Back to the Basics of Health: God, Community, Food, MAHA — Exclusive Interview with Gary Brecka
"When 70% of our nutritional research is funded by private companies, you get food pyramids that say Lucky Charms are more nutritious than grass-fed steak, and the public doesn't stand a chance." The MAHA movement is growing rapidly as Americans realize their foods are filled with poisons, allowed in through the hypocrisy and cowardice of their leaders. To kick off your new year, Gary Brecka discusses the 5 things that are most important to hack your new year and escape the poison Big Food is feeding you. Join Charlie's interviews in-person at next year's AmFest by becoming a subscriber at members.charliekirk.com.Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Gary, great to meet you in person, man.
Great to meet you in person.
So I've been following you for a while.
You did Dan Bongino or vice versa.
Yeah, yeah, I did Dan Bongino's podcast.
And I was just like, I love the way this guy thinks.
You're all about creating the ultimate human through health, wellness, optimization.
Introduce yourself to the audience.
So my name is Gary Brecka.
I'm a human biologist, a biohacker, a researcher.
I spent about 22 years in the mortality space as a mortality researcher for large life insurance companies.
So essentially what that means is, if the team that I was working with 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 go, if you predict life expectancy to the month, you'd be, you know, won a Nobel Prize, but it's actually some of the most accurate science in the world.
What became glaringly apparent to me after 20 years in that industry was two things.
Number one was that there were human beings on the other side of these spreadsheets.
So I began to recognize that it wasn't just data.
And I realized that had I been able to, which I was prohibited by law, pick up the phone and just contact some of these patients or some of the treating physicians that were seeing these patients, I could have added on average seven years to their lifespan.
Not just their lifespan, but their healthspan.
And so I abruptly quit that career and decided 10 years ago with my wife that I would start a functional medicine clinic and I would teach people how to live healthier, happier, longer, more fulfilling lives.
And you've done an amazing job.
Thank you.
From Dana White to many others, they credit you with really optimizing their health.
And so this is very applicable.
I have a million different questions.
Fire away.
Maha is the kind of new movement here.
It is.
And you're a leader in that.
You're an advocate for it.
As someone who has been really pushing for healthcare, like actually life care, not just healthcare, that you don't believe that there's a pill for every ill, what do you make of this emerging Maha movement?
You know what's really amazing is that I travel the world, I have a health and wellness podcast, and so by the grace of God I get some of the brightest minds in the world come to see me.
PhDs, MDs, researchers, biohackers, some of the most progressive minds in the field of longevity.
What's very fascinating to me is that we are coming full circle, and we're just getting back to the basics.
We're actually realizing that longevity, anti-aging, bio-optimization, wellness, extending our health span, extending our lifespan has to do with doing more of what God gave us and less of what man makes us.
And thank you.
And that's just a fact, right?
Touching the surface of the earth, breathwork, sunlight, getting reconnected to nature, sense of community, sense of purpose.
You know, it's really astounding if you look at Blue Zone research, you don't see continuity between diets, right?
So there's no dogmatic dieting that works.
It's not carnivore, keto, paleo, pescetarian, vegan, vegetarian, raw food.
It's none of those things.
It's whole foods.
Yes.
Eating whole foods will extend your lifespan.
Touching the surface of the earth will extend your lifespan.
Having a sense of community and a sense of purpose will extend your lifespan.
- Breath work.
- Breath work will extend your lifespan.
Now, the problem is that in comes the agricultural revolution and the corruption in our food supply and the corruption in our nutritional research and the stranglehold that food and pharma has on our public policy, and you start to reduce the chances that people can get back to the basics.
Because when we, the amount of glyphosates and herbicides and insecticides and pesticides and preservatives that is embedded in our food supply, and when 70% of our nutritional research is funded by private companies, you get food pyramids that say Lucky Charms is more nutritious than grass-fed steak.
And so the public doesn't stand a chance.
And when you have 77% of our military-aged men and women that cannot qualify to enter the military because they can't pass a simple physical exam, you realize that we're about to have a national security crisis on our hands.
And when you realize that as the biggest spender of healthcare worldwide, $4.5 trillion a year on healthcare, the United States only leads the world in seven things.
Maternal mortality, infant mortality, the lowest life expectancies of the next 66 civilized nations in the world at birth, 66 in the world now below some sub-Saharan African nations.
We lead the world in morbid obesity, type 2 diabetes, and multiple chronic disease in a single biome.
And the reason for that is we believe That the solution to nutritional deficiencies, vitamins, minerals, and amino acids are chemicals, synthetics, and pharmaceuticals.
And we have sold the public a bill of lies that disease and pathology is genetically inherited, which it's not, right?
The next time you're told that you have high blood pressure or you have hypothyroid or you have type 2 diabetes or you have a tendency for drug and alcohol addiction or any number of other things, you know, your thyroid is off because someone in your family had it.
I want you to look that physician in the eye and I want you to ask them, if I inherited this from my ancestor, what gene did I inherit from that ancestor that caused this condition to exist?
And you watch their face go blank because that gene doesn't exist, which means that those conditions do not exist.
We just need to get back to the basics.
Our soil is so depleted.
You know, when you pick up a bag of spinach in a grocery store, the macros have been updated, the protein, the carbohydrate, the saturated fat, all of that.
But very often, the mineral content on that label is borrowed from a 1945 soil lineage study.
Which means that those micros very often haven't been updated for half a century.
Well, half a century ago the soil was much different than it is now.
And so my whole point is one of hope.
It's not going to be found in some expensive, rare nicotinamide mononucleotide, you know, NAD therapy, some rare organism that somebody has discovered in the Amazon jungle.
It's going to be found in the basics that is all around us that God gave us.
And I love that.
So this movement is...
I don't know why I'm eating these.
What are these?
These are lozenges so I don't lose my voice.
So I just...
That's actually rude what I just...
That's okay.
You can do it.
These are lemon, acacia, echinacea, and ginger lozenges.
So that's very Maha.
It's very Maha.
My wife will tell you I actually have a problem with that.
You know, I actually will take things off her plate.
You want my phone?
And I almost just...
I'll work my way there.
I think maybe I'm like a classic klepto.
I don't know.
No, no.
I'm just going to put my hand over here.
Yeah, yeah.
No, it's okay.
Because you've got secret service here.
So let's kind of get down to the basics.
If you were to say, hey, someone says, I'm chronically obese, I'm overweight, I'm depressed, I'm anxious, I'm suicidal.
Before they do anything, what are the top five things where you say, you got to get these five things figured out?
Sunlight exposure, vitamin D levels, what you are eating, you know, make sure that you're limiting the bad carbohydrates, maximizing good fats and lean proteins.
You know, what are the five things if you were to say, hey, this is a rubric before you go see an expert, before you go spend a bunch of money that every American should look at and say, I need to try to do better in these five things.
Number one would be make being selfish non-negotiable.
And by that I mean that very often people believe that putting themselves first is very selfish and it's actually the most selfless thing that you can do.
This is especially true with young mothers and fathers.
You know, we have a tendency to put our families and our careers and our spouses and, you know, our employees and our partners and the rest of the world first.
And so we don't take time for self-care.
And if we take time for self-care, we increase the capacity to care for others.
So by that I mean that you should develop a non-negotiable morning routine.
And you should always have 30 to 90 minutes of the day that belongs solely to you.
My wife knows that the first 90 minutes of every day belongs only to me.
And what do I mean by that?
That is my time for self-care.
I wake up in the morning.
I hydrate.
I drink 10 ounces of water.
I add something called Baja Gold Sea Salt to it.
If you want my favorite life hack, it's called Baja Gold Sea Salt.
For 15 bucks, it'll last you five years, a bag of this salt.
We bought it from your podcast.
All 91 trace minerals are in there.
You put that in water, you hydrate and mineralize the body.
The second thing you do is you permanently get tap water out of your life.
Fluoride is not fluoride.
It's fluorosilicic acid.
It's the byproduct of phosphate fertilizer production, and we dump it into our municipal water supply.
If you go to the NIH, you'll see that fluoride is actually classified as a neurotoxin.
So stop drinking tap water.
It's full of chlorine, fluoride, and all kinds of other things, microplastics, pharmaceuticals, what have you.
The next thing I would do is I would start where you are and don't think too far into the future.
I have a very good friend named Ed Milet and he said as a kid, his father was an alcoholic and he said every day from the time he was 10 until he was about 18 years old, he would ask his father the same question.
He would say, Dad, are you ever going to drink again?
And he said, I don't know, son, but I know I'm not going to drink for one more day.
And I think it's a very profound way of saying that sometimes when we get so far from where we thought we would be health wise, we think it's too insurmountable to make a change.
All you have to think about is the day that's right in front of you.
Walking, I will tell you, is the most underrated exercise in the world.
It really is.
If you want to put walking on steroids, do it outside.
And if you really want to put it on steroids after that, add a weighted vest.
Just walking can change the trajectory of your life.
So the three things that I would do is I would try to get highly processed foods out of your diet.
I wouldn't be dogmatic about dieting.
I would eat whole foods.
The second thing that I would do is I would make morning exercise and self-care non-negotiable.
The third thing I would do is I would start getting used to being uncomfortable.
Aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort.
The more aggressively we pursue comfort, the faster we age.
We've got to stop telling grandmother not to go outside, it's too hot, not to go outside, it's too cold, just to lay down, just to rest, to eat at the very first pang of hunger.
This is destroying her natural defense mechanisms, and it's the same with everybody in this room.
If you don't load a bone, it will not strengthen.
If you don't tear a muscle, it will not grow.
And if you don't challenge the immune system, it weakens.
You see, coming out of the pandemic, the worst thing we ever did was social distancing, residential quarantining, and masking.
What you're seeing is the global weakening of the immune system.
That's right.
Right?
So now what happens?
Monkeypox.
What the hell is that?
I mean, I never heard of monkeypox.
It's been around all the time, but nobody caught it because it was such a weak virus.
We never heard about it.
We're on our ninth iteration of Omicron.
Because we weakened the immune system.
You know what human beings are meant to do?
Exactly what you guys are doing right there.
Be in close proximity to other human beings.
Perfectly fine.
So walk in the park for your immune system.
And then I would begin to add small hormetic stresses.
By hormetic stresses, I mean weight-bearing exercise, directly linked to longevity, and I would add cold showers.
Get used to being uncomfortable.
Yes.
How many of you do cold showers?
Cold water works.
I love you guys!
And all those things you can do, by the way, for free.
It doesn't require signing up for stuff or anything.
I have no e-book to sell you.
Act of the will.
So Bobby Kennedy, Dr. Oz, Marty McCary, and Jay Bhattacharya, this kind of team of Maha, you looking at the outside as someone who really wants to see the country become healthy again, what are you hoping they can do from a policy standpoint?
And it's not political stuff, right?
We have our own political opinions, whatever.
It's fine.
This is way bigger than politics.
What do you want to see them do that would make your job easier, you know the space so well, that the government can do to actually release the health potential of the nation?
Okay, I'm going to tell you, but then I am going to disappear before I make it back to my hotel room.
So I want you all to open an investigation.
Didn't hang myself on a bed sheet.
I'm very happy.
Great marriage with my wife.
God, he was so happy.
So here's what I think we could do from a public policy perspective.
Number one, by executive order, we could actually prohibit pharmaceutical companies from advertising directly to the consumer.
Now, can that be done by executive order?
It can be done by executive order.
My understanding is it can be done by executive order.
No, I have heard that before.
New Zealand and America are the only countries that allow it.
Because the only two that allow it.
And it is the worst return on investment of any marketing spend on planet Earth.
So why do they do it?
So they can control the media, right?
I mean, if you're 74% of the operating budget of a media outlet, they're not going to turn on you, right?
So it doesn't matter what the return on investment is.
It's not that you want people to learn the Ozempic jingle.
It's that you want to be...
And they don't even try in the ads either.
I mean, it's just like B-roll of some random person.
It's not even the B-roll.
Like, do you ever actually listen to some of them?
No, I know.
It's really sick.
What was the one I had to look up on YouTube the other day?
Because they were going through...
It's always like grandfather pushing his daughter on the swing.
I know.
Liver failure, blindness, occasionally death.
Yeah.
My favorite one.
I'm going to look this up and give it to you in the show notes.
And they said, contact your physician immediately if you experience a sudden loss of consciousness.
Can you just...
I was like, did they act?
There's no way.
I was sitting on the couch.
I grabbed my wife.
I went to YouTube.
And it was like, they didn't say call your doctor if you lose consciousness.
And they did.
But how do you call your doctor if you're unconscious, too?
Well, just so...
Hey, if you didn't call the doctor, that's on you.
No, I told you to call the doctor.
You're passed out.
How do you call your doctor?
That's what I said.
I was like, there's no way...
That's exactly what it said.
I ran to the...
Into my office and YouTube did, and that was exactly what it said.
So we could stop the direct advertising to consumers to stop the control of the media.
You know, I think the other thing that we could do is we could prohibit our Food and Drug Administration and our Centers for Disease Control powers to be from going into the private industries that they regulate.
If you are a senior regulator and you regulate an industry and you're responsible for enforcing regulations in the best interest of public policy and the country, and then you go directly into that private enterprise, but you know that you're moving into that private enterprise long before you depart that portion of your career, how does anyone not look at that as a conflict?
And I think the final thing that we could do is make our public policies and our public nutritional research institutions truly independent.
They should be funded by the taxpayer for the taxpayer.
They shouldn't be funded by private industry.
What we've done in this country is we have privatized profits and we have socialized the expense.
Yeah.
The expense.
So the expense goes onto Medicaid, Medicare, and onto the taxpayer, and the profits go into private industry.
That same private industry funds 72 to 74 percent of our nutritional research.
Again, this is how we get Lucky Charms being more nutritious than grass-fed steak.
This is how you pull physical education out of the public school system.
This is how you say that the 67 percent of highly processed food that we feed our children is not toxic and is inconclusive as to whether or not it has an effect on their cellular biology.
And yet we have the highest rates of childhood cancer in recorded history.
And autism.
And autism.
Yeah, I mean, I graduated high school, I'm dating myself right here, but I graduated high school in 1988. Not only did I not know an autistic person, I didn't know someone who knew an autistic person.
And, you know, I also have a 16-year-old daughter, and she knows at least 10 children, or siblings of her friends.
So she could name 10 people off the top of her head.
I believe that autism rates, don't quote me on this, but they've gone from roughly 1 in 5,000 to about 1 in 35 the last time that I saw the...
It's even lower now.
It's 1 in 28 now.
Okay, 1 in 28. It's insane.
2006 was the last time I saw the statistic.
And what is autism?
It's a neuroinflammatory condition.
Right, what could be causing neuroinflammatory conditions?
Well, I mean, first of all, when we vaccinate against statistically insignificant risks, we could start there by, you know, taking a baby out of the womb and vaccinating them for things like...
Hepatitis B, yeah, the high risk of getting that.
Yeah, sexually transmitted and intravenous drug use, unless the mother was positive, which obviously you know.
That's why they put in those guidelines originally, but then you test the baby in utero whether or not the mom has hepatitis B. Exactly.
Comes back negative, and they still vaccinate against hepatitis B. Yeah.
So those are areas that I think that we could start, right?
If our research institutions were truly independent, as they should be, because I think the public believes that they are.
They look at the National Institute of Health, the National Library of Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, and they say, those guys are here to protect us.
They're standing between us And the wrongdoers that might not care about our cellular biology, right?
And now if you look at the food that we allow into the public school systems, it's worse than prison food.
If you look at the amount of sunlight young children get, it's worse than incarcerated prisoners.
If you look at the amount of physical education and movement that they get, and we wonder why they have attention deficit disorder and autism and all kinds of learning disabilities.
And then what we do is we take their little minds that are racing, And we say the solution to a racing mind, to a rapidly moving mind, is to put an amphetamine into their little bodies to race their central nervous system to match the pace of the mind.
So let's take the system that's not broken, the central nervous system, and let's break it to match the system that is.
It's like if you've got a flat tire and you just got out and slashed your other two tires.
Well, you created equilibrium, right?
That worked.
All right, now everything's the same.
We're good.
And so, which, by the way, that's, you know, Vyvanse, Ritalin, Adelaral.
These are amphetamines, right?
And they affect the neuroplasticity of our children's brains.
You know, whereas most of the time when children have attention deficit disorder, it's not an attention deficit at all.
It's an attention overload disorder.
It's too many windows open at the same time.
It's not that they lack the ability to pay attention.
It's that they lack the ability to pay attention to so many things.
So what we need to do is reduce the amount of things they're paying attention to or quiet the mind, which you can do with things like methylfolate, the complex of B vitamins.
But what do we do?
We feed them fortified or enriched foods.
Fortified or enriched foods are just another label for sprayed with the chemical folic acid.
So we take the entire grain supply in the United States, all flour, all rice, all bread, all pasta, and grains of any kind, by law, are sprayed with the chemical folic acid.
Most of you think folic acid is a natural B vitamin.
It's not.
It does not occur anywhere naturally in nature.
You cannot find folic acid anywhere on the surface of the earth.
We make it in a laboratory.
This is why if you've ever had pasta or bread in the United States and you blow up like a tick and then you go to Italy and eat a fat bowl of bread and bowl of pasta and you feel fine.
If you've ever traveled overseas and actually eaten like that.
That's because it doesn't contain the folic acid.
It doesn't contain the seed oils.
44% of the world's population has a gene mutation that does not allow them to process folic acid.
Is that the MF gene, or is that a different one?
Well, it's MTHFR, but it doesn't stand for the motherfucker gene, Charlie.
I mean, that's really...
It stands for methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase.
That's literally the acronym MTFR. It is MTHFR, so its nickname is the MF gene.
But it stands for methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase.
I wasn't making it up.
It's a real thing.
Yeah, I know.
And you don't need to know that.
I just want you guys to know I'm smart.
But...
So this gene mutation doesn't allow us to process folic acid.
That doesn't sound like a big deal until you realize folic acid is the most prevalent nutrient in the human diet.
Why?
Because we force it into our grain supply.
But we don't call it sprayed with folic acid.
We call it fortified or enriched.
So now moms and dads are walking down the cereal aisle and there's two boxes of cereal.
One says it's fortified or enriched.
That's the one they grab off the shelf.
And you put this into the little bodies of children and that's why it's a full contact sport to get them in the car to go to school in the morning.
And this goes with all kinds of other mental conditions.
We don't have a mental health crisis in this country.
We have a lack of mental fitness.
We are nutrient deficient and when we get nutrient deficient we get the expression of disease.
How many people in this audience right now have either suffered from or know somebody who's suffered from anxiety?
That's like 60% of the audience.
No one's ever told you what anxiety is.
If you ask 10 therapists and 5 doctors and him and most people in this room, what is anxiety, they will tell you that anxiety, they will describe the characteristics of it.
It's inflammation.
It is a neural inflammation, but anxiety is a rise in four neurotransmitters called catecholamines.
They're fight or flight neurotransmitters.
If I injected any one of you with these four neurotransmitters, you would instantly begin to have a panic-like feeling.
Your pupils would dilate, your heart rate would increase, your extremities would flood with blood.
Only the difference is, you don't need the presence of a fear for these to rise.
You need a deficiency.
In methylfolate, the complex of B vitamins, and a very specific form of B12 called methylcobalamin, if you're deficient in that, the catecholamines begin to rise in the brain.
When catecholamines rise in the brain, you feel the presence of fear without a fear.
That's what anxiety is.
So why are we not going after the nutritional deficiency in a lot of these patients and we put them into behavioral therapies?
The same thing we do with antidepressants.
I have so many clients that have come to see me and I'm like, how long have you been on antidepressants?
They say 15 years, 18 years.
My first question is always, when did you think it was going to kick in?
Right?
Yep.
So, you know, again, I truly believe so much more in what God gave us than what man makes us.
And I believe that if we got back to the basics, Community, whole foods, sunlight, grounding, breath work, focusing on sleep.
By the way, if you're not sleeping, nothing else is going well in your life.
You cannot supplement your way around poor sleep, right?
You can't exercise your way around a poor diet.
And so the majority of this, we could take back control of our country.
Let's go really quick.
No, it's okay.
No, no, it's amazing.
I just have to go get to the signing because people are already lining up.
So let's get to two questions really quick.
Daisy, can we do that?
Really quick.
And then, Gary, if you're game, maybe you want to stay around for a couple minutes and just say hi to folks.
I know you got it.
Yeah, sure.
I'd be happy to say hi.
Daisy?
Emma, yeah.
Yes, my name is Tom.
I have a question about sunlight.
When are we going to stop geoengineering?
Say what?
When are we going to stop geoengineering?
Yes.
When are we going to stop?
Chemtrail.
Oh, chemtrail.
Well, that's the generic term.
The real term is geoengineering.
So that's outside my core competency.
I'm a human biologist, researcher, kind of biohacker.
But what I will say about sunlight, and by the way, those are mainly done with aluminum because of its reflective nature, and that's why you see high amounts of aluminum in the atmosphere and high amounts of aluminum in our air quality.
What I will just say quickly about sunlight is if you're worried about sunlight, just get sunlight in the first hour of the day.
There's no UVA. There's no UVB rays.
There's just beautiful blue light.
You can still raise your vitamin D3 level.
You can look in the direction of the sun, reset your cortisol, reset your melatonin, and actually put yourself back on a good circadian rhythm.
Last question here.
Last question.
Hello, sir.
I'm 20 years old and I hope to have a lot of children one day.
I want to know your thoughts on vaccines for children in child health care.
How can I best prepare and what things that I should do and should not do?
So here's my view on vaccines.
First of all, vaccines should fit the definition of a vaccine.
It should prevent the infection and the spread.
If you get the polio vaccine, you actually don't get polio, you don't spread polio.
The second thing is it should be a true vaccine.
True vaccines are actually what's called attenuated viruses.
They are not messenger RNA. They are not synthetic copies of our DNA. If you actually were to go inside of a cell and go inside of the nucleus and you were to find the DNA, you'd find that that's the boss, the CEO, the head honcho.
It does two things.
One, it makes a perfect copy of itself.
That's called replication.
The other thing it does is it runs the show.
It writes messages into the cell to tell the cell what to do.
So if we were the DNA and you were the cell minions, we would be sending messages into this crowd to go tell you guys to do stuff.
That message is called mRNA, messenger ribonucleic acid.
What they did was they hijacked the CEO's notepad.
And they wrote a synthetic message into the cell.
The only problem with synthetic messaging versus organic messaging is that organic messaging degrades.
Synthetic messaging stays.
So now I tell you to go make the spike protein.
You get back to your desk.
It says make the spike protein.
You come back to your desk.
It says make the spike protein.
You come back to your desk.
It says make the spike protein, whereas an organic message wouldn't do that.
So those are not vaccines, in my opinion.
And I'm not a physician.
I'm not licensed to practice medicine.
I should disclose that.
Those are gene experiments, right?
Those are gene therapies, so we don't know where they're going to go.
If you go to my Instagram, which is just my first and last name, at Gary Brecka, I put links to what I think is the best vaccine advice from really, really well-credentialed MDs and PhDs for young parents that are looking to navigate that maze.
