Bio-Hacking with Gary Brecka: MTHFR, Alzheimers, Hormones, Vaccines and More

Hi, I'm Natalie Jill, fat loss expert turned lifestyle and high performance coach. Welcome to Listen up the podcast. On this podcast I do what I do best. Taking complicated information that is relevant to us now and breaking it down simply with actionable steps you can implement to level up your life. I also regularly interview some of the most inspiring and courageous men and women on the planet who at their worst, learned how to achieve success greater than anything they ever, ever dreamed possible. Creating everything from nothing. If you are new here, I encourage you to go back and listen from episode one when this podcast was previously called Leveling up for the Full Transformative Experience. I've always been intrigued by the idea of biohacking. Now, being a fat loss expert myself and knowing a lot about the importance of how we eat, and even touching on how we supplement and move our body, I always wanted to know how can we go even deeper with our blood work? What if we could customize things to take years off of a disease coming on, or extend our life, or even hack into looking and feeling younger? How could we do that? And then I met Gary Breca. He is the founder of Streamline Medical Group. Now he's a human biologist, a biohacker himself, and an expert medical researcher. Some of his clients include some of the great people like Grant Cardone, the Prince and Princess of Morocco, and some of the top UFC fighters. Now, Gary's journey to becoming a top blood work analyst, it actually began as a mortality expert. He would be summoned sometimes to high profile court cases and they would ask him to predict patient death to the exact year and month based on biomarkers and demographic information specific to the patient. Through his studies, he could tell the exact many months, not just years, but exact months. Someone's life expectancy would be 4. Now, the level of his work, how his specialization in this lab work and finding these biomarkers, it's allowed him to use it for improving and even reversing diseases and all the signs of aging internally and externally. Today I dive deep with Gary on things like the MTHFR gene. What do we do when we have that? What's the relationship between that and things like ADHD and obsessive compulsive order? We talk about what happens when your insulin levels are out of check and how that links to dementia, Alzheimer's, and more importantly, can we reverse that in the early stages or even prevent it altogether? We also touch on a little bit of some controversial topics like vaccines and especially after you've had Covid itself. So we have a great conversation Today I'm have to have Gary back for more on my podcast because he's just such a great wealth of knowledge, I could have gone on for 10 hours with him. So without further ado, meet Gary Breca. Today I'm talking to one of my newly favorite people, Gary Breca, because he really did change my life. I was going through a lot of setbacks in my own health with a lot of injuries in the last year. I've talked about that many times on my podcast and if you follow me on social media. And I didn't know what was going on, I didn't know what the cause with it. And most of the doctors I was meeting with were just putting me through test after test and we really weren't getting anywhere. And it wasn't until a friend introduced me to Gary and I was fortunate enough to get to work with him with his crazy busy schedule of his long list of high profile clients. One conversation with Gary, I felt like I was talking to a psychic. I mean he literally the questions he was asking me, I thought, are you, are you talking to my husband? Are you talking to my daughter? How do you know these things about me? So I wanted to have him on today because he's just a wealth of knowledge. He is my ghost to my true go to for advanced medicine, for biohacking, advanced cutting edge research. He is who I run everything by now. So Gary, thank you so much for being here today.

You are so welcome. I'm excited to be on your podcast today.

So Gary, take us back a little bit because first of all, a lot of people listening, they don't know what a bio, a biologist is, what a biohacker is. Can you explain what that is and like why that was even something you were interested in becoming and stepping into?

Yeah, sure. When I was younger, I was always interested in science and science is always kind of the geeky little study of everything, how things work in the universe. But I was fascinated with the human body. There's an area of human science called human biology, which is essentially the area of the study of how the human body functions. When I went to undergrad, I got my first degree in, in general biology and graduated with a bachelor of Science in biology. And then I went on to graduate school and I spent another four years focusing on human biology. So instead of just studying the biology of plants and animals and things like that, I focused solely on the biology of the human body. And I was lucky enough when I left college to grad school to go into a very niche market of life insurance, where if I got five years of your medical records and five years of demographic data on you, my job was to tell the insurance company how many more years you had left on earth. And I was able to do this very, very accurately. So I developed a model for mortality to predict death to the month based on the absence of optimal health. So I.

When you would look at somebody, one of your patients in life insurance, you could tell just by everything you were learning and knew, you could say they have a life expectancy of another five years or another 50 years or whatever it is, you could tell that not.

Five years or 50 years, 172 months or 203 months or 101, that, that kind of accuracy. At one point, I was a certified expert witness in federal court for litigation related to mortality. And so, you know, we were very, very accurate at predicting death because we were able to take blood work and genetic work on patients, and we were able to look at somebody who was otherwise healthy, never been to the doctor, felt great, and tell the insurance company how many more months they had left on erc. And, you know, one of the, one of the things I hope we get to share with your listeners today is just some of the basic things that you can do to add years and years to your life and years and years to your health span. You know, after we talk about some of the specifics, you want to get into fat loss or what have you.

Yeah, that's, that's pretty wild. And so is this. That's uncommon, I'm assuming. I'm not, I'm not thinking many people in the world can look at somebody's history and could predict that to the month of how long they have left.

So it's a very small core competency to, to, you know, to really be able to predict death to the month. And, you know, it's just, it's actuarial science with the specific information on that, on that particular, that person that's applying for life insurance or an annuity. But what it allowed me to do, I mean, this population database that we had access to had 370 million lives. And so it had lot of data. And, you know, being a human biologist and a researcher on the human body, I went in and, you know, answered my own questions on, you know, we're going to talk about fat loss today. You know, what really is the best way to lose fat? What is the best way to build muscle? What's the best way to deepen sleep, to increase your waking energy, to improve cognitive Function. And I was able to do this from a very scientific basis, having access to hundreds of millions of lives. And it was really, you know, a phenomenal area to build the foundation for the rest of my life, career.

Was there a specific commonality that you saw that was popping up that, that was like an obvious, that, wow, a lot of people don't know this. Did you see that? Or was it very custom and unique for every single.

No. There's a common theme to every human being walking this planet. If I was to say the three biggest impacts on mortality, what are they? What could people do to extend their lifespan, their health span? I would tell you this. Invariably, just about every life expectancy study that we did came down to three things. It came down to hormone balance, nutrient deficiencies, and glycemic control. Blood sugar control. In my opinion, the Bible should say that sugar is the root of all evil, not the love of money, because I will tell you, sugar is the root of all evil. It's part of the disease etiological pathway of so many different things that go wrong in the human body. It's, it's unthinkable. So controlling blood sugar, balancing hormones and, and specific nutrient deficiencies, the number one being vitamin D3.

Okay, let's get into, while we're on that, let's get into those a little bit more because first of all, let's. Let's start with. I want to start with, with the sugar thing, glycine, because a lot of people think, well, if I don't have insulin sensitivity or I don't have low and high blood sugar, if I don't have that, sugar's fine. Can we talk about that and like, what kind of sugar specifically?

So first of all, I'll just start by giving a fact because, you know, sometimes I'll talk about different types of diets and I get a lot of pushback from the bro science community. So to just set the stage, okay, There are two essential fatty acids in the human body. If you don't have these two fatty acids, you will die. There are nine essential amino acids in the human body. If you don't have these nine amino acids, proteins, you will die. There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. I'm going to say that again. There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate, meaning sugars and carbohydrates are not essential to life. And now I'm not telling you not to eat sugars or carbohydrates, but just to clear the air and dispel any of the myths that carbohydrates are necessary or sugar is necessary. That is absolutely scientifically false. There is no such thing as.

And, and I want to jump in on that because, Gary, as you all know, if you follow my fat loss stuff, he is a fan of fruits. Fruits and vegetables. Like those nutrients are carbs. And he is a fan. So he's talking. You're talking primarily about starchy carbs.

Yeah, I'm assuming, talking about starchy carbs and high glycemic carbohydrates. Right. White rice, white pastas, white potatoes, those types of fast burn carbohydrates that raise insulin very quickly. Because, see, most people don't understand that it's actually not the sugar that's the issue. It's two things. It's the rate that the sugar raises your blood, it raises in your blood, which is called your glycemic index. I don't want to get too scientific on here, but every, every carbohydrate has a location on the glycemic index. So things that raise your blood sugar really quick, like table sugar or simple carbohydrates, are very high on the glycemic index. Things that raise your blood sugar very slowly, like a sweet potato, are very low on the glycemic index. So the faster something raises your blood sugar, the worse it is for you. Because what rises when blood sugar rises is something called insulin. And most people think that insulin, the primary role of insulin, is to lower blood sugar. That's not true. The primary role of insulin is to block any other form of energy utilization in the body. So what does that mean? That means if I eat sugars that quickly raise my insulin, that insulin will immediately block any access to fatty acids, which means my body cannot burn fat in a high sugar environment. So if I'm going to burn fat, the first thing I need to do is lower insulin. Because there is no such thing as burning fat if your insulin is high. So one of the things that really prevents us from burning fat, our blood is one of the things that prevents us from burning fat in our bloodstream is insulin rising and blocking access to the fatty acid pathway. So the faster something raises your blood sugar, the worse it is for you. Just think about this. The United States is still one of the few civilized nations in the world that continues to call Alzheimer's and dementia. Alzheimer's and dementia. Do you know what Alzheimer's and dementia really is?

Right? Type 3 diabetes. It's the type 3 diabetes.

Yeah, it's a type 2 diabetes. And I would invite your audience to Google that, because type 3 diabetes is not some fringe, you know, rogue scientific phenomenon. Mayo, Cleveland Clinic, Kellogg University, Berkeley. They've all linked elevated blood sugar over a prolonged period of time to the accumulation of amyloid plaques in the brain. Which means that when blood sugar rises, let's remember that our brain is addicted to carbohydrate. 45% of all the carbohydrate taken into the body is consumed by the brain. And the brain is such a voracious consumer of carbohydrate that it actually makes its own insulin. Even most board certified endocrinologists think that all insulin is made in the pancreas. And that's not true. Our brain actually makes its own insulin. It consumes so much sugar that it makes its own insulin. Well, what happens as we get older and we get insulin resistant in the brain? Well, when we're insulin resistant in the body, we store sugar. We store sugar in the liver, we store sugar in the muscles, this form of stored sugars called glycogen. And in the brain, there's no space. The only space that exists in the brain is the little space between nerve endings. There's a little tiny space there called the neurosynaptic junction. And the brain will pack sugars in there in the form of plaques called amyloid plaques. What happens is, as sugar remains elevated, these little spaces in the brain fill up and it interrupts the communication between memory and consciousness. See, the big lie, the big myth about Alzheimer's and dementia is that patients lose their memory. That's not true. Patients lose access to their memory.

They lose access to people when people are treating. So that's very clear to me about what could be creating it. So when people say it's genetic, it's in my. But they could interrupt that by not having these foods, by not having that sugar and not creating that. Once they have the dementia and Alzheimer's. Can you fix anything with that knowledge?

Yeah. Early onset Alzheimer's and dementia and we saw thousands and thousands and thousands of cases of it get reversed. And I will tell you this, in my entire 20 year career in the mortality space, I personally never saw a single applicant for life insurance that had early onset Alzheimer's or dementia that did not have 10 years of elevated blood sugar prior to, not once.

Wow.

Now that's anecdotal. I didn't do a clinical study on that. But I will tell you that there is a direct link between prolonged elevated blood sugar and the Onset of Alzheimer's and dementia. And if you know somebody who is affected by Alzheimer's or dementia, I would really encourage you and your listeners to look at their blood sugar. And I will guarantee you this, they have probably had 10 plus years of elevated blood sugar prior to cognitive decline.

Now, once they are in a stage two or three or four, is that too late then to reverse that?

Well, once it gets further progressed, eventually these plaques fill up the neurosynaptic junction and they close it off. Once it closes off, the tissue begins to die and the brain literally begins to shrink. Alzheimer's and demented patients, when they do autopsies on their brains post mortem, you'll find that the brains are actually smaller. Now, once tissue has died, you can't bring it back. But if you know someone that has early onset Alzheimer's and dementia, now is the time to get them on a very, very, very low glycemic, low sugar diet with lots of healthy fats, avocados, nuts, coconut oil, olive oil, you know, avocados, so that, that we can get healthy fats into the body and have them metabolize.

You know what's so interesting is you, you hear the dumbing down of nutrition all over the place, like really basic stuff. So you'll, you'll see articles about prevent Alzheimer's with fish oil. And it's funny like talking to you because really what that's, they're taking a very small part of what you said, that yes, we need healthy fats and oh, by just adding fish oil in, we're going to reverse it. That's not how, what he's saying. You're saying you've got to be extreme about not having sugar, not produce, having this overload of insulin, not creating that and eat a diet rich in those foods.

Yes. In fact, those cases, when you're using diet therapeutically, you want to be on a prescription ketogenic diet. And by prescription ketogenic diet, I mean you need to put your body into nutritional ketosis and you need to stay there. You cannot, you can't have days off. You can't kind of do it. Not kind of do it. You can't date this diet. You have to marry it because you have to, because you're looking for a therapeutic outcome right at the point where you're trying to pull Alzheimer's and dementia out of the brain. You know, we're beyond look, you know, trying to improve the look of our skin or, you know, develop lean muscle. We're really trying to have a specific Physiological outcome.

That brings me to our next question about diabetics, then. So if that's stage, if they have type one or type two, and I'm very familiar with both of them. So my sister actually has type one. I've got. My mom had type two at one point. She was able to reverse a lot of that with her diet.

And can we do that?

Can you do anything with type 1 diabetics that are insulin dependent, diabetics that are taking insulin shots? Is there anything they can do there to help that?

Yes. So type 1 diabetics, you know, a lot of type 1 diabetes is linked to a process called methylation. The one reason why they call it juvenile diabetes is it usually starts as they're passing through puberty or emerging from puberty, and what's happening is the process of methylation has been interrupted. And therefore the pancreas, which has a specific type of cell called a beta cell that makes insulin, is not functioning properly. And therefore they're insulin dependent, not because they've overloaded their body with sugar, but because they can't actually produce healthy insulin. If you'd like, I'll send you some links to articles for how to fix methylation in the body that can really support type 1 diabetics. That's why I encourage everybody to get a genetic test, the cheek swab test that we did on you, because when you take a Q tip, you swab your cheek, you put it in a test tube, send it to the lab, five or eight days later, they send back the results. You only do this test once in your lifetime, and now you know exactly what raw materials the human body can produce and what raw materials the body cannot produce. And this is so important to optimal health because most people are kind of walking around in this blind fog like a Frankenstein, just supplementing for the sake of supplementing, right? They read an article in Vogue, and now they're taking Coq 10. And then they read an article in Men's Health, and now they're taking Saw palmetto, and then they hear that vitamin C is good for you. And now they're taking vitamin C and then pretty soon they've got three shelves of supplements in their cabinet. They don't know what's doing what. They don't know what the target is of all of these supplements. And the fact is, the majority of us are taking supplements right now that are killing us and accelerating our mortality. We just don't know it.

And I want to share that. That's a lot of what was happening with me and this is what Gary.

Yes.

Now, there was a lot of supplements I was taking that were great, and then what we found in that cheek swab was I had that MTHFR gene. So can we talk about that? Because you, I learned from you that a lot more people have that gene than we thought, and there's some very critical things we need to look at with our supplements if we have that.

Yes. I mean, mthfr, I'm not going to tell you what the nickname is, we know, But I'm sure if your listeners write it down, they can sound it out, And I didn't come up with it, but the MTHFR gene, methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase is a gene that codes for the conversion of folic acid into the usable form that the body can burn. Now, you see, there's a process in the human body and it's called methylation. And this process is what every human being goes through to take something from its non usable form and convert it into its usable form. Right. It's like the fuel that goes into our car. You can't pull the oil out of the ground and put it in your gas tank. Your car doesn't know how to use that raw material. What we have to do is we have to refine that oil into gasoline, and then we take gasoline and we put it in our gas tank and boom, the car runs. The human body is the same way. It takes that oil through a process of methylation, turns it into gasoline, and then puts the gasoline into our cells. So we'll take a folic acid, we will convert it into something called 5methylfolate, and that's the fuel the body can use. Well, let's just say, for example, that your body, a part of your methylation cycle, is broken. You can pull the oil out of the ground, but you don't have the right genomic background to convert it to gasoline. Now, your car is deficient in gasoline and it doesn't run properly. So this is what methylation does in the human body, and there are several actionable genes in the human body that will tell you exactly what raw materials you're deficient in. And when you're deficient in certain raw materials, you get what looks like pathology or looks like disease, but really what you have is a lack of raw material. So, for example, in people that have the MTHFR gene mutation, like yourself, which 44% of the population has, that's a.

Huge percent, by the way. That was crazy when you told me that.

Yes, 44%. This is the leading cause of postpartum depression in pregnant females, because what are pregnant females told to do as soon as they get pregnant? They're told to take a prenatal vitamin.

That has folic acid.

Yeah. The 1400% of the daily allowance of folic acid. And when you put that much folic acid into a pregnant female that has that gene mutation, she's going to go nuts. Right. So next thing you know, she's got postpartum depression. And the postpartum depression lasts until the pregnancy ends, and then they stop taking the prenatal vitamin and the symptoms go away. So they blame it on the pregnancy, not on the vitamin. So I would encourage all of your listeners to get a genetic test, look at your methylation pathway, find out exactly what your body can and cannot process, and then just supplement for those deficiencies.

So, Gary, can we talk about. I want to talk about what happened with me a little bit with this part, because I know this is more specific to me, but I think there's a lot of nuggets in here that that's going to be an aha moment for other people. So for me, I had exactly what he's talking about. And my, the only time in my life I went through a massive depression was when I was pregnant. And I know that it made sense when he was sharing this with me. I had a lot of other stuff going on in my life, too, but I'm sure that did not help. But I also was telling him, or he figured it out with me without even me telling him. Because you felt. I felt like I was talking to a psychic. He asked me all these questions about my ADD and all the things that I had. And, and what's interesting is since we've switched and we've gotten control of this methylation process, like, I'm, I don't even have the ADD signs anymore. It's, it's like. But. So I have questions about that. But I also have questions about. You had explained why I kept getting all those pains and those breaks on my right side through this. So can we share? Because there's people listening that really resonated with that with me, where they have an injury and then they have another one and they have another one, and this could be one of the culprits for them.

No question. So the way that the body heals, the way that the body digests food, the way that our brain functions, all of our emotions, our mood, our emotional state, all of these things in the human body require raw Material. And if you hold back some of the raw material, then you get misfires, mistakes in these processes. So, for example, if I asked you to make me a chocolate chip cookie, but I didn't give you brown sugar, and I didn't give you chocolate chips, you see, there's nothing wrong with you. It's just that you lack the raw material to complete the task. The human body is the same way. We ask it to make all of these different recipes, but then we hold back some of the raw material, and the body doesn't have the choice to not proceed, so it proceeds with whatever it has. And so when we talk about addiction or ADHD or ocd, if you or any of your listeners are affected by any of those conditions, which in my opinion, they don't actually exist, what exists is a lack of raw material. I'll explain that in a second. So let's take ADD or adhd, and then I'll get to your nerve condition. Attention deficit disorder. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Obsessive compulsive disorder. What are these? Well, it's an issue with the process in the brain called staging. So imagine if you were sitting in the front seat of a theater and there's a stage in front of you. You're by yourself, and there's an empty stage in front of you. Every time you have a thought, it's like an actor walking to the edge of that stage and engaging you in a dialogue. Now, when you're done that conversation, that person should exit the stage. If you are deficient in the raw material, like MTHFR will make you deficient, or another gene break, you lack the raw material to degrade thought. So now that person stays on the stage. And now a second person comes up, engages you in a conversation, and when that conversation's over, they stay there. And then a third and then a fourth. And pretty soon you're having a conversation with. With 10 people on the stage in front of you at one time. So you don't actually have attention deficit disorder. You have attention overload disorder. You're paying attention to too many things at the same time. And what these people will say is, I work really well under pressure. Now, physiologically, what that means is you're incapable of signing priority on your own, so you require external pressure to push priorities to the surface.

That was totally me. That was exactly me, what you just said.

Isn't that crazy? So someone that is deficient in theanine, magnesium, zinc, and B vitamins, what will happen is they'll. They'll have a very high priority task going on in their life. Let's say, for example, you're closing on your dream home. Yeah. You just, you're, you and your husband, you're getting ready to move into your dream home. You got 45 minutes to get the paperwork back to the broker. It's, it's 4:15. At 5:00, you lose the house permanently for good. So you're working on this paperwork and message pops up on your phone. It's an Instagram message, you go, ding. Let me see what's going on here. And it's a video of your neighbor's cousin's kid fishing in a lake. And you go, I wonder if he's going to catch the fish. And so you start watching the video of this kid fishing in a lake that you have no connection to at all. Meanwhile, you don't have 45 minutes left.

You've only got literally my, this is my life, Gary. This was my life.

Five minutes. And then you go, oh my God, I, I stopped watching the video. You jump back to the paperwork, you rush, rush, rush, rush, rush, rush, rush. And you get it in at 459, saved by the bell. And you go, wow, I really work well on depression.

Yeah, totally. My life and I, and that's also I noticed with my daughter too, like we'll shut. We would show up so well under on the spotlight when the pressure, when all the tension had to be there, we could hyper focus. But on other, other times it's like you can't, you can't prioritize what's important, what's actually not important. It's all seems equally interesting.

And yeah, your body, your body prioritizes everything the same. Your body, brain lacks the capacity to create internal prioritization. This is usually just a simple deficit in raw material. Zinc, magnesium, the methionine. And one of these genetic tests will tell you exactly what that is. And you'll see that problem of viscerate in young children. The majority of add, ADHD and OCD is because they have the MTHFR gene mutation and they're being pumped full of folic acid before they get to school in the morning. Because you see, it was about 1993, the US federal government required that our entire grain supply be sprayed with folic acid. So all grains, all flour, all white rice, white bread, white pasta, all white grains are fortified or enriched with folic acid.

So what's so interesting when you say that, it's like if you think about what I mentioned earlier about people Wanting to simplify things. So then we hear things like if you are adhd, don't have processed foods. But really this is the science behind why. This is explaining a lot of why. Because just saying don't have white bread or whatever to help your add, it's important to know why.

Yeah, I'll tell you why. I mean if you have adhd, you need to get folic acid out of your diet and folic acid is in all grains and cereals. So you need to look for the words fortified or enriched on the back of every box of crackers and cereal that you have in your house and you throw in the trash. Folic acid is like cocaine for six year olds. Not kidding. It makes their brain ricochet, right? It makes it hyper excites their brain. And if you take a child that has, has an MTHFR gene mutation and you give them a standard American breakfast, two bowls of cereal, a little glass of orange juice, two flintstone bites, it will be a full contact sport to get that kid in the car to go to school. By the time school, the teachers are calling going hey, little Johnny doesn't pay attention, he's fidgety, he's disruptive, he has outbursts, he's not.

And then they say let's give him speed to medicate him.

Bring in the riddle. Let's bring it. And what does that do? Well, the mind is moving so fast that we give an amphetamine to the body to race it so it matches the pace of the mind. So we create calm by stimulating the body with artificial amphetamines so we can match the pace of the mind instead of just quieting the mind. And that is not a long term solution.

No. And I have so many questions for you now. I don't want to keep getting off, I have like, I need to like have 10 hours with you.

But.

Okay, so let me ask about that since you just brought that up. So when I was diagnosed with ADHD as a kid and it, and then and adult was like even worse adhd and then I never medicated until I was an adult and I did for one year and during that one year taking a very low dose of Adderall for me, yes, I could hyper focus on things but what I found is I would hyper focus on things that didn't matter. They weren't like all of a sudden I was interested in spreadsheets or whatever and then I would have, I lost all my creativity during that and I would have a massive drop off from it.

Oh yeah. When the Amphetamine leaves the system. I mean, that's hyper stimulatory. So now, so now you need increased stimulation in order to reach the same natural threshold. I mean, these things have what's, what's called tachyflaxis, but they have a, they have a sensitization. The more you use it, the less sensitive you are, so the harder you have to hit those receptors. So the more you need to take. Which is why nobody ever decreases their Adderall dose. Over time. They all increase their.

And that's what doctors will keep pushing to do more. And then their answer, most medical doctors that I found, their answer to that come down was to then take a Xanax. So it's like this whole vicious cycle. So it's interesting, when I started working with Gary, I hadn't taken Adderall or anything, and I wasn't patient initially with him. And I said, like, should I be taking some again? And all of that. And like, what's interesting is I don't even have that question anymore because it took a little time, but like, that whole problem went away. It's amazing just by, by being clear what's in my blood work and tweaking those things.

Right? Yeah. I mean, look, here's the bottom. Here's the great news. You don't need to put anything into your bloodstream that's not already in your bloodstream right now in order to fix this stuff. It's just we need to find out what raw material is missing, and then we need to supply that raw material. It's like, it's like a good mechanic, a really good car mechanic, doesn't ever fix your car. It keeps your car from breaking down. And there's a difference. Right? You mean you bring it in, he checks your oil and says, okay, your oil's dirty, you're low on fuel, you're almost out of transmission fluid. If you don't change your oil and fill up your transmission fluid, you know, you're going to blow the engine or you're going to blow your transmission. Okay, well, let's go. And, and, and, and now I don't have to deal with the, with the breakdown. Human body is the same way. If we give it the raw material that it needs, you'd be shocked how resilient it is. And most of us are not only not giving our body what it needs, we're giving it supplements and nutrients that are causing us harm. You know, in the United States, believe it or not, we're out actually allowed to make synthetic vitamins. Most of the vitamins in the human body. Every vitamin in the human body occurs naturally in nature with the exception of vitamins that are man made, that are allowed to be made by the government allows us to make them. And they're made out of synthetic materials. Our body doesn't recognize these. The number one form of vitamin B12 in the world does not occur anywhere naturally in nature. It's called cyanocobalamin and believe it or not, it's made from cyanide and the B12 molecule. We are allowed in this country to make B12 from hydrogen cyanide. Guess what else? We use hydrogen cyanide in what? Chemical weapons.

Wow.

And if you don't just google cyanocobalamin and put a space and put the word pubchem and you can go to the US federal government's website where they catalog nutrients and you can see that we make B12 out of hydrogen cyanide. So I would also encourage all of your listeners to spin their vitamin bottle around.

Yeah, I threw, I tossed one away that I was taking because it had that after you told me me that.

Yeah, guess what vitamin uses hydrogen cyanide? Flintstones.

Oh my gosh, everyone's.

And that's the number one vitamin given to prepubescent children in the world. The one selling vitamin in the world is Centrum and it also uses cyanocobalamin and folic acid. So if you have ADHD or ADD or OCD or you have poor sleep or poor gut health and you're taking that vitamin, it's making your condition significantly worse.

Okay, before I forget to ask this while we're on that, and then I'm going to go back to the other things you mentioned because I prom. I want to talk about the hormone and the nutrition deficiency, some of that with the D. Can you talk about the MTHFR and the pains that I kept getting and the nerve and how I kept getting injured? Because you explained it and I don't think I can explain it to somebody else. So I want to because this could be. This could be. I had so many people message me that, wow, I had that same thing happen. Like I had an injury and then I got another one and then it cycle.

Yeah. So it's same side injury. So basically what happens is that, you know, there's a, there's an entire kinetic chain in the human body. Right. And so anytime that there's dysfunction anywhere in the human body, there's compensation somewhere else in the human body. So for example, if I take one Vertebrae in your spine, and I stop it from being able to move, then the vertebrae that's above it and below it will increase their motion to make up for the decrease in motion of the one that's immobile. So in your case, and in many cases, you get a single injury, you get an injury to your right ankle. And now the next thing you know, I've got pain in my right shoulder. And then the next thing you know, I've got pain in my right hip. And then a little, a few months later, I start to get pain in my left low back, my low back area. Like, wait a second, I. I injured my ankle, now I've injured my shoulder, now I've injured my hip, and now my low back hurts. And it's because there's compensation going up, this entire kinetic chain. And one of the things that we need to do to heal the human body is we need to accelerate the process of healing. There's a compound, a peptide, called BPC157.

Which is what I've been on now with you. Yes.

This does is. Anytime there's a soft tissue injury or an injury to a ligament or tendon, when the body is injured, it sends a signal out into the bloodstream and says, hey, I'm hurt, I'm hurt, I'm hurt. These signals are called inflammation, right? They're called histamines. And what happens is your body sends healing cells to that site and it heals the site of injury. The challenge with these injuries is they take a long time to heal, and the signal is very, very weak. So a lot of times someone's ankle injury lingers, and it lingers long enough that now you have shoulder injury and you have a. You have neck pain. And the neck pain lingers long enough to now cause hip pain because the body is beginning to compensate, compensate for its different injuries. And so one of the things I really encourage people to do is bring their inflammatory cascade down. We brought inflammation way down in your body. We looked at 68 biomarkers in your blood, and then we brought your inflammation way down. And then we gave the body raw material in order to help it heal. We gave it a peptide called bpc. And then we fixed your methylation, your mthfr, because MTHFR slows the cycle of healing because it deprives the body of the raw material.5 methylfolate. And remember that this process of methylation, without getting too complicated, is kind of like a sandbag pass, right? Like a truck pulls up, one guy takes the sandbag off the truck he passes the sandbag to the next guy. He passes it to the next guy. Passes it to the next guy. So this process in the human body is sequential. And MTHFR is the first. First one in the cycle. So if you're broken at mthfr, then the entire chain is broken. Right. I mean, if the guy that's supposed to take the sandbags off the truck is supposed to take 10 sandbags off and he only takes four, well, then the best the rest of the line can do is four. And that's why DHFR is so important and so easy to fix, but it's also so important to get fixed because it supplies raw material to the entire rest of the chain.

Wow. Okay. Wow. Oh, that's that. So I've been doing BPC1. Can people. Is that something that people can get with a prescription anywhere, or is that only in certain states? Like, I. When I've mentioned BPC157 to people there, it seems to be like a little bit controversial or not. Is that something that anyone can get?

So it's. It's not. You know, the Food and Drug Administration has not evaluated it for efficiency, but, you know, but they haven't evaluated parachutes or vitamin C either. But. And we know that those work. So, but so it's. BPC is a. It's a gastric peptide. It's been proven to be very safe. The reason why that people feel that it's controversial is that most of the studies that have been done in the United States have been done on animals. The studies outside of the United States, the larger studies which have been done on human beings by major research institutions outside of the U.S. and FDA doesn't recognize any research done outside of the U.S. but I will promise you this. The Germans, the Japanese, the Australians do some of the most phenomenal research in the world. I subscribe to a lot of their journals to get information. And yes, BBC is legal in every state in America. I would not order it over the counter or off the Internet because that's nutritional grade, not pharmaceutical. And if you really are trying to heal from an injury, you want a pharmaceutical grade.

And I would also suggest that anyone. I mean, I'm not a doctor, but I'm going to suggest that anyone that before they're doing any of these, they should have their blood actually tested to know what's actually going on before just piling stuff in, no question. Okay, so I wanted to go back to when you mentioned earlier. There's three biggest things in mortality. We dove into glycemic We've touched on nutrition, but you mentioned vitamin D with nutrition. So can we, can we talk a little bit more about that? And is it enough to go out in the sun for 15 minutes a day to get it, or do you also need to take a supplement with that?

You know, it is enough to go out in the sun for 15 or 20 minutes every day. That's the best way to get vitamin D3. Think about this. The human body has hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of vitamins floating around our bloodstream right this morning. But your body is only capable of making one. A human being can only make a single vitamin on our own, and it's vitamin D3. It's called cholecalciferol. Cholecalciferol. Imagine how important that vitamin is to human function if it's the only vitamin that the human body can make on its own. Just imagine how important it is if it's the only one we can make on our own. When I was in population mortality, you could see that all of the longest life expectancies on Earth were centered right around the equator. As you go, for every 20 degrees latitude that you go away from the equator, there's a precipitous drop in life expectancy until you get to the poles where the shortest life expectancy on Earth exists. An Eskimo, a true Eskimo, when I was born in 1970, had a 57 year life expectancy. They get virtually no sunlight. So. So vitamin D3 is not only the most important single nutrient in the human body, it is the most common nutrient deficiency in the world. And there is not a single cell in the entire human body that does not have a receptor site for that vitamin. So that if I was to say what is the single most important nutrient in the human body, I would say beyond the shadow of a doubt, it's vitamin D3.

Do you think that has something to do with, like, you know when people say that they feel better in the sun or just getting outside? Do you think that's a big part of it? That, like, you're getting that vitamin D boost?

Oh, no question. It's a mood enhancer. It's a component of neurotransmitters. It's a component of our mood cascade. By the way, you know, they say that. Not. They say that if you look at the CDC's website, you will not find a single reported death from COVID with a vitamin D3 level above 34 nanograms per density, 60%. All emergency room admissions for Covid 60% were clinically deficient in vitamin D. Wow. And one of the things you hear is that, is that Covid disproportionately affected minorities. That's true. But it had nothing to do with their ethnicity and has to do with the pigment of their skin. Latino, African American, dark pigmented, Indian origin. Dark pigmented skin absorbs less sunlight. So in the Caucasian community, the deficiency in vitamin D3 runs at about 50%. In the African American community, it runs above 85% because they need longer time in the sun to absorb the same amount of sunlight. So it's. It's especially important for darker complected people to. To supplement with vitamin D3 because they're more likely to be efficient.

Wow. And I was, I was, when I tested with you, I was sure I was not, and I was deficient. And now my numbers are great. I know that since I've been working with you on this. Okay. You also mentioned hormones. So what, what do people need to know about that? Because from what I. My experience with you and me is we've had to sort of tweak this along the way. Like especially being 49, being 49 years old myself, they getting closer to menopause. It's like I feel like they shift on me a lot. That's what we're seeing on the lab work. Is that the case with everyone? Should you be testing this every three months? Like what, what's your guidance for around that?

Yes. So, you know, most of us think of hormones as they relate to mood or weight gain or weight loss or, you know, menopause is famous for hot flashes and night sweats and things like that. And testosterone is famous in men for roid rage, for male characteristics. But that's the kind of things that make headlines, right? The majority of a hormone's functions have nothing to do with any of those characteristics. In fact, the primary role of testosterone in both men and women has nothing to do with male characteristics. The primary role of the hormone testosterone is to put pressure on the bone marrow to produce healthy levels of blood. And so when, when you're low on testosterone, then you're low on pressure to the bone marrow to produce healthy red blood cells. If you're low on healthy red blood cells, you're low on energy. So let's let me walk you through this concept for a while. Every human being walking the face of this earth, everybody listening to this podcast right now, will eventually meet their demise. The same way we all die of something called hypoxia, lack of oxygen to the brain, that's the definition of death. So every human being leaves this earth the exact same way by depriving oxygen to the brain to the point where you're no longer with us. So if we all die of hypoxia, then what we want to do is we want to try to avoid hypoxia. But we tend to think of hypoxia as an event, as something that occurs, that happens to us, like the proverbial gunshot wound or a bus or a heart attack. But that's not true. Most of us are slowly sliding down this hypoxic scale, slowly creeping into the grave. Well, you can flatten that curve out by normalizing and optimizing your hormones. So the majority of people that come into our clinics come in because they say, gary, I'm low on energy. I don't have the same energy I had a few years ago. I just. I just don't feel like I have that much, much energy on the impetus to work out. And, you know, I just lack energy. And so when that happens, we. We. When that happens, we. What we're really saying is we're low on red blood cells, we're low on oxygen. So what determines whether or not those red blood cells are at their normal levels or their maximum levels are your hormones. So when your hormones are deficient, your blood is deficient in its capacity to carry oxygen, and you're tired. And when you're tired, you're not tired because you're tired. You're tired because your hormones are low, and your hormones are not doing their job to produce healthy red blood cells to carry healthy amounts of oxygen.

So what's so wild, Gary, when you just said, that is you actually said to me on our last call together, you said, when you did my most recent labs, you said, how on earth are you even, like, getting through your day and working out and doing any of this? Like, you must be so tired. And I, I was, but I kept thinking, well, I'll just. It's in my head and just push through. So. And I was. I was very low. He saw, on progesterone and testeron testosterone.

Yes, that's. And that is going to have the effect of lowering red blood cell counts in your. In your blood. And that's going to have the effect of decreasing your energy. Because when you say, gary, I have a lot of energy today, physiologically, what you're saying is, I have a lot of oxygen in my blood today. So if oxygen equals energy, which it does, then if I want to raise your energy level, I need to raise your oxygen level. And so to raise oxygen I have to balance your hormones. So if you're low on energy and you haven't had your hormones checked, I would really encourage you to check your hormones because once you do, you're going to find out the reason why you're low on energy.

And this is why it's so important. Because here I was low on energy and my thought was, oh, I need a B12 shot, you know, to help me. And that was like the worst thing I could have done because I was already high on that and low on the other thing. So this is, I'm such a fan of getting blood work. I do want to say as much as I'm talking about, we're talking about blood work, it's still so critical. And I know you agree with this, Gary, that the first line is to be eating a healthy, unprocessed, natural food diet. Because when I think there's a misconception that people are eating a heavy, processed, fast food junk diet and now they're just going to go get all their blood tests, the first thing is you should clean all that up first so you can even see what's actually going on. That's not food related.

Absolutely. No question. You and I are 100% mono. A mono on that one. You know, remember, our bodies recognize natural things. They recognize things that are called metabolites, right? So but when you put processed food or pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, when you put preservatives into the body, think about what a preservative is. For example, what is a preservative? Preservative is something that prevents, prevents the process of oxidation. Well, guess what? The process of digestion is also called oxidation. So if you prevent oxidation, you prevent digestion. And if we called preservatives what they should be called, which is an anti digestive, then nobody would take them, nobody would eat preservative laden food because they know that they can't digest it. So if you're going to eat preservative laden foods, you might as well just suck on an ice cube because you're getting no nutritional value from it and you're putting chemical compounds into the body that the body doesn't recognize. So it has no mechanism to get rid of them. So the body's a very, very intelligent machine. But when it encounters things that it doesn't recognize, things that don't occur naturally in nature, it throws, makes it go haywire. You know, we talked earlier about cyanocobalamin Cobalamin is the cobalt metal. When you put the cobalt metal into the body, it's called cobalamin. But when you detach that metal and you have a floating cyanide molecule in your blood, the body doesn't recognize cyanide. It looks at it and goes, I don't know what that is. Right. So it doesn't have a way to get rid of it.

It.

It's like heavy metals like mercury, lead, arsenic. So it doesn't have a way to get rid of it. So what happens is that cyanide molecules is a thief. It'll grab oxygen, it'll grab light metals, and it will leave the blood with valuable metals.

Okay, I do have another question that I can't, like, let you go without answering because this is like my own thing right now that's driving me crazy. So, as you know, I had Covid, my husband had Covid, my daughter had Covid. And it was not. I'm not recommending it for anyone. It was not amazing, and you helped me through a lot of that. But now that I have the antibodies and I actually have natural immunity, I'm personally triggered by this whole, I'm not anti vax at all. I have no anti vax in me. But why this push to get vaccinated even if you have the COVID antibodies? Can you help me with that? And should people be doing that? Am I dumb not to like, to me, it doesn't make sense. So can you help with that?

Yeah. So. So, you know, this is, you know, a political hot potato. So I'm going to be. But. And I'll put a little disclaimer out there before I even tell you my opinion. I am not a physician. I'm not licensed to practice medicine. You should always go and get advice from your physician rather than take advice from a human biologist. However, I have done an inordinate amount of research in my lifetime, and I've dedicated my entire adult lifetime to the research of the human body. And part of that research was centered around immunity and the immune response that's created when we are attacked by a viral pathogen. So in other words, when the human body is stressed, it generally improves its function. Let me be specific. If you don't load your bones, they will not strengthen. If you don't tear your muscles, they will not grow. If you don't challenge your immune system, it will weaken. So the more social distancing, masking, residential quarantining we do, the more distance we create, the less effective our immune system becomes. Now, if you've caught Covid and you're on the other side of it and you now have the antibodies. You have what's called a broad immune response. So your immune system has created antibodies that have a very, very broad, broad line of defense. If you get the vaccination, you create a very narrow line of defense. Now, a narrow line of defense is better than no defense. So I am not anti vaccine. I'm only anti vaccine for people that have, that are healthy, that have a healthy immune system or have gotten the COVID virus and have already created an antibody response.

Could it be dangerous? Gary, if you had, if like someone had Covid and has the anti antibodies, could. And they got the vaccine on top of it, is that, what would that create? Could that be dangerous?

Yes, that could be dangerous. You could develop the COVID infection. Remember, the vaccine is not designed to prevent the infection and it's not designed to prevent the spread. It's designed to prevent the symptoms. It's designed to lessen the symptoms. So what the vaccine does is it reduces the symptoms that you have in response to be infected. It does not prevent you from being infected. It does not prevent you from spreading the disease. If you're immunocompromised, if you haven't had Covid, if you travel a lot, if you are morbidly obese, diabetic elderly, then you should get the vaccine. But if you are a healthy adult that has already survived the COVID virus, I don't see a scientific mechanism to improve your response by getting the vaccine. I just don't see that. And the CDC publishes survival rates. The current survival rate for Covid is 99.997%. It's better than the flu.

Yeah.

Covid infects more people than influenza, but it is significantly less deadly than influenza. It is significantly less deadly than influenza. It infects more people, but it kills fewer.

Yeah, and like I said, it's not fun to get. I don't recommend getting it, but I just, I have this block about, like, getting a vaccine after I already have the immunity to it.

I know exactly what you're saying.

Yeah, this was awesome, Gary. I have to have you back because, like, this was so good. Thank you so much for doing this today. Thank you so much.

Welcome. Love to be back on, you know, anytime. I mean, I enjoyed getting to know you as a patient and, you know, I've enjoyed getting to know you professionally, personally, and I would love to work with, you know, your, your podcast listeners and I'd love to be back on again. We can get more specific into fat loss, nutrition. Yeah, you know, whatever you'd like.

Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed that episode with Gary as much as I enjoyed interviewing him. I always just love going so deep with him and I cannot wait to bring him back and do more with him and go to into some deeper topics. Now if you are starting at level one and you are still at a point where I've got to learn to even eat for fat loss, I've got to clean things up, I've got to start losing the fat, get to a healthy weight, start getting my energy and focus up, then I'm going to highly encourage you to jump on to the free virtual training workshop I am doing this whole week here. All you have to do is go to NatalieJillClass.com that's NatalieJillClass.com and we'll be doing this this whole week on how to get and stay motivated, how to dive into nutrition as we age and then on movement and your body and even with the pain happening, how to prevent and even reverse some of that. Can't wait to see you there. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to listen in as my guest today. If you found this episode valuable, please share it with friends and on social media media. I don't advertise this show so I rely on word of mouth and reviews to get it out in the world. The biggest thank you that you can give me is leaving me a review and a nice one. I hope. By the way, this is how others find these episodes. If you do leave me a review, be sure to message me@supportnataliejill fitness.com with a screenshot of your review because I would love to send you a free digital download of my DSR journal as a thank you. And please don't forget to connect with me on social media at Natalie Jill Fit on Instagram and Facebook.