Solving the Mystery of Chronic Illness with Dr Tom O'Bryan
It is quite possible to arrest and reverse the direction of chronic disease. The important thing is to make a start.
Better Way Today on 15 April 2024 featured a conversation between World Council for Health Steering Committee Member Christof Plothe DO and well-known health educator Dr Tom O'Bryan – ‘the Sherlock Holmes of chronic disease’.
Dr Tom teaches that the journey to better health starts with recognising and addressing the underlying mechanisms that activate the body’s immune response. He has found that tackling inflammation is key to treating every chronic disease condition. He has also shown that sensitivity to wheat can contribute to the development of autoimmune diseases.
Where it all started …
In 1979, as a student of chiropractic, Dr Tom and his wife were battling to fall pregnant. Soon after consulting a number of holistic doctors and making some dietary changes, they found themselves expecting a baby! Their good news travelled fast, and soon Dr Tom was successfully advising others experiencing infertility and other hormone-related issues. He makes a key observation:
They were eating foods they did not know were a problem for them because they did not get gut pain when they ate the foods. … for every one person that gets gut symptoms when they have a problem with wheat, there are eight people that don't. They get thyroid symptoms or brain symptoms or joint symptoms or skin symptoms.
Disease begins in the ‘leaky’ gut
Being sensitive to food substances like gluten or lectins is extremely common and may cause the immune system to react in an attempt to protect the body. This in turn can result in the development of an autoimmune disease (e.g. rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis or Alzheimer's disease), rates of which are increasing every year.
But how does this actually happen?
In 1997, Harvard professor Alessio Fasano published the first paper on the mechanism, which involves intestinal permeability. It was titled: All disease begins in the (leaky) gut.
Dr Tom explains this mechanism simply:
The digestive system is a tube about six to seven metres long. Imagine that the inside of the tube is lined with something like cheesecloth. When you chew and swallow food, the bits of chewed food can’t get through the cheesecloth into the blood – they must be digested first. Proteins, for example, must be broken down into much smaller building blocks called amino acids, which are small enough to get through the cheesecloth into the bloodstream.
But if the gut becomes inflamed, the cheesecloth may become ‘torn’. This allows larger molecules to get through the gut wall and enter the bloodstream. The immune system doesn’t recognise these larger molecules and, in order to protect you, it produces antibodies to these larger food molecules in the bloodstream. This is how we can develop an immune response to a wide range of foods.
Prof. Fasano lists five factors that contribute to the ‘perfect storm’ of intestinal permeability:
Your genetics determines what the ‘weak link’ in your chain is, i.e. which organ (heart, brain, liver, etc.) is most likely to be affected.
Environmental triggers (e.g. pathogens, toxins, stress) activate your genes to produce an inflammatory response.
Too many ‘bad’ bacteria grow in your gut and overwhelm the ‘good’ bacteria, causing disruption of the microbiome.
This causes ‘leaky gut’, which allows bigger molecules to enter the bloodstream.
Your immune system tries to protect you from the molecules it doesn’t recognise and causes inflammation in the bloodstream.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the USA, with the exception of accidents, 14 of the 15 top causes of death in the world today are chronic inflammatory diseases, which are caused by the mechanism described by Prof. Fasano. This is why reducing inflammation in the gut is the first step in addressing this wide range of illnesses.
Avoiding environmental triggers
We are all exposed to numerous environmental toxins in the air, water, soil, and food. Dr Tom investigates this issue in his most recent docuseries – The Inflammation Equation – which launched in early April and is now available for purchase. Click on the link to watch the trailer.
Most of us are unaware of our exposure to these toxins, and of their impact on our health. Dr Tom shared a shocking observation from a 2019 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). During a study of couples requiring fertility treatment, they discovered that women with the highest consumption of fruits and vegetables per day were18% less likely to conceive; and if they did get pregnant, they were 26% more likely to lose the baby than women who were not eating fruits and vegetables. This is because conventionally grown fruits and vegetables are loaded with toxins, from pesticides to glyphosate.
On the other hand, women eating organic produce had the exact opposite results: the more fruits and vegetables they ate, the better the outcomes. Even three servings per week were enough – probably because people trying to eat organic food tend to be careful about avoiding other sources of toxins, such as those in cleaning products and cosmetics.
In the following segment of the recording, Dr Tom focuses on the dangers of phthalates – a class of chemicals used in the manufacture of plastics.
Find out about how:
children born to pregnant mothers with high levels of phthalates in their urine had reduced mental capacity;
huge numbers of plastic nanoparticles found in water bottled in plastic can reach the brain where they cause inflammation;
phthalates from various sources (e.g. nail polish, food stored in plastic containers) accumulate in the body; and
women of childbearing age should detox prior to falling pregnant to give the baby's brain the best opportunity to develop to its full potential.
Protect your brain
One of the most serious and rapidly developing chronic conditions today is Alzheimer’s disease. In 2020, the largest health insurance company in the USA reported that between 2013 and 2017 there had been a 200% increase in Alzheimer's diagnoses among 30- to 64-year-olds. What was even more shocking was a 407% increase among 30- to 44-year-olds. This reflects high levels of brain inflammation among young people who are being exposed to substantial environmental toxin loads. According to the US government, this increase in rates of Alzheimer’s disease has the potential of bankrupting the economy.
The death of brain cells begins about 20 years before people generally realise that their memory is starting to be impaired; this stage is known as mild cognitive impairment. A great deal of inflammatory damage then takes place before the person is said to be in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. It is important to test for and address the sources of brain inflammation as soon as possible, as in the early stages there is a chance to arrest disease progression.
Dr Tom recommends that all his patients complete the Vibrant Wellness Neural Zoomer Plus test that identifies numerous markers of neuro-inflammation with high levels of sensitivity and specificity.
Progress, not perfection
To reduce your risk of disease, or to encourage healing, it is essential to calm the inflammation, and the consequent activation of your immune system, by reducing your exposures to environmental triggers. As Dr Tom says:
The choice you make is either going to water your garden for healthy growth or fuel the fire of inflammation.
It is quite possible to arrest and reverse the direction of chronic disease. The important thing is to make a start. It doesn’t matter if it takes a couple of years, as long as you’re on the path and moving in the right direction. Baby steps are just fine!
Here are some small steps we can all take:
Eat organic food whenever possible and wash well to remove surface toxins from conventional produce.
Get educated! Set aside an hour a week for research, and then put into practice one small action step at a time. Dr Tom explains more in his book, You Can Fix Your Brain. You can also sign up for his latest summit.
The World Council for Health proudly carries Dr Tom's book, The Autoimmune Fix, in our online bookshop. Click here to order yours today!
Get a friend to go through the changes with you. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, this approach is called ‘network medicine’ and it increases your likelihood of success by 171%.
As you start changing your lifestyle one small step at a time, you will look and feel much healthier. Within six months you will be amazed by the changes. Just remember, it’s about progress, not perfection! You won’t be perfect so don't even try. Just allocate a bit of time each week to learn and to change your environment or a lifestyle habit that was exposing you to toxins.
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It's pretty freaking amazing that this is common knowledge yet the scammers and their sychophanta raised by academia still ignores it. They actually do the opposite, introduce more toxins to fight the bad toxins.
"And then there is the psychological effect of the Big Lie which is axiomatic in gaslighting. The paradox here is that the bigger the lie, the harder it is for the mind to bridge the gulf between perceived reality and the lie that authority figures are painting as truth. I believe that the prospect of being deceived evinces a primitive emotional response on a par with staring death in the face. We are hard-wired to fear deception because we have evolved to interpret it as an existential threat. That’s why deception can elicit the same emotional response as the miscalculation of a serious physical threat. Lies told to us don’t always bear the same cost as a misjudged red light, but the primitive part of the brain can’t make this distinction and we rely on cerebral mediation for a more appropriate but delayed response. And in the long run, the lie is often just as dangerous as the physical threat. Many government whoppers – ‘safe and effective’ – do cost lives.
To avoid the death-like experience of being deceived, a mental defence is erected to deny that the lie is happening."
(From https://leftlockdownsceptics.com/alleged-cia-involvement-in-jfk-assassination-goes-mainstream-so-now-what/ )
The most obvious start is to look up medical conditions online and try the alternatives suggested first. This has saved me from multiple appointments with a doctor and pricey prescriptions that probably wouldn't have worked as well as the supplements that solved the problems.