The penthouse at the top of the glass tower is vast, airy, and very angular. It boasts a four-car garage and six bedrooms, wrapped by a terrace with “sweeping ocean and bay views,” according to the listing. It has its own spa, gym, and sauna rooms. At 10,065 square feet, this Miami suburb palace sold for USD 19.5 million. Its owners? Gary Brecka and his wife.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t bother with real estate gossip, but Brecka’s modern-day Xanadu unveils the wealth that comes with “making it” in the ever-growing wellness industry. Gary Brecka is The Ultimate Human. His website, a minimal greyscale affair with pops of yellow, welcomes you with a video montage of the fiftysomething man soulfully breathing in, staring into the horizon, or absorbing the healing rays of the sun. Branding is everything in this space, and Brecka positions himself as an influencer who has figured out life and is now standing on top of the world. The penthouse certainly helps with the latter.
He has been a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience and its nearly identical runner-up, The Shawn Ryan Show, where he delivers mouthfuls of biological and medical jargon in a calm, collected voice. As my friend and fellow skeptic Michael Marshall put it when reviewing Brecka’s appearance on Rogan, “all this vocabulary is because you can’t hear a white coat on a podcast.”
Brecka, who is not a doctor, embraces cold plunges, red light therapy, and hydrogen-infused drinks. Should you?
Running out of gas
Here and there, Gary Brecka has made bold claims that either defy medicine or reveal a spiritual motivation. “There are 45,000 documented cases,” he is quoted as saying, “of women curing breast cancer by changing the frequency that we send through our body. This is a fact.” Oncologists would disagree with that. When it comes to autoimmune diseases—where your body’s own immune system rebels against you—Brecka simply doesn’t buy it. “I’m going to assume that God didn’t make a mistake,” he told Navy-SEAL-turned-podcaster Shawn Ryan.
Brecka’s questionable expertise, according to his LinkedIn profile, comes from a Bachelor’s of Science in Biology from a public university in Maryland and another Bachelor’s of Science, this one in Human Biology, from a former chiropractic school whose expanded scope of training now includes a course entitled “Homeopathy I: First Aid.” Because in the midst of a medical emergency involving suspected internal injuries, what we really need is a toxic plant called Arnica montana diluted one part in a million—scratch that, one part in ten million. It is serious, after all.
Rounding up his undergraduate studies is his two-decade work experience in the insurance industry, where he claims to have figured out who was likely to die early. Armed with this, he now points his customers to a range of health interventions that run the gamut from unproven to pseudoscientific.
Brecka’s moniker could be revised as The Ultimate Hydrogenated Man given his love of hydrogen. He calls for people to dissolve tablets—which he sells—into their morning glass of water to enrich the liquid in hydrogen, and to bathe in similarly gas-infused water. He talks up hydrogen as the antioxidant of choice to give you more energy, mental clarity, and longevity. While it is true that many early studies into hydrogen therapy for a variety of diseases show promise, they tend to be small, with the entire area of research being deemed by scientists who have a financial stake in it as “still in its infancy.” And drinking hydrogen after dropping an effervescent tablet into it (where the tablet’s magnesium and water react to release hydrogen gas) probably does not deliver a high dose of hydrogen to the body, according to a review article. Bathing in it faces similar issues, I suspect.
One of Brecka’s key protocols is breathwork, specifically the Wim Hof method, named after the Dutch extreme athlete whose meditation practice and voluntary hyperventilation are said to give him protection against the cold and boost his immune system. A systematic review of eight trials of the technique relays mixed results from very-low-quality studies done mostly in men. Hof’s slew of record-beating feats—like speeding through a half-marathon barefoot on ice and swimming 57.5 metres under frozen water—may look superhuman, but Hof has been displaced from many of them by people who do not use his breathing method. Hyperventilating, especially when alone or swimming, can be dangerous, as we exhale too much carbon dioxide, making our blood more alkaline, which our brain uses as a trigger to slow down breathing. The potential outcome? Fainting. And losing consciousness in water, especially ice water, can be deadly. Indeed, one journalist has claimed to have tied at least 31 deaths to people practicing Wim Hof’s technique.
Brecka also endorses “exercise with oxygen therapy” or EWOT, also called hyperoxic training, where you work out while wearing an oxygen mask in order to deliver a boost of the precious gas to your tissues and gain an advantage. (So far, a reductionist read on Brecka’s obsession with gases would be “CO2 bad,” “O2 good,” and “H2 really good.”) Here too, the evidence is a lot more mixed than Brecka would have you believe: elite athletes pursuing marginal gains might benefit from it, but the rest of us may not see a difference. From a public health standpoint, moving more is the goal, not training with oxygen masks; and if you’re an athlete, you should be getting guidance from someone more qualified and more in tune with the scientific literature than Gary Brecka.
The webpage on Brecka’s protocols also highlights photobiomodulation;(an overhyped use of red light, the studies of which are often disappointing), peptides like BPC-157 and TB-500 (trendy, injectable black-market experimental drugs, often abandoned by pharma for lacking benefits or being unsafe), and grounding (the pseudoscientific notion that touching the ground with your bare feet will fill you up with electrons that will reduce oxidative stress). His reading of the scientific literature is typical of health gurus: latching onto preliminary findings that are unlikely to be confirmed in rigorous studies and commercializing their promises, a process termed “scienceploitation.” To Rogan’s face, he cites a study in which older adults drank hydrogenated water and their telomeres lengthened, an indication that they were perhaps getting younger. Brecka calls this “the greatest biohack on Earth,” even though the study was a pilot trial funded in part by a company that sells hydrogen-rich water.
As I mentioned when I wrote about Rogan himself, Gary Brecka wants to beat the lab mice to it. This has made him so much money, he was briefly sued by his own company over it.
A zero-sum game with lots of zeroes
Putting aside the branded merchandise, Brecka sells roughly 24 products on his website, including a USD 599 methylation gene test and a variety of dietary supplements. His hydrogen tablets are priced at USD 1 a day, but if you want to soak in the dissolved gas, as Brecka also recommends, you’ll be spending USD 8 to 16 in hydrogen bath tablets—possibly more if your soaking tub is large—every single day. Even though hydrogen is apparently “the greatest biohack on Earth,” there are still, somehow, more supplements to collect on his website in order to increase the size of your monthly bill.
The protocols page, which exalts the merits of sunlight, breathwork, grounding, and cold water, is smartly conceived: for each life-altering habit, there is a free version and a paid one. You could, for example, simply take a cold shower in the morning; but we all know that people who are serious about it should buy Gary Brecka’s branded cold plunge tub, priced at a cool USD 11,443 when not on sale. Disregard the fact that cold plunges, while they will make you more alert, will probably harm your recovery from a workout.
For an additional Benjamin Franklin a month, you can become a VIP and gain access to a live question-and-answer monthly video featuring Gary Brecka himself, a privilege that his private clients are said to pay an uncanny USD 50,000 an hour for. But if Gary can’t answer your personal VIP question, fear not. Many influencers are now turning to artificial intelligence to answer their multitudinous fans’ questions, training a bot on their material, and Brecka is no exception. This presumably frees him up to do paid work elsewhere, something with which not everyone is comfortable.
On March 17th of this year, a complaint was filed against Gary Brecka, his wife, Cicely Sage Workinger, and a few other parties. The plaintiffs were Cardone Ventures, LLC, and 10X Health Ventures, LLC, the latter of which was co-founded by Brecka and Workinger. The complaint accused Brecka of deserving the triple crown of “hypocrisy, fraud, and tyranny.” More specifically, Brecka was accused of perpetrating a “massive fraud” against 10X Health by making money elsewhere—building “a dizzying array of lucrative ‘side’ businesses, clandestine partnerships, and co-marketing and equity arrangements that he now values at $100 million.” Brecka countersued, and he and his wife also filed a complaint against the wife of 10X Health co-founder Grant Cardone, whom they accused of besmirching Gary on social media. Quickly, all parties jointly filed to dismiss these lawsuits and the court agreed.
I’m not taking sides in this legal drama, but there’s a point to be made here. The word “lucrative” fails to prompt the imagination into fully imagining the mountains of cash wellness influencers make by peddling products based on preliminary studies. The wellness industry—a sometimes nebulous construct that can admittedly be defined in a very broad way–has been evaluated at 2 trillion dollars globally. Let me spell out the zeroes: that is $2,000,000,000,000. Dr. Joe Mercola alone, one of the pioneers of using the Internet to promote alternative medicine and all-natural supposed cures, has admitted being worth over $300,000,000. They may not be lying for money—Mercola’s recently-revealed video chats with his medium advisor show him to be, in my opinion, a true believer—but there is no denying that successful health gurus do not live like you and me. They float in a higher stratum of the sky, far from the plebs, in penthouses both literal and figurative.
In 10X Health’s legal complaint against the couple, I found the following: “[Gary Brecka] and Workinger [his wife] went from traveling commercial to flying on private jets, and from a strip mall to holding nearly $35 million worth of luxury homes, capped by a 10,000 square foot Coconut Grove penthouse with a hefty $19.5 million price tag.”
If you buy his tablets, your water is not the only thing that will become hydrogen rich. Gary Brecka will, too.
Take-home message:
- Gary Brecka, who has undergraduate degrees in biology and work experience in the insurance industry, believes he has found ways to turn yourself into the ultimate human, cure diseases, and live longer
- His recommendations include questionable interventions with no rigorous scientific evidence behind them, including drinking hydrogen-rich water
- Brecka is an example of how selling a lifestyle based on preliminary scientific findings can make a person very rich in the wellness industry
