How Food, Toxins, and Mold Hijack Thyroid Health

Introduction and Speaker Background 0:00

Hello everyone. Welcome back to Reversing Hashimoto's and Thyroid Disorders Summit. I am your host, Doctor Anshul Gupta, a world Hashimoto's expert. And truly, what I am going to share with you now, the speaker over here has been my mentor, the person that, you know, I have learned functional medicine from. He was one of those pioneers, you know, who started the whole revolution of functional medicine, has taught at multiple, like, conferences and, all the biggest institutes of functional medicine.

So I'm really honored to have him over here and, sharing his snippets and also his experience about dealing with autoimmune diseases, obviously, like, you know, he has already written several books about it and then has helped, millions of people. So really stick together for this because you want to hear each and everything. What he's sharing today. Because that can be very important for you in your Hashimoto's journey. But let me introduce him first and then we will directly go into the discussion.

So doctor Tom O'Brien has built his career on one mission to help you understand the why behind your symptoms. So you and your doctor can focus on how to keep his philosophy simple, make it easy to do the right thing, and guides every step of his work. And internationally recognized expert in functional medicine, doctor Tom is known for advancing research on food sensitivities, environmental toxins, and autoimmunity. His bestselling books, Global Summits and docu series have reach millions worldwide.

Often called the Sherlock Holmes of chronic illnesses, doctor Tom combines complex science with compassion rooted in research, driven by results and always delivered with heart to help patients and practitioners create lasting change. Doctor Tom O’Bryan, welcome over here. Thank you so much, Doctor Gupta, a pleasure to be with you. And to support this very important event that you're doing. Absolutely. So pleasure is all mine, as I said, you know, like when I started my functional medicine journey.

You talk all about autoimmunity. Your book about autoimmunity came out and I was reading about it, and that was actually one of the major drivers for me to look into auto immune diseases in a very different fashion. And then I found my passion into Hashimoto's disease and things. So all thanks to you that, you know, after several years, you know, like we are over here and sitting down and talking and discussing about autoimmunity. So thank you so much. But all the contributions you have made, thank you so much.

So why don't we open up, you know, like you know about this question about, you know, often you say is that Hashimoto's disease? Is it just a thyroid problem? It's an immune system problem. So why do we explain people. What does that mean okay. Yes. Thank you. There are a couple of basic concepts to understand when we are addressing any auto immune disease. The first one is that an autoimmune disease by definition means that your immune system is activated. It's working very hard right now, and most doctors think, well, it's working too hard.

We need to quiet it down. And I would take issue with that. For 85 to 90% of all autoimmune diseases. Yes. It's important that we reduce the symptoms so people can function. But when we understand that the immune system is the armed forces in your body, it's the Army, the navy, the Air force, the Coast Guard, the Marines. We call them IGA, IgG, IgG, cytokines, many different

Hashimoto's as an Immune System Problem 4:00

branches of the armed forces. But they're there to protect you. That's their job. And it's negotiable that when there is a threat identified, the immune system gets activated to protect you. That's why we're still here as a human race is because our ancestors developed this immune system that would protect them from all the bugs and the parasites and the bad food and things that they had 10,000 years ago. Right. But they survived. And a primary component to that survival which we have inherited today is an immune system that gets activated to protect you.

So when we understand that basic concept and don't brush past it, and you really can't brush past it, if you want to put an auto immune disease into remission, you have to understand this basic concept. Then the million dollar question is what is your immune system trying to protect you from? And when you explore, when you do the right tests and you identify what your immune system is fighting right now, for example, you know, with Hashimoto's thyroid, we know that helio back factor infections, the bacteria helio factor, may contribute to the development of autoimmune thyroid disease.

When the immune system fights that bacteria, which conservative estimates say 50% of the world population has helio factor bacteria. And if your immune system is fighting that helio factor, those same antibodies fighting the bacteria may also attack your thyroid. There are six different mechanisms by which that may occur. Perhaps it will do that depending on your genetic vulnerability. But the problem is a helio factor. Infection. And when you address the helio factor infection, many times the thyroid starts to come down in its act overactivity and the number of antibodies.

Here's a really good example one. Not one. The Godfather of predictive auto immunity, meaning identifying if someone is heading down the path to a particular autoimmune disease. The Godfather is an immunologist named Professor Yehuda Schonfeld, and he's at Tel Aviv University in Israel. He has many, many credentials. The one that impresses me the most is that last year at when I counted last year, 26 of the medical doctors who went back and got their PhD in immunology from his department at Tel Aviv University, 20 said there are many more, but 26 of them.

Chair, Department of Immunology in medical schools and hospitals around the world. They're his students. This is the Godfather, right? And when you read his research papers, you go, wow, I never would have thought of that. And he published a paper a couple of years ago on the impact of a sensitivity to gluten and auto immune diseases. And he said that although the nutritional value of wheat is not that high, it's okay, but it's not that high. The immune response is very common. And they looked at, over 80 research articles on the topic of gluten sensitivity and auto immune disease.

And they found that let me get my numbers straight. 65% of the patients with auto immune diseases got better on a gluten free diet. And they were not celiac, but 65% of the patients got better. And this was confirmed in 78% of the studies. So not every study, not every patient, but certainly the majority get better on a gluten free diet. And when a doctor explores this with his patients and does the right type of tests to identify if the immune system is fighting wheat, and you identify that there is an immune reaction right now and you put him on a gluten free diet.

And Professor Schoenfeld said, surprisingly, Hashimoto's thyroid disease was the most common auto immune disease to respond to a gluten free diet. And 87% of Hashimoto's patients get better on a gluten free diet and they're not celiac, that there are other mechanisms. So if wheat is a mechanism for someone that is activating their immune system, it may manifest as Hashimoto's thyroid disease, or it may manifest as rheumatoid arthritis, or it may manifest as multiple sclerosis. It depends on your genetics, but the point is, what is your immune system trying to protect you from?

So when you take the time to explore what your your immune system is fighting right now, not that it's attacking your thyroid, that's of course very important, very important. And we want to calm all that down. But in order to calm it down, you have to identify what is activating this defensive mechanism from the immune system. And when you explore that and you might it might be mold, which is so very common. People are living in moldy houses and they can't tell sometimes. Or it might be chemicals that have accumulated in the body over time.

It might be a food sensitivity, like wheat, or there are many different triggers that can activate the immune system. But if we don't explore what is activating the immune system, then it's extremely difficult to put an autoimmune disease into remission. So what you are explaining is that, you know, we have this protective immune system and something, you know, like, our body's trying to protect us from certain things around in our environment. And in that process, the immune system starts attacking our own body and the whole cascade of inflammation and autoimmunity starts.

So we have to look we will have to kind of look into deep what we call is the root causes of what is, you know, your immune system protecting against. So if you say, like, you know, 5 or 6 root causes or like, you know, big categories that you say that people has to look into what those big categories of root causes would be. Yes, of course. And I would make just a slight tweak to what you said, that I don't believe in the concept of root causes of disease. I think there are many causes, but there are root mechanisms to disease.

And, you know, the CDC, the center for Disease Control, tells us that 14 of the 15 top causes of death are chronic inflammatory diseases. It's always inflammation. And so it's always an immune system that's been activated.

Common Triggers: Food, Mold, and Chemicals 12:00

So the question is what is the trigger activating this mechanism that's manifesting as Hashimoto's thyroid or as any of the other autoimmune diseases. So I just want to I just want to tweak that a little bit because people can get confused and they say, oh, I found the root cause and it's mold, you know, so they do an anti mold protocol and they feel better, but they're not really well yet. So that that can be defeating in a way because there are many many there are many causes to why the immune system gets activated.

Rarely is it just one rarely but the most common ones. As Professor Schoenfeld showed us, 87% of Hashimoto's thyroid patients get better on a gluten free diet. That was. And there were three autoimmune diseases, with Hashimoto's being the most responsive. The next one was psoriasis, and the third one was inflammatory bowel diseases, Crohn's or colitis. That those three were very high. Response. So foods are the first of these mechanisms that can be triggered, in the body. That's a most common one.

I often say the most common source of inflammation is what's on the end of your fork. And and so it really is we need to become conscious of not only the, type of food that we're eating, but also the quality of the food, because, you know, our technology has improved so much now that one of the things we're doing with every patient, I won't talk to a patient if they don't do, these five tests. I mean, I just need to know what the likely triggers are so I can help them as opposed to theorizing. One of the tests is called the total tax burden for toxic.

And it looks at 18 heavy metals and 28 mycotoxins. That's the exhaust of mold and 34 different chemicals that can accumulate in the body. And we often find that people have a whole lot of mold in their body and they don't know it. They don't know it. And they have a lot of BPA, the, the fallait that's used to mold plastic because we store our food in plastic containers. And the next day, that food, that leftover chicken now has phthalates in it from the plastic container. And you eat it and you can't taste it at minute amounts, but it can accumulate in your body.

So the first category that you, to your question is foods, the most common source of inflammation is what's on the end of your fork. That's the most common next chemical accumulation in our body. Because in many parts of the world we have these chem trails, these chemicals that are being sprayed in the air that you can't taste it, you can't smell it or see it. But they accumulate in our bodies some of the heavy metals and things. Next very common is mold. When we run the total tax burden, I would say, and I haven't kept count, but I would say probably 80% of the people we run the tests on have mold levels very high in their body.

And they didn't know. And that certainly can affect your brain function or your kidney function or your lung function. Very common to see. So foods would be first, molds I suspect would be second. Third are the organophosphates, the insecticides and pesticides that we're all exposed to in our food. And I'd like to give you an example of how important that concept is about the organophosphates. So this paper, this published paper came out, about five years ago now. And it didn't get any press at all, which is just a shame, because it came from Harvard and it was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

And the editors of the journal made a comment. They said, this is an elegant study using sophisticated biomarkers to demonstrate their point. Now, Doctor Gupta, you you're you're from Cleveland Clinic. You know very well the editors of the journal, the American Medical Association don't say that very often. They don't give that stamp of approval to an article, but they did with this one. So what did they do in this study? They looked at women at infertility centers and they ruled out all of the known risk factors for success with fertility, alcohol consumption, cigarets, weight, socioeconomic class, food selections, all of that.

They ruled him out in an elegant way and looked at one thing and one thing only. How many servings of fruits and vegetables is the woman eating a day during the implantation period? How many servings? And they divided them into fourths, the lowest number, the second, the third and up to the highest number. And the results were shocking. Those women in the highest category of fruit and vegetable consumption per day, compared to those women in the lowest category of fruit and vegetable consumption per day, those in the highest category had an 18% less likelihood of successful implantation.

Wow. And if they were successful in getting pregnant, they had a 26% less likelihood of a live birth. They had more miscarriages. What? Wait wait wait what? The more fruits and vegetables you eat, the worse the outcome. Yes. And you can't argue with the study. I mean, the editors of the journal put a stamp of approval, and this came from Harvard. You know, you can't argue with the study, but no one pays attention to it because the interpretation of the results are so uncomfortable. Well, what what does that mean?

They happen to have a group of women in the study who are eating organic. And in that category, the results were the exact opposite. The more fruits and vegetables, the better the success rate. So what does that mean? It means that the minute amount of fruits and vegetables, of chemicals in the fruits and vegetables we eat that are, conventional fruits and vegetables the lettuces, the tomatoes, the broccoli, the raspberries, the strawberries, the minute amount of chemicals that accumulate in your body as we're eating them, that people must be.

These women must be so high on the threshold of how many chemicals have already accumulated in their body that the more fruits and vegetables they eat, the more inflammation against those chemicals and the worse the outcome. When they're spending tens of thousands of dollars to try to have a family, you know? So, I mean, when you think about that, you wait, what, what? And then it gives you an appreciation of how important it is just to test and see how many chemicals have accumulated in your body that may be activating your immune system right now, contributing to your auto immune condition of Hashimoto's thyroid disease.

It just makes sense that you test there's no dogma here. Well, everybody should do this or everybody should do that or no, but everyone should just test accurately to see is this a problem that you need to address? That is such an important concept when you're wanting to put an auto immune disease into remission is to ask the question, what is my immune system trying to protect me from? Absolutely. I mean, I so agree with that because time and again, we also see this in our clinic with our patients is that they will come in.

They have no idea what is going on with them, and they feel that, you know, they might be no chemicals or anything like, you know, in their body. And suddenly you do this test and so many chemicals, mold and plastics and everything shows up and they have no idea how that has been accumulated. But the total toxin burden, if it is high, definitely it affects you know, especially your thyroid, your hormones, you know, your whole mental thing. So, I'm so thankful that, you know, you are also doing this testing, you know, into your practice and then sharing this important information that, you know, people should be aware that, you know, first of all, this kind of testing is available and how important it is.

It is critically important. And we've never paid attention to it as practitioners very much. You know, we've all said, yeah, I eat organic whenever I can, but the level of chemicals that are accumulating in people's bodies, because the world is so much more toxic now than it was 20 years ago. So the amount of chemicals in the water, the amount of chemicals in the air, the amount of chemicals in the food is like never before in human history. And I'm not a fanatic about, you know, being organic. But when you see the results, when you do test after test after test and you see how many toxins are in people's bodies, and then we educate them on how to get this stuff out, how to avoid the, you know, for example, glass storage containers are critically important in your kitchen.

You can't use plastic containers because the plastic leaches

Why Testing Matters in Functional Medicine 23:00

into the food when it's in the refrigerator. Well that's nonsense. I don't taste any plastic. Well, you don't have to taste it. It's minute amounts that accumulate in your body. So you get glass storage containers. And then people write to me and say, but there's a plastic lid on the glass storage container. And I respond, well, don't turn it upside down. So the food touches the lid, you know, just leave. Just leave it this way. But you're doing better. You're on the right track, right? And you just have to start thinking about these kinds of things.

The plastics, they're called phthalates. That's the the category of chemicals. The phthalates and nail polish are in your bloodstream in 4 to 5 minutes. Wait, what? Well, that's what makes the nail polish hard is the plastics, the plasticizers in them. And so when you learn that, like in my book, I give you three URLs for organic nail polish. And you go order organic nail polish that doesn't have phthalates. And you order glass storage containers that don't have plastic. Right. And the lid fine doesn't don't turn it upside down, you know, and you just start to learn the little things that you can do.

And this is the other thing I would want to make sure to mention is in my book, you can fix your brain number 1 in 7 categories on Amazon. I'm very proud of that. The subtitle of the book is just one hour a week to the best memory, productivity, and sleep you've ever had. And that's the secret when you're wanting to change the direction of your health, it doesn't matter if it's your brain or if it's your thyroid. The secret because you're going to learn so much good information in this summit. So it's overwhelming.

It's just overwhelming. So what do you do? You tell your family every Tuesday night after dinner or every Saturday afternoon? Don't bother me for one hour. Don't bother me. I'm going to spend an hour to learn a little more. How we can be healthier. And then you go back to the summit, you know, the thyroid summit, and you go back and listen to that lecture that you really enjoyed again. And you start taking a couple notes. Right. And then or you go back to my book, you can fix your brain and there's 36 to dos in there.

Here's three URLs for glass storage containers. Here's three URLs for nail polish, organic nail polish or cosmetics. And then you go online and all those are okay. And you go on oh I really like those. And you ordered the glass storage containers, three round ones, two square ones, one for the Pi. You pay with your credit card, you hit send and you're done. You're done for the week. It took you an hour. You're done for the week. But never again will you poison your family. With my new amounts of phthalates because you were using plastic storage containers.

And then next week you do cosmetics, and then next week you learn about houseplants and which houseplants. And NASA says, absorb the toxins in the air so that your family is not breathing so many toxins and then next week, you look at food tests to see what foods you might be sensitive to every week, one hour. And in six months, you're going to church or to services and you see someone you haven't seen. They go, what happened to you? You look wonderful. You look so young. Have you lost weight? Well, let me tell you, I came up with this idea because I watched this thyroid summit.

And, you know, I got rid of my plastic storage containers, and I got organic nail polish and organic cosmetics, and I've got houseplants in every room of the house and blah, blah, blah. And your friends go, oh, yeah, they're just overwhelmed. But you did it one hour a week. It was manageable. And that is the secret to success. Any time you want to arrest and reverse the direction your health is going is you allocate this much time every week just this much, because it's really overwhelming. You've got so many great speakers on this thyroid summit with great information that people don't know what to do.

You know, when they hear this one, oh, I need to do that. But then they listen to, oh, I need to do that. And they just don't know how to start. Right. So I think that's so important. You like I just want to pause over here is that people think it's like a 100 meter sprint. Okay. Well, you know, I take this supplement, you know, or do this even like do this real quick and everything will be gone. Yes. It's a consistency you have to you that you the reason you landed up in this situation right now is not what happened just yesterday.

It was a process, you know, which kind of brought you over here to. So to get out of this, you have to follow a process and it has to be simple, right? In a simple squat of simple things, you know, like, you know, and that's the beauty about your books or your things that you've shared is that, you know, you kind of give them actionable things which are so simple that, you know, people can easily do it. You give them the right resources and bingo, like, you know, you just spend some time, you follow those things and you're done with that.

So yes, I really like that process of, you know, making it simple with no small actionable steps. So again, that is great advice over here. Oh thank you. Yes, I believe that that is the secret to success. And I don't know of any other secret to success. There's no fountain of youth, you know, there's no magic pill that's going to fix your thyroid. There are, of course, wonderful, protocols that help. But if you don't reduce the inflammation that's causing 14 to 15 causes of death are inflammatory diseases.

If you don't reduce the inflammation, you're going to be chasing your tail of the symptoms, right? Absolutely. So now you were mentioning that, you know, there are certain things that you love. You know, like one of them, obviously you mentioned was a total toxin burden or a total toxin load. What I mean, I think some of the other tests which you'll really love and which each and every Hashimoto's patients should look into, there are many, many good tests that are very beneficial, but these tests, I believe, are the ones that set the foundation of what direction we're going to go.

And there may be other tests you have to do, but these set the stage. The first one total tax burden. The second one is called the wheat zoomer because you zoom in on the problem. Testing for wheat historically has been looking at 1 or 2 markers, and, but there's 62 markers that, 62 peptides of wheat that can activate your immune system. They're immunogenic. Why are we only looking at 1 or 2? You know, 50% of celiac do not have elevated antibodies to glide and which is the most common test. But we know celiac is always about wheat sensitivity.

That's the only autoimmune disease we know for sure. But half of the people don't test positive for a problem with wheat. Well, it's the test. The test is not comprehensive. Good test for half the celiac, but the other half are reacting to omega glide ins, not alpha glide ins or, gluteal more fins or amylase trypsin inhibitors. They're not they're not responding to the alpha glide. And that was the first test done. So you want to do a comprehensive test for wheat. And that is the wheat Sumer. Also that test includes the most common comprehensive measure of leaky gut.

And leaky gut is the gateway in the development of autoimmune diseases. So you always want the measurement of what's our starting point here? Patients have an autoimmune disease. You've got leaky gut. We know that. Well, why do I have to do the test? Because we need to know your starting point, how bad it is. So when we check, when we recheck it in six months, we can see. Yes. You're feeling better. Good. And yes, you're improving. You were, 35 points outside of range. Now you're only 11 points out of range, but you're still out of range, right?

So keep it up. You. But I feel great. Good. Keep it up so that we can make it even better than you can imagine. Right? If you don't have the test to measure the improvement, people are likely to ease up on the hard work they're doing. That's helped them to get better. Right? So that's the wheat zoomer. That's the second test. The third test is the gut zoomer. Very comprehensive test. What's going on in your gut? And we know all diseases begin in the gut. Professor Fasano has helped us understand that over the years.

So. And it's a very comprehensive test looking at not only the good bacteria and the bad bacteria, but the inflammation in your gut, the leaky gut. It's very comprehensive. And so that's the third test. The fourth test is called the oxidative stress profile. Now, most people have heard that an atom has an electron going around it, or they've seen a drawing somewhere about this electron that goes around the atom. And when you're exposed to radiation, as an example, like when you fly in an airplane or something, the electron gets knocked out of orbit.

Now it's inside the cell, but it's, like this bouncing around inside the cell. And it will it can damage your DNA. Well, what does that mean? Well, your DNA is the blueprint of the cell, and every cell in your body regenerates every single cell. Some really fast, some really slow. Well, how do they regenerate? Well, they've got to have a blueprint. So if the blueprint gets damaged when that cell reproduces, it can reproduce as a mutant cell. That's where cancer comes from. And also increased aging comes from these, these free radicals that are bouncing around out there because of the foods we eat or the radiation we've been exposed to or the mold that we're breathing.

They all caused knocking these electrons out of orbit. So the, oxidative stress profile measures how much of this is going on right now where they're knocked out of orbit, and that's damaging your DNA. It looks at 18 different, not 24, 24 genetic markers that make you vulnerable to these electrons being knocked out of orbit. Okay. That's good. The genetic tests okay. But it also looks at 18 markers if those genes are activated causing a problem right now. So that's what's so beautiful. And this is going to be a little geeky.

But for the doctors that are listening, for example eight hydroxy deoxy goannas in a well validated marker of DNA damage, that's one of the 18 biomarkers that it looks at. So when you do the oxidative stress profile, you're looking to see how much damage is going on right now in your body, how much of this is going on. And to give you a visual on that, I will go to our friend and mentor, Doctor Jeffrey Bland.

Brain Inflammation and the Five Core Tests 35:00

And Jeff came up with this visual back in 1988, and I've never forgotten this visual. If you take an American football field and you lay a mouse trap, your mouse traps about the size of your phone, right? You lay a mouse trap on the football field and fill it up with mouse traps. Late side by side. It takes 976,000 mouse traps to fill up an American football field. Now, only Jeff would figure that out right. But. And he said, if you cock each mouse trap. Okay, now put a ping pong ball on each mouse trap.

Now you have 976,000 mousetraps on this football field. So the football field looks like it's covered with snow. Everything's white. That's all you can see. Are the ping pong balls right? Walk along the sideline with one ping pong ball. Throw it out there on the field. It hits a mouse trap. Pop. Now there's two ping pong balls in the air. The one you threw out there and the one of the mouse trap that just popped. They hit two mouse traps. Now there's four ping pong balls in there. Eight, 16. Bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah.

That's oxidative stress that damages your DNA because of the lifestyle we're living. The environment that we're in. All of this is going down all the time, and it has caused the auto immune disease you're currently dealing with. So we want to measure how much of this is going on right now so that in six months when you test again, oh, look how much better your oxidative stress is. Still a little too high, but so much better than it was. Oh, and I feel so much better. Great, great. But look how much better you're doing.

And then once you get it to normal ranges, maybe you check it every 2 or 3 years, you know, to see, how is this all this coming back? Because this is where cancer comes from. And autoimmune diseases. PA pa pa pa pa pa pa pa. That doesn't stop. So now we have the technology and the test called the oxidative stress profile, will allow us to measure what's your current status? This is what's caused the disease you currently have. But now we know how much of that is going on for you. And now we'll start our protocols.

Everything you learn on this summit, you know all these great steps and the foods and the environment and all that. And then we'll check it in six months and we'll see how much better it is so people can understand that they understand, oh, good. So this is not just a good idea that we have hard evidence okay. So when you first do the tests, you know, when people come back after a first test result for our, our flora and after a first visit and they do the test, they're always nervous, always, you know, for test results.

And I'll look at them and I'll say, well, this is really good news. You're a mess. You're a mess. Look at that. This will take two months to fix. This will take about eight months. This may take a year to a year and a half. But look at this is why you feel the way you do. And it's all reversible. Oh, so it's empowering for people when they can identify not just how much of a mess they are right now. But here are the protocols to change the direction of where your health is going. And that's what functional medicine is.

And Doctor Gupta, you're one of the best dealing with thyroid on this. You have an excellent reputation for this. But that's the concept people need to understand is that to make it easy to do the right thing, you have to figure out what the right thing is to do. Well, how do I figure out what the right thing is to do? You have to figure out what's going on in the body. And where is it coming from? Mold, heavy metals, toxic chemicals, gluten. Where is it coming from. If you don't identify all that then you just watch the movie of the dog chasing its tail.

Right? You keep chasing the symptoms. So yeah. Absolutely. So that is so great that, you know, I totally believe that. And so empowering for a lot of my patients to when they come in said you know, like I've done all the testing with, you know, with all of my doctors, nothing shows up. But I feel miserable. My disease is not getting better. And then suddenly I present to them, okay, well, let's do this deep dive, these different testing which your regular doctors unfortunately don't have access to.

And they say, well, I'm sure nothing is going to show up. I said, trust me. Like, you know, something will show up over there. And then as you said, suddenly, like, you know, their eyes pop open, you know, like once they're reviewing those test results with them. Wow. There is so much going on inside my body and I had no idea about it. And it's really good news. It's very, very good news. When we find out you're a mess. That's that's very, you know, like that's a good point. Now you know exactly why you're feeling this way.

And now all of these things we can work on to get you better. And truly, they feel empowered. That time you said, you know, Doctor Gupta, after a while, I know what is wrong with me. I knew deep down something is going on, but I didn't do that. So finally, these tests are showing me that. So absolutely. I agreed to all the testing that you are showed over here. Discuss with that. You know, it's so important to do and I think, people, should try to find these tests, you know, like a great functional medicine provider like you or anybody else who can do these testing and do that.

So there's there's, there's one more test. I, I've given you for the fifth one is the neural zoomer. Plus that it looks at 54 markers of inflammation in the brain. Now, people, I think the most terrifying disease that people are afraid of is dementia. And becoming more and more common, unfortunately, at earlier ages. So you want to identify if is going on in your brain right now. And so this looks at 54 markers of inflammation in the brain. Now the brain weighs about 2% of the body weight about.

But it has 16 to 18% of the body blood at any one time okay. So what does that mean? Well, if 14 of the 15 top causes of death are chronic inflammatory diseases and the inflammatory molecules are in your bloodstream, where do you think they're hanging out longer than anywhere else? Right. They're hanging out in the brain causing damage. So you want to see how much damage is going on right now. Because when you find out you've got 18, 20 to 26 markers of inflammation in your brain, it explains why your memory may not be as good as it was a few years ago.

But then you start to turn all that around. And when you turn it around in six months or a year, you're thinking so much better. You've calmed down all that inflammation. And you know you're on the right track. So those are the five tests that we begin with. Once again, there may be others that need to be done. There may be, but those five and they're on our website and, the those five are the ones that we feel give us a good starting point to develop a comprehensive overview for the patient of what to do.

Absolutely. That's so great. You know, like, we can keep going on and on for a long time about this discussion, which will take, you know, a complete day to get into the details. But we're running out of time. So in the context of time, you will kind of, you know, try to wrap up our session over here. So when you shared, you know, like why people are feeling this way, they have to look for the underlying triggers, which are mechanisms which are very important. And and I think, you know, you create this docu series too, you know, like last year interviewing the world's expert, you know, about inflammation and things.

So tell people about it, you know, like, because I'm sure that it's so useful for people to know about inflammation. And, you know, they would love to kind of, you know, see that too. Oh, thank you, thank you. Yes. I traveled the world last year. I went to seven countries and interviewed 64 world experts like Professor Schonfeld in Israel.

The Inflammation Equation and Final Advice 44:00

And, you know, this will give you a sense of what it's like to talk to these very, very smart people. So I saw him and I said, Professor Schonfeld, how are you? And he looked at me and said, we are born 99% human and we die 90% microbial. And he didn't say anything else. We just waited to see how it was going to respond to that. And for those who are listening, some of you have heard that there's ten times more bacterial cells in our body than human cells. Yes, that's true. Ten times more of them than us.

But when you think about that, and Professor Schonfeld statement was, oh, wait, why? What? And so then I said to him, so, sir, does that mean that the dance of life is learning how to live with the bacteria? Mostly in our gut? Precisely. And so, but but in the inflammation equation, it was conversations like that that I had with world experts to help us think a bigger picture about why is my immune system activated. And so, I'm sure if you would put a link in your, show notes for this and. Yes, yes, we will do that.

And as, doctor Tom was saying, the name of that is the inflammation equation. That's the name of the docu series. We'll put all the links in the description, but yes, check it out. And I think, as you were mentioned before, it's free for anybody to watch. Yes. It's free, it's free. And it's at the inflammation equation.com and it's all free. And, what I suggest to every doctor, I said just watch five minutes. If it doesn't grab you, turn it off. Turn it off. But, you know, usually in the first couple of minutes you say, wait, what?

Why like the study about pregnant women or not? Not pregnant women, but women at infertility centers and, conventional food versus organic food. It's that kind of like, wait, what? What? And that gets us thinking about how we might have to change how we live our life if we want our bodies to be healthier. Absolutely. So please check out that docu series. Definitely highly recommended. You know, like doctor Tom has put up a lot of effort for you guys, going world over and then, you know, like, you know, getting these experts to kind of, you know, share their information.

So please check it out. The doctor Tom, what parting words you have for people over here. The secret to success is one hour a week and have patience. And if you understand that basic concept, you'll be able to take the information from this Hashimoto's thyroid summit and apply it in a way that's very successful. And you'll look back and be very grateful to Doctor Gupta and all of us who were on this docu series that we gave you some information that helped lead you and your family to a healthier, longer life.

Absolutely. Again, such wise words, with hope to a lot of people and a clear, simple blueprint that, you know, each and every person out there can follow. So again, thank you so much for doing that, sharing your knowledge. And, you know, spending some time with us today, really means a lot for me as well as obviously for everyone who is who is watching over you. So thank you so much. Thank you. All right guys, this is it for me. Yes. You would like to listen to this discussion more than a couple of times so that you can take all the show notes and then obviously follow all the links that we share for Doctor Tom, because he has tons and tons of information for you and resources.

So please do that. I will see you next time till the time. Take care. Bye bye.