Your Gut Health, Inflammation & Microbiome

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Oh, thank you, Matt. It’s a real pleasure to be with you.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

So normally, sometimes like the other day, I was interviewing somebody in Minneapolis and it was one degrees there and they were feeling real jealous that I was in sunny California. I’m a little jealous today, ’cause tell everybody where you are.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Oh, we’re in the blue zone of Costa Rica.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Yeah. Isn’t that amazing? How is it down there?

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Weather wise, perfect. You couldn’t ask for more. We’re very grateful.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Huh, that’s that’s wonderful. Well, how did you were initially get interested in gut health and tell me a little bit of how you got here. What were the influences in your career that brought you to this moment in terms of your understanding of gut health?

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

42 Years ago, I didn’t know you were gonna ask this. 42 years ago, my ex and I could not get pregnant and I was an intern at the time in Chicago and I called the seven most famous holistic doctors I’d ever heard of. And I was able to talk to each of them and I asked them, “What do you do for infertility?” And they’d all tell me what they do. And they’d say, “Do you know what a category one is?” No. Learn. Okay. Category one. And I just wrote down everything they said and I put a program together and we were pregnant in six weeks. My neighbors in married housing, we lived on campus, they had gone through artificial insemination and nothing had worked and they’d ask if I worked with them and I’d said, “Well, it’s not gonna harm you, sure.” They were pregnant in three months. So now we’re like five months pregnant, just grateful and happy, telling all of our friends and our friends would tell their sister in Wisconsin, who was having problems with fertility and she’d drive down to Chicago. And I was treating people out of my dorm room. And I actually got called into the President’s office and he said, “You can’t do that.” I said, “Yes, I understand, thank you, sir.” And then I just kept doing it, I had too much passion. So I came into practice helping people successfully achieve pregnancy or maintaining a pregnancy. Lots of recurrent miscarriages that we’ve helped. 

And there’s not much in medicine that’s all or every, but this was every. Every couple that had a problem with fertility, of one type or another, whether it’s premature ejaculations or recurrent miscarriages, or can’t get pregnant, every couple, as a component of what was causing their problem, they were eating foods they did not know their immune system were fighting, thus creating inflammation in their body. They didn’t know. Because they didn’t get stomach pain when they ate whatever it was, so they just didn’t know. And we learned over time that the most common food that seemed to have this impact on inflammation production in the body is wheat. And so my career began with looking at wheat and reading the science on wheat. And very early on, one of the first studies I read was this very famous neurologist in England, named Marios Hadjivassiliou. He runs a tertiary center. Meaning, you go to your doctor with a nerve for problem, a brain problem, they can’t help you, they send you to a neurologist. He does something, that can’t help you. They try something else, it doesn’t work. They send you to a tertiary research center. 

So this is Hadjivassiliou at Sheffield, England the tertiary research center. And he published a paper where they took 10 people with unrelenting migraines who had been out of work at least eight years, every single one of them. They can’t work, they’re suffering so much. And I thought about those families, I don’t know why, but I did. That in these 10 people, shh, dad’s got a headache. What’s it like to be a child growing up in that house where dad can’t function? I’m imagining they’ve gone through their life savings after eight years, just trying to stay above water. What’s it like growing up in that house? Hadjivassiliou put them all on a gluten free diet, seven out of 10, got complete relief, Two out of 10, got better and one refused to do the diet. So nine out of 10 improved or got completely better after eight years of being unable to work. And that just caught me ’cause I was thinking about the kids in that family. So I read that study and then I ordered the references in the back of the paper and read those studies and read those studies. And so for 40 years, I’ve been reading about the possible impact of a wheat related disorder with or without celiac disease. 

Celiac disease doesn’t matter. It can be just as devastating if you test negative for celiac, but you have a problem with wheat. And it’s just as devastating. Causes Hashimotos thyroid disease, lupus, Ms, I mean, the list goes on and on. Then once you cross a line of tolerance with wheat, it is the gasoline on the fire causing the inflammation in your body that can manifest wherever your genetic vulnerability is. So my entire career has been based on the birth of our daughter, who now is just over 40 and has two kids. I have two grandchildren and just has a wonderful, happy life. And I’m just so grateful that we looked into all of this back in 1979, when we couldn’t get pregnant. And I called those seven most famous holistic doctors I’d ever heard of.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

It’s interesting, you have like certain cognitive dissonances happen in your career. When you’re a young anesthesiologist, you’re schooled with a lot of science and information and you kind of think that you know everything. And so, I met this very influential person for me, my yoga teacher, whose name is Darkati. And basically the first thing that he told me was, he was like, oh yeah, if people have a problem getting pregnant, he goes, “That’s like the easiest thing in the world to fix.” And I was like, what do you mean? I actually had a job where I would do sedation for people when they would do the artificial insemination type of as techniques. And I was like, “Well, how do you do that?” He goes, “Oh, I just put them on a gluten-free diet. And then I optimized their diet and their lifestyle.” And then basically I started meeting all of these people who got pregnant that he had helped. And so then that was like one of the very things that let me to start to think, oh, okay, there’s something on this diet, nutrition side. And I ended up being gluten free. So I supported a hundred percent everything you said. I thought that you really, when we were talking the other day, you gave me a beautiful story about how you think of the analogy of words and sentences and paragraphs and proteins and peptides. Maybe, why don’t you take me down a story of that and then what actually happens when you eat gluten and how that affects your body?

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Goodness. Yes, okay. This is the Peptide Summit. So what’s a peptide? Well, a peptide is a part of a protein. And proteins are sometimes hundreds of amino acid long. If you think of a pearl necklace, that’s a group of pearls, that’s a group of amino acids. That’s a protein. And when you eat a protein, hydrochloric acid in your stomach undoes the clasp of that necklace. Now you have a string of pearls, but it’s still a protein. And our enzymes have to break that necklace down into each little Pearl of the pearl necklace, right? And that’s digestion, is breaking down those proteins into peptides and then into each pearl or each amino acid that gets absorbed into our bloodstream and those are the building blocks that we use. So what you’re referring to, I just made that up on the spot when we were talking the other day, I’d never thought about that before, but it made sense to me at the time, you know? Which is that a peptide, if you think of when you wanna get an idea across to somebody, it might take two or three or four sentences. Like a paragraph, if you’re writing. It takes a little bit of ideas put together, like a paragraph to get that concept across. That’s a protein. Where a peptide is maybe one sentence of that piece of the puzzle, that piece of the paragraph. So one sentence leads into an important component of the big picture, of the paragraph that you’re wanting to talk about. But it’s one sentence, it’s not the whole paragraph. So peptides are really important as a component of that.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Right. And so then imagine we have an entire string of pearls, a peptide might be just four pearls. And those four pearls may have a certain message. Now, then the next six pearls may have a different message, because they lock onto a receptor. And then another eight peptides or two peptides. So then a peptide could be 50 amino acids or it could be two.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Right. And that’s the problem with wheat. Is that no human can digest wheat completely into each Pearl of the pearl necklace. No human has the capability of doing that. The result is, the proteins of wheat, get broken down into peptides and there’s different peptides. Some of them are harmless. Some of them are beneficial, but the majority of them are not good for you at all. And they can stimulate a whole lot of different responses. That’s why if you go to Google and you type in gluten and multiple sclerosis here come the papers that say sometimes, that’s a component. It’s gasoline on the fire causing the inflammatory disease, multiple sclerosis. Or gluten and root rheumatoid arthritis, or gluten and depression or gluten and schizophrenia. I mean, it doesn’t matter what condition you’re thinking about that there are peptides of wheat that can be a problem for that individual depending on their genetics. As a matter of fact, can I show you a couple of slides,

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Oh, yeah.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

On this topic? I’m going to share my screen here and introduce you, the audience, to Professor Alesio Fasano. Professor Fasano, if you look at his credentials, he’s a Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, a Professor of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health, the Chief of Pediatric Gastroenterology at Mass General at Harvard, the Director of Mucosal, the Director of the Center for Celiac. This guy, five titles, any one of them is a lifelong goal for someone at the top of their field. We think this guy is gonna win the Nobel prize, someday, because it’s him and his team in 1997, that introduced the mechanism of where leaky gut comes from. It’s a protein called Zonulin. So they discovered this protein and when there’s too much of it being released, then you get this leaky gut. And Fasano published a paper last year and if you look at the title of the paper, “All disease begin in the leaky gut: The role of this protein Zonulin in the development of chronic inflammatory diseases.” And he’s so careful about what he says. But this is what they’re teaching at Harvard Medical School right now. This concept is a critical baseline concept for all of their, gastroenterologists are getting this, to understand where disease comes from. 

And what they showed, Fasano talks about this perfect storm. And I love this picture because if you look at this guy, he’s leaning against a wall, hands in his pocket, left knee’s bent, foot back against the wall, just as calm and relaxed as can be in the midst of all this chaos because he’s protected. When you understand this concept, that I’m about to give you, of where the perfect storm comes from, from which you get heart disease or you get diabetes, or you get anxiety or you get Alzheimer’s, it doesn’t matter what the disease is. The chronic inflammatory disease, this is where it comes from. And when you understand this and you put this much of your attention on focusing on reducing these triggers, the result is your healthy, your vibrant and you can be comfortable that you’re not worried when you go in for physical, what’s he gonna find, rather you go in for a physical and you say, “Tell me how good I am. Tell me how healthy I am.” It’s a whole different concept when you understand and live your life out of this principle. So there’s five basic components that Professor Fasano talks about. The first one is your genetics. And you can’t do anything about your genes, it’s the deck of cards you were dealt. But if you’ve got the gene for Alzheimer’s or you’ve got the gene for breast cancer, you’re not getting breast cancer. 

You’re extremely vulnerable to getting breast cancer, but it doesn’t mean you’re gonna get breast cancer. It means if you pull at a chain, the chain always breaks at the weakest link. It’s at one end, in the middle or the other end, wherever the weak link is, that’s where the chain’s gonna break. So if your genetics say that your weak link is diabetes, don’t pull on the chain so hard. And what’s the pull on the chain? The pull on the chain is inflammation. That all of the diseases we get are inflammatory diseases. So and that pulls on the chain and whatever genetic weak link you’ve got, that’s where it’s gonna show itself down the road. So if you understand that concept, I mean, it’s not good to have the Alzheimer’s gene, but what it means is, you’re gonna check and make sure that gene is not expressing itself. Maybe every year, every two years. And with that one, there’s a gene called ApoE4, and it’s not good if you’ve got that gene. But all of our patients with ApoE4s, they get a battery of tests, not expensive, but a battery test every year to make sure they don’t have inflammation in their brain right now. Now, when we first start with them, they’ve got tons of inflammation in their brain because they’re eating French fries. And they’re drinking soda pop every once in a while and all the other silly things we do that we know we’re not supposed to do. But after they’ve applied the protocol, all those inflammatory markers better be down to zero. 

And then you check them once a year, once every two years, just to make sure that you haven’t slipped too much. ‘Cause we all cheat once in a while. We’re not supposed to, but we do, right? So the first one of the five is your genetics. Can’t do anything about that. And doctors say, turn the genes off, turn the genes on genes. Don’t turn on and off. They operate on a dimmer switch and what you wanna do is dim down the genes of inflammation and ramp up the genes of anti-inflammation. So that they’re dominant. So don’t think I’m gonna turn the genes off for breast cancer. You’re never gonna turn the genes off for breast cancer if you’ve got those genes. But you can dim them down so they’re not dominant expressing themselves and you turn up the genes of anti-inflammation and you’re safe. Everything we know in the science today says you’re safe. That’s the way to think about genes. Now there are some genes like cystic fibrosis. If you got that gene, that’s a real problem. There’s about 25, 30% of the diseases of genetic origin, We really don’t know much about what to do for those. But the vast majority, there’s a lot we can do. I’m sorry, you’re gonna say something, Matt.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Oh, well I’m just echoing the research on SARS. Basically, if you think chronic mold and inflammation, they’re finding the same thing. They do these basically genomic tests that look at what genes we’re printing and the people that are really sick are printing the inflammation genes.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Right, exactly.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Whether we’re dealing with people at the far end of the extreme that are really sick or people that are just trying to get a little bit healthier, and that’s such a good analogy, the dimmer switch. Because I can either be in kind of fight or flight or rest and relax, and when it comes to my genes, I can be printing chill out genes like I’m in Costa Rica and everything’s good or I can be printing Manhattan fight or flight difficult genes. And so we have a dimmer switch that can determine which one we are printing. A big component of the dimer switch is fundamentally what we eat.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Right, exactly. Now that’s number two. Number two are the environmental triggers, right? This is what they’re teaching at Harvard Medical School that the hand on the dimmer switch are the environmental triggers that we’re exposed to. That means what you breathe, what you eat, the most common triggers. What’s on the end of your fork, that’s most common. But also our thoughts, because we create stress hormones or the environment, too much noise. The hormones that get produced, the defensive hormones. But the environmental triggers are the hands on the dimmer switch, ramping it or turning them down. So that’s number two. Number three, when you have too many inflammatory environmental triggers, you alter the good bacteria in your gut to where you’ve got an altered microbiome. Everybody knows that 70% of the immune system’s in the gut. Why? Because that’s where most of the threat comes, in what we eat and what we drink. So you need the majority of your protection, your army, army air force, Marines, coast guard. I call the immune system the armed forces of our body. It’s there to protect you, right? And the majority of it’s in the gut. But when you have too much of the inflammatory triggers, you alter the balance of good guys and bad guys, and you get this thing called dysbiosis, which means gut out of balance. That creates a whole lot of inflammation, which leads us to number four. 

The inflammation in the gut causes the leaky gut, intestinal permeability. There’s no pill you’re gonna take to fix a leaky gut. If you have this dysbiosis in there, you have to rebuild the microbiome. And we’ll talk about that today, on rebuilding the microbiome so that it’s not an inflammatory microbiome. Well, when you get this leaky gut, for those that don’t know what this is, Mrs. Patient, your digestive tract is a tube. It starts at the mouth, goes to the other end. It’s about 20, 25 feet long, winds around in the center. The inside the tube is lined with cheese cloth. And when you eat food, like we talked about the pearl necklace, proteins are a pearl necklace and our enzymes have to cut it into peptides, smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, until they’re so small, each pearl of the pearl necklace goes right through the cheesecloth, into the bloodstream. And that’s how we absorb our nutrients to build new muscle cells and new bone cells and new brain cells. That the nutrients come through the cheesecloth into the bloodstream. But when you get tears in the cheesecloth, that’s what a leaky gut is. Tears in the cheesecloth because of all the inflammation inside the tube, where the microbiome is. 

All that inflammation in there causes tears in the cheesecloth, now you get larger clumps of the pearl necklace. Peptides that get in to the bloodstream before they’re supposed to be able to get into the bloodstream. It doesn’t matter if it’s a tomato or a bad bacteria. If it gets in when it’s a macro molecule, a big molecule, then it gets in the bloodstream and it takes off and your bloodstream’s just a highway, lots of traffic on the highway. It’s all going the same direction, but it’s just a highway and there’s no lanes of traffic. So it’s like bumper cars in there, everything’s bumping into each other. But you’ve got these big molecules getting into the bloodstream. Now your immune system, trying to protect you, has to say, what is that? That’s not something I can use to make a new brain cell. I better fight that. And then you get this systemic immune response, and now you’re fighting tomatoes or you’re fighting chicken, or you’re fighting wheat, or you’re fighting whatever the big molecule is that got through the tears in the cheesecloth. And this is the perfect storm because it’s the systemic immune response. Meaning your immune system, trying to protect you from the macro molecule goals, now this inflammation is on the highway. 

Everywhere along the highway, there’s inflammation, trying to protect you fighting all these macro molecules. Then depending on your genetics, where the weak link in your chain, that’s where you’re gonna go down, eventually. And it doesn’t happen overnight. And what Fasano told us in this paper, this is what they’re teaching at Harvard Medical School. We have to understand that. This is not just some good idea that I’ve got, this is what they’re teaching there. That the two most powerful triggers are the exhaust of the bad bacteria in your gut, called LPS. It’s the metabolites of that bad bacteria. It’s called LPS and gluten. They are the two most powerful triggers. Nothing else is anywhere near the category of these two. Now, Maureen Leonard, who’s a very famous gastroenterologist, also at Harvard, published this article in the journal of the American Medical Association, where she looked at, I think it was 60 plus studies on this topic. And this was the conclusion she came to. Many studies have shown that gliadin that’s in wheat, the gluten and wheat, can cause immediate and transient increase in gut permeability. This process takes place in all individuals who eat gluten. So if you had a bagel this morning, or you had toast, you just cause tears and the cheesecloth. 

Now it’s transient, meaning, what does that mean? It means it heals. Mrs. Patient, you have an entire new body every seven years. Every cell in your body regenerates, some are really quick. Like the inside of your gut’s every couple three days, some are really slow. So you have toast for breakfast, you tear the lining of your gut, but it heals. You have a sandwich for lunch, you tear the lining of the gut, but it heals. You have pasta for dinner, you tear the lining of the gut. Crotons on your salad, a cookie, tear, tear, tear, until one day you don’t heal anymore. There’s too much inflammation, you don’t heal anymore. Now you’ve got the leaky gut and now you’re off to the systemic race, so to say, with all of that inflammation. So that’s the concept I wanted to make sure that everybody understands that what they’re teaching at Harvard Medical School is all disease begins in the gut and it’s inflammation that’s the trigger for all of this. Now that doesn’t take away, when you’ve got symptoms, you may wanna take this or this or this to help you feel better, but you have to stop throwing gasoline on the fire, also, if you wanna get well.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

That’s such a good one. And that kind of dovetails with on the peptide front, I would say potentially one of the more successful strategies that people have used is using the immune peptides. And so many people will say, “Oh my God, I felt so much better taking thymosin or thymogen.” There’s a whole bunch of different ones that regulate the immune system. And it turns out some other things that help people feel real good are stem cells and exosomes. what are those two? They regulate the immune system. Now why does that immune system need to be regulated? Well, if you’re taking something that goes in and causes inflammation your gut and then that cheesecloth opens up and then stuff is leaking into your bloodstream, your immune system starts to get triggered and over overactive.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Trying to protect you. Your immune system is having to withdraw from the reserves of its bank account to fight whatever this is that just got into your system. So when you take these peptides that really help your immune function, all you’re doing is putting deposits back into the bank account, right? You’re building up the immune system, you’re building up your bank account, but if you keep throwing gasoline on the fire, it’s like robbing Peter to pay Paul. Who’s gonna win? And eventually, inflammation always wins, eventually.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Eventually. I was telling you, it’s kind of like, you walk over to a river and you see all of these people floating down the river drowning. One idea is to go try to pull them out and then the other idea is to go upstream and figure out who’s throwing all those people in the river. And this is kind of an upstream me kind of mentality. Because if you don’t stop feeding that fire, that sometimes it’s hard for that fire to go out because your immune system thinks that it’s kind of being continuously attacked. And I’ve seen this myself and I’m sure you’re probably one of the great luminaries in the world on this topic is, you’ll do food allergy testing and you see certain people come in and they’re allergic to everything. I don’t know if you wanna talk a little bit about that.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Sure, sure. Yeah, that’s an easy one really because oh my God. So you do a 90 food blood test to see what might you be sensitive to. And it comes back and you’re sensitive to 25 different foods. Oh my God, that’s everything I eat. Well, of course it is because you’ve got a leaky gut and the macro molecules are going through in your bloodstream and your immune system trying to protect you from these things that aren’t supposed to be in the bloodstream are what your testing for. Do you have antibodies to different foods? Yes, you do. Why? Because these macromolecules of chicken got in or these macromolecules of strawberries got it in. Doesn’t matter what the food is, that if it gets in through the tears in the cheesecloth, your body can’t use it to make new brain cells and bone cells and muscle cells, it’s not a resource. It’s a deficit, it’s an inflammatory deficit. And so your immune system’s got to fight this thing to get rid of it, it’s a threat. 

And so you’re withdrawing from your immune system bank account to fight all of these foods that are in your bloodstream. So people, you test for a leaky gut. So you’ve got your markers to begin. Yup, there it is. And then you do your protocols, whatever they are. We tell patients six months to two years before you retest. It’s not gonna be done in two weeks, give it a break. It’s not gonna happen. It’s not possible because your microbiome has developed over many, many years of too much Mountain Dew and too many KitKat and too many marshmallows and too many of the wrong things that we’ve done. Well, I don’t do that very often. No, but when you were a kid, you did it a whole lot, which built that microbiome. Now you only do it once in a while, which still feeds that microbiome, right? And so it’s gonna take a while to change that microbiome to a healthy, diverse, vibrant microbiome.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

I feel like that’s a good title for a book, “Too Many Marshmallows”.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

“Too Many Marshmallows”. Well, our son just had his one year birthday a few days ago and my wife bought a bag of marshmallows. I said, what? ‘Cause we don’t do that kind of stuff, but she loves to bake. And this was a grandmother recipe. And so there were seven layers to this cake, it was unbelievable. And every layer was a different flavor and one of them had some marshmallows in it. So that was our son’s first exposure to any of that kind of food. So there’s marshmallows in the O’Brien house this week.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

It’s so interesting, I grew up, speaking of grandmothers, there’s maybe nobody in North America that likes gluten and croissants more than my mother and maybe me. And so then it was a journey for us to get there. And then for a while, even she still had symptoms and she kept baking with it. And eventually, it takes a concerted effort and I’ve got her to a hundred percent buy in to the journey. But it’s really a lifestyle and it takes a while to kind of get into it. Now, I’ve been gluten free for eight years. Every time I go to France, I eat a croissant. But other than that, which only happens every few years. I’ve been gluten free and it’s been one of the greatest things I ever did for my health.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Now I’m told that there are a couple of bakeries in Paris that do incredible gluten free croissants, so I’m ready. I’ve always said I’m not going to Paris until they’ve got gluten free croissants. So it’s on our hit list this year.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Now, but I’ll take you on this one. So like the there’s a company called Mari Posta, this in the bay area that makes great gluten free. That being said, one thing that I’ve noticed is that some people who react to gluten will also react to a lot of the gluten free foods.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Oh yeah. Oh, that’s a whole discussion that there’s a danger in the gluten free diet. And I published a paper on that with a couple of friends, “The danger of the gluten free diet”. That when you learn about building a microbiome, a healthy microbiome, one of the critical things that have to become a lifestyle or habit is that you feed the good bacteria in your gut. And the foods that feed the good bacteria are called the prebiotics and they feed the probiotics, the good bacteria in your gut. Well, 78 to 81% of the prebiotic in the standard American diet comes from peptides of wheat called arabinoxylans. 78 to 81% of the prebiotic in the Western diet comes from wheat. Take wheat out of the diet, which is a good thing to do, but then eat gluten free crap, excuse me. And there’s no prebiotics in the gluten free foods. So you’ve taken the good, the beneficial parts of wheat, not everything in wheat is bad for you, but the bad outweighs the good, but you’ve taken the beneficial things out in a gluten free diet and you’ve not replaced them. So what happens? At first, you feel great. You lose weight, your energy’s up, your brain’s brighter, your skin clears up. Whatever your genetic vulnerability is, that starts to clear up. But six months to a year down the road, you’re getting sick again because the good bacteria in your gut have been starving out and the bad bacteria feed on all the garbage paste, white paste stuff that we eat. 

So the ratio of the good and bad now all of a sudden reverses. And you’ve got more bad guys in your gut than good guys, because the good guys have been starved out. That’s why you have to know how to rebuild a healthy microbiome when you go on a gluten free diet. You cannot eat the gluten free products and think that it’s healthy for you. It’s now look, I’m half Italian. My grandparents came from Italy through Ellis Island. We made our own pastas, raviolis for Christmas was my favorite treat. And I’m gonna eat gluten free pasta every once in a while because I love gluten free or I love pasta. I love the feeling of pasta. I’ll do it maybe once every three, four weeks. I take the gluten digesting enzymes when I do just to help. But you can’t do that every day. Oh, I’m gonna have a blueberry muffin at the coffee. Oh, it’s gluten, great, it’s healthy for me. No, it’s not, it’s just not poison for you. So you have to learn how to do this right.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

I remember this so clearly, when I was an anesthesiologist, you’re stuck in the operating room all day and then you get a break and you’re so excited and we would get like nine minutes or something like that. And so then you’d run down to the coffee shop and I remember at that point, I would run down to the coffee shop, get a cup of coffee and I’d a zucchini muffin ’cause it reminded me of my childhood. My childhood was zucchini muffins in the morning and pasta and raviolis at night ’cause we’re half Italian also. And so I knew I liked you for some reason. And it’s the same. I would always get a stomach ache. And so you’re thinking and I’d be like, “God, I have a stomach ache when I eat that muffin, but it reminds me of my childhood and I felt so good.” And it made me so happy and I did that for about six months until I realized I get a stomach ache every day when I do this, I got to stop doing this. It’s kinda interesting that’s like that cognitive dissonance.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Yeah, it’s nice that you share that story because people are gonna blow it all the time. We’re not perfect, we’re human. Being human means you’re gonna blow it, but you just wanna make more good decisions than bad decisions. And eventually good decisions are the everyday norm and the bad decisions become less and less frequent.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

You know what? I was talking to Barb about that last night and I said, it was kind of funny. I said, “10 years ago we were making a lot of bad decision and some good decisions.” And I said, “Now we make almost all good decisions and some bad decisions.”

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Yeah, way to go.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

If you can get to that and then get that lifestyle part of it dialed in, if I had the choice of giving you my best peptide protocol, that I have or getting this lifestyle piece, and that’s why I wanted to interview you, because I think you’re the best at this, I would do this. This is more important than anything else because this regulates your immune system. I’m gonna give a wholehearted recommendation of what you’re to say and this is, the question is how do we rebuild that gut? How do we rebuild that microbiome? You hear a lot about the microbiome, just that balance of all of those little bacteria and organisms and yeast that are inside of our gut. So what’s your perspective on this? I loved what you said because, I went through a journey of getting leaky gut that I could tell you about. But then I basically did almost exactly your protocol. So tell us what it is ’cause you crystallized it perfectly for me.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Thanks. Well, first an understanding of the size of this microbiome and nothing helped me understand this better than my mentor and my friend, Dr. Jeffrey Bland. Jeff is the founder of Functional Medicine. This is the godfather of all of us, what we follow. And I interviewed him last year for something and he said, “You know, Tom.” And Jeff does not exaggerate at all. And he said, “A teaspoon of poop, a teaspoon of poop has more bacteria than all the stars in the known universe.” And I went, “What?” I mean, how do you wrap your head around how much bacteria is in our gut? When one teaspoon is more stars, more bacteria than all the stars in the known universe. Every forkful of what you put in your mouth feeds good bacteria or feeds bad bacteria. There’s no neutrals except healthy water. That’s the only neutral. Everything else is going to be a plus or a minus. When my son, and he’s one now, he loves pomegranates. And they’re just the most bitter tasting fruit, right? And he’ll eat a strawberry, he’ll eat some blueberries. And then he wants the pomegranates, that bitter taste. And I just smile because, and we cut them in two quarters for him, size, ’cause he is only got six or eight teeth, I don’t know. But every time he takes one more piece of a pomegranate and chews it a little bit and swallows it, I know that he’s feeding a few thousand more good bacteria in his gut. Every fork-full of what we take in is going to have that kind of effect. 

So now here’s the protocol. First and most important, Mrs. Patient, when you go shopping, not most important, they’re all important. When you go shopping to buy your fruits and vegetables, always buy organic, critically important, more never. You can’t think the way you did 10 years ago about organic or conventional because it’s much worse now. But buy a couple of every root vegetable in the store, get rutabagas and turnips and parsnips and radishes and sweet potatoes. Not too many white potatoes because of the glycemic index, it affects your blood sugar. Some if you like them, but not too much. Carrots, multicolored carrots. And have one root vegetable every meal, one root vegetable. Maybe is just gonna be a little bit of radish. And you’ve been to nice restaurants where they shave the radish and it’s on a salad raw and you eat it and say, “Whoa, what’s that gonna taste like?” Oh, oh, that’s not bad ’cause you’re not biting into a big radish, right? So you might just dice it up a little bit. But every meal, you have a little bit of root vegetables, every meal, every day. Next.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Oh, let me tag team on that one.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Sure.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

So then this is like the stuff that we do every single day and so I do that. We go through that same spectrum. And then I have radishes four or five days as an appetizer and then we do a root and then I usually eat meat and then I finish with the root vegetable ’cause I get kind of full with the meat and then I eat that root vegetable afterwards. And then it took a while to kind of get into it. But then those rutabagas and then going through that diversity of something different every night. And so sometimes sweet potatoes, sometimes purple sweet potatoes, sometimes yams, sometimes. And so that diversity, becomes a really fun thing to do.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

It does, it does. And where we are, we have yuca and cassava. And we make mashed potatoes out of yuca that’s really good. It’s like, whoa, that is really good. So it’s fun to explore. Now people say, “Well, I don’t know how to cook a turnip.” Well, neither do I. So what I do, is I slice an onion, I slice up the turnip, dice it up, peel some garlic, little coconut oil or avocado oil, saute it all together, throw some sauce on it, gluten free and I eat it. You don’t have to be Julia Child here, right? So what about a rutabaga? I slice it up, dice an onion, peel some garlic, a little bit of oil, saute it up, put a sauce on it and I eat it, right? You don’t have to be a chef to learn to work with these basic vegetables. And you just wanna get them down there. You don’t have to taste them and chew them and enjoy the flavor of them, you just wanna get them down there because they feed the good bacteria and every root vegetable has different components of fiber that feed different families of the good bacteria. They never feed the bad bacteria. 

That’s why you don’t eat carrots every day, just carrots. Well, this is a root vegetable, I’m eating my carrots. Well, that’s good, but you need sweet potatoes and yams and turnips and parsnips and radishes. So you alternate that. Next go to Google. Type in list of prebiotic foods. Print it out and put it on your refrigerator. Every day, you have two from the list and you’re gonna learn that a banana is a prebiotic. So it’s not just the root vegetables. An onion is a prebiotic, oh I got that with my turnips. So I’m good. So you get two from the list and one root vegetable everyday. Then Mrs. Patient, for a couple of months, ’cause we’re taking wheat out. And so that’s been the fiber that your bacteria have been living on, the good bacteria have been living on wheat and that’s one of the benefits of wheat. The detriments outweigh the benefits, but that’s one of the benefits and we don’t want a deficit to develop and you’re learning about root vegetables and other prebiotics. But for a few months, I’d like you to take a prebiotic supplement. You don’t have to take it forever, but for a few months. And there are many good ones out there. Every doctor has his different favorite. We use one called mega mucosa.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

I like that.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

There are many. I don’t know that it matters which one, because you aren’t depending just on that supplement, you’re also training your lifestyle with the root vegetables and the list of other prebiotic foods. But for a few months, take a prebiotic supplement just to make sure you have more than enough food for your good bacteria to thrive and that they don’t suffer while you’re transitioning. Next, when you go shopping, buy five different types of fermented vegetables. Get sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, fermented beets, curry flavored, whatever you like. And every day, you have somewhere between a teaspoon and a tablespoon of fermented vegetables in your meal. And well, I don’t like sauerkraut. You don’t have to like it. Hide it in the mashed potatoes. You don’t have to chew it up and enjoy the flavor, you don’t have to. We got one recently called pink lady and it’s it’s shredded, oh, there’s carrots and bok choy and some other vegetables in there. But the flavor is, I like it. Marzie makes these wonderful gluten free buns out of almond flour and some other flour, I don’t know. But they’re really wonderful. And our breakfast this morning, she makes great scrambled eggs. And so I took one of the buns, sliced it in half and I put the pink lady sauerkraut on there and I put the scrambled eggs on top of it and then a slice of avocado and that was my sandwich for breakfast. And so I got my fermented vegetables without having to chew and taste and say, “All right, this is healthy for me, I’m gonna do it.” But I like the flavor myself, but that it was hidden in all those other flavors, right? So every day.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Now that one to me, if you’re out there and you’ve been eating French fries and toast your whole life, your life is about to get a thousand times better. But part of it is psychology of kind of wrapping your head around like, it took a while for us, but now my favorite thing, the way that I start every dinner is I make like basically a taster plate that has a little bit of, sometimes I use kimchi and sometimes there’s some miso and sometimes there’s some sauerkraut and we’ve got four or five different types.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

There’s a part of this that is like a conditioning of yourself to tell yourself, “Oh, I love this.” And then next thing you know, if you told me that I had to go to the standard American diet, I would felt like I was in a concentration camp compared to what we have now.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Yeah, exactly right. And it’s a transition, it takes time. It takes time, but and when I’m doing this on stage and I’m showing all the slides, I show the studies that say a teaspoon to a tablespoon a day, you increase the ferment, you increase the bacterial inoculation, 10,000 fold from your food. 10,000 fold. Not tenfold, not a hundred fold, 10,000 fold, just buy a teaspoon to a tablespoon every day. So you’re inoculating your gut with the good guys. And that’s why you vary, the don’t just eat sauerkraut. I mean, it’s okay if you did. But when you do different fermented vegetables, every vegetable, when it ferments, produces different families of the good bacteria. ‘Cause there are hundreds and hundreds of families of the good bacteria. So you want a little of this and a little of that and a little of this and oh, I really like this one, so I’m gonna have this again, whatever it is. But you want the diversity and Mrs. Patient, for a couple of months, I want you to take a probiotic supplement, for a few months while we’re transitioning you into this lifestyle. Now we like the spores, so we recommend a product called MegaSpore, but there are many, many good probiotics out there. Whatever your doctor or you feel you’re attracted to, to help inoculate with the good guys.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And that one has some pretty good science. The MegaSpore, I like that one also a lot and have used that myself. And there’s some pretty good science on that it can help grow certain, like it’ll help grow akkermansia, I think.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Right, exactly, exactly. They’re called the Keystone species. The ones who are really important. Really important. And using these spores help the keystones to grow. So you get really.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

What are the keystone species? What do they do?

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

They’re like, how do I say this? They’re the big Kaunas. They’re the ones that create the environment for all the other smaller concentrations of good bacteria to thrive in. So usually the key stones, they’re more dominant. There’s more of them, but they make room for the other good guys and they help to protect against the bad guys, getting a foothold in there.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Right, so then.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Next.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Oh, go for it. Yeah, go for it.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Okay. Next, arguably, Mrs. Patient, the most powerful enzyme in your gut is called intestinal alkaline phosphatase. IAP. IAP does so many beneficial things for you. It lowers your cholesterol if it’s too high, it lowers your triglycerides if they’re too high. So that’s non-alcoholic fatty liver syndrome that just starts to come down. It stabilizes blood sugar. So insulin sensitivity goes up, insulin resistance goes down. So you need less insulin, your blood sugar is stable more of the time. Probably it’s most critical benefit is that it grabs LPS and it locks it up in the gut and it escorts it out in the poop. Remember, Fasano said that the two most powerful triggers causing leaky gut are LPS and gluten. So intestinal alkaline phosphatase grabs LPS and just won’t let go, it locks it in and it just moves out with the poop. Intestinal alkaline phosphatase is increased by pectin. It’s the primary food for IAP, is pectin. So Mrs. Patient, when you go shopping and you’re buying your fruits and vegetables, always buy organic, buy 10 to 15 20 apples. When you go home, rinse them off, wash them, don’t peel them, cut the seeds out of them, so cut the core out. 

Chop them up, put them in a pot and if it’s this much apples in the pot, add water to about one third the height of the apples. About a third, put some cinnamon in there, turn it on high, in 10 to 12 minutes, you made apples sauce. That’s all it takes to make apple sauce. Now, my wife likes to then put it in the blender and just blend it up so it’s really creamy, consistency, I don’t do that. So if I make in the apple sauce, it’s chunky, right? But it doesn’t matter and do it with your kids, so they’re part of all this and learning about it. And when you have a tablespoon a day of freshly made apple sauce, the commercial stuff doesn’t work. So freshly made it’ll last four or five days in the refrigerator and it’s a no brainer to do. It takes less than 15 minutes to make it and have a tablespoon. Well, can I have more? Of course you can have more. If you want more, have more. But a tablespoon a day because I’m thinking over the long term, if you get in this habit, so maybe every morning, on the plate, with whatever breakfast is gonna be, there’s a scoop of apple sauce, a little scoop of apple sauce. And you and your kids are gonna get used to seeing the apple sauce on the plate every morning. 

Whatever your family habit’s going to be, just get it in on a daily basis. And you’re increasing the intestinal alkaline phosphatase, which also by the way, gets rid of the bad bacteria and feeds the good bacteria in your gut. It helps the good bacteria to lock onto the walls of the intestines to colonize. So it helps them dock in to colonize. IAP has so many benefits for us and just having a tablespoon a day of apple sauce will increase your IAP levels. Next. Bone broth, organic bone broth. Critically important. Bone broth has what’s called gelatin tannate. And when you read the science on gelatin tannate, gelatin tannate acts like a seal over the tears in the cheesecloth of your gut. So it’s a seal which then a allows under the surface, that damaged area to heal much quicker because all of the material moving through is not scraping against it so much. The gelatin tannate’s like a bandaid over it so the tissue can heal quicker. So one cup of bone brought the day. Now, my friend, Dr. Terry Walls, when she began dealing with these, our veterans coming home from Afghanistan and the Gulf war with PTSD and they were completely dysfunctional, completely dysfunctional. 

She had them drinking a quarts a day of bone broth. Well, I can’t afford to buy bone broth. And she’d look at them and say, “You have a rifle?” Yes, ma’am. Go hunting. And they’re all happy, they go out and kill something, And they go out hunting and then they harvest the animal for meat for the family, but then they save all the bones that they never thought of before and they make bone broth with it. And if you roast like, my kids gave me a cuisinart countertop roaster. You open the door and there’s things there and you put a chicken on it like this and there’s a drip pan that collects all the fat. So I would chop up some root vegetables and put them in the drip pan and put the chicken on there. Actually, I put the chicken in a Ziploc bag with a little olive oil at first and a whole bunch of Italian herbs and shake it up in there. And then I put the chicken on that thing and it stands up, close the door, and it goes around in a circle roasting and an hour and 15 minutes, I’ve got a really great chicken with all these root vegetables that have been soaking in the chicken fat, it’s just delicious. 

I mean, it’s a no brainer. And my wife was really impressed. She thought I could cook when I started dating her when I do that, right? I mean, I scored. So that was great. But making your own bone broth from chickens and from fish and from beef, and if you can’t make your own, just get organic, ’cause there’s a problem with many bones out there that are not organic. They can be high in lead and you don’t want that. But have a cup of bone broth a day to put a seal over the tears in the cheesecloth ’cause it heals every two to three days, you have a new lining to your gut. But when it’s damaged, it doesn’t heal as easily. So the gelatin tannate and you might do that until your tests, your follow up tests come back negative for leaky gut. So you might be on a cup of bone broth a day for six months, maybe a year. And after that you might just like it and wanna continue ’cause it builds your bones, your collagen, your tendons, your ligaments get stronger. Your skin gets nicer from it. So all of those other benefits also occur.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

I do a couple of cups every day.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Oh, it’s marvelous, marvelous.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Everything you’re talking about, I do. I did the apple sauce in my journey and then I stopped and then you reminded me and I’m like, I’m gonna get back on that one too.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Yeah, yeah. Is they’re good habits. And when you have a leaky gut, they are must do things. And they’re inexpensive to do and you’re not dependent on a whole bunch of supplements to do this. You’re adapting your lifestyle to a healthy lifestyle. And that’s what takes a little bit of time. But in the meantime, you’re doing everything you can to create that environment inside the tube that is, listen to this. And this is from Professor Yahuda Shaunfeld, the godfather of auto immunity. This guy, when I interviewed him, 26 of the PHD students who received their PHDs in immunology from him, there are many more, but 26 of them chaired departments of immunology in Med schools and hospitals around the world. They’re his students. And he tells us 36% of all the small molecules in healthy blood are the metabolites of the microbiome. They’re the exhaust of what the microbiome, the bacteria in your are producing, 36% of everything in your gut. Or no, in your bloodstream is from the exhaust of the microbiome. Why? Because they’re the messengers that are telling your, the geek term is modulates. 

So what it means is, it has its hands on the steering wheel of where you’re going down the road of life, right? So for every one message from the brain going down telling the gut what to do, and this is from Michael Gresean at Princeton. When he wrote his book, “The second brain”, back in 1999, he showed us for every one message from the brain telling the gut what to do, there are nine messages from the gut going up, telling the brain what to do. That all of our brain hormones, called neurotransmitters, the ratio of all of those, come from directions from the gut. The metabolites of the gut. So if you’ve got a dysbiotic gut, meaning an inflamed gut, you’ve got an inflamed brain and that’s depression or anxiety or schizophrenia. So any brain condition, you always have to include as part of the protocol, rebuild microbiome. Because the microbiome has its hands on the steering wheel of how your brain’s functioning.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

One of the reasons I wanted to interview you was for this topic. One thing that I’ve kind of gotten into now is when I’m talking to people now, there’s something that I can say, oh, I go listen to my interview with Tom O’Brien and then there’s gonna be, that’s almost like a college course that you can take.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Thank you, thank you. And puts tears in my eyes because I want every healthcare practitioner to understand what professor Fasano is now teaching at Harvard, all disease begins in the gut. All disease, so whatever you’re dealing with.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And so then it’s interesting, ’cause when you talk about depression, anxiety, PTSD, we do a lot of that, take care of a lot of people who came back from war and all over the world. And interestingly, we do stellate ganglion blocks to turn off fight or flight. We’ll use ketamine as a way to kind of modulate the central nervous system. Interestingly and it’s amazing for me to kind of go through the experience of when you have a problem, like let’s say PTSD, there are people like what you mentioned. There are people who just work on the gut and then all of a sudden PTSD goes away, right? There are people that work, for almost every problem known to man, there’s people who work on the gut and then they can get that problem to go away, whatever that problem is.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Right, which means that the gut is a component contributing to whatever the problem is.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Right.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Right? And sometimes you’ve go to deal with the stellate ganglion or you’ve got to deal with other things with it, of course, so people feel better and function better quickly ’cause it takes a while to rebuild a healthy microbiome.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Yeah.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

It takes a while. And so you want to have these other tools, which are great tools, they’re just great. But you can’t keep throwing gasoline on the fire, creating tears in the cheesecloth and expect to have a healthy, vibrant body. It cannot happen.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Yeah, yeah. No doubt. We are human beings. Where we were at the beginning a little bit of that like making good decisions and making bad decisions. It’s sort of maybe one of the most important things to figure out is a way to get to a point where you’re overall making better decisions.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

This is the way. I’m glad you brought this up. It’s really an important concept. In my most recent book, it’s titled, “You can fix your brain” and I could have done, “You can fix your heart”, “You can fix your gallbladder” it wouldn’t matter. The concepts are the same, but we’re all scared about brain function. I mean, everybody knows someone that had a heart attack and survived and changed their diets, started exercising, looks better than they’ve looked in years. Most of us know someone who’s diagnosed with cancer that went through the protocols, is in remission and they feel great. No one knows anyone diagnosed with brain deterioration disease that’s doing great. It terrifies us. It just terrifies us. And that’s why I picked the brain to talk about these concepts, you can fix your brain. The subtitle of the book is as important as the title. I went around with Rodeo Press for two weeks on the title. They wanted all these different, no, no, no. You can fix your brain, right? But the subtitle, “Just one hour a week, to the best memory productivity and sleep you’ve ever had”. And it’s not cutesy subtitle, it is the only way to be successful when you’re changing lifestyle. Mrs. Patient, every Tuesday night after dinner, every Sunday after services, whenever it is. 

But you tell your family and you put in your calendar, every Tuesday night at seven o’clock, I’m gonna devote an hour to learn more and apply the principles for one aspect of being healthier. Every week. And when you go back, ’cause you’ve read in my book, that you can’t store food in plastic storage containers, because the phthalates, the plasticizers in the container leach into the food and when you eat the chicken the next day or the spaghetti, it’s got plasticizers in it that accumulate your body. And so you go back to my book, you find the three URLs for glass storage containers. So you go to mileskimble.com and Amazon and the third one, whatever it was, oh, those are nice. Oh, I like those. And you order three round ones and two square ones and one for the pie and you pay with your credit card and you hit send, it took an hour. It took an hour. But never again are you gonna poison your family with plastic storage containers with these minor amounts of poisons that accumulate in your body over the the years. But then you’re done for the week because you’ve got a busy life. Next week, you go back and you say, “Oh my God, he talked about nail Polish.” And the phthalates in nail polisher in your bloodstream in four to five minutes. And now, you’re gonna go to the URLs that we give you for organic cosmetics and you get phthalates free nail Polish. 

And you order some and you try and you don’t like it. Then you have to go back and order more. It’s gonna take a while, but one hour a week. And about air filtration, and when you go and you learn that indoor air pollution is much worse than outdoor air pollution in most environments and you learn from NASA, that two six inch house plan in a 10 by 10 room absorb over 70% of the toxins in the air. You go out and you get the house plants. And then you say, “Oh, I don’t have a green thumb. They’re gonna die.” Then you buy more. Every week you just do one little thing and six months down the road, you see a friend you haven’t seen in a while and they say, “Oh my God, you look so different. Wow, what happened? You look so wonderful.” Oh, well, I’ve changed out my food storage containers. I got organic cosmetics, I healed my leaky gut. Bum, bum, bum, bum. But it’s overwhelming at first, when you try to do it all at once. And in our culture today, we want it now. It doesn’t work like that. Rebuilding a microbiome is gonna take you six months to two years, depending on how advanced out of balance you are, right? So one hour a week. And there’s a term that I talk about in the book that changed my life, when I went through a divorce 20 years ago now. When I went through a divorce, I was having a rough time and in this book, I was in a store that just called to me and the book by a woman named Pema Chodron.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Oh, I like her.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

And there was a word that she talked about, and I don’t know how to pronounce it. It’s a Tibetan word. I’m gonna say it’s maitri or maitri, M A I T R I. And it means loving kindness and an unconditional friendship with one’s self. You are your own best friend and lighten up on yourself. Don’t expect to be perfect. You just stay in the ball game. You just keep putting your foot forward. So one hour a week, to apply these principles that cumulatively over time, completely change the direction of your health. But don’t try to do it all at once, just be kind to yourself, be gentle and take the time, whatever it takes to get this done.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

I feel like this interview is the sort of the last 20 years of my life because Arkarti basically said, we were like, we met Arkarti and Arkarti was like, “Oh yeah, you can’t have anything in plastic. So you got to get glass containers.” And so then we threw all of those plastic containers away. It was literally a slow journey of kind of going through adopting all of these new ideas. But then what happens is, is then you see people get healthier and healthier and healthier. And so then I wanna echo this idea, I just love that idea of stay in the game, stay in the game, be kind to yourself. Pema Chodron is as good as they come in terms of this loving, kindness. Adopting that attitude for yourself and everybody else. And then slowly, I love everything you said. I’m so grateful that I got a chance to talk to you. You’re one of the nicest people in the business and anything you wanna add?

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Well, you’re the poster boy for this. If you’ve been doing this for 20 years, here’s the result. I mean, you look great, right? And you’ve got great attitude in life. You sparkle and you radiate, you’re serving humanity in your passion. And this is what happens to every one of us when we take care of ourselves with loving kindness, that it’s an accumulative growth process into more of yourself with less of the chaos that surrounds us.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And so everybody that listens to this, try to go out and buy Tom’s new book and it’s “You can change your brain”

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

“You can fix your brain.”

Matthew Cook, M.D.

“You can fix your brain.” Okay, well, I’m so grateful. Thank you for being with us and I look forward to talking to you again soon.

Tom O’Bryan DC, CCN, DACBN

Thank you, Matt. It’s a real pleasure to be with you brother. Thank you.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Thank you.