The Chronic Effects of Gluten On Children’s Health and Behavior

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Hi everyone, welcome to the show, I am Dr. Nicole, and today we’re going to talk about all things gluten. Most people have heard of gluten and gluten-free diets, but I find in my practice that it’s a major area of confusion for parents when it comes to their own health and the health of their children, particularly when it comes to how it can be connected to brain-based or mental health kinds of issues and behavior issues in kids. It’s really important to understand what gluten is, why it can be problematic and how to appropriately do a gluten-free diet if you feel like you want or need to. So to help us explore this topic today, I’ve invited my friend and colleague, Dr. Tom O’Bryan on the show. Dr. Tom is absolutely my go-to source of research-based information on all things gluten and health, and so I’m really excited that he agreed to spend this time with us. Let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Tom. He’s an internationally recognized speaker focused on food sensitivities, environmental toxins, and the development of autoimmune disease. He is considered a ‘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. Dr. Tom has trained and certified tens of thousands of practitioners around the world in advanced understanding of the impact of wheat sensitivity and the development of individual autoimmune diseases. He has written several best-selling books and is the founder of theDr.com and the visionary behind The Gluten Summit – A Grain of Truth, featuring 29 of the world’s experts on the gluten connection to diseases, disorders, and a wide-range of symptoms and ages. It is a pleasure to have him on the show today, welcome, Dr. Tom. 

Dr. Tom O’Bryan:

Thank you so much, it’s a pleasure to be with you. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

So I have been looking forward to this conversation since we scheduled it because you and I always have such great discussions around kids and brains and gluten and all of this stuff and I just know that our listeners are going to love hearing what you have to share. Let’s start out with how you got started even doing work in the realm of gluten, food sensitivities, how did you come to be on this path in terms of your practice?

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: 

My ex and I could not get pregnant. This was 39 years ago, and I was an intern at the time and I called the 7 most famous holistic doctors I had ever heard of and asked them — what do you do for infertility? They all told me what they do, I put a program together, we were pregnant in 6 weeks. My neighbors in married housing — we lived on campus, asked if I’d work with them and I said, “Sure, I don’t think it will hurt you.” She’d been through artificial insemination and nothing had worked. And she was pregnant in 3 months. So when I came out and practiced, we were hot to trot to help everyone get pregnant that wanted some help and we helped hundreds over the years and there’s not much in medicine that’s all or every, but this is every. Clinically speaking, every person that has a hormone-related problem, whether it’s infertility or recurrent miscarriages or PMS or premature ejaculation or low-sperm count, low testosterone, altered hormones, perimenopausal symptoms — every person that we’ve seen clinically always has as a component of what’s contributing to their problem, they’re eating foods that they don’t know are a problem for them. And the reason they don’t know is because they don’t get sick when they eat the food, so they think it’s fine. But in the world of wheat and gluten, the ration is 8:1. For every one person that has gut symptoms in their problem with gluten, there are 8 people that don’t. They’ve got brain symptoms or joint symptoms or skin symptoms or liver symptoms or kidney symptoms. They don’t have gut symptoms. So they eat the food and they think they are fine, but the inflammation caused by eating of food that they are sensitive to manifests in a different tissue. So people think they’re fine when they eat wheat because they don’t feel bad.

And they don’t realize the migraine they wake up with the next morning was caused by the pasta they ate yesterday or whatever their symptoms are. The ratio is 8:1. So every person with hormone-related imbalances, always had as a component, foods that they were — not just wheat, but dairy or lectins or some kinds of food, but we found that wheat was the most common one. Startling! And 68% of everyone that came into our practice, irrespective of their age or their presenting complaints, 68% of them, if you test them properly have elevated antibodies to wheat, meaning their immune system is fighting wheat. That’s 7 out of 10 people that have some health complaint. It doesn’t matter what the health complaint is. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah. Well that’s huge, and I’m glad that you brought that up about how so many people are unaware of it, because I think that’s one of the things that gets people so confused, is people associate food with digestive issues, and they say, “Well, my child is not having any digestive issues,” or “I don’t have any of those issues, so it can’t be related to the food.” And what you’re saying is that actually, the vast majority of the time, there’s at least some component related to the food and a lot of the time it’s wheat. So I think this is such an important thing for people to understand because it’s one of the big objections that people have, right? “No I don’t need to look at food, I don’t need to look at gluten because I don’t have issues with constipation, with gut pain, my kids’ bowel movements are fine, my kid eats just fine,” right?

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: 

Right. That’s exactly right. And the message is, you just have to check! You just check! It doesn’t matter what the health complaint is, if what you’re doing is not working enough, just check to see if the foods you’re eating might be a problem. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Well, and we’re at the point now, I mean even the most recent study done on this was done on data already that’s five years old but showing that 54% of children, at least in the United States, have some form of chronic health condition, whether that’s a physical condition, a brain-based condition. That’s more than one in every two, so it does make sense to look at how things like gluten, like food plays a role in that because so many kids are sick in so many different ways. 

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: 

Yeah, that’s exactly right. Exactly right. And you know, for the first time in the history of humanity, for the very first time in the last eight years, every year now, the world health organization comes out and tells us, every year for the last eight years: Children born today have a shorter expected lifespan than the age that their parents will die at. Kids will die at earlier ages than their parents because they’re getting sicker earlier. And we don’t think about this. We don’t think about the underlying mechanisms, which are almost always inflammation. At the cellular level, the cell’s on fire. It doesn’t matter if it’s a kidney cell or a brain cell, the cell’s on fire. So the question is: Is it gasoline or kerosene? Is it dairy or wheat? Is it your kidney cell or brain cell? I mean that’s the way parents have to think about this as they’re talking to their healthcare practitioners about, “How do I help my child be healthier?”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Let’s dive into just even some basics here because I know that gluten is a term that almost everybody has heard at this point, but a lot of people aren’t really sure exactly what that is. And so I’d love to have you just give an explanation of what we are talking about when we say gluten and wheat sensitivity and these terms, what are we really talking about?

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: 

Sure, there was a Jimmy Kimmel Show where they went out on the street, they just stopped people to say, “Are you gluten-free?” “Yeah, yeah! I’m gluten-free!” “And well, what’s gluten?” “Well, you know it’s ah, ah, It’s ah… ah, It’s not good for ya!” That was really funny! So here is the rule. Gluten is not bad for you. Bad gluten is bad for you. Because gluten is a family of proteins that are in corn and rice and quinoa and wheat. And the bad glutens are in wheat, rye and barley. That family of glutens, no human can digest, and you have to understand this: No human can digest it. I have five studies, I have an all-day course online for people to learn to really dial down wheat sensitivity and gluten sensitivity and it’s for health care practitioners and also for the general public. There is a version for the general public. And there are five studies, two from Harvard and other major institutions, they’re showing — they say the same thing: All humans have a problem with wheat, whether you feel it or not. It’s gasoline on the fire for every human. And that’s because we don’t have the enzymes to break down wheat. Mrs. Patient, and I know that doesn’t mean anything to anybody, Mrs. Patient, think about proteins as a pearl necklace. Hydrochloric acid made in your stomach undoes the clasp of the pearl necklace. Now you have a string of pearls, and it’s your digestive enzymes from the pancreas and the gallbladder and the liver and the microbiome, those enzymes act as scissors to cut that pearl necklace, snip, snip, snip snip snip. All the way down to each pearl of the pearl necklace, so it cuts it — that pearl necklace into two pieces, and then four pieces, then eight pieces, then sixteen pieces, and bop bop bop bop bop bop bop. What you’re doing is breaking down the pearl necklace into the pearls. They’re called amino acids. And we absorb the amino acids, and they’re the building blocks to build the bone and muscle and brain and nerve cells. Everything in the body is made from amino acids. 

So it’s the job of our digestion to break down the protein and each pearl of the pearl necklace. The problem is no human has scissors that breaks down wheat, rye or barley into anything smaller than clumps of the pearl necklace. And those clumps are called peptides, and those peptides trigger inflammation and you get transient leaky gut every time you eat wheat. Every single time. So for those who are there listening, if you’re human, if you are, now sometimes your wife doesn’t think you are, but if you’re human, this relates to you! But it’s a minor irritant. Just a minor irritant, until you cross the line of tolerance. And that can be when you’re two years old or 22 years old or 92 years old, whenever that point happens, you’re not tolerant anymore, and the technical term is loss of oral — eating, loss of oral tolerance. And when you lose oral tolerance, you eat wheat, you get leaky gut that’s not transient. It stays with you. The geek term is pathogenic intestinal permeability. And now these clumps of the pearl necklace, they get through the gut bigger than they should, remember only pearls are supposed to get through, it’s like a cheese cloth on the inside of the tube. Mrs. Patient, your intestines are a tube, it starts at the mouth, goes to the other end. If you think of a donut, if you stretched a donut out and you looked down the donut — that’s your intestines, that’s your digestive tract, right?

And the inside of the digestive tract is lined with cheesecloth. Only really tiny pearls of the pearl necklace amino acids can get through the cheesecloth into the bloodstream. So when you swallow food, it’s really not in the body, it’s in the tube. And it’s got to be broken down to get through the cheesecloth into the bloodstream, and then go to your heart or to your brain or to your liver, wherever those amino acids will go. The problem is when you lose oral tolerance, you get tears in the cheesecloth that don’t heal, and now you’ve got that leaky gut and those big molecules called macromolecules, they get through the tears in the cheesecloth into the bloodstream, and your immune system trying to protect you says, “Whoa! What’s this! This is not something that should be on the highway, in your bloodstream! This shouldn’t be here! I’d better fight that!” And now you make antibodies to whatever that big molecule is. If it’s tomatoes or if it’s chicken or if it’s beef, it doesn’t matter what it is. Your immune system is trying to protect you. So that’s the person that does a 90-food blood test with their doctor to see what foods they might be sensitive to, and it comes back and they’re sensitive to 20 or 25 different foods, and they say, “Oh my God, that’s everything I eat!”

Well of course it is. Your immune system is trying to protect you, there’s nothing wrong with your — you don’t take medications to shut down the immune system! You heal the leaky gut! And the first thing to do to heal the leaky gut is stop throwing gasoline on the fire. So you have to find out what foods you’re sensitive to and get rid of those foods from your diet for a while. Two to three months. Three months or more because it takes that long for the antibodies to go away. 3 months, then you go back and check again. There are like two foods you’re sensitive to instead of twenty. Those are the ones you stay away from forever. 

 Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Right. And I think that’s such a helpful explanation so that people really can get a picture of what’s going on, because we do, we throw around terms like leaky gut and peptides and gluten and all of this and that explanation really gives people a visual for what’s happening with that, and that our bodies are designed just for those individual pearls to get into the bloodstream to fuel all of the processes in our brain and body, but as you’re saying, every time we eat these bad glutens, it automatically has tiny tears then because we can’t break it down and those larger peptides are getting out into the system then and aggravating and causing some problems. 

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: 

If your immune system is strong enough to protect you. Now some people have been eating the wrong foods for so long, their immune system is worn out and it can’t protect them anymore, and they get much sicker, they get seizures. You know, 50% of children with drug-resistant epilepsy — that means that the doctors have tried at least three medications, they don’t work, your child is still getting seizures — 50% of them go into complete remission on a gluten-free diet. 50% of them!

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

And I’ve absolutely seen that in clinical practice myself, the difference that makes for sure, and these are families who are being told, “Well, there’s nothing more that can be done now to get seizure control.”

Dr. Tom O’Bryan:

Right, right, exactly. And these drugs that they’re given have side effects and of course, if you need to use drugs, you use them, but the problem is not a deficiency of drugs that you’d have to supply. Hopefully the drugs will stop the symptom while you figure out why this is happening, but it’s so very common, it’s a wheat-related disorder. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

So I want to delve into — and you’ve talked about the leaky gut and how it goes from being just kind of intermittent to becoming a chronic problem where now all kinds of things are leaking out all the time. Let’s talk a bit about how that connects to brain function, for adults, but particularly for kids, because I think that’s a connection that gets missed, is we’ve talked about people associating things that they eat with physical things, so they might be listening and going, “Okay, well I can understand then why I might get gas or bloating or constipation or those things,” but let’s talk about how it is that the gluten and the leaking of that into the system, how does that go into the brain? How does that affect the brain of children?

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: 

Yeah, sure. I think you’ve been in the room for my talks. You know, if there are a hundred docs or three hundred docs or thirty docs, it doesn’t matter, the response is always the same: “How many of you know or suspect that you may have a sensitivity to wheat, can I see a show of hands, please? Lift your hands high, come on, put them up!” You know, because docs do this. “No put them up there and hold them up high and then keep your hands up. Look around the room.” And they look around and they’re like “Whoa, wow!” 80% of the room raises their hand! And I said, “Now this is not a talk to a celiac group where everyone’s got celiac — this is a talk to healthcare practitioners who just happen to know a little more about how their body is working, right? This is your practice. This is what’s walking into your door everyday, it’s about 80% of the room has a sensitivity to wheat. Now watch this: “How many of you that raised your hand the first time know that if you have an exposure to wheat, it seems to affect your brain?” And about 80% of the room again, of that first 80% raise their hand. “Look around the room.” And they go, “Wow, wow!” Because the brain is the most common system of the body that’s affected by inflammation and especially with wheat-related disorders. It’s the most common symptom whether it’s depression or anxiety, it’s professor Michael Maes, he started publishing back in 2004, 2005. He’s a very famous psychiatrist and he started publishing on inflammation is the mechanism causing depression and anxiety and schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder, that it’s always inflammation in the brain that’s triggering the brain to not work quite right. So the anti-depressants we take, they may help function a little bit, which is great because you have to function, but you’ve got to put the fire out. You’ve got to stop throwing gasoline on the fire, and this is especially true with kids. 

132 kids diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. They put them on a gluten-free diet, and within 6 months, every child or the parents said that all 12 DSM-IV markers of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, all 12 markers improved. All 12 of them, for every child! Fails to pay attention, interrupts frequently, blurts out answers, can’t sit still, unruly — every marker improved in every child. If that were a drug, it would have been on the front page of every paper in the country, but there is no profit in going gluten-free. Right? So nobody heard about that study. Very few healthcare practitioners know about that study. 132 kids, every child. What! Or 50% of kids with epilepsy, drug-resistant epilepsy! They go into remission on a gluten-free diet. What! And as you read these studies — I’m a geek, I’ve been reading these studies for years. I keep doing the “What!” factor. I’m like what! what! It just drops your jaw! Kids with a celiac disease have a 54% increased risk of suicide, compared to kids of the same age not diagnosed with celiac disease. What! You just see it again and again and again. So the message is, you just have to check properly. You just test. Don’t guess. Test. And if you do the right tests, and they come back negative, don’t worry about it. Check again in a year or two, just to make sure that they’ve not crossed that line of tolerance from being okay to the loss of oral tolerance.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

It is astonishing, the number of symptoms that we see in kids, both in the physical health and the mental health realm where we have a body of research, studies that show the connection between gluten and what’s going on with those, I mean you talked about the ADHD, the epilepsy, we’ve got studies now with schizophrenia, with bi-polar, lots of studies now related to autism, the autism spectrum disorders, and yet, this is not information that most parents are being made aware of, because their practitioners aren’t aware of it or poopoo it or say, well “No, that’s a behavioral disorder”. Which I think is one of the big challenges in mental health. The realm that I’m in is we still have this really unfortunate idea that the brain and the body are separate, that mental health is separate from physical health, and so you know, I get all the referrals from the physicians who says, “Well, I’ve ruled out any physical problems, go see the psychologist. This is clearly a mental health problem.” Then I start asking questions about, “What is your kid eating and what are their bowel movements like, and how are they sleeping?” All of these things, and they go, “Wait, you’re asking physical health problems. I was sent here for a mental health issue.” It’s like it’s all connected but people aren’t being given that information.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan:

You know, that’s exactly right. I mean the classic one is, the number one complaint in gastroenterologists’ offices — not complaint, the number one diagnosis in gastroenterologists’ offices is IBS. That stands for Irritable Bowel Syndrome. So you take your child to the doctor and they can’t figure what’s going on, so they send you to the specialist, the gastroenterologist, who says, “Well, your child has irritable bowel syndrome, IBS”. And parents are so out of their comfort zone sitting in a doctor’s office, especially because they’ve got the holy gown on, white robe, right? The holy gown? Especially the ones that wrap the stethoscope around their neck, that’s the chalice — 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

That’s right, “I am the anointed one.”

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: 

Right, “I am the anointed one.” Well, “Your child has irritable bowel syndrome.” A parent who has done a little study would say, “Wait a minute doctor, thank you, okay. So you’re telling me my child’s bowels are irritated. That’s why I’m here. Why are my child’s bowels irritated?” “Well, well, w… w.. we don’t know that, we just know they’re irritated.” “So you’re telling me that my child’s bowels are irritated but food has nothing to do with my child’s bowels functions.” “That’s correct, there is no evidence that food has anything to do with it.” “Really, doc, really? You’re trying to tell me that whatever I put down there doesn’t have an effect on how the tissue works, really? Really?”  If you take a step back — it’s unfortunate because people are suffering terribly, but you would laugh at what they say! So here is something to take to deal with the symptoms. “Thanks! I hope it helps me son feel better, but why does he have this?” “Well, we don’t know that.” 

Yes we do! That’s just not an area that you’re familiar with, doctor! 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

And the really interesting thing, looking at IBS is how much research we have now showing how connected IBS is to mental health symptoms. Those people with IBS, depressed mood, anxiety in children, hyperactivity, all of that. So what often for children gets called a behavioral disorder, this is a behavioral problem, really has the root in — their behavior is disordered because their brain can’t function properly because they’re having all of this inflammation, so that’s where addressing this stuff becomes so important for parents who want to get to the root of that, who don’t just want to do — well, behavioral therapy and medication and hope for the best. It’s like what else can I be doing? We have to look at this stuff, because when you were talking about the peptides, we’ve got tests now that can look at things like the peptides from gluten, from casein, those kinds of things getting into the system. And what we see in these kids with those high levels of peptides, extremely hyperactive, impulsive, aggressive behavior — I mean you can test for that stuff and see the connection there. 

Dr. Tom O’Bryan:

Yeah, that’s very true. For every one message from the brain, going down to the gut, there are 9 messages from the gut going up to the brain. The technical term, the geek term is modulates. And what does that mean? It means your gut, the microbiome in your gut has its hands on the steering wheel of where your brain’s going. That’s what “modulates” means. So if you just take your steering wheel and you just turn just a little bit to the side, a hundred yards down the road, you’re off the road! And when you’ve got problems in the gut, when you’ve got imbalances in the gut, which you can’t feel most of the time, you can’t feel any of this stuff, but it sends a message to the brain, “Make this amount of brain hormones.” They’re called neurotransmitters. “Make this amount of serotonin,” “Make this much amount of melatonin,” “Make this much amount of norepinephrine,” The point is, the gut controls all of that. So when you have behavior problems, the first thing you have to do is stabilize the child and if you need some medication, you take the medication for a short period of time. The second thing you do is rebuild the gut. Build a stronger, healthier microbiome. And then you don’t need the medications after a while, depending on how successful you are with rebuilding, because your child is functioning more normally again.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Yeah. I want to get into a little bit about testing because you made the comment that we can look at these things now objectively, we have good tests. I think historically there have been some not-so-great tests, there have been better tests. Testing has been a confusing thing. What do you feel like at this point — what are the kinds of tests that are available, if a parent’s saying, “Boy, I really want to find out if this is an issue for my child or for myself. What’s the best way to do that.” 

Dr. Tom O’Bryan:

You bet. Do you have your cell phone near you, right now?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Yeah!

Dr. Tom O’Bryan:

Okay, good. My wife took mine, I was just looking for it, so she just put it — I call it the 30-30 Rule. 30 years ago, it took a 30 x 30 room, floor to ceiling computers to generate the computing power — can you hold your phone up? Of that phone! 30 years ago, it took a room this big to do what that phone can do. Thank you, thank you. Technology improves. We never could have dreamt 30 years ago that you could take your phone and find out the particulate matter in the air in New Delhi in 5 seconds, right? Or when I’m travelling, I can call my wife on FaceTime and she answers the phone within 3 to 10 seconds, wherever I am in the world. And it’s all free, right? But we never could have guessed any of that would be possible. The exact same paradigm shift has happened in the world of laboratory testing. And the problem is, most doctors don’t know about this, and they’re using the tests that were developed 15 years ago, 20 years ago — and they’re good tests, but they’re not as accurate as the tests that are available today. And MayoClinic calls this new type of testing, their language is “A new era in laboratory medicine.” This stuff is paradigm shifting, it’s like, “Really?” And it’s so easy to do the tests now with a very, very high degree of accuracy. It’s called sensitivity, it’s 97-99% and specificity is 98%-100%. It’s all geek, but what it means is — it’s right on the money, every time. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

It’s accurate!

Dr. Tom O’Bryan:

Yeah! And our tests, docs don’t know this because they don’t talk to the laboratory technicians, but if doctors ask their lab, “What’s the sensitivity and specificity of your tests?” The sales representatives don’t know, and they’ve got to go back and check, and the docs —  “Well check and get back to me, please. I’d like to see some science on this.” They’re startled to find that the sensitivity and specificity is in the 70% power range, maybe 82%, which means it’s right 8 out of 10 times, but it means it’s wrong 2 out o10 times. But we think when a blood test is done, it’s going to be always accurate. Well, depending on the technology they’re using! So there’s technology now that is right on the money every time. And the tests are called the Zoomer tests, because you zoom in on the problem. And there is the wheat Zoomer, which is the most comprehensive — you know, I teach all over the world, right? And there is no laboratory that has this kind of accuracy in their testing like the Zoomers. They just came out a couple of years ago, there is a wheat Zoomer, there is a dairy Zoomer, there is an egg Zoomer, there’s a peanut Zoomer, there is a lectin Zoomer, there are many different Zoomers, and the wheat Zoomer is the most comprehensive test for sensitivity to wheat or gluten that you can find anywhere in the world. It’s right on the money, everytime. 

And see, here is a problem. Remember I talked about the pearl necklace and that our enzymes can’t break down the proteins of wheat into each pearl, the pearl necklace, it breaks it down into clumps of the pearl necklace, those are called peptides, and the science shows us there are at least 60 peptides, in one study, 62 peptides of poorly-digested wheat that can trigger an immune response. But every laboratory in the world checks one peptide, it’s called alpha-gliadin, some labs check two peptides — but what about the others? “Well, I don’t know, it’s all we could do.“ So if you do that test, that most doctors do and it comes back negative, it doesn’t mean it’s okay to eat wheat! It means that your child is not responding to that peptide or those two peptides. So the wheat Zoomer looks at 26, the top 26 peptides that are most common to have a sensitivity to, and you don’t miss them anymore. Like when doctors raise their hand and 8 out of 10 in the room have a sensitivity to wheat, this is a blood test that will identify it that frequently. That’s how frequently — when doctors start using these tests, these Zoomers — the technology is called silicon chip technology. A little silicone chip, just a tiny little chip that — they can look at 6000 different things in one blood drop if they wanted to, it’s like what! That’s the 30-30 concept. What! But that’s the technology, that’s the most sensitive test, and people can go to my website, theDr.com and they can download the information about the Zoomer test and take it to your doctor and say, “Would you please order this test for my child or for me?” And most doctors will say, “No.” Because they don’t know these tests, or they’re associated with a hospital and the hospital needs to approve every test, but some doctors will say, “Oh, this sounds interesting, I didn’t know about this!” But if your doctor won’t order the test, you can order it from my website, wherever you live in the country and and we’ll find a — we’ll tell you where to go, ship you the kit. And you take the kid into a blood draw center, they draw your blood and they send it back to the lab, right? But I’d much prefer that your doctor does these tests so they start learning about them. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

I think that piece about the specificity and about testing for 26 of them is so important because I’ll get patients into the clinic who have done some of the more standard, older generation of IGG kinds of testings for food sensitivities, those kinds of things — like, “Oh, you know, my wheat wasn’t high, the gluten wasn’t high, it’s not a problem.” But clearly, we know clinically when we do a gluten-free diet with them, they do better. So it’s like there’s something there, but the problem is when we come back with a test that doesn’t show it, and then people are really resistant to looking at that, which is why I think that the more specific we can be with our testing, ultimately that helps people to get on board more easily with the idea that this is something I need to work on for my

self.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan:

That’s exactly right, you know? You just want good evidence of what’s wrong with your child or why you aren’t healing before you — here’s an example: People think, oh my child’s eating some food and they might be allergic to them, they go to an allergist and, well it’s good thinking, but what does an allergist do? Skin prick test. Skin prick tests came out in 1958. It’s the same test today that they’re doing, and the studies show that the test is accurate 48% of the time for adults and 56% of the time for kids. That means it’s wrong 1 out of 2 times. Just read the science! That’s a test from the 1950s. It’s a good test, but it’s not comprehensive. It’s just not that comprehensive. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

I think one of the other things that comes up with the testing piece, now that we’re talking about this is that sometimes people will say, “Well, I brought this up with my child’s physician or healthcare provider and so they said they would run a celiac test and they said it came back negative, so therefore wheat and gluten aren’t a problem, and I’d like for you to comment on that. 

Dr. Tom O’Bryan:

Yeah, good catch. We cut our teeth in science about problems with wheat by studying celiac disease. And it was really important to do that, but that’s why there have been over 20,000 studies now on wheat because the vast majority of them have been done in the 1970s, 80s, 90s and early 2000s on celiac disease. Really important to check for celiac disease. But celiac disease is only one manifestation of a wheat-related disorder. In Italy, they’ve really dialed this down. The government has authorized 38 centers as gluten-related disorders centers. And there were 28 of them are gastroenterologists, 6 are allergists, a couple of family practice centers. It’s important. If you get a diagnosis from them, then your food has a tax deduction. And so there are 38 of them around the country. So they published on 5000 patients that came through their centers. It’s a really good study, a really good overview, it’s 5000 patients. What did they find? Of the patients who were referred to the gluten-related disorder center by their family doctor, suspecting a celiac disease or something, 7% of them had celiac disease. 93% of them had gluten-related disorders termed gluten sensitivity. So 93% don’t have celiac, they’ve got problems with wheat, but it’s not celiac. So if you’re only checking for celiac, you’ll get it right one out of ten times that a person has a problem with wheat. So it’s really important to check for celiac, but it’s only one manifestation. And your doctors don’t know this. So they say, “We’ll check your child. Wheat? Okay, we’ll check your child for celiac disease. Nope, see? Your child doesn’t have celiac disease, they’re fine, it’s okay to eat wheat.” It’s a terrible recommendation! because it’s not comprehensive. Great that your child doesn’t have celiac, but if they’ve got seizures and wheat’s the trigger for the seizures, or they’ve got anemia, recurrent anemia, or they’ve got depression, and if wheat is the problem, but don’t have celiac disease and are told it’s okay to eat wheat, your child continues to suffer. 

 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

I just think that information about testing is so important because so many people have heard that even if they know enough to ask about it, they kind of just get steered down that path of, “No, well, we looked at celiac and that’s not the issue.” So obviously, as we start to look into what we can do about this, a gluten-free diet becomes an important thing to consider, right? If we know that gluten creates a problem in one way, shape or form for the majority of kids, the majority of adults, looking at removing gluten from the diet makes sense, and you talked about how doing that for a minimum of 3 months to see how the child or the person’s going to react is important. I want to delve into that just a bit more because unfortunately as the whole idea of gluten sensitivity and gluten-free diets has become more popular, what people often think of or do as a gluten-free diet today is not the kind of gluten-free diet that you or I would prescribe for a patient to do. We’ve sort of entered this realm of junk food gluten-free diet, so I’d love for you to share with listeners, when you are talking about doing a gluten-free diet for children, for adults, what does that really mean? What does that look like? 

Dr. Tom O’Bryan:

There are two important points here: First is that gluten-free substitutes are, excuse me, crap. It’s just white paste. There is no fiber, there is no prebiotic in the food, it’s not enriched, so there are no vitamins, no minerals, it’s just white paste. It’s high glycemic index, which means it alters your blood sugar. There’s nothing wrong — I like gluten-free pasta. I like pasta, I’m half Italian — I like pasta! 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Me too!

Dr. Tom O’Bryan:

I’ll do gluten-free pasta maybe once every couple of weeks. Who cares? But you don’t live on that stuff, you don’t eat the gluten-free breads and you don’t eat the gluten-free pasta. You eat grains, outside of wheat, rye and barley. You eat vegetables. Lots of vegetables. We guide our patients on how to do this, so there are two things I said. One is what foods to select. And it’s a lot of vegetables, some wholesome grains are the primary. Some fruits, a little bit of fruits, especially berries are so good for you for many, many reasons. The other thing though is that in March of last year, they just published a study. They looked at 5624 different items on gluten-free menus in restaurants. The study teams went into gluten-free restaurants and ordered from the menu. When the waiter or waitress walked away, they pulled out their testing equipment, put it on the table. When they came back with the food, they put the food in the testing equipment and checked it. 32% of everything in a gluten-free restaurant is not gluten-free. It’s toxic with gluten. 32%, that’s one out of three times! 54% of gluten-free pasta is not gluten-free. 52% of gluten-free pizza is not gluten-free, it’s contaminated. So that’s like, what! 5624 different items that they checked. And this was Peter Green and his team at Columbia, a very famous celiac center in the world that did this. So what does that mean? It means you always have to have protection from inadvertent sources of gluten that may be getting into your diet. Any time you go out to eat anywhere, irrespective of what you’re ordering, you take one capsule of the enzymes that help protect you. They’re called Wheat Rescue. One capsule with every meal at the beginning of every meal. 

“Well I’m only ordering gluten-free.” A third of the time, it’s not gluten-free. It’s toxic, right? So you have to do that. So don’t eat the gluten-free substitute foods very often. If you want a gluten-free pizza once in a while, that’s fine. That’s fine once every couple of weeks, who cares? And take wheat rescue before every meal. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

I think it’s so interesting, when you first shared with me several months ago, that study about the testing of restaurant foods — number one, it helps explain why so many people who think that they’re adhering to a gluten-free diet aren’t getting better like we would expect them to because they’re actually getting a lot of gluten in their diet without realizing it. But I think what you shared about these gluten-free foods being like white paste — to me, that’s so important because there have been several studies that have been blown up in the media over the last year, a couple of years about how gluten-free diets don’t work. “Look, we did this study and people who go on the gluten-free diet, actually are unhealthier.” And I look at that and I go, well, right, because look at what you have these people do? They were not on a healthy, gluten-free diet. They basically went on a diet of the standard American diet, processed kind of crappy food that just didn’t have gluten in it, which is, as you pointed out, takes away all the beneficial fibers, the prebiotics. So it makes sense that a gluten-free diet in that way is not going to be helpful, right?

Dr. Tom O’Bryan:

Yeah. Now there’s one more concept to give you today, and that is: Many of us have heard how important the microbiome is, and it really is. The microbiome modulates your health overall. What does that mean? Has its hands on the steering wheel of how your heart functions, how your brain functions, how your kidneys function. In the microbiome, there are many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many studies coming out about the microbiome and its impact on the rest of the body. Now everything about wheat is not bad. 80% of the prebiotics in the western diet come from wheat. There are some components of wheat called arabinoxylans. They’re not the proteins. And arabinoxylans are prebiotics that feed your good bacteria in the gut. So what happens when you go on a gluten-free diet, is that you stop giving 80% of the food to the good bacteria in your gut. You stop feeding it. Once again, the gluten-free foods are white paste. There is no prebiotic in them. So what happens to the good guys in your gut when you stop feeding them? 80% of the food is taken away. They die off! They starve to death, and then the bad guys that were kept in check because the good guys outnumbered them — I don’t know the numbers, it depends on the individual, but 100:1, 500:1, I don’t know, depends on the individual themselves, but now the bad guys start to rear their ugly head. And 6 months down the road, you’ve got people on gluten-free diets that are sicker with something else. 

So they took 10 healthy people, the average age was 30.3 years old, no health complaints, no sensitivity to wheat, anything like that. They put them on a gluten-free diet for a month and they measure the microbiome before and they measure the microbiome after. What did they find? They found that the good guys dropped dramatically. The bad guys went up exponentially, and the diversity went down. And we all know as healthcare practitioners that it’s the diversity of the good guys in the gut that’s most important. So when you go on a gluten-free diet, you’re taking away — and you have to go on a gluten-free diet if your immune system says you’ve got a problem. So you do the right tests and you find out you have a problem, but you’re taking away 80% of the food for the good bacteria in your gut. So you have to feed them prebiotics. So I just want to talk about that and it’s the last point. 

There are three different things to that. Mrs. Patient, when you go shopping to buy your food and buy your vegetables, always organic, buy every root vegetable you can find, the variety, get rutabagas and turnips and parsnips and radishes and sweet potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes, get one or two of every one of them, and everyday you have one different root vegetable everyday. And you keep alternating it. Then you go on google and you type in “List of prebiotic foods” and print it out and put it on your refrigerator. You’re going to learn that bananas are a prebiotic, and so many other common foods are prebiotic. So everyday you have two foods from the list and one root vegetable everyday. That’s the first thing you do. The second thing you do is you take a supplement of probiotics for two months. I say two months. Some doctors go more, which is great, but I want at least two months, and it’s called MegaPrebiotic. Why? Because you’re going to pull away the food that your bacteria has been accustomed to and you’re going to supply it with the root vegetables and the other prebiotic, but let’s just jumpstart to make sure you’ve got plenty of prebiotic right now so you don’t know any deficits and the good guys still get fed. It’s like the good guys are going to a gourmet meal now. Things are really much better. So that’s the first thing you do. The second thing you do is you get 5 different types of fermented vegetables. Get Sauerkraut, Kimchi, Miso, fermented beans, curry-flavor, whatever you like. And everyday you have one forkful of one of the fermented vegetables. Why? Because every vegetable that ferments produces different families of the good bacteria. So you’re inoculating your gut with probiotics. And your kids don’t like the taste? Put it in the mashed potatoes. It doesn’t matter, they don’t have to taste it. You’ve just got to get it down into the gut. That’s the most important thing you have to do, right? So that’s the fermented vegetables, and then you also take a supplement for a couple of months called Megaspore, it’s a probiotic supplement just to make sure that you’ve got lots of diversity, you’re not going to have any kind of a deficit whatsoever. Some docs like to give the patient Megaspore — just stay on it. I don’t have a problem with that. I personally am on it, I take it everyday.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

I am too. 

Dr. Tom O’Bryan:

Every day that I remember to, some days I don’t remember, but every day that I do. But I want at least two months. So that’s the second thing. The first thing: Root vegetables and prebiotic, second thing: Fermented vegetables and probiotic called megaspore, third thing: In England, they called it stewed apples. Here, we call it applesauce. Wash the apples (always get organic), don’t peel them, dice them up, get rid of the seeds, put them in a pot, add water to a third the height of the apples, throw a little cinnamon in there, turn it on high, boil it. In about 8-12 minutes, look in there, and when you see a shine on the skin of the apples, turn it off. You’re done. That’s your apple sauce. If you have kids, through some raisins in there too, they like the sweetness of the raisins. The shine on the apples is the pectin in the apple. And the pectin gets released when you cook it so it’s easily accessible to the good bacteria in your gut when you eat it. What’s the importance of that? Pectin feeds the good bacteria, it prevents the accumulation of bad bacteria, it reduces the load by 78% of something called endotoxin (or docs will know, lipopolysaccharides), it reduces it by 78%, lowers cholesterol, lowers triglycerides, stabilizes blood sugar — because pectin feeds and increases a really powerful enzyme in your gut called intestinal alkaline phosphatase, IAP. And IAP is a really good guy to help get a nice, healthy, strong microbiome and a healthy gut. So that’s the 3 things you do when you’re going gluten-free: Prebiotic, root vegetables, two of those from the list and the Mega Prebiotic supplement. Probiotics, fermented vegetables, a tablespoon every day of a different type, and Megaspore, and applesauce, a tablespoon to two tablespoons a day. And just be consistent with it and you will build the healthiest, strongest microbiome possible. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

What I love about those three things is that they’re all doable for families, they’re all doable with kids. Let’s say if you’re like, “Oh my gosh, my kid’s not going to eat any of that,” you start with one thing. You start where you need to start, but these are all doable things with kids, and you ease into it, because I do that every day with families at the clinic and these things are doable, and really there are a lot of these foods that kids already like or grow to like and those supplements are really well-tolerated by kids, so it’s really a plan that families can implement, which I think is wonderful.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan:

Yes. Fully agree.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

This has been such an amazing wealth of information. You and I could spend all day talking about this, but I know we need to wrap up here. I want to make sure that people know where they can find out more information about you. You talked about your website, the Zoomer tests, I know you’ve got an amazing wealth of resources for families. Where can they find you online?

Dr. Tom O’Bryan:

Well, thanks! It’s theDr.com. One of the things that we have for you guys — My wife and I traveled the world, we went to seven different countries. We interview 85 different people on autoimmune diseases and we put together this thing online, it’s all free, it’s called Betrayal: The Autoimmune Disease Solution They’re Not Telling You. And we’ve had over 600,000 people watch it. It’s really very cool.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

It’s incredible.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan:

That people learn that you really can reverse rheumatoid arthritis, you can reverse seizures, you can reverse Hashimoto’s Thyroid Disease, you can reverse MS, and the whole series is about, why do these diseases come? You can reverse diabetes. Why do these diseases come? So you talk to the scientists that are doing the research, and we went all over to interview them because I read their papers. I’m the geek that reads the papers, so I knew the questions to ask them. And then we interviewed the doctors who were applying the principles that these scientists were talking about, and then we interviewed the patients who were complying with the doctor’s recommendations, reversing their MS. There is one 44-year-old woman in England. She said, “I took the tube to come here today…” that’s the underground train in London, “…and I walked the seven blocks from the tube station.” And she said, “It’s not a big deal,” and she got a little teary-eyed and she said, “But it is.” And then we show you pictures of her in a wheelchair two years ago where she can’t walk and she’s got seven lesions on her brain, and here she is today, no symptoms, two lesions left on her brain. Right? And you see this again and again and again with recurrent miscarriages, with chronic fatigue, with multiple chemical sensitivities, with Hashimoto’s Thyroid, with severe depression. It doesn’t matter what the diagnosis is. When you start looking, where does this come from? So that’s Betrayal. It’s all free. Just go to theDr.com/betrayal and it will pop up for you and you just register for it and we send it to you, and you get to watch it. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Yeah, and it’s an amazing series, and we’ll make sure that we have the link to the website as well as to the betrayal series in the show notes so people can easily access them and we appreciate you making that available to people. I just want to thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule. You are traveling all over all the time doing amazing, and I can’t thank you enough for agreeing to be on the show today. Thank you.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan:

Thank you, it’s a real pleasure.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

And thanks to all of you for listening, we’ll catch you next time on our next episode of The Better Behavior Show.