#2060 - Gary Brecka

Thanks for saving Dana White's life.

That's what he credits. He credits talking to you and taking your advice as completely changing his life, and now he feels infinitely better.

He's like, okay, well, I'm 53. now. 63 doesn't seem that far off. Right. You know.

And she took the same test that Dana White did. It was life-changing for her, and she was like.

And then the car can run. Okay. So, in human beings, there's a similar process called methylation. There's not a single compound known to mankind. Not one.

There's no vitamin, no mineral, no amino acid, no nutrient, no protein. No nutrient of any kind that enters the human body and is used in the format that we put it in. Without a single exception, everything we put into our bodies has to be refined into the usable form. If you can't make this conversion, you have a deficiency. It's this deficiency that leads to the most common ailments that we suffer from.

So, that process is called methylation. And there are several genes that govern it. This is where a lot of the misconception about genetically inherited disease comes from, right? We'll say, well, Joe, you know, your father-in-law has—not your father-in-law. Your father, on your mom's side, had hypertension.

Your grandfather had hypertension. Now you have hypertension. So, you have genetically inherited hypertension or you have familial hypertension.

But it's rarely the disease that's passed from generation to generation. What we pass from generation to generation is the inability to refine a raw material, which causes a deficiency, which leads to that disease.

But if you have an impaired ability to break homocysteine down, right, to take that amino acid, homocysteine, and convert it into a harmless amino acid called methionine, if you can't make this conversion, homocysteine rises, causes something called hyperhomocystinemia, high homocysteine in the blood. When homocysteine rises, it becomes one of the more inflammatory compounds in the human body. As it's cruising by the inside lining of the artery, it starts to irritate the artery. It actually reduces the artery's elasticity and can even cause it to constrict. So, think about this.

You've got 63,000 miles of blood vessel roughly in your body. It doesn't take much narrowing to drive pressure up. Think about it. 85% of all hypertensive diagnosis, diagnosis of high blood pressure, primary hypertension or essential hypertension are idiopathic. Right?

Unknown origin. Only 15% of them are secondary hypertension of where we know the exact cause. And so what we do is we take people that have high blood pressure. We run a bunch of tests on them with EKG. It's normal.

EEG, it's normal. Heart and lung sounds. Cardiac cath. Eye contrast study. We do all of these cardiovascular tests and they all come out normal.

Yet the person still has high blood pressure. And that's largely because the high levels of homocysteine are causing vascular narrowing. I mean, this is a fixed system. Right? So, if I make the pipes smaller in a fixed system, pressure goes up.

So, in Dana's case specifically, and he's thrown his blood work out on the Internet so we can talk about his labs. But in his cases, he had one of the highest levels of homocysteine that I've personally ever seen and our clinical team had seen.

You think you would feel high blood pressure, but very often it's the silent killer because you don't feel it. It's not like you hear your blood rushing in your ears, although you may. It's not like you feel pressure in your head, or pressure in your neck or pressure in your chest. That's why high blood pressure, hypertension is one of the silent killers in cardiovascular disease. In fact, one of the first primary symptoms is sudden death.

So, we often put people on hypertensive medication before we actually look at whether or not they have high levels of homocysteine, or whether or not they might have a gene mutation specifically called MTR. And you can test for it or MTRR. And what this gene codes for is it codes for the enzymes that break down homocysteine and turn it into an amino acid called methionine. And so if this conversion is impaired and this homocysteine starts to rise and your vascular system constricts, it can drive your pressure up. And it drives your pressure up without anything being wrong with the heart.

So then we start standing on the heart, which is what happened in Dana's case, beta blockers, calcium channel blockers, diuretics, all of these things. His blood pressure was still through the roof.

And it was consistently high. We were actually, you know, our clinical team was taking his blood pressure two or three times a day, seven days a week. And it was consistently very elevated, even though he was on blood pressure medication.

That pressure is going to back up, right? And so we rarely go outside the heart to diagnose whether or not – and for the record, I am not a physician. I'm not licensed to practice medicine. I'm a human biologist. I didn't, you know, learn my trade in medical school.

I took eight years of undergrad and postgraduate education in human biology. But for 20 years, I was a mortality expert in the insurance industry, and I just read medical records for a living. So the vast amount of what I've come to understand about modern medicine has just come from reading thousands and thousands and thousands of medical records. And you can see very often that when people were being diagnosed with high blood pressure, they were always looking at the heart. They never looked outside the heart to say, well, could it possibly be beating into a dysfunctional arterial system?

And so, in Dana's case – and I should have brought the numbers because I had the week-over-week numbers. It was astounding. You know, we just put them on a simple amino acid called trimethylglycine, you know, an amino acid you can get off the shelf. And what it did? was it made up for this genetic deficiency, this lack of code to break down homocysteine.

And his body started to methylate to break homocysteine down.

So trimethylglycine will actually help to metabolize, to help give the body the raw material it needs.

And they'll go, you know what? This soil is deficient in nitrogen. And then they'll add nitrogen to the soil and the leaf will heal. But we don't think about human beings like this anymore. I feel like there's such a paucity of understanding of deep human physiology in a lot of the medical community, not all the medical community.

And we don't actually have faith in mankind and humanity and the body's ability to heal itself. And whether or not someone might be deficient in a raw material, not pathologic or diseased. So, for example, in Dana White's case, he was diagnosed with idiopathic hypertension, which he essentially did not have. He was being medicated for it. He had been medicated for it for 15 years.

And he didn't really have hypertension. There was nothing really wrong with him. It's that his body couldn't break down homocysteine. It was deficient in the amino acids needed to break this homocysteine down. As soon as we put those back in his body, it started to function normally.

But if you look at the micros, like how much spinach, how much iron is in spinach or calcium is in spinach, or how much nutrients are on the label of most foods, I mean, it's a fraction of what's actually listed there. And so, we're nutrient deficient, right? Human beings are not as sick as we have been led to believe. we are. The majority, in my opinion, of pathology and disease as we know it today are nutrient deficiencies, missing raw material in the human body.

And we just accept all these things as a consequence of aging, weight gain, water retention, lack of sleep, poor focus and concentration, lack of waking, energy, hormone imbalance. And we think that the body has all of these different pathologies and diseases, but the truth is it's usually nutrient deficient. It's astounding what happens to human beings. when you give their body the raw material that it needs to do its job. I mean, it really is.

And so, if you're just supplementing for the sake of supplementing, then there's only a marginal chance that you're getting what you need. If you're supplementing for deficiency, that's when magic happens in the human body.

That's why I say I think everybody at once in their lifetime should do a genetic methylation test. And the reason for that is that you do this test once in your lifetime. You never have to repeat it. The genes you're born with are the genes you die with. And based on, there's five major genes of methylation.

Based on how these five genes are working or not, you supplement for their deficiency. So, for example, one of the most common gene mutations in the world is called MTHFR. It's called a motherfucker gene. Stands for methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase, but we call it the motherfucker gene. This gene is estimated to be compromised in somewhere between 40% and 60%, depending on the study.

40% to 60% of the population has this gene mutation. And what this gene mutation does is it interrupts the ability to convert folic acid into the usable form called methylfolate. And while that might not sound like a big deal, until you realize that folic acid is the most prevalent nutrient in the human diet. Folic acid, by the way, is an entirely man-made chemical. You can't find folic.

We've been lied to about folic acid. I mean, it's entirely man-made and synthetic. You can't find folic acid anywhere on the surface of the earth. It does not occur naturally in nature. Folate does, but we make folic acid in a lab.

And then what we've done since 1993 is we've sprayed all of our grains, all white flour, all white rice, all white bread, and grains of any kind are sprayed with this chemical folic acid. It's called fortified or enriched. So when you spin a box of crackers around, it says fortified whole wheat flour or enriched bleached white flour. That means it's been sprayed with folic acid. Well, 44% of the population can't convert that into the usable nutrient.

First of all, you now have a deficiency in the form your body needs and an excess in the nutrient you can't process. And this causes things to go haywire.

It helps improve the intestinal motility of our gut. It helps degrade thought. It helps actually break down catecholamines, which are fight or flight neurotransmitters that can actually stimulate thought. And so people will go a lifetime eating white bread, white flour, white rice, white pasta, you know, breads and cereals of all kinds. And they're reading the label and they're like, wow, it's fortified.

It's enriched. But fortified or enriched for 44% of the population means you can't break that nutrient down. This is why there's a lot of evidence that getting folic acid out of the diet has immediate behavioral changes. I mean, if you're a parent and you're listening to this podcast and it's a full contact sport to get your kid in the car to go to school in the morning, look at what you're feeding him. The standard American diet is going to be like a Pop-Tart, a white bagel, a bowl of cereal.

And all of those are fortified with folic acid. Well, there's a 44% chance. your kid can't process that. And you're amping them up in the morning. It can literally be like cocaine for a six year old.

Right. It could make their mind race. So now this kid gets up and he goes to the breakfast table and he has a Pop-Tart. He has a white bag or he has a bowl of cereal. He dumps all this folic acid in the body.

And now his mind starts to ricochet. Right. And and it's a full contact sport to get him in the car. And then, by the time they get to school, you know, the calls coming home saying, hey, little Johnny can't pay attention. He doesn't focus.

He can't concentrate. Doesn't follow directions. Can't pay attention.

Because, you know, in our brains, we don't just create thought. Right. We also dismantle thought. We break thought down. Right.

We transfer methyl groups from neurotransmitters and break them down, so they no longer have an effect. Right. Or else you'd always be in the same. So when we start creating thought at a faster rate than we break thought down, we call this ADD or ADHD. Right.

But it's not an attention deficit at all. You know, in many of these cases, it's an attention overload disorder. It's too many windows open at the same time. Right. So if we're opening too many windows now, all of a sudden, we can't pay attention.

And it's not that the majority of people with ADD or ADHD lack the ability to pay attention, because they actually can hyper focus. They lack the ability to pay attention to so many things. Right. So, you know, you're thinking about a job you're working on and your friend walks up and you're thinking about a job and you start talking to your friend and you notice a logo on your friend's jacket that reminds you of a vacation you want to take. So you're thinking about a job, talking to your friend, looking at the logo, thinking about a vacation you want to take all at the same time.

And why is this? Because very often it's because you have a slow breakdown, slow methylation of neurotransmitters. So thought, thought, thought comes in, and now, all of a sudden, we're like, this kid can't pay attention. This guy's all over the place. If you look at the link between that simple gene mutation, MTHFR, and its incidence in stroke, cardiovascular disease, its incidence in ADD and ADHD and OCD, you'll find not a direct causal link, but enough of a prevalence.

to say, why wouldn't we just take folic acid out of the diet, add methylfolate, and take a shot at correcting the course of these conditions?

It just sucks. Okay, that's because it's not sprayed with folic acid.

So, GMOs aside, and that's another thing. I mean, I tell people you got to get GMO foods out of your diet. We didn't genetically modify seeds to increase yield. We modified seeds to be resistant to glyphosate, to poison and pesticides. But if you go back to the folic acid and seed oils, for that matter, but if you go back to the folic acid theory, if we stop spraying our grains just for 30 days, don't even stop eating white bread, white flour, white pasta, white rice or grains.

If that's what you eat. I don't need any of those things, but if that's what you eat, don't stop eating them. Just switch to the organic, non-fortified, non-enriched version and watch what happens to your mood, your focus, your concentration, your short-term recall, the depth of your sleep and your waking mind at night.

That's my number one weakness. Yeah. My number one weakness is bread and pasta. If I do go off the rails with a diet, like I have a cheat day, that's what I cheat with.

You know, I hear about a lot of people that have gluten allergies and gluten intolerances. And now I'm wondering, what does that mean?

Sometimes I get slaughtered online for saying, oh, you're talking about postpartum depression before the pregnancy ends. Yes, the diagnosis of postpartum depression happens very often before the pregnancy. Before the pregnancy is carried to term. So 44% of women have this gene mutation. What's the first thing their OBGYN tells them to do when they get pregnant?

Take high doses of folic acid. Well, 44% of them can't process this folic acid. So what happens?

Because what happens if you're pregnant? You have this gene mutation, MTHFR. Number one, you have a skyrocketing incidence of miscarriage. But then, because you don't have the methylfolate that your body needs for the adhesion of the egg implant into the uterine wall. But now she's pregnant, and she starts to take a prenatal vitamin.

with 1,400, 1,600% of the daily allowance of folic acid. She starts to go nuts, right? Develops postpartum depression. Eventually, the pregnancy ends. She stops taking the prenatal vitamin, and the symptoms go away.

But she still blames it on the pregnancy, not on the vitamin. Whoa. The truth is, I have yet to see a peer-reviewed published clinical study linking pregnancy hormones to postpartum depression.

And, you know, we all know people that are suffering from anxiety. If we haven't suffered from anxiety ourselves, chances are. we know somebody who's suffered from anxiety. And if you really break down what anxiety is, right, a fear of the future, you know, we have to understand that it doesn't require the presence of a fear for us to feel fear. Right?

So you could drive home tonight and pull into your driveway, and when you get out of your car, somebody's standing in front of you with a knife. Right? So that's a real fear. Right? Your pupils are going to dilate.

Your heart rate's going to increase. Your extremities are going to flood with blood. You're going to start to have a fight-or-flight response, mainly because an area of your brain has dumped catecholamines, fight-or-flight neurotransmitters into your brain. Boom. Now you start to have a fight-or-flight response.

But you could also be laying on the 30th floor of a condo in bed, and you could just start thinking about getting eaten by a shark. Yeah. And the chances of a shark getting out of the ocean and coming up the 30th floor elevator, right, are zero. But you can have the exact same reaction. So how is it that I can have the same reaction to the presence of a real fear as an entirely perceived fear?

Because it doesn't require the presence of a fear for these excess catecholamines to leak into the brain. And this is why the majority of anxiety that we have seen in our practices, that my clinical team treats, is coming from our physiology. It's not coming from our outside environment. In fact, if you ask most people that suffer from anxiety three questions, if you say, have you had it on and off your entire lifetime, they'll say yes. There's your first sign that it's a genetic deficiency.

And then you say, well, can you point to the specific trigger that causes it? They'll say, most of the time I can't. There's your second sign that it's not coming from their outside environment. And then the third question is, if you've ever tried anti-anxiety medications, have they worked? And the majority of the time they'll say, no, it just makes me feel like a zombie.

And that is very indicative that this is a nutrient deficiency and not a mental condition. We have a lack of…. Yeah.

The basic raw materials that your body needs to perform the process of methylation, because methylation is how we create neurotransmitters, right? I mean, we make serotonin from taking tryptophan and amino acid and methylating it into serotonin. We make dopamine from phenylalanine and tyrosine. If you can't make these conversions, you have certain deficiencies. And yes, you can have deficiencies in neurotransmitters, which will lead to the expression of a mood disorder.

You don't have a mental illness. You just have a lack of mental fitness. And this is why I think that we're so quick to say that we have pathology and disease or dysfunction. And then we go to chemicals and synthetics and pharmaceuticals. And I'm not anti-pharmaceutical, but I'm saying is before we diagnose somebody with a mental illness or an autoimmune disorder, or with an allergy or a sensitivity or irritable bowel syndrome or any number of other conditions, we should ask ourself what raw material could be missing from their body that could be causing this to happen.

Right. I mean, like when I was in the, when I was in the mortality space, you know, for 20 years, you know, I was reading medical records. It's just horrific, voluminous amounts of medical records. I would see simple nutrient deficiencies get misdiagnosed as autoimmune conditions more times than I can even remember. So, for example, you know, you'd have people go into their primary care physician and I would look at their medical records for 5,, 8, 10 years.

Sometimes we had more than 10 years of medical records. And I'd see, man, this person is single digit vitamin D3 levels. Like they are so clinically deficient in vitamin D3. And vitamin D3, you know, goes from about 30 nanograms per deciliter to 100 nanograms per deciliter. 60 to 80 is the perfect range.

But chronic deficiency in vitamin D3, the sunshine vitamin, right. The only vitamin, by the way, that human beings can make on our own. I think it's arguably the most important nutrient in the human body. In fact, it was the second leading cause of morbidity in COVID for people. that deficiency.

And it's also why we said that COVID disproportionately affected minorities. Because there's a higher incidence of vitamin D3 deficiency because of the pigment of their skin. But we would see these deficiencies in vitamin D3 that have gone on for decades, right. Now, all of a sudden, the patient is going into their doctor and saying, Doc, I wake up sore and achy in the morning, like I had a workout the night before, when I haven't. The soles of my feet, my ankles are sore.

when I get out of bed in the morning to walk to the bathroom. My knees and hips really bother me lately. And you know what? Just these past few weeks, it's kind of hard to make a fist. You would be shocked how many family medicine practitioners go, you know what, Joe, you've got rheumatoid arthritis.

I'm going to hit you with some high dose prednisone. I'm going to put you on something called a corticosteroid and you're going to be fine. Well, we knew in the mortality space that if you started corticosteroids, you had six years and one day until you were having a joint replacement. It was so accurate that if I saw you were misdiagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and started a corticosteroid, I would artificially advance your age six years and one day and I would schedule the joint replacement. And then what I would do is I would model the reduction in what we called your ambulatory profile.

How well you ambulate, how well you move, because sitting is the new smoking, right? Sedentary lifestyle is the leading cause of all cause mortality. And so, as I reduced your mobility, I would bring in all the diseases that exacerbate with reduced mobility. So now, if you rewind that, you had a simple nutrient deficiency in vitamin D3, cholecalciferol. You were diagnosed with a condition you did not have.

Put on a medication that wasn't required, which led to a joint replacement that wasn't necessary.

They artificially give you the same condition as this gene mutation, which is why one of the biggest side effects of corticosteroids is gut issues. Because methylfolate is involved in the motility of the gut, you now start taking a corticosteroid and it shuts your gut down.

You know, constipated sometimes, and then I get diarrhea. Sometimes I blow up like a tick.

Because there are cells in injured tissues that are essentially through the inflammatory process, calling platelets to the site of an injury. Right. Which is one of the ways that we heal. We call platelets to the site of the injury. The plate itself is kind of useless, but it has growth factors inside of it.

When it arrives on site, it bursts, drops off the growth factors. And now you start this healing process, which is one of the reasons why PRP works so well. You know, platelet-rich plasma, because you're taking all the platelets from the body and you're concentrating them into a site of injury. It's why I used to love BBC 157, until the FDA just came down on it.

It is so good for the gut. It's a gastric pentadecapeptide. It's actually synthesized from gastric juice, so it's actually tolerated very well orally.

By the way, you know, some more land, I think, was first FDA approved in 1983, if I remember correctly. So, you know, these things have been around for decades. We have lots of safety data on these and thousands and thousands of patients without an adverse event. We're going to have to drop it.

Right? Which is another, by the way, thing that methylation helps to fix.

It's not that all depression is related to methylation, but the prevailing theory when I was in mortality space was that if you were low on serotonin, you were by definition depressed. And I was like, well, if the serotonin hypothesis were true, I was thinking about this back then, and now it's been disproven, then if low serotonin were depression, then why wouldn't we just raise serotonin? Why would we put people on a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor that just rations or slows the uptake of serotonin rather than increase the supply of serotonin?

You know, I've had irritable bowel syndrome, or I've had Crohn's disease or diverticulitis, or I have intermittent gas and bloating and constipation, and irritability and cramping. And, you know, and I look at their allergy test, and they're like, man, I'm allergic to all these things, wheat, soy, corn, dairy, blueberries, bananas. I'm like, okay, let's slow this down.

Let's just take corn, for example. You say you're allergic to corn. Is there ever a time that you can eat corn and not have a reaction? They go, yeah, sometimes I can eat corn and not have a reaction. Okay, then you're not allergic to corn because allergies are not transient.

Allergies are consistent. So if you can sometimes eat it and sometimes not, you're not allergic to it. You don't have a sensitivity or an allergy. You have a gut motility issue. It's the most overlooked thing in all of bariatric medicine, in my opinion, because we stopped thinking of the gut as a conveyor belt, right?

It's like, remember Henry Ford, he wasn't made famous for the automobile. He was made famous for the production. Yeah, for the assembly line. So the assembly line was just a glorified conveyor belt. You put a part on it at one end, and as it kind of traverses the assembly line, every few feet, somebody just tinkers with the part, tinkers with the part.

And by the time it reaches the end, it's fully assembled. Well, the human intestinal tract is no different. It's just a glorified conveyor belt. It's 30 feet long. We put contents on it at one end.

As it exits the stomach in a very acidic environment, and as it traverses the gut, it generally becomes slightly more alkaline. Then it exits the rectum. That sequence of events is very important, right? If Henry Ford just walked into his factory one day and doubled the speed of the conveyor belt, what would happen? The entire line would break down.

Nothing wrong with the conveyor belt. Nothing wrong with the part on the conveyor belt. Nothing wrong with the people working there. Nothing wrong with the food. Nothing wrong with the bacterial flora.

It's not gut dysbiosis. It's not improper flora. It's not an allergy. It's not a sensitivity. It is a gut motility issue.

When you change the motility of the gut, you get all of the outcomes that look like food sensitivity, food allergy, bacterial flora being off, and then people start shoveling down probiotics, and they get all this allergy testing, and they go on these restrictive diets, and it doesn't seem to help because they haven't addressed the motility issue. Methylfolate, complex of B vitamins, very often will give your body the raw material it needs to restore that peristaltic activity, and then you can get off the proton pump inhibitors and the TOMS for the acid reflux, which is now screwing things up down the line. Again, I always come back to this theory that we should always look at the soil before we diagnose the disease or the pathology, because there's very little to lose by saying what nutrient deficiency could this person have that could be causing this condition to exist. It's like when people come into our clinics for hormone therapy. Very often, we don't put them on hormone therapy.

We just put them on nutrients to support healthy hormone therapy. I mean, if you have low vitamin D3, low DHEA, and high protein in your blood called SHBG, your hormones are going to be off. Free testosterone is going to be clinically deficient. Testosterone will probably also be low, and you don't need hormone therapy. Your endocrine system hasn't failed you.

Your body just doesn't have the raw material it needs to do its job to produce those hormones. So, you know, I really wish we would stop or we would start going back to studying human physiology and saying, what could we put back in this body so it could perform optimally? I really think magic things happen to human beings if their body just has the raw material it needs to do its job.

And these people, if you ask them, well, what are you thinking about at night? They'll tell you it's the most innocuous little nonsense. It's like, did I get everything on my grocery list today? Did my belt match my shoes? You know, did I return that Instagram post?

It's nothing that couldn't wait till the next day, right? So why does the mind wake up at night? Because we are releasing these catecholamines into the brain. We're not breaking them down at the right rate, so our mind is awake.

Catecholomethyltransferase, this CompT, takes those excitatory neurotransmitters, and it breaks them down. This is why things like magnesium and zinc and SAMe work so well to help people sleep. They're not actually sleep aids. They're methylation aids that help you break down neurotransmitters that create that wake state. And this is why, you know, those same people will say, you know, I work really well under pressure.

Physiologically, when you tell me you work well under pressure, you're saying to me, well, I lack the ability to set priorities internally. So I use external pressure to set my priorities for me. Well, what if you didn't have to rely on that extra stress, right? What if you didn't give equal weight to every thought that came into your mind? What if you weren't laying awake all night thinking about, you know, what color dishes you'd use for a Thanksgiving Day party, and you'd lay down and actually just went right into it?

You dealt a wave of sleep. I mean, just think of the impact that would have on the balance of your lifetime. And you may be one simple supplement away from that.

dopamine, one of which we call adrenaline. And so you don't need a massive dump like a fight or flight response. You just need to have them rise and not be able to break them down at the right rate.

If you don't have it here, you can't have it here. So rarely do. serotonin imbalances start here. They usually start here. And so by taking a methylated multivitamin, which is very simple to get, methylated folate, a complex of B vitamins, Sam E, trimethylglycine, if you have high homocysteine, you have a shot at feeling the difference between good and great.

I mean, I think most people are walking around right now at about 60% max of their true state of normal. They just accepted such an erosion of their baseline sense of normalcy. They've forgotten what it feels like to be normal. They're like, I'm just supposed to not sleep that well. I'm supposed to get a great idea in the bedroom, walk to the kitchen and wonder what the hell I'm doing in the kitchen.

You know, I'm supposed to have this little bit of weight gain or water retention around. I'm not really supposed to be responding to exercise in my 40s or my 50s. And none of that is true. None of that is true. These are not consequences of aging.

They're consequences of missing raw material in the human body. Wow.

That's different. Right. Or? I'm afraid of heights. And every time I walk to the edge of a 30th floor balcony and look over, I get massive anxiety.

Right. That's different. What I'm talking about.

I think those can be some of the most beneficial things that anybody does. They're signs of strength. But the majority of what we teach people to do with anxiety is cope with it. Here's how you deal with it. You breathe.

You get a, you know, you learn to get a therapist. You avoid certain situations. You modify your lifestyle. We rarely say, why don't we supplement for the breakdown of catecholamines, fight or flight neurotransmitters, which are associated in urinary excretions, with anxiety? Why don't we supplement for the proper breakdown of catecholamines and just see what happens?

And you watch people's anxiety eviscerate.

Magnesium, calcium, gluconate, hydroxycobalamin, this specific form of B12..

You know, when you take a complex of B vitamins, a certain form of B12, methylcobalamin, hydroxycobalamin, methylfolate, and you put it into these bodies and they start breaking down catecholamines for the first time and getting rid of them, they may, for the first time in their adult lifetime, be anxiety free and be like, what in the hell did I wait so long for?

And then you'll see little, certain forms of it. The one thing you want to avoid, like the plague in the B12 category, and I get a lot of shit for this, but is a form of B12 called cyanocobalamin. How do you spell that? C-Y-A-N-O-C-O-B-A-L-A-M-I-N, cyanocobalamin. Can we pull something up on here?

Sure. Can you Google? Because before everybody climbs all over me and says it's basically it's a cyanide-based form of B12, right? It rarely occurs naturally in nature. It's, you know, the most bioavailable forms are called methylcobalamin, hydroxycobalamin, and adenosylcobalamin.

But,

oh, are we going to be able to see it? Yeah. Oh, okay. Just go to Google and put in cyanocobalamin, C-Y-A-N-O.

Okay, cyanocobalamin, and then put a space and put the word PubChem.

So I'm just going to take you to the National Library of Medicine. Just click on that first link. So I'm going to take you to the National Library of Medicine at the National Institute of Health. You can go here. We're on their public chemical site, and you can look up this form of B12..

You see how it says cyanocobalamin B12?. Can you scroll down to section 5.3?. So if I want to see the component compounds, like what is this made out of? I can go right here to section 5.3, and I can look at its component compounds. Can you click on hydrogen cyanide?

So this is a flammable, acute, toxic health hazard, environmental hazard. By the way, this is the most common form of B12 in the world, right? We put this in Flintstone vitamins. We put it in all kinds of vitamins. The body can't even use this.

It has to be converted into hydroxycobalamin. It's astounding that we're allowed to do this, right? Because in the U.S., we use something called single-dose toxicity to determine whether or not something is dangerous for you. And people that say things like the dosage determines the poison, that is pathetically nonsensical, because nobody gets mercury poisoning from a single allowable dose of mercury. Nobody gets chemical poisoning from a single small dose of a chemical.

But let's go down here and go to view more at the bottom.

So just read that sentence right there. See, hydrogen cyanide is a highly toxic. See that?

Our toothpaste is full of fluoride. But if you look at the fluoride studies in 3,600 municipalities around the United States, there's an inverse relationship between the concentration of fluoride and IQ.

But you could just brush your teeth. Or you could just brush your teeth, right? It's astounding, too.

So every apple should have sunscreen in it. Right. It's really that dumb.

It says, if swallowed, contact poison control.

And it goes in one ear, out the other. You sound like a kook. Fluoride's bad. Fluoride's good for your teeth. Like, how do you know?

Why are you saying that? Do you know it's bad for you? What? Fluoride's bad for you. Fluoride's associated with low IQ.

You know, the higher the dose of fluoride in the drinking water, the lower the town IQ is, for real. Yeah. People go, Gera, come on. Why would they do that?

I mean, it's public panic.

What I did say was industrial process. seed oils are bad for you. If you put a canola plant in a commercial press and it comes out gummy, and then you take that gummy canola plant and you degum it with hexane, which is a known neurotoxin, and then you take that degummed oil and you heat it to 405 degrees and turn it rancid. So now you have a rancid neurotoxic oil. And then you take that rancid neurotoxic oil and you deodorize it with sodium hydroxide, which is a known carcinogen.

And then occasionally you bleach it so you clear the liquid. Then you bottle it and put it on the shelf. That is horrible for you. In fact, that's the problem with the majority of our food supply is that it's not the food itself. It's the distance from the food to the table.

Right. I mean, everybody vilifies meats, but if you look at grass fed meats versus industrial raised cattle, they're night and day. They're completely different.

And then you have to click through and it says food grade seed oils are not toxic for human beings. Experts say. I'm like, well, I'd love to debate that expert.

What would the post say? What is the post?

Yeah. Yeah. There. Keep going. Down, down, down.

Down, down, down. It's right around here. Keep going. No, that one they didn't catch. Okay.

Yeah. Keep going.

Keep going. Has a little. Keep going. It's pretty obvious when you see it, because it's cloudy.

Interesting.

Because it was on a podcast I did with Bradley.

Health and wellness.

So many people are consuming seed oils, and they really are industrial lubricants. Right. They essentially repurpose them for human use because they had a bunch of it laying around.

Aren't those good for you?

A Tufts University nutrition scientist told lead stories. There's no basis for the claim that food-grade canola oil is unsafe for humans to consume. In fact, evidence suggests that canola oil may benefit heart health. The claim about canola oil's toxicity appeared in a video posted on Instagram December 25th, 2022.. In that video, an unidentified on-camera narrator claimed,

There's no basis on which to claim that any canola oil on the market contains uric acid or the oil extracted in any way that is different from other plants, such as soybean oil. So what are you getting out of this?

And this is the thing that we do in this country. We have something called single-dose toxicity, which means that if this capsule has a certain amount of arsenic in it, but it's not enough to cause a toxic reaction, then I can still give it to you. But it's the cumulative dose toxicity most European countries use, which is why there are dozens of compounds that are legal in the United States, that aren't legal anywhere else on the surface of the earth. They're certainly not legal in Europe. They don't use folic acid in Europe.

They don't use cyanocobalamin. Actually, cyanocobalamin, I'm not sure.

I know. They get fucking paid. They get fucking paid.

It's all of these little micro-toxicities that are adding up. When you look at cellular metabolism and how it's interrupted by all of these micro-toxins, one of the reasons why people, when they go on certain types of diets, like a carnivore diet, experience, such a dramatic improvement in health is because the majority of what's happening is they're removing a lot of these toxic chemicals.

But when you look at your blood work and you see that your LDL cholesterol is marginally high. You know, let's say, that it should be 99 or less and you're 109.. And they say, well, you should go on a stat. I mean, marginally elevated cholesterol, when we were in the mortality space, was a marker of longevity. At the time, what we would do is if you had low levels of triglyceride and you had elevated, marginally elevated LDL cholesterol and high HDL cholesterol, the high-density lipoprotein, we would actually extend your life expectancy.

Really? We would extend your life expectancy. If you were clinically within these certain margins, if you were very low on cholesterol, like your LDL cholesterol was clinically pushed down. Remember, cholesterol is not a fuel source, right? The body can't use cholesterol for energy.

It's a construction material. So we used to build every cell wall. We used to build cell membranes. We used to make hormones. It's a very necessary construction material.

And it gets vilified because it's at the scene of a lot of crimes. But it's not pulling the trigger, right? I mean, a more dangerous measure would be to have high cholesterol and very high triglycerides, because then you start to reduce the particulate size of cholesterol. So remember, like from high school geometry, as the size of a sphere gets smaller, its surface area to volume ratio goes up. And so a lot of these small particulate cholesterols are very dangerous because they pass through the arterial wall, they get kind of eaten by a macrophage, and they start this process of scarring.

But just having elevated levels of LDL cholesterol was a marker for longevity in our mortality space.

He had all five of those five in a really bad way.

And, you know, it's a very hard concept for him to understand, too, that you have, you know, this kind of life-threatening level of triglycerides, so we're going to put you on a high-fat diet to bring your blood fat down. Right. Right, we're going to try to put you into a state of ketosis, so your body starts to use beta-hydroxybutyrate and fat as a fuel source, so we can actually drive the triglycerides in your blood down. And everybody, you know, hammered me, and they're like, oh, I don't have $10 million to spend on a program like that. I'm like, it was a 10-week, 12-week keto reset, you know, peptides, yes, hormone balance, but all the fancy equipment, the red light therapy beds, the hypermax oxygen, the PMF, all those things you can get for free by just, you know, going out in sunlight, grounding, and learning how to do breath work.

But most people don't give it the credence that it deserves because it's free, right? It's like, you know, most people don't even want to take a cold shower, much less get into a, you know, a cold plunge. You know, most people don't want to wake up with the sun and take their shirt off and go outside and expose it to natural sunlight. Most people don't want to take eight minutes and do breath work. But if you just added those three things to your morning routine, you'd change the entire trajectory of your life.

Juve, yeah. Is that good?

I barely use my Juve. I think it does something. I feel better when I use it. Yeah, that's it. That looks like a fucking spaceship.

You know, just add to your morning routine, exposing your skin to sunlight and getting out in first light and doing breath work.

But the real magic happens in the mitochondria.

But really, what happens inside the mitochondria, I have kind of a saying that the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease. Because during my 20-year career in the mortality space, we did not find a single disease etiological pathway that did not have its roots in a lack of blood, oxygen or, specifically, was not exacerbated by hypoxia. And if you think that we all die the same way, right? I mean, every human being leaves this earth the same way. We all die of hypoxia, lack of oxygen to the brain.

But it's just what causes that to happen, right? Is it a gunshot wound, a boss, a stroke, you know, heart attack? But the truth is that this level of oxygen management in the body is a measurable thing. You're either using oxygen very well and therefore you are slowly approximating the grave, or you're using oxygen very poorly and you are accelerating towards the grave. So, for example, when you look at how human beings are truly powered, right?

Like, where do we really get our energy from? It's really one energy source called ATP, right? And it's produced inside this little organelle called the mitochondria. There's about 110 trillion of these in your body. 10% of your body weight is mitochondria.

And the mitochondria has a voracious appetite for oxygen. When it receives oxygen, it will create 16 times more energy. It will produce 36 ATP rather than 2 ATP. So imagine a little mitochondria that has a motor inside of it called the Krebs cycle. And every time this motor makes one revolution, it has two choices.

It can either create 2 units of energy, 2 ATP, or it can create 36 units of energy, 36 ATP. The difference between a 16-fold increase or 16-fold decrease in energy is the presence of oxygen. And so if oxygen enters this cycle, right, it produces 16 times more energy. It puts out water and it also puts out carbon dioxide. If there's no oxygen present, it only produces 2 ATP and it releases lactic acid, which, by the way, doesn't make your muscles burn, but it releases lactic acid.

So what if, when you used a red light bed, one of those wavelengths of light actually goes through the mitochondrial wall and it goes into this motor, it goes into the Krebs cycle, and it actually kicks out a gas called mitochondrial nitric oxide and forces oxygen to dock. There's a little place in this motor called cytochrome c oxidase, and cytochrome c oxidase is like a one-armed man. He can either shake hands with oxygen or he can shake hands with nitric oxide, but he can't do both. So if I can get him to let go of nitric oxide and grab oxygen, I can get a 16-fold increase in mitochondrial output.

You generally find therapeutic wavelengths between 680 and 720 nanometers, specifically 810 and 940.. Those are the ones that have the most clinical research on them. They're also extraordinarily safe. And so I think it's actually FDA approved for the skin and certain eye treatments, but I'd have to go back and check that. But I think it does.

Red light does have an FDA approval. But laying in red light therapy every day, if you do that for a month, even if you did it 10 minutes a day for 30 days, at the end of that month, you would notice a profound and material change in your performance.

That's why there's red light beds at the UFC.