If you want to strip fat off your body, there is nothing, no type of cardiovascular or weight training that comes anywhere close to... 20 years working in life insurance, predicting when people were going to die to the nearest month, and now he's on a mission to extend your life. Most people, if they're walking around right now, with about 55% of their true state of normal. There is an element missing from their body that would make the difference between them being an average person and being a superhuman.
Everything that we put into our bodies, it's converted into usable form. If you cannot make this conversion, you have a deficiency. And it is this deficiency that leads to these conditions. They have accepted something as either a consequence of aging, stress, or their environment.
It's not a consequence of any of those things. I'm going to tell you exactly how to find out what it is that's missing so you can thrive in a way that you probably never thought possible. Let's use Dana White as an example. So LabCorp calls us to say we have a life-threatening alert on our patient.
He had all of these conditions. I've been talking to doctors. None of them could fix any of my problems. He said, I'm surprised you can't even sleep through the night without choking, gagging.
He's like, slammed his hand down. How did you know that? And I said, if you don't do what we're going to ask you to do, you have a life expectancy of 10.4 years. And in 10 weeks, he has such a material change.
And he was like, I had no idea I could feel this good. I have life expectancy? Someone who's just heard that at home, where do they start? So...
Gary. Yes. This is the first time I've started this podcast in this particular way, but this is where I wanted to start it. It's with a slightly curious question, which is, there's people that have just clicked onto this podcast listening up, right?
YouTube, Spotify, Apple, wherever they're listening. Why should they stay and listen to the message that you have committed your life to spreading? Because everybody wants to be better, right? I mean, everybody wants to improve their health.
And most people, especially young people, probably don't realize that they're walking around right now at about 55%, maybe 60% of their true state of normal. There is a nutrient, an amino acid, a substrate, a compound, an element missing from their body that if they knew what it was, would make the difference between them being an average person and being a superhuman. They have accepted something as either a consequence of aging or a consequence of stress or a consequence of their environment, something like brain fog or repeated poor sleep or weight gain or water retention or not the healthiest response to exercise or brain fog or poor short-term recall or any number of things, that they've accepted as a consequence of life, of aging, of stress, or what have you. It's not a consequence of any of those things.
It's a consequence of missing raw material. And I'm going to describe that in detail and tell you exactly how to put that raw material back into your body and how to find out what it is that's missing so you could thrive in a way that you probably never thought possible. Who are you? I'm a human biologist and a researcher, biohacker.
My background is in, of all things, mortality science. My undergraduate degrees were in biology. My postgraduate degrees are in human biology. I'm fascinated by the human body, its form, its function, how we can improve its performance.
And I'm a researcher. You know, I spent 22 years as a mortality expert in the insurance industry, which meant that if we got five years of demographic data on you and five years of medical records, we could tell the insurance company how long you had to live to the month. To the month. To the month.
And I get a lot of flack about that. People say, oh, if you could predict death to the month, you'd win a Nobel prize or, you know, only God can tell you when you're going to die. I mean, and that's very true. I mean, obviously, if we do a mortality prediction on you, it doesn't mean December 12th, you know, 2065, you're going to drop dead on that day, but it is very accurate science.
You know, if you think in the most successful financial institutions on the planet as a category are insurance companies, you look at the failures during the 2008, 2009 financial crisis, which was a global crisis, you know, in the U.S. we had 364 banks fail. You didn't have a single life insurance company fail. No other financial institution, no other investment enterprise, hedge fund, angel investor, venture capital firm would ever put tens of millions of dollars at risk on any kind of investment on one single variable.
Yet every time a life insurance company bets on your life or issues an annuity or reverse mortgage or any number of other financial services instruments that are based on mortality, they're only betting on one factor. They don't care where you are on a mortality curve. They want to know how many more months does this person have left on earth? And it is some of the most accurate science on the planet.
And they have perfected this. And the good news is that this science is very accurate, and I'm going to share a lot of the details of that today, but the downside of this industry and the reason why I left it was that during my tenure in this career, I was not allowed to have any contact with the patient or any contact with the treating physician. Now, I'm not licensed to practice medicine. I'm a human biologist.
But if I was reading a medical record and saw a life-threatening drug interaction, I could not contact the patient. And this database, where this information is drawn from, if this database could see the light of day, I believe it would permanently change the face of humanity. It would upend modern medicine in a way that would be completely catastrophic. Because you see, they have information that no other database has, no other research study, no other financial institution, no other university has.
And that is that they know the day, the date, the time, the location, and the cause of death for hundreds of millions of people that they have all of these records on. You know, if I'm a cardiologist and you come in to see me and I put a heart stent in your heart, when you leave my office, I don't know what happens to you two months later, two years later, 12 years later. I don't know if you died as a consequence of something that went wrong with the procedure I did or if you died of something completely different. I don't know exactly what kind of impact on your life that procedure had or didn't have unless it's contained in a very short-term clinical study.
And not that I want to go into the whole science of mortality, but if you had access to this database, you would realize that the most common ailments that we suffer from are not diseases and pathology that are happening to us. They are things that are happening within us. You know, I always say that if I was to boil my entire career down to a single sentence, it would be that the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease. And nothing is more impactful than that statement.
The presence of oxygen is the absence of disease. I have yet to find a single disease etiological pathway, something that's happening in the human body causing pathology, causing disease, dysfunction, that doesn't have its roots in a lack of blood oxygen or its roots is not aggravated by something called hypoxia, a lack of oxygen. In fact, all human beings die of the same thing. We all leave this earth the same way, right?
We all die of hypoxia, lack of oxygen to the brain. That's the definition of death. Only we tend to think of it as an event, right? And a gunshot wound, a bus car, a stroke, heart attack.
But the truth is we are on a hypoxic curve, meaning we are either accelerating quickly or accelerating slowly towards the grave. And the second thing that we discovered in this voluminous data-driven industry was that when you deplete certain raw materials in the human body, you get the expression of that deficiency. So what I mean is, you know, we've all heard that disease, you know, travels in families or you might have genetically inherited hypertension or genetically inherited hypothyroid, genetically inherited drug and alcohol addiction, diabetes, depression, anxiety. These things tend to run in families.
So we've accepted the myth, in most cases, that these are genetically inherited diseases. But think about this. The next time one of your listeners gets told that, oh, you have genetically inherited hypertension, what we call idiopathic hypertension, or genetically inherited hypothyroid, or you have this genetically inherited disease or that genetically inherited disease, stop your physician and say, well, wait a minute, we've mapped the entire human genome, so we know every gene in the human body. Can you tell me what disease I inherited from my ancestor that's actually causing this condition?
And watch their face go blank because in the majority of cases, we have accepted that disease travels in families when it's actually not the disease being passed from generation to generation. It is the inability for their body to refine a certain raw material which causes a deficiency, which leads to that disease. So in other words, there's not a single compound known to mankind, not one, no mineral, vitamin, amino acid, protein, carbohydrate, no nutrient of any kind, no element known to man that enters the human body and is used in the format that we put it in. Everything that we put into our bodies gets taken in by the body and converted into the usable form.
If you cannot make this conversion, you have a deficiency and it is this deficiency that leads to these conditions How did you do? I did very well. I actually found it quite a breeze. You know, when I was an undergrad, my, you know, biology, chemistry were considered the toughest majors.
And I went to a branch campus at the University of Maryland. A lot of my roommates were political science, not busing on political science majors at all, or philosophy or psychology. And they got to party all the time. And, you know, I had really intense classes, you know, morphology of fallowites and chemistry and, you know, biomechanics and, and science and and a lot of plant biology courses and human biology courses.
But I was able to have the same kind of social life that they were because I would record a lecture and then I would recirculate the lecture when I needed it during during the test. Is it a gift or a curse? Because with all things in life that appear to be gifts, there's often some kind of hidden curse. Well, the curse is that I can't, I rarely read for pleasure.
It's very difficult to read for pleasure because I record all of that information. So when I'm going in to read a book, you know, a lot of people read a book that they didn't really like. It doesn't stay with them. Or they read a fiction novel, it doesn't really give them any benefit.
It's not, it doesn't, doesn't feed them, but they do it to relax or they do it for entertainment. For me, it would take up storage. You know, I would record that information. So there's no need for me to have that information in my possession.
I find other ways to, to relax and meditate and unwind. But reading for pleasure is just, just not one of them. So I guess that could be a curse. But, you know, then I went to grad school for human biology.
I went to another four years of school for human biology. So I had eight years of science. And then I was either going to go into chiropractic or into orthopedic medicine. I really liked the idea of orthopedics because again, an orthopedic surgeon was somebody that fixed people.
And, you know, an internist was somebody that just managed disease. You know, they took a obese, hypertensive, diabetic patient and they just kind of managed their case throughout their lifetime. But I felt like an orthopedic was somebody that, you know, you came in and you had a broken leg and they, you know, fixed your broken leg and you were back to normal. I liked the idea of fixing things and then kind of returning function back to people.
And I took some time off, you know, after I got my human biology degree and I ended up going into a rare area of science, this mortality science for life insurance and secondary life insurance, where you would take medical records and demographic data. And you would use this in what's called a probabilistic model to predict life expectancy. And I was fascinated by it because I loved the big data nature of it. And for years, I actually subscribed to the fact that this was just data and that I had no influence on this person's outcome.
I didn't put them in this position, nor am I responsible for getting them out of this position. But eventually, I think as both my faith grew and my awareness of the fact that there were human beings on the other side of these spreadsheets, I finally made a conscious decision to say, what am I doing? I'm going to spend the rest of my life just predicting death for the monetary gain of an investor versus taking this information and helping people live healthier, happier, longer, more fulfilling lives. Because by studying medical records and, you know, I read, you know, eight to 10 hours a day, six days a week, thousands and thousands and thousands of medical records and extracted from those how we would impact somebody's outcome of their life, you know, how it would impact the length of or the shortness of the duration of their life, their health span and their lifespan.
And once you realize there's human beings on the other side of the spreadsheet, you start to feel like you're sitting behind a thick glass wall just watching blind people walk into traffic. And towards the tail end, I used to artificially kind of manipulate the record. I would say, well, what if I, what if I artificially fixed this person's D3 deficiency? What if I cured the anemia?
What if I actually noticed that they had a gene mutation called MTHFR. And instead of trying to fix them with folic acid, I fixed them with methylfolate. And you would just see the life expectancy jump. In the model.
In the model. Yeah. Right. And this model was based on very large data.
So it was very likely to have a real life impact. And when I say we predicted death to the month, it was based on that patient's current position. And it doesn't mean that they couldn't walk out the next day and get hit by a bus or die in a commercial airline, you know, disaster or something like that. But there's, there were standard deviations that would account for those kinds of risks.
What the insurance company wanted to quantify or the annuity company or the reverse mortgage company wanted to quantify was based on this person's everything that we know about this person right now, the function of their liver, the slightly hypoxic anemic profile that they have, the deficiencies that they have in vitamin D3, the suppressed immune system, you know, the elevated visceral fat, the body mass index, the bone mineral density, based on all of these things, when do these things all meet and actually cause a catastrophic event, catastrophic event? And there were things called mortality debits and comorbidity debits. And we put all these together and I really liked the data of it. But realizing that there were human beings on the other side of the spreadsheet just woke me up.
And I said, you know, I have this chasm of knowledge, even though I'm not a physician, I have a fundamental understanding of human physiology. I'm fascinated by human physiology and ways that we can improve lifespan and health span. And so why wouldn't I take this gift and get into an industry like wellness or functional medicine where I could actually make a difference, where instead of predicting death, we could extend life and in doing so help people live healthier, happier, longer lives, more fulfilling lives, get rid of a lot of the ailments that people suffer from. I mean, when you, when you start to peel back the way that modern medicine defines a lot of conditions that we have, you know, take depression or anxiety or ADD or ADHD, because a lot of your listeners are probably entrepreneurs and a lot of entrepreneurs have very active minds and they've been told they have attention deficit disorder, right?
Or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Well, attention deficit disorder is not an attention deficit at all. We misdefine these things. It's an attention overload disorder because you see in the human brain, we don't just create thought.
We also dismantle thought. It's just as important for you to be able to create a new thought or feeling as it is to dismantle it, right? And if you don't degrade thought called catecholamines, if you don't degrade them, and there's a gene that governs this catechol-O-methyltransferase. If you create thought at a faster rate than you degrade thought, then the mind gets very clouded.
And so attention deficit disorder is attention overload disorder. It's too many windows open at the same time. So modern medicine says, well, if the mind's racing, let's put an amphetamine into the body, race the central nervous system to match the pace of the mind. And this is a very poor choice, right?
Because eventually this will burn you out. It can actually change the neuroplasticity of the brain. Rather than put the right amino acids back into the body, the right B complex blend, the right methylated folates so that the mind can actually begin to quiet. What would you say to someone that says that ADHD is also in some ways a result of some early trauma?
Well, you know, trauma is always fascinating to me. Trauma can trigger methylation. Trauma can interrupt the methylation cycle, right? But the idea in modern medicine that you have some kind of trauma, you have a disrupted relationship with your mother, for example, and that somehow we're going to go and put neuroplasticity altering chemicals into the brain.
And it's going to fix this 30 year broken relationship you have with your mother. To me, it doesn't make any sense, right? And so it's not at all to pooh-pooh trauma, depression really exists. Anxiety really exists.
But if you actually look at how we define these conditions, take depression, for example, we define depression, at least in America, we define depression as an inadequate supply of serotonin, right? So if you are low in serotonin, you're by definition depressed. So then you would think that the solution would be to raise serotonin, right? If we defined depression as low serotonin, you'd think the solution would be to raise serotonin.
But that's not what we do. We take people that are depressed and we put them on SSRIs, Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. And what these do is they ration what little serotonin these people have. So by definition, it never raises serotonin.
So by definition, it never ends depression. I mean, I have clients come in to see me all the time and on our clinical team, and I'll say, well, how long have you been on antidepressants? They say, 15 years, 18 years. And my first question is, well, when did you think it was going to kick in?
Right? So if we understand that serotonin is actually methylated in the gut, this process that I'm talking about is called methylation. We actually make serotonin from an amino acid called tryptophan. The one that's famous for making you sleepy And the way that we deal with stress, right, like cortisol, when you measure cortisol levels, cortisol is not really a measure of how much stress is in your life.
It's a measure of your body's reaction to stress. So why are some people more resilient to stress and don't have anxiety attacks? And why are other people not as resistant? Again, this is not to say that if you didn't have a violent attack in your life or a terrible car accident that sometimes when you've had, you know, a vehicle accident, you approach an intersection, the memory of having been T-boned, you know, recently and badly injured is going to give you anxiety.
But the majority of people are not suffering from that type of hyper-specific situational anxiety. They're suffering from something called generalized anxiety or idiopathic anxiety, which means of unknown origin. So for somebody who's very famous and gets into a crowd and doesn't know who's coming at them, that's a very, I wouldn't even define that as anxiety. That's a very primal instinctual reaction to a real fear, right, just like walking to the edge of a 30th floor balcony.
What's not a primal reaction to a real fear is when there's no presence of a fear, especially if that incident has never happened and you aren't even sure what you are afraid of or why you are anxious or why you have anxiety, then this is coming from your physiology. So how would you treat that? You look at the different, there are five major actionable genes that I like to look at and they're, what's it called, they're sub-alleles. And when you find out what they're deficient in, you start to supplement with things like SAMe, S-adenosylmethionine, methylated forms of vitamins, L-methionine, the proper balance of B-complex, methylated forms of folic acid or folate called methylfolate.
And what happens is now the body has the capacity to degrade these neurotransmitters that are causing this fight or flight, this group of neurotransmitters called catecholamines and the anxiousness that follows. And you'll find that the majority of people that suffer from idiopathic anxiety or generalized anxiety, because of low serotonin, they also have gut issues. Usually it'll be a person that's truly depressed, and I'll show you somebody that's also suffering from severe gut issues, either gas or bloating or diarrhea, constipation, irritability, cramping, because the same neurotransmitters that affect these emotional states also are responsible for the motility of the gut, the speed of the gut. This is the most overlooked thing in all of bariatric medicine, because people that believe that they have all of these allergies—well, I'm allergic to wheat, soy, corn, dairy, blueberries, bananas, gluten— yes, sometimes those individual allergies do exist, but the majority of time, even if you talk to somebody who says, yeah, I get bloated, or I deal with gas or cramping or diarrhea, constipation, or irritability, I deal with all of these gut issues, irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, all these names that we give to conditions in the gut.
When you ask them, well, what are you allergic to? And they give you this laundry list of things. And then you ask them another question and say, well, if you're really allergic to corn, is there ever a time that you can eat corn and not have a reaction? The majority of time, people will say yes.
Okay, well, right there, you know you don't have an allergy. Allergies are not transient. Allergies are consistent. You don't wake up Monday morning and being allergic to milk, and then you're unallergic on Wednesday afternoon and then reallergic on Saturday morning.
But what happens when people have gut issues that they can't explain is they always correlate it to what they last ate, and it's hard to make this connection. They're like, wait a sec, I ate the same thing Monday and I was fine, and I ate the identical food on Wednesday and I blew up like a tick. So this is not an allergy. This has to do with the motility of the gut.
So if you don't know what gene mutation you have that is causing a deficiency, then you don't know what to supplement with to restore gut motility. But once you do, the gut goes back to its normal pace. What's gut motility? It's the pace of the gut.
So if you remember Henry Ford was actually not made famous for the automobile. He was made famous for something called the assembly line. So the assembly line was just a glorified conveyor belt, right? And when you walked into his factory, they put a part on it on one end.
And about every six feet, somebody stood and tinkered with that part. So it went to me, I tinkered with it and moved to the guy to my right. And he did something to it and moved to the guy to his right. And by the time it reached the end of that conveyor belt, it was fully assembled.
This is very analogous to how the human intestinal tract works. It's 30 feet long. It's a giant conveyor belt. You put parts on it at one end as they exit the stomach in a very acidic environment.
And it moves slowly towards the rectum. And before it exits the rectum, it's in a relatively alkaline environment. So instead of having people standing along a conveyor belt, you have bacteria that are graded by pH. The sequence is very important.
So imagine what would happen if Henry Ford walked into his factory one day and doubled the speed of the conveyor belt. The entire assembly line would break down. Not because there's anything wrong with the parts, the contents. Not because there's anything wrong with the people that are working there, the bacteria.
But because you changed the speed. What if you went in there one day and reversed the conveyor belt? What if you just ran it in the opposite direction? It would screw the whole thing up, right?
So by changing the pace of the gut, the speed of the gut, the conveyor belt, I've ruined this sequence of events. And I spend a lifetime trying to figure out what's wrong with the parts, what's wrong with the workers, what's wrong with the conveyor belt itself. Nothing. It's how quickly or slowly it's running because the motility, this peristaltic activity is affected.
And once you supplement for this deficiency and you return that activity to normal, you find that all of a sudden these strange allergies eviscerate and all of this gas and bloating, diarrhea, constipation, irritability and all of this inability to equate things that I'm eating back to what is going on in my gut seem to go away. It's true with all kinds of conditions. You know, we have subscribed in this world to the fact that we are so affected by disease and pathology. And once I get you to subscribe to the fact that you have a disease and can get you to subscribe to a lifetime of medication.
You know, this is true in hypertension. You know, it's another huge, you know, we think genetically inherited disease. And a lot of families have, you know, grandfather had high blood pressure, dad had high blood pressure, now the son has high blood pressure. So they go, well, it's genetic.
It's genetically inherited high blood pressure. OK, well, what gene is being passed down from these generations to cause this? Well, they don't know. OK, well, then we know all of the genes.
So if we don't know what gene it is, then let's look at the methylation genes. Let's look at the genes in the human body that refine raw materials. Because if you have a certain deficiency, for example, in hypertension, very often, not always, but very often it's caused by elevated levels of an amino acid called homocysteine. You have it in your bloodstream right now.
I have it in my bloodstream. Every listener to this podcast has homocysteine in their blood. Because in the process of normally refining this amino acid into something called methionine, we keep this level at a reasonable level. But when you can't break homocysteine down, it rises.
When homocysteine rises, it's very irritating to what's called the endothelial lining of the blood vessel. It irritates the lining of the blood vessel. Well, when you irritate a blood vessel, it clamps down. Well, if you make the pipes smaller in a fixed system, pressure goes up.
You have 63,000 miles of blood vessel in your body. It doesn't take much narrowing to drive pressure up. And so these people end up with hypertension, high blood pressure, and they go to the doctor and the doctor does an EKG. It's normal.
An EEG, it's normal. Stress EKG, it's normal. Cardiac cath, normal. Heart lung sounds, normal.
Dye contrast study, normal. The entire cardiac workup is normal. And then they still start pounding on the heart with medication because they can't figure out why the blood pressure is up. But they never actually looked at what raw material was missing in their body, not allowing them to bring the homocysteine down and allowing the vascular system to relax.
As the vascular system relaxes, pressure returns to normal. You spent 22 years at that insurance company looking at the database that you described. And as you're saying now, much of the medical profession and I think most of society... Yeah, and I don't want to attack the medical profession.
I am a huge lover and believer in modern medicine. It saved people very close to me. And trust me, if I had a windshield at 20 miles an hour, I want a surgeon. I want painkillers.
I'm going to the ER. But again, it's not a preventive approach to disease that we've taken over the last couple of decades. It really is, you know, to put a bandaid on something that's emerged. And as when you get out of bed in the morning to walk to the bathroom and take your first pee, your knees and hips and ankles start to stiffen up.
Then it goes across the shoulders, and eventually it's hard to make a really tight fist. Well, if you go to the wrong physician, a family medicine practitioner, that's seeing a lot of high-volume patients, you start to give them that description. They go, you know what? You got rheumatoid arthritis.
I'm going to hit you with something called corticosteroids. I'm going to put you on some prednisone first, and then we're going to transition you to a corticosteroid like methotrexate or one of these, and then you're going to be fine. It's going to push this off into the future. Well, we knew that if you started corticosteroids, that at first they had an anti-inflammatory effect.
But you had roughly six years and one day until you're having a joint replacement because first they're anti-inflammatory, but then they eat the joint like a termite. And so it was so accurate that if you were a 60-year-old female and you were misdiagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis because you had a vitamin D3 deficiency, I would artificially advance your age six years. I would schedule a joint replacement that wasn't required, by the way. I would schedule the joint replacement, and then I would begin to reduce what's called your ambulatory profile, how well you ambulate, how well you move.
And we know now that sitting is the new smoking, right? Sedentary lifestyles are the leading cause of all-cause mortality. And so as I start to reduce your ambulatory profile, I bring in all of the diseases that exacerbate with reduced motility. So if I back this up, you're diagnosed with a condition that you didn't have because you had a deficiency in a very simple nutrient.
So then you're put on a medication that wasn't required. This caused you to have surgery that you didn't need, began to replace a joint that wasn't initially going to be defective. This reduced your mobility and it brought diseases forward that you never would have caught, and you died early from a condition you never would have had because you had a deficiency in a nutrient that was misdiagnosed, mistreated, and led to your early demise. And I can give you hundreds of examples like this, and this is why if you look at the 2016 Harvard study, the 2019 Johns Hopkins study, medical error is the third leading cause of death.
Medical error. Is that misdiagnosis? Misdiagnosis and medical error. The average American over 50, 52, is on five prescription medications.
These are synthetic chemical pharmaceuticals, right? And in a lot of cases, we don't know the long-term side effects of these, and in a lot of these cases, we actually don't even know the mechanism by which they work. If you actually open the PDR that comes with a lot of these medications, you'll see that they say mechanism of action unknown. Well, it's a sleep medication.
How does it make me sleep? I don't know. It just makes you sleep, right? In fact, most people that are suffering from sleep issues are suffering from sleep issues not because they can't sleep, not because they're not tired, because their mind is keeping them awake, right?
And if you have a gene mutation called COMT, catechol-O-methyltransferase, then what happens to you is you lay down to go to sleep, and there's nothing more frustrating than one spouse having this gene mutation and whatnot. Oh, my God, I think you're talking about me and my partner. I'm the one that I need some, like, sound or something to go to sleep because she's just out like a light. There you go.
See, nothing's more frustrating because... So I'm going to sleep in another room. Okay, so the reason why you're not falling asleep is because when your environment quiets, your mind wakes up. And if you actually hone in on the kind of things you're thinking about, you're thinking about the most innocuous little nonsense, right?
I mean, it's like, did I get everything on my grocery list? Did my belt match my shoes today? Did I return that email? It's nothing that could wait till the next day.
100%. Yeah. And so, and sometimes you can't even catch yourself going, what am I doing? Thinking about the color of dishes I'm going to have if I threw a party, which I'm probably not going to throw.
It's just like, how did I get down this rabbit hole, right? And this is because, you know, the, you are not quieting the mind at the pace that you are exciting the mind. So in other words, when you lay down and go to sleep and your environment quiets, your mind starts to wake up, so you need to be distracted so that your mind doesn't continue to run. But if you just put the right amino acid balance, in fact, I would bet my career, you have this gene mutation.
I will pay for your test if you don't. It's $599. It's a cheek swab you do once in your lifetime, and it will tell you if you have this gene mutation, COMT. And if you do, I'll tell you exactly what supplement to take, and it will become a permanent thing of your past.
What supplement can I take? Don't end your sentence there, Gary. So it's called L-methylfolate. You take L-methylfolate, you take methylfolate, and depending on where the gene break is and how severe it is, you may add something called SAMe, S-adenosylmethionine.
And these sound like fancy names. They're just fancy names for vitamins and amino acids. All of these are in your bloodstream right now. So when you look at the sequence of breaks that somebody has, then you can tell them exactly what supplement to take.
When they take the supplement, their body is no longer deficient, right? Deficiencies over time express themselves as all kinds of things. You know, there's a lot of people that can't reach elevated emotional states for any prolonged period of time. This is because mood and emotional states are recipes just like, you know, a chef bakes a recipe.
But if you went to a bakery chef and you said, you can bake whatever you want, you just can't use butter. Okay, it doesn't sound like a big deal. It's just one ingredient. But think of the number of cookies, pastries, pies, brownies that it would affect.
It would affect so many different recipes just by removing one ingredient. This is the same thing that happens in human beings if you couldn't use serotonin to assemble mood. Okay, now any emotional state that requires that neurotransmitter as a part of its structure, you can't assemble. And as a result of that mutation, when people hear the term mutation, they think of it as being something that's happened in me, and I'm maybe, you know, one of a few that have that mutation.
Mutation sounds like aliens. It sounds like, my sister won't have it and it's just me. Okay, so the gene mutation means that, you know, we get a copy of our genes from each parent, right? And then the copy of these genes is passed down to us.
And we know, you know, most of us are familiar with basic genetics, you know, eye color, skin color, detached earlobes. But there's nothing you can do with that information. So beyond your ancestry, you know, whether you've got Irish heritage or Native American Indian or what have you. I mean, those are, if you did a 23andMe, you'd be able to find your ancestry, which is also your genetic history.
That's not actionable information. When you look at the genes of methylation, right, and there are several of them, I look at five majors and a few minors. When you look at the genes of methylation, these are the genes that code for how materials are taken into the body or refined into the useful form. And these are not mutations that you're going to suffer from.
What they do is they cause deficiencies to arise in the body. And it's this deficiency that leads to the expression of these conditions. And so when you can't adequately methylate neurotransmitters, you have a deficiency in a certain neurotransmitter. Any mood, any emotional state that requires that neurotransmitter, you can't assemble.
If you have a deficiency in the ability to quiet the mind, then you have excess neurotransmitters in the brain, which cause it to, say, an awakened state. So that gene is responsible for my loud mind when I go to sleep. Do you have any idea the amount of people that have that particular gene? Well, 44% of the world's population has a gene mutation called MTHFR, methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase.
This is a genetic mutation that impairs the ability to convert folate into methylfolate or folic acid into methylfolate. And that might not sound like a big deal, but folic acid is one of the most prevalent nutrients in the human diet. And the thing about folic acid is that folic acid is an entirely man-made chemical. Folic acid is not found anywhere on the surface of the earth.
You can't find folic acid anywhere naturally in nature. And yet, we give folic acid to pregnant women when they get pregnant because we tell pregnant women that folic acid prevents neural tube defects. That's patently false. Folic acid doesn't prevent anything.
Folic acid has to be converted first into tetrahydrofolate, then dihydrofolate, but eventually it becomes something called methylfolate, and that prevents a neural tube defect. Well, what if, like 44% of the population and 44% of women, this woman has this gene mutation, and you give her folic acid, the man-made version of folate, and she can't convert And that's the clip that made me go down the rabbit hole. I watched that clip. I then did some research.
I then watched a series of videos of you online talking about health. And I watched you asking audience members to stand up and name the health issue they were suffering. And you, on the spot, told them what was missing from their life, their diet, whatever it might have been. You kind of diagnosed them in a way.
And then I reached out to you on Instagram. And that's why you're here. But if we go back to the start of that, it was that story that Dana White told that had me so compelled to reach out to you. For anybody that doesn't know, and there will be some people that don't know, Dana White is the president of the UFC, which is the big fighting tournament where everybody kicks each other's heads in.
So what's your take on the Dana White story? So Dana White is an example. I mean, he's just a celebrity example, but he is a shining example of the vast number of people, you know, men and women in his age category that have given up on the capacity to thrive. They've accepted that they have hypothyroid, hypertension.
They wake up sore and achy in the mornings, that they don't have a response to exercise. They have a little bit of spare tire. They're brain foggy. They're on three or four medications.
In his case, he was on seven medications at the time, three of which were for blood pressure. He was on, you know, I think a thyroid medication he was also on. He's been very public about this, by the way. And again, I have to say, I'm not licensed to practice medicine.
It was my clinical team that came up with the diagnosis and I communicated it to Dana. I do train physicians to read blood work and genetic testing, but I can't practice medicine. But the point is that when I met Dana, all he wanted to do was for me to predict his life expectancy. And I hadn't done that in almost seven years.
I left that industry for a reason. I don't do it anymore. The test that I do does not predict life expectancy. The genetic test and the blood work that I do will not tell you how long you're going to live.
I have no interest in predicting death anymore. I only have an interest in extending life. And, you know, when Dana was only interested in me predicting his death, so I said, Okay, for Dana White, I'll come out and meet with you. I'll do a blood test on you, a gene test on you.
I'll pull all your medical records and I'll give you your life expectancy. Well, what I did was went out and got his blood work and his gene test. And I was actually in bed at 1:30 in the morning when the lab was running his blood work. And I've had seven life-threatening alert calls in the middle of the night because when you drop blood work off at the lab, the lab runs it through the night.
If they find a life-threatening alert, they call the account holder. So I owned the company. I was on the account. So LabCorp calls us at 1 o'clock, 1:30 in the morning and says, Hey, we have a life-threatening alert on a patient.
I was like, Whoa. What's the patient's name? They said, last name is White. I said, Dana White?
They said, Yeah. I go, Wow, what's the life-threatening alert? They said, triglycerides are almost 800. Now, triglycerides are a measure of blood fat.
They should be above 149. At 200 or 300, this is a cataclysmic level in the blood, especially in a fasted state. We pulled his blood in a fasted state. They weren't 400.
They weren't 500. They weren't 600. They weren't 700. They were like 768.
So they were, I mean, this is an enormous number. And so I said, Okay, I'm going to give the blood work over to the doctor. And when they sent the blood work into the portal, I then saw that he was insulin resistant. He was hyperinsulinemic.
He was prediabetic. He had skyrocketing levels of cholesterol. He was hypertriglyceridemic. He was hyperhomocysteinemic.
This homocysteine that I told you elevates and causes the blood vessels to constrict. I mean, he had all of these conditions. I literally, at that moment, booked a flight for 7:30 or 8:30 in the morning to head out and see him because I said I need to go see him in person. And I remember, I think his assistant called me, and I was at the airport.
And she said, Hey, Dana wants to know if his life expectancy is in. I go, Well, I'm on my way to see him. And she goes, Oh, God, is it like that? I said, Yes, like that.
And so I flew out to see him and I sat down with Dana. And when we talked about the blood work, I didn't even explain the levels. I explained the symptom. I did not know that he was on a CPAP machine, but I said, I am surprised that you can actually sleep through the night because he was so hypoxic, red blood cell count, hemoglobin levels.
I'm surprised you can even sleep through the night without like just waking up choking, gagging. He's like, Dude, I'm on a CPAP machine. I wake up every night. I throw up in the middle of the night.
I throw up so much, I'm losing my voice. And I said, This level of coagulation triglycerides in the bloodstream, I'm surprised you can't bend down and tie your shoes. That's not painful to tie your shoes. Not that it's not restrictive to tie your shoes.
It's not painful. Like, it doesn't feel like the skin's gonna peel off your legs. And he went, What the fuck? I mean, he slammed his hand down.
He was like, How did you, you know, how did you know that? And I said, Dana, your level of brain fog and fatigue right now has got to be at a crushing level of fatigue. I don't know how, the only thing getting you through the day is your own stubborn willpower. And I'm surprised you can remember anything from one minute to the next.
And his whole staff was like, Dude, he's so forgetful. He passes out meetings. He's sleeping on the planes. He's gagging, snoring.
These were not things I necessarily knew about him. So I began to describe all the outcomes of these kinds of conditions. And I said, Look, if you don't do what we're gonna ask you to do for the next 10 weeks, you know, based on this blood work and the medical records that we pulled for the previous 10 years and the demographic data we pulled for 10 years, you have a life expectancy of 10.4 years, you know, for a 52-year-old man to realize that he's not gonna make it out of his 60s, a big realization. And he flipped the switch, a level of discipline that, you know, I haven't seen in a patient in a long time.
He goes, Dude, I'll do whatever you tell me to do. So we wrote a prescription ketogenic diet. I'm a fan of the keto diet. I don't think everybody needs to be on the keto diet.
But by prescription ketogenic diet, we wrote a keto diet right down to the grocery list, keto reset diet. And I said, If it's literally, if it's not on here, you can't eat it, Dana. This is your grocery list. You go to the store, you buy this.
You send your chef to the store to buy this. You make this. If it's not this recipe, if it's not on here, you literally can't eat it. Your only leeway is water and the supplements.
And we started a process of bouncing hormones, controlling his glycemic index, of using amino acids to bring down his level of homocysteine to actually try to fix the insulin resistance, to reduce his triglycerides. And in 10 weeks, he had such a material change in his blood work. I forget how much weight he lost. I think he lost almost 28 or 30 pounds at the time.
He's over 40 pounds now. By the end of the fifth month, he was completely off of every prescription medication he was on. He's down 44 pounds. He's no longer using a CPAP machine.
He no longer is prediabetic. He no longer has insulin resistance. He no longer has life-threatening levels of triglyceride. In fact, they're normal.
His kidney function improved. His liver function improved. His immune system strengthened. He feels like a 35-year-old man again.
His skin tone all improved. His blood pressure returned to normal. He's not on any blood pressure medication. So his blood pressure returned to normal.
And he was like, Dude, I had no idea I could feel this good. I feel freaking amazing. And his life expectancy? Almost tripled.
Almost tripled. Almost tripled. Just under 30 years. When I heard this story about Dana White and I saw he'd gone from respectfully being a man that had a little bit of weight to having these six-pack abs on Instagram.
Of course, the six-pack isn't the outcome. It's, as you've said, it's the stuff going on inside him, and that's really the transformation. It left me with a question, like, okay, I heard the keto bit, but what can someone who's just heard that at home, where do they start with extending their life by triple and getting the... So, you know, he also started something called the superhuman protocol.
And superhuman protocol is There was a time when we used to think that putting athletes in cold water after exercise was good because of its anti-inflammatory effects. We know now that that's only about 15% of the benefit. The majority of the benefit comes from something called a cold shock protein. If you really want to be fascinated, Google cold shock proteins.
These are reserve proteins that are in your liver. They're dumped into the bloodstream in an effort to save your life when you put yourself in cold water. They scour the body of free radical oxidation. They increase the rate of protein synthesis, muscle repair.
They are free. You get them when you put yourself in cold water. I don't know what the Celsius conversion is, but I use 50 degrees for three minutes. Minimum six minutes maximum.
It's actually not that cold. I mean, you know, I see people getting in 37, 38 degree water. There's no evidence that I've read that shows that colder is better. You get a peripheral vasoconstriction, so it forces all the oxygen into the core and up to the brain.
And you get an activation of something called brown fat, right? Thermogenesis comes from brown fat. And for the women that are listening, for some reason, I seem to ensnare the women when I say this. Remember that the definition of a calorie is a measure of heat, right?
I mean, the definition of a calorie is the amount of energy it takes to raise one cubic centimeter of water one degree centigrade. So if a calorie is a measure of heat, then this means that when heat's leaving your body, calories are leaving your body. So if there is nothing, nothing, no amount of exercise, hits, cardio, no type of cardiovascular or weight training that comes anywhere close to immersing yourself in cold water in terms of what will strip fat off your body fast. If you want to strip fat off your body, get in cold water three to six minutes a day.
That's fascinating. Because the oxygen rushes to my head, that's why it has a really profound impact on mood. That's why it has a very profound impact on mood. Because if you think about it, what's the reason why we need deep sleep?
What happens in deep sleep that's so special? There's a secondary oxygen transfer. We transfer oxygen from the periphery, from the extremities, to the brain. Remember, the brain's a non-metabolic organ.
So in other words, it's unlike a muscle. If I pick up a weight and start to work out my muscle, my arm, my body will send more blood, more amino acids, more oxygen to that muscle because it's working. Well, if I'm sitting at my computer and I'm watching reruns of The Simpsons, or I'm sitting at my computer and I'm solving the most complex joint venture agreement, partnership agreement with all kinds of mathematical equations, my brain gets the same amount of nutrients, same amount of blood flow, same amount of oxygen. So it eats the same meal whether or not it's in a dead sprint or whether or not it's just chilling on the couch, except in deep sleep and when you're in cold water because it's forcing the oxygen up to the brain.
You said earlier about comfort. Yes. I was speaking to someone yesterday about this thing called, he referred to it as the comfort crisis and how as we've become more, I would say civilized, but I don't know if that's the right terminology. As we've become more advanced technologically as humans, we can make our lives increasingly more comfortable.
Correct. Sounds like a good thing. Terrible. It accelerates aging in every form.
I mean, aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort. We've got to stop telling grandma not to go outside if it's too hot, not to go outside if it's too cold, just to lay down, just to relax, to eat at the very first pang of hunger. This is collapsing all of our own natural defense mechanisms. You know, if we don't load our bones, they don't strengthen.
If you don't tear a muscle, it doesn't grow. If you don't challenge the immune system, it weakens. And so stress is very often very good for the body. Thermal stress, weight bearing exercise, breath work.
These things put stressors into the body that are very, that have a very positive effect at strengthening you. We want to regulate everything now. We regulate our temperature. We go from a temperature controlled office to a temperature controlled car to a temperature controlled home.
You know, we don't we don't thermal regulate anymore. I mean, you know, usually when you when I ask people to start taking cold showers, they take their first cold shower. They never do it again because they don't want to be uncomfortable. And so when you learn to deal and become comfortable with being uncomfortable, this is like a metaphor for life.
It's almost like yoga. If you've ever done really intense yoga and you're holding a yoga pose and you're trying to remain calm and focus on your breath while your body is in intense pain. Now you're not in any risk, but your ass feels like it's going to peel off your legs and your hamstrings are firing and you're sweating and you're shaking and you're doing this thing. That's called the candlestick, but it's really painful.
And if you can maintain calm and breathe through a situation like that, what happens four hours later when you get a nasty Instagram message? Nothing. It doesn't shift your mood. And if we don't learn to control our emotional state, we will never control our future.
You know, MIT did an incredible clinical study that showed that the amygdala of the brain, which is where we experience emotion, is the sole gateway to an area of the brain called the hippocampus, which is where we hold our memories. So just imagine that the emotional center of the brain is the sole gateway to the memory of the brain. This is why if you've ever had an argument with your spouse, you can always recall with incredible accuracy every other time they made you feel this way. You did this on September 21st.
You did this when you were on the boat with my boys. You did this at, you know, our Christmas holiday party four Christmases ago because that emotion is linked to that memory. So you can recall that memory very accurately. Well, our memory, our hippocampus is what projects into the prefrontal cortex.
It determines our future. It's our conscience. So this means if emotion is the only gateway to memory and memory projects to our conscience, which is our future, this means that your current emotional state determines your future. That's a biophysiologic fact.
So, like, for example, if you had an argument with your spouse on the way to work and you get out of the car and you slam the door and you walk into the office, when you break the plane of the door of that office, the only memories you can recall about the office at that moment are negative. You're going to walk through the door of the office. You'll be like, they don't respect me around here. I'm gonna have a stern talk into management today.
You know, my office better not, you know, nobody better be my desk. And you know what? Mary better not run into me today because she doesn't respect me. You can just start going through all the negative things about the office.
The office didn't do anything to you. I don't want to change your emotion. You learn to control your emotion. Well, first, you start by putting the right nutrients into the body that allows you to achieve elevated emotional states.
And you learn to do things like when you feel like you are beginning to lose control of your emotional state, you actually break that cycle. I usually do it with breathwork. And so, you know, first it begins by having the right raw materials. But this is just taking you back to the cold punch.
If you can start your day in an elevated emotional state, if anybody listening to this has ever really done a cold punch, tell me if you were ever in a bad mood getting out of a cold punch. Just try to be in a bad mood getting out of a cold punch. They say if you want to cure depression, put somebody in cold water. You know, and it's so true.
You're in such an elevated emotional state. You're like, wow. Now you go cruising into the day and get a little negative, you know, Instagram message. And your spouse calls you and tells you she forgot what you wanted to get at the grocery store and you get to work and you got a little problem at the office.
Things roll off your back instead of shifting your state, which now shifts your memory, which now changes the trajectory of your prefrontal cortex, which affects your future. I do a lot of traveling, Gary. I travel all over the world all the time. It's one of my favorites.
Yeah, you travel a lot? Tons. You've got a bit of a system for traveling because when I travel, I feel like shit. Oh, I feel amazing when I travel.
And I post all about it on my Instagram. You know, all I do is teach on Instagram. But, you know, I went Miami, Atlanta, New York, London, Stroud, Switzerland, Dubai, Dubai, Miami, Miami, Vegas. I got up at four o'clock this morning to come here and I landed here at, I think, 7 15 this morning.
And you're flying out of here. I'm flying out of here now in five minutes. I'm flying out of here in five minutes and I'm going on a red eye back to Miami. And you feel good when you travel and I feel like shit.
What do you think we're doing differently if you had to guess? OK, so there's three things that you can do when you travel. And first and foremost, and I don't know why anybody talks about this, is that, you know, everybody talks about waking with the sun, which I'm a big believer in or forcing yourself to stay up to try to get onto And I know that it's not, and it's ridiculous, and you shouldn't be that. Being that discipline actually is not sustainable over a long period of time.
I think that, like a lot of people listening to this podcast, I'm very hard on myself. I'm my own worst enemy sometimes. And I have an insatiable appetite to do what I'm doing. And I think that if I just wasn't so hard on myself, I probably would find it a lot easier.
Thank you so much. Everybody listening to this should go check out 10X Health. Much of the information you've discussed here lives within that ecosystem, and your Instagram and your website and those channels, which I've explored in depth, are incredible resources to understand how to start your journey to live in a more healthy life. And that's everything that you espouse.
You're incredible, Gary. Thank you so much. It's very, very rare that I find someone online. I then DM them, and I nagged you on DM for a couple of months to get you here.
But I think everybody listening to this can understand why. You're doing incredible work, incredibly important work, and an incredibly important time to shift the narrative. And as I said to you, I think, before we started recording or in an interval, I realized that this is literally just the start for you in the journey and the mission that you're on. That's so clear to me.
Thank you. I feel the same way.