Juice for Healing Your Energy Body

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

Thank you, Dr. Keesha. Really a pleasure. Always a pleasure to be with you and support your efforts. It’s just great what you’re doing out there.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Well, I feel the same way about yours. So I’d love to talk a little bit, you talk about each of us being consumers, right? As a consumer with a number of symptoms trying to get healthier. What’s the big picture that we have to keep in mind when we’re focusing on healing the energy body?

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

Oh, you bet. Just in healing in general, whether it’s the physical body, the energy body, the chemical body, just healing, we have to know where is the drive: where’s the power train that’s pushing disease? What’s the momentum? I mean, if you wanna change the direction of your health, you have to change the direction of your metabolism. And so what’s the push? And we know that 14 of the top 15 causes of death in the world today are chronic inflammatory diseases: 14 out of 15. The only one that’s not is unintentional injuries. Everything else is a chronic inflammatory disease, which means when I go down or when you go down or when any of us go down, it’s very likely to be from a chronic inflammatory disease; meaning this inflammation was going on for a long time. It was chronic. It’s been going on for years. “Well, I feel fine.” Oh really? Well, I would wager almost $1,000 that with most people, if they do the right tests, they’re gonna find out they’re inflamed. And they’re carrying more inflammation than what the body can adapt to. And when you have excess inflammation, then you have tissue degeneration, collateral damage from the inflammation. 

And that occurs just wherever your vulnerability is. I call it the weak link in your chain. If you pull a chain, it always breaks at the weakest link: one in the middle, the other end. It’s your heart, your brain, your liver, your kidneys, your immune system, wherever your genetic weak link is. Well, it’s a combination of genes, and this is a geek word: antecedence, which means how you’ve lived your life. If you eat tuna fish three times a week, you got mercury poisoning. That’s just a given now because all tuna fish, except for one type, has high levels of mercury. It’s a predator fish. And the bigger predator fish accumulate a lot more mercury than the little tiny smelt or anchovies or sardines do. So if you eat a lot of tuna, it accumulates over the years: that’s an antecedent. So it’s your genetics and antecedence that determine where the weak link in your chain is. But it’s always inflammation. That’s the big picture here. So if there’s only one direction that we wanna focus our attention on to learn more, if there’s only one, I hope there’s many, but if there’s only one, it’s how do I live more of an anti-inflammatory life? That’s the big kahuna. 

And when you’ve got that one, then you look at what I break down into four categories. Some may have different breakdowns of these various components of health, but I call it the pyramid of health. When you look at a pyramid, there’s three sides to a pyramid. No, there’s four. There’s also a base, right? And that’s your structure. And that’s the home of chiropractic and massage and exercise and your bones and your muscles and your ligaments and posture and all of that. And that can change any health, the direction, if that’s the primary area that’s out of balance. I’ve seen so many miracles with just straight chiropractic care, mechanical care, over the years that if that’s the primary imbalance, that’s what you have to fix. So that’s the base of the pyramid. Then one side is the biochemistry, and that’s where most of us spend all of our time trying to get healthy with what we eat, what we drink, the medications we take, the supplements we take, the air that we breathe. Really important to address that. But it’s only one of the four sides. The next side is the mental or spiritual side, and that’s what we’re looking at here today. 

And the last side is the electromagnetic. In the last 30 years now, that’s become as big a player as structure or biochemistry or emotions that we have. That’s why my cellphone has got a Pong case on it, P-O-N-G, because it just minimizes the amount of radiation that comes to the phone. And I know it works because the car that I drove for many years is an Acura. And when I walk up to the car, the lights turn on that shine down by your feet and the inside lights turn on before I get to the car. So my key sends a message. It says, “We’re here,” and the lights turn on so you can see the inside of the car. You can see by the door handle and all that. But if I’m holding my keys in the same hand as my phone and I walk up to the car, the lights don’t turn on. But what’s wrong? Oh yeah, of course. And then I change hands and then the lights turn on right away before I touch the car. So that tells me this thing is doing something. I’m no expert on EMFs, but I’ve recommended Pong to people for years because I know it works. And there are others also on the EMF side of it.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

I wanna say something that you said about the pyramid and where we’re focusing most of our time and energy is on that mental, spiritual. But actually we’re not.

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

The biochemical. The biochemical is where we spend most of our time.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

But you were saying on the summit that the energy body is mostly over there, but actually, it’s all four of those: EMS affects it, biochemistry affects it, Your structure affects it, it’s all, right?

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

Yes, exactly. They’re all interconnected. And that’s the next concept I wanted to address. And for some, it’ll be introduce them to it. And that is the concept of network medicine. It was jaw-dropping, and we conveniently forget about stuff that is outside our paradigm, the world that we live in. If there’s something that we’re not quite, it doesn’t fit, then we just conveniently forget about it. And I’m writing a paper right now, and the title of the paper is: The Enigma of the Gluten-Free Diet: Reduce Symptomatology and Increase Mortality. And if you don’t do the gluten-free diet correctly, I mean, if you do it correctly, it’s the best thing in the world. But if you don’t do it correctly, you just start eating all the gluten-free garbage that’s out there. Your health goes down. It goes down. And I start off this paper and for this first paragraph, I just wanted to bring it up here because it’s such a great concept. Oxford Languages defines an enigma as a person or thing that is mysterious, puzzling, or difficult to understand. And when you have an enigma in healthcare, so many of our doctors conveniently bypass the enigma. They stay with what they know and they bypass the rest of it. 

So here’s a concept from the “New England Journal of Medicine” that came out 18 years ago. And yet most people if they hear it today, they say, “What? What? I didn’t know that.” Meaning that they bypassed the information. So what they did, there was a paper that came out that identified a particular gene called the FTO gene. And we know that it’s a gene that is indicated of high risk for obesity. And if you carry one of those genes, you can carry none, one, or two, ’cause you get one from your mother, one from your father. And if you carry one of those genes, we know that the risk of developing obesity for that person is 30% higher than people that don’t carry the gene. Now, that’s really interesting. And if you carry both genes, then the risk of developing obesity is 67%. Okay. So that means it’s more than likely that person is gonna develop obesity unless they take some measures to quiet that gene down. But it’s more than likely that they will. And about 1/6 of the population from Europe, of European descent, carries one or two of those genes. So this is an important concept to understand just in general. But here is where the concept of network medicine really came into play. Friends have an even more important effect on a person’s risk of obesity than the genes do. That if you’re friends with someone who develops obesity while you’re friends with them over the years, your risk of developing obesity goes up by 171%. So if you have one gene, it’s 30%. Two genes, it’s 67%. 

If your friend develops obesity, it’s 171%. And they followed this line of thinking, and it took up to the fourth degree of separation, friend of a friend of a friend, before there was no effect. Now, that’s network medicine, meaning there are networks like you were just saying about energy body with mechanical. And there’s networks that we have to understand. And we’ve grown up in a world that wants us to believe there’s a magic pill. And what do I take for this? What pill do I take? And that’s not the case. When you’re dealing with network medicine and all of it is network medicine, because you work on the structure and you’re affecting the energy body and you’re affecting the biochemistry and you’re affecting the emotions. I mean, there are so many studies that tie all of this together, that network medicine should be the prerequisite for every physician before they implement any protocols. To understand, well, if we do this, it could affect this, this, this, and this. We don’t think like that and our doctors don’t think like that. It’s critically important that we all understand that it’s not a single shot to address your blood sugar imbalance or address your high cholesterol or address your back pain or address your brain fog or your long COVID. There is not a direct way of doing it. You have to deal with the whole picture, the whole network. And that’s why events like this are so important because you learn one more piece of the puzzle and then one more piece of the puzzle and then one more piece. You say, “Oh my God.” And then you finally realize you’re gonna be learning pieces of the puzzle probably for many years to come.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

And how they fit with you ’cause each of us are different. Yeah, the individualization. I would say if one theme has percolated to the top of this particular summit, it’s been the thing that you just pointed to: that it is not one thing. It’s critical mass, and it’s not one thing that will get you better. And it’s not an instant thing either. It’s a journey and it’s a process. And it’s learning how to really clue in with compassionate curiosity in a collaborative way with all of your systems, instead of a tyrannical I want you to be this way, therefore we’re . So the body doesn’t really respond very well, just like small children don’t .

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

That’s a really good point, a really good point. And for some people it’s hard to embrace this concept as the scaffolding that you stand on as you’re climbing up to better health. This is the platform, is that it’s all connected. And if you change your diet but you still have stinking thinking, it’s unlikely that you’re gonna get the results you want, right?

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Yep.

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

And so it’s a long journey when you’ve crossed that line of tolerance and now you’re manifesting wherever the weak link in your chain is. It’s a long journey. And if you can embrace and settle down for the ride and know that your goal is to roll across the hills a little bit at a time, you’re gonna have some ups and you’re gonna have some little downs, as opposed to a roller coaster where you’re going, oh, you feel great, and all of a sudden next week you crash. So the goal is it’s called the Zen wave. It just is a slow rise, a slow drop, a slow rise. But there’s a consistency across the scale. But that’s the goal when you’re trying to reverse the direction of one’s health. And you can get it pretty quickly. Usually in a month to two months, you can see some excellent biomarkers that things are changing in the right direction. But it’ll take a year to two years to really settle in to your body having a different way of integrating all of the things that you’re learning. It just takes a while.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

I really appreciate you pointing to the wave because everything comes in wave forms: light, sound, energy of all kinds, the tides, the cycles of the deep end. Everything comes in these. And it seems like humans expect straight lines. Once I’ve reached this bar, then I’m going to stay there until I go to this bar. And having dips is not something, it’s like, “Oh no, I’m getting bad again,” instead of realizing that everything happens this way. I notice that people are a little intolerant to having their mood dip without, if they’ve had a history of deep depths, without having some anxiety around that until I show like, “Yeah, this is the wave form. This is the way it goes.” The only thing that is a straight line is human invention. When we look outside at Mother Nature, there are no straight lines: none.

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

That’s a really good point. And I’m reminded, back in 1970, probably ’76 or ’77, I had done a weekend experience called EST, E-S-T, back in ’75. And anytime the trainers came into town to do their courses, I would treat them. I was called to their rooms, their hotel rooms, and happy to do that. I was a young stud just opening my practice. And one day I had a nice conversation with one of these trainers, and he explained to me the path to consciousness. And it just made so much sense. He said, “Have you ever done something and you look back like three days later and say, ‘Why did I say that to that person?’ That was strange. That’s not what I meant at all.” And he would say, “Oh well, I don’t know. I just did.” And then the next time a stimulus comes in that’s similar and you have that same kind of response with another person, maybe you recognize it a day later instead of three days later. “Oh man, I did that again. I really don’t like that.” Maybe even you’re gonna send that person an email and say, “Hey, I just realized that what I said to you yesterday, that’s not what I meant at all. 

And this is what I meant.” You’re trying to clean it up a little bit. Maybe there’s some lousy energy you left in the space with that person. And then the next time that input comes in and you react to it, you catch it maybe three hours after it happens. And you call the person and say, “Hey, you remember I said this little, I really didn’t mean that all, I’m sorry. I’m really working on this to understand why that happens. But that’s not what I meant mean. Here’s what I meant.” And then the next time it happens, you catch it in five minutes. You’re still in the conversation with the person when you feel threatened by something that they said that they didn’t mean it was a problem, but you just feel threatened by it. And five minutes later, “Oh, you know I said just a minute ago? I didn’t really mean that, man. That’s just my old pattern. And this is the way I’m thinking about it now and this is what I meant by that.” And then the next time it happens, you catch the thought before it gets to the muscles of your tongue and you don’t say it. But that’s the path to awareness. It’s not like you’re gonna go sit in a cave in India somewhere and achieve enlightenment. It’s just pounding the pavement every day and trying to clean up the mess that you create in your life and the world around you so that your energy body can be refreshed. And your psyche gets refreshed. You just keep cleaning up the mess that you’ve made. And you say, “Well, what mess? I don’t make any messes.” Well, you are a blind one .

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Deluded. I posted a meme the other day that one of my patients responded to and said this helped so much. And the meme was: If you stop listening through your wounds, you might really be able to hear what people are saying to you.

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

No, exactly. Exactly. And this process, well, when you recognize it, it may be two months after something happened. But if you put the energy into cleaning up whatever it is that you’ve just realized was not what you meant at all, you put the energy into it, it might be an email, it might be a phone call, it reinforces your desire for a more authentic, balanced response the next time that energy comes in. But if you say to yourself, “Oh, that was four months ago,” and you just kind of write it off, then it sits in there. It’s like dirt in the space, or I’m being polite in my language now. But it’s dirt in there. If it’s in your awareness, you need to clean it up.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Yeah, this is a really good, I was talking to a patient yesterday and she said, “When am I going to be over this or overcome this part of myself?” And I said, “Well, that’s the wrong language.” It’s when can I have compassion for that part that has that response, and meet them with something stronger that’s loving. And then that part gets integrated and brought into wholeness. You’re not trying to kill the part of you or overcome it or overpower it. That’s actually what autoimmunity is.

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

It’s very true. it’s very true.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

It’s just like bringing the anger that you might have, like you’re a mother with a baby and you’re bringing the baby close to you and the baby soothes, because just the presence of that loving energy allows the baby to then co-regulate. You’re co-regulating yourself. Yeah, you’re replacing the anger with something stronger: loving, compassionate energy.

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

Yes, and it doesn’t matter how long ago the incident occurred. If it comes up in your consciousness, clean it up as best you can. Clean it up.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Every moment is an opportunity.

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

That’s right. That’s right. And you’ll find at the time it may feel kind of awkward and stumbling, but it will make you lighter. And so that every time you do do that, you get a little lighter, a little lighter, a little lighter. And then you catch the thought before it goes to the muscles of your tongue. That’s the goal. And that’s when you’re gonna get over something. You’re never gonna get over something. You’ve got these programmed responses. We call it PTSD. And that’s the extreme. But it’s just a programmed response to a noise or a comment or a look from someone. For our survival, you get all these stress hormones going, and that’s how we learn to survive. What we need to do is reprogram. And to reprogram, it’s exactly what I just said. All the things that come up for you: “Boy, I wish I hadn’t had said that to that person last month.” All right: “Dear Kathy, I was just thinking about our conversation a month ago, and I realized that I wasn’t speaking my entire truth. And here’s what I really felt.” Whatever.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Here’s one of my favorite ways of saying that: “I realized I wasn’t very skillful in my communication.”

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

Oh, that’s good. Yeah, that’s good. But it’s embracing this concept that is the formula to bringing more balance to your psyche and your energy body. That’s the first thing and most important ’cause our brains are just going a million miles an hour. The thoughts that keep coming and keep coming and keep coming. And we wanna program in giving attention to those thoughts that we prefer. You can’t stop the thoughts that come in, but they’re like clouds going by. I remember this analogy that someone gave: “Every thought is like a cloud.” Just going by, oh, bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah. But what we do is bah-bah-bah , and we put that thought right in the midst of our awareness and it’s all encompassing.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Grab it and stick some lightning in it .

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

That’s right. And much of that is because when we were kids, we didn’t have the conscious skills to deal with a particular energy that came in. So to survive, we did whatever we did and we survived. And that kind of response mechanism is a savior life response mechanism. And we just unconsciously keep using that response mechanism as adults when an energy comes in that’s similar to what we experienced as a kid.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

We call that the strategy, the wise mind of your child-self created that was perfect for that time.

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

Yeah, you couldn’t do anything else. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

And that may be outdated now. Not skillful because it was a child’s mind. And so people that have an expectation that they were supposed to leave home at whatever, 18 years old we’ll say, are supposed to be cooked like a turkey with the little button that’s come out. You’re not done. You’re not done when you’re 18. You’ve only just begun. So you have an opportunity to learn new skills all the time if you’re just willing. So each opportunity that you get to uplevel your skills is one that is a blessing maybe sometimes in disguise.

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

And it sounds kind of airy-fairy and wussy that each time there’s a stress that comes in and it’s an opportunity. And it sounds like, yeah, whatever. But that’s just being stuck in our current mode of action, that we are reacting to what comes at us. And there’s a big difference between a reaction and a response. A reaction is an automatic. You do this, I do that. And automatic. and those thoughts that come up to your tongue, and bloop, out comes whatever comes up. A response is in comes the energy, and no, no wait, I don’t wanna say that. And then you respond consciously as opposed to reacting unconsciously. And it takes a lot of practice.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

It does.

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

A lot of practice to do that. But it’s very doable and it has profound benefits in terms of the quality of your health overall.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

You just can’t be lazy with your mind. And that’s the thing. Automatic negative thoughts are matter, what they are because they’re automatic is just the relaxing of your witness, your observer. And you just have to make sure that you’re always awake to it. That’s what awake awareness is.

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

Well, I would say you’re awake as often as possible. ‘Cause it always sets us up for failure.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Yeah, for sure.

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

When you’re aware, pick up the phone and clean it up. If you’re not aware, there’s nothing to do. But when you’re aware and you say, “Ah, I’ll do it later.” No, do it now.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Yeah. So what does this have to do with supplementation?

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

Supplementation is a very valuable tool. It’s one of the four sides of the pyramid. And there are some supplements that help to repattern your emotional response. And that is when you can increase your body’s detoxification capabilities, and the geek term for that is… Methylation is a primary one, and breaking down histones is the second. But when you can increase your methylation pathway, then the genes that your body expresses, the genes that get activated are genes that are not from the survival response that you’ve already been programmed into. They’ve done this with a lot of animals, and they show that they can change completely from a relaxed response to a stimulus to the target to go to a relaxed response, that if the first response with an animal is stress response, and that’s because of how they were raised as infants and they can measure all that, if they can increase their methylation pathways, they don’t respond with a stress response. They respond with a normal, more relaxed response. So for people who… That’s why there’s so much work now going on with methylation pathways and methylation genetics. Lots of doctors are doing tests now to see how accurate or how comprehensive are your methylation pathways. Are you really doing well there? And it’s a simple-

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

And it goes beyond MTHFR 677 and 1298, everybody. We have a lot more information now on methylation.

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

Right, right, right. And one nutrient that seems to be effective, a few studies that I’ve read on that and there are probably more, is SAM-e, ’cause SAM-e just helps your body methylate better. So when you methylate better, your brain response is different. It’s not a reaction or it’s less likely to be a reaction. It’s more of a response. And with animals, they’ve shown that to be the case. So that’s one answer to the question what about supplements. The second answer is where we started is that you must have an anti-inflammatory lifestyle. Because if you’re inflamed, you’re much more vulnerable to reacting to the stimuli in your life as opposed to responding to that stimuli. Because inflammation affects the brain hormones called neurotransmitters. And so your brains can be very easily out of balance, and you’re more likely to react as opposed to respond.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

So SAM-e always looked really good on paper to me, and I thought, “Oh, I should try this.” And remember when I was very first learning about genetics years ago, I went to somebody that I had been training with and said, “Why do I feel like I want to become a serial killer on SAM-e?” I was just so overstimulated. And he mentioned that if you have a lot of activity, that it might be a bit much and bring up some of that manic kind of feeling. So just be aware that. And the dosing on SAM-e goes from 400 to 1600 a day. It’s a pretty wide range for joints versus mood. So just being aware that you are always the guru of your own body. And start low, go slow. Yeah.

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

I’d like to look at some markers of methylation to see where they’re at. I always look at homocysteine. There’s two ways of looking at homocysteine. The analogy I give is if you’re pregnant and you’re checking your blood sugar, many obstetricians will just do a fasting blood sugar draw. But some, especially if there’s a history of diabetes or problems in pregnancy for women in the family, they might do a little more aggressive tests. And they do a glucose tolerance test where you drink a bottle of sugar and then you do the blood draw over a couple of hours to see how does your body handle a little extra sugar stress. How does your body handle it? Or if you’re checking the electrical conductivity of the heart, you can do an EKG, and it measures how the heart is working. But if you really wanna know, you put ’em on a treadmill and you do a stress EKG; you push ’em a little bit harder. The same with homocysteine. That you can do a fasting blood draw for homocysteine, but you miss a lot of them. And if you really wanna know, then you give ’em some methionine to take. And it’s a fair amount. A methionine is an amino acid. And depending on your body weight, it’s usually somewhere between 18 and 25 capsules of methionine. And you take ’em within about five minutes. 

And then four hours later, you check the homocysteine again. And it’s because the methionine is supposed to be metabolized, and it’ll produce homocysteine that’s then supposed to go somewhere else. And it’s called a provocative challenge. And now you see the hidden ones, the ones that are missed. So a regular homocysteine, your perspective of what the lab says according to Kilmer McCully, the godfather of all this research, he said, “Anytime your homocysteine is above 8, your blood vessels are inflamed.” And with the provocative challenge, it’s anything above 25 your blood vessels are inflamed. So you’ve pushed that a little bit. So that’s the first test that we’ll do, kind of to look at methylation. And the next one is we’ll do a organic acids profile and look at what’s called FIGlu: that stands for formiminoglutamic acid. And if you’re not methylating very well, your body’s not using folate very well, your FIGlu level goes up. And in that same organic profile, MMA is called methylmalonic acid. Once again, with methylation, it’s a marker of how your body is using B12. So we’re looking at B12, folate, and homocysteine as just a couple of general inexpensive indicators of how well are we methylating right now.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

So you can overmethylate.

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

Yes.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Yeah, and drive those pathways, push them too hard. And that has upstream and downstream complications, yeah?

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

Yes.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

So what about the environment that we live in today that has so many toxins? Then we start talking about detoxification, building not just our energy body, but our physical spectrum also. 

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

It’s a topic that in the last 20 years has gained a whole lot of traction. And it’s at the point now to where it needs to be basic 101 understanding for everyone, for everyone. This whole concept of detoxification is not something you do once a year or once a quarter. You do it every day. Meaning your choices of lifestyle and your choices of foods and things has to include the screening of detoxification. Now, why do I say that? This study just dropped my jaw. It came out in the “Journal of the American Medical Association” three years ago, and the editors wrote a commentary to say, “This is an elegant study with sophisticated biomarkers,” to show their point. And you don’t get that kind of stamp of approval from the editors of the “Journal of the American Medical Association” very often. What did they show? They looked at couples who were going to assisted-fertility centers, and they ruled out all of the other potential contributors like obesity or smoking or exercise. They ruled all of that out and they had some way of doing that, where the editors said, “This is a sophisticated study. They did great.” So I’m going to believe that they set this up correctly. 

And they just compared couples who were eating conventional fruits and vegetables and couples eating organic fruits and vegetables. And they broke each group into fourths: those eating the lowest amount of fruits and vegetables, the next, the third, and the highest amount. And they compared the group eating the highest amount of fruits and vegetables conventional, meaning they buy ’em at the local supermarket, and those eating the highest amount of fruits and vegetables organic. So they compared those two groups. Once again, all the other factors had been ruled out. What did they find? They found that if you were eating the highest amount of fruits and vegetables, the Mediterranean diet or the Rainbow diet that we always talk about, the highest amount of conventional compared to organic, you had an 18% less likelihood of successfully getting pregnant. 18% eating the highest amount of fruits and vegetables. And this was the kicker. If you did get pregnant, you had a 26% less likelihood of a live birth compared to the couples eating the same amount of fruits and vegetables organic.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

That’s so high. 

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

26% of those people eating as best as they know how to eat, trying to be healthy, they were losing their babies 26% more than those eating organic. What does that mean? It means that the amount of chemicals that we are exposed to now that are inside our body, see there’s two types of toxins. There’s toxins that you’re exposed to in the air and on the end of your fork and what you’re drinking. But then there’s also toxins that have accumulated that are inside your body. We all know that lead toxicity, lead gets in the bones. And it’s a primary reason why the incidence of Alzheimer’s in 40- and 50-year-olds, if you compare male to female, much higher in men earlier in life than in women: dramatically higher. But when women go through a change of life, all of a sudden within a couple of years, their percentages are just as high as the men. Well, why is that? Well, it’s because as they go through a change of life and the ovaries stop producing their hormones, it’s the job of the adrenal glands to pick up the slack and make about one 1/10 of the estrogen that the ovaries used to make. But most people, their adrenal glands are so worn out they can’t do it. And so they have hormone insufficiencies. And when you have hormone insufficiencies and you go through a change of life, when you don’t have enough estrogen, you increase osteoporosis: the bone cells break down. 

And the bones are where the lead’s been stored for so many years in the minor amounts that we’re exposed to on a regular basis. But it accumulates in the bones. Now it’s in the bloodstream and it gets up to the brain causing more inflammation in the brain, accelerating the collateral damage of inflammation in the brain. So within a couple of years after menopause, the percentage of women getting Alzheimer’s is right up their neck and neck with men. But it’s the lead that was stored in the bones. That’s why I did that whole analogy. And we store mercury in the brain and organophosphates, the chemicals used on our fruits and vegetables, in our fat cells and in our livers and in our lymph nodes. And if you really test comprehensively, many of us are walking cesspools of toxic chemicals and toxic debris that we’ve been exposed to over decades. And it’s a topic that people don’t like to hear because you have to begin the detoxification process. And that just takes time. You take baby steps and you make sure you’re throwing less toxins in your body. How do you do that? You get an air filtration system in your house because the indoor air pollution in most places are much worse than outdoor air pollution. “Well, what do you mean? My house is nice and clean. What do you mean?” Well, everything that’s in your house that’s plastic outgases the chemicals used to mold plastic called phthalates. For years your plastic blinds are throwing phthalates into the air. “Well, there’s nothing in my air. 

My air is nice and clean.” Really? You ever look at the sun coming through the window at a certain time of day, and you see the sun, the rays of the sun and you can see the dust in the air. That’s what you’re breathing. And it’s full of all kinds of garbage, the flame-retardant chemicals on your sofa and on your bed and on your sheets and your comforters, unless it’s organic cotton. And you start to learn about all of this and it’s overwhelming. You can only do a little bit at a time. But when you do these little things to change your environment, NASA published the studies on house plants absorbing toxins in the air, because their astronauts were going loopy in space, and they never talk about it on the news. They said, “What’s going on? These guys are not thinking. They’ve got lots of brain fog.” And they found out it was the air and it was the phthalates in the air that was causing inflammation in the brain. And the phthalates were coming from all the equipment with plastic counters and plastic keyboards and whatever else. And so they funded the studies to look at house plants, and which house plants help to clean the air. And it was jaw-dropping. You get two six-inch house plants in a 10 x 10 room, you absorb over 70% of the toxins in the air just by doing that. So if you go my website-

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

I have 50 of them throughout my house because of study.

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

Yes. Yes.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Well, that’s easy.

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

It’s very easy. If you’ve got eight rooms in your house, you go out and you buy 20 house plants. And you go: “Whoa, I don’t have a green thumb. They’re gonna die.” Then you buy more. You just learn the little things that you can do that will make a big difference. And it’s all those little baby steps you take that create an environment where you’re getting less toxins coming into you. Your kitchen cabinets and your bathroom cabinets. If they’re not solid wood, they’re pressboard. Pressboard is soaked in formaldehyde which outgases for years. “Well, I can’t smell it.” That doesn’t mean anything. Now, there’s no evidence that the amount of formaldehyde that outgases out of cabinets is toxic to humans. There is no evidence whatsoever. Or that the amount of flame-retardant chemicals that outgas out of your sofa every day is toxic to humans. There’s no evidence: none. And that’s how they got away with this legally, because you have to prove that what a person is exposed to in 24 hours is toxic to them. It’s not. But this stuff is accumulative in the body and it accumulates over years. And eventually you cross a threshold. Now you’ve got all this stored mercury or the stored cadmium or arsenic or lead or organophosphates or glyphosate from GMO foods that is accumulated. 

Now it’s at a level where your immune system is fighting it. Now you’re getting inflammation. Just google BPA and thyroid, and here come the studies that show BPA can grab onto your thyroid and many other tissues. But if it grabs onto your thyroid, now your immune system’s gonna attack that area because that’s not thyroid tissue. That’s like thyroid and something. I better fight that. And you kill that, it’s called a neoepitope, a new compound. You kill that neoepitope, but now you’ve damaged the thyroid cells. So now you make more antibodies to your thyroid to get rid of the old and damaged cells. And that becomes perpetual. And here comes Hashimoto’s thyroid disease. And Dr. Keesha is just world-renowned for talking about this stuff. But you have to clean your environment. You have to stop drinking out of plastic water bottles. You have to make efforts to get the cleanest water you can possibly get. I mean, all these little things that’ll take you six months to a year to implement, but the result will be you’ve changed your paradigm. You’ve changed how you live your life if you addressed one thing at a time.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Thank you so much, Dr. Tom, for coming on and sharing your wisdom with us. It’s always such a pleasure to just listen to you.

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

Well, thank you. Thank you. It’s that big picture idea that if people have that big picture idea, they weather the disappointments. Once again, the Zen wave versus the roller coaster. So the more you know, the more can implement just a little bit at a time, and the greater your level of health as a result.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Thank you.

Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DABCN, CIFM

Yes. Thank you, Keesha.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

All right, everybody, until next time, be well.