The Man Who Can Predict How Long You Have Left To Live (To The Nearest Month): Gary Brecka | E225

If you want to strip fat off your body, there is nothing, no type of cardiovascular or weight training that comes anywhere close to. He spent 20 years working in life insurance, predicting when people were going to die to the nearest month. And now he's on a mission to extend your life. Most people, if they're walking around right now at about 55% of their true state of normal, there is an element missing from their body that would make the difference between them being an average person and being a superhuman. How everything that we put into our bodies gets converted into the usable form. If you cannot make this conversion, you have a deficiency. And it is this deficiency that leads to these conditions. They have accepted something as either a consequence of aging, stress, or their environment that's not a consequence of any of those things. I'm going to tell you exactly how to find out what it is that's missing. So you could thrive in a way that you probably never thought possible.

Let's use Dana White as an example.

So LabCorp calls us, says, hey, we have a life threatening alert on a patient. He had all of these conditions. I've been talking to doctors. None of them could fix any of my problems. I said, I'm surprised he can even sleep through the night without choking, gagging. He's like, slammed his hand down. How did you know that? And I said, if you don't do what we're going to ask you to do, if you have a life expectancy at 10.4 years and in 10 weeks, he had such a material change, and he was like, I had no idea. I could feel this got.

And his life expectancy almost tripled. Someone who's just heard that at home, where do they start?

So.

I just want to start this episode with a message of thanks. A thank you to everybody that tunes in to listen to this podcast. By doing so, you've enabled me to live out my dream, but also for many members of our team to live out their dreams, too. It's one of the greatest privileges I could never have dreamed of or imagined in my life to get to do this, to get to learn from these people, to get to have these conversations, to get to interrogate them from a very selfish perspective, trying to solve problems I have in my life. So I feel like I owe you a huge thank you for being here and for listening to these episodes and for making this platform what it is. Can I ask you a favor? I can't tell you how much you can change the course of this podcast, the course of the guests. We're able to invite to the show and to the course of everything that we do here just by doing one simple thing. And that simple thing is hitting that subscribe button helps this channel more than I could ever explain. The guests on this platform are incredible because so many of you have hit that button. And I know when we think about what we want to do together over the next year on this show, a lot of it is going to be fueled by the amount of you that are subscribed and that tune into this show every week. So thank you. Let's keep doing this. And I can't wait to see what this year brings for this show, for us as a community and for this platform. Gary? Yes, I. This is the first time I've started this podcast in this particular way, but I was. But this is where I wanted to start it. It's with a slightly curious question, which is there's people that have just clicked onto this podcast to listen now, right? YouTube, Spotify, Apple, wherever they're listening. Why should they stay and listen to the message that you have committed your life to spreading?

Because everybody wants to be better, right? I mean, everybody wants to improve their health. And most people, especially young people, probably don't realize that they're walking around right now at about 55%, maybe 60% of their true state of normal. There is a nutrient, an amino acid, a substrate, a compound, an element missing from their body that if they knew what it was, would make the difference between them being an average person and being a superhuman. They have accepted something as either a consequence of aging or a consequence of stress or a consequence of their environment. Something like brain fog or repeated poor sleep or weight gain or water retention, or not the healthiest response to exercise or brain fog or poor short term recall or any number of things that they've accepted as consequence of life, of aging, of stress or what have you. That's not a consequence of any of those things. It's a consequence of missing raw material. And I'm going to describe that in detail and tell you exactly how to put that raw material back into your body and how to find out what it is that's missing so you could thrive in a way that you probably never thought possible.

Who are you?

I'm a human biologist and a researcher, biohacker. My background is in, of all things, mortality science. You know, my undergraduate degrees were in biology. My postgraduate degrees are in human biology. I'm fascinated by the human body, its form, its function, how it can improve its performance. And I'm a researcher, you know, I spent 22 years as a mortality expert in the insurance industry, which meant that if we got five years of demographic data on you and five years of medical records, we could tell the insurance company how long you had to live. To the month. To the month, to the month. And I get a lot of flack about that. People say, oh, if you could predict death to the month, you'd win a Nobel Prize. Or, you know, only God can tell you when you're going to die. I mean, and that's very true. I mean, obviously if we do a mortality prediction on, it doesn't mean December 12, you know, 2065, you're going to drop that on that day. But it is very accurate science. You know, if you think of the most successful financial institutions on the planet as a category are insurance companies. If you look at the failures during the 2008, 2009 financial crisis, which was a global crisis, you know, in the US we had 364 banks fail. You didn't have a single life insurance company fail. No other financial institution, no other investment enterprise, hedge fund, angel investor, venture capital firm would ever put tens of millions of dollars at risk on any kind of investment on one single variable. Yet every time a life insurance company bets on your life or issues an annuity or a reverse mortgage, or any number of other financial services instruments that are based on mortality, they're only betting on one factor. They don't care where you are on a mortality curve. They want to know, how many more months does this person have left on Earth? And it is some of the most accurate science on the planet. And they have perfected this. And the good news is that this science is very accurate. And I'm going to share a lot of the details of that today. But the downside of this industry and the reason why I left it was that during my tenure in this career, I was not allowed to have any contact with the patient or any contact with the treating physician. Now, I'm not licensed to practice medicine. I'm a human biologist. But if I was reading a medical record and saw a life threatening drug interaction, I could not contact occupation. And this database, where this information is drawn from, if this database could see the light of day, I believe it would permanently change the face of humanity. It would upend modern medicine in a way that would be completely catastrophic. Because you see, they have information that no other database has, no other research study, no other financial institution, no other university has. And that is that they know the day, the date, the time, the location and the Cause of death for hundreds of millions of people that they have all of these records on. You know, if I'm a cardiologist and you come in to see me and I put a heart stent in your heart, well, when you leave my office, I don't know what happens to you two months later, two years later, 12 years later. I don't know if you died as a consequence of something that went wrong with the procedure I did, or if you died of something completely different. I don't know exactly what kind of impact on your life that procedure had or didn't have, unless it's contained in a very short term clinical study. And not that I want to go into the whole science of mortality, but if you had access to this database, you would realize that the most common ailments that we suffer from are not diseases and pathology that are happening to us. They are things that are happening within us. You know, I always say that if I was to boil my entire career down to a single sentence, it would be that the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease. And nothing is more impactful than that statement, the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease. I have yet to find a single disease etiological pathway, something that's happening in the human body, causing pathology, causing disease, dysfunction that doesn't have its roots in a lack of blood oxygen or its roots is not aggravated by something called hypoxia, lack of oxygen. In fact, all human beings die of the same thing. We all leave this earth the same way, right? We all die of hypoxia, lack of oxygen to the brain. That's the definition of death. Only we tend to think of it as an event, right? In a gunshot wound, a bus, car, a stroke, heart attack. But the truth is we are on a hypoxic curve, meaning we are accelerating quickly or accelerating slowly towards the grave. And the second thing that we discovered in this voluminous, data driven industry was that when you deplete certain raw materials in the human body, you get the expression of that deficiency. So what I mean is, you know, we've all heard that disease, you know, travels in families. Or you might have genetically inherited hypertension or genetically inherited hypothyroid, genetically inherited drug and alcohol addiction, diabetes, depending on depression, anxiety. These things tend to run in families. So we've accepted the myth in most cases that these are genetically inherited diseases. But think about this, the next time one of your listeners gets told that, oh, you have genetically inherited hypertension, what we call idiopathic hypertension or genetically Inherited, hypothyroid, or if you have this genetically inherited disease or that genetically inherited disease, stop your physician and say, well, wait a minute, we've mapped the entire human genome, so we know every gene in the human body. Can you tell me what disease I inherited from my ancestor that's actually causing this condition? And watch their face go blank. Because in the majority of cases, we have accepted that disease travels in families, when it's actually not the disease being passed from generation to generation, it is the inability for their body to refine a certain raw material which causes a deficiency which leads to that disease. So in other words, there's not a single compound known to mankind. Not one. No mineral, vitamin, amino acid, protein, carbohydrate, no nutrient of any kind, no element known to man that enters the human body and is used in the format that we put it in. Everything that we put into our bodies gets taken in by the body and converted into the usable form. If you cannot make this conversion, you have a deficiency. And it is this deficiency that leads to these conditions. And so if you go hunting for that deficiency and you supplement not for the sake of supplementing, but you supplement for the sake of deficiency. Magic things happen in human beings. There is a superhuman inside of every person listening to this podcast. And if they actually were able to test themselves, do a genetic test and look at what's called their methylation, how their body refines raw materials, and they were able to replace the deficiency that is holding their body back from creating adequate levels of neurotransmitter and achieving normal new mood, moving contents through the gut and achieving normal gut function, elevating emotional state, deepening their sleep, quieting their mind, all of these conditions that society has labeled different pathologies and disease, then they would begin to thrive in a way that they just never thought possible.

It's so blatantly clear how passionate you are about this subject matter. Which begs the question. You know, I remember when I was reading through your story, I uncovered that you'd read hundreds of peer reviewed papers. I think the quote was something along the lines of, if there's a peer reviewed paper on the subject matter of biohacking and disease and longevity and those kinds of things, you've basically read it. So this begs the question to me, like, why is one individual so unbelievably passionate about this subject matter? And I would like you to take me as early as you possibly can to answer that question in your own life. Where did your obsession, passion, where was it fostered and nurtured so that you spent and committed your life to this subject matter. Where did that begin?

So it actually began. I grew up on a very large tobacco farm. My father was a navy captain, my mom was a flight attendant, she worked for the airlines. But. But we had a farm that we leased out to other farmers. And surrounding this 300 acre tobacco farm were all kinds of animal farms. There were cattle farms, there were chicken farms, there was horse farms. And I was an only child. My nearest neighbor was miles away, in fact from my home. You couldn't even see another house from my parents house until I was in my early 20s. And so for me to play with another child, I had to get on a bike and spend half an afternoon biking to their house. So I got very familiar with the farm. And I was always just fascinated by the veterinarians that would come onto these farms and fix horses and fix cattle and fix sheep and fix chickens. And I always thought it was so cool that these animals could be laying on the ground seemingly about to die and the veterinarian would come on board and do a bunch of stuff. And the next thing you know this horse was up and a few days later it was galloping back in the field or you had all kinds of strange things would happen on this farm and there was always someone arriving to just fix it. And I started to get fascinated with medicine, I guess in that way. I always found it as a way to take something that was sick and helpless and sort of help it get back to normal function. And I found out in the eighth grade, sometime during my eighth grade year, that I was clinically photographic. So I have a clinical level of photographic recall, which is different than just having a visual memory. I'm clinically photographic, so I have a voluminous capacity to recall things that I read, even if I don't understand them, which is why I never read for pleasure. I'm very cautious about what I read and very cautious about what I look at because I record everything. So I can't be flying on American Airlines and take the seat back magazine out and read the seat back magazine because three months later I'll tell you where the sales center is for a condo project in Buenos Aires. You know, so I can, I can fill my brain with senseless things like that and record it and, and regurgitate it, or I can fill it full of things that fascinate me. And so I naturally gravitated towards science.

Is that what they call a photographic memory?

Photographic memory is usually someone that can remember seven numbers in sequence. They have extremely good recall for things that they visualize. Clinically photographic is being able to regurgitate voluminous amounts of information with incredible accuracy. So I still remember, you know, section 15 2, subparagraph B of my first employment contract that I signed 28 years ago.

Really?

Really? Yeah, I remember, I remember that it was actually with a trading firm that I signed it with. So you know, when I read peer reviewed papers in scientific journals, it doesn't make me more intelligent than someone because very often I can recall information that I don't understand. So I can regurgitate voluminous amounts of information. So subjects that rely on rote memorization like chemistry, biology, neurobiology, microbiology, a lot of these sciences don't actually make sense, right that you just have to memorize how they operate. Chemistry in a lot of ways doesn't make sense, right. You just have to remember what happens when you put these two elements together. They create this. When you pull a carbon bond or you double a carbon bond here or hydrogen bond there that you, that the molecule shifts in this way. And so I gravitated towards science. I got my undergraduate degree in biology.

How did you do?

I did very well. I actually found it quite the breeze. My, you know, when I was an undergrad, my, you know, biology, chemistry were considered the toughest majors. And I went to a branch campus, University of Maryland. A lot of my roommates were political science. Not investing on political science majors at all, or philosophy or psychology. And they got to party all the time. And you know, I had really intense classes, you know, morphology of phthalophytes and chemistry and, and you know, biomechanics and, and science and, and a lot of plant biology courses and human biology courses. But I was able to have the same kind of social life that they were because I would, you know, record a lecture and then I would regurgitate the lecture when I needed it. During, during a test.

Is it a gift or a curse? Because with all things in life that appear to be gifts, there's often some kind of hidden curses.

Well, the curse is that I can't, I rarely read for pleasure. It's very difficult to read for pleasure because I record all of that information. So when I'm going in to read a book, you know, a lot of people read a book that they didn't really like. It doesn't stay with them or they read a fiction novel, doesn't really give them any benefit. It's not, doesn't, doesn't feed them, but they do it to relax or they do it for entertainment. For me, it would take up storage, right? I would record that information. So there's no need for me to have that information in my possession. I, I find other ways to, to relax and, and, and meditate and unwind, but reading for pleasure, just, just not one of them. So I guess that could be a curse. But, you know, then I went to grad school for human biology. I went to another four years of school for human biology, so I had eight years of science. And then I was either going to go into chiropractic or into orthopedic medicine. I really like the idea of orthopedics because again, an orthopedic surgeon was somebody that fixed people and you know, an internist was somebody that just managed disease. You know, they took a mobis hypertensive diabetic patient and they just kind of managed their case throughout their lifetime. But I felt like an orthopedic was somebody that, you know, you came in and you had a broken leg and they, you know, fixed your broken leg and, and you were back to normal. I like the idea of fixing things and kind of returning function back to people. And I took some time off, you know, after I got my human biology degree. And I ended up going into a rare area of science, this mortality science, for life insurance and secondary life insurance, where you would take medical records and demographic data and you would use this in what's called a probabilistic model to predict life expectancy. And I was fascinated by it because I love the big data nature of it. And for years I actually subscribed to the fact that this was just data and that I had no influence on this person's outcome. I didn't put them in this position, nor am I responsible for getting them out of this position. But eventually, I think as both my faith grew and my awareness of the fact that there were human beings on the other side of these spreadsheets, I finally made a conscious decision to say, what am I doing? I'm going to spend the rest of my life just predicting death for the monetary gain of an investor versus taking this information and helping people live healthier, happier, longer, more fulfilling lives. Because by studying medical records and, you know, I read, you know, eight to 10 hours a day, six days a week, thousands and thousands and thousands of medical records and extracted from those how it would impact somebody's outcome of their life, you know, how it would impact the length of or the shortness of the duration of their life, their health span or their lifespan. And once you realize there's human beings on the other side of the spreadsheet. You start to feel like you're sitting behind a thick glass wall, just watching blind people walk into traffic and towards the tail end. I used to artificially kind of manipulate the record. I would say, well, what if I artificially fix this person's D3 deficiency? What if I cured the anemia? What if I actually noticed that they had a gene mutation called mthfr? Instead of trying to fix them with folic acid, I fixed them with methylfolate. And you would just see the life expectancy jump in the model. In the model, yeah. Right. And this model was based on very large data, so it was very likely to have a real life impact. And when I say we predicted death to the month, it was based on that patient's current position. And doesn't mean that they couldn't walk out the next day and get hit by a bus or die in a commercial airline, you know, disaster or something like that. But there's. There were standard deviations that would account for those kinds of risks. What the insurance company wanted to quantify or the annuity company or the reverse mortgage company wanted to quantify was based on this person's. Everything that we know about this person right now, the function of their liver, the slightly hypoxic anemic profile that they have, the deficiencies that they have in vitamin D3, the suppressed immune system, you know, the elevated visceral fat, the body mass index, the bone mineral density based on all of these things. When do these things all meet and actually cause a catastrophic event? Catastrophic event. And there were things called mortality debits and comorbidity debits. And we put all these together, and I really like the data of it, but realizing that there were human beings on the other side, the spreadsheet just woke me up. And I said, you know, I have this chasm of knowledge, even though I'm not a physician, I have a fundamental understanding of human physiology. I'm fascinated by human physiology and ways that we can improve lifespan and health span. And so why wouldn't I take this gift and get into an industry like wellness or functional medicine where I could actually make a difference, where instead of predicting death, we could extend life and in doing so, help people live healthier, happier, longer lives, more fulfilling lives, get rid of a lot of the ailments that people suffer from. I mean, when you, when you start to peel back the way that modern medicine defines a lot of conditions that we have, you know, take depression or anxiety or ADD or adhd. Because a lot of your listeners are probably entrepreneurs and a lot of entrepreneurs have very active minds and they've been told they have attention deficit disorder, right? Or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Well, attention deficit disorder is not an attention deficit at all. We've misdefined these things. It's an attention overload disorder. Because you see, in the human brain, we don't just create thought, we also dismantle thought. It is just as important for you to be able to create a new thought or feeling as it is to dismantle it. Right? And if you don't degrade thought, called catecholamines, if you don't degrade them, then there's a gene that governs this catecholomethyltransferase. If you create thought at a faster rate than you degrade thought, then the mind gets very clouded. And so attention deficit disorder is attention overload disorder. It's too many windows open at the same time. So modern medicine says, well, if the mind's racing, let's put an amphetamine into the body, race the central nervous system to match the pace of the mind. And this is a very poor choice, right? Because eventually this will burn you out. Can actually change the neuroplasticity of the brain. Rather than put the right amino acids back into the body, the right B complex, blend the right methylated folates so that the mind can actually begin to quiet.

What would you say to someone that says that ADHD is also in some ways a result of some early trauma?

Well, you know, trauma's always fascinating to me. Trauma can trigger methylation, trauma can interrupt the methylation cycle. Right. But the, the idea in modern medicine that you have some kind of trauma, you have a disrupted relationship with your mother, for example, and that somehow we're going to go and put neuroplasticity altering chemicals into the brain, it's going to fix this 30 year broken relationship you have with your mother. To me, it doesn't make any sense, right? And so it's not at all to poo poo trauma, to put trauma down. Depression really exists, anxiety really exists. But if you actually look at how we define these conditions, take depression, for example. We define depression, at least in America, we define depression as an inadequate supply of serotonin, right? So if you are low on serotonin, you're by definition depressed. So then you would think that the solution would be to raise serotonin. Right. If we define depression as low serotonin, you'd think that the solution would be to raise serotonin, but that's not what we do. We take people that are depressed and we put them on SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. And what these do is they ration what little serotonin these people have. So by definition, it never raises serotonin. So by definition, it never ends depression. I mean, I have clients come in to see me all the time in our clinical team. And then I'll say, well, how long have you been on antidepressants? They say 15 years, 18 years. My first question is, when did you think it was going to kick in? Right. So if we understand that serotonin is actually methylated in the gut, this process that I'm talking about is called methylation. We actually make serotonin from an amino acid called tryptophan, the one that's famous for making you sleepy after Thanksgiving dinner. I know you guys don't have Thanksgiving in the uk, but I'm from America. But so, because we eat a lot of turkey on Thanksgiving and turkey has a lot of tryptophan. So when you take tryptophan, methylate it into the neurotransmitter, serotonin, of which 90% resides in your gut.

Methylate is basically processing.

Yeah, the processing. It's like the refining process. Crude oil gets refined into gasoline. Amino acids get methylated into neurotransmitters. And so this process of methylation, when it's broken, and it can be relatively easy to fix when it's broken, it means that we have an impaired ability to create, we have an impaired ability to refine a raw material that leads to this deficit. Well, serotonin, for example, 90% of it resides in your gut. So if you don't have it here, you can't have it here. So depression rarely begins in the outside environment. It usually begins in the gut. Now, it may be trauma that led to the deficiency, but the fix is not in a chemical or synthetic or pharmaceutical blocking the brain's capacity to uptake these neurotransmitters. The fix is in restoring adequate levels to the body so we can naturopathically make its way back up the vagus nerve and arrive to the brain. Similar things are true with anxiety. I mean, if you actually have ever suffered from, or know somebody who suffered from anxiety, if you ask them three questions, you can find out very quickly that their anxiety is not coming from a cluster of symptoms. It's not coming from their outside environment, it is coming from within them. It's coming from their physiology. Right. I mean, if you know someone who's suffering from anxiety and you say, well, have you had anxiety on and off throughout your lifetime? The most of the time, they'll say yes. And then if you say, can you point to the specific trigger that causes it? Very often they'll say, no. I mean, yes, I know some of my triggers, but I could be sitting in a podcast just like this, in a very calm environment, there's no threats around, and all of a sudden I get overwhelmed by anxiety. I can be driving home from work on an otherwise innocuous day, and I can be overwhelmed by anxiety. Well, that is not coming from your outside environment. Right. This is coming from a process called methylation, and it is caused from excess catecholamines entering the brain and an inability to downregulate these. So the body's entering this mild fight or flight response without the presence of a fear. See, remember that? As sophisticated as we like to think our brains are, it's really not. Our brain is very primal. You know what the brain cares about? The brain cares about survival. And so doesn't care how fat or skinny you are, how pretty or ugly you are. Doesn't care about your skin, your hair. It cares about survival. And so when we understand that the brain does not know the difference between perception and reality, we start to understand how it can play tricks on us. So I always use the example that, let's say you drove home tonight and you got out of your car. When you got home, you got out of your car and somebody was standing in front of you with a knife. It's a very real threat. Right? You'd have a fight or flight response. Your pupils would dilate, your heart rate would increase, your extremities would flood with blood. Your hearing would get very acute. Your brain would flood with catecholamines. You are getting ready to fight or fight flight. But you could also be laying on the 30th floor of a condo building in bed and start thinking about getting eaten by a shark. There is zero chance of a shark getting out of the ocean, going up a 30th floor elevator, right? Coming into your condo and biting you in that bed. But you can have the exact same.

Response if you're watching a movie or something.

Exactly. So one is entirely real, one is entirely perceived. The physiologic response is identical. So now, once we understand this, now we begin to understand how I can feel the presence of a fear, which is what anxiety is. It's A fear of something happening in the future. Usually it's not going to happen, usually hasn't happened in the past and is not likely to happen. But this fear starts to build up, you start to get very anxious. It can actually change your heart rate to the point where panic attacks can land you in a hospital, or it can be mild enough that it just causes you anxiousness and mild anxiety. But there's no presence of a fear. And so you start trying to correlate it to your outside environment, start to drive you crazy because you go, well, I don't get it. I'm on vacation with my wife and my spouse and my kids, and I'm in the resort of a lifetime. I've been here a thousand times. I love this place. There's no reason I should feel like this. But all of a sudden you have this feeling of anxiousness, anxiety. So these are, these are lack of raw material in the human body. My mission is to try to help people by taking a genetic test once in their lifetime, find out where is methylation broken and then stop supplementing just for the sake of supplementing and start supplementing for this deficiency so your body can thrive.

In the case of people that are listening to this now, and they can pinpoint the moments where they've got an anxiety. So say they've. I remember I had one guest on the podcast maybe two years ago, and after he became famous, he developed social anxiety. So he, whenever he would be with, around a lot of people, he would feel that sense of anxiety and then from that sort of catalystic moment, then when he's at home, he'd get the same rush of anxiety, but he would point to that catalystic moment of becoming famous. And then some things had happened in his life and then he'd get anxiety at home when nothing was going on right in that situation. What's the.

So there you go. So, so now you've, you've, you've interrupted methylation because there's one where there is the presence of fear and there's one where there isn't. There's the absence of a fear. So to be very specific, anxiety, true, anxiety does exist, but you can point to the specific trigger that causes it. So for example, if you, if you have a fear of heights and you walk to the edge of a 30th floor balcony and look over it, you're going to feel anxiety. If you're claustrophobic and you step on a really crowded elevator, you're going to feel anxiety. But if you're claustrophobic and you're sitting at home and you start to become overwhelmed with anxiety. Yeah. This is actually not coming from that trigger. This is coming from your physiology and the way that we deal with stress. Right. And like cortisol, when you measure cortisol levels, cortisol is not really a measure of how much stress is in your life. It's a measure of your body's reaction to stress. So why are some people more resilient to stress and don't have anxiety attacks? And why are other people not as resistant? Again, this is not to say that if you didn't have a violent attack in your life or a terrible car accident, that sometimes when you've had a, you know, a vehicle accident, you approach an intersection. The memory of having been T boned, you know, recently and badly injured is going to give you anxiety. But the majority of people are not suffering from that type of hyper specific situational anxiety. They're suffering from something called generalized anxiety or idiopathic anxiety, which means of unknown origin. So for somebody who's very famous and gets into a crowd and doesn't know who's coming at them, that's a very, I wouldn't even define that as anxiety. That's a very primal instinctual reaction to a real fear. Right. Just like walking to the edge of a 30th floor balcony. What's not a primal reaction to a real fear is when there is no presence of a fear. Especially if that incident has never happened and you aren't even sure what you are afraid of or why you are anxious or why you have anxiety, then this is coming from your physiology.

So how would you treat that?

You look at the different. There are five major actionable genes that I like to look at in their, what's called their sub alleles. And when you find out what they're deficient in, you start to supplement with things like same S adenosylmethionine, methylated forms of vitamins L methionine, the proper balance of B complex methylated forms of folic acid or folate called methylfolate. And what happens is now the body has the capacity to degrade these neurotransmitters that are causing this fight or flight, this group of neurotransmitters called catecholamines and the anxiousness that follows. And you'll find that the majority of people that suffer from idiopathic anxiety or generalized anxiety because of low serotonin, they also have gut issues. You show me a person that's truly depressed and I'll show you somebody that's also suffering from severe gut issues. Either gas or bloating or diarrhea, constipation, irritability, cramping. Because the same neurotransmitters that affect these emotional states also are responsible for the motility of the gut, the speed of the gut. This is the most overlooked thing in all of bariatric medicine, because people that believe that they have all of these allergies, well, I'm allergic to wheat, soy, corn, dairy, blueberries, bananas, you know, gluten. Yes, sometimes those individual allergies do exist. But the majority of time, even if you talk to somebody who says, yeah, I get bloated, or I deal with gas or cramping or diarrhea or constipation or irritability, I deal with all of these gut issues. Irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis. All these names that we give to conditions of the gut. When you ask them, well, what are you allergic to? And they give you this laundry list of things, and then you ask them another question and say, well, if you're really allergic to corn, is there ever a time that you can eat corn and not have a reaction? The majority of time, people will say, yes. Okay, well, right there, you know, you don't have an allergy. Allergies are not transient. Allergies are consistent. Right? You don't wake up Monday morning and being allergic to milk, and then you're unallergic on Wednesday afternoon and then re allergic on Saturday morning. But what happens when people have gut issues that they can't explain explain is they always correlate it to what they last ate. And it's hard to make this connection. They're like, well, wait a second, I ate the same thing Monday, and I was fine. And I ate the identical food on Wednesday, and I blew up like a tick. So this is not analogy. This has to do with the motility of the gut. So if you don't know what gene mutation you have that is causing a deficiency, then you don't know what to supplement with to restore gut motility. But once you do, the gut goes back to its normal pace.

What's gut motility?

It's the pace of the gut. So if you remember, Henry Ford was actually not made famous for the automobile. He was made famous for something called the assembly line. So the assembly line was just a glorified conveyor belt, right? And when you walked into his factory, they put a part on it at one end, and about Every six feet, somebody stood and tinkered with that part. So it went to me, I tinkered with it. It moved to the guy to my right. He did something to it moved to the guy to his right. And by the time it reached the end of that conveyor belt, it's fully assembled. This is very analogous to how the human intestinal tract works. It's 30ft long. It's a giant conveyor belt. You put parts on it at one end as they exit the stomach in a very acidic environment. And it moves slowly towards the rectum. And before it exits the rectum, it's in a relatively alkaline environment. So instead of having people standing along a conveyor belt, you have bacteria that are graded by physical. The sequence is very important. So imagine what would happen if Henry Ford walked into his factory one day and doubled the speed of the conveyor belt. The entire assembly line would break down. Not because there's anything wrong with the parts, the contents, not because there's anything wrong with the people that are working there, the bacteria, but because you changed the speed. What if he went in there one day and reversed the conveyor belt? What if he just ran it in the opposite direction? It would screw the whole thing up, right? So by changing the pace of the gut, the speed of the gut, the conveyor belt, I've. I've ruined this sequence of events. And I spend a lifetime trying to figure out what's wrong with the parts, what's wrong with the workers, what's wrong with the conveyor belt itself? Nothing. It's how quickly or slowly it's running because the motility, this peristaltic activity is affected. And once you supplement for this deficiency and you return that activity to normal, you find that all of a sudden these strange allergies eviscerate, and all of this gas and bloating and diarrhea and constipation and irritability and all of this inability to equate things that I'm eating back to, what is going on in my gut seem to go away. It's true with all kinds of conditions. You know, we. We have subscribed in this world to the fact that we are so affected by disease and pathology. And once I get you to, to subscribe to the fact that you have a disease and can get you to subscribe to a lifetime of medication, you know, this is true in hypertension. You know, it's another huge, you know, we think genetically inherited disease. And a lot of families have, you know, grandfather had high blood Pressure. Dad had high blood pressure. Now the son has high blood pressure. So they go, oh, it's genetic. Genetically inherited high blood pressure. Okay, well, what gene is being passed down from these generations to cause this? Well, they don't know. Okay, well, we know all of the genes. So if we don't know what gene it is, then let's look at the methylation genes. Let's look at the genes in the human body that refine raw materials. Because if you have a certain deficiency, for example, in hypertension, very often, not always, but very often, it's caused by elevated levels of an amino acid called homocysteine. You have it in your bloodstream right now? I have it in my bloodstream. Every listener to this podcast has homocysteine, their blood, because we in. In the process of normally refining this amino acid into something called methionine, we. We keep this level at a reasonable level, but when you can't break homocysteine down, it rises. When homocysteine rises, it's very irritating to what's called the endothelial lining of the blood vessel. It in. It irritates the lining of the blood vessel. Well, when you irritate a blood vessel, it clamps down. Well, if you make the pipes smaller in a fixed system, pressure goes up. You have 63,000 miles of blood vessel in your body. It doesn't take much narrowing to drive pressure up. And so these people end up with hypertension, high blood pressure, and they go to the doctor, and the doctor does an EKG, it's normal. An EEG, it's normal. Stress EKG, it's normal. Cardiac cath, normal. Heart and lung sounds, normal. Dye contrast study, normal. The entire cardiac workup's normal. And then they still start pounding on the heart with medication because they can't figure out why the blood pressure is up, but they never actually looked at what raw material was missing in their body, not allowing them to bring homocysteine down and allowing the vascular system to relax. As the vascular system relaxes, pressure returns to normal.

You spent 22 years at that insurance company.

Yeah.

Looking at the database that you describe, and as you're. As you're saying there, you know, much of the sort of medical profession, and I think most of society.

Yeah. And I don't want to attack the medical profession. I really, you know, I'm in no place. I am a huge lover and believer in modern medicine. It's saved people very close to me. I mean, and trust me, if I hit a windshield at 20 miles an hour. I want a surgeon, I want painkillers, I'm going to the er.

But there's been this kind of, this, it's not a preventative approach to disease that we've taken over the last couple of decades. It really is, you know, to put a band aid on something that's, that's emerged. And as you said at the start of this conversation, these predicaments, these diseases emerged decades before we even see the symptoms. Oftentimes at the end of your 22 years at the insurance company, you started to look at these things which you call modifiable risk factors.

Yes.

What is a modifiable risk factor and what are the most common modifiable risk factors in your view?

Well, I mean, one of the most common ones that I saw was modifiable risk factor is. It's a risk factor that you have, and if you changed it, it would have modified it, it would have a demonstrative impact on the trajectory of your life. So, for example, anemia, right. Low hemoglobin, low red blood cell count, low oxygen transport in the blood will exacerbate just about any condition that you have. Right. So if you are hypertensive and anemic, if you are diabetic and anemic, if you are morbidly obese and anemic, meaning you have low blood oxygen because you have low red blood cells, low hemoglobin, what if you could modify the anemia? Well, if you could modify the anemia, carry more oxygen in the blood, you'd be much more resilient to all of these conditions. Right. So the same thing is true with dementia and Alzheimer's and cognitive function. As you impair cognitive function, you increase the incidence of all cause mortality. So a modifiable risk factor would be something like looking at the levels of vitamin D3 in the blood, blood in the body. So it's estimated that roughly 50% of the world's population is clinically deficient in vitamin D3.

Why is that important?

Well, vitamin D3 is the only vitamin that a human being can make on our own. There's hundreds of vitamins in your bloodstream right now you're only capable of making one. And it's vitamin D3, cholecalciferol. We make it from sunlight and cholesterol. You don't even need to eat to make this vitamin. There is not a single cell in the entire human body that does not have a receptor site for this vitamin. It also acts like a hormone. It's a calcium transport molecule. It's enormously impactful in your immune system. Clinical deficiency in vitamin D3 was at one time the second leading cause of morbidity in Covid. You know when they said Covid disproportionately affected minorities, if you ever heard that, it's true. So how did Covid disproportionately affect minorities? It wasn't like the virus didn't start going after certain minority populations. Well, it actually did, but it wasn't because they were not minorities. That had to do with the pigment of their skin. The darker the pigmentation of your skin, the lower the vitamin D3. The lower the vitamin D3, the more compromised the immune system. The more compromised the immune system, the more susceptible you are to attack.

That suggests that if you have darker skin like I do, that you should spend more time in the sunlight.

Yes, it does. It absolutely does. I mean, you and I just. Based on our skin tone, if you and I in a pair of board shorts went out and spent 30 minutes in sunlight, I would manufacture about 25,000 IUs, international units of vitamin D3. You would manufacture about 3,500. It's not fair.

We can run.

But you also, you also look better older and you don't age, you don't get wrinkles as much, and you have better oily skin. There's some trade offs. So. So when you look at, you know, African American populations, Latino populations, Middle Eastern populations, the percentage of vitamin D3 deficiency approaches 85%. Right. The truth is, most of us are not getting enough sun. It's not that we're getting too much. So let's talk about the depletion of this one nutrient.

Can I just ask them before we move on to the depletion of that nutrient, because I want to understand why that is. My guess was that because people with darker skins have grown up in sunlight.

Correct.

We spent more time in. In the sunlight, I'm guessing, which meant that we adjusted our production of vitamin D3 to suit the environment we lived in.

Yeah. You actually have a better barrier. Right. You are less susceptible to skin damage from sunlight than someone with lighter skin. Right. And so if you actually look, because I used to be a population mortality expert, you know, the, the longest life expectancies were centered right around the equator of the earth. If you look at most of the blue zones, they're going to be sort of closer to the equator of the earth. They're going to be closer to places where the sun shines longer periods of time throughout the year.

The blue zones.

Blue zones are. Sorry Blue zones are areas of the world where people live extraordinarily long life expectancies, right? Mediterranean diets. So the longest life expectancies are centered around the, the equator. So for every 20 degrees latitude, because this is longitude, every 20 degrees latitude, there's a precipitous drop in life expectancy until you get to the polls where when I started in this industry, a, the lowest, the shortest life expectancy on earth existed. So when I was born in 1970, a true Eskimo had a 56 year life expectancy. 56 years, true Eskimo. So these are, these are at the poles now. Why? Because they would go months without seeing the sun. And when they did see the sun, they were layered up. So they had brittle bone disease, they had autoimmune disease, they had immunocompromised conditions, all kinds of conditions that go with severe depletion in vitamin D3. And so I would see this in the medical record all the time, right? I would see medical record after medical record. You know, patient has been had a decade or longer of clinical deficiency in vitamin D3. Well, when you deplete this nutrient and you don't supplement for it, by the way, vitamin D3 is so easy to supplement for. Everybody should be taking vitamin D3 unless you're getting adequate sunlight. 5000ius of D3 with 80 micrograms of K2 and you know, you deplete this nutrient, eventually you will develop rheumatoid arthritis like symptoms. Now you don't have rheumatoid arthritis, but you have, you have the same identical symptoms. When you're depleted in vitamin D3, you start waking up sore and achy like you had a workout the night before. When you haven't soles, your feet and your ankles are tender. When you get out of bed in the morning to walk to the bathroom, take your first pee, your, your knees and hips and ankles start to stiffen up, then it goes to cross the shoulders and eventually it's hard to make a really tight fold fist. Well, if you go to the wrong physician, family medicine practitioner that's seeing a lot of high volume of patients, you start to give them that description, they go, you know what you got, you got rheumatoid arthritis. I'm going to hit you with something called corticosteroids. I'm going to put you on some prednisone first and then we're going to transition you to a corticosteroid like a methotrexate or one of these and and you're going to be fine. You know, you know it's going to push this off into the future. Well, we knew that if you started corticosteroids that at first they had an anti inflammatory effect, but you had roughly six years and one day until you were having a joint replacement. Because first they're anti inflammatory, but then they eat the joint like a termite. And so it was so accurate that if you were a 60 year old female and you were misdiagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis because you had a vitamin D3 deficiency, I would artificially advance your age six years. I would schedule the joint replacement that wasn't required, by the way. I would schedule the joint replacement and then I would begin to reduce what's called your ambulatory profile. How well you ambulate, how well you move. And we know now that sitting is the new smoking, right? Sedentary lifestyle is the leading cause of all cause mortality. And so as I start to reduce your ambulatory profile, I bring in all of the diseases that exacerbate with reduced motility. So if I back this up, you were diagnosed with a condition that you didn't have because you had a deficiency in a very simple nutrient. So then you were put on a medication that wasn't required. This caused you to have surgery that you didn't need to replace a joint that wasn't initially going to be defective. This reduced your mobility and it brought diseases forward that you never would have caught and you died early from a condition you never would have had because you had a deficiency in a nutrient that was misdiagnosed, mistreated and led to your early demise. And I could give you hundreds of examples like this. And this is why, if you look at the 2016 Harvard study, the 2019 Johns Hopkins study, medical error is the third leading cause of death.

Medical error.

Medical error is that misdiagnosis, misdiagnosis and medical error. The Average American over 50, 52 is on five prescription medications. These are synthetic chemical pharmaceuticals, Right. And in a lot of cases we don't know the long term side effects of these. In a lot of these cases, we actually don't even know the mechanism by which they work. If you actually open the PDR that comes the, the, the disclaimer that comes with a lot of these medications, you'll see that they say, mechanism of action unknown. Well, it's a sleep medication. How does it make me sleep? I don't know. Just makes you sleep, Right. In fact, most people that are suffering From. From sleep issues. Are suffering some sleep issues. Not because they can't sleep, not because they're not tired, because their mind is keeping them awake. Right? If you have a gene mutation called comt. Catechol o methyltransferase, then what happens to you is you lay down to go to sleep.

Sleep.

And there's nothing more frustrating than one spouse having this gene mutation and one not.

Oh, my God. I think you're talking about me and my partner. I'm the one that I need some, like, sound or something to go to sleep because she's just out like a light.

There you go. See? And nothing's more frustrating because.

So annoying. I sometimes sleep in another room.

Okay, so the reason why you're not falling asleep is because when your environment quiets, your mind wakes up. And if you actually hone in on the kind of things you're thinking about, you're thinking about the most innocuous little nonsense, right? I mean, it's like, did I get everything on my grocery list? Did my belt match my shoes today? Did I return that email? It's nothing that couldn't wait till the next day.

100.

Yeah. And so. And sometimes you can even catch yourself going, what am I doing? Thinking about the color of dishes I'm going to have if I threw a party, which I'm probably not going to throw. It's just like, how did I get down this rabbit hole? Right? And this is because, you know, the. You are not quieting the mind at the pace that you are exciting the mind. So in other words, when you lay down to go to sleep and your environment quiets, your mind starts to wake up, so you need to be distracted so that your mind doesn't continue to run. But if you just put the right amino acid balance. In fact, I would bet my career you have this gene mutation. I will pay for your test if you don't. It's $599. It's a cheek swab. You do once in your lifetime, and it will tell you if you have this g mutation comt. And if you do, I'll tell you exactly what supplement to take, and it will become a permanent thing in your past.

What supplement can I take? Don't end your sentence there, Gary.

So it's called L Methionine.

Oh, it's.

You take el methionine. You take methylfolate. And depending on where the gene break is and how severe it is, you add. You may add something called SAM E S adenosylmethionine. And These sound like fancy names. They're just fancy names for vitamins and amino acids. All of these are in your bloodstream right now. So when you look at the sequence of breaks that somebody has, then you can tell them exactly what supplement to take. When they take the supplement, their body's no longer deficient, Right? Deficiencies over time express themselves as all kinds of things. You know, there's a lot of people that can't reach elevated emotional states for any prolonged period of time. This is because mood and emotional states are recipes. Just like, you know, a chef bakes a recipe. But if you went to a bakery chef, and you said, you can bake whatever you want, you just can't use butter, okay? It doesn't sound like a big deal. It's just one ingredient. But think of the number of cookies, pastries, pies, brownies. You know, that it would affect. It would affect so many different recipes just by removing one ingredient. This is the same thing that happens in human beings if you couldn't use serotonin to assemble mood, okay? Now, any emotional state that requires that neurotransmitter as a part of its structure.

You can assemble and as it relates to that mutation. When people hear the term mutation, they think of it as being something that's happened in me, and I'm maybe, you know, one of a few that have that mutation. Mutation sounds like a. Yeah, it does sound.

It sounds like an alien's about to.

Start, like, growing out of it.

Sounds like.

It sounds like, you know, my sister won't have it, and it's just me.

Okay, So a gene mutation means that, you know, we get a copy of our genes from each parent, right? And then these. The. The copy of these genes is passed down to us. And we know, you know, most of us are familiar with basic genetics. Eye color, skin color, detached earlobes. But there's nothing you can do with that information. So beyond your ancestry, you know, whether you got Irish heritage or Native American Indian or what have you, I mean, those are. If you did a 23andMe, you'd be able to find your ancestry, which is also your genetic history. That's not actionable information. When you look at the genes of methylation, right? And there are several of them. I look at five majors and a few minors. When you look at the genes of methylation, these are the genes that code for how materials are taken into the body, are refined into the usable form. And these are not mutations that you're going to suffer from. But what they do is they. They they cause deficiencies to arise in the body. And it's this deficiency that leads to the expression of these conditions. And so when you can't adequately methylate neurotransmitters, you have a deficiency in a certain neurotransmitter, any mood, any emotional state that requires that neurotransmitter you can't assemble. If you have a deficiency in the ability to quiet the mind, then you have excess neurotransmitters in the brain which cause it to stay in awakened state.

So that gene that is responsible for my loud mind when I go to sleep, do you have any idea the amount of people that have that particular gene?

Well, 44% of the world's population has a gene mutation called MTHFR, methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase. This is a genetic mutation that impairs the ability to convert folate into methylfolate or folic acid into methylfolate. And that might not sound like a big deal, but folic acid is one of the most prevalent nutrients in the human diet. And the thing about folic acid is that folic acid is an entirely man made chemical. Folic acid is not found anywhere on the surface of the earth. You can't find folic acid anywhere naturally in nature. And yet we give folic acid to pregnant women when they get pregnant, because we tell pregnant women that folic acid prevents neural tube defects. Well, that's patently false. Folic acid doesn't prevent anything. Folic acid has to be converted first into tetrahydrofolate, then dihydrofolate, but eventually it becomes something called methylfolate and that prevents a neural tube defect. Well, what if like 44% of the population and 44% of women, this woman has this gene mutation and you give her folic acid, the man made version of folate, and she can't convert it into methylfolate. This is where postpartum depression develops. And you know, I have not seen a single peer reviewed, published clinical study linking elevated levels of hormones in female pregnancy to postpartum depression. But if you give a woman that can't methylate folic acid 1400% of the daily allowance of folic acid, and she can't break it down, then she goes nuts and, and then eventually the pregnancy ends, the depression goes away. And so she blames it on the pregnancy, not on the vitamin. And you know, we do this over and over and over again. You know, we have, in the modern industrial world, we try to synthesize what occurs naturally in Nature. In a laboratory, you know, there's three types of B12, right? Adenosylcobalamin, hydroxycobalamin, methylcobalamin. These forms of B12 occur naturally in nature. There's one that we make synthetically in a laboratory. It's called cyanocobalamin. We make it from hydrogen cyanide. It is useless in the human body. The human body actually has to take it and convert it into the active form of B12 called hydroxycobalamin. And so a lot of times the supplements that we're taking us are causing more harm than good. And we're taking them because a doctor said, well, I'm pregnant. My ob GYN told me to take this synthetic chemical called folic acid, which, it's always beyond me why anyone would think that something that we make in a laboratory that's entirely synthetic, that isn't natural, that isn't found anywhere on the surface of the earth, could ever be required for optimal health. I mean, just in its, on its surface, that sounds strange to me, but, you know, yet we do, and we don't understand this process of methylation. So if you, once you understand where your genetic mutations are, where the genetic inability to refine raw materials is, you can go about supplementing, targeted supplementing for that deficiency.

So you would recommend people take a genetic test to find out these answers, right?

I'd recommend everyone take that test once in their lifetime.

You know, I, I, I'm in the camp that we're, as humans, we're not broken.

Like, we're not totally agree with you.

You know what I mean? And so whenever there's something going on in my body or, you know, a way that I am, or a habit I have that I'm like, why do I do that? I'm always trying to figure out the sort of, I guess the ancestral reason why that might have helped me to survive or what's going on. So when I hear mutation, it sounds a little bit like broken to me.

Yeah, yeah. So I shouldn't use it. I mean, we use the term mutation, but basically, you know, in our ancestry, right, we pass on our entire genetic code, which a lot of that is hair color, eye color, skin color, you know, our heritage. But we also pass on how our body refines certain raw materials. And it's not to say that it's good or bad or broken or fixed, but there are certain families and human beings that have an inability to refine certain raw materials. And if we could be aware of this, it is astounding. What happens to human beings when you just give their body the raw material to do its job? Lots of people that have attention deficit disorder have trouble sleeping. Will are also having trouble with prioritization. They just don't know it. They'll say things like, I work really well under pressure. Right? Most entrepreneurs say I work really well under pressure. Do you.