Gluten, Mold & Nutrient Deficits: Inflammation’s Trio

Introduction to the Summit and Dr. Osborne 0:00

consistently being exposed to mycotoxins, it can cause anything that gluten can, cause it, can caused anything, that Lyme can. Cause it. Can cause, anything. That heavy metals can cost because it's basically stimulating your immune system to generate an inflammatory response to try to help you heal and repair. And because you're never getting out of the environment, the immune response never really goes away. So your. Immune system just stays on high alert. stays in chronic activation mode. It puts the body in its sympathetic dominant state and it really just makes it hard to heal and repair.

This is Dr. Talks. Welcome to the Conquering Chronic Inflammation Summit. I'm your host, Dr. David Jockers, and I've got the pleasure of interviewing Dr Peter Osborne. Today, we talk all about gluten, inflammation, and he's one of the most sought after functional medicine doctors in the country. His practice is centered on helping those with painful chronic degenerative and autoimmune diseases with a primary focus on gluten sensitivity and food allergies. He's the founder of The Gluten Free Society, the author of best seller, No Grain, no Pain.

And he is the host of Glutinology Masterclass Series, The Ultimate Guide on Going Glute Free.

What Gluten Is and Where Itu2019s Found 1:24

We're gonna do a deep dive on Glutan, how it impacts gut health and how it impacts inflammation anywhere in your body. So you guys are in for a treat here. Without further ado, let's go into the interview. Dr. Peter Osborne, always great to connect with you. And I know obviously your expertise is in gluten and food sensitivities, food allergies. Let's start by talking about gluten. What is that? A lot of people hear about Gluten Free and gluten, but what actually is it and what are the foods that obviously contain gluten?

Yeah. So gluten is basically, it's a family of proteins found in grains. Wheat, barley, rye are the classic grains people think about when they think of gluten. But there are actually forms of glutens also found and oats and rice and corn and sorghum and millet, which are again, classically, these grains are considered gluten-free, but there's no such thing as a gluten free grain. Gluten is the family proteins, found on the seeds of grass. which is what grains are, these proteins are soluble in alcohol.

That's the botanical definition, if you will. So anytime you're eating bread, pizza, pasta, made from these items, anytime, you are using a gravy that's been thickened with wheat flour, any time you pick up a donut or any other type of baked good, You're going to be getting gluten exposure. Yeah, absolutely. And so a lot of people will pivot to gluten-free. It's funny because my wife and I kind of laugh because I've got family members that'll be like, oh, this is gluten free. They kind light up like hey, I can eat as much of this that I want and it's healthy.

But are all glutenfree products healthy? What does gluten actually do in the body? Let's kind go through that. Yeah, so gluten as a protein, it can do several things. One of the newer research studies, and this has come out in the last 10 years or so, shows that gluten exposure can cause leaky gut. It doesn't matter who you are, whether you're gluten sensitive or whether your not gluten-sensitive.

How Gluten Drives Inflammation and Leaky Gut 3:25

So that's one of downfalls to having a high gluten diet is that it actually punches microscopic holes in your gut lining, allowing your poop basically to leak into your bloodstream and everything else. That's a precursor to most forms of autoimmune disease. We don't want that, obviously, but gluten also is a neurotoxin. There's group of researchers at Oxford who've been studying this for decades now and they have MRI evidence that shows how gluten can form antibodies against brain tissue, nervous tissue.

Actually, shrink areas of the brain causing diseases like imbalance, vertigo, tinnitus, And even gluten has been linked to diseases like bipolar and schizophrenia. Actually, its original name was Bread Madness, which is an interesting history about gluten itself. Now, what is the mechanism for that? What does gluten do in the gut that will then cause increased intestinal permeability in key gut? Yeah, so there's an interaction that occurs in the immune system. Once your immune systems sees gluten and it presents it to your your immunity cells, your dendritic cells will then launch into two possible scenarios.

One of the scenarios is you'll make antibodies against that. These antibodies are basically little weapons that are trying to neutralize gluten, but in process of neutralizing gluten they cause inflammation to the surrounding tissues. So it's kind of like friendly fire killing killing the wrong person, right? So if that inflammation is occurring in the gut, you get inflammatory damage to the guy. That's what leads to classic celiac disease or villus atrophy is the hallmark sign of that, which is basically just an erosion of the folds of intestine.

So it causes malabsorption and really severely can affect a person's health. We see the same kind of antibody reaction also occurring and brain tissue. There's an enzyme called tissue transglutaminase or TTG that is present also in the brain and so some people when they're exposed to gluten, the antibody responses are occurring in brain tissue and you can get the outcome of that can be what we call brain inflammation, right? Brain inflammation. which can contribute to depression and anxiety and bipolar situations.

Even schizoaffectives or schizophrenics have been shown to have a high percentage of them have gluten antibodies. We've actually seen in our clinic a number of schizophrenic get better. Now, I'm not saying that all schizophrenia is caused by just gluten. There's certainly an array of different potential things that can happen with neurological disease, but gluten is a major trigger. As far as the madness component, there's a mold component to gluten. Originally, when it was called bread madness, it because the grain flowers have a high propensity to grow mold on them.

There was an alkaloid of mold called ergo, E-R-G-O-T, that was a hallucinogenic mold byproduct. Individuals eating moldy bread, for example, would develop bread madness that have schizoaffective hallucinations. That's where that term comes from. Yeah, that's really interesting. Now, a lot of people will go gluten free and they'll buy stuff that gluten-free.

Why Gluten-Free Processed Foods Can Still Be Problematic 6:32

A lot it's made with what's considered glutenfree sources like corn and rice. What are your thoughts on those types of things? They're bad news for several reasons. Rice has a form of gluten in it called oresin and corn has that form a gluten unit called Zane. These types of glutens are equally inflammatory to people with gluten sensitivity. In my experience, we see this all the time. We actually have named it. It's called gluten free whiplash. It's when a person originally goes gluten-free, generally they go wheat-barley, rye- free.

There's a period of improvement that they start feeling better, but once they started discovering that gluten free food aisle with all the corn and rice products, they starts going backwards. They start whiplashing backwards into health issues again. So it's not something I recommend, although technically, you know, the FDA considers those grains gluten-free. They do have, they're just different types of gluten that can stimulate similar types in inflammatory reactions. So gluten free sources, not necessarily good, especially, if they are labeled glutenfree, what should people stick with when it comes to an anti-inflammatory diet?

How do you approach that in your clinic? We test them. I mean, the best thing to do is test, don't guess. That's my opinion of it. So we test to see, because a person could be gluten sensitive, but they could also be reactive to dairy, they can be active to broccoli. It's an array of potential possibilities. And so when we establish a persons diet, we first test him to discern what their immune systems perceive to be the threat, right? And then we can modify their diet based on their own uniqueness.

And in that way, that's the ultimate personalized anti-inflammatory diet. Now, if we're generalizing, a safe bet would be buy organic foods. When you're talking about plant-based products, try to avoid processed food at all costs.

Testing, Diet, and Common Nutrient Deficiencies 8:27

There's major studies coming out now on ultra-processed food really causing a lot of inflammation and damage. And so it's just a save bet to stay away from those types of things. So whole food, organic food when it comes to meat, grass-fed free range, organic, wild caught, or some good general guidelines to follow if you're just trying to make sure that you are avoiding the chemicals and the processing and some of the other things that are just not good for any human. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

So obviously trying to get rid of the processed foods, really sticking with whole real foods. It's a great baseline as far as nutrition goes. Now, what are some of your nutritional deficiencies that you see associated with people that are maybe dealing with autoimmunity, gluten sensitivity, a lot of different issues that your seeing in your clinic? Yeah, we've been tracking this now for over 20 years and the top five deficiencies that I've recorded through testing on individuals with gluten issues, number one, vitamin D, Number two, iron, three B12, four zinc and number five, omega-3 fatty acids.

So those five are the most common we see. If you're at home watching this and you think, should I maybe take some supplements? You know, think about those five based on my own clinical experience, but really ideally go get them tested. Like work with your doctor to get those levels tested because you may not have one of those 5. You may have something totally different and you need something different. So it's always best to give a personalized recommendation, in my opinion, through lab testing.

Especially with some of those like iron, for example. A lot of people have high iron. Certainly we see iron deficiency anemia, which tends to be a lot more common in menstruating females in particular, or people that have inflammatory bowel disease where they have malabsorption. then those individuals are at higher risk. But most men, for example, actually have too much iron already. So if they start supplementing with iron, it's actually going to cause more oxidative stress and inflammation in their system.

You don't want to guess. I know you didn't mention magnesium. Is that somewhere in your top 10? Actually, no, it's probably in my top 15, but I know that's counter to what a lot of people see on the internet. And I'm not saying that magnesium is not important, But I don't think that many people, at least not in My experience, in over 10,000 tests, probably closer to 50,00 tests. but over 10,000 individual people, where we just don't see magnesium as frequently as what it's being reported. Now, I think a lot of people benefit from magnesium because it actually has therapeutic effects, right?

It's a natural muscle relaxer. If you've got anxiety or muscle tension, it is going to have a therapeutic effect. That effect may not be correcting a deficiency per se. It may just be the relaxation effect that magnesium presents and makes a person feel better. but we don't see the level of deficiency that's oftentimes reported. I've seen reports where it's like 8 out of 10 people are deficient in magnesium and that just has not been my experience. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah, that's really interesting.

I see a lot of people respond really well, putting them on magnesium. But like you said, maybe the calming effect, the effect on helping balance the glutamate to GABA ratio in the brain. Glutamates the gas pedal and GAB is the brakes. And most people when they have inflammation, particularly brain inflammation too much. They have a distorted ratio too, much glutamine, not enough GABI and the nervous system is overexcited. Magnesium is real powerful, calming break like effect. And a lot of people are noticing improvements there with improved sleep, relaxation, better stress resilience, things like that.

Vitamin C, Scurvy, and Gut Support 12:14

Yeah, for sure. And then on the gut too, with constipation, a lotta people use it. I look at magnesium as almost like one of the antidotes for sympathetic dominance. So when somebody's in chronic inflammation mode, their nervous system is generally sympathetic dominant, and so magnesium can kind of help balance that, And certainly therapeutically can be very effective. And there's not really a great danger to using magnesium. So I think if it helps a person, more power to them. But I'm always cautious in practice that we don't try to use what I call green medicine, which is where you use supplements to appease their symptoms without digging for why their systems exist.

So I'm perfectly fine with saying, yeah, take the magnesium for now to improve your quality of life, but let's really try to understand the deep underlying reasons as to why your problems exist so that you don't need to take magnesium forever for the rest of your life in extra high doses. Yeah, that's always a good idea. Just try and find the root cause factors. Now, when people have severely damaged gut issues, obviously an elimination diet like you talked about is key. What are some of the key supplements that help support people healing their gut?

My favorite for that really honestly is vitamin C and there's some pretty good research on celiacs. Not fully seeing a resolution of inflammation unless vitamin c is used. I've used vitamin-c for 20 years in practice and I just see it do fantastic things for people. We actually have a vitamin sea flush protocol that we put people through where we're giving them approximately six grams of vitamin C every 15 minutes to flush out the bowel, and that's just to saturate their system with vitamin c. And then once we do that, we keep them on five grams a vitamin, C daily to just keep that to keep going.

Vitamin C, it's amazing. You asked about deficiencies earlier. It's in the top 10. I see quite a bit of scurvy actually in my practice. We always hear about there's no such thing as scurry. People don't not in a modern world. I bet you I see 20% of the people walking through the door having low vitamin C because we measure it two ways. We measure intracellularly, but we also measure in the serum and the plasma. And we find that a lot of people are below the threshold in blood for vitamin c is 0.2. I find people all the time with undetectable levels.

And then when you batch their symptoms to scurvy, it's like textbook. It's not like scurry, like they're losing their mind, they are going crazy and their teeth are falling out scourvy. But it is like muscle pain, muscle aches, gums are bleeding all the time. They have high anxiety. These are kind of the early, what you would call subclinical or preclinal before full blown scirvy sets in, but these people are definitely scervy. Wow, really interesting, I haven't heard that. I know also that you've had experience with mold, and a lot of your clients are coming in with the mold.

You've personally had an experience that and you're actually working on a documentary series right now all about mold so let's go into that, let us talk about what mold where we can be exposed to mold and then how mold drives inflammation.

Mold Exposure and Its Effects on the Body 15:28

Yes, I mean mold can, let's talk about environmental mold because environmental molds, most people have heard of black mold as the bad mold, right? But there are other environmental modes beyond even stachybotrys, which is black molds. Aspergillus, penicillium, or fusarium are other types of mold that produce different types toxins that can make people very sick. A lot of these have been shown to be inhibitory of DNA, RNA, and protein synthesis. So what happens when you're in mold? is it slows down your body cells ability to regenerate DNA, RNA and protein.

So basically ages you, it accelerates the aging process, the body starts breaking down. A lot of people in mold will, if they're trying to work out, they'll get injured very easily and those injuries won't heal. a lot people will develop hormonal shifts or hormonial changes. Men will be more prone to hyperestrogenism because there's certain mold toxins that mimic estrogen. Women will prone the symptoms of estrogen dominance. And so we see this a lot already in clinical practice, right? Even without mold, but these are some hallmarks of what mold can do.

Once you're in mold, consistently being exposed to mycotoxins, it can cause anything that gluten can, cause it, can caused anything. That Lyme can. Cause it. Can cause. Anything that heavy metals can because it's basically stimulating your immune system to generate an inflammatory response to try to help you heal and repair. And because you never getting out of the environment, that immune response never really goes away. So your system just stays on high alert. It's. stays in chronic activation mode.

It puts the body in its sympathetic dominant state and it really just makes it hard to heal and repair. A lot of these people, they've changed their diet. Like they're gone gluten-free, grain- free, avoiding dairy, have been allergy tested. They're just not finding any kind of improvements with the typical changes that we might see a person make that recovers really well. So if you're one of those individuals where you've worked with a functional doc and you have done diet and lifestyle change and are still struggling, you really want to consider the potential that you might have mold mold exposure.

Myself personally, I was in a house that was only two years old. And when we started suspecting mold and tapped into the wall cavity, we measured in some of the walls cavities, over 200,000 spores of different species of mold were present in our wall cavity. So it was quite a toxic environment, quite toxic situation that nobody really suspected until we start asking deeper questions. Wow. Yeah. And what percentage of your patients are you seeing mold? Oh man, it's a high percent. It's more than half.

I was actually, what happened, I said, God, please quit sending chronic mold cases to me. Because it is a tough thing and it was tough for many reasons. As a practitioner, It's very hard to watch people go through it. I'm empathetic, so I take a lot of people's energy into me. That's just part of the work, right? But it's also very challenging sometimes to convince people that mold is their problem. This is part of why I love testing and being objective, because you can't just walk up to somebody and say, we think it is mold, get out of your house, walk away from your home.

You have to have an overwhelming amount of evidence. It's kind of like building a court case, you've got to an have overwhelming evidence to prosecute mold as the guilty party, so to speak, and be responsible for hurting the client or the patient. It's just tough, but that was my prayer. It was just, please quit sending chronic mold. And then I had mold in my house within six months. So I think that God's answer to me was, no, we're not going to stop seeing mold, you're going get better at it. You're gonna learn more about it and I'm going put you through it to make you learn.

That's what happened. At this point, I know more mold than I ever wanted to know. I knew more architecture and more building technology. all the things that go into creating a mold in an environment, in a home environment. And the alarming part about mold is the builders have been using cheap, non-skilled labor to save money. So the infrastructure of a lot of the newer housing developments and things of that nature are compromised. There's a huge, great risk for mold to grow in homes that probably didn't exist 30 or 40 years ago, but it's And we're seeing it so much more.

I think mold toxicity is going to become the new gluten sensitivity of the next decade, just because the problem is pervasively getting worse because mold grows more as time goes on. And what I mean by that is you could have a new house and you can have mold in that house. The more there's a water source, and it doesn't have to be a running water, it didn't to have be broken pipe and didn' have it be leaky roof. you could just have a humidity control problem in your home. And that humidity is a source of water.

If you've got a chronic source humidity where the vapor barrier of your house is compromised, which was my case, that mold will spontaneously continue to grow. The longer that problem exists, the stronger that mode gets. Rains that come, the more the humidity is uncontrolled, bigger and bigger, and that problem gets with time. And so what happens is sometimes it starts out as the small thing, but it gets bigger bigger. Bigger and then people start getting sicker and sickering because it takes so long.

They don't even realize because their environment wasn't like they moved into this home and all of a sudden they're sick from this.

Managing Mold Toxicity and Dietary Strategies 21:08

It was just that environment got more and more poisonous as time went by. And so that's where mold can get tricky because you don't always suspect it. Now, some people move into a moldy environment and it's like a switch, right? They start getting sick right away. Maybe they move in to a more mature home where the mold is already matured and its really sporading and is really kicking out toxins. But it is one of those things that can happen slowly. That's kind of the way it did in my house. In the first couple of years we lived in it, it wasn't that big of a deal.

And then my family started getting sickness and then, my dog died. You know, it was just all kinds of things started happening until we were able to figure it out. Yeah, absolutely. And what are some things outside of getting out of the house? What do you see as far as maybe nutritional supplements, strategies that people are taking to get healthy from mold? You can do binders, but it's like a stopgap. It's not going to solve the issue. So you could do like zeolites and charcoal, activated charcoal.

If you try to do heavy liberty toxification through biotransformers like alpha-lipoic acid and acetylcysteine glutathione, a lot of times if they're still in mold, they get worse because as they are in it, there being exposed to the toxins. And then here you're trying to mobilize those toxins out of the body. The body shoves those toxins in fat cells. to try to contain the damage. But when you use high dose nutrients for detox, you're mobilizing that stuff into the blood, plus you are being exposed from the environment.

So a lot of people feel really bad. One of the hallmarks of mold toxicity in my experience is detox supplement intolerance. People can't tolerate the methylated versions of B vitamins or alpha-lipoic acid or cysteine or glutathione. This is a common issue where we see mold as a reason why. Binders can be taken. Usually most people tolerate those. It's a stopgap. Other stop gaps that I've seen work really well when people are still in mold is the carnivore diet. One of the reasons why is that the Carnivores diet has virtually no mold in it.

So one of those top foods that contain mold and mycotoxins is grain. And that's another reason why when I wrote my book, No Grain, no Pain, the book title wasn't No Gluten,No Pain. It was because there's a lot of things in grain and mold is one of them. But carnivore diet reduces a ton of potential for mold exposure. And so these people in mold generally tend to do better on carnival or even if they're still in molds. I've got patients right now that. are in mold, they can't get out of it, can afford to leave their house, and can not afford the remediation.

We've got them on carnivore diets. They're doing a lot better than they were not being on the carnival diet. And they're do a better on a carnivo diet than to say they are doing on like a grain-free diet, right? So that's something else that I think a lots of reasons why the Carnivores community has gotten so popular is because mold is such a big deal. And you talk to a lot of these folks that are doing carnivore, one of the back trends that you'll typically find is many of them are in mold. But that's what a person can do if you're still in it.

So like going carnival is a potential option, using binders, but number one thing you can is to get out of mold, and that sometimes can be easier said than done. Yeah, that is great. I look forward to seeing your docuseries on that. That will probably be out, what, end of this year, next year? Yeah, we're aiming next year, early next, year fingers crossed. Yeah, for sure. Well, it's a work that needs to get out there. Obviously a lot of people, like you talked about, dealing with mold issues. And depending on your level of sensitivity, some people are better at detoxing mold than others.

This is why mold's not healthy for anybody, but you can have a husband, wife living in the same house. Wife's got all these chronic health issues, the husband doesn't, husband seems like everything's fine because his body is able to detox it better than his wife's. So her body's starting to break down, although it is not helping for him as well. Yeah, and it's also a dose exposure issue, right? Usually, in my experience, it is the stay-at-home wife, so she's home all day.

Final Thoughts and Where to Find Dr. Osborne 25:18

She doesn't leave home. And the husband goes off 12 hours a day, is out of the house. So she is getting double exposure. Typically, she weighs a lot less than him. There's already a physical disparity between men's capacity to withstand chemical stressors versus women. They're just stronger at dealing with things and then you add a dose exposure that's twice as long. It's not uncommon to see women get sick first or kids or pets. So if you're in a moldy situation or you think you might be in mold situation, husbands may be doing just fine, but the kids and the pets and in the wife are all doing poorly, then you may want to suspect mold as a potential and get a good inspector to come out and maybe do an investigation or help you do it investigation.

Yeah, really important stuff. Well, Dr. Peter, this has been a great interview. Any last words of inspiration for people? You can of course go out and get his book, No Grain, no Pain, a really, great book. And working people will find out more about you and how to work with you in your team. Yeah, they can find us at glutenfreesociety.org. That's our hub for all things autoimmune and diet related. If you want to learn more about those, just come over. We've got a bunch of free things. When you sign up for our newsletter, we send you resources.

You can also come to us over at YouTube. It's Dr. Peter Osborne on YouTube and we do a live Q&A every Thursday and a master class every Tuesday. Anybody's welcome to come and join. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for your time. Appreciate that. Dr. Peter Osborne, guys, check out his website. Check out YouTube and we'll see you on a future interview. Be blessed, everybody. Thank you for tuning into Dr Talks. We hope today's episode has enlightened and inspired you, on your path to optimal health. Each day is a new opportunity to make choices that empower your wellbeing.

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