The #1 Biohack That Actually Works for Everyone (But No One Is Doing It Right)

Listening to this podcast, you're probably trying something. Red light therapy, peptides, cold plunge supplements. And here's what's maddening about all that. Some of it works, some of it does not. Now your friend lost 15 pounds on the same protocol that made you gain weight and she's glowing from red light while maybe you're seeing zero results after many months and you have no idea why your body won't cooperate and you're starting to think you're broken. But here's the plot twist. There is one biohack that seems to work for everyone. It doesn't matter if you're a fast responder, a slow detoxer, inflamed, depleted, in perimenopause, or even postmenopausal, this one keeps coming up and it's hydrogen, molecular hydrogen. And the bigger issue is most women trying it are barely scratching the surface. They bought the bottle, they drink the water, they assume they're doing the right thing, but they are often not getting anywhere near the dose that you actually need to get results. So today we're gonna talk about all the biohacks, but more importantly, we are following one thread through this whole conversation and that's gonna be hydrogen because I wanna get into why that one matters, why this keeps showing up underneath everything else, and why dosing might be the reason why— Why? Why some are not feeling a massive shift. And also, it might be the reason why some of your other biohacks are not working as well. Today's guest is Kash Khan. I call him my guru, my health guru. He's the founder of The DNA Company, but he is so knowledgeable when it comes to all of these different biohacks. He is my go-to that I will message and say, what's the real scoop on this? What do I need to know about this? He personally healed himself from multiple chronic diseases using functional genetics, and he's here to help us connect the dots between personalization, mitochondria, inflammation, hydrogen, and what is wrong in the biohacking space. Hello. Thanks so much for being here, Kash.

Awesome. Pleasure. It's gonna be fun.

I always learn so much from you. I've made you my guru all of a sudden. You're— you are the one that you probably regret giving me your phone number because now I'm gonna ask you any and everything that I hear of that's new or fascinating. But I wanna sort of back up because before you were this guru and you were such an expert with all these health things, you went through your own chronic disease. Can you just give a little backstory for people that don't know you on what that was?

Yeah, and the story is not so uncommon when you talk to people that are in that functional health space, mean like root cause medicine, system-based medicine. It's usually because they were forced, because whatever else exists out there in our sick care system didn't work for them, right? So going to the doctor was like diagnose and prescribe and that's it, and I want to know more and I can't get the more. That's what happened to me. Is I was actually running a business where we help technology startups grow. So when we were doing a really good job of whatever they needed that they didn't know that they needed, there were startups, you know, and we were sort of more mature, we helped them. I got sick in that time. So I got eczema so bad that I couldn't even open my left eye. It was like sealed shut from inflammation. I had psoriasis. So eczema is inflammation, psoriasis is autoimmunity. So I had both inflammation and autoimmunity, gut issues. Yeah. There was depression days where I just didn't want to do anything. It didn't make sense to be active. And then the things that actually sent me to the doctor were, I would say, the reflux and the migraines. So inability to eat and the migraines were completely debilitating. So I didn't know what doctors did until I needed one. And the answers I got were diagnose and prescribe. But I was asking, I've never been sick. And then all this stuff is happening all at once. This is not a coincidence. Right. So what did I do? And being sort of a problem solver, which is what I did in the tech world, I tried to analyze like, this doesn't make sense. So I started to dig into traditional Chinese medicine, homeopathy, naturopathy, functional medicine, eventually genetics. And I saw that there were modalities where you could ask why instead of what. Like, what would be cancer? Why is like, where, why caused the cancer? And I healed myself. And I healed my mom and I started healing friends and that turned into a research company and a major sense of purpose for me. And I just don't stop learning. That's what I do all day.

You know, when you were going through all that, what do you think triggered in your brain to go, I've got to figure this out. I'm going to go deeper versus what a lot of people do and they just start piling on the medications and they just accept it.

It didn't make sense to me that all this stuff happened at the same time, right? Within months of each other. And Even when I was a kid, I remember an uncle or an aunt telling me to take some Tylenol for a headache. And my question was, but why do I have the headache?

Yeah.

Or why are you telling me to mask the pain? Like, can't we figure out why I got a headache? Because I didn't have it yesterday. What did I do? And that thinking has always been with me. I think I grew up in a family where my father was very much into herbs and teas, and I learned from him, right? I used to have severe allergies when I was young to the point where my earlobe would disconnect from my head from the dryness.

Oh wow.

And yeah, and so medicine, creams, and my dad was like, "Nope, this doesn't make sense." He took me to a traditional Chinese herbalist who told me that I had kidney and liver issues, and 2 months of drinking a bunch of tea cocktails, and I've never had allergies since.

So you had like the, you had this engineer brain, but you had the dad, you had that in your lineage that was doing a little bit of the, "Let's help fix you on our own." Yeah, which always made me ask questions.

Right? And that's what I do.

That's awesome. For someone that is hearing this for the first time or hearing you for the first time, can you explain what functional genomics means in English? Like, what does that mean?

It's, yeah, it's the same difference between— so medicine is diagnose and prescribe. Here's your disease, here's the pill, good luck. Functional medicine is why, why are you sick? What did you do? Something caused this, mold, chemicals, stress, right? It's the same difference between genetics and functional genomics. Genetics is This gene means you're getting breast cancer, but we're not going to tell you why. Functional genomics is let's look at the several combination of biological pathways from your hormones to your detox pathways to your neurochemicals and your stress that come together to show us why. So pathways and systems, your everyday biology, every day your metabolism is on, every day your hormones are on, every day your neurochemicals are on. Those systems, the way we operate, are different.

Yeah.

And so, it's especially reading your own Human Design and understanding your everyday priority systems. What do they look like? What's broken?

Yeah. You taught me— we had talked about this that I was wondering why certain things that we're going to go through today were affecting me really bizarrely. For example, I'm told we're here, if you have an MTHFR gene, you have to take methylated B vitamins, which isn't necessarily true. It depends on what your version of MTHFR and do you have a slow COMT? There's all these extra things. And, if you take generic advice without understanding your full DNA, you could actually have completely different reactions to things that other people respond well.

Yeah, the exact thing that might help one person can actually hurt somebody else. And we think that these things that are nutrients are harmless, right? Oh, if I take too much vitamin D, I'll just pee it out, which is partially true. But when— here's the, the myth is that when you add something to your body, that's now what's in your body. The truth is when you add something to your body, there's genes that recognize it and convert it into other stuff. And that conversion, we're doing different things, right? And so this is where, you know, something as simple as glutathione— everybody wants to take glutathione, good for your skin, it's an antioxidant, it's the main master antioxidant of the body to detox you and keep you healthy— well, there's a single gene pathway that determines how effectively your body knows how to use it. And if that gene is missing, literally missing for some people— It's minus.

Yeah.

Yeah. Then you add this tool into your body and you start to feel fatigue and brain fog and lack of motivation, and that all feels like mood issues. You put— you throw a pill at it. But really what it is, is if you don't have the genetic instruction telling the glutathione what to do, yes, it may neutralize some toxins, but it's also going to pull minerals and nutrients and vitamins out of your body because it's not being discriminate. There's no instruction. So one simple thing One little monkey wrench can change how you feel. Now imagine everything you do all day.

Yeah.

I'm gonna be a vegan. Here's how I sleep. Here's the hormones I take. Every single one of those things can be personalized.

I have so many things I'm gonna ask you about, from red light to more DNA to peptides. But before I even do that, I just, and we're gonna get more into hydrogen later, but I just wanted you to just give a little idea of, I know we're gonna come back to hydrogen, but why hydrogen became so important to you.

So in this work, I built a genetic research company. I'm so enthusiastic about my results and my family that I started to fund the research. I didn't even know why. I just was saying that there's something here, right? That turned into a genetic testing company, and that turned into thousands of people saying, okay, I finally understand what my body's doing. And that also turned into clinics sending us their most complex patients that they can't figure out. And we did the tech detective work— Lyme disease, stage 4 cancer, Parkinson's— like, we would figure out what got them there, right? Um, and that led to while we have these highly complex sensitive clients, most of them can't handle most of what they need. Their body is just not in that place. So I had to investigate all the tools and all that's out there to figure out what to recommend for our own clients, our own patients, right? So I would say we have likely the largest, fastest growing functional medicine clinic in the country. You know, we're not a, a name that's out there flashing ourselves, but in terms of volume of people, we're probably the biggest. Right? And so, that volume of complex patients, I have to look for what works for everybody. What's safe? What is going to give you the outcome without hurting you, without creating a Herxheimer's response, without giving you a headache? And that kept pointing me back to hydrogen.

Okay. We're going to get more into that a little bit later. I want to go through sort of the standard ones that everyone is hearing about and gravitating towards first. And I want you to be just like really honest with me and tell, you know, say like this is gimmick or this is something. And I want to start with red light. I've done many episodes on red light. I use red light. I have learned from my DNA. I didn't even tell you this, Kath. I have a bunch of red light panels at my house. And, I was getting in this habit of— you can do a setting like 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 20, but I would turn it on, I would journal in the morning, and I would leave it on. So, I was sitting in there 40 minutes, 45 minutes, 50, and I couldn't understand why I would then get this wired feeling after. And, it finally hit me the same reason the glutathione and the methylated B, it's too much. So, I want to understand red light more. Is it gimmick? Is it true? What do we need to know?

Very, very true. So if I were to break it down into simple terms, here's the key things that red light does. Your cells go through what's called a Krebs cycle, which is how you produce energy. So oxygen and nutrition come in to make energy. Usually your body's using nitric oxide. So when red light— it's one of the very few things that can actually penetrate the cell membranes and get deep inside to the mitochondria, right? And so it kicks the nitric oxide out. Which allows oxygen in. And oxygen has 18 times the energy production value of the nitric oxide. So imagine you just turned your cellular energy production capacity times 18.

Wow.

Right, right. That's what one thing— and this is why people feel like they recover faster, their brain is more energized. That's why you were wired, right? Because you overloaded yourself with, uh, energy. Now you have all this excess energy, and red light also creates the ATP, the battery to store the energy. So not only have you made more, but you also can retain it for future use. So the next day and the day after, you actually feel a little bit of resilience, right? And this is again why pro athletes use it so much. So that's one big thing it does. The other really cool thing it does is repair. So there was a famous study that was done at Stanford, Dr. Nur Kibbe, and she was looking at— there's all these claims around hair growth and scar tissue and skin quality and like, what's the science here, right? So she studied it and she did find that, in fact, when you use red light on scar tissue, it heals at 2 to 3 times the speed, right? And so she's like, okay, now what's the actual mechanism? And she realized that nitric oxide getting kicked out leads to better blood flow. The same thing I said, it— better energy production. But where did the nitric oxide go? It got kicked out to increase blood flow, which means better nutrient delivery and better debris removal, which means the scar heals faster, right? Then you dig in deeper and you realize there's more to that tissue healing. Red light also induces a system called phagocytosis, which is the— essentially, if you wanna go renovate something, you don't put a kitchen on top of a kitchen. You gotta get rid of the old kitchen first, right? Which there's cellular debris, there's cellular senescence, there's dead cells in your body that need to get removed. Every 8 years that you're alive, the volume of senescent cells double. And so that cellular junk is clouding your replenishment, your recovery, your rejuvenation. Mm-hmm. So phagocytosis is the removal. Red light increases the capacity.

Phagocytosis, I'd never heard. Is that what urolithin A is doing essentially when you take something like that?

So urolithin A is supporting the mitochondria and the mitochondrial function was that as an outcome, you'll do a better job of phagocytosis. There's more energy, right? But this is an actual job that happens in your body. Removal of dead senescent cells and cellular debris.

Phagocytosis.

Okay.

And that's what like the Senolytics would do that too. I know you had told me about that originally. Okay.

That's part of the catabolic process, getting rid of the senescent cells.

Okay.

Now, step 1 of 3 steps. Now, you got rid of the debris. Now, you need to rebuild and repair tissue. So, before you do the rebuild, you need scaffolding. And, that scaffolding is called a fibroblast. So, the fibroblast is now the pieces that the new tissue is built onto. Once you have the scaffolding in place, you then need the actual raw materials, the soft tissue, the collagen, the tendon, the ligament, the stuff that's hard to build. So all 3 of those steps, the phagocytosis, the fibroblast production, and the soft tissue production all get hyper-accelerated when your body gets red light. And that's why this scar tissue heals. That's why the hair grows back. That's why the skin looks youthful. Because you're hyper-pushing these, these processes to an extreme. Now I can talk about red light for an hour straight.

I'm just giving you a couple of things. Yeah, I do have a, I wanna get a couple clarifying questions. I know this could be a whole its own topic here, but when it comes to red light though, you can overdo it. Like I found out myself with that. How do you know, like, if you can overdo it? Is there a certain amount of time? And how do we even know? I have 5 different brands here, 4 different brands here. How do we know?

So, I would say the big failure of the red light industry is not personalizing who's using it for what purpose. There's a huge difference between I'm trying to have better skin versus I have chronic pain versus I need my immune system modulated and I have cancer versus I have a thyroid issue. Red light will help with all of those things. But the way you use it, the hertz rate, the pulsing, which most of these devices don't even do, the pulsing light. Second, the percentage of intensity, the wattage, right, the actual nanometer. So all of that customization, you're now solving specific problems. How deep is it going into the tissue? Which job is it triggering? So the phagocytosis, for example, doesn't always get triggered. You have to have the right dose at the right percentage with the right hertz. So I actually spent a lot of time doing this and I wrote like a little red light Bible for myself, which all the settings and all the— and so we actually make a red light machine that we supply to clinics and I give it that to them because I say, don't just turn it on and leave people there. You got to know why they're there and set it to the right adjustments. And again, going through that would take a lot of time, but there are very specific settings for very specific problems.

And then that's what I'm assuming why. And then you would say all red lights are not created equal, like just buying one on Amazon is probably not the best. Idea, I would assume.

Yeah. The wavelengths matter, like 660, 850 is a great combination, right? If you want to go, and I would say a lot of these machines that claim they have so many different wavelengths, I don't think that's a good idea because now you have not enough of each. You have all these bulbs, right? You're not getting the dose of the therapeutic wavelength. So wavelength matters. Wattage matters. A lot of these Amazon-type devices have, you know, 100, 150 watts when you really need like 600, 700, 800 to get the intensity Pulsing matters. That's the thing that I think most red light machines fail on, which is you can't adjust the pulse rate. Pulse is like hertz, a sound wave-based—

So, it literally goes on like you see it going on and off or it's just— okay.

Depending on the hertz rate. So, it goes from 0 to 999. 10 might be like boom, boom. And, 999 is so fast you can't even see it.

Got it.

But, those all do different things in terms of your body.

And then, I've also learned that— like I started using a separate face one because when you're actually doing it for skin, it should be contouring. You can't be sitting several feet in front of it.

Yeah, getting close matters. So, for example, one thing I'll do is if I feel like I went through a toxic burden, like a flight or like a golf course, I'll actually sit with my back right up against the red light to get my kidney and liver support.

Got it.

A foot away doesn't do it.

Makes sense.

Okay.

Yeah. Okay. So, okay, let's talk about— this is another really big topic lately. Obviously, I don't think you can scroll social without seeing it. It feels like there's a peptide for fricking everything now. And this is— I'm not against peptides, I just think it's very confusing. And I think that women need to be aware of what's like real, what's hype, what's made up. Can you help us break this down? Like what's— what do you love or not love about peptides?

Well, everything you hear is true. All the magic and all the bad news, both are true. So, and the problem is what they do, it's true. They are signals that already exist in your body. That you can just crank the volume to high and now that job is happening at a maximum. You might have a signal of go build muscle, go build bone, go make more testosterone. Those are all signals that already exist and the peptide treatment allows you to amplify the signal, right? Now, all the other stuff of this causes cancer, this will give you a headache, this way— those are also true, right?

Okay.

This is why you dosing, protocoling, stacking with experience is the game changer. The peptide itself, you'll hear, here's a peptide for recovery, here's another peptide for recovery, here's another peptide. Which one do I use? They all are for recovery, right? And if you dig into the science, there's— recovery isn't what they do. There's very specific pathways they manipulate, very specific jobs they're doing where the net result is I feel like I recovered. But what got you there? Did it create more capillaries with more blood flow? Did it create more tissue repair? Did it create more of the scaffolding? Like there's different jobs that lead to recovery. So you need to know what job you're trying to actually implement. So I would say the biggest failure is the industry has been pushed by bro science, right? The fitness and gym industry. Those guys experiment on themselves. They know what they're doing. They go by feel. Great. But then they take their stuff and say, here's a big menu of peptides, go test them out. Right. And what you really need to do is stack and protocol properly. Now, if you do that, there is phenomenal magic in peptides. If you know, here's the thing, 5 things I need. What order do I do them in? How many days for this? What dosage for this? When do I cycle on? When do I cycle off? A stack. And if you do it properly, it should look like a 12-week program. And if you do that properly— so let me give you a simple example. If you're taking some anti-aging peptide, maybe I'm going to take some NAD. Everyone's taking NAD, right? Okay. Is it doing its job? Yes. But how did you know that was the first job you needed to do? —so anti-aging starts with removing the cellular debris. You don't start going increasing capacity of the cell if there's still junk and debris choking it, right? So step 1 is removal. So there's, for example, the FOXO4 peptide, which unlocks apoptosis, like cellular death. So first, let's get rid of the stuff you need to kill, right? Then you go in and say, I still don't want to induce all these jobs, like make more testosterone, build bone, because the cell has degraded over time, the quality of the membrane, it's like rusty. Let's first repair the cell, right? And then there's other peptides that will do that. Then once the cell is repaired, now you can give it the NAD and the more energy because now it's capable as a hardware, it's capable of actually delivering that volume of energy. You don't want to energize something where the physical structure can't tolerate that volume of energy. Then once it's energized, now you can start inducing the jobs, build muscle, build bone, recover faster, etc. Then you can get into the anti-aging of like growth hormone and, you know, DNA repair. And so there's steps.

So if you don't follow steps, so let's just say you were to do some of those things, but you didn't follow the steps. So you're just jumping in. Oh, I— there's an anti-aging one or a skin glow one or whatever, but you haven't done those other steps. Is that where the problems start going?

That's where there's— it's not that it's not going to work. It's not going to work as well as you think it should have. Right. So give me less return on investment. It may not be sustainable because there's other interferences. Like, like if you're— if again, doing a renovation, you could build this beautiful kitchen, but if you didn't get the plumbing and electrical right, it's going to fall apart after a couple months, right? Like if you didn't build the plumbing to absorb all this new taps and all the new— where's it all going, right? So anything, any job you alter in your body, there's an upstream and a downstream. So what are those chain— what does the full chain look like? So add some GHKCU, yes, your skin is going to start looking better. Right. Will it always work and always be beneficial? Why are people saying taking too much BPC-157 can cause cancer? Both sides of the argument are true, right? If you only do that, it didn't also energize the cell, improve your immune system. So it sounds overwhelming and it can be, right? And I would say it does come back to simplicity with somebody that is experienced. It doesn't take much to get it right, but it's very easy to get it wrong if you don't have—

So the cancer conversation around it, and is this just Natalie's logic or is this what it is? To me, I'm thinking if these things are signals and they're helping grow things, so grow, repair, grow tissue, grow new, whatever it is. To me, if you have underlying cancer stuff happening, it would also grow that. Is that where the cancer conversation comes from with this?

That's one of the reasons. Yeah. For example, Tesamorelin, which is people use it to burn visceral fat. There's studies that say the fat on your organs, use Tesamorelin for a month and you'll have a 20% reduction. So, it's an incredible tool, right? It specifically targets belly fat and organ fat. But we also know if you have active cancer, you should never touch it, right? It's going to cause the cancer to proliferate and make you very sick. We also know that BPC-157 improves recovery in muscle tissue. I just use it, by the way. I had an injury in my forearm from doing a pec fly and my arm went like, whoop, and that caused a tear 6 months ago. For a month I did some red light, felt better. Then I did it again and it got worse. Hmm. I doubled down on the injury, right? So I went for some chiro treatment, whatever. Nothing worked. 6 months of pain. I did 4 days of BPC-157 and TB-500, and on the 4th day, I couldn't feel the pain.

Wow.

Yeah, that is incredible, right? Now, what did the BPC do? It created blood flow, new capillaries, new veins. But that also fuels cancer cell growth, right? The same thing that fuels this muscle tissue repair, like rapid cell of production. Also, cancer is a rapid cell or a rapid proliferating cell, right? So, does it cause cancer? If you do it wrong.

Yeah, it just scares me. So, I'm like the peptide conversation and I thought— because I know— and I've definitely used BPC-157. I used it after surgery. I've used it for repairs. I know Brooks used it with his shoulder, injuring his shoulder and his hand. So, I do understand using it and I do understand cycling things like that. My concern is that there's so many things that can go wrong and that's why I just— it concerns me when someone sees somebody on social media just posting about it and now they go order it on their own from a research lab. You don't know your full story and I feel like you could be playing with fire there.

Yeah. If you get it right, it is an incredible thing to do. It's very easy to not get it right. Just make sure you have guidance from someone who really knows what they're doing, a functional medicine doctor who's used it in clinical practice on complex patients.

So, not just a random person on Instagram saying they used it basically because that's the concern. I think what people see, somebody they've been following is all of a sudden talking about all their peptides and they're just like, "Oh, let me order all those too." Yeah.

So, that random person on Instagram will tell you what went right and they're correct, but they've never dealt with somebody where it went wrong. They never dealt with complex stuff. They don't have patients. They have clients, right?

So, the GHQCU, that's the copper peptide, that's for skin. That has been like the most intriguing to me like, and I have not used it yet at all, but that you could do topical or an injection. Can things go wrong with that one too?

Yeah, I would say that the research-only product, a lot of people are getting sort of welt bruising pain, right? And so now they end up diluting it with more bacteriostatic water. And, you know, I have— go into conspiracy theory territory, whatever you want to call it. Everything that's good unfortunately gets taken over by people that are bad.

Yeah.

Right. Best organic food brand all of a sudden gets bought by Nestlé and it's not the same anymore. Right. I kind of see this happening with peptides where the answer to, oh, GHK-CU causes you pain, dilute it with more backwater. Bacteriostatic water is a neurotoxin, right? It's not something you're supposed to be injecting in high volume every day. Right. And so if anyone here wants to use GHK-CU, I would suggest using a pen. The pens don't use the— they're more expensive for sure, but you're going to have— you won't have the pain, you won't have the side effects. It's going to give you a slightly better outcome. And you avoid all that excess backwater, right? So there's things like that that are just— it's coming up now that there's so much use where we know what the things are we need to look out for.

So when they do it topical, is that doing anything when you're putting it in your skincare stuff? Like there's a lot of—

No, it's working. Yeah, if you take like, you know, 30 mL of hyaluronic acid and you mix like a couple vials of GHK-CU in there, it will last you a good month and you will see change.

Really? What do you see change?

You'll see skin is glowing, micro wrinkles are gone. You'll see the pores look different. You'll see even color and sort of tone look different, right? Yeah, I would suggest the first time you do it, you microneedle and then just daily topical, maybe a couple of times in the month microneedle and then just the, but the daily topical still work.

Why are so many Western medicine doctors and like, I guess, so against peptides?

It's the script. It's like if you had a perfect peptide regimen, there's no reason for you ever need pills. Right. And the other challenge is the branded peptides like Ozempic and trizeptide, which is Mounjaro, you can now buy them off brand. And that's the first example, retatrutride, which is way beyond Ozempic in terms of what it does. You can buy it for a couple hundred dollars as opposed to your $1,000, $1,500 a month Ozempic. Prescription through your insurance. And so for a fraction of the price, you get a better product in a many-hundred-billion-dollar industry, right? That is a serious threat. That is a very serious threat.

Wow. Okay. I want to talk about the GLPs for a minute because that's like the peptide that has the most press. And there's 3 different types we hear about: semaglutide, tirzepatide, and then retutuartide, which is the GLP-3. Aside from the weight loss conversation, the obesity conversation, because that's not the conversation I wanted to have about it right now. Like, I'm not— I don't think anyone's disputing that that helps for that. You're a big fan of doing small amounts for inflammation or for other things. Can you just— and you even have talked about it for heart health, for reversing. Can you just speak into that some?

And this is what I meant by having the experience to know how to stack and protocol. Most of these peptides, we know them to do one thing. Here's your recovery, here's your weight loss, but they usually do other things too. Right. And, and the other things don't get spoken of that much. So for example, we were having a conversation about trizeptide, right? Which trizeptide is a GLP-2, and that one is obviously sold as a weight loss drug. It curbs your appetite, induces satiety, ramps up metabolic health to some degree. But we know that in a microdose, it actually breaks down arterial plaque.

Hmm.

And, and the answer from the doctor is there's nothing you can do about arterial plaque, but that's not true. There are things you can do, including microdosing, you know, the standard dose is like 10 to 15 milligrams. If you go to like 1.5, which is a tiny dose, it will get you there over time. We've seen it. And I've done this work with cardiologists, right?

So, so, so hold on a second. So like when you look at tirzepatide, for example, the starting weight loss dose is 2.5 milligrams, I believe, right? So you're saying at almost half of that, you could—

Half of that. Okay. Yeah, they're starting at 2. They're trying to get you up to like 5 or 10.

Can you even do lower? Like, can— because some people do tiny, tiny amounts, like, like really small, like 0.75, or could would that also help with the heart stuff?

Yeah, it will help. The tiny— the smaller dose will help. The smaller frequent dosing will help.

And why does that work with, with reversing plaque?

So a single peptide doesn't have a single signal, right? We believe that this is a weight loss signal, but it does other things. It literally helps the body. So your body uses nutrients to— so two layers. Plaque is oxidized cholesterol, right? So your body was using cholesterol to fight inflammation. And when the cholesterol got in, it got exposed to the toxin that caused the inflammation. It turned into plaque. It gets calcified. It gets damaged, right? So what we're saying is we know it's a cholesterol molecule. We know that it's oxidized. We know that healing the inflammation in the tissue prevents the need for cholesterol. And we know that the antioxidative effect allows the cholesterol to be cleared, right? So it's like reducing the inflammation— inducing, I should say, antioxidation. And also upregulating the nutrients that break down plaque. For example, we know that vitamin K2 breaks down plaque, right? So it's a combination of things.

Okay. One, not to get too off topic here, but I want to— it's a good time to ask you about this. We've had many talks about cholesterol medication and statins, which you're not a fan of for pretty much anyone. And you had mentioned— can you just speak a little bit into why you believe cholesterol is protective and why the better route would be addressing it with something like tirzepatide? Something else to reduce the plaque.

So only 11% of your cholesterol score has to do with food or fat or anything of that nature. 89% has to do with inflammation. So if anyone has a cholesterol issue, it's not I don't exercise, I don't eat properly. It's like, why are you so inflamed? And which part of your body is inflamed? And why would you have inflammation? Your toxic burden, your hormones, your stress and your cortisol, your food and your metabolic dysfunction. Your leaky gut. These are root causes.

And then genetics too. I know you've said it plays a role too.

Huge role. Yeah. In terms of which one of those buckets I mentioned is the priority, right? So now all of a sudden you have inflammation. If you have an organ that's inflamed, your body knows that's a major red flag priority. So it tries to repair it. And how does it repair it? It uses cholesterol. Cholesterol is the primary anti-inflammatory molecule for major inflammation on organs. But our anti-inflammatory system which we inherited for many tens of thousands of years of ancestry, didn't know that we would be getting inflammation from toxins. The assumption is if you have inflammation, you got injured.

Mm-hmm.

That's the only reason you should have had inflammation. You got injured, right? Now, when the cholesterol molecule reached the site of inflammation, it did not anticipate that it would come in contact with a toxin. It wasn't supposed to. So it's not designed to tolerate oxidation and a toxin. And so the cholesterol molecule gets damaged. And now the cholesterol transport system the ApoE gene doesn't recognize that damaged cholesterol molecule anymore, just leaves it there. And that's how the fatty liver and the fatty kidney and the cholesterol and plaque and the amyloid plaque in the brain— Alzheimer's— these diseases are all plaque and cholesterol formation. So it is trying to do a job that's highly beneficial, fight inflammation. If you have a toxic burden, then the cholesterol gets oxidized. So do you have too much cholesterol? No, you have too much inflammation, which is why your cholesterol is high. So let's fix the inflammation. As opposed to suppressing the thing your body is trying to use to fight the inflammation.

Because if you do just the statin— I want to follow the logic here. So if you do this, the statin, you might get the cholesterol down, but now you don't have the protection.

You just shut the protection off, right? And you didn't get rid of what's causing the inflammation, so that organ's gonna fail.

Wow.

Right? And now what happens when you shut down your cholesterol? Cholesterol is the primary ingredient for hormone production. It's— this is why men lose their libido and they lose their vigor and they have no motivation anymore. It's— why is the statin prescription and Alzheimer's prescriptions right in line? Because your brain is a ball of cholesterol. And if you start suppressing it, what happens to your brain health?

So, if I'm hearing you correct, it's not that the cardiologists and the doctors prescribing statins are wrong in their thinking that, yes, it's true that LDL oxidative stress, all of that does cause problems with heart disease. So, that— you're not disputing that. You're saying, yes, that's a thing. What you're saying though is if we just attack that number and we're like, oh, let's just get the cholesterol down. How are we addressing this other problem? So, the better route, it's not about not lowering your cholesterol. You're not saying that at all. You're saying, "Let's figure out what's causing that inflammation." And, it's not just food because we always go to food. It's not just food. It's not just exercise. We have to actually go in and figure that piece out and then the cholesterol will naturally go down. So, you're still wanting it to go down, you're just going about it a different way. Did I get that right?

It is true. That the primary ingredient to form the plaque is cholesterol, which is why doctors don't like it. That's true. And you don't want the plaque because that's where you literally can die, right? The solution isn't stop producing the ingredient. The solution is why is your body producing the ingredient? Because you have inflammation. Let's get rid of the inflammation. But if you get rid of inflammation, the entire medical system doesn't exist, right?

And getting inflammation is a whole chase in its own thing. So like, that's something I've been chasing forever. Like, it's like you can, you can start cleaning up the bucket. But depending on genetics, I mean, there's just— there's so many things.

Yeah.

There's so many things. Okay. So, okay. So, I think now's a good time to sort of get into hydrogen here because I feel like— and I'll have a lot more questions here, but let's talk about hydrogen because I feel like hydrogen is actually a solution to a lot of these things. And when I first learned about hydrogen, I instantly was the one using the tablets and then the bottles. And you were like, "You're wasting your time. You need to do the hydrogen breathing," which I do every single day now for at least an hour. So, let's Let's talk about hydrogen. What is that? Why does this help so much?

So the really cool thing about it, it's first of all, what is it? It's an antioxidant, right? It's a highly discretionary antioxidant. It knows what is problematic and it knows what's good. And this is one of the challenges with antioxidants is when you add them, for example, like somebody will say, hey, take a binder, but make sure you take it away from your food because it's also going to bind what's in your food. Hey, here's some glutathione, but you might feel fatigued because of the minerals being depleted, right? So hydrogen is a core, discriminant, intelligent molecule that knows how to target exactly what is bad and leave alone exactly what is good, right? So it does that. Now, it is the smallest molecule in the universe, literally. So it is the only molecule that is smaller than any membrane, any barrier in your body, that it can't— there's nothing that can block it. So why does that matter? Because sometimes you store toxins in your fat. Sometimes you need mitochondrial support, which means getting— crossing the mitochondrial membrane. Sometimes your brain needs support, which means crossing the blood-brain barrier. And a lot of the tools you take can't get to those locations, right? Have you ever heard of how to detoxify your fat? No. How do you do that, right? There's not enough blood flow. So because hydrogen is the smallest molecule in the universe, it goes everywhere. Nothing can block it in your body. So it goes and cleans up areas that have never been touched because it's so intelligent. It only targets what's bad. And the other layer to his intelligence, it also knows exactly which location your body has the highest level of inflammation that needs the support first. And then it goes to this sort of hierarchy of inflammation where it starts in one area, and when that area is resolved, it then goes to the next area. Mm-hmm. And the next. And once everything is resolved, it turns from a solution to pain to an anti-aging molecule. So instead of fixing things, once there's nothing left to fix, it now starts improving things, starts increasing cellular energy, detoxification, your immune system. It's really cool in terms of like, like I said, just like what red light— I can talk about hydrogen for an hour straight and I wouldn't—

Right.

But it's one of the few things now here, just in a nutshell, to really open people's eyes. Whenever you look at clinical studies, there's usually a thing for a thing. Here's a study around an Alzheimer's tool. Here's a study around a fibromyalgia tool. And that's what the tool is for, right? This tool is for breast cancer. This tool is for brain fog. And there's a study. Great. Hydrogen is one of the few things you can look up that there is a study for everything. Name it. Cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cardiovascular disease, kidney, liver health, fibromyalgia. You know, hormone dysregulation, thyroid health. It, it doesn't make sense because what does this thing do? Is it a thyroid tool? Is it like— it's not any of those. It goes back to the thing I said earlier. You cannot have a chronic disease without inflammation and autoimmunity. Either you need one of these two, right? Otherwise the disease doesn't exist.

Mm-hmm.

What hydrogen does is eliminates both of these things, inflammation and autoimmunity. So if these things are gone, you can't have the disease. That's why there's a public study peer-reviewed on— you name a disease, you'll find it.

So, when you do a hydrogen tablet or hydrogen bottle, is that doing anything?

So, it's not doing nothing, it's just not enough. So, here, this happens in every biohack where there's a really cool new piece of science and it's real and it's true, but it's also potentially expensive, right? And so, the marketing gurus come out and say, we can take all this information around hydrogen because it's still the same molecule in the pill, and we can wrap all that messaging around this, you know, consumer price level product, and we can sell a lot of it. And that's true. So the, the science and research is based on a heavy dose, right? It's based on getting enough of it to get the work done. Then you take that science and research and say, well, I can make a $50 bottle of a supplement instead of a expensive machine. And now, is it true that the hydrogen molecule does everything that those studies say? Yes, it's true. But when you get into the context, they weren't taking pills. They were breathing it all day long.

So, all the studies are not on pills. They're breathing it and you're saying that then they're taking the science and saying, "Okay, but this works in a tablet, this works in a bottle, this works in a pill." Yeah.

So, yes, it still works. But it's not gonna move the major boulders like what I was talking about with all these studies. It's gonna be more like a daily antioxidant or something.

So when people are doing the bottles and they're like, I feel amazing and this has changed my life and all those things, is that more of a placebo thing, do you think?

Uh, no, I, I do think that they'll feel increased cellular energy because one thing that hydrogen does, even in a small dose, is it's one of the very few things that can induce what we call mitogenesis. It's very hard to do that. Mitogenesis is the production of new mitochondria.

Okay.

And mitochondria is the energy production center, right? And so as you age, once you get to your early 30s, your mitochondria start to die. And once you get to your early 50s, they really fall off a cliff. Like they really die quickly. Between the age of 50 and 70, the average human loses 70% of their mitochondria. Just they shrink and they die. So they're either dead or the ones that exist are way smaller than they used to be. So your energy production capacity isn't the same, which is why you don't recover as fast, which is why you don't have the same physical capacity, which is why your brain is more sensitive, which is why you have brain fog. All that is based on energy. When you get into mitogenesis, the production of new mitochondria, you can make your cellular energy terrain as if you're 25 years old once again. And you will feel that. You'll feel it, right? But, but so that the pill will do that. But imagine what a pill. Yeah. Is equivalent to about 20 seconds of breathing it.

Wow, that's a big difference. So, that's why like the pill or a bottle could be great for travel or when you can't breathe it, but it's not a substitute for it.

No.

Okay, I have a question. You mentioned about mitochondria there and help us understand this. So, I was sharing earlier about my genetics with slower COMT and my type of MTHFR. If I do too many input things that produce mitochondria, I feel overly stimulated where other things do— it's great for me. So, for example, I could do sauna and that's great for me, the infrared versus red light. I can do hydrogen breathing and it's great for me. It helps me relax. I can even take things like urolithin A, it helps clean it out. But then, things like CoQ10, methylated B vitamins, any— most energy brain support supplements, they stimulate me way too much. A nightmare for me. And I know some women listening can resonate. And like NAD or glutathione put me over the edge. That just would not work for me. Why? Because you said hydrogen is stimulating mitochondria. Why is that not giving that ramped-up feeling?

So, everything you mentioned in the supplements need clearance. They need to be removed, right? So, the reason you get overstimulated because you're slow calmed and there's also a gene called SYP1A2. Which is responsible for nutraceuticals, you don't clear. So the, the standard dosage is like a way overdose for you. Got it, right? You can't remove— it's active for far too long. Hydrogen doesn't need your body to tell it what to do. It works on its own.

Got it. And that's why you could do that for hours if you wanted to and not feel— like, I could do it right before bed.

Yeah, yeah. We— if I have like a Parkinson's patient, I tell them to sleep with it for 8 hours every night, right? And this is where we see these people that their doctor says nothing you could do, and they start getting better.

So when you're seeing people, chronic health stuff, when people are coming into your system, is this sort of like the one thing that you say everybody can do this?

Yeah, I would say there's 3 things that everybody can do. Hydrogen is— and this is why I talk about it so much because it's safe. It doesn't matter what you're doing, what your problem is, whether you're a biohacker, anti-aging, whether you're ill, it works on all levels of health and wellness, right? It just does different things based on your terrain and where you're at. Yes, hydrogen. I would say the other thing is red light. And I would say the third is PEMF.

I was going to ask you about that. So, so, but with red light though, it's that you did say with the right settings because you can't, you can, you can overdo it. You can do it incorrectly.

Especially if you're sick.

Okay. And then now you didn't even talk about PEMF. Tell me about that.

Yeah, I just think it, think of it as like a catalyst, an enhancer, whatever else you're doing is going to work better. Right? If you're going to the gym to try and build your bone and muscle, it'll work better. If you're using hydrogen and you do the PEMF at the same time, it'll work better. So it's another thing that helps your body prioritize what to work on. So for example, my son, 10 years old, flipped on his scooter and broke his arm.

Okay.

Right? So he was supposed to be in a cast for, I think it was 3 or 4 months. So I used PEMF and red light. He was also breathing hydrogen, but the thing with the— he's always been breathing hydrogen. But the arm thing, I use a PEMF and red light. He healed in 1.5 months. And the doctor's like, what happened here? Is this guy like a mutant? Is he an X-Man? Right? And now the funny thing is my niece also broken bone in the same time period. She actually got hit by a car and broke her leg, which is crazy. And she was told she was going to be in a cast for 6 months because her leg takes longer. And she was in it for 2.5.

Wow.

Right? So these are not— what we have to move away from is siloing and thinking, what is my bone solution? What is my muscle solution? What is my— this solution, as opposed to your body already knows how to do everything. Yeah, we're just amplifying it. We're already— we're just taking PMF and amplifying, allowing your body to do what it does faster. Right. Hydrogen does that. Red light does that. PMF does that.

I do have a question on PMF. I used to love PMF. I used it all at my place. I work out, has it. When I had my disc replacement, I stopped doing it. And the reason is in my head, when they tell you to remove metal, I thought, well, if there's titanium in my disc, can you not do PMF? And my surgeon had no idea. Do you know anything about that? Can you not do it if you have metal in your body?

Yeah. My understanding is titanium is not an issue. Oh, okay. Yeah. But that's what I, that's what I read. That's what I've been told. There's a brilliant guy. I would say of all the people that have studied PMF and talked about it, Dr. William Pawlik has dove, dove the deepest. I would say he wrote a book about it. And I remember hearing from him that no issue, like people with hip replacements and titanium that go.

Okay. Good to know. Yeah. My surgeon had no idea and I was like, well, I don't wanna, I don't wanna risk that. I have a bunch more questions for you and I'm going to ask them in a second, but in more of a rapid-fire way. But before I go further, y'all, if you've been following my podcast long and you've been with me in my community, you know I love doing these live interactive workshops where I bring on guest experts where we dive deeper on a topic. And on those live workshops, it's kind of like a podcast here that we're doing. However, you can be on there too and actually ask questions and interact with my expert as well. And then usually at the end of them, if we have a way for you to get something less expensive or be part like the hydrogen machine, we share that. My expert will share that. We have one of those coming up on June 25th. Yeah. So, mark your calendar whenever you're listening to this, June 25th. It's a Thursday and we're going to be doing one of those live interactive workshops. It is totally free to attend. I would absolutely sign up and attend it and be on there because on that particular one coming up, we're going way deeper specifically on hydrogen and you'll be able to actually ask Kash your questions and interact with him face-to-face. So, highly recommend that. I'll put all that in the show notes. But, if you're driving and you want to come back later, just a quick easy one to remember, midlifeconversations.com/hydrogen. So, midlifeconversations.com/hydrogen. If you're listening to this after that date, you could still go to that link. I'm sure we'll redirect it to maybe a replay or something there, but I can't promise that we'll have the units or anything after that date. So, whenever you're— but that's the link if you can attend that class live. And I'll also make sure in the show notes below I link up some other past classes that we've done, like on DNA, so you can get that information. So you have that as well. Okay. Actually, before I ask you these sort of rapid-fire classes, before giving away the whole workshop too, because I want them to come on, what's a few reasons that you think that they would want to be on that workshop?

Well, we're going to dive deeper into the actual mechanics of how it— I mean, there's enough time to go deep. But I would tell you it will blow your mind when you learn what human biology is capable of and how we can actually interact with our body and take control. Like, this whole thought around health sovereignty and being— and owning your health, but it's hard to do if you don't understand how your body works, right? So that's what I want to help you guys with, is like, health sovereignty should be the outcome if you understand what actually makes you sick, what the purpose— what, what extends life, and what gives you anti-aging capacity. Hydrogen will be an example. There's many things that do it, but you'll get it, you'll understand it, and you'll feel secure in, "I can actually do this myself and maintain my health as opposed to responding to my health." Okay, that's awesome.

And I know last time he gave, and we'll do the same thing again, where he can buy in bulk a bunch of hydrogen units for people on the class and get them super crazy discounted. That's how I got mine. So, another reason to come if you're considering doing that. All right, I want to kind of rapid-fire a few biohacks we didn't mention. And I just want to get your Yay or nay and just like anything you have to say on it. And some of these you didn't even know I was going to ask you, but one, vibration plates.

Awesome. Yeah. Opening up your limbs. Like whenever we're working with anyone complex, one of the first things we do is we get them to Flowpresso, Bouncer Floor, vibration plate, get the limbs open. Your limbs don't— you have more lymph fluid in your body than you have blood. The difference is your blood has a heart that pumps it. Your lymph fluid doesn't have it. It requires movement, vibration, action. So yes, 100%.

So vibration things are good. Okay. Saunas, infrared or traditional and why?

I use a traditional because I feel that the heat that hits your skin— so the traditional sauna is surface level. The infrared sauna is a subcutaneous deeper heat. And so, it's less stressful. And the surface level heat is far more stressful, which gets you to the heat shock protein faster, which is where all the magic starts, all the brain, all the So, the data around Alzheimer's risk is reduced by 60% with sauna is based on a traditional sauna, not a red light sauna.

So, okay. So, you said red light sauna, but what if you're just using the infrared? Are there other separate benefits on an infrared sauna if you turn the red light part off?

Here's the main difference is the infrared is heating you from the inside, the traditional is heating you from the outside. The stress is greater, whereas the infrared, it's more like anti-aging mitochondrial support on the inside. So, they do They both do both, but they lean towards—

Okay. I have an infrared here. I started turning my red light off in mine because I didn't want the extra red light for mine, but I go the infrared hot. Okay. Cold plunges.

Yeah. This is where genetics matter a lot. And especially if we're talking to an audience of women here, you have to be very careful because anybody that tries a cold plunge in the first week or two, it will give you the benefits that you hear, which is you'll burn fat and your brain feels amazing. Maybe the experience sucks. The outcome is great. Now, there are genes that regulate your— what is called thermoregulation, your ability to actually recover. If that's not working well, after a few weeks, it's going to hurt you. There are some women that are more estrogen dominant, genetically wired. If that's not working well, after, it's going to hurt you. So that's an area where personalization is important. And just listen to your body. If it feels horrible after a little while, just—

Okay.

Or at least don't be free.

So I think you would say the same thing about cryotherapy then.

Yeah, cryotherapy, little different. Cryotherapy, first of all, it's not done as frequently. So the culture of cold plunging is like, I'm trying to do this every day, right? You don't do that with cryotherapy. That's one big difference. The second difference is the way you experience the cold. The water is directly on your skin. Your body responds very differently. It's far more stressful, right?

Wellness IVs.

So again, personalization is key, right? One thing to consider is the plastic bags and the amount of toxins and microplastics they're delivering into your body. This is an area I actually just filmed a video about this. It's going to go live next week. Weak, right? There are very specific chemicals that are in these soft bags. So you want to be careful about what bag they're using. Second, you— and I would even suggest asking for glass vials, which is possible, by the way. And the big ones like NAD, glutathione— if you feel like fatigued or, you know, you just don't feel good, just know that you're not genetically wired.

Yeah, that's— I'll never— I'll forget, like, it was like a year ago My friend and I went at 6 o'clock at night to get Wellness IVs and she was so relaxed, felt so amazing after. I was amped up, wired and tired, awful. And, it wasn't until later that I learned it's because the glutathione and the methylated B vitamins that were in there. That glutathione push was awful for me. So, we're all different.

So, if it works, amazing. If it doesn't work, it's horrible. And, to the point where you can hurt yourself pretty bad if it doesn't work. So, This is an area where I say if I had your DNA, I can just literally tell you what to do. But I would just say pay attention to your body. If it doesn't feel good, don't do it.

What about things like a Hocket? Have you heard of that? Where it has all the things at one time?

Yeah. I think it's a great device. I've actually built my own. It's not exactly like a Hocket, but I can show you. If I show you what's right in front of me, I can turn my computer on and show you. I have this machine here that's like a scanner that scans your frequency. There's a— you see in the background, there's two machines there. I think you may be able to see one of them. So there's— those are fat burning machines. So I built a laser that actually pierces holes into your fat.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah. And I built another machine that it's like an eSculpt, which is like equivalent of 20,000 sit-ups in 30 minutes.

You're so funny. So I know your dad was into like holistic stuff like teas and herbal, and that was your mom like an engineer brain or what, trying to figure out where— So this is where you came from. You're like this combination of the holistic meets engineer. It's pretty funny.

Yeah. So I, I, this is what I do. I have, my house is like a workshop and I build all these things and we have like a factory where we build this stuff now. And so, yeah, so I built a, like a MedBed style whole cloth thing, but it's the modalities are different. They're what I think people need, which is a combination of red light. There's vibration, there's PEMF, but there's also PEF, which people—

Yeah. What is that?

So, uh, just more, um, So if I were to make it easy, think about using vibroacoustics, right? And then between the PEMF and PEF, different wavelengths, right, that are doing different things to your body. And then also negative oxygen ions that are doing things. So there's a combination of 10 different modalities that are in one thing. I built it just to test it, and I think clinics will need it. So if you want to come to Toronto, you can test it out. It's arriving.

I love all this. You know, it's so funny because so when you So, I've really come to find that anybody that's in like the alternative health or the biohacking or the age-optimizing space, they had their own massive setback like you shared at the beginning of this conversation. Like, they had their own— Western medicine failed them in a lot of ways and they had to figure it out. And then, in figuring it out, they uncovered all this information and that's why they start sharing. So then, what happens is you'll see these like polarizing things online. You'll hear these extreme ideas from brilliant brains actually like Kash's that walked through actual health situations himself. And then, you'll see this other side, which is very Western medicine. Nothing against Western medicine, but very like, "All this stuff is crap. None of it works." Like, very this. Typically, that person talking didn't have any of those issues because there are people that genetically, that's amazing, they don't have those issues. But, just like he talked at the beginning how we're all so bio-individual and genetically different, just because some people don't have those problems doesn't mean others do. So, all these things that Kash is venting and is in his house and he's sharing with us and all these things, they are extremely helpful for a lot of people. Some people, granted, they don't need it because they don't have a lot of these problems. But, I don't think it's as black and white as, "Oh, that's pseudoscience," or, "That's bull—" Like, there's literally this— we're all so different.

Yeah. You can say that about literally every— where we started with peptides, is it good or is it bad? It's both depending who you are and what you do with it.

So good. Thank you so much. I'm sure I'll have you back on, but this was really informative. Everyone listening, I will link all these things in the show notes. I'll list the upcoming live hydrogen workshop. I'll list the recent DNA conversation that we had, and I'll— anything else you mentioned, I'll get from Kash so we can make sure we have all the links for you right there in the show notes. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you.

Pleasure. It was fun.