137: Father of Functional Medicine + Discussion on Autoimmunity | Dr. Jeffrey Bland

On today's episode of the Real Foodology.

Podcast, when we think of autoimmunity, it suggests that people become allergic to themselves. Somehow one Monday morning they wake up and their body hates themselves. And that's actually not true. What happens is that the body has developed in response to a perception that it's under attack from something, that something, maybe even a non materialistic thing like trauma, post traumatic stress. So it's not just chemical exposures, it's also psychological exposures, environmental and radiation exposures. All of those can be captured by your immune system to remember them as bad experiences that live longer than the experience.

Hi everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Real Foodology podcast. I am so excited that you're here today. And today's episode is a really, really great one. So I sat down with Dr. Jeffrey Bland, who is frequently referred to as the father of functional medicine. He's also an iconic figure in the establishment and growth of the natural products industry. And his goal is to change the global convers conversation about immunity and get people thinking about personalization in an entirely new way. It was such an honor for me to have him on the podcast. If you guys have been listening to this podcast for a while or following me on Real Foodology, you know how important I find functional medicine to be. I talk about it on a lot of my episodes. It is a root cause way of looking at our current disease model where right now we are putting band Aids over things and we are not looking at the root cause and functional medicine, and that's where that comes in, actually looks at the whole body and the way the body works in symbiosis and attempts to get to the root cause and looks at diet, lifestyle traumas that you've been through, your emotional state, your social life, all of these things play a role in your overall health. And this is why I find functional medicine so incredibly important. So I brought Dr. Jeffrey Bland on today to talk about functional medicine. We also talk about the immune system a little bit. We talk a little bit about our food industry. We touch on autoimmunity. We talk a lot about epigenetics, actually, which is another really fascinating conversation that I love to talk about. And then he also tells us a little bit about Himalayan Tartary buckwheat, which is actually a buckwheat that he discovered, a superfood and he actually sells it now through his company, Big Bold Health. So with that, let's just get into the episode. Guys, I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. And if you guys are loving the podcast. Please make sure to leave a rating and review. It takes just a couple seconds and it means means more to me and supports the show more than you would know. Thank you so much. I really hope you guys enjoyed the episode. I love Thai food, but I don't always have the time to cook it because there's a lot of ingredients, there's a lot of added spices and everything that goes in there. To be honest, it's a little intimidating for me and I don't love to do to order takeout because you never know what kind of oils they're using and there's probably a bunch of preservatives and junk in there. You just never know.

So.

So I am so stoked that I found this company called Yai's Thai. They make a ton of ready to go convenient marinades and sauces based on the founder's Thai grandmother's recipes. How cool is that? So you know that they're not only legit and they taste really good, but they're also lower in sugar. They don't have any added preservatives or junk in there. Many of them are Whole 30 approved. They're vegan, paleo and keto. So they're crossing off all the boxes of being healthy. And then, you know, they're delicious because they're from her Thai grandmother's recipes. I have a couple in my pantry right now. I have a Thai coconut curry that is so delicious. I really, really love curries. There's also a yellow Thai coconut curry. There's a Penang curry. They also make a pad Thai sauce. I love a pad Thai and I love that I can make it at home because many of the ones out at restaurants are not gluten free. So I can do a little gluten free noodles, add on the pad Thai sauce, add in a couple of vegetables, and then you have a really simple, convenient meal that's so delicious and it's ready really fast and you know that you're getting clean ingredients, like you know exactly what's going in there. Y Thai has so graciously given me a code to share with you guys. If you use code real foodology, you're going to save 20% on any product or bundle. When you go to YAI.com that is spelled Y-A I S T H A I.com and use code real foodology, I feel like everyone in the health world right now is talking about the importance of getting enough protein and also the importance of maintaining muscle mass for longevity and I think this is a really important conversation. As we age, our muscles naturally deteriorate. So it's incredibly important, especially as we age, to focus on our muscle mass and make sure that we maintain it because it only gets harder to gain muscle and to maintain it the older we get. But if you start at a younger age and you are constantly working at it and making sure that you're getting good, high quality protein and doing strength training, it's only going to be easier as you age, not harder. And something really interesting to note is that, did you know our body makes up of 50% amino acids? Amino acids are the building blocks of life and they are the building blocks of protein. Protein is what helps us to not only gain healthy muscle mass, but to also maintain it. One of the ways I do this is I take Kion amino acid powder every single morning. They give you a little natural energy boost. They also help to build lean muscle and enhance athletic recovery. And they taste really good. So it's a super simple way to get your amino acids in every day. They're really clean. They don't have any artificial flavors or sweeteners. I'm a huge fan of them. If you guys want to try any of the Kion products today, including the amino acids that I talked about, go to getkeon.com Real Foodology that's G-E-T-K-I-O-N.com Real Foodology and you're going to save 20% on monthly deliveries and 10% on one time purchases. Many people talk about you as the father of functional medicine, which is why I was so excited to bring you on because functional medicine is a huge passion of mine. And I think it's really, it's incredibly important as we move forward and try to fix this mess that we're in with our healthcare and our food system. So I would love to hear a little bit about, or I want my audience to hear a little bit about your story and how you got into functional medicine in the first place.

Well, you know, it's really interesting when I think about that question because Courtney, what you're doing is actually with real foodology, it's exactly the way that my sister and I were raised in Southern California. We grew up in the San Fernando Valley back in the 50s. And my mother was a natural foods devotee. She was an Adele Davis person. Her mother was also a natural kind of nutrition person. And so, you know, we never had white bread, we never had desserts, we never had soft drinks, we never had snack foods. My mother was all from scratch type of upbringing. So it was really a powerful imprint. And when I later went on into medical school, it's very funny, I would come home really excited of what I'd learn and I would sit down and, you know, kind of bring my mother up to speed as to what I was learning and hoping that she was going to be proud of me, right? And she would say, well, Jeff, that's really great what you're learning, but are you learning anything about nutrition? And I would say, well, no, I'm actually not getting much in nutrition. She says, well, when you learn something, it's important to let me know, Would you? So that was kind of her own philosophy. So that obviously imprinted me. You know, I became a professor. I was involved for many years and doing research and I had the opportunity to spend a couple of years on sabbatical blindness. Pauling two time Nobel Prize winner at Stanford and so I was getting my chops kind of over the years and more and more recognizing that there was a gap between the way that I was trained and I think the way that most health professional people were trained, which is very disease centric, and what we consider health. And we would most say, all of us, that health is more than the absence of disease. Yet the way I had been trained was really to think of disease as the primary focus of all of our intention, diagnosis and treatment. It led me into really collaborating with individuals ultimately around the world. I started doing research that got some publicity and that then got me onto the speaker circuit and got me traveling globally. And eventually now I've traveled over 6 million miles. But over the course of all those experiences, I was meeting really remarkable people that were thinking about this whole question of health from a different perspective. And that ultimately led my wife Susan to say to me, jeff, you've been doing all this traveling, this is in the 80s, and you speak about all these really remarkable people that have these extraordinary ideas. Maybe we ought to host a meeting. I'll put it together. You can bring say 40 or 50 of these pacely leading individuals in and we'll do a whiteboard discussion about what would be a health care system that would be ideal if you took away licensure and reimbursement, just talked about the concept of health. And so that led us ultimately to have with her organization this meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Vancouver island in Victoria, where these about 48 different people representing different disciplines were kind enough to come in. And we sat down for three days and had a brainstorming and it was really hugely exciting. I think all of us were just feeling like we were touching on all sorts of different topics from emotional well being, psychological, physical exercise, stress. I mean, the whole gamut of different things. And that then led us to have the following year, that would be 1990, a second at the same place, second meeting. And it was at that second year that I had this idea in a kind of a dream state. This is where often we do our most creative thinking. I think about the fact that what we were really talking about over those two years was not so much disease as something you'd put a name on, but rather function. And then I started to say, you know, maybe it's dysfunction that precedes disease. And so how could we think of dysfunction in a different way? Because it would force us to think upstream, to think about root cause. Because later downstream becomes the broken parts that we call disease that get certain diagnostic codes that we call the International Classification of disease, or ICDs. And that leads to the ability for doctors to reimburse for services when they get a ICD on a person, but they didn't actually ever ask the question how they get there and what happened to their journey. And so that led me to then suggest to my group on that second year that maybe we could think of function in four different quadrants or four different areas. And those were physical functioning, metabolic functioning, cognitive functioning, and behavioral functioning. If you could quantify each of those like we quantify disease, if you could find a way to really actually know how to say how a person was functioning in each of those four areas, maybe we would able to define something that we would call health, not just disease. Maybe that's their state of health. So I threw out that idea to the group and we jousted about it for several hours and eventually it was decided. Okay, the term functional medicine doesn't sound like a really great term in 1990 because it really had two kind of connotations in medicine. One was geriatric medicine with older age, people that were disabled, and the other was psychosomatic medicine. It's all in your mind. And I said, well, yeah, those are the way that functional medicine has traditionally been thought of. But in reading the literature, I'm seeing more and more evidence of functional radiology and functional endocrinology and functional cardiology. Maybe it's going to take on a new definition over time. Maybe we ought to skate to where the is going rather than where it is. We all then agreed, okay, let's just put our stake in the ground and we'll talk about this as a systems biology approach to healthcare with function as our focus, and we'll call this the Functional medicine. Well, to finish off this long winded quick question, what happened was several years later, we did found the Institute for Functional Medicine. My wife then went through the American College of Community courses to become a provider of continuing education for health providers. And so several years later, one of our members came up to me and he said, so, Jeff, you realize that the functional medicine was actually written about in the 1844 issue of the Lancet medical magazine. And I said, you got to be kidding me. I mean, I consider myself a bibliophile. I read the medical literature quite extensively, and I would have thought that if functional medicine had ever been discussed before, I would have known about it, but lo and behold, I did not. And he said, yeah, you can get a copy of this article, which I was able to get out of the archives. And it was written by the dean of medicine of the medical school at Birmingham Medical School in England. And he was quite an esteemed physician, and he wrote a series of lectures on functional medicine in which the. Although it was written in a language that was of the 19th century, if you really parsed it out, it was very, very similar to the functional medicine that we were designing. The only difference was we had a lot of tools that they did not have in, in the 19th century that we had when we formed functional medicine in terms of assessment tools. But really the philosophy was, was really laid down very nicely in his lecture. So I, I don't feel like I, I invented anything coming up with functional medicine. We just have taken that concept and embellished it over the last. Now, I can't believe it. It's 30, 31 years since we founded the Institute for Functional Medicine.

I mean, that's incredible. And I just want to take a minute to honor you and say thank you so much for all the work that you've done in this field, because it's, it's absolutely incredible. And it. Every time I have a conversation about functional medicine, I'm just blown away that it has taken us so long to get to this place where we've started recognizing that root cause and preventative measures are what we need to be doing when we're talking about our health and the way that we're addressing diseases and et cetera, and especially when you look at, I mean, even just the last, like 50 years, the rise of all of these chronic conditions, that so many of them are driven by lifestyle and diet choices. Why have we taken so long to get to this place where we're like, oh, yeah, there's got to be a root cause to this. And how can we get to the root cause? Find it and then, you know, relieve people's suffering. And it's just crazy. I mean, it's taken us this long.

Yes, it is, Courtney. But I think there's a reason for it. If you think about, let's put ourselves in a situation that we were way back when, a couple thousand years ago or more, and having to design a medical system. So what would be the first things that we would do? Because our skills and our tools were fairly rudimentary centuries ago. So we might say, well, the first thing I'm going to do is, like a true eye system. I'm going to find people that are bleeding, or people have bumps in their body, or people have lesions that have sores, or people that are passed out. So I'll do the most remarkable, easy things first, which are the things that don't require a lot of diagnostic acumen because the person is pretty obviously in distress. So you would start off with a medicine that would focus on those conditions. Then over time, you start to say, well, but there are some things that are beyond those immediate crises that if we don't do something about it, it becomes more severe over time. So now you look at things like what we call today diabetes, or you might have forms of mental illness, or you might have problems of digestion, and you say, well, if we don't do something about it, it will get worse with time. So you start feeding people all sorts of different things from plants. You see what might help them. And then you start cataloging over thousands and thousands of years of history experience, which becomes a pharmacopoeia of traditional Chinese medicine or Ayurvedic medicine or natural medicine from different cultures that go way back. And that becomes then the next step. Now, from there, you eventually get to where you start to say, well, actually, if you look at the function of the individual at a deeper level, which is what Linus Pauling brought to us with the concept of. Of biochemistry as applied to health and cellular biology, then you start to say, well, we can use different lenses to explore the upstream problems that even precede the onset of a condition like diabetes. So we ended up pre diabetes and insulin resistance, and on it goes. So now you develop a library of tools that allow you to ask and answer questions that you could not answer previously. And I feel like I was just fortunate to be born at the time where that transition was starting to happen in the 1900, late 1900s. And now as we move into the genomic and post genomic age now, the tools have become so robust that we can answer all sorts of questions. But the problem is we're still holding onto a model that's a legacy 200 years ago, and we're resistant to give it up because it has been pretty incorporated into teaching and into professionalization in the finances, in the reimbursement. All those things are resisting factors to make change.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you brought up a great point. We have a lot of. There's a lot of uphill battles when it comes to changing this whole system, and a lot of it is financial. You know, you look at insurance, insurance doesn't cover a lot of preventative care because they don't even recognize it as like a form of. Of care in the health care system. And then, you know, there's a lot of money incentives in putting people on medications instead of getting to the root cause, because there's a lot more money in just putting a band aid over it than actually fixing the problem.

You said this beautifully. I've listened to a number of your podcasts, and I think your efficacy is really, really powerful because you start asking, you've asked this question, but I'm going to ask it for your listeners. And that is, what are the things that we can change, that we can gain control over that are in our locus of control? It doesn't require some highly trained professional to intervene with some magic something and rescue us from disease. And of course, a shared common human experience is eating. I've yet to meet someone that hasn't eaten some time. And we know that eating, as with breathing, are fundamental factors that influence our function. And therefore we start saying, well, does it make a difference what you eat, or is it all just about calories? As long as you get enough calories that you keep your energy stores properly rejuvenated, you're going to be fine. And, and we recognize now that, no, that food is not just nutrients. Food is information picked up by our genes. It's translated into our function. Let me say that again because I think this is a simple thing that blows off my tongue because I've said it so many thousands of times, but I think it's a fairly profound, recent concept. When I say recent, I mean within the last, say, 30 years, that food is information for which our genes pick up information to figure out how they're going to function. Now, if that is a different way of thinking about Nutrition and real foodology. Now we've developed a whole new paradigm, a new operating system, a new way of thinking of our responsibility towards our eating, what we. Where it comes from, how it was growing, whether it's happy food or angry food, and then how that influences our function over time, that then later translates into our diseases. That model is an entirely different model than I was exposed to when I went to medical school and got my PhD in the 60s. That was never discussed once. So I think here is a new opportunity. You're doing a wonderful job of communicating that to your podcasters.

I really appreciate that a lot. Well, I know this is a topic of discussion that you are very well versed in, and I've heard you talk about this a lot as epigenetics, and I think this really ties in with what you were just saying, is that food is information. And it's one, I guess, component of the epigenetic conversation that I find so fascinating. And I really want to. I want to talk about this a little bit. I've mentioned it a couple times in podcast episodes, but. So when we think about food being information for our genes, what is the role that plays in epigenetics and what we've learned recently about how we can turn these genes on and off, depending on what we eat, lifestyle, et cetera.

Yeah, that's a magic question. You know, when I went to. Again, I'm a throwback guy. I know. So I'm just going to give a little historic perspective. We were told without any question when we went through our training that the genes, once you get past fetal development, are locked in place and you didn't fill out an application card, you got whatever you got. If you got the good luck of the draw, Hooray. If you didn't, well, we're just going to have to find something to help you with medicine. That concept of what I call genetic determinism was a very, very powerful concept in and still is resonant in medicine today and to some extent even in nutrition. With that as a construct, it was believed that, well, the best we could do is fix broken people because they had bad genes. But now what we've recognized that this concept of genes, once they are in place, can never be modified in terms of their function is changing. That's the epigenetic revolution. It doesn't mean that we're actually changing the genes. Our architecture, what I call our book of Life, which is encoded in our 23 chapters that are half of each chapter written by our biological mother. The other Half by our biological father. That genetic code stays the same. But what changes is the way that code is read. And that's what epigenetics does, is it? It marks the book with what I call paper clips and sticky notes. But the paper clips are things put on our genes that say, don't read here. This is expurgated. And the sticky notes say, read here. Now, the reason that's, I think, an important, interesting concept is that if you recall that we're all developed from a single fertilized egg. That single fertilized egg turns into every cell type of our body, which there are hundreds of different cell types. Now, how does that happen if they all have the same book of life? It's because in development, in fetal development, epigenetics regulates what cells will become a nervous cell, what cells become a heart cell, what become in all the different cell lines. And that is related to epigenetics. There's been no doubt that epigenet development, what is now more recent and remarkable is that we see now that even in adults, even in older age adults, there is still some ability to modify the genetic imprinting, these marks, these sticky notes and these paper clips to modify how genes are expressed. So you might have what you think is the genes for autoimmune disease, but actually it turns out there are no specific gene for autoimmune disease. It is a complex array of multiple genes that are expressed as a consequence of the experiences in life that we've had that have imprinted our book of life in such a way that it becomes hostile to our environment. We're not allergic to ourselves, we're allergic to our environment. And now we have to see, can we reverse that, rejuvenate it? And can we do that specifically on our immune cell? Because that's where most of autoimmunity resides, is in imprinting epigenetically of our immune system. And so the breakthrough that we've seen in the last 20 years, particularly accelerating the last decade, is that there are ways of turning back these marks that lead cells into feeling that they're in a state of hostility, they're in a state of alarm, they're in a state of they have to do battle. They've been epigenetically programmed to think that they've got to put up their dukes and do battle. And what we need to do is make them back into peaceful, tranquil, blissful cells by changing their epigenetic marks, by bathing them in a different series of experiments, part of which comes with how we eat and the things we eat, we don't eat angry foods, we eat peaceful foods. And those are things that then reprogram our epigenome to allow our genes to be the white light of good health that we deserve.

There's nothing more comforting than a warming cup of hot chocolate before bed. I know coming from me, that may sound a little counterintuitive because you're probably thinking, how is hot chocolate healthy for you? But I've got a little hack for you and it's called Organifies Gold Chocolate. First and foremost, the most important thing here, it has 1 gram of total sugar in it. So you get the satisfaction of having a comforting, cozy, little sweet treat after dinner without all the loaded sugar. And it's like with this one, you get a twofer, a two for one, because you also have the added bonus of things like turmeric, lemon balm, turkey tail. There's also magnesium and there's reishi in there. So whenever I drink this at night before bed, it gets me really sleepy and ready to wind down and it really improved my sleep. There's also a blend in there that helps with digestion. There's acacia, cinnamon, ginger, black pepper and turmeric. So if you have this after dinner, it's also going to help with your digestion and it's going to get you ready for bed. My favorite thing about Organifi products, outside of them being all organic, they're also glyphosate residue free. If you have listened to this podcast long enough or paid attention to my Instagram, you know that glyphosate is a huge, huge concern for all of us in this country. Glyphosate is a known carcinogen that is being sprayed. It's an herbicide. It's being sprayed on all of our crops that are not organic and it's also being leaked into organic products as well, organic foods. So this glyphosate residue free stamp is so incredibly important. And it's one of my favorite things about Organifi outside of their actual products, which I love. If you want to try this hot cocoa from Organifi or any of their other products that I mentioned today, make sure that you go to organifi.com realfoodology and you are going to save 20% on your order. Again, that's O R G A n I f I.com realfoodology so when we're talking about autoimmunity, I mean, we're seeing such a high percentage of people dealing with the, with this now, what do you think the reasoning is behind that? I mean, because you had mentioned that it's also the experiences that we've been through in life. Right? So, so it's obviously diet, lifestyle, could be traumatic experiences as well. What's, what's your, what's your thinking behind that?

Well, I think you just said it, you. That was brilliant what you just said. Because in the past it has been known by rheumatologists, doctors who specialize in autoimmune disease, that there are certain chemicals that will induce autoimmune disease in some people, in fact, or even some drugs that have warning labels on them because they can produce autoimmune disease. As if the body then becomes hostile and the immune system responds by inflammation. Now, how does that happen? It happens because our body is continually sensing the outside and inside world. 24 7, 365. There are three systems of the body to do that. They're working for us simultaneously, and that's the nervous system, the mucosal surfaces of our body, which are gut mucosa from the mouth down to a southern hemisphere, and our respiratory epithelium in our nose all the way through our lungs. Those are constantly sampling the outside world and sensing whether there is friends or hostels available and exposed. If it's hostile, then there's a whole very remarkable system to activate a defense mechanism called the immune system. So when we think of autoimmunity, it suggests that people become allergic to themselves. Somehow one Monday morning they wake up and their body hates themselves. And that's actually not true. What happens is that the body has developed in response to a perception that it's under attack from something. Now that something could be the microbiome, it could be dysbiosis, that something could be chemicals eating in their food, that something. And this is your point that you made that I want to emphasize, maybe even a non materialistic thing like trauma, like post traumatic stress, that we now see that those signals are also picked up by this immune system through the nervous system and translated epigenetically to mark your immune cells in such a way that they become scarred. They become scarred from that bad experience. So it's not just chemical exposures, it's also psychological exposures and environmental and radiation exposures. All of those can be captured by your immune system epigenetically to remember them as bad experiences that live longer than the experience. So they linger with you sometimes for the rest of your life. But this is the big news. Anything in our body that moves one way has been found to have A path that can move the other way. There's no such thing as one way streets. Sometimes the other street going back is slow, but it still is available. The question is, how do we rejuvenate getting those scars out of our immune system? Getting what is sometimes called zombie cells. That's a pretty strong term, isn't it? That makes a good point. Zombie cells that live with us. How do we get rid of zombies so that our body rejuvenates the capability to be a youthful, resilient immune system and not being at war with ourselves. And that, to me, is the frontier of the new field of rheumatology. Because it's not just the drugs that we've been using that just suppress the immune system. They put a blanket over the immune system. That's why the warning labels on those drugs say, by the way, this could increase your risk to tuberculosis, or this could increase your risk to various forms of cancer. Because we've suppressed your immune system. No, what we're trying to say is rejuvenate the immune system so that it has the chance to regain its functional capability.

Yeah, that's really fascinating for people listening that don't know what zombie cells are. What are those?

Well, it turns out that when immune cells get injured or cells in the body get injured, they can collect the injuries as these, what are called scars. And those are kind of epigenetic and metabolic scars. And those then turn that cell because it turns genes on that were previously quiet. Now they become. They have a voice. And those cells are called senescent associated secretory phenotypes. Sasp Secretory, meaning they're secreting substances outside the cell into the body. And they are associated with the outcome of inflammation. Now your body moves into a state which has been called inflammaging, that you've got an inflammatory simmering pot of stewing all the time that is associated with accelerated biological aging. Aging of your immune cells, aging of your skin, aging of your liver, aging of your. Whatever organization du jour that we're talking about. Inflammation is part of the zombie cells activating this process to release these secretory associative inflammatory molecules. So it doesn't sound good, right? People don't want to be a simmering pot of inflammation. So how do you reverse inflammation? And here is where the diet plays a big role. Lifestyle plays a big role. Exposure to. Getting rid of exposure to toxic chemicals plays a big role. Having love and attribution in your life and being in a safe place plays a big role. All those things Nourish you at many levels to rejuvenate the cells that were injured and carry this zombie cell architecture.

Oh, I love that. And what about, would autophagy be something that would get rid of those? Are the zombie cells different than like dead cells or would it be through autophagy you also get rid of them?

Yes, they're actually not dead cells. They're. They're cells that have this personality of having been converted into an inflammatory state. And autophagy, which was only discovered the mechanism within the last 20 years that won the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology for its discovery in, in 2013. So it's a reasonably recent discovery that that process is a cellular garbage collecting that eats up these damaged components and allows renewal of cells that have the full potential and are not carrying these bad messages, not carrying these scars. And it was really. I'm not speaking to the frontier of a revolution because if you, I want to take it just a step back with you because I know of your, your strong advocacy with real foodology of what's going on in our food supply system. If you look at the corporate capture of the nutrition professional in the United States, the corporate nutrition profession, let's just call it corporate nutrition, has really been advocating a form of nutrition that I think most people would say fosters and supports high ultra processed foods.

Yeah.

And ultra processed foods are kind of like, it's like a four letter word, right? It's like really, it's, it's bad.

Yeah, it's like putting fuel over the fire that's already raging.

Exactly. Yeah. And so when you start looking at ultra processed foods, you start seeing that they are heavily involved with stack and convenience foods and with the corporate culture of the food processing industry, things are changing. So I don't want to throw too much babies out with the bathwater, but I think that we have seen a history of decades of the concept that good nutrition comes from eating these convenience foods. And the way that that nutrition industry has been successful in getting that message out to the public is not only through public service and advertising, messaging, but also through kind of co opting the nutrition professional community. Particularly what used to be called the, well it's now called and used to be the Dietetics Association, American Dietetics Association. And by heavy support of that organization, they really won over the body politic of nutrition information. And they made it look like people who spoke to the contrary, like my mother did when I, when she was raising me, were, they were weirdos. Right. They didn't really know they didn't have good education. They had good education. They would be members of the team. This is a little bit of what's happening in medicine, by the way, as well. There's a similarity here. Being a member of the guild, right? You want to be recognized by your colleagues of not being weird. And so now we're starting to see the corporate capture of the nutrition profession changing, in which we have people like yourself that have said, okay, I, I. There are things that I will take away from my education that is very useful. But that's not the only thing that I need to know. I need to know how foods are alive. I need to know how foods were growing in mycorrhizal friendly soils and how those foods ultimately ended up being converted into a product that people eat and what were they packaged in and what other things were put in there to preserve them and so forth and so on. And all of those questions then frame a new dialogue as it relates to food and nutrition. And it takes us away from then the ultra processed foods into a new movement which is gaining huge, quick response, I think, and growing popularity, which is the food is medicine approach. And it was the, you know, President Biden had this September Congress conference in Washington D.C. of the first conference of its type at the federal level since the McGovern committee hearings back in the 60s on hunger, nutrition and health. And out of that particular Congress conference came something that I would not have believed actually happened at the government national level. That was the group of individuals who were meeting came to the recognition that we need to turn over the way we're thinking about food as just this source of calories and maintain proper body weight and so forth. To think of it as bioactive ingredients that really influenced the function of our body in remarkable ways. So that food is medicine, and that term food is medicine was actually coined, not coined, was championed in the reviews of that meeting, even including the New England journal of medicine. Dr. Darius Musafarian wrote a brilliant article called the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health A New National Strategy. This appeared in the New England Journal of medicine in the November 2 issue this last year. He was reviewing this concept of food is medicine as a new concept in which it was even suggested at the conference. I know this is enough to blow your socks off that maybe we would get to the point where physicians would be prescribing vegetables as a prescription that would be reimbursed for people going to the store and using them in their diets. This is revolutionary. Different thinking, out of the box thinking and so I think we're in a paradigm shifting period that is really, really exciting. Even things that we thought were, you know, alternatives that were, we felt a good step. Let me use an example. Recently, something you're very familiar with, received a lot of noteworthy news, and that's the recent evidence from Stan Hazen that he published in Nature Medicine on erythritol.

Oh yeah, I just saw that.

So people took sugar out of foods and they started adding sugar substitutes or non caloric sweeteners. One of those was erythritol, this polyol sweetener that's non metabolic, supposedly. But now Stanheisen at the Cleveland Clinic, who by the way, was already very well established in his research, considered quite a luminary scientist, he and his colleagues at Cleveland Clinic found that there was an increased risk of cardiovascular disease in people who were consuming erythritol at significant levels. And therefore now we say, well, something that was put in there to take sugar out actually may have created another problem of its own because it's a synthetic derivative. So I think we're starting to look with much more precise views about how food influences function and what are the array of things that we didn't consider to be important in food that now we think are really important, like the phytochemicals in food that we took out. In fact, I remember reading an article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition back in in 2000 and it was talking about the food processing industry is involved with genetic hybridization of foods to remove these bittering agents out of food. So we'll be able to make vegetables and various things less bitter or less astringent so that people will like them. They'll be more like mild flavoring. Well, when you take those flavors out of food, you're taking out the phytochemicals that are there to help protect the body's function. So yes, you might make it more tasty, sweet, salt and fat, but you're not making it more healthy. So all these things are trends that we're starting to see happening right now. That's really exciting.

Yeah, that's really fascinating. And I wanted to take a little step back because I loved how you brought up the corporate interest in all of this. My story was I actually was on the RD track to be a registered dietitian. And I pulled myself out of the program because I started seeing all the corporate ties and I didn't want to be involved in that in any way at the time. I don't know if they're still doing this. But I remember they were being sp. Their events they had every year were sponsored by General Mills and Coca Cola. And it was just. It was mind blowing to me because I was going into the nutrition field wanting to help people heal their bodies. And I had this concept of food as medicine. And then here this program was that was teaching my curriculum. They were taking money from these highly processed food companies. And so my philosophy has always said back to what you said about your mom and how they were trying to say that people like us that have this notion of food as medicine is that do the opposite of what mainstream says to do. Be okay being the weirdo. Because you know what? It's way cooler that way. Because slowly we're all catching up to the fact that, you know, the people that have been saying this for a long time, that food is medicine is actually correct. We were right. And we know this from what you're saying about when we look at the phytonutrients in foods, you know, like we think about, like blueberries, for example, fight free radicals in our body. And that's just one example of the multitude of different fruits and vegetables that we have that actually have a real effect on our body. And I want to say one more thing that I'm not sure a lot of people know this. And I've always found this fact so fascinating. Most drugs, most pharmaceutical drugs that we create are either built off of a plant component that already exists in nature, or they're trying to mimic the way that certain plants work. And when I found that out, I was like, wow. I mean, what are we doing with all these synthetic pharmaceutical drugs? Why are we not studying more these components in real foods that are actually having similar effects on the body and helping us heal?

You just said it. That needs exclamation with big stars after it. Because if you look at a interesting topic right now, which is this weight. These weight loss drugs, Ozempic and Wegovy. So they are revolutionizing weight loss clinics all over the country, sprouting up with these particular drugs as the treatment of choice. So it begs the question, yes, they do cause weight loss. So how do they work? They work because they are what are called GLP1 agonists. What is GLP1? That's glucagon, like peptide. It's a hormone that is secreted naturally by our gastrointestinal cells in the small intestine that goes into our blood and stimulates insulin and reduces inflammation. And that hormone is a natural hormone that's produced but it's stimulated by certain foods in our diet that happen to be bitter foods.

Interesting.

Bitter foods activate GLP1. So now we have these drugs that are mimicking nature and trying to up the volume by giving therapeutic doses. By the way, it's very interesting, just as an aside that Ozembic is a diabetic drug, Wegovy is a weight loss drug. They're the same exact active material. What's the difference? The difference is the dose. Now here's where the interesting difference in consumer manipulation occurs. We're told don't use Ozemic because it's a diabetic drug, but it's safe to use Wegovy. But it turns out that Ozembic is half the dose of Wegovy. Wegovy is actually twice as strong yet because it got the approval from the government as a weight loss drug, it can be used in teenagers without diabetes, whereas Ozembic, half the dose, cannot be used legally because it's only for diabetes. You see the paradox that we get involved. It's crazy making. But the point I'm trying to make is that natural foods that we've been eating historically from a complex diet that's rich in plant foods, will activate your GLP1 receptors and produce naturally these materials that help to regulate weight. And, you know, for more than 30 years, I've been saying in seminars for doctors that we have been misled thinking that calories is the solution to weight. Calories are important. I don't throw them out. Calories are a source of potential energy. That's what they measure is potential energy. But it's how the energy is used that's as or more important than the potential of the energy. If a person can't metabolically use the energy of calories that they're consuming, what does their body do? It's very intelligent. It stores it for a rainy day that never comes, called body fat. If you're metabolically impaired, you then have a tendency to store calories as fat. And in so doing, it may be associated with alterations of your blood sugar, which then alters your taste perception and makes you feel hungry. So now you increase your calorie consumption because your body's thirsting for proper nutrition to feed cells with energy, but it's not being made. So the body says, okay, we better eat more. So now you get sugar craving. You get all these various things that are occurring that really multiply this obesity phenomena that we're observing in our culture. So the construct, by eating foods that contain the right kind of signaling Molecules to send your genes friendly messages as to how to turn on your metabolism epigenetically. That's the solution to the problem. It's not just restricting calories, and it's not just taking GLP1 agonist drugs either.

I have such a problem with this Ozempic thing happening right now because, I mean, I'm just always. I always like to err on the side of caution, and I like to take a totally different route and look at the person's diet and try to get to the root cause. I mean, this is what we've been talking about, talking about this entire episode. And it concerns me that we have so many people that are just so willing to jump on, you know, the next trend of this drug, you know, next drug that comes out. And then when you look at how the FDA approves things, oftentimes they approve it preemptively, and then they go back later and pull it from the shelves. That's. Or they see the detrimental effects it's had on people. And, yeah, it's really concerning, especially when we know what we know. Everything we've talked about in this entire episode, the importance of food and diet and exercise. And then this great point that you just brought up with the highly processed foods. The reason why they're so concerning is that they are essentially empty calories. And I think this is where the part of the conversation where calories do matter. Because when you think about you're essentially just eating high caloric density air, that your body is just like, well, we didn't get any nutrients from that, so now we need more. And then, you know, it's as if the calories counted in the way that they shouldn't have counted. You know what I mean? Where it's like, you've taken a lot in, but then now you don't have any energy to produce from it, because your body, in a way like this obesity epidemic we're seeing, people are starving at a cellular level because they're not getting their nutrient needs met.

You're absolutely on target. I totally agree. And actually that just to make a segue, that's what kind of drew me into this Himalayan tertiary buckwheat. You know, I never thought in my life that I would be in organic farming and owning parts of farms in upstate New York and an artisanal Miller in Trumansburg, New York. And it was all drawn to me into asking the question, what are the foods that have characteristics that really break this vicious cycle of empty calories that then encourage all these metabolic problems? Ranging from arthritis to diabetes to dementia to just go down the list. Chronic illnesses I just happen by if there is such thing as serendipity. And the older I get, the more I'm doubting if it's serendipity. I think we tend to hang out with certain people that are more likely to tell us something we didn't know than just by coincidence. But it happened that three different people in three different occasions, all in the course of about two to three months, introduced me to this concept of Himalayan tertiary buckwheat, which I found out had been lost, as in the food in America 200 years ago, when it was an ancestral colonial food that our, our ancestors had brought over because it was so hearty and it was so nutritionally dense that people could live on it, grow it easily in bad soils without fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides. And it didn't, bugs didn't like it. It was really this wonderful nutrition product that we had lost entirely. And the more we have been studying Himalayan tartery buckwheat, which is, by the way, different than common buckwheat. This is.

I was just gonna ask you. That.

Has a different genetic structure. The seeds look different. It is obviously a relative. So there are members genetically of similar families. But the Himalayan tertiary buckwheat has 50 to 100 times. Now, I want to emphasize times, not percent, 50 to 100 times as much phytochemicals that are immune strengthening as common buckwheat. So it's like a pumped up immune version of common buckwheat. And it is a remarkable product, high in protein, about 12 to 13% protein, high in essential amino acids, very rich in B vitamins, high in minerals like zinc, magnesium. I mean, it's just one of these remarkable foods that we lost in our food supply system. I'm still asking the question why? I don't think there's probably one answer to that. It's probably several answers. I think one of the answers is it has flavor. And if you want to make a food supply system that's sweet fat and sugar, sweet fat and white flour, this is probably not the exact thing you want. This has its own personality. So as we went to personality free foods in our American food processing, ultra processed. This is probably not a good example of something to use for someone who really likes flavor, texture and composition. It's magnificent. And now we have a food lab, now that we have over 100 different recipes we put together of chefs around the country playing with it. So it's, it is Revitalizing, by the way. This, this has been a cultivated food for 4,000 years. Can you believe it?

Wow.

No, it's one of the oldest foods that's been consumed by humans in a cultivation situation.

Okay, that's so fascinating. And actually I had the pleasure of trying some and I also have some in my pantry right now. But when we met, I tried something. Was it like pancakes that we had? I'm trying to remember. But I. It was, it was so good. So good.

It's so fun for me because we, we had to develop this agriculture because it didn't exist in the United States. So I had to get soil scientists and organic farmers to work with us. And eventually we're able to grow enough to get the seeds because you can't go to the seed store and buy it. So we had seeds that we could expand the crop. Now this, this year, we are the number one artisanal flower on Amazon. So we're starting, we're starting to bring it back. You know, you can see Himalayan chartering. Buck, we just started. People are saying, let me give it. Let's see what, what this is all about.

Yeah, it's really awesome. Can you imagine when you were talking about, you were listing off all the health benefits of it. Can you imagine if we had gone a different route and buckwheat was one of, you know, the crops that we grew to such extreme levels like we do in America, instead of like wheat, corn and soy. I was like, what if we were using this Buckwheat turf? What is it? Buckwheat turf. Himalayan or Himalayan. How do you say?

Himalayan Tertiary. Buckwheat Tertiary. And the reason Tartary is the Tartan district is a district in China on the foothills of the Himalayan mountains where this was first found.

Okay, well, I'm glad you clarified the difference because that was one of the questions I was going to ask you is what was the difference between that and traditional buckwheat? And also for people listening, even though it sounds like it is a form of wheat and you and they would have gluten in it, it's. Buckwheat is actually gluten free. And a really great gluten free alternative to have it.

That's another interesting question, isn't it? How does this get labeled as a wheat when it has no relationship genetically to wheat whatsoever? It's actually related to. Doesn't have any relationship to the grass family of grains. What's not even a grain. It's a fruit seed. So it's always struck me Interesting. That got it labeled as a wheat because then maybe that was good years ago to make it simple, but now it's not so good. It's just confusing.

Yeah, it's very confusing. But it's a great flour. I love using it. I love buckwheat in general. I've been a huge fan for a long time, so I was excited to try this when I met you.

One of the things that we have also found and we're getting actually a lot of support from the scientific community, a lot of research is now being published on chartery buckwheat, particularly from Asia because it's been a historic food in Asian countries, Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan. And it turns out that it stimulates the release of GLP1 and it lowers glucose levels in the blood. It's very favorable for insulin resistance. So it's like I was talking about earlier, there are foods that are our food is medicine capabilities of managing. It actually turns on brown fat as well. So it activates the metabolism of fat in fat cells that are involved with energy production. So it's the more we study, the more we say, wow, how has this not been part of our opportunities in America for 200 years?

I know, it's really wild. So I'm very curious to know what you have to say to this. So one of the biggest questions I get all the time is there's a lot of confusion about what to eat because not only do we have obviously all these hyper processed foods and everyone's confused in that realm, but even when you really dive into nutrition and we have vegan diets, we have carnivore diet, I mean we have some people saying that plants are going to kill you and then we have other people saying meat is going to kill you and where do you stand and what would you tell someone listening that's just like I'm so confused. What do we eat, what do we follow? What would be your answer to that?

Well, this is probably in some ways a reflection of my age, but I'm a believer in history as being a good teacher. And when I say history I ask the question, what is the largest, longest scientific study that's ever been done on relationship of food to health? And it's called natural selection. It is millions of years old, right? That stuff has been going on for millions of years. So when I then ask the question, if I go to regions of the world where people are eating things that are around for lots of years, thousands of years, in this case of Terry Buckley, 4,000 years, what's the health outcome in those populations. And this takes me like the Dan Buettner's Blue zones. We start seeing people that are in Sardinia or people in the Bilkumboma area, or people in the Himalayan region who are still out working actively in fields when they're 90 and don't have modern medicines. And now there are many variables there. So I don't want to put it all on food because they're active, they've got community, they've got love and attribution. Their lives maybe are less stressful. They don't have cell phones. These are all parts of the story. But certainly food plays a very, very big part of this. And so you start saying, okay, are these people keto or are these people paleo, or are these people no plant food people? Or. And the answer is no, they eat what's available because the soil is the closest thing they've got to producing food for them. They can't go to the supermarket and buy things. And so they eat diets that are a lot like what Michael Pollan talks about. 60, 70% plant foods, the rest animal foods, if they're so lucky, lean cuts of meat they've been organically raised. Dairy products, if they use them, are not treated with BSE and other growth accelerants and things of that nature. So they're living close to the land, living in an unadulterated environment, and they're getting a lot of eating by the rainbow, a lot of different colored foods that are seasonal and they get lots of fiber and vitamins and minerals and plant proteins can balance themselves. Legumes and grains. We've known that. So that, that's kind of my watchword. I, I, you know, I met Francis mollapay in the 70s when I was a professor. I had her as a guest professor and she had just come out with a book, Diet for a Small Planet. And a lot of the things that she was talking about then are equally valid today. And so I just think that some of this is extremism and everybody wants to have a new story. I recognize that. I mean, diet books are built around a new story. You don't have a best selling book selling somebody else's old story. But unfortunately, the old stories are the ones that really are tried and proven and they have showing value. So you start saying, well, what about food allergens and what about toxins and what about things like gluten? And then we say, well, is it gluten for sure or is it in the way that we've hybridized grains to produce other things in the grains other than just gluten that are causing these allergic type reactions. So I, I think eating principally unadulterated natural foods is a very good place to start.

I loved that answer so much. It's very similar to what I tell people as well because my message is, you know, real foodology. So I always tell people, just as close to nature as you possibly can get, real food, real whole foods, that's. I feel like you can't go wrong there. And also another little rule of mine is if it was once alive and you can apply that to plants and animals, then it's fair game in my eyes. As long as, you know, not as long as you don't have personal allergies to stuff because obviously you can't do that. But otherwise, yeah, I feel like if it was once alive, it's fair game. And just try to follow the principle of whole real foods and you'll be doing a lot better than most people.

Well, and there are people now talking about the anti nutrients that are found in vegetable foods. Yeah, okay, okay, let's put this in context. Everything is toxic at some level. Even air and water. Even air and water. You can kill a person by hyperhydration, you can kill them by hyper oxygenation. So it's how much do you consume? And this concept of hormesis, you want to stress your body slightly because that's the way your genes best work, when they have a chance to exercise. So plant materials, these phytochemicals I'm talking about are hormetic substances that activate the best of your gene expression. That's very different than saying, well if a little is good, a whole lot more ought to be better. We're not talking about boatloads of taking any one ingredient. We're talking about the way naturally we have been using them and have grown up with them for millions of years to be in concert with our best physiology.

Yeah, yeah, it's a really great point. Well, I want to, I want to be mindful of your time. So is there anything else that you felt like really needed to be heard today before we go?

Well, I think only one other area which we know is, is getting a tremendous amount of very justified attention and that is this microbiome which we now recognize as the reactor between us and our food. So we're not just feeding us, we're feeding our microbiome. And you know, in the early 80s I recall giving talks to doctors actually, actually the first one I recall was in 1985, in which I was talking about dysbiosis and leaky gut and endotoxemia. And I had gastroenterologists in the audience that were criticizing me saying, there is no such thing. This is, you know, I'm making this up and it doesn't really exist. And now, of course, we see this is the news of the day. It's like new discovery endotoxemia, dysbiosis and prandial endotoxemia. So this concept of feeding our gut microbiome is really, really important with the proper prebiotics and, and having the proper probiotic organisms to help us. This is actually one of the things we've really been focusing on in big world health is how does the Himalayan tartary buckwheat work along with omega 3 fatty acids and work along with prebiotic fibers to actually renourish the gut? We call it the three pillars because when you renourish the microbiome, it does work for you. It signals to your immune system that all is well rather than all is alarmed. And once you get the immune system of the gut, which is, by the way around the gut is where 60% or more of our immune system is clustered, you send the right signal to the rest of the body. So that, that's another big part of our story. And anyone that's interested, by the way, in more of this, we have a whole series of educational tools on bigbowlhealth.com you can go and find me spouting ad nauseam about all these things that we are learning about the microbiome and the important role that nutrition plays in our health.

Yeah, it's fascinating. I would love to have you come back on at some point because there's so much I wanted to talk to you about.

Well, let's find a time and place. It won't bore your listeners and we'll give it another whirl.

Yeah, I would love that so much. So I want to ask you one more question that I ask all my, my guests, and this is a personal one. What are your health non negotiables? So these are things that you do daily, weekly to prioritize your own health?

Well, I think I have one non negotiable and probably only one, and that is I don't want anyone taking over my health for whatever. I want to be the master of my own destiny. Doesn't mean that I always make exactly the right decision, but I much prefer to make a decision on how I would like to proceed in the regulation of my zone. Of influence than have someone else do it for me. And so that leads me into then being responsible for making decisions for myself that are as well informed as I can make them. And that probably is what drew me to this field rather than staying in my traditional kind of medical environment that I was trained. So to me that, that concept of both self responsibility but taking, taking charge of how I want my body to be treated, I think is a fundamentally important part of how I lead my life. And I'm looking at my grandchildren now. I'm at that age where that really, that legacy situation, that's very, very important. And I have these remarkable power women that I call, I used to call them my grandchildren. They're now my grand young women. And I can see that they're going to be entirely different than, than girls in my generation. They're taking charge. They're, they're powerful, they're strong in their beliefs and their advocacy and you know, they're going to have different kinds of relationships as they go through their life. And probably the girls that were in my young women that were in my high school class. So I, I think these are all really important parts of making your journey in life as purposeful and meaningful as possible.

I think that's one of my favorite answers I've ever gotten. Seriously, because that, that message right there is so important for people to understand that we as individuals are the only ones that can truly take care, take hold of our health because we're also the only ones that are going to care the most about our health, you know, and our journey. So it's our responsibility to make sure that we do everything we can to, to take care of ourselves. Well, please tell all of my listeners where they can find you. And we'll also add links in the, in the show notes.

Oh, yeah, sure. Well, like you can find me at bigboldhealth.com or you can find me also at jeffreybland.com j F-F-R-A y b l a n d.com and you'll find probably more stuff than you ever thought. One of those two sites.

Yeah, no, it's really awesome. Well, I just want to say thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much, Dr. Bland.

Well, so according, I think you're doing a magnificent job. As I said this, the whole positioning you have for your podcast couldn't be more topical and important. So thank you.

Thank you. I really appreciate that. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of the Real Foodology Podcast. If you liked the episode, please leave a review in your podcast app to let me know. This is a resonant media production produced by Drake Peterson and edited by Mike Fry. The theme song is called Heaven by the amazing singer Georgie. Georgie is spelled with a J. For more amazing podcasts produced by my team, go to resonantmediagroup.com I love you guys so much. See you next week. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a subject substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and doesn't constitute a provider patient relationship. I am a nutritionist, but I am not your nutritionist. As always, talk to your doctor or your health team first.

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