[text_block style=”style_1.png” align=”left”]Mike: All right everyone. Welcome back to the Autism Intensive. We are very excited to be here with Tom Malterre. He is a best-selling author of three books, which we will have links below this video, which can more about. Well, Tom, I think a great starting place would be talking about the environmental toxins and the way that the effect our metabolism, neurodevelopment. I know you’ve looked at this. You are a father yourself. So maybe give us a broad picture overview of how bad and how real is with the toxins.

00:22 Autism and the Environment

Tom: Is it a real problem? That depends on your perspective, right. If we start looking at what the research is telling us, so we look at American Academy of Pediatrics, and we look at some of the data came from own government in the year 2010, basically what we are seeing is we have now 74 billion pounds of chemicals being imported are produced in the United States every single day. 74 billion pounds per day, that's over 250 pounds per person per day. That number did not include some of the four most commonly thought of chemical classes, which of the pharmaceuticals, the pesticides, the food additives and fuels, things like natural gas and petroleum. It didn’t include those chemicals. So we have this massive production of chemicals. Look everywhere. Try and avoid certain chemicals. It’s really difficult. It is not like we’re living with dirt. It's not like we are in these big huts these days. We have housing materials, everything we touch; our couches are made of some sort of chemical. There is foam everywhere. We are consuming out of coffee cups that have plastic lids and word sucking in the BPA. They are everywhere. They are all over the place. We have to imagine, if indeed we’re seeing this drastic rise of autism over the last few decades, and synonymously we’re seeing this drastic rise in chemical use, is there some sort of correlation? So you start looking at the data put out by Rossingol and Frye. They looked at some really nice analyses of the research, and said “Yeah, sure the chemicals are likely contributing to autism.” Go back even farther and you look at Dr. Palmer. He was in Texas. He was saying “Hey, wait a second. We can track these regional areas and by thousand pound of mercury exposure in these areas, we can dictate, we can say that would have an increased risk of autism based on what we see here.” Okay, there are a couple of studies there. Andre recently came out with his review and many others as well, we’re authors. They showed something similar. “Look, yeah, it’s totally locational. There's gotta be some sort of exposure attached to it.” But Andre’s paper was fascinating, because the tightest association he had was for anogenital distance. What tells me is that something is happening in utero when the child is developing. Their sex organs are being altered in some way, not the normal distance they would be. When you look at the data, what would create anogenital distance variation? It turns out there's one specific class of chemicals called phthalates.

03:07 Phthalates

Tom: The phthalates, which are plasticizers (what a fun name for Scrabble PHTHALATES, good luck with that one. If you get stuck with Hs sometime right?), the phthalates themselves are these substances that are used to fix oil and water mixtures. Oil and water mixtures would be things like essential oil-type fragrance with some sort of carrier, or some sort of coloring oil, and some water carrier. What I'm talking about primarily is cosmetics. I'm talking about personal care products, high in phthalates. But they are also using plastics as a softening agent, so you'll find them in things like vinyl curtains. You'll find them in vinyl flooring to soften that. Polyvinylchloride would be a vinyl softened floor. Sure enough, Scientific Americans even had a journal article. It was interesting. It showed, they weren’t looking for this, but they found the rates of autism were increased in people who had poor air circulation in their homes, and they had vinyl flooring. This fascinating paper in 2014 came up and says “Wait a second. Some of these metabolism and phthalates are so specific for the autism condition that with a 91% specificity, we can look for some of these metabolites and we can predict then whether a child may or may not have autism.” So you say “Okay, plastics may be altering brain function in children? How is this possible? My goodness, what are all these things? What are all these chemicals out in the environment? What do they do?” Plastics like phthalates and plastics like BPA, they’re called endocrine disrupting chemicals. Their chemical structure looks similar to hormones. It kind of looks like estrogen, really, its ring structure and whatnot. It can have this binding to estrogen receptors. In fact let's talk about the other plastic that we know of.

05:11 BPA

Tom: BPA, everybody talks about the plastic bottles and the BPA, the plastic wrap everywhere, BPA, BPA, look for BPA-free. We are hearing about that bisphenol a everywhere. Did you know this was first manufactured in 1891 and through 1930s, was used originally as a synthetic estrogen? BPA was actually manufactured as a synthetic estrogen. They fed this stuff to animals to make them fat. They later gave it to humans as a synthetic estrogen supplement. It didn’t last very long. It got replaced by something called DES, which later was shown to cause cancerous issues and all sorts of problems. This was a synthetic estrogen. Then it got repurposed 1950s as a plasticizing agent. It softens up the plastics. It is found everywhere now. You see the word plastic, it likely has BPA, unless it says BPA- free. We have this estrogenic type compound everywhere. I went diving through. I was like “How much BPA are we producing? What’s going on with this stuff?”  I found this fascinating article by the industry that was saying that we were well over 15, closer to 16 billion pounds of BPA being produced every single year.

06:24 Endocrine Disruption

Tom: You know estrogens. They react on minute levels in the human body, teeny, teeny, teeny little part per billion levels in the human body or less, part per trillion in some cases. You have these minute levels of this compound that can change hormonal function. We start looking in utero. We can see alterations in brain function, in sex hormone function, with the exposure of these different chemicals. We can see that when women apply skincare products, and some of the phthalates, some of the plasticizing agents come out in their urine in higher amounts, average woman 12 personal care products a day. She's got sunscreen. She's got lotion. She's got some sort of antiaging cream. She's got some sort of shampoo, some sort of deodorant, some sort of toothpaste. All these things have the potential of having this phthalate in them, especially if they have fragrance or colors in them. One of the most common things is gonna be a perfume. For men it is going to be an aftershave. In fact there was one particular trial that was showing as men increase their personal care products, for each personal care product they used, they 33% increase of these chemicals showing up in the urine. If you put something on your skin, you put something anywhere where you can inhale it you're going to end up with this stuff in your body. It is going to end up in your urine. A Northern Mexican study was fascinating. It showed that women who took more of these personal care products, had higher levels of phthalate metabolites in their urine, and they had two times the rate of breast cancer. When they looked at pre-menopausal women, so they already have a higher estrogen level to begin with, they had a 4.1 times increase of breast cancer, the higher these levels. We know these hormones are completely shifted. What we’re finding in the population of course is you will have these weird thyroid issues in the moms that might leave the child more susceptible for altered brain development. If you look at the different studies on levels of BPA, levels of phthalate specifically, you’ll find that these endocrine disrupting chemicals shift thyroid function quite effectively. They don't shift TSH. There's this fascinating play of these minute chemicals in our environment everywhere that are altering the hormonal function and possibly the development of the child in utero. But it gets even more exciting. I guess you could call is exciting. It is kind of sad, really.

09:04 The Body’s Response to Plasticizing Agents

Tom: These plasticizing agents, when they come into the human body, the human body will respond. Nature always responds to signals. We drove here today and it was a beautiful, cold fall day and the leaves are falling everywhere. The leaves no longer receive the radiation they needed to keep producing chlorophyll. The chlorophyll colors disappeared. The green disappeared and now we are seeing these bright cricoid compounds left in the leaves. Responding to environmental signals, this is what cells, this is what life is supposed to be doing. As we're receiving signals from these plasticizing agents, our body will respond. It will say “Wait a second. This is not self. Therefore I should probably process this. I should probably change it into a form that I can recognize and get it out of the body, because it's not self. We know this process as metabolism or it might be need detoxification. The presence of these chemicals will alter the production of certain enzymes. It will alter these so called phase 1 enzymes, the Cytochrome P4 50- based enzymes.

10:20 PXR/ Pregnane X Receptor

Tom: Interestingly enough, how it does this is through a specific receptor called the pregnane X receptor or PXR. PXR is fascinating. It up regulates some of these detoxification genes. One of the genes it up regulates is the 24 hydroxylase enzyme. This 24 hydroxylase is interesting because it does something to one of our favorite nutrients, which is vitamin D. The research on vitamin D connections with autism are all over the place, deficiencies, all over the place. We are wondering, why is that? Is it a lack of sun exposure or lack of dietary intake or lack of transport? What's going? Is there some sort of gene? I am going to hypothesize that it's environmental. I was at a conference back in 2009 it was, with Dr. Michael Holick, one of the vitamin D researchers. We were sharing hotel rooms next to each other, so we got a cab back to the hotel and we were chatting. One of the things he mentions is a little aside was “By the way, Tom, keep your eye on PXR.” I’m like “PXR? What’s PXR?” Of course, I am looking it up and sure enough it looks like certain anti-seizure medications at that time will really excellent at degrading vitamin D. So I was like, wait a second. Autism, valproic acid, anti-seizure medications, there's a tight correlation here. Could it be now that the pathway that’s linking a lot of these autism studies on different chemicals could be associated with this PXR activation?  What do we have? We have air pollutants. Some of air pollutants activate PXR. We know when you live a certain distance from highway, you're more likely to have an autistic child. What about the organochlorine pesticides? Yes, within 500 m of an organochlorine pesticide poundage site, 6.1 times increase of autism. There are all these likelihoods of increasing autism when you're exposed to chemicals that excite this pregnane X receptor. Now we’ve had another study just came out a few months back on BPA, bisphenol a, and it turns out, yes it does a beautiful job of exciting this PXR. Possibly one of the mechanisms, tying together the chemical exposure, which the chemicals themselves causes, is mitochondrial dysfunction, hormonal imbalances, but also now we are seeing this aspect of nutrient deficiency. We might be contributing to a vitamin D deficiency.

Mike: Tons of research about it, yeah.

Tom: You listen to functional medicine updates, right?

Mike:  Correct.

13:05 Vitamin D

Tom:  Dr. Jeff Bland, back in 2004 he did this wonderful exposé on vitamin D. Do you remember that? There was Colleen Hayes. Colleen Hayes from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, came on and she gave this beautiful talk about how it modulates immune cell function, and whatnot. She was doing research on MS at the time. She was doing this animal model of MS and she could reverse it with the active hormone 125 dihydroxy cholecalciferol. Fascinating stuff, reverse MS with a hormone. This was amazing. I had to get an interview with her. So I sat down with her lunch one time. She said ”Tom, you know vitamin D is fascinating.” She said “Look at this. It appears that the human body will allow the immune cells to get excited and active for about 48 hours. After that time, each cell will turn on then a specific enzyme, called the one hydroxylase enzyme that will then produce more 125 dihydroxy cholecalciferol. Once it does that, this active hormone then changes the behavior of the immune cell. It actually causes them to migrate out of sensitive areas. In this case it was the brain for her research. It actually causes them to apotose or kill themselves, so you don't have hyper responsive immune attack to tissues. So in essence, if you look at that data, and others now since then, many reviews on the immune modulation of vitamin D, it looks like it's a modulating switch, or a turn off switch of sorts, to dampen down. If we don't have adequate vitamin D, is it possible we are leading to an increase of inflammatory response wherever there's damage. It could be in the brain. It could be in the gut. We are going to have accelerated damage. We’re missing a key turn off switch and it could be because of these chemicals.

Mike: So much to take away there, Tom. It is important to emphasize this loss of immune intolerance. I want to explore that with the micriobiome, but just recap because there was a lot there. So the environmental toxins affect the metabolism and endocrine system. We know from the Environmental Working Group, and many others, that these hormones are involved in neurodevelopment. That's kind of connection and you talked about that and then this pregnane X receptor. I’ve seen that in research, but haven't heard it articulated that well. These toxins upregulate that and suppresses vitamin D functions in a sense.

Tom: Exactly, it’s like nuclear factor kappa B. It’s like Sulforaphane. It’s a transcriptive factor.  When a chemical binds to this particular transcriptive factor, it will cause a portion of the DNA to be read that will express certain proteins. The DNA opens up. We read it. We make more proteins. Some of the proteins are enzymes and the enzymes that we’re making, a lot of our enzymes, the enzymes that we are making will put an extra hydroxyl group on vitamin D. Normally we want 25 hydroxyvitamin D. We want 125 dihydroxyvitamin D. We are all of a sudden getting 24,25 hydroxyvitamin D or 124, 25. The body doesn’t like those. It takes them out and depletes your vitamin D store. So yes, yes.

Mike: Interesting, I worked with a functional medicine practitioner in Colorado doing nutrition work for number of years. There are 300+ days a year in Colorado and it was a mystery how many people came in vitamin D deficient. Interesting stuff.  What are some of the high hit rate compounds in foods? You touched on organophosphates. I know those are a big one linked with autism. You talked about the vinyl flooring, a big one. Any high hit rate foods that you want to make sure that parents and practitioners can avoid?

16:39 Plastics Exposure

Tom: We want to talk about the plastics first. We want to talk about where people are going to get exposed to this so they can reduce their possibility of having problems. We are seeing now that it is connected to obesity and diabetes, and you name the disease. BPA itself is going to be found in plastic wraps. Oftentimes it can be found in bottles, specifically the polycarbonate bottles, like the Nalgene-type bottles. By the way, the BPS or the BPA-free stuff still has these hormone qualities to it. It's not safe. I would say get a stainless steel bottle. The hemp plastic should be out soon. Hopefully those will be coming real soon, so that's great. They are making a mushroom plastic right now. I’m not sure they are going to use those for water, but maybe for other things. Watching what's called a fresh food lifestyle. If you're eating out of the can, you’re going to get BPA lining in the can, unless it’s Eden Foods and what not. If you are eating out of mason jars, you can actually get BPA free lids for the mason jars. Eco-jars makes nice lids, if you want to carry around your stuff like that. You can avoid plastics by eating fresh foods, literally. There is a study where people went on a fresh foods diet, and after they went on a fresh foods diet of not eating things out of cartons, plastic bottles, their milk and their orange juice were out of glass, everything, everything not touching plastic. They can reduce their BPA by over 60% by just eating a fresh food diet. A lot of it is coming through the food supply. Some of it’s coming in thermal paper receipts from the grocery store. Please by no means ever go up and grab a hand sanitizer and then grabbed a receipt because the hand sanitizer increases absorption BPA by over hundredfold. You want to definitely take that receipt and either put in your wallet or get rid it. Take a snap shot of it with your phone and that’s the best thing. Do something, but don't handle those receipts too much, or don't handle money, because of receipts are next those as a source of BPA. Then we go to phthalates. We say phthalates are scents and fragrance. Think of the word parfume, perfume, aftershave, anything scented, anything with color that you're putting on or near your body, anything in your house that you are using the spray for fragrance, anything that you have the vinyl curtain. These shower curtains are incredibly toxic. It takes them a good six days before the levels are even decent to go around, to off gas will run rampant, so don’t buy them. Buy hemp curtains. Buy cotton, organic cotton curtains, whatever you can do. They wash easily. They work great. Then BOOM, you just reduced a tremendous amount of your exposure to these plasticizing agents. Watch out for the air freshener things on the dashboard of your car or hanging from the rearview mirror and dryer sheets. It appears what's happening now is so many people are sensitive to scents. Over 30% of the population when tested has some sort of fragrant sensitivity, so just watch out for the fragrance stuff. You should be fine.

Mike: What about couches and things like that. Do you go that far with some parents and some people you work with? Couches, rugs, mattresses and pillows?

19:34 More Sources of Plastics

Tom: Absolutely. In some people I do. First I say “Get rid of the dryer sheets”. A lot of those people are putting in dryer sheets and they are sucking that stuff in all night, especially my asthmatic kids, people with ADD/ADHD and autism. I say the dryer sheets are out. You just can't do them. There are natural fragrant stuff from seventh generation, so you can get away with softening your stuff and scenting it without using those chemicals. No, I don't always go there, depending on the sensitivity of a person. Yeah, you’re right. There are pesticides. There are plastic compounds, nylon, in the couch the flame retardants, so there are chemicals everywhere. Ideally, we would be conscious of those things when we are buying our furniture, absolutely. We need to raise the awareness. I won’t get into it because that would be a completely different talk, but the flame retardants have been proven not to be effective, and they've been shown to be very toxic and very persistent in our environment. They don’t work on the PJs. We are putting it on our kid’s PJs for goodness sakes. We are putting in our laundry and then it gets all over the other laundry and people are getting in through their skin. It's kind of a mess.

20:33 Detoxification

Tom: We need to be conscious that these synthetic compounds were never made by nature, and our bodies don't necessarily know how to process it. We don't know how to take the signals, like the plant does with sunshine, and change it. We just don't know yet. We’re trying our best. One more thing, the plastics, this is fascinating, the plastics usually get shoveled out of our body via detoxification. We said how they up regulate the phase I enzymes, but they don't work on the phase II very well. They use up something called glucuronide in the process. There are three primary ways to get out. They get out through sulfate. They get out through glutathione. They get out through glucuronide. It turns out, specifically in the autism population, when you look at the phthalate data, and you look at the BPA data, autistic kids have the genetics that slow down the production of this glucuronide. They have this UDP-glucuronyl transferase SNP, so they can't shuttle this stuff out of their bodies. When they get exposed, they keep it. They hold onto it. They are going to have more effects from it. But you know what we found?

 

21:39 Sulforaphane

Tom: We found a natural compound and Zimmerman, etal, did a beautiful study on this. In nature they can up-regulate many different enzymes: glutathione enzymes that are commonly low in the autistic population, all of these detoxification antioxidant enzymes, and that’s where the Sulforaphane came in.  We saw that beautiful trial in autism and Sulforaphane. I think you are going to see a lot more in the near future.. I was looking at Sulforaphane for a decade now. I found that Gilbert’s people were getting better on Sulforaphane. What is Gilbert’s? Gilberts is elevated bilirubin. What is the enzyme? UDP-glucuronyl transferase, so when you give your Gilbert’s clients the Sulforaphane, you’ll see the bilirubin drop. Now you may have something that helps with the plastics. While Zimmerman etal, did not imply that this was reducing the plastics and getting the plastics out of the system, it’s exactly what it was doing, because it upregulates this leases UDP-glucuronyl transferase. I'm excited about people diving into more research about PXR, about plastics, and about the specific enzymes. I think we will find some really neat connections there.

Mike: That’s pretty fascinating. That is an easy biomarker people can look at. Most family medicine docs, internal medicine docs, they see elevated bilirubin; they say “You have Gilbert’s. There's nothing you can do about it.” They are not aware of this nutritional induction of these detox enzymes. I'm so glad you hit on that. Another part of the inflammatory-immune pathway, if we could shift gears just a little bit for the sake of time, is indoleamine 2 3 dioxygenase. I know you love talking about this. We see a lot of neuroinflammatory aspects. Let’s roll on that for a little bit.

23:17 IDO Pathway

Tom: This specific enzyme will initiate then the degradation of tryptophan. Tryptophan, we all know of as the happy feel good after Thanksgiving put you to sleep amino acid. That amino acid has to go through a specific process of becoming 5 hydroxy tryptophan and becoming then serotonin, and then becoming melatonin, before it can regulate your mood and your sleep. That process needs a couple of cofactors. It needs something called tetrahydrobiopterin, which is extremely oxidant sensitive. You can look at tetrahydrobiopterin the wrong way, and it stops working. When I was working at a company, we thought we could try and produce this stuff. It is so so sensitive. It just oxidizes like that. You are doing some sort of cryo- machine to carry it around so it doesn’t oxidize, very very sensitive. You really need to be conscious of the inflammatory environment of a child if you're going to affect the metabolism of tryptophan where it needs to go. There are chemicals. A lot of these toxic chemicals that were talking about that stimulate a secondary pathway, this IDO pathway and when you stimulate IDO, all of a sudden tryptophan, instead of going to 5 HTP, will go down something called the kynurenine pathway. What we are seeing and an article just came out last week that was showing that this kynurenine pathway can produce something called quinolinic acid. The quinolinic acid is neurotoxic. It basically stimulates what's called the NMDA or N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor. That will cause neural excitability in the brain. In essence, what we’re talking about with IDO is, you have toxins, you inhibit tryptophan from becoming happy feel good go to sleep, to neural excitement damage to the brain. That story is kind of a sad story, but there's hope. What we're seeing is people like, Ben, people like Dr. Frye, people who are looking at folates, Jill James looking at methylation. All of these people are saying, “Aha, when we give methylation, we see that we can benefit some of these issues with glutathione levels, antioxidant levels in the brain, so what's going on? What's going on there? ” It turns out that the methyl folate itself is a brilliant replenisher of the tetrahydrobiopterin. It will stop any sort of negative free radicals from forming, and stabilize that particular substance, so you can make more 5 HTP, serotonin, and melatonin. This is an interesting piece I just have to mention. A lot of people don't understand that the methyl nutrients and a lot of vitamins are electron donors. In essence, that means they’re antioxidants. When you're giving somebody methyl B12, you’re giving someone methyl folate, or you are giving somebody a lot of these folate metabolites, these things will donate electrons freely. In a state of oxidative stress in the brain, they will sacrifice themselves as the active enzyme cofactor, they will disappear. They will become an oxidized version of something, so they are no longer effective. All of a sudden people are noticing they are giving these high doses and high doses and finally I get an effect. Perhaps you’ve just quenched most of the free radicals and now you have some of the stuff you need as a cofactor. I don’t know if that made sense. Basically, you rob your use of certain vitamins, when there's a lot oxidant stress. Lower the chemical exposure and all of a sudden vitamins work better.

Mike: That is an amazing point. I haven't heard articulated that way, but it does make sense because these extra electrons neutralize “free radicals” which you alluded to. I know you are a clinician. You look at things like organic acids. What should someone look for? Maybe their child is hyperactive, or they feel depressed, or something along those lines. Should you look at quinolinic acid in an organic? What have you found clinically?

27:29 Reduce Exposure

Tom: Sure. As a nutritionist, I mostly look at the big picture first before I dive into the minutiae. I used to the minutiae and what I found is, you can get lost there. If I don't have the moms looking at simple things like, “Is my son inhaling a bunch of flame retardant's from whatever couch they're sleeping on or are they getting any sort scented agents, or are they eating junk food first and foremost? What happens is, when you're exposed to these chemical, what you talked about, is you lose something called immune tolerance and you start reacting to everything. You start reacting to things in your environment. You start reacting to things that come into your body on a daily basis. What comes into your body on a protein basis more than anything else? Your food. What I'm seeing and what we saw from the Autism Research Institute questionnaire of over 27,000, now it’s up to over 40,000 parents. They looked at every single medicine, every single intervention that they have ever done for children. They looked and they said “What's the most effective?” Bar none, bar none, it was always food. It was the gluten. It was the wheat. It was the chocolate. It was the combination of food reactions that got the best results when the children ate whole foods, allergen free, reactivity free foods. I have to start there. I have to start with the foods. I have to start with the chemicals. I look where their parents are located and I say “Look out your window. Do you see a fracking well?” I've actually had this with a family not too long ago. They had a fracking well on their property. I was like, my goodness. We now know there are quite a few these chemicals that are neurotoxic. We might want to see if we can purify our water, perhaps move to a different property if at all possible. There are people in New Jersey that I counsel. A lot of them are in industrial areas. They are not drinking purified water and you go let’s start there first. Then you can look at some of the other markers. Sure, you can look at glutathione markers. You can look at the quinolinic markers.

29:34 Microbiome

Tom: You can get into the basis of what’s going on with the microbiome, which I know you want to get into. That's another piece that I would like to speak to is – if you are eating an acellular carbohydrate autism-specific diet, which a lot of sensory children, all they want is their chicken nuggets, and their mac & cheese, and their grilled cheese sandwiches. It’s the same foods over and over again, French fries whatever it is. That's not to provide the food to keep beneficial microbes around. And that food supply, that specific food supply, is going to be laden with herbicides. It’s going to be laden with insecticides. It’s going to be laden with fungicides. We now know each and every one of those has an adverse effect on inflammation, mitochondrial function, oxidative stress, and every time you have to pull a toxin out of the body, you pull a good guy out with it.  Every time you go in and you pull out a pesticide, you're probably going to pull out some glutathione with it. You are going to pull out some sulfate with it. You’re going to pull out glycine with it. You’re going to pull out all sorts of different things. We need to be conscious of the fact; more chemicals, less ability to tolerate something else that's going to come in. We need to fill up the pot, as Sid Baker always said, “Disease is a balance of too many things you don't need, and not enough things you do need.” I love that man. What a brilliant man. Yeah, how simple is that? We have a teeter totter. Let’s lower the irritants.  Let's raise the nutrients. I started on a simple layer there. Then you can find then you can fine tune on the outskirts.

31:11 Acellular Carbohydrates

Mike: Love it. That is fantastic. You hit on a word that I think people need more learn more about and that’s acellular versus cellular carbohydrates. I think Ian Spreadbury did a lot of research on that. These acellular carbohydrates, they have lectins and anti-nutrients. People know that gluten is bad, but what are these other anti-nutrients that are found in grains, and why are they not so hot?

Tom: What you're looking for is the possibility of exciting immune response, of creating extra stress. Some foods might have these lectins that you're speaking of, that might initiate some response, but I'm not sure I want to dive into the lectin theory yet, because of the lack of human trials in mixed food diets. We’re hearing about these anti-nutrients. Some of the trials look promising. Some of the trials look washed out. They’re animal trials. They are done with concentrated non-cooked lectins, so I am going to wait on that piece there. Let's just say that the type of carbohydrate that would not feed beneficial organisms is something we’re missing a lot in the diets. What we see, of course, from Jim Adams, wasn’t that a beautiful study did with Rose? How they found the missing prevotella. That’s a huge difference. These organisms that help children break down carbohydrates, if you start looking at microbes and you start saying “My, gosh, they can produce over hundred and 80 different enzymes. One microbe can produce over a hundred and 80 different enzymes to break apart certain carbohydrates. If you're missing the microbes, you are missing your backup. You're missing the person who could help you out more than thing elsewhere, and those same microbes are going to be producing folates for you in the colon, constantly 24/7. They’re going to be producing some of the B vitamins, so having missing microbes is not a good idea. You are missing your buddies.

Mike: That’s a very important point. The way to increase diversity is through a diverse diet, wouldn’t you say? That’s what a lot of people are coming down to. It’s like more diverse diet, more herbs, spices, more fiber. What have you found to be effective?

33:18 Feeding the Microbiome

Tom: Absolutely, diverse diets. The other piece that we’re missing is, you outside right now and after we turn off the cameras, I’ll show you. We can wild harvest some of the food outside this is place here you right now. Every one of them, they are going to have a bitter sensation to them. They are going to have a bitter bite to them. That's really tough with the autism population. Good luck getting a kid to consume berberine or even the Sulforaphane-rich broccoli sprouts. They don’t want it. Good luck trying to get them, but that's what really helps to balance out digestion, and microbial communication, and growth. If we can get some of the bitter sensations back slowly into children, and what I'm doing is I'm hiding the stuff. I make this cashew ranch dressing and then we’ll will put in a little bit of ground-up broccoli sprouts or we will put in a little bit of a capsule of broccoli sprouts, something in the dressing and then they’ll get a little bit more bitter, and little bit more bitter and just add over time and you do the same thing with their smoothies. If you're currently making any kind of smoothies or some children don’t like the smoothie texture, so we will have a Popsicle. You add it in one little collared leaf and it just blends up and they don’t even notice it. You do that for a week, and then you're adding two leaves in the cup. Pretty soon the kids don’t even know what’s happening and they're consuming more these foods, and they actually crave them. I think the bodies understand. Too much sweet is not healthy. A little bit of bitter tonifies so tremendously.

Mike: That’s amazing. So slowly ramp it up over time.

Tom: You have to because of the children, if you hit them once too hard, I'd rather you go slower than faster, because they will remember. They are so intelligent. They’ll call you on it in a heartbeat.

Mike: Tom, great information. Let’s talk more about the gut microbiome. There are a lot of changes in the environment as you talked about, the 70 billion pounds of chemicals being introduced into our environment. What else has changed in our environment that may potentially, I know antibiotics are a big one, which we can talk about, but what else is in our environment that’s affecting those 100 trillion bugs called our gut microbiome?

35:23 Impacting Gut Microbes

Tom: The birthing process itself and the more C-sections we have, the less breast-feeding we do, we know those are very tightly correlated with establishing beneficial microbes. We can see the outcomes of not doing that. If you are a C-section child, or you haven't breast-fed, you are more likely to have the four A’s. You are going to have asthma, eczema, and you are also going to have possibly autism.  It's an issue. Asthma, I missed asthma, didn’t I? I would say that's something we need to be conscious of, but where is this all coming from? Where is the shift now in our environment? Where are the microbes to begin with? The microbes, interestingly enough, are in the air. They are in the water. They are in the soil. They’re in the food. They’re on our skin. They are in our nasal passages. They are in our guts. They are everywhere. What is going to shift the balance of organisms is when you get rid of their original environment, and replace it with a synthetic environment like a city. That's one. The other thing is you're going to be exposed to certain agents that have the word “cide” on the end of them, so insecticide, fungicide, herbicide, plant killing, these chemicals have now been shown to have adverse effects on microbes. Let us take for example the greatest used agricultural chemical now in history which is the glyphosate-based herbicides. You will know them as Roundup. I don’t know if you have been to the USGS site yet. They monitor the water supplies, and they have to know what chemicals are going into the waterways. The United States government provides this data on this site where you can go there and you can plug in your favorite pesticide du jour and it will show you all the high spots all over the United States where this is used. It will tell you historical data from 1992 to 2012, how much was used during that timeframe. So you look at something and you are saying 2,4-D, for example, 35 million pounds back in in 1992 and we are up to 40-some odd, so a mild increase. You see right now, with glyphosate herbicides, they started around 10 million back in 1992. We are well over 270 million now in 2012, used every single year. 270 million pounds of a substance that can kill all plant matter that it touches, that can alter soil microbes. I had a wonderful interview with Dr. Kremer.  Robert Kremer a USDA scientist. He was just looking at how the use of this herbicide is shifting the colonies of organisms around the plant roots. Let’s talk about that for a second.

38:18 Plant Biology

Tom: Think about this. The plants are taking in energies. This is what causes life on planet Earth, basic biology 101. The plants are taking in radiation from a star called the Sun. The plants are then converting that, with water from the air and from the soil, and minerals as cofactors, and they are converting this whole thing by breathing in CO2 through the bottom of their leaves through something called stomata. They’ll breathe it in water, air, fire, water, air, earth, all the elements joined in this leaf to form this little packet of energy called a carbohydrate. We consume that packet energy. We digested it. Yes, we get goodness from it. Did you know that plant is not really making the carbohydrate for us at all? The plant is making the carbohydrate so it can feed its root system. It actually exudes the carbohydrate through the base of the roots, and then feeds the organisms surrounding the root structure. By feeding the organisms around the root structure, then it's able to get the benefits of those organisms. Those benefits will protect that plant from disease. Those organisms will prepare minerals in the soil to be bound to the root. They’ll form more root nodules so it can be bound. There is this wonderful communication that happens. What he says is, when you indiscriminately spray millions of pounds of a substance that's patented as a herbicide and a biocide, you will most definitely shift the colonies of organisms in the soil.

39:50 Glyphosate

Tom: Now the question becomes, with the International Committee on Cancer now saying that there is a possible carcinogen, what else is it doing? If it is doing this to microbes, what can it to do humans? Now we are understanding, as you do so eloquently on your blog all the time talking about the microbiome. We are seeing that the microbiome is behind our brain function, our immune function, and all sorts of different digestive capacities. When they're gone, our health is gone. If we are now eating the food, which we are, the vast majority of us are eating 70-80% of our diet genetically modified. There is going to be something in there that's can be a corn or a soy or something that is going to be genetically modified. They are often times sprayed with this glyphosate. We are having soy that is going to China now that's 50 times the level that would be accepted with glyphosate in the European Union. We have canola oil now. They're lowering, the EPA is lowering the level that's necessary to be considered safe. Excuse me, they are raising the level. It used to be a certain amount part per million. Now they are saying, you can do a higher amount because all the soil samples and the food samples are so spoiled, we have to raise these amounts. We’re saturated in this stuff. It’s in the air. It’s in the water. They are now finding it in breastmilk. We are finding it in urine of nonagricultural workers.

41:14 Avoiding Glyphosate

Tom: If people want to avoid glyphosate, the best way is to really eat organic. That’s the easiest way. Even when you are buying stuff that says “made with organic ingredients”, you have to be conscious that it's not all going to be organic. Let’s take corn chips. Everybody loves to do parties and everything, so they will go grab and it says “made with organic corn” and you’ll flip it around and it will say “made with organic corn” and canola oil. It doesn’t say organic canola oil. It just says canola oil. The chances of you getting organic canola oil that doesn’t say organic are slim to none. It’s not happen. The canola oil we now know is one of the highest concentrated exposures to glyphosate. Cottonseed will be slightly higher, but canola oil is pretty darn high. Look at your soy. Look at your corn. Look at your high fructose corn syrup. Interestingly enough, a lot of the pulses, a lot of the grains in the United States are what's called burn down with glyphosate. Let’s say you have an oat crop, for example. I’m a gluten-free. I like to eat oats, so they will eat this non-organic oat. As the oat is growing, a really plump grain and they are just awesome. You’ll see the plant still have a lot of green. They want to kill the green back, so will spray the glyphosate and right at the right point, they can have a lot of the moisture, and a lot of nutrients from the plant go to the seed, if they burn it back right. They will apply the herbicide. It will burn the plant down and get a plumper seed, if they do it correctly. At the same time, it highly concentrates the glyphosate. So you begin to wonder, if this is shifting microbes in the soil, can it shift microbes in mammals. We've seen a couple of different trials. We had a fish trial and then we had a chicken trial and cow trial from Kroeger over in Germany. We showed there was a massive shift in the microbial colonization of the animals. We have Eep. Where is he from? Over in Norway or Sweden, I forget. He's doing a pig farming experiment, where he is doing some with the GMO feed and then taking the GMO and replacing it with non-GMO. He is noticing his pigs changing in their stool patterns and whatnot, which is implying that we have some sort of shift. Of course, they're not doing any trials on humans, because it would be unethical to feed us glyphosate. So we don't know what's happening in the humans. If our shift in the microbe biome could be any indication, it could be a possible contributor. I am not going to say it’s a cause, because that’s ridiculous. Martha Herbert schooled me on the idea of a cause of autism. She said “No, we are systems people, systems. I love the way she thinks. She's amazing, Martha. She says “Stop looking at the causes, and look at all the contributors. What are the multitude of contributors that are happening?” The likelihood of glyphosate being a contributor to a lot of diseases is pretty high. One of my neighbors out on Lomi Island out here, Nancy Swanson, she's a physicist. She did some Pearson correlation coefficients between glyphosate and autism, glyphosate and diabetes, glyphosate and obesity, which are indicating microbiome imbalances, hormonal imbalances, mitochondrial dysfunction and imbalances. The Pearson correlation coefficients were .96, .98, really high. Correlation never equals causation and I’m never going to say that, but you have to say, as a possible contributor, it's a good suspect.

Mike: So avoid the sources, the main sources like GMO foods, like you mentioned oats and then canola. That's tough nowadays. A lot of folks feel comfortable. You go into whole foods. You go to any whole foods. I travel a lot I go to whole foods and I go to the salad bar you get beets rolled in canola oil, butternut squash, seemingly healthy foods. People don’t associate canola oil with bad. They see the colorful beets or the squash and they just go for it.

Tom: It’s saturated sometimes in that stuff.

Mike: The other hidden one, high fructose corn syrup.

Tom: Most people know. They are not going to eat the candy or drink the soda pop, but it’s in the coffee, the coffee syrups. A lot of times when people are putting their whatever they’re called, yeah, it’s going to have all of the caramel or whatever is in it, and sometimes you getting 35, 70, 90 g of this stuff. It’s intense.

Mike: Nasty stuff. Okay. So cook your food from scratch. That’s what you’re saying. Go to farmer’s markets. Grow your food, if you can.

Tom:  Those are ideal. Of course, you can look at reducing your exposure by just avoiding canola, cottonseed, soy, corn, some of the biggest crops that are genetically modified, to avoid the glyphosate exposure. But the other chemicals you can refer to the EWG. Everybody loves that, The Clean 15 and The Dirty Dozen. That little handout to have in your wallet is extremely helpful. There are simple things you can do. Sure, those of the ideals, but not anybody can do the ideals. You might as well start small.

46:16 Where to Find Tom

Mike: That's what’s great about the books that you’ve written, Tom.  You have a lot of practical recipes, way to avoid some of the common triggers and so forth. As we part ways here, where would you want our listeners to, I know you have a couple different websites and Facebook channels and books. Where should our listeners check you out?

Tom:  Wholelifenutrition.net is a good place to look at some of the information we have. Go click on the articles and look deeper in the site. There are a lot of good videos, a lot of content there that you won’t find just on the head page. We also have the Nourishing Meals blog where my wife just gives away free recipes. That's really fun to go to as well, but wholelifenutrition.net is our home site. We usually branch off from there.

Mike: Fantastic. You also have a practitioner coaching program, I believe.

Tom: I do. I am a certified Functional Medicine practitioner, so as you know, you’ve been through some of the stuff there, yeah. It’s been a seven year process for me. I went through a lot of the modules multiple times, G.I. five times, detox five times. I was a liaison for Thorne Research. I got to get embedded into all the Functional Medicine teaching. Now I’m just like “Wow, you want to know this? You want to know that?” So I design these different modules and I teach people. We just had one last night it was a blast. The docs are getting really pumped up. It's a lot of fun. We are making a lot of change.

Mike: Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on the Autism Intensive and sharing your wisdom and knowledge and keep up the great work, Tom, really appreciate it.

Tom: Oh, Mike, I’m a huge fan of yours. You do the same, man.

 

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