54. Q&A: Reducing Brain Fog, Top Tips For Seasonal Allergies, Red Light Therapy & More with Gary Brecka

Hey guys, you asked, I listened. So here we go. Modifying some of the podcast shorts to answer the most commonly asked questions across all of the social media platforms due to I cold plunge more than once a day. What steps should young people take to protect their cognitive function? Tips for eating a healthy diet while dining out? Avoid anything. I would say the top three ways to protect cognitive function in our youth are, number one, focus on ultimate human. Hey guys, you asked, I listened. And so here we go, modifying some of the podcast shorts to answer the most commonly asked questions across all of the social media platforms. So we've consolidated those into the top 20 most commonly asked questions and we're just going to go through them one by one and hopefully provide tremendous value to you for those questions that are just nagging at you that you've submitted to info at the Ultimate Human human dot com. So number one, how can I get more vitamins into my kids, especially my fussy eater? Well, there are a number of ways that we put methylated vitamins into children's diets. Number one, you can always take the capsules and break them open and put them into food, yogurt, cereals, non fortified, non enriched cereals or other things that the kids are eating. You know, these, the great way to spread these out so they don't actually see the vitamins or think that they're taking the vitamins to just break the capsule open. My second favorite is to use the gummy version. There are some tremendously good gummy versions for children. They actually taste like a gummy bear. They're flavored with sweeteners that are not going to impact their glycemic profile like monk fruit. And these are easy ways to get vitamins, you know, into, into your kids diets. What steps should young people take to protect their cognitive function? Wow, this is a great question. I would say the top three ways to protect cognitive function in our youth are, number one, focus on sleep. Most of our children are on their phones absorbing very high amounts of blue light late in the night and they're throwing their circadian cycle off. Teenagers have gone from being just exhausted to absolutely flabbergasted. You know, it's, there's a lot of science behind the amount of sleep that prepubescent and pubescent teens need. And I think the educational system has it backwards. We actually start younger children in the public school system with school starting later in the day and children that are older are actually in. Teenagers are actually having to go to school earlier. It's usually the polar Opposite. So a lot of science that pubescent teens, especially growing young teens, 13 to 17 year olds, need significantly more sleep than younger children. So number one, I would say focus on their sleep. Screen time is a big one for kids going to bed. You wouldn't believe after you shut the door at night what they're doing in that bedroom, on their phones, on Snapchat, on all of these different social media platforms bombarding themselves with the blue light. So second thing is there are settings in your phone. I will put the instructions to those in the show notes below. You can go into an iPhone or an Android and you can actually turn on a red light screen at a certain hour of the night. I suggest that you turn the screen on after 6pm to start to reduce the amount of blue light that's going into their brain that's creating awakened state. The third thing I would do is it's very safe to use metabolites in children. I mean, metabolites are things that the body recognizes, it can break down and it can get rid of things like magnesium threonate, small amounts of melatonin, magnesium theanine and melatonin supplements for them at night that do not create a dependency. They don't create something called tachyphylaxis, which is a desensitization response and they don't create a long term reliance. They're not tranquilizing their metabolites that help quiet the mind. And then the last thing I would say for protecting cognitive function is to try to get as much processed food out of their diets as possible. Children's flavor profile changes as they age and what happens is we get more adept at thinking that processed foods are actual foods. We actually start to enjoy the taste of food dyes and artificial sweeteners more than we do whole natural foods. So the more whole foods that you can get into your children, meaning keep the distance from the table to the soil as short as possible, the better you will do towards protecting their cognitive function. The final tip I would say is help your children get natural sunlight. There is nothing better for kids than being outside, touching the ground, breathing, running around and getting bathed in natural sunlight. What kind of diet do you recommend to reduce inflammation? Wow. Inflammation really is the root of all evil. I feel like the Bible should say inflammation is the root of all evil because, you know, once the inflammatory process takes hold, it has a tendency to become long term and chronic. Chronic inflammation is the root of a tremendous amount of evil in our society. So what I would recommend to reduce the amount of inflammation in the body is first and foremost dramatically reduce the amount of processed sugars in your diet. So sugars are founding their way into everything. In the 90s we had a war on fat. And so you saw all of these products that started to replace fat with sugars and even artificial sweeteners, but mainly sugars in an order to lower fats. So again, diets that are whole food diets are usually the best to reduce inflammation. I'm also a fan of trying elimination diets. I don't think that keto diets or carnivore diets in particular are good diets to be on for a prolonged period of time. I think that we do need other things in in these diets like fruits, like raw dairy. But if there was a diet that I would recomm to reduce inflammation, it would be a whole food diet. If you still find that you have skin irritation, gut irritation, an elimination diet like the Carnivore diet for 30 days very often and I've seen in my own clients has had a substantial reduction in their inflammatory response. And I have seen miracles with some of these keto reset diets and carnivore diets. For short periods of time, make sure that you're doing clean keto or clean carnivore. Making sure that you're fish is wild caught or line caught. Making sure that your meats are grass fed and grass finished. Making sure that your eggs are pasture raised and not just free range or organic. Making sure that your chickens are free of antibiotics, hormones and other kinds of fillers and that they're also pasture raised. What is your opinion on parasite cleanses? Should people do them or should I focus on my gut health? Well, you should do both. Number one, there's some excellent parasite stool tests that you can use. I'm a big believer in frequency, things like ripe frequency and so transdermal ozone or ozone therapy for certain parasites. But there are a number of products that are out there that are available as a parasitic cleanse. I'll put links to those in the show notes below. I do not actually manufacture a parasitic cleanse on my own. So I'm happy to shout out some of my competitors that I feel are doing good things to address the issue of parasites in our gut. Remember that not all parasites are bad. We do have good parasitic flora in our gut and sometimes a reduction in healthy parasitic flora is the issue just as much as an overgrowth of bad bacteria. So in my opinion, opinion parasitic cleanses are good, but it's really a much More complicated answer than saying, yes, you should do a parasite cleanse. No, you shouldn't. You really should take some time to figure out what parasite, if any, that you have and address that specifically. And my preference is stool testing for parasitic colonies and then going after those with a specific parasitic cleanse. Do you have any tips for dealing with seasonal allergies naturally? Yes. One of the best ways to deal with seasonal allergies naturally is to reduce your overall baseline state of inflammation. Getting homeless cysteine down, having that checked, looking at your inflammatory response, your histamine response and its baseline level versus just the response that you have to pollen or wheat grass or timothy grass or any number of other seasonal allergy, airborne allergy. The second thing that I would do is think about investing in a really high quality air filter. You know, the air in our home is actually contributing to a lot of seasonal allergies, a lot more than people think. I have an air filtration system that filters down to almost 0.1 micron, which is actually smaller than a virus. It has a setting on it that allows for ozone gas to be run when you're not in the house. Remember, if you'd get one of these air filters that does filter down to that small of a micron level, you want to actually have a setting for ozone. You can't leave plants or anything living basically in the house. You can't have pets, children, human beings or animals in the house when you run the ozone setting. But if you're out for the weekend or you're out for a 24 hour period, you do an ozone setting on these air filtration systems and it will help reduce the exposure. Exposure to molds and mycotoxins that are in our air. Very often mold is hiding behind our drywall and we don't see it because it hasn't penetrated the drywall. But when these molds sporulate and they, they put these allergens into the air, it raises your baseline sense of inflammation. And then all you need is minor exposure to pollen or other irritants and your histamine response becomes noticeable. So air filtration is an excellent way. You can also test for your, your baseline level of homocysteine. You can test for your baseline level of other inflammatory markers, and you can address those with things like charcoals, silica, clays, and other nutrients that absorb these histamines from the gut. How can I improve blood circulation in my legs? Wow, that's another great one. Lymphatic drainage is great. Vibration plates, but not vibration plates that rattle the body. I don't think it's a good idea to rattle the body at all. In fact, I think that if you're going to invest in a vibration plate, you get one that has a magnet in it, like the sonic that moves in a vertical plane so that it is not rattling the body, it is just sending a shock wave through the body, which has actually been shown to increase bone density during the lymphatics and also improve circulation. Another really interesting way to improve circulation. It's a trick that I use at home. I don't have a clinical study to support this, but have a loved one hold your feet up close to their chest with the palms of your feet, the, the base of your feet pointing at the ceiling and use a massage gun, like a hypervolt on your feet to drive all of that stale blood out of your feet. It's like a. Feels like a massage. When you put your feet back down, they'll tingle, they'll feel like you'll have those nerve paresthesias. That's the blood in the circulation returning back to your legs. Lastly, we've also looked at some of the impact of using things like resveratrol to help improve vascular laxity and also improve circulation. And of course, get a blood test, go to your doctor and see if you have any conditions in your blood like elevated hematocrit, which is an elevated level of blood viscosity, and address the blood viscosity. Should I cold plunge more than once a day? Cold plunging more than once a day is fine. It's the duration of the cold plunge that I always try to target with folks. I say three minutes minimum, six minutes maximum. I've seen very little evidence that that deeply colder is better or longer is better. So we're trying to cold shock the body, not necessarily cold adapt the body. I've actually used cold plunging to help me go to sleep. It does actually lower your core body temperature and as your body warms up, it has a very calming effect. So the requirement for the body to actually cool about 2 degrees Fahrenheit before you sleep is also a necessary part of getting into a good deep circadian cycle of sleep. So I have no issues with cold plunging more than once a day. My preference is in the morning, first thing upon waking and to exercise. You know, a lot of the evidence is in now that we want to support good, healthy physiologic function. And if you think about what happens when we tear a bunch of muscle, which is the whole purpose of going to the gym and working out, the body is naturally going to increase the blood supply to that area because it wants to supply amino acids, nutrients, oxygen, pull something called creatinine, muscle breakdown product out of the muscle. So let's not try to interrupt that natural physiologic process by getting in cold water immediately after exercise. I would wait 45 minutes after intense exercise to submerse yourself in cold does not mean that you should not ice an injury. By all means, if you have a lateral epicondylitis or a knee or a hip, shoulder or rotator cuff or something that's bothering you can always ice that you know after injury. But save your cold plunging for prior to exercise. Tips for eating a healthy diet while dining out Avoid anything fried or breaded I personally do not eat white rice, white flour, white bread or white pasta out at restaurants unless you know the source of it. Good Italian restaurants and support their pastas, their other whites, white flours because they're they're folic acid free, they're not fortified, they're not enriched. My preference is a healthy steak with grilled vegetables. I always ask what they're grilling the vegetables and the steak in just to make sure that you go that extra mile to ensure that they are not frying those things or sauteing them in seed oils. Some high end restaurants actually do use grass fed butter or ghee butter, but this adds a lot of expense to their menu items. So it's always good to ask. But tips for eating out would be to avoid the white so white flour, white rice, white bread, white pasta. Unless you know the source being organic and non fortified, non enriched. And I would again go for whole foods while eating out and completely avoid fried and breaded foods. How does mold toxicity affect hormones? That's an interesting one. It's slightly outside my core area of expertise. I can say that we've seen a pretty parabolic rise in our client population of mold and mycotoxin toxicity. We also seem to see a connection between levels of mold toxicity and the incidence of anxiety. I'm not sure yet of the physiologic connection. I have to go down the rabbit hole the science behind that. But one of the best ways that our clinical team treats mold toxicity is with metal and chemical free cleanse, which is a body health product. We also treat it with transdermal ozone using something called a hocat. Or you can find a clinic near you that does ozone IVs and has experience treating mold toxicity with IVs. I will get Back to you on the link between mold toxicity and its direct or indirect effect on hormones. What are your thoughts on colostrum? We are huge fans of colostrum. Very often in inflammatory conditions of the bowel diverticulitis, irritable bowel syndrome, even conditions like Crohn's disease where you have a consistent level of inflammation and clients are put on anti inflammatory, sometimes even immunosuppressants to stop the immune reaction. There is nothing that is going in and healing the gut gut or fixing the leaky gut. Our clinical team has a lot of experience using colostrum peptides like BPC157, which are gastric pentadecapeptides, and then also digestive enzymes to make sure that the contents in the gut are not causing irritation. It's not as simple as taking a digestive enzyme, a probiotic and maybe a peptide like BPC or just colostrum. But we are enormous fans of colostrum. We think that colostrum has shown significant improvement in overall gut health, tends to lower the inflammatory response in the gut and help the luminal wall of the gut heal after it's been inflamed. Can you talk about your thoughts on ghee and avocado oil? Well, ghee butter is one of my favorites. Believe it or not, if you're vegetarian or vegan, you can actually eat ghee butter. It's clarified butter. I prefer that you cook in in butters and oils that actually can sustain high temperatures like avocado oil, coconut oil, ghee butter, tallow or make sure that it's grass fed butter. All of those will not denature at elevated temperatures. My preference is to use, you know, extra virgin organic olive oils at room temperature. So what can I do about my sleep apnea? Well, sleep apnea is a pretty complicated topic too. We're going to dedicate an entire podcast episode to sleep apnea. I have seen significant improvements in clients treated by our clinical team with obstructive sleep apnea and other forms of sleep apnea when they were able to reduce their baseline state of inflammation and when they were able to actually lose weight and narrow or widen the area back where their adenoids are. But sometimes this is corrected through surgery. There's surgical procedures that can be done to the gut. There are jaw corrective measurements. I know some people use mouth tape that are sleep apnea. We've had several clients come off of sleep apnea machines when they actually get their diet and their inflammatory cascade down by eating a whole food diet, exercising Regularly learning to do breath work, getting on a good sleep schedule and very often sleeping on the right side. So we're gonna again we're gonna dedicate an entire episode to sleep apnea and I'd rather really take a deep dive on this one and be thorough with that, that answer and that explanation. Why do you do oxygen while in the red light bed? I don't do oxygen while I'm in the red light bed. Very often I'll run hydrogen gas while I'm in the red light bed. I'll just run a little bit of nasal hydrogen. It's very anti inflammatory. Hydrogen gas is one of the most prevalent gases in the human body. We do oxygen prior to the red light therapy bed. One of the things that red light therapy does, amongst all of its other myriad of benefits is it dissociates something called mitochondrial nitric oxide from a place in the mitochondria called cytochrome C oxidase. And then oxygen docks so you can increase your partial pressure which is the amount of oxygen in the blood. You can increase your, your pulse oxygen, the amount of oxygen in your red blood cell by doing mild amounts of exercise, walking on a treadmill, by breathing higher concentration oxygen. This is called EWAT or exercise with oxygen therapy. It's based on research done called multi step oxygen therapy where you breathe higher concentrations of oxygen than you would get in ambient air. Ambient air is about 21% oxygen. These hypermax oxygen systems are 93 to 95% oxygen. When you breath them for short periods of time under mild exercise it creates a little additional perfusion pressure and allows that oxygen to get deep into our tissues. So my preference is that you do hypermax oxygen prior to red light therapy and then use all of that beautiful valuable oxygen you've got in your blood to drive into your mitochondria to upstage your mitochondria and allow them to eliminate waste, repair, detoxify and regenerate in a much more oxygenated environment. Are there any supplements that can help with brain fog? There are a a myriad of supplements that can help with brain fog. The idea is to find out what's causing your brain fog. We find that very often low oxidative states, meaning low levels of oxygen transport capacity in the body, cause us to have brain fog. Everything that you perceive about energy and most of what you perceive about your short term recall and cognitive function have to do with how much oxygen is in your blood. This is why we get a runner's high. This is why when you're moving and you're mobile and you feel good after exercise because you've increased the oxidative state. So the fastest way to do this is to get a blood test done. Have your doctor look at your hormone levels, have them look at your red blood cell count and your hemoglobin levels to make sure they're in an optimal range so that you can actually carry more oxygen in your blood, which you will perceive as more energy. An entire episode should be dedicated to Brain Fog and supplements for Brain Fog because this is a wide open top. We have to talk about circulation in the brain, we have to talk about nutrients in the brain. We have to talk about deep sleep, the time when the glymphatic system in the brain is helping to eliminate waste. We have to talk about adequate rest or circadian cycle, not just as simple as taking a supplement and brain fog taking a backseat. This is a multifaceted answer and I'm glad that this one was asked, because now we're gonna dedicate an entire podcast episode to Brain Fog. So be on the lookout for that. How often should people do the water fast? Well, you modifying my position on water fasting towards something called fast mimicking. So a lot of data coming out now, mainly published by Dr. Valter Longo, one of the preeminent authorities out of University of Southern California's Longevity Research center, that is doing randomized trials on real human beings looking at the difference between different types of fasting, intermittent fasting, prolonged fasting, water fasting, and something called fast mimicking diets. Fast mimicking diets are the those where the body is fed but believes it's in a fasted state. And by doing this, they've had profound impacts on type 2 diabetes, even on some of the neurodegenerative and cognitive diseases out there, like Alzheimer's and dementia and Parkinson's, and have shown a tremendous impact on reducing markers of longevity, meaning that actually reversing the age or backing up your biological age. The study that was just published, I'll put this in the show notes, showed a two and a half year reduction in biological age just by doing a fast mimicking diet once a month, every three months and repeating that over three different cycles. So I'm going to talk more about fast mimicking diets and less about water fasting diets as time goes on, because I think that we should always follow the research, we should always modify our opinion based on what the data says. What's the number of rays to look for on a red light bed? That is an excellent question. You know, the majority of the therapeutic wavelengths are in the non visible spectrum. So there is red light, which is visible light. There's infrared, there's near infrared, there's far infrared. There are a lot of wavelengths that are therapeutic in a red light bed that are not actually visible spectrum wavelengths. The 680 to 720 nanometers, the 840 to 910 nanometers, generally nanometer wavelengths over 1100 nanometers are getting into the spectrum where you're creating heat, which red light beds are, are not meant to create. And it is not necessarily the brightness of the red light, the visible light that makes a bed good or bad. My personal opinion is that it's very difficult to find a red light bed that is therapeutic, that doesn't plug into a more powerful outlet. You need a lot of electricity to drive those light diodes. Thea Lite 360 makes a great light bed. We actually make a light bed. There's tremendous number of of red light panels on the market. Remember that it's the proximity to those panels that matters. You want the light to spread within the skin, not just bounce off of the skin. So sitting two or three feet away from a red light panel doesn't do you as much good as being in close proximity to that panel, allowing the light spread beneath the skin. So it gives you the vasodilation, it gives you the increased circulation, and it begins to help your mitochondria better utilize oxygen. How long should I do red light therapy per day and how far away from the light panel should I be? Well, the closer the better. I do 20 minutes of red light therapy every day in a 10x health red light therapy bed. It's manufactured by Therilite 360. They're not the only ones that make red light beds. That's just the one that I use. But I prefer whole body photobiomodulation if you have access to it. These are cost prohibitive to have in your house. So the next best thing is to use red light panels. I will put some of the manufacturers that I am a big fan of down below. And no, I do not have affiliate links with these manufacturers. I will just tell you which nanometer wavelengths at which milliwatts of irradiance, meaning the power behind those lights, seem to have the best therapeutic effect. I really hope you found this podcast short, very helpful. I'm going to try to continue to answer these questions and pull out the ones that deserve an entire episode on their own. So we can take a really, really deep dive seems to be a lot of interest in cognitive function and hormones, especially female hormones. So be on the lookout for some of our top female regenerative medicine physicians to be attending the podcast over next few months. And please continue to submit your questions. I love allowing you to drive where my focus and tension and energy goes. And until next time, that's just science.