wo ultimate human hey guys welcome to the ultimate human podcast I'm your host human biologist Gary Brea where we go down the road of everything longevity anti-aging uh functional medicine biohacking and everything that makes average humans ultimate humans so today I have a very special guest my wife Sage working or soon to be Sage Brea and today is where we take questions directly from you and we answer them here on the podcast so I know you've got the questions on your phone babe so what were some of the questions that came into to us that people are have on their minds I threw it out to the world of Instagram and actually we got a lot of responses of questions that they wanted to ask you questions that they had for me um so let's start with okay we're going to kind of go in the diet range so one of the questions was specifically is there any fruit or vegetable that you would eat that's not organic so me personally I wouldn't if you're going to spend money anywhere in the diet the place to spend money if you eat fruit is on organic fruits non-organic fruits remember fruits absorb pesticides and herbicides and preservatives through their skin so they have a tendency to draw pesticides herbicides insecticides into the fruit so if you're going to spend money anywhere in your diet and you actually do eat fruit it's best to go with organic fruits rather than non-organic fruits my preference would be that you eat fruits that end in Berry blackberry blueberry raspberry strawberry they're lowest on the glycemic index meaning they raise blood sugar slower than other fruits and they have you know their high amounts of fructose and contrary to popular belief fructose is processed differently than than other sugars so it has less of an impact on uh your blood sugar cool all right and then there's lots out there on how to clean your fruit Tik tok's got crazy ways of soaking it in some sort of solution that that sucks all the color out of strawberries and obviously that's can't be the right way so what do you recommend when you bring your fruit home even if it's organic how you wash oh yeah even if it's organic I actually recommend that you wash your fruits and your meat so the way to wash fruits is put them in a bowl with filtered water um and preferably as cold a water you can get it you can even actually use ice um but put it in a in a bowl of a glass bowl of cold water filtered water and then add about A4 of a cup of vinegar white rine white rice vinegar uh white wine vinegar um even apple cider vinegar so 1/4 cup of vinegar and about a tablespoon of baking soda and you'll notice it will Fizz up and then just massage the fruit around in there a little bit you only need to leave it in the bowl for one minute okay you don't leave them let it soak for 10 or 15 minutes it will actually start to draw the color out of the fruit and it will even draw the sweetness out of the fruit which is not what you want you want the pesticides the herbicides that that may be on the surface of the fruit to be drawn out and then get all the bug parts and droppings and possible worms and things off of the fruit and any kind of dirt or debris that's on it but it only takes 60 seconds to wash your fruit in cold water 1/4 cup of uh vinegar your choice of vinegar is fine it's super cheap to buy a bottle of vinegar just a few bucks and then a tablespoon of baking soda does it taste vinegary afterwards not at all you don't taste it at all cuz so when you're done washing it dump the bowl of fruit out and then rinse it with filtered water and then put it in in the refrigerator in a covered glass pan I'm kind of laughing at my question because clearly I've been eating the fruit here and I haven't tasted it but I didn't know if you were really washing it I was washing it I always wash the fruit so if it's back in our fridge babe I've washed it right and then for Meats um the trick with Meats is you know take the meats out of the package remember remember just caring for your food is a great thing to do before you eat just being intentional about how you eat and what foods you eat so you take your poultries or your meat your pork your steak and put it in a pan cover it completely with kosher salt let that sit for about a minute rub the salt into one side of the meat flip it over rub it into the other side of the meat let it sit for a minute then fill the pan up that the meat's in and same thing add a little bit of um make sure that the water is ice cold and add a small amount of um vinegar no baking soda in this case just a small amount of uh white wine vinegar white rice vinegar apple cider vinegar let it sit for about a minute and then rinse it off put it in a glass pan and then put it back in the refrigerator and cook it when you're ready what's the difference between using kosher salt versus like Himalayan sea salt or Celtic salt or salt so the the the pink Himalayan sea salt you know there's been a lot of studies recently that show that a lot of brands of pink himalay and sea salt the majority of them are coming out of China and they're actually Laden with Mercury they have a lot of heavy metals in them so based on the way the salt is mined um if they don't take the crystal vein of the salt and they actually start to get some of the ore that's around they can get heavy metals so my recommendation is that you use Celtic salt especially for your table salt because it it actually has more minerals I think it has 61 or 62 minerals that are essential for human beings and the Celtic salt um tastes even saltier it just actually has a more full flavor than iodized table salt or pink Chimay and sea salt so you can use those for eating uh you can also use um Baja gold that's one of my favorites that's a sea salt I want to say that that's mined in Mexico and it's completely heavy metal free you can use it also to cure your meats and your um poultries but uh ground up in a in a salt grinder it's amazing salt and contrary to popular belief sodium rarely raises your blood pressure what raises your blood pressure is IOD eyes table salt but most of us are deficient in sodium we're not having too much sodium as a matter of fact one of the reasons why people's level of sodium shows up uh as elevated in their blood is usually because they're dehydrated levels have a tendency to rise when the concentration Rises so for example if you had half a glass of water and you put a teaspoon of salt in that water you'd have one concentration of salt if you filled the glass the rest of the way up you would cut the salt concentration in half but not because you remov salt but because you added water so hydration is super important but actually your intake of salt most of us are clinically deficient in sodium chloride yeah we always sprinkle the Celtic Sea salt in our water so or you can make a sea salt solay which helps with headaches and dehydration yeah about 85% of all migraine headaches are directly related to sodium deficiency the osmotic gradient or the movement of water across a membrane is what really governs very often whether or not you get a migraine because remember there's no pain receptors in the brain that's why brain surgery is painless right there the brain cannot send a pain signal but there's a covering over the brain called the dura and this covering which is like Saran Wrap that's over top of the brain is fraught with pain receptors and it hates two things it hates being stretched and it hates being contracted and so what determines whether or not it's stretching or Contracting is the sodium gradient and so when you're deficient in sodium that that Dura can actually send pain signals which is why the majority of migraine heches occur in the mornings when you are the most dehydrated so you go to sleep at night you're respiring all night you're actually have moisture leaving your body Heats leaving your body you wake up in the morning and now you have a migraine first thing in the morning if you add a pinch of Celtic Sea Salt to your drinking water and you drink 10 ounces of water in the morning those usually will be a permanent thing of your past in 48 hours it worked for me awesome y okay other question okay daily diet and best foods to eat so you want to talk about well I guess your diet you've kind of gone that keto route tell us a little bit about what you eat on a daily basis what's in Gary's kitchen idea well my whole philosophy on dieting is not everybody needs to be on keto or carnivore or vegan or vegetarian or paleo or Ain or cyclical dieting or raw food diets the most important thing about the food we eat not the diet that we're on is that we eat whole real foods it's the distance from the soil that really hurts us so when you look at vegetarian or vegan diet some vegans and vegetarians have higher incidences of of breast cancer and other forms of cancer coloral cancer being one of the major ones and not because vegetables are bad for you but because they eat a lot of pesticide insecticide herbicide Laden vegetables lots of preservatives and it's those secondary chemicals not the vegetables that are really causing the harm so one of the things that's happened through the Agricultural Revolution is the distance between the soil and the table has lengthened meaning there are more steps to how food is processed before it lands on the grocery store shelf so we know that if it takes an apple 30 days to make its Journey from the tree to the shelf that we're going to preserve that apple and preservatives were originally called anti-d digestives but some smart person realized that people are not going to go to the anti-d digestive area of the supermarket so they they switch the name to preservatives it's just like when we spray foods with folic acid we don't call it sprayed with folic acid we call it fortified or enriched because it just makes it sound so much more nutritious like they're doing you a favor yeah I feed my kids fortified whole grains or enriched bleached white flour it just sounds like something beneficial has happened when really uh that's the root of all evil in my opinion never really thought about like strawberry preserves it full of like jelly is just well those aren't strawberry preservatives those are strawberry preserves so when you seal it in a can um that's different preserving it is actually very healthy meaning preserving it in a sealed jar preservatives are terrible because it's the time of just our old school grandmother's way of preserving fruits preserving vegetables pickling um cucumbers and things like that those old school methods are actually very very healthy if you look at the incidents of cardiovascular disease and type two diabetes in the 40s it's a fraction of what it is today and and if you oils yeah well I mean that's also seed oils true but you know I did a big post on seed oils the other day and I got a lot of flak online because people said well food great canola oil and sunflower oil these these oils are not bad for you that is true until they are industrially processed right so it's not actually the food very often it's the distance from the food to the table so if you take a seed like a or you know let's say you take canola oil and you press the canola and it comes out very G well now they need to De gum it so they de gum it with something called hexane which is a well-known neurotoxin once it's degummed they heat it to about 4 45 degrees when you heat an oil like that it denatures and it turns rancid so now you have a rancid oil that was Den that was degummed with a neurotoxin and now when you cool that oil back down it's cloudy so they need to um deodorize and decloud it and they use sodium hydroxide which is a known carcinogen and then very often they can even use um commercial bleaching agents like a mild amounts of of chlorine um not all of them go through that process but some do and then it makes it to your shelf so the issue is not the canola plant per se or the sunflower seed per se it's the distance between that and the table which is why I say you really only need four oils in your kitchen you need a grass-fed butter or ghee um or Tallow and you need a coconut oil which you can use at high temperatures it doesn't denature at high temperatures and my preference is small batch extra virgin olive oil so you're not a fan of something like um Can't Believe It's Not Butter no those are it's crazy though cuz I get those questions is that an okay butter margarine margarine Can't Believe It's Not Butter um because this is what people grew up with and especially in I 80s or 90s they went through like the fat-free butter phas yeah they went through the war on fat yeah I mean that was the worst thing to ever happen to the morbid obesity and and diabetes I'm guilty of it I used that spray I'm a toast in college yeah oh I mean most most of us did but you know the thing is that it's not fat that makes you fat it's sugar that makes you fat because when we eat sugar our insulin Rises when insulin Rises the primary role of insulin is not to lower blood sugar the primary role of insulin is actually to block any other form of energy use in the body which includes using fat as energy so if you can't use the fatty acid pathway if you can't metabolize fatty acids then where does fat build up well the first place it builds up is in the blood which is why people that eat the highest amount of sugar have the highest blood fat so if you look at a blood panel it's called a lipid panel and you look at triglycerides HDL cholesterol the healthy cholesterol vldl cholesterol the very low density lipoprotein the really dangerous one and LDL cholesterol you'll see that um triglycerides are very high in people that have high insulin people that have high insulin are generally people that are eating high amounts of sugar especially refined sugars gotcha okay oh back to diet keto why did you kind of so I don't think that everybody needs to be on keto diet keto reset is really good I do actually have put carbs back into my diet I eat um natural local honey I do eat um berries uh I think those things are very safe for you and you become what's called metabolically adaptive you you you actually adapt to having carbohydrate and having um um meats and fats in your diet keto is a great way for people to reset because it's a high fat low protein very low carbohydrate diet um it puts your body into a state of ketosis your body starts to use something called beta hydroxy butyrate as a fuel source which is a really lwi inflammatory fuel source the diet was originally constructed for um addressing epilepsy really yeah because because epilepsy has a an inflammatory component so keto dieting using a keto reset is very healthy it can strip weight off your body put you into a state of ketosis kills sugar and hunger cravings um it's very lwi inflammatory it's one of the lowest inflammatory diets on the planet as long as you're eating clean keto and it's the lowest in something called dyum depleted water which we get do a whole podcast on that but um people find it fascinating that human beings on a daily basis we manufacture about a 100 gallons of intracellular water every day yeah I can't process that it's so hard for people to process cuz they how can I manufacture 100 gallons of water if I only drink half a gallon of water right well you make water in your body the same way they make it in space you take two hydrogens and one oxygen you slap it together you have a water molecule what happens that water molecule is it instantly enters the mitochondria and is turned into energy by something called the KB cycle and it creates energy for your body called ATP so we're not capable of drinking enough water in day to to fuel our mitochondria for even 10 minutes 10% of our body weight is these little battery batteries inside of our cells called mitochondria you have about 110 trillion of these and these make every source of energy that human beings are powered by we're not powered by food we eat the air we breathe the supplement we take we're powered by one energy source called ATP Denine triphosphate and we need water in order to make that so the body creates water out of gases and then throws that water into this cycle that breaks it apart and creates energy cool and keto dieting is very low in something called dyum depleted water which dyum is heavy water so it actually helps yourselves make lighter water that should be a whole podcast yeah the duum duum water is a fascinating fascinating subject so many random types of water and you get so excited about it I do it's well it's a water molecule with an extra Neutron okay if you must know this and this is the part where it goes ready just we are going to do a whole podcast on water the difference between hydrogen water oxygen water alkaline water tap water spring water and filtered water so we're going go through it all you nerd out about it um I always tell people if they're going to try a keto diet that you cannnot date a keto diet you have to commit and marry a keto diet that's right there's no cheat why is that yeah no cheat because people do that they're like oh it's Sunday it's my cheat day why can't you cheat on a keto diet because when once you become fat adapted as soon as you put carbohydrate High carbohydrate back into the body then it instantly um will stop processing fat and you're eating a high fat diet and so now the fat will build up in the blood and it will be stored in the visceral tissue rather than being being used as an energy source remember the first preferred source of energy for the body and there are no exceptions to this rule is always glucose so if you have sugar in your blood you have no choice your body will always choose that source for energy first so you have to bring the glucose down in order to get into ketosis so as soon as you raise your blood sugar raise your glucose and you raise your insulin now your body can't burn fat but you have high amounts of fat in your diet and now you're in a dangerous situation you're triglyceride Skyrocket you will see that your dangerous cholesterols your vldl cholesterols will Skyrocket so keto diet is just like you said the diet that you marry you don't date okay yeah people always ask me since you were doing it you know oh is that what you follow too I am of the you eat very clean though I eat clean you super clean I don't h i don't follow a diet I just really enjoy salads yeah but you don't eat a lot of white flour white rice white bread white pasta but I do eat it I just make sure it's not enriched or fortified or fortified oranic um but I don't I don't eat a lot I really cut sugar out quite a bit I never see eat sugar I never really eat it ever like I don't know every the occasional like piece of chocolate but I don't crave it I Quit Sugar accidentally um accidentally accidentally because literally we ran out of sugar for our coffee and I was too lazy to go to the grocery store this before instacart and the glory of having groceries brought to you and so I just didn't put it in my coffee in the morning and what I found is that at lunch I wouldn't be craving a Snickers bar and at dinner after I ate dinner I wasn't craving hog and Daws and all it took was it was like a 7 to 10 day period oh yeah it's a period where you go through the withdraw and then you're fine and that was fine but funny enough then I started to Crave uh salt so then I craved more like crackers and potato chips but I still limit those I don't really crave that even as much anymore once I got chips out out I think that that it really came down the seed oils yeah there's no like good I did find one kind of chip it was like a it's from Boulder of course y crunchy Boulder um but I think it literally is called Boulder chips but they didn't have seed oils it was like avocado oil excellent so we'll have to check that out well I really should get back on that but anyway but I like salads I like adding grilled chicken and just everything like everything in the in the fridge I can find and just throw it in a salad and people think that's weird when I tell people that they think that's really strange why do you think that is well I mean because people just people don't think of salads the way you think of salads they think of salads as like lettu aide salad yeah you make a salad with avocados and chicken and it's just nuts and hemp seeds and yeah I mean you make you make really healthy salads with lots of stuff in them my family is just known for salads super known for salads yeah but okay so okay you want to take one question trying to keep it to 20 minutes so I think that's good no I think we actually covered all the alcohol but we could alcohol we could save that for a different one okay so we're telling we got three more minutes so um alcohol so here's how alcohol works first of all we know now through peer-reviewed published clinical studies that no amount of alcohol is good for you used to be that glass of wine a day keeps the doctor away it's absolutely not true there's rest veratrol and wine but you can get rest veratrol through supplement a now in much higher concentrations and much more bioavailable but if you must drink alcohol um it's not so much the alcohol itself it's what the alcohol becomes and alcohol converts into something called acetal alahh which is a poison it poisons your brain um it makes your body acidic so it actually can move the pH of your blood uh several tents of a point remember the PH range of the blood is very narrow it's only about four or five tents of a point so when we shift slightly to becoming more acidic this is the state where we don't feel well so if we look at what alcohols convert the slowest to both sugar and to acetal alahi by far Agave based alcohols tequila tequila are way out in front but you got to skip the margarita part yeah you have to skip the sugar part that's the part that people are like oh so I can have Margaritas no that's like a recipe is just tequila ice with either water and a squeeze of fresh lime um and then there's a big gap and then you get to clear alcohols like vodka and like um vodkas and Gins and then there's another Gap and you start that's where you meet uh red wines full body red wines um colored alcohols and then below that are your white wines pros and your high sugared wines so the the number one by far is is to kill Agave based alcohol takes a very long time and very low conversion to acetal alide we kind of just quit again yeah I mean we've just basically stopped tring accidentally well we we did a reset in October and we went down to Colombia and did a stem cell I and you weren't allowed to drink for 30 days and I think it was like a two week period even before that so almost a month and a half and then we got back and we just never drank again we don't crave I don't crave it I I think we were always finding a reason to drink we had a hard day let's have a drink we had a really great day and we want to celebrate let's have a drink we're having a friend over the kids are coming over have a drink and it we were always looking for reasons and then I think we started to realize geez we really drink a lot yeah and then we just quit I don't even think I feel so much better I do I sleep better sleep better feel better feel so much I hate that feeling of waking up with that headache and foggy now I wake up and do a cold plune oh God you're so chatty in the morning too I get excited when I get out of that c punch I'm captain chatty and I like to come in and share my gold fingers with her and I also like to share um my stories about the previous day I'm I have a lot to get off my chest at 6 in the morning lot of words coming out of your mouth in the morning so I'd like to do more of these the 20 minute we call them 20- minute shorts we try to keep the podcast to 20 minutes we'll take your questions if you have additional questions you'd like to hear us answer you'd like more details on anything that we covered today please put them in the comments below please remember to like And subscribe to the channel which gives us the resources to continue to do this and as always everything we talk about is just science