Pod Insights The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka 215. Dr. Vonda Wright: On Menopause, Women’s Hormone Therapy, and Perimenopause Symptoms About this episode Forget expensive biohacks and longevity gadgets; the real secret to anti-aging starts with getting you from “fine” to extraordinary through the basics that most doctors never discuss. Dr. Vonda Wright challenges the entire medical paradigm by treating patients as whole people rather than collections of body parts, revealing how a 46-year-old woman’s frozen shoulder is actually a warning sign of perimenopause, inflammation, and systemic hormone depletion that conventional orthopaedics completely misses.
Join the Ultimate Human VIP community for Gary Brecka's proven wellness protocols!: https://bit.ly/4ai0Xwg
Get Dr. Vonda Wright’s book, “Unbreakable“ here: https://bit.ly/4hGy9Bh
Listen to "HOT For Your Health" on all your favorite platforms!
YouTube: https://bit.ly/3WBTpP2
Spotify: https://bit.ly/3WyIJRp
Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/4hLREJ2
Connect with Dr. Vonda Wright
Website: https://bit.ly/439JGmN
YouTube: https://bit.ly/43EDGTe
Instagram: https://bit.ly/47UjwHl
TikTok: https://bit.ly/3X7Mcq2
Facebook: https://bit.ly/3JGqEhi
X.com: https://bit.ly/4oiKJt1
LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/3Lj4T7K
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
COLD LIFE: THE ULTIMATE HUMAN PLUNGE: https://bit.ly/4eULUKp
WHOOP: JOIN AND GET 1 FREE MONTH!: https://bit.ly/3VQ0nzW
AION: “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4h6KHAD
A-GAME: “ULTIMATE15” FOR 15% OFF: http://bit.ly/4kek1ij
PEPTUAL: “TUH10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4mKxgcn
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 METHYLATION TEST (UK ONLY): https://bit.ly/48QJJrk
GENETIC TEST (USA ONLY): 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 of Show
02:40 Are You Really “Fine?”
06:27 Orthopaedic Surgery Style: Taking Care of the Whole Person
10:21 Why Are People So Inflamed in Midlife?
22:12 Misunderstanding Biology Leads to Disruption in Relationships
24:55 Physiology is the Answer
26:26 Osteoporosis Begins in Teenage Years
35:25 What is a Healthy Bone Lifestyle?
40:26 Bone Density is Highest in Gymnasts
43:14 Impact of Female Hormone Therapy
54:06 USA’s Life Expectancy vs. Global
56:56 Connect with Dr. Vonda Wright
58:18 What does it mean to you to be an Ultimate Human?
Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not provide medical advice. It is not intended for diagnosing or treating any health condition. Always consult a licensed healthcare professional before making health or wellness decisions.
Gary Brecka is the owner of Ultimate Human, LLC which operates The Ultimate Human podcast and promotes certain third-party products used by Gary Brecka in his personal health and wellness protocols and daily life and for which Ultimate Human LLC and / or Gary Brecka directly or indirectly holds an economic interest or receives compensation. Accordingly, statements made by Gary Brecka and others (including on The Ultimate Human podcast) may be considered promotional in nature.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript 10,650 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 You can decrease the odds by 60% of the following diseases by starting hormones earlier in perimenopause: stroke, cardiovascular disease, heart attack, brain death, and osteoporosis.
0:12 Gary Brecka? There is a temporal disconnect here that I will worry about that when I need to worry about it. Starting earlier is really, prevention is the best medicine.
0:21 Speaker 00 Listen, I can help anybody, 50, 60, 70-year-olds. But if you truly want to get in front of prevention, the critical decade people, 35 to 45, need to wake up. It is time to get your health standards together. Not something weird that we do for six weeks. It's just how we live.
0:37 Gary Brecka? But I think this is just such a powerful message that you don't have to suffer to be natural. As a woman, you should be in a position to thrive all the way through your 50s, 60s, 70s.
0:47 Speaker 00 Listen to me, Gary, how passionate I get. It is a war cry, a mantra to me, that I am going to save the health of the women coming after me.
0:55 Gary Brecka? Having had such an intimate experience with it and how it revolutionized my wife in such a short period of time, how soon can a woman reasonably start hormone therapy, estrogen, pregnenolone supplementation?
1:08 Speaker 00 If we're truly interested, Gary, in preventive health for women.
1:26 Gary Brecka? Hey, guys. Welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecka, where we go down the road of everything: anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And today's a really special, special session because we're coming to you live from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, with my guest that I am so excited to have on. I don't say this very often. You can go back and look at all my podcasts. I am a big fan of your work, and so is my wife. She was super excited about this podcast. She's starving, so she's eating right now. And then she's going to come sit in with us. But welcome to the podcast, Dr. Von der Wight.
2:01 Speaker 00 Thank you so much for having me.
2:03 Gary Brecka? And I'm going to take it easy on you today because it's 3:30 in the morning, our time.
2:06 Speaker 00 That's right.
2:08 Gary Brecka? You're from Orlando, I came from Miami, so we're on the same time zone. And I just checked the time, like, okay, it's 3:30 in the morning. I don't think I've ever done a podcast at 3:30 in the morning, but you're holding up pretty well.
2:18 Speaker 00 I'm doing great. And how ironic that we're practically neighbors in the United States and we've flown 5,000 miles to sit across from each other.
2:26 Gary Brecka? I was talking to the team about that this morning. I'm like, why is it that we're landing so many of these guests and we're halfway around the world? You know, but I'm glad that we got a chance to do this. You know, what I love about your work, I mean, you're, you're a board certified orthopedic surgeon, clearly qualified. But what I love about your work is you're, you have this very back to the basics approach. And you're not afraid to talk about weightlifting for women, diet, sleep, you know, exercise, mobility, those things that we have big data on that we really just can't overlook.
3:00 Speaker 00 Yes.
3:00 Gary Brecka? You know, I think in this space that you and I are both in, you know, the biohacking longevity space, whatever you want to call it, so often people are looking for that magic pill.
3:09 Speaker 00 Yes.
3:10 Gary Brecka? Like, is it N A D? Is it N M N? Is it this special type of resveratrol? You know, what is the secret to life extension? And the truth is, there's some of the basics that you just can't get around.
3:21 Speaker 00 Well, you know, it's interesting, as a, as a practicing surgeon, people come to me and what they're asking me for are all the gadgets, the longevity things, the evidence influenced things. But they come to me in what I call, fine. Their health is, how are you today? I'm fine. With that, I'm just tired and fine. And so I think having taken care of nearly 100,000 people in my career, I've come to understand that if I take you from fine to doing all the things that we know work and have known work, the things you've just mentioned, and we optimize your health, then I can apply the same things
4:04 Speaker 00 I apply to pro athletes and executives because I'm a sports surgeon, right? So my whole career has been optimizing performance in the performers. Then I can apply to you those principles. And then when you're at peak performance, of course, then I'm going to reach into the longevity world and do all the secret sauce things that we're just discovering. But I tend not to want to jump to this until we're optimized because I feel like we're skipping steps.
4:37 Gary Brecka? I agree with that. And in your experience, where are the vast majority of people getting it wrong? When they say that they're fine, usually what they'll do is they'll just chalk it up to a consequence of aging or a consequence of their environment, their stress, or their spouse, or their kids, or their career. But I've found that it's usually not any of those things. You know, it's usually the absence of a lot of the basics. But where do you find that the vast majority, men and women, that are coming to you that say they're fine? What are they getting wrong?
5:05 Speaker 00 I think they feel good enough today, right? They're able to get up and just go through their daily routine with their health and their future as an afterthought. Somehow, we've prioritized the carpool, or the next meeting, or the the next deal as from a temporal perspective, like today, more important. But there's this concept in banking, I learned from the bankers, it's called temporal disconnect. And in the banking and finance world, it means that, on average, they can't get anybody to save $10 for their future, right?
5:44 Speaker 00 Well, from a health perspective, if we're feeling fine today, it's good enough today, we can't bank the health for the future. So what I try to do is help people identify what it's going to take to feel amazing today, not just fine. I want you to feel vibrant today, because that, my friend, is addictive. That is what people will come back to, not some remote promise of 150 years, which we'll probably get to based on science and and all the things we're learning. But if I can make you feel optimized today, that is why you'll come back.
6:25 Gary Brecka? That's amazing. And where do you start with them? I mean, do you do, because I think this whole term lifestyle medicine is is a term that I've really fallen in love with because. Rarely, if you've ever gone to see a physician, do they ask you anything about your lifestyle? I mean, you have hypertension, you have poor sleep, you have weight gain, what a retention, brain fog, you have all these consequences going on, and no one ever says, well,
6:51 Speaker 00 How are you sleeping?
6:52 Gary Brecka? Yeah, how are you sleeping? Or what are you eating on a daily day? You know, walk me through your day. Are you moving, other than to just get in the car and take the kids to school? Or to get between your home and your office? And so where do you start with them? How does that assessment look for you?
7:08 Speaker 00 In my own practice, whether honestly, it's, I have separated out my time, whether it's my orthopedic practice, and I'll give you an example, or whether it's my midlife menopause, or my precision longevity practice, we always assess where you are now. So I'll give you an orthopedic example of taking care of the whole person. And we can go into why many doctors can't do the whole person approach if you want to, and it doesn't have to be do with our desire. It frankly has to do with time. But
7:41 Gary Brecka? Time and compensation.
7:42 Speaker 00 Time and compensation, if we're honest about it. So if a woman comes to me, and she has the dreaded frozen shoulder, which means
7:50 Gary Brecka? Oh my gosh, my wife had that, so I want to go down this rabbit hole. Awful.
7:54 Speaker 00 So what happens in frozen shoulder? It's an inflammatory response to midlife, or inflammation, obviously, because it also happens in people with diabetes. But how it presents is, out of nowhere, Gary, nothing happened. You did not bang your shoulder into the door. You did not work out hard. You have quick onset of excruciating pain.
8:17 Gary Brecka? Unbelievable.
8:18 Speaker 00 Unrelenting, and you cannot sleep. And then, with very short amount of time, you can't move your arm, right? It's this motion people come in with.
8:28 Gary Brecka? Exactly what happened to my wife. I mean, exactly what happened to Sage.
8:31 Speaker 00 In a quick amount of time. So when a person comes into my orthopedic clinic, and I know, I read, oh, 46-year-old woman, shoulder pain, almost without pause, I know what's going on. So I'll go in the room, and I'll say, how can I help you today? But I do not focus on the shoulder first.
8:52 Gary Brecka? Hmm.
8:53 Speaker 00 We talk about the fact that she's forty seven or forty six and how are you sleeping? And what else are you feeling? And because I am interested in helping her identify that she's in this critical time period of her life when her ovaries are stop are stopping their production of estrogen and things are changing. If I were to do the typical thing, which is just say, oh, your shoulder's not moving. You've obviously got a frozen shoulder. Let me give you an injection, send you to therapy, blah, blah, blah.
9:22 Gary Brecka? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
9:23 Speaker 00 I miss the whole picture and I'm not taking care of the whole person. And so for me, my style of Orthopaedic surgery is taking care of the whole person. So we're talking about how the fact they're not sleeping, they're anxious, they've never been anxious.
9:39 Gary Brecka? Right.
9:39 Speaker 00 But all of a sudden, they feel different. And within five minutes, Gary, of starting a whole person approach to the frozen shoulder, these women are crying in my office. And it's not because I'm the meanest doctor they've ever seen. It's because finally, finally, they feel heard and seen. And it's so hard. And almost without, almost to a woman, Gary, and men say this to me too, because I take care of both men and women, but people will say to me, but you know what? I have a very high pain tolerance.
10:19 Gary Brecka? Mm hmm.
10:19 Speaker 00 Because there seems to be some badge of honor that is handed out on the.
10:23 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
10:23 Speaker 00 The, oh, I've got a, they say, I have a very high pain tolerance and I thought I could do this. I didn't want to come. But the reality is people wait and wait and wait and suffer.
10:34 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
10:35 Speaker 00 When we could have intervened really early. And so I think that's why coming in with a frozen shoulder, treating someone like a whole person and not a body part.
10:44 Gary Brecka? Mm hmm.
10:45 Speaker 00 They are quickly telling me about how they really feel.
10:50 Speaker 00 And crying sometimes.
10:52 Gary Brecka? Yeah, no, that was my wife.
10:53 Speaker 00 I feel like that is the way people deserve to be treated. As not a sum of body parts, whether it's your liver, your pancreas, or your heart, or your shoulder.
11:03 Gary Brecka? And I, you know, it was interesting because I was not, I wasn't aware of the relationship between menopause and frozen shoulder. And so we sent her for an MRI and she had a piece of capsulitis.
11:14 Speaker 00 Of course.
11:15 Gary Brecka? And of course, the first thing that that orthopedic did was say, well, we can do manipulation under anesthesia. I can break up all these.
11:21 Speaker 00 Yeah, but you don't need to do that.
11:22 Gary Brecka? I know, thank God we didn't.
11:23 Speaker 00 Okay.
11:25 Gary Brecka? And I, you know, we, we decided to go down the road of, of taking a deep dive into the hormones. We did a Dutch test. And, uh, which I'm sure you're familiar with, but what was fascinating about this test was it just showed a complete collapse of not just the hormones, but also some of their precursors. Pregnant alone was zeroed out or cortisol was completely floored out. So it wasn't rising in the morning at all. In fact, her melatonin was off the charts in the morning. So she was waking up with a high amount of melatonin and virtually no cortisol response. She had no pregnant alone, so aldosterone, cortisol were all off because of that.
12:07 Gary Brecka? And, and so we began to go down the, the
12:12 Speaker 00 Of course.
12:12 Gary Brecka? Hormone road, which, which I will tell you was life changing for her. Within weeks, her shoulders started to thaw and it's completely thawed now.
12:21 Speaker 00 Yes.
12:22 Gary Brecka? I mean, she can.
12:23 Speaker 00 Should we talk about that?
12:24 Gary Brecka? I definitely want to talk about that. If nothing else, I'll just keep this podcast for my wife because she'll appreciate it. I'll get brownie points with Sage. But yeah, and, and, and you and I talked about it beforehand. I want to go down this road for sure because there's so many women listening to this. And I think there's a paucity of understanding of that timeframe.
12:42 Speaker 00 I want people to understand the biology of what's going on. Yeah.
12:46 Gary Brecka? And also maybe we can talk a little bit about dispelling some of the myths of the link between estrogen and breast cancer.
12:52 Speaker 00 Oh, let's do that.
12:53 Gary Brecka? There's a lot of fear around that. One of the things that we discussed before the camera started, started rolling was I found those studies too, and actually followed the very same study that, uh, linked breast estrogen at the time to breast cancer. Decoupled it and fell in the polar opposite camp that there was actually a reduction.
13:15 Speaker 00 Yeah.
13:16 Gary Brecka? And I think there's a lot of women listening to this and a lot of husbands that are curious about this too, for their wives.
13:23 Gary Brecka? You know, is the hormone therapy a viable option? If you know me, you know, I'm a huge believer in the benefits of hydrogen water. H2 Tab delivers cost effective portable tablets that generate ultra clean molecular hydrogen at 12 parts per million, one of the highest concentrations on the market. With over 1,300 published studies showing benefits of oxidative stress, energy, recovery, brain function, and so much more, taking charge of your health has never been easier or more cost effective. Just drop a tablet in water, let it dissolve and drink it back. It's less than a dollar a day, science backed and part of my daily routine. I never travel without this and it is my favorite bio hack.
14:06 Gary Brecka? Visit drinkh2tab.com, that's drinkh2tab.com and upgrade your hydration today. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast.
14:18 Speaker 00 Well, let's, do you mind if we start back at?
14:20 Gary Brecka? No, let's go back to square one.
14:22 Speaker 00 Why does this even happen? So I think the fascinating, almost legendary thing that happens when you birth a female baby, a baby with XX chromosomes is housed within her eggs, her ovary, her ovaries are all the eggs she will ever have, more than 2 million.
14:42 Gary Brecka? Still fascinating.
14:42 Speaker 00 Isn't that fascinating?
14:43 Gary Brecka? That is still fascinating.
14:43 Speaker 00 So the legacy of your entire family exists within the ovaries of these baby girls that we have, right? So it's the natural history of ovarian life that, you know, and to contrast it, the analogous structure in an XY person, a male, is testicles, but.
15:05 Speaker 00 You build fifteen hundred sperm a day or minute. It's rapid, right?
15:11 Gary Brecka? Right.
15:12 Speaker 00 A female child is born with all the eggs. The natural history is that by puberty, we've lost a large percent of those. And then what we are designed to do, which we don't always do, is every month cyclically, as hormones predictably rise and fall, we use and exhaust a percentage. But here is why midlife is so profound for women and so different between men and women, because it is wrong to say that the physiology of men or women are the same. My own data show down to the stem cell level that they're different. So by the time a woman reaches thirty five to forty, you start to not feel
15:54 Speaker 00 like you've always felt because we have less than one percent of our eggs left. Estrogen, by and large, a very tiny percent is made in the adrenals, but most of a woman's estrogen is made in the follicle or the eggshell of an egg. So when you have so few, you're just not producing the same level, healthy levels you've always produced. And the reason that's important, and I, and if there's one of several things I want your audience to walk away with, is estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone are not sex hormones. They are hormones, just like thyroid hormone, or, or any hormones our body makes. They're
16:36 Speaker 00 not specifically sex hormones. There are estrogen receptors, alpha and beta, on every tissue of the body. So imagine, every tissue in the body becomes rapidly starved of one of its key ligands, of one of its key signaling pathways, for all the good things, such that we know from the work of, of Lisa Moscone and Robbie Brenton, that without estrogen, your brain not only stars, but changes its chemistry. The heart, without the influence of estrogen, has thirty to forty percent more microvascular disease. And let's, I'm a, I'm a, I'm an orthopedic surgeon, let's talk about bone. We will lose twenty percent
17:19 Speaker 00 of our bone density in the time between perimenopause and menopause.
17:24 Gary Brecka? Wow.
17:25 Speaker 00 These are profound, profound biologic changes.
17:30 Speaker 00 So we started this conversation talking about frozen shoulder. Why do people walk in so inflamed? Why are women so inflamed in midlife? It's because estrogen is a profound anti-inflammatory. So when women walk into my office, bringing it back, and we take the time to listen, how are you sleeping? What's your brain doing? How, how do you feel in general? And they say, I don't feel like myself anymore. From a human biology standpoint, it makes so much sense. If every tissue in your body is affected, it makes sense that we should be having longer conversations about the restoration of the most natural way of living,
18:15 Speaker 00 which is with estrogen. It's not a byproduct. It's not something we should suffer through. If we're truly interested, Gary, in preventive health for women, we must talk about estrogen and we must talk about it earlier. Because my generation of women, I'm a generation Xer. You know, baby boomers have lost out because of this study. Xers are not sitting down, we are going to change the future so that millennials and my seventeen year old daughter, my eighteen year old daughter, will never starve our brains. Will never have sixty percent more microvascular disease in our hearts. Will not lose our bone density so that we end up frail.
19:00 Speaker 00 It's almost, listen to me, Gary, how passionate I get. It is a war cry, a mantra to me, that I am going to save the health of this, the women coming after me.
19:11 Gary Brecka? And it's so astounding because I think it starts a lot earlier than,
19:15 Speaker 00 Oh, yes.
19:15 Gary Brecka? You know, now that I've, I, I went through it with, with my wife. So I'm way more familiar now than I was before. And what seemed like this rapid collapse, I mean, the, the frozen shoulder was the peak where we're like, okay, we are going to come to a full stop and we're going to fix this. But when we started backing things up, just like what you're talking about, the brain fog, mood numbness, loss of libido.
19:44 Gary Brecka? Short term, I don't want to say short term memory issues because that sounds too.
19:48 Speaker 00 But. No, I lost my nouns.
19:50 Gary Brecka? Yes, exactly. That's what I mean.
19:52 Speaker 00 I lost my nouns.
19:53 Gary Brecka? It's not like dementia or Alzheimer's. It's just like fumbling a little bit, like the words that, you know, she would say, it's just right on the top.
20:00 Speaker 00 It's right here. I can't get it.
20:01 Gary Brecka? And I can't get it out. You know, I, you know, childhood best friends that I haven't talked to in a while and I would be talking about a story with them and then their name would escape me. And, you know, so she was like, and my wife is on her game. I mean, we built a business together. She's very detail oriented. She's a list taker. She's, she's very structural about the way that she goes about her day. Extremely organized and then in all at one time.
20:27 Speaker 00 Yeah.
20:27 Gary Brecka? Just unraveled and, and it was astounding to me how fast the genie went back in the bottle.
20:33 Speaker 00 Oh, yes.
20:33 Gary Brecka? Once we addressed it, like, I mean, I've got to say, you know, women, if you're listening and you're suffering from this, you know, get a really good hormone test. Go see a practitioner that understands this because it was life changing.
20:47 Speaker 00 And I want women to be literate themselves. I think gone are the days, long gone are the days. Maybe when I started practicing medicine, we were still in it. But gone are the days when a person can just blindly take advice. I encourage all people, men and women, to become experts in their own health, to become literate.
21:05 Gary Brecka? Citizen scientists.
21:06 Speaker 00 That's right. To understand, um, so that they can make the best choices for themselves and to do it early. Right. To your point, we think perimenopause can, which is the time when we're, when we have so few eggs can, can start in their 35. Who would suspect while we're still having children, but many women, we understand now, including myself, I had my last child when I was 40. Go right from postpartum to perimenopause.
21:38 Gary Brecka? And wow.
21:39 Speaker 00 But I don't, I'm going to say this now because we're going to unpack it, but I want women listening to understand that.
21:47 Speaker 00 It's you can feel better again. I mean, I, in a silly way, say, I went from menopause misery to midlife mastery. I have mastered this.
21:57 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
21:57 Speaker 00 I am back in a way that.
21:58 Gary Brecka? Mastery. I like that.
21:59 Speaker 00 Yeah, I am back in a way that I always was.
22:01 Gary Brecka? I get 15% of it because you said it on my podcast, but.
22:05 Speaker 00 That's, listen to you.
22:07 Gary Brecka? Menopause misery to midlife mastery. I love it.
22:09 Speaker 00 Yeah.
22:10 Gary Brecka? Yeah. And so these, these women that are listening now, 35, 37, 40, because I think we have mistakenly put menopause much further into our future. And we think I'll start worrying about that in my late 40s, maybe even my early 50s. And I'll just address it then. And these subtle changes that are sort of stacking on top of each other, you know, I liken it to tearing pages out of a phone book, right? They're not, it's, it's not like you all of a sudden go off a cliff. It's just, you know, I can't find my keys in my wallet and then.
22:44 Speaker 00 I don't feel like myself.
22:46 Gary Brecka? Feel like myself and kind of, you know, libido sort of starts to leave the building and, and I noticed too, like a little bit of flattening of the mood, not like a flat affect, but I mean mood numbness, right?
22:58 Speaker 00 Of course.
22:59 Gary Brecka? Peaks and valleys. Wasn't like.
23:02 Speaker 00 A little apathetic.
23:02 Gary Brecka? Was running around just always upset.
23:04 Speaker 00 I don't care anymore.
23:04 Gary Brecka? And but like the elation, the passion, the arousal, the joy, you know, that's sort of flattened out too. And I think the sad thing is that a lot of these are consequences or scenarios that women can push through, they can live with. It doesn't drive them to the ER.
23:19 Speaker 00 Right.
23:19 Gary Brecka? It's not taking you to the urgent care. And so these pages keep coming out of the phone book, right? And pretty soon you're an inch through, I'm dating, both of us, by the way, because we both know what a phone book is.
23:32 Speaker 00 Yes, the yellow page.
23:33 Gary Brecka? The millennials are like, yeah, we don't know what the yellow pages are.
23:37 Gary Brecka? But and then all of a sudden, it's it's to the point where it can be it can be disrupting relationships, it could be disrupting your career.
23:44 Speaker 00 Completely. Well, you've brought that up a couple of times and I and I think it's so critical and I love that we're recruiting male experts into this conversation because several studies have been done that show that up to 70% of all midlife marriages that end a divorce, at least partly can be attributed to a lack of understanding about these changes. Because if a man doesn't understand that it's not that his spouse doesn't care for him anymore, it's all these biological things going on and she doesn't want to talk about it and he just assumes that it's a caring issue. I mean, so if we could save marriages that have gone on for 20, 30, 45 years.
24:29 Gary Brecka? For sure.
24:30 Speaker 00 That are ending in midlife, that's work worth doing, even as an aside.
24:34 Gary Brecka? I totally agree with you, you know, and I think very often we we attach love and attraction to arousal and libido and they're very different things. You can be deeply in love with your spouse, you can be very attracted to your spouse, but you don't have arousal or libido because of these changes going on. And it doesn't mean that you're now disinterested in your spouse or you're any less attracted to them or or love them any less. But I think because we lump all of those together, we think very often if libido and arousal leave the marriage or they are less frequent, that that all of a sudden means my spouse doesn't love me anymore. They're not attracted to me anymore, you know?
25:14 Speaker 00 But when you think about it biologically, you know, people in at the forefront of sexual health like Kelly Kasperson and Rachel Rubin, talk about estrogen, progesterone and testosterone not as systemic hormones, which they are obviously, but almost as neurotrophic hormones, right? I mean, libido comes from the brain. I mean, I'm not an expert at this, right? It's a it's it happens in the brain first, then it happens physiologically. But it's an interesting point you make that that.
25:50 Speaker 00 That these, these relationship type changes that happen because of physiology are actually attitudinal, they're psychological, they're brain functions. And so to call these hormones, to recognize that they're neurotrophic hormones working in the brain makes so much sense.
26:12 Gary Brecka? 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. I've been deep down the rabbit hole of it. I mean, you know, fascinated by, because I'm a human biologist
26:53 Gary Brecka? and I really believe that physiology is where the answer lies. And very often when you just deprive the body of certain raw material.
27:02 Speaker 00 Right. This is a raw material.
27:05 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
27:05 Speaker 00 A primary messenger.
27:07 Gary Brecka? You get the expression of that disease, you know, you're, you're an orthopedic. I mean, we, I spoke recently at a conference for osteostrong, which is a
27:16 Speaker 00 Yes, I know them.
27:17 Gary Brecka? You know, bone density machines that actually, you know, load the bones for bone density. It was fascinating to me how many folks that were there, you know, still were onto the auspice that bones were made of calcium and, and bones are calcium combined with phosphorus and which makes hydroxyapatite. But in order for these to combine, you need these 12 minerals. And, and so deficiencies in these nutrients have consequences in, in brittle bones. And it's not just the absence of the load, it's also the absence of the mineral requirements to assemble the bone. And for women, when you think of emotion, it's like, well, how do you assemble emotion? Well, I mean, just like You said your hormones are signaling molecules.
28:02 Gary Brecka? And so when when your emotions are off and your mood is off, you're not developing a mental disorder, a mood disorder, an emotional illness, you know, you're missing raw material.
28:12 Speaker 00 You're missing raw materials. That's right. Yeah, it's very analogous to bone.
28:16 Gary Brecka? Yeah. And so putting them back can be just phenomenal. So when you do this assessment with with a woman, even in perimenopause, which I'm really glad that you pointed out could happen in 30s, because I don't think most women in their 30s are even thinking about this. I love the fact that you talk about bone density in the 30s, too. You're like, hey, you better get busy now. So you don't have osteopenia.
28:35 Speaker 00 Yeah. Osteoporosis is not, it is a disease that manifests in old age, but it begins in your teen years. So.
28:43 Gary Brecka? You know, I had two grandmothers that had fractured hips.
28:48 Speaker 00 Yes.
28:48 Gary Brecka? I was lucky enough to be alive and have a great grandmother for a while, but also my grandmother. What was fascinating to me, and people should really listen to this, is that in both cases of their hip fractures, we found out that their hip fractured and then they fell.
29:08 Speaker 00 Yes.
29:09 Gary Brecka? They didn't fall and break their hip.
29:11 Speaker 00 That's right.
29:11 Gary Brecka? My, my grandmother was actually at the, at a sink washing dishes.
29:17 Speaker 00 So common.
29:18 Gary Brecka? And her femoral neck broke.
29:19 Speaker 00 Yes.
29:20 Gary Brecka? And, and she fell and they said, oh, grandma fell and, and broke her hip. And then we found out from the ortho, no, actually.
29:26 Speaker 00 It broke and then she fell.
29:27 Gary Brecka? It broke and then she fell. I remember when I was in the mortality space, now we didn't.
29:33 Speaker 00 With insurance.
29:33 Gary Brecka? Know this with insurance, that, you know, this hip fracture, we called it a triad of death. Because it was a very quick acceleration to the grave. And I think I realize now that it wasn't the actual fracture that accelerated to grave. It was just the representation, the skeletal system cannot even support its own weight.
29:51 Speaker 00 Yes.
29:52 Gary Brecka? Right? I understand if you fall down a flight steps and you get
29:56 Speaker 00 Traumatic is very different than a traumatic.
29:58 Gary Brecka? Yeah. So I'd love to unpack that, too.
30:02 Speaker 00 Let's talk about bones.
30:03 Gary Brecka? Because, because you know, there's got to be connection between this hormonal depletion, you know, perimenopause and loss of
30:11 Speaker 00 Let's unpack it.
30:11 Gary Brecka? Of bone density because men don't suffer the same consequences until much later.
30:15 Speaker 00 Much later. I mean, 2 million men in the United States have osteoporosis, but to your point, we'll just do men first. Men.
30:22 Gary Brecka? Yeah, let's get us out of the way.
30:23 Speaker 00 Yeah, let's get the men out of the way. Because of the way testosterone interacts with the bone, I mean, men will see osteoporosis at 50, if you have a metabolic disease, and after 70, almost 80, from true osteoporosis. And then men have, have a 30% and women have a 30% chance of dying in the first year. And we'll talk about the cause of the triad that you're talking about. And then if you do survive it, 50% of the time, you'll never be independent again. So, but the reality is, bone health, as I've alluded to, begins in our teenage years. And so as I talk about this globally, I want people to understand
31:01 Speaker 00 that it's almost a harbinger of total health. Meaning because bones are a primary organ. We think of them, if we think of them at all, Gary, often we don't unless we're at Fashion Week and we're thinking about our
31:15 Gary Brecka? Cheekbones.
31:16 Speaker 00 And our collarbones.
31:18 Gary Brecka? Most of those are covered in filler by the time you're 50, so.
31:20 Speaker 00 There you go. The, the reality is, bone is structural.
31:25 Gary Brecka? Mm hmm.
31:26 Speaker 00 Without bone muscle, which we're all, we're all love muscle these days, is just a heaping pile of, of metabolic tissue without bone that gives us human form, right? But bone, not just structural, you alluded to the fact it's a storehouse of many minerals in our body that the body just takes out of like a cupboard. That's the point.
31:48 Gary Brecka? We buffer the pH of the blood from there.
31:49 Speaker 00 That's right. Every day, we, we withdraw minerals from the bone. That's its job. In the long bones and the pelvis, we make all the hematopoietic cells our body needs, red blood cells, white blood cells, the platelets.
32:02 Gary Brecka? Stem cells.
32:03 Speaker 00 With the stem cells, with the spleen. So it's, it's an incubator. It is a storehouse. It is structural. But here's what I love to tell people. It is an endocrine organ producing multiple hormones that travel to different parts. It is the master communicator of your body. So I'll give you a couple of examples. The bone creates a hormone called or a substance called osteocalcin. Osteocalcin will go to the brain and help your brain make neuro derived, brain derived neurotrophic factor to build a better brain.
32:40 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
32:41 Speaker 00 It coordinates with your pancreas and muscle for glucose and insulin regulation. If you're a man, osteocalcin from your bone goes to the testes to help make testosterone. And there are mind, there are bone gut axis. There's a bone brain axis. So when you, it puts a whole new light on bone and why it's important. Because it is the body's master communicator. And why wouldn't it be? If I were designing a human, we have bone from the top of our heads to the bottom of our pinky toe. Why don't I make that the highway of communication? So that sets the stage for why it's so important to build a lot of bone.
33:25 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
33:25 Speaker 00 We build peak bone mass by the, between 15 and about 25.
33:31 Gary Brecka? Okay.
33:31 Speaker 00 So
33:33 Speaker 00 because I'm a bone doctor, I get bone densities or REM scans on every person. And Gary, I find very, very young women with low bone density. And it's because several things. I think women are still dying under the thought that we have to be this big.
33:50 Gary Brecka? Right.
33:50 Speaker 00 We can't take up space. We can't eat.
33:53 Gary Brecka? Can't take up space.
33:54 Speaker 00 And we can't, right. And so as a result, many women do not have regular cyclical periods, which is critical for building better bone. Or maybe, you know, we're 54 years into Title IX, which equalized sports in the United States. And maybe we're just working out and burning 10,000 calories a day. And like so many teams I've taken care of, replenished with gummy worms.
34:18 Gary Brecka? Right.
34:18 Speaker 00 Never going to be enough. Right? Or maybe the third reason young women are not building enough bone is they're too sedentary. It's an epidemic around the world, sedentary living. So we have this young population of women not peaking out their bone density. And then we move into, there's this term running around social media called the matri essence, the time when we're fertile and deciding to have children, right? Well, it's very unknown that during pregnancy, it takes about 500 milligrams of calcium a day to build a baby. And if we're not eating enough calcium, we're going to take it from our bones. The body will prioritize the baby.
34:59 Gary Brecka? Parasitic relationship, yeah.
34:59 Speaker 00 Yes. And so there is an entity called the osteoporosis of pregnancy that results in vertebral fractures.
35:07 Gary Brecka? Wow.
35:07 Speaker 00 It's isn't that amazing?
35:09 Gary Brecka? Wow.
35:09 Speaker 00 Our body is designed after we give birth to replenish our bones, but only if we eat, only if we're not trying to lose the 40 pounds we gain, right? And starving ourselves. And then if we choose to breastfeed, and I'm a big fan of breastfeeding, I don't want any of your audience to think I'm not, it takes calcium to build milk for your baby.
35:31 Gary Brecka? No question.
35:31 Speaker 00 So there's this time in middle, in early, you know, young womanhood, when we're still taking from our bones. If we then replete our bones, great, many women do not, because then this is what happens, Gary. In perimenopause, when estrogen is walking out the door and she's not saying goodbye, she's just leaving.
35:53 Gary Brecka? She didn't say goodbye in our case here.
35:54 Speaker 00 Yeah, right. She's gone. It happened to me, like, gone. Estrogen is critical for controlling the homeostasis of bone. So bone biology, I know I'm not teaching you, but to your audience, the osteoclast, the cell that resorbs bone, is controlled by estrogen. Because it is, I like to think of it as a wild child. It's going to eat bone. That's all it does. It's going to take what the body needs. Coming behind it is the osteoblast, which rebuilds the potholes of bone. When we have estrogen, our body loves homeostasis. It's going to keep cell, these two cell types working in harmony.
36:33 Speaker 00 But without our estrogen, the osteoclast gets ahead and we have more bone breakdown.
36:40 Gary Brecka? Wow.
36:40 Speaker 00 Than we have bone building to the tune of 20% in the perimenopausal years. We triple our bone loss. Both men and women will lose bone over time. But without estrogen, women triple it so that if you're-
36:56 Gary Brecka? This is why I hear you preaching to women in their thirties so often.
36:58 Speaker 00 Oh, my gosh. It's the critical decade. It is, if we're truly interested in prevention, Gary. Listen, I can help anybody, 50, 60, 70 year olds. But if you truly want to get in front of prevention, the critical decade people, 35 to 45, need to wake up.
37:17 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
37:17 Speaker 00 It is time to get your health standards together. Make this lifestyle that you and I talk about the standard, not something weird that we do for six weeks.
37:27 Gary Brecka? Right.
37:28 Speaker 00 How we live, it's just how we live.
37:30 Gary Brecka? What does a healthy bone lifestyle look like?
37:33 Speaker 00 For men and women. Yeah, for men and women. We have to eat enough protein. Bones are 50% protein. We have to be concerned with calcium and minerals from our diet. I think it's hard to get enough, you talk about this all the time, a micronutrients because our soil is depleted. But I still would rather you get most of your calcium from your food. And it's not that hard. I mean, a cup of yogurt has about 300 milligrams. You just have to be conscientious about it. So calcium and protein from our food, micronutrient supplementation.
38:10 Speaker 00 Most of us need that because of the depletion of our soil, number one. Number two, we must get in a habit of lifting weights.
38:18 Gary Brecka? Loading.
38:18 Speaker 00 Our bones must be loaded. Bones take the biomechanical impact of loading. I like to pound my hand. The biomechanical of loading, turn it into biochemical signals to build better bone.
38:34 Speaker 00 Because think, I don't know if you've ever had a cast, but if I put someone in a cast, they're, not only do their muscles atrophy, right? You physically get a stronger, a littler limb. But if you look on an extra x-ray, you'll have the osteopenia of disuse. Bones actually stop investing in that bone.
38:56 Gary Brecka? It is amazing how efficient the body is. Like when you ignore it, it just.
39:00 Speaker 00 It just, oh, that must not be important.
39:02 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
39:03 Speaker 00 So it takes, it takes great nutrition. It takes impact exercise, not only from lifting weights to build muscle, which pull on the bone, but I'm trying to introduce the world back to jumping.
39:18 Gary Brecka? Yeah, I've heard you talk about an eight inch.
39:21 Speaker 00 Eight inch box jump. It does, because walking gives you about 1.5 times body weight of impact. Running only about 2.5. We need three to four times body weight to stimulate our bones to, for impact. You'll get that from really short jumps. People get a little intimidated. I box jump with a 24 inch box. It's because I do it all the time. You don't have to. But most adults don't do two things anymore. We don't sprint.
39:51 Gary Brecka? Very true.
39:52 Speaker 00 And we don't jump, but we're capable of it. It's just we stop playing.
39:56 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
39:56 Speaker 00 Our foundational motion patterns are playing. Think of our children.
40:00 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
40:01 Speaker 00 They've got it right. Jumping and playing. So food, lifting weights, jumping. Here's one that people don't talk about, but I talk about all the time, is balance and foot speed. Because you may have strong bones, you may jump around, but unless you can balance.
40:22 Gary Brecka? I know.
40:22 Speaker 00 You're gonna fall over.
40:24 Gary Brecka? It's so frustrating that you say that because I was actually watching one of your videos one time and you were talking about balancing on one foot while you're brushing your teeth. So then I started.
40:35 Speaker 00 You tried it?
40:36 Gary Brecka? I tried it and I was like, damn, this is harder than I thought. I was, and you made it look so easy. And then you did like a candlestick pose or something. And, um, but it's so true. You know, we, we, I read a statistic. I don't, it wasn't a clinical study, so don't quote me on this. But it said that after the age of 30. Less than 5% of adults will ever sprint again.
41:00 Speaker 00 Yes, I've read that somewhere.
41:01 Gary Brecka? So for the rest of your life, you don't break out into a dead sprint? I found that fascinating.
41:07 Speaker 00 And it's not because we're incapable.
41:10 Gary Brecka? Right.
41:10 Speaker 00 It's just because we stopped doing it, right?
41:13 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
41:13 Speaker 00 You're totally, you're completely capable of sprinting.
41:16 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
41:17 Speaker 00 I mean, yeah.
41:17 Gary Brecka? Yeah, so, so these kinds of things are so good for us. I mean, our auxiliary muscles of respiration, you know, exercising our diaphragm, getting air down into the lobes of our lungs.
41:27 Speaker 00 Oh.
41:28 Gary Brecka? Just, um, so I actually, I read that and I immediately started sprinting again.
41:32 Speaker 00 Yeah.
41:33 Gary Brecka? But it, and I hadn't gone my whole lifetime without sprinting. But I think that is so important too, because, you know, I, I have a saying that aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort. And the reason why I coined that term is because most of us are aggressively just seeking comfort, you know, grandma, you shouldn't go outside, it's too hot, you shouldn't go outside, it's too cold, just lay down, relax, just eat at the first pang of hunger, right?
41:57 Speaker 00 Oh, sure.
41:58 Gary Brecka? And it sort of destroys our natural defense mechanisms, you know? If we don't load our bones, they really don't strengthen.
42:04 Speaker 00 They do not.
42:04 Gary Brecka? If you don't tear your muscles, they don't grow, right? If you don't challenge the immune system, it weakens. So for women that are listening to this, especially women in their 30s or at any age, adding into their regimen, things like jumping, maybe they're not in condition or don't like sprinting for whatever, whatever reason. But, you know, jumping impact, I, I also read a study that the, the, um, the bone density was the highest in gymnasts.
42:34 Speaker 00 They are. That's work out of University of Wisconsin-Madison.
42:39 Gary Brecka? Okay.
42:39 Speaker 00 Um, done by one of my colleagues.
42:41 Gary Brecka? Have to do with the?
42:42 Speaker 00 The impact.
42:43 Gary Brecka? Just?
42:43 Speaker 00 Of all collegiate athletes, the gymnasts have the best bones. And it makes sense, right?
42:48 Gary Brecka? Yeah. It makes sense once you understand that.
42:49 Speaker 00 Yeah, we did a study years ago in, in masters age athletes, those that are 50 and above, competing in the national senior games. And the first study we did, did just observed who had the best, but can you, the question was, can you preserve bone density? Density over lifespan and even those athletes in their eighties had good bone density, which was remarkable.
43:10 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
43:10 Speaker 00 So we dug deeper and asked the question, well, which athletes? And of course, we knew the answer would be the impact athletes. But we documented that the jumping, the volleyball, the basketball, the, the jumping type sports, because of the impact, had much better bone density than, say, bowling or, or the walking, which is a sport in the national senior games. Yeah, but the more the swimmers.
43:34 Gary Brecka? Those cornhole, you know.
43:36 Speaker 00 The swimmers had less good bone density. So, I mean, we know the answers, but it likened so many things in life. We know what to do, Gary.
43:44 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
43:44 Speaker 00 We just don't do it.
43:45 Gary Brecka? We just don't do it.
43:46 Speaker 00 We don't, we're not willing to invest in ourselves.
43:49 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
43:49 Speaker 00 And then suddenly a light bulb goes off. But that's why I think you and I agree, and I say this all the time. Aging is not an inevitable decline from vitality to frailty. We stop being able to work hard because we simply have stopped working hard.
44:04 Gary Brecka? Yeah. You know, Peter Attia talks about the hundred year decathlon, you know, about how you need to prepare today for what you want to be able to do when, when you're age 100. And I think that theory, what'd you call it? Temporal disconnect.
44:18 Speaker 00 Yes.
44:19 Gary Brecka? I'm going to steal that one from you, by the way. You're going to see it start appearing on my podcast.
44:23 Speaker 00 I stole it from the bankers. It came from me, people.
44:25 Gary Brecka? Okay.
44:28 Gary Brecka? You know, because you're right. It, it, there is a temporal disconnect here that I will worry about that when I need to worry about it.
44:35 Speaker 00 Yeah.
44:36 Gary Brecka? And when people are getting more woke to their wellness and they're becoming citizen scientists, like you said, and so starting earlier is really, prevention is the best medicine. I, I definitely want to close the loop on, on female hormone therapy though, because having had such an intimate experience with it and how it revolutionized my wife in such a short period of time. And knowing the number of friends that she has that are her age that are either still suffering or just haven't, haven't figured it out. And, and my female audience, you're a fan of hormone replacement therapy?
45:13 Speaker 00 Yes.
45:15 Gary Brecka? And testing for the hormones? And how soon can a woman reasonably start hormone therapy? Estrogen, protein alone supplementation?
45:23 Speaker 00 I want to premise this entire conversation with the thought that. Um, women are sentient beings with agency to choose. So I demand not that every woman go on hormones. Although if I were the queen of the world, every woman would go on hormones and go on them early. But every woman is sentient and has agency to choose, but you must choose out of facts, not fear. You can't glom onto some cultural mantra and go with that. You must be more curious and must be wiser in the decisions because it's your body. So that's my disclaimer.
46:02 Speaker 00 Number one, um, some women come to me and say, well, I want to do it naturally. I don't want to put artificial things in my body, to which I say, uh, what? Let's, let's unpack that statement because I hear it dozens of times a day.
46:22 Gary Brecka? I'd rather be miserable and natural, you know?
46:23 Speaker 00 Miserable, well, what's more natural than giving your body the building blocks it's always has had? You have always had estrogen, progesterone and testosterone. That is the natural state. What's not natural is not having them. So then the next thing people say to me is, yeah, but you know, I'm not a pill person. I don't want to take pills. I'm going to eat some soybeans and some yams.
46:49 Gary Brecka? There you go.
46:49 Speaker 00 Okay, we'll do that. But do you know where body identical estradiol comes from? It is a plant based.
46:57 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
46:58 Speaker 00 Uh, uh, uh, harvesting of the hormone your body makes. You cannot, so what's more natural than taking the hormone your body makes? That's natural, not eating yams and soybeans to try to get at what your body makes anyway. Oh, and by the way, we harvest estradiol, the molecule, which is the body identical hormone. It's the same molecule. There's only, you know, body, bio identical is a marketing term, but when we say body identical, estradiol is a chemical structure. We're not making this stuff up.
47:35 Gary Brecka? Right.
47:36 Speaker 00 Uh, nature made this stuff, right? Right, creation made this stuff up.
47:39 Gary Brecka? I was fascinated when I found out it came from yams too.
47:42 Speaker 00 Yeah, right. So, okay, estradiol, uh, your bodies, there, there are three or four kinds of estrogen, but this is the main one. Uh, to restore to your body, if you have a uterus, you must protect the endometrium with micronized progesterone, not, not uh, artificial progesterone, micronized progesterone. And then testosterone is a female hormone.
48:09 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
48:10 Speaker 00 It's a, it's a hormone. Men and women have it.
48:12 Gary Brecka? And let me tell you something. Everything came back with her.
48:16 Speaker 00 This regiment.
48:16 Gary Brecka? Not to get too personal, but things got a lot better.
48:18 Speaker 00 No, and I'm, I always talk about my own hormone journey. These three systemic hormones is where we start. But that's not where we end.
48:29 Speaker 00 To prevent the genital urinary syndrome of menopause, which is vaginal atrophy, atrophy, the loss of uh, sensation in our perineum. The loss of tissue, our labia will reabsorb.
48:43 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
48:44 Speaker 00 And yes, I'm so glad you said that. Eighty percent of all women suffer from incontinence. Nobody talks about it.
48:50 Gary Brecka? Nobody talks about it.
48:51 Speaker 00 Vaginal estrogen, which is safe for every person, including people who have breast cancer. That's the fourth component. That is the fourth component. And then, you know, frankly, I'm as vain as they come. We lose thirty percent of the collagen in our face as estrogen walks out the door.
49:10 Gary Brecka? Yes.
49:11 Speaker 00 Micro doses of estrogen on the face can restore the collagen build to an extent.
49:19 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
49:19 Speaker 00 So much better than superficial things we pat on, you know? So facial estrogen, vaginal estrogen, estradiol, progesterone, testosterone is the complement that gives our body back the, the building blocks that it needs. And how early can we start? You can start in perimenopause, which can, and some women can start at thirty five. The average age of perimenopause is forty five. But we do not have to start, we do not have to wait until menopause at fifty one or fifty two, we can start much earlier. And the opposition to that, that I hear all the time is why are you going to start a young woman on hormones? Blah, blah, blah.
50:04 Gary Brecka? She needs to, yeah.
50:06 Speaker 00 But let's think about that. There are generations of women who have been put on birth control pills, which I'm not opposed to. However, uh, it's synthetic. It is not natural. Those are, those are artificial types of estrogen. At 10 times the dose of menopause hormone therapy.
50:27 Gary Brecka? Hmm.
50:27 Speaker 00 So in menopause hormone therapy, we're giving you.
50:30 Gary Brecka? At 14 years old, too.
50:31 Speaker 00 Oh, right.
50:32 Gary Brecka? 15, 16 years old.
50:32 Speaker 00 For decades, right? Right. So we're taking body identical hormones in very low doses. It is not an argument when people bring up to me, yeah, but why are you giving hormones to young women? Well, you're giving birth control to young women, which is 10 times the dose. We do it for decades and decades, starting at teenagers.
50:55 Gary Brecka? Much lower ages.
50:56 Speaker 00 Right, so, and I don't want people to think from this conversation, I'm opposed to birth control. I am not, but I want people to be more curious. And just don't slam on a mantra they hear somewhere that, oh, hormones, well, you're taking them anyway.
51:10 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
51:10 Speaker 00 So let's think this through a little bit.
51:13 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
51:13 Speaker 00 Because if I can, Gary, there's new data that I'm going to present at this conference that is, was presented.
51:18 Gary Brecka? At Xenos here?
51:18 Speaker 00 At Xenos. That was.
51:20 Gary Brecka? Saudi Arabia.
51:21 Speaker 00 And Saudi Arabia. Well, it's been currently, as we speak, presented at the menopause meeting in Orlando that's going on this week. New data in 120 million women. It's a retrospective analysis of a vast database.
51:37 Gary Brecka? 120 million?
51:38 Speaker 00 120 million. This is a vast study that shows that you can decrease the odds by 60% by, of the following diseases by starting hormones earlier in perimenopause. Stroke, cardiovascular disease, heart attack, brain death, and osteoporosis.
52:05 Speaker 00 Going back to the astonishing ability of early hormone decision making.
52:12 Speaker 00 In truly being preventive disease modalities.
52:17 Gary Brecka? Let me tell you about something that's been a total game changer for my sleep and my stress levels. BuyOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough. Here's the thing most people don't know. Regular magnesium supplements only give you one or two forms, but your body actually needs seven different forms to function properly. That's why you might be taking magnesium and still feel tired, or stressed, or having trouble sleeping. Magnesium Breakthrough is the only supplement that combines all seven bioavailable forms in just a single capsule. Within just a few days, I noticed I was falling asleep faster, staying asleep longer, and waking up actually more refreshed. Plus, my post-workout muscle recovery has been incredible. If you're ready to finally get the deep restorative sleep you deserve and feel more relaxed during the day, head to BuyOptimizers.com and use the code ULTIMATE to save on Magnesium Breakthrough.
53:02 Gary Brecka? Trust me, your body will thank you. Now, let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. Wow, that is astounding. You know, there was a very similar mantra with men, and I think with men, it's a little bit different. You know, starting testosterone too early can be, you know...
53:20 Speaker 00 It suppresses sperm.
53:21 Gary Brecka? Yeah, suppresses, and you also have a few other arrows in the quiver to try to raise testosterone production of testosterone more naturopathically. But in 2018, the American Journal of Urology updated their clinical guidelines on testosterone therapy. I found it fascinating. In fact, if you go to that study, American Journal of Urology, and you put in American Journal of Urology testosterone, you scroll down to section 13, you'll start to read there on guidelines that clinicians should use to inform testosterone-deficient patients. Now, it also talks about women in this, too. And dispelling the myth that it was linked to prostate cancer, or dispelling the myth
54:06 Gary Brecka? that it was increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease, dispelling the myth that if you had prostate cancer, that it increased the incidence of prostate cancer. But yet so many, now that was 2018, so I realize why that one's holding on a little bit. But I think there is a fear around hormone replacement therapy because of some of these studies that came out early on. It's like we talked about the war on saturated fat. Yeah. That was in the 90s. Yeah. And people still think that rib eyes are deadly. And so we just need to be eating highly processed foods and, and you know, sugar is not the enemy. Saturated fat is, you know, the enemy. We know that to not be true. Now thankfully, we're about to update our nutritional guidelines, you know, H, Health and Human Services is. But, um, but
54:51 Gary Brecka? I think this is just such a, such a powerful message and such a great message that you don't have to suffer to be natural. Um, you know, you should be, as a woman, you should be in a position to thrive all the way through your 50s, 60s, 70s. We have the technology now. The science is there. Yeah. These are safe. These are effective. Um, there are physicians that understand what, what they're doing. I think it's becoming a lot mainstream. I hope so. You know, we, we were really blessed to have a, uh, an OB-GYN as our clinic director. Her name's Dr. Carrie Sarda. She, she delivered 9,000 babies. She's an absolute phenom of
55:31 Gary Brecka? a woman, um, especially when it comes to female hormone therapy. And she was preaching the same thing years ago. Yeah. And getting a lot of flack from her colleagues that she wanted to start, um, women on these hormones. And to your point, estrogen is like, um, you know, if you had to pick something sinister to really mess with a woman, it would be estrogen because it's like skinny elasticity, um, mood, memory, emotion, sleep, uh, energy and, um, libido. Yes. You know, all of these things. It's everything. Just like that one thing. If I just wanted to have one dial to mess up as much stuff as I could. Mm-hmm.
56:13 Gary Brecka? It would be that estrogen dial and, you know, especially the E2 dial. But, um, so I'm so glad that you clarified for, um, that for us and came full circle because. So many people have become citizen scientists now. Thankfully, there's great thought leaders out there like you that are teaching women and men, for that matter.
56:33 Speaker 00 Yes.
56:35 Gary Brecka? That you need to take your healthcare choices into your own hands right now.
56:40 Gary Brecka? And there are lifestyle changes we used to, we used to call modifiable risk factors in the, in the, in the insurance space. And modifiable risk factors were, okay, this person has, their BMI is too high, they're morbidly obese, they're heavily sedentary, they're smoking. Modifiable risk factors were, what if they change these? But the sad truth is, the vast majority of people don't.
57:05 Speaker 00 Well, and that continues today. I mean, I think that as a population, it would seem, you know, if, if, if I believe my social media, because I tend to click on the healthy things, I would believe that people are really making big steps. And I think that there are a lot of big steps, but I don't have to tell you with your history in the insurance business, that 70% of people in the US, many people across the world are fine, they're living and fine, they're good today, until we know the research shows that health span ends about 63.
57:42 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
57:43 Speaker 00 Life expectancy for men in the United States is about 76, for women, 79. In Australia, we were talking about Australia, it's 85, they're doing something better.
57:53 Gary Brecka? I love Australia. We were actually just talking about how much we both love Australia, you know, I just had a tour there and people are amazing.
57:59 Speaker 00 They are.
57:59 Gary Brecka? Food is really good.
58:01 Speaker 00 Food is great, they're outside, I love Australia, but their life expectancy is 85. But we're in the Middle East right now, and on average, the life expectancy is like the United States, 79. So the question becomes, I believe we are moving the needle, I believe people are becoming the CMOs of their own health, but at a population level, I think it takes the kind of effort that you've described to me in Dubai and what they're doing here in the Kingdom, because still 70% of people do not invest every day in their health and mobility. They're just living fine, doing whatever it takes to carpool, get home.
58:39 Gary Brecka? Yeah.
58:39 Speaker 00 And it's going to take.
58:42 Speaker 00 One by one, countrywide change.
58:45 Gary Brecka? Yeah, I agree. Well, it's it's happening, you know, um, I I cheer uh the Maha Action, uh, which is, you know, supporting Bobby's Bobby Kennedy's agenda to to make some changes at Health and Human Services and CDC and the FDA. And it get the there's a lot of flack and a lot of pushback on that, too. And it is not a political agenda by any means. It's an agenda about recapturing the health of America because no parent is excited to hear that for the first time in modern history, our children have a shorter life expectancy than we do. That, to me, is mind numbing with all that we have access to and that
59:26 Gary Brecka? we spend $5 trillion a year on healthcare. Our children should all be living a lot longer than we are.
59:33 Speaker 00 And yet I think the primary driver of children's health is parent health.
59:38 Gary Brecka? I agree with that. And and they're been the parent influence. So this is fascinating. Um, so my um, audience loves you.
59:48 Speaker 00 Oh, thanks, guys.
59:50 Gary Brecka? Um, but for those that are new to you, where where can my audience find you?
59:55 Speaker 00 I love that you've asked. So every day.
59:57 Gary Brecka? Please talk about your new book.
59:58 Speaker 00 Yes, every day I educate on Instagram. I want you to go and follow me. And but 90 seconds is never going to be enough.
1:00:04 Gary Brecka? Well, that's where I started doing the candlestick and the brushing my teeth on one leg. So I'll be honest with you. Try brushing your teeth on one leg. She does it on her videos. So.
1:00:14 Speaker 00 That's it. But I've written a new book. Uh, it's called Unbreakable. And it's, you know, the title Unbreakable is a nod to the fact that I'm a bone doctor. But what it really is.
1:00:23 Gary Brecka? My wife's reading it right now.
1:00:24 Speaker 00 Oh, that's wonderful.
1:00:25 Gary Brecka? It's on our NICE app.
1:00:26 Speaker 00 It is a mindset approach to aging with power. It is a physical approach to aging with power. And I do end the book by examining where are we going? What are the peak performance things we can do? And what are the emerging longevity technology that after we've optimized our health, implemented the peak performance I do for athletes, where can we go into the future? Uh, because longevity science is changing. So it's called Unbreakable. It's a thankfully, I'm so thankful it's a New York Times and London Times bestseller. Thank you.
1:01:00 Gary Brecka? Awesome. Great job. Yeah, and he deserves to be, and they can find you on Instagram, too. And I wind down all of my podcasts by asking my guests the same question. So there's no right or wrong answer to this question. But what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?
1:01:17 Speaker 00 To be ultimately human, to me, means to not only...
1:01:24 Speaker 00 I've got so many answers. Ultimately, human to me means that I get to do what I want to do, when I want to do it, uninhibited by mental and physical constraints. To be ultimately human takes a daily investment in myself and not in a selfish mantra. But this vessel is worth caring for.
1:01:51 Gary Brecka? It is. Yeah. And I think you were so spot on to point out that so many people are living in fine.
1:01:59 Speaker 00 Yes.
1:02:00 Gary Brecka? You know, they're walking around at a six. They're like, I can deal with this because it's not a two. And they could be walking around at a nine or a 10.
1:02:09 Speaker 00 That's right.
1:02:10 Gary Brecka? So, Dr. Wright, thank you so much for your time today. We're going to go into my VIP room because the VIPs are a community that I'm building of like-minded people. And they're the only ones that I let know who's coming on the podcast first.
1:02:27 Speaker 00 Oh.
1:02:27 Gary Brecka? So they have some, they have some questions for you. I let them ask their guests questions directly. So they have some great questions for you. But for the rest of you guys, please check out Dr. Vonda Wright. She is an absolute pioneer, not just in women's health, bone health, men's health. I think gives very practical advice, unencumbered advice with real statistics and science to back it up. Please read her book, especially if you're a woman. My wife is partially part of the way through the book now. So we're big fans. And until next time, that's just science.
Previous 214. Methylation Test Explained: Stop Guessing What Supplements You Need Next 216. Dr. Labib Ghulmiyyah: On How To Prepare Your Body for Pregnancy, Fertility Decline, and Preconception Health Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
