Uncover Your Gut’s Reaction To Gluten Sensitivity, Nutrient Deficiencies And Medications

Peter Osborne, DC

Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Well, let us just dive right in because you were one of the first ones to really sound this alarm in a way that the whole population could hear. Help me understand or how, but let us start by unpacking for the audience, and maybe from a timeline perspective, when you saw gluten becoming a serious issue and what your personal journey was in, it was discovering that and sharing it with the world.

Peter Osborne, DC

Yes, I go back to when I was in graduate school and going through a residence program in the rheumatology department at the VA hospital. I am a veteran of the Air Force, and so I have a fondness for other veterans. In my heart, they should be taken good care of; at the very least, they should be taken great care of. In this rotation that I was involved with, I would watch these soldiers come in through the VA in Houston. They come from Louisiana; they come from all over. They are coming from all over. The rheumatology department largely treats autoimmune diseases. Imagine rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, scleroderma, enclosing spondylitis, psoriatic arthritis, etc. They made a huge deal. My attending doctors made a huge deal about differential diagnosis, meaning it was super important to get it right. You had to memorize the criteria for the diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, or seven criteria, and patients have to have four out of the seven. Which, to me, means that the criteria for diagnosis were, in large part, subjective, not objective. I did not understand why it was a big deal because, from my historical perspective on immunological disease, most people would go to five different rheumatologists and get five different diagnoses anyway. Why the hubbub anyway? They handed me this big, thick text called The Primer on Rheumatologic Diseases. It is a big, thick book, and said, “Do not come back until you read it.” That was Friday. I have got to go home now and spend a weekend away from the people I love most, which is one of the sacrifices that we make. We were going through school, and we spent a lot of time studying. But so I went home, read the book, and made a ton of dog-ear notes, highlights, and everything else. When I came back on Monday to the internship, it was just quiet. I wanted to just kind of observe because this was my first day clinically working there.

What I did was do about two weeks of observation and just keep my mouth shut and kind of stay at the back of the room with the other newbies, with the other green ears. After two weeks, I started to ask questions, and one of the first questions I asked was, Why are we not doing any objective testing to any great degree? Because you asked me to read this book, this book, although not really super organized, does, if you read it, spell out all the possible known triggers for autoimmune disease. As an example, certain types of pesticides are known to be triggers. There were in-depth chapters on kind of going through some of that information with certain types of autoimmunity. I am. Why are we not testing these people for pesticide exposure? Because that is a trigger. I mean, my frustration was that in two weeks of observation, every patient, no matter what the diagnosis, got the same set of drugs and the same basic treatments. Which at the time was methotrexate, which is a cancer medication. But because it inhibits DNA and RNA synthesis, it can stop pain. Unfortunately, it also rips holes in the gut lining and damages and destroys the GI tract, which would perpetuate an autoimmune disease pretty much indefinitely. That was my frustration: if we know that there are triggers from immune disease, but we were not objectively testing our patients for those triggers, and we were giving everybody the same medication, why does it matter whether or not we have a nuanced diagnosis? To me, that was more about the doctors having big egos because they could say big words but not really having big outcomes or big results for the people that they should care about the most. I did not like that.

Anyway, I was told that was just the way it was, and we were going to do that. I kept quizzing, and I kept quizzing the attending, and I was not doing it out of disrespect. I was not trying to be that snarky student in the back of the room who was trying to catch the teacher in a bind. It was just really out of pure curiosity and pure care for the people that were under our care. But what evolved in that rotation was ultimately one of the days I cannot remember, which was Tuesday or Wednesday, but it was called surgical console day. It was very real and revealing because on surgical console days, you would have patients that would come in again from Texas but also from attached states because they all kind of filtered into the Houston VA hospital. These were people who had been on the drugs for 20 or 15 years; they had been on methotrexate that long, and ultimately, their disease was still progressing. Their pain was not being controlled, and their joints were still destroyed. Surgical console day was all about popping an X-ray and then saying, “Yes, you are a good candidate for surgery. Let us schedule it.” There was no orthopedic exam. The orthos would come to the floor, and they would basically put an x-ray of the patient up and say, “Yes, they look like they are a good candidate.” There was no detailed history taking, no taking, and no common conversations with the actual patient. Yes, you look like a good candidate for surgery. I am. Are you freaking kidding me? This guy’s been on methotrexate for 20 years. His gut was destroyed. He is malnourished. There is no way he is coming out of that surgery feeling traumatized because surgery is a trauma. We had what I call surgically scheduled trauma.  Sometimes surgeries are necessary. But at the end of the day, if somebody is malnourished, the level of potential for complications post-surgery is astronomically high. You are asking somebody who has been medicated with steroids and methotrexate, two drugs that destroy the gut, destroy the absorption and digestion of nutrition from food that we eat, but also induce nutritional deficiencies biochemically, including vitamin C and vitamin D, calcium, and magnesium. These are the nutrients that you need to knit, heal, and repair cartilage, collagen, and what? You are about to cut into this person and rip all those things out. They are going to need those nutrients to heal. You are not even measuring to see what their status is pre-surgery to give them a better outcome. 

It made me mad. It was that anger that fueled me and emboldened me to just continue to question. Now, it was not just, Okay, what about pesticides? What would the book teach me? I cannot take full credit. But for this fundamental knowledge, I mean, I read it and just applied it. That is, there are four common primary triggers for autoimmune disease, no matter what it is: rheumatoid or rheumatological; thyroid Hashimoto’s or Graves; liver autoimmune hepatitis; or skin diseases like psoriasis or eczema. Four triggers. If your audience wants to write those down, this is what I would demand of any doctor. If I were a patient or a patient advocate, Number 1 first triggers food, and we knew that we had the largest body of research conducted on a cause of autoimmune disease in celiac disease. I mean, this is not rocket science. We have known about celiac disease since the 1950s, and we have known about food being the trigger for it. It is not rocket science or even a huge leap to say, Okay, well, if one autoimmune disease is caused by food, would it not be fair to say that other autoimmune diseases could also have a food trigger? The amount of research now being done on people with celiac disease who also develop rheumatologic disease is vast. Yes, there is a high percentage of people who have celiac disease who go on to develop RA, or there is a high percentage of people our age who also have celiac disease. When I started diving into that literature and really reading it, I would bring stacks of studies to my attending, and he would throw them in the garbage and say, We are not doing this. 

Then I had to go back to the library because, in Houston, I had access to one of the largest medical libraries in the world. At that time, there were no computers. You clicked on PubMed, and you can access 10 million research studies right now. It was, you go to the library, you pull the dusty volumes of journals that are bound, or you pull the microfiche and you scroll through microfiche, and then you go to the copy machine and you make copies, and then you take it all home and you have your trusty highlighter and you highlight this stuff. Then I had a special computer program that I created where I would scan the documents in and start. I had a huge database before PubMed existed. Where we were categorizing: the nutrient, the vitamin, the disease associations with the vitamin, the disease triggers, all that kind of stuff. I had this big database that I had started to collect. Part of that, when I was at the VA hospital, was bringing that research to my attending. Some of it was the research on gluten. Then he threw that away. I brought him the research on fasting, and I said, “Look, fasting can alleviate pain in 48 hours.” There is no drug alive that can do that. None. No drug is known that we can even compare to the efficacy of just not eating. If that does not tell you that food plays a role in a person’s autoimmune disease, I do not know how to get through to you.

Well, I threw that out, and then I brought him research on fish oil because I thought, okay, fish oil is something. There is a prescription for fish oil. Maybe we could get him to write prescriptions for fish oil for these patients. Fish oil is more effective at treating inflammation than nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen. When you take it in high enough doses—4 to 8 grams a day—it is actually more impactful and more effective for inflammation. Nope. He threw that in the garbage too. I had three strikes, and I was out. They did it. They hated me there. They did not treat me as a student. They wanted me out of there as quickly as they could. I was happy to leave, frankly, because it was very depressing and demoralizing to know that they were just completely ignoring research and pumping the same old line again. But they made all this damn nuance about, Oh, well, you have got to have the criteria because you have got to get the diagnosis right. I am. Why? Why do you have to get the diagnosis right? This person has lupus, and you prescribed methotrexate. This person had enclosing spondylitis, and you prescribed methotrexate. This person had rheumatoid arthritis, and you prescribed methotrexate. What the hell does the nuance matter other than you sounding smarter than everyone else in the room, which has no applicable outcome of improvement for your patients? The people who are coming to you and who are depending on you are entrusting you with their care. Yes, I said, it was; it just pissed me off.

When I left the V.A. hospital, one of the first things I did was open my own practice, and I had a little girl come to see me. Her name was Ginger. She was nine. She had a diagnosis of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. She had been pumped full of methotrexate since she was two. She got her diagnosis at the age of two. Here we are, seven years later. Her mom called around to see me. What had happened was that after seven years of being treated by the rheumatologist, the rheumatologist looked at her mom and said, There is nothing more we can do for your daughter. She might have six months. You need to go home and get your affairs in order because this little girl is very sick. Her knees would swell up, and when she was an infant, she could not crawl. They would get so swollen when she was a young child that she could not go on the playground with everyone else because they would get so swollen. She needed pain management so frequently. She had a port embedded in her arm—a permanent one—because she was in and out of the hospital so frequently for pain management and treatment. When I got her, it was like God was just dropping her in my lap and saying, Here you go, prove it.  The first thing I did was test her for gluten sensitivity, and she was positive. We took her gluten-free, and within six months, the port came out of her arm, and she was not dead. Within a year, she was completely in remission and off of all medication. Today, she graduated college. This was where I was really able to take my experience. That was good and bad. It was good in some ways and bad in other ways, and I applied it in a real-world application with my own patient and found that not only could we help somebody, but we could literally save their life. If you look at autoimmune disease as a whole, there are about 140 different types of autoimmune disease. For females, some would argue it is definitely in the top five causes of death in females under the age of 65. But some would argue, and I am one of them, that it is the top cause of death in females under the age of 65 because some of the autoimmune diseases technically should be classified as autoimmune, but they are not yet. But the mechanisms have been researched, and they are autoimmune mechanisms.

That being the case, we saved her life, and then that was it for me. From there on, I knew it was now less academic and more of a real-world experience. From there, my mission has been ever since to save as many lives as I could of people who were run through that crappy system of lack of empathy, lack of science, and really the cloak of expertise. I am the wolf in sheep’s clothing because they drape themselves in these white coats and talk in very big language, and people cannot understand it. They are misleading people. I am not saying all doctors are bad, are misinformed, or are intentionally doing it. Some of them just do not know any better. But the time for not knowing any better is over. I could see. Maybe not knowing any better. 25 years ago, prior to the internet. But today, if I want to learn about something, I can learn about it, and I can master the topic or knowledge in two days. If I really wanted to learn academically, not experience-wise, but academically, I could pull all of the information available in the world. I could, and I could convene to learn that in a very short period of time. These doctors no longer have any excuses to hide behind. There is no research because even in the time of microfiche, I was showing them the research, and they were ignoring the research and their own research. It was not out of a men’s health journal. Hey, they say you could fast, but no, this was other rheumatologists that had M.D. or Ph.D. degrees that were doing studies where fasting was showing massive improvement in patients. You are just ignoring that, in lieu of the pharmaceutical-funded research, that is obviously going to be biased toward medications and obviously going to be biased toward prescriptions, all because it takes longer to have a diet conversation with a patient. If I am going to teach somebody about gluten in my practice, one-on-one, it is a minimum of an hour of conversation, and then we have a 14-hour blast that we give to our patients, so they can go home and dive into it. But that requires time, effort, caring, empathy, and understanding. It requires knowledge of how to implement technology in a learning platform scenario so that you can help the people who are paying you to help them. That whole model was just so broken. My practice was basically launched by seeing Ginger and then just knowing the real-world application of how diet change can literally save someone’s life. Despite the medications and despite the ignorance of the medical intervention.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

I am so glad to hear you share this story in this way, because I know there are so many people in the audience who feel deeply seen right now because this is their experience. We normalize it. Then it just becomes a rite of passage. Hey, I am alive in this day and age. Therefore, I am participating in this food culture and getting exposed to these toxicants. Now I am going to go get gaslighted by the medical system until I am finally well enough to get a diagnosis. It does not matter what the diagnosis is because the treatment does not even reflect the data that is available today. That is the truth of it.

Peter Osborne, DC

Yes.  In that regard, people do not realize until they get into this world that prescription medications are the leading cause of death. Let that sink in. There was a time, and this was over 20 years ago. There was a doctor’s strike in California, and the death rates went down. I am not looking; I am not anti-doctor, I am not anti-hospital, and I am not anti-go get help if you need help. But our system sucks. If you have a chronic degenerative autoimmune problem, our system is the worst health care in the world. Now, if you have a broken bone or need to get a bullet removed, a knife stab sewn up, or an accident fixed, those guys are phenomenally good, or emergency room doctors can sell you, patch you, or save your life if you have a heart attack, but I think at the end of the day, and look, it is not all doctors either. Its patients have to advocate for themselves. You cannot just dispense your responsibility for the precious gift of life to a stranger in the trust or interest that they are going to have your best interests. They are not thinking about you when they go home. I promise you that. They saw 50 people today. I have been there. I have been in high-volume practice where you were seeing 50 or 60 days. You do not have the bandwidth to think about people. That is why I left that environment. I left that environment because I needed the bandwidth to be able to think about the people who were entrusting me with their care.

If you cannot do that or if you are not doing that, in my opinion, get the hell out of doctoring; you do not belong there. What you are doing is, basically, running a scalable business model that does not serve your customers. You are enriching yourself by doing it while hurting others. There is no place for that. There is no excuse for that anymore. The knowledge is out there. This is not fringe stuff anymore. Gluten-free may have used to be a fringe word 20 years ago, but me and a few of my colleagues made sure that today everybody in the world has heard of the gluten-free diet. Why have they heard of it? Because the work we have done and the outcomes do not lie. Now, if a gluten-free diet sucked and did not help anyone, no one would ever hear about it. But because it works so remarkably well and people have had life-changing, life-saving transformations using diet change, those whispers become a roar, and even still, in the face of that roar with a medical profession that continues to ignore it, it is like the house is on fire and they are telling you, The house is not burning down; it is in your head. Then, all the while, we are all inhaling smoke and burning up with it.

You cannot hide it forever. That is why I think we are in for a medical revolution. I think that is starting to happen. I think with the term functional medicine, there have been other words, and I do not really like the term functional medicine. I use the term self-responsibility. You owe yourself this knowledge. I mean, how much time do people spend researching which phone they are going to buy, which car they are going to drive, or what vacation they are going to take? And how many people spend equal amounts of time researching how well they should be exercising or focusing time and attention on quality, sleep, sunshine, or good, healthy food? I think the age of self and personal responsibility has to be the next age. Because if it’s not, I mean, what is going to happen? We spent $4 trillion last year on medicine, or, I mean, 4.2 trillion. That is enough to bankrupt us. It is under care. That does not work. By the way, $4 trillion was spent on drugs and surgeries that did not fix the origin or educate the patient. I mean, all of our efforts should be focused on educating the patient on how to empower themselves and basically handing them back responsibility.

Ultimately, if we do that, then they are going to drive the consumer’s need for organic food, and that is going to lower the price of organic food. It is going to make organic food more available. It is going to drive the consumer’s need for healthy houses and for building houses properly that do not wear out and do not become mold traps. It is going to drive the need for so many things in our society that are more health-oriented and less reactive because medicine is just a reactive profession. You are in your worst state. You just had a stroke or heart attack. Yes, we are reacting to the way you have abused your body over the last 20 years, and part of it is your fault. But the other part is our fault because we have been appeasing you for 20 years by saying, Yes, do not worry about that diet and exercise stuff. Here is a diabetic drug. Here is metformin; here is a statin; here is Zocor or Lipitor. Let us keep your cholesterol low without being any more detail-oriented or actual outcomes-oriented.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

I completely agree. Michael, that is my partner in practice. Michael. I know he always says the doctor of the future is you. One of the biggest things that we still have to educate people on today, even for people who are super proactive, is that everybody watching this now is obviously taking their health into their own hands. Good on you. We still have to unpack this cascade of beliefs that are interconnected. Whether you are in the U.S. or a developed country, somehow there is this presupposition that we do not have to think for ourselves because it is on the shelf. The regulatory body did that for us, and nothing could be further from the truth. In the US, the burden of proof is on the consumer to say, Hey, this chemical, this fake food, or this medicine is harming me, and you have to go through the legal system to actually prove that at great cost to yourself. So it’s a very laborious process that is usually left undone. Then, the chemical companies go, Oh, that is too bad; do not worry, we have another one right behind it. That is basically a duplicate because we cannot afford an interruption in business.

Peter Osborne, DC

Now our regulatory agencies are captured. I mean, they are basically not, even if we were to say, Okay, well, yes, we want to send experts up to Washington, to the police, to police certain things. That is great. I think, in concept, it is fine. But when they are all being bought off, when there is a revolving door of people who are supposed to be regulating the industry, they end up going and working for the industry, and then they go back and become regulators. That is not serving us. They are all getting rich, and we are all getting sick. People have this naive trust that governments have our best intentions. I think governments may theoretically have our best intentions. But the outcome is that it is not so great. Just look at the last three years. Look at what happened. I do not know what your audience feels about COVID, and we do not have to have that conversation because that is a big thing to unpack. But I think at this point, it is quite obvious that when you are trying to coerce people into getting something by giving them lottery tickets and donuts, your message is very skewed. Your message is very wrong when you say you have to take this chemical shot that we do not have any data on. No long-term data, especially. Do not worry about Zeke, and let us take every doctor who is talking about vitamin D, zinc, and QUERCETIN and let us send the FTC and their office and give them a Roto-Rooter and try to shut them down. They try to shut down natural immunity. There is no such thing; they are basically saying that you have to rely on us because your body is so weakened and pathetic that it has no capacity to protect you. That is what our government’s message is: if you think anything differently, then you are a naive fool.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

That is not the way that you are going to get censored. You could have your medical license revoked. If you refuse to let the government decide what is right for your body, you could lose your job and your livelihood, and your family could be in peril. Is that really a government that you want to trust?

Peter Osborne, DC

Yes. Is that the tyranny you want to live under? I am not me. I fought in the war. I know what war is. I have been to countries where tyranny is prevalent. I have seen beheadings and stonings. I know what that is. No, thank you. I do not want that to come to our shores.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Yes. All that is to say that we are in charge of our own bodies. The more we outsource that to somebody, the more we prolong and increase our pain.

Peter Osborne, DC

Yes, absolutely. You have to get to the point in your own mind where you can respect your doctor and have a conversation with them. But if they are not being acquisitive, if they are not acting in a Sherlock Holmes-type way where they are trying to help you investigate why you have your illness, then they are not doctoring you. They’re slapping a toxic bandage on your ailment, that will not serve you in the long haul.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

I would like you to very briefly unpack this concept of natural immunity and gut health. How should we be thinking about that in today’s day and age?

Peter Osborne, DC

I mean, the gut is ultimately, if we just define it as what it is, a tube from your mouth to your anus, and its fundamental primary job is to be a quarantine zone. What is quarantining? Because when you eat, there are dangerous things in food, even healthy organic food. There are dangerous things there. We have different plant chemicals. We have different types of bugs, viruses, bacteria, fungus, etc., even with the best intentions. But the gut is so awesome that it has this amazing, wonderful immune system and this amazing, wonderful system of checks and balances that it can quarantine that food and take what is good from that food—carbohydrates, fats, proteins, amino acids—and break them down into amino acids, fatty acids, and smaller substrates, vitamins, and minerals. It can recognize what is good and let those things end up in the bloodstream. It can recognize what is not good, and it can push that and form stool with it. Then it comes out the other end, and now it is good there because now it is fertilizing something else. The system that we have where we can take what we need, quarantine the bad, and then sustain great health as a result. That is your gut. You have to look at that as you would never, first of all, want to do something to that gut that has the potential to damage it, especially something consistently long-term. 

Some of the things that damage the most are toxic compounds, food additives, dyes, and preservatives. When you go to a fast food joint, you are exposing yourself to heavy metals and pesticides. You are exposing yourself to high-calorie, low-nutrient-density foods that will malnourish you. You are damaging your gut by eating them. The more you damage your gut, your gut, your body’s still amazing. It can heal it. You go eat one meal, and your guts are totally destroyed. Your body will react, heal, and help you. For decades before you can get sick. Because there is a lot of the stuff that I mean, the reason why fast food is banned as poison is because it does not kill you quickly. I mean, and so you think of it as the slowest poison or the most dangerous poison. Fast poisons. Easy. Okay. I took some arsenic, and it killed me. Okay. That’s no more arsenic.

We’ve got to get that stuff out. But okay, low doses are okay. I mean, just, anyway, my point is that slow poison is insidious because it has a nefarious will to act in such a way that it creates low levels of chronic inflammation over long periods of time to such a great extent that your body ultimately will break down but will not break down today. When you recognize that, just like with anything else, if you look at body builders who say, Did they work out once and get muscles now that that was years ago? Look at a gymnast. Did they train once and now they can do cartwheels for miles in their abs, or, out here now, they were training for 15 years for that to happen? It’s the little things. It’s the things that you do day in and day out that have long-term ramifications and consequences. In life, you do not become wealthy by making a whole bunch of money in one day and putting it in the bank. You put a little away all the time, and you have the magic of compound interest over time. But it’s the repetitive behavior that allows you to have the outcome, good or bad. So when you have a repetitive behavior of slowly damaging yourself with things that are societally acceptable but not necessarily healthy, you are going to end up in a place where your body is now compromised and your GI tract is compromised. Then, the first thing that people do when they have this set of symptoms is visit a doctor.

That is, typically, when it gets bad enough, you go to the doctor. The first thing that most doctors are going to do is pull out the prescription pad. If your problem is pain-related or pain-oriented, that prescription pad might be something like a steroid for pain, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory, or even an opiate-type pain-relieving medication. All these drugs damage your gut if you are slowly poisoned over the course of your life and raise your blood pressure. They are going to give you blood pressure medication. Some of those blood pressure medications damage angiotensin receptor blockers. One of the most commonly prescribed blood pressure medications actually causes villous atrophy. There are 100, and I think there are 28 or 38 studies now that show that that class of medication can cause this atrophy. If you get heartburn, you are going to take an antacid, and those drugs damage your stomach acid, which is part of your immune system. Your immune system: Your acid is part of your gut immune mechanism. It’s what kills off invaders—viruses, bacteria, etc.—from colonizing your lower GI tract. Now you are going to suppress that acid, and then you need that acid to absorb calcium, magnesium, zinc, selenium, chromium, copper, protein, etc. Now you are going to become malnourished, and once you become malnourished, your immune system does not have the tools and resources it needs to keep functioning. Now it’s a vicious feedforward cycle.

Once you hit the point where you have eaten enough poison or done enough damage to yourself, the gut fundamentally is now breaking down. You’re trying to medicate it, but the medicines you are taking are breaking it down faster. Now you’ve become malnourished. Now you are devoid of the nutrients that are necessary to maintain it. Then you hit an accelerant. Now it’s the fire; you poured gasoline and diesel on it. You put a bunch of wood shavings in it, and then you win it, and it just blew up like a bomb. That is where a lot of people end up. It just takes 20 or 30 years to get there. But there are clues all along the way. The clues are things like brain fog and fatigue. I am getting older. My vision is slipping, and my knee hurts a little bit more than it used to. Or I am gaining a little weight and I do not know why, or I am a little stiff and achy all the time. These are clues. These are not normal things. Doctors will try to gaslight you into believing that your body fundamentally breaking down as a result of being 30, 40, or even 50 is a normal thing. I am 50, and I feel great. I am 50, and I am probably in better shape than I was when I was 20. That is, if you had one of my heroes, Jack Lane. He was a chiropractor who, if you remember him, was of the older generation. But he made juicing popular with The LaLanne Victory. He celebrated his 80th birthday by swimming the English Channel with eight people in a boat strapped to his back. The man was a beast, and he never let age be his excuse. He never let that happen. I mean, I am not saying people do not age because we have the oxygen paradox, which is that the thing we need to survive is also the thing that slowly rusts us. There’s a big difference between graceful aging and aggressive aging. I mean, the perfect way to understand that is to look at a cigar smoker’s face. They look ten or 15 years older than a non-cigarette smoker. Why? Because they are putting on a free radical all day long. They’re accelerating their aging process and damaging their DNA. You have choices that you make every day. You choose what you eat and what you put in your mouth. That’s probably one of the biggest choices that you can make. So that choice consistently over time is either going to equate to a healthy GI tract and healthy functioning in healthy digestion and absorption in healthy nutritional status. Or it’s going to equate to something other than that. That’s the road and the path to disease.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Yes, I think you have touched on so many important points here, and I really want to unpack this nutrient deficiency with you further. Before I do, you have so many good references about medications that actually contribute to nutrient deficiencies and gut damage over time. Did we leave out any medications or estimators of the gut that you want to make sure you are?

Peter Osborne, DC

On a lot of them, every medicine comes with a price—every single one. Your ladies with breast cancer, if you took Tamoxifen, Tamoxifen has now been shown to actually drive lupus. It can actually contribute to the creation of autoimmune diseases. If you are taking excessive hormones—and I say excessive—a lot of people get put on hormone therapies. People need them. But a lot of times people get put on them, and their doctors do not monitor their levels very effectively. Well, there is a cost to that because estrogen can cause magnesium, vitamin B6, vitamin C, vitamin B2, and zinc deficiencies. Testosterone can cause that. If you are just thinking that you will go to your doctor and get some hormones to feel young again, you are going to pay a nutritional price there. If you are taking combinations of things when you take a steroid, for example, for pain and you mix it with a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory, there’s a 7- to 10-fold increased risk of ripping holes in your gut microscopically. Sometimes when you combine certain medications, and we have, I do not quote me on this, but the average 50-plus person is on more medication. None of these drugs were ever studied in combination. They were only ever studying one disease and one drug as far as safety and efficacy. But the interactions that they have were never really, truly studied and approved as safe. You get all kinds of polypharmacy, folks. They come in, and they are 15 medications deep, and there are masses. A lot of the reason they are the masses is not because of their choices.

It’s because the medicines are synergistically destroying them, and they do not even really realize it. They’re slow poisons sometimes, too, but they are very common medicines that can cause nutritional deficits. Drugs for diabetes, such as metformin, particularly cause B12 deficiency, folate deficiency, and coQ10 deficiency. Which is ironic because metformin is supposed to reduce your risk of heart disease by controlling your blood sugar. When you have a coQ10 deficiency, you can develop high blood pressure and congestive heart failure. You see the irony in it. It’s medicine. Their textbooks are written on this. Probably the best author on the topic is Daphne Roe; you can buy her books. They’re very expensive because they are older, and there are not very many in circulation. They were kind of taken out of circulation. I have all of her books, but she did a great job of helping us understand the biochemistry behind how medications can either cause nutritional deficiency by damaging the guide, causing malabsorption, or they can cause nutritional deficiency by creating a biochemical need for more of that nutrient in order to process that drug correctly. Or causing a nutritional deficiency because they somehow have some type of conflicting damage to an organ or tissue. So we will burn up more nutrients in an effort to try to heal or repair that tissue. So there are a lot of different potential mechanisms. But again, I think it’s important that everybody understand that there are no free rides. Every medicine you pay a price for.

That’s why, in pharmacy, there is a name for it. It’s called risk-benefit.  What is the risk of the side effects of this drug versus the benefit that it might give me? I think it’s important. It’s what informed consent is all about. It’s important that if you are going to choose to take a medicine, your doctor should have a conversation with you about drug-induced nutritional deficit as it relates to that medicine and give you all the facts. That way, you can make an informed consent decision instead of your doctor just gaslighting you by saying, “Oh, side effects are rare.” It’s not okay; it’s not good enough. Side effects are not rare. Not when you take that drug and mix it with others. We don’t even know what we don’t know. Most doctors say the side effects are rare because they ignore the fact that their patients are having side effects and call the new side effect a new disease. Then they medicate the new disease with another drug. If that is your attitude, if your attitude is to bandage everything, every little symptom, with another pharmaceutical chemical, then yes, you will never see the forest through the trees. But if you are, and if your audience wants to know more and is more specific, I have several articles on different drugs that affect the GI tract and how they affect the GI tract, as well as a chart on drug-induced nutritional deficiencies that I would be happy to share.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

You had to be fantastic. This is so important because we haven’t even gotten to actual side effects, and in the context of chronic conditions, I do not know about you, but so many of the people who come to our practice are coming because of mold or parasites. Those are wonderful topics we’re super passionate about, but they are on things to help them, like sleep and poop. Whether they have an autoimmune disease or more than one, I certainly did. I understand the path of how they got here, but they are on these drugs, and the side effects are digestive conditions. The side effects are digestive symptoms. They are, Oh, well, can you work around this or can you help me get off of this? As a natural health practitioner, as a tradition that I legally cannot comment on, I’ve got to turn you around. You’ve got to go back to your prescribing doctor. You’ve got to work on a plan to get off of this because I cannot help you get off of it, and you are coming to me for the side effects. It’s so frustrating; it’s a really weird landscape that we’re in.

Peter Osborne, DC

It is. I think that is where people just get themselves empowered. Then they can start making their own decisions. Remember that your doctor prescribing you something is not an order. It’s not a mandate. It’s a recommendation. It’s why they call it an opinion. You always hear, Go get a second opinion.  It’s a third opinion—their opinions, their subjective opinions. If you are on multipharmacy, how much time did your doctor spend with you conversing with you about your history, the nuance, the ins and outs of your life, and your behaviors before making that recommendation of a very powerful drug that they want you to stay on for the rest of your life? How much time did they devote to you before they just made that decision for you? Again, it goes back to you. You have to be smarter to make that decision, weighing the risk and the benefit. It’s not that if the doctor’s not doing their job, it’s either your job to fire them or it’s your job to go and do that work in that research so that you are an informed consumer, because that is what changes the world. What is going to change your health if you just listen and take whatever it is they throw at you? You have to make sure it’s the right fit, and it’s not always the right fit. If it were the right fit, it would not be the third leading cause of death in the U.S., and not if that does not wake you up and alarm you to the nature of the problem. Nothing will.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

This is so important because I remember vividly that I came from a mental health first and was chronically ill. I was mystery patient X. I unhooked myself and worked at a hospital because they just stopped caring. They were really interested and excited to run tests on me first, and then they were like, Oh, well, this is no longer fun because I cannot easily categorize you.  Everyone arrived at a different diagnosis, and the pressure to medicate is intense. Then you go to the next one. They have a completely different diagnosis, and it’s the metformin dispensary where you work. That is not working.

Okay, so let us. I really want to highlight a couple of things before we run out of time in your zone of genius. I mean, obviously, this is all your zone of genius, but you said something really crucial that I want to unpack a little bit. I was getting interviewed the other day, and somebody said, Well, we’re overnourished in this country. No, we’re not. We’re overfed and malnourished. I really want you to help people understand these gluten-induced nutritional deficiencies and these lifestyle-induced nutritional deficiencies that really affect gut health for the long term. I would just love for you to speak to that.

Peter Osborne, DC

60% of the nutrients that your gut receives come from the food you eat directly—what you put in your mouth. Actually, 100% do. But directly, as your guts are being nourished, they’re actually being nourished by the food as it comes through you, versus, say, your heart, which is being nourished through the bloodstream, or your liver, which is being nourished in the bloodstream. The gut itself has to get nutrition from the food that you eat. This goes back to high-calorie diets with low vitamin and mineral content. Give your body work to do. Understand that digestion does not come free; it is a very, very energy-laden process where we are breaking food down through multiple different biochemical processes that require energy. It requires chemical conversions. That energy is provided through vitamins and minerals. Vitamins and minerals are what we oftentimes refer to as cofactors.  They play a role in regulating the little motors inside of ourselves. These little motors either generate energy or function. These motors—think of them as the car keys to these motors—are zinc, magnesium, calcium, B vitamins, etc. If you are eating a low-nutrient density diet, which generally speaking is what America’s diet is, it’s roughly 60 plus 70 plus percent carbohydrate, and those are processed carbs. You have to understand the history of processed carbs.

In 1943, America banned the sale of processed grain because it was responsible for killing people to the tune of 8,000 or so deaths a year through beriberi and pellagra. These were diseases. These were plagues that were B-vitamin deficiency diseases that were actually caused by processed grain consumption. Instead of saying that these processed foods are bad for us, the solution was to fortify them with synthetic vitamins. That is where the food fortification came from. It actually came from the need to not kill people with the food they were eating, and the brilliant stroke of marketing genius, which was, in my opinion, rather evil, was from Kellogg. Kellogg: You have heard of Kellogg Cereal. Kellogg was a doctor, and his brother was a marketer. They created cornflakes together. the company. Kellogg Well, instead of saying, Hey, do not eat cereal because it’s going to kill you, they said instead, Hey, eat more of it because it’s now fortified with vitamins and minerals.  It’s an even bigger and healthier part of your day. 

We all grew up with that kind of cereal commercial message: Part of a balanced breakfast. Part of a balanced breakfast. They never said it was a balanced breakfast. It is about how they had to say it was part of a balanced breakfast because they knew what they were selling. It was an incomplete, nutrient-lacking toxic swill that cost them pennies, but they could charge you $8 a box for it, so it was a huge markup, and it was huge profitability coming from cheap labor and cheap food where they could throw some synthetic vitamins in it and trick you with marketing to make you think your kids needed it. Cereal was an invention in 1895. Prior to 1895, cereal did not really exist. Post created the first cereal; Kellogg followed, and this was all in the early or late 1800s. Most people do not realize that because they grew up thinking, Oh, gosh, cereal. We grew up with it. We think we kind of reinforce this false belief that somehow that has been a staple food for humans for generations. It has not.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

It is not, Oh, you are not going to let me have my cereal. Is that what you think? Well, you are not missing out on this right to exist. You are missing out on a marketing phenomenon. That’s all.

Peter Osborne, DC

Well, today’s luxuries are tomorrow’s necessities. So, originally, what would you say cereal-wise, was it? It was luxury food, and it became more and more commonplace and more and more of a necessity in people’s eyes, and a lot of trends work that way. Luxuries become necessities, and it weakens us. It makes us weaker and weaker with each passing generation. But back to nutrition. If you eat a high-calorie, low-nutrient food, your body has to create the energy to break that food down. If that food is not providing vitamins and minerals, then you do not have the capacity to break it down. Your body will instead convert that food into other things. One of the things it will convert it into is a triglyceride, especially a carbohydrate. If your diet is rich in carbohydrates, you will make more carbohydrates. I am sure you will make more triglycerides from carbohydrates. When your triglyceride levels go up, they pack around your liver and cause it to become fatty. Then your cholesterol goes up, and they want to put you on a statin. This is the chain. This is why keto diets are so popular. Carnivore diets are becoming more popular. I do not look, and I am not saying that I am not a fan of any of them for certain reasons.

But I think ultimately, what is true about keto and what is also true about carnivore diets is that they are grain-free diets. They are really just another level of a grain-free diet with even further restrictions. I think a lot of people feel better when they initially go keto or carnivore because they are actually going grain-free, and we could talk about the ins and outs of gluten as a poison or a toxin. Is it the most well-studied trigger of autoimmune disease? Most well-studied autoimmune diseases happen in your gut, such as celiac disease, but gluten, aside from gluten grains, contains other proteins that ripple in the gut lining and activate little receptors in the gut called amylase trypsin inhibitors, which cause inflammation in the GI tract indirectly. This is not even a gluten reaction. It’s a different reaction altogether. We also know that grains are oftentimes contaminated with mold and mycotoxins, and those molds and mycotoxins can damage your liver and create inhibition of DNA and RNA production, which makes it harder for you to heal and helps you age faster. We know that grains are super high and super rich in omega-6 fats, which are highly inflammatory when they are overbalanced. If you are not getting enough omega 3, which you do not really get from grain, but you are eating grain, which is a staple food in the U.S., 60% of all calories come from wheat. so we know it’s a staple food. You are getting a really high omega-6 anti-inflammatory fat ratio. You’re getting mold, you’re getting mycotoxins, and you’re getting pesticides, predominantly glyphosate, because most grains today are sprayed twice with glyphosate, once before they are planted and once during harvest to dry them up before being combined. You are getting all those.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Organic if it’s sprayed as a desiccant at the end. That is what people do not understand. Oh, what? It’s organic. It’s glyphosate. If we know that is not what organic means, organic does not make life slippery. It means lower in glyphosate potential.

Peter Osborne, DC

Yes.  At the end of the day, the story behind glyphosate is that the FDA did not even have a way to measure it until a few years ago, yet they had created an upper level limit that nobody could measure. The whole thing is nonsense. The whole thing is that they were a bunch of lawyers, and we’re just trying to see why. For the government and for the industry anyway, back to the point. I know we’ve diverged a lot, but at the end of the day, if you eat bad food with lots of calories and low nutrients, you are going to cause vitamin and mineral deficiencies. The way I want you to think of vitamins and minerals is, if you own a car factory and you are putting together a car, you need steering wheels, brake pedals, doors, and tires. all of the things that cars are made from. Think of those ingredients as carbs, fats, and proteins. Those are the building blocks of everything our bodies are made of. You have carbs. It’s really even deeper than that. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus are the main elements that go into creating who you are as a human being. Those building blocks, if we’re going back to the car analogy, are the steering wheels, the doors, and the frames in the tires. But those things just do not self-assemble. You have to have factory workers putting those things together. That is what vitamins and minerals are. They’re the factory workers who pick up the tire and put it on the car. That bit screws the steering wheel, and to make sure the airbag is running right, make sure you have a radio with a button. If you do not have adequate vitamins and minerals, what you have is a bunch of parts that can oxidize and form. When that happens, that is where disease comes from to a large extent. 

That’s why it’s so important. It’s why the number one thing that you have the ability to control is what you think about and do better with. That is why, at least in my experience, you will never heal, you will never repair, and you will never overcome a chronic autoimmune gut condition or any other form of autoimmune disease. Without changing your diet, I do not care how many supplements you take; it does not matter. Supplements do not fix a diet that is inflammatory. You cannot keep eating poison and think supplements are going to cure your body from eating the poison. Imagine a fish tank, and now the fish are swimming around in the water. It has poison in it, and you are putting organic food in the water. They’re still going to die. Those fish are still going to be sick. The environment has to be your environment, both internally and externally. I mean, we can talk about environmental issues, chemicals, and other things, but at the end of the day, food is the control point because its job is to nourish you. Its job is not to create a war for you. Most people do not realize that the fluid they are eating causes their body to battle it. So they are using most of the nutrients that the food is providing to battle the very food that they are eating. So they end up with a bank account that is devoid of cash. They end up writing hot checks, and then the constable comes to the door and throws him in jail. That is what disease really is.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

It’s really well said. I have two quick questions for you as we wrap up here. One is for the folks who hang out with summer junkies. I have got you covered. That’s your lab. You’re the last question. But for the folks who are in between, they kind of waffle. They do what they can, and they are, well, I know gluten is bad, isolated sometimes? I am doing my best. That is the frame of mind they have. What would you say to those folks? how to consider their responsibility and what they need to do next.

Peter Osborne, DC

No greatness was ever achieved with a mediocre attitude. If you want to be great, ask yourself. Look, not everybody wants to be great. I am not here to judge. If you want to choose mediocre food or if you want to justify cheating, there will be a price that you have to be willing to pay. If you are willing to pay it, then it’s yours to pay. It’s not mine to judge your choice to pay. You just have to ask yourself what you want, and then you have to go get it. If you want health, you have to go get it. You cannot justify bad choices if that is what you want. Yes. Again, no judgment for me. I just do not even work with people who are not serious at this point in my career. To me, every hour lost trying to convince somebody they need to do something is a total hour lost in time. This is way too valuable and precious because there are way too many sick people who are at a point where they are willing to make the changes. They’re just starving for someone to give them guidance. because medicine is not a great field for that.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Yes. That’s why I call it the medical industry. Most people do not usually refer to the medical field for all the reasons we talked about today. The last thing I would love for you to comment on is the folks that are listening. I can feel their thought process right now. They are saying, Dr. Peter, I have been off gluten for ten years, and I am still on just a few foods, and I am supplementing. I have tried all the diets. I have tried all the things. How should I be thinking about this? What should I try next?

Peter Osborne, DC

You’ve been piecemeal. The piecemeal thing is when you take a good concept and apply it in part without putting the other important parts in as well. There are six non-negotiable fundamentals of being healthy. The first is what you eat. The second is how you sleep. The third is how you move during exercise. The fourth is clean air. The fifth is clean water, and the sixth is stress control and stress management. These are not negotiable things, but you can try to negotiate with them. You will always lose. I do. Every time I try to negotiate with them, I see it. I have seen it in thousands of people. If you do not get a good night’s sleep, you are not going to perform as well tomorrow. If you do not eat a good meal, you are not going to think as clearly. That’s why they are non-negotiable. I realize no one’s perfect, and we’re not asking for perfection from anyone. Everybody has weak moments. Everybody has flaws, including myself, and that is okay. But it’s what you do day in and day out consistently. If you are, if you think you have done all those things, if you are stuck and you are doing those things, then where you are is at a place where you have been piecemeal because you do not understand your unique biochemical need. There are different things that need to be measured in anyone who’s struck, stuck, or struggling. These were the things I discovered to bring this story back to the very beginning. When I was in the V.A. hospital, I discovered four primary trigger factors for autoimmune disease.

Number one was food. Then that needs to be measured. If you have already done an elimination diet and you are stuck and do not know what else you could avoid or what else you need to avoid, you need to have it measured. There are six different ways your immune system can react to food, and all six need to be measured. But most people measure in one direction. Doctors will measure IgG, and that is okay. But it does not measure everything you need. IgG, A-game. You need an immune complex, a T-cell response, and hygiene. If you do not measure all of them, you could be missing something. That’s what I mean by piece mealing. You have parts of the data, but you are missing the complete picture. That is food, right? That is one trigger. The second trigger is chemical exposure. Chemical exposure: what could that look like? That could look like heavy metal. When you think about mercury, arsenic, and cadmium, one of the problems with grains is that they are contaminated with mercury, cadmium, and arsenic. The other thing you think about in the chemical family is what chemicals you use in your house to clean your house, whether it is the Everglade Brush or if you have one of those air plug-ins that just pump out toxic neurological chemicals in your household. If you wear perfumes and colognes, what is the fragrance that you are applying to your hair when you wash your hair? What are all those things that you are applying and rubbing on your body, assuming that they are safe and assuming that they are somehow healthy?

First of all, you should do your best to be as natural as you possibly can. But, even beyond that, people can be reactive to natural things. I mean, I get people allergic to rosemary all the time. Rosemary is a major ingredient in a lot of soaps and shampoos. So chemicals need to really be looked at and measured. Another example of a chemical that is really overlooked and quite common is mycotoxins. Mycotoxins are the metabolic byproducts produced by mold, especially environmental molds, and they can really make you sick. They are big-time drivers, I estimate, and one in three households has a mold problem. They just don’t know it. That’s my estimation. It’s a big problem. We’re going to hear more about mold in the next 20 years. Mold and mycotoxins—you are going to hear those words 20 years from now, the way you think about gluten today. Then we will be at the forefront today. Everybody’s kind of whispering about mold a little bit here and a little bit there, but it’s going to become a roar, just like gluten did. But that chemical, so back to the fore, it’s food, chemicals; those can be measured as well. They should be measured. If you are struggling, you should have the measure. 

The third are your microbes in your gut. your gut itself. Your microbiome is very critical to your health. You’re actually outnumbered genetically by the bacteria and fungal microorganisms that live inside you. Their importance is tremendous. They help you make vitamins. They help you digest your food. They help produce mucin, which coats and lines the GI tract, preventing it from leaking. They talk to your immune system. Actually, they have a telephone line to your immune system, kind of like the president and the Pentagon, and they are like, Hey, what is coming down the mouth? Oh, it looks like some bad McDonald’s is coming down the drain. Maybe you ought to mount up some IGA and some other canons of immune power. that we can neutralize this food this person just ate. That is what your bacteria help you do: they talk to your immune system and prepare it so it can respond and react appropriately. You can measure that, and you should, because many people do not have adequate quantities of healthy bacteria. Many people have inadequate quantities of the wrong kind of bacteria. There are several species of gram-negative bacteria that are primary drivers of broader immune diseases. We do not know. You have them. I mean, they are not infections; they are acute infections where you have a 102 fever and you are in bed and you are feeling that way.

These are slow burners. These are long-lasting poisons. I said before that you could have a yeast overgrowth or a fungal overgrowth in your GI tract, and that can all be measured. Looking at your microbiome fundamentally and understanding the milieu to the best of your ability is an important thing to measure. The fourth is your nutritional status. Okay, as I mentioned earlier, vitamins and minerals are the workhorses in the factory. They’re the ones who put the parts together. If you do not have zinc, for example, if you are lacking zinc, you need zinc to make digestive enzymes. Think about how just the zinc deficiency can cause a digestive enzyme deficiency that could cause food malabsorption that could cause future vacations in your gut. It could cause constipation, which could cause malnutrition. .   We’re just talking about one simple little mineral. Yes, there are 40 essential nutrients. You should have the measurements. The best way to measure them is intracellularly, not in the serum. A lot of doctors are looking at them in the serum. That is an inaccurate way to assess nutritional status.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

You’re saying that.

Peter Osborne, DC

Yes, you need to have those measured, and then you also need to have your capacity to digest your food measured because that is part of your nutrition. There are three primary systems involved in helping you digest your food. The first is obvious; that is your GI tract. You can measure parts or aspects of your GI tract around absorption. You can measure fat, protein, and carb malabsorption; you can measure digestive enzyme production; and you can measure age. These are all different things that can be measured. You understand how well your GI tract is going to function to help you break down your food and extrapolate the nutrients from it. The other two organs that are what we call accessory organs to the GI tract are your liver and your liver produces bile, which is an acid that it basically emulsifies as fat so that you can absorb it. When you think about fat being an important component, we’ve gone through this no-fat diet craze of the eighties and nineties. Fat is super important. Omega three is fat. Vitamin A is fat. Vitamin D is fat. If you have A.D. and omega fatty acids are essential nutrients. If you have a dysfunctional or fatty liver or if your gallbladder has been removed, these are problems that could potentially affect you and need to be addressed with the help of your doctor and/or practitioner so that you understand what you need to do. 

The other organ is your pancreas, and your pancreas has two functions or more than two, but they’ve got to be basic major functions. It’s got to execute and function, including the endocrine function. The endocrine function is insulin production. It helps you regulate your blood sugar, which is important for your appetite, how hungry you are, and whether you have carb cravings. But the other function of your pancreas, the exocrine function, is that it releases digestive enzymes into your small intestine to help you break down your food. It also releases bicarbonate, which is a buffer that neutralizes stomach acid. Your stomach acid does not burn a hole in your small intestine. so that your pancreas can be assessed right there. There are different laboratory analyses where you can measure pancreatic function, liver capacity, and liver function. Doctors can also run ultrasounds on these organs to make sure there is nothing visibly and anatomically grossly wrong. But you can have the biochemical milieu of these organs assessed, and you can have your nutrition status assessed by measuring vitamins and minerals. If you have the keys to those four points of information—food, chemicals, microbiome, digestion, absorption, vitamins, and minerals—those all put together equate to what we call the primary non-negotiable biochemical factors that can be measured and can give you a blueprint to follow in your diet or lifestyle plan so that you are no longer guessing at what you should be doing.

Because a lot of people do the best they can with the tools they have, and then they hit a plateau. That plateau is generally because they are working from a premise of lack of knowledge. There is something they are not doing that they should be. Oftentimes, it’s not something. It’s some things, right? Because it’s never been, when I look at testing across the board with my experience, I never find a smoking gun. The closest thing I’ve ever found to a smoking gun is gluten. Second closest, maybe mycotoxins. But at the end of the day, usually people have anywhere from 15 to 20 different unique sets of issues from those four categories, and sometimes more. That is what can make it overwhelming. That is why a lot of people continue to struggle. A lot of people get better because they hit all the right notes. But a lot of people continue to struggle because they do not know what notes they are missing, and their doctors do not even know how to begin making that assessment because they are not privy to that knowledge. I will not say they are not privy to that knowledge, but they have never given it time and attention, and they have never applied it in the way that it needed to be applied clinically. 

That is why I said earlier that they just do their patients a huge disservice by really pretending. Pretending that if we sweep your symptoms under the rug with a toxic cocktail of chemicals, somehow that will improve your quality of life. then I can go to sleep at night thinking that your quality of life is better, knowing that I have just made you a slave to paying hundreds of dollars a month in pharmaceutical bills for the rest of your life while not solving your problem. But the reality is, you can empower a whole lot of people by knowing those four categories of biochemistry and helping them create a blueprint to apply that knowledge in their own lives. To me, if you are stuck, you have to start there by trying to use your health as if you are stuck. It’s no longer a do-it-yourself project at home. You’ve got to get an expert. You’ve got to get somebody who understands this stuff on your team, understands biochemistry analysis, and understands labs. Because if you do not, the other problem I see, Sinclair, is that you people who maybe will measure one aspect of those four things—what do I mean? Then and there, for example, they will get a vitamin D test from their doctor, and their vitamin D is low. so they will take vitamin D. But what about zinc and B12? Yes, I mean.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Green Pharmacy, you are low on these 37. Here are 37 different supplements. Yes, a shopping bag and a big to-do list do not actually help you here.

Peter Osborne, DC

So my credo is test on gas. If you are stuck now, or if you are not stuck and you have never applied, the basic fundamentals apply to you. First, do not go visit the doctor. Apply the fundamentals first, because you may be surprised at how much better you feel. You may feel better. It may take you three months to get to see your doctor anyway. Apply those in that three-month interim so that when you do go, you will have at least a basis for understanding how much your health can improve with just some simple changes in your life. But the whole point of seeing a doctor is that you are beyond your expertise. If the patient is the doctor, the future is the patient. The patient has to embrace the six fundamentals on a consistent enough basis to give their body the opportunity to heal, repair, and maintain itself again. That’s when you seek expertise. That’s when you quit the do-it-at-home project and you make it; that’s when you embrace an expert. That is the best advice I could give. in terms of helping those folks who are just trying to figure it out, because I know how frustrating that can be when you are sick because you are not thinking clearly when you are sick, right? Your brain does not work as quickly. It’s not as fast.

You’re trying it. It’s like trying to swim when you cannot keep your head above water and you are not getting enough oxygen. It’s just really hard. It’s really hard to do everything that needs to be done when you are not able to think clearly and enroll a partner in your care, and that is the best thing you can do sometimes is seek out an expert to seek out somebody who understands those basics. Don’t go to somebody who’s going to just continue your perpetual piecemeal thing. If you are going to a doctor, let me give you an example. If you go to a doctor and they say, Well, let us just check your thyroid first, and we will do that for a while, that is piecemeal. Your thyroid is not your body. The thyroid is one of many organs. It’s not wrong to measure your thyroid and check your thyroid or your adrenals; there is nothing wrong with checking your gut. But if you do not do it in a comprehensive way, you are just going to come away from that table with 10% of the puzzle pieces. You ever tried to put together a puzzle where 90% of the pieces weren’t even in the box, and you did not have what the puzzle was supposed to look like; you did not have a picture of what it was supposed to look like, other than maybe a memory of what you remember, good health, or maybe a feeling. You are working on a memory with brain fog, and you do not have all the pieces. 

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

I spent years that way. I vividly remember. It’s really awful. Yes.

Peter Osborne, DC

Yes, it’s awful.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Thank you so much for all of your insights today, for sharing the different frameworks and how you look at things with your patients, and for spearheading this conversation in such a fantastic way. This is so important that we reclaim our integrity in the medical field and unhook from the medical industry. I just love the work that you are doing. Thank you for being an advocate for people with chronic health issues, especially the folks listening today. They need more of this, not less. I just blessed you on your path, and I really appreciate your time.

Peter Osborne, DC

Well, thank you. Thank you for putting on this event. I know it’s a lot of work.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Ridiculous amount of work, but it’s my job to do it. Every one of these interviews is a love letter to where I was ten, 15, or 20 years ago. I remember what it was: Guys, all you need to listen to is that next nugget, their reason to keep going, their reason to take back that much more responsibility. You’ve got this.

Peter Osborne, DC

Amen.