Up to 90% of Americans are metabolically sick — and most of them don't even know it. Dr. D — the pioneer of biohacking, the doctor every celebrity quietly calls behind the curtain, and the founder of Biohacks Medical — walked off the residency path after watching 1,000-pound patients die in surgery while top metabolic doctors drank Coca-Cola in the next room. He built a 50-state-licensed telehealth and biotech operation that runs on epigenetics, environmental-toxin testing, and a brutally simple framework most American doctors will never tell you. He sat down with the School of Hard Knocks podcast and broke the entire playbook down. Here are the 11 lessons.
Dr. D — "Dr. De" in the interview — is a Brazilian-American physician, biotech entrepreneur, and the founder of Biohacks Medical, a 50-state-licensed telehealth and biotech company. He is 40 years old at the time of the interview. Mom from Brazil, dad from Portugal. He went through traditional medical school, finished, and went to the Cleveland Clinic Florida to do research at the Metabolic Institute.
That's where he watched the system fall apart in front of him. He sat through research meetings with the country's top metabolic doctors as they drank Coca-Cola and ate hamburgers while debating the metabolic future of America. He watched a 1,000-pound patient die in surgery and overheard the desensitized response from a senior physician. He was repeatedly shut down when he tried to propose research on fasting. Meanwhile he was personally exhausted — tired, drained, no focus — in his early 30s. Two stories ran in parallel: the system is broken, and so am I.
He quit medicine. Spent time in Brazil learning the natural-medicine traditions there. His mother introduced him to functional medicine. He fell down the rabbit hole of South American root-cause physicians, came back to South Florida, and at 23 started knocking on doors. He partnered with a Fort Lauderdale physician named Dr. Richard Silva, started doing $200 consults with bloodwork from a glass-walled office where he literally wrote on the windows because he could not afford whiteboards. That little practice grew into Biohacks Medical — now a multi-vertical operation working with celebrities, athletes, billionaires, and CEOs around the country, expanding to Europe, and launching an epigenetic-targeted supplement product on a finger-prick test of nearly 2,000 markers.
What follows are the 11 health and longevity lessons that came directly out of his 70-minute breakdown on the School of Hard Knocks podcast. They are unromantic, blunt, and (from his point of view) the operator-level take on what most physicians won't tell you.
Dr. D's opening framing for why up to 90% of Americans are metabolically sick is the cleanest one-liner in the interview. He blames the environment, not the individual.
The dirt in the tank, in his telling: pesticides introduced in the 1970s, GMOs, 3D-printed food (yes, that exists for salmon now), vertical farming inside buildings, food dyes that are illegal in Europe but cleared here, "natural flavors" that can legally mean any of 60 to 70 undisclosed compounds, and a steady drip of endocrine-disrupting plastics that hit your testosterone, your fertility, and your inflammation profile every single day.
His point: the human body is doing remarkably well given how much synthetic load it's processing. He's not bashing the human, he's bashing the environment we ask the human to survive in. Europe gets a D-plus in his grading. America gets an F-minus. The fix isn't more medication — it's cleaning the tank.
Dr. D's harshest take on traditional medicine isn't on individual doctors — it's on the business model. Chronic-care medicine, in his framing, isn't designed to make you well. It's designed to keep you coming back. Acute-care medicine (the ER) is just the exacerbation point of unaddressed chronic issues.
He stresses that he's not knocking individual doctors. The ones in the system get desensitized doing the same thing over and over. The institutions reward managing symptoms, not finding causes. The new technologies — robotic Da Vinci surgical systems and so on — look like medical advancement but, in his view, are downstream optimization on a broken upstream model.
The autism statistic he cites is the one that hits hardest in the interview. He references CDC numbers showing autism rates moving from 1 in 10,000 in 1970 to 1 in 31 today. He challenges the audience to fact-check him directly — he is quoting the CDC's own published data. Whatever the cause, the trajectory is steep enough that "more pills, more procedures" is not a credible national plan.
Dr. D says the belief that gets him laughed out of traditional health conferences is this one: your body is designed to consume only what it recognizes. Water. Whole foods. Naturally occurring nutrients. Anything else — synthetic dye, undisclosed "natural flavors," titanium dioxide in your candy, BPA from your plastic water bottle — gets read by the immune system as a foreign invader.
That self-attack pattern is, in his framing, the seed of autoimmune disease. The chronic low-grade inflammation that comes from years of immune-system overdrive is what he links to elevated cancer risk. He's careful to point out that traditional immunology disputes this framing — the standard line is that the body has "immune tolerance" for low levels of toxins. Dr. D's perspective is that the dose-load model is failing because the dose-load has compounded so massively in the last 50 years that tolerance is exhausted.
His tactical heuristic for patients: flip the package over. Look at the ingredient list. Imagine all those compounds laid out on a table in front of you. Would you eat them? If the answer is no, the food is no.
When the interviewer asked about fasting, Dr. D didn't hedge. He said it twice in a row.
His historical framing: every ancient civilization, every holy book, every medical tradition reaching back thousands of years incorporated some form of fasting. The 1915-1916 Nobel Prize-winning research on autophagy — the body's process of consuming and recycling its own damaged cells — sits at the heart of why. When you stop eating for long enough, the body switches from "use new fuel" to "clean up the old machinery." Damaged proteins get broken down. Senescent cells get cleared. Inflammation drops.
He distinguishes intermittent fasting (the 16:8 window) from prolonged fasting (72 to 96 hour water fasts), and his perspective is that the deeper biochemical processes engage in the longer windows. He notes there is no perfect published schedule, but the data on prolonged fasting and longevity is strong, and working up toward it — safely, with supervision — is one of the few interventions where mainstream and functional medicine actually agree.
When asked which deficiency he sees most often across his patient population, Dr. D went straight to magnesium. He's seeing it in patients with headaches, with high blood pressure, with cardiac arrhythmias including torsades de pointes (the "twisting of the points" rhythm on an EKG). He's seeing it in himself.
His own atrial fibrillation episode — a roughly two-hour run of A-fib that hit him while sitting in his office at 36 — is the case study he uses. The standard cardiology response was an offer of ablation. He routed the case to a metabolic cardiologist colleague at Johns Hopkins, who reframed it: the issue wasn't structural — it was lingering spike protein from a COVID infection a few months earlier, layered on top of stress, sleep deprivation, and the standard nutritional gaps. The treatment plan was plasma exchanges, stem cells, peptides, and aggressive micronutrient repletion. No ablation needed.
His broader point: standard care looks for structural problems and procedural fixes. Functional care looks at deficiencies, infections, environmental loads, and stress before reaching for the scalpel. The gap between those two approaches is enormous, and most patients never know the second one exists.
This is the section where Dr. D was asked to be controversial, and he took the question head-on. His perspective is that he personally does not subscribe to the mRNA COVID vaccine. He challenges the speed of the approval process, notes that mRNA technology is genuinely new and worth scrutiny, and questions the cultural pressure that suddenly made every doctor stop asking questions about a brand-new product.
But the larger clinical point in this section isn't the vaccine. It's the spike protein itself — both from the virus and from the shots. Dr. D's perspective is that the spike protein causes ongoing damage in the cardiovascular and nervous systems. He cites Dr. Thomas Levy — a metabolic cardiologist with strong credentials — who told Dr. D when he described his own A-fib case, "Oh, you're another one of those, right?" Pattern recognition from a clinician seeing it everywhere.
Dr. D mentions that he sees a small region of the COVID spike protein with anatomical similarities to portions of the HIV virus, which he flags as a curiosity worth questioning. He emphasizes that other countries (he names Bolivia as one example) sanctioned the use of alternative protocols during the pandemic that the U.S. healthcare system ignored.
The actionable takeaway from this section, in his framing: if you've had a post-COVID symptom you can't shake — A-fib, neurological issues, brain fog, fatigue — ask your physician to test for lingering spike protein and to consider therapies (plasma exchange, peptide protocols, targeted antioxidants) before defaulting to a procedure.
If fasting is the highest-leverage longevity move, sleep is the highest-leverage productivity move. Dr. D was emphatic. Sleep and fasting are the two interventions where the return on minimal effort is enormous.
His specific framing: the entrepreneur "I slept four hours and I'm grinding" badge of honor is one of the biggest scams in modern culture. Being awake is not the same as being productive. Dr. D's argument is that you can be awake and unproductive — sending stupid long emails, scrolling social, attending useless networking events, having low-energy conversations — while convincing yourself the volume of activity equals output. Real productivity, in his framing, is eight to ten hours of authentic high-output work, then real recovery.
The metric he watches: heart rate variability (HRV). Heart rate you want as low as possible at rest. HRV you want as high as possible. The way to raise HRV is to spend more time in the parasympathetic state — rest, digest, social connection — and less time stuck in sympathetic fight-or-flight. America, in his framing, lives stuck in sympathetic 24/7 and has forgotten how to flip the switch.
Dr. D's framing of the modern American nervous system is "wired and tired." Roughly 30% of Americans suffer from insomnia. A massive portion can't focus and end up on amphetamines (Adderall, Ritalin) plus a cycle of energy drinks and caffeine to artificially keep the throttle open.
The result is a country that is simultaneously over-stimulated and under-rested. Off when it should be on. On when it should be off. The chronic-care implications are enormous — mental health, cardiovascular load, sleep architecture, hormonal regulation, all of it.
Dr. D cites the four centenarian (100+ year-old) communities in the world: Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Costa Rica; and Loma Linda, California. The single behavior that links them is not what they eat or how much they exercise — it's how much time they spend doing nothing.
Sitting in cafes. Talking. Long unhurried meals. Real social connection without phones. He references his own meeting with Italian business partners in New York where he sat at the table for 12 hours, ate pasta, and had to roll out of the meeting. His American partner kept asking, "When are we going to get to the meeting part?" The Italians' answer, implicit in everything they did: this is the meeting part. This is also the medicine.
Chronic sympathetic state. Phone in hand from 7am. Notifications every 90 seconds. Burnout disguised as hustle.
Long meals. In-person social connection. Daily parasympathetic state. No phone-driven cortisol spikes. Living past 100 is the result.
Practical version of the lesson: Dr. D suggests the two-phone protocol for entrepreneurs who can't disconnect. One phone is for your spouse, kids, and parents only. The other phone is your work phone — you pick it up at 9am, you put it down at 6pm. Then you live your life. Test it for three months and see how you feel.
This is the section where Dr. D drops the science fact that turns most listeners around in their chairs. Humans have between 22,000 and 25,000 genes total. A grain of rice has 52,000. A grain of rice has roughly twice the genetic library a human has.
Your genes themselves don't change. Test them today, test them in 100 years — same library. What changes is which genes are turned on, turned off, and at what volume. Methylation turns expression off. Acetylation turns it on. Toxins, hormones, foods, sleep, stress, and infections all act as switches and dimmers on those genes. That entire control surface is called epigenetics, and Dr. D calls it the next frontier of medicine — "the crypto of medicine."
Why this matters for the patient: when a doctor says "it's in your genes," Dr. D's perspective is that they're handing the patient a sentence. The patient walks out believing they have no control. The truth, in his framing, is that you have enormous control over which genes get expressed. Your environment, your food, your sleep, your toxin load, your stress — all of it is methylating and acetylating those switches every day.
His company's commercial play around this: a partnership with True Diagnostic, which he describes as the largest epigenetic database in the world. A finger-prick test reads almost 2,000 markers on a drop of blood — including how many times you've smoked in your life, how many times you've drunk in your life, and (in development) where you live based on environmental-toxin signatures matched to zip-code data. From those markers, Biohacks formulates targeted micronutrient supplements delivered in espresso-style pods. The pitch: get the same data-driven personalization their celebrity clients get, at a few dollars per serving.
When asked what test every American should run, Dr. D's number-one answer wasn't vitamin D or blood sugar. It was your rate of aging — how fast your DNA is degrading per chronological year. Modern epigenetic clocks (he calls out Harvard, Yale, and Duke as institutions where True Diagnostic has published validation studies) can predict, with roughly 92% accuracy and a five-year confidence band, when you're going to die if you keep your current habits.
His perspective is that this test changes the patient conversation completely. It's no longer "your blood sugar is fine, see you next year." It's "you're aging 1.4 years for every chronological year you live, and here are the three interventions with the highest predicted impact for your specific epigenome." That's medicine optimized for prevention, not management.
Toward the end of the interview, the host put the question directly: I'm 23 right now. My goal is to live to 100. If I keep my current habits I'll probably make it to 75. Give me five things to install right now.
Dr. D's answer was clean. Five pillars. No hedging. This is the playbook he gives a young person who wants three more decades on the back end of life.
The interviewer pushed Dr. D on whether a 23-year-old needs testosterone replacement, advanced peptides, or stem-cell therapy. His answer was a flat no. A 23-year-old needs detox and nutrient repletion, not hormone replacement. Run an environmental-toxin panel. Pull BPA, phthalates, heavy metals, mold mycotoxins. Watch the endocrine disruptors. The body at 23 still wants to do its own work — your job is to stop pouring poison into the engine, not to add more chemistry on top.
The closing technical section of the interview was Dr. D's view on regenerative medicine — stem cells, peptides, exosomes — and where the next decade of treatment is heading.
His framing: stem cells are one of the greatest advancements in medicine, period. He cites his close friend Dr. Joshua Hare — one of the most cited figures in stem-cell research with 67,000+ Google Scholar citations and a pioneer of injecting stem cells directly into the heart for cardiac regeneration — as evidence that the science is real, not fringe.
The current regulatory map: Florida has now adopted regulations that allow certain stem-cell therapies under specific conditions, which previously required medical tourism to Costa Rica or other countries. His perspective is that the regulatory landscape is moving in the direction of broader access, and that within the next decade, regenerative therapies will mitigate huge categories of unnecessary surgeries — ligament tears, tendon injuries, cardiac scarring, joint degeneration.
The framing he wants patients to take from this: if a surgeon offers you a procedure for a soft-tissue injury, ask whether stem-cell therapy or peptide protocols are an alternative before signing the surgical consent. The answer might still be that surgery is the right call. But the question deserves to be asked, and most patients never know to ask it.
The last 15 minutes of the interview pulled in a thread that runs underneath everything else: faith, family, and a worldview oriented toward serving rather than extracting. It's not a "health lesson" in the clinical sense, but it's the reason Dr. D operates the way he does, and skipping it misses the point of the framework.
His view on faith: he reads epigenetics as proof that a lifestyle aligned with the creator's blueprint will literally impact your DNA for the better. His business north star is to look at God's medicine — nature, whole foods, ancestral wisdom — before reaching for synthetic intervention. His view on his marriage: he prayed for and "designed" the woman he wanted to marry before he met her, and the relationship is, in his framing, the elixir to the formula. Without it, none of the rest works.
Whether or not the faith framing maps to your worldview, the operational lesson underneath it is universal: build a system whose center of gravity is something larger than the next quarterly result. A doctor whose only metric is patient throughput will optimize for throughput. A doctor whose metric is "did this patient leave with a real path to wellness" will optimize for that. The system you build is downstream of the metric you choose. That's true in medicine, and it's true in every other operator domain.
If you're an operator reading this, the practical takeaways from Dr. D's framework are straightforward and actionable. They don't require turning your life upside down. They require pulling on a few specific levers that compound over years.
That last point is where this breakdown overlaps with everything else we write about at Style Marking. The mental model that makes a $100M business sellable — documented systems, real dashboards, decision-making on data instead of founder intuition — is the same mental model that makes a body sustainable for 50 more years. The operator who runs that playbook on their company and not their body is solving half the equation. The operator who runs it on both is the one who gets to enjoy the exit.
Dr. D is the founder of Biohacks Medical, a 50-state-licensed telehealth and biotech company. He trained as a traditional physician, completed research at the Cleveland Clinic Florida's Metabolic Institute, and walked away from conventional medicine in his early 30s after watching 1,000-pound patients die in surgery while top metabolic doctors ate hamburgers and drank Coca-Cola in research meetings. He is described as the pioneer of biohacking and the celebrity-favorite doctor by the School of Hard Knocks team.
Dr. D's perspective is that the human body is designed to consume only what it recognizes — water, whole foods, and naturally occurring ingredients. Synthetic chemicals, dyes like Yellow 6 and Red 40, titanium dioxide, and "natural flavors" are not recognized by the body and trigger immune attack. Over time that immune attack becomes self-attack (autoimmune disease) and chronic inflammation that he links to cancer risk.
Dr. D calls fasting "the best thing you could do" for longevity in the interview. He cites the 1915-1916 Nobel Prize-winning work on autophagy — the body's process of eating its own damaged cells — and notes that all ancient civilizations and holy books reference fasting. He distinguishes intermittent fasting from prolonged fasting (72-96 hour water fasts) and describes the latter as where deeper biochemical processes engage.
Dr. D names magnesium as the deficiency he sees most across his patient population. He links low magnesium to headaches, high blood pressure, and cardiac arrhythmias including torsades de pointes. He also flags vitamin D3 and broader micronutrient deficiencies as common.
Dr. D's five pillars given to a 23-year-old in the interview: (1) seven to eight hours of sleep every night, (2) no processed foods, (3) incorporate prolonged fasting (working up toward 72 hour water fasts), (4) take inventory of your toxin exposure — food, water, plastics, endocrine disruptors, (5) supplement with high-quality micronutrients including magnesium and vitamin D3.
Dr. D describes epigenetics as the study of gene expression — the on/off switches that determine which of your genes are active. He notes that humans only have 22,000-25,000 genes (less than half of a grain of rice's 52,000), and the complexity of human biology comes from how those genes are expressed, not how many we have. Each gene can have up to 30,000 permutations of expression. He calls it "the crypto of medicine" because it is the next frontier and where his Biohacks supplement product is targeted.
Dr. D's perspective is that he personally does not subscribe to the mRNA COVID vaccine and questions the speed of its approval process. He flags lingering spike protein from both the virus itself and from the shots as a real clinical issue he sees in patients — including in himself, where he developed atrial fibrillation a few months after his own COVID infection at age 36. He emphasizes this is a personal medical opinion and that patients should work with metabolic cardiologists to evaluate their own situation.
Dr. D's number-one recommended test is an epigenetic clock that measures your rate of biological aging. Companies like True Diagnostic publish studies with Harvard, Yale, and Duke and can predict mortality timing with roughly 92% accuracy plus or minus five years if current habits continue. This is the test he says reframes the entire patient conversation from symptom management to prevention.
Dr. D's perspective is that a 23-year-old with low testosterone needs detoxification and nutrient repletion, not hormone replacement. He recommends running an environmental-toxin panel to identify endocrine disruptors (BPA, phthalates, microplastics, heavy metals), reducing exposure, and supporting micronutrients (magnesium, vitamin D3, antioxidants). His framing: the body at 23 still wants to do its own work — the priority is removing what's blocking it.
The systems-level thinking Dr. D applies to longevity — data first, root cause over symptoms, dashboards over guesses — is exactly how we build software for our clients. Free 30-minute bottleneck audit: we map every choke point in your operation, tell you which ones to fix first, and quote the custom software, automation, and dashboards that will get you out of the day-to-day. Call or text (320) 360-8285.