lungs better. It's getting to your muscles at a higher amount than drinking hydrogen water. So a lot of muscular or skeletal issues, maybe inhalation will be better. For athletes, maybe you want to do both. And it's getting both. Getting to the brain inhalation a little bit higher than hydrogen water. But hydrogen water also has the gut brain connection. It's improving your gut, so it's improving your brain. So I think the future, we're going to be doing several modalities of hydrogen therapy. People are going to be doing drinking high concentration hydrogen water, doing inhalation in a proper and safe way. Bathing in hydrogen water, you know, there's hydrogen saline, like IVs, right? For purposes in the hospital.

• 50:50Gary Brecka?

  So I, you know, I'm interested about how could somebody incorporate these, these H2 tabs? Which is the elemental magnesium that effervesces into hydrogen gas. How does someone that's watching this podcast that's interested in getting hydrogen gas into their daily routine? Maybe doesn't have the money for, you know, a hydrogen bottle. You know, what's the dosage? How do they take it?

• 51:10Speaker 00

  So our studies range from one to, well, five tablets a day, but most of them one to three tablets a day and various volumes of water.

• 51:18Gary Brecka?

  I'm taking like five to eight.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  I take, I take five personally, but I've got a lot of damage. Yeah. So first thing on an empty stomach is important. So the right, the perfect volume of water is different for every person because it's the volume that you can chug, drink rapidly.

• 51:35Gary Brecka?

  Right. At a room temperature.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  So because hydrogen is this stress, like H2 is this stress, like exercise. You don't want to be sipping on it all day long.

• 51:46Gary Brecka?

  Right. You want to get the dosage in.

• 51:48Speaker 00

  You want a high dose intermittently because you want the stress and the recovery.

• 51:52Gary Brecka?

  So let's say 750 milliliters, like a, you know, mountain valley spring water.

• 51:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can drop a couple of tablets in there.

• 51:59Gary Brecka?

  And then wait for it to effervesce and then whack it back.

• 52:02Speaker 00

  So exactly, I do a liter, right? But most people can't chug a liter. So most of our research on athletes uses half liter or 16.8 ounces. Our research on metabolicly impaired middle aged people usually uses about 12 ounces, 333 times a day. And on the elderly, we used a cup. So we use 250 milliliters or eight ounces because.

• 52:25Gary Brecka?

  The point is any amount helps, but for somebody to say, okay, I'm going to put this into my daily routine. I'm going to take a.

• 52:31Speaker 00

  Room temperature, glass bottle of water, drop a tablet or two in it.

• 52:36Gary Brecka?

  And then chug it as fast as you can.

• 52:37Speaker 00

  And it's really important, you want to drink it on an empty stomach. Right? So a lot of companies in hydrogen water don't actually talk about this because they don't understand it very well. But one, say you are producing a bit of hydrogen from consuming fiber. You don't want to be competing with that.

• 52:53Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 52:53Speaker 00

  Right? You want that separately. But two, one of my patents involves I've turned hydrogen water and various fibers into dense foams and gels. It stabilizes. So if you eat it at a time where you've just had some fiber, you might not be getting rapid uptake into your system.

• 53:12Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 53:12Speaker 00

  Which can affect the therapeutic value. So what we're learning right now in hydrogen research, we haven't found a plateau yet.

• 53:21Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  Right? For most indications. So some indications, we need vastly higher amounts of hydrogen that then we can reasonably.

• 53:28Gary Brecka?

  Intense exercise, severe metabolic syndrome.

• 53:32Speaker 00

  Liver health. For instance, liver health, we need 10 times more exercise to start seeing an effect. So dose and concentration is critically important. You want to get the dosing right to have a better effect on the body.

• 53:46Gary Brecka?

  But for the average person that's listening to this podcast, it says I'm sold.

• 53:50Speaker 00

  One to three times a day.

• 53:51Gary Brecka?

  One to three times a day.

• 53:51Speaker 00

  One to three times a day, the most water that you can comfortably chug down in one to three gulps. You know, within 15 to 30 seconds and on an empty stomach.

• 54:02Gary Brecka?

  On an empty stomach.

• 54:03Speaker 00

  So sometimes I like is in the morning or right before you exercise.

• 54:08Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 54:09Speaker 00

  You know.

• 54:09Gary Brecka?

  That's what I do.

• 54:10Speaker 00

  Or middle, middle of the afternoon or right before dinner. Like you can eat five, 10 minutes after you drink the hydrogen water. Just don't drink it after you eat.

• 54:18Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. And, and you know, what I find is that if I do the hydrogen first, I really don't want caffeine. I'm just, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm more wide awake, more focused, more clear. And then I, I max it with the amino acid product, you know, except there's just essential amino acids. And, and then I just go in and, and hit the gym. And I'm always looking for ways that we can kind of bio stack things. Take something like, um, you know, the fluid that's going to hydrate you and make it anti-inflammatory by lowering its ORP, which it clearly does. Um, but then also there must be some effect on. On the lactate threshold, because I noticed that if I do what I've affectionately called

• 54:59Gary Brecka?

  a hydrogen bomb, I'll put five of these in about 750 mLs, and when it effervesces, whack it back. I can absolutely tell that my workouts can be more intense with less muscle burn.

• 55:14Speaker 00

  100%. And actually, there's a systematic review and meta-analysis showing an anti-fatigue effect with hydrogen water. And we have a couple of really cool studies that I know I briefly told you about that are in press right now on the H2 tabs, showing remarkable benefits. And they were in completely different study populations. So the first one was a shorter-term study, I think it was four weeks. It was in Olympic athletes, and it was done in Russia. And they were taking two tablets in 16.8 ounces or 500 milliliters a day before and after training. And we improved body composition in these Olympic athletes, which

• 55:57Speaker 00

  was incredible. But we also improved their peak torque on leg extension at the end of the trial, and more significantly, after they'd exercised and warmed up, showing the anti-fatigue effect.

• 56:08Gary Brecka?

  Wow, so they took it during exercise?

• 56:09Speaker 00

  Right before and right after.

• 56:11Gary Brecka?

  Right before and right after.

• 56:12Speaker 00

  And we have another trial in the opposite study population. And this was a 50-plus group. And I was actually just, I was one of the authors on both of these. But I was just in Milan, Italy, at Aspen, at a conference presenting this study with the corresponding author. And so there's these 50-plus people who had no adult experience with exercise. They were very out of shape, so much so that they were starting doctor-guided exercise protocols to try and turn their lives around.

• 56:46Gary Brecka?

  Huge deconditioned population right now.

• 56:48Speaker 00

  Exactly. And this was, off memory, I think it was six weeks, six or eight weeks, I can't quite remember. But it was, again, double-blind placebo-controlled. And in the placebo group, we actually saw some very concerning things. They were borderline rhabdomyolysis.

• 57:04Speaker 00

  So the stress from the exercise dysregulated their cortisol response. It increased myoglobin by 1100%, right? So 11 times. It increased creatine kinase by like seven times, 700%. They had serious damage.

• 57:23Gary Brecka?

  That's where they get the kidney issues with RABDO.

• 57:25Speaker 00

  Exactly. Oh, and with the hydrogen group, and we actually, we saw this too in the Olympians. It didn't raise the creatine kinase at all. No, no significant rise. So we had no significant rise in creatine kinase or myoglobin. We regulated the cortisol response. We improved DHEA and free testosterone.

• 57:45Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  And we improved sleep outcomes specifically in females. So we're actually seeing a potential gender response.

• 57:53Gary Brecka?

  My female audience is gonna love you, man.

• 57:55Speaker 00

  There's a few studies now, both in press and one published, where we had stronger results in females and males.

• 58:00Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 58:01Speaker 00

  So it could be mediated by estrogen. We're still trying to figure this out.

• 58:04Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 58:05Speaker 00

  But.

• 58:05Gary Brecka?

  Well, Alex, I want to follow this research that you're doing. I'm going to put links to all of, in the study notes, to all of the research you've published so far and links to other research on hydrogen gas and the H2 tabs, this elemental magnesium. I'll even put some information on how people can find the H2 tabs if they're interested in adding these. What I like is that now, you know, we're under a dollar a day for people to incorporate hydrogen gas into their, into their lifestyle instead of, you know, several hundred dollars.

• 58:34Speaker 00

  And a consistent dose, right? Because all machines start breaking down over time, but the tablets, you're getting this high dose every time.

• 58:42Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 58:42Speaker 00

  Right? Unless you have a lab to test the machine, you don't know when it starts to deteriorate.

• 58:46Gary Brecka?

  Right. But with those tablets, you're getting a safe, consistent dose every time. And in fact, I would love to even do another podcast on women's health because I've noticed again anecdotally, where my wife has really bad menstrual cramps, that it seems to mitigate the intensity of those cramps too. So I'd love to go down the rabbit hole with you on that.

• 59:05Speaker 00

  And we're diving deeper, like, we actually have a few studies underway that are separating gender to look deeper into these. Gender-based responses. And we're starting, I've just signed off on the protocol. We're starting the very first responder study on hydrogen. You know, looking at people's endogenous breath hydrogen production over some time to establish the difference in effect of people with low breath hydrogen versus high breath hydrogen. So we can really start narrowing in on the research.

• 59:39Gary Brecka?

  That's amazing, man. Well, I end every podcast by asking all my guests the same question. And there's no right or wrong answer to this. But it is, what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

• 59:50Speaker 00

  I think just constantly the pursuit to improve, right? Not perfection, right? It's just growing and learning. And I think that a philosophy behind maintaining is accepting that you're going to respond to things after it's broken. That's what it implies. So the only way we can stay satisfied is by always trying to move forward. So my philosophy in life is always forward, right? You know, and forward in as many ways as you can. You know, trying to improve your health, trying to improve your purpose, your business, your family life, right? Everything, just always be trying to make small improvements.

• 1:00:34Speaker 00

  Most people want to say with money, go to bed poor and wake up rich without having to do any work. And, you know, it's an age-old saying, but Rome wasn't built in a day. And the only way we can continue moving forward and achieve what we dream to achieve is by taking one step at a time.

• 1:00:52Gary Brecka?

  That's awesome.

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  One small improvement.

• 1:00:54Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, one small improvement. Man, I really appreciate you coming on. I, guys, I hope that this has given you the depth that you need to maybe incorporate hydrogen gas into your, into your daily routine. It's one of those, I think, must-have biohacks that's affordable for the, for the masses. I'm going to stay very close to the research on hydrogen gas, hydrogen water, hydrogen inhalation, because I'm absolutely fascinated by it. I will link all of Alex's studies in the study notes below, as well as a link to some other studies that are not Alex's, but will give you further background if you really want to go down the hydrogen rabbit hole. And as always, until next time, that's just science.