226. Gary Brecka Live at the Zenos Health Summit 2025 in Saudi Arabia: Nutrient Deficiencies and Genetic Methylation

Because something runs in a family does not mean that it's genetic. In fact, the human genome is specifically designed to not pass on disease. You would actually have decreasing populace if the DNA was not excellent at removing mutations and keeping them from passing from generation to generation. It twists our mind to start unwinding some of these fallacies that we have accepted in modern medicine. But getting you to subscribe to the fact that you have a genetically inherited disease makes it very easy to get you to subscribe to a lifetime of medication. And we have built a multi-trillion dollar industry treating the expression of disease, not fixing the nutrient deficiency. And so we are suffering because we are nutrient efficient and we are being treated for the outcome of those deficiencies. And if you want to see magic happen in human beings, you give their body the raw material that it needs to do its job. The best modalities harness the power that we have from other nature. They bring it indoors and make it convenient. The best treatments restore our body's ability to protect and heal itself. The most important thing and I think the most overlooked thing in all of bariatric medicine is the ability to do so. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Wow. What a beautiful country. What beautiful people. What amazing hospitality. Thank you so much. Zeno's Health Summit for putting on this event. So thank you for being so gracious and hosting us. My name is Gary Brekka. I'm a human biologist, a biohacker, a researcher. For those of you not familiar with my background, for 22 years, I was a mortality researcher for large life insurance, which meant that if we got 10 years of medical records on you and 10 years of demographic data, we could tell the insurance company how long you had to live to the month. And I get a lot of flack for that because people say, well, you really can't predict life expectancy to the month, but I assure you that it is some of the most accurate science in the world. And I would always say during my career there that if this database with the 371 million lives that we have access to, this very particular database that knew the day, the date, the time, the location, and the cause of death for 371 million lives, if that database could see the light of day, it would permanently change the face of humanity. It would upend modern medicine in a way that would be catastrophic. Now, sadly, that database will never see the light of day, but the big data doesn't lie. And the sad thing about that career was that even though I was allowed to have access to your medical records, I could see your demographic data, I could see your divorce decrees, I could see your trust in your entire estate plan, your bank accounts, your brokerage accounts, I was not allowed to have any contact with the patient. I was not allowed to have any contact even with the treating physician. Even if I saw life-threatening drug interactions, I couldn't pick up the phone and warn that person. So I felt like I was sort of sitting behind a thick glass wall just watching blind people walk into traffic. And eventually one day over a very specific case, I made a conscious decision and I said, why am I going to spend the rest of my life predicting death when I have so much knowledge on how to help people live healthier, happier, longer, more fulfilling lives? And so that's why I'm standing in front of you today. I left that industry 11 years ago and I decided to dedicate the balance of my lifetime to helping people live healthier, happier, longer, more fulfilling lives. So let's get to work. Every time I take the stage, I make this statement. I think it's one of the most important things that you will see for the balance of your lifetime in terms of determining how many more months you have left on earth, your weight gain, your water retention, your focus and concentration, how well you regulate your hormones. You see the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease. I didn't expect that to be sparkling water. That came on a lot harder than I anticipated. A little came out the nose. So we are, the pipes are clear. We're good to go. And the reason why I say that is that in 22 years of research, we did not find a single disease ideological pathway, not one, that did not have its roots in the absence of oxygen or was not exacerbated by the absence of oxygen. And I'm going to give you some context on that in a second. I also make two bold promises every time I take the stage. The first one is that if you do what I ask you to do today, statistically speaking, and this is very valid, it will add seven years, not just to the lifespan, but to the health span of everyone in this room. You'll see that by the end of my talk, you'll see that the overarching theme is that we need to get back to believing more in what God gave us than what man makes us. And over the last 50 years, we have gravitated towards what man makes us and further from what God gave us. What's fascinating about the vast majority of the longevity, the anti-aging, the bio-optimization research is that as I mentioned before, it's coming full circle and we're getting back to the basics. The best modalities harness the power that we have from other nature. They bring it indoors and make it convenient. The best treatments restore our body's ability to protect and heal itself. I believe deeply in the body's ability to heal itself because I have seen this happen hundreds of thousands of times. When we started our functional medicine clinic 11 years ago, we treated a quarter of a million patients differently than any other clinic at the time was treating patients because we just restored their natural physiology. So I'm going to try to cut through a lot of the noise today and give you some basics on where do you start? What is the first test that you should do? How do you decide what to supplement with? Because the vast majority of us are supplementing for the sake of supplementing. We are not supplementing for deficiency. And if you want to see magic happen in human beings, you give their body the raw material that it needs to do its job. And so the second bold promise that I make is at the end of my talk, we're going to open it up to Q&A, and I will take any ailment, any ailment that you or loved one suffers from, ADD, ADHD, OCD, manic depression, bipolar, hypothyroid, autoimmune, and right here from this stage in front of a panel of other physicians, I will tell you what raw material is missing from their body that is causing the expression of that disease. You see, we, I talked about this last night at the YPO or two nights ago, we believe this in plant physiology, and we used to believe this in human physiology. You know, if you had a leaf rotting in any one of the palm trees out here, and you actually called a true arborist, a true botanist out to look at that, that tree, they wouldn't even touch the leaf. You know what they would do? They would co-rotest the soil, and they would say, you know, there's no nitrogen in this soil, and they would add nitrogen to the soil, and the leaf would heal. I can assure you human beings are no different. When you deprive the body of certain raw material, you get the expression of disease, and we have built a multi-trillion dollar industry treating the expression of disease, not fixing the nutrient efficiency. And there is scantily a disease ideological process that could not be traced back to that very, very first domino. If you heard me speak earlier, I said, in human beings rarely, if ever, do multiple systems fail at the same time. Usually what happens is one thing goes wrong, that causes everything. And so this is about getting back to that first domino. And so I always start with this chart. There's a quiz on this later, so I want you to take notes, commit this to memory. So I show you this chart for a reason. It's purposely confusing, right? This is a chart of what's called your methylation pathway. This is what's happening inside of 32 trillion cells in your body every second of every minute of every hour of every day. You realize that of the 32 trillion cells that you have in your body, 300 billion cells that you woke up with yesterday would not be with you tomorrow. Which means that about every 84 days, we turn over nearly every live cellular structure in the body. If I met you today and met you 84 days from today, you would be a completely different cellular human being. So why is it that we cannot heal from nearly everything that we face if we turn over all of the live cellular structures in the body in 84 days? The question is, what frequency are we sending those cells? What nutrition are we sending those cells? How are we helping them to eliminate waste, repair, detoxify, and regenerate? Miracle cures are not miracle cures. They are the restoration of healthy cellular physiology. And inside of every single cell in your body, nearly every cell, you have dear DNA. You have 32 trillion strands of this DNA. If it is broken in one cell, it is broken in every single cell in your body. The DNA is not only responsible for replicating itself. It is responsible for every message that goes into the cell called transcription to give it a command to eliminate waste, to repair, to detoxify, to regenerate. And yet we never talk about what does that DNA need to do its job? Again, if it's broken in one cell, it's broken in every cell. Do you know that of every strand of DNA in your body, only 60% of it is human DNA? 40% of every DNA strand in your body is viral. 40% of us is viral. And for your immune system, this is a walk in the park. Every time that DNA unwinds and rewinds and unzips and re-zips and unzips and re-zips, it silences these viruses and it can do it for decades over and over again until it is deprived of certain raw material and then it breaks down. And as that expression of disease emerges, we start treating that expression of disease. And modern medicine has had a convenient way of developing a lot of fallacies around this so that we can get you to subscribe to lifetimes of medication. One of them is that the vast majority of disease is genetically inherited, which is patently false. You know, you can get paralysis of analysis by chasing the genome, right? All of your predispositions to all of these diseases create all of this anxiety. And the truth is rarely, if ever, do we pass disease from generation to generation. In fact, the human genome is specifically designed to not pass on disease. You would actually have decreasing populace if the DNA was not excellent at removing mutations and keeping them from passing from generation to generation. So if you have a chronic condition, let's say that you have high blood pressure, hypertension, and you go to your doctor and they say, well, you know what? Yeah, I need still water, so it doesn't come out my nose again. Thank you. Always my wife to the rescue. Thank you, babe. If you go to your doctor and they diagnose you with high blood pressure and they do a full cardiac workup and there's nothing wrong with your heart. Your EKG is normal, your EEG is normal, your heart and lung sounds are normal. All your advanced testing is normal and they can't find anything wrong with your heart. Right before they medicate your heart for a crime, they can't prove that it's committing. They're going to look at your genetic history. They're going to ask you for your family history and they're going to say, oh my goodness, your mom's brother has high blood pressure. Your father's brother has hypertension. You have familial hypertension. You have a genetically inherited disease. We do this for hypothyroid. We do this for type two diabetes. We do this for drug and alcohol addiction. We do it for anxiety, for depression, for all kinds of conditions that run in families. Because something runs in a family does not mean that it's genetic. If you actually looked your physician in the eye and said, well, if I have high blood pressure because my ancestor gave it to me, what gene did I inherit from my ancestor that caused this condition to exist? You see, that's when their face would go blank. Because in the vast majority of cases, that gene does not exist. And if that gene does not exist, that means that that disease does not exist. And so it twists our mind to start unwinding some of these fallacies that we have accepted in modern medicine. But getting you to subscribe to the fact that you have a genetically inherited disease makes it very easy to get you to subscribe to a lifetime of medication. So the fascinating thing about this chart and the reason why I show you this chart is not to prove to you how smart I am because I've committed that to memory. But it is actually to show you that if I were to blow this chart up, and I'm going to do this in a moment, nearly every person in this audience would recognize nearly every single thing on that chart. They are common vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and nutrients. And as you start to remove minerals, amino acids, vitamins, and nutrients from this very important chart called the methylation pathway chart, you begin to break down and express certain forms of disease. So how many of you, if we're going to be honest here for a minute, how many of you know someone or you actually suffer from attention deficit disorder? ADD, ADHD? 40% of you. Wow. How about anxiety? How many of you know someone, okay, or you suffer from anxiety? How many of you are not going to raise your hand no matter what I say? One honest woman back there, thank you. Comfort ticket, please. Give her a refund. So if I were to just go into this chart for a moment and say, well, you know, because when I was very young, I was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. Back then they called it hyperactivity and impulse control disorder. I was put into a special needs program at University of Maryland, taken out of the regular school of children. What they later found out was I was clinically photographic. So I had a clinical level of photographic recall at the time. They thought maybe that was idiots of vaunt or autism. And so I have an overdeveloped area for photographic recall. I learned differently than other children. I recall voluminous amounts of information, so I can't read for pleasure, but I can read to record information. And I was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. Thankfully Ritalin and Adderall of Vivance weren't around by then, or that I would have been heavily medicated. But if I were to go into this chart and I was to say, well, if you have ADD or you have ADHD, I would bet that no one has actually told you what it really is. You see, in the human mind, we don't just create thought. We also break thought down. We actually dismantle thought. So the neurotransmitters that create thought are actually neutralized through a process called methylation, one carbon metabolism, and we actually break this thought down. So if you are creating thought at a faster rate than you break thought down, then this means you are opening windows faster than you are closing them. So attention deficit disorder is actually not an attention deficit at all. It's the opposite. It's an attention overload disorder. It's too many windows open at the same time. And so if too many windows are opening at the same time, shouldn't the answer be, well, how do we close some of these windows? But that's not what we do. In modern medicine, we say, well, if the mind is racing, let's put an amphetamine into the body to race the central nervous system to match the pace of the mind. And this is exactly what Vyvan's Ritalin, Adderall do. They're an amphetamine. They race the central nervous system, improve the processing speed so that it can match the pace of the mind. So this is what I said yesterday. It's like getting a flat tire and getting out of your car and slashing your other three tires, just create equilibrium. Right? So let's take the system that's not broken and let's break it to match the system that is. So if attention deficit disorder is an overload, it's too many windows open at the same time, what causes these windows to open? Well, we have a set of neurotransmitters in our body. They're called catecholamines, the same neurotransmitters that are involved in a fight or flight response. I use the analogy that if any of you walked out this door this afternoon and when you exited this door, somebody was standing in front of you with a knife. Very real threat. 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. How did you begin to have a fight or flight response? You didn't put anything into your body. Nothing changed. What caused this response to happen? You had a rise in four neurotransmitters. They are called catecholamines, norepinephrine, epinephrine, ephedrone, dopamine. When these neurotransmitters rise, the very first feeling that you have is anxiousness. You begin to feel anxious. If they rise from a two to a four, you will start to feel mild anxiety. You will begin to feel the presence of a fear without the presence of a fear. The genesis of anxiety does not come from your outside environment. It comes from your inside environment. So if you've ever suffered from anxiety, as so many of you graciously admitted, or you know someone who has suffered from anxiety, no one has told them that their anxiety is a rise in catecholamines. Because we don't treat anxiety by reducing catecholamines. We treat anxiety by tranquilizing people with high catecholamines. And so if you've suffered from anxiety, you know that it has three common characteristics. Number one, you very likely had it your entire lifetime, on and off throughout your life. You also know that it's very hard sometimes to point to the specific trigger that causes it. And if you can't point to the specific trigger that causes it, you don't have situational anxiety. This is not something that's happening to you. It's something that's happening within you. And the vast majority of people that try anti-anxiety medications will say they just make me feel like a zombie. They don't actually fix the problem. So I have to choose between mood numbness or the sensation of anxiety. So the question is where are these made? How does the body regulate them? You know for decades we developed a we theory in depression called the serotonin hypothesis of depression. It was essentially that if you suffered from depression that you had low serotonin. Serotonin is the main driver of mood. It is the main driver of emotion. When this neurotransmitter is deficient, we express the disease or the out path of depression. And so it's fascinating to me that we would define depression as low serotonin. And you would think that the treatment would be to raise serotonin. That's also not all we do. We take people that are low serotonin. We put them on something called an SSRI, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, which essentially rations what little serotonin you have. So by its own definition, it doesn't raise serotonin. So by its own definition, it doesn't end depression. I can't tell you how many people I have sat across from. Then I've asked them, they're suffering from depression, I say, well how long have you been on an anti-depressant? And they'll say 12, 15 years. I go, great. When did you think it was going to kick in? Like should we run this for like another two years just to see if maybe 17 years is the right time frame? Because we're not fixing the deficiency. I'm getting us back to the deficiency. So the question is how is serotonin made in the body? Is this a laser pointer? Serotonin is made in the body by taking a simple amino acid called tryptophan and converting it into the neurotransmitter serotonin. So in the U.S. we're famous for falling asleep on Thanksgiving. That's because Turkey has a lot of tryptophan. So that amino acid gets converted by a process called methylation into the neurotransmitter serotonin. This is governed by two genes. If you have a break in either one of these two genes, and I'll tell you what they are in a moment, but if you have a break in either one of these two genes, you have a poor capacity to convert tryptophan into serotonin. And if you are low in serotonin you will express things like depression, mood numbness, the elevated moods, passion, elation, joy, arousal, libido start to leave the building. So to the lower tiers of emotion. And all of a sudden you have a mood disorder because you have a deficiency in serotonin. Now what does travel in families is the poor ability to methylate serotonin. Not the disease depression, not the not the condition attention deficit disorder, not the expression of anxiety. There's no gene for anxiety. There is no gene for depression. There is no gene for attention deficit disorder, but they do travel in families. What's traveling in that family is the deficiency, the inability or the impaired ability to convert tryptophan to serotonin. Do you know what the body needs to convert tryptophan into serotonin? It needs the complex of B vitamins. It needs a very specific form of B12 called methylcobalamin. And it needs a very specific form of folate called methylfolate or folinic acid. In the absence of those you have impaired conversion. The consequence is just what we talked about. The same thing happens when we convert things like tyrosine and phenylalanine into the neurotransmitter dopamine. You know that there is an inherited gene mutation that impairs your ability to take these two amino acids and convert them into dopamine. What happens if you have a dopamine deficiency? You begin to engage in dopamine seeking behavior. We had a saying in the mortality space, if I actually saw this gene mutation and I saw that you were in drug and alcohol treatment center or you had an addiction that you were struggling with, if I knew that you were unaware of that genetic mutation, I would give you in our model a zero chance of conquering that addiction. In fact, if you know anything about addiction, you've ever been an addict or you've ever known a true addict, you know that addiction has a tendency to shift. It never really goes away. Drug addicts become alcoholics, alcoholics become workaholics, workaholics become workoutaholics. So this dopamine deficiency which drives us to engage in dopamine seeking behavior is what drives addiction. We used to say that the absence of dopamine is the presence of addiction. I used to want to, I would just suffer because I'd want to pick up the phone and say, listen, when you come out of drug and alcohol addiction program, here's exactly what you're going to take. You're going to take this methylated multivitamin, you're going to supplement with methylfolate, you're going to take something called SAME, acidental methionine, and I want you to put this kind of B12 back into your body. This is going to fix the dopamine deficiency and you'll never have to worry about addiction again. But I didn't have the ability to do that. And that's why I'm doing what I do today. And so I saw this over and over and over and over again. People being told that they inherited addiction, they inherited hypothyroid, they inherited hypertension, they inherited anxiety, they inherited type 2 diabetes, that these were actually things that were passed on to them in the genome and never discussed the deficiency. What happens when you put the raw material back into the human body and turn this cycle back on? In fact, I'll tell you another one, a big one, and this happened with Dana White. There's an interesting part of the methylation cycle where every person in this, I feel like I'm walking in front of all these cameras. So there's a cycle in our body. The human body is just so fascinating. The more I study human physiology, the more I am certain that this was created by God, it didn't happen by accident. You'll never convince me that two bacteria may love in a mud puddle a billion years ago and a lizard crawled out and eventually we had primates and then boom, we had human beings. It's too fascinating of a machine. But what's astounding is, you know that saying one man's trash is another man's treasure. This is exactly how the body works. You put a raw material, a vitamin, a mineral, amino acid, a protein, a carbohydrate of some kind into your body and it starts here and he uses that in his transaction and his waste gets passed into the next transaction. And then that gets used and that way gets passed on. And this is a sequence of things being converted. So homocysteine, which I'm going to explain here in a minute, which is an amino acid, gets broken down into something called methionine. Now methionine then goes up and it helps quiet the mind. When it's done quieting the mind, methionine gets converted into acidenosyl methionine and acidenosyl methionine converts into acidenosyl homocysteine and makes homocysteine again. It's this fascinating cycle of taking nutrients and passing them along so they can actually complete the sequence of transactions. So what happens if you have this amino acid in your blood, which all of you do, and you inherited, which is inherited, a poor ability to break down this amino acid? Well, the first thing that happens is homocysteine, since you can't break it down, it rises. Well, homocysteine is really fascinating because in the right levels it's amazing. As it rises and it's cruising by the inside lining of your artery, it begins to irritate your artery. And if you irritate an artery, it will clamp down. And if you make the pipes smaller in a fixed system, the pressure goes up. And so is it possible that when the pipes narrow and the pressure goes up, you go see your doctor and now you have been diagnosed with hypertension? And they look at the family history, your uncle had it, and your mom's brother had it. So you have two uncles that had hypertension. You had two uncles that had genetically inherited hypertension. Or is it possible that you inherited a poor ability to methylate homocysteine? And you actually don't have a genetically inherited disease you have an inability to break down a common nutrient in the human body. So this is what happened to Dana White. That's probably the case that I was made most famous for. I set my water down, but I don't know where I put it. And I don't want to drink yours. So I'll drink yours. Thank you. So when I met Dana White, Dana had, he was what was called a brittle hypertensive. He had, he was on three blood pressure medications. In addition to that, he was also on a diuretic. They were using to get water out of his body. Unfortunately, he wasn't on a potassium sparing diuretic. So he kept ending up in the emergency room with a potassium deficiency. And so he was on these three medications. They couldn't control his blood pressure. And when it got so bad, they decided that they were actually going to do a heart ablation. They were going to go in through the rib cage. They were going to burn the AV node of his heart. They were going to permanently disable the heart to try to lower the blood pressure. I had to pull 10 years of medical records on Dana and lay the record out in front of him and say, Dana, in 10 years, you've never had an abnormal EKG. You've never had a normal EEG. You've never had abnormal heart sounds. Never had abnormal lung sounds. You had advanced cardiac testing done, imaging x-rays, cardiac cath and a di-contrast study. All normal. There's nothing wrong with your heart. And so when we looked at his homocysteine level and we looked at the fact that he had a gene mutation that impaired his ability to convert homocysteine into methionine, it was one of the highest homocysteine levels I had ever seen. Homocysteine in the double digits is very scary. As it gets into the 20s and for the first time I had ever seen in the 30s, it is very, very scary. There's a lot of irritation going on in those arteries. And by the way, we have 63,000 miles of blood vessel in our body. 63,000 miles. Our heart is only responsible for circulating 30% of that blood. Most of us think that the heart circulates all the blood in the body. It doesn't. It circulates 30% of the blood in the body. The other 70% of our circulation, which is microvascular, venules and capillaries, there is no pressure in that system. It is circulated by an activity called vasomotor. I always liken it to a snake swallowing a mouse. It's not the pressure pushing the mouse along. It's an actual vasomotor constriction that is moving that bolus of blood along. We never even examine the 70% of our circulation that the heart doesn't do. We blame the cardiac system very often for crimes it's not committing. It doesn't take much arterial narrowing in 63,000 miles to drive pressure up. So I explained to Dana, I said, listen, I am not a physician. I'm not licensed to practice medicine. I cannot tell you to stop taking your medication. What I can tell you is that we're going to put you on an amino acid that your body is missing. It is called trimethylglycine, TMG. I'm going to put you on this amino acid and over time, your body is going to, for the first time in your adult lifetime, begin to metabolize this homocysteine. And as your homocysteine level falls, your vascular system should relax. And as the vascular system relaxes, the pressure should return to normal. I don't think that he believed me at the time. He believes me now. But he didn't believe me at the time. So we started this treatment. I put him on it. I looked at his gene mutations and I actually supplemented for each of those deficiencies, which is why I like genes of methylation. I think if you want to get paralysis of analysis, start going down the genome pathway. The vast majority of that is just data, data that you cannot do anything with. Methylation genes are actionable. You cannot fix the gene, but you can supplement for its deficiency. And if you supplement for its deficiency and fix it in one cell, you fix it in every cell in the human body. And so I put him on this trimethylglycine, amongst other things. And over the next 21 weeks, his homocysteine started to fall. I'll never forget the day that he called me and he said, Gary, something's really wrong. And I was like, what's up? And he said, every time I go into the gym for the last few days, as soon as I step on the treadmill or I pick up a weight, I get immediately lightheaded. I'm feeling like woosy lately. I go, Dana, that's a great sign. And he goes, what the heck do you mean? I said, when your blood pressure is high, your blood pressure medication will make it normal. As your blood pressure normalizes, it will actually make you hypocystallic. It will actually push your blood pressure down. This is the first sign that we need to talk to your cardiologist about titrating you off of your medication. And luckily, we found a physician that was willing to titrate him off. And at week 21, he was off all of his hypertensive medication. This is going back two years. He is perfectly normal blood pressure now. He has not been medicated in two years. And his blood pressure returned to normal. And he canceled the heart ablation. I'll never forget the call that I got from the cardiologist at Cedar, Sinai, when Dana called to cancel this heart ablation. That was a very nasty one, wasn't it? Maybe. Yeah. We were actually dinner one night and my phone started ringing. It was going, and it was like this number from LA. It was a 303 number. Finally, it had called so many times and I didn't answer it. And they called again and didn't answer and it called again. And so I picked up the phone and I said, hello? And he said, Gary Brecka? And I said, yeah. And he said, this is Dr. Ramdan Deliah. I have cardiothoracic surgery. Cedar, Sinai and Los Angeles. And I was like, oh boy. Here we go. And he said, listen, Gary, I don't know who you are. I don't know what you're doing, but I think that you're playing with people's lives. I don't believe in a thing that you're doing. And I still didn't even know who he was or why he was yelling at me. But, and I had on his speakerphone. So Sage was listening and he said, I've asked Mr. White to come out to Cedar and repeat his entire cardiothoracic workup. And he said, so help me God, Gary. If it's not perfect, this will not be the last call you get from me. And he hung up the phone. I go, well, okay, that went well. So Dana did that. He went out to the Cedar for three days. And he had a complete cardiothoracic workup. And to Dr. Dan Deliah's credit, if you know Dr. Ram Dan Deliah is a phenomenal cardiac surgeon, we're actually best friends now. We actually sit on a complicated case committee together. So things work out. But he went out, he did three-day workup as cardiothoracic exam was perfectly normal. And to Dr. Dan Deliah's credit, he called me back and said, I owe you an apology. Would you humor me? Would you walk me through how you got this patient off brittle hypertensive medication? And we talked about the homocysteine, cyclone, the damage to the endothelium and microvascular circulation for three hours. And at the end of that call, we were best friends. And so very often, I find too, even in these case committees, how we intentionally try to overcomplicate things. But the truth is, getting back to the basics, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, nutrients, does this body have the raw material that it needs to do its job? That should be our first question. That's where we should start. And those genes, these are the genes right here. By the way, I don't offer a gene test in Saudi Arabia. I would love to, so I have nothing to sell you. These are the genes of methylation that we look at. And I can give you the specific reason behind every single one of these. But what's fascinating about these genes is that if I actually looked at your genetic profile, if you gave me those genes, and I did not know you at all, had never met you, I can tell you how do you go to sleep at night? I can tell you how you wake up in the morning? I can tell you whether or not the soles of your feet are sore and achy when you get out of bed in the morning and walk to the bathroom to take your first beat. I can tell whether or not you wake up sore and achy like you had a workout the night before when you haven't. How soon libido will leave the building? Whether or not you lay down to go to sleep at night, and as your environment quiets, your mind wakes up. My way, how many of you fall into that category? You just lay there and ruminate at night. Why is it that when your environment quiets, your mind wakes up? Because you do not break down catecholamines at the right rate. Catecholamines are waking neurotransmitters. If you have a break in a gene called COM-T, catecholomephal transferase, you are not able to regulate these neurotransmitters. It is, by the way, very easy to fix. And so what happens is, as your environment quiets, your mind wakes up. And so you lay there and you think about the most ridiculous stuff. If I was to actually go into your mind, you'd be embarrassed, right? Because it's not like life-changing or a shattering thought. You are not solving the world problems. No, you're not fixing humanity. You're wondering if your belt matched your shoes that day. If you got everything on your grocery list. If you should have a dinner party with green dishes, right? This is the kind of thing that goes through your mind at night. It is a waking state from catecholamines. It's one of the first things I fix when I work with people. As I put their catecholamines back into proper balance, they start sleeping like a baby. And by the way, if you fix sleep, that is the human superpower. That's where we're, that's the foundation of longevity. And so these people that have this same kind of waking state are also the ones that generally suffer from anxiety. Because, and they have that type of anxiety where you can't point to the specific trigger that causes it. It seemingly comes and goes without a trigger. Because those catecholamines rise and fall without a trigger. You can go into a full-blown panic attack laying in your bed thinking about getting eaten by a shark. Not too many shark attacks in Saudi Arabia lately. I've read the news, right? But you could still think yourself into a panic attack. And so we are suffering because we are nutrient efficient and we are being treated for the outcome of those deficiencies. Nearly every form of pathology and disease can be traced back to the initial breakdown in cellular metabolism. All cancer, regardless of its form or its origin, was at one time a healthy cell. Why do we believe that healthy cells can become metabolically sick? But we don't believe that metabolically sick cells can become healthy. That is patently false. And I can prove that to you. And so, and that goes back to the theory where I say generally one thing goes wrong that causes everything. And so I also, in working with thousands and thousands of clients that suffer from anxiety, I have never once, not once in my entire career, met someone who suffers from anxiety who does not also have gut issues. But it's not the gut issues that you think. They suffer from either gas, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, irritability, can I say diarrhea? I said it. So, okay. Gas, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, they have irritability, they have cramping. And what they do is they try to link it to what they last ate. Right? But it's odd because they eat the same thing on Monday and they're fine. And then they eat the exact same thing on Wednesday and they blow up like a tick. Well, right there, you know it's not an allergy, right? Allergies are consistent. Allergies are not transient. But you're doing food testing. You're doing allergy testing. You're doing food sensitivity testing. And you're down the road and you clean up your diet and you go on a maps diet or some other diet and it doesn't work. You still have the same symptoms. Because you're actually chasing the byproduct, the outcome. Because the most important thing, and I think the most overlooked thing in all of bariatric medicine, is not even the microbiome. The microbiome is extraordinarily important. We don't eat to feed ourselves. We eat to feed our microbiome and it eats to feed us. But it's not the microbiome. It's not food allergies. It's not food sensitivities. It is the pace of the gut. You see, the human intestinal tract is a 30 foot long conveyor belt. We put contents on it at one end as they exit the stomach. 30 feet later, they exit the rectum. The pace of that conveyor belt is extraordinarily important. If you walked into any factory in the world that worked on a conveyor belt system and you walked into that factory and you doubled the speed of the conveyor belt, the entire factory would break down. Nothing wrong with anything there. The conveyor belt is not broken. People working there are fine. The part that's on the conveyor belt is fine. Nothing wrong. You just change the speed of the conveyor belt. Too fast diarrhea, too slow constipation, pause, cramping, bloating, and what we feel like, menstrual cramps. And if it pauses, by the way, for too long, you start to get the ituses, diverticulitis, ulcerative colitis. And eventually, if you develop tears and leaks in this single cell layer, you will have contents leaking from the gut, leaky gut, going into areas of the body where they don't belong. That will call the immune system to that location. The immune system will show up. It will begin to wage a war. And then in the process of waging that war, it will manufacture an antibody. And now you are told that you have an autoimmune disease that for no reason at all, you woke up one day and your immune system decided to attack the colon. I'm sorry to tell you you have Crohn's. Right? Again, rarely is that the case. In fact, I'm not going to go down the whole autoimmune bandwagon, but the best demonstration I can give you is this. And the human body, if this was a mold spore or a mycotoxin or a parasite or a virus or a pathogen of some kind, and this was a healthy cell, this does not hide like this. It hides like this. That's the most important distinction I can tell you, because the immune system is hyper vigilant. It wants to get to that. It's trying to protect you. In an effort to get to the villain, which is inside of a cell, when the immune system reaches a healthy cell but needs to attack a villain, it doesn't have permission to go inside. Do you know the immune system gains permission to enter a cell? Manufacturers and antibody. So what happens when heavy metals get embedded in the thyroid and the immune system is called to the thyroid and it lights up the thyroid tissue? You have Hashimoto's. What happens when the immune system gets called to the colon because you have leaky gut and it's lit up against pathogens escaping the gut? You have Crohn's. And we can go on and on. What happens when helminth parasites and cystodonematodes, corkscrew burrow into the myelin sheath and the immune system lights up at that location? You have multiple sclerosis. But you're told that you have an autoimmune disease for no reason at all. You woke up one day and the immune system just decided to attack you. Well, why did it decide to attack me? Didiopathic. We don't know. It just went haywire for no reason. But we noticed that your mother-in-law, your mom's sister had this. Maybe you inherited it. Maybe it's a familial condition. Your dad's brother had it too. And there you go. It's a familial condition. So if we would just get back to that first domino, which is why I think methylation is so important, when we do not eliminate waste from the body, and I'm not talking about stool or urine. I'm talking about cellular waste. When cells do not have the ability to eliminate waste, repair, detoxify, and regenerate, this is the genesis of disease. You have a shift in cellular metabolism very often because those cells are nutrient deficient, not pathologic. Cancer is not something that happens to us. It's something that happens within us. And so this is why I am such a fan of methylation testing and supplementing for deficiency. So if you want to know where to start and you want my opinion, you start by finding out the deficiency in your body. You fix the deficiency first and then you can go down the road of supplementation. I am a huge fan of NED, resferatrol, CoQ10, Ashwagandha, St. John's wort, NMN, nicotinamide riboside. I'm a fan of all of it, but the fact is you will get paralysis of analysis and supplement your way into a conundrum if you do not have a roadmap to what your body needs. And just like the example with the nitrogen missing from the soil, if you didn't find the nitrogen, nothing else matters. Everybody has their opinion on what's good for trees. We should add some water. Water is good for trees. Well, I've been watering it for three weeks. Nothing changed. Sulfur is good for... Let's add sulfur. Let's add phosphorus. Phosphorus is amazing for plants. Nitrogen. If you didn't find the nitrogen missing in the soil, nothing else mattered. And so that's why when I try to distill down where people should start, that's where I think you should start. What you should supplement with, let your body tell you what you're deficient in. If you have the MTHFR gene mutation, which I won't tell you what the nickname is for that gene. I've already said diarrhea, so I won't say that. If you have that gene mutation, which by the way, 46% of the population has, 46% of the people in this room cannot take folic acid or folate, which you get from green leafy vegetables, and turn it into the form your body needs, which is called methylfolate. So you have a deficiency in methylfolate, and you have an excess of folic acid, which by the way, folic acid, just for the record, is an entirely man-made chemical. You cannot find folic acid anywhere on the surface of the earth. It does not exist naturally in nature. We make it in a laboratory. It didn't even exist until 1993. Somebody explained to me how a synthetic nutrient that we make in a laboratory that doesn't exist on the surface of the earth is somehow essential for a healthy pregnancy. It's not. Folic acid doesn't prevent neural tube defects. Methylfolate does. That stops S-phase arrest in the DNA and prevents a neural tube defect. So if, again, if we just get back to what God gave us, now what may make us, back to what God gave us, we would find and we would advance the health and welfare of our society by leaps and bounds. This is getting us back to that theory that I have of getting back to the basics. So insulin resistance is one of the big ones. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this. This is one of the first dominoes to fall in the vast majority of patients that I don't have patients. I'm not a physician. Clients that I see that have cardiovascular disease, hormone disruption, PCOS, syndometriosis, positional orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, all of these conditions that where we are again chasing the diagnosis and not the root, insulin resistance is one of the big first dominoes to fall. In fact, now there's a whole theory in Alzheimer's called type 3 diabetes. Some physicians will tell you and some neurologists will tell you that Alzheimer's is type 3 diabetes. It is insulin resistance in the brain. That is the genesis before the neurofibillary tangles, before the amyloid plaque. Those are outcomes of prolonged insulin resistance. So I also am not a person that stands on stage and pushes products. I actually have nothing to sell you. I don't believe that there is any miracle supplement or miracle nutrient. However, I have been for the last three years down the rabbit hole of hydrogen and why hydrogen is so important in the human body. Hydrogen gas and the hydrogen ion. Again, without boring you to tears, I believe that the discovery of how hydrogen is acting in the human body and how we have had an increase, a decrease in hydrogen gas, both in the hydrophiles in our gut, in our bloodstream, intracellular concentrations, over time because of depletion in our soil, in our air, in our water. Hydrogen, which is the smallest, lightest element in the universe, which is also 10% of your body weight, is a miracle molecule in the human body. It is the only truly selective antioxidant that I'm aware of. We know that oxidative stress, oxidation causes ourselves to rust. What are things that cause us oxidative stress? Can I get nerdy for a second? Why don't we do this? Why don't we, before I go to the whiteboard, can we just actually take an obnoxiously deep breath together and through our nose? Just sit comfortably, face me. We are going to take the most obnoxious, deep breath you've ever taken in your life. We're going to pause at the top and we're going to exhale through a straw, an imaginary straw. Ready? Hold and exhale through a straw. We're going to do that two more times. Ready? Psss. And exhale through a straw. Last one. And exhale through a straw. So, we developed a theory called the oxidative theory of aging. I would assume that a lot of The practitioners in here would agree with that, you know, you agree that oxidation, stress, free radical oxidation causes damage to our cells. The fascinating thing about oxidation is that without oxidation none of us would be alive, right? We actually don't want to suppress inflammation, oxidation, the cytokine response. We actually do not want to suppress this too far. That is as dangerous as the oxidation itself. We have very important free radicals in the human body. I'll give you a couple of the big ones. We have something called superoxide. I always asked them to check these before and they never do. On a hundred percent of my talks I get bad. What was the budget for this? Did we, I mean was this really where we had to save the money? Right here. We have superoxide. You don't need to know what that is. Just know that we have it in our cells. It is excellent for human beings until there's too much. We have hydrogen peroxide. That is absolutely necessary for cellular function until there's too much. We have oxygen singlets. We know that oxygen is absolutely critical for human survival and for cellular respiration and for our mitochondria until there's too much. Oxygen and oxygen singlet can be one of the most damaging things to your phospholipid bilayer. It can cause them to rust. Then we have a hydroxyl free radical. There is no known benefit in the human body for the hydroxyl free radical. We want that at zero. We could go on and on. There are these different free radicals. When something is a free radical, the counter to that is an antioxidant. Blueberries are antioxidants. Does anyone know why they are antioxidants? What do they do? They make some antioxidants. They donate electrons? They what? Polyphenols. But what do the polyphenols do? That you're right. They donate electrons. Something that is an antioxidant is donating electrons and reducing oxidation. But if you over suppress that, you fall out of something called redox homeostasis. In human beings, for us to thrive, we don't just need to suppress oxidation. We need something called redox homeostasis, a balance between oxidation and reduction. You can actually have that going on in the cell membrane and inside the cell at the same time. And so what if there was a molecule that when you put it into the body was a selective antioxidant? It only suppressed oxidation down to neutrality and actually raised inflammation if it needed to, to neutrality. What if it targeted homeostasis? That's what hydrogen does. That's why hydrogen is so unique. It is a selective antioxidant. It uses the intelligence inside of your cell. If I go inside of a cell and I find the DNA, which we just talked about giving the DNA the raw material it needs to do its job, the DNA has the capacity to regulate these superoxide, dismutase, oxygen, singlets, oxygen free radicals. There is a pathway into the DNA. I won't bore you to tears with this, called the NRF2 pathway. If you take that pathway into the DNA, then the DNA will take over the suppression of oxidation and the increase of redox reactions. It will actually restore perfect balance. Hydrogen gas uses that pathway to access oxidation. It is the only absolute selective antioxidant that you can put into the body in abundance, if even over abundance with no risk of over suppression. You can drink hydrogen gas. I take a tablet called H2Tab. It is an elemental magnesium tablet. You drop it into water. It effervesces into pure hydrogen gas, and you drink that hydrogen gas while it is in the water, and the hydrogen will go to work. I will link all of these studies. Hydrogen administration decreases the expression of various oxidative stress markers, such as myeloproxidase. In clinical studies, it reduced generalized markers of inflammation, high sensitivity C-reactive protein, and reduces, it lowers inflammation and irritation in the liver by restoring liver enzymes to normal. A 2001 study found that breathing high pressure hydrogen could cure parasite-induced liver inflammation. This was a very, very interesting study that was done in the Journal of Experimental Gerontology because it was done in an older age population. They measured sit-stand ratios. They used markers of methylation to check their methylation cycle. Every marker of short-term memory recall function timing improved by adding hydrogen water to their routine, and it reduced markers of oxidative stress, including improving insulin sensitivity. It doesn't act like other antioxidants. There is not a professional athlete I work with in the world, including one that lives here in this country, that is not drinking hydrogen water on a regular basis. I am not a believer in the hydrogen water bottles. I am a believer in taking an elemental magnesium tablet, which is called H2Tab, and putting it into water and having it ever best. In fact, I just did, with my wife reluctantly on her part, I was excited about it. We did 14 cities in 18 days, and I changed time zones every day for 14 days, and I'm talking Los Angeles to Sydney, to Melbourne. If you guys follow me, maybe you saw that journey. My sleep scores didn't drop below 88%. I used hydrogen water to help me adjust to time zones and turn the lights on in the morning, rather than stimulants. If there were one thing that I was to say that I think should be in everybody's routine, it's hydrogen tablets. I'm not going to bore you again. That's the one that I take. It's called H2Tab. It's elemental magnesium, effervesced into hydrogen water. The reason why I use that exact tablet is that all 25 of the peer reviewed studies that I will cite after this lecture are all using that tablet. They compare it to the rice protocol in orthopedic injuries. It is a phenomenal, phenomenal compound. I get asked a lot about what my morning routine is. That's my morning routine. If you want to know, it's very simple. This is what I use to turn the lights on in the morning. I take an amino acid supplement. I take a multivitamin. I take something called Baja Gold Sea Salt, which has all 91 trace minerals. You would not believe the expression of mineral deficiency in human beings. About 85% of us are clinically deficient in key minerals. I don't mean the big electrolytes, potassium, magnesium, sodium. I mean the minerals nobody talks about, malibdom, manganese, boron, zinc, silica. These can all be found in mineral salts. I believe that supplementing with a mineral salt is one of those, if there was a catch-all supplement, supplementing with a mineral salt is excellent. In fact, we were talking about this at lunch. I spoke at a bone conference a while ago called Osteostrong. Fascinating to me how many even practitioners in functional medicine doctors still think that our bones are calcium. They're actually not calcium. They are calcium combined with something called phosphorus. We talked about this at lunch. Phosphorus and calcium combine to form something called hydroxyapatite, and our bones are hydroxyapatite. Yes, you need to apply a load, load to the bone to start that bone remineralizing, but if you are missing any one of 12 minerals, you cannot combine phosphorus and calcium into hydroxyapatite. The vast majority of people with osteopenia and osteoporosis are not calcium deficient. They are mineral deficient. In fact, if you go to cystic care living facilities all over the world, you will find elderly men and women, plethora of them, that have osteopenia and osteoporosis that have been on calcium supplements for 15 years. The answer is not excess calcium. The answer is the minerals the body needs to combine calcium and phosphorus. The last thing before I go to open it up for questions, and I hope we have a few minutes for questions, is I want to invite you guys to join my VIP community so we can keep this conversation going. This is a community that I am building of like-minded people, where I do live Q&As like this for hours every single month. I have put into that community mold detoxification guides, heavy metal detoxification guides. What is the best testing to find out if you have mold metals, viruses, parasites? Where do you get that testing done? And then once you find out the results, what do you do with them? I built a 10-month course called Becoming the Ultimate Human. It starts with what you test with, what you supplement, how you eat, how do you go to sleep, what is the best sleep routine, proven sleep routine to improve your sleep scores, what is the best thing to do within 30 minutes of waking, what is the difference between whole food diet and a highly processed diet? And I gave you guys all, I think, a 50% discount on that. But this is a community that I am building that I believe will actually change the world. We know that community and connection is so important and so missing from our society. Yes. So guys, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much. I am happy to continue this conversation after this. Thank you.