Get Rid of the Toxins Sabotaging Your Longevity, with Kyle Hulbert

Hello and welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. I'm Wendie Trubow, MD, MD, joining us today, and we have Kyle Hilbert. He is the CEO of the Longevity Center. He's co-host of the Longevity Unlocked podcast, and he's a wellness and integrative nutrition coach who specializes in our favorite topic, which is detox. In its first year, his Longevity Center helped over 1,500 people detox, heal, and restore their vitality. So, Kyle, welcome. We're so excited to have this conversation with you today.

Yeah, I'm glad to be on today. I love talking about toxins. It changed my life. So hopefully the information we can share today will change someone's life.

How'd you get into it?

Well, I was sick. I went to doctor to doctor to doctor, and half of them told me I was making it up. Half of them told me that they couldn't find anything. They didn't think I was making it up, but they couldn't figure it out. Which led me down the rabbit hole. I ended up going to biohacking conferences and all of these things and kind of got plugged into the integrative kind of functional medicine world. And that's kind of where I discovered what my root was. Mercury.

How long did it take you from the time you identified that you didn't feel well to the time that you were like, oh, it's mercury?

It was about 3 years. Um, and I—

it's not bad. Yes, I mean, relatively speaking, that's not too bad.

Yeah, I mean, who I am, I, I don't like to sit on something when I know I can do something. So I dove into research and I never stopped asking questions, um, and just kept looking further and further until I found the answer.

And dare I ask, where, where was that mercury from? Do you— have you figured that out?

Yeah, so I was, uh, I was the, like, uh, you know when you're a kid and you go to the soda fountain and you put all the different types of soda into one cup? That's like, they call it soda suicide, right? Doesn't taste great. But that was me with mercury. So I was born, uh, my mom had amalgam fillings, so I was born, I got some of it in the womb. And then, um, I was actually during a, uh, a period, I was born during a period in which let's say certain injections were given to certain children.

You can say the words that, that there was thimerosal in the vaccines and you got them. It's okay, you can say the words.

Yeah, there's thimerosal in the vaccines and I received the entire course of them. Um, and then, you know, I grew up in Florida, so I ate grouper and tuna all the time. And then in high school I got really into like health and fitness, and I thought that being big and having muscles was health. Um, and so I started eating, you know, cans of tuna because lean protein, just mustard on top of it, just like stacks of them from Costco.

Nice.

And it was kind of like a little bit of everything that culminated in this kind of mercury poisoning event. And I kind of fell off the cliff around 21 years old.

Did something happen before you fell off the cliff? That you—

not necessarily. Um, it was just like one day, you know, I was myself, and then it was a pretty rapid slide into fatigue, depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, allergies, gut problems, joint achy pain, um, you name it. It just all happened within like one year period.

It's pretty profound, Kyle. Like, I'm glad you got diagnosed.

Yeah, it was, it was, it was kind of scary because, you know, like, objectively, I was like, I was in college, right? I was in my master's degree, and compared to all my friends, like, I didn't party, I didn't go out and drink, like, I ate clean, I spent most of my free time in the gym. And then all of a sudden, it didn't matter what I did, it was just my health was getting worse and worse and worse, and I could not figure it out.

So what'd you do? How'd you get rid of it?

Yeah, that became your message, clearly, right?

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, that led me to, you know, I went to a biohacking conference. I met this concierge physician who, he treated my hormones, which helped a lot, but it didn't solve all the problems. And then he said, you know, go to, go see a friend of mine down in Miami. You should get tested for heavy metals. It's like, okay, don't know what that is, but I'll dive in, I'll research, I'll learn about it. Did some research and I signed up and went and got my test and my results came back and sure enough, tons of mercury. So they do a pretest and a posttest. So you do a pretest, which is unprovoked urine. You kind of pee in a little vial. And my results on the pretest were zero mercury, showing that my body does not excrete mercury on its own.

And you weren't actively being exposed either, right? This is a past exposure. It's not anything current. It's not like you just did a, did a mercury can, right? You weren't diving into mercury that day.

Yeah. So it wasn't— yeah, you're right. It wasn't current. And I don't excrete it by myself. And then we did the IV, which is DMPS. It's a chelating agent which pulls heavy metals out of your tissues. And my mercury was 34, which is about 3 or 4 times the red level on the testing guide. So it was pretty hefty, um, which led me to being treated at a different facility that that doctor had, where I met my, my now business partner, Dr. Benjamin Kosubeski, who treated me and got me well through a series of— I don't know, I did 50 IV chelations, um, with some EBOO treatments and a bunch of other stuff to kind of fix all the downstream problems that the mercury caused.

It's, it's like, I feel like we're, we're just sort of talking. I'm like, oh, that happened to me too. So, uh, can you tell— let's pivot and, and talk about, okay, now that you've went through this and you've— your message, your message, you obviously started a business from it, and now you spend your days helping people detoxify from these toxins. And toxins. So talk to the audience about how toxins are linked to longevity and why should we care? I mean, look, I know why we should care, but why should the listeners care?

Yeah, so when it comes to toxins and longevity, it's kind of like everybody in the longevity industry, most supplements, most treatments, all the expensive cutting-edge stuff, they focus on the new things, the additives, right? Like, here, here's the molecule, the longevity molecule that can do X, Y, and Z, whether it be fatty 15 or C60 or whatever it might be. All these longevity molecules, metformin. But where you have to start is you have to get rid of the interferences before these molecules can help you extend your healthspan, your lifespan. You have to get rid of the signals that are saying, hey, we need disease, we need disruption. And these, these are the toxins. So you can get the most bang for your buck on longevity by waiting on all the longevity supplements, the longevity treatments, and all those things until you've cleaned up the system and just gotten the body back to neutral. So before we can go positive, we need to get back to how we intended to run, which you remove the heavy metals, you remove the mold, you get the Epstein-Barr virus in remission, the Lyme Disease. All these things might be keeping you below where your body should be operating. Once you get rid of these things and you get to where you should be operating, that's when you can do a lot of the fun stuff with the longevity medicine and push it further.

I mean, I'm always like, crawl, walk, run. You can't do the fun stuff until you do the foundations. Otherwise, you're just going to get sicker. Yeah.

Well, you are speaking our language. I mean, it really is. People come in, oh, I wanna live forever or whatever else. And that's great. And that's, I love the peptides and I love the newest and latest and greatest. They're cool things. I truly enjoy them. And let's deal with the stuff that you don't wanna deal with first.

I literally had a patient yesterday in my office. She said, I hadn't seen her in like 8 months and she sat down and she said, so what's all the latest and greatest? I was like, well, we can talk about that, But your Mercury is 54, so we probably want to deal with that since her father had dementia and it's a massive risk factor for all the nasty, the degenerative, the autoimmune, the cancer, and the Alzheimer's dementia kind of thing. So I was like, why don't we deal with that before we get into all the things I could spend your money on? And she was like, I'm tired of that. I'm like, I don't blame you, but we really need to double down because your body burden is really high. And she took out a Mercury filling without going to a biologic dentist and got a massive exposure because her previous level was 27 and she doubled. I was like, well, don't take your last mercury filling out that way. Like, go to a biologic dentist, please. So I think it's really interesting because most people don't want to do the foundations. It's not, it's not sexy, but eating right, sweating, getting rid of the toxicants, making sure your mental health is good, fixing your gut. Like, these are the, these are the foundations you have to focus on first.

I do want to plug for whatever reason, every time we talk about toxins, I do want to plug in like all the toxic relationships, all the stress, all this previous stuff.

That's trauma.

Just trauma is still— it's not just the biological stuff, it's all that other stuff also that has to be worked through.

Yeah. Yeah.

All right.

Going back to you, how, how are you guys assessing it in your patients?

Heavy metal exposure, toxin exposure, all of it.

Yeah, all of it.

Yeah. So we have, uh, we have an interesting system. So we like to take things one step at a time. Our, our methodology is based on affordability, so we try to make all the things we do as affordable as humanly possible at Longevity Centers of America. Um, so when you come in, we grab comprehensive blood work, pretty, pretty dang comprehensive. We check a bunch of stuff. Um, like it's more comprehensive than your function panels and that kind of thing. Um, we actually are able to run that through patients' insurance, so they often get a very small bill for that. And then from there, we take the subjective— so what the patient is dealing with— and then the lab work results. And then from there, we assess, hey, our providers might say you need specialty test X or Y or Z or these two combinations, because we want to save the patient money. We don't want to just throw the entire testing gambit at them. In terms of like the specific testing, you know, I'm sure you use probably a lot of the similar ones. I mean, Doctor's Data for heavy metal provocation, we use Vibrant for Lyme, we like the Vibrant Total Tox. I mean, and there's dozens of other ones. You're looking at deep hormones, we're looking at Dutch, um, you know, there's, there's probably 12 of the 12 or 13 other ones we pull based on the subjective combined with the lab data.

Can you talk about the biggest misconceptions people have when they think about detoxification?

Oh, the biggest misconceptions. Juice cleanses. That's got to be number one. That has got to be number— I can juice cleanse my way through heavy metal poisoning. It just doesn't work.

Right.

Or a cleanse, not a detox.

A cleanse is a detox. Cilantro or juicing enough cilantro and everything will go away, which is, yeah, I mean cilantro, I love cilantro and we use it in as part of our protocol.

I won't eat that, but I'll put it in, I'll use the extract.

But it's, you can't just juice enough cilantro or eat enough cilantro to get it.

So you need like a bathtub of cilantro every day. It's not even, it's not even sustainable. All right. Juice cleanses is one misconception. Anything else?

Yeah, one thing I love to talk about when misconceptions is the marketing and supplement world surrounding detox. Just because it says detox on the bottle doesn't mean it's going to help you or your specific toxins. So the way I like to address this misconception is if you don't know what toxic burden you have, how could you ever guess what is going to be the right application for detox? You have to test first. There is no broad spectrum detox. It doesn't work like that. There are specific things that are detox specific ways, specific IVs, specific supplementation, but you can't just take activated charcoal and you're good to go. You have to know what you have and then focus on those in a scientific and logical manner.

Test, don't guess.

Yeah, I'm going to temper that a little bit because there are universal get your glutathione in a better place or get help you de— your body detoxify better. And I agree 1,000% that it won't get rid of your mo— that won't get rid of your mold or your heavy metals or your Lyme or any of that. But you can help your general detoxification system.

Yeah, I think you can help underlying pathways. At the end of the day, you know, we have a confirmation bias because our patients are sick. And so they've usually tried all of the things, right? And so it's like they need the heavy-duty support. Um, but even if you're like— one non-misconception that I actually really like is like the infrared sauna, thinking about opening up those detox pathways. Um, they have great studies about, you know, the sweat analysis of what comes out in the sweat. In infrared saunas, and it's all kinds of garbage. So that's a really good one. But yeah, I do like to test and then create, like, our physicians, our practitioners will create a plan specifically based on what your burden is. That might be different speeds based on how you react or what you have or different ways to hit it. But for the most part, each person will follow a slightly different journey.

Yeah, well, everybody has slightly different responses and slightly different experiences and exposures and genetics. I mean, it's— it really is personalized, right? Like, I was just thinking, though, as the two of you were talking about things to do, I think— I think that there's levels of this. So anybody can decrease their exposure, right? It's great. Stop dyeing your hair. Level up your medications, level up your supplements, level up your food, eat organic, get enough sleep, exercise regularly, don't have toxic relationships. That one's for you, just to plug that. Deal with your past.

You want to tell me something?

We're married, Kyle. But like, no, it was more just that you feel strongly about that.

I just want to make sure.

I wanted to make sure your commitments were included in this.

There's marriage counseling, by the way, involved in all these podcasts online all the time.

So, okay, so then there's ways to remove the exposures you have, and then there's ways to optimize your general pathways by fixing the gut, making sure the gut's happy, making sure your adrenals are happy, making sure the liver's not stressed— don't drink alcohol— and then optimizing yourself, like the glutathione and the sauna and the dry brushing and the exercise and the sweat. And then there's the specifics, right? This, I'd call it almost like the top of the pyramid because the, the foundations anyone can do. The top of the pyramid is specifically remove and target the toxicants that are in your fat, bones, brain, and organ. Don't just sort of broad stroke it. Go specifics, which I love.

Well, you mentioned chelation. You mentioned ibu. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Yeah, ibu.

Sure.

Yeah.

Extracorporeal blood oxygenation and ozonation. Do you guys do ibu?

We don't. We're in Massachusetts and it's very strict here.

Ah, we refer to it, but we don't do it ourselves.

Gotcha.

Yeah.

So basically we pull blood out of one arm, you run it through a closed-loop sterile system, it goes through a dialysis filter which filters out mold, filters out pesticide, a lot of pesticides, glyphosate specifically.

Oh, you said the magic word.

Oh. Yeah, don't say that word.

And we have pre and post tested this multiple times, and every time there are high levels of glyphosate that come out of the waste. And then when it's running through the filter, it's mixed with ozone, which does kind of two major things. One, it hyperoxygenates, so it gives you about a 30% boost in your oxygenation levels. That's like kind of the closest you can come to blood doping without doing it. So there's athletes that actually do it pre-game. And then the ozone also kills a lot of the other garbage, viruses, bacteria, and stuff like that. Then it runs out of the filter, runs through a UV and LED light system, which it gets treated with multiple different types of UV and LED lights. For further light activation and killing of more of the bad stuff, and then it runs back into your other arm. It's a pretty— it seems scary. Like, if you look at it, you're like, oh my gosh, there's so much blood outside of me. But it's actually, it's actually a very safe process, and the results are just absolutely astounding. What we've seen in our clinic is, is amazing. I mean, Anything from the bottom level of being like, hey, I just slept really well and my skin looks a little better, to Epstein-Barr that was actually absolutely crushing someone is now in remission.

What other, what other modalities are you using in your clinic?

You name it, we have it. So if it exists in integrative medicine, we probably do it or have access to it. So We do a lot of biologics, a lot of minimally manipulated biologics, things like that. We do joint injections. We do all kinds of specialty IVs, specialty immunity IVs. We do methylene blue IVs. We do procaine neural therapy. We do SGB. We do—

what's SGB?

SGB is a stellate ganglion block. So it's about a 3-inch needle. That Doc sticks in your neck under ultrasound and he goes around the stellate ganglion nerve and he numbs it with procaine. And what it does is it stops the fight or flight signaling. So it resets your fight or flight. Amazing results for anxiety and PTSD.

It sounds amazing and it sounds barbaric. Sort of like the thought of a needle going into my neck gives me the heebie-jeebies. But then the result, if I were someone with anxiety, it was like, oh, that would be worth it. If I felt that way.

It's, it's one of those things that, like, if you come off the street asking for an SGB, the answer is not yes. Like, like, the doc has to evaluate you thoroughly to make sure that you're a proper candidate for this. This is not something you can just be like, off the menu, I want the SGB. Yeah, yeah, we do stuff like B-cells, like laser-guided stem cells. Very cool technology.

What does that say about that? I've never heard of that.

These cells are very small embryonic-like stem cells, and they're actually adult stem cells that are able to differentiate. They live in everyone's blood. They're just there. The problem is they're dormant and they only turn on when you're like dying. So like if you're like freezing to death, these things would kick in to keep you alive a little longer.

Nice.

But there's a doctor, he lives out in California, but he created a way to activate these cells through a specific frequency of laser and then we reinfuse them. So it's PRP, you pull off PRP, you spin it down, you have the PRP, you activate the cells in the PRP with the laser, you reinfuse. And then he actually has studies showing that where you target the laser on the body is where those cells will aggregate. To help heal.

So it's great for wound repair.

Great for wound repair. It's really good for organ treatment because you can't necessarily— you can't stick a needle in an organ and fill it with a biologic, right? It doesn't work like that. Let's not stick holes in our kidneys. But we can put a laser at a kidney and aggregate the cells there. So brain. One of the most amazing things we've seen is an ovary treatment, actually. So it was a young woman who was not cycling, and she came in for the laser-guided stem cells, put it on both of her ovaries for— it was like 5 minutes each after the reinfusion. And about a month later, she had her first period she's had in 5 years. Just restarted her whole—

that's amazing.

Yeah.

And then I'm assuming you're doing a ton of um, chelation and IV, both IV and oral in the practice?

So we only do IV for the most part. Um, the oral, um, part of my journey was testing every single version of chelation, and time and time again, the oral is just very brutal. It's hard to go through. Um, for me, the dosage and, and the cadence at which, like, based on the literature, it should be taken. The side effects were just brutal. So we offer only IV.

Do you have a lot of people experiencing detox reactions? And can you talk about what people would be experiencing if they had that?

Yeah, we have some people that have pretty intense detox reactions, but we have kind of— we have a system where we'll step up. We'll start with low dosage, or maybe we'll start with like just glutathione or something like that to start opening up the pathways, um, to kind of ease people in if they are known reactors. In terms of like normal detox symptoms, we like to say it's anything that you would normally have as your symptom. So like if you have fatigue on a day-to-day basis, your detox symptom would most likely be fatigue, just a little stronger post-chelation, um, as a detox. Or if it's headaches, it might be headaches. Joint pain, it might be joint pain. We see the whole gambit. We see everything from headaches, migraines, fatigue, joint pain in varying levels. And if it's something that's like the patient tells us like, hey, that was a lot, then we adjust and we reformat.

What are some of the supportive things you recommend people do?

Yeah, one of them, um, actually one of the things that we recommend with chelation is actually the ibu. You know, as you pull heavy metals from the body, heavy metals act as a scaffolding, especially for mold. So the mold likes to live, build its biofilms in that heavy metal scaffolding. And so if you pull out the heavy metals, you've released a lot of mold into the system. And so cleaning out the blood with Eboo generally helps people. You add in that oxygenation, you add in the ozone that kills a lot of the bad garbage, that usually cuts down a lot of the detox symptoms. Uh, if we want to go further, some people benefit from methylene blue IVs. If you're having more of a, like, a mental health reaction to the detox, like the anxiety, the depression, we'll go for procaine IVs. Um, sometimes it's just vitamins and minerals that really does it for people. Um, so it really depends on, again, what the symptoms are, if they can tolerate it, and what we can do to help.

Yeah, we do— we're also adding in and recommending that people do Epsom salt soaks. Because that helps reset their nervous system, and the Epsom salt provides the magnesium that they need. I feel like I'm blanking on other supportive mechanism things.

You're pretty good. Niacin too.

What's that?

Niacin to help flush, help flush things out.

Yeah. Um, when— let's go big picture. You know, I always say, people are always like, where did I get this? I'm like, well, you're human, you live on this earth, and every time Canada and California burn, and California burned last way— last year in such a significant fashion. It wasn't just mercury being released, it was every toxicant coming into the environment and traveling in the clouds and then falling to the ground. So when people are saying, okay, how do I know if I have this? I'm like, well, you're alive, so you have it. The question is, how badly do you have it? What are some of the things that you recommend people pay attention to, to think, okay, I've optimized my gut, my adrenals, and I'm still not well. What are some of the symptoms people might be looking at?

Yeah, I mean, if you've optimized your gut and adrenals, that's when you probably have a source. And I would throw hormones in there as well. Yeah. So because if your hormones are off, your sex hormones are off, even if your gut and adrenals are great, you're not going to feel well. Um, but if you've gotten those and you still don't feel well, I would look for like two separate places. I would dig deep for toxins that are not super common. So I would do your heavy metal testing, your Total Tox. I would look for all the things. And the second part is I would look for active exposures. Um, so, you know, hey, let's take a look at your— let's send the mold dog to your house and see if the mold dog finds any mold. Or, um, where do you live? I live on an interstate. Oh, well, we might want to consider moving. Or where do you live? I live on a golf course. Oh, goodness. Yeah.

So I have a family member who lives on a golf course, and I was like, no, it's so bad for you. Yeah, it's like a little glyphosate IV.

If you've kind of optimized the basics, say you're eating well, you're moving well, you're drinking well, you've got your hormones and gut and adrenals good. Then you're getting to the point where like one of two things is going on. You have something that you haven't found yet that we need to get rid of, or you're being actively exposed to something and you got to stop that active exposure.

Cool. Where can people find out more about you? What—

how— we'll put everything in the show notes so you can just—

yeah, I mean, you can find more information about our clinics at www.thelcoa.com. So that's the Longevity Centers of America dot com. LCOA. But I, when I'm on podcast, I really don't like— I'm not here to sell anything. Like, we have a podcast as well, Longevity Unlocked. That's where I want people to go. Like, we have, I think, 100 episodes, and we go in deep about chelation and ibu and all the things I've mentioned today. It's purely for education. We just want to get the, the word out there. So if you want to learn more, go to Longevity Unlocked. That's our podcast.

Awesome.

We'll put that in the show notes. All right, Kyle, thank you for being on the podcast. Really, this is right up our alley. This is exactly what we do all day, every day. And RMS was our message too. So, thank you for being here. And to the listeners, thanks for joining us for another episode of the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. Thanks, Kyle.

Glad to be here. Thank you, guys.