The Dan Bongino Show - Life Hacks With Gary Brecka

Episode Date: December 26, 2023

Daily live shows return on January 3rd (01/03/2024) In this special episode, I talk to Human Biologist & "Biohacker" Gary Brecka about everything health, nutrition and how to optimize your life. The Ultimate Human Follow @garybrecka on Instagram Copyright Bongino Inc All Rights Reserved Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get ready to hear the truth about America on a show that's not immune to the facts with your host, Dan Bongino. Welcome to my special interview with Gary Brecker. You're going to love it. Stand by. You're really, really going to like this show today. I'll tell you why here in a second. I've been raving about Beam Dreams Powder.

They're hot cocoa for sleep. Get up to 40% off a limited time when you go to shopbeam.com slash Bongino and use code Bongino at checkout. Folks, you know I love life hacks, right? Grounding, cold showers, all this stuff. Let me say in advance, I'm not your doctor. Get your checkup. Do all that stuff.

I'll say it multiple times throughout the show. However, you know, I'm 49, been through cancer, a lot of stuff. It's not a sob story. It's just I, after the cancer, even though I've always been into health and fitness, I've been absolutely determined to maximize my life and not go through that again. And one of the guys I went to for a lot of these life hacks is this guy, Gary Brecker. You're going to meet here in a minute. It's an amazing show.

Just ask you for your patience for a second. These sponsors paid for the show, paid to be here and talk to you. I really appreciate it. Then we'll get right to Gary Brecker. You having trouble sleeping or staying asleep? Is poor sleep negatively impacting your life? Have you tried other sleep supplements with no success? It's time to embrace the importance of a restful slumber and introduce yourself to an amazing product that could revolutionize your nighttime routine. I use it. I'm just talking about life hacks. I need to get

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I put in some milk and enjoy before bedtime. If you want to try Beam's best-selling Dream Powder, get up to 40% off for a limited time when you go to shopbeam.com and use code bongino at checkout. That's shopbeam.com and use code bongino for up to 40% off. Our next sponsor for today's show, the apples in your holiday pie. They taste amazing, but it's not exactly the recommended five servings of fruits and vegetables, folks. A top-ranked U.S. hospital says if you want to help prevent heart disease, lower blood pressure and cholesterol, eat five servings of fruits and vegetables, folks. A top-ranked U.S. hospital says if you want to help prevent heart disease,

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disease. Now, get your notepads out. Get ready for some good solid life hacks here. It's one of my favorite interviews i've ever done i've been eager to get this out there here's my interview with gary brekka uh welcoming to the show uh hopefully a good friend we met a couple weeks ago but he's such a nice guy gary brekka gary so great to have you here it's great to be on the show and it's funny because the night that we met at the at the ufv fights you, hey, Gary, I'm a huge fan. I'm like, I'm a huge fan of yours. It was a mutual love fest. I know my wife knows you too because I'm always sticking your videos in her face. Hey, look what Gary said today.

So, you know, we're in a unique time, Gary. You know, listen, in the past 100 years ago or so, you and I obviously weren't alive, but the concern was survival. I mean, during the Great Depression, if you ate, it was okay. Like, no one was really concerned about, like, you know, how do I get the right breakdown of macros? It was like, how do I stay alive? But we're in a different time now. Right.

It's a different time. And now people, we're given medical technology. They want to make their life not just longer,, they want to make their life not just longer, but they want to make their life productive. So one of the things you got me into, and you totally turned me on to this, and I got to tell you, when I first started, Gary, it was miserable. You got me into the cold exposure in the morning. I have a cold plunge in my new house, but in the house I'm in now, where I'm still living in, I take ice cold showers in the morning.

And I'll preface this by saying to mandatory folks, get your doctor, say we're not giving you medical advice. We don't know your situation. I'm telling you it worked for me. Gary absolutely changed my life. Why does it work? So, I mean, four things happen when you submit the body to cold water exposure. Remember, first of all, that water is 29 times more thermogenic than air, meaning it removes heat from the body at 29 times the rate of air. Did I lose you?

No, no. Oh, it removes heat from the body at 29 times the rate of air. So what this means is it pulls, strips heat out of the body. So when you submerse yourself in cold water, four things happen. First of all, you get a massive peripheral vasoconstriction, right? And so remember, arteries are actually smooth muscle. They're muscular. They can dilate and they can constrict. So when you submerse yourself in cold water, you get massive peripheral vasoconstriction.

It drives all the blood to the core, liver, lungs, pancreas, kidneys in an effort to save your life. It also forces oxygen and fresh blood up to the brain. in an effort to save your life, it also forces oxygen and fresh blood up to the brain. And so the first thing you get is this massive vasoconstriction driving blood to the core organs and up to the brain. The second thing that happens is your body activates a very special type of fat called brown fat. Brown fat is our thermostat. And what brown fat does is it actually can raise your body temperature. And there's a caloric expenditure to this. One of the reasons why submersing yourself in cold water is very good for weight loss is not

only does it help you control sugars and insulin, but it actually helps you to burn calories just in a very short amount of time exposed to cold water. And then your liver also panics and it dumps a very specialized type of protein in the blood called a heat called a cold shock protein. If you really want to have some fun, just Google cold shock proteins. You will be astounded at what these things do. They scour the blood of free radical oxidation. They can increase the rate of protein synthesis, which is muscle repair. So, you know, how you repair after intense exercise. The other thing that it does is it causes your body to release sirtuins. These are survival genes,

right? It's a survival mechanism. You know, when we slip into cold water and we're shocked by, you know, this, this submersion in cold water. So the body in an effort to survive releases all of these things that are super beneficial to your health. When you get out of a cold point, I promise you, you will not be in a bad mood. You can be in a bad mood getting in, you feel like you won the lottery when you get out of a cold plunge. And that's so true.

And that's just a poor expenditure. You know, you've activated brown fat. You've actually started to emulsify some of your white fat. It has so many, so many incredible benefits. You know, Gary, I'm very open with my audience on the air and the radio show. I'll run some clips from this on radio as well. I don't hide it.

I've been through a lot of health traumas with cancer and all this other stuff. It's not some sob story, but he's got, you know, a lot of people have far more serious issues than me. But one of the things I've dealt with has been the most debilitating. It runs in my family. It's been clinical depression. I tell people it's not being sad. It's a different thing. It's kind of like this black cloud.

I swear to you on my life, the cold, you are so right. When you get out of that thing, I think it's a combination. Tell me if I'm crazy here, but is it not? It's not just the biochemical reaction, but it's also the idea that you did something difficult at the start of your day and it's over. Am I crazy? Like you get out of that. You're like, yes, this is conquered the day, baby. I mean, it's a form of meditation. You know,

lots of us have a very difficult time clearing our mind. Right. And so what is meditation? Meditation is actually trying to be getting to a thoughtless state, into a theta wave and just clear your mind. A lot of people that are type A like myself, like yourself, we have a very hard time clearing our mind. Me sitting down, thinking about a long hallway with a light at the end of the tunnel and then, you know, palm tree swinging in the breeze. I just start going, man, I got way too much going on to be thinking about this. But you get into cold water, I promise you for the three minutes that you're in that cold water, the only thing that you're thinking about is what's in that cold water. Right? It's one of the reasons I used to go.

I joined a CrossFit gym. I stopped because I didn't want to get injured, but I just remember doing these CrossFit wads. They were so intense that if you didn't want to quit at some point during the exercise, you weren't doing it right. And it was an unique form of meditation. I felt amazing leaving there. It's the same thing with cold water.

It breaks the cycle of your day. It avoids the brain of thought. You're focused on that water. You get out, you dry off. As your body warms up, you feel amazing. They liken it to a nine-hour cocaine buzz. I mean, I don't advocate doing drugs, but that lasts 20 minutes. A cold plunge will last six to nine hours. The rise in dopamine will last that long. You feel amazing. It improves your mood, raises your emotional state, strips fat off your body, repairs muscle tissue at a faster rate, cleans the blood of free radicals, and it's free. Yeah.

You know, it's interesting. When I was doing criminal investigations and we arrested all these people for cracking cocaine. Obviously never having done this stuff. I happen to put in a search engine one day. I said, what does it feel like? I kept wondering why people do this drug and throw their lives away. And it said, I'll never forget this.

It said cocaine. It's like stealing happiness from the future because you just said it's like a 20 minute high and then you're miserable. Not with the plunge. Like you get out of there. And like you said, you're just ready to rock and roll for the day. I want to getunge. Like you get out of there. And like you said, you're just ready to rock and roll for the day. I want to get to some other stuff. Cause there's right now, like you said,

I'm using the cold shower in the morning. It just has changed my life. And I really, I attribute that to you. But what I do right afterwards, I've got a whole routine now and it's, it's kind of like the Gary Brecker routine, like my whole morning into it. I used to get up even after the cold plunge and I would do what most Americans do. Gary run to the coffee machine, a little milk in my coffee and just sit down and have my coffee.

And I watched you on a video, another Gary Brekker video, and you'd said, ah, maybe not the best idea that you should time your caffeine for 60 to 90 minutes or so after you wake up. It's another Gary Brekker trick I implemented, and it totally changes your mental state if you just wait. Massively changes your mental state. Why is that? What you want to do is you want your body to naturally reset the cortisol and the melatonin receptors. Remember, cortisol is rising in the morning because it's a waking hormone, right? It's sensitive to light passing through our eyes, right?

Just like melatonin is sensitive to dark, right? So melatonin rises, helps us get into a sleep. Cortisol rises. It's not all bad. All cortisol is not bad. It rises and it's part of our waking cycle. We don't want to stimulate ourselves during that first 60 to 90 minutes of our waking cycle. So my personal morning routine

is I wake up in the morning, I walk into my bathroom, I splash water on my face, I brush my teeth, I immediately get into a cold one. If you don't have a cold brunch, just immediately get into a cold shower. Most of your listeners are not going to get into a cold shower because it's uncomfortable, which is one of the reasons why I coined the term that aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort. Right. The more aggressively we pursue comfort, the faster we age. And so by doing something hard, doing something difficult and surviving it one to three minutes in cold water. And there's not anyone listening to this podcast right now that can't survive one to three minutes in a cold shower. It's uncomfortable. But when you get out and you dry off, you just key into how you feel for the next four to six hours. And you will start to chase

this feeling like a rat to cheese. And then as your body begins to warm up and you put some clothes on and you get 60 minutes into your day or 90 minutes into your day, then have your coffee and watch how much longer the caffeine stimulation effect lasts. If you just wait 60 to 90 minutes after rising, um, to have your first cup of coffee, like you said, it's a game changer. You know, Gary, I work out in the morning, so I was having the coffee and I, I don't work out right away. I get up about five. I start working out about six 30 and I just started the caffeine timing about three weeks ago because I, again, saw one of your videos on it and the workout quality is just incredible. The perceived

exertion effect is so much lower, even though I meticulously write down my workouts, Gary, nothing's different. It just feels like a different workout. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, my morning routine is, you know, and I say, you can add these four things to your daily routine. They will cost you nothing and it will entirely change the trajectory of your life. So if you want to spend exactly zero, you wake up in the morning, you brush your teeth, splash some water on your face and get into a cold shower, dry up from a cold shower, and then find a comfortable place in your house or preferably outside exposing your skin to sunlight. I expose my skin to first light every day because the first light from the sun is very, very special light. The first 45 minutes of the day, there's no UVA, there's no UVB rays, right? It's just the healthy blue light from the sun.

So you can't burn your skin. And you gaze out onto the horizon and you do a round of breath work. Three rounds of 30 breaths with a breath hold in between. Remember that the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease. And I really mean that. The presence of oxygen is the absence of disease. And I really mean that. The presence of oxygen is the absence of disease. Every elevated emotional state that a human being can experience requires oxygen as a part of its molecular structure. So the reason why no human being has ever woken up laughing is because you

don't have the oxidative state to experience laughter out of deep sleep. But can you wake up angry? Yes, because low emotional states do not require the presence of oxygen. Anger, resentment, despair, jealousy, all of these low tier emotional states are readily accessible to all of us. The reason why some of us only reach elevated emotional states like a heart monitor, right, is because we don't have the physiology. We don't have the oxidative state to experience these elevated emotions. Things like passion, elation, joy, arousal, libido, all the hell yeah, I won the lottery emotions, all tied to oxygen. So if you woke up in the morning, exposed your body to cold,

and then went outside, preferably, I understand some of you live in Northern climates and can't do that. So you can do it by a window where you can actually see natural sunlight. And you did a round of breath work, three rounds of 30 obnoxiously deep breaths, followed by a breath hold, a breath inhalation, and then another round of 30 breaths and 30 breaths. You start with as little as five breaths, three rounds of five. Work your way up to three rounds of 10, three rounds of 15, go to three rounds of 20. Eventually work your way to three rounds of 30 breaths. And you tell me if just that cold exposure, looking at sunlight first thing in the morning, horizon gazing in the morning, and doing a round of breath work, do that for seven

days and you will never quit it. Promise. And if you can, you also want to take your shoes off and touch the surface of the earth, try to get a little grounding. Grounding is actually a very real concept. Earthing and grounding is very real. We discharge into the earth. Human beings build up a charge and you cannot change the charge in the body by drinking alkaline water. I hear people say all the time that if you want to change the pH of the blood, you drink alkaline water. That's the biggest marketing myth ever sold to the public. If you want to change the pH of the blood, remember pH stands for potential hydrogen. It's a charge. So if you want to move the potential hydrogen, you run a low Gauss current through the body, like the surface of the earth. So using bare feet and touching bare

soil, dirt, grass, sand, really has not just a grounding effect, but it actually has a real positive physiologic effect in the body. And grounding, cold exposure, breath work, sunlight first thing in the morning, all free. God gives it to us every single day. It will materially change the trajectory. That is, folks, listen, I can only attest to my personal condition following Gary's advice, but everything he just said to do, I do. I just started the grounding a couple months ago. Gary, you only made one mistake.

I live in Florida. One day I got dangerously close to a bunch of fire ants. Just missed them. Just missed them. So, folks, if you're going to land. We got to worry about hypodermic deals and dog crap. Brother, grounding is very real. Now, you know, it's interesting because I found this is the one idea.

Forgive me. You know I love you and your family. But this is the one I heard from you where I was like, come on. Stepping on the surface of the earth with bare feet. Like, this is crazy. And then I looked it up. And you're like, okay, this guy's a hippie freak. I thought it was nuts

right i was like am i back in the 60s should we be smoking doobies like what's going on and i actually put it in a search engine grounding or earthing and sure as hell man you're darn right like there's a good body of research that this works and i'm i'm sleeping better when i start since i started doing it. Yeah, no question. I mean, I actually, I'm on the 30th floor of a condo building. I live in Miami. So, you know, sometimes I don't get down to ground and earth. So I have a PEMF mat, pulse electromagnetic field mat.

And I have this in my bed and I just hit a little button when I go to sleep at night and it creates a low gauss current. It alkalizes my body while I sleep, literally changes the polarity of the surface of your red blood cell, fact. And when you wake up, you wake up alkaline. So sometimes in the mornings where I don't do grounding, I never miss a day where I never miss breath work. I will miss a commercial flight to not miss breath work, eight minutes of breath work.

I'm not kidding. I would bet in 39 or 40 months, I haven't missed a single. Your body will crave it like a rat to cheese. And for those of you that travel very often, it is the one consistent thing that you can do within 30 minutes of waking that tells your body, your circadian cycle, what time of the day it is. So, you know, I have a blistering travel schedule sometimes. I did 11 cities in nine days, you know, last month. And they were in all different time zones, Miami, Dallas, Vegas, L.A. And then I went all the way to Dubai. And I woke up and within 30 minutes of every single morning waking up,

I was doing eight minutes of breath work. And it was game changer for me. Yeah. Gary, you know, you got me into the breath work too and uh one of the things i i do i told you at the ufc is i have oxygen everywhere whether it's these boost containers and then i got an o2 concentrator for my bedroom so i'll be sitting there with like the plug up my nose like drinking i mean drinking in the oxygen through my breathing it in. I have precision matter. And, you know, you're right. Although the oxygen saturation of a healthy human being is 98, 99 percent.

I kind of thought that was another thing. I was like, ah, it sounds legit, but let me try it. But you're right. It does kind of like, I don't know about you, but it relaxes me, but not in an exhausted kind of way. Like you're tired. It relaxes me like, yeah. Yeah. Like I just feel normal instead of crazy. I travel around the world. I meet the greatest biohackers in the world. You know, the top PhDs, the top researchers, the top MDs in the field of bio-optimization, longevity,

anti-aging. And, you know, we all agree on one thing, that we have got to start getting back to the basics. It's the absence of the basics that is the reason why the majority of us are suffering from common ailments that we chalk up to a consequence of aging. Right. So, you know, I learned two things in the mortality space. I was a mortality researcher for almost 22 years. I learned two things in the mortality space. Number one, the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease. And the reason why most people are not living healthier, happier, longer lives are what we call modifiable risk factors. And the second thing that we learned is that the majority of pathology and disease as we know it today does not exist.

know it today, does not exist. What exists is a deficiency, a nutrient deficiency in the human body, which leads to the expression of that disease. 85% of all hypertensive diagnosis are idiopathic of unknown origin. Then why are 85% of all people that are diagnosed with hypertension, why can the doctor not tell you what the source of your hypertension is? It's because it's not coming from the heart. It's usually coming from something called high homocysteine. Homocysteine is a natural amino acid that's found in the human body. It's in every one of your listeners' blood right now. But if homocysteine rises too high and your body doesn't have the raw material to break it down, another amino acid called trimethylglycine,

then what happens is as homocysteine is cruising by the inside lining of your artery, it irritates your artery. And when you irritate an artery, it clamps down. Well, if you make the pipes smaller in a fixed system, pressure goes up. So now you go to your doctor and he says you have high blood pressure and they do an EKG. It's normal. An EEG. It's normal. Heart and lung sounds, they're all normal. They do a die contrast study, it's normal. A CT scan, it's normal. Cardiac cath, it's all normal. But yet they still medicate the heart for a crime it's not committed. So, you know, I talk about the different nutrient deficiencies in the human body that lead to the expression of disease. I mean, we have a pandemic of hypothyroid

in this country. Every single one of your listeners listening to this podcast right now knows somebody suffering from hypothyroid. Yeah, me. I'm one of them. I told you that. I'm one of them. It's the worst.

You can't get out of bed. You get your hypothyroid, and we're going to come back on and do another podcast about it. Because I will admit my entire career that you were diagnosed with hypothyroid because you have a low level of something called t3 exactly you nailed it 100 so the little known fact about the thyroid is that it is only responsible for producing 20 of the t3 in your blood so wait a second T3 is low, we're diagnosed with hypothyroid, but there's an 80% chance it's not the thyroid? Yes. The other 80% of the T3 hormone, that's the real question. Where does that come from? Where does 80% of the reason for hypothyroid diagnosis of low T3 come

from? It is methylated outside of the thyroid. We actually take T4 and convert it into T3 in the gut and the periphery in the liver. And this is done with certain nutrients, selenium, thiamine. So when we're deficient in certain raw materials, we can't make that conversion of thyroid hormone T4 into thyroid hormone T3. And then what happens is we get diagnosed with hypothyroid. We medicate the thyroid. I mean, you want to talk about pandemic. We have a pandemic of holding organs in the human body responsible for crimes they're not committing. It happens all the time. And so if you have a nutrient deficiency, methylfolate, the complex of B vitamins and a form of B12 called

methylcobalamin, you very likely are susceptible or have hypothyroid. You put those raw materials back in the human body, your T3 goes to normal. People tell me all the time, my God, Gary, you fixed my thyroid. I didn't fix your thyroid. There was nothing wrong with your thyroid. There's so many people suffering from all of these little ailments, right? All these little anchors off their stern that we chalk up to a consequence of aging, right? Or our environment or our spouse or our career or stress in our life. And it's not a consequence of any of those things. It is a consequence of missing raw material in the human body. I can't tell you how many times I saw reading medical records, and I'm not poo-pooing modern medicine by any means,

but reading medical records, how many times somebody with a clinical deficiency in vitamin D3, the sunshine vitamin, right? The only vitamin that human beings make on Earth, right? Arguably the single most important nutrient in the human body. 50% of the world's population is clinically deficient in vitamin D3. 85% of dark-complected populations, African-Americans, Latino are clinically deficient in vitamin D3. So what happens when you have a clinical deficiency in vitamin D3 over a prolonged

period of time? You begin to experience rheumatoid arthritis-like symptoms. Now you don't have rheumatoid arthritis, but if you go to the wrong physician and tell them that you're sore and achy when you get out of bed in the morning, the soles of your feet and your ankles hurt when you walk to the bathroom to take your first pee in the morning, that your hips and your shoulders and your neck are really stiff, and lately it's really hard to make a fist, there are plenty of physicians that right then and there, without doing any confirmatory blood tests, will say you've got rheumatoid arthritis and they will put you on a corticosteroid and that corticosteroid six years and one day from the day you start taking it will force you to have a joint replacement that was not required and i saw this over and over and over again we know that medical error is third leading cause of death in this

country the third leading cause of death if you want to look it up, it's a 2016 study by Harvard University. It was repeated in 2019 by Johns Hopkins and it got worse. And this isn't because doctors are sinister or big pharma is just trying to kill you. It's because the pace of modern medicine and the training of these physicians were not taught to look for nutrient deficiencies, right? So simple deficiencies in D3 have these kinds of consequences. I bet 40 percent of your listeners either are suffering from or know somebody suffering from ADD or ADHD. Right. And but but the truth is, you know, attention deficit disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. They're not attention deficits at all. They are attention overload disorders. It is too many windows open at the same time, right? People that suffer from ADD do not lack the ability to pay attention. They lack the ability to pay attention to so many things. So if you have a child that's suffering from ADD or ADHD, let me prove to you right now that by getting one nutrient out of their diet for one week, you will have a materially different child now. And that is to remove the folic acid from their diet. Folic acid is found in all fortified or enriched foods. And do not be

tricked. Folic acid is a man-made chemical. You cannot find folic acid anywhere on the surface of the earth. It does not occur naturally in nature. And what do we feed our kids first thing in the morning for breakfast? White bagels, full of folic acid. Cereals, full of folic acid. Breads, full of folic acid. Pop tarts, full of folic acid. Where do you find folic acid? In the United States, by law, the government signed a deal with big pharma and chemical companies to spray our entire grain supply with folic acid.

We spray all white rice with folic acid, all white flour, all white pasta is fortified or enriched. Get the fortified or enriched foods out of their life for one week and watch the behavior changes. These are nutrient deficiencies, right? And so people that have ADD or ADHD, there's a very high likelihood that you have the most common gene mutation in the world called MTHFR. It's affectionately called the motherfucker gene. You can cut that out if you want. Don't worry. We don't have to cut it out of this show. Okay, good.

They're not sensitive. No, no. all right good it's called the motherfucker gene if you want to look it up please capitalize mthfr or you'll find yourself on some super colorful website but mthfr is an inability for the body to process folic acid and turn it into the nutrient the body needs called methylfolate. 44% of the population has this gene deficiency. If you have it, you supplement with methylfolate, your anxiousness, your anxiety, and your ADD go away. And why is that? Well, because these are nutrient deficiencies. I mean, people that suffer from anxiety, for example, and everybody either suffers from it or knows somebody that suffers from it, but nobody tells you what it really is, right? Like what is anxiety? Well,

I know it's a fear of the future and I get anxious about getting on flights, but what is it? What's chemically going on in the body that's causing this feeling of anxiety? Anxiety is a buildup in the brain of a category of neurotransmitters called catecholamines. These are fight or flight neurotransmitters, norepinephrine, epinephrine, ephedrone, dopamine, one of those we call adrenaline. So these can build up in the brain and they cause a mild fight or flight response. They actually create a sensation of fear without the presence of a fear. You see, we like to think that our brains are very sophisticated. Your brain's not. You know what your brain cares about? Your brain cares

about survival. Your brain is nasty. It's like the little Kim Jong-un of dictators. It sits up there and it takes everything for itself, right? If it wants calcium, it'll leach it from the bones. If it wants amino acids, it'll strip it from lean muscle. If it wants sugar, it'll activate a receptor on the back of your tongue and give you a dopamine reward for giving it sugar. It will drug you and thank you for giving it sugar. So if we think about the genesis of anxiety, think about this. You could, let's say, drive home tonight and you could get out of your car and somebody's standing in front of you with a knife. Very real fear. Your pupils would dilate, your heart rate would increase. Your extremities would flood with blood.

But you would start having a fight or flight response. But you could also be laying in the 30th floor of my condo in my bed. And you could start thinking about getting eaten by a shark. Well, the chances of a shark getting out of that ocean and coming up that elevator are zero. But you can have the exact same reaction. Why is that? Because it's the same chemical cascade creating the presence of a fear that's not there as the dude standing in front of you with a knife. So people that have anxiety have high catecholamines, anxieties directly related to urinary catecholamines.

How do you bring these down? You supplement with methylated B vitamins, methyl B12, folate, and something called SAMe, S-adenosylmethionine. These are just raw materials your body needs to break these neurotransmitters down. Try that. If you've had anxiety for on and off throughout your entire lifetime, you'll be shocked what simple supplementation can do to change the course of those conditions. And I could go on and on and on through hundreds of these different things, but the majority of the population is nutrient deficient. I'm going to take a quick break, but before I get to the break, how do people get in touch with you if they want to find out more about all of these things you discussed?

And we'll mention it again at the end of the show, but I want to make sure I get it in there now. How can people contact you? Um, you can go to the ultimate human.com. Um, the ultimate human.com. Um,

I have a genetic test that you can do there to find these nutrient deficiencies. I have a free newsletter. I write a newsletter every single week. It's completely free on just different ways to change the trajectory of your life. Getting GMO foods out of your life getting gmo foods out of your diet you know um water filtration cold showers breath work sunlight grounding all those

kinds of things if they have an instagram you can it's just my first and last name at gary brecca um g-a-r-y-b-r-e-c-a i follow instagram him on Instagram. He does. We follow each other. And I'm like, dude, I think I'm going to get 30 years. I love your stuff. Like I said, I'm always sticking it in my wife's face, the phone. Hey, look, it's Gary Brecken video. Hold on. Take a quick break.

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Consult with your tax attorney or financial professional before making an investment decision. Message and data rates apply. Thank you very much, folks. Appreciate it. Now back to my interview with Gary Brekker. So Gary, one other thing you've turned me on to, there's a lot of this, as you can tell, you probably changed my life more than you know. Don't say that I turned you on, Gary. Yeah, I know. We can cut that out. I could be used a thousand different ways. You've totally flipped me on the fasting thing. The fasting thing, I kind of, I had always believed in intermittent fasting. I shouldn't say believed in it. I've used it because of, I read this book, Sugar Busters, years ago, and it got me into the whole, whether it was right or wrong, I don't know,

but it got me into the whole idea of insulin sensitivity right or wrong, I don't know, but it got me into the whole idea of insulin sensitivity and diabetes unfortunately runs in my family. Luckily, I eat very low carb macros and I kind of control my diet. So I haven't had any issues, thank the good Lord. But I did a three day fast on your recommendation online, how this would work. And I'm going to tell you, it was really hard. It was harder than I thought. I stopped eating at about Friday or so at noon and didn't eat again until Monday morning. I don't know. It was like 10 a.m. So it was roughly three days. By night two, Gary, I was hurting pretty bad. But I lost about 10 pounds. Now, a lot of it was likely water. I get that. lost about 10 pounds. Now, a lot of it was likely water. I get that. I gained back about five,

but five of those pounds never came back. And I felt amazing. The first meal was kind of rough. Like you got to take it easy. You don't want to like wolf down a ribeye. Yeah, I didn't know that. That was kind of a mistake. You know what I mean? But I didn't realize that till after the fact, but I felt amazing. Maybe six hours in after the refeeding. Why does this work? What's so amazing is there's so many things like this that God gave us that we can just tap into for nothing that have insane physiological effects in the body. So let me start first by complimenting you on your diet. You know, before I explain the fasting. Just remember that if something is essential, it's necessary for life. Okay. So there are three essential fatty

acids, three fatty acids that you have to get or you'll die. There are nine essential amino acids, proteins that you must get from diet or supplementation or you will die. There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. Just let that sink in for a second. There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. Just let that sink in for a second. There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. Carbohydrates are not essential for life. So this is where you need to make your food choices wisely. Okay. So just complimenting you on, on, on your diet and sort of busting through a lot of carbohydrate mess. But, um, you know, to, to move on to the fasting thing, fasting has been done for centuries, right? I mean, it's a part of an enormous amount of religious circles, right?

And it's not just the religion of fasting. It is the health benefits of fasting. Ron talks about this. The Bible talks about this. And so what happens when we fast? Our bodies are extraordinarily efficient, right? So first of all, we burn all, not all, but we burn the usable amount of sugar out of them. When we burn the amount of sugar out of the blood, we have a backup of sugar. Okay. It's called glycogen. There's some in our muscles, which are used to move our muscles around. There's some in our liver, which the liver then turns into sugar and throws into the bloodstream. Well, going into about an hour 22, 24 by hours 30, you have no available glucose. You still have glucose in your blood. You're not dead,

but you have no available glycogen. So now where's your body going to get energy? Well, it's going to get energy from two places. It's going to enter a stage where your body begins to consume cells in your body called senescent cells. You see, as we get older, the percentage of cells, they're also called zombie cells, they're floating around in your bloodstream that can no longer perform their function, but they're still taking up space, gets larger and larger. So think of a company full of lazy employees. They're all on the payroll. They're not doing a damn thing. I'd like to get their ass out of the seat

and put somebody there that's gonna do their job. It's the same with your biology, right? A senescent cell is living, but it's not doing its job. It's a red blood cell that can't carry oxygen. It's a white blood cell that can't mount an immune defense. It's a platelet that can't carry growth factors. So what happens is your body turns on this and it breaks these cells down and turns them to energy. It breaks them apart into amino

acids and other nutrients. And so you actually begin to eat yourself, but from the most efficient waste product first. So your body cleans itself of all of these senescent cells called cellular autophagy. It's an amazing experience. It also lowers your blood sugar. And remember, blood sugar is the root of all evil. In fact, if it was up to me, the Bible would say blood sugar is the root of all evil, not the love of money. People are dying from blood sugar, not because they love money. But that was a joke. But what happens is we know now, for example, that Alzheimer's is type three diabetes, right? It's insulin resistance in the brain. Just Google type three diabetes. You'll see all the published peer-reviewed

clinical research, Berkeley, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Kellogg University, National Library of Medicine, National Institute of Health. we've known that insulin resistance in the brain is the genesis of Alzheimer's for a long period of time. But we don't treat insulin resistance. We don't treat blood sugar, you know, pre-diabetes. This is why if you have diabetes, you have a ninefold increase in the incidence of Alzheimer's. Because when the brain has no place to store sugar, you essentially end up with something called amyloid plaques in the spaces of the brain where nerve signals travel. It is a complete fallacy that people that have Alzheimer's are losing their memory. They are losing access to their memory. There's a difference, right? There's a difference between the memory fading and the access to the memory fading because access can be restored.

So fasting will even help clear the brain of some of these byproducts. So if you can do a three-day water fast, I wrote a free three-day water fasting guide. If you go to theultimatehuman.com, it's called The Ultimate Guide to Water Fasting. I tell you what spring water to get, what bone broth to get. I use one called Kettle and Fire. And the day one, I ease into the fast and day four, I ease out. So day one, I take some electrolytes in the morning. I drink spring water called Mountain Valley Spring Water. And then you eat two bowls of bone broth, one at noon, one at six. Day two, you enter a

full fast. Day three, you're fully fasted. Day four, you take bone broth in the morning as you come out of the fast and then go back to solid food, which is what you experienced. But I am telling you, it's like a level of mental clarity. People have no idea what they can feel. No, it's incredible. And, you know, day two, when my quick access to glucose had pretty much dried up, I had a cup of black coffee, no calorie content, no milk, no cream, no sugar, no nothing. But the weirdest thing, like I had this incredible burst of energy despite being obviously extremely low on blood glucose. And when I got out of that fast, I felt amazing. But you said something in your comments about, you know, basically managing blood sugar being the key to a good quality life. I think any medical professional would agree with that statement. So having said that, what's your take on things like berberine and metformin? One's a pharmaceutical, one's

over the counter. You can just, it's a natural supplement berberine um what's your take on those valuable or just first of all they're both glucophages right so so um metformin is the most commonly prescribed glucophage in the world meaning that it helps to control blood sugar but in side-by-side clinical studies berberine which is a safe route not a pharmaceutical perform better at reducing hemoglobin A1C, the three-month average of your blood sugar, than metformin. I am a huge believer in berberine. There's my –

By the way, Gary, not to interrupt you, but I started taking berberine after another one of your videos. Just so you know. I don't have anything else on my desk. Well, I have a thing that I'm going to wash my car with, but I don't have anything else on my desk but berberine because I take it with each meal, a game changer. I'm also a big believer in NAD.

But berberine, if you take a berberine with each meal, you'll actually help the body process sugars. You'll keep your glycemic profile very low. In fact, one of the things I do with a lot of clients that I work with, I'm not a physician, I'm a human biologist, but I have a very large team of licensed MDs and practitioners that work for me. And one of the things that we do very aggressively is, you know, teach people how to control their blood sugar. You want to change the trajectory of your life. Just learn to control your blood sugar. I got lean, Gary, on it too, on berberine.

I lost like two or three pounds of body fat. The nice part is it wasn't immediate. So it wasn't like I was worrying about bone density loss or water. I was reasonably confident it was the bad stuff, the body fat. I don't want to take up any more. One more question. I'll let you go. You've been generous for your time.

We'll get to your website, too, before we leave. But your supplement routine, I know a lot of my listeners are curious. You mentioned NMN. I take a nicotinamide riboside supplement myself, so obviously you think it's valuable. Why does that work? What are your thoughts on resveratrol, which has kind of gone up and down in popularity riboside supplement myself uh so obviously you think it's valuable why does that work and what are your thoughts on resveratrol which has kind of gone up and down in popularity and then a collagen if you have a minute uh or so on that because i'm a big believer before we started about ozempic

do you want me to talk about oh yeah yeah please ozempic too that's a big topic so um there there's two core compounds one is called semaglutide you you know, the Ozempic and Wagovi. The pharmaceutical is called semaglutide. There is a better one called tirzepatide, right? It's a GLP-1 and a GDP inhibitor. But remember, if you have type 2 diabetes and you're morbidly obese, the potential side effects and risks of these usually are outweighed by the fact that you're morbidly obese and type 2 diabetic. And they can be actually life changing for people like that.

But remember that a third of the weight that you lose is lean body mass. So if you are going to take one of those, Wagovie, Ozempic, Semaglutide, or even Terzepatide, one of the things that I would highly encourage you to do is to also take a peptide, one called sermorlin acetate. It is an amino acid peptide. It is anti-sarcopenic. It's anti-muscle wasting, and it will help you protect muscle

while you're actually losing that weight. Because most people, when they say, I want to lose weight, what they really mean is I want to lose fat. That's what they're really, right? They don't mean I want to lose muscle and I want to lose bone density. They want to lose fat. So those drugs can be life changing. Now, if you don't have type 2 diabetes and you're just doing it for vanity or to lose

weight, my preference would not be that you do semaglutide or terzapatide because they can restrict gastric emptying. They can cause a lot of regurgitation. They slow the rate of gastric emptying. So food contents can sometimes putrefy. My preference would be that you use something like a berberine in intermittent fasting. You can get just as good, if not better results from the combination of intermittent fasting and berberine with a peptide. My preference is one called Sermorlin acetate. It's legal. It was FDA approved in 1983. You can get it from just about every compound pharmacy. They make it in capsules or tablets that go underneath of your tongue. But what were the other two questions you wanted me to address?

The nicotinamide riboside, the NMN, and then collagen and resveratrol, if you feel like diving in there. Huge, huge, huge fan of resveratrol. There is a form of resveratrol. Oh my gosh, a huge fan of resveratrol. Because I have seen it in thousands of patients of the clinic that I own, that my physicians put patients on, high blood pressure, hypertension, any type of cardiovascular issues whatsoever. It actually raises a peptide that actually lengthens your telomeres of your chromosomes called telomerase. One of the signs of reversing aging is reducing your biological age as your telomeres of your chromosomes called telomerase. One of the signs of reversing aging is reducing your biological age as your telomere length. You can lengthen telomeres with resveratrol. There's a very specific form of resveratrol called Pisceid resveratrol. It's made by Vinya resveratrol. It is the best resveratrol in the market. If you have any kind of cardiovascular condition, obviously check with your doctor. You should be taking resveratrol in the market. If you have any kind of cardiovascular condition, obviously check with your doctor.

You should be taking resveratrol. It helps with circulation. It helps restore vascular laxity. I mean, you can see the blood flow in scans of the brain. You can see actually the blood flow increase to the brain and to the heart, right? So it's good for microvascular circulation. It's good for making your veins more elastic, whereas ferritrol is one of the best supplements you can take. And then there's a class of these

NAD-like supplements. Remember, you cannot take NAD orally. So anyone that says they're taking NAD is lying to you. You cannot take the molecule NAD orally. It's actually NAD plus. So you can take nicotinamide riboside, nicotinic acid, or NMN, nicotinamide mononucleotide. And what these do is they raise your level of NAD naturally. Why is NAD so important? Because inside of our cells is a little battery called the mitochondria. Inside of the mitochondria is a little motor called the Krebs cycle. Every time this motor makes one revolution, it has two choices. It can either create 36 units of energy, 36 ATP, or it can create two units of energy, two ATP. Wouldn't you rather have 16 times more energy than 16 times less energy? What determines that is the presence of oxygen.

What carries the oxygen in is NAD. And as we age, by the way, fun fact, NAD is the only molecule that exists inside of every living cell on earth. Bacteria, protozoa, parasite, mouse, horse, moose, human, bird, fish, every living organism contains NAD. That is how important it is to living function. So I'm a big fan of- And Gary, I know there's the big rage right now, obviously, is the anti-aging. You see like J-Lo, she's 50, she looks 18. It's like, you know, when you were 50 in that movie Cocoon, you look like you were 85. Now 50 year olds look like 20 year olds. So it's amazing. Like it's, I mean, I'm 49.

I'm going to be, by the time this show airs, I'm 49 years old. I'm a year away from 50. I went through cancer and I got to tell you, Gary, I, outside of arthritis, I've never been leaner and never felt better. I take the riboside. I take the resveratrol. But the final question, we'll wrap on this, and we'll get to it. I do have one other supplement on my desk.

These aren't even mine. It's just funny. We're talking about NAD and berberine. They're literally sitting on my desk. I found it on a video, and, again, I looked it up. I do my homework, and the research is outstanding. But finally, collagen. Now, my wife is going to be 50 as well soon.

She has been a religious taker of collagen peptides, full-form collagen and glycine for probably 10 years. Gary, you met her. Your wife looks 20. My wife looks 20. I'm not going to say...

They're starting to tease us. They're like, is that your daughter? And you're like, I get those brother. I get that. It's the weirdest thing. People are like, Dan, why did I was on a, I was at the iron bowl, the college game. I put a picture on Instagram. People are like, Dan, why are you taking pictures with college girls? I said, that's my wife. That's not a college girl. You weirdos. She looks amazing. She doesn't have a ring. That's not a college girl, you weirdos.

She looks amazing. She doesn't have a wrinkle in her skin. It was freaky deaky too. I'm like, that's my wife, man. But the collagen, I absolutely swear by it. My arthritis pain has significantly diminished. Your thoughts on collagen, peptides, and glycine. Collagen, peptides, and glycine, especially collagens and glycine especially collagens type two three five nine these are the collagens that actually help um um repair the skin collagens are not only involved

in collagen it's also involved in elastin and fibrin so the skin elasticity the dermal thickness of the skin and even the production of new blood vessels in the skin called angiogenesis. Collagen is easy to add to coffee. There are a lot of great collagen brands out there. What's the one that we take is by Dr. Axe, A-X-E. That's the form that I take every morning in coffee, but a lot of great organic collagen brands out there. You can get them from grass-fed bovine sources and they're very assimilable. You'll notice the difference in your nail beds and your skin. You'll be clipping your nails every two days once you, right? It's the craziest thing.

And your hair, Gary, gets so thick. And then not to like make this show like in any way macabre, but when I was going through chemo, my doctor had said to me, he says, listen, I'm just going to warn you. I've never seen a patient go more than three weeks without losing their hair. So I was on TV at the time. And we were like, at Fox, we're like, what are we going to do? Am I going to wear a baseball hat? Like, what do we do about eyebrows? Like, Gary, I was on chemo almost four months. I never lost my hair. I mean, I'm not saying collagen was a, but I never lost my hair, like not at all. Not, not even a little bit. And I'll tell you, I never stopped working out. I never stopped cold plunging. I never stopped the sauna. And I'm starting to wonder if that

had something to do with it. And maybe my body was able to fight off some of the pernicious effects of the chemo. I mean, it is poison. That's what it's designed to do. Poison cancer cells. So I didn't lose hair at all. It was the weirdest, not even in my beard. So it was crazy. I'm not surprised by that at all. Again, nutrient deficient, right? You give the body the raw material it needs to do its job and magic things happen. That's when the magic happens in the human body, when it has the raw material it needs to do its job. Gary, your website again for all the wonderful listeners who are going to find this really illuminating and want to get in touch with you, the website

is theultimatehuman.com. Or you can follow me on Instagram at Gary Brekka, but theultimatehuman.com has the newsletter. You can pre-order a copy of my book if you like any topics that I talked about. You can even do that test that I referred to to find out what your body is deficient in so you can start supplementing for deficiency and not just the sake of supplement. Folks, guys, really amazing. Like I said, I ran into him at the UFC.

I was actually stunned. He knew who I was because I just watch him all the time. And this stuff works. The grounding, the caching. Our social media, we both knew each other without knowing each other. Only by accident.ana you you know dana you know i i don't know dana as well as you do but i know him through a business partnership and he was kind enough to let us sit in the front row and i was so glad to run into you because i just want to thank you

because so much of this stuff you talk about i had never heard of grounding i mean cold plunges i'd heard of but i didn't really take it seriously you were just so convincing on the video and dana was so like you got to do this man i thought i had steve harvey i had stephen a smith i had dana white you know i've had a whole bunch of you know interesting characters that have had a personal journey um with me and with my um wellness companyX Health. And the cold plunge is a story and it runs through all of those. Life change. You know, one last thing, Gary.

I'm sitting next to Tucker at the UFC. He's right to my right. And we're, you know, we obviously are friends from Fox and we work there. We're chatting and he's asking me about all this health stuff. And that's the first thing I mentioned. I said, listen, I'm not going to bore you with everything, but you had one thing.

I said, the cold shower in the morning. He said, oh, my gosh. He's like, I have a house in Maine. The water's freezing. It's well water. I said, even better. And Gary, I tapped Dana. You know, he was right in front of us at the announcer's table.

I'm like, Dana. I said, tell Tucker about the cold plunge. And he looked at him stone cold. He goes, brother, change your whole life. Change your whole life. And Tucker's like, I got to try this out. And he looked at him stone cold. He goes, brother, change your whole life. Change your whole life. And Tucker's like, I got to try this out. Has he done it, though? You need to follow up with him.

I will. I'll shoot him a text. I will. Because by the time this airs on. I've been watching him since the fight, too. I was trying to connect with him in Tampa. But, yeah, I'm going to start telling him a little bit about the cold plunge. By the time this episode airs.

Gary Brekka, thank you so much for your time. We so deeply appreciate it. You're welcome on the show anytime. Thankskka. Thank you so much for your time. We so deeply appreciate it. You're welcome on the show anytime. Thanks a lot. Thank you so much, brother. You got it, brother. I hope you really enjoyed that folks. I've been using a lot of those life hacks for a long time and I can tell you with absolute candor, you know, I don't spin your wheels. They've really changed my life.

I had a lot of problems with the black cloud depression following me, bad sleep, all that stuff. And just a few quick simple changes like that. My whole life changed. bad sleep, all that stuff. And just a few quick, simple changes like that. My whole life changed. I hope you enjoyed that show. Hope you're having a great holiday season, a Merry Christmas and a very, very happy new year to come. We so appreciate your time. Thank you so much. See you next week. You just heard the Dan Bongino show.