Gary Brecka: Nutrient deficiencies, practicing whole food diets, modifiable risk factors and more!

The reason why most people are not living healthier, happier, longer are for what we called modifiable risk factors. Let's say you start to develop high blood pressure. Then they go, your mother had high blood pressure. You have genetically inherited hypertension. Well, the next time a doctor says that to you, you should look them right in the face and say, well, what gene did I inherit from my ancestor that gave me this condition?

Yeah.

And watch their face go blank because you inherit the.

The choices you made.

The choices you. It's so true that God gave us everything that we need to thrive. The more I've studied the human body, the closer it's brought me to God. We're so nutrient deficient that we get the expression of these nutrient deficiencies. You're being treated for a mental illness that is the result of a nutrient deficiency.

So how many people are going to the doctor and being diagnosed with things that are really due to the mineral deficiencies in their body?

Oh, my gosh. It's an absolute pandemic. The third leading cause of death is medical error. We have put more faith in what man makes us than what God gave us. It's night and day. The difference you can get with mobility, sense of community, and a whole food diet. A lot of us are out there, we're eating non nutrient dense foods and then wondering why we're fat. Why am I fat? Right. What got me here? Instead of thinking that if I take a drug to lower my cravings and then I will just eat less junk, but I'm still bathing my cellular biology.

In a toxic soup, what is the type of food? What are the foods that we should be eating that are non negotiables in our life?

Foreign.

Welcome to Vaughn and Powers Talks, where we don't just scratch the surface. We dive deep into the lives of some of the world's most amazing change makers. I'm your host, Brandy Harvey. Now, y', all, this one is gonna be so good. Today, the man, the myth, the legend is here. We're gonna talk all things health and vitality. Gary Brucker is a renowned human biologist, biohacker, and longevity expert. As the host of the number one wellness podcast, the Ultimate Human Podcast, Gary's mission is to empower you with the knowledge and tools to achieve peak performance and vitality. With over 20 years worth of experience as a human biologist, Gary is on a mission to change the face of humanity by helping his clients find innovative ways to achieve absolute peak function in their bodies. Gary believes the ultimate superpower is sleep. Vaughn Powers talks Welcome, human biologists, the human expert and entrepreneur Gary Breca to the show.

Wow, that was great. Thank you. I'm like, man, I want to tune into that.

It's you, Gary.

Sounded good.

Listen, I'm so excited. We got a little bit before the show started. You gave me my hydrogen tablets, so I'm kind of feeling like a Power Ranger right now.

Yes, you are.

I'm supercharged up because I got my hydrogen tablets. But I mean, you are really on this mission to change the way people live their lives and improve their health?

Yes, I really am. You know, I began my career in the mortality space.

This was so interesting to me. Like 20 years, right?

20 years, yeah. So we, we were developing models. I mean, believe it or not, there's a lot of financial services instruments that are based on mortality, annuities, life insurance, reverse mortgages. And when a life insurance company is getting ready to take 10 million or $25 million worth of risk on your life, they really don't care where you are on one of those actuarial curves. They want to know your specific mortality. How many more months does this person have left on Earth? And it's some of the most accurate science in the world. I mean, if you want to know how good life insurance companies are at predicting mortality, just look at what happened during the 2008, 2009 financial services crisis. We had about 364 banks fail. We didn't have a single life insurance company fail.

Right.

There's no other institution that takes that kind of risk on just a single variable. Right. How many more months does somebody have left on Earth? And what was really fascinating about this research looking into all things mortality, cholesterol, lifestyle, diet, morbid obesity, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, all of these conditions, was that the reason why most people are not living healthier, happier, longer, more fulfilling lives are for what we called modifiable risk factors.

Oh, Gary, I want you to get into this. You know, this is why you're here.

Yes.

Yeah, this is why.

Yeah. I mean, modifiable risk factors are not simple changes that are in control of the individual, that if they would make these switches, these shifts, they would dramatically change, not only extend their lifespan, but they would dramatically extend their health span. You know, your audience that's listening to this podcast right now is, for the most part, I believe they are walking around at about 50 or 60% of their true state of normal.

Wow.

Yeah.

50. 50 to 60%.

Maybe 60% of their true.

Why do you say that? Because you said these modifiable Risk factors is diet, is lifestyle, it's nature, but it's also isolation.

It is, you know, so. So to be very specific, you know, the human body, if I, If I was to put up a chart of your human, your. Your cellular biology up on. Up on a screen, and maybe I'll. I'll. I'll show you one, we can throw it up for your viewers to look at. It would look like this really complex, intricate maze of arrows and circles going everywhere, and all of these different compounds. It would look super complex because every day that we're alive through 300 billion cells that were with you yesterday will not be with you tomorrow. We turn over about 300 billion cells a day. We have about 32 trillion cells in the human body. So that means about every 84 days, you're a completely new cellular human being. And if you look at this chart, as complex as it seems, I point this out to people because of what you don't see in the chart. What you don't see in there are any chemicals. You don't see any synthetics, and you don't see any pharmaceuticals.

Yeah.

What you do see are vitamins, minerals, amino acids, nutrients. You know, all human beings need the same basic things. We need two essential fatty acids. We need nine essential amino acids. Right. These are the building blocks of proteins. We need essential fats, which are the building blocks of nearly everything else. There's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. Right? So carbohydrates are not essential for life. Just let that settle in for a second.

Yeah, let us settle in, Gary. Let us settle in that carbs are not essential.

They are not essential for life. You cannot name an essential carbohydrate. My point is, we become nutrient deficient. Right? So we believe this in plant physiology. So if you had a leaf rotting in one of your palm trees at your house, and you called a true arborist, a true botanist, out to your house, they wouldn't touch the leaf, Right. They would cortest the soil.

The soil.

And they would say, you know what? There's. There's no nitrogen in this soil. And they would add nitrogen to the soil and the leaf would heal. Human beings are no different. We've been led to believe that we inherit disease from our ancestors.

Yeah, yeah.

Which for the most part, is patently false. I mean, so, for example, we've mapped the entire human genome. We know every gene in the human body. And so if you Suddenly, in your mid-40s, let's say, you start to develop high blood pressure, and you go to your doctor and your doctor examines your heart and your EKG is normal, your EEG is normal, your heart sounds are normal, your lung sounds are normal, your whole cardiac exam is normal. But you still have high blood pressure. Then they go, oh, I see that your mother had high blood pressure, your father's brother, your uncle had high blood pressure. You have genetically inherited hypertension. Well, the next time a doctor says that to you, you should look them right in the face and say, well, what gene did I inherit from my ancestor that gave me this condition? And watch their face go blank.

Because you inherit the choices, you made the choices.

What we pass from generation to generation is rarely disease. What we pass from generation to generation is the inability for the body to refine a raw material which causes a deficiency which leads to that disease. So I'll give you an example. About half of your audience, statistically speaking, has a gene mutation called mthfr. I won't tell you what the nickname is for that gene. If you see it on the paper, you'll figure it out.

No, tell us Gary.

The nickname is the mother gene. But that's why I try not to say it. You pulled it out of me. But it doesn't stand for the mother gene, it stands for methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase. The reason why I'm telling you this is because so many families have this gene mutation and what it does is it does not allow you to. It's actually more prevalent in African American community like some conditions. So what doesn't allow you to take the nutrient folic acid and turn it into the form that the body can use called methylfolate?

I'm so glad you're going down this path of folic acid because it was all my things to talk about with you because this is a synthetic nutrient that has been created. Right. And we really cannot break down folic acid.

That's right.

But we've been told that you have to give a mother folic acid for over you get you up your intake of folic acid.

Yeah, I mean folic acid is a completely synthetic man made chemical. You can't find folic acid anywhere on the surface of the earth. It does not exist naturally in nature.

This was so intriguing to me when you said this because I was like, oh my God. Because of course our entire lives we've been led to believe all the things we've been led to believe.

Yeah. So now think about this. So about half your listeners have this gene mutation mthfr. And so it doesn't allow them to convert this folic acid into the usable form. And in human beings, what happens is any compound that enters our body, any vitamin, mineral, amino acid, nutrient, any raw material we put into the human body goes through a process of being refined, turned into the usable form. Nothing that you eat or drink or breathe is used in the format that you put it into the human body. Without a single exception, everything goes through this refining process. I always use the analogy that we pull crude oil out of the ground. Right. But you cannot put crude oil into your gas tank.

Right.

Because the car doesn't understand that fuel source. You have to take crude oil, you have to refine it into gasoline. Now the car can run. So in human beings, folic acid, for example, you put this nutrient into the human body, it's useless until the body converts it into something called methylfolate. Well, what if you can't make this conversion? Well, now you have a deficiency. And what are the consequences of this deficiency? Well, a methylfolate deficiency leads to all kinds of things. So the primary one is that it affects the motility of the gut. So you gotta think of your intestinal tract, your gut, as a 30 foot long conveyor belt.

Yeah.

Okay. It's 30ft long. You put contents on it as one end. At one end they exit the stomach, and then 30ft later, it exits the rectum. The pace of this conveyor belt is extremely important. Right. I mean, think about it. If you went into any factory in the world that worked on a conveyor belt system and you doubled the speed of the conveyor belt, the entire line would break down.

Yeah.

If you halted the conveyor belt, if you reverse the speed of the conveyor belt, the entire assembly would break down. And what happens to people? And there's a lot of your listeners that are affected by this right now is you have this deficiency in methylfolate, which is very easy to fix, by the way. I'll tell you how to do it. And so the intestinal motility is off, and you're walking around with gas or bloating or diarrhea or constipation or irritability or cramping. So what do you do? You think about what was the last thing that I ate? And you go on all kinds of elimination diets and you do allergy testing, you do food sensitivity testing, and nothing seems to work. Right. And because you're not thinking about the speed of the conveyor belt, you're thinking about what did I just eat, what.

Did I put on the conveyor Belt.

What contents in my gut? What's my gut microbiome. And so these conditions learn to be something that we just, quote, unquote, live with. Right. But this is a deficiency. And now once you affect the motility of the gut, you think about what other things are going on in the gut. Well, 90% of the serotonin in our body is right here. And if you can't make serotonin here and it's deficient, then you can't have it here. What does serotonin do? Serotonin is the main driver of mood. So now you have a mood disorder or a mental illness or you can't convert dopamine. So, for example, how do we make neurotransmitters, which is what. Florida warms our mood? Like, if you said to me, gary, what is a mood? What is an emotional state? I would tell you that it's a collection of neurotransmitters bound to oxygen. So let's take a bowl and say, all right, we want to make happiness. Okay, that's so much serotonin, so much norepinephrine, so much epinephrine, so much dopamine. Boom. You have the emotion of happiness. What if I say, well, you can be in any mood that you want. You just can't use serotonin.

Oh.

Because you can't make it now, so you can't use serotonin. So now any mood that requires serotonin, you can't assemble. So because of this deficiency, you've been told you have a mood disorder or a mental disorder. So now you're. You are dealing with ADD or ADHD or OCD or manic depression or bipolar or any other number of conditions, and you're being treated for a mental illness that is the result of a nutrient deficiency. I mean, it's so true that God gave us everything that we need to thrive.

Yeah.

You know, the soil is now so depleted, we're so nutrient deficient, that we get the expression of these nutrient deficiencies. I mean, if you look at nursing homes, for example, all over the country, they are full of elderly men and women that have osteopenia or osteoporosis. This brittle bone conditions. And they've been taking calcium supplements for 25 years. Yeah, it's not calcium. It's minerals. It's nutrients. So, for example, if we just want to take bones for a second, our bones are actually not calcium. Our bones are calcium combined with something called phosphorus that forms a compound called hydroxyapatite. Same thing. Our teeth are Made out of. In order for this to happen, we need 12 minerals. If you're missing boron, manganese, molybdenum, selenium, silica, magnesium. If you're missing any one of these 12 minerals, you can't form bones. And now you have brittle bones. And now you're being treated for a brittle bone disease. That is the expression of a nutrient deficiency.

So is this what I mean, there's so many places I want to go with this conversation, from the mood disorder and mental health and the crisis that we see in America.

Yes. And.

And then with. Everybody breaks a hip when they get over 70 years old. So what minerals are we missing that we can get every single day in the food that we're taking?

That's a great point. I mean, most people think that the elderly have a tendency to fall and break their hips very frequently. That's actually not true. What happens is their hip breaks, and then they fall. The fall.

I think I was not called the fracture.

The fracture causes the fall. And so why that's so important is, you know, Grandma's standing at the sink, she's washing dishes, and all of a sudden, crack. Her hip breaks. Her femoral neck of her femur breaks, and she falls. And then you get the call, hey, Grandma fell and broke her hip. No, her hip broke and then she fell. And the reason why that's so important is because at the point at which your skeletal system can no longer support its own weight, forget trauma, right. I mean, just support its own weight. That is a sign of how demineralized that person is. And what's the easiest way to get minerals in the morning? You can take. I take something called Baja Gold sea salt. It's probably one of my favorite biohacks. A 10 bag of this stuff will literally last you five years. It's a mineral salt. You can also use Celtic salt. But a mineral salt will have the complete profile of these minerals that your body needs. So in the morning, if you just took a half a teaspoon of this mineral salt, put it in water, stirred it up, and whacked it back, you would hydrate and mineralize the body. Now you're giving the body the raw material, the basic building blocks it needs.

To function first thing in the morning.

First thing in the morning, hydrate and mineralize the body.

So all this Celtic sea salt I have in my house, I could be doing this every single morning.

Every single morning.

Got it.

I think Celtic salt is great. Baja Gold is the one. One that I use because it has a Great mineral profile. They test these salts for all kinds of things like heavy metals and glyphosate and things. But. So they're very clean salts. But when you give the body those minerals back to that, you know, palm tree example, if, if you didn't find the nitrogen missing in that soil, that leaf would have never healed.

Yeah.

And we would have spent a lifetime up there in the leaf, like trimming it, cutting it, spraying poison on it, trying to treat the leaf. But the truth is we had a nutrient deficiency. And salt, for example, we've been taught to fear salt.

Yeah.

But nothing could be further from the truth. You know, I'm like, if you were, if your blood pressure, let's say, was so high right this moment that you called 91 1, the first thing they would do when they got here is they would bag sodium, they would bag sodium chloride into your veins to lower your blood pressure. If you were so dehydrated right this moment that you landed in the emergency room, the very first thing they would give you is a saline.

Yeah.

And there's a very interesting study published in the Wiley Journal of Headaches, it's a very renowned journal on, on headaches. And it was looking at migraine sufferers. And what they found was they found an inverse relationship between sodium and migraine headaches. In other words, as sodium went up, migraine headaches went down. As sodium went down, migraine headaches went up. And why is that? It's because people think when they have a headache or migraine that the pain is coming from their brain. But that's not true. The brain actually doesn't have any pain signals. Your brain is not capable of generating a pain signal. So then where's the pain coming from? It's coming from the covering of the brain. Imagine taking a piece of Saran wrap, right, and wrapping it over the brain. It's called the dura. And this, this Saran wrap is fraught with pain receptors. And it hates two things. It hates being stretched and hates being contracted. What, what determines whether or not it stretches or contracted sodium. So by taking mineral salts very often, I'm not saying always, and I'm not telling you if you're on migraine medication to stop taking migraine medication. But what I am telling you is if you suffer regularly from migraine headaches or headaches, especially in the mornings, which are dehydration related, mainly try adding a mineral salt to your morning routine and see if in 48 hours is 72 hours, those headaches become a permanent thing in your Past.

Oh, wow.

And so this is what I mean by, you know, nutrient deficiencies. You know, we, we. We get deficient in vitamin D3, you know, the sunshine vitamin.

That's one of the things when you start testing for your hormones, you start doing your blood work. One of the things, because I've been told this, that vitamin D is low, no question.

I mean, that's probably one, you know, among the biggest pandemics in the world is that is a clinical deficiency in vitamin D3. So this is the sunshine vitamin.

Yeah.

So when God made us, he made us with the ability to make one vitamin. So if I tested your blood right now, or anybody in the studio's blood right now, you'd see that you have hundreds of vitamins in your bloodstream. You're only capable of making one. So how important do you think that vitamin is to human function? So vitamin D3, we make from sunlight and cholesterol. Right. So when sun hits our skin and interacts with cholesterol through the kidneys, we make something called vitamin D3. It acts partially like a hormone, it acts like a vitamin. When you have a clinical deficiency in D3, which, by the way, was the second leading cause of morbidity and Covid. When you have a clinical deficiency in vitamin D3, you know, what are some of those consequences? Well, your immune system gets compromised, your joints start to ache. We used to see in the mortality space over and over and over again, people go into their primary care doctor and they would be reporting the symptoms of vitamin D3 deficiency.

Yeah.

The doctor would hear the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, and they would often diagnose them with rheumatoid based on their symptoms.

Based on them not having high D3.

Levels, based on a deficiency in vitamin D3.

So how many people are going to the doctor and being diagnosed with things that are really due to the mineral deficiencies in their body?

Oh, my gosh. It's an absolute pandemic. I mean, if you look at the leading causes of death in America, number one is cardiovascular disease, number two is cancer. The third leading cause of death is medical error. And if you just pause for a second and think, wait a second. The third leading cause of death is. Is the industry designed to prevent death?

Yeah.

You know, if you translated that to any other industry, it'd be. It'd be laughable. Right. If you sold home security systems. But you were like the third leading cause of home invasion. Right. I don't think you'd be in business very long.

Exactly.

But we're like, I know where I'm gonna, you know, get my, get healthy. I mean, I'm go to the third leading cause of death and ask them what they would do. And, and that's not to poo poo modern medicine or, or to attack physicians or even big pharma. I mean, because I think the industry really is designed to try to help people. But what we've done is we have put more faith in what man makes us than what God gave us. And I believe so much more in what God gave us than what man makes us. Meaning. Before we assume that the body is making a mistake, that we are dysfunctional, or we have a disease or a pathology, we should first ask, do we have the raw materials to function properly? Like, don't ask me why the leaf's rotting if there's no nitrogen in the soil.

I mean, a well mind creates a well body, right? And so I want to go back to the mood disorder because we have so many people, especially living in the United States, who are clinically depressed, who are on antidepressants, who are on some sort of medication to help regulate the mind. And so I want you to really talk about this mind body connection and how our mood is being altered by the foods we eat, the deficiencies that we have, the lack of serotonin, how we need to. All these different things, you know, what's playing into it.

You know, interestingly, there, there was an emerging theory in depression called the serotonin hypothesis of depression. It's well documented, and essentially the serotonin hypothesis of depression says if you are low on the neurotransmitter serotonin, you are by definition depressed. So if we just take that definition for a moment and say, okay, if I'm low on serotonin, by definition depressed, then the solution should be to raise serotonin, right? But that's not what we do. Very often. We put people that are low on serotonin onto something called SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. So what these do is they essentially block the uptake of serotonin. And so in essence, what they're doing is rationing what little serotonin you have. So by definition it doesn't raise serotonin. So by definition, it doesn't end depression. I've had clients come in through our clinic system all the time. And I'll say, well, how long have you been on antidepressants? They'll say 15 years, 18 years. I go, well, when did you think it was going to kick in. When did we think that this antidepressant was going to.

Yeah, after 15 years.

After 15 years. And so then we ask ourselves, okay, where's serotonin made in the body? It's made in the gut. How do we make serotonin? We take an amino acid called tryptophan, the one that's famous for making you sleepy at Thanksgiving dinner, and we methylate it into the neurotransmitter serotonin. So there's no serotonin pills that you take? You actually make serotonin, 90% of which is in your gut. We make serotonin, then it travels up something called the vagus nerve and goes into the brain and creates your mood. So is it possible that you're deficient in the amino acid, tryptophan, one of the essential amino acids? Absolutely. Is it possible that you are missing the complex of B vitamins and something called methylcobal.