150. Alex Tarnova: Unlocking Longevity with Hydrogen Water - Anti-Aging, Increased Energy & Reducing Inflammation

Summary

Podcast Summary: Episode 150 - Alex Tarnova: Unlocking Longevity with Hydrogen Water - Anti-Aging, Increased Energy & Reducing Inflammation

Published on March 20, 2025

In Episode 150 of "The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka," host Gary Brecka delves deep into the transformative potential of hydrogen water with guest Alex Tarnova, a pioneering expert in hydrogen therapy. This comprehensive discussion explores the scientific foundations, personal experiences, and groundbreaking research surrounding hydrogen water and its role in anti-aging, inflammation reduction, and overall wellness.

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1. Introduction to Hydrogen Water and Its Relevance

Gary Brecka opens the conversation by addressing common misconceptions about hydrogen water, particularly the skepticism around hydrogen gas's ability to remain dissolved in water and exert therapeutic effects.

• Gary Brecka [00:07]:

  "When I talk about hydrogen in the water, their reaction is, well, doesn't the gas just float to the top, go out into the atmosphere? How are you able to ingest the hydrogen gas and have it create its therapeutic effect in the body?"

• Alex Tarnova [00:18]:

  "Hydrogen water gets into the gut a lot better than inhalation. They elevate different tissues in different capacities. It's better for a lot of these metabolic conditions."

2. Alex Tarnova’s Personal Journey and Motivation

Alex shares a compelling personal story that led him to focus intensively on hydrogen gas and elemental magnesium as therapeutic agents. At 29, after a period of intense physical training and subsequent unexplained illness leading to severe inflammation and polyarthritis, Alex sought alternative solutions beyond conventional medicine.

• Alex Tarnova [03:15 - 07:03]:

  "I was training as if I was a professional athlete... Suddenly, I got really sick. I developed sudden onset narcolepsy, sleeping like 16 hours a day, crushing fatigue... My C reactive proteins were about 100 times abnormal."

His struggle with debilitating symptoms and the ineffectiveness of standard treatments propelled him into extensive research, ultimately leading to his discovery and development of the first clinically valid hydrogen tablet.

3. Development and Innovation of H2 Tablets

Alex narrates the challenges faced in creating effective hydrogen tablets, including initial failures with hydrogen water machines and the critical realization that commercially available machines did not produce therapeutically viable hydrogen levels.

• Alex Tarnova [08:26 - 11:37]:

  "I found a reagent to test for hydrogen gas in water. The first test detected no hydrogen. I had to over triple the input to reduce a single drop... I started thinking I need a powder so I can control the dose."

Collaborating with Dr. Richard Holland, an organic chemistry PhD, Alex refined the tablet formulation through thousands of iterations to ensure consistent and effective hydrogen delivery. This collaboration was pivotal in validating the scientific claims behind hydrogen therapy.

4. Scientific Insights and Clinical Research

The episode delves into the multifaceted mechanisms by which hydrogen gas exerts its benefits, emphasizing its role as a mitohormetic effector—a mild stressor that promotes cellular resilience and homeostasis.

• Alex Tarnova [25:14]:

  "Hydrogen is acting as a mitohormetic effector. It spikes the inflammation and oxidative stress higher and then drops back down to homeostasis faster."

Gary and Alex discuss various clinical studies demonstrating hydrogen water's efficacy in reducing inflammation without suppressing the necessary immune responses, enhancing athletic performance, and improving cognitive functions. Notably, hydrogen therapy has shown promise in:

• Anti-Aging and Longevity:

  • Improvement in telomere length and cognitive scores among older adults ([20:25] Gary Brecka).
  • Enhanced methylation markers linked to youthfulness ([21:24] Alex Tarnova).

• Metabolic Health:

  • Reversal of metabolic syndrome in clinical trials ([44:40] Alex Tarnova).
  • Regulation of appetite hormones like GLP1 and ghrelin, aiding in weight loss and metabolic balance ([46:31] Alex Tarnova).

• Inflammation and Recovery:

  • Comparable anti-inflammatory effects to the RICE protocol for injuries, but with improved circulation and healing markers ([38:51] Gary Brecka; [38:57] Alex Tarnova).
  • Reduction in post-concussion symptoms by over 70% in severity scores ([40:55] Gary Brecka).

5. Practical Application: Incorporating Hydrogen Gas into Daily Life

Gary and Alex provide actionable guidance on how listeners can integrate hydrogen tablets into their wellness routines. Emphasizing dosage, timing, and consumption methods ensures optimal absorption and therapeutic benefits.

• Alex Tarnova [51:10]:

  "Our studies range from one to three tablets a day... It's important to drink it on an empty stomach."

• Gary Brecka [52:36]:

  "Any amount helps. Put this into your daily routine, take a room temperature glass bottle of water, drop a tablet or two in it, and then chug it."

Key recommendations include:

• Dosage: Typically 1-3 tablets per day, tailored to individual needs and health conditions.
• Consumption: Rapid ingestion of the tablet-dissolved water on an empty stomach to maximize hydrogen absorption.
• Timing: Morning or pre-exercise times, with a brief waiting period before meals to avoid competition with endogenous hydrogen production from dietary fiber.

6. Future Directions and Ongoing Research

Alex outlines the expansive scope of current and upcoming research projects aimed at further validating and expanding the applications of hydrogen therapy. These include:

• Gender-Specific Studies: Exploring differential responses in males and females, potentially mediated by hormones like estrogen ([58:00] Gary Brecka).
• Expanded Clinical Trials: Additional studies in Serbia, Russia, and Australia targeting various health outcomes.
• Collaborations: Partnership with the Molecular Hydrogen Institute to advance scientific understanding and secure funding for future research ([41:18] Alex Tarnova).

7. Conclusion: The Path to Becoming an Ultimate Human

In the closing segment, Alex reflects on the philosophy underpinning his work and the pursuit of continual improvement—central themes of the "Ultimate Human" ethos.

• Alex Tarnova [59:50]:

  "Constantly the pursuit to improve... Always forward, trying to make small improvements."

Gary echoes this sentiment, highlighting the affordability and accessibility of hydrogen therapy as a vital biohack for enhancing health and longevity.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Gary Brecka [00:07]:

  "When I talk about hydrogen in the water, their reaction is, well, doesn't the gas just float to the top, go out into the atmosphere? How are you able to ingest the hydrogen gas and have it create its therapeutic effect in the body?"

• Alex Tarnova [00:18]:

  "Hydrogen water gets into the gut a lot better than inhalation. They elevate different tissues in different capacities. It's better for a lot of these metabolic conditions."

• Gary Brecka [02:56]:

  "Ultimate Human... I'm a big proponent of hydrogen gas, hydrogen water, as a way to reduce inflammation, improve our circulation, as a way to actually just make this a part of our health and wellness journey."

• Alex Tarnova [12:04]:

  "Elemental magnesium and the organic acids we're using are reacting with the water, and it's breaking that bond between the H2 and the oxygen... It doubles as a highly bioavailable magnesium substance supplement."

• Gary Brecka [20:22]:

  "They had higher breath hydrogen than the average young person."

• Alex Tarnova [25:14]:

  "Hydrogen is acting as a mitohormetic effector... It's improving the health and the number of the mitochondria."

• Gary Brecka [51:10]:

  "Hydrogen gas has a positive effect on metabolism... restoring the gut barrier that single cell barrier that protects our inside world from our outside world."

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Final Thoughts

Episode 150 offers an in-depth exploration of hydrogen water's potential to revolutionize health and longevity. Through Alex Tarnova's expertise and personal journey, listeners gain valuable insights into how a simple molecule like hydrogen can play a pivotal role in reducing inflammation, enhancing metabolic health, and promoting overall well-being. The discussion underscores the importance of scientific validation and ethical research practices, positioning hydrogen therapy as a promising frontier in anti-aging and biohacking.

For those inspired to incorporate hydrogen gas into their daily routines, Gary provides clear guidance on the use of H2 tablets, ensuring affordability and accessibility. As ongoing research continues to unveil the myriad benefits of hydrogen therapy, this episode serves as a compelling invitation to embrace innovative approaches to health optimization.

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Resources Mentioned:

• Gary Brecka’s Website
• Studies on hydrogen therapy referenced in the conversation (available in the show notes)

Transcript

[Alex Tarnava]

Our last universal common ancestor, the single cell organism that spawned all life on this planet, actually consumed hydrogen as its fuel source.

[Gary Brecker]

When I talk about hydrogen in the water, their reaction is, well, doesn't the gas just float to the top, go out into the atmosphere? How are you able to ingest the hydrogen gas and have it create its therapeutic effect in the body?

[Alex Tarnava]

Hydrogen water gets into the gut a lot better than inhalation. They elevate different tissues in different capacities. It's better for a lot of these metabolic conditions.

[Gary Brecker]

There is a significant, significant improvement in mental alertness. Almost replaced caffeine with hydrogen. I feel the difference. You don't feel stimulated, but you just feel more clean and clear and awake. There are a lot of people that poo poo the hydrogen tablets as a therapeutic measure for reducing inflammation.

[Alex Tarnava]

Hydrogen is in fact, a weak antioxidant in vitro and it's only driving towards homeostasis. And this is actually critically important because.

[Gary Brecker]

Ultimate Human. Hey, guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecker, where we go down the road of everything anti aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And as most of you guys know, I am way down the rabbit hole and a big, big proponent of hydrogen gas, hydrogen water, as a way to reduce inflammation, improve our circulation, as a way to actually just make this a part of our health and wellness journey. And I am so excited for today's guest because we are going to go deep down the rabbit hole of the science behind hydrogen gas and how this gas, this simple gas, can change the trajectory of your health journey. And I've been using hydrogen water for years now. I was a big proponent of, of using it for exercise, for improving performance. But now we have the scientifically validated research to really support some of the claims and we probably have. The world's most renowned expert on the podcast today developed and patented the first clinically valid hydrogen tablet, which I use every day. H2 tabs. But I really want to go down the the rabbit hole of the research into how can hydrogen gas be simply incorporated into your life and make a major improvement on your health journey. So welcome to the podcast. Alex Tarnova. Tarnava Tarnava. There's a. There, there's a common theme and my viewers hear me talk about this all the time. That runs through most of my podcasts and that is that I feel like the people that are the most passionate, the most purpose driven, that are making the biggest change in the world are people that have solved a problem in Their life. And you have a really interesting story about what led you to hyper focus on hydrogen gas and elemental magnesium. I wonder if you might share that story and then. And let's get into the science.

[Alex Tarnava]

Yeah, absolutely. So I'll be as brief as possible so you can focus on the good stuff. But as we were talking about earlier, I mean, up until this event in my life, I would research, learn about something for a few months and then get bored and move on. And so I was kind of a generalist. I had an encyclopedia of knowledge on a million different things, but wasn't really close to an expert on anything.

[Gary Brecker]

Right.

[Alex Tarnava]

And fast forward to when I was 29. I was running a successful business in a completely different industry on an innovation I'd had there. But that business was giving me a lot of free time. I was on the road like a week out of the month. And when I was at home, I was working like an hour a day, two hours a day. So I was basically training as if I was a professional athlete, even though I wasn't. I was training four to six hours a day, five days a week. Six days a week. And having an active recovery day once or twice a week.

[Gary Brecker]

And this was Muay Thai, jiu jitsu.

[Alex Tarnava]

Yeah. Various martial arts, CrossFit. I did some CrossFit competitions at the time too. And I was in by far the best shape of my life. Right. And all of a sudden I got really sick. And they never were able to figure out what happened. But it's most probable I had some sort of virus that caused an autoimmune reaction. So basically overnight, I developed sudden onset narcolepsy. You know, if I sit down and wasn't engaged for a minute or two, I'd fall asleep. Wow. I was sleeping like 16 hours a day. I had crushing fatigue. Yeah, crushing fatigue. I had also central nervous system fatigue. So basically I went from being able to do like 20 bar muscle ups unbroken to I couldn't do a chest of our or a 54 inch plyometric box jump to I couldn't get airtime. I couldn't jump an inch off the ground with both feet.

[Gary Brecker]

Wow.

[Alex Tarnava]

And I couldn't sprint, do anything that was explosive and reactive. But my slower movements, like my deadlift, my squat, my bench press were completely unaffected. My strength was normal.

[Gary Brecker]

Wow.

[Alex Tarnava]

Right. In addition, I had very high markers of inflammation. So my C reactive protein, my C reactive proteins were about 100 times abnormal. Wow. They were, you know, 34 milligrams a liter. Wow. At its peak.

[Gary Brecker]

So by the Way C reactive protein should be less than three. It actually technically be less than one.

[Alex Tarnava]

Yeah.

[Gary Brecker]

If you want to have a really.

[Alex Tarnava]

Low risk of cardio, I mean usually you might spike to.

[Gary Brecker]

Yeah.

[Alex Tarnava]

One to three when you're sick, when you have a cold or the flu or something.

[Gary Brecker]

Right.

[Alex Tarnava]

Most healthy people are below 0.5. Right, right. Like if you're metabolically healthy.

[Gary Brecker]

Right.

[Alex Tarnava]

You know, if you have chronic inflammation, you start trending up. But for a 29 year old in the shape I was in, I should have been below 0.5, below 0.3.

[Gary Brecker]

People that are not familiar with C reactive protein, it's a non specific marker of inflammation, doesn't tell you exactly what's causing it, but it tells you that something is going on in your body. The liver is reacting, creating this protein that is an indicator of, of inflammation. Could be in the brain, could be in the liver, the lungs, the pancreas, the kidneys and the blood be coming from just about anywhere. But when it gets really, really high, like what you're explaining, this is cause for investigation. So. So you have this elevated C reactive protein, you know, you're crushing fatigue, which is by the way, classic viral. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Alex Tarnava]

And my roommate got really sick at the time too. And it hit him different. He actually had to go to the hospital a couple times with pneumonia. Right. And this was a guy who was, you know, top threeing in triathlons and Spartan races. So again, he was a super fit, healthy 29 year old that got taken out by, by whatever hit us. It just, he didn't get the autoimmune response like I did.

[Gary Brecker]

Right.

[Alex Tarnava]

But this lasted a couple months and when the dust settled, I was left with polyarthritis. So I developed osteoarthritis in 11 joints, the worst of which is my left shoulder, which this is as high as it goes now. It's bone on bone. But also my hip was quite bad. My, my hands and you know, basically anywhere I'd had an injury in sports throughout my long life of contact and combat sports.

[Gary Brecker]

Wow.

[Alex Tarnava]

I was told I had to quit working out. Right. Period. You cannot exercise more. You can't lift weights. Just walk.

[Gary Brecker]

Right, Right.

[Alex Tarnava]

Maybe do like some swimming, just like with, you know, breaststroke or something that doesn't need the shoulder. And they put me on a thousand milligrams of naproxen a day. So think like super aleve, like a leave is naproxen, but you might get 200 milligrams. So I was on five times that dose and I was Taking cortisone injections.

[Gary Brecker]

Okay.

[Alex Tarnava]

And I just knew that none of this was how I wanted the rest of my life to go. And it wasn't a long term solution. It was going to lead to long term side effects. So the time I'd spent exercising, I just dove into PubMed and I just started reading any study I could find on regulating inflammatory response and any sort of therapeutic. Started a ton of different biohacks from growing, going to cryo saunas and normal saunas and you know, trying to get.

[Gary Brecker]

This out of you. Whatever.

[Alex Tarnava]

Trying to get it. I. And at the time I found some research on hydrogen water and this. The industry was very nascent at the time. There's only, you know, 40, 50 studies. But I found a couple clinical trials and I bought a machine for like $5,000. This hydrogen gas purportedly.

[Gary Brecker]

Okay.

[Alex Tarnava]

So I went on my merry way and didn't know if what, if anything was working. Cuz I was still taking the naproxen and the cortisone injections and trying to get back into exercise. And eight or nine months later I fainted a few times in the gym. So I, I developed multiple ulcers from the naproxen and I had to abruptly stop. Right. So basically as I stopped in a proxim, I hadn't had a cortisone shot in a while. All my joints froze within a few days.

[Gary Brecker]

Wow.

[Alex Tarnava]

So I realized that nothing I was doing was really helping. Like going to the sauna and the cryo. It would help for a few hours or the rest of the day, but then I'd wake up rough again. And you just stiff as a board. Exactly right. I couldn't put on socks without sitting down or lying down. I couldn't put on jackets and some shirts. It was rough. And I went back to PubMed and I just started reading more and more. And in this nine month period I found some new research on hydrogen water. And at first it pissed me off because I had this $5,000 paperweight that wasn't helping. But then it just dawned on me. I took the salesman's word for it that this made hydrogen water. How do I know there's hydrogen gas in here and what dose is needed? So I started buying the full studies to read the material and methods. And I found that not a single one of them at the time were using a machine like what I'd bought. They were making the hydrogen water in labs in various ways, like bubbling gas or using magnesium under pressure. So then I found a reagent to test for hydrogen gas and water. And I ordered it, and the first test, it detected no hydrogen. I had to over triple the input to reduce a single drop. Putting it at.

[Gary Brecker]

Is that the methylene blue test?

[Alex Tarnava]

Yeah, yeah. Putting it at like 0.03 parts per million.

[Gary Brecker]

Right.

[Alex Tarnava]

Which is well below the lowest ever observed.

[Gary Brecker]

You know, any kind of therapeutic dose.

[Alex Tarnava]

Any type of physiological effect on the body, like, you know, 1. 1 30th of the lowest observed minimum threshold to do anything. Right, right. So that gave me a bit of hope, and I went about trying to source magnesium, which was going to be the easiest way for me to do it. And first I sourced some rods, and then I had some concerns that with magnesium rods, I'm. I don't know how much magnesium I'm getting, and I didn't want to get hyper magnesia. And so then I started thinking I need a powder so I can control the dose. Quickly realized it's very hard to get elemental magnesium powder. Like in the United States, it's controlled by the State Department and DoD. You have to go through background checks and everything. So I sourced some from Eastern Europe and some from China at first. And they arrived saying, like, silver paint, coloring. I'm like, okay, this is a little bit sketchy, but I tried anyways. I figured the powder floats, so I wasn't able to make the hydrogen water, and I'm going to need to compress this. So that's where the tablet idea came. I should have compressed.

[Gary Brecker]

And you eventually ended up patenting this because, I mean, I take your tabs, your H2 tabs, every day. I travel with them now. They're super easy to use. You know, I either use the hydrogen water bottle or I use these tablets. And interestingly, you know, a lot of my audience is like, listen, I don't have 250 bucks or 275 bucks for a hydrogen water bottle, but these tablets are inexpensive. But the elemental magnesium, what's effervescing into the hydrogen gas?

[Alex Tarnava]

Yeah. So basically the elemental magnesium and the organic acids we're using are reacting with the water, and it's breaking that bond between the H2 and the oxygen. Right. And that's what creates these small nanobubbles that you see in the water so you can drink down the hydrogen water. Now, basically, the magnesium in a couple complex reactions goes from the elemental magnesium to just free magnesium ions, Mg2 plus, which is exactly what our body needs. So it doubles as a highly bioavailable magnesium substance supplement. Wow.

[Gary Brecker]

So and so many of us are so deficient in this, like, essential. Essential metal. Yeah, we really are.

[Alex Tarnava]

Yeah. No, we are like, I think 80 to 90.

[Gary Brecker]

Yeah. So many people sleep overnight by adding, you know, magnesium.

[Alex Tarnava]

And you, you likely know there's. There's big bioavailability concerns with a lot of the magnesium supplements on the market. Someone might go buy a magnesium oxide that's on average 4 or 5% bioavailable.

[Gary Brecker]

Right.

[Alex Tarnava]

So we are delivering it in the exact form your body needs. Your stomach doesn't have to liberate it off of another compound. It just freely goes into your system.

[Gary Brecker]

Yeah.

[Alex Tarnava]

So it's completely bioavailable because of the way we're delivering it. But. So, yeah, when I started developing these tablets, we. I quickly started feeling better.

[Gary Brecker]

Now, when you. Were you drinking them, were you bathing them?

[Alex Tarnava]

I was drinking. So I was drinking several liters a day and I was getting at first to about three parts per million, you know, sealing them under pressure. And my joints loosened, I felt better. I'm like, wow, there's something here. But then I had a bit of a sober second thought. I didn't want to win a Darwin.

[Gary Brecker]

Award, you know, like, blow yourself up.

[Alex Tarnava]

Blow myself up in my kitchen with hydrogen gas.

[Gary Brecker]

And by the way, elemental magnesium is flammable and it burns at a very.

[Alex Tarnava]

High temperature, 5,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Right. It's the whitened fireworks. Right. Which is why it's so, so tightly controlled. And I had to go through background checks and everything, like. But also too, like, I wanted to test for heavy metals and the contaminants. And is there any dangerous side reaction that's happening? Like, I understood enough about the basic chemistry, but I'm not a chemist. Right.

[Gary Brecker]

Right.

[Alex Tarnava]

So I found my founding partner, you know, Dr. Richard Holland. He's a PhD in organic chemistry. He works in the pharmaceutical industry. So he designs small molecules for different therapeutic targets. And I found him, he was doing consulting work, offering it, and I told him about my project and he said, this is the worst pseudoscience I've ever heard in my life.

[Gary Brecker]

Not what you wanted to hear?

[Alex Tarnava]

Yeah. Well, he gave me a list of reasons why it wouldn't work. Why you like. Hydrogen has no role in the body, and even if it did, you should inhale it and not drink it because of the low saturation point. And if you'd like, we can get into that later. The pharmacokinetics of inhalation and water are actually completely different. Hit different organs in different ways. But because I'd read Every study to date on hydrogen as a therapeutic. Like at that time, I was able to rebut all of his responses with peer reviewed evidence. And he came back to me and said like, I'm actually in shock. Right. I still don't really believe it, but there's enough that I can help you out. Sure, Right. So he starts tweaking my formula. I'm sending him a new publication every day just to pique his interest because I'm really excited about the project and he calls me for lunch. And serendipitously, I sent him this clinical trial on a certain disease state. And it was a decent size and it was using a high concentration at the time, about 5 parts per million over a liter a day. And it found pretty good results in this group, in this population. And I was not aware, but his current job was developing small molecules for this exact disease. Wow. And he said, you know, with the other studies you've sent, I'm not a subject matter expert, right. So I just have to trust the findings, look at the, you know, methodology and trust the researchers. But with this I am and in lessic is fraud. This works and it works better than the molecules I'm developing. Right. Are you interested in commercializing this? Right. So I thought long and hard about it. I had no expertise in this area and I was just doing this as a do it yourself project for my own health. But I figured, why not? What do I have to lose? I can learn as I go. Let's do this right. So I proceeded forward and it only took a few weeks to refine. There wasn't much changes to my formulation to get to work in a mortar and pestle. But then the hard work started. We quickly realized that doing this in mass, making millions of tablets at high speed, is dramatically different for safety, for getting the reaction right, everything than making 20 in a mortar and pestle. Mixing by hand and then hand pressing. It took us a year, over 2,000 iterative adjustments and 15 failed scale up attempts at manufacturing to get our first production ready tablet.

[Gary Brecker]

Wow.

[Alex Tarnava]

Since then we've stopped counting at version 5000, but we're probably at 10,000 iterative adjustments in the R and D process to get to where we are, to.

[Gary Brecker]

Where you can take elemental magnesium, compress it, have it sink to the bottom of a glass and ever vest into.

[Alex Tarnava]

The water and get in this open cup and get these small nano bubbles in the 10 to 30 nanometer in range, which is critically important so that in say half a liter of water or 16.8 ounces we're getting over 12 parts per million. That's incredible.

[Gary Brecker]

I mean, that's really incredible. And I think a lot of people, you know, when I talk about hydrogen gas in the water, their first reaction is, well, doesn't the gas just float to the top and then, you know, go out into the atmosphere? You know, how are you able to ingest the hydrogen gas and have it, you know, create its therapeutic effect in the body? I can tell you that I feel the difference. I've almost replaced caffeine with hydrogen and.

[Alex Tarnava]

I know I told you. We have a couple clinical trials head to head against caffeine after acute sleep deprivation.

[Gary Brecker]

Really?

[Alex Tarnava]

In the first study, we showed equivalent improvement in the Attention network test to caffeine, but they affected different domains of. Of attention. Right. Caffeine effects alerting and the hydrogen affected orienting. Right. So we did a bigger, better controlled study with four groups. And it was a, you know, crossover design also. So everyone did all therapies. So it was, it was a quadruple crossover so design. So there was placebo, placebo, hydrogen placebo, caffeine placebo, and caffeine plus hydrogen. And it found that the hydrogen groups, with or without caffeine, had a substantially more robust improvement in brain metabolism, so choline to creatine ratios in the brain than the caffeine alone. So hydrogen was basically, it's. As your brain metabolism slows due to the acute stress of sleep deprivation, hydrogen is temporarily restoring it back to proper function.

[Gary Brecker]

I've noticed that truly when I travel, and sometimes I do my best to schedule meetings and travel around sleep and exercise, but sometimes flights happen when flights happen, meetings happen when they happen, or you're just in a different time zone. And there is a significant improvement, I notice, in mental alertness and just my general sense of, I would say, cognitive energy. Right. You don't feel stimulated, but you just feel more clean and clear and awake and focused. Interestingly, I read a study, I think it was actually with your tablets. And I'll put the links in the. In the study notes below was in the Journal of Experimental Gerontology and it was in November of 2021 y. And what I found really fascinating because I've been not down the road of developing hydrogen tablets or hydrogen water bottles, but of researching the hydrogen gas. Because I think it's one of those things that in my opinion, will be as common as a multivitamin in 10 years. Because the evidence is so strong.

[Alex Tarnava]

I think so, yeah.

[Gary Brecker]

But, but what I read in experimental gerontology was that they were 70 year olds and 70 and up.

[Alex Tarnava]

Yes, 77 or 70. This was the average age. Yeah.

[Gary Brecker]

Okay, so, okay, so then you're obviously very familiar with it and I might paraphrase it wrong, but they. This was a six month study and it was, it was double blind, it was placebo controlled and so one group was drinking hydrogen water. I forget what the parts per million where the other group was not. But they measured telomere lengths which improved. They measured. Yeah, yeah, they got measured cognitive scoring which improved. They measured sleep. So they actually were looking at stages of sleep, deep REM sleep. They measured their sit stand ratio, which I thought was really interesting. I mean that there might be some effect on sarcopenia like age, age related muscle wasting. They measured different factors in the frontal lobe of the brain, their reaction times and across the board all of these metrics improved. And they even used a marker, Tet 2, I think Tetu, to measure the methylation.

[Alex Tarnava]

Well, that's linked to young blood. So anyone who's seen the research where they take an aged mouse and they take the blood of a young mouse and you know, swap it out like an oil change and it revitalizes the old mouse skeletal tissue anyways, that's linked to tattoo. So we doubled that in the blood.

[Gary Brecker]

I saw that. Which it's also a marker of methylation, which I'm very interested in because I think that when the body's able to take compounds and convert them into the usable form. Yeah, you know, you're improving the cellular metabolism and you're making that cell less susceptible to all forms of disease and sickness because it can eliminate waste and it can repair, it can detoxify, can regenerate. But I thought it was fascinating that they actually were measuring markers of methylation in 70 plus year olds.

[Alex Tarnava]

So tattoo was my idea was actually in that study. So you can bring it in. Like research is, is very important to me when I decided to go down this road. As we all know, there's so many snake oil salesmen in the health industry and supplements and I wanted to do something that I could look at myself in the mirror and go to bed happy and feel like I'm having a purpose in life and I'm doing something good, not just out there to make money. Right, right. So as we were getting ready to launch, I did a bunch of research on what the regulatory requirements are. So we have GRAS status and new dietary ingredient status with the FDA. Actually now we have 21 validated structure function claims to FTC standards through an expert panel that reviewed all our research. But I wanted to make sure that my hunch that the higher concentration and dose we were delivering was actually going to have an effect and wasn't going to have a harm because that's very important with any molecule. Every molecule works on a dose dependent and sometimes concentration dependent response and increasing the dose can increase efficacy, but there could be side effects. And I really wanted to explore this to make sure I was delivering something that was safe and effective for people. So before we launched, as we were doing our first production run, I emailed every single first and corresponding author on every single clinical trial on hydrogen and preclinical in mice.

[Gary Brecker]

Okay.

[Alex Tarnava]

And I offered free product, free placebo and to donate funds, no questions asked. So I don't believe in silencing science.

[Gary Brecker]

If the research came out negative, not in favor of what you were doing, they can still want to publish it. Okay.

[Alex Tarnava]

Exactly.

[Gary Brecker]

Love that.

[Alex Tarnava]

We cannot understand this world better if we're not publishing negative data.

[Gary Brecker]

Wow.

[Alex Tarnava]

As we've talked about before that the big problem, there is a law passed in the 1920s called shareholder supremacy. So corporations have to do what's best for their shareholders and if they don't, they're breaking the law and can be sued. Right. So that's why I've kept my company private so that I can make my own decisions.

[Gary Brecker]

Right.

[Alex Tarnava]

And be like, this is what is true and ethical and moral.

[Gary Brecker]

Right.

[Alex Tarnava]

This is how I'm going to do. And that's why I've resisted all, you know, venture capitalists who have tried to invest in my companies. So I got some bites. And that's why now, just in the last six, seven years since we've been doing research, we actually have more clinical and preclinical research than all other commercial hydrogen water products combined.

[Gary Brecker]

Wow.

[Alex Tarnava]

Right. So, and, and we have way more that, that's, you know, we, we have like over 20 human studies now.

[Gary Brecker]

We have, I've read a lot of them. We have ankle injuries, CTEs, traumatic brain injuries, inflammatory compounds. I, I, and I actually want to do that. I want to go down sort of the road of hydrogen gas and its implication in a bunch of different categories.

[Alex Tarnava]

We can actually even talk about it from the very beginning, why it's important from evolution and why we're not getting that. So what we're realizing is first we realize that hydrogen is having this impact on the body, right. Then the question is, what's the mechanism? How is it having this impact? And we've now been able to identify there's a few different mechanisms that's working. So throughout the whole body, it's acting as something called the mitohormetic effector. So that's hormesis of the mitochondria. Right. So hormesis is anything like a stress that's mild enough that we get stronger from and adapt.

[Gary Brecker]

Right.

[Alex Tarnava]

So exercise, cold exposure, sauna, sunlight even. Yeah, radiation in certain amounts, like sunlight, even ethanol at the right dose. Right. And timing, it's just with hormetic agents, they all operate on like a reverse U or a reverse J. When you don't get it at all, you start here. If you get the right dose and timing, you improve your health. And then if you go too high, it goes either back to baseline or a lot worse. Like with alcohol, it's a very tight reverse, which is why we can't really recommend alcohol for anyone at any dose, because every person would find a benefit at a different dose and every day. So we just don't have the science there to make advice. We're acting kind of like exercise for the mitochondria, which is improving the health and the number of the mitochondria. In addition, hydrogen is interacting with our microbiome. It's improving gut health. And in a yet to be fully understood mechanism, we know we're partially metabolizing it in the liver and it's driving liver homeostasis. So there's a few ways that hydrogen's helping. And now why is hydrogen doing this in our body? What role did it have? We actually have to go back to the very beginning of evolution. So our last universal common ancestor, the single cell organism that spawned all life on this planet, actually consumed hydrogen as its fuel source. Then our first mitochondria came from eukaryotes. And those eukaryotes was a symbiotic relationship between organelle, one of which expelled hydrogen as a waste product.

[Gary Brecker]

Right.

[Alex Tarnava]

And now we've actually carried that throughout all of evolution. And there's other factors too. At times in evolution, a couple of billion years ago, there was a lot.

[Gary Brecker]

More hydrogen, a lot of exposure to hydrogen gas. And obviously it's a necessary element. But I mean, the, you know, I would say that what are we, 60 or 67% water by weight? Yeah. So obviously we have a lot of.

[Alex Tarnava]

Molecular hydrogen is the first molecule in the universe too. Right. So it's seems obvious in retrospect that it has a role in our life and our body. And we actually, we evolved to produce a tremendous amount of hydrogen gas internally. Endogenously, we do this by fermenting fiber. Now, the big problem here is throughout the majority of human evolution, we were consuming 100 to 150 grams of dietary fiber a day. Now, the average person in the Western world consumes 10 to 15 grams of dietary fiber a day. But the average person on a standard American diet is only consuming 1 to 3 grams of fiber a day.

[Gary Brecker]

Wow.

[Alex Tarnava]

So we're not getting the fuel to produce hydrogen. And the bacteria that are breaking down fiber in this process and releasing H2 gas, they're like any living thing. If you stop feeding them, they die. And that is one of the reasons we're getting this dysbiosis of the microbiome. You know, these hydrogen producing bacteria are dying out. They're being replaced by methane producing bacteria. So actually, when we do studies, we, we can look at a high percentage of middle aged and older metabolic impaired people. We give them a hydrogen breath test after lactalose, and they produce more methane than hydrogen or no hydrogen at all.

[Gary Brecker]

Wow.

[Alex Tarnava]

And this is critically important because we know that methane is strongly correlated with basically every disease outcome. It's correlated with mortality. And we also know that hydrogen is correlated with longevity. So a study in centenarians, so people over 100 in Okinawa found that these centenarians had higher breath hydrogen than the average young person.

[Gary Brecker]

Wow.

[Alex Tarnava]

So their lifestyle had carried.

[Gary Brecker]

They had the healthy microbiome to produce the hydrogen gas.

[Alex Tarnava]

Yeah. And as we know, with a lot of the gut dysbiosis, some of the bacteria doesn't come back. Right, right. So for a lot of people that have not lived a perfect lifestyle, which who has, you can maybe only get your hydrogen at the right dose, exogenously. Right through hydrogen water or hydrogen inhalation or Asian gas.

[Gary Brecker]

Yeah, yeah. Hi guys. Gary here. I want to take a few minutes of your time to invite you to my ultimate human VIP community. This is a private community with front row seats to my most advanced health protocols, exclusive monthly Q and A calls, a private podcast where you can ask my guests and me your most pressing questions, and my own personal wellness blueprints and everything you need to optimize your health. You'll connect with like minded folks in this community. You'll get firsthand access to cutting edge insights and enjoy special discounts on products that I trust the most. And here's the best part. Membership is just 97 bucks a month, a fraction of the cost my private clients pay for the same deep dive guidance. If you're ready to supercharge your wellness and skip the guesswork, I'd love for you to join us, head to theultimatehuman.com VIP that's theultimatehuman.com VIP right now to become one of my ultimate human VIPs. This is your fast pass to better health, so don't miss it. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. It's fascinating to me because I think it has so many implications. You know, it's a part of my daily life. But there are a lot of people that poo poo the hydrogen water bottles or poo poo hydrogen tablets or just hydrogen gas as a therapeutic measure for reducing inflammation, for improving circulation. We now have clinical evidence to support that. But I want to kind of break down the different categories because there's several areas where I'm hyper interested in what hydrogen gas can do for sports performance, what it can do for cognitive function. I both my parents drinking hydrogen gas water, you know, every day. I can tell you I have emphatically noticed the difference in their acuteness and their memory, their, their recall. My father says it about my mother all the time. So let's just break down. Once we get this hydrogen gas into the body, first of all, how is it getting through the stomach? Once it gets through the stomach and enters the small intestine or perfuses through the blood brain barrier, what is it doing? How is it, how is hydrogen gas an anti inflammatory? You know, we can measure its orp. I've got an ORP meter right here. We can measure its oxidative reduction potential. It's highly negative, which is great. But explain that mechanism.

[Alex Tarnava]

This is actually where it gets kind of interesting and makes hydrogen a lot more profound than just a standard anti inflammatory or an antioxidant. So, so hydrogen is in fact a weak antioxidant in vitro. Right. So outside of a living body in a test tube or a cell culture, which is why we can get a negative ORP from it. But how it's actually working as an antioxidant in vivo is similar to how exercise works. It's actually acutely an oxidative stress in the mitochondria. That's what's actually triggering Nerf 2 reaction, you know, activation, which. Exactly. Which we produce more glutathione catalase, superoxide dismutase. So we're producing more of our endogenous antioxidants and it's only driving towards homeostasis. And this is actually critically important because there are a lot of deleterious effects from taking too high of antioxidants. Right, right. You can go into reductive stress, which is as harmful as being oxidatively. Yes. So hydrogen just drives towards redox homeostasis. It's getting this harmony back between the yin and yang of our reductive molecules. And because you're behind the body's physiologic.

[Gary Brecker]

Process to create homeostasis, rather than imposing it upon.

[Alex Tarnava]

Exactly. And it's doing the same thing with inflammation. So it can actually acutely spike inflammation, Just like exercise. Exercise will release Interleukin 6, which is one of the nastiest pro inflammatory cytokines. But it's such a low amount from skeletal tissue that it's a myokine role. And hydrogen does the same thing, which drives this harmonious inflammatory response. And a lot of people just think of inflammation as a bad word.

[Gary Brecker]

Yes.

[Alex Tarnava]

It's only bad when it's not behaving how it's supposed to. Inflammation is critically important to our physiology.

[Gary Brecker]

It's part of healing.

[Alex Tarnava]

Exactly right.

[Gary Brecker]

And nothing in the body would heal without the inflammatory response.

[Alex Tarnava]

Exactly right. It's part of our immune system to fight off viruses. Actually, that. That was one of the big issues with COVID 19 is a lot of people. A lot of people's bodies weren't recognizing it was a threat. So they didn't have sufficient inflammatory response at the beginning. And then once the virus started taking over, their body would panic and they go into cytokine storm.

[Gary Brecker]

Right.

[Alex Tarnava]

Having this healthy, harmonious inflammatory response is incredibly important. And hydrogen drives that. And it does that for a lot of other processes too, like autophagy. You know, it's all the rage. And anti aging with autophagy.

[Gary Brecker]

Right.

[Alex Tarnava]

And a lot of people think, oh, I want to always be activating autophagy. But no, you want to intermittently activate autophagy. And in a lot of research, hydrogen has shown to actually activate autophagy. But in some important studies, it's shown to inhibit autophagy, like after heart failure and drowning resuscitation, when you absolutely don't want that to happen. Happen.

[Gary Brecker]

Right.

[Alex Tarnava]

So in a way it can. It's kind of. We'll explain. Hydrogen, kind of like a. A supervisor.

[Gary Brecker]

Yeah.

[Alex Tarnava]

In our cell.

[Gary Brecker]

It's sort of a selective antioxidant, if you will, and meaning that, you know, it's. If we could get behind our own cellular physiology, Our own cellular biology to create homeostasis, reduce the inflammatory response when it's not needed, and not inhibit the inflammatory response where it is. Like, I've started taking it before hyperbaric sessions because I know that, you know, these oxidative species, you know, high amounts of oxygen under pressure can actually have negative effects, like, and positive effects. And I can mitigate some of those by taking the hydrogen, but actually potentiate the stress acutely.

[Alex Tarnava]

And we've talked about this before, so there's really cool research on hydrogen with other hormutic stresses, you know, whether it be heat exposure, cold exposure, or exercise, that acutely, hydrogen is actually increasing the stress response. But then after the stress finishes, it's driving back to homeostasis faster.

[Gary Brecker]

Wow.

[Alex Tarnava]

So, like, with exercise, that's as if you worked out harder and recovered quicker.

[Gary Brecker]

Yeah.

[Alex Tarnava]

Because it's spiking the inflammation and oxidative stress higher and then dropping back down to homeostasis faster.

[Gary Brecker]

Yeah. And, you know, I. I notice in athletes, I've introduced several very dominant athletes like Michael Chandler or Jon Jones, other athletes that I can't name consider publicly public about their work. With me, when I introduce hydrogen water, it seems to close that last five yards for them. It reduces the amount of pain that they wake up in in the morning. Like knees, hips, shoulders, rotator cuff. I've seen firsthand what happens to people when I put them in a hydrogen bath. You know, I was getting ready to invest almost a hundred thousand dollars in this electrolysis unit that made oxygen water, and I got this hydrogen generating machine and. And started to use it in my bathtub. And what I've seen get in and out of that bathtub is nothing short of miraculous. I don't even talk about it online because so many people would say you're a charlatan because you can't put somebody in a hydrogen bath that has crippled with arthritis. And then they just walk out of your unit like they won the lottery. But I've seen it.

[Alex Tarnava]

We. We have a couple clinical trials using, you know why.

[Gary Brecker]

Can't wait for those, dude.

[Alex Tarnava]

To validate.

[Gary Brecker]

Yeah.

[Alex Tarnava]

These H2 tabs, you know, in bathing.

[Gary Brecker]

Yeah.

[Alex Tarnava]

Right. And anecdotally, like, as we talked about, I. I love martial arts. I'm a lifetime martial artist. And a buddy of mine is a former UFC fighter, and during one of his camps, he. He cracked his rip. Right. Like, and he was a. I gave him a ton of H2 tabs, right. And he was taking daily baths, and he was able to continue training every day and make his fight.

[Gary Brecker]

Wow.

[Alex Tarnava]

Six weeks later when he cracked his rip.

[Gary Brecker]

Wow.

[Alex Tarnava]

So really cool anecdotes like that.

[Gary Brecker]

Well, I read the study that, that you published on. It was a lateral ankle injury, and it was recovery after you know, acute injury. And what I thought was fascinating was it reduced the inflammatory process but didn't reduce the inflammation. And I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but, you know, ice creates this vasoconstriction. And what you were doing was comparing the RICE method, you know, rest, ice, compress, elevate to the use of hydrogen. And hydrogen wasn't creating this constrictive effect, which was reducing the presence of inflammation. It was actually reducing the inflammatory response, but improving the circulation.

[Alex Tarnava]

So there's cool research on that that, you know, cold exposure reduces blood plasma flow.

[Gary Brecker]

Right.

[Alex Tarnava]

So you're not getting healing to where you've injured.

[Gary Brecker]

Right. Because the plasma has the platelets, and the platelets carry the growth factors, which causes the healing.

[Alex Tarnava]

Hydrogen is regulating the inflammatory response, but it's actually increasing blood plasma flow. So this was an acute study, and I wish we'd recruited more people. I think it was only like 12 participants, and we were equivalent to Rice protocol, but in four very important markers. We were had strong trends to be better after this single session than Rice protocol. Yeah, I think the, the professor told me if we'd record recruited like three more people, it would have been significantly better than Rice protocol. Right. In lowering inflammation, in improving range of motion, and decreasing the, the visual analog score for pain. And there was another. I, I can't. Oh, it's circumference.

[Gary Brecker]

Yeah, the, the, the, the I, I. I read another one of your studies. I've read a lot of your studies, by the way. You know, that was looking at CTE and traumatic brain injury, and immediately post concussion, using H2 tabs in the buccal fold, just putting it there, and letting high amounts of hydrogen gas get into the body so that you can reduce the inflammatory response post concussion. I don't want to misquote it because it was your study, but I want to say that, you know, there, the way that concussions are evaluated, you use the standard concussion evaluation protocol, and there are a number of categories that qualify you for having a discussion, having a concussion. And he had, I want to say, 13 of 24 the next day that was cut in half. And then the severity score, how they, they rate the severity of these different measurements, was also cut in half. In fact, it was cut by more than 70%. I remember reading as. I was so blown away that I was like, why not immediately after concussion, are we not just giving hydrogen gas?

[Alex Tarnava]

I think in the future we might. And, you know, we have a RAT study that came out of Stony Brook in New York for post stroke recovery that found some synergy between hydrogen and minocycline. Right. To improve the post stroke recovery. And Stony Brook actually has a clinical trial underway on post stroke recovery.

[Gary Brecker]

Wow.

[Alex Tarnava]

So there's a lot of cool research that's coming down the pipe here. As I mentioned, we've got over 20 human studies. I think we have five more that are either finishing up peer review or impressed about to publish and 15, 20 more that are in the planning stages way. So the research isn't stopping. And actually because of my devotion to advancing the research on hydrogen therapy, the Dr. LeBaron from the Molecular Hydrogen Institute just invited me and I accepted to.

[Gary Brecker]

Be smartest guy I've ever spoken to about hydrogen. Spin your beanie.

[Alex Tarnava]

If we're going to go into, say, the biochemistry of hydrogen, he is the top in the world. He understands, you know, the biochemistry of what hydrogen does in the bottle better than anyone. Where the only thing I'd say that I have an advantage of him on is I have a better memory and I've read more papers than him.

[Gary Brecker]

So it's not a contest. Sorry, Tyler.

[Alex Tarnava]

No, no, no. But I mean, he's exponentially more knowledgeable than me in the biochemistry, like exponentially. Right. So I'm taking a sliver here, but he's invited me to be the first chairman of the Hydrogen Research Committee under the mhi. So it's a volunteer position and basically what I'll be doing is I'll be working with the MHI and working with the public in industry. So Dr. LeBaron has hired another PhD, Dr. Grace Russell from the UK, who's published a lot of research on hydrogen. And I know her personally. She's going to be helping research teams fill in NIH grants, right. To get more funding for hydrogen research in the United States. And I'm going to be working with the public in industry to, to get more funding to fund this research in addition to supplement the NIH grants and also to do outreach with the universities. Because that, that was one of the first things I did. I, I emailed, like I said, every first and corresponding author on every study that I could find. So we're going to be doing that and saying, hey, this is where the evidence is. We can help these NIH grants, we can connect with industry to get future like, further funding. And then at the end of the day, once we, we get partners that have all agreed, Dr. LeBaron and I are going to review the protocols to make sure that the targets make sense, the methodology makes sense, the Dosing makes sense.

[Gary Brecker]

This is amazing. I mean, you know, first of all, I think it's an, it's an area that's vastly understudied. And I think it's also because of the trouble that industry has with, you know, patent protection and copyright protection, trademark protection around this, you know, element which you've, you've patented, but around this element and its impact on physiology. I want to bring this down to a practical standpoint, like some actionable steps that people that are watching this podcast might take away. How do they incorporate hydrogen gas into their daily routine and why would they want to do that? And what can they expect in terms of absorption for their vitamins, minerals, amino acids, nutrients, gut health.

[Alex Tarnava]

I think we should touch on a few areas. We can touch on metabolic, the anti aging aspect.

[Gary Brecker]

You know, they estimate as high as 80% of Americans have some form of metabolic syndrome.

[Alex Tarnava]

And we've reverse metabolic syndrome, you know, in a double blind placebo controlled trial with 60 people over six months.

[Gary Brecker]

By the way, I'm going to link all these studies into the show.

[Alex Tarnava]

Notes. I think it was 21 of 23 measured outcomes. We, we had a significant clinical and statistically significant impact just by adding H2 tabs to. It was three H2 tabs a day in 12 ounces of water in these people middle aged and older.

[Gary Brecker]

That would cost you less than three bucks.

[Alex Tarnava]

Yeah. So we, we reverse metabolic syndrome. We've shown weight loss in weight loss or improved body comp. And I think it's six studies now.

[Gary Brecker]

Now how would the gas improve body composition or weight loss?

[Alex Tarnava]

So it could improve muscle mass by improving exercise recovery and energy output and everything like that. And we're actually finding some cool research. Some of this is not published yet, but I'm an author on some of it. I'll touch on it briefly. But we're regulating appetite. So GLP1, GLP1. So we, we do have a study in mice under peer review right now that, that we regulated GLP1. We had an effect and we have a clinical study. 12 week, I think was NF40, 40 participant double blind placebo control in obese metabolically impaired people where we increased GLP1. Right. Wow. In addition, we regulated ghrelin already in a clinical trial on overweight people. And, and ghrelin is often called in pop culture like the, the, the hunger hormone, but it actually has a lot of other roles. It regulates our insulin response, glucose homeostasis, it has a lot of neuroprotective effects and what is poorly understood by the General population and even some physicians is that we actually want a peak and valley of ghrelin. So we want ghrelin to be very high when we're on an empty stomach and crash to nothing.

[Gary Brecker]

Right.

[Alex Tarnava]

And in obese people, it becomes impaired. So there's no peaks and valleys. It's just kind of in the middle all the time. Which is why they're always snacking. They're never really hungry.

[Gary Brecker]

But hungry.

[Alex Tarnava]

Yeah, and, and hungry. But also they're never really as hungry as a healthy person. They're just kind of hungry and snacky all the time. So we actually show to restore that fasting peak and valley. And we're working on some more research in there and we, we had another study where we improved and modulated the, the brain chemistry involved in satiety.

[Gary Brecker]

Right.

[Alex Tarnava]

So there, there's some interesting stuff there. We're actually planning several other large, you know, clinical trials on metabolic outcomes with hydrogen. Some of them are currently enrolling, others are in the planning stages, set to kick off in March. We're doing two of them in Serbia, one in Russia and one in Australia.

[Gary Brecker]

Say that right now molecular hydrogen, hydrogen gas has a positive effect on metabolism. And when we say metabolism, so we throw that word around a lot. You know, a metabolic syndrome is a complex of a bunch of different variables that probably the most impactful would be insulin resistance. You know, that is the root of a lot of evils. But also, you know, elevated triglycerides, you know, hypertriglyceridemia, hypertension, abdominal fat, elevated cholesterol, and, and restoring homeostasis and restoring the, the gut barrier that, that single cell barrier that protects our inside world from our outside world. You know, if I had a penny for every ailment that was a byproduct of gut dysbiosis, I would be a very wealthy man. And I have in the last 10 years become very interested and fascinated by ways that we can properly heal and seal and restore function to the gut. Because it's the genesis of a lot of autoimmune, if not all autoimmune disease. It's the genesis of a lot of pro inflammatory conditions, not the least of which is elevated C reactive protein. There's just so many downsides to not having a properly regulated gut. And very often it's not just a matter of taking probiotics or even in some cases eating, you know, switching your diet to eat the right foods. Because if you've wiped these bacteria out, you need to restore the gas that the bacteria that are now gone would have otherwise produced.

[Alex Tarnava]

That's very important because there are certain bacteria that can come back within a few days or a week. There's others that might take months or years. And there's bacteria strains that we've identified by looking at, like, tribal peoples that we've discovered in the Amazon or South Asia, where could be generational. Right. They might never come back once we've lost them. Now, in that same study where we regulate ghrelin, we reduced calprotectin, so a marker of inflammation in the stomach. And we improved a couple of short chain fatty acids, propionic and butyric acid.

[Gary Brecker]

Oh, wow.

[Alex Tarnava]

Right. So there's some definite gut links. And actually, hydrogen water uniquely gets into the gut a lot better than inhalation, obviously is going to your lungs. So that's what I was mentioning. Hydrogen water and hydrogen inhalation have different pharmacokinetics. They elevate different tissues in different capacities. So hydrogen water interacts with the gut better. It gets to the liver at a higher concentration and some of the internal organs, which is why it's perhaps better for a lot of these metabolic conditions. Yeah. Whereas inhalation, it's getting obviously to your lungs better. It's getting to your muscles at a higher amount than drinking hydrogen water. So a lot of musculoskeletal issues. Maybe inhalation will be better for athletes. Maybe you want to do both. And it's getting both are getting to the brain inhalation a little bit higher than hydrogen water. But hydrogen water also has the gut brain connection. It's improving your gut, so it's improving your brain. So I think in the future we're going to be doing several modalities of hydrogen therapy. People are going to be doing drinking high concentration hydrogen water, doing inhalation in a proper and safe way, bathing in hydrogen water. You know, there's hydrogen saline, like IVs. Right. For purposes in the hospital.

[Gary Brecker]

So, you know, I'm interested about how, how could somebody incorporate these, these aging two tabs, which is the elemental magnesium that effervesces into hydrogen gas. How does someone that's watching this podcast that's interested in getting hydrogen gas into their daily routine maybe doesn't have the money for, you know, a hydrogen bottle, you know, what's the dosage? How do they take it?

[Alex Tarnava]

So our studies range from one to, well, five tablets a day, but most of them one to three tablets a day at various volumes of water.

[Gary Brecker]

So you want like five to eight.

[Alex Tarnava]

Just so you know, I take, I take five personally, but I've got a lot of damage. Yeah. So first thing on an empty stomach is important. So the. Right. The perfect volume of water is different for every person because it's the volume that you can chug. Drink rapidly.

[Gary Brecker]

Right. So at a room temperature.

[Alex Tarnava]

So because hydrogen is this stress like H2, is this stress like exercise, you don't want to be sipping on it all day long.

[Gary Brecker]

Right. That would be like you want to get the dosage in, you want a.

[Alex Tarnava]

High dose intermittently because you want the stress in the.

[Gary Brecker]

So let's say 750 milliliters, like a, you know, mountain valley spring water.

[Alex Tarnava]

Yeah. You can drop a couple of tablets in there.

[Gary Brecker]

I drink to effervesce and then so exact.

[Alex Tarnava]

Exactly. I do a liter. Right. But most people can't chug a liter. So most of our research on athletes uses half a liter or 16.8 ounces. Our research on medical metabolically impaired middle aged people usually uses about 12 ounces, 333 times a day. And on the elderly we used a cup. So we use 250 milliliters or 8 ounces.

[Gary Brecker]

Because the point is, any amount helps. But for somebody to say, okay, I'm going to put this into my daily routine, I'm going to take a room temperature glass bottle of water, drop a tablet or two in it and then.

[Alex Tarnava]

Chug it as fast as you can. And it's really important you want to drink it on an empty stomach. Right. So a lot of companies in hydrogen water don't actually talk about this because they don't understand it very well. But one, say you are producing a bit of hydrogen from consuming fiber. You don't want to be competing with that.

[Gary Brecker]

Right?

[Alex Tarnava]

Right. You want that separately. But two, one of my patents involves I've turned hydrogen water and various fibers into dense foams and gels. It stabilizes. So if you eat it at a time where you've just had some fiber, you might not be getting rapid uptake into your system.

[Gary Brecker]

Okay.

[Alex Tarnava]

Which can affect the therapeutic value. So what we're learning right now in the hydrogen research, we haven't found a plateau yet. Right. For most indications. So some indications, we need vastly higher amounts of hydrogen than we can reasonably, reasonably intense exercise.

[Gary Brecker]

Severe metabolic syndrome, liver inflamed, for instance, liver health.

[Alex Tarnava]

We need 10 times more exercise to start seeing an effect. So dose and concentration is critically important. You want to get the dosing right to have a better effect right on the body.

[Gary Brecker]

But for the average person that's listening to this podcast, it says one to three Times one to three, times one.

[Alex Tarnava]

To three times a day. The most water that you can comfortably chug down in one to three gulps, you know, within 15 to 30 seconds. And on an empty stomach, not empty. Sometimes I like is in the morning or right before you exercise.

[Gary Brecker]

Yeah, you know, that's what I do.

[Alex Tarnava]

Or I do middle, middle of the afternoon or right before dinner. Like you can eat five, ten minutes after you drink the hydrogen water. Just don't drink it after you eat.

[Gary Brecker]

Yeah. And, and you know what I find is that if I do the hydrogen first, I really don't want caffeine. I'm just, you know, I'm, I'm more wide awake, more focused, more clear. And then I, I mix it with the, a, an amino acid product, you know, that's just essential amino acids and, and then I just go in and, and hit the gym. And I'm always looking for ways that we can kind of bio stack things. Take something like, you know, the fluid that's going to hydrate you and make it anti inflammatory by lowering its orp, which it clearly does. But then also there must be some effect on, on the lactate threshold because I noticed that if I do what I've affectionately called hydrogen bomb, I'll put five of these in a, you know, in about 750 mls and when it effervesces, whack it back. I can absolutely tell that my workouts can be more intense with less muscle.

[Alex Tarnava]

Burn a hundred percent. And actually there's a systematic review and meta analysis showing an anti fatigue effect with hydrogen water. And we have a couple of really cool studies that I know, I briefly told you about that are in press right now on the H2 tabs. Yeah, right. Showing remarkable, remarkable benefits.

[Gary Brecker]

Okay.

[Alex Tarnava]

So in the first. And they were in completely different study populations.

[Gary Brecker]

Wow.

[Alex Tarnava]

Right. So the first one was a shorter term study. I think it was four weeks. It was in Olympic athletes and it was done in Russia and they were taking two tablets in 16.8 ounces or 500 milliliters a day, you know, before and after training. And we improved body composition in these Olympic athletes, even Olympic athletes, which was incredible. But we also improved their peak torque on leg extension.

[Gary Brecker]

Wow.

[Alex Tarnava]

At the end of the trial and more significantly after they'd exercised and warmed up, showing the anti fatigue effect.

[Gary Brecker]

Wow. So they took it during exercise.

[Alex Tarnava]

Right before and right after.

[Gary Brecker]

Right before and right after.

[Alex Tarnava]

And we have another trial in the opposite study population and this was a 50 plus group. And I was actually just, I was one of the Authors on both of these. But I, I was just in Milan, Italy at Espen at a conference presenting this study, you know, with the corresponding author. And so in these 50 plus people who had no adult experience with exercise, they were very out of shape. So much so that they were starting doctor Guided exercise protocols.

[Gary Brecker]

Wow.

[Alex Tarnava]

To try and turn their lives around.

[Gary Brecker]

Huge deconditioned population right now.

[Alex Tarnava]

Exactly. And this was I off memory. I think it was six, six weeks. Six or eight weeks. I can't, I can't quite remember. But it was again, double blind, placebo controlled. And in the placebo group, we actually saw some very concerning things. They were borderline raptomyolysis. So the stress from the exercise dysregulated their cortisol response. It increased myoglobin by 1100%. Right. So 11 times. It increased creatine kinase by like 7 times. 700. They had serious.

[Gary Brecker]

That's where you get the kidney issues with rhabdo.

[Alex Tarnava]

Exactly. Oh. And with the hydrogen group. And we actually, we saw this too in the, the Olympians. It didn't raise a creatine kinase at all. No. No significant rise. So we had no significant rise in creatine kinase or myoglobin. We regulated the cortisol response. We improved DHEA and free testosterone.

[Gary Brecker]

Wow.

[Alex Tarnava]

And we increased improved sleep outcomes, specifically in females. So we're actually seeing a potential gender response.

[Gary Brecker]

Is going to love you, man.

[Alex Tarnava]

There's a few studies now, both in press and one published, where we had stronger results in females and males.

[Gary Brecker]

Yeah.

[Alex Tarnava]

So it could be mediated by estrogen. We're still trying to figure this out.

[Gary Brecker]

Yeah.

[Alex Tarnava]

But.

[Gary Brecker]

Well, Alex, I want, I want to follow this research that you're doing. I'm going to put links to all of, in the study notes, to all of the research you published so far.

[Alex Tarnava]

Far.

[Gary Brecker]

And links to other research on hydrogen gas and, and the H2 tabs, this elemental magnesium. I'll even put some information on how people can find the H2 tabs if they're interested in adding these. What I like is that now, you know, we're under a dollar a day for people to incorporate hydrogen gas into their, into their lifestyle instead of, you know, several hundred dollars and a consistent dose. Right.

[Alex Tarnava]

Because all machines start breaking down over time. But the tablets, you're getting this high dose dose every time.

[Gary Brecker]

Yeah.

[Alex Tarnava]

Right. Unless you have a lab to test the machine, you don't know when it starts to deteriorate.

[Gary Brecker]

Right. But with those tablets you get getting a safe, consistent dose every time. In fact, I, I would love to Even do another podcast on women's health because I, I've noticed again, anecdotally, when my wife has really bad menstrual cramps that it seems to mitigate the intensity of those cramps too. So I'd love to go down the rabbit hole with you on that.

[Alex Tarnava]

We're diving deeper. Like, we actually have a few studies underway that are separating gender to look deeper into these gender based responses. And we're starting, I've just signed off on the protocol, we're starting the very first responder study on hydrogen, looking at people's endogenous breath hydrogen production over some time to establish the difference in effect of people with, with low breath hydrogen versus high breath hydrogen. So we can really start narrowing in on the research.

[Gary Brecker]

That's amazing, man. Well, I end every podcast by asking all my guests the same question and there's no right or wrong answer to this, but it is. What does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

[Alex Tarnava]

I think just constantly the pursuit to improve. Right. Not perfection. Right. It's just growing and learning. And I think that, that a philosophy behind maintaining is accepting that you're going to respond to things after it's broken. That's what it implies. So the only way we can stay satisfied is by always trying to move forward. So my philosophy in life is always forward, right. You know, and forward in as many ways as you can. You know, trying to improve your health, trying to improve your purpose, your business, your family life. Right, Everything. Just always be trying to make small improvements. Most people want to say with money, go to bed poor and wake up rich without having to do any work. And you know, it's an age old saying, but Rome wasn't built in a day. And the only way we can continue moving forward and achieve what we dream to achieve is by taking one step at a time.

[Gary Brecker]

That's awesome.

[Alex Tarnava]

One small improvement.

[Gary Brecker]

Yeah, one small improvement, man. I really appreciate you coming on, guys. I hope that this has given you the depth, depth that you need to maybe incorporate hydrogen gas into your, into your daily routine. It's one of those, I think must have biohacks that's affordable for the, for the masses. I'm going to stay very close to the research on hydrogen gas, hydrogen water, hydrogen inhalation, because I'm absolutely fascinated by it. I will link all of Alex's studies in the study notes below, as well as a link to some other studies that are not Alex's, but will give you further background if you really want to go down the hydrogen rabbit hole. And as always, until next time, that's just science.