#422: Lessons from Centenarians: Immunity, Lifestyle, and Changing the Aging Game With Dr. Jeffrey Bland

Welcome to Longevity. I'm your host, Natalie Nidom. I'm a nutritionist, a human potential

and epigenetic coach, and I created this podcast to bring you the latest ways to take control

of your health and longevity. We cover it all from new technology and ancestral health

practices, to personalize interventions, and a very special interest of mine, peptides

and bio-regulators. Enjoy the show. Welcome back to the show, folks. I'm Natalie Nidom

your host. What if the single biggest predictor of your longevity isn't your heart, your hormones,

or your genetics, but it's the age of your immune system? Today, Dr. Jeff Bland explains why

immune resilience beats immune boosting. How your immune system turns over every few months,

and how your diet is constantly retraining it for better or worse. We talk about a lot of

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at checkout. Discount is valid on one-time purchases only. Jeffrey Blend, welcome to the podcast.

It is really an honor to have you here today. Thank you. Oh, well, it's my honor, truly,

Natalie. And I think what we're going to be discussing is right at the forefront.

Kind of a lot of the dimensions of change that are going on right now and how it'll

influence people's lives going forward. And for me, this month having my 80th birthday,

it's all about, you know, past four, the next generation's coming up. What's on the horizon?

It's really going to make a difference in the quality of our lives. So this is a great conversation.

Yeah. Well, happy birthday. You don't look a day over 60.

Well, thank you. That's very kind. How do you feel?

I feel like there's a lot more work to be done. And I hope I have the time to do it. So, yeah.

Well, I'm sure you will. So let's go back in time a little bit. And then what was that moment when

you first realized that the conventional medicine model just couldn't possibly explain what you were

seeing? Well, you know, I think without being dramatic, overly dramatic about this, I think it was

with me for a very long time because my mother would, if she were still living, would say that

she remembers me back even in grade school with a very strong interest in why people got sick.

And what was the reason that people got sick? And it was a driving force for me, obviously,

all the way through high school. And, you know, I learned about infectious disease. And I

recognized it. Okay, that's one really good kind of explanation about bugs. But then there was

this other area of non-bug related illness chronic disease that couldn't be described easily by

infection. And so where did that come from? And why does that happen? And then the logic at the time,

and now I'm going back to the 60s, was that it's because of genes that your genes carry this

information. And so if you have a family with heart disease, you get heart disease, or cancer,

what dementia or whatever it might be. But when I started looking at the data, it wasn't so

clear to me that these were inherited diseases. They didn't appear, there might be some kind of a

association. But it wasn't so simple cause and effect, you say, if your father had this and

you're going to have it for sure. And so I started to really be a little bit of skeptic as I got

into college. And then I went to medical school. And because I thought in medical school, this is

going to be the place where I'll be able to find an answer to that question. And for probably a

variety of reasons, one of which I was probably very young to go into medical school because I

graduated from high school when I was 16. So I was really in a fairly young age by the time I got

into medical school. I don't think maybe I was mature enough to really handle the

nature of that environment. And so I was like the constant question or guy. And I was always asking

questions. And the environment is really not set up for a lot of questioning. It's like you

just learn this stuff. You memorize it and you recite it on demand and keep quiet and you'll

have a chance to ask questions later. That was the model. And that didn't really work for me.

And so finally, at the end of my second year of medical school, my advisor, who I had a great

amount of respect for, he said, so Jeff, you're a smart guy. You're doing fine. But it doesn't seem

like this is really jiving with your philosophy. And you're kind of a pain in the ass, actually,

really, because you're asking a lot of questions and you're interrupting class. And it's not really

the standard of operations that we would like. So, you know, maybe you ought to consider going

over to a PhD program in the medical school, where you can ask as many questions as you want. Now,

this was before the development of what are now robust MD PhD programs. If I think I was a

student today, I probably would have just gone into an MD PhD program. But I decided then, okay,

I would go across the hall and I'd start doing research and get in a PhD program, which turned

out at the time. This would be, let's see, what would that be? That would be 67 was the right timing

for me. And so that allowed me to have free-raining opportunity to explore. And eventually,

that led me into an academic position. And it was at that point where I think I had a personal

life epiphany, which I would not recommend to any other human on the planet. In fact, if I could

help anybody to avoid it, I would do all I could to make that happen. My wife and I had her second

son as I finished my PhD degree and was then hitting on my academic position for the first real

job I would have. And we got to the place and sat down, didn't really even know the area yet,

was supposed to start in my faculty training in the next Monday. This was a Wednesday and our

infant son dies. Oh, my God. I'm so sorry. Yeah, it was, it was, I mean, I could go on and on.

But let me just say that it wasn't epiphany for us. And it changed everything about the way I saw

my career. I was really just starting at that point. But I came to recognize that if I could do

anything to help anybody to avoid this happening in their lives, that it would be a life well served.

So I think it opened me up to all questions. Again, I was already a questioner. But now I said,

hey, I'm going to be open to all sorts of ideas because you can't just find ideas where they maybe

are conveniently located. You've got to look elsewhere in corners and be opening discussions that

at first sound, well, that's strange. I never heard about that before. So I think it was very good

for me as my, as I started this, I started 1970 as a professor. And this was, you know, the beginning

of Earth year. And I was hired as a joint professor in biochemistry and environmental science to

start an environmental science program. So it gave me a perfect launching pad to be an explorer.

Yeah. So I think that's what happened. Yeah, you know, it's interesting to me is by going

into academia and teaching. It means that, you know, had you been a medical doctor, you might have

practiced medicine completely differently than anybody else, which would have been wildly valuable

to every life that you touched. But by going into academia and teaching other people, I would

imagine that you wouldn't were inviting the questions. You were inviting, you were inviting

that those students to challenge to think, which is not, as you aptly described, is not the model.

You know, like it is not the model. I, and I can tell you that, you know, without going into any

detail recently, I've had a fairly complex medical condition come up. And when I challenged the

doctor who was taking care of me, she fired me. I would say that, you know, that, that, that

undercurrent of, this is what we know, this is what we do, this is how we do it, don't ask any

questions. Still is a very powerful, current, unconventional medicine. And not just, and I,

and I, what I don't want to do is throw doctors under the bus, because at the end of the day,

I think they're people who are trying to help other people for a living. And generally speaking,

they're underpaid, overworked, and, and, you know, stressed, and they worry about all the things

everybody else worries about, the, the framework, both what they're taught in and what they're

being forced to work in, is essentially disabling their ability to be curious, to be engaged, to be,

to treat every patient as like my, my analogy, to treat every patient as a unique,

Rubik's cube that needs to, to be worked with. And, and, you know, we'll talk about functional

medicine, and how you kind of moved into that space, and created it, really, you created this

universe, how that, in its best iteration, is about inviting that conversation between, even

between the patient and the medical doctor, hopefully. Yeah, I think you said it beautifully,

and that, that really was probably the, the change in my whole focus of my career was, I got an

appointment in the medical school. And so, and then later, with a colleague in 1980, we started

our own medical school, the Bastier University in Seattle, Washington, was started with Joe, Dr.

Joe Pizzorno, Les Griffith, and Bill Mitchell, and I, and, and that, and then grew up to,

really, open up the door to all sorts of interesting conversations with people around the world,

and, and over my life now, I've traveled six million miles, more than six million miles. And I,

I don't think there are probably many people that have that much other than pilots, maybe,

that have that much air time. But what that gave me the opportunity to do is to visit with so

many different thought leaders in different areas. It were way out of what I would normally have

been exposed to. And so, I think what happened to me is I became a mosaic. I'm, I'm a pretty good

sponge for ideas. I don't know how many unique ideas I've come up with, but I think I have been

imprinted by many, many different good thinkers that had allowed me to assemble then, kind of a

mosaic of all these ideas. And, and then I, in 1981, was very fortunate to be asked to take a

sabbatical two years, actually, with Linus Pauling, two-time Nobel Prize winner at Stanford. And so,

I became his director of research lab in his Institute of Science and Medicine in Palo Alto,

California. And, and that was working with he and then his wife, Eva Helen, who was a power

house of her own right, changed my whole philosophy is where I wanted to spend the rest of my career.

How I wanted to pursue whatever my opportunities might be. And it was that then that,

I, I don't want to, to bore people, but I think there's a little bit of an anecdote here that's

interesting. So, I was finishing, finished up my two years, was going back to my 10-year

faculty position. And I was really had a good position at the university by that time. The president

liked me. I could teach in other departments. I had the biggest research group. I was voted two

years in a row as a top professor in the universe in the sciences. So, I had a good thing going.

A college education for my kids would ultimately be paid for. And so, I, I got in the, got my stuff

packed up in my office at the Pauling Institute. And Dr. Pauling came by and he said,

Jeff, you're really nice to have you here. I hope we'll continue to collaborate.

The last question he asked me was, I just have one question to be in, and that is,

do you think your classroom as you head back is big enough? And I got in the car and I thought,

I had a, you know, with my family there, we're driving 11-year-olds back to our house in Washington

state. And all the time, I'm thinking, what the heck was that? You know, what, what was he really

asking me? And then it, then it became fairly clear to me what he was asking. And so, I know this

sounds crazy, but it's actually true. I got home. My parents had been watching our house in the

couple of years that we were gone. I had asked my dad to take early retirement from the aerospace

industry. And so, they were living now up in Washington state, rather than Southern California.

And so, we're all excited to see one another, a lot of hugging and so forth. And then,

I say to them, so I've been giving some very deep thought as to what I'm going to do. And I made

a decision that I'm giving up my tenured faculty position to start some kind of a organization

that's going to teach doctors how to do nutritional medicine in their practice. Now, you could have

heard any pin drop. And then my dad, who was an accountant by training and an engineer, he

finally breaks the silence. And he says, Jeff, do you realize you do have a family like you do

have a mortgage? You do have responsibilities. And I said, yeah, I do recognize that. But I think

my passion is such that I'll find a way to make this work. I'm just not sure yet. So my

God, my loving father, he says, after going through some angst, he then says, well, if you're

going to do this, I got to come out of retirement because you know nothing about business. And it was

kind of accountant by training. So he became my business manager for the few years as we got going.

So anyway, that's was the transition for me in 1982 to a whole different regime.

That's incredible. So you've clearly, you spent decades translating complex science for

clinician. What's the most dangerous oversimplification that you've seen take off? I mean, the internet

is right with them right now. But in what we're seeing right now, like, you know, in a world where

people are trying to grab sound bites, they're trying to grab eyeballs and ears and say the most

outrageous thing to get people's attention. We're all attracted to shiny objects. And we love

new stuff. And we love stuff that really sounds glamorous and sounds that we can tell other

people that were first to mark and that we know about this and they don't know about it. It's kind

of fun. And in this field right now, I guess what's been coined biohacking, there's a huge

amount of that. And it's shiny object stuff. And quite honestly, I don't think we yet know

if any of this stuff is going to prove to be what it's purported to be. And that is to people

live to be centarians and have no disease and ultimately achieve their success because the best

lesson that we can take are from things like Dan butner's blue zone countries where people are

not biohackers. But other than the fact that they're living a life that has been somehow compatible

with their genes and producing outcome of a century of good living in which they're still vital

and active and loving and engaged. So my feeling is we got to be very sanguine about how we take

on these new ideas and adopt them without fully understanding what the risk benefits are and whether

they're going to return on the investment both time and money. That's not to say I'm not encouraged

also always by new things and by new opportunities. But I think they have to be vetted

a little bit before we totally say, oh, this is this is the best thing since I've read.

Yeah, I agree with you. You know, I've often said that none of the centenarians of a life today

set out to be centenarians. You have this whole wave of people are like, I'm going to live to be

120, which now I'm going to believe to be 180 or 200 or whatever the case may be, which is

which is amazing. You know, you're a living lab. Great. But the challenge is I think that there's

a trail of people by them that's drinking the Kool-Aid. And, you know, I guess we won't know

otherwise, but it is, but I feel like people need to understand this is in real time ongoing

experiment. And time will tell, as you said, which I think is so powerful. Are there any beliefs

that you held very confidently maybe 15 or 20 years ago that you're like, yeah, no, I had that's

so wrong. Yeah, I think I wouldn't I want to qualify this by saying I don't think it was so

wrong, but it was somewhat wrong. Okay. I think that I got into the view of the orthomolecular

medicine group. And I was certainly a principal in that group for a number of years that more is

better of certain nutrients. And that you could take, you know, super physiological doses and it

would actually do things across all people that were beneficial. And I want to be very cautious when

I do this, I want to say this because there are certain examples. Absolutely. We're of high levels

of intake of nutrients are very beneficial for an individual, but to generalize it and say that

every person needs mega doses of vitamins and minerals is is an really an exaggeration.

Because what we're actually finding out now is that it's appears our body likes it best to be

pulsed. It likes to these kind of hermetic exposures where if you look historically at people,

they went through periods of fasting and then they went through periods of gorging. And so our

body kind of has this thing built into it that it it likes the synchrony of big and then small

or a lot and then a little and and so just staying on regimes where we're just taking

fistfuls of supplements to me is it's not intelligent. And there's really no data to say that that is

beneficial. I've felt that for a long time. And even the pulsing of different nutrients at

different times, right? I mean, as a nutritionist, I was taught at school, you you cycle through things.

You don't do the same thing. I mean, you want to maintain your vitamin D3K2 levels. Yes,

like there are certain foundational elements that if they're missing, all these process in the body

don't happen. But but especially when and I find especially in the whole longevity anti-aging space,

we tend to find a button and start to push it. And I'm like, yes, you know, you're going to

tick somebody off in your body at some point. Like it's a little bit like constantly

nattering at a child. They eventually might tune you out where if you give that signal and then

step away and allow things to unfold and then come back again, I think over and over again,

to your point, we see that this is how our bodies work anyway. So why not kind of feed into that

rhythm and allow it to do what it's going to do? Yeah, I absolutely agree with you. And you know,

if you think of the way we've eaten historically, it's seasonally. We didn't have, you know,

all the things all year long. So the body has the genes that have these circadian temporal rhythms

built into them. And so I I'm kind of now getting more and more into the what can we learn

from history type of philosophy here? If we go back anthropologically and look at what people

have consumed, how they consume them, where did it come from and what season was it consumed?

And what level was it consumed? So there I'm certainly not an anti-supplement person. So I want

to make that very clear. But I think it's prudent to use the tools that we have that are individualized

to the need of the person. That's the secret sauce. And I've been speaking about personalization

of nutrition for 40 years. And I've been criticized fairly heavily for that. I think for two reasons,

one of which people said, well, there's no evidence to say that we need to do anything other than

treat people with the standard daily dose of these things and everyone's going to be fine.

And then secondly, people have said, if you were to personalize, it would be impractical because

we wouldn't have the resources to be able to personalize. We need to do things in groups.

And I think that that's changing dramatically with the new technologies we have now that are

helping us to understand our bodies. I think of myself, you know, I have these wearable devices

that I'm wearing that give me real-time information about my body. We're never accessible to any

other group before us. And that helps me to understand some of the things like if those of us that

have worn continuous glucose monitoring to see what happens in our daily lives, you find,

oh, my word, my blood sugar went way wacky. And I wasn't even eating. I just had a stressful

conversation, or I just didn't get a good night's sleep, or I just used alcohol beyond that,

which I should have. And look at what happened to my blood sugar. So these are real-time

perspectives that give us an opportunity to personalize and say, well, what's good for you may

not be the best for me. And I think that's kind of where I believe the payoff is for what we're

learning to tune ourselves up based on who we are uniquely. Yeah, I agree. I think that the

continuous glucose monitor is one of the most powerful tools we can put in someone's hand who's

been educated and understands how to use it. It is, it's even better than our rings. You know,

like it's because it's more actionable, it's more immediate, it's more direct. And it gives you

such powerful feedback on whether what you're doing is working or not. So, okay, I want to move over

to the immune system because we, you know, there's a whole, this is what we really want to talk about.

And it's, anyway, it's particularly near and dear to my heart right now. So, when people say I

want a stronger immune system, why are they missing the mark here? Like, you know, people always,

and we see it in this supplement space, boost your immune system, power up your immune system,

make your immune system stronger. What, what are they missing? Yeah, I think that's a really,

really great question. So, before I answer that, let me just give a really prep,

preparatory thought. If we were to look at what's known about longevity right now, and this is

certainly not all that we're going to learn about it, but from what we know right now, and you were

to ask the question, what would be the single most important thing that we know today that would

help you understand your potential for longevity? It would be the age of your immune system.

That is the single most important determinant of how long you live based on what we know today.

Now, that begs the question, how do you determine the age of your immune system? And fortunately,

there are new tools that are available that allow us to measure with a blood spot or a blood screen

age of our immune system. So, if that's true, what I just said, and I believe it to be true,

then the question is, how do you get the immune system that's associated with

longevity? And you get one that's the most resilient immune system. It's not the most

boosted immune system. It's the most resilient. And we learned something about boosting during

SARS-CoV-2 in COVID-19, and that was people who died, often died because their immune system

was so boosted that it killed them. Their immune system was in hyperfunction and they had

these what are caused cytokine storms, which was the immune system gone wild, and they drown in

their own fluids, basically. And so, that's the extreme example of an immune system over boosted.

What you want is a regulated immune system that has the intelligence to know when to turn on and

when to turn off and what cell types to actually get engaged and what cell types to

maintain quiet. And that particular story is a whole different story than has been told,

I believe, about immunity, coupled with the concept that our immune system is much more than

just the defense against infectious organisms. It does a lot more than just virus and bacterial

defense. It is rebuilding tissues. It's surveilling 24-7. There are only two systems in the body

that are sensing the outside world 24-7. 365. One is a nervous system and the other is the

immune system. And they're telling the whole rest of the body how to behave. And so, if we have a

resilient immune system, one that has all the capabilities in knowing friend from foe and knowing

when to turn on and when to turn off and what cell type out of the hundreds of different cell types

in the immune systems to activate and which ones to deactivate, that intelligence in the immune

system is associated with people that are 100 years of age and still healthy. In fact, there was

just a paper published of a Italian gentleman, 122 years of age in which they, in fact, he just passed

away. But when they measured his immune system age using these molecular tools, when he was 118,

he had an immune system in the age of a 65-year-old. That's incredible. So if you want to talk about

longevity, that's where some of the secret sauce lies. So when I think of how you then maintain

resilience and the ability of the immune system to have this intelligence to do the right thing at

the right time, whether it's allergy or arthritis or chronic pain or fatigue or cognitive dysfunction,

which are all associated with immune imbalance, then you want to find ways to speak to the

immune system at a fundamental upstream level. And you say, okay, where is that? Who is the

teacher that instructs the immune system how to behave? And it turns out, and I didn't know this

until the last few years when I really started digging deep into this field, that 40% to 60% of

the immune information that targets our immune system comes from our diet, 40% to 60%. That's a

pretty remarkable figure, isn't it, when you think about it? And the thing that I think most

people don't probably understand about the immune system is that our cells are immune system that

we have right now, as we see it here and have this conversation, will be different than the cells

in our immune system that we'll have four months from now. Our immune system turns over about every

four months. And therefore, it has a chance to learn. It can learn bad things. It can learn good

things. If, for instance, either one of us was to have a very severe viral infection in the next

week or so, our immune system would learn from that viral infection, that information,

that that infection produced, and it would, for that generation of immune cells, respond and have

that memory. If we ate junk food, if we did, the supersize me, the study on our own body,

and we ate, say, for a month, just ultra-process foods, our immune system would remember that,

and it would imprint those cells that would stick around for as long as we continue to eat that

diet, and we would have a different immune system. Now, maybe at the end of the four months, we say,

oh, I've had enough of that, as Morgan Perlock did, when he said, okay, now I've degenerated my

health, now I need to regenerate it by getting off the supersize me diet, which was the

McDonald's three meals a day. And when he did that, then his, all of his blood parameters returned

to normal, and, but the blood parameters returning to normal were surrogates for what was going

at the immune system. Yeah, so that's, I mean, that's both frightening and exciting, right? Because

it means that whatever you're doing today, if it's not optimal, you can change it. You can use

your powers for good or not good. It is, and I think that that's one of the things that

sometimes scares people, not in our space, not in the, you know, whether we want to call it the

biohacking or longevity space, but regular folks walking around on the street, they don't want that

responsibility. And because it's a little bit overwhelming, it's a big, it means it's on you.

But I think it's so empowering to know that you can mess it up. And then you get a do-over.

I mean, it's not always that simple, obviously. But, but the inherent resilience in the human body

that is built in can be forgiving under the right circumstances. So, you know, not to, I mean,

look, there's plenty of people dealing with crazy immune system dysregulation, and we maybe we

can talk about that a little bit. So, you know, like, can you think of, I mean, I'm sure you can.

Like, what would be a real life case where a person's symptoms look like, like they have a

weak immune system, but actually the real issue is the dysregulation at a much deeper level.

Well, that's a really great question. So, I think we have a cultural, almost iconic

stigma. Maybe stigma is not the proper word, but some kind of a bias that women have weak

immune systems, weaker than men. Because women... Yes, stronger immune systems. Well, you do.

You do. But the reason I say that is that 80% of patients that have autoimmune diseases are

the 80 different types of autoimmune disease from thyroiditis to multiple sclerosis to

rheumatoid arthritis or to systemic lupus. 80% of them are women. And so, there has been this

disview that somehow women must have weak or damaged immune systems, which actually is not true,

and I could go through a whole narrative why that's not true. But let's just say no. What you

just said, now, ladies actually correct, that women have stronger, they have more robust immune

systems. And for one reason is their immune systems have to accommodate a foreigner living in

their body for nine months. That may even be the opposite sex from them. And I mean, just think

of that. That's an immune system that's got tremendous plasticity to accommodate a foe and

friend in different ways. So, I think that the constructs that we carry about the immune system

sometime lead us into a self-fulfilling prophecy that woe is me. I just got stuck with this bad

immune system. And if we look at the number of... I'm now talking from experience of the last

more than probably 30 years of individuals who complain with what we'd be called preclinical

auto-immunity of these different forms like chronic fatigue syndrome related conditions or

fibromyalgia related syndrome conditions. These are arthritis, I mean, I could go on and on, but

I have seen countless, and we have published actually numbers of papers on this,

intervention with diet and lifestyle, how these things resolve, because we retrain their

immune system. Now, there is a point where your immune system becomes so trained and so

ensconced with experiencing trauma that it's very, very hard to get it back. Even post-traumatic

stress syndrome is an immunologically oriented problem. And it's hard to undo some of those

trauma-induced changes that occurred. You know, I always say the harder they were to put on,

the harder they are to take off. So if you've been really traumatized, it's harder to get them off.

This may be actually where some of these hallucinogenic drugs and psychedelics are working,

because they're hard at getting, and they're changing epigenetically the immune system. It requires

that degree of leverage to do that. But I think a lot, most of us, much more simple things can relate

to the resurrection or the rejuvenation, as I would call it, of the immune system. And the number

of symptoms that improve from that, it's always amazing to me when this occurs with a patient,

because they'll say, I came in wanting something to like my sore shoulder to be improved.

But now I'm sleeping better. I'm waking stronger. I feel like I have more energy. My mind is more

clear. How did that happen? Well, they're all interconnected, right? Our body is a network of web,

things that tie together. So I think that there's some immune rejuvenation concept, which is what

I'm spending all of our groups time trying to understand. And we have now names for different

immune cells. You've probably heard zombie cells. That's a really interesting name.

Cells that are still sitting there in our body, carrying on functions that are kind of like fugitive

cells, but they're kind of not up to par as it relates to the cells that should be doing the work

that they're designed to do. And so you carry this, these cells around as baggage that are

sending bad messages to your body. And if you get enough of them, now you really feel pretty bad.

And it creates these diseases. And it's associated with aging. And I'm reminded there is a cell type.

I'm going to use a long winded term here. And this is not to try to impress people just to show how

this field is evolving. These cells are called members of the clonal hematopoisis of indeterminate

potential family. Now if I use, if I use, if I use the acronym, clonal hematopoisis of indeterminate

potential, CHIP. So these are chip cells. So they sit in there as chips and they are clinkers.

And it turns out that because they're hemopoetic, what means they're in the bone marrow,

they're the starting point from which all the other white and blood cells are formed.

So if they are already carrying bad messages, it creates a lot of hazards or chaos in everything

that's going on. So it turns out that it is known, well known, that over age, age of birthdays,

that people collect these chip cells. What has more recently now been found is that the number

of chip cells you collect is not totally connected to your birthdays. People can be young,

they have a lot of chip cells, or they can be old in birthdays and have few chip cells.

And it turns out that the factors that create chip cells are part of our diet lifestyle and

environment that create mutations in the hemopoetic stem cells that make them into these

kind of clonal nefarious cells that don't do the jobs that they're supposed to do. They're

doing other things, and they stimulate inflammation, the process of inflammation connected to aging.

And so now we're really asking how do we get the bone marrow to be healthier? These cells that come

out of the bone marrow. And so there are now a lot of work going on to look at how diet and

lifestyle and other interventions can resurrect these primordial stem cells that are in the bone marrow.

So I think this is where this field is all going. It's a much more precise way of describing

the immune system than we previously had. You know what's amazing about this is it comes full

circle, right? I mean on the one hand, as I said to you before we started recording,

I interviewed a researcher yesterday who is working on mitochondrial transplants. And you know,

they're working on actually transplanting mitochondria into stem cells, which will to your point,

I mean, it could potentially rejuvenate the immune system to a degree, right?

But how fascinating that our diet and our lifestyle and nutrition, that pure nutrition going

back to the foundations can also play a role. And I believe that these two are not exclusive.

Like both need to happen, right? Like you can implant as many mitochondria as you want.

If you're eating, if you're super sizing every fricking day, you're going to fundamentally

disable that. If you're living in a stress in the state of chronic stress that you're

unable to control or mitigate the effects of on your body, that too will fundamentally affect

your immune system's ability to respond. You know, I'm so I just want to say that I'm so

happy that you said that about the immune system and aging because I said that to someone recently

and they said, no, well, you know, there's a cardiovascular system, there's this, this, this,

that. And I'm sitting there going, but it's the immune system that decides everything that's happened,

everything that's going sideways and all those other systems is really coming from that immune

balance function, whatever the case may be, in some way, shape or form. Like you know, you're,

I asked the question when I'm talking to docs and I've been amazed actually, quite honestly,

maybe a little bit dissolution when I asked this question, they say, so where does the immune system

reside? And most people immediately say, well, it's in the bloodstream, that's true, the white

blood cells floating around about 10% of your blood is white blood cells. But I say, actually,

the immune system is in every organ of your body. What other, what other organ do you know

is in every other organ? What is the heart in the lungs? Is the kidney in the pancreas?

Why is the immune system in every organ? The immune system is in your fat, it's in your brain,

it's in your thyroid, your pancreas, and your gut, it's everywhere because it's the universal

messenger. It's the message maker. Sidebar question. Sometimes before auto-immunity comes an

overactive immune system. Like, how does that show up in people? And fundamentally auto-immunity

is an overactive immune system that is missing, that's hitting the, it's like a gun that's been

pointed in the wrong direction kind of thing. How does that show up for people? Like, are there

signs before the auto-immunity hits that the immune system's kind of gone offline or is overactive

that people are seeing? Yeah, I think first of all, I think the term auto-immunity is miss a

misnomer. I want to qualify this by saying, I'm a heretic here. That's okay, you're allowed to

be. You've earned the right, sir. Okay, well, thank you. I don't think everybody will necessarily

agree with me. But the reason that I say that is that auto-immunity by a term suggests that you wake

up some morning and your body doesn't, your immune system doesn't like you anymore. You have been

you all these years, and then suddenly your immune system, it's been with you, says, no, hold on,

just a minute. I don't like something about you, and I'm going to attack you. The most pivotal thing

that we share, which is you, I'm not going to make you an enemy, and it's not only an enemy,

but it's so specific, I'm going to actually even attack your DNA, your book of life. I'm going to

produce a response and do war against your DNA in yourselves. Now, when I ask that question kind

of rhetorically, does that sound like a logical way for the body to design itself that suddenly it

wakes up and says, you're an enemy of me, and I'm going to attack you? Or was there something that

precipitated that situation where your immune system starts attacking what appears to be you?

So now you dig deeper with that question. You start to, which I've spent decades

not digging deeper. And what you find out is that, no, normally, it's not the immune system attacking

you. It's something that changed in you. Some molecule or some protein or something that used to

be you got changed. Now, let me use an example. We all know about glycohema globin, A1c,

as an association with diabetes. What is A1c? A1c is when glucose, the sugar in our body and our blood,

attaches itself to the major protein in red blood cells hemoglobin. So now when there's a chemical

attachment of glucose to hemoglobin, it forms a new kind of hemoglobin, this protein hemoglobin,

called glycosylated hemoglobin. Now, is that hemoglobin a natural U or not? The hemoglobin was a

natural U. The sugar maybe was a natural, but you put them together, that's something foreigner.

Right. Now, and what does the immune system do when it sees a foreigner?

Exactly. It says, I have a job to do. I've got to get rid of foreigners. Now, what do we know

about the correlation between autoimmune disease and diabetes? They're very correlated.

Why? Because mechanistically, they share the same common theme that you form something that is

not you. That your body now starts to attack. And who will be the first person to do the attack?

The ones with the most sensitive immune systems. And who do they happen to be? Women.

So all this stuff when you retell the story doesn't sound like autoimmunity. It sounds like

something else it's going on. Now, let me use an example of thyroiditis because we see a lot of

autoimmune thyroiditis, Hashimoto's disease, particularly in women. And it's if suddenly their

thyroid gland said to their body, you're not a friend anymore. I'm going to kind of, the immune

system is going to take care of you by reacting against you. Well, actually, if you look at this

more intelligently, you find out that these anti-thyroidal antibodies are being produced by your

immune system against things where your thyroid tissue was changed. And one of the things that

causes to be changed is exposure to polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, organic pollutants,

organic pollutants, bind with thyroid tissue. And that causes now the tissue to no longer be you.

It's now transformed tissue. And your immune system says, well, we don't want that here. That's

bad. We better get rid of it. And it attacks. And the innocent bystander is you.

So what do we do? Well, we detoxify. Because things turn over, cells don't stay around. I mean,

even even the neurological cells in the brain have been found to have a turnover. They're

much more slow than the immune system. So the whole concept is reconstruct your body. That's,

you know, this term I'm writing this book now around this concept of rejuvenation. When we look

at rejuvenation as a cell biological phenomena, we've now discovered how that actually occurs.

Processes of apoptosis and mitogenesis and so forth are processes of rejuvenation. The body

has it. The problem is that we've overloaded the damage beyond the scope of our ability to rejuvenate.

So we collect more and more junk. And we stop fasting. That's right. Exactly. Stop fasting, right? We

have to remove the inputs for the body to turn inwards to do the work. Which goes back to our

initial concept of eating cyclically, eating circadianly, nutrients in different levels in different

seasons. This is all part of a natural rhythm. Yeah. So if someone's sitting there saying,

okay, well, how do I know that I have balanced resilient immunity? What does that look like?

Like, how do they measure that? Is there, can they tell? Yeah. Yeah. So we're doing a study right now

that I'm quite excited about. You're the first person to have the chance to share this with.

It's a clinical observational trial. So I don't want to call it a double-length placebo control

trial. But we are looking at a marker. That's a very simple marker for immune resilience that most

people have overlooked as a tool. And that is, it's a $6.20 test that everybody that's...

We don't even need a discount code for that. Exactly. Everybody that's ever had a blood test

from their doctor has had this test done. It just wasn't red in the right, in the way that I'm

going to describe. So this test is called the complete blood count with differential, the CBC with

differential. Yeah. And the differential is to type the different types of blood cells in your

blood screen. So you get lymphocytes and you get monocytes and macrophages and ESNophils and

you get a list of the different characters that are making up your blood cell population.

And it turns out that the ratio of those characters in your blood personality, blood cell

personality tells you some things about your immune system. This has got a name. This use of this

algorithm. It's called the systemic inflammatory index or SII. And the SII is just a mathematical

way of using the data that comes from a blood test to see what the status of your immune system is.

And what we have found is that you can change your SII to make it more resilient

by dietary and lifestyle intervention. So it's an easy marking tool. Now I want to emphasize

that this is a surrogate mark. It's a blunt tool. It's not specific to the level that if you did

cytology and you did very detailed immunological work, you get better information. But for a general

first level pass for six dollars, it's a pretty good way to infer information.

Are those values available anywhere of the ratios that people are aiming for?

Yeah, they are. It's just training docs now how to use this. They just have to do a mathematical

calculation. You can do on a calculator very simply. Is it something we can share with the audience

or maybe put a link somewhere? We can certainly, there are many, there are, I was going to say hundreds,

but let's say a hundred or more clinical studies on the SII, more than a hundred.

So basically we want to look for what are the values we're looking for in the SII that establish

it that gives us an idea that are we've got immune balance. That's right. Immune balance, which

is immune resilience, which is immune intelligence. That's right, which is immune age.

So this, this is the biomarker that's going to matter when we're looking for immune aging,

immune activation, immune competence, like these ratios are going to tell us where we're at.

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powder. I believe that in our space and in good medicine, what we want to look for is the hints

that things are starting to slide off. And sometimes the ratio is not off by a lot, but it might

be off by a little, and you're not going to run around like chicken little that first day. But when

you repeat those labs, and maybe you'll repeat them in three months instead of in six months,

if things are starting to slide, either they'll come back or they'll have gone a little further.

I think you said it very well because three months is good. It's 90 days. That's the time it

takes for the immune system to start turning over. Yeah. And so we have I'm very proud to say

I think I'm going to say it's true. We have the largest clinical trial, double mind placebo

controlled trial in humans ever done on a single food intervention over 90 days looking at immune

resilience using molecular analysis of epigenetic sites of the immune system. It's 850 people

in a double mind randomized control in which the food we're using is the as far as we're

concerned, the most immune active food that we've ever been able to see, which is this tardary

buckwheat that we fall on, fell on to, which is a food that has a I have some downstairs. Yeah,

2,500 year history. It has the highest level of these immune active nutrients,

polyphenols and flavonoids. And so we have a clinical trial. We've fully recruited now

clintrails.com.gov. And we will have data by May. And I think it's going to be a revolution.

We'll have terabytes of data. We're doing molecular analysis using gene chip analysis plus promise

questionnaires from the age to look at the effect on brain health, energy, sleep, and all sorts of

parameters. The only intervention is that they're consuming the tardary buckwheat.

Yeah, 30 times a day. Mm-hmm. They're doing everything us ad lib. They're normal life,

whatever it was. It's not a metabolic word study. Now, the reason that we think that we're

going to have data that is meaningful is that we did a pilot trial that we published

in November on 90 people, excuse me, 50 people over 90 days in which it was not a placebo controlled

trial. We just wanted to see if there was any evidence that if we did a bigger study, it was going

to be worth the effort. And we were amazed to see that without any diet control, with no placebo,

that individuals who were on the tardary buckwheat for 90 days, some of their expressions of their

immune systems were changed 24, 24. So we think we are on to something here that to be able to

explain how diet plays such an important role. Well, it's also how a nutrient or the collection of

like the sweet of nutrients that is delivered by this food affects, it's got to be affecting gene

expression, it's got to be affecting, like to be that powerful, it actually has to be going way

up the chain. That's right. And we've actually can tell you the low side of the, we're 1.2 million

gene sites on our chip that we're measuring. And we can tell you what genes are having the greatest

performance as a consequence of eating that food. What made you look at that food? What got your

attention? I mean, I know there's a little man with a stand at the farmer's market in the summer

who's trying to get people to drink the tea, eat the noodles, buy the flour. But what made you look at

that? Well, I think it might have been the little man that you're talking about, and she was part

of our story. Sam Beer and his wife live in Angelica, New York, and he was a former ag research

professor of Cornell that started growing this humbling tertiary buckwheat on his little farm

with his wife who was a nurse just for fun, and started to see some really remarkable things

when he was starting to share it with neighbors and so forth. And then I happened to run into

by a coincidence, if there are such things as coincidences. I was invited to go to China to speak

to 10,000 Chinese medical doctors. My host there was a Chinese medical doc, but he had a PhD from

John Hopkins, so he spoke very good English and we had a great time together, and I was asking him

if he knew anything about tartarie buckwheat because that already was kind of introduced to this

farmer, farmer researcher, and he looked at me, he says, you got to be kidding me, and I said,

no, why do you say that? He said, my research group in Wuhan are the leading researchers on

tartarie buckwheat in all of China, and we've been looking for someone in the United States to

collaborate with. So we formed a collaboration agreement, and I came back and then was introduced

to another investigator at Vanderbilt University that was measuring the effect on the immune system

of one of the principles in tartarie buckwheats, it's unique, called two hydroxybenzolamine,

and we ultimately formed a collaboration. Now I believe it or not have a consortium of tartarie

buckwheat farms in upstate New York that we are a regenerative ag approved, and we're the first

people in the United States ever to grow it. So that's been my last few years.

Gosh, that's insane. It is so not a coincidence. There is nothing coincidence about any of this.

Like it just is, I'm sorry people, you can think I'm crazy. I don't care. This is energies and forces

and whatever moving people to where they need to be at the right time in the right place.

There's no coincidence. That's just fascinating. I'm going to come back to my original thread

only because this was just so fascinating. There are some basic questions that I think people

are going to want to hear some answers that they can hang on to a little bit, but other than the

fact that we all need to run around getting our hands on some tartarie, Himalayan tartarie buckwheat

like now. I don't need to see the results. I'll just eat it. I'm fine.

I recommend the sprout powder. It's three times higher level of the immune active nutrients

over the flower. And so, Himalayan tartarie buckwheat sprout powder, two teaspoons a day

provides the level that we did in our clinical trial.

Okay, you heard it here first and we'll put a link down below. I mean, I don't know if you

sell it. I don't care. We'll just let people know where they can find it. There's this whole

distinction between short term inflammation signal that is adaptive that we want. We need it to

survive. And then chronic inflammation that is actually degenerative. So, how do we tell the

difference between the two? And especially because the chronic one can be much more insidious.

Like, you're going to feel that adaptive. Yeah, that's exactly right.

So, that's, again, comes back to this SII because that's measuring more of the chronic states

of the fire pot as the pot is boiling kind of thing over time. The, as you know,

Charles Sierhahn at Harvard Mass General gave us a big gift about this, this inflammation

that comes and goes when he discovered this class of substances in our immune system called

specialized pro-resolving mediators or SPMs. And these SPMs actually are the quintures of

inflammation. So, your body needs to turn it on when you need inflammation to get rid of garbage

and to recreate new tissue, but then it needs to turn it off so it doesn't become a long standing

chronic problem. And these SPMs that the body makes in response if you have a resilient immune system

are the things that turn the, the inflammation process off. And it turns out that those SPMs are

derived from omega-3 fatty acids, icosipigenoic and docosahixinoid. And so there are forms of these

oils commercially that have a higher levels of the pro-resolving mediators that can convert it into

SPMs. And those are the ones that are the minimally processed oils. That's why eating fish is

different than eating a fish oil. And so we're studying these because they're all part of this

immune resolution process. And getting, you, you want inflammation at the right time at the

right place at the right level, but then you want to get rid of it and what a resolve it. That's

what these things do. Well, otherwise you're basically on fire. That's a lot of fun. Okay, we have

not mentioned the microbiome yet. We have not mentioned mitochondria. So I'd love to kind of,

spend a few minutes talking about this microbiome mitochondria connection and, and this fatigue that

people just, so, you know, if, if you can help frame for the audience, like gut dysbiosis and,

and how does end end up reducing mitochondrial energy output, which is how people just then

they can't get up out of their chair. They can't get out of their beds.

You are so good. Wow. I'm just really impressed. That's, that, I'd compressed a lot of stuff

of importance in a few words. I have a little bit of maybe pride in this area of discussion because

my colleagues and I were the first people I think to use the term dysbiosis and leaky gut

back when I did seminars in 1985 for doctors. I must have thought you were insane. They did.

They still do. I mean, they still think leaky gut thing. So it's unbelievable. The number of

criticisms that we sustained over those early years. But with that said, we now all recognize

that 70% of the immune system is clustered around the gut. You know, and people ask why? Was it a

cosmetic reason that the great designer of the human body said, I can't think of any other place

to put the immune systems, all this throw it around the gut? Well, remember that, of course,

of living a person will eat somewhere between 10 and 15 tons of foreign molecules in our area,

that our body has to decide what to do with. And so it puts the immune system right there close

to the action where that stuff's coming has to make a decision as to whether it's friend or foe.

So the immune system is taking messages from what's going on in the intestinal track. And as we know,

the intestinal track has all sorts of a living organ that is not connected through the

bloodstream. It's called the microbiome. Literally hundreds of different species of living critters,

both bacteria, viruses, and protests of different types. And those organisms all have personalities.

And they have their own metabolic characteristics related to their genes because they have their

more genes in microbiome than there are genes at the human body. And so what they're doing is they're

processing and creating outcome that our immune system has to determine whether that's friend or foe.

Well, it turns out some of those bacteria, members of the grand positive bacteria,

as you know, grand negative bacteria family, have in their cell walls various construction

elements that when their release can activate a immune system in the inflammation, these are

called lipopolysaccharides. And so if we have dysbiosis, meaning imbalanced bacteria in our gut,

they can, when they die, they liberate these things that made their bodies, what they were,

the cells, what they were. And our receptors of our immune system, so-called toll-like receptors,

and particularly toll-like receptor four, picks up this information. And then it signals to the whole

body that we have foreigners on board that we need to fight against. And that becomes the chronic

inflammation systemically. So that's the dysbiosis connection. And then you say, well, does it stop

just that the gut? No, it doesn't, because the blood coming out of the gut, the first place it

goes is to the liver. And the liver has 10% of its construction made up of immune cells,

called cup for cells. So the cup for cells, which the the liver's immune system says,

oh, there's a foreigner on board, I got to do something. So it sends out message that caused

in fatty liver disease. And then that sends out messages into the blood that goes to the brain.

And the brain has its immune system called the microglia. The microglia picks up that information,

and he says, oh, geez, there's foreigner on board, I better do fights. And it fights back to

become neuroinflammation. Now we have dementia. So all these things are interwoven. Then as it

relates to this immune relationship of the gut microbiome, to the way we eat, and the things that

are going on in our intestinal tract. That's incredible. So I'm going to ask you, before I ask for your

approach to sequencing interventions, because I do think when we're dealing with stuff like this,

there's an order of operations that need to be followed. But before I do that, what's a fatigue

pattern that makes you suspect in immune metabolic dysfunction rather than, oh, it's a hormonal issue,

or it's just a sleep issue? Like, is there are there a couple of hints that you're like,

you know, what this sounds like? It's it's coming out of the gut.

Well, I think the first symptom I'd look at is Pots, Pots, or the orthostatic hypertension syndrome,

when a person who stands up and they get dizzy and they they can't accommodate the change,

people would say that's an adrenal problem. Yeah, it is related to the adrenal glands,

but the adrenal glands are taking their message from this whole inflammatory cascade. And

and so that is kind of a whole body kind of surrogate marker for something going on that's associated

with chronic fatigue, post viral fatigue syndrome, post a post COVID long haul syndrome,

although share that in common. So and it's also if you study the mitochondrial function at the

cellular level, which we've done using various types of new tests, you'll find that the mitochondria

are energetically deficient. They're not producing what they need and they're involved with reactive

oxygen species. So you're now in free radical oxidative injury. So all those things are are

fitting together. So to me, that symptom is is and then you know, I can't go upstairs is

effectively. I feel winded immediately and I don't have COPD. All those kind of things are get

light headed and feel like my confused. I can't clear my thoughts. All those things fit together.

Yeah, like it's a total energy drain. Exactly. Okay. So what is your approach in sequencing

interventions? Is it the gut first, the mitochondria, the nervous system? Like I would that's that

depend on the person or is there a north of operations that really kind of you feel and you know,

we started off this conversation with talking about personalization, but in a situation like this,

do you feel that there's a kind of a first line of defense that has to be addressed before we move

on to the next things? Well, in in 1991, we developed a program that now I have to say is probably

if I look back, been the most highly adopted thing that we've ever put out in the world.

We call it the four-hour program. It's a sequenced program for I learned that program. I was

going to go to school. Yeah. So for ours, our program that we developed it was really the

birthing of the Institute for Functional Medicine with that program. And it's removed

replaced reenoculate repair. That's what the four are stand for. And it's a sequence of tools

interventions that are easily applied, remove the foreigners and the allergic producing substances

in the toxins and then replace the acid and digestive enzymes if necessary, then reenoculate with

pre and probiotics and then repair the gut lining with the various nutrients and bioactive substances

actually to better mucosal integrity. That that has probably been applied now to millions of

people over the last 40 years or 30 years or 30 years. It's foundational. It's it's easy to do

and it works. And when when new practitioners come into the field and they say where should I start

with my practice? They start to be comfortable with the four-hour program because if you do that,

you're going to get such positive feedback from your patients or clients that they'll think you're

a magic maker and then you can expand your tools out in doing you know hepatic detoxification

or my name of mitochondria resuscitation. There are all sorts of other things you can do with.

That's a great place to start. Yeah. And I think what's amazing about it is it's not

singling out the gut, the mitochondria or the nervous system. It's singling, what it's doing is

it's addressing the foundation of where the the assault is coming if you will and all of those

things will benefit from that approach. That's exactly right. That's where we that's where we got

root cause you know it started to say hey you know what what we're really trying to do is keep

going upstream to root cause and this this helps you get there. Yeah in a in a in a general

weirdly general way. Right exactly. Do you want to talk a little bit about motility circadian rhythm

in this whole microbiome energy conservation space? Well I think the thing that I and that I

haven't when they're probably many things we haven't talked about but one that I think is

is is very important because it cuts across a lot of therapeutic disciplines is the lymphatic system

and the important role that the lymphatic system plays has a drainage system that gets things

flowing in the right direction and doesn't have them sitting in the body and we all know about

lymphostasis particularly women who've had breast surgery often or chemotherapy for breast cancer they

end up with the lymphatic injury that causes lymphostasis and then they get swelling and

and they get pain in that in that area where the toxins don't get eliminated. Yeah exactly so

the the lymphatic system is interesting because it it's a fluid flow system a separate set of

canals to that of the blood system but it doesn't have a pump whereas the blood system has the

heart and so the only way you can pump lymph around the body is by mechanical force, by movement

and so this brings in all the kind of traditional therapies that go way back in history with

Arievator or traditional Chinese medicine or you you name it every culture and Native American

has had some physical method of moving things by massage or all sorts of different physical

methods to do it. Like physical movement I think it's a whole idea. Yeah this idea of being a human

and moving as opposed to this new found animal that sits for eight hours a day like like we're doing

right now. Yeah so I'm on a meditation chair I get to move around so I don't know. Okay good for you

and no I'm not I've changed my position a few times but but truthfully yes I mean to be fair.

So the theme here is the construct of when I talk about personalized lifestyle medicine

it really embodies all these tools that you know some people say well those are kind of old things

right I like new stuff well the old stuff is tried and proven for thousands of years and we

shouldn't throw out and these things all get integrated together just like things if we learn

historically about eating and eating the right kind of foods and minimum processed and you know

Mark Hyman has his new edition of his book just out food fix that is I read it it's it's it's

revolutionary in that it takes the whole food industry and the whole agonistry on front front

front face no prisoners and and and says you know we have a we have an issue it's an existential

crisis yeah we have to do something with because it doesn't go away by just forming more

GLP1 drugs you have to make fundamental changes in the way we think about life and how we treat ourselves

starting with the way we grow food people talk about epigenetics we talk about the genetic the

the impact of all these different things on the expression of our genome and one of the things

that I think often doesn't get enough attention is food and how foods can trigger those genes

and I'd love to invite you to speak a little bit to how food does this like through epigenetics

transcription factors nuclear receptors read like the microbiome metabolites like all of this whole

you know this this this wealth of information and now I you know I'm I'm sure you've said it a

million times but food is not just calories and nutrition it's information to our system and

can I invite you to speak to that a little bit oh boy uh yeah you're right in my sweet spot for sure

so I'm just finishing up a book actually called the nearest gene love it uh that is going to be

on this topic coming out in 27 with Harper uh and I'm pretty excited about this book I think it's

revolutionary in the way that I'm really talking about diet from a whole different perspective

based upon the very model that you just described um I think it was 23 years ago when I

know it's more than that now it was 1998 so that's uh 25 or six years ago I guess when I wrote a book

called uh genetic nutrition hearing which I now look back and see it was probably the first book

written for the consumer public on nutrigenomics and how genes and nutrition fit together

we have come so far since then that it's it's truly remarkable but it all maps against our observation

people don't have to be a molecular geneticist or a biologist to look historically at what people

have eaten and how it relates to their health and I think we all recognize that we've been

involved in an uncontrolled study called the ultra processed diet in which we are participants in

that study for the last uh 50 or 40 years and you know the results of the study are coming out

they're not good yeah people's health is are being significantly adversely affected then we can

say there's a kind of another observational study that's been going on and that's to go to regions

of the world that are still eating their traditional diets that come out of the soil and and look

at their health patterns and I'm always amazed when I I take us like one one example would be in

Japan if you look at the Japanese people who stayed on a traditional Japanese diet their

level of cardiovascular disease diabetes arthritis was extraordinarily low one tenth that that we

see in the United States in some examples but when those Japanese people carrying their genes

with them come to the United States and are exposed to our our variation on the diet suddenly they

get the same frequency of these chronic diseases the rest of the population does so it's not just

the genes in themselves it's something that is causing the genes to behave differently uh-huh

so in in the last 20 years with the revolution in understanding our book of life our genome that's

encoded in 23 chapters that represent our 23 pairs of chromosomes half of which coming from

our mother and the other half from our father we've learned that those particular genes don't

tell us exactly who we are they tell us what we might be now let me stop there I think that's

a very important point meaning there are many ways that are in our genes it depends on the signals

and the experience that our genes are exposed to as to how they will express themselves to become

what we are in our look in our phenotype how we look at and feel and in that model that I've just

described which was pushed back to some extent by by medicine because medicine is there to treat

us once we're broken and they don't really spend a whole lot of time thinking about how we got there

the route to get to that point where we are broken uh but now it's an irrefutable fact there are

tens of thousands of studies across multiple disciplines that show that our genes in into themselves

are not the solution to how we look at and feel it's how we express our genes and I'm

reminded that when I think of the two twin brothers in our space project here in the United States

one of who went to space lab up in this satellite for a period of about six months and his twin

brother stayed on land and they measured all sorts of things in both the brothers in fact

it's they're probably the most expensive twins ever in the history of science literally millions of

dollars was spent uh measuring all these things in them and what they found of course was the twin

brother up in space who had the same genes as his brother their identical twins um as the as he

stayed in space he became more and more different in the way that his body was working than his twin

on land and when he came back down to earth it took uh more than a year for his physiology to

re-correct itself to be more like his twin brother so how did that happen well that happened because

the signals that he was getting through the what he was eating what he was exposed to the environment

of space were signaling to his genes to express themselves in a different way and so now we we look

at countries where there's longevity and and historically centenarians live and have productive

lives and we ask well what are they doing um what they're doing is they're they're eating and living

a lifestyle that sends signals to their genes to what I call them express their bus genes

they're good their goodness genes yeah they're a celebration of life genes

um under a different set of circumstances where you feel can continually under under stress under

hostility under threat under not love not a no attribution you're eating junk your your body is

responding that is trying to protect you against trying to kill yourself and then so in that case

it turns on all the genes that are there to protect against the alarm and those are inflammatory

genes and so now our major disorders in the western world are diseases of this inflammation but

what is inflammation it's about his attempt to try to protect itself against hostility yeah because

our diet is hostile our relationships are hostile our environment is hostile so these things are

really powerful shapeshifters of what the new medicine is going to be the the old model which is a

very deterministic model that said whatever our genes were that's who we're going to be that was

Mendelian genetics is being replaced rapidly by this model of genetic plasticity and it changes

all of medicine changes our whole I mean this is a seismic shift that we're undergoing right now

and then we ask well how long does it take for a seismic shift to be incorporated into policy

and you know I think it's quicker today than it used to be because of the internet and

eight you know all kind of communication mechanisms we have today but it doesn't happen overnight

you know there's a lot of people that hold on to old ideas even if they're totally wrong

yeah go hold on to them because it's they're comfortable with them or it's to their advantage or

they mix them look good or whatever it might be so I think we're in this revolution in which the

whole nature how our food and health system are constructed is flawed it's built around a model

that's not right and we will as a society somehow find how the truth is going to be enacted and

and delivered to people who are not scientists you know they don't study all this stuff like I do

but they can be the benefit I think of this information that can really change lives in a positive way

100 percent I mean you know a podcast like this this is about this is a call out to each individual

who's listening to the show right now you have the power to do this you have the power to change

the way that you feed your body which is going to have the power to change the way your genes express

that is huge that is the foundation of food is medicine as a as a statement right but food be

thy medicine is a foundational concept it's old as time and it you know it's just what's old

is new and that wisdom will never go away so I wanted to ask you one sidebar question here because

you mentioned the people in Japan and you know there's the blue zones there's all these people

and it occurs to me that in this melting pot that is North America how big a role do you think

the loss of connection to our heritage like our like what it takes for like I'm Mediterranean

somebody else will be Japanese somebody else will be something else to me I've always believed

that for me to get to the full expression positive expression of my genome going keto like a

like an inuit person or or or something actually and it shows me all the time doesn't work

it doesn't I don't have those genes I don't have the genes it takes to really to respond to

I mean I might respond to a ketogenic diet as an intervention if I do it properly within a

Mediterranean framework but if I try to practice or if I even try to adopt an Okinawan diet

it's not going to deliver the information to my genome that it needs. I think you're right on

on the the nature of what we're learning and and you know as I said earlier in our discussion

I've been a proponent for more than 30 years of this concept of personalization and you know

when I work with Linus Pauling on the two-time Nobel Prize winner you know his whole concept

about understanding the genomic uniqueness of individuals and then matching that with their

nutrition need or nutrition intake was was foundational and that's really what spurred me on quite

honestly just to start functional medicine as a concept and so I think what you're saying is true

I mean we look at let's use one example I'd say this is probably not appropriate anymore to use

this term and that's Chinese restaurant syndrome which is a kind of a response that people have

the monosodium glutamate yeah and they get reactions to it and it turns out that there are certain

genotypes that are very sensitive to MSG and then there are other genotypes they're not sensitive

to MSG at all and so to just make a blank statement saying no one should ever have a meal with MSG

may not be an accurate way of really defining it and we could go down the list we could talk about

sulfites we I mean I there's a it's a long list of things that are unique to a person's genetics

that makes them either more or less responsive yeah and so I think that this intelligence that

we're starting to get now about the personalization based upon our genetic heritage and then how we

we fit knowing that we're all that not not not everyone is but most of us are sandpile genotypes

we have I mean when we do our genetic evaluation we find G-Wiz we got interesting legacy

components that we didn't even know about and yeah it's well I found an interesting statistic

actually that a fairly significant percentage in 23 of me of their of their database of the people

that have had their genes analyzed our individuals have found out that their members of families if

they didn't even know about yeah because we had a lot of stuff going on that people were not

talking about so this this revelation or revolution maybe it's the best word that we're

understanding more about our genetic heritage and our uniqueness and therefore the the food one

could become the poison of another it is a very very important part of this whole story that's

emerging yeah for sure all right a couple more quick questions what's an example of a compound

food that acts like information more than fuel well I think that virtually every substance we put

on our mouth can be considered an information yeah contributor some much more intelligent

contribution meaning very specific and how they communicate in others more general so you know

if I was to use a general concept I would say what about sugar glucose yeah you know glucose

is a is a energy molecule obviously it's broken down in the energy in our body but it has a lot

of impact on how it hits on receptor sites that then create signaling that releases hormones and

gets in engaged with very complex network biology and it's it's uniquely different from person to

person some people are very glucose intolerant in terms of their diet other people have

ability time to manage it more effectively so and then we can go into more specific examples and

we can say well there are members within the phytochemical field that may be very very specific

let's use sulfurifane as an example from broccoli sulfurifane you know has this really

remarkable effect on liver expression of enzymes that are involved with detoxification and

depending upon your genes that regulate your detox enzymes in your liver you may have a more or

less response to sulfurifane some let me use another example dying to wheel methane or a dim that's

another interesting compound that's found in the cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and brussels

sprouts and cabbage and and in some women you will find that taking that particular phytochemical

at a couple hundred milligrams a day has a dramatic effect on influencing their estrogen metabolism

and you know really helps in clearing estrogen from their body and and then another woman has

taken the same amount we find that the influence is much less so it and that activates a specific

enzymes that are detoxifying estrogen which we have a whole family of those so I think there is

many examples of specificity of specific nutrients and then you you mentioned earlier

this emerging concept of epigenetics and you know we have we should give a lot of umbrage to

Randy Gertel and Robert Waterland who is his post-doc at Duke who really made this discovery that's

birthed in 2003 the field of nutritional epigenetics and that was the discovery in the agudium

house that when you gave the pregnant in this case rodent you gave that gave her high doses of the

methylating nutrients folate B12, B6, Betaine that the offspring were like they had never seen

before the osmin had a different coat color whereas their parents got fat and diabetes and the

females got breast cancer and they died young the children lived the offspring lived 35%

longer they were lean their coat color was different and they didn't get diabetes the same genes

but just epigenetically modified differently by the the addition of these nutrients early on

in fetal development wow and that just opened up the whole door saying whoa just is that the case

what are we feeding kids now what are we feeding mothers that are going to have kids

100% and how does that influence the development of children and does that relate to things like

autism or eczema or asthma or the things that we're staying in children and so all these are new

questions that are being legitimately raised based upon this understanding of this epigenetic

remodeling of how our genes are expressed love it yeah wow wow I love it love it love it love it

love it this is so great all right let's leave our audience with a little bit of a practical

roadmap if we can so if someone wants to eat for immune balance which by now we should all be

you know kind of gnashing our teeth going what do I do how do I do it what's the simplest structure

for meals without turning this into some kind of crazy obsession not that it would be the worst

obsession but let's just say let's what's a really simple framework we can offer people

that they can start tomorrow yeah you know it's interesting to me we've got a lot of controversy

right now about plant foods and and they're I mean there are there's a pretty big movement that's

anti plant foods really powerful yeah that they're not healthy and they're damaging and they

cause arthritis and they do bad things to our gut I think it depends a little bit on how we

talk about plant foods if plant foods are coming from highly processed things that are ending up

as white flour and and a bunch of devitalized corn and soy that's those are plants but it'll be

like saying you're a vegetarian if you drink Coca-Cola and you take eat twinkies I mean

Amazon is exactly so so I think that this this plant kingdom has so many messenger substances

that speak to our bodies in ways that you don't get out of animal products now there are

certain advantages to animal products as it relates to protein and amino acid levels and certain

vitamins like vitamin B12 that's generally found in animal products and other vegetable products

but in terms of the overall health benefits if we were to weigh those of the plant foods if you

if you ate a diet that made sure it had a rich array of different plant foods that were

minimally processed you would be hitting a lot more success stories as it relates to how

we know the body really works and this relationship that we have with plants that goes way back

in evolutionary history you know hundreds of millions of years is is a very intimate relationship

that we are seemingly still debating it's which I find kind of fascinating so then we say well

what kind of plant foods and and that's where I think I had mentioned this concept of eating the

rainbow where we eat foods that are are naturally colored from the red orange to the blue grain

and yellow those colors are all different families of phytochemicals all of which have different

effects epigenetically on how genes are expressed and become the master regulators to a great extent

of how our genes are expressed so we could say all those foods are anti-inflammatory or we could

say they're antioxidants well that's a kind of a gross way of talking about them but more specifically

they're actually interacting at a very specific level to turn on and turn off genes epigenetically

and create a different outcome so our body feels more at home more friendly and less in an hostile

environment so that's kind of where I would start you know you give over the ultra processed stuff

and you start introducing more of the eating by the rainbow by including vegetable products into

your diet yeah I love that and eating meat and chicken and fish like I think that over and over again

what we see is that we do really well as omnivores when we eat the right foods like that we have the

luxury of being able to access the nutritional the nutrient density from both camps so that doesn't

mean that everyone's no while you don't have interventionally a reason to go one way or the other

for a short period of time maybe but you know there's a lot of wisdom in this I just wanted to

throw at the concept of inviting people to do an experiment like this on themselves maybe for

90 days right if you I mean start start with a week if you find 90 days overwhelming but maybe

you can speak a little bit to the to that there is a magic number at 90 days there's there's a

magic to 90 days in impact on the human body of a certain intervention I totally agree and I

I think this is actually a major theme in my book I have this immune rejuvenation food plant and

it's it's a it's a 90 day food plan and the reason for it is the immune system as we mentioned

earlier turns over every three to four months and so if you want to really renew your immune

information you need to give it some time to do so those some cells have to leave the

leave the system and others have to replace them that are imprinted with different information

and and our immune system is constantly learning so we want to send it new information to make it

friendly and and that takes 90 to 120 days so you can't be impatient it's not like taking the

antibiotic proof of bacterial infection you expect in three days you get over the infection we're

talking about restructuring the way the body actually is working love it all right a couple

rapid fire questions dr. blind to finish this off a health belief that you have changed your mind

on recently oh that's a good one so I I think gluten would be probably what I put as a quick

that's what kind of when I go quickly into my head and think about this now what we're finding is

it by the hybridization of grains that have occurred over years with genetic inbreeding and

and crossing and so forth that we have produced a product that is not just gluten alone there are

many other unique proteins that are in that yeah that the immune system has not seen before the

immune system of humans so now it starts to look like a foreigner and and people often say you

know when I go to Italy I don't seem to have any problem with gluten but when I'm here in the

in the North America I've got all sorts of problems well it's the same supposed product but it's

actually not genetically the the the makeup of the proteins in that grain is different so I think

this is something that's very real this whether you call it gluten sensitivity or

carbohydrate intolerance or you know we have the FODMAP giant that is used for a lot of people with

these problems so that that has been kind of one of my aha learnings over the last decade or so

yeah and I think what you what you said is so true it's it's not the gluten molecule that we may

be works exposed to 50 or 60 or 70 years ago it's it's the we've changed it and yeah it's changed

all right a biomarker you think will be mainstream in five years that is not today

oh go that's a good one so I'm going to throw out an esoteric one that probably most people are not

yet familiar with but I I think it's a the dark horse it it's it's acronym is super S U P A R

little S little U capital P capital A capital R it stands for solvable

Europlasmidogen activator inhibitor I like so far I thought you would yes and it turns out that

that that analyte which you can measure in the blood fairly simply is really really powerfully

indicative of chronic inflammatory states more than any other marker that has been studies

that's conveniently measured and it's it's not so easily changed by the immediate environment

like is HSCRP HSCRP a high-sensitive CVACP protein it can move all over the map if you're

if you're sick or have a cold or something whereas as super is really stable because it gives you

a more consistent message as to what is your own inflammatory state so that that's my inside

track and of course I also talked earlier in our discussion about this very simple six dollar

test from your complete blood count which which is the SII and SIRI that comes from your differential

that's a that's a biomarket simple and available to everybody today so that would be my choice

cool a food you personally keep coming back to for immune balance salmon the question you wish

every patient would ask their doctor what does their doctor feel about the importance it

diet and lifestyle play in health outcomes thank you and if someone only remembers one idea from

this conversation what would you wish it to be each person is in charge of the orchestration of

their health journey love it doctor bland where can listeners learn more about your work

and big bold health and get their hands on that magical and other really powerful

product actually the started recovery buckwheat yeah yeah so I'm really in three different

places that you can find me actually I my family doesn't really think this is a good idea but

I'm giving it a whirl I have a virtual Jeff that is now codified oh wow my two terabytes of data

that I have put into the world's literature of all my presentations all my publications were all

put into a AI program that is learned by me or taught by me so you can you can speak to Jeff

if you want to you can either write or talk and I will either talk to you or write back to you

and so that you can find me on my my own website jeffrieblan.com it's I'm also on the

similarly with a with a virtual Jeff on the personalized lifestyle medicine institute that I found

it which is PLMI or if you it's actually plminstitute.org you know but you can just look at PLMI

if you do a Google and then lastly is the work that we've been doing on immune rejuvenation and

immune health through big bold help so bigboldhealth.com you'll find me and my colleagues Dr. Ross and

Pearl Metter and others that have been working the last eight years and trying to decipher how to

treat our immune system with respect so those are the three places you can find me thank you and

guys check out the show notes because we may have a Lincoln code for you guys down there to just

as a listener of the podcast. Dr. Bland this has been a total honor and pleasure thank you so much

for taking your time. Now you're you're awesome I think your listeners get a huge value proposition

by by following you you're you're very insightful very sharp and also a lot of fun to be with so

that's a pretty good mix. Hey folks just a quick reminder that all of the information presented in

this podcast is for information purposes only no medical advice no diagnosing no treatments

suggested here before you try anything that you hear about or learn about here make sure that

you check with your medical provider.