S2:E3 - The Gluten Show - Mark Ottobre and Dr. Thomas O’Bryan

Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, welcome to the Enterprise Fitness Podcast. This is the show that lets you inside the doors and behind the scenes of the personal training studio Enterprise Fitness, and I'm your host slash the owner guy, Mark Ottobre here to welcome you. So we thought at Enterprise we would blow some dust off the old podcasts I did and reintroduce them in 2018 because they're gold, to be quite frank with you. They are gold. This one is with Dr. Thomas O'Brien, who is one of the world's leading authorities in the space of gluten and gluten sensitivity. Sensitivity. I was very fortunate to have this conversation with him. And we don't mince words. We get straight into it. I designed these questions to basically, if you're new to the world of gluten sensitivity, he explains it. He lays it out, what it is, why you want to avoid it, what foods it is, and then the conversation just evolves and develops from there. I think this is one of the best interviews I've done in the space. And I think it's a great, you know, it's a great audio. It's a great interview. It's a great podcast to listen to. If you're new to the conversation of gluten, or if you're a seasoned vet, I think you'll get a lot out of this too.

Let us know your thoughts.

Our website is melbournepersonaltrainers.com, or jump on the Facebook and just search Enterprise Fitness. And we're also on Instagram, wherever you crazy kids these days do all your social. But feel free to comment, feel free to lend us, lend us, lend us, feel free to comment or ask a question of us. Always up for a chat. And yeah, I hope you enjoy this podcast. Hope you get a lot out of it. It really is evergreen, this one, because evergreen just simply meaning it hasn't aged a day. It's ever ripe and yours for the bounty of taking and fruitfulness for the ears. So hope you enjoy this one and speak to you on the other side of this one.

Bye. Dr. Thomas O'Brien is an internationally recognized speaker specializing in gluten sensitivity and celiac disease. He is the Sherlock Holmes for chronic disease and metabolic disorders. He holds a teaching faculty position with the Institute of Functional Medicine and the National University of Life Sciences. Dr. O'Brien is passionate about teaching the many manifestations of gluten sensitivity and celiac disease as they all, all occur inside and outside the intestines. You can learn more about Dr. Thomas O'Brien by visiting www.thedoctor.com. So with that said, let's welcome Dr. Tom O'Brien to the show. Hi, Tom, it's Mark. How you doing?

Hi, Mark, very well, thanks. How are you today?

I'm very good. Very absolute pleasure to speak to you today. You know, really looking forward to this call. You know, I've read a lot of your stuff and listened to a lot of your videos, and I went on your website, downloaded a lot of the other podcasts. And yeah, it's great information, really great what you're doing, you know, in the field of gluten. So yeah, really appreciating you coming on today to, you know, talk about it.

You bet, happy to do it.

Yeah, thanks for that. So let me ask you, how did you become a leading expert in the field of gluten?

Well, I was in a seminar in 2001 with Dr. David Perlmutter, neurologist from Naples, and he was talking about a study that had just been published in the journal Neurology. That talked about 10 people with unrelenting migraines, and their migraines were so bad that they were unable to work, and the average was 8 years that they had been out of work on workman's compensation. And if you're on workman's compensation for 8 years, you're not a malingerer. You know, these are people that are truly suffering. And somehow what came up for me was I wondered What's it like to live in that house? What's it like for the children of that family when dad's got a headache? Shh, shh, shh, quiet, quiet, dad's got a headache. How is it growing up in a house like that, and how suppressed might the children be? And let alone the stress of the family where they haven't had an income in 8 years, living off retirement funds and disability and whatever they could get. And so I ordered that paper because I was caught by the concept, and I read the paper and turned out that 7 out of 10 of those migraine patients were sensitive to gluten. They did not have celiac disease, they were sensitive to gluten. And the doctor took gluten out of their diets, and 7 out of 10 never had a headache again. 2 out of 10 had partial relief, and the 10th one refused the diet. So I said that wrong— 10 out of 10 had a sensitivity to gluten. 7 never had a headache again on a gluten-free diet. 2 got partial relief on the gluten-free diet, and the 10th one refused the diet.

Wow.

So that really caught me, and so I looked at the references in the back of the paper and ordered those papers and started reading them, and I've read hundreds of articles now on this.

Geez. So yeah, 10 out of 10. So I guess let's start with the most obvious, because, you know, I tell all my clients and all my listeners to obviously avoid gluten, but, you know, one of the most common questions I get from, I guess, people who are introduced to gluten, what exactly is it and what foods is it found in?

Good, good, good question. Gluten is the protein in most grains. It's a family of proteins. Rice has gluten, corn has gluten, but there's a toxic family of glutens that are found in wheat, rye, and barley. So anything that is made from wheat, rye, and barley will have some of this protein in it, and if you're toxic to that, your body thinks that you're eating a poison. And when you're eating something that's dangerous to you, the immune system comes into action to go after it. And that's what happens with celiac disease or with gluten sensitivity in general, is that the immune system goes after these proteins of gluten to destroy them. And that's not a problem at all, except if you're having toast for breakfast and a sandwich for lunch and pasta for dinner, and the next day you're having toast for breakfast and a sandwich for lunch and lasagna for dinner, and the next day you're having toast for breakfast and a blueberry muffin at lunch and croutons on your salad at dinner. I think you get my point that we keep eating more and more and more gluten. That there's, I guess the easiest way to say it is that there is collateral damage that occurs. And once the collateral damage occurs from all of the immune activity trying to protect you from a poison, once the collateral damage begins to occur, it has a life of its own.

So this is how, sorry.

This is how you develop other autoimmune diseases with gluten sensitivity. And we know that autoimmune diseases are one of the primary causes morbidity and mortality, that means getting sick or dying, in the world today. And we know that autoimmune diseases are 10 times more common if you have gluten sensitivity. So the number one cause of death in most places of the world, of the industrialized world, is 10 times more common if you have a sensitivity to gluten. Gluten's the gasoline on the fire for most people. There may be others also, but gluten is a primary one.

One of the things I've heard you mention in past interviews and podcasts is that 70% of gluten— sorry, celiacs go undiagnosed because there's no symptoms in the gut. Is that correct?

Actually, it's— yeah, that's, that's close. It's 1 out of 8. For every 1 that has symptoms in their intestines, there are 8 that don't. They've got brain symptoms or joint symptoms or skin symptoms. They've got psoriasis or rheumatoid arthritis or recurrent ear infections or migraines or attention deficit or kidney disease or muscle cramps or anemia or miscarriages, and the list goes on and on and on.

So miscarriages are also linked to gluten intolerances, is that correct?

Oh yes, yes. Actually, I published a paper on this in the Journal of Practical Gastroenterology in 2009 called Reproductive Disorders and Celiac Disease. And gluten sensitivity, celiac disease, is one of the most common causes of unexplained miscarriages. Wow.

Yeah. I didn't know that one. So let me ask, gluten, you spoke before about obviously your immune system being on alarm. So one of the things that I sometimes get a little bit confused with is does gluten cause an inflammation inflammation response or does it cause an immune response and why is that significant?

Well, good. The inflamma— inflammation is the mechanism of all degenerative diseases. As far as I know, every degenerative disease at the cellular level is always an inflammatory state. Always. When you eat a food that you're allergic to, your immune system gets called into action and what it does is it goes after that food to attack it, you know, it attacks that food. And it does so by producing cytokines that are chemical bullets, if you will, that will cause that inflammation that kills the cell, or it destroys that protein. You also make antibodies against that food. First, it's the immune, the natural immune system, called the innate immune system, and you make, you produce these interleukins that produce cytokines, and try to destroy it, and when they can't do the job any longer, then they have to call in the reserves, and the reserves are the antibodies. And the antibodies come in and the antibodies attack the substance and try and destroy it also. It's always an inflammatory mechanism by which an invader, whatever the body considers as an invader, it's always an inflammatory response that destroys the invader.

[Speaker:MARK OTTOBREY] Right, so gluten causes an inflammation response. And then is there any immune response to that?

Gluten causes the inflammation response. What happens is that gluten causes a mechanism in the intestines. It's called intestinal permeability, or the slang term for it is leaky gut. This leaky gut occurs within 36 hours of eating gluten. And the leaky gut occurs because the immune system is attacking these gluten protein molecules and trying to destroy them, and it does so by producing this inflammation, these cytokines that cause an inflammation that destroys the cell. When you have recurrent episodes, this minor amount of inflammation that is almost undetectable until you're being exposed to this thing day after day after day after day. Now it becomes an inflammatory state, and now you've got measurable amounts of inflammation and all the tissue damage that occurs from that.

Alrighty. So it's my understanding that if you do have any type of gluten sensitivity, you basically, you can't have it, period, in your diet. Why is that?

Well, the rule is you can't be a little pregnant. And you can't have a little gluten. And the reason for that is that the mechanism by which the antibodies are produced to the gluten proteins of wheat, barley, and rye is the same mechanism by which antibodies are produced to measles or any other of the vaccines that we've received in our life. So what happens with a measles vaccine, as an example, they give you an injection of the bug measles. Your brain sees this and says, "Well, this is not good for me." And there are generals in your immune system, Army, Air Force, Navy generals. And the brain says, "You, general, you now are General Gluten. Take care of this." General Gluten produces an assembly line that starts making soldiers. Those soldiers are called antibodies. and those soldiers are trained to go after gluten. That's all they do. Or go after measles. That's all they do is go after measles. Now those soldiers are in your bloodstream. They're going around shooting all the measles bugs that you had been injected with. And when all the measles bugs are destroyed, General Measles, who's watching all this, says, okay, turn off the assembly line. We don't need that. We don't need more measles antibodies here right now. You shouldn't have any measles antibodies in your bloodstream right now unless you were exposed to measles. You shouldn't have any. But General Measles is now vigilant the rest of his life. The rest of his life. It's his main job. If measles ever comes back, General Measles just, he doesn't have to build an assembly line again. He just has to flip the switch and turn it back on. And the antibodies are out very, very quickly. That's why if you go to Africa to visit, you need vaccinations months ahead of time for all of the strange diseases that you— dengue fever, yellow fever, all of the diseases that you might be at risk of contracting in Africa, you need these vaccinations months ahead of time. But if you're going back to visit 5 years later, you just need a booster shot 2 weeks before you go because you just have to wake up the general again to start making the antibodies.

Right. So I've heard in the past some other people talk about it takes 90 days. There's basically a 90-day rule that it takes to reset and for the antibodies and the response to go down. Can you talk a little bit more about this?

Well, the lifespan of the antibodies is anywhere from 4 to 6 weeks, perhaps a little longer, maybe up to 8 weeks. So if with one exposure to gluten General gluten gets turned on, he flips the switch, the antibodies are produced within 14 days, and they're around 4, 6 weeks, 4, 6, 8 weeks, somewhere around that category from one exposure. Now, if you're having gluten every day, the mechanism just stays— the assembly line is up and running, working 3 8-hour shifts a day. It doesn't stop.

So is there— I guess we said before, you can't be a little bit pregnant. You know, I remember you telling a story about as much as 1 milligram of not even a full gram of gluten will cause this response. So, you know, if basically someone goes to a restaurant and someone's making, let's say, pasta, and they use the same spoon to make the steak, that can actually cause a gluten response. Is that right?

That's exactly right. In sensitive individuals, that's all it takes. The Codex limit is 20 parts per million. So imagine a million pinheads sitting on your desktop, a million pinheads, then just imagine how many 20 of those are. That's how much gluten it takes to activate general gluten.

Right. So not a lot at all. You know, a little bit of gluten will definitely cause the response. So let me ask you this. You know, people obviously talk about oatmeal and having oats in the morning and porridge and these type of things, but you know, to my understanding, a lot of these products actually made in the same places other wheat products. So in your opinion, is that, is that to say we should avoid things like rice or oatmeal?

Well, they're, they're different grains. Oats, there, it's been published on oats. When oats grow out of the ground, there's no toxic gluten in them. When, when you buy oats off the shelf, off the supermarket shelf, there's gluten in them, and it's contamination, it's cross-contamination from either the— when they harvested the oats in the field, they threw them in the truck to drive to the manufacturing facility, and that truck hauled wheat last week, and they don't clean the truck or in the same facility, and it was in the air, was on the assembly line, something like that. But in here in the US, there are a few companies that are very proud now to put on their label gluten-free oatmeal or gluten-free oats, and they go out of their way and they test their batches to make sure that they're completely gluten-free. Okay, so in general, in general, it's not safe to eat oatmeal out in a restaurant. In general, if you're a celiac, it's not safe because when they've looked at different brands of oatmeal, they're all contaminated. Even those that are from an oats-only facility like McCann's, which is a famous oats here in the US that comes from Ireland. They're grown and they're packaged in Ireland and they're an oats-only facility, but 2 out of the 4 samples that they looked at had levels of gluten above the toxic limit.

Right.

So, so you, uh, if you eat oats, and we recommend our patients to use oatmeal, it's okay. And if they don't heal the way we see they should, then we take oats out. But you just need to make sure that the oats you're using are gluten-free oats.

Right. And that is normally advertised on the packet?

That's correct.

Yeah, cool. So, um, let me ask you this. If, what if someone turns around, they get a test 'Cause the next question I'm gonna ask you is about tests, but what if someone gets a gluten test and it comes back that they're not intolerant, they can actually have gluten, would you advise to keep having gluten?

Well, there's a couple of different levels to that answer. The first one is body language never lies. It never lies. And many of us speak a second language, perhaps Spanish or French or Italian, Many English-speaking people speak a second language. How many speak body? Most of us do not speak body at all. We don't understand the language, we don't listen to it. If we have something going on, we take an aspirin to get rid of the headache. But if we have 2 or 3 headaches a week, we take aspirin 2 or 3 times a week and not worry about it. That's like going into under the dashboard of a car and the hot light comes on, and so you go under the dashboard and you look for the wire going to the hot light, you cut the wire, and And then you look at the dashboard and see that the hot light's not on anymore and you keep driving your car. We don't, we don't speak body and we should learn to speak body. From that context, the best test in the world— stop eating gluten. Completely stop for 2 to 3 weeks. Notice what happens. If you feel better and then you go back to eating gluten and you start heading back to that same not better, then your body's telling you, I don't feel good when you do this, when you put this food in me. So that's the first answer. The second answer is that the tests are notoriously inaccurate. If you have— it's called total villous atrophy. That means the inside of your intestines is a, it's a tube. The intestines are a tube going through your abdomen. The inside of the intestines is lined with shag carpeting. And each shag absorbs different nutrients. This shag over here is calcium. This shag over here is magnesium. This one is oils. This one is good fats. This one is proteins. All the shags absorb different nutrients. Celiac disease, which is gluten sensitivity affecting the gut— celiac disease wears down your shag. So you don't have shag carpeting anymore, you've got Berber. And if you've got Berber carpeting, you don't absorb calcium. You get osteoporosis. It's not rocket science, hmm, why it happens, right? That's why in the Annals of Internal Medicine they say every osteoporotic patient needs to be checked for celiac disease. Celiac disease could be the cause of their osteoporosis. So I say the doctors, when I show them that study, say, doctors, if the Annals of Internal Medicine say every osteoporotic patient needs to be tested for celiac disease because celiac disease could be the cause of osteoporosis, which one are you not going to check? Mm-hmm. Yeah, there's, there's silence in the room. So the tests are notoriously inaccurate because the— let me back up. The tests are right on the money, completely accurate, right on the money, very high degree of sensitivity and specificity, 96, 98, 100%, very, very accurate if you have total villus atrophy. If your shags are worn down completely and you've got Berber. The blood tests are very accurate. But if you've only got partial wearing down or you've just got the inflammation and nothing's worn down yet, the blood tests are wrong up to 7 out of 10 times. So the blood tests are very accurate and all the studies say how accurate they are for celiac disease, but celiac disease requires the shags to be worn down completely, total villous atrophy. Right. So that's why I call this the conundrum of gluten sensitivity. This is why so many people get blood tests, they come back negative, but if they stop eating wheat, they feel better. But since the blood test was negative, I guess I can eat wheat. So they're not listening to body language, they're listening to that piece of paper that was wrong. New tests have just come out here in the US in the last 3 months where The reason the tests are wrong and they're not sensitive enough, one of the reasons is because we know that, see, gluten is a protein and the protein molecule is made up of hundreds of amino acids. They're the building blocks, if you will, or the bricks that make up the wall, the protein gluten. Digestion is removing the mortar from in between the bricks so each brick comes off. So good digestion breaks down your proteins into single amino acids that go right through the shags into the bloodstream. That's normal. That's how it's supposed to occur. But when you have gluten sensitivity, it's like someone took a sledgehammer to the wall and broke the wall into big clumps. 17 bricks, 33 bricks, 18 bricks, 44 bricks. These big clumps of brick that still have all the mortar on them. That's when you have gluten sensitivity and you don't break down your foods very well. Those big clumps go into the bloodstream and the immune system goes into action to fight it, and here comes the whole cascade of effects. The blood tests look at one clump. They look at 33-brick clump. It's called a 33-mer peptide of gluten called alpha-gliadin. All the blood tests look for the same thing, alpha gliadin. That's all they look for. But we know there are over 60 different peptides of gluten, clumps of the brick wall, 60 different ones that the immune system will react to. Why are we only testing one? Which is my question. So a laboratory just opened up 3 months ago and they're testing the top 10 peptides of gluten. And now we aren't getting the false negatives anymore, and people are learning exactly what it is they've got, and there's an accurate test. The lab is called Cyrex, C-Y-R-E-X, cyrexlabs.com. And your listening audience can go there and they can find a doctor in their area that has an account with Cyrex and order the test to be done. And if they don't have someone in their area, then Cyrex will tell you where the closest one is.

Can you do it internationally?

Not yet. Soon, but not yet.

Right.

I've been speaking, I've been speaking in Mexico and Canada and London and Brazil, and they're all very, very interested. They really want these tests because it makes perfect sense. So we hope within the next year— actually, I was speaking to someone last week from New Zealand who would like to help to bring the tests over to New Zealand and Australia. Yeah, that's great. I'm sure within the next year they'll be there.

So I guess, you know, I guess because obviously a lot of my listeners are listening in from Australia, what tests can we ask for, or is it really just learning to speak body?

Well, the only tests that are available are looking for— if you say I want to test for gluten sensitivity, what they check is gliadin. They check because 50%— the studies say 50% of celiacs will have antibodies to gliadin, but the rest of them don't. And they say, well, it's not a good test then. But no, they say it's not a sensitive test. Well, that's true. That's because these people are reacting to a different peptide. They're not reacting to the gliadin. The other 50% not reacting to gliadin, they're reacting to gluteomorphins or glutenins or 17-MER. Or a 13 or 11-mer. They're not reacting to the 33-mer. So the first test that's done, and as far as I know, the only test that's done in Australia, is for the 33-mer gliadin peptide, and the other is transglutaminase. Transglutaminase is an enzyme that is in the Saran Wrap that covers the shags. Do you have Saran Wrap over there?

I think we call it that, maybe.

Oh, you're right, right. It's like a— like cling wrap. Yeah, good. Let's say the cling wrap. So transglutaminase is an enzyme inside the cling wrap, and if your body makes antibodies to transglutaminase, you destroy the transglutaminase and you destroy the cling wrap, and you get the leaky gut intestinal permeability. There's such a major problem. So the only tests that are over there are gliadin and transglutaminase, as far as I know. If you're positive there, you're really positive. If you're not positive there, it doesn't mean that you're negative for celiac disease. It just means that that test doesn't identify it. So the most sensitive thing you can do is do a gluten-free, dairy-free diet for 3 weeks. No dairy of any type and no gluten of any type for 3 weeks. Why, why don't you have lots of health The enzyme that breaks down the sugar molecules in dairy, the enzyme is called lactase. Lactase is produced in the single cell outside lining of the shags, of the epithelium. So when your shags are inflamed or your shags wear down, you don't produce the enzymes to break down the protein molecules in dairy. And you fuel more inflammation because of the poorly digested protein molecules of dairy. In papers where they've looked at this, they put people on a gluten-free diet and check to see if they were making their enzymes to dairy. And 6 months, the answer was no. It took a year. A year on a gluten-free diet, and then some of these people— not all of them, but some of these people— started making their enzymes again to break down dairy.

Right.

And when you eat dairy, if you have celiac disease or gluten sensitivity, when you eat dairy, your body still thinks you're eating gluten. It's a cross— it's called a cross-reactive reaction. Cross-reactive.

And I've heard you talk about caffeine, getting rid of caffeine except green tea. What is the reaction there with caffeine?

Well, there's two levels to answer that question. First, as part of the protocol to heal the gut, getting caffeine out of there is important because it'll cause some inflammation in the intestines and you're trying to heal the damage is there. The second level of that question is that caffeine is a cross-reactive food. Excuse me, coffee. Coffee is a cross-reactive food. So if you're sensitive to coffee, not everyone is, but if you're sensitive to coffee, your body thinks you're still eating gluten and you keep getting the same kind of damage as if you're eating gluten, right?

So how would you find out if you're sensitive to coffee?

Well, there's a blood test from Cyrex Labs. They have a test called cross-reactive foods. This lab is set up specifically to identify gluten sensitivity and identify the complications that occur from gluten sensitivity. This lab is, I do believe, going to change the face of medicine in terms of the test because doctors will have much more ammunition now to show to the patient why they feel the way they do, which will instill more compliance. The patients will follow along with the recommendation and then they get better.

With that said, let me ask you this question. What do you think of the, I guess, the compliancy of the doctor to implement lifestyle changes to the patient? Because I don't know, Western medicine does seem a little bit on the other side of, you know, let's prescribe pills rather than look at the patient's health.

Well, that's true. That's because that's how they're trained. Unfortunately, the education system for our medical doctors is not one that teaches them about healthcare. They're taught about crisis care, and when there's a crisis, here's the medication to use. And so we call that acute care, and it's of great value. And you know, almost all the medications that have been approved in the US— I'm not sure how it is in Australia, but certainly here in the US, all of the medications have been approved, they're short-term use. They were not designed to be taken long-term. And the result, when you take them long-term, nobody knows what the complications are gonna be. And so people get surprised with some of the complications that occur. Unfortunately, our medical doctors are not trained in healthcare. They're trained in crisis care. So we need to reeducate them, and there are many, many schools now that are doing that. Functional medicine is beginning to take a more primary role in the education of medical doctors. Which is just fabulous. Yeah, just fabulous, so that you'll have the best of all worlds.

I heard a parent say the other day, it was a debate we were having, obviously I didn't want to take part in it because my opinion was a little bit too outspoken, but one of the parents said that you should get your child adapted to gluten, so give them gluten at an early age and they will adapt to it. Can you explain perhaps maybe the problems with this approach?

There are some research papers that have identified in a, in the group of high-risk infants, meaning their parents, one or two of their parents have celiac disease, in that group of high-risk infants, if you introduce minute amounts of gluten to them between 3 and 6 months of age, not before and not after, but between 3 and 6 months of age, it seems to have a beneficial effect in strengthening their resilience to being exposed to this food that they're likely genetically sensitive to. So what is minute amounts of gluten? Well, a child between 3 and 6 years of age doesn't have teeth yet, so they're still breastfeeding. I believe and recommend our patients consider that when your child's got teeth, it's time to give them food. Until then, there's one food that's the ideal food for them. So a child's breastfeeding between 3 and 6 months. So if the mother has just a little bit of gluten, half a cracker, half a cracker is all it takes, and she chews it very well and takes some digestive enzymes, those molecules, those protein molecules will get into the blood going to the infant. And so you're exposing the infant to minute amounts of predigested, poorly, but predigested gluten, minute amounts of it, and it appears to be able to stimulate the immune system to desensitize that baby to gluten. It appears to be that way. It's not a recommendation from the American College of Pediatrics or any other medical education group that I'm aware of, but there is some talk about it and there have been some papers written about it.

Okay, and if the child is, say, let's say 2, 3 years old or 4 years old, would you recommend, you know, is that too late in a sense?

Well, if the child has not had gluten and they're 2 to 4 years old, they're well on the way to being extremely healthy and strong. As the numbers keep coming out about the frequency of gluten sensitivity, it gets more and more shocking. Yeah, but if— so if they're between 2 and 4 years of age and the parent wants to know what to do here, if there's a family history of celiac disease or gluten sensitivity, the first thing I would do is recommend the genetic test. If the child is carrying the gene, Don't expose them to gluten. If you can keep gluten out of their life, they're going to do much better. Yeah, if they've got the gene and there's a family history of celiac disease.

A functional—

if the—

sorry, continue.

If the child does not have the gene, then you can do— if you want, I guess you can do a small amount, which would be a third of a cracker. Just some small amount and have them chew it really well and do that 3, 4 days a week for a couple of weeks. Then do the blood test looking for the antibodies to the multiple peptides of gluten, not just to gliadin but the multiple peptides. And hopefully the test will be over there before too long so that Australians have access to it also.

Yeah, so functional medicine, I guess tip that I was given was blue eyes, blonde hair are much more at risk of having gluten intolerances. Is this true?

Well, there is a tendency for certain ethnic groups to have more of a tendency towards it, more vulnerability towards it, and blonde-haired, blue-eyed is one of those groups. The Mediterranean cultures, Greeks, Italians, French, North Africans, and the Norwegian, I'm not sure what the term, the Nordic cultures also have a high sensitivity and vulnerability, as does Ashkenazi Jewish people. And I'm not sure that there's been a differentiation between Australia, New Zealand, and the US. All fall into that same category.

Right. Okay. One of my teachers taught me that gluten affects the brain and basically builds plaque on it like a tooth. Can you explain this?

Yes. The most common system of the body that's affected by gluten is the brain. It's not the gut. The most common system is the brain, and It can cause what's called small vessel disease where some of the blood vessels plaque up, they get hardened, not inside the center of the blood vessel, but the walls of the blood vessel get hardened. Other areas of the brain will— it'll cause white matter lesions in the brain where part of the brain tissue called white matter starts to calcify, it just hardens up. And there actually are some papers of reversing those lesions in the brain when you put a person on a gluten-free diet. Right.

So it can, it can return. So is— would gluten be linked to things like Alzheimer's?

Yes, it has. Actually, in Journal of Gastroenterology in 2008, they published a paper. Two people, they checked, they checked them out of the Alzheimer's facility after they put them on a gluten-free diet because they came back, they were functional again.

Right.

And so yeah, it'll affect any tissue of the body, any tissue of the body. I'm sorry, let me say a little differently. It'll affect any tissue of the body. And I say it like that 3 times, 4 times, then people still say, well, could it affect my liver? It'll affect any tissue of the body— your thyroid, your skin, your nose, your eyes, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, colitis. The list goes on and on and on. There are over 19,000 papers now published in the medical literature on gluten sensitivity and celiac disease.

So it can even affect things like muscle tears and muscle pulls, things like that?

Oh my goodness, any tissue in the body, but especially that. You bet. Athletes that have a lot of fibrosis find that when they go on a gluten-free diet, their muscles soften up and they're much more pliable, which allows them to be much more elastic, which means they get more power out of every contraction of the muscle.

Yeah, absolutely. I just wanna shoot to some Facebook questions. Some of these we've kind of already answered, but just to reiterate, one of the Facebook questions I got was, what about rice?

Rice does not have toxic gluten peptides in it. Rice is rice, and some people are allergic to rice. Some people are allergic to tomatoes. You know, some people allergic to artichokes. You can be sensitive to anything. Rice is on the cross-reactive food panel because a lot of people eat rice on a gluten-free diet, and that's not a problem. But remember, we're not supposed to be eating the same food every day. The only thing we're supposed to have every day is water. Everything else is supposed to come through the seasons, so our diets will vary through the season. So when you're eating rice, 5, 6, 7 days a week, you easily can build up a sensitivity to rice.

Yeah, for sure. What would you say to the statement, um, gluten is nothing to worry about if you're not a celiac?

Um, somewhat. Well, if it's the general public, they just don't know and it's not their fault. If it's a physician, he's got his head in dark places. That there are hundreds and hundreds of articles of gluten sensitivity outside the gut. Causing ataxia, causing— ataxia is when you get the cerebellum area of your brain destroyed and you can't walk very well anymore. And there's nothing wrong with your legs, it's that you don't have the control in your brain. And that can be from gluten. As a matter of fact, it's the main cause of idiopathic ataxia. Idiopathic means we don't know where the problem comes from. When someone's got ataxia and it's idiopathic, Gluten sensitivity is the main culprit. It's published in the literature. Gluten sensitivity will cause chronic fatigue. It'll cause fibromyalgia. It'll cause major depressive disorder. Not minor depression where a little medication helps, or moderate where you have to take a couple of drugs. Major depression, which is very, very difficult to treat. These people just don't function very well, and they're staying alive on their medication. And gluten sensitivity will cause major depressive disorder by itself without celiac disease. So that person, if it's a healthcare practitioner, they need to read the literature a little more before making statements like that. Yeah.

So I guess my— the other Facebook question I was gonna ask, but you've kind of already answered it, is why should the average person cut out gluten from their diet? And just as you've said, 'cause it can lead to all these other problems and it affects every tissue in the, in the body.

Yep. Yeah. What you'll find out in the next year or so as the papers are published is that 7 out of 10 that are checked have gluten sensitivity. You just have to have a test that's sensitive enough to identify them. 7 out of 10. And gluten sensitivity, with gluten sensitivity, autoimmune diseases are 10 times more common. And most of us die with autoimmune disease. So it shortens your life, it reduces the quality of your life, you suffer more, but it doesn't happen in a day with one sandwich. Unfortunately, it happens accumulatively over a number of years.

For sure. Now, another— the last Facebook question I was actually given, I've never heard of this one, but I wanted to ask you. This is what his naturopath said, and he's not sure if it's correct. But she said that if you're gluten intolerant, you may not be intolerant to all types. She said there was 4 types. Now I've never heard of the 4 types. Have you ever heard of this or is this naturopath completely, you know, no idea what you're talking about?

I don't know what she's talking about, about 4 types of gluten. There's different strains of wheat. There are different peptides when you break the wall inefficiently. There's different peptides, 33-mer, 17-mer, 11-mer. There are over 60 peptides that are putative, meaning they trigger an immune response from gluten. There's different types of gluten, but it sounds like this person is talking about different categories of gluten, and, and I don't know what she's referring to. But for example, the one about sprouted wheat, and is it better to eat sprouted wheat? The answer is no. The proteins are not broken down into single cell— single amino acids with sprouted wheat. They still have to be digested, and the body is, is very resistant to digesting these proteins. So a vast majority of people will still have gluten sensitivity and celiac disease eating sprouted wheat. You, you can't do it. It's not a safe food.

Cool. So if I was just to, I guess, simplify for the listeners, and just correct me if I get this wrong, but when we eat gluten, gluten raises antibodies, and those antibodies attack the gut. In turn, that inflames the GI tract, and that attacks the intestinal lining and the cell wall, set up to, you know, increase gut permeability and all those things that we don't want. And that can cause leaky gut. Is that right, or have I, am I missing something from the picture there?

That is correct. You, you've got it exactly correct.

Excellent. Okay, so what are your final thoughts, and how would you sum up gluten?

1 out of 70 women admitted, 1 out of 70 pregnant women admitted to the hospital for any reason whatsoever turns out to be a celiac patient. Now, celiac patient, to be a celiac patient, you have to have total villus atrophy. So if they had expanded their horizons to look for partial villus atrophy or just an increase of inflammation from gluten, the number would not be 1 out of 70. It'd probably be closer to 20 or 30 out of 70 have gluten sensitivity. But the only numbers they used were with celiac, so it's 1 out of 70 had celiac disease. 90% of these women had a poor outcome of pregnancy. 90% of them, meaning they lost the baby, it was a premature birth, the baby was born with birth defects, something. 90% of them. Every one of those women, when, when you put them on a gluten-free diet for a year, 9 out of 10 of them had a healthy second baby. No, excuse me, 8 out of 9 of them had a healthy second baby. 8 out of 9 had a healthy second baby. This kills people. It kills people, and you don't know that it was gluten. You think it was an unexplained miscarriage. You think that it was 'Liver problems that your godmother died with.' No, it was liver problems secondary to gluten sensitivity. You think it was a heart attack your grandfather died— no, it was a heart attack secondary to gluten sensitivity. Much of the time, much of the time. So if you don't feel like a million bucks in life, the first thing, the very first thing I would recommend people consider, if you don't feel like a million bucks— and that means not artificially with 2, 3, 4 cups of coffee a day or a couple of pops in the middle of the afternoon to keep your energy up or eating lots of candy or excess exercise. Nothing to keep you artificially stimulated, but if you don't feel like a million bucks, please consider gluten as a potential candidate that's holding you back from living the life that you deserve to live.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So you have a couple of DVDs and I'm sure there's a lot of listeners out there who wanna learn more about gluten. Can you direct us as to how can we get a hold of those DVDs and other podcasts and things that you've done?

Yes, yes, of course. My website is www.thedr.com, T-H-E-D-R. So don't spell the word doctor out, just D-R dot com. And there, there's a link to a number of past webinars and interviews that I've done. You can listen to them. And there are 2 DVDs. The first DVD is about 2.5 hours. It's with my friend Susan Vess, a brilliant nutritionist and a cook, a chef. Her website is specialeats.com. And that DVD, I talk for 2.5 hours to the general public with slides and pictures and explanations of what is gluten sensitivity, what is celiac disease, How can it manifest? So I do that for 2.5 hours, and then Susan comes on and talks about how do you begin a gluten-free diet. And that's on the website, thedoctor.com. The second video is a set, it's a 3-DVD set, professionally videoed of my all-day talk last year on gluten for doctors. So it's a little more technical, much more technical, but that one, if doctors order that or healthcare practitioners order it and then they take the test, I wrote a test up, take the test, we then list them on our website as a gluten coach. And I put a caveat there that says, I don't know how these people practice, but I can guarantee you they were in the seminar or they reviewed the seminar and passed the test. So they know about gluten. And so that's called Find a Gluten Coach. That's on our website also. So doctors who order that second DVD set take the test, they then are a gluten coach. There's no charge to them for that. There's no back end. I don't want anything from them. I just want people to be able to find somebody that knows what they're talking about when they're dealing with gluten sensitivity. So 2 DVDs, the, the 2.5-hour one and the 7-hour one. They're both on the website.

Excellent. And what's— what does the future hold? What are you working on currently?

Gluten sensitivity is the mechanism, the most common mechanism that stimulates the development of autoimmune diseases. And the papers will be coming out on that in the next 2 to 3 years. Paper after paper after paper. Tests are about to be available called predictive antibodies where you can do a panel of 24 antibodies Usually one antibody is $200 to $300 for one, and this lab is going to be doing this, 24 antibodies for about $400, I think. So there'll be 24 different antibodies to your brain, and you can find where the autoimmune mechanism is going on in your brain years before there's so much damage that there's obvious symptoms. Or antibodies to your heart, or antibodies to your skin, or antibodies to lupus, or to MS, years before you have symptoms, which will give the patient an opportunity, a window of opportunity to shift their lifestyle because we'll be able to show you what's coming down the pike for you. So that's on the horizon. Our goal right now is to get the word out about gluten completely and so that every doctor knows just the basics about this and then educate on how to address it. Gluten sensitivity and celiac disease.

Sounds fantastic. Really doing some awesome work. And I'd like to thank you so much for being on the show. And just remind the listeners to check out Dr. Tom O'Brien's website, www.thedoctors.com. That's D-R-S, sorry, D-R.

No, no, no, no, no, excuse me.

Yeah, there's no S. No, it's D-R dot com for more information, you know, to contact Dr. Tom O'Brien. So thanks again, really appreciated. And, you know, wish you the best of luck in the future. And thank you so much for your contribution to the field of nutrition because it's absolutely awesome.

Thank you very much, and thank you for spreading the word with us out there that people that listen to you today, this may change their lives. So thank, thank you very much for the opportunity to share this information.

You're very welcome. Speak to you next time, Tom.

You bet. Bye-bye.

So that was the Gluten Show. Hope you guys enjoyed. Remember to check out Dr. Tom O'Brien's DVDs at www.thedoctor.com. Links can be found on my website, or just chuck into Google and you'll find his site. Hope you guys enjoyed. Post your comments below in the comment box, and remember to share this with your loved ones and your friends.

Speak to you next time, guys. I hope you enjoyed that one. That was some vintage Maximus Mark stuff going on right there. It's a little bit hilarious listening to myself all those years ago. I would have been, what, I don't know, maybe 25, and yeah, quite young, and you can kind of see it in my voice and the way I talk. Very much in awe of Dr. Thomas O'Brien, I'm not going to lie. I try to play it cool. But you can tell maybe my balls hadn't dropped in that interview yet, 'cause sounding pretty nervous there. If I'm a bit critical of myself, I know these young hipster 2018 podcasters like to have a bit of humor on the show and like people to take the piss. So there you are, there's one at my expense. But yeah, I hope you enjoyed. And if you want more vintage Maximus Mark, aka me, Mark Ottobre, Don't Go By That Alias anymore. Yeah, stay tuned to this podcast, Enterprise Fitness, that's the one. There will be more hilarity coming at you, but for now we've got vintage, vintage information and I hope you enjoy. And yeah, if there's any questions, again, check out our website, www.melbournepersonaltrainers.com is the place to be if you need some personal training. Best in show, can't go past Enterprise Fitness.

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