Episode 61 – Celiac & Gluten Sensitivity
Speaker 1: 00:00 This is Dr Chad Edwards and you’re listening to podcast number 60, one of against the grain.
Speaker 2: 00:04 What guy doesn’t want to maximize their testosterone through using all natural and organic ingredients? Men now have an option for a locally made paragon and sulfate free shampoo, conditioner and face wash. Not only does dudes, mainly products smell great, which drives lady’s crazy by the way, in a good way. They put a unique spin on their shampoos without actually having a dark gray color because of the coconut shell charcoal that is used to remove the toxins. Dude can be purchased at the Tulsa men’s shop and also online@wwwdotdudemanlystuff.com. That’s d o d manly stuff.com. Welcome to against the grain podcast with Dr Chad Edwards, where he challenges the status quo when it comes to medicine. We get into hot topics in the medical field with real stories from real patients to help you on your way to a healthy lifestyle. Get ready because we’re about to go, go, go, go against the grain.
Speaker 1: 00:58 Hello. Hello. This is the Super Tall Marshall Morris and today I’m joined by Dr. Chad Edwards, who believes that 80 percent of medical recommendations are crap technically speaking here. Uh, Dr Edwards is a board certified family physician. He served in theU , s military, and he is the author of revolutionize your health with customized supplements. And of course not to forget, he is the founder of Revolution Health Clinic. Dr Edwards, welcome. Thank you so much. Again. Always it’s like you hear the, you say these things and I’m like, who is he talking about who we have a special guest today? Yeah, it’s crazy. Dr Edwards, we meet every single week and we talk about some of these hot topics in the medical field. What are we getting into today and why is it a hot topic now? I’ll tell you it’s a hot topic because it’s one that there’s, there’s a lot of, uh, uh, the short story is we’re talking about CELIAC disease.
Speaker 1: 01:54 So celiac disease by the traditional medical community is recognized as an entity to affecting about one and 100 people in the United States. The reason that it’s a hot topic because there’s a lot of people that think they have some kind of problem with gluten and gluten sensitivity and all those kinds of things that don’t actually have celiac disease. And uh, I, I shouldn’t say we’re not talking about CELIAC disease, although we are a, we’re talking about the bigger picture of Celiac sensitive or a of gluten sensitivity. So, and there’s just a lot of, there’s a lot of turmoil. That’s not the word. There’s, there’s just a lot of, there’s a lot of stuff out there about Celiac, gluten sensitivity and all those kinds of things. And when I first started looking into nutritional medicine and how our body adapts to the food that we eat, and you know, how the food that we eat affects our health.
Speaker 1: 02:46 Gluten was one of the very first thing. So, you know, I, I, uh, I was, uh, a big follower of robb wolf and his, his Paleo solution podcast, which is fantastic. I mean, I, I soaked up all I could, which by the way here in a couple weeks I get to be a guest on the Robb Wolf podcast. Okay. So excited about that. Um, anyway, he’s just, I mean he really has a good grasp on that nutritional medicine, so obviously, you know, kind of following along that line, there’s a lot of impact with wheat and you know, Dr William Davis as an interventional cardiologist, wrote the book wheat belly, read his book and there’s a lot of influence with wheat on our gut, on our overall health, on our brain function. Dr Perlmutter talks about it in the book grain brain. Uh, I mean it’s just, it’s a big topic, but it’s so much more than celiac disease.
Speaker 1: 03:40 So immediately for all the new listeners, they think that this is the against the grain podcast. Yeah. And it has no relationship to this particular episode or maybe it does. Maybe it does. Oh, so, so a Celiac, I’m being related to gluten sensitivity, right? What is Celiac? Or maybe we’re going to get into that. Yeah. So I think that’s a great place to start. What is Celiac? And then of course let’s, we’ll get into how is it different from gluten sensitivity and you know, what’s the deal with this? So celiac disease is an autoimmune condition. An autoimmune conditions mean you know, we have an immune system and our immune system is supposed to fight for and things. So you know, Kinda like with. I remember growing up my dad wouldn’t talk about the Vietnam War and how many of the soldiers in Vietnam would, you know, we didn’t know who were the good guys, who is the bad guys?
Speaker 1: 04:37 And it was very difficult, you know, because the, the Viet Cong and they were, you know, invasive guerrilla warfare kind of things and they would invade the local population. You didn’t know who was who. A very similar things in Iraq, Afghanistan, you don’t know who’s the good guy, who’s the bad guy, they don’t wear uniforms. So how do you differentiate one versus the other? While our immune system has the same kind of problem, we get it. I mean it sees a lot of chemicals. There’s a lot of stuff that it’s exposed to. And how does it know to fight against this or to fight against that. And so an auto immune condition is when you have a mix up between the body itself and what it should recognize as self and not mount an immune response against versus a foreign invader. And so you know, things like bacteria and viruses and all the, those kinds of things.
Speaker 1: 05:24 Our immune system is required to fight those things. And you know, growing up I heard about the boy in a bubble and I think there are movies about it and you know, all that Kinda good stuff, which you know, they have a condition known as skids or severe combined immune deficiency disorder and they, they can’t mount an immune response so they have to live in a sterile environment. They can’t fight it with an auto immune disease. You are mixing up the, the body, the self versus the foreign invaders. And so you will mount an immune response against something that your body has. We see this in Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. So it’s a thyroid condition where you have antibodies attacking your thyroid gland is the most common cause of Hypo thyroidism. We’ve got multiple podcast where we talk about thyroid. A lot of thyroid patients in the clinic, autoimmune conditions, uh, you have things like rheumatoid arthritis.
Speaker 1: 06:14 Your body develops antibodies against things in your body. We’ve talked before about flu vaccine and the possibility of [inaudible], that’s where your body cross, you know, gets it, gets his wires crossed and it develops antibodies against itself. And you have this ascending paralysis, this associated with Guillain Barre, with celiac disease, you are developing antibodies against gluten and it’s the immune response that ultimately destroys the lining of the small intestine. So when you think about the small intestine, the, I don’t remember the surface area, probably should have looked it up before this podcast, but it’s this huge surface area that’s supposed to absorb all of our nutrients and in order to increase, you know, it’s just this tube that’s maybe 30 meters long. I don’t remember exactly how long did you just say 30 meters, 30 meters inside people. And maybe a little bit long, but still, I mean it’s maybe it’s 30 feet anyway, it is.
Speaker 1: 07:11 This long tube. Anything more than six meters is worrisome for me because that’s how tall you are, right? Six meters. That’s right. So anyway you have the small intestine is this long tube and it has a high surface area. The way it increases its surface area is through these little folds, you know, all over called the [inaudible] and then you have micro villi which are folds on the folds. So it creates more surface area. That’s correct. So you know, now instead of like having a flight, a plain sheet of paper, if you were to fold it up into kind of a wavy kind of thing, then you can get more surface area in a smaller area. So that’s what the small intestine does and it’s so that we can get nutrients across and get fluids across and you know, all those kinds of things. And there’s also, you know, there’s definitely a lot of bacteria in there and that the, you know, those probiotics that we hear about, then there are essential for optimal gut health.
Speaker 1: 08:09 And Gut function, so these Vli increase the surface area so that we can absorb. With celiac disease, you have an autoimmune destruction, so with your immune system comes out fighting the presence of gluten and the immune response ends up, it’s not really a scar, but it ends up eliminating these Villi and microvilli where instead of having all these folds all over the place, you have this kind of flat surface and it is a market decrease in the surface area of the small intestine. And it results in a true malabsorption syndrome. In fact, we used to diagnose celiac disease based on what we call it, failure to thrive, uh, that, that wasn’t the criteria, but this is one of them. So you’ll get kids that are not growing there, they look emaciated, they’re thin and look like they’re wasting away. Is that true? Malabsorption syndrome? It’s like starvation and the sea of plenty.
Speaker 1: 09:04 And you’re like, why not? They’re not absorbing. They can absorb anything, you know, they’re, they, they can’t get their fats and vitamins and minerals and nutrients and proteins and all those things. So they have difficulty with all of that. Plus there’s a lot of inflammation and that it’s awful, awful condition and it can be fatal, but you know, most of the time when we catch it in plenty of time and we, and we managed that simply by gluten elimination. So this is kind of what is in the forefront of Western medicine and this autoimmune condition. Well, how do you diagnose celiac disease and you read them bread. You know, actually it’s interesting because that’s a lot of what we do in traditional medicine. That’s, that’s what we, that’s what I did. If I wanted to know if someone has a gluten antibody response. So there’s a difference between having antibodies against gluten and having CELIAC disease.
Speaker 1: 10:03 CELIAC diseases, the autoimmune destruction of the small intestine, those Microvilli, you can have antibodies against gluten and not have celiac. So really it’s a, it’s a biopsy diagnosis. They put you to sleep, go in and get a sample of your small intestine, you through your mouth, not like surgery. And then they’ll go and take a bite of that and if it doesn’t have the Microvilli and you have the, the antibodies against gluten. And you know, there you go, you put them on a gluten free diet and they like all of a sudden take off and they thrive and they’re doing great and all that kind of stuff so that, that is celiac disease. But there is a spectrum, there’s a much bigger world out there. CELIAC is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the association with gluten and multiple medical problems.
Speaker 1: 10:48 And really this can be applied to many other things in a functional medicine realm. We look for a lot of this, uh, you know, I did not look for it in traditional medicine and many of these are so nuanced that they’re difficult to identify and many of them don’t show up, you know, at the time. So in other words, if there’s a, there’s a delayed response if you were to come up and you know, if, if, if you punched a everybody in the face that came up and pushed you in the nose and you put and you punch them immediately, it quickly, we would learn, don’t punch, push Marshall’s, knows, get punched in the face. If, I mean I wouldn’t be able to reach it and unless I stood on a chair but at six meters tall, but anyway, um, so, but if we pushed you in the nose and two days later you came up and punched in the face, we would have, it would take forever to figure that out because it’s a delayed response for many people when they have food sensitivities, the manifestations of that may not be immediate.
Speaker 1: 11:50 You don’t eat it. And then two hours later you start having gastrointestinal distress and diarrhea and you start feeling awful and low, you know, low energy and fatigue and all these things, uh, at any other host of potential problems that you can have. It’s often delayed. It might be two, three, four days later. The only way to identify in that way is to really get a food log and get very detailed and then slowly completely eliminate certain kinds of foods for several days. And see how you feel. My traditional approach to patients that come into the clinic, I almost always recommend a just a baseline Paleo Diet. And it’s not that I’m, I’m certainly not religious about the term Paleo and it needs to be Paleo approved because I mean, you can get ridiculous and overthink this stuff and while the caveman didn’t eat this, so should I eat, you know, is it okay?
Speaker 1: 12:37 And don’t overthink it. Just basically meats, vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruits, no, no grains, no legumes, no dairy. That’s my general nutritional approach. Initially. That’s not my longterm plan. That’s the initial approach, uh, because it gets rid of a lot of the irritants. Now obviously with grains, wheat, wheat and wheat is kind of what we’re talking about with, with the, uh, the CELIAC issues. Um, so let’s go ahead and take a quick break and then we’ll come back. We’ll talk about some of the other issues with Celiac and, and yeah. Okay. And then why I think this is an issue because of one little story real quick. I, when I first started talking with a friend of mine, strong Christian man, when I first started talking with him, this was several years ago about gluten. His response to me was, you know, they, they bred in the Bible, they just can’t buy that.
Speaker 1: 13:26 I don’t buy it, that it’s, that it’s sweet. And I was telling him, I completely understand, um, you know, what you’re saying, but the reality is many patients have issues with this. You cut out gluten, you cut out wheat, and many of them, not all of them by, uh, by any stretch do much, much, much better. So some of them need to do this even though they don’t have celiac. I can’t tell you exactly why. Why was it permissive? Liberal Bible, not now, I don’t know, but the reality is many patients do better. So, uh, you know, I don’t know that it was for a long time. I was thinking, how is this wheat? I mean, I don’t know. Maybe it is. And you know, some people would say it’s the protective husk of the wheat that, you know, humans aren’t meant to digest that and all that kind of good stuff.
Speaker 1: 14:14 But, you know, uh, you know, uh, even 50 years ago, really celiac just wasn’t really an issue. A 200 years ago. I’m not sure we even, they had even identified anything like that, so, uh, you know, had maybe we just didn’t, weren’t able to catch it. We were probably still sticking leeches on people trying to fix malabsorption or something. Um, but, uh, I think there’s some really interesting stuff. And in, in, uh, in the next podcast we’re going to talk about, um, some of this and I’ll allude a little bit more to it after the break. So anyway, we’ll take a quick break. We’ll be right back. Are you tired and fatigued? Are
Speaker 2: 14:51 you frustrated with doctors because they just don’t seem to listen? Do you want to fix your pain without surgery? If you answered yes to any of these questions and we are the clinic for you, we offer prolotherapy prp or platelet rich plasma therapy and stem cell injections, ivy nutritional therapies, bioidentical hormone replacement therapy and functional medicine to get you back on track to optimal health. Call our clinic at nine one, eight, nine three, five, three, six, three, six. Or visit our website@wwwdotrevolutionhealth.org to schedule your appointment today.
Speaker 1: 15:22 Okay, we are back with Dr Chad Edwards and I want to get right into it. We were talking about gluten sensitivity and Celiac in, uh, in the first half. We were talking quite a bit about Celiac and how, uh, how it all really works and how somebody might develop celiac or as an autoimmune or auto immune disease, how it manifests itself. But you said it’s a much bigger topic. There’s a lot more contained in it. So, so let’s get into that a little bit. Yeah. So it starts to separate from Celiac, you know, at the tip of the iceberg to this underlying issue with, uh, with wheat and gluten and the wheat itself. There’s a large insulinogenic response. It develops, you know, an insulin response with it just because of the ingestion of wheat. It actually has a w when you look at bread, a white wheat bread actually has a higher glycemic index, meaning that it raises your blood sugar more faster than table sugar.
Speaker 1: 16:24 So if you were to eat a scoop of sugar and stick it in your mouth, equal amounts of carbs and sugar and in the bread, you know, assuming they were equal amounts, your blood sugar would go up more faster with wheat bread than it would with table sugar. That’s incredible. It’s amazing how it works. And you know, most people don’t know that. But. So if you’ve got sugar problems, diabetes, I got the sugar. If you’ve got anything like that, then you know, I, I do recommend really being careful on, on wheat ingestion, but it goes much bigger than, than that even there’s. So you’ve got some issues with the wheat itself, but the auto immune response, a lot of people, and we, we routinely test many of our patients for these antibodies are, there’s a bunch of antibodies that you can check my routine blood panel.
Speaker 1: 17:14 I’ll often check, uh, the, uh, anti gluten antibodies. There’s a chicken anti gliden and a tissue transglutaminase and there’s a whole host of other antibodies that we can check. Uh, but those are the ones I would, I would often check. But there’s a, there’s a test done by Cyrex call, an array three a where we can do a full anti wheat gluten antibody profile. Gives us a lot of really good information. Dr Perlmutter is a huge fan of that panel. I’ve seen some good results with that. There’s a, there’s a charge for it. Will you do this in our, in our clinic. And I’ve seen some, some really interesting stuff come back. Uh, so you can develop antibodies against gluten and not Oregon’s one of the components and not have celiac.
Speaker 3: 18:03 I feel like a lot of people, you know, because, because Celiac is kind of one of those buzz buzz word diseases now, you know, because Gluten Kinda came, came up. It’s a fad disease. It’s a, is that what you would call it now with the disease is in that I feel like a lot of people that I know, they’ve cut gluten out of their diet, right? Um, and what they say is it makes them feel a lot better. And that’s, and I believe, um, I believe, I’m sure, but that doesn’t mean you have celiac.
Speaker 1: 18:39 No, that’s exactly around telling people that they have celiac. That’s exactly right. Now again, I, because of the multiple issues and you know, carbs are such an issue because of all the things that we can do, I think that most people would be better off by eliminating it. It’s not. My ultimate goal for my patients is not that they eliminate that there appear Paleo and they completely eliminate bread. My goal is that I had one patient that he knew that if he ate a slice of pizza that he would be in the bathroom if uh, or you know, he might have a little bit of gas or something, but if he ate two slices, he’d be in the bathroom and sick. So, you know, I’m assuming regular crust. The idea was that, I mean he avoided it most of the time, but if you know, if he wanted, he could have a piece of pizza and you knew the outcome.
Speaker 1: 19:31 Okay. I know that’s the outcome. I know I’m going to pay for it. I know how I’m gonna pay. I choose to do it or not. Okay, cool. But at least we had the answer, we know how it’s gonna react, you know, if you had two pieces, he was getting sick and he knew that now you can make good choices and now you can focus on health and stuff, uh, health and stuff and that stuff. We should have a website health and stuff, health and stuff that sounds interesting. And every time I say health and stuff, you have to echo it. Health and stuff. Dot Net. So anyway, um, so there are a lot of issues that can come up. You can have certainly antibodies against gluten and not have Celiac, but you can also have a sensitivity to gluten and not have antibodies and gluten is found in so many things.
Speaker 1: 20:18 It’s in Teriyaki sauce and soy sauce and you know, so if you go and you get like chicken and rice, you know, like a Chinese place and you’re thinking okay, it’s not breaded, it’s like stir fry or whatever. And then they put some soil on top of it and you’re like, now you have gluten unless you get gluten free soy sauce. So it’s just in a lot of stuff. I remember my, my ex wife had some issues with gluten and she went, she was, got some, um, some beef jerky and she was like, she came home and she was like, I am, I’m itching, I’m having issues and I don’t know why. She was like, I feel like I got an gluten somewhere. And she was like, all I had was this beef jerky and I grabbed the bag and I was like, it’s got soy sauce in it.
Speaker 1: 21:07 And so she got exposed to it and she knew and she could tell. So there are a lot of issues that can come about because of the ingestion of this stuff. And again, not everybody has it. I’m not telling everyone to go eliminate wheat or gluten. I think it’s a very interesting experiment for most people to do because you may be shocked at the impact that it can have on how you look, feel, and perform. So I do recommend try, try cutting it out for 30 to 60 days. Now I want to just kind of, as we’re wrapping up here, kick a sacred cow, sacred cow. Um, do I understand correctly that that wheat contains a higher glycemic index in that and more gluten than a white bread might. Do I understand? Is that fact or as far as the gray area as far as the gluten, I don’t know.
Speaker 1: 21:58 It probably depends on who made it because sometimes they’ll actually add gluten because it, it, it, it changes the property, the doughy gooey kind of, you know, that texture. That’s gluten. That’s what does that. So the reason why I ask is because, um, I don’t know if it still is or people still maintain this, but you’re always encouraged to go to get the wheat bread and not the wonder bread, wonder bread, white bread because it was supposed to be better for you. Yeah. And the raw, not raw. The, the whole wheat is going to have more fiber in it. And we’ve been told for a long time, you know, you gotta have the fiber and all those things and there are some b vitamins and things like that. The wheat portion is less processed, you removing less nutrients from it. So it’s, you know, the white bread is more processed, but it actually has a lower glycemic index.
Speaker 1: 22:47 It’s just, it’s interesting. We do a lot of things that we think we’re being healthier and not necessarily now the, you know, before we shut down and I want to, I want to give a plug for the next podcast that we’re going to do because for years I thought this was gluten and I thought it was either the GMO or the hybridisation of wheat. Now there is not a gmo, genetically modified organism. There’s not a GE or, or genetically engineered. And Ge, uh, it’s not genetically modified wheat on the market. It’s hybridized, meaning they’ll take two different kinds of wheat, you know, and George Gregory Mendel, you know, the old genetics guy, uh, you know, back in the 18 hundreds, um, he, he would cross piece and see how they came out different. So it’s Kinda like, you know, I’m a labradoodle. Oh yeah, that’s a hybridized dog sort of.
Speaker 1: 23:41 So you’re, but you’re taking different species and you’re, and you’re combining them and you’re seeing what the outcome is and so you’ll, and you might do that for a specific effect. Uh, and there’s all different kinds of, of things like that and well, we can have a podcast sometime on genetically modified and hybridized, but the wheat is hybridized, not genetically modified. Uh, so I don’t know if that’s a really important distinction, but maybe a little bit, but I used to think that it was the wheat and maybe it is. There may be a, certainly a component of that and some people who may be affected by it. Um, and so for a long time I recommended that people get organic heirloom wheat. The heirloom means old school, uh, you know, the door kind of wheat. It’s not as a or the door fleet is the newer stuff.
Speaker 1: 24:27 Sorry. And they get the tall ones because they, you know, the big bundles that you used to see not, I didn’t used to see them, but like pilgrim days, that kind of stuff to get that stuff. And there’s, there’s still a good reason to do that, but I think the reason may be different. I’m not sure that the gluten molecule is the primary issue. Uh, now we certainly get antibodies against gluten. I’m not sure that’s the primary issue. There was gluten in wheat back in the Bible and they certainly ate it and there’s no discussion of gluten in the Bible. Not that that means that it didn’t exist, but according my buddy that was, that was a big deal in his thought. So there’s a bigger issue for this and I think it’s far more interesting and it certainly makes a lot more sense. And so that’s what we’re going to talk about in the next podcast. So definitely tune in and listen to that podcast because I think it’s. I think it’s really interesting.
Speaker 3: 25:20 Dr Edwards. Thank you so much for joining us today talking about Celiac and gluten sensitivity. We’re going to get into it in the next podcast. I appreciate you joining us today. Thanks. We’ll see you next time. Thanks for listening to this week’s podcast with Dr Chad and tune in next week where we’ll be going against the grain.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
