EP 51: WTH ?!? You can Fix your Brain with Tom O'Bryan

Noticed how our healthcare system may not have your best interest in mind. Join Dr. Eckel in this fun and sometimes disturbing exploration of the state of healthcare and what it means for you. Now, here's your host, Dr. Eckel.

Welcome back, everybody. I'm Dr. Greg Eckel. And this is what the health and have you noticed that the medical system may not have your best interest at heart? I know I'm seeing a lot of that these days. I am really excited about my guest today, Dr. Tom O'. Brien. He is considered a Sherlock Holmes for chronic disease and teaches that recognizing and addressing the underlying mechanisms that activate an immune response in is the map to the highway towards better health. He is faculty member at the Institute for Functional Medicine, National University of Health Sciences. He's trained and certified tens of thousands of practitioners around the world in advanced understanding of the impact of wheat sensitivity and the development of individual autoimmune diseases. His most recent book, you Can Fix youx Brain, Just one hour a week to the best memory, productivity and sleep you've ever had, was published through Rodell Books in September 2018 to global accolades. That is our topic today, you can fix your brain. Welcome aboard, Dr. Tom.

Thank you, Dr. Gregg. Pleasure to be with you.

Yeah, I always love our conversations. You know, you are really getting the message out on the interwebs and you're helping thousands of patients and practitioners really up their game in the neurodegenerative condition front. You have a very practical book here and courses and guides along the line. Some of the topics and highlights that we want to really, I want to make sure that we're handling here. You know, we're going to talk about learning about autoimmune response and how that plays a role. You don't really hear about that when you talk about brain health. What is leaky brain and can you test for it? So, you know, just kind of starting out at the top, what triggers impact brain function? So, like, what are you seeing is you're talking to thousands of patients around the globe and then how does autoimmunity affect brain function?

Really good questions. Really good, really important questions. And perhaps I can begin this way, that the definition of the word crazy is to keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. So if we keep living the lives we live, but maybe I'm going to take some extra vitamin called N acetylcysteine, but we keep living the life that we live and we expect a different result, it's not likely to happen. And the missing link in degenerative diseases for Most people and all doctors know this, who study integrative medicine, complementary medicine, functional medicine. We all know this, is that every degenerative disease is a disease of inflammation at the cellular level. The cell is always on fire. And the question is, is it a brain cell or is it a kidney cell? You get bladder infections or do you have brain fog or your kid gets seizures? Is it the brain or the kidneys or the joints or the skin? So what tissue is it? Is it gasoline or kerosene? What's causing the fire? And when we think that way, it's a big picture view. When you think like that, then you start to understand what's it going to take to stop the recurrent sinus infections or to stop the brain fog or to stop the migraines, what's it going to take? And it's not going to take a pill or a couple of vitamins or some pharmaceutical that's going to change the direction your health is going in. Those things can help. They certainly can help. Pharmaceuticals are great when they're needed. You have high blood pressure, you better take the medication. But you have to identify, why do I have high blood pressure? Or why does my daughter have seizures, where's it coming from? And I've thought of this in the last couple of weeks and I hope it helps some people with this concept. I moved from Chicago to Southern California in 2010, and I drove across country to get there. Four days drive. When you go from Chicago to San Diego, you need a map. You need a map. You can't just get in the car and turn it on and start driving and think you're going to get to where you want to go. When you currently have a child with recurrent seizures, or you currently keep having uterine fibroids, or you currently have low testosterone, you want to get to higher levels of testosterone or no seizures for your child or whatever the health condition is. You want to get over there, but you're here now. So to get from here to there, you need a map. You need to know where is this coming from? And when you have an understanding, that's the job of your doctors, is to help you figure out why is this happening, where is it coming from? Not just how do I get some relief right now, that's important. How do I keep my blood pressure down right now, that's really important. But what do I do that reduces the need for the blood pressure? So from that perspective, we'll talk today about the brain. And our book is you can fix your brain and you really Can. But the book is how do you read the map of getting from where you are now, Whether it's early cognitive decline, mild Alzheimer's, or whether it's recurrent headaches, or whether it's ringing in your ears or your child's got seizures, whatever the brain dysfunction is, how do you get from there, from here to over there where your brain's functioning better? So the book is the map. And what we'll talk about today is some of the ways of reading the map and what do you have to look for. So if I can start with that, then it's not going to be more of the same that we hear from really great doctors that have great recommendations that help. But the momentum continues in the same direction if the inflammation is still going on. Short term relief does not equate with long term benefit. So that's the key here. I hope that's what will be different for people listening today is to understand I need to learn how to read a map and read the map of my body and the direction my body's going in. Love it.

That whole inflammation as the crucial component, the concept of inflammaging as we age and there's inflammation and so inflammaging is what we're seeing in our society. Why chronic disease, illness is kind of on the rise across the board. This is crucial. So when we talk about this map, where do you start?

Well, you know, you hit the magic word. The Italians came up with that word inflammaging in 2008. And what it signifies, there's about 1200 genes of inflammation in the human genome. About 1200. And what's turning on those genes causing the inflammation which accelerates the aging process. So they came up with the term inflammaging because you age quicker in life.

With the more inflammation you have.

So the key to being really vibrant and functional long term in your senior years where you could rock and roll, you'd love to like dance, do the twist with your granddaughter at her wedding and really shake it up. So the crowd goes, look at that old guy. Holy cow, right? I mean, isn't that a great dream to have? But inflammaging is the key. It really is the key. And that term was coined to recognize the role that turning the genes on of inflammation has. So you're absolutely right. But we're right back to the same thing. Is it gasoline or kerosene? Is it mold in your house or sensitivity to wheat? Is it a dairy sense? What Dairy? Really? I love dairy. Just go To Google and type in casein. That's one of the proteins in dairy. C, A, S, E, I, N, casein and sudden infant death syndrome. And you go, what?

What?

And you see here are the studies that sometimes that may be a contributor to that condition. Fatal, you know, unfortunate condition, but it can be a dairy sensitivity that may set that off. And there's a number of studies that talk about that. Not that every case of sudden infant death syndrome is because of dairy. Absolutely not. But is it gasoline or kerosene? That's the way that we have to look at this.

Interesting. All right, so you brought up the casein and the dairy.

Food.

So you're saying is food. Is this where we start? Is that where you start?

Oh, my goodness, yes. The most common source of gasoline on the fire in your body is what's on the end of your fork. Most common. I mean, there are many others that also have to be looked at in the checklist. And if you read the book or listen to the audio. I did the audio on the book. It was the most difficult thing that I've ever done in my life, literally. And I lived in a martial arts school in Japan in my 20s, you know, as a deshi, nothing compared to doing four days, eight to 10 hours a day in front of a microphone. And every sentence, every sentence, you know, my brain had stayed sharp. So if you like the way I talk, and some people do get the audio and, you know, it'll be engaging for you, but it's. It's the. The whole book is about what are the triggers of inflammation that can manifest in your brain? What are those triggers? And the most common trigger is what's on the end of your fork.

So eating your way to your grave, basically.

That's right. And there's one more point to that. It doesn't matter how you feel with the food that you eat, because we know, for example, with gluten, with wheat, for every one person that gets gut symptoms from a sensitivity to wheat, there are eight that don't. Their gut feels fine, I feel fine. When I eat wheat, I feel fine. When I eat pizza, or when I eat gluten, I feel fine. Because they're determining how does the gut feel. But the ratio is eight to one. For everyone in the gut, there are eight. It's your brain, your kidneys, your skin, your hair. It just depends on your genetics as to where it manifests. The most common system of the body is your brain. That's the most common system. For example, if you, you know, life's going pretty good for you. And then one day, all of a sudden, you wake up and you're kind of barky and a little bit pissy with your spouse. Excuse me, but if you're a little bit off with your spouse and you're not having a good day, where'd that come from? If you say, oh, I had pasta last night, no, that couldn't be it. I felt fine after I ate pasta. It tastes really good. I felt fine. But it may be the weak link in your chain, where it manifests. You pull at a chain, it always breaks at the weakest link. One end the middle, the other end your heart, your brain, your liver, your kidneys, always your weak link. So if your weak links your brain, it may be the next morning or the next day, and you're just a little ornery, or you're just a little depressed, or you're a little more anxious than usual. It'll manifest whatever your genetic vulnerability is. But the gasoline for that example is the food the person ate that set that up. That activated the genes of inflammation.

Got it. Now, there's a couple of routes to go there, but one, will you, because you are one of the head educators on gluten, Gluten sensitivity in the country world, will you speak into that one in particular? Because people don't necessarily have to have symptoms. We do know it creates inflammation in the bowel.

Exactly right. Exactly right. And so how do you read the map? The first thing to understand is that we have the exact same body as our ancestors 15,000 years ago. We have the same kidneys, we have the same pancreas. We have the same bones, we have the same ears. You know, everything works the same. We use our brains more, so we've got more creature comfort, but everything works the same. Our ancestors, when the. Their main focus was finding food before agriculture, 10,000 years ago, our ancestors before that were nomads. They followed the herds everywhere. And so they were always looking for food. They found seeds and nuts and fruits and some vegetables, roots. And once in a while, they'd harvest an animal, have some meat. But they were always looking for food. How could they tell if some food was okay? They pick it up. They smell it first. That was the first thing they did. Smell is really important. Maybe we'll get to that in the brain. Talk about brain function. They'd smell it. Then they taste a little bit. If it was okay, then they'd eat it. But if there was some bacteria or parasites on that food that they couldn't taste and they Eat it. The acid in our stomach, the hydrochloric acid kills. It kills the bacteria. Really good mechanism to kill anything that shouldn't be there. That's part of the reason for the acid. It's the first line of defense of our immune system against parasites. If anything got through the stomach and went into the small intestine, there are sentries standing guard called toll like receptor 4. It's a little geek term, I'm sorry, but it's like an antenna. And these sentries are standing guard there. And if there's anything that gets into the first part of the intestine that's not supposed to be there in terms of bacteria or parasites, toll like receptor 4 gets activated right away. It turns on a lot of inflammation in the gut to kill whatever it is that's not supposed to be there. Really good system we've got now. We've known since. I think the first paper I have on this is 2006, and I've got maybe seven, eight different studies on this. Every human, every time they eat wheat, activates tow like receptor 4. Your body mistakenly thinks that wheat is a bug and it's got to fight that bug. Which means that every human, when you eat a sandwich and the residue of that comes out of the stomach into the small intestine, it activates toll like receptor 4 in everyone within five minutes. And you get transient intestinal permeability, the leaky gut, within five minutes, every person, every time. And you don't feel this when it's happening, but you know, the science is so advanced now. We've even got the videos I show in my full day courses. I show the video of what happens when wheat goes out of the stomach into the small intestine. And you see within five minutes, here comes the leaky gut. And you see it when it's happening. And doctors in the audience, their jaw drops, they've never seen anything like this. They say, oh my God, I didn't know that. I didn't know that. Because it doesn't cause any pain. You don't feel bad when it's happening. But every human every time gets this transient intestinal permeability. Now this is all about reading the map, Mrs. Patient. You have an entire new body every seven years. Every cell in your body regenerates, some really quick, like the inside lining of your guts every two, three days. Some cells are very slow, like brain cells, thyroid cells and kidney cells, but every cell regenerates. So you eat toast for breakfast. You tear the lining of the gut. It's transient because it heals. You have a sandwich for lunch, you tear the lining of the gut, but it heals. You have pasta for dinner, you terrifying gut, but it heals Day after week after month after year until one day you don't heal anymore. And when you don't heal anymore, that transient intestinal permeability is not transient anymore. Now it's permanent. Now you've got the leaky gut, and now the systemic inflammation starts, meaning in your whole body, because these molecules are getting through the leaky gut into the bloodstream. And then wherever your weak link is, that's where the inflammation is going to show.

Got it. So from that leaky gut, that then is also that's activating our immune system. Then what's the next step on our.

You bet. Now, so think about. Proteins are like a pearl necklace. The acid in your stomach undoes the clasp of the pearl necklace. Now you've got a string of pearls, and it's your enzymes, the acids and the pancreatic enzymes and the gallbladder enzymes and the microbiome enzymes. They act like scissors to cut that pearl necklace into smaller pieces of the pearl necklace. Snip, snip, snip, snip, snip, until you're down to each pearl of the pearl necklace. That's called an amino acid. Now, your gut is a tube that goes from the mouth to the other end, one big long tube. The inside of the tube is lined with cheesecloth, so that as the food. So think of the tube like a donut. If you could stretch a donut out, one big, long donut, 20, 25ft long, that's your digestive tract. And if you look down the center of the tube, when you swallow food, it's in the tube. It's not in your body yet. It's got to get into the body, which means it's got to go through the walls of the tube to get into the bloodstream. How does that happen? Snip, snip, snip, snip, snip. Makes it smaller, smaller, smaller, until the pearl necklace is so small, each pearl of the pearl necklace, called an amino acid, goes right through the cheesecloth into the bloodstream. Now, your bloodstream is just a highway. It's all going the same direction, but there's no lanes of traffic. Everything's bouncing into each other, but it's all going in the same direction. But now these amino acids are in there, and they're available to make new bone cells and new brain cells and new thyroid cells and everything Else, what happens when you lose tolerance to wheat? As an example. And the transient intestinal permeability is now intestinal permeability, leaky gut. Larger molecules called macromolecules get through the tears in the cheesecloth before they've been snipped down enough to fit through the cheesecloth. These bigger molecules get through before they're supposed to. It doesn't matter if it's a banana or if it's chicken. It doesn't matter what it is. Macromolecules get in your bloodstream, and your immune system says, what is this? This is not building material to make new cells. I better fight this. Now your immune system makes antibodies to bananas or to tomatoes or to chicken or to beef or to pine nuts or to lentils. It doesn't matter if it's a macromolecule that got through. Your immune system trying to protect you, makes antibodies to fight that stuff. And these people, they go to a doctor who does a 90 food panel and comes back, they're sensitive to 20, 25 different foods. And. And the patient says, oh, my God, that's everything I eat. Well, of course it is. Your immune system's trying to protect you when you heal the gut, so there's no more tears in the cheesecloth, wait six months and go back and test again. Now you're sensitive to two foods, maybe three, and those are the ones you stay away from. So all of these concepts. And I hope people can listen to this again and again and again, because when you understand, there's a map. Oh, look, there's a little detour here. I have to deal with the tears in the cheesecloth thing or. Oh, yeah, I'm sensitive to 15 different foods. Well, I know it's really not the foods now. That's right. There's tears in the cheesecloth. So I have to deal with that. And you start learning what are the steps that it takes for me to get my health back again. What are the steps? That's a really important concept. We've all been brainwashed into believing. Just take this drug or just take this combination of vitamins and you'll be fine. The drugs help. The nutrition helps, Absolutely no question. But you have to identify what's the mechanism causing the inflammation, because if that's still there, you still have mold and shower curtain in your bathroom. It doesn't matter how much vitamin C you take in IVs, it doesn't matter. You're going to keep getting hit again and again with a weakened immune system because you're breathing Mold every day in your house. You just have to look and see where's it coming from. All of this is so important when you're asking the question, why isn't my brain working the way it's supposed to?

Nice. You know, this is so crucial, right, because we're seeing the rates of mild cognitive impairment, dementia and Alzheimer's just boom. You know, even Parkinson's is on the rise. And so it's like one in 15 people now predicted to have Parkinson's. 50% of the population by the age of 65 are going to have some dementia or brain neurodegeneration. So with this component, like in conventional land, they're not really even looking at this. Just like, can we give you a pill to maybe get rid of the symptom? And that's why I feel we haven't made any breakthroughs in neurodegeneration in the last 200 years. Because unless you're talking diabetes, conventional docs are saying, well, diet doesn't matter. It's like, no, this is. You just said it so eloquently in layman's terms. So, folks, I'm Dr. Greg Eckel. This is what the Health. I've got Dr. Tom O' Brien on here. If you want to listen to this Again, go to naturecuresclinic.com podcast and please share this with your friends and family. Because this next phase that going to go into, like, once that bigger molecule gets into our blood, wait until you see this next piece of the map here. Because, you know, it is that aspect, right? We've got what, 90% of our immune system surrounds our gut?

Dr. Tom it depends on the study. Somewhere between 70 to 80% is most.

Commonly identified a greater majority of our immune system. So what how does now, like, is that the next step on the roadmap or did I jump ahead?

No, it's critically important. Professor Alessio Fasano is one of my heroes. This is the guy who identified the mechanism of leaky gut in 1997. Now he's chair of pediatric gastroenterology at Mass General at Harvard. He also is the director of the Mucosal Immunology Department. He runs the Celiac center at Harvard. I mean, he's got a number of titles. The guy is just one of the top researchers in the world in this field. He's really careful of everything he says. Really careful, because he can be misquoted so easily. He came out with a new paper. He's got over 200 publications now. He came out with a New paper in January of this year. Listen to the title. All Disease begins in the Leaky Gut. That's the title of the paper. Well, what about rheumatoid? All Disease Begins in the Leaky Gut. What about ms? All disease? What about Alzheimer's? All disease. And he talks about the five pillars. He's really talking roadmap strategy in this paper. And he talks about the five pillars in the development of chronic inflammatory disease. This is a PhD level stuff, but we all should know this. At the everyday level, we all should know this. That's why I'm talking about it. Because if you understand there's five pillars in the development of disease, chronic inflammatory diseases, like Parkinson's, like Alzheimer's, like diabetes, like ms, like lupus, like chronic arthritis is like depression, like anxiety, when you understand that there's five pillars and you start learning to read the map to each of these pillars, then you've got a really great odds of having a healthy, vibrant, long life. Once you understand this, what are the five pillars? First, genetics. No question now that somewhere between 80 and 90% of the diseases that we manifest are not because you have the gene. It's not mandated that you're going to get if you have the gene. It doesn't mandate you're getting the disease, it mandates that you're vulnerable to getting the disease. If you turn that gene on. That's the big if you pull in a chain, it breaks at the weakest link, could be your heart, your brain, your liver, your kidney. Wherever the weak link is, don't pull on the chain so hard, which means don't turn the gene on. That's the whole inflammaging concept. So the first thing is the gene. You can't do anything about the gene, but you can understand what genes you have and what turns them on. So what you want to avoid, that's the first thing. The second thing is an environmental trigger that turns the gene on. The one that we all know about, there's no question, is celiac in celiac disease. If you carry the gene for celiac disease, what turns it on is wheat. But not everyone, because a third of the population has the genes for celiac. But only 1 to 4% get the disease. 33% have the gene, but only 1 to 4% get the Disease. So even if you have the gene and you eat wheat, it doesn't mean you're going to get celiac, but it means you're vulnerable to celiac. That's. Number two is the trigger. Number three, your microbiome in your gut. What kind of a microbiome do you have? Many people have now heard lots of information about the microbiome. I'm sure, Dr. Eckel, you've had experts on talking about it before, and people can go to your site and go back and listen to some of those interviews of the experts. But microbiome number four, intestinal permeability. When you lose the transient intestinal permeability, you lose that tolerance, so it doesn't heal anymore. And now you've got the leaky gut, intestinal permeability. And that's the gateway where these molecules get through into the bloodstream. And, and number five, the fifth pillar is your systemic immune response. The immune system trying to protect you fights these macromolecules. So if it's klebsiella, that's a bacteria, the most common infection people get in hospitals, arguably one of the most common is Klebsiella pneumoniae. And people get pneumonia in the hospital, but it's in your gut and it gets through the leaky gut into the bloodstream. And if your immune system fights Klebsiella pneumoniae, and if you carry a particular gene that all Doctors learn about, HLA B27, you're vulnerable to getting ankylosing spondylitis. That's the disease you get. If that's the gene that you carry, or if you get a Proteus infection, you're vulnerable to getting rheumatoid or Ms. Or whatever the disease is. The environmental trigger has been identified for many of these diseases. But it's five pillars. And you don't get this in a one hour talk. You know, you can't hold all the information. But if you can see that there's a big picture. If you understand when you want to go from Chicago to San Diego, you need a map. And when you understand that there is a map and you allocate a little bit of time. You know the subtitle of my book? The book's called you'd Can Fix youx Brain. The subtitle on the COVID is Just One hour a week to the best memory, productivity and sleep you've ever had. And that's not a cutesy subtitle. It is the Secret to Success. Because people get so overwhelmed by all of this great information that they get from your podcast, from my books, from other experts, books from other events out there, they're overwhelmed. But what I talk about in the book, you allocate every Tuesday night after dinner, every Sunday morning after services. It doesn't matter when it is. But every week I'm allocating one hour, and we're going to focus. I'm going to focus on one thing, just one thing. For example, when you read in the book that phthalates, the chemicals used to mold plastic, everybody's got phthalates in their body now. It's in everybody's urine. When you understand that phthalates inhibit brain function, and you say, boy, I want to get some of these phthalates out of our lives so I'm not exposed to it. And you understand that plastic storage containers that you store your leftovers in leach phthalates into the food overnight in the refrigerator, and the chicken you eat the next day has got phthalates in it. When you understand that concept, then it becomes important to get glass storage containers instead of plastic. And you go back to the book and you look at the three URLs that I put in, mileskimble.com, amazon.com and whatever the third one was, I don't remember. And you say, oh, those are. Oh, I like those. I really like those. And you order three round ones and two square ones and one for the pies, and you pay through credit card and you hit send. It took an hour to do that. You're done for the week. But never again will you poison your family with these minute amounts of poisons from phthalates leaching into leftovers. And six months, every week, one hour, one thing after another, just one at a time. And in six months, you've changed the lifestyle that was causing the problem. Remember, I started all this off by saying the definition of crazy. The only way you can change the lifestyle is by being persistent, focused and directed. And you can't do that six hours a day, every day, Right?

One hour a week. And this can get super overwhelming. And I really appreciate that about your book is that you do have action items and steps. And it's actually, it's very doable. You know, you've got the recap at the end of the chapter with the links. So it is. It's a great resource. And, you know, all of us with a brain that we want to maintain our brains, this is a very good program to implement, right, because you talk. So let's get into that because, I mean, you just unpacked so much in that little bit that you just said there, kind of like synopsis, everything. And now let's, like, bring it back out. So, okay, if we go back down the train here of, okay, we got the leaky Gut, right, so there's some triggers. What other triggers? You name phthalates and plastics. What about, you know, electro pollution? You know, what do we got there? There's a big kind of scary topic for folks and you know, talking about electromagnetic pollution. What is it? How is that like, does that fit in here as one of these triggers?

In the 1950s you could read on the front page of most newspapers in the country that the government said, no problem, everything's safe. With the above ground nuclear tests in Nevada, it's not a problem. Government said that to us, right? In the 1960s and the 1970s, the very famous picture on the front page of the New York Times called the Seven Dwarfs. It was the heads of the seven largest tobacco companies standing before Congress with their hand on their heart, swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And they lied through their teeth. The photo is called the Seven Dwarfs. Oh, it's safe. There's no problem with smoking cigarettes. And everybody believed it. In the 1980s it was transformed. Fatty acids and margarines, safe for you. Don't worry about it. Government says it's Safe. In the 1990s they started talking about electromagnetic pollution and how safe it was. Nonsense. There are hundreds and hundreds of studies on this that electromagnetic. Once again, the roadmap. Once again, whatever your health problem is, the big picture roadmap is that there are four categories you have to look at. Those four categories are the structural. That's the home of chiropractic and massage and pillows and beds and car seats and orthotics in your shoes. That can change the darndest things you would never think possible. But structure can cause disease. Biochemistry can cause disease. That's one we all focus on. What we eat, drink, breathe, spiritual or emotional can cause disease. We call that stinking thinking. There's lots of studies about that. And the fourth one, the newest kid on the block is electromagnetic can cause disease. And in the book we talk, there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of studies to this. Well, there is no evidence that electromagnetic pollution can harm humans. Nonsense. The exact same industry sponsored and industry marketed statements that we heard about nuclear reactors, about tobacco, about transformed fatty acids. It's been the same mechanism. And because they pay for these ads and they get on the front page of the paper, people believe it because they're not scientists. You know, but it just makes sense that you don't put a battery next to your brain. And now this 5G network that's out, really nasty. You know, the smart meters that people have been installed on people's homes that they didn't ask for them, but they came and did it. I've had two patients in this last year. Both had arrhythmias, really bad arrhythmias. One had to have a pacemaker, the other was scheduled for a pacemaker. When they came to me, first thing I asked them, as soon as they talked about arrhythmias. You have a smart meter on your house? Yeah. Have you been out of the home? Have you gone, like on two, three week vacation, anything like that? No. All right, go for two, three weeks, get out of the house, rent a condo, go on vacation, stay with somebody else. Don't go in a house with a smart meter. Preferably be as far away from electromagnetics as you can. Turn the wireless off at night, wherever you are. Turn your phone on airplane mode. When you're not using it for two to three weeks, just see what happens. Both of them, their arrhythmia stopped. They just stopped. They go back home, the arrhythmias start again. So it just depends on where the weak link is as to where it'll manifest. But absolutely, electromagnetics are one of the problems. Back in the 80s, I used people who were depressed coming into the practice. And the first thing we'd say is, get the alarm clock away from your bed. Get it off the nightstand, Put it on the other side of the room on the dresser. But I'll have to get out of bed. Well, that's the idea of an alarm. Right? Right. Well, I like to snooze. Well, figure out another way. But get it away from the bed, get the electricity away from you. And I would give people smart meters. Not smart meters, EMF meters, to take home overnight and check their whole house. Go along every wall, because mice might have chewed on some of the wires in the wall. Go by the electrical outlets, go by the light switches, Turn those light switches off, turn them on and see what happens. I had a bank of light switches, 10 light switches when you walked into the house, that went to all different rooms. Right. And they were all on dimmers. When I walk in the house, and supposed to be less than three, you put the meter next to that darn bank of switches. It went to 45.

Wow.

45. But as I pulled it away when I was 4ft away, it was down at 2, which meant, don't stand there. Just don't stand by those switches all the time. But you have to check television, colored televisions, the wall, the room on the other side of the wall, if that's your kid's bedroom, that may be triggering their attention deficit. And I've had that happen a number of times. Right, so EMFs are absolutely one of the gasolines on of inflammation. Absolutely. Without a question.

Yeah, huge. So that component of what you put that in toxic environment category, right? You mentioned plastics, we talked about food, you mentioned plastics. Now we got electro smog or emfs. What else would you put in that trigger?

We know from the work of our friend Dr. Dale Bredesen, who wrote the book the End of Alzheimer's. Really good book that there are five different types of Alzheimer's. The most common type of Alzheimer's is called inhalation Alzheimer's. It's what you're breathing that goes right up to your brain, causing the inflammation in your brain. What's the most common cause of that mold? Mrs. Patient? If you go out of town on vacation for a week or two, when you come home and do you have to open all the windows to air the house out? Oh, yeah, you've got mold. Have a specialist come in and check. Check to see if there's mold in your house because you don't feel it when mold's being inhaled. Going up to you. And you know that little shower curtain.

A little black on the shower curtain?

Well, it's not too bad yet. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. You're breathing that every time you're in the shower. You bet. You bet. Speaking of showers, in the book, you read this, you gotta get rid of your shower head, get a new shower head, because biofilms build up on the showerhead. You go in the shower, you turn it on, you get blasted with millions of bacteria that are living in the shower head. Especially for people have sinus infections, asthma, breathing difficulties, eye infections, acne on their face. They may be getting blasted by millions of bacteria every time they take a shower. When you read the studies on this, in the warmer climates, they put new showerheads on and within six months they were all contaminated again. In the colder climates like Colorado, it took two years before they were contaminated again. In the book we talk about clean your showerhead every two, three months with 8% or greater vinegar. You can't get the vinegar at the stores because at 6% it's not strong enough. You need 8%, 10, 12%, something like that. And you get it online and it's really cheap. But you got to clean your showerheads once in a while because the water, the water in the city supply has got bacteria in it. Not a lot not enough to make you sick. But when you turn the shower off, the water sticks up there at the top in the shower head. And the bacteria that's in that water can start colonizing and they produce a biofilm that makes like a nest, like a bird nest, but it's a hard plastic and it's more like a polymer, like a hard plastic. It's like a bird's nest, but it's a bacteria nest in your shower head.

So with that aspect and a couple of these.

One more thing, Greg. I'm sorry, One more thing with that. I just thought of this. So when you're taking a shower, you're inhaling, this bacteria goes right up to your brain. Right up to your brain. And that's the trigger for the inflammation for some people when they pass, unfortunately from Alzheimer's, and they do autopsy on the plaque in the brain, it's loaded with antibodies to bacteria, to Klebsiellia, Klebsiella and Proteus. And mold.

That's where I was going here. What is that? That's the immune system response to these invasions, these triggering agents. Right. So especially this day and age, right now, speak into the immune system, like that aspect, because we said we were going to cover the autoimmune component to fixing your brain here today. So how does that tie in here? When you're saying like, okay, well that created the inflammation, our antibodies to that, so that was our immune system that did that. So basics of the immune system function and then possibly that autoimmune component that's leading into the brain degradation.

Let's go back to the map. Perfect. You have to learn how to read the map of what's going on in your body. You don't have to be the doctor, but you have to understand the questions to ask. You have the same body as your ancestor thousands of years ago. What did your ancestors immune system have to protect them from? Bugs, parasites, viruses, mold, fungus and bacteria. That was it. Bugs, parasites, virus, mold, fungus, bacteria. There was no perchloroethylene or red dye number 42 or benzene. When you smell gas, it goes right up to your brain, killing brain cells. When you're smelling gas, the smell of gas, it's killing brain cells. Well, I don't feel bad. Well, it didn't kill off half your brain. But do that once a week for 30 years and what do you think happens? Right? Your ants, bugs, parasites, viruses, mold, fungus and bacteria. Now, separate piece of information and you'll see how it relates. The journal Pediatrics is arguably the Most prestigious journal, medical journal for children's health in the English language. The number one journal. They published a policy statement which means it was a message from the board of the American Academy of Pediatrics that they wanted every pediatrician to know. And what they said was the Toxic Substance Control act, which is the legislation at the federal level that regulates all chemicals manufacture and introduction into the environment. The Toxic Substance Control act, excuse me, failed miserably. Their words failed miserably to protect children. And then in parentheses, and adults. And the number is 27 trillion pounds of chemicals manufactured or imported into the United States every year. That doesn't mean anything to anyone until you divide it by the population of the United States. 360 million, whatever it is. When I looked it up, it was 350 some million. And then you divide that by 365 days, it comes out to 247 pounds of chemicals per person per day.

Wow.

That are imported or manufactured into the United States. That's five 50 pound bags. That's the flame retardant in the sofa you're sitting on right now. Or the car seat if you're in the car. That's the flame retardant chemicals that outgas into the air in minor amounts. Now, there's no evidence that the amount of flame retardant chemicals that outgass from car seats is toxic to humans. That's how they got away with it in the Toxic Substance Control act because they paid off the legislators to write the legislation so that you have to show the amount of outgassing chemicals as toxic to humans. It's not. There's no evidence of that. But this stuff accumulates in the body. Give me 25 years of phthalates. Chemicals used to mold plastic that's in bpa. Like BPA is a phthalate. Plastic bottles or plastic blinds on your windows in your house that outgass phthalates into the air. Now, I can't smell it while you're breathing minute amounts.

No.

There's no evidence that the amount of phthalates that leach out of plastic blinds in your home is toxic to humans. That's how they get away with this. But here's what happens when it accumulates. 346Pregnant women in Chicago, they measured their urine for phthalates in the eighth month of pregnancy. We've all got phthalates in our bodies now, but they measured in pregnant women and they categorized it into fourths, the lowest fourth, the next one the third and the highest fourth. They followed the offspring of those pregnancies for seven years. When the kids turned seven years old, they did Wechsler IQ test, the official IQ test on these kids. Not much in medicine is all or every. This was every. Every child whose mother was in the highest quartile of phthalates in pregnancy compared to the children whose mothers were in the lowest quartile of phthalates in urine and pregnancy. The children in the highest quartile, their IQ was 7 points lower than the kids in the lowest quartile, 6.7 to 7.4 points lower. That doesn't mean anything until you understand a one point difference in IQ is noticeable. A seven point difference is a difference between a kid working really hard getting straight A's and a kid working really hard getting straight Cs. This kid doesn't have a chance in hell of doing great in school no matter how hard he works. And just google phallates. P H T H A L A T E S Phallates and neurogenesis. Nerve growth. Here come the studies that phthalates inhibit nerve growth. So moms that had the highest level of phthalates in pregnancy inhibit nerve growth in the brain of babies. Seven years later they did the IQ test on them. So the Toxic Substance Control act failed miserably because there's no evidence that the amount of mercury in a can of tuna fish is harmful to humans. There's no evidence of that. But this stuff accumulates in the body. That's what we're up against today. That our ancestors, their immune system had to fight bugs, parasites, viruses, mold, fungus and bacteria. We don't have any mechanism to fight trichloroethylene or BPA or benzene or mercury or lead toxicity. We don't have an immune system that can do anything about it. All the immune system can do is fight a bug, parasite, virus, mold, fungus or bacteria. That's inflammation. That's what we're up against. That's what's going on in your brains. That's why one out of three elders dies with Alzheimer's. Now, according to the Alzheimer's association, one out of eight children in the country are on medications for anxiety or depression. Kids under 18, one out of eight. It's like what? That's why. It's because every newborn child in America today has at least 200 chemicals in their bloodstream at birth that aren't supposed to be there. When you understand that, now go. Once again, this is all the map. We're just trying to understand how to read a map. Now go out to your garden and you're proud of your tomatoes that you grow every year. But for the next season, let's just take a half a teaspoon of gasoline and put it at the base of every one of your tomatoes. Just a half a teaspoon, Nothing will happen. Your tomatoes are great, but do a half a teaspoon every week and watch what happens in that season when you do it every week. When we accumulate all of these toxic chemicals, there's no way for our bodies to function normally anymore. It's just not possible. And this is a whole paradigm shift for people to understand. You want to go from Chicago to San Diego. You need a map. You want to get your brain working so that you're not one of the three that dies with Alzheimer's. You need a map. You need to understand this. And you can't just take a multiple vitamin and some extra vitamin C and maybe some N acetylcysteine and think that you're going to do great. You can't do that because our brains, our bodies are toxic. Just read the science. It's just unbelievable.

In this one, our viewers, listeners, we are dialed into this. So thank you, Dr. Tom. You are speaking to the choir. And again, this is why you need to share this information with your loved ones. This is how we get the word out. Coming down, the final bits, like two minutes of the show. Any final inspiration you'd like to leave our listeners and viewers with, Dr. Tom?

Yes, thank you. 1986, a microbiologist, M.D. in Australia, writes a paper and says, you know, I think that sometimes bacteria cause ulcers. And everybody said, what are you, a nutcase? Everybody knows that ulcers are caused by too much acid and you need antacids. He was ostracized. So what did he do? He did an endoscopy. He put a tube down his throat, took pictures of the healthy pink tissue of his stomach. Then he drank a beaker, a beaker of bacteria called Helicobacter pylori. He waited four days until he was as sick as could be. Did another endoscopy, showed pictures of the many ulcers in his stomach. Then he took the antibiotics to kill the bacteria. Waited a week or two until he felt great again, and then did another endoscopy to take pictures of his healing stomach. Then he published it. Then everybody knew he was a nutcase. But the World Health Organization sent that paper with the pictures to every medical society in the world. Why? Because at the time, stomach cancer was the number one cancer in the world, commonly caused by helicopter infections. So if doctors picked up early on a helicopter infection because people had heartburn and dyspepsia and treat it, the plan was they'd reduce the incidence of stomach cancer. This guy, Barry Marshall, Dr. Barry Marshall was still considered a nutcase. He didn't care. 21 years later, he wins the Nobel Prize in physiology. And the Nobel committee said, and this is the quote, who with tenacity and a prepared mind, challenged prevailing dogma. That's what every one of you have to do. You need tenacity one hour a week so you don't get overwhelmed. But every week you need a prepared mind. You listen to this interview again and other interviews on Dr. Eckel's show and you read my books. And then you challenge the dogma that you've lived your life by thinking it's okay to have all this flame retardant chemicals and phthalates and stuff in the air. Then you'll learn like in the book, the house plants that suck up these toxic chemicals in the air so you're not breathing it anymore. You'll learn all the little pieces at the one hour a week. So it's the tenacity and the prepared mind that you can then challenge the way you're currently living your life.

Oh, yes. Thank you. Dr. Tom O', Brien, Fix youx Brain I've got the links in the show notes, everybody. This is what the Health. I'm Dr. Greg Eckel. We are here Tuesdays from 2 to 3pm Pacific Standard Time. Tune in and share it with your loved ones. We'll see you next week.