The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 10. Q&A: How to Eliminate Migraines, The Best Overall Diet, and The Truth About Alcohol | Ultimate Human Short

Episode Date: November 16, 2023

Get weekly tips on how to optimize your health and lifestyle routines - go to https://www.theultimatehuman.com/ Get more resources + information from Gary here: https://linktr.ee/thegarybrecka ECHO GO PLUS HYDROGEN WATER BOTTLE https://echoh2o.com/?oid=19&affid=236 BODY HEALTH - USE CODE ULTIMATE10 for 10% OFF YOUR ORDER bodyhealth.com/ultimate Today on the podcast Sage and Gary answer your most asked questions about diet and nutrition from foods to avoid at all costs, to the proper way to wash fruit and meat, and the best alcohol if you choose to drink. There are so many symptoms people experience in their daily lives from migraines to low energy that can be solved simply and quickly by proper hydration and nutrition. Tune in to hear what causes fat gain, and why you can’t cheat on your Keto diet. 00:45 Is there any fruit or vegetable that is ok to eat that is NOT organic? 02:00 The proper way to wash fruit and meat before you eat it. 07:00 How to eliminate migraines. 08:00 What is the best diet for overall health? 11:00 Cooking oils to avoid and the 4 best oils to cook with for your health 13:15 What foods cause us to gain fat? 14:00 The benefits of eating a Keto diet and how to decrease inflammation. 17:15 Why can’t you cheat on a Keto diet? 21:00 Is any amount of alcohol good for you? Gary Brecka: @garybrecka Sage Workinger: @sageworkinger The Ultimate Human: @ultimatehumanpod Subscribe on YouTube: @ultimatehumanpodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, welcome to the ultimate human podcast. I'm your host human biologist Gary Brekka where we go down the road of everything longevity, anti aging, functional medicine, biohacking, and everything that makes average humans ultimate humans. So today I have a very special guest, my wife, Sage Workinger, soon to be Sage. Soon to be. Brecca. And today is where we take questions directly from you and we answer them here on the podcast. So I know you've got the questions on your phone, babe.

So what were some of the questions that came into us that people have on their minds? Well, I threw it out to the world of Instagram. And actually, we got a lot of responses of questions that they wanted to ask you, questions that they had for me. So let's start with, okay, we're going to kind of go in the diet range. So one of the questions was specifically, is there any fruit or vegetable that you would eat that's not organic? So me personally, I wouldn't, if you're going to spend money anywhere in the diet, the place to spend money if you eat fruit is on organic fruits, non-organic fruits. Remember, fruits absorb pesticides and herbicides and preservatives through their skin. So they have a tendency to draw pesticides, herbicides, insecticides into the fruit. So if you're going to spend money anywhere in your diet

and you actually do eat fruit, it's best to go with organic fruits rather than non-organic fruits. My preference would be that you eat fruits that end in berry, blackberry, blueberry, raspberry, strawberry. They're lowest on the glycemicmic index meaning they raise blood sugar slower than other fruits and they have you know their high amounts of fructose and contrary to popular belief fructose is processed differently than than other sugars so it has less of an impact on your blood sugar cool all right and then there's lots out there on how to clean your fruit. TikTok's got crazy ways of soaking it in some sort of solution that sucks all the color out of strawberries. And obviously that can't be the right way. So what do you recommend when you bring your fruit home, even if it's organic, how you wash it? Oh, yeah. Even if it's organic, I actually recommend that you wash your fruits and your meat.

So the way to wash fruits is put them in a bowl with filtered water um and preferably as cold water as you can get it you can even actually use ice um but put it in a bowl of a glass bowl of cold water filtered water and then add about a quarter of a cup of vinegar white rind white rice vinegar uh white wine vinegar um even apple cider vinegar. So a quarter cup of vinegar and about a tablespoon of baking soda. And you'll notice it will fizz up. And then just massage the fruit around in there a little bit. You only need to leave it in the bowl for one minute.

You don't let it soak for 10 or 15 minutes. It will actually start to draw the color out of the fruit, and it will even draw the sweetness out of the fruit, which is not what you want. You want the pesticides, the herbicides that may be on the surface of the fruit to be drawn out and then get all the bug parts and droppings and possible worms and things off of the fruit and any kind of dirt or debris that's on it. But it only takes 60 seconds to wash your fruit in cold water. Quarter cup of vinegar, your choice of vinegar is fine. It's super cheap to buy a bottle of vinegar, just a few bucks. And then a tablespoon of baking soda. Does it taste vinegary

afterwards? Not at all. You don't taste it at all. So when you're done washing it, dump the bowl of fruit out and then rinse it with filtered water and then put it in the refrigerator in a covered glass pan. I'm kind of laughing at my question because clearly I've been eating the fruit here. And I haven't tasted it, but I don't know if you were really washing it. I was washing it. I always wash the fruit. So if it's in our fridge, babe, I'd wash it. And then for meats, the trick with meats is, you know, take the meats out of the package.

Remember, just caring for your food is a great thing to do before you eat. Just being intentional about how you thing to do before you eat. Just being intentional about how you eat and what foods you eat. So you take your poultries or your meat, your pork, your steak, and put it in a pan, cover it completely with kosher salt. Let that sit for about a minute. Rub the salt into one side of the meat, flip it over, rub it into the other side of the meat. Let it sit for a minute, then fill the pan up that the meat's in and same thing add a little bit of make sure the water is ice cold and add a small amount of vinegar no baking soda in this case just a small amount of white wine vinegar white rice vinegar apple cider vinegar let it sit for about a minute and then

rinse it off put it in a glass pan and then put it back in the refrigerator and cook it when you're ready what's the difference between using kosher salt versus like himalayan sea salt or celtic salt or so the the pink himalayan sea salt you know there's been a lot of studies recently that show that a lot of brands of pink himalayan sea salt the majority of them are coming out of China and they're actually laden with mercury. They have a lot of heavy metals in them. So based on the way the salt is mined, if they don't take the crystal vein of the salt and they actually start to get some of the ore that's around, they can get heavy metals. So my recommendation is that you use Celtic salt, especially for your table salt, because it actually has more minerals.

I think it has 61 or 62 minerals that are essential for human beings. And the Celtic salt tastes even saltier. It just actually has a more full flavor than iodized table salt or pink Himalayan sea salt. So you can use those for eating. You can also use Baja Gold. That's one of my favorites. That's a sea salt. I want to say that that's mined in Mexico. And it's completely heavy metal free. You can use it also to cure your meats and your poultries. But ground up in a salt grinder, it's amazing salt. And contrary to popular belief, sodium rarely raises your blood pressure. What raises your blood pressure is iodized table salt. But most of us are deficient in sodium. We're not having too much sodium. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons why people's level of sodium shows

up as elevated in their blood is usually because they're dehydrated. Levels have a tendency to rise when the concentration rises. So for example, if you had half a glass of water, and you put a teaspoon of salt in that water, you'd have one concentration of salt. If you filled the glass the rest of the way up, you would cut the salt concentration in half, but not because you remove salt, but because you added water. So hydration is super important, but actually your intake of salt most of us are clinically deficient in sodium chloride yeah we always sprinkle the celtic sea salt in our water so or you can make a sea salt soleil which helps with headaches and dehydration yeah about 85 of all migraine headaches are directly related to sodium deficiency

the osmotic gradient or the movement of water across the membrane is what really governs very often whether or not you get a migraine. Because remember, there's no pain receptors in the brain. That's why brain surgery is painless, right? The brain cannot send a pain signal. But there's a covering over the brain called the dura. And this covering, which is like saran wrap that's over top of the brain, is fraught with pain receptors. And it hates two things. It hates being stretched, and it hates being contracted. And so what determines whether or not it's stretching or contracting is the sodium gradient. And so when you're deficient in sodium, that dura can actually send pain signals, which is why the majority of migraine headaches occur in the mornings

when you are the most dehydrated. So you go to sleep at night, you're respiring all night, you're actually at moisture leaving your body, heat's leaving your body, you wake up in the morning and now you have a migraine first thing in the morning. If you add a pinch of Celtic sea salt to your drinking water and you drink 10 ounces of water in the morning, those usually will

be a permanent thing of your past in 48 hours. It worked for me. Awesome. Yeah. Hey guys, the most important website that I think you may ever go to is theultimatehuman.com. That's theultimatehuman.com. On this website, you can sign up for a completely free newsletter that I write every single week on how to live a healthier, happier, longer life. If you want to see all of the products that I've reviewed and recommend for chemical-free, healthy living, I've got those listed on the website. And you can also sign up for your genetic test. But most of all, the information in that newsletter is completely and totally free. I do it every single week in an effort to touch the face of humanity because I know that this information needs to reach the masses.

If you want to see chemical-free living products, they're there. And if you want to get your genetic test, it's also available on TheUltimateHuman.com. And now, back to The Ultimate Human Podcast. Okay, other question. Okay, daily diet and best foods to eat. So, I want to talk about, I guess, your diet. You've kind of gone that keto route. Tell us a little bit about what you eat on a daily basis.

What's in Gary's kitchen idea? Well, my whole philosophy on dieting is not everybody needs to be on keto or carnivore or vegan or vegetarian or paleo or Atkins or cyclical dieting or raw food diets. The most important thing about the food we eat, not the diet that we're on, is that we eat whole real foods. It's the distance from the soil that really hurts us. So when you look at vegetarian or vegan diets, some vegans and vegetarians have higher incidences of breast cancer and other forms of cancer, colorectal cancer being one of the major ones. And not because vegetables are bad for you, but because they eat a lot of pesticide, insecticide, herbicide laden vegetables, lots of preservatives. And it's those secondary chemicals, not the vegetables that are really causing the harm. So one of the things that's happened through the agricultural revolution is the distance between the soil and the table has lengthened, meaning there are more steps to how food is processed before it lands on the grocery store shelf.

So we know that if it takes an apple 30 days to make its journey from the tree to the shelf, that we're going to preserve that apple. And preservatives were originally called anti-digestives. But some smart person realized that people are not going to go to the anti-digestive area of the supermarket. So they switched the name to preservatives. It's just like when we spray foods with folic acid. We don't call it sprayed with folic acid we call it fortified or enriched because it just makes it sound so much more nutritious like they're doing you a favor yeah i feed my kids fortified whole grains or enriched bleached white flour it just sounds like something beneficial has happened when really

uh that's the root of all evil in my opinion i never really thought about like strawberry preserves is it full of like jelly is well those aren't strawberry preservatives those are strawberry preserves so when you seal it in a can um that's different preserving it is actually very healthy meaning preserving it in a sealed jar because theervatives are terrible. Because it's the time of just came off the bush. Our old school grandmother's way of preserving fruits, preserving vegetables, pickling cucumbers and things like that, those old school methods are actually very, very healthy. If you look at the incidence of cardiovascular disease

and type 2 diabetes in the 40s, it's a fraction of what it is today. And if you... Yeah, well, Is, it's a fraction of what it is today. And if you... Yeah, well, I mean, that's also seed oils, true. But, you know, I did a big post on seed oils the other day, and I got a lot of flack online because people said, well, food grade canola oil and sunflower oil, these oils are not bad for you. That is true until they are industrially processed, right?

So it's not actually the food very often. It's the distance from the food to the table. So if you take a seed, like a, you know, let's say you take canola oil, and you press the canola, and it comes out very gummy. Well, now they need to degum it. So they degum it with something called hexane, which is a well-known neurotoxin. Once it's degummed, they heat it to about 450 45 degrees when you heat an oil like that it denatures and it turns rancid so now you have a rancid oil that was denate that

was degummed with a neurotoxin and now when you cool that oil back down it's cloudy so they need to um deodorize and de-cloud it and and they use sodium hydroxide, which is a known carcinogen. And then very often they can even use commercial bleaching agents like a mild amounts of chlorine. Not all of them go through that process, but some do. And then it makes it to your shelf. So the issue is not the canola plant per se or the sunflower seed per se. It's the distance between that and the table, which is why I say you really only need four oils in your kitchen.

You need a grass-fed butter or ghee or tallow, and you need coconut oil, which you can use at high temperatures. It doesn't denature at high temperatures, and my preference is small batch extra virgin olive oil. So you're not a fan of something like, can't believe it's not butter. No, those are... It's crazy though, because I get those questions.

Is that an okay butter? Margarine? Yeah, margarine, can't believe it's not butter. Because this is what people grew up with. And especially in the 80s or 90s, they went through the fat-free butter phase. Yeah, they went through the war on fat. I mean, that was the worst thing to ever happen to the morbid obesity and diabetes i'm guilty of it i used that spray on the toast in college yeah i mean most of most of us did but you know the

thing is that it's not fat that makes you fat it's sugar that makes you fat because when we eat sugar our insulin rises when insulin rises the primary role of insulin is not to lower blood sugar. The primary role of insulin is actually to block any other form of energy use in the body, which includes using fat as energy. So if you can't use the fatty acid pathway, if you can't metabolize fatty acids, then where does fat build up? Well, the first place it builds up is in the blood, which is why people that eat the highest amount of sugar have the highest blood fat so if you look at a blood panel what's called a lipid panel and you look at triglycerides hdl cholesterol the healthy cholesterol

vldl cholesterol the very low density lipoprotein the really dangerous one and ldl cholesterol you'll see that um triglycerides are very high in people that have high insulin people that have high insulin are generally people that are eating high amounts of sugar especially refined sugars gotcha okay oh back to diet keto why did you kind of so i don't think that everybody needs to be on keto diet keto reset is really. I do actually have put carbs back into my diet. I eat natural local honey. I do eat berries. I think those things are very safe for you and you become what's called metabolically adaptive.

You actually adapt to having carbohydrate and having meats and fats in your diet. Keto is a great way for people to reset because it's a high fat, low protein, very low carbohydrate diet. It puts your body into a state of ketosis. Your body starts to use something called beta hydroxybutyrate as a fuel source, which is a really low inflammatory fuel source. The diet was originally constructed for addressing epilepsy. Really?

Yeah, because epilepsy a an inflammatory component. So keto dieting using a keto reset is very healthy, it can strip weight off your body, put you into a state of ketosis, kill sugar and hunger cravings. It's very low inflammatory, it's one of the lowest inflammatory diets on the planet, as long as you're eating clean keto. And it's the lowest in something called deuterium depleted water which we could do a whole podcast on that but um people find it fascinating that human beings on a daily basis we manufacture about a hundred gallons of intracellular water every day and i can't process that it's so hard for people to process because how can I manufacture 100 gallons of water

if I only drink half a gallon of water? Right. Well, you make water in your body the same way they make it in space. You take two hydrogens and one oxygen, you slap it together, you have a water molecule. What happens to that water molecule is it instantly enters the mitochondria

and is turned into energy by something called the Krebs cycle and it creates energy for by something called the Krebs cycle. And it creates energy for your body called ATP. So we're not capable of drinking enough water in day to fuel our mitochondria for even 10 minutes. 10% of our body weight is these little batteries inside of our cells called mitochondria. you have about 110 trillion of these and these make every source of energy that human beings are powered by we're not powered by food we eat there we breathe the supplement we take we're powered by one energy source called

atp adenosine triphosphate and we need water in order to make that so the body creates water out of gases and then throws that water into this cycle that breaks it apart and creates energy cool and keto dieting is very low in something called deuterium depleted water which deuterium is heavy water so it actually helps yourselves make lighter water that should be a whole podcast yeah the deuterium deuterium water is a fascinating fascinating subject so many random types of water and you get so excited about i do it's well it's a water molecule with an extra neutron okay if you must know this and this is the part where it goes we are going to do a whole podcast on water the difference between hydrogen water oxygen water alkaline water tap water spring water and filtered water so we're going to do a whole podcast on water the difference between hydrogen water oxygen water alkaline water tap water spring water and filtered water so we're gonna go through it all

nerd out about it hey guys if you know anything about me or the ultimate human podcast you rarely see ads on here i do not just push products i don't let any advertiser on my podcast because i am absolutely obsessed with the types of products that can service the human body in ways that actually have a measurable benefit. One of them is this Echo water filtration bottle. I take this thing literally everywhere that I go. I never get on a flight, leave the house, never get in the car without this Echo bottle. What it does, it makes high part per million hydrogen water on the go. You can take a bottle of water, you can dump it in this little reservoir, you hit this little button right there, and it will actually make high part per million hydrogen

water. You will feel and notice the difference. If you want to get one, you can get it at echoh2o.com. That's E-C-H-O-H-2-O.com. I think there's a 20% discount available on the website right now. I've had this one for several years if you buy one it's going to last you forever it's the water bottle that i literally do not leave home without that's echo e-c-h-o h2o.com now back to the ultimate human podcast um i always tell people if they're going to try a keto diet that you cannot date a keto diet you have to commit and marry a keto diet that you cannot date a keto diet you have to commit and marry a keto diet that's right there's no cheat days that yeah no cheat because people do

that they're like oh it's sunday it's my cheat day why can't you cheat on a keto diet because once you become fat adapted as soon as you put carbohydrate high carbohydrate back into the body then it instantly um will stop processing fat and you're eating a high fat diet. And so now the fat will build up in the blood and it will be stored in the visceral tissue rather than being used as an energy source. Remember, the first preferred source of energy for the body, and there are no exceptions to this rule, is always glucose. So if you have sugar in your blood, you have no choice.

Your body will always choose that source for energy first so you have to bring the glucose down in order to get into ketosis so as soon as you raise your blood sugar raise your glucose and you raise your insulin now your body can't burn fat but you have high amounts of fat in your diet and now you're in a dangerous situation your triglycerides skyrocket you'll see that your dangerous cholesterols your vldl cholesterols uh will skyrocket so keto diet is just like you said the diet that you marry you don't date okay yeah people always ask me since you were doing it you know oh is that what you follow too i am of the you eat very clean i eat clean you eat very clean, though. I eat clean. You eat super clean. I don't follow a diet. I just really enjoy salads. Yeah, but you don't eat a lot of white flour, white rice, white bread, white pasta.

But I do eat it. I just make sure it's not enriched or fortified. Enriched or fortified. But you don't eat a lot of it. But I don't eat a lot. I really cut sugar out quite a bit. I never see you eat sugar. I never really eat it, ever.

I don't know. The occasional piece of eat sugar. I never really eat it ever. Like, I don't know every the occasional like piece of chocolate. But I don't crave it. I quit sugar accidentally. Accidentally? Accidentally. Because literally, we ran out of sugar for our coffee. And I was too lazy to go to the grocery store this before Instacart and the glory of having groceries brought to you. And so i just didn't put it in my coffee in the morning and what i found is that at lunch i wouldn't be craving a snickers bar and at dinner after i ate dinner i wasn't craving haagen-dazs and all it took was it was like a seven to ten day period oh yeah it's a period where you go through the withdrawal and then

you're fine and i was fine but funny enough then i started to crave salt. So then I craved more like crackers and potato chips. But I still limit those. I don't really crave that even as much anymore. Once I got chips out, I think that it really came down. The seed oils. The seed oils. Yeah, there's no like good. I did find one kind of chip.

It was like, it's from Boulder, of course. Yeah. Crunchy Boulder. But I think it literally is called boulder chips but they didn't have seed oils it was like avocado oil excellent so we'll have to check that out well i really should get back on that but okay anyway but i like salads i like adding grilled chicken and just everything like everything in the in the fridge i can find and just throw it in a salad and people think that's weird when i tell people that they think that's really strange why do you think that is well i mean because people just people don't think of salads the

way you think of salads they think of salads as like lettuce a side salad yeah you make a salad with avocados and chicken and it's just nuts and hemp seeds yeah i mean you make you make really healthy salads with lots of stuff in them my family is just known for salads super known for salads yeah okay so okay you want to take one more question trying to keep it to 20 minutes so okay so then i think that's good no i think we actually covered all the alcohol but we could alcohol we could save that for a different one okay so we're telling we got three more minutes. So alcohol.

So here's how alcohol works. First of all, we know now through peer reviewed, published clinical studies that no amount of alcohol is good for you. It used to be that a glass of wine a day keeps the doctor away. It's absolutely not true. There's resveratrol in wine, but you can get resveratrol through supplementation now in much higher

concentrations and much more bioavailable but if you must drink alcohol um it's not so much the alcohol itself it's what the alcohol becomes and alcohol converts into something called acetyl aldehyde which is a poison it poisons your brain um it makes your body acidic so it actually can move the pH of your blood several tenths of a point. Remember, the pH range of the blood is very narrow. It's only about four or five tenths of a point. So when we shift slightly to becoming more acidic, this is the state where we don't feel well. So if we look at what alcohols convert the slowest to both sugar and to acetyl aldehyde, by far, agave-based alcohols, tequila, are way out in front. But you got to skip the margarita part.

Yeah, you have to skip the sugar part. That's the part that people are like, oh, so I can have margaritas. No, that's like a recipe for a hangover. The best is just tequila, ice, either water and a squeeze of fresh lime. And then there's a big gap and then you get to clear alcohols. Like vodka and gin. Like vodkas and gins.

And then there's another gap and that's where you meet red wines, full-bodied red wines, colored alcohols, and then below that are your white wines, Proseccos and your high-bodied red wines um colored alcohols and then below that are your white wines prosecco's and your high sugared wines so the the number one by far is is tequila agave based alcohols takes a very long time and very low conversion to acetyl aldehyde we kind of just quit again i mean we've just basically stopped accidentally. Accidentally. Well, we did a reset in October. And we went down to Columbia and did a stem cell IVs.

And you weren't allowed to drink for 30 days. And I think it was like a two-week period even before that. So almost a month and a half. And then we got back and we just never drank again. We don't crave it. I don't crave it. I think we were always finding a reason to drink. Like, we had a hard day. Let's have a drink.

We had a really great day. We want to celebrate. Let's have a drink. We had a really great day. We want to celebrate. Let's have a drink. We're having a friend over. We made friends for a drink. The kids are coming over. Have a drink. And we were always looking for reasons.

And then I think we started to realize, geez, we really drink a lot. Yeah. And then we just quit. I don't even think about it. I feel so much better. I do. I sleep better. Sleep better.

Feel better. I feel so much. I hate that feeling of waking up with that headache and foggy. Yeah. Now I wake up and do a cold plunge. Oh, God. You're so chatty in the morning, too. I get excited when I get out of that cold plunge.

I'm Captain Chatty. And I like to come in and share my cold fingers with her. And I also like to share my stories about the previous day. I have a lot to get off my chest at 6 in the morning. A lot of words coming out of your mouth in the morning. So I'd like to do more of these. The 20-minute, we call them 20-minute shorts. We try to keep the podcast to 20 minutes.

We'll take your questions. If you have additional questions you'd like to hear us answer or you'd like more details on anything that we covered today, please put them in the comments below. Please remember to like and subscribe to the channel, which gives us the resources to continue to do this. And as always, everything we talk about is just science.