Transcription
No one really tells people that have anxiety what it is, and this is why very often people don't have a specific trigger they can point to. So they're trying to pin it on their outside environment, but the truth is that they are usually deficient. Gary Brea, a human biologist, spent 20 years working in life insurance predicting when people are going to die to the nearest month, and now he's on a mission to extend your life.
A couple of days ago, someone did a swab inside of my mouth. What was that test, and why did I do it? You did it to look at whether your parents gave you a gene mutation, and it's one of the most overlooked things in all modern medicine because it's this deficiency that leads to some of the most common ailments that we suffer from: mental illness, ADHD, OCD, manic depression, bipolar disorder, sleep disorders, and very severe gut issues. I mean, there are so many that don't seem to be fixable with conventional therapies or dietary changes because very often disease is not happening to us; it's happening within us.
I'm not going to stop getting the message out to the masses because I just think about all the times I could have made a real material change in somebody's life, and I didn't have the opportunity to do it. I felt like I was sitting behind a thick glass wall just watching blind people walk into traffic. Now I have a chance to make a difference.
So what are the simple things that we can be doing to prevent us from even getting these chronic diseases? There are five things that I would commit to doing on a regular basis. Number one is, upon waking, I would invite Dr. Carrie Sard, who’s going to give me the results of my test. I want to know if there are any health implications that I should be aware of.
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Gary, Stephen, good to see you back! You threw me off. It's good. I know I threw your game off there, Stephen. Great to be back, man, it really is. If someone has just clicked on the podcast and they're wondering why they should stay and listen, you're going to direct the conversation. I'm going to go where you want to go. I'm going to follow my curiosity and ask questions, but what are they going to get from this conversation today?
If you are at the driving wheel, I'm just stating how to live a healthier, happier, longer life and maybe answers to some of the most pesky health-related challenges that they're having. When I say pesky health-related challenges, I mean everybody has these little tiny anchors off their stern: weight gain, water retention, brain fog, lack of focus and concentration, poor waking energy, lack of deep sleep. It's shocking how many of these conditions have a common repository. They like the hub of the wheel where all these individual spokes come together at a common hub of methylation.
Methylation is essentially nutrient deficiencies in the human body. I don't usually start off with this analogy, but I'll start off with an analogy. When I was in grad school, first of all, I'm a human biologist; I'm not a physician. My undergraduate degrees are in biology, and my postgraduate degrees are in human biology. But when I was in my second four years of grad school getting my human biology degree, I had to take all these plant botany courses, which I hated because I wanted to study anatomy and physiology in human beings, but I was studying algae.
But the one thing that stood out to me about plant physiology was, let's say you have a palm leaf that's rotting in a palm tree, and you call a true arborist, a true botanist, out to your house. They see that that leaf is rotting in the tree; they won't touch that leaf. They will test the soil and then they'll say, "You know what, Stephen? There's no nitrogen in this soil," and they'll add nitrogen to the soil, and the leaf will heal.
Only we've stopped thinking about human beings this way. We've lost a lot of faith in humanity and mankind's ability for this to heal. We believe very often—and this is true in some cases—that disease and pathology are happening to us, not something that happens within us. If you go back to the tree analogy, you could put anything you wanted on that soil, right? You could supplement for the sake of supplementing, and I think a lot of people get lost in this realm where, "Well, I heard NN is good, and Resveratrol is good, and CoQ10, and St. John's Wort, and ashwagandha, and vitamin C, and I should take a multivitamin."
You know, pretty soon you have this paralysis of analysis because you're supplementing for the sake of supplementing. In the tree's case, if you didn't find the nitrogen, the leaf never would have healed. The reason why most supplement for the sake of supplementing is that we don't have data. We just don't get data on our bodies.
When I bring—and you run into a lot more young entrepreneurs than I do—but when I run into them, and I'll bring them up sometimes when I'm doing a stage talk, and you can question them about their priorities, like, "What's the most important thing to you?" "My health." "How important is health to you?" "Oh, it's the number one priority I have." I say, "What? Come on up here, and let's talk about, you know, how much you're prioritizing your health."
And you said, "You know what kind of business you have? A marketing agency. What does your business earn on a monthly basis?" "$148,000 a month." "What's your net income?" "$38,200 a month." "How many employees do you have?" "16." "What's your hemoglobin A1c?" Blank. "Where are your testosterone levels?" "How much are triglycerides?" "You ever look at your C-reactive protein?" And their face is just blank.
We have more data on our businesses than we do on our temple. I actually saw you on a stage talk, I believe it was, and you talked about how you could take anything away from me in my life. You referred to your dog and your girlfriend. Yeah, I remember. Hopefully, you still have the dog and the girlfriend. But you said, "You know, if you took my girlfriend away, you took my dog away, I still have my business. I still have my life."
But if you took away my health, I'd lose everything. I think most of us don't realize the importance of it until it is taken away. So recognizing that the temple is the most important vehicle that we have, I just really encourage people to get data—basic data on their body—so they have some kind of roadmap. They are supplementing for deficiency, not just for the sake of supplementing, and that they're getting the most out of their body because that's how they're going to get the most out of their business.
Just picking up these little tiny anchors that are nibbling away at productivity. People that suffer from ADD and ADHD don't really realize that ADD and ADHD very often are not attention deficit disorders or attention deficit hyperactivity disorders; they're actually attention overload disorders. We characterize people that have ADD as not being able to pay attention, but the truth is they don't lack the ability to pay attention; they lack the ability to pay attention to so many things.
If we understand that this is an overactive mind, not a mind that's trying to pay attention to too many things, then we can go about quieting the mind and not stimulating the central nervous system to match that pace of the mind, which is kind of what Adderall and amphetamines do when you take them for ADD and ADHD.
If we understood that as normal or as good as we think we feel, we have no idea how good normal feels until we find the missing raw material in our body and we put it back. You want to see magic happen in human beings? Find the raw material that's missing and put it back in their body. By raw material, I mean simple things. Depending on who you talk to, there are 72 minerals; I think 16 of those are essential minerals. There are two essential fatty acids, and there are eight essential amino acids.
It is astounding how many people are clinically deficient in some of those basics, and then they go searching for all of the esoteric super supplements and red light therapy and NAD-boosting supplements, and they're actually just missing one of those raw materials: basic essential amino acids, basic fatty acids, and basic minerals. That's where all human beings should start.
From there, we should do some testing—biomarkers in the blood. In my opinion, every human being should do a genetic methylation test, the very same test that you did, whether they do it through me or not. A genetic methylation test is a test you'll do once in your lifetime, and it will tell you exactly what raw materials your body can convert into usable form and what it can't.
Because in human beings, just like in that tree analogy, when you have a deficiency, you get the expression of disease. When we talk about deficiencies, it brings me back to something I think we talked about briefly last time, which is it makes me feel like humans are being born broken. Is that true? Because if I'm deficient in something that my body needs, then does that not mean that my body was born broken?
It's not that it's born broken; it's just not functioning optimally. All of us have genetic SNPs; we have these—they're called single nucleotide polymorphisms. We have these genes that code for enzymes to conduct these different activities in the body. What is astounding about human beings is how beautifully intricate the human body is. We take one raw material, we put it into a physiologic process, and then we take the waste product from that process and we feed another process, and on and on.
For example, we'll take folate from green leafy vegetables, we'll convert that into methylfolate. Methylfolate becomes one of the most prevalent nutrients in the human body; it helps to downregulate an inflammatory amino acid called homocysteine, which then turns into something called methionine, which then goes up to the brain and helps to quiet the mind. So you start with this green leafy vegetable, and it winds its way all the way up to helping you sleep.
It's not that the spinach leaf is helping you sleep; it's what the spinach leaf has become that's helping you sleep. This sequence of events is called methylation, and what's astounding about methylation is that in many cases, when it's broken, while we can't fix the gene, we can just supplement for its function.
The most common gene mutation in the world, which we talked about last time on your podcast, is MTHFR, affectionately called the "f*** gene." About 44% of the population has this gene mutation. I talk about it all the time, and it's a simple inability to convert folic acid and its derivatives—folate—into the usable form called methylfolate. Well, it's very easy to supplement with methylfolate, and very inexpensive, I might add.
Deficiencies in methylfolate are linked to all kinds of conditions, including neural tube defects, because it's not folic acid that prevents neural tube defects; it's methylfolate that prevents neural tube defects. It's what the body converted into the usable form. When we look at methylation in the human body, we get an exact roadmap of what we need to supplement with so that we're not wandering around just supplementing for the sake of it.
You mentioned the entrepreneurs that you meet, that you bring up on stage, and you ask them various questions. Then you ask them about sort of biomarkers in their body. What are the simple biomarkers you think that everyone needs to understand? Because, listen, I'm not a chemist; I'm not going to be a biologist. So if there are a couple of them I can probably get my head around them and stay on top of them, but I can't stay on top of everything.
So I would say three. Okay, number one is what's called glycemic profile, which is a check of how well your insulin and sugar metabolism is. It has three markers: glucose, hemoglobin A1c (a three-month average of your blood sugar), and insulin. So definitely your glycemic profile because blood sugar, I promise you, is the root of all evil.
So first, I would do your glycemic profile. Second, I would do your hormones. Can I just check on the glycemic profile? That's basically my relationship with sugar. That's your relationship with sugar, and it's also your relationship with insulin because, you know, very often even people that don't eat high amounts of refined sugar and Ben & Jerry's ice cream every night have issues with insulin sensitivity.
As insulin rises, it causes a whole myriad of conditions. It's one of the hallmarks of something called metabolic syndrome, which we're seeing in younger and younger populations, and it's generally easy to catch early on. You have three markers that look at how well you're regulating your blood sugar: glucose, which is a measure of the amount of sugar in your blood right now; hemoglobin A1c, which is essentially a three-month average of your blood sugar; and then you have your insulin.
The higher your insulin relative to your blood sugar, the more insulin resistant you are. The more insulin it takes to drop your blood sugar, the more resistant you are to insulin. This is an early warning sign of metabolic syndrome, but it's not just metabolic syndrome. It's that when insulin rises, there's a whole downstream cascade of events because insulin is not just responsible for helping us metabolize sugar; it's also responsible for blocking other forms of energy use in the body, one of which is fatty acid metabolism.
Generally, people that have very high insulin have very high blood triglycerides; they have high blood fat, and high blood fat and elevated cholesterol are other markers for cardiovascular disease. So by actually bringing down one biomarker, you have a positive effect all the way downstream.
I would say if you're only going to look at three things, I would look at your glycemic profile, your blood sugar, and your insulin and your hemoglobin A1c hormone panel. Okay, so looking at your hormones, and then specifically looking at what contributes to healthy hormone production: DHEA and a protein called SHBG. Then I would look at basic nutrient deficiencies: vitamin D3, magnesium, potassium, and vitamin B12, which are on most blood panels.
That is a great place to start to get the basics: how am I regulating my blood sugar, are my hormones balanced, what nutrient deficiencies do I have? The second piece of information I would get, which you only do once in your entire lifetime, is a methylation test. These are widely available all over the world; I'm sure they're very easy to get in the UK. You want to look at five genes: MTHFR, MTR, MTRR, AHCY, and COMT.
Just to be clear, so I can dumb this down for myself here, those five genes relate to how my body processes the things that I put into it at different stages in that sort of processing line? Yes. So take, for example, that gene at the top, COMT. If you look at what COMT does, it stands for catechol-O-methyltransferase. It's a fancy way of saying it transfers a methyl group from the category of neurotransmitters called catecholamines.
That's a huge mouthful, but essentially what this means is these four neurotransmitters that are called catecholamines are responsible for our fight-or-flight response. For example, if you drove home tonight and you got out of your car and somebody was standing in front of you with a knife, right? You would instantly have a fight-or-flight response. Your pupils would dilate, your heart rate would increase, your extremities would flood with blood; you would begin to have a fight-or-flight response based on that stimulus.
But you could also be laying in your bed at night, and you could start thinking about getting eaten by a shark, and you could have the exact same response because the brain doesn't really know the difference between perception and reality. The similarity between these two events—a very real fear and a reaction to it and an imagined fear—is they both meet at catecholamines.
Some people are very slow to break these down. What are the consequences of this? Well, if you've ever had anxiety or know somebody that's suffered from anxiety, no one really tells people that have anxiety what it is. They describe the feeling, so they say it's a fear of the future, it's a sense of impending doom, it's a sense of anxiousness. But what is it physiologically? What's going on in the body?
Very often, it is a rise in catecholamines, the same class of neurotransmitters that are involved in a fight-or-flight response. This is why very often people that suffer from anxiety don't have a specific trigger they can point to. They could be on a podcast like you and I are doing right now, and all of a sudden, as those catecholamines rise, they get that sensation of anxiety, and they're trying to pin it on their outside environment. They're trying to look for a cluster of symptoms outside their body, but this is because they are usually deficient in a complex of B vitamins—a very specific form of B12 called methylcobalamin, methylfolate—these methylated nutrients that downregulate these catecholamines.
What else could it be? Well, I mean, there are true anxiety disorders, right? Generally, people that have true anxiety actually know what the trigger is. They're afraid of heights; they walk to the edge of a 30th-floor balcony, they have an anxiety attack, they have a fear of flights. Is this different from someone who's been through a trauma in their life? So they had an early trauma, and then certain things in their adult life end up triggering that?
This is very different from what you're saying here. Some people that have trauma and they wake up, for example, consistently in the past, their first thought of the day is about the pain that they are already suffering from. Well, these thoughts—fight-or-flight thoughts—have a tendency to be worst-case scenario because they are also highly related to catecholamines. In fact, people that have that gene mutation fall into one of two categories.
Think about it this way: if catecholamines rise very fast, you're a warrior. The nickname for that gene is either a worrier or a warrior because as those catecholamines rise, they call it fast COMT or slow COMT. So just looking at this one gene mutation, if you're slow to break these catecholamines down and they rise, what are the consequences of that?
I lay down to go to sleep at night, and my body is tired, but my mind is awake. My mind is just clicking through the day, thinking about the most innocuous little thoughts. I have a tendency, when I consider scenarios, to go straight to worst-case scenario. I'm an overthinker. I am prone to anxiousness and anxiety. I walk around at a six instead of walking around at a two.
So things that would only move somebody from a zero to a two take me from a six to an eight. Very often, people in their surrounding environment will say the punishment doesn't fit the crime, the way that they react to certain situations. This means that the mind is in an awakened state, a heightened state of alertness. Think about a fight-or-flight response, but not quite to that level. They're in a heightened state of alertness, and this gives you that feeling of anxiety.
Now, what's driving the catecholamines can have different drivers. It could be this gene mutation; it could be trauma; it could be the presence of a real fear. It could be that you're claustrophobic and stepping on a crowded elevator. But for people that have not isolated trauma in their life, they have a tendency to consider worst-case scenario. They find that their mind is very active at night, interrupts their sleep, or if they get up to go to sleep at night and they go back to bed and they can't fall asleep because their mind is awake, thinking about the most innocuous little thoughts.
They have a tendency to be anxious; they have a tendency to be a worrier. They have a tendency to have feelings of anxiety that are not tied to their outside environment. Those are all hallmarks of that gene mutation.
So can I view this as a predisposition? I often wonder why we can all be in the same situation, but we can have entirely different experiences. In the case of anxiety, some people, as you report, just for some reason, they're just more anxious in the modern world than some other people. The modern world has changed; we use screens, and we have notifications, and we have all this stimuli. They're struggling more in the modern world than others.
What you're suggesting is that they could have a predisposition to worry more because of these catecholamines? Yes, because of the catecholamines. Yes, catecholamines: norepinephrine, epinephrine, and dopamine—one of those we also call adrenaline. You have the main driver of behavior, and you have catecholamines. We all know what adrenaline does in the body.
So when these four neurotransmitters are not downregulated, right, then our mind is awake, and it is very often fearful. Think about somebody who has a sensation of impending doom or anxiety without any trigger. The other hallmark is they will have had it on and off throughout their entire lifetime. Even when they were a child, when they were a child, they might have understood the complex sensation of anxiety, but they had that sensation.
As they grew to be an adult, they understood that this is anxiety. I mean, when you're a child, you're just fearful, right? You don't know how to explain to your mom, "Hey, I'm worried about something that might happen in the future that's probably not likely to happen, but I'm still afraid it's going to happen." It's a very complex emotion, right?
So they've had it on and off their entire lifetime. It's very hard for them to point to the specific trigger that causes it. The majority of the time, if they tried anti-anxiety medications, they don't work; they just make them feel like a zombie. So this is time to look inside and make sure the body has the raw material it needs to do its job, which is the complex of B vitamins to dismantle catecholamines.
So if we went out onto the street now and I pulled in 100 people just off the street that were walking past, and we did these three tests on them to look at their glycemic profile, their hormone panel, their nutrient deficiencies, what are some of the most popular things that a random group of people off the street would be missing that are central to their high performance?
So let's take men, and then we'll take women so we can be specific about hormones. In 50% of that population, you would see a clinical deficiency in vitamin D3. I have to say, you actually run a lot of tests every single month. Yes, tens of thousands. We run 20,000 a month. We do about 20,000 gene tests a month.
One of the unique things about the perspective that I come from is we have voluminous amounts of data. We see 20,000 of these new patients a month testing for genetic methylation, and on a lot of these patients, we also have blood work. So we have a full what's called a CBC, comprehensive metabolic panel, lipid panel, hormone profile, a full thyroid panel. We have their nutrient deficiencies that I'm speaking of, cholesterol, triglycerides.
We have a pretty—we have about 74 biomarkers on them. Then we also get this genetic test, and then we look at what happens to certain biomarkers on average when you simply supplement for deficiency. For example, I'm not saying that every person that has high blood pressure or hypertension has this gene mutation, but two of these genes are highly linked to poor homocysteine metabolism.
There have been plenty of peer-reviewed studies; we can put the link to the one below in the Journal of Hypertension, which linked higher levels of urinary catecholamines and urinary homocysteine to cardiovascular disease. What happens is when you have a certain amino acid in particular rise in the blood called homocysteine, as this amino acid rises, it has a tendency to cause the vascular system to constrict.
If we make the pipe smaller in a fixed system, pressure goes up. But there's nothing wrong with the heart. Think about the fact that 85% of all diagnoses of hypertension are idiopathic; it's of unknown origin. Well, of unknown origin means we can't find anything wrong with the heart. We've tested the heart: EKGs, EEGs, stress tests, dye contrast studies, cardiac cath, what have you.
But we haven't looked at the vascular system. We haven't looked to see, was there a simple nutrient deficiency keeping this person from breaking down homocysteine, which caused the vascular system to constrict? We know that there's a correlation between this amino acid homocysteine and its elevated nature and increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
So before we actually went the route of chemicals and synthetics and pharmaceuticals, why wouldn't we just test to see if we have an issue dismantling this amino acid, breaking this amino acid down into something called methionine? Why don't we supplement for that deficiency and see if by putting that raw material back into the body and bringing homocysteine metabolism into normal, we can normalize this person?
So back to your question: without the people in the street, you would see that 50% of them are clinically deficient in vitamin D3, cholecalciferol, you know, the sunshine vitamin. The darker their complexion, the higher the risk that they would be clinically deficient in vitamin D3. If you put vitamin D3 at the center of a hub of a wheel and looked at all of the different spokes, it's one of the only vitamins that human beings make on our own.
I have argued, and people have counter-argued, but I take the position that it's arguably one of the most, if not the most, important nutrients in the human body. You need a lot of essential nutrients, but if you really start isolating them, vitamin D3 is the only vitamin that human beings make on our own. Every cell in the body has a receptor site for vitamin D3. When we're deficient in this vitamin, this nutrient acts like a hormone; sometimes it acts like a vitamin. Other times we make it from sunlight and cholesterol.
When it's deficient, we have a compromised immune system. We know that it leads to osteopenia, osteoporosis. There are all kinds of consequences that you wouldn't think stem from a simple nutrient deficiency, but they do. One that we get from going outside in the sun.
We get it from going outside in the sun; we make it from sunlight and cholesterol. If you look at COVID statistics, it was the second leading cause of morbidity in COVID. So first, you would see that they're D3 deficient. The majority of them are also B12 deficient. If you look at the vitamin B12, you'd see it's less than 500. The higher end of B12 is around 1,500.
Then you would see 25% to 40% of that population would be hormone deficient, meaning that their hormones would be out of the optimal range, but not because they have an endocrine system issue per se. Generally, because they have, especially in younger ages, nutrient deficiencies—things like elevated SHBG (sex hormone-binding globulin), deficiencies in DHEA, raw materials that the body needs to manufacture hormones.
So a good hormone panel will tell you not only what your hormone levels are but what some of the nutrients are that your body is using to make those hormones. Again, by putting some of these raw materials—very often DHEA—not all the time, but very often putting DHEA and vitamin D3 alone back into men with deficient levels of testosterone or deficient levels of free testosterone, or looking at a protein that interrupts the conversion of testosterone into free testosterone called SHBG, by actually just addressing these, you see that the hormone levels rise back to the normal range.
They don't need to take hormones from outside the body and shut their production down; they need to put nutrients and raw materials back into the body so their body can produce hormones on its own. Then if you looked at their glycemic control, you would see a shockingly high percentage of people that are pre-diabetic. It is an absolute pandemic right now because of the amount of processed foods.
We think that pre-diabetes is only because people are eating a ton of sugar, so they must be drinking soda and eating chocolate cake and Ben & Jerry's every night, but that's actually not true. When we overload the body with high glycemic carbohydrates, even if they ate a lot of white flour, white rice, white bread, white pasta, white potatoes, and fruit, I'm not saying any of those things are going to kill you, but when we eat diets high in refined carbohydrates—even things that we don't consider to be sweets—it overpowers our pancreas, and our blood sugar gets out of control.
But wouldn't you want to know that? Wouldn't you want to know that? Do I have some of these nutrient deficiencies or hormone imbalances or poor blood sugar control that could be nibbling away at my performance? Am I maybe one raw material, one methylated multivitamin away, or an amino acid away from being in a state of being optimal? Maybe even not having to deal with little things like intermittent feelings of anxiousness and anxiety or poor focus and concentration or even mild states of mood numbness.
Remember that nutrients, amino acids, for example, in our gut become neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters form the basis of all mood; they drive our emotion, they govern our behavior. Is it possible that an amino acid like tryptophan or phenylalanine or tyrosine, which become serotonin and dopamine, the deficiencies in these amino acids could lead to deficiencies in hormones, which could actually lead to deficiencies in neurotransmitters that would be labeled as mental illness? Yes.
Again, I feel like I'm eating your face a little bit, but what I really mean to say is that if we would get basic information, basic data on the body—hormone balance, glycemic control, nutrient deficiencies—if we would actually look at what our body can convert into the usable form and what it can't and supplement for that deficiency, you would see your body begin to thrive in ways you never thought possible.
You work with a lot of high-profile individuals as well. I do. What are some of the high-profile names that you have permission to share? Well, clearly anyone that's shared their journey with me on the podcast. It was a great hit piece on me in the Daily Mail that had listed a lot of them. But Dana White, Steve Harvey, Stephen A. Smith, Steve Aoki, Kendall Jenner and I were on one of her Hulu specials together running some IVs. There are a few others that will be public here very shortly that have gotten on podcasts with me.
I don't necessarily want to be known as a celebrity biologist or just working with professional athletes and A-listers. My message is actually for the non-woke biohacker. I don't feel like my job is to sit here and impress you with how smart I am. I feel like my job is to put information out to the masses that is educational enough to inspire them to make a change.
I think all too often we're all competing for eyeballs in this space, and we're trying to become the biggest influencer, and we really forget about the mission of speaking to the masses. We just start speaking to each other. We want to get on podcasts and stage talks and interviews and impress people with how much we know about the carboxylic acid cycle or the electron transport chain or something going on inside of the mitochondria. Those minute nuances are not what's going to impact humanity.
A lot has changed since we last sat down. In your life, it has. Yeah, it really has. I feel like I live somebody else's life; I really do. What's changed? I mean, when I first reached out to you, it was because I saw a clip on YouTube that had 20,000 views, and that clip on YouTube I found really interesting.
So I think I personally sent you a DM and said, "Hey, Gary, I want to come on my show," which I, to be honest, never personally send the DM because my team, the way our system works here, is they understand what I'm interested in and curious about right now. So they'll go out into the market and try and find people for me. They'll bring those people to me as a pitch; they'll pitch the individuals to me, and then I have the say whether I'm curious enough to sit down and have the conversation.
Right now, I made it twice. In this case, I saw something you did online, I don't know, more than a year ago now, it feels like, and it was really compelling to me. So I wanted to sit down with you. Since then, I've observed you; you've kind of had this meteoric rise on loads of different podcasts and social media, and your business has exploded.
There is something different about you, and the thing that's different about you that strikes me is you strike me as a man that has been through some s***. Oh yeah, frankly. Yeah, because the Gary that I met the first time versus this Gary is slightly different, and it's the type of thing when someone's been through some s***. With all good things come the opposite; it's unavoidable.
Yeah, I mean, you go under a level of scrutiny. You start off, you're like so excited, you're like, "I'm going to get the message out," and God has blessed me with the ability to take ultra-complicated information, distill it down, and get it to the masses. Then you realize that there are people that are watching your videos, like a three-hour podcast, and they're looking for the one gotcha moment.
"Right, he said sodium chloride, not sodium hydroxide! Scam artist! Charlatan! He pretends to be a doctor; he's not a doctor!" I've never pretended to be a doctor. You will not find a video, a stage talk, a podcast, or anything in the media where I've ever represented that I'm a doctor. I go out of my way to say that I'm not licensed to practice medicine.
So yeah, I have become a little more gun-shy and a little more guarded with what I say. It's an effort to be more precise with what I'm saying, but I'm not going to stop getting the message out to the masses because I know that this is God's calling for me. I know that because I spent so many years of my life not in service to humanity, and I think a lot of people find their purpose in their pleasure, and I found my purpose from my pain.
What pain? You know, when I was doing life expectancies and mortality predictions, we were sort of brainwashed to believe that this was just data, right? You weren't responsible for it; you didn't have anything to do with this person. I was on a mortality team, and we were charged with predicting the life expectancy of people for large life insurance and investment companies.
So when you apply for a large life insurance policy, you know, everybody's on an actuarial curve, right? So you're on one, I'm on one, everybody listening to this podcast is on an actuarial curve. What happens is when a life insurance company is getting ready to put $10 million or $20 million or $50 million worth of risk on your life, only one thing matters: how many more months do you have left on Earth?
The science of predicting that mortality is a very accurate science. I get a lot of flak about it, but if you want to know how accurate life insurance companies are at predicting death, just look at what happened during the 2008-2009 financial services crisis. We had 364 banks fail; not a single life insurance company failed a valid death claim.
In the United States, a valid death claim has never failed to be paid. They are some of the most solvent institutions in the world. There's not another financial services enterprise anywhere on the planet that would take that level of risk on one variable. I mean, you have an investment fund; you wouldn't put that level of risk on a single variable, right? How many more months does this person have left on Earth?
They have data that no other medical enterprise has. They have data that no other collegiate university has—not even the government has. They know the date, the time, the location, and the cause of death for millions and millions of lives. So they know what leads to early mortality.
How do they get your health biomarkers to overlap that? Well, first of all, they do a blood test on you. If you've ever had a large life—I'm not talking about term life insurance where you get $100,000 or $200,000 or even a million-dollar term life insurance policy. I'm talking about permanent universal life or whole life insurance.
Also, annuities. When there's something in the States called a SPIA (single premium immediate annuity), where you give the insurance company, for example, a check for a million dollars, they guarantee you an income stream for life. Well, how do you think they're determining that income stream? They're predicting how many more months you have left on Earth.
They use morbidity factors and comorbidity factors, and yes, they factor into your recreational profile, your demographic profile. It's not as simple as a blood test or a gene test, but essentially what you do is you start on a curve in a pool of a thousand lives that are similar to yours, and your life expectancy is the dead center of that curve.
So if your life expectancy is 200 months, that means in 200 months you have the exact same chance of being dead as you do of being alive. Now, what determines your increased probability of death or your mortality factors? Are you obese? Diabetic? Anemic? Do you have cognitive decline? Are you compliant with your medication?
There are all of these different debits, and then there are certain debits that we call comorbidities. If you are hypertensive, that was a debit. If you were diabetic, that was a debit. If you were obese, that was a debit. But if you were hypertensive, diabetic, and obese, it wasn't 1 plus 1 plus 1; it was 1 plus 1 plus 1 equals 10, right? These were massive comorbidity factors.
My job was to read the medical record and do the medical record extraction, and we had incredible data on these people. You saw their trusts and you saw their wills, their trust, their divorce decrees. You knew that they were treating their children differently in their estate, bank accounts, brokerage accounts, tax returns, and their medical records. You have recent blood work on them, but when you read a medical record on somebody, there’s more than just their height, weight, and blood pressure and the medications that they're on.
You really start to get a profile for a lot of the person, and a lot of times I felt like I was really getting to know these people. Oddly, because I had so much personal information on them, a lot of these people came alive to me. I know that sounds very strange, but when you're reading about their repeated visits to the doctor and they're constantly talking about their grandchildren, and then all of a sudden you see in the medical record where the husband passed away, and then you see the antidepressants creeping in, and you see their body mass index change, and you actually, as you're going through years of their medical record, you really get a real profile for them.
I started to realize that there were human beings on the other side of these spreadsheets, and there were cases where I knew that if I could have picked up the phone and just contacted that patient, I could have completely changed the trajectory of their life. I was prohibited from doing so by law, and even at one point in my career, I was threatened with prosecution for threatening to call a patient and warn them about a life-threatening potential life-threatening drug interaction that I'd spotted in the medical record between two physicians that had written contraindicated scripts.
Something called the MIB (Medical Information Bureau) hadn't picked it up, and the data that I had said that this was going to lead to a thrombolytic event, like a blood clot, stroke, heart attack, and embolism. I remember calling the Human Resources Director and just, you know, basically saying that I'm going to contact this patient and being threatened with prosecution.
I think about it a lot, and I just think about all the times I could have picked up the phone and just made a real material change in somebody's life, and I didn't have the opportunity to do it. A big part of my career felt like I was sitting behind a thick glass wall just watching blind people walk into traffic.
I wasn't in service to humanity. All I wanted to do was be wealthy. I was very unauthentic, and then I just woke up one day and said, "What the hell am I doing?" I mean, I have so much information. I'm a human biologist, and I've been studying this database for 20 years. I could help people live healthier, happier, longer lives.
I quit my career and went home and told my fiancée at the time, now my wife, that I wanted to start a wellness firm, and that was the genesis of my firm, Streamline, and part of the trajectory that I'm on. So it still sits with you every day, really? Oh dude, it sits with me in a good way because, you know, whereas before, it's really hard to imagine, you know, somebody coming into your office and going, "Hey, you know, Gary, oh my God, remember the Mrs. Smith life expectancy we did 13 years ago? You predicted her life expectancy was 188 months; she died in 184 months. Oh my God, you did a great job!"
It's amazing that claim just paid. Is it really amazing? You know, when you start to realize that was somebody's sister or somebody's daughter, somebody's mother, you start to realize that I allowed myself to be brainwashed and just think that it was data and forget that there were human beings on the other side of the spreadsheet.
Now, I'm sorry, I'm getting emotional, but now I wake up every day and I open my eyes and I go, "F*** yeah!" You know, I got a chance to make a difference, and I talk about the research and the fact patterns that we saw in predicting death, and I want to counter those so that we can extend life, so we can help people live longer, healthier, happier lives.
So the counterarguments that you've experienced, you know, you use the word counterargument and hit piece. What do those sort of counterarguments tend to center on as it relates to your work? Obviously, you talked about the doctor thing. I've definitely made some mistakes. You know, I made a mistake earlier in my career of quoting articles and not research, which I regret, and I've made some of those mistakes.
I think very often what I try to do is simplify the message. I talked, for example, about a 2018 study—we should put the link to this—which was in the Journal of Headaches and Face Pain. There's a Journal of Headaches and Face Pain. I want to say it was 2018; there were 8,819 participants in this meta-analysis, so a very large analysis. They found a direct inverse relationship between sodium intake and migraine headaches, meaning that as sodium levels went up, migraine headaches went down.
Now, by no means am I telling everybody that has a migraine headache that you need to take a little bit of salt and you're going to be fine. What I'm saying is on your comprehensive metabolic panel, you can see your sodium level. When your sodium level gets to a critically low level—which, believe it or not, quite a few people have—people that regularly sap, people that exercise and don't remineralize with electrolytes, people that drink filtered bottled water in an effort to filter out fluoride and microplastics but don't remineralize their water get nutrient deficient in sodium.
Remembering that the brain actually doesn't have any pain receptors, but the covering of the brain does. You know something called the dura, and the dura hates two things: it hates being stretched and it hates being contracted. What determines whether or not it's stretching or contracting is something called the osmotic gradient, the movement of water across the membrane.
Yes, it can be as simple as supplementing with sodium. My preference would be Baja gold sea salt or Celtic salt so that you get all of the other trace minerals as well. I was on the Joe Rogan podcast a few months ago, and he ended up buying one of these red light beds from me, and we installed it in his house. He told me about four or five weeks ago that he's no longer wearing readers anymore. His eyesight has improved that much, and he said he's starting to really notice the changes in his skin.
Photobiomodulation is very real, and it absolutely works. But, you know, without people having to think that they have to spend that kind of money on a red light therapy bed, you can also just expose your skin to sunlight, especially during first light—the first 45 minutes of the day when there's no UVA, there's no UVB, there's high amounts of healthy blue light. You can still generate vitamin D3.
Let me just run that back so I'm clear on the point about Rogan's eyesight. I did some research about the impact of red light on eyesight, and it said that it's good for eyesight. It's incredibly good for eyesight because I was wondering whether I should be looking at this thing while it's on. Yes, and then I went online, Googled it, had a rummage around, and it said you can look at it, you can stare at it.
Yes, you can because remember there's no UVA, there's no UVB. Some of the marginal information that comes out about red light being damaging to you, you have to remember that red light is a spectrum. Infrared, for example, is a spectrum. Most red light therapy beds run from 600 nanometers to about 1,000 nanometers wavelength of light.
As you get above that, you're in the infrared spectrum. But you're going all the way to 1,000, maybe even above. So in other words, when you say infrared light, this is a non-visible spectrum of light, but there's a broad number of wavelengths, right? An infrared red light bed will have infrared light, but it will be very low in the spectrum, so it doesn't create heat, doesn't excite a chromophore that creates vibration and makes you sweat.
When you get an infrared sauna, you're getting very high into those wavelengths; you're exciting a different chromophore in the body, and your water, to be specific, vibrates and creates heat, and you start to sweat. So you don't sweat in a red light therapy bed, even though it's infrared low in the spectrum, but you do sweat in an infrared sauna.
Even though it's infrared light, it's high in the spectrum. So the infrared light and the red light that comes from red light beds and red light panels and face masks is incredibly beneficial for you. I mean, I would be scared to even tell you all the positive outcomes that we've seen in people that regularly use red light therapy because you can't really make medical claims around them.
But I can tell you firsthand we have seen just astounding things that people would probably consider miracles with red light therapy. You mentioned the first 45 minutes of sunlight. First light, because I'm trying to figure out the sort of evolutionary backstory to red light and where it came from in nature and why it was good for us as humans and why we've lost it.
Those are the three sort of questions. We're really photovoltaic beings. I mean, we're very tied to this circadian cycle of the sun. Light causes the body to behave in very special ways. You know, you've probably heard that getting first light can actually reset your circadian cycle and do more for you to sleep that night than probably just about any other sleep habit.
So your sleep routine really starts with your morning routine, and it has an effect on cortisol receptors. It has an effect on dopamine, I mean, on melatonin receptors. Remember, cortisol is a hormone that responds to light, right? When our light—when our eyes are closed and light is passing through our eyelids, it has a tendency to raise our cortisol levels, which is why they tell you not to use blue light at night, right? You're stimulating cortisol, and you're stimulating an awakening hormone when you're actually trying to go to sleep.
So by getting first light, you're telling the body that it's morning. You're raising cortisol, you're downregulating your melatonin receptors, you're getting healthy blue light into your eyes, you're getting healthy light onto your skin. There's no UVA, there's no UVB, none of the damaging rays of the sun. In 15 or 20 minutes, if you stack them all together, you can ground, do breath work, and get sunlight.
Just try for seven days. What if I have the red light at nighttime? Is that going to trick my body into thinking it's the morning? No, the red light won't do that; it's completely different. It's not the blue light spectrum that we're talking about.
So I can have red light any time of day? You can have red light any time. In fact, red light, I find it very relaxing. I sometimes will do my red light bed right before bed and sleep like a baby. We've been doing that as well at home, so I was just checking. I did Google to see if it was something that would wake me up, but no, you're right; blue light is the thing that wakes us.
A bit of a tangent, but I just saw you have a gulp of that water. What is in that water? Hydrogen water. Why hydrogen water? This is a little hydrogen generator. I don't know if you can still see that, but there's a little—pick it up and you'll be able to see—a little electrolysis pump down there, and it's basically adding hydrogen gas to the water.
There's not much left in there, but if you fill it with water, you can see that. I mean, it is fascinating. I am so convinced that hydrogen water is the best water that you can put in the human body, and there's a website called hydrogenstudies.com that has about 1,350 studies on the site. You can go to hydrogenstudies.com. When you get to that site, you can actually search by human clinical trials or animal clinical trials.
So you could sort out and look at human clinical trials and look at all of the ways that hydrogen gas is used in therapeutic treatments: reducing inflammation, improving the absorption of supplements, improving athletic performance, delaying muscle soreness, reducing neural inflammation. I mean, there are so many clinical trials proving the efficacy of hydrogen gas in the body.
People do hydrogen gas through a nasal cannula, through ear culus, through eye canes; you can breathe hydrogen gas. But by drinking hydrogen water, you have a very positive effect on inflammation in the body. When you pump that hydrogen into there, doesn't it just come out the top? No, it's sealed, so it's under pressure.
What it does is it forces the gas back into the liquid. The liquid actually gets a high part per million concentration of hydrogen gas. The colder the liquid, the more gas you can dissolve. So it takes about five hours for it to dissipate from that. Some people use hydrogen H2 tablets. I just use this hydrogen bottle, and I take it literally everywhere I go. I notice when I don't have it.
How many of you started thinking about your long-term health when you hit 30? For me, this was a wake-up moment of me thinking to myself, "Okay, I probably need to start paying a little bit more attention now." I already felt a change in myself when I hit 30 with things like my metabolism and my energy levels.
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One of the things that's been really sort of pertinent in culture at the moment is this subject of Ozempic. You know, since we spoke, it's got even more popular, and it's everywhere. I looked yesterday at the company that makes Ozempic, and I believe, if my Apple stock app wasn't deceiving me, the company's worth trillions now.
Oh, I'm sure. Yeah, Ozempic is a peptide called semaglutide. It's a GLP-1 inhibitor. There's another one called tirzepatide, which actually did better in side-by-side clinical trials than semaglutide, and that's the Wegovy version or the Mounjaro version.
Semaglutide, I think, is Osemaglutide, and Wegovy, but these are great for people that have type 2 diabetes or that are morbidly obese and have issues with cravings, that have either diabetes or significant obesity. I think they've become drugs for vanity, and what people are realizing now is all of the issues with gastric emptying, paralytic gut.
The fact that when you start to have paralytic gut, which is where you actually get paralysis in the gut because one of the things that they slow is gastric emptying. Very often, contents can purify in the gut, and it's not that I'm totally against these peptides. If you use these peptides, you have to be in a weight training program, so you have to be doing resistance training because a third of the weight that you lose, as much as half of the weight that you lose in some of the studies, is lean body mass.
So if you're taking semaglutide or tirzepatide, you want to make sure that you're also on a—I, our clinical team would put you on a peptide, a growth hormone peptide like sermorelin or ipamorelin to muscle protect, and then also make sure that you're on a good strength training regimen because just taking these, you don't get to spot-remove fat.
What happens is you start to aggressively mobilize and metabolize fat, very often from the cheeks and from the face, and people are getting "Ozempic face."
Or wovi face, they're saying now where like their cheeks get really sunken in, their eyes, the fat pads beneath their eyes are metabolized, and their eyes start to look like they're sunken in. So if you're morbidly obese or have a significant amount of weight to lose, you struggle with cravings. You're either severely pre-diabetic or you're diabetic. I mean, they can be life-changing, but for vanity purposes, I think there are a lot better peptides and a lot better ways to do it.
What's your life like these days?
It's amazing. You know, I think I was telling you before I got on the show today that I feel like I live somebody else's life. I really do. I can't believe that I found something that I would otherwise do for free and somehow monetized it. You must feel the same way, you know, when you're doing a podcast and your message starts to resonate. The caliber of people that it attracts, I mean, the rooms that you get to get in. For me, I have an insatiable level of intellectual curiosity; I'm super, super curious. The fact that I get to sit down with people like yourself, some of the greatest minds in the world that are studying longevity, anti-aging, biohacking, cancer mortality, and sports performance, it's just—I pinch myself. I mean, I really do.
With our privilege comes our pain.
Yeah, what's the pain?
You need to be honest with me here because this is why we started this podcast many years ago. For me, the pain is that as I've become more popular, I guess, and as the message has resonated, I've become a little more distant from the folks that I initially sought to serve and support. I had a lot more individual interaction in the beginning, and now I just simply can't interact with a number of people that would like me to, that actually do need me. I've turned my attention to trying to train and support the training of as many qualified people as I can so we can really touch the masses. I had no idea how much the message would resonate, and it resonated in a way that overpowered my company. One of the worst things is kind of collapsing under the weight of your own success. That didn't quite happen, but the message began to resonate, and there were so many people coming to take our tests and seek our services that really, really needed us. I felt the burden of that need. We were, for a period of time, unable to respond; we were overwhelmed, and that turned vitriolic in some cases. That's stabilized now, but you know, it's kind of the—it's kind of be careful what you ask for because you might get it. But by the same token, I wouldn't change a thing. I feel like the most blessed person in the world.
What about the family impact? Because you got kids and all that.
You know, that is the greatest blessing for me. My kids are landing at LAX, and within a few hours, they're in the air right now. I've got three children, and the oldest two work for me full-time. My daughter just graduated from nursing school; she's starting her PhD in nursing. My son's about 14 weeks behind her, so they're both going for their PhDs in nursing. They'll both have their doctorate in nursing, and that is the greatest blessing in life—seeing that your kids have a passion. I feel like you can teach your kids anything, but you can't give them a passion. The fact that they think enough about me and what I'm doing to want to follow in my footsteps is beyond anything. I can't even put it into words because I travel with my kids; I see clients with my kids. My wife is also in the business, and I think the pace of our life would be a lot more difficult if I didn't have my family around.
I saw Dr. Peter talking on a podcast once, and I'm paraphrasing, so I don't know if I'm getting it right, but he said you get 19 years with your kids. The first 18 is from when they're born to when they're 18 years old, and then they're gone. The last year is spread out over the entirety of the rest of their lifetime. I thought how sad, because I spend more time with my kids now than I did almost since the day they were born, and they're just becoming these adults that really inspire me. So I think that of all the blessings that God has given me, that's the biggest one.
There are a couple of other things that I was really curious about when I knew I was going to speak to you today. One of them was kind of what we were talking about there with your family, which is just like the role of community. We're clearly in a bit of a loneliness epidemic.
Well, you know, we knew in the life expectancy space, and this is a material fact, that if you wanted to cut somebody's life expectancy in half at any age, put them in isolation. If you put a human being in isolation, you will cut their life expectancy in half.
How could you see that in the data?
There was something we called broken heart syndrome or caregiver syndrome, and it's well documented in the elderly. You know, when you have a companion that you've been with for 40, 50, or 60 years, and that companion passes, very shortly thereafter, the second companion goes. I always thought that was a myth, like a nice tale of heartbreak and love. When we call it broken heart syndrome, it has nothing to do with a broken heart, but I mean the emotional state—the frequency in their body changes. When the mind surrenders, the body surrenders. There's a lot of emerging evidence that's actually putting some science behind the theory that emotions can make us sick. I think everyone believes that stress can actually lead to pathology and lead to disease.
So, you know, when we isolate human beings, it's hard to completely isolate them, but we know when we isolate human beings that it has a traumatic effect on life expectancy. Some of the worst science that we do and research that we conduct is when we study components of the body or cells from the human body in isolation. You take a cell out and you put it in a Petri dish, and you look at how it behaves in vitro, and then you assume when you put that cell back into the body that it's going to behave that way because cells exist in communities too. They exchange with their outside environment; they eliminate waste; they repair; they detoxify. They're a very active community.
And so, you know, the impact of community has meaning all the way down to a cellular level.
They do animal studies on this kind of thing, right?
Oh yeah, no question. Loneliness and isolation have a dramatic effect on life expectancy. It's been a while since I've read an animal study, but we knew that isolation had a dramatic effect on mortality. So when a loved one got moved into an assisted living facility, or we looked at the proximity of family members to a mother or a father that had just lost a grandmother or grandfather, that had just lost one or the other spouse, and you knew that the family wasn't going to visit frequently, and now that person was in isolation—when I mean isolation, not completely isolated, but they were isolated from daily activity—that had a dramatic effect on life expectancy. It was a comorbidity factor that we used mainly in the elderly, but it would happen in younger ages as well.
So I think that community is increasingly important for me. You know, I remember when I sold my company, my partner Grant Cardone told me, "Your sphere is about to get a lot smaller." I was like, "That doesn't make sense. My sphere is about to get a lot larger." And it was true; what he said was very true. I spend the majority of my time with my kids. They're working for me full-time; we travel together; we see clients together; we're in the hunt together. They're big supporters of the business; they caught the bug; they're in school together. You know, my youngest still lives with me, so my circle has gotten so much smaller, even though you see me out there with like Dana White and celebrities and athletes. Those are the flashbulb moments, but in my day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month, I'm intensely surrounded by my family and a very small team that I have a high level of trust in that is really helping me continue to be in service to the clients that I'm working with.
What about retirement then, and the purpose and the role that plays in our longevity?
It's been a while since I used to have the VBT, the variable basic table, memorized, but there is a probabilistic factor for retirement and communal interaction. I forget exactly what the level of impact was, but we had a probabilistic model where we would use this demographic data. But there is no question that mortality accelerates post-retirement. I don't know that I've delved enough into the science to really accurately comment on it, but it must have something to do with the loss of the sense of purpose.
When you look at Blue Zones and centenarians, one of the key themes, even beyond the diet—because you know the diets were very different. Singapore has one of the longest life expectancies on Earth; they eat the highest amount of meat. Sardinia has very long life expectancies; they eat high amounts of bread, pasta, and flour. The Mediterranean Blue Zones eat high amounts of oils, fish, and fats. But what was a common theme between all of them was mobility into older ages and a sense of purpose. There was no such thing as assisted living facilities; assisted care was when Grandma and Grandpa moved back in with their kids and lived with the kids until the day that they died. Maybe her purpose was just to get vegetables that night for dinner, and Grandpa's purpose was maybe to continue to make belts for the leather smith down the road. They had a sense of purpose.
When you think back to your job in life insurance and the role that you had, are there any parts of it that you look back on now and think about the industry that are unethical?
Because you can't reach out because of law and privacy to these people, as you've said, that would be a violation of a variety of different policies and stuff. But is there anything else within the practice of it that you find unethical?
Just the fact that I wasn't allowed to have any contact with the patient or the training physician. I understand for good reason, because most of the people that are doing this work are not licensed to practice medicine. They don't want them jumping into the practice of medicine. But when you notice things that are obvious, and then maybe you know that a doctor would have appreciated that phone call—"Oh my gosh, I didn't know that she was on that other script. Thank you for calling me." I mean, it wasn't to step on them or take over their practice of medicine, but I really wish that database would see the light of day. The databases that are used in predicting mortality, in my opinion, could change the face of humanity. I know why they won't, because it would upend modern medicine in a way that, in my opinion, would be catastrophic.
Destroy their business as well, wouldn't it? Because they need people to die, really.
They do, because they don't want to be paying out. Well, you know, annuities need people to die; life insurance wants people to live a little bit longer.
Oh yeah, because the longer they live, the more they pay.
The longer they live, the more they pay. But annuities—well, you've put down a deposit basically, so they want that deposit. They guaranteed me an income stream for life. So if you could kindly expire tomorrow, that would be good for me.
And the same companies do both?
Okay. There's something called a life insurance life annuity contract, a LILAC, where you actually put an annuity and a life insurance policy on the same life, and you can't lose.
I did a genetic test with 10X.
You did?
I did. And like you said, you're not able to give me the results of my test, but I wanted to invite in Dr. Carrie Sard, who's going to give me those results now, and she's going to explain a little bit to me about my results and also what the test is and what it means for me. So I'm very excited to see the results.
I'm excited for you to see them. Let's get her in.
A couple of days ago, I had someone come to my studio, and they did a swab inside of my mouth for something called the 10X genetic methylation test. I believe—what was that test, and why did I do it?
You did it to look at the five major genes of methylation. So remember that if we pulled your entire genetic code, we would get a lot of non-actionable information. I could see that you have dark olive skin, you have dark eyes, you have detached earlobes, but there's nothing you can do with that genetic information. We want genetic information that's actionable. So while you can't go in and fix the gene, you can very often supplement for its function. The genes of methylation are very special because they code for the process of converting one raw material into the usable form. So in other words, we take in folic acid or its derivatives, but we convert it into a usable form called methylfolate. This process is called methylation; it's the most important process that human beings go through. We do it 300 billion times a day, and when you have breaks in certain genes, this means that your body is not converting one raw material into the usable form, and this causes a deficiency. Very often, it's this deficiency that leads to some of the most common ailments that we suffer from.
Dr. Carrie, hello! Thanks for having me. Could you give us a little bit of your bio and your background?
Sure! My original training was surgical; it was obstetrical and gynecology. I just found that more chronic disease was happening, and people weren't really getting better. So my specialized training has been in functional medicine, kind of a more holistic approach. I have two master's degrees in this and met up with Mr. Brea eight years ago now. It's been a while, and in a small room, we started looking at these genetic tests and reasons that people were not getting better.
So I've got my test results here, which, full disclosure, I'm yet to see. So Jack over here has put them on my iPad and told me that I can swipe up and look at them. So what am I looking at here, and what does it tell me?
Okay, so with your permission, we can share that.
Of course, because that's important.
Only if it's good! I'm joking.
Well, I do want to tell you, your parents did you a solid.
Yeah, they did! You won the genetic lottery. So remember that in genetics, I think people get confused. Genes are like blueprints. Your mother writes half of that blueprint, and your father writes the other half, and you're born with that. You take that to your grave. So when you do have something that isn't quite exactly what you want, the term we tend to use is "variant." When that does happen, we want to find out ways to work around that.
How we color code this to make it understandable is if you have a kind of a normal copy and a normal copy from each parent, that's green. If you have one copy from a parent that is normal but one copy that is not, we're going to color that yellow. You have one of those, and if you have both copies that are not normal, that's red, and you don't have any of those, which is great. The significance of that is the green genes will code 100%; you're good to go. Yellow genes are about 40%, and red genes are 10% or less. Think of it like putting spokes in a wheel; it's just kind of clogging it up because these genes do follow a pathway.
It's the methylation pathway. I like to think of methylation as activation, like we talked about—taking something raw, bringing it in, and allowing your cells to convert it to what it can use. So if you have any glitches in the pathway, you're not going to be as efficient. You would want to correct for your one variant gene there.
So you come in nicely with that first gene; that's probably the most common one, and that's the real popular one. We kind of take it to the next level; we follow the pathway all the way up. The reason why this even matters is because it affects everything on you. It affects how you sleep; it affects, ultimately down the road, at a deeper level, how you sleep, how your thyroid functions, how your gut functions, how your moods, how you detox—especially heavy metals, how you detox. It affects your inflammation in your body, how well you can fight free radicals. Those are all important things, and that's why this is more than just data—it's real data.
So if you do not correct your one yellow, you're not going to be as good at doing all those things: detoxing, fighting inflammation, your gut movement, those kinds of things. It's a pretty simple fix for you. If you don't activate or activate those nutrients, then let's give you activated nutrients. For example, you most likely have trouble activating B12. That's probably an issue that you're not as efficient at. Of course, you do it, but you're not as efficient at it because it wasn't green. So you would want to therefore take the activated B12 form, the methylated B12 form.
By doing that every day, I kind of liken it to the road being broken, but you've built a bridge over it. That's how you can compensate for that gene variant or that gene break.
We like to kind of lovingly call them that.
On my results, it says one parent passed on a gene mutation. Which one was it?
So that's right. So he wants to know who to blame. So that's the thing—unless you tested your parents, you're not going to really know who gave you what. You do know that you had one that gave you a normal gene and one that gave you a variant, and that's why it's yellow.
What else does this mean for me on a practical level? Does this mean that I'm going to—like, you know, I want to know if there are any sort of health implications that I should be aware of.
So anytime you have any kind of variant in your methylation, especially in the lower pathway, you have to understand that it is going to affect it all the way up. So effects can be all the way from simple sleep issues to not being able to sleep at all. It can be mood issues, gut issues.
Okay, but you can take it out of the loop with the supplement.
Are you able to tell me about the worst sort of profile you've seen and the sort of real-world consequences of that when all five markers are interrupted?
Yeah, we've seen them where there's a heavy mix of red and green. This is where you see significant personality alteration, significant what we would refer to as mental illness—severe ADD, ADHD, OCD, manic depression, bipolar. You see very high propensities for addiction because of the depleted level of dopamine. You see significant sleep disorders, very severe gut issues—gas, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, irritability, cramping—that don't seem to be fixable with conventional therapies or dietary changes. Those are amazing cases to watch the clinical team work with because by getting methylation right, I have seen those cases solved by our clinical team, and many of those symptoms become fully remissive. We get a lot of chances to make good people great, but when you can materially change somebody's life by fixing those gene mutations, that's when you're really making an impact.
There are these five acronyms here: COMT, MTHFR, MTR, upper gut, and lower gut. That's the one that I have, this yellow one on, and then there's the—[ __ ] one. I shouldn't say that—the MTHFR, which is mind and gut. These are the five sort of factors for methylation, which is really about how I process the ingredients I put in my body.
Yes, and I'm guessing that these are at different stages in my body. So the ones that say "mind" are in my head; the one that says "upper gut" is sort of higher up in my gut; the one that says "lower gut" is in my lower gut; and then this MTHFR that says "mind and gut," that's—
Yes, and the reason is that remember these are sequential, right? So I always use the analogy that think of it like a sandbag pass. You have a bunch of guys lined up; you have one guy that's taking the sandbags off the truck and passing it to the next guy, and he passes it to the next guy, and so on. Well, if early in that chain he was supposed to take 10 sandbags off the truck but he dropped four, the best the rest of the line could do is six. So in other words, if an early gene like MTHFR, which is early in the methylation cycle, is impaired, it impairs the entire downstream. If several gene snips later you have another major gene snip, it will impair things further downstream.
The reason why MTHFR is one of the worst to have but the easiest to fix is because it's the earliest in the methylation cycle.
Okay, it's first, right?
It's first. So if that's red, meaning both parents gave you that gene mutation, you could have consequences through the entire methylation cycle.
So is that what you tend to see if someone has the—
Yes, this is why if you Google "consequences of MTHFR" or "MTHFR and miscarriages," "MTHFR and ADD," "MTHFR and ADHD," "MTHFR and anxiety," you're going to see hordes of articles and clinical studies linking that gene mutation to what seems like a vast myriad of consequences. Well, that vast myriad of consequences is actually related to the gene snips that are further downstream, but they're affected because they're not getting the raw material they need to do their job.
In my opinion, one of the most overlooked things in all of modern medicine, as simple as this test is and as easily and widely available as it is, I'm surprised that more frontline clinics do not do this because people do it once in their lifetime, and they supplement for deficiency. Sometimes you see miraculous changes in their life.
Gary, thank you. I'm going to put these results—my results—in the description of this episode below, exactly as it is here in front of me, so everyone can see, and the details of how I got the test, etc., will all be available there for you guys to check out.
As you know, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. The question that has been left for you is this one: "I wish I knew who your last guest was."
Okay, so they said they're quoting someone, and it says, "Gandhi said, 'Be the change that you want to see in the world.' What is the change you want to see, and how will you be it?"
Wow! Well, I want to see people live healthier, happier, longer lives—more fulfilling lives. I will be that by continuing to get the message out, and that's why I'm here. That's when I wake up anew every day, and I can't hold a candle to Gandhi, but I will spend the balance of my adult lifetime continuing to get the message out.
Gary, thank you so much for having me. Getting to know you on and off camera, you're such a genuine, true, lovely human. Thank you, and your intent and your intentions are so clear to me and so pure. I've had loads of people reach out to me since our last conversation and speak to the value that your advice has had on their lives—thousands and thousands of people.
I mean, that makes me—I mean, I looked at the last conversation; I looked at my emails around that time. I searched your name, and when I say thousands, I mean thousands and thousands of people that are reporting to have better lives, happier lives because they listened to that conversation.
So awesome! They probably won't be able to reach you, so on behalf of those people, I wanted to say thank you so much for doing what you do because it's very important, man. It's not always easy.
Yeah, but you know, it's an occupational hazard.
Yeah, it is. Putting yourself out there in the world, as I would know.
So thank you so much. I appreciate your time.
Super welcome! [Music]