How To Live Longer & Better, Plus The Small Habits That Make The Biggest Difference According To Gary Brecka | SLMan Podcast

0:02That's the sound of zero sugar, 200 milligrams of caffeine, and the power to burn body fat. Storm, energy for life. Storm Energy Blend helps boost metabolism, which in combination with exercise and a healthy diet helps burn fat. This product alone does not produce weight loss. Individual results may vary.

0:15Gary Brecka:So good, so good, so good. New summer arrivals are at Nordstrom Rack stores now. Get ready to save big with up to 60 % off brands like Rag & Bone, Levi's, Adidas, and Free People. Join the Nordy Club to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. Welcome to this week's SR Man episode where we're joined by Gary Brecker. In this week's episode, he's explaining how one simple DNA test can transform your wellness journey. I really, truly believe that every human being, once in their lifetime, should do a genetic methylation test.

0:59Gary Brecka:So they stop supplementing for the sake of supplementing. They start supplementing for deficiency. This alone will eliminate so much stress and noise from your body. General myth-busting around supplements. Protein, I think, is overrated. I'm a fan of creatine, not just because of its capacity to improve gains that we make in the gym. but for its cognitive benefits. And one quick hack that'll upgrade your daily routine. Long, slow, obnoxious inhale through your nose. Pause and out through a straw. Thanks so much for joining us. It's a good one.

1:48Welcome back to the SL Man podcast with me, Harvey James. Today I'm joined by Gary Brecker, a renowned human biologist, founder of the Ultimate Human Wellness. He's a leader in the fields of longevity and biohacking, and someone who's managed to captivate an audience of over 3 million on social media with his insights and answers on those topics and more. Today, we're going to talk all things wellness, from training to supplementing, how to live longer, how to live better. We'll be answering your questions on those topics and beyond. So welcome, Gary. How are you? I'm amazing, man. Good. So you arrived on Sunday, is that correct?

2:28Gary Brecka:I arrived on Sunday for the health event. Went Monday to Cannes, France, came back last night, and here we are. You're not wellnessed out yet. I'm not wellnessed out. My voice has given up on me. I'm a little hoarse. Yeah. Um, I, uh, the day before that I spoke for five hours in the Utah desert. So, and when I went home that night, I woke up the next morning, I had no voice. So I've never lost my voice before. So I don't know much about the Utah desert, but it doesn't sound like very dry. Not, not great. Not great. And so we were talking a bit before about jet lag and some of your, your ways to combat it?

3:05Do you want to just explain that? Yeah, sure.

3:06Gary Brecka:I mean, I will tell you the one that I never hear anyone talk about, and it is arguably the single best thing you can do when you're traveling to adjust to a new time zone, and that is to not eat during your normal sleeping window. I live on the East Coast of the US in Miami. So I go to bed at 10 p.m. I wake up at six o 'clock in the morning. So between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., my body's used to sleeping. If I feed myself during that normal sleeping window, it will throw my circadian clock off worse than anything. So if I go to the UK like I am right now, it's five hours ahead, which means that 6 o 'clock in the morning is 11 o 'clock in the morning here.

3:46Gary Brecka:I just won't eat solid food before 11 a.m. That's it. Is that difficult? No, it's not difficult at all. You get up at 7, 8 o 'clock in the morning here, you don't put solid food in your body until 11 a.m. It's very easy. you can have all the fluids you want. You can have coffee, you can have tea, you can have water. It doesn't interrupt my workouts. And that way you're keeping your digestive clock on the same time. And there's so many different clocks inside of our body that run our circadian rhythm. We're very circadian creatures. Our bodies love habit. And there's a master clock in the brain.

4:21Gary Brecka:It's called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. And what this does is it runs all kinds of different systems in the body, your cortisol cycle, your melatonin cycle. For women, it runs their hormonal cycle, their menstrual cycle. And when you throw it off through travel, you want to keep as many of those clocks on the same schedule as possible. So one of the things we have control over is the timing of food. So if you eat at the same time, regardless of where you are in the world, major difference in your ability to adjust to a time zone. I feel like we've jumped in there to wellness biohacking. Yeah, we just went in.

4:59We even hit female hormones.

5:00Gary Brecka:Yeah. So yeah, we're in it now. We're in it there. That was great. No, let's talk a little bit about wellness and what that is, because it's a word that's risen in popularity, I'd say in the last five to 10 years with the rise of kind of influences, but also our understanding about science and how we can optimize our bodies a little bit more. so let's get your kind of definition of what that word means well i think that medicine is something that we outsource and wellness is something we have control over so your wellness journey is the journey to being the optimal person the optimal state of you but you're in control so what are the things that i can do to not just add years to my life but life to my years what can i do to improve my cognitive function, my waking energy, my sleep, my focus, my response to exercise.

5:53Gary Brecka:And these are all a part of a wellness journey. So things like targeting your sleep, which is our human superpower, and probably the most bullied thing in our schedule. You know, we really bully sleep around in our schedule, right? I mean, when you ask most people, what do you do to go to sleep? They go, what do you mean, Gary? I just lay down in bed. And I say, well, what time do you go to bed. Well, whenever I'm done getting my work done. So, you know, sleep is truly our human superpower. Eating a whole food diet, a diet absent processed foods, making mobility non-negotiable, making exercise non-negotiable.

6:28Gary Brecka:These are things that are in our control and they should be a part of our wellness journey. So I really see wellness as things people have a personal possession of, whereas medicine is something that really should be done done by you know a licensed practitioner somebody who's trained to actually put pharmaceuticals or chemicals or synthetics into your body you call yourself a human biologist what does that mean and how did your career path get you here yeah yeah so i don't just call myself a human biologist that's what my degree is in so fine um my my undergraduate degree was in biology yeah um and then i went to grad school and got a second degree in human biology.

7:07Gary Brecka:So what it means is, you know, biology is the study of living things. Human biology is the study of human beings. And so I have a fascination with the human body and its form, its function. How can we improve it? I mean, how can we harness the God-given power of our immune system? What can we do that's within our own control to change the entire trajectory of our life. And there's so much that we can do that is so empowering that if people would understand how human beings operate, for example, if you want to see magic happen in human beings, you give their body the raw material it needs to do its job.

7:51Gary Brecka:And so very often we're deficient in raw materials. You know, we believe this in plant physiology. So if you had a leaf, let's say, rotting in a palm tree, and you called a true arborist, like a true botanist, out to look at that leaf, they wouldn't even touch the leaf. They would core test the soil. And they would say, you know what? There's no nitrogen in the soil. They would add nitrogen to the soil and the leaf would heal. Human beings, I promise you, are no different. When you deprive the human body of certain raw materials, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, nutrients, you get the expression of dysfunction, expression of disease.

8:29The ultimate human wellness. How did that brand come about and what were your goals when starting?

8:34Gary Brecka:Well, the ultimate human wellness was meant to be the cleanest, most bioavailable supplements that science had to offer. And one of the reasons why I believe so much in targeted supplementation, meaning not supplementing for the sake of supplementing, but supplementing for deficiency. And this is where the magic happens. Most people start their supplement journey by either catching something on TikTok or Instagram or an influencer or their neighbor or their coworker or their boyfriend or girlfriend. And this is the reason why one size doesn't fit all. I'm a true believer in getting data. I think that data is so important to our wellness journey.

9:18Gary Brecka:So I'm really proud of being able to bring what's called a genetic methylation test. to the UK. It's done right here in a UK lab. And it's a cheek swab. You put a cheek swab in your mouth, you send it off to the lab, and the results that come back tell your body exactly what raw material your body can turn into the usable form and what it can't. You see, what most people don't realize about supplements is that, number one, one size doesn't fit all. But number two, there is not a single compound known to mankind, not one, that we put into the human body that is used in the format that we put it in, with no exception.

10:02Gary Brecka:There's no vitamin, no mineral, no amino acid, no protein, no carbohydrate that we use in the form that we put it in. Without exception, everything that enters our body gets converted into the usable form. So imagine that we pull crude oil out of the ground. You can't put crude oil into your gas tank because the car doesn't understand that fuel source. But if you take crude oil and you refine it to gasoline, now the car can run. Human beings are no different. So when you do a genetic methylation test, it tells you, what can I convert from crude oil to gasoline? What can I convert from the form that entered my body to the form that my body can use.

10:48Gary Brecka:And once you know that, you no longer guess about what you need to supplement with. And this is why some people have like miracle results with certain supplements. And some people go, I started taking ashwagandha, St. John's work, CoQ10, NAD, NMN, and I felt nothing. It's because your body wasn't deficient in that. Your body could convert those raw materials. But once you find out what you can't convert, And you put that back into the body. And that's when magic happens. That's fascinating. Yeah. Maybe that is the next frontier of wellness. Is it more personalized? Yes. The next frontier of wellness is personalized wellness, data-driven wellness, individualized wellness.

11:31Gary Brecka:For so long, we've had this one size fits all, men's multivitamin, women's multivitamin, women over 40 multivitamin, kids vitamin. And they all have relatively the same ingredients. uh but the question is what does your body need you know a good mechanic is somebody that fixes your car a great mechanic is somebody that keeps your car from breaking down and i think there's a material difference and people that are on a wellness journey they don't want to break down right they they don't necessarily want to have to rely on a system that they outsource to make choices for their health health journey and and the way to avoid that is to make sure that your body has the raw material it needs to do its job i suppose that will come into medicine as well and hopefully in the future where they've got personalized drug kind of um use as well rather than just being on the wellness i think so too i think you see a lot of precision coming into uh mainstream medicine now you know again we we very often will do genetic testing to determine what drugs certain patients will respond to.

12:37Gary Brecka:Not everyone responds to any inflammatories or pain medication or psychiatric medication the same way. So what's true in medicine is also true in wellness. The same is true with supplements as you have with chemicals and synthetics and pharmaceuticals. And so getting that piece of data is the missing link between getting so much more out of your wellness journey and just feeling like you're supplementing for the sake of supplementing what's your personal story obviously you you studied human biology was it at that point that you decided i want to kind of not experiment with myself but get into it for my own health reasons rather than just intellectually being interested in it You know, I had kind of a unique journey.

13:26Gary Brecka:I graduated from grad school, and I went to work for large life insurance companies. And the team that I was on was charged with predicting mortality to the month. So not just putting you on an actuarial curve. It's creepy. But telling the insurance company how many more months you had left on earth. and i get a lot of flack for saying that but the truth is it's some of the most accurate science in the world because life insurance companies have data that no other financial services enterprise um has and it's in their interest to get it right it's in their interest to get it right and if you want to know how good they are at predicting death just look at what happened during the 2008 2009 financial services crisis you had 364 banks fail not a single life insurance company failed they are some of the most solvent institutions in the world.

14:21Gary Brecka:And the reason for that is that they have data that very few, if any other organization has, you know, the federal government doesn't have it. Our CDC and FDA don't have it. Collegiate universities don't have it. They know the day, the date, the time, the location, and the cause of death for 371 million lives. And so you take that data and you draw it back into the record and you say, what are some of the blood biomarkers? what are some of the patterns that lead to early demise? And I can tell you that if I was to boil that entire 22-year career down to just a few sentences, it would be that the reason why the vast majority of humanity is not living healthier, happier, longer, more fulfilling lives are what we called modifiable risk factors.

15:15Gary Brecka:These were dietary and lifestyle changes that if people would have implemented, would have added in our model on average seven years to their lifespan and their healthspan. And people just didn't feel that empowered to change their journey. And after doing that for so long, I finally said to myself, like, what am I doing? You know, Am I going to spend the rest of my life predicting death? Or am I going to take this information and get it to the masses and help people live healthier, happier, longer, more fulfilling lives? And so that's kind of why I'm sitting here today. That's amazing. Did you feel like you were kind of like the person to communicate that?

15:59Gary Brecka:Well, you know, I think God blessed me with, you know, the talent of being able to take the ultra complicated and make it simple. because it's not about trying to impress people with how smart you are. It's about giving people enough education so that they're inspired to make a change. Because if you don't affect somebody's habits, nothing else matters. We're not a collection of our goals. We're not a collection of our priorities or our desires. We are a consequence of our daily habits. The micro daily habits that we do every single day, that's what you are a consequence of. You can look at somebody and tell if they're in the gym on a regular basis.

16:39Gary Brecka:You can look at somebody and tell, um, you know, what kind of care they take of themselves. And so I think that that message that we are a lot more empowered than we think we might think we are. Let's get into a bit more of the minutiae of kind of some supplements and substances that are quite popular at the moment. So there's a lot of talk around creatine. yes um personally i've used it and i found it really effective as well but let's sort of try and get to the bottom of some of these myths around it sure is it just for building muscle or well you know i am an enormous fan of creatine there's creatine monohydrate and there's creatine hydrochloride hcl i'm a huge fan of creatine hcl because it's 41 more water soluble than monohydrate even though there's more data on monohydrate there's still very solid data on hcl and for women especially that are concerned about bloating men too men don't want to bloat either um hcl is much more water soluble but i'm a fan of creatine not just because of its capacity to improve gains that we make in the gym but for its cognitive benefits for its ability to restore natural capability to the body to um methylate and what i mean by that is the human body is fascinating there's a saying one man's trash is another man's treasure this is very true in how the body processes nutrients we take certain amino acids into the body and then that amino acid is broken down into other amino acids some build muscle muscle some build bone some build connective tissue some build natural killer cells some build collagen elastin and fibrin.

18:27Gary Brecka:And so what the body does is it takes all of these raw materials and as it starts to process them, the waste from certain processing goes into feed the next transaction. Creatine is one of those that is produced by the body. We make creatine endogenously inside of our body. When we're not producing enough, the body goes to other resources, mainly something called SAM-E, S-A-M, lowercase e. And SAMe is the primary methyl donor in the body. It's very much involved in our mood, in our emotion. It's very much involved in our sleep-wake cycle. People that have a hard time falling asleep because their mind is awake, not because their body's not tired.

19:18Gary Brecka:SAMe is the most necessary methyl donor. If you're deficient in creatine, the body will steal it from SAMe. The same way that if you're deficient in minerals, your body will steal it from the bones. If you're deficient in amino acids, your body will rob it from lean muscle. So in order to stop your body from using one resource that it's deficient in and stealing it from another resource, creatine is one of those things that we can put into the body and has such a myriad of benefits. I mean, I say that if you're a woman over 40, you have to be taking creatine um men as well um you know men mainly take it for uh gains in the gym and they're not so enticed by the cognitive benefits but they get those too but i'm a huge huge fan of creatine yeah i i came onto it after suffering quite a long bout of insomnia and kind hearing reports online about that kind of macro dosing or doing a little slightly more than what's recommended on a day that you haven't slept very well.

20:28Gary Brecka:Up to 20 milligrams. Yeah. It can have quite a powerful effect. Not just a powerful effect, but it can mitigate the effects of not sleeping. Yeah. And there's nothing else that can do that. Yeah. It does feel quite magical in that sense. Yeah. How can it restore this kind of thing that otherwise you would feel like you've been hit by truck. Yeah, exactly. So if you have periods of sleep deprivation, high stress, you know, you can go up to four times the daily dose of creatine and mitigate the effects of having not slept. That's very, very true. There's a lot of science around that. Could your test detect whether you're deficient in creatine?

21:06Gary Brecka:Well, what it will do is detect whether or not you're deficient in methylating creatine and methylating something called SAMe. So you'll know exactly what to supplement with. So let's say you do this cheek swab and you find out that you have the MTHFR gene mutation, which is the most common gene mutation in the world. About 46 % of the population has this gene mutation. When you have this gene mutation, you have an inability to convert folate and folic acid into the usable form. Now that doesn't sound like a big deal until you realize that folic acid is the most prevalent nutrient in the human diet.

21:49Gary Brecka:When you can't convert that nutrient into the form the body can use. So in other words, you can't take that crude oil and convert it to gasoline. What are the consequences of that? Well, one of the primary consequences is poor gut motility. And gut motility has to do with the pace of the gut. There's listeners listening to this podcast right now that are struggling with gas, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, irritability, and cramping. And they've searched for years in their diet. They've done every food allergy, food sensitivity test. They've done gut microbiome testing and nothing seems to work because the most overlooked thing, in my opinion, in all of bariatric medicine is the pace of the gut.

22:34Gary Brecka:Your gut is like a 30-foot-long conveyor belt, and we put contents on it at one end when they exit the stomach. 30 feet later, they exit the rectum, and the pace of that conveyor belt is critical to its processing. So if you went into any factory in the world that worked on a conveyor belt system and you just walked into the factory and doubled the speed of the conveyor belt, the whole factory would break down. not because there's anything wrong with the conveyor belt there's nothing wrong with the contents on the conveyor belt what you've done is you've changed the speed too slow constipation too fast diarrhea pausing gas bloating cramping so if we can restore the motility which you can um by supplementing with something called methylfolate which that genetic test will tell you um then you restore the natural pace of the gut and people go wow i didn't have a food allergy or food sensitivity.

23:27Gary Brecka:It wasn't dairy or wheat or gluten or blueberries or bananas. Like my test said, it was just the pace of the gut. And then if you look at what else happens when you change the pace of the gut, well, we make 90 % of the neurotransmitters that form mood and emotion. 90 % of the serotonin in your body is in your gut. So if you don't have it there, you can't have it in your brain. Serotonin travels up the vagus nerve. It populates the brain. It creates mood. It creates an emotion. and so you have a mood disorder or an emotional disorder and really what you don't have is a mood or emotional disorder which you have is a deficiency from serotonin production in the gut so very often when we go back into the soil and we say how do we restore optimal function how do we turn the serotonin factory back on for example well we make serotonin critical neurotransmitter from an amino acid called tryptophan.

24:26Gary Brecka:And we use certain B vitamins and we use certain methyl donors to take that tryptophan and turn it into serotonin. Well, if that cycle's broken, it can be fixed very often with simple nutrients. Same thing happens with dopamine. When dopamine is low, which is the main driver of behavior, very often we refer to this as depression. Low serotonin referred to as depression, low dopamine becoming a driver of addiction. You know, someone that is a true addict did not wake up one day and say, I want to get really smashed. I want to get really banged up. What do you say here? Really pissed. Pissed. Pissed.

25:07Gary Brecka:I love the Brits, dude. You guys got cool names for everything, like schemes and pissed. We're trying to hide the fact of what it is to make it sound cooler. Yeah, it does sound a little cooler. Yeah, we say, you know, we say drunk, banged up. But I like pissed. I'm going to bring that one back with me. So most addicts didn't wake up one day and say, I want to get really banged up. They woke up one day and said, I want to feel normal. It was the search for normalcy where they developed an addiction. And that normalcy was the drive to get dopamine back because that's the main driver of behavior.

25:42Gary Brecka:What if you could turn the dopamine factory back on with simple nutrients? What if you could turn the serotonin factory back on with simple nutrients? What if you could quiet the mind so that when you laid down to go to sleep at night and your mind woke up, which is called rumination, and you laid there body tired but mind awake, what if you could just calm the mind? Because most people think about sleep as being tired. That's not true. Sleep is not about being exhausted. Going to sleep is about your body feeling safe to shut off. And you don't do this by tranquilizing yourself. You do this by quieting the mind.

26:20Gary Brecka:And that's why one of the things that people commonly report after doing that genetic methylation test is, oh my God, Gary, my sleep improved immediately. I stopped ruminating at night. I didn't notice my husband or wife even got out of bed and came back to bed at night. I sleep through the night. I noticed that I'm not sleeping longer, but I'm sleeping deeper. For the first time, I'm waking up refreshed. I feel clear and cognizant in the morning. I just thought brain fog was a consequence of aging, which it's not. or it's a consequence of missing raw material. And it's just so fascinating to see how extraordinary the human body can function when you give it the raw material it needs to do its job.

26:58The daily routine, because you were talking earlier about the body as this kind of complex clock system. Yes. So the daily routine is an important part of setting up those systems. No questions. I'm going to share mine. Okay. And you can see how awful it is. Just give your thoughts because the daily routine as well is something that probably changes a lot for people as some things work and don't. And as your life changes, I've just had a newborn son. Good for you. Congratulations. Change that. But so my daily routine, I'm waking up at seven and then immediately looking at my phone. I'm then probably checking my aura ring score.

27:40or probably potentially going on emails, depending on how busy I am. Then I'm going to iron my clothes, and then I'm making a coffee. But ideally before that, I'm having yogurt, fruit.