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The Dr. Hyman Show
The Health Conspiracy No One Talks About: Life Insurance, Big Data & Aging | Gary Brecka
01:36:03
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- [00:00]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show.
- [00:03]
Gary Brecka
You could tell them most of the month when someone's going to die.
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To the month. Yeah. And it was, it's and it's a very accurate model. The reason why we were table rating a lot of these and the reason why we were shortening the life expectancy was because of the intervention of chemicals, synthetics and pharmaceuticals. The more pharmaceuticals you were on, the easier it was for us to predict your life expectancy.
- [00:22]
The more you were on, the more likely you're to die sooner.
- [00:24]
The more you're on, the more likely you were to die sooner and the more predictable.
- [00:27]
Dr. Mark Hyman
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- [02:28]
Gary Brecka
I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my.
- [02:32]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand.
- [02:40]
Gary Brecka
Well, you.
- [02:41]
Dr. Mark Hyman
If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for Real time lab insights. And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, well, check out my membership community, Dr. Hyman Plus. And if you're looking for curated trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, Visit my website drhyman.com for my website store and a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products.
- [03:06]
Gary Brecka
Well, Gary, it's so great to have you on the podcast. It's been a long time coming.
- [03:10]
Yeah, it's been a long time coming. I think I've been chasing you longer than you've been chasing me, though.
- [03:15]
Maybe. But here I am in Miami in your studio, in your house.
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Yeah, this is good.
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It's awesome. And we just took this extraordinary tour through your house, which has me seething with jealousy about all the tools and gizmos and gadgets you have to upgrade your health. We're going to get into all that. I'm just so excited about.
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I always say, like, we end up running a podcast before the podcast.
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That's right. We saw your Hydra machines, your ozone sauna, the. Your whole biohacking suite, the red light therapy. It's quite interesting. But, you know, maybe people know or don't know about you, but the thing that I find interesting is you came at this through the lens of sort of understanding why people die, not through the lens of longevity, which is sort of like you were trying to, like, help companies save money by Understanding what was causing death and mortality and trying to help them navigate that. So can you tell us about your background, how you got like the insights about the nature of our chronic disease epidemic, what's going on, why these insurance companies have all this data, what they've learned and why it matters to us.
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So for the better part of my career I was a mortality expert, which essentially means that, you know, we studied mortality, the, the variable basic tables, not, not just putting people on an actuarial curve. Right. I mean we're all on one, right? If you're a 54 year old male, you have a life expectancy of X. If you're a 34 year old female, you have a life expectancy of Y. You're lumped into a massive pool of, of mortality. But when a life insurance company is getting ready to put 25 million or $50 million worth of risk on your life, or an annuity company is getting ready to issue you a spia, what's called a single premium immediate annuity, where you give them a lump sum of ca, guarantee you an income stream for life, or you're getting ready to do what's called a reverse mortgage, which means you get to live in your house but you sell it while you're still alive. All of these are based on mortality. The only thing that matters in those financial services instruments is how many more months does this person have left the earth. So they don't really care where you are on an actuarial curve. Right. They want to know your, adjust the.
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Prices to match when you're going to.
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Die so they don't lose money. And insurance is priced like that. You have super preferred preferred standard. Then you have what's called table ratings.
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So what did you get learned as you sort of started looking at the data and the lab data for people.
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Who are in the pool?
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Cause these companies actually get your blood like.
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Oh yeah, oh, they get your blood, they can take genes, they get all of your medical records, they have all your demographic data. They know. I mean it's a, it's a proctology exam. I mean if you've ever applied for.
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Maybe a full colonoscope.
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Yeah, I don't think you get as much information from a colonoscope as you do a full blown life insurance application. Now I'm not talking about term life insurance. I'm talking about real, whole, whole life life, you know, permanent universal life insurance where people are putting 10 million, 25 million, 50 million of risk on a single life. What happens in those cases is they take not only a deep dive into your demographic data, but, I mean, they get everything. Your divorce decrees, your trust accounts, your bank statements, your brokerage statements, your, you know, your, your work history and all of your medical records. And then before they actually issue the policy, they will essentially send nurse to your house and they will pull whatever biomarker they want.
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So you got to, like, have an inside view of what that is.
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Real inside view. You know, my. I'm. First of all, I'm not a physician. I'm. I'm a human biologist. My undergraduate degrees are in biology. My postgraduate degrees are in human biology. And so I spent eight years in formal education just studying human physiology. And they wanted someone like that on the team with the, with the rest of, you know, the MDs, and an actuarial scientist, because we were trying to really build a model that was very accurate, probabilistic model that was accurate. What really emerged from this big data. I always say that if this database could see the light of day, it would permanently change the face of humanity.
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Yeah, it. It would spill the beans. Gary.
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Yeah.
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Let's go.
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Well, I. I wish I had, like, secretly downloaded it, you know, like one of those government conspiracies, and I had it on a flash drive, you know, because trust me, I would put it in the public domain, probably go to prison for the rest of my life, but I would, I would get it out there. So I do, I do my best to get it out there with what I've got in my. The very unpopular information that emerged from this, or I shouldn't say unpopular, I should say anti mainstream, was that the reason why the majority of people are not living healthier, happier, longer, more fulfilling lives were because of what we called modifiable risk factors? Right. There were the non modifiable factors and then there were the modifiable factors. You could have a restricted range of motion from a massive injury or surgical procedure. That's not modifiable. You have, you know, spinal rods in your. In your back. Those are not modifiable risk factors. Modifiable risk factors were diet, lifestyle supplementation, exercise, mobility, and. And in my case, I would add to that significant changes in your blood biomarkers.
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Yeah.
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And so what we noticed was that the reason why we were table rating a lot of these and the reason why we were shortening the life expectancy was because of the intervention of chemicals, synthetics, and pharmaceuticals. And the more pharmaceuticals you were on, the easier it was for us to predict your life expectancy.
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The more you were on, the more likely you're die sooner.
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The more you're on, the more likely you were to die sooner and more predictable because not only could we predict the onset of other conditions, but we could predict the severity of and how quickly you would succumb to them. And so we, we tell them most.
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Of the month when someone's going to die based on the data.
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To the month. Yeah. And it was, it's, it's a very accurate model. And I, I get a lot of flack for that because people say, well, if you could predict life expectancy to the month, which I don't do anymore, that, you know, you would be Jesus or you would have won a Nobel Prize. And I've never won a Nobel Prize and I'm not Jesus. I believe in Jesus. But. And the reason why, you know, they say that is because they don't realize how accurate the science is. But if you, but if you want to know how accurate life insurance companies are, annuity companies are at predicting death, just look at what happened during the 2008, 2009 financial services crisis. We had 364 banks fail. You didn't have a single life insurance company fail. In fact, some of the largest institutions, aig, whose credit derivatives division was taking the company under, were bailed out by the life insurance. Yeah, they are some of the most solvent institutions on the planet. They're some of the highest rated financial institutions on the planet because they know, they know, they're really, they know how.
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To manage the risk because they understand the biology. So the things that came up were modifiable things. And there were things you could see on blood work that you could see by their.
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You could absolutely see it on blood work. So, so things like. What were you looking at? So we, we looked at three main areas and when we would look through your blood work, we would look at glycemic control, how well you controlled your blood sugar over a lifetime. Because we saw that hyperinsulinemia, elevated hemoglobin A1c, and poor glycemic control was a risk factor, was what we called a comorbidity.
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So were the insurance companies measuring insulin?
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They were measuring insulin, glucose and hemoglobin A1C.
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That's amazing because Gary, less than 1% of all lab tests in America done by physicians include an insulin level, which is probably one of the most important biomarkers for longevity and risk.
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No question.
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And it's something we use as core part of function, health and our offerings company I co founded to help people understand their own lab data because it's so critical, and it's amazing to me that the people who know how to manage risk are actually measuring it.
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Yes.
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And not doctors.
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What's interesting is you would get 15, 18 or 20 years of medical records on someone and you would see the atherosclerotic, the arteriosclerotic issues. You would see the cardiovascular disease, you'd see the very, very, very low levels of statin controlled LDL cholesterol, but you would see extreme proliferation in cardiovascular disease. You would see early mortality in these groups because of what they called non correlated events, hormonal events. What our scientific team drew back to cell wall, cell membrane dysfunction, early onset. Not just early onset dementia or Alzheimer's, but all forms of cognitive decline. You know, we knew, for example, that LDL cholesterol, for example, was, was not a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. An independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease.
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That's a big statement.
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Yeah. And that is a material fact, by the way, because.
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Because the, the insurance companies are not selling statins, so. No, they're not actually. No, they're actually looking at what data is the most relevant. And LDL is a factor, but it's not by itself the factor. It's really metabolic health, which you measure by looking at insulin and blood sugar and A1C. And we wanted to see, you know.
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What was the chance that this person would have LDL cholesterol called to the arterial wall, not in what was the presence of LDL cholesterol. You know, if they were hyperinsulinemic, then they had significantly higher incidence of plaquing, scarring, narrowing and other forms of cardiovascular disease. But the centenarians, you know, not once in my entire career. And I don't know that this, I'm not saying this is a blanket statement, but in my career, we processed death claims too, and we didn't see a single death claim on a centenarian, someone that lived to age 100. At that time. Many of the policies would, would do what they call endow at age 100. So at age 100, the policy would just pay out. It would pay the death claim. So if you're lucky enough to live to 100, you could screw your kids. Like, I just got my $20 million life insurance.
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The person who's still alive gets his life insurance.
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Person that's still alive.
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That's pretty cool.
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Yeah. And there are other things called accelerated death claims, you know, where they would actually accelerate the payout while the person was alive. They had it if they had a terminal illness.
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Yeah.
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But what was really interesting is I didn't process a single death claim on a centenarian, not one who lived over age 100 that did not have clinically elevated levels of LDL cholesterol at the time of their death. Because very often we had blood work on these people. You know, they'd be in ciscare, living facilities or other kind of facilities and we would actually have the, the, the data. And, and due to that, for things like, you know, we, we followed trends in calcium supplementation in the elderly and really in the fact that they weren't really impacting, you know, they weren't impacting bone, bone density and, and so osteopenic patients that were put on high doses of calcium still became osteoporotic.
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That's right.
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And, and, and it's the vitamin D. Yeah, vitamin D and K2. Like, I mean that was another one. You know, we, we, it was 20.
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Did you measure nutrient levels in these populations?
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We didn't measure nutrient levels. And you know, if I had known then what I know now, I think we probably would have measured nutrient levels. But you could, you could surmise from the data because you could see their diet, their lifestyle, alcohol consumption, the medications that they were on and you could actually follow certain clinical deficiencies. Like vitamin D3 was a big one for us. We would see clinical deficiencies in vitamin D3 and I'm talking like single digit, low double digit D3. Not, not bad. Oh yeah, yeah. And you would be, it's common, surprised how many people have that level of deficiency in, in D3. So they would have these long running clinical deficiencies in vitamin D3, let's say nanogram per deciliter, between 7 and 25, you know, even below the lowest threshold for most labs, which would be 30, 200. And I still think 30 is clinically deficient.
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Definitely.
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Yeah. But you would see these, these very low levels of vitamin D3 for years and years and years in the medical record. And then eventually the, the, the patient would present to a primary care physician with rheumatoid arthritis, like symptoms. And I make sure that I say that correctly because they didn't have rheumatoid arthritis. You know, very often we know that, you know, medical error is the third leading cause of death. There's a great study, 2016 study done by Harvard, I think it was actually repeated by Hopkins and got worse in 2019, if you want to look up the study. But yeah, there was a National Academy.
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Of Science report on that too.
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Yeah, I mean looking at all the ICD 9, ICD 10, 11 codes. You know, that medical error was the third leading cause of death. And we saw this repeatedly in our, in our insurance, actuarial underwriting, because, so take this patient that had clinical deficiency and vitamin D3, and they present to their primary care and they start describing the symptoms. You know, my, my soles of my feet are sore and achy. When I get out of bed in the morning to walk to the bathroom and take my first pee, my ankles just ache. Takes me 45 minutes to get the motor going. You know, over the last few years, it's moved from my knees now to my hips and low back. I'm really stiff across the shoulders and, and, and lately it's, you know, been hard for me to make a fist, like a tight fist. You would be shocked how many primary carers would just say, you know, Mark, you've got rheumatoid arthritis.
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Take this $50,000 year drug.
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No RHA factors, no SED rates. No. No diagnostic work.
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They call it seronegative rheumatoid arthritis. Yeah, that's what they call it.
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I'm adopting that saying.
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No, it's a, it's a well known.
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It'S an actually thing.
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Yeah.
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Okay, so. So we check it out. We knew about it, we just didn't know the name of it then. And so say, you know, we're just. The good news for you is we're going to put you on something called a corticosteroid. You're going to take this oral steroid and everything's going to be fine. And so methotrexate, whatever the corticosteroid was, and what we realized in the record, because we were looking at hundreds of thousands of patient records, was that if you started a corticosteroid, you had six years and one day until you were having a joint replacement.
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Because initially they, steroids definitely are not good. They cause osteoporosis. They, you know, degrade your bones. They can cause avascular necrosis of the hip. I mean, they're pretty bad. Yeah.
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And avascular necrosis of the hip is what's leading to the hip fractures.
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The femoral head basically means the blood just flow stops to the hip and then the hip.
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Yeah, that artery that goes in the femoral head is, is compromised. And, and now you get no blood flow. And then you get that osteoporotic condition in one of the highest load areas of the body. And, and you know, most people think that grandma fell and broke her hip, but her hip broke and then she fell.
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Yeah.
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An important distinction, right? That can happen, the fracture causing the fall rather than the fall causing the fracture.
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Yeah.
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And that was one of the reasons we called that the triad of death. And I know you're really familiar with that, hip fractures and their propensity to accelerate mortality, but it's, it wasn't the hip fracture that accelerated.
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So all this amazing stuff you did with this sort of learning about how the insurance companies look at death, mortality, risk factors, it taught you a lot about what to think about in terms of how we create a healthy human. The opposite.
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Yeah.
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So you went from like managing death to managing life.
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Yeah.
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Because can you talk about like, what now kind of you switch to in terms of your thinking and how, how it kind of started your journey and what you're doing, because you're doing this really extraordinary, Gary. You're basically kind of synthesizing and collating and putting together a lot of different modalities and strategies to help upgrade people's biology.
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No doubt.
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It's something we never learned in medical school, which is how do you create a healthy human? Like, it's just not a course and it doesn't get taught. And there's no understanding of what is health. It's not just the absence of disease.
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Most would say it's the absence of.
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It's not, it's something else. And when you have it, you know it, you feel awesome, your brain's clear, you have energy, you sleep great, you can do whatever you want to do. You know, you can basically be free from the burdens of a lot of the suffering that many people struggle with. Even if it's not a disease. I joke and I say there's this really terrible thing that most Americans suffer from called FLC syndrome. That's when you feel like crap.
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Yeah, there's a lot of FLC going around.
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It's so bad. I mean, we just launched a 10 day detox program, which I wrote a book about 10 years ago, and in 10 days, people have up to a 70% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases by just a simple set of lifestyle changes in a week.
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Believable. I wholly believe that and subscribe to that because in these modifiable risk factors, first of all, I was prohibited by law from having any contact with the patient or the treating physician. So even if I saw a life threatening drug interaction, I couldn't pick up the phone and warn the physician. And sometimes the MIB wouldn't catch these. Right, These, these thrombolytic combinations of, of different pharmaceuticals. And, and you'd want to contact the physician because it wasn't done on purpose, it was by error. And the system's very good at catching things like narcotic surfers and things like that, but it's not very good at catching contraindications. And, and just to finish the D3 example, so here's a nutrient deficiency, clinical deficiency in this. Now, now, now they're on a corticosteroid. It was so accurate that I would advance your age, artificially advance your age six years and one day. And I would schedule the joint replacement for you. And then as soon as I scheduled the joint replacement, I would begin to reduce your. At that age, I would begin to reduce your ambulatory profile. How well you ambulate. And as you reduced ambulation, what we realized was as you reduced mobility, you would bring in all of the diseases that begin.
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Less exercise, more disease.
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Yeah, it's an, it's a direct correlation.
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And I always say if you don't move, you won't.
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That's a good one. I say aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort. But, you know, the more more aggressively we pursue comfort, the faster we age.
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Yeah.
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And so, you know, even, even as.
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These chairs are pretty comfortable. Gary. I don't know.
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Yeah, but we're not going to stay here, brother. We're not gonna stay here. We're gonna put on a weighted vest and go do some pull ups after this.
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Okay.
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And you're getting in the hydrogen bath.
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Okay.
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I'm excited to hear how that works out.
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I just want to see how I look without my shirt on.
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I know what that's, that's going all over the Internet, guys. Www.ultimatehuman.com to see more time of this shirt off. But, so, so now they have this clinical deficiency in D3. They've been put on a corticosteroid. I've advanced their age artificially, six years in one day. I've reduced their ambulatory profile. And now I bring in the, you know, our algorithm would start to bring in all the diseases that exacerbate with reduced mobility. And then what you would see is we could predict not only the onset of, but the severity of and how quickly you would succumb to a condition. So when you start to rewind that back. This person died early of a disease that they never should have had because of mobility that was reduced because of an operation that was not necessary, because of medication that wasn't required, because of a condition that didn't exist. Had they taken 5 or 9,000 IUs, 10,000 IUs of vitamin D3 daily with little K2 and applied a load to their bones, that trajectory would have been completely different. Something as simple as that.
- [21:41]
That's true. I mean I'm thinking we had vaccine mandates. I think we should have vitamins D mandates.
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I totally agree.
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I think, you know, we, I totally agree because I actually shared this data with some people during the administration around how serious it was for Covid. If you had low vitamin D, you would.
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Second leading cause of morbidity and Covid.
- [21:59]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
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Gary Brecka
You would get more likely to end up in the hospital and die if you had low vitamin D. And from the Israeli data, if your vitamin D was over 50 and the reference range is 20 to 30 depending on the lab, if it was over 50, there was nobody who died.
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I was actually just going to say that because I was looking at big data, you know, reporting during that time frame too. And. But in functional ranges of 60 to 80 nanograms, there was not a single death.
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Yeah, that's, that's extraordinary because vaccines don't even do that, right?
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No, they don't prevent the infection or the spread. I mean that's, that's a whole nother issue.
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But.
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Oh yeah, you know, and if, and if you want to really see the impact of vaccines, just follow the life insurance companies. Right. So people tell me all the time, oh well, you know, they don't, they don't factor in whether or not you've been vaccinated. I go, you don't think that they factor in whether or not you've been vaccinated? Why do you, why do you not think that? And they say, well, they don't ask the question on the application. Like they don't have to ask.
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They can see from your blood, they.
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Get it from your medical record. It's just like if you told, if you answered on the, you know, on your application, I'm a non smoker. Have you ever smoked? No. You know, have, have you ever, you know, vaped or.
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They check your urine, your blood for.
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If you show up with nicotine in your blood, I'm going to table rate you as a smoker. You know, it's just like if you tell, you know, there's that section on alcohol, how many drinks a week? 1 to 2, 2 to 5, 5 to 7. We never believed what they said. If you had liver cirrhosis. We, yeah, we.
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Table radio underestimate how much they exercise, they eat and overestimate how much they exercise when you ask them.
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Yeah, it's very true. So we just went off the data and that.
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And that led you kind of thinking about how to create a different approach to helping people gain health. Right. And that's where you sort of led to your path. And you're kind of known as sort of this biohacking genius. And I think most people may not even know what biohacking is. When I first kind of heard the term, like, what is that? And I don't quite get it. And I was thinking about it, and really, as I've sort of come to understand what it is, it's really the application of tools and technologies and approaches to life that, that actually create health that are not disease treatments per se, but that work by activating the body's own healing reparative mechanisms.
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No question.
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And so in a sense, that's what functional medicine is for me. It's the ability to understand how we deviate from health and how to create health by removing the bad. So putting in the good stuff and a lot of the technology and tools we looked at as we toured your apartment was basically tools that helped up regulate different biological systems. Whether it's your mitochondria, reducing oxidative stress, reducing inflammation, detoxification. These are all things that are fundamental to creating health that we don't learn about in medical school, that we don't know how to apply. But you've actually come up with an approach that includes all these modalities. So I'd love you to sort of talk about, you know, how do you think of biohacking? What is it?
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Yeah.
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What are the most important aspects of it that we should be focused on? Because there's a million things out there, right. And you probably have 95% of them.
- [24:53]
Yeah, yeah, I do.
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Or maybe 98, I don't know. So. So how do you separate the wheat from the chaff?
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Here's my big first line rule, is that the best biohacking devices, best biohacking modalities, equipment, what have you mimic what we get from Mother Nature. And so, for example, we get three things from Mother Nature. Mainly we get oxygen from the air, we get light from the sun, we get magnetism from the earth. And the further we get away from those basics, you know, the sicker we become. And the truth is that we are so disconnected from nature now, we're disconnected from each other too. I mean, deep, meaningful relationships, sense of purpose, sense of community. You know, there were a lot of mortality factors that we would study that actually when, when an elderly Person lost their sense of community, their loss of spouse.
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Yes.
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Or family. Or became isolated, which is the fastest way to accelerate all cause mortality nominess.
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Is like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day in terms of its mortality rate.
- [25:54]
I don't know that that's true, but I would totally agree with that off the cuff because we saw it in the data. You know, we, we, we call it broken heart syndrome.
- [26:02]
Yeah.
- [26:03]
Essentially, you know, spouses that were. And it wasn't so much the loss of the spouse, it was being thrust into immediate isolation. Right. Because you know, mom and dad live, you know, five states away and the kids are busy and they're raising kids and they see them on Christmas and Easter and New Year's like most families. And then one spouse falls ill and passes and now the other spouse is totally isolated. And that isolation, we know that in all forms of animal species and human beings, isolation, it, you know, reduces your, your lifespan.
- [26:34]
So biohacking is having a friend.
- [26:35]
So, so, so, so back to biohacking. I would say the best devices, but I think it is actually that mimic mother Nature. Right. So, so things like mineral salts, amino acids, nutrients that you would find in nutrient dense soils, you know, you would physiologic impact you can have on people just by putting them on a complex of B vitamins, vitamin B12, some methylfolate, which are basic core nutrients required for the process of methylation. And when they're deficient, they become like the hub of the wheel. They have all of these spokes and people think that they have an autoimmune disease and they have a mental illness and they have a weight gain issue and they have sleep disruption and they have anxiety, they have ADD or adhd. And the truth is they very often have nutrient deficiencies. And so if I was to, to say, you know, what are the best biohacking devices? Those are the devices that mimic mother nature. And so if you didn't have the budget to spend on those, you should be able to duplicate those by committing time, you know, in, in nature, exposing your skin to sunlight, getting first light in the morning, learning to do basic breath work, touching the surface of the earth, grounding, earthing, which is a very real thing.
- [27:42]
They're all super expensive things to do, right?
- [27:44]
Yeah, yeah. Cost, exactly. I think in fact this morning I, I just as, you know, as, as sort of a, a joke, I, I said, you know, I'm taking my morning antidepressant and you know, and I was out on the balcony getting sunlight and just doing some breath work. And I and I listed the side effects of enhanced mood, increased focus, concentration and then I said, you know, don't, don't, don't you know, forget your your mood enhancer that you know the best neurotropic. And I just did a round of breath work and gotten a cold plunge.
- [28:13]
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- [29:55]
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- [29:57]
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- [30:12]
Gary Brecka
Now we have these devices, cold plunges, which is essentially mimic being hormetic stresses that we might have, you know, found just in our normal thermostat, in our.
- [30:22]
Houses, in our, in our, in our TPS or.
- [30:24]
Yeah. And our bodies react very well to certain stresses. You know, we got to stop thinking about stress as a, as a negative. You know, very often it can, it can be what makes you resilient. The body very often strengthens in response to stress. I know, I know that you know this but.
- [30:39]
Yeah.
- [30:39]
So when, when we talk about biohacking devices, you know, my favorite would be, you know, PEMF mats Pulse electromagnetic field. These mimic the logos current of the earth. So if you don't have time to earth or ground come in contact with mother earth earth, you can use a PMF mat. My probably my favorite device is a, is a red light therapy bed. Full body red light therapy and red light therapy. I mean the science is in on red light therapy. It's very hard to overdose on it if you dose it 10 to 20 minutes a day. Even if you're using very powerful nanometer, I mean milliwatts of irradiance and you're using the right nanometer wavelengths of therapeutic light because you emit the portions of the light spectrum that are damaging and you concentrate the portions of the light spectrum that you would get from the sun that are very healthy. And we're very photovoltaic beings. I mean light is a very important component to health.
- [31:29]
It really regulates our mitochondria inflammation.
- [31:32]
I mean certain wavelengths of light, for example in the mitochondria will actually, in the Krebs cycle, you'll see that cytochrome C oxidase will bind with a gas called mitochondrial nitric oxide. And when it's bound to mitochondrial nitric oxide, it's, it's sort of like a one armed man. It can either shake hands with nitric oxide or it can shake hands with oxygen, but it can't do both. So in order to, in order to bind oxygen and upstage the mitochondria, you know, to, to have this aerobic cycle which is roughly 16 times more efficient than the anaerobic cycle, it has to let go of mitochondrial nitric oxide. And one way to do this is to pass red light light through the skin and through the wall of the mitochondria. It will literally kick nitric oxide out of the mitochondria. You can measure this in the serum of the blood you can actually do nitric oxide testing pre and post red light therapy and measure the impact of this release of mitochondrial nitric oxide, which will cause a temporary vasodilation and then it will force oxygen to dock. Well, now, if you're forcing oxygen into the mitochondria, I mean, that's arguably.
- [32:37]
That's the fuel.
- [32:38]
That's the tip of the root. Right. That's as deep as you get in the soil. Everything improves from there. Yeah, literally everything.
- [32:44]
That's what your mitochondria do. They take oxygen and food and they combust them and run them down an assembly line to create energy. And energy is the key to health and life and everything else.
- [32:53]
Yeah. And I think a lot of times we gloss over that a little bit, like, well, the cell has a lot of energy. But what happens when a cell has energy? Well, it can eliminate waste, it can repair, it can detoxify, it can regenerate. And so, so I would make a bold enough statement, and I'm making it in front of you, so you take issue this if you feel it's inaccurate. But nearly every form of pathology and disease known to mankind is a shift in metabolism. It's a shift in the metabolism, basically, in the mitochondria. The sicker the mitochondria become, the sicker the host will become, and the more fertile you are for all forms of pathology and disease. These are not things that are happening to us. They are things that are happening within us. And so if I was to say what, you know, what's your favorite, you know, biohacking device would be a red light therapy bed. And then, and then you can add things like exercise with oxygen therapy, you know, ewat. I mean, we know that athletes that would train at altitude would have a proliferative. Yeah. Perform better. Why? Because you get, you know, enhanced. Yeah. Erythropoiesis. But you essentially are upgrading the mitochondrial mitochondria.
- [34:03]
Yeah.
- [34:04]
And you, you're adding red blood cells to the bloodstream so you have more taxis to shuttle oxygen. But, and, and so these are the kinds of devices, you know, I have an EMF tent around my bed. And people are like, well, you're getting crazy about ems. Well, you know, ancestrally, we didn't really come in contact with a lot of EMFs. And I think that the jury is. Is still out on the implications of.
- [34:23]
5G and better safe than sorry kind of. Yeah, you have a tent over your battery. We think it's not actually helpful for your body to have this exposure constantly to EMFs. And Wi Fi and 5G. But by putting the scent over your bed, you block it at night and that improves your sleep and feel different.
- [34:40]
Yeah. And if you look at things as they occur naturally in nature, like if you were to take a cup and scoop it out of a running stream and you were to analyze what's in that water, you would find high mineral content, first of all. And not just potassium and magnesium and sodium, the big ones that are in most electrolyte supplements. You would find all of the other trace minerals. Boron, zinc, zinc, selenium, manganese, molybdenum. You find all of these that, that they're not the sort of headline minerals that most people think about. But if you, if you back that up and you, and you say, well, what if you become mineral deficient? Well, you, you need 12 essential minerals to, to build bone. You know, you don't just need calcium. Calcium combines with phosphorus to form hydroxyapatite, which really makes our bones dense. But in order for that to occur, you need these 12 minerals. And so if you're not getting the 12 minerals, you need to biohack that. You need to, to take, you know, add a mineral salt to your, your morning routine. Maybe it's a Celtic salt, maybe it's a Baja gold sea salt, which is my favorite. But just adding the right raw materials back to the human body, it is astounding what you, you see happen in human beings when you give their body the raw material it needs to do its job. You know, my other favorite device would probably be hydrogen water. And certainly filtering your water. I mean, I mean, I think people should get tap water permanently out of their life. We know that. It's, you know, it's got neurotoxins in it, like floor so many contaminants.
- [36:02]
It's incredible.
- [36:03]
Yeah, it really is. I mean, it is mind numbing. I actually just did a post of backwashing the filter, the four stage RO filter in my house into my bathtub. And Miami is considered, you know, really healthy water. The municipal water supply is like generally accepted as safe the grass, but it's very high in PFAs and, and, and polya phenols.
- [36:29]
Forever chemicals.
- [36:30]
Yeah, forever chemicals. And so it's, it's not voodoo science, you know, to, to start biohacking yourself. It doesn't even need, you don't even need a big budget. You know, I tell people they're starting out with cold plunging just to take ice, put it in a Tupperware. I mean, take water, put it in a Tupperware and stack it in your freezer. Throw the big cubes of ice in, and when you wake up in the morning, toss it in there and 30 minutes later, get in a cold plunge. Yeah. Expose your body to these hormetic stresses. You know, mineralize the body, hydrate the body. I mean, I, you know, before we got on here, I was showing you the oxidative reduction potential of hydrogen water. I think if you have a choice between drinking regular water or hydrogen water, you should be drinking hydrogen water. If you have a choice between drinking tap water or filter water, there's. You should be filtering your, your water supply. So I think biohacking is, is a way of getting us back to the basics. If you're not getting sunlight, you need to be supplementing with vitamin D3. It's probably the most pandemic deficiency in the world.
- [37:27]
It is. So basically what you're talking about are these things that have been used by humans forever, such as being on the earth, walking on the dirt with your feet, being in sunlight.
- [37:39]
Yeah.
- [37:42]
Getting water from the river that's full of minerals. I mean, these are really sort of simple things. And the breath works. Sunlight and exercise. These are all biohacking techniques. So I think the biohacking people get confused. I think it's, to me, it's really just what is the science of creating health?
- [37:58]
Yes.
- [37:59]
And functional medicine is sort of the medical version of that. But there's so much that we can do on our own to upgrade our biology and to actually activate these healing systems in our body that are why we get these chronic illnesses.
- [38:13]
No question. And we saw these, and then we would have these in the mortality space. We'd have these things called comorbidities. Right. So I don't believe in that. You don't?
- [38:24]
No. Because. Because they're not comorbidities because they're all connected, underlying by the same mechanism. So hypertension, heart failure, diabetes, heart disease. You know, these are things.
- [38:34]
Yeah. They're not independent.
- [38:35]
No kidney failure, fatty liver. These are all comorbidities. But they're all have the same root cause. You fix the cause and everything gets better.
- [38:43]
I could not agree more with you.
- [38:46]
They're not like random events. Oh, this person happened to get five different chronic diseases. No, they're all the same problem. They're just called different things at their end stage. But they're caused by insulin resistance most of the time.
- [38:57]
First of all, I would wholly agree with you. We would see things, insulin resistance being the worst. We looked at glycemic Control hormone balance. Even though hormones weren't being therapeutically tested or measured. We would look at hormone balance and then we would look at certain nutrient deficiencies. Vitamin D3, B12, major nutrients in the body.
- [39:20]
As part of the insurance screening of.
- [39:22]
The insurance screening for the underlying. Because one of the things we wanted to do was assess the chance that this person would correct their behavior and because the last thing you wanted to do was issue a policy at one level and then they correct it.
- [39:35]
And like I'm working with John Hancock and they're all in on helping their policyholders improve their health. And they have a whole vitality program, they're offering wellness services, they're offering even cancer screening with a multi cancer detection test gallery.
- [39:49]
Do you know why?
- [39:50]
Because it saves them money.
- [39:52]
Yes. Because if I issue a policy now and then I can improve your health and you live longer. I collect more premiums.
- [39:58]
That's right.
- [39:59]
You will notice that the annuity companies don't do that. Because the annuity companies, their risk is that you live too long.
- [40:05]
Yeah.
- [40:05]
Not that you die early.
- [40:06]
Yeah.
- [40:07]
The insurance, A life insurance company doesn't want you to die too soon because they want to collect.
- [40:11]
You want to be aligned with the life insurance insurance.
- [40:13]
Yeah. You don't want to be aligned with the annuity companies. Probably going to get.
- [40:16]
But it's fascinating, it's fascinating that they, you know, this is a financial incentive for them to actually get people healthier. Because it saves them money.
- [40:24]
Yes. And it's. And it's done after the policy is issued. Because if I can issue you a standard policy and that can turn you into a super preferred.
- [40:31]
Yeah.
- [40:32]
Then that's, that's a win because I issue the policy with a 26 year life expectancy and if I can get your life expectancy to 37 years more then that's a major win. On the other hand, if you're an annuity company and I take a payment from you and I'm going to guarantee you an income stream for life, the shorter your life, the larger my return.
- [40:52]
Yeah.
- [40:52]
And so in fact there was a lot of arbitrage financial services instruments and during my day that have been outlawed since where people would buy life insurance and annuities and pair the two because one was the risk of early death, one was the risk of late death. So back to what we were saying, there would be underlying issues like much to what you're saying. We would see people that were clinically deficient in testosterone, for example, men and women. And so this erythropoietic pressure on the bone marrow to create new red blood cells would go down, and they would be borderline anemic for decades. Right? They would just. They would just. They didn't have classic anemia, right? But their RBC count would be very, very low. Their hemoglobin would be very, very low. Their mean corpuscular volumes and mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentrations would be very, very low. The red cell distribution width would be very high. So what would happen is they, Their, their. Their bodies were carrying oxygen very poorly. They were essentially suffocating to death. And in almost all of these cases, we would see this progression of events. So the, the hormone levels would decline. As the hormone levels would decline, the blood counts would decline. As the blood counts would decline, they would become. Become increasingly more hypoxic. As they became more hypoxic, they were more. Their, their blood would become more acidic. As they became more acidic, they were more fertile to other forms of pathology and disease. And along this way, almost all of these patients would become sleep deprived. You know, they would, they, they would have major sleep disruption. Because when you become really hypoxic, you know, the brain wakes you up by.
- [42:27]
Yeah, yeah. When you go to altitude, you can't sleep well.
- [42:30]
Right?
- [42:30]
People, like, fly to Aspen and whatever, they.
- [42:32]
Because you're hypoxic, so it doesn't let you get into deep or REM sleep. And you start. Once you hit the sleep cycle, that's the end of the road. You know, I mean, we, I think sleep is our human superpower.
- [42:42]
Yeah. And I was, I was in Bolivia this year, and we went to like, 16,000ft to this.
- [42:48]
16,000.
- [42:48]
Or maybe it was 14. It was really high.
- [42:50]
14 or 16 is high.
- [42:51]
It was really high. I mean, this. You land in, in La Paz, and it's. The airport's at 13,000ft. Feet.
- [42:57]
Yeah.
- [42:58]
And you, like, get off the plane, you're like, yeah. But we got up to this hotel in the middle of nowhere because we were going to this cell flats and we were crossing over to, I think, Chile, and I got really hypoxic. Like, I checked my, my O2 sats, and they were like, in the 60s. Wow.
- [43:16]
Not your pulse oxy.
- [43:18]
No, no, no. My oxygen saturation, which usually as a doctor, you're, like, intubated in the ICU at that level.
- [43:23]
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [43:23]
I said to my wife, I said, hey, can you go tell the guy that I need the oxygen tank? They brought it in, and I put it on, and he's like, we'll just take it back in a few minutes. I'm like, no, you're going to leave with me and somebody else needs it. You can go get it in the middle of the night. But I was pretty frightening. And my wife stayed up the whole night watching me because she was worried I was going to die. But hypoxia is a real thing. But it's also hormetic stress in the right dose. So it's really about the dose. If you stay up at altitude too long, you're going to die. But if you do it for short bursts, it's actually, actually activates your healing system. So a lot of the technologies that you know are involved that are biohacking.
- [44:04]
For example, ewat exercises with oxygen therapy is making that hyperoxic, hypoxic state. And actually, and there's a lot of.
- [44:11]
Gizmos and equipment and people can buy those things too. But I think the basics are also biohacking. Eating well is biohacking, no question. Phytohormesis, which is taking a lot of these plant compounds that upregulate these, these various longevity pathways is biohacking. Having your nutrient status optimized is biohacking.
- [44:29]
Yes.
- [44:29]
Exercise, breath, work, eating whole foods, getting into a routine relationships, having your nutrients that upregulate all the biochemical reactions in your body. All that I say is mostly free and is available to all of us. And even hot and cold therapies, you can take a hot bath and cold.
- [44:46]
Bath and most of us don't want to do that. That's why I say aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort. We would see the more, more, the more aggressively people pursue comfort, the faster they age. Right. We gotta just stop telling grandma not to go outside. It's too hot, Mark.
- [45:03]
Every time I get the urge to exercise, I lie down till it goes away.
- [45:11]
That's not a good plan.
- [45:12]
No, but it was interesting. She, you know, she came back from the hospital once my, my sister had died and her husband, my stepfather, died and you know, she lived near me, but she couldn't really live on her own. So I moved her into my house after she had an episode of heart failure. And you know, she was just overweight. She didn't really eat great. She didn't obviously didn't listen to me.
- [45:32]
Yeah, I mean, no one wants to listen to their. I even provided like the best functional medicine doc on the planet meals for.
- [45:40]
Like, you know, three weeks to just get her started. She didn't eat anything. And I took her in my house. I literally locked her up like I, she had no car, there was no Uber, there was no delivery where we live in the Massachusetts. So she had to eat what I fed her. I made her get on an exercise bike with oxygen because she was hypoxic. I got her nutrient status up, made her take her vitamins. I basically just treated her because I had her captive. And she got off the oxygen, she was able to live alone again. She was able to recover from her heart failure. It was quite amazing to see how quickly she lost a ton of weight.
- [46:15]
Yeah.
- [46:16]
And you know, I had her, I had her locked up in a kind of a hymen prison.
- [46:20]
You know, there was a Nobel laureate prize winner for, for multi step oxygen therapy. It was Otto Warburg's. Wasn't Otto Warburg, he also won a Nobel Prize, but Otto Warburg's cohort that actually did the majority of this work on, on multi step oxygen therapy. It's just fascinating. You know, even taking deconditioned elderly patients, they really can't exercise. And even exposing them to heat to elevate their blood, I mean to elevate their heart rate a little bit. And then running a nasal cannulus of oxygen and looking at how fast the mitochondria begin to recover. Yeah, they sputter and they, it's like, you know, starting an old motorcycle and it fires and backfires and then all of a sudden you see these things come back.
- [47:07]
Yeah. So we kind of understand the basic foundations of creating health, which is. So we all kind of agree, but all these new technologies. I think there's some just sort of curiosity I have about red light therapy and hydrogen water and some of these tools. Can we dive a little bit more into the light therapy? Because I think people talk about it, there's all these red light devices, everybody's using them. But I don't think most people understand the science behind it and the biology of what it does. You mentioned briefly how it affects nitric oxide in the cells and gets rid of it and allows oxygen to come in and activate the mitochondria. But can you talk about one, what is the science behind how this works? Works to, you know, what, what does it do in terms of improving health and, and why should people be using it?
- [47:51]
So, so basic, you know, basic overview of light, first of all is, is light can be damaging and light can be therapeutic. And we have visible light and we have invisible light. So light sort of follow, doesn't sort of. It follows this spectrum. You have X ray, which is a light. Right. Which is a Can be very, very damaging. Then you have ultraviolet, and these are non visible spectrums. You have ultraviolet, uva, uvb, which are the, you know, rays from the sun that cause skin cancer and burn your skin. These are also non visible. And then you have a very narrow sliver of light, which is the visible spectrum, the red, orange, green, blue, yellow, indigo, violet. You have this very narrow spectrum of light. And within that is the red light spectrum. And I'll come back to that in a second. And then above that you have infrared and near infrared. And, and not all infrared and near infrared are the same. As you get higher in the wavelengths, you excite different chromophores in the body.
- [48:45]
So what's a chromophore?
- [48:46]
So like water is a chromophore. And so an infrared sauna, if you lay in, in an infrared light bed, you don't get hot and you don't sweat. Why is that? That's because that's a lower wavelength of light. So it's not actually causing the water chromophore to vibrate, create friction, which creates heat and causes you to sweat. So in an infrastructure infrared sauna, which is a very high wavelength, usually over 1100 nanometers or higher, you're going to create heat and you're going to sweat. Below that, you're still in the infrared spectrum, but you're not creating wavelengths that cause friction and create heat. So something very special happens in the red light and near infrared and infrared spectrum. This slice of light is very therapeutic to human beings. We know that it improves collagen, elastin, fibrin. We also know that that's all your connective tissue. That's your connective tissue which is often.
- [49:44]
Very inflamed and that causes pain or dysfunction.
- [49:47]
Yes. I mean, it's not just how our skin appears. Right. I mean, we all want our skin to look better and you know, red light, even have some FDA authorizations for, for skin. I mean, we know that it can in depending on the severity of hair loss. It's, it's very good for hair follicles, it can restore some hair growth. It's very good for your skin, for, for the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles. I mean, there's lots of studies on the proliferation of collagen, elastin and fibrin. And also this process of angiogenesis, which is this new capillary formation, new arterial formulation formation that causes arteries to branch and sprout and actually can, you know, supply more oxygen to tissues, namely the skin. So the red light the visible red light is a very shallow light, right. It doesn't penetrate very deeply. And so there are lots of red light devices out there, masks, you know, little masks you can wear, devices you can wear on your wrist mats that you can lay on. But to get into the infrared and near infrared and the real therapeutic spectrums, this takes a lot of power to mimic this spectrum. And by power I mean specifically something called milliwatts of irradiance. So you lights measured a couple of different ways. You have the nanometer wavelengths, which is what is the wavelength of this light? Is it 640? Is it 810, is it, you know, 1100? And light essentially does the same thing, just at different depths. So if you use red light, you're just getting very superficial effects. You might have some, some pleasing effects on the skin, like, you know, improve collagen, lasting fibrin in the surface of your skin. You might have some reduction of fine lines and wrinkles. You could wear one of those hair devices and get some mild improvement in hair density. But if you really want the therapeutic wavelengths, you need power to drive these. So in my opinion, if you're looking at a red light device, especially a red light bed, if it plugs into a regular 110 outlet outlet, it's not powerful enough to create the therapeutic wavelengths that you want. I would wait until you can afford one that actually plugs into like a220. It uses real power. It's drawing down real power. You'll see that as you lower the milliwatts of a radiance, you decrease the penetration of that light and you essentially decrease its effectiveness. The sun is very powerful. Right. If we're going to mimic the beneficial wavelengths for the sun, we actually need to draw a lot of power and then we need to force it through as many diodes as possible that are as close together as they possibly can be. We want.
- [52:25]
That's what you're seeing, those red light beds, all those little.
- [52:28]
Yeah, you see very small diodes. Generally, the larger the bulb, the less therapeutic it is. The more superficial, the smaller the bulb, the more therapeutic and the deeper the penetration. You also shouldn't look for red light devices that have a high amount of visible red light light. That's the least effective spectrum. You want red light devices that actually have a high percentage of non visible light, because that is the therapeutic spectrum. So for example, if you look at the red light bed that I have, when you turn it on, it looks like most of the rows of lights are burned out. That's because they're infrared or near infrared. Those are the real therapeutic wavelengths.
- [53:07]
Yeah, I noticed that it was like there was red and there's all this. Here's it where I was like, oh, is it just need to be turned on?
- [53:13]
Yeah, yeah, that's what everybody says. They're like, I paid all this money and only half the lights work. I mean, that's exactly what you want. But manufacturers will get, you know, build these red light walls and then all of the bulbs are visible already. You know, that's non therapeutic. Okay. You're just, you're just seeing the red light. And to the consumer they're like, well, there's more red lights on on this one and fewer on this one. The one that probably looks like some of the lights are off is probably the best device because you're in the invisible spectrum. And so now what do those do biologically? So the, the main thing. Well, so first of all, they're very good for vasomotor circulation. And a lot of, a lot of folks are unaware that about 70% of our circulatory system circulation throughout our body is actually not done by the heart. I mean, none of us has a heart that's strong enough to pump blood from our chest to the tip of our toes, through all of the arteries and capillaries in our brain, to the back of the eye eye and through our liver, lungs, pancreas and our kidneys. The, you know, we're about 14 arteries, we're about 11 and a half percent veins. The majority of our circulation is microvascular. You have small blood vessels and capillaries. That's about 70% of our circulatory system. That's actually not powered by the heart. It's powered by an activity called vasomotor. It's similar to a snake swallowing a mouse. So almost like a peristaltic activity.
- [54:30]
Little smooth muscle fibers in the blood vessels that sort of move the blood along.
- [54:35]
Exactly. I mean, you know, arteries are smooth muscle. Right. There's three types of muscle in the body. We have the cardiac, which is confined to the heart. And you have skeletal, which is the muscle everybody knows about. And then you have the smooth muscle. It's sort of this differentiating, overlapping layers of muscle that when they contract, they create a wave like motion. Again like a, like a snake swallowing a mouth else. Right. So arteries can dilate, they can constrict. But the most important thing that they do is this vasomotor.
- [55:05]
And the red light helps that.
- [55:06]
And the red light is tremendous. For vasomotor activity. Like, when people start using red light therapy, they'll report things like, they stop wearing readers. Like, I'm 54 years old. I don't wear readers. Perfect eyesight. And the reason why eyesight begins to degrade in your 50s is not because of, you know, something happening to the rods, the cones, the macula. It's not a degenerate, degenerative process. It's a lack of microvascular circulation. So if you restore the vasomotor to the back of the eye, you restore the eyesight. Yeah, you know, so like Joe Rogan, I was on his podcast a few months ago. He bought a red light bed while he was on the podcast. And he texted me five weeks later. He's like, holy, bro, I'm not. I'm not wearing readers anymore. Like, my eyesight's amazing, improved. Everybody notices the improvement in their skin. But when you start to improve vasomotor activity. Now you're talking about microvascular circulation. So, so think about all of the compromised areas in the body that receive microvascular circulation. This is all of our joints, our ligaments, our tendons, our musculotendinous insertions. And this is the. This is the inside, the erector spina group in the. In the spine. All the microvascular circulation in the brain. These are all enhanced by red light. And so if we can restore vasomotor activity, if we can kick out mitochondrial nitric oxide, the gas that is binding to cytochrome C oxidase, that's competing for oxygen. Right, Because. And keeping that cycle anaerobic rather than aerobic, and we can put oxygen into that cycle. Now, you're talking about one device that upstages the mitochondria, that improves. Improves collagen, elastin, and fibrin in the skin, that improves angiogenesis, the formation of new blood vessels beneath the skin and other areas of the body, it improves microvascular circulation. So all these compromised areas of the body, like our knees, hips, shoulders, rotator cuff, low back, these all get the benefit of improved microvascular circulation. And all of a sudden, people's back pain goes away or their knee pain goes away. Now, yeah, but deformity or cartilaginous erosion or some other kind of osteotic condition going on in the joint, it's not going to improve that. But you. So you see reduction in pain, improvement in energy levels, balancing of mood, increased circulation, and all of the benefits that come from that. Just like what you were talking about, you know, where people don't have all of these conditions, they generally have one condition or one state that's causing all of these spokes to appear.
- [57:34]
You know, when you look at mitochondria and the importance of mitochondria and the fact that restrictions red light actually works primarily through its effect on mitochondria.
- [57:41]
Yes.
- [57:42]
You understand how it has its broad effects because when you look at all the chronic diseases we have, whether it's heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia, obesity, you know, mental illness, these are all mitochondrial diseases.
- [57:55]
They're all mitochondrial diseases. They're all shifts in metabolism.
- [57:59]
This is not just kind of a wacky, like crazy kind of alternative concept. I mean, leading scientists like Suzanne Goh, who had on the podcast Harvard trained, London, trained at Oxford, I mean, just brilliant physician, pediatric neurologist. Studied the mitochondrial function of autistic kids and saw that their brains had super low energy levels.
- [58:23]
Yeah. And very high levels of nitric oxide, by the way.
- [58:26]
Yeah. And so mitochondrial therapies actually help these kids and she treats them using mitochondrial cofactors, nutrients. So this is not just a fringe idea, but it's central, whether it's Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. And the impact you can have by treating mitochondria is so important. And it's one of those hallmarks of aging that we talk about. I wrote about my book Young Forever that is actually central to so much of what goes wrong. If your mitochondria are messed up, you're in bad shape. Yes. And it causes long Covid fatigue, chronic fatigue syndrome. All these sort of chronic illnesses that we're suffering from are primarily mitochondrial. So it's kind of cool to see that there's tools, tools in addition to exercise and supplementation that can actually start to help regenerate and renew and optimize mitochondria.
- [59:11]
No doubt. I mean, I think, you know, red light therapy, in my opinion is probably the most, has the most single, as a single device, prolific impact on mitochondrial function.
- [59:21]
So you're like doubling down on red light therapy.
- [59:23]
I really am. I mean I.
- [59:24]
And you have to ten a million dollars.
- [59:25]
I'm not even trying to sell a red light.
- [59:26]
But like, can you do it for a reasonable cost? Because Cindy's things are really expensive.
- [59:30]
Thousands. You can do it for a reasonable cost. Lots, lots of clinics that allow people to go into memberships to the really powerful beds, but there are lots of walls. The, the, the, you know, that you can hang on the back of a door, you can sit in front of. Proximity to the panels really matters.
- [59:45]
To be close to it, you want.
- [59:46]
To be very close to it. Right. You want the light to spread in the skin. You don't want the light to spread before it hits the skin. Right. Because the skin is actually a barrier too. If you actually looked at red light passing through the skin, it doesn't just penetrate it like a laser. It hits, hits it and spreads. So the closer you are to the diode of light, the more likely that light is to spread inside of the tissue. If you look at cadaver studies where they bury light meters and, and cadavers and they look at penetration of depths, you know, proximity to the light matters. So if you have one of those red light devices, the ones for the, you know, the masks for the face are great for collagen and elastin in your skin, fibrin in your skin. But if you really want therapeutic wavelengths, you should use a, you know, red light panel that has, has some, some density and look for wavelengths between 680 and 910. In that, in that range, you're going to capture most of the real therapeutic wavelengths. And then if you do want to step up and get a red light bed, make sure it's a red light bed that actually has a commercial outlet. You know, you usually have to have, you know, 220 outlet like you need.
- [60:44]
For your washing machine, washer, dryer.
- [60:45]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you want to, if you're going to spend that kind of money, get, get, get the power.
- [60:49]
That's what it means, the power.
- [60:50]
So, you know, those are the kinds of biohacking devices. But you know, truthfully, people that actually get regular micro doses of sun exposure get this the same benefit.
- [60:59]
Yeah.
- [61:00]
You know, so I really encourage people.
- [61:02]
To get in nature, get outside the.
- [61:04]
First 45 minutes of the day during first light. Well, there isn't any UVA or UVB rays. Right. So you don't have a lot of the damaging rays in the first 45 minutes. That's why sunrise. Yeah, sunrise. First light is so important. I was out there. I mean I flew, I spent 32 hours on a plane plane in 38 hours on the ground in the last four days. I left, I left Thursday and came home Sunday to Dubai. Right. So it was 15 and a half hours over there. I think it was like 17 hours back. So it was like 32 hours in the air. All I did was just tap into some of the quote, biohacking mechanisms that I can. I just posted my sleep scar tonight. 99 sleep score. My. I was showing you.
- [61:41]
Yeah.
- [61:42]
Deep and. And rest. And I didn't drug myself to sleep. I just bookended my sleep. I made sure that I do the same routine every single night. I have the same sleep hygiene routine every night, and I have the same sleep hygiene routine every morning. My body knows that if we do.
- [61:58]
It, because sleep is, again, the ultimate biohacking tool. I think if you can get your sleep sorted, it corrects so much. Right?
- [62:04]
Yeah.
- [62:05]
And so many millions, 70 million Americans have sleep issues.
- [62:09]
It's terrible. And when we talk about these people that have. Have, you know, following this sort of stage of consequences that we would see in the medical record, and I'll come, come back to my sleep routine in a second. You know, we would see these people that had, especially in their 50s, 60s, 70s, as their hormonal levels would plummet, especially the hormone testosterone.
- [62:31]
Testosterone.
- [62:32]
Yeah, because it's. It's one of the main hormones that's putting pressure on the bone marrow to. To make.
- [62:37]
Make red blood cells and to build bone and to build muscle and everything else.
- [62:40]
Yeah, it does so many things.
- [62:41]
It's an anabolic hormone, meaning it helps to build.
- [62:44]
Yeah. And I think, sadly, we think of it as a male hormone, you know, so we think, you know, women think of testosterone. A lot of women, I'm not saying all women, but women will think of testosterone as a very, you know, deep voice, aggression, facial hair, muscles. Yeah, but that's actually really not true.
- [62:58]
It's important for women, too, especially for sex drive and libido and.
- [63:02]
Yeah. I mean, you show me a woman with a testosterone level, you know, less than 3 and 2.3 on free testosterone, there's no sex drive there. And their libido's out the window. And then, you know, of course, when libido leaves a marriage, you know, the opposite spouse will think that love and attraction has left the marriage. They're very different things. Libido's emotion. Loving. You can love your spouse and be very attracted to them and have no sex drive.
- [63:26]
Right.
- [63:26]
And as soon as you put the sex drive back, you know, all the magic starts again. But, you know, when we. We would see these patients applying for policies and you would see this just long hypoxia just hiding in plain sight, you know, this low red blood cell count, low hemoglobin levels.
- [63:41]
Yeah.
- [63:42]
Inevitably, all of them would be on sleep medication because. And this is an interesting.
- [63:50]
Kind of. Makes sense, right, because if you go to altitude, you have low oxygen, you don't sleep. So. Great, right?
- [63:53]
Yeah. You don't sleep.
- [63:54]
You're Kind of at low, you're, you're at like high altitude at sea level because you have low white blood cell count.
- [63:59]
But it's a really double edged sword because if you ask most physicians why do people that are the most exhausted sleep the worst, their face will go blank. They'll go, well, if you're the most exhausted, it's probably the only thing you do well is sleep. But it's actually the opposite because you're exhausted because you're hypoxic, but you're also not sleeping because you're hypoxic. So the people that are the most exhausted actually sleep the worst. And then what happens is they go to their doctor and they say, look doc, I mean, I'm tired all the time and I just can't sleep. And so then they do the worst thing. They put them on some kind of tranquilitic sleep medication. And what this does is this actually prevents your brain from waking you up, right? So your brain is actually trying to save you when it, when it keeps you in from going into deep sleep. When you're hypoxic because your respiratory rate gets so shallow that you become severely hypoxic. These people actually gasp at night. If you're sleeping next to them, you'll hear them, you know, you'll actually hear them gasp at night. It's severe hypoxia. And so, so what happens is Trazodone and Zolipedam, nitrate, Diazepam, a lot of these will actually block the brain's view of blood oxygen, essentially shut off the monitoring system and then it allows them to get into a deep sleep, but they're not actually sleeping, they're suffocating. And so what happens is these people will wake up in the morning and God, man, I really hate taking Tylenol PM because it makes me so drowsy the next day. That medication's been out of your system for hours. You're not feeling the effects of the Tylenol pm. You're feeling the effects of having suffocated for six hours, hours. And so you take a hypoxic person, put them on sleep medication and force them into severe hypoxia. And that's when the real magic begins. Now you start to see all cause mortality begin, begin to rise.
- [65:49]
So to connect the dots, so you're saying hormone therapy can help people increase their oxygenation by increasing the red cell count, which helps their.
- [65:57]
No question.
- [65:58]
But doesn't mean everybody should be on testosterone therapy.
- [66:00]
Doesn't mean that everybody should be.
- [66:01]
But you can raise your testosterone with a lot of different approaches.
- [66:03]
Yeah, and, and, and I'll be the first one to tell you that 70% of the clients that I see that qualify for hormone therapy are not on hormones. So when I say qualify for hormone therapy based on their levels, you know, you see a male come in at 262 or 315 on testosterone and the free testosterone is between four and a half and seven. You know, really low levels of free testosterone. It doesn't necessarily mean that their testicular production of testosterone has stopped. It could mean a whole host of things. Very often the signaling hormones are low luteinizing hormone, follicle, stingling hormone. Those are easy pathways to mimic. Very often they're deficient in the raw material that's used to make testosterone cholesterol. Yeah, I was just gonna say there's the big bellwether.
- [66:48]
Saturated fat is amazing and jacks up cholesterol. And I mean it, jacks up your testosterone.
- [66:54]
But no one, I will tell you right now, when I started preaching about this 10 years ago, people thought it was a complete charlatan for saying the people that are on statins that get their, that are on heavy statins that took their LDL cholesterol from 180, which they put them on a statin for down to 57. We would see this every, not would say every single time, but the majority of time in the medical records, they the collapse in their hormone function. And as soon as their hormones collapse, now they're hypoxic, they're exhausted, they don't sleep well. The erectile dysfunction, the memory loss, the confusion, the short term recall issues, the all kinds of cognitive impairments. And, and if you look at the number of cognitive impairments, you know, Alzheimer's, dementia, you know, memory loss, all of the, all of the cognitive impairments that start earlier than they should. In almost every case what we saw was because they had clinically deficient, in my opinion, levels of test, I mean of, of LDL cholesterol. So you restore the cholesterol, you can restore the hormones. Very often you restore the DHEA level, you restore the hormones. Very often you get sex hormone binding protein out of the way. By taking a mineral called boron, you get the sex hormone binding proteins that are actually lowering your free testosterone. You get these things out of the blood or back into normal range. If you have high shbg.
- [68:14]
Yeah.
- [68:15]
And you want to lower sex hormone binding glob, globulin, boron is, which basically.
- [68:18]
Binds all the testosterone and lets summon free in the blood to do the work. But if you have too much of it, it basically doesn't allow you to have enough free hormone to do the actual work.
- [68:28]
Right. So people have low hormonal levels and they immediately go on hormone therapy. When you know, if we look at the cause of the majority of low.
- [68:37]
Hormone, that's really important question.
- [68:39]
There really three main causes that, that we have seen. Number one is, is clinically low levels of LDL cholesterol. And the second one are what I would put in the nutrient deficiency categories, vitamin D3 and high SHBG or low DHEA. Those three are critical to having healthy levels of testosterone. So if you see somebody that has low double digit levels of dhea. Right. And high, which is also usually caused by stress.
- [69:13]
Stress, right.
- [69:13]
Yeah, it's very often caused by stress. It's an easy supplement to take. You, you supplement them with DHEA and then all of a sudden the hormone production starts again. Or you see low signaling from the pituitary, the, the luteinizing and follicle stimulating hormones which are essentially your, your volume knob.
- [69:30]
Right.
- [69:31]
For turning up or turning down testosterone. They do, they do other things, but so very often we're deficient in the level of the hormone because the signal has been turned down.
- [69:40]
Yeah.
- [69:40]
Right. I mean when we can't hear the music walking into a room, we don't mess with the speakers.
- [69:45]
The main reason you didn't mention that causes testosterone plummet is sugar. Well, yeah, when you get insulin resistance and you get belly fat, you get low testosterone.
- [69:54]
Very true.
- [69:55]
Yes. Especially if you're a guy, if you're a woman, it's a little different, but it really is a big factor. So you can almost kind of inversely relate your size of your belly with your testosterone level. Bigger your belly, the lower your testosterone.
- [70:06]
And your estrogen levels get to.
- [70:07]
And your estrogen level goes up. But you, you know, cause causes feminization, water retention.
- [70:12]
Feminization.
- [70:12]
Yeah.
- [70:13]
I think you and I are very aligned philosophically that very often we are even, even the hormone therapy clinics or just treating the hormone always ask why is this low?
- [70:24]
Yeah, right.
- [70:25]
I mean there is true testicular hypo function, but that's very rare. Yeah, you know, primary hypogonadism is pretty, pretty rare. But we treat all low hormones as primary hypogonadic. And we just put people on hormones and it doesn't make them even temporarily makes them feel better, but they're still bathing their cellular biology in the toxic soup. And so they end up going right back to where they were.
- [70:48]
Well, that's the other problem you mentioned, toxic soup. But a lot of the environmental toxins are estrogenic and they do actually affect hormone function. And I think it's a big role in a lot of what's going on in our society with hormone dysregulation, change in fertility rates change and, you know, birth rates between men and women. I mean, there's a whole bunch of things that are happening that are quite frightening that have to do with environmental chemicals, which, which is partly why you filter your water.
- [71:12]
Yeah, I, I, I filter everything. I filter my water, I filter my air. When, when we're done the podcast, I'll take you out and show you my air filtration. So this is surgically clean air in this house. So it goes through, it feels like, you know, people that come in here say the air feels different in here. And because, you know, I filter it through a HEPA filter, then through a carbon filter, and then essentially it goes into a chamber and it goes through high dose uva, UVB and, and blue and infrared light and then it gets sucked up into the, into the chamber in the house. So that's how you, you know, you avoid the mold and the mycotoxins and all, all the other nonsense that's coming through our ventilation systems. Because we're in the mold capital of the world here in Miami.
- [71:53]
Definitely.
- [71:53]
Yeah, we won the mold lottery. But just to bring the, the hormone thing full, full circle, there's, there's also a genetic predisposition that women need to watch out for called compt C o m T. Yeah. If you've ever actually seen a Dutch test, a female hormone test, which is in my opinion probably the most accurate way to measure especially cycling in, in, in women. Because a blood test will only take a snapshot in time, but it, but a Dutch test will, will actually show you the cycling and then to make sure that they're monophasic so they're moving from follicular to ovulation to luteal feel.
- [72:25]
You know, if you're menstruating woman.
- [72:27]
Yeah, yeah. If you're a menstruating woman and, and you know, postmenopausal women still have a cycle. It's just the amplitude is very, very low. Right. But they still have somewhat upcycle. But there is, if you look at adjust a Dutch test and this just flies by a lot of obgyns, you will see an area, you will actually see this gene mutation. Catechol o methyltransferase compt it's right on the Dutch test. And essentially what this is doing is in the elimination pathway of estrogen. Estrogen. Sending it down the E2 pathway. So actually getting estrogen out of the bloodstream and putting it into a form where it can actually be eliminated from the blood and not build up in the blood. You know, this gene mutation is variation, right? Gene variation. It's. It's essentially responsible for the breakdown of catecholamines, the, the norepinephrine, the epinephrines, the dopamine, adrenaline.
- [73:15]
Surprise, surprise. It needs nutrients to operate.
- [73:18]
And it needs nutrients to operate. That's what's so exciting is like all this stuff can go wrong and all you need are nutrients to fix it.
- [73:26]
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you know this, Gary, but you know, the, the original sort of hypothesis around nutrient therapy and functional medicine came from this guy, Abram Hoffer, who was a psychiatrist in Canada who was treating, I love him. He was studying schizophrenics and using high dose of niacin and zinc and magnesium and B vitamins and B6 actually help treat these patients. And he became friends with Linus Pauling. And Linus Pauling wrote an article in Science magazine 1969 called Orthomolecular Psychiatry. Ortho means to straighten molecular. Means to straighten molecules and essentially talked about using nutrients at high doses to push enzymatic reactions which were stuck basically, which is making kind of greasing the wheels of your biochemical pathways. And you know what's really even more amazing is the discovery of how so many of our genes code for enzymes. And Bruce Ames wrote a beautiful paper. He just died. He's one of the. I mean, you learn about mitochondria, you can't miss Bruce Ames work that giant and mitochondrial renewal and therapy as you get older as a way of sort of mitigating the effects of aging. He just died, sadly, but very old. But he was an amazing guy who basically wrote this paper, I think, with the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that said that one third of our entire DNA A codes for enzymes. And every enzyme requires cofactors. And what are the cofactors? They're nutrients. They're vitamins and minerals.
- [74:50]
Dr. Mark Hyman
So all.
- [74:50]
Gary Brecka
And, and each mineral and vitamin doesn't just affect one pathway. It can affect hundreds and hundreds of pathways.
- [74:56]
Oh my gosh.
- [74:57]
And so that's why nutrition is so important. And, and you know, you were mentioning earlier seeing nutrient deficiencies in these populations and I think that, that there is so much subclinical nutritional deficiencies that people just are not aware of. And I, and I was just at an event where I had chance to talk to Bill Gates about this, and I was talking about the work he was doing with putting bullion cubes and with vitamins into the food supply in the developing world to help with really significant vitamin deficiencies. Have, like zinc and vitamin A, and I mean, they have real deficiencies there. And I said, there's a lot of deficiencies in the U.S. he's like, oh, there is not. There's no way. We're all eating healthy and we eat plenty of protein and food and there's no nutrient deficiencies. But he's wrong because first, NHANES data, which is our National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, has documented that, yes, when you check blood on Americans, they're deficient, but in function health, where now we've had over 10 million, probably 15 million biomarkers, we've checked.
- [75:48]
Wow.
- [75:49]
We have 100,000 members. We see the, and this is a health forward population. And we see at the reference ranges from the lab, not what you and I would think would be optimal.
- [76:00]
Right.
- [76:00]
Like vitamin D, over 50, like vitamin D, 30 or less. 67% of people we test are deficient in one or more nutrients at this minimum level. Elevated homocysteine, methyllotic acid, which is B vitamins, which is very important for these pathways, like cmt, vitamin D, iron, zinc. I mean, it's just, it's staggering.
- [76:21]
Yeah.
- [76:21]
How these are so common and, and, and, and they're affecting so much of our biology that makes us eventually have what Robert Heaney, who was an incredible vitamin D scientist, called long latency deficiency diseases. So if you're vitamin D deficient, and it's cute, you'll get rickets. But if you get vitamin D deficiency over a long period of time, or insufficiency, you'll get osteoporosis, you'll get heart disease, you'll get dementia, you'll get depression.
- [76:47]
Right. I mean, you're just so singing my tune. What is amazing, too, is the profound change that happens when you just give the body the raw material it needs to do its job. You know, one of the most common.
- [76:57]
Is light or water or oxygen or air or sleep or exercise or exercise.
- [77:01]
Like, we're not as diseased or as pathological or as sick as we think we are. We're nutrient deficient. I mean, we should always start there. We should, we should ask ourselves what's missing from this biome that could be causing this to Happen.
- [77:12]
So what are the. In your experience, as you've sort of done all this work and treated so many people and had all this experience with the data, what are the most important nutrients that we're missing and what are the supplements that we should be taking?
- [77:23]
Okay, so. So, you know, when you call something essential, that means it's necessary for life, right? So if you. We, we have two essential fatty acids. You know, if you don't get these fatty acids, they're. They're essential for life.
- [77:36]
Omega 3s.
- [77:37]
Yeah, omega 3s, omega 3 fatty acids, EPAs, DHAs. They're eight essential amino acids. You would be shocked how many people are amino acid deficient. And people think that amino acids are proteins. They're not. They're the building blocks of proteins. And so if you're deficient in the building blocks of proteins, then you can't assemble proteins. Proteins, which is not just skeletal muscle. I mean, this is our natural killer cells. Collagen, elastin, fibrin in our skin. A lot of marketing gimmicks have allowed us to think that we can target direct protein. Like we can eat collagen, and it shows up as collagen in our skin. You know, it's like it's badly false. I mean, collagen. I don't have anything against collagen, but it's an incomplete protein.
- [78:15]
Cancel muscle from it.
- [78:16]
But, but, you know, we don't. We don't need our nails to grow our nails, and we don't eat our hair to grow our hair, although we.
- [78:22]
Do eat muscle to grow muscle.
- [78:24]
We think. Well, we think we can eat collagen to grow collagen.
- [78:26]
Right?
- [78:26]
Yeah, you can eat muscle, but you. The reason why you eat muscle is to get to the amino acids.
- [78:30]
Yes.
- [78:30]
To build the muscle. That's right. It's not to, you know, that protein is useless until it's broken. It's broken down.
- [78:36]
It's not like you just get, like you eat a steak and that steak becomes your muscle number gets broken down. Right?
- [78:41]
Right. Yeah. So. So all protein, you know, if we oversimplify for a second, just becomes the same thing, right? It becomes amino acids, and then those amino acids. Amino acids go out and build whatever structure is necessary. We can build muscle, certainly. And we can also build natural killer cells, and we can build collagen in our skin, and we can build connective tissue and all kinds of things. So. So I think the three fatty acids.
- [79:04]
Amino acids.
- [79:05]
Fatty acids, amino acids and minerals.
- [79:07]
So my way, just so people know we're talking about fat and protein. There are no essential carbohydrates.
- [79:12]
There's no such thing.
- [79:14]
We can eat them, we can process them, we use them them, we use them for fuel. But if you never had a carbohydrate in your life, you would be fine.
- [79:22]
You would be fine. Yeah. Which is why we should be the most judicious with our carbohydrate choices.
- [79:27]
Right.
- [79:27]
It's not.
- [79:28]
But I also say that carbohydrates are the most important thing for your longevity. Because when you eat broccoli, that's a carbohydrate.
- [79:36]
Yeah.
- [79:36]
When you have a vegetable with the phytochemicals, those are carbohydrates. So those are low calories, nutrient dense, phytochemically rich, I would say conditionally essential nutrients that we need to optimize our health. So I kind of make a joke about it.
- [79:50]
I would agree with that.
- [79:50]
I make a joke about it because people like, you know, they all eat a low carb diet, but you know, you want to eat actually by volume a very high carb diet, which is like a lot of colorful plant foods and those. I'm not plant based. I don't think that's good for our health. But I, but I, but I do think that including a lot of the phytochemically rich molecules in your diet is critical. And I think we talk about these essential amino acids, essential fatty acids, essential minerals, but I think there's also a whole class of compounds that I call conditionally essential that you won't get a deficiency disease, but you might get a chronic disease.
- [80:25]
Oh, no doubt.
- [80:26]
If you don't have enough sulforaphane or glucosinolates or phytochemicals that upregulate various pathways like urolithin A or other things that we're finding out now have such powerful impact on our biology. Like you're going to get sick and die faster.
- [80:39]
Yeah. You know, I don't even think that we have chronic disease in this country. I think that we have a chronic expression of nutrient deficiency.
- [80:50]
So amino acids, minerals.
- [80:52]
So an essential amino acid, I take one called perfect aminos. It's all the eight essential amino acids. It's non caloric, won't even break a fast. It has all eight of the essential amino acids. Because remember, as soon as you get deficient in one of those eight amino acids acids, there's a high likelihood that that's converting to fat or into sugar. Right. So it's incomplete protein. So I take something called perfect amino. I Take a mineral salt every morning. I take one called Baja gold sea salt. But a mineral salt like a Celtic salt or a Baja.
- [81:18]
Could you use electrolytes is that I.
- [81:20]
Use that as my electrolyte. And then I take a. I take a black seed oil. I prefer the black seed oil, the Omega 3 version from Black seed, but you can also get it from fish sources. Omega 3 fatty acid. And then I think you mean black.
- [81:34]
Cumin or black cumin.
- [81:35]
Yeah, I think that's a great source.
- [81:39]
Which, by the way, has incredible antiviral properties and had some evidence that it might even help for Covid as a sort of support to help prevent.
- [81:47]
I didn't know that. But now. Now, now it's even.
- [81:49]
Yeah, even better.
- [81:51]
So I take that every morning. And I also take a methylated multivitamin. And the reason why I say method methylated multivitamin is because it is the vitamins in their already methylated form. So instead of taking folic acid, which 44% of the population can't even process and is, contrary to popular belief, not a natural nutrient, we make it in a laboratory. It doesn't exist anywhere on the surface of the earth. You can't find folic acid anywhere naturally in nature. It doesn't exist. Folate exists naturally in nature, but folate and folic acid follow the exact same same physiologic pathway. There are about 10 enzymatic reductions that need to happen before that folic acid or folate can be converted by the gene MTHFR into the active form called methylfolate. And there's some really interesting research about methylfolate deficiency and whether or not it can be fixed by taking folic acid and folate. And the truth is that it can't. When we started spraying our entire grain supply, all flour, all grains, all rice, all. All pasta in the United States are sprayed with the chemical folic acid. Right. We call this fortified or enriched, I would say.
- [83:02]
Why do we have to enrich food? It's because we've impoverished it in the first place by how we process it.
- [83:08]
It's like, I think I heard Max Lugaver say the other day, if your grocery store has a health food section, what does that tell you about the rest of the rest of the store?
- [83:18]
If there's a health claim on the label, don't eat it.
- [83:20]
Yeah, exactly.
- [83:20]
This is low fat, high fiber, low sugar. It's usually something bad. It's masking something bad. I mean, an egg doesn't have a label on it. And the broccoli doesn't have a ingredient list. Right.
- [83:32]
Steak. Yeah, exactly. So I take a methylated multivitamin. I mean people see profound and immediate effects when they start taking methylated nutrients. You know, the methyl form of cobalamin. I mean of B12, B12, B6, B9.
- [83:47]
And by the way, Kerry, those are the things we're finding deficiencies in and significant. Right. Rates in the cohort of function, which.
- [83:53]
Yeah.
- [83:53]
Sort of was surprising to me.
- [83:54]
And with anemia.
- [83:56]
And what's interesting is the homocysteine level that the lab uses is not where I would say would be optimal, not I would say 6 to 8 is optimal. And they're like, you know, 13, 14. And even at that level.
- [84:06]
Yeah. 14.9 is the high end.
- [84:08]
We're seeing significant deficiencies. And we know that for example, if your level of homocysteine, which is a blood test, that is better than just checking your folate and your blood. Blood is. If your folate's over 14, you increase your risk of dementia by 50%.
- [84:23]
Yeah.
- [84:23]
So this is just simple things you can do to actually.
- [84:26]
So true. And if you have, if you have hyperhomocystinemia, you know, we, we've, and I'm, I'm preparing to publish this data. So we have about150,000 patients that have that. We've done blood work on 70, 74 biomarkers and then also done a methylated genetic test looking at the main, main markers of methylation, compt, mtrr, mtr, ahcy, and mthfr. In contrary to popular belief, if you have mthfr, you need to avoid folic acid like the plague and you have to supplement with methylfolate.5 methylfolate and the, the, the, the proof in what's called S phase arrest, which is essentially when the DNA is replicating and, and copying itself or even when it's making a transcription, an MRNA message, something called S phase arrest, which is designed to stop the passing of genetic mutations when the cell goes into S phase arrest because it's efficient in methylfolate. There's significant clinical evidence and I'll give you the link to the study that you can actually restart. You can arrest S phase arrest and actually restart the replicatory process by adding methylfolate and methylation.
- [85:38]
Methylation is such a key hub of our biochemistry for people don't know what that is. It's like if you took a big metabolic chart with all the thousands and thousands of biochemical reactions that happen in the body. At the center is this process of methylation and sulfation, which are totally tied together, that regulate everything from your DNA and how your DNA is run and transcribed, your epigenome, mood, chemicals, mitochondrial function, detoxification, I mean, just you name it. Fertility. Everything is regulated by these core pathways. And when we're seeing is pretty significant deficiencies because 60% of our diet's ultra processed food and it doesn't have any of that in there. And it has maybe some of the wrong forms in there. If they fortify it. Yes.
- [86:20]
Yeah. And so you have an excess of folic acid and a deficiency of methylfolate. So if you get the folic acid out of the diet and you supplement with methylfolate and magic happens, you see peristaltic activity restored to the gut, you see the normal pace of the gut restore, which in my opinion is one of the most overlooked things in all of modern medicine.
- [86:38]
Because pooping regularly.
- [86:39]
Yeah, pooping regularly, right. Just being regular.
- [86:42]
You know, I had a patient, I said, so I happen to go to the bathroom, she says, I'm pretty regular. I said, how often do you go? She's like, once a week. I said, that's not regular. She was regular for me. I go every week. I'm like, no, we need to go.
- [86:53]
I'm within 20 minutes of waking up. I mean, like, I need to be on a commode. But, you know, methylfolate of all of the single. And I don't like to say, you know, it all comes down to one nutrient, but if it came down to one or two nutrients, D3 and K2 would be up there. Methylfolate would be right at the absolute top of the chart for me. Because if you look at the number of physiologic pathways and enzymatic pathways that methylfolate is directly responsible for, it's downstream from homocysteine regulation. And hyper. Homocysteinemia, we know now, can lead to idiopathic hypertension because of the vasospasm that occurs, at least all kinds of other issues. I agree with you.
- [87:33]
It should be cancer, single digit dementia, depression, add, I mean, you name it.
- [87:39]
Why would it lead to cancer? Heart disease, dementia. You know, I've never really fully gotten to express this, but, you know, when you start to affect vasomotor activity, microvascular circulation, the amount of organ systems that this impacts, right? You affect vasomotor activity to the back of the eye, your eyesight diminishes, you affect vasomotor activity in the brain. Brain microcirculation in the brain. This is the definition of poor Short term recall and cognitive decline. And this hyperhomocyst anemia, I mean, 85% of all of the essential hypertension diagnoses in America are idiopathic, they're of unknown origin.
- [88:10]
We call it essential hypertension because essentially we have no idea what causes it. But we do, we do. If we actually took it to science. It's insulin resistance, sleep apnea, nutrient deficiencies, it's lead, heavy metals, toxins. We actually can identify what these things are and get rid of them.
- [88:28]
I can tell you the best way to lower homocysteine is 500mg daily in a capsule form of trimethylglycine TMG. Lots of great manufacturers that make it out there. I make one. Symbiotica makes it. Thorne. Pure encapsulations. It's not an expensive nutrient. If you have hyperhomocystinemia, that's a must have supplement. The majority of us will benefit from methylated multi. Multivitamins. So methylated multivitamins on omega fatty acid, minerals in the morning acid. And that will cover your basis because if you are missing the basics, and then I would add probably to that a vitamin D3K2.
- [89:04]
Yeah, I'm with you on that.
- [89:06]
If you're, if you're missing the basics, then nothing else matters. It's like if you're not sleeping, nothing else matters. If I can't fix your sleep, I really can't help you become metabolically healthy.
- [89:14]
People don't understand that every single biochemical reaction in your body requires these nutrients. And if you don't have them, things just don't work.
- [89:21]
Yeah, and then what happens is we start chasing the expression of disease. You know, when you start blaming organs for crimes they're not committing. You know, when you blame cholesterol, which is like a fireman, for showing up to put the fire out. And you come up with the hypothesis that if we had less firemen, we'd have fewer fires, you know, you're just going down the wrong path. You know, when you realize that the majority of our thyroid hormones that are actually responsible for thyroid diagnoses like low T3 being diagnosed as hypothyroid, the majority of that's not even made by the thyroid. It's deodenized in the liver and it's, it's in the periphery and in the gut. And so very often we're blaming, you know, you want to talk about a pandemic? Selenium, Selenium, thymine. And, and you know, to help this, this, this outer ring, deiodonize. In. In the liver, which is where two thirds of it comes from, and the balance is in the gut and a little bit in the brain periphery. But the point is that a nutrient deficiency can lead to a hormone deficiency that gets diagnosed as a. As organ malfunction. And now we're. Now we're pounding a perfectly healthy organ for a crime. It didn't come in.
- [90:26]
Right, Right.
- [90:26]
You know, when. When, at best, it's only going to change your level by 20%. And we do this with. With. We do this with the heart, we do it with the liver, with the lungs, with the pancreas, with kidneys, with the thyroid, with all kinds. Kinds of conditions. And if we would just take a step back and say, you know, I wish. I wish we would force physicians to study the expression of nutrient deficiency. Right. Like. Like a botanist or an arborist studies soil nutrients. You know, if you. If you. If you have a leaf rotting in a palm tree and you call a true arborist, a true botanist, out to your house, they don't touch the leaf. They cortex the soil.
- [91:00]
Soil, Right.
- [91:01]
And they go.
- [91:01]
You don't consider what functional medicine is. It's treating the soil, not the plants. Plant. Yeah.
- [91:05]
No nitrogen in the soil, Mark. And you add nitrogen in the soil, and then, boom, the leaf heals and you go, wow, how did that happen? You know, we want to cut the leaves, spray poison on it, trim it, skin it, replace it.
- [91:14]
Exactly. Traditional medicine, sort of like industrial agriculture, we spray chemicals and do all kinds of stuff. Yeah.
- [91:21]
And now we're like, well, now the bark's falling off. Well, and put some more poison on the bark, and now the roots are rotting. And so I think your message. My message is a message of hope, because it's a message that we are not as sick or diseased or as pathogenic.
- [91:36]
Dr. Mark Hyman
People don't.
- [91:36]
Gary Brecka
People don't have to suffer like they do. There's so much that they can do, simple things that people can do for themselves at home. I mean, what you're talking about is pretty basic. I mean, yeah, maybe a bed, Light bed is expensive, or a nose machine, or those are kind of fun things. But most of the basic things are either free or basically what you're doing already or maybe a little extra. And they make profound differences. And you and I have seen this with thousands of patients, and it's. I know I'm frustrated. Imagine you're frustrated that, you know, Americans just don't know about this or not hearing about it. And your work's so important because you're Starting you're sort of getting out there and sharing about this and you're providing resources and tools and programs. I think it's very cool. I mean, I'd like, I feel like, you know, this is part one. You have to come to Austin because we have to do part two. Yeah, I feel like we barely scratch the surface. I want to go into hydrogen water. I want to go into all these other tools and gizmos you got. But I think, you know, for someone like you who's sort of looked at the data around why we get sick and what's happening, and the insurance industry is so fascinating because you're right. They kind of have this secret code of what to know to make a lot of money based on our health.
- [92:44]
They do.
- [92:45]
And so they got to know. It hits them in the wallet. So that's kind of revealed a lot of things that you've understood and you've been able to translate those things into tools and techniques and approaches that really help up level people's health and create the ultimate human. So it's pretty awesome. Gary, I can't wait to come of spend more time with you. Kind of do a lot of the gizmos you got here.
- [93:06]
Same.
- [93:07]
I want to kind of get your advice on what I should bring to my house in Austin that I built. But this is, this is really awesome.
- [93:12]
I'm putting you in the hydrogen bath before you leave.
- [93:14]
Okay, I'm doing that. I'm down. I'm down. So thanks so much, Gary, for being on the podcast. Everybody can check out your work. Tell them where they can find more about you and what you're doing and what they want.
- [93:25]
I mean, you can find me on social media. Just my first and last name. Met Gary Brea. B R E C K A. I also run a podcast called the Ultimate Human which is in the health and wellness space which I'm coming on soon. You're. You're going to be on there in a few minutes. The Ultimate Human. It's a media platform that I use to just try to message without the expectation of receipt. You know about things that are working in my life and then, you know, great thought leaders like your yourself who are my heroes and I just try to help get their message out. So you can find that at the Ultimate Human.
- [93:59]
Amazing. Well, thanks, Gary. Thanks for all you do to make the world a better place.
- [94:02]
Dr. Mark Hyman
If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels @ Dr. Mark Hyman, please Reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions, versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness center at ultrawellnesscenter.com and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes. Changes especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public. So I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors.
- [95:20]
Gary Brecka
Hey Dr. Hyman here. I'm the author of 15 New York Times Best selling books, I'm the host of the top rated Dr. Hyman show podcast and have over 7 million social media followers. And today I'm excited to announce something special. A place where we can go even deeper together.
- [95:34]
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's called the Hyman Hive. A space where you can learn directly.
- [95:37]
Gary Brecka
From me and my team team and thousands of others who are serious about their health. Inside the Hive you'll get access to monthly live events with me, expert coaching, behind the scenes content, science backed protocols and challenges to keep you motivated, and lots more. If you're ready to take control of your health, I'd love to have you join us right now. You can join the wait list and lock in founding member pricing. Just $27 a month, the lowest it'll ever be. But this offer won't last, so just go over to Dr.hyman.com hive h I v E and join the waitlist. Now that's Dr.hyman.com hive and I can't.
- [96:08]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Wait to see Inside.