The Inflammation Equation: What Drives Inflammation And How To Fix It
with Dr. Tom O’Bryan
Dr. Wendy Myers
Welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers, and on this podcast, we talk about everything related to heavy metal and chemical toxicity. We talk about more advanced topics in health than other podcasts, ’cause I get bored talking about the basics. So I’m doing this show for myself. We talk about bioenergetics, emotional trauma, biohacking, and all kinds of really interesting topics. Today, we’re gonna be talking to my friend Dr. Tom O’Bryan about inflammation. He recently filmed a documentary called The Inflammation Equation, talking to 60 to 70 doctors all over the world.
He met them in person to film them, and he found out some really interesting things about inflammation, how it’s the main driver of the top 15 diseases that kill people. We’re gonna be talking about the underlying root causes of inflammation, one of those being heavy metals and chemicals that stimulate your immune system. Inflammation is essentially an overreactive immune system. It’s reacting where it should sometimes, as for wounds, for example, to heal them. But other times it’s an overreaction where we see an autoimmune disease. We see in food sensitivity reactions. We see in MCA or mast cell activation syndrome that it produces really miserable symptoms.
So we’re gonna be talking about all of the underlying root causes of inflammation, including gluten and glyphosate. That’s an herbicide found in gluten and all about autoimmunity. It’s just a really, really good show on what you can do to reduce your inflammation. Our guest today is Dr. Tom O’Bryan, an internationally recognized expert on gluten sensitivity, autoimmune disease, and the environmental triggers that drive chronic illness. For more than four decades, Dr. O’Bryan has been at the forefront of identifying hidden immune triggers, particularly non-celiac gluten sensitivity, in their connection to autoimmune disease and systemic inflammation. He’s a clinician, researcher, educator, and paradigm shifter who challenges conventional thinking and empowers people to think differently about chronic disease, environmental toxins, and immune activation.
He continues to lead conversations about the root causes of illness and how simple, consistent shifts, even just one hour a week, can dramatically change the direction of our health. You can learn more about Dr. O’Bryan’s work at thedoctor.com. He’s got the best URL of any health website. It’s thedoctor.com. Dr. Tom, thank you so much for joining us.
Dr. Tom O’Bryan
Oh, thank you. It’s always a pleasure to hang out with you.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started in the health field?
Dr. Tom O’Bryan
That would be 46 years ago, I was an intern, and my ex and I could not get pregnant. I called the seven most famous holistic doctors I’d ever heard of because I’d started reading about holistic healthcare during my education, and they would say, well, do you know what a category one is? No. Learn category one. I put a program together, and we were pregnant in six weeks, and we were living in married housing. And our neighbors had gone through artificial insemination at the time, and nothing had worked. They’d asked if I’d work with them, and they were pregnant in three months.
So now we’re four months pregnant, hot to trot, just telling all of our friends, and our friend would say, you know what? My sister has had three miscarriages. She’s in Milwaukee. Can she drive down to Chicago and talk to you, please? So I started seeing patients out of my dorm room. We lived on campus. You’re not supposed to do that, but I did. We opened our practice with a much bigger picture of healthcare and addressing the underlying triggers, which is just such a common language that people use today. You can really tell as a patient or a client, if you’re a practitioner, your health coach, your medical doctor, your chiropractor, your nutritionist, if they’re really looking at underlying triggers or do they have a new technique or a new laser therapy or something else that’s got great results, and they’re trying to put that one on you.
And the way that you can tell is if they say to you, well, the first thing we have to do for your symptoms is identify why you are inflamed, because the CDC tells us that 14 of the 15 top causes of death are chronic inflammatory diseases. It’s always inflammation. Unless it’s acute trauma, an accident, or something, it’s always inflammation. It doesn’t matter if it’s Alzheimer’s or diabetes, reproductive disorders or migraine, it doesn’t matter. They’re all inflammation.
So if you’re dealing with someone who’s including looking at what’s the trigger for all of this, if they’re thinking that way, if they’re talking to you that way, then you know you’re in the hands of someone who’s thinking the big picture.
Dr. Wendy Myers
What is inflammation exactly? I think people hear that a lot. It’s thrown around a lot. But what exactly is it?
Dr. Tom O’Bryan
That’s a really good question. Your immune system is the armed forces in your body. It’s there to protect you. There’s an army, a navy, an air force, a Marine Corps, and a Coast Guard. We call ’em IgG, IgA, IgE, IgM cytokines. They’re all different branches of the armed forces, and their sole job is to protect you. And if you don’t need protection at the moment, your immune system’s very quiet. It’s in the background, it’s kind of dormant. Like the soldiers at Buckingham Palace with those big hats, they’re just standing there, they’re not doing anything, they’re dormant.
But when your immune system gets activated, it gets activated to protect you. So the million-dollar question is, what is it trying to protect you from? And when you identify, is it heavy metals? Is it mold? Is it a toxic accumulation of pesticides? Here’s an example. At a French fertility clinic, they published this paper about a year and a half, almost two years ago. When they do blood tests on the men of the couples that are coming in, if they have measurable levels of glyphosate, it’s a chemical that’s used on most of our produce now, our fruits and vegetables. If the men have measurable levels of glyphosate in their blood, the glyphosate level is fourfold higher in their semen because glyphosate accumulates in the testicles in testosterone-loving tissue.
If glyphosate is accumulating in the testicles, it damages the sperm, and the immune system gets activated to fight this toxic chemical that’s not supposed to be there. And the inflammation that results from the activated immune system damages the sperm is called fragmented sperm. What’s fragmented sperm DNA? Babies get their genes, one from the mother, one from the father. So do you have blue eyes or brown eyes? Are you gonna be tall or short in every cell of your body? The development of our bodies is controlled by the DNA, which is nothing but a blueprint. But when you have fragmented sperm, your blueprint is damaged. You’ve lost a few pages of the blueprint, so the cell reproduces, but it reproduces as a damaged cell, an incomplete cell.
In that paper that I was just quoting, if men had measurable levels of glyphosate in their sperm, if that sperm was successful to impregnate the egg and they did in vitro fertilization and was successful, there was a 146% increased risk of miscarriages. If dad had fragmented sperm, if dad had glyphosate levels in their testicles, 146%, not 10%, not 20%, 146% increased miscarriages. And the fertility clinics say, well, you know, we’ll have to try again. And that’s more stress for the couple, another $10,000, $20,000, because insurance doesn’t pay for this, and it’s really the accumulated amount of toxic chemicals in dad’s body that contributed to the problem that developed.
That all stems back to your immune system trying to protect you from this foreign in invader, glyphosate, creating the inflammation that defragments the sperm. It’s always inflammation, but nobody thinks this way. So do you wanna know if you’ve got a big picture doctor or health coach or nutritionist that’s going to help you? If they don’t ask the question in some form or another, well, where’s all this inflammation coming from? If they’re not thinking, if they’re not including that in their thinking, they’re doing what I call shotgun medicine. Well, let’s try this drug, or, well, let’s try this nutrition. Well, let’s try this diet. Well, let’s try this laser therapy for your thyroid problem.
All of those protocols are so helpful. They’re really worth considering to help you feel better right now, but they have to be including, where’s all this coming from? I think I went off tangent on how did I get into this field
Dr. Wendy Myers
No, that was a perfect introduction to inflammation
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Dr. Wendy Myers
So what are some of the other triggers? You mentioned toxins as triggers. Food sensitivities are a big one. Can you go into some of the other triggers of inflammation?
Dr. Tom O’Bryan
Of course. Well, in the food category, the most common food is wheat. And that’s with or without celiac disease. There are 62 different components of the proteins of wheat that can activate an immune response, not just gluten. Gluten’s important to test for to see if your immune system’s fighting, of course, but there are many, many more. So if your doctor is just testing for gluten sensitivity, and that’s important to test for, but it often comes back with a false negative, saying there’s no problem because the immune system’s being activated by the wheat amylase trypsin inhibitors or by the wheat gluteomorphins or the pro-dynorphins. I don’t wanna geek out here, but the point is that there many different components
Dr. Wendy Myers
But we’re here to geek out Tom.
Dr. Tom O’Bryan
The point is there are many different components of wheat that may be activating your immune system. 50% of card-carrying celiacs don’t have a measurable sensitivity to gluten. But wait, they’re celiacs. That’s the only autoimmune disease everybody is certain is from wheat. But the test for gluten’s negative. Well why is that? Because it’s not gluten for that person. It’s the glut morphines or the amylase trypsin inhibitors or some other components. So you need to do a test that’s more comprehensive and that test is called the wheat zoomer because you zoom in on the problem, it looks at 26 different things, and that’s anywhere in the world.
Now I’ve not been to the Far East, but I teach in Rome, London, Spain, and Hungary. I’m going to Hungary in a couple of weeks. In all the laboratories I’ve seen in the western world, there’s no tests that come anywhere near the wheat zoomer. And it’s just a finger prick and it’s so very, very accurate. 97 to 100 percent accurate. So it could be wheat, that’s the most common food. It could be dairy, it could be lectins. The Plant Paradox was a very famous book a couple of years ago, and he brought out a lot of good science about the category of foods called lectins and how they may be a problem for people. My problem with the book and the author of the book is that he says nobody should eat lectins. And that’s nonsense. It’s a food that’s on the planet, that’s here for us. But no one should eat lectins if your immune system is fighting lectins.
Dr. Wendy Myers
It’s like half, maybe 50% of people roughly are sensitive, right?
Dr. Tom O’Bryan
That’s right. So it’s valid. It’s really important to check for, and that’s called the lectin zoomer. There’s the dairy zoomer and they’re very comprehensive tests. But the rule of thumb is in God we trust all others require data. If you don’t have the data, you’re guessing. You’re in the category of what I refer to as shotgun medicine. You throw something up on the wall and hope it sticks. Well, let’s try this and see how you do. So in the category of foods, wheat is the most common. Lectins, dairy, soy, they’re all fairly common that you might have a problem with environmental triggers including mold. So commonly the tests that we do called the total tox burden looks at 18 heavy metals and 28, they’re called the exhaust of mold mycotoxins.
They’re so small, they’re 1000th the width of a human hair. They’re just so tiny and they get through you when you breathe them in, they go right up through into your brain, they accumulate in the brain. There are 28 mycotoxins from mold. That’s very, very common to see. And 34 or 36, I don’t remember, chemicals, organophosphates, the pesticides, insecticides, rodenticides and fungicides that we’re exposed to every day, which is so very important to see. Is your body accumulating these over the years? Has your body been accumulating? ’cause you’re exposed to a little too much. So with that simple urine test, that also is extremely accurate.
This person has inflammation going on that’s fighting the lead that’s accumulated in their body, or the glyphosate, or the organophosphates or the mold. But if you don’t know, if you don’t check, there’s no way that you’ll ever make the effort to reduce your exposure to whatever it is and to get the stuff outta your body that’s not supposed to be there. So there’s food categories, there’s environment that we’re exposed to, there’s very, very common and close to the top of the list is too many bad guys, not enough good guys in the gut. That’s called dysbiosis, meaning your gut’s outta balance. Well, why would that be so important?
Well, here’s an example. It was Michael Gersin, I think he was at Princeton in 1997. He published the book, The Second Brain, and in The Second Brain, he told us, for every one message from the brain going down, telling the gut what to do, there are nine messages from the gut going up, telling the brain what to do. The ratio is nine to one. What kind of messages, how many hormones is your brain making? They’re not exactly hormones, but for our understanding, we can refer to ’em that way. They’re called neurotransmitters, but how much serotonin, how much melatonin, how much dopamine, how much of all of the hormones, the volume of production is regulated, or the medical word is modulated.
And all that means is, the gut has its hands on the steering wheel where the car’s going. How many hormones your brain makes, you don’t make enough of certain hormones, you get depression. You can’t show me a diagnosed depression patient that doesn’t have an imbalance in hormones, ’cause every single one of them does well. Well, let’s give you some drugs to help with that. The serotonin uptake inhibitors are for anti-depression, but why don’t they have enough serotonin? And when you learn that 90% of the serotonin that controls our brain function, our happiness quotient, if I can use that term, is produced in the gut and stored in the gut well, if you don’t have enough of the good guys in your gut, you don’t make enough serotonin.
If you don’t make enough serotonin, then your brain goes out of balance. Your steering wheel gets turned five degrees and you’re off the road. You got depression or you’ve got schizophrenia. See, I make it sound so simple, right? It’s so complicated to understand all this, but from the patient’s point of view, it’s really simple. My goal, you’ll appreciate this, Wendy, I brought a consultant in a number of years ago and my practice was virtual by then. So I brought everybody to Southern California when I lived in San Diego.
We had a day at my house with this guy, and he charged $10,000. It was like, holy cow. But he came really well recommended. And out of the whole day what really focused us and got me just laser focused for many years afterwards was we came up with the moniker for my website, which is the doctor.com
Dr. Wendy Myers
The best held website name out there
Dr. Tom O’Bryan
Thank you. What’s the moniker? Thedoctor.com: making it easy to do the right thing.
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Dr. Tom O’Bryan
It’s really easy for a patient or a client to do the right thing when you know what the questions are. Now, the answers may be difficult to implement and very sophisticated, but it’s easy. You just need to ask the question, where is my inflammation coming from? First, do I have excessive inflammation? Well, if you’ve got recurring migraines or joint pain or psoriasis or Hashimoto’s, yeah, you’ve got long, chronic, low-grade inflammation. So the question is, where’s it coming from? That’s the easy part. You hold that boundary and then you start looking to see, how do I find out where my inflammation’s coming from?
And that takes time. That’s not easy to do. You’ve written some books that have been very helpful in that arena, but it’s easy to do the right thing. You just stay on track to get the answers to that question. Well, what’s triggering this migraine? Well, the root cause is a methylation problem. No, it’s not. That’s a mechanism. But what’s triggering the methylation problem? Where’s it coming from? It’s always inflammation. You’ll always find it’s inflammation. So we talked about diet, we talked about environmental triggers, the microbiome of the gut, emotional stress, and emotional trauma.
The hormones that are produced with emotional stress and hormone imbalances that occur are a huge component for many people, especially for people who say, I’ve tried everything and nothing works. For those people, there’s often some emotional trauma from very early in life, not in the last week or two, or last month or two, but earlier in life. We all learn to survive as children, to do the best we can. And how we react to particular stress that comes into us as children is how we usually respond to similar types of stress as adults. We have that same line of thinking or that same response mechanism or withdrawal mechanism, whatever it is.
But there’s a history of where it came from, My ex was a Jungian analyst for Carl Jung. There was Freud and Young, two of the big guys. So I learned a lot about how that can contribute to your physical pain. Your inflammation level is the amount of stress you’re carrying. Sleep is a critical component. If you don’t get enough sleep and well, I get enough sleep fine in my sleep, how much do you get? I get five hours a night. No, it’s not enough. And it’s really easy to tell. It’s easy to do the right thing when you know, okay, this is how I explore if sleep is causing inflammation or not. How do you do it? You wear an aura ring, or a ring that measures, there you go.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Love mine
Dr. Tom O’Bryan
It’ll tell you, and you can’t argue with it. In God we trust. All others require data. The AA ring gives you information of the quality of your sleep. And so you can’t argue with it. I get five, six hours a night. Is it refreshing? I’m okay. No, you don’t wanna be okay. You wanna be great. You need to wake up feeling great. My wife has finally agreed to get room-darkening shades. She never grew up with those, and she didn’t want them. There was always a little nightlight in the bedroom.
Dr. Wendy Myers
It makes such a huge difference. It’s shocking.
Dr. Tom O’Bryan
That’s right and it’s shocking. It’s been a couple of weeks now, and she’s already like, wow, I didn’t know that. I wasn’t refreshed in my sleep.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I can imagine high blood sugar, which afflicts so many people, as a massive driver of inflammation.
Dr. Tom O’Bryan
Yes, exactly. That’s next on the checklist. And that’s easy to identify. That’s really so easy. Now, how do you do it? You get a CGM, a continuous glucose monitor. It’s like a nicotine patch. You put it on your arm, it lasts for two weeks, and then you download the app on your phone, and you take the phone. You say, what’s my blood sugar right now? Oh, okay. Then you go eat whatever you eat, and then you check it again and you check it an hour later you say, wow, look at that. What really? If I eat rice, my blood sugar jumps sky high and then it crashes really well. That can’t be right. I’ll try that again in a couple of days and you do it again.
It’s, wow, I’m not gonna eat so much rice anymore. It’s easy to learn how to stabilize blood sugar if you have the feedback mechanisms that are guiding you. So it’s not just a good idea ’cause rice is supposed to be brown, rice is healthier for you. It’s supposed to be a good idea, but for some people it just skyrockets their blood sugar and then they crash.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, it drives me nuts when people’re like, oh, I had my fasting glucose checked, and it was normal. That’s one client for over a year. It’s just that it gives you zero information. You have to do continuous blood sugar monitoring to see how you react after you eat. Do you have continuous blood sugar spikes throughout the night, right? If it affects your sleep, if you have a high carb meal in the evening, there’s so many components to it that you need to look at.
Dr. Tom O’Bryan
And we’re all different. We all respond differently because we’ve all had different histories. I grew up and when my mother went shopping, I’d help her carry the bags back into the house because I’d always look for the cream cheese cake from Sarah Lee. It is always in the bag. And I’d grab it and I’d eat half of it before I got in the house. We all have different histories, which set us up completely. The window of childhood is so important to allow these children’s bodies to develop to their potential, whatever their potential is.
I wanna give you some shocking numbers now. We heard late last year that the CDC gave us more accurate numbers on the frequency of autism, and we now know that one in 34 children in the US is on the autism spectrum. When I came into practice, it was one in 10,000 that most doctors never saw an autistic patient in their entire career. Now they see ’em every week. Well, it’s not because of better testing. There’s no test that confirms autism by itself. It’s really that there are more children whose brains are not functioning properly. And that one in 34 number is done by every state that collects the data in the state and they send it to the government.
The federal government puts it together, one in 34, okay? But in California, it is one boy and 12 is on the autism spectrum by the age of four. So the pregnancy went good, the delivery went good, the baby looked healthy. Parents have a great healthy baby, and the baby does fine. But by the age of three to four, it’s like. What’s wrong with this child? My son’s different from the others. Why isn’t he? And then you see your child’s on the autism spectrum as if it just happened. Now you go back and you read the science that when mom has dysbiosis, too many bad guys, not enough good guys in the gut during the pregnancy.
The myelin, which is the insulation around nerves, never develops to the potential of what it’s supposed to. And the number of nerves, if your nerves are a network of wires, all connected to each other, there’s less wires. When mom has dysbiosis, the baby’s brain does not develop to its genetic potential. We now have the science on this, and you see the pictures of the myelin. You go, wow. And so the baby never had a chance because the baby’s brain did not develop in utero to its genetic potential. Maybe because dad had glyphosate in his testicles and had fragmented sperm, or mom had dysbiosis in her gut, too many bad guys, not enough good guys, causing inflammation.
Oh, and mom had too much accumulated chemicals, and she had what’s called endometritis inflammation on the inside lining of her uterus. 24% of women of childbearing age, when checked, have endometritis. Whether they have symptoms or not, that means there are too many chemicals or too much inflammation on the inside lining where the fertilized egg is supposed to implant, but it’s inflamed there, so there’s more miscarriage.
That’s what we’re up against. And now I’m gonna put one more study into the equation. There’s a doctor, she’s at the University of Montana. She’s from Mexico originally, and she has been focusing on air pollution in Mexico City for the last 25 to 30 years. And she did all the footwork and got the government to do this, where they have monitoring stations in different neighborhoods all around Mexico City. They’ve been following children in Mexico City and their brain function. What they found a number of years ago, the most polluted neighborhoods, because maybe too many freeways or a factory close by, those polluted neighborhoods had dramatically higher percentages of children that had brain function problems.
And she started showing that, gosh, it was 15 years ago, she showed that in Mexico City the neighborhood didn’t matter, every dog had evidence of Alzheimer’s plaque in the brain. Every dog that was 15 or more years old, last year, she published. Unfortunately, if some of these children who had died for some reason, whatever it may be, 203 children, with an average age of 14 from different neighborhoods in Mexico City, 202 out of 203 had evidence of Alzheimer’s. The average age is 14. It’s the air pollution
So you make it easy to do the right thing. It’s very difficult to identify all of these different triggers. You either need to have a healthcare practitioner like you, Wendy, or me, someone who has spent years and hours and hours and hours studying all this, being blown away by it all, but keeping the big picture so that you can investigate where my inflammation is coming from. And it’s not gonna be just gluten. If you are fighting gluten, if your body’s fighting wheat, and you go completely gluten-free, there’s no such thing as cheat days. There is absolutely no such thing. If you go gluten-free, you feel better, great.
But you’re not gonna feel a hundred percent because there’s also gonna be some mold, or there’s gonna be some bacteria in the gut, the dysbiosis in the gut, heavy metals, or our world is so toxic today. It’s almost impossible where it comes back when you do the right test, that there’s only one thing. There are a number of things that have to be addressed.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Let’s talk about Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCA). This is something that is increasingly affecting so many people. It’s a very, very severe immune system reaction. Can you explain what that is exactly?
Dr. Tom O’Bryan
Well, the question is, why is your body getting activated with excess mast cells? Where is this histamine coming from? And there’s no one answer. It’s going to be the same investigative approach of, what are the toxins you’re exposed to? What’s accumulated in your body? My experience has been that with MCAs, it’s never a nutrient deficiency, meaning that all you have to do is give ’em the nutrient, then they’re fine. They can certainly be helped by it. They are helped by a number of different protocols, but you’ve got to identify why the immune system is being activated.
Unfortunately in our world today, I didn’t hear this 10 years ago. Now you’re seeing more and more studies that are referring to this baby’s immune system, which did not develop comprehensively in utero. So they’re much higher on a sensitivity index. They have a much lower threshold of tolerance for anything they’re exposed to because mom was so inflamed when the baby was in utero, developing. We’ve known that for a long time with asthma. If mom had asthma and was taking inhalers, the baby’s lungs wouldn’t develop properly. Or if a baby as an infant or as a child, a toddler or as a child, is taking steroid inhalers, babies’ lungs don’t develop properly. There’s an inhibition in development and for the rest of their lives, they’re compromised to one degree or another.
So we have a generation now that is coming onto the planet, not with a full deck. If I could say it that way. And it’s because moms of childbearing age now, women in their twenties to forties, mid forties, came from mothers who were the first generation of large percentages of toxic women to have pregnancies. And that baby’s not developing to its potential. At the same time, the amount of toxins in the environment keeps going up and up and up and up, and our threshold keeps going down and down and down and down. So now we have one boy in 12 in California who is on the autism spectrum. That’s what we’re up against.
It’s a huge problem. Boys today have, I think the latest study is 22%. I think that was right. 22 or 24% of the sperm count their grandfathers had at the same age. So it’s this inflammatory cascade. Mast cell activation syndrome is just another example of a highly activated immune system. So the question is, why is it so activated? Is it that it didn’t develop to its full potential and the threshold is much lower? They’re being exposed to a little bit of gluten or a little bit of air pollution and their immune system can’t handle it. And so they’re getting a much higher response. You have to investigate that to see where it’s coming from.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
What can people do? So many people are dealing with inflammation. They have pain as a result of that, and food sensitivity reactions and MCAS, which is a more severe inflammatory response. What can people do? What is your approach to help people calm down the inflammation in their bodies?
Dr. Tom O’Bryan
That’s why last year I went to seven countries. I interviewed 64, I think it was experts, world experts. I didn’t do a Zoom interview for and to put when I’m talking to a scientist, I brought in film crews and went full force. And we’d sit there and I knew the questions to ask because I read their studies and I say, Professor Yehuda Shoenfeld, Tel Aviv, Israel is the godfather of predictive autoimmunity. He’s got so many accolades.
This one puts it in perspective. At the last count that I had, 26 of the medical doctors who went back and got their PhD in immunology from his medical school, immunology department, 26 chair departments of immunology and medical schools and hospitals around the world are his students. This is the godfather, right? And so we were on stage together in Rome, and then I organized to interview him afterwards. And so Professor Schoenfeld, how are you? He looked at me and he is a very serious guy. Actually. His alarm went off on his phone during our interview. He looked really worried and said, someone is bombing my neighborhood right now in Tel Aviv.
No, he said, they’re bombing our neighborhood right now. That’s what he was living with. He excused himself, made a call, made sure everything was okay, and I said, how are you? He looked at me and said, Tom. We are born 99% human. And that’s true. A newborn baby has a little bit of bacteria in their gut. A microbiome from mom, but not that much. We are born 99% human and we die 90% microbial. And then he just stared at me and I looked at him for a moment. So he was testing to see how I am gonna react to this, right? And I looked at him and I said, so professor, does that mean that the true dance of life is the microbiome? Precisely so. That kind of thinking that if there’s only one thing you’re going to do, only one thing, eat your sauerkraut, or alternate sauerkraut, kimchi miso, you alternate your fermented vegetables so that you’re not just focusing on one family. But yeah, eat fermented vegetables every day. I mean, how often do you see obese South Koreans?
Dr. Wendy Myers
Never. I didn’t see any. I was there. Very few
Dr. Tom O’Bryan
Very few. Why? Because they eat kimchi every day of their life. They’re eating fermented vegetables, and they change out the flavors and all of that. Our dear friend, Suzanne Benson wrote the book, the Kimchi Diet. She comes from seven generations of South Korean healers and doctors. She shows you how easy it is to make kimchi and to make it a flavor that your family will like. So if there’s one thing you’re going to do, it’s going to be to work on your microbiome, that’s where you start. But anyway, I interviewed Shoenfeld, I interviewed world experts like that, and we put it together in the docuseries called The Inflammation Equation.
It’s free for everybody. It’s about 45 minutes a day for nine days and it’s all free. And you listen to these experts and then you say, wow, that just makes sense. Okay? And then you talk to your family about it. You say, Hey, can, can we start exploring what types of kimchi we might like? You don’t have to like everything, but let’s just try it. Let’s see what sauerkraut tastes like. Let’s see if I can find one for you guys that you like. And you just start exploring because you don’t act like a five-year-old. I don’t like it.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I don’t like it. Yeah, you just have to eat it.
Dr. Tom O’Bryan
We have a five-year-old in our house. The rule is you have to take one bite, even a teeny tiny bite. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to eat it. But don’t say to me you don’t like it if you’ve never tried it. Right? So you just take a bite. And so what he does is he’ll go, I don’t like it. Okay, fine. Thank you for trying it. Really, that’s the extent of it. And sometimes we find things that he likes. Most of the time we don’t, but sometimes we do. But that’s what it takes. It takes that kind of focused attention to develop the lifestyle that supports your health and vitality.
And most people won’t do it. They won’t do it until they’re sick enough. They’ve gotta do something. All right, I’ll give it a try. Right then they get into it and hopefully they do it full force and they notice they feel better and then they go back and screw up and they feel terrible. They say, yes, I’m done with that. That’s my goal for people, is that they feel so good in a short period of time. And then when they say, well I thought you’re selling a little piece of birthday cake. It’s my daughter’s best friend’s birthday and her mom is my best friend and I’m over there helping at the birthday party.
So I took a couple of bites and then the next day, boom, you’re hit. And when I talk to ’em, they tell me, I say, oh, that’s great. Congratulations. And they look at me, I say, now, you cleaned up your act and then you threw something in there that you shouldn’t have, and your body is revolting. Well, how come I didn’t feel that way before? Because you were so toxic before, your immune system was so inflamed protecting you. It dulled the response until it couldn’t dull it anymore. And then here come your symptoms. So when people start understanding that it’s your immune system that really is your best friend and it’s non-negotiable, it’s not gonna say, well, that’s not good for him.
I’m a little tired today. I’m not going to deal with that. It’s always going to try and protect you to save your life because we inherited the immune system from our ancestors. Before agriculture, they were nomads. They followed the herds looking for food. And those that survived developed those that had the genes that allowed survival, those are the ones that produced, and they passed all that onto us. Those that didn’t have good immune function, they died. Their progeny is gone. They didn’t reproduce. So we are the progeny of those really strong immune systems that successfully kept our ancestors alive. And people don’t think this way. The inflammation equation gives you just a little bit every day, a little bit say, wow, I didn’t know that.
That’s pretty cool. That’s really cool. And then you’ll decide what you wanna work with and what you don’t. Things like the ora ring like you’ve got on now are so important. We talk about those kinds of things. I talk about cleaning your shower heads. You have to clean your shower heads because bacteria accumulates in the shower head. There’s bad bacteria in the water. The chlorine and what cities do to clean the water helps, but it can’t get rid of it all. So you turn the shower off and then the water’s up at the top of the pipe right in the shower head, and it’s gonna be a day or a lot of time where that water’s just sitting there.
The bacteria in that water starts producing this kind of film. It’s like a polymer or a plastic to protect itself. It’s called biofilms. And you form this biofilm of the bad bacteria and then the chlorine can’t get at it anymore. This is where antibiotic resistant bacteria come from ’cause the antibiotics can’t get at the bacteria in your body ’cause it’s got a polymer over it called your a biofilm. And then you get in the shower, you turn it on, and you get blasted with millions, literally millions of bacteria of Klebsiella or pseudomonas. And then you wonder why you get recurrent sinus infections or why you got pink eyes, or why your daughter keeps getting sore throats.
You have to clean your shower heads. If you live in tropical climates, it’s every three months. They checked Hawaii and Colorado. In Colorado after eight months, there was no new bacteria if you cleaned it properly. But in Hawaii, after three months, it was loaded again. So in warmer climates, you have to clean your shower heads about every three months or less, right? So you just learn all these little things in the inflammation equation. We give you, I think it’s 36 to-dos after you’ve listened to the world experts talking about biofilms and or whatever the topic was.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
What website do people go to to watch?
Dr. Tom O’Bryan
Theinflammationequation.com.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Okay, perfect. And any other tips? You mentioned heavy metals and chemicals cause inflammation. So detox is definitely super important. I imagine infrared saunas are a big part of that.
Dr. Tom O’Bryan
Yes, they are. Infrared saunas now have come down in pricing. They’ve got these little systems that fold up like a notepad. They fold up pretty small and then you get just a plastic chair and you unfold the notepad and then zip it up and your hands can come out in a sleeve and you’re working, while you’re sitting in this infrared sauna. You don’t have to spend $5,000 anymore for an infrared sauna. They work, they’ll help all of us have to learn how to detox.
Well, so it used to be, when I came into practice, we called it spring cleaning. So every spring cleaning, you do a fast in the spring or you do a detox program every spring to keep your body. The world’s so toxic now. It has to be a part of everyday life. Not that you’re doing saunas every day, but you’re doing something. You’re eating the fruits and vegetables that help to detox. You’re taking some supplements to help depending on where you live and what your body has accumulated. It just depends on where you are. But it’s a concept that is a daily focus, not an annual event detox.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes, I agree. Well, Dr. Tom, thanks so much for coming on the show. That was really, really good. I always love interviewing you. I can just sit back and relax and you give us all the interesting facts that you have in your head. So thanks so much for coming on the Myers Detox Podcast.
Dr. Tom O’Bryan
Thank you, Wendy. Pleasure to be with you.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Everyone, thanks so much for tuning in to the Myers Detox Podcast. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers, and I love doing this show every week, bringing you experts around the world to help you upgrade your life and giving you those pieces of the puzzle to help make you help make those distinctions that you need. I want you to feel good, so thanks for tuning in.
Disclaimer
The Myers Detox Podcast is created and hosted by Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Wendy Myers and the producers, disclaims responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. The opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.
