238. Gary Brecka, Dr. Will Cole & Dr. Tara Swart Bieber Live at the Wellness Oasis Event

0:00If you don't master sleep, whole food, diet and mobility, nothing else matters. All of the chronic disease in America is preventable through diet and lifestyle changes. So in functional medicine, we have to have a both and not either or approach to dealing with the physical, but then dealing with the mental, emotional, spiritual and the interconnection between both. Mood and emotion have direct effects through the gut on how we manifest disease and pathology. The basics like sleep and diet, particularly taking care of your gut, but also understanding where stress shows up for you. The research is clear.

0:33Things like shame and stress, they raise inflammation just as much as a food that doesn't love the human body back. What extends life is the absence of processed foods. You have to be sleeping enough, eating well, hydrated. Things like spending time in nature, immersing yourself in the arts and culture. That's gratitude to the next level. So much could be solved in our life by just getting back to the basics. How can our thoughts and our beliefs biologically impact the way our bodies heal or perform? The single critical factor that will impact your longevity is...

1:16Huge thank you to our presenting partner, Chase. So today's panel that we're kicking off with, how to achieve whole health. So we just learned what some of our barriers are and what stress can kind of do to our bodies in the last workshop. And now we're going to have a chance to explore that even deeper. We are ready to move into this first conversation, one that invites us to look at what it really means to feel whole in mind, in body and in your personal energy. These three thought leaders are bringing together biology, neuroscience, and functional medicine to help us rethink how we nourish ourselves from the inside out.

1:57So please join me in a round of applause, grateful hearts, and introducing Gary Brecka, human biologist, longevity expert, and founder of The Ultimate Human. Dr. Will Cole, my favorite doctor, who is the leading functional medicine expert, best-selling author, and host of The Art of Being Well. And Dr. Tara Swart-Bieber, neuroscientist and author.

2:28Welcome, welcome. How are you? Great to be here. How are you? Wonderful. I'm so excited to dive into this because I just have so much respect for each of you and I'm obsessed with optimizing my human experience and my human biology. So Gary, I want to get started with you. You've built a career that's at the intersection of human biology and optimization. So for those in the audience that are really focused on longevity, which I think is all of us, right? Like how do we live the best, fullest life possible that feels good. What is one daily behavior that can dramatically improve overall well-being, but most people seem to overlook that or just not be able to really lock into it?

3:11I would say the most overlooked thing on most people's longevity journey is drawing your attention to your sleep. You know, we have big data on this. We knew this from the mortality space. We know it from the Blue Zone studies that if you don't master sleep, whole food diet and mobility, nothing else matters. You know, and so many people ask me whether they should start their wellness journey. Should I get a red light bed? Should I get a sauna? Should I get a PMF mat? Should I do transcranial light therapy? And until you've really drawn your attention to your sleep and mastered sleep, mastered a whole food diet, not a dogmatic diet.

3:43There is no evidence that dogmatic dieting, carnivore, keto, paleo, pescatarian, vegan, vegetarian, raw food extends life. What extends life is the absence of processed foods. And sleep is truly our human superpower. If you look at the correlation between sleep deprivation and early onset cognitive decline, neurodevelopmental disorders, mood disorders, hormonal disruption, so much could be solved in our life by just getting back to the basics. What do you think, you know, collectively our beef is with sleep? Like I think about, you know, cause it's the first thing all of us want to like take off the list.

4:20And, you know, if you're Gen Z or millennial, I think we're so used to those things like sleep is the cousin of death. I'll sleep when I die. I'm grinding. You know, what do we have against it that kind of keeps something so easy yet feels so far? It's because it's the most mobile thing in our schedule, right? It's the only thing that we control that we can actually schedule around. You know, six years ago, I decided that I would schedule all of my meetings and travel around sleep and exercise. So if you actually look at my phone right now, you would see that no matter where I am in the world, the first thing on my schedule is sleep, and the next thing is exercise, and then everything else falls into the calendar around that.

4:57I think the majority of the reason why most people don't draw attention to their sleep is they're unaware of the impact that this has on really true human function. About half of this audience has a gene mutation called Comp T. And so when you go to bed at night and your environment quiets, your mind wakes up, and you lay there body tired but mind awake, and this is called rumination, these are very easy issues to solve. There's targeted supplementation that quiets these catecholamines and quiets the mind, the same neurotransmitter cascade that leads to anxiety, anxiousness, ADD, ADHD, OCD. So I really think we haven't emphasized the importance of having a sleep routine.

5:41If we went around the audience and I asked you, what's your routine to go to sleep? Most people just haven't developed one. We have a routine to get our kids to school. We have a routine for exercise, but we actually don't have good sleep hygiene. I don't know if I answered your question or I just rambled for five minutes. Yeah, no, it's important because it is one of the things we have to change it, right? If you want better health. Dr. Cole, your work in functional medicine really emphasizes balance over bioperfection. How do you help patients shift from chasing the metrics? Because we can get obsessed with anything, right?

6:18Chasing those metrics to cultivating actually sustainable wellness habits. Yeah. So I also love that we talked about the Calm T gene variant at 10 a.m. in the morning. It's a great way to start the day. Thanks, Gary. We went right after. So you're right. I love data. And a lot of my job is looking at labs and getting those labs improved. But more hyper focus on these things, I think the context and the intention around all of this stuff matters. Now, look, there's a lot of bio-individuality to how we even receive information. For some people, the biohacker that's sort of type A, they have a big vessel to receive a lot of information, and it doesn't stress them out.

7:06It invigorates them. They come alive with that information. Some people, you get that information, even just basic labs. It really does keep them up at night. There's a lot of rumination. There's a lot of shame and obsession. And it can become, you know, there's a term for this orthorexia. It's disordered eating around healthy foods. But there's a larger, I think, orthorexic spectrum that happens within the wellness world where it's just data. It's like obsession about data and they're consuming data and information. And if like stressing about healthy things isn't good for our health. So it's if you've learned nothing else today, it's that.

7:43and it's just having discernment and knowing when it's okay to put your phone away, it's okay to not consume more stuff and just keeping it simple. So part of my job, I guess, is finding out their why and then how do they receive information and then making this fun. We've lost the plot if it's a source of dread and obsession. So there's not an easy answer to that question, but it's just, I guess, on an individual level, checking yourself and seeing is this healthy stuff creating an unhealthy obsession and i think at that point less is is more in in the profound ways because i see people do all the things in the health that we do but they're completely they're they're they're filled with a lot of obsession and negativity and it's impacting their labs so we have to realize that the your what we eat matters what the supplements and peptides we do matters, but what are we feeding our head and our heart on a daily basis?

8:43That's more nebulous. That's more abstract, but it's something that we need to find out for ourselves what that looks like and having discernment. Wow. I'm grateful for the way you broke that down because I think when we talk about being whole, right, like those are the pieces that can get left on the table is the mind and the heart connection, but all of it flows when all of it is present. Dr. Bieber, as a neuroscientist, you often speak about the mind's influence on physical health, and it feels like that is, you know, such a through line here. How can our thoughts and our beliefs biologically impact the way our bodies heal or perform?

9:21What is happening when we are staying up, ruminating about our health or just about the world? Yeah, so I just want to segue on from what Will just said, which is that in terms of longevity, you can do all the good things that we know we're supposed to do and you can stop doing all the bad things that we know we're not supposed to be doing but the single critical factor that will impact your longevity is low level chronic stress so not having that is the single most important thing and the answer to your question is because every thought correlates with a range of emotions and every emotion correlates with certain hormones like cortisol for the stress and survival emotions and oxytocin for the bonding emotions and serotonin also for mood but a lot more which I'll come to so basically every time you have a certain thought if it's inducing a survival emotion like fear or shame or sadness or self-disgust then that's increasing the levels of cortisol in your blood that's going around your body corroding your immune system creating inflammation and dehydration in your system and obviously impairing your ability to heal or perform.

10:31On the other hand if you have gratitude and you look at beauty and you spend time in nature and you indulge in the arts and culture then you induce the hormone oxytocin which helps you to build up your immunity, build up your resilience, perform better, heal quicker. There's a really important interesting new hypothesis called the serotonin hypothesis, which is about how trauma is stored in the body. So most of you will have heard of Bessel van der Kolk's book, The Body Holds the Score. And we now understand that serotonin is not just to do with mood. Actually, more than 95 % of our serotonin is produced outside the central nervous system and mostly in the gut.

11:13The word itself means serum and tone. So that's your blood and plasma products and tone means how it asks the vessels to constrict to either push more or less nutrients and oxygen into the tissues and fascia of your body therefore creating bracing patterns in your body created by trauma or not so i always say that serotonin could be producing the impacts of trauma in your body or it could allow you to release hidden wisdom and intuition from your body through somatic practices like the kind of things you'll see here today. Wow. Wow. Thank you.

11:55Gary, what is one misconception about biohacking that you might like to correct, especially in this, you know, truly trend-driven era of wellness? You know, I think it's obsessing on too many variables. You know, what we found in our functional medicine clinic over the course of 11 years is that very often or rarely, if ever, do multiple systems fail in human beings at one time. Usually what happens is one thing goes wrong that causes everything. You'll never get me to believe that someone has multiple autoimmune diseases in the same biome. You had one thing go wrong that caused a complete domino effect, and now we're down the road usually chasing the symptomology from multiple issues going wrong.

12:43We have over 39 ,000 disease and diagnostic categories to slot you into. So if you have ADD, ADHD, OCD, manic depression, bipolar, autoimmune. And what these do is they make us feel that we have individual ailments that we have to go and chase. The truth is that the vast majority of these are related back to a single variable. You know, we learned in our functional medicine clinic after treating almost a quarter of a million patients that nearly every autoimmune patient that we received had one of four things. They had mold, mycotoxin, parasite, virus, or heavy metals. And very often when we eliminated those pathogenic invaders, their autoimmune disease went into remission.

13:27And so people become obsessive with the diagnosis, the category. I've been told that I have attention deficit disorder. I have obsessive compulsive disorder. I've been told I have a genetically inherited disease because this thing runs in my family. The human genome is actually specifically designed to not pass on disease. If it wasn't, none of us would be sitting here right now. So we're not as sick or diseased or as pathological as we think we are. We're not as mentally ill as we think we are. We don't have as many mood disorders as we think we do. Very often, we are simply nutrient deficient.

13:59When you deprive the human body of certain raw material, you get the expression of disease. If you're familiar with something called methylation, this is the process the body goes through to take all of the nutrients and compounds that enter our body and convert it into the usable form. Very often, when this process is impaired, you have a deficiency. And this deficiency maps to some of the most common ailments that we suffer from. So I recently, well, recently, about 18 months ago, I began sitting on a complicated case committee at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles. And what's fascinating about being on this committee, looking at cases that don't make medical sense, is how overcomplicated many of the specialists want to make these conditions.

14:44And the truth is, what we try to do is we try to go back and find that very first domino to fall. High insulin, hyperglycemia. What was the gut dysbiosis? What was the very first domino to fall? And then you see massive healing occur. We believe this in plant physiology. You know, if there was a leaf rotting in any of these palm trees out here, and you called a true arborist, a true botanist out to look at that plant, 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. And they would add nitrogen to the soil, and the leaf would heal.

15:16Human beings are no different. When you deprive the body of certain raw material, you get the expression of disease. and so again I don't know if I answered your question um or I just I think you more than my wife says I eat people's face so sorry if I just ate your face no it was so fascinating to hear that and thank you so much specifically for that example because I think you know for a lot of us that are even really into this space like it can get we're not doctors so it can get so overly complicated but hearing something like that I'm just like oh my gosh okay so that's how I should be looking at my body.

15:53Yeah. You know, I think it's fascinating the way that you talked about serotonin, you know, the main driver of mood, main driver of emotion. And it is the vast majority of serotonin is made right here in our gut. And what we do is we take an amino acid called tryptophan, the famous one that makes you sleepy at Thanksgiving dinner. And we methylate that into the neurotransmitter serotonin. And serotonin is not only responsible for vascular tone. When you think about vascular tone, what is that? Well, if you realize that our heart only circulates 30 % of the blood in our body. Most people think our heart is circulating all of the blood in our body.

16:28It's not. 70 % of your circulation is done by an activity called vasomotor. These are very small capillaries and venules. And serotonin has a distinct effect on the tone of this vasomotor activity, driving blood pressure up. So mood and emotion have direct effects through the gut on how we manifest disease and pathology. I've had so many cases of patients with chronic hypertension that we solved by calming down their resistance to serotonin and by actually fixing the methylation pathway and allowing their vascular system to relax and their pressure to return to normal. So, you know, I thank you for that explanation because we're now starting to accept the fact that mood and emotion have a real impact on physiology.

17:21Dr. Cole, I'm really kind of excited about asking you this question because I had the privilege of being able to work with you and it was utterly life-changing for me and my understanding of myself, my body. So, you know, in your book, which I huge fan of gut feelings, you explore the link that's between emotional stress and inflammation. And that seems to be its own epidemic. You know, everyone I talk to, we are talking about having inflamed bodies and the effects of that. So what does emotional inflammation look like in your everyday life? And how can we begin to regulate that? It's a concept.

17:59I made up a word called shameflammation. I just make up words all day long. But how do things like shame and things that cause shame, like chronic stress and unresolved trauma, when you're not showing up as the best version of yourself, you're snapping, you're eating foods that don't love you back, and you're dysregulated, like Gary was saying. There's these core dysregulations. So in functional medicine, we have to have a both and, not either or approach to dealing with the physical, but then dealing with the mental, emotional, spiritual and the interconnection, the bidirectional communication between both.

18:35both. So kind of part two of the first question that I gave was looking at things like underlying gut problems, looking at things like nutrient deficiencies and these things that Gary was talking about, these biotoxin, bacterial virus, mold, environmental toxins, all of that matters, right? I mean, you cannot meditate or breath work your way out of these things that are on a physiological level right but it's just one side of the coin and we have to look at those mental emotional spiritual things and metabolize stored trauma just as much as we would an environmental toxin but it's a lot more again non-linear abstract because it's more straightforward and prescriptive for me to say eat these foods don't eat these foods take these supplements do this peptide protocol to deal with the physiological but how do you say like don't have that stress don't have that trauma.

19:28You can't just drop that trauma. Don't have it anymore today. It doesn't work like that, obviously. So these are the complex things that need to be talked about, but have to be part of the conversation, as far as I'm concerned, in functional medicine. The research is clear. Things like shame and stress, they raise inflammation just as much as a food that doesn't love the human body back. But bringing things in that are acts of stillness, they're supportive of the parasympathetic, like this through line of the things we're talking about is how does serotonin and dopamine, how do these neurotransmitters that are made and stored, like 95 % of serotonin is made and stored in the gut.

20:08It works upon not passing through the blood brain barrier as we understand it. It's working on GI motility. It's working on connection of that vagus nerve, the largest cranial nerve in the body that's responsible for that resting, digesting, that parasympathetic aspect of it. So all the physical stuff we have to look at, but then we have to look at these more nebulous mental, emotional, spiritual things. So things like breathwork and meditation, for the initiated here, they understand it. But a lot of the world will say that's woo-woo, that's weird. It's why would I give it any attention? I'm fine.

20:42I'm not that stressed. We know that we're this hyper-scheduled culture, right? And just because something's our everyday doesn't mean we should settle for it. Just because something's common doesn't necessarily make it normal. And a lot of people, they're in this hypervigilant state all the time that they're not even used to a different state. They're not even used to something that's supportive of the parasympathetic, that resting, digesting state. So we prescribe, if you will, things like meditation, breathwork, somatic practices. Not that we have to do all the things, But we have to pick a consistent practice.

21:18Like the panel that was before us, journaling is a massive way to metabolize stored trauma in the body. What does it feel like to be me today and show up and do Nicole Sacks' work is a great way to start to get that mental, emotional, spiritual things that are stored in the body, like the body keeps the story eloquently talks about, and be consistent with it. But then I like wearables. I like devices like the transcutaneous vagal nerve stimulation devices that go on the ear, on the neck, because it's not another thing to do per se. It's just you wear it and it stimulates the vagus nerve that I find it makes the meditation or the breath work or the somatic practice a lot more effective.

22:00Because the people that say meditation is not for me are typically the people that need to do it the most. But they're so dysregulated that it's very uncomfortable. So doing some device that's stimulating the vagus nerve helps to create enough of a window to allow the breath work or the meditation to even be consistent. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Thanks, guys. I didn't expect to clap. Something I as a kind of foundationally meditation teacher, something I always tell people is like, you've got to have a little foreplay before you start your practice. You know, you've got to let yourself kind of let your body learn to slowly relax before you get to that next stage.

22:41It's so important. You know, so much of what you were saying, I remember even in my first time working with you, the first question you asked me was, so what's happened to you? Like, what are some of the hard things that have happened to you in your life? What was your childhood like? And it's been amazing that that is part of the conversations that we can now have with our doctors to get that deeper understanding. We have to. I mean, I have every telehealth patient fill out an ACE score, which is, I think that's what we were talking about, adverse childhood experiences. And it's talking about really heavy things like sexual trauma growing up, physical abuse growing up, substance abuse in the home growing up, neglect, all these type of really heavy things.

23:19But the research is clear that the higher somebody's ACE score, the more likely that I have things like autoimmune problems, metabolic problems, hormonal problems, and of course, mental health issues. So it's not to put, again, obsession or I'm screwed, there's no hope for me, I'm broken. It's okay. No, we have to know what we're dealing with to do something about it. And the human body is amazingly resilient when you start to address these things that are oftentimes overlooked. Thank you so much. Dr. Bieber, you teach about neuroplasticity as a foundation for well-being. for someone that is trying to rewire old stress patterns, much of like, you know, what we're talking about, things that have happened, fears, what's a realistic starting point that actually, you know, kind of endures beyond the first week?

24:10Yeah. So, I mean, I think we're so lucky to be living in an era where we have all of these technologies and AI and biomarkers and supplements and things that we can take, but I'm going to speak at the two ends of the spectrum. So I think the basics, like Gary and Will have already mentioned, like sleep and diet, particularly taking care of your gut, but also understanding where stress shows up for you. So there's the gut, gut microbiome brain connection. So for a lot of people, when they're stressed, it really does show up in their gut through bloating or leaky gut symptoms or indigestion. but there's also something called psychodermatology which is about the connection between your mental state and your skin so obviously if you have a breakout that affects your mood but equally the skin isn't just the physical boundary of your body it's the psychological boundary of um of like transgressions so emotional financial sexual transgressions can actually show up as rashes on your skin so really understanding where stress shows up for you there's also i could go into the psycho-neuro-endocrino-immunology connection, but basically everything's connected.

25:23So all the systems will show some symptom of stress. Like Gary said, we don't all have every autoimmune system, but it will show up somewhere for you. And I think I love that analogy of the first domino. So I would start with the basics. If you're not creating the physical foundations for success in your body to change something with neuroplasticity, it's like saying I'm not going to put gas in the car but I expect it to drive so you do have to be sleeping enough eating well hydrated not being sedentary you know oxygenating your system and managing your stress I really want to bring it back to that being very important you can't do neuroplasticity if you're if you're in stress once you think you've got that to a decent level then there are the beautiful and ethereal things that we can do that we can learn from our ancestors are not luxuries they're absolutely crucial to our survival.

26:17Things like spending time in nature, immersing yourself in the arts and culture, noticing beauty and appreciating it, that's gratitude to the next level. I mean, we're in Miami and it's Art Basel, so I'm just going to give you a few statistics about the importance of these things. So when you spend time in nature, trees actually release chemicals called phytoncides that trigger the release of natural killer cells in your immune system, boosting your immunity not just against colds and flus but also against potentially heart attacks and cancers because there are tumor cells circulating in our blood all the time and they help to kill them off and then if you indulge in the arts and culture every two months so that's going to a free gallery or a sculpture park or the ballet or the theater then you have a 31 % lower chance of dying compared to someone that doesn't.

27:10If you only go every two months, you have a 14 % lower chance of dying than someone that doesn't indulge in the arts and culture. So I mean, to me that these are no brainers, you know, they're free, they're freely available. It's just about prioritizing and making the time. And, and we don't do that because we tend to think they might be frivolous and not essential. It's more important to go for a run or it's more important to, you know take your supplements but actually our ancestors in paleolithic times had no spare resources for doing anything other than survival they they didn't give up resources for thriving it was only for surviving so why did they dance and drum and chant and hum and make cave paintings we think cave paintings are the first evidence of humans making art that's 40 000 years ago 10 and 25 ,000 years before that we were carving into ostrich eggshells in South Africa we were making necklaces out of shells and adorning ourselves 80 ,000 years before that we were crumbling ochre from the ground and smearing it onto our faces and our bodies and we believed that there was a reproductive advantage to this because we would look more attractive and more creative 500 ,000 years ago we made tools that were more beautiful and symmetrical than they had to be to complete the task that they were for.

28:32So I'm just going to leave you with that. Like if you don't go and do something arty this week, I don't know what's going to persuade you. Wow. Thank you so much. Such great information. This next question is for each of you and Gary, I'd love to start with you. When you think of whole health, how, how do you define thriving versus merely maintaining? I really define thriving versus nearly maintaining as making self-care non-negotiable. If you look back to the category of autoimmune, the reason why 82 % of all autoimmune disease is found in women is not because autoimmune disease is selective by sex.