608: Empower Your Body to Heal with Functional Medicine with Dr. Philip Oubre

Hello and welcome to the achieve your goals podcast, the show that empowers you to wake up to your full potential and achieve your biggest goals and dreams. I am your host, Hal Elrod and I invite you to join us each week as we share actionable strategies to take your life to the next level, as well as interview world class experts and entrepreneurs who have achieved extraordinary goals themselves. And we ask them to give you a peek behind the curtain and teach you exactly what you need to do.

To do the same. Ready?

Here we go.

Foreign.

S welcome to the achieve your goals podcast. I'm your host, Hal Elrod. And if you care about your health, whether it's preventing future challenges with disease or it is maybe something that you're currently undergoing, maybe it's a chronic illness or maybe it's an acute illness, something that you want to heal, you are in for a treat today because we're talking to my functional medicine doctor, Dr. Philip U. MD. He is a board certified physician and functional medicine expert who helps patients uncover the root causes of their health struggles rather than just treating symptoms. And that's what we're diving into a lot today, which are root causes. Most traditional conventional medicine just prescribe medications to treat the symptoms. Oh, you're having headaches, take this Imitrex prescription, right? You're having some sort of challenge. Take, take this medication or this prescription. Whereas functional medicine looks at what are the lifestyle choices that you're making, what are the environmental toxins that you might suffer from, whether that's mold or in my case it was heavy metals and removing heavy metals from my body and brain that allowed my cognitive function to flourish. And Dr. Ube is a specialist in reversing chronic illness through personalized nutrition, lifestyle interventions and advanced testing. And he's known for his educational approach, which is what he's bringing today. Because it's not just about hiring as your doctor. Like you can do that at the end of the episode. He works with people all over the world, in person in Austin, but then virtually. But it's about learning practical solutions and paradigms so you can reclaim your health and take total responsibility for healing yourself and for thriving and extending your life as long as you want it to be. Again, I don't get a kickback.

I don't know if I said that.

Already, but I don't get any kind of kickback for Dr. Oob I'm just a big fan. I believe that if something is benefiting me or someone is benefiting me, it is my responsibility to share that someone or Something with you, with our listeners, with my audience, with our community. So it is my great pleasure to introduce you to the one and only Dr. Philip.

Oops.

I want to start right off the bat.

Let's go.

I want to answer a question that I couldn't have answered off the top of my head and I was actually watching some of your videos and I go, oh, this is a layup for him because it's what you do all day. Okay, but you are a functional medicine doctor, Is that accurate?

Correct.

Okay, what is the difference between functional medicine and conventional or traditional whatever you would call it?

Yeah, we typically say conventional medicine and functional medicine. So the basic answer is conventional medicine is your standard medical doctor that went through medical school, got their residency training and started practicing insurance based type stuff. When we say functional medicine, that really means that the doctor, if whoever's promoting that, there's no real regulation of the term. So anyone can use it. But what the word with the term is supposed to mean is someone that's really trying to investigate the root causes of why you're sick. Now conventional medicine uses the root cause word all the time, but they just say that to give out a medication. They're actually not in preventive medicine, they're an early detection medicine. Whereas functional medicine is not only literally preventing future disease, we're also about reversing disease. And conventional medicine doesn't believe most of the things we do are truly reversible, but we've proven it. So that's the easiest way is that a functional medicine doctor says you've acquired something along the way. We're going to help you unacquire it. Not just take this medication so you don't feel it, but literally unacquire the disease, quote unquote, that you've accepted to become part of your life.

I like you said root causes.

Right.

That's really the essence of it is it's like, well, what are the root causes of this thing? And if we can address the root causes at their root, then you can eliminate the thing that. I'll give you an example. I watched a movie. Oh gosh, it was a documentary and I think it was called reversing diabetes in 30 days. I think that's what it was called. Oh boy, don't could be wrong on the title. That's definitely the topic. But they took 20 something type 2 diabetics that were on insulin every single day and that were told by conventional medicine doctors that they had to be, there was no other option. The only way to treat their Diabetes was to treat the symptoms with insulin every.

For the rest of their life.

For the rest of their life. They took all was 20 something, 26, I think they took them to this retreat center where they had no access to the real world. They couldn't go to McDonald's or they.

Couldn'T go get ice cream in the freezer.

Diet.

Yeah.

And they gave them a raw vegan diet that was. That's hard. Yeah, yeah, Raw vegan. However, within chewing, you.

You just burn all your calories via chewing.

But 100 of them did not need insulin anymore.

Agreed.

Except for the one that left. One of them said, I can't take.

Well, that makes sense.

I need some McDonald's. Something along those lines. That was literally what they said. They're like, I need McDonald's.

Yeah. That's scary though. So many people don't believe it's reversible. And that's some of the easiest things we do. Reversing diabetes we have. The only diabetics we have in practice are type one diabetics and they've lost their pancreas for the rest of their life. So they'll never make insulin again unless we invent stem cells or something. So they're the only diabetics we have. Otherwise everyone else is reversed.

This has been reversed. Okay, so let me real quick start with where I discovered you. Right. Mike Dillard, who is one of your patients and a good longtime friend of mine.

Love Mike.

Mike and I are always trading like, oh, here's what we're doing to address the physical ailments that we struggle with. And he and I have both suffered from cognitive challenges for a long time. His was from mold, mine might have been from mold, but it was more so I believe from chemotherapy. They call it chemotherapy so often.

Multifactorial, Right?

Yeah. And I saw Mike at a function at our kids school. And then he said, hal, hey, I discovered something that has fixed or. Yeah, repaired my cognitive function, improved it more than anything else and it's removing heavy metals. And so he said it was the most significant. Like his brain. Every treatment of removing heavy metals, it was getting better and better and better. And so that's how he referred me to you. And I went through the same protocol of getting heavy metals removed and noticed also very quickly, significant improvement to my cognitive function. Talk about your perspective. I know you obviously you just explained the difference of functional and conventional talk more elaborate, more on your perspective of things like removing heavy metals, things like addressing mold, like what are some of the things that you see that are the root causes. Give me examples of root causes and then how y' all address them.

It's pretty simple. We've got it narrowed down to six basic root causes that cause all disease across all of humanity, Chronic diseases. So I always like to tell people, if you get your leg bitten off by a shark, like, come on, that's not root cause. That's the shark. It's gone, right? It's never coming back. But the six basic root causes are. Number one is gut issues. Number two is biological toxins. Think things that grow in you and on you that are trying to survive but kind of kill you while they're surviving. Number three is mold toxins, which they can live and grow inside you, but really they live and grow in walls and you breathe. Or toxins. Four is environmental chemicals. Think plastics and fertilizers and all that crap. And then fifth is heavy metals. And sixth is a lot of what you do how. Which is the emotional toxins, we call them. Just how your mind has shaped the different ins and how you can overcome those things. So basically, in. In our world, every brain fog, fatigue, autoimmune condition, whatever it is, is one of those six root causes. And every now and then, we have patients that are just an obvious. Like, Mike had an obvious mold exposure and was a different human being before and after mold exposure. But then after he was healing from the mold, he still had metals. And so, interestingly, a patient like Mike that would come to see me, to use him an example, his brain fog, we would say, well, it's mold. And then we would treat the mold. But if it's not, it's like, well, it's clearly something else. Let's keep looking. Oh, it's metals. Let's get the metals out. And bam. Now your brain fog comes back online. And now we look back and say, okay, his brain fog, or cognitive issues were from metals, but not everyone. So I've got a lot of mercury. I'm still working to detoxify for myself, and luckily, I've never lost my brain function. My wife might think my memory is not as great as she would like it to be, but, yeah, basic answer is there's something that's causing it. Unless you were born with that brain fog, in which case there might be something just genetically wrong, or you're born that way. But if you acquired something, if you had the ability in your 20s to do something that now you don't, you need to be investigating what are those causes and removing them.

God. Totally makes sense.

Yeah.

I even Think about, was it Aristotle or Hippocrates that said, let food be thy medicine?

Exactly. Yeah, I think that was Hippocrates. But don't quote me on that.

Don't quote me.

So where's AI?

Did you start as a functional medicine doctor or start conventional and make the switch?

Yeah. So sadly enough, this has been kind of a God given blessing to me because I. I went through conventional medical school. You know, I grew up on pop tarts and pizza like the rest of us. And I even did a presentation in residency on how fish oil was useless. And now I give every patient fish oil that shows up for being alive. So, yeah, the calling kind of found me. I didn't find it. Moving to Austin, I was working for a doctor that was doing some really advanced lab testing. So as I started doing the advanced lab testing, I started seeing numbers that I had never seen before and just started doing the research. And I was like, well, this is all neat. How come I was never taught this? So I kept learning, learning, learning with an open mind. Eventually realized, like, what the heck? I've been lied to. There's so many things that we can do, so much more. We can reverse things. And once you see something reversed that you were told is irreversible, then it really makes you wonder, like, well, what else is reversible? If that was reversible, what else? And that's what's led me to where I'm at. And we keep finding things like alopecia. We just had our first severe alopecia. I mean, this guy had huge, like, crop circle circles and his head. And he really wanted me to tell him that I had someone else that had reversed their alopecia. And I said, look, we've reversed a lot of autoimmunity. Here's my first alopecia patient. He struggled. He struggled with believing that we could do it. And I can officially say he's been, I think, six or nine months in our practice. And he's got peach fuzz all in his alopecia. So it's coming back. It's coming back, baby. But so now we have her.

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Yeah, I mean, the human body, if you just zoom out and you go, oh, the human body is designed to repair itself, right? From, you know, I got a cut. Oh, it repairs. But it's like anything outside of a cut, it's like we've been told, well, no, no, no, the body doesn't repair that. You have to take a medicine or a treatment, something that we can patent and profit from.

Right.

One of the things that was eye opening for me when I was diagnosed with cancer and I went and saw my oncologist and I know how important nutrition is in diet or in healing, in health, in building our immune system, et cetera. And so I wanted to kind of. It was just kind of a test, if you will, to assess. Like, did I go, all right, I want to see where this guy stands. What part does nutrition play in my healing cancer? He said, it doesn't matter as long as you do the chemotherapy and take the pharmaceutical drugs and that.

Unbelievable, right?

And I was like, oh, I can't trust you. Like, I can't trust you. And not that you're.

And I know your cancer was. Was 10 years ago or so, right? How. But it's not like nutrition knowledge was devoid 10 years ago.

No, no, not at all.

Come on, man.

And so I want to ask you your take on that. Can you break down from your perspective how nutrition plays a role in a chronic illness? Why so many people are misinformed about it, why so many doctors are misinformed about it.

Oh, boy, that's multilayered. And the first answer is that nutrition is simply the thing that would save America. So as you probably know the healthcare industry is slated to bankrupt the country and we're either going to have to start rationing health care or close the government. So I'm assuming rationing health care is coming if we don't change something. And as fancy as the stuff we do, I mean, we do vitamin infusions and peptides and all kinds of crazy cool stuff, but literally 80, 90% of the work that patients do is primarily nutrition. If you change your nutrition, so many things get better. Just educating the American population on why they should eat the way you should eat. Not a don't eat this. It should be a eat this because this feeds your body. Don't eat that because it's ruining your body. Right. Garbage in is garbage out. One of the shocking parts of the human body. We're incredibly made. You can put extreme things in our body and we can still operate. Take eating disorder patients that eat 500 calories a day, they still survive. Take raw vegans. Right? Still survive. Take the other extreme carnivore, they still survive. I always think of that back. Maybe I'm dating myself, but that Back to the Future movie, when Doc shows up and he's showing like banana peels and crap in his car, he's just putting whatever he can and the car still runs. That's our human body. You put whatever crap you want and we run. We survive. But notice I'm using the word survive, not thrive. Something will go wrong the more trash you put in. It's like showing up to the gas station and putting diesel in your car. Like, I don't know, let's see what happens today. Yeah, it ain't gonna work.

Yeah. Yeah.

So I guess to answer another part of that when we could get lost in the controversy, but basically big pharma has bought medical schools. Yep.

I'm so glad you said that. Can you say that again for the.

People in the back?

It is, unfortunately, and I don't like to say that doctors are bought. Doctors don't make any money off of pharmaceutical companies anymore. It looks like we do because we prescribe medications. But the people making money are. Well, we won't say Congressman out loud, but we'll say all the people in big pharma's pocket. Doctors are paid by insurance companies, not big Pharma anym. We used to get trips and stuff. But yeah, big pharma has bought medical school, basically. So we're indoctrinated as when when a plumber shows up to do the plumber's job, he's going to show up with what he was trained to do. If you ask him to fix your cabinetry, he doesn't know how to do that. So we're trained to use medication. So when you show up in the room, we're going to use medication. I can literally tell you God's honest truth. How I'm not a fish story person. We had one hour of nutrition. One hour of nutrition.

I heard that publicly.

Yeah. I still remember it. And I remember, like, is this lady actually going to test us on this stuff? This is so pointless. Why are we learning this?

It was literally one hour in your entire medical.

One physical hour. Now, it was, as in medical school, one hour of lecture is commonly like six hours of studying. But it's still one physical hour was dedicated to nutrition. And everything else was pharmacology and pathology. And we still learn a lot. But all of my nutrition knowledge, all of my nutrition knowledge was absolutely learned after medical school, after residency. I still remember how the book that changed my life was Mark Hyman's Eat Fat, Get Thin. And the basic premise is, you've been lied to. Start eating fat to get thinner. And I still remember reaching into my fridge and reaching for the butter and thinking, mark Hyman said, this is good. He's smarter than me. He's more. He has research proving that this is good. I remember, like, unlearning something is the hardest thing to do. You can learn something, but unlearning is harder than learning. We have been lied to. And I have case study among case study proving conventional medicine wrong. But it's not changing. Yeah, they're not. We are.

Yeah. Yeah.

Why is it.

Because this is my theory. Right. Is that you're a pharmaceutical company, and to your point, they have bought the medical school, so they're choosing education, and they're choosing education that benefits their bottom line, which is very smart as a business. Right.

Brilliant.

Brilliant.

Yeah. And so I guess my theory, and I want to know if you would agree with this or see it differently, is that health is not taught because it's not profitable. Right. If you go to a patient, you say, oh, you're suffering from these symptoms. You need to lower your inflammation by cutting these things out of your diet. Well, the doc, you don't make money by saying, cut this out of your diet or by saying, go to the grocery store now. Buy these things. But if you say, hey, take this prescription. I'm curious, is that. Why? Is it that obvious?

I choose to believe I'm very disappointed in my profession, but I choose to believe it's less sinistral, less sinister. And I choose to believe it's doctors that really believe they know the truth and they really believe that nutrition doesn't matter and they don't see it. And what I often encourage my patients to do when they start seeing me and they reverse their autoimmune condition or whatnot, they don't need the rheumatologist anymore, they don't need their surgeon, they don't need their GI document. And I encourage them, you should go back and you should tell them what you did and why it worked. I realize you have to pay a copay and there's no point to seeing them, but if you never see them again, they'll never hear this story. And so if you go back and they mock you or laugh at you, I'm really sorry. But know that you tried, you tried to teach that doctor that there is another way. And so unfortunately, I don't think doctors are sinister in this, but they are guilty. They are guilty by choosing to be close, close minded. You have to have an open mind. And one of my pet peeves is when a doctor tells one of my patients or someone that goes and is interested in functional medicine and their response is, there's no research to prove that. Yeah, How? There's so much research to prove what we do now. So there's a difference. Because you don't know the research does not mean it's not researched. You, my friend, are the unresearched doctor. The research is there. Maybe not to prove everything we do, but also not. They don't have everything researched either. So that's one of my pet peeves in medicine where I feel like doctors are to blame. They may not be sinister and evil in doing the medications, but they are guilty by choosing to stick their head in the mud and refuse to learn.

Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't disagree. I want to ask you a question on a similar track. And it's prescription drug commercials on tv. I was just telling somebody about this yesterday. I forgot how it came up. But my kids, My daughter is 16, my son's 13, and thankfully we have educated them to pay attention to the last 30 seconds. For sure. If you've been doing commercials where it's like, hey, this will help you feel less gloomy, but it can cause suicidal ideation, hives. Right on. And like they came 10 times worse than the thing that it benefits. And I will never forget when I was in the hospital getting chemotherapy, I was literally, I had a big needle in my arm. I'm Getting five days of chemotherapy. And I just happened to glance at the bag hanging off the IV tower and on the back of the bag it had a skull and like in crossbones or whatever was the warning. And again, keep in mind, I have acute lymphoblastic leukemia. That's the cancer I am treating. And this chemotherapy says warning can cause leukemia.

Wait a minute.

So I go, wait a minute. And again, it's hard to not be a little bit suspect of a sinister intention, which is like, well, wait a minute. If you are using a so called medicine, drug, poison, whatever you want to call it, that causes the thing that.

You'Re treating, that you claim to be.

Treating, if you actually, you know, they always say follow the money. And if you make money, if I get another cancer, I have personal friends, I have relatives that they get cancer, they go get chemo and then they're good for. And then another cancer comes, and then they get chemo and then another cancer comes.

Right now, that's one of the only places where doctors do make money on the pharmaceuticals, but they're not making money on the pharmaceuticals. They're making money administering it. And so that's where oncologists specifically, but most doctors writing pills, you're getting it from the pharmacy, they're not making any money. But if it were, hey, come in and get this iv. Then the doctor's making money off of the administration of the drug.

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Interesting. So it's finding. Kind of finding a loophole to where they can profit off of it. Yeah, exactly. Oh, man. I mean, I can get fired up about this stuff, right?

I can, too.

I can't.

Yeah. When my doctor, when that happened, where he said. He said, diet doesn't matter. And I'm like, this is the first.

Time I'm meeting him.

And then I went into the cafeteria at the hospital. This is at MD Anderson Cancer Center. And I'm in the hospital and I'm watching people that are hooked to their chemo, their IV tower. They're getting chemo, dragging their IV tower around, and they're loading their plate up with pizza and cake and pie and ice and drinking soda. And I just thought, angry fructose. They were just told that they could eat anything they wanted as long as they did chemo. And now they're feeding their cancer with refined sugar. Like, this is criminal.

This which is proven. Sugar is proven to advance cancer. Is proven. It's not even question anymore, just proven. And A, the biochemistry makes perfect sense. B, is proven. You've got two great reasons to do something. And they act like it doesn't matter. They act like it doesn't matter. It is unreal.

Here's the lesson I want to impart for people, right? Like, not just us, like, complaining and being like, this is terrible, and there's really nothing change it. It's that if you're listening to this, and whether you or just anyone listening to this or anyone you know, you have to take 100% responsibility for your health, your healing, your recovery. When I went into the hospital, it was the doctors on my team. I am not delegating my health and my survival to this person in the lab coat.

Yep.

Like, I'm 100 responsible. So I was every day researching and learning about healing and looking at what are other people that have cured their cancer naturally. What did they do? One of my, I think, most underrated forms of. And I think you would agree with this kind of based on what you already said, doctor who. But is anecdotal evidence. Like, if a thousand people cured something by doing the thing, it was natural.

It's not anecdotal anymore.

Yeah, yeah. It's like, yeah, that's reality.

Especially the things that are harmless. Right. Eating broccoli, it Gives you a better chance of survival. Well, hello, eat it. It's not like it's going to kill you. Going gluten free, even if it's not studied, that's not going to kill you. The number one thing we try to teach our patients is part of our process. We have some lab testing and luckily everything nowadays can be tested. Like if I think you have mold, I can prove with you, I mold all of that stuff. But the number one thing is as you're going through your treatment plan of whatever it may be, experiment and listen to your body. So maybe your body loves Carnivore, maybe your body loves Paleo. It's not all about like, well, this one person did this one thing. It's like, okay, that one person did that one thing. Let me understand why they chose that. Let me put it in my body and see how my body reacted. And if it doesn't work, well then, okay, try the next, try the next, but keep searching. Just like you said, Hal, I mean I don't want to say don't trust your doctor, even though I did just, but don't trust them with the full plan, you have to go out and seek. And nowadays with social media and AI, there's so much information at your fingertips, tips that just because your doctor said something doesn't mean you have to take their word for it. And Nowadays there's an AI called openevidence.com that I tell patients about all the time where it's a research only based AI, it's only used as medical research. And so a patient will come to me and this really pisses me off. This will toot my own horn on a little bit, but a patient will come to me with a drug on their chart and they're telling me why they're on the drug and I roll my eyes and I say, okay, let's look this up together. And so I have a TV in my office and I pull up open evidence and I give it the exact patient I have in front of me, my 80 year old female on Eliquis, whatever it is, does she need this? And the AI will tell us a lot of times, because I know the answer, it will tell us that no, this patient is not indicated to be on this drug. And I'm like, your own doctor has lied to you. It's one thing to be on a medication, it's another to be on a medication that actually is research proven, but it goes back to the plumber with the wrong tools, can't fix the job. So unfortunately, conventional medicine is just so 12 minute visits, next, next, next, next, that they're not paying enough attention. And you said it per how you have to be an advocate for yourself and you have to have a family member, especially if you're on chemo and your brain's chemo brain, you can't think for yourself. You have to have a health advocate. Because one of the top killers of people in America is actually medical mistakes. That's scary. That's not in the chart when you look for it, but it is real. The medical mistakes that are killing people. Every patient that goes in the hospital usually comes back with at least one story of a mistake that they or a family member caught that was just a whoopsie. It was not, not evil. No one wanted to do that, but it was like, oh, sorry, I'm glad you caught that. Like, we're gonna go fix that now. Scary. Now we're really off topic.

Well, on that note, the survival rate for my cancer if I got the treatment is 30%. So 70% of people that trust their doctor, their oncologist and say, I will take this treatment that you give me, 70% of them die. And that's why I'm like, okay, the only way that I'm gonna get into the 100% of survivors is I've got to combine the best of western medicine, traditional conventional medicine, and every holistic practice known to man to detoxify my body from the chemo. I even asked my doctor, hey, a lot of people die. 70% die from chemo toxicity and some other side effects from the chemo. And he said yes. I said, so how can I improve my odds? How can I detox my liver and the organs that the chemo poisons? And he said, well, there's a drug we can give you to do that. There's enough. Oh, there's a pharmaceutical. We can give you enough. So, okay, I took milk thistle. I did three coffee enemies a week minimum. Like, yeah, I did all these natural things that have been proven to detoxify your organs.

Exactly.

I'm here.

It's simple. If you have a trash problem in your house, you're going to need to hire some cleaners or get cleaning yourself. Right. So no different. You're introducing a lot of toxic chemicals into your body. You just have to add the nutrients that are the byproduct for that. So it's not rocket science. And that's what's really irritating. Like a doctor can learn that too. You learned it how? Why can't they learn it and this is their profession, it's one thing if they're like, look, I don't believe in this stuff. But look, the research says if you do this and this, it makes sense that biochemically you could help detoxify. We have many patients that go through radiation and chemo and stuff, and they're looking around at their counterparts and like, I'm not burned from my radiation. Some patients even still keep their hair. Usually not glorious hair, but at least can keep their hair. Their a still feel fine. They don't look like death, basically. So, yes, and we're just talking cancer right now, but that goes for so many things. And if you have lupus and the statistic is that 70% of the time you're going to end up on an autoimmune drug, well, how do you not be in that group? What are the things you can do to minimize that? Even if you don't believe lupus is reversible, what are the things you can do to minimize the flares or minimize the drugs, whatever it may be, Even if you can't afford to see a functional medicine doctor or something? Do the obvious stuff. You put trash and you're going to get trash out. Fix your nutrition, stop putting refined carbohydrates and stop with the sodas and things and just vegetables. Right? I'm not a vegan, not a fan of veganism at all or carnivore at all. Those are both extreme diets on opposite ends of the spectrum. We in my practice are much more balanced. And number one thing we ask everyone to do is gluten free. And then of course, gotta eliminate the sugars and balance your macros, the proteins, fats and carbs.

Now, no sugar is an obvious one. Why no gluten for anybody listening?

So I'm not a fan of the no gluten for anyone. But if you're in my office, if you're sitting on that couch in my office in the background, chances are I've got inflammation. Yes. So if you're in my office, generally speaking, you have inflammation, you have problems. And gluten is just such a common trigger for everyone. And there's literally no health benefits to having it in your life. So if something has no benefit, then just remove it. And so some patients are able to add gluten back into their diet later, after they've done the healing. But just why play with fire if you already have so much fire you don't know what's burning you? So we ask everyone to give up gluten because it's the number one food trigger, especially in America. We don't need to go on a tangent. I'm sure most people know America has tainted their gluten, ruined their gluten, and so it's literally dynamite for most people. Now, gluten in Europe, that's a whole different discussion. But gluten in America is just poison, unfortunately.

Yeah. And why is gluten in Europe so different? That's what I, I, I experienced when I went there, because I don't, I don't do much gluten here. And my wife was, she's from Poland. She's like, oh, no, you can eat all the bread. It's totally different here.

Yeah. So there's kind of three main things. Number one is in Europe, they're using the more archaic version of gluten that is untainted and unadulterated. Number two is in America, it is gmo, genetically modified. They've actually multiplied the amount of gluten per grain, basically. So eating the same wheat in America can have exponential more amounts of gluten. And then, number three, we raise it with such toxic chemicals that no one knows which of the three is the problem, and it's more likely a combo of it all. No different than if you ate strawberries every day of your life. Just quantity. Your immune system would get pissed off at it. Number two, if your strawberries were just covered in chemicals, your immune system would be pissed off at it. It's no different than a vaccine. A vaccine. And I don't get. We can get into vaccine debate if you want to, but no, the basics of a vaccine are we're trying to immunize you. They are trying to immunize you against something that's dead. Well, you don't have an immune reaction to something that's dead. So what do they do? They give it chemicals and all kinds of things that they call adjuvants to intentionally piss off your immune system so that you become reactive to the dead thing they gave you. So let me re explain that. They gave you something dead that didn't have an immune reaction, but they gave you a lot of other crap that was immune reactive so that you would react to that thing. So now let's take that to gluten. Gluten may not be that reactive, but we've strapped atom bombs to it so much that your immune system's tired of seeing the gluten, and so now it's an inflammatory trigger, and it hasn't forgotten about it. So I'M not a big fan of saying gluten. No gluten for all. But everyone needs to at least attempt gluten free for two months before they decide they're not gluten. React.

Nice. Yeah, yeah. When I went after chemo, for whatever reason, I never thought about gluten beforehand, but when I started eating gluten after my chemo, I would break out in rashes all over my face.

It's so common. Hell yeah. It sounds crazy to eat something daily and not have a reaction and then eliminate it completely and then add it back in, have a, a profound reaction. And so we've come up with all kinds of metaphors to explain that, but the truth is when the body's chronically inflamed to something, the reaction is actually kind of subdued. But when it releases it, it's like pulling the rubber band back. And then when it exposes, then it hurts again. So if you react, it's not just some functional medicine doctor trick that we play that now, now we've sensitized you. It's. No, it was not good for you for the beginning. Your immune system just got worn out by.

Totally makes sense. I got a couple more questions for you.

All right?

For somebody listening right now, and we may have already covered some of this with the diet, but if somebody is listening and they want to take the first step toward reclaiming their health, like, they know that's an area of improvement for them and they know they're settling and they're, you know, they should make some changes. What advice, what practical advice would you give them today to get started?

Easy. Look up. And we don't like the D word, the diet word. That's a bad word. It's a four letter word. We like food plan, right? We all have to eat. It's not about what you don't eat. So the simplest advice is simply look up something like Paleo or Whole30. Those are some of the two simplest food plans where you have tons of options of food, tons of option of food, but just a few things that, hey, you probably shouldn't be eating those things. If you did that, I'm serious, that 80, 90% of chronic disease would start falling away. Now, you also have to be smart about it, right? A paleo muffin is still called a muffin, folks. That's right. It's still a muffin. So a paleo food plan, the idea, the Paleolithic era. Do you think the cavemen were making muffins in their oven? No. So you can eat junk Food of all types. Right. So yeah, that's the main thing is when you look down at your dinner plate, you should see real food that needs sunlight to grow.

There you go.

Water.

Water or something. Yeah, Twinkies, they don't need air. No one else seems to like this, but I always like saying it. Like if you can get your food wet and still eat it, it's generally a good food. And what I mean by that is like, well, you could dip a steak in water and still cook it, it's still good. Right. But if you dip that Oreo in water.

Not so good.

Right.

Your crackers and water, like it's starting to get your bread and water. That's kind of gross.

Yeah.

Dip a boiled egg in water and still eat it. Your broccoli and water still eat. So that's one of the ways.

Yeah. A little back test.

Simple.

You mentioned I almost called this out right when you said it because I know that anyone listening? That's vegan. I forgot how you said it. But basically I don't recommend the vegan diet. But then right after that you said I don't recommend the carnivore diet. Right. So it wasn't. I'm against veganism. It's like I'm against extremes and recommend balance. I want to just mention something for anyone listening. So I was vegan for 20 plus years. Most.

That's hard to do.

Roughly half my life I was vegan. And what actually got me to consider not. And it was just because I was like, yeah, I don't want to injure animal. I saw a video and you know, it's like. Or a documentary about injuring animals. I'm like, yeah, if we don't have to injure animals, why would we do that?

Right.

So that was. That caught my attention and I went down that path.

Yeah.

However, the reason I switched back is I discovered that vitamin B12, which is an absolutely crucial. And like, if you are vegan, I am not here to impose anything on you. I'm here to give you information and share and I see you. So I want you to share this after. Yes, you can look this up. You can look this up. If you're listening. I learned that vitamin B12, which is a crucial nutrient for a human to thrive, is virtually non existent. In a vegan diet there are a couple random foods, like a nutritional ye. Like there's a couple random things where you can get a small amount of B12 but sufficient amounts of B12 only come through animal products. And when I learned that my Whole world, like my whole paradigm shifted. I went, wait, how could the proper diet that I've been on for 20 years be veganism?

Completely agree.

Missing this crucial nutrient. It can't be the proper diet. It can't be. Yeah. And then if somebody says, well, you can supplement it with over the counter supplements. Yeah, yeah. But if you have to do that.

Then it's not natural, not a complete diet. Completely agree.

Anything that you would add to that?

Yeah. So vegan, unfortunately is our least favorite nutritional plan. It is the only one we're truly against because A, the B12. You're right. But like you said, and anyone that is a vegan and choose to continue being a vegan must be on a B12 supplement. We actually encourage all vegans to be on a B12 injection. We have some Indian populations with us that do vegan, but it's hard. So the two main things are B12. So you got to be on a supplement, preferably the shot, just so you know you got it. Number two is it's really hard to get your protein. Most vegans are carbitarians and just being a carbitarian is hard to manage your weight and insulin, I. E. Inflammation and so oddly enough, as weird as it sounds, I would rather someone be carnivore than vegan. But like you said, I really don't like extreme in general. So. Yeah is the answer. But getting your protein as a vegan is really hard. And, and your fat, like there's only so many avocados you can eat to maintain your fat. Most plants are not high in fat or protein. So if it's not high in fat, it's not high in protein. Well, that means carbs.

Yeah.

And all those protein sources also come with carbs. So that's the hard part.

Balanced diet. That's where I have landed. And even for a long time I was, I would say I'm vegan by day, Paleo by night, because I would, I would have like a smoothie in the morning with some nuts and seeds for protein and some fats. You know, I literally put an MCT oil, then I'd have a salad with nuts and seeds and avocados for lunch. Right. So. And then for me it was the energy. It's like I feel like I have more energy when I don't put on like a big steak to have to digest in the middle of the day.

It takes energy to break down food.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's one of the most energy draining processes that we go through. And so, and then for Dinner. It's a grass fed bee for pasture raised chicken or whatever. All right, I got one, one last big picture question for you. And it's how do you see the future of medicine evolving as more doctors and patients are looking for root cause approaches instead of system management, but still there's an entire industry that is focused on profit and system management.

That is a great question, Hal. And of course this is a predict the future. But where functional medicine has grown already is it's really a movement of the people. So if the people are learning on social media, the people are learning, the patients are learning about these things and going and asking their doctors and when they're not getting the answers they want, they then start looking for them. So basically every time a functional medicine opens up their shingles, it's the hope that some patients come to see them. And so the idea is it's a supply and demand issue. Functional medicine is growing in demand and more and more physicians and practitioners and all that are getting disenfranchised with the medical system. So right now it's a movement of the people. The problem is that insurance is not covering it. So most of us function medicine based doctors are cash based. So not everyone can afford us, unfortunately. And so the wealthiest, the people of means, are the ones making this movement happen. And that's why I'm so passionate about trying to get this information out to the public with courses that I have on my website and YouTube videos and all of that, just trying to help as many people as I can that maybe can't afford it. But where I do see the future of medicine going is basically it's going to be like Europe in some way, form or fashion. There's going to be a healthcare shortage and the government's going to get involved. And then unfortunately it's going to be government insurance or cash based medicine. And the cash based medicine is going to become increasingly functional medicine. A bigger problem we have right now is that we don't have enough generic practitioners out there, meaning that we've specialized doctors so much that you don't just go to a really good general practitioner, you go to a cardiologist and a neurologist and none of them are comm. They only care about the organ in front of them. They don't care that their medication is also harming the brain. And so that was one of my claims to fame as I started with patients and started minimizing their specialists and saying, you don't realize that your specialists have you on medications that are contradicting each other. So let's simplify your medicine list. And that was one of the early starts I got into functional medicine. And so this functional medicine movement is actually creating a vacuum. So patients are demanding it and there's not enough supplies. So doctors are becoming it and it's actually creating a vacuum where specialists for the first time ever are unspecializing. Oh wow.

Yeah, yeah.

It's interesting when you see a functional medicine cardiologist, quote unquote, there's no such thing as a functional medicine cardiologist because you can't just treat the heart, you have to treat the gut, you have to treat the toxins, you have to treat the entire human being. So it's actually in a way unspecializing. Now that functional medicine cardiologist obviously knows more about cardiology than I do as a family medicine functional medicine doctor. But that is the ultimate solution. You pair in there with hopefully AI and one of the projects I'm looking looking to start is creating a functional medicine AI doctor so to speak so that maybe people that can't afford the one on one time with me. If we can train this AI doctor to treat the 80, 90 of patients that don't need my time, they just need the nutritional advice, they need the supplements, they need the guidance, they need something to interpret the labs kind of semi put it together. We can save the American healthcare industry and not bankrupt our country. I think that was the answer you were looking for.

I think so. I think you nailed it it. So obviously I'm a patient yours here in Austin Texas. So is Mike Dillard, so are my friends that I have referred. John V. Than is a patient of yours. Justin and Jennifer Donald are right people. When I believe in something or someone I tout it to other people. So if somebody's in the Austin Texas area obviously looking you up. But what's the best way for people to find you whether they are in Austin Texas or they're going to find you on YouTube to watch videos. What's the best way to. Can I.

Could you?

Yeah. So luckily I have a very weird last name so u medical. It's pretty easy to find me. So umedical.com of course u medical. YouTube.

You gotta spell it though because it's not spelled the way it sounds. The R is not at all.

Yeah, it's South Louisiana nonsense. So it's O U B R E Medical. So U O U B R E Medical.com and luckily with zoom and things nowadays we have patients all over the country, all over the world. So with the virtual meetings and things, we can. I would like to tell people that it's like 95% is if you're in the room with us because we can ship supplements and pe peptides. There's of course, some things we just can't do if you're not in person. But we can still do 95%, the majority.

Because you can have somebody go get their labs, just like I go get my. I don't get my labs at your office. I go everywhere, somewhere in town. Interesting. And then you're okay. That makes so much sense. So, yeah. So to remember, it's. I always just think of uber medical dot com. That's how I remember it. O medical dot com well, Dr. U, it's always a pleasure, man. This is the first time we ever connected in this capacity. But I really, really enjoyed enjoy this.

And we love and appreciate everything you do. How my wife just loves that. She's always like, oh, look what Hal posted today. Like, okay, show me. You've always got great stuff, man. Thank you.

On our life. You're a wonderful man, Al.

Thank you, brother. Thank you. Well, goal achievers, thank you for tuning in today. I encourage you to pursue functional medicine in your life, not when you have to because something came up that you didn't take a proactive approach to. But actually, I don't have anything wrong with me necessarily right now, but I see Dr. Ub to prevent things going wrong in the future. And so check out uber medical if you will. O U b r e medical.com and I love you so much. Thanks for tuning in and I will talk to y' all next week.

Thanks for listening. To learn more about the achieve your goals podcast and to get access today's show notes, transcript, script and exclusive content from Hal Elrod, visit HalElrod.com podcast thanks again for joining us. Be sure to tune in next week for another episode of the achieve your goals podcast.