Summary of Hypoxia with Gary Brecka

If I was to boil my entire career down to one sentence, I say this all the time, it would be that the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease.

Presence of oxygen is the absence of disease.

Yes. We didn't, we did not find a single disease etiological pathway that did not either have its roots in the absence of blood oxygen or was not severely exacerbated by the absence of blood oxygen.

Can you give me an example?

Hypoxia. You know, all cancer begins in a hypoxic environment. Type 2 diabetes begins in a hypoxic environment.

Warburg effect. Cancer generating energy, anaerobically producing lactic acid.

Tissue acidosis, and then springing upon you to create that angiogenic effect.

Okay.

To eventually provide oxygen to grow a tumor. But the genesis of that tumor begins in hypoxia.

Okay.

I mean, how does cancer decide where it's going to metastasize to? It looks for a focal area of hypoxia and it sets up shop in that area.

Okay.

And if you look at anemia, sedentary lifestyle, these are leading causes of all cause mortality. Sitting is the new smoking. But why is sedentary lifestyle and why is sitting become the new smoking? Because sedentary lifestyle is a foundation for hypoxia. The less we move, the less we breathe, the more poorly we manage oxygen. Not only the faster we're accelerating towards the grave, but the faster the parabolic curve of all cause mortality. So we could predict the onset of and the severity of disease based on your hypoxic condition. If you have anemia, for example, and it's non responsive because you have the MTHFR gene mutation, you don't respond to folic acid, you only respond to methylfolate, for example. And you have a cardiovascular condition, atherosclerosis, arteriosclerosis. You can predict how much more quickly that will accelerate based on a normal table of atherosclerotic. Really progression.

Okay. And I know if I'm wondering this, other people might be also. But of course we seek out in some cases, as health enthusiasts, hypoxia. Like you and I when we were doing the breath workout on the porch, like we got to certain sections where we were blowing all of our air out and holding that for as long as possible, or some people will do. I don't know if you've been like a CVAC chamber which is hypoxic, or I even do like you do, exercise with oxygen therapy, but I have a little switch on that, that therapy device I use that pulls me into hypoxia, gets my pulse, O2 down, like my blood oxygenation down, and then it goes back up once I get that surge of oxygen. But you're not saying that all hypoxia is bad, right?

No.

There's a kind of like a hormetic effect to having periods of time with low oxygen.

No systemic hypoxia. Okay. Long duration hypoxia is bad. Short term exposure to hypoxic conditions or even altitude can actually improve oxygen transport. You look at the way that a healthy body responds to a hypoxic condition. It increases erythropoiesis. Right. So that increase in erythropoiesis offsets altitude. Okay, but if you weren't, weren't offsetting that altitude and you put yourself in a hypoxic environment, your body didn't offset that oxygen deficit, you would have severe long term consequences for that.

Now, besides a hypoxic state, and this might be a loaded question, I don't know, but I'm sorry, Besides a sedentary state like you alluded to with the sitting is the new smoking, what type of other factors have you identified that seem to be pretty associated with people being in this hypoxic state?

Anemic conditions, age related sarcopenia that actually collapses the, the respiratory rate, the respiratory.

Volume, muscle loss and the inability to carry oxygen. Lack of muscle.

Yes, lack of. I mean muscle is our metabolic currency. I mean there's a direct correlation between early onset disease and even early onset death and your muscle volume, the percentage of muscle that you have. I mean, muscle really is our metabolic currency. We're realizing now that muscle is more important in older ages than flexibility.

I've been starting to pay attention to that. Dr. Gabriel Lyon, who does a lot of. She calls it muscle centric medicine. I think she's writing a book about. I'll have to get her on.

I'm a big fan. I follow her on Instagram too.

Yeah, so. So sarcopenia or loss of muscle would be one thing associated with hypoxia. Sedentary lifestyle anemia. And I assume by anemia you don't just mean low iron. I don't just mean like, because there's that guy Morley Robinson who talks about the iron copper ratios and the issue. And some people supplement with iron and it causing things like hemochromatosis without adequate copper on board. So I assume it comes down to.

More than just like, yes, it comes down. I mean that's a broad category. I mean there's A lot of people that we would find that had an anemic condition, low red blood cell, low hemoglobin, and they were non responsive to therapy. So for example, take a, take a patient that has homozygous MTHFR gene mutation. They're, they're poor folate metabolizers. These people don't respond to conventional therapies, folic acid, B12 and iron, which is normally what they would give somebody who's an anemic condition. And so these become chronic and now chronic anemia. If you look at the type 3 diabetes, one of the early links to Alzheimer's, in fact, in my 22 year career, I didn't see a single early onset Alzheimer's patient, not one that did not have at least 10 years of elevated blood sugar prior to. And this myth that people are losing their memory is not really true. They're losing access to their memory. So it's not the memory that's actually fading, it's the access to the memory that's fading because neurosynaptic junctions get full of eventually amyloid plaques. But that viscosity changes a long time before you actually have these issues with, with memory.

Which is why a more stable source of fuel like ketones or coconut oil, etc can be very beneficial for Alzheimer's or dementia because it's staving off the diabetic condition in the brain. You know what else I think?

Insulin resistance in the brain.

And I don't know if you've thought about this much at all before, but I think part of it, in addition to the presence of too much carbohydrate and glucose in neural tissue, it's also the lack of choline precursors that one gets from lots of healthy fats. There's a guy named Duane Goodenow who wrote a book called Breaking Alzheimer's and that book goes into plasmalogen deficiencies. Plasmalogen being these tiny fat based molecules that he has found are heavily associated with onset of this type 3 diabetes. Turns out that the main precursor for plasmalogens is the type of choline that we'd find in eating a lot of grass fed beef or walnuts and other seeds and nuts and avocados and olive oil and all these things we know are healthy for the brain. So it's kind of like that one, two combo of sugar excesses and plasmalogen deficiencies that seems to result in this type 3 diabetes onset.

No question.

And so back to the oxygen piece. So we got a sedentary lifestyle, we got sarcopenia we have some form of anemia. Not necessarily everybody needs to go rush out and buy iron. But something related to MTHFR or iron, copper or. That's why I put raw liver in my smoothie every morning. Which I'm gonna get you on the bandwagon for.

I'm not quite there yet.

Smoothie this morning.

I feel pretty good right now.

We'll get to the smoothie eventually because we got back from the. And we eventually got to that. But what other biggies while we're talking about the reasons for hypoxia do you think you could recognize as the main ones for people to think about if there's any others?

Poor methylation porn. Poor. Poor use of mitochondrial nitric oxide and oxygen at the mitochondrial level.

Okay.

And if you look at older ages and respiratory volumes, you know, one of the things that we would look at is how well they ambulated. So if you take a patient that had. We had what was called morbidities and comorbidities. So if you had a certain disease condition, if you had type 2 diabetes and.

You would get a debit. If you were morbidly obese, you would get a debit. If you were hypertensive, you would get a debit. But if you put all of these debits into the same body, it's not 1 plus 1 plus 1 equals 3. It's 1 plus 1 plus 1 equals 10. And so we realized that the presence of oxygen was the absence of disease and that the deficiency in oxygen was the presence of a lot of diseases. Not only the onset of, but the severity of disease. And towards the tail end of my career, we started to delve deep into methylation pathways. And I think that methylation is one of the most overlooked areas in all of modern medicine because it doesn't assume that what goes into your body and goes into mine and goes into. Everyone listening to this podcast is treated exactly the same. Yeah, Right. That's the biggest fallacy in modern, modern medicine.

If I was going to come to you, how would you test me for methylation? Is this like one of a salivary genetic test?

It's a salivary genetic test. Methyl detox profile.

Okay.

You can get way down the rabbit hole of methylation. So what I prefer to do is look at the big five genes of actionable genes of methylation, because it's no use looking at genes where you can't supplement for their deficiency. Right.

So, you know, the actual. Would this be the alleles that you're.

Looking at the genes and Their sub alleles. So, for example, MTHFR has two big alleles, C670T A1298C. Those are the big known ones, okay? But you look at people that have homozygous breaks, meaning both parents gave them the gene mutation, okay? And depending on where that allele is, they have a predictable deficiency. And it's that deficiency that leads to some of the most common conditions that we accept as a consequence of aging. I mean, most people listening to this podcast are walking around right now somewhere between 55 and 60% of their true state of normal. And what I mean when I say that is if they haven't looked at their own methylation pathways, if they're not supplementing for certain deficiencies. I'm not a huge believer in just supplementing for the sake of supplementing. I believe that we supplement for deficiency in the human body, and when we do, magnificent things happen. You know, the majority of disease that we believe is genetically inherited disease doesn't have a genetic link at all. The majority of disease that's passed from generation to generation, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, hypercholesterolemia, hypothyroidism, depression, anxiety, add, adhd. These conditions that run in families do not have a gene directly associated with that deficiency. What they have is a methylation pathway deficiency. And so what this means is they can't refine a certain raw material that can't turn folic acid into methylfolate. Now they have a deficiency in methylfolate.

Which is why if you're having like a multivitamin or a cereal fortified with folic acid, it could be doing you more harm than good.

The worst thing, I mean, most people don't even realize that folic acid is an entirely man made chemical, right? When you can't find folic acid anywhere on the surface of the earth, it doesn't occur anywhere naturally in nature. Neither does. You know the most common form of B12, right? Cyanocobalamin, hydrogen cyanide based B12. You know, three forms of B12 occur naturally in nature. The adenosole, the hydroxy and the methyl. But the cyano, the cyanide based form, which generally comes from human sewage, from the sludge, from human sewage. When you bind hydrogen cyanide to the cobalt metal and create a B12 molecule, the body not only doesn't recognize that, but has to convert it into a natural form of B12 to even use it. So a lot of times our supplements, because we use something called single dose toxicity in the United States, or one of the few civilized nations in the world that uses single dose toxicity. Right. Which means that if I give you something in a capsule or a pill and there is some arsenic in there, or there's some hydrogen cyanide in there, or there's some other toxic chemical in there, as long as it doesn't have an effect on you in that dose, then it's safe to give it to you. But we don't take into account cumulative dose toxicity. Right. Nobody gets mercury poisoning from one sushi meal.

Yeah, we don't test what happens over time is what you're saying.

We don't test what happens over time.

By the way, did you say that B12, one of the synthetic forms of it, is constituted from human sludge, like human sewage?

Yeah. So when we process human sewage, there's a foamy yellow substance that they discard and it's called sludge. And that sludge is, is almost purely hydrogen cyanide. And so we can take that sludge. Not, not we, certainly not me. But you can take that, that sludge, you can dry it into a powder, you bind it to the cobalt metal, which all B12 is cobalt metal. You bind it to the cobalt metal and now you have cyanocobalamin, cyanide base, B12. And I. And a lot of people say, oh, Gary, it doesn't matter, that dosage won't harm you. But it's. Again, it's not the. Or the dosage determines the poison. That's not true. The cumulative dosage determines the poison. If you're okay putting small amounts of mercury in your body every day, it won't be the small amounts that you put in every day. It will be the accumulation of that heavy metal that causes.

Okay, so yeah, obviously we can talk about methylation alone for a couple. Yeah, we go way down the rabbit hole. I want to give the big bird's eye overview of some of these issues related to hypoxia. So we talked about sedentary lifestyle, we talked about sarcopenia, we talked about the methylation issues and anemia related issues. One thing I've noticed that you're also very keen on is light exposure. Is there a link between light exposure and a hypoxic state?

Well, there's not a direct link between light exposure and a hypoxic state, but most people don't wake themselves up in the morning. They use stimulants to wake themselves up instead of waking naturally.

Yeah.

So you know about first light. I'm not teaching you anything that you don't know, but that first 45 minutes of the day is very special. Blue light. Not like the blue light that comes from your phone.

Yeah.

There's no uva, there's no uvb. You can't look straight at the sun, but you can absorb those rays. You still create cholecalciferol. Right. You still actually will generate vitamin D3 in the morning from morning light, but you don't have the.

Really? You can still generate cholecalciferol even when it's kind of like red ish outside.

Oh, you can still generate called calcal cipherol on the cloudiest of days. You don't need much sunlight to generate vitamin D3.