215. Dr. Vonda Wright: On Menopause, Women’s Hormone Therapy, and Perimenopause Symptoms

24:08Because if a man doesn't understand that it's not that his spouse doesn't care for him anymore, it's all these biological things going on and she doesn't want to talk about it. And he just assumes that it's a caring issue. I mean, if we could save marriages that have gone on for 20, 30, 45 years that are ending in midlife, that's work worth doing, even as an aside. I totally agree with you.

24:35Gary Brecka:And I think very often we attach love and attraction to arousal and libido. And they're very different things. You can be deeply in love with your spouse. You can be very attracted to your spouse. But you don't have arousal or libido because of these changes going on. And it doesn't mean that you're now disinterested in your spouse or you're any less attracted to them or love them any less. But I think because we lump all of those together, we think very often if libido and arousal leave the marriage or they are less frequent, that that all of a sudden means my spouse doesn't love me anymore. They're not attracted to me anymore.

25:13But when you think about it biologically, you know, people at the forefront of sexual health like Kelly Casperson and Rachel Rubin talk about estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone not as systemic hormones, which they are obviously, but almost as neurotrophic hormones, right? I mean, libido comes from the brain. I mean, I'm not an expert at this. Psychosomatic, for sure. It happens in the brain first, then it happens physiologically. But it's an interesting point you make that these relationship type changes that happen because of physiology are actually attitudinal. They're psychological. They're brain functions.

26:04And so to call these hormones to recognize that they're neurotrophic hormones working in the brain makes so much sense.

26:11Gary Brecka:If you want protein to build lean muscle, but without the caloric impact or need to cut, you need Perfect Amino. It's pure essential amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, in a precise form and ratio that allows for near 100 % utilization in building lean muscle and no caloric impact. So we build protein six times as much as whey, but without the excess body fat we normally get during bulking. This is the new era of protein supplementation, and it's real. If you want to build lean muscle without having to cut, you need Perfect Amino. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast. I've been deep down the rabbit hole of it.

26:49Gary Brecka:I mean, you know, I'm fascinated by it because I'm a human biologist and I really believe that physiology is where the answer lies. And very often when you just deprive the body of certain raw material. Right. This is a raw material. Yeah. A primary messenger. You get the expression of that disease. You know, you're an orthopedic. I mean, I spoke recently at a conference for OsteoStrong, which is a bone density machines that actually load the bones for bone density. It was fascinating to me how many folks that were there, you know, still were onto the auspice that bones were made out of calcium and bones are calcium combined with phosphorus and which makes hydroxyapatite.

27:35Gary Brecka:But in order for these to combine, you need these 12 minerals. And so deficiencies in these nutrients have consequences in brittle bones. And it's not just the absence of the load, it's also the absence of the mineral requirements to assemble the bone. And for women, when you think of emotion, it's like, well, how do you assemble emotion? Well, I mean, just like you said, your hormones are signaling molecules. And so when your emotions are off and your mood is off, you're not developing a mental disorder, a mood disorder, emotional illness, you're missing raw material. You're missing raw materials.

28:13That's right. Yeah. It's very analogous to bone. Yeah.

28:16Gary Brecka:And so putting them back can be just phenomenal. So when you do this assessment with a woman, even in perimenopause, which I'm really glad that you pointed out could happen in the 30s, because I don't think most women in their 30s are even thinking about this. I love the fact that you talk about bone density in the 30s too. You're like, hey, you better get busy now so you don't have osteopenia. Yeah. Osteoporosis is a disease that manifests in old age, but it begins in your teen years. Yeah. You know, I had two grandmothers that had fractured hips. Yes. I was lucky enough to be alive and have a great grandmother for a while, but also my grandmother.

28:54Gary Brecka:What was fascinating to me, and people should really listen to this, is that in both cases of their hip fractures, we found out that their hip fractured and then they fell. Yes. They didn't fall and break their hip. That's right. My grandmother was actually at a sink washing dishes. So common. And her femoral neck broke. Yes. And she fell and they said, oh, grandma fell and broke her hip. and then we found out from the ortho, no, actually - It broke and then she fell. It broke and then she fell. I remember when I was in the mortality space, now we didn't - With insurance. No, this with insurance, that this hip fracture, we called it a triad of death because it was a very quick acceleration to the grave.

29:41Gary Brecka:And I think I realized now that it wasn't the actual fracture that accelerated to the grave. It was just the representation, the skeletal system cannot even support its own weight. Yes. Right? I understand if you fall down a flight of steps and you get - Traumatic is very different than a traumatic. Yeah. So I'd love to unpack that too. Let's talk about bones. Because there's got to be connection between this hormonal depletion, perimenopause, and loss of bone density. Because men don't suffer the same consequences until much later. Much later. I mean, 2 million men in the United States have osteoporosis, but to your point, we'll just do men first.

30:21Men -

30:22Gary Brecka:Yeah, let's get us out of the way. Yeah, let's get the men out of the way. Because of the way testosterone interacts with the bone, I mean, men will see osteoporosis at 50 if you have a metabolic disease and after 70, almost 80 from true osteoporosis. And then men and women have a 30 % chance of dying in the first year. And we'll talk about the cause of the triad that you're talking about. And then if you do survive it 50 % of the time, you'll never be independent again. So, but the reality is bone health, as I've alluded to, begins in our teenage years. And so as I talk about this globally, I want people to understand that it's almost a harbinger of total health, meaning because bones are a primary organ.

31:08We think of them, if we think of them at all, Gary, often we don't, unless we're at fashion week and we're thinking about our cheekbones and our collarbones.

31:17Gary Brecka:Most of those are covered in filler by the time you're 50. There you go. The reality is bone is structural. Without bone, muscle, which we all love muscle these days, is just a heaping pile of metabolic tissue without bone that gives us human form, right? But bone, not just structural. You alluded to the fact it's a storehouse of many minerals in our body that the body just takes out of like a cupboard. That's the point. We buffer the pH of the blood from there. That's right. Every day we withdraw minerals from the bone. That's its job. In the long bones and the pelvis, we make all the hematopoietic cells our body needs, red blood cells, white blood cells, the platelets.

32:02Stem cells. With the stem cells, with the spleen. So it's an incubator. It is a storehouse. It is structural. But here's what I love to tell people. It is an endocrine organ producing multiple hormones that travel to different parts. It is the master communicator of your body. So I'll give you a couple examples. The bone creates a hormone called or a substance called osteocalcin. Osteocalcin will go to the brain and help your brain make neuroderived, brain-derived neurotrophic factor to build a better brain.

32:40Gary Brecka:Yeah. It coordinates with your pancreas and muscle for glucose and insulin regulation. If you're a man, osteocalcin from your bone goes to the testes to help make testosterone. And there are mind, there are bone-gut axis. There's a bone-brain axis. So it puts a whole new light on bone and why it's important, because it is the body's master communicator. And why wouldn't it be, if I were designing a human, we have bone from the top of our heads to the bottom of our pinky toe. Why don't I make that the highway of communication? So that sets the stage for why it's so important to build a lot of bone.

33:25We build peak bone mass between 15 and about 25. So because I'm a bone doctor, I get bone densities or REM scans on every person. And Gary, I find very, very young women with low bone density. And it's because several things. I think women are still dying under the thought that we have to be this big. We can't take up space. We can't eat.

33:53Gary Brecka:Can't take up space. We can't. Right. And so as a result, many women do not have regular cyclical periods, which is critical for building better bone. Or maybe, you know, we're 54 years into Title IX, which equalized sports in the United States. And maybe we're just working out and burning 10 ,000 calories a day. And like so many teams I've taken care of, replenish with gummy worms. Right. Never going to be enough. Right. Or maybe the third reason young women are not building enough bone is they're too sedentary. It's an epidemic around the world, sedentary living. So we have this young population of women not peaking out their bone density.

34:33And then we move into, there's this term running around social media called the matriessence, the time when we're fertile and deciding to have children, right? Well, it's very unknown that during pregnancy, it takes about 500 milligrams of calcium a day to build a baby. And if we're not eating enough calcium, we're going to take it from our bones. The body will prioritize the baby.

34:59Gary Brecka:It's a parasitic relationship, yeah. Yes. And so there is an entity called the osteoporosis of pregnancy that results in vertebral fractures. Wow. Isn't that amazing? Wow. Our body is designed after we give birth to replenish our bones, but only if we eat. Only if we're not trying to lose the 40 pounds we gain, right, and starving ourselves. And then if we choose to breastfeed, and I'm a big fan of breastfeeding. I don't want any of your audience to think I'm not. It takes calcium to build milk for your baby. No question. So there's this time in early young womanhood when we're still taking from our bones.

35:40if we then replete our bones, great. Many women do not because then this is what happens, Gary. In perimenopause, when estrogen is walking out the door and she's not saying goodbye, she's just leaving.

35:53Gary Brecka:She didn't say goodbye in our case either. Yeah, right. She's gone. It happened to me, like gone. Estrogen is critical for controlling the homeostasis of bone. So bone biology, I know I'm not teaching you, but to your audience, the osteoclast the cell that resorbs bone is controlled by estrogen because it is i like to think of it as a wild child it's going to eat bone that's all it does it's going to take what the body needs coming behind it is the osteoblast which rebuilds the potholes of bone when we have estrogen our body loves homeostasis it's going to keep cell these two cell types working in harmony But without our estrogen, the osteoclast gets ahead and we have more bone breakdown than we have bone building to the tune of 20 % in the perimenopausal years.

36:47We triple our bone loss. Both men and women will lose bone over time, but without estrogen, women triple it.

36:55Gary Brecka:This is why I hear you preaching to women in their 30s so often. Oh my gosh. It's the critical decade. Right. If we're truly interested in prevention, Gary, listen, I can help anybody, 50, 60, 70-year-olds, but if you truly want to get in front of prevention, the critical decade people, 35 to 45, need to wake up. Yeah. It is time to get your health standards together. Make this lifestyle that you and I talk about the standard, not something weird that we do for six weeks. Right. How we live. It's just how we live. What does a healthy bone lifestyle look like for men and women? Yeah, for men and women.

37:35We have to eat enough protein. Bones are 50 % protein. We have to be concerned with calcium and minerals from our diet. I think it's hard to get enough. You talk about this all the time, of micronutrients because our soil is depleted. But I still would rather you get most of your calcium from your food. And it's not that hard. I mean, a cup of yogurt has about 300 milligrams. You just have to be conscientious about it. So calcium and protein from our food, micronutrient supplementation, most of us need that because of the depletion of our soil, number one. Number two, we must get in a habit of lifting weights.

38:18Our bones must be loaded. Bones take the biomechanical impact of loading. I like to pound my hand. The biomechanical of loading, turn it into biochemical signals to build better bone. Because think, I don't know if you've ever had a cast, but if I put someone in a cast, they're not only do their muscles atrophy, right? You physically get a stronger, a littler limb. But if you look on an x-ray, you'll have the osteopenia of disuse. bones actually stop investing in that bone it's amazing how efficient the body is like when you ignore it it just it just oh that must not be important yeah so it takes fast it takes great nutrition it takes impact exercise not only from um lifting weights to build muscle which pull on the bone but i'm trying to introduce the world back to jumping yeah i've heard you talk about an eight inch, eight inch box jump.

39:22It does because walking gives you about 1.5 times body

39:26Gary Brecka:weight of impact running only about 2.5. We need three to four times body weight to stimulate our bones to, for impact. You'll get that from really short jumps. Um, people get a little intimidated. I box jump with a 24 inch boxes because I do it all the time. You don't have to, But most adults don't do two things anymore. We don't sprint. Very true. And we don't jump. But we're capable of it. It's just we stop playing. Yeah. Our foundational motion patterns are playing. Think of our children. They've got it right. Mm-hmm. Jumping and playing. So food, lifting weights, jumping. Here's one that people don't talk about, but I talk about all the time, is balance and foot speed.

40:16because you may have strong bones, you may jump around, but unless you can balance, I know you're going to fall over.

40:24Gary Brecka:It's so frustrating that you say that because I was actually watching one of your videos one time and you were talking about balancing on one foot while you're brushing your teeth. So then I started, I tried it and I was like, damn, this is harder than I thought it was. And you made it look so easy. And then you did like a candlestick pose or something. But it's so true. I read a statistic. It wasn't a clinical study, so don't quote me on this, but it said that after the age of 30, less than 5 % of adults will ever sprint again. Yes, I've read that somewhere. For the rest of your life, you don't break out into a dead sprint.

41:05Gary Brecka:I found that fascinating. And it's not because we're incapable. Right. It's just because we stopped doing it, right? Yeah. You're completely capable of sprinting. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Yeah. So these kinds of things are so good for us. I mean, our auxiliary muscles of respiration, exercising our diaphragm, getting air down into the lobes of our lungs. Oh, absolutely. So I actually, I read that and I immediately started sprinting again. And I hadn't gone my whole lifetime without sprinting. But I think it is so important too, because, you know, I have a saying that aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort.

41:43Gary Brecka:And the reason why I coined that term is because most of us are aggressively just seeking comfort. You know, grandma, you shouldn't go outside. It's too hot. You shouldn't go outside. It's too cold. Just lay down, relax, just eat at the first pang of hunger. Right. And it sort of destroys our natural defense mechanisms. You know, if we don't load our bones, they really don't strengthen. They do not. If you don't tear your muscles, they don't grow. If you don't challenge the immune system, it weakens. So for women that are listening to this, especially women in their 30s or at any age, adding into their regimen things like jumping.

42:18Gary Brecka:Maybe they're not in condition or don't like sprinting for whatever reason. But jumping impact. I also read a study that the bone density was the highest in gymnasts. They are. That's worked out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Okay. I forgot where I read it. Done by one of my colleagues. And it must have to do with the - The impact. Just - Of all collegiate athletes, the gymnasts have the best bones. And it makes sense, right? Yeah. It makes sense once you understand that. Yeah. We did a study years ago in master's age athletes, those that are 15 and above competing in the national senior games.

42:58And the first study we did just observed who had the most – the question was, can you preserve bone density over the lifespan? And even those athletes in their 80s had good bone density, which was remarkable. So we dug deeper and asked the question, well, which athletes? And of course we knew the answer would be the impact athletes. But we documented that the jumping, the volleyball, the basketball, the jumping type sports because of the impact had much better bone density than say bowling or the walking. Which is a sport in the National Senior Games. But the swimmers, for instance. So is cornhole.

43:35Yeah. The swimmers had less good bone density. So, I mean, we know the answers, but like in so many things in life, we know what to do, Gary. Yeah. We just don't do it.

43:45Gary Brecka:We just don't do it. We're not willing to invest in ourselves. And then suddenly a light bulb goes off. But that's why I think you and I agree, and I say this all the time, aging is not an inevitable decline from vitality to frailty. We stop being able to work hard because we simply have stopped working hard. Yeah. You know, Peter Atiyah talks about the 100-year decathlon, you know, about how you need to prepare today for what you want to be able to do when you're age 100. And I think that theory, what did you call temporal disconnect? Yes. I'm going to steal that one from you, by the way. You're going to see it start appearing on my podcast.

44:23Gary Brecka:I stole it from the bankers. It came from me, people. Okay. Yeah. You know, because you're right. There is a temporal disconnect here that I will worry about that when I need to worry about it. Yeah. And when people are getting more woke to their wellness and they're becoming citizen scientists, like you said, and so starting earlier is really prevention is the best medicine. I definitely want to close the loop on female hormone therapy though, because having had such an intimate experience with it and how it revolutionized my wife in such a short period of time and knowing the number of friends that she has that are her age that are either still suffering or just haven't figured it out and my female audience.

45:11Gary Brecka:You're a fan of hormone replacement therapy and testing for the hormones. And how soon can a woman reasonably start hormone therapy, estrogen, prenatalone supplementation? I want to promise this entire conversation with the thought that women are sentient beings with agency to choose. So I demand not that every woman go on hormones, although if I were the queen of the world, every woman would go on hormones and go on them early, But every woman is sentient and has agency to choose, but you must choose out of facts, not fear. You can't glom on to some cultural mantra and go with that. You must be more curious and must be wiser in the decisions because it's your body.

46:00So that's my disclaimer. Number one, some women come to me and say, well, I want to do it naturally. I don't want to put artificial things in my body, to which I say, what? Let's unpack that statement because I hear it dozens of times a day.

46:22Gary Brecka:I've got to be miserable and natural, you know? Miserable. Well, what's more natural than giving your body the building blocks it always has had? You have always had estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. That is the natural state. what's not natural is not having them so then the next thing people say to me is yeah but you know i'm not a pill person i don't want to take pills i'm going to eat some soybeans and some yams there you go okay we'll do that but do you know where body identical estradiol comes from it is a plant-based harvesting of the hormone your body makes. So what's more natural than taking the hormone your body makes?

47:12That's natural. Not eating yams and soybeans to try to get at what your body makes anyway. Oh, and by the way, we harvest estradiol, the molecule, which is the body identical hormone. It's the same molecule. There's only, you know, body, bioidentical is a marketing term. But when we say body identical, estradiol is a chemical structure. We're not making this stuff up.

47:35Gary Brecka:Right. Nature made this stuff, right? Right. Creation made this stuff up. I was fascinated when I found out that came from yams too. Yeah. I mean. Right. So, okay. Estradiol, your body's, there are three or four kinds of estrogen, but this is the main one. to restore to your body. If you have a uterus, you must protect the endometrium with micronized progesterone, not artificial progesterone, micronized progesterone. And then testosterone is a female hormone. It's a hormone. Men and women have it. And let me tell you something. Everything came back with her. Oh, this regimen - Not to get too personal, but things got a lot better.

48:18No, and I always talk about my own hormone journey. These three systemic hormones is where we start, but that's not where we end. To prevent the genitourinary syndrome of menopause, which is vaginal atrophy, the loss of sensation in our perineum, the loss of tissue, our labia will absorb. Yeah. And yes, I'm so glad you said that. 80 % of all women suffer from incontinence. Nobody talks about it.

48:50Gary Brecka:Nobody talks about it. Vaginal estrogen, which is safe for every person, including people who have breast cancer, that's the fourth component. That is the fourth component. And then, you know, frankly, I'm as vain as they come. We lose 30 % of the collagen in our face as estrogen walks out the door. Yes. Micro doses of estrogen on the face can restore the collagen build to an extent. Yeah. So much better than superficial things we pat on. So facial estrogen, vaginal estrogen, estradiol, progesterone, testosterone is the compliment that gives our body back the building blocks that it needs. and how early can we start?

49:40You can start in perimenopause, which in some women can start at 35. The average age of perimenopause is 45, but we do not have to wait until menopause at 51 or 52. We can start much earlier. And the opposition to that that I hear all the time is why are you gonna start a young woman on hormones? Blah, blah, blah.

50:05Gary Brecka:She needs to, yeah. But let's think about that. There are generations of women who have been put on birth control pills, which I'm not opposed to. However, it's synthetic. It is not natural. Those are artificial types of estrogen at 10 times the dose of menopause hormone therapy. So in menopause hormone therapy, we're giving you - At 14 years old too, 15, 16 years old. Oh, right, for decades, right? Right. Right. So we're taking body identical hormones in very low doses. It is not an argument when people bring up to me, yeah, but why are you giving hormones to young women? Well, you're giving birth control to young women, which is 10 times the dose.

50:52We do it for decades and decades, starting at teenagers.

50:55Gary Brecka:Much lower ages. Right. And I don't want people to think from this conversation, I'm opposed to birth control. I am not. But I want people to be more curious and just don't slam on a mantra they hear somewhere that, oh, hormones, well, you're taking them anyway. Yeah. So let's think this through a little bit. Yeah. Because if I can, Gary, there's new data that I'm going to present at this conference that was presented - At Xenos here? At Xenos. All right. That was - Saudi Arabia. Here we go. Saudi Arabia. Well, it's being currently, as we speak, presented at the menopause meeting in Orlando that's going on this week.

51:30new data in 120 million women it's a retrospective analysis of a vast database 120 million this is a vast study that shows that you can decrease the odds by 60 percent by of the following diseases by starting hormones earlier in perimenopause stroke cardiovascular disease heart attack brain death and osteoporosis. Going back to the astonishing ability of early hormone decision making and truly being preventive disease modalities.

52:16Gary Brecka:Let me tell you about something that's been a total game changer for my sleep and my stress levels. Buy Optimizers Magnesium Breakthrough. Here's the thing most people don't know. Regular magnesium supplements only give you one or two forms, but your body actually needs seven different forms to function properly. That's why you might be taking magnesium and still feel tired or stressed or having trouble sleeping. Magnesium Breakthrough is the only supplement that combines all seven bioavailable forms in just a single capsule. Within just a few days, I noticed I was falling asleep faster, staying asleep longer, and waking up actually more refreshed.

52:49Gary Brecka:Plus, my post-workout muscle recovery has been incredible. If you're ready to finally get the deep restorative sleep you deserve and feel more relaxed during the day, head to buyoptimizers.com and use the code ultimate to save on magnesium breakthrough. Trust me, your body will thank you. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. Wow, that is astounding. You know, there was a very similar mantra with men. And I think with men, it's a little bit different. You know, starting testosterone too early can be, you know, it suppresses, suppresses in you. And you also have a few other arrows in the quiver to try to raise testicular production of testosterone more naturopathically.

53:31Gary Brecka:But in 2018, the American Journal of Urology updated their clinical guidelines on testosterone therapy. I found it fascinating. In fact, if you go to that study, American Journal of Urology, and you put in American Journal of Urology testosterone, you scroll down to section 13, you'll start to read there on guidelines that clinicians should use to inform testosterone deficient patients. Now, it also talks about women in this too. And dispelling the myth that it was linked to prostate cancer, dispelling the myth that it was increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease, dispelling the myth that if you had prostate cancer, that it increased the incidence of prostate cancer.

54:15Gary Brecka:But yet so many, now that was 2018. So I realized why that one's holding on a little bit. But I think there is a fear around hormone replacement therapy because of some of these studies that came out early on. It's like we talked about the war on saturated fat. That was in the 90s. And people still think that ribeyes are deadly. And so we just need to be eating highly processed foods. And sugar is not the enemy. Saturated fat is the enemy. We know that to not be true now. Thankfully, we're about to update our nutritional guidelines, health and human services is. But, um, but I think this is just such a, such a powerful message and such a great message that you don't have to suffer to be natural.

54:59Gary Brecka:Um, you know, you should be as a woman, you should be in a position to thrive all the way through your fifties, sixties, seventies. We have the technology now, the science is there. Um, these are safe. These are effective. Um, there are physicians that understand what, what they're doing. I think it's becoming a lot mainstream. I hope so. You know, we, we were really blessed to have a, uh, an OBGYN as our clinic director. Her name's Dr. Carrie Sarda. She, she delivered 9 ,000 babies. She's an absolute phenom of a woman. Um, especially when it comes to female hormone therapy and she was preaching the same thing years ago and getting a lot of flack from her colleagues that she wanted to start, women on these hormones.

55:43Gary Brecka:And to your point, estrogen is like, you know, if you've had to pick something sinister to really mess with a woman, it would be estrogen because it's like skin elasticity, mood, memory, emotion, sleep, energy, and libido, you know, all of these things, Just like that one thing. If I just wanted to have one dial to mess up as much stuff as I could, it would be that estrogen dial and, you know, especially the E2 dial. But, um, so I'm so glad that you clarified that for us and came full circle because so many people have become citizen scientists now. Um, thankfully there's great thought leaders out there like you that are teaching women and men for that matter, that you need to take your healthcare choices into your own hands right now.

56:39Gary Brecka:And there are lifestyle changes we used to call modifiable risk factors in the insurance space. And modifiable risk factors were, okay, this person has, their BMI is too high. They're morbidly obese. They're heavily sedentary. They're smoking. Modifiable risk factors were, what if they change these? But the sad truth is, the vast majority of people don't. Well, and that continues today. I mean, I think that as a population, it would seem, you know, if I believe my social media, because I tend to click on the healthy things, I would believe that people are really making big steps. And I think that there are a lot of big steps, but I don't have to tell you with your history in the insurance business that 70 % of people in the US, many people across the world are fine.

57:34They're living in fine. They're good today until we know the research shows that health span ends about 63. Life expectancy for men in the United States is about 76 for women, 79 in Australia. We were talking about Australia. It's 85. They're doing something better. I love Australia. We were actually just

57:54Gary Brecka:talking about how much we both love Australia. I just had a tour there and people are amazing. They are. Food is really good. Food is great. They're outside. I love Australia, but their life expectancy is 85, but we're in the Middle East right now. And on average, the life expectancy is like the United States, 79. So the question becomes, I believe we are moving the needle. I believe people are becoming the CMOs of their own health, but at a population level, I think it takes the kind of effort that you've described to me in Dubai and what they're doing here in the kingdom, because still 70 % of people do not invest every day in their health and mobility.

58:35They're just living fine, doing whatever it takes to carpool, get home. And it's going to take one by one countrywide change.

58:45Gary Brecka:Yeah, I agree. Well, it's happening. You know, I chair the Maha Action, which is, you know, supporting Bobby's, Bobby Kennedy's agenda to make some changes in health and human services and CDC and the FDA. And there's a lot of flack and a lot of pushback on that, too. And it is not a political agenda by any means. It's an agenda about recapturing the health of America because no parent is excited to hear that for the first time in modern history, our children have a shorter life expectancy than we do. That to me is mind numbing with all that we have access to and that we spend$5 trillion a year on health care.

59:29Gary Brecka:Our children should all be living a lot longer than we are. And yet I think the primary driver of children's health is parent health. I agree with that. And the parent influence. So this is fascinating. So my audience loves you. Oh, thanks guys. But for those that are new to you, where can my audience find you? I love that you've asked. So every day - And please talk about your new book. Yes. Every day I educate on Instagram. I want you to go and follow me. but 90 seconds is never going to be enough. Well, that's where I started doing the candlestick and the brushing my teeth on one leg. So it impacted you.

1:00:10Gary Brecka:I'll be honest with you. Try brushing your teeth on one leg. She does it on her video. That's it. But I've written a new book. It's called Unbreakable. And it's, you know, the title Unbreakable is a nod to the fact that I'm a bone doctor, but what it really is - My wife's reading it right now. Oh, that's wonderful. It's on our night, Sam. It is a mindset approach to aging with power. It is a physical approach to aging with power. And I do end the book by examining where are we going? What are the peak performance things we can do? And what are the emerging longevity technology that after we've optimized our health, implemented the peak performance I do for athletes, where can we go into the future?

1:00:51Because longevity science is changing. So it's called Unbreakable. Thankfully, I'm so thankful it's a New York Times and London Times bestseller. Thank you. Awesome. Very nice. Great job.

1:01:01Gary Brecka:Yeah. And it deserves to be, and they can find you on Instagram too. And I wind down all of my podcasts by asking my guests the same question. So there's no right or wrong answer to this question. But what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? to be ultimately human to me means to not only i've got so many answers ultimately human to me means that i get to do what i want to do when i want to do it uninhibited by mental and physical constraints. To be ultimately human takes a daily investment in myself and not in a selfish mantra, but this vessel is worth caring for. It is. Yeah. And I think you were so spot on to point out that so many people are living in fine.

1:02:00Gary Brecka:They're walking around at a six, they're like, I can deal with this because it's not a two. Um, when they could be walking around at a nine or a 10. That's right. So Dr. Wright, thank you so much for your time today. We're going to go into my VIP room. Um, cause the VIPs are a community that I'm building of like-minded people. And, um, uh, they, they're the only ones that I let know who's coming on the podcast first. Oh, um, so they have some, they have some questions for you. I let them ask the guests, questions directly. So they have some great questions for you. But for the rest of you guys, please check out Dr.

1:02:37Gary Brecka:Vonda Wright. She is an absolute pioneer, not just in women's health, bone health, men's health. I think gives very practical advice, unencumbered advice with real statistics and science to back it up. Please read her book, especially if you're a woman. My wife is part of the way through the book now. So we're big fans. And until next time, that's just science. We'll see you next time.