191. Dr. Darshan Shah: How to Reverse Aging with Plasma Exchange and Stem Cell Therapy

Your genetics are never your destiny, even with genetic dispositions, you can prevent Alzheimer’s and optimise longevity. After my conversation with Dr. Darshan Shah of Next Health, I’m convinced we’re living through the biggest revolution in human optimisation since the discovery of antibiotics. The science is crystal clear your immune system is getting hammered by 150,000 environmental toxins that didn’t exist 50 years ago, leading to accelerated aging & chronic disease. But therapeutic plasma exchange & precision diagnostics are changing everything. We’re not just extending lifespan anymore, we’re extending healthspan. Join the Ultimate Human VIP community for Gary Brecka's proven wellness protocols!: https://bit.ly/4ai0Xwg Get Dr. Darshan Shah’s book, “Making the Cut: Ten Things You Should Consider Before Having Plastic Surgery”: http://bit.ly/411FWCL Listen to "Extend Podcast with Darshan Shah, MD" on all your favorite platforms! YouTube: http://bit.ly/4mG5UnO Spotify: http://bit.ly/45vNoHR Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/4mCBEdd Connect with Dr. Darshan Shah: Website: http://bit.ly/4mbyc9R YouTube: http://bit.ly/4mCZztc Instagram: http://bit.ly/4owhLq1 Facebook: http://bit.ly/4lmy4Tw TikTok: http://bit.ly/45LZihW X: http://bit.ly/4mbzvW8 LinkedIn: http://bit.ly/3H9G2lb Thank you to our partners H2TABS: “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4hMNdgg BODYHEALTH: “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: http://bit.ly/4e5IjsV BAJA GOLD: "ULTIMATE10" FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/3WSBqUa EIGHT SLEEP: SAVE $350 ON THE POD 4 ULTRA WITH CODE “GARY”: https://bit.ly/3WkLd6E COLD LIFE: THE ULTIMATE HUMAN PLUNGE: https://bit.ly/4eULUKp WHOOP: JOIN AND GET 1 FREE MONTH!: https://bit.ly/3VQ0nzW MASA CHIPS: 20% OFF FIRST ORDER: https://bit.ly/40LVY4y VANDY: “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: https://bit.ly/49Qr7WE A-GAME: “ULTIMATE15” FOR 15% OFF: http://bit.ly/4kek1ij CARAWAY: “ULTIMATE” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/3Q1VmkC HEALF: 10% OFF YOUR ORDER: https://bit.ly/41HJg6S BIOPTIMIZERS: “ULTIMATE” FOR 15% OFF: https://bit.ly/4inFfd7 RHO NUTRITION: “ULTIMATE15” FOR 15% OFF: https://bit.ly/44fFza0 GOPUFF: GET YOUR FAVORITE SNACK!: https://bit.ly/4obIFDC GENETIC TEST: ⁠https://bit.ly/3Yg1Uk9 Watch the “Ultimate Human Podcast” every Tuesday & Thursday at 9AM EST: YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RPQYX8 Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3RQftU0 Connect with Gary Brecka Instagram: https://bit.ly/3RPpnFs TikTok: https://bit.ly/4coJ8fo X: https://bit.ly/3Opc8tf Facebook: https://bit.ly/464VA1H LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/4hH7Ri2 Website: https://bit.ly/4eLDbdU Merch: https://bit.ly/4aBpOM1 Newsletter: https://bit.ly/47ejrws Ask Gary: https://bit.ly/3PEAJuG Timestamps 00:00 Intro 02:01 Therapeutic Plasma Exchange & Longevity 08:17 Immunosenescence 11:03 Mold & Metal Toxicity Tests 12:50 Plasma Exchange vs. EBO2 15:46 Redefining Longevity 16:51 AI in Early Health Detection 22:19 Wellness Wheel & Functional Medicine 26:10 Early Alzheimer’s Diagnosis 29:43 When to See a Functional Medicine Doctor 36:58 Getting Stem Cells 47:17 Stem Cells vs. Exosomes 51:56 Toxin Testing & Detox Protocols 55:21 Leaky Gut Biomarkers & Healing 1:02:14 GLP-1 Resistant Foods 1:06:12 Future of Longevity & Anti-Aging 1:10:47 Connect with Dr. Shah The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka Podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical advice, and no doctor/patient relationship is formed. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from this podcast is at the user’s own risk. The Content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical condition they may have and should seek the assistance of their health care professionals for any such conditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Your genetics are never your destiny, right? Even if you have two copies, you can still prevent Alzheimer's disease. With preventative medicine, there's incredible diagnostics right now that we can detect heart disease, Alzheimer's, and other brain cognitive diseases, and also cancer very early.

• 0:14Gary Brecka?

  The possible early signs of shrinkage in the hippocampus being the leading indicator for things like Alzheimer's, dementia, early onset cognitive decline. We're detecting cancers now at what they're calling stage zero.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  And that's why we're seeing this massive resurgence of cancer, especially in like young people right now.

• 0:31Gary Brecka?

  I think a lot of us think of the immune system as something that protects us from foreign invaders, which it does. But the majority of the immune system's role is to police ourselves.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  Our immune system is overburdened, overtaxed, and can't do everything all at once. And that's what leads to the acceleration of aging over time and also chronic disease.

• 0:48Gary Brecka?

  We'll talk a little bit about where the science of longevity and aging medicine is going.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  The emerging thought process in longevity medicine right now is one of the key reasons that we age is.

• 1:12Gary Brecka?

  Hey, guys. Welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecka, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, longevity, biohacking, and everything in between. And today's guest is not just a personal friend of mine, but I have been a client of his clinic. I have availed myself of many of his services, which are absolutely on the cutting edge of anti-aging and longevity medicine. I truly believe that the market and the science is 25 years ahead of where modern medicine is right now. And Dr. Darshan Shah is on the forefront of all of that. So you're in for a treat in today's episode. Welcome to the episode.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  Wow, that was an awesome intro. Thank you, man. Can you just go everywhere with me and intro me everywhere I go? Thank you, man. Thank you.

• 2:01Gary Brecka?

  So, you know, there's so many things that I want to, I want to talk to you about. And I want to get away from the conventional podcasting that I do and really talk about where the science of longevity and anti-aging. Bio-optimization is, and we might as well start with my journey because I've had a personal journey with you and your clinic, Next Health, you're one in, out in LA. The last time that I flew to Dubai, I had some time in, in Los Angeles and I am an enormous fan of, of Dr. Mark Hyman. And I saw a post in an article where he had done this therapeutic plasma exchange with you. So of course I start going down the rabbit hole. I'm pulling

• 2:41Gary Brecka?

  all of the PubMed articles on it. And this was a mechanism to take the plasma out of your body, right? And replace it with sterile albumin. And I'll say it was, it was a, you know, two needle sticks, but it was a painless procedure. I was chilling the whole time, just chatting it up with you. My wife was there. My pre and post labs were amazing. Happy to share those and put them into the show notes. I'm an open book on those things. But talk a little bit about therapeutic plasma exchange. And then I want to really start picking your brain about where the science of longevity and aging medicine is going.

• 3:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think therapeutic plasma exchange is a perfect example of where the science is going. Because what's really cool about therapeutic plasma exchange is this is a technology, this was actually FDA approved in 1970 to be used in the hospitals.

• 3:34Gary Brecka?

  Wow. Was it for sepsis or?

• 3:36Speaker 00

  No, it was actually for people that had a condition called Wollamstorm's disease.

• 3:42Gary Brecka?

  Wollamstorm's disease?

• 3:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. I think that's how you're supposed to say it. And it's where the blood gets really thick. And so when you do this, use this machine, you can remove the thick portion of the blood, the plasma, and then re-infuse the red blood cells. Because obviously we need our red blood cells to carry oxygen. Now, this machine that does this is basically a giant centrifuge. Okay. It's super complicated, but it's a giant centrifuge that, you know, when you take a vial of blood and you put it in a centrifuge and you spin it down, it separates into the red cells at the bottom and the top part, the 45% is plasma. That's the liquid portion. So this just does this on a mass scale for your entire blood volume. Okay. So then they started using it for other diseases that

• 4:23Speaker 00

  built up something toxic inside your plasma. So there are autoimmune diseases that build up immune complexes. And for years, I remember training as a resident, people were coming even with like, Overdose of certain medications and they would be in the plasma and they would die unless they got the apheresis done. Apheresis is a plasma exchange or two kind of interchangeable terms.

• 4:45Gary Brecka?

  Okay. Right.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  So we used to call it apheresis.

• 4:47Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, they call it plasmapheresis too.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  Right.

• 4:48Gary Brecka?

  Total plasmapheresis, total plasma exchange.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  Exactly, yep. And so we would use this machine in the emergency room when someone would come with like a digoxin toxicity. And so that would completely detoxify that because basically anything that's living in your plasma that is toxic to your system can be removed with this machine.

• 5:07Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  And what's cool about it is you're not adding something to your body. We're not giving you a drug or a chemical. You're just removing the bad stuff that's circulating in your plasma.

• 5:16Gary Brecka?

  I mean, there's good stuff in the plasma too, right? You have growth factors and platelets and all kinds of things in there. They're doing a lot of good. So it does it. Is there any detriment to taking those things out of circulation? And then how do they get replaced?

• 5:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, great question. So absolutely, you know, we need the things that are in our plasma as well. But your body is so incredibly good at regenerating those mostly within 24 hours. Your growth factors.

• 5:38Gary Brecka?

  24 hours?

• 5:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. Regenerate everything. The only thing that takes a little bit longer is immune globulins. Immune globulins are, you know, the, the infection fighting mechanism of a part of our immune system. Those take a little bit longer. So we give people that are at risk IVIG, IV immune globulin after the treatment. If you're at risk for infections, okay?

• 5:57Gary Brecka?

  Gotcha.

• 5:58Speaker 00

  But otherwise, most of the other things that circulate in our plasma, like hormones and growth factors, those are replenished within sometimes even less than 24 hours.

• 6:07Gary Brecka?

  Wow. You know, I noticed that after I had it done, luckily I was, I was actually boarding a, a flight a few hours later and it was a nonstop flight to, to Dubai on Emirates, which is actually nicer than spending the night in my house.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  It's pretty awesome.

• 6:23Gary Brecka?

  I'm trying to fast on the airplane. Food service is so good. They got showers. So I had like the best airplane sleep I've ever had.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:32Gary Brecka?

  And I felt, you know, just a, a good kind of tired. And then when Lee landed, it was like the light bulb went on and I felt like I'd taken a limitless pill. I was, you know. I was solving multinational crises in my head. It was like, you know, I just felt like I was really just alert and, and just oriented and cognizant. I felt very zen. Just kind of clean from the inside out. It's a really hard thing to describe.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 7:02Gary Brecka?

  My wife was like, babe, your skin and your, like the whites of your eyes, you know, it looks great. And like, like I just took in a, taken a fresh shower or something. And, and I felt it for a few days and then, you know, I went back to just feeling great. Cause I feel pretty good all the time, but I, I think that these kinds of, of therapeutic applications really dovetail with a theory that I've been embracing a lot lately. You know, I've talked to Dr. Peter De Montes and a lot of leading minds in, in longevity medicine and, and anti-aging, bio-optimization, whatever you want to call it. And there's, there's this, I think, general theory emerging about aging called immunofatigue.

• 7:47Gary Brecka?

  And the, the sort of progressive overloading of our immune system.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 7:53Gary Brecka?

  You know, and, and it's multifactorial. It's not like one thing. It's not like just glyphosate or just a vaccine or just, or sleep, but it's, you know, thinking of it like a bucket. It's kind of these just consistent ways that we are just over, you know, burdening our immune system.

• 8:11Speaker 00

  Right, absolutely.

• 8:12Gary Brecka?

  And I wonder if you would talk about that a little bit, or if you agree with that kind of concept.

• 8:17Speaker 00

  Oh, not only do I agree, but I think the emerging thought process in longevity medicine right now is one of the key reasons that we age is immunosynesthesia and immune aging, as you called it. Because you're right, we are constantly throwing stuff at our immune system, more than we ever have in human civilization. You know, there's 150,000 toxins in our environment that were never there just eight decades ago.

• 8:38Gary Brecka?

  150,000.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  150,000 that we know of, that were never there 80 years ago.

• 8:42Gary Brecka?

  The FDA lets them all go in our food supply.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, food, air, water, they're everywhere, right? And so our, what's helping us take care of that, eliminate that? It's our immune system. Then our immune system is constantly fighting off. More and more infections, we're seeing more and more infectious disease. Our immune system is also responsible for fighting off cancer.

• 9:00Gary Brecka?

  Right?

• 9:01Speaker 00

  And that's why we're seeing this massive resurgence of cancer, especially in like, young people right now.

• 9:08Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  So many more people are getting cancer and people are wondering why. Well, it's because our immune system is overburdened, overtaxed, and it's can't do everything all at once. And that's what leads to the acceleration of aging over time and also chronic disease. So you're absolutely right.

• 9:24Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of us think of the immune system as something that protects us from foreign invaders, which it does.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  It does.

• 9:29Gary Brecka?

  Right?

• 9:29Speaker 00

  That's one job.

• 9:30Gary Brecka?

  And bacteria, viruses, what have you. But the majority of the immune system's role is to police ourselves.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 9:37Gary Brecka?

  Right? I mean, it keeps order in the body. And cellular senescent, these cells that are also called zombie cells, whatever you want to call them, these are those cells that are kind of hanging around. They're still living, but they can no longer perform their function. Maybe there are red blood cell that's not carrying oxygen or a platelet that's not capable of transporting growth factors or, you know, an immune cell or a, you know, white blood cells that can't really mount an infection, you know, a response.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:05Gary Brecka?

  And I think the idea of, you know, cleaning these out, getting rid of the lazy employees in our company and putting people back in those seats that are going to really work hard and do their job. It's kind of a great analogy for how we can bolster the immune system and maybe fight back father time.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I mean, you know, senescent cells too. The other thing they do besides just not work well is they actually secrete toxic substances to the neighboring cells, which causes the neighboring cells to then also become senescent or more not as functional as they could be. And so it's imperative to remove senescent cells from our system. Our immune system does that, but it needs a break from fighting infections, fighting toxins to do that, right?

• 10:49Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  And so what the plasma exchange does is it gives our immune system that break. It's like an oil change for our body. It completely removes all the toxins from the plasma. So our immune system can now be like, I can take a breather and I can do my job.

• 11:02Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 11:03Speaker 00

  And so.

• 11:04Gary Brecka?

  And you know, there are other technologies that are out there. I've also done EBO2 ozone, which I'm also a big fan of. You know, my daughter and I and my wife actually recently had, I had mild mold exposure, but I also had a pretty significant metal toxicity. I had this water machine that a doctor that I trusted because he was very well credentialed. Thankfully, I didn't tell anybody about it on social media or anything. So I had this water machine and it was, it was a modified welder from China and he convinced me that it was restructuring my water. And basically, you know, there were a lot of, there was a lot of heavy metal toxicity coming out of it. And my son and I, my daughter, to a lesser extent, my wife, I was drinking two to four liters of this water a day.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  Structured water.

• 11:50Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, structured water. And, and you know, I, I noticed that I started having some of the symptoms of heavy metal toxicity. Lo and behold, I did this provoked metal test, you know, chelation and then an eight hour urine test.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  DMSA.

• 12:04Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah, DMSA. Which by the way, if you, if you, if you really think that you have heavy metal poisoning, you know, sometimes it's difficult to find the metals.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:14Gary Brecka?

  Right? Not like a lot of time you urine test and they don't really show up.

• 12:18Speaker 00

  Right. Well, the problem is because they're heavy metals and these toxins, they end up in your organ tissues. And so when you're doing a urine test, for example, or even a blood test, if you're not doing a provoked test, you're not going to get an accurate representation of what's really living in your tissues. So we actually do the same thing before a plasma exchange.

• 12:35Gary Brecka?

  Oh, wow.

• 12:35Speaker 00

  We provoke it out of the tissues, get it into your plasma and then get rid of all of it.

• 12:39Gary Brecka?

  Oh, wow. So you'll do like, like a chelation.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 12:43Gary Brecka?

  And then a plasma exchange.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  Right, immediately after.

• 12:45Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. So if you're suffering from heavy metal toxicity, this is like, you know, chelation on steroids.

• 12:50Gary Brecka?

  Wow, that's, that's really good. I did an oral chelation protocol and then I did some EBO2. Talk to me a little bit about the differences maybe between therapeutic plasma exchange and EBO2, because there's also a filtration system there.

• 13:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 13:02Gary Brecka?

  And they add ozone. So what are the main differences there?

• 13:06Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Yeah. So there are two different treatments. And even though there's some overlap in what they're useful for, we use, do both of them in our clinic and some patients get both of them. And so EBO2, the main effect is exerted through exposure of the blood through ozone, which creates an oxidative stress that causes cells to renew and also can kill. Bacteria, viruses, fungi that live in your system. Okay. Now, the filter that they also put on the machine can also filter your blood as well. What plasma exchange does is it does a complete removal. And so there's no oxidative stress that's really put on to your cells. It's just removing whatever's in the plasma. And so there's different applications for both.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  A lot of times if someone comes with like mold or Lyme toxicity, we recommend EBO2. If they come in with heavy metals, we'll do the provoked plasma exchange. And if someone's just doing it for longevity purposes, we'll kind of talk about both of them. But I'm a big believer in plasma exchange being one of the keys, I think, to longevity. And we can talk about some of the science behind that, too.

• 14:07Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I'd love for you to go into the science behind it and maybe even talk about how. I mean, right now, these are not inexpensive treatments because, you know, the the machine is very sophisticated. A practitioner has to be onsite the entire time. Lots of sterile vials of albumin because I mean, I got, I think about two liters of. I mean, it was a big.

• 14:26Speaker 00

  You had almost three liters of plasma that we removed.

• 14:29Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I was, I was really surprised that all of that came, came out of my body. But I think as time goes on, you know, these therapies will become more accessible, more affordable, obviously. As, as in everything in modern medicine, you know, the, the science kind of leads. You know, it stays maybe a decade, decade and a half ahead of where, you know, the actual mainstream is. But it's, it's nice for people to know that we're not stuck in the state that we're in. You know, there are things that we can do to extend our health span, potentially even extend our, extend our lifespan.

• 15:08Gary Brecka?

  And I think sadly, when you look at aging, one of the things I talked to Peter Demontis about was, you know, he said, you know, right now. You know, before we even open the discussion about life extension.

• 15:19Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 15:19Gary Brecka?

  We should really open up the discussion about health extension.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  Absolutely. That's what I talk about all the time.

• 15:25Gary Brecka?

  People are dying, let's say, at 82, but you, you really begin to die in your seventies. And your quality of life went down so bad. And I think. Most of the people that are listening to this podcast would say, hey, rather than extend me another 10 miserable years, I'd rather slide into the grave, you know, like margarita in one hand, jukebox on my shoulder.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah, I mean, to me, I think, you know, people ask me like, what kind of doctor are you? And I say, you know, I'm a longevity and health optimization doctor, but I want to redefine the term longevity. To me, longevity means adding healthy, productive, vibrant years to your life up until the very end.

• 16:01Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  Because you can add 30 years to an 80 year old's life and get them to live 30 more miserable years. Or like you said, you can live up to 85 and feel incredible, like you know, the blue zones. And there's this guy, Arrington, who works out at Gold's Gym in Venice Beach, and he's 91 years old. He's buff like you, and he is super sharp. Yeah. He's, he's, he's, he can lift more weight and he can also think faster than people who's half his age. And I've talked to this guy.

• 16:28Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  And so I look at that guy, I'm like, it's absolutely possible for people living right now to achieve this. It's just getting into the right routines and habits. And it doesn't even need to take expensive procedure, which we are trying to bring down the cost exponentially. Just like, you know, you just had a full body MRI, you're telling me that used to cost $20,000.

• 16:47Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 16:47Speaker 00

  To do it. Now it's like 2,000 bucks, right?

• 16:49Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  Everything goes down.

• 16:50Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  Right, exactly.

• 16:51Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. And, and I think, you know, for, for right now, it's such an exciting time to be, I like, I wake up every day like a little kid.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  I'm the same way.

• 17:00Gary Brecka?

  Like, I get like, giddy, excited about it. You know, we were walking around, looking at all my biohacking devices before the podcast, which is a lot of fun. But, you know, the, this is such an exciting time in, in, in medicine and functional medicine and longevity research, because, you know, you've got artificial intelligence coming together with big data.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  Right.

• 17:19Gary Brecka?

  With things like early detection. And you put these three components together and, you know, we're can't, we're detecting cancers now at what they're calling stage zero.

• 17:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 17:29Gary Brecka?

  Right? Circulating tumor cells before they become a nodular tumor. And I think the old, you know, a lot of the old diagnostic mechanisms waited until you actually had a disease process.

• 17:41Speaker 00

  That's exactly.

• 17:42Gary Brecka?

  But it's exciting with AI to think that, you know, you're on the prepath to this and we can nip it in the bud now. You know, I remember when we first started our clinic, initially, we started in a, an urgent care center and we had a, a doctor that was an urgent care doctor. And so we tried to go the traditional like insurance route, which was brutal.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  Brutal. I had lived in that world for 20 years. It's so, so difficult.

• 18:06Gary Brecka?

  And for a board certified physician to spend the majority of their time, you know, negotiating with an insurance company about whether or not they have the authority to order a biopsy or a certain set of tests is amazing because I remember how frustrated this physician was because he's like, man, I just literally spent two hours on the phone with a, you know, 20 year old non-college graduate debating about whether or not I had the authority.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  That was a lot of my life. Yeah, it's crazy.

• 18:29Gary Brecka?

  And so that administrative burden and, and one of the things we saw over and over again was there, there was no attention to the predisposition of disease. We have, we would have hundreds and hundreds of, you know, patients come through this clinic and they would be prediabetic, for example. And the insurance company would say, we don't do anything for that.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 18:47Gary Brecka?

  And, and, and sometimes they would even say, well, he's really close to being insulin dependent. And as soon as he becomes insulin dependent, you know, we'll take care of him.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:56Gary Brecka?

  And I was like, man, it's just so amazing. It's so incredible, that mentality. If you want protein to build lean muscle, but without the caloric impact or need to cut, you need perfect amino. It's pure essential amino acids, the building blocks of proteins in a precise form and ratio that allows for near 100% utilization in building lean muscle and no caloric impact. So we build protein six times as much as weight, but without the excess body fat we normally get during bulking. This is the new era of protein supplementation and it's real. If you want to build lean muscle without having to cut, you need perfect amino. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, that's, that's why I left traditional medicine, right? Because with traditional medicine, you can't get anything paid for. And you know, where the financial incentives are, that's where the business goes. You can't get anything paid for until there's a diagnosis of a disease. So there has to be either a numerical one, like you said, you have to be diagnosed with diabetes or an anatomical one that you need to have a surgery done. Everything else before that. That that system was not built for that, right?

• 20:03Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  It was built to, you know, thank God we have the Western medical system. If you get hit by a bus, if you get a heart attack, you get diagnosed with stage four cancer. Thank God we have that system, but we really need to focus on creating a new system, which is what you did and what I'm doing at Next Health. It is a health focused system and this prevents you from going into that Western medical system.

• 20:24Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 20:24Speaker 00

  So I feel that, you know, I think there's a lot of frustration with the Western medical system and I totally get it, right? But I think just people need to get their heads wrapped around. That's there for a reason. Another reason is taking your health into your own hands and focusing on your health and clinics like, you know, what you had and Next Health, we're going to keep you away from the disease management system because there's that is never built to reverse chronic disease in the first place.

• 20:50Gary Brecka?

  Right. Yeah, so true. So I would love to talk more about, you know, the this, the additional science behind longevity.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 20:59Gary Brecka?

  Behind aging, because, you know, in addition to this theory on immunofatigue, there's a lot of research now around mitochondria, mitochondrial health, you know, the powerhouse of our cell. I think we we ignored these 110 trillion little organelles for for decades and now we're realizing that, you know, as the powerhouse of our cell becomes metabolically sick, the cell follows and as the cell follows, the organ system and the organism follows. And it's so fascinating now that we're we're down to this little organelle, this little battery house and trying to find ways to service this and maybe even increase, you know, its density proliferate these as a way of, you know, helping the body function better.

• 21:42Gary Brecka?

  And it reminds me of the fact that most of the really good anti aging medicine is really just trying to get back to what God gave us and less of what man makes us.

• 21:55Speaker 00

  Right.

• 21:56Gary Brecka?

  Because the greatest pharmacy is is right here.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  I always say, you know, we're all born with a hundred billion dollar pharmacy. It's living in your gut.

• 22:06Gary Brecka?

  25 million right now.

• 22:07Speaker 00

  Exactly. We're all born with it. We just have to use it right and give it the the substrates and the tools and the environment it needs to give us what we need back. And then you can avoid all the pharmaceuticals, you know?

• 22:19Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. So, so somebody that's beginning this journey, you know, it sadly can be really confusing. I mean, if you get online right now and start Googling around, you will get paralysis of analysis. Right? It's like trying to buy a stock chart with 50 different charts. One time you buy, sell, hold, and I think people get paralysis of analysis. They don't know what works, what doesn't. So, somebody that has the basics covered, and by the basics, I mean, they're paying attention to their sleep. They're eating a whole food diet. They're getting decent amount of exercise, right? And it may be a psycho biohacker. They got a, you know, good handle on basic biomarkers. They're taking some supplementations. Where do they start this next level of their journey?

• 23:03Speaker 00

  So, we have this entire program laid out for our patients. And I put it together when I first started my clinics and it's worked extremely well for thousands of our patients right now. And we call it the Wellness Wheel. Basically, a wheel of 12 aspects of your health divided up into four categories. What you just mentioned was lifestyle medicine, right?

• 23:22Gary Brecka?

  Love that word.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  Yep. Nutrition, metabolic health, exercise and movement and sleep and recovery. Those all come first. If you don't do those three things first, everything else is harder to make any gains on, right? Second aspect of our program is preventative medicine. That's where we focus on heart health, brain health, and your immune system, which prevents you from cancer. With preventative medicine, there's incredible diagnostics right now that we can detect heart disease, Alzheimer's and other brain cognitive diseases, and also cancer very early. So, then we check those three boxes for all of our patients.

• 23:58Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  Then we move on to my favorite topic, which is functional medicine, right?

• 24:02Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  Functional medicine is focusing on gut health and optimizing that, optimizing your hormone health, detoxifying your system, and getting your mental health and stress management right. And so, that's what Dr. Hyman talks a lot about in his books. And he and I work very closely together. Once you get to that functional medicine part of it, I say it's my favorite because not only does it help you reverse and prevent chronic disease, but getting those right, you start feeling great.

• 24:29Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  You feel vital again, you know?

• 24:31Gary Brecka?

  I try to set that hook for my clients early on, like, you know, dietary and lifestyle and supplement changes, you know, I try to give them a win out of the gate so that they really subscribe to that journey, right? I mean, that's what we did with Dana White. You know, we had a fascinating conversation before we came on the podcast and you were talking about the new Pranovo scan, or it was Pranovo, right? That is scanning the brain and looking at the hippocampus and the possible early signs of shrinkage in the hippocampus being the leading indicator for things like Alzheimer's, dementia, early onset cognitive decline.

• 25:13Gary Brecka?

  Because, you know, I feel like the majority of these diseases, we don't start to address until, not only do we have them, but we're pretty far progressed.

• 25:24Speaker 00

  That's the problem, right?

• 25:25Gary Brecka?

  In the, in the, in the disease pathway, because, you know, you can't find your keys in your wallet and then, and then you find your keys and, but they're in the refrigerator. Then you start parking in the neighbor's driveway and then finally a spouse or a loved one goes, we need to get this checked out and then bang, you've got early onset dementia, Parkinson's, or Alzheimer's, or what have you. And now that, that process has taken hold.

• 25:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. Then it's hard to right the ship, right?

• 25:54Gary Brecka?

  Right. And, and now you're on the hamster wheel too. You're on the pharmaceutical hamster wheel. A lot of that is disease maintenance and symptom management. But I was really fascinated by it. So, so, you know, in stage two, when you look at some of these diagnostics, talk to me a little bit about the shrinking hippocampus.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So what you're referring to there is-

• 26:12Gary Brecka?

  I'm gonna have mine checked next.

• 26:15Speaker 00

  Preemptive diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease before it's too late. And there's a couple of incredible innovations in that field right now. One is we can use artificial intelligence and look at the hippocampal volume. The hippocampus is the memory center of your brain. And before you start losing your memories, your hippocampus starts shrinking. And then we can compare that volume through an MRI of the brain to people that have normal cognitive powers in your same age group, right? And so then we know that your hippocampus is maybe a little bit smaller than somebody else. And then we can start taking proactive steps to reverse that tide, to right the ship. Because like you said, the earlier you right that ship, the easier it is to sail it in the right direction, right?

• 26:59Speaker 00

  And it gets too hard when you've already been diagnosed with full-blown Alzheimer's. Now, there's another test, I don't know if you know about this one, the PTAL 217 test. Have you heard of this?

• 27:09Gary Brecka?

  No, is this a genetic test?

• 27:11Speaker 00

  No, this is an incredible blood test that measures a protein biomarker of Alzheimer's disease.

• 27:16Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 27:16Speaker 00

  And actually gives you a level.

• 27:18Gary Brecka?

  Because there are genetic markers for Alzheimer's.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  There's APOE, which is a genetic marker, right?

• 27:21Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  And that gives you some indication of your risk of Alzheimer's. If you have two copies, it's 16x and one copy is 4x. Your genetics are never your destiny, right? You can still, even if you have two copies, you can still prevent Alzheimer's disease.

• 27:35Gary Brecka?

  You just have to be intentional and diligent about it.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  You need to look at all the root causes of why we age and don't have longevity and work on all of them. But PTAL 217 is incredible because this is actually a blood biomarker that's highly correlated to the scans of the brain that tell us whether or not you have Alzheimer's. So this, and actually has a level. It goes from like zero all the way up to, you know, hundreds. And so the higher your level, the more likely you are to have Alzheimer's disease. But what's really great about this biomarker, it can tell us decades before you have Alzheimer's if you're in greater.

• 28:07Gary Brecka?

  Decades.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  Decades. And you can track. Your interventions and see if they're working because you can see the biomarker actually come down. So Dr. Dale Bradison, he wrote the book End of Alzheimer's incredible guy. He's one of the main scientists talking about this. And it's truly an incredible world we live in right now.

• 28:25Gary Brecka?

  So somebody has this protein. Let's say they have the APOE gene and they have a predisposition, one or two copies. And obviously that raises a level of concern. And then they do this protein test. What are they going to get from this protein test? And like, what are kind of some of the actual steps they would take?

• 28:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. So they're going to get a number or a level. It'll tell them how are they, how far along you are in the disease progression towards Alzheimer's. And what you want to start doing then is putting into place lifestyle changes. A lot of the ones, you know, we talk about eating whole foods and staying away from seed oils and processed food and getting better sleep and exercising more and having less sedentary time, obviously. But then there's additional things that you need to do to reverse this. And one of the biggest reasons people develop Alzheimer's disease is a massive amount of toxic exposure as well. So you want test for heavy metals, mold, Lyme disease, etc. Those can also increase your risk of Alzheimer's. Plasma exchange has been shown in a really great research

• 29:23Speaker 00

  study called the AMBAR study that Dr. Kiprov did to actually slow down the progression of Alzheimer's disease by removing a lot of these toxic substances from your blood as well. So there's a lot of things you can do that are free and a lot of things that you can do that might cost a little bit of money, but it absolutely arrests the process and turn it around.

• 29:43Gary Brecka?

  Wow. You know, I've, I've met people in my travels, you know, from, from all over the world that have had all kinds of conditions that have now gone into remission. And what, what's amazing about a lot of these conversations is I had a woman, for example, I, I spoke at a conference, she was not a client of mine, for the record. But I had seen her at the same conference almost two years earlier. And she had just begun to lose sight almost completely in one eye because of multiple sclerosis. And we were having a conversation, she found a great functional medicine doctor and this functional medicine doctor.

• 30:25Gary Brecka?

  Didn't believe that she actually had multiple sclerosis. He said, I'm not going to accept the diagnosis until I do mold mycotoxin, heavy metal virus, and some parasite testing. And lo and behold, she had severe heavy metal toxicity, and which had flown under the radar for years, probably why she was unresponsive to therapy. And she had a, I want to say it was chronic Lyme, either chronic Lyme or chronic West Nile. And she got those addressed. And within six months, her eyesight was fully restored. And now they've recanted this diagnosis of MS diagnosis. And I think a lot of time, again, I'm not a physician, you are, I'm not licensed to practice medicine.

• 31:10Gary Brecka?

  But I think a lot of time, just looking from the outside in and watching, you know, 150,000 clients come through our clinic system and just reading medical records for so many years. I think what happens very often in medicine is someone is diagnosed with a condition. And call it whatever you want, an anchor diagnosis. Once that's in the medical record, as they get passed from doctor to doctor, specialist to specialist, no one ever really goes back and says, I wonder if, you know, Dr. Shaw did. He says she has rheumatoid arthritis. I want to look at the sed rates and, you know, the rheumatoid factors and all of these other things. And so, once you are diagnosed as that patient, you are kind of always that patient.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 31:56Gary Brecka?

  And there tends to be this kind of continuity of care where we take whatever disease we're told the client or the patient has, and we just sort of continue along that path.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  So true.

• 32:08Gary Brecka?

  And this is purely observational. And I don't have a clinical study to back this up. But I would say if you were diagnosed with any kind of severe condition, I would first go look for these kinds of pathogenic invaders. Your toxicity level, your heavy metals, your mold mycotoxins, viruses, you know, where do you fall on that?

• 32:30Speaker 00

  Right, absolutely. I'm 100% believer in that. And, you know, when I trained in medicine, This was 30 years ago now. I'm aging myself, but it was a while ago.

• 32:40Gary Brecka?

  Well, you look great, man.

• 32:41Speaker 00

  Thank you, man. Thank you. But 30 years ago, and this is still true today. Medicine is trained in silos, right? And so the problem with that entire model is it doesn't take into account the effect of all these systems working together and pathogens affecting multiple systems at the same time, right? So no one's really looking at what could be affecting the brain and the joints and the gut. No one's looking at that.

• 33:07Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, you've got a GI for this. You've got a rheumatologist for that. You've got a therapist or a neurologist for that.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  That's exactly what happens.

• 33:14Gary Brecka?

  Super bifurcated, right?

• 33:15Speaker 00

  Right, right. So there are certain categories of diagnostics that people need to do when they have something that's bad or they're not recovering from, and they're just frustrated. And these indolent infections, you know, molds, Lyme disease, heavy metal toxicity, gut health issues, leaky gut. These are all diagnoses that were never considered until we got to root cause medicine, functional medicine, where we're like, wait a minute, all these systems function together. And there's these root causes of disease that can be leading to all of this. So let's look for that stuff.

• 33:48Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  And so, you know, thank goodness for Jeffrey Bland, Mark Hyman, and these guys really bringing that to the consciousness of medicine. The problem is functional medicine is not taught in medical school. So once again, the Western medical system has its role, right? You have, you have people, thank God, they're rheumatologists and there's neurologists.

• 34:05Gary Brecka?

  Very good at interventional medicine, crisis medicine. I mean, we're probably the best in the world.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  Best in the world, right? And the stuff we do for people, save lives.

• 34:12Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  But if you are frustrated with the typical, you know, referral to multiple doctors and you're not getting anywhere, you're getting worse, absolutely. One needs to see a functional medicine doctor, bring it all together and just press the reset button and see what else could be going on.

• 34:27Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, and I think when you look at human physiology and the effect on methylation and all of these other multifaceted systems, very often, you know, it looks like if you think about all these spokes on a wheel and they all have a hub, you know, very often we're out there chasing the spokes of the wheel. This person has a mental issue. They have an autoimmune issue. They have an inflammatory issue. They have a gut issue. They have cardiac issue. And it's not like the whole world went to hell in a handbasket at one time.

• 34:53Speaker 00

  Right.

• 34:54Gary Brecka?

  You know, very often, one thing goes wrong that causes everything.

• 34:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:59Gary Brecka?

  And if we can find that thing, that underlying Chronic viral, that, that severe heavy metal toxicity, that, that undiscovered, you know, mold toxicity, which, which I hear a lot of folks on, online talking about how that mold is just completely made up. And I'm telling you, it's, it's not. Everybody has mold and, you know, human beings have had mold for centuries and we've never gotten sick from it. I, I find that to be patently false. And, and so, you know, getting back to, you know, the one thing that could have potentially caused everything. I think it's such a message of hope for a lot of people. Hey guys, let me tell you about one of my favorite new hydration drinks. Now, this is for distance athletes, HIIT's cardio exercisers, people that sweat a lot or exercise

• 35:43Gary Brecka?

  intensely. And A Game is a hydration drink. It has eight essential vitamins. It has all of the electrolytes, the entire suite of B vitamins. Before you freak out and read that it has 21 grams of sugar, which it does, the sugar is coming from natural cane sugar and honey, my preferred mechanisms for getting glucose into the blood during intense exercise. It also has natural flavors, but these natural flavors don't come from bacterial fermentation. They actually come from real citrus fruits and the color is from vegetable juice, not artificial dyes. So next time you're looking for a great hydration drink and you're exercising intensely, A Game is your choice. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  It really is. And, you know, I could tell you at our clinics and, you know, just from patients I've talked to, when you completely figure something out for someone and reverse the entire destiny of their health and their, and some of these people, they, they are so sad and depressed over what they're going through that they just don't want to live anymore. And you find out that one thing and you treat it within six months. I mean, it's a, it's a game changer for people. So, you know, like I, I always say, you know, if you're frustrated with what's going on right now, you have to take your health into your own hands, become the CEO of your own health, learn about your biomarkers, learn about your disease and start getting a team together of people to figure this out.

• 36:59Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. You know, I think the pandemic, if it did have any favors, and it's hard to think about the pandemic doing its favors, but I think if it did, it sort of woke people up to their own wellness and said, you know, I need to become a little bit of a citizen scientist, take this kind of into my own hands and, and go on this journey on my own behalf. So I want to, I want to move on to the next level.

• 37:22Gary Brecka?

  You know, there's a lot of talk and I think a lot of misconceptions, misunderstanding about stem cells, exosomes, what I would call these biologics that can have phenomenal impacts in, in the human body. And, uh, you know, I, for a while was the health services director for the NFL Alumni Association of Athletica. So we saw lots of repetitive use injuries, you know, like knees, hips, shoulders, rotator cuffs. And our, our physician did a lot of intra-articular injections with a lot of, um, stem cells, um, exosomes, other biologics, and it saw some phenomenal results. The one thing that we did notice

• 38:04Gary Brecka?

  was that when you put even great biologics into a, an unhealthy biome, people that had severe insulin resistance, uh, really elevated hemoglobin A1C, high fasting glucose, um, super high inflammatory markers like C-reactive protein, or their liver was under stress, or their kidney function was low, low, low EGF Rs, and some of these other conditions, they had, um, demonstratively worse outcomes. Or, or by worse outcomes, I mean, they just didn't have any

• 38:37Speaker 00

  No resolution.

• 38:38Gary Brecka?

  You know, resolution or the benefit. So I wonder if you might just talk a little bit about stem cells to my audience. And what is the difference between, I mean, not all stem cells are created equally.

• 38:47Speaker 00

  No.

• 38:48Gary Brecka?

  Right? They come from amniotic, chorionic, umbilical cord, Wartens jelly, um, you know, blood, uh, cord blood, they come from all kinds of places. Um, first of all, do you guys use stem cells?

• 38:58Speaker 00

  We do.

• 38:59Gary Brecka?

  Okay. And, um, so you're a believer?

• 39:01Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely.

• 39:02Gary Brecka?

  And, um, what type of stem cell and, and why? Where, where do they come from?

• 39:06Speaker 00

  Right. So, you know, the whole stem cell world, because of the FDA has severe restriction on the United States, it is not allowed the stem cell science to really proliferate as it should have, right? And you can get all, you know, you can

• 39:20Gary Brecka?

  I think that might change, you know, under Bobby Kennedy. I think, I think a lot of these

• 39:24Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I think it's changing.

• 39:25Gary Brecka?

  Ceiling might get raised a little bit.

• 39:26Speaker 00

  Well, we should do what Japan did. Japan, you know, they recognized the value of stem cells and they just created a new body to deal with regenerative medicine, a new governing body to deal with regenerative medical science that was separate from the FDA. Because the FDA is graded, you know, evaluating chemical compounds for drugs, but they're not graded looking at regenerative therapies. And you could argue, you know, not to get conspiracy theory or a theory on it, but Stem cells can put a lot of these pharmaceutical companies out of business, because they have so many varied applications. And so, yes, I was just talking to your people here about stem cells. You have to be extremely careful. Where do you get your stem cells from? We know some common friends that have had lots of problems with stem cells.

• 40:04Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, that have had very, I know people that I've had, you call it miracles happen. And I know people that have had debilitating, even life threatening types of infections. So it's, and these were very well credentialed clients in themselves, some of them icons in our, in our industry, two of them that come to mind readily. So talk a little bit about the stem cells. Where do they come from? Where are they harvested? What are some of the applications that you find that they're a really good fit for?

• 40:33Speaker 00

  So there's a couple of different places you can get stem cells from in general terms. One is from your own body, right?

• 40:38Gary Brecka?

  Host derived.

• 40:39Speaker 00

  Yep, exactly. And so you can get either your blood, stem cells live in your blood. They live in your bone marrow. They live in your fat. And you could take those stem cells and then you can multiply them and give them to your, give them back to yourself where you need them. And you can't multiply them in the United States, but you can go out of the country to get them multiplied.

• 40:58Gary Brecka?

  Is that what they call expand or minimally manipulate?

• 41:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 41:01Gary Brecka?

  Is that term?

• 41:02Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. So in the United States, we, we, we need to not manipulate the stem cells. In other countries, they can, and they put them into Petri dishes and then they expand the cell lines. Okay, so say you extracted a million stem cells, you can then expand that into 10, 100 million stem cells. And that's what they can do.

• 41:19Gary Brecka?

  And these, in this case, if they're derived from the host, those are your own stem cells. So they can either tap your bone marrow, like your hip, or.

• 41:27Speaker 00

  Or your fat, like a little liposuction.

• 41:29Gary Brecka?

  And for the most part, you can take those stem cells if you don't expand them, and you can put them back into the host, right? And joints, knees, hips, shoulders, rotator cuff.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  And people do that. People do that a lot. And people even do that with PRP. They'll just take even the plasma from your blood and they'll put it into your shoulders and your knees. We do that therapy as well. And that's, that's also helpful. The problem with your older stem cells is that they're older, right?

• 41:54Gary Brecka?

  They're the age of the host, right? So I'm 54, so they're my age. I mean, right?

• 41:58Speaker 00

  Your age, right. And they come, and especially if you're unhealthy to begin with, they have the same health qualities as your overall biology, right? So if you are, if say you have diabetes or you're. Or you have inflammation, your stem cells are not going to be healthy. So you're just injecting unhealthy stem cells back into the joint. And they can't do anything powerful there. That's probably why what you guys are seeing there in your, in your clinics with the NFL. Right now you can get also stem cells from basically donated blood or placenta from babies that are just born. Right now, this is where it gets a little bit hairy because you need to make sure that the source, the baby.

• 42:38Gary Brecka?

  They're not actually from the fetus.

• 42:40Speaker 00

  No, they're not for the fetus. They're from the umbilical cord or the placenta. Right, that's totally illegal.

• 42:44Gary Brecka?

  From the, yes. Because I think there is also like, people get online, there's all these sinister things that they're, they're ground up fetuses or that they harvest the fetus and make the stem cells. That is, that would be very unethical and immoral. But the, these are placentas and umbilical cords that are otherwise going to be discarded.

• 43:03Speaker 00

  They're going to be thrown away so they're donated for science. And then they, they actually harvest the blood or they harvest other parts of the umbilical cord or even the placenta.

• 43:11Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  And then they take those, purify them, test them, and then inject those. Now, these have a lot more power behind them because they're younger, they have more exosomes, and they don't have all the, they haven't been exposed to a lot of inflammation in their life.

• 43:25Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, they're very early stage of life, right?

• 43:28Speaker 00

  Brand new, right, exactly. So that is important to understand the sourcing of these. But it's also important to understand that when you take these cells and you multiply them in a Petri dish, you're also, it's a Petri dish, it can grow infections, it can grow other bacteria. And, and you can inject those into people and that can get you into trouble as well. So you have to be really cognizant about the lab that's getting these, right? And also, obviously, you want to make sure the mother and the baby are, don't have any other infections. They don't have anything else going on in their biology, viruses, you know, things that are being tested for as well. So as long as you're sourcing your stem cells responsibly, you're dividing them responsibly. You know, a lot of countries like Panama, they, they have excellent labs that can divide the stem cells.

• 44:12Speaker 00

  Then you're going to be safe and they could have massive amounts of applications, not just joint injuries. People are looking at stem cells IV to create regenerative effects because the stem cells can hone in on where you have inflammation.

• 44:23Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 44:24Speaker 00

  They can go to those tissues and encourage healing of any area of inflammation, you know, wherever, wherever you might have it, liver, bone, anywhere.

• 44:32Gary Brecka?

  And did they work by, if I did an intravenous infusion of, of stem cells, let's say what's called mesenchymal stem cells, right? From umbilical cord blood or Wharton Shelley or, or what have you. You put these into the body. What I find fascinating is they get into the bloodstream and how do they know where to go?

• 44:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, they have the incredible ability to hone in on areas of inflammation and that need repair. And that's what stem cells are built to do, right? And so they are attracted by cytokines. So cytokines are signals that injured areas produce and the stem cells just follow those to those injured areas. And they can, they get there and then the stem cells have exosomes within them. These are little packets of basically healing substances that get secreted into the tissues.

• 45:19Gary Brecka?

  Growth factors.

• 45:20Speaker 00

  Growth factors, right? And then they encourage the tissues in those areas to heal and the stem cells in that area to divide.

• 45:26Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. I mean, it seems to me that if you do the chain of custody and the research on the cell line first, and you know that you have a sterile product, you know, you have, or at least aseptic product, you know that it's gone through the right pathology testing, you know, viruses, bacteria, what have you. It seems like for the, you know, in the grand scheme of things, for the volume of procedures, these are very safe.

• 45:53Speaker 00

  They can be very safe, right? Absolutely. And so we've never had, knock on wood, any problems with any stem cells that we've done ever. We source all of our stem cells from the United States. We follow the entire chain of custody and they, they are extremely safe because they're your body's natural molecules and signals that we've evolved to live with for all of humanity.

• 46:14Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. You know, I know that there's a concern sometimes that these stem cells could carry the mRNA vaccines, other things, because, you know, these vaccines can become intertwined into the DNA and, and stem cells have DNA, unlike exosomes, which don't carry DNA, they just carry. High molecular rate, high uronic acid, growth factors, other really beneficial things. So do you store stem cells that are pre COVID? Or is there any way to test to see if maybe that mother was vaccinated for people that don't want to take that risk?

• 46:48Speaker 00

  You can definitely ask about the sourcing of the stem cells, if they came from an unvaccinated individual or not. Now, because these are mostly babies that are, you know, the donated umbilical cords, the the stem cells of these babies, the babies have not been vaccinated yet, right? And so, so we feel pretty safe that there's no mRNA in these particular cells. Because the, the donated umbilical cords and placentas, those babies that are just born have not been vaccinated.

• 47:18Gary Brecka?

  Right. Yeah. Because, and I, and I think that's, you know, when we talk about different biologics, like stem cells versus exosomes. I mean, exosomes are these nano secretions, what they call them secretomes. They're secreted from stem cells. And what I find really fascinating, see, this gets back to just the fascination with the human body and this hundred million dollar pharmacy you're talking about. You can take stem cells, from my understanding, and you can bathe them in certain media and solicit a response and kind of target direct the response, meaning what kind of exosomes they secrete.

• 48:00Gary Brecka?

  And you can get exosomes targeted at skin regeneration, or hair regrowth, or inflammation, or tissue regeneration. And that, to me, is really fascinating, because you're taking a, a live tissue product, and you're manipulating it in a way, you're exposing it to this media that causes it to secrete something. It's almost like you're going to the pharmacy, and you're writing the script for, hey, I want to, something for collagen, elastin, fibrin in the skin. Okay, we're going to put the stem cells in this media, it's going to create exosomes that are more geared towards those kinds of growth factors. And, you know, like I say, high molecular rate, high uronic acid, and some of these other

• 48:43Gary Brecka?

  things are really beneficial for skin. And then you apply those topically, or to the scalp, or what have you. So do you also use the exosome biologics?

• 48:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, we also use exosomes as well.

• 48:55Gary Brecka?

  What kind of applications?

• 48:57Speaker 00

  We use them in conjunction with our stem cells and frankly, exosomes are less expensive. So if people, you know, the price tag on stem cells is too much, then we can use exosomes. But we use them for many of the similar applications of stem cells as well.

• 49:11Gary Brecka?

  So, and what do you find that they're really proficient at treating like, you know, skin regeneration, fine lines and wrinkles, hair restoration?

• 49:18Speaker 00

  Great for skincare. You know, we do a lot of exosome injection into the scalp as well for hair regeneration. They're actually pretty helpful for joints as well. And so a lot of people like them as a substitute to stem cells or as an upgrade to PRP for joints as well. So I think one, one thing that everyone should know is that stem cells are going to affect differently depending on your own personal biology. I think you mentioned this earlier as well. So if you're going to go in for stem cells and you're looking for hair regeneration or skin, or even exosomes, wrinkle reduction is really imperative in my view to get the rest of your biology in order.

• 49:57Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I agree. This is why, you know, I like this sort of wheel or this sequence of events that you put people through because you're not starting them at the top. You're saying, let's, let's get the root foundation done. Make sure that we've got dietary lifestyle, sleep, you know, whole foods. Let's maybe clean up the blood. Maybe one of these filtration technologies, EBO2 or therapeutic plasma exchange. And if you want to continue on this journey, let's talk about how we can take a clean, healthy, functioning biome and enhance it even, enhance it even further.

• 50:32Speaker 00

  That's exactly right.

• 50:32Gary Brecka?

  And that's what I love about this. It's like, I feel like we're just scratching the surface.

• 50:36Speaker 00

  Scratching the surface right now.

• 50:37Gary Brecka?

  Of it. But in your, in your practice at Next Health, what, what has been as an overseeing physician, like what's been your biggest aha moment that you see in your patients that are on this journey? What do you find that most people have that they're surprised about? Or what are some of the outcomes that you find really like fascinating and exciting for them? When it comes to snacking, masa is flipping the script on what real food should look like. Masa chips are crafted with grass fed. Beef tallow, one of the healthiest fats on the planet. These chips are packed with essential vitamins like vitamin A, D, E, and vitamin K2, all of which play a role in keeping your skin vibrant, your immune system strong, and your bones solid.

• 51:21Gary Brecka?

  But here's the real magic about masa. Masa's corn goes through an ancient process called nixtimalization, which makes it way easier to digest and it amps up its nutrient profile. Plus, these chips are low in PUFA, so you won't find any of the inflammatory seed oils that you find in most snacks. And instead masa uses pure Redmond sea salt, giving you a natural hit of minerals that keep your cells hydrated and your energy steady. So don't just snack. Reach for masa. It's real food, real health, without any of the junk. Grab a bag and I promise you'll feel the difference. Now, let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast.

• 51:56Speaker 00

  The thing that surprises a lot of people is when we do total toxin testing.

• 52:01Gary Brecka?

  Oh, shocked me, man.

• 52:02Speaker 00

  Right?

• 52:03Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I did yours too. Yeah, no, crazy.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's when we discovered mold, right? And we were like talking about it.

• 52:08Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 52:09Speaker 00

  So I think-

• 52:09Gary Brecka?

  Aflatoxin A, aflatoxin B.

• 52:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:12Gary Brecka?

  I had bisphenols, the microplastics, glyphosate. I had the April little A. And, you know, I take really good care of myself.

• 52:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, one of the healthiest people I know, exactly, but we all-

• 52:26Gary Brecka?

  My air for the- And, and so it means that, you know, the average populace that's unaware of these things. And I don't mean to seem that I'm not average, I'm very average, but, but the, the average populace is unaware of these and, and I don't think the modern medical system even really looks at or even considers toxicity.

• 52:48Speaker 00

  Not at all, right?

• 52:49Gary Brecka?

  So that's the biggest one.

• 52:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that was one of the biggest ones. I think, you know, there used to be three legs of the stool, there's nutrition, exercise, and sleep. Toxins is definitely the fourth leg of the stool, in my opinion. I think it needs to be addressed and it usually is now the root cause of many people's health issues. Because most people know, you know, how to eat better. They know they need to sleep. They know they need to work out and exercise almost. Most people get that stuff right as they're going through their health journey, if they're trying to fix something. But toxins are not considered. And then when we measure them and we show people they're heavy metals or mold, it's a big surprise. But the good news is there's things you can do about it, right? And so a lot of what you talk about is reducing your exposure.

• 53:35Speaker 00

  That's, that's the Pareto principle, right? That's the 20% of actions you could take that will get you 80% of the result is reduce your exposure. And then on top of that, we can do some things to detoxify you like Ibu, total plasma change, but even sauna detoxifies you, even high intensity training.

• 53:51Gary Brecka?

  Glutathione.

• 53:52Speaker 00

  Right, IV therapy.

• 53:53Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, sauna, they don't have to be the really expensive treatments. You know, I think that has been a big aha moment for me too. Someone just forwarded me recently a postmortem study and I've only cursory read it, but it was looking at the postmortem autopsies on MS patients. And at least in this study, 100% of these multiple sclerosis patients had parasites. And, you know, sometimes when you think about lesions in the myelin sheath or on these nerves, you wonder, well, what could cause these lesions? And all of us have parasites. I mean, sorry, guys, everybody listening to this podcast right now has parasites. You've got good ones and bad ones.

• 54:37Gary Brecka?

  You know, sometimes, you know, I think as our immune system gets less and less accurate and maybe, you know, more and more fatigued, these little things slip by, you know, circulating tumor cells slips by, the DNA methylation process, you know, an old virus, like a monovirus starts to raise its ugly head, is Epstein Barr. Or you had chicken pox as a child and now you have shingles. And I think a lot of people don't realize that very often, some of these ailments that we suffer from are not things that are happening to us. There are actually things that are happening within us.

• 55:11Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 55:12Gary Brecka?

  Right. And clinics like yours, and I think functional medicine in general, is really trying to strengthen the body back to the point where it can do its job on its own.

• 55:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, we haven't even talked about gut health yet. That's the other number two.

• 55:24Gary Brecka?

  Let's get into that one. Yeah, that's another.

• 55:26Speaker 00

  So we measure a serum zonulin level and also we do stool testing on most of our patients. And especially if they're having any sort of weird symptomatology, right?

• 55:37Gary Brecka?

  Serum zonulin.

• 55:38Speaker 00

  A serum zonulin is a marker of, it's actually the protein that holds our gut cells together, our enterocytes. And when the enterocytes separate from each other, this protein gets released and ends up in your bloodstream. And that's how you can know if someone has leaky gut or not. Yeah. So it's an incredibly useful biomarker of leaky gut.

• 55:56Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 55:57Speaker 00

  And then you can actually follow the levels as you heal someone's gut as well.

• 56:00Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 56:00Speaker 00

  And so we do this testing on our patients and it's a game changer.

• 56:03Gary Brecka?

  So that level should be zero theoretically, right? And I, and I think it's fascinating that we only have a single cell layer that really, truly is separating our inside environment from our outside environment. You know, I like to think of our gut as being actually outside of the body.

• 56:18Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 56:19Gary Brecka?

  It runs through us.

• 56:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's the size of a football field.

• 56:22Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, but like a pipe, you know, it's contiguous with the side of your cheek, you know? And, you know, when you get internally, you only have a single cell layer really protecting you. Yeah, that's, that's just incredible. So think about all the ways that that could go wrong.

• 56:40Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 56:40Gary Brecka?

  And then all of the consequences it could cause. What does a gut healing protocol look like?

• 56:45Speaker 00

  Your gut has, you're right, one layer of enterocytes that you have, but you also have another layer of your microbiome. And your microbiome is also working hard to protect you from the outside environment, keep toxins out and help you absorb nutrients, right? Now, if your microbiome is off and/or your entero, if your microbiome is off, your Endocysts then start separating and you get this leaky gut. So the gut healing protocol involves number one, getting your microbiome healthy again, right? And then number two, it involves giving your endocysts what they need to regenerate themselves. So they need collagen, they need glutamine. Your endocysts also need a break from substances that cause them to get inflamed.

• 57:29Speaker 00

  So they need a break from like gluten, some people dairy as well. We do a lot of gluten sensitivity testing, dairy sensitivity testing. And we figure, I can't tell you the number of people we find that have gluten sensitivity. It's almost everybody. It's kind of crazy. And so I think you give your gut a break from all the things that are damaging it. And then you give it some of the substrates it needs to heal. And you, at the same time, help your microbiome be healthy by taking in more fiber, by eating, you know, fermented foods.

• 58:00Gary Brecka?

  Yep.

• 58:01Speaker 00

  And then you can heal your gut over time. So bone broth is also extremely useful in healing the gut. A lot of collagen.

• 58:07Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. I do a lot of kettle and fire bone broth.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  I love kettle and fire.

• 58:10Gary Brecka?

  I love those guys too. Big shout out to Justin. What's up?

• 58:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:14Gary Brecka?

  But you know, I'm a huge fan of that. I actually use it to get into and out of a fast.

• 58:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:21Gary Brecka?

  I find that just going cold turkey into a fast for me is a little bit harder. So, you know, the day before I'll, I'll have a bone broth at noon. I'll have a bone broth at six o'clock at night, which really helps you get through that first 24 hours. And, and it's very satiating.

• 58:37Speaker 00

  Is this for your water fast, when you do it a longer term?

• 58:39Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, when I do the water fast. And then days two and three, when I'll do these fasting challenges, then we'll switch to just the mineralized water in the morning. Maybe black coffee if, you know, there's a lot of people can't just cold turkey on coffee. But black coffee or teas and then just with no cream or sugars or anything, obviously. And then easing into that last, that second and third day. And I find that that gets 70% of the people 100% of the way.

• 59:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:07Gary Brecka?

  Right? Does that, does that even make sense? Did I make that up? It's only Ron Burgundy and Anchorman. So 60% of the time it works every time.

• 59:19Gary Brecka?

  But you know, it's, it's, you know, then it's just not too much too fast.

• 59:24Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 59:24Gary Brecka?

  You know, because especially.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  That's a great tip.

• 59:27Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, especially people that have poor insulin regulation because that drop in glucose and the drop in insulin just drives hunger. And then you just binge it in the middle of fast.

• 59:40Gary Brecka?

  Which is kind of the bad, the worst thing for, but I, but bone broths are excellent. What, what kind of gut healing protocols do you put most of your clients on? Is it probiotics? Do you ever use things like BPC 157?

• 59:55Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So all BPC 157.

• 59:58Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 59:58Speaker 00

  We also do IV glutamine as well. And then those are the supplements to the actual, you know, dietary program that we use as well. And so we always tie them with a nutritionist that they need help as well to really modify their diet. And then, um, yeah, those are, those are the, the big highlights, pretty much. Yeah.

• 1:00:20Gary Brecka?

  And then, and then, um, also probiotics?

• 1:00:22Speaker 00

  And also we use probiotics later on.

• 1:00:25Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  We try not to put too much into the gut at the same time.

• 1:00:28Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  And then after we start seeing some healing and we try, we try to rebuild their microbiome. And this is also really important for people like on GLP ones, right? One of the main reasons we have this massive deficiency of GLP one in our population is because ultra-processed food has destroyed the bacteria that make GLP one nor help us make our own GLP one.

• 1:00:49Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:00:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so anytime we have someone on a GLP one, we also start them on probiotics to regenerate that bacteria that can help us make our own GLP one. And so, you know, there's a lot of talk about being on GLP ones forever.

• 1:01:03Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:01:03Speaker 00

  I don't think you need to be. You just have to use the time that you're on GLP ones to regenerate your bacteria in your gut that help you make the GLP one.

• 1:01:10Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. And you know, a lot of GLP one responds to nutrient density.

• 1:01:14Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:01:15Gary Brecka?

  So when we eat non-nutrient dense foods and in some of the studies that compared ultra-processed diets to whole food diets, you, you see that, you know, Mark Hyman talks about this all the time. You see that the people on ultra-processed foods have a tendency to dramatically overeat.

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:01:31Gary Brecka?

  And even on, even if given the same caloric density, one is a whole nutrient-dense food and one is a highly processed food that the highly processed participants, you know, had a tendency, I want to say it was either 500 or 800 extra calories a day, but those will add up fast. And they got hungrier faster.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:01:51Gary Brecka?

  They also got hungrier more frequently. And they felt less satiated and a lot of times are, you know, again, back to pharmacy. The pharmacy responds to nutrient density. If your brain is like, hey, we don't have.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:02:04Gary Brecka?

  I don't have the raw materials I need. Just get, put more in.

• 1:02:07Speaker 00

  Putting more in.

• 1:02:08Gary Brecka?

  And you keep shoveling more in and it's, it's not ringing the bell because you're not actually giving your body the, the, you know, the nutrients.

• 1:02:15Speaker 00

  It needs, right.

• 1:02:15Gary Brecka?

  Nutrients it needs.

• 1:02:16Speaker 00

  And guess what's coming? So the big food companies have re-engaged with the food scientist to make new chemicals and new foods that they can add and make their foods GLP-1 resistant.

• 1:02:30Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:02:31Speaker 00

  Yes. So I just read some articles on this and it's kind of in secrecy, but they've, um, the, some got leaked that the food companies have been engaged to start making GLP-1 resistant foods. So now you'll be on a GLP-1 and you'll eat this processed food and you, the GLP-1 won't work and you just keep eating it. So what I tell all of my patients is look, it's insane.

• 1:02:56Gary Brecka?

  Incredible.

• 1:02:56Speaker 00

  I mean, this is a multi-billion dollar industry.

• 1:02:59Gary Brecka?

  So intentionally sinister.

• 1:03:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. It's, it's a multi-billion dollar industry and these, these companies are gonna, you know, do what they need to do to maintain their value, unfortunately. And so, um, what I tell all my patients is, look, I understand you need this GLP-1 right now, but we're going to use this time to not just regenerate your gut bacteria, but to completely change your relationship with food.

• 1:03:21Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  And I think that's key, right?

• 1:03:24Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. And then you, you, I imagine you titrate them up and you can titrate them off.

• 1:03:28Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:03:28Gary Brecka?

  Which, you know, physicians in my previous clinic have done that with clients. I mean, I know that everybody's supposed to be on these for life. I mean, look, um, with the, you know, the American Pediatric Association has approved these down to, you know, age nine.

• 1:03:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:42Gary Brecka?

  Um, and I understand that there's a push to get that to age six. I mean, can you imagine starting on a GLP-1 when you're six years old and still being on it when you're 50?

• 1:03:54Speaker 00

  I mean, crazy.

• 1:03:55Gary Brecka?

  That is mind numbing.

• 1:03:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, it's just a massive subscription revenue for the companies that are making these GLP-1s. And we always have a goal with our patients that this is when we're going to get you off GLP-1, but you have to have that clear offboarding program. So involves probiotics, nutrient dense food, changing relationship with food. And a really good tool that we use on that too, Gary, is a CGM. It really

• 1:04:17Gary Brecka?

  Constant glucose monitor.

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  Continuous glucose monitor.

• 1:04:19Gary Brecka?

  Oh, continuous glucose monitor, yeah. So that they actually get an idea. You know, those are pretty fascinating because you start to see some of the magic in the human body. I remember when we started using those too. I would get calls all the time and someone would say, I woke up in the morning and I haven't even eaten. I started moving around and my blood sugar rose. And I was like, good, that means your liver is working, you know?

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  Means you're alive.

• 1:04:40Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah, means you're alive. But they're like, how's my blood sugar going up? I'm not even eating. I literally didn't even have water. And I was like, you know, we store glucose in the form of glycogen. And, and obviously one of your liver's roles is to take this stored glucose, this glycogen, and then turn it back into glucose when you need it for fuel.

• 1:05:00Gary Brecka?

  This, so this gluconeogenic process is what you're seeing. And it's, that's really amazing that you're seeing that even in patients or clients that are on ketogenic diets. They'll see these same kind of weird rises in, in blood sugar. And I'm like, well, you know, your liver is actually converting it back into sugar and putting it in your blood. Excuse me, that's how dependent we are on, on, and, and how crack addicted we are to sugar.

• 1:05:28Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:05:29Gary Brecka?

  And back to your previous point, you know, I've read several articles on, you know, labs around the country that are specifically looking at ways to stimulate dopamine receptors and dopamine agonists in the body so that you get not just a flavor reward, but you get this sort of emotional reward from food. So they can get addicted to this dopamine cycle specifically designed to create addiction. So you don't just like the food, you're addicted to the food, right? Was the commercial can't eat just one? Why can't we just eat just one? Some scientists figured out how they, how they get us addicted to it.

• 1:06:12Gary Brecka?

  So what else is really exciting you about this field of longevity and, and anti-aging bio-optimization?

• 1:06:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you know, you, there's a couple of things. I mean, you had mentioned AI earlier. I think we are headed into this golden age where AI and Quantum computing combined with just sheer computing power that we have right now, even before quantum computing can be used to create digital cellular twins and also create new peptides. And so

• 1:06:39Gary Brecka?

  Digital cellular twins.

• 1:06:41Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:06:42Gary Brecka?

  Not laying you off the hook on that.

• 1:06:43Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:06:43Gary Brecka?

  Hell is a digital cellular twin?

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  We will be able to replicate a cell within the brain of a computer and test molecules against it.

• 1:06:51Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:06:51Speaker 00

  At scale. Okay. And so when we can do this, and Stanford just did this, there was a news article yesterday, how Stanford created a new GLP one that has a specific response just to the hunger centers and doesn't have any response, doesn't create a nauseating response or some of the other side effects.

• 1:07:08Gary Brecka?

  Wow, or some of the paralytic valve or

• 1:07:11Speaker 00

  Gastroprisis.

• 1:07:12Gary Brecka?

  Gastroprisis, that was the word I was looking for.

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

  And so they found this peptide molecule with a computer, AI-enabled computer program. And so we are going to develop these peptides, these molecules, rapid speed. And so, you know, that's my other thing is peptides. Peptides are the holy grail of medicine, I believe. These are natural drugs that our body makes and our hundred billion dollar pharmaceutical inside of us, right? That, that we've made for all of humanity. And so now we're going to discover more and more of these peptides by using computing power. And, you know, peptides are incredibly low cost to make.

• 1:07:47Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:47Speaker 00

  And, you know, you can get them from your compounding pharmacy, for example, and they have lots of great effects and their side effects are also not as bad as regular pharmaceuticals.

• 1:08:02Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:08:02Speaker 00

  So I'm really excited about peptide science expanding and also getting some political power behind it as well.

• 1:08:09Gary Brecka?

  Yes, I'm really excited about that, too. You know, the whole Maha movement, you know, this opportunity to affect public policy and come top down where you can actually really impact the masses. What would be really exciting is if we saw, you know, the healthcare model change. There's whole societies in the world, Singapore being one of them, Japan being another one, where they have actually engineered. Their health, their, their health system and they are extending life expectancy.

• 1:08:38Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:08:39Gary Brecka?

  Their life expectancy is continuing to go up.

• 1:08:41Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:08:41Gary Brecka?

  Um, by now, some of these countries, it was not by military force, but it was essentially by force because they would restrict people's ability to access to healthcare, but they would, they reward things like walking, they reward things like exercise, they reward things like clean diets. They don't have a, uh, let's say a subsidy program that would cover things like, you know, high fructose corn syrup laden foods, highly processed foods, cigarettes, you know, pens, alcohol, um, you know, and foods with high fructose corn syrup sodas, things like that. They, they actually cover the kinds of foods that serve their cellular biology.

• 1:09:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:09:22Gary Brecka?

  And, and it's astounding, um, I'm going to dig more into this because I was fascinated that there are governments out there that are looking at this crisis and that don't have a healthcare system like ours that is profiting off of symptom maintenance and disease management. They don't have a profit center for type two diabetes. They don't have a profit center for cancer. They don't have a profit center for autoimmune conditions. They actually have the opposite. They, they.

• 1:09:48Speaker 00

  They're losing money as a government, right?

• 1:09:51Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. Because here we, we socialize the expenses and we privatize the cost.

• 1:09:56Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:09:57Gary Brecka?

  Um, I mean, sorry, we socialize the cost and we privatize the, um, the profit.

• 1:10:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:10:02Gary Brecka?

  You know, so the profit goes to private industry, but the cost goes to taxpayer, public, Medicare, Medicaid.

• 1:10:08Speaker 00

  All of us being into health insurance as well. And so it's crazy. Yeah. And so, you know, I think the incentives are totally misaligned. Um, and that's why our healthcare system cost is going up every single year. It's $3 trillion. Massive portion of our GDP goes to our health expenses because people make money off us being sick.

• 1:10:26Gary Brecka?

  Yes. So true.

• 1:10:27Speaker 00

  And you look at other countries and like, we can't have this much sickness and illness. We have to fix it. We recognize ultra-processed food is one of the number one enemies. We also recognize that. Probably close behind or equal to that is sedentary behavior. And so we're just going to legislate against that. And then people will get healthier. And then we don't spend so much money on this stuff, you know?

• 1:10:47Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, it's not about eliminating free choice. It's about getting poison out of the food supply. Well, Dr. Darshan Shah, this has been amazing. I absolutely want to have you back for a series on the podcast. I'm excited about the expansion of your Next Health franchise. How does my audience find you?

• 1:11:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, so.

• 1:11:08Gary Brecka?

  We'll find out more about it next time.

• 1:11:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, Next Health on the internet, next-health.com. Me personally, I'm at social media at Darshan Shaw M D. I have a website, drshaw.com. People can ask me questions on my website. I try to respond to as many as possible or also on social media. Yeah, yeah. And those are the main places to find me. And I'm happy to engage with the audience and help anyone along their journey.

• 1:11:32Gary Brecka?

  That's super. Well, I have a VIP group, a community that I'm building. And this is a community that I really pour myself into. We do live group Q and As, we do private podcasts, we do challenges. We, I wrote an entire course, I put a course together on becoming the ultimate human and gave it into this community. So we're going to go into a private room now so they can ask you a couple of questions. If you're interested in becoming an ultimate human VIP, you can go over to theultimatehuman.com/vip. Sign up to be a VIP client and we will see you in that private room. Otherwise, I wind all my podcasts down by asking my guests the same question.

• 1:12:16Gary Brecka?

  And that is, what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

• 1:12:22Speaker 00

  I think for me, being an ultimate human means to feel good in my own skin, have time for myself, time for my family and time for my children. And also to wake up every day with a positive outlook on life.

• 1:12:34Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:34Speaker 00

  That's it.

• 1:12:35Gary Brecka?

  So amazing, man. So amazing. Well, guys, VIPs, I'll see you over in the private podcast room. And the rest of you guys, make sure that you look in the show notes below. Follow Dr. Darshan Shah and check out Next Health if you're interested in living forever. And until next time, that's your science.