The Dr. Josh Axe Show - Human Biologist Predicts How Long You’ll Live | Gary Brecka

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

In this eye-opening episode of the Dr. Josh Axe Show, longevity expert Gary Brecka shares game-changing insights on extending your lifespan and reversing disease. As a human biologist with decades of experience in mortality research, Gary brings a unique perspective on how to truly get to the root of health issues. Dr. Axe and Gary dive deep into the often-overlooked factors that impact our health and longevity, challenging conventional wisdom with evidence-based approaches. Here's what you'll learn: Why your immune system may be attacking your thyroid for good reason The surprising link between sedentary lifestyles and accelerated mortality How residential quarantining may have weakened global immune systems The power of hormesis and why aging is the "aggressive pursuit of comfort" Why hydrogen water could be a game-changer for reducing inflammation The top 5 supplements Gary recommends based on extensive mortality data A simple sleep hack that increased average sleep scores by 28% in a study Tune in to gain a fresh perspective on optimizing your health from the cellular level up. You'll walk away with actionable strategies to become an "ultimate human" and practical tips to extend your healthspan starting today! Want more of The Dr. Josh Axe Show? Subscribe to the YouTube channel. Follow Dr. Josh Axe Instagram Twitter Facebook Tik-Tok Follow Gary Brecka Instagram Twitter Facebook YouTube ------  Links:  Check out Gary Brecka’s podcast, The Ultimate Human Podcast → https://www.youtube.com/@ultimatehumanpodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everyone, welcome to the Dr. Josh Axe show. I am your host, Dr. Axe. And each and every week on this podcast, we dive deep into the science and principles and how to grow in body, mind, spirit, and take your health and your life to the next level. On today's episode, I'll be interviewing longevity expert Gary Breka. Gary is a human biologist. He also is a health expert when it comes to, as I mentioned, longevity and anti-aging. He's also the host of a phenomenal podcast called The Ultimate Human Podcast. And we're going to dive into today, a lot of topics, everything related to how to extend your lifespan, the truth about methylated vitamins. We'll also be talking about how to truly get to the root of your issue to reverse disease all on today's episode. Gary, welcome the show.

I'm psyched to be here, man. Man, I'm so excited to have you. You know, I have been so impressed with what you've been doing recently. Thank you. Thank you. What an amazing educator you are. And you've been explaining things in a way that I've really never heard anyone explain when it comes to how to get to the root of an issue, start to reverse disease.

And my first question for you is, what makes you so unique in terms of, you call yourself a human biologist in terms of what you're actually doing. And I really understand that term and what that means now after hearing you communicate with others, but walk me through why your perspective is so unique. Well, I call myself a human biologist because my postgraduate degree is in human biology. Okay, there we go. Yeah, it makes sense. Conferred the degree of human biologist on there. So I just figured I called myself a human biologist. My undergraduate degree was in biology, you know, just the study of living things. And then my postgraduate degree was in human biology, which is just the study of human

being. So a lot of cadaver anatomy, a lot of human biological science. And I, you know, I don't know that I'm that unique, but I may have had a unique career path because I spent the better part of 20 years in the mortality space and mortality research. And by that, I mean, you know, a niche market of life insurance and that is trying to predict mortality to the month. And people, I get a lot of flack for that because people go, well, if you could predict mortality to the month, and it wasn't me, it was the whole model and the whole team, but if you could predict mortality to the month, you know, you would be Jesus, you would have won a Nobel Prize. But the truth is, it's some of the most accurate science in the world. If you look at the number of financial

services instruments that are based on death, you'd probably be astounded. I mean, tens of billions of dollars a year. Obviously, life insurance, right? I mean, so, when you file, and I'm talking about large life insurance policies, you can pick up the phone and call a insurance company and get a term life policy without a physical exam or blood work, probably without even medical records. But if you want a $5 million or $10 million or $25 million policy on your life, what we call universal life or whole life policy, somebody like myself is going to be sitting in a back room somewhere, not an actuary, but actually looking at a company like Fasano and Associates or American Viadical Services or a company is going to be looking at your

data and predicting your mortality to the month. And they're going to give that monthly number to the insurance company. And that's going to have a large impact on how your financial services instrument is priced. So annuities, for example, reverse mortgages, life insurance, these are all based on when you're going to die. You know, there are there are annuities. called SPIAs, single premium immediate annuities and what these are, their retirement or investment vehicles where you cut the insurance company a check, let's say you give them a million dollars, and they guarantee you an income stream for life. So they'll say, Josh, if you cut us a check for a million dollars, we're going to pay you X dollars a month for the rest of your life,

no matter how long you live. But what do you think matters in how they determine that income stream? Longevity. Yeah, longevity. and they would actually prefer that you don't live too long, right, because it extends the payments. So, you know, annuities and life insurance kind of have the polar opposite risk factors. You can actually marry these in financial services, too, to offset risk. Like, in life insurance, there's a risk of you dying too early, right? Because the death claim would pay out before they've collected a lot of premium.

In annuities, there's a risk of you living too long because then they've extended a payment stream to you far beyond what they predicted. So they took the million dollars from you. They expected to pay premiums for, let's say, 10 years, but they ended up paying premiums for 20 years. And if you look at the financial solvency of these institutions, there's some of the most financially solvent institutions in the world. And the reason for that is that they are very good at doing what they do. I mean, they're very good at predicting death. And, you know, in the 2008, 2009 financial services crisis, we had 364 or 365 banks fail. You didn't have a single life insurance company fail, not one. And, you know, the, in fact, it looks like the whole AIG debacle. It was it was the

life insurance division that bailed out the credit derivatives department. So sometimes poor financial decisions made on one side of these companies are propped up by the insurance side. And so in the science of mortality, I want to be careful about saying this, but it's true. We didn't really care about randomized clinical trials. We didn't care about data on statins, data on NSEDs, data on SSRIs. What we cared about was their impact on mortality, and we used big data to determine that impact. So instead of looking at a single variable, like, oh, this person had a, uh, uh, uh, risk of cardiovascular disease, then they took a statin. Well, then we would look at, well, what are the other risk factors that come with with statin therapy? You know, what happens when

you reduce cell walls, cell membranes, hormones, vitamin D3? What are the downstream consequences? And when you have data from mortality, which is the day, the date, the time, the location, and the cause of death, which is on somebody's death certificate, which is required, by the way, to get the death claim, when you have that kind of data and you know what car, causes death and you triangulate that back into the record, you get a very good picture of what is accelerating mortality, what is extending mortality. If there is a randomized clinical trial that says something different than the big data, you always go with big data. And because big data is the study of human beings in their natural environment across large populations. And you know that

certain risk factors have demonstrative outcomes in people's life span. Like, you know, sitting is the new smoking, right? I mean, we know that sedentary lifestyle is the leading cause of all cost mortality. So are there other risk factors of mortality? Sure, morbid obesity, type 2 diabetes smoking, but sedentary lifestyle is the leading cause of all cost mortality. So we would have factors for sedentary lifestyle, what we called your ambulatory profile. And when you look at data this way on human beings, you start to see pictures emerge, like when you study blue zones, right? I mean, this is big data.

And you say, well, there wasn't really a common link between a specific diet. It wasn't carnivore, keto, raw food, vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, that specifically led to longevity. It was the common factors were things you might not think of, mobility, right? Like in Sardinia, life expectancy was directly related to the slope, the grade of the slope that people were walking up and down. You know, if you're 92 years old and you're walking up a 37 degree incline, 10 blocks every day to get to church or to the market and back to your house, I mean, those are really good things, right? You're going to build muscle. Muscles are metabolic currency. Your risk of falls is less.

You're going to absorb more glucose from the bloodstream. You're going to release more enderfins. There are pleasure and longevity hormones that are released by muscle. And so it might not be as obvious as saying, but then you look at it and go, well, they eat a really high carbohydrate diet. They eat lots of pasta and lots of wheat. I mean, lots of bread.

And that flies in the face of some conventional wisdom. And then other areas, you know, Singapore, one of the highest meat consumption in the world, one of the longest life expectancy is in the world. But you can't just say that, well, everybody should eat meat. And the Mediterranean diets that are high in polyunsaturated fatty acids and fish and oils, and they have extended life expectancy.

So you look at the data trends and you see, well, what really, what was some of the common themes, you know, things like sense of purpose, mobility into later in life, community, family. And you start to realize, which has, you know, a lot to do with the kinds of things that you talk about

and teach are some of these more nebulous, less obvious factors. that have real impact on longevity and lifespan, you know, happy people live longer lives. Purpose-filled people live longer lives. You know, there's something called broken heart syndrome, you know, when one spouse passes, and very shortly after the second spouse passes, and, you know, in these marriages that have lasted 50, 60, 70 years, because an entire part of their life is gone. and you can't point to a change in their diet.

You can't point to a specific symptom that they had or a specific medication or a specific nutrient. But it's this broken heart syndrome, which actually changed their purpose, changed their passion, it changed their... There's a study on retirement, which is really good on this too, where if somebody retires

and they don't find something else to do that's meaningful after work, that it, you know, can reduce their life savings. I totally believe that. I absolutely believe that. I mean, isolation was one of the fastest. I mean, if you were isolated, that was probably the point of the, aside from a very specific predictable condition, like, you know, terminal illness, once you became isolated, we would

cut your mortality in half. So if your life expectancy was 11 years, it would become five and a half years. Wow. And this is true with human beings. It's also true with cells. You know, if you want to cut a human being's life expectancy and half at just about any age, put them in isolation. And this is why a lot of research, in my opinion,

that we do when we take cells out of the body and we study them in isolation is not as valid as when we study them in communities, right? When we study large populations of people sleeping in their homes versus a sleep study with eight people at a university campus, you know, sleeping in a sterile cold room, with electrodes all over their head.

So a lot of times, you know, it's not to say that modern science is not valid, but that's not what I mean by any means. It's very often what we do is we take a single clinical study, randomized clinical trial, and we say, you see this data point, that means that everybody should eat nothing but red meat. Everybody should eat nothing but vegetables.

Everybody should only have this type of boil. Everybody should do this form of exercise. And the truth is, that's not how human beings behave. and one of the most exciting times for me, I truly believe it's going to be the next five years in medicine because for the first time you have computing power through artificial intelligence, combining with early detection and big data

to create actionable steps for people. So we're going to see what the big data says. Not what a single randomized clinical trial says, but what happens when you apply this to a population of millions, of people and you start to get real tangible data that can really influence the longevity of people's lives. That's exciting. Yeah, super exciting.

It's going to be amazing. I know you've had the chance to work with some really well-known people. I know some are confidential, but some have been open. You've had them on your podcast. I've had you on their theirs. Who are some of the most well-known people that you've been able and had the honor of working with? That I could talk about, probably Dana White, for sure.

Dana White, Grant Cardone, Stephen A. Smith. um, Steve Harvey, um, Anita, one of the top, like, artists in the world. And, you know, in each of those cases, I, I helped solve something unique, a unique challenge that they had. Um, and, you know, I'm not licensed to practice medicine. I'm a human biologist. So I have a clinical team behind me that is licensed to practice medicine. Sometimes I don't give them enough credit because they're some of the best MDs and, and nurse practitioners and PAs and NPs in the world of functional medicine. And, So a lot of the credit goes to those teams. But some of what I try to teach when we approach looking at human beings is just a different philosophical way of approaching a patient's condition.

I don't have patients, they do. But when we approach the blood work, the genetic testing, the supplementation, the diet, the lifestyle changes, I think that if we took the approach that, first of all, that God didn't make a mistake, meaning if this person has an autoimmune disease, Crohn's disease, Hashimoto's, before we assume that the immune system woke up one day and began to manufacture antibodies to the thyroid or woke up one day and started manufacturing antibodies to the gut, maybe we should ask ourselves the question, okay, well, the immune system behaving properly. What is it after? Why is it in there?

Is it after the thyroid because there's heavy metals embedded in the thyroid? Is it after the thyroid because there's a viral pathogen in there or mycotoxin? Is it after the gut because maybe the luminal wall of the gut has become compromised? And now you've got bacteria and other pathogens in areas of the body where they shouldn't be and the immune system's in the right place doing the right thing. And we're assuming that it's made a mistake. and I think by by starting with that you know God didn't make a mistake meaning the human body is to make an error here we have to figure out why is it behaving this way and then secondly and this was a big one that came out of the you know mortality data and I think you're going to see more and more and more of this as big data begins to be published and and you know pushed out into the public domain you're going to see that um you have to ask yourself the question, what nutrient deficiency could be leading to this condition?

It is astounding the number of pathologies and diseases that we think are happening to us that are actually happening within us. I mean, when you start to go down the myriad of list of conditions that people can have, virtually none of them are conditions you catch. They're not conditions that happen to us. You don't catch heart disease. You don't catch cancer. You don't catch autoimmune disease. If you have Crohn's disease, you're not going to pass it to me. And so when we stop thinking about disease as something that's happened to us

and as something that's happened within us, then we start to say, well, what caused the expression of this condition? What caused the expression of this disease? And we should be able to trace that down into the root and say very often this nutrient deficiency leads to the expression of this condition. You know, I mean, and if you take big swathing areas

of pathology like, you know, hypothyroid and you say, why so many people have hypothyroid? Well, the majority of hypothyroid diagnoses are done because they have low levels of thyroid hormone T3. Well, a majority of that hormone is not even made in the thyroid. It's deiodinized in the liver and the gut and the periphery. The majority of it in the liver and then the rest in the gut in the periphery. But this deiodinization process requires certain nutrients, you know, thymein, selenium. And so when you start depriving the body of certain nutrients and you interrupt that process of de-o-denization of these two rings, you know, the outer ring and the inner ring, you not only interrupt the conversion

of thyroid hormone T-4 into thyroid hormone T3, you also interrupt the signaling system when the liver creates this hormone back to the master puppeteer, to the boss, the pituitary, to tell it to slow down again. And so this entire system can look like it's dysfunctional or diseased or pathological when really it's nutrient deficient. And I mean, I could go through 100 different, you know, of these types of scenarios. And I think if the second thing we asked ourselves was what nutrient could be missing from this biome that could be causing this condition to exist. And then finally, to take all of the symptoms that a patient has, I mean, and we were talking about a few before the podcast and say, well, what is the common link between all of the things that this person

is experiencing, right? Do they have early onset dementia, congestive heart failure, and peripheral neuropathy, meaning do they have a mental condition, a cardiac condition, and a neuropathic condition, or do they have a circulation issue? Because if I reduce circulation, I could actually cause all of these things. So instead of looking at spokes on a wheel, we, you know, trying to find the hub of where they meet, that was the exciting thing about being in the mortality space because we knew that certain things led to this myriad of conditions.

Clinically efficient in D3, and you have all of these exacerbations, right? And then you would see modern medicine just approached the very singular variable, like osteopenia progressing to osteoporosis, like, right? You know, porous bones progressing, to really brittle bones, right?

And they think calcium. Calcium's in bones. So let's just add calcium. And, you know, nursing homes are full of osteopenic and osteoporotic patients that have been taking calcium for 20 years. Yeah. Right? They all got osteoporosis.

Yeah. So it's not this, because calcium is in bone, but calcium needs to combine with phosphorus to make hydroxyapit, and that builds strong bones, and you need 12 other minerals. You know, you need like, what do you need, you need iron, you need boron, you need calcium, magnesium, selenium, phosphorous. Yeah, there's phosphorus. You actually need collagen too. You need a lot. Yeah. Yeah. And you need collagen, which is made from amino acids. So you need amino acids. Again, to just kind of narrow this down, you, you see the expression of all of these conditions in people. And we start treating that disease or that pathology as if it's something

that happened to them. If we said if it's something that happened within them, then we can hunt within the biome for the deficiency that could be causing it. And I'm not saying that all disease and all pathology or all mental illness by any means is caused by, you know, a missing B12. What I am saying is that when you, the further that we get from the basics, the sicker we become, you know, all human beings need 91 minerals. We need two essential fatty acids. We need eight essential amino acids. They're called essential because they're essential for life.

And for the record, there's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. I have this debate all the time. Carbohydrates are not essential for life. I'm not saying you can't eat them, but they're not essential for life. That's where we should be the most judicious with our food choices. And so when you, when you, you know, anybody that's been in construction will tell you the most important thing about any structure is the foundation. I mean, if you get the foundation wrong, the rest kind of doesn't matter.

So if you get the basic nutrients, minerals amino acids, fatty acids, wrong. Then you start to get the expression of all kinds of conditions. And so very often these are, like I say, they're just linked back to the same thing. You know, you deplete oxygen in the blood. One of the things we used to use in the mortality space quite often was something we called a hypoxic curve. And it was basically the, um, how well or how poorly somebody was managing oxygen in their body, right? Because, um, oxygen is the main, one of the main foods for the, uh, for the, for the, for the, for the CREB cycle. And it, and it determines, you know, how much energy

is produced. Um, if it's 36 ATP or two ATP, um, can be the difference between oxygen and or entering the cycle and not entering the cycle. And when you start to deplete oxygen in the biome, people start to get tired, people start to have brain fog, people start to have porcelain patterns. And yet this kind of condition can hide in plain sight when you pull their blood work and you look at their, what's called their CBC, their complete blood count,

and you see you look at the area where you're looking at the structure of the blood, the red blood cells, the hemoglobin, the corpuscular volumes, you see that as you start to deplete these, within normal ranges, right, as they start to get down towards the lower end of these ranges, people have all of these symptoms, but their labs are normal, right? Because you're robbing the body of one of the primary nutrients that it needs, oxygen, to perform all of its functions. And then, instead of chasing oxygen and saying, how do we raise a red blood cell count? How do we raise hemoglobin?

How do we get more circulation? We start treating the byproduct of that. They have a sleep disorder. Now we're tranquilizing them to bed. They're drinking caffeine or taking amphetamines because their energy level is so low. They stop exercising and their mobility goes down, which is the opposite of what they need to do. And so these conditions have a tendency to exacerbate. And when we were in the mortality research space, this was great for us because it made it easier to predict death. You know, the trajectory of pharmaceuticals and chemicals and synthetics also made it easier to to predict death because they all have a certain defined impact on mortality.

Yeah, wow. I mean, it's an amazing perspective to be able to look at, look at it. Basically what you're doing, you're looking at patterns. And this is a form of wisdom. I really believe this. And I think that, you know, for instance, if I want to go and find, what is the best way to use my money, the best way to invest, I'm going to go and look at Warren Buffett, Ray Dalio.

I mean, I'm going to, you know, the top five people and say, what do all five of them have in common? Where is that? Not what are the spokes, but where is the hub where all of those things meet? And there are certain principles such as, well, spend, you know, spend less than you make when the market's high sell, when it's low and everybody's running away. Actually, Warren Buffett has the saying when there's blood in the water, that's when you want to enter in and start investing. And so all of those things. And so it's a very similar thing where you are looking at different patterns. And you're able to remove the bias of, in a way, a lot of studies, which oftentimes there's false positives or false studies and being able to go, okay, here's where all of these things line up together.

And it makes sense. What walk me through, I'd love to hear what is so. I know there are several things you do in terms of blood work. But what are your top three to five favorite panels to look at when it comes to? to helping, you know, figure out what's going on with somebody. So, you know, the basic place to start, I always think that say that people need to get data, right? Because if not, you're not only relying on your own opinion

or your spouse's opinion or your friend's opinion or the opinion of people on Instagram or even my opinion, which you shouldn't rely on those. You should rely on the data from your body. You know, so, for example, now we have, since we've mapped the genome in the human body, we're getting closer and closer and closer to being able to hyper-target supplementation based on, we can do this to a certain degree now. You know, is hyper-target supplementation based on your genetic methylation pathways,

which is simplest way to explain that is how do I take a raw material that enters my body, folic acid, for example, and convert it into the usable form, methylfolate. and do I do this well or do I do this poorly? And if I do this very poorly, I should supplement with that nutrient. Do I need supplemental B vitamins, supplemental B12, which is a metal in one of the really bioavailable forms? Do I need methyl folate? You know, what nutrients is my body deficient in? It's pretty interesting because a genetic test is something you do once in your

life, right? Because your genes don't change. You can't go in and fix the gene, but you can very often supplement for its deficiency. And there are genetic predispositions for all kinds of things, and there are genetic anomalies that don't allow us to metabolize certain types of fatty acids. Some people are better taking omega-3s from plant sources than they are from fish sources. Wouldn't that be nice to know? So if you're going to supplement with it, you supplement with a form that your body can use. If you're going to take a multivitamin, instead of just taking a random, you know, men's over 50 or women's menstruating multi or just a general prenatal, why don't I take something that gives my body what I'm deficient in? So the first thing is data. I'm a huge believer in genetic testing because genetic testing is like getting, you know, all 32 trillion of your cells together in a conference room and having them write a book about you.

And in that book, what they tell you is what they need to do their job. right? And like, what do they need to eliminate waste, repair, detoxify, and regenerate? And if your cells gave you that information, number one, would you read it? And number two, would you respond to it? Most people would say, yeah, I would love to have a book written by my cells with nobody else's opinion. You know, I used to say about, I used to have a saying about the blood work that the one thing I, I like about blood work is what's not in the blood work. And what's not in anybody's blood work is somebody else's opinion. And so you get this data and it says, hey, you can't convert homocysteine into methamothionine.

Well, now we need to supplement for that deficiency. You can't convert folic acid into methylfolate. You can supplement for that deficiency. And these are kind of absolutes, right? Because that's never going to fix itself. Now, you can eat to provide those nutrients too, which is why diet is super important. But you can also supplement for these deficiencies. But when you look in the blood, I think there's three pillars, at least from a mortality,

standpoint that that I would look at. One is what I would call your glycemic profile. How well are you regulating your blood sugar and how sensitive are you to insulin? Right. So that's glucose, hemoglobin A1C, and insulin. Glucose being the amount of sugar in your blood right now, hemoglobin A1C being a three-month average of your blood sugar. And then your insulin being, how much insulin does it take to maintain this level of blood sugar? Insulin resistance is one of the signs of metabolic syndrome. It's one of the early mortality factors that we would use to reduce your life expectancy. The more insulin resistant you were, the higher your, your worse your glycemic profile, the faster we would accelerate you towards the grave. And the interesting

thing about this is very often it's asymptomatic, right? I mean, people live with a pre-diabetic condition for decades. A long time. Right? We would see it go untreated and sort of, you know, hemoglobin A1C goes, the thing about this metric two is, as you become more insulin resistant, less insulin sensitive, there is a parabolic part of this curve. So you slowly inch from having normopathic blood sugar into being slightly pre-diabetic. And then you sort of walk your way down the diabetic corridor through pre-diabetes, and then you start jogging, and then you start sprinting. right and as that has insulin collapses or the insulin sensitivity decreases or insulin resistance rises

and that curve is parabolic so you can you can slip from being pre-diabetic into diabetic to insulin dependent like that the the crawl is from normal blood sugar into the pre-diabetic state and people hang out here for years and then bang it just well raises its ugly head. And so glycemic profile hormone balance is another big one. In women, it's super important to look at the ratios of hormones. You know, on most blood tests, you'll see that you can look at the cycle regulators like leutinizing hormone and follicle stimulating hormone. And then you can look at the cycle outcomes like estrogen, progesterone. And you can,

you can see whether or not they are monophasic entering the phage. together, right? Like all the girls are going into and out of the phase together. Or you can see if they're aphasic. Sometimes one is in one phase and one is in another based on its level. And in women especially,

I think in our clinic director is an OBGYN. So I don't profess to be an OBGYN, but just watching her practice all this time is been fascinating. She's a functional medicine doctor. You know, ratios are more important than levels.

and so when you look at the ratio of certain hormones, you start to find some of the pathologies and conditions hiding in plain sight. Like if you look at women's normal menstrual cycle, for example, depending on where she is in her cycle, it's perfectly normal for estrogen to be in the 400s. It's also perfectly normal for it to be in the teens. So if you take a snapshot of estrogen, who's to say that 179 or 210 or,

315 is high or low. We don't know. First of all, you have to look at what cycle they're in. You have to look at the ratio to other hormones and try to restore that homeostasis. In men, it's a little less complicated, you know, testosterone, free testosterone, estrogen, in certain ranges. But the majority of the time, at least in our clinical practice, when we see hormone-deficient males, they're not deficient because their testicles can't produce testosterone anymore. they're usually deficient because their body lacks raw material nutrients.

The key ones being vitamin D3, you know, sunshine vitamin, colicaciferal, and DHA. And again, just don't guess at this, get data. And then there are other proteins like sex hormone binding globulin, which is a protein that binds to sex hormones. You know, that protein can rise and artificially suppress your free testosterone levels. And then there are also signaling issues where, The signal from the pituitary to the testicle is suppressed. You know, remember in the human body, most organs or hormone-producing organs, testicles, for example, don't determine how much hormone they produce.

They have a boss. Very often, it's the signal from the boss that is low, not the organ. You know, like, you know, speakers don't determine how loud they play. The tuner does. Yeah. So if you walk into a room and you can't hear the music, you don't go mess with the speakers, you find the tuner, you turn the signal up.

So very often, you know, when you look at human beings in totality and hormones together, you have to look at the signaling, and they're getting a good signal, and then you have to look at the nutrients. I mean, the thyroid's a good example of that. Pirates a great one. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, well, walk us do a little bit about thyroid. I love to hear your thoughts on, one of my biggest surprises when I opened my clinic back in 2007, so this is, you know, almost 15 years ago now. Oh, no, sorry, 17, gosh. Was the amount of women coming in with hypothyroid? I mean, it just absolutely blew my mind. It's something that didn't tell you in school.

Hey, every woman coming in almost is going to have an issue with thyroid, low energy, all those sort of issues. So when you have someone come and see you with hypothyroid, what do you see to be some of those primary causes? So let me just finish the last. So I would say glycema control, hormone balance, and nutrient deficiency. So when you say, what would you look at in the blood that would be those three? I just wanted to add that last one.

And so are you doing a micronutrient test, organic acids? What would you specifically? You can go down that road afterwards, but I'm saying when you first throw the casting that out to see what's under the surface, right, which is, you know, because you could get paralysis of analysis with labs. I forget how many thousands of lab choices, lab corp, and Quest diagnostic have, right? And so you could get crazy with autoimmune panels and micro toxin panels and viral panels and and all sorts of, you know,

broaden cholesterol panels and eventually you'll end up getting paralysis of analysis. But if you started with hormone balance, nutrient deficiencies, the main ones, D3, DHA, vitamin B12, and then, of course, the nutrients that are, the electrolytes that are in your comprehensive metabolic panel, potassium, and the others, sodium.

And so nutrient deficiencies, glycemic control, hormone balance. That's the place to start. The reason why I believe that that's the place to start, and we would do this in the mortality space, is because once you see that deficiency, that's what tells you where else to go, you know, where else to hunt. And again, we need data. We should have a good clinical rationale for the supplements that we take. We should have a good clinical rationale for the type of diet that we're on. Like, I wouldn't put everybody in the world on a keto diet, but I've had clients that I've met, like Dana White, for example, triglycerides were 800 fasted.

I put him on a very strict keto diet. And it's a hard concept. It was a really hard concept for him to say, wait a minute, my blood fat is really high and you're going to put me on a high fat diet. Yes. That's so hard for people. It seems super counterintuitive that you want me to eat 75% of my calories from fat when I'm dying from fat in my blood.

but you know, putting the body into a state of ketosis so it sees fat as a resource, you know, it's one of the best ways to clean up the blood because it will eat the fat there first. And so to your second question about thyroid, I think we approached the thyroid like we approach every other condition. And first you ask yourself, what nutrients could be missing from this biome that could be causing this condition to exist? Selenium thiamine are huge. and then the complex of B vitamins,

because they're involved in the methylation pathway, even though the hormone is deiodinized in the liver and the gut in the periphery, it's heavily dependent on the complex of B vitamins. And if you're deficient in B vitamins or selenium or thiamine, then you're interrupting the capacity for the body to do its job, which is to convert one of the main thyroid hormones that we use, to determine whether you are normalopathic or hypothyroid. The other is to decide what side of the thyroid issues on, right?

In other words, you know, basic thyroid metabolism, and this is very basic. We're going to get ripped apart by my haters online for this being too basic. But you have the pituitary sending a signal down to the thyroid, a thyroid stimulating hormone. Very often this signal is deficient. So the volume is on two, and the thyroid's producing hormones.

at a two. That seems to be normal. So you're on one side of the thyroid with a signaling issue. Then the other issue is looking at the other thyroid hormones, T4, which the thyroid produces the majority of, and T3, which it produces only 20% of. And as you start to look at, am I on the signaling side and I need to work on the signal, or am I on the production side and I need to work on the production? And then the second question is, where's the production coming from? If the production is not coming from the thyroid, then let's not medicate the thyroid for crime that it's not producing. Right.

I mean, you want to talk about a pandemic in this country. We have a pandemic of medicating organs for crimes they're not committing. Right. So we see a low level of thyroid hormone T3, for example, and we go, okay, they're hypothyroid. So let's medicate the thyroid. Let's just hold it responsible for crime. It's not committing, which is why in the majority of, if not all,

of long-term thyroid treatments, you know, the only guarantee is that your dosage is going to go up, right? Because you have desensitization and decafalaxus, and you're still not fixing the issue, which is very often a conversion issue. And then the second would be when you look at thyroid pathology, right? You have, you know, pathologies that nodules on the thyroid that can be symptomatic or asymptomatic.

and they can be pathological or benign. And then when you look at things like Hashimoto's, where the thyroid is, supposedly the immune system is manufacturing antibodies to the thyroid, to attack the thyroid, take a step back and say, immune system's acting properly, it is attacking this gland for a reason,

let's at least hunt for why it could be attacking this gland. So what are some of the pathogens and foreign invaders they can embed themselves into the thyroid that would even call the immune system to that location because very often it's the human body calling the immune system to that site.

There's so much wisdom with this and this is not the way that most people think, but the reality is I think, I think your medical philosophy, everyone's medical philosophy, there is a foundation to it. And so one of the foundations you have is God did not mess up when he made you.

I mean, your body is actually doing the right, thing at the right time to help save you to extend your life to protect you. And so I just want to point out that that when a physician like you has that mindset or a health expert, when a health expert like you has that mindset, that is just critically important. Everything else kind of stems from there. And as I just wanted to say, I just, this is not the mentality that most people have today. And it's, it's critical. So walking through that with Hashimoto, I mean, you, do you often see, Is it infection? Is there something like that that's often contributing?

We see, in our clinical practice, we see a lot of viral pathogens, low-grade chronic viral, which will sometimes hide out at the bottom of a CBC, too. You know, when you look at a complete blood count, you look at the order of white blood cells, and you look at neutrophils, basophils, eosinophils, and then you get towards the bottom, and you look at the immature granulocytes. and the bottom of the CBC, they'll have either no established range or the established ranges are very low. And very often we overlook asymptomatic conditions, right? So your white blood cell counts in the normal range.

Your white blood cells are all normal, but the whole bottom end of the CBC, with all of these immature granulocytes, basophils, are elevated. And so you have what I call the rear flank of the immune system, right? not the immune response that's causing massive amounts of inflammation and driving congestion and itchy, watery eyes and fevers, that's when people go seek help. Where people don't seek help and they just live with a chronic condition for prolonged period of time, low-grade Lyme, West Nile, which comes from Zico, which we had a big outbreak here in Miami a few years ago, recurrent cytomegalovirus, recurrent epstein bar virus. Yeah.

It's hard for people to conceptualize that a lot of these viruses are not viruses that you caught. There are viruses you've always had. It's just that when your immune system is weak, they raise their ugly head, right? So if you had mono as a child, it comes back as Epstein Barr as an adult. If you had chicken box as a child, it comes back as shingles as an adult. You didn't catch shingles. You've always had it. You didn't catch Epstein bar virus per se.

You've always had it. And so this is what I mean that this is not happening to us. It's happening within us. And so now is when you take the next stage and you start doing diagnostic testing, like heavy metal testing, viral panels and mold and mycotox. You know, I'm in Miami. I found out from one of my buddies, Dr. Minkoff, David Minkoff, we're in the mold capital of the world.

Yeah. Like I don't know how we won the mold water. It's so bad. It's so bad. And, you know, when it's 98 degrees and 90% humidity out and it's 70 degrees inside and low humidity, you're going to have that moisture barrier. But in mold and mycotoxins and heavy metals and low-grade viral infections are some of the things that they hide in plain sight on a lot of lab work.

And they don't have the kind of symptoms that force people to take action. They just learn to live with it. Right? And the gut's always kind of a mess. they're always kind of tired. They've got brain fog. They got virtually no response to exercise. They don't sleep well.

They've got some weight gain around the middle. They've got water retention. Their short-term recall is terrible. You know, their short-term memory's bad. But they just start to look to their outside environment and then just link it to something that it's not linked to, like their age or their environment or their kids or their job or their stress. And usually it's not a consequence of any of those things.

It's a consequence of missing raw material. in the human body. Right? I mean, a lot of us, for example, are not sleeping because we lay down to go to sleep at night and our mind is awake. And so we tranquilize

ourselves to sleep. Instead of asking the question, why is my mind wake up when my environment quiet? And the reason why your mind wakes up when your environment quiets is generally because of a gene mutation that doesn't allow you to quiet the mind.

There's a specific gene mutation called CompT, C-O-M-T, stands for catacoleole, o-methyl transferase. It's a gene mutation that downregulates, either quickly or slowly, a class of neurotransmitters called catacolamines. These four neurotransmitters are the same ones that are involved in a fight or flight symptom, right? So if somebody ran into this room with a knife, you and I would both go into a fight or flight scenario, catacolomines would dump into our brain, our heart rate would increase, our pupils would dilate, our extremities would flood with blood.

we would start having a fight or flight. And that's a great protective mechanism, right? If you're sleeping in a cave and you wake up and there's a tiger in your face, you want many catacolamines going into bodies again because you want to be alert and fast. But if these neurotransmitters are rising, were elevated, not to the point where you're in a fight or flight, but to the point where you're an awakened state.

Because your body doesn't have the raw materials, B vitamins, methylfolates, B-12, methionine to downregulate them. Then what happens is when your environment quiet, your mind wakes up. And you lay there in bed, just thinking about the most innocuous little thoughts, and you even catch yourself,

and you go, why am I thinking about my grocery list? It's 2 o'clock in the morning. I should be sleeping. And then you start getting frustrated that you can't sleep. And then eventually you do, which you shouldn't do when you go to your doctor and say, I can't sleep, and they put you on a tranquiletic,

like a zolopedum nitrate. or diaspam or Xanax or Clonopin or something. And what this is doing is, in many cases, they're tranquilizing you, but it's not down-regulating the catacolamines. It could be as simple as the deficiency in methionine. Right. So if you got data and you said,

wow, could a nutrient deficiency be causing my mood disorder? Could it be causing my sleep disorder? Could it be causing my poor mental condition? to my poor short-term recall. Could it be affecting my waking energy? Yes. And very often you don't have all of these different pathologies. You have a nutrient deficiency.

And what's astounding is, you know, I don't want to say this the wrong way, but I get credit for all these miracle cures. They're like, oh, my God. You know, like you saved Dana White's life where, you know, some of what I've heard you do is a miracle. It's really not. it's more basic human physiology. Can I say this?

It's not as complicated. So Jordan Rubin, you know, Jordan, he's a great guy. He always says this, to your credit. It's not a miracle. It's just missing. You've been missing this thing. And so people will take vitamin D or if you have something that's not methylating properly and you have them start doing some of these methylated vitamins that you,

people feel like it's literally a miracle. Yeah. I mean, you want to talk about a miracle, The human body's a miracle. If you want to see miracles happen in the human body, give it the raw material that needs to do its job. That's when you see miracles happen in the human body. When people call me and say, oh, my God, Gary, I'm four weeks into this.

I feel amazing. I go, you don't feel amazing. You feel normal. That's what normal is supposed to feel like. You've just accepted such an erosion of your baseline sense of normalcy, that now normal feels amazing to you. It's just like when you get the stomach flu and you get up off the floor after six hours in the toilet,

you know, and you wake up the next morning, you're like, I feel great. You don't actually feel great, and you felt just as good as you did a week ago. You just have perspective now. Yeah, most of the time, if you're sick, it's too much or too little. You have too much or something or too little of something. And I think we make health is incredibly complex thing

when it doesn't necessarily have to be complex. One of the things that I mention, and this is why I love the way that you treat people. It's why, you know, I would have, feel comfortable referring my family to you. Thank you. The reason I say is you are helping the body heal itself. You're not trying to treat the disease.

Our entire conventional medical system today, it is a, it's trying to play God. It's we are going to treat the disease. Hey, you've got an infection. We are going to give you things to kill the infection. Versus the way Chinese medicine looked, the way Ayurveda, the way that you practice today, it's very much, no, we're going to support the body. body and the body will heal itself. If you strengthen your body enough, it will kill the line. It will kill the infection. I had my siblings, my parents, take a test for Lyme disease

many years ago. All of them had it. None of them have symptoms right now. Right. There are millions of people right now walking around with Lyme and have Lyme, but many of them have symptoms and many of them don't. Right. Why does one have symptoms and why does one not? Well, first of all, you got to process the fact that roughly 40% of our DNA sequence inside of every cell in our body

is viral. Wow. Only 60% of our DNA is human. When I say that everybody's on Google right now, you're going to find out that's true. And, you know, so you take the helical ladder of DNA, right? And you look at that helical ladder of DNA inside of every cell

in your body about 40% of that DNA is viral. 60% of its human DNA. So almost 40% of our DNA is not even human DNA. So these are, every time that DNA unzips and rezips, right? Every time it replicates, we silence those viruses. And this seems astounding, which is where you really begin to appreciate the intricacies that God put together to create the human body.

So one of the interesting things about becoming a scientist has actually made me believe more in God than a random theory. that, you know, two bacteria banged in a mud puddle and we became a lizard. Next thing you know, we're sitting here. But, you know, when you, when you think about the fact that roughly 300 billion times every day, 300 billion cells that you woke up with this morning will not be with you tomorrow. There were 300 billion chances for that virus to come back. And it happens virtually 0% of the time.

So if we can strengthen that system of silencing viruses, healthy DNA transcription, healthy DNA replication, then you can live, you can have mono in eighth grade and die at 95 years old and never have Epstein bar, right? Or you can have mono in eighth grade and have Epstein bar 15 times

between your 40th and your 60th birthday, right? Because your immune system's weakened. Same human, same human beings, same pathogen, same virus. One expresses it 15 times, one expresses it zero. And I could give you a myriad of things like that. So it is the expression of disease.

So what I say is disease is the expression very often of a deficiency, not the presence of a disease. So it didn't happen to me, happened within me. And if I take that vantage point, did this happen within me, then what was it within me that caused that condition to exist? If people think about it like this, if you enable your child to the point where you do everything for them and they never do anything themselves, you're not helping them, you're making them weak. And today it's happening with medications. Hey, we're just going to give you this hormone. We're going to give you this drug.

We're going to give you this. And then your body, in a sense, becomes weak and versus, I'm going to give you vitamins, minerals, building blocks, peptides, all these things your body needs. I'm just going to give you the tools I need to help strengthen you. And you're going to fight the fights yourself. But now you're going to continue to get stronger and better for it. Yeah, I mean, what's amazing about the body is that, you know,

I think we need to stop thinking about all stress as being, negative, right? I think aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort. You know, the more aggressively pursue comfort, the faster we age. You know, we, we tell them that grandma not to go outside is too hot, not to go outside, it's too cold, just to lay down, just to relax, to eat at the very first pang of hunger. This is collapsing our natural defense mechanisms. You know, we, you know, there's a, there's a process in the human body called hormesis, more hermetic stress, and these they're generally good, right? You stress the body and it strengthens in response, right?

If you don't actually load your bones, they don't strengthen. If you don't, you know, tear, for lack of better words, your muscles, strain your muscles, they don't grow. If you don't challenge the immune system, it weakens. I mean, one of the things you're seeing coming out of the back of the pandemic is the global weakening of the immune system, right? The worst thing we ever did, and this usually cuts the audience right in half.

well, we won't cut your audience in half, but the worst thing we ever did was residential quarantining, masking, and social distancing. Because what we did was we took human beings out of contact with one another. And we actually took the natural contact with foreign invaders and pathogens out of the equation for a while.

So you know what the immune system did? Because the human body is so efficient, is it weakened? And then we come out of the pandemic and we're like, monkey box, where did monkeypox come from i've never heard a monkeypox well that's because everybody's immune system is so weak you have these new relatively you know new things that were always there but now they're prevalent i've seen i i truly have a lot more people the past couple years have been sicker with it with viruses

and those sort of issues because of the beginning yeah and and not to mention lack of human touch less oxytocin i mean there are there are so many factors right and you're absolutely right to talk I want you to talk about, finish your thought, but also talk about Hormesis because this is a really important principle. I know I'm excited to be at your house here and cold plunge and other things out. Oh yeah, we're doing the cold plunge, Astana. You got such a great setup here. Thank you. Talk to us about that in relation to some of the therapies that you recommend for people. Well, you know what's interesting about the therapies that I recommend is all they're doing is mimicking nature.

Right? So we have something called the superhuman protocol. We didn't develop it. It's a combination of magnetism, oxygen, and light. Magnetism coming from a PEMF mat, pulse electromagnetic field.

Oxygen coming from this, which you saw back there, this bladder of oxygen that we call EWAT, exercise with oxygen therapy, which is an oxygen concentrator, filling a bladder of oxygen with about 93 to 95% 02 and you breathe that for about 10 minutes under mild exercise and then red light

and it's a you know it's a very expensive setup and but you can get that entire setup for free because all it's doing is mimicking what we get from other nature we get magnetism from the earth we get oxygen from the air we get light from the sun the further we get away from those core um basics the sicker we become so if you want the computer You buy all that equipment, bring it in your house. But every one of us has access to the outdoors. And so the truth is, I believe most of us are not getting enough sunlight. It's not that we're getting too much.

And if you're worried about damaging your skin, then just, you know, expose your skin to sunlight in the first 45 minutes of the day when there's no UVA or UVB right is during first light. You know, healthy blue light from the sun. You still create vitamin D3. So if you were to say, how could I harness those modalities that I recommend? Yes, I recommend PMF, what's called Hypermax oxygen and red light therapy. But you could get all of those for free. By taking your shoes off and touching the surface of the earth, earthing and grounding is a very real thing.

I did some videos on my Instagram where I held, I was a TriField meter, and I put the post in one hand, and then I plugged the other post into the dirt. And I stood on top of my shoes. And as soon as I stepped off my shoes and contacted the earth and completed that circuit, you see it just bang. You know, the post bangs all the way to the other side. There's a local's current that the earth creates. And what this does is repolarize the surface of our cells.

If you were to prick your finger right now, most of us, and you were to put it under a microscope, you would see that the polarity, meaning the charge on the surface of your cells, when they're the same charge, they repel, right? They can't touch, like two north poles of a magnet. As soon as they get opposite charges, they attract. And everywhere that they touch, cellular structures touch, you've lost surface area.

It's like if you look at the surface area of a $10 roll of quarters, or you take that $10 roll of quarters and you throw it on the ground and the quarter scatter, and you look at how much more surface area there is, like 80 times the surface area in a roll of quarters on the ground versus in that role. So when they clump together, and I'm not talking about coagulating, creating blood clots. I'm talking about our red blood cells and things just sticking together. Now you've lost that surface area. Now what's happening to the cell, it's reducing its ability to eliminate waste to repair,

to detoxify, to regenerate, to exchange with its outside environment. As soon as you start to ground, you see that condition in the blood change. So it's measurable. You can do this. We do it with Darkfield all the time. It freaks people out because I'll have a client over and I was doing this, Ben Greenfield and some folks last year, and I do it here. all the time. You prick their finger, you put a drop of blood on a slide, and you put it under

microscope, and you see that all, you know, the cells are kind of stuck together and clumped up. Then you go lay on a PMF mat or go outside and walk on the surface of the earth for about 20 minutes, come back inside, wait about 10 minutes, and do the same thing. You see all the cells are free floating, and you can tell when they're going by each other, they're not touching, they slither by each other. They look like eggs, like hard-boiled eggs covered in olive oil, kind of slithering around a plant, which is a great thing to see on your blood under a microscope. So you get magnetism from the earth, you get oxygen from the air, and most of us are really not breathing well anymore. And one of the fastest accelerants in mortality, sedentary lifestyle,

why is sedentary lifestyle such a risk for mortality? Well, one has to do with muscle, but the second reason is because of a respiratory volume, when you think as your breathing gets progressively more shallow and your auxiliary muscles of respiration weaken, the intercostals, even your diaphragm. And you stop pulling air into the lobes of your lungs and you're only breathing with the apex of your lungs, which is the top third, which is the smallest volume of the lungs.

And if you look, when you exhale, you know, from the tip of your nose and the front of your, your mouth all the way to the back of your nasof pharynx, down your esophagus, out your bronchials, to your lungs. That's all expired air. So, right, until you breathe to hear, you're not even getting fresh oxygen, right? And so what happens as we age is our respiratory volume starts to decrease. We go from having a healthy respiratory volume, which is one of the reasons why VO2 max is one of the predictor of longevity, yeah.

And that's the volume of your oxygen. So when our respiratory volume starts to decrease and our auxiliary muscles of respiration atrophy and her diaphragm becomes weak and our posture starts to collapse in on itself, we're just slowly suffocating to death. And since it doesn't happen quickly, we don't give it the attention that it deserves. But as you start to drop the oxygen level in the blood, you get tired, your short-term memory goes, your sleep is out the window because your brain will wake you up when you get to a hypoxic level. you start taking sleep medication, you're exhausted, you don't recover from exercise, you stop exercising, and you know, your waking energy is gone, your mood starts to become depleted because most elevated emotional states require oxygen, passion, elation, joy, arousal, libido, these all require us to be in a high oxidative state, right? The reason why no human being has ever woken up laughing is because you don't have the oxidative state to experience laughter out of deep sleep. But you can wake up angry because anger doesn't require oxygen.

right? If I pinched you when you were in a deep sleep tonight, you would wake up angry. Instantly, as soon as you open our eyes, you'd be pissed off. But if I want you to laugh, I have to wake you up, I have to orient you, I have to elevate your oxidative state, then you can experience laughter or passion or elation or joy. And so if we understood the link that oxygen has to vitality, to mitochondrial function, to energy, to short-term recall, we would start to realize that breathing so important. Yeah. So I am taking a very long time to answer your question.

But the second part... Let me say, I mean, what you shared was, I mean, these therapies you're recommending, you're harnessing the power of nature. Yeah. It's light, it's earth, it's breath. And yeah, it makes total sense. And I think it's the same thing we try and do is supplementation. We're trying to take what's in food and get your body that in a very, very similar

I want to do something right now. I want to go through some kind of a quick fire with you. Sure. About 60 seconds for some of these answers. And you can go a little bit longer. But what's the best type of water and why? Hydrogen water by far. It is the best at reducing inflammation and improving the absorption of supplements. I mean, one place that everybody should go is hydrogen studies.com. Go to hydrogen studies.com. Select out for the animal studies and just look at the number of clinical trials published on the use of hydrogen water. If you're going to drink any type of water, you should be drinking hydrogen water. I drink an echo water bottle, but you can, you can, some people use hydrogen tablets. There are other people that make water bottles, but

hydrogen, there are bacteria in our gut that produce hydrogen. Most of us are hydrogen gas deficient in our gut. You know, hydrogen is one of the most prevalent gases in the human body. I actually bathe in it too. You can use it transdermally to reduce inflammation, eczema, psoriasis, scleroderma, all kinds of conditions of the skin. You know, my youngest daughter had cystic acne for a while and we would just put her in a hydrogen bath with a snorkel, face down in the water for 20 minutes and you'd see those, you'd see the skin clear right up. Drinking hydrogen water is a game changer. Wow. Absolute game changer. What are the top five supplements you recommend. Based on you said dabbit, you've looked at so much data of so many people.

What are the top five supplements in ranking order you think would help people the most, generally speaking? So I would say a good omega-3 fatty acid. Okay, those are essential. And most of us are not getting good omega-3 fatty acids. A methylated multivitam. By methylated, I mean they are non-synthetic nutrients that have already been converted to the usable form. So, for example, folic acid is a synthetic form of folate. It's in tons of vitamins, but folic acid is an entirely man-made chemical. You can't find folic acid anywhere on the surface of the earth. Folic acid does not occur naturally in nature. We make it in a laboratory and we put it in our supplements and we call it, you know, vitamin B9. It's not. It's the synthetic form of that

vitamin. So methylated multivitamins. So if you're pregnant, take a methylated prenatal. If you are a man or a woman taking methylated multivitamin. And those will be your entire complex of B vitamins, your main metals, which are magnesium, zinc, B12, B12 is actually a metal. A lot of people don't know that. It's the cobalt metal. And there are synthetic forms like cyanocobalman, and there are natural forms like methyl cobalman, hydroxy cobalmen that are much more bioavailable. And so I would say a methylated multivitamin and a vitamin D3, and I think a mineral salt.

I use one called Baja Gold Salt, but you can use Celtic salt because most of us are mineral deficient. We are deficient in one of three things. Minerals, amino acids, or omega-3 fatty acids, essential fatty acids, essential fatty acids, essential amino acids, and essential minerals. And if you're missing those basics, right,

which you could get in the morning, and then I would say outside of that, making sure that you get the right balance of amino acids, right? There's eight essential amino acids. There's one that's conditionally essential. And the thing about amino acids that a lot of people don't realize is it doesn't matter what protein you eat. It all becomes the same thing. It's becoming an amino acid, right?

And then the amino acids enter the body and they go to assemble everything, not just muscles, right? Our immune system is made out of amino acids. Our blood cells are made from amino acids. Collagen, elastin, fibrin. we need amino acids in the body in order to build the proteins to build structure. And when I say we get deficient in amino acids, what I mean is there is a ratio of these essential amino acids. And when you get as little as a single one of these amino acids missing, then the body can't

assemble certain proteins. When it can't assemble proteins, it turns those into sugars or in. to fat. So if you want to be less wasteful and very efficient, you can take a full spectrum amino acid supplement. So those would be my vitamin D3, a mineral salt, a methylated multivitamin omega-3. That's where you start. That's so good. For sure. Last question for you. There are a million things we could do to become an ultimate human. Yeah. What's the number one thing people need to do to become an ultimate human? I would say if you're going to hack anything,

if you only hacked one thing, because this will take care of the rest, hack your sleep. Most of us have a great workout routine. We have a great routine for our kids. We have a great routine for our business. We have poor sleep hygiene, and we do not even have a sleep routine.

If you ask most people what they do to work out, they'll tell you the day and date and where they go and the gym and what they do, this is a leg day. This is a chest and tries. This is back and buys. I do hits cardio on this day, especially people that are relatively woke to exercise.

If you say, what's your sleep routine? I'll just go to bed. What time do you go to bed? Well, it depends on when my day ends or what I have to do. Well, how long are you to sleep? I don't know, until my alarm clock goes off. So the point is that we get data on everything else and we have routines for everything else

and we don't have a routine for sleep. And sleep is like the quicksand that will erode the foundation. and it is the greatest superpower that we have is the power that's locked in good sleep, the lymphatic system in the brain detoxifying, like the lymphatic system in the body, the difference between deep and REM sleeps allowing the body to regenerate and allowing the brain to regenerate. And so, you know, I would say if you're only going to do one biohack, you know, red light therapy, you know, grounding, sunlight, cold plunging, the very first thing to do is to hack your sleep. Because all the other things will do is try to make up for the deficiencies that are being created from a lack of sleep.

That's so good. And I'll give you one other tip just because I just did a big sleep challenge a week ago. And it was, I'm a huge fan of big data. And it was sponsored by Woop. So I had Will Ahmed, who's the CEO and founder of Wupon. And we had a really fascinating discussion because they have big data. on sleep, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people.

And what is amazing is when you realize that things that truly are ruining your sleep and truly are helping your sleep, so like four or five things that you could do right now without spending any money to really hack your sleep tonight,

if you have a sleep tracker. We did this with about 8,000 people. And I said, and everybody opted into this group, and we said, Okay, so tonight, what we're going to do is we are going to be, we're going to pick the time that we're going to go to bed and we're going to stick to it. So we went to bed at 1030 on the East Coast.

We're going to surgically remove every ounce of light from the room. So I'm done it like tape over the fire alarm, you know, unplug the electronics within six feet of the bed, block all the light out of your room as best as you can. We're going to sleep, colder than we normally sleep. We can try to get the room down to 68, 69 degrees. We're going to use a sleep mask if we have one. We're going to do breathwork. We're going to stop screen time an hour before bed.

And then people that have a hard time getting to sleep, we're going to do contrast therapy, which is just a hot shower followed by a 30 second to 45 second, really cold shower. And only 30 to 45 seconds. We're not trying to, like, mimic the cold plunge. We're actually trying to shift our body into a parasympathetic state and break, you know, shift our state so we actually break from the day and move into bed. we had a 28% increase in the average sleep score. Phenomenal.

Simple tactics like that. Consistent bedtime, no alcohol, don't eat within two hours of bed, dark in the room, cool the room off, maybe out a sleep mask, and do something to shift your state like breathwork or a contrast hour. Those won't cost anyone listening to this podcast anything. Try that for a week and see what happens to your energy levels. That's awesome. Here, this has been so great. I can't wait to have you on again. Yeah, this is...

Yeah. So, so good. Yeah. Hey, let us everybody know where they can find out more about you and your great work. So you can follow me on Instagram, just my first and last name, Gary Brecker. I also have a podcast called The Ultimate Human podcast, which you were just on. And so they can go to the Ultimate Human.com to see some of my favorite supplements and tips and tricks. Or you can follow me on Instagram.

And that's where I just give advice without... expectation of receipt. So good. Awesome. Well, everybody, thanks so much for listening to the Dr. Josh Ack Show. It's been amazing having Gary Brecka on. He is a human biologist and an incredible longevity expert. I wanted to say, thanks so much for watching and supporting this channel. Remember, every week we're diving deep into the science and principles and how to help you grow

in body, mind, and spirit. And, hey, do me a favor. Share, subscribe, like this episode. If there's someone you know who needs to know this information, send them a text message, post on social, but let people know about how to heal using food is medicine, mindset medicine, lifestyle medicine, and how to become, as we talked about today, an ultimate human. All right, everybody. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you on the next episode.