How to Eliminate Migraines, Best Overall Diet, and The Truth About Alcohol | TUH #010

Ultimate human.

Hey, guys. Welcome to the Ultimate Human podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecker, where we go down the road of everything. Longevity, anti aging, functional medicine, biohacking, and everything that makes average humans ultimate humans. So today I have a very special guest, my wife, Sage Workinger, soon to be Sage Burka. And today is where we take questions directly from you and we answer them here on the podcast. So I know you've got the questions on your phone, babe. So what were some of the questions that came into us that people are, well, have on their minds?

I threw it out to the world of Instagram and actually we got a lot of responses of questions that they wanted to ask you, questions that they had for me. Um, so let's start with. Okay, we're going to kind of go in the diet range. So one of the questions was specifically, is there any fruit or vegetable that you would eat that's not organic?

So me personally, I wouldn't. If you're going to spend money anywhere in the diet, the place to spend money if you eat fruit is on organic fruits, non organic fruits. Remember, fruits absorb pesticides and herbicides and preservatives through their skin, so they have a tendency to draw pesticides, herbicides, insecticides into the fruit. So if you're gonna spend money anywhere in your diet and you actually do eat fruit, it's best to go with organic fruits rather than non organic fruits. My preference would be that you eat fruits that end in berry. BlackBerry, blueberry, raspberry, strawberry. They're lowest on the glycemic index, meaning they raise blood sugar slower than other fruits. And they have, you know, they're high amounts of fructose. And contrary to popular belief, fructose is processed differently than, than other sugars, so it has less of an impact on your blood sugar.

Cool. All right. And then there's lots out there on how to clean your fruit. That TikTok's got crazy ways of soaking it in some sort of solution that sucks all the color out of strawberries. And obviously that's can't be the right way. So what do you recommend when you bring your fruit home, even if it's organic, how you're washing.

Oh, yeah. Even if it's organic. I actually recommend that you wash your fruits and your meats. So the way to wash fruits is put them in a bowl with filtered water and preferably as cold a water as you can get it. You can even actually use ice, but put it in a. In a bowl of a glass bowl of Cold water, filtered water, and then add about a quarter of a cup of vinegar, white r. White rice vinegar, white wine vinegar, even apple cider vinegar. So a quarter cup of vinegar and about a tablespoon of baking soda, and you'll notice it will fizz up. And then just massage the fruit around in there a little bit. You only need to leave it in the bowl for one minute.

Okay.

You don't need to let it soak for 10 or 15 minutes. It will actually start to draw the color out of the fruit, and it will even draw the sweetness out of the fruit, which is not what you want. You want the pesticides, the herbicides that may be on the surface of the fruit to be drawn out. And then get all the bug parts and droppings and possible worms and things off of the fruit and any kind of dirt or debris that's on it. But it only takes 60 seconds to wash your fruit in cold water. Quarter cup of vinegar, Your choice of vinegar is fine. It's super cheap to buy a bottle of vinegar, just a few bucks, and then a tablespoon of baking soda.

Does it taste vinegary afterwards?

Not at all. You don't taste it at all because. So when you're done washing it, dump the bowl of fruit out and then rinse it with filtered water and then put it in. In the refrigerator in a covered glass pan.

I'm kind of laughing at my question because clearly I've been eating the fruit here and I haven't tasted it, but I didn't know if you were really washing it.

I was washing it. I always wash the fruit.

I will.

So if it's better in our fridge, babe, I wash it. And then for meats, the trick with meats is, you know, take the meats out of the package. Remember, just caring for your food is a great thing to do before you eat. Just being intentional about how you eat and what foods you eat. So you take your poultries or your meat, your pork, your steak, and put it in a pan, cover it completely with kosher salt. Let that sit for about a minute, rub the salt into one side of the meat, flip it over, rub it into the other side of the meat, let it sit for a minute, then fill the pan up that the meat's in. And same thing, add a little bit of. Make sure that the water is ice cold, and add a small amount of vinegar. No baking soda, in this case, just a small amount of white wine vinegar. White rice vinegar, apple cider vinegar. Let it sit for about a minute, and then rinse it off, put it in a glass pan, and then put it back in the refrigerator and cook it when you're ready.

What's the difference between using kosher salt versus, like, Himalayan sea salt or Celtic salt or.

So the. The. The pink Himalayan sea salt. You know, there's been a lot of studies recently that show that a lot of brands of pink Himalayan sea salt, the majority of them are coming out of China, and they're actually laden with mercury. They have a lot of heavy metals in them. So based on the way the salt is mined, if they don't take the crystal vein of the salt and they actually start to get some of the ore that's around, they can get heavy metals. So my recommendation is that you use Celtic salt, especially for your table salt, because it. It actually has more minerals. I think it has 61 or 62 minerals that are essential for human beings. And the Celtic salt tastes even saltier. It just actually has a more full flavor than iodized table salt or pink Himalayan sea salt. So you can use those for eating. You can also use Baja gold. That's one of my favorites. That's a sea salt. I want to say that that's mined in Mexico, and it's completely heavy, metal free. You can use it also to cure your meats and your poultries, but ground up in a. In a salt grinder, it's amazing. Salt. And contrary to popular belief, sodium rarely raises your blood pressure. What raises your blood pressure is iodized table salt. But most of us are deficient in sodium. We're not having too much sodium. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons why people's level of sodium shows up as elevated in their blood is usually because they're dehydrated. Levels have a tendency to rise when the concentration rises. So, for example, if you had half a glass of water and you put a teaspoon of salt in that water, you'd have one concentration of salt. If you filled the glass the rest of the way up, you would cut the salt concentration in half, but not because you remove salt, but because you added water. So hydration is super important. But actually your intake assault. Most of us are clinically deficient in sodium chloride.

Yeah, we always sprinkle the Celtic sea salt in our water, so. Or you can make a sea salt soleil, which helps with headaches and dehydration.

Yeah. About 85 of all migraine headaches are directly related to sodium deficiency. The osmotic gradient, or the movement of water across a membrane is what really Governs very often whether or not you get a migraine, because remember, there's no pain receptors in the brain. That's why brain surgery is painless right there. The brain cannot send a pain signal, but there's a covering over the brain called the dura. And this covering, which is like Saran Wrap that's over top of the brain, is fraught with pain receptors. And it hates two things. It hates being stretched, it hates being contracted. And so what determines whether or not it's stretching or contracting is the sodium gradient. And so when you're deficient in sodium, that that dura can actually send pain signals, which is why the majority of migraine headaches occur in the mornings when you are the most dehydrated. So you go to sleep at night, you're respiring all night, you're actually have moisture leaving your body, heat's leaving your body. You wake up in the morning and now you have a migraine first thing in the morning. If you add a pinch of Celtic sea salt to your drinking water and you drink 10 ounces of water in the morning, those usually will be a permanent thing of your past in 48 hours.

It worked for me.

Awesome.

Yep. Okay, other question. Okay, daily diet, best foods to eat. So you want to talk about, I guess, your diet, you've kind of gone that keto route. Tell us a little bit about you eat on a daily basis. What's in Gary's kitchen idea?

Well, my whole philosophy on dieting is not everybody needs to be on keto or carnivore or vegan or vegetarian or paleo or Atkins or cyclical dieting or raw food diets. The most important thing about the food we eat, not the diet that we're on, is that we eat whole reality foods. It's the distance from the soil that really hurts us. So when you look at vegetarian or vegan diets, some vegans and vegetarians have higher incidences of, of breast cancer and other forms of cancer, colorectal cancer being one of the major ones. And not because vegetables are bad for you, but because they eat a lot of pesticide, insecticide, herbicide laden vegetables, lots of preservatives. And it's those secondary chemicals, not the vegetables, that are really causing the harm. So one of the things that's happened through the agricultural revolution is the distance between the soil and the table has lengthened, meaning there are more steps to how food is processed before it lands on the grocery store shelf. So we know that if it takes an apple 30 days to make Its journey from the tree to the shelf that we're going to preserve that apple. And preservatives were originally called anti digestives. But some smart person realized that people are not going to go to the anti digestive area of the supermarkets. So they, they switch the name to preservatives. It's just like when we spray foods with folic acid. We don't call it sprayed with folic acid. We call it fortified or enriched because it just makes it sound so much.

More nutritious, like they're doing you a favor.

Yeah, I feed my kids fortified whole grains or enriched bleached white flour. It just sounds like something beneficial has happened when really that's the root of all evil in my opinion.

Never really thought about like strawberry preserves.

Yeah.

Of like jelly is just.

Well, those aren't strawberry preservatives, those are strawberry preserves. So when you seal it in a can, that's different. Preserving it is actually very healthy. Meaning preserving it in a sealed jar. Preservatives are terrible because it's the time of just grandmother's way of preserving fruits, preserving vegetables, pickling cucumbers and things like that. Those old school methods are actually very, very healthy. If you look at the incidence of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes in the 40s, it's a fraction of what it is today. And, and if you.

Oils.

Yeah, well, I mean that's also seed oils. True. But you know, I did a big post on seed oils the other day and I got a lot of flack online because people said, well, food grade canola oil and sunflower oil, these, these oils are not bad for you. That is true. Until they are industrially processed. Right. So it's not actually the food very often, it's the distance from the food to the table. So if you take a seed like a, or you know, let's say you take canola oil and you press the canola and it comes out very gummy. Well, now they need to de gum it. So they de gum it with something called hexane, which is a well known neurotoxin. Once it's de gummed, they heat it to about 454 and 5 degrees. When you heat an oil like that, it denatures and it turns rancid. So now you have a rancid oil that was d that was de gummed with a neurotoxin. And now when you cool that oil back down, it's cloudy. So they need to deodorize and decloud it and they use sodium hydroxide which is a known carcinogen. And then very often they can even use commercial bleaching agents like a mild amounts of, of of chlorine. Not all of them go through that process, but some do. And then it makes it to your shelf. So the issue is not the canola plant per se, or the sunflower seed per se. It's the distance between that and the table. Which is why I say you really only need four oils in your kitchen. You need a grass fed butter or ghee or tallow and you need coconut oil, which you can use at high temperatures. It doesn't denature at high temperatures. And my preference is small batch extra virgin olive oil.

So you're not a fan of something like can't believe it's not butter? No, those are, it's crazy though, because I get those questions. Is that an okay butter margarine?

Can't believe it's not butter.

Because this is what people grew up with. And especially in, I don't know, the 80s or 90s, they went through like the fat free butter.

Yeah. They went through the war on fat.

Yeah.

I mean that was the worst thing to ever happen to the morbid obesity and diabetes.

I'm guilty of it. I, I used that spray. I'm a toast in college.

Yeah. I mean most, most of us did. But you know, the thing is that it's not fat that makes you fat, it's sugar that makes you fat. Because when we eat sugar, our insulin rises. When insulin rises, the primary role of insulin is not to lower blood sugar. The primary role of insulin is actually to block any other form of energy use in the body, which includes using fat as energy. So if you can't use the fatty acid pathway, if you can't metabolize fatty acids, then where does fat build up? Well, the first place it builds up is in the blood, which is why people that eat the highest amount of sugar have the highest blood fat. So if you look at a blood panel, what's called a lipid panel, and you look at triglycerides, HDL cholesterol, the healthy cholesterol, VLDL cholesterol, the very low density lipoprotein, the really dangerous one, and LDL cholesterol, you'll see that triglycerides are very high in people that have high insulin. People that have high insulin are generally people that are eating high amounts of sugar, especially refined sugars.

Gotcha. Okay. Oh, back to diet keto. Why did you kind of.

So I don't think that everybody needs to be on keto diet. Keto reset is really good. I do actually have carbs back into my diet. I eat natural local honey. I do eat berries. I think those things are very safe for you. And you become what's called metabolically adaptive. You, you, you actually adapt to having carbohydrate and having meats and fats in your diet. Keto is a great way for people to reset because it's a high fat, low protein, very low carbohydrate diet. It puts your body into a state of ketosis. Your body starts to use something called beta hydroxybutyrate as a fuel source, which is a really low inflammatory fuel source. The diet was originally constructed for addressing epilepsy.

Really?

Yeah, because. Because epilepsy has a. An inflammatory component. So keto dieting using a keto reset is very healthy. It can strip weight off your body, put you into a state of ketosis, kill sugar and hunger cravings. It's very low inflammatory. It's one of the lowest inflammatory diets on the planet, as long as you're eating clean keto. And it's lowest in something called deuterium depleted water, which we could do a whole podcast on that. But people find it fascinating that human beings, on a daily basis, we manufacture about a hundred gallons of intracellular water every day.

Yeah, I can't process that.

It's so hard for people to process because how can I manufacture 100 gallons of water if I only drink half a gallon of water?

Right.

Well, you make water in your body the same way they make it in space. You take two hydrogens and one oxygen, you slap it together, you have a water molecule. Well, what happens to that water molecule is it instantly enters the mitochondria and is turned into energy by something called the Krebs cycle. And it creates energy for your body called ATP. So we're not capable of drinking enough water in day to. To fuel our mitochondria for even 10 minutes. 10% of our body weight is these little battery batteries inside of our cells called mitochondria. You have about 110 trillion of these. And these make every source of energy that human beings are powered by. We're not powered by food. We eat there, we breathe the supplement we take. We're powered by one energy source called ATP, adenosine triphosphate. And we need water in order to make that. So the body creates water out of gases and then throws that water into this cycle. That breaks it apart and creates energy.

Cool.

And keto dieting is very low in something called deuterium depleted water, which deuterium is heavy water, so it actually helps your cells make lighter water.

That should be a whole podcast.

Yeah, the deuterium. Deuterium water is a fascinating, fascinating subject.

So many random types of water and you get so excited about it.

I do. It's. Well, it's a water molecule with an extra neutron.

Okay. If you must know this, and this is the part where it goes.

We are going to do a whole podcast on water. The difference between hydrogen water, oxygen water, alkaline water, tap water, spring water, and filtered water. So we're gonna go through it all.

Nerd out about it. I always tell people if they're gonna try a keto diet, that you cannot date. A keto diet. You have to commit and marry. A keto diet.

That's right. There's no cheat days.

Yeah, no cheat. Because people do that. They're like, oh, it's Sunday, it's my cheat day. Why can't you cheat on a keto diet?

Because when, once you become fat adapted, as soon as you put carbohydrate, high carbohydrate back into the body, then it instantly will stop processing fat. And you're eating a high fat diet. And so now the fat will build up in the blood and it will be stored in the visceral tissue rather than being used as an energy source. Remember, the first preferred source of energy for the body, and there are no exceptions to this rule, is always glucose. So if you have sugar in your blood, you have no choice. Your body will always choose that source for energy first. So you have to bring the glucose down in order to get into ketosis. So as soon as you raise your blood sugar, raise your glucose, and you raise your insulin. Now, your body can't burn fat, but you have high amounts of fat in your diet. And now you're in a dangerous situation. Your triglycerides skyrocket, you'll see that your dangerous cholesterols, your vldl cholesterols will skyrocket. So keto diet is just like you said, a diet that you marry, you don't date.

Okay. Yeah. People always ask me, since you were.

Doing it, you know.

Oh, is that what you follow too? I am of the.

You eat very clean.

I ate clean.

I think super clean.

I don't. I don't follow a diet. I just really enjoy salads.

Yeah, but you don't eat a lot of white flour, white rice, white bread, white pasta.

But I do eat it. I just make sure it's not enriched or Fortified.

Enriched or fortified.

But you don't eat a lot. But I don't eat a lot. I really cut sugar out quite a bit.

I never see you eat sugar.

I never really eat it ever. Like, I don't know, every. The occasional, like, piece of chocolate, but I don't crave it. I quit sugar accidentally. Accidentally. Because literally we ran out of sugar for our coffee and I was too lazy to go to the grocery store. This before Instacart and the glory of having groceries brought to you. And. And so I just didn't put it in my coffee in the morning. And what I found is that at lunch I wouldn't be craving a Snickers bar. And at dinner, after I ate dinner, I wasn't craving Haagen Dazs. And all it took was. It was like a seven to ten day period.

Oh, yeah. It's a period where you go through the withdrawal and then you're fine.

And I was fine. But funny enough, then I started to crave salt. So then I craved more like crackers and potato chips, but I still limit those. I don't really crave that even as much anymore. Once I got chips out, I think that. That it really came down. The seed oils. Yeah, there's no, like, good. I did find one kind of chip. It was like a. It's from Boulder, of course.

Yeah.

Crunchy Boulder. But I think it literally is called Boulder chips. But they didn't have seed oil, so it was like avocado oil.

Excellent.

So we'll have to check that out. Well, I really should get back on that. But anyway. But I like salads. I like adding grilled chicken and just everything, like everything in the, in the fridge I can find and just throw it in a salad. And people think that's weird. When I tell people that, they think that's really strange. Why do you think that is?

Well, I mean, because people just. People don't think of salads the way you think of salads. They think of salads as, like lettuce, A side salad. Yeah. You make a salad with avocados and chicken and it's just nuts and hemp seeds. Yeah. I mean, you make. You make really healthy salads with lots of salt stuff in them.

My family is just known for salads.

Super known for salads.

Yeah. But.

Okay, so.

Okay, you want to take one more question?

Trying to keep it to 20 minutes. So.

Okay, I think that's good. No, I think we actually covered all the alcohol, but we could.

Alcohol.

We could save that for a different one.

Okay, so we're telling we got three more minutes. So alcohol. So here's how alcohol works. First of all, we know now through peer reviewed, published clinical studies that no amount of alcohol is good for you. It used to be that a glass of wine a day keeps the doctor away. It's absolutely not true. There's resveratrol in wine, but you can get resveratrol through supplementation now in much higher concentrations and much more bioavailable. But if you must drink alcohol, it's not so much the alcohol itself, it's what the alcohol becomes. And alcohol converts into something called acetaldehyde, which is a poison. It poisons your brain, it makes your body acidic, so it actually can move the PH of your blood several tenths of a point. Remember, the ph range of the blood is very narrow. It's only about four or five tenths of a point. So when we shift slightly to becoming more acidic, this is the state where we don't feel well. So if we look at what alcohols convert the slowest to both sugar and to acetyl aldehyde, by far agave based alcohols, tequila are way out in front.

But you gotta skip the margarita part.

Yeah, you have to skip the sugar part.

That's the part that people are like, oh, so I can have margaritas? No, that's like a recipe for a hangover.

Tequila ice either water and a squeeze of fresh lime.

Yeah.

And then there's a big gap and then you get to clear alcohols like vodka and like vodkas and gins. And then there's another gap and you start, that's where you meet red wines, full bodied red wines, colored alcohols. And then below that are your white wines, Prosecco and your high sugared wines. So the, the number one by far is, is tequila. Agave based alcohol takes a very long time and very low conversion to acetyl aldehyde.

We kind of just quit again.

I mean we've just basically stopped accidentally.

Well, we did a reset in October and we went down to Columbia and did a stem cell and you weren't allowed to drink for 30 days. And I think it was like a two week period even before that. So almost a month and a half.

And then we got back and we just never drank again.

We don't crave, I don't crave it. I, I think we were always finding a reason to drink. Like we had a hard day. Let's have a drink. Let. We had a really great day. We want to celebrate. Let's have a drink. We're having a friend over.

We made friends for a drink.

The kids are coming over.

Yeah.

Have a drink. And it. We were always looking for reasons. And then I think we started to realize, geez, we really drink a lot.

Yeah.

And then we just quit. I don't even.

I feel so much better.

I do. I sleep better, sleep better, feel better, feel so much.

I hate that feeling of waking up with that headache and foggy.

Yeah.

So I wake up and do a cold plunge.

Oh, God, you're so chatty in the morning, too.

I get excited when I get out of that cold plunge. I'm Captain Chatty and I like to come in and share my gold fingers with her. And I also like to share my stories about the previous day. I'm. I have a lot to get off my chest.

A lot.

Six in the morning.

A lot of words coming out of your mouth in the morning.

So I'd like to do more of these. The 20 minute. We call them 20 minute shorts. We try to keep the podcast to 20 minutes. We'll take your questions. If you have additional questions you'd like to hear us answer. You'd like more details on anything that we covered today, please put them in the comments below. Please remember to like and subscribe to the channel with gives us the resources to continue to do this. And as always, everything we talk about is just science.