Immune Support: How To Weaponize Your Immune System During The Coronavirus Pandemic with Gary Brecka

The cloud. And then I'm about to go live here in just a second. Okay. I think we are about to be streaming live. It does say it's setting up the meeting here, so we're going to see if we are live yet on the Facebook. Give me just a second here.

Hey, Kirk. This is Ben.

We are live. All right, today I am joined by my personal medical specialist extraordinaire, Gary Brecke from Streamline Wellness. And just as a quick introduction here, some of my podcast listeners will know that a few weeks ago or months ago, you and I did a. You and I did an interview just talking about overall health, wellness, how to live forever, anti aging, et cetera. And since that time, you know, the world has been thrown into a major health crisis. One of the biggest. I mean, the biggest health crisis, probably anybody alive's experience. And there's a lot of uncertainty out there and a lot of things that everybody's going, what the hell's going on with the virus? Et cetera. And Gary is one of the smartest guys I know when it comes to health and biological mechanisms and things we can do to weaponize our immune system against the ravages of whether it's a virus, bacteria, or any number of things that can kind of get us down. So without any further ado, Gary, welcome back. It's good to have you.

Hey, Brad. How you doing, man? So good to be back. Yeah, it's great to be talking about this because it means so much to so many people.

Yeah, it sure does. So, I mean, I don't want to belabor the point. The world is freaking out. A lot of stuff's going on. Everybody's an armchair expert in everything. What do you think? I mean, you lead the way. What do people need to know in times like this? I guarantee you've had more conversations about this than I have.

Yeah, you know, quite a few, actually. You know, it's really interesting. I think. I think there's really kind of two camps that you could be in. Right. So we'll kind of define the two camps, and then we'll talk about which camp your audience is in, and then we can take it from there. Essentially, I think we all agree that there's a. You know, there's a war coming, right? The enemy's coming for us. Right. This virus is out there, you know, spreading. And so you could take the school of thought on the one hand that I want to hide from the enemy and hope the enemy doesn't see me, and the other school of thought is that I'm going to prepare for the enemy to find me and I'm going to be ready for the fight. And so if you're in the school of thought that I want to hide and I hope the virus doesn't find me, well, then you're doing things like sanitizing your counter stops. You know, you're not going to public places, not taking public transportation, getting on planes, going in crowds. And I think that's a really poor choice because you are assuming that that virus is not going to find its way to you. You know, the CDC's most recent estimates, and they're actually higher over in Europe, is that close to 70% of the world's population will come in contact with the virus. So if you use some of the CDC estimates, you know, you think there's about a 70% chance that you'll actually come in contact with it. So I think the better bet is let's assume that the enemy is going to find us. And when it finds us, I want to be ready for the fight. And, you know, then the question becomes, how do you want to fight? Do you want to fight with a knife, do you want to fight with a gun, or do you want to fight with a zuka? I would choose bazooka.

Bazooka.

And, you know, by that I mean, how are we going to fight? Well, we fight with our immune system. And so how do we give the weaponry to our immune system so that it can engage this enemy and for that matter, engage any enemy, but particularly viral pathogens, because antibiotics are useless. Right. So we really do need our immune system to. And there are three main pillars that support immune function. Primarily, our immunity comes from the gut. About 70 to 80% of our total immune response begins in the gut. There's an endothelial lining in the gut. There's also complex labyrinth of lymph nodes in the gut. And so depending on the health and the gut flora, it has a lot to do with the immunodex, the height of your capacity to respond. So what's the one, the best thing that you can do to prepare your gut? We can take a probiotic. I get a lot of questions about probiotics, about prebiotics. Well, I eat kefir, I eat yogurts, I drink kombucha. It's interesting, you know, how probiotics work, and I think there's a lot of misnomers about probiotics and how to, you know, get them into the human body and get them to the location where they colonize. Right. Because probiotics are a lot like people, you know, they like to live in communities where they're comfortable. Right. So. And comfort to a probiotic is based on ph. A probiotic that would live near the proximal end of your small intestine up near the stomach is going to be able to tolerate a high acidic environment. The more distal it is in your small intestine or proximal into the large intestine, or distal in the small intestine or large intestine, the more likely the ph is to be more alkaline. So what happens when you take a capsule with a bunch of probiotics? Well, about 92% of the probiotics you take, if that capsule does not have a ph guarded technology, they will die in the stomach acid. Because a probiotic, by design cannot survive the stomach acid. It does not live in acidic environment. So you go to Whole Foods and you get 30 billion or 50 billion, it says 10 strains and 50 billion probiotics and then you swallow it. And about 98% of that is immediately destroyed. If you have the capsular technology that allows. And there are a few brands that have this. I'll give you some after this one that I'm offering a discount code for, but I am not at all affiliated with them. They're not partner of mine owning the company. I've just sought them out. Storn brand Solgar. The one I'm going to recommend is called Common Sense. But my objective here is not to sell probiotics, but to tell you that the most important thing that you can do is you can drop a probiotic into the stomach and not have that capsule dissolve in the acidic environment. So it works its way through the small intestine into the large intestine and releases there.

Okay, so let me, and let me just recap that as I understand it, so that a lot of people take probiotics, but one of the problems with just taking normal probiotics is that the stomach acid eats away and kills most of them. So by the time they get down into your gut where they should be, it's like it's worthless. Right? It's like a dull exact.

Exactly. I mean, they literally colonize. They're like, it's like if the Irish didn't want to live at the Italian, Italians didn't want to live with the French. You know, they wanted, you know, they, and I'm not saying that probably offending somebody.

No, I know what you mean.

You know, they just, they want to live together. And if you Put them in an environment where they're not friendly, they die very quickly. Probiotics, Lactobacillus, acinophilus, you know, they're, they're very fragile organisms. Now, if they're in the right environment, they're extremely robust. But in the wrong environment, they're very fragile. And ph is one of the things that actually does more harm than good for probiotics. So the first thing you can do is harm your immune system, right? So bolster the integrity of your gut's response and its capacity to actually build a good, healthy white blood cell and immune response. And then one of the most overlooked are the very front line of your defense, right? And if you know the immune system lines up in a very specific way to fight. You and I had this conversation when we went through your blood work, and it kind of reminds me of a scene from the movie Braveheart. So you look up on the hill and you got like, you know, you got a line of guys with arrows, and then you got a line of guys on horseback behind that. And then you got this crazy dude in the very back that'll stab anything, right? By the time you've gotten through the guys with the arrows to the guy on the horseback, to the dude with the knife, things have gone really bad. It's gone through your line of defense. One of the things about the coronavirus is that COVID 19 actually slips by your first line of defense because it jumped species, it was an animal virus, and it left that species and actually became a human virus. SARS has done that. Mars, the Middle Eastern respiratory virus, has done that. There have been some other bovine and equine based viral infections that have actually made that transition. When it does that, our bodies are not used to that. See, they've never been exposed to a virus with that kind of proteinaceous coating, which is why the immunocompromised have difficulty fighting the virus. So it slips past the guys with the arrows and it's already in the fight. With your second line of defense, your front line needs to turn around and engage. And this is where your killer T cells are very, very important. And killer T cells are super important, because killer T cells are not only a part of that first line of defense, but killer T cells have a memory, right? That's why when you're young and you got mono, let's say, and then you're 40 years old and you got Epstein Barr, that's the exact same virus. It just had a latent phase where it was not affecting you. And A lytic phase where it actually caused an infection. And viruses can lay dormant for weeks, for months, for years, for decades, in fact. A scary thought, but it's actually scientifically true. Of all the DNA in the human genome, inside your body right now, only 60% of your DNA is yours. In fact, only 60% of the DNA in your body is human DNA.

I actually learned that on a recent south park episode. Really?

Yeah.

Did you see the one? I think it's called this one's for the Ladies. And it was one of the funniest but grossest south park episodes. It's all about fecal transplants because one of the kids moms got a fecal transplant because she had an issue. And then it became like all the rage. And all the women around the town were like, oh, I'm going to get a fecal transplant too. But that's one of the things they talked about, is how, like 60% of the biome in our body is not even human and how important that is. So that's funny.

That's very true. So when our DNA is replicating, right? Opens like a zipper, right? And then it zips back up. So I have two identical copies. When that process is happening, it is important for us to turn genes on as it is to turn them off, right? So there's a process called methylation. And methylation is the process of gene transcription, but it's also the process of gene silencing. And methylation pathways are extraordinarily important. In fact, your methylation pathways are what lead to anxiety. They lead to depression, they lead to brain fog, they lead to poor neurotransmitter activity. Because, remember, neurotransmitters are made inside the human body. That's why it's always fascinated me that we look for anxiety and depression in a cluster of symptoms outside of the body before we go into the human biome and we say, hey, wait a second. The definition of depression is inadequate levels of serotonin and dopamine. And the human body makes serotonin and dopamine. Why don't I check the factory, make sure it's working and producing adequate amounts before I look outside of the cluster of symptoms, which, by the way, is the same way that Abraham Lincoln was diagnosed with depression 120 years ago. So very likely, if you've had anxiety since you were a child, and you have a brother or sister or sibling with anxiety, and you have a parent that suffers from anxiety or depression, then you also will have a parent that suffers from high blood pressure. And if you have that lineage in your family, depression, anxiety, and high blood pressure, that is a methylation pathway issue. It is not hypertension, anxiety, or depression. Interesting.

Okay.

That's related to the manufacturer through methylation of these neurotransmitters. But when we get back to the T cell function, the immune response, so your T cells are first to get in the fight, calm killer T cells for a reason. But they're the ones that have the memory, right? So you got to scuffle when you were on the playground when you were 10 years old. Now you're 30 years old, and you see that same bully out in public. So your T cell remembers the fight you had on the playground, and it recognizes that bully. It's not going to wait for the bully to come after you. Just goes and smashes him right in the house. The T cell is not only the first to the fight, but it records and stores the information from that pathogen so it can manufacture an antigenic response, an antibody, and it holds that antibody. So if that bully ever shows up again, you know you're ready for him before he comes at you. So the second thing that you can do, and there is, if anyone ever wants to see any of the research that I cite, you know, I subscribe to something called the Journal of Leukocyte Biology, which is like the most important thing in the world if you're not seeing.

Some people like romance novels, some people like detective stories. You like leukocyte reading?

Journal of Leukocyte Biology, bro. But it's a phenomenal journal. And, you know, if you're a microbiologist or human biologist like I am, or you deal with disease and pathology, you're aware of this. There was an incredible clinical study done about the influence of omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids on your killer T cell function and how bolstering your fatty acid levels can actually really elevate your immune response. So now you've got a probiotic, and you've got an omega 3 fatty acid, and now you've got white blood cell support, and you've got support for your killer T cells. So they remember this virus because of the people that are infected, about 50% of those people will have a reinfection. And the caliber of the reinfection depends on your immune response. And then the third thing I tell people to do is get a really, really good vitamin D3, K2. I mean, I just. You've heard me talk about D3. I'm constantly harping on it, but, you know, the human body is only capable of manufacturing a single vitamin. So just pause on that for a moment and think how important is that vitamin to human function? If we only make one human being can only create a single vitamin, then how important is that vitamin?

Which is the vitamin that we can create?

Vitamin D3, cholecalciferin. We actually make it from sunlight and cholesterol. About 85% of the world's population is deficient. 50% of the world's population is clinically deficient. Which means you have symptoms from your deficiency in D3. You just don't know that it's coming from D3. In fact, long term clinical deficiencies in vitamin D3 manifest themselves exactly like rheumatoid arthritis.

Yeah, I remember us talking about that and that's one of the things that my wife had and that she's been on a big D3 supplementation regimen and starting to see better results.

Excellent. So you want to remember that D3 is a fat soluble vitamin. It should always be combined with K2. And the brand that I'm going to recommend today, they combine it with vitamin A even better. So if you take an adk, an omega fatty acid supplement and a probiotic, you are literally going from a knife to a gun to a bazooka. You're literally handing that down.

I'm writing that down over here. That's trademark because I like bazookas. So a, it's the, it's the vitamin D3 plus K2 plus vitamin A. And you said you there the other one is, is a DHA. Yeah, the like Omega 3s and then Omega 3 is a high quality probiotic which is, has like you mentioned earlier, for anybody who missed this, they have the ability to protect the probiotics in the capsule from dissolving in the stomach and then getting eaten. And it actually passes to the gut where you want it.

Yes, that's exactly it. That's exactly it. And you know, with, with regard to the, the omega, you want to see if you can get an omega from something called the green lipped muscle. If you are not allergic to shellfish, your source of omega fatty acids should be from the green lip muscle. If you are allergic to shellfish, then you can use another source of omega fatty acids. But you know, even people with shellfish allergies actually rarely have a reaction to it. On the off chance that you have a severe shellfish allergy, you may want to avoid it. But if you don't, the green lipped mussel is arguably the best single source of Omega fatty acids on the planet.

So it's called what the green. What is that?

Green lipped muscle. L, I, P, P, E, D. Green lipped. Okay.

And that's a. And that's the muscle like that you eat in a two table muscle.

Like a clam. Yeah. Okay.

By the way, one of the things just to kind of. I want to address one thing that I was really interested in, in hearing your opinion on this, and I have a feeling you just answered it because it was about probiotics. So I don't know if you've seen it, but a lot of people have. It's already like seven and a half million views. Joe Rogan just did an episode with Michael Osterholm.

Did you.

Are you familiar with this episode?

Not that particular one. I know Joe Rogan podcast.

Yeah. So it's awesome. And he's an internationally recognized expert in infectious diseases, epidemiology, et cetera. And it was an amazing eye opening episode. But in there, Joe asked, specifically asked him about, are probiotics effective in improving our immune system? And now he basically said, you know, the data doesn't support it. There have been studies which show that, you know, two different cases, people given probiotics, people not given probiotics, and it did not protect either of these control groups from the, from getting ill. However, one of the things you just. And I was going to ask you about that, but you just started off with that concept that, well, most people, the vast majority, it sounds like, who take probiotics are taking it in a way that it gets disintegrated. Yeah.

Think about this. There was just a published study. It was Cleveland Clinic. I think I'll pull the study up. It is a very valid placebo control, double blind, clinically backed research study. And it concluded that, and you may have heard of this study or this research that elevated levels of vitamin B12 in the blood are associated with cancer. So elevated B12 is associated with cancer. So immediately you go, whoa. High B12 is associated with cancer. But if you read the research, you'll see that it's not actually the elevated level of B12. Because why is B12 high in the serum concentration of the blood? Because it's not being metabolized into the cell. Where is it important to have methylcobalamin inside the cell? See, if you think about what B12 is and what it's not, first of all, B12 is a metal. It's the cobalt metal. When you put the cobalt metal into the body, it's called cobalamin, there are four types of cobalamin, methylcobalamin, adenosylcobalamin, hydroxycobalamin, and cyanocobalamin, which actually comes from the cyanide molecule. So when you cleave that form of cobalamin, you're left with cyanide. Interesting. Just hold on to that one. When you put four different types of B12 into the body, most people can only methylate two of them. What happens to the other two? They have a tendency to rise inside the bloodstream. If you're supplementing with a vitamin B12 like a cyanocobalamin, it's going to rise in your bloodstream and not go into the cell. If it doesn't go into the cell, then your level's not going to go down. So you have a high level of B12, your cell is deficient, and that's why you're getting cancer. You're actually getting cancer from the deficiency in B12 because your serum concentration is high. Saying that your high concentration of B12 leads to cancer is so misleading. It's just like saying that probiotics have not been proven to bolster your immune system. I will tell you this. Without probiotics, you would not have an immune system. All immunity gets its baseline function from the gut. That's where our white blood cell neurotransmitters, xenobiotics, probiotics, that's where neurotransmitters, that's where they're made, they're manufactured. Okay, so the question is, if I take them orally and they're fried in the stomach, then yes, the probiotics not gonna have any influence. What we should say is, is gut inoculation with probiotics, does that elevate your immune system? I guarantee you what the studies did not do was actually track the level of the gut biome. They track the level of ingestion, and then you get misleading results. This happens all the time. The same thing is true with cholesterol. There are tons and tons and tons of studies that link elevated levels of LDL cholesterol to cardiovascular disease, but in every case, they have a corresponding increase in triglyceride. There are zero clinical studies that show that just elevated LDL cholesterol on its own in the absence of high triglycerides leads to cardiovascular disease or thrombolytic events or increased risk for stroke. But if you don't link the research properly, you think, oh, high cholesterol leads to cardiovascular disease. That is actually not true. Elevated LDL cholesterol and low triglyceride is a marker for longevity. Good.

Well, that's on my last blood test with you guys.

That.

That was one of the things I had. So, you know, and coming from a guy who's got genetically high cholesterol and, you know, my dad's been on statins, you know, for years, et cetera, because, you know, just the traditional medical recommendations. And I remember when I read. I think it was Johnny Bowden. I don't know if it's Dr. Johnny Bowden's book, the Great Cholesterol Myth. And then I talked to him, and I learned that years ago, and I was like, oh, wow. Okay. It's good to know that there'. It's not all. You know, there's so many nuances.

I mean, to get to just boil it down to the lowest common denominator, it has to do with the particulate size of cholesterol. Tennis balls, or bbs. Bbs pass through the arterial wall, create inflammation because they get eaten by something called a macrophage. Creates inflammation, narrows the lumen of the artery. The large particulate cholesterol cannot pass through the arterial wall. Remember, arteries are smooth muscle. They're actually three layers of smooth muscle. So as the cholesterol molecule passes through that arterial wal, gets trapped in there, macrophage eats it, inflammation occurs, and the lumen of the artery is narrowed. In fact, more narrowing of arterial lumens are done by inflammation than atherosclerotic plaques. So cholesterol is absolutely vital to human function. We build all of our hormones from cholesterol. Every cell wall in our body is made from cholesterol, and it gets maligned. And then people that don't deserve to be on statins get put on statins, and they end up with joint pain, low hormonal function, and depression. Well, how do you get depression from a statin? Because depression lowers the amount of cholesterol. If I don't have cholesterol, I can't build hormones. I can't build hormones. My mood is suppressed. My mood is suppressed. I have depression.

You know what? And just kind of going back to where I started this little conversational thread, talking about how. Well, I saw this super expert in infectious epidemiology just talking about. And he kind of just dismissed one of the things that Joe felt fully. What do you call it? Like, surprised by, like. What do you mean? Like, probiotics don't help your immune system. And he kind of dismissed it just going, well, the data doesn't support it, but it goes to show that I Mean, health is such a. It is such a complex systemic thing that there are so many little mechanisms that make things.

Yeah, I agree with you to an extent, because what I try to do is bring the simplicity back to the equation.

Right?

Right. When I train physicians to read labs or when I speak on blood labs or etiology or chronic disease or biometric pathways, I always say, look, when we have issue that presents itself with a symptom in the body, let's first make sure that the biometric pathway is intact. And second, let's make sure that the body has the resources to do its job. So, for example, if you're low on testosterone, then before I say that you have endocrine dysfunction and you can't make the molecule of testosterone, I say, well, what's testosterone made from? Well, it's made from dhea, dihydriepi, androsterone. If I don't have adequate supply of dhea, I can't make testosterone, which means I don't have a hormonal problem, I have a supply issue. And most of the things in the human body work like that. Pathology and disease exists much less often than we think it does. I'm not saying it doesn't exist. What I'm saying is we go very quickly to pathology and disease when really we should look to restore effective biometric pathways. What we need to be optimally healthy is right within our grasp. It does not exist in a rare Amazon root or a funky blue green algae. It doesn't exist in a wrapper. You know, adequate levels of vitamin D3, DHEA, hormone balance, glycemic control. You do those things, that's the foundation of optimal health. You really want to bolster your immune system. Then you add a probiotic, an omega 3 fatty acid and a D3 supplement. Unless you're getting enough sun. Right. I mean, it's no, it's no coincidence that if you look at population mortality, the longest life expectancies are centered around the equator of the earth, directly related to the level of sunshine. And the shortest life expectancies get the least amount of sunshine. You know, if you look at the immune, immunocompromised, autoimmune disease, brittle bone disease, osteopenia, osteoporosis. Look at Middle Eastern cultures and females that garb up and never get any signs they're not supplementing with D3. Then you look at a myriad of autoimmune and bone diseases that affect that population. You can link it directly to lack of. Lack of sunlight, poor supplementation.

Yeah, it's important.

So I know we're in awful tangents, dude, I'm the.

No, but that's good. That's good. And I want. And I know there's also some people who are tuning in because we're recording this live. It's going to go on the podcast soon.

And.

Well, but I want to, for anybody who's watching this live, one of the things, the three pillars you said was a certain type of probiotic where that protects the actual probiotic from the stomach acid and actually gets into your gut. You said the other one is a high quality omega 3 DHEA supplementation.

And then the other one, preferably from the green lipped muscle. Right.

I've been to. I personally take a krill oil.

Krill oil is also very good. Right? Because remember, the smaller, the deeper and the colder the fish, sardines, mackerels and krill. Will, krill are really, really small, but krill are basically just an exoskeleton. And oil, that's really all they are. But they power the largest mammal on earth. I mean, sperm whale eats nothing but krill.

Yeah, I know, right? So, Gary, on Facebook here, my friend Britt Thomas just asked me, women, should women take DHEA or stay away?

Women should take DHEA if they're clinically deficient in dhea. See, I never recommend just supplementing with DHEA unless you know your levels. I mean, it's a really simple blood test to find out what your DHEA levels are. But women, too, if clinically deficient in dhea, you will be clinically deficient in testosterone free testosterone. And remember, testosterone is not just for men anymore. In women, testosterone also controls the impetus for the bone marrow to create new red blood cells. It's called erythropoiesis. Inadequate levels of testosterone will lead to exhaustion because you lack the stimulus to the bone marrow to create adequate red blood cells and hemoglobin that carries the oxygen around your blood. So if you're deficient in those, you'll be exhausted. And by the way, you'll be exhausted and you won't be able to sleep.

Right. So basically, Brit, get tested, find out. And then my wife, my wife was. She found her deficiencies and she started to supplement for DHEA and whatever else, you know, Gary had her on and she just recently, a couple, like a week ago, a week or two ago, got retested after. I can't remember if it was three or six months. And I think she said she can like reduce that now because whatever you recommended worked.

So, yes, you get to an adequate serum level and then you just stay on a maintenance dose. Yep, very true. If you supplement with DHEA when you don't need it, you'll activate your sebaceous glands, you get adult onset acne, you'll get a lot more oil in your skin. So you know, I would just get the level tested and, and then supplement accordingly. You know, you can use different dosages of DHEA, all from 15mg all the way up to 50mg. I would rather take it consistently in a lower dose than more, less often in a higher dose. So Instead of taking 50 milligrams three times a week, I'd rather take 15 milligrams seven days a week and keep adequate levels of serum concentration so that your body has the raw material that's going to assemble a hormone. It just starts grabbing dhea. Yep.

And then as, and I was just recapping like you said, the probiotic, the DHEA and then a D3K2 plus a supplement.

You can get an ADK, a vitamin A, vitamin D3 minimum, 5000ius of D3. I see a lot of 2000, 1000. I see 400 milligrams of D3. I mean you might as well suck on an ice Cube. And so 5000ius of D3, 50 to 90 micrograms of K2. And also your vitamin A, a probiotic which has a capsular technology allows it to pass through the stomach acid. And that's very common technology. There are ph dependent release capsules now that are, you know, they're made from plant sterols, they're vegan, they're, they're non toxic, they're dye free. And then.

But you said, you said it's common, it's a common technology, but it's not common in.

Is that common in most expensive for them. So they just pack them junk, don't absorb them. Thorne is a great brand. The brand that I recommend. I'll send a link out if anyone wants that brand. I called them and said I'm gonna do a bunch of Facebook lives. I want you to give them a discount code.

Yeah, let's talk about it. You mentioned this earlier. You're not, we're not doing this to commercialize the coronavirus and doing all this.

Not at all.

You're just making recommendations. You are not the manufacturer of these supplements.

This is not manufacturer. I'm not the owner, I'm not the seller, I'm not the distributor.

Do you want to give a. If you Want to give me a list right now and then we can also. I'll end up putting this in all the show notes, etc. But do you want to talk about.

I mean the brands that I'm a big fan of are. The one that I'll send you a link to to get a discount code will be Common Sense supplements. Common Sense, it's owned by a physician, happens to be a very good friend of mine, Dr. Derek Da Silva. He's a board certified internist. He has been for 31 years one of the most intelligent, thorough authorities on supplementation I've ever met in my life. Thorne Brand T H O R N E is a great brand. Again, I'm not affiliated with them in any form or fashion. I wish I was, but they do really, really, they make very high quality supplements. I treat a lot of my methylation pathway patients. The Thorn brand vitamins and there's one called Solgar. Although I really only like Solgar for their iron bis glycinates and a few other things not for the brand. The line that I'm talking about right.

Now, so with the soul Gar, would you recommend those for. You're not talking about them for any of the three?

Not for any three, but you're just saying in general. Supplement brand for iron bis glycinates, things like that. But, but really Common Sense and Thorn are really, in my opinion, the top two for. To bolster your immune system.

Nice. Okay, so then in general, in other general or specific things, other things we can do, I mean, obviously keeping our stress down, keeping, you know, stress, sleep.

All of those things, you know, they go a long way. But I mean, telling people to take the stress out of their life when a virus is coming for them is sometimes a little more difficult. Now you've got their businesses being closed, they can't travel, they got meetings being canceled, they've got events being canceled. I like to do the most with the least amount of effort. You want to really talk about bolstering your immune system, you do those three things and your immune system in five days will be in a materially different position than it is right now. You can actually text your Immunodex your immune profile. I test mine all the time. In fact, I post it online if you want to see mine.

How do you test your immune profile?

There's a group called Cell Science Systems and they do an immuno index test and what they do is they look at the amount of antioxidant protection you have inside your cell. It's called a micronutrient test or a cellular nutrition assay. And because it's just like when you take a vitamin, it doesn't matter what the concentration of the vitamin is. It matters what shows up in the blood. The same thing is true once you get into serum. Concentration doesn't matter so much what's in the blood. It matters what makes its way into the cell, because those vitamins are needed for methylation, for DNA transcription, to power the mitochondria, to run the Krebs cycle. And so they're very nutrient rich. They're hungry, right? Those, those, those cellular respiratory processes are very, very hungry. So if we're looking at immune function, I'm looking at the best way to get raw materials into the body so the immune system can be bolstered. But when we talk about intracellular antioxidant assays, that will tell you your capacity to fight pathogens and disease. If you look at the last one that I posted, minor, right. Bumping up against the top 2% of the tier for all five categories. And you could just kind of dial that in, like tuning in a radio with supplementation, you know, diet, fasting.

That's great. That's fantastic. Any. Anything else that, you know, by the way, like, we didn't come out, as I said, we didn't come on here to commercialize this, et cetera. But I mean, you are my health advisor. You are the one who, you know, I go to, to keep me finely tuned, and I go to you every few months for full plan of blood tests, et cetera. And I know you offer this, and although that wasn't the point of doing this, but if people do want to get their pan, like I personally tell everybody I see, dude, get your panel tested. Like, I waited till I was in my.

Yeah, you've said.

I was in my mid-40s before I did this. And I just wish I could go back and see what my numbers look like in my 20s and then 30s, et cetera, just to see how things change. So if people, for instance, if they want to get a blood panel done, you guys do order those. And they can be any. Like, I'm in California, you're in Florida.

And states in the country. And you can go to any LabCorp in the country. In fact, the CEO of LabCorp was on with the President today talking about how LabCorp is going to add testing for coronavirus. So we use LabCorp. There's usually a LabCorp within two miles of every emergency room in the country. So it's very Easy for patients to get there. You know, I send them a link, we write a prescription for the blood. You know what panel we want LabCorp to pull. They walk into a LabCorp, get their blood drawn, and then 48 hours later populates our system. And one of my clinicians goes through the blood work with each patient.

Yeah, it's amazing. And I know everybody I send to you is like, gary is a badass. Gary is a monster. He's like, this is awesome. So, like, what is streamline wellness.com?

Is that still streamlinewellness.com?

Yeah.

Cool. Nine locations now, five states.

Nice, nice. Well, I know that you also get. You gave me some stuff to look at as well, and I'm really glad, like, on the probiotics, because I used to take probiotics. I stopped taking them a while back. I kind of hadn't been on them. It's probably been a minimum of a year or so since I've been on them. And then I saw that, you know, then I saw some of this other conflicting information that go. It's kind of overblown. I don't think it works as well. But I love how you kind of described the mechanisms, but also one of the reasons that keeps probiotics from working as well as they. As they can. We're in this, you know, we're in a time right now where, yeah, the. I mean, the Coronavirus COVID 19, dangerous for a lot of people. We don't know how dangerous it's going to be. I compare this to. This is a very. You know, it's maybe a more extreme example of, like, Y2K, where the clock is ticking. We think that once it hits midnight, everything's pandemonium is going to fall apart. But only in this case. We don't know when midnight is, if it's going to hit it or if it's gonna be next week, next month.

Pandemonium is. Pandemonium is not preparing your immune system and thinking you're gonna hide from the virus.

Absolutely.

As soon as you disinfect the hand pole in a, you know, on a public bus and that somebody gets off and the next guy that touches it just now, not sanitary anymore. Right. You walk out to the mailbox and open the mailbox. The mailman's been there. You're not saying it's not sanitary anymore. You've got to go grocery shopping. You got to take your kids to school. You got. So I would rather prepare for us to come in contact with a virus and then just deal with the Consequences. And then if the virus doesn't find us, well, great. You know, I've just bolstered my immune system. And what you'll find is if you do that, not only are you going to battle viruses and other pathogens very easily, you'll get less bacterial infections. You'll. Your. You know, your cognitive function will mildly improve. Your gut biome is where you make neurotransmitters.

The second brain, they call it. Right.

For mood. Pardon?

They call it the second brain.

Yeah, called the second brain. There's no question. The gut brain connection. You know, Dr. Perlmutters written some excellent books on this. He's. He's a neighbor of mine in Naples, Florida. You know, that's where my clinic is headquartered.

It might even be the first brain. Right? This brain here might be the second one because, I mean, this is so dependent upon what's going on systemically with the rest of it, like, there's no questions. It's really. This is our second brain.

It's incredible to me that modern science thinks the brain is here and the body's here, and we have things going on here that don't affect this. The two are just inexorably connected.

Absolutely. Gary, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you. In a time of such uncertainty, it's good to have folks out there who can kind of bring a level head and instead of just go run and hide, it's like, now arm yourself up and do what you can. The body is an insanely sophisticated, powerful machine built over millions of years for survival and, you know, thriving in the. In the midst of, like, you know, nature does not love us. Nature is trying to kill us. I can't remember where I read. You know, also read about this. I think it was in. I can't remember if it was Feynman's book or it was a different book, but it was like, nature tries to kill you. It doesn't really want you here, but our bodies survive despite it. Like, it is a cold, harsh world out there. But we've evolved mechanisms to ward things off. And the fact that we're all here right now means we, you know, our, you know, DNA has survived millions and millions and millions of threats against us. You know, we are. We are weapons against nature.

But, yeah, it's army.

We let ourselves go, and those weapons get rusty.

Your immune system is trained to fight. That's what it does. It's like a special forces unit. It doesn't. It's happy fighting. That's what it was meant for. And so you can arm it so that it can overpower the enemy instead of allowing the enemy to overpower it. And what we discussed today is the most effective way to do that.

I love it. I love it. Well, I'm gonna give you, I'm gonna give you a plug, even though that's not why you're here. But streamlinewellness.com and then Gary, if anybody just sees this, wants to reach out to you personally.

You can reach out to me. You can follow me on instagramarybreca. You can direct message me there. Arybreca. I don't sell anything there either. I just educate, educate, educate. I put a lot of really good scientifically backed analogies and information online for people to have. I think that the best way for us to, to take charge of our own health is to be empowered with real information.

I couldn't agree more. Well, I'm just glad I can be a conduit to help get.

Yeah, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it.

It's my pleasure. So for everybody else, I'm going to sign off on the Facebook live here and we're going to, we're going to stop this. If you want to get a hold of Gary streamlined wellness.com follow him at garybreca throughout the social medias. And if you, if you want any more my opinion, like as I said, I work directly with Gary, my guy and feel free to hit me up, message me on Facebook, send me an email, happy to give you my experience, etc. But yeah man, Gary, thanks a lot and keep sharing the wealth of knowledge with everybody out there.

I appreciate now it's great being on. I'll be on anytime.

All right, my pleasure.

Take care, man.

All right, I just stopped recording.