How Can We Decrease Bodily Toxins? | Dr. Tom O'Bryan

Hello, everyone.

Welcome to the Marcel Pick Women to Women recordings for the podcast. I am so excited today to have one of my favorite people here. We have lots of conversations together and today is a special one for me, and it's Dr. Tom O'. Brien. Let me tell you a little bit about him. When it comes actually to getting healthy and being a detective for health, I think he's the go to person I refer people to and his goal is making it easy to do the right thing. He's an internationally recognized, admired and compassionate speaker. I've seen it firsthand, talking on food sensitivities, environmental toxins, and the development of autoimmune diseases, which is a significant problem, actually in our culture. Dr. Tom's audiences discover that it's through a clear understanding of how you got to where you are, which is really about functional medicine, that you and your doctor can figure out what it will take for you to get well. Dr. O' Brien is considered Sherlock Holmes for chronic disease and teaches that recognizing and addressing the underlying mechanisms that activate an immune response is the map to the highway towards better health. He holds teaching faculty positions with the Institute for Functional Medicine and the National University of Health Sciences. He has trained and certified tens of thousands of practitioners around the world in advanced understanding of the impact of wheat sensitivity, which is a huge thing that we'll talk about today, and the development of individual autoimmune disorders. So welcome, Dr. Tom. Thank you so much for this last minute conversation.

Thank you. It's really a pleasure. Anytime I can be with you. It's a pleasure.

Yes. We always seem to have interesting conversations, don't we? So let's start out with this whole notion of environmental toxicity. It's something that some people consider controversial, but what I'm seeing, and I think what you're seeing, is how it's increasing fatigue and also the enormous number of increase numbers of patients with autoimmune disorders.

Well, if I can be so bold, you know, it's like we don't have time for this anymore. People saying that it's just nonsense. There are hundreds and hundreds of studies, you know, in the last month of pregnancy, it's somewhere around 300 quarts of blood a day that are pumping from mom to baby. Somewhere around that amount. What has mom accumulated in her body over a lifetime? I'll give you one example to start with because it's just a jaw dropper. In Chicago a couple of years ago, I think it's four years ago now, they took 346 women, pregnant women in the eighth month of pregnancy and they did urine analysis to see how many phthalates do they have Now. Phthalates are chemicals used to mold plastic. The most popular one that people have heard of is bpa. It's in water bottles and many other places. There are many, many phthalates. They just looked at the top five and how much phthalates are in mom's urine.

Then they took those results and they put them into categories of fourths, the lowest quartile, the next, the third and the highest. They then followed the offspring of those pregnancies for seven years. And when the kids turned seven years old, they did Wechsler IQ tests on them. There's not much in medicine that's all or every. This was every, every child whose mother was in the highest quartile of phthalates and urine in the eighth month of pregnancy compared to the children whose mothers were in the lowest quartile. Every child in the highest quartile, their IQ was seven points lower.

That doesn't mean anything to anyone until you recognize a one point difference in IQ is noticeable. A seven point difference is a difference between a child working really hard getting straight A's in school and a child working really hard getting straight Cs. This kid doesn't have a chance in hell of ever excelling in school because their brain never developed properly. Then just go to Google and type in phalates. P H T H A L A T E S. I love being a spelling bee. Phalates and neurogenesis. Nerve growth. Here come the studies how these phthalates inhibit nerve growth. And here's the example of children at 7 years old. Every one of them, their brain function is compromised because the brain never developed to whatever its potential was. And so for people to say, well, this thing about environmental toxins is nonsense.

Never before in the history of humanity have we been exposed to as many environmental toxins now, every day as we are never before. And why is that? It's not the greenhouse effect. It's the number of chemicals that are being brought into our environment. The flame retardant chemicals in the clothing that you wear to sleep and in the blankets and your sheets that stuff out gases. Just tiny amounts, tiny, tiny amounts for years. It outgasses and you're breathing that now there's no evidence that the amount of chemicals that you're inhaling from your down comforter because it was soaked in flame retardant chemicals. There's no evidence that that amount of chemicals is toxic to humans. And that's how they get away with this garbage that they pass. So the flame retardant chemicals, the phthalates in the plastic lines on the windows, that outgass into the air. The formaldehyde in the nightstand next to the bed, if it's not solid wood, it's pressboard. When they use pressboard, they put formaldehyde in there to hold it together. That outgasses into the air. Well, I don't smell anything when I walk in the bedroom, of course, because they're minor amounts. But if you ever see the sun shining in through the window that time of day, you see the dust in the air, that's what you're breathing. That dust is loaded with minor amounts of all of these chemicals that accumulate in the body. So that by the time a baby is born in our country today, the average is 280 different chemicals in their bloodstream at birth that are not supposed to be there. And they don't have any defense against this. Now, how could this happen? How did we ever allow this to happen? 1978, the Toxic Substance Control act of 1978, where the lobbyists for the chemical industry paid off the senators and the representatives, excuse me, but they did paid it off so that the legislation that they passed and had no teeth to protect everybody. Because the legislation that was passed says you have to prove that the amount of phthalates that leach out of plastic blinds is toxic to humans. Right now. It's toxic. And it's not. It's not. Or the amount of phthalates that leach out of your plastic food containers. You put chicken in a plastic food container, leftover chicken in the refrigerator. The next day you eat the chicken, it's loaded with phthalates. But you have to prove that that amount of phthalates is toxic to humans. It's not. But give me a little girl who starts at 5 years old with nail polish on her fingernails and her toenails, 20 different applications, maybe once a week for 20 years. Now she's 25 years old, 30 years old. And these chemicals that have been accumulating, never before in history have we accumulated so many chemicals. Now these chemicals are in her body, they're in her bloodstream, they're in baby because she's pregnant. Hopefully she has a healthy pregnancy and baby is born, hopefully a healthy birth. But now this baby never got to develop properly because of these chemicals. So I'll stop there. But as you know, Marcel, I can go on for an hour with nonstop, just study after study after studying on this topic of our bodies have become A depository that nobody wants to talk about because it's so overwhelming. And so tell me, what about if I take vitamin C? Is that going to fix me? No, it's not. It's going to help this much, but it can't undo all of that damage that's been accumulating for so long. One more point, if I may. Blue Cross Blue Shield, arguably the largest for profit health insurance company in the English language, published a paper last year in February of 2020, and they said the incidence of diagnosing Alzheimer's in 30 to 45 year old people between 2013 and 2017 just in four years, has gone up by 406% in four years because younger people are accumulating more of these toxins and the inflammatory cascade that develops inside the body is manifesting because you're killing off cells, killing off cells, killing off cells. And it's manifesting at earlier ages. So when you see something that's the pandemic that's here now, it's not coming, it's here now. And take 30 to 40 year olds and say, how's your brain function? And how many times do you get, oh, great, optimal, I feel really good. You don't go, well, you know, I'm not remembering the way I used to. That's the really common answer that you get just in the casual question.

So I want to come back to this because I want to talk to people about, you know, what we can do and, and baby steps because I think so many people are overwhelmed by it. You know, when I sit down and I hear a conference with Bob Rowntree or something like that, I come away myself and I know a lot, kind of like, oh my God, it's gotten so much worse. So, you know, at the end of this conversation, I'd really like to talk about what are the baby steps that people can do to really heal themselves of this because it is, you know, we have an emergency on our hands here, you know, with the number of people with autoimmune issues. So I would like to kind of look at how we also see not only environmental toxins, but we also see emotional toxicity from trauma, how that also increases the problems with regards to fatigue and autoimmune issues. Cause I think there's a connection here with regards to cortisol. Can you speak to that as well?

Of course, of course.

I was just looking at a paper earlier today from Professor Michael Mays, well known psychiatrist who's been publishing on the inflammation of psychiatry since 2004. 2005. He's really a pioneer that's helped so many people in brain function to understand that it's inflammation that triggers depression and anxiety and schizophrenia. It's inflammation that is the mechanism for these things. He wrote this paper last year. Early life trauma predicts effective phenomenology, and the effects are partly mediated by staging coupled with lower lipid associated antioxidant defenses. I mean, a really geeky title. But early life trauma sets us up for having an inflammatory cascade, because any even perceived sense of trauma that comes at us after we've experienced trauma reactivates that same defensive pathway to protect ourselves. And the result is you get more inflammation, you get less ability to respond to the stress and.

More tissue damage, more activation of your immune system. And the result of early life trauma, when you're an infant or you hear loud noises, you ever seen infant startle? When somebody closes the door, That's a trauma. That's a trauma to them. Oh, well, everybody has that. Yeah, everybody. Everybody's exposed to that type of thing. But it's one of the things that accumulatively put someone at risk of having later brain function imbalances, whether it's depression or anxiety or schizophrenia. You know, our son, as you know, my son was born almost five months ago, and we had planned this great home birth. We were doing the pool, you know. You know, and we had two midwives and two doulas and a hypnotherapist and a birth therapist and.

Other specialists over the course of the pregnancy so that we were becoming educated on how to do this properly. And I, of course, had the bag packed with everything in it in case there was an emergency. And we had to go to the hospital. And we were close to the hospital if we needed, and we had our pediatrician and our obstetrician that we had visited a number of times. And they said, well, if you need me, just call, I'll be available, and all of that. Unfortunately, my son would not be born by natural childbirth. Turns out his hands were like this under his head. And so baby's supposed to be born chin tucked down, coming out head first, but with his hands and his elbows close to his sides. His head was up like that. There was no way he was coming out. And so we had to have a traumatic C section birth. And our son was born not breathing and blew an apgar of four, meaning he was not alive.

Very professional team, they did a great job. Within two to three minutes, he was screaming his bloody head off, like, where am I? And so I'm standing right there and.

He opens his eyes for the first time and starts screaming. There's the first sight he has of the world, the very first sight is these bright lights shining down on him and five giants in white masks, white hats, white gowns looking down at him like this. That's his first view of Earth, planet Earth. And he's screaming his head off. That's traumatic. And that type of a birth can be very traumatic and have long term impact on an individual. My wife and I are privileged enough to know a little something about this and so we've been doing just a top notch job, I'm so proud of her. In reducing the stress of his life. And now at almost five months old, he is a buoyant, happy advanced. At his four month checkup, his pediatrician's jaw dropped and he showed us on the charts that he is at the very top of the normal growth patterns for a seven month old and in the middle for nine month old. And this was at four months. And a neurologist friend, I was talking to him on Facebook just the other day and I had my son in my hands and he was looking at the screen, little baby's like, wow, what's that? Looking at it. And the neurologist said, I've never seen a four month old so neurologically organized before. That's really impressive. And I didn't ask him, he just volunteered that information. So I know that we're doing the things that hopefully will minimize the early life trauma that he experienced. So he has a real chance of coming into his world with a full deck of cards. That's the goal here and that's what we want for everyone.

To learn the things that you need to do to take care of what's happened to you in the past. That it's the accumulative amount of trauma, whether it's physical trauma, emotional trauma, chemical trauma, structural trauma, radiation trauma, EMFs, whatever it is, you have to learn about these things. And unfortunately, the days of putting our health in the hands of your doctor, it's not going to work anymore. Very rare that doctors have the structure to walk a person through the many different topics that have to be addressed. Okay, let's see where this rheumatoid arthritis came from. Let's take a look at how come you've got this numbness and tingling right now or where is this fatigue coming from? That it's a, that's why, you know, in the introduction you said that I emphasize it's really important to find the map of how you got to where you are so that you can successfully get to where you want to go. That's why it's so important.

Oh, absolutely. And, you know, I want to reiterate for people the importance of this notion of trauma. And, you know, the ACE study, which a lot of people have never heard of before, is adverse events. Adverse Childhood event study, showed that if we have trauma, you know, depending upon, maybe there was a single parent, maybe there was a parent that died, maybe those arguing the house maybe didn't feel loved. All of those carry with it some significant biochemical changes in the brain that also increase cortisol that has lifelong effects. However, it is also changeable once you understand it and do something about it, just like you did with your son.

Yes.

And I think that's the piece. But the recognition that is related is really important. So let's kind of take that a little bit further. So what about this notion of people being in sympathetic, most of their lives in overdrive and fear and angst. How does that play into autoimmune disorders and fatigue, which is, you know, really what you're talking a lot about these days.

Oh, my goodness.

It was Professor Hans Selye way back in the early 50s that associated the word stress with health. And he showed.

The glands that handle the stress of life, which was the title of Selye's book for the general public, is still a best read, the Stress of Life. He showed that the glands that handle that stress are called the adrenal glands. They sit on top of the kidneys and they're about the size of a walnut. On each of the kidneys, we have two adrenal glands. He showed that a young man that died of trauma, a healthy young man, vibrant and unfortunately died of a car accident or some type of trauma. His. His adrenal glands are the size of a walnut. A young man of the same age that dies of a disease, whether it's cancer or any other disease, his adrenal glands are the size of a peanut.

So can a gland the size of a peanut function to help you handle the stress of life as you're going through your life? Can it do an adequate job? And the answer is no, it can't. It's been worn down. Now, how does that happen? What Professor Selye talked about, if you think about the nerves of the two different nervous systems, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems, the sympathetic nervous system, for an analogy, is the size of my baby finger. The parasympathetic nerves, for analogy, are the size of my thumb. They're noticeably bigger because they have more insulation around them. That's what makes them bigger. They have more insulation.

Ask any electrician.

The more you run a current through a wire, the hotter the wire gets, so the more insulation you need around the wire.

Okay, that makes sense. Okay, so what does that mean? Now ask an anatomist, someone who specializes in anatomy. What does it mean that the parasympathetic nerves are so much larger terms of the insulation to the sympathetic nerves? Well, it means that parasympathetic nerves are supposed to run more often because they're carrying more, they're carrying the juice more often. Okay, how often? Cellie told us that the parasympathetic nervous system is designed to run somewhere between 92 to 98% of the time and the sympathetic nervous system somewhere between 3 to 8% of the time. Because the sympathetic nervous system, the fight, flight or fright, is designed to save your life. Our ancestors, when did they have to get activated to save their life? When there's a saber toothed tiger, you better respond really quick. And now ask an electrician. The less insulation around a nerve, the faster the current goes through the nerve. So the sympathetic nerves are much, much faster than the parasympathetic. Why? To save your life that you don't want. If you hear a growl behind you or the rattles of a snake, the hissing of a snake, you don't say, well, I don't want to get too worked up about this. I'm having a nice day here. Right? It's an automatic oh, and you jump just automatically. That's your sympathetic nervous system saving your life. Your heart starts beating faster, your lungs are working faster. Short, sharp breath.

Blood'S going to your muscles, so you run fast. Not so much blood to your skin. In case you get cut, you don't want to bleed so much. So blood is shunted away from the skin more to the muscles, no blood to digestive system. Not important when you're fighting for your life, that you digest your food, many, many different functions are determined by whether you are in a sympathetic dominant state or a parasympathetic dominant state. When you're exposed to stress of any type, whether it's emotional stress from a history earlier in life, a chemical stress, a mechanical stress. When you're exposed to stress, you activate the sympathetic nervous system.

The more our lifestyle and our environment activates our sympathetic nervous system, the more stressed you are, the less ability you have to heal. But you only heal when you're in a parasympathetic dominant state, which is when you're sleeping. For most of us, that's the only time unfortunately, that we get anywhere near a parasympathetic dominant state. That's why you only heal when you sleep, is because that's when your body calms down and you're not fighting to save your life.

Now how does that play into increasing inflammation? How does that kind of biochemistry of that?

Right. So when you're under stress, when that stress response gets activated, your immune system is ready to go. Going to make sure if you get cut or something, you get a little dirt in your bloodstream from the nails of the tiger or whatever it is, your immune system's ready to go. What happens is that stress, one of the responses of the stress is that it activates intestinal permeability, the leaky gut, which allows some of the bacteria in your gut to get into the bloodstream, which activates the immune system. Make more antibodies here, make more anti inflammatories. Let's get you ready to go here. You're about to get into a fight with a saber toothed tiger or a caveman or your neighbor, you know, whatever it is, but you're ready to go. So the inflammation at the time of the exposure to stress is a defense mechanism. The long term inflammation is because we don't heal properly from the original.

Stress response that we had.

Absolutely. So what about, you know, one of the things that we don't talk a lot about that also I think ties in very much to the immune system is dental health. You know, very, very few people made the connections. I've known about it for years. But let's kind of bring our audience up to date in that because we've talked now about early trauma, we've talked about the fact we have environmental toxicity and we've talked also about the fact that we have huge amounts of stress in our lives that are absolutely contributing to autoimmune issues as well as fatigue. Well, let's dig a little deeper into the mouth because it is so connected as well.

It is, it is the. There's over 800 species of bacteria in the oral mucosa.

Oh, is that all.

As they're supposed to be? Unfortunately for many of us that's not the case anymore. You know, we have too much of the bad guys, not enough of the good guys.

When you have a oral microbiome that's out of balance, there's inflammation in your mouth. You ever brush your teeth and you rinse the water out, and you spit the water out and it's a little pink, a little red. Or when you floss, it's a little pink. That's severe inflammation in your gums.

The result of that is that. And like when you floss, if you get the little bit of pink water or blood, you've caused leaky gums. We've heard of leaky gut and leaky brain. You also get leaky gums. When you get leaky gums, the bacteria in your mouth, some of the bacteria can get through the leaky gums back into the bloodstream. Why do you think dentists give antibiotics when they want to work in your mouth? There's only one reason. Because when they're working in your mouth and they squirt some water in, you lean over and you spit the water out in the porcelain thing and it's pink or red. He gave you leaky gums. And for a few days you're going to have leaky gums. It takes two, three, four days for those to seal up again. In the meantime, you got leaky gums. And there's over 800 bacteria, different types of bacteria in the mouth. Some of them get into your bloodstream. Strep. If strep gets into your bloodstream and it grabs a hold and it starts to reproduce, your immune system will make antibodies to fight the strep. That's a really good thing. But the problem, and this goes into the whole topic of autoimmunity, the problem is the antibodies to fight the strep infection that you got, because the bacteria in your mouth is got through the leaky gums, it set up shop somewhere and it started reproducing. And so the immune system says, whoa, we better fight that one. And you make antibodies to the strep.

The way antibodies work, it's like they're trained to go after one thing and one thing only. So you make antibodies to strep. They're going through the bloodstream everywhere, looking for, let's say, orange vest, that they're looking for a protein structure, let's say, okay, you're looking for orange vests. That's strep. So everywhere they see orange vest, they fire their chemical bullet, destroy the strep. The problem, and what a primary contributor is to the development of almost all autoimmune diseases is that the antibodies that your body makes to protect you and fight something, looking for orange vests or blue vests or pink vests. The protein structure of those vests that the antibodies are trained to look for looks a whole lot like human protein. Like the valves of your heart, the antibodies to strep. If they see the valves, because blood goes everywhere. If they go past the valves of the heart. Look over there, orange vest. And they fire their chemical bullet at the valves of your heart. That's rheumatic fever. And that'll kill you. So the dentist gives you antibiotics before he works in your mouth, so that when he. When he creates leaky gums. Side effect of dental work. When he creates leaky gums, if any strep gets into your bloodstream, the antibiotics are already there to kill the strep. So your body won't make antibodies to protect you.

As far as I know, that's the only reason why dentists give antibiotics. And it's arguable. It's a good point. For some people, it might be a good thing to do. I'm not sure everyone needs that, depending on their immune structure. But some people, absolutely, it's the right thing to do. So the mouth, once again, the mouth. The bacteria in the mouth, we've known, and there are so many. When you have this hot environment in your mouth, you really can't tell that you have inflammation. It doesn't feel so bad until it gets really, really bad. Down the road, you don't know that it's happening. But the inflammation in your gums, it can get into your bones, it can get into the nerves.

There's something called cavitations that when people, they've tried everything and nothing works to help with their kidney problem, they go to a biological dentist and he looks at the nerve that's associated the tooth that's associated with the kidneys. And oh, yeah, I had a root canal there, doc. And they go in and they find that there's all kinds of inflammation back underneath the tooth called a cavitation. And that was the feedback loop that was contributing to the recurrent kidney problems. The person was having unbelievable cases of people getting well from biological dentists. If the tooth or the oral cavity is the problem, sometimes it is, sometimes it is. So the oral cavity is so important that we pay attention to. And my wife and I, we use a toothpaste that has some natural antibacterial products in it. It's called Bioc. Dental side. It's called dentalcidin. It's an excellent. Kids love the taste of it. It doesn't have any sugar, but it's kind of a little better than neutral for taste, so kids will do it. And then there's a little pump spray so we brush every night, and then we do a couple of pumps of the dental side and mouthwash, kind of swish it around, rinse our mouths out with it. And I don't know of a better protocol. There may be. I just don't know of a safer protocol than that to keep your oral cavity healthy.

The other piece that we need to tell people about also is how important it is to get the mercury out of their mouths.

Oh, goodness, yes.

Unfortunately, a lot of people, certainly I did it years ago, still have mercury in their mouths. And it's not so much that we are, you know, if it breaks off and we swallow it, because our digestive system take care of that. It's when we chew and we have the, you know, fumes from the mercury that actually can cross the blood brain barrier. So that's a huge issue.

A biological dentist to kind of have it evaluated because they can evaluate your mouth. Very, very important, especially in terms of brain function and health and healing. So. So I just want to remind people of that. So let's talk a little bit about the leaky gut. You mentioned it a little bit with regards to. I see it a huge problem with people with inflammation in general, joint pain, joint discomfort, and how's it tied to autoimmunity.

There are our friend, Dr. Alessio Fasano.

He is the chief of pediatric gastroenterology at Mass General at Harvard, a professor of nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health, a professor of gastroenterology, Harvard Medical School, the director of the Celiac Research center at Harvard, the director of the Mucosal Immunology center at Harvard. Five titles that any one of these titles is a lifelong goal for scientists at the top of their field. He's got five of them. He published a paper last year, and he's always so careful of what he says, so that he's not misquoted. He published a paper last year, all disease begins in the leaky gut. The role of the protein called zonulin in the development of chronic inflammatory diseases. And he tells us that there are five pillars in the development of chronic inflammatory diseases. And people might not know that every disease is a chronic inflammatory disease. It's what we deal with all day, every day. Doesn't matter if it's diabetes or brain fog or gingivitis or rheumatoid arthritis. It doesn't matter. They're all chronic inflammatory diseases. And he tells us that there are five pillars in the development of chronic inflammatory disease. First, it's your genetics. Can't do anything about that. If you got the gene, you got the gene. But it doesn't mean the vast majority of time, it doesn't mean you're getting the disease like the Alzheimer's gene or the breast cancer gene. It means that you're vulnerable to getting the disease. Well, how do I not have have the gene cause a problem? So what you want to do is dim down. Genes don't work on, on off switches. Genes work on dimmer switches. And so what you want to do is dim down the genes of inflammation. That may be the Alzheimer gene. And you want to turn up the genes of anti inflammation in your brain. That's always the goal. So don't worry about the genes. If you have a gene, it means, okay, I may be vulnerable to this. I'll have to check this every once in a while in my life to make sure there are no early indicators that I'm heading down the wrong path. Right? You don't wait until you're like flushed down the rabbit hole, right? You check, they're called biomarkers. If you have a gene for Alzheimer's, you check the biomarkers for Alzheimer's every year or every two years to make sure there's no indicator that that gene is ramped up right now. So you check.

That'S the genes. The second one is environmental triggers. And that's what we're talking about. Whether they're mechanical or biochemical or emotional, spiritual or electromagnetic, all of these things in our environment that we're exposed to, they're the ones that turn up your dimmer switch or turn down your dimmer switch. You have a family history that four out of the eight grandparents and great grandparents developed diabetes. You eat sugar every day of your life. You're turning that diabetes gene up really high, right? It's not rocket science, right. Don't eat sugar in excessive amounts. And that depends on the individual. What's excessive? It depends on the individual. But environmental triggers, that's what turns the genes on up or turns the genes down. Third, the environmental triggers create an altered microbiome. It's called dysbiosis. It just means the environment inside your gut is out of balance. It's an inflammatory environment. That's number three, four. That inflammatory environment causes a leaky gut. The leaky gut is the gateway. So when you've got a leaky gut, these large molecules go through the leaky gut into the bloodstream before they're supposed to be able to do that, when they get into the bloodstream, that activates number five, your immune System trying to protect you from whatever this thing is that got through the leaky gut. That is the development of chronic inflammatory diseases. It doesn't matter which one you're diagnosed with. You always want to think about this as the platform from which you ask all questions and you go to environmental triggers. Well, I heard something about shower heads. Is that important, Doc? Well, Mrs. Patient, you've got recurrent sinus problems, and it's very likely that. That you've never known to clean your showerhead. And showerheads develop biofilms and colonies of bacteria. So every time you get in the shower and you turn it on, you get blasted with millions of klebsiella or proteus. Every time. Well, I don't feel bad when I take a shower. No, of course you don't. Of course you don't. But if you inhale this stuff, then you're taxing your immune. So, yeah, environmental triggers can be really important for you. The leaky gut. Let's talk. You asked about the leaky gut.

Mrs. Patient. Your digestive system is a tube. It starts at the mouth. That goes to the other end. One big, long tube kind of winds around in the center. When you eat food, when you swallow food, it's not in your body, it's in the tube. And it's got to go through the walls of the tube to get into the bloodstream to be used in the body. That's the digestion and absorption process. Now, the inside of that tube is lined with cheesecloth so that when you eat food and it goes into your stomach, gets churned around in there for an hour, hour and a half, two hours with the acid to break it down some more. Then it goes into the small intestine. Enzymes are starting to break it down even more. You're breaking down this food into smaller and smaller pieces. Professor Fasano talks about a pearl necklace. Hydrochloric acid that's made in your stomach undoes the clasp of the pearl necklace. Now you have a string of pearls, and your enzymes act as scissors to cut it into two pieces, into four pieces, eight pieces, 16.

That's digestion. Until you have each pearl of the pearl necklace called an amino acid. So small, it goes right through the cheesecloth into the bloodstream. That's normal digestion and absorption. When you get a leaky gut, you get tears in the cheesecloth. Now you get larger molecules called macromolecules that are getting through the tears in the cheesecloth before there's been enough time for it to be broken down. Snip, snip, snip, snip, snip. By the digestive enzymes. That's the problem. So these macromolecules get into the bloodstream number four, the leaky gut. They get into the bloodstream through the leaky gut. Your immune system trying to protect you said, what is that? I can't make new bone cells or brain cells out of that. I better fight that. And now you make antibodies to chicken or to tomatoes or to be. It doesn't matter what it is. It doesn't matter if it's a macromolecule. Your immune system trying to protect you is going to fight that thing. So that's our patient that does a 90 food blood test to see what they're sensitive to. Comes back 20, 25. Oh, my God. That's everything I eat. Well, of course it is. Your immune system's trying to protect you. You've got a leaky gut. Let's fix this leaky gut. Let's fix the dysbiosis. Let's look at what the environmental triggers are that are causing the dysbiosis that is causing the leaky gut. Then we'll recheck it in six months or a year, likely, you'll be fine. But that's how you have to think about this whole process of chronic inflammatory diseases.

We talked about environment, we've talked about trauma, we've talked about emotions, we've talked about the gut, we've talked about the mouth. And people are probably sitting there going, oh, my God, where do I even start? Can we talk about some baby steps so that people can digest this in terms of some very simple things to do?

Yeah. There's only one way. I know, Dr. Marcel. That people are successful. It's only one day. One way. And it's the subtitle of my book. I'm not plugging the book. It's a great book, but it's the.

Please, do. We want to hear about it?

It's the subtitle. So the book's called you'd Can Fix youx Brain. It's number one in seven categories on Amazon for brain function. But the subtitle is Just One hour a week to the best memory, productivity and sleep you've ever had. That's not a cutesy subtitle. That's the only way to be successful. What do I mean by that? Every Tuesday night after dinner, every Sunday morning after services, whenever it is, but every week at the same time, you allocate one hour that you're going to learn A little more about how to create a different environment for you and your family. So you're going to go to my book and you're going to look for the URLs for glass storage containers. And there's Miles Kimball and there's Amazon and whatever the third one was, I don't remember. And you go online, you say, oh, those are kind of nice. Oh, I like those. And you order three round ones and two square ones and one for the pies. You pay with your credit card, you hit send. It took an hour. You're done for the week. But never again are you going to poison your family with minor amounts of phthalates because you didn't know that plastic storage containers are causing toxins in your family's brain. You didn't know, but now you know. Give the Tupperware to your husband to store nails in the garage. It's really good for that. And then next week, you're going to listen to one of Dr. Pick's Facebook lives. You're going to come up with, oh, yeah, I remember that. You're going to make a list of the topics you want to address. And then next week you're going to look at nail polish that doesn't have phthalates. And then next week you're going to test your son for sensitivity to wheat because you suspect maybe. And so you have to take some time to learn. How do I do that? What's the right test? That'll take you an hour to find out. But every week, and Mrs. Patient is going to, you know, someone reached out to me a couple days ago and two sisters that have chronic nephrotic syndrome, their kidneys are shutting down on them. They're both teenagers and they've been to the best doctors in the world. And they read my book and they said, will you talk to us? And I sent a very nice message and I said, you know, thank you so much for your flattering words. However, I don't want to waste my time or yours. Read the book first. Because when you read the book, you understand there is no quick fix, that it's boots on the ground. One hour a week to learn one new thing to implement in your life. It's going to take six months to two years to successfully transition the direction your health is going in. You can't get it done quickly. There are certain things that will help you feel a little better. Of course, we all, we'll do our best to help our patients feel better, but to turn around the direction of your health, it Takes step, by the way I say it is base hits. Win the ball game. It's all the base hits you do. And I'll give you one example of that. 1986, a gastroenterologist and microbiologist in Australia writes a paper and he says, you know, I think that sometimes ulcers are caused by a bacteria. All of his friends and his peers said, what are you, a nutcase? Everybody knows that ulcers are caused by too much acid and you have to give antacids. It's always been in the top 10 medications. Billion dollars a year are sold for antacids. Everybody knows that he didn't care, and he was ostracized. He didn't care. What did he do? He did an endoscopy. Put a tube down with a camera down his throat into his stomach. Took pictures of the healthy pink tissue of his stomach. Then he drank a beaker, a beaker of bacteria called Heliobacter pylori. He.

Can'T imagine that. Then he waited five days until he was feeling really sick and did another endoscopy, Took a picture of the ulcers forming throughout his stomach. Then he took the antibiotics to kill the bacteria, waited about a week and a half until he felt better, and then did another endoscopy to show the healing that was going on in his stomach. Then he published it with the papers or with the pictures. Then everyone knew he was a nutcase. Right? But he proved that sometimes ulcers are caused by bacteria. Now, the World Health Organization thought that that was such an important paper. They sent the paper to every medical society in the world and said, send this to all of your members. Why? Because at the time, the number one cancer that was killing people in the world was stomach cancer, caused by a Heliobacter infection most of the time. And their theory was, if doctors knew about this association of bacteria with ulcers, sometimes they'll at least check to see if the bacteria is there. And then they'll deal with the bacteria, reduce the incidence of stomach cancers. And if you look at the numbers now, stomach cancer is way down from where it was 30 years ago. But Dr. Barry Marshall was still ostracized by all of his friends. He didn't care. He just knew he was right. 21 years later, he wins the Nobel Prize in physiology and the Nobel committee, said Dr. Barry Marshall and his partner, who, with tenacity and a prepared mind, challenged prevailing dogma. He got the Nobel Prize. The only way I know of that people will get the Nobel Prize of health for themselves is by having tenacity one hour a week because it's so overwhelming. And there's no way not to be overwhelmed. You're going to be overwhelmed, but to understand and have the tenacity one hour a week to prepare your mind, you're going to learn about plastic storage containers, you're going to learn about showerheads, you're going to learn about gluten, you're going to learn about all the little things that are in your environment. You have to learn these things to challenge prevailing dogma. That's the secret to success.

So if you want to find out more about you and how to get more of your information, how can they go about doing that?

Oh, thank you. The doctor dot com. The doctor dot com. Just don't spell the word doctor out. That's our site. Got videos and articles and all kinds of good things there. And we have a event coming up, fatigue and Autoimmunity, where we've interviewed so many experts and I read their papers, so I knew the questions to ask you. I didn't say, well, tell us how you got into this field and waste time with all of that. Right. I went right for the jugular. So tell me, how is it that you found out that Heliobacter is a problem with ulcers? Those kind of questions. And so that it's a deep dive in everyday layman's language. I do my best pearl necklace and snip, snip, snip and all that and cheesecloth. So people can understand these really complicated topics, but enough information, enough of the depth of information to be understood so you can take positive action.

Excellent. Excellent. Well, thank you so much. And we'll have a link below so people can sign up for this amazing workshop and really get deep into understanding how to take care of yourself and how to heal. So thanks very, very much and God bless.

Thank you.