Transcription
Gary Brea, welcome, man. I'm super pumped to be here.
Man, I'm pumped to have you. Uh, some incredible conversations, it's some funny ones downstairs. But I just want to do a quick warm-up. We do this with a handful of guests, and man, I'm not very knowledgeable about the health space, but it's something I'm really getting into. I have kids now, you know, and so I want to live for them as long as possible. And I've really been, me and my wife have been trying to clean it up and find the right doctors and everything.
So, anyways, we do the segment. Sometimes we do it with a lot of the operators and the warriors: what do they carry to protect themselves? Uh, we did one with Hoverman: five things you can't live without. So, I want to do something with you very similar. What are, what are five, five health, let's say, let's say five health gadgets, supplements, whatever you want to do, that you think that you can't live without, that you use in your daily life every day?
So, I'll, I'll put supplements into one category and then maybe just give you four others that are pretty simple. Supplements, in my opinion, come down to us getting back to the basics, right? I mean, most of us are supplementing for the sake of supplementing; we're not supplementing for deficiency. That's the difference.
And you know, like we believe this in plant physiology, right? If you, if you had a, if you had a palm tree at your house and the leaf started rotting in the palm tree, and you actually called a true arborist or a botanist out to your house, they wouldn't touch the leaf, right? They, they would soil test the soil and they would say, "You know what, Sean, there's no nitrogen in the soil," and they would add nitrogen to the soil and the leaf would heal. So, human beings are no different, right? When you deprive the soil, you deprive the body of certain raw materials, simple things which I'll list for you. You get the expression of that deficiency.
So, I think everybody, every human being walking this Earth, should, should, should be on four things. What's called a methylated multivitamin, which is a basic multivitamin with the B complex. The methylated form of vitamins, which is essentially the already converted form. So, instead of folic acid, it will have methylfolate. Instead of cyanocobalamin, it will have hydroxy or methylcobalamin. Just fancy names for the different types of vitamins. But a methylated multivitamin. Lots of brands make these. I make one, Thorn makes one, Pure Encapsulations makes one, Symbiotica makes one. Very easy to find, but use the word "methylated." This way, you know that you're getting the raw material in the form your body can use.
The second thing is a good EPA DHA, either fish oil or omega-3 fatty acid. We're very high in omega-6 fatty acids, the ones that are very pro-inflammatory, and most of us are deficient in the omega-3 fatty acids, the ones that feed our brain and reduce inflammation. So, it's very easy to take an oil supplement in the morning. You take a black seed oil, you could take a fish oil supplement, a good fish oil supplement.
My favorite biohack in the world, which is a mineral salt. You know, human beings need 91 essential minerals, and a lot of us are very mineral deficient. And I don't mean like the big minerals and electrolytes that we hear about, like potassium, magnesium, sodium. I mean all the trace minerals: boron, manganese, molybdenum, selenium, silica, you know, the boring ones that you don't hear a lot about. I use something called Baja Gold Sea Salt. It's probably my favorite life biohack because a $15 bag of this sea salt will last you five years. And you take a pinch of the sea salt, put it in 8 to 10 ounces of water in the morning, stir it up, and whack it back so you hydrate and mineralize the body.
Oh, no kidding! You, I, you gave me a little, you got downstairs a sample of that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I sent you like a care package, and it was in there.
So, I'm supposed to put that in the water?
Yeah, just a quarter teaspoon of that. Put it in water, stir it with a wooden spoon, not a metal spoon, because the metal will interact with some of the metals in there. Same reason why you don't use metal with honey. You never see metal and honey; you only see wood in honey because the metal will interact with some of the compounds in the honey. So, just take a quarter teaspoon, put it in a glass of water, stir it with a wooden spoon, and whack it back first thing in the morning.
The minerals, being mineral deficient, leads to all kinds of consequences. You know, like, if you look at nursing homes all over the country, they are full of elderly men and women with osteopenia or osteoporosis, brittle bone disease, or the precursor to brittle bone disease, that have been on calcium supplements for 20 years. Calcium is not the answer. Our bones are actually not made of calcium. They're made of calcium which combines with something called phosphorus to form something called hydroxyapatite and makes a hard, strong bone. But in order for that process to happen, the mineralization of those bones to happen, you need a few things. One, you need a load, which is why exercise is so good for you. But the other thing you need is 12 essential minerals. If you're deficient in those minerals, all the calcium in the world won't help you, right?
So, hydrate, mineralize the body, good fatty acid, methylated multivitamin. And then I take something called Perfect Aminos, but there are a lot of other essential amino acid supplements out there. Most of us, we try to get to the amino acids by getting to a protein equivalent, right? So, they'll say one pound of, or one gram of protein per kilogram of body weight, which is a great, you know, guideline. But all protein becomes the same thing; it all breaks down and becomes amino acids. If you're deficient in any one single one of the eight essential amino acids, the rest of those amino acids convert to sugar, to fat. So, most of us are not protein deficient; we're amino acid deficient. And it's very easy to get the essential amino acids. The reason why they're called essential is because they're necessary for life, right? We have two essential fatty acids, you have eight essential amino acids, necessary for life. So, they're essential fats, and they're essential amino acids which build proteins.
There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. So, just if you just marinate on that for a second, carbohydrates are not essential for life. So, you should be the most judicious when you make your choices about what carbohydrates to eat.
So, are fruits and vegetables considered carbohydrates?
They're, they have carbohydrates in them. Yeah, those are great sources of carbohydrates, very low in carbohydrates. Most, most vegetables. Fruits are going to be higher in carbohydrates, but fruits, fruits are complete sugar too. You know, like if, if you sometimes if you listen to the wrong pundits, you'll hear the fructose, which is very true, is, you know, raises your insulin, leads to insulin resistance, raises our blood sugar, can, can be very bad for you. But in nature, fructose occurs with glucose, right? So, so, so fruits are whole sugars. I'm not saying you make your entire diet fruit, but don't be afraid of fruits, especially fruits and berries, because fruits and berries are lowest on the glycemic index. So, blackberry, blueberry, raspberry, strawberry.
So, like this morning, I had two poached eggs, organic chicken sausage, half an avocado, and a small bowl of berries. I feel amazing, and I'm not hungry because I've gotten, you know, I've gotten all the nutrients into my body. Most of us are actually overeating because we're deficient in nutrients. I mean, the brain knows when it's fed, right? And if you eat a highly processed food diet, which we can talk about in the podcast, but what happens is it tricks the brain. Even though you are full and you've taken in the right number of calories, you haven't taken in the right nutrients. So, the brain's like, "Hey, I still need the complex of B vitamins. I still need folate. I, you know, I still need methylcobalamin. I need B12. I need zinc. I need magnesium." So, it forces you, makes you hungry again, and forces you to overeat.
So, if you put two, two people on identical caloric diets, one is a whole food diet, meaning whole natural foods, and one is a highly processed diet, you'll see the highly processed diet group will eat, overeat by about 500 calories a day because they're trying to get to the nutrients. And so, you know, my message for the masses is we are, we are not as sick or as diseased or as pathological as we've been led to believe. We are nutrient deficient.
You started every day hydrating and mineralizing the body, a really good omega-3 with some omega-6 fatty acid, EPA, DHEA fatty acid, an amino acid supplement, and then supplementing with 5,000 IUs of vitamin D3 with 80 micrograms of K2. That's the base. And the reason why I say that's the base is because if you don't have the basics, nothing else matters, you know? So, now you start going down the road of all the exotics: NMN and NAD and nicotinamide riboside and Resveratrol and Ashwagandha and St. John's Wort. And you're, you're going down the road of all of these incredibly powerful supplements. But if you, it's like back to the plant example: if you're missing the nitrogen, nothing else matters. If you just started watering the plant, "Oh, the leaf is still sick." You know, if you started putting phosphorus on there, "The leaf is still sick." You put, you know, potassium on there, "The leaf is still sick." Put the nitrogen, plant recovers, right? So, it's the same in human beings. So, if you just cover the basics, then you can start stacking on additional, additional habits.
So, so one would be that supplement stack, which is a basic supplement stack. And then the other one, which is our human superpower, and it is the most bullied thing in our schedule. It's the thing that we bully around most in our life. It's the bastard stepchild of humanity, and it is our absolute human superpower, and that is sleep. You know, if again, if you're not sleeping, sort of nothing else matters, right? If you look at the consequences of prolonged sleep deprivation, they are not only physiological, they're psychological. You know, a lot of, a lot of the mental illness, if you will, that we deal with is exacerbated by sleep deprivation. So, one of the best things you can do is develop good sleep hygiene. And by sleep hygiene, I mean it's just a routine to go to sleep and a routine to wake up.
If you put 100 people into this room and said, "What's your exercise routine?" most people have an exercise routine. "What's your routine to get to work? What's your routine to get your kids to school in the morning? What's your, what's your morning routine like?" They'll tell you. If you say, "What's your sleep routine?" right? "What do you do to go to bed?" People go, "I go to bed." "What time do you go to bed?" "Well, whenever I'm done getting my stuff done for the day." But consistency in bedtime, sleeping in a dark room, like literally surgically removing all the light from the room. Put a, put a, you know, t-shirt over your alarm clock. Little pieces of tape over your, you know, the little lights that are on your, uh, you know, smoke detector, your smoke detectors. You know, getting, you know, blackout blinds or even using a sleep mask. I travel with a sleep mask. No blue light. Not eating two hours before bedtime.
If you actually develop a really good sleep routine, if you just put those five things together: try to eat your last meal two hours before you go to bed so you're, so the blood that should be in your brain is not diverted to your gut. Digestion is a really intensive process on the body. Your, your, your intestinal tract is 30 feet long. It's enveloped with blood vessels. When you stuff it full of food, the blood leaves the brain and the rest of your body, and it goes to the gut to digest, right? It's a, it's a, it's an ancestral part of human existence is to prioritize digestion. So, as soon as you eat, everything else stops: waste elimination, repair, detoxification, regeneration. And everything focuses on digestion. So, stop eating two hours before bedtime. Get a sleep mask or surgically remove the light from the room. Decrease the temperature in the room 2, 3, 4 degrees. It's probably 68 degrees in this room. This is the kind of room you should be sleeping in, a lot colder than you, than you think.
If you're one of those people that ruminates at night, if you lay down to go to sleep and your mind wakes up and you just sort of lay there thinking about the most innocuous things, which is a lot of the reason...
That's me.
Yeah, that's a lot of the reason, you know, people aren't sleeping. Then do a contrast shower. You know, do a, what I call a contrast shower. So, get in the shower right before bed. Run it warm, get used to it. Then run the water as hot as you can stand it: the back of your head, your spine, down your back, just as warm as you can possibly stand it. Not scalding, but really hot. And then step out of that stream of water. Turn the water as cold as it'll go. Let it run for about 30 seconds. And then step back into that stream of water for 1 minute, there, 60 seconds. That contrast shower, that, that temperature contrast. And then dry off and go climb in bed. What that will do is it will break the cycle of something called catecholamines, these neurotransmitters that accumulate in the brain and cause a woken state, right? You got to break, so you got to take a break between your day and getting into bed.
And those things, first of all, none of those will cost you a dime. Maybe, maybe it increases your AC bill if you got, if you live in a hot climate, but none of those will cost you much of anything. And now you, you tell your body, "This is what I do. This is what we do when we go to bed." That like, when these things start to happen, we're going to bed. When these things start to happen, we're waking up. Like, within 30 minutes of waking every single day of my life, and I, I think I counted 48 months or 50 months or so that I've gone without missing a single day. I do a simple round of breath work. This morning at the hotel where that I stayed at, you know, right down the street here, I woke up, pulled the curtains open, was in my shorts, went outside. It was probably, I don't know, 40 degrees this morning. Went outside, let the cold air hit my son, let hit my skin, face the sun, did a few rounds of breath work, came back into the, into the room. When I shut that door, man, I was switched on. And my body knows that breath work happens within 30 minutes of waking. When travel, I start doing breath work, my body knows it's time to wake up. I take a contrast shower, start darkening the room, the temperature starts to drop, and I get off my phone. I haven't eaten for two hours. My body knows it's time to go to sleep.
Wow. So, it's subconsciously preparing itself for waking up or going to sleep?
Yeah, don't surprise yourself with sleep, right? You, so one night you're, you're, you're tired around 10:00, so you go to bed. You just, when you just decide you're watching a movie or something, you're like, "Man, I'm exhausted." You just go and go to bed. And then, the next night you got a lot of stuff to get done, so you're up till 1:30 in the morning on your computer. And now you're in bed at 1:30. And then, I mean, this is like time zone shifting, right? This is like shift work. So, if you can get consistent with bedtimes, you will see your productivity, your short-term recall, your focus, your concentration, your waking energy, all of these things will skyrocket. So, I would say the second thing is prioritize sleep, like develop a sleep routine, sleep hygiene. My, I, I, I wrote a whole manual. It's on, on my website. It's completely free. Just a, you know, good sleep hacks and sleep routine hacks so that you're not relying on tranquilizing yourself to go to sleep.
And then, you know, I, I, you know, another one is just a whole food diet. You know, the, the truth is that most of us, the pandemic chronic disease in this country is because we've just gotten back away from the basics. You know, we just don't eat whole foods anymore. The distance from the, the food to the table is so far that 67% of our diet is highly processed foods. And highly processed foods, for the most part, are not even food, right? You just put pro-inflammatory compounds in your body, stressing your body out. Most of us do not think of our body as a temple, right? And we allow our bodies to be the filter instead of, instead of building this sort of imaginary fence around yourself and filtering things before they get to your body, right?
Like, I don't think, I think people should permanently get tap water out of their life. Like, if they're listening to this podcast, make today the day you never drink tap water again, right? It's got fluoride, which is essentially fluosilicic acid, the byproduct of industrial fertilizer production. It's a waste product from fertilizer production. It's called fluosilicic acid. We take that fluosilicic acid, we dump it into our municipal water supply. There hasn't been a single clinical study that doesn't link fluoride and fluosilicic acid to neurotoxicity. They're, they're very marginal benefits.
Did you just say there hasn't been a single study that links fluoride to neurotoxicity?
There hasn't been a single study that links, that does not link fluoride to being a neurotoxin.
That's, yeah, that's, I just wanted to reiterate that and highlight.
And if there is, well, call it out in the podcast right now. Send me the study showing that fluoride is not a neurotoxin. It's a fluosilicic acid. And in the production of industrial fertilizer, phosphate fertilizer, we have a waste product, right, that we don't use because it kills the plant. Burns, burns, burns out the root. And this fluosilicic acid, which we call fluoride, is then dumped into the municipal water supply. If you want to look at the study, there's a 2000, there's a 2023 report by the National Toxicology Program. So, you can Google "National Toxicology Program 2023 fluoride study." This is where they looked at all of these municipalities that had high fluoridated water, and they found a direct correlation between the increased amount of fluoride and the decrease in IQ. As fluoride went up, IQ went down.
Holy.
Especially in prepubescent teens. One of the things that, that, that RFK is talking about, you know, Bobby Kennedy is talking about, is getting the fluoride out of our municipal water supply. And then there's chlorine, you know, microplastics, pharmaceuticals. So, so just make, you know, today the day you never drink tap water again. You know, that alone. So, now you're filtering things before they get to the body because if you drink tap water, your body will separate the chlorine, it'll separate the fluoride, it'll remove the micro, you know, it'll, it'll filter out the microplastics, it'll deal with the pharmaceuticals. But it will cost, right? I mean, it's, it's just an additional stressor.
So, those would be my main things is, you know, prioritizing sleep, covering the basics of nutrition. Most people that are listening to this podcast right now, they, they can go an entire day, at least statistics say this, they can go an entire day without drinking a single glass of water, and their body will not remind them to drink. So, if you're one of those people that realizes that you can wake up at 7, 8 o'clock in the morning, you can eat breakfast and have a cup of coffee, and it's 5:00 at night and you realize you haven't had a glass of water, the reason why that's happened is because you are so clinically dehydrated, your body has shut off the satiation for thirst, right? It's just like if you've ever gone to a restaurant and you walk into a restaurant and you're, you're starving, so you order everything on the menu, and it takes so long for the food to come out that by the time the food gets out, you're no longer hungry. Well, what happened? You know, I was hungry 45 minutes ago, now I'm no longer hungry. The body protects itself. As your blood sugar is falling, you get very hungry. Once it's floored out and it's fallen, it shuts off the sensation for hunger, right? You're searching for food, you don't find it, it stops you from searching for food so you can prioritize other things. This happens with thirst too.
So, the best way to turn this back on is to take 10 ounces, not six or eight, 10 ounces of water every morning for 4 days. Don't change anything else about your morning routine. Take 10 ounces of water, put a quarter teaspoon of Baja Gold Sea Salt in it, or Celtic salt. Stir it up and whack that back first thing in the morning. By day four, that satiation will return. Now your body will start to remind you to drink again.
This is crazy. It's, it's awesome.
I mean, and it's just simple things, man. I mean, wow, I wish, wish I could sell it, but it's free. But it's, it's back to the basics.
Well, thank you for the knowledge, Gary.
Of course, man. And um, all right, so win the segment and get into the show. Let's go.
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