tom obryan glutens impact on the inflamed brain anxiety ... · thanks for sharing that. so...

Dr. Tom O’Bryan - Gluten’s impact on the inflamed brain: reducing anxiety and depression www.theAnxietySummit.com November 3-16, 2014

© 2014 Trudy Scott All Rights Reserved of 34

Gluten’s Impact on the Inflamed Brain: Reducing Anxiety and Depression

• Terminology and why it’s not called gluten intolerance but sensitivity • Is gluten sensitivity just a fad and the recent FODMAPs research • The multitude of diseases and symptoms caused by gluten sensitivity • Gluten sensitivity as a contributing factor to psychiatric

manifestations/anxiety/depression and new 2014 research from Italy • Suicide rates in kids with celiac disease (even when they quit gluten), and

kids celiac camps • The conundrum with testing • Doing an elimination and then challenge? • Can anyone eat wheat or should we all be gluten-free

Trudy Scott: Welcome to The Anxiety Summit: Nutritional Solutions for

Anxiety. This is Season 2, and the place to hear from experts on the topic of anxiety and how to find answers so you can feel great again. I am your host, Trudy Scott. I'm a certified nutritionist, author of The Antianxiety Food Solution, and known as a food mood expert. Today's interview is: “Gluten's Impact on the Inflamed Brain: Reducing Anxiety and Depression.”

Surprisingly enough, gluten issues are so much more than simply a

digestive issue, and sensitivities can make you feel more anxious and even depressed. And I know this firsthand; I have a gluten sensitivity and if I'm exposed to any gluten in my diet I feel very flat, very blah, sad, anxious and I feel totally wiped out.



Today, you're going to hear how gluten can impact your mood, and cause a host of other health problems. And I am just so thrilled to be interviewing someone that I look up to, a hero of mine actually, and someone I consider to be the expert on this topic. And this is Dr. Tom O'Bryan. Welcome Dr. Tom.

Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Hello Trudy. Thank you very much. Trudy Scott: Really great to have you here. Let me read your bio and then we

will get started. So Dr. Tom O'Bryan is an internationally-recognized speaker and

workshop leader specializing in the complications of non-celiac gluten sensitivity and celiac disease as they occur inside and outside of the intestines. He is the founder of TheDr.com, and he recently hosted the paradigm-shifting, The Gluten Summit: A Grain of Truth, bringing together 29 of the world's experts on celiac disease and non-celiac gluten sensitivity at TheGlutenSummit.com. And what an excellent summit it was, Dr. Tom.

Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Oh thank you, thank you. It was really an honor to be able to

speak with all of the experts. Trudy Scott: It was enlightening and, as you say paradigm-shifting. I was just

blown away by the experts that you pulled together. So thank you for doing that. And you know, your bio says you're an international speaker, and I know you've just come back from Europe, speaking there. How was that?

Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Oh that was marvelous. Yes, we just got back a couple of days ago

- Dublin and London and Milan – the entire world wants to know about this. The entire world is recognizing that for some people this is a problem, and the many different ways that it can manifest. And so our presentations are being more validating than they are new concepts for people. And I give them the science behind why their suspicions are valid and why they feel the way they do. That validation just helps people feel more secure and more empowered to continue addressing this issue and they learn how to be more thorough. And that's what I hope we'll be able to touch on today for your guests.

Trudy Scott: Okay, great. And it's interesting that you say that you're validating

it and a lot of people know about this, but I saw a study that was just published in the U.K. and they were looking at the awareness about gluten-related disorders in the general public, and they said



from 2003 to 2013 awareness went up 44 percent to 74 percent. So that means 25 percent of people still don't know about gluten-related disorders, which I thought was really interesting. So there are definitely people who don't know about this.

So why don't we just assume that there might be 25 percent of the

people listening to this who may not even know what gluten is. So let's just start with a definition of gluten and where it's found.

Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Okay. Well, the first thing is gluten's not bad for you; bad gluten

is bad for you. And what that means is that gluten is the name - it's an umbrella term for a family of proteins in many different grains. There's gluten in rice. There's gluten in corn. There's gluten in quinoa. It does not mean that it's bad for you. But the gluten family of proteins that is in wheat, rye and barley are the toxic ones for all humans. And so whenever we're referring to gluten sensitivity we would be much more accurate if we said toxic gluten sensitivity, but that's too many words and so we've cut it short.

It's kind of like people will take a piece of paper and hand it to someone and say, "Would you mind please Xeroxing this?" Well Xerox is the name of a company. But it's been transferred into an action for people to do. And that's the way it is with gluten. We think all gluten is bad. Not, it's not. But the gluten proteins in wheat, rye and barley are the ones that are a problem for people.

Trudy Scott: And then tell us a little bit about oats, because that can be an issue

because of contamination issues? Dr. Tom O'Bryan: I'm sorry, about what? Trudy Scott: Oats. Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Oats? Oh yes, yes. When oats grow out of the ground there is no

toxic gluten in them. When you buy oats off the shelf there is toxic gluten in them. And it's because the truck that harvested the oats on the fields and took it to the manufacturing facility, are the trucks hauled wheat last week and they don't clean the trucks. So there's wheat that's interspersed with the oats. And you're absolutely right. It's called cross-contamination.

Now there are people who can be sensitive to oats. I mean there

are people sensitive to tomatoes or to artichokes or to any food. So you may have a sensitivity to oats. But when you talk about gluten sensitivity you're referring to the toxic family of proteins in wheat,



rye and barley, and the cross-reactivity that can occur with oats, in general, is because of the contamination of those oats.

They did a study where they looked at three different types of oats

and they got four samples over the course of a year. So it was more than one batch of each of the oats: Quaker Oats, Country Life, because they're organic, and McCann's, which is manufactured in an oats-only facility in Ireland. And they looked to see about contaminated oats and how many of them had toxic gluten in them.

Now as you may know the guidelines currently state that if it's 20 parts per million or less it's safe, and it can be called gluten-free. So how many of these 12 samples of oats, three different companies, four different samples, 12 total samples, how many of them had levels of toxic gluten above 20 parts per million? There was only two out of the 12 that did not. So the McCann's facility, which is oats-only, and they market as gluten-free, two of the four samples from them were below the level. But the other two were above 20 parts per million. The Quaker Oats, my goodness, that was 1,800 parts per million, 1,600 parts per million – remember they were supposed to be less than 20. So Quaker is highly contaminated. So what that means is that if you're gluten sensitive and you're staying in a hotel and you think, "Well I'll just have oatmeal in the morning," unless you bring your own gluten-free oats that you travel with, the likelihood of contamination is very high and that you would have an immune reaction to the oats.

Trudy Scott: Great. Thanks for sharing that. So let's talk about terminology,

Dr. Tom, because we don't want to call it gluten intolerance – and I remember having a conversation with you and you corrected me, saying it's a sensitivity, and we don't want to use this word intolerance. So let's just talk a little bit about some terminology here.

Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Okay. In 2011, at the International Celiac Symposium in Oslo, the

experts in the world got together and said, "You know, we really have to come up with terminology that we all use: the scientists, the researchers, the doctors, the clinicians, the general public, the educators. Can we all use the same language, please?"

And at the top of the list of looking at this whole field of gluten

sensitivity is a gluten-related disorder. That's the umbrella term that covers all of it. The patient comes in and says, "I don't feel



good when I eat gluten." "Well, Mrs. Patient, you have a gluten-related disorder." "Well what does that mean?" "Well we don't know. Let's find out which one you've got. But we know it's a gluten-related disorder." So that's at the top.

Now first one is wheat allergies. Allergies are the term used for a

particular immune response. The soldiers in the immune system, your immune system's the armed forces; it's there to protect you. And there's an army, an Air Force, a Marines, a Coast Guard, a Navy: IgA, IgG, IgE, IgM.

The IGs are different branches of the armed forces, and an allergy

is an IgE reaction. That's the skin prick test that doctors have been doing for 60 years, where your skin is pricked on your back, on your arm with different food substances and they see, if you get a red weal or a welt there. And they say, "Well see? Your body's reacting to it. That food's not good for you." That's the technical term "allergy". And if you don't have an IgE reaction you don't have an allergy. Only IgE reactions can be called allergies. And most of our allergists they specialize in doing IgE reactions, the skin prick tests. A good test.

The problem is that many doctors say, when they do a skin prick

test if you don't come back sensitive to a food, in this discussion wheat, they say, "You don't have a problem with wheat." Well, that's not true because it may not be the air force that was called out today; it might be the marines. Maybe it's an IgA reaction. Or it might be an IgG reaction, the army. So when you look at one branch of the armed forces and it comes back positive, you've got a problem. But if it comes back negative it doesn't mean you don't have a problem, it just means the navy hasn't been called out. You don't have an IgG problem if that's all you're checking is IgG.

And most of our doctors have never thought about this. And most

of the laboratories only look at one branch of the armed forces when they're checking to see if a person has a problem with a food. So you really want to look at multiple branches of the armed forces, and we'll talk about that.

So the first one is an IgE reaction, the skin prick test. The second

one, under gluten-related disorders, is celiac disease. And celiac disease is a disease that damages the intestines, when wheat damages the intestines. Most of the people will have a particular set of genes for that – not all of them. The most recent studies say that 93 percent of people will have the genes DQ2 or DQ8, but 7 percent don't. So we used to think that 100 percent of the people



have these genes but now we know that's not true. So the genes are a good screen to see if you're vulnerable to developing a problem but they don't tell you whether or not you've going to get the problem because 7 percent of the people who don't have the gene, still get celiac disease. So it's a good test, though, to do. But that's celiac disease, and that's when your intestines get damaged. And we may talk more about what that looks like.

So we've got an IgE reaction, that's the skin prick test; we have

celiac disease; we then have non-celiac gluten sensitivity. That is the one that the vast majority of the people have.

With the IgE reaction the skin prick test it's about 1 out of 1,000 people. With the celiac test it's about 1 out of 100, give or take, but it's about 1 out of 100. With non-celiac gluten sensitivity the papers are saying it's anywhere between 6 to 20 out of 100 of the general population.

Now in a doctor's office when you have people coming in sick,

they've got some symptoms, not just the general population but those that have symptoms it's closer to 4 to 6 out of 10. It's a huge number of people that have a problem with gluten that's not celiac and it is not an IgE reaction.

The next category, after non-celiac gluten sensitivity – oh, by the

way, there's been a whole lot of hullaballoo lately saying non-celiac gluten sensitivity is a fad, and it's not true.

Trudy Scott: Good. I'd like to talk about that. Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Yes, let's make sure that we do talk about that. Trudy Scott: Good. Dr. Tom O'Bryan: So the next one, after IgE (skin prick), celiac disease, non-celiac

gluten sensitivity, is nutritional deficiencies because of a gluten problem that don't cause an immune reaction, for example osteoporosis. You could have a deficiency of calcium, of vitamin D or vitamin K, the things necessary to build strong bone, then you get osteoporosis. And when you stop eating wheat the osteoporosis goes away for many, many people.

So now we've got IgE, that's the skin prick, celiac, non-celiac

gluten-sensitivity, non-immune malabsorption syndromes – and then there's one called FODMAPs, fermentable carbohydrates, FODMAPs. And that's another component of wheat. You know,



wheat's more than just protein: there's carbohydrate in there, there's some oil, some fats. There's a number of different components of wheat. So FODMAPs is the one that's been getting a lot of press lately. So you've got five different manifestations under the umbrella of a gluten-related disorder that may be the way that a gluten sensitivity manifests.

And then in the terminology the experts in Oslo also said, Could

we please stop using the term, "gluten intolerance"? Because people have heard of lactose intolerance and they think, "Oh, lactose intolerance for dairy, and if I take lactase enzymes then I can take dairy and I won't have the lactose problem," because the lactase enzymes break down the lactose. So that's lactose intolerance. And people think, Oh, if I've got gluten intolerance I take the enzymes, I can then start having gluten. No, you can't. So they've said, Please, can we stop using the term "gluten intolerance"? Because people are being misled into believing it's okay to take gluten if they take the enzymes. And perhaps we can talk more about that because there's some really good enzymes out now that do have a benefit, but you cannot eat gluten and take enzymes and expect that you're going to be safe.

Trudy Scott: Great. Thank you for that clarification, and that's fantastic. I'd

love to just have a follow-on question about FODMAPs – and for people who may not be familiar with that, it's fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols. I've seen some research saying that the thought is, that this high number of people that we're thinking may have this non-celiac gluten sensitivity, which you said was 6 to 20 out of 100 may in fact be this issue with FODMAPs. In other words, someone may have SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, and they're actually reacting to the fact that it's a grain, rather than the gluten. Can you talk to that?

Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Yes, yes I can. It's really important to talk about that one because

that has caused so much hullaballoo and it makes me angry that this has happened because tens of thousands of people are being misled now, thinking "I don't have celiac disease; I guess I don't have a problem with gluten sensitivity," and that's because a paper was published last year in the Journal of Gastroenterology, and that's a very important journal, and the paper was entitled, "No Effects of Gluten in Patients with Self-Reported Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity After Dietary Reduction of FODMAPs, Fermentable Poorly-Absorbed Short-Chain Carbohydrates".



What these authors did, they said, "Hey, there's a lot of different components to wheat. There's the protein like the gluten family of proteins, there's these carbohydrates that are poorly absorbed and they can ferment in the intestines and cause gas, there's these fats like wheat germ oil, there's a number of different components to wheat. And I wonder which one of these components actually are causing people to have the gut symptoms they have, the bloating and the gas and the abdominal pains that some people have when they're exposed to wheat." That was the purpose of their study was to see, do people have a reaction to these carbohydrates, these FODMAPs. That was the purpose of their study.

So when they were structuring the study – you know what? I

should almost back up. Yeah, I'm going to back up. We've got a blogger in Great Britain that saw the title of this

article, I think probably in November or December of last year: “No Effects of Gluten in Patients with Self-Reported Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity After Dietary Reduction of FODMAPs". He didn't read the study but he saw the title of the study and he said, "Look, look, there's no effects of gluten. See? It's a fad. It's a fad. There's no effects. These scientists are telling us there's no effects." Well, that was nonsense.

And then the writer for the London Times read his blog and they

wrote an article for the London Times: "Science says non-celiac gluten sensitivity is a fad." Then the London Inquirer wrote about that and then the Wall Street Journal wrote about that, and then the New York Times wrote about that, and then Forbes Magazine wrote about that, and none of these people read the study. So let's go back to the study now.

Trudy Scott: Okay. Dr. Tom O'Bryan: So what they did was – oh wait a minute – let me say one more

thing. None of the people read the study. So now you've got tens of

thousands of people that read these articles in the magazines and in the newspaper and they start thinking, "Well, I guess it's okay to eat wheat. Oh good because I really like wheat. Maybe it's natural for me to be sick and to feel bloated. Okay, but wheat's okay because I guess it's a fad. Okay, this science says that." And that's what really is frustrating when you have these writers who are, if I can be kind, sophomoric in their level of knowledge and write as experts. And then the general public thinks they're experts. It



hurts people. It damages people, and that's not okay. That is really not okay. So let's go back to the study.

When these researchers were going to look for people to see if the

FODMAPs were a problem for them, they took people who reported that they had a problem with gluten. And they had 250 people that responded to their advertisement, saying, "We're looking for people that have a problem with gluten." And there were 250 of them that applied to be in the study.

Well, 37 out of 250 had elevated antibodies to the proteins of

gluten, and they did not have celiac disease, they had non-celiac gluten sensitivity – 37 of them. They were not allowed in the study. So they immediately took out of the study those who had an immune reaction: IgA, IgG, IgM, where the immune system is saying, "We've got a problem with this protein." They immediately were taken out of the study, not allowed in the study because the authors were looking to see if people had a FODMAPs sensitivity. It's not a problem for the authors; it's commonly done.

Then they looked for people that had the genes for celiac disease,

DQ2 or DQ8. They took them out of the study. They were not allowed in the study. So if people were carrying the gene – now, somewhere between 30 to 40 of people with non-celiac gluten sensitivity carry this gene for celiac disease, which means this is not the gene for celiac disease; this is the gene for a gluten-related disorder. You remember the umbrella term, "gluten-related disorder"? DQ2 of DQ8 are genes for gluten-related disorders, not just celiac disease. So if they had the gene they were taken out of the study.

Then they ran their study, and what did they find in the study?

Yeah, when they took the FODMAPs out for the rest of these people, when they took the carbohydrates out for the rest of these people all their bloating went away. All their gas pains went away. But even in that group they found 8 percent of them still had a problem with the protein. Their immune system didn't show an elevated antibody level but when they took the protein out 8 percent of this selected group, their symptoms went away. And for the rest of them when they took the carbohydrate out their symptoms went away.

So the only problem with this study – we call that cherry-picking

the group. And it's okay to do that, to get the group to see is FODMAPs a problem. The only problem I have with this study is that the authors titled it, "No effects of gluten in patients with self-



reported non-celiac disease when they take out the FODMAPs." That's not true. They should have said, "Minor effects of gluten," because 8 percent of the people still had an effect with gluten, even after the people diagnosed with the gluten sensitivity were not allowed in the study. Eight percent of those people left in the study still had a problem with the protein. So the word "no effects of gluten" shouldn't have been used. It should have been, "Some effects", "Minor effects of gluten in patients with self-reported," but they wrote “no”. That was a mistake.

Then the blogger reads the title and then goes on this whole

rampage because it sells a lot of papers when you can say, "It's a fad. It's a fad. These people don't know what they're doing. It's a waste of time and a waste of money. It's okay to eat gluten" and people like reading about stuff like that. It's kind of a sensationalism thing, you know?

Now the other thing that I would point out – there's two other

studies I want to tell you about. The first one is by the same group that published the study, "No effects of gluten". Six months later – so that was in April of this year, eight months later – they published another paper and – this is the same group, and this paper was entitled, "Gluten May Cause Depression in Subjects with Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity". And they showed that people with NCGS, non-celiac gluten sensitivity, so they recognized it immediately that there is such a thing, and they showed – and this was their conclusion – I'm going to read the conclusion.

"Short-term exposure to gluten specifically induced current

feelings of depression with no effect on other parts of the body, or on other emotional dispositions. Gluten's specific induction of GI symptoms was not identified. Such findings might explain why patients with non-celiac gluten sensitivity feel better on the gluten-free diet, despite the continuation of GI symptoms."

So what they're pointing out is that it appears to be the FODMAPs

in the wheat – you know, it took two studies to do this but it appears to be the FODMAPs in the wheat that cause the GI complaints, the bloating, the gas, the abdominal pain, but it's the proteins that cause symptoms in the brain and other parts of the body. And this is the same group of researchers, eight months after the published study that supposedly claims that it's a fad, according to the bloggers.

And there's one more paper that I want to tell you about, and I

waited to talk about any of this until a couple of months ago when



this paper came out in June of this year. And this paper was entitled, "An Italian Perspective, Multicenter Survey on Patients Suspected of Having Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity". And what did they do? They looked in 38 Italian research centers, all recognized as referral centers by the Italian Health Ministry for the diagnosis of gluten-related disorders. In other words these are the health care clinics, the research centers where the Italian government says, "These are the experts; you go to them and we'll pay for your care," because literally they pay for a lot of the health care if you have a gluten-related disorder.

And of these 38 centers 27 of them were gastroenterology centers,

five were internal medicine, four were pediatrics, two were allergies. So it's a wide array of specialty offices that looked at gluten-related disorders. And what did they find? Of course there's gluten-related disorders. Of course there are. And the symptoms – what are the symptoms of people that have non-celiac gluten sensitivity? What are the extra-intestinal, meaning outside the intestines, symptoms that people may get?

They looked at 12,255 patients – I mean this is the big kahuna

study – from 38 different centers, recognized by the Italian government as the centers of experts and we'll cover the care, we'll pay for the health care if you go there. And this is what they've published as the summary from all 38 centers: 68 percent of people with NCGS have a lack of well-being, meaning they just don't feel good. Something's not right. Sixty-four percent have fatigue; 54 percent have headaches; 39 percent have anxiety; 38 percent have foggy mind; 32 percent have numbness; 31 percent have joint and muscle pains; 29 percent have skin rashes. And it goes on and on: 18 percent have depression; 23 percent have anemia. It goes on and on and on of the different symptoms that people may have if they have non-celiac gluten sensitivity. This is looking at 12,000 patients.

But unfortunately there's no blogger writing about this because

there's no sensationalism in it. It's not going to sell more newspapers. It's not going to make them look like an expert when they cry "Wolf". It's utter nonsense. Excuse me, but it's nonsense, and it's just not right when these people present themselves as experts and they don't read the study; they read the title to the study. So we need to just put the nail in the coffin on whether or not NCGS, non-celiac gluten sensitivity occurs. Of course it occurs. And it's much more frequent than celiac disease or wheat allergies.



Trudy Scott: Fantastic. Thank you for the clarification. And thanks for sharing that research. I like to be able to share the research, and in giving us clarification on this whole fad issue. And then I loved your analogy of the armed forces. I think that's a very nice way to remember that there are many mechanisms at play here that we need to think about.

Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Yes, yes. Trudy Scott: You've talked about some of these symptoms that we don't think

about like fatigue and foggy mind and joint pain and I'd love to go into some more detailed discussion about some of the mood research that we've seen. But could you just touch on a few other symptoms or conditions that we may see when someone has one of these gluten-related disorders, that we may not think about as being associated with gluten?

Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Yes, of course. I'm going to have the privilege of this coming

weekend, and I'll be – this will have occurred when our interview actually airs but this weekend I'm going to San Francisco to lecture on stage with my good friend Dr. Rodney Ford. And Dr. Ford is a pediatric gastroenterologist from New Zealand. And this guy is the pioneer. In the early nineties, he was talking about gluten without celiac disease is a problem for some children. And they thought he was a nutcase and all of his peers just isolated him and didn't have nice things to say. And now he's being validated by all of us who follow in his footsteps. And I'm really excited to see him because he's flying over for this.

I bring that up because Rodney has the very best way of answering

the question of how gluten sensitivity manifests itself, and who should be concerned about a gluten sensitivity. And his answer is “anyone who's sick should think about it”, that if your current protocols, if the current health care things you're doing to be healthy and vibrant, dynamic aren't working, you are sick. Even if it's just tired in the mornings or not sleeping very well or a little bit of anxiety, or a lot of anxiety, whatever it is, and so your protocols aren't working very well, what you're doing right now, just consider gluten sensitivity. Just check, accurately check because it might be the missing link.

So what does that mean? I mean, well, what about for something

like rheumatoid arthritis? Of course. What about for MS? Of course. What about for chronic fatigue syndrome? Of course. What about for multiple chemical sensitivities? Of course. What about for miscarriages? Of course.



I published a paper in the Journal of Practical Gastroenterology –

and it's available on my website for free – the website is TheDr.com where you get this article on reproductive disorders and celiac disease. And when you have unexplained miscarriages, very, very commonly the trigger is a sensitivity to gluten, or a baby that doesn't grow very well called intrauterine growth retardation, or recurrent miscarriages, or early childbirth, or failure to thrive, you know, these babies that don't thrive, they don't grow. Any and all of these symptoms may be caused by a sensitivity to gluten. Recurrent miscarriages – I can't tell you how many people we've helped to have healthy babies who have had recurrent miscarriages just by getting them on a healthy diet.

So there's no symptom, Trudy, that may not be caused by a

sensitivity to gluten. That's why in the medical literature – if you go to Pub Med, P-U-B M-E-D, stands for Public Medical information, PubMed.gov it's the National Library of Medicine, it opens up to 25 million research articles at your fingertips. And it opens on a search engine. You just type in "gluten and heart", "gluten and liver", "gluten and cholesterol", "gluten and miscarriages", "gluten and vision problems", "gluten and headaches", "gluten and acne" – whatever you type in, boom, here come the papers. And you'll see the research is out there that talks about the many different manifestations how this thing may show itself.

So there's no symptom, Trudy, that may not be caused by a sensitivity to gluten. Even these really strange, rare diseases like focal leukoencephalopathy, which is a nasty disease of the brain. That may be caused by gluten sensitivity. When you get gluten out of the diet it goes away. ALS, atrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease has now been shown – there's a couple of papers of reversing ALS, this incurable, fatal diagnosis – there have been a couple of people reversing it on a gluten-free diet. And you see that the lesions in the brain go away – they go away. You reverse lesions in the brain on a gluten-free diet. In my all-day presentation I've got five different papers on that: reversing lesions in the brain. And any radiologist you talk to will say "That's nonsense. What have you been smoking?" That's just utter nonsense. They just haven't seen the papers. They just have to look in the literature and they'd see the papers. And there's the pre and post MRI showing the lesions in the brain are gone. So there are so many different manifestations of a sensitivity to gluten that many show themselves.



Trudy Scott: Fantastic. And this is one of the reasons why it can be so difficult

to figure out and diagnose because it can affect each person differently. And I’m so glad you mentioned going to Pub Med and putting in gluten and whatever the condition is because when I'm doing my anxiety food talks to health professionals I invariably get a question about gluten and something like is it related to Alzheimer's, and I say, "Go and search gluten and that condition and invariably you'll find a connection." It's just amazing.

I had one client who had what the doctors called idiopathic -

meaning there wasn't a cause for it - pancreatitis. And she came to work with me, she was on diabetes medication and we had her go on a gluten-free diet, and she was eventually able to go off her medication because it was gluten that was causing the issue with her pancreas.

Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Well you know, I'm sitting here at my computer and I just typed in

"gluten and pancreatitis" and 30 research papers just came up. Trudy Scott: There you go. Dr. Tom O'Bryan: You know, boom, boom, boom. And if I type in "gluten and

anxiety" we get 49 research papers that pop up immediately – 49 different researchers, or teams of researchers. This first one is 1, 2, 3, 4 researchers on that team; the second one is two researchers. They spend six months to a year, they look at this topic, they gather all the data, they take a month, two months to write the paper, they submit the paper to the medical journal. The journal edits it, sends it back to them and say, "Change this language, change this language." They rewrite it, send it back again. So it's a year to a year and a half of work, 49 different teams have done this to talk about the effect that gluten may have on anxiety.

Trudy Scott: Absolutely. So I'd love to talk a little bit about some of the mood

research. There's a great paper written by Jackson and Fasano and they also are great people to know about in the world of gluten. I'm glad you mentioned Dr. Rodney Ford and I'm glad you're speaking with him; that sounds fantastic. In one of the 2012 papers, they say “gluten sensitivity is undertreated and under-recognized as a contributing factor to psychiatric and neurological manifestations.”

When I wrote the chapter in my book on gluten it was 2010 and it

was published in 2011 certainly the term "gluten sensitivity" didn't exist, and all the research was looking at celiac disease and



anxiety, celiac disease and social anxiety, celiac disease and depression. And even social phobia and even schizophrenia. So I'm just really excited to see that we're seeing these papers on mood and this non-celiac gluten sensitivity that you're talking about because the study that you mentioned in Italy, I mean that's powerful. That really is so powerful to get this kind of information. And it's validation that practitioners like yourself and other practitioners, nutritionists in the world of holistic health have known about. It’s fantastic that we're now seeing it in the research.

Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Yes, yes, exactly correct. Trudy Scott: So when we talked a while back you shared with me a study

looking at suicide rates in kids with celiac disease. Can we talk a little bit about that one?

Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Yeah, that's really a sad one, you know, that children diagnosed

with celiac disease have a 40 percent increased risk of suicide, with or without a gluten-free diet. I mean it's just startling that that's the situation but it is. And maybe we'll get into this more, but it's because people get diagnosed with a sensitivity to gluten, or people think they have a sensitivity to gluten so they go on a gluten-free diet. That is not the treatment for what's ailing the patient; that is a prerequisite to the treatment for what's ailing a patient, that you have to deal with the damage that's accrued over the years from eating this food that you did not know was a problem for you.

It's the same as for elders diagnosed with celiac disease, they have

a 3.86, that's almost fourfold increased risk of dying in the first year after diagnosis. They're four times more likely to die in that year after diagnosis and going on a gluten-free diet compared to someone their age who has not been diagnosed and does not go on a gluten-free diet. They're four times more likely to die in that first year. Because you can't just put people on a gluten-free diet; you have to deal with the damage that's accrued. And that's the missing link.

And that's the missing link for our kids with this suicide thing.

There's two things: one, you have to deal with the damage that's accrued. You've got to take the right vitamins and the right minerals. You have to work with a nutritionist that knows what they're doing to help rebuild your tissue and give you good, high levels, not maintenance levels; there's really a difference between a maintenance level of a vitamin and a rebuilding level of a vitamin. You need the maintenance levels, obviously, just to maintain and



not regenerate, but then you need more to rebuild. And many of our doctors don't know that.

And with children there's two things – that's one of them. The other thing with children is called social phobias. And the social phobias mean they are afraid to go out. They don't want to go to school. They don't want to be involved with their friends because their friends tease them: 73 percent of kids diagnosed with celiac disease have social phobia, and 68 percent of them do after they go on a gluten-free diet. So it doesn't help to go on a gluten-free diet. They still have social anxiety disorders. It's also called social phobia. And it's characterized by a fear of performance, an excessive fear of scrutiny, a fear of acting in an embarrassing way, that they just don't want to be looked at or seen, so they hide. They don't go to school. They don't go out on Friday night because their friend's going to the pizza parlor. So they don't attend classes and they go into fits of depression. And it sets them up for both anxiety and depression. Really it's the chronic depression that's the consequence of the social phobias, and eventually it can cause suicide. So we have to be much more comprehensive and I'm going to give you an example of how to be more comprehensive. There's a group called the Gluten Intolerance Group, and they're wonderful. They're based out of the State of Washington, and they've got over 100 chapters around the country that meet every month. There are celiac support groups or gluten intolerance support groups. And they meet every month and they have a guest speaker come in. They're in most major cities. And the speaker comes in and talks about whatever the topic is. And they share recipes, they say, "Oh, I've tried this one," or, "Oh Thanksgiving's coming up. Who's got a good recipe for a gluten-free stuffing?" So they interact. Well, that's adults that do that, mostly – not many kids are there. But the Gluten Intolerance Group hosts a summer camp, two summer camps. And this is how they do their summer camps: celiac kids get to go to the summer camp, but it's a summer camp with non-celiac kids also. So there's the kids eating the regular food and then there's the kids eating the celiac food. So they have separate kitchens so there's no contamination, separate kitchens but the same cafeteria to eat in. But the gluten intolerance group is really smart. They did something really, really smart. They hired a really good, gluten-



free chef to cook the food. So when it's pizza day the gluten-free chef makes pizza that's just – oh, it's killer. It's really, really good. So it only takes a day or two before the kids going through the cafeteria line, eating the regular food see the food and they sit and they're talking with the kids that are eating the gluten-free food and they go, "Wow, that's really good. I want your food." And so it doesn't take long before the gluten-free food is what most of the kids want to eat. So the celiac kids feel proud because their food is the food of choice. So they have the experience of knowing that everybody likes their food if it's prepared well, right, that they're kids but they see that everybody likes the food, and they want the food. That's very cool. That is very, very cool. So then when they go back to their regular school in the fall and they have all these bozos that are teasing them or something, kids have a little bit of experience now to know that those kids are just being jerks and that their food is really good. And then they're able to talk about it with their moms, or when they come home they're not hiding and feeling like lepers and withdrawing. So that's something that the Gluten Intolerance Group does. And every time I lecture in the city I ask people, "Please, if you live in this city call the local gluten intolerance group and say, 'Hey, I just want to support what you do. Can I give you one hour a month to help you on a project? I've got one hour a month.'" And if we had 100 people doing that can you imagine in a city what a gluten intolerance group, how much more they could do to focus on kids if they had 100 hours of help per month? That's 1,200 hours in a year. I mean realistically if people would do that, or give two or three hours once every quarter – because they're volunteer groups. They don't make any money on this. Anyone that's running the group, it's all volunteer. So if we support this we could address this issue of suicide in kids. We'll figure out programs to continue during the year for these kids, like the gluten intolerance group is modeling in their summer camp. We really need to do this. I mean it seems so far away until it's your neighbors' kid that just committed suicide, or, God forbid, your cousin, or your nephew, or your kid. Then all of a sudden it's the most important thing in the world. I believe that we all need to live a life of paying it forward, however you do. I mean sometimes – if you haven't done this try it one time and see what happens: when you're going through the



tollbooth on the highway just go through the change area, as opposed to using your little remote thing, and as you drive up to the tollbooth it'll register and the gate will open for you, but then just give her some money, "This is for the car behind me," and then just drive away. And just pay it forward. Do something. And if this topic that we're talking about, about kids and gluten sensitivity catches you because some of your listeners may have concerns or interest in anxiety and depression and social phobias give an hour a week, or an hour a month to the Gluten Intolerance Group and see how it feels to be paying it forward like that. You're going to change and maybe save somebody's life by doing that.

Trudy Scott: Love it. Thank you. Thanks for sharing that. And I'm familiar with the gluten intolerance group. I wasn't familiar with their summer camps and that sounds wonderful. I love the whole idea of paying it forward. I've actually done that at the tollbooth, and I've actually had it done to me. And that feeling when you get to the tollbooth and someone says, "Someone paid for your toll" it's just an amazing feeling. You just feel so good.

Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Yes, it's like, "What? What?" Trudy Scott: It raises those endorphins and makes you feel good. And then

when you do it yourself to someone you feel good as well. So I love that whole idea of paying it forward.

I wanted to just go back to one thing that you said, and we're not

going to have time to go into it in a lot of detail but you talked about this fascinating thing where you have the symptoms when you're on the gluten and then you remove it. And so many of the kids and the study participants still have the issue, and you say you've got to deal with this underlying damage. And this is going back to healing the gut, because you talked about nutrients, and then addressing deficiencies that may have been caused because of the damaged gut.

Something that comes to mind is low iron. I actually worked with

a little girl who had serious gluten issues. I know she had really low levels of iron. And we need that iron as a co-factor to make serotonin, which is going to make us feel better. Zinc is a common deficiency and all these other nutrients that we may see low when we've got this damage to the gut.



Dr. Tom O'Bryan: That's exactly right. One of the cues for the listening audience – and this is not diagnostic; this is just suggestive, but you look somebody in the eye – and you know, people have beautiful eyes, but if the white part of the eye has a bluish tint to it – doesn't have to be blue but if you just see a bluish tint that's suggestive of an iron deficiency, or insufficiency – not enough iron. Certainly most people need to be checked.

You have to rebuild the system, and it's not easy to rebuild the

system; it's really not. And there are many things that people need to take to rebuild the system.

Some people will say, "Well I'll take fish oil." I say, "Well that's great. Fish oils are really important. They're one of the things that people need." Or, "I take vitamin D." "Oh that's great. Vitamin D is one of the things that people really need." Or, "I take glutamine." "Oh that's great. Glutamine is one of the things that people really need." But people aren't going to take 10 or 15 different bottles of nutrients. They're not going to open 10 bottles a day. They're just not going to do it.

So we came up with the gluten sensitivity packs. "Mrs. Patient,

can you take one pack a day? There's six pills in there but can you take one pack a day?" "Well yeah, I can do that." So it's one pack a day if you're 125 pounds or less; one pack twice a day if you're more than 125 pounds. And it's a minimum of six months, usually a year. But then you've got 22 different nutrients in good, substantial doses, that are going to heal the intestines, reduce the inflammation and help your body to regenerate healthier, stronger tissue.

So, for all of your listening audience, as you work with your

doctors and your nutritionists, you've got to understand that they're trying to give you the best that they can, and if you say, "I'll take one thing, and only one thing," you're really tying one of their hands behind their back that you need so much more than that. It's great to take something, and something's better than nothing. It's really great. But you need more than that.

First, you have to stop eating gluten, obviously, because stop

throwing gasoline on the fire, and then we need to rebuild the tissue. That's the protocol. And if you support these Gluten Intolerance Groups, you get these kids into programs that educate and support them, Teens with Celiac, things like that then we've got a good shot of reversing this statistic about mortality after diagnosis with celiac.



Trudy Scott: Fantastic, and we'll share the information about your gluten

sensitivity packs on the blog, together with a lot of this research that we're talking about. So thanks for creating that. And it makes sense: you've got to heal the gut, I mean you've got to build up those levels that have become depleted because of the damage to the gut.

Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Yes. Trudy Scott: Can we move on to testing and just do a nice little summary of

testing? I'd love you to talk about some of the issues, there's the current testing: if you go to your doctor you may come back with results and it might say, "No, you don't have a gluten issue." And then some of the new testing that is available that looks at these different peptides of gluten, which – sorry, it looks at the antibodies to these, the peptides of gluten, that your current doctor may not be doing. And if they are integrative or have trained in functional medicine.

Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Yes, yes, critically important. There are two concepts that people

– three, three concepts that people need to understand when looking to see if you have a sensitivity to gluten. Concept number one: if you only check one branch of the armed forces you can't make any conclusional statements about whether you have a sensitivity or not. So if your doctor does an IgG test – it's a good test – but you can't say, if it comes back negative you don't have a problem with gluten. You can't say that because it may be an IgA problem; it may be the marines, and not the army, that's called out. That's concept number one. And your doctors don't think this way. So you have to ask them, when they're going to do a test, "Well we'll test to see if you have a sensitivity to gluten." "Well what kind of test, Doctor?" "It will be a blood test. It's an allergy test." "Okay, can I ask what type of immune test is it? You know, I don't know much about this." "Well, it's an IgG Test." "Oh, that's one of the branches of the immune system, isn't it?" "That's right, IgG." "Well, but aren't there other branches also, like IgA? And there's IgA, IgG, IgE, IgM. So but aren't there other branches? And couldn't I have a problem with another branch of the armed forces and not necessarily IgG?"

And some doctors don't like to be challenged and so you don't want to do that in a challenging way. You might say, "You know, I heard this doctor on The Anxiety Summit and I wrote down the notes about it and he said IgG is a really good test. But it's not comprehensive, so that you can't make conclusional statements if



you do just one branch of the armed forces. You can certainly make statements that IgG is not a problem for you with wheat, that's true if it comes back negative. But you can't say it's not a problem, because you don't know if it's a problem or not." So that's the first concept in testing is that you need multiple branches of the armed forces. There's only one lab that I know of that's doing multiple branches and that lab is Cyrex, C-Y-R-E-X. And we'll talk more about that. The second concept is that if your doctor's testing you for celiac disease they look for an antibody called transglutaminase. That is the blood marker for an indication of celiac disease. It is the correct test to do. Here's the problem: many studies have talked about transglutaminase as being 97 percent accurate, 98, 99 percent accurate, right on the money. Really a good test to identify if somebody has celiac disease or not. And how were those research papers published? They took a bunch of people with celiac disease and the looked to see did they have elevated antibodies to transglutaminase. Yes, they did – 99 percent, 98 percent of the time they had elevated antibodies of transglutaminase. Well that's really good. It's an accurate test for celiac disease. But I wrote to many of those authors of the papers: "Doctors, when you did your test, and the group that you looked at, did you look at people that didn't yet have their celiac disease at the most severe stage, when the intestines are all worn down, the microvilli are worn down? That's called total villus atrophy. Did you look at people, other than total villus atrophy? Did you include people that had partial villus atrophy?" And the answer, every time, is, "No, celiac disease is total villus atrophy, meaning that the intestines are severely damaged." And that's the people that they checked the blood on. And every one of those people, or almost every one of those people, have elevated antibodies to transglutaminase. But when other researchers start looking at people that have partial reduction of their intestines, where they're just worn down a little bit, the sensitivity of the blood test for celiac disease, transglutaminase, goes from 97, 98, 99 down to 27, 32, 33, which means that it gives false negatives, saying there's no problem seven out of ten times. So the tests will come back negative for a problem seven out of ten times, if you've got the damage going on but you just haven't hit the end stage yet.



So transglutaminase is not a good test to look for earlier stages of celiac disease. It's a very good test to look at the end stages of celiac disease, a very good test for that. But doctors don't know this. So they'll do the blood tests for transglutaminase, "No, you don't have celiac disease. You're fine. It's okay to eat wheat." And that's a conclusion that you just cannot make from that test. You can't do that because it's not accurate. That's premise number two.

Trudy Scott: Right, and then we don't want to wait until we're at the end stage

and then we're saying positive because then we're going to have a host of other problems. So we want to really catch it as early as possible. So I can see why that's a big problem.

Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Exactly right, Trudy. Let me give you an example of that kind of

thinking. Many of us have had a friend or a neighbor or a family member

who had a heart attack and survived. And they come home and they say, "Oh, my doctor told me that I had a heart attack previously. I never knew." And many people have had that experience. And it's because they see the damage to the heart wall on an EKG. They see that this heart's damaged. "Oh boy, you've had a heart attack before." And the guys says, "No, no." And the doctor says, "No, you did. You may not have known it. Have you ever had chest pain?" "Well I have a little chest pain once in a while." "Well you actually had a heart attack, killing off your heart tissue. You're a very lucky man." And that's a story that many people have.

So what if our cardiologist, when you go in for a checkup, says,

"My father had a heart attack. I just want to check to make sure I'm okay." And he does a blood test but he also does an EEG, or excuse me, ECG, and he says, "Oh, no, there's no damage to your heart. You've not had a heart attack, so you're fine." And he isn't paying any attention that your cholesterol's 350. Says, "No, no, it doesn't matter. See? Your heart's fine. Your heart's fine. There's no evidence of any damage to your heart."

So if we did that with celiac disease we would use a test like

transglutaminase because it only identifies, very, very accurately, people that have advanced damage to their intestines. So you don't want – and that's a good test to do, but it's not the only test to do. So that's premise number two.



Premise number three in testing is that as you said, Trudy, multiple peptides of gluten. This is the test; this is the cat's meow.

Trudy Scott: [Laughs] Dr. Tom O'Bryan: This is where the pedal hits the metal. This is the test because if

you think of gluten like a pearl necklace – hydrochloric acid is made in your stomach and it undoes the clasp of the pearl necklace. Now you're holding this necklace that's one long string of pearls. And enzymes in our stomach, in our intestines, are supposed to act like scissors to cut each pearl off of the necklace.

Unfortunately, no human can do that with gluten. No human can

do it. Whether you get sick or not no one can digest gluten completely. So this pearl necklace gets broken down into clumps of pearls, not each individual pearl. And it's the clumps of pearls that cause all the problems.

So you get a clump of pearls that causes inflammation and

damages your intestines and then your body makes antibodies to those clumps of pearls; your immune system tries to protect you. So that's the mechanism by which the damage occurs.

So Cyrex Labs, C-Y-R-E-X, Cyrex Labs has come up with a test where they look at 10 different peptides of gluten, not just one. Every lab looks at one, it's called alpha gliadin. Every lab looks at that but they only look at one. Cyrex looks at 10 different peptides of gluten and they look at transglutaminase and they look at some more sensitive celiac markers. So this blood test is the blood test that will tell you, as accurately as any blood test in the world, it is the most accurate blood test in the world, "Do you have a problem with gluten?" There's a lot of information on that, on my website for people – and once again that website is TheDr.com.

Trudy Scott: Fantastic, and we'll definitely get some of those articles and share

them on the blog so people can look at that. Thank you so much for sharing that. And your comment about "No one can digest gluten," I would love to get your comment on that. Should none of us be eating gluten or can some of us eat gluten?

Dr. Tom O'Bryan: That's a really good question. And because I'm a speaker I have to

be careful how I say this because if I say "No one should eat gluten" I sound like a nutcase. But no human can digest gluten. No human on the planet can digest gluten. That's just a fact. Read



the science. It's a fact. Now, whether or not it causes symptoms and problems for you is determined by when do you cross the threshold. When do you have the straw that broke the camel's back? And when that occurs now you've got a problem. But if you want to wait until you get a problem that's fine. You will wait.

But you identify it much earlier if you do this blood test that I just

talked about. So if you've got a blood test that's come back positive you've got a problem. Even if you don't think you feel bad, you've got a problem and it's going to take you down, there's no question. Elevated antibodies don't just sit around with nothing to do; they're destroying tissue. They're always destroying tissue. It's just a question of what tissue.

So whether or not you eat gluten – no, let me say it differently – if

you eat gluten you're going to get a problem. You want to wait until you get a problem? That's up to you. But I personally don't know why we would eat anything that causes inflammation in our body when there are so many problems with the inflammatory condition of living in this world today. Gluten is a primary contributor to that inflammation. So that's the answer to that question.

Trudy Scott: Great. Thank you very much. I've got two final questions. One is

this: earlier on in the interview we talked about enzymes. And you said you would just share a little bit about some enzymes that may be helpful if someone knows that they have a gluten issue.

Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Oh you bet, you bet. That's a great question. And I've been

working for two years on this and we are launching next week. So by the time of the airing of this summit, it'll be available, and that is an enzyme that will have 99 percent full breakdown, cutting the pearls off the necklace, for gluten, dairy, corn, soy and egg, within 90 minutes. And that's really important because it's within 90 minutes, that means that these peptides, these clumps of the chain don’t' get down into the small intestine where the immune system is where the guards are that turn on the immune response. So this stuff gets broken down beforehand.

I've got to say right now this does not mean that you can go out

and eat gluten. But this means everyone that has a sensitivity to gluten should be taking Glutenza whenever they go out to eat because of the possibility of cross contamination and some hidden exposure to protect yourself. So there is a product now that is available that will protect you. And it creates an environment in your intestines, there are prebiotics in there that are going to



strengthen the dynamics and help to heal the small intestine. And there's two probiotics in there that are designed specifically to heal the intestinal damage. So this is a fabulous – there's never been anything like this product; we're very excited about it. It's called Glutenza, and it's just coming out onto the market now.

Trudy Scott: Fantastic. I look forward to taking it out and sharing it. And I

would assume that it contains the DPP 4 enzyme. Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Well that's a very good assumption on your part, and it is the first

product ever that has endo and exo peptidase DPP 4. The problem with DPP 4 – and it does help, but it cuts the end pearl off. Every DPP 4 on the market cuts off the pearls on the end of the chain, and it just takes a long time to do that. So these big clumps of pearls are going down into the intestine, stimulating an immune response.

But when you have an endo DPP 4 peptidase you're cutting the

chain in the middle, you know, one-third, the second-third, and on the ends at the same time, and you break it down much, much quicker. That's why this product is so unbelievable is because it's breaking that chain down into individual pearls much, much quicker. There's never been anything like this.

Trudy Scott: Fantastic. Cutting edge information. I love it. Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Exactly. And this is the first time I've talked about it, Trudy. So

no one knows about this so your group is the first to hear it. Trudy Scott: Great. Well thank you for sharing it. I look forward to checking it

out and sharing it. We'll definitely provide a link to that as well. And then one final question, and there's so much we could talk

about. I interviewed Jeffrey Smith on The Summit and there's a connection between GMOs and gluten sensitivity and then last season I interviewed Dr. Stephanie Seneff and she talked about Round Up being sprayed on the wheat just before harvest. So we've got all these other issues that definitely play a role. I heard you present at the NANP, National Association of Nutrition Professionals conference about LPS, these lipopolysaccharides that are endotoxins that have relocated into the bloodstream and cause all these problems. So there's so much more we can go into and maybe we can have you back on the next summit.

Can we just end on a comment about doing an elimination of

gluten and then challenging. What is your approach on that?



Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Okay, I'm happy to answer that and I want to end talking about the

Gluten Summit, if I may, after that. Trudy Scott: Absolutely, please do. Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Thank you. If you have a sensitivity to gluten, you go on a gluten-

free diet, so you've done the blood test, you've done the proper blood test, you see how bad the problem is, "Oh my gosh!" You go on a complete gluten-free diet, you're vigilant. You feel great, your weight's stabilized, your energy's up, your symptoms are going down, you feel really great. Six months to a year later you do the blood test again and all the antibodies are down to normal. Oh great, they're back to normal. Can I eat gluten?

Well, here's the answer. When you get a vaccination for measles

they give you a shot of the bug measles. And your brain says, "Whoa, what's this? This is not good for me. You, General." And in your immune system you've got army, air force, marine corps generals sitting around with nothing to do. "You, General, you now are General Measles. Take care of this."

General Measles builds an assembly line. The assembly lines

starts producing soldiers. Those soldiers are trained as assassins to go after measles. They're called antibodies. And all they do is go after measles. So they're in the bloodstream, going around firing their chemical bullets called cytokines and going after measles. "Boom, boom, boom-boom, boom, boom, boom."

When all the measles bugs from the vaccination are gone General

Measles, who's watching all this, says, "Okay, turn off the assembly line. We don't need any more soldiers out there right now." You shouldn't have any measles antibodies in your bloodstream right now, unless you've been exposed to measles, and then maybe you will, but you shouldn't have any.

But, if you're ever exposed to measles again, General Measles,

who the rest of his life that's his job now, the rest of his life. He's called a Memory B cell. And he has a memory of this. He's always vigilant. Measles ever comes back he just has to flip the switch for the assembly line. He doesn't have to build the assembly line again.

That's why if you go to Africa you need vaccinations months and

months ahead of time for yellow fever and dengue fever, all these strange diseases. But if you go back ten years later to visit again



you just need a booster shot two weeks before you go. You just have to wake up General Yellow Fever, General Dengue Fever. That's a booster shot to wake up the Memory B cell.

Well, you do the blood test and find out you've got elevated

antibodies to gluten you've got Memory B cells to gluten. They never go away. They never go away. So you've done the blood test, you've got a problem, you go squeaky clean, gluten-free, you feel better, your symptoms go away, you redo the blood test six months or a year, comes back normal, "Well can I eat gluten now?" "Well, no, the evidence says no but if you need to check this out go ahead and check it out. Go ahead and eat some gluten." And there's a whole process to do that. And then you wait a month and then you take the blood again. If General Gluten's raised himself back up, now you know. And there's the evidence, whether you get sick or not, that the antibodies that destroy the tissue are activated once again.

And I don't recommend, personally, as a doctor, recommend doing

the gluten challenge because some people never recover from the challenge. They never recover. Some people develop severe anxiety that they didn't have beforehand, but when they do the gluten challenge it's with them now and it's there for years and years and years. So we've seen that happen and so I don't recommend the challenge, but if you're going to do it that's the way to do it.

Trudy Scott: You answered a question that I didn't ask but that was good

because I didn't know I needed to ask it. And I didn't think of anyone doing the blood test, going gluten-free and then thinking – you know, doing it again and then thinking they could eat it. So that was good to get that clarification. But what about someone who's hearing this for the first time and thinking, "Well gluten may be an issue," and they want to just remove it for a short time and see if they feel better and notice that their symptoms, maybe two weeks, and then add it back with this challenge and see if they notice something. So you have a problem with that?

Dr. Tom O'Bryan: I understand. Trudy Scott: That was my question and maybe I didn't make it clear. Dr. Tom O'Bryan: I understand. Well, the term "gluten challenge" is used in the

literature after you've been gluten-free to challenge the immune system again. So you're referring to not challenging the immune



system; you're referring to challenging the symptoms that a person has.

Trudy Scott: Yeah. Dr. Tom O'Bryan: So I go gluten-free; I feel better. I eat gluten again; I don't feel

good. Is gluten good for me? That's not rocket science. But the danger with that is that people determine the degree of bad by how severe their symptoms are. And if they don't have a lot of symptoms then they think, "Well, you know, it's not a big deal. I can do that just fine." No, you can't. Because what you're not noticing is the immune system and all the antibodies that have developed that are attacking your brain, or attacking your heart or your lungs or your liver. And you don't feel bad.

Nobody gets Alzheimer's in their 60s and 70s. You get Alzheimer's in your 30s and 40s. It just takes 30 years of killing off brain cells before it's so bad it's obvious. And you feel fine when you're in your 30s, "Oh, I guess I'm getting older. I don't remember quite the way I used to, ha ha." No, no, there's an inflammatory cascade going on. We're supposed to be able to learn new languages in our 80s and 90s. So it's not that the brain's supposed to deteriorate by the age of 35 or 40, but it does and we don't know what to do so we joke about it.

If you base whether gluten is okay for you on how you feel you run

the risk of allowing all of the internal damage to continue that is going on in your body. That's the danger of giving up gluten and then eating it again to see how you feel. Now if you feel bad when you eat it again there you go. But then you may say, "But I don't feel that bad. I'll just have it once in a while." You cannot be a little pregnant; you cannot have a little gluten if you have a Memory B cell to gluten. You have the Memory B cells? Sorry, man, it's all over. Your immune system, for the rest of your life, is going to try and protect you. That's how it is. It protects you from poison. And in your body that's a poison.

Trudy Scott: Great. The reason I ask this is so many of my clients - I work with

women with anxiety - I would say more than 80 percent notice an improvement when they take gluten out of their diet. So I like them to remove it, keep a log for two weeks, see how they feel energy-wise, mood-wise, bloating, you name it, everything. And then add it back after two weeks. And see how powerful it is, and then realize that it is an issue and then move on to testing.



I was just wanting to know your thoughts on that because feeling those symptoms is powerful. And then any comments on that? And then I just wanted one follow-up question on the testing because you may not even get a positive result, is that true?

Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Okay. To the question regarding giving it up for two weeks,

casing it again, seeing how you feel, sure, that's going to work. But then you said and then go on to testing. That's great. That validates that it's worth spending the money. But especially with anxiety patients – anxiety patients are a dysfunction of the brain. It's a dysfunction. The person doesn't have anxiety, the brain is not functioning properly. And when you get the function back the anxiety calms down for the vast majority of people.

So the question is not dealing with the symptom but rather dealing

with the mechanism behind why that symptom is showing. And we don't think about brain dysfunction that way very often but it really is what's the mechanism. So you give up gluten for two weeks and you feel better, then you eat gluten and you notice the next day you've got a lot of anxiety again or a lot of fatigue, that's great. It's great to experience that and see it.

What that suggests is that if you're pulling a chain and the chain

breaks at the weakest link, it's at one end, the middle, the other end, your heart, your brain, your liver, your kidneys, it's the weak link.

So what it suggests is that for that person the brain is one of their

weak links. And what that would suggest is that if you did the right test you will find it got elevated antibodies to the brain tissue. That's the danger.

If they have elevated antibodies to their brain tissue, and thus they

get brain symptoms, and when they go off gluten they don't have as much brain symptoms they've got elevated antibodies. And with the elevated antibodies they've got to come down. It takes six months to a year to get those down if you have the right protocols. And if you have the crumbs – someone brings you a salad with croutons, you pick the croutons off because you won't eat gluten. The crumbs on the lettuce that you can't see that were on the croutons, that's all it takes to wake up General Gluten again. And when General Gluten gets woken up you get elevated antibodies to your brain, if that's the weak link in your chain, for a minimum of three to six months – a minimum. From the crumbs on a crouton that you picked off the salad.



So you must do the testing, especially if you have brain symptoms, to see do you have elevated antibodies to your brain, so that you then get the education and understand you don't mess around with this because elevated antibodies to the brain means you're killing off brain tissue.

I have three elevated antibodies to my brain. I did this test as a

research test eight years ago and I had elevated antibodies to myelin basic protein – that causes MS, gangliosides, which causes numbness and tingling and anxiety and depression, and cerebellar, peptides, which causes the loss of balance when you're in your 60s and 70s and you can't walk up stairs easily, or down the steps at the local hotel; you've got to be really cautious because you don't have good balance. I had three elevated.

And I called the lab and I said, "What's this? This is a mistake." And they said, "No, it's not." I said, "Do it again." "We did. We know it's you. We did it again. It's accurate." And so that woke me up. I didn't have anxiety or depression. I didn't have any of those symptoms. But I had elevated antibodies killing off my brain tissue. That's the missing link, Trudy, that you don't get from how do you feel. You won't know that that mechanism is going on until enough brain tissue is killed off. Now you start getting symptoms. And so it's great that you said do a two-week trial and then reintroduce the food and then do the testing. As long as you're doing the testing I think that's a great protocol.

Trudy Scott: Great. And then if you have taken gluten out of your diet and

you're going to do the testing how long does it have to be in and how much do you need to consume before you do the test?

Dr. Tom O'Bryan: We are not going to recommend that people do a challenge. I

never recommend that. I recommend that people do the test as-is, meaning they've been gluten-free for two years. Do the test because 60 percent of the people that do that, follow my recommendations, about six out of ten come back and they're positive. I say, "Wait, I’m not eating gluten." "Yes, you are." "No, I'm not." "Well you're getting it somewhere. Now let's invest IgA to find out where you're getting it." Because what they've been doing is not working. So I do not recommend a gluten challenge before the test.

Trudy Scott: Okay and that's what you'd said earlier: don't do the challenge

because you may have some issues with it. Great.



Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Correct. Trudy Scott: Well thank you. This has been absolutely fantastic, Dr. Tom. I am

so glad that you've been on, sharing this. And I would love to give you an opportunity to tell us about The Gluten Summit and anything else that's coming up that you want to share. Of course, you're going to share your great new enzyme and your other product that you mentioned and everything else. But yeah, let's give you an opportunity to share about the next Summit.

Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Thank you, Trudy. The thing that I want to say about The Gluten

Summit is that I traveled the world. I went to Oxford, England to interview the godfather of celiac diagnosis; Bologna, Italy: the godfather of non-celiac gluten sensitivity; Tel Aviv, Israel, the godfather of predictive autoimmunity. I asked the real experts, the researchers, the people that the general public never heard from, they have no idea, and most doctors have never heard from because these guys are buried in their universities doing the research.

I asked them the tough questions because I read their papers, and I

knew the questions to ask. And then I interpreted their answer. I said, "Excuse me, Professor, did you just say --?" "Yes." "Does that mean --?" "Yes." Do you hear that, people? Here we have the godfather of celiac diagnosis telling us non-celiac gluten sensitivity is as important or more important than celiac disease. And so I did that again and again and again. And we've had 200,000 people now listen to The Gluten Summit.

I think everyone needs to listen to that summit. You need to listen

to these experts. And you need to play this when you're cooking dinner, play it when you're driving to work, whenever you're got a chance. There's 29 hours of interviews with world experts, 29 hours of interviews. So it's going to take you a couple of months, but you're going to hear something that's an OMG for you. "Gosh, I didn't know that. I didn't know that. Wow." You're going to hear it again and again and again.

This has changed so many lives that I think everyone needs to hear

this. It's at TheGlutenSummit.com. And if you decide that this is worth doing and getting there's three gifts that because you're part of The Anxiety Summit that we have set up for you. The first one is lifetime free access to the webinar that I did after The Gluten Summit, "Now That You Know, Where Do You Go?" where I talk about the tests to do in detail. "What tests? What laboratories?



Write this down. Take this to your doctor. Here's the website for these tests. And then here's what these tests mean." So that you then have action steps as to what to do with the questions that come up for you. That's the first gift.

The second gift is we will give you the complete elaboration – you have a front row seat to the video that I did on this gluten sensitivity – is it a fad or not. And I went into great detail with a bunch of slides to show you the studies and the names of the authors of the studies and here they are when they did the study on depression with non-celiac gluten sensitivity. So we'll give you that also. And the third thing is we'll give you an article that discusses the science behind gluten sensitivity, non-celiac gluten sensitivity and the reality. And all three of those are there for you if you wish as a result of being part of The Anxiety Summit.

Trudy Scott: Thank you so much. And as I said right at the beginning I can

highly recommend The Gluten Summit. You really raised the level when it comes to these educational summits with the content and the speakers and everything was just very professionally done and the insights, the OMGs were just fantastic. So I thank you for doing it and then thank you for these gifts. I'll make sure that all of this is on the replay page so everyone who's listening can get access to it.

Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Well that's marvelous. Thank you, Trudy. Trudy Scott: Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Tom. It's been fantastic. Any

final words of wisdom before we end? Dr. Tom O'Bryan: Yes, yes. Many people don't like to even think about not even

gluten. They don't like it. Two words. No, two concepts: first is "sorry", that's life. And the second is – this comes from a fellow – Studs Terkel was a well-respected icon in Chicago. He died about eight or nine years ago. He was a great guy, a writer, told it the way it was in a Chicago style.

Studs would often say, as he was walking out from being with his

friends he'd say, "Take it easy – but take it." So don't be afraid to look at this issue of is gluten a component of what's affecting me in ways I don't like to be affected. Don't be afraid to look at it. Take it.



One way is by listening to The Gluten Summit. Certainly listening to this interview here on The Anxiety Summit, I've given you some basics of all this. You'll hear so much more. Just take it. Get the information, make the decision for you and your family: Is this rational? "Well, these scientists --? And so is this rational? Yes. And then consider, "I'm going to give this a shot and see what it does for me. I'm going to get the right testing to know the baseline of where I am, and then we're going to try this." So thank you very much, Trudy, for the opportunity to speak with you today.

Trudy Scott: Thank you. Thank you so much for those final words and thanks

for all your insights and everything that you're doing in this field. We really appreciate you. Thank you, everyone, for signing in to another amazing call on The Anxiety Summit. This is Trudy Scott signing off and I look forward to hearing you on one of the other interviews. Thank you.

Here is the speaker blog: http://www.everywomanover29.com/blog/anxiety-summit-glutens-impact-inflamed-brain-reducing-anxiety-depression/ Dr. Tom O'Bryan, host of The Gluten Summit

Dr. Tom O'Bryan is an internationally-recognized speaker and workshop leader specializing in the complications of non-celiac gluten sensitivity and celiac disease as they occur inside and outside of the intestines. He is the founder of TheDr.com, and he recently hosted the paradigm-shifting, The Gluten Summit: A Grain of Truth, bringing together 29 of the world's experts on Celiac Disease and Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity at TheGlutenSummit.com



Trudy Scott, CN, host of The Anxiety Summit, Food Mood expert and author of The Antianxiety Food Solution

Food Mood Expert Trudy Scott is a certified nutritionist on a mission to educate and empower women worldwide about natural solutions for anxiety, stress and emotional eating. Trudy works with women one-on-one and in groups, serving as a catalyst in bringing about life enhancing transformations that start with the healing powers of eating real whole food, using individually targeted supplementation and making simple lifestyle changes. She also presents nationally to nutrition and mental health professionals on food and mood, sharing all the recent research and how-to steps so they too can educate and empower their clients and patients.

Trudy is past president of the National Association of Nutrition Professionals. She was recipient of the 2012 Impact Award and currently serves as a Special Advisor to the Board of Directors. She is a member of Alliance for Addiction Solutions and Anxiety and Depression Association of America. Trudy is the author of The Antianxiety Food Solution: How the Foods You Eat Can Help You Calm Your Anxious Mind, Improve Your Mood and End Cravings (New Harbinger 2011). The information provided in The Anxiety Summit via the interviews, the blog posts, the website, the audio files and transcripts, the comments and all other means is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for advice from your physician or other health care professional. You should consult with a healthcare professional before starting any diet, exercise, or supplementation program, before taking or stopping any medication, or if you have or suspect you may have a health problem.

tom obryan glutens impact on the inflamed brain anxiety ... · thanks for sharing that. so...

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