287. Live at the Southern Utah Holistic Health Summit 2026

26:24Gary Brecka:There's no reason for you to feel that way. There's nothing for you to be afraid of. Why do you choose to act like that? Because it's not a choice. That fear is very present. And it happens in children, and it causes misbehavior, and we want to tranquilize children, or we want to speed up their nervous system with Ritalin, or Vyvanse, or Adderall, and in order to solve which is what we call a chemical imbalance, which is a nutrient deficiency. The vast majority of people with that gene mutation need a very specific form of B12, you may want to write this down, called hydroxycobalamin. It's a form of B12.

27:01Gary Brecka:The most popular form of B12, by the way, is one called cyanocobalamin. Does anyone know what that's made from? Hydrogen cyanide. Yes, it's legal in the United States to take the waste product from human sewage treatment plants called sludge, which is pure hydrogen cyanide, take that hydrogen cyanide, bind it to a metal called the cobalt metal, and make cyanocobalamin. B12 is a metal. We bind it to other molecules. Methylcobalamin is the one the body uses. Cyanocobalamin is one we generally make synthetically. It's very cheap. A lot of it does come from human sewage. Happy to show you the patents.

27:40Gary Brecka:Happy to take you to the National Library of Medicine at the National Institute of Health and let you read it for yourself. But those forms of B12 exacerbate anxiety. So hydroxycobalamin, the entire complex of B vitamins that I showed you right here, a specific form of folate called methylfolate or folinic acid. In fact, the US FDA just approved the first nutrient as a prescription. It's called leukophorin. is folinic acid, a raw material, a nutrient for cerebral folate deficiency, autism, and neurodevelopmental disorders. So now it's FDA approved, and all it is is a nutrient because they couldn't find something that worked better for this cerebral folate deficiency.

28:27Gary Brecka:And so if you have anxiety and you want to break down those catecholamines, those waking neurotransmitters, if you have trouble going to sleep at night because you ruminate, those are very likely your nutrient deficiencies. And fixing those in addition with zinc, specific form of zinc called, or magnesium called magnesium three and eight, and zinc will help to quiet the mind. See, we're not as sick or diseased or as pathological as we think we are. Very often we are nutrient deficient. Do you know in the United States, until about 11 months ago, the Physician's Desk Reference, we defined depression as an inadequate supply of serotonin.

29:09Gary Brecka:It was called the serotonin hypothesis of depression. So essentially, if you were depressed or you exhibited the science of depression, you were low on serotonin. So you would think if we defined depression as low serotonin, that the fix would be to raise serotonin. I mean, that makes sense, right? But that's not what we do. We take people that are low on serotonin and we put them on something called an SSRI. It's a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. So what does this do? What it does is it blocks receptors and it rations what little serotonin you have. So you don't go off a cliff. So by its own definition, it does not raise serotonin.

29:47Gary Brecka:So by its own definition, it doesn't end depression. Sage and I have had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of patients come into our clinic and I will sit across the table from them and say, well, how long have you been on an antidepressant? And they'll say, 15, 18 years. I go, great. When did you think it was going to kick in? Should we just run this for another two years and see how it goes? Because that's not what's raising serotonin. Does anyone know where serotonin is made in the human body? Yeah, in the gut. 90 % of the serotonin in your entire body is right here. If you don't have it here, you can't have it here.

30:26Gary Brecka:Depression may begin in your external environment. It is always continued in your internal environment. The serotonin factory is right here. And it's either underproduction or under migration, right? It moves right up the vagus nerve, populates the brain, creates mood, and creates our emotional state. So if you're low on that raw material, you now have a mood disorder, a mental illness. there are 38 ,000 categories for disease and pathology. There are none for nutrient deficiencies. There are no ICD-9, 10, or 11 codes for nutrient deficiencies. There are 38 ,000 for pathology and disease. And so if we want to turn the factory back on that makes serotonin, we have to go back into the gut.

31:12Gary Brecka:And how do we make serotonin? Well, we take an amino acid called tryptophan, you know, the one that's famous for making you sleepy on Thanksgiving dinner, and we methylate it into the neurotransmitter serotonin. And if that process is broken, which is usually broken because of a deficiency in tryptophan or a lack of complex vitamins, then you can't convert tryptophan into serotonin. You now have low serotonin, and now you have a mood disorder or a mental illness. And we could just keep going through hypothyroid, autoimmune, migraines. We could just continue, and I'm going to do this when we open the floor to questions later.

31:50Gary Brecka:You can ask about any of those conditions, but first we need to ask ourselves, does the body have the raw material it needs to do its job? Does this tree have the nitrogen that the leaf needs to heal? And if not, before I spray poison on the leaf, let me put the fertilizer back into the soil. And I can tell you this from experience the last 10 years, putting thousands and thousands and thousands of people fully into remission with attention deficit disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorders, with depressive disorders, migraine headaches. You know, my famous journey with Dana White, how many of you saw the journey that I had with Dana White?

32:28Gary Brecka:He's the current CEO of the UFC. And Dana, in fact, I'll give you a very specific example here. um dana had what we call a brittle hypertension all i'm doing is going into that chart so he had a brittle he was a brittle hypertensive he he was on a beta blocker uh what's called a calcium channel blocker and something called an ace inhibitor and um they could not get his blood pressure down it was life-threateningly high and this had gone on for years so they put him on very, very powerful diuretics. And these diuretics would strip the potassium out of his body. By the way, this is all in the public domain.

33:08Gary Brecka:I'm not disclosing his medical records without his permission. And because it was not a potassium sparing diuretic, he would end up in the emergency room once or twice a year with hypopotastinemia, which is very, very low potassium, which caused him to be tachycardic, caused a regular heartbeat. And so when I met Dana and I was introduced to him. He had no interest in me doing his blood work or his gene testing. He just wanted me to tell him how many more months he had left on earth. He was like, I just want to know how long I have left so I can just run this clock out with my foot as hard on the gas as I can.

33:44Gary Brecka:And so I got blood work and I got a gene test on him. And I pulled 10 years of medical records on him. And I said, Dana, I don't think you have hypertension. He goes, what the heck do you mean? I've been on meds for almost 15 years. I've got the top cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, you know, about to do a heart ablation on me to lower my blood pressure. I think I've got that covered. And I go, well, when I look at your medical records, you've never had an abnormal EKG. You've never had an abnormal EEG. You've never had abnormal heart sounds. You've never had abnormal lung sounds. In fact, you've had the most advanced cardiac diagnostics in the world.

34:24Gary Brecka:You had a cardiac catheterization. You had Dicontrast studies. You had a clearly exam. All of your cardiac workup was normal. And he goes, well, then why the heck am I on all these meds? And I'm paraphrasing because he said it a lot more vile than that. I'm going to use, I'm going to use heck, shucks, and darn in replace for some very colorful Dana White language. But he said, why in the shucks am I on all these meds? And I said, well, darn it, Dana.

34:57Gary Brecka:So I said, he goes, you know, I inherited it. This runs in my family. I go, that's my favorite one. I go, why don't we get the cardiologist on the phone and ask him what gene you inherited from your family member that caused this condition to exist. And so what I found, it was that in Dana's family a very specific gene mutation called MTRR. This gene mutation ran in his family. What this gene does in combination with a gene mutation called MTHFR was it impairs your ability to break down an amino acid that is in the blood of everyone in this room called homocysteine. And when I told Dana that he had high homocysteine, he looked me straight in the eye and said, I'm not a homo.

35:40Gary Brecka:I said, no, this is an amino acid. This is a true conversation, by the way. I'm not making any of this up. I said, Ben, you've got really high homocysteine. He said, I'm not a homo. It's not a homogene. It's homocysteine. So we had to walk our way out of that because he was very offended by that statement. So this amino acid is in everyone's blood in this room. As that amino acid rises and it's cruising by the inside lining of your arteries, it irritates the artery. And if you irritate an artery, it will clamp down. And if you make the pipes smaller in a fixed system, the pressure goes up. Any apprentice plumber knows if you want to increase the pressure, you decrease the pipes.

36:27Gary Brecka:Make the pipes smaller, pressure goes up. By the way, does anyone know what percentage of the blood in our body is circulated by our heart? Does anyone know? She's thinking. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Four? We'll all be dead. 30? 60? Random stabs in the dark now. 79! 30%. Your heart is only responsible for 30 % of your circulation. 70 % of your circulation is not done by your heart. It is done by an activity called vasomotor. I want you to think of a snake swallowing a mouse. There is no pressure in 70 % of your vessels because the heart is not pushing the blood. The blood is being moved around by this vasomotor.

37:21Gary Brecka:We never examine the 70 % of our circulatory system. We look at 30 % that the heart is responsible for circulating. You have about 63 ,000 miles of blood vessel in your body. Nobody in this room has a left ventricle that with one contraction can push blood 63 ,000 miles. It is done by this activity called vasomotor. Vasomotor is very sensitive to high homocysteine. And so you don't need much arterial narrowing in 63 ,000 miles to drive pressure up. So as that homocysteine rose and his vascular system contracted, his pressure went up, which is why he was non-responsive to medication, which is why 85 % of the time the diagnosis of high blood pressure is idiopathic.

38:04Gary Brecka:Google it. Ask ChatGPT. What percentage of primary hypertension is idiopathic? 85%. Percentage of autoimmune is idiopathic? 85%. These things don't happen randomly and by accident. And so instead of putting Dana on medication, I put them on an amino acid. And if you have high blood pressure, you may want to write this one down. It is called TMG. Try methylglycine. You can get it over the counter. I don't even sell it. So try methylglycine. Trimethylglycine will help homocysteine to be metabolized back into something called methionine. And the important point here is that this nutrient deficiency, which leads to high homocysteine deficiency in TMG, leads to high homocysteine, causes vascular constriction, drives pressure up.

38:56Gary Brecka:We call that hypertension. That runs in families. That is not genetic. And again, I could just keep going and going and going, but my wife says I eat people's face, so I don't want to eat your face. But I could stand here up all day. We could talk about hypothyroid. We could talk about migraine headaches. We could talk about neuropathy, all kinds of conditions that first, we just don't define them. And second, we never think they could be as simple as a nutrient deficiency causing the exacerbation of disease. So I put him on something called trimethylglycine. And over the next 21 weeks, as his homocysteine fell, his vascular system began to relax.

39:35Gary Brecka:As his vascular system began to relax, his pressure returned to normal. In fact, I'll never forget the call that I got from him one day. And he was like, he called me in the morning and he was like, Gary, something's wrong. And I was like, what's going on? He goes, every day for the last few days when I walk into the gym, as soon as I pick up a weight or I step on a treadmill, I get immediately lightheaded. I go, that's a great sign. He's like, what the heck are you talking about? What in the darn are you talking about? What in the shucks, by golly, do you mean? And he said something very different.

40:05Gary Brecka:And I said, Dana, when your blood pressure is high, your blood pressure will make your pressure normal. When your blood pressure is normal, it will make you hyposystolic. It will actually push your blood pressure down. This was the sign that I was looking for to talk to your cardiologist about titrating you off of your medication. How do you think that conversation went? So cardiologist wanted no part of it. So I brought in another physician to titrate him off his meds. And at 21 weeks, he was off all of his blood pressure medication for the first time in 15 years. That was almost three years ago today and he is still to this day normal blood pressure never had heart ablation and is on no medication for blood pressure so i got it for that one too so the reason why i keep going through these cycles is because we're we're just tracing this back into the soil right so first do we have everything that god gave us that we need in order to function if not i'm not going to assume that anything is wrong with you.

41:05Gary Brecka:Before I label you with a diagnosis, I'm going to first see if your body has the raw material it needs to do its job. And then after that, get out of its way and watch it recover. And then if it doesn't recover, then we go looking for pathology and disease. I'm not saying that it doesn't exist. It just does not exist nearly at the scale. God specifically designed the human genome to not pass on disease. It is specifically engineered to not pass on disease. Yes, it malfunctions and things slip by, but none of us would be sitting in this room if genetically inherited disease was something that we promulgated in the human genome, right?

41:47Gary Brecka:We would all not be here. And so we, you know, we had a saying in the mortality space because we saw it so often that the absence of dopamine was the presence of addiction. It was literally a saying we had around the office. The absence of dopamine was the presence of addiction because dopamine, this valuable neurotransmitter, is the driver of behavior. So if I was able to stick a magic syringe in anybody's shoulder here and just pull the dopamine out of your body, as soon as I sucked that neurotransmitter out of your body, you would immediately begin to engage in dopamine-seeking behavior, promiscuity thrill-seeking workaholic workaholic drugs alcohol oh you know all of these different chemicals or or or stimulants that actually would give us a normal level of dopamine addiction if you've ever actually been an addict or you've known a true addict addiction has a few characteristics number one it has a tendency to shift and never really go away because we don't treat the dopamine deficiency.

42:51Gary Brecka:Drug addicts become alcoholics. Alcoholics become workaholics. Workaholics become workaholics. The addiction shifts from one thing to another. Why? Because we don't fix the dopamine deficiency. We don't fix the driver of behavior. And so, you know, addicts, and I have given hordes of my time to drug and alcohol treatment and addiction treatment centers, rarely does an addict or did an addict just wake up one morning and go, I want to get really banged up. They woke up one morning and said, I want to feel normal. It was the search for normalcy where they developed an addiction. And usually they are running from a low.

43:33They're

43:34Gary Brecka:actually not running towards a high. They don't even like how they feel when they're on that drug or that alcohol or they're engaged in that activity. It just makes them feel normal. And so if we would understand that deficiencies in dopamine drive behavior, why wouldn't we go back in and fix the dopamine pump? You know that we make dopamine from something called phenylalanine and tyrosine? We make it from basic amino acids that are methylated in our gut into dopamine. Having that deficiency drives dopamine-seeking behavior. When I was a triathlete years ago for a period of time. I bet 45, almost 50 % of the guys that I raced with were recovering alcoholics.

44:14Gary Brecka:This was their new addiction, was work-alcoholic, because they hadn't addressed the dopamine deficiency. And again, we could just keep going on and on and on. These are the main genes that genetically inherited genes that drive most of the conditions that I just discussed. They are very common. They are passed in families, which is why things like drug and alcohol addiction, depression, anxiety, hypothyroid, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, these things do run in families even though they are not carried on the genome because the deficiency leads to the disease, not the disease being carried on the genome.

45:00Gary Brecka:And so I wish that we would go back into human physiology and really study how human beings were architected before we brought in chemicals, synthetics, and pharmaceuticals. And so if you have, for example, this COMT gene, you're very likely to be a need freak. You're also likely to be a need freak that ruminates at night, that has a hard time falling asleep because your mind is awake, or you're a very light sleeper and your spouse gets out of bed and when they come back into bed, you're awake, your mind turns on, you can't get back to sleep. You're also a worrier, not a warrior. Everything scares you.

45:40Gary Brecka:When you actually think about things at night, you take them right to worst case scenario. I have a job interview tomorrow, there's no chance I'm getting hired. I suck and they hate me. And so it's just, and then you wake up in the morning, you're like, okay, I really took that for a ride, you know? Always worst case scenario. What's fascinating about these conditions is that fact patterns and reality don't shift their mindset. So you think something bad's going to happen on your way to the office. You think when you get to the office, something bad's going to happen. You go 101 days straight, go into the office, nothing went wrong.

46:17On

46:17Gary Brecka:the 102nd day, you think something bad's going to happen, right? So reality doesn't matter, right? And so we learn to live with these. We call them consequences of aging or we're just, I'm just a warrior. I'm just a bad sleeper. I have brain fog, weight gain, water retention, poor focus, poor concentration. I don't respond to exercise. None of those things are a consequence of aging. They are consequences of nutrient deficiencies. And a lot of them actually have to do with basic amino acids. So many of us are deficient in the category of amino acids that we call essential amino acids, what the body uses to build all kinds of structures.

46:55Gary Brecka:Proteins, I mean, amino acids are not proteins, by the way. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. So when we get amino acids into the body, especially essential amino acids, we build muscle, we build connective tissue, we build collagen, elastin, fiber, and we also build natural killer cells. We build so many things. The reason why there is a protein equivalent is not to get enough protein. Protein is useless when you put it in the body until it is converted into amino acids. The target is the amino acid equivalent. And by the way, sadly, guys, we cannot target direct protein in the human body.

47:30Gary Brecka:We do not eat our nails to grow our nails. We don't eat our hair to grow our hair. You cannot eat collagen to grow collagen. You can take collagen. It's great. It's a great protein. It's an incomplete protein. Can't build muscle from it. But you cannot say, I'm going to take collagen from here and it's going to show up as collagen in my skin. That's not true. It's no different than eating a piece of steak and showing up its collagen. It will show up as amino acids, and amino acids will go build collagen, elastin, fibrin, muscles, skin, all of these structures, natural killer cells. So getting the right amino acid equivalent is as important, if not more important, than getting to a protein equivalent.

48:08Gary Brecka:And sometimes it's very hard for women, especially, to reach their protein equivalent without going way over their macros. They don't like to eat a 14-ounce ribeye and half a dozen eggs every day. So that's one of the reasons why I take an amino acid supplement. It doesn't break a fast. It's the equivalent to eating 29 grams of whey protein, and you get all of the essential amino acids that your body needs. So as you go through here, a lot of these also have to do with nutrient deficiencies that are related to motility in our gut. So I can't tell you how many clients and patients I've had that have had gut dysbiosis or irritable bowel syndrome, and they've had every food sensitivity and food allergy and gut microbiome test.

48:57Gary Brecka:But the most overlooked thing in all of bariatric medicine is not the contents of the gut. It is the pace of the gut. And rarely, if ever, do I talk to bariatric specialists that even think about the pace of the gut. You have to think about your gut as a 30-foot-long conveyor belt. Okay, so if we were to stretch it all out, it's 30 feet long. So we drop contents on it at one end as they exit the stomach. 30 feet later, they exit the rectum. The speed of that conveyor belt is more important than the contents. So if you walked into any factory in the world that worked on a conveyor belt system, and you just walked into that factory and you doubled the speed of the conveyor belt, the whole line would break down.

49:42Gary Brecka:If you stopped the conveyor belt, the whole line would break down. If you slowed it, it would break down the whole line. Too fast? Diarrhea. Too slow? Constipation. Pausing? Bloating. Irritability? Cramping? Dysbiosis? Diverticulitis? Ulcerative colitis? And if contents begin to leak, as in leaky gut, then the immune system will get called to that location. And it will stay there until the condition goes away, or it will persist and pervert into what we call Crohn's disease, an autoimmune disease. The immune system didn't just show up and randomly attack your colon. It showed up to protect you from contents that were exiting the luminal area of your gut and getting into your blood.

50:29Gary Brecka:It showed up to protect you, and now we're going to hold the immune system responsible and just put you on powerful corticosteroids, anti-inflammatories, and possibly even immunosuppressants. So restoring the pace of the gut, and this is in the vast majority of these cases, is a deficiency in methylfolate. If you are deficient in methylfolate, you have impaired gut motility. And then what happens when you have impaired gut motility? You have impaired serotonin synthesis. And now you have anxiety. This is why not a single one of you that raised your hand and said you suffered from anxiety doesn't also have gut issues.

51:10Gary Brecka:I have never in a quarter of a million patients met a single person suffering from chronic anxiety that did not also have gut issues. Not once. Raise your hand if you have rampant anxiety and you don't have gut issues. There you go. Forty percent of the room raised their hand for anxiety. See, so we sometimes just have to zoom out, really identify these things and identify who the villain is. and once we identify the villain, then we can go about treating it. You know, my wife and I were in Saudi Arabia. I spoke at this conference called the Zenos Health Summit. Very traditional medical system over there.

51:52Gary Brecka:Excellent medical care. I didn't realize it, but I happened to land on a room full of psychiatrists and psychiatric specialists. not a lot of them like me. So, um, and at the end of my talk, I asked if there were any questions and this lady stood up. Do you remember this babe? Where's my wife? She remembers. Um, oh, she, she, she left. She left. Tell her to get back in here and listen to her husband. Okay. When she comes back in the room, we are all going to stare at her and shame her for leaving my presentation. I want her to feel the heat. Um, but so we were, we were standing there and this lady stands up and I mean she went apoplectic she said Gary I take great offense to what you're saying um I think you are leading people astray uh you you're not a doctor um and she said I have helped thousands of patients including kids for years with Adderall Vyvanse um Ritalin and I've successfully helped them manage this disease and I said okay well since you said you've helped thousands of kids with um Vyvanse Ritalin and Adderall what were you using that to treat.

52:59Gary Brecka:And she said, ADHD. I said, what was the last patient that you diagnosed with ADHD? She said it was a pubescent child that had attention deficit disorder. I go, what was the actual diagnosis that you made? She said, idiopathic attention deficit disorder. I go, great. So now we have a disorder of unknown origin. And what did you use to treat them? She said, Ritalin. I said, have you ever read the package insert for Ritalin? Because the first line on the third paragraph for Ritalin's, Vivan, and Adderall. Read exactly this. The mechanism of action of this medication is unknown. So you can't tell me that you know the mechanism because the manufacturer doesn't know the mechanism.

53:41Gary Brecka:So you have a diagnosis of unknown origin and a medication of unknown action, yet you're certain that's the solution? What I'm telling you is this is human physiology. This is absolute. It works the exact same way in every single cell, in every single human being, whether you're male or female, you're black or white, Republican or Democrat, whether you're Middle Eastern or Saudi Arabian, or you're from Southern Texas. It is human physiology. And so if we would obey those laws first, we would find our pathway to so many cures for root causes in the human body. And I'm hell bent on getting that message out.

54:21Gary Brecka:The other thing that I realized, and I just use this as an example, the other thing that we realized in the mortality space was that rarely, if ever, do multiple systems fail in a human being at the same time. You will never convince me that someone has more than one autoimmune disease. You will never convince me that someone has more than one mood disorder or mental illness. Because what happens is multiple systems do not fail at the same time. One domino falls that causes everything. And if you can start standing them back up and find out where that first domino is, you will find the root cause.

55:03Gary Brecka:Yes, they may have been diagnosed with multiple autoimmune. They may have been diagnosed with all kinds of mood and mental illnesses, or mood and mental illnesses, and autoimmune, and other dysbiotic diagnoses. But you will not be able to show me that all of those systems failed at one time. One domino falls that causes everything. And this happens in so many, and we knew this in the mortality space. If I saw that you had rampantly uncontrolled blood sugar, I will promise you blood sugar is the root of all evil. I'm working on amending the Bible. It's not the love of money, it's blood sugar. That's a joke, especially in this crowd.

55:44Gary Brecka:But we should say the love of money, parentheses, and blood sugar are the root of all evil because they are the root of all evil. You know, insulin resistance is such a consequential domino in such a myriad of ailments. It's unbelievable. In fact, we would actually tie it to early onset Alzheimer's, dementia, and neurocognitive decline. There are some studies, if you Google it, that Alzheimer's is type 3 diabetes. It's insulin resistance in the brain. We blame cholesterol for its oxidative process, which happens from high insulin. Cholesterol itself, in fact, no one in this room could give me any shred of evidence anywhere in the published peer-reviewed clinical literature that links elevated LDL cholesterol on its own to cardiovascular disease.

56:33Gary Brecka:Yet, if your LDL cholesterol is even slightly elevated, we're going to put you on a stat. What we didn't look at that we saw in the mortality space was this molecule, which is manufactured by the liver, only about 15 % of it comes from diet, but about 85 % of this nasty compound, LDL cholesterol, is in your blood, is manufactured by the liver. But it's not a fuel source, so what does the body use it for? It's a construction material. We use it to build every cell wall, every cell membrane. We make hormones from cholesterol. We make vitamin D3, colocalciferol, the only vitamin that human beings make on our own.

57:12Gary Brecka:How important do you think vitamin D is to human beings if God only gave us the ability to make one vitamin? We don't need to eat. We don't need to breathe. We don't need to drink. All we need to do is expose our skin to sunlight and have cholesterol in our blood, and we make vitamin D3. How important do you think that is to human function? In fact, the second leading cause of morbidity in COVID was a clinical deficiency in vitamin D3. The leading risk factor was morbid obesity and type 2 diabetes, and the second was clinical deficiency and vitamin D3. And so when we start to rewind a lot of these myths, you know, we built a trillion-dollar industry on keeping LDL cholesterol below 99, when the truth is in 22 years in the mortality space, we didn't process a single death claim on a centenarian, someone over the age of 100, that did not have clinically elevated levels of LDL cholesterol at the time of their death, right?

58:13Gary Brecka:Cholesterol is not the answer. Oxidized cholesterol and some of the other lipoproteins are the villain. If you had low triglycerides and high LDL cholesterol, we would extend your life expectancy. Why? Because that's what the data said. And sometimes we have to apply common sense and mass data to what we do in medicine and how we treat human beings. In fact, if you apply a data, you know, large data studies, and this is about to happen at scale because of artificial intelligence and big data. If you look at diet or exercise and you start looking at what are all the big meta-analyses and the big data studies and all the blue zone studies, where all of them line up?

58:58Gary Brecka:Well, they will tell you that there's no argument for dogmatic dieting. The secret to extending your life is not carnivore, paleo, pescatarian, vegan, vegetarian, raw food. The secret to extending your life is the absence of processed food. We'll stop. Right? Oh, thank you. I love this audience. Usually by now I've chopped the audience right in half. Yeah. They don't talk about politics, don't talk about science, don't talk about religion. We talked about Jesus a little bit, or we haven't talked about politics. We'll get into that. Well, no, I'll just stick to biology. But the secret to the right diet is the absence of processed foods.

59:42Gary Brecka:Because you can take any region in the world, you can go to Sardinia, highest carbohydrate consumption in the world, one of the longest life expectancies. But in Singapore, it's the highest meat consumption per capita. Very long life expectancy. You go to the Mediterranean, very high in fatty fish and fatty oils. Almost a liter of olive oil per person per week. If you told your cardiologist like that, their head would explode. Very long life expectancies. And then the French, to heck with the French, because they screwed up the whole model because they're smoking cigarettes, drinking wine, eating cheese, living to 100.

1:00:13Gary Brecka:The secret to a long life is the absence of processed food. What no one rarely talks about, if ever, is the need for community and connection and faith. And thank you. Because we just don't think about faith as medicine and community as medicine and connection as medicine. But I talked about this a little last night. we knew in the mortality space that if you wanted to cut a human being's life expectancy in half, and I mean in half, at any age, you put them in isolation. Isolation is the most detrimental thing to our physiology. If you have faith, you're never isolated. If you have good, deep familial connections, you are not isolated.

1:01:01Gary Brecka:Human beings were meant to do what we're doing right now, be in the proximity of other human beings. That's why I like these events, because there's no replacement for community and for connection. You know, we know this because every one of us has known a relative that has, or a friend's relative that's died of broken heart syndrome, right? I mean, a couple that's married 40, 50, 60 years, one spouse passes, what happens to the other spouse? It's usually very quickly. And why is that? That's the first time that that person has been in isolation in maybe half a century. They were just immediately isolated.

1:01:35Gary Brecka:When you look at some of the most horrific crimes that you see all over the news, who were they committed by? Oh, the loner, the kid that's in isolation, that didn't come out of his bedroom, that didn't have a friend group. So community, connection, faith, these are medicine. And so, you know, the answers are sometimes a lot more simple than what we think. The reason why I showed this chart was just to show the, some of the consequences of insulin resistance, because in modern medicine, and we chase all of these spokes of the wheel and not the actual hub. I did want to, before I opened it to questions, I wanted to talk about molecular hydrogen.

1:02:14Gary Brecka:Just shift gears here for a second. Probably the world's leading PhD in molecular hydrogen is sitting right there, Dr. Tyler LeBaron. So I'm not going to do it justice. I believe in the supplement and nutritional space, the discovery of the role of hydrogen gas in the human body, not the discovery of hydrogen gas, it's the lightest, most prevalent element in the universe, the role that it plays in human physiology as a supplemental treatment, in my opinion, is the greatest discovery of our millennia. Because we know that, well, hydrogen is about 10 % of your body weight is hydrogen. We know that this gas is harmless to human beings.

1:02:58Gary Brecka:But what we're discovering now, and it is well reviewed in the literature, Dr. LeBaron has published a lot of this research, so much so that hydrogen is a part of something that I do every single day. But hydrogen gas has some very, very unique properties when you put it into the human body. First of all, it acts as a selective antioxidant. Vitamin C and blueberries and elderberry and quercetin are all great antioxidants, but they're not selective. What does that mean? Well, we know that oxidative stress and free radical oxidation and inflammation, you know, these have consequences in the human body.

1:03:39Gary Brecka:They degrade cell membranes. They impair the healing process. They disrupt the immune system. But the challenge is knowing if you have oxidative stress, how much antioxidant do you take so that you don't over suppress oxidation. That can be just as dangerous as having too much oxidative stress. So for you science nerds in here like me, what we want in the human body is something called redox homeostasis. We want a balance between oxidation and reduction, between inflammation and too much inflammation. If not, the body doesn't heal the way that it should. If you're walking down the street and you step off the curb and twist your right ankle, how does the body know to heal the right ankle and leave the left ankle alone?

1:04:25Gary Brecka:It's the inflammatory process, right? The fibroblastic signaling, the inflammatory process, why peptides are so good. Without that process, we wouldn't be able to heal. Hydrogen, when it enters the cell, it enters through a unique pathway called the NRF2 pathway. When it enters this pathway, what it does is it restores, it brings oxidative stress to neutrality and stops. It can also increase oxidation if needed. Because there's a lot of things that have dual roles in the human body. Like superoxide, not having it is detrimental. Having too much is detrimental. Hydrogen peroxide, not having it is detrimental.

1:05:08Gary Brecka:Having too much is detrimental. with the exception of something called a hydroxyl radical, which I don't think is any known benefit in the human body. So hydrogen gas will neutralize the hydroxyl free radical and restore the other free radicals to neutrality. It is very inexpensive. You can drink it. You can bathe in it. You can breathe it. Every single one of you, I'm going to give you molecular hydrogen tablets before you leave. I brought thousands of them. You just drop them in your water. It's elemental magnesium. It becomes hydrogen gas. You drink the hydrogen gas. You tell me how you feel.

1:05:41Gary Brecka:It is not a stimulant. It helps to reduce inflammation and turn the lights on. So I'm not going to bore you to tears with all of the clinical studies. This one I found fascinating because most of the time when they do research on supplementation and sports rehabilitative research, they do it on young, healthy individuals. This was actually a study that was published in the Journal of Experimental gerontology. I found this because I am going through this issue with my parents right now. I have one parent whose body is failing and his mind is very sharp. And I have another parent whose body is very strong and her mind is failing.

1:06:19Gary Brecka:And I can tell you that in both cases, hydrogen gas has been a material part of their recovery. I'm documenting this right now and I'm going to publish it on Instagram. Everything from the brain scan studies to the gold standard memory test that I did on my mother. And I'm going to show you how in 21 weeks, I can take an 82-year-old forgotten, disoriented female and bring her back to the kind of sharp acuity that she had in her 40s. It's already starting to happen. My dad is already telling me she's driving him crazy. At first, she was asking him the same question all the time. And now she wants to redecorate the whole house and change all the carpets and switch out the artwork.

1:06:57Gary Brecka:And he's like, hey, can you just dial her back a little bit? I'm like, dad, it's one or the other. You know, either she mumbles like an idiot and asks you the same question every 15 minutes or she's redecorating the house, but there's no, there's no like six or seven. It's a 10 or a one you choose. Um, so, uh, again, I won't bore you with all of the research. Um, I'll talk to you about it. The booth, that's the product that I take. It's just called H2 tab. Um, it is a molecular hydrogen tablet. I drop it every, every morning into water and I drink the gas from that. I also spend a lot of time on airplanes and that will mitigate all of the effects of travel.

1:07:35Gary Brecka:Low barometric pressure, high static electricity, high radiation, dry air, what have you. This is probably the most common question I get asked. What's your morning routine? So there it is. If you want to just take a picture of it, it's pretty simple. It's exactly what I did this morning. What's amazing is, you know, I find that things that are free, like touching the surface of the earth, getting sunlight under your skin, and learning to do a round of breath work. They are so simple. They're free. They're so accessible, and they're portable. People do not give them the credence that it deserves.

1:08:08Gary Brecka:I regularly hold sleep challenges. Have any of you ever done one of my sleep challenges? A couple of you? Two of you? I'm doing really good in this room. This is awesome. Three? Three? Great. Okay. Could you raise your hands out of sympathy for me so I'm not embarrassed? Thank you. Another honest dude. But, you know, we're circadian creatures. Our bodies crave routine. We actually have a biological cycle in our body. We have an area of our brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. Very complicated name, very simple task. What it does is it regulates the secretion of hormones. It regulates our digestion.

1:08:46Gary Brecka:And if we don't have any normalcy that our body can tie into, then this whole system gets dysregulated. one of the best things you can do to have a good night's sleep tomorrow is get sunlight in your eyes this morning. Very simple. Allow sunlight to, you know, touch your skin. We have to stop being afraid of the sun. We've been taught to fear the sun. The truth is most of us are not getting enough sunlight, not getting too much sunlight. You know what's fascinating to me? 18 brands, or sorry, 23 brands of sunscreen have been pulled from the market since 2018 for directly or indirectly to causing skin cancer.

1:09:23Gary Brecka:And, you know, I used to have a chart that I would give at my stage talk showing the parabolic rise in skin cancer since the late 1980s, and it's superimposable with the parabolic use of sunscreen. Sun's not our enemy. It's okay to spend a few minutes in sunlight in the morning naturally into your eyes to reset your circadian rhythm. I do a style of breath work called Wim Hof. There are hundreds of valid styles of breath work. I'm by no means saying that that's the best one. I do three rounds of 30 breaths, obnoxiously deep breaths, followed by exhaling through a straw. And at the end of each round of 30 breaths, I hold my breath as long as I can, allow CO2 to build up in my bloodstream, dilate my blood vessels, and I do it again.

1:10:05Gary Brecka:They are free, they are portable, and they tell your body what time it is. It's time to go to bed, it's time to wake up. So a very common thing that happens after I leave stage talks is people want to get in touch with me. They want to ask me questions. I'm really, really proud of this. I spent the last two and a half years building an artificial intelligence app that I have never once let crawl the web. I have fed it every stage talk, podcast, lecture, interview. It's read every book I've ever written. It's read all of the white papers. I selectively will feed it research if I think that it is valid and it's done on human beings and it doesn't have a bias, you can ask it anything.

1:10:47Gary Brecka:It's like having me in your pocket. You could ask it about supplements, your blood work. It will read your genetic testing. It will read your labs. It will give you responses to your autoimmune disease. It will actually tell you how much hydration or minerals you need. So if you want to join the VIP community, I would love to have you. Are there any of my VIPs in here right now? Are you there? Can I just tell a few stories since I have some witnesses in the room? You're welcome to talk to these people. They're part of my VIP community. Since you've been a part of my VIP community, have you seen people heal from any pathologies or disease?

1:11:24Yeah.

1:11:24Gary Brecka:We have people come on all the time that have autoimmune Hashimoto's. And what I'll do is I'll spotlight them, and I'll bring them up onto an artificial stage, and they'll let me be transparent with their medical records and their tree bents in front of, there's tens of thousands. There's actually almost 10 ,000 members in this VIP community. And right in front of everyone over the course of 10 to 12 weeks, we will permanently put that condition into remission. And they will come on every month and talk about their journey. And it's just so inspiring. Talk to one, I did not know they were here.

1:11:59Gary Brecka:I didn't plant these people in the audience. Just talk to them about the journeys that happen in this VIP group. because I am trying to build a community of like-minded people like you to go change the world. And we're going to do it from the bottom up, you know, not the top down. So thank you. All right. I have a few minutes to get to questions. I can't understand this clock. Do I have 15 minutes and 45 seconds left or have I talked 15 minutes too long? Yeah, so we're like right probably at ending, but let's take just a couple of questions real quick. So raise your hand and you'll walk to you.

1:12:36Gary Brecka:You sprung out of your seat. That's my mom for you. Knock the woman over next to her. What about Addison's disease? I have a son that's 48. He was diagnosed at 13. And when he was diagnosed, I asked the doctor, well, is there anything he can do to rebuild his adrenals? And they go, no. So for 35 years, he's been on levothyroxine, Synthroid, and Florinev. Okay. So let's talk about Ascens disease. I also want to talk about Graves disease and Hashimoto's at the same time. Just all things thyroid for a moment. So really quickly, how many of you either have or know somebody that has hypothyroid? Holy cow.

1:13:19Gary Brecka:Okay. So when you're diagnosed with hypothyroid, you're usually diagnosed with hypothyroid because you have low T3 hormone. Can you just write that down if you have hypothyroid? You have low T3. That is the vast majority of hypothyroid is low T3 hormone. So the thyroid sits right here in your neck, and it produces these two hormones, T4 and T3. If T3 gets low, that's called hypothyroid. Only the little known fact about the thyroid is it only produces 20 % of the T3 in your blood, which means if your t3 is low there's an 80 chance it's not the thyroid yet in 100 of the cases we medicate the thyroid for a crime it's not committing so the question is where does the other 80 of the t3 come from does anyone know okay it is methylated from t4 into t3 and that happens in the liver.

1:14:23Gary Brecka:So 80 % of your thyroid hormone is not coming from your thyroid, your T3 hormone. It is coming from your liver. Yes, some for you guys that are science nerds, a very small amount in the periphery and some in the gut. But the vast majority of that is coming from the liver. We methylate T4 into T3. In order to convert T4 into T3, you need several nutrients, one of which is iodine. Most people are not iodine deficient. But one of the critical nutrients and this deficiency runs in families, this deficiency is genetically inherited, not hypothyroid. You inherit a selenium conversion deficiency. Selenium is a nutrient converted into something called selenomethionine, and that enters the liver and helps this process, this conversion process.

1:15:19Gary Brecka:Selenomethine and selenocysteine helps this conversion process. If you have a gene mutation that causes poor conversion of that raw material into the material your body needs, you have a deficiency. That deficiency impairs the conversion of T4 into T3, making T3 low. And you're diagnosed with hypothyroid. And then we medicate the thyroid for a crime it's not committing. So I would really investigate a deficiency in selenium or selenomethionine because the absence of those methylated nutrients are the catalyst the liver needs to deiodonize thyroid hormone T4, what's called outer ring to inner ring thyroid deiodonization.

1:16:06Gary Brecka:And so without getting boring you to complete tears, the nutrient deficiency is inherited. The disease is not. There is no gene for hypothyroid. It runs in families, and you got it from your ancestor, but you didn't inherit the disease. The second thing is, and this is true with autoimmune, does anybody take the top off of one of those water bottles? Can I have the top off that one? Thank you. All right. So with Addison's Hashimoto's, I'm going to teach you what most endocrinologists don't know about autoimmune disease here in 90 seconds. If this was a mold spore, a mycotoxin, a parasite, a virus, or a heavy metal, this thing right here, and this was a healthy cell, this does not hide like this.

1:16:56Gary Brecka:It hides like this. That is the most important distinction I can make. mold, mycotoxin, parasite, virus, heavy metal, healthy cell, hides like this. Now, the immune system is hypervigilant. It wants to get to the perpetrator. Just like if somebody robbed a bank across the street and ran in this room and barricaded themselves in this room, the police would bust down that door to get to the perpetrator. They're not trying to break the door, they're trying to get to the perpetrator. The immune system is after the villain. And the villain is hiding very often intracellularly inside of your cell. Do you know what happens when the immune system reaches the door?

1:17:38Gary Brecka:How does it bust down the door? It manufactures an antibody. It's manufacturing an antibody to a cell that's containing a villain, not randomly manufacturing antibodies to your own tissue. It is after the perpetrator. And we hold the immune system responsible and say the immune system has gone haywire. You know, in the vast majority of Hashimoto's patients that we have put into remission, and yes, we put them into remission because my VIPs have seen that in real time in my VIP group, it is because of toxic heavy metals embedded in thyroid. The thyroid has an affinity for heavy metals, mercury, arsenic, palladium, lead have an affinity for the thyroid.

1:18:21Gary Brecka:When they migrate to the thyroid, the immune system shows up at that location and it wages war. And instead of actually helping them rid the toxin, we actually go after the immune system. I will promise you this. If you have an autoimmune disease, I'm not saying this is a source of all autoimmune disease, but if you or a loved one has an autoimmune disease right now, these are the five major villains you need to look for. Mold, mycotoxin, parasite, virus, heavy metal. If you just hit those categories and got them out of the body, this is called subtractive medicine, you would very often see the immune system completely calm down because you don't have an autoimmune disease.

1:19:05Gary Brecka:You have a pathological infection. And so we just think these incidences are random. The incidences just don't show up places and bust it. If no bank robber ran in here, the police would never bust down that door. Right? If your house didn't catch fire, the firemen would never show up. They would just randomly stop by with a hose. Right? Something called them to that location. We should always ask ourselves, you know, the first, in our mind, when you have one of these conditions, an autoimmune condition, the first thing is, hey, guys, God didn't make a mistake. I don't think he made a mistake.

1:19:39Gary Brecka:I think the immune system is acting properly. We just have to find out why it's here. Instead of immediately getting off on the other fork, immune systems made a mistake, and now we're down this bandwagon of autoimmune. Instead of saying, what could have called it to this location? Why did it show up? We do the same thing with cholesterol. Cholesterol doesn't jump out of the bloodstream, stick to the blood vessel, right, and stick to the arterial wall, to the endothelium. Something called it to the endothelium, usually inflammation and damage. or oxidation. So, and I'll be happy to talk to you about what supplements I might recommend as soon as I get off the stage.

1:20:14Gary Brecka:One more question, maybe, because I'm over my time. Yes, ma 'am.

1:20:26Gary Brecka:2025, you went through a cancer journey, and it's left you.

1:20:43Gary Brecka:Okay, so she went on a cancer journey. It clearly was a successful journey, so God bless you for that. And now post-recovery, you have neuropathy. So here are my feelings on neuropathy. So first, what is neuropathy? Generally, it is poor circulation in proximity to the nerves. So if I wanted to give anyone in this room peripheral neuropathy right now, I would just put a tourniquet on your forearm. In three minutes, five minutes, you would have peripheral neuropathy in these fingers, right? In about 10 minutes, I could pinch the top of your hand as hard as I could, and you wouldn't even feel it.

1:21:26Gary Brecka:The most important point is nothing is wrong with those nerves. What would happen when I took the tourniquet off? All that feeling would come back, right? Right? So peripheral neuropathy very often and neuropathic disorders are not pathology of the nerve. They are pathology of the circulatory system. Remember I said that the heart doesn't circulate 70 % of our blood? That vasomotor circulation is happening in the microvasculature. Some of these vessels are a fraction of the size of a human hair. Under a microscope, red blood cells are literally leaping over each other and leaping back from the tissue.

1:22:02Gary Brecka:Very, very small vasculature. This is why biologics very often don't work in neuropathic patients. The molecular size is too big to get to the target tissue. In medicine and in inflammation and in biologics and tissue biologics, proximity doesn't matter. If you're having a heart attack on the floor and the paramedics are locked right outside your door, does it matter that they got really, really close to you? Okay, so we have to obey certain laws of physiology. These are circulatory. So I would be focusing on how do I improve microvascular circulation? So if we identify the villain as circulation, vasomotor, microvascular, what can I do for that?

1:22:48Gary Brecka:Red light therapy is probably the single biggest and best intervention that you can do. The reason why is because certain wavelengths of red light will literally pass through the skin and pass through the arterial walls. without getting too complicated, it dissociates a gas called mitochondrial nitric oxide, which causes a vasodilation and hammers oxygen into the mitochondria. It kickstarts the mitochondria. The second is I would be taking a form of resveratrol called PICIED, P-I-C-I-E-D, resveratrol. I take one called VINYA, but there are lots of great brands out there. I have no association with them, but I take VINYA resveratrol.

1:23:26Gary Brecka:And the third thing I would be doing is I would be taking a vascular endothelial repair supplement, something like endocalyx or revasca, to actually repair and heal the endothelium of that microvascular. You restore the circulation, you restore the nerve function. Most neurological decline in the brain is due to poor circulation from trapped inflammatory compounds, trapped histamines. The big fallacy in a lot of these neurological disorders, Alzheimer's, dementia, early onset cognitive decline, is that these patients are losing their memory. That is not true. Alzheimer's patients are not losing their memory.

1:24:06Gary Brecka:They are losing access to their memory. And access can be restored. So it can be restored in your case too. Guys, thank you so much for your time. I hope that you got value out of this. God bless you I really really appreciate it I will be back thank you