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Dr. Tom O’ Bryan on The Natural Solution to Gut Healing, Autoimmune Disease, and Restoring Brain Functions

https://www.learntruehealth.com/dr-tom-o-bryan-on-the-natural-solution-to-gut-healing-autoimmune-disease-and-restoring-brain-functions

Highlights:

What is Intestinal Alkaline Phosphatase (IAP)
Benefits of eating organic fruits and vegetables
The pyramid of health
Phthalate-free vs. BPA-free

Dr. Tom O’Bryan, gluten expert and founder of theDr.com, talks about the importance of eating more whole foods and going gluten-free. He shares how to make fresh applesauce and why we should eat them daily. He also talks about phthalates and other toxic chemicals off-gassed by the things around us.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Well, it has definitely been a few weeks since I posted an episode. You know, when I started the podcast, I was very consistent with posting three episodes a week. I want to get back in the swing of things. My goal is to definitely start doing two a week. I’d love to be able to do that.

Unfortunately, my old computer broke, the one that my husband built me, and so he had to build me a new computer and that’s what’s taking so long. So finally, I’ve got a new computer. I’m back up and running, and I am so excited to bring you today’s interview. This last week, I’ve interviewed some really amazing guests. And this interview today that you’re going to hear is probably up in my top five, and that’s saying something.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan has got some really interesting things, we had such a great conversation, and he’s definitely going to be back on the show. Strap in your seatbelt and get ready to have a fantastic time listening to this episode. I know you’re also going to want to share it with your friends because it’s a great one.

Another thing you’re definitely going to want to know and share with your friends is that my favorite Magnesium Soak has their biggest sale of the year going on right now and for the next week. Check it out, go to livingthegoodlifenaturally.com, and you have to use coupon code LTH to get the discount. That’s coupon code LTH as in Learn True Health. It’s going on from November 20th to 29th. The sale is 30% off plus, for certain orders, they’re going to get a free gift. I’m excited for you to get that.

We have over 200 testimonials of listeners sharing their stories about how this Magnesium Soak has changed their lives in the Learn True Health Facebook group. I have absolutely just fallen in love with this Magnesium Soak over the years. Our son who always used to fight sleep, we would put it in his bath, and he would ask to be put to sleep. He would ask to be put down. After a bath he’d say, mama, I’m tired. I’m too tired to read books. Let’s just go to bed. I was like, whoa, this is amazing. My kid who will bounce off the walls until 1:00 in the morning wants to go to bed on time after using the Magnesium Soak in his bath. So that was the biggest conveyancer for me.

But I’ve had friends who no longer have migraines after using the Magnesium Soak, who are no longer in chronic pain. It helps balance hormones. It’s so phenomenal. Magnesium is the number one most important mineral. We need 60. There are 60 essential minerals the body needs, and magnesium is used the most by the body.

I have a really long and amazing episode about magnesium with Dr. Carolyn Dean who is both a naturopathic physician and a medical doctor. She’s been practicing for 40 plus years, and she’s really well known as the magnesium doctor. When she came on the show, I think it was something like a three-hour interview. It is really long and amazing, just filled with great information. You can find that by searching learntruehealth.com if you want to search for that episode, a great listen.

And what she shared was that magnesium is used in over 1800 enzymatic processes in the body as the number one most used mineral. The second most used is zinc at 800 enzymatic processes, so that’s a really big gap. Calcium is not even in the top two, and we always think calcium is the most important. Well, it is important, it’s just not the most used. So magnesium is the most used. Actually, magnesium is also the one that we’re most deficient in or the most common deficiency.

We talk in episode 294, which you definitely want to go listen to with Kristen Bowen, as she shares information on how you can tell you have magnesium deficiency, the best blood test to get if you want to test for it, and then talks about her experience with soaking in this magnesium. Now she also has a cream for applications if you have a specific pain or tension. My favorite is the Magnesium Soak, but I love the cream as well for local applications. If you just have tension in your legs or in your shoulders, it’s fantastic.

If you know anyone with restless leg syndrome, that is a magnesium deficiency. We’ve heard from listeners saying that their Restless Leg Syndrome has disappeared after using this Magnesium Soak. Kristen Bowen did some lab tests and discovered that we uptake grams of magnesium from this magnesium soak. It’s different from soaking in flakes or Epsom salt. It is far more efficient for the body to absorb it in the form that it is in. In the natural format it is in, the body uptakes it very easily instead of those other forms. And so, we see that people absorb grams. We’ve even seen people absorb 20 grams of magnesium in a one-hour foot soak, which is phenomenal.

Now I’ve had intravenous magnesium before and I know what that feels like. And when I use the magnesium soak, it feels very similar to that. I can actually feel it enter my body. So I definitely want you to try it. If you haven’t tried it already, you should absolutely go to livingthegoodlifenaturally.com, and you have to use coupon code LTH to get the listener discount. You want to use that to make sure that you get the best price you’re going to get, the 30% off. You might get that gift. She’s giving select orders a special gift, so I’m excited about that.

So go to livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and use coupon code LTH. Do that between now and November 29th. And if you’re listening to this after November 29th, you should still get it anyway because the LTH coupon code will give you a discount. Black Friday sale will be over after the 29th, but you’ll still get a discount if you use the coupon code LTH after the 29th, and it is still worth getting the Magnesium Soak and try it for yourself because of how amazing you will feel.

You can also join the Learn True Health Facebook group and check out over 200 testimonials that we have written there. Listeners, over the years, have been sharing their experience with it and how fantastic it is. And if you want to learn more about it, you can listen to episode 294. You can also listen to episode 381, but listen to episode 294 first because Kristen Bowen shares her story about how she was so sick she was about 97 pounds having 30 seizures a day in a wheelchair barely able to talk, and she went from that to being so healthy that she has also turned her life around, and now she’s helping others do the same, kind of like me.

I was really sick. Natural medicine I used to turn my life around, and now I’ve dedicated my life to spreading this information so that other people can no longer be suffering. Suffering should be an option. It should be optional because this information is out there. We just have to spread it. That’s why it’s so important to take these episodes and share them with your friends and family, those who no longer want to suffer who want answers.

Listen, MDs, medical doctors, they have their place, right? Drugs have their place. But the problem is, we’re raised to believe that they’re the only thing when they’re not. They’re just one small piece of the puzzle when it comes to healing your body, and there are real remedies out there, there are real solutions out there to support your body’s ability to heal itself. And that’s what this episode is about today. And magnesium is one of those huge, huge fundamental keys because if you have a magnesium deficiency, there are over 200 different symptoms of magnesium deficiency.

Think about it, if your body uses magnesium in 1800 enzymatic processes, you could have migraines, you could have digestive problems, you could have muscle problems, you could have nerve problems. Magnesium is used in every system of the body. If you go to an MD, they’re not going to look at you and say, oh, your migraines are caused by a magnesium deficiency. That’s not how they’re trained. They’re not trained to look at nutrient deficiency like that. They’re trained to go, oh, you have a migraine. Here, take this medication.

Medication helps to mitigate a symptom, it doesn’t get to the root cause and supports the body’s ability to heal itself. My show is all about the tools you need and the things you can learn to achieve your true health. And the Magnesium Soak is one of those huge tools that I believe can help everyone because magnesium deficiency is such a common thing, it causes so many symptoms, and has a very simple solution. This Magnesium Soak, you bypass the intestinal tract so you don’t have to take it orally so your body can absorb more through the skin into the lymphatic system.

Check out those two interviews, 294 and 381, to listen more about the Magnesium Soak. Use coupon code LTH when you go to livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. Get the Magnesium Soak. And then come join the Learn True Health Facebook group and check out all the testimonials and share your own. I’d love to hear your story, especially parents who go, oh my gosh, I can’t believe my kids. I put it in their bath and I can’t believe I’m noticing they’re calmer. I’m noticing they’re happier. Or children who have aches and pains from growing pains, oh yeah, this is fantastic.

When your kids are in pain, you don’t want to fill them up with drugs, right? Pain receptors are turned off by magnesium. When there’s a magnesium deficiency, pain receptors can’t turn off. Just like muscle cramps, muscle uses magnesium to relax, and it uses calcium to contract. So when you have a magnesium deficiency, it can actually have a hard time relaxing and so the contraction stays there, which causes a buildup of lactic acid and ischemia, and that’s incredibly painful.

So there are simple solutions, and these magnesium products are something I believe in fully because they’ve helped my life, they’ve helped my family, they’ve helped my friends. You don’t even know how many friends are now lifelong customers of Living the Good Life Naturally because I will always carry Magnesium Cream on me. I always soak my friends’ feet in magnesium when they come to visit. I even bring it over to their house sometimes, their homes. It’s been a wonderful gift and a blessing to share this. And then of course hearing over 200 listeners who’ve shared so far. Listeners keep sharing with me the benefits that they’ve seen.

This episode is in my top favorites. I’m very, very excited for you to hear it today. Dr. Tom O’Bryan has some wonderful insights to share, and I hope that you get a chance to listen to the whole episode and also share it with your friends because I just know this episode’s going to make a big difference in many people’s lives.

Come join the Learn True Health Facebook group. I’d love to see you there. It’s a fantastic community where we all uplift each other, support each other, answer each other’s questions, and increase about holistic health issues that we’re all looking to heal. And thank you. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast. I feel truly blessed to be able to continue to spread this information to help you learn true health. Enjoy today’s interview.

[00:11:21] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 469. I am so excited for today’s guest this is something that my listeners have been begging for, have been asking for. To answer the question, where did my disease come from and how can I reverse it? How can I get to the root and stop being given prescription after prescription? I can’t tell you how many listeners are told by their doctors that they will always have to be on medication for the rest of their life, only to find out later that that’s not the case. That’s not the truth.

And it’s not that their doctors are evil. It’s that their doctors are misinformed because the entire medical system is filled with myths, and frankly, medical lies. And what I love about what our guest today does, Dr. Thomas O’Bryan, is he cuts through those lies, he cuts those myths. And with real grounded science, he shows you the root cause of disease and how you can finally get a grip, a foothold on your health.

I am so excited to have you on the show because your latest endeavor is Betrayal: The Autoimmune Disease Solution They’re Not Telling You. There are so many myths, and they’ve really muddied the waters when it comes to autoimmune disease because that is such a cash cow for the medical system, frankly. They don’t have any stake or any desire to reverse it, to prevent it, to stop it, but they’d love to test for it and to prescribe medications for the rest of your life. And again, I don’t see any one individual doctor is evil or has this malicious intent, but the system as a whole is designed to keep us sick and suffering, not designed to make us healthy.

So we have to seek out doctors like Dr. Tom O’Bryan in order to learn how we can achieve true health. Dr. O’Bryan, it is a pleasure to have you on the show today. Welcome.

[00:13:33] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Thank you, Ashley. It’s a pleasure to be with you. It truly is. I don’t think I’ve ever had an introduction like that before. That’s perfect. That’s right on the money.

[00:13:44] Ashley James: I’m on fire. I’m on fire. You lit me up. We had a great conversation before we hit record, and you lit a fire under me. I got a little preview today before we hit record of what Tom is going to talk about here, and boy oh boy are we going to have a fun show. Strap yourselves in and get ready to hit the share button, copy and paste, and just send this to every single one of your friends because they’re going to want to hear today’s show.

Now we keep hearing gorgeous birds in the background. I’m super jealous, but Dr. O’Bryan lives in Costa Rica. Is that right?

[00:14:20] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Yes, yes. My wife and I used to live in Northern Italy, a very beautiful area called Lago di Garda or Lake Garda. In March of last year, I was on a speaking tour in the US, and so my wife went to Dublin to visit friends. We heard that the epicenter of this viral scare outside of China was Northern Italy. And we said, what, what? It turned out, it was about an hour away from where we lived. I didn’t know what this thing was at the time, but I said, honey, we are not going back there. Let’s go to Costa Rica. She said, okay. Because I can be anywhere as long as I have a good internet to do my work, aside from my traveling and teaching.

And so, we came back to where we spent our honeymoon, which is in the Blue Zone of Costa Rica. And for those that don’t know what the Blue Zone is, it’s the one book that everyone must read if you want to be healthy and vibrant in your 80s and 90s and cross a century. This is where the pedal hits the metal. It’s called the Blue Zones. I’ll just give you a little background on that so people will go get the book.

Scientists noticed that there were cultures in the world where there was a large percentage of people that lived into their 90s, over 100 fully participating in society—still working, still active members, not put out to a retirement home. And they identified on a map of the world, they circled these places. And it was Okinawa, Sardinia, Costa Rica, and they call them Blue Zones. And they found a Blue Zone outside of Los Angeles. Everybody said, what, what?

Because in LA, if you run a 10-kilometer run, you breathe in as much particulate matter as if you smoked a pack of cigarettes. That was the air quality in LA about, oh, this was maybe 15 years ago. I don’t know if it’s changed. I’ve not looked into it. But that’s how it was around the turn of the century. You run a 10K run, so you’re out there for about an hour, a little less, a little more. You’re breathing in, inhaling into your lungs as much particulate matter as if you smoked a pack of cigarettes.

So you’re trying to be, but you’re sabotaging yourself. But they found this blue zone area, and it was Loma Linda outside of Los Angeles, which is the home of the Seventh Day Adventists. And so, they realize that it’s not, because I heard Blue Zone I thought oh, blue like the sky. Oh, it’s pure air. Yeah, air pollution is a problem. No, it wasn’t the air. Okay, blue. Oh, water. Maybe it’s clean water. Maybe there are minerals in the water. Well, no, that wasn’t it. They used the blue highlighter on the map. When they circled these areas, they called them Blue Zones. I love that little geeky stuff in there.

But it turns out, it turns out that there are nine factors that are consistent amongst all Blue Zone cultures where people are living into their 80s, 90s, over 100 fully functional, fully active, not on any medications. And the 55-year-old researchers are trying to follow the 90-year-old guy as he goes up the hill, and they’re huffing and puffing. This 90-year-old is just way ahead of them and they can’t keep up with them. These Blue Zones had nine features. So I’m going to tell you the nine features, but I hope that you all read the book because once again, this is where the pedal hits the metal.

You could read hundreds of studies about vitamin C and how helpful it is for you. I would not argue with that, but there are no studies that show long life longevity consistently amongst different cultures around the world except the Blue Zone. And when you read about these nine features of a Blue Zone culture and how do you start transitioning over to some of those, it changes your life. It’s a paradigm shift.

So the nine features. First, move naturally, which means walk, be active outside, not pumping weights. Pumping weights are okay, but that’s not natural to the body. You want balance. Move naturally.

Second, the Japanese term, hara hachi bu, which means eat 20% less. So the way that I have my patients do that is buy smaller dinner plates. Because you’re always going to want to fill your plate to whatever you’re accustomed to, so get smaller plates.

Third, a plant slant, meaning all these cultures eat lots of vegetables, lots of fruits, lots of vegetables, some fruits.

Fourth, grapes of life, meaning a little red wine is great for you.

Five, have a purpose. Now that you’ve got a passion and a purpose in life, it may be you’re 92 years old, and every day or three days a week, your job is you go to the local orphanage and you sit and hold these little babies, and just being beloved to them. But that’s your job and you love your job. It doesn’t matter what it is, but you’ve got a passion for what you’re doing. You’ve got a purpose in what you’re doing with your life.

Six, downshift, means whether you call it prayer, whether you can call it meditation, but having a little quiet time for yourself. Slow down, you allocate a little time for that.

Seven, belong. Belong to a community. Be with like-minded people. It might be the old guy sitting at the coffee shop drinking espresso watching all the pretty young girls walk by, and you feel like Waldorf, and what was the other guy’s name in the Muppets? The two old Ben on the balcony? Whatever that other guy’s name was, I can’t remember right now.

Eight, loved one first. That there’s a primary in your life where they witness you and they witness your life like no one else can.

And ninth, the right tribe. That you are a welcomed member of the family and you are not put out to pasture. That’s the Blue Zones. And when you read the Blue Zone book, it starts to make sense and you start evaluating how you’re living your life right now.

But I tell you all that because it turns out, where we came for our honeymoon is the Blue Zone of Costa Rica. And so, we are living in the Blue Zone now. And the pace here, there’s no great surf towns where we are. With people coming from all over the world to go surfing and to party. This is the quiet. We have butterflies, hummingbirds, dragonflies, and monkeys here. It’s just very peaceful and quiet.

And what I’ve noticed in the last year, so we came here for our honeymoon in March of last year, and we got pregnant within two weeks of being here.

[00:22:05] Ashley James: Oh, congratulations.

[00:22:06] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Oh, thank you. So our son was born here, on New Year’s Eve. And he’s a Tiko, and we now are here and just loving life here in Costa Rica. And understanding more and more about why this is a Blue Zone environment. Why there are so many elders here who are fully functional and dynamic? Maybe we’ll get into a little more of that. But yes, we’re here in Costa Rica today.

[00:22:33] Ashley James: Apart from living longer or the average person living longer, is there evidence to show that there is considerably less disease? In Blue Zones, are there less rates of autoimmune disease?

[00:22:51] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: I’ve not seen epidemiological studies on the Blue Zones and disease across the culture. But what you do see in these people that they’re looking for to qualify and be categorized as Blue Zones, they’re not on any medications. They’re still working. They’re still active in their life. They’re vital people. They’re authentic with life, and they’re not sitting in front of what my father used to call the idiot box just zoning out to the television all day. They’re not doing that. They’re active members of society.

So in terms of the number of diseases they get, we can only assume. If they’re living into their 80s, 90s, and over 100, high percentages of them and they’re not on any medications, we have to assume that they’re not walking around full of disease because of the quality of their life that you can witness.

[00:23:47] Ashley James: It’s so exciting. We’re raised in a system and we have to become these observers. Leave your body mentally, leave your body and get this 30,000-foot view of your life and start to question the status quo. Because we were raised in a system that makes us believe the doctors have all the answers, we wait to get sick, and then we go get a pill.

And one of my mentors, I’m sure you’ve heard of him, Dr. Joel Wallach, he grew up on a farm. He said to his dad when he was a kid, why do we give the calves these pellets to prevent disease? Why don’t we give them vitamins and minerals to prevent disease so they don’t get sick? Because it keeps the cost down. But humans wait to get sick, which keeps the cost up. Why don’t we use the same methods to keep the animals’ costs down for farming? Why don’t we keep that same mentality of let’s prevent disease in animals to keep the cost down, why don’t we also prevent disease in humans by taking the right vitamins, minerals, and eating the right feed for humans?

And that’s what really struck him. And I actually heard his lecture when I was about 12 years old, and it just hit me like a ton of bricks. That totally changed my perspective. I started to see the marketing. I started to see we are constantly marketed to fast-food restaurants, brand foods like Kellogg’s, for example. Were marketed to from a very young age so we grow up believing and we feel good. Oh, we see that familiar brand our whole life. We feel good going there. We get nostalgic. That’s very intentional the, I want to say, brainwashing that takes place.

[00:25:51] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: When you said Kellogg, what went in my mind immediately because I was born in the early ‘50s and so I grew up with all of that. What went in my mind when you said the word Kellogg? K-E-double-L-O-double-good, Kellogg’s best to you. I mean, it’s so burned into my brain listening to that marketing that it automatically came up when you said the word Kellogg. And we all are prey to that kind of subtle input. What do you call the box that hangs on the wall in the bathroom? It’s a medicine cabinet. The medicine cabinet. Why isn’t it a health cabinet? Why isn’t it a health cabinet? It’s a medicine cabinet.

We are brainwashed from day one to accept the healthcare system that we were born in. And unfortunately, usually, the vast majority of people have to get sick enough and frustrated with how the protocols that they’re trusting their experts gave them don’t work, and they have to get so frustrated and sick enough or their child has to get sick enough that they start looking for other alternatives. And then they find what looks like common sense like Joel Wallach was saying about farmers to keep the animals healthy, common sense basic things that completely turn around the way they look at the healthcare system, and we get hardened at times.

It’s kind of like a sequential order of development in getting to the light and stop drinking the Kool-Aid. There is a sequential order that happens for most people, and it’s shows like yours, hopefully, that help people accelerate through all of that so that they don’t have to suffer as much before they’re willing to question their pre-consumed beliefs.

I mean, here’s one that everybody should know. It should have been on the front page of every paper in the country. The New England Journal of Medicine, one of the most prestigious journals in the English language, published a study. They looked at over 30,000 people taking an aspirin a day to prevent cardiovascular incidents. And they followed them for, I don’t recall if it was 7 or 11 years. Somewhere over seven years. I’m not quite sure how many more years they went out. It may have been 20, I just don’t recall.

[00:28:26] Ashley James: It’s a long time, significant.

[00:28:28] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: A long time taking aspirin every day, and what did they find in the reduction of people who were taking an aspirin every day and people who did not take an aspirin every day of the same age, same socio-economic class? What did they find in terms of incidence of strokes, heart attacks, and mortality from cardiovascular disease? Absolutely no difference. Taking an aspirin a day doesn’t work to prevent cardiovascular disease.

[00:28:55] Ashley James: No, it doesn’t work for that, but it does work in that Bayer has made a lot of money.

[00:29:02] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Oh, sure. They were able to spend billions and buy Monsanto.

[00:29:06] Ashley James: They sold a lot of aspirin, but it has not prevented cardiovascular disease.

[00:29:12] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Exactly right. And you take one aspirin and you create pathogenic intestinal permeability in your gut, meaning its slang term is leaky gut. From 1 aspirin, not taking aspirin for 10 days. From one aspirin you get a leaky gut and you alter your microbiome, and it takes weeks and sometimes longer for all of that to heal, if it even does heal. But when you take an aspirin every day, you develop pathogenic intestinal permeability, which we’ll talk about today, the leaky gut, which is the gateway into the development of autoimmune diseases.

But we all believe an aspirin a day is healthy for us because they market it to us that way, and it’s just not true. The epidemiological studies are now very clear about that.

[00:30:03] Ashley James: I believe that if they have to market, if they have to sell something to you for your health, run the other direction. If they’re marketing food to you, there’s a profit to be made and the cost is your health. No one’s running around going make sure you eat apples, make sure you eat kale. Make sure you drink enough water, drink enough clean purified water.

[00:30:30] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Can I tell you about apples for a minute? Can I tell you about apples?

[00:30:33] Ashley James: Yeah.

[00:30:34] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: You just hit a point. First, they’re usually number one or number two on the Environmental Working Group’s Dirty Dozen, meaning they are some of the most polluted fruits or vegetables you can eat with pesticides and insecticides. So you cannot eat conventional apples, and you’ll see why in this talk today. But organic apples, the biological value of organic apples is 34% to 52% higher than conventional apples, meaning they’ve got more of the good stuff, the meat in them.

When we have all of our patients, when you need to heal leaky gut, there are many steps you have to take, but one of them, Mrs. Patient, when you go shopping for your food, always buy organic. But buy about a dozen or a couple of dozen apples. Wash them, don’t peel them. Cut the seeds out, dice them up, put them in a pot, add water to a third the height of the apples in the pot. Throw a little cinnamon in there, maybe a couple of raisins. If you got kids, they like a little sweeter. Turn it on high to boil. In 10 to 15 minutes, you got applesauce.

That’s how easy it is to make applesauce. And you make sure that everyone in your family has at least a tablespoon a day. Why? Because the pectin in applesauce increases, arguably, the number one enzyme in your gut is called intestinal alkaline phosphatase, IAP. And what IAP does, it lowers total cholesterol if it’s high. It lowers total cholesterol triglycerides if they’re high. It stabilizes insulin sensitivity so your blood sugar stabilizes. It increases the good bacteria in your gut. It produces bacterial [inaudible 00:32:26] that kill the bad bacteria in your gut. And maybe most important, it also stimulates healing the leaky gut, so you make new cells, healthier cells. And arguably, most important, it grabs on and binds to what’s called lipopolysaccharides, LPS, which is the exhaust of bad bacteria in your gut.

If you exercise too hard and your muscle is sore the next day, you know that that’s lactic acid. Okay, it’ll go away in a day or so. Lactic acid is the exhaust of your muscle cells. LPS is the exhaust of bad bacteria in your gut. And what happens is the LPS goes right through the leaky gut into the bloodstream, and it gets stored in your spleen, your liver, and your lymph nodes, and it accumulates and it’s inflammatory in your body over time. LPS accumulates day after week after month after year after year. You accumulate more, you’re more inflamed. You accumulate more, you’re more inflamed. Until eventually, you develop what’s called sepsis.

[00:33:33] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.

[00:33:34] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Sepsis is the number one killer of elderly in the hospitals, 1.7 million people a year, get sepsis, of which 250,000 die every year, and it’s just accumulated crud from bad bacteria that’s been building up over the years that nobody ever checked for. When you eat a little bit of applesauce every day, you increase intestinal alkaline phosphatase, which acts like a sponge to grab the exhaust of that bad bacteria and escort it out in the poop. Until you get rid of that excess LPS, in the meantime, you’re using a healthy sponge to grab that crud and get it out of there.

So everyone needs to eat at least a tablespoon a day of fresh applesauce. The commercial stuff doesn’t work, but the fresh does. Organic, you got to get organic. But you see how many steps I gave you in that one recipe? First, you can’t eat regular apples because they’re at the top of the list of the Dirty Dozen, meaning every year, they’ve got the highest amount of pesticides and insecticides that cause inflammation in your cells and build up over the years. And you get cancers and autoimmune diseases from it, and we’ll talk about that today. So that’s first.

Second, it’s really simple to make this stuff, and especially with your kids, you make it a family thing. Third, it doesn’t taste like cardboard. I mean, it’s really delicious. And you just have to have a little bit every day. But fourth, is the daily habit. If you forget a day, you forget a day. But the idea is small doses over time because your body is going to thrive and build up more intestinal alkaline phosphatase, which lowers cholesterol, lowers triglyceride, stabilizes insulin sensitivity, stimulates more production of good bacteria, produces bacterial [inaudible 00:35:29] to kill the bad bacteria, and acts as a sponge to grab this LPS from all the bad bacteria in your gut and escort it out in the poop.

That was a profound recommendation I gave you. Excuse me for being bold about it, but it’s a simple thing that has so many cascade benefits for you and your family. That’s the way you turn around your health is by learning more of those little pearls again and again and again.

[00:36:00] Ashley James: Oh, absolutely. Applesauce, can you eat more of it? Could you have it for breakfast? Eat like a cup and a half of it every day for breakfast?

[00:36:09] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Of course, of course.

[00:36:10] Ashley James: So you can eat more.

[00:36:11] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: No, no, no, no. Yeah, it’s always good to have more, but just a little bit every day is going to set you in the right direction. Now the problem with having more is that most of us grew up on Coca-Cola and three Musketeers, or for me, it was Mountain Dew and Kit Kats. But most of us have grown up on that garbage food, those garbage sugars that have thrown our blood sugar way out of balance, way out of balance. Our blood sugar-regulating systems are functioning on a 1 to 10 scale. Most of us are functioning at 5.4 to 6.2, meaning we’ve got blood sugar imbalances whether or not we’ve been diagnosed with diabetes or pre-diabetes. We’re already on the road of not functioning adequately, blood sugar levels, and we have to rebuild our blood sugar-regulating system. So that’s a whole nother dimension of discussion to do that.

So I like to start people on just a little bit of a great habit like having a tablespoon or so with applesauce every day. You want more? Have more, it’s fine. But you don’t want to eat too much because it’s naturally sweet, which is okay, but your blood sugar-regulating system has been so beaten up by what we accepted. Trix cereal when you’re a kid, Trix are for kids. Every spoonful of Trix is 50.4% pure sugar, every spoonful, and so our blood sugar-regulating systems get knocked out of balance very early in life. You have to have a big picture on that so that you don’t assault it further by eating good food, applesauce, but eating too much of it for your blood sugar-regulating system to control.

[00:37:59] Ashley James: I want to point out that you have other recipes you want to give the listeners. They can go to thedr.com/getrecipes. So you’ve got some other really useful healing recipes, and that one I’m absolutely going to do. The other day, we bought a bunch of organic apples from a farm locally, and so they’re fresh, big, big box of them. Unfortunately, we peeled them and we made our own apple butter. We just simmered down to where it was like a thick concentrated apple sauce. But oh my gosh, this stuff’s amazing. My son loves it.

So I’m just going to take your advice. I’m going to get more of those apples from the local farm and keep these peels on because the peels are great fiber as well, and then we’ll start making our own applesauce every day because I love all those benefits you just mentioned.

Now in terms of clearing that gunk that can lead to sepsis as it builds up in the body, is there any way to clear it from the spleen, from the liver, and from the lymph system?

[00:39:11] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Oh, yes, yes. You know, when people want a different result, so when I moved from Chicago to Southern California, I needed a map to get there. I mean, I’d love to drive, and so I drove cross country, you need a map. And sometimes you’re on the map, oh, there’s a detour and so you got to go around, there are obstacles, but you need a map.

So when your level of health is at (I’ll make up a number) 6.2, and you want to get to an 8.4. I mean, everybody wants to be at 10, but be realistic. You just want to have a vibrancy and good function, every year be a little bit healthier if you can, but it takes time. But you’re at a 6.2, how are you going to get to an 8.4? You need a map. You need a map.

When you want to learn how to read maps, when you want to learn how to read your body, you have to start with a 101 information. And then you go to 102 and maybe 103, then you go to 201, then 301, and then 401. Now you’ve graduated with a bachelor’s degree in taking care of your health. Maybe you’re going to go on to the master’s level and really dial down on some particular areas. And a few will go to the Ph.D. level and be a world expert in one particular topic that you’re learning about in terms of health.

So what you’re asking about getting rid of stored lipopolysaccharides, LPS, is absolutely true. When you get to about the 400th level, you realize, wow, I really need to learn what we do to detox as a family on a daily basis. How do we start getting rid of all this crud? Because there’s so much to learn. It’s the baby steps you take over time that cumulatively make the difference? Because as you go from 101 to 201 to 301, the information gets more disruptive. It’s like, what? What? What did you just say?

I’ll give you an example. Chicago 2016, 346 (I think it was) pregnant women. They checked their urine in the eighth month of pregnancy, and they were looking for five different phthalates. Phthalates are chemicals used to mold plastic. The one that we’ve all heard about is BPA, Bisphenol-A. Oh, I use BPA-free bottles. I buy my water in BPA-free bottles. Well, that just means that they’re using BPS and they don’t have to tell you, and it’s much more toxic than BPA. But it’s going to take years before people understand that BPA-free is not safe. Phthalate-free is safe, but very few plastic bottles will say phthalate-free. But those are the companies that are really putting out the effort, not BPA-free. You see that, that’s alarm bells for you.

They measured the phthalates, five different phthalates in these 346 pregnant women. And there are many more than five, but they measured the top five. They categorize them into quartiles, meaning the lowest quartile, the lowest fourth, the next level of phthalates in urine, the third level, and the highest level. So they put these 346 women into one of those four categories, the lowest to the highest. They then followed the pregnancies and the offspring of these pregnancies for seven years.

When the children turned seven years old, they did Wechsler IQ tests on them, that’s the official IQ test. There’s not much in medicine that’s all or every, but this was every. This is what? Every child whose mother was in the highest quartile of phthalates in urine in pregnancy, compared to the children whose mothers were in the lowest quartile of phthalates in urine in pregnancy. Every child in the highest quartile, their IQ was 6.7 to 7.4 points lower than the kids whose mothers were in the lowest quartile of phthalates. What?

Now, that doesn’t mean anything to anyone until you understand a one-point difference in IQ is noticeable. A seven-point difference is a difference between a child working really hard getting straight A’s in school, and a child working really hard getting straight C’s in school. This child doesn’t have a chance in hell of ever excelling in school because mom was high in phthalates in urine in pregnancy. Then you go to Google, the great library in the sky, and you type in phthalates and neurogenesis, nerve growth. Here come the studies of how phthalates inhibit brain cell and nerve growth. So the higher mom was in phthalates in her urine—meaning in her blood and then filtered into the urine—the lower the baby’s IQ seven years later.

Where does mom get phthalates? Well, you read my book, You Can Fix Your Brain, it drops your jaw because you see the studies that say, do not store leftover food in plastic containers in your home. Because if you put the leftover chicken in a plastic storage container in the refrigerator, the next day, the chickens got phthalates in it. The phthalates, the chemicals used to mold plastic leach out of the plastic containers. Do not buy coffee in a coffee shop and put a plastic lid on it because the steam rises, it condenses on the inside of the lid, it drips back down into the coffee full of phthalates. You put that coffee cup up to your lips, the hot liquid hits the underside of the coffee lid, tapers down into the opening, and you drink it through the opening full of phthalates.

You start learning about these plasticizers—chemicals used to mold plastic—that are in our environment. You read the studies that show that when you apply nail polish, the phthalates in your nail polish are in your bloodstream in four to five minutes.

Now, there’s no evidence that the amount of falsehoods that leach out of nail polish into your bloodstream, the amount of phthalates that leach out of plastic containers into your food, or the amount of families that leach out of a plastic lid into your coffee or tea are toxic to humans. There’s absolutely no evidence of that, and that’s very true and that’s how they get away with this.

It was the Toxic Substance Control Act where they paid off the senators, they paid off the representatives to pass this legislation that says you have to show the amount of phthalates that leach out of plastic are toxic to humans. There is no evidence that the amount of phthalates that leach out of a plastic storage container is toxic to humans. There is no evidence, that’s how they got away with it.

And at the time that this legislation was proposed, consumer groups were saying you can’t use that as the benchmark if it’s toxic to humans because this stuff accumulates in the body, and it’s the accumulated cumulative amount of these different chemicals interacting inside your cells. Immune system trying to protect you.

So give me a little girl who puts nail polish on her 10 little fingers and her 10 little toes starting at five years old. Give me 25 years of that little girl applying this nail polish with minute amounts of phthalates leaching into the bloodstream that accumulate in the body in her fat cells. Now, she’s 25, 30 years old, she gets pregnant, hopefully she has a healthy pregnancy and a healthy delivery. Now seven years later, you check that baby’s IQ, they’re seven points lower than the moms in the lower level of phthalates.

That’s what’s happening in our world today, and the statistics I’m going to give you about brain function today are because of this. Because of the accumulated amount of toxins that we are exposed to and the level of chemicals is rising every year in our water, in our food, in our air. Let me just jump to the study that I told you about earlier. I’m going to go out of sequence here.

[00:48:06] Ashley James: Oh, please. Oh, yes. Let’s do it. Absolutely.

[00:48:08] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: This is from the Journal of the American Medical Association. This is in the Journal of the American Medical Association, arguably the number one most prestigious medical journal in the English language, arguably. And the editors wrote a comment before the article. This is the quote, I’m reading the quote, “an elegant example of a prospective epidemiological study,” meaning the possibilities of what happens across time for people, “that uses sophisticated biological markers,” meaning indicators, “to identify a subclinical,” meaning you don’t get any symptoms, “effect of pesticide exposure on human health.”

So I’m going to read that sentence again because it’s a geeky, JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association sentence. But what they’re saying, “an elegant example of a prospective epidemiological study that uses sophisticated biological markers to identify a subclinical effect of pesticide exposure on human health.” And what did they do?

They looked at pregnant women, a large group of pregnant women, and they compared pregnant women who were eating high levels of fruits and vegetables and those that were not eating fruits and vegetables every day. And they were looking at conventional fruits and vegetables, meaning what you buy in the supermarket that’s not organic, which means it’s got high pesticides on it. So many of our fruits and vegetables now are GMO, which means they bred these plants in a laboratory to live after they’re exposed to lots of pesticides and insecticides so they don’t die. But they’re loaded with these chemicals now to kill the bugs that were growing on the plants. And what did they find?

They found that compared with women in the lowest fourth, once again, they divided these women into fourth. The highest fourth of fruits and vegetables, the next level, the next level, and the next level. So they compared women who were eating less than one serving a day of conventional fruits and vegetables with women who were eating more than 2.3 servings per day. Now that’s nothing. You give me a salad. It’s got lettuce, tomato, cucumber, carrot, maybe some sliced radish, that’s more than 2.3 servings of fruit and vegetable per day. And so they compared the lowest amount—less than one serving, to the highest fourth—more than 2.3. If you were in the highest quartile of eating fruits and vegetables, which we all think is good for us, more than 2.3 servings per day, you had an 18% lower probability of getting pregnant and a 26% lower probability of a live birth.

[00:51:18] Ashley James: Meaning miscarriages or stillbirth.

[00:51:21] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: That’s exactly right.

[00:51:23] Ashley James: So women have a harder time getting pregnant, and if they do get pregnant, they very likely lose the baby.

[00:51:34] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: And one out of four of them lose the babies, one out of four by eating fruits and vegetables.

[00:51:39] Ashley James: Conventional. And the key to this is that they were conventional, which is the opposite of “organic”. So conventional is you go to a restaurant and you get a side salad. You go to a smoothie bar, you get fruit in your smoothie or whatever. But if you’re eating out at a restaurant, 99.9% of restaurants aren’t going to choose organic. It’s going to be conventionally grown food. Or if you just go to the grocery store you don’t discriminate.

You pick up an apple, some avocado, and some carrots because you were told you should eat more vegetables because you’re pregnant. Most women increase their fruits and vegetables when they’re pregnant, but most women also don’t buy organic. So we’re leading into, and we have been for a while, a huge problem where the women have problems conceiving and carrying a child to term, and they end up turning to medicine for major drug interventions, fertility treatments because they think it’s something wrong with them when it’s actually the chemicals being sprayed on the food.

[00:52:59] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: That’s exactly right. And that these chemicals accumulate in your fat cells. They have an affinity for the fat cells in your thighs, your hips, and your lower abdomen. These toxins accumulate over the years, 10 little fingers and 10 little toes of nail polish starting at 5 years old for 20, 30, 40, 50 years. When you read my book and you read the studies that show plastic blinds in your bedroom outgas phthalates into the air and you’re breathing this stuff for six, seven, eight hours when you’re sleeping all night every night. You’re breathing minor amounts.

Now, there’s no evidence that the amount of phthalates that leach out of plastic blinds is toxic to humans. That’s how they get away with this, or the flame retardant chemicals in your sheets, your blankets, and your comforters. You wash them 20 times and they still outgas flame retardant chemicals into the air. Now, there’s no evidence that the amount of flame retardant chemicals that leach out of your sheets is toxic to humans. That’s how they get away with this. But this stuff, these minute amounts, are accumulating in us. That is the primary reason why all of our autoimmune diseases are exponentially skyrocketing in the last 20 years.

You look at the amount of chemicals coming into the environment, the amount of chemicals in your drinking water year after year after year that increase the amount of chemicals in the air that we’re breathing, and you look at the graph of that and you look at the graph of autoimmune disease increase, year by year, they’re neck and neck. I mean, it’s not rocket science to look at this stuff. And when you see this and when you go, oh my God, how can this be? They wouldn’t allow it. Of course they allowed it. They got paid off to pass legislation that doesn’t have any teeth.

So this is what we’re up against. Now, let me give you another statistic, just to drop your jaw a little further if it hasn’t fallen far enough yet. Excuse me, but we all need to know this kind of information. Blue Cross Blue Shield—arguably the largest for-profit health insurance company in the English language—published a paper last year entitled Early-Onset Dementia and Alzheimer’s Rates Grow for Younger American Adults. And they show that between 2013 and 2017, that the incidence of Alzheimer’s in the ages 30 to 64 tripled in four years. It tripled in four years, and when they broke it down by decades, the 30- to 44-year-old people from 2013 to 2017, the incidence of Alzheimer’s went up 407% in four years.

Now, this is all the people out there saying, oh, you know, I’m getting older. I don’t remember the way it used to, haha. Well, how old are you? Well, I’m 38. No, that’s not supposed to happen ever. Somebody has a heart attack, unfortunately, they have a heart attack, but they survive. They change their diet. They start exercising. Six months, a year later, they look better than they’ve looked in years. You look great. I feel great. I feel really good.

Unfortunately, someone gets diagnosed with cancer. They go through the protocols, they put the cancer into remission. Hey, how are you doing, man? Oh, I feel great. I’m doing really good. No one knows anyone diagnosed with a brain deterioration disease who’s doing really good.

So when you start talking about the brain to people, they check out. It scares them, and they make silly jokes about it because they just don’t know what to do. I’m telling you, you have to learn to read the map of what’s going on right now in your brain. And when you understand that in this last decade, the incidence of Alzheimer’s is exponentially going up every year because of all the toxic chemicals we’re being exposed to.

Our friend, Dr. Dale Bredesen, who wrote the book, The End of Alzheimer’s, and it’s an excellent book to read. He tells us that of the five types of Alzheimer’s, the most common type is inhalation Alzheimer’s. 60% to 65% of all Alzheimer’s cases are inhalation. It’s what’s your breathing that goes straight up through your nose, the olfactory nerves right back to the memory center of the brain and causing inflammation. Your immune system gets activated trying to protect you from what’s in the air you’re breathing, and you get all this inflammation in the memory center of your brain killing off brain cells, killing off brain cells, killing off brain cells. This is no fluke.

When you walk out to the parking lot of the shopping center you say, now, what lane did I park my car in? Where are my keys? That person I walked into, what’s their name? What’s their name? It’s no fluke, and it’s not stress. It’s that the hippocampus, the memory center of your brain, is on fire. It’s inflamed, and you’re killing off brain cells, killing off brain cells, killing our brain cells like never before in history. And in four years Blue Cross Blue Shield tells us 30- to 44-year-olds, their incidence of Alzheimer’s went up by 407%. This is what we’re up against.

This is like, wake up, world. Wake up. If we don’t understand this toxic world that they’re always telling, oh, it’s safe. Don’t worry about it, it’s safe. No, it’s not. No, just read the science. There’s so much good science now. Like this thing about conventional fruits and vegetables and pregnancy. I’m embarrassed that I didn’t know about that study. I’m so embarrassed because I found it. That study came out in 2018. That was three years ago, and I didn’t know about this study. I now know and I’ll make sure that everyone in my audience hears that study.

And that you start heading in the direction of growing more food yourself. Get a little bay window in your kitchen and grow some herbs, right? And maybe get some pots. They’ve got these things now. You can put it in your backyard, these stands, and there’s a hose that water runs through and you grow your lettuces and your cucumbers out of these stands now. You don’t even need a big garden space. You can grow it on a balcony.

[01:00:05] Ashley James: Yeah. I have a friend that sells those and she filled an entire room. It’s like a sunroom off of her house. She filled the entire room with those stands, and she grows all of her family’s fruits and vegetables in their house, basically. That’s what she does for a living. It’s really interesting to watch what she does. If anyone, any listeners want her contact information, feel free to contact me and I’ll pass it along.

This year has been hellish for me, and my listeners who’ve been listening for a while know my story, but I lost my daughter during birth. She passed away while I was giving birth to her in April. And then like three days later I had COVID. That was a fun whammy. I have noticed that since COVID, and for me it was like a triple whammy recovering postpartum, recovering from grief, and recovering from COVID. I noticed a significant decrease in my cognitive abilities, and I’ve noticed a significant decrease in my memory, specifically nouns. I’ll be like, can you pass me that thing over there? Oh, yes, a spoon. And also with names. I’ll be like, oh, I interviewed this doctor. His name is, and then I can’t remember his name whereas I could before.

It’s been slowly getting better, but it’s definitely concerned me. And I’ve looked into and seen that a lot of people, post-COVID, say that they have a cognitive decline. And even they’re showing the brain scans, the smaller brains. The brain shrinks during COVID. So I think that not just for me, but for a lot of listeners who have had COVID, and of course your book, I definitely recommend that listeners read it because it’s not just this one thing, but it is everything. It’s everything we’re eating, it’s everything we’re breathing that we need to take into account in order to heal our brain. For people who’ve had COVID, what can we do to really make sure we’re supporting our brain health and getting it back as much as possible?

[01:02:30] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I don’t want to ignore what you said. Thank you for sharing that, and I’m very sorry for the loss for your family. And I know that something is integrating into you. That never goes away, it just becomes a part of who you are, right? And it’ll fuel you to carry you forward to talk about health issues.

[01:02:55] Ashley James: Thank you. Mental and emotional health is also physical health, and it definitely affects it. I think it’s important that we talk about and we acknowledge the losses that we have instead of burying it deep inside.

[01:03:10] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Critically important.

[01:03:11] Ashley James: Yeah, don’t bury it inside. Have the courage to talk about it and to ask for support when you need it. We need to do that. So yeah, healing the brain after COVID.

[01:03:25] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Yeah, I’ll get to that. Let me just say one thing here with what you’re talking about. In my book, You Can Fix Your Brain, I talk about the pyramid of health. And there are four sides to a pyramid. No, there are three sides to a pyramid. No, there are four. There’s also a base. And so, you have to look at any health condition from four sides.

First, the base and that’s your structure. That’s the home of chiropractic, osteopathy, exercise, massage, yoga, posturing, your car seat in the car—all of the things that affect your muscles, bones, and ligaments are critically important for any health condition because that may be the trigger causing any health problems that you may have. So that first is the base. Next, one side of the pyramid going up is your biochemistry. That’s what you eat, what you drink, what you breathe, the medications you take, the nutrition you take, the foods you choose.

Next is the emotional or spiritual side, as you were just starting to talk about. And the last one is the latest one. In the last 15 years, it has become just as relevant as the other three, and that’s electromagnetic pollution. That all four sides of the pyramid of health have to be looked at when you’re dealing with a health issue and you’re not getting the results that you want.

So many people that we see over the years, not exaggerating, so many of them and they’ve been to many doctors—complementary medicine, alternative medicine, functional medicine doctors—and they’ve gotten better, but they’re not there yet. And they get to us and where do we find the problem? It’s in the mental or spiritual side of the pyramid of health.

They buried something and they haven’t integrated it into their lives stepping forward, and it’s the emergency brake. If you back out of a driveway and you say, what? What’s wrong with this car? It’s moving but it’s so slow. Oh, the emergency brake. And you let go of the emergency brake but then you back up just fine. It’s the emergency brake in your pyramid of health that doesn’t get addressed because we think it makes us weak if we’re talking about our issues, our upsets, or something. We have some preconceived notion so we hide it or we bury it.

I am really impressed with you, Ashley, and I don’t know you at all. This is the first time we’ve met today, but you can reference such a traumatic event in such a healthy way in this short period of time since it occurred. What that tells me is that you’re integrating, you’re really working to integrate. And I honor that baby, that spirit, and who’s always part of your family in this lifetime, but you’re integrating it. And so, kudos to you for that.

And you’re modeling for everyone out there, if this woman can do that with what she has just gone through, you can do it with a divorce where that idiot was treating you so poorly years ago, and you still have fears and apprehensions about relationships. Meaning, you can integrate whatever has happened to you, you just need some coaching and some help, and you got to find the right people to do it. But you work to integrate the emotional trauma so that you detox from it. That’s how you detox. The detox is not just chemicals you got to get out of your body. It’s any emergency brakes that are holding back your health.

I did not want to miss the opportunity to acknowledge you for how you’re modeling this, and I want everyone to understand what they just heard. Maybe go back and listen to this again and listen to her voice. Listen to how she stuttered a little bit in her voice because this is extremely painful, and that she’s not just breezing over it like la la la, but she’s present as she’s talking to us about it. And she’s not sobbing right now, and she may at other times during the day, that’s very healthy to do. But she’s making it present for us. That’s what we all have to do with whatever the emotional traumas are on the mental-spiritual side of our pyramid of health.

So now, back to the brain question, what do you do? What do you do if you’ve had COVID and you’re noticing brain dysfunction or brain dysfunction in general? First, you need a map. You have to understand where you’ve got to go to get through to the destination of better brain health. What am I referring to? The rule is test, don’t guess. So you have to test, is my brain inflamed right now? Do I have inflammation in my brain because then I thought I was going to do a sequential presentation here today, but you and I are just flowing, which is really great.

The first point I was going to bring up today is that every degenerative disease, without exception, that comes into your practice doctor or that comes into your home mom is a disease of inflammation. The cell is on fire. The question is, is it a kidney cell or a brain cell? Is it gasoline or kerosene? But it’s always inflammation.

So I’m going to tell you now and I’ll get to the brain question, I’m leading into it. I’m going to tell you now about Professor Alessio Fasano. Professor Fasano, he’s my friend and my mentor. We think he’s going to win the Nobel Prize one day, we truly do because this is the guy—he and his team are the ones who identified the mechanism that causes this thing we now call leaky gut. They identified how it happened back in 1997 they identified, and they’ve been studying it and writing papers about it for over 20 years now. There’s no question that this is the gateway to the development of autoimmune diseases.

So Professor Fasano, he is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health, Chief Pediatric Gastroenterology Mass General Hospital at Harvard, the Director of the Mucosal Immunology Center—that’s the lining of your lungs, the lining of your gut, the lining of your brain—at Harvard. The director of the Celiac Research Center at Harvard. This guy has five titles. Any one of these titles is a lifelong goal for someone at the top of their field, and he’s got five. This guy is in another dimension in terms of the contributions he’s giving to us, and what I’m about to tell you is what they’re teaching at Harvard Medical School right now.

This is what our future doctors are learning right now. Professor Fasano wrote this paper last year for all of us, and you can google it. You can google the paper and download it. The title of the paper is, All disease begins in the (leaky) gut. All disease begins in the (leaky) gut. The role of zonulin—that’s the protein that causes leaky gut—in the development of pathogenic intestinal permeability and chronic inflammatory diseases. And what he tells us is that there are five pillars in the development of inflammatory diseases. Every disease that comes into your office doctor is an inflammatory disease, and there are five pillars in how they develop.

First is your genetics, and you can’t do anything about your genes. That’s the deck of cards that you were dealt. And some people say, well, I can turn off the gene. You cannot turn off genes. Genes don’t operate on an on-off switch. Genes operate on dimmer switches. And you can dim down the genes of inflammation, but they’re still there. They need to be there. And you can ramp up, turn up the genes of anti-inflammation.

For example, many doctors have heard about the studies, you eat one cup of blueberries a day (organic) for three years and your brain’s working as well as it was 13 years ago at one cup of blueberries a day. Why? Because the blueberries dim down the genes of inflammation, and they turn up the genes of anti-inflammation regeneration in your brain and other parts of your area. But the first is your genes. So you can’t turn them on and off but you affect the dimmer switches.

How do you affect the dimmer switches? By number two of the five pillars, environmental triggers. What your body is exposed to from the environment is the hand on the dimmer switch turning on your genes to brighter or turning down your genes to less bright. It’s the environmental triggers. And the most common environmental trigger is when the end of your fork. That’s most common, but it’s also what’s in the air, what you put on your skin, all the environmental exposures to our body come into play here.

And also, what’s happening inside your body. The geek word is endogenous, meaning inside the body. The endogenous triggers, what are those? The stress hormones that you’re producing on a daily basis ramp up your genes of inflammation. Stress hormones turn up inflammation, that’s their job. That’s what they’re supposed to do. Excess stress hormones cause disease. Normal levels of stress hormones keep us alive, that’s why we make them, they’re good for us. But it’s the excess that causes disease. That’s the environmental triggers.

Also, internal endogenous is all the chemicals stored in your body, the lead in your bones. Why do you think postmenopausal women, their brains go down so quickly compared to before menopause? It’s because when they go through menopause, they’ve worn out their adrenal glands and the adrenal glands can’t handle the stress of life anymore. So now, they’re in a state of depletion, and you start losing bone because you’ve got more inflammation and you’re in a state of depletion.

The adrenal glands are supposed to make 1/10 the estrogen that your ovaries used to make. When you go through menopause, the adrenal glands are supposed to take over, but if the adrenal glands are dysfunctional, they’re deficient because they’ve been worn out. Because they’re the gland called the stress glands, the stress of life. And they’re worn out and they can’t make that 1/10 the estrogen that your ovaries used to make, now you develop estrogen deficiencies because the adrenal glands are not doing their job.

And when you have estrogen deficiencies, you get bone loss. And when you get bone loss, what’s inside the bones is the lead that you’ve been exposed to for the last 50 years in minute amounts. And when it gets in your bloodstream and the brain says get that stuff away from me, it’s stored in your bones. Petrochemicals are stored in your fat cells, heavy metals are stored in your bones and other areas. But now, you’re postmenopausal and you’ve got an estrogen deficiency because the adrenal glands are worn out, and now you started losing bone and in that bone is the lead you’ve been exposed to.

Now it’s in the bloodstream, lead goes right to the brain, causes inflammation in the brain, and your brain deterioration accelerates. That is the most common mechanism for postmenopausal loss of cognitive function. This causes this causes this causes this causes that. So anyway, so that’s the environmental triggers, that’s number two from Fissano.

Number three, altered microbiome. The environmental triggers that we take in that cause so much stress, so much inflammation destroys the good bacteria in our gut and creates a space for more bad bacteria to grow and prosper. That’s called dysbiosis, and that’s where the LPS comes from, the exhaust of the bad bacteria. But now we’ve got this altered microbiome, dysbiotic microbiome, which creates number four of the five pillars.

And number four is the inflammation from the dysbiosis in your gut creates the leaky gut. Mrs. Patient, your intestines are a tube from the mouth to the other end, one big long tube about 20–25 feet long, winds around in the center there. The inside of the tube is lined with cheesecloth. And so when you eat food, when you swallow a bite of steak, for example, you chew it four or five times and you swallow it. You should do it 15 to 20 times, but we don’t. So you guzzle it down a couple of chews and you swallow them. Those shreds of meat fiber can’t get into the bloodstream. They’d be very poisonous to the bloodstream. Your digestive system has to break down the meat fibers. How did they do that?

Your enzymes act like scissors. If you think of protein like a pearl necklace, you chew, swallow, the acid in your stomach undoes the clasp of the pearl necklace. Now you have a string of pearls. Your digestive enzymes act like scissors to snip that pearl necklace smaller, smaller, smaller, snip, snip, snip, snip, snip until you’re down to each pearl of the pearl necklace. That’s called an amino acid. The amino acids, the pearls of the pearl necklace, go right through the cheesecloth. They’re small enough to go right through the cheesecloth into the bloodstream.

Now those amino acids in the bloodstream are called the building blocks, and they build new bone cells, new brain cells, new muscle cells. That’s how we get our raw material to make new cells is by our enzymes snipping them down smaller, smaller, smaller until they go right through into the bloodstream. The problem is when you’ve got inflammation in your gut, you tear the cheesecloth. That’s called leaky gut.

When you tear the cheesecloth, now bigger molecules of this food that’s in the process of being digested, but bigger molecules slip through the tears in the cheesecloth into the bloodstream before they’re supposed to get through. Now these bigger molecules in the bloodstream, they’re called macromolecules, big molecules. Now your immune system says, whoa, what’s this? This is not good for me. This is not safe. I better fight this. Now you make antibodies to wheat, to dairy, to beef, to chicken, or to tomatoes. It doesn’t matter what the food is. If a macromolecule gets through into the bloodstream, now your immune system trying to protect you is going to fight that. And so leaky gut is number four, and the activation of your immune system is number five, systemic immune activation.

Now your body, in your bloodstream, there’s lots of inflammation, and depending on your genetic vulnerability, if you’ve got the gene for Alzheimer’s, the inflammation is going to your brain. Other areas, but it focuses on your brain. If you’ve got the gene for breast cancer, the inflammation is going to your breasts. If you’ve got the gene for rheumatoid arthritis, the inflammation is going to your joints. If you’ve got the gene for MS, it’s going to your nerves. It doesn’t matter. All diseases are inflammatory, and Professor Fasano is showing us these are the five pillars in the development of chronic inflammatory diseases.

So when you understand this, then as a consumer, you start asking the question, okay, so what environmental triggers are inflammatory in my life, or what’s the state of my microbiome right now? Do I have intestinal permeability, the leaky gut that I have to rebuild the microbiome so that I calm down that inflammation? Do I have elevated antibodies to gluten right now, to dairy, to beef, to chicken, to Klebsiella, to staff, or to strep bacteria that you’re exposed to? What is my immune system fighting right now?

This is the pathway, this is the map that you have to look at and you have to start exploring to figure out, where do I need to direct my attention? So the concept from someone who comes from the paradigm that we were raised in where their home has a medicine cabinet and they come to me and they say, what do I take to get rid of my rheumatoid arthritis? We have to have this discussion over a number of visits to say, you need to change your questioning. We need to change your paradigm, and you need to understand, this is going to be a six-month to two-year journey to figure out why you’ve got osteoporosis right now, why you have cognitive decline, why is your sense of smell going, or whatever that condition is. But you need to change the paradigm of how you think about that, then we start teaching you how to read your map as to what’s going on in your body right now.

So that’s the five pillars from Fasano that every medical student at Harvard is being taught right now to think about these five pillars. So the question about your brain function, and what do I do? You need the map. And the first thing you look at is, is there inflammation in the brain? Well, obviously there is because it’s not functioning properly, all right. How do I identify the inflammation? And the test is called the Neural Zoomer Plus because you zoom in on the problem. The Neural Zoomer Plus.

The laboratory also offers the Neural Zoomer. That was the first test and that’s got eight markers on it of brain inflammation, but the Neural Zoomer Plus has 48 markers on it. So you get this blood test done, and you look to see how bad is it right now? And it’s going to be bad. You want it to be bad because if you see, oh look, I’ve got 18 antibodies elevated in my brain right now killing off brain cells, by definition, when the antibodies are elevated, they’re killing off brain cells. Okay, so I’ve got 18 right now, how do I deal with it? So I’ll give you a couple of examples.

One of the antibodies that I look for is called gangliosides. Ganglioside is a component of your nerve fibers. And if you have those antibodies elevated, you’re killing off the nerves. Well, we know that gangliosides when you start losing gangliosides because of elevated antibodies, one of the symptoms of peripheral neuropathies. That’s numbness and tingling in your fingers, your toes, your cheek, and your tongue. It doesn’t matter where it is, it’s peripheral neuropathy.

[01:24:06] Ashley James: Sorry to interrupt. That’s a common symptom that people have been complaining about after having COVID.

[01:24:14] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: You think? I’m from Chicago and in the immortal words of Rosanne Rosanna Danna, “you think?” Of course, of course. So, you want to know, do I have elevated antibodies to gangliosides? Okay. You do in this example. What do you do? Well, the first thing, where are they coming from? And we know, if you just read the science, and I’m this geek that I’ve been reading the science now for 30 years, wheat and problems in wheat. And when you read the science, I show you the studies that say peripheral neuropathies are the most common nerve symptom when you have a sensitivity to wheat—most common. And 22% of all celiacs have peripheral neuropathy.

Every single one of them with peripheral neuropathies has elevated antibodies to gangliosides—100% of them. And when you get gluten out of the diet in those people, the ganglioside antibodies go down to normal. Take six months to a year, it depends on the individual, how well they comply, and how successful we are in teaching them. But every single one of them, if they’ve got peripheral neuropathies and they have a sensitivity to gluten, put them on a gluten-free diet, the ganglioside antibodies go down. That’s how you deal with gangliosides, you just check. Do I have a problem with wheat? And that test is the Wheat Zoomer, the most comprehensive test in the world.

I traveled the world teaching. I was on stage in Lisbon six weeks ago in Milan and Georgia last weekend, and it’s the most comprehensive and the most accurate test in the world. Just read the science, I just won’t take the time to explain all that to you guys right now. Read about it. So you do the Wheat Zoomer and you do the Neural Zoomer Plus.

Now the Wheat Zoomer, it’s the most accurate test for intestinal permeability that’s out there. So with those two blood tests, Wheat Zoomer and Neural Zoomer Plus, now you have an idea, do I have leaky gut right now? The gateway in the development of autoimmune diseases, do I have leaky gut? And the answer is yes, you probably will. Do I have a sensitivity to wheat? And the answer is yes, you probably will. Even those who are gluten-free for two years still have elevated antibodies and it shocks them when they find out, and then they start to learn why. We teach you all of that how the inadvertent exposures add up.

And some doctors out there say, well, just have a low gluten diet. I have no room for that kind of gobbledygook, and I am in their face. Hey, doc, can you show me one study where a low gluten diet was safe to the immune system, that the immune system was an activated low gluten diet? And they can’t, there’s no such thing as a low gluten diet calming down the inflammatory cascade. They made it up because they want to be nice guys, and most patients won’t comply gluten-free unless you teach them how to do it properly. And these doctors just don’t take the time to learn how to do it properly. Excuse me, I’m a little worked up on that one. I need to calm down and be more politically correct.

[01:27:36] Ashley James: No, I absolutely love it. I love it because about 11 years ago, my husband and I learned about this and we cut out barley, wheat, rye, and oats because oats contain gliadin, which is similar to gluten. Might as well just get rid of them too while you’re at it. We didn’t do many other changes in that one month, just cutting out barley, wheat, rye, and oats. I lost 25 pounds of water weight, and my husband and I, both of our wedding rings, which we had custom made, were flying off our fingers. And so we waited six months before we had them resized because we were like well, we don’t want this to all of a sudden bounce back and that our rings don’t fit on our fingers.

When we had them resized, I went down 1.5 ring sizes and my husband went down 2 ring sizes, and that was from cutting out barley, wheat, rye, and oats. It was going gluten- and gliadin-free. I come up against people who say, well, I tried that for a few months and I didn’t notice a difference, so I just went back to eating it. And I get it.

[01:28:43] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Here’s a problem with that one. It’s called the tacks rule. Sit down on four tacks, you jump up really quickly. Take two tacks out and sit down again, it doesn’t reduce the pain by 50%, you understand? I mean, there’s more than just wheat. You may have a dairy sensitivity. You may have lectin sensitivity. You may have bacteria. You may have an abnormal microbiome. The tacks rule says you have to be comprehensive. You can’t do it piecemeal. You have to find out where is the inflammation coming from, you can’t do it piecemeal.

So back to your question about the brain, you do the Neural Zoomer Plus and I’m going to give you one more example of 48 antibodies and many of them come back positive. I’ll give you one more. It’s called the RAGE antibody. When it’s elevated, that’s a sign of brain inflammation and deterioration. And where does that come from? We’ve known for a long time that when you cook food, when you add heat to protein, you brown it, you change the shape of it like barbecuing. Beef, when you get those black lines from the grill, you burn the beef. They’re called advanced glycation end products, AGEs.

Bread, when you knead bread, it feels really good in your hand. You get that nice elasticity to it. I used to be a baker in another lifetime, you get that nice elasticity. But when you bake it, there is a crust. That’s advanced glycation end products. And when you eat advanced glycation end products, they’re a little bit of gasoline on the fire. There is no way to avoid having any inflammation in your life, that’s not possible, but you can certainly reduce excessive inflammation.

But when we eat foods that have been cooked at high temperatures and change the structure of the food, they produce advanced glycation end products. That’s an argument of why more raw food in our diet is a good thing or lightly cooked foods. Not a raw food diet, I’m not recommending that, but most people rarely eat raw foods like having celery as a snack or peanut butter on celery for your kids as a snack is a great idea.

But these advanced glycation end products, they’re in your bloodstream. Now, the way that hormones and some other substances get inside your cell is that there are receptors sitting on the outside of the cell. The receptor is like a catcher’s mitt facing the bloodstream, and the pitcher throws the ball to the catcher. So you have estrogen receptor sites sitting outside the cell, and estrogen in the bloodstream goes by, it gets magnetically pulled into that receptor site for estrogen.

Thyroid hormone will not go into an estrogen receptor site. It goes into the thyroid receptor sites. Testosterone will not go into a thyroid receptor site, an estrogen receptor site, or a progesterone receptor site. It goes into a testosterone receptor site. So receptor sites sit on the outside of the cells facing the bloodstream and act as magnets to pull in whatever they’re supposed to.

Well, there are receptor sites on our cells called receptors for advanced glycation end product. And what’s the synonym for that? RAGE, receptor for advanced glycation end products, RAGE. And when the RAGE receptors get activated by advanced glycation end products, it turns on lots of inflammation inside that cell. So the more cooked foods we eat that have changed the protein structure of the food, meaning high temperature, the more advanced glycation end products we eat, the more inflammation we turn on inside ourselves.

So RAGE antibodies are one of the antibodies on the Neural Zoomer Plus test. So if you have elevated antibodies to RAGEs on your brain function test, what do you think you’re going to do? One of the recommendations we give is, let’s get more raw foods and slow-cooked or low cooked foods in your diet, Mrs. Patient, and the RAGE antibodies come down in six months. But you have to learn all of these little steps that go with every one of these 48 antibodies to your brain to reduce.

I’ll give you another one, Herpes Simplex 1, the herpes virus that causes cold sores on the mouth for so many people. You get a cold sore in your mouth, it’s a herpes virus sore, you’ve got inflammation in your brain. It’s almost guaranteed. Why? Because your immune system can’t keep the virus under control and you’re having an outbreak, meaning there are elevated levels of the virus in your bloodstream. So you’re likely going to have elevated antibodies to Herpes Simplex 1, HSV-1. That’s another one of the markers on the Neural Zoomer Plus.

So if that comes back positive in your Neural Zoomer Plus test, Herpes Simplex 1, now we have to look at how is it that the bank account of your immune system is so low that you’re overdrawn and your immune system can’t keep this virus under control? How is that happening? Where are you draining the bank account of your immune system? And how come your immune system doesn’t have the energy to keep this virus under control?

So then we start looking for other bacterial infections in your body like Klebsiella, Proteus, or E.coli. Klebsiella is the number one infection in hospitals for people with lung problems. If you develop pneumonia in the hospital, it’s very likely a Klebsiella infection. So what do you look at? We have to look to see what other bacteria and viruses your immune system is fighting right now. And then we have to go after Klebsiella. So of course, we give natural products. We do a sensitivity test to see will your Klebsiella be killed by olive leaf extract or by some herbs, or do we need to use the big guns and bring antibiotics? Sometimes you need to. That’s called a sensitivity profile to find out how are we going to kill your Klebsiella.

And then you have to look at where the Klebsiella coming from that’s inside your body. And where do you look? We teach people about their showerheads. Those showerheads form biofilms that accumulate behind the showerhead right up in there, and every time you turn that shower on, you’re blasted with millions of bacteria, especially if you live in warm climates.

[01:36:00] Ashley James: And breathing it in.

[01:36:01] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: And breathing it in. Every time you turn that shower on, the aerosol in the air, you’re sucking in lots of Klebsiella, Proteus, or it just depends on what’s in your showerhead. So it’s so overwhelming and it’s so comprehensive to do this. But that’s why the subtitle of my book, You Can Fix Your Brain—I’m going to get to that. But that’s the answer to your question about how do you determine what your current brain status is. You do the Neural Zoomer Plus and the Wheat Zoomer and you find out and then you have to explore, all right, now I see the map and I want to get from here to there, how do I get there?

Well, that’s going to take you six months to a year to do and you read my book and you start to understand all these little steps. Like phthalates in your plastic storage containers, in your nail polish, or in the air. If you go to my site, thedr.com/plant, you download the article from NASA that two six-inch house plants in a room absorb 73% of the toxins in the air so that you’re not breathing it all night, the House plant breathes it in.

You just have to learn all of these little steps. And that’s why the subtitle to my book, You Can Fix Your Brain is, Just 1 Hour a Week to the Best Memory, Productivity, and Sleep You’ve Ever Had. Now, what do I mean by that? That’s not some cute little moniker. It is the only way that you will be successful in stopping the deterioration in your brain. I believe it in my heart and soul, it’s the only way. Well, what the hell do you mean by that, doc?

Every Tuesday night after dinner, every Sunday after services, whenever it is, but every week, without exception, you allocate one hour and you tell your family, don’t bother me. I’m going to study to learn a little bit more about how to make us healthier. And you’re going to go back to my book, you’re going to come back to this podcast, you’re going to listen to it again, and you’re going to listen to this thing about nail polish. Oh, that’s right nail polish. And you’re going to look for organic nail polish.

You’re going to go to my book and you’re going to open up to glass storage containers. I give you three URLs: mileskimball.com, amazon.com, and whatever the third one is, I don’t remember. And you go to the one, you say, oh those, I really like those. And you order three round ones, two square ones, and one for the pies. You pay with your credit card, you hit send, and you’re done. It took an hour. You’re done for the week. But never again are you going to poison your family by storing leftovers in plastic storage containers. You’re going to start using the glass storage containers, and then you’re done with that one.

Next week you’re going to tackle nail polish. Next week you’re going to look at this house plant thing, and you go to the nursery. I give you the list of plants, and you’re going to go get some plants. Oh, I don’t have a green thumb. They’re going to die. Well then you’ll buy more so that your kids are not breathing these toxins, right? And every week you just learn one more thing. Now you can do two hours a week if you want, but the concept is you have to be patient with yourself. You have to be kind to yourself because this is so overwhelming. It’s a paradigm shift from what you thought was safe.

What they’ve told you out there in the marketing to buy their stuff, they don’t tell you that the nightstand next to your bed, if it’s not solid wood it’s pressboard. Pressboard is soaked in formaldehyde. And it outgases formaldehyde for years in your bedroom. You’re smelling formaldehyde every night. Well, I can’t smell it. That doesn’t mean a thing. Or the kitchen cabinets, if they’re not solid wood, they’re pressboards and they’re soaked in formaldehyde, and the varnish that you’re breathing. And when you start learning about air pollution, oh my God, I need an air filtration system. Yes, you do. Well, what do I get? Well, you go to my website and we tell you all about air filtration systems or you just start doing your research.

But every week you take one more thing. And in six months, you’ve dialed this down, you’ve got it, and you really are on the path now and you’re calm. And you get frustrated when you learn things like this article in the journal the American Medical Association about pregnant women and conventional vegetables. I was so upset that I didn’t know about that because this came out three years ago. You’re still going to get rocked every once in a while, but now you have a paradigm to hold all this in. You understand that it’s you and your family against the world out there, against the commercial world of what you’ve been told is safe.

It’s not you and your family against the world. Don’t ever social distance ever. You may have to physical distance, maybe, but not social distance. But it’s you and your family against the commercial world out there.

[01:41:12] Ashley James: Against the mainstream media. Use your own brain, learn critical thinking. A free website is triviumeducation.com. Pick through it, begin to study critical thinking. It’s called the Trivium and the Quadrivium. It’s a 2500-year-old way of critical thinking that was taught for 2500 years, but it was systematically taken out of the education system 150 years ago when they invented what is now the modern education system, the Prussian education system. Because the education system now is meant to make good little factory workers or good little citizens that comply, not free thinkers with critical thinking.

But the Trivium is still taught. It is the best way to learn very quickly, and children can learn it too, how to critically think and how to listen for the linguistic fallacies. And when you learn it, you will see the matrix. The matrix, the little green numbers will start to come down as you watch mainstream media and you read the titles of articles, you will see the fallacies, the linguistic lies, and manipulations.

And then go read books by Edward Bernays and you will learn the propaganda that they have been stringing us along, and they’ve been getting better and better and better at it—at manipulating us with words and controlling our reality with their marketing. Everything is marketed to us. Every channel you turn on the TV, it’s all marketing. Every news story is marketing.

We have to train our brain to filter information and not blindly take it in and allow this information to bypass our critical faculty. We have to train our critical faculty. I recommend studying the Trivium so that you can learn linguistic fallacies and then you can start thinking for yourself and identifying when they’re trying to do the thinking for you.

I wanted to point out, I did an interview with Andrew Pace. I’m going to give you his information. I think that you guys should hook up if you haven’t already. He is a third-generation building contractor who in the late ‘70s had a very intense incident where his workers fainted after using what is a “non-toxic” substance to seal a sealant from concrete. And that’s when he dove into this world and realized that all the materials that are rubber-stamped by the EPA are not healthy, are incredibly toxic, and harmful.

And he shares a story about how the EPA 10 years ago built a new building, a new headquarters for themselves. Out of all the building materials that you could go to Home Depot to buy, or Lowe’s or whatever, that are all rubber-stamped and approved by the EPA, so, therefore, we believe they’re safe, that you could go and build your own home or your own office with them—commercial or residential. And their building was so toxic that 100 of their workers 10 years later are still permanently disabled from the off-gassing of all of the building materials of their brand new headquarters.

Now, these are the same people that said they were safe, and what they admit themselves is over 90% of what they approve 100% never gets tested for safety. So in that interview I did with him, he goes into detail about that, episode 453. I think that that is really important because he also talks about formaldehyde and how prolific it is in every home and every office. And we have to really be conscious about filtering it and getting rid of it.

And then I also have a similar—this reminded me of it, I wanted to tell you about him. Dr. Troy [inaudible 01:45:07] who is here locally to me in Seattle, and he has personally saved his own money and spent tens of thousands of dollars of his own money. Almost every year he does a 30-day fast and he tests his own blood for all of the major chemicals that you mentioned, all the environmental toxins. And what he’s trying to show is that certain types of fasting can actually remove these forever chemicals. And what he discovered is that it has to require a binder.

Fiber is a binder, heated activated charcoal, but that our liver will try to get rid of them, but then they’re immediately re-uptake by the colon because bile is reabsorbed, and bile is what these forever chemicals are bound to. And so a binder, when he did these blood tests, found that when he did activated charcoal during his fasts, he had significantly lower levels of these forever chemicals.

He’s trying to get that study off the ground, but it’s just him and now another one of his friends is doing it because he’s not interested in making money, he’s just interested in getting this information out there. But he goes around and learns from all these doctors and figures out how to get rid of these forever chemicals in the body. I just thought that was right up your alley because this is what you’re talking about.

[01:46:36] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: You bet. Yeah, please send me the contact for Andrew and Troy

[01:46:41] Ashley James: Absolutely, I will. And I have to tell you, and this is not to toot your horn, I don’t say this to guests, you’re definitely in my top 10, probably my top 5 interviews I’ve ever done, so I have to have you back on the show. I said it at the beginning of the show, but I really did mean it. You take the science, the real science, not the quack trying to sell us more garbage science, but the real science of how our body works and how we can get to the root cause.

Inflammation is at the root of disease, but before that is what is causing the inflammation, and that is exactly what you’re exposing. And I love that you’re realistic. It takes some time, years. I’ve been on my health journey, 2008 is when I started my health journey. I was incredibly sick, very, very sick with many illnesses. I was told I’d never conceived naturally, I was on constant antibiotics. I had adrenal burnout, polycystic ovarian syndrome, type 2 diabetes.

I was so sick in my 20s, and when I was 28 years old, my husband and I sat down and watched some food documentaries on Netflix and we started to shop the perimeter of the grocery store and eat organic. And eating organic that first month, my chronic infections went away. And I thought, if I can change my immune system, in one month my chronic infections I no longer need to be on constant antibiotics because I chose to eat organic. And I hadn’t even cut out gluten or dairy.

I just shopped the perimeter of the grocery store, ate more whole foods, and ate organic. That’s what led me on this long journey of mine where I’ve healed those issues, and I’m still healing, I’m not done yet. But I’ve come so far, and I know that the keys you’ve given us today. Everyone who applies them is going to go light-years with their health, myself included. I feel so blessed to have had you on the show today to shed light on this information.

Now, you have this book about healing the brain, and then you have Betrayal: The Autoimmune Disease Solution. Now, you have more than a book though. Don’t you also have videos? Can you talk a bit about how we can plug into you and learn more from you ongoingly?

[01:49:11] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Sure, thanks so much. Yeah, I’m awkward in trying to say this information in a way that people can hear. I should preface by saying, don’t shoot the messenger.

[01:49:37] Ashley James: Right. People are in love with their gluten products. I get it. They don’t want to give up. Now, here’s the thing. We didn’t even touch on that most of the foods that are harming them also trigger the dopamine response, so they legitimately have an addiction. They have a biochemical addiction to the foods that are hurting them. And so, yeah, they’re going to get upset when you take away their [inaudible 01:49:59]. You’re taking away the thing that brings their brain joy.

I can tell you how I’ve been gluten-free for so many years, now I’ve messed up once in a while. Listen, I don’t blow up, I don’t break out in hives. My hair doesn’t fall out if I have one meal with gluten in it, but I can tell for over a month after one meal with gluten in it, I can tell I have inflammation in my body. I do my best to be 100% gluten-free.

[01:50:25] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Well, I’m glad to hear that. It’s one of the things—my 10-month-old son is crying for me or reaching for me, so I just told my wife I’ll be done in a few minutes. The problem with wheat is not wheat. I mean, for most people the ratio is 8:1. For every one person that gets gut symptoms from eating wheat, there are eight that don’t. They get brain symptoms, joint symptoms, kidney symptoms, or bladder symptoms. They don’t associate what they ate with having a migraine the next day or having a seizure. But just google seizures and celiac or seizures and gluten, here comes studies when you read this.

So the ratio is 8:1. And so, the real danger is that when you have a sensitivity to wheat and if your genetic vulnerability—number one of the five pillars from Fasano—is to the collagen of your joints, when you make antibodies to wheat, those antibodies go into the bloodstream looking for wheat, looking for wheat. They’re looking for a protein signature of wheat. I call it an orange vest, so they’re looking for the orange vests, that specific protein structure of a wheat molecule to identify and to kill it. And unfortunately, that protein signature of wheat is very, very similar to the protein signature of your joints, the collagen in your joints.

So the antibodies looking for wheat, if your genetic vulnerability is to collagen, those antibodies start attacking your collagen. It’s called molecular mimicry, or if your genetic vulnerability is to MS, those antibodies to wheat will start attacking the myelin, the saran wrap around your nerves is what causes MS when you lose myelin.

So when you have exposure to wheat and the antibodies get turned back on to wheat, so you’ve turned on the assembly line to make antibodies, that assembly line stays on for anywhere from four to eight weeks. From one exposure, you’re making antibodies now. If you get a vaccination, if you’re going to Africa, you need vaccinations months and months in advance for yellow fever, Dengue fever, and all these crazy things because it takes months to build the assembly line to make the soldiers, the antibodies for yellow fever and Dengue fever, it takes a couple of months. But then when you go there, if you’re exposed, you’ve got the antibodies in your bloodstream. Great.

If you go back to Africa 15 years later, you just need a booster shot two weeks before you go. And everyone has heard booster shots, well, you just have to wake up. You just have to flip the switch to turn the assembly line back on. You don’t have to build the assembly line again, which takes months. You just have to turn the switch on, and within a day or two, you’ve got antibodies to yellow fever and Dengue fever back in your bloodstream again.

The same thing happens with wheat. You give up wheat, you feel better, everything is great. I’m going to have a little at the holiday, it’s no big deal. I’ll feel bad for a day or two. You say, you can tell for a month, that’s how sensitive you are. So you have an exposure, the assembly line gets turned back on making the antibodies to wheat, but that’s not a big deal for most people. They don’t feel it when that’s going on and they get back on the wagon again and they get off of wheat, they’re fine.

But the assembly line is going to stay on for a couple of months. It doesn’t go away the next day, it stays on for a couple of months. And the lifespan of the antibodies that are produced towards the end of that six- to eight-week period is four to six weeks themselves. So now you’ve got these antibodies to wheat continually in your bloodstream for three, four months from one exposure. Just read the science and you go, holy cow.

And if your genetic vulnerability is to MS, those antibodies are attacking the myelin in your nerves. And for three or four months, you’re killing off more myelin, killing off myelin, killing off myelin as a result of a single exposure. That’s the OMG that nobody knows about until you start reading the science.

So these doctors that say, well just cut down, go low gluten, you’ll be okay. Nonsense. There is no science behind that at all, and the science says that’s absolutely false, and you’re accelerating their degenerative disease and their vulnerabilities from number one of the five pillars, your genetic vulnerability. You’re accelerating. You’re turning that dimmer switch up brighter for MS, for rheumatoid, for chronic fatigue, for seizures, for psoriasis, for thyroid problems, Hashimotos, or for lupus.

I mean, just read the science and you see that for some people, the weak link for them, their genetic vulnerability is to XYZ disease. And then just type in XYZ disease and gluten, here come the studies that for some people, you take gluten out of their diet, their psoriasis goes away. Well, this is why. This is why. So you can’t be a little pregnant, you can’t have a little gluten once you’ve crossed the line. I couldn’t let that slide, I have to say.

[01:56:41] Ashley James: Yeah, no, thank you. Like you said, don’t shoot the messenger. But here’s the thing, once they learn how to make these changes, and you said, if you can do one hour a week, baby steps. A year from now, you will have a whole different body, a whole different life. You will feel so much better if you do baby steps. I’m sure you teach in your book the baby steps we can do. Your website, which is thedr.com, right? Thedr.com, fantastic information there.

[01:57:22] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Excuse me, I forgot to answer your question about Betrayal, I forgot. I got diverted. So let me tell you about that and that’s where we’ll wrap it up. My wife and I went to seven different countries and I went looking for the world experts in immunology. And I know who these guys are and these women because I’ve read their papers. And so, I knew what to ask them. I didn’t say, well, doctor, please tell us how you got interested in this field. I didn’t do any of that garbage. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say that.

[01:58:00] Ashley James: I need to stop asking that question.

[01:58:01] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: So Professor, you are world-renowned in reversing type 2 diabetes, and sometimes type 1 diabetes. How is it that an acetylcysteine can impact on the development of type 1 diabetes? And that’s where I started, with questions like that. And they go, oh. Not many of them get excited. They’re not animated. They’re geeks and they’re very calm, but they talk about it.

Then I went to the clinicians around the world in seven different countries who were studying this work and applying these principles, and I asked them to invite two or three of their patients who would follow their recommendations. And then I interviewed the patients who reversed their MS, reversed their rheumatoid, reversed their chronic fatigue, reversed their multiple chemical sensitivities, reversed their major depressive disorder. It didn’t matter what the condition was. Eighty-five people we interviewed, and we put it together as a docu-series. You hear three minutes of this person, seven minutes of that one, nine minutes of this one, and two minutes of this person back and forth as a story.

I’ll never forget the woman in London. She said, I took the tube to come here today, the underground train. And she said, I walked the seven blocks from the tube station to here, that’s not a big deal. But then she got a little teary-eyed and she said, but it is. And then we show you the pictures of her two years ago in a wheelchair, she can’t walk because her MS is very severe. And I show you her MRIs with seven lesions on her brain causing the MS. And then here she is two years later, no symptoms whatsoever, and the MRIs are two lesions left on her brain.

That’s the power of this work when you find the map and you understand there are many detours and you have to find, according to Fasano, the five pillars. We put all that together in a docu-series, it’s called Betrayal: The Autoimmune Disease Solution They’re Not Telling You. We’ve had over 600,000 people watch this. It’s free. You just go to thedr.com/betrayal and it’s right there for you. You watch this and then you understand the journey that’s in front of you. Okay. You say, well, I really need to read these books. All right, I’m in. Wow, that’s great.

You see these real people in real-time, many of them are crying when they talk about how hard it was for them, they lost a child, or whatever their story is, but they’re authentic. They’re authentic people. Jesus, I got tears in my eyes now because I sat with each one of them. I just listened and asked the questions, and I explained to them before they were on camera, I said, we probably will talk about some upsetting things here, but there will be thousands and thousands of people who may benefit from you sharing your heart, sharing your experience, and how difficult it was. That’s Betrayal, and it’s free for everyone to see at thedr.com/betrayal.

[02:01:40] Ashley James: I love it. I love it, I love it, I love it. Imagine the entire world has the information in your head. Just imagine if everyone in the entire world had the access to the information in your head, in one generation we could end disease. This entire world would be turned upside down. We’d no longer create those chemicals that are killing us. The entire commerce, all of manufacturing and commerce would be changed to have ecology for ourselves, for our community, and for our planet. Ecology means is it healthy for you, is it healthy for your neighbors, is it healthy for the soil, is it healthy for the air? And if the answer is no to any one of those we don’t do it. We don’t do it.

We have to make products that are ecological for every sphere, right? I’m not talking about climate change. Climate change is a terminology that is a part of their carbon credit taxation, all that stuff. It’s politicized. I’m talking about actual toxins and pollution. Notice that they don’t mention acid rain and they don’t actually talk about pollution anymore. They don’t because they have an agenda, right? So I’m not even jumping on that train. I’m not saying there is or there isn’t climate change.

What I’m saying is you know what there is, there is pollution. There is pollution and it is killing us, and you are teaching us how to avoid this pollution that is in our food, in our water, in our air, and how to heal our body. And these people are suffering. There’s suffering happening everywhere. And if everyone had the information that you give, then we would change this planet in one generation. So that’s why I’m so excited for the work that you do. I’m excited for my listeners who are hearing this and who are sharing this episode with those they love.

Now, I’m going to have the links to your books and the links to everything that you do, that Dr. O’Bryan does in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Your books are absolutely going to be the best Christmas gifts, Hanukkah gifts, holiday gifts that people can receive. So buy it now, buy it early, wrap it up, put all your friends’ names on it, and give possibly the best gift of all. The path towards their true health, the path towards them making these changes that are life-altering to get their brain back. Oh my gosh I can’t wait.

I’m so excited learning from you today, and please come back on the show. I want to have you back. We have so much more to talk about. I can’t wait to have you back. Go cuddle your 10-month-old, he sounds adorable. Thank your wife for us also for lending us to you. Go enjoy the rest of your beautiful day in Costa Rica. We’re all a bit jealous of you. We all want to move there and live in the Blue Zone with you, I think that would be wonderful. But we’ve got to create our own Blue Zone in our own household, right? And we can do it. We can take on and copy the same changes that everyone else made that live in those Blue Zones. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

[02:05:10] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Just be kind to yourself in this process. It’s so overwhelming, it freaks people out. There’s a Tibetan word, and I don’t know if I’m going to say it correctly, but this is the operating dynamic to be successful in this journey. The word is maitri, and it translates as loving kindness and an unconditional friendship with one’s self. Just know that you’re doing your best. You’re your best friend, just lighten up a little bit, and don’t think you have to get it all right now. Just be kind to yourself, but just be consistent.

And the last thing I’ll tell you is the other end of the spectrum from the [inaudible 02:05:59] talking about maitri. There was a guy in Chicago, a writer at the Chicago Tribune. His name was Studs Terkel, and he wore a fedora cigar in his mouth all the time, and was just a gritty, guttural guy, a great writer. He’d hung out in this local bar and was an icon in Chicago. When he leaves the bar every time, apparently, I don’t know if it’s true, but that’s the story. It may have gotten exaggerated a little bit, but he’s walking out, he puts his fedora on, he’s walking out. He takes a cigar. He turns around, takes a cigar out of his mouth, and says, take it easy, but take it. And then he walks out. So everyone, take it easy. Be kind to yourself, but take it one hour a week, every week. And thank you so much, Ashley, for the opportunity.

[02:06:56] Ashley James: I love it. Dr. Tom O’Bryan, it’s been such a pleasure having you on the show. I can’t wait to have you back. This has been quite a ride.

[02:07:05] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Thank you.

[02:07:07] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Dr. Tom O’Bryan. Wasn’t he wonderful? I can’t wait to have him back on the show. Be sure to stay tuned. We’ve got more great interviews that I am just itching to release that I’ve done lately and I’m excited for you to hear.

Remember to get the Magnesium Soak I was talking about, the absolute, amazing Magnesium Soak, and also the Magnesium Muscle cream, which is wonderful for pain and for relieving tension. So many listeners have said that they rub it on their shoulders, their neck, and their jaw right before sleep and they notice that they relax and have better sleep afterward, so check it out. Go to livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and you have to use coupon code LTH as in Learn True Health to get the fantastic sale that’s going on right now. Use that coupon code anytime though because we get a fantastic discount on top of any sales that happen. So that is livingthegoodlifenaturally.com, coupon code LTH.

Have yourself a fantastic Thanksgiving if you’re in the United States and you’re listening to this before Thanksgiving. And if it’s after Thanksgiving, I hope you had a great one. And wherever you are around the world, whenever you’re listening to this, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day.

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Books by Dr. Tom O’Bryan

Betrayal: The Autoimmune Disease Solution They’re Not Telling You

The Autoimmune Fix

You Can Fix Your Brain

469 New Info on Healing The Gut, Reversing Autoimmune Disease, Restoring Brain Function, Decreasing Inflammation, Reversing Leaky Gut, & Food Sensitivities, with Functional Medicine Foods, Supplements, & Labs You Should Know About, Dr. Tom O'Bryan 02:08:26 Share

Learn True Health with Ashley James

Shownotes Transcript

469 New Info on Healing The Gut, Reversing Autoimmune Disease, Restoring Brain Function, Decreasing Inflammation, Reversing Leaky Gut, & Food Sensitivities, with Functional Medicine Foods, Supplements, & Labs You Should Know About, Dr. Tom O'Bryan