The 5 pillars of inflammation

Guest: Dr Tom O'Bryan

[00:00:10] Alex Howard

Dr Tom O'Bryan
Thank you so much. This is such an incredibly important topic for all of us. It's an honor to be here
with you.

Alex Howard
I think this is also a really important piece of the jigsaw. As we were just talking before we started
recording, we are going to be talking about the role of inflammation in pretty much every chronic
disease and health implication that we can talk about. And as many people understanding the
impacts of trauma will realize, one of the key ways that trauma impacts on our physical body is in the
result of raising inflammation. And we're going to come more into that in a moment.

Just to give people a bit of Dr O'Bryan's background, Dr Tom O'Bryan is considered a Sherlock
Holmes for chronic disease and teaches that recognizing and addressing the underlying mechanisms
that activate an immune response is the map to the highway towards better health. He holds teaching
faculty positions at the Institute for Functional Medicine and the National University of Health
Sciences. He has trained and certified tens of thousands of practitioners around the world in
understanding of the impact of wheat sensitivity and the development of individual autoimmune
diseases.

Dr Tom, do you want to run us through, I know you've got a bit of a presentation here which I think will
really help bring this to life, but some of these core principles around the five pillars of inflammation
and how inflammation is impacting our bodies in all of these different ways.

Dr Tom O'Bryan
Thank you. And to begin with, I'd start with, you aren't going to like this. People aren't going to like
what they hear. And it's our lifestyles that are creating this condition, and we know that, but there's
aspects of our lifestyles that have changed. The technology of 10 years ago is no longer the most
comprehensive understanding of what's happening today, that we can't be thinking the way we did 10
years ago about what's good and what's bad, that we have to continually expand our understanding
as more knowledge becomes available.

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I'm going to show you some things today that will be new for most people. I'm going to talk about the
complications of the Mediterranean diet and fruits and vegetables. What, yes, fruits and vegetables
can be a real problem fueling your autoimmune disease, fueling your brain deterioration, fueling your
inability to have successful pregnancy. So I'm going to go into about 15 to 20 minutes of information
for you and then we're going to shoot to the questions.

So if I may share my screen. I talk about the brain as being the "Canary in the Coal Mine". That when
someone has a heart attack and if they survive, they change their diet, they start exercising, they look
better than they've looked in years. If someone is diagnosed with cancer and they go through the
recommended protocols and they put the cancer in remission, they're feeling good, they're doing
great. No one feels good when they've been diagnosed with a brain deterioration disease. It scares us
more than anything else, and we avoid it because there's no answers that people have as to what to
do if your brain is going down on you.

So, a "Canary in the Coal Mine", it's an early advanced warning of a danger. And this is when the coal
miners used to carry a canary in a cage down into the mines and they listened to it sing all day while
they're working. And if they didn't hear the singing, someone walked over and looked at the canary, if
it had fallen over and dropped down dead in the cage, they blew a whistle, everyone got out of there
immediately because humans can't smell methane when it's first leaking out, or carbon monoxide,
and it would kill them. So the "Canary in the Coal Mine" was an advanced warning of a danger.

Your brain is the "Canary in the Coal Mine" of your body. When your brain is not working the way that it
should be, and I'm getting older I don't remember the way I used to, 'how old are you?'. 'Well, I'm 42'.
Well, that's not supposed to happen. That's a warning system. Something's not right here. 'Where did I
park my car in the parking lot of the shopping center?'. 'Oh, that person walking towards me, what's
her name? What's her name?'. 'Where are my keys?'. Those are early warning systems of a problem.

So the question is, what song is your canary singing? Now the Alzheimer's Association told us last
year that 1 in 3 seniors will die with Alzheimer's or another dementia. That means between our host
and me and you, the viewer, one of the three of us, statistically, is going to die with dementia. That's
how bad it is. I'm going to show you where the triggers are coming from causing the brain
deterioration that the vast majority of us are experiencing.

Blue Cross Blue Shield came out last year with this report. Now they're the largest for-profit health
insurance company in the English language. And they published this report that said, early onset
dementia and Alzheimer's growth in younger Americans. And that in 4 years there was a tripling from
4 to 12 per 10,000 people who were diagnosed with Alzheimer's. It tripled in 4 years. And when they
broke it down by age bracket, the 30 to 45 year olds had a 407% increase in 4 years. The brain is the
"Canary in the Coal Mine".

When you're noticing your brain is not working the way, 'oh, it's just stress. I'm too stressed', you can't
write it off anymore because the inflammatory cascade is going on, killing off brain cells, killing off
brain cells, killing off brain cells. And we want to recognize these early warning systems, which then
give us some clues as to how do we begin to put the brakes on this inflammation.

So what's the takeaway from the startling statistics as to what's happening to our brains? More and
younger people are having their brains fall down on them at earlier stages and they're not listening to
the early signs their brains are saying. So it's terrifying. It's just terrifying when we think about that.

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Now, in order to hear what your brain is saying to you, the warning signs, there are a few basic
concepts to understand first. So there's three concepts I'm going to give you here. First, the most
prevalent pathology at the root of all disease is inflammation. And over the last 15/20 years we've
recognized inflammation with disease after disease after disease, until now, look at the title of this
paper, Chronic inflammation in the etiology, (meaning the development of disease) across a lifespan.

Chronic inflammatory diseases have been recognized as the most significant cause of death in the
world today. As a matter of fact, 8 of the top 10 leading causes of death are inflammatory. The only
ones that are not are accidents and suicides. And arguably suicides are inflammatory because they
come with depression and depression is an inflammatory state in the brain. Depression is the number
one cause of disability worldwide, is often fatal, and it's the major cause of suicide, now one of the top
10 causes of death.

So when I give this talk, I ask the audience of doctors, 'doctors, what symptoms might you be
suffering from that are not inflammatory?'. And I just look at their faces and they start to get a little
confused because, I only know of one disease of the brain that's from a sodium deficiency that
causes brain shrinkage that doesn't have inflammation. Everything else is inflammation. It's
inflammatory. We have to understand that big picture view.

Now, where is the excessive internal and external molecules of inflammation coming from? For that,
let's look at Professor Alessio Fasano, my friend and my mentor. He's a professor of Pediatrics at
Harvard Medical School, a professor of nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health, chief pediatric
gastroenterology MassGeneral Hospital at Harvard, the director of the Mucosal Immunology Center
at Harvard, the director of the Celiac Research Center. This guy, any one of these titles is a lifelong
goal for people at the top of their field, he has five. We think he's going to win the Nobel Prize. We
truly do. Because he and his team are the ones that identified the mechanism that causes what we
now refer to as leaky gut, intestinal permeability. He identified it back in 1997 and they've continued to
publish about it ever since.

And he's always very careful of what he says so that he's not misquoted. Look at the title of the paper
he published last year, All disease begins in the (leaky) gut: the role of the protein zonulin in creating gut
permeability and inflammation. And in this paper he talks about the five pillars in the development of
chronic inflammatory diseases. He says these five pillars create the perfect storm to produce
inflammation in our body.

And what are the five pillars? Genetic vulnerability. You can't do anything about your genes. Now we
used to say, turn genes on, turn genes off, genes don't turn off, they don't turn on. They're on a
dimmer switch. And what we want to do is dim down the genes of inflammation. You have the gene
for Alzheimer's, it doesn't mean you're getting Alzheimer's. It means that if you get too much
inflammation, it's going to attack your brain, most likely. You have the gene for breast cancer, it
doesn't mean you're getting breast cancer, but it means if you have too much inflammation it's going
to attack your breast cells, most likely. That's what genetics mean. And you want to dim down the
genes for inflammation and turn up the genes for anti-inflammation. But they don't turn on and off.
They operate in degrees.

And so we're always wanting to turn up the genes of anti-inflammation, that's what you have to learn
to do to protect you and your family, and turn down the genes of inflammation. And I'll show you
some of those examples. That's number one, the genes.

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Number two, the environmental triggers. And the most common environmental trigger is what's on
the end of your fork, but it's not the only one. What you breathe, the most common type of
Alzheimer's, 60% to 65% of all Alzheimer's cases are inhalation Alzheimer's. It's what you're breathing
that goes straight up to your brain, and they're the molecules of inflammation, they're gasoline on the
fire, causing the inflammation in your brain. So the environment around you.

And it's also the environment inside of you, the trauma that you experience and relive sometimes in
your memory, creates stress hormones that are inflammatory when you have excessive amounts of
them and are regularly producing them, they're inflammatory. So there's internal triggers and there's
external triggers. We need to learn about both of them.

The environmental triggers turning up the genes of inflammation create an altered microbiome. The
good guys in your gut go down, and the bad guys populate, they rear their ugly heads. And the more
of the bad guys you have, the more you have an imbalanced microbiome. It's called dysbiosis. And
that inflammation created by the dysbiosis causes number four of the five pillars, and that's the leaky
gut. Intestinal permeability, the leaky gut.

And when you have the leaky gut, larger molecules leak from the intestines into the bloodstream.
They're called macromolecules. They get in before they're supposed to and the result is your
immune system, trying to protect you from this macromolecule, creates number five, systemic
immune inflammation, trying to protect you. That's the five pillars that Fasano talks about. And the
three in the middle we've got complete control over. It's going to take you 6 months to a year to really
learn about how to deal with these three but this is where you put your attention, is on the
environmental triggers that are inflammatory for you, rebuilding a healthy, diverse microbiome and
healing intestinal permeability.

Now, although there are dozens of environmental triggers, the big kahunas, Fasano tells us there are
two small exposure to large amounts of bad bacteria, and its exhaust is called lipopolysaccharides
(LPS), and gluten. Those are the two most powerful triggers creating the inflammation in the gut.

Now, Professor Maureen Leonard, also at Harvard, she works with Fasano, so she went back and
looked at all of the articles between 2010 and 2017, (7 years) about 64 articles she picked on this topic
of gluten and permeability. And her conclusion is that previous studies have shown that gluten and
wheat causes immediate and transient increase in gut permeability. This process takes place in all
individuals who ingest gluten. Whether you feel it or not, you don't have to have any symptoms in
your gut to create a leaky gut. It's really important to understand, because many people say, 'I feel
fine when I eat pizza. I don't have any problems with wheat, I feel fine'. It doesn't matter how you feel.
The lucky ones are the ones that get gut symptoms from wheat. The unlucky ones are the ones that
don't. They get brain symptoms or joint symptoms or skin symptoms.

Now, how does this occur? Why is wheat such a problem? Because gluten activates something
called toll-like receptor 4. You have the same body as your ancestor thousands of years ago, the
same kidneys, the same bladder, the same immune system. And when your ancestors would find
some food, the first thing they do, they pick it up, they smell it. Does it smell safe? Next they nibble on
it. Does it taste okay? If they eat it, and if there's bad bugs on it they didn't identify, when that food
comes out of the stomach into the intestine, right there the sentries are standing guard, toll-like
receptor 4, to say, 'that's a bug, we need to kill that'. And the sentry then sends a message to create
leaky gut immediately. Within 5 minutes you've got leaky gut.

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Toll-like receptor 4 was designed to protect you from a bug. That's its job in our bodies. And we have
the same body as our ancestors thousands of years ago. Now, Professor Fasano tells us the activation
of the leaky gut pathway, by toll-like receptor 4, is a defensive mechanism to flush out the bad bug.
So when you get leaky gut, water comes into the gut and it washes out the bug in the poop. Just get
rid of it. That's its job. So gluten is misinterpreted by the zonulin pathway as a potential harmful
component of a bug. That's why it's so important for everyone to take a look at this thing about wheat
when you're wanting to be healthier, it's not the only problem, but it occurs in every individual,
according to Maureen Leonard who read 64 studies on this. Yeah, there's Maureen Leonard's article.
Once again, it happens to every individual who ingests gluten.

A couple more concepts. Okay, we now know that wheat and bad bacteria are problems. What are
other common triggers? Just as accrued toxic compounds from cigarette smoke are well established
to cause various health conditions, many toxins originating from day to day exposures accumulate in
people and cause a world of hurt. Shifts in the inflammatory response from short to long live,
meaning the inflammation continues all the time, occurs because we're storing these toxins. If we
can't get rid of them they accumulate in our body. And then the immune system is constantly trying
to fight these pesticides, these insecticides, this mercury, this lead, this bad food, whatever it is that
we're being exposed to, that's accumulating in our bodies.

And look at the title of this article, Understanding inflammation, it's regulation and relevance for health:
A top scientific and public priority. You all as individuals need to understand this. Not the geeky stuff
that I'm talking about, but just what are the triggers causing inflammation for you in your body?
Understanding the process may provide important insights into why people develop diseases, and it's
really important.

The systemic immune response comes from these five pillars for every disease. So you see that
systemic chronic inflammation is the center cog wheel that turns the other wheels that may come
from chronic infections, bacteria and viruses, inactivity, obesity and altered microbiome, bad foods
that you're eating, the stress and the trauma that we have from stress, disturbed sleep, and then the
chemicals were exposed to. These are the factors that we need to look at step by step. It's going to
take you 6 months to a year to dial it down for you and your family, to figure out which ones are the
major problems to get them out of there.

I'm going to show you three studies and then we're going to the question period. So this study from
the Journal of the American Medical Association had this comment that came from the editors. Now,
the editors don't do this very often, but they said this is an elegant example of a study that uses
sophisticated biomarkers to identify the subtle effects of pesticides on human health.

So the editors gave this article the stamp of approval. And what did the article say? Greater intake of
high pesticide fruits and vegetables was associated with a lower probability of successful pregnancy
and successful birth. What? And here's the numbers. They took all these pregnant women, they put
them into fourths, the lowest fourth that didn't have many fruits and vegetables, conventional fruits
and vegetables from the supermarket, the next group, the third group and the highest group. And
they compared the lowest and the highest group. It's not the fruits and vegetables that are the
problem. It's the pesticides on the fruits and vegetables.Look what happened for the people who are
eating more than 2.3 servings a day.

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Now, if you're having a salad, which is greens and perhaps tomatoes and perhaps carrots and
perhaps cucumbers, you're over 2.3 servings per day. 26% lower probability of a live birth, meaning
these pregnant women lost the baby, if they were eating 2 points more than 2.3 servings of fruits and
vegetables a day that were conventional, meaning they're not organic.

We've allowed the corporations to poison our food and we do nothing. 'Well, I know I should eat
organic, but I don't have the time'. This is the result. Our technology is so good now we're able to
identify, what are the triggers of inflammation in this group of people, pregnant women or women
wanting to get pregnant? 18% lower probability of getting pregnant if you were having 2.3 servings or
more of vegetables a day, conventional vegetables.

Second study. They measured the amount of pesticide residue in the urine of healthy people. They
had no health concerns, no problems whatsoever. And they found out there was a 91% lower level of
pesticides in the body and in the urine of people that were eating organic. 91%, which is really quite
wonderful and how it should be for all of us. Now, when they took people from the average habitual
Western diet, we call it the Standard American Diet, the SAD diet, and they put them on the
Mediterranean diet, which we've heard about for years is so good for us, look at the increase in the
amount of insecticides and organophosphates and pyrethroids that were in the urine when people
went on the Mediterranean diet.

There's no question the Mediterranean diet is really good for you, but if you're using fruits and
vegetables that are conventionally grown, you're going to accumulate all of these toxins in your body,
you're likely to accumulate all these toxins in your body that will manifest years down the road
because of the gasoline on the fire, wherever your genetic vulnerability is. Here comes Alzheimer's, if
you carry the genes for Alzheimer's. Here comes cancer, if you carry the gene for cancer. But the
Mediterranean diet helps to lower your blood pressure, you lose a little weight, you feel better, but
you have all these toxic chemicals now in your body causing the inflammation that eventually, down
the road, manifests as whatever your genetic vulnerability is.

And the last study. This was for me because I traveled so much teaching. I was in Lisbon a couple of
weeks ago and then Milan and the airports don't have much food that's really okay to eat. So when
I'm really hungry I'll drink my green tea. I have a container I carry with me all the time, and I always
have green tea. And then I'll get a bag of potato chips and I fall down on it.

This study shows us that eating potatoes does not increase your risk of mortality, not in the least,
unless you're eating fried potatoes. That's French fries and potato chips. If you're eating French fries
and potato chips 2 to 3 times a week you have a 95% increased risk of mortality within 8 years. If
you're eating French fries and potato chips more than 3 times a week, you have 126% increased risk of
mortality within 8 years. And I didn't like that at all. That was not so good for me. But it just reminded
me that I can't have those little cheats. That our science is so good now that we're getting much more
comprehensive information on the subtle triggers that accumulate over time.

So this is jaw dropping information about fruits and vegetables. We all need to be eating
Mediterranean diet style fruits and vegetables, rainbow diets, but it must be organic. And it may take
you 6 months to a year to grow some herbs in the bay window of your kitchen. 'I don't have a bay
window', well install one and just grow some herbs there. A little parsley, a little rosemary, a little
thyme, and grow vegetables or find your sources for organic produce.

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[00:25:43] Alex Howard
I think, firstly, it's a very compelling narrative that you're sharing. And I think I like the simplicity of that,
and in some ways I think we should finish there, everyone go and eat more vegetables and eat
organic. And this is one piece of a bigger picture in terms of these pillars of inflammation.

I'm wondering, that's a given people need to do that but what are some of the other pieces they can
look at? Particularly looking at this research around leaky gut and the microbiome, and this is an area
that you've been speaking about and writing about for a few decades now, I'm curious as to what are
some of the other simple practical pieces people can work with?

Dr Tom O'Bryan
If people say to me, 'what test should I do?'. And I say there's really three. The first one, because I've
spent decades studying this, is The Wheat Zoomer. Look for a test to see is wheat giving you a
problem? And that's because I've studied so much science on that one. Most doctors won't say that.
They just haven't seen the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of studies of how it may manifest.

The second test is called The Neural Zoomer Plus, it's the most comprehensive test. And I travel the
world and I always, at the breaks, I go down to the vendor booths and look at the laboratories that are
there for the doctors. And I look at all the tests that are available and there's nothing like the Zoomers.
They're called Zoomers because you zoom in on the problem, and The Neural Zoomer Plus to see,
'oh my gosh, my brain is on fire'. Because if you don't know your brain is on fire, you're not going to do
anything about it. But if you know, when you identify it, now you've got a map. 'All right, I'm here. I'm in
brain inflammation. I want to be over here, no brain inflammation. What do I do?'. And you read my
book, You Can Fix Your Brain because it talks about so many of the hidden triggers of inflammation in
the brain.

And the third test is a good test for the microbiome, and there are many. We use The Gut Zoomer but
you need to identify what's the current status of my microbiome? And if there's only one thing that
you're going to work on, 'Doc, I'll work on one thing. Just one thing only. What should it be?', build a
healthy, diverse microbiome. Nothing has more benefit, more trickledown effects than building a
healthy microbiome.

It was Michael Gershon from Princeton University in 1999 that wrote the book The Second Brain. And
he told us back then, for every 1 message from the brain going down telling the gut what to do, there
are 9 messages from the gut going up telling the brain what to do. The ratio is 9 to 1. So if you have
depression, fix the gut. If you have anxiety, fix the gut. If you have high stress and all the time, fix the
gut because it's the exhaust of the microbiome, that's called the metabolites.

If you exercise too hard, your muscles are sore the next day, that's lactic acid. That's the exhaust of
your muscle cells. The exhaust of the bacteria cells in your gut, called the metabolites, make up 36%
of all of the small molecules in your bloodstream. One third of everything in your bloodstream are the
messengers from the bacteria in your gut instructing your brain, instructing your heart, instructing
your kidneys, instructing your liver, one third of everything.

So if you've got a lot of the bad guys in your gut, the messages that are going to your brain are
abnormal inflammatory messages. So when you build a healthier, diverse microbiome, you change
the messaging system. And just Google 'depression and the microbiome', 'bipolar disorder and the
microbiome', 'anxiety, schizophrenia and the microbiome', and here come the studies that show
sometimes people get dramatic results in brain dysfunction by rebuilding a microbiome.

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[00:29:58] Alex Howard
And in terms of rebuilding the microbiome, obviously the food is an important part of that, perhaps
you can say a little bit about some of the other pieces, antimicrobial work, probiotics, some of the
other ingredients of that rebuilding.

Dr Tom O'Bryan
Yeah, of course. Critically important. And the first thing on the list is change the lifestyle that created
what you've currently got. So stop throwing gasoline on the fire. Meaning if you have a sensitivity to
wheat, you have to stop eating wheat. If you have sensitive dairy or corn or soy, you have to find out, is
my body okay with these foods or not?

And the way you feel doesn't matter. The ratio is 8 to 1. For every 1 person that has gut symptoms with
a food sensitivity, there are 8 people that don't. They get brain symptoms or joint symptoms or skin
symptoms, and they can't tell that it's the eggplant parmesan they ate last night that's making their
joints so sore today. They can't tell. They don't associate the two.

Now, if you get gut pain and you're like, 'oh, man, I don't feel so good after eating that', then you know
you're the lucky ones. So stop throwing gasoline on the fire. You have to test. The rule is test. Don't
guess. Test. Accurately test. That's number one.

Number two, and there's a number of things to include. The first one, Mrs. Patient, when you go
shopping for your vegetables, always organic, but buy a couple of every root vegetable in the store.
Get rutabaga and turnips and parsnips and radishes and sweet potatoes and carrots. Not too many
white potatoes because the glycemic index affects your blood sugar, but get every root. 'Well, I don't
know how to cook a turnip'. Well, neither do I, but what I do is I slice an onion, peel some garlic, slice
and dice the turnip, a little coconut oil or avocado oil in the pan, heat it up, add a little sauce to it, and I
eat it. 'Well, what about a rutabaga?'. I slice up an onion, peel some garlic, dice it, put it in a pan with
some oil, put a little sauce on it and eat it. You don't have to be Julia Child. You just have to get it
down because the root vegetables are the fibers that feed the good bacteria in your gut. They're
called insoluble fibers that feed the good, they don't feed the bad bacteria. They feed the good
bacteria.

So the first thing, you have to have it every day. Every day a root vegetable, one root vegetable for
you and your family every day. Then you go to Google and you type in, 'list of prebiotic foods' and you
print out the list and you put in the refrigerator and you have two from the list every day. Bananas are
prebiotic and onions are prebiotic, garlic is a prebiotic. So you want two from the list and one root
vegetable every day to feed the good guys.

Next, fermented vegetables, probiotics. A tablespoon a day. You work up to a tablespoon a day of
sauerkraut or kimchi or miso or fermented beets or curry flavored, many flavors of kimchi, whatever
you like. But every day, one tablespoon, and if your children, a teaspoon. 'Well, they don't like it'. Hide
it in the mashed potatoes. They don't have to taste it. You just have to get it down there. And when
you do that you increase the microbial count in your food by over 10,000 fold. Meaning you're
inoculating with the good guys. Yes, it's good to take a supplement, but that's what we did 50 years
ago, not 40. I can't date myself that bad. 1980 we were using probiotic supplements that we still do
today. But it's not the mainstay, that's a short-term boost as you're transitioning lifestyle so that foods
are where you're going to take care of your family's microbiome every single day.

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Next, a cup of bone broth every day. Make your own bone broth. Just Google how. It's really simple.
It's a no brainer. Why? Because bone broth is high in gelatin tannate. Gelatin tannate acts like a seal
over the leaky gut so the cells can heal quicker. It's like a band-aid that protects the damaged area
and then the cells heal quicker.

Next, Mrs. Patient, when you go shopping for fruits and vegetables (always organic), buy 10, 15, 20
apples, organic. Wash them, but don't peel them. And cut out the seeds, dice them up, throw them in
a pot. And in the pot, so if the apples are this much in the pot, add water to one third the height of the
apples, one third. Dump in some cinnamon, maybe a couple of raisins if you've got kids and they like
a little sweeter, turn it on high. It takes 12 minutes. You're done. You made apple sauce. That's all it
takes. Boil them for 12 minutes, you've got apple sauce. Then you can put it in the blender. My wife
likes to add just a little bit of vanilla to it. It makes it really tasty. But you got apple sauce. Apple sauce
is one of the most potent foods to feed the strongest enzyme in your gut called intestinal alkaline
phosphatase, IAP.

IAP heals the gut, increases the good bacteria, fights the bad bacteria, reduces cholesterol, reduces
triglyceride, stabilizes blood sugar. There are so many different things that IAP does for you, and you
increase IAP dramatically by having a tablespoon a day of homemade apple sauce. Not the
commercial stuff, that won't work. It's the pectin in the fresh apple sauce that feeds intestinal alkaline
phosphatase. Those are just some of the basic things to rebuild a healthy microbiome.

Alex Howard
I think one of the challenges sometimes is people can be very quick to go to functional testing and
want to take this supplement and this protocol and sometimes miss the importance of fundamentals.
And I'm mindful of time, but I think perhaps a helpful way to bring this together is actually how much
people can do with those fundamentals.

Dr Tom O'Bryan
You know, Alex, what you're describing is the way we practice functional medicine when I came out
of practice in 1980 and 1990s and 2000, I recommended a lot of supplements for people with good
justification. There was good rationale for it, and people got better. But now we know it's the lifestyle
that contributes to the inflammation that causes the presenting complaints and the diseases. So we
have to change the lifestyle and you want to train your family to enjoy the foods that are positive,
beneficial, healthy for you and not be dependent on 15 different supplements.

Good rationale to use the supplements, and I ask my patient, 'Mrs. Patient, can you take a probiotic
supplement?'. We like the spores called megaspore, 'but can you take a probiotic supplement for 2
months while you're transitioning over to eating more fermented vegetables?'. 'Yes, I can do it'. Good
for about 2 months. That's a nice transition to make sure you're getting enough of the good guys
while you're changing your diet.

And we always emphasize while you're changing your diet, because if you go with the mindset that,
'well, if I take this, I can keep doing what I was doing in my lifestyle', it's like a dog chasing its tail.
You're going to keep having symptoms because you still have the inflammation. So you can't put the
fire out by trying to put a band-aid on the fire while you're pouring gasoline on the fire. You can't do it.

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[00:37:58]
And it's a paradigm shift for people. I know this is a little traumatic, what I'm telling you about fruits
and vegetables. You must eat organic now, it's not a question anymore because of the amount of, 26%
lower chance of having a live birth pregnancy. And this is in the Journal of the American Medical
Association, the number one journal, arguably the number one journal in English language, maybe
number two, but really top tier. 26% loss of live births just by eating conventional fruits and
vegetables.

So this is a paradigm shift for all of us. And I'm going to invite everyone here to wrestle with these
ideas. Listen to this interview again and again, because I'm like motor mouth speed. I know I am,
because there's so much information I want to tell you, but listen to it a couple of times. 'Oh, I missed
that the first time'. 'Yeah, I remember hearing that'. And you want to develop the ability to look at the
map of your health and your family's health. 'We're here. We want to be here. How do we get there?'.
And you go this route, little detour here, probiotics, prebiotics, applesauce. You have to learn. Pots
and pans, you can't use aluminum pots and pans anymore. There's lots of science about all this stuff
now.

Alex Howard
Fantastic. There's so much more that we could say but for people that want to find out more about
you and your work, what's the best way to do that and what's some of what they can find?

Dr Tom O'Bryan
Oh, thank you. There's two things. Our website is thedr.com just don't spell the word doctor out. Lots
of videos, lots of free handouts for you. For example, if you go to the thedr.com/plant we give you the
article and the summary from NASA on house plants absorbing 73% of the toxins in a room. Two 6
inch house plants absorb 73% of the toxins in the room. Because you're going to learn that indoor air
pollution is much worse than outdoor air pollution. So thedr.com/plant you've got the handout.
There's all kinds of handouts and videos like that there.

And my wife and I did this thing a few years ago, we went to seven countries. I interviewed the world
leaders on autoimmune diseases. And then I interviewed the doctors who were following the
guidelines of the world leaders. And I knew the questions to ask these guys because I read their
studies. So we got down into the meat of it right away. And then the doctors who were using that
information, and I asked each of these doctors to bring in 2 or 3 of your patients who were compliant
and who had good results.

And then we interviewed the patients who reversed MS, reversed lupus, reverse chronic fatigue,
reversed multiple chemical sensitivity again and again. I'll never forget the woman in London, during
the interview she said, 'I took the tube to come here and it's a seven block walk from the station to the
hotel, and I walked, it's not a big deal'. But then she got a little teary eyed and said what it is. And then
we show you a picture of her in a wheelchair 2 years ago with MS, she can't walk. And we show you
her MRIs, 7 lesions on her brain. And here she is today, no symptoms whatsoever, does a little jig. And
we showed the MRIs, 2 lesions left on her brain.

That's the power of this work. When you have the patience and the understanding that it's going to
take you 6 months to a year to really dial this down. But you need the map to understand the kinds of
questions to ask.

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[00:41:53]
So that's at thedr.com/betrayal and that's where the docuseries is. It's all free for everyone out there.

Alex Howard
Fantastic. Dr Tom O'Bryan, I really appreciate your time and wisdom today. Thank you.

Dr Tom O'Bryan
Alex, thank you for the opportunity.

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Relationship Super Conference, 2021