The Man Who Predicts How Long You Have Left To Live (To The Nearest Month): Gary Brecka

Gary Brecka is one of the world’s foremost experts on how breathwork can transform your life, and how thinking differently about nutrition can protect us against disease and make us the best version of ourselves. Gary: Instagram: http://bit.ly/3IVf6Dw Twitter: http://bit.ly/41w492P YouTube: http://bit.ly/3Iwemn2 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?

  If you want to strip fat off your body, there is nothing, no type of cardiovascular or weight training that comes anywhere close to.

• 0:10Speaker 01

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

• 0:17Gary Brecka?

  Most people, they're walking around right now at about 55% of their true state of normal. There is an element missing from their body that would make the difference between them being an average person and being a superhuman. How? Everything that we put into our bodies gets converted into the useful form. If you cannot make this conversion, you have a deficiency and it is this deficiency that leads to these conditions. They have accepted something as either a consequence of aging, stress or their environment. This is not a consequence of any of those things. I'm going to tell you exactly how to find out what it is that's missing. So you could thrive in a way that you probably never thought possible.

• 0:53Steven Bartlett?

  Let's use Dana White as an example.

• 0:55Gary Brecka?

  So LabCorp calls us, so it says, hey, we have a life threatening alert on a patient. He had all of these conditions.

• 1:01Speaker 03

  I've been talking to doctors, none of them could fix any of my problems.

• 1:04Gary Brecka?

  He said, I'm surprised you can even sleep through the night without choking, gagging. He's like slammed his hand down. How did you know that? And I said, if you don't do what we're going to ask you to do, if you have a life expectancy of 10.4 years. And in 10 weeks, he has such a material change. And he was like, I had no idea I could feel this good.

• 1:22Steven Bartlett?

  And his life expectancy?

• 1:23Gary Brecka?

  Almost tripled.

• 1:24Steven Bartlett?

  Someone who's just heard that at home, where do they start?

• 1:27Gary Brecka?

  So.

• 1:38Steven Bartlett?

  Gary.

• 1:39Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 1:40Steven Bartlett?

  I, this is the first time I've started this podcast in this particular way, but I was, but this is where I wanted to start it. It's with a slightly curious question, which is.

• 1:51Steven Bartlett?

  There's people that have just clicked onto this podcast to listen now, right? YouTube, Spotify, Apple, wherever they're listening. Why should they stay and listen to the message that you have committed your life to spreading?

• 2:05Gary Brecka?

  Because everybody wants to be better, right? I mean, everybody wants to improve their health. And most people, especially young people, probably don't realize that they're walking around right now at about 55%, maybe 60% of their true state of normal. There is a nutrient, an amino acid, a substrate, a compound, an element missing from their body, that if they knew what it was, would make the difference between them being an average person and being a superhuman. They have accepted something as either a consequence of aging, or a consequence of stress, or a consequence of their environment, something like brain fog, or repeated poor

• 2:49Gary Brecka?

  sleep, or weight gain, or water retention, or not the healthiest response to exercise, or brain fog, or poor short-term recall, or any number of things that they've accepted as consequence of life, of aging, of stress, or what have you. That's not a consequence of any of those things. It's a consequence of missing raw material. And I'm going to describe that in detail and tell you exactly how to put that raw material back into your body, and how to find out what it is that's missing, so you could thrive in a way that you probably never thought possible.

• 3:20Steven Bartlett?

  Who are you?

• 3:21Gary Brecka?

  I'm a human biologist and a researcher, biohacker. My background is in, of all things, mortality science. You know, my undergraduate degrees were in biology, my postgraduate degrees are in human biology. I'm fascinated by the human body, its form, its function, how we can improve its performance. And I'm a researcher, you know, I spent 22 years as a mortality expert in the insurance industry, which meant that if we got five years of demographic data on you and five years of medical records, we could tell the insurance company how long you had to live to the month. To the month. To the month. And I get a lot of flack about that. People say, "Oh, if you could predict death to the month, you'd win a Nobel Prize," or, "You know, only God can tell

• 4:06Gary Brecka?

  you when you're gonna die." I mean, and that's very true. I mean, obviously, if we do a mortality prediction on it, it doesn't mean December 12th, you know, 2065, you're gonna drop dead on that day. But it is very accurate science. You know, if you think of the most successful financial institutions on the planet as a category are insurance companies. If you look at the failures during the 2008, 2009 financial crisis, which was a global crisis, you know, in the US, we had 364 banks fail. You didn't have a single life insurance company fail. No other financial institution, no other investment enterprise, hedge fund, angel investor, venture capital firm would ever put tens of millions of dollars at risk

• 4:47Gary Brecka?

  on any kind of investment on one single variable. Yet every time a life insurance company bets on your life, or issues an annuity, or a reverse mortgage, or any number of other financial services instruments that are based on mortality, they're only betting on one factor. They don't care where you are on a mortality curve. They wanna know, "How many more months does this person have left on earth?" And it is some of the most accurate science on the planet. And they have perfected this. And the good news is that this science is very accurate, and I'm gonna share a lot of the details of that today. But the downside of this industry, and the reason why I left it, was that during my tenure in this career, I was not allowed to have any contact with the patient or any contact with the treating

• 5:30Gary Brecka?

  physician. Now, I'm not licensed to practice medicine, I'm a human biologist. But if I was reading a medical record and saw a life-threatening drug interaction, I could not contact the patient. And this database, where this information is drawn from, if this database could see the light of day, I believe it would permanently change the face of humanity. It would upend modern medicine in a way that would be completely catastrophic. Because you see, they have information that no other database has, no other research study, no other financial institution, no other university has. And that is that they know the day, the date, the time, the location, and the cause of death for hundreds of millions of people that they have all of these records

• 6:13Gary Brecka?

  on. You know, if I'm a cardiologist and you come in to see me and I put a heart stent in your heart, well, when you leave my office, I don't know what happens to you two months later, two years later, 12 years later. I don't know if you died as a consequence of something that went wrong with the procedure I did, or if you died of something completely different. I don't know exactly what kind of impact on your life that procedure had or didn't have, unless it's contained in a very short-term clinical study. And, not that I want to go into the whole science of mortality, but if you had access to this database, you would realize that the most common ailments that we suffer from are not diseases and pathology that are happening to us, they are things that are happening

• 6:54Gary Brecka?

  within us. You know, I always say that if I was to boil my entire career down to a single sentence, it would be that the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease. And nothing is more impactful than that statement. The presence of oxygen is the absence of disease. I have yet to find a single disease ideological pathway, something that's happening in the human body, causing pathology, causing disease dysfunction, that doesn't have its roots in a lack of blood oxygen, or its roots is not aggravated by something called hypoxia, lack of oxygen. In fact, all human beings die of the same thing. We all leave this earth the same way, right? We all die of hypoxia, lack of oxygen to the brain. That's

• 7:36Gary Brecka?

  the definition of death. Only, we tend to think of it as an event, right? A gunshot wound, a bust, car, stroke, heart attack. But the truth is, we are on a hypoxic curve, meaning we are accelerating quickly or accelerating slowly towards the grave. And the second thing that we discovered in this voluminous, data-driven industry, was that when you deplete certain raw materials in the human body...

• 8:02Gary Brecka?

  You get the expression of that deficiency. So what I mean is, you know, we've all heard that disease travels in families, or you might have genetically inherited hypertension, or genetically inherited hypothyroid, genetically inherited drug and alcohol addiction, diabetes, depression, anxiety. These things tend to run in families. So we've accepted the myth, in most cases, that these are genetically inherited diseases. But think about this. The next time one of your listeners gets told that, oh, you have genetically inherited hypertension, what we call idiopathic hypertension, or genetically inherited hypothyroid, or you have this genetically inherited disease, or that genetically inherited disease.

• 8:45Gary Brecka?

  Stop your physician and say, wait a minute. We've mapped the entire human genome. So we know every gene in the human body. Can you tell me what disease I inherited from my ancestor that's actually causing this condition? And watch their face go blank. Because in the majority of cases, we have accepted that disease travels in families, when it's actually not the disease being passed from generation to generation. It is the inability for their body to refine a certain raw material, which causes a deficiency, which leads to that disease. So in other words, there's not a single compound known to mankind, not one. No mineral, vitamin, amino acid, protein, carbohydrate, no nutrient of any kind, no element known to man, that enters the human body

• 9:30Gary Brecka?

  and is used in the format that we put it in. Everything that we put into our bodies gets taken in by the body and converted into the usable form. If you cannot make this conversion, you have a deficiency. And it is this deficiency that leads to these conditions. And so if you go hunting for that deficiency, and you supplement, not for the sake of supplementing, but you supplement for the sake of deficiency, magic things happen in human beings. There is a superhuman inside of every person listening to this podcast. And if they actually were able to test themselves, do a genetic test, and look at what's called their methylation. How their body refines raw materials.

• 10:11Gary Brecka?

  And they were able to replace the deficiency that is holding their body back from creating adequate levels of neurotransmitter and achieving normal mood, moving contents through the gut and achieving normal gut function, elevating emotional state, deepening their sleep, quieting their mind, all of these conditions that society has labeled different pathologies and disease, then they would begin to thrive in a way that they just never thought possible.

• 10:38Steven Bartlett?

  It's so blatantly clear how passionate you are about this subject matter, which begs the question, you know, I remember when I was reading through your story, I uncovered that you'd read hundreds of peer reviewed papers. I think the quote was something along the lines of, if there's a peer reviewed paper on the subject matter of biohacking and disease and longevity and those kinds of things, you've basically read it. So this begs the question to me, like, why is one individual so unbelievably passionate about this subject matter? And I would like you to take me as early as you possibly can to answer that question in your own life. Where did your obsession, passion, where was it fostered and nurtured so that you spent and committed your life to this subject matter?

• 11:23Steven Bartlett?

  Where did that begin?

• 11:24Gary Brecka?

  So it actually began, I grew up on a very large tobacco farm. My father was a Navy captain, my mom was a flight attendant, she worked for the airlines. But we had a farm that we leased out to other farmers. And surrounding this 300 acre tobacco farm were all kinds of animal farms, there were cattle farms and chicken farms, there was horse farms. And I was an only child. My nearest neighbor was miles away. In fact, from my home, you couldn't even see another house from my parents' house until I was in my early twenties. And so for me to play with another child, I had to get on a bike and spend half an afternoon biking to their house.

• 12:05Gary Brecka?

  So I got very familiar with the farm and I was always just fascinated by the veterinarians that would come on to these farms and fix horses and fix cattle and fix sheep and fix chickens. And I always thought it was so cool that these animals could be laying on the ground, seemingly about to die, and the veterinarian would come on board and do a bunch of stuff. And the next thing you know, this horse was up and a few days later, it was galloping back in the field or you had. All kinds of strange things would happen on this farm and there was always someone arriving to just fix it. And I started to get fascinated with medicine, I guess, in that way. I always found it as a way to take something that was sick and helpless and

• 12:45Gary Brecka?

  sort of help it get back to normal function. And I found out in the eighth grade, sometime during my eighth grade year, that I was clinically photographic. So I have a clinical level of photographic recall, which is different than just having a visual memory. I'm clinically photographic, so I have a voluminous capacity to recall things that I read, even if I don't understand them, which is why I never read for pleasure. I'm very cautious about what I read. I'm very cautious about what I look at, because I record everything. So I can't be flying on American Airlines and take the SeatBack magazine out and read the SeatBack magazine, because three months later, I'll tell you where the sales center is for a condo project in Buenos Aires. You know, so I can, I can fill my brain with senseless

• 13:29Gary Brecka?

  things like that and record it and regurgitate it. Or I can fill it full of things that, that fascinate me. And so I naturally gravitate it towards science. Is that what they call a photographic memory? Photographic memory is usually someone that can remember seven numbers in sequence. They have extremely good recall for things that they visualize. Clinically photographic is being able to regurgitate voluminous amounts of information with incredible accuracy. So I still remember, you know, section 15, two, so paragraph B of my first employment contract that I signed 28 years ago. Really? Really? Yeah, I remember, I remember that. It was actually with a trading firm

• 14:11Gary Brecka?

  that I signed it with. So, you know, when I read peer reviewed papers in scientific journals, it doesn't make me more intelligent than someone, because very often I can recall information that I don't understand. So I can regurgitate voluminous amounts of information. So subjects that rely on rote memorization, like chemistry, biology, neurobiology, microbiology. A lot of these sciences don't actually make sense. Right, that you just have to memorize how they operate. Chemistry in a lot of ways doesn't make sense. Right, you just have to remember what happens when you put these two elements together. They create this, you know, when you pull a carbon bond or you double a carbon bond here or hydrogen bond there that you that the molecule shifts in this way.

• 14:55Gary Brecka?

  And so I gravitated towards science. I got my undergraduate degree in biology.

• 15:00Steven Bartlett?

  How did you do?

• 15:01Gary Brecka?

  I did very well. I actually found it quite the breeze. You know, when I was an undergrad, my, you know, biology and chemistry were considered the toughest majors. And I went to Branch Campus University of Maryland. A lot of my remains were political science, not investing on political science majors at all, or philosophy or psychology. And they got to party all the time. And, you know, I had really intense classes, you know, morphology of thalidides and chemistry and, and, you know, biomechanics and, and science and, and a lot of plant biology courses and human biology courses. But I was able to have the same kind of social life that they were because I would, you know, record a lecture and then I would regurgitate a lecture when I needed it during, during a test.

• 15:45Steven Bartlett?

  Is it a gift or a curse? Because with all things in life that appear to be gifts, there's often some kind of hidden curse.

• 15:50Gary Brecka?

  Well, the curse is that I can't, I rarely read for pleasure. It's very difficult to read for pleasure because I record all of that information. So when I'm going in to read a book, you know, a lot of people read a book that they didn't really like. It doesn't stay with them. Or they read a fiction novel, it doesn't really give them any benefit. It's not, doesn't, doesn't feed them, but they do it to relax or they do it for entertainment. For me, it would take up storage. Right, I would record that information. So there's no need for me to have that information in my possession. I find other ways to, to relax and, and, and meditate and unwind. But reading for pleasure is just, just not one of them. So I guess that could be a curse.

• 16:34Gary Brecka?

  But, you know, then I went to grad school for human biology. I went to another four years of school for human biology. So I had eight years of science. And then I was.

• 16:44Gary Brecka?

  Either going to go into chiropractic or into orthopedic medicine. I really liked the idea of orthopedics because, again, an orthopedic surgeon was somebody that fixed people. And, you know, an internist was somebody that just managed disease. You know, they took a obese hypertensive diabetic patient and they just kind of managed their case throughout their lifetime. But I felt like an orthopedic was somebody that, you know, you came in and you had a broken leg and they, you know, fixed your broken leg and, and you were back to normal. I liked the idea of fixing things and then kind of returning function back to people. And I took some time off, you know, after I got my human biology degree and I ended up going into a rare area of science.

• 17:26Gary Brecka?

  This mortality science for life insurance and secondary life insurance. Where you would take medical records and demographic data and you would use this in what's called a probabilistic model to predict life expectancy. And I was fascinated by it because I loved the big data nature of it. And for years I actually subscribed to the fact that this was just data. And that I had no influence on this person's outcome. I didn't put them in this position, nor am I responsible for getting them out of this position. But eventually, I think, as both my faith grew and my awareness of the fact that there were human beings on the other side of these spreadsheets.

• 18:09Gary Brecka?

  I finally made a conscious decision to say, what am I doing? I'm going to spend the rest of my life just predicting death for the monetary gain of an investor. Versus taking this information and helping people live healthier, happier, longer, more fulfilling lives. Because by studying medical records and, you know, I read, you know, eight to 10 hours a day, six days a week. Thousands and thousands and thousands of medical records and extracted from those how it would impact somebody's outcome of their life. You know, how, how it would impact the length of or the shortness of the duration of their life, their health span or their lifespan.

• 18:49Gary Brecka?

  And once you realize there's human beings on the other side of this spreadsheet, you start to feel like you're sitting behind a thick glass wall. Just watching blind people walk into traffic. And towards the tail end, I used to artificially kind of manipulate the record. I would say, well, what if I artificially fixed this person's D3 deficiency? What if I cured the anemia? What if I actually noticed that they had a gene mutation called MTHFR? Instead of trying to fix them with folic acid, I fixed them with methofolate. And you would just see the life expectancy jump.

• 19:20Steven Bartlett?

  In the model?

• 19:21Gary Brecka?

  In the model.

• 19:22Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 19:22Gary Brecka?

  Right? And this model was based on very large data. So it was very likely to have a real life impact. And when I say we predicted death to the month, it was based on that patient's current position. And it doesn't mean that they couldn't walk out the next day and get hit by a bus or die in a commercial airline disaster or something like that. But there were standard deviations that would account for those kinds of risks. What the insurance company wanted to quantify, or the annuity company or the reverse mortgage company wanted to quantify was, based on this person's, everything that we know about this person right now, the function of their liver, the slightly hypoxic anemic profile that they have, the deficiencies that they have in vitamin D3, the suppressed immune system, the elevated visceral fat,

• 20:06Gary Brecka?

  the body mass index, the bone mineral density. Based on all of these things, when do these things all meet? And actually cause a catastrophic event? And there were things called mortality debits and comorbidity debits. And we put all these together and I really liked the data of it. But realizing that there were human beings on the other side, this spreadsheet just woke me up and I said, you know, I have this chasm of knowledge, even though I'm not a physician, I have a fundamental understanding of human physiology. I'm fascinated by human physiology and ways that we can improve lifespan and health span. And so why wouldn't I take this gift?

• 20:48Gary Brecka?

  And get into an industry like wellness or functional medicine where I could actually make a difference, where instead of predicting death, we could extend life. And in doing so, help people have healthier, happier, longer lives, more fulfilling lives, get rid of a lot of the ailments that people suffer from. I mean, when you, when you start to peel back the way that modern medicine defines a lot of conditions that we have, you know, take depression, or anxiety, or ADD, or ADHD, because a lot of your listeners are probably entrepreneurs. And a lot of entrepreneurs have very active minds, and they've been told they have attention deficit disorder, right, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Well, attention deficit disorder is not an attention deficit at all. We've mystified these things.

• 21:30Gary Brecka?

  It's an attention overload disorder, because you see in the human brain, we don't just create thought, we also dismantle thought. It is just as important for you to be able to create a new thought or feeling as it is to dismantle it, right? And if you don't degrade thought, called catecholamines, if you don't degrade them, then there's a gene that governs this, catecholomethyltransferase. If you create thought at a faster rate than you degrade thought, then the mind gets very clouded. And so, attention deficit disorder is attention overload disorder. It's too many windows open at the same time. So, modern medicine says, well, if the mind's racing, let's put an amphetamine into the body, race the central nervous system to match the pace of the mind. And this is a very poor choice, right?

• 22:15Gary Brecka?

  Because eventually, this will burn you out, can actually change the neuroplasticity of the brain. Rather than put the right amino acids back into the body, the right B-complex blend, the right methylated folates, so that the mind can actually begin to quiet.

• 22:28Steven Bartlett?

  What would you say to someone that says that ADHD is also, in some ways, a result of some early trauma?

• 22:34Gary Brecka?

  Well, you know, trauma is always fascinating to me. Trauma can trigger methylation, trauma can interrupt the methylation cycle.

• 22:43Gary Brecka?

  Right, but the the idea in modern medicine that you have some kind of trauma, you have a disrupted relationship with your mother, for example, and that somehow we're going to go and put neuroplasticity-altering chemicals into the brain, and it's going to fix this 30-year-broken relationship you have with your mother. To me, it doesn't

• 23:01Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:01Gary Brecka?

  make any sense, right? And so it's not at all to poo-poo trauma, to to to put trauma down. Depression really exists, anxiety really exists. But but if you actually look at how we define these conditions, take depression, for example, we define depression, at least in America, we define depression as an inadequate supply of serotonin. Right? So if you are low in serotonin, you're by definition depressed. So then you would think that the solution would be to raise serotonin. Right? If we define depression as low serotonin, you'd think that the solution would be to raise serotonin, but that's not what we do. We take people that are depressed and we put them on SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. And what these do is they ration what little serotonin these people have. So by definition, it never raises serotonin.

• 23:44Gary Brecka?

  So by definition, it never ends depression. I mean, I have I have clients come in to see me all the time and and and in our clinical team, and then I'll say, well, how long have you been on antidepressants? They say 15 years, 18 years. And my first question is, well, when did you think it was going to kick in? Right? So if we understand that serotonin is actually methylated in the gut, this process that I'm talking about is called methylation. We actually make serotonin from an amino acid called tryptophan, the one that's famous for making you sleepy after Thanksgiving dinner. I know you guys don't have Thanksgiving in the UK, but I'm from America. But so because we eat a lot of turkey on Thanksgiving, and turkey has a lot of tryptophan. So when you take tryptophan, methylate it into the neurotransmitter serotonin, of which 90% resides in your gut.

• 24:28Steven Bartlett?

  Methylate is basically processed.

• 24:29Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, the processing, it's like the refining process. Crude oil gets refined into gasoline. Amino acids get methylated into neurotransmitters. And so this process of methylation. When it's broken, and it can be relatively easy to fix, when it's broken, it means that we have an imperative ability to create. We have an imperative ability to refine a raw material, and it leads to this deficit. Well, serotonin, for example, 90% of it resides in your gut. So if you don't have it here, you can't have it here. So depression rarely begins in the outside environment. It usually begins in the gut. Now, it may be trauma that led to the deficiency. But the fix is not in a chemical, or synthetic, or pharmaceutical,

• 25:12Gary Brecka?

  blocking the brain's capacity to uptake these neurotransmitters. The fix is in restoring adequate levels to the body. So it can naturopathically make its way back up the vagus nerve and arrive to the brain. Similar things are true with anxiety. I mean, if you actually have ever suffered from, or know somebody who's suffered from anxiety, if you ask them three questions, you can find out very quickly that their anxiety is not coming from a cluster of symptoms. It's not coming from their outside environment. It is coming from within them. It's coming from their physiology. Right? I mean, if you know someone who's suffered from anxiety, and you say, "Well, have you had anxiety on and off throughout your lifetime?" The most of the time, they'll say yes. And then if you say, "Can you point to the specific trigger that causes it?"

• 25:56Gary Brecka?

  Very often, they'll say, "No." I mean, yes, I know some of my triggers, but I could be sitting in a podcast just like this, in a very calm environment. There's no threats around, and all of a sudden, I get overwhelmed by anxiety. I can be driving home from work on an otherwise innocuous day, and I can be overwhelmed by anxiety. Well, that is not coming from your outside environment, right? This is coming from a process called methylation, and it is caused from excess catecholamines entering the brain, and an inability to down-regulate these. So the body's entering this mild fight-or-flight response without the presence of a fear. See, remember that as sophisticated as we like to think our brains are, it's really not. Our brain is very primal. You know what the brain cares about? The brain cares about survival.

• 26:38Gary Brecka?

  And so, doesn't care how fat or skinny you are, how pretty or ugly you are. It doesn't care about your skin, your hair. It cares about survival. And so, when we understand that the brain does not know the difference between perception and reality, we start to understand how it can play tricks on us. So I always use the example that, let's say you drove home tonight. And you got out of your car, when you got home, you got out of your car and somebody was standing in front of you with a knife. It's a very real threat, right? You'd have a fight or flight response. Your pupils would dilate, your heart rate would increase, your extremities would flood with blood, your hearing would get very acute, your brain would flood with catecholamines. You are getting ready to fight or flight. But you could also be laying on the 30th floor of a condo building in bed and start thinking about getting eaten by a shark.

• 27:23Gary Brecka?

  There is zero chance of a shark getting out of the ocean, going up a 30th floor elevator, right? Coming into your condo and biting you in that bed, but you can have the exact same response.

• 27:31Steven Bartlett?

  If you're watching a movie or something.

• 27:32Gary Brecka?

  Exactly. So one is entirely real, one is entirely perceived. The physiologic response is identical. So now, once we understand this, now we begin to understand how I can feel the presence of a fear, which is what anxiety is. It's a fear of something happening in the future, usually is not going to happen, usually hasn't happened in the past, and is not likely to happen. But it's, it's, this fear starts to build up, you start to get very anxious, it can actually change your heart rate to the point where you can, panic attacks can land you in a hospital, or it can be mild enough that it just causes you anxiousness, mild anxiety, but there's no presence of a fear. And so you start trying to correlate it to your outside environment, it starts to drive

• 28:13Gary Brecka?

  you crazy because you go, well, I don't get it, I'm on vacation with my wife or my spouse and my kids and I'm in the resort of a lifetime, I've been here a thousand times, I love this place, there's no reason I should feel like this. But all of a sudden, you have this feeling of anxiousness, anxiety. So these are, these are lack of raw material in the human body. My mission is to try to help people by taking a genetic test, um, once in their lifetime, find out where is methylation broken, and then stop supplementing just for the sake of supplementing, and start supplementing for this deficiency so your body can thrive.

• 28:49Steven Bartlett?

  In the case of people that are listening to this now, and they can pinpoint the moments where they've got an anxiety. So say they've, I remember I had one guest on the podcast, maybe two years ago. And after he became famous, he developed social anxiety. So whenever he would be with around a lot of people, he'd feel that sense of anxiety. And then from that sort of catalytic moment, then when he's at home, he'd get the same rush of anxiety. But he would point to that catalytic moment of becoming famous. And then some things had happened in his life. And then he'd get anxiety at home when nothing was going on.

• 29:20Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 29:21Steven Bartlett?

  In that situation, what's the?

• 29:23Gary Brecka?

  So there you go. So now you've interrupted methylation because there's one where there's the presence of fear and there's one where there isn't. There's the absence of a fear. So to be very specific, anxiety, true anxiety does exist, but you can point to the specific trigger that causes it. So for example, if you, if you have a fear of heights and you walk to the edge of a 30th floor balcony and look over, you're going to feel anxiety. If you're claustrophobic and you step on a really crowded elevator, you're going to feel anxiety. But if you're claustrophobic and you're sitting at home and you start to become overwhelmed with anxiety. This is actually not coming from that trigger. This is coming from your physiology. And the way that we deal with stress, right? And like cortisol, when you measure cortisol levels, cortisol is not really a measure of

• 30:07Gary Brecka?

  how much stress is in your life. It's a measure of your body's reaction to stress. So why are some people more resilient to stress and don't have anxiety attacks? And why are other people not as resistant? Again, this is not to say that if you didn't have a violent attack in your life or a terrible car accident, that sometimes when you've had a vehicle accident, you approach an intersection, the memory of having been T-boned recently and badly injured is going to give you anxiety. But the majority of people are not suffering from that type of hyper-specific situational anxiety. They're suffering from something called generalized anxiety or idiopathic anxiety, which means of unknown origin.

• 30:49Gary Brecka?

  So for somebody who's very famous and gets into a crowd and doesn't know who's coming at them, that's a very, I wouldn't even define that as anxiety. That's a very primal, instinctual reaction to a real fear. Right, just like walking to the edge of a 30th floor balcony. What's not a primal reaction to a real fear is when there is no presence of a fear, especially if that incident has never happened and you aren't even sure what you are afraid of, or why you are anxious, or why you have anxiety, then this is coming from your physiology. So how would you treat that? You'd look at the different, there are five major actionable genes that I like to look at and they're what's called their sub alleles.

• 31:31Gary Brecka?

  And when you find out what they're deficient in, you start to supplement with things like SAME, asadenosomethionine, methylated forms of vitamins, L-methionine, the proper balance of B complex, methylated forms of folic acid or folate called methylfolate. And what happens is now the body has the capacity to degrade these neurotransmitters that are causing this fight or flight. This group of neurotransmitters called catecholamines and the anxiousness that follows. And you'll find that the majority of people that suffer from idiopathic anxiety or generalized anxiety because of low serotonin, they also have gut issues. You show me a person that's truly depressed and I'll show you somebody that's also suffering

• 32:16Gary Brecka?

  from severe gut issues, either gas or bloating or diarrhea, constipation, irritability, cramping, because the same neurotransmitters that affect these emotional states also are responsible for the motility of the gut, the speed of the gut. This is the most overlooked thing in all of bariatric medicine because people that believe that they have all of these allergies, well, I'm allergic to wheat, soy, corn, dairy, blueberries, bananas, you know, gluten. Yes, sometimes those individual allergies do exist, but the majority of time, even if you talk to somebody who says, yeah, I get bloated, or I deal with gas, or cramping, or diarrhea, or constipation, or irritability, I deal with all of these gut issues, irritable

• 32:57Gary Brecka?

  bowel syndrome, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, all these names that we give to conditions of the gut, when you ask them, well, what are you allergic to? And they give you this laundry list of things. And then you ask them another question and say, well, if you're really allergic to corn, is there ever a time that you can eat corn and not have a reaction? The majority of time, people will say yes. Okay, well, right there, you know, you don't have an allergy. Allergies are not transient. Allergies are consistent, right? You don't wake up Monday morning and being allergic to milk. And then you're unallergic on Wednesday afternoon and then reallergic on Saturday morning. But what happens when people have gut issues that they can't explain is they always correlate it to what they last ate. And it's hard to make this connection. They're like, well, wait a second. I ate the same thing Monday and I was fine.

• 33:41Gary Brecka?

  And I ate the identical food on Wednesday and I blew up like a tick. So this is not an allergy. This has to do with the motility of the gut. So if you don't know what gene mutation you have that is causing a deficiency, then you don't know what to supplement with to restore gut motility. But once you do, the gut goes back to its normal pace. What's gut motility? It's the pace of the gut. So if you remember, Henry Ford was actually not made famous for the automobile. He was made famous for something called the assembly line. So the assembly line was just a glorified conveyor belt, right? And when you walked into his factory, they put a part on it at one end. And about every six feet, somebody stood and tinkered with that part. So it went to me, I tinkered with it, it moved to the guy to my right. He did something to it, moved to the guy to his right.

• 34:26Gary Brecka?

  And by the time it reached the end of that conveyor belt, it's fully assembled. This is very analogous to how the human intestinal tract works. It's 30 feet long. It's a giant conveyor belt. You put parts on it at one end as they exit the stomach in a very acidic environment. And it moves slowly towards the rectum. And before it exits the rectum, it's in a relatively alkaline environment. So instead of having people standing along a conveyor belt, you have bacteria that are graded by pH. The sequence is very important. So imagine what would happen if Henry Ford walked into his factory one day and doubled the speed of the conveyor belt. The entire assembly line would break down, not because there's anything wrong with the parts, the contents, not because there's anything wrong with the people that are working

• 35:10Gary Brecka?

  there, the bacteria, but because you changed the speed. What if he went in there one day and reversed the conveyor belt? What if he just ran it in the opposite direction? Throw up. It would screw the whole thing up, right? So by changing the pace of the gut, the speed of the gut, the conveyor belt, I've ruined this sequence of events. And I spend a lifetime trying to figure out what's wrong with the parts, what's wrong with the workers, what's wrong with the conveyor belt itself? Nothing. It's how quickly or slowly it's running because the motility, this peristaltic activity is affected. And once you supplement for this deficiency and you return that activity to normal, you

• 35:52Gary Brecka?

  find that all of a sudden, these strange allergies eviscerate and all of this gas and bloating and diarrhea and constipation and irritability and all of this inability to equate things that I'm eating back to what is going on in my gut seem to go away. It's true with all kinds of conditions. You know, we have subscribed in this world to the fact that we are so affected by disease and pathology. And once I get you to subscribe to the fact that you have a disease, I can get you to subscribe to a lifetime of medication. You know, this is true in hypertension. You know, it's another huge, you know, we think genetically inherited disease and a lot of families have, you know, grandfather had high blood pressure, dad had high blood pressure. Now the son has high blood pressure.

• 36:36Gary Brecka?

  So they go, oh, it's genetic, genetically inherited high blood pressure. Okay, well, what gene is being passed down from these generations to cause this? Well, they don't know. Okay, well, we know all of the genes. So if we don't know what gene it is, then let's look at the methylation genes. Let's look at the genes in the human body that refine raw materials. Because if you have a certain deficiency, for example, in hypertension, very often, not always, but very often, it's caused by elevated levels of an amino acid called homocysteine.

• 37:07Gary Brecka?

  You have it in your bloodstream right now. I have it in my bloodstream. Every listener to this podcast has homocysteine in their blood because we, in the process of normally refining this amino acid into something called methionine, we, we keep this level at a reasonable level. But when you can't break homocysteine down, it rises. When homocysteine rises, it's very irritating to what's called the endothelial lining of the blood vessel. It irritates the lining of the blood vessel. Well, when you irritate a blood vessel, it clamps down. Well, if you make the pipes smaller in a fixed system, pressure goes up. You have 63,000 miles of blood vessel in your body. It doesn't take much narrowing to drive pressure up.

• 37:51Gary Brecka?

  And so these people end up with hypertension, high blood pressure, and they go to the doctor, and the doctor does an EKG, it's normal. An EEG, it's normal. Stress EKG, it's normal. Cardiac cath, normal. Heart and lung sounds, normal. Dye contrast study, normal. The entire cardiac workup's normal. And then they still start pounding on the heart with medication because they can't figure out why the blood pressure's up. But they never actually looked at what raw material was missing in their body, not allowing them to bring the homocysteine down and allowing the vascular system to relax. As the vascular system relaxes, pressure returns to normal.

• 38:25Steven Bartlett?

  You spent 22 years at that insurance company.

• 38:28Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 38:28Steven Bartlett?

  Looking at the database that you describe. And as you're, as you're saying there, you know, much of the sort of medical profession and I think most of society.

• 38:38Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. And I don't want to attack the medical profession. I really, you know, I'm in no place, I am a huge lover and believer in modern medicine. It's saved people very close to me. And trust me, if I hit a windshield at 20 miles an hour, I want a surgeon, I want painkillers, I'm going to the ER.

• 38:52Steven Bartlett?

  But there's been this kind of, it's not a preventative approach to disease.

• 38:55Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 38:55Steven Bartlett?

  That we've taken over the last couple of decades. It really is, you know, to put a Band-Aid on something that's, that's emerged. And as you said at the start of this conversation, these predicaments, these diseases emerged decades before we even see the symptoms oftentimes. At the end of your 22 years at the insurance company, you started to look at these things which you call modifiable risk factors.

• 39:16Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 39:16Steven Bartlett?

  What is a modifiable risk factor? And what are the most common modifiable risk factors in your view?

• 39:23Gary Brecka?

  Well, I mean, one of the most common ones that I saw was, a modifiable risk factor is, it's a risk factor that you have. And if you changed it, it would have modified it, it would have a demonstrative impact on the trajectory of your life. So for example, anemia, right, low, low hemoglobin, low red blood cell count, low oxygen transport in the blood will exacerbate just about any condition that you have, right? So if you are hypertensive and anemic, if you are diabetic and anemic, if you are morbidly obese and anemic, meaning you have low blood oxygen because you have low red blood cells, low hemoglobin. What if you could modify the anemia? Well, if you could modify the anemia, carry more oxygen in the blood, you'd be much more

• 40:08Gary Brecka?

  resilient to all of these conditions, right? So the same thing is true with dementia and Alzheimer's and cognitive function. As you impair cognitive function, you increase the incidence of all-cause mortality. So a modifiable risk factor would be something like looking at the levels of vitamin D3 in the blood, in the body. So it's estimated that roughly 50% of the world's population is clinically deficient in vitamin D3.

• 40:37Steven Bartlett?

  Why is that important?

• 40:38Gary Brecka?

  Well, vitamin D3 is the only vitamin that a human being can make on our own. There's hundreds of vitamins in your bloodstream right now. You're only capable of making one, and it's vitamin D3, cholecalciferol. We make it from sunlight and cholesterol. You don't even need to eat to make this vitamin. There is not a single cell in the entire human body that does not have a receptor site for this vitamin. It also acts like a hormone. It's a calcium transport molecule. It's enormously impactful in your immune system. Clinical deficiency in vitamin D3 was, at one time, the second-leading cause of morbidity in COVID. You know, when they said COVID disproportionately affected minorities? If you ever heard that, it's true. So how did COVID disproportionately affect minorities? It wasn't like the virus didn't start...

• 41:23Gary Brecka?

  Going after certain minority populations, well, it actually did. But it wasn't because they were not minorities that had to do with the pigment of their skin. The darker the pigmentation of your skin, the lower the vitamin D3. The lower the vitamin D3, the more compromised the immune system. The more compromised the immune system, the more susceptible you are to attack.

• 41:39Steven Bartlett?

  That suggests that if you have darker skin like I do, that you should spend more time in the sunlight.

• 41:45Gary Brecka?

  Yes, it does. It absolutely does. I mean, you and I, just based on our skin tone, if you and I in a pair of board shorts went out and spent 30 minutes in sunlight, I would manufacture about 25,000 IUs, international units of vitamin D3. You would manufacture about 3,500.

• 42:00Steven Bartlett?

  Fuck, you know, that's not fair.

• 42:01Gary Brecka?

  It's not fair.

• 42:03Steven Bartlett?

  We can run fast.

• 42:04Gary Brecka?

  But you also, you also look better, older, and you don't age, you don't get wrinkles as much, and you have better oily skin. So there's some trade offs. So, so when you look at, you know, African American populations, Latino populations, Middle Eastern populations, the percentage of vitamin D3 deficiency approaches 85%, right? The truth is, most of us are not getting enough sun. It's not that we're getting too much. So let's talk about the depletion of this one nutrient.

• 42:28Steven Bartlett?

  Can I just ask then, before we move on to the depletion of that nutrient? Because I want to understand why that is. My guess was that because people with darker skins have grown up in sunlight.

• 42:38Gary Brecka?

  Correct.

• 42:38Steven Bartlett?

  We spent more time in, in the sunlight, I'm guessing, which meant that we adjusted our production of vitamin D3 to suit the environment we lived in.

• 42:48Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, you actually have a better barrier, right? You are less susceptible to skin damage from sunlight than someone with lighter skin, right? And so if you actually look, because I used to be a population mortality expert, you know, the longest life expectancies were centered right around the equator of the earth. If you look at most of the blue zones, they're going to be sort of closer to the equator of the earth. They're going to be closer to places where the sun shines longer periods of time throughout the year.

• 43:17Steven Bartlett?

  The blue zones.

• 43:18Gary Brecka?

  The blue zones are, sorry, the blue zones are areas of the world where people live extraordinarily long life expectancies, right? Mediterranean diets. So the longest life expectancies are centered around the equator. So for every 20 degrees.

• 43:37Gary Brecka?

  Latitude, because this is longitude. Every 20 degrees latitude, there's a precipitous drop in life expectancy. Until you get to the poles, where when I started in this industry, a, um, the lowest, the shortest life expectancy on earth existed. So when I was born in 1970, a true Eskimo had a 56 year life expectancy. 56 years. An Eskimo had 56. True Eskimo. So these are, these are at the poles. Now, why? Because they would go months without seeing the sun. And when they did see the sun, they were layered up. So they had brittle bone disease. They had autoimmune disease. They had immunocompromised conditions, all kinds of conditions that go with severe depletion in vitamin D3. And so I would see this in the medical record all the time. Right? I would see medical record after medical record.

• 44:22Gary Brecka?

  You know, patient has been, had a decade or longer of clinical deficiency in vitamin D3. Well, when you deplete this nutrient and you don't supplement for it. By the way, vitamin D3 is so easy to supplement for. Everybody should be taking vitamin D3 unless you're getting adequate sunlight. 5,000 IUs of D3 with 80 micrograms of K2. And, you know, you, you deplete this nutrient. Eventually you will develop rheumatoid arthritis like symptoms. Now, you don't have rheumatoid arthritis, but you have, you have the same identical symptoms when you're depleted in vitamin D3. You start waking up sore and achy like you had a workout the night before when you haven't. Soles of your feet and your ankles are tender when you get out of bed in the morning to walk to the bathroom and take your first pee. Your, your knees and hips and ankles start to stiffen up.

• 45:07Gary Brecka?

  Then it goes to cross the shoulders and eventually it's hard to make a really tight fist. Well, if you go to the wrong physician, family medicine practitioner, that's seeing a lot of high volume of patients, you start to give them that description, they go, you know what? You've got, you've got rheumatoid arthritis. I'm going to hit you with something called corticosteroids. I'm going to put you on some prednisone first, and then we're going to transition you to a corticosteroid like a methotrexate or one of these. And, and you're going to be fine. You know, you know, it's going to push this off into the future. Well, we knew that if you started corticosteroids, that at first they had an anti-inflammatory effect. But you had roughly six years and one day until you're having a joint replacement. Because first they're anti-inflammatory, but then they eat the joint like a termite.

• 45:49Gary Brecka?

  And so it was so accurate that if you were a 60-year-old female and you were misdiagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis because you had a vitamin D3 deficiency, I would artificially advance your age six years, I would schedule the joint replacement, that wasn't required, by the way, I would schedule the joint replacement, and then I would begin to reduce what's called your ambulatory profile, how well you ambulate, how well you move. And we know now that sitting is the new smoking, right? Sedentary lifestyle is the leading cause of all-cause mortality. And so as I start to reduce your ambulatory profile, I bring in all of the diseases that exacerbate with reduced motility. So if I back this up, you were diagnosed with a condition that you didn't have, because you had a deficiency in a very simple nutrient.

• 46:31Gary Brecka?

  So then you were put on a medication that wasn't required. This caused you to have surgery that you didn't need, to replace a joint that wasn't initially going to be defective. This reduced your mobility, and it brought diseases forward that you never would have caught, and you died early from a condition you never would have had because you had a deficiency in a nutrient that was misdiagnosed, mistreated, and led to your early demise. And I can give you hundreds of examples like this, and this is why, if you look at the 2016 Harvard study, the 2019 Johns Hopkins study, medical error is the third leading cause of death. Medical error? Medical error. Is that misdiagnosis?

• 47:07Gary Brecka?

  Misdiagnosis and medical error. The average American over 50, 52, is on five prescription medications. These are synthetic chemical pharmaceuticals, right? And in a lot of cases, we don't know the long-term side effects of these. In a lot of these cases, we actually don't even know the mechanism by which they work. If you actually open the PDR, that comes, the disclaimer that comes with a lot of these medications, you'll see that they say "mechanism of action unknown." Well, it's a sleep medication. How does it make me sleep? I don't know. Just makes you sleep, right? In fact, most people that are suffering from sleep issues are suffering from sleep issues, not because they can't

• 47:50Gary Brecka?

  sleep, not because they're not tired, because their mind is keeping them awake, right? If you have a gene mutation called COMT, catecholomethyltransferase, then what happens to you is you lay down to go to sleep. And there's nothing more frustrating than one spouse having this gene mutation and one not. Oh my God, I think you're talking about me and my partner. I'm the one that I need some like sound or something to go to sleep because she's just out like a light. There you go. See, and nothing's more frustrating because. So annoying. I sometimes sleep in another room. Okay. So the reason why you're not falling asleep is because when your environment quiets, your mind wakes up. And if you actually hone in on the kind of things you're thinking about, you're thinking about the most innocuous little nonsense. Right? I mean, it's like, did I get everything on my grocery list? Did my belt match my shoes today?

• 48:34Gary Brecka?

  Did I return that email? It's nothing that couldn't wait till the next day. A hundred percent. Yeah. And so, and sometimes you can even catch yourself going, what am I doing? Thinking about the color of dishes I'm going to have if I threw a party, which I'm probably not going to throw. It's like, how did I get down this rabbit hole? Right? And this is because, you know, the, you're not quieting the mind at the pace that you are exciting the mind. So in other words, when you lay down to go to sleep and your environment quiets, your mind starts to wake up. So you need to be distracted so that your mind doesn't continue to run. But if you just put the right amino acid balance, in fact, I would bet my career, you have this gene mutation.

• 49:15Gary Brecka?

  I will pay for your test if you don't. It's $599. It's a cheek swab you do once in your lifetime and it will tell you. If you have this gene mutation, C O M T, and if you do, I'll tell you exactly what supplement to take and it will become a permanent thing of your past. What supplement?

• 49:31Gary Brecka?

  Don't end your sentence there, Gary. So it's called L-methionine. And you take L-methionine, you take methylfolate. And depending on where the gene break is and how severe it is, you add, you may add something called SAM E, S adenosyl methionine. And these sound like fancy names. They're just fancy names for vitamins and amino acids. They, you, all of these are in your bloodstream right now. So when you look at the sequence of breaks that somebody has, then you can tell them exactly what supplement to take. When they take this supplement, their body's no longer deficient. Right? Deficiencies over time express themselves as all kinds of things. You know, there's a lot of people that can't reach elevated emotional states for any prolonged period of time.

• 50:14Gary Brecka?

  This is because mood and emotional states are recipes, just like a, you know, a chef bakes a recipe. But if you went to a bakery chef and you said, you can bake whatever you want, you just can't use butter. Okay, it doesn't sound like a big deal. It's just one ingredient. But think of the number of cookies, pastries, pies, brownies, you know, that it would affect. It would affect so many different recipes just by removing one ingredient. This is the same thing that happens in human beings. If you couldn't use serotonin to assemble mood. Okay, now any emotional state that requires that neurotransmitter as a part of its structure, you can't assemble.

• 50:50Steven Bartlett?

  And as it relates to that mutation, when you people hear the term mutation, they think of it as being something that's happened in me. And I'm maybe, you know, one of a few that have that mutation. Mutation sounds like a

• 51:02Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, it does sound. It does sound like an alien's about to start.

• 51:05Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, but it also sounds like, you know, my sister won't have it and it's just me.

• 51:10Gary Brecka?

  Okay, so a gene mutation means that, you know, we get a copy of our genes from each parent. Yeah. And then these, the copy of these genes is passed down to us. And we know, you know, most of us are familiar with basic genetics. Eye color, skin color, detached ear lobes. But there's nothing you can do with that information. So beyond your ancestry, you know, whether you've got Irish heritage or Native American Indian or what have you. I mean, those are, if you did a 23 and me, you'd be able to find your ancestry, which is also your genetic history. That's not actionable information. When you look at the genes of methylation, right? And there are several of them. I look at five majors and a few minors. When you look at the genes of methylation,

• 51:55Gary Brecka?

  these are the genes that code for how materials are taken into the body or refined into the usable form. And these are not mutations that you're going to suffer from. What they do is they, they, they cause deficiencies to arise in the body. And it's this deficiency that leads to The expression of these conditions. And so when you can't adequately methylate neurotransmitters, you have a deficiency in a certain neurotransmitter, any mood, any emotional state that requires that neurotransmitter, you can't assemble. If you have a deficiency in the ability to quiet the mind,

• 52:37Gary Brecka?

  then you have excess neurotransmitters in the brain, which causes it to stay in awakened state.

• 52:43Steven Bartlett?

  So that gene that is responsible for my loud mind when I go to sleep, do you have any idea the amount of people that have that particular gene?

• 52:52Gary Brecka?

  Well, 44% of the world's population has a gene mutation called MTHFR, Methyl-ene tetrahydrofolate reductase. This is a genetic mutation that impairs the ability to convert folate into methylfolate or folic acid into methylfolate. And that might not sound like a big deal, but folic acid is one of the most prevalent nutrients in the human diet. And the thing about folic acid is that folic acid is an entirely man-made chemical. Folic acid is not found anywhere on the surface of the earth. You can't find folic acid anywhere naturally in nature. And yet, we give folic acid to pregnant women when they get pregnant, because we tell pregnant women that folic acid prevents neural tube defects. Well, that's patently false. Folic acid doesn't prevent anything.

• 53:37Gary Brecka?

  Folic acid has to be converted, first into tetrahydrofolate, then dihydrofolate, but eventually it becomes something called methylfolate. And that prevents a neural tube defect. Well, what if, like 44% of the population, 44% of women, this woman has this gene mutation, and you give her folic acid, the man-made version of folate, and she can't convert it into methylfolate? This is where postpartum depression develops. And, you know, I have not seen a single peer-reviewed, published clinical study linking elevated levels of hormones in female pregnancy to postpartum depression. But if you give a woman that can't methylate folic acid 1,400% of the daily allowance of folic acid,

• 54:21Gary Brecka?

  and she can't break it down, then she goes nuts. And then eventually, the pregnancy ends, the depression goes away, and so she blames it on the pregnancy, not on the vitamin. And you know, we do this over and over and over again, you know, we have in the modern industrial world, we try to synthesize what occurs naturally in nature in a laboratory. You know, there's three types of B12, right? Adenosylcobalamin, hydroxycobalamin, methylcobalamin. These forms of B12 occur naturally in nature. There's one that we make synthetically in a laboratory. It's called cyanocobalamin. We make it from hydrogen cyanide. It is useless in the human body. The human body actually has to take it and convert it into the active form of B12 called hydroxycobalamin.

• 55:04Gary Brecka?

  And so a lot of times the supplements that we're taking us are causing more harm than good. And we're taking them because a doctor said, well, I'm pregnant. My OB GYN told me to take this synthetic chemical called folic acid, which it's always beyond me. Why anyone would think that something that we make in a laboratory that's entirely synthetic, that isn't natural, that isn't found anywhere on the surface of the earth could ever be required for optimal health. I mean, just in its, on its surface, that sounds strange to me. But you know, yet we do, and we don't understand this process of methylation. So if you, once you understand where your genetic mutations are, where the genetic inability to refine raw materials is, you can go about supplementing, targeted supplementing for that deficiency.

• 55:48Steven Bartlett?

  So you would recommend people take a genetic test to find out these answers, right?

• 55:52Gary Brecka?

  I'd recommend everyone take that test once in their lifetime.

• 55:55Steven Bartlett?

  You know, I, I'm, I'm in the camp that we're, as humans, we're not broken.

• 56:00Gary Brecka?

  Like, I totally agree with you.

• 56:01Steven Bartlett?

  You, do you know what I mean? And so whenever there's something going on in my body or, you know, a way that I am or habit I have that I'm like, oh, why do I do that? I'm always trying to figure out the sort of, I guess, the ancestral reason why that might have helped me to survive or what's going on. So when I hear mutation, it's, it sounds a little bit like broken to me.

• 56:17Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah. So I shouldn't use the, I mean, we use the term mutation, but basically, you know, in our ancestry, right, we pass on our entire genetic code. Which a lot of that is hair color, eye color, skin color, you know, our heritage. But we also pass on how our body refines certain raw materials. And it's not to say that it's good or bad or broken or fixed. But there are certain families and human beings that have an inability to refine certain raw materials. And if we could be aware of this, it is astounding what happens to human beings when you just give their body the raw material to do its job. You know, lots of people that have attention deficit disorder, have trouble sleeping,

• 57:02Gary Brecka?

  will also have trouble with prioritization. They just don't know it. They'll say things like, "I work really well under pressure." Right? Most entrepreneurs say, "I work really well under pressure." Do you say that?

• 57:13Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, my God.

• 57:14Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 57:15Steven Bartlett?

  I only work when there is pressure.

• 57:16Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 57:17Steven Bartlett?

  I was that kid in school that would only do the test when, you know, there was an hour left to go, or, you know, the homework, whatever.

• 57:22Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, so many entrepreneurs are that way. And when you say you work really well under pressure, physiologically, what you're saying is, "I lack the ability to set priorities internally, so I use external pressure to set my priorities." And why is that? It's because when you don't have the right methylated nutrients in the body, you lend equal weight to every thought that comes into your mind. Right? So you could be working on, you know, the deal, the joint venture, business closing of a lifetime. Right? And you got the contract and you have 45 minutes to get it back to your lawyer. You know, the deal's permanently going to go away. This is a life-changing deal. You've waited for this your entire life. It's a very meaningful event. You're working your way through this legal document and you look over at your phone

• 58:07Gary Brecka?

  and there's an Instagram message. And you're like, "Oh, that's my neighbor's cousin's kid fishing in a lake. And I wonder if he catches a fish." So you start looking at it and you're like, "See, he's still casting." "No, he didn't catch it that time." Now meanwhile, this has gone from 45 minutes to 35 minutes. And now it's down to 25 minutes. And all of a sudden, you go, "Oh, you know, crap." You turn the phone off, which didn't mean anything anyway. And you focus all of your attention. And because you're very intelligent and you execute and you can hyper-focus, you hyper-focus on this and you worm your way through it. And one minute before the deadline, you hit the send button. Lawyer gets it, the deal goes through and you go. I work really well under pressure.

• 58:49Steven Bartlett?

  What's that called? That process you described there is many people describe that as procrastination.

• 58:54Gary Brecka?

  It's procrastination, but it's procrastination because you give equal weight to all of these different variants that come into your and that come into your your field. So you actually give equal priority to very unequal events.

• 59:09Steven Bartlett?

  But also, you know, sometimes if I'm looking at that contract, the contract clause is a little bit difficult. And my attempt to maybe just escape discomfort would be, I'll just go do the dishes. Right. And so I had Neil O'Reilly on the podcast, he wrote a book called Indistractable. And he says, we're creatures that we're not pleasure seeking creatures. We're creatures that are avoiding discomfort, essentially.

• 59:30Gary Brecka?

  I think that aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort. Could not agree with you more.

• 59:36Steven Bartlett?

  Let's use Dana White as an example.

• 59:38Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 59:39Steven Bartlett?

  Because, you know, the reason why I came across your work is because of a clip that, you know, involved Dana White. And I'm sure you I know you get this a lot because I've seen you be asked about this in interviews. But for context, for anybody listening, I don't know where I was or, ah, now I know what happened. My friend sent into a WhatsApp group, a clip of Dana White talking about you. And that's the clip that made me go down the rabbit hole. I watched that clip. I then did some research. I then watched a series of videos of you online talking about health. And I watched you asking audience members to stand up and name the, you know, the health issue they were suffering and you on the spot told them what was missing from their their life, their diet, whatever

• 1:00:22Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:00:47Gary Brecka?

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

• 1:01:31Gary Brecka?

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

• 1:02:14Gary Brecka?

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

• 1:02:57Gary Brecka?

  They said, last name's White. I said, Dana White? And they said, yeah. And I go, wow, what's the life-threatening alert? They said, triglycerides are almost 800.

• 1:03:08Gary Brecka?

  Now triglycerides are a measure of blood fat. Okay, it shouldn't be above 149. At 200 or 300, this is a cataclysmic level in the blood, especially in a fasted state. Okay, we pulled his blood in a fasted state. They weren't 400, they weren't 500, they weren't 600, they weren't 700, they were like 768. So they were, I mean, this is an enormous number. And so I said, okay, I need to get the blood work over to, you know, to the doctor. And when they sent the, um, the blood work into the portal, I then saw that he was insulin resistant. He was hyperinsulinemic. He was prediabetic. He had skyrocketing levels of cholesterol. He had, he was hypertriglyceridemic. He was hyper, um, homocystinemic.

• 1:03:53Gary Brecka?

  This homocysteine that I told you elevates and causes the blood vessels to constrict. Um, I mean, he had all of these conditions. I literally, at that moment, booked a flight for 7:30 or 8:30 in the morning to head out and see him. And, um, because I said, I need to go see him in person. And I remember, I think his assistant called me and I was at the airport and she said, hey, Dana wants to know if his life expectancy is in. I go, well, I'm on my way to see him, you know? Um, and she goes, oh God, is it like that? I said, yeah, it's like that. And so I flew out to see him and I sat down with Dana. And when we talked about the blood work, I didn't even explain the levels.

• 1:04:38Gary Brecka?

  I explained the symptom. Um, I did not know that he was on a CPAP machine, but I said, I am surprised that you can actually sleep through the night because he was so hypoxic. Um, red blood cell count, hemoglobin levels. Uh, I'm surprised you can even sleep through the night without like just waking up choking, gagging. He's like, dude, I'm on a CPAP machine. I wake up every night, I throw up in the middle of the night. I throw up so much, I'm losing my voice. And I said, this level of claudication triglycerides in the bloodstream, I'm surprised you can even bend down and tie your shoes. That's not painful to tie your shoes. Not that it's not restrictive to tie your shoes. It's not painful. Like, it doesn't feel like the skin's gonna peel off your legs. And he went, what the fuck? I mean, he slammed his hand down. He was like, how did you, you know, how did you know that? And I said,

• 1:05:21Gary Brecka?

  Dana, your level of brain fog and fatigue right now has got to be at a crushing level of fatigue. I don't know how, the only thing getting you through the day is your own stubborn willpower. And I'm surprised you can remember anything from one minute to the next. And his whole staff was like, dude, he's so forgetful. He passes out in meetings. He's sleeping in the planes. He's gagging, snoring. These were not things I necessarily knew about him. So I began to describe all the outcomes of these kinds of conditions. And I said, look, if, if you don't do what we're gonna ask you to do for the next 10 weeks, you know, based on this blood work and the medical records that we pulled for the previous 10 years and the demographic data we pulled for 10 years, you have a life expectancy

• 1:06:04Gary Brecka?

  of 10.4 years. You know, for a 52-year-old man to realize that he's not gonna make it out of his 60s, a big realization. And he flicked a switch, a level of discipline that, you know, I haven't seen in a patient in a long time. He goes, dude, I'll do whatever you tell me to do. So we wrote a prescription ketogenic diet. I'm a fan of the keto diet. I don't think everybody needs to be on the keto diet, but by prescription ketogenic diet, we wrote a keto diet right down to the grocery list, keto reset diet. And I said, if it's literally, if it's not on here, you can't eat it, Dana. This is your grocery list. You go to the store, you buy this. You send your chef to the store to buy this. You make this. If it's not this recipe, if it's not on here, you literally can't eat

• 1:06:45Gary Brecka?

  it. Your only leeway is water and the supplements. And, and we started a process of balancing hormones, controlling his glycemic index, of using amino acids to bring down his level of homocysteine, to actually try to fix the insulin resistance, to reduce his triglycerides. And in 10 weeks, He had such a material change in his blood work. I forget how much weight he had lost. I think he had lost almost 28 or 30 pounds. He's over 40 pounds now. By the end of the fifth month, he was completely off of every prescription medication. He was on, he's down 44 pounds. He lost, you know, he's no longer using the CPAP machine.

• 1:07:26Gary Brecka?

  He no longer is prediabetic. He no longer has insulin resistance. He no longer has life-threatening levels of triglyceride. In fact, they're normal. His kidney function improved. His liver function improved. His immune system strengthened. He feels like a 35-year-old man again. His skin tone all improved. His blood pressure returned to normal. He's not on any blood pressure medication. So his blood pressure returned to normal. And he was like, dude, I had no idea I could feel this good. I feel fricking amazing.

• 1:07:53Steven Bartlett?

  And his life expectancy?

• 1:07:56Gary Brecka?

  Almost tripled.

• 1:07:57Steven Bartlett?

  Almost tripled?

• 1:07:58Gary Brecka?

  Almost tripled. Just under 30 years.

• 1:08:02Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:08:29Gary Brecka?

  So, you know, he also started something called the Superhuman Protocol. And Superhuman Protocol is using magnetism, oxygen, and light, right? So, the only things that we really get from Mother Nature, the big benefit we get from Mother Nature, is we get magnetism from the earth, we get oxygen from the air, we get light from the sun. The truth is, most of us are not contacting the surface of the earth that much anymore. So, he bought $150,000 worth of equipment, a PMF mat, an oxygen, what's called a HyperMax oxygen, to do exercise with oxygen therapy, and a red light therapy bed. And I had him use that equipment every single day, seven days a week. But if your listeners want to do it for free... You can take off your shoes and contact the surface of the earth.

• 1:09:14Gary Brecka?

  And I'm talking about bare feet on soil, dirt, grass, sand. Because earthing and grounding is a very real thing. We actually discharge into the earth. We actually, human beings, build up a charge. Do you know that pH, the acid alkaline scale, pH stands for potential hydrogen? It's a charge. It's a complete fallacy that you can get alkaline by drinking alkaline water. That's the biggest marketing myth ever sold to the public. But you can get alkaline by contacting the surface of the earth. So if you don't have 150 grand, which I don't expect anybody listening to this podcast to spend 150 grand, but he did. I said, you need a PMF mat so you can be alkaline. You need to spend 10 minutes a day breathing 95% O2 under mild exercise and you need to lay in a red light therapy bed.

• 1:09:59Gary Brecka?

  So in the absence of the superhuman protocol, you can become superhuman by contacting the earth and by learning to do breathwork.

• 1:10:07Steven Bartlett?

  Let's talk about breathwork.

• 1:10:09Gary Brecka?

  I spend eight minutes every day doing a very specific series of breathwork and I'll teach it to you now. You said your wife is certified in?

• 1:10:16Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, my partner, she's a breathwork practitioner.

• 1:10:18Gary Brecka?

  Oh, your partner?

• 1:10:19Steven Bartlett?

  I've done breathwork with her. I've done breathwork with a few people, but no one's ever had the profound impact on me through breathwork that she has. I've never shouted her out before, so I probably should. Her Instagram is @Meloai for anybody that's interested in breathwork.

• 1:10:34Gary Brecka?

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

• 1:11:18Gary Brecka?

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

• 1:11:59Gary Brecka?

  God knows what they think we're doing out there. Right outside this podcast. They're like, a bunch of freak out. I knew it was a cult.

• 1:12:08Gary Brecka?

  I knew he was a cult leader. But um, so you do three rounds of 30 breaths. On the 30th breath, you exhale and you hold, allow the carbohydrate receptor to reset. When you don't feel you can hold anymore, you take a deep breath in, you hold again, and then you let it out slow.

• 1:12:25Gary Brecka?

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

• 1:13:08Gary Brecka?

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

• 1:13:27Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:13:37Gary Brecka?

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

• 1:14:20Gary Brecka?

  Otto Wahlberg, won both of his Nobel prizes for his work in exercise with oxygen therapy. You want to be a superhuman, do mild exercise every day while breathing 95% O2. It's important that you're exercising. And then after that, you move into a red light therapy bed, photobiomodulation. So, you know, if you don't have access to a HyperMax oxygen machine, just do the breath work, get the breath in, you know, exchange the oxygen tension in the tissues and expose yourself to first light.

• 1:14:47Steven Bartlett?

  What about cold, cold water plunging?

• 1:14:49Gary Brecka?

  So I'm a huge fan of cold water plunging, but probably not for the reasons why you think. You know, I also sit on the board of the NFL Alumni Association Athletica as a health service director, you know, there, there was a time when we used to think that putting athletes in cold water after exercise was good because of its anti-inflammatory effects. We know now that that's only about 15% of the benefit. The majority of the benefit comes from something called a cold shock protein. If you really want to be fascinated, Google cold shock proteins. These are reserve proteins that are in your liver. They're dumped into the bloodstream in an effort to save your life when you put yourself in cold water. They scour the body of free radical oxidation, they increase the rate of protein synthesis, muscle repair. They are free. You get them when you put yourself in cold water.

• 1:15:33Gary Brecka?

  I don't know what the Celsius conversion is, but I use 50 degrees for three minutes. Minimum six minutes maximum. Cold. Yes, it's actually not that cold. I mean, you know, I see people getting in thirty seven, thirty eight degree water. There's no evidence that I've read that shows that colder is better. You get a peripheral vasoconstriction, so it forces all the oxygen into the core and up to the brain. And you get an activation of something called brown fat, right? Thermogenesis comes from brown fat. And for the women that are listening, for some reason, I seem to ensnare the women when I say this. Remember that the definition of a calorie is a measure of heat, right? I mean, the definition of a calorie is the amount of energy it takes to raise one cubic centimeter of water, one degree centigrade. So if a calorie

• 1:16:15Gary Brecka?

  is a measure of heat, then this means that when heat's leaving your body, calories are leaving your body. So if there is nothing, nothing, no amount of exercise hits cardio, no type of cardiovascular or weight training that comes anywhere close to immersing yourself in cold water in terms of what will strip fat off your body fast. If you want to strip fat off your body, get in cold water three to six minutes a day.

• 1:16:42Gary Brecka?

  That's fascinating. Because the oxygen rushes to my head, that's why it has a really profound impact on mood. That's why it has a very profound impact on mood. Because if you think about it, what's the reason why we need deep sleep? What happens in deep sleep that's so special? There's a secondary oxygen transfer. We transfer oxygen from the periphery, from the extremities, to the brain. Remember, the brain's a non metabolic organ. So in other words, it's unlike a muscle. If I pick up a weight and start to work out my muscle, my arm, my body will send more blood, more amino acids, more oxygen to that muscle because it's working. Well, if I'm sitting at my computer and I'm watching reruns of The Simpsons, or I'm sitting at my computer and I'm solving the most complex joint venture agreement, partnership agreement with all kinds of mathematical equations, my brain

• 1:17:24Gary Brecka?

  gets the same amount of nutrients, same amount of blood flow, same amount of oxygen. So it eats the same meal, whether or not it's in a dead sprint, or whether or not it's just chilling on the couch. Except in deep sleep, and when you're in cold water, because it's forcing the oxygen up to the brain.

• 1:17:41Steven Bartlett?

  You said earlier about about comfort.

• 1:17:44Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 1:17:45Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:17:59Gary Brecka?

  Correct.

• 1:18:00Steven Bartlett?

  Sounds like a good thing.

• 1:18:01Gary Brecka?

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

• 1:18:45Gary Brecka?

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

• 1:19:31Gary Brecka?

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

• 1:20:16Gary Brecka?

  You know, you did this on September 21st. You did this when we were on the boat with my boys. You did this at, you know, our Christmas holiday party four Christmases ago. Because that emotion is linked to that memory, so you can recall that memory very accurately. Well, our memory, our hippocampus is what projects into the prefrontal cortex. It determines our future. It's our conscience. So this means if emotion is the only gateway to memory and memory projects to our conscience, which is our future, this means that your current emotional state determines your future. That's a biophysiological fact. So like, for example, if you had an argument with your spouse on the way to work and you get out of the car and you slam the door and you walk into the office, when you break the plane of the door of that office, the only memories you can recall about the office

• 1:21:01Gary Brecka?

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

• 1:21:44Gary Brecka?

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

• 1:22:26Steven Bartlett?

  I do a lot of traveling, Gary. I travel all over the world all the time.

• 1:22:30Gary Brecka?

  Oh, it's one of my favorites.

• 1:22:31Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. You travel a lot?

• 1:22:32Gary Brecka?

  Tons.

• 1:22:33Steven Bartlett?

  You've got a bit of a system for traveling because when I travel, I feel like shit.

• 1:22:37Gary Brecka?

  Oh, I feel amazing when I travel. And I post all about it on my Instagram. You know, all I do is teach on Instagram, but you know, I went Miami, Atlanta, New York, London, Stade, Switzerland, Dubai, Dubai, Miami, Miami, Vegas. I got, I got up at four o'clock this morning to come here. I mean, I landed here at, I think, seven fifteen this morning.

• 1:22:56Steven Bartlett?

  And you're flying out of here.

• 1:22:57Gary Brecka?

  I'm flying out of here now.

• 1:22:58Steven Bartlett?

  In five minutes.

• 1:22:59Gary Brecka?

  I'm flying out of here in five minutes and I'm going on a red eye back to Miami.

• 1:23:02Steven Bartlett?

  And you feel good when you travel and I feel like shit. What do you think we're doing differently? If you were to guess?

• 1:23:07Gary Brecka?

  Okay. So there's three things that, that you can do when you travel. And first and foremost, and I don't know why anybody talks about this, is that, you know, everybody talks about waking with the sun, which I'm a big believer in, or forcing yourself to stay up to try to get onto a new time zone. When you change time zones, the single most important thing that you can do is preserve your sleeping window. Do not eat during your normal sleeping window. Let me tell you what I mean. Let's say that you're on the east coast. You live in New York and you go to bed at 10 and you get up at 6 a.m. Okay? You go to bed at 10 p.m., get up at 6 a.m. Most people go to bed at midnight, get up at 6 a.m. So let's say you go to bed 10, you get up 6 a.m. And now you go to London.

• 1:23:49Gary Brecka?

  Okay. So now London is, depending on the time of the year, six hours ahead. If you eat. During 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM New York time, there is zero chance you will adjust to that time zone. We are more tied to our digestion in terms of our circadian rhythm than we are to the sleep-wake cycle of the sun. So, in other words, if I fly to London and I start eating when it's 3:30 in the morning my time, my body goes, "What the heck are you doing? We're having steak and eggs and a champagne. It's 3:30 in the morning." Right? Your circadian rhythm is screwed up. So, shift your sleeping window and preserve that sleeping window in your new time zone and do not eat during those times.

• 1:24:31Gary Brecka?

  So, in other words, in London, that would be 6:00 AM to noon. So, between 6:00 AM and noon, I'm not going to eat. I'll have coffee, or I'll have water, or fluids, but I will not start to eat until noon. For how long do I preserve that window? Well, depending on how long you're going to be there, usually I'm only, if you're there a week or less, preserve your sleeping window the entire week if you're there. When you're there for more than seven to 10 days, then you need to really adjust to that time zone. What happens physiologically if I don't? If you don't, you will irrevocably mess up your circadian rhythm. I mean, just imagine it. So, let's say you lived in New York and you didn't travel. You go to bed at 10:00 and you wake up at 6:00 AM.

• 1:25:14Gary Brecka?

  Try for three nights, setting alarm for 3:30 in the morning, get up, eat a big breakfast at 3:30 and try to go back to bed. Watch what happens to your sleep cycle, right? You'll destroy it. So, we don't, we preserve our sleeping window. The other thing is, I fast on domestic flights. I don't care what time or where I'm going. If I fly anywhere in the continental United States, I fast on airplanes. So, I allow myself, you know, water, I hydrate, and I have black coffee. On international flights, I just came back from Dubai, it was 16 hours, I ate on that plane. And then, for flights that are more than an hour, every hour on the hour, I get up, out of my seat, I don't care how weird it looks, I go to the back of the plane, I do 25 air squats, I go either into the bathroom or in the back of the plane, I do 25 deep breaths.

• 1:25:56Gary Brecka?

  On a 10-hour flight, I'll do 250 deep breaths and 250 air squats over the course of a 10-hour flight. You feel amazing. And then, I eat fats and proteins on flights. Carbohydrates at altitude are terrible for you and it's usually where all the salt hides. Remember that, you know, there's, there are essential fatty acids, meaning they're essential for life. There's two of them. If you don't get these fatty acids, you'll die. There's nine essential amino acids, they're proteins, they're essential for life. If you don't get these nine essential amino acids, you'll die. There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate.

• 1:26:30Steven Bartlett?

  Why, why are carbs so bad in the air?

• 1:26:33Gary Brecka?

  Carbs are bad in the air because as soon as you divert blood from your brain to digestion, let's not forget, it's a 30 foot long tube. The higher the, the consumption of carbohydrate, the more blood floods to your gut.

• 1:26:46Steven Bartlett?

  So you're gonna feel like crying.

• 1:26:47Gary Brecka?

  So now you're seated and your gut is flooded with blood. It's all come from your brain. So now you're tired, you're not focused, you're exhausted and you're seated. So you're, this isn't a good place to be tired because you're not going to get good sleep. Right. So I said a huge priority on energy. Energy is a huge priority to me. So when I look at food, I look at it two ways. It's going to serve me, it's going to steal from me. When I'm, I'm flying first class back to Miami tonight, it's a red eye. I'm going to actually use that time to sleep. I'm not going to waste it on eating because I know that I'm, first of all, I'm past my feeding window now because I preserve my East Coast time feeding window. And this is what keeps your, the train running on time.

• 1:27:25Steven Bartlett?

  What is energy? You said energy there. What is that?

• 1:27:27Gary Brecka?

  Energy, energy is oxygen in your blood. Everything that you perceive about energy is nothing more than oxygen in your blood. If you told me, Gary, I had a lot of energy today. Physiologically, what you're saying is I had a lot of oxygen in my blood today. Oxygen equals energy.

• 1:27:42Steven Bartlett?

  At the start of this conversation, I asked you a question. I said, why should people listen to your message? At the, we're now at the end of the conversation. What have I missed that is pertinent, important to your message that we haven't discussed?

• 1:27:54Gary Brecka?

  You know, I feel like I could talk about this forever. Like to me, I feel like the podcast is just getting going. You know, I, I, I, I believe in human beings and, and the ability of the body to heal itself. I believe in the power of the mind and frequency and the power of this to heal this. I guess my, my message would be, and I don't think that you've missed anything. My message would be that optimal health is found in the basics, not in the complicated fancy norotropics or some rare root that's buried deep in the Amazon jungle. It's found in the basics. The further we get away from the basics, magnetism, oxygen, light, whole foods, the more unhealthy we become. And you know, my message, what I try to teach on Instagram and what the message that I get to

• 1:28:37Gary Brecka?

  the world is, you know, not that you need a lot of fancy equipment. Sure, if you can afford it, you can have it. But if you get back to the basics with Mother Nature and back to the basics with, you know, our foods, a good rule of thumb is if your great grandmother wouldn't recognize it, don't eat it. Then you'll find a state of optimal health that's beyond anything that you thought imaginable. There's a superhuman inside of everybody listening to this podcast.

• 1:29:01Steven Bartlett?

  Gary, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're asking it for. The question that's been left for you is, what is the unobvious thing that you struggle with?

• 1:29:16Gary Brecka?

  What is the unobvious thing that I struggle with? You know, I, I believe that I'm so committed to my craft and I'm so committed to being authentic that I struggle sometimes like everyone else when I, I have an extra burden of guilt whenever I want to just to have any kind of marginal enjoyment. Like if I just want to have a cocktail or I want to eat some birthday cake, which I know is not going to hurt me and it's not, you know, it's not going to throw me off, but I, I really struggle with that. I feel like I'm letting the whole world

• 1:29:58Gary Brecka?

  down when I do that. And I know that it's not, and it's ridiculous and you shouldn't be that, you know, being that disciplined actually is, you know, is not sustainable over, over a long period of time. I think that, like a lot of people listening to this podcast, I'm, I'm very hard on myself, on my own worst enemy sometimes. And I have an insatiable appetite to do what I'm doing. And I think that if I just wasn't so hard on myself, I probably would find it a lot easier.

• 1:30:34Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you so much. You're welcome. Everybody listening to this should go check out 10x Health. Much of the information you've discussed here lives within that ecosystem and your Instagram and your website and those channels which I've explored in depth are incredible resources to understand how to start your journey to living a more healthy life. And that's everything that you espouse. You're incredible, Gary. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. It's very, very rare that I find someone online. I then DM them and I nagged you on DM for a couple of months to get you here. But I think everybody listening to this can understand why. You're doing incredible work, incredibly important work and incredibly important time to shift a narrative. And as I said to you, I think before we started recording or in an interval, I realised that this is literally just the start for you in the journey and the mission that you're on. Yeah. That's so clear to me.

• 1:31:20Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you. I feel the same way.