Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2060 - Gary Brecka
Uploaded: 2023-11-09T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2060 - Gary Brecka' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-11-09. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2060 - Gary Brecka' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-11-09. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2060 - Gary Brecka

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
How are you, man?
I'm doing amazing, man.
Thanks for being here.
Dude, you're welcome.
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.
Yeah.
I mean, he did a lot of the work himself.
Well, he had to, but you had to tell him what to do, but luckily he listened.
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.
Uh-huh.
And, you know, because that's something you can calculate.
He's like, okay, well, I'm 53 now.
63 doesn't seem that far off.
Right.
You know.
A lot of, like, high-stress individuals that don't take care of themselves,
their ticker
checks out.
Yeah.
Around 65, 67.
That's pretty standard.
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.
Oh, yeah.
He does kind of look like he was about to pop, you know.
It's not good.
Yeah.
He had a big old moon face, and he was, you know.
Beans up on the forehead and the veins out of the side of the neck.
What was, like, first of all, how did he meet you?
How did this come about, and, like, how did the conversation start?
So, we have a mutual friend named Carrie Kasem.
If you remember Casey Kasem.
Yeah, I know Carrie.
I worked with her back in the day in the early UFCs.
Okay, 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, look.
What is this test?
It's a genetic test.
It looks at genetic methylation pathways.
So...
Methylation pathways?
Methylation pathways.
What's that word mean?
So, think about it like this.
You know, we pull crude oil out of the ground, right?
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, right?
We'll say, well, Joe, you know, 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.
And hypertension is commonly known as high blood pressure.
Is that the same thing?
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.
What we pass from generation to generation is the inability to refine a raw
material, which
causes a deficiency, which leads to that disease.
And what generally leads to hypertension?
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've 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.
It causes something called hyperhomocysteine, a 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.
Think about it.
85% of all hypertensive diagnosis, diagnosis of high blood pressure, primary
hypertension
or essential hypertension, are idiopathic, right?
Unknown origin.
Only 15% of them are secondary hypertension where we know the exact cause.
And so what we do is we take people that have high blood pressure.
We run a bunch of tests on them, EKG, it's normal, EEG, it's normal, heart and
lung sounds, cardiac
cath, Dichontra study.
We do all of these cardiovascular tests and they all come out normal, yet the
person still
has high blood pressure.
And that's largely because the high levels of homocysteine are causing vascular
narrowing.
I mean, this is a fixed system, right?
So if I make the pipes smaller in a fixed system, pressure goes up.
So in Dana's case specifically, and he's throwing his blood work out on the
internet, so we can
talk about his labs.
But in his cases, he had one of the highest levels of homocysteine that I'd
personally ever
seen and our clinical team had seen.
So when you say high blood pressure, could you define, like, I'm not good at
that.
Whenever I get my blood pressure, they tell me the number and they say it's
good.
And I go, okay.
What's a good number?
So 120 over 70, 120 over 80.
And what's high?
130, 140, 150, 160.
When does it get dangerous?
140, 150 starts to get dangerous.
People walk around at 140, 150, 160 all the time.
And they don't know it?
It's the silent killer.
You don't feel it.
You think you would feel high blood pressure, but very often it's the silent
killer because
you don't feel it.
It's not like you hear your blood rushing in your ears, although you may.
It's not like you feel pressure in your head or pressure in your neck or
pressure in your
chest.
That's why high blood pressure, hypertension, is one of the silent killers in
cardiovascular
disease.
Right?
In fact, one of the first primary symptoms is sudden death.
Right?
So we often put people on hypertensive medication before we actually look at
whether or not they
have high levels of homocysteine or whether or not they might have a gene
mutation specifically
called MTR, and you could test for it, or MTRR.
And what this gene codes for is it codes for the enzymes that break down homocysteine
and
turn it into an amino acid called methionine.
Right?
And so if this conversion is impaired and this homocysteine starts to rise and
your vascular
system constricts, it can drive your pressure up.
And it drives your pressure up without anything being wrong with the heart.
So then we start standing on the heart, which is what happened in Dana's case.
Beta blockers, calcium channel blockers, diuretics, all of these things.
His blood pressure was still through the roof.
And what was his number?
I think he was 160 over 110.
I want to say it was very high.
And it was consistently high.
We were actually, you know, our clinical team was taking his blood pressure two
or three times
a day, seven days a week, and it was consistently very elevated, even though he
was on blood
pressure medication.
Really?
So statins?
So what he was on?
So statins was what you'd use on cholesterol, like a Repath or anything.
So those are trying to lower it.
So what's a hypertension medicine?
They're called beta blockers, like enderol, calcium channel blockers.
We call it ACE inhibitors.
Sometimes we use diuretics.
And so he was still jacked up, even though he was on those?
Oh, he was still jacked up, even though he was on medication.
And what are the other factors?
What other things cause hypertension?
Well, I mean, cardiovascular disease, and there are certain, you know, direct
genetic links
to cardiovascular disease, but they're very rare.
But diet, atherosclerosis, you know, narrowing of the arteries, arterial sclerosis,
harding
of the arteries, calcifications in the arterial wall can cause pressure to go
up.
You know, regurgitations in heart valves can cause, you know, pressure to
increase.
But when you think about the heart as a muscle, right, and all four chambers
are circulating
blood normally, and it's got a good vascular supply, but it's beating into
constricted pipes,
think about what happens.
That pressure is going to back up, right?
And so we rarely go outside the heart to diagnose whether or not, and for the
record, I am not
a physician.
I'm not licensed to practice medicine.
I'm a human biologist.
I didn't, you know, learn my trade in medical school.
I took eight years of undergrad and postgraduate education in human biology.
But for 20 years, I was a mortality expert in the insurance industry, and I
just read medical
records for a living.
So the vast amount of what I've come to understand about modern medicine has
just come from reading
thousands and thousands and thousands of medical records.
And you can see very often that when people were being diagnosed with high
blood pressure,
they were always looking at the heart.
They never looked outside the heart to say, well, could it possibly be beating
into a dysfunctional
arterial system?
And so in Dana's case, and I should have brought the numbers because I had the
week over week
numbers.
It was astounding.
You know, we just put them on a simple amino acid called trimethylglycine, you
know, an amino
acid you can get off the shelf.
And what it did was it made up for this genetic deficiency, this lack of code
to break down
homocysteine.
And his body started to methylate to break homocysteine down.
And is this an amino acid that pretty much everybody should be taking?
It's an amino acid that everybody with hypertension should consider if they
have high homocysteine.
Say the word again.
What is it?
What's the amino acid called?
Trimethylglycine, TMG.
It's capital T, capital N, K, G.
Is that similar to regular glycine?
No, this is trimethylglycine.
It's a little bit different than the amino acid glycine.
So trimethylglycine will actually help to metabolize, to help give the body the
raw material it needs.
I feel like I should write this shit down.
I'm going to write down trimethylglycine.
He's going to be on trimethylglycine tomorrow.
Well, I just want to keep track of all these different things you're saying.
And oftentimes I do forget.
So trimethylglycine.
Trimethylglycine.
Or just put capital T, M, G.
That's what it'll say on the bottle.
T, M, G.
Okay.
And so, you know, sometimes I use the analogy that, you know, when I was
getting my second human biology degree, I was in grad school to get my human
biology degree.
I had to take all these plant botany courses, which I hated, but you have to
take them.
Morphology, ethylophytes, and all these crazy courses about plants.
But the one thing that really stood out to me by taking all these plant biology
courses is that if there's ever anything wrong with the leaves of a plant, like
the tree, you know, the trunk, the leaves, or the branches,
and you call a true arborist or a true botanist out to your house, they won't
even touch the leaves or the branches of the trunk of the tree.
The first thing t