#2060 - Gary Brecka

Gary Brecka (0:13)

I'm doing amazing, man.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

Thanks for being here.

Gary Brecka (0:15)

Dude, you're welcome.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

Thanks for saving Dana White's life.

That's what he credits. He credits talking to you and taking your advice as completely changing his life, and now he feels infinitely better.

Gary Brecka (0:27)

Yeah. I mean, he did a lot of the work himself.

Joe Rogan (0:29)

Well, he had to, but you had to tell him what to do, but luckily, he listened.

Gary Brecka (0:33)

Yeah. I mean, I think giving him a life expectancy just kind of validated it for him. It just really put it in his face, because that's something you can calculate. He's like, okay, well, I'm 53 now.

63 doesn't seem that far off.

Joe Rogan (0:47)

Right. A lot of high-stress individuals that don't take care of themselves, their ticker checks out.

Gary Brecka (0:55)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:55)

I mean, you're talking around 65, 67, that's pretty standard.

Gary Brecka (0:59)

It just takes its toll. I mean, and the funny thing is, you know, when you go back and you look at the pictures of him prior to, he does kind of look like he was about to pop, you know.

Joe Rogan (1:12)

It's not good. He had a big old moon face and he was, you know.

Gary Brecka (1:16)

The veins up on the forehead and the veins out of the side of the neck.

Joe Rogan (1:20)

What was the, like, first of all, how did he meet you? How did this come about and, like, how did the conversation start?

Gary Brecka (1:27)

So we have a mutual friend named Carrie Kasem. If you remember Casey Kasem.

Joe Rogan (1:32)

Yeah, I know Carrie. I worked with her back in the day in the early UFCs.

Gary Brecka (1:37)

So, you know, I recently met Carrie and she had kind of a life-changing experience as well. You know, if you know anything about her journey with Lyme disease and chronic viral infection, I mean, she really struggled and ended up healing herself.

And she took the same test that Dana White did. It was life-changing for her. And she was like, what is this test? It's a genetic test. It looks at genetic methylation pathways.

Joe Rogan (2:02)

So methylation pathways, methylation pathways.

Gary Brecka (2:06)

So think about it like this.

You know, we pull crude oil out of the ground, right? But but you can't put crude oil into your gas tank, right? Because the car doesn't understand that fuel source. So what happens is crude oil has to be refined into gasoline, and then the car can run. Okay, so in human beings, there's a similar process called methylation. There's not a single compound known to mankind, not one. There's no vitamin, no mineral, no amino acid, no nutrient, no protein, no nutrient of any kind that enters the human body and is used in the format that we put it in. Without a single exception, everything we put into our bodies has to be refined into the usable form. If you can't make this conversion, you have a deficiency.

It's this deficiency that leads to the most common ailments that we suffer from. So that process is called methylation, and there are several genes that govern it.

This is where a lot of the misconception about genetically inherited disease comes from. We'll say, well, Joe, your father-in-law has... Not your father-in-law, your father on your mom's side had hypertension, your grandfather had hypertension. Now, you have hypertension, so you have genetically inherited hypertension, or you have familial hypertension.

Joe Rogan (3:25)

And hypertension is commonly known as high blood pressure?

Gary Brecka (3:28)

High blood pressure. Yeah, high blood pressure. But 85% of all high blood pressure is what we call idiopathic, right? It's of unknown origin.

So we say that things are genetically inherited because they run in families, but it's rarely the disease that's passed from generation to generation. From generation to generation, what we pass from generation to generation is the inability to refine a raw material, which causes a deficiency, which leads to that disease.

Joe Rogan (3:56)

What generally leads to hypertension?

Gary Brecka (3:58)

So if you look at Dana White's case, right, is a perfectly common case. In fact, the Journal of Hypertension published an article in November 19th of 2017, if you want to look that article up, and essentially linking an amino acid in the bloodstream called homocysteine to hypertension. And the reason for this is you got homocysteine in your blood, I've got it in my blood, everybody listening to this podcast has homocysteine.

But if you have an impaired ability to break homocysteine down, right, to take that amino acid, homocysteine, and convert it into a harmless amino acid called methionine, if you can't make this conversion, homocysteine rises, causes something called hyperhomocysteinemia, high homocysteine in the blood. When homocysteine rises, it becomes one of the more inflammatory compounds in the human body. As it's cruising by the inside lining of the artery, it starts to irritate the artery. It actually reduces the artery's elasticity and can even cause it to constrict. So think about this, you've got 63,000 miles of blood vessel, roughly, in your body. It doesn't take much narrowing to drive pressure up.