Listen
Listen to this podcast or watch the video. CLICK HERE
Transcript
- 06:04 What is gluten?
- 07:31 Good gluten and bad gluten
- 12:33 Do oats contain gluten?
- 14:07 The 50-50 rule on gluten
- 15:14 Common health disorders caused by gluten
- 21:43 Should everyone avoid gluten?
- 24:49 Gluten and the thyroid
- 29:56 Are you gluten sensitive?
- 31:55 Celiac disease vs. gluten sensitivity
- 33:11 Tests for celiac disease
- 38:21 Cyrex Labs – the best lab for gluten testing
- 39:28 Drawbacks of testing
- 40:37 Statistics of gluten sensitivity
- 41:19 Food elimination diet
- 43:53 Gluten-free products
- 49:55 The First Ever Gluten Summit!
Wendy Myers: Welcome to the Live to 110 podcast. I’m your host Wendy Myers. Today we are interviewing Doctor Tom O’Bryan about the many dangers of gluten. It’s something that I don’t include in my diet anymore because it is nasty stuff. This protein is eaten by most Americans in every meal in the form of bread, crackers, tortillas, pies, cookies, cakes, etc., any food that contains wheat, rye, barley and oats. You probably had it in your plate in the last 24 hours. Doctor O’Bryan is going to elaborate why gluten is a silent killer and that it could be the cause of one of your health problems. Doctor O’Bryan is a physician that has dedicated his life to getting the word out on gluten to help professionals and to help enthusiasts. Today I’m thrilled to have our guest on the show. You can find him at the enviable url: thedr.com .
Doctor Tom O’Bryan is an internationally recognized speaker and workshop leader specializing in the complications of non-celiac gluten sensitivity and celiac disease as they occur inside and outside the intestines. Since 2004 he has served as a teaching connoisseur for international audiences of health care practitioners and currently holds teaching faculty positions with the Institute for Functional Medicine and the National University of Health Sciences. He also serves on the scientific advisory committee of the International and American Association of Clinical Nutritionists and the medical advisory board of the National Association of Nutritional Professionals. Hello, Doctor O’Bryan. Thank you for coming on the show.
Tom O’Bryan: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be with you.
Wendy Myers: Well, first, why don’t you tell the listeners a little about yourself and why you have become such an advocate against gluten.
Tom O’Bryan: Okay. Well, the British Medical Journal published a paper in 2011 where they did a med analysis, and what that means is looking at many studies on that particular topic and doing a summary of all the studies. And they looked at what is the time frame from when translational research is first published, and what’s translational research? It’s research that’s going to change the way doctors think and act in practice in terms of how they think about a problem and what therapies will they use. That’s translational research. It’s going to completely transform how a doctor thinks about a particular topic. British Medical Journal did a med analysis of many papers on this topic and what they found was that the average is 17 years from the time an article is first published before the doctor down the street knows about this information and is using it in practice. 17 years! So when they first started publishing studies about cholesterol associated with heart disease it was 17 years before the doctor down the street was doing cholesterol checks. And his goes on with many, many different topics in medicine. 17 years. In the meantime people are suffering and people are dying.
So I made a decision with this topic of gluten sensitivity with or without celiac disease that that’s not going to happen. It was just two years ago that the International Celiac Conference acknowledged that there is this thing called non-celiac gluten sensitivity, NCGS. That means you are sensitive to gluten, it’s making you sick, but you don’t have celiac disease. It was just two years ago that they finally validated that there is such thing. And he result of that is that now there are papers coming out about this topic of NCGS. But the track record would be 17 years before your doctor down the street, or 15 more years, before your doctor down the street knows about this and understands how to test for it and knows what to do for it.
I’m not going to let that happen, because what you’ll learn is that people are dying everyday and that the death certificate says liver cancer, or heart attacks. They were secondary to a gluten sensitivity; or some, not all of them, but for some of these people, like my father, or my godmother who died of liver cancer, but it was secondary to undiagnosed celiac disease. I’m not going to let that happen, so I’ve put together this gluten summit where I’ve interviewed 29 of the world’s leaders, of the scientists, the researchers, who are on the cutting edge publishing these papers. And then then cutting edge clinicians, the doctors in practice who are well known and are looking at this topic of gluten sensitivity and implementing some of these protocols. And then the nutritionists who say “how do you send your kids to school or for lunch? or how do you order at a restaurant? I put all of these people together and we’re offering it for free online. It’s called the Gluten Summit and it airs November 11 through the 17th.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. “And if you listeners want to learn more about it you can go to myersdetox.com. There’s a sidebar, a little graphic that you can click for the Gluten Summit. You can also go to thedr.com and sign up for that. Is there another website they can go to?
Tom O’Bryan: Your website is probably the easiest one for them to access. It’s the most convenient one.
Wendy Myers: Okay, perfect. So I tell every single one of my clients to stop eating gluten whether it be for weight loss, or just for health reasons, or for detoxing. Whatever reason motivates them because many people don’t realize the huge, huge devastating health effects that gluten has so I try to give people whatever their motivation is, I tell them: nix gluten for that reason. Because people just cannot believe that they need to take this protein out of their diet. Why don’t we start with the basics for the newbies that don’t know about gluten or never heard of it. What is it and what foods contain it?
Tom O’Bryan: You bet. Gluten is the family of proteins that are in most grains. By the way, gluten is not bad for you. Bad gluten is bad for you, because there’s gluten in rice. There’s gluten in corn. There’s gluten in quinoa. They are not bad for you. Now you could be allergic to rice, and then it’s a problem allergies are always to proteins, so you could be allergic to the gluten protein of rice. But this topic of gluten sensitivity relates specifically to wheat, rye, and barley. That’s the family of grains that are toxic to humans. It’s the protein in wheat, rye, and barley that we’re talking about here.
Wendy Myers: When you say good gluten and bad gluten, what exactly do you mean by that?
Tom O’Bryan: Think of protein like a brick wall. Digestion is taking the mortar of the bricks. You got each individual brick which is an amino acid. The amino acids then can be absorbed. They go right through the walls of the intestines into the bloodstream. They just go right there so small and there’s like a cheesecloth that’s covering the intestines so that only a certain size of molecules can get through into the bloodstream. And amino acids are small enough to go through the cheese cloth. The problem with these toxic families of gluten is that the human body cannot digest them down. You’ll hear Doctor Alessio Fasano, from Harvard, in the summit saying no human can digest gluten. Let me say that again, no human can digest the toxic gluten proteins of wheat, rye, and barley. One more time: no human can digest the toxic gluten proteins of wheat, rye, and barley. Does that mean I can’t absorb it? Yes. That means no human. If you are human, you cannot digest it.
Now if you could take the hydrochloric acid that’s produced in our stomach and you put it in a bottle. Doctor Fasano talked about this. If you put your finger in that bottle, it will eat your finger to the bone in less than a minute. If you put gluten, like a piece of bread, in that same bottle, it doesn’t digest the bread. It’ll eat your finger to the bone, but it won’t break down the proteins of bread. It just can’t. No human can digest this protein. What happens is that because we cannot digest it, we can’t get it down to each individual brick of the brick wall, it’s like someone took a sledgehammer and broke the wall into clumps and you get a 33-brick clump, a 17-brick clump, and an 11-brick clump. All these different clumps of brick that are called peptides they are made up of 33 amino acids–way too big to get through the cheese cloth into the bloodstream. But the immune system sees these clumps of brick and thinks that they’re a pathogen, bad bacteria. And the result is, we start making an inflammatory response to attack these bacteria which are these clumps of brick. So the inflammatory response in the intestines, the inflammation in the intestines causes tears in the cheese cloth.
When you get tears in the cheese cloth, now these larger molecules of these clumps of brick that couldn’t be broken down into amino acids, now can get through the tears in the cheese cloth into your bloodstream, and your immune system starts making antibodies to protect you from this invader you can’t use to make new muscle or new nerve hormones or new bone cells. You can’t use them. Your body tries to fight it. Now you get the inflammatory response that’s in your circulation going through your whole body–these antibodies that are looking for gluten and firing these chemical bullets called ISOTYPES that cause inflammation throughout your body.
You pull the chain, and the chain breaks at its weakest link. It’s at one end, the middle, the other end. It’s your heart, your brain, your liver, your gut, wherever the weak link is in the chain, that’s where you will eventually get the symptoms of gluten sensitivity wherever the weak link is. Because this inflammation is going throughout your body, that is why one person will manifest seizures. The next person will manifest psoriasis. The next person will manifest achy joints. The next person will manifest fatigue. The next person will manifest thyroid problems and all the symptoms of a bad thyroid. The next person will manifest infertility. The list goes on and on, because it’s a systemic inflammatory process that will manifest wherever the weak link is in your chain.
Wendy Myers: That’s really compelling because every imaginable health symptom and condition could have a root cause having gluten be the contributor.
Tom O’Bryan: That’s exactly right. It would be very silly and foolish to say, every condition is caused by gluten sensitivity and everyone should go gluten free. That is silly. But it’s very rational and scientific to say, any condition may be caused by gluten sensitivity so every patient should be checked for gluten sensitivity. That’s very rational.
Wendy Myers: What about oats? I think that’s something a lot of people have a confusion about. Can you explain exactly why most oats contain gluten?
Tom O’Bryan: Yes. When oats grow out of the ground, there’s no gluten in them. When you buy it off the shelf, there’s gluten in them, and it’s the toxic family of gluten. There’s gluten in oats. It’s called avenin. Like there’s gluten in rice and corn. But avenin is not toxic to you unless you are allergic to oats and some people are allergic to tomatoes. You can be allergic to oats. But to this discussion of toxic family of glutens of wheat, rye, and barley, oats do not have that toxic family of gluten in them. However, the trucks that are hauling the oats from the fields when harvest to the manufacturing facility hold wheat. They don’t clean the trucks so there’s cross contamination. So when you buy oats off the shelf there’s often toxic gluten in them. So as long as you’re buying your oats from a gluten-free oat company, andthere are companies that go a long way to do their best to make sure there’s no cross contamination. Bob’s Red Mill is a national brand. Glutenfreeoats.com is another one. There are many out there now. That are proud to say “we go the extra mile to make sure our oats are gluten free”. Well, they’re not gluten free because they have avenins, but they’re toxic gluten free.
Wendy Myers: One thing that is concerning to me that I found very interesting was how the wheat today is very different than it was a hundred years ago, and therefore more problematic. It has more gluten in it than it did a hundred years ago.
Tom O’Bryan. That’s right. That’s called the 50-50 rule. In the last 50 years the gluten content has gone up by over 50%. It’s gone from 2% gluten. It’s actually much more than 50% now. It’s gone from 2% gluten to the earliest biblical forms of wheat to 14% toxic gluten which is currently the levels in most brands of wheat that are commercially prepared.
Wendy Myers: Obviously that’s going to be causing a lot more problems. Haha
Tom O’Bryan: Yes. Gluten means glue. This is really interesting. In Poland they use wheat flour, add water to it, make a paste out of it and use it as wallpaper paste. It so sticky it holds the paper to the wall for years.
Wendy Myers: Yeah I remember when I was three years old I made a piñata. I used flour, water, and made a piñata. That’s glue haha. So what health disorders can someone suffer if they eat glue. You named a few, but what are some of the more common ones that people aren’t attributing to gluten sensitivity?
Tom O’Bryan: First, the common symptom of every food sensitivity is fatigue. Just across the board fatigue. And for all of your listeners here’s the way to determine if you’re fatigued or not. On a 1 to 10, 10 is the amount of energy you should have. Five is half as much. Take your willpower out of the equation, and what’s your energy?
Wendy Myers: And caffeine out of the equation. Haha.
Tom O’Bryan: That’s right. What’s your body energy when you take the stimulants out? I teach our doctors the same way all the time. 1 to 10, 10 is the amount of energy you s ould have, five is half as much, and then pause, doctors. In that pause, everyone has a number. They say, I have an 8 or a 9. And then you say “but take your willpower out of the equation. What’s your body energy?”And you see people’s faces go “Oh. Reality check, I’m a 3 or 2”. That’s a most common symptom of food sensitivity, which is fatigue. Anemias are another suggestive of gluten sensitivity–very, very common to see.
Osteoporosis is so common that annals of internal medicine said that “we have no hesitance in saying every osteoporotic patient should be checked for celiac diseases. Celiac disease could be the cause of their osteoporosis”. So I showed that study and I say, “so doctors, if the annals of internal medicine say every osteoporotic patient needs to be checked, because it’s so common as acause, which patient are you not going to check?” And you see this look of realization come into their faces saying “Oh I didn’t know that. Why I need check every one of them?” Yes, exactly. Because if you give the drugs, I think, and there’s no paper on this as far as I know, well there are papers on the reality. And that is when you give the drugs for osteoporosis called bisphosphonates.
The study showed that if you look at the x-rays you take bisphosphonates and there’s more bone. The bisphosphonate drugs worked to produce more bone. But the problem is the bone is balsa wood, not oak. The post-menopausal women that take bisphosphonates have just as many fractures with their osteoporosis as women who don’t take bisphosphonates who have osteoporosis. The fracture rate’s the same. It doesn’t make a difference in the fracture rate. But what the sales people do, they show the studies show x-rays where there are more bone. So the doctors believe that bisphosphonates is what you should do. But the bone is balsa wood, it breaks really easily. Why? Because they may have a gluten sensitivity and they’re not absorbing the calcium or the vitamin D or the vitamin K that they need to make really strong bone.
So the drugs work partially but not completely. The annals of internal medicine say that every osteoporotic patient needs to be checked. That’s another symptom. The most common symptom I think is brain dysfunction. I gave a lecture a couple days ago in North Dakota. I was at Fargo, North Dakota, of all places. They were wonderful people. There were 300 people in the room and when I said “how many know or suspect that they have a sensitivity gluten”, almost the entire room raised their hand and I laughed because that’s a loaded question to this audience. But “how many of you know or suspect that if you have an inadvertent exposure to gluten it seems to affect your brain?” Over 75% raised their hand again. That’s the most common system that’s affected—the brain. That means brain fog, or headaches, or seizures or attention deficit or any symptom of brain dysfunction that a person may get, may be because of sensitivity to gluten.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I keep reading that even a lot of people don’t have intestinal or stomach alarms going off, they don’t have any kind of intestinal symptoms. That means the celiac or non-celiac gluten sensitivity can really be damaging their brain.
Tom O’Bryan: That is correct. Unfortunately you don’t feel it when the antibodies are attacking your brain cells until it’s pretty far along. And takes years about for most people before it’s far along and now you get obvious symptoms. You don’t feel it when you brain cells are getting killed off until you hit a critical mass. No one get Alzheimer’s in their 60’s or 70’s. It’s a decades-long process of killing off brain cells until you kill off enough brain cells that the symptoms become a little more obvious. And if you look in the history, there are always jokes “Oh, I’m getting older, I can’t remember the way I used to. haha”. “Oh, how old are you?”.”Oh, 36″. No! That’s not good. That’s not normal, That’s not aging. We all should be able to learn a foreign language in our 80’s. There’s no reason why not. Your brain is supposed to be working that well, unless you’ve been killing it off. Eating foods that are causing inflammation, pulling the weak link in your chain, which in your case, may be the brain.
Wendy Myers: I definitely feel like a part of brain fatigue or brain fog and mental fatigue that I deal with everyday is partly due to heavy metal toxicity but also because of the fact that I ate gluten everyday for 40 years.
Tom O’Bryan: Absolutely right. It takes a while to rebuild those cells. So in the meantime, being aware of it and being meticulous to not throw any more gasoline on the fire it’s critical.
Wendy Myers: Yes, so your brain can regenerate after you stop eating gluten?
Tom O’Bryan: Yes. It used to be that doctors thought that you kill your brain cells, and you’re toast. There’s nothing that you can do. Well, we know now that it’s true. You regenerate brain cells. They’re slower than most cellular areas in the body, but you supply the right environment and you can have some really good results occur.
Wendy Myers: Do you think that everyone should be avoiding gluten?
Tom O’Bryan: Well, as an expert on the topic, it’s really difficult. I got to be careful as to what I say. And I can only speak from the science and then give my personal opinion. And the science says no, everyone should not be off gluten. But the science also says if you’re having an immune reaction you need to be off gluten. That’s obvious. Your immune system is there to protect you. It’s the armed forces of your body, it’s the army, air force, marine, coast guard, navy, IGA, IGG, IGE, IGM. Different branches of the immune system. And if the army is out in force, your body is talking to you. Your immune system is saying, we’ve got a problem here. So anyone that has elevated levels of antibodies to gluten certainly should be off gluten. Or anyone that notices that they feel better when they’re off gluten. Why would you eat a food that you notice you’ve got symptoms for? “Well, the symptoms aren’t too bad”. That’s right, they’re not too bad perhaps, but they’re killing off brain cells or heart cells or liver cells, and when you get enough of them killed off, the symptoms are much more frequent and they get worse. So should be everyone off gluten? Science says no, but those with immune response or with symptom response should be off gluten.
Now I’m going to give you my personal opinion. Why would we eat anything that our bodies can’t really digest and causes inflammation? We live in such an inflamed society already. Most people have heard you want an anti-inflammatory lifestyle, whatever that means. So one of the premises of an anti-inflammatory lifestyle to reduce your risk of different degenerative diseases is stop throwing gasoline at the fire. So whether you get symptoms from throwing gasoline at the fire or not is just a question of how much tissue has been damaged. Here’s a thing about wheat, though. You can’t argue with the value of wheat. It has saved millions and millions of lives. When we have shipped container vessels of wheat to third-world countries that are having famine, you save millions of lives, because you can get some of the calories out of these, you get a little bit of protein out of it; you can keep your body going. Yes, the body will use some of that, but it also will cause the tears on the cheesecloth, the inflammation and the long-term degenerative diseases. So when there’s nothing else in the world to eat, of course you eat wheat because it’s going to save your life. But in this country, there is no reason. There are so many other options available to us.
Wendy Myers: Let’s talk a little bit about gluten and the thyroid. I personally have a thyroid issue and I’ve had to stop gluten because of that. And so, it is a personal interest to me. So how exactly does gluten hurt your thyroid and therefore your metabolism if you consume it? I’ve been dealing with a thyroid issue for a few years now and I’ve just read over and over and over that you need to cut gluten out of your diet. Can you explain exactly why that might be a good idea?
Tom O’Bryan: Sure. There’s a mechanism that’s very common, and I’ve spoken to pulling on a chain at the weak link breaks. And the weak link is your thyroid. How is it? What’s the weak link? Well, one of the most common mechanisms is called molecular mimicry. What does that mean? When your immune system is trying to protect you it makes antibodies against this food, the toxic proteins of gluten, and let’s say the toxic protein is 33 amino acids long, that’s the most common one, called glia-α9. It’s one of the clumps of brick when we don’t digest gluten completely. It’s 33 bricks long. Let’s say those amino acids are AABCD. Now it is 33 letters, and I’m not going to say the 33 letters. So with AABCD, I’m referring to glia-α9. And your body makes antibodies to glia-α9. Now these antibodies are soldiers. Think of Arnold Schwarzenegger with his head out of a Hummer with a big submachine gun, and he’s got those dark glasses on. Here in California we call them The Governator so, think of The Governator with this big submachine over there, over there, firing these chemical bullets called synochymes trying to attack the 33 brick amino acid glia-α9, AABCD.
Proteins are made of hundreds of amino acids. The blood is going through your entire body. Let’s say the blood is going past the thyroid. The surface of the thyroid that the blood is going past is made up of proteins and fats. Proteins are made up of hundreds of amino acids. So the blood is going past the surface of the thyroid made up of proteins, which are hundreds of amino acids. Part of the amino acid complex there is AABCD. So Arnold, who’s firing these chemical bullets at AABCD anywhere he finds them in the bloodstream, got these dark glasses on. He doesn’t seem to see very clearly. And he fires up chemical bullets at your thyroid because part of the walls is made up of AABCD. That chemical bullet damages the surface of the thyroid. Why do we have any antibodies to our tissue, to our thyroid, or lungs, or liver, or muscles? How come there’s a normal range of antibodies? It’s because your body is cleaning up the damaged cells all the time. When cells get damaged you got to get them out of there, or else they can mal-form and cause cancers and many other things. But it’s your body’s protection: get that damaged cell out of there. So you make antibodies to your thyroid to get rid of that damaged cell.
That’s a normal process. But now you’d have toast for breakfast. And there’s more soldiers coming out to deal with AABCD [in German accent] “over there, over there”. Then you had sandwich for lunch, then you had pasta for dinner, the next day you had toast for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, or maybe pancakes for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, and now you got croutons on your salad on dinner with a cookie in there. And you’re being exposed to these toxic families of gluten multiple times a day every day, lots of Arnold soldiers are out there trying to kill it and it gets confused and it goes after the weak link in your chain, your thyroid because AABCD is in your thyroid. Now Arnold is attacking your thyroid regularly. And now your body is trying to make these clean up cells antibodies to the thyroid to clean up the damaged cells and these processes are going so fast and so quick and so constantly. Eventually your body continues to make the antibodies to your thyroid at its own. Now you have an auto-immune thyroid disease called Hashimoto’s or Graves’. That’s the most common mechanism as to how gluten can affect the function of your thyroid.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s really compelling because you would always going to think, oh I just have some disease, and my metabolism has slowed down but it’s gluten that’s a huge, huge factor in thyroid disease.
Tom O’Bryan: That’s exactly right.
Wendy Myers: So what test should you get if you want to find out if you’re sensitive to gluten and what labs do you recommend?
Tom O’Bryan: There’s only one test that’s comprehensive in looking for gluten sensitivity. I mentioned glia-A9, the 33 brick amino acid. It’s the most common toxic peptide of gluten. About 50% of celiacs have glia-A9 being elevated. But the other 50% don’t. They have other peptides of gluten, other clumps of brick, that they’re reacting to, not the 33 clump of brick. Well, every lab in the country that looks for sensitivity of gluten looks at GLIA-Α9. It’s good that they look at GLIA-Α9, but it’s not complete. If you’re sensitive to GLIA-Α9 and it comes back positive, you got a problem. But if it comes back negative it’s not necessarily negative, all it’s telling you is that you are not reactive to GLIA-Α9. You may be reacting to one of the other peptides that the lab didn’t check for. Why aren’t they checking the other peptides? That’s a million dollar question no one has ever been able to answer. Really just dollars and politics. But technology improves all the time. The the papers started coming out in the 1999 talking about testing for other peptides of gluten, and the papers have been coming out consistently ever since, now there’s a laboratory in the last three years. They opened up last three years ago. That looks at 11 different peptides of gluten, the laborator is called Cyrexlabs,cyrexlabs.com That’s the test that you do. If that comes back negative, likely, you’re okay and you don’t have sensitivity to gluten right now that’s causing elevated antibodies.
Wendy Myers: Sadly I have many clients who have IBS issues and they go to their doctor and the first doctor’s test is a test for celiac disease. None of them have tested for gluten sensitivity. Their test invariably comes back negative, and they’re told that they can eat gluten. What’s wrong with that picture?
Tom O’Bryan: That’s a really good question. Remember, we started off this interview with the 17-year concept. And it’s taking 15 years. The pattern would be 15 years from now your clients go to their doctor and he checks for gluten sensitivity instead of checking for celiac disease. Because celiac disease is one manifestation of gluten sensitivity. There are many manifestations. But we all focus with blinders on celiac disease. That’s the only one that we thought of. So if you come back positive for celiac; you got a problem! You need to take care of it. But if you come back negative to celiac, it’s not necessarily that gluten’s okay for you. You may be manifesting it in your thyroid with no damage to your gut at all. Or in your brain. Or in your heart. Or somewhere else. And it’s not just manifesting anywhere else.
Wendy Myers: I’ve also heard that the tests for celiac disease, that many of those are not accurate as well. And just because you have a test come back negative, does not mean that you don’t have celiac disease. Can you explain that a little bit? I’ve heard that in some of the tests you take, you have to have 80% of your villi missing, or the length of the villi 80% missing to get a positive confirmation of celiac disease. But what if 20% were worn down?
Tom O’Bryan: Well this is really, you’ve done your homework. Good girl.
Wendy Myers: Haha. Yeah.
Tom O’Bryan: High five girl. Good job haha.
Wendy Myers: Oh yeah! I like to read.
Tom O’Bryan: Yes, that’s very accurate. The studies started to come out in 2005 showing that. Your intestines are a tube, 25-feet long tube that winds around inside your abdomen. It can twist around in there. But it’s a tube. The inside of the tube is lined with shag carpeting.
Wendy Myers: I love that analogy hahaha.
Tom O’Bryan: Oh, thank you. This absorbs vitamin. The shag over here is fat. The other shag is amino acid. All the shags absorb different nutrients. Celiac disease is when all your shags are down and you get Berber (flat carpet). If you get Berber, you don’t absorb calcium. You get osteoporosis. So the test that looks for celiac disease the markers that they look at are transglutaminase, or endomycium. Endomycium was the older version. It is still used but not as much. Transglutaminase is more sensitive, meaning it identifies more of them than endomycium does. Mostly it’s transglutaminase. The problem is that the papers that the doctors have read all say the same thing – that endomycium and transglutaminase are 97, 98, 100% accurate. Doctors who read these papers say, “Oh, these are really good tests. We’ll do this test”. Well, I wrote to many of those authors. Many of them and now it’s common knowledge. It wasn’t five years ago when I started writing them.
When these researchers do their research to see which kinds of blood tests is going to work, they buy a couple hundred of samples of celiac blood. There are blood banks that have patients with diabetes. They have the blood of patients with diabetes, the blood of patients with rheumatoid. Many kinds of diseases. So researches can buy these blood samples and they are assured these are all patients with rheumatoid, all patients with diabetes, all patients with celiac. And then they can check and see how accurate their tests are to identify it in those blood samples. So, the doctors who have published the papers on these transglutaminase and endomycium bought their samples of blood of celiac patients. In order to get a diagnosis of celiac disease, the microvilli, the shags in the shag carpeting, have to be worn down completely. It’s called total villous atrophy. If you don’t get total villous atrophy, you don’t get a class diagnosis of celiac, and so your blood is not stored in those blood banks. Only those with total villous atrophy, their shags worn down completely, have their blood stored in the blood bank. Researchers buy their blood. So the blood they’re buying are all people who were at the end stage of the disease.
Their shags are worn down completely. And when you write to the authors and you say, “dear Doc, in your study, did you look at people who had partial villous atrophy, where the shags are only partially worn down?” “Or people who just had high levels of inflammation and whose shags are not worn down yet? Did you look at those patients?” And they all respond the same way: “No. See that disease is total villous atrophy.” So unintentionally, they cherry picked their group so that everyone had the end stage of disease and so the test is really accurate. When you look at people that have partial villous atrophy, the shags are wearing down but they are not worn down completely yet. Or they have a lot of increased information. The studies tell us that those tests can be wrong, and say there’s no problem up to seven out of ten times. It’s called desensitivity. And desensitivity is 27 to 33% with partial villous atrophy. Meaning, it comes back and says you’re fine and you’re really not. So that’s the test for celiac disease. That’s why if you want to do a test for celiac disease, that’s okay but you also want to do the test for gluten sensitivity, which looks at multiple peptides of gluten because that’s much more important than whether or not your shags were worn down completely.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Ideally it seems like you want to be diagnosed prior to your shags wearing all the way down, so it’s still going to get that.
Tom O’Bryan: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.
Wendy Myers: So you can head it off of the curve. Are there any labs that you prefer to do the celiac testing that you think is more accurate, or more sensitive test?
Tom O’Bryan: There’s only one lab currently in the country that’s doing multiple peptides of gluten with the celiac test. Or just the multiple peptides of gluten test. No other lab is doing this yet. That lab is called cyrexlabs.com.
Wendy Myers: So the same one, they’ve got their act together. Haha.
Tom O’Bryan: They do. They’ve worked really hard on this and the creator of those tests is a world-famous immunologist named Doctor Aristo Vojdani. Doctor Vojdani is one of the guests in the summit. He talks about how he thought about these tests and how he came up with these tests. His background. This is a culmination of 35 years’ worth of work for Doctor Vojdani to come up with these tests.
Wendy Myers: Are there any drawbacks of this test? Like for instance the studies show 1 in 3 people have gluten sensitivity, but other studies show that even people that have this tiny, tiny bit of gluten can have damage in their intestines even if they’re not full blown gluten sensitive for what I understand. So are there any drawbacks of this at all? What are the alternatives do people need to be doing? Do they need to do a food elimination diet to be a 100% certain that they’re not gluten sensitive if their test comes back negative?
Tom O’Bryan: The only drawbacks to the test that I know of are if someone is on steroids. If they’re taking steroids cortisone, hydrocortisone, or steroid inhalers for asthma. You can’t test. You really can’t because it will come back altered. It’s not accurate. Aside from that, there are no other drawbacks to the test that I’m aware of. Absolutely not.
Wendy Myers: Was that accurate when I said 1 in 3 people have gluten sensitivity?
Tom O’Bryan: Actually not. What the papers currently show that you can stand strong on is that 6 to 10% of the population. However, by condition, there are certain conditions. Take for example the irritable bowel syndrome. People card carrying wrong two criteria, they have a bowel syndrome. 30% of them are gluten sensitive. When you put them in a gluten-free diet, their IBS symptoms all go away. So by condition, it may be as high as 30%. But over the entire population what the numbers currently tell us is 6 to 10%.
Wendy Myers: Okay. What about if someone were to have their test come back negative, do you think it’s a good idea for them to do a food elimination diet with gluten just to be sure? I’ve heard that is the golden standard for determining if you’re sensitive to gluten.
Tom O’Bryan: The gold standard is looking at the immune system to seeing if your army-air force, marines–are fighting right now. You’re irrespective of how you feel. It doesn’t matter how you feel.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, because you said some people don’t have symptoms.
Tom O’Bryan: Correct. Exactly. Because people are motivated when they feel sick or when they’ve got problems. They want to find out why and then they’ll check. But it doesn’t matter if you’ve got problems or not. I personally believe everyone in the country should be checked for gluten sensitivity because it’s so very very common. But if you do the elimination diet and go off of gluten and you feel better, what more do you need? If you notice that some of your symptoms go away, whatever they are, well they are if you’re off gluten–then you eat them and the symptoms come back, here is the rule: body language never lies. Some people speak Spanish; some people speak French. Some people adds a second language. But very people speak body. I mean, we don’t listen to what our body tells us. So you eat a food, you don’t feel good. You don’t eat a food, you feel better. You eat the food, you don’t feel good. You think?
Wendy Myers: Haha.
Tom O’Bryan: But then, people say, well, I don’t feel so bad, and I really like my pasta. But what they don’t know is that information that’s going on internally is killing off their brain cells every single day—or killing off their heart cells, or their skin cells–wherever the weak link is in their chain. And they’re going to cross that imaginary line, they have to have the straw that broke the camel’ back. Now they start getting symptoms, and they think, “Oh. I just developed a problem”. No, you’ve had a problem for quite a while. It just wasn’t causing symptoms that are a wake-up call.
Wendy Myers: I’m excited I’m getting my gluten sensitivity panel on a couple of days. I will just go to my immunologist Dr Bernard Gellar, a very wonderful immunologist. I’m going to see what’s going on inside. What I am sensitive to.
Tom O’Bryan: Excellent.
Wendy Myers: I’ll do my daughter’s as well. So what do you think about gluten-free products? One thing my husband loves to do. We have our daughter on a gluten free diet. But he, like many other people, just goes to the gluten-free aisle and buys all these cookies and wafers and all these processed foods. And I say, “honey, those aren’t necessarily healthy”. Haha. What is your idea on gluten-free products?
Tom O’Bryan: Some doctors and nutritionists and registered dieticians are saying that a gluten-free diet can be dangerous for you. Gluten-free diets are not bad for you. Bad-gluten-free diets are bad for you. You would stop every morning at a coffee shop to get your coffee on the way to work and you normally get a blueberry muffin. But now you’ve been diagnosed with gluten sensitivity, so you stop getting the muffin. You get your coffee and you just feel that craving but, no, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to have that muffin. Well, you’re taking care of yourself. But one day you order your coffee and you see that sign that says, Gluten-free blueberry muffins.
Wendy Myers: There you go.
Tom O’Bryan: You immediately say, oh, I can have that. That’s healthy for me. As a matter of fact, I can have two.
Wendy Myers: Haha.
Tom O’Bryan: It’s not healthy. It’s just not as bad for you. But it’s not healthy for you. There’s nothing wrong with having a gluten-free muffin every once in a while. Who cares? There’s nothing wrong with it, but let’s get a bigger picture here for a moment. The biggest epidemic in our country today is obesity which will then cause insulin resistance that progresses on to diabetes. It’s a huge problem. It is massive. When I came out of school we called it Adult onset 2 diabetes. We don’t call it adult onset 2 anymore because kids are getting this now. They just published some statistics a few months ago that show if the increase in diabetes continues as it is now getting worse and worse and worse by 2044, the cost of taking care of the diabetics just on medicare will be more than all the taxes collected in the entire United States.
Wendy Myers: Woah.
Tom O’Bryan: It will bankrupt us. We need to wake up. You can’t be obese. We can’t encourage obesity. Our doctors say, “give them more exercise”. And their patients are packing in an extra 30 pounds in there. They need to get a bigger picture. There’s an article in New York Times I saw about four or five years ago the mortuary industry is in great distress because people don’t fit in the caskets anymore. They need to go double wide much more frequently now. As a civilization, we’re killing ourselves off. I don’t know if your listeners know this, but there’s a study eight years ago. It’s true today and worse than it was even then. And that is, your newborn children have a shorter projected lifespan than you do. Kids are going to die earlier than you. You live to 68, your kids won’t live to 68. They’ll die early. And it’s the first time in history this has ever happened. Ever. And we’re just blindly going ahead, eating our muffins every day, eating all our pasta and bread. Bill Davis’ book Wheat Belly is an excellent read on this topic of how breads and wheat in general fatten you up. We can’t continue to fatten our kids; they’re going to die early.
And as a civilization, we’re going down. I don’t like to be a prophet of doom. Just read the studies. I don’t know that there’s anyone in the world today who argue that the environment is changing and the greenhouse effect is real. Two years ago there are still some scientists that worked for this big corporation. “Oh there’s no evidence” Nonsense! Nonsense. We all know and we are experiencing every day with the floods and the increased storms and the heat waves and the cold spells that are worse than ever. There’s no question that our planet is in great distress. Well, the human body is in the same type of distress because of obesity.
So how does this relate to gluten-free diet? The flours that are used in gluten-free diets have a higher glycemic index. If you eat two slices of whole wheat bread, your body is thinking you’re eating as much sugar as a Snickers bar. From two slices of bread. How about a plate of pasta? It’s much worse. The glycemic index is how much sugar your body thinks you’re eating and how much insulin it produces in response. The higher the glycemic index, the more insulin your body makes. Wheat is very high on the glycemic index. Bill Davis talks a lot about that in his book. He’s also in our summit, and you’ll hear him explain that in great detail in the gluten free summit. The glycemic index in some of these gluten-free flours is higher than wheat. So you eat a gluten-free blueberry muffin and your body thinks you’re getting more sugar than a Snickers bar.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. That’s one of the biggest lessons that I think a lot of my clients are really blown away by. Is that when they eat rice flour, or whole grains, that they getting a huge dose of sugar that’s gravely affecting their health. So why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit more about you and where they can find you and again about the gluten summit.
Tom O’Bryan: Okay, thank you. Our website is thedr.com, and there are a number of articles that are all free. By the way, the summit is free. Everything about the Gluten Free Summit is free for you folks. It’s free for everyone so that this information can get out there and doesn’t take 17 years for our doctors to know about it. That’s why we’re doing this. At thedr.com we’ve got educational videos and radio shows like this one on different topics that we talk about. Just a lot of information for people. We’re about to launch an educational program on how you transition into a gluten free lifestyle – how do you do that? – and a really nice, hand-holding, guided path to developing a gluten-free lifestyle for you and your family.
Wendy Myers: That’s a really great idea. So many people have a hard time figuring out what do they eat because they’re eating gluten at every meal. That’s a really good idea.
Tom O’Bryan: Yes. I don’t want people to go cold turkey. Unless they’re really sick, I want people to transition so that they can be successful and make it fun and happy for their kids. By the way, these foods don’t taste like cardboard. They are delicious. These recipes that you can make and treats for your kids that are just delicious and healthier for them.
Wendy Myers: I was really surprised. I got some gluten free bread for my daughter that is made of other kinds of grains, some are made of almond flour. They’re fantastic. You have to find the right brand, just play around a little bit. Some of them are gross, but a lot of them are delicious.
Tom O’Bryan: That’s exactly right. What we put together is a list. Ok, go shopping and buy all these now. And just stock your covers with this gluten-free soy sauce and these gluten-free salad dressings depending on what flavor you want. But we give people the basics to start with so your kitchen is prepared and then you start transitioning over. That’s what we’re working at right now.
Wendy Myers: I’m really excited about the Gluten Summit. I’m going to be there. I encourage the listeners to be there. I want to learn more in depth about gluten and the dangers it causes. I know quite a bit about it but I want learn a little bit more so that I can convey that information to my clients and listeners as well. So thank you so much for coming on the show, Tom. The show is going to be a real wake up call for so many people because it’s so important to get this message out because people have a really hard time believing that their arthritis or other health crisis is caused by the sandwich they’re having every day at lunch. Thank you for coming on the show.
Tom O’Bryan: You’re very welcome. Thank you for the opportunity.
Wendy Myers: Have a wonderful time at the summit. I’m really looking forward to it.
Tom O’Bryan: Thank you.
Wendy Myers: If you want to learn more about health, you can follow me on Facebook and Twitter at iwillliveto110. I am also on YouTube at wendyliveto110 and on Instagram and Pinterest at liveto110. I am all over social media. So again, thank you, listeners, for tuning in. Remember the time to be thinking about your health is while you still enjoy it, not waiting until you get sick. Please go check our websites. I can be found at www.myersdetox.com. If you like what you’ve heard on the show, please give the Live to 11o podcast a nice review and rating in iTunes. Thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 podcast.
