You Can Fix Your Brain (Just 1 Hour A Week For Optimal Health, Energy, Memory, And More) With Dr. Tom O’Bryan

Content By: Ari Whitten & Dr. Tom O’Bryan

You CAN fix your brain. And according to Dr. Tom O’Bryan, it can be done in just an hour a week.

Are you struggling with symptoms like brain fog? Do you find yourself moody or lacking motivation and drive? Or maybe you’re having more difficulty remembering things that used to come easily to you? Do you get fatigued easily after things like driving or reading or working?

These are all early warning signs that your brain is struggling. If the health of your brain is not optimal, it can lead to energy problems, cognitive function problems, and ultimately it can progress to neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia (which are now becoming epidemics). Fortunately, you CAN fix your brain. And it is relatively easy to do so.

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Tom O’Bryan, who is the founder of www.thedr.com and the author of the books “Autoimmune Fix” and “You Can Fix Your Brain.” He’s considered a Sherlock Holmes for chronic disease and metabolic disorders, holds teaching faculty positions with the Institute for Functional Medicine and the National University of Health Sciences. Dr. Tom shares his knowledge about how you can fix your brain (in just 1 hour a week) for optimal health, energy, memory, and more.

Contents show

In this podcast, Dr. Tom O’Bryan will cover

Dr. Tom’s pyramid framework for identifying the root cause of brain-related disease
Why do MIT statisticians predict that one in two kids will be on the autism spectrum in the next 10 years?
Dr. Tom’s view on lectins and how to check for sensitivity (and the new test that can detect gluten and lectin sensitivity with up to 97% accuracy)
For women — why you should do a detox before you try to get pregnant
For men — why eliminating toxins is critical
Dr. Tom’s top nutrition tips for brain health
Why Dr. Tom believes gluten is a problem for virtually EVERYONE
Dr. Tom’s tips for reducing EMF exposure (and why it is critical for optimal brain health)
What your posture and body position have to do with chronic fatigue (and how you fix it)
Dr. Tom’s top strategies for improving brain health

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You Can Fix Your Brain (Just 1 Hour A Week For Optimal Health, Energy, Memory, And More) With Dr. Tom O’Bryan – Transcript

Ari Whitten: Hi everyone, welcome back to the Energy Blueprint Podcast. I’m your host, Ari Whitten, and today I have with me Dr. Tom O’Bryan, who is the founder of thedr.com and the author of the “Autoimmune Fix” and the new book which I have with me here, coming apart a little bit with the cover, but “You Can Fix Your Brain.”

He’s considered a Sherlock Holmes for chronic disease and metabolic disorders teaching that the underlying mechanisms that trigger the development of chronic disease are the key to health. He also holds teaching faculty positions with the Institute for Functional Medicine and the National University of Health Sciences. He has trained and certified tens of thousands of practitioners around the world in advanced understanding of the impact of wheat sensitivity and the development of individual autoimmune diseases. So welcome to the show Dr. Tom O’Bryan.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Thank you, Ari. It’s a pleasure.

What “You Can Fix Your Brain” really means

Ari Whitten: Yeah, it’s a pleasure to have you. So, you wrote this new book “You Can Fix Your Brain.” I want to talk to you all about brain stuff today. So first of all, I think a nice kind of overview of different sort of brain related issues would be helpful and kind of what specific things we’re talking about when we’re talking about fixing our brain.

So, you know, there’s things like brain fog, there’s things like brain related fatigue and sort of poor brain stamina and poor ability to focus. There’s also dementia and overt neurological diseases. And you know, probably a number of other different subcategories there or even whole categories. So how would you kind of categorize all of this in terms of what are we specifically talking about fixing when we’re talking about fixing your brain?

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: All of the above and more. Everyone knows someone who’s had a heart attack and survived, changed their diet, started exercising, and they look and feel better than they’ve been in years. Most of us know someone diagnosed with cancer, went through some protocols, alternative or traditional, put the cancer into remission and are thriving. No one knows anyone with a brain deterioration diagnosis who’s thriving. It terrifies us. It just terrifies us because we think that from the neck down, we can heal anything but the brain we have no control over. And that’s just not the case.

Every cell in your body regenerates. Every single cell, including your brain. We used to think the brain did not regenerate. Now we know it does. There are many studies, for example, with wheat sensitivity and people that have shrunken cerebellums, areas of their brain. They go gluten free, a year later their cerebellum is bigger, that they rebuilt some of the damaged cerebellum. And their coordination is better, the brain’s functioning better, and all of that.

There’s a number of studies like that. Every cell in your body regenerates. The purpose of this book is to take the system of the body that scares us the most and guide us in taking a step back, at looking at the big picture of where does this problem come from? And with fatigue, as an example, that’s a really good one to use.

There is, I refer to a pyramid to health and that we have to look at our health from a pyramid perspective. What does that mean? There’re four sides to a pyramid, there’s the three sides coming up, and then there’s the base, so there’s four sides and what does that mean? There’s the structure that’s at the base, that’s the realm of trainers and chiropractors and massage therapists and Feldenkrais technique, Alexander Technique, pillows that you sleep on, yoga classes, exercise, muscles, bones, ligaments.

That whole world of structure may be where your fatigue is coming from. We’ll talk about fatigue, but I could easily say migraines, or I could say infertility. I mean there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of studies of the most surprising conditions that reverse when you fix structure. So that’s the platform, structure.

And then there’s three sides to the pyramid. One side that we all tend to focus on more than any other is the biochemistry. That’s pharmaceuticals and nutrition and foods and diets and air and water. And that’s a really important component.

The next side is the emotional or the spiritual, which I think is the most impactful of all, and we run away from the most, you know. We don’t want to deal with “Why do I have recurrent bladder infections or kidney infections.” Well, what’s pissy in your life? And people don’t want to go there to look at what’s pissy in their life.

But they create these stress hormones that cause a suppressed immune function and you get bladder infections, right? And sometimes that’s the side of the pyramid that needs to be addressed. And the last one, new to humanity in the last two decades, never before on the planet like this is electromagnetic. And electromagnetic pollution can cause cancer.

It can cause a heart attack, cause strokes, it can cause, there are, once again, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of studies. So, there are four sides to the pyramid that we have to look at with any health condition.

You can’t just focus on, “Well, I’m going to take these pills because it’s going to help my mitochondria work better and my energy is going to go up.” Now that may be that you have a deficiency of CoQ10 or Alpha lipoic acid or any of the other great nutrients that sometimes help with fatigue. It may be that you have a deficiency and the pills are going to help. But why do you have a deficiency?

Then you have to look to, “Well, maybe my food selections aren’t very good.” “No, I eat organic and I’m eating a really good selection of food.” Okay. Then maybe it’s absorption and your guts not working right. So, you have to do a gut evaluation.

The point is we all have been raised with the idea, single symptom, single cure. And that concept is taking us down the toilet. The numbers keep going down and down and down. In terms of the number of diseases they’re going up. The quality of our healthcare, it keeps going down and down. And that more kids with autism than ever in the history of humanity.

I came out in practice, it was one in 10,000. Now the CDC said not too long ago it’s one in 33 and there are numbers coming out by MIT biostatisticians that say within 10 years will be one in two kids on the autism spectrum. That’s a brain that’s not working right. Let me give you an example of brain function and fatigue. If you’re diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity, if your child is, the recommendation is to take medication. The medication is called Ritalin or Adderall. Those are the most common medications. They are speed. Why do you give a kid speed to slow them down?

What’s that about? Well it’s really easy? Their brains are not working properly. Their brains are not working on all eight cylinders. You know, I’m born and raised in Detroit, so I talk about cars as analogies a lot, right?

Ari Whitten: And it’s got to be a V8 of course.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: It’s a V8, eight cylinders. I’m an old muscle car guy, you know. There’re other nice cars, but… So, you know, I had 13 cars going through undergrad years that costs less than $100. I didn’t have any money. I paid my way through school. So, you buy a car for 75 bucks and it lasts you for four months and it dies. Okay. Get a new car, right? Right. So many of those cars needed a tune up really bad, but I don’t, I’m not going to pay for a tune up when it costs more than the car, right?

So, some of those cars that need a tune-up really bad, they’d stall at the red light. How do you stop a car from stalling at the red light? You rev the engine. You put it in neutral and you rev the engine a little bit, or you put the clutch in and you rev the engine. You’re not hot rodding. You just don’t want the car to stall. Light turns green, put it in drive and off you go, right?

Adderall and Ritalin rev the engine of your brain. It’s a brain that’s not functioning very well, so you’ve got to give the kids speed to slow them down. So, the question is, why is their brain not firing on all eight cylinders? There’re so many triggers to that. I’ll give you two examples. There’s one study in the book about electromagnetic pollution causes a lack of brain function. It slows down neurotransmission.

So, if your child has an alarm clock on the nightstand next to their pillow, you may be frying their brain a little bit every night contributing to the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. I’ll give you a second example. Seventy three percent of people with a sensitivity to wheat have something called hypoperfusion. It’s a really good scrabble word.

What it means is a lack of blood flow into the brain. And if you have a lack of blood flow going into the brain, hypoperfusion, well in my talks, I have all 200-300 doctors say, “Will everyone please cross your legs for a minute? Come on, cross your legs.” And they’ll go, “Agh, alright. And they cross their legs.” And I’ll say, “Leave them like that for three hours. Then stand up and run.” Give your child toast for breakfast if they have a wheat sensitivity, send them to school to learn. It may be a biochemical imbalance that’s contributing to their attention deficit. It may be an electromagnetic imbalance that’s contributing to their attention deficit. The brain that’s running too slow, so you have to give them speed.

So, when you think of fatigue, like brain fatigue, it’s a great example, that you have to look at the entire pyramid. All four sections and start asking questions of where’s this coming from?

How the 4 pillars in the pyramid of brain health can be used to solve most brain related issues

Ari Whitten: Perfect. That’s a perfect segue to me asking you a question. So, we have this pyramid, the four sides of this pyramid. Structure, biochemistry, and then we have the emotional and spiritual component and psychological component, and then we also have the electrical sort of bioelectrical EMF component.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Right.

Ari Whitten: So just to be clear, this sort of paradigm this pyramid that you’ve created as a conceptual framework explains both root causes and the path to a solution. Correct?

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Exactly. Exactly.

Ari Whitten: Okay. And pretty much all of the different brain conditions, whether we’re talking about autism or ADD or overt neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or whether we’re talking about brain related fatigue, pretty much all of that, and brain fog, pretty much all of that can be basically sort of seen through the lens of the four factors of this pyramid. Correct?

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: I believe it’s the most comprehensive lens by which to look so you don’t miss something. Every child, every child that they check… Back in the 1990s, every dog that they autopsied in Mexico City had evidence of the mechanisms of Alzheimer’s. Every dog. In the mid 2000s to the late 2000s, they had tests now for urine and blood tests. Every child that they check in Mexico City has evidence of the inflammation that triggers Alzheimer’s. Every single child.

Ari Whitten: What explains that?

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: The air pollution, it’s so bad. The particulate matter that they’re breathing in goes right through their nose, straight up to the brain, right through the lungs, straight up to the brain. It’s triggering the inflammation. We now know of the five main types of Alzheimer’s, the most common type Dr. Dale Bredesen, our friend at UCLA who has done so much great research on Alzheimer’s, says 60 to 65 percent of all clinical cases that come in are inhalation Alzheimer’s.

It’s what’s they are breathing that’s triggering the problem. So, we think we’re going to give them a drug? Two pharmaceutical industries have closed down, companies have closed down their Alzheimer research departments, and laid off the scientists. They said, “We’ve spent billions. We’re never going to find an answer. Let’s allocate our research somewhere else.”

Ari Whitten: While you have Dale Bredesen over there reversing it in nine out of 10 people.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. Because he talks about the 37 different factors that you have to look at. And it’s electromagnetic, it’s biochemical, it’s emotional, spiritual and it’s structural.

Ari Whitten: Well, yeah, I mean this is a fundamental issue of paradigm here. I mean, this is, you have a number, a group of people, you know, people within conventional medicine and the pharmaceutical industry that’s essentially trying to say what’s going on in Alzheimer’s? Let’s look at it under a microscope. Let’s analyze the blood, let’s, you know, do histological examinations and biochemical and gene analysis and find the specific mechanisms on the micro level that are going off, going wrong in Alzheimer’s relative to normal people.

And then we develop a specific compound. Which is going back to what you were talking about earlier, is this sort of one, you know, kind of single pronged one factor attempt to find a solution to a specific problem. Let’s develop a drug to fix Alzheimer’s. And that has been remarkably unsuccessful. And then you have Dale Bredesen over here doing this thing, which a lot of people in conventional medicine would think of as quackery, doing it with nutrition and lifestyle and successfully reversing Alzheimer’s.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Over a 100 cases now fully documented.

Why lifestyle and nutrition matters to our health and survival

Ari Whitten: Yeah, so you know, I mean I just think kind of this state of affairs and I think that the Alzheimer’s thing really encapsulates it so well that just the nutrition and lifestyle approach to treating chronic disease is just so vastly superior to the pharmaceutical approach.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: I don’t think there is any other way to be successful with a vast majority of the people. Dr. Bredesen’s protocols are the go-to protocols to deal with any brain dysfunction. But it’s very geeky, very technical. And what this book has done, “You Can Fix Your Brain” is in general layman terms on a day to day basis just open the person’s mind.

What? Again, what? For example, you go to Starbucks or some coffee shop, you get your coffee and you’re walking out with it. The steam from the hot beverage rises up, it condenses on the underside of the lid. It drips back down into the coffee full of bisphenol A and the other phthalates, the category of chemicals that mold plastic. You put the coffee cup up to your lips and the hot beverage hits the entire underside of the lid, tapers down through the opening full of bisphenol A. So, you’re getting these phthalates.

They just published a study a few months ago. They took, I think it was, I’m sorry, I don’t remember if it was 230, 280 pregnant women, somewhere in that category. And they collected their urine and their blood, and they measured in the urine the level of two of these phthalates of these families of chemicals that mold plastic.

They measured two of them. And they put the results into, for all the women, into quarters. The lowest quarter, the middle quarter, the third quarter and the highest quarter. And they followed these offspring of these women for seven to 11 years.

And for the two chemicals that they checked, if women were in the highest quarter of concentration of these phthalates, this particular phthalate, there were two different ones in their urine. They were in the highest quarter, their offspring were six points, and in the second chemical, seven points lower IQ by seven years of age, every one of them, seven points lower IQ. And that’s substantial. And that’s because the child’s brain, theoretically, nobody knows for sure, but the assumption is their brain never developed properly because the phthalates affect brain development in utero.

When baby’s growing inside of mom. We know for example, if mom has bisphenol A in her bloodstream, it inhibits the laying down of myelin, that’s like the saran wrap over the areas of the brain called the hypothalamus. So, there’s less myelin, which means that brain is not going to develop quite right. Why do we have such an increase in autism now? Well, there are many factors, but the toxicity of this world is one of the big factors.

So, this concept of one symptom, one drug or one piece of nutrition or one diet is going to fix it. It can help temporarily, but you have to look at the whole picture now. It’s a very different planet than it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago. It’s very different. We’re at the stage now, and I say this often, we don’t have time to mess around anymore. I’ll tell you two studies. The World Wildlife Fund published a study about two and a half years ago that there has been on an average of 58 percent reduction in the population of everything on the planet with a spine, insects, birds, mammals, fish, everything except humans.

Fifty eight percent reduction across the board between 1970 and 2011 in 41 years. Forty-one years, 58. it was 35 percent for the birds. Seventy eight percent for mammals living near fresh water. Seventy eight percent of the beavers are gone. The porcupines, they’re gone, in 41 tears they’re gone. Seventy eight percent of them. Why? They’re drinking the water. And if you are drinking the water coming out of the streams or out of the rivers by your home, you get cancer quicker. You’d be unable to reproduce just like the animals. There’s no mystery as to why this is happening. They’re being poisoned. Second study, they did a meta-analysis. That’s when you look at a whole bunch of studies on one subject, and this is between 1974 and 2011, 37 years. So, the same timeframe, 37 years, 186 studies on sperm count in healthy men, not infertile men.

Healthy men like you, Ari, and your friends, your buddies. You know you’re a young guy, you know…

Ari Whitten: Now I’m afraid of what you’re going to tell me about my sperm count.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Yeah, you should be. It’s a 59 percent reduction across the board. Fifty nine percent in 37 years. It doesn’t mean anything to anyone. Until you read that scientists worry about extinction of a species at 72 percent. We’ve lost 59 percent in 37 years. That’s all the guys. Everyone. Why? Because these toxic chemicals that are called endocrine disruptors. They bind onto your estrogen and testosterone receptor sites. And when they bind onto those receptor sites inside your body, they alter testosterone function. They alter estrogen function. And you get, eventually you get the results that you’re just not functioning properly anymore. You’re just not making enough sperm.

Ari Whitten: Yeah. I’ve also, to add to what you’re saying, I’ve also seen another piece of research from, I forget which specific wildlife organization, but basically talking about how the incidence of hypospadias, of basic, and ambiguous genitalia has been skyrocketing across basically all animal species in the last few decades due to basically hormone disruptors in the environment.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: That is exactly right. Yeah.

Ari Whitten: Yeah. So, this is a huge issue. So…

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: May I tell you one more?

Ari Whitten: Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: That’s for the guys, here it comes for the women. In the Nordic countries they did a study. It was supposed to be a six-month study. It went for two and a half years almost because there was so much information coming out and so polarizing. The pharmaceutical industry, the chemical industry is, “No, no, it’s not a problem,” and yet consumers are saying, “We’ve got a problem here.” And the topic was should we recommend women not breastfeed in a first pregnancy? This went for two and a half years, serious study, lots of discussion. Why?

Because people in the Nordic countries eat a lot of fish. The fish come from the fjords. The fjords are long and narrow and deep. The farmers have been using pesticides, insecticides for 40 years. The rain washes that stuff into the fjords. The fish have PCBs in them.

There is no study that shows that the PCBs in a fish that you eat from the fjords is going to be dangerous for you. There is no study like that. However, if a person doesn’t detox those chemicals, when they eat that fish, those chemicals accumulate in your body. And where do they accumulate?

They are endocrine disruptors, so they accumulate in the testosterone and estrogen receptor sites, i.e., women’s breasts. So now this 28, 30-year-old woman gets married, she gets pregnant, really happy. It’s a healthy pregnancy. Now here comes the delivery. It’s a healthy delivery, uneventful. And her brain has sent the message on, let’s make some milk here. Let’s feed this newborn that’s about to come out.

And so, the breasts start producing milk. They lactate. Well, where does the raw material come for the breast milk? From the fat cells of the breast. But where have these endocrine disrupting chemicals been being stored for the last 25 to 30 years? In the fat cells of the breast.

So, the breast milk, the first three days called colostrum. The colostrum is loaded with PCBs at very toxic levels to baby. This is no longer just a little bit in one fish. This is 25 to 30 years of accumulation. And they are endocrine disrupting brain deteriorating chemicals that are in the breast milk. Now, this is a wakeup call for everybody. This is not some far-fetched theory. This is going on right now.

Why do you think we have so many autistic kids? This is another piece of the puzzle for that, right? So, the end of the report said, “No, no, it’s more important to breastfeed than not.” And I personally agree with that with one caveat. All women of childbearing age need to take six months before they get pregnant and detox their breasts. Everyone needs, every woman needs to do that. If you want to have kids, you want to protect your future baby’s brain, and this is one of the critically important things to do is get that crud out of your body. And you don’t know you have it because you don’t feel sick. It just stores in there and it accumulates.

Ari Whitten: And are there any sort of breast detoxification specific strategies or is it we’re talking general detoxification strategies?

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: There are some strategies I’ve been talking about with my friends, so I can give you the checklist of things you need to do. The first thing is you have to look at your genetics as to where is your detox capabilities compromised, likely compromised because of your genes. And then you check to see, “Am I detoxing properly? Am I methylating well? Am I producing enough glutathione?” There’re some technical things to all that. But you just check to see if detox is working for you, and you’ll find the areas that are vulnerable or weak. Those areas you supplement a lot and then you have to have really good elimination. You have to make sure that you’re hydrating at least a half ounce per pound body weight every single day.

You must have the venue to get rid of this stuff as you start mobilizing it. And you have to have the nutrients in your system to break these chemicals down. Once you get them out of the fat cells and you start to mobilize them and then you do aerobic exercise. You wear a pulse monitor. You’re not going out there trying to, you know, kick butt. You’re just, you’re being aerobic so that you’re mobilizing fat. Hot yoga does that.

You know if you’re sweating or infrared saunas, there’s a number of ways of doing. But you want to mobilize fat, mobilize fat while you have enough of the nutrients that your body may be genetically vulnerable to not having enough of to break down these chemicals. Because when you start mobilizing fat, you don’t want these chemicals hanging out and then going up to your brain.

You want to get them out of your breast and out of your body. So, if you drink a half ounce of water per pound body weight, “But it’s a lot.” Yes, it is. “But I’ll be peeing all day.” That’s the idea. That’s the idea. You got to get this stuff out of there to protect your future baby’s brain. One last point, this world is so messed up now that Einstein said this, he’s attributed to saying this, “The problems we’ve created today cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that created the problem.”

We need to up our game. But as adults we are pretty locked in to the direction that we think and how we process information. We need the next generation thinking outside the box. So, we have to protect these future babies’ brains. That means mom, you got to do the grunt work now… Oh, I forgot. You also put castor oil packs on your chest three times a week for a half hour to mobilize this stuff and get it out of there. And so, mom, you need to do the grunt work to detox. You’re going to feel so much better just in general, but this is for your baby your future baby’s brain.

How your posture can help you fix your brain

Ari Whitten: Yeah. Excellent. So, I want to get back to your pyramid and I want to start at the base with structure. This is, you know, interestingly enough, just like two days ago, I was having, doing another podcast interview with another chiropractor who is a specialist in fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome.

And I broached the topic of structure and posture and muscle balance and movement and that sort of thing. And I was actually very surprised that he kind of, he almost brushed it off like it was not that important which is very interesting to me because my older brother is a chiropractor. I’ve seen him do remarkable things with people with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome just by addressing the structure and the movement side of the equation.

So, and there’s also, one other person I’ll mention is Raymond Perrin, I don’t know if you’ve heard of him. He’s a chronic fatigue researcher out of the UK who originally kind of found this link between posture and a person’s structure and chronic fatigue syndrome. And then has kind of developed a method around that. And then kind of it evolved into him developing a theory that it’s specifically revolves around toxins stagnating in the lymph system and the glymphatic system of the brain. And he developed now a specific protocol of lymph drainage technique. And from what I can tell doesn’t emphasize structure anymore. But I personally am a big believer that structure is a big part of the equation. So, I would love to hear your take on this.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Yeah. If you herniate your disc in your low back, you get low back pain. You want the best orthopedic surgeon that does that specific surgery a couple times a day, every day doing your surgery. That’s his window. That’s what he does. He’s dialed that in. If you have a particular condition, you want to listen to the guy who does this every day. The compromise to that though, is that aside from the trauma, treatments for trauma like surgery, in general when we have a health condition, we need to make the decisions on our body. Which means we have to be able to ask questions and kind of get an overview, “Does this make sense or not?”

And when you read, “You Can Fix Your Brain,” you understand there’s a pyramid here. And sometimes it’s the electromagnetic that’s causing the problem. Sometimes. Sometimes it’s the structure that’s causing the problem. And for anyone to say that, “No biochemistry doesn’t matter. I’m just going to deal with emotions. You come sit on my couch and we’re going to process your childhood and that’s going to deal with your migraines.” Well, you know, it may be that there is a component there. But it also could be the person’s got a posture where their head is in front of their shoulders and their head is drooped down like this and they need to deal with posture…

Ari Whitten: Which is, of course, incredibly common nowadays given our technology addiction.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: You know, you always want to be careful, aside from trauma, you always want to be careful when you’re dealing with a healthcare practitioner that bleeds, “It’s my way or the highway.” You just want to be cautious, always. And the whole concept behind “You Can Fix Your Brain” is to get the big picture of you. And there are so many of the little things in here that just drop your jaw again and again, like some of the bullets I’m giving you. That’s why the subtitle of the book, you’ve got the book there. What’s the subtitle?

You Can Fix Your Brain – Just 1 Hour A Week For Optimal Health, Energy, Memory, And More

Ari Whitten: The subtitle is, “Just one hour a week to the best memory, productivity and sleep you’ve ever had.”

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Exactly. That’s not a cutesy little phrase, you know, with some big claim. It’s the way that you get successful is that every Tuesday night after dinner, every Sunday morning after church, whenever it is, you’re going to spend an hour and you’re going to learn a little more about your condition, whatever it is. And for example, when you read that the phthalates in plastic Tupperware containers, any plastic containers leach phthalates into the food.

You stop using plastic containers to store your food and you stop using plastic wrap on your food. Well, what does that mean? Well, it means you got to go to… In the book I talk about mileskimball.com or go to Amazon.com and you’re going to look for glass containers. “Well, let’s see. I’m going to need four round ones. I need a couple square ones. Different sizes. Yeah. Sometimes there’s like lasagna leftover. It’s bigger so I need a big one, you know.” And it’s going to take you an hour. Then you’re done for the week.

That’s the one hour a week. Next week you’re going to do one more thing and in six months you’ve got this. You’ve got this nailed where you’ve implemented the lifestyle changes that have you in the direction of really dealing with whatever the health concern is that you have.

Ari Whitten: “But Dr. Tom, that sounds way too difficult. I just want to have one thing like a pill that I get to pop right now that will be the solution and then I don’t want to have to ever think about this again.” And obviously I am saying this sarcastically but, of course, we know that that kind of thinking, not so much the people listening to this podcast, but it’s way too prevalent in the general public.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: That is… That’s exactly right. That’s the tattoo for millennials today. I want it all and I want it now. I want it now, like this. You aren’t going to get it now, you’ll be one of those statistics. You won’t be able to have kids because you’re infertile. Or your kids are going to be autistic, and that means for the rest of their life, right? This is a wakeup call. This is really a wakeup call as to where we are in our history right now.

Ari Whitten: Yeah. So, in terms of specifics on this structure point, do you have any specific practical recommendations of how people should address their structure?

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: You bet. You bet. The first thing, find a good chiropractor. We all need a good chiropractor. We all do, whether you have back pain or not, because our structure is not designed to sit in chairs and car seats. And with, you want to see how bad your spine is? Get in your car.

Before you start the car, get comfortable, put your hands on the wheel, adjust the rear-view mirror so that the top line of the rear-view mirror aligns with the top line of the rear window. So, it’s just aligned perfectly right? Then start your car and drive away. Go do your day, whatever you’re doing. At the end of the day when you’re getting into your car to go back home, don’t turn the car on. Look at the mirror. Oh, you have to adjust the mirror.

And if you have to adjust the mirror, your spine has shrunk during the day. And you have to adjust the mirror to the top line of the mirror, top line of the back window. That’s how you know that your discs are not hydrated very well. That’s a long-term mechanism that’s been going on, but that’s a wakeup call when you see that.

And when you start doing mechanical care to get mobility and flexibility and you start doing the little things, they’re in the book. Like most of us drive our cars with our car seat leaning back and we’re like this. I’m exaggerating so you could visualize it. So, what you do on the first of every month, you click your car seat one click up. Just a little bit every month or else it gets too much of a strain on the muscles of your back. And the next month a little bit more.

And the next month, a little bit more. And the next month, a little bit more. And within five, six months you’re sitting more straight and you’ve seen a chiropractor, you’ve gotten a massage every once in a while, you’re more flexible. Now you’re checking your mirror and at the end of the day you go, “Yes, it’s the same.” You know, it’s the same. That means your spine is more pliable, more flexible. You have a younger spine. Everyone needs mechanical care. Everyone does because of the chairs we sit in, they’re not designed for humans.

It’s what we were born and raised in. But we’re supposed to squat. Our posture is designed to squat or to sit on our knees the way they do in Japan. That’s what the physical structure is designed for. Doesn’t mean you have to do that. But, you know, we’re all going to sit in chairs and sofas and things and car seats. But you have to accommodate the stress that that causes.

Ari Whitten: Yeah. Also, movement I think relates to this and I know you kind of touched on that a little bit there. But, you know, the pumping action that is created around the spinal discs just from moving your body also helps kind of pump fluid back into those discs. So, somebody who’s sitting all day long is going to notice that effect more.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. There is no blood going into the disc after the age of 26, 28, the blood vessels dry up. The only way you get blood into the disc to keep them mobile is that the plate of the bone above and the plate, the top of the bone below, when they move, they squirt a drop of blood. They hydrate that way. It’s a hydraulic system. There’re no more blood vessels going into the disc. So, if you aren’t moving and if your joints aren’t moving, if you don’t have good range of motion, when you turn your head to the side, if you like… Here’s the bathroom mirror, right? I’m looking at the bathroom mirror right now. You go straight 90 degrees to the bathroom mirror.

Make sure your shoulders are 90 degrees. And then you turn your head. If this is as far as you can turn your head… My eyes can see 90 degrees, but that’ll fool you. You have to look at the tip of your nose. When you look at the tip of your nose you see that I’m looking over here, I’m not looking…

Ari Whitten: And just for people listening who can’t see this, he’s looking like his head is not turned all the way to the side and basically, it’s more like a 45-degree angle relative to the mirror.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Thank you. Yes, but my eyes are looking 90, so I think I’m fine. So, you look at the tip of your nose and you see, “Wow, I’m only turning 45 degrees.” And you’re really supposed to be able to turn your head directly over your shoulders. That’s just an easy little screen. Do you have normal mobility? That’s not excellent mobility. That’s normal. That’s how it’s supposed to be. So, there’s lots of little things like that that you can do.

How EMFs affect your brain

Ari Whitten: Yeah. I would love to dig deeper on this topic with you, but there’s a whole bunch of stuff on my list here that I would love to cover with you and I know we’ve only scratched the surface of what you have. I want, there’s some controversial aspects of what you do or what you recommend. So, I want to talk to you about some dietary stuff, you know, grains and gluten and lectins and stuff like that that, you know, a lot of that stuff is controversial.

But EMFs is one of your sides of the pyramid. That’s another controversial area where, you know, we have kind of a lot of people in the natural health community who are really going on and on about how important EMFs are as a factor. And even some people, you know, like I can think of Dr. Jack Kruse, for example. He’s a little out there, but he really considers nonnative EMFs, or manmade EMFs to be the primary driver of chronic disease.

Then we have a lot of people, you know, in this sort of skeptics’ communities, more mainstream communities. And to be fair, there’s quite a bit of evidence also supporting the idea that these things are perfectly safe and non-harmful. So, we have kind of this mixed bag of evidence of some studies suggesting its harmful, other studies suggesting no harm. So, what has led you to conclude that EMFs are a very big factor that we should be concerned about?

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Well, good question. Really good question. They are a component. For some people they are the primary component triggering whatever their health concern is. For others, they are a fueling component. And for others, they are no problem at all. It just depends on the individual. So, it’s dangerous to always think it’s all or every.

There’s only a couple of things that are all in every. But when you read the science it is really clear. Everyone has a problem with wheat, whether they know it or not. Just read the science. There’s no controversy if you read the science. When that topic of disagreements come up, I go back to, I’ve got a slide that’s a cartoon from the 1950s.

And in the background is a nuclear bomb going off. And then there’s a couple sitting on their porch and they’re looking off in the distance to the nuclear bomb, the mushroom way out there. And they’re sitting on the porch reading the paper, and the headline of the paper says, “Government Study Says Nuclear Bombs Are Safe.” Right?

And then the next cartoon is from the 1980s when it was BGH, bovine growth hormone is safe, right? And so, the industry tries to sneak around ways of diffusing any concern. They always do that. And that’s the same with the cell phone, the electromagnetic field right now. Just last night I was at an event with Dr. Gilles Seralini, who is the French scientist who identified Roundup is a huge problem.

What he identified a number of years ago was that Monsanto said Roundup is perfectly safe. It doesn’t harm humans. No, I’m sorry, they said, glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, glyphosate does not harm humans. And there’s no study that shows that it harms humans.

It harms the microbiome seriously, but that’s not human tissue. And so that’s how they get away with that. But it’s the, 46 percent of Roundup is glyphosate and 56 percent is listed as inert ingredients. And so, nobody checks the inert ingredients, they are inert. And the government regulators just let that stuff slide.

But it was Seralini’s lab that found out the inert ingredients are highly carcinogenic. There is lots of toxic compounds in those chemicals that make up more than half of Roundup. And so…

Ari Whitten: Wasn’t it, to my knowledge, correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t he attacked. Monsanto kind of went after him and attacked his research.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Aggressively, aggressively, and it’s been years. There’ve been seven lawsuits. He’s won every lawsuit because the judge finally said, he just throws Monsanto’s lawyers out. And…

Ari Whitten: Good for him.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: So, the story that there were 18 lawyers for Monsanto. And then Dr. Seralini and his one lawyer. You know, you’re up against an army over there. But they’re trying because it’s a billion-dollar industry for them.

So that’s true with electromagnetics right now in that they’re saying there’s no evidence there’s any harm. It’s the accumulation of the amount of toxic input that our bodies are getting. For some people, electromagnetics, they’ve got good resilience against electromagnetics. Some people don’t and they’re the canaries in the coal mine.

The yellow canaries in the coal mine. For them electromagnetics is critically important. You know, it was 25 years ago that it would take a room twice the size of the room I’m in, so about 40 by 40, floor to ceiling computers to have the computing power of this phone, right? And anyone 25 years ago could never have imagined that this was possible.

You walk around, and, in your hand, you’d have this thing. But this thing secretes electromagnetic pollution. And for some people it, you don’t hold a battery next to your brain. There’re too many studies that show it may be a problem for some people. Every one of you listening should have an electromagnetic case on your phone.

Now I drive an Acura and as I walk up to the Acura with the keys in my hand, the lights by the door handle turn on soft light, so at nighttime I can see where I am, and the interior dome light goes on as I get close to the car. The key sends a message, right? But if I’m holding the key in the same hand as my phone, which has a Pong case on it…

Ari Whitten: P-O-N-G?

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: P-o-n-g. It doesn’t work. The lights don’t turn on and I have to take the keys out of the hand with my phone and then it works just fine. This case now there may be better cases, I don’t know, but I know the Pong works because it doesn’t turn on the lights in my car.

Ari Whitten: Yeah, that’s the reason I was curious about the spelling of the specific brand you’re using because, yeah, I’ve heard mixed stuff around this. But I’ve heard from people saying that if you do get one of these cases and it actually is effective than your phone won’t actually function.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: My phone works fine. And I’ve used a Pong, oh gosh, it must be six years now, six, seven years. Every time I upgrade the phone, I just get a new one.

Ari Whitten: Okay.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: You know, I can trash that argument right away.

Ari Whitten: Have you tested the EMF emission of it with an actual EMF tester?

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: I have not. And I will. I’ll buy a tester soon. I just haven’t got around to buying one, but the lights don’t turn on my car.

Ari Whitten: Okay.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Bottom line, the lights don’t turn on.

Ari Whitten: Got you. It’s blocking something at the very least.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: It’s blocking something, right? I mean there might be some that are better. I’m not saying this is the best, but I’m saying we all should have something just to reduce the assault on our brain and our electromagnetic system. We are electrical beings. And when you, when you throw your electrical radiance out of balance, when you lose your Schumann waves, Schumann waves, 7.83 megahertz. It’s what protects planet earth from the radiation out there.

Humans have Schumann wave brain patterns, 7.83. And when you don’t have enough Schumann waves you get anxiety, you get depression, you get brain dysfunction because your electromagnetics are out of balance, right? We’re electromagnetic beings. And that’s a component of what we have to get some balance to.

Ari Whitten: Yeah. So, like rapid fire, in addition to the case on the phone, do you have maybe two other strategies that you know, just quick tips for people as far as reducing EMF exposure?

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Oh, absolutely. Turn the wireless off at night. Who needs wireless on when you’re sleeping? You know, turn it off. “Ohh, it’s a pain in the butt.” Well, we’ll put that on your tombstone, right? So, turn the wireless off. And second, get anything electrical that doesn’t have to be in your bedroom, out of your bedroom. That’s where you spend six, seven, eight hours a night, a day, every day. Have that be as electromagnetic free as possible.

How diet affects your brain

Ari Whitten: Nice. So, I want to get into not the whole biochemistry side of the pyramid because that, I’m sure we could talk about that for 10 hours by itself. But specifically, some of the dietary stuff for brain health. I want to make sure that we cover some of these controversial things that I mentioned, and I know we’re somewhat limited for time now.

I appreciate that you don’t have a hard cutoff right now, too, but I won’t take advantage of you too much here and keep you too long. But hopefully we can cover this relatively quick. So, lectins and gluten grains and dairy. So real quick, sort of in a rapid fire way, I know that these are very nuanced, complex topics, but what would you say to skeptics of people who, you know, don’t support Dr. Gundry’s theories around lectins being harmful, for example, or say that there just isn’t much evidence to support the idea that gluten and grains are driving autoimmune disease. So, what do you feel are the strongest arguments to support that lectins are toxic, or grains are?

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Mrs. Patient, your immune system is the armed forces of your body, army, air force, marines, coast guard, navy. It’s there to protect you. If your immune system is called out and says, “We’ve got a problem here with these lectins,” you’ve got a problem. That doesn’t happen out of the blue. There’re no such thing as normal, elevated antibodies. It’s never normal to have elevated antibodies. If your immune system is fighting something, there’s a reason why it’s fighting, and you have to pay attention to that. And there are new tests that just came on the market recently. It’s so cool. I’ll go to wheat first and then I’ll come back to lectins. That in the world of wheat sensitivity the problem has always been, but there are multiple components of wheat that may trigger an immune response. But the laboratories, every laboratory in the world checks one, it’s called alpha gliadin and that’s all they check.

Some labs will check two. They also check deamidated gliadin, but that’s all they check. But there’s at least 62 different components of wheat that may trigger an immune response. And so, if your immune system is fighting gluteomorphins, a component in wheat, but you’re only checking alpha gliadin, alpha gliadin comes back normal.

But you’ve got elevated antibodies to gluteomorphins when you eat wheat, it’s directly going to affect your brain because it hits the opiate receptors in your brain. That’s why they’re called morphine, like morphine. And so, you’re going to impact brain function with that sensitivity that you’ve got. But you’d never know that because your doctor only did the tests that looked at one component of wheat. January of 2016 Mayo Clinic came out with a study. And this is from Dr. Joe Murray and his lab. He’s one of the top researchers in the world on celiac.

There are four horsemen in celiac. I call them the four horsemen. He’s one of them. And he’s the only one that doesn’t have any pharmaceutical affiliations. He is as pure a geek scientist as you could want, wears a bow tie, leather patches on the elbows of his sport coat, horn rimmed glasses. Just a wonderful guy. Just classic geek of geeks. His team published a study.

There’s a new era in laboratory medicine and there’s technology now. Just like we talked about with the cell phones that what’s in your hand now took a room, a 40 by 40 room 25 years ago. The same is true in laboratory medicine and there’s a technology called silicone chip technology where they can look at 6,000 different antigens, things that stimulate an immune response, in one blood draw, 6,000. So, they came out with a test using this technology called the Wheat Zoomer and the Wheat Zoomer looks at 26 different peptides of poorly digested wheat, 26.

Plus it looks at intestinal permeability and it has a 97 to 99 percent accuracy every single time. There’s never been a lab tests that had that kind of sensitivity and specificity before, but it’s a new era in technology. They’re remarkable. I tell you this because there is now the Lectin Zoomer that’s come out that looks at, I haven’t counted, 25 or 30 different lectins. If your immune system is fighting lectins, you got a problem with lectins. You need to read the “Plant Paradox.” But if your immune system comes back with this technology tests and says there’s no problem with lectins, you don’t have a problem with lectins as far as we can tell. So, I disagree with Dr. Sinatra that every person needs to avoid lectins. I fully agree with him that everyone has to check.

Ari Whitten: So, did you mean to say Dr. Sinatra or Dr. Gundry?

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Gundry. Excuse me. I get both steeds confused sometimes. Thank you. So, I think that everyone needs to check if they have a food sensitivity to lectins and if you do, you can’t argue, body language never lies. If your immune system with this most comprehensive test… You can find out about the tests at thedr.com, thedr.com. They’re all there. But if your immune system says you got a problem, you got a problem.

Ari Whitten: Yeah, I think that’s a nice nuanced and evidence-based approach to answering that apparent dichotomy and controversy there. There’s also, you know, kind of the issue of how common… Well, I guess there’s a few issues here, but how common this is happening, you know. With Dr. Gundry’s approach, he’s making the case that these things are causing so many different diseases, but then you actually go into the literature and you look at a lot of the foods that are supposedly high in lectins and you go, is this food associated with disease and accelerated aging?

You know, for example, tomatoes. We can just take that, and you know pretty much every place you look, you find that in general, the research supports the idea that tomatoes are protective against various diseases, protective against neurological diseases. Now that certainly doesn’t mean that in certain cases somebody may be reactive to them and they may be harmful. But I just don’t think it’s supportable that you could say these are universally harmful to everyone when the science is just clearly showing that they’re not.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: I fully agree with you. I completely agree. The way to look at this and with the technology that we have today, and of course different types of tomatoes are on the Lectin Zoomer profile. You can find out if your immune system is fighting, if your immune system is activated against tomatoes, do not eat tomatoes because it’s causing more inflammation for you. And inflammation is the driver to every degenerative disease.

The problem with gluten

Ari Whitten: Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. So, based… how common do you think it is for people to have a problem with wheat and gluten or various compounds in wheat?

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: It’s 100 percent. The studies are very clear. I’ve got five studies, five different studies on this. Every human gets intestinal permeability every time wheat comes out of the stomach into the small intestine, every person, every time. But Mrs. Patient, you have an entire new body every seven years. Every cell in your body regenerates, the inside lining of your gut is the fastest, every three to five days. Some cells are very slow, like bone cells and brain cells, but every cell regenerates. So, you have toast for breakfast. You tear the lining of your gut, but it heals. So, you’re fine. You don’t feel anything. You have a sandwich for lunch, you tear the lining of the gut and it heals. Pasta for dinner. You tear the lining of the gut, it heals. Croutons on your salad. You take thyroid medication that’s got wheat in it, or some of your vitamins or your probiotics have wheat in them.

You tear the lining of the gut, but it heals until one day you don’t heal anymore, and that’s called loss of oral tolerance. When you lose oral tolerance, there are many reasons why that happens, but when you, and that’s all in the “Autoimmune Fix,” my first book. When you lose oral tolerance, now you get pathogenic intestinal permeability, which we call the leaky gut. And now these larger molecules get through the tears in the cheese cloth into the bloodstream.

And these macromolecules, your immune system fights these macromolecules trying to protect you like lectins or something. It might be fighting lectins if the macromolecule of tomato got in and your immune system makes antibodies to tomatoes because of that. It’s just trying to protect you and then because of molecular mimicry and there’s seven reasons, but now you run the risk of developing autoimmune diseases.

Because your immune system, trying to protect you from the macromolecules getting through the tears in the lining of the gut into the bloodstream, create your cross reactivity and you attack your brain, or you attack your joints, or you attack your skin.

Ari Whitten: Yeah. Now, just a couple specific points on that. First of all is that gut permeability, do you feel that’s the most common driving factor for why food intolerances develop and why so many people develop more and more food intolerances to such a wide array of different things? It’s just because you’re getting these macromolecules leaking into the bloodstream and then the immune system is now fighting it. Now you become intolerant to the food.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: That’s a really good question and that’s exactly what happens. I mean, it’s a given in functional medicine practice, when you do a 90-food panel for someone, they come back sensitive to 20, 25 different foods. Then, “Oh my god, that’s everything I eat.” Well, of course it is. Your immune system’s trying to protect you. You’ve got a leaky gut. We need to heal your gut. Wait three to six months and check again and then you’ll have one food, maybe two that you have to stay away from. Yeah, yeah. That’s a very commonly accepted mechanism. Lots of research on that.

Why not all types of gut permeability are inherently bad

Ari Whitten: Got you. And I want to play devil’s advocate on one point regarding kind of the stimulus of the gut permeability. Exercise itself, like just doing a workout, for example aerobic exercise, whatever kind of workout, creates a transient gut permeability.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Correct.

Ari Whitten: So, given that and given that we know exercise is so strongly associated with such a wide array of health benefits, how much stock can we put in sort of that mechanism of action being so critical. And I’m asking this question, but I do agree that probably just the frequency at which you do it. If you’re doing it chronically, every day, multiple times a day, it’s probably a problem. Even if it’s from exercise.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Well, there’s a difference between endurance athletes who are pounding the pavement and just beating themselves up and people who are doing aerobic exercise, 30, 40 minutes, three, four days a week. There is a huge world of difference. And the intestinal permeability that comes from exercise is transient, as you said, it’s transient and you heal. You heal immediately unless there are so many factors coming in causing a tearing of the lining of your gut.

Exercise is one more in there and then you got a problem and then you have a huge problem. It’s not the exercise, it’s the environment in the gut and here’s the pearl. You have to rebuild the microbiome and when you rebuild the microbiome exercise is not a problem anymore. Caveat, the endurance people. That’s a whole other… you’re doing hundred-mile runs, trainings and all that. That’s a whole other world. You’re going to pay the piper when you do that.

Ari Whitten: Definitely. Well there is still a pretty long list of stuff that I would love to have covered with you and maybe I can have you on again at some point. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. I have one final question for you, which is what are the top three or four tips that you want to leave people with, or practical recommendations for improving their brain health? And I would also, since we didn’t sort of cover the positive side of food, of maybe like brain health boosting foods, can, I would like to request that one of the four be maybe a mention of a few specific foods that you like for boosting brain health?

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Sure, of course. First one, half ounce of water per pound body weight. Critically important for every system of your body, including your brain. Got to be able to flush out toxins, get them out of there, have the highway running smoothly. So, when you’re dehydrated, everything’s sluggish and backed up. It’s like you’re doing a 30-minute drive, but it’s bumper to bumper traffic, it takes you two hours.

That’s what happens when you’re dehydrated inside your body. Second one, eat the colors of the rainbow every day. Five different colors every day, some blueberries, some orange carrots, some red tomatoes, some green broccoli, some purple cabbage, every day, five colors of the rainbow. Every day. Third one, and this is a real pearl, go to vitalchoice.com. It’s in both of my books, VitalChoice. They have the highest quality wild seafood commercially available that I’ve ever found.

The president of the company is a friend. He was a salmon fisherman for 20 years and put four families together to bring this food out to the world and they have a particular type of tuna fish. And most of us don’t eat tuna fish much anymore because we all know that it’s high in mercury. All the tuna is high in mercury except for this one because Randy, my friend, figured it out that salmon fisherman always catch tuna in their nets, you know. And usually the baby tuna hang out with the salmon for some reason, don’t know. And they throw the baby tuna way. There’s nothing they can do with it. So, Randy said, “You know, I’ll take, let’s take the baby tuna.” And so, he takes, he cuts the belly of the baby tuna and cans it. It’s called Ventresca.

And because the baby tuna hasn’t had enough time to eat big fish, bigger fish, because tuna eat… Tuna is a big fish, it eats, tuna eat the middle-sized fish that are concentrated with mercury. So, tuna get more mercury per gram of meat. But the baby tuna hasn’t eaten big fish yet. They’re still eating plankton and whatever else they’re eating. Right? So, the baby tuna is mercury free. They can’t say no mercury. Some competitors filed a lawsuit because if you do spectroscopy, you’ll find some mercury in there, but it’s not measurable. Right? So, you get cans of Ventresca, v-e-n-t-r-e-s-c-a, Ventresca at vitalchoice.com. One can of Ventresca has 7,000 milligrams of omega 3s.

Ari Whitten: Nice.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: That’s enough brain food for your child for a week. Make them a tuna fish sandwich. He’s got enough brain food for the week. So that’s just, it’s a pearl. That’s just a pearl. My jaw dropped when I learned that.

Ari Whitten: Yeah, that’s fascinating. I’ve never heard that before.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Yeah. Another one, from VitalChoice is the salmon roe, the salmon eggs. Infants love salmon roe.

Ari Whitten: Yeah. I can attest to that very much from my own personal experience. I have a two-year-old son and we’ve been feeding him the salmon eggs, the ikura from VitalChoice since he started eating when he was about six months old.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Marvelous. It’s great food for them. Great brain food. It’s got the omega 3s plus a few other fats in there that are just great for them. It’s got the astaxanthin, the polyphenols, it’s great, great brain food.

Ari Whitten: Yeah, there was actually just a study that came out maybe two or three days ago showing that people with the APOE4 genotype that are predisposed to Alzheimer’s were… They found that omega 3s in the phospholipid form, like you’d get them sort of with astaxanthin and with the phospholipids, like in the salmon roe was uniquely beneficial in supporting brain health and brain uptake of the omega 3s.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Oh, marvelous. Marvelous. Glad to hear that. I wasn’t familiar with that one. Yes. So, a few things increase your water, rainbow – five colors a day, salmon roe, and Ventresca.

Ari Whitten: I love it. Well, thank you so much Dr. Tom, this has been an absolute pleasure. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you and having you on the show for this podcast and you’re a wealth of wisdom. I hope that I can have you on again at some point and we can tap into some of the other many aspects of the four sides of the pyramid. In the meantime, I would recommend to everybody listening in who cares about their brain.

And whether you have brain fog or whether you have brain related fatigue, or you just care about protecting your brain from Alzheimer’s and dementia, which everybody should, get this book, “You Can Fix Your Brain.” Also, I think you mentioned, Dr. Tom, that you have a freebie that you want to give away. We can set that up at a link on the… We’ll set it up at theenergyblueprint.com/brainfix. And what, do you want to tell people about what that freebie is?

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: You bet, you bet. It’s one of my pantry essentials. It’s the anti-inflammatory brain boosting staples. It should be in your kitchen, from herbs and spices to nuts and seeds, proteins, beverages, fermented foods, dark colored fruits, cruciferous vegetables, and a bunch of other things. So, I put this list together for you and you can download it at the link that you’ll have for them

Ari Whitten: Yeah, so theenergyblueprint.com/brainfix. So, Dr. Tom, thank you so much again. It was an honor, a privilege and I hope I can have this conversation or have another future conversation, an extension of this one in the future with you and have a wonderful rest of your day.

Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Thanks, Ari. I would just say to all of your listeners, this is a critical concept for you guys, for you and your children and your future children to just learn some basics, how to take a step back. So, thank you for the opportunity to talk.

Ari Whitten: Yeah, really a pleasure. Take care of Dr. Tom.

You Can Fix Your Brain (Just 1 Hour A Week For Optimal Health, Energy, Memory, And More) With Dr. Tom O’Bryan – Show Notes

What “You Can Fix Your Brain” really means (1:17)
How the 4 pillars in the pyramid of brain health can be used to solve most brain-related issues (11:35)
Why lifestyle and nutrition matters to our health and survival (15:39)
How your posture can help you fix your brain (28:37)
You Can Fix Your Brain – Just 1 Hour A Week For Optimal Health, Energy, Memory, And More (32:29)
How EMFs affect your brain (39:33)
How diet affects your brain (48:53)
The problem with gluten (56:20)
Why not all types of gut permeability are inherently bad (59:42)