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Dr. Kelly Halderman is a former physician turned biotech expert. She currently serves as Chief Health Officer for Weo - a health-conscious biotech company that uses patented technology to transform and perfect the most precious molecule on the planet, water. Weo is known today as the world’s global leader in... Read More
- The episode features Dr. Kelly Halderman and Dr. Brady Wirick in a podcast discussing thyroid health and nutrition
- Dr. Wirick shares insights about his practice, including functional medicine, functional neurology, and regenerative medicine
- They emphasize the connection between diet and thyroid health, highlighting the impact of inflammation, gluten sensitivity, and food additives
- The conversation covers probiotics, gut health, and the significance of making conscious dietary choices to improve overall well-being
Dr. Kelly Halderman
Hi, I’m Dr. Kelly Halderman. I’m a former medical physician and author of the thyroid debacle. I’m now devoting my life to education, research and biotech because I realized we need educated people to bring us cutting edge information, especially when we find ourselves with a diagnosis such as hypothyroidism. When I was practicing al empathic medicine, I myself became very sick, bedridden with what would be diagnosed as Lyme and mold infections along my health journey. I was also diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, a condition I was told that could only be managed with medication. Well, I’m here to tell you that there is more than medication to help you as you will learn through my powerful interviews with several functional medicine practitioners. There are tools that will help empower you to take charge of your health. Join me today as I interview leading doctors naturopathic specialists to uncover the most useful health insights for you. This podcast has been launched in collaboration with DrTalks visit them today at DrTalks.com/calendar to learn more about their upcoming summits.
This is Dr. Kelly Halderman and I am joined by the fantastic Brady Wirick, DC for another edition of DrTalks, thyroid series. Welcome. Dr. Wirick.
Brady Wirick, DC
It is an absolute honor and a pleasure to be here Kelly. It’s Dr. Halderman you and I go back a ways and we’ve collaborated over the years, throwing some great ideas back and forth. And when you invited me to join you, that means a lot to me. So thank you.
Dr. Kelly Halderman
Well, awesome is totally my honor because I know you’re going to drop some knowledge bombs as usual first before you do so, tell us about yourself, tell us about your practice.
Brady Wirick, DC
Okay, great. So I’ve been in practice here in Idaho Falls Idaho. Oh think Salt Lake City, Utah three hours directly north. Hey, I’ve been in practice now for about 16 years. I literally opened my practice here because I really like to fish and the best fishing in Utah where I grew up is actually in Idaho. So Here I am, I came to Utah right, see I came to Idaho to to to be a lot around a lot of great outdoor stuff and I’ve been here for 16 years now and I absolutely love it. My practice has many facets to it from functional medicine, to functional neurology, to regenerative medicine. My wife and I won’t run a weight loss program. So there’s a lot of facets to it. I’ve been fascinated with the whole laser concept lately and the things that laser can do for T. B. I and stroke. It’s been, it’s been a wild ride. I like it a lot by training. I am a chiropractor. There’s very few patients that I have that I actually adjust. There’s many many more things that we have available to us that they are very helpful. So love to be outside, love to teach people how to eat and that’s me and a
Dr. Kelly Halderman
That’s awesome. Yeah your instagram is full of beautiful pictures. I’m not you know I’m not a person. I’m not really an outdoorsy really person but you inspire me doctor whatever you inspired me to like get out there and fish and all this stuff. So it’s really cool. But you also are really inspiring you and your wife. We talked about this because of what you’re doing with nutrition. I mean not only are you the people that you’re interviewing that you’ve taken to your program, they look fantastic. They are talking about more energy. They just feel better. They feel better. And that’s the most important part is we feel better. So today we’re talking about thyroid and I’m like I’m going to bring you on because I want to talk to you about person comes in. They have hypothyroidism. Most likely causes autoimmune thyroid is what is what is your approach like how do you start thinking about what to even do with this person.
Brady Wirick, DC
Well first off we do run a weight loss a weight loss program and if we can talk business for two minutes, I call it a weight loss program, mainly because people don’t understand what people here in Idaho. Don’t really understand what functional medicine is. So if I call it a functional medicine program, spend all this money on advertising. I’m not gonna get a whole lot that’s coming back because they don’t understand that they’re overweight because they’re broken. They just think that they’re overweight because they’re putting too much food in and not enough exercise, which has some merit. But it’s so antiquated. It’s just it’s not even, it’s not even funny. It’s actually quite sad. I did not know how to turn my phone on my computer on. Do not disturb. So sorry if I get little things every now.
So about a year and a half ago I was introduced to a program that I actually, I bought the rights to use it. And then I started looking at the fundamentals of what the program was based upon, which is basically there there’s like a tropic drops that you put underneath your tongue that they act as an adaptive gin to regulate insulin and sensible eating, you know, two meals a day, four ounces of fruit, four ounces of vegetables, four ounces of protein at its core. It was brilliant. But as I started looking into this thing, I’m like, this is so close to the functional medicine program. There’s just a few things that we can tweak, we’ve made it our own. So we’ve gotten rid of all the anti, excuse me, We’ve gotten rid of all the inflammatory oils. We’ve really made some changes to this thing and really like dug into it, which I think we’ve made it awesome.
So back to your question, people come in and one of the main things we want to look at is what medications are on because we see people on thyroid medications all the time. I haven’t looked at the statistics lazy. Last time I looked, it was like the second highest prescribed drug in the country. I think it goes back and forth. So we see it all the time and I’ll sit down with people and I say, look, I see you’re on thyroid medication. And the most likely cause for that is an autoimmune reaction. So, and I just explained to them that what we’re going to do is put them on an anti-inflammatory diet. That’s going to help regulate your thyroid better. As far as thyroid medication is concerned, I, you know, I’m a chiropractor. I can’t tell to take drugs or not take drugs. I just help, hey, look, it’s gonna be tough to regulate thyroid medication and you’re probably still gonna have to do it when you’re done. But if you’re feeling better and the, and the drugs actually doing what it is claim that it does. You’re gonna be better off in the long run. So we’re gonna get rid of some diet. Then we go into the whole we’re gonna get rid of some inflammation and that’s what I meant to say. Then I explain to them that Hashimoto’s in particular is carried on the same genius, gluten sensitivity. And there’s a high high probability that you’re gluten sensitive and try to ease them into this, right? Because if you come in full force and gluten is gonna go, if you look, if you come in and tell them the freaking truth their brain chemistry goes can handle literally. And it’s not because they’re like a weak person. It’s because their neurochemistry so screwed up because of morphin that their primitive addicted brain hates my guts, sitting across from them telling them they can’t have this particular food so we ease them into it.
Dr. Kelly Halderman
So use a big word there lad. A morphine can you kind of get a lay person’s definition?
Brady Wirick, DC
I forgot the last time. I think we did this, we did this for doctors, didn’t we?
Dr. Kelly Halderman
Yeah, we did. So we didn’t have to that basically your brain is getting a morphine response from the food you’re eating from your donut or you know you’re getting like this woo like this rush and it’s very addictive.
Brady Wirick, DC
It’s a thing.
Dr. Kelly Halderman
It’s a thing, it’s 100%.
Brady Wirick, DC
Here’s what happens, people think wheat is about gluten and gluten is about sell yaks, there’s a bunch of other proteins that are involved which is why the testing that your doctor probably did to say if you’re not a total high probability that it’s garbage you like how I stop myself there. Sogliano then is a protein that’s found in wheat hits your stomach acid breaks apart and your body can actually take that and turn it into what’s called morphin. So it becomes a completely different compound and it’s called morphin for a reason because it binds to the morphine receptors in your brain and you literally get the same rush that you would get from just anything from anything that you can get a rush from in particular things like crack gives you the same type of buzz and it literally, right, so taking that away, people look at me when I say that they want to punch me in the face.
So I’d like to stay in business and keep doing what I do. So I don’t come in like both barrels like that in the very, very beginning because the truth hurts. And the truth is they’ve got to come off of it right now. Here’s a problem when they start thinking that they want to take all of their sandwiches, pastas, donuts of the standard American food and just replace that with gluten free products, which you and I both know there’s some pretty dang good gluten free products out there like, but if you make that switch, just one for one. The problem is there’s a lot of those other products have other things in them that can cause the same types of reaction. They’re also loaded with sugar that can cause the same type of reaction. So you may come off of gluten for you may go gluten free for two weeks, but your body doesn’t change, it’s still get the same reaction because you’re not doing it correctly.
Dr. Kelly Halderman
Right, right, you haven’t even like addressed probably the damage that has been done from the food sensitivities and such. And so I’ve seen that over and over is I went off gluten for two weeks and I didn’t notice anything. It’s like, okay, well you replace that just like what you said was something that’s gluten free, but talk to us doctor about cross contamination to that molecular mimicry in some gluten free things like corn and oatmeal and things.
Brady Wirick, DC
There’s other compounds that have proteins in them, they’re not gluten but they look a lot like gluten and you know, if the receptor on your cell is shaped like this and the protein is shaped like this, it’s still gonna fit into that receptor, right? So it will cause the same type of reaction. So it’s important to look at some of the cross contaminant cross reactive foods, which a big one is dairy. Like I had a conversation with someone just this week cause like my daughter tried going gluten free and she tried very well, did you try them at the same time. Oh you have to do that. Yeah, you do okay because dairy is not a lactose issue. It is for some people, there’s other proteins and dairy to like milk, beauty trophy, Alan and Casey and you can have reactions to those particular products that look just like a gluten product. You mentioned oats, there’s proteins and oats, there’s proteins and rice, there’s proteins in amaranth, there’s proteins in corn. A social media has been buzzing lately because of that cute kid singing the corn song, right? You may love corn, but corn does not love you back. I gets in fact, one of my most popular videos that I’ve done on social media was me and, and Kim driving across Nebraska and we’re just kind of raging on corn saying a lot of the same things. But the reality is like, it can still cause a cross contamination reaction and you can be completely gluten free and getting this, not getting any results because you just didn’t you’re, you’re still in some of those, those
Dr. Kelly Halderman
Right. You didn’t address that. And so it’s, it’s, you know, it’s very valiant effort to, you know, go gluten free, go dairy free, but in the past when I was practicing, I’d use Cyrix testing because then I could see that those, those foods were causing the exact same reaction because it’s so frustrating as a patient to do to implement things, but your time and put your money in and then still just hit the wall and still not have any positive results. So I would sometimes have to resort to doing that to just see like, okay, you know, a lot of people, things are resolved. They go gluten free, dairy free and they’re like, oh my gosh, I feel so much better. Everything’s good. And then there’s a lot of people who get stuck. So with your approach. Okay, So you, you have the person, they’re coming in your, if they have the they have hypothyroidism, you’re suggesting that you’re perhaps using the same labs, that I am or different labs. Is there anything else I talked to us like about about dig into that diet a little bit more. Like how did you refine it?
Brady Wirick, DC
So when we first got it, there were things in there like Melba toast, Right, That’s total trash. That was the first thing to go. But it had things like using pam cooking spray and pam is nothing but industrialized oils and propellants which your body still causes an inflammatory reaction. So we replaced that with avocado spray and extra virgin olive oil spray, which we tell operations go buy it at Costco. Like there’s no propellant, It’s still in a spray can still does the same thing. You know, our line that we use is we guess we want to, we’re trying to burn fat off of you. So we want to limit the amount of exogenous fat that we bring in, exogenous means stuff that you bring in from the outside world. So we don’t want to consume a bunch of fat while we’re trying to burn fat off of you.
But you still have to have healthy fat if you don’t, if you do not have healthy fat, it’s going to affect brain function and we don’t want to do that. So we added in some healthy oils. But I think the biggest thing that we’ve done is just added the education component of it. We do classes in our office twice, twice a month. So the second Thursday of the month, excuse me. The second Wednesday of the month and the fourth Wednesday of the month. We do classes in this very same room that I’m sitting in right now where we just teach people like look, if you really want to be well and you really want to be healthy, do not eat anything that has a freaking label. Did I say read I’m gonna eat, do not eat anything that has a label.
Dr. Kelly Halderman
That’s very very it’s easy, right? That’s really pretty easy for people to latch onto that right? And to start making choices just according to that. Like what’s for breakfast? Well it’s not that packaged, you know, cereal with the additives and all that. You know, it’s just something simple like an egg. They’re not allergic.
Brady Wirick, DC
So we actually have. People skip breakfast, we’re two meals a day. So it’s lunch and dinner. So there is a component of this where we are intermittent fasting, which by the way, intermittent fasting is a fancy way of saying skipping breakfast. Hey, don’t complicate it. I swear breakfast was invented by people who want to sell your pancakes. They’re saying, you know, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. That’s, that was brought to you by people
Dr. Kelly Halderman
Marketing. That’s right. Someone’s making money off of you, right? And then you’ll go on medication.
Brady Wirick, DC
What we should do is Kim and I should actually like charge people to go to the, for us, to them for us to go to the grocery store with them so we can just like walk around and just kind of like point out to them some of the nonsense that’s, you know, I tell people all the time if a food, if your label is making a health claim, they’re hiding something or they’re lying or both. Even in the health food section, it’s like we picked up what was it got gluten free. It was a mix of some sort and the first ingredient was sugar.
Dr. Kelly Halderman
Right?
Brady Wirick, DC
You know, people with thyroid issues, they can’t handle sugar causes so much inflammation, they just, you keep tipping the scale in the wrong direction. So we tell them food companies lie and if they understood how they’re trying to get you addicted to their food so you keep buying it, then I think that sets people free. You know, you look at fast food companies and they purposely put msg in their food because monosodium glutamate is excited, torture is an excitatory neurotoxin, like it winds your brain up and gets you excited. So you keep going back and buying their garbage, they hashtag chick fil a
Dr. Kelly Halderman
Hashtag outlawed in Europe. Like a lot of these things, Europe was like, nope, no way, no way. But we’re not really protected over here,
Brady Wirick, DC
But we’re not hungry here. So
Dr. Kelly Halderman
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so let’s say that your good patient is following all these rules, but they have a day where they slip up and you know like everyone does and they’re paying the price. Obviously we’re going to get them back on track. Like just you know, like when you slip up, just get back on the horse, is there anything else you do supplement wise? I know we’re both fans of us enzymes master someone can you kind of go through that like a gut.
Brady Wirick, DC
So you know, everybody’s human except for Kim. I have never, I have never ever seen a person more what’s the word I’m looking for? Not dedicated, but just like she, it’s ridiculous how she’s loyal to which she practices what you guys preach, she’s phenomenal specimen of a person, I’m human, I make mistakes where patients are human, they make mistakes. But Kim’s just, she’s not human. So that said, what we’re trying to do here with people in our office is trying to build up some metabolic flexibility.
Dr. Kelly Halderman
Okay.
Brady Wirick, DC
So that when they have those insulin and inflammation surges, they’re gonna spike up your body deals with them and then returns back to baseline very, very quickly. Okay, when they first get here, they’re inflammation and insulin levels are through the roof. No bueno. And we’ve got to get them back down here and then build up. So when they do have a slip there back that metabolic resiliency, metabolic flexibility. It’s a beautiful thing. Okay, now, for those people who do make mistakes, there’s ways that can get them back quicker, right? And there’s this really cool enzyme DPP for google it. I don’t even know what it stands for and I can’t even pronounce what it stands for. But there is a crap ton of research on DPP four that basically when you get these food insults, when you make those mistakes, it can get you back to that baseline very, very quickly can actually start breaking down. Because if you eat gluten it’ll stay in your system for up to six months.
Dr. Kelly Halderman
That’s right. And not even you don’t even have to consume a lot of gluten deferred to mess with you for six months.
Brady Wirick, DC
BPP four can break it down much, much quicker. Getting back to normal sooner rather than later and it’s found in a product that we use called blue design. It’s a fabulous product. There’s I just Google DPP four.
Dr. Kelly Halderman
Yeah that’s one of the things I’ll use to if I go to because I’m gluten free I have fashion models. Everyone probably listening knows that by now but I’ll use that before the meal during the meal and then just a couple of days after just in case because you know restaurants try their best but there can be exposures in there. So I do I love that the blue design for that.
Brady Wirick, DC
It’s a fact but you gotta be you gotta be frank though. It is not a kitchen pass.
Dr. Kelly Halderman
No
Brady Wirick, DC
You cannot just say well I’m going to take some DP before and eat that cupcake. Please don’t do that. But you can use it as both a prophylactic and as a crap. I made a mistake. Before and after you go to a restaurant. That’s a big deal.
Dr. Kelly Halderman
Definitely. What about keeping the gut healthier in general? What do you think about probiotics? Probiotics? Post biotics? What’s your thoughts on that?
Brady Wirick, DC
There is a ton of data out there about anaerobic and aerobic microbes in your gut. You know the anaerobic. So good guys. The aerobics are the bad guys and I’ve said for years that bad bacteria will eat your nutrients and poop toxins into your system. Good bacteria will eat toxins and poop good bacteria.
Dr. Kelly Halderman
That’s really good. That’s nice. That’s good visual.
Brady Wirick, DC
Yeah you probably shouldn’t let my 15 year old brain cross said cartoon but it’s a big deal like you have to if there is a toxin in our environment it’s going to affect your gut bacteria first. Okay more and more people are becoming aware of the whole glyphosate problem. They glyphosate Monsanto. They claim it’s safe for human consumption. And the only reason why they make that claim is because it doesn’t kill you right when you consume it. But what it does is it kills your gut bacteria. Then you take an antibiotic and then you’re drinking diet soda and then you’re under all this stress and then you’re walking into your you know to your bedroom where you have a candle burning that’s from bath and body works and just all of this like fragrance and just this crap in our environment.
It’s going to kill your gut bugs which over time will kill you. So probiotics are awesome. There’s fabulous products out there like like sun spectrum can certainly help with the prebiotic load fermented foods you know that’s one of the things that we encourage people to eat a lot of while they’re on this program is fermented foods for that exact reason. There’s so many good you know when us enzymes and master supplements marry each other. You know you want to talk about probiotics that can change the world between those two companies, there’s fabulous, fabulous products available to help keep your gut inoculated with that good stuff. Overuse of bacteria, of anti antibiotics, overuse of hand sanitizer and other stupidity that we have going on right now. Your immune system, your gut do them a favor. Probiotics are our key. One of the favorite things we like to use here is a product that was developed by our good friend Dr. Ian Holloman. Great dude. He’s got a product design that’s basically I call it a multivitamin for your immune system.
Dr. Kelly Halderman
Oh that’s good. I love.
Brady Wirick, DC
Yes it’s a fabulous. I mean it’s probiotics, it’s vitamin D. It’s what’s the one I can’t think of right now?
Dr. Kelly Halderman
I am.
Brady Wirick, DC
Yeah. So just a wonderful product. If you don’t like taking a lot of pills that’s a great way to go because you can just do one or two a day and actually definitely.
Dr. Kelly Halderman
Yeah it’s obviously in this day and age super important to have our immune system healthy. You know immune system in the gut. You know so you think gut health then you tie it all back to your diet. So if you really really so powerful what we can do for our health by changing what we put in our into our mouth and into our bodies. I don’t think there’s anything that can supplant that I really don’t you know obviously exercise is very important. But like you said in the beginning when your brain’s on fire because your guts a mess, you know, you’re inflamed all, you don’t really have that capability really. That neurological capability of dopamine pathways are all, you know, in shambles to really get up and move. So it’s almost a process where you start, you start changing your diet, start buying foods that don’t have labels getting off food that can be inflammatory.
I love how you said that the hypothyroidism is autoimmune and those jeans, they’re in the same area for gluten sensitivity because not that long ago brady, you’ll agree with me. It was people thought that gluten sensitivity was a joke. They’re like, oh, you know, I mean there’s celiac, he likes real but now we know that gluten sensitivity is a diagnosable and then we’ve gotten better with our lab testing. We’ve gotten better with the research that we’ve been doing. So I really, really enjoyed everything that you brought to the table because I think that just that reminder, like it starts with nutrition and it and it really, you have to get that right. You really do have to get that right. So do you have any parting thoughts before I give everyone your information on where to find you.
Brady Wirick, DC
You know, we could really launch into a traumatic brain injury thing right here. I don’t know if you want to open that can of worms yet or not or if we want to do this on another time, but there are studies that show that post traumatic brain injury, there are elevated levels of protein in your bloodstream after you hit your head, that only come from the gut. So there’s immediate effect and that there is a correlation between developing food sensitivities and leaky gut syndrome from traumatic brain injury. So let’s that’s our teaser, right? Let’s have a conversation about that very, very soon. The point that I’m trying to make is our genes are the gun, the environment pulls the trigger. Okay, you can’t just blame your genetics for where you’re at right now, something has happened, something stressful in your life for you. Med school was stressful and that’s when the crap hit the fan for you. For other people it may have been a brain injury for other people, it may have been some other sort of stress when at the end of the day, you cannot control that crap. You will literally can you have to put an explode if I keep saying crap, you will literally try, you will literally drive yourself crazy trying to control the outside environment like that. You’re going to be exposed to chemicals, you’re going to expose the fragrances, you’re going to be exposed to this big joke. We have called 5G. All this stuff is here and it’s not going away. What you can control 100 is what you put in your mouth. So every bite that you take is either killing you or healing you. You get to decide what it’s doing.
Dr. Kelly Halderman
That’s awesome because a lot of the messages we hear are gloom and doom and it just feels like we’re we have no choice and we’re just going to be, you know, drowning in this toxic sludge. But you you nailed it with that, like you really have the choice to decide your health and with what you put in your mouth. So Dr. Brady. Where do we find you and your lovely wife for all these programs and name your instagram too because it’s very, very fascinating. Some of your videos on instagram where you guys go in the grocery store. Amazing. So tell us where we can find you.
Brady Wirick, DC
So on facebook I’m Brady Wirick, DC. W I R I C K you can find me there, you can find me on instagram on the same with the same, you know, with some underscores I think dr_brady_wirick, blah blah. Anyway, I’m on there, you may come across my personal stuff. My personal stuff is me having a good time and it’s not always professional, just so you know, but you find us on facebook on instagram. My wife is living with lupus on instagram. Intermountain regenerate our our practice is called Intermountain center for well being Intermountain center for well being is going to be in the mountain center for well being dot com is coming very soon. I hope I can just give you a bunch of links and you can link all this back. I think that the next step for us Kelly is we need to get the three of us in the same room so you and Kim can tell your auto immune stories and how you both have just managed to absolutely thrive and be the glowing individuals that you are now.
Dr. Kelly Halderman
Yeah, definitely. I mean, it’s like friends like you, like I’ll text you when I have questions and stuff. I mean like I didn’t get here like on an island, like I have really smart friends like you who you know, you’re you’re always you’re always really involved in and you’re really in the trenches and helping people, like I said when I started like look at your instagram, these people that you are working with, you guys are nailing it and it’s because you put in the work and it’s because you know, your nonstop quest for knowledge and application. So I really enjoyed this conversation Dr. Brady and this is definitely part one and we’ll see you back for part two.
Brady Wirick, DC
Alright, sounds awesome.
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