Protect Your Brain: Combat Gluten-Related Damage

Peter Osborne, DC

Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Heather Sandison, ND

I want to dive straight into this connection between gluten and neuroinflammation. I read a study recently. It just came out in 2023 about how they found in mice brains that just a little bit of gluten in the diet is directly neurotoxic and causes inflammation directly in the brain. Something that we eat can directly impact us, even though this was in mice. There’s a model for this directly impacting and breaking down the blood-brain barrier in mice. Tell us what you’ve seen in your clinical practice in terms of how gluten can set us up for neurodegeneration.

Peter Osborne, DC

 great question. There are several mechanisms at play that we’ve seen, and we measure a lot of things objectively. We do a lot of lab testing in practice, so trying to track and see why something is happening is always very important. However, one of the mechanisms of gluten-induced neurological problems has to do with gluten fundamentally changing the microbiome. We get gluten-induced bacterial abnormalities. That creates an inflammatory cascade within the gut itself. Probably most of your audience or listeners have heard of leaky gut. when we talk about something leaky. Leaky gut; there’s a leaky brain. There’s a leaky kidney. There’s a leaky vascular endothelial lining. There are leaky tissues that can occur throughout the body.

There’s a kind of general trend with gluten that it can cause leaky barrier syndrome. It starts in the gut. Certainly, once it gets through the gut, that inflammation can go systemically, and then it can also contribute to a breakdown in the blood-brain barrier. part of what we’ve identified with gluten as far as the neurological components is, number one, changes in the microbiome. It can alter certain types of bacteria. There’s some research now that I have been looking at and doing where we’ll see people with common yeast overgrowth. let me give you a scenario. You take somebody with gluten sensitivity. It damages certain types of bacteria in the microbiome, and it makes that person more susceptible to yeast overgrowth. Think of Candida. Candida albicans is probably the most well-researched and well-studied yeast overgrowth in humans. Candida albicans can then produce a protein that mimics gluten. It’s like now you’re eating gluten, then you’re creating a life form that overgrowth within your GI tract produces a protein that also looks like gluten. That protein is called a hateful wall.

Protein, or WP. now you have kind of this double gluten impact, but that’s just one component. But yeast will also ferment your carbohydrates. As you’re eating your foods, let’s just say you have to bake potatoes perfectly gluten-free. But now you have this yeast overgrowth in your gut, and it’s taking that potato and turning that potato into potato wine. That’s what fermentation is. It’s taking carbohydrates. It’s using those carbohydrates for energy and then producing alcohol as a byproduct. That’s how we make wine. We take grape sugar, and we subject grape sugar to yeast. That yeast can then ferment that grape sugar into wine. We can do the same things as humans. There’s something called Otto Brewery Syndrome, which is where a person has a bad enough yeast overgrowth. They’re going to ferment their carbohydrates into alcohol. Now, what does alcohol do to raise the risk of Alzheimer’s and dementia? Aside from alcohol being damaging to nerve tissue, alcohol directly causes vitamin B deficiencies that can lead to a host of problems. It leads to mineral deficiencies that can lead to a host of problems with energy production within the mitochondria of brain cells, thus reducing the capacity for cognition, recognition, and functionality of the brain.

You have yeast changing the microbes or gluten changing the microbiome, increasing the likelihood that yeast overgrowth could be a real possibility. That’s one mechanism. But you also have gluten, which directly causes an immune response. We’ve seen this in schizophrenics, we’ve seen it with bipolar, we’ve seen it with people who suffer from depression and dementia, where they’re producing antibodies against neurological tissues in the brain. We know gluten can directly be related to the pathway of antibody production against neural tissue. You’ve got gluten-induced yeast overgrowth through microbiome changes, and you’ve got gluten-induced direct antibody production that can damage neurological tissues. Then you have gluten-induced malabsorption, so you get damage to the gut, and that malabsorption can cause things like fat deficiencies. People with Alzheimer’s often have low omega-3 fatty acids, especially low EPA and DHEA, which can affect and alter how they’re able and capable of thinking cognitively and clearly. But we also have malabsorption that can occur with any number of nutrients: selenium deficiency and magnesium deficiency, B vitamin deficiency and zinc deficiency, etc. The list is long because there are 40 essential nutrients, and we know that gluten-induced GI tract damage can induce any number of nutrients depending on the individual and on other varieties and factors within that individual’s choices and lifestyle.

Heather Sandison, ND

Those three things that you just described fit well into the analogy that Dr. Bredeson uses, that our brain can think of it like a country. if that country, if my brain is done, is at war, if it’s attacking and defending against the yeast, or if it’s attacking and defending against itself. This autoimmune process that you described can be triggered by gluten, but we don’t have the resources to go into that regenerative mode where we’re building infrastructure neurons and those connections between them. then you also described it this way: there’s a reduction in resources. These crucial nutrients for the brain are reduced because gluten can induce this low malabsorption. Even though maybe you’re choosing to eat the right things outside of gluten, you are not able to absorb them because of their impact on the GI tract. Even with those resources that we have, if we’re fighting that war, we’re using up any resources we have, plus we’re not getting enough. You can see how this is a setup for disaster and disease.

Peter Osborne, DC

You can’t fight your food to win. The purpose of eating is to nourish the body, not to create a battle. It creates quite a conundrum for people who are gluten-sensitive and don’t realize it.

Heather Sandison, ND

These are the mechanisms by which gluten can put us at risk. Now, talk about what you’ve seen with patients. Sometimes people care why it’s happening, but mostly we care about how we get this to work for us and what we do about it. What have you seen your patients do?

Peter Osborne, DC

The first thing is a diet change. It’s the number-one modifiable risk factor. You have 100% control over it. That’s the good news. Some people are hesitant to go gluten-free because they feel like they’ll miss out on social opportunities. They’ll feel like they’ll miss out on the traditions around the holidays,  like birthday cake,  Christmas cookies, or whatever it might be. But in reality, and this is why I generally don’t just say everybody goes gluten-free because the likelihood that somebody going gluten-free is going to stick to the diet to the level that they need to stick to the diet, where it has a profound impact, an improvement in their health is not likely. It’s a big ask.

Generally, what we do clinically is genetically test people. We do genetic testing for gluten and gene predispositions. If we find a gene predisposition, we take them gluten-free. When I say gluten-free, that’s probably a different meaning than what most are saying. When we say gluten-free, we mean grain-free. Because if you define gluten, it is not just limited to wheat, barley, and rye. That is the FDA’s limited definition, and that is the European Union’s limited definition. But gluten is defined as the family of proteins found within the seeds of grass. that is all grass, not just wheat, barley, and rye, but also oats, corn, rice, sorghum, and millet, which are commonly labeled as gluten-free products. Research shows that up to 92% of people go on gluten-free diets in the traditional sense, that’s the wheat, barley, and rye-free version of the diet.

Continue to have inflammation in their villi after up to five years of gluten-free diet compliance. I discovered this very early on in private practice because I would see people initially making the change. In the first few months, it was like gangbusters. They were feeling great. Their joint pain was reducing, their cognitive function was improving, their energy was improving, and their sleep was improving. You name it, we saw a symptomatic reduction. But what would happen once they figured out how to do food substitution? Instead of eating Cheerios over here, I’m going to eat this corn-based cereal that’s labeled gluten-free. What we saw was that when people started to discover food substitutions like that, they would go back into what I call gluten-free whiplash. They would whiplash backward into their old symptoms and sometimes into new symptoms because they were eating grains. when I did a deeper dive into the existing research around what gluten is, what does that mean to be gluten? What does it mean to be gluten-free? Like, nobody looked at this to the level that I did and brought it out in layman’s terminology.

Other researchers were looking at it. They were just talking about such geeky science that nobody understood what they were saying. What I tried to do was make sense of it based on what I was observing clinically. what we found in the literature was that there’s a type of gluten in corn, for example, called zein, and that a lot of people who have gluten reactions react to zein as well. A study in 2012 showed that celiac patients reacted worse to zein than they did to wheat gluten called gliadins. There’s also a gluten in rice called orzenin. and it’s one of the most common food allergens. Or there’s a term called FPIES Food Protein-Induced Enterocolitis. It’s an acronym, and that’s what it stands for. But rice is one of the top causes of this. This is a cause of gastrointestinal inflammation. Which is exactly what celiac disease is. The disease manifestation of celiac disease is the autoimmune intestinal inflammation caused as a result of wheat, barley, or rye, at least traditionally so. But again, we’re finding rice gluten, corn gluten, and other forms of gluten are also causing very similar types of reactions in our patients.

When we originally take them gluten-free for those first few months, they’re so paralyzed by not knowing what food substitutions to make that they’re truly grain-free. But once they start figuring out what those substitutions are, they start adding them to their diet, and they start going backward. It was my observation, clinically. we started to delineate the terminology. The way I delineate the terminology is that instead of going gluten-free in the traditional sense, we call that the traditional gluten-free diet. We ask our patients to go truly gluten-free, which is grain-free. now we can at least ensure they’re not being exposed to these gluten-based proteins that are found in all grains. The definition of gluten is that it’s a family of proteins found in the seeds of grass that are soluble in alcohol. This was defined by another Dr. Osborne, not me, but we call him the Father Of Plant Protein Chemistry. He classifies gluten originally into different classifications called prolamins. It gets a little esoteric for the average listener. Well, I won’t get into all that, but people must understand that there’s no such thing as a gluten-free grain. When I use the term gluten-free, I’m not talking about going to get your oatmeal this morning and making sure you eat some cornflakes. I’m saying you need to be grain-free if you want to restore your brain health and reduce the inflammation that so many of these other glutens can also cause.

Heather Sandison, ND

This is so helpful, and I have so many directions I want to take. This is exciting. The first question is testing. You mentioned testing people genetically, but the way that you’re describing it, it almost sounds like everyone could benefit from going grain-free.

Peter Osborne, DC

The reason I wrote the book No Grain, No Pain instead of No Gluten, No Pain is because gluten is the only thing in grain that can be detrimental to people. that a lot of people’s positive responses to going gluten-free have more to do with a lot of these other things as well. It’s not that the story is deeper than gluten. because again, you have gluten, which is found in all grains. Is it possible everyone could benefit from going gluten-free? it is. It’s possible. Is it probable? No, because you can’t take everyone in the world simultaneously and have them go gluten-free measure all the outcomes, and do so while ruling out the variables. That’s an impossible trial. You can’t do it in a double-blind fashion either. It just makes it hard for research. But I would argue that anyone with an existing autoimmune condition benefits from a grain-free, gluten-free diet, period. I have not yet seen a case where that wasn’t true. Again, it doesn’t mean it couldn’t be true.

It’s just that I’ve seen over 10,000 patients in my 22 years of practice. I would say that that’s never been the case. Everyone I’ve ever tested with autoimmune disease has had gluten-sensitive gene markers that predispose them to react to gluten.  again, my population is biased because people don’t come to me to say, “Hey, I feel great; make me feel greater.” People come to me because they have five, six, seven, eight, or nine autoimmune diagnoses, and they’re trying to figure out what they can do in their diet and lifestyle to get better because the medicines aren’t working. But there’s so again, I’m digressing here, so let me back up. You asked, Could everyone benefit from going gluten-free? 

My answer is: Yes, it’s been my observation. If they have an autoimmune disease, that is fine. But what are some of the other things that are found in grain? They could also be detrimental to the human brain. one of the factors around grain that has nothing to do with gluten is this family of proteins. I call them plant sensory proteins because the job of these proteins is to defend the actual seed. Remember, that’s what grains are; they are seeds. when we look at seeds as a function of Mother Nature and the world around us, their job is not to be your staple food. Their job is to preserve their species from being eaten into extinction.  although they may not have arms and legs that can fight you, they do have chemicals inside of them that can fight you. people don’t. Doctors, unfortunately, don’t. What’s the best word? They don’t appreciate that as well as they should. If you ever look at Mother Nature, go watch your Mother Nature show. Everything is eating everything else. It’s very violent. Do you think, for one second that that seed can’t defend itself? If you do, then you’re naive.

If you’re a doctor saying that nutrition is not important to health, I would say you’re practicing in a very scary way that is going to lead to many people continuing to believe things that get them hurt and continue to perpetuate chronic autoimmune disease. But you’ve got proteins in grains that are not gluten-free. For example, there’s a class of proteins called serpent ends and another class of proteins called amylase trypsin inhibitors. These have been shown in research to cause damage by activating the immune system through a different kind of mechanism. Then what gluten does, and this is one of the mechanisms, is through what’s called a toll-like receptor, or TLR. These plant proteins can activate TLR receptors and toll-like receptors in the immune cells and create an inflammatory cascade that leads to chronic inflammation. We also know that grains can be contaminated with mold and mycotoxins because of the way they’re stored. Mycotoxins are very neurally inflammatory, meaning they damage nerve tissue. This was a federal court case a few years ago, Frederico versus the U.S., where they proved for the first time in a court of law that mold damaged the brain. and they did so with all kinds of unique testing and what are called neuroplant imaging, where they took three-dimensional MRIs of the brain and showed atrophy of the brain as a result of mold exposure.

This is found in grains; it’s one of the most contaminated moldy foods that we could consume. We also know that some pesticides and herbicides are being used in mass, so you’ve got things like glyphosate in atrazine that are sprayed on these grains, and glyphosate is now being double sprayed. It’s sprayed before and right before it’s sprayed on the ground when you plant, but it’s also sprayed as a desiccant to dry the crop up so that it can be harvested. Then we also have other things in grains like heavy metals, like, for example, cadmium, lead, and arsenic, which have all been found in high quantities in rice. We know that mercury has been found in grains, especially corn. we have metals, we have plant century proteins, we have molds, we have mycotoxins, and we have pesticides.

Now, you also add to the fact that if you look at grain quantitatively as a food and as a staple in the U.S., it represents anywhere from 60 to 80% of total caloric intake in humans. what does that equate to and equate to a carbohydrate-toxic diet? It’s too abundant in carbohydrates, of course. Some are now calling Alzheimer’s disease type 3 diabetes. When you’re using grain as a staple food, it’s also driving up blood sugar. I’ve made this observation. Colleagues like my friend Dr. William Davis, who famously wrote the book Wheat Belly, observed that the compound components of wheat are packed in, or it’s four to eight times more glucose promoting out of the blood than sugar, like pure crystallized sugar. Then you also have the fact that grains, when you consume them as a staple, have a very poor ratio of omega-6 to omega-3. You end up getting large quantities of omega-6 in your diet, but the quality of these omega-3s is very poor. That ratio imbalance drives the inflammatory process. I know I just threw a ton of bricks out there on the field for everyone to hear about grain. But I just wanted to make sure that people understood that it’s far deeper than just gluten alone.

Heather Sandison, ND

That’s helpful and eye-opening. We recommend an organic ketogenic diet for folks who are struggling with any sort of cognitive decline. There’s been sort of a debate, and we certainly see that it makes a big difference. But what you’re describing makes it sound like maybe it’s because we cut out grains that people benefit so much. I’m curious about your thoughts on legumes, but I also want you to just comment on that. There are these different mechanisms that are proposed to explain why people benefit so much from a ketogenic diet. Cutting out grains is potentially a large part of that. Do you think it’s all of it, or is there more to it?

Peter Osborne, DC

I’ve gone back and forth because I treat people who’ve been on keto diets and carnivore diets, and they’re still struggling; they’re still sick. It’s always more to do it. It’s an individual story and equals one. Each individual is very unique in terms of how they’re going to react and respond. It’s important that when we’re seeing people, we’re not trying to use the one-size-fits-all approach because, although one size might fit many, people will fall through the gaps of that mentality. Part of what it is is that some people don’t need to be keto, and keto is detrimental to many, and I’ve seen that be the case. That being said, keto can be very helpful for others. I generally find people do best if I’m generalizing here, and not with great degrees of specificity, but the generalization is that you don’t need to be keto or you don’t need to be a carnivore.

What you need to be is balanced. What does that mean? That means you’re getting carbs, fats, and proteins as an equal distribution of your macronutrient ratios. Approximately a third of your calories come from carbohydrates, a third from protein, and a third from fat. The rule with that equal third distribution pattern also needs to fall under the auspice that it’s all real food and that it is not processed food that way. You’re ruling out any kind of potential reaction to dyes, preservatives, gums, pesticides, or other things that might also be contaminating what we’re calling food. Part of the problem is that we defined food, and then the US government allowed for the grass listed as generally recognized as safe food and additive ingredients to just be grandfathered. for all these chemicals that are grandfathered into being called safe, there’s no data on whether they’re safe or not. There’s just data that says that if you eat them today, they won’t kill you tomorrow. That’s not the same thing. Because it’s just like with cigarette smoking: you don’t smoke a cigarette today and have lung cancer tomorrow.

It’s the chronic, persistent, and consistent use over time that leads to the detriment. None of that has been studied in the food industry except for actual, real food. We have thousands of years of humankind historical data saying that if you eat real food, you generally don’t see chronic degenerative autoimmune inflammatory diseases cropping up. I’d say the kind of catalog that is probably best in modern times is Western Price. The dentist who traversed the globe looking at indigenous tribal peoples found that within one generation of the introduction of processed foods, cavities shot up, diabetes shot up, and inflammatory disease shot out. Their jaw sizes changed, their jaws shrank, and their teeth became crowded he documented very, very well. All to the detriment of processed food. Shortly after that, Francis Pottenger, documented in animal studies predominantly with cats, is a great read for anyone interested in reading the actual work. But what Pottenger did was take three groups of cats. He took one group and fed them a carnivore diet, which is what cats are. They’re carnivores.

He took another group and fed them an all-processed food diet, and he took another group and fed them a mixture of carnivorous and processed food. He followed these cats for three generations and documented the changes in what he found in the all-carnivorous group: robust health, and what he found in the all-processed group was that they were infertile by the third generation. The cats had mange; the males were acting like females, and the females were acting like males. Their bone structures had changed, even in terms of their physicality. The males were starting to look like females, and the females were starting to look like males. you saw the same changes in the mixed processed and in the Carnivore risk group, but to a lesser degree, and I look at where we’re at in humankind.

We can’t do that human study ethically, so nobody will do it. But where we are, we’re confused about gender. I don’t say that, but this is not a conversation about whether I believe it’s right or wrong to be gay. I believe you are. You are. However, I also believe the environmental influence of foods, the chemicals in foods, and the estrogens that we’re exposed to today have certainly impacted the sexuality of our population and how our population is feeling because these things act as hormones. If we bury our heads in the sand about that, we’re naive and fools. Now, all that being said, going back to the point where processed food in these cats led to infertility and a subsequent demise. me what you follow that down. It’s a trajectory to the end state of the disease. What you’re left with is that infertility is the death of the species.

We have to recognize that we’re seeing a deterioration in humans as a result of many things happening to our food. But if we’re trying to reverse it, we have to recognize that what we put in our bodies and what we put in our mouths is fundamental to our health. What’s in grain plays a big role in that. I have not seen one dietary change that was more prolifically powerful at reversing what the rest of the medical community says is not reversible. I’ve seen rare autoimmune diseases go away. I’ve seen common autoimmune diseases go away—you name it. I’ve seen it improve or go away completely, all with a diet change. What does that tell me? That tells me that the illness is in the food. It’s not just in the food, but a big part of it is in the food. Because food is the number one thing that we can viably change and that we have 100% control over, it is the very first thing that people should be looking at in terms of outcomes.

Heather Sandison, ND

I want to go through a typical day and what you recommend your patients eat because this is where some people get hung up. But particularly in our population, we’ve been told that fats are bad for us and that grains are what we want to make in that food pyramid. The foundation of that food pyramid in the eighties and nineties was grains: eight to 12 servings of grains a day. As we start to flip that on its head and add more protein and different types of carbs, I want you to take us through like a practical day, somebody going to the grocery store, somebody making food at home. What are the carbohydrates you recommend having? What are proteins? What are the fats? What does that look like?

Peter Osborne, DC

It’s very simple: meat, vegetables, nuts, and fruits. In any variety that you could imagine and any variety that’s in season, I recommend that we follow the seasonal pattern of eating, where what’s available and in-season in your local geographic areas is what you should focus on. Join a local co-op and support good farmers who are doing it and who aren’t poisoning your food supply. To do that, you have to let convenience go. Do not do that. You pay a convenience tax, and the convenience tax is the demise of your health. if you’re willing to pay that convenience tax, and that’s your choice that you get to make, but the reality is, if you eat with the season and you eat just wholesome, real food, you’ll be just fine.

Most people will. Now, some people are also allergic to different things, and we will see food sensitivities or food allergies, and folks that, I’ve seen, I had a case of a little girl one time. She’s nine terminal and has six months to live. She was gluten-sensitive, and she was allergic to blueberries. Of course, she was eating gluten. Every morning, her mom would make her a blueberry smoothie. Well, we changed those two things about her diet. We saved her life. That was 20 years ago today. This little girl graduated college. She had six months to live. Today, she’s a graduate of college and has made diet changes. it’s powerful. And so you don’t have to make it complicated. Where people find that it’s complicated is that they realize that if they’re going to be healthy, they have to dedicate time, attention, and effort in knowledge to understanding new recipes for a new way of eating. They have to be willing to give up the fast food line.

The  Whataburger line in the morning, that’s why you’re not going to achieve health by doing that. Anyone telling you you can or will is a liar. We could say, look, historically, there are several things we could point to historically as a corollary graph to human health decline. Fast food is one of them. Restaurants were rare when I grew up. Restaurants were rare when I grew up. Today, more people eat out. They eat it at home. We can correlate restaurant numbers and the growth of the restaurant business and industry to chronic general disease. We can correlate the quantity of vaccines to that given to children. In that same graph, we could correlate the quantity of exposure to pesticides. To that same graph, we can correlate the use of grain as a staple food from the 1940s to 1943 to that same disease graph, as a lot of people say, well, correlation is not causation. But correlation is proof and evidence that we need to look out a lot more closely. You didn’t have the disease levels that you had or that you have today before those things.

You can also draw a corollary between the 3000 chemicals that are on the grass lists that have been approved for putting in our food and that same list. There’s an assault on our health through our food, and people have outsourced the production of the most important thing that will register their vitality to companies that don’t care about their vitality. Many of these companies profit as a result of a deterioration in your vitality. Do you see what I’m saying? if you like, if you look at Big Agro, they’re in bed with pharma. If you look at pharma, it is in bed with medicine. Medicine is no longer owned by mom-and-pop doctors who run small practices and are just out to try to help people feel better. Their corporations run businesses with interlocking corporate directorships between them. you’ve got folks that are on the board at big agro companies that are also on the board at Big Pharma, companies that are also on the boards of big hospital corporation companies, and they’re all patting each other on the back. The feeding frenzy is all about profit, and it’s all about, let’s make as much as we can, and let’s, let’s, let’s not prioritize the values of human life in health care. Let’s prioritize the value of profit over those things.

Heather Sandison, ND

Or the environment. These are all ultra-processed foods that are very, very hard on not only our bodies but also on the planet.  so fascinating. I do want to just go back and, like, pin you down. What I’m going to do is I’m just going to go through a day because, you know, it doesn’t have to be complicated. But I want people to go home with practical things that they can put into place today. Many of our listeners are females who are over 65 or about to hit that age and are concerned about frailty. We don’t want to lose too much weight. A lot of people associate those grains with how they maintain a healthy weight. they’re scared to go keto, or, in this case, even go grain-free. Let’s go through meal by meal. A great breakfast. Fantastic, super.

Peter Osborne, DC

You’ll have tons of great resources, and we add recipes every month. I have a professional chef who cooks and does things, and we try to get them to do easy things, and we try to get him to do nice things. There’s a nice variety of breakfasts, lunches, dinners, etc. As far as Nightshades are concerned, some people need to avoid them, and some people don’t. But I wouldn’t make the statement that everyone needs to avoid nightshades the way people quantitatively need to avoid gluten. Dairy: we keep dairy out of people’s diets for the most part because of its ability to mimic gluten. There’s some evidence now showing that casein, which is the protein found in dairy and one of the primary protein constituents of dairy, has molecular mimicry with gluten.

If a person is new to the gluten-free diet and they’re just navigating this, a lot of them do better when they go dairy-free.  If they don’t go dairy-free, a lot of them tend to continue to struggle and suffer. Initially.

Heather Sandison, ND

Another thing that comes up a lot is wanting to give people great dietary advice, and then it’s about access and it’s about cost as well. Organic is going to be more expensive.  

Peter Osborne, DC

Actually, that’s not what I mean. When you eat healthily versus eating out the number of dollars you will save overall. You will save most of the time on our analysis cost analysis, and it’s a break-even proposition where you lose if you’re going to places some people call a whole paycheck and whole foods because it’s just more expensive. They have a reputation in their name. You’re going to pay anywhere from 20 to 50% more than you could find it at, say, other retail outlets that maybe are not quite as popular or famous. You could join a local food co-op, and you could get a ton of great locally-grown organic produce for half the cost. There are a lot of ways to save money in that regard. People jump at the cost issue when they’re new to it because they’re gawking at the fact that these strawberries are $7. Great. These non-organic ones are $2. A great. I just can’t justify the $5 difference. Look, if you’re healthy and you feel good, I don’t fault you for that; you’re trying to be budget-conscious or whatnot.

That’s smart because money is important, and it’s about understanding and having conversations about what a person can and can’t afford. That’s an important step in life, as a general rule of thumb. But when you’re talking about your health and you own a $1,000 iPhone, but you won’t buy organic, I’m sorry; that’s a priority issue, not a cost issue. People have to start learning to prioritize what is important. If your health is important, then you will sacrifice some of the other things that you may be using, as things that you are willing to spend money on but that are not 100% essential. And you’re reestablishing your health. The quickest way to deteriorate your ability to make a good living for your family is to be chronically ill. The cost of being chronically ill far outweighs the cost of buying organic food. There are so many ways you could break down that cost analysis. Organic wins every time. When you compare it to restaurant food dollar for dollar. As opposed to looking at the long-term consequences, it wins hands down. But in the immediate now, it isn’t any more expensive.

Heather Sandison, ND

Then you mentioned having chef access to a chef, many people. It’s a time issue. When someone is going grain-free, many of your recipes, I’m assuming, are quick and easy, but do you have any other recommendations or strategies for how to make this less time-consuming?

Peter Osborne, DC

Bulk cooking is what I do every Sunday personally in my own life. And so it makes it a lot easier. So, I mean, that’s just an example, but bulk cooking is a time saver. You could also do where you make a recipe, where you make a lot of a particular recipe. Yeah, you could argue that I’m not I’m not going to disagree with you, but, you know, you you can either save time by both cooking and cooking a lot of the same things, or you could dedicate time, you know, to cooking on a regular nightly basis as well. And either one of those strategies is fine. But from a time saving perspective, if you’re if you’re really trying to shave down the bulk cooking.

Heather Sandison, ND

We freeze a lot as well. We’ll make, like you mentioned, a Stewart chili, and we’ll put it in Mason jars, put it in the freezer, and a few weeks later, we can pull it out, put it in the fridge, and it’s thawed by dinner time. That’s another strategy so you can keep it fresh and mix it up. We will often add greens to anything; just add extra greens when we’re preparing something for just that night. It does feel fresher; add extra spices or something that mixes it up. Coming back to Alzheimer’s specifically, you recommend some top supplements, or maybe not even as supplements as supplements are; sometimes they put them in that highly processed category to use supplements as supplemental. But if you can get these things from your diet, even better. You talk about some of the top nutrients to reduce your risk of Alzheimer’s. Would you share that with our audience?

Peter Osborne, DC

Which is a lot of 40 essential nutrients. What does that mean? That means there are 40 different nutrients that your body cannot produce on its own and that you have to consume by eating the right foods.  Most people have heard of the B vitamins. Most people think of minerals. like things like calcium, magnesium, zinc, selenium, chromium, copper, etc. Then you have fat-soluble vitamins like vitamins A, D, E, and K, and then the fats—the omega-3 fats and the omega-6 fats—are essential. Getting those in is the best way to do that, which is to eat seasonally, and eat a variety. Going back to the rule of thirds. If we look at nature, everything is always about balance. There’s not an example you can give me of a situation where the opposite of balance is the standard rule. It’s always about balance in nature. A third is where I like to funnel people, because that at the very least gives them some degree of balance. If your diet is balanced in that way, you’ll get a lot of those nutrients.

But what are some critical ones? I’d say that with cognitive decline, one of the biggest ones that I see is omega 3. That’s not just DHEA. A lot of times people call the brain fat because it’s very critical for cognitive function and for white matter in the brain. However, EPA is very critical as well because of its anti-inflammatory properties. EPA regulates the inflammatory cascade and, of course, Alzheimer’s and dementia. These are planetary processes. You need those omega-3s to properly regulate inflammation in the body. You also, very importantly, need vitamin B1. There are clinical trials on vitamin B1 and cognitive decline in clinical trials in both animals and humans, showing improvement in dementia scores with higher doses of vitamin B1. Now there’s a kind of vitamin B1. You certainly can eat vitamin B1. It’s found in meat. It’s found in green vegetables. Green beans are a good source of vitamin B1 is an example, but there’s a special type of vitamin B1 called Benfotiamine. It’s a fat-soluble vitamin B one that they’re using in clinical trials in humans, too. Then they’re measuring cognitive outcomes by using different batteries of tests to see, okay, do we improve cognitive function in these individuals? The answer is yes. far, the trials have been limited. It’s not like we’ve got 100,000 people going through a trial double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial. 

Heather Sandison, ND

I tried to double-click on that real quick. The reason why is that you cannot patent B1, and you can’t patent Benfotiamine. No pharmaceutical company is going to spend the billions of dollars that it would take to get that through phase three clinical trials because there’s no profit margin on the other side of that. 

Peter Osborne, DC

They’d have to share their profits with everyone else who could also produce the same vitamin and make the same, and take advantage of the research that the pharmaceutical company would be doing.

Heather Sandison, ND

But some people don’t understand that the reason pharmaceutical companies are incentivized is that they’re incentivized to put the effort, the money, and the time into those trials that it takes to get things across the FDA finish line. After all, there’s a huge profit margin on the other end, and for supplements, herbs, natural things, and dietary changes, you won’t see those trials happening. Even if we have a trial with 100 people or a smaller number of people, that’s still helpful because what it can do is help us assess the risk rate. If there’s very little risk and not very high cost, then it’s probably something worth trying potentially at home. Now, talk to your doctor, but something worth considering. Thank you, Dr. Osborne. I just wanted to make sure that people understood that context.

Peter Osborne, DC

Research-based medicine doesn’t exist. You have profit-based pharmaceutical research on patentable medications only, and that unfortunately stifles true knowledge from ever making it out of the cloud. Unless you’re up there living in the clouds with people like myself, who all we do is study, research, apply, study, research, and apply. To me, if you’re dismissing vitamins and minerals as a lack of research, you’re missing the boat. It’s not a matter of them not being effective. In my experience, It’s a matter of us not coalescing enough clinical trial data to be able to make claims where the FDA won’t or the FTC won’t come and take away your license and shut you down, because that’s what it’s about. It’s about the threat. The Federal Trade Commission doesn’t allow you to say certain things.

It’s why when you look at a supplement bottle, it says this product has not been investigated, approved, or authorized by the FDA. You see that long line of, it’s lawyer speak. We’re saying, Hey, we can’t make claims that this vitamin can do X, Y, or Z, even though all the research in animals shows that it does that very thing. Even though we may have even human clinical trials that show that it does that very thing, we still can’t make that claim because it doesn’t fit in and check off all the FDA-approved boxes. Anyway, Benfotiamine is something that your audience would want to look into and read the studies. Read the studies that are out there that are available and decide as to whether or not you think it’s the right move for you to take.

But if I had early-onset dementia, I would certainly be entertaining. 300 milligrams a day of Benfotiamine for myself. That being said, there are a lot of other things. There’s magnesium. Magnesium is interesting. My studies on magnesium have shown that it improves cognitive function dramatically, especially magnesium Magnesium Threonate, which is a type of magnesium that is attached to Threonate molecules. It can pass through the blood-brain barrier more readily than other forms of magnesium. That’s another option that is another potential possibility that your audience can look at and make a judgment call as to whether or not they’re going to attempt taking magnesium in that way. I would just caution anybody using magnesium Threonate for the first time. It will cause ninja dreams that are just what ninja dreams are: very vivid, very realistic dreams. Some people who are prone to nightmares might wake up in cold sweats because the dream felt so real. Just be aware of that and taper your dose up if you’re going to use it start at 100 milligrams, which is an hour or so before bed, and then work your way up. It’s safe. It’s just that if you’re prone to very vivid dreams already, it can make them even more vivid, which for some people can be disturbing if they’re prone to nightmares.

Heather Sandison, ND

Thanks for the heads-up on that one.

Peter Osborne, DC

Then there’s the battery of other B vitamins, like folate and vitamin B12, and vitamin B6 and vitamin D too. These B vitamins are very critical for the regulation of a chemical called homocysteine. One of the risk factors for the development of cognitive decline is elevations in homocysteine. This has been pretty decently studied. We know homocysteine is neurotoxic. Keeping your homocysteine levels below nine, and so you can ask your doctor to measure homocysteine. It’s a very easy test to ask for. It’s a simple blood test they can run when they’re doing their standard workout. The CBC and the chemistry panels. If you’re over nine, you can use B12, folate, and vitamin B6 in combination with each other.

It’s got a homocysteine-moderating effect. It can pull that homocysteine if it’s elevated down to that under-nine range. Other things can elevate homocysteine beyond that. If you have a preexisting chronic kidney disease, there are some other nuanced factors. But, as a general rule of thumb, those B vitamins are very helpful. Vitamin B3 is very, very powerful. We can thank Dr. Abram Hoffer, one of the psychiatrists who coined or helped to coin the original phraseology, orthomolecular. That was Linus Pauling. But Abram Hoffer is one of the doctors who elevated it. What that means is the right molecule, the orthomolecular right molecule. He was an orthomolecular psychiatrist, and what he found in his schizophrenic patients was that high doses of vitamin C mixed with high doses of niacin would, in many cases, lead to tremendous improvement and neurological deficits that they were experiencing with depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and schizoaffective disorder.

We know those nutrients play a major effect factor and play a major role in the brain’s overall brain health. His theory was something called the Adrenal growth theory, which says humans have a byproduct of adrenaline. Production is something called Adrenochrome, which is a hallucinogenic compound that can cause schizoaffective disease. You’re imagining things. But niacin could help your body break that chemical down. Again, when we look at dementia and Alzheimer’s, sometimes these people are also hallucinating. So it’s not very clear-cut. A lot of the diagnostic criteria for Alzheimer’s disease are subjective. It’s in its batteries of tests, and memory, and many mental examinations that doctors will perform or other cognitive batteries that they’ll perform to assess a person’s mental status. These are subjective tests. They’re not objective at all. Most of the time, when someone dies, the actual, true diagnosis of Alzheimer’s is made on an autopsy. That’s where you discover abnormally folded proteins and things of that nature—what they call tau proteins. Anyway, I’m digressing too far afield, but my point is, that you have a lot of different nutrients. The B vitamins, magnesium, and omega-3s are good ones to start with. Are there more? There’s lots more. What I would encourage people to do is test. There’s a type of micronutrient test that can be done called Intracellular Nutrition Analysis, where you’re measuring deficiencies for these nutrients in patients or people that they just want to know. “Hey, where do I begin? If I have a deficiency, which one do I need to focus on for myself?” Because otherwise, it’s just kind of generic, try these things. But if you want to get nuanced, ask your doctor to run an INA on you and an Intracellular Nutritional Analysis test where you can observe and find out what micronutrient deficiencies you have, and then you can eat food accordingly and supplement accordingly if necessary.

Heather Sandison, ND

This has been so helpful, doctor. I’ve been fascinated by the stuff that you’re doing. I can just tell how passionate you are about the research and finding true solutions for your patients, and it’s just a pleasure to have this opportunity to learn so much from you. Thank you. I want everyone to know how they can find out more about you and your clinical practice.

Peter Osborne, DC

If you want to find out more about me, you can go to the glutenfreesociety.org. That’s our platform for everything gluten. We talked a lot about gluten today. If you want to learn more about gluten in dementia and gluten in the brain, we’ve got lots of videos and articles there. There are thousands of articles and videos, lots of recipes, and other resources on the gluten-free diet. If you want to just learn more about my clinic, about what we do, and about online nutrition, you can go to drpeterosborne.com. And that’s DR Peter Osborne, OSBORNE dot com. 

Heather Sandison, ND

Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us.

Peter Osborne, DC

Thanks for having me. It is a pleasure.