The ONE Root Cause Behind Every Autoimmune Disease | Gary Brecka

Artificial intelligence is about to circumvent the modern medical system in a way that may be catastrophic for a lot of modern medicine, and it may fly in the face of some of the advice that we've been given. You'll never convince me that somebody has more than one autoimmune disease. Usually what happens is that one thing causes everything. People get sick like dominoes falling.

Almost every time I look at blood work, there's always one thing, and it's like if you fix the one thing, all the symptoms start to get corrected.

Yeah, I'll get credited with these miracle cures. There's no miracle It's just finally someone took the time to zoom out and look at the whole picture.

There's so many supplements and there's so many diets. What moves the needle the most?

You don't need a fancy red light bed. You don't need a half-million-dollar hyperbaric chamber and you don't need to go to Switzerland to get your blood filtered. I encourage people to really just get used to doing breathwork every single day, preferably outside, preferably in sunlight, just for a few minutes. Here's the foundation of a long, healthy, happy life. They are using intermittent hypoxia to reverse age. I read that they're at 8.6 years Less than halfway through this full study.

I mean, think about that. Extending lifespan or reversing age by 8.6 years from the parameters.

Isolation was one of the most detrimental things that could happen to a human being. If you wanted to cut a human being's life expectancy in half, and I mean in half, at any age, you put them in isolation. I believe that community and connection is medicine. Sleep is our human superpower. It's the most bullied thing in our schedule. We sleep when we can. There was for, you know, decades, I'll sleep when I'll die, crush your enemies.

You know, like, don't sleep and you will die. How about that?

Definitely.

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I've got Gary Brecka with me today. Gary, welcome to the show.

Dude, this is awesome, man. I love sitting down with you, man. We end up running a podcast before the podcast really starts. I'm like, can we just turn the cameras on?

It was really good.

Oh, I felt the same way. I'm so excited to talk to you because I think you have just such an amazing mind when it comes to how to heal and especially conditions that are difficult. Again, adding years to someone's life. I'm excited to get into all that as well today. And I love being at your house for a lot of other reasons too. You've got a hyperbaric chamber in your house.

Yeah, I just got out of it actually.

Last time I was in here, I got in your HOCATT, which is doing so many things at once, right? Transdermal ozone and red light and PEMF and sauna and everything else, and a lot of amazing things. And so today I want to talk about how to detoxify, how to heal conditions that doctors may say you can't heal today, get into boosting our own stem cells. And we're going to talk about this thing that I know I've seen Joe Rogan doing and a lot of other people. Plasma exchange. There's a newer, I don't know if I'd call it a newer version, a different version called inuspheresis that most people have never heard of.

I go to Switzerland to do that tomorrow. I leave at 5 o'clock tomorrow and I'm going to, I go through London, then I connect to Basel, Switzerland, and I'm going to do inuspheresis with my wife in Basel, Switzerland.

Well, let's start there with blood. One of the things that I love, there's a verse in the Bible that says something that's very similar to healing is in the blood. I mean, so we know going all the way back to the Bible, looking at ancient forms of medicine, knowing today that Keeping our blood cleansed, but also very rich in oxygen and nutrients and healthy is incredibly important. And one thing I do a lot today is I analyze a lot of blood work, and there are so many people that have poor oxygen, poor ferritin iron levels, and they're exhausted and sick because their blood isn't healthy.

Yes.

So talk to me about these different forms of blood filtration and the importance of keeping our blood healthy.

I think the new era, if you want to call it that, of longevity medicine is what I would call subtractive medicine. And I come from a data science background, so I was a data scientist for large life insurance companies for years, and we really followed big data trends. We really didn't ignore the big data, right? Like, for example, there's—

Yeah.

I get that a good gold standard randomized placebo-controlled clinical trial that is done at a collegiate university that is peer-reviewed and published in a major journal has significant scientific validity. But very often we ignore that validity in the face of contraindicated massive amounts of data.

Yeah.

You could take a zoom out on the modern healthcare system and say, okay, we spend $5 trillion a year. On healthcare. We've done 279,000 independent, randomized, peer-reviewed, placebo-controlled clinical trials. What has been the result? Well, we're the sickest, fattest, most disease-ridden nation in the world. We spend the most on healthcare, you know, 7 times the next nearest civilized nation. We're ranked 66th in the world in life expectancy. We lead the world in morbid obesity, type 2 diabetes, infant mortality. maternal mortality, and multiple chronic disease in a single biome. So what's going on? How do those 2 statistics live in the same universe? And, you know, if you look at parachutes, for example, there's zero evidence that parachutes work. No one could sit here and make the claim that parachutes are effective, that they are safe, that there's any scientific evidence that they work, because there's zero evidence that they work. We've never done a randomized clinical trial. on parachutes. We've never done a placebo group. I don't know who wants to sign up for that, the placebo group that's going to jump out without the parachute. So we have no evidence at all of any kind, from any kind of scientific basis, that parachutes work. Yet the data screams in the face of that, and no one would jump out of an airplane without one. And so I think the merger of large data and practical science, this gold standard science that we've that we hold in such high regard. This is something I'm really, really excited about because artificial intelligence, in my opinion, is about to circumvent the modern medical system in a way that may be catastrophic for a lot of modern medicine. Because when you can take 700 trillion independent variables and create an actionable result, actionable result, you're taking the big data set and you're creating an actionable result. And it may fly in the face of some of the advice that we've been given. And when we look at subtractive medicine, these different types of blood filters, It's back to the old adage that when a fish gets sick, the first thing we do is clean the tank, right? Because it's so obvious, right? You look in there and it's like you're swimming around in murky water and it's got a lot of algae and we're like, okay, yeah, I see why the fish is sick. With human beings, we sort of mess with them while they're in the tank and we leave them there. And by the tank, I mean this environment, this environment that we're in right now, not even this outside environment. What is our internal environment?

Yeah.

Like, you know, you talked about the blood. The blood isn't just a fluid that circulates around our body and transports things from one place to another, although it does that. The blood is a living ecosystem. There are hundreds of billions of mechanisms at work inside of our blood at all times. And when you look at what has happened as society has modernized and we've introduced things to our diet and into our environment that we just were never ancestrally meant to deal with. You know, this toxic load is something that is feeding the chronic disease pandemic. The question is, how do we lower our toxic load?

Yeah.

Right? And that's where this whole era of subtractive medicine, in my opinion, comes in. Clean the tank. And so there's lots of ways to do that. The procedure that I'm getting done in 2 days from today is called in-use pheresis. So in the United States, you can do therapeutic plasma exchange. And this is a procedure where you put the blood through a separator, the whole blood comes back into the body, the plasma is discarded, and it's replaced with a sterile fluid called albumin. And this is safe, but there are also a lot of proteins in the plasma that we want.

I mean, there's a lot of good stuff going on in the plasma.

Yeah.

Um, are heavy metals in there? For sure. Are, are there, are there, uh, biofilms? Are there fungi, potentially mold, mycotoxins, or heavy metals hanging out in the plasma? Yes. Microplastics can be found in the plasma. So certainly filtering those things out is, is, is a good thing. Uh, my preference, uh, between those 2 treatments would be in-use pheresis, but you can't get it yet in the United States.

Yeah.

So what in-use pheresis does, which is different from therapeutic plasma exchange, is it filters the plasma and it returns it. So what is this good for? This is good for things like Lipo, right?

Yeah.

Which is a genetic component of cholesterol, a component that I have. I manage every other lifestyle risk factor, but I have only been able to marginally affect my Lipo, and I manage it through diet, through lifestyle. through exercise, through regular sauna, regular grounding, breathwork, sunlight, all of the free basics that everyone that's watching this podcast has access to. You don't need fancy equipment to do that. But I haven't been able to materially lower that lipo. What I've found has had a good impact on it has been bergamot oil, a citrus peel extract.

Yeah.

I've had success with slow-release niacin. But even the PCSK9 inhibitors for cholesterol, don't touch it. And there is no pharmacological solution right now. Inuspheresis will trap those cholesterol proteins. And so it will immediately and dramatically reduce the Lp.

And just for everyone listening, this Lp marker, which is really a marker that we just really started running more recently and looking at heart disease risk. I mean, there's a very large genetic component when it comes to Lp, and so it's really important. You want to get that lower for heart disease risk. And a lot of times it's paired with ApoB, which is important too. I just wanted to bring that up why getting that lower is just important. That's amazing that it's doing that.

Yeah.

I mean, these really small proteins will cross the endothelium of the blood vessel and they start this whole reaction with macrophages creating foam cells. And And, and this is the genesis of this atherosclerosis, arterial sclerosis, plaquing, scarring, hardening, narrowing, all of those conditions of cardiovascular disease that we talk about. And it's, you can manage it by managing lifestyle risk factors.

Yeah.

Um, yeah, I've looked at the Cleerly exam and Prenuvo exam, so I'm in the, in the clear now, but I still want to make sure that, you know, I manage it. And so I, I think this whole era of subtractive medicine, there are filtration technologies like hemodetox filters, for example, that don't use micron size. So they don't use pores like a filter because at some point, as you make the size of a filter smaller, you will simply trap everything in the blood.

Yeah.

Right. And you're getting down to the size of a virus, for example. Well, a red blood cell, a platelet is going to be much larger in diameter. So you're going to trap those too. So there are these different types of filtration that that cleanse the blood from different components. Like, Chemo Detox is a filtration technology that will filter out circulating tumor cells, fungi, mold, mycotoxin, organic toxins. And it uses not micron size, it uses something called heparin binding sites. So imagine just a column full of these glass beads. They're coated with heparin. Heparin is a blood thinner. Um, it's something that, um, is coating the inside lining of our, our arteries. And, and the reason why that's important is a lot of these pathogenic invaders know that, that on the other side of that heparin is the tissue. That's, that's where I can create an infection, right? I mean, the virus is useless unless it has a host, right?

Right.

Unless it has a cell. And mold and mycotoxin don't really wreak havoc floating around the blood. They wreak havoc when they get into our tissues and sporulate and what have you. So I'm very excited about the fact that we can now clean the tank because I believe it's very difficult to hurt someone, to hurt a human being by cleaning the tank. It's very difficult to harm the fish by draining and putting fresh, clean water in there. It's going to do nothing but help the fish. And the same with our environment. And so very excited about these blood filtration technologies. But if we just took a step back, And said, you know, what does a detox lifestyle look like? What does a detox, you know, uh, protocol look like? Um, if you don't have a dollar to spend, what it looks like is having regular bowel movements. Um, I mean, I can't tell you how many clients of mine, you know, want to start the conversation about bowel movements. And I'm like, you wake up in the morning, how long is it until you go, oh, it's Tuesday. And then again on Thursday afternoon, and then sometimes on Sunday morning.

Yeah.

That's not a good sign, right? So stool, urine, sweat, these are phase 1, phase 2 detox in the liver. These are things that we can access on a regular basis, very inexpensively, if not entirely for free. And those changes keep the tank clean.

Yeah. And it's like we always want to be doing those things, even if you are able to go to Switzerland and get Enospheresis or plasma exchange or something else. You want to be able to cleanse your blood, cleanse through sweat, cleanse through urine and bowel movements, no matter who you are, what you're doing. And sometimes I see people kind of like, it's like reaching for the supplement before you change your diet.

Right.

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You know, as you were talking about Plasma Exchange, again, we've seen there's been a lot of really big names who I see who are, you know, holding their bags.

Yeah.

Yeah. Joe Rogan just did it.

Yeah. And so, so there's a lot of people. But yeah, my concern with that has always been To your point, getting out some of the really important proteins, filtering those out of your blood. And actually in a very similar way, we were talking about stem cells before we started shooting here and how doing your own bone marrow culture expanded, you're weakening your immune system for months. I mean, your own stem cells—

Yes.

Are so important. Now, I do think plasma exchange is definitely a step less than that. I think doing bone marrow— pulling your own bone marrow is a little bit more traumatic to your body. But I do think the thing I like about some of these newer techniques is that they are able to preserve what you really need and really just get rid of the toxins and the stuff that you definitely want out of there.

I totally agree with you. And again, coming from a data science background, we accept so many fallacies in modern medicine and we accept so many unknowns in modern medicine. So for example, if you look at the entire category, Of autoimmune. Um, let's throw all autoimmune into one category. Crohn's disease, Sjögren's, Hashimoto's, multiple sclerosis, lupus, all of these autoimmune diseases as a category. About 82% of the time when you're diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, it's idiopathic. It's of unknown origin. So you say, well, Gary, why do I have Crohn's disease? Well, because your immune system's attacking your colon. Well, why is it attacking my colon? Well, you know, Josh, we don't know. It's luck of the draw.

Oh, look at this.

You might even have a family history of it. That's my favorite one. But because autoimmune is rarely, if ever, with very few exceptions, hereditary or genetic. But that being said, why do we accept that 82% to 85% of the time when the immune system is attacking a healthy tissue or it's manufacturing antibodies to a healthy tissue, why do we think that the immune system has done something wrong? What if we just took one step back and we said, what if the immune system is acting properly? We just need to find out why it's here. Like, what called the immune system to the colon? Was it just random? Or was it leaky gut? You know, did they disrupt this single-cell layer on the inside?

Mm-hmm.

of this luminal wall of the intestine, which, by the way, is outside of our body, right? I mean, our intestines are— they run through us, but it's external to the body. And it's meant to be external for a reason, right? Like the skin. And in fact, your luminal wall of your intestine is contiguous with the back of your forearm if you follow it all the way in. And so we just assume that if it's attacking the—

Thyroid.

Well, you have Hashimoto's, and if it's attacking the lacrimal gland of the eye, you've got Sjögren's, and if it's, it's, it's creating sclerosis in the myelin, you've got multiple sclerosis. But I, I have come to, um, the position that if you were to look at these 5 categories, um, you would find the genesis, in my opinion, of the 82% of idiopathic autoimmune disease. And that is mold, mycotoxin, parasite, virus, and heavy metal. And I say this somewhat anecdotally, but I say it also based on hundreds of thousands of patients that have come through a clinic system that I owned and exited last year, and looking at voluminous amounts of data on people that have severe heavy metal toxicity, especially embedded in the thyroid, that have a link to Hashimoto's, or parasitic infections linking to multiple sclerosis, heavy metal and leaky gut that has perpetuated itself for sometimes years, even decades, that resulted in an autoimmune attack. And so I think we're beginning to reframe How intelligent the body is, that it just doesn't spontaneously break down, that people don't have multiple autoimmune diseases. Usually what happens is that one thing causes everything. People get sick like dominoes falling, not like the Big Bang Theory where everything just goes to— pardon my French, but just goes to hell in a handbasket at one time.

Right.

You'll never convince me that somebody has more than one autoimmune disease, ever. You'll convince me that they have one issue that has led to multiple autoimmune conditions.

Yeah.

And, and if you go back and sequence when these things, um, um, have occurred and you eliminate mold, mycotoxin, parasite, virus, and heavy metal, I believe you would get to the genesis of why most of us are having our immune systems Yeah.

You know, Gary, one of the things I've done, and I opened a clinic in Nashville this past year, and then I've practiced before, and I've looked at thousands of things of blood work. And I can tell you that almost every time I look at blood work, to your point exactly, you're always seeing 5, 7, so many things on blood work, but there's always one thing, sometimes a secondary, but that's it. And it's like, if you fix the one thing, to your point, is it a virus? Is it a really severe nutritional deficiency? Is it cortisol is absolutely through the roof all the time? But there's typically just that one thing, and if you fix it, the 5, the 7, all the symptoms, they start to get corrected.

Yeah, I think it's that domino theory, right? You start standing the dominoes back up and try to find the first one that falls.

That's right.

Whereas if you treat it like there's a hub of a wheel and there's all these spokes, the way modern medicine has oriented itself is it's hyper-specialized. And a lot of times when I've parachuted into clients' cases, And I'll get credited with these miracle cures. It's— there's no miracle cure. Like, I don't have a basis of knowledge that you don't have, that anyone else in this space doesn't have. It's just finally someone took the time to zoom out and look at the whole picture, right? You, you have a cardiologist that is not talking to the nephrologist and doesn't see the early-stage kidney failure puts them on a diuretic to try to bring blood pressure down and doesn't realize the impact that that's having on the kidney because these 2 people are not talking. And it's medical error that's the 3rd leading cause of death. It's not medical malpractice.

Right.

It's medical error, right? Doctors are overwhelmed, not a long time with the patient. Rarely do we zoom out and look at the entire picture. This is where I think artificial intelligence is really going to have a very positive impact on modern medicine because artificial intelligence can zoom out. And it can take all of these independent variables. I mean, we're doing lab experiments now, um, in human organ tissue and running clinical trials in AI that's saving us 10 years of animal studies and human clinical trials. Um, and, and it, it can include so many variables, hundreds. I mean, the methylation cycle alone is 300 billion independent transactions. going on inside of every single cell, of which you got 32 trillion, plus or minus, uh, every minute of every day. There's no human being that can wrap their arms around that. I mean, I dedicate a large portion of my adult lifetime to the study of methylation, and I believe that it's one of the foundational things that I look at in every client to see how well they're, you know, methylating, how well are their cells eliminating waste, repairing, detoxifying, you know, regenerating. Are they supplementing for the sake of supplementing, or are they supplementing for deficiency? But it's a really exciting time because yes, I'm going to Switzerland to do enosphaeresis, mainly because I'm so curious about it. And I'm an N of 1 right now. So I've done a Vibrant Wellness Total Toxic Burden.

Yeah.

Right? And I did that today with first urine. I'm going to do one the day after I'm finished the filtration, and I'm just going to look at the data and say, what happened to my aflatoxins, ochratoxins, Hopefully I don't have those.

But what, you know, was I able to immediately, um, limit these?

But by the same token, you know, I, I held a, uh, a detox challenge last year, and we had, I don't know, 70,000 people. I got my whole team here, but we had like 70,000 people or so sign up for it. We sent out, um, hundreds of these Vibrant Wellness, uh, total toxicity tests. And it was shocking to me how many people had the same silicone glues, flame retardants, accelerants like you find in Raid cans, including myself and my wife, had this in our urine. I eventually traced it back to my mattress because about 98% of all the mattresses sold in America are by law soaked in flame retardants.

Oh, right.

And we spend a third of our life on our mattress, and it's, it's petroleum-based memory foam, it's silicone glues, um, you know, it's fabric dyes, uh, and, and then there are these, uh, all of these accelerants and flame retardants so that that mattress can't smolder or, or ignite. But we lay our face down on that thing for 8 hours a night. So all of these different, you know, uh, aflatoxins, ochratoxin showed up in people's urine. We were able in 5 weeks to titrate the vast majority out of that, out of people's urine, um, through very naturopathic means, depending on the type of toxin they were encountering. We just use different widely available binders, activated charcoal, zeolite, um, and, uh, and, and other binders, um, silica. We used regular sauna sessions. We used lymphatic drainage. We made sure that we got the bowel movements happening on a regular basis. We hydrated with minerals. And the vast majority of people's toxic burden fell dramatically. So I don't want to create this notion that, hey, if you don't have X thousands of dollars to fly halfway around the world and do one of these blood filters, you're doomed.

Yeah.

You're not. If you are sweating, pooping, urinating, exercising, getting sunlight, doing things like grounding and breathwork, and eating a whole food diet, which is where all the data lies. Again, back to the big data. The big data doesn't say that dogmatic dieting extends life, right? So you don't find hyper-life extension in any of the meta-analyses, big data studies, or Blue Zones. where you have extreme dogmatic dieting. So it's not carnivore, keto, paleo, pescatarian, vegan, vegetarian. It's, it's the absence of processed food.

Yeah, that's right.

Right. I mean, there are people that eat very high carbohydrate diets, have their entire lives, live into 108 years old.

Yeah.

Um, and there are people that eat very high meat consumption, Singapore, for example, um, per capita, and they're living very long lives. You go to the Mediterranean and the amount of fatty fish and oils, I mean, if you told your cardiologist that you were going to drink a liter of olive oil per week per person—

They'd have a heart attack.

They would have a heart attack right then and there. They'd be like, get out of my office. And yet they don't have cardiovascular disease and they're living healthy lives.

So sometimes we just have to let the air out of the balloon and realize, have a lot more control than we think we do. Um, we can make dietary and lifestyle changes, um, that really set us up for long, healthy, happy lives. And, and one of my actually favorite, uh, influencers, I won't say who it is. I saw her talking, uh, on Instagram about just not putting a banana in with, uh, uh, berries because somehow the banana decreases the absorption of polyphenols in the berries. I'm like, oh my God, guys, we're like.

Yeah. We're getting to the point where it's like I'm getting paralysis from analysis.

Oh yeah. And it's overwhelming. I mean, that's the biggest thing. So when I first opened my practice in Nashville, the number one thing I would hear, especially from, it was a lot of families, a lot of moms coming in, and still today is, I'm overwhelmed.

Yeah.

And so let's help people not be overwhelmed because it can feel like so many things. And what's your advice on that, Gary? Because I think about people that are, I'm thinking of a mom, she's got 3 kids and she's like, okay, well, I want to reverse my Hashimoto's. But she's hearing about all of these different types of biohacks and there's so many supplements and there's so many diets. Where does she start and what moves the needle the most?

Well, I will tell you, I mean, just because you said Hashimoto's. Now, again, this is anecdotal, but this is what I've seen in my clinic system and with hundreds and hundreds of patients. And in my VIP community, we have documented cases of Hashimoto's. I don't want to say Hashimoto's reversal. Like, we didn't really reverse Hashimoto's, but we stopped the immune system from manufacturing antibodies against the thyroid. So whatever you want to call that. And in the vast majority of these particular cases, they had rather severe heavy metal toxicity. These were people that could not methylate heavy metals. Um, and they had very high mercury, arsenic, in some cases palladium, other heavy metals, which by the way, the thyroid has an affinity for heavy metals and that tissue has an affinity for it. And, you know, if you, if you take a toxin, right? Like, so let's, let's say that this is, this is a mold spore or, or a mycotoxin or virus, um, or very often a heavy metal. And this is a healthy cell. These generally do not hide like this. They don't hang out outside that cell. They hide like this. Viruses are infamous for this, right? I mean, a virus doesn't attack the cell. What a virus does is attach to the cell membrane, inject its DNA, and infect this cell. So the virus is hiding like this. So that means what's facing the outside world? What's facing the outside world is your cell wall.

Mm-hmm.

The perpetrator is inside. The immune system is hypervigilant, right? It's just like a police officer chasing a bank robber. If he runs into a house and barricades himself in the house, the police are going to kick down the door to get to the perpetrator. They're not trying to bust the door down. They're trying to get to the perpetrator, right? So if he had never gone in there, they would never have showed up and knocked down the door.

Yeah.

Immune system is kind of the same way. When it arrives to a cell wall, It doesn't have permission to go inside, right? So the way it gains permission is depending on what it is, nuclear capsid protein, it manufactures an antibody, creates an antibody. It says, this is the antigen, the foreign invader is inside there. I need to bust down this door to get to the perpetrator. And then we hold the immune system responsible for a crime that somebody else committed. Like we're arresting the police officer.

Yeah.

We're like, hey, you busted down the door. So like, hey, immune system, you manufactured an antibody to this thyroid tissue. You're all screwed up. It's like, no, I'm not here to kill the thyroid. I'm here to get to the metal or potentially to the other invader. And I think now data is starting to prove this at scale. So people like yourself and I are being vindicated for talking about therapies that are thousands of years old, right? I mean, nothing that we're doing, we were laughing before the podcast, absolutely nothing we are doing today in modern medicine, even this indus phrasis I'm getting ready to do, will we be doing in 5,000 years?

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

But in Eastern medicine, if something has been around for 5,000 years, I feel like it's— and it hasn't changed, probably because it works.

Yeah, yeah. I totally agree. One of the things you were referencing is you were able to work in looking at life insurance and looking at— and I remember the first time I had you on the podcast, you were talking about one of the greatest factors increasing mortality is if somebody had a spouse die, and especially if they didn't have close family around them. And what that meant for them in terms of that loneliness and increasing mortality. And so—

Isolation.

Isolation. And being able to see that, that big picture. And again, that wasn't a double-blind study. That was just massive data over a pretty long period of time that's been able to predict mortality, increase risk. And Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, the Bible, the advice there, it's a very similar thing where— and the Bible, I'll kind of remove it from this part of the conversation to where With Chinese medicine, they've come up with this over 3,000 years of individual case studies, millions of individual case studies, and it works. It really, really works and it's effective. And I think it's more reliable than— there was a study that came out about studies and it's something like nearly 50% of studies, at least when you read the headlines, are wrong. They're false.

And fundamentally biased.

Yeah.

Yeah. And there were like 6 or 7 points to that in terms of, People are cherry-picking data. Most of the time, somebody wants there to be a certain outcome and they're paying for that to happen. And so they're setting up the study to create just that. And so that's why I think it is so important because there are people out there, by the way, and I know some of them have been critical of you and many other people in the space, and that is they'll say that they'll live and die by the science.

Yes.

The problem is, what if Dr. Fauci right now is under this trial?

Ooh, wow.

And I saw Robert F. Kennedy coming out with all this stuff about it, and it's like, Okay. Those people that were saying everything he said was absolute golden science, well, now what are they saying?

Yeah.

You know, and so all that being said, you don't want to live and die by the science. Science has so many, and by the way, when we say science, science is a method. You don't want to live and die by studies funded primarily by pharmaceutical companies, but double-blind placebo studies, they can add value in helping you understand. But if you do that alone without pairing it with common sense and understanding—

And big data.

How the body works and data and this tradition. Then you're missing one of the legs of your stool and you're unbalanced and you're likely going to tip over at some point. Yeah.

I mean, if you go just by the science, you'll jump out of an airplane without a parachute.

That's right. There you go.

Because you're like, you know what? There is no evidence these work. And I use that example because in cellular biology, with hundreds of billions of independent downstream and upstream transactions going on constantly, and when we pick one isolated variable, You know, like, we— I was talking on the spike protein a few months ago, and someone was like, well, why isn't everybody having the same reaction? If they all got the same vaccine, they got the same mRNA, and it's overprogramming this production of spike protein, then why don't we just see this uniform reaction in everyone? And I'm like, well, this is where individuality comes into play. You know, this is where the human genome comes into play. This is where something called methylation Um, if you took 100 people and said, okay, we're all going to eat the same amount of mercury-laden tuna fish every single day for, let's say, 90 days. At the end of that period, even though everyone took in the same dose, about a third of those people would have severe heavy metal toxicity, um, and have severe symptoms. About a third of them would have mild symptoms that you could live with, some brain fog, water retention, weight gain, poor focus, poor concentration, muscle aches. But you would live with it. They would probably think it was a consequence of aging. And the third would have no symptoms at all.

Can I actually—

can I—

and no trace of heavy metal.

But let me even challenge you on this or go one step further.

Yeah.

No, a third of them would be radically healthier.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Because of the protein.

Well, there's a study out of Japan, and so they did this with pregnant women and they said, okay, is this going to affect the fetuses negatively? Is it going to affect the mother's health if they're doing a lot of this raw fish, salmon, tuna? a lot of, a lot of this fish. And they said, no, surprisingly, a good majority of them were healthier because of such a high dose of omega-3s and phospholipids and protein in their dietary intake.

Exactly.

And so your point is, yeah, some people are gonna get way sicker and some people might actually get healthier, but that's where personalized medicine is so important.

Agreed.

Totally agreed.

And this is where like the methylation cycle comes into play. How do we eliminate waste? How do we, are your glutathione pathways working? Is, is transsulfuration working? Um, and, and if you have impaired waste elimination pathways, and I don't mean stool and urine in this case, I mean like cellular waste elimination, um, then you're going to have increased toxic load. Increased toxic load is going to result in critical or chronic illness. And, and that's why we don't all react the same way to the same things.

Yeah.

The one thing that is universal though, that everyone can benefit from, I mean, the data is in on mobility. You know, mobility's got to be non-negotiable.

Oh, yeah.

Okay, so exercise is longevity medicine. We know muscles are metabolic currency. We know that there are many correlations between muscle, leg strength, grip strength, and longevity. So that's within our control. Um, the second is the absence of processed foods. So you will do no harm by intentionally and aggressively getting processed food out of your diet. A lot of these are the compounds that we don't, uh, our body is just not meant to encounter. Sleep is our human superpower. So we can control our sleep for the most part. Most of us don't. We bully it around in our schedule. It's the most bullied thing in our schedule. We sleep when we can. There was, for decades, sort of sleep was haunted upon because it wasn't a part of being an entrepreneur and taking the hill, burning the candle at both ends. I'll sleep when I'll die. Crush your enemies.

It's so true.

I mean, the sleep when you die one, I mean, that's—

Yeah, sleep when you die. Actually, just don't sleep and you will die. How about that? Exactly.

Perfect. And now we're starting to realize the importance of things like community and connection.

Oh yeah.

Right?

Because data is coming in on community and connection, which we knew in the mortality space, you know, going back to isolation. Isolation was one of the most detrimental things that could happen to a human being. We knew that if you wanted to cut a human being's life expectancy in half, and I mean in half, At any age, you put them in isolation. We know this because of broken heart syndrome. My parents have been married 60 years. I don't want to think about what's going to happen when my first parent passes. By the grace of God, both of my parents are still alive. And we saw this in the mortality space. We used to process death claims on policies, universal life policies called second-to-die, which is where the death claim pays when the second spouse dies. What's really interesting about that data is the earlier the first spouse death, the less impact it had on isolation. Because if you look at the community people are in, in their 30s, their 40s, in their 50s, there's a lot of communal support.

Yeah.

Maybe they have a career, they're still raising kids, family is close. they still have a purpose, they still have meaning, they're working, and it was less of an impact. As you aged and became more dependent on your spouse to not be isolated, it had a dramatic impact. Post-retirement, second-to-die policies would pay out very, very quickly because the second spouse would pass. shortly after the first. So we know that isolation is very damaging. We're the most isolated we've been in recorded history. We think that community and connection comes through iPhones and iPads, and it doesn't. It comes from what we're doing right now.

Yep.

And I'm encouraged by what I see because I have 4 Gen Zs. So Gen Z goes from what, 18 to 28? So I have an 18-year-old daughter, I have a 22-year-old son, I have a 25-year-old son, and I have a 28-year-old daughter. So I know Gen Z.

You want to know anything about Gen Z? I'm your guy, right? Because I've got 4 that span the whole Gen Z generation.

Alcohol consumption is down 34% in the last 24 months. Run clubs are up 400%. The types of community and connection and events that they do are so much different now than they were even 5 years ago. My oldest daughter, who's 28, is having a completely different experience than my youngest daughter, who's 18. And so they're craving community and connection here.

Yeah.

And I love to see that because that's a part of longevity medicine. So all those things that we just talked about, you don't need a fancy red light bed. You don't need a half-million-dollar hyperbaric chamber, and you don't need to go to Switzerland to get your blood filtered. You, those are the basics that have proven big data, meta-analyses, Blue Zone studies, all pointing in the same direction to say, here's the foundation of a long, healthy, happy life.

I love it. I love it. You know, it actually makes me think about the Bible as well, because, you know, the Bible, one of the first things God says is rest. You know, it talks about a Sabbath. It talks about, Connection and community. We have the food laws from Moses, like don't eat pork because of all the parasites.

I talked to your partner about that.

Oh yeah, Jordan Rubin. Yeah, Jordan.

Yeah, Jordan and I had a great podcast and, and, and he reframed a lot of things that I was, you know, the way that I even thought about food. And you know what is amazing? It is so readily available.

Yeah. Oh yeah.

Um, now look, maybe you're not getting the hormone-free, antibiotic-free, you know, pasture-raised chicken while you're moving through an airport. But using those guardrails of a biblical diet is a great way to just keep your food intake on course.

Yeah.

And it's relatively easy because they are widely available food compounds. And so I've dropped pork and shellfish. I've actually added a lot of beans, which is something I didn't eat a lot. I've added a lot of fermented foods. And I have had a noticeable difference in the— too much information, but the constitution of my stool and the regularity of my stool, just with those 2 changes, adding more fiber and, and adding the soluble insoluble fiber through fermented vegetables. Now, I, I also didn't have SIBO or, um, anything, you know, any issues in the gut where I couldn't tolerate the fermented foods. But when I'm eating them regularly, I feel better. My digestion is better. And I have more regular bowel movements. And those are, by the way, some of the most inexpensive foods you can buy.

Yeah. That's so powerful.

They're the cheapest.

One thing I don't think a lot of people realize is when it comes to probiotics, when we take these probiotic supplements, you're getting maybe, I don't know, 50 billion CFU. But if you drink a cup of kefir, you're getting over a trillion probiotics.

Yeah.

I mean, it is so much more.

I can taste them.

It's tart a little bit.

It has that light burn on your tongue. Well, to your other point there, and then there's those acids.

Acids like acetic acid, similar to what you'd find in apple cider vinegar, combined with the probiotics acts as this sort of fuel. So I mean, probiotic supplements are great, but again, it's like the food is always better.

It's always better.

Yeah. I don't take a probiotic.

Another thing I was going to ask you about, I want to talk about oxygen for a minute.

Oh yeah.

Because this is so important. So if you talk to Jordan, you guys probably didn't get into this, but he has his theory and I think it's a good theory in terms of before the flood. That basically the Earth was under a canopy. And so the humidity and the oxygen levels and things were just radically higher. And that's what was keeping people alive so much longer. But all that being said, there's such a critical importance of oxygen. And I know you talk about this a lot. I know you've talked about hyperbaric chambers. You've talked about exercising without oxygen. You've talked about breathwork. I'd love for you to dive into oxygen a little bit, the importance, and also some of those different therapies.

Well, I actually trademarked a saying that the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease. disease. Um, so use that liberally, but I get 15% of everything that comes out of it.

Well, and I love that because that's feeding off of so much wisdom like Otto Warburg and others. I love—

Yes, Otto Warburg's multi-step oxygen therapy. I was a big fan of his work. Um, I've actually done that with my parents. You know, they're, they're both deconditioned, uh, meaning they can't— there's no zone 2 cardio for my mom and dad in their 80s. Um, so it's hard to get their heart, heart rate up. So he used sauna, um, and to, to raise their heart rate into what we would call like zone 2 for an 80-year-old, and then about 50% O2 concentration. So ambient air is 21%, he used 50% O2 and saw dramatic improvements in cognitive function and age-related maladies. So accessing the breath and what we can do by controlling this precious gas in the body is phenomenal. So every year there's Elon Musk and Peter Diamandis have something called the XPRIZE. So if you look at this right now, I don't know when this podcast is coming out, but if you Google it while you're reading or listening to this podcast, you'll see this. The XPRIZE this year was for the collegiate university, research institution, foundation, clinic, what have you, that could prove 20 years of life extension, which is the same as 20 years of age reversal. And you're looking at real parameters, glycan age, mitochondrial density, telomere length, real objective markers, not just, oh, we feel better, we look better, we're thinking more clearly. These are objective markers, so you can't fudge it. Started with about 765 applicants. They wiped out about 665 of them initially. They just wiped out another 80, down to the top 20 finalists. What I find really fascinating is University of Arizona in Tampa is running a double-blind, very well-controlled placebo group controlled randomized clinical trial, and they are using intermittent hypoxia to reverse age. And right now, some of the study, I guess, leaked out, and I read that they're at 8.6 years, less than halfway through this full study.

I mean, think about that, extending lifespan or reversing age by 8.6 years from the parameters.

And the mechanism of that is— so in this case, they're using a hyperbaric chamber. So you get in a hyperbaric chamber and it's simulating going below the surface of the Earth. So it's increasing the pressure. When you increase the pressure, you decrease the size of gases. And that means that gas, mainly oxygen, is now flooding tissues where it normally wouldn't go. And if we take a step back from that for a second and realize that our heart is only circulating 30% of the blood in our body, Uh, most people think the heart circulates all the blood in the body. It doesn't. 70% of our circulation is actually not done by the heart. There's no pressure in 70% of our vessels, venules, and capillaries. That circulation is done by an activity called vasomotor. So vasomotor or vasomotion is how 70% of our blood is circulating. Vasomotor and vasomotion are microcapillaries, venules, and capillaries that in some cases are much smaller than a human hair. Red blood cells are leapfrogging over each other to get to the tissue, drop off gas, pick up gas, bring it back to the lung. And so this part of the circulatory system doesn't— we don't measure it, we don't evaluate it, we don't cater to it, but it's responsible for 70% of our circulation. And one of the things that we noticed in the mortality space, and the reason why I coined the saying, the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease, is at that time, I didn't see a single disease etiological pathway that did not have its roots in the absence of blood oxygen, including cancer. Or was not exacerbated by the absence of blood oxygen. If you want to disable the capacity for a cell to fight, you disable its ability to utilize oxygen. You go into the mitochondria and you start breaking apart the Krebs cycle, electron transport chain. You change the way that a cell creates energy, right? And if you just go from aerobic to anaerobic, you decrease, meaning using oxygen to using carbon dioxide, you decrease the output of energy from that cell. 36 ATP versus 2 ATP. So again, I don't want to get so granular that we lose the audience, but the important point is how do we get more oxygen to more tissues without a hyperbaric chamber? Breathwork is one of the greatest ways to do that because the main vasodilator in the human body is carbon dioxide. It's not nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is a vasodilator. It's also a caustic gas. But in high amounts, it's not as much of our friend as we think it is. But carbon dioxide, the reason why you get vascular when you go to the gym is the CO2 going back to the lung. So carbon dioxide is the main vasodilator in the human body. And by increasing the CO2 level and dropping the oxygen level, you will cause a systemic dilation of the vasculature. So you open up this microvasculature, this 70% of our circulation that Is not done by our heart. And when you do breathwork and you do prolonged breath holds and you build up this CO2 tolerance, you're dilating that vasculature, by the way, for free, right? Without any fancy equipment. And then when you re-inhale a dramatically deep breath, you now have pathways that are— you have pipes that are larger and more dilated. One of the reasons why You can feel tingling and numbness. You can feel lightheaded. You know, when the oxygen tension changes in the brain, you feel a little bit lightheaded. And we don't give it the credence that it deserves because it hasn't gone through the gold standard of clinical trials. But I will tell you, you know, I encourage people, especially people that are on a budget to want to access these different fancy modalities, to really just get used to doing breathwork every single day around the same time every day, preferably outside, preferably in sunlight, just for a few minutes, and experience those long, dramatic breath Do rhythmic, deep, excessive, obnoxiously deep breaths to exercise those intercostals, the secondary muscles of respiration, and then exhale and hold as long as you can and try to drown out the outside noise. Try to fight the urge to breathe. Let that CO2 build up and then take a dramatic deep breath in. What we see in What we're seeing in the studies is that intermittent hypoxia, short periods of oxygen deprivation followed by short periods of oxygen excess, are causing a rapid shift in the mitochondrial metabolism, which is causing them to proliferate.

Hmm.

And mitochondrial density is the definition of age reversal.

I had somebody who had a major knee injury and they were working to rehab their knee. And have you seen this too, where they'll wrap the bands around the knee to kind of reduce—

Like restricted blood flow restriction training.

It's a similar principle in ways, potentially.

Which is brutal, man.

If you just put up and then you just grab like a 15-pound weight, you're like, oh my God.

But I know people whose knees were ruined. They started doing that with a physical therapist and it was like a miracle for their joints.

Yeah.

Because think about the amount of microvasculature in our joints. I mean, joints are some of the most compromised blood flow in the body. And this is why they're the slowest to heal. It's why in professional sports we have the number of non-contact injuries that we have, because athletes are not overtrained, they're under-recovered.

That's right.

And under-recovery is a pandemic in professional sports. And this is why you've got running backs blowing an Achilles heel being whistled into the game, or receivers that are blowing an ACL running a normal pattern down the field. We shouldn't have to tolerate those kinds of injuries in professional sports. We understand trauma, right? If your leg's planted, 300-pound lineman falls on your knee, it's going to be what it's going to be. So trauma we understand, but non-contact injuries is a sign of under-recovery. And I see very little in sports performance. It's changing slowly, really geared towards sports recovery. Like, what are you doing for ligaments, tendons, bones, muscular tendinous insertions, the cartilage, the joint spaces? Are you using high-intensity red light therapy? Are you using hyperbarics, especially to Heal and repair those types of tissues. Um, hydrogen nanobathing. I mean, I— this will probably be the first time that I talk about it in the public domain because, man, I'm telling you, here come the charlatan comments. So just bring it on, guys. But I'm going to say it anyway. Um, I have seen, of all the modalities I have in my house, I have seen the most number of miracles with people that I put into a hydrogen bath. I remember when, when John Ryan came And to do my podcast. And he was talking about all the aches and pains he had as a Navy SEAL. And I was like, dude, you got to get in my bathtub.

And he goes, he goes, bro, I am not getting in your bathtub, man. He's like, we just met. You're starting to freak me out. I'm going to be honest.

You're starting to freak me out.

That's hilarious.

I was like, I'm not getting in there with you, dude.

You know, you get in there by yourself.

And so I explained to him that it's just hydrogen gas, which is the smallest, lightest element in the universe. It's also the most prevalent element in the universe. It's hard to hurt human beings with hydrogen gas. There are a lot of naysayers out there, but the naysayers have not read the data. And the data is extraordinarily clear. When this gas passes through your skin, passes through your digestive system, or you inhale this gas, that molecule acts as a selective antioxidant. And a selective antioxidant is very different from something that just suppresses oxidative stress, right? We know free radical oxidation is bad. We know free radical damage is bad. We know oxidative stress is bad. But nearly every free radical also has a critical role in cellular biology. Superoxide.

Dismutase, of course.

Huge.

It becomes superoxide dismutase.

Yeah.

Superoxide dismutase, hydrogen peroxide. Probably the only free radical that I'm aware of that has no known benefit in the human body would be the hydroxyl free radical, right? We want to neutralize that, take it to zero. But we heal and repair from injury through the inflammatory process. Yeah, that's right. Through this free radical process, through this oxidative process.

Well, what surprises people is like, you know what? I was even getting in a hyperbaric chamber. You're increasing oxidative stress.

Yes. Oxygen singlets can oxidize the cell membrane, right? Um, so what hydrogen gas does is it restores something called redox homeostasis. So, so the ideal condition for, uh, optimal cellular function is redox homeostasis, this balance between oxidation and reduction, right? It's not, it's not too much oxidative stress, but it's also not zero, right? Um, if, if you twisted your ankle and, and didn't have inflammation, that ankle would never heal because the body would never know that tissue was injured, right? The fibroblasts signaling, the cytokine and histamine signaling. wouldn't attract the platelets to drop off the growth factors to heal the tissue. So we need this oxidative stress. But when I put people with inflammatory conditions, eczema, psoriasis, joint pain, arthritis, knees, hips, shoulders, rotator cuff, low back, all of these, what I would call repetitive use injuries, bathe them in hydrogen gas, what I see is miraculous. My wife has, Sage has an L5-S1 fusion. She has a spinal fusion.

Yeah.

From a bad car accident she had. And I wish I had— it was right around the time that we met, and I wish I'd been able to stop her from doing that, but it is what it is. But anybody that's had back surgery that's listening to this, I'm preaching to the choir here.

Well, I never had surgery.

Not surgery, but a back issue.

But yeah.

I mean, those are debilitating.

Hers moves right up her spine, right? It's rarely the L5-S1 Fusion that hurts. It's all that lordotic and kyphotic, you know, interference goes all the way up to her shoulders. And when she locks up, she can't sleep. If I put her in a hydrogen bath for 25 minutes, she'll sleep 7 hours like a child.

Wow.

And so what I find fascinating about is that these are the things that have been all around us for such a long period of time. And I feel like modern medicine is getting back to more of what God gave us. less of what man makes us.

Mm-hmm.

I know you're going to love that statement. Feel free to use it liberally, because we realize the innate intelligence of the immune system, the power for the body to detoxify, repair, regenerate, and divide in a healthy way as long as it has the right inputs. And so hyperbarics is one of those things that can accelerate that time frame. But breathwork is one of those lifestyle choices you can make that And gives you very similar outcomes to a very expensive hyperbaric.

I love that. Actually, I'm getting a new whole-house filtration system, and one of the things that they're doing now is doing hydrogen showers.

Yeah.

And so I'm incredibly excited to be doing that. So it's going to be amazing.

Yeah, I think that that kind of stuff falls into the category of what I would call passive biohacks. And I think at some point you can just spend all your time biohacking.

Oh, sure.

Especially in my house. So you get paralysis of analysis, but air, water, lighting, depending on the budget that you have. But if you do have the means to add some kind of biohacking device to your home environment, that's where I would start before I even put in a red light bed or hyperbaric chamber or even a cold plunge. or a sauna, I would say, can I get rid of the dirty junk food lighting? Can I filter my water so that I am showering, bathing, cooking, drinking, washing vegetables in clean filtered water? I have an amazing under-the-counter water system and I have a whole home filtration system. And then that doesn't add any more time to your day.

Yeah.

I've also upgraded the lighting.

This is terrible lighting in here, but this is like the junk food of light that we're sitting in now.

But everywhere else in the house is biocentric lighting.

flicker-free lighting. Love it.

When you're replacing those bulbs, you can replace them with constant-on, like the sun. And this is less fatiguing to your brain. And things like organic mattresses to make sure that you're not laying on a mattress that's outgassing. And then air filtration, like you were talking about upgrading your air filtration. Now your environment where you're spending third of your lifetime, maybe even more, is not adding toxins to your body.

Yeah, I love it.

And it's an easy thing to clean up. And then you can start stacking the biohacking modalities, probably start with a sauna and a cold plunge and go from there.

So powerful.

Yeah.

All right, I want to do rapid fire here.

Okay, let's go.

All right. Olive oil or butter?

Olive oil.

Okay. Vegetables or meat?

Meat.

Okay.

send a lot of people into a tailspin, but definitely me.

Sauna or cold plunge?

Ooh, killing me, Josh.

Can I say this?

You're killing me with that one.

I mean, you're doing so good because I don't know that I've ever answered just the answer without giving a disclaimer.

I want to go deep down the rabbit hole, but if you force me to choose, I'm going to say sauna.

Yeah, same. Even though cold plunge can be amazing. I love it. Okay. Turmeric or ashwagandha?

See, I'm going to ask some qualifiers. Is it sleep? Is it—

let's say for the average person, let's do that.

For most people, what they would benefit from most.

I would say ashwagandha.

Hyperbaric chamber or red light bed?

Ooh, another tough one, dude. Don't make me choose. Red light bed.

Enospheresis or stem cell therapy?

I would do venous pheresis before stem cell therapy for sure.

Wow. Oh, for sure.

You do not want stem cells being distracted by other pro-inflammatory cytokines that you can get out of the blood. When you get stem cells, you want them to go to the place where they're needed. Systemically, they're going to chase everything that's inflamed, every low-grade chronic condition in the body, clean the terrain. Then do the therapy.

Lower stress or increase sleep?

By the way, I've never given anyone as hard of questions as I have you today.

This is so—

this is like really tough.

And usually I'm not stumped by the— not even my team has put me through this much pain.

Here's the thing.

I asked you all the questions that I don't want to answer. So that's just how this goes.

Lower stress or increase sleep? I'm going to have to say increase sleep.

Exercise without oxygen? Or breathwork?

Oh, breathwork for sure. Yeah, for sure. You know, so many of those things can— are we done? Because that was very painful.

Yeah, yeah, we're done.

Okay. Because I don't think I could take any more of those.

What?

Those are tough. It's like, hey, pick between your—

usually it's like seed oils or grass-fed butter. And I'm like, okay, grass-fed butter.

I was going to say, like, who's your favorite child? Yeah, it's very hard. Not quite that much.

My kids all the time.

And I tell them that too. I'm like, hey, Madison's in the lead right now and you better step it up.

All right, last question for you. How has your faith in prayer impacted your health?

I will tell you, the more I study the human body, the more I believe in God, full stop. You will never convince me that this happened by chance or that a billion years ago, 2 bacteria made love in a mud puddle and here we are.

Yeah, right.

Um, I know now that faith is medicine. And I believe that community and connection is medicine. I believe that prayer is medicine because of the infinite number of factors that being connected to source, how it positively impacts our cellular biology. And I believe that there's concrete evidence for that now. I love that.

That's so great. Well, Gary, thanks so much for coming on. Again, you're one of my favorite guests to have on the show. I love how you You practice what you preach. That's one of the things that's so amazing when I'm in your house or even when I see you traveling. I mean, you're doing breathwork, you're doing a lot of the therapies, you're also just eating healthy. I mean, I know when I get out of here in just a second, I'm going to eat a gourmet meal here. Oh, you are. And I can't wait.

I don't even know what we're having.

I want to be surprised by it. The Amish. It came from the Amish, so I trust those guys, by the way.

I love it. So again, thanks so much for practicing what you preach. Thank you so much for helping millions of people. And I just want to encourage everybody to check out everything Gary has going on. You can check him out at The Ultimate Human, Ultimate Human Podcast.

He's got so many amazing products I want to encourage you to check out.

And I just want to say thanks so much for tuning in here to the Dr. Axe Show, where every week we're diving deep into the science and principles of how you can heal physically, mentally, spiritually, and take your health and your life to the next level. Again, thanks so much to Gary Bracken for coming on the show today. Thanks for watching. We'll see you on the next episode.