The Dr. Hyman Show - The Health Conspiracy No One Talks About: Life Insurance, Big Data & Aging | Gary Brecka

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

What if I told you life insurance companies can predict, almost to the month, when you’re going to die? That’s exactly what Gary Brecka, a human biologist and former mortality expert, used to do��until he uncovered something shocking. After years of analyzing blood work and medical records, he realized that the biggest predictors of disease and early death aren’t genetic—they’re modifiable. Now, he’s using that knowledge to help people optimize their health and extend their lifespan. In this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show, we discuss: How insurance companies use hidden health data to predict life expectancy with stunning accuracy. The biggest factors that shorten lifespan—and why most of them are within our control. Why vitamin deficiencies, especially vitamin D, are quietly fueling chronic disease. How the right biohacking tools, like red light therapy and oxygen optimization, can reverse aging. What you can do today to take control of your health and longevity. This conversation will change the way you think about your own health. View Show Notes From This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal This episode is brought to you by BON CHARGE, Timeline Nutrition, Paleo Valley, and Big Bold Health. Order BON CHARGE’s Max Red Light Therapy device today and get 15% off. Visit boncharge.com and use code DRMARK for 15% off.  Support essential mitochondrial health and save 10% on Mitopure. Visit timeline.com/drhyman to get 10% off today. Get nutrient-dense, whole foods. Head to paleovalley.com/hyman for 15% off your first purchase. Try Big Bold Health’s HTB Rejuvenate and get 25% off by going to bigboldhealth.com and use code DRMARK25 at checkout. 

Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman show. You could tell them most of the month when someone's going to die. To the month. Yeah, and it's a very accurate model. The reason why we were table rating a lot of these and the reason why we were shortening the life expectancy was because of the intervention of chemicals, synthetics, and pharmaceuticals. The more pharmaceuticals you were on, the easier it was for us to predict your life expectancy.

The more you were on, the more likely you were to die sooner? The more you're on, the more likely you were to die sooner. The more you're on the more likely you were to die sooner and the more predictable. Let's talk about red light therapy. After my recent back surgeries recovery and managing back pain became a top priority. That's where Bond Charge has made a world of difference. Bond Charge is all about making science-backed wellness tools accessible and their red light therapy collection has become a game changer in my recovery. Whether you're looking to reduce muscle soreness, boost your energy, or simply unwind,

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head to timeline.com slash darheimen for 10% off. Trust me, your cells and muscles will thank you. Now, before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights.

If you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, Dr. Hyman Plus. If you're looking for curated trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website, DrHyman.com, for my website store and a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products. Well, Gary, it's so great to have you on the podcast. It's been a long time coming. Yeah, it's been a long time coming.

I think I've been chasing you longer than you've been chasing me. Maybe, but here I am in Miami in your studio, in your house. Yeah, this is good. It's awesome. And we just took this extraordinary tour through your house, which has me seething with jealousy about all the tools and gizmos and gadgets you have to upgrade your health.

We're gonna get into all that. I'm just so excited about it. Yeah, yeah, it was awesome. I always say like we end up running a podcast before the podcast. That's right, we saw your hydrogen machines, your ozone sauna, your whole biohacking suite, the red light therapy, it's quite interesting.

But, you know, maybe people know or don't know about you, but the thing that I find interesting is you came at this through the lens of sort of understanding why people die, not through the lens of longevity, which is sort of like you were trying to like, help companies save money by understanding what was causing death and mortality and trying to help them navigate that.

So can you tell us about your background, how you got the insights about the nature of our chronic epidemic, what's going on, why these insurance companies have all this data, what they've learned and why it matters to us? So for the better part of my career, I was a mortality expert, which essentially means that, we studied mortality, the variable basic tables,

not just putting people on an actuarial curve, right? I mean, we're all on one, right? If you're a 54 year old male, you have a life expectancy of X. If you're a 34 year old female, you have a life expectancy of Y. You're lumped into a massive pool of mortality. But when a life insurance company is getting ready

to put 25 million or $50 million worth of risk on your life or an annuity company is getting ready to put $25 million or $50 million worth of risk on your life or an annuity company is getting ready to issue you a SPIA, what's called a single premium immediate annuity where you give them a lump sum of cash and they guarantee you an income stream for life. Or you're getting ready to do what's called a reverse mortgage, which means you get to live in your house,

but you sell it while you're still alive. All of these are based on mortality. The only thing that matters in those financial services instruments is how many more months does this person have left on earth? Yeah, right. So they don't really care where you are on an actuarial curve, right?

They wanna know your- They wanna adjust the prices to match when you're gonna die, so they don't lose money. And insurance is priced like that. You have super preferred, preferred, standard, then you have what's called table ratings. So what did you learn as you sort of started looking at the data and the lab data for people

who were in the pool? Because these companies actually get your blood. Oh yeah, they get your blood, they can take genes, they get all of your medical records, they have all your demographic data, they know, I mean, it's a proctology exam, I mean, if you've ever applied for- Maybe a full colonoscope.

Yeah, exactly. It's, I don't think you get as much information from a colonoscope as you do a full-blown life insurance application. Now, I'm not talking about term life insurance, I'm talking about real, whole life, permanent universal life insurance, where people are putting 10 million, 25 million,

50 million of risk on a single life. What happens in those cases is they take not only a deep dive into your demographic data, but I mean, they get everything, your divorce decrees, your trust accounts, your bank statements, your brokerage statements, your work history, and all of your medical records. And then before they actually issue the policy, they will essentially send a nurse to your house

and they will pull whatever biomarker they want. So you got to like have an inside view of what that is. Real inside view. First of all, I'm not a physician. I'm a human biologist. My undergraduate degrees are in biology. My postgraduate degrees are in human biology. And so I spent eight years in formal education

just studying human physiology. And they wanted someone like that on the team with the rest of the MDs and actuarial scientists because we were trying to really build a model that was very accurate, probabilistic model that was accurate. What really emerged from this big data, I always say that if this database

could see the light of day, it would permanently change the face of humanity. Yeah. It would- Spill the beans, Gary. Yeah. Let's go. Well, I wish I had like secretly downloaded it, you know, like one of those government conspiracies

and I had it on a flash drive, you know, cause trust me, I would put it in the public domain. Probably go to prison for the rest of my life, but I would get it out there. So I do my best to get it out there with what I've got in my head. But the very unpopular information that emerged from this, or I shouldn't say unpopular,

I should say anti-mainstream, was that the reason why the majority of people are not living healthier, happier, longer, more fulfilling lives, were because of what we called modifiable risk factors. There were the non-modifiable factors, and then there were the modifiable factors. You could have a restricted range of motion

from a massive injury or surgical procedure, that's not modifiable. You have spinal rods in your back, those are not modifiable risk factors. Modifiable risk factors were diet, lifestyle, supplementation, exercise, mobility. And in my case, I would add to that significant changes in your blood biomarkers.

And so what we noticed was that the reason why we were table rating a lot of these and the reason why we were shortening the life expectancy was because of the intervention of chemicals, synthetics and pharmaceuticals. The more pharmaceuticals you were on, the easier it was for us to predict your life expectancy. The more you were on, the more likely you were to die sooner?

The more you were on, the more likely you were to die sooner and the more predictable. Because not only could we predict the onset of other conditions, but we could predict the severity of and how quickly you would succumb to them. And so we realized- You could tell them most of the month

when someone was gonna die die based on the data? To the month, yeah. And it's a very accurate model. And I get a lot of flack for that because people say, well, if you could predict life expectancy to the month, which I don't do anymore, you know, you would be Jesus or you would have won a Nobel Prize.

And I never won a Nobel Prize and I'm not Jesus. I believe in Jesus. But, and the reason why, you know, they say that is because they don't realize how accurate this science is. But if you wanna know how accurate life insurance companies are, annuity companies are at predicting death, just look at what happened during the 2008, 2009 financial services crisis.

We had 364 banks fail. You didn't have a single life insurance company fail. In fact, some of the largest institutions, AIG, whose credit derivatives division was taking the company under were bailed out by the life insurance. They are some of the most solvent institutions on the planet. They're some of the highest rated financial institutions

on the planet. Because they know shit. They know shit. They're really good. They know how to manage the risk because they understand the biology. So the things that came up were modifiable things and they were things you could see on blood work,

they could see by their. You could absolutely see it on blood work. So things like. What were you looking at? So we looked at three main areas and when we were looking through your blood work, we would look at glycemic control, how well you controlled your blood sugar over a lifetime

because we saw that hyperinsulinemia, elevated hemoglobin A1C, and poor glycemic control was a risk factor, was what we call the comorbidity. So were the insurance companies measuring insulin? They were measuring insulin, glucose, and hemoglobin A1c. That's amazing, because Gary, less than 1%

of all lab tests in America done by physicians include an insulin level, which is probably one of the most important biomarkers for longevity and risk. And it's something we use as core part of function health in our offerings, a company I co-founded to help people understand their own lab data because it's so critical.

And it's amazing to me that there are people who know how to manage risk, are actually measuring it, and not doctors. What's interesting is you would get 15, 18, or 20 years of medical records on someone. And you would see the atherosclerotic, the arteriosclerotic issues. You would see the cardiovascular disease.

You'd see the very, very, very low levels of statin controlled LDL cholesterol. But you would see extreme proliferation in cardiovascular disease. You would see early mortality in these groups because of what they called non-correlated events, hormonal events, what our scientific team drew back to,

so also membrane dysfunction, early onset, not just early onset dementia or Alzheimer's, but all forms of cognitive decline. You know, we knew, for example, that LDL cholesterol, for example, was notL cholesterol, for example, was not a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease. That's a big statement.

Yeah, and that is a material fact, by the way. Because the insurance companies are not selling statins. No. They're not actually, they're actually looking at what data is the most relevant, and LDL is a factor, but it's not by itself the factor. It's really metabolic health, which you measure by looking at insulin and blood sugar and A1C and particle size.

We wanted to see, you know, what was the chance that this person would have LDL cholesterol called to the arterial wall, not in what was the presence of LDL cholesterol. You know, if they were hyperinsulinemic, then they had significantly higher incidence of blacking, scarring, narrowing, and other forms of cardiovascular disease.

But the centenarians, you know, not once in my entire career, and I don't know that this, I'm not saying this is a blanket statement, but in my career, we processed death claims too. And we didn't see a single death claim on a centenarian, someone that lived to age 100. At that time, many of the policies would do what they call endow at age 100.

So at age 100, the policy would just pay out. It would pay the death claim. So if you're lucky enough to live to 100, you get through your kids. I'd be like, I just got my $20 million life insurance policy. The person who's still alive gets his life insurance. Persons that's still alive. That's pretty cool.

Yeah, and there are other things called accelerated death claims, you know, where they would actually accelerate the payout while the person was alive if they had a terminal illness. But what was really interesting is I didn't process a single death claim on a centenarian, not one, who lived over age 100 that did not have clinically elevated levels of LDL cholesterol

at the time of their death. Because very often we had blood work on these people. They would be in CIS care living facilities or other kinds of facilities and we would actually have the data. And due to that for things like, we followed trends in calcium supplementation in the elderly and really in the fact

that they weren't really impacting bone density. And so osteopenic patients that were put on high doses of calcium still became osteoporotic. That's right. And- It's the vitamin D. Yeah, vitamin D and K2. Like, I mean, that was another one.

You know, we, it was 2016- Did you measure nutrient levels in these populations? We didn't measure nutrient levels. And you know, if I had known then what I know now, I think we probably would have measured nutrient levels, but you could surmise from the data because you could see their diet, their lifestyle, alcohol consumption, the medications that they were on,

and you could actually follow certain clinical deficiencies. Like vitamin D3 was a big one for us. We would see clinical deficiencies in vitamin D3. And I'm talking like single digit, low double digit D3, not- That's bad. Oh yeah. Yeah, and you would be-

It's common. Surprised how many people have that level of deficiency in D3. So they would have these long running clinical deficiencies in vitamin D3, let's say nanogram per deciliter between seven and 25, even below the lowest threshold for most labs, which will be 30 to a hundred.

And I still think 30 is clinically deficient. Definitely. Yeah. But you would see these very low levels of vitamin D3 for years and years and years in the medical record. And then eventually the patient would present to a primary care physician with rheumatoid arthritis-like symptoms.

And I make sure that I say that correctly because they didn't have rheumatoid arthritis. Very often, we know that medical errors, the third leading cause of death, there's a great study, 2016 study done by Harvard. I think it was actually repeated by Hopkins and got worse in 2019 if you wanna look up the study. Yeah, there was a National Academy of Science report

on that too. Yeah, I mean, looking at all the ICD-9, ICD-10, 11 codes, you know, that medical error was the third leading cause of death, and we saw this repeatedly in our insurance actuarial underwriting, because, so take this patient that had clinical deficiency in vitamin D3, and they present to their primary care, and they start describing the symptoms,

you know, my soles of my feet are sore and achy when I get my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my it's been hard for me to make up a fist, like a tight fist. You would be shocked how many primary carers would just say, you know, Mark, you've got rheumatoid arthritis. Take this $50,000 a year drug. It's gonna suppress you. No RA factors, no sed rates, no diagnostic work to confirm that. They call it seronegative rheumatoid arthritis. Yeah. That's what they call it.

Seronegative. I'm adopting that saying now. No, it's a well-known- It's an actually thing? Yeah. Okay, so- Check it out.known. It's an actually thing? Yeah. Okay, so. Check it out. We knew about it, we just didn't know the name of it then.

And so they would say, you know, the good news for you is we're gonna put you on something called a corticosteroid, you're gonna take this oral steroid and everything's gonna be fine. And so methotrexate, whatever the corticosteroid was. And what we realized in the record, because we were looking at hundreds of thousands of patient records, was that if you started

a corticosteroid, you had six years and one day until you were having a joint replacement. Because initially they- The steroids definitely are not good. They cause osteoporosis, they degrade your bones, they can cause avascular necrosis of the hip. I mean, they're pretty bad. And avascular necrosis of the hip. I mean, they're pretty bad. Yeah, and avascular necrosis of the hip

is what's leading to the hip fractures, the femoral head fractures. I think it basically means the blood just flow stops to the hip and then the hip joint dines. Yeah, that artery that goes in the femoral head is compromised and now you get no blood flow and then you get that osteoporotic condition in one of the highest load areas of the body.

Yeah. And you know, most people think that grandma fell and broke her hip, but her hip broke and then she fell. It's an important distinction, right? The fracture causing the fall, rather than the fall causing the fracture. And that was one of the reasons, we called that the triad of death, and I know you're really familiar with that,

hip fractures and their propensity to accelerate mortality, but it wasn't the hip fracture that accelerated it. So all this amazing stuff you did with this, sort of learning about how the insurance companies look at death, mortality, risk factors, it taught you a lot about what to think about in terms of how we create a healthy human, the opposite. So you went from like managing death to managing life.

Can you talk about like what now kind of you switched to in terms of your thinking and how it kind of started your journey and what you're doing? Because what you're doing is really extraordinary. You're basically kind of synthesizing and collating and putting together a lot of different modalities and strategies to help upgrade people's biology. And it's something we never learned in medical school,

which is how do you create a healthy human? Like it's just not a course and it doesn't get taught and there's no understanding of what is health. It's not just the absence of disease. Most would say it's the absence of disease. It's not, it's something else. And when you have it, you know it, you feel awesome, your brain's clear, you have energy, you sleep great,

you can do whatever you wanna do. You know, you could basically be free from the burdens of a lot of the suffering that many people struggle with. Even if it's not a disease, I joke when I say, this is a really terrible thing that most Americans suffer from called FLC syndrome. That's when you feel like crap. Yeah, there's a lot of FLC going around.

It's so bad. I mean, we just launched a 10 day detox program, which I wrote a book about 10 years ago. In 10 days, people have up to a 70% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases by just a simple set of lifestyle changes in a week. Unbelievable. I've wholly believed that and subscribed to that

because in these modifiable risk factors, first of all, I was prohibited by law from having any contact with the patient or the treating physician. So even if I saw a life-threatening drug interaction, I couldn't pick up the phone and warn the physician. And sometimes the MIB wouldn't catch these, right? These thrombolytic combinations of different pharmaceuticals

and you'd want to contact the physician because it wasn't done on purpose, it was by error. And the system is very good at catching things like narcotic surfers and things like that, but it's not very good at catching contraindications. And just to finish the D3 example, so here's a nutrient deficiency, a clinical deficiency in this.

Now they're on a corticosteroid. It was so accurate that I would advance your age, artificially advance your age, six years in one day, and I would schedule the joint replacement for you. And then as soon as I scheduled the joint replacement, I would begin to reduce your, at that age, I would begin to reduce your ambulatory profile, how well you ambulate.

And as you reduced ambulation, what we realized was as you reduced mobility, you would bring in all of the diseases that begin to exacerbate. Yeah, less exercise, more disease, yeah. It's a direct correlation. And- I always say, if you don't move, you won't. That's a direct correlation. And... I always say if you don't move, you won't.

That's a good one. I say aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort, but the more aggressively we pursue comfort, the faster we age. And so, even as I was leaving... These chairs are pretty comfortable, Gary. I don't know. Yeah.

But we're not gonna stay here, brother. We're not gonna stay here. We're gonna put on a weighted vest and go do some pull-ups after this. Okay. And you're not gonna stay here, brother. We're not gonna stay here. We're gonna put on a weighted vest and go do some pull-ups after this. Okay. And you're getting in the hydrogen bath. Okay, down. I'm excited to hear how that works out for you.

You just wanna see how I look without my shirt on. I know what's this about. Yeah. That's going all over the internet, guys. www.ultimatehuman.com to see more time with your shirt off. But, so now they have this clinical deficiency in D3, they've been put on corticosteroid. I've advanced their age artificially,

six years in one day, I've reduced their ambulatory profile. And now I bring in, our algorithm would start to bring in all the diseases that exacerbate with reduced mobility. And then what you would see is we could predict not only the onset of, but the severity of, and how quickly you would succumb to a condition.

So when you start to rewind that back, this person died early of a disease that they never should have had because of mobility that was reduced because of an operation that was not necessary because of medication that wasn't required because of a condition that didn't exist. Had they taken five or 9,000 IUs, 10,000 IUs

of vitamin D3 daily with a little K2 and applied a load to their bones, that trajectory would have been completely different. Something as simple as that. That's true. I mean, I'm just thinking, you know, we had vaccine mandates. I think we should have vitamin D mandates. I totally agree. I think, you know, we mandates. I totally agree. I think we can.

I totally agree. Because I actually shared this data with some people during the administration around how serious it was for COVID if you had low vitamin D. Second leading cause of morbidity in COVID. Yeah, you would get more likely to end up in the hospital and die if you had low vitamin D. And from the Israeli data, if your vitamin D was over 50

and the reference range is 20 to 30, depending on the lab, if it was over 50, there was nobody who died. I was actually just gonna say that because I was looking at big data, reporting during that timeframe too. But in functional ranges of 60 to 80 nanograms, there was not a single death.

That's extraordinary, because vaccines don't do that, right? No, they don't prevent the infection or the spread. I mean, that's a whole nother issue. Oh yeah. And if you want to really see the impact of vaccines, just follow the life insurance companies. Yep.

Right, so people tell me all the time, oh, they don't factor in whether or not you've been vaccinated. I go, you don't think that they factor in whether or not you've been vaccinated? Why do you not think that? And they say, well, they don't ask the question on the application.

Like they don't have to ask the question. They can see from your blood. They get it from your medical record. It's just like if you answered on your application, I'm a nonsmoker, have you ever smoked? No. Have you ever, you know, vaped or? Well, they check your urine, your blood for.

If you show up with nicotine in your blood, I'm gonna table rate you as a smoker. It's just like if you tell, there's that section on alcohol, how many drinks a week? One to two, two to five, five to seven. We never believed what they said. If you had liver cirrhosis,

we table rated you as an alcoholic. People underestimate how much they eat and overestimate how much they exercise when you ask them. Yeah, it's very true. So we just went off the data. Yeah, on the data. And that led to you kind of thinking about how to create a different approach

to helping people gain health, right? And that's where you sort of led to your path. And you're kind of known as this sort of this biohacking genius. And I think most people may not even know what biohacking is. When I first kind of heard the term, like, what is that? And I don't quite get it.

And I was thinking about it. And really, as I sort of come to understand what it is, it's really the application of tools and technologies and approaches to life that actually create health, that are not disease treatments per se, but that work by activating the body's own healing, reparative mechanisms. No question.

And so in a sense, that's what functional medicine is. For me, it's the ability to understand how we deviate from hell and how to create health by removing the best of putting in the good stuff. And a lot of the technology and tools we looked at as we toured your apartment was basically tools that helped upregulate different biological systems, whether it's your mitochondria, reducing oxidative stress, reducing inflammation,

detoxification, these are all things that are fundamental to creating health that we don't learn about in medical school that we don't know how to apply. But you've actually come up with an approach that includes all these modalities. So I'd like you to sort of talk about, how do you think of biohacking?

What is it? Yeah. What are the most important aspects of it that we should be focused on? Because there's a million things out there, right? There's a million things out there. You probably have 95% of that. Yeah, yeah, I do.

Or maybe 98, I don't know. So, how do you separate the wheat from the chaff? You know, here's my big first line rule is that the best biohacking devices, best biohacking modalities, equipment, what have you, mimic what we get from Mother Nature. And so for example, we get three things from Mother Nature mainly, we get oxygen from the air,

we get light from the sun, we get magnetism from the earth. And the further we get away from those basics, the sicker we become. And the truth is that we are so disconnected from nature. Now we're disconnected from each other too. I mean, deep meaningful relationships, sense of purpose, sense of community.

There were a lot of mortality factors that we would study that actually when an elderly person lost their sense of community, their loss of spouse, their family or became isolated, which is the fastest way to accelerate all cause mortalities. Yeah, while loneliness is like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, in terms of its mortality risk. I don't know that that's true,

but I would totally agree with that off the cuff because we saw it in the data. We call it broken heart syndrome, essentially spouses that were, and it wasn't so much the loss of the spouse, it was being thrust into immediate isolation, right? Because mom and dad live five states away and the kids are busy and they're raising kids

and they see them on Christmas and Easter and New Year's, like most families, and then one spouse falls ill and passes and now the other spouse is totally isolated. And that isolation, we know that in all forms of animal species and human beings, isolation reduces your lifespan. So biohacking is having a friend. So back to biohacking, I would say the best devices

are the ones that mimic mother nature. So things like mineral salts, amino acids, nutrients that you would find in nutrient dense soils. You wouldn't believe the physiologic impact you can have on people just by putting them on a complex of B vitamins, vitamin B12s, and methafolate, which are basic core nutrients required for the process of methylation.

And when they're deficient, they become like the hub of the wheel. They have all of these spokes. And people think that they have an autoimmune disease and they have a mental illness and they have a weight gain issue and they have sleep disruption and they have anxiety and they have ADD or ADHD.

And the truth is they very often have nutrient deficiencies. And so if I was to say, what are the best biohacking devices? Those are the devices that mimic mother nature. And so if you didn't have the budget to spend on those, you should be able to duplicate those by committing time, you know, in nature, exposing your skin to sunlight, getting first light in the morning,

learning to do basic breath work, touching the surface of the earth, grounding, earthing, which is a very real thing. They're all super expensive things to do, right? Yeah, yeah, they're exactly. I think, in fact, this morning, I just as a, earthing, which is a very real thing. They're all super expensive things to do, right? Yeah, yeah, they're exactly. I think, in fact, this morning, just as a, you know, as sort of a joke, I said, you know, I'm taking my morning antidepressant,

and, you know, and I was out on the balcony getting sunlight and just doing some breath work, and I listed the side effects of enhanced mood and increased focus and concentration. And then I said, you know, don't, you know, forget your mood enhancer, you know, the best neurot don't, don't, you know, forget your, your mood enhancer that, you know, the best neurotropic. And I just did a round of breath work and got Nicole punch. As a doctor focused on longevity, I often remind my patients that aging

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We gotta stop thinking about stress as a negative. Very often it can be what makes you resilient. The body very often strengthens in response to stress. I know that you know this, but so when we talk about biohacking devices, my favorite would be PEMF, Matt's Pulse Electromagnetic Field. These mimic the low Gauss current of the earth.

So if you don't have time to earth or ground, come in contact with mother earth, you can use a PEMF, Matt. Probably my favorite device is a red light therapy bed, full body red light therapy. And red light therapy, I mean the science is in on red light therapy. It's very hard to overdose on it

if you dose it 10 to 20 minutes a day Even if you're using very powerful nanometer I mean a milliwatts of irradiance and you're using the right nanometer wavelengths of Therapeutic light because you omit the portions of the light spectrum that are damaging And you concentrate the portions of the light spectrum that you would get from the Sun That are very healthy and we're very photovoltaic beings. I mean, light is a very important component to health. Really, yeah, regulates our mitochondria, inflammation.

It's quite impressive. I mean, certain wavelengths of light, for example, in the mitochondria will actually, in the Krebs cycle, you'll see that cytochrome C oxidase will bind with a gas called mitochondrial nitric oxide. And when it's bound to mitochondrial nitric oxide, it's sort of like a one-armed man. It can either shake hands with nitric oxide

or it can shake hands with oxygen, but it can't do both. So in order to bind oxygen and upstage the mitochondria, to have this aerobic cycle, which is roughly 16 times more efficient than the anaerobic cycle, it has to let go of mitochondrial nitric oxide. And one way to do this is to pass red light through the skin and through the wall of the mitochondria. It will literally kick nitric oxide out of the mitochondria.

You can measure this in the serum of the blood. You can actually do nitric oxide testing pre and post red light therapy and measure the impact of this release of mitochondrial nitric oxide, which will cause a temporary vasodilation. And then it will force oxygen to dock. Well, now if you're forcing oxygen into the mitochondria, I mean, that's arguably, that's the tip of the root, right? That's as deep as you get in the soil. Everything improves from there.

Literally everything. Well, that's what your mind can do. They take oxygen and food and they combust them and run them down an assembly line to create energy. And energy is the key to health and life and everything else. And I think a lot of times we gloss over that a little bit. Well, the cell has a lot of energy,

but what happens when a cell has energy? Well, it can eliminate waste, it can repair, it can detoxify, it can regenerate. And so I would make a bold enough statement and I'll make it in front of you. So you take issue this, if you feel it's inaccurate, but nearly every form of pathology and disease known to mankind is a shift in metabolism.

It's a shift in the metabolism, basically in the mitochondria. The sicker the mitochondria become, the sicker the host will become and the more fertile you are for all forms of pathology and disease. These are not things that are happening to us. They are things that are happening within us.

And so if I was to say, what's your favorite, you know, biohacking device to be a red light therapy bed. And then you can add things like exercise with oxygen therapy, EWOT. I mean, we know that athletes that would train at altitude would have a- Perform better. Yeah, perform better.

Why? Because you get, you know, enhanced- Erithrin proesis. But you essentially are upgrading the mitochondria. And you're adding red blood cells to the bloodstream, so you have more taxis to shuttle oxygen. But, and so these are the kinds of devices. I have an EMF tent around my bed,

and people were like, well, you're getting crazy about EMS. Well, you know, ancestrally, we didn't really come in contact with a lot of EMFs, and I think that the jury is still out on the implications of 5G and Wi-Fi. Better safe than sorry, kind of., you have a tent over your bed. You think it's not actually helpful for your body to have this exposure constantly to EMS and Wi-Fi and 5G,

but by putting the tent over your bed, you block it at night and it improves your sleep and you feel different. Yeah, and if you look at things as they occur naturally in nature, like if you were to take a cup and scoop it out of a running stream, and you were to analyze what's in that water,

you would find high mineral content, first of all, and not just potassium and magnesium and sodium, the big ones that are in most electrolyte supplements, you would find all of the other tracements, boron, zinc, selenium, manganese, molybdenum, you find all of these, they're not the sort of headline minerals that most people think about.

But if you back that up and you say, well, what if you become mineral deficient? Well, you need 12 essential minerals to build bone. You don't just need calcium. Calcium combines with phosphorus to form hydroxyapatite, which really makes our bones dense. But in order for that to occur, you need these 12 minerals.

And so if you're not getting the 12 minerals, you need to biohack that. You need to add a mineral salt to your morning routine. Maybe it's a Celtic salt, maybe it's a Baja Gold Sea salt, which is my favorite. But just adding the right raw materials back to the human body, it is astounding what you see happen in human beings

when you give their body the raw material it needs to do its job. You know, my other favorite device would probably be hydrogen water and certainly filtering your water. I mean, I think people should get tap water permanently out of their life. We know that it's, you know, it's got neurotoxins in it

like fluorosilicic acid. So many contaminants, that's incredible. It really is. I mean, it is mind-numbing. I actually just did a post of back washing the filter, the four-stage RO filter in my house into my bathtub. And Miami is considered really healthy water, the municipal water supply is generally accepted

as safe, the grass, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's very high in PFAs and polyalkylphenols. Forever chemicals. Yeah, forever chemicals. So it's not voodoo science. To start biohacking yourself, it doesn't even need, you don't even need a big budget.

I tell people they're starting out with cold plunging just to take ice, put it in a tupperware, I mean, take water, put it in a tupperware and stack it in your freezer and throw the big cubes of ice in. And when you wake up in the morning, dust it in there and 30 minutes later, get in a cold plunge.

Yeah. Expose your body to these hormetic stresses. You know, mineralize the body, hydrate the body. I mean, I, you know, before we got on here, I was showing you the oxidative reduction potential of hydrogen water. I think if you have a choice between drinking regular water or hydrogen water,

you should be drinking hydrogen water. If you have a choice between drinking tap water or filter water, you should be filtering your water supply. So I think biohacking is a way of getting us back to the basics. If you're not getting sunlight, you need to be supplementing with vitamin D3. It's probably the most pandemic deficiency in the world. It is. So basically what you're not getting sunlight, you need to be supplementing with vitamin D3. It's probably the most pandemic deficiency in the world.

It is. So basically what you're talking about are these things that have been used by humans forever, such as being on the earth, walking on the dirt with your feet, being in sunlight. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's- Getting water from the river that's full of minerals.

I mean, these are really sort of simple things and the breath work, sunlight and exercise, these are all biohacking techniques. So I think the biohacking people get confused. I think it's, to me, it's really just what is the science of creating health? And functional medicine is sort of the medical version of that.

But there's so much that we can do on our own to upgrade our biology and to actually activate these healing systems in our body that are why we get these chronic illnesses. No question. And we saw these, and then we would have these, you know, in the mortality space, we'd have these things called comorbidities, right?

So. I don't believe in that. You don't? No, because they're not comorbidities because they're all connected underlying by the same mechanisms. So hypertension, heart failure, diabetes, heart disease. These are things.

Yeah, they're not independent. No, kidney failure, fatty liver. These are all comorbidities, but they all have the same root cause. You fix the cause and everything gets better. I could not agree more with you. Not just like random events. Oh, this person happened to get five different

chronic diseases. No, they're all the same problem. They're just called different things at their end stage, but they're caused by insulin resistance most of the time. First of all, I would wholly agree with you. We would see things like insulin resistance being the worst. We looked at glycemic control, hormone balance, even though hormones weren't being therapeutically tested

or measured, we would look at hormone balance and then we would look at certain nutrient deficiencies, vitamin D3, B12, major nutrients in the body. As part of the insurance screening? As part of the insurance screening for the underlying because one of the things we wanted to do was assess the chance that this person would correct their behavior.

And because the last thing you wanted to do was issue a policy at one level, and then they correct it. But what's interesting, I'm working with John Hancock, and they're all in on helping their policyholders improve their health. And they have a whole vitality program, they're offering wellness services, they're offering even cancer screening

with a multi-cancer detection test gallery. Do you know why? Because it saves them money. Yes, because if I issue a policy now and then I can improve your health and you live longer, I collect more premium. That's right. You will notice that the annuity companies don't do that

because the annuity companies, their risk is that you live too long. Not that you die early. The insurance, a life insurance company doesn't want you to die too soon because they want to collect- You want to be aligned with life insurance insurance and risk factors. Yeah, you don't want to be aligned

with the annuity companies. You're probably gonna get shadow banned for that. But it's fascinating that this is a financial incentive for them to actually get people healthier because it saves them money. Yes, and it's done after the policy's issued because if I can issue you a standard policy and that can turn you into a super preferred,

then that's a win because I issue the policy with a 26 year life expectancy and if I can get your life expectancy to 37 years more, then that's a major win. On the other hand, if you're an annuity company and I take a payment from you, and I'm going to guarantee you an income stream for life, the shorter your life, the larger my return.

And so, in fact, there was a lot of arbitrage, financial services, instruments, and during my day that have been outlawed since, where people would buy life insurance and annuities and pair the two, because one was the risk of early death, one was the risk of late death. But so, you know, back to what we were saying,

you know, there would be underlying issues like much to what you're saying, we would see people that were clinically deficient in testosterone, for example, men and women. And so this erythropoietic pressure on the bone marrow to create new red blood cells would go down and they would be borderline anemic for decades, right? They would just, they didn't have classic anemia, right?

But their RBC count would be very, very low. Their hemoglobin would be very, very low. Their mean corpuscular volumes and mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentrations would be very, very low. The red cell distribution width would be very high. So what would happen is their bodies be very, very low. The red cell distribution width would be very high. So what would happen is they, their bodies were carrying oxygen very poorly.

They were essentially suffocating to death. And in almost all of these cases, we would see this progression of events. So the hormone levels would decline, as the hormone levels would decline, the blood counts would decline. As the blood counts would decline, they would become increasingly more hypoxic.

As they became more hypoxic, their blood would become more acidic. As they became more acidic, they were more fertile to other forms of pathology and disease. And along this way, almost all of these patients would become sleep deprived. You know, they would have major sleep disruption

because when you become really hypoxic, youic, the brain wakes you up by helping. Yeah, yeah, when you go to altitude, you can't sleep well. People like fly to Aspen and whatever. Because you're hypoxic, so it doesn't let you get into deep or REM sleep. And you start, once you hit the sleep cycle, that's the end of the road. You know, I mean, I think sleep is our human superpower.

Yeah, I was in Bolivia this year, and we went to like 16,000 feet to this. 16,000? Or maybe it was 14, it was really high. 14 or 16 is high. It was really high. I mean, you land in La Paz, and the airport's at 13,000 feet.

Yeah. And you like get off the plane, you're like, whoa. Yeah. But we got up to this hotel in the middle of nowhere, because we're going to this cell flat and we were crossing over to, I think, Chile. And I got really hypoxic. I checked my O2 sats and they were like in the 60s.

Wow. Not your pulse oxy, your O2 sat. No, no, no, my oxygen saturation, which usually as a doctor you're like intubated in the ICU at that level. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I said to my wife, I said, hey, can you go tell the guy that I need to oxygen tank?

They brought it in and I put it on. And he's like, we'll just take it back in a few minutes. I'm like, no, you're gonna leave it with me and somebody else needs it, you can go get it in the middle of the night. But oh, come on. And I was pretty frightening and my wife stayed up a whole night watching me

because she was worried I was going to die. Yeah. But hypoxia is a real thing, but it's also a hormetic stress in the right dose, right? So it's really about the dose, right? If you stay up an altitude too long, you're going to die, but if you do it for a short burst, it's actually activates your healing system. So a lot of the technologies that are involved,

or methodical. Bio-hacking, for example. E-watt, exercise with oxygen therapy, is mimicking that hyperoxic, hypoxic state that are involved, or methods are involved. Biohacking, for example, EWAT, exercise with oxygen therapy, is mimicking that hyperoxic, hypoxic state. And there's a lot of gizmos and equipment, and people can buy those things too, but I think the basics are also biohacking. Eating well is biohacking.

No question. Phytohormesis, which is taking a lot of these plant compounds that upregulate these various longevity pathways is biohacking. Having your nutrient status optimized is biohacking. Exercise, breath work, sleep. Eating whole foods, getting into a routine.

Relationships, having your nutrients that upregulate all the biochemical reactions in your body, all that I say is mostly free and is available to all of us. Even a hot and cold therapy, you can take a hot bath and a cold bath. I mean, it's just like. And most of us don't wanna do that.

That's why I say aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort. We would see the more aggressively people pursue comfort, the faster they age. We gotta just stop telling grandma not to go outside. It's too hot, not to go outside. It's too cold. It's like my mother, she's like,

Mark, every time I get the urge to exercise, I lie down until it goes away. Yeah. I get it. My mother was. Okay, yeah, that's not a good plan. No, but it was interesting. She came back from the hospital once.

My sister had died and her husband, my stepfather died, and she lived near me, but she couldn't really live on her own. So I moved her into my house after she had an episode of heart failure. And she was just overweight, she couldn't really live on her own. So I moved her into my house after she had a episode of heart failure and she was just overweight, she didn't really eat great, she didn't obviously then listen to me.

Yeah. I mean. No one wants to listen to their song. I even provided her. You know, like the best functional medicine doc on the planet. I even provided her meals for like three weeks to just get her started, she didn't eat anything.

And I took her to my house, I literally locked her up. Like she had no car, there was no Uber, there was no delivery, wherever we lived in the Massachusetts. So she had to eat what I fed her. I made her get on an exercise bike with oxygen because she was hypoxic. I got her nutrient status up, made her take her vitamins.

I basically just treated her because I had her captive. And she got off the oxygen. She was able to live alone again. She was able to recover from her heart failure. It was quite amazing to see how quickly she lost a ton of weight. And I had her locked up in a kind of a Heimann prison. There was a Nobel Prize winner

for multi-ep oxygen therapy. It was Otto Warburg's, wasn't Otto Warburg, he also won a Nobel Prize, but Otto Warburg's cohort that actually did the majority of this work on multistep oxygen therapy. It's just fascinating. Even taking deconditioned elderly patients that really can't exercise

and even exposing them to heat to elevate their blood, I mean, to elevate their heart rate a little bit and then running a nasal canulus of oxygen and looking at how fast the mitochondria begin to come back. They sputter and they start in an old motorcycle and it fires and backfires and then all of a sudden you see these things come

back. Yeah. So we kind of understand the basic foundations of creating health, which is something we all kind of agree on. But all these new technologies, I think there's some just sort of curiosity I have about red light therapy and hydrogen water and some of these tools. Can we dive a little bit more into the light therapy? Because I think people talk about it.

There's all these red light devices, everybody's using them, but I don't think most people understand the science behind it and the biology of what it does. You mentioned briefly how it affects nitric oxide in the cells and gets rid of it and allows oxygen to come in and activate the mitochondria. But can you talk about, one,

what is the science behind how this works? Two, what does it do in terms of improving health and why should people be using it? So basic overview of light, first of all, is light can be damaging and light can be therapeutic and we have visible light and we have invisible light. So light sort of follows this spectrum. You have x-ray, which is a light, right?

Which can be very damaging. Then you have ultraviolet, and these are non-visible spectrums. You have ultraviolet, UVA, UVB, which are the rays from the sun that cause skin cancer and burn your skin. These are also non-visible. And then you have a very narrow sliver of light,

which is the visible spectrum, the red, orange, green, blue, yellow, indigo, violet. You have this very narrow spectrum of light. And within that is the red light spectrum. And I'll come back to that in a second. And then above that, you have infrared and near-infrared, and not all infrared and near-infrared are the same as you get higher in the wavelengths.

You excite different chromophores in the body. So for- What's a chromophore wavelengths, you excite different chromophores in the body. So for- What's a chromophore? So like water is a chromophore. And so an infrared sauna, if you lay in an infrared light bed, you don't get hot and you don't sweat.

Why is that? That's because that's a lower wavelength of light. So it's not actually causing the water chromophore to vibrate, create friction, which creates heat and causes you to sweat. So in an infrared sauna, which is a very high wavelength, usually over 1100 nanometers or higher, you're going to create heat and you're gonna sweat.

Below that, you're still in the infrared spectrum, but you're not creating wavelengths that cause friction and create heat. So something very special happens in the red light and near infrared and infrared spectrum. This slice of light is very therapeutic to human beings. We know that it improves collagen, elastin, fibrin. We also know that... That's all your connective tissue. That's your connective tissue. Which is often very inflamed and that causes pain or dysfunction.

Yes, I mean, it's not just how our skin appears, right? I mean, we all want our skin to look better and you know, red light even have some FDA authorizations for skin. I mean, we know that it can, depending on the severity of hair loss, it's very good for hair follicles. It can restore some hair growth. It's very good for hair follicles. It can restore some hair growth.

It's very good for your skin for the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles. I mean, there's lots of studies on the proliferation of collagen, elastin, and fibrin. And also, this process of angiogenesis, which is this new capillary formation, new arterial formation that causes arteries to formation that causes arteries to branch and sprout and actually can supply more oxygen to tissues, namely the skin. So the red light, the visible red light is a very shallow light, right? It doesn't penetrate very deeply. And so there are lots of red light devices out there, masks, you know, little masks you can wear, devices you can wear on your wrist, mats that you can lay on. But to get into the infrared and near infrared and the real therapeutic spectrums, this takes a lot of power to mimic this spectrum. And by power, I mean specifically something called milliwatts of irradiance. So you, lights measured a couple of different ways.

You have the nanometer wavelengths, which is what is the wavelength of this light? Is it 640? Is it 810? Is it, you know, 1100? And light essentially does the same thing just at different depths. So if you use red light,

you're just getting very superficial effects. You might have some pleasing effects on the skin, like improved collagen, lasting fibrin in the surface of your skin. You might have some reduction of fine lines and wrinkles. You could wear one of those hair devices and get some mild improvement in hair density. But if you really want the therapeutic wavelengths,

you need power to drive these. So in my opinion, if you're looking at a red light device, especially a red light bed, if it plugs into a regular 110 outlet, it's not powerful enough to create the therapeutic wavelengths that you want, I would wait until you can afford one that that actually plugs into like a 220 and uses real power, it's drawing down real power, you'll see that as you lower the milliwatts of a radiance, you decrease the penetration of that light, and you essentially decrease its effectiveness. The sun is very powerful, right? If we're gonna mimic the beneficial wavelengths for the sun, we actually need to draw a lot of power, and then we need to force it through

as many diodes as possible that are as close together as they possibly can be. We want light- And that's what you see in those red light beds, all those little- Yeah, you see very small diodes. Generally, the larger the bulb, the less therapeutic it is, the more superficial.

The smaller the bulb, the more therapeutic and the deeper the penetration. You also shouldn't look for red light devices that have a high amount of visible red light. That's the least effective spectrum. You want red light devices that have a high amount of visible red light. That's the least effective spectrum. You want red light devices that actually have a high percentage of non-visible light because that is the therapeutic spectrum.

So for example, if you look at the red light bed that I have, when you turn it on, it looks like most of the rows of lights are burned out. That's because they're infrared or near infrared. Those are the real therapeutic wavelengths. Yeah, I noticed that. It was like there was red and there was all this hairs that were, and I was like,

oh, does this need to be turned on? Yeah, yeah. That's what everybody says. They're like, I paid all this money and only half the lights work. That's exactly what you want. But manufacturers will build these red light walls and then all of the bulbs are visible.

Already you know that's non-therapeutic. You're just seeing the red light. And to the consumer, they're like, well, there's more red lights on on this one and fewer on this one. The one that probably looks like some of the lights are off is probably the best device because you're in the invisible spectrum.

And so now- And what do those do biologically? So the main thing, well, so first of all, they're very good for vasomotor circulation and a lot of folks are unaware that about 70% of our circulatory system, circulation throughout our body is actually not done by the heart. I mean, none of us has a heart that's strong enough

to pump blood from our chest to the tip of our toes, through all of the arteries and capillaries in our brain to the back of the eye and through our liver, lungs, pancreas and our kidneys. The, you know, we're about 14% arteries, we're about 11 and a half percent veins. The majority of our circulation is microvascular. The vast majority, yeah, small blood vessels and capillaries.

That's about 70% of our circulatory system. That's actually not powered by the heart. It's powered by an activity called the vasomotor. It's similar to a snake swallowing a mouse. It's almost like a peristaltic activity. A little smooth muscle fibers in the blood vessels that sort of move the blood along. Exactly. I mean, arteries are smooth muscle, right?

There's three types of muscle in the body. We have the cardiac, which is confined to the heart, and you have skeletal, which is the muscle everybody knows about, and then you have the cardiac, which is confined to the heart, and you have skeletal, which is the muscle everybody knows about, and then you have the smooth muscle. And sort of this differentiating, overlapping layers of muscle that when they contract, they create a wave-like motion, again, like a snake swallowing a mouse, right?

So arteries can dilate, they can constrict. But the most important thing that they do is this vasomotor activity. And the red light helps that? And the red light is is this vasomotor activity. And the red light helps that? And the red light is tremendous for vasomotor activity. Like when people start using red light therapy, they'll report things like they stop wearing readers. Like I'm 54 years old, I don't wear readers.

Perfect eyesight. And the reason why eyesight begins to degrade in your 50s is not because of something happening to the rods, the cones, the macula, it's not a degenerative process. It's a lack of microvascular circulation. So if you restore the base of motor to the back of the eye, you restore the eyesight. So like Joe Rogan, I was on his podcast a few months ago.

He bought a red light bed while he was on the podcast and he texted me five weeks later and he's like, holy shit, bro, I'm not wearing readers anymore. Like literally my eyesight's improved. Everybody notices the improvement in their skin. But when you start to improve vasomotor activity, now you're talking about microvascular circulation. So think about all of the compromised areas in the body

that receive microvascular circulation. This is all of our joints, our ligaments, our tendons, our musculotendinous insertions. And this is the inside the erector spinae group in the spine, all the microvascular circulation in the brain. These are all enhanced by red light. And so if we can restore vasomotor activity,

if we can kick out mitochondrial nitric oxide, the gas that is binding to cytochrome C oxidase that's competing for oxygen, right? Because, and keeping that cycle anaerobic rather than the aerobic, and we can put oxygen into that cycle. Now you're talking about one device that upstages the mitochondria

that improves collagen, elastin, and fibrin in the skin, that improves the angiogenesis, the formation of new blood vessels beneath the skin and other areas of the body, and improves microvascular circulation. So all these compromised areas of the body, like our knees, hips, shoulders, rotator cuff, low back, these all get the benefit of improved microvascular circulation and all of a sudden people's back pain goes away or their knee pain goes away. Now yeah, deformity or cartilaginous erosion or some other kind of osteotic condition going on

in the joint, it's not going to improve that. So you see reduction in pain, improvement in energy levels, balancing of mood, increased circulation, and all of the benefits that come from that. It's like what you were talking about, where people don't have all of these conditions, they generally have one condition or one state that's causing all of these spokes.

I mean, I agree with you that when you look at mitochondria and the importance of mitochondria and the fact that red light actually works primarily through its effect on mitochondria, you understand how it has its broad effects because when you look at all the chronic disease we have, whether it's heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia, obesity, mental illness, these are all

mitochondrial diseases. They're all mitochondrial diseases. They're all shifts in metabolism. This is not just kind of a wacky, like, crazy kind of alternative concept. I mean, leading scientists like Suzanne Gove who had on the podcast, Harvard trained London, you know, trained in Oxford.

I mean, just brilliant physician, pediatric neurologist studied the mitochondrial function of autistic kids and saw that their brains had super low energy levels. Yeah, and very high levels of nitric oxide, by the way. Yeah, and so mitochondrial therapy has actually helped these kids. And she treats them using mitochondrial cofactors

and nutrients. So this is not just a fringe idea, but it's central, whether it's Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. And the impact you can have on by treating mitochondria is so important. And it's one of those hallmarks of aging that we talk about. I wrote about my book, Young Forever, that is actually central to so much of what goes wrong.

If your mitochondria are messed up, you're in bad shape. Yes, you're right. And it causes long COVID, fatigue, chronic fatigue syndrome, all these sort of chronic illnesses that we're suffering from are primarily mitochondrial. So it's kind of cool to see that there's tools in addition to exercise and supplementation that can actually start to help regenerate

and renew and optimize mitochondria. No doubt. I mean, I think, you know, red light therapy, in my opinion, is probably the most, has the most single, as a single device, prolific impact on mitochondrial function. So you're like doubling down on red light therapy. I really am.

I mean, I, I've- And you have to spend a million dollars to go- I'm not even trying to sell red light, but I'm just saying- But like, can you do it for a reasonable cost down on red light therapy. I really am. I mean, I hate, I've. And you have to spend a million dollars to go. I'm not even trying to sell a red light bed. I'm just saying. But like, can you do it for a reasonable cost? Cause some of these things are really expensive. Yes, you can do it for a reasonable cost. There's lots of clinics that allow people

to go into memberships to the really powerful beds, but there are lots of walls, that you can hang on the back of a door, you can sit in front of, proximity to the panels really matters. To be close to it matters. You wanna be very close to it, right? You want the light to spread in the skin.

You don't want the light to spread before it hits the skin, right? Because the skin is actually a barrier too. If you actually looked at red light passing through the skin, it doesn't just penetrate it like a laser, it hits it and spreads. So the closer you are to the diode of light,

the more likely that light is to spread inside of the tissue. If you look at cadaver studies where they bury light meters in cadavers and they look at penetration of depths, you know, proximity to the light matters. So if you have one of those red light devices, the ones for the, you know, the masks for the face are great for collagen and elastin in your skin, fiber in your skin. But if you really want therapeutic wavelengths, you should use a red light panel that has some density. And look for wavelengths between 680 and 910 in that range. You're gonna capture most of the real therapeutic wavelengths.

And then if you do wanna step up and get a red light bed, make sure it's a red light bed that actually has a commercial outlet. You usually have to have a 220 outlet. Like you need for your washing machine. Washer, dryer, yeah. I mean, if you're gonna to have, you know, a 220 outlet. Like you need for your washing machine. Washer, dryer, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you're going to spend that kind of money,

get the power. That's where you need the power. So, you know, those are the kinds of biohacking devices, but, you know, truthfully, people that actually get regular micro doses of sun exposure, it's the same benefit. Yeah. You know, so I really encourage people to-

Get in nature, get outside. In the first 45 minutes of the day during first light, well, there isn't any UVA or UVB rays. So you don't have a lot of the damaging rays in the first 45 minutes. That's why. Sunrise. Yeah, sunrise.

First light is so important. I was out there, I mean, I flew, I spent 32 hours on a plane and 38 hours on the ground in the last four days. I left Thursday and came home Sunday to Dubai, right? So it was 15 and a half hours over there. I think it was like 17 hours back. So it was like 32 hours in the air.

All I did was just tap into some of the quote, biohacking mechanisms that I can. I just posted my sleep score tonight, 99% sleep score. I was showing you Deep and Rem. And I didn't drug myself to sleep. I just bookended my sleep. I made sure that I do the same routine every single night. I have the same sleep hygiene routine every night.

I have the same sleep hygiene routine every morning. My body knows that if we're doing. What is it? So, yeah. Sleep is, again, the ultimate biohacking tool. I think if you can get your sleep sorted, it corrects so much, right? Yeah.

And then so many millions, 70 million Americans have sleep issues. It's terrible. And when we talk about these people that have, following this sort of stage of consequences that we would see in the medical record, and I'll come back to my sleep routine in a second, we would see these people that had,

especially in their 50s, 60s, 70s, as their hormonal levels would plummet, especially the hormone testosterone. Testosterone, yeah. Because it's one of the main hormones that's putting pressure on the bone marrow to make red blood cells. To build bone and to build muscle and everything else.

Yeah, it does so many things. It's an anabolic hormone, meaning it helps to build. Yeah, and I think sadly we think of it as aabolic hormone, meaning it helps to build tissue health. Yeah, and I think, sadly, we think of it as a male hormone. So we think, women think of testosterone, a lot of women. I'm not saying all women, but women will think of testosterone as a very deep voice, aggression, facial hair, muscles. But that's actually really not true.

That's important for women too, especially for sex drive and veto and- Yeah, I mean, you show me a woman with a testosterone level, less than three and 0.2, 0.3 on free testosterone. There's no sex drive there. And there are libidos out the window. And then, you know, of course, when libido leaves a marriage, you know, the opposite spouse will think that love and attraction has left the marriage.

They're very different things, libidos and emotion, love and, you know, you can love your spouse and be very attracted to them and have no sex drive. And as soon as you put the sex drive back, all the magic starts again. But when we would see these patients applying for policies and you would see this just long hypoxia, just hiding in plain sight,

this low ribletal count, low hemoglobin levels, inevitably all of them would be on sleep medication. Because, and this is an interesting- It kind of makes sense, right? Because if you go to altitude, you have low oxygen, you don't sleep so great, right? Yeah, you don't sleep great. You're at like high altitude at sea level

because you have low blood cell count. But it's really a double-edged sword because if you ask most physicians, why do people that are the most exhausted sleep the worst? Their face will go blank. They'll go, well, if you're the most exhausted, it's probably the only thing you do well asleep, but it's actually the opposite

because you're exhausted because you're hypoxic, but you're also not sleeping because you're hypoxic. So the people that are the most exhausted actually sleep the worst. And then what happens is they go to their doctor and they say, look doc, I'm tired all the time and I just can't sleep. And so then they do the worst thing.

They put them on some kind of tranquilitic sleep medication. And what this does is this actually prevents your brain from waking you up, right? So your brain is actually trying to save you when it keeps you from going into deep sleep when you're hypoxic, because your respiratory rate gets so shallow that you become severely hypoxic. These people will actually gasp at night.

If you're sleeping next to them, you'll hear them, you'll actually hear them gasp at night. It's severe hypoxia. And so what happens is trazodone and zolapetaminitrate, diazepam, a lot of these will actually block the brain's view of blood oxygen, essentially shut off the monitoring system. And then it allows them to get into a deep sleep,

but they're not actually sleeping, they're suffocating. And so what happens is these people will wake up in the morning and go, God, man, I really hate taking Tylenol PM because it makes me so drowsy the next day. That medication's been out of your system for hours. You're not feeling the effects of the Tylenol PM. You're feeling the effects of having suffocated

for six hours. And so you take a hypoxic person, put them on sleep medication, and force them into severe hypoxia, and that's when the real magic begins. Now you start to see all cause mortality begin to rise. Whereas if you just fix the hormone, you wouldn't have that.

So you're saying hormone therapy can help people increase their oxygenation by increasing the red cell count which helps their sleep. No question. But doesn't mean everybody should be on testosterone therapy. Doesn't mean that everybody should be on testosterone. But you can raise your testosterone

with a lot of different approaches. Yeah, and I'll be the first one to tell you that 70% of the clients that I see that qualify for hormone therapy are not on hormones. So when I say qualify for hormone therapy, based on their levels, you see a mail come in at 262 or 315 on testosterone, and the free testosterone is between four and a half and seven,

really low levels of free testosterone. It doesn't necessarily mean that their testicular production of testosterone has stopped. It could mean a whole host of things. Very often the signaling hormones are low, luteinizing hormone, follicle signaling hormone. Those are easy pathways to mimic. Very often they're deficient in the raw material

that's used to make testosterone. Cholesterol. Yeah, I was just gonna say. There's the big bellwether. Actually saturated fat is amazing, it jacks up cholesterol. Right. And it jacks up your testosterone.

But no one, I will tell you right now, when I started preaching about this 10 years ago, people thought it was a complete charlatan for saying the people that are on statins, that get their, that are on heavy statins that took their LDL cholesterol from 180, which they put them on a statin for, down to 57. We would see this every, not when say every single time,

but the majority of time in the medical records, they collapse in their hormone function. And as soon as their hormones collapse, now they're hypoxic, they're exhausted, they don't sleep well, they collapse in their hormone function. And as soon as their hormones collapse, now they're hypoxic, they're exhausted, they don't sleep well, the erectile dysfunction, the memory loss, the confusion, the short-term recall issues, all kinds of cognitive impairments. And if you look at the number of cognitive impairments,

Alzheimer's, dementia, memory loss, all of the cognitive impairments that start earlier than they should, in almost every case, what we saw was because they had clinically deficient, in my opinion, levels of test, I mean, of LDL cholesterol. So you restore the cholesterol, you can restore the hormones.

Very often you restore the DHEA level, you restore the hormones. Very often you get sex hormone binding protein out of the way by taking a mineral called boron, you get the sex hormone binding proteins that are actually lowering your free testosterone, you get these things out of the blood or back into normal ranges. By taking boron.

If you have high SHBG and you wanna lower sex hormone binding globulin, boron is. Which basically binds all the testosterone and then lets some free in the blood to do the work, but if you have too much of it, it basically doesn't allow you to have enough free hormone to do the actual work. So people have low hormonal levels and they immediately go on hormone therapy

when, you know, if we look at the cause of the majority of low hormone levels. Yeah, that's a really important question. There are really three main causes that we have seen. Number one is clinically low levels of LDL cholesterol. The second one are what I would put in the nutrient deficiency categories. Vitamin D3 and high SHBG or low DHEA. Those three are critical to having healthy levels of testosterone.

So if you see somebody that has low double digit levels of DHEA, right? And high- Which is actually usually caused by stress, right? Yeah, it's very often caused by stress. It's an easy supplement to take. You supplement them with DHEA and then all of a sudden the hormone production starts again. Or you see low signaling from the pituitary, the luteinizing and follicle stimulating hormones,

which are essentially your volume knob, right, for turning up or turning down testosterone. They do other things, but so very often, we're deficient in the level of the hormone because the signal has been turned down, right? I mean, when we can't hear the music walking into a room, we don't mess with the speakers, we mess with the tuner.

But part of the main reason you didn't mention that causes testosterone aplombin is sugar. Well, yeah. When you get insulin resistance and you get belly fat, you get low testosterone. Very true. Especially if you're a guy. If you're a woman, it's a little different,

but it really is a big factor. So you can almost kind of inversely relate your size of your belly with your testosterone level. Bigger your belly, the lower your testosterone. And your estrogen levels get to. And your estrogen level goes up, which causes feminization. Water retention and feminization.

Think you and I are very aligned philosophically that very often we are, even the hormone therapy clinics are just treating the hormone level. Gotta treat the cause. You should always ask why is this low. Yeah, that's right. I mean, there is true testicular hypo function, but that's very rare.

Primary hypogonadism is pretty rare, but we treat all low hormones as primary hypogonadism, and we just put people on hormones. And it doesn't make them, it temporarily makes them feel better, but they're still bathing their cellular biology in the toxic soup, and so they end up going right back to where they still bathing their cellular biology in the toxic soup. And so they end up going right back to where they were.

Well, that's the other problem. You mentioned toxic soup, but a lot of the environmental toxins are estrogenic and they do actually affect hormone function. And I think it's a big role in a lot of what's going on in our society with hormone dysregulation, change in fertility rates, change in birth rates between men and women.

I mean, there's a whole bunch of things that are happening that are quite frightening that have to do with environmental chemicals, which is probably why you filter your water. Yeah, I filter everything. I filter my water, I filter my air. When we're done with the podcast, I'll take you out and show you my air filtration.

So this is surgically clean air in this house. So it goes through. It feels like it. Yeah, people that come in here say the air feels different in here. And it is different because, you know, I filter it through a HEPA filter, then through a carbon filter,

and then essentially it goes into a chamber and it goes through high dose UVA, UVB, and blue and infrared light. And then it gets sucked up into the chamber in the house. So that's how you, you know, you avoid the mold and the mycotoxins and all the other nonsense that's coming through our ventilation systems, because we're in the mold capital of the world

here in Miami. Definitely. We won the mold lottery. But just to bring the hormone thing full circle, there's also a genetic predisposition that women need to watch out for called COMPT, C-O-M-T. If you've ever actually seen a Dutch test, a female hormone test, which is, in my opinion,

probably the most accurate way to measure, especially cycling in women, because a blood test will only take a snapshot in time, but a Dutch test will actually show you the cycling. And to make sure that they're monophasic, so they're moving from follicular to ovulation to luteal. If you're menstruating women, yeah. Yeah, if you're menstruating women.

And postmenopausal women still have a cycle. It's just the amplitude is very, very low, right? But they still have somewhat of a cycle. But there is, if you look at a Dutch test, and this just flies by a lot of OBGYNs, you will see an area, you will actually see this gene mutation, catechol, O-methyltransferase, CompT,

it's right on the Dutch test. And essentially what this is doing is in the elimination pathway of estrogen, sending it down the E2 pathway, so actually getting estrogen out of the bloodstream and putting it into a form where it can actually be eliminated from the blood and not build up in the blood.

You know, this gene mutation is- It's a variation, right? Gene variation. It's essentially responsible for the breakdown of catecholamines, the norepinephrine, the epinephrine, the dopamine, adrenaline. Surprise, surprise, it needs nutrients to operate. And it needs nutrients to operate.

That's what's so exciting is like, all this stuff can go wrong, and all you need are nutrients to fix it. Yeah, I mean I don't know if you know this Gary, but the original sort of hypothesis around nutrient therapy and functional medicine came from this guy Abram Hoffer who was a psychiatrist in Canada who was treating schizophrenia. Well I love him.

I wanna read his book. He was studying schizophrenia and using high dose of niacin and zinc and magnesium and B vitamins and B6 to actually help treat these patients. And he became friends with Linus Pauling. And Linus Pauling wrote an article in Science Magazine, 1969 called Orthomolecular Psychiatry. Ortho means to straighten,

molecular means to straighten molecules. And essentially talked about using nutrients and high doses to push enzymatic reactions, which were stuck basically, which is making kind of greasing the wheels of your biochemical pathways. And what's really even more amazing is the discovery of how so many of our genes code for enzymes. And Bruce Ames wrote a beautiful paper, he just died.

He's one of the, I mean, you learn about mitochondria, you can't miss Bruce Ames' work. He's a giant in mitochondrial renewal and therapy as you get older as a way of sort of mitigating the effects of aging. He just died, sadly, he was very old, but he was an amazing guy who basically wrote this paper, I think it was the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition

that said that one third of our entire DNA codes for enzymes. And every enzyme requires cofactors and one of the cofactors, they're nutrients, they're vitamins and minerals. And each mineral and vitamin doesn't just affect one pathway, it can affect hundreds and hundreds of pathways. Oh my gosh. And so that's why nutrition is so important and you know, you were mentioning earlier,

you're seeing nutrient deficiencies in these populations. And I think that there is so much subclinical nutritional deficiencies that people just are not aware of. And I was just at an event where I had a chance to talk to Bill Gates about this. And I was talking about the work he was doing with putting bullion cubes and vitamins into the food supply in the developing world

to help with really significant vitamin deficiencies like zinc and vitamin A. They have real deficiencies there. And I said, there's a lot of deficiency in the US. He's like, oh, there is not, there's no way. We're all eating healthy and we eat plenty of protein and food and there's no nutrient deficiencies. But he's wrong because first the NHANES data,

which is our National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey has documented that yes, when you check blood on Americans, they're deficient. But in function health, we now have had over 10 million, probably 15 million biomarkers we've checked. Wow. We have 100,000 members. We see the, and this is a health forward population.

And we see at the reference ranges from the lab, not what you and I would think would be optimal, right? Like vitamin D over 50, like vitamin D 30 or less. 67% of people we test are deficient in one or more nutrients. At this minimum level, elevated homocysteine, methamalotic acid, which is B vitamins, which is very important for these pathways

like CMT, vitamin D, iron, zinc. I mean, it's just, it's staggering how these are so common. And they are affecting so much of our biology that makes us eventually have what Robert Heaney, who was an incredible vitamin D scientist, called long latency deficiency diseases. So if you're vitamin D deficient and it's cute,

you'll get rickets. But if you get vitamin D deficiency over a long period of time or insufficiency, you'll get osteoporosis, you'll get heart disease, you'll get dementia, you'll get depression, right? You are so singing my tune. And what is amazing too is the profound change that happens when you just give the body the raw material

it needs to do its job. You know, one of the most common. Whether it's light or water or oxygen or air or sleep or exercise or nutrients. I keep wanting to say, we're not as diseased or as pathological or as sick as we think we are. We're nutrient deficient. I mean, we should always start there.

We should ask ourselves what's missing from this biome that could be causing this to happen. So what are the, in your experience, as you've sort of done all this work and treated so many people and had all this experience with the data, what are the most important nutrients that we're missing and what are the supplements that we should be taking?

Okay, so. So, you know, when you call something essential, that means it's necessary for life, right? So if you have two essential fatty acids, if you don't get these fatty acids, they're essential for life. Omega threes. Yeah, omega threes, omega three fatty acids, EPAs, DHAs.

There are eight essential amino acids. You would be shocked how many people are amino acid deficient. People think that amino acids are proteins, they're not. They're the building blocks of proteins. And so if you're deficient in the building blocks of proteins, then you can't assemble proteins, which is not just skeletal muscle.

I mean, this is our natural killer cells, collagen, elastin, fibrin in our skin. A lot of marketing gimmicks have allowed us to think that we can target direct protein, like we can eat collagen and it shows upibrin in our skin. A lot of marketing gimmicks have allowed us to think that we can target direct protein, like we can eat collagen, and it shows up it's collagen in our skin. You know, it's like, this is badly false. I mean, collagen, I don't have anything against collagen,

but it's an incomplete protein. You can't throw muscle from it. But, you know, we don't eat our nails to grow our nails, and we don't eat our hair to grow our hair. The way you do eat muscle to grow muscle. We think, well, we think we can eat collagen to grow collagen, but yeah way you do eat muscle to grow muscle. We think we can eat collagen to grow collagen, but yeah, you can eat muscle, but the reason why you eat muscle

is to get to the amino acids to build the muscle. That's right. It's not to, you know, that protein is useless until it's broken into amino acids and reassembled. It's like you just get like you eat a steak and that steak becomes your muscle and then it gets broken down. Yeah, so all protein, you know,

if we oversimplify it for a second, just becomes the same thing, right? It becomes amino acids, and then those amino acids go out and build whatever structure is necessary. We can build muscle, certainly, and we can also build natural killer cells, and we can build collagen in our skin, and we can build connective tissue and all kinds of things.

So I think the three key- Fatty acids, amino acids. Fatty acids, amino acids, and minerals. So my four go-to's. And by the way, just so people know, we're talking about fat and protein, there are no essential carbohydrates. There's no such thing. There is no such thing

as essential carbohydrates. So we can eat them, we can process them, we use them, we use them for fuel. But if you never had a carbohydrate in your life, you would be fine. You would be fine, yeah. Which is why we should be the most judicious with our carbohydrate choices.

Yeah. Right? It's not judicious. But I also say that carbohydrates are the most important thing for your longevity because when you eat broccoli, that's a carbohydrate. Yeah. And you have a vegetable. Sweet potato.

With the phytochemicals, those are carbohydrates. So those are low calorie, nutrient dense, phytochemically rich, I would say conditionally essential nutrients that we need to optimize our health. So I kind of make a joke about it. I would agree with that. I make a joke about it because people like, they all eat a low carb diet,

but you want to eat actually by volume, a very high carb diet, which is like a lot of colorful plant foods. And those, I'm not plant based, I don't think that's good for our health. But I do think that including a lot of the phytochemically rich molecules in your diet is critical.

And I think we talk about these essential amino acids, essential fatty acids, essential minerals, but I think there's also a whole class of compounds that I call conditionally essential. That you won't get a deficiency disease, but you might get a chronic disease. Oh, no doubt. If you don't have enough sulforaphane or glucosinolates

or phytochemicals that upregulate various pathways, like urolithin A or other things that we're finding out now have such powerful impact on our biology, like you're gonna get sick and die faster. Yeah, you know, I don't even think that we have chronic disease in this country. I think that we have a chronic expression of nutrient deficiency.

So amino acids, fatty acids, minerals. So an essential amino acid, I take one called Perfect Aminos. It's all the eight essential amino acids. It's non-caloric, won't even break a fast. It has all eight of the essential amino acids because remember, as soon as you get deficient in one of those eight amino acids,

there's a high likelihood that that's converting to fat or into sugar, right? So it's incomplete protein. So I take something called Perfect Amino. I take a mineral salt every morning. I take one called Baja Gold Sea Salt, but a mineral salt like Celtic Salt or a Baja Gold Salt. Could you use electrolytes? I use that as my electrolyte.

And then I take a black seed oil, I prefer the black seed oil, the mega three version from black seed, but you can also get it from fish sources on mega three fatty acid. And then I think- You mean black cumin? Black cumin. Yeah.

I think that's a great source. Which by the way has incredible antiviral properties and had some evidence that might even help for COVID as a sort of support to help prevent COVID. I didn't know that, but now it's even better. So I take that every morning and I also take a methylated multivitamin.

And the reason why I say methylated multivitamin is because it is the vitamins in their already methylated form. So instead of taking folic acid, which 44% of the population can't even process, and is contrary to popular belief, not a natural nutrient. We make it in a laboratory. It doesn't exist anywhere on the surface of the earth.

You can't find folic acid anywhere naturally in nature. It doesn't exist. Folate exists naturally in nature. But folate and folic acid follow the exact same physiologic pathway. There are about 10 enzymatic reductions that need to happen before that folic acid or folate can be converted by the gene MTHFR

into the active form called methylfolate. And there's some really interesting research about methylfolate deficiency and whether or not it can be fixed by taking folic acid and folate. And the truth is that it can't. When we started spraying our entire grain supply, all flour, all grains, all rice, all pasta in the United States are sprayed with the chemical folic acid, right? We call this fortified or enriched. I was gonna say, why do we have to enrich food?

It's because we've impoverished it in the first place by how we process it. Yeah, exactly. It's like, you know, I think I heard Max Lugavere say the other day, if your grocery store has a health food section, what does that tell you about the rest of the store? The rest of the, yeah.

That's a similar idea. I said, if there's a health claim on the label, don't eat it. Yeah, exactly. It says low fat, high fiber, low sugar. It's usually something bad. It's usually something bad. It's masking something bad. I mean, an egg doesn't have a label on it,

and the broccoli doesn't have a ingredient list, right? Yeah, exactly. So I take a methylated multivitamin. I mean, people see profound and immediate effects when they start taking methylated nutrients. You know, the methylform of cobalamin, I mean, of a methylated form of B12, B6, B9. And by the way, Kerry, those are the things

we're finding deficiencies in at significant rates in the cohort of function, which, sort of is surprising to me. And leads to hyperhomocystinemia. And what's interesting is the homocysteine level that the lab uses is not where I would say it would be optimal. Not at all.

I would say six to eight is optimal, and they're like, you know, 13, 14. And even at that level, we're seeing significant deficiencies. And we know that, for example, if your level of homocysteine, which is a blood test that is better than just checking your folate in your blood,

is if your folate's over 14, you increase your risk of dementia by 50%. So these are just simple things you can do to actually. So true. And if you have hyperhomocystinemia, and I'm preparing to publish this data. So we have about 150,000 patients that we've done blood work on 74 biomarkers and then also

done a methylated genetic test looking at the main markers of methylation, compT, MTRR, MTR, AHCY, and MTHFR. And contrary to popular belief, if you have MTHFR, you need to avoid folic acid like the plague, and you have to supplement with methylfolate, 5-methylfolate. And the proof in what's called S-phase arrest, which is essentially when the DNA is replicating and copying itself,

or even when it's making a transcription, an mRNA message, something called S-phase arrest, which is designed to stop the passing of genetic mutations. When the cell goes into S-phase arrest because it's efficient in methylfolate, there's significant clinical evidence and I'll give you the link to the study that you can actually restart,

you can arrest S phase arrest and actually restart the replicatory process by adding methylfolate. And methylfolate. Methylfolation is such a key hub of our biochemistry for people to know what that is. It's like if you took a big metabolic chart with all the thousands and thousands

of biochemical reactions that happen in the body, at the center is this process of methylation and sulfation which are totally tied together that regulate everything from your DNA and how your DNA is run and prescribed, your epigenome, mood chemicals, mitochondrial function, detoxification, I mean just, you name it, fertility, everything is regulated by these core pathways

and when we're seeing this, pretty significant deficiencies because 60% of our diets ultra processed food and it doesn't have any of that in there and it has maybe some of the wrong forms in there if they fortify it. Yes, yeah and so you have an excess of folic acid and a deficiency of methylfolate. So if you get the folic acid out of the diet

and you supplement with methylfolate, magic happens. You see peristaltic activity restore to the gut. You see the normal pace of the gut restore, which in my opinion is one of the most overlooked things in all of modern medicine because- Pooping regularly? Yeah, pooping regularly. Right, just being regular, you know?

I had a patient, I said, so how often do you go to the bathroom? She says, I'm pretty regular. I said, how often do you go? She goes, once a patient, I said, so how often do you go to the bathroom? She says, I'm pretty regular. I said, how often do you go? She goes, once a week. I said, that's not regular. She goes, it's regular for me, I go every week. I go, I'm like, no, we need to go twice a day.

I'm within 20 minutes of waking up. I mean, I need to be on a commode. But, you know, methylfolate of all of the single, and I don't like to say, you know, it all comes down to one nutrient, but if it came down to one or two nutrients, D3 and K2 would be up there, methylfolate would be right at the absolute top

of the chart for me. Because if you look at the number of physiologic pathways and enzymatic pathways, the methylfolate is directly responsible for. It's downstream from homocysteine regulation and hyperhomocysteineemia, we know now, is it can lead to idiopathic hypertension because of the vasospasm that occurs,

at least all kinds of other issues. I agree with you, it should be single digits. Cancer, heart disease, dementia, depression, ADD, I mean, you name it. Why would it lead to cancer, heart disease, dementia? I've never really fully gotten to express this, but when you start to affect vasomotor activity, microvascular circulation, the amount of organ systems that this impacts, right, you affect vasomotor activity to the back of the eye, your eyesight

dementias, you affect vasomotor activity in the brain, microcirculation in the brain. This is the definition of poor short-term recall and cognitive decline. And this hyperhomocyst anemia, I mean 85% of all of the essential hypertension diagnoses in America are idiopathic, they're of unknown origin. They call it essential hypertension because essentially we have no idea what it's called. Yes, essentially I'm not, yeah. And again, it's not.

But we do, we do if we actually took it to science. It's insulin resistance, sleep apnea, it's nutrient deficiencies, it's lead, heavy metals, toxins. We actually can identify what these things are and get rid of them. I can tell you the best way to lower homocysteine is 500 milligrams daily in a capsule form of trimethylglycine, TMG.

Lots of great manufacturers that make it out there. I make one, Symbiotica makes it, Thorn, pure encapsulations, not an expensive nutrient. If you have hyperhomocysteineemia, that's a must have supplement. The majority of us will benefit from methylated multivitamins. So methylated multivitamins on omega fatty acid, minerals in the morning and amino acid.

And that will cover your basis because if you are missing the basics, and then I would add probably to that a vitamin D3 or K2. Yeah, I'm with you on that. If you're missing the basics, then I would add probably to that of vitamin D3, K2. Yeah, I'm with you on that. If you're missing the basics, then nothing else matters. It's like if you're not sleeping, nothing else matters. If I can't fix your sleep, I really can't help you become metabolically healthy.

People don't understand that every single biochemical reaction in your body requires these nutrients and if you don't have them, things just don't work. Yeah, and then what happens is we start chasing the expression of disease. You know, when you start blaming organs for crimes they're not committing, you know, when you blame cholesterol, which is like a fireman, for showing up to put the fire out,

and you come up with the hypothesis that if we had less firemen, we'd have fewer fires, you know, you're just going down the wrong path. You know, when you realize that the majority of our thyroid hormones that are actually responsible for thyroid diagnoses, like low T3 being diagnosed as hypothyroid, the majority of that's not even made by the thyroid, it's deiodinized in the liver and it's in the periphery and in the gut. And so very often we're blaming, you know, you want to talk about a pandemic. Selenium.

Selenium, thiamine, and, you know, to help this outer ring deiodinize in the liver, which is where two thirds of it comes from and the balance is in the gut and a little bit in the periphery. But the point is that a nutrient deficiency can lead to a hormone deficiency that gets diagnosed as organ malfunction. And now we're pounding a perfectly healthy organ

for a crime it didn't commit. Right, right. When at best it's only gonna change your level by 20%. And we do this with the heart, we do it with the liver, with the lungs, with the pancreas, with the kidneys, with the thyroid, with all kinds of conditions. And if we would just take a step back and say,

I wish we would force physicians to study the expression of nutrient deficiency, right? Like a botanist or an arborist studies soil nutrients. If you have a leaf rotting in a palm tree and you call a true arborist, a true botanist out to your house, they don't touch the leaf. They core test the soil. Soil, right.

That's exactly what functional medicine is. It's treating the soil, not the plant. Yeah, there's no nitrogen in the soil, Mark, and you add nitrogen to the soil, and then boom, the leaf heals, and you go, wow, how did that happen? We wanna cut the leaves, spray poison on it, trim it, skin it, replace it.

Exactly, traditional medicine's sort of like industrial agriculture, we spray chemicals and all kinds of stuff. Yeah, and then we're like, well, now the bark's falling off, well, and put some more poison on the bark, and now the're like, well, now the bark's falling off. Well, and put some more poison on the bark and now the roots are rotting. And so I think, you know, your message, my message is a message of hope because it's a message

that we are not as sick or diseased or as pathological. People don't have to suffer like they do. There's so much that they can do, simple things that people can do for themselves at home. I mean, what you're talking about is pretty basic. I mean, yeah, maybe a bed light bed is expensive or a nose and machine, those are kind of fun things. But most of the basic things are either free

or basically what you're doing already or maybe a little extra. And they make profound differences. And you and I have seen this with thousands of patients. And it's for, I know I'm frustrated, imagine you're frustrated that, you know, Americans just don't know about this or not hearing about it.

And your work's so important because you're sort of getting out there and sharing about this and you're providing resources and tools and programs. I think it's very cool. I mean, I feel like, you know, this is part one. You have to come to Austin because we have to do part two. Yeah, I wanted to do that. I feel like we barely scratched the surface.

I wanna go into hydrogen water, I wanna go into all those other tools and gizmos you got. But I think for someone like you who's sort of looked at the data around why we get sick and what's happening in the insurance industry is so fascinating because you're right, they kind of have the secret code of what to know to make a lot of money based on our health.

They do. And so they gotta know. It hits them in the wallet. So that's kind of revealed a lot of things that you've understood and you've able to translate those things into tools and techniques and approaches that really help uplevel people's health and create the ultimate human.

So it's pretty awesome, Gary. I can't wait to kind of spend more time with you, kind of do a lot of the gizmos you got here. Same. I'm gonna kind of get your advice on what I should bring to my house in Austin that I built, but this is really awesome. I'm putting you in the hydrogen bath before you leave.

Okay, I'm doing that. I'm gonna down, I'm down. So thanks so much, Gary, for being on the podcast. Everybody can check out your work. Tell them where they can find more about you and what you're doing and what they want. I mean, you can find me on social media, just my first and last name, at Gary Brekka, B-R-E-C-K-A.

I also run a podcast called The Ultimate Human, which is in the health and wellness space. Which I'm coming on soon. You're gonna be on there in a few minutes. The Ultimate Human, it's a media platform that I use to just try to message without the expectation of receipt about things that are working in my life and great thought leaders like yourself who are my heroes and I just try to help get their message out.

So you can find that at The Ultimate Human. Amazing. Well, thanks, Gary. Thanks for all you do to make the world a better place. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out, I'd love to hear your comments

and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to The Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on The Dr. Hyman Show.

This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at UltraWellnessCenter.com and request to become a patient.

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