Gary Brecka: The TRUTH About Biohacking, Light Therapy, and Nutrients

The more pharmaceuticals you were on, the easier it was for us to predict your life expectancy.

The more you are on, the more likely you're to die.

Sooner the more aggressively people pursue comfort, the faster they age.

Covid, if your vitamin D was over 50, there was nobody who died.

If this database could see the light of day, it would permanently change the face of humanity. Gary Breca, a human biologist and longevity expert, applies his background in mortality science to help people optimize their health and extend their lifespan. The annuity companies, their risk is that you live too long. Life insurance company doesn't want you to die too soon. All this stuff can go wrong, and all you need are nutrients to fix it.

Yeah, 67% of people we test are deficient in one or more nutrients.

You gotta stop thinking about stress as a negative very often. It can be what makes you resilient. The best biohacking devices, best biohacking modalities mimic what we get from ugly nature. Once you hit the sleep cycle, that's the end of the road. I think sleep is our human superpower.

Yeah. 70 million Americans have sleep issues.

The reason why the majority of people are not living healthier, happier, longer, more fulfilling lives were because of what we called.

Well, Gary, it's so great to have you on the podcast. It's been a long time coming.

Yeah, it's been a long time coming. I think I've been chasing you longer than you can. Chasing me.

But you're here. I am in Miami in your studio, in your house.

Yeah. This is good.

It's awesome. And we just took this extraordinary tour through your house, which has me seething with jealousy about all the tools and gizmos and gadgets you have to upgrade your health. We're going to get into all that. I'm just so excited about.

Yeah, I always say, like, we end up running a podcast before the podcast.

That's right. We saw your hydro machines, your ozone sauna, your whole biohacking suite. The red light therapy is quite interesting. But, you know, maybe people know or don't know about you, but the thing that I find interesting is you came at this through the lens of sort of understanding why people die, not through the lens of longevity, which is sort of like you were trying to, like, help companies save money by understanding what was causing death and mortality and trying to help them navigate that. So can you tell us about your background, how you got, like, the insights about the nature of our chronic disease epidemic, what's going on, why these insurance companies have all this data? What They've learned and why it matters to us.

So for the better part of my career I was a mortality expert, which, which essentially means that, you know, we studied mortality, the variable basic tables, not, not just putting people on an actuarial curve. Right. I mean we're all on one, right. If you're a 54 year old male, you have a life expectancy of X. If you're a 34 year old female, you have a life expectancy of Y. You're lumped into a massive pool of, of mortality. But when a life insurance company is getting ready to put 25 million or $50 million worth of risk on your life, or an annuity company is getting ready spia, what's called a single premium immediate annuity, where you give them a lump sum of cash and they guarantee you an income stream for life. Or you're getting ready to do what's called a reverse mortgage, which means you get to live in your house but you sell it while you're still alive. All of these are based on mortality. The only thing that matters in those financial services instruments is how many more months does this person have left.

Yeah, right.

So they don't really care where you are on an actuarial curve. Right. They want to know you're going to.

Adjust the prices to match when you're.

Going to die so they don't lose money. And insurance is priced like that. You have super preferred preferred standard. Then you have what's called table ratings.

So what did you learn as you sort of started looking at the data and the lab data for people who are. Yes, because that, because these companies actually get your blood. Like.

Oh yeah, oh, they get your blood, they can take genes, they get all of your medical records, they have all your demographic data. They know. I mean it's a, it's a proctology exam. I mean if you've ever tried for.

Maybe a full colonoscope.

Yeah. I don't think you get as much information from a colonoscope as you do full blown life insurance application. Now I'm not talking about term life insurance. I'm talking about real, whole, whole life, you know, permanent universal life insurance where people are putting 10 million, 25 million 50 million of risk on a single life. What happens in those cases is they take not only a deep dive into your demographic data, but I mean they get everything, your divorce decrees, your trust accounts, your bank statements, your brokerage statements, your, you know, your, your work history and all of your medical records. And then before they actually issue the policy, they will Essentially send a nurse to your house and they will pull whatever biomarker they want.

So you got to, like, have an inside view of what that is.

Real inside view. You know, my. I'm. First of all, I'm not a physician. I'm a human biologist. My undergraduate degrees are in biology, my postgraduate degrees are in human biology. And so I spent eight years in formal education just studying human physiology. And they wanted someone like that on the team with, with the rest of, you know, the MDs and an actuarial scientist, because we were trying to really build a model that was very accurate, probabilistic model that was accurate. What really emerged from this big data. I always say that if this database could see the light of day, it would permanently change the face of humanity.

Yeah, it would spill the beans, Gary.

Yeah.

Let's go.

Well, I wish I had, like, secretly downloaded it, you know, like one of those government conspiracies, and I had it on a flash drive, you know, because trust me, I would put it in the public domain, probably go to prison for the rest of my life, but I would, I would get it out there. So I do, I do my best to get it out there with what I've got in my head, but the very unpopular information that emerged from this, or I would shouldn't say unpopular, I should say anti mainstream. Was that the reason why the majority of people are not living healthier, happier, longer, more fulfilling lives were because of what we called modifiable risk factors. Right. There were the non modifiable factors and then there were the modifiable factors. You could have a restricted range of motion from a massive injury or surgical procedure. That's not modifiable. You, you have, you know, spinal rods in your, in your back. Those are not modifiable risk factors. Modifiable risk factors were diet, lifestyle supplementation, exercise, mobility, and, and in my case, I would add to that significant changes in your blood biomarkers.

Yeah.

And so what we noticed was that the reason why we were table rating a lot of these and the reason why we were shortening the life expectancy was because of the intervention of chemicals, synthetics, and pharmaceuticals. And the more pharmaceuticals you were on, the easier it was for us to predict your life expectancy.

The more you were on, the more likely you're to die sooner.

The more you're on, the more likely you were to die sooner, and the more predictable, because not only could we predict the onset of other conditions, but we could predict the severity of and how quickly you would succumb to them. And so we could tell them most.

Of the month when someone's going to die based on the data to the month.

Yeah. And it was, it's, it's a very accurate model. And I get a lot of flack for that because people say, well, if you could predict life expectancy to the month, which I don't do anymore, you know, you would be Jesus or you would have won a Nobel Prize. And I never won a Nobel Prize, and I'm not Jesus. I believe in Jesus. But. And the reason why, you know, they say that is because they don't realize how accurate the science is. But if you, but if you want to know how accurate life insurance companies are, annuity companies are at predicting death, just look at what happened during the 2008, 2009 financial services crisis. We had 364 banks fail. You didn't have a single life insurance company fail. In fact, some of the largest institutions, aig, whose credit derivatives division was taking the company under, were bailed out by the life insurance.

Yeah.

They are some of the most solvent institutions on the planet. There's some of the highest rated financial institutions on the planet because they know, they know, they're really.

They know how to manage the risk because they understand the biology. So the things that came up were modifiable things, and they were things you could see on blood work that you could see by their.

You could absolutely see it on blood work. So. So things like.

What were you looking at?

So we, we looked at three main areas, and when we would look through your blood work, we would look at glycemic control, how well you controlled your blood sugar over a lifetime. Because we saw that hyperinsulinemia, elevated hemoglobin A1c, and poor glycemic control was a risk factor. It was what we called a comorbidity.

So were the insurance companies measuring insulin?

They were measuring insulin, glucose and hemoglobin A1C.

That's amazing because, Gary, less than 1% of all lab tests in America done by physicians include an insulin level, which is probably one of the most important biomarkers for longevity and risk. And, and it's something we use as core part of function health and our offerings company I co founded to help people understand their own lab data because it's so critical. And it's amazing to me that the people who know how to manage risk are actually measuring it.

Yes.

And not doctors.

What's interesting is you would get 15, 18 or 20 years of medical records on someone and you would see the atherosclerotic the arteriosclerotic issues, you would see the cardiovascular disease, you'd see the very, very, very low levels of statin controlled LDL cholesterol. But you would see extreme proliferation in cardiovascular disease. You would see early mortality in these groups because of what they called non correlated events, hormonal events. What our scientific team drew back to cell wall, cell membrane dysfunction, early onset, not just early onset dementia or Alzheimer's, but all forms of cognitive decline. You know, we knew, for example, that LDL cholesterol, for example, was, was not a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. An independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease.

That's a big statement.

Yeah. And that is a material fact, by the way, because.

Because the, the insurance companies are not selling statins, so. No, they're not actually. No, they're actually looking at what data is the most relevant. And LDL is a factor, but it's not by itself the factor. It's really metabolic health, which you measure by looking at insulin and blood sugar and A1C.

And we wanted to see, you know, what was the chance that this person would have LDL cholesterol called to the arterial wall, not in what was the presence of LDL cholesterol. You know, if they were hyperinsulinemic, then they had significantly higher incidence of plaquing, scarring, narrowing, and other forms of cardiovascular disease. But the centenarians, you know, not once in my entire career, and I don't know that this, I'm not saying this is a blanket statement, but in my career, we processed death claims too, and we didn't see a single death claim on a centenarian, someone that lived at age 100 at that time. Many of the policies would, would do what they call endow at age 100. So at age 100, the policy would just pay out. It would pay the death claim. So if you're lucky enough to live to 100, you could screw your kids. Like, I just got my $20 million life insurance.

The person who's still alive gets his life insurance.

Person that's still alive.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah. And there are other things called accelerated death claims, you know, where they would actually accelerate the payout while the person was alive. They had it if they had a terminal illness.

Yeah.

But what was really interesting is I didn't process a single death claim on a centenarian, not one who lived over age 100, that did not have clinically elevated levels of LDL cholesterol at the time of their death, because very often we had blood work on these people, they'd be in cystcare living facilities or other kind of facilities. And we would actually have that, the, the data. And, and due to that, for things like, you know, we, we, we, we followed trends in calcium supplementation in the elderly and really the fact that they weren't really impacting, you know, they weren't impacting bone, bone density. And, and so osteopenic patients that were put on high doses of calcium still became osteoporotic.

That's right.

And, and, and it's the vitamin D. Yeah, vitamin D and K2. Like, I mean that was another one. You know, we, we, it was 20.

Did you measure nutrient levels in these populations?

We didn't measure nutrient levels. And you know, if I had known then what I know now, I think we probably would have measured nutrient levels. But you could, you could surmise from the data because you could see their diet, their lifestyle, alcohol consumption, the medications that they were on and you could actually follow certain clinical deficiencies. Like vitamin D3 was a big one for us. We would see clinical deficiencies in vitamin D3 and I'm talking like single digit, low double digit D3, not, not. Oh yeah, yeah. And you would be, it's common, surprised how many people have that level of deficiency in D3. So they would have these long running clinical deficiencies in vitamin D3, let's say nanogram per deciliter between 7 and 25, you know, even below the lowest threshold for most labs, which will be 30, 200. And I still think 30 is clinically deficient.

Definitely.

Yeah. But you would see these, these very low levels of vitamin D3 for years and years and years in the medical record and then eventually the, the, the patient would present to a primary care physician with rheumatoid arthritis like symptoms. And, and I make sure that I say that correctly because they didn't have rheumatoid arthritis. You know, very often we know that, you know, medical error is the third leading cause of death. There's a great study, 2016 study done by Harvard. I think it was actually repeated by Hopkins and got worse in 2019 if you want to look up the study. But yeah, there was a National Academy.

Of Science report on that too.

Yeah, I mean looking at all the ICD 9, ICD 1011 codes, you know, that that medical error was the third leading cause of death. And we saw this repeatedly in our, in our insurance actuarial underwriting because so take this patient that had clinical deficiency in vitamin D3 and they present to their primary Care and they start describing the symptoms. You know, my, my soles of my feet are sore and achy. When I get out of bed in the morning to walk to the bathroom and take my first pee, my ankles just ache. Takes me 45 minutes to get the motor going. You know, over the last few years it's moved from my knees now to my hips and back, really stiff across the shoulders. And, and, and, and lately it's, you know, been hard for me to make a fist like a tight fist. You would be shocked how many primary carers would just say, you know, Mark, you've got rheumatoid arthritis.

Take this 50, 000 a year drug.

No raptors, no said rates.

No.

No diagnostic work.

They call it seronegative rheumatoid arthritis. Yeah, that's what they call it.

I'm adopting that saying.

No, it's a well known, it's an actually thing. Yeah.

Okay, so, so check it out. We knew about it, the name of it then. And so they would, they would say, you know, we're just. The good news for you is we're going to put you on something called a corticosteroid. You're going to take this oral steroid and everything's going to be fine. And so methotrexate, whatever the corticosteroid was. And what we realized in the record, because we were looking at hundreds of thousands of patient records, was that if you started a corticosteroid, you had six years and one day until you were having a joint replacement. Because initially they, they, steroids definitely are not good.

They cause osteoporosis, they degrade your bones, they can cause avascular necrosis of the hip. I mean they're pretty bad.

Yeah. And the avascular necrosis of the hip is what's leading to the hip fractures.

The femoral head basically means the blood just flow stops to the hip and then the hip.

Yeah, that artery that goes in the femoral head is, is compromised. And, and now you get no blood flow and then you get that osteoporotic condition in the, one of the highest load areas of the body. And, and you know, most people think that grandma fell and broke her hip, but her hip broke and then she fell. It's an important distinction, right, the fracture causing the fall rather than the fall causing the fracture. And that was one of the reasons we called that the triad of death. And I know you're really familiar with that, hip fractures and their propensity to accelerate mortality. But it's it wasn't the hip fracture that accelerated.

So all this amazing stuff you did with this sort of learning about how the insurance companies look at death, mortality, risk factors, it taught you a lot about what to think about in terms of how we create a healthy human. The opposite.

Yeah.

So you went from like managing death to managing life.

Yeah.

Because can you talk about like, what now kind of you switch to in terms of your thinking and how, how it kind of started your journey and what you're doing. Because what you're doing is really extraordinary, Gary. You're basically kind of synthesizing and collating and putting together a lot of different modalities and strategies to help upgrade people's biology. No doubt it's something we never learned in medical school, which is how do you create a healthy human? Like, it's just not a course and it doesn't get taught and there's no understanding of what is health. Right. It's not just the absence of disease.

Most would say it's the absence of.

It's not, it's something else. And when you have it, you know it, you feel awesome, your brain's clear, you have energy, you sleep great, you can do whatever you want to do. You know, you could basically be free from the burdens of a lot of the suffering that many people struggle with, even if it's not a disease. I joke and I say there's this really terrible thing that most Americans suffer from called FLC syndrome. That's when you feel like crap.

Yeah, there's a lot of FLC going around.

It's so bad. I mean, we just launched a 10 day detox program, which I wrote a book about 10 years ago. And in 10 days, people have up to a 70% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases by just a simple set of lifestyle changes in a week.

Believable. I wholly believe that and subscribe to that because in these modifiable risk factors, first of all, I was prohibited by law from having any contact with the patient or the treating physician. So even if I saw a life threatening drug interaction, I couldn't pick up the phone and warn the physician. And sometimes the MIB wouldn't catch these, right. These, these thrombolytic combinations of, of different pharmaceuticals and, and you'd want to contact the physician because it wasn't done on purpose, it was by error. And the system's very good at catching things like narcotic surfers and things like that, but it's not very good at catching contraindications. And, and just to finish the D3 example. So here's a nutrient deficiency, clinical deficiency in this. Now, now, on a corticosteroid, it was so accurate that I would advance your age, artificially advance your age six years and one day. And I would schedule the joint replacement for you. And then as soon as I scheduled the joint replacement, I would begin to reduce your. At that age, I would begin to reduce your ambulatory profile. How well you ambulate. And as you reduced ambulation, what we realized was as you reduced mobility, you would bring in all of the diseases that begin.

Less exercise, more disease.

Yeah, it's an, it's a direct correlation.

And I always say if you don't move, you won't.

That's a good one. I say aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort. But, you know, the more, more aggressively we pursue comfort, the faster we age.

Yeah.

And so, you know, even, even as.

These chairs are pretty comfortable. Gary. I don't know.

Yeah, but we're not going to stay here, brother. We're not gonna stay here. We're gonna put on a weighted vest and go do some pull ups after this.

Okay.

And you're getting in the hydrogen bath.

Okay. Down.

I'm, I'm excited to hear how that works.

I just want to see how I look without my shirt on.

I know what's, yeah, that's, that's going all over the Internet, guys. Www.ultimatehuman.com to see Mark. But, so, so now they have this clinical deficiency in D3. They've been put on a corticosteroid. I've advanced their age artificially, six years in one day. I've reduced their ambulatory profile. And now I bring in, you know, our algorithm would start to bring in all the diseases that exacerbate with reduced mobility. And then what you would see is we could predict not only the on of, but the severity of and how quickly you would succumb to a condition. So when you start to rewind that back. This person died early of a disease that they never should have had because of mobility that was reduced because of an operation that wasn't, was not necessary, because of medication that wasn't required, because of a condition that didn't exist.

Yeah.

Had they taken 5 or 9,000 IUs, 10,000 IUs of vitamin D3 daily with little K2 and applied a load to their bones, that trajectory would have been completely different. Something as simple as that.

That's true. I mean, I'm thinking we had vaccine mandates. I think we should have vitamins D, man.

I totally agree.

I think, you know, I totally agree because I, I actually shared this data with some people during the administration around how serious it was for Covid. If you had low vitamin D, you would.

Second leading cause of morbidity and Covid.

Yeah. You would get more likely to end up in the hospital and die if you had low vitamin D. And from the Israeli data, if your vitamin D was over 50, and the reference range is 20 to 30, depending on the lab, if it was over 50, there was nobody who died.

I was actually just going to say that because I was looking at big data, you know, reporting during that time frame too, and. But in functional ranges of 60 to 80 nanograms, there was not a single death.

Yeah, that's, that's extraordinary because vaccines don't even do that, right?

No, they don't prevent the infection or the spread. I mean, that's, that's a whole nother issue. But. Oh, yeah, you know, and if, and if you want to really see the impact of vaccines, just follow the life insurance companies. Yeah, right. So people tell me all the time, oh, you know, they don't, they don't factor in whether or not you've been vaccinated. I go, you don't think that they factor in whether or not you've been vaccinated? Why do you, why do you not think that? And they say, well, they don't ask the question on the application. Like, they don't have to ask the question.

They can see from your blood, they.

Get it from your medical record. It's just like if you told, if you answered on the, you know, on your application. I'm a nonsmoker. Have you ever smoked? No. You know, have you ever, you know, vaped or.

They check your urine, your blood for.

If you show up with nicotine in your blood, I'm going to table rate you as a smoker. You know, it's just like if you tell, you know, there's that section on alcohol, how many drinks a week? 1 to 2, 2 to 5, 5 to 7. We never believed what they said. If you had liver cirrhosis.

We, we Table radio underestimate how much they exercise. They eat and overestimate how much they exercise when you ask them.

Yeah, it's very true. So we just went off the data.

The other day and that, and that led you kind of thinking about how to create a different approach to helping people gain health. Right. And that's where you sort of led to your path. And, you know, you're kind of known as this sort of, this biohacking genius. And I think most people may not even know what biohacking is. When I first kind of heard the term like, what is that? And I don't quite get it. And I was thinking about it and really as I, as I've sort of come to understand what it is, it's really the application of tools and technologies and approaches to life that, that actually create health that are not disease treatments per se, but that work by activating the body's own healing reparative mechanisms.

No question.

And so in a sense, that's what functional medicine is for me. It's the ability to understand how we deviate from health and how to create health by removing the best of putting in the good stuff. And a lot of the technology and tools we looked at as we toured your apartment was basically tools that helped up regulate different biological systems. Whether it's your mitochondria, reducing oxygen stress, reducing inflammation, detoxification. These are all things that are fundamental to creating health that we don't learn about in medical school, that we don't know how to apply. But you, you've actually come up with an approach that includes all these modalities. So I'd like you to sort of talk about, you know, how do you think of biohacking? What is it? Yeah, who, what are the most important aspects of it that we should be focused on? Because there's a million things out there, right? There's every single. And you probably have 95% of them.

Yeah, yeah, I do.

Or maybe 98, I don't know. So, you know, how do you separate the wheat from the chaff?

You know, here's, here's my, you know, my big first line rule is that the best biohacking devices, best biohacking modalities, you know, equipment, what have you mimic what we get from Mother Nature. And so, for example, you know, we get three things from mother Nature. Mainly we get oxygen from the air, we get light from the sun, we get magnetism from the earth. And the further we get away from those basics, you know, the sicker we become. And the truth is that we are so disconnected from nature now, we're disconnected from each other too. I mean, deep, meaningful relationships, sense of purpose, sense of community. You know, there were a lot of mortality factors that we would study that actually when, when an elderly person lost their sense of community, their losses, Spouse.

Yes. Or family.

Or became isolated, which is the fastest way to accelerate all cause mortality.

This is like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day in terms of its mortality risk.

I don't know that that's true, but I would totally agree with that off the cuff because we saw it in the data. You know, we, we, we call it broken heart syndrome.

Yeah.

Essentially, you know, spouses that were, and it wasn't so much the loss of the spouse, it was being thrust into immediate isolation. Right. Because, you know, mom and dad live, you know, five states away and the kids are busy and they're raising kids and they see them on Christmas and Easter and New Year's like most families. And then one spouse falls ill and passes, and now the other spouse is totally isolated. And that isolation, we know that in all forms of animal species and human beings, isolation, it, you know, reduces your, your lifespan.

So biohacking is having a friend.

So, so back to biohacking. I would say the best devices, but I think it is actually that mimic mother nature, right? So, so things like mineral salts, amino acids, nutrients that you would find in nutrient dense soils, you know, you wouldn' physiologic impact you can have on people just by putting them on a complex of B vitamins, vitamin B12, some methylfolate, which are basic core nutrients required for the process of methylation. And when they're deficient, they become like the hub of the wheel. They, they, they have all of these spokes and people think that they have an autoimmune disease and they have a mental illness and they have a weight gain issue and they have sleep disruption and they have anxiety, they have ADD or adhd. And the truth is they very often have nutrient deficiency. And so if I was to, to say, you know, what are the best biohacking devices? Those are the devices that mimic mother nature. And so if you didn't have the budget to spend on those, you should be able to duplicate those by committing time, you know, in, in nature, exposing your skin to sunlight, getting first light in the morning, learning to do basic breath work, touching the surface of the earth, grounding, earthing, which is a very real thing.

They're all super expensive things to do, right?

Yeah, yeah. There's exactly zero. I think, in fact this morning I, I just as a, you know, as, as a, a joke, I, I said, you know, I'm taking my morning antidepressant and you know, and I was out on the balcony getting sunlight and just doing some breath work. And I, and I listed the side effects of enhanced mood, increased focus, concentration, and then I said, you know, don't, don't, don't, you know, forget your, your mood enhancer that you know, the best neurotropic. And I just did a round of breath work and gotten a cold plunge. Now we have these devices, cold plunges, which is essentially mimicking hormetic stresses that we might have, you know, found just in our normal.

We didn't have a thermostat in our houses, in our, in our TVs or.

Yeah. And our bodies react very well to certain stresses. You know, we got to stop thinking about stress as a, as a negative. You know, very often it can, it can be what makes you resilient. The body very often strengthens in response to stress. I know, I know that you know this, but.

Yeah.

So when we talk about biohacking devices, you know, my favorite would be, you know, PEMF mats Pulse electromagnetic field. These mimic the logos current of the earth. So if you don't have time to earth or ground, come in contact with mother earth, you can use a PMF mat. My probably my favorite device is a, is a red light therapy bed. Full body red light therapy and red light therapy mean the science is in. On red light therapy. It's very hard to overdose on it if you dose it 10 to 20 minutes a day.