If you could know the date of your death, would you want to find out? It’s one of humanity’s age old questions. Is it better to be able to plan and prepare for the end of your life in full understanding of the time remaining? Or is it better to live without the weight of true knowledge as to just how exceptionally fleeting your life may be?
For UFC president Dana White, at least, it appears that the quest for answers made it a risk worth taking. Unfortunately, the information he got back was anything other than good. According to his blood work biomarkers, the 53-year-old had just a decade left to live.
White talked about the revelation on a recent episode of the Action Junkeez podcast and how it’s triggered a bunch of positive changes in his life. The mixed martial arts promoter was apparently turned on to the process via radio host Kerri Kasem—daughter of famed DJ Casey Kasem. It’s all part of a treatment plan offered by “human biologist & mortality expert” Gary Brecka.
“So this guy can take your blood and your DNA and tell you when you’re gonna die,” enthused White. “And he’s right within a month. How crazy is that? So I was fucking obsessed, I had to know.
“So he’s down in Miami... So I become fucking obsessed with finding out the month I’m gonna die. We’re down there for my son’s 21st birthday party in Miami. I connect with this guy and they come in and do my blood work and they scrape the insides of your cheeks to do your DNA. And I’m gonna find out—it’s a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday we’re down there—the following Wednesday is when my results are supposed to be back.
“So he calls me—all I’m talking about is finding out this date—and he says, ‘I’m gonna come out, personally, and walk you through your blood work,” he continued. “And I’m like, ‘Motherf-cker.’ I wanted to know today, when this was gonna happen... So, he ends up coming out, he sits down for three-and-a-half hours and goes through my blood work. And I’m all fucked up. My triglycerides are like 764—they should be down between 80 and 150—and everything else that could possibly be bad is bad. He gave me 10.4 years to live. This was 16 weeks ago. And he says, ‘If you don’t change these things that you’re gonna do, this is your life expectancy right now.’”
Fortunately for White—at least according to Brecka—while the news was bad, there was something the UFC boss could do about it. All provided, of course, that he follow Brecka’s plan of weight loss and dietary modification.
“First of all, the thing that freaked me out the most was: he did my blood work—I didn’t tell this guy jack shit about me, my medical history, what was going on with me personally—he told me everything that was wrong with me,” White revealed. “Shit that I didn’t even tell my wife. Told me what was wrong with me, told me everything that was wrong with me, from my blood work.
“So he says, ‘If you do what I tell you to do for the next ten weeks, I promise you I’ll change your whole life.’ So I’m one of these people that, if I set my mind to do something, I absolutely do it. So I did everything he said, to the letter. I lost 30 pounds. My legs were so fucked up 13 weeks ago, I couldn’t tie my shoes. I Couldn’t bend over to tie my shoes, because my legs were fucked up. I could barely walk some days.
“Sleep apnea, snoring; I had these doctors that I went to for 10 years, asking them, ‘What’s wrong with my legs?’ They couldn’t fucking tell me,” White explained. “I told them I was having problems with sleep apnea and snoring. They sent me to one of those sleep studies where you go sleep for four fucking hours. And then they give you a fucking C-Pap machine that a 400 lb fucking guy uses. I sleep with it for 20 minutes and rip it off my face and throw it on the floor. No more sleep apnea, I don’t snore anymore. Everything is gone in 10 fucking weeks. I’ve been working with doctors for 10 years that couldn’t do it.
At one point, White said that his snoring was so bad that he was throwing up every night as a result. It got to the point that he was starting to lose his voice due to the damage to his esophagus. But now?
“I feel like I’m 35-years-old again. Swear to god, I feel like I’m 35 again.”
‘He gave me 10.4 years to live’ - Dana White says health scare prompted lifestyle change
