Tom O’Bryan: The Autoimmune Fix
Tom O’Bryan is a world expert on gluten and its impact on your health. He’s an internationally recognized and sought-after speaker and workshop leader, specializing in the complications of non-celiac gluten sensitivity, celiac disease and the development of autoimmune diseases as they occur inside and outside of the intestines.
Tom O’Bryan holds teaching faculty positions with the Institute for Functional Medicine and the National University of Health Sciences. He is the founder of www.thedr.com. That’s T-H-E-D-R .com, and he’s the visionary behind Betrayal, a docuseries about autoimmune disease. Today we’re going to discuss his critically acclaimed groundbreaking book called The Autoimmune Fix. It outlines the step by step development of degenerative diseases and gives us the tools to identify our personal disease processes years before the symptoms are obvious and hopefully in time to reverse them.
An Interview with Tom O’Bryan: The Autoimmune Fix
Interview by Miriam Knight
To listen to the full interview of Tom O’Bryan on Miriam Knight’s Show, New Consciousness Review, on OMTimes Radio, click the player below:
Miriam Knight: Welcome, Tom O’Bryan.
Tom O’Bryan: Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be with you.
Miriam Knight: I have read many books about autoimmunity and digestion and paleo and what you should do for your gut, and I was so pleased to read your book because it seemed to explain many of the concepts that had been only fuzzily explained before, and it kind of pulls everything together for me.
Tom O’Bryan: Well, thank you. That’s a compliment.
Miriam Knight: Let’s jump in because gluten sensitivity is something that has really risen on the radar of so many people. I suspect that most people are like me, and they have only a very fuzzy notion of what gluten sensitivity is and what it does to your system. What do the people who have this gluten sensitivity experience in their bodies? How is it affecting them?
Tom O’Bryan: Well, if you pull a chain, the chain always breaks at the weakest link. It could be at one end, the middle, the other end, it’s your heart, your brain, your liver, your kidneys, wherever your weak genetic link is. You pull on the chain, that’s where the link’s going to break.
So, when you have a sensitivity to food that’s causing inflammation in your body, it’s pulling on the chain. So, it just depends on the individual as to where it’s going to manifest.
There are over 20,000 studies now in the medical literature on the dangers of wheat and the symptoms that might come from it. For example, our gallbladders store bile that’s made by the liver, and when we eat fat, bile gets squeezed out of the gallbladder down into the intestines to break down the fat, kind of like soapy water. When you have a sensitivity to wheat, you secrete less than 20 percent of the amount of bile that you should for fat that you’re eating. So, someone that does not have a sensitivity to wheat, they’ll secrete, let’s say 10 milligrams of bile when they eat an avocado. Someone that does have a sensitivity to wheat, they’ll secrete two milligrams for the same amount of fat in an avocado. So, that means you don’t digest your fats well, and your gallbladder begins not functioning well, and you can develop gallbladder disease, and it can be as the result of wheat sensitivity.
Or, it could be your brain, or it could be your heart. That’s why Mayo Clinic publishes studies on reversing a very serious disease called cardiomyopathy when you go on a wheat-free diet. And that doesn’t happen for everyone, but if they have the sensitivity to wheat and they have cardiomyopathy, when you put them on a wheat-free diet, the cardiomyopathy gets better.
Miriam Knight: This actually hits quite close to home because my husband had gallbladder disease, and he ended up having the gallbladder removed as an emergency procedure, which is no fun. And now, he has all kinds of digestive problems.
Tom O’Bryan: Of course, because now, the ability to digest fats, one of the key mechanisms in our body to digest fats has been removed. They’ve taken it out. You don’t want to have complications from the surgery. But, they’re surgeons. They’re not functional medicine doctors. And so, they don’t say, okay, now you’re not gonna be secreting any bile anymore when you eat fats, so you better take the digestive enzymes to break down fats. Thousands of gallbladder surgeries are done every year. I don’t know the exact number, but it’s in the tens of thousands. None of these people were told they now have a vulnerability for the rest of their lives of having fat deficiencies, meaning the fat-soluble vitamins like A, vitamin D, vitamin E, vitamin K. And they’re not told that they must compensate because a part that is supposed to be dealing with that in every meal has been taken out.
Miriam Knight: Tom O’Bryan. You mentioned functional medicine, and I think that that is a revolution in the approach to medicine that we sorely need. Can you explain what that is for our listeners?
Tom O’Bryan: Yes, of course. When you get symptoms–no one gets Alzheimer’s in their 60s or 70s. You get Alzheimer’s in your 20s and 30s, and it just takes decades of killing off brain cells until there’s so much damage it becomes obvious. And the damage accumulates in speed. You lose more and lose more and lose more and lose more. But, it starts decades before there’s ever a symptom. So, by the time you get symptoms, whatever the disease should be, you’re falling over a waterfall. You’re just going down.
Functional medicine it’s called upstream. Let’s go back up the river away or go back up the stream before you fall over the waterfall, and let’s see what the things that are causing the problems that eventually will manifest as whatever the weak link in your chain is like Alzheimer’s or heart disease or gallbladder dysfunction are. What’s going on upstream?
In Functional medicine, we teach doctors of all disciplines, mostly medical doctors but also chiropractors and acupuncturists and natural parts and osteopaths, we teach them how to look upstream, how to ask the right questions of the patient, what’s their health history been so that we get a big picture overview. When you get migraines, you don’t treat the head. You have to treat what’s causing the migraines. And of course, you want symptom relief, and so you’ll do medications to feel better, but you have to look at why is this happening, what’s going on upstream.
And unfortunately, in our medical education, we’re not taught this. We’re not taught to think this way. What we’re taught is how to reduce the symptoms, how to calm down the symptoms. And that’s very important to do. Can’t say enough about how important it is so people can feel better and function in their lives. But, we have to go upstream, and that’s what functional medicine is.
Miriam Knight: At the beginning of your book, you talk about how you were turned on to the notion of functional medicine when you were super-duper fit and healthy, and yet you were having problems. Is it a genetically related trait that gives you your particular weak link?
Tom O’Bryan: The weak links are contributed to by two main factors. One is your genetics, and the other is your antecedents. Antecedents are the things that have happened to you and have accumulated in your life. For example, if you love tuna and you eat tuna two to three times a week, you’re gonna have high levels of mercury in your body because practically all the tuna, all the tuna in the world is high in mercury. So, that’s called an antecedent. Tuna is good for you, but you get high mercury levels, and if mercury accumulates in your brain, you’re gonna have brain dysfunction problems, and you’ll never know where it came from unless you’re looking upstream to see. So, genetics, you can’t do anything about the genes. That’s the deck of cards you were dealt in life. But, you don’t have to turn those genes on. Genes just mean that’s a little bit of a weak link, don’t pull on that chain too much.
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