Transcription
Wow, ultimate human! Hey guys, welcome to the Ultimate Human podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brea, where we go down the road of everything longevity, anti-aging, uh, functional medicine, biohacking, and everything that makes average humans ultimate humans.
So today, I have a very special guest, my wife Sage, working or soon-to-be Sage Brea. And today is where we take questions directly from you, and we answer them here on the podcast. So I know you've got the questions on your phone, babe. So what were some of the questions that came in to us that people are have on their minds?
I threw it out to the world of Instagram, and actually, we got a lot of responses of questions that they wanted to ask you, questions that they had for me. Um, so let's start with, okay, we're going to kind of go in the diet range. So one of the questions was specifically, is there any fruit or vegetable that you would eat that's not organic?
So me, personally, I wouldn't. If you're going to spend money anywhere in the diet, the place to spend money if you eat fruit is on organic fruits. Non-organic fruits remember, fruits absorb pesticides and herbicides and preservatives through their skin, so they have a tendency to draw pesticides, herbicides, insecticides into the fruit. So if you're going to spend money anywhere in your diet and you actually do eat fruit, it's best to go with organic fruits rather than non-organic fruits. My preference would be that you eat fruits that end in “berry”: blackberry, blueberry, raspberry, strawberry. They're lowest on the glycemic index, meaning they raise blood sugar slower than other fruits, and they have, you know, their high amounts of fructose. And contrary to popular belief, fructose is processed differently than than other sugars, so it has less of an impact on uh your blood sugar. Cool.
All right. And then there's lots out there on how to clean your fruit. TikTok's got crazy ways of soaking it in some sort of solution that that sucks all the color out of strawberries, and obviously that's can't be the right way. So what do you recommend when you bring your fruit home, even if it's organic, how you wash?
Oh yeah, even if it's organic, I actually recommend that you wash your fruits and your meat. So the way to wash fruits is put them in a bowl with filtered water, um, and preferably as cold a water you can get it. You can even actually use ice, um, but put it in a in a bowl of a glass bowl of cold water, filtered water, and then add about a fourth of a cup of vinegar—white rine, white rice vinegar, uh, white wine vinegar, um, even apple cider vinegar—so 1/4 cup of vinegar and about a tablespoon of baking soda. And you'll notice it will fizz up, and then just massage the fruit around in there a little bit. You only need to leave it in the bowl for one minute. Okay, you don't leave them—let it soak for 10 or 15 minutes; it will actually start to draw the color out of the fruit, and it will even draw the sweetness out of the fruit, which is not what you want. You want the pesticides, the herbicides that that may be on the surface of the fruit to be drawn out, and then get all the bug parts and droppings and possible worms and things off of the fruit and any kind of dirt or debris that's on it. But it only takes 60 seconds to wash your fruit in cold water, 1/4 cup of uh vinegar—your choice of vinegar is fine; it's super cheap to buy a bottle of vinegar, just a few bucks—and then a tablespoon of baking soda.
Does it taste vinegary afterwards? Not at all. You don't taste it at all, cuz so when you're done washing it, dump the bowl of fruit out, and then rinse it with filtered water, and then put it in in the refrigerator in a covered glass pan. I'm kind of laughing at my question because clearly I've been eating the fruit here, and I haven't tasted it, but I didn't know if you were really washing it. I was washing it. I always wash the fruit. So if it's back in our fridge, babe, I've washed it, right?
And then for meats, um, the trick with meats is, you know, take the meats out of the package. Remember, remember, just caring for your food is a great thing to do before you eat—just being intentional about how you eat and what foods you eat. So you take your poultries or your meat, your pork, your steak, and put it in a pan, cover it completely with kosher salt. Let that sit for about a minute, rub the salt into one side of the meat, flip it over, rub it into the other side of the meat, let it sit for a minute, then fill the pan up that the meat's in, and same thing, add a little bit of um—make sure that the water is ice cold—and add a small amount of um vinegar—no baking soda in this case—just a small amount of uh white wine vinegar, white rice vinegar, apple cider vinegar. Let it sit for about a minute and then rinse it off, put it in a glass pan, and then put it back in the refrigerator and cook it when you're ready.
What's the difference between using kosher salt versus like Himalayan sea salt or Celtic salt or salt? So the the the pink Himalayan sea salt, you know, there's been a lot of studies recently that show that a lot of brands of pink Himalayan sea salt, the majority of them are coming out of China, and they're actually laden with mercury. They have a lot of heavy metals in them. So based on the way the salt is mined, um, if they don't take the crystal vein of the salt and they actually start to get some of the ore that's around, they can get heavy metals. So my recommendation is that you use Celtic salt, especially for your table salt, because it it actually has more minerals. I think it has 61 or 62 minerals that are essential for human beings, and the Celtic salt um tastes even saltier; it just actually has a more full flavor than iodized table salt or pink Himalayan sea salt. So you can use those for eating, uh, you can also use um Baja gold—that's one of my favorites—that's a sea salt I want to say that that's mined in Mexico, and it's completely heavy metal free. You can use it also to cure your meats and your um poultries, but uh ground up in a in a salt grinder, it's amazing salt. And contrary to popular belief, sodium rarely raises your blood pressure. What raises your blood pressure is iodized table salt. But most of us are deficient in sodium; we're not having too much sodium. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons why people's level of sodium shows up uh as elevated in their blood is usually because they're dehydrated. Levels have a tendency to rise when the concentration rises. So, for example, if you had half a glass of water and you put a teaspoon of salt in that water, you'd have one concentration of salt. If you filled the glass the rest of the way up, you would cut the salt concentration in half, but not because you removed salt, but because you added water. So hydration is super important, but actually your intake of salt—most of us are clinically deficient in sodium chloride.
Yeah, we always sprinkle the Celtic sea salt in our water, so or you can make a sea salt solé, which helps with headaches and dehydration. Yeah, about 85% of all migraine headaches are directly related to sodium deficiency. The osmotic gradient or the movement of water across a membrane is what really governs very often whether or not you get a migraine because remember, there's no pain receptors in the brain; that's why brain surgery is painless. Right? There—the brain cannot send a pain signal, but there's a covering over the brain called the dura, and this covering, which is like Saran Wrap that's over top of the brain, is fraught with pain receptors, and it hates two things: it hates being stretched, and it hates being contracted. And so what determines whether or not it's stretching or contracting is the sodium gradient. And so when you're deficient in sodium, that that dura can actually send pain signals, which is why the majority of migraine headaches occur in the mornings when you are the most dehydrated. So you go to sleep at night, you're respiring all night, you're actually have moisture leaving your body, heat leaving your body. You wake up in the morning, and now you have a migraine first thing in the morning. If you add a pinch of Celtic sea salt to your drinking water and you drink 10 ounces of water in the morning, those usually will be a permanent thing of your past in 48 hours.
It worked for me! Awesome. Y okay, other question. Okay, daily diet and best foods to eat. So you want to talk about, well, I guess your diet. You've kind of gone that keto route. Tell us a little bit about what you eat on a daily basis. What's in Gary's kitchen idea?
Well, my whole philosophy on dieting is not everybody needs to be on keto or carnivore or vegan or vegetarian or paleo or AIP or cyclical dieting or raw food diets. The most important thing about the food we eat—not the diet that we're on—is that we eat whole, real foods. It's the distance from the soil that really hurts us. So when you look at vegetarian or vegan diets, some vegans and vegetarians have higher incidences of of breast cancer and other forms of cancer, colorectal cancer being one of the major ones, and not because vegetables are bad for you, but because they eat a lot of pesticide, insecticide, herbicide-laden vegetables, lots of preservatives, and it's those secondary chemicals, not the vegetables, that are really causing the harm. So one of the things that's happened through the Agricultural Revolution is the distance between the soil and the table has lengthened, meaning there are more steps to how food is processed before it lands on the grocery store shelf. So we know that if it takes an apple 30 days to make its journey from the tree to the shelf, that we're going to preserve that apple, and preservatives were originally called anti-digestives, but some smart person realized that people are not going to go to the anti-digestive area of the supermarket, so they they switched the name to preservatives. It's just like when we spray foods with folic acid; we don't call it sprayed with folic acid; we call it fortified or enriched because it just makes it sound so much more nutritious, like they're doing you a favor. Yeah, I feed my kids fortified whole grains or enriched bleached white flour. It just sounds like something beneficial has happened when really uh that's the root of all evil in my opinion.
Never really thought about like strawberry preserves; it's full of like jelly is just… well, those aren't strawberry preservatives; those are strawberry preserves. So when you seal it in a can, um, that's different. Preserving it is actually very healthy, meaning preserving it in a sealed jar. Preservatives are terrible because it's the time of just our old-school grandmother's way of preserving fruits, preserving vegetables, pickling um cucumbers and things like that; those old-school methods are actually very, very healthy. If you look at the incidence of cardiovascular disease and type two diabetes in the 40s, it's a fraction of what it is today. And and if you oils… yeah, well, I mean, that's also seed oils, true, but you know, I did a big post on seed oils the other day, and I got a lot of flak online because people said, well, food—great canola oil and sunflower oil—these these oils are not bad for you. That is true until they are industrially processed, right? So it's not actually the food very often; it's the distance from the food to the table. So if you take a seed like a or you know, let's say you take canola oil, and you press the canola, and it comes out very… well, now they need to degum it, so they degum it with something called hexane, which is a well-known neurotoxin. Once it's degummed, they heat it to about 445 degrees. When you heat an oil like that, it denatures, and it turns rancid. So now you have a rancid oil that was denatured that was degummed with a neurotoxin, and now when you cool that oil back down, it's cloudy, so they need to um deodorize and decloud it, and they use sodium hydroxide, which is a known carcinogen, and then very often they can even use um commercial bleaching agents like a mild amounts of of chlorine. Um, not all of them go through that process, but some do, and then it makes it to your shelf. So the issue is not the canola plant per se or the sunflower seed per se; it's the distance between that and the table, which is why I say you really only need four oils in your kitchen: you need a grass-fed butter or ghee um or tallow, and you need a coconut oil, which you can use at high temperatures; it doesn't denature at high temperatures. And my preference is small-batch extra virgin olive oil.
So you're not a fan of something like um… Can't Believe It's Not Butter? No, those are… it's crazy though, cuz I get those questions: is that an okay butter? Margarine? Margarine? Can't Believe It's Not Butter? Um, because this is what people grew up with, and especially in the 80s or 90s, they went through like the fat-free butter phase. Yeah, they went through the war on fat. Yeah, I mean, that was the worst thing to ever happen to the morbid obesity and and diabetes. I'm guilty of it. I used that spray I'm a toast in college. Yeah. Oh, I mean, most most of us did, but you know, the thing is that it's not fat that makes you fat; it's sugar that makes you fat because when we eat sugar, our insulin rises. When insulin rises, the primary role of insulin is not to lower blood sugar; the primary role of insulin is actually to block any other form of energy use in the body, which includes using fat as energy. So if you can't use the fatty acid pathway, if you can't metabolize fatty acids, then where does fat build up? Well, the first place it builds up is in the blood, which is why people that eat the highest amount of sugar have the highest blood fat. So if you look at a blood panel, it's called a lipid panel, and you look at triglycerides, HDL cholesterol—the healthy cholesterol—VLDL cholesterol—the very low-density lipoprotein, the really dangerous one—and LDL cholesterol, you'll see that um triglycerides are very high in people that have high insulin. People that have high insulin are generally people that are eating high amounts of sugar, especially refined sugars.
Gotcha. Okay. Oh, back to diet, keto. Why did you kind of… so I don't think that everybody needs to be on a keto diet. Keto reset is really good. I do actually have put carbs back into my diet. I eat um natural local honey. I do eat um berries. Uh, I think those things are very safe for you, and you become what's called metabolically adaptive; you you you actually adapt to having carbohydrate and having um um meats and fats in your diet. Keto is a great way for people to reset because it's a high-fat, low-protein, very low-carbohydrate diet. Um, it puts your body into a state of ketosis; your body starts to use something called beta-hydroxybutyrate as a fuel source, which is a really low-inflammatory fuel source. The diet was originally constructed for um addressing epilepsy, really. Yeah, because because epilepsy has a an inflammatory component. So keto dieting, using a keto reset, is very healthy; it can strip weight off your body, put you into a state of ketosis, kills sugar and hunger cravings, um, it's very low-inflammatory; it's one of the lowest inflammatory diets on the planet as long as you're eating clean keto, and it's the lowest in something called deuterium-depleted water, which we get—do a whole podcast on that—but um people find it fascinating that human beings on a daily basis we manufacture about 100 gallons of intracellular water every day.
Yeah, I can't process that. It's so hard for people to process cuz they—how can I manufacture 100 gallons of water if I only drink half a gallon of water? Right? Well, you make water in your body the same way they make it in space: you take two hydrogens and one oxygen, you slap it together, you have a water molecule. What happens to that water molecule? It instantly enters the mitochondria and is turned into energy by something called the Krebs cycle, and it creates energy for your body called ATP. So we're not capable of drinking enough water in a day to to fuel our mitochondria for even 10 minutes. 10% of our body weight is these little battery batteries inside of our cells called mitochondria. You have about 110 trillion of these, and these make every source of energy that human beings are powered by. We're not powered by food we eat, the air we breathe, the supplements we take; we're powered by one energy source called ATP, adenosine triphosphate, and we need water in order to make that. So the body creates water out of gases and then throws that water into this cycle that breaks it apart and creates energy. Cool. And keto dieting is very low in something called deuterium-depleted water, which deuterium is heavy water, so it actually helps your cells make lighter water. That should be a whole podcast. Yeah, the deuterium—deuterium water is a fascinating, fascinating subject. So many random types of water, and you get so excited about it.
I do. It's—well, it's a water molecule with an extra neutron. Okay, if you must know this, and this is the part where it goes: ready? Just—we are going to do a whole podcast on water: the difference between hydrogen water, oxygen water, alkaline water, tap water, spring water, and filtered water. So we're going to go through it all. You nerd out about it. Um, I always tell people if they're going to try a keto diet that you cannot date a keto diet; you have to commit and marry a keto diet.
That's right. There's no cheat. Why is that? Yeah, no cheat because people do that; they're like, oh, it's Sunday; it's my cheat day. Why can't you cheat on a keto diet? Because when—once you become fat-adapted, as soon as you put carbohydrate—high carbohydrate—back into the body, then it instantly um will stop processing fat, and you're eating a high-fat diet, and so now the fat will build up in the blood, and it will be stored in the visceral tissue rather than being being used as an energy source. Remember, the first preferred source of energy for the body, and there are no exceptions to this rule, is always glucose. So if you have sugar in your blood, you have no choice; your body will always choose that source for energy first. So you have to bring the glucose down in order to get into ketosis. So as soon as you raise your blood sugar, raise your glucose, and you raise your insulin, now your body can't burn fat, but you have high amounts of fat in your diet, and now you're in a dangerous situation; your triglycerides skyrocket. You will see that your dangerous cholesterols, your VLDL cholesterols, will skyrocket. So a keto diet is just like you said—the diet that you marry; you don't date.
Okay. Yeah, people always ask me, since you were doing it, you know, oh, is that what you follow too? I am of the… you eat very clean though. I eat clean. You super clean. I don't—I don't follow a diet; I just really enjoy salads. Yeah, but you don't eat a lot of white flour, white rice, white bread, white pasta. But I do eat it; I just make sure it's not enriched or fortified or fortified or organic, um, but I don't—I don't eat a lot; I really cut sugar out quite a bit. I never—I eat sugar—I never really eat it ever, like, I don't know, every—the occasional like piece of chocolate, but I don't crave it. I quit sugar accidentally.
Accidentally? Accidentally. Because literally we ran out of sugar for our coffee, and I was too lazy to go to the grocery store—this before Instacart and the glory of having groceries brought to you—and so I just didn't put it in my coffee in the morning, and what I found is that at lunch I wouldn't be craving a Snickers bar, and at dinner, after I ate dinner, I wasn't craving Ho-Hos and all it took was—it was like a 7- to 10-day period. Oh yeah, it's a period where you go through the withdrawal, and then you're fine, and that was fine. But funny enough, then I started to crave uh salt, so then I craved more like crackers and potato chips, but I still limit those; I don't really crave that even as much anymore. Once I got chips out—out—I think that that it really came down to the seed oils. Yeah, there's no like good… I did find one kind of chip; it was like a—it's from Boulder, of course—yummy, crunchy Boulder, um, but I think it literally is called Boulder chips, but they didn't have seed oils; it was like avocado oil.
Excellent. So we'll have to check that out. Well, I really should get back on that, but anyway, but I like salads; I like adding grilled chicken and just everything—like everything in the in the fridge I can find and just throw it in a salad. And people think that's weird when I tell people that; they think that's really strange. Why do you think that is?
Well, I mean, because people just—people don't think of salads the way you think of salads; they think of salads as like lettuce-aide salad. Yeah, you make a salad with avocados and chicken, and it's just nuts and hemp seeds and… yeah, I mean, you make—you make really healthy salads with lots of stuff in them. My family is just known for salads—super known for salads. Yeah, but okay, so okay, you want to take one question? Trying to keep it to 20 minutes, so I think that's good.
No, I think we actually covered all the alcohol, but we could—alcohol—we could save that for a different one. Okay, so we're telling—we got three more minutes, so um alcohol. So here's how alcohol works. First of all, we know now through peer-reviewed, published clinical studies that no amount of alcohol is good for you. Used to be that a glass of wine a day keeps the doctor away; it's absolutely not true. There's resveratrol in wine, but you can get resveratrol through supplements now in much higher concentrations and much more bioavailable. But if you must drink alcohol, um, it's not so much the alcohol itself; it's what the alcohol becomes. And alcohol converts into something called acetaldehyde, which is a poison; it poisons your brain; um, it makes your body acidic, so it actually can move the pH of your blood uh several tenths of a point. Remember, the pH range of the blood is very narrow; it's only about four or five tenths of a point. So when we shift slightly to becoming more acidic, this is the state where we don't feel well. So if we look at what alcohols convert the slowest to both sugar and to acetaldehyde, by far agave-based alcohols—tequila—tequilas are way out in front, but you got to skip the margarita part. Yeah, you have to skip the sugar part; that's the part that people are like, oh, so I can have margaritas? No, that's—like a recipe is just tequila, ice, with either water and a squeeze of fresh lime. Um, and then there's a big gap, and then you get to clear alcohols like vodka and like um vodkas and gins, and then there's another gap, and you start—that's where you meet uh red wines, full-body red wines, colored alcohols, and then below that are your white wines, rosés, and your high-sugared wines. So the the number one by far is—is to—kill agave-based alcohol; it takes a very long time and very low conversion to acetaldehyde.
We kind of just quit again. Yeah, I mean, we've just basically stopped drinking accidentally. Well, we we did a reset in October, and we went down to Colombia and did a stem cell IV, and you weren't allowed to drink for 30 days, and I think it was like a two-week period even before that, so almost a month and a half, and then we got back, and we just never drank again. We don't crave—I don't crave it. I I think we were always finding a reason to drink: we had a hard day, let's have a drink; we had a really great day, and we want to celebrate, let's have a drink; we're having a friend over, the kids are coming over, have a drink, and it—we were always looking for reasons, and then I think we started to realize, geez, we really drink a lot. Yeah, and then we just quit. I don't even think—I feel so much better.
Je dors, je dors mieux, je me sens mieux, je me sens tellement mieux. Je déteste cette sensation de me réveiller avec ce mal de tête et ce brouillard. Maintenant, je me réveille et je fais une douche froide. Oh mon Dieu, tu es tellement bavarde le matin aussi. Je deviens excitée quand je sors de cette douche. Je suis capitaine bavarde et j'aime venir partager mes doigts en or avec elle. Et j'aime aussi partager, euh, mes histoires sur la journée précédente. J'ai beaucoup de choses à me sortir de la poitrine à 6 heures du matin. Beaucoup de mots sortent de votre bouche le matin. Donc j'aimerais faire plus de ceux-ci, les 20 minutes, on les appelle les courts de 20 minutes. On essaie de garder le podcast à 20 minutes. Nous prendrons vos questions si vous avez des questions supplémentaires que vous aimeriez nous entendre répondre, si vous souhaitez plus de détails sur tout ce que nous avons couvert aujourd'hui, veuillez les mettre dans les commentaires ci-dessous. Veuillez vous souvenir d'aimer et de vous abonner à la chaîne, ce qui nous donne les ressources pour continuer à faire cela. Et comme toujours, tout ce dont nous parlons n'est que science.