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So what are the societal and individual-level things that we can be doing to prevent us even getting these chronic diseases? The simplest thing that we can do first is think about having an invisible fence around us, like a little force field, and we should filter things before they make it to the temple. Because either we can filter things for the temple, or we can let the temple be the filter. So you can drink tap water, and if you drink tap water, your body will filter out the fluoride, the chlorine, the microplastics, the pharmaceuticals. Or you can filter your water before you drink it and take one toxic load off your body.
So what I would say is probably five things that I would commit to doing on a regular basis. Number one: upon waking, I would drink mineralized water. I would take 10 ounces of water and add either a Celtic sea salt or a Baja Gold salt to my water. The reason for that is that most of us are deficient in some or several of the trace minerals in our body, the boring ones: boron, manganese, selenium, and so on. Stir it up and drink it back.
The second thing I would do: you're not talking about table salt here, right? No, no, no, not sodium chloride. I'm talking about Baja Gold sea salt, which is probably the best salt that you can put in the human body because it has all 91 trace minerals. It's tested down to 250 parts per billion for microplastics and glyphosate, plus pink Himalayan and sea salt. Forget table salt. I would just get that permanently out of your life.
So number one, I have my mineralized water. Number two, I would take a DHA/EPA fish oil supplement, or a fatty acid supplement with DHA or EPA oil, or an MCT oil. I'd take a fatty acid oil in the morning, an omega-3 supplement. Then I would develop a morning routine that included the basics from Mother Nature: sunlight, grounding, breathwork, and a cold shower.
So I want to zoom in on grounding. I'm a huge fan of grounding. My girlfriend grounds, and again, listen, my girlfriend is much smarter than I am about it. Everything she says to me, eventually I sit here with a neuroscientist a year later and it turns out she was absolutely right. I thought she was a little bit cuckoo for thinking that getting outside in the morning and putting her feet on the ground was at all beneficial, but I've been told time and time again. What is grounding, and why does it help?
So we get three things from Mother Nature. We get magnetism from the earth, we get oxygen from the air, and we get light from the sun. The further we get away from those things, the sicker we become. Really? Yes, absolutely. The magnetism piece sounds like spiritual, cuckoo stuff. I mean, probably 10,000 years ago they thought the same thing about gravity. But the Earth has a low-level electrical current. We were meant to spend 85% of our time outside. We spend 97% of our time indoors. The truth is most of us are not getting too much sun; we're not getting enough sun. Because of the way we eat, seed oils, and everything that is oxidizing in our skin, our cancer rates are exploding, but not because of our sun exposure. It's because of our diet, and we can talk about that later.
When bare feet touch bare soil, grass, or sand, we discharge into the Earth. By that I mean you actually change the polarity in the body, and this is measurable. If you want to do a little experiment, find somebody that has a basic microscope, get a slide, prick your finger, take a drop of your blood, put it on the slide, smear it around, and look at it under the microscope. I think I have a video of this on my Instagram. What you'll see when you look at your blood in real time is that most of your red blood cells are stuck together and clumped up. Not clotted, but attracted to each other, because when cells have the same charge they repel. When they repel, it increases the amount of surface area that each cell has to contact the outside environment. Now it can exchange waste, eliminate waste, detoxify, repair, and regenerate. Imagine a bloodstream full of red blood cells that start to get opposite charges. They attract, they touch, and everywhere they touch, that cell loses surface area to exchange with the outside environment.
When you touch the surface of the Earth for a few minutes, you will repolarize. Prick your finger 10 minutes after you come inside, put it back on that same slide, and look at your blood. It's going to look like eggs slithering around in a bowl of oil. They'll bump into each other and slide around, but they will not be clumped together and stuck.
So what's going on then? It must be the charge coming through my feet? Yes. You're actually discharging into the Earth. You're exchanging ions. It's a low-level current, so like a magnet, you're exchanging ions with the Earth. You're discharging, you're grounding.
What if I live on the ground floor? Do I still have to go outside? Yes, you have to touch bare dirt, soil, grass, or sand. Why can't I just do it on the ground floor of the house? Because the materials insulate you from the Earth's magnetic field. There's usually steel, concrete, wood, and other barriers like tile and asphalt that actually prevent you from contacting the surface of the Earth. There are grounding mattresses that you plug into a ground wire, and if you look at how a grounding circuit works, at some point it runs directly into the ground, with a pole in the ground connected usually by copper to that wire and connected to your outlet.
Can't I just get some kind of mat that has the same charge? You could get a PEMF mat. But one of the things I get a lot of flak for is saying that you have to buy all this expensive equipment. So there are two ways to do it. You can buy a pulsed electromagnetic field mat, a PEMF mat. I have one. They cost about five grand. If you've got five grand lying around, it's one of the best investments you can make. You put it in your bed, you go to sleep on it, you run a low-level current at night, and it will help get you into a deep sleep. You'll wake up alkaline every morning. It will push the electro-smog right out of your body, because PEMF gets rid of electro-smog, 5G, and Wi-Fi.
When you say you wake up alkaline every morning, what do you mean? The pH of the blood is a pretty narrow range, about 7.35 to 7.45, so about half a point. It's a complete fallacy that you can change the pH of the blood by drinking alkaline water. Alkaline water will not actually change the pH of your blood. If you want to change the pH of your blood, among other things, you apply a low-level current. pH stands for potential of hydrogen, and it's a charge. So by running a low-level current through the body or touching the surface of the Earth, you can actually move the pH of the blood slightly, and an alkaline state is a disease-free state. The more acidic we get, the sicker we become. So if we want to move the pH of the blood slightly, if we want to wake up alkaline, if we want to run a low-level current through our body, we can either touch the surface of the Earth or buy a PEMF mat.
So they've done tests where someone lies on a PEMF mat for a certain amount of time, they then do a blood test, and they find their blood is more alkaline? Yes. And you can see that separation of blood cells instantly. Getting off a PEMF mat, I've got videos of me doing this with my production manager. In my house, I broke his finger, put his blood on a slide, put it on the PEMF mat, and looked at it afterwards.
The second thing I would do is learn breathwork. I use something called a Hypermax, which is based on the work of Dr. Van Ardennes and Dr. Otto Warburg, Nobel Prize-winning work. It's called multi-step oxygen therapy. You take an oxygen concentrator, fill a bag with 900 liters of 95% O2, and breathe that 95% O2 for 10 to 12 minutes while you're active on a treadmill. But if you don't want to exercise with an oxygen therapy machine, you can learn to do breathwork: engage the auxiliary muscles of respiration, get oxygen down into the lower lobes of your lungs, and out of the apex of your lungs.
One of the articles I quoted turned out not to be a study, and I still can't find the reference for it. It said that after age 35, 90% of people will never sprint again. I haven't been able to find whether that came from a clinical study or an article. But whether or not that's true, the vast majority of people stop engaging their auxiliary muscles of respiration, not really exercising the diaphragm or using the intercostal muscles between our ribs to push air down into the lower lobes of our lungs. As our posture collapses and our CO2 rises, think about the expired air in your body from the tip of your nose and mouth, all the way down your esophagus, out through your bronchials, into the farthest reaches of your lungs. That's all expired air until you get oxygen all the way down and out to the edges of the lung. You're not getting oxygen into the bloodstream. So as we age and our posture collapses, our respiratory rate gets shallower and shallower. We're essentially hyperventilating carbon dioxide, which accelerates aging. Aging is the absence of oxygen, and the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease.
So one, I would ground. Two, I would learn breathwork. I do a Wim Hof-style breathwork: three rounds of 30 breaths with an extended breath hold every single morning. It is the one thing I never, ever miss. Why? Because I make little promises to myself and I try to keep them, and I find that I lose confidence in myself when I consistently break really small promises to myself. I think a lot of people do this, and our bodies crave consistency. You lose confidence in yourself when you say you're going to go to bed at a certain time tonight and then you don't, or you say you're going to work out first thing in the morning and you don't. Or you listen to a podcast, you think, I'm going to do what Gary said, I'm going to ground, get some sunlight, and do some breathwork, and then you don't do it. The little internal promises we make to ourselves, which people don't make to their spouse, their kids, or their partners, and which aren't the big promises everybody knows about, nibble away at our self-confidence and our ability to trust ourselves.
So I have a morning routine and I'm very consistent with it, but the one thing that is portable for me is the ability to get outside, ground, and do breathwork. I can't even tell you how many years I've gone without missing a single morning of breathwork. The other thing it does for me is that human beings crave consistency. If within 30 minutes of waking, no matter what time zone you're in, you're doing three rounds of 30 breaths, your body begins to zero in on that and understands that this is go time. It's simple to do. I might wake up at a different time because I'm usually on the East Coast, but I open the door, go out on the balcony, sit on the chair, face the sun, and do three rounds of 30 breaths every single day.
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