How to Fix Your Brain with Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Rational Wellness Podcast 064
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Dr. Tom O’Bryan explains how to fix your brain and prevent and reverse neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease with Dr. Ben Weitz.
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Podcast Highlights
4:48 Dr. O’Bryan pointed out that autoimmune diseases are recognized to be the third leading cause of getting sick and dying in the world. And now since we now know that the mechanism of atherosclerosis is autoimmune, autoimmune becomes the number one cause of morbidity and mortality.
6:00 Dr. O’Bryan explained that the main mechanism for autoimmunity is molecular mimicry. He cited the work of Dr. Alan Ebringer from the 1970s where he wrote about the link between the HLA-B27 gene, an infection with Klebsiella pneumoniae, and ankylosing spondylitis. If you have the HLA-B27 gene and you get an overgrowth of Klebsiella pneumonia, which is an environmental trigger, you are now very much at risk of developing the autoimmune disease, ankylosing spondylitis, since the immune system that attacks the Klebsiella then attacks your spine. Here is the reference for the paper: https://academic.oup.com/rheumatology/article-abstract/16/3/190/1778858
8:34 Dr. O’Bryan went on to give another example of molecular mimicry where the immune response to the measles vaccine leads to a cross reactive attack on the thyroid. Or your immune system may go after your myelin sheath on your nerves, which is what MS is, etc.
12:45 Dentists may give you antibiotics, esp. if you have a history of heart problems, because when they probe around in your mouth, you may get leaky gums and since you have lots of bacteria in your mouth and if any of that bacteria, esp. if you have streptococcus bacteria that gets through the leaky gums into the blood stream, through molecular mimicry, your immune system may go after your heart valves and you get rheumatic heart disease. Dr. O’Bryan said that he saw Dr. Ebringer in Portugal presenting at the Autoimmune Conference and he found that when they swabbed the noses of MS patients and found that every one has high concentrations of Actinobacter. When your immune system makes antibodies to that actinobacter, then it goes after the myelin sheath of your nerves and your brain, creating MS. Once you understand this mechanism, then you have to do what you can to reduce the environmental triggers, such as exposure to toxins, such as breathing in the benzene when you pump gas in your car. Or the BPA in the plastic coffee lids at the coffee shop.
19:05 The World Wildlife Foundation did a meta-analysis and they found that there has been a 59% reduction in the sperm count in fertile, healthy men. Scientists worry about extinction of a species at 72% and we’re at 59% in 37 years. What do you think is gonna happen in the next 20 years? We have to wake up. And where’s this coming from? It’s all the toxic chemicals that get into our body. We should stop storing food using plastic wrap and stop cooking using aluminum foil. Over time, it’s the accumulation of all these toxins that store in our bodies for years and years. You eat fish, which is healthy but fish often have pesticides, PCBs that were leaked into the ocean from the farms and they tend to accumulate in our bodies, esp. in the tissues with estrogen receptors like the breasts, uterus, ovaries and the testicles, which is one of the reasons for the lowered sperm count. And then these pesticides are passed from the mother through the breast milk into the babies and these chemicals like PCBs are neurotoxins. Dr. O’Bryan recommends that women should detox their bodies for six months before getting pregnant so their baby has the best shot to develop the best brain. And if our kids are going to be the ones to save the planet, they need to have good brains.
26:00 We now know that pathogens like bacteria and viruses can get into the brain due to a leaky blood-brain barrier and when the immune system in the brain, the glial cells attack, they produce amyloid plaques which can create an inflammatory cascade in the brain that leads to neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, over time.
32:32 Dr. O’Bryan advocates spending one hour per week learning about how this autoimmune mechanism gets activated by our environment and what we can do about it.
Dr. Tom O’Bryan is a Doctor of Chiropractic, a best-selling author, and an internationally recognized speaker focusing on food sensitivities, environmental toxins, and the development of autoimmune diseases. His 2016 book, The Autoimmune Fix won the National Book Award and the docuseries he released the same year, Betrayal: The Autoimmune Disease Solution They’re Not Telling You has been seen by over 500,000 people worldwide. He also organized The Gluten Summit – A Grain of Truth. His website is www.theDr.com He will be releasing his second book You Can Fix Your Brain: One Hour a Week to the Best Memory, Productivity, and Sleep You’ve Ever Had on September 18, 2018.
Dr. Ben Weitz is available for nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also specializing in Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure and also weight loss, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111.
Podcast Transcripts
Dr. Weitz: This is Dr. Ben Weitz with the Rational Wellness podcast, bringing you the cutting edge information on health and nutrition from the latest scientific research and by interviewing the top experts in the field. Please subscribe to Rational Wellness podcast on iTunes and YouTube and sign up for my free ebook on my website by going to drweitz.com. Let’s get started on your road to better health.
Hello Rational Wellness podcasters, thank you so much for joining me again today. And for those of you who enjoy the Rational Wellness podcast, please go to iTunes and give us some ratings and reviews so more people can find out about the Rational Wellness podcast. And if you want to see the video version, go to YouTube and search for Rational Wellness or Weitz Chiro. Our topic for today is autoimmune diseases. Autoimmune diseases are becoming increasingly common causes of sickness and death in the United States. Autoimmune diseases have been on the rise for at least the last four decades.
Now, our immune system is designed to protect us from bacteria and viruses and parasites, and to repair our tissues when they’re damaged. Autoimmune diseases are when they are diseases where the immune system, instead of attacking outsiders, starts attacking our own cells and organs. This means that our immune system is out of balance. There are approximately between 80 and 100 different autoimmune diseases and at least 40 other diseases are suspected to have an autoimmune basis. According to Dr. Tomas O’Bryan, if we include diseases that have an autoimmune basis, autoimmune diseases are the third leading cause of death in the United States, since most of these diseases are chronic and often life threatening.
Some of the more common autoimmune diseases include Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, Crohn’s disease, Hashimoto’s hypothyroid, multiple sclerosis, and diabetes. Conventional medical doctors typically treat autoimmune diseases by trying to control the symptoms, such as providing thyroid hormone in the case of Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, or by using medications that suppress the immune system. Such as corticosteroids, chemotherapy agents, or the now very common but very expensive injectable TNF alpha blocking agents like Humira and Remicade. These drugs, often referred to as biologics simply block your immune system, or part of it, which is a problem ’cause you need your immune system to fight off infections and cancer.
But Functional Medicine treats autoimmune diseases by looking at some of the underlying triggers and factors that have led to the immune system becoming dysregulated, such as leaky gut, food sensitives, toxins, infections, nutritional deficiencies. And this is very important, if I have a patient with hypothyroid of autoimmune origin and most women in the US with hypothyroid, have Hashimoto’s autoimmune disease, and all this patient is treated with is with thyroid medication. Sure, they’ll feel better for a period of time, but it doesn’t do anything for the underlying, smoldering fire of the autoimmune disease that has been attacking her thyroid gland and chances are, this will continue. The patient likely will need a higher dosage of thyroid medication over time, or they may end up with another autoimmune disease.
So, not just regulating the thyroid but doing something about the autoimmune disease is crucial for this patient’s long term health. I’m so happy that we’re joined today by Dr. Tomas O’Bryan, internationally recognized speaker, educator, and Functional Medicine doctor. He’s a member of the prestigious Institute of Functional Medicine Faculty. Dr. O’Bryan is a best selling author, and in fact, his last book, The Autoimmune Fix, won the National Book Award. And he’s most known for his work on the dangers of gluten and on autoimmune diseases, and he has an upcoming book on autoimmunity in the brain that we are going to pick his brain about today. Thank you for joining me, Dr. Tom.
Dr. O’Bryan: Oh, thank you Dr. Ben, it’s really great to be with you and that was a wonderful introduction and summary, and I would just tweak one thing that you said. And that is that immunologists have known for at least 15 years that autoimmune diseases are the third leading cause of morbidity/mortality, getting sick and dying in the world, just across the board. When you include what we now know is true, that atherosclerosis, the plugging up of your pipes that causes cardiovascular disease, atherosclerosis is autoimmune. Now autoimmunity becomes the number one mechanism in getting sick and dying in the world, ’cause we’ve always thought that heart disease is the number one cause of dying, but now we know that heart disease is autoimmune in it’s initiating phases so that means the mechanism. Whether it manifests in your heart, or your blood vessels, or your brain, or your kidneys, or your lungs, or your liver, the mechanism of getting sick and dying is your immune system trying to protect you, attacking your own cells.
Dr. Weitz: Right. And that’s something that’s really interesting is how we always want to ask, “How is it that our body’s creating disease?” But in autoimmunity, the body’s actually trying to protect us.
Dr. O’Bryan: That’s right, that’s right. So that we don’t just geek out here between the two of us and lose people, let me give you this analogy. And this puts it in perspective because what most researchers say the number one mechanism behind all of this happening is something called molecular mimicry.
Dr. Weitz: Yes.
Dr. O’Bryan: I’m gonna give you an example of what molecular mimicry is. It was 1978, in my first genetics class and I still remember the day when the instructor came in. The professor came in and he had this research paper in his hand and he was so excited, so excited, because here was a paper that he said was a paradigm shift in medicine and in genetics. And the paper was by Dr. Alan Ebringer from King’s College in London, who I was with just two weeks ago in Lisbon at the Autoimmunity Congress, now 40 years later. This is when Dr. Ebringer was a graduate student working on his PhD, and he had published this paper that if you carry the gene HLAB27, and that’s just one of the genes.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Dr. O’Bryan: And if you get an infection to a bacteria called Klebsiella pneumoniae, which is the most common cause of pneumonia for old people in hospitals, it’s this bacteria. If you get a Klebsiella infection and if you have this gene, you’re very vulnerable to developing the autoimmune disease ankylosing spondylitis and it’ll kill you. That’s not an easy diagnosis, you don’t want that diagnosis. But this was the first paper that said, “Genetics?” Now what are genetics? Genetics are the deck of cards you’ve been dealt in life, you can’t do anything about your genetics. You got the gene, you got the gene, but it’s genetics. And then there was an environmental trigger, that’s the category we’re gonna talk about, environmental triggers. In this example, it was the bacterial infection Klebsiella, ’cause we all have a little Klebsiella in us, but when it grows and it starts to take over, now it’s an infection. So the genetics and the environmental trigger, you’re at risk of developing the autoimmune disease ankylosing spondylitis, and this was 1978. Here is the reference for the paper: https://academic.oup.com/rheumatology/article-abstract/16/3/190/1778858
Dr. Weitz: Wow.
Dr. O’Bryan: And I’d forgot about it after that, I didn’t pay any attention to it until now, this whole world of what we’re talking about is molecular mimicry. Let me give you an example of molecular mimicry. When you get a vaccination for measles, they give you a shot of the bug measles. It’s an injection and your brain says, “Whoa, what’s that in the bloodstream? That’s not good for me. General! You and your immune system, you have army, air force, marine corp generals, sitting around with nothing to do. General, you now are General Measles, take care of this.” General Measles builds an assembly line, that assembly line starts producing soldiers, or actually special forces, and they’re trained to just go after measles. They’ve got high powered rifles and they go out into the bloodstream, looking for measles, they’re called antibodies. These antibodies are going through the bloodstream, they’re going everywhere looking for the … and it’s a protein signature of the bug measles. So General Measles has programmed these special forces, said, “Look for this protein signature.” And I’m gonna say it’s AABCD, I’m just gonna make up the numbers of the signature of that particular protein. These soldiers are going through the bloodstream everywhere looking for AABCD, wherever they find it, they’d fire a chemical bullet. AABCD, boom, and they fire the chemical bullet. Now you have to remember, the bloodstream is a highway, it’s just a highway. Everything’s going in the same direction, but it’s a highway, there’s no lanes of traffic. It’s like bumper cars in there all the time. Like, remember the circus when you were a kid? Driving bumper cars, crashing into each other. That’s what’s going on in your bloodstream all the time.
You’ve got these special forces going through there, bumping into everybody looking for AABCD and wherever they find AABCD, they fire their chemical bullet. Now, the blood’s going past … I’ll use the example of the thyroid. The surface of the thyroid facing the bloodstream is made up of proteins and fats, the proteins are made up of amino acids, and the amino acids are hundreds of amino acids long, but in that sequence of the surface of the thyroid facing the bloodstream, the amino acid sequence includes AABCD. So now you’ve got special forces looking for measles bugs AABCD, over to AABCD, all of a sudden they go, “Hey look, over there! AABCD.” Boom. And they fire their chemical bullet at the wall of the thyroid facing the bloodstream. Now you’ve damaged that thyroid cell.
You have an entire new body every seven years, every cell in your body regenerates. Some cells are really quick like the inside lining of your guts, every three to five days, some cells are very slow, like bone cells are very slow. But you have a whole new body every seven years. And how do we get these new cells? Well, your immune system makes antibodies to get rid of the old and damaged cells, like thyroid cells, to get rid of the old and damaged cells and make room for new thyroid cells to grow. And there’s antibodies to your muscles. and to your brain, and to your liver, and to your kidneys. That’s like if you do a blood test looking for antibodies, there’s a normal reference range for those antibodies. So you’ve got special forces looking for measles, they mistakenly see AABCD and they fire their chemical bullet at that, you destroy or damage that thyroid cell, so your body makes a few extra thyroid antibodies to get rid of the damaged cells.
It’s not a problem, except it keeps happening day after day, after day, and then eventually your immune system becomes … it’s a continuous loop making more thyroid antibodies and you develop an autoimmune disease of your thyroid, called Hashimoto’s thyroid disease. And it’s molecular mimicry that the AABCD of measles looks like the AABCD of your thyroid, and the same is true for the myelin, the saran wrap around your nerves and if you go after your nerves, if you go after myelin, that’s what MS is. The same is true for your muscles and your heart. Why do dentists give you antibiotics when you go to see the dentist? It’s because when they’re probing around in there and you rinse your mouth out, you’ve got pink water, right? There’s a little blood in the water. What does that mean? Well, it means you’ve got leaky gums now. If you’ve heard about leaky gut, you get leaky gums when they’re probing around in there and the blood comes out, you got leaky gums.
There’s thousands of bacteria, different types of bacteria in our mouth, if any of that bacteria gets through the leaky gums, especially streptococcus … everybody knows about strep throat, so you got strep in here. If strep gets through the leaky gums into the bloodstream, your immune system makes antibodies to strep, but it’s very, very common that because of molecular mimicry, AABCD to the strep, it goes after your heart valves and you develop heart disease. That’s why dentists give you antibiotics is to kill the strep that may have gotten into your bloodstream through the leaky gums, so that you don’t make a bunch of antibodies to strep, which because of molecular mimicry, may go after your heart, and you get rheumatic heart disease.
That’s the mechanism, that’s a very common mechanism and what causes MS. As I said, I was with Dr. Ebringer two weeks ago in Portugal, and he was presenting at the Autoimmunity Congress that every single MS patient that they check, every single one, they do nasal swabs and they check for the bacteria up in the sinuses. And every single MS patient has actinobacter in high concentrations in their nasal cavity, and actinobacter via molecular mimicry, goes after myelin, the saran wrap around your nerves, and if it does that, you get MS. And every single MS patient … and he published on this and he presented his papers to the Scientific Congress, there were 500 doctors in the room. Just our jaws dropped because when you see … the only other one we know as 100% is celiac disease, 100% of celiacs have a problem with wheat, no question about that, everyone knows that. But now we know with MS, they’ve got actinobacter infections up in their sinuses.
That goes right up into the … that bacteria gets up and it goes up into your brain and if you make antibodies to that bacteria because of molecular mimicry, AABCD, it may go after the myelin of your nerves and of your brain and you develop MS. That’s molecular mimicry, the number one mechanism in getting sick and dying in the world, your immune system attacking yourself. And now we’re learning, why does this happen? Where does it happen? And that’s what this book is about. That’s why it won the National Book Award is because you read this and you go, “Oh my god. Wow, that just makes sense.” ’cause there’s over 300 studies in the back references of this book. It’s 35 years of my life, right? But I mean, that’s the mechanism. So every parent, every person, but especially every parent needs to understand this, so you can protect your children and ’cause when you learn about this mechanism, you start doing the little things to reduce the environmental exposures that activate your immune system. Remember I talked about you’ve got the gene, you get the environmental exposure, then you get the disease? So you want to reduce the environmental exposure. For example, you ever pump gas and you can smell the gas?
Dr. Weitz: Sure.
Dr. O’Bryan: You’re smelling benzene. Benzene is a neurotoxin, it goes up into your brain and it fries your brain, it causes inflammation in the brain. We’re just so used to it ’cause we don’t feel sick when we smell it, we think it’s fine. It’s not fine. You’re standing downwind and you’re smelling benzine, so what do you do about that? You have to pump gas. Walk around to the other side of the hose. Now you’re upwind and you don’t smell it anymore.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, I usually just get back in the car and close the door till it’s done.
Dr. O’Bryan: Exactly, exactly. Even better. But we have to start thinking differently about how to protect our bodies ’cause if you go, “Oh I’m smelling something. Oh, I’m downwind.” And then you get back in the car or walk around to the other side, but we don’t think that way, we just stand there and say, “Oh yeah, I can smell the gas. And fine, it’s not harming me. I’m fine.” No, you’re not fine. It’s killing off brain cells, but it’s not enough to make you feel sick at the moment so you think it’s okay. But if you make antibodies to benzene or benzene binds onto your own tissue, then the immune system goes after that tissue to kill that tissue. That’s the other mechanism, the primary one’s molecular mimicry, and the other one is called neoepitopes. That’s geeky stuff, we don’t have to get into that.
But the message is, we have to wait … listen, we don’t have time to mess around anymore, we don’t have time. I’m gonna tell you two studies. The first one, the World Wildlife Fund published this study almost two years ago, and between 1970 and 2011, that’s 41 years, there has been on average, a 58% reduction in populations of all vertebrae species on the planet. Anything with a spine, insects, birds, fish, mammals, 58% that are gone in 41 years. Now, for the birds, the average as a category was 35%, for mammals living near fresh water, it’s 78%. 78% of the beavers are gone in 41 years, 78% of the bobcats, of the porcupines, the woodchucks, they’re gone. 78% gone in 41 years, why? They’re drinking the water and if you were drinking the water coming out of the streams by your house, or out of the rivers by your house, you’d get cancer quicker, you’d be unable to reproduce, just like the animals. That’s the first study. They say, “Oh well, that’s too bad. We don’t need bobcats anyway.” Some people think like that, that’s okay if you think like that-
Dr. Weitz: I’ve heard people say that.
Dr. O’Bryan: Yeah. That’s okay if you think like that, but here’s the one that you can’t ignore. They did a meta analysis, that means they looked at many studies on one subject. And the subject, it was 186 studies between 1974 and 2011, so 37 years. Same time period as the World Wildlife began wiping out the animals, same time period. Between 1974 and 2011, the topic for 186 studies? Sperm count in healthy men, not in fertile men, healthy men. And it’s a 59% reduction in sperm count across the world, 59% reduction. So what? Scientists worry about extinction of a species at 72%, we’re at 59% in 37 years. What do you think is gonna happen in the next 20 years? We have to wake up. And where’s this coming from? It’s all the toxic chemicals that get into our body, it’s the plastic lids on the coffee cups at Starbucks and every other coffee shop, it’s the saran wrap you put on your food, and the plasticizers in the saran wrap leak into the food. You can’t have food touch plastic wrap.
Dr. Weitz: I know, you go to the store and you try to buy organic chicken and it’s sitting on styrofoam covered with plastic wrap.
Dr. O’Bryan: Exactly right. Exactly right. We have to wake up, we have to wake up. Aluminum foil breaks down, you bake with aluminum foil, 185 degree centigrade, which is 365 Fahrenheit for an hour and a half, you can bake a turkey in there or a chicken, hour and a half. And then you take the aluminum foil and you put a magnifying glass to it, it’s all broken up into thousands and thousands of little pieces of aluminum. You can’t see it with the naked eye but use a magnifying glass and go, “Holy cow, look at that.” That stuff is in the food. It’s in your food, you get aluminum in your food, you say, “Oh so what? I can’t taste it, it tastes good.” Just Google “aluminum and Alzheimer’s” and look at hundreds of studies, I’m not exaggerating. “Well, where’s it come from? Where do we get aluminum?” It’s from your aluminum foil, it’s from the vaccinations that they use aluminum, there’s a whole list of places, it’s in the chem trails. There’s so many places that we’re getting minor amounts of aluminum exposure. And the industry-
Dr. Weitz: In the antiperspirants that people put under their arms.
Dr. O’Bryan: Exactly, exactly. Aluminum chlorohydrate, and the industry, the way they get away with this, there’s no study ever that’s shown, when you use aluminum chlorohydrate in your antiperspirant, it causes a problem in humans. There is no study, none. However, the aluminum has a half life in your body at 7 to 11 years and it’s the accumulation of all of the little exposures that build up over time. The plasticizers, they’re called phthalates that’s in all plastic, the heavy metals like aluminum, and arsenic, and lead, and mercury, the PCBs. They did a study in Norway, two and a half years before they closed the study, this was a government commission. Should we tell women not to breastfeed in their first pregnancy? Two and a half years, it’s like, “What? I thought breastfeeding was good for you, that’s the best thing you can do for a baby, the very best thing.” Well, what are they talking about?
People in Norway eat lots of fish. The fish come from the fjords, the fjords run along the country going up and down the country, they’re narrow and they’re deep. But the farmers have been using insecticides and pesticides for generations, the rain carries the insecticides and pesticides down into the fjords. The fish have pesticides, insecticides, PCBs in their meat. There’s no evidence that the amount of PCBs in any fish is dangerous, there’s no evidence. But it stays in your body for decades and when you grow up eating a lot of fish, which is healthy for you, these PCBs accumulate. Where do they accumulate? In the estrogen loving cells. In women, that’s the breasts, the uterus, the ovaries. In men it’s the testicles. Yeah, there’s estrogen receptors in your testicles. It’s one of the reasons why loss of sperm count.
The women are accumulating these PCBs in minor doses for 20 years, for 30 years. Then they get pregnant, hopefully they have a wonderful pregnancy and a wonderful delivery. Now, as they’re in the delivery phase, the brain’s sending message down to the breasts saying, “Okay, it’s time to start lactating, start making some new milk, make milk.” And the milk is made by the fat cells in the breasts. Well, the fat cells in the breasts is where all the PCBs have been hanging out for 20 years and accumulating, so mother’s breast milk is highly toxic to this poor, immature immune system, vulnerable baby. And these PCBs are neuro toxins, they fry your brain. Just think of a hot pan and you put an egg in there, that’s what these PCBs do in your brain. And it inhibits the child’s brain from developing properly and you read the studies and you see kids that have PCBs exposures, their IQs are down when they’re seven, eight years old. Not a lot, but they’re down, they’re not as functional, they’re musculo-skeletal coordination is less, it’s cause the brain didn’t develop properly.
So, what do you do? The commission said, and there’s so much politics in this, and finally, “No, no. Breastfeeding is more important than the other, pros and cons of both.” And I agree, breastfeeding is more important. There are too many benefits to breastfeeding, but what do you do? Every woman of childbearing age, should detox their breasts before they get pregnant. For six months beforehand, you learn how to detox your body and get the stuff out of you so that your baby has the best shot to develop the best brain they can, because it’s the future generation that’s gonna have to save the planet. We’ve messed it up so bad and it’s those kids who will think outside of the box. They’re the ones that’ll save the planet, so we need their brains working as good as possible.
Dr. Weitz: That’s great. You were talking about infections and we’ve learned recently that we used to think that the brain was a completely sterile situation because of the blood-brain barrier. But now we’ve learned that there are pathogens, bacteria, and viruses that actually get into the brain, isn’t that right?
Dr. O’Bryan: In my new book, which comes out in September, it’s called, You Can Fix Your Brain: One Hour a Week to the Best Memory, Productivity, and Sleep You’ve Ever Had. We have an entire chapter in here on the blood-brain barrier and I’ve coined a term that I hope becomes common language in the next year, capital B, the number 4, B4. “What’s your B4? Do you have B4?” What does that mean? A breech of the blood-brain barrier. You’ve heard of leaky gut, well you also get leaky brain, and when you get a leaky brain, these big molecules get in there and you have four different immune systems in your body. And the most potent one, the no mess around immune system is in your brain, called the glial cells. These guys have bazookas. They don’t have high powered rifles, they have bazookas. Anything gets in the brain, they just blast it, which is great except if you’ve got B4, things are constantly coming into the brain, so you’re blasting, blasting, blasting. There’s lots of collateral damage and that starts the entire inflammatory cascade in the brain. Every brain dysfunction, depression, anxieties, schizophrenia, bipolar, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, seizures, attention deficit, autism, they all have a breech of the blood-brain barrier because that’s how the molecules get in that your immune system gets activated to protect you from, that causes the inflammation that damages your brain tissue. When you do the right tests, and we talk about the tests in the book, for B4 and you say, “Oh my god, I’ve got B4.” That’s just like saying, “Oh my god, I’ve got a leaky gut.” Okay, “How do I fix a leaky gut?” Okay, “How do I fix a breech of the blood-brain barrier?” And then you start applying the principles to fix the breech of the blood-brain barrier and then you go back and you recheck in three to six months to make sure you’ve dialed this thing down and it’s fixed now.
Dr. Weitz: Now, some people out there would be hearing all this talk about bacteria, and viruses and they might think, “Yeah, we just need to take more antibiotics and just kill these things.”
Dr. O’Bryan: Well, that’s probably the main reason we have the problem we do now today, is because that was a … it’s called reductionistic thinking. “Let’s just wipe out all the bacteria.”, the antibacterial soaps and all that kind of thing that generations have been focusing on. And what we now know, is that humans are designed to live in balance with Mother Nature, we’re all on the same planet. I don’t want to get airy fairy here ’cause some people say, “Oh, he’s too airy fairy.” But we’re designed to be in balance with the planet earth, when you’re in balance with the planet earth it means that you walk on planet earth, not concrete. I mean, even when you live in a city like LA, or New York, or Kansas City, wherever you are, on Sundays get out in a park and take your shoes off. Do the Pretty Woman thing that you know, he takes his shoes off and he’s like, “Oh, this feels different.”, and just get grounded.
Dr. Weitz: Earthing.
Dr. O’Bryan: Earthing, yeah. Right. I mean, there’s a lot of validity to that concept. Your brain works much better when you’ve done some earthing exercises, get grounded on the planet. Antibiotics are absolutely the last resort, not the first option. And we are exposed to so many of them because they spray most of the vegetables in this country with antibiotics. Some of the spray when the planes are going by over the fields, it’s full of antibiotics and they’re killing off the bugs and bacteria to let the plants grow, but then you get weak plants. You don’t have plants that are as strong as the others, but then the antibiotic residue’s in the food. But the industry says, “There’s no studies that show the level of antibiotic in broccoli is ever a problem for humans.” They get away with that crap, but it’s the accumulation, it’s the accumulative damage that occurs that has caused problems for us today.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, ’cause this stuff doesn’t leave our bodies. Yeah, I was going into the supermarket the other day and this woman’s taking those wipes and I said, “No, no. You should lick the handle of the supermarket cart, that’s the best thing for you.” She thought I was crazy and she just kept going.
Dr. O’Bryan: You are a nut case. Sorry.
Dr. Weitz: How do we protect ourselves and prevent these autoimmune diseases? What can we do? Besides trying to avoid some of these toxins, but avoiding toxins is not an easy thing, but assuming that we do get some of these toxins and what do we do?
Dr. O’Bryan: The first thing is, read the book. Read this book and I’m not saying it because I wrote it, I’m saying it because it’s a paradigm shift, that when you understand what you’re up against, it’s an OMG, it’s like, “Oh my god.” But then the way you approach it, and this is how you are successful, the way you approach it, there’s two concepts. The first one is … and in many of my talks, I start with this line in the very beginning. In the Museum of Science in Florence, Italy, there’s a display and it’s a round marble stand with a glass dome above it and inside the glass dome is Galileo’s finger, one finger, like this. Now, it happened to be his middle finger and it was his last message to the church. There’s a couple of books on Amazon that you can read about Galileo’s life and how-
Dr. Weitz: Are we gonna put Trump’s middle finger in a glass?
Dr. O’Bryan: That’s a really interesting idea. But the one finger concept is one hour a week. You allocate one hour a week, Tuesday nights after dinner, Sunday mornings before church, whenever it is, but one hour a week every week. “To this topic, I’m going to learn more about how the autoimmune mechanism gets activated by my environment and by my children’s environment. I’m gonna learn more about this.” ‘Cause it’s overwhelming, and it’s so overwhelming, it’s immobilizing. You don’t know what to do, but if you allocate one hour a week, just one hour and you set the alarm on your watch for one hour, you can bite size chunks of those. ‘Cause my term is, “Base hits win the ball game.” So you just go for a base hit this week, “Okay, I’m gonna learn a little more about these PCB things and how that stuff accumulates. And then how can I reduce my exposures?”
You only need one hour, that’s it. And next week, “I’m gonna learn about mercury and how I can prevent so much mercury from my kids. Oh my god, all the tuna’s got mercury? I didn’t know, oh my god.” Well, there’s one that doesn’t, it’s called Ventresca, with a V, Ventresca from Vital Choice Seafoods, you can find them online, and that can of tuna fish, there is no measurable mercury in it at all, and there’s a reason why there is none. And it’s seven grams of tuna fish, so you give your kid a can of tuna fish once a week that’s Ventresca, doesn’t have the mercury poisoning that all the other ones do, once a week and your kid’s got brain food, the most important brain food, the DHAs for a week, from one can of tuna fish.
Dr. Weitz: How did they get the mercury out of the tuna?
Dr. O’Bryan: Randy Hartnell owns the company and Randy was a salmon fisherman in Alaska for over 20 years. All salmon fishermen, they get tuna in their nets. And if they catch a tuna, they put them in a different bin and then they sell them to the tuna guy when they come back to shore, but the baby tuna, nobody wants. So all the salmon fishermen throw them away, they throw them back into the water and it’s unfortunate, but that’s fishing, that happens. So Randy goes, “Well, wait a minute here.” ’cause he had learned how mercury accumulates in tuna because mercury comes from the rain coming down on the ocean and the mercury is in the air from cold burning power plants, the rain brings it down into the water, the plankton absorbs the mercury. The little fish eat the plankton, so they get some mercury. The medium size fish eat the little fish, they get higher concentrations of mercury. The big fish, like tuna, eat the middle sized fish, they get the highest concentrations of mercury, right?
Baby tuna haven’t had the time yet to eat a bunch of medium sized fish, they don’t get the mercury. So Randy found that the belly of the baby tuna, there was enough meat there to make it worthwhile, to lug it back and do whatever they have to do for the manufacturing stuff. So they’re canned tuna fish is the belly of baby tuna, it’s called Ventresca, it means fish belly in Italian. So that fish has no measurable … you can’t say none because you could find electro microscopic traces in there, but no measurable amounts of mercury compared to all other tuna fish.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Dr. O’Bryan: And it’s much more expensive because it’s more manpower and more of these fish have to be … for each can, that kind of thing. But one can a week for your kid, they’ve got all the brain food, that DHA they need for a week.
Dr. Weitz: Cool.
Dr. O’Bryan: It’s very cool. Very, very cool.
Dr. Weitz: They can also eat sardines too, it may not be quite as good but also because it’s a smaller fish.
Dr. O’Bryan: That’s right, that’s exactly right. And they’ve got good levels, really good levels, I think it’s about three grams to three and a half grams EPA DHA in a can of sardines, which is a good amount, a really good amount. But seven grams in that can of tuna fish, dropped my jaw when I saw that. That’s a tremendously high-
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, that’s amazing. Yeah.
Dr. O’Bryan: That’s really great. ‘Cause most of the capsules are 760 milligrams.
Dr. Weitz: No, most of them are like 500 and some as low as 200, so you probably need like 15 capsules.
Dr. O’Bryan: That’s right. To get the same amount of brain food as you get in one can of Ventresca.
Dr. Weitz: Wow.
Dr. O’Bryan: That’s exactly right.
Dr. Weitz: That’s cool.
Dr. O’Bryan: I know, it’s just so cool. And that’s in my book, so it’s like one hour a week to learn that one little thing. You say, “Oh cool, I’m gonna order that.” Then you order it, okay, you’re done for the week. That’s it. Next week, you learn a little bit more, next week, you learn a little bit more. And that way it’s in bite size chunks that you can apply for you and your family and in six months, you’ve got it down. You’ve got it down. But we don’t live our lives that way, we want it all now. So we read this whole book all at once and go, “Oh my god, this is a really great book.” And what are you gonna do, “I don’t know where to start.”, right? So, one hour a week with this stuff and you can implement it. And who cares if it takes you six months or a year, who cares, it’s the rest of your life, and you will have made these changes, these lifestyle changes, reducing the amount of exposures that you and your family are getting everyday.
Dr. Weitz: Great. How can we get rid of these toxins after they’re in us?
Dr. O’Bryan: There’s protocols for detoxification, you have to detox. One of the things you can do is aerobic exercise, you have to sweat ’cause sweat will just flush some of this stuff out. And aerobic exercise means you wear a pulse monitor. You wear a pulse monitor and you stay in your pulse range, and you set the alarm on your pulse monitor on the watch, and the formula is 180, minus your age, plus or minus five, that’s your range. And if you’ve been diagnosed with a disease, you do 175, minus your age, plus or minus five. And you stay in that range, and you set the alarm on your watch for that range. Let’s say it’s 130 to 140, so you’re walking on a treadmill and your pulse is going up and it gets up into that range, “Oh good, I’m in the range.” And then it goes, “Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Oh, I’m at 149, wow. Okay, I better slow down a little bit.”
And you slow down a little bit and the beeping stops and you’re in your range again, and then it goes, “Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Oh wow, I’m up at 152, what happened? Oh my gosh I was thinking about my uncle and what a jerk he is.” Whatever your brain does will effect your pulse, so you slow down again, you get in your range. And then it’s going, “Beep. Beep. Beep. Oh, I’m too slow. Oh, I better pick it up a little bit.” And then you’re training yourself to stay in the range where the alarm is silent. And you stay in that range 30 minutes … it’s 150 minutes a week, so it’s 30 minutes, 5 days a week. You go for walks around the block, that’s all you have to do, just get in your range. And if you’re walking and you’re not quite in your range, most people will be in your range by just walking, and if you’re not quite in your range, carry a couple of soup cans with you and then that will bring your pulse up a little bit.
Dr. O’Bryan: That’s the old Jack LaLanne thing, the soup cans, “Okay ladies, go in the kitchen and get your cans of soup.” Right? When they come back with their soup cans and they’re exercising and doing their thing, it doesn’t have to be difficult. So the first thing you do-
Dr. Weitz: By the way, you know Jack was a chiropractor?
Dr. O’Bryan: That’s right, that’s right. He was a great man and he was just a giant of a man.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, I love Jack LaLanne, very inspirational.
Dr. O’Bryan: Yeah. Next, everybody when they wake up in the morning, they go to the bathroom, almost everybody, first thing they do is you go to the bathroom. The very next thing you do before anything else, drink two big glasses of water before anything else, two big glasses of water to start your day. And within a few days to a week, you’re looking forward to the water ’cause you notice you had a great bowel movement an hour later, or just feel a little bit better. You have to hydrate, you have to have the highway able to carry the traffic to get rid of the crud that’s in your body. So you start with two glasses of water, and then throughout the day, the amount is a half ounce per pound body weight. That’s how much water you have to drink in a day, a half ounce per pound body weight, and just figure out what you weigh, and then divide that by two, that’s the amount of ounces of water you have to drink.
It’s a lot of water. If you weight 150 pounds, that’s 75 ounces of water a day, that’s a lot of water. “Oh my god, I’m gonna pee a lot.” Yes, you are. And that pee’s gonna be full of toxic crud that you have to get out of your body, deal with it. “Oh no, I don’t want to go to the bathroom so much.” Then we’ll put that on your tombstone, “You didn’t want to pee it out.” I’m sorry, right? There’s just some basic things that we have to do to clean our bodies out. And when you do that, you notice in a week, a month, a couple of months, you’re just feeling better than you’ve felt in a long time, right? And people are saying, “Wow, you look good, you look good.” And say, “Oh, I’ve been drinking more water and I’m walking five days a week and yeah, it just feels really good.”
Dr. Weitz: That’s great, Tom. You’ve got tons of great information and thank you so much for sharing with us. We could talk for hours.
Dr. O’Bryan: Yes, we could. Yes, we could. My recommendation for everyone is read the book, if you go to my website, thedr.com, but just don’t spell the word doctor out. Thedr.com/book, and then it’ll take you to Amazon, but there are some handouts that you can download there that are extras, after I wrote the book. When you read the book, you’ll say, “My gosh, this just makes sense. This just makes sense. My son’s attention deficit, maybe we can help.” Or, “My husband’s rheumatoid arthritis, maybe we can help.” Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Weitz: And when is your new book gonna be out, On The Brain?
Dr. O’Bryan: September 18th.
Dr. Weitz: Okay, good. We’ll be looking forward to that.
Dr. O’Bryan: Thank you so much.
Dr. Weitz: Okay. Anything else for people who want to contact you? I guess you gave us your website and we know about your book, so that sounds great. Thank you so much for joining me, Tom.
Dr. O’Bryan: Oh, it’s a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
