Living A Full Life

Biohacking, Debunked

• Full Life Chiropractic • Season 4 • Episode 10

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Tired of being told you’re broken and sold another fix? We pull back the curtain on biohacking and walk through five myths that drain wallets and willpower while ignoring the basics that actually rebuild energy, mood, and metabolism. From “optimize your hormones” to “cold plunges burn fat” and “wearables will make me healthier,” we separate what helps from what hijacks your attention, so you can stop chasing shortcuts and start stacking real wins.

We begin by reframing hormones through behaviors: deep, dark nights, bright mornings, steady meals, and resistance training. Then we explore why cold exposure is a stress tool, not a transformation plan, and how red light therapy can support skin and tissue without replacing nutrition or training. We dig into wearables and data anxiety—when metrics guide change versus when they paralyze—and why supplements should be called add-ons. Along the way, Dr. Enrico Dolchikori shares candid stories, from his father’s cancer turnaround to patients who found a powerful “why” and lost over 100 pounds through structure, not magic.

What emerges is a clean health hierarchy: sleep first, then nutrition quality and quantity, strength training, daily movement, stress management, community and purpose, and only then optimization tools. If you’ve felt pushed into endless tests, shifting protocols, and fear-based marketing, this conversation hands you back the steering wheel. Trade hacks for habits, anxiety for agency, and novelty for consistency. If this resonated, follow the show, share it with someone who needs the reminder, and leave a review so more people can find practical health without the hype.

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Biohacking didn't start as health. It started as insecurity. Now it's a billion-dollar industry convincing people they're broken, so they'll buy gadgets, supplements, and protocols instead of doing the basics. Welcome to another episode of Living a Full Life Podcast. I'm Dr. Enrico Dolchikori, and every week bringing you tips to live a healthier, happier life. How are we doing in 2026? Do you like the new tone? Do you like the new tenacity? Uh, I've been getting good feedback on the first two episodes for this year. It's been good. People are like, I like it, keep going. It's real, it's truthful, it's factual, and we're gonna keep going. No more BS in between to cover all the bases. I hope you know what that means. It's just gonna be straight punch mouth facts of what you can do in under 20 minutes in this podcast so that you can take them home and live a healthier, happier life. That's the goal of this whole thing. Biohacking has always rubbed me the wrong way. Whenever you take what God designed and you start to play with it, and you're like, I'm gonna biohack. You're not gonna hack anything, you're not gonna hack the universe, you're not gonna hack intelligence uh universal design, you're not gonna attack uh biohack or hack anything, uh uh intelligence, uh innate intelligence, good luck. You're never gonna do it. Uh, you're never gonna be smarter than how everything has been designed. So I've never liked the biohacking. Hacking, a computer hacking, a software hacking, fine. That's coding and computer. I get that, but biohacking means we're gonna hack biology, and there's really no way of doing this. So it is what it sounds like. Biohack, you're just gonna hack it up and mess it up. So there's not really what it is. What I think what biohacking was supposed to be when it first came out, when it people meant to say it at the beginning, was you know, track data, make small measurable improvements with cardiovascular health, endurance, stamina, improving performance on top of solid fundamentals. That's how I looked at biohacking. I was kind of excited about it. But what it really became is a distraction, uh, a status symbol, an excuse to avoid discipline, a way to feel productive without actually changing behavior. I like that. I mean, it was just for social media, honestly. That's where you see all the biohacking stuff. You don't see a PhD scientist saying, here's some biohacking tips. They'll never say that. They don't say that. This is all for social media, it's all for clicks, it's all for attention. Uh, and most people are trying to optimize a system that they never built in the first place. There's nothing to optimize if we don't build the fundamentals of our health. And the biggest biohacking myths is what today is going to be all about. And I just want you to be aware. That way you don't get fooled. You don't get fooled into something that's gonna cut time short or give you a quick fix when there really isn't one. Myth number one: I need to optimize my hormones. Hmm. I didn't know you were designed poorly. I didn't know your hormones were just designed poorly. Uh, most hormone issues today are not a hormone issue. You need sleep, you need proper sleep. People start inconsistently sleeping in their teenage years and 20s. Gen Z is speaking up about this. They're like, as a teenager, I've got so much work to do. I stay up late, I'm on my tablet, I'm on my phone, I'm getting the dopamine hit. I go to bed at 1 a.m. I have to wake up at 5 a.m., 6 a.m. to get to school. They're saying this stuff at 17 years of age. What are we expecting their hormones to be in their 20s and 30s and 40s? A complete wreck. So most hormone issues today are chronic sleep deprivation. You need to go into hibernation. You literally just need to say F you to everyone and get a cave and come out three months later. Just go to sleep and come back out and three months later, your body will reset. Humans can't hibernate for that long. But you get the point. We need to, you know, chronic sleep deprivation is the big hormone issue. Blue light at night, excess caffeine, under eating, and overstimulation. That sums up 80% of Americans today. Overstimulated, they're actually under-eating. They're eating under 2,000 calories a day. It's just processed food. That's the issue. They drank two, three, four, five cups of coffee a day. They got tons of blue light exposure, and their sleep sucks. Well, that's a hormone disaster. You don't need Dutch tests, saliva panels, or$2,000 lab bundles. You need darkness at night. You need to blackout your room. We have three episodes on sleep. Go back and listen to them. They're they're fantastic. Yeah, I did them, but they're fantastic about sleep and how we have to darken the room, remove digital clocks from the room, remove blinking lights, remove everything, and go into a true night. If you've ever been outside of a city at night camping outside, it's eerie, it's dark, unless it's a full moon. So sun in the morning when we wake up, we need to open a window. We need to get the direct light to our retina, lifting weights, and consistent meals. We have to space out our meal eating every day, just every three, four hours, eat. And that creates this healthy dopamine whole, well, not just dopamine, all neurotransmitters. It helps create this cyclical hormonal cascade of the endocrine system doing its thing. It just requires those things. That's the source of it. So if we don't have darkness at night, we don't wake up with sun in the morning, we don't lift a little bit of resistance training, there's no biohacking. There's no biohack to go around that. I hope we're getting the point of this. The fundamentals cannot be cheated. Myth number two: cold plunges burn fat and build discipline. Absolutely not. They do not cause meaningful fat loss. Uh, they do not replace training. They can actually blunt muscle growth if misused. Cold exposure is a stress tool, not a transformational tool. If your life is already stressed, adding stress isn't health. It's stupidity. Yeah, there you go. Do I need to talk more about cold plunges? Myth number three: red light therapy fixes everything. We're big fans of red light therapy, can help skin and localize tissue healing. That's true. It's actually true. Does not undo poor diet, does not increase muscle mass, does not override insulin resistance. You don't glow your way out of bad habits. We use it with our weight loss program because it helps with lymphatic flow, collagen production, wrinkles, skin, subepidermis, uh, epidermis, uh, psoriasis, eczema. It has some benefits to it. But the whole weight loss thing, the the way we get people to lose weight is our program intermittent fasting and whole foods throughout the day with a calorie deficit. I mean, that's simple from the 1900s. We know we've known how to lose weight. Red light just adds benefit to the process, and there's many benefits to it, but it does not fix everything. Myth number four wearables will make me healthier. Fitbit, Apple Watch, Aura Rings, Whoop. Useful tools, but here's the truth on them. If you already sleep poorly, eat poorly, and don't train, then tracking it just gives you data about your failures. That's the truth on that. You don't need more metrics, you need behavior changes. No reason to buy anything unless you change your behavior and you want to monitor and metric the new behaviors. That's kind of neat. That's good information. But to keep reminding yourself that you have poor sleep and you don't you f and you can't breathe for 11 seconds between breaths because of apnea, and you're restless and you get up three times at night to go pee, and you know, and you see that every day. I mean, are you really is there any new information that you're getting from that? We're not changing any of your habits, you're just looking at data. Now, data is important by getting those data points. You may make changes in your life, which is absolutely fantastic. But if you're like me, you've been wearing your Apple Watch for five, six, seven years. I don't know what model we're on now, series five now or something like that. You're wearing it. The data's cool. I look at it. I like the sleep score thing, that first thing that pops up in the morning. You did really well last night. You got a 98. I'm like, oh, good. Went to bed on time, got my eight hours, did you know that's good, that's good to know. Uh, and it's good to know when I don't do well. Hey, you had a poor sleep last night. Why? That's that's good information as well. But we're buying these things and giving these things to people for Christmas for New Year's resolutions, and then they're looking at that for motivation. The motivation is not coming from a device, it's not coming from anywhere, it comes from you and you wanting to make a change. If you don't want to make a change, you won't make a change. You have to really want it. And that want, I realized in the first time in my life with my father. My father, that was it. He was 67 at the time. That puts me at oh, what was I 20? I don't know, 27. Yeah, because he's about 40, 39 years older than me. So I was about 28. And he got diagnosed with colon cancer. Scared everybody, scared everybody in the family, you know. Uh, but finally, for the first time in his life, scared him. Tough Italian immigrant. He looked like, you know, uh Danny DeVito. Uh not even. He looked like uh the guy from Taxi. Yeah, Danny DeVito. I'm all right. Danny, he looks like Danny, a skinnier Danny DeVito, if you look at him, slash um, slash uh goodfellas. What's the guy's name? De Niro. DeVito and De Niro. He's got a half half there, right? So he comes in, tough guy. Always been tough. Never really seen the guy scared, worried, concerned, yeah, but finally scared with cancer, stage three, colon cancer. And that's where the changes finally come. Immediately. We're like, Dad, you need to do this and this and this. Here's your medical options, chemotherapy and radiation. Here's your holistic options, IV therapy, chiropractic, naturopathy, and this and this and this. If you've heard my story, you know it. 99 days later, his cancer is gone. No chemo, no radiation. Um, but he changed his entire life for the first time. We've been telling him you can't, you know, you can't eat salami every day. That's nitrates, you can't do this every day. You know, you can't eat that much, you know, bread, can't skip meals, dad. You gotta drink some water, geez. Do you even drink water? Like, didn't change anything until then. He's still here today. He's 80, gonna turn in in a few weeks here. He's gonna turn 82. So he's doing great, uh, cancer free, you know, no issues there. But uh the the fear, the fear that comes to make it that's what took him to the point to change. And I realized, well, maybe there's a lot of people even listening right now that that's what it's gonna take for them to change. And there's no hope for me as a doctor to help them. Sad, but it's true. There's a few people that it's gonna take something like that. And unfortunately, when it comes to cardiovascular, the first symptom of a heart attack is death. Uh we we lost someone last year, a close friend, my age, 42, died in his backyard from a massive heart attack, left the nine-year-old and a five-year-old. That was his first symptom, was a heart attack. And his first symptom of the heart attack was death. So sometimes we don't get a second chance, and that's unfortunate. But for the rest of us, don't use fear to motivate you, use will to motivate you. Something that motivates you moving forward. We have some great success stories with weight loss patients over the years, where they're like, they you know, they stood up and helped other people lose weight or or get healthy, and they would say, I just wanted to walk my daughter down her wedding aisle. She's a she was a teenager at the time. Now she's about to get married, you know, seven years later, and he dropped 100 pounds. He's like, That was my goal. Did he lose 100 pounds? Yeah, he lost 135 pounds. Uh the so that's a will, you know, that's a will, a reason to move forward. And that's what you should set your goals around. Otherwise, you're never gonna achieve the goals. You're never gonna pursue them because there is no will, there is no desire, and it's not strong enough, it's not big enough. That's really it. Myth number five: supplements fix lifestyle damage. Now, you know, for me, coming from me, I'm a big fan of supplements. We got many podcasts on specific supplements, many supplements, the ones you should do, the ones you should avoid, the basics for your children, for your infants, for pregnancy. We've done many episodes on supplements. You know I'm a fan of them. Supplements should be called add-ons, not solutions. There is no supplement to fix anything. No supplement replaces protein, fiber, movement, or sleep. None. There's none. If supplements worked like people think, construction workers would need IVs, prison populations would be shredded, and third world countries would dominate physique sports because they could just take a supplement. But it's not like that. They don't, because lifestyle beats capsules every single time. It's just the way it is. So those myths have to be crushed and thrown in the trash can for 2026 for you. Just do not pursue them, do not unless the basics have been met. The biohacking industry secret is a business model. It's not any type of uh physiological or biology at all. It's number one to convince you you're broken. I've I'm seeing it now, and I you know what my side gig is? Helping health professionals market their businesses online. Google, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok across all platforms. I've learned the background of advertising as I teach these people to be successful in their practice and attract new patients to their office. So even though we collectively are working holistically and um positively for the community to bring them into chiropractic to show them holistic health care and truly want to help people, the biohacking industry does the same marketing procedure that convinces you you're broken. Number one, that's where the biohacking goes. Oh, you need to hack your biology because you're broken in this and this hormones and um muscle growth. That's why you can't get bigger muscles, and that's why you can't regulate your hormones is because you're broken. Number two, sell you a test to prove it. Here, do this Dutch test, here, do this uh blood test, and we'll show and we'll see if anything's wrong. Oh, see, it's wrong. I got something to sell you. Sell you a protocol to fix it, and then keep moving the goalpost forward and forward and forward when the magic pills aren't working. That's the protocol, and then it's cyclical. Keep selling you the next package, keep convincing you the other thing is wrong. No, you got chronic uh PCOS polycystic ovary syndrome, you know, in women. You have this because your hormones are missed, you spend$2,000 doing that. Oh, I get what you I guess your hormones were a little bit off. The next thing to do is let's test for mold. You might have a mold issue, and then it comes in, yeah. You see, you do have microplot, you do have some mold in your let's let's remediate your house and you, and then now you're$20,000 into it, and you still got polycystic ovary syndrome, and you lost a lot of money. Wonderful, right? What a great thing to sell people on. Health became a subscription model with this biohacking crap. And most people don't need fixing, they need structure. Our simple weight loss program, and I'm not pushing that on this podcast, over these last six years, has been so simple, so easy. I look at it, I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. Everyone signs up for it for 900 bucks. They all lose 25 pounds in six weeks, the first six weeks. Uh 20 plus pounds is there is our guarantee. And then they may do a second round for six weeks to hit their goal if they have 40 pounds to lose or 50 pounds to lose or 135 pounds to lose, whatever it is. They'll just keep repeating the process under doctor supervision and get to their goal, all because of accountability and structure. That's really it. We're not selling them any supplements. We actually tell them to not take anything during this, to just eat whole foods. Oh, it's it's been eye-opening as as your years as a clinician keep moving forward and you start to see the design of how it all works, God's design, universal design, innate intelligence, how the body works. That's what I'm talking about. Once you start to see that, you're like, oh, oh, there is no cheats. There is never, there never was. There never was a cheat. I thought I could do tons of cardio to stay healthy. I was like, man, if I stay, if I do cardio, I'll stay skinny. Nope. Nope. I'm predisposed, exomorph. I just put on weight, and I use that to my advantage now in my 40s when I finally I did it in my 20s, and I know I could do it. I put on muscle, muscle just goes on. I could put on 10 pounds of muscle in a year, uh, just by working out, and other people really struggle, and just by eating food, nothing crazy. And uh, so I'm an ectomorph and I knew that. But if I don't work out, I don't stay disciplined, I'll put on fat very quickly. That's just how it works, that's how my body works. My thyroid panels are good, my hormones are good, and I'm starting to see that in my 40s. And as now I'm catching it now as things start to slide. Now hormones do start to slide down. Now energy starts, it's just the part of life that happens as time goes on. And I'm like, dang, why did I wait so long to catch it? But I was busy doing other things like starting a family and raising them and starting businesses and doing all that stuff. So I see it through myself, and I hope it shows you as well. So those myths. Why this is making people worse, in my opinion, is the biohacking culture increases health anxiety. Everyone's like anxious about their health. And they don't even know what's wrong. They don't haven't even been diagnosed with anything, but they're anxious. It creates obsession with numbers. I should be here, but I'm here. I should weigh this much, but I weigh this much. I should be getting restful sleep and popping out of bed in the morning, uh, ready to rock and roll within a few seconds, because some Instagram person told you that. It encourages self-diagnosis. And with AI and everything, it's very easy to self-diagnose, which could help or could stray you on the wrong path. And it pulls people away from intuition and consistency. People now know their heart rate variability, but can't cook a meal. That's backwards. It's great. You know, metrics about your biology that 20, 30 years ago, people didn't even know what their heart rate variability was or what their even their blood pressure was. They'd have to go over to the pharmacy, sit in the machine, do the blood pressure cut cuff, and check it. And uh, if they never went to the pharmacy, they would never check their blood pressure, really. And now today you have all the data and Gen Z can't cook a meal. Hey, can I have an omelet? Uh, you just throw three eggs in a frying pan and just shake them. Well, that's it. And uh, they have a tough time to even do cook, cook a meal. I mean, that's the issue, and not just Gen Z, even my generation. Our parents did our baby boomers did everything for us. They came from nothing and wanted everything for their kids, and the Gen X and Gen Millennials were taught here, you get the spoils. Here you go. These are all the things I never had. And as we got all this stuff, now millennials are raising their kids, and like, you don't need all this stuff, they're not getting all this stuff, but they're also not getting life skills, they need the life skills to move forward as well. So that's backwards. If we taught our kids how to eat healthy meals, cook. Healthy meals, prepare healthy meals. Uh, what's bad? I remember I was on a flight. This was three years ago, and my daughter was probably seven or eight at the time, and it was an Air Canada flight from New York to Calgary. And uh, there was a because it was a long flight, they had them the meal. And they're like, Hey, what would you like? And there was a like like a pizza and it came with a snack, and the snack was a Kit Kat. She thought she was gonna get the Halloween-size Kit Kat. She got the whole Kit Kat bar, and she was her eye eyes lit up. I'm like, Go ahead, sweetie, enjoy. And she eats half of one stick, because she knows that's a proper serving. And she looks at me, she's like, Daddy, could I die if I eat all this? Like, because she knows sugar is bad, and I've made it bad, and it made me take a step back and be like, Whoa, here's a great opportunity for a conversation. Sugar, sweetie, doesn't kill, won't kill you. Like, that's not what I wanted you to get from that, but it does damage, it causes damage in the body, and that's why you sometimes you feel a little anxious after you eat it or you get a little hyper or it can cause physiological effects in you. And we we had a great discussion about it, and I was like, no, sweetie, don't be scared about this, but I'm really glad you're you're health conscious about that. Should you eat the whole thing? She's like, No, I shouldn't, Daddy. I'm like, no, no, no, you shouldn't eat that. Save it for later. But that was a good portion I ate. One stick is good. You can probably eat the two if you want. And she was like, no, I'll save it. But her rebuttaling after a year or two of talking about sugar and Halloween and all the all the times we eat and how sugar is bad for you, her that's how I created this monster for her of how bad sugar is. And yes, I want her to know it's bad, and yes, I want her to know to not eat it. So that was really cool. The actual health hierarchy is sleep, nutrition quality and quantity, strength training, daily movement, stress management, community and purpose, then optimization tools. We have this all backwards. People won't even get proper sleep, number one, and they'll put optimization tools and functional medical doctors ahead of the stuff and peptides and shots. We've reversed the order, and that's why we are where we are. Biohacking is what people do when they want the benefits of discipline without the discomfort of discipline. You like that? I like that one. I told you, 2026 is all gonna be punches, left hooks and right hooks. Healthy people don't track everything, aren't obsessed with labs, eat consistently, move their bodies, recover naturally, and live their lives. They're not hacking biology, they're respecting it. You don't need another device, protocol, supplement, or test. You need to do the boring things consistently. Health isn't found in optimization, it's found in responsibility. Microphone drop. I am out. I will catch you next week. Stay well, stay healthy. God bless.

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Dr. Enrico Dolcecore

Host
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Dr. Christine Hafer

Co-host