The ONE Root Cause Behind Every Autoimmune Disease | Gary Brecka

Your immune system may not be malfunctioning — it may be doing exactly what it was designed to do. Gary Brecka joins Dr. Josh Axe to reveal why one root cause drives nearly every autoimmune condition, and what you can actually do about it. **In this episode:** - Why you likely don't have multiple autoimmune diseases — and the single upstream trigger (mold, mycotoxins, parasites, viruses, or heavy metals) that creates the domino effect - How the blood functions as a living ecosystem, and why "cleaning the tank" is the first step to healing chronic illness - The breathwork protocol Gary uses daily — no equipment, no cost — and the science behind intermittent hypoxia reversing biological age - What the X Prize longevity study found: 8.6 years of age reversal using oxygen training, less than halfway through the trial - Why sleep is the most underprotected lever in your health — and what community and connection do to lifespan that no supplement can replicate - The free, foundational habits Gary ranks above every biohacking device in his own home Uncover what’s really going on in your body with advanced biomarker testing for hormones, thyroid, and metabolism— plus a 1-hour consultation with a Senior Health Advisor! → http://mybloodwork.com *Disclaimer: The bloodwork our team runs at mybloodwork.com covers a handful of the biomarkers listed in the guide above — including critical thyroid and metabolic markers — plus a 1-hour consultation with a Senior Health Advisor, but does NOT cover all 25. You will want to consult your primary or functional doctor for the entire list. Thank you to our sponsors! Sunlighten Sauna: https://get.sunlighten.com/axepodcast Manukora Manuka Honey: https://manukora.com/axe Watch The Dr. Josh Axe Show every Monday & Thursday on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@drjoshaxe?sub_confirmation=1 🎧 Early Access! Our listeners enjoy every episode before anyone else! Tune in below and join our exclusive group of listeners → Spotify: https://bit.ly/DrJoshAxeSpotify Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/3JDvWcS Pre-order my NEW BOOK, Heal Your Cells → www.healyourcellsbook.com Watch my free training on how to naturally balance your blood sugar and reverse your symptoms → http://DrAxeDiabetesClass.com Discover practical steps you can take today to start healing your thyroid naturally → http://DrAxeThyroidClass.com If you’re ready to start feeling like yourself again and balance your hormones, take my free class → http://DrAxeHormoneClass.com CONNECT WITH DR. JOSH AXE Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/drjoshaxe/ Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/DrJoshAxe/ TikTok → https://www.tiktok.com/@thedrjoshaxeshow/ X → https://x.com/drjoshaxe/ LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshaxe Website → http://thehealthinstitute.com Sign up for my newsletter → https://bit.ly/4oE9Jf3 Ask Dr. Axe → http://speakpipe.com/drjoshaxe CONNECT WITH GUEST Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/garybrecka Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/ultimatehuman TikTok → https://www.tiktok.com/@garybreckaofficial X → https://x.com/thegarybrecka YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@ultimatehumanpodcast 0:00 Why AI will disrupt modern medicine 1:40 Introduction — Gary Brecka on healing "irreversible" conditions 3:14 Blood as a living ecosystem: the case for subtractive medicine 8:25 Plasma exchange, apheresis, and blood filtration explained 17:34 The domino theory of autoimmune disease 28:58 How Gary stopped Hashimoto's antibody production naturally 38:32 The 4 longevity levers everyone can control 45:38 Oxygen, breathwork, and intermittent hypoxia 52:02 How mitochondria proliferate under oxygen cycling 57:55 What modern medicine is finally getting back to 1:00:48 Rapid-fire: sauna vs. cold plunge, sleep vs. stress, and more 1:03:18 Why studying the human body deepens faith in God DISCLAIMER This content is strictly the opinion of Dr. Josh Axe and is for informational and educational purposes only. It

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Artificial intelligence is about to circumvent the modern medical system in a way that may be catastrophic for a lot of modern medicine. And it may fly in the face of some of the advice that we've been given. You'll never convince me that somebody has more than one autoimmune disease. Usually what happens is that one thing causes everything. People get sick like dominoes falling.

• 0:17Josh Axe?

  Almost every time I look at blood work, there's always one thing. And it's like, if you fix the one thing, all the symptoms start to get corrected.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll get credited with these miracle cures. There's no miracle cure. It's just finally someone took the time to zoom out and look at the whole picture.

• 0:31Josh Axe?

  There's so many supplements and there's so many diets. What moves the needle the most?

• 0:34Speaker 00

  You don't need a fancy red light bed. You don't need a half a million dollar hyperbaric chamber. And you don't need to go to Switzerland to get your blood filtered. I encourage people to really just get used to doing breath work every single day, preferably outside, preferably in sunlight, just for a few minutes. Here's the foundation of a long, healthy, happy life. They are using intermittent hypoxia to reverse age. I read that they're at 8.6 years, less than halfway through this full study.

• 0:56Josh Axe?

  I mean, think about that extending lifespan or reversing age by 8.6 years from the parameters.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  Isolation was one of the most detrimental things that could happen to a human being. If you wanted to cut a human being's life expectancy in half, and I mean in half, at any age, you put them in isolation. And I believe that community and connection is medicine. Sleep is our human superpower. It's the most bullied thing in our schedule. We sleep when we can. There was for, you know, decades, I'll sleep when I'll die, crush your enemies. You know, like, don't sleep and you will die. How about that?

• 1:24Josh Axe?

  Exactly.

• 1:40Josh Axe?

  Has a doctor ever told you your cholesterol is fine, yet you're still worrying about your heart? Maybe because of your family history, or your energy, or that nagging feeling that that really basic panel isn't telling you the whole story. Here's the thing. Standard cholesterol numbers miss a lot. And I want to share with you something deeply personal. I had my father-in-law die of a heart attack at six years old, when his cholesterol levels were 100% completely normal. And we wish so badly, we could go back and do the more advanced blood work panels, looking at the more advanced blood work markers. The real drivers of heart health often tend to be related more to inflammation and metabolic markers than they do cholesterol. And all the scientific evidence points to that direction

• 2:25Josh Axe?

  as well. This new test completely changes things. And my team knows exactly what to look for. I'm currently offering a simple at-home blood test that actually tests for the right things. Targeted biomarkers, including hormones, thyroid, and metabolism. You'll also get a full hour with one of my senior health advisors to review your results and discover ways that you can work with the Health Institute to finally find lasting healing. If you want to check it out and grab one before they're gone, just go to mybloodwork.com now.

• 3:02Josh Axe?

  If you want to boost energy, reverse chronic illness, even irreversible conditions, or at least some doctors may call that, and promote longevity, today I'm bringing on a good friend of mine, and really one of the world's most brilliant minds when it comes to natural medicine. I've got Gary Brecka with me today. Gary, welcome to the show.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  Dude, this is awesome, man. I love sitting down with you, man. We have, we end up running a podcast before the podcast always starts. I'm like, can we just turn the cameras on? It was really good.

• 3:31Josh Axe?

  I felt the same way. I'm so, I'm so excited to talk to you because I think you have just such an amazing mind when it comes to how to heal. And especially, you know, conditions that are difficult, again, adding years to someone's life. I'm excited to get into all that as well today. And I love being at your house for a lot of other reasons, too. You've got a hyperbaric chamber in your house.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I just got out of it, actually.

• 3:53Josh Axe?

  Last time I was in here, I got in your HOCAT, which is doing so many things at once, right? You know, transdermal, you know, ozone, and red light, and PMF, and sauna, and everything else. And, and a lot of amazing things. And so today I want to talk about how to detoxify, how to heal conditions that doctors may say you can't heal today, get into boosting our own stem cells. And we're going to talk about, you know, this thing that I know I've seen Joe Rogan doing, a lot of other people, plasma exchanges, a newer, I don't know if I'd call it a newer version, a different version called inusephoresis that most people have never heard of.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  I go to Switzerland to do that tomorrow. We have five o'clock tomorrow, and I'm going to, I go through London, then I connect to Basel, Switzerland, and I'm going to do inusephoresis with my wife in Basel, Switzerland.

• 4:35Josh Axe?

  Well, let's start there with blood. You know, one of the things that I love, there's a verse in the Bible that says something that's very similar to, healing is in the blood. I mean, so we know going all the way back to the Bible, looking at ancient forms of medicine, knowing today that keeping our blood cleansed, but also very rich in oxygen and nutrients and healthy, is incredibly important. And one thing I do a lot today is I analyze a lot of blood work. And there are so many people that have poor oxygen, poor ferritin iron levels, and they're exhausted and sick because their blood isn't healthy.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 5:07Josh Axe?

  So talk to me about these different forms of blood filtration and the importance of keeping our blood healthy.

• 5:12Speaker 00

  I think, I think the new era, if you want to call it that, of longevity medicine is what I would call subtractive medicine. And, you know, I come from a data science background. So I was a data scientist for large life insurance companies for years. And we really followed big data trends. We really didn't ignore the big data, right? Like, for example, there's, I get that a good gold standard randomized placebo-controlled clinical trial that is done, you know, at a collegiate university that is peer reviewed and published in a major journal, has significant scientific validity. But, but very often, we, we ignore

• 5:56Speaker 00

  that validity in the face of contraindicated massive amounts of data, right? You could take a zoom out on the modern healthcare system and say, okay, we spend $5 trillion a year on healthcare. We've done 279,000 independent randomized, peer-reviewed, placebo-controlled clinical trials. What has been the result? Well, we're the sickest, fattest, most disease-ridden nation in the world. We spend the most on healthcare, you know, seven times the next nearest civilized nation. We're ranked 66 in the world in life expectancy. We lead the world in morbid obesity, type 2 diabetes, infant mortality, maternal mortality, and multiple chronic disease in a single bio. So what's going on? How do those two statistics

• 6:41Speaker 00

  live in the, in the same universe? And, you know, if you, if you look at parachutes, for example, there's zero evidence that parachutes work. No one could sit here and make the claim that parachutes are effective, that they are safe, that there's any scientific evidence that they work, because there's zero evidence that they work. We've never done a randomized clinical trial on parachutes. We've never done a placebo group. I don't know who wants to sign up for that placebo group that's going to jump out without the parachute. So we have no evidence at all of any kind, from any kind of scientific basis, that parachutes work. Yet the data screams in the face of that. And no one would jump

• 7:21Speaker 00

  out of an airplane without one. And so I think the merger of large data and practical science, this gold standard science that we've, that we hold in such high regard, this is something I'm really, really excited about because artificial intelligence, in my opinion, is about to circumvent the modern medical system in a way that may be catastrophic for a lot of modern medicine. Because when you can take 700 trillion independent variables and create an actionable result, actionable result, you're taking the big data set and you're creating an actionable result. And it may fly in the face of some of the advice that we've been given. And when we look at subtractive medicine, these different types of blood filters, it's back to the old adage that when a fish gets sick, the first thing

• 8:05Speaker 00

  we do is clean the tank. Right? Because it's so obvious, right? You look in there, and it's like you're swimming around in murky water, and it's got a lot of algae. And we're like, okay, I see why the fish is sick. With human beings, we sort of mess with them while they're in the tank, and we leave them there. And, and by the tank, I mean this environment, this environment that we're in right now, not even this outside environment. What is our internal environment like? You know, you talked about the blood. The blood isn't just a fluid that circulates around our body and transports things from one place to another, although it does that. The blood is a living ecosystem. There are hundreds of billions of, of mechanisms at work inside of our blood at all times. And when you look at what has

• 8:48Speaker 00

  happened, as society has modernized, and we've introduced things to our, our diet and into our environment, that we just were never ancestrally meant to deal with. You know, this toxic load is, is, is something that is feeding the chronic disease pandemic. The question is, how do we lower a toxic load?

• 9:09Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 9:09Speaker 00

  Right? And that's where this whole era of subtractive medicine, in my opinion, comes in. Clean the tank. And so there's lots of ways to do that. The procedure that I'm getting done in two days from today is, is called inusephoresis. So in the United States, you can do therapeutic plasma exchange. And, and this is a procedure where you, you know, you, you put the blood through a separator, the whole blood comes back into the body, the plasma is discarded, and it's replaced with a sterile fluid called albumin. And this is safe. But there are also a lot of proteins in the plasma that we want. I mean, there's a lot of good stuff going on in the plasma. Are heavy metals in there? For sure. Are there,

• 9:53Speaker 00

  are there biofilms? Are there fungi, potentially mold, mycotoxins, heavy metals hanging out in the plasma? Yes. Microplastics can be found in the plasma. So certainly filtering those things out is, is a good thing. My preference between those two treatments would be inusephoresis, but you can't get it yet in the United States. So what inusephoresis does, which is different from therapeutic plasma exchange, is it filters the plasma and it returns it. So what is this good for? This is good for things like lipolipol A, right? Which is a genetic component of cholesterol, a component that I have. I manage every other

• 10:35Speaker 00

  lifestyle risk factor, but I have only been able to marginally affect my lipolipol A. And I'm, and I manage it through diet, through lifestyle, through exercise, through regular, regular sauna, regular grounding, breath work, sunlight, all of the free basics that everyone that's watching this podcast has access to. You don't need fancy equipment to do that. But I haven't been able to materially lower that lipolipol A. What I've found has had a good impact on it has been bergamot O, a citrus peel extract. I've had success with slow release niacin, but even the PKSK9 inhibitors for cholesterol, don't, don't

• 11:16Speaker 00

  touch it. And there is no pharmacological solution right now. Inosphoresis will trap those, those cholesterol proteins. And so it will immediately and dramatically reduce the lipolipol A.

• 11:30Josh Axe?

  And just for everyone listening, this LPA marker, which is really a marker that we just really started running more recently and looking at, you know, heart disease risk. I mean, there's, there's a very large genetic component when it comes to LPA. And so it's really important. You want to get that lower for heart disease risk. And a lot of times it's paired with APOB, which is important too. I just wanted to bring that up. Why, why getting that lower is just, you know, important. That's amazing that it does.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, these, these really small proteins will, you know, they'll, they'll cross the endothelium of the, of the blood vessel. And they start this whole reaction with macrophages, creating foam cells. And, and this is the genesis of this atherosclerosis, atherosclerosis, placking, scarring, hardening, narrowing, all of those conditions of cardiovascular disease that we talk about. And it's, you can manage it by managing lifestyle risk factors.

• 12:19Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. I've looked at the clearly exam and PRNOVO exam. So I'm in the, in the clear now, but I still want to make sure that, you know, I manage it. And so I, I think this whole era of subtractive medicine, there are filtration technologies like hemodetox filters, for example, that don't use micron size. So they don't use pores like a filter. Because at some point, as you make the size of a filter smaller, you will simply trap everything in the blood.

• 12:48Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  Right. And you're getting down to the size of a virus, for example, well, red blood cell, a platelet is going to be much larger in diameter. So you're going to trap those two. So there are these different types of filtration that, that cleanse the blood from different components, like hemodetox is a filtration technology that will filter out circulating tumor cells, fungi, mold, mycotoxin, organic toxins. And it uses not micron size, it uses something called heparin binding sites. So imagine just a column full of these glass beads. They're coated with heparin. Heparin is a blood thinner. It's something

• 13:31Speaker 00

  that is coating the inside lining of our, our arteries. And the reason why that's important is a lot of these pathogenic invaders know that that, on the other side of that heparin is the tissue. That's, that's where I can create an infection, right? I mean, the virus is useless unless it has a host.

• 13:48Josh Axe?

  Right.

• 13:49Speaker 00

  Right? Unless it has a cell. And mold and mycotoxin don't really wreak havoc floating around the blood. They wreak havoc when they get into our tissues, we can spoil it and what have you. So I'm very excited about the fact that we can now clean the tank, because I believe it's very difficult to hurt someone, to hurt a human being by cleaning the tank. It's very, it's very difficult to harm the fish by draining and putting, you know, fresh clean water in there. It's going to do nothing but help, help the fish and same, same with our environment. And so very excited about these, these blood filtration technologies. But if we just took a step back and said, you know, what does a detox lifestyle look like? What does a detox, you know, protocol look like? If you don't have

• 14:32Speaker 00

  a dollar to spend, what it looks like is having regular bowel movements. I mean, I can't tell you how many clients of mine, you know, want to start the conversation about bowel movements. And I'm like, you wake up in the morning, how long is it until you go, oh, it's Tuesday? And then again, on Thursday afternoon, and then sometimes on Sunday morning?

• 14:52Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 14:54Speaker 00

  And that's not a good sign, right? So stool, urine, sweat, these are phase one, phase two detox in the liver. These are things that we can access on a regular basis, very inexpensively, if not entirely for free. And those changes keep the tank clean.

• 15:13Josh Axe?

  Yeah. And it's like, we always want to be doing those things, even if you are able to go to Switzerland and get inosphoresis or plasma exchange or something else, you want to be able to, you know, cleanse your blood, cleanse through sweat, cleanse through urine and bowel movements, no matter who you are, what you're doing. And sometimes I see people kind of like, it's like reaching for the supplement before you change your diet.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  Right.

• 15:34Josh Axe?

  You definitely need to be able to do that.

• 15:39Josh Axe?

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• 16:24Josh Axe?

  principles, and also 40 incredible longevity recipes. You'll get all now, that's $500 worth of content for free. If you go to healyourselfbook.com and get it today. Now, there's one other bonus I want to give you. You can also get an at-home blood work kit that goes through cellular markers. So you can actually see what are your levels of inflammation? What's your blood sugar? Are you deficient in key nutrients like vitamin D? All in that blood kit? In fact, this blood work can typically cost anywhere from double to triple this amount. If you want to do this now, it's only $79 for a very limited time. It's our lowest price ever. And with it also comes a one hour consultation. So you'll have real answers in hand. Again, that's healyourselfbook.com. Just want to say thank you so much. I appreciate your support.

• 17:12Josh Axe?

  You know, as you were talking about plasma exchange, again, we've seen, there's been a lot of really big names who I see who are, you know, holding their bags.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, Joe Rogan just did it.

• 17:19Josh Axe?

  Yeah. And so, so there's a lot of people, but yeah, my concern with that has always been, to your point, bringing, you know, getting out some of the really important proteins, filtering those out of your blood. And, and actually in a very similar way, you know, we were talking about stem cells before we started shooting here, and how doing your own bone marrow, culture expanded, you know, you're weakening your immune system for months. I mean, your own stem cells.

• 17:45Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 17:45Josh Axe?

  Are so important. Now, I do think plasma exchange is, is definitely a step less than that. I think doing bone marrow, pulling your own bone marrow is a little bit more traumatic to your body. But, but I do think the thing I like about these, some of these newer techniques is, is that they are able to preserve what you really need and really just get rid of the toxins and the stuff that you definitely want, want out of there.

• 18:08Speaker 00

  I totally agree with you. And again, coming from a data science background, we accept so many fallacies in modern medicine, and we accept so many unknowns in modern medicine. So for example, if you look at the entire category of autoimmune, so all autoimmune into one category, Crohn's disease, Sjogren's, Hashimoto's, multiple sclerosis, lupus, all of these autoimmune diseases as a category, about 82% of the time when you're diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, it's idiopathic. It's of unknown origin. So you say, well, Gary, why, why do I have Crohn's disease? Well, because your immune system's attacking your colon. Well, why is it attacking my colon? Well, you know, Josh, we don't

• 18:52Speaker 00

  know. It's luck of the draw. Oh, look at this, you might even have a family history of it. That's my favorite one. But, because autoimmune is rarely, if ever, with very few exceptions, hereditary or genetic. But that being said, you know, why, why do we accept that 80 to 2 to 85% of the time, when, when the immune system is, is attacking a healthy tissue, or it's manufacturing antibodies to a healthy tissue? Why do we think that the immune system has done something wrong? What if we just took one step back? And we said, what if the immune system is acting properly? We just need to find out why it's here. Like, what called the immune system to the, to the colon? Was it just random?

• 19:37Speaker 00

  Or was it leaky gut? You know, did, did they disrupt this single cell layer on the inside of this luminal wall of the intestine, which by the way, is outside of our body, right? I mean, our intestines are, they run through us, but it's external to the body. And it's meant to be external for a reason, right? Like the skin. And in fact, your, your luminal wall of your intestine is contiguous with the back of your forearm. If you follow it all the way in. And so we just assume that if it's attacking the thyroid, well, you have Hashimoto's. And if it's attacking the lacricle gland of the eye, you've got Sjogren's. And if it's, it's, it's creating sclerosis in the myelin, you've got multiple sclerosis.

• 20:17Speaker 00

  But I, I have come to the position that if you were to look at these five categories, you would find the genesis, in my opinion, of the 82% of idiopathic autoimmune disease. And that is mold, mycotoxin, parasite, virus, and heavy metal. And I say this somewhat anecdotally, but I say it also based on hundreds of thousands of patients that have come through clinic system that I owned and exited last year. And looking at voluminous

• 20:56Speaker 00

  amounts of data on people that have severe heavy metal toxicity, especially embedded in the thyroid that have a link to Hashimoto's, or parasitic infections, linking to multiple sclerosis, heavy metal and leaky gut, that has perpetuated itself for sometimes years, even decades, that resulted in an autoimmune attack. And so I think we're beginning to reframe how intelligent the body is, that it just doesn't spontaneously break down, that people don't have multiple autoimmune diseases. Usually what happens is that one

• 21:39Speaker 00

  thing causes everything. People get sick like dominoes falling, not like, not like the Big Bang Theory, where everything just goes to, you know, pardon my French, but just goes to hell in a handbasket at one time. But you'll never convince me that somebody has more than one autoimmune disease, ever. You'll convince me that they have one issue that has led to multiple autoimmune conditions. And, and if you go back and sequence when these things have occurred, and you eliminate mold, mycotoxin, parasite, virus, and heavy metal. I believe you would get to the genesis of why most of us are having our immune systems light up.

• 22:20Josh Axe?

  Yeah, you know, Gary, one of the things I've done, and I opened a clinic in Nashville this past year, and then I've practiced before, and I've looked at thousands of things of blood work. And I can tell you that almost every time I look at blood work, to your point exactly, you're always seeing five, seven, so many things on blood work. But there's always one thing, sometimes a secondary. But that's it. It's like, if you fix the one thing, to your point, is it a virus? Is it a really severe nutritional deficiency? Is it cortisol? It's absolutely through the roof all the time. But there's typically just that one thing. And if you fix it, the five, the seven, all the symptoms, they start to get corrected.

• 22:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's that domino theory, right? You start standing the dominos back up and try to find the first one that that falls. You know, whereas if you treat it like there's a hub of a wheel, and there's all these spokes, you know, the way modern medicine has oriented itself is it's hyper specialized. And, you know, a lot of times when I've parachuted into clients' cases, and I'll get credited with these miracle cures, it's there's no miracle cure. Like, I don't have a basis of knowledge that you don't have, that anyone else in this space doesn't have. It's just, finally, someone took the time to zoom out and look at the whole picture. Right? You, you have a cardiologist that is not talking

• 23:39Speaker 00

  to the nephrologist, and doesn't see the early stage kidney failure, puts them on a diuretic, you know, to try to bring blood pressure down, and doesn't realize the impact that that's having on the kidney, because these two people are not talking. And, you know, it's medical error. That's the third leading cause of death. It's not medical malpractice. It's medical error. Right? Doctors are overwhelmed, not a long time with the patient. Rarely do we zoom out and look at the entire picture. This is where I think artificial intelligence is really going to have a very positive impact on modern medicine, because artificial intelligence can zoom out, and it can take all of these independent variables. I mean, we're doing lab experiments now, in human organ tissue, and running clinical

• 24:21Speaker 00

  trials in AI that's saving us 10 years of animal studies and human clinical trials.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  And, and it can include so many variables, hundreds, I mean, the methylation cycle alone is 300 billion independent transactions going on inside of every single cell, of which you got 32 trillion, plus or minus, every minute of every day. There's no human being that can wrap their arms around that. I mean, I dedicated a large portion of my adult lifetime to the study of methylation. And I believe that it's one of the foundational things that I look at in every client, to see how well they're, you know, methylating, how well are their cells eliminating waste, repairing, detoxifying, you know, regenerating? Are they supplementing for the sake of supplementing? Or are they supplementing for deficiency? But it's a really exciting time, because, yes, I'm going to Switzerland to do Inews

• 25:14Speaker 00

  for Easies, mainly because I'm so curious about it. And I'm, I'm an N of one right now. So I've done a, like a vibrant wellness total toxic burden. Right? And I did that today, with first urine. I'm going to do one the day after I'm finished the filtration, and I'm just going to look at the data. And say, what happened to my aflatoxins, ochratoxins? Hopefully, I don't have those. But, you know, was I able to immediately limit these? But by the same token, you know, I held a detox challenge last year, and we had, I know, 70,000 people, I got my whole team here, but we had like 70,000 people or so

• 25:56Speaker 00

  sign up for it. We sent out hundreds of these vibrant wellness, total toxicity tests. And it was shocking to me, how many people had the same silicone glues, flame retardants, accelerants, like you find in raid cans, including myself and my wife, had this in our urine. I eventually traced it back to my mattress. Because all the, about 98% of all the mattresses sold in America are by law soaked in flame retardants.

• 26:26Josh Axe?

  Oh, right.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  And, and we spend a third of our life on our mattress. And it's petroleum based memory foam, it's silicone glues, you know, it's fabric dyes. And, and then there are these, all of these accelerants and flame retardants, so that that mattress can't smolder or, or ignite. But we lay our face down on that thing for eight hours a night. So all of these different, you know, aflatoxins, ochratoxin showed up in people's urine. We were able in five weeks to titrate the vast majority out of that, out of people's urine,

• 27:06Speaker 00

  through very naturopathic means. Depending on the type of toxin they were encountering, we just used different widely available binders, activated charcoal, zeolite, and, and other binders, silica. We used regular sauna sessions. We used lymphatic drainage. We made sure that we got the bowel movements happening on a regular basis. We hydrated with minerals. And the vast majority of people's toxic burden fell dramatically. So I don't want to create this notion that, hey, if you don't have X thousands of dollars to fly halfway around the world and do one of these blood filters, you're doomed. You're not. If you're

• 27:49Speaker 00

  sweating, pooping, urinating, exercising, getting sunlight, doing, doing things like grounding and breath work, and eating a whole food diet, which is where all the data lies. Again, back to the big data. The big data doesn't say that dogmatic dieting extends life. Right? So you don't find hyper life extension in any of the meta analyses, big data studies, or blue zones, where you have extreme dogmatic dieting. So it's not carnivore, keto, paleo, pescatarian, vegan, vegetarian. It's, it's the absence of processed food.

• 28:25Josh Axe?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  Right? I mean, there are people who eat very high carbohydrate diets, have their entire lives living to 108 years old. And there are people that eat very high meat consumption, Singapore, for example, per capita. And they're living very long lives. You go to the Mediterranean, and the amount of fatty fish and oils, I mean, if you told your cardiologist that you were going to drink a liter of olive oil per week, per person.

• 28:50Josh Axe?

  They'd have a heart attack.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  They would have a heart attack right then. Get out of my office. And yet, they don't have cardiovascular disease, and they're living healthy lives. So, so sometimes we just have to let the air out of the balloon, and realize, we have a lot more control than we think we do. We can make dietary and lifestyle changes that really set us up for long, healthy, happy lives. And, and one of my actually favorite influencers, I won't say who it is, I saw her talking on Instagram about just not putting a banana in with berries, because somehow the banana decreases the absorption of polyphenols in the berries.

• 29:34Speaker 00

  I'm like, oh, my God, guys, we're like, we're getting to the point where it's like, I'm getting paralysis from analysis.

• 29:41Josh Axe?

  Oh, yeah. It's overwhelming. I mean, you know, that's the biggest thing. So when I, when I first opened my practice in Nashville, the number one thing I would hear, especially from, it was a lot of families, a lot of moms coming in, and still today is, I'm overwhelmed.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:53Josh Axe?

  You know, and so let's help people not be overwhelmed, because it can feel like so many things. And what's your advice on that, Gary? Because I think about, you know, people that are, you know, I'm thinking of mom, she's got three kids, and she's like, okay, well, I want to reverse my Hashimoto's, right? But she's like hearing about all of these different types of biohacks, and there's so many supplements, and there's so many diets, you know, where does she start? What moves the needle the most?

• 30:20Speaker 00

  Well, I will tell you, I mean, just because you said Hashimoto's. Now, again, this is anecdotal, but this is what I've seen in my clinic system, and with hundreds and hundreds of patients. And in my VIP community, we have documented cases of Hashimoto's. I don't want to say Hashimoto's reversal, like, we didn't really reverse Hashimoto's, but we stopped the immune system from manufacturing antibodies against the thyroid. So whatever you want to call that. And in the vast majority of these particular cases, they had rather severe heavy metal toxicity. They're, they're, these were people that could not methylate heavy metals. And they had very high mercury, arsenic, in some cases, palladium, other

• 31:05Speaker 00

  heavy metals. Which, by the way, the thyroid has an affinity for heavy metals, and that tissue has an affinity for it. And, you know, if you, if you take a toxin, right? Like, so let's, let's say that this is, this is a mold spore, or, or a mycotoxin, or virus, or very often, a heavy metal. And this is a healthy cell. These generally do not hide like this. They don't hang out outside the cell. They hide like this. Viruses are infamous for this, right? I mean, a virus doesn't attack the cell. What a virus does is attach to the cell membrane, inject its DNA, and infect this cell. So the virus is hiding like this. So that means what's facing the outside world? What's facing the outside

• 31:47Speaker 00

  world is your cell wall. The perpetrator is inside. The immune system is hyper vigilant. Right? It's just like a police officer chasing a bank robber. If he runs into a house and barricades himself in the house, the police are going to kick down the door to get to the perpetrator. They're not trying to bust the door down. They're trying to get to the perpetrator. Right? So if he had never gone in there, they would never, never showed up and knocked down the door. Immune system is kind of the same way. You know, when it arrives to a cell wall, it doesn't have permission to go inside. Right? So the way it gains permission is, depending on what it is, nucleocapsule protein, it manufactures an antibody, creates an antibody. It says, this is the antigen, the foreign invader is inside there.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  I need to bust down this door to get to the perpetrator. And then we hold the immune system responsible for a crime that somebody else committed. Like, we're arresting the police officer. We're like, hey, you busted down the door. So like, hey, you immune system, you manufactured an antibody to this thyroid tissue. You're all screwed up. Like, it's like, no, I'm not here to kill the thyroid. I'm here to get to the metal. Or potentially to the other invader. And, and I think now, data is starting to prove this at scale. So people like yourself and I are being vindicated for talking about therapies that are thousands of years old. Right? I mean, nothing that we were laughing before the podcast.

• 33:11Speaker 00

  Absolutely nothing we are doing today in modern medicine, even this Injus Pharisus I'm getting ready to do, will we be doing in 5,000 years?

• 33:19Josh Axe?

  Sure, yeah.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  But in, in, in Eastern medicine, if something has been around for 5,000 years, I, I feel like it's, and it hasn't changed, probably because it works.

• 33:28Josh Axe?

  Yeah, yeah, I, I totally agree. You know, one of the things you were referencing is you were able to work in, in looking at life insurance and looking at, and I remember the first time I had you on the podcast, you were talking about, one of the greatest factors increasing mortality is if somebody had a spouse die, and especially if they didn't have close family around them.

• 33:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:46Josh Axe?

  You know, and what that meant for them in terms of that loneliness and increasing mortality. And so

• 33:50Speaker 00

  Isolation.

• 33:51Josh Axe?

  Isolation and being able to see that, that big picture. And again, that wasn't a double-blind study. That was just massive data over a pretty long period of time that's, that's been able to predict mortality, increase risk. And, and you know, Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, the Bible, the, the advice there, it's a very similar thing where, and, and the Bible will kind of remove it from this part of the conversation to where with Chinese medicine, they've come up with this over 3,000 years of, of individual case studies, millions of individual case studies, and it works. It really, really works and it's effective. And I think it's more reliable than, you know, there was a study that came out about studies and it's something like nearly 50, yeah, nearly 50% of studies, at

• 34:35Josh Axe?

  least when you read the headlines are wrong.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:39Josh Axe?

  They're false.

• 34:39Speaker 00

  And they're fundamentally biased. Yeah.

• 34:40Josh Axe?

  Yeah. Yeah. And, and there, there were like six or seven points to that in terms of people are cherry picking data. Most of the time, somebody wants there to be a certain outcome and they're paying for that to happen. And so they're setting up the study to, to create just that. And so that's why I think it is so important because there are people out there. By the way, I know some of them have been critical of you and many other people in the space. And, and that is, they, they, they'll, they'll say that they'll, they'll live and die by the science.

• 35:06Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 35:06Josh Axe?

  The problem is, what, what if, you know, like Dr. Fauci right now is under this trial?

• 35:10Speaker 00

  Ooh.

• 35:10Josh Axe?

  And I saw Robert F. Kennedy coming out with all this stuff about it. And it's like, okay, those people that were saying, everything he said was absolute gold in science. Well, now what are they saying?

• 35:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:21Josh Axe?

  You know? And so all that being said, you don't want to live and die by the science. Science has so many, and by the way, when we say science, science is a method. You don't want to live and die by studies funded primarily by pharmaceutical companies, but double-blind placebo studies, they can add value in helping you understand. But if you do that alone without pairing it with common sense and, and understanding

• 35:41Speaker 00

  And big data.

• 35:42Josh Axe?

  How the body works and data and, and this tradition, then, then you're missing one of the legs of your stool and you're in balance and you're likely going to tip over at some point.

• 35:51Speaker 00

  I mean, if you go just by the science, you'll jump out of an airplane without a parachute.

• 35:55Josh Axe?

  That's right.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  Cause you're like, you know what? There is no evidence these work. And I, I use that example because in cellular biology, you know, with hundreds of billions of independent downstream and upstream transactions going on constantly. And when we pick one isolated variable, you know, like we, I, I was talking on the spike protein a few months ago, and someone was like, well, why isn't everybody having the same reaction? If they all got the same vaccine, they got the same mRNA, and it's, and it's over programming this production of spike protein, then why don't we just see this uniform reaction in, in everyone? And I'm like, well, this is where individuality comes into play, you know? This is where the human genome comes into play. This is where something called methylation.

• 36:39Speaker 00

  If you took 100 people and said, okay, we're going, all going to eat the same amount of mercury laden tuna fish every single day for let's say 90 days. At the end of that period, even though everyone took in the same dose, about a third of those people would have severe heavy metal toxicity and have severe symptoms. About a third of them would have mild symptoms that you could live with some brain fog, water retention, weight cane, poor focus, poor concentration, muscle aches, but you could live with it. They would probably think it was a consequence of aging. And the third would have no symptoms at all.

• 37:12Josh Axe?

  Can I actually?

• 37:13Speaker 00

  And no trace of heavy metal.

• 37:14Josh Axe?

  But let me, let me even challenge you on this or go one step further.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:18Josh Axe?

  No, a third of them would be radically healthier.

• 37:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, yes. Yeah. Because of the protein.

• 37:23Josh Axe?

  Well, there's a study out of Japan. And so they did this with pregnant women and they said, okay, is this going to affect the fetuses negatively? Is it going to affect the mother's health if they're doing a lot of this raw fish, jam and tuna, a lot of, a lot of this fish? And they said, no, surprisingly, a good majority of them were healthier because of such a high dose of omega threes and phospholipids and protein in their dietary intake.

• 37:47Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 37:47Josh Axe?

  So your point is, yeah, some people are going to get way sicker and some people may actually get healthier, but that's where personalized medicine is so important.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  Agreed. Totally agreed. And this is where like the methylation cycle comes into play. How do we eliminate waste? How do we, are your glutathione pathways working? Is there's transsulfuration working? And, and if you have impaired waste elimination pathways, and I don't mean stool and urine in this case, I mean like cellular waste elimination, then you're going to have increased toxic load. Increased toxic load is going to result in critical or chronic illness. And, and that's why we don't all react the same way to the same things.

• 38:24Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 38:24Speaker 00

  The one thing that is universal though, that everyone can benefit from, I mean, the data is in on mobility. You know, mobility's got to be non-natural.

• 38:32Josh Axe?

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:32Speaker 00

  Okay. So, exercise is longevity medicine. We know muscles are metabolic currency. We know that there are many correlations between muscle, leg strength, grip strength and longevity. So that's within our control. The second is the absence of processed foods. So you will do no harm by intentionally and aggressively getting processed food out of your diet. A lot of these are the compounds that we don't, our body is just not meant to encounter. Sleep is our human superpower. So we can control our sleep for the most part. Most of us don't. We bully it around in our schedule. It's the most bullied thing in our schedule. We sleep when we can. There was for, you know, decades, sort of sleep was haunted upon

• 39:15Speaker 00

  because it wasn't a part of being an entrepreneur and taking the hill, burning candle at both ends. I'll sleep and I'll die, crush your enemies, you know?

• 39:23Josh Axe?

  I mean, the sleep when you die one, I mean, that's

• 39:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, sleep when you die, right? Actually just don't sleep and you will die. How about that?

• 39:30Josh Axe?

  Exactly.

• 39:32Speaker 00

  And, and now we're starting to realize the importance of things like community and connection.

• 39:36Josh Axe?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:36Speaker 00

  Right? Because data is coming in on community and connection, which we knew in the mortality space, you know, going back to isolation. Isolation was one of the most detrimental things that could happen to a human being. We knew that if you wanted to cut a human being's life expectancy in half, and I mean in half, at any age, you put them in isolation. We know this because of broken heart syndrome, right? My, my parents have been married 60 years. I don't want to think about what's going to happen when my first parent passes. By the grace of God, both of my parents are still alive. And, you know, we saw this in the mortality space. We used to process death claims on policies, universal life policies called second to die, which is where, where the death claim pays when

• 40:18Speaker 00

  the second spouse dies. What's really interesting about that data is the earlier the first spouse's death, the less impact it had on isolation. Because if you look at the community people are in, in their 30s, their 40s, and their 50s, there's a lot of communal support that maybe they have a career, they're still raising kids, family is close, they still have a purpose, they still have meaning, they're, they're working. And it was less of an impact. As you aged and became more dependent on your spouse to not be isolated,

• 41:01Speaker 00

  it had a traumatic impact. Post-retirement, second to die policies would pay out very, very quickly because the second spouse would pass, you know, shortly after the, after the first. So we know that isolation is, is very damaging. We're the, we're the most isolated we've been in, in recorded history. We, we think that community and connection comes through iPhones and iPads, and it doesn't. It comes from what we're doing right now. And I'm encouraged by what I see because I have, I have four Gen Z's. So Gen Z goes from what 18 to 28. So I have an 18 year old daughter. I have a 22 year old son. I have a 25 year old son and I have a 28 year old daughter. So I know Gen Z. You want to know anything about Gen Z? I'm your guy, right? Cause I've got four that, that span

• 41:46Speaker 00

  the whole Gen Z generation. Alcohol consumption is down 34% in the last 24 months. Run clubs are up 400%. The types of community and connection and events that they do are so much different now than anywhere even five years ago. My, my oldest daughter is 28, is having a completely different experience than my youngest daughter is 18. And so I'm, they're, they're craving community and connection.

• 42:09Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  And I love to see that because That's a part of longevity medicine. So all those things that we just talked about, you don't need a fancy red light bed. You don't need a half million dollar hyperbaric chamber, and you don't need to go to Switzerland to get your blood filter. You, those are the basics that have proven, big data, meta-analyses, blue zone studies, all pointing in the same direction to say, here's the foundation of a long, healthy, happy life.

• 42:33Josh Axe?

  I love it. I love it. It actually makes me think about the Bible as well, because you know, the Bible, one of the first things God says is rest. You know, it talks about a Sabbath, it talks about connection and community. We have the food laws for Moses, like, don't eat pork because of all the parasites.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  I talked to your partner about that.

• 42:47Josh Axe?

  Oh, yeah, Jordan Root.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, Jordan, yeah, Jordan, I had a great podcast. And, and, and he reframed a lot of things that I was, you know, the way that I even thought about food. And you know what is amazing? It is so readily available.

• 42:59Josh Axe?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  Now, look, maybe you're not getting the hormone-free, antibiotic-free, you know, pasture-raised chicken while you're moving through an airport. But you're using those guardrails of a biblical diet is a great way to just keep your food intake on course.

• 43:16Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  You know, it's, and it's relatively easy because they are widely available, you know, food compounds.

• 43:23Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  And so I've dropped pork and shellfish. I've actually added a lot of beans, which is something I didn't eat a lot. I've added a lot of fermented foods. And I have had a noticeable difference in the, not too much information, but the constitution of my stool and the regularity of my stool, just with those two changes, adding more fiber and, and adding the soluble insoluble fiber through fermented vegetables. Now, I also didn't have sebo or anything, you know, any issues in the gut where I couldn't tolerate the fermented foods. But when I'm eating them regularly, I feel better, my digestion is better. And, and I have more regular bowel movements. And those are, by the way, some of the most inexpensive foods you could buy.

• 44:08Josh Axe?

  Yeah, that's so powerful.

• 44:09Speaker 00

  They're the cheapest.

• 44:10Josh Axe?

  You know, one thing I don't think a lot of people realize is like, our, you know, when it comes to probiotic, when we take these probiotic supplements, you're getting maybe, I don't know, 50 billion CFU. But if you drink, like, a thing, like, a cup of Kefir, you're getting over a trillion probiotics.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:26Josh Axe?

  I mean, it is so much more.

• 44:27Speaker 00

  It's like tart a little bit. It almost has like that light burn on your tongue.

• 44:31Josh Axe?

  Well, to your other point there, and then there's those acids, like acetic acid, that's similar to what you'd find in apple cider vinegar, combined with the probiotics access, or is this sort of fuel. So I mean, probiotics supplements are great. But again, it's, it's like, the food is always better. It's always better.

• 44:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't take a probiotic.

• 44:46Josh Axe?

  You know, another thing I was gonna ask you about, I want to talk about oxygen for a minute.

• 44:49Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:50Josh Axe?

  Because this is so important, you know, if you, if you talk to Jordan, you guys probably didn't get into this, but he has his theory, and I think it's a, I think it's a good theory in terms of before the flood, that the, basically, the earth was under a canopy. And so the, the humidity and the oxygen levels and things were just radically higher. And that's what was keeping people alive so much longer. But all that being said, there is such a critical importance of oxygen. And I know you talk about this a lot. I know you've talked about hyperbaric chambers. You've talked about exercising without oxygen. You've talked about breath work. I'd love for you to dive into oxygen a little bit, the importance, and also some of those different therapies.

• 45:27Speaker 00

  Well, I actually trademarked the saying that the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease. So use that liberally, but I get 15% of everything that comes out of it.

• 45:35Josh Axe?

  Because that's feeding off of so much wisdom, like Otto Warburg and others.

• 45:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, Otto Warburg's multi-step oxygen therapy. I was a big fan of his work. I've actually done that with my parents. You know, they're, they're both deconditioned, meaning they can't, there's no zone two cardio for my mom and dad in their 80s. So it's hard to get their heart, heart rate up. So he used sauna and to, to raise their heart rate into what we would call like zone two, an 80-year-old. And then about 50% O2 concentration. So ambient air is 21%. He is 50% O2. And so dramatic improvements in cognitive function and age-related

• 46:15Speaker 00

  maladies. So accessing the breath and what we can do by controlling this precious gas in the body is phenomenal. So every year, there's, Elon Musk and Peter Diamantis have something called the X Prize. So if you look at this right now, I don't know when this podcast is coming out, but if you Google it while, while you're reading or listening to this podcast, you'll see this. The X Prize this year was for the collegiate university research institution, foundation clinic, what have you, that could prove 20 years of life extension, which is the same as 20 years of age reversal. And you're looking at real parameters, glycan age, mitochondrial density, telomere lengths, real, objective markers,

• 46:58Speaker 00

  not just, oh, we feel better, we look better, we're thinking more clearly. These are objective markers, so you can't fudge it. Started with about 765 applicants, they wiped out about 665 of them initially. They just wiped out another 80, down to the top 20 finalists. What I find really fascinating is, University of Arizona, Tampa, is running a double-blind, very well-controlled placebo group, controlled, randomized clinical trial. And they are using intermittent hypoxia to reverse age. And right now, some of the study, I guess, leaked out, and I, I read that they're at 8.6 years, less than halfway through this full study.

• 47:39Josh Axe?

  I mean, think about that, extending lifespan, or reversing age by 8.6 years from the parameters.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  And, and the mechanism of that is, so in this case, they're using a hyperbaric chamber. So you get in a hyperbaric chamber, and it's simulating going below the surface of the earth. So it's increasing the pressure. When you increase the pressure, you decrease the, the size of gases. And that means that gas, mainly oxygen, is now flooding tissues where it normally wouldn't go. And if we take a step back from that for a second, and realize that our heart is only circulating 30% of the blood in our body, most people think the heart circulates all the blood in the body. It doesn't. 70% of our circulation is actually not done by the heart. There's no pressure in 70% of our vessels, venules and capillaries. That circulation is done by an activity called vasomotor. So vasomotor or vasomotion

• 48:30Speaker 00

  is how 70% of our blood is circulating. Vasomotor and vasomotion are microcapillaries, venules and capillaries that in some cases are much smaller than a human hair. Red blood cells are leapfrogging over each other to get to the tissue, drop off gas, pick up gas, bring it back to the lung. And so this part of the circulatory system doesn't, we don't measure it, we don't evaluate it, we don't cater to it. But it's responsible for 70% of our circulation. And one of the things that we noticed in the mortality space, and the reason why I coined the saying, the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease, is, at that time, I didn't see a single disease etiological pathway that did not have its

• 49:10Speaker 00

  roots in the absence of blood oxygen, including cancer, or was not exacerbated by the absence of blood oxygen. If you want to disable the capacity for a cell to fight, disable its ability to utilize oxygen, you go into the mitochondria and you start breaking apart the Krebs cycle, electron transport chain, you change the way that a cell creates energy, right? And if you just go from aerobic to anaerobic, you decrease, meaning using oxygen to using carbon dioxide, you decrease the output of energy from that cell, 36 ATP versus 2 ATP. So, again, I don't want to get so, so granular that we, that we lose the audience.

• 49:50Speaker 00

  But the important point is, how do we get more oxygen to more tissues without a hyperbaric chamber? Breath work is one of the greatest ways to do that. Because the main vasodilator in the human body is carbon dioxide. It's not nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is a vasodilator. It's also a caustic gas, but in high amounts. It's not as much of our friend as we, we think it is. But carbon dioxide, the reason why you get vascular when you go to the gym, is the CO2 going back to the lung. So carbon dioxide is the main vasodilator in the human body. And by increasing the CO2 level and dropping the oxygen level, you will cause

• 50:32Speaker 00

  a systemic dilation of the vasculature. So you open up this microvasculature, this 70% of our circulation that is not done by our heart. And when you do breath work, and you do prolonged breath holds, and you build up this CO2 tolerance, you're dilating that vasculature, by the way, for free, right? Without any fancy equipment. And then when you inhale a dramatically deep breath, you now have pathways that are, you have pipes that are larger and more dilated. One of the reasons why you can feel tingling and numbness, you can feel lightheaded, you know, when the oxygen tension changes in the brain, you feel a little bit lightheaded. And we don't give it the credence that it deserves, because

• 51:17Speaker 00

  it hasn't gone through the gold standard of clinical trials. But I will tell you, you know, I encourage people, especially people that are on a budget, to want to access these different fancy modalities, to really just get used to doing breath work every single day, around the same time every day, preferably outside, preferably in sunlight, just for a few minutes, and, and experience those long, dramatic breath holds. Do rhythmic, deep,

• 51:42Speaker 00

  you know, excessive, obnoxiously deep breaths to exercise those intercostals, those secondary muscles of respiration. And then exhale and hold as long as you can. And try to drown out the outside noise. Try to fight the urge to breathe. Let that CO2 build up, and then take a dramatic, deep breath in. What we see in, in the studies is that intermittent hypoxia, short periods of oxygen deprivation, followed by short periods of oxygen, oxygen excess, are causing a rapid shift in the mitochondrial metabolism, which is causing them to proliferate.

• 52:25Speaker 00

  And mitochondrial density is the definition of age reversal.

• 52:31Josh Axe?

  You know, I had somebody who had a major knee injury and they were looking, working to rehab their knee. Have you seen this too, where they'll wrap the bands around the knee to kind of redo?

• 52:40Speaker 00

  Like restricted, uh, blood flow restricted training?

• 52:43Josh Axe?

  It's a similar principle in, in ways potentially.

• 52:45Speaker 00

  Which is brutal, man. If you just put up, and then you just grab like a 15 pound weight, you're like, oh my God.

• 52:51Josh Axe?

  But I, but I know people whose knees were ruined. They started doing that with a physical therapist and it was like a miracle for their, for their joints.

• 52:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. Because think about the amount of microvasculature in our joints. I mean, joints are some of the most compromised blood flow in the body.

• 53:02Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 53:03Speaker 00

  And this is why they're the slowest to heal. It's why in professional sports, we have the number of non-contact injuries that we have, because athletes are not overtrained, they're under recovered. And under recovery is a pandemic in professional sports.

• 53:16Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 53:16Speaker 00

  And this is why you've got running backs blowing an Achilles heel, being whistled into the game, or receivers that are blowing an ACL, running a normal pattern down the field. We shouldn't have to tolerate those kinds of injuries in professional sports. We understand trauma, right? If your leg's planted, you're a pound lineman, falls on your knee, it's, it's going to be what it's going to be. So trauma, we understand, but non-contact injuries is a sign of, of under recovery. And I see very little in sports performance. It's changing slowly, really geared towards sports recovery. Like what are you doing for ligaments, tendons, bones, muscular tenderness, insertions, the cartilage, the joint spaces? Are you using high intensity red light therapy? Are you using hyperbarics?

• 53:59Speaker 00

  Especially to heal and repair those types of tissues. Hydrogen nano bathing. I mean, I, this will probably be the first time that I talk about it in the public domain, because man, I'm telling you, here come the charlatan comments. So just bring it on guys, but I'm going to say it anyway. I have seen, of all the modalities I have in my house, I have seen the most number of miracles with people that I put into a hydrogen bath. I remember when, when Sean Ryan came and to do my podcast and he was talking about all the aches and pains he had as Navy SEAL. And I was like, dude, you gotta get my bathtub. And he goes, he goes, bro, I am not getting in your bathtub, man. He's like, we just met, you're starting to freak me out. I'm going to be honest, you're starting to freak me out.

• 54:44Speaker 00

  I'm not getting in there with you, dude. You know, you're getting there by yourself. And so I explained to him that it's just hydrogen gas, which is the smallest, lightest element in the universe. It's also the most prevalent element in the universe. It's hard to hurt human beings with hydrogen gas. There are a lot of naysayers out there, but the naysayers have not read the data. And the data is extraordinarily clear. When this gas passes through your skin, passes through your digestive system, or you inhale this gas, that molecule acts as a selective antioxidant. And a selective antioxidant is very different from something that just suppresses oxidative stress. Right? We know free radical oxidation is bad. We know free radical damage is bad. We know oxidative stress is bad.

• 55:29Speaker 00

  But nearly every free radical also has a critical role in cellular biology. Superoxide.

• 55:37Josh Axe?

  Dismutates, of course, huge.

• 55:39Speaker 00

  Become superoxide, dismutates. Yeah. Uh, superoxide dismutates, hydrogen peroxide. Probably the only free radical that I'm aware of that has no known benefit in the human body would be the hydroxyl free radical, right? We want to neutralize that, take it to zero. But we heal and repair from injury through the inflammatory process.

• 56:00Josh Axe?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 56:01Speaker 00

  Through this free radical process, through this oxidative process.

• 56:04Josh Axe?

  Well, it surprises people. It's like, you know what? I was even, getting in a hyperbaric chamber, you're increasing oxidative stress.

• 56:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oxygen singlets are, are can, uh, you know, oxidize a cell membrane, right? So, um, so what hydrogen gas does is it restores something called redox homeostasis. So, so the ideal condition for optimal cellular function is redox homeostasis. This balance between oxidation and reduction, right? It's not, it's not too much oxidative stress, but it's also not zero. Right? Um, if, if you twisted your ankle and, and didn't have inflammation, that ankle would never heal because the body would never know that tissue was injured, right? The fibroblasts signaling, the cytokine histamine signaling, wouldn't attract the platelets to drop off the growth factors to heal the tissue.

• 56:51Speaker 00

  So we need this oxidative stress, but when I put people with inflammatory conditions, eczema, psoriasis, joint pain, arthritis, knees, hips, shoulders, rotator cuff, low back, all of these, what I would call repetitive use injuries, bathe them in hydrogen gas. What I see is miraculous. But my wife has, Sage has an L5 S1 fusion. She has spinal fusion from a bad car accident she had. And I wish I was right around the time that we met. So, and I wish I'd been able to stop her from doing that, but it is what it is. But anybody that's had back surgery that's listening to this.

• 57:27Josh Axe?

  Well, I, I'm preaching to the choir here. Well, I never had surgery.

• 57:30Speaker 00

  Not surgery, but a back issue.

• 57:31Josh Axe?

  But yeah.

• 57:33Speaker 00

  I, I mean, that's, those are, those are debilitating. Hers moves right up her spine, right? It's rarely the L5 S1 fusion that hurts. It's all that lordotic and kyphotic, you know, interference, because all the way up to her shoulders, and when she locks up, she can't sleep. If I put her in a hydrogen bath for 25 minutes, she'll sleep seven hours like a child. And so what, what I find fascinating about is that these are the things that have been all around us for such a long period of time. And I feel like modern medicine is getting back to more of what God gave us, less of what man makes us. You know, you're going to love that statement. Feel free to use it liberally.

• 58:16Speaker 00

  Because we realize the innate intelligence of the immune system, the power for the body to detoxify, repair, regenerate, and divide in a healthy way, as long as it has the right inputs. And so hyperbarics is one of those things that can accelerate that timeframe. But breathwork is one of those lifestyle choices you can make that gives you very similar outcomes to a very expensive hyperbaric.

• 58:43Josh Axe?

  I love that. You know, actually I've been, I'm getting a new whole house filtration system. And one of the things that they're doing now is doing hydrogen showers.

• 58:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:53Josh Axe?

  And so I'm incredibly excited to, to, to, to be doing that. So it's going to be.

• 58:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do. I think that that kind of stuff falls into the category of what I would call passive biohacks. And I think, you know, at some point you can just spend all your time biohacking.

• 59:09Josh Axe?

  Oh, sure.

• 59:10Speaker 00

  Especially in my house. So you get paralysis of analysis, but air, water, lighting, depending on, you know, the budget that you have. But if you do have the means to add some kind of biohacking device to your home environment, that's where I would start. Before I even put in a red light bed or hyperbaric chamber, or even a cold plunge or a sauna, I would, I would say, you know, can I get rid of the dirty junk food lighting? Can I get, can I filter my water so that I am showering, bathing, cooking, drinking, washing vegetables in, in, in clean filtered water? I have an amazing under the counter water system and I have a whole home filtration system. And then that doesn't add any more time to your day.

• 59:55Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 59:56Speaker 00

  I've also upgraded the lighting. This is terrible lighting in here. This is like the junk food of light that we're sitting in now. But everywhere else in the house is bio centric lighting. It's flicker free lighting.

• 1:00:08Speaker 00

  When you're replacing those bulbs, you can place, replace them with constant on like the sun. And this is less fatiguing to your brain. And things like organic mattresses to, to make sure that you're not laying on a mattress that's, that's outcasting. And, and then air filtration, like you were talking about, upgrading your air filtration. Now your environment where you're spending third of your lifetime, maybe even more, is, is not adding toxins to your body.

• 1:00:38Josh Axe?

  Yeah, I love it.

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  And it's an easy thing to clean up. And then you can start stacking the biohacking modalities. Probably start with a sauna and a cold plunge and go from there.

• 1:00:45Josh Axe?

  So powerful.

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:46Josh Axe?

  I want to do rapid fire here.

• 1:00:47Speaker 00

  Let's go.

• 1:00:48Josh Axe?

  All right. Olive oil or butter?

• 1:00:51Speaker 00

  Olive oil.

• 1:00:52Josh Axe?

  Okay. Vegetables or meat?

• 1:00:55Speaker 00

  Meat.

• 1:00:57Josh Axe?

  Okay.

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  I know that's going to send a lot of people into a tailspin, but definitely meat.

• 1:01:01Josh Axe?

  Sauna or cold plunge?

• 1:01:03Speaker 00

  Ooh, killing me, Josh.

• 1:01:06Josh Axe?

  Can I say this?

• 1:01:07Speaker 00

  You're killing me with that.

• 1:01:07Josh Axe?

  I mean, you're doing so good because I, I don't know that I've ever answered just, you know, the answer without giving a disclaimer.

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  I want to go, I want to go deep down the rabbit hole, but if you force me to choose, I'm going to say sauna.

• 1:01:19Josh Axe?

  Yeah. Yeah. Same. Even those cold plunges can be amazing. I love it. Okay. Turmeric or ashwagandha?

• 1:01:27Speaker 00

  Hmm. See, I want to ask some qualifiers, like, is this sleep, is it?

• 1:01:33Josh Axe?

  Let's say for the average person, let's, let's do that. For, for most people, what they would benefit from most.

• 1:01:37Speaker 00

  I would say ashwagandha.

• 1:01:39Josh Axe?

  Hyperbaric chamber or red light bed?

• 1:01:42Speaker 00

  Ooh, that's a tough one, dude. Don't make me, don't make me choose. Red light bed.

• 1:01:47Josh Axe?

  Inosphoresis or stem cell therapy?

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

  Inosphoresis before stem cell therapy, for sure. Oh, for sure. Do not want stem cells being distracted by other pro-inflammatory cytokines that you can get out of the blood. You get stem cells, you want them to go to the place where they're needed. Systemically.

• 1:02:08Josh Axe?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:09Speaker 00

  They're going to chase everything that's inflamed, every low grade chronic condition in the body. Clean the terrain, then do the therapy.

• 1:02:18Josh Axe?

  Lower stress or increased sleep? By the way, I've never given anyone as hard of questions as I'm asking you today.

• 1:02:25Speaker 00

  This is like really tough and usually I'm not stumped by the, not even my team has put me through this much pain.

• 1:02:31Josh Axe?

  I asked you all the questions that I do, I don't want to answer. So that's just how this goes.

• 1:02:34Speaker 00

  Lower stress or increased sleep? I'm going to have to say increased sleep.

• 1:02:40Josh Axe?

  Exercise without oxygen or breathwork?

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  Oh, breathwork. For sure.

• 1:02:45Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:45Speaker 00

  For sure. You know, so many of those things can, are we done? Cause that was very painful.

• 1:02:52Josh Axe?

  Yeah, yeah, we're done.

• 1:02:52Speaker 00

  Okay. Cause I don't think I could take any more of those.

• 1:02:56Speaker 00

  What? Those, those are tough.

• 1:02:58Josh Axe?

  It's like, hey, pick between your.

• 1:03:01Speaker 00

  Seed oils or grass fed butter? And I'm like, okay, grass fed butter.

• 1:03:05Josh Axe?

  Say like, who's your favorite child? You know, it's very hard, not, not quite there.

• 1:03:08Speaker 00

  Mine shifts all the time and I tell them that too. I'm like, Madison's in the lead right now and you better step it up.

• 1:03:13Josh Axe?

  Our last question for you. How has your faith and prayer impacted your health?

• 1:03:18Speaker 00

  I will tell you, the more I study the human body, the more I believe in God. Full stop. You will never convince me that this happened by chance. Or that a billion years ago, too, bacteria made love in a mud puddle.

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  And here we are.

• 1:03:33Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:33Speaker 00

  Right? I know now that faith is medicine.

• 1:03:39Speaker 00

  And I believe that community and connection is medicine. I believe that prayer is medicine. Because of the infinite number of factors that being connected to source, how it positively impacts our cellular biology. And I believe that there is concrete evidence for that now.

• 1:03:58Josh Axe?

  I love that. That's so great. Well, Gary, thanks so much for coming on. Again, you're one of my favorite guests to have on the show. I love how you, you practice what you preach. That's one of the things that's so amazing when I'm in your house or even when I see you traveling, I mean, you're, you're doing breathwork. You're doing a lot of the therapies. You're also just eating healthy. I mean, I know when I get out of here in just a second, I'm going to eat a gourmet meal here.

• 1:04:17Speaker 00

  Oh, you are.

• 1:04:18Josh Axe?

  And I can't wait. I don't even know what we're having.

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  The Amish. It came from the Amish, so I trust those guys.

• 1:04:23Josh Axe?

  I can't, I love it. So again, thanks so much for practicing what you preach. Thank you so much for helping millions of people. And I just want to encourage everybody to check out everything Gary has going on. You can check him out at the ultimate human, ultimate human podcast. He's got so many amazing products I want to encourage you to check out.

• 1:04:41Josh Axe?

  I just want to say, thanks so much for tuning in here to the Dr. Ak Show. Where every week we're diving deep into the science and principles of how you can heal physically, mentally, spiritually, and take your health and your life to the next level. Again, thanks so much to Gary Brecker for coming on the show today. Thanks for watching. We'll see you on the next episode.