Josh (03:59.37) Tom O'Brien, welcome back to Reversible.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (04:04.171) Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be with you. I remember our previous interview and it was a lot of fun. So I'm glad to be doing it again.
Josh (04:12.074) Well, I'm happy to report Tom because of you, I did have to throw out that entire bag of those cinnamon raisin muffins that I just bought. And it has been many months now and I've still not had a single bite of wheat or gluten since.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (04:18.928) Hahaha!
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (04:24.971) Good for you, good for you. And what have you noticed in how your body functions?
Josh (04:29.99) I've never felt better. So I'll tell you, I've had ADHD looking back my entire life, but looking back, I've also had gut issues my entire life. And now...
I feel incredible. My brain is clear. I've had an on and off candida issue that got really bad last year from an old sinus infection. It's actually due to a root canal that burrowed a hole through my bone and into my sinuses. And that just wreaked havoc. My candida blew up. I started getting acne. I'm 31, 32 years old. I don't know how old I am, but I started getting acne. And after cutting that, that was half the battle and it just dropped things right away. It's been incredible.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (04:46.141) Mm-hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (05:05.375) Yeah, it really is when you identify the source and stop throwing gasoline on the fire and the inflammation goes down. It's part of the human nature that we have an entire new body every couple of years. Every cell in your body regenerates. And how does that happen? I mean, how come you're the same size if every cell is regenerating?
Josh (05:12.585) Mm-hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (05:32.127) because you get rid of the old and damaged cells, that's called autophagy, that's the geek word for it, but it's getting rid of the old and damaged cells to make room for the new cells, right? And that's right, that's right. But what happens for people is that the whole process of autophagy and regeneration, it...
Josh (05:44.14) Like upcycling.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (05:57.023) You're backing out of the driveway and you say, what's wrong with this car? It's not, it's moving, but the emergency brake. And you let go of the emergency brake and then you back out just fine. The same thing happens in your body. So you can't regenerate the cells that the blueprint says, which are perfect cells. You know, when you were born as a baby, your blueprint was perfect cells. And it's the...
Josh (06:17.691) Mm-hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (06:24.815) emergency breaks that we develop in our life that slow down the regeneration of our tissue and we don't regenerate perfect cells. I'll give you just a conceptual example. You've got cold hands and feet, hard to get up in the morning, you wish you had 20 more minutes in bed, you know, your pulse is a little low, your brain's moving a little slow, you probably have a sluggish
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (06:55.319) And so I'm going to say, let's assume that your thyroid's functioning as a 6.1 on a scale of 1 to 10, and 10 is perfect the way it's supposed to be. You're functioning at 6.1. Not acceptable. I mean, 70 is passing in school, right? But you're functioning as a 61, 6.1. Well, that cell, although the blueprint is to reproduce a thyroid cell that's a 10,
Josh (07:13.69) Mm-hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (07:25.203) you reproduce as a 6.1 because of what's around the cell. That's called the epigenetics. But the message from your DNA is 10. But it doesn't get expressed fully. You reproduce as a 6.1. Why? Because what's going on around the cell, the amount of toxins around the cell, the amount of inflammation around the cell.
is an emergency break that holds back the reconstruction process. And I mean, that's a geeky, that's a simplistic way of explaining the geeky concepts of tissue regeneration. So you reproduce as a 6.1, but your lifestyle is the same lifestyle that's putting the emergency breaks up in your life. You're sensitive to gluten, as an example.
Josh (08:07.751) Hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (08:20.427) That's a lifestyle thing. So now you start functioning as a 6.0. That cell reproduces as a 6.0. You keep doing the same lifestyle, you start functioning as a 5.9. That cell reproduces as a 5.9, 5.8, 5.7. That's the process of degeneration and the development of disease. But now you learn, oh, one of the emergency breaks.
Josh (08:44.224) Mm-hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (08:49.591) Well, it was gluten. And you take gluten out of your diet, you take wheat out of your diet. Now you're functioning at a 6.8, like a big jump. Look, I know I'm better, my mind's clear, my energy's up. I sleep better, I wake up refreshed. You're functioning at a 6.8. That cell reproduces as a 6.8, but now when that cell's normal cycle to regenerate is coming up, you reproduce as a 6.9.
Because without the inflammation from the wheat, the environment is allowing you to regenerate healthier tissue. And that, and you function as a 6.9, and then a 7.0, and then a 7.1. That's called an anabolic state. And that's how you reverse disease, is one baby step at a time. But first you have to identify the emergency breaks, always, and get those emergency breaks off.
Josh (09:24.587) Mm.
Josh (09:44.803) Let's talk about some of those emergency breaks because, you know, reversible reverse able this entire podcast is about that. Really what we do primarily is tie in the gut in its role in everything how our world interacts with our gut and how our gut interacts with our health, our wellness, our mind, our world, our personality. It's just amazing. And there are so many emergency breaks that we have on. Hit me with it, Tom.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (10:06.063) Oh, here's one for you that's just remarkable. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I shared the stage in December last month with Professor Yehuda Schoenfeld, the godfather of autoimmunity in Rome. We were at a conference in Rome. I was the co-chairman of the conference. And Schoenfeld started off with this fact that was like, what? Now to understand Schoenfeld, he runs the Department of Immunology at Tel Aviv University.
And medical doctors, after they get their MD, that's one of the places they go to get their PhD in immunology. And to give you a sense of that department that he built, 26 of the PhDs who receive their PhD from him, there are many, many more, but 26 of them chair departments of immunology in medical schools and hospitals around the world. They're his students. This is the Godfather, right?
And I had invited him to come to Rome and he did, and it was a great presentation. But he started off with this fact. We are born 99% human. A newborn baby has very little bacteria in their gut. They've got a little from mom's environment in utero, so they've got a little, but not very much. We're born 99% human cells, and we die 90% microbial.
Josh (11:36.066) Come on.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (11:37.439) That's like, what? But you've heard before, there's 10 times more cells of bacteria in our gut than there are human cells in the body, 10 times more. The ratio is 10 to one for the number of bacterial cells compared to human cells in an adult. So Schoenfeld just put it in perspective. We're born 99% human and we die 90% microbial.
Josh (12:07.606) You know, Tom, I talk all the time about this, about the gut and the microbes that make up two to three percent of your entire body weight, outnumbering your cells ten to one. And this is information my listeners have heard dozens of times from my mouth, but never has anybody put it in that perspective that you're born 99 percent human and die 10 percent human, 90 percent microbes. That's wild. Yeah. Hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (12:07.958) What?
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (12:21.951) That's right.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (12:26.931) Right, right. So who's in charge? Who's in charge? Now, you know, and we say, oh, that's a cute thing. And I tell it, uh, the comment often when my friends and I, when we've been teaching all day at symposiums for doctors, and now the day's over, we're out to dinner together. And it's usually the second bottle of wine where we're talking about, are we humans with a whole lot of bacteria or are we bacteria having a human experience?
Josh (12:57.076) Hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (12:57.719) And people laugh about that. Ha ha ha. Oh, no, wait a minute. Wait a minute. What Schoenfeld is telling us. And so if they outnumber us 10 to 1, and here's another fact, 36% of all the small molecules in healthy blood are the metabolites of the microbiome, the exhaust of the microbiome. Well, what does that mean? You know, if I exercise too hard,
and my muscles are sore the next day, that's just lactic acid, everybody knows that. Drink some water and in a day or two, you're fine. Your muscles won't be sore anymore. Lactic acid is the exhaust of muscle cells when you've been working them too hard. Well, bacteria produce exhaust. They're called short chain fatty acids and nucleic acids and a number of others, but they're just the exhaust.
Josh (13:31.31) Sure.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (13:49.811) Well, 36% of all the molecules, small molecules in the bloodstream are the exhaust of the bacteria in our gut. Well, wait a minute, but that's in the gut. So this exhaust gets into the bloodstream? Yes. And it's over one third of all the small molecules in the bloodstream? Yes. Well, why is that? Because they're the messengers. Now the geek term is modulates.
And that's a good scrabble word, but all it means is has its hands on the steering wheel of where your body's going, right? So the bacteria send these messengers out into the bloodstream and they've got their hands on the steering wheel that turn on the genes to make more serotonin in your brain or more melatonin in your brain or the neurotransmitters, the brain hormones. They're not hormones, but I refer to them as hormones.
but they're called neurotransmitters. All of that and the balance of those is controlled, modulated by the messages coming from the gut, telling the brain how much neurotransmitters to make. So anyone that has a brain dysfunction problem, whether we label it as depression,
or anxiety or schizophrenia or bipolar or migraines or seizures, anyone that has a brain function problem, you must always include as part of your protocol building a healthy, diverse microbiome. And it was Michael Gershon from Princeton in 1999 that published the book The Second Brain.
Josh (15:35.726) Mm-hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (15:36.035) And he told us way back then, 24, 25 years ago, for every message from the brain going down, telling the gut what to do, there are nine messages from the gut going up telling the brain what to do. The ratio is nine to one.
And this is what these messages do. They're in the bloodstream and the blood goes up to the brain and they turn on genes to make more neurotransmitter or make less neurotransmitter, to make more anti-inflammatory compounds or more inflammatory compounds. All of that is controlled by the bacteria in your gut. All of it, without exception. And when we understand, if we go back to Schoenfeld's comment,
We're born 99% human, we die 90% microbial. We understand these guys are in charge of how our body functions. They're not secondary, they're primary. But it takes a humble intellect to accept that, well, I'm in charge of my body. Well, no, you're not. No, you're not.
wait a minute if I want to go over here I go over here. Well yeah that's your that's your thinking process and you're very much in charge of your thinking process but your emotions and what generates here sadness, happiness, anxiety, stress, all of that is modulated hands on the steering wheel by the microbiome in your gut all of it. So Alessio Fasano
Josh (17:10.894) Thank you.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (17:19.963) is at Harvard. He's a professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School, professor of nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health, the chief of pediatric gastroenterology at Harvard, the director of the mucosal immunology center, that's the lining of your lungs, the lining of your brain, the lining of your gut, Harvard, the director of the Celiac Research Center, Harvard.
He's got five titles. Any one title is a lifelong dream for someone at the top of their game. He's got five. We think he's gonna win the Nobel Prize, we do, because it was him and his team that identified the mechanism by which this thing that we now call leaky gut occurs. They identified it in 1997.
Josh (17:51.651) Mm-hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (18:06.271) and it's a protein called zonulin that opens up the space between the cells. And when you open it up too much, now you get leaky gut. And he identified, he's one that identified that. And he tells, he's so very careful of everything he says so that he's not misquoted ever, right?
Josh (18:15.146) Mm-hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (18:26.031) And he's got hundreds of research papers now to his credit. So you'll see a really good research paper and there'll be eight names of authors on there. And the last one, Alessio Fasano, meaning he put his stamp of approval on it and reviewed it and guided these researchers in what to say or what to do. This is a paper he wrote himself. And there are very few papers that he writes by himself, but this is one of them.
Josh (18:38.839) Hmm.
Josh (18:47.871) Wow.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (18:54.807) came out a couple of years ago. All disease begins in the leaky gut, the role of the protein zonulin in the development of chronic inflammatory disease. So you've got one of the top minds in the world, kind of like a Einstein for gastroenterology, one of the top brains in the world telling us, he never exaggerates, all disease.
begins in the leaky gut. Well, does that mean my mother was diagnosed with rheumatoid? All disease. Well, but my husband has throat cancer. All disease begins in the leaky gut. Well, my daughter's got depression. All disease begins in the leaky gut. Well, my son's got acne. All disease begins in the leaky gut. Do I get my point across? It's hard for people to understand this.
Josh (19:33.289) Hmm.
Josh (19:49.166) I'm going to go ahead and close the door.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (19:52.503) You know, to embrace it. It doesn't matter what you're dealing with. You always have to include building a healthier, diverse microbiome as a component of, of releasing the emergency breaks that are creating the problem that you're experiencing right now.
Josh (20:14.91) You know, Tom, you are gonna give, I have to put a warning label because you're gonna give our listeners an existential crisis. We're just, we're all living and dying and not even ourselves. And we're bacteria having a human experience and all the molecules, the small molecules in our blood, over a third, 36% are byproducts of microbes. And it is all back to our gut. And it's just an amazing, amazing thing to understand. And my primary goal.
This episode just really highlights, and we're only 15 minutes in, it's really just highlighting how much of a reverence we need to have for our gut non-microbes when we look at our food, our soil, what we consume. You know, I was out the other night, I put a post on my Facebook page, it's really quite blown up, and it was just me going to the grocery store, looking at a package of dried mango slices, and I love mango.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (20:51.924) Mm-hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (21:04.939) Mm-hmm.
Josh (21:06.102) but it had seven different ingredients, had yellow number five, FTC and tartrazine and this and that, had all these ingredients and preserves. It was more of a jelly and it was coated in sugar. And so, you know, we just start to look at how these things disrupt.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (21:08.264) Yeah.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (21:18.067) Well, Josh, when you come visit us here in Costa Rica, you can come out to my mango tree and we'll pick a mango and you can have some mango. Right.
Josh (21:27.746) don't tempt me with a good time. I am a, I love mango, Tom, okay? So you're messing with me now. Well, walk me through, I love that you have a mango tree. If you guys are moving to Italy and you're selling, let me know. Let's walk through some of these, because obviously all these begin in the leaky gut, all diseases across the board. And last time you were on, we really dove into gluten.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (21:33.473) As do I.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (21:41.049) I
Josh (21:51.762) And our listeners can definitely get into there. I believe your episode nine, that one did exceedingly well. We talked about the role of gluten and leaky gut and how detrimental it is. Tom, could you walk us through some of these other bits talking about what is disrupting our microbes? What is this low grade inflammation? You have this amazing new docu-series, you have this documentary coming out talking about inflammation. Let's talk about the documentary quickly and then let's cover some of the things you cover about how this goes about. Let's summarize it that way.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (22:08.913) Yeah.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (22:20.435) Sure, sure, thank you. Yeah, I've started most of my talks in the last few years, wherever I am and whatever the topic is, I begin the same way all disease begins in the gut and that there is this chronic.
Josh (22:21.522) to catch my thoughts up there for a minute. I'm just so excited.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (22:40.023) low-grade inflammation under the surface that's there for years and you think you feel fine because you're functioning okay. I'm sure Josh you thought that you were feeling fine a year ago, two years ago. You were doing, yeah you know I'm a 28, 29 year old guy. I'm doing fine. You know I'm pretty good.
Josh (22:58.902) That's it.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (22:59.691) Right. You didn't know that you had emergency breaks in the form of gluten that were suppressing your vitality, suppressing your mental clarity, but you had this low-grade inflammation while you felt fine, quote, fine. And that's the way people are today is that I feel fine. You know, yeah, I don't have any problem with the doctor. He says I'm healthy. Really? Did he test you for health or did he test you for disease?
Josh (23:27.874) Hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (23:28.611) And the difference is when you get a physical and they do a blood test, all they're doing is looking for indicators of disease. They're not looking for indicators of vitality and wellbeing. And there's a.
Josh (23:35.656) Mm-hmm.
Josh (23:41.582) They're not looking at why either, they're just looking for what is.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (23:44.819) Right, right, right. What is in the moment? What is, hey, your car is pulling to the right. It's going off the road there. And well, let me just, and so you're driving with your steering wheel to the left a little bit. And so you take this medication and it'll help you with your steering wheel so you stay on the road of life and you don't veer off. But wait a minute, if I let go of the steering wheel, the car goes off to the right. It pulls to the right. And they don't look, they don't examine.
that it's, you remember six months ago, sir, when you hit that pothole and it rocked your whole body, thinking, oh my God, did I blow the tire? And so you're driving and say, oh good, I guess it's okay. But within a few months, your car's pulling to the right because you knocked that tire out of balance. Let's go look at the tire. And then you see that tire is worn down compared to the other tires because it was knocked out of balance. And so.
your car is pulling to the right and so you turn the steering wheel to the left and you go in and say doc I don't feel so good my steering wheel. I have to hold my steering wheel to the left That's the symptoms you have Whatever they are, right? And they look for why that's happening, but they're not looking for indicators of vitality and well-being So i've been starting almost all of my talks with this basic These two basic concepts first
Josh (24:50.946) Mm-hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (25:04.539) And that is there is this low grade inflammation under the surface in all of us. Nobody tests for, nobody puts any attention on as long as we feel fine. You know, and so I realized about a year ago, you know, I'm having to do this in every talk and, you know, and I'm talking to physicians, but I'm still having to do this because they don't know this. Well, we need to change the paradigm here.
We need to change the way that people think. All right, I guess I'm doing a docu-series. So I've spent the last nine months now traveling the world, interviewing the world's greats in the field of research and vitality. Schoenfeld, I interviewed Schoenfeld. Jeff Bland, the father of functional medicine. Joe Pizzorno, the father of naturopathic medicine. David Fuhrman at the Buck Institute who has a contract with NASA.
Josh (25:47.918) Hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (26:01.759) to figure out why are the astronauts aging so quickly in space. There is no way a human can make the two to two and a half year journey to Mars. It's impossible they'll die on the way of old age in two or two and a half years because aging is so accelerated in space. Now they don't talk about that because if they did, NASA wouldn't get the funding to keep researching how do we get people to Mars. But that's what's going on right now.
Josh (26:01.9) Hmm.
Josh (26:26.042) Hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (26:30.471) And Furman tells us it's always this low grade inflammation that's just magnified in the astronauts, but we all have this low grade inflammation going on. So I've interviewed the world greats and we put it together in eight, it's gonna be eight or nine, I haven't decided yet, one hour episodes, one hour a day for eight or nine days. But it's going to be seven minutes of Professor Schoenfeld, six minutes.
Josh (26:55.812) Hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (27:00.067) of Jeff Bland, three minutes of this patient who applied these print snows and reversed their MS, nine minutes of somebody else. So my point, you know, it's a story. We're putting the story together so people can follow the story. And at the end of it, Tom Maltaire and I are going to sit down and say, well, can you believe when David Furman said this and Professor Schoenfeld said this and Dr. Isaacs said, well, that really makes sense. So that means that we need to do
this in our lives to reduce that amount of emergency breaks. And so that's what the event's going to be like, and it's called the inflammation equation, decoding the path to optimal well-being. And it took me like three months to come up with the title because we're also overwhelmed with the amount of information out there. And it's to the point of being immobilizing.
Josh (27:56.066) Mm-hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (27:56.083) Should I do my genetics? Do I have an MTHFR? Well, should I take vitamin D? How much vitamin D? What about stem cells? What about this thing on autopsy? Should I fast? What kind of a diet should I do? Should I do paleo diet? Should I do keto? You know, there's so much out there. So decoding the path, because there's many paths, you know, it's called pleotropic. I mean, all roads lead to Rome. There are many ways to get healthy, healthier.
Josh (28:17.634) Mm-hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (28:24.935) And we're decoding all of that for people so that they understand, okay, what do I need to evaluate for myself and my family, especially my son who was diagnosed with attention deficit? What do I need to diagnose? Or what do I need to explore here? What tests do I need to do to see what's his real underlying status? How much inflammation does he have and what type of inflammation is it? And then what do I do about it?
Josh (28:52.162) Mm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (28:52.267) How do I reverse the direction from a 6.1 to go to a 6.4 instead of to a 6.0? How do I change the direction? That's our goal in this event. So people will, for the rest of their lives, my goal is to make this paradigm shift in every attendees way of thinking about health. So they don't get caught just dealing with the symptoms.
Josh (29:16.753) Thank you.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (29:19.335) and then keep doing the same thing that they've always done. Because our healthcare system is really a crisis care system. It waits until you're in crisis, and then it tells you what to take to reduce the crisis. Well, that's not healthcare, that's crisis care. Wait till you get a diagnosis of something, and then take this, Mrs. Patient, and then it'll calm it down. But this didn't come about, whatever tension deficit
Josh (29:22.912) Hmm.
Josh (29:37.458) Yeah.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (29:49.427) migraine seizures, that didn't come about because you had a deficit of this medication. That's not why you have this problem. Now the medication may put the bandaid on the oozing wound for a while so that your symptoms reduce, but it doesn't deal with the underlying mechanism going on. And so you, for example, you know, with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, the medications help patients a little bit to function better.
while this thing is progressing. Keeps progressing. Well, why is that? Well, Parkinson's, I mean, we all know if you read the science, starts 25 years before you ever have a symptom in your gut. In your gut. And there's this protein called alpha-synuclein, I don't mean to get geeky, but that's the twisted protein in Parkinson's. And it's the gut bacteria that twists that protein.
Josh (30:19.714) Mm-hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (30:49.567) Then that protein goes right through the walls of the intestines into the nerves. This misfolded protein has an attraction and it goes up the neurons like eats the beans, the spider went up the water spout, right? The alpha-side nucleon goes up the neurons to the vagus nerve all the way up to the brain, up the spinal cord to the brain. And it has an attraction to a particular area of a brain.
Josh (31:05.721) Mm-hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (31:18.295) called the substantia nigra, where the inflammation occurs. And because of the collateral damage from inflammation, you kill off the cells of the substantia nigra. And after 20 years of that, now the substantia nigra, which controls your muscle movements, is getting some mixed messages. And now you're starting to do this. And I'm exaggerating. At first, it's almost not noticeable.
but it comes from a bacteria that misfolded in your gut. We learned that in 2010. That was the first paper I ever saw on that. And you ask every Parkinson's patient that I've ever asked, they had a history of constipation for years and years and years beforehand because your gut was out of balance and you were losing the action of the gut to push the bowel material through.
Josh (31:50.102) Yeah.
Josh (32:05.806) Mm-hmm.
Thank you.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (32:14.647) And that went on for many, many years and that set them up. And the weak link in their chain, you pull it a chain, it always breaks at the weakest link. So one end, the middle, your other end, it's the heart, the brain, the liver, the kidneys, wherever your weak link is. The weak link for those people is a substantial nigra in the brain and alpha-synuclein that's going to itsy bitsy spider. You know, I've got a three-year-old, so we sing itsy bitsy spider once in a while.
Josh (32:35.572) Hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (32:44.427) down came the, you know, that whole thing. But that's what happens. That's right. That's good. Good.
Josh (32:47.464) You should start doing that with them and sing down came the substantial Niagara and the muscles went
Josh (32:57.558) Well, that's amazing. You know, Tom, it's really, really interesting we dive into this stuff because again, it just builds such a reverence around our gut. Now, something I find very interesting and very unfortunate, and we're just talking to the gen pop, you do such a good job of explaining these things, is that they go to their doctor and if they have one bowel movement every two to three days, they go, oh, that's normal. But what's happened, common, yes.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (33:20.275) No, no, it's common. It's not normal, but it's common. And doctors get those two words wrong all the time.
Josh (33:27.19) Yes. And that's why I say normal because it happens, but it's not optimal, right? Common, not normal, isn't a normal health. And so what can, what can our listeners do? Because obviously you got so upset there. And I love that because it does, it grinds my gears. They say, Oh no, once every three days is normal. I had somebody come in, Tom, they haven't had a bowel movement in a month, a month. And their doctor wasn't terribly concerned because they have IBD and blah, blah. And so my concern is, or I guess my primary question is.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (33:46.984) Yeah.
Josh (33:56.35) In your experience, you've been doing this for a long time, probably longer than I've been alive. What would you say to the average person listening who's having even benign gut issues like bloat, little bit of, you know, maybe one bowel movement every two days, a little bit of indigestion, a little bit of nausea. What is your first advice to either A, looking for a solution or B, advocating for themselves when talking to their doctor?
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (34:18.991) C, be willing to change your paradigm. You have to change your paradigm. Well, what does that mean? You have to think differently. Well, how do I do that? What do you mean? You have to be exposed to information like I'm giving you now, often enough to where you realize and you accept that this is how your body runs. Then some of the answers become more obvious.
Josh (34:20.826) Love that.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (34:43.915) But you have to take your health into your own hands to explore for yourself the why. My first mentor was George Goodhart, Dr. George Goodhart, the founder of Applied Kinesiology. He would be on stage and I traveled for 45 different weekends over the course of a few years.
to Detroit where he lived and he held his conferences at the Marriott Hotel at the airport, at Metropolitan Airport. So you fly in, you get a room at the Marriott on Friday night, you know, wake up Saturday morning, walk down to the conference room and Saturday morning and Sunday, all day Saturday and Sunday morning, done at noon and fly home. 45 times I did that. And
George and the stage at the Marriott was a wooden platform, sections that they unfold out and then put the next section, a butting up against it, then the next section. And these were wood stages. So he'd be up on stage with a podium there. And when you saw him lift his knee, he'd lift his right knee up in the air and his right arm. And then you learned to get ready, here it comes. Why?
doctor and he'd slam his foot down in that wooden stage and we all do this, you know, it's so loud. He slammed his foot down there to drill it into us. Why does the person have what they have? No, it's not their genes. That's just the weak link in the chain. Your genes don't cause disease. There are a few diseases like cystic fibrosis. Yeah, if you've got that gene, it's not good. But most of the genetic variances we have, they don't cause your disease.
Josh (36:08.949) Amen.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (36:25.523) They set you up. That's the weak link in your chain. And if you pull at the chain too hard, that's the link that breaks. That's how you think about genetics. And what's the pull on the chain? Well, the pull on the chain is inflammation. Always, without exception. Every disease, it's the same. It's inflammation. The Center for Disease Control tells us that 14 of the 15 top causes of death in the world,
are chronic inflammatory diseases. Everything except for unintentional injuries is a chronic inflammatory disease. So from that perspective, now wait a minute, wait a minute. You mean it doesn't matter if it's Alzheimer's or a stroke? It doesn't matter if it's MS or psoriasis? No, it doesn't matter. The mechanism is the same. And so when you understand that,
Josh (36:57.322) Mm-hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (37:23.759) and that becomes your paradigm, then your primary focus is how do I reduce the inflammation in my body? How am I pulling at the chain? And when you learn that for you and your children and your family, and like your example, you reduce the pull on your chain with one of the big ones, gluten. And that's why, you know, people do great gluten-free diets.
Josh (37:34.381) Hmm.
Josh (37:47.438) Mm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (37:55.523) in March of 2022, the results of a gluten-free diet in non-celiac autoimmune disease. And he reviewed over 60 research papers. And the conclusion was that 79.5% of the time, autoimmune patients get better on a gluten-free diet. And this was concurred.
in 63.7% of the studies. So more than half the studies say the majority of the time with autoimmune disease, you get better on a gluten-free diet. And it doesn't matter what the autoimmune disease is. He looked at 28 different autoimmune diseases and consistently people get better on a gluten-free diet. Not every time, not every time. I recommend people test for it, do the right test to find out if you need to go gluten.
free. But my point is, if you're receptive to the data, that your paradigm, how you think, starts to change. And so then everything in your life, you look at it from a different perspective, honey, we need to buy some new bedding when we can afford it, new sheets and new blankets and comforters. Well, why?
Josh (39:05.499) Hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (39:18.931) Well, because all of these are soaked in flame retardant chemicals that out gas for years, minute amounts of these chemicals, doesn't matter how many times you wash them. There's minute amounts of these chemicals that you're breathing all night long, and they accumulate in your body. These might now and there's no evidence that the amount of chemical that out gases from a down comforter, a standard down comforter, there's no evidence that
that amount of chemical is toxic to humans. And that's how the chemical industry got away with this. You have to prove within 24 hours that the amount you're exposed to is toxic to humans. It's not. Let's use the example of nail polish. The phthalates chemicals used to mold plastic. The phthalates and nail polish are what hardens nail polish. The phthalates are in your bloodstream in four to five minutes when you apply nail polish.
Josh (39:49.879) Hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (40:13.887) but there's no evidence that the amount of phthalates that get into your bloodstream in four to five minutes from applying nail polish is toxic to humans. There's just no evidence, but this is accumulative in your body. So give me a five-year-old girl that paints her 10 little fingers and 10 little toes once a week for 25 years, and now she's 30 and married and wants to get pregnant, and hopefully she has a...
Josh (40:22.448) Hmm.
Josh (40:38.231) Mm-hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (40:43.255) healthy pregnancy and a healthy delivery. Okay, baby looks great, baby looks healthy. Chicago, 2016, 326 pregnant women in the eighth month of pregnancy. They collected urine from them and measured the amount of phthalates in their urine, which means how much is circulating in their body right now. And they looked at five phthalates, there are many, but they just looked at five, and one of them was Bisphenol A, BPA, that many of us have heard of.
And they categorized the results in fourths, the pregnant women with the lowest amount in their urine, the next, the third, and the highest amount. They followed the birth of these babies, and when the child turned seven years old, they reached out to the parents, hi, how's your baby? Oh, great, glad to hear it. Well, we'd like to do the tests now, the Wechsler IQ tests, the official IQ tests. So they checked 326 babies whose mothers,
were measured for the amount of phthalates in their urine during pregnancy. And there's not much in medicine that's all or every. This was every. Every child whose mom was in the highest category of phthalates and urine in pregnancy compared to the children in the lowest category, every child in the highest category, their IQ was seven points lower. 6.7, yeah. Now for most people, that doesn't mean anything.
Josh (41:49.323) Hmm.
Josh (42:01.766) Seven points is the difference from average and special.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (42:09.319) A one point difference in IQ is noticeable. A seven point difference is a difference between a child who's working really hard in school, getting straight A's, and a child working really hard, really working, getting straight C's. This child doesn't have a chance in hell of ever excelling, ever. Because now just go to Google and type in phallates and neurogenesis, nerve cell growth.
Josh (42:12.386) Yeah.
Josh (42:24.731) Wow.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (42:37.919) Here come the studies, the higher the level of phthalates, the more inhibition in brain cell growth. And because these chemicals are accumulative in the body, but the chemical that gets away with this, well, there's no evidence that the amount of phthalates that leach into your body from applying nail polish is toxic to humans. That's how they get away with it. So, and that's what we're talking about in the inflammation equation. All of these things in our lifestyle.
Josh (42:48.226) Hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (43:06.651) and asking the scientists, what have you found? Oh, plastics, oh my goodness. The new research came out just a month ago about plastics. They developed a new technology and we've heard about microplastics and how it's in the fish and then we eat the fish and we get this in our bodies. But their new technology is a laser evaluation technology. They can identify nanoplastics.
Josh (43:33.549) Mmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (43:33.755) not microplastics, but nanoplastics, which is much, much smaller pieces. And what they found in the three most commonly sold bottles of bottled water in plastic bottles, in a liter, the average was 240,000 nanoplastics in a liter of water, 240,000. Now that stuff goes right through your blood brain barrier into your brain, activating your immune system to fight it.
Josh (43:57.102) So what is that?
Yeah.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (44:03.239) It goes into your liver, into your kidneys, into your heart, into your lymph nodes, that we are becoming more plasticized, that it's more in our environment.
Josh (44:14.502) So how does that translate Tom? Because because let me rephrase that. Yes that's what translates don't touch that stuff. So I mean last time I had checked it said the estimate was an average of about five grams a week of plastics the average person consumed which is the weight of a credit card consuming a credit card per week with this new laser tech is that number jumped even more then. Wow.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (44:18.107) Don't buy bottled water in plastic bottles. That's how it translates.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (44:35.583) Yeah, right, right.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (44:41.111) much more. They said it's over 100 times more.
Josh (44:46.398) So we have people eating the plastics of about 100 credit cards a week, arguably.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (44:53.463) I've they've not published that but yes the credit card amount of plastics was by evaluating microplastics but what they have found is that there's a hundred times more plastic when you look at the nanoplastics when the technology can identify these tiny pieces.
Josh (45:16.174) Wow, okay. So there was a study I'm sure you'll be well aware of. It was back in 2004. I believe it was published by the Red Cross and it makes its rounds every few years. And it was republished in 0405 by the Environmental Working Group where they cut the chords freshly cut.
10 cords of baby's, right, the 10 umbilical cords, and they found more than 287 chemicals with pollutants and pesticides and toxins and plastics, cigarettes, whatever. 180 chemicals are known to cause cancer in humans and animals. 217 were toxic to the brain and nervous system. 208 known to cause birth defects in animal studies. And that was 20 years ago. And things have gotten much worse, right? Working in the IBD space, I look at the pesticide use that gets wild.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (45:51.655) Right. Yeah. Well, do you know, do you know the, have you heard about the increase in the incidence of autism?
Josh (46:04.75) Yeah, it was one in fifty thousand, now it's like one in three, isn't it?
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (46:08.415) Well, no, when I came into practice in 1980, it was one in 10,000. And the most current statistics that I can see in boys, it's one in 26.
Josh (46:21.31) I've heard people say that they're expecting by 2040 to be 1 in 2, that it may be 1 in 3 now or someone on the spectrum.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (46:25.447) Right, right, right. Because moms are so toxic. Moms are walking toxic soup. Baby is developing in the amniotic fluid that's as toxic as can be. That's why, and as I mentioned to you before we started recording, one of my target groups to attend this event, the inflammation equation, is women of childbearing age.
Josh (46:50.232) Hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (46:50.419) so that they can learn this because every woman needs to detox for six months to a year before she ever gets pregnant. Don't get pregnant until you've detoxed for the well-being of your baby's brain. I mean, I know I'm sounding fanatical, but when you read the science and you look at how many kids are sick, how many kids are on antidepressants or anti-anxiety, how many kids are on the autism spectrum, how many kids are attention deficit.
Josh (47:02.464) Yeah.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (47:22.084) It's pandemic. It's an unrecognized pandemic, meaning across the world, that's going to wipe out our culture. And I don't mean to look. Blue Cross Blue Shield published a study in March of, no, February, February of 2020, right when this virus came out. So nobody listened to what Blue Cross said. Everybody was really scared about the virus. But they said, we've got a real problem here.
Josh (47:24.096) Yeah.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (47:47.195) And Blue Cross Blue Shield is the largest for-profit health insurance company in the English language. They're a multi-billion dollar company. And they said, we've got a problem. In the last four years, there was a 407% increase in the four-year period in the diagnosis of Alzheimer's, 407% increase in the diagnosis of Alzheimer's in 30 to 44-year-olds. In four years.
Josh (48:14.485) Hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (48:16.683) That's your age, Josh, 407% increase. Wake up that we need to wake up of how toxic our world is right now and play. And what do I do? What do I do? You need a really good, strong offense. What does that mean? You need a strong offense playing defense. You need to protect yourselves and your family. Well, how do I do that? That's what you have to learn.
Josh (48:18.442) Wow.
Josh (48:39.074) Hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (48:45.851) How do I do that? So I mentioned NASA talking about toxic air in the space shuttles, it's phallates. So NASA published the studies, they financed the research, how do we clean the air? So they financed the research on houseplants. And when you read the studies, two six inch houseplants,
In a 10 foot by 10 foot room, two 6 inch houseplants absorb 74% of the toxins in the air.
Josh (49:21.079) Hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (49:22.639) It's simple science. So you go to my website, the dr.com forward slash plant, and you download the handout from NASA on the plants. And here's the pictures of the plants. Oh, I know those plants. I've seen those before. They're not expensive. And if you have 10 rooms in your house, you know, or if you have six rooms in your house, you go buy 12 plants and you put them in, and if you say, well, I don't have a green thumb, they're going to die. Then you buy more.
Josh (49:52.16) Hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (49:52.479) But in the meantime, you put these house plans in your kids' bedrooms. So in the environment there, eight hours a night, the air is being cleaned. You get air filtration systems if you can afford them, but you start learning, how do I change my paradigm? And I'm, you know, people don't like to hear this, but you know, when, when you see the science, everything I'm telling you is from the studies, everything.
It's not my idea. I'm just here saying, wake up world, wake up. The only way I think we're gonna save the world, and I do believe that, this is my opinion, the only way that we can stop the direction that so many things are going right now is by raising a generation of children that think outside the box. They think for themselves. And in order to do that, they have to have brains that are operating at full potential, whatever their potential is.
Josh (50:27.03) Wow.
Josh (50:43.042) That's rare.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (50:48.887) So in order to do that, we have to educate moms to detox because their uteruses are toxic soups and baby's brain doesn't develop properly. And it affects the outcome of the, these children look great as a healthy birth, healthy delivery, kids look great. But when you check them at seven years old, their IQ is seven points lower, just on phthalates. They didn't look on anything else, right? So we have to educate these young women.
Josh (50:56.483) Hmm.
Josh (51:13.183) Mm-hmm.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (51:17.543) Okay, I need to clean up my body. Let me give you another one. This puts it in perspective and then I have to go.
In the Journal of the American Medical Association, they published a study in 2019 from Harvard. And the editors of the journal said, this is an elegant study using sophisticated biomarkers to demonstrate their point. Now, for anyone that reads medical journals, the editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association don't say that very often. That's really unusual to get a validation like that. So that told me, oh, this must be really important.
All right. And it was looking at couples going to assisted fertility centers. And Josh, you're in the age bracket. You may have some friends that are doing that. And they're spending tens of thousands of dollars and a tremendous amount of stress to try to get pregnant and have a baby, a beautiful thing. So they ruled out all of the known risk factors, obesity, cigarette smoking, alcohol.
Josh (52:05.694) Mm-hmm. I do.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (52:24.303) exercise, no exercise, socioeconomic class, race. They ruled all of that out in an elegant way and looked at one thing. How many servings of fruits and vegetables is the woman eating a day during pregnancy? And what did they find? They found that they divided them into fours, the lowest amount, the next third, and the highest amount of servings per day.
Those in the highest category of fruits and vegetable servings per day had an 18% less likelihood of getting pregnant of successful implantation, 18%. And if they did get pregnant, they had a 26% less likelihood of a live birth. The baby died, miscarriages and stillbirths. Wait, wait, wait.
Josh (53:13.932) Wow.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (53:20.743) more fruits and vegetables they eat, the worse the outcome? Yes, yes, rock the world. And the editor said, this is an elegant study using sophisticated marketing. That's why they did it because the results were completely opposite of what anyone would think. But then they found that there was a subgroup in all of those couples that they were working with that was eating organic.
Josh (53:46.05) Hmm
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (53:47.419) And what happened for those people? It was the exact opposite. The more fruits and vegetables you eat, the more success you had, organic fruits and vegetables. So it's the insecticides and pesticides and fungicides, rodenticides, antibiotics, glyphosates on the conventional fruits and vegetables that, see, and this is my opinion. I haven't found any science on this. I've looked and I can't find any science on this one yet.
that I think the most sensitive tissue to these foreign toxic chemicals in the human body is a fertilized egg. It's got no defense. It's completely dependent on the mother's environment, the uterus and the womb completely. But when mom's environment is loaded with all of these toxic chemicals and she's taking more on a daily basis, so they're in the bloodstream, the more fruits and vegetables you eat, the worse the outcome.
and she's taking more every day in the bloodstream and that blood's flowing in there, but there's pesticides and insecticides and antibiotics in there, the worse the outcome. The worse the outcome. And here's the really good news in this study, which is why I love this study so much. They classified women as being in the organic category if they ate three servings a week. Not 21 servings a week of organic, three servings a week.
and it changed the outcome completely. And I asked them about that, and because they didn't comment, you know, why do you think that is? Well, we really don't know. And you know, these are Harvard guys, and they're not going to go out on a limb and say anything they can't prove. So I said, well, do you think it's because women who are eating organic on occasion, they probably have organic shampoo, and they're using organic makeup, and they're doing other things for their health that weren't looked at in the study?
He said, well, yes, quite honestly, that's what we think, is that they've changed their paradigm. They're trying to avoid as many of these chemicals as they can. Wake up, girls. Excuse me, but wake up. We need your future babies to be baby Einsteins, to think outside the box. That's how we're gonna save the planet. That's why all of my marketing dollars for the inflammation equation to...
Josh (55:51.991) Hmph.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (56:11.559) announced this to the world is going to two groups. One, baby boomers, because that's my group and we're all falling apart, you know, so we want a better life so we have to learn how to do that. But two is your age bracket, Josh, because we have to get to these women to change the way they take care of themselves and how much toxic exposure they have accumulating in their body.
Josh (56:21.566) Yeah.
Josh (56:37.302) Wow.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (56:39.159) So listen, man, I hope that you will sing from the rooftops to get everyone to register for this event. We'll give you the link. You can put it in the show notes, right? So that people will take this one hour a day for eight or nine day journey with us to be exposed to all of this stuff that I've just given you in an hour. It's like so overwhelming. What do I do with this? And we started off with what's one of the primary things you do.
Josh (56:48.078) Amazing.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (57:07.403) We are born 99% human and we die 90% microbial.
Josh (57:11.588) Hmm.
Amazing. Tom, blow in my mind, as always, I love getting you on this show to do these interviews. I think it's amazing. I know you got to run. I just want to say thank you so much for your time. There's so much to do. And right after we wrap up here, I will have a question for you as well, because I think we can do something really cool here that I can really help you out. But I'll have my editor cut that little piece of the interview. But Tom, is there anything else you'd like to leave our listeners with before we wrap things up?
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (57:37.3) Yeah.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (57:41.287) Yes, yes, I'm sure I overwhelmed you. I know I did, but I think that's the only way, you know, it's kind of shock and awe. But the subtitle to my most recent book, the title is You Can Fix Your Brain. And it's a great book. It won a National Book Award, and it's got 36 how-to's in there, in the book. You know, for example, when you store your leftover food in plastic storage containers,
The next day the chicken has got phthalates on it from the plastic storage container. So you need glass storage containers. So we give you three URLs to go to, you know, like, uh, miles Kimball and Amazon and wherever the third one was, you say, well, those are, oh, I like those. And you order three round ones and two square ones and one for the pie. And you paid the cricker. It took you an hour to do that.
But never again will you poison your family with minute amounts of phthalates from food being stored in plastic, right? So the subtitle of that book is Just One Hour a Week to the Best Memory, Productivity, and Sleep You Ever Have. And that's the way to be successful in reversing the direction of your health is that you allocate one hour a week to this overwhelming amount of information that you get, and you do one thing.
And then next week you allocate an hour on houseplants. And then next week you allocate an hour on organic cosmetics. And then next week, you see, just one hour a week, every week, but in six months, you've completely changed your lifestyle. You've completely changed the paradigm successfully. That is the only way to be successful. My patients have fallen on their face so many times over the years because I overwhelm them.
Josh (59:19.327) Amazing.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (59:31.047) and they're just, they're overwhelmments, that's when I realized, let's just take one hour a week. Let's just take baby steps and do one thing. Well, what about, that's important, but we'll do that next week. And that's the way that you'll be successful. We'll talk a lot about that in the inflammation equation.
Josh (59:49.098) Amazing. Tom, thank you so much for your expertise as always. We're going to link everything and will that be available for listeners who are getting this episode after it's been launched? Will there be recordings available? Amazing. Thank you very much. So I appreciate you being here.
Dr. Tom O'Bryan (59:58.267) Oh yes, no, it'll be evergreen. It'll be evergreen.
Thank you, Josh.