16. Discover the Secrets of Immuno-rejuvenation (with Dr. Jeffrey Bland)

The work that's been done over the last few years on immune age has illustrated or indicated that the age of our immune system, the biological age, not the age in birthdays, but the biological age of our immune system is the most determining thing we can measure right now for determining our life expectancy. So people with aged immune systems have short life expectancies. People with young immune systems, biologically young immune systems have long life expectancy. So if you look at centenarians, healthy citinerans, like in the blue zones, these individuals have very young immune systems relative to their age and birthdays. So I think this is a, this is an aha discovery that is being made in the field that I think we can access and employ. And it's going to be, I believe, another clinical tool for the functional medicine provider.

Today's guest is Dr. Jeff Bland, who is a personable and highly respected thought leader who has spent more than five decades focused on the improvement of human health. He is known worldwide as the founder of functional medicine. His pioneering work has created the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute as well as the Institute for Functional Medicine, the global leader in functional medicine education. Since 1991, hundreds of thousands of healthcare practitioners have participated in PLMI and IFM programs. And this collective knowledge has positively impacted the lives of patients all over the world. Dr. Bland is the author of bestselling books and over 120 peer reviewed research publications. Dr. Bland is the author of bestselling books and over 120 peer reviewed Research publications. Dr. Bland's latest project is Big Bold Health where he's on a mission to transform the way people think about one of nature's greatest innovations, the immune system. Welcome, Dr. Jeff Bland. I'm so excited to have you on Take Back youk Health with Dr. Amy Myers. I think we used to call you the father of functional medicine. And this is not due to your age, but more. To more generations of people coming into functional medicine. I think maybe we can call you the grandfather of functional medicine.

I think that's it, amy. With the 78th birthday just happening last week. Yeah, I think that's probably correct.

Well, happy belated.

Thank you.

You look amazing. I hope 78. I'm flying off to Hawaii with my grandchildren and still contributing to the world like you are.

I'm sure you will, so thank you. Yeah, it's been quite a run, for sure.

Well, why don't you tell those who are not familiar with you just how you. I mean, I can't even say how you got into functional medicine because you really created what we now know is functional medicine. So do you mind sharing your story with us?

I've always been a guy that was kind of a science geek all the way through school and ultimately then through medical school and then into my PhD work was really focused, I thought, on, on more on research and trying to understand the origin of disease. It was always my, my, my, my mother said since I was very young, I was always asking, why do people get sick? So we know that infectious disease is fairly well understood, both viral and bacterial disease, and we certainly have been through the SARS CoV2. But there was always this other category of disorders that were not easily understood as to where they came from. And now we call them chronic complex disorders, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, dementia and so forth that don't have a single infectious origin for their incidence. And so I always got worried or concerned about what's causing them. And it's not just in your genes because we could see in studies that were done with identical twins that they don't have identical incidences of these types of chronic illnesses. So it always was a burning question of mine. And as I became a professor in 1970 in chemistry and environment environmental science, I then decided that my focus was going to be on trying to understand more about the origin of these chronic conditions. I was very fortunate over the first few years of my professorship from 70 on to have some remarkable students working with me. And we made some discoveries about something I thought I'd never work on, which was on vitamin E. I didn't consider myself to be a vitamin person at all, but I had a student who were really interested in vitamin E. And so we did this research. It turned out to be very successful. And we were the first group to kind of understand the mechanism by which vitamin E could prevent, at the cellular level, aspects of cellular aging that were related to a term back then that was, this was 1975 was kind of new and it was called lipid peroxidation and oxidation oxidative injury. So we became kind of experts in this whole immersion of the field of antioxidants and oxidants early on that ultimately led me then to be invited on a sabbatical two years to work with Dr. Linus Pauling, two time Nobel Prize winner laureate at Stanford. And so I, in 81, 82, I spent those years running a research lab in his institute, the Institute of Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in Palo Alto. And that then led me into recognizing that this was the area that I really wanted to work on the so so called molecular medicine, which was a term that he had coined in 1946. And so when I left the Pauling Institute to go back to my professorship, the last question he asked me as I was leaving was, do you think your classroom is big enough? And I wondered what the ulterior motive of that question was. And I had a long drive home with my family back to Washington State from Palo Alto, 1100 miles. And so I got thinking about it and I eventually recognized what he was really asking me is do I need to broaden my base of what I'm working on to be broader than just the classroom and the university and my research group that ultimately led me, by the time I got home, to give up my tenured faculty position. It's crazy when I think back to this, I had a family and a mortgage and all those things, but I decided to dedicate my life to trying to help physicians to understand how to employ nutritional practices or nutrition medicine in their practice. And that became the basis, that was the whole business plan from a business that I started breaking away from the university. That ultimately led me then into meeting all sorts of extraordinary people like you that were in the healthcare and health delivery areas around the world. I, I've traveled now 6 million miles in my life, which it seems crazy to even say that. Yeah, it's pretty hard to believe, but those travels had me meeting extraordinary number of remarkable people, innovative thinkers. And, and so my wife then in 1989 said, you know, you always talk about all these people you're meeting all around the world and all these thought leaders and new concepts that you're being impacted by. Why don't we host a whiteboard meeting and bring some of these people in and just have a discussion about what would be the ideal health care system. Let's remove licensure, remove reimbursement, just talk about what are the fundamental principles that could lead to the optimal healthcare system. And so we invited a little over 40 people to come into Victoria, British Columbia, on Vancouver island in 1989. And it was a remarkable discussion. I was total free flowing. We had people from all sorts of different disciplines in different countries. And that ultimately was so successful, we said, well, let's do it again. So we did it in 1990, same place, about same time of the year, and in 1990, by that time I'd had really a chance to be thinking about the nature of the conversations that we were engaged in the previous year. And I, I then came to the concept that what we've been talking about is not Just disease, but the preceder precedent of disease, which is the alteration in function. And I recognized that there were really three kinds of ways that function was, was expressed. Number one was physical function, our movements, our muscle, ligaments, tendons, all the kind of things we do at skeleton. The second was our metabolic function. Third was our cognitive function, and fourth was our behavioral function. And what I came to recognize from these discussions that we've been having in these meetings was that we had really great ways of diagnosing and defining disease, but we didn't have really great ways of understanding function. That maybe it was the lack of understanding function that gave us the lack of having a healthcare system. What we had is a disease care system and no real healthcare system because we'd never found a real good way of looking upstream or root cause of where disease comes from as it relates to change in function because we couldn't find ways to quantitate function. So in the second day of the second year of this meeting, I suggested to my colleagues, I said, maybe we should call this functional medicine. And they pushed back at first and they said, well Jeff, that's an interesting concept, but quite honestly, functional medicine, this is 1990, already has some bad connotations. It's either geriatric medicine with rehabilitation or it's psychosomatic medicine, all in your mind. And so it doesn't have a very favorable concept. But I said, I've been reading the literature carefully and I've been seeing more and more articles coming out with functional radiology, functional cardiology, functional endocrinology. So maybe the term is going to be changing its definition over time. Maybe we should skate to where the puck is going, not to where it is. So I convinced my colleagues that maybe we should give a whirl to the term functional medicine. And from that then the Institute for Functional Medicine was formed in 1991. We did our first international meeting in 92. And now it's to my great surprise, and I thank my wife Susan for this because it was her emergence of this idea and organizing these meetings that led to the development of this concept. But now there's over 200,000 practitioners that have gone through its programs. It's certified by the ACC ME to provide Continuing Medical Education's Category 1 credits. And. And it is starting to become discussed in real serious terms as a way of applying systems biology and healthcare to look upstream to where downstream disease comes from. So that's kind of the brief story of how we got to functional medicine.

It's pretty incredible that I started in functional medicine in about 2010, or it might've been a little earlier, 2009. So you had already, for almost 40 years, been having these meetings. And then I can tell the massive change since, you know, and then in the last 15 years since I went. I mean, it was still a pretty small group when I started and now with the hotels are bigger and I felt like I knew everyone when I went to the conferences and there's so many new faces and ever expanding. So it must be a very proud moment or moments for you.

Yeah, I'd have to say that the quality of the people that have elected to participate in functional medicine is, to me, so overwhelmingly wonderful because I was told early on by my colleagues in the academic medical community, having been a medical school professor for a number of years, that I was never going to be able to get doctors to go back and open up their books on anatomy, physiology, cell biology, biochemistry, nutritional, whatever. That was just not going to happen. People moved on. They didn't want to go back and look at those things. And I said, well, I think that's historically right. If it's like looking at it the way they had to look at it the first time, which was by demand and by requirement, and it wasn't clinically connected very well to what they were seeing in their practice. But if we can bring this science to life by bringing it in to demonstrate the clarity of how it can improve outcomes in patients with complex chronic illness that ways that they couldn't get by just looking at the disease in and of itself, maybe we will find enough people that are interested in doing that. And I think it's been proven that, yes, there are these extraordinary people like you who are willing to go that extra mile, to go back and relearn things and to maybe learn new things and to start applying it successfully to the reduction of the burden of disease that previously was. We didn't have good solutions to it. So I think this is really. This is for me, extraordinarily exciting.

Yes. I mean, I finished medical school, three years of residency now. I mean, I was a little bit different in that I knew I went into medical school knowing I wanted to do what we now know as functional medicine, or what I now know as functional medicine. But back then didn't. I had spent some time with Dr. Andrew Weil and considered integrative medicine. That just felt like I was sort of triaging people. I wasn't getting to the root. When I finally met Dr. Mark Hyman and heard him speaking about functional medicine, I mean it was like, that is exactly what I've been waiting for, right. And then it, it did. It took me another two full years of all of the trainings to go back through. But it was so refreshing in, in a way of. I felt that intuitively that is exactly how I thought it would be in medical school, but it wasn't right. And then you hear so many stories. At least I have, and I'm sure you have over the years of physicians that either themselves got sick and got failed by conventional medicine or the few that didn't get sick themselves or didn't have a family member that just got frustrated that their toolbox was limited to pills and really not solving problems. I was fortunate. I chose to go into emergency medicine because I knew I would find functional medicine one day. And that was a part of conventional medicine that I could believe in. But I also purposely did that with the idea that I could get out and I wouldn't have to do what many people had to do, which is change their practice from insurance to cash based or move altogether. So yes, it's been an incredible journey. And you have something. When you do have all of these people that are so committed to go back and learn additional ways to really frankly heal people and prevent disease, reverse disease and prevent disease, I think we got some help.

All of us in this field. I'd like to say we were pressing enough to know this is going to happen. But that may be a little bit filled with hubris. But, but the genomic revolution that has occurred in healthcare and medicine over the last now 24 years has been a real help in us understanding how it is that uniqueness among different disorders are expressed in different individuals. And we used to think that a disease was kind of like sacred. If you had a diagnosis of a disease that was, everybody with that diagnosis had the same disease. And we've now learned through genomic studies and cell biology research over the last 20 plus years that any one disease has multiple ways that it's expressed in the body that are different from person to person. So if you're not personalizing, you're not looking at the actual cause, you're just looking at the downstream effect. Then you're treating somebody as a generic individual which only provides a successful outcome in some small percent, sometimes of the individuals. I always look at autoimmune disease with the development of these TNF alpha blocking agents that are used to treat autoimmune diseases. Well, they're, they're revolutionary drugs that can lower the inflammatory burden that people have. Autoimmune disease. But if you actually look at the data on the number to treat in order to get a successful effect, it's only about three to four out of 10 that have a positive effect. Six to seven out of 10 people taking the same drug with the same diagnosis don't have a very positive outcome. So we, we actually measure success based upon the minority of respondents, which then very begs the question, what about the other six or seven people that didn't respond? What's going on with them? And that leads us into understanding that there are other things that we should be taking into account. If you really want to treat the individual, not just treat a disease, but treat the individual, you have to take these other factors into account. The factors that we in functional medicine have been speaking to now for 25 years or no, excuse me, 34 years.

Yeah, that possibly, as we all know from how medical school sort of came about with the antibiotics to treat an infection, and then that sort of moved into one drug for one disease. Yeah, antibiotics can be helpful for all of those people with that infection. But as you say, when we start getting into these chronic diseases, it's way more complicated than that. And then those six people that aren't getting benefit also all of the downsides to those immunosuppressive drugs, right from getting other infections and all the way to sepsis and potentially death. Now, you've since sort of branched off, if that's the best way to say it, into personalized lifestyle medicine. And in a lot of us, I've been to your conferences, those of us, I sort of consider myself one of the old schoolers in functional medicine. I wasn't there at the earliest days, when the meetings were 40 people, but certainly feel like I hit it before it's prime. And so many of my colleagues who have also attended those conferences, it reminds us of how the functional medicine conferences were originally much smaller, more familiar. Can you tell us what is personalized lifestyle medicine? And maybe does it differ from functional medicine? And if so, how?

When we set up functional medicine in 1991, we had two objectives for the institute. One was to put together a teachable curriculum that we could give tools to practitioners that could execute or use in their practice based upon the concepts of systems biology. They would look at people as a system, as a unique individual, not just as a single organ or single disease. And they would start to look at these upstream or root cause things that influence function. I think over the 30, now four years of the institute's lives, that objective has been reasonably well Achieved. I think that the curriculum and the certification program that the Institute for Functional Medicine has done a quite a good job of refining the clinical training component. The second objective, which is a little bit more esoteric, but it was to always make sure that our curriculum stayed at the cutting edge, the leading edge. Now, hopefully not the bleeding edge, but the leading edge of new concepts and new things that we're entering into the field of healthcare. Now that is a more complicated thing to integrate in the curriculum because of the nature of getting certified as a postgraduate medical education institute. Because now the accrediting agency, which is the ACCME American College of Continuing Medical Education, they require the curriculum to be usual in customary and standards of care. Which means if you want to kind of push the envelope a little bit, then it gets into all sorts of like, well, is that really double bind or is that randomized placebo controlled and how many studies have been published and so forth. So we had more challenge in IFM in making sure that we stayed at the leading edge. So I felt that maybe there would was a need for another organization that was not CMEA certified that could bring in these new ideas. It was all comers. So we could bring in whoever we wanted as a thought leader to kind of stimulate the, to I guess nurture the medium. And, and so we, I started PLMI recognizing that the concept of lifestyle medicine is kind of a generic term that covers everything. It can cover any kind of thing that influences a person's health and life. So it can be behavioral, it could be biochemical, environmental. And so I thought this could be an all comers place where we bring in ideas and we just kind of use this as an incubator for ideas. And then those that kind of rise up and sustain can be transferred over into IFM's curriculum and they can then be some of those people that we have already vetted can become teachers, lecturers and opinion leaders. And now that we started the PLMI 13 years ago, and I'd have to say that we've been pretty successful now in achieving that objective. This last year, in 1989, in 2023, we had 85,000 practitioners come to our courses, which were virtual courses from PLMI and we had lectures. Yeah, it's. It blows me away actually quite honestly as to how effective this has been, getting the message out. And the interesting thing is that we have people coming not only from the United States, but globally, but we also have all sorts of different disciplines. We've got researchers, clinicians, people working in insurance companies and in healthcare Institutions, people developing new assessment tools, laboratory methods, informatics, wearable devices. So it's been a melting pot for all sorts of new ideas which then allows us to translate or to appropriate some of those into the IFM curriculum. So I'm very kind of pleased to see that this model that I kind of speculated on into 13 years ago is actually working. We're actually getting now more people. In fact, what was it? Out of our 85,000 participants in programs in 2023, I think it was more than 50% of them were first timers that had never come to any IFM program. So we're getting, we're broadening the base, getting more people to be interested in the discipline, and then transferring them over into certification programs through the ifm.

And so what are some of the key topics that you've seen that you've been excited about that, that have made their way into the IFM curriculum from the blmi?

So I think there's a number of them, one which most people are all now very familiar with in our field, which when we started it was not so common, and that's mitochondrial bioenergetics. I'm kind of proud because I think we were the first group actually in IFM to start talking about mitochondrial function and its relationship to health. That was 1993. And we have kind of taken that up in PLMI in bringing a lot of the leaders in mitochondrial function and damage response and a lot of the things that are now emerging to be very important clinically as it relates to mitochondrial mitochondriopathies, functional mitochondriopathies. And so I think that has been a contribution for growing interest and clinically importance for application. Secondly, recently we've really been on this description of how the immune system connects to the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. And for years we've known about parasympathetic sympathetic regulation, but I think its interconnection to the immune and the nervous system and the gut microbiome has not been well understood. And so we brought a lot of the leaders of this area of research. And I think PLMI has been a really vanguard in kind of bringing up this gut brain immune connection as a major theme which has now woven its way very strongly into the IFM curriculum and its training. And a lot of the docs in the field now are really becoming experts in that area of which you're certainly one. So I think these are some examples of, of how PLMIS some 13 years ago started getting interest in these areas that have now pulled them into the IFM curriculum.

So those are the things that have made their way into ifm. What are you seeing as cutting edge right now that, you know, certainly hasn't been vetted yet in order to go to ifm? What are you excited about right now that you are interested in hearing more about or that you're diving deeper in?

I've come to recognize when I've tried to assemble in, in my mind, the learnings, my personal learnings over the last, say, 40 years, and ask the question, what's the gateway that people can enter into this concept of functional health? And that would have the greatest effect on their clinical outcome? And I recognize that there are really only two ways that our body communicates with the outside world. 24 7, 365. One is the nervous system, and the other is the immune system. And what I've come to recognize, and this became patently obvious during SARS COV2 and COVID19, is that our immune system's functional state is very dynamic and it's very viable based upon the environment and the experience and the lifestyle that the person is is experiencing. And so what I've come to recognize is that the immune system cells that make up our immune system Turnover about every 90 to 120 days. Meaning our cells that actually compose our immune system four months from now will be different cells than the cells that are in our immune system today. So then it begs the question, well, will those cells be more functional, less functional, or the same function as the one they're going to replace? And what has happened, I think over time, and we started to see this, obviously with SARS COV2, is that somehow the functional capability of our immune system has been declining as a population, and it becomes confused. And so we have a lot more autoimmune disease. You're an expert in that area. We have a lot more allergy and atopy. We also have a lot more immunosuppressive problems that relate to people getting infections that they can't manage well. And so it's like too much on both sides of the curve where the immune system is overactive, like in inflammation diseases, and where the immune system is underactive, like infectious disorders. So what has caused that imbalance? That is really kind of been the topic of me, that has occupied my Central Nervous system 247 here for the last few years. And I recognize that we're very kind of at an interesting time. For me, it's almost a little bit of back to the future because I was at The Pauling Institute during the early 80s when AIDS, HIV, AIDS was first being discovered and we had being in San Francisco area we had a lot of discussions and a lot of the individuals who are experts on the early stages of Kaposi sarcoma and HIV that were giving lectures at the Pauling Institute and then the relationship of how does that relate to nutrition and so forth became big topics. And then we had chronic fatigue syndrome, myalgic encephalitis as it's sometimes called. Or me that, that grew out about the same time. It's a little bit similar to me as to what's happened. And now as we've gone through this period of COVID 19 now into post Covid syndrome with a lot of autoimmune disease, chronic fatigue, myalgia, POTS and postural or static hypertensive system syndrome. And so I start to say the immune system is kind of our master operator and how do we get it to behave so we own our immune system rather than we become a victim of our immune system. And fortunately the field of immunology is rapidly advancing in understanding it's explosive exploding. And I often feel I can't even keep up by trying to follow the literature carefully because of the nature of the explosion that's occurring in that area. But there's a lot of things that are being discovered which are not being adequately translated over into consumer ease so people can actually implement these things successfully in their lives. And we came up with a term which we're hopeful people will eventually understand called immunorejuvenation, that the immune system has the inherent capability of rejuvenating itself. And in fact we just finished a clinical trial that I'm quite excited about. I'm also kind of blown away by the results actually. We followed a group of individuals over 90 days that were taking a, a food derived concentrate that was very rich in, in a family of por polyphenols, certain nutrients in, in, in this food. And we looked at the effect that it had on their immune system using a very sophisticated epigenetic tool that was a gene chip that had 850,000 gene sites embedded on the chip that we could analyze then the effect that this was having on individuals immune systems. And what we found is after 90 days the people who consumed this polyphenol containing supplement had a 47% reduction in their immune age over the course of 90 days. This has never been demonstrated in any previous study. So that opens the door for us to say maybe there's things that we have access to that we can really rejuvenate that immune system by getting bad memories out of our immune system. Epigenetic marks that trigger inflammatory responses like inflammaging or that cause what are called zombie cells. That's not a really good name, but that's what they have been termed. These zombie cells that build up in our body that create these adverse messages in our immune system related to inflammation and to poor immune response. And so we're really now focusing very heavily on how do you construct a lifestyle that's personalized to that individual's own immune system so that it will deliver this capability of rejuvenating the immune system and turning back the biological clock on their immune age. And by the way, just to summarize, the work that's been done over the last few years on immune age has illustrated or indicated that the age of our immune system, the biological age, not the age in birthdays, but the biological age of our immune system, is the most determining thing we can measure right now for determining our life expectancy. So people with aged immune systems have short life expectancies. People with young immune systems, biologically young immune systems have long life expectancies. So if you look at centenarians, healthy centenarians, like in the blue zones, these individuals have very young immune systems relative to their age and birthdays. So I think this is a, this is an aha discovery that is being made in the field that I think we can access and employ. And it's going to be a, I believe, another clinical tool for the functional medicine provider.

And so in this study, did you all change anything else or they simply took this supplement and are you able to share what it is?

No, this was an ad lib trial. It was what we call an N1 trial where the person was their own internal control. So we looked at before and after intervention, they didn't have to change their lifestyles. Now, these were apparently healthy individuals from the age of 37 to 77 in the study, mixed men and women, but we didn't require any dramatic change in exercise or other lifestyle variables. So it was, that's why we consider this quite dramatic that we were able to demonstrate that the signal was strong enough to modulate their immune system function at that level. To answer your question, as you know, where did these polyphenols come from? Well, this is another part of my interesting journey in life. Like you, I'm more and more recognizing as we get older, we collect a lot of experiences with people we've met and things that would have had happen. And so this concept of serendipity, which we thought was coincidence is probably not as coincidental as we thought because we started to collect together experiences that make it more probable we'll have the coincidence of these discoveries. And that that happened to me three years ago when within a couple of months period I had three things that all happened independently, but they all interrelated, one of which was I read an article in the Journal of Clinical Investigation that was being done at Vanderbilt Medical School on lowering blood pressure using a substance that could affect the immune system. And I had never thought about how does the immune system affect blood pressure? And so this mechanism had to do with endothelial cell health and so forth. And the compound that they were using to, to have that favorable effect on lowering blood pressure was a, a compound that had the name two hydroxy benzylamine. Well, when I read the fine print of the article in the methods in detail section of the paper, there was in fine print the statement that this particular molecule is found in only one natural product, one food, which was called Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat. Well, I have never heard of Himalayan tartary buckwheat. I, I thought, and of course being a nutrition interested person, I thought well, there's an interesting, I need to look into. So I asked my colleague, first of all, I contacted the investigator at Vanderbilt, had a discussion with him, Naji Amuran, and now have a relationship with him. And then I asked my colleague, Trish, worked with me for now 25 years. I said, Trish, who grows this tartery buckwheat? I'd like to know more about this. I've never heard about this boot. So I was leaving, leaving. This is the third coincidental thing. I was leaving the next week to go to China to a lecture I was invited to give to the China Health Check Center. About 10,000 Chinese doctors meet annually. These are like primary care providers. And they were meeting up in Harbin, China, the northernmost city In China, about 23 million people, believe it or not. And so I, I said while I'm gone, do you think you'd see who's who grows tartery buckwheat in the United States? She said, oh, sure, I'll look into that. I was gone then for a couple of weeks. My host was a, a Shanghai medical doctor that had a PhD from John Hopkins in, in clinical chemistry. Very well spoken, very sharp guy. And as I finished my, my presentation in Harbin, we were able to fly back to Shanghai, the other side of the country, and there was a Typhoon in Shanghai. So the planes weren't flying. So he said, jeff, we could either wait out or if you're interested, we could get on the bullet train and we could travel from Harbin all the way to Shanghai, all across China and at 250 miles an hour on this train. And I thought, whoa, my, that would be quite an experience to see all of China going by at a 250 miles an hour on the ground. That would be pretty cool. So we did that. And about halfway across China, as China rushed by, was this diorama. We're in this agricultural area. And I turned to him, I said, so I have kind of an off the wall question, but I've just learned about this Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat. Do you know anything about that? Probably just an esoteric question. Well, it was like the train stopped and we were in freeze frame. His eyes got big, he looked at me and he said, I can't believe you're asking me that question. I said, well, why is that? And he said, my research group are the leading research group on tartary buckwheat in China and we've been looking for someone in the United States that would be interested in collaborating with us that knows something about this. So by the time I got back then from China, I had this connection with Vanderbilt, I had the connection with this investigator and his group in China. And then Trish had found there was only one person growing Tartery buckwheat in the United States. It was a former ag research professor from Cornell and his nurse wife in, he's now retired and they have a little hobby farm in Angelica, New York growing Tartery buckwheat. It turns out that this farm in Angelica, New York, this, this hobby farm that Sam and Lucia Beer had, he was quite a, because of him being a research ag professor, took this on as kind of an intellectual enterprise, even though there was just a small farm. He built a, a mill, an artisanal mill was milling the flour. His wife was doing recipes. They were selling the flour at roadside stands in upstate New York was, it was a hobby. But he also took this very seriously and put together a website on Tartery Buckwheat. And the reason it's tartery, this is the tartan district of China. It's up against the foothills of the Himalayan mountains. So that's how it got its name, Tartery Buckwheat. And it's very different than common buckwheat Esculatum is common buckwheat tartaricum is the tartery Buckwheat, they're genetically very different. And the level of these immune active phytochemicals in tartery buckwheat are 100 times, a hundred times not percent higher than that in common buckwheat. So this is like an immune superfood. And so I got very interested in what he was doing eventually that led us into purchasing angelica mills and he retired. We then developed an organic farming consortium in upstate New York with organic farmers growing tartery buckwheat. And we're the, we're the first producers now in the United States of organically certified tarter rebukwheat. And we've now got a whole research projects into compounding this into different kinds of foods and products and supplements and trying to get this product reintroduced. It was lost in America about 200 years ago. So we're now, we're trying to re. Bring back in tartery buckwheat as an important food product. It's a 4,000-year-old food by the way. It's one of the two oldest cultivated foods in the world. So we, we think this is something that is very valuable, particularly in this time of immune challenge to rejuvenate the immune system. So we're trying to introduce it back in multiple ways into people's daily regime.

And I knew you were doing something with the tartary buckwheat, but I had no idea that this is the immune modulator that you were referring to. So had I known, I would have jumped on that a long time ago. So I'll talk to you about that afterwards about getting some. But. And yes, I was going to ask about. Because it was concerned about it getting grown in China, but the fact that you've created somewhere here for it to be grown organically and tell us about. Buckwheat is considered a grain, but no.

It'S not a grain.

Not okay.

It's a fresh seed actually.

It's actually okay.

Yeah, it's. And I don't even know how it got the name wheat associated with it because it's not related genetically at all to a cereal. It's a gluten free fruit seed. And it turns out that ternary buckwheat is very high in protein with high in essential amino acids. And someone asked me, jeff, do you think you could live if you had only tertiary buckwheat to eat? And I said yes, I think you could because it's very high in essential amino acids, it's very high in omega 3 fatty acids, it's very Rich in vitamins, very high in certain minerals like zinc, magnesium, and it has these favorable phytochemicals. Plus it's rich in unusual prebiotic fibers like D Chiro inositol. That's very helpful for the microbiome. So it's like to me, yeah, and.

I do wonder, I mean, I grew up eating buckwheat pancakes and buck. My mother made a lot of our food homemade and we never, she made homemade bread and it was always whole wheat. We had homemade whole wheat or buckwheat pancakes, homemade yogurt. So she was very into the microbiome and knew about superfoods. So they weren't called that back then. And so, yeah, I mean, I do wonder if having the wheat attached to it, because I actually knew it wasn't a grain. So I don't know why I asked you if it was a grain, but I wasn't sure what it was. And so I do wonder if part of that, having the wheat associated with that has in some ways cause problems for its marketing product.

I think that's exactly right. And particularly as we've gotten more concerning, concerned about gluten in, in grain based products and I think just to have an association with the word wheat already puts people off who don't understand that it's not related to the wheat family at all. It's not a grass member of that family at all. And so I think this is part of our uphill, I guess, an opportunity to educate people. And that's one of the reasons that we've made concentrates of the Himalayan Tertiary buckwheat. So we could get into other delivery forms as functional foods or as supplements. And actually the product I was mentioning, that lowered immune age by 47% is a concentrated capsule delivery form. It's called HTB Rejuvenate. And it become, it has become our kind of flagship approach because for a lot of people that's an easy entry into the Himalayan Tartary buckwheat store is taking two to four capsules a day and getting the same amount they would get from a half a cup of tartery buckwheat flour. So I found that not everybody goes in the kitchen and makes things, but most people can get something into their mouth that, that is in a capsule form.

And that's what I was gonna ask in these, in the studies that you were doing, what was the dosage that was being utilized daily?

Yeah, it was two capsules twice a day. So it was four capsules, which is equivalent to, to give a A person, a kind of a magnitude of intake of something like 1600 milligrams of these polyphenols that are in tartery buckwheat each day based upon that concentrate.

And you said that equals about a half a cup, right? And if you are making pancakes or something with this flour, does cooking denature it in any kind of way or affect these polyphenols in any kind of way or.

No, That's a very interesting story as well. That actually what happens when you put water with the flower is it goes from a brownish color over time, and time is maybe of a few minutes at room temperature, it'll start to turn a little bit greenish. And the reason for that is that you activate the live enzymes in the flour. We, the way we process this, the seed is by preserving the integrity of the enzymes in the, in the seed. So it has, it's kind of a live food as such. So when you add water, it activates those enzymes and those enzymes start converting the what are called gly. Glycone forms of these polyphenols. The, the way that nature puts them in a storage form, it converts them into a bioavailable form. The a glycone forms and those compounds have a different color. So you actually start seeing the dough or the mix change color from kind of brown to a little bit of a greenish brown. And so by the time you cook now, you've got those in a very bioavail form for absorption.

You mentioned doing testing for immunologic aid, and is that a commercially available test? What how were you testing for someone's immunologic age?

The way that we did it is it's, I would still call a research lab technology, but it's built around a concept that is actually available in a kind of a less sophisticated way today commercially. And that is we take. Take an individual's blood. About 10% of our blood is what's called the buffy coat, which is the immune cells. Those immune cells are a whole different type. That's the whole nature of both the lymphocytes, the innate immune system, and the adaptive immune system cells. We then take those cells and we are able to evaluate the degree of epigenetic imprinting that those cells have had based upon their experience in our body. That's the baseline. Then we're able to put the person on the program, retake their blood and once again take those immune cells and look at how the epigenetic patterning of those cells using this gene chip array that we've had developed for us gene chip array illustrates the difference in the epigenetic pattern of the cells after intervention with the tartary buckwheat to polyphenols. There is a less research based test that one can use that measures kind of biological age of the individual and a company called True Diagnostic offers that test. I'm sure you're familiar with that, Amy that and that that's kind of the less research based version of what we're doing in a more research based application.

You mentioned the research based one is checking your immunologic age and the True Diagnostics is checking sort of your biological age. And so in your opinion how do those there's obviously a correlation between the two, but do you know what that correlation is or how you could define that correlation?

Our organs don't all age at the same rate and so we could have a young heart and an old pancreas or whatever variation you want to look at. So our organs have differing biological ages and often the conditions that we experience as health problems are the organs that are aged more rapidly. So it could be the liver like in people that have suffered from non alcoholic fatty liver disorder or it could be the endocrine pancreas if people have insulin resistance and pre diabetes. So the the construct is that when you measure biological age of the individual, you're looking at aggregate of all the different organ systems averaged together. And that's what most of the laboratories who do biological age determination are providing is that level of information that relates to aggregate age across all organ. If you want to be more specific, however, as we have done with our study in immune age, you're going to want to have just the immune cell algorithms that you're utilizing to measure that specific cell type, the immune cell types and so it gives you a more differential so you could have cell types of any organ that gives you the age of those organs. And actually there are investigators that have done this type of work that have actually published papers showing in an individual how the different ages of their biological ages of their organs can vary quite dramatically.

And do you think that this is something that will become more mainstream and be the consumer can purchase to be able to determine their various organs and their and the biological age?

Yes, I do and I the reason I'm very bullish on this and I'm saying this like it's matter of fact and it's commonplace, but this construct that we can epigenetically modify how our genes are expressed if we would have well, if I would have talked about this, and I guess I actually did talk about it before the year 2000. I speculated on this. It would have been considered heretical or no one in traditional medicine would have thought that to be correct. They thought that our epigenetics were completely locked in infancy and we weren't going to have variations on a theme occurring over the course of our aging process. It was only as a consequence of the pioneering work of Randy Girdle, who did the work with the agouti mice, with the, then the formation of epigen nutritional epigenetics, that we started to see that you could vary actually the genetic expression patterns epigenetically by altering diet and nutrients and so forth. And that has been an exploding body of research across hundreds, probably thousands of investigators around the world over the last 20 years. So this field has just grown up all of a sudden going from where it was said not to be true at all to where now people are saying, well of course it's true. Yes, there are these metastable epithelials that can be modified throughout the course of our life, even in aged individuals that can affect then how that person performs. So you can have post traumatic stress that produces an epigenetic situation that locks you into inflammation and stress. The nice thing about all of what we learned is this is a two way street. It's not just a one way street to bad news that you can now, as I said, rejuvenate. That's the immunorejuvenate process because the body has inherent in it the ability to put on and take off these epigenetic marks over the course of living if you do the right things. And so that's the whole nature of the functional medicine model, helping that person to do the right things to epigenetically repair, reprogram these cell types. In this case, I'm talking about the immune cells, but it could be many other cell types. The reason I like the immune cells is they can pretty rapidly change over the course of three months. So this is to me, the, the front edge of how we're going to actually be able to measure what a person needs to do and then measure the effect of what they're doing by intervening with the therapeutics that they're going to be engaged with. It's a remarkable transition in the, the tools that we now have to measure this.

And do you think that mainstream medicine is going to, what do I want to say, adopt this type of testing, I mean, without there being drugs? I mean, you and I practice with the lifestyle medicine as ways to Intervene and reverse age, reverse disease. I recently just interviewed Alessio Fasano and he was saying the new age of medicine is gonna be all of this AI and the ability to do these lifestyle changes to then reverse intestinal permeability that will then reverse these larger diseases. And sort of asked him the same question. You have these big pharma and they're incentivized, frankly, to keep us sick. And so how do we see this becoming mainstream? Like functional medicine has adopted a lot of this, but how do we see this pushing further into mainstream medicine?

I think it begs the question, what is mainstream medicine in the future? I want to go to that because what we assume to be mainstream medicine today was certainly not mainstream medicine 50 years ago and it will not be mainstream medicine 50 years from now. And so my belief as to what is happening right now is we're seeing a bifurcation in what is considered mainstream medicine. The bifurcation is there will be those practitioners who really are focused on healthcare and there will be those practitioners who really focus on disease care. And they will have equal opportunities and equal training and equal skills at equal reimbursement, depending on what they're really focused on. You cannot be good at all things. We need a disease care system. We need all the subspecialty of medicine. There is no question that this is advent advantageous to populations. But the question is it cost effective when we're trying to treat health issues, not disease issues, to use a disease care system? And the answer to that is quite obviously no, it's not cost effective. And so a new system is emerging to be a healthcare system and it will be a different kind of provider. You're one of them, a leader in this field that has different skills, different insight, different way of interacting with their patients, different objectives. You're not treating terminal disease, you're treating the precedence of dysfunction to hopefully avert the need for hospital based healthcare. But in the process you're delivering different kinds of skills, both assessment and intervention. And I think that's going to happen. And that will become, by the way, insurance reimbursed, it will become Medicare approved because we cannot continue to sustain a disease care system trying to treat health care problems. It doesn't work. We know that.

And so the buckwheat that you're the tartar, is that how you pronounce it? Tartar? Buckwheat. Is that the company Big Bold Health is or is that a different initiative?

No, that's. That ultimately got me to where I recognize if we're going to do this. We, Trish Urie and my colleagues that have been working with me for years said, Jeff, you got to just do one more thing. Because I think to make this real, you're going to have to invest in this and you're going to have to make it real. And so we formed Big Bold Health around this immunorejuvenation concept and tartery buckwheat. And I'm actually quite amazed in, in the two years since we started down this process. Cause we had to grow our own tartery buckwheat. It didn't exist. You couldn't go to the store and buy it. That we've now seen a tardery buckwheat flower become the number one artisanal flower on Amazon. So it's like, okay, people are starting to try it. We have chefs and gourmet people starting to include it in recipes and menus. And we have a food lab, by the way, with Big Bold Health. They're my colleagues I've worked with for years, are putting together all sorts of recipe and menu guides to include this in different ways, both savory and other aspects into the diet. So I think this is kind of, to me, maybe my last hurrah. But it's, it's something I think is very important is how do we get to the immune system and rejuvenate it.

And so tell me your role. I mean, you started this. Are you overseeing the growers? Do you have someone else doing that? Tell me your involvement on the day to day with Big Bold Health. Cause I know you're so busy with all of your research and PLMI and everything else.

So I think I have three things that occupy my time. The Institute for Functional Medicine, as a member of the board and as a co founder. Second is the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute that I am the president. Work with our little small but very capable team to get our education programs put together. And we actually have a really great program coming up, our annual meeting in this year. It's going to be in Dana Point, California at the Laguna Hills Resort on a topic that is only really emerging now that I think is important called immunometabolism. So we're going to have leaders in talking about what is immunometabolism. That's October 28th and 9th and it's on our website, on the PLMI website, the discussion of the program and the individuals. And then the third thing obviously is Big Bull Health, where I'm nominally called the president, but what that means is that I have the fortune and pleasure of working with this really extraordinary, talented, small but mighty group of people that are trying to bring Tarawee Buckwheat back. So we've got the growers, we're connected to the farmers, we're connected to the mill, we're connected to the distribution system, we're connected to the research and we have a soil scientist, Emily Reese, who PhD in soil science from Cornell that is the steward of our soil. We've done mycorrhizal inoculation studies on our soil to, to speak to our plants to give the highest level of phytochemicals. We now have a specific inoculant we're using, that's mycorrhiza. We're really into soil science and the concept is the immune system of the soil connects to the immune system of the plant which connects to the immune system of the human. So it's all part of a systems approach to looking at immune health.

You certainly have experience with supplements having been part of metagenics. But you know, have you done anything with agriculture before?

Yes and no. I would say this is my first really major foyer into now we're moving to rock certification so learning more about regenerative agriculture and what's required for it. So we've got farmers that are very committed to this and they have been using stewardship on their farms. It's really conducive to ROC certification. The other part of what I do in this little big bowl health is we also have a imperative that we're excited about in Dutch Harbor, Alaska out in the Aleutian Islands. As a consequence of a colleague friend that owns a commercial fishing operation in Alaska that's sustainable fishering. We have a MSC on an RFM certified fishery. We built the first pharmaceutical plant in Dutch harbor to isolate a very unique series of bioactive fish oils which contain high levels of pro resolving mediators for anti inflammation. So that's also part of Big Bolt Health is our unique fish oils coming out of our facility in, in Dutch harbor, which you probably know the Deadliest Catch TV series. That's Dutch harbor where those boats come out of. So you know, I, I feel very what I'm saying like I'm in a rapid learning curve here between what goes on in Dutch harbor with our fish oil factory and, and also our farms in upstate New York. It's been quite fun for me with this big bold help. That's why we called it big and bold because we're trying to do something that's I don't think ever been done before.

You're a person who's achieved a lot in your lifetime, been very successful, and easily could have just hung up your hat and said, I'm done. What's the motivation?

No, thank you. That's a really insightful question. My wife, Susan, has been asking me that question as well, because I think she anticipated that when we turn 78, she's just a few months younger than I am, that, that we would be on a different timeline than having the kind of responsibilities you have with these three activities that I'm involved with. But I feel this very strong sense of pay forward because I've definitely had an unbelievably privileged life that I've been fortunate to lead over the last 40 years. And the people like you that I've met, how I've been impacted by them and the impact that it's been. It's had on my family. All my children have worked with me in one way or another over the years. They're raising their children, our grandchildren, with certain principles that came out of what we learned. I still have people come up to me and say things that I find hard to believe. That dysfunctional medicine saved their lives or something. I said help them with one of their friends or family or themselves. And so I think there's a pay forward responsibility. And I've had this fortune of all these experiences, and I feel I need to give that baton forward. So the groups that I'm working with have obviously younger people that will carry whatever experiences they have working with me and these projects afford in their lives. And my hope is that we can continue to pay forward with expanding the application of these concepts, because, let's face it, the world needs a lot of what you do every day needs those things to be spread out and scaled in ways that would make it accessible to people of different socioeconomic backgrounds and different needs. That would really reduce the unnecessary burden of disease. And I think that's a driving force for me. I'm very fortunate. I don't have to do anything. There's nobody that says I have to do anything at this point. But if I have a bad day, it's my own fault, because I'm doing, should be doing exactly what I'm put on the planet to do.

So many people we discuss. I mean, myself, I had health issues and conventional medicine failed me. And so I was seeking something that I'm aware of. You didn't have that. And so it seems like just your passion, your curiosity, your heart has been the driving factor here. Many people come into this with a passion because they themselves were failed or a family member or something like that. So it's more of a statement than anything of just sort of appreciating you and commending you that you just out of frankly, the goodness of your own heart and the curiosity of your own mind, have put yourself in these positions and moved radically forward and taken many risks that have created some incredible pathways for those of us behind you.

We all have people in our lives, probably a small number of people in our lives that were seminal in our development and our growth and who we become. And I'm very fortunate. I have three of those individuals. But the one that stands at the first in class would be my father. My, my father was always a life of the mind person, was always intellectually interesting, interested in stuff. He got me involved with those sorts of hobbies, like electronics when I was a kid, photography. He built a green. A dark room for me. And I mean, it was always stuff that we were learning and being pushed on to, to learn new things. And he was an aerospace engineer professionally. He then later I encouraged him to take early retirement. He actually worked with me as my office business manager when, when I left the university and my tenured position, he came out of retirement to work with me for the first six years in, in managing the business aspect of paying the bills. And the. At the end of his life, he started to have some significant health problems and it led him into where he had Parkinsonism that was really affecting his quality of life and the things that he loved doing. One of the things was computer programming. He had become quite a skilled computer programmer and loved playing around. And it got to the point where working on the computer was extraordinarily challenging for him. And he had eventually then moved out of the bedroom with my mother into a separate bedroom because he recognized he was keeping her awake and blah, blah, blah. So there was a lot of stuff going on. And so to make a long story a little bit longer, but dip the punchline, I wondered if my father, who was being seen by an MD, PhD, an internist who also had a PhD in hematology. I was wondering if, if he had ever had any work done on homocysteine and methylmalonic acid levels in his body, meaning functional tests for vitamin B12 and folic acid. And so my mother said, well, I'll, I'll ask the, I'll ask his doctor if he'd had those tests done. And it turned out no, he had not had those tests done. And the doctor actually said, I'm not too familiar with those tests. Can your son send me some information? Well, you can probably imagine, you know, if someone asked me to send information. Actually his nurse called the next saying, don't send any more articles, you're burning out the fax machine. This is back in the days of fax machines. And I sent all these articles to him. And so then he called me and he said, so I'm not familiar with this, but it looks actually pretty valuable. And so what do you think I sh. I should do? And I said, well, I'm. My suggestion is that you start my father on a folate supplement and you start, you teach my mother how to do B12 injections with hydroxy cobalamin, which he did. And so my father started on that program administered by my mother. And a couple weeks went by, didn't hear anything. And then I got a call from my mother and she was hysterical and I was really worried. I mean she was crying and carrying on, couldn't complete a sentence. And I mean it was pretty critical. I thought, oh geez, I must have done something here or my father really must have had a very bad episode. I eventually got her calm down. I said, so what, what's the news? I think it was going to be really bad news. And she said, oh no, it's not bad news, not bad news. She said, this morning I awoke and there was your father standing next to my bed, completely dressed for the first time in over a year, saying, can we go for a picnic today? Now this is. A guy had not left the house for a year. From that day on with this therapy, my father was at his computer 46 hours a day programming and for the next six years was cognitively intact. And those things are transformative for each one of us, right? They are so deeply imprinted. That ultimately led me to move my parents back up closer to me. And I had the privilege then of being with my father through the remainder of his life, interacting. But we would have lost him years earlier and my mother would have been burdened with his care. So it was, it was transformative to recognize what can happen if you get, if you ask the right questions and you get the right thoughts, answers to.

Those questions, and if you have the right open minded physician willing to do that, right? So do you know, did he end up changing his practice at all with any of his other patients? Did he do that with anyone else?

So he called me after he saw my father's response. I mean he was miraculous. He said, wow, I've got to learn more about this. So can I take a weekend course from you so that you I can become a functional medicine provider? And I said, well, you could take a weekend course, but I don't think you would really be fully confident. He says, well, I'm really busy, I only have about a weekend. And I, I said, well, I, I'm not sure that I could guarantee that a weekend is going to provide you the knowledge that you would really feel comfortable with to become confident. But then I found out months later when I happened to go by his office that he had put up a. Another sign on his marquee saying that he was now a functional medicine provider. So you just never know how these things play out. But I guess the good news is that he was at least interested in starting to do things in this area.

I never knew that story about your father. That's amazing. And yes, those are the things that propel us forward. And I'm glad that he was in the hands of someone who was open minded enough to try that because I'm sure all of the stories of unwilling physicians and their patients or family members not having the resources to be able to go somewhere else and so that's great that he was willing to do that.

I think you said something there, Amy, that's really important. You know what? I was the overseer of the Functional Medicine Clinical Research center for about 10 years and we had quite a remarkable clinical staff there of really remarkable clinicians. And we saw about a thousand patients a year on different types of clinical trials. And so that we had one patient that had a very serious autoimmune disease, arthromyalgia, in which he was only 36 years of age, but had three children, but could not leave her house, could not even stand for longer than minutes at a time. And she came into us. I won't give the whole story, but just to say that she was being treated by the autoimmune section of the University of Washington School of Medicine. Very high level quality of care that she, she was getting and she wasn't getting better, she was taking very large amounts of different medications for her condition unsuccessful and remediation of her from. So we took her on as a clinical research subject after talking with her immunologist saying that we're just going to be modifying her diet and lifestyle and would that be acceptable? And so he gave approval that she could be involved in this trial. To make a long story finished, she was in our trial. She was a master success story over the Course of a year she went to where when I first saw her come in for her first visit, her husband drove her in. She could barely walk to the front door of our clinic, was seriously impaired. A year later she was in jogging shoes and dancing into the clinic. And she actually brought a. A wonderful gift which was a framed large photograph of her standing at the top of Mount Sigh, which is a about a 3,400 foot mountain outside of Seattle that you can hike up to the top of is a hiking trail. It's quite vigorous even for fit people to. To do it. It's pretty demanding. And here she is at the top of my thigh holding up a sign that her husband took the photo saying thank you Dr. Jack and Deanna, who are the two therapists that were the principals in her recovery. It's only a couple experiences like that you need in your life to feel like you're doing something good. And that then led the nurse dietitian in that program who managed her case come into me one day, one morning after this experience and she was disgusted and she's a not a person easy to be aggravated at all and. But I could tell she was very aggravated and I said so what's wrong? It's just I am so upset. So as Jeff every time a research subject finishes one of our trials, we send to their attending physician the records of their experience with on the trial and they get all the data so that they can go into their chart. And so I did that with this person that had this extraordinary success story. And I've waited now for weeks and no one, not anyone in that office has asked me any information about what we did that related to her complete remission and the fact she's not taking any medications anymore. No one asked me the question and I gave them my card. I followed up. I gave them contact information to. You can call me anytime, you can text me. She said, this is so disgusting. Well, I think it again is symbolic of what goes on. If we're afraid to learn something that may be different than what we know and we have to then figure out what to do with it. And I start recognizing that fear is.

Yeah, I was literally going to say fear. Right. I mean it says they don't want to be challenged. They. I fortunately didn't. I mean I of course had some experiences like that, but I think also coming from an MD to another MD I generally was fairly well received. But yeah, I mean general people don't. They spent all those years medical school training, they have their practice. It's it takes a lot for people to want to think another way, right? Or to think that maybe they're not helping people as well as they could be.

That's why I'm trying very hard with our Big Bold Health to bring the science up so we can speak to docs and people in the field while we're also giving things to people that they can easily integrate into this immunorejuvenation program. I feel kind of guided into this Himalayan tertiary buckwheat story. I mean, I can't believe that this has sit. This has been sitting for 200 years in America. No one's previously taking it up at a time where immunity is so important. It just seems almost why raises the question. But we're doing all we can. Get this information out through Big Bold Health.

Tell us how people can find. You find Big Bold Health.

Yeah, they can. They can go to bigboldhealth.com or they can go to jeffreybland.com, j E F R E Y B l a n d.com or they can also go to PLMI. Just if you type into Google PLMI, it'll come up with a personalized lifestyle medicine institute. And we have all these videos from these experts over the years that we've interviewed on different topics that are available for download.

If you have three recommendations, three suggestions that you'd recommend that our listeners can do today to take back their health.

Well, I think the first recommendation is exactly what you've been so eloquently doing with your podcast, take back your health, that we are in charge of our health to a great extent. The problem, it's been stolen from us under marketing of products and services that are always not best for us. And so taking back our health starts with us affirming that we deserve to own our health and that we will do so. I think that's that supersedes anything else. If we don't have that belief, if we don't have that commitment, then all the other stuff is window dressing and it doesn't stick and it doesn't affect on the long term outcome. So we have to be A confident that we can take back our take back our health, B that we deserve to take back our health and that C then we're willing to implement programs that we know will turn the tide against what we consider these age related chronic problems that are impeding our quality of life. So that's number one. Number two is we need to recognize that the things that influence our health are not just the genes that we were born with. Yes, there are certain genetic characteristics that lead to altered sensitivities to certain things. But we 70% of our health outcome is not tied directly to our genes. It's tied to the messages that we send our genes. How we participate in our daily life, who we hang out with, how we eat, how we think, how we breathe, how we move, how we, how we see ourselves as worthy. And so that's this whole love and attribution part of it. All of those are messages that our body picks up and translates into the signals of our function. And so that to me becomes really important to recognize it. What we might consider to be small things over many years of living are big things. They're the biggest things, the things that we can modify. And then third of those, the thing that most influences people's overall outcome of health are things that cause distress. Long term distress in our body's function. And distress can come from eating a toxic diet because our body sees it as a foreigner, a hostile thing. So ultra processed foods are stress factors. They create inflammation, toxic relationships, toxic chemicals, toxic electromagnetic radiation. All these things are things that are, if we understand them, can be modified and become part of our approach towards healthy living. And we then compress our sickness, we extend our health span and we now we live out not only just the limits of our biologically determined life expectancy, but we do it with extraordinary vigor and vitality like people in the blue zones.

I appreciate you sharing those three and I really appreciate you taking the time during your family's vacation in Hawaii for spring break to to do this interview. So that is the sign of someone who is truly committed to helping others and get the word out. So I appreciate you very much and I hope you have safe travels and a wonderful rest of your vacation with your family.

Thank you Amy. I wish the same to you. I think the work you're doing and spreading the news is so critically important. You do it very well. So keep up the great work. Thank you.

I want to thank this week's guests for sharing their time and knowledge and thank you for listening to read the full show notes for each episode which include a summary, timestamp, quotes and any resources mentioned. Please visit amymyersmd.com podcasts lastly, if you've enjoyed this episode, I'd love if you would leave a rating and a review on Apple or Spotify and we'll select a few to read out loud in a future episode. Tune in next week to hear from another inspiring guest as we help you take back your health.