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Transcript
- 01:28 Limitless Energy: How to Detox Toxic Metals and Exhaustion and Chronic Title
- 03:13 About Dr. Leo Galland, MD
- 06:22 Allergy epidemic
- 07:42 Underlying root causes of an overreacting immune system
- 11:22 What’s behind the rising trend of allergies
- 13:59 GMO foods, allergies and asthma
- 16:06 Allergies and our gut
- 18:57 Leaky gut and allergies
- 21:43 Mission detoxible
- 29:17 Fast food and allergies
- 35:54 Long-term use of allergy medications
- 40:41 Recommended natural anti-histamines for allergies
- 49:32 Supplementing with probiotics
- 54:14 The most pressing health issue in the world today
- 58:11 Where to find Dr. Galland
Wendy Myers: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. I’m your host, Wendy Myers. You can check me out at myersdetox.com.
And I’m going to be talking today with Dr. Leo Galland, author of The Allergy Solution about all the underlying causes of your allergies and how you can heal yourself from allergies by healing your immune system and your gut.
We also talk about how obesity, the obesity crisis, is in part caused by allergies and how a lot of diagnoses or misdiagnoses are actually allergies, and people have fibromyalgia and pain, arthritis, obesity and other types of diagnoses that allergies can be playing a major role in contributing to those symptoms. So it’s a very good podcast today.
Please keep in mind that this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. The Live to 110 Podcast is solely informational in nature, so please consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging in anything that we suggest today on the show.
Wendy Myers: And I have had a fantastic week. I published my first book called Limitless Energy: How to Detox Toxic Metals and Exhaustion and Chronic Title. So it’s a long title. I have trouble getting it out, but you can buy it for pre-sale on Amazon. That will be officially being published on April 29th, 2017, but you can buy it right now for free order.
And it’s all talking about the toxic metals that contribute to mitochondrial dysfunction. And a lot of people today are exhausted. I know I was for many, many years. And I try to go down different paths, healing my adrenal glands, healing my thyroid and working on my diet and focusing on sleep and taking the right supplements and all this. But detoxification is a huge piece of the puzzle.
If you’re doing all those things and you’re still feeling really sluggish and you’re still feeling really tired or even suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome, you’ve got to address these toxic metals that cause fatigue, arsenic, aluminum, tin, thallium. Cesium is a big problem in the environment because of the Fukushima fallout in the Pacific. So if you eat a lot of sushi like I did for many years, you can have a big problem with cesium toxicity.
And a lot of these metals will poison enzymes that actually transport nutrients into mitochondria, therefore causing them to not produce enough energy or ATP. So I talked about all those specific metals in the book and how to detox them, a lot of stuff you guys have heard on the show if you’ve been regular listeners. So check that out on Amazon.
Wendy Myers: Our guest today is Dr. Leo Galland, MD. He’s a board certified internist and is recognized as a world leader in integrative medicine. Educated at Harvard University and NYU School of Medicine, he won the Linus Pauling Award for his trailblazing vision that created a new way to practice medicine for thousands of doctors.
Dr. Galland has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Self and Men’s Fitness Magazine and has appeared on the Today’s Show, Good Morning America, The Dr. OZ Show, PBS, CNN and Fox. He is co-author of The Allergy Solution: Unlock the Surprising Hidden Truth About Why You are Sick and How to Get Well, with his son, Jonathan Galland. Join his natural health community at DrGalland.com and at Facebook.com/LeoGallandMD.
Dr. Galland, thank you so much for coming on the Live to 110 Podcast.
Dr. Leo Galland: It’s great to be talking to you today.
Wendy Myers: Can you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and your background?
Dr. Leo Galland: I’m an internist. That’s a specialist in internal medicine. I’ve been in practice for a few decades. I trained at Bellevue Hospital, NYU School of Medicine. And for about 35 years or a little bit more, I treated patients who have complex problems that have not been helped by seeing a lot of other practitioners and by seeing all sorts of conventional specialist.
And so I’ve developed an approach to dealing with healthcare that tries to focus on the needs of the individual person rather than just categorizing the disease and treating that. And it’s an attempt to create a dynamic model of what’s relevant at any given point in time to the health of any individual. And then we try to work it through looking for factors and it’s always multi-factorial that are contributing to their health problems.
Along the way, I’ve treated many, many patients with allergies and allergic illnesses. For some of these people, it was clear that they had allergies and they came to me because they had asthma or eczema.
But for many of them, they didn’t know they had allergies until I started working with them. They had problems like chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia or migraine headaches or arthritis. Some of them had been given other diagnoses. They were told, “Oh you have rheumatoid arthritis,” but in fact, what they really had was an allergic arthritis.
So I’ve developed methods to try and help people understand the role that allergy is playing in their health problems and what to do about it.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, you have a new book out called The Allergy Solution. It’s a bestseller. Can you talk to us a little bit about the concepts that you lay out in your book?
Dr. Leo Galland: Sure! I love to talk about it. There are actually several principles, but the main one is why you’re allergic and why is there an epidemic of allergies that is sweeping the world.
Now it’s important for an individual to be able to identify whether the symptoms that are troubling them or the diseases that they’ve been told they have, have an allergic basis and to understand what allergy is. And I spend some time in the allergy solution, helping people identify whether their problems are allergic and what the nature of their allergies are. In particular, what are the triggers and what are the mechanisms for allergy?
But the really more profound question is why are you allergic. And what can you do to help correct allergies so that you don’t respond in allergic fashion the way that you did before your self-treatment started.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. An approach a lot of people take as the thing that they need to do is to avoid the foods and avoid the allergen if possible.
Wendy Myers: Can you tell us why that’s not a long-term solution and you want to understand the underlying root cause of why your immune system is overreacting?
Dr. Leo Galland: Avoidance by itself doesn’t eliminate allergies, but it can control systems. I mean it’s not that avoidance is necessarily a bad idea. It depends on how extreme the avoidance has to be.
For people who have an undiagnosed chronic illness with an allergic basis and the allergies that have not been previously identified and if there are triggers that can be removed like a food for example, the response to removing a food to which you’re allergic on a chronic disease can be really dramatic. It’s probably the most dramatic natural reaction or the most dramatic reaction to a natural therapy that I’ve ever seen.
So it is something that I advocate, especially at the beginning stages because someone can get to feel much better very quickly. And I have a section in The Allergy Solution. It’s called The Power Wash and a follow-up section called Re-entry and the Immune Balance Diet , which help people identify the role that food allergies are playing in their illness.
The problem is I see a lot of people who are allergic to so many foods that it’s hard for them to be well nourished on the diet they need to follow. And with environmental allergies, it can be really difficult to control environmental exposures.
So people tend to rely on drugs to suppress symptoms, which don’t help. They may relieve symptoms. They have side effects, short term and long term and they don’t really correct the situation. So there’s a lot to be said for trying to get to the roots of allergy and treat allergy where it starts in your immune system. Improve immune function, balance it better because not only it will help with allergies, it will help you with other aspects of your health.
Wendy Myers: Yes. That’s where I was getting at, where you want a long term address, healing your over-reactive immune system so that you don’t always have to avoid foods to which you developed allergies or sensitivities to.
Dr. Leo Galland: Right, that’s really an important point. And the thing is that the factors that are creating this epidemic of allergies in the world—I mean there are billion people with allergic diseases now. Those factors are contributing to other diseases and illnesses. And so to some extent, having allergies is what allows you to be the canary in the coalmine to know that there’s something toxic that’s happening and to give you the clues that you needed in order to make fundamental changes.
So when you start eliminating the toxic exposures and the nutritional deficits that interfere with detoxification and your allergies improve, you are helping your body in multiple ways, not just relieving the symptoms of allergy.
Wendy Myers: So we’re seeing a huge epidemic of allergies, especially in young children. And this is unprecedented. It was not like this in the ’80s and it has been increasing subtly, the epidemic of allergies since the 1990s and going up and up and up. Why is that?
Dr. Leo Galland: There are several factors. And I actually to go back even further in looking at the history of this because the concept of hay fever did not exist before the middle of the 19th century. That is the idea that you could have seasonal sneezing. That didn’t exist in the world. There was no such thing.
It started to increase during the 19th century. It started to become noticed in the early 20th century. It’s still considered pretty rare. I think we can trace it to industrial pollution as an important factor in initiating that part of the allergy epidemic.
Second phase of the allergy epidemic probably is best characterized by asthma, which started to reach epidemic proportions in the 1960s. It was associated with time spent indoors and increasing indoor air pollution—factors like formaldehyde that’s used in glued wood products, the very strong correlation with asthma for example.
The food allergy epidemic is the third wave and that really did start to take off in the 1990s as you pointed out. Between 1995 and 2010, the prevalence of food allergies in children in the US and the UK tripled. That’s an astonishing rise. Now that probably has to do with changes in the bacteria living in our bodies.
The bacterial communities that populate our bodies have gotten a lot of publicity lately. They’re called the microbiome. And there have been progressive changes in the human microbiome, especially in the gut, but also in other parts of the body on the skin and the respiratory tract. And these are associated with, in particular, the food allergy epidemic. So it’s been layer after layer of environmental factors.
Wendy Myers: Do you feel that the introduction of genetically modified foods in the 1990s play a role in increased prevalence of allergies and asthma?
Dr. Leo Galland: Yeah, I definitely do think that GMO foods play a role. But I don’t think it’s necessarily the genetic modification of the food in a direct way. The reason that they make GMO food, especially in industrialized countries is to make them resistant to pesticides and herbicides. So Monsanto is the pioneer, if you can use that term. They’re the Darth Vader of pioneers in this area.
Wendy Myers: The evil.
Dr. Leo Galland: Right. And so they have developed soy beans for example and other foods that are resistant to the effects of Roundup, of glyphosate.
Now glyphosate is an herbicide. If you’re growing crops that are genetically modified to resist glyphosate, then that enables an industrial approach to agriculture. You can do aerial spraying or machine spraying with glyphosate field after field. All the weeds die, but the crops that are glyphosate-resistant survive and those are the ones that you want to harvest.
The problem is when you harvest those crops, they’re all contaminated with glyphosate. So people who are eating these genetically modified foods are now ingesting the herbicides, which have antibiotic effects that those foods are contaminated with. And those impact on the bacteria in your gut.
There have been studies done that have shown that exposure, that if you take chickens for example, expose them to glyphosate, they develop the kind of gut bacterial imbalances that are found in people with allergies and other types of inflammation.
Wendy Myers: Yes, that leads to my next question. It’s that allergies start in the gut. And we’re hearing, a lot these days, that the majority of your immune system, even up to 90% is found in your gut. So what role does the gut play in predisposing one to allergies or causing allergies?
Dr. Leo Galland: Okay. The gut plays a really important role. Probably about 70% of the cells in your immune system are found in the lining of the small intestine. And the bacteria that live in the small intestine create a boot camp through your immune system. They train your immune cells that are there to react in a particular way.
These cells them enter your bloodstream. They travel throughout your body where they communicate messages to other parts of your immune system and then return to your gut. And the gut really plays a primary role in allergies and many inflammatory disorders, even ones that are not directly allergic. And it happens because the dysregulation of immune function that occurs because of the disrupted gut microbiome impairs normal immune balance.
So there are cells that prevent immune responses from getting out of hand. They’re called regulatory T cells or T-regs. And the gut is an important source of T-regs. And the bacteria in your gut are very important in the development of T-reg cells. And I go into that in quite a bit of detail in The Allergy Solution.
But there are other factors that work together with the bacteria, nutritional and dietary factors that enhance regulatory T cell activity which then help to down-regulate allergy.
So there’s a multipronged approach in the allergy solution, which includes improving nutrition, especially enhancing your consumption of those nutrients that help T-regs to function. Balancing your gut flora and diet has a huge impact on that. And we can talk about the dietary factors that are important. Enhancing detoxification, that brings us back to nutritional factors. And avoiding, as much as you can, environmental toxins, indoors especially where you have the greatest level of control.
Wendy Myers: And let’s talk about leaky gut and what in plays in allergies. So can you tell us what leaky gut is and how that contributes to the immune system malfunctioning and reacting to foods and allergens?
Dr. Leo Galland: Sure. Your gut is a barrier, just the way that your skin is a barrier. Your skin is a barrier to the outside world while the lining of your gut is a barrier to the hundred trillion bacteria that live there, bacteria that come in from food, toxins that come in from food, undigested protein.
And that barrier is created by the lining cells and that’s just one cell thick to microscopic barrier. The mucus that covers it, some of the antibodies that are found in the mucus and then the immune system that underlies that lining, their function to sample whatever is in your gut environment, educate the rest of the immune system, allow nutrients that need to come in and keep whatever toxins that can be excluded out. And among those toxins are whole bacteria and large food protein that are especially allergenic.
Now, with leaky gut, there’s a breakdown in that barrier. And undesirable substances are able to sneak mostly between the cells. If my fingers represent the cells that line your gut, normal absorption for the most part is through the cell. With leaky gut, the cells are not glued so tightly together and molecules are able to enter your body between the cells.
Now there are many factors that can contribute to leaky gut, but one of the most important factors for preventing that are the bacteria that normally live in your gut. Lacto bacilli and bifidobacteria in particular play an important role in maintaining normal integrity of the gut lining and preventing leakiness.
Wendy Myers: Great. Yeah. That’s a huge problem with all the clients that I work with. And there’s such a plethora of information about leaky gut in the blogosphere because it’s a huge problem. There are so many things working against our gut function and gut bacteria. So it’s not surprising that so many people have allergies and food sensitivities and the like.
Wendy Myers: So you talked about toxins. I talk a lot on the show about toxins and detoxification and how they affect our health. So what can people do about all the toxins in their daily life that are contributing to allergies? You’re also talking about mission detoxible. What do you mean by that?
Dr. Leo Galland: Okay. Yeah, mission detoxible is a chapter in The Allergy Solution. And a lot of that information was gathered by my son Jonathan who’s the co-author and who loves to talk about that area. He came up with fascinating studies.
The first thing that you can do is take check of your environment. The environment that you can’t control is toxic enough. There’s automotive pollution, which plays a major role in allergy, even more so than industrial pollution.
There are things going on outdoors that you can’t control.
Your home should be a sanctuary, not only emotional and spiritual sanctuary, but a chemical sanctuary. Don’t import toxins into your home. You don’t have to.
Now, there are at least a hundred thousand chemicals that we bring into our homes with unknowingly, so you need knowledge to avoid those. Chief on the list is formaldehyde, which is an irritant, a carcinogen, a major factor in allergy. The sources of formaldehyde include particle board and pressed wood and kind of glued wood products.
There’s been a dramatic increase in the levels of formaldehyde in home air over the past 40 to 50 years and it’s mostly due to the kinds of the furnishings and cleaning products and things like that and building materials. So to the extent that you can avoid the use of formaldehyde-containing products are better.
And if you do have things that are made of particle board or pressed wood—and people do have them because frankly they’re cheaper—make sure that they’re sealed all the way around. I’ve seen a lot of these products that are sealed with a laminate on the side that you see, but the side that you don’t see is just exposed to the air. Temperature and humidity causes the glue to break down and release formaldehyde.
So substances like that, new clothing or new fabrics are stiffened with formaldehyde. Allow them off-gas or wash them if they’re washable to get it out. Keep those out of your home.
The agents that are used to prevent infection, things like triclosan and other antiseptics that are in personal care products, they’re very dangerous. They play a major role in contributing not only to allergy, but to infection even though they’re supposed to prevent infection. Use natural products and don’t bring that stuff into your home.
We have a checklist of things that you can do very simply and you can start doing it right away to decrease your toxic exposures at home.
The other side of the coin though is of course, it’s important to decrease the exposures because they are unnecessary. But start building up those nutrients that help your body detoxify and get rid of the toxins.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I think that the household cleaner manufacturers have really done a number on people’s psych and trying to promote and sell their household cleaning products like Lysol, like triclosan-containing products and the like and trying to convince people that germs are really, really bad and they need to be destroyed and killed. Oh, but the chemicals are okay and completely safe.
People need to be chemical-phobes, not germ-phobes and yes, I’m talking to the germ-phobes out there. You have it completely backwards. You’ve got to be very, very worried about all of these chemicals you’re bringing home and introducing in the form of perfumes and laundry detergents and fragrances and our personal care products.
Dr. Leo Galland: Yeah, right. The fragrances are really important. There was this amazing study down at the University of Washington where they sample the air coming out of a dryer, like a regular home dryer. And they put those fragrance strips into the dryer that people are using.
Wendy Myers: The dryer sheets?
Dr. Leo Galland: The dryer sheets, yeah.
Wendy Myers: Oh, I hate those.
Dr. Leo Galland: I mean the chemicals that came out of that. I mean it was hundreds of toxic chemicals coming out of that. Sometimes when I’m walking on the street in New York, some of the apartment houses have laundry rooms in the basement that vent the outside air. I have to cross the street.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I think people don’t realize that dryer sheets are probably some of the most toxic chemicals besides bleach maybe that they’re putting in their home. It’s just crazy. And their sheets smell like it and their clothing and they’re just breathing that in. I actually don’t allow people in my home if they are wearing perfume or plagued with dryer sheet chemicals in their clothing.
Dr. Leo Galland: We tried that. It doesn’t always work.
Wendy Myers: No, it doesn’t.
Dr. Leo Galland: Some people are so unconscious of the fragrances, the artificial fragrances that they’re exposed to. They don’t even notice them anymore.
That work at the University of Washington, what was really interesting or a second aspect of it was the research that did it was unable to get funding in this country after the initial study was published and had to move to Australia to continue her research.
The industry that’s involved with artificial scents is so strong. I mean there are so many lobbies that these chemical industries have. It’s really hard to get research done here in the US.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, it’s really, really sad because the pharmaceutical companies and the big industry people, Johnson & Johnson and these other companies that make these very toxic products that are making us sick, they have a lot of power. So they do suppress university research.
Dr. Leo Galland: Yeah. And of course, it’s only going to get worse over the next few years because restrictions, government restrictions on industry are going to be pulled back significantly. Not that they’ve been strong enough to begin with. What is lacking is a sense of responsibility to the society and the environment.
Wendy Myers: But the problem is also consumers. They’re not educated and they want products that smell good. They buy products that last for five years on the shelves that have parabens and other preservatives. And they want those sudsy shampoos that have the other toxic chemicals that make them have a rich lather and on and on and on, the other features.
Dr. Leo Galland: But there is a lot of brainwashing that has created that generation of consumers.
Wendy Myers: Absolutely. Yeah. And so let’s talk about diet. In your book, you posed that fast food causes allergies. I love that. So can you explain that to us?
Dr. Leo Galland: Fast food causes allergies by at least two mechanisms, maybe three. One is it has a real disrupting effect on the gut microbes. And the microbes in your gut, they’re a hundred trillion perhaps and they’re maybe a thousand species. What really creates health there is the diversity of microbes.
It’s phenomenon of biodiversity. And I compare it to a rainforest because it is very much like a rainforest. Health in almost any environment is supported by biodiversity and when that diversity of organisms starts to diminish, that’s usually associated with damage to the environment and it tends to snowball. And diversity of microbes in the gut protects against allergy, even more so than any specific one microbe.
So there’s this really interesting single case study that I talk about in the PBS specials. It’s not mentioned in the book because it actually came out after I had finished writing the book. But there’s a public television show on the allergy solution, which still airs during the pledge seasons. It started airing last June.
And there’s a researcher in the UK who’s writing a book about the effect of diet on health and he’s a geneticist actually, but he was working with colleagues who are looking at the microbiome. And he decided to do an experiment and he got his son, a college student, to do it.
He told his son that for a week, he could eat all the meals he wanted at McDonald’s and he would pay for them. And so this kid was really psyched, all of his friends were jealous. He ate three meals a day. It was like Super Size Me. The first few days, he felt okay. By the end of the week, he was feeling awful.
His father had one condition, that he had to check, collect a specimen for a microbiome check before this week and at the end of the week. In the course of just a week, he lost 50% of the bacterial species in his gut by taking all his meals at McDonald’s. So fast food just depletes the beneficial bacteria. It doesn’t feed them.
One of the reasons it doesn’t feed them is it’s low in fiber and those bacteria really need fiber. And the other reason probably has to do with these chemicals in foods called polyphenols of which the main ones are the bioflavonoids. I’ve been a big fan of bioflavonoids for 30 years. It turns out that flavonoids, aside from all the other good things they do, which I’ll talk about in a minute, also act like conductors or growth promoters to the gut microbes and they help encourage diversity and growth of beneficial gut bacteria.
This is an area that I’m actively researching now because I think there are specific types of flavonoids found in specific fruits in particular that have especially potent effects, fruits like pomegranate and cranberry and blueberry. So this is an area of hot ongoing research.
So that’s one impact of a fast food diet. The other is just the lack of nutrients that are needed for immune balance. Flavonoids are very important there because of their direct effects on immunity. But there are also other nutrients, magnesium in particular. A very important anti-allergic, anti-inflammatory nutrient tends to be really low on a fast food diet. And omega-3 fats, the kind that are found in healthy cold water fish or flaxseed and chia seed.
In The Allergy Solution, we put together a dietary program that does two things. Number one, it allows you to identify what foods you need to avoid because those foods don’t have a good effect on your body even if they might be healthy for somebody else. Actually, there are three things.
Number two is to eliminate those food components that are toxic to your body and that deplete beneficial bacteria. And number three is to nourish your cells and your gut microbes with specific foods that are especially good for encouraging the function of T reg cells and encouraging bacterial diversity in your gut.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I can definitely relate to that because I suffered from allergies, really bad allergies as a child and teenager. And my diet consisted of fast food and sugar, so no big surprise there. I always thought, “Oh, I just outgrew the allergies.” No, I started eating more healthy foods and vegetables, beginning in high school and just caring more about my diet and my body. I think I outgrew them because my gut bacteria are probably repaired.
Dr. Leo Galland: That’s a great news that you can turn it around. None of this is written in stone. We have the ability with a little bit of education and making the right choices to totally reverse the immune imbalance that underlies allergic disorders.
Wendy Myers: I lived on allergy medications as a teen. Every single day, I took them and I was falling asleep on my desk. Really unfortunately, high school was just this haze for me because I was on Benadryl every single day. And so I always wondered if taking them on a daily basis really had some health consequence. What are some of the problems that you found with using allergy medications long term?
Dr. Leo Galland: First of all, they don’t treat the condition. All they do is suppress the symptoms or some of the symptoms. There’s been some data looking at the effects of Benadryl in particular and other anti-histamines that enter into the brain on cognitive function. And there’s an increase risk of cognitive decline with age associated with the use of allergy meds.
But the antihistamines are not the only problem contributing to this allergy epidemic. I think among the most toxic drugs that are widely used and available over the counter are the acid-suppressing drugs like Prilosec or omeprazole and other drugs that are used for treating heartburn.
Wendy Myers: That’s a slow death or a slow death by malnutrition.
Dr. Leo Galland: Yeah. They do so many adverse things to your body. I mean I’ve been railing against them for 25 years, probably 20 years that they’ve been around. And for the longest time, I couldn’t get any mainstream docs to say, “Oh, there are many problems with this.” That has changed a lot over the past several years because the scientific data has just become undeniable.
They increased the rate of fractures in osteoporosis. They may contribute to cognitive decline. They cause malnutrition, especially for vitamin B12, which may have something to do with the cognitive decline. They increased your risk of pneumonia and a various types of gut infection, some of them really serious.
And with regard to allergy, they actually contribute to allergies and the weight gain. And the allergy connection has been very well-studied. The allergy connection may explain the weight gain that’s associated with their use.
But one of the things that help to make food not allergenic is the acid in your stomach that starts to break down the protein. You suppress that and the protein that you eat and medications that you take become much more likely to cause allergies.
There’s a study done in the hospital where people taking these acid suppressors were three times as likely to experience an allergic reaction to medication in the hospital as people not taking acid suppressors. And the level of allergic antibodies to foods increases dramatically if you’ve been on these drugs called proton-pump inhibitors for at least four weeks.
Wendy Myers: That’s very, very interesting. There are also some toxic metals like mercury and arsenic that are also working as proton-pump inhibitors. So I guess that can directly contribute to allergies as well.
Dr. Leo Galland: Interesting. Oh yeah, they definitely do play a role in allergy. I wasn’t aware of the proton-pump inhibitor connection. They do dysregulate immune function.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s all I do all day. It’s to pretty much study toxins and how they cause various health conditions and disease. It’s amazing when I knew to uncover.
Is there any benefit or is there still issues with like Benadryl-type medications that cause drowsiness versus Zyrtec and Claritin that don’t cause drowsiness? Do you warn against people taking those long term as well?
Dr. Leo Galland: Dealing with an illness by suppressing its symptoms rather than getting to the cause is never the desirable effect. Are there some patients or some people who are going to have a hard time weaning themselves from a suppressive medication? Sure.
What are the risks? Well, with Claritin, which doesn’t enter the brain, it’s probably less than with Benadryl or Allegra or even Zyrtec, which can get into the brain.
Wendy Myers: So let’s talk about natural anti-histamines. Sometimes people have to take something to improve their symptoms because they can be really, really miserable. What are your recommendations for natural substances in nature that work as anti-histamines?
Dr. Leo Galland: Flavonoids are my favorite anti-histamines and the most potent of these and easiest to find as a supplement is quercetin. Quercetin normally occurs in many of the foods that we eat, oats and apples. It’s found in oak trees. That’s where its name comes from.
And there’s a lot of research on quercetin. The main limiting factor is how well absorbed is it. It tends to be better absorbed with food than on an empty stomach, generally with a light meal rather than a large meal. But I certainly recommend quercetin to people who are looking for a natural anti-histamine.
The other supplement that has really been helpful is an amino acid called N acetylcysteine or NAC. That plus quercetin has had really very nice anti-histaminic effects in patients or allergy quenching effects because I don’t think it’s only the histamine blocking that these things do. They’re very potent anti-oxidants and as anti-oxidants, they help to quench allergic reactions.
Wendy Myers: Interesting. I know bee pollen also has quercetin in it. I don’t know if there are high enough levels to make a difference, but some people do seem to be helped with their allergies with bee pollen.
Dr. Leo Galland: The thing with pollen is choosing the right pollen, if you have pollen allergies—
Wendy Myers: Not going to work.
Dr. Leo Galland: No, no. If you eat that pollen and don’t breathe it in out of season, it may actually work. There’s amazing study—because you see, the gut has this ability to create allergic tolerance because of the T reg cells in the gut.
There was this great study done in Norway. There are a lot of birch trees in Norway and birch pollen allergy is a big problem there in the early spring, which is when birch trees pollinate, like March and April. These researchers did a study with birch pollen honey and they added extra birch pollen to it just to make sure it really had the birch pollen allergens in it.
And they fed it to people during the fall and winter. And there was a 60% reduction in the symptoms of allergy in season when the birch pollen was in the air. They didn’t have them continue it in season. Now, birch pollen cross-react with a lot of different foods. So people who are allergic to birch pollen may have problems with apples and nuts and a wide variety of foods. I go through the list in The Allergy Solution.
Foods that are ordinarily healthy and would be good for other people, eating those foods, especially in birch pollen season might cause a variety of symptoms. The most common would be an itchy throat. And so there’s a rationale for eating those foods out of season and avoiding them in season to diminish their symptoms of allergy. And there may be other ingredients in pollen.
Propolis, which is something that comes from bees that they use to glue their hives together, has immune-boosting and anti-allergic effects. But there are two other things. One of them is the food. The other could be a food.
Broccoli sprouts, there’s this amazing study done at UCLA. And I’m sure you have the same experience, Wendy. The great thing about really being a committed researcher and looking at the medical literature is you find really fascinating research that is being done in major medical centers throughout the world that nobody in mainstream medicine seems to know about. But the academic credentials that this research has is just as good as all of the drug research that’s being done, maybe even better.
So these UCLA researchers did an experiment with pollen allergy and diesel exhaust. Now, it’s well-known that if you’re exposed to diesel exhaust, that’s pretty irritating. And in fact, diesel exhaust exposure increases the risk of asthma and allergic diseases.
So they took people who had allergies and they first exposed them to diesel exhaust fumes in a chamber. And it was the level that you would get if you lived in LA and were standing under an overpass by a freeway.
Wendy Myers: I bet the participants were very thankful for that.
Dr. Leo Galland: Yeah, right. Of course, that was annoying to the people to begin with, but I guess they’re being paid for it. Then they exposed them to the pollens that they were allergic to. The diesel exhaust really amped up the allergic reactions to the pollen.
So then they started feeding them broccoli sprouts. Within three days—and the amount of broccoli sprouts that they were giving them was the equivalent of about eating six ounces of raw broccoli a day. Within three days, they were no longer being affected by the diesel exhaust. Their allergens have really come down. They could measure these changes in the secretions from their respiratory tract. It was an antioxidant and detoxing effect, and it really
calmed down their allergic reactivity.
Wendy Myers: Very interesting.
Dr. Leo Galland: So broccoli sprouts—you can get commercial broccoli sprout powder, which is organic. It’s another anti-allergic food. It’s one of my favorites.
Wendy Myers: I’m going to go out and get some of that right now because I’m in Los Angeles and I don’t know what’s going on with the smog, but myself and two of my friends I had talked to were sneezing and having allergy symptoms. What is going on?
Dr. Leo Galland: Yeah, you guys should be living on this stuff. In fact, I recently came across a study from China where there’s humongous pollution and the broccoli sprouts were helpful in preventing and protecting people from the effects of air pollution even in China.
Wendy Myers: Wow. They can work there. They can work anywhere.
Dr. Leo Galland: Right, I would say. That’s like the ultimate stress test, that and New Delhi.
And the other thing is probiotics. And what really blew me away as I was doing the background research for The Allergy Solution is the large number of studies showing beneficial effects of probiotics for nasal allergies, allergic rhinitis. So I’m not even talking about food allergies. I’m talking about pollen allergies, dust allergy, dust mite allergy. So this is an effect on the immune system.
Lactobacillus bacteria seem to have the best effect. And there is a particular species called lactobacillus paracasei, which was tested more than any of the others. It takes about three weeks of exposure and you start getting a protective effect. In some studies, it might have taken as long as eight weeks.
And the improvement in allergic symptoms was not due to an anti-histamine effect. It was due to an effect on the immune system. It was the ability of these probiotics to improve immune function in an anti-allergic fashion. And of course, fermented foods can do that if you don’t want to take a pill.
One of my favorite lactobacillus probiotics is lactobacillus plantarum. That’s in sauerkraut. It gets its name because it grows naturally on plants. And so eat sauerkraut every day.
Wendy Myers: I hosted the Medicinal Supplements Summit and I was interviewing someone, Jay Davidson, about probiotics and he suggested that you should rotate probiotics. If you take a supplement of probiotics, get a new bottle every single time as we have, you said, a thousand species in our gut. You don’t want to be taking the same strains all the time with the same brands. It’s good to do rotation. What are your thoughts on that?
Dr. Leo Galland: Possibly. I mean I’m not going to definitely endorse that because the probiotic area and the whole microbiome area is really complicated. In fact, understanding gut microbe is like rocket science meets quantum physics because the interactions are tremendous.
And sometimes there’s one organism or one species that acts because of the way it impacts on the community of microbes. I call these Alexander microbes and I’m thinking about Alexander the Great. So Alexander the Great led an army that conquered the world from Sicily to Afghanistan 2300 years ago. Of course, he didn’t do it by himself. It was the army that did it. But without Alexander, the army wouldn’t have been able to do. He was the leader that was needed for that to happen.
There are microbes in your gut that act like Alexander. They organize the whole army of microbes. And it may be that a single species actually winds up being more important than we realize because that species is the one that is secreting substances that interact with other bacteria that create the biodiversity.
There was this another amazing study that was done at UCSF. It was done with mice and I really quote my studies, but I happen to like this one. What the scientist did was they looked at the effect of dust on the allergic potential of mice.
Now, it’s well-known that if you have a pet at home, especially a dog that goes outdoors—indoor pets won’t really do this, but outdoor pets, a decreased likelihood of allergy. So they collected the dust from a home, in which there was a dog, an outdoor dog, and they fed it to a bunch of mice. And they collected the dust from a home that did not have a dog and they fed it to the same breed of mice.
And then they tried to see how easy it was to make these mice allergic. And they found that the mice that had been fed the dog dust were very resistant to developing allergy, whereas the mice that had been fed the non-dog dust were easily made allergic.
So then they housed the mice together because mice will share their gut bacteria because of their feeding habits. And that was able to—the dog dust mice, if you want to call them that, were able to overcome the allergy potential of the other mice.
When they started looking at the gut microbes of these mice, they found two things. One was that there was much greater microbial diversity as we’d expect in the stool of the mice that had been eating the dog dust as part of their meals than the other mice. But there was one particular species called lactobacillus johnsonii that was the standout difference.
So then they isolated the lactobacillus johnsonii and they fed it to ordinary mice and it did exactly what the dog dust did. It increased diversity of the microbes and resistance to development of allergy. So it is possible that there are specific species of bacteria that actually act like generals of the bacterial population and organize everything in the way you wanted organized. So merely having more species or more strains may not be what you need.
Wendy Myers: Okay, very, very interesting. Thank you for explaining that. And so I have a question that I like to ask to all of my guests. What do you think is the most pressing health issue in the world today? And I apologize for putting you on the spot.
Dr. Leo Galland: I think it’s the obesity epidemic and the diabesity epidemic. I mean it’s having a devastating effect. It had started in the US and it’s a reflection of our eating habits. But it does involve gut bacteria and allergy as well and I’m going to get to that in a moment.
And then it started spreading to Europe, to Asia, Latin America. Right now, in Mexico, it’s their major public health problem. In fact, it turns out that in other parts of the world, people are genetically more susceptible to diabesity than many people in the United States. So it’s galloping around the world and it’s getting more serious.
I really think the future of the human race, aside from other problems that are related to the environment, is going to be very much impacted on whether we’re able to get control of the obesity epidemic.
Now, one of the things that’s fascinating is the length between obesity and allergy. Obesity, first of all, let me say that obesity is definitely impacted by gut bacteria. And nobody has quite determined exactly what the patterns of bacteria are that are necessary for protecting against obesity because most of the studies have been in mice and humans are very different from mice in many ways. The natural diet of a mouse is a low fat vegan diet, which is not necessarily the natural diet of the human. Humans tend to be omnivores. So you can’t necessarily extrapolate from what you find in a mouse to what you find in a human.
But gut bacteria do have profound effects on metabolism and inflammation and the tendency to gain weight. And it is, in some way, tied into allergies as well. People who have allergic disorders are more likely to be overweight or to gain weight. People who are overweight to begin with are more likely to develop allergies.
And the cells that are involved in allergic reactions, which are called MEST cells—those are the most primitive of the cells involved in allergy. Those cells promote weight gain when they’re activated. This research was done at Harvard. And if you take a mouse and you deplete it of MEST cells, it won’t gain weight no matter what you feed it.
So there is something to do, there’s some relationship between allergy, the activity of MEST cells and the tendency to gain weight, which makes the allergy epidemic and the obesity epidemic very much related to one another.
Wendy Myers: Very, very, very interesting. Thank you so much for sharing that very unique perspective on obesity epidemic. And I think also to a lot of the toxins on our environment that are obese-genic also, it’s such a multi-factorial problem why two-thirds of United States is overweight. It’s very scary and saddening at the same time.
Wendy Myers: So Dr. Galland, thank you so much for coming on the show. Can you tell the listeners more about where they can find you and where they can get your book?
Dr. Leo Galland: The Allergy Solution is available in Amazon, Barnes & Noble, many local bookstores. I have a website, DrGalland.com. There’s a lot of information there as well.
There’s a public television show called The Allergy Solution, which will be airing on some stations nationwide during March. It’s already played, shown about a thousand times in the US and we’ve had great responses to it. And I practice medicine in New York City. I have an office down in Greenwich Village, an area that I love.
Wendy Myers: Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on the show and congratulations on the PBS special. That’s huge. That’s great.
Dr. Leo Galland: Thanks. It was really a pleasure to talk to you today.
Wendy Myers: And everyone, if you want to learn more about me, you can go to myersdetox.com. You can learn more about my detox healing program at MineralPower.com. Thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast.
