Health Update: Gary Brecka Wants to Detoxify America. Here’s What That Means. – What Experts Say

My wife gave me some of her menstrual pads to put in my underwear. A day or two went by. My doctor didn’t respond, maybe because it was the weekend. My anxiety mounted. Sunday night arrived. My flight to Miami was in a few short hours and I was still bleeding freely out of my ass.

I sent my doctor another message, basically groveling at this point, something to the effect of “Still bleeding. I do not know what to do. Please advise.” I downloaded a separate health app, for my insurance company, which then provided me with a link to download a third app that promised 24/7 consultations with an on-duty nurse practitioner.

I had many questions, such as: “Am I going to die?” but also much more importantly: “What do I do if Gary Brecka wants me to do a cold plunge? Should I do that with a bleeding ass?” Brecka’s approach to health had been described to me as transformative. I’d also seen him called a huckster and a quack. Here I was, brought low by one of the everyday indignities of human life. Would seeing Brecka help me transcend? The health app, for its part, redirected me to a browser window, which put me in an online queue. Eventually, I fell asleep, my questions unanswered. In the morning, I put on a fresh menstrual pad and got on the plane.

IF YOU DON’T know who Gary Brecka is, you probably will soon. Since entering the wellness space in the late 2010s, Brecka has garnered a combined 5.4 million followers across a portfolio of personal and branded social media channels where he regularly collaborates with a star-studded list of clients and friends who swear by his lifestyle, fitness, and diet recommendations. Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, credits Brecka with changing his life. Chart-topping country artist Jelly Roll says Brecka kick-started his journey to losing close to 300 pounds. Mark Wahlberg name-checks him. Joe Rogan’s had him on his podcast twice.

Brecka bills himself as a “longevity expert” whose decades of research into human biology and health led him to create a brand called The Ultimate Human, which is dedicated to helping people optimize their health and unlock their full potential. And Brecka’s brand is expansive. He says he has thousands of Ultimate Human members—celebrity and otherwise—who pay for any number of his services: coaching, genetic testing, supplements, apparel, wellness AI technology. His Ultimate Human podcast—all 230-plus episodes of it—currently ranks in the top 20 in Apple’s Health & Fitness category.

All his hustle has, needless to say, paid off for Brecka. “By the grace of God, it just exploded,” Brecka says about his social media reach. “We crossed 200 million views a month—when you see that content being viewed 200 million times a month, you realize you’re onto something.”

Brecka shoots social media content with his videographer, Max, for various products.

Those numbers reinforce the importance of Brecka’s mission. “The sole intention of this media platform is to give without the expectation of receiving,” he says. “Our only intention is to take this information and, intentionally and authentically as possible, push it to the masses. I’m not going to measure it by our social media, by how many Instagram followers we have. We’re not going to monetize it.”

As of the most recent election cycle, people in high places are paying attention too. Brecka has positioned himself squarely inside the controversial Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, and he has the ear of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. All this clout, you could argue, makes Brecka the most powerful wellness influencer in the world. (Sorry, Bryan Johnson.)

And Brecka’s ascendance is a great thing for Americans, he says, because now he can help even more people. He can heal what ails them and protect them from the toxins he says lurk in almost every corner of the modern world. Endocrine disruptors, mold, heavy metals—these are responsible for “hijacking your hormones, inflaming your gut, and speeding up cellular aging,” he’s said on his podcast.

If you watch Brecka’s content online, see his appearances on Fox News and The Joe Rogan Experience, listen to his podcasts and read his newsletter, chances are you’ll drift into one of two camps. Either you’ll think he’s a genius guru who has cracked the code to higher living or you’ll dismiss him as a charlatan. But if you ever meet him in person, you’ll see that neither of those descriptions quite fit.

Brecka’s home refrigerator is stocked with naturally fermented foods, like kimchi and sauerkraut, along with fresh fruits, raw dairy, and pasture-raised meats.

LIKE MANY PEOPLE devoted to sculpting the human body into its ultimate form, Brecka lives in Miami. The day after my existential battle with hemorrhoids—miraculously, the bleeding had stopped with no need for an intervention from Brecka—I woke up at a hotel in the city’s posh Coconut Grove neighborhood and walked to Brecka’s home in a luxury high-rise a few blocks away.

Brecka’s property manager, a friendly, trim guy who everyone calls JC, whisks us up an elevator and directly into Brecka’s apartment, which is a palace of soothing beige tones: stone floors, light-toned wooden built-in bookshelves—some of which are being installed by a small group of carpenters—a coffee table in one room adorned with a gargantuan book of Oscar Niemeyer’s architecture. There is no mess, save the carpenters’ construction debris, which JC apologizes for. From around a corner, Brecka pads into view.

Brecka, 55, is the healthiest-looking man I have ever seen. This is a trait that in Miami requires some qualification. His face bears many of the lines that a 55-year-old man’s does, but it does not appear Botoxed, or plumped, or stretched—and there are no blemishes. He is muscular but not incongruously jacked and vascular, like, say, his friend RFK Jr. If I were a physician, which I am not (and for that matter, neither is Brecka), I would be overjoyed to have him as my patient.

Unsurprisingly, maintaining this vibrancy requires work. But Brecka also appears to possess a near-limitless amount of energy. After greeting me, he hops on a couple of calls. One is personal and includes the question “You’re coming to Mar-a-Lago, right?” The other is business, the details of which were off-record, but it includes the statement “I believe that hydrogen is the greatest discovery of our medical millennia.”

Hydrogen is something Brecka is very excited about. In one of his bathrooms, a series of tubes pumps the gas from a complicated-looking machine into a tub of room-temperature water, which he says takes the “oxidative stress out of every layer of your skin.”

Brecka’s son, Cole, 25, an ultra-endurance athlete who recently ran seven marathons on all seven continents in seven days, has cofounded a new line of hydrogen tablets that dissolve in water, conveying various benefits depending on whether you drink it or bathe in it. For the former, we head to the kitchen.

Following Brecka is not a particularly easy task, as he often gets up and walks quickly to the next thing he would like to show you without really checking if you have stopped looking at the last thing he showed you. “If you wanna live forever, this is how you do it,” Brecka says, opening his fridge. It is stocked neatly with fiber balls, raw dairy products, drawers of frozen and unfrozen pasture-raised meat. “I still can’t get myself to eat the organs,” he admits. There is also a normal tub of Chobani, which Brecka spots, frowning. “This is my wife’s,” he grumbles. “Not a big fan of that.”

There are many things Brecka is not a fan of. For example: seed oils, thickening agents in nut milks, PFAS in tap water, refined sugar, chemical sunscreens (he prefers a blend of beef tallow and non-nano zinc oxide), granola with grain, basically anything nonorganic. At one point later in the day, Brecka records several social media videos featuring popular products—a Starbucks latte, a fruit and yogurt cup, etc.—and explains why he thinks each is harmful and what a healthy replacement would be.

These videos, and Brecka’s fridge, speak to the core of his work: The most ubiquitous products, from corporate-chain coffee to sugar-loaded yogurt, are what’s wrecking your overall health. But there are always better alternatives, a multitude of which you can buy through him.

Brecka explaining how his HOCATT pod works (first image) and exiting his $250,000 hyperbaric chamber (second image). He’s claimed that hyperbaric oxygen therapy can reduce inflammation, boost brain function, and strengthen the immune system. 

Take, for example, Brecka’s partnership with BodyHealth. On the web page for the company’s Perfect Amino supplements, the company claims that amino acid supplements are more effective in building lean muscle than protein powders, which can lead to fat gain and may contain toxins. Perfect Amino, he’s claimed, is “clean” and prevents “blood sugar spikes, bloating, and fatigue tied to badly digested proteins.”

Brecka begins to explain all this science to me as we sip g(It all tastes a bit like salty lemonade. Not unpleasant, but not quite as satisfying as the Diet Coke I guiltily drank before entering his apartment.) But then we’re off to the next thing, headed outside to do breathwork.

Brecka and I sit cross-legged on his balcony, which has a view of both the building his son lives in and his building’s twin tower, where he says both Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez have lived. Zac Efron lives nearby as well, he says, and often pops over to use one of Brecka’s many complex pieces of wellness equipment. The day was overcast and almost perfectly temperate. Brecka seems both serene and happy. “Every morning, man—the sunlight, the air,” he says. “I call it my drug of choice.” We take off our shirts, close our eyes, and breathe.

Brecka engages in his daily outdoor meditation practice on the balcony of his Miami high-rise.

The rest of Brecka’s morning routine passes in a blur. We move from the balcony to a tour of the house, which is both awe-inspiring and overwhelming. There’s a room with a hyperbaric chamber the size of a small submarine, large enough to fit an entire podcast recording studio, a weight bench, and two armchairs. Brecka has a structured workout routine that involves short runs, including sprints, as well as a variety of pull and push dumbbell and TRX exercises, some of which he often does in the hyperbaric chamber to save time.

There’s a hallway that has a dry sauna with red-light therapy, a steam room, and two cold-plunge tubs. There’s a smaller room that has both a 130-below-zero cryo chamber and a red-light therapy bed. There are several actual bedrooms, some of which have other devices just sitting there in the corner. Many of these devices are branded with the Ultimate Human trademark.

His latest product is called The Ultimate Snooze. Brecka says the mattress is made out of natural fibers, including imported wool from New Zealand that has natural flame-retardant properties, which he claims eliminates the need for many of the retardant chemicals used in mattress production. Other mattresses, he says, soak their foams and fibers in a fearsome concoction of toxic chemicals, which Brecka is adamant are poisoning all of us in our sleep. A queen-size Ultimate Snooze mattress starts at $1,999.

Brecka’s entire house, he says, is rigged with a state-of-the-art air and water filtration system, the inner workings of which he shows me inside a maintenance closet. “A lot of our homes are making us sick,” he says. “When a fish gets sick, the first thing we do is clean the tank. But when a human gets sick…we take the people out of the tank, mess with the people, and put them back in the tank, and we’re like, ‘Why do you keep getting sick?’ We never think about cleaning the tank!”

Later, while we are doing a short three-mile run around a nearby park wearing 12-pound weighted vests, I ask Brecka, out of curiosity, how much his electric bill is. He has no idea. “You’d have to ask JC,” he says.

Brecka dunks himself in his Ultimate Human–branded cold-plunge tub, which can chill water to as low as 37°F.

Brecka’s way of life, of course, is wildly out of reach for almost every American in the country. The cheapest hyperbaric chamber you can buy costs somewhere around $8,000. (Brecka’s, with the home gym actually built inside, was $250,000.) It is incredibly challenging for someone with just about any standard 9-to-5 job to do daily breathwork sessions, 20 minutes on a red-light bed, 20 minutes in a sauna, 3 to 6 minutes in a cold-plunge tub, and an hour or more working out every single day. Brecka tells me about plans he has with a fellow entrepreneur to put massive affordable health spas in major cities, new third spaces where everyday people can come and enjoy the benefits of saunas and hydrogen baths and cold plunges and fresh foods—a dream that is both lovely and utterly implausible.

What’s more concrete, however, is the work Brecka says he’s doing with RFK Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again Action Committee, a “private partnership of influencers that supports Bobby Kennedy’s Health and Human Services agenda,” he explains, from uncontroversial policies like improving the nation’s food supply to highly polarized issues like looking into the “root causes of autism” and investigating vaccine mandates.

“If I can even be just a small bit of the shift in policy, I mean, that’s a legacy unlike anything else I could ever leave,” Brecka says. “If we can clean up the food supply, if we can get back to sustainable farming, if we can get physical education back into public schools, if we can give people a break from this pandemic of chronic disease, that would affect hundreds of millions of lives.”

BRECKA WILL BE the first to tell you that his fanatical devotion to well-being was hard won as a mortality researcher in the trenches of the American health care system. For more than 20 years, he says, he worked in the life insurance industry, reading “thousands” of medical records to predict when the company’s customers would die. At first, his transition from insurance to wellness was rocky. Brecka holds an undergraduate degree in biology from Frostburg State University and a second BS degree in human biology from what is now the National University of Health Sciences in Illinois (and was, at the time of his graduation, called the National College of Chiropractic).

His first foray into wellness was a company called Streamline Medical Group in 2017 that specialized in antiaging treatments, but his social media profile started to grow exponentially through his company 10X Health System, which he cofounded with the financial influencer Grant Cardone. Celebrity clients as well started taking note. But his relationship with Cardone was less stable.

The breakup of 10X Health led to a snarl of lawsuits, with Cardone accusing Brecka of inflating his earnings at 10X Health’s expense and raking in some $13 million of “side hustle revenue” through a network of business entities and separate trademarks. Brecka, in turn, accused Cardone of attempting to strong-arm him and his wife, fellow cofounder Sage Workinger, out of the company. And Brecka filed a separate $100 million defamation suit against Cardone’s wife, Elena, over an Instagram post she made that pictured Brecka with the now-imprisoned musician Sean “Diddy” Combs. Cardone and Brecka settled their legal disputes in April of last year; the defamation suit was dismissed soon after.

Still, the most controversial aspects of Brecka’s businesses are, legally speaking, completely aboveboard. As the wellness industry exploded in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Brecka positioned himself as a scientific expert on both longevity and the more nebulous field of biohacking, making himself available for specialized coaching for VIP clients willing to pay for detailed feedback and exclusive access. (The current cost of an Ultimate Human VIP membership is $97 per month or $970 per year.)

One of Brecka’s loudest critics is Layne Norton, PhD, a nutrition researcher, who has tangled with Brecka many times online, releasing debunk after debunk. “The problem right now is that social media is a firehose of information,” Norton says. With so much content flooding the zone, the average person is “not equipped to disentangle” fact from fiction when it comes to scientifically complex concepts. This is especially true of Brecka’s work, Norton says. Brecka’s claims, he says, are often both highly technical and wildly hyperbolic: difficult, if not impossible, for the average consumer to fact-check on the spot.

For example, one of Brecka’s frequent punching bags is folic acid, a form of vitamin B9 that is often added to food in the United States. In his appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast back in 2024, Brecka went on a nearly eight-minute-long rant about it. His complex, jargon-filled case against folic acid relied on the claim that a common gene mutation made 44 percent of the population unable to properly metabolize the acid. As a result, these people were suffering from an epidemic of mood imbalances, anxiety, ADHD, and other behavioral issues—particularly children, who were eating folic-acid-enriched products for breakfast every day. Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that folic acid is safe regardless of a person’s genotype.

Brecka takes a work call in a guest bathroom equipped with a hydrogen therapy tub.

Many of Brecka’s other controversial claims deal with the concept of “toxins,” a fuzzy term that can be used to describe basically anything negative in the body. In another conversation with Rogan on his podcast, Brecka claimed that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration allowed large corporations to “micropoison” consumers. Like many other wellness influencers, Brecka’s focus on “detoxification” can go to extremes. He has urged followers to engage in multiday water fasts, depriving their systems of all nutrients to flush toxins out of the body. Again, the scientific consensus on this approach is clear: Humans with functioning livers do not need to “detox,” with water or any other substance.

These pseudoscientific digressions, Norton says, often distract from the “big levers” of health—exercise, diet, and sleep—which are far more difficult to regulate than popping a tablet in your water or bulk-ordering the right kind of granola. “What people like Gary do is provide an outlet for people to be able to go, “Oh, no, it was this thing—it was the seed oils, it was the microtoxins—it was something I don’t have control over,’ ” Norton says. “That is a lot more powerful for people than having to self-reflect and take responsibility for their own actions.”

Brecka, for his part, agrees that the big levers are the most important factors in a person’s health. His work, he says, consistently emphasizes whole foods, good sleep, consistent exercise, and a sense of community and purpose. “If you’re not doing those four things, nothing else matters,” Brecka says. But alone, they’re not enough to build an audience. “At some point, your entire messaging strategy can’t just be those four things, or you have nothing else to message about.”

And Norton is hardly alone in criticizing and sounding the alarm around Brecka’s work. There now exists an entire micro-algorithm of Gary Brecka Debunks online, in which licensed physicians, exercise scientists, and neuroscientists have all piled on to pick apart what they consider the specific flaws in his messaging. Norton has repeatedly requested to debate Brecka publicly, but the showdown hasn’t materialized. “As a scientist, you get used to being wrong a lot,” Norton says. “But when there’s a cult of personality around what you do, part of your mythos is that you’re a guru and you’re never wrong.”

Brecka says he has admitted when he’s been wrong and explains to me that he has adjusted his positions on topics like blending fruit for nutrient intake and the value of intermittent fasting, but he still defends the parts of his practice that fly in the face of existing medical consensus.

“We have to be careful that consensus is not just groupthink,” Brecka says. “I wear it as a little bit of a badge of honor that I would go against the grain.”

BRECKA GREW UP Catholic, on a 300-acre farm that his family leased to a tobacco farmer. In the summers, he worked to hang the sticky plants to dry in furnace-hot, tin-roofed barns for $5 an hour—money that gave him his first taste of being high school rich. That drive stuck. Brecka now identifies as more spiritual than religious. His reinvention of his relationship to God, he says, coincided with a personal reckoning around his own behavior: relationship struggles, drunken antics (he blew his ACL in a liquor-fueled hotel-room wrestling match with a friend), and an obsession with being rich. After the reckoning, Brecka says, he cut back on drinking and started helping.

“I really decided, All right, I’m gonna spend the rest of my life helping people live healthier, happier, longer, more fulfilling lives,” Brecka tells me, as we finish our three-mile run in the bayside park across from his apartment, watching fat iguanas and a few scruffy chickens wander around the docks. “For the first time, I took radical responsibility for basically everything that happened in my life. Divorce, bankruptcy, failed partnerships, a failed marriage. And I completely gave up the search for being wealthy. All I wanted to do my entire life was be rich. And I just said, Instead of focusing on being wealthy, I’m going to focus on people’s well-being.”

Brecka swears that he does not endorse any product he doesn’t use and like, which sounds implausible until you observe the sheer number of products that Brecka genuinely does use and like on a daily basis. He is welcoming, open, and extremely nice. He delights in eating good, healthy food and watching the people around him enjoy it as well. His staff are believers too—not in a culty way, but like young people who think they’re doing a fun job for a pretty cool boss.

The day I visited, it turned out, was property manager JC’s birthday, and his wife and kid dropped by Brecka’s house for lunch, where Brecka was excited to show them the “no refined sugar, sweetened with banana and maple syrup, guilt-free” cake he’d obtained for the occasion. Everyone—personal staff, employees, and JC’s family—seemed at ease around him. His high-profile clients say similar things.

I reached out to the UFC to ask if Dana White wanted to give a quote on Brecka, and a few days later received a two-minute voice note from White telling the story of how he and Brecka met. A reluctant, hungover White commissioned one of Brecka’s companies to give him an IV the morning after his son’s 21st birthday, and Brecka showed up to do it personally. “While he [Brecka] was doing the IVs, he said, ‘Can I do your blood work,’ ” White remembers. Brecka came back with a comprehensive diagnosis and promised to change White’s life in 12 weeks. “Everything he said he would do, he did,” White says.

Before running a 5K in a weighted vest around his Miami neighborhood, Brecka stretches things out.

You can be cynical about that, of course. That was Gary Brecka making a big sale—putting another huge name alongside Steve Harvey, Stephen A. Smith, David Beckham, and multiple Kardashians on his expansive client list. But it was also Brecka immediately connecting with a man who was sick, who was waking up vomiting every night because his sleep apnea was so bad, whose blood pressure was off the charts, and whose overstuffed appearance was becoming a meme for MMA fans online.

If you watch enough of his videos, let alone meet him in person, it’s incredibly easy to believe that Brecka can do this for you too. Part of the reason this works is because Brecka has identified something true: America is sick. We all know it. We all feel it. Somewhere along the way, our society fell ill and we are all paying for it. Millions of Americans work too many hours and sleep too few. Everyone I know is sick in some way. My friends are anxious. They’re depressed. They’re diabetic. They’re overweight. They’ve struggled with autoimmune disorders, chronic illnesses, and types of cancer that used to mostly affect people twice their age. They get concerning hemorrhoid ruptures and—despite their best efforts to contact a medical care professional—they never hear back.

Brecka says he sells the fix to most of this: personalized coaching that helps people eat healthier, move more, and sleep better. But he also sells what credentialed medical professionals aren’t so quick to name: the problem. Doctors don’t blame. They treat. Brecka blames: the doctors who don’t have answers, the companies that make our drugs, the systems that fail so many Americans. He warns, constantly, of plots against us, of poisons lurking in mundane places. He insists, somehow, that none of this is “fearmongering.” Fear is negative. He’s only trying to help. For him, I think these constant warnings—about folic acid or micropoisons or refined sugar or maybe even all those vaccines you got as a kid—are an act of love.

During my day with Brecka, after a lunch of grass-fed beef, organic chicken, and simple roasted vegetables—drizzled liberally with olive oil and scattered with Himalayan pink salt—I watched him record a series of ad reads for a discounted membership to his online coaching service.

Brecka holed up in his home podcast studio, a large room equipped like a home theater, with two chairs occupying center stage under studio lighting. “No feet, right?” Brecka asked his videographer, because in his own home, he’s loath to put on shoes.

“Picture this,” he began as the camera rolled. Then he’d select a common malady—brain fog, trouble sleeping, migraines—and although the symptom was different for each video, he’d end all of them with the same actionable fix: signing up for his service.

Later that day, as I was about to leave, Brecka finally seemed to acknowledge that I was there to write about him. “Be gentle with me,” he said—one last pitch, one last chance to buy in. I told him that I’d give him a fair shake. After spending the whole day in his world, it was hard not to be sold.