Autoimmunity Unlocked: How To Heal Autoimmune Disease And Optimize Your Ability To Fight Cancer

Peter Osborne, P.S.c.D.

Hey, it’s my pleasure, I’m super excited to be here today. 

Nathan Crane

So in all your years of research and experience working with thousands of patients, what have you found to be some of the most common causes of auto-immune disease in general? 

Peter Osborne, P.S.c.D.

Well, number one, hands down, above and beyond everything else is gluten. And that may sound like a broken record, I mean, that’s why I wrote “No Grain, No Pain”, but it’s gluten as a component of grain. And we’ve known about it being the cause of autoimmune disease since the early 1950s, actually probably before that, Dr. William Dicke, a pediatrician during World War II observed that during grain rations, all the kids with celiac disease in his hospital got better, spontaneous recovery and so he was the first to actually write about the connection between grain causing celiac disease. 

Now, you gotta remember at the time celiac disease, we didn’t know what caused it. So it was a disease where you would vomit and diarrhea until you dehydrated and died from malnutrition. So it’s not a, it’s not something that anybody wanted to have, you know, again, one of the primary staples in the American diet is wheat. 50% Of our caloric intake or more is from wheat. So when you think about gluten sensitivity, now understand that gluten is in wheat, it’s the primary form of protein and wheat and 50% of the diet is from that, right? So, so we have this, this dramatic increase in gluten sensitivity because we have this dramatic increase in wheat production. And in wheat consumption, look at the day, you know, the daily diet of most people cereal, the cereal industry has done a great job of making you think you have to eat it to be healthy, right? 

You’ve got, you know, pizza. Most people have pizza night at home. Most people have pasta night at home, right? So there’s always, you know, sandwiches, right? There’s always something that’s coming in that’s a gluten bomb. And now today we even add gluten to bread mixes because it makes things chewier, right? So when you look at like the chewy crust on the pizza or the like the subway sandwiches, you know, with the big soft chewy dough, like that’s chewy because of added gluten. So we all, we have gluten, then we add gluten to the grain to get the chewy feel in the mouth texture, and now we’ve created this massive caloric ingestion of something that’s a known auto-immune inducing peptide. So auto-immunity, hands down, we know gluten is linked to celiac disease. It’s linked to rheumatoid arthritis. It’s linked to Hashimoto’s hypo thyroid. It’s linked to Addison’s disease. It’s linked to ankylosing spondylitis and psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis and scleroderma and dermatomyositis. 

There are 100 forms of auto-immunity and they’re generally broken out into and called different things. But what I want your audience to understand is auto-immune disease is not 100 different diseases. Autoimmune disease is a process and how it affects you is how it affects you, right? So the underlying process of how auto immune disease develops, one of the triggers is gluten. But for you, it might affect your thyroid. For example, and you end up with a Hashimoto’s diagnosis, but for somebody that might affect their joints, creating joint dysfunction and swelling. And so they may get a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis. It’s still the same underlying mechanisms, right. Of illness and it’s still the same underlying triggers. We just choose to call it different diseases, which is interesting because if you look at cancer, you know, when you look at cancer statistics, cancer’s, arguably, it’s the number one, number two cause of death, right? 

Depending on what year, sometime, you know, it’s that and heart disease, cancer and heart disease, kinda do this, but they lump all the cancers together, right? I mean, so, you don’t just say, you don’t say, oh, no, osteosarcoma, you know, versus, you know, skin cancer versus, you know, thyroid cancer, you clump them all into one category called all cancer, and you say cancer kills, you know, anywhere from half a million to a million people a year and you call it the number one, number two cause of death. With autoimmune disease, we don’t do that. We don’t lump anything together. It’s all separated out. If you lumped autoimmune disease together, it would outshine cancer by orders of magnitude, same thing with heart disease, auto immune disease, number one killer in women under the age of 65. And that’s when you separate the different kinds out, okay? Well, when you out 

Nathan Crane

Well, I want, I wanted you to repeat that. So if you clumped all the autoimmune diseases together as one and call it just auto immune disease, you’re saying that, that would be the number one killer in women under the age of 60, is that what you’re saying? 

Peter Osborne, P.S.c.D.

No, it already is. Even if you don’t clump it, it’s the number one killer in women under the age of 65. Now, if you clump all of auto immune disease together, it would shadow cancer and heart disease as the number one cause of death. 

Nathan Crane

Wow. That’s, that’s crazy. And it’s not something that I think our medical industry understands very well because they’re treating all of these different forms of autoimmune disease as separate things and prescribing different things that are masking symptoms and aren’t actually really helping people reverse many of these auto-immune diseases, right?

Peter Osborne, P.S.c.D.

Absolutely, I mean, if you look at medical specialization, in my opinion is the bane of good healthcare because, you know, you’ve got a cardiologist, for example, maybe he’s seeing a patient with, you know, with pericarditis, which is a swelling of the sack around the heart. It’s auto-immune, by the way, and gluten can trigger it. And then that same patient maybe also has Hashimoto’s, right, which is an autoimmune inflammation of the thyroid gland. And so they’re seeing an endocrinologist and they’re seeing a cardiologist, neither one are putting the two together. They’re getting separate medications from both doctors. They’re getting both being told, oh, nutrition has nothing to do with this, right? And that’s the model. Because auto-immunity, as a class is not really taught. You don’t go to, when you go to medical school, when you go to graduate school, there’s not like auto-immune disease 101, here’s all the forms of autoimmunity. And this is a class that majors in autoimmunity, that doesn’t exist. 

You take classes like pathology and pathology is lumping all forms of pathology into one class, maybe over a year, over two years, depending on how your school breaks it out. But auto immune disease is not given like this, this aggressive attention. So most doctors that train in it, they’re training only in one specialization. So like, if I’m an endocrinologist, I know about Hashimoto’s, but I don’t know much about Sjogren’s or rheumatoid arthritis. If I’m a rheumatologist, I know about rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis, but I don’t know much about pericarditis or Hashimoto’s or Addison’s disease, you see what I’m saying? So like this specializations have kind of separates, it’s almost like if we’re trying to be experts and get all the right people in the room to talk together, they’re not ever talking together, right? So we never come to some kind of conclusion that says, look, this whole pattern of disease that we’re seeing evolve and starting to out shine cancer and heart disease is not 90 or 100 separate conditions, it’s one condition underlying that’s the trigger, and gluten is probably, well, it’s the most well-researched trigger for autoimmune disease of anything we could talk about. Now, there are other triggers, certainly, cancer is, and these are similar for cancer. 

So like if, okay, if we look at gluten is probably the biggest one, but what about chemicals, right? We’ve got like 30,000 new chemicals in the last 30 years that have been added into our life, right? Through food 3,000 and food approved as generally recognized as safe. We’ve got pesticides, we’ve got herbicides, we’ve got fungicides that are being sprayed on crops, right? So we’ve got that as an element. We’ve got the genetic manipulation of food and what that does to the human microbiome. We’ve got vaccine schedule going from, you know, a dozen shots to upwards of 80, some odd doses now, you know, up to the year up to the age of 18. 

So you’ve got all the adjuvants in these vaccines that are known triggers for autoimmunity. I mean, there’s actually a condition it’s this, these are not my words, this is Dr. Yehuda Shoenfeld, who’s one of the world leading researchers and experts on vaccines causing autoimmunity. And he actually named this term, it’s called Asia A-S-I-A, it stands for autoimmune syndrome or autoimmune inflammatory syndrome induced by adjuvants. And so the adjuvants in the vaccines, the propylene glycol, the mercury, the aluminum, the other chemical compounds that we know can create and incite inflammation that triggers the onset of an autoimmune process. Then you’ve got plastics and you’ve got, there are, BPA is one of the ones that you’re seeing now, BPA free everywhere. 

That doesn’t mean much because there are other biz phenols there’s BPB and there’s BPC and they’re also problematic. So it’s, it’s really window dressing, at least BPA free bottles, you know, but plastic plasticizers are known triggers. We’ve also got certain medications that are triggers, a lot of the medications, actually, some of the medications for women to treat breast cancer after the fact actually are, have been shown to induce autoimmunity. There are about 46 prescription medications that we know can cause lupus, which is a form of auto-immune disease. And they’re known, and it’s very well established and very well researched. Actually, I just did a lecture on this last year at the Torrance Memorial Hospital in California. And, you know, it was all about, it was all about triggers for autoimmune disease. 

So we know this, we know these triggers are there. And actually that my experience was when I was coming up through graduate school, I was in the VA hospital working in rheumatology. And I was, frankly, I was very upset because here these veterans were coming in to get treatment and they were just being pumped full of steroids and methotrexate, you know? And, and I’m like, well, they’re not, the problem’s not being solved that, what kind of sense does this make? 

So I approached my attending physician. I said, look, let’s look at gluten because gluten is, we all can agree, gluten causes autoimmunity. And there’s tons of research on it. And that was 20, you know, this was 20 years ago and I was told, “No, we’re not gonna do that, quit asking,” like, I kept going back to my attending with more information. What about fasting? What about omega-3 fatty acids? Like, there’s all these great ways that we can, that we can lower inflammation and we can actually treat the root cause and not just masquerade around with, with suppressing their immune systems with drugs, but I was promptly pushed out. I mean, I was basically told, quit being inquisitive, quit asking questions. You’re not here to learn. You’re here for us to indoctrinate you. And that’s not what they said, but that’s what they meant. Like if I was there to learn, we would have had an engaging learning conversation and we could have had, you know, a back and forth, but I was just shut completely down. And the research I was bringing to my attending, I mean, you’re not, we’re not talking about men’s health, we’re talking about generally of rheumatology. We’re talking about Journal American Medical Association, “Lancet, British Medical Journal”, like major research being published in major journals that was saying gluten-free can help rheumatoid arthritis, gluten-free can help psoriatic arthritis, but they were just, they were just not willing to open their minds to it. 

And so you have to understand a lot of the drugs used to treat autoimmunity, suppress the immune system and increase the risk for cancer. And this is one of the reasons why auto immunity is actually pre-cancer, okay? Because if you go in and you go through the main care of treatment, right? The main type of treatment you’re gonna get, if you have a rheumatological autoimmune disease, which is like a joint pain type of disease, your first option is gonna get a drug called methotrexate, okay? And sometimes they’ll combine methotrexate with a steroid, which when you do that, it causes leaky gut, it rips holes in, microscopic holes, in your gut lining over time, which sets you up for autoimmune disease. 

So like you’re treating autoimmune disease in one way, and then you’re inducing autoimmune disease in another through the drugs that you’re taking to treat the autoimmune disease, which is another reason why it never made sense to me, but the drugs themselves, if those fail, then the next level up is something called biologics. And this is a class of medications that suppress the immune system. And they have the highest level of warning on their labels that you can give a drug, which is called a black box warning because they cause cancer, right? So you take somebody who’s 35, they’ve been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. They’re now on a biologic. And this drug, like over time, over 10 years suppresses their immune system so well, now they have lymphoma. 

Now they develop cancer, okay? So now they get thrown over to MD Anderson or whatever other cancer treatment facility. And now they’re being pumped full of chemicals, chemotherapy, or radiation, right. To deal with the fact that they’ve been suppressing their immune system for 20 years, right? And that’s not a solution either. And so when I say auto-immunity is pre-cancer, that’s one of the reasons why is that the drugs used to treat auto-immunity, suppress the immune system and increase the risk for the development of cancer. But one of the other reasons, why is that cancer has a lot of the same triggers as autoimmune disease. There are certain cancers that gluten can trigger, pancreatic cancer, stomach cancer, intestinal cancer. We know people with celiac disease are at much higher risk for developing those types of cancers. And that’s as a result of the underlying autoimmune process, that leads to such aggressive inflammation over time. 

The immune system is so overwhelmed, Nathan, by trying to fight the food that it can’t fight and do its normal maintenance, which is part of maintaining the body, which is killing cancer cells, which are very normal occurrences. As you know, we all have cancer cells, it’s just that we also all have an immune system that can deal with these cells by certain mechanisms that create apoptosis or cell programmed cell death of these cancer cells. And so again, gluten can disrupt that, but the malnutrition associated with the intestinal damage. So for example, those with celiac disease and gluten sensitivity have a greater tendency to be deficient in vitamin D, okay? Vitamin D is associated with 19 terminal cancers, right? I mean, causation, not, not like loose association, but like vitamin D deficiency causes 19 types of cancer, vitamin A deficiency causes cancer, selenium deficiency causes cancer. 

And people with gluten damage are more apt to have those deficiencies. So now that deficiency over time is leading to, or contributing to the potential development of underlying tumors or other types of cancers. And so, and so if we don’t know that, and we don’t know it, like to test that, like to measure that and help these individuals know when to supplement, know how to change their diets accordingly, then that malnutrition just, multiply it over 10 years over 20, over 30 years, because most cancers, I mean, unless they’re rare, pediatric cancers, most cancers are adult diseases, right? I mean, we’re not, you know, we’re, I had a son that had a very, very rare tumor called osteosarcoma, which is a rare pediatric tumor, super rare, not much is known about it, but most cancers that we know things about, those cancers are our lifestyle, right? They’re lifestyle diseases. They’re their lack of exercise, lack of sunshine, poor diet, too much stress, right? Not enough sleep. And it’s the compilation and the accumulation of those things over decades because nobody wakes up tomorrow and oh, all of a sudden they have cancer. It’s a slow, steady progression of poor health until the body breaks down and can’t fundamentally function. 

Nathan Crane

You know, I mean, right there, you just shared a whole book worth of, you know, life-changing information. And I wanna kind of unpack a couple of things there that you said one of them was, you know, at least right now how auto-immune disease is, they’re often treated as all these different diseases, rather than looking at the similar causations. One of them being gluten and others being, you know, chemicals and toxins and stress and so forth. Dr. Thomas Lodi, who I’ve interviewed as part of the series. I encourage people to go listen to he’s a medical doctor and a holistic physician who’s been treating cancer patients for many, many years. You know, he also agrees with you about cancer is, is what you’re talking about auto-immunity, he says, look, we treat all these different cancers like they’re all these different things, but the reality is they’re all the same. 

Whether it’s the most rare cancer there is, or it’s, you know, the most common cancers, whether it’s pancreatic or it’s breast cancer, it’s a tumor, or it’s a, you know, in your blood, whatever it is, it’s, they have similar causations and they have similar solutions. And so when he’s working with cancer patients, he says, look, you know, we treat people with cancer, basically the same. You might have some, you know, you might do some low dose chemo, some IPT or something to help shrink a tumor, which might be different than for somebody else. But in general, they’re looking at causation as well as solutions from that larger lens. And it’s obviously working because he gets a lot of results with his patients. 

And I think, you know, just understanding that is that if we start looking at all the similarities and the underlying causes between various chronic diseases from autoimmune disease to cancer, you know, we’re so much more educated and equipped to actually treat it better, just like we need to treat the whole body, the whole human, the mind, the emotions, the physicality, you know, from that holistic viewpoint, right? The other thing I wanna share briefly, which I didn’t think of before, until you just said it, as auto-immunity being a precursor to cancer, you know, we know through the literature, it’s very well-documented, very well understood that chronic inflammation directly causes cancer. It can cause cancer if you have chronic inflammation and we know autoimmune diseases, one of the symptoms, or one of the results, maybe one of the triggers, right, is chronic inflammation. So it’s another way that auto-immunity can directly cause cancer, right? Is through that state of chronic inflammation. 

Peter Osborne, P.S.c.D.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the autoimmunity is triggered by a host of factors that all generally lead to a chronic inflammatory response of a person’s immune system against their own tissue, right? So whether that’s producing cytokines or other chemicals that damage our own tissue, whether that’s intentional or whether that’s, what’s known in the body as collateral damage. So when your body sees like a food and it says that food’s an enemy attack it, you know, and attacks that food and in the process of attacking that food, it damages the gut or the lining of the gut around that food as well. So that’s in warfare, we call it, you miss, if you shoot a missile and you miss and you hit the hospital, the hospital blowing up is called collateral damage. Well, the same thing happens in our body. Our immune system are the soldiers and when they shoot their bombs and missiles and weapons, and sometimes they hit the right target, but the bomb is stronger than what it needed to be. 

That’s what chronic inflammation is, that, that overlap of inflammation starts to affect and impact other tissues that then, you know, remember what cancer is that the formal precancer is called dysplasia, meaning it’s a change in the nature of the cell because the cell is so damaged when it makes its daughter, its next cell line, it’s not quite the same. That’s called dysplasia. It’s different, right? And then that turns into metaplasia and then that turns into cancer. If we’re looking at it from a, you know, from a biology perspective and it’s that chronic inflammation that sets the stage for that cell and the next cell line and the cell line after that, to struggle in producing a predictable, healthy working functioning cell. 

Nathan Crane

Yeah, and that’s, you know, to that point, some people think, oh my body’s not doing what it’s supposed to do. My immune system’s attacking itself. It’s not functioning properly and that’s not exactly true, right? Your body is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. The problem, at least from what I understand, I’d love for you to talk a little bit more about is, you know, when auto-immunity happens is because of that leaky gut it’s because of those proteins, from those things like gluten and so forth that get, you know, delivered into the blood and then the body starts identifying those cells, those proteins, trying to attack ’em, but it’s also attacking, you know, your own body because those proteins have leaked out of the gut and into the rest of your body. Is that a good understanding? 

Peter Osborne, P.S.c.D.

Yeah, so one of the primary triggers of autoimmunity is leaky gut. So you have your gut, understand what your gut is. Your gut is like this super pipe from your mouth to your anus that

is like this mega quarantine zone, okay? Nothing, you know, the old saying, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. What happens in your gut is supposed to stay in your gut unless your gut allows it to come in, right? So think of your gut as like the big bouncer, the Italian Tony guy at the bar, right? He’s like, yeah, this guy’s with me. Come on in, right? That’s what your guts supposed to do. Everything else is supposed to go out in your poop. Well, when you’re doing things that damage Tony, the bouncer, and he can no longer be doing his job, that’s a leaky gut. Now things are leaking in directly into your bloodstream. Now understand that the bloodstream right behind the gut is called the portal circulation. It goes right to the liver and then it gets access to everything. So it’s like it gets access to the mainframe. Now also remember that 75 to 80% of your immune system is concentrated around your gut. 

Nathan Crane

Right. 

Peter Osborne, P.S.c.D.

You have a massive set of tonsils that are wrapped around your small intestine. It’s called the gastro associated lymphoid tissue or the Galt. And so when something leaks through that doesn’t belong, those immune cells are there and they’re like, hey, that doesn’t, Tony didn’t say that guy was okay, right? So let’s create an antibody or let’s create an inflammatory chemical. And let’s neutralize that thing before it creates more problems, okay? And it does that. It does a good job of that. And sometimes in that process, if that’s happening regularly enough, that inflammation creates collateral damage and damages and starts to break down the gut further, so then the problem just gets worse. But sometimes some of the things that leak in, okay, the proteins, the toxins that leak in, sometimes they’re similar. They share homology, which means they share sameness with proteins in your body. .

So imagine that maybe there’s a bacteria that lives in your gut normally, but it’s, but it produces a poop or a by-product, and that by-product, that it makes looks something like your thyroid, okay? The proteins in your thyroid. And so as that’s leaking through, your immune system is doing the right thing. It’s saying, hey, that doesn’t belong here, let’s get it. But what happens over time is this process called molecular mimicry where the molecules that are leaking through mimic your own tissue. And so then your immune system is looking at the thyroid saying, hey, that looks like the bacterial toxin that we’ve been trying to neutralize, go get it. And so then the immune system charges on the thyroid and now we have a Hashimoto’s situation. And the only way to stop it is to stop the leak, right? And you have to stop the leak, the immune system has a six month life span, meaning that all of your circulating immune cells will be dead in six months and replaced by daughter cells. And so with autoimmunity, this is why it can take three, it takes about three generations of

cells to calm the immune system down from attacking what was created from a molecular mimicry scenario, this is average. 

Nathan Crane

Three, yeah, three generations of cells within the gut or within the 

Peter Osborne, P.S.c.D.

Within the circulation, so. No, the gut cells turn over every two days. 

Nathan Crane

Right. 

Peter Osborne, P.S.c.D.

But the immune cells okay, which are 70 to 80% of them are focused in the gut. They turn over every six months. So let’s say you change your diet today, right? You quit eating gluten. Gluten was part of the problem, those immune cells for the next five months, are still gonna be hyper vigilant, hyper, almost like a soldier who’s been at war for so long that he shoots before he asks questions or thinks because he’s just like on edge. And so the immune cells are hypervigilant and we gotta let the next generation come in and be calmer, right? And the way we calm them down is we quit exposing them to things that make them wanna have warfare, okay? And the way we do that is we seal the gut and the way we seal the gut is we take away the things that cause it to leak. Does that make sense? So that’s gluten. That’s why gluten is so notorious, right? Because we know for sure gluten causes leaky gut, but if they’re left to 

Nathan Crane

And there are literally tears, little rips in the cell lining within the gut, right? 

Peter Osborne, P.S.c.D.

Well, what it does is there’s several different things that it does mechanistically. One of them is there’s a protein. If you’ve ever played with a Lego block, you know, the real thin ones and you snap ’em together, they’re kind of hard to put, to take apart. ‘Cause there’s the, they’re so thin, right? 

Nathan Crane

Yeah, my son, you know, he brings ’em to me when he can’t get it. Otherwise he’s trying to take ’em apart with his teeth.

Peter Osborne, P.S.c.D.

Yeah, exactly. Well, that’s what your cells in your gut do. They’re they like Lego blocks. They snap together and they’re really, that’s called a tight junction. There’s that’s the formal name for that. And so it’s like a little prong that sticks out that snaps into the next cell. Well, those little protein prongs are called zonulin. And what gluten has been shown to do is disrupt that zonulin. So now imagine you take your Lego block and shave off the prong and they don’t stick together. And so then the cells start to drift apart and then you get the gap in between it. 

So now gluten peptides and bacterial peptides and fungal peptides and chemicals from the food additives or whatever else you’re being exposed to, all that’s just leaking through that gap directly into your immune system and your immune system’s like, these things don’t belong here. So if the gut is integrity, if its integrity is intact, excuse me, then you don’t have to worry about even some of the toxins being in your gut. Remember you’ve gut’s quarantined, right? So it’s not the toxins per se, it’s when the toxins are our allowed access behind the curtain. And that’s when the whole problem began. So that, that those cells, we have to first seal the gut and let those cells have time to calm down, okay? And that’s why autoimmunity, you know, that’s why a person can go gluten free and they may not feel better like tomorrow or the next day or even next month. They may, it may just be kind of a slow, steady improvement in the right direction. It’s because those immune cells are still over attacking. 

So we gotta get ’em to calm down, kind of like the post-traumatic stressed soldier, We gotta council him, we gotta bring them down and reintroduce him back into society and say, look that person’s not an enemy that person’s your friend. Don’t punch them in the face. This, it’s the same kind of thing in the gut. So when those next cells, that next cell line is a little bit calmer, the next cell line after that is a little bit calmer if we do the right things. Now, if we, if we cheat and we, you know, we basically, we don’t make it anywhere. So this is why you go gluten free. There’s an adage, it’s called the 20 parts per million rule. If you get a breadcrumb of gluten, which is what 20 parts per million is equivalent to, that can cause inflammation for two months. 

Nathan Crane

Wow. 

Peter Osborne, P.S.c.D.

So yeah. So imagine, oh, I’m kinda going gluten-free or I’m reducing my diet and I’m eating less gluten. I’m sorry if you’re truly gluten sensitive, it’s not enough. It’s better, it is less poison. Don’t don’t get me wrong, less is still better. But if we’re talking about shutting down leaky gut, shutting down auto-immunity and regulating the immune system so that it’s not over-reactive, you’ve got to get it out. Otherwise the fire’s just gonna keep burning, again, that long-term fire, that long-term inflammation. Yeah, aside from causing dysfunction and damage, it’s what sends most people to the doctor’s office. The number one treatment for chronic inflammation is a combination of non-steroidal, anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen, Celebrex, those types of drugs and steroids, okay? But also opiate, pain prescription medicines. Now, if we combine those classes of medicines altogether, they kill, oh, close to 40,000 people a year when used appropriately. We’re not talking about addiction. We’re not talking about the opiate crisis. We’re just talking about proper use. The, the CDC director, Thomas Frieden was quoted once saying we know of no other class of medications so readily prescribed that kills the people that it’s trying to help. 

Nathan Crane

Right. 

Peter Osborne, P.S.c.D.

This is why we’re having, you know, a pain crisis is because the drugs that they use don’t fix the problem, right? The way you fix the problem is you change the diet, you change the lifestyle, and then the medicines become unnecessary. 

Nathan Crane

So what about people who obviously, you know, people who have any sensitivity to gluten at all, people who know they’re celiac or people who are having symptoms of, or have autoimmune disease or have cancer trying to prevent cancer, like just get rid of gluten, right? Like that’s an easy first step for anybody. Just get it completely, or I should say simple. I don’t know if it’s necessarily easy for everybody, but simple first step for everyone completely get it out of your diet, right? Just be precautionary about it. But what about people who say, oh, I don’t have sensitivity to gluten. I don’t have, you know, it’s like, I don’t have to worry about it. I can eat it, I don’t have any symptoms. What would you say to people who have that mindset and who have cancer or who are trying to prevent cancer? 

Peter Osborne, P.S.c.D.

I’d say get tested. You know, I mean, if you’re not sure you don’t really know, it’s not, gluten sensitivity is one of the slowest forms of poison known to man. It’s not the acute poison. It’s not like, oh, I just drank some Clorox and now I feel horrible and I’m about to die. It’s I’ve been eating a slow poison and my body is resilient enough and healthy enough to deal with the slow poison. But part of the process of dealing with that poison has created the chronic inflammation that now I’m calling cancer, or I’m calling, fill in the blank, right? Whatever inflammatory condition that is. So if you’ve got chronic inflammation, look, I’m not saying that gluten is the sole cause for all chronic inflammation, I don’t think anyone could make that claim. And I certainly don’t wanna be the guy that’s beating that drum that hard, but here’s what we know statistically, one in six, okay, to one in seven has auto-immunity. In the U.S., 46 to 50 million people, okay, estimated. And that’s an, that’s probably an underestimation, to be honest with you because what we’re learning is that many of the diseases that we didn’t think were auto-immune are actually autoimmune, type two diabetes, autoimmune process. 

Alzheimer’s autoimmune process, bone loss, osteoporosis, autoimmune process, not a calcium deficiency. So, you know, as we learn more about this whole auto-immune complex puzzle, we’re finding that it’s so much more common. And again, what’s the number one cause of autoimmune disease? It’s gluten. Now some researchers believe that approximately 1% of the population has celiac disease, okay? So one in 100 has celiac disease. Now of that one in 100, some researchers believe that six in 100 have non-celiac gluten sensitivity. Meaning if celiac disease affects 1% of the population, then non-celiac gluten sensitivity, which is a type of gluten reaction that’s not manifested as the classical diarrhea and stomach pain and wasting, okay? Then 6% of the population has non-celiac gluten sensitivity. 

And some researchers believe that it’s as high as 33 to 40%. Okay, so I don’t know that anyone knows the exact true answer, I fall on the 30 to 40% With some of my other colleagues just simply because of my biased experience. I mean, I’m day in and day out. I’m seeing, you know, seeing on immunity and gluten relationships. So I tend to fall on the side of higher bias because of my experience but I mean, I, by no means have we tested everyone in the world that we could make that claim, you know, for everyone, but as high as 33 to 40% on a low conservative level, 6%, right? That’s a lot of people, that’s a lot of people. 

So how many of that can extrapolate over to those with cancer? That’s, that’s quite a few. And I would say if you’re a naysayer or a doubting Thomas, there’s two things that I would recommend that you do. Number one is we have a quiz that people can take. It’s free, it’s an online quiz. It’s about 32 questions. You just check the box and it kind of gives you an idea as to whether or not there’s a suspicion that you could be gluten sensitive. So that’s an option. And that can, people can find that at glutenfreesociety.org, which is my foundation. 

Nathan Crane

Say it again, glutenfreesociety.org? 

Peter Osborne, P.S.c.D.

Yes, and then the other is to do genetic testing. The way to know whether or not you’re gonna react to gluten, there’s a gene or actually a couple of genes, they’re called HLA DQ genes, same genes associated with celiac disease. But there are patterns on these genes that if you have them, you’re predisposed to react to gluten. And so knowing your genetic predisposition, you understand that gluten sensitivity is not a disease, right, gluten sensitivity, if ignored causes disease. But gluten sensitivity is not a disease it’s a state of genetics. You either have the genetic predisposition or you don’t, if you have the genetic predisposition and you ignore it. You know, you’re gonna end up slowly poisoning yourself over a lifetime until you develop a disease that, you know, most likely, if you’re a female is gonna kill you before you’re 65 or dramatically alter your life, you know, and your quality of life, whether it kills you, it’s gonna dramatically alter your quality of life. 

Now we know that the undiagnosed celiac disease, you have four time greater risk of mortality rate, meaning, you know, you can four times more likely to die if you have a gluten issue and you don’t even know it. So, and then that’s just that there’s a whole, Nathan, there’s a term in medicine. You heard me use the term non-celiac gluten sensitivity, which should be kind of self-explanatory, right? But, but there’s another term called silent celiac disease, which to me is a bogus term. 

Like I know a lot of doctors use it, but what does that mean? That means you have the damage from gluten, but you don’t have celiac disease, okay? So that’s why they call it silent celiac disease. Well, that’s the same thing basically as non-celiac gluten sensitivity. ‘Cause the only way to diagnose celiac disease is to diagnose the damage that gluten can cause to the intestine. And that can take 30 years or more. I think the average time to diagnosis is like three and a half decades. So by the time you get it, you get gluten identified as a problem, you’re three and a half decades into damaging and poisoning yourself slowly. And now you’ve got all that work and that big pit of illness to climb out of. It, to me, it makes a lot more sense to genetically test people at birth and say, look, you’re predisposed to react to gluten, be a good idea if you didn’t eat it. And if we did that, we would probably have a good chunk of our auto immune health crisis in this country solved, you know, in the next generation. It’s just, it won’t happen though. 

Nathan Crane

Well, and it’s easy enough now because there’s so much information and definitely a lot of credit to you for the great work you’ve done around, you know, spreading this education that getting gluten free, almost anything from the grocery store now is really easy. I mean, you can, gluten-free pancakes, gluten-free cereals, gluten-free flour, gluten-free everything, you know, and if you get it certified, you know, that it’s, you know, not, doesn’t have the 20 million parts per million, wait, 20 million parts per million 

Peter Osborne, P.S.c.D.

20 parts per million? 

Nathan Crane

20 parts per million. And, and so it’s, it’s actually easy. We’ve gone completely gluten-free here in my house because I suspected some, you know, issues from it. I tested negative for celiac disease, but I had a lot of common symptoms coming up. And so far, knock on wood since I, you know, completely, we went completely gluten free, haven’t had any of those symptoms. So that’s one of the things that is actually really easy to do is to go gluten-free, be proactive. You know, just take that step. You also talked about vaccines and the adjuvants in vaccines to potentially, you know, be a trigger for autoimmunity. I wanna, you know, we don’t need to get into a ton of information about vaccines specifically, but I wanna share something and I’m not encouraging, 

You know, saying all vaccines are bad, never take a vaccine or whatever. My family and I, we don’t do vaccines. That’s our choice, right? Everyone’s entitled to their own choice and their own reasons, but at least you should have the education. I wanna read a quote from Dr. Jay Anthony Morris, who was a former chief vaccine control officer at the FDA. This is not me saying it. This is a former chief vaccine control officer from the FDA, former, right? Of course, ’cause this is what he said. He said, there’s no evidence that any influenza vaccine, any flu vaccine thus far developed is effective in preventing or mitigating any attack of influenza, the producers of these vaccines know that they are worthless, but they go on selling them anyway. They know they’re worthless, but they go on selling them anyway. 

I can just about guarantee, that’s why he’s the former control officer for the FDA. And you know, I wanna share that because you talked about different triggers for auto immunity now, basically, which also lead to chronic inflammation, chronic inflammation leads to cancer, it’s all tied. You had mentioned toxins, pollutants. You’ve mentioned, you know, the adjuvants in vaccines and gluten. What are some other things that people, if they just start eliminating from their life, from their diet, you know, can really increase their chances of reversing or preventing autoimmunity and in turn reversing or preventing cancer? 

Peter Osborne, P.S.c.D.

I think if we look at it from a kind of a broad sweeping, common sense perspective, it’s not so much even what you need to eliminate, it’s what you can add also, right? So add sleep and lots of it. You know, eight hours a day, people talk about eight hours and some people brag, ah, I can get by with five or six. You’re not really getting by, what you’re doing is you’re paying a price. You just don’t know it yet. You haven’t paid the price yet, but you will. It catches up to you, so sleep. When we sleep, how we sleep matters, but our bodies re-regulate our inflammatory mediators, the chemicals that help regulate inflammation, chemicals like cortisol. 

The timeframe to get the most quality out of your sleep is 10:00 PM to 2:00 AM. And that’s been really well researched that if you’re going to bed at midnight, you miss 50% of that window. You’re you’re not gonna make it up by sleeping later. You’ve you’ve really, you want, and somebody will say, well, I’m a night person. No, you’re not, you’ve evolved with technology and with electricity to become a night person. But unless you have infravision, or unless you can see in the dark, you’re not really technically a night person, you’ve just evolved your lifestyle around staying up at night. I know that I used to be a night shift worker and when I was in the air force. So, you know, I did midnight to eight for years. And it took a huge toll on my overall health. But sleep, adding sleep at the right time is super critical. 

Nathan Crane

You used to be night shift worker, I used to be a night shift partier. So, and it really hurt me growing up. I didn’t go to bed til the sun came up and then I slept all day and then did it all again. And you’re right. I mean, in a short amount of time, it really destroys your mental faculties as well as takes a toll on the body. 

Peter Osborne, P.S.c.D.

Yeah, and so the other thing you can add is exercise. And you can add sunshine to your day, especially if you live North of 27 degrees latitude. 

Nathan Crane

Right 

Peter Osborne, P.S.c.D.

Because you’re gonna, you’re gonna make more vitamin D and that arguably there, you know, Dr. Michael Holick, one of the lead world-leading researchers in vitamin D estimates that you could eradicate a good percent of all cancer by correcting the vitamin D deficiency of the country. And the best way to get vitamin D is not supplements. It’s sunshine, right? I mean, you can eat liver. You can eat mushrooms to get some vitamin D, you can eat eggs to get some vitamin D, but sunshine, hands down is number one. And so many people are so busy lathering up with chemical carcinogenics toxin cocktails, ’cause they’re scared of the sun because the field of dermatology has done a huge human disservice in my opinion, they’ve told everybody that sunshine causes skin cancer. That’s like saying water causes drowning. 

So don’t drink it anymore, right? I mean, sunshine doesn’t cause skin cancer, ultraviolet radiation, overexposed over many years does. Right, and we have to differentiate that, we can’t just blame the sun. We have to, you know, your tolerance to sun is based on your exposure time. It’s based on your genetic skin tone, right? Some people are darker, some people are lighter. You have to take that into account. This is personalized choices. But if you’re a, you know, if you’re an Irish girl with freckles and super pale and you’ll burn in six minutes in the sun, then go out for four, right? Don’t ever go out long enough to burn, but go out, get some sun if you’re, you know, if you’re darker than that and you, and you never burn, you know, that also means it’s harder for your skin to make vitamin D. So you, you know, you theoretically are gonna need more sunshine than people who are more fair skinned. 

So, get outside, get in the sun, it, beyond the sun, it’ll connect you to nature. It’ll connect you to the earth’s electromagnetic field and connect you to dirt. I understand that one of the other theories behind auto-immune disease is something called the hygiene hypothesis that we won’t get into too terribly deep, but being too clean is actually a trigger for cancer and auto-immunity, so those are all things that you can add to your life. If you want to do other things, you should be adding passion to your life, right? What drives you? What is your, what fulfills you as a person? Maybe that what fulfills you is your job, you’re passionate about what you do. I certainly am passionate about what I do, and I think that’s why I have a huge advantage in this world is because God, He blessed me to find my passion and I would encourage all of you to do the same, you’re all passionate and good and great or great about something. 

Find what that is and learn how to incorporate it into your life. Don’t go to work every day to a job you hate and let your soul be solely drained from you if that makes, if that makes you miserable, because it will take years of your life away from you. So find what you’re passionate about and try to do it as much as you possibly can and surround yourself with positive and loving reinforcement of people who are not negative influences in your life. Like those are things that you should be thinking about doing from a non diet perspective. And then outside of that, it’s, look, if we could just simplify it to the nth degree, it’s eat real food, right? And if you, let’s take it one step up, know where your food comes from, okay? When you go to the grocery store and you buy, you know, a product, where did it come from? Who was the farmer? Right? Was it, was it mass produced? And does it have what we call in the business of nutrition, we call it window labeling or window dressing, where it looks healthy, but actually it’s not, right? And so, know, where your food comes from, know your source, because like, if you take some of the chains, like some of the big corporations that, what any company tries to do as they get bigger is they try to scale the production of their food so that they can generate more profit. 

And so one of the concepts in business to scaling production is called vertical integration. And what that means is I’m gonna use McDonald’s. Instead of getting their potatoes or their beef from farmer Jack over here, they buy all their own land, bring in their own cows, chemically manipulate the feed so that their beef tastes the same whether you’re eating a Mc-whatever it is, a Mc-sandwich, right? Whether you’re eating one in Hong Kong or whether you’re eating one in New York, their motto is one taste worldwide. Well, real food is not one taste worldwide. 

Real, you know, a beef cow in Texas on Texas grass is gonna taste different than one in Ohio, on Ohio grass, right? And so food should taste uniquely different. And if you, if you buy from these mass companies, what you’re buying is you’re buying vertical integrated food so that they can sell to you at a higher profit margin. And you have to understand that that’s their goal. Their goal is higher profit margin and profit to their shareholders. They don’t care about your health. I promise they don’t care about your health. No matter what they say McDonald’s doesn’t care about your health ’cause if they did, they would have closed down years ago, right? None of these big chain places really care about you. The only person that can care about you as you, right? And hopefully the people around you that love you. And so you’re eating real food and sourcing your food as much as you can from, you know, I mean, some of you may be thinking, gosh, that’s impossible. How do I get, you know, local, locally grown food and know where it comes from? It’s called the co-op, it’s called a farmer’s market, Go support them, right? Because the only way we’re gonna change the paradigm of disease, and that includes cancer and autoimmune disease in this country, the only way that paradigm is gonna change is when we recognize that where we source our food and who we give our money to is the loudest voice that will create the paradigm change that needs to happen. 

So that doctors and hospitals and everyone that owns a business understands that you’re gonna speak as a consumer with your wallet. You’re gonna speak with your money. And if you’re speaking with your money loud enough to demand that you get local, fresh, organic, proper care of animals, you know, that is what is going to, basically, that’s what’s going to propel new thoughts and new ideas around how to provide more of this type of food to more people so that the world can be a healthier place to be in. And if you think about where the world is today, a lot of people are mentally ill. 

A lot of people are irrational in their thoughts, and you have to understand that food plays a role in that too. If you’ve ever seen a kid eat sugar for the first time and then climb up the walls, you know that food can affect a choice and behavior. And so a lot of people make bad choices around their food because they’re eating bad food that doesn’t allow them to make intelligent choices because their brain doesn’t work properly. Their brain chemistry’s dysfunctional. So start by eating real food. And the way that I would recommend that you do is support your farmer’s markets, support your local co-ops as much as you possibly can, and even take it one step further, if you have the ability to do so. And that’s, you know, plant a raised garden bed. You know, plant a fruit tree, get some real food that where you absolutely know where it’s sourced from, because it’s sourced from you, right? And that’ll help you connect to the earth and it’ll help you understand life in a whole new dynamic way. Life is precious, and, you know, there’s an old saying, you know, when we dump poison on the Eagle, we’re dumping poison on ourselves, right? When we dump poison in the tributary and poison the frogs we’re poisoning ourselves, right? And if you wanna stop poisoning the world, stop poisoning yourself first, because if you demand the best for you, then you will change the way business is done globally. And if that happens, we’re all better off for it. 

Nathan Crane

I love that, I mean, that’s a perfect place to, I think, to end this because the question often is, well, what can I do to make a difference? I’m just one person. But the reality is what you’re indicating there is every single one of us voting with our dollar, where we choose to spend our money determines what the market delivers to us. Meaning the more you, each person, I, individual go out and spend more money on organic food, on local food. At the, as you said, the farmer’s market, your co-op you’re supporting local farmers. Well guess what? More and more farmers will start to grow local, organic, seasonal food. More large corporations will start to produce, you know, more healthy food because that’s what individually we demand by how we vote with our dollar. And one person becomes two people becomes a million people becomes the world, right? So. 

Peter Osborne, P.S.c.D.

Right, your voice then becomes a roar. 

Nathan Crane

Every person is very powerful with that ability. So, yeah, I just wanna say, you know, Dr. Osborne, thank you so much. Thank you for the great work you do. I know you have a lot of resources. I want people to go and take a look at your website, drpeterosborne.com. You can pick up a copy of his book there. He has lots of great articles. You can go in depth, definitely join his newsletter, where you’re gonna get some of the latest up-to-date information going deeper into, you know, preventing and healing auto-immunity and all these great resources on helping us live longer and healthier. So I just wanna say, you know, thank you so much for being such a pioneer and a spokesperson in this field. And you know, this was incredibly valuable today. 

Peter Osborne, P.S.c.D. 

Well, you’re welcome, Nathan, thanks for having me and thanks for putting on this wonderful event. 

Nathan Crane

My pleasure, and I wanna thank all of you for tuning in here to the Global Cancer Symposium. Make sure to share this with anyone, you know, who needs this information to help change their life. Also go visit drpeterosborne.com. Pick up a copy of his book and join his newsletter and visit healthandhealingclub.com. You’ll learn more about our global membership dedicated to helping you get and stay healthy. Again, I’m Nathan Crane, I wish you all ultimate health and happiness, take care.