205. Finding Hope in Immune Rejuvenation with Dr. Jeffrey Bland

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If you think back to the 80s with the development of the microcomputer revolution through the silicone chip, that was not a big industry prior to Steve Jobs and the development ultimately of home computing and then computers became everywhere and microchips, but it didn't exist prior to the 80s. I think the same thing is going to happen over the next 20 years in the healthcare system and there'll be people who will make a decision, do I want to go into the disease care or do I want to go into healthcare?

Dr. Jeffrey Bland is an international, nationally recognized leader in the nutritional medicine field. He co founded the Institute for functional medicine in 1991 and is known to many as the father of functional medicine. A biochemist by training, Dr. Bland is a fellow of both the American College of Nutrition, where he is a certified nutrition specialist, and the association for clinical biochemistry. Dr. Bland's latest project is Big Bold Health, launched in 2018. He's on a mission to transform the way people think about one of nature's greatest innovations, the immune system. Through big bold health, Dr. Bland is advocating for the power of immuno rejuvenation to enhance immunity at a global level. It is an ambitious and purpose driven effort that encompasses his active stance on regenerative agriculture, environmental stewardship and planetary health. Let's welcome the father of Functional Medicine, Dr. Jeffrey Bland, to the show.

All right, Dr. Jeffrey Bland, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you. We just had such a sweet little chat before this even started. We have so many connections. You grew up here in Southern California, surfing killer Dana, which is I think my husband's dream. But now it's a, now it's a harbor. It's gone. What were they thinking? But just really so even more excited to interview than I was before. And for those of you guys that don't know Dr. Jeffrey Bland, he started the Institute of Functional Medicine. He is the founder of Metagenics. He you're the godfather, truly really starting a new movement of physicians who care about root cause. I have to know, like, we have to start from the beginning. How did that even happen?

Well, that's a really great question, but I just want to check in for a moment here on Killer Dana because one of the most remarkable features of that particular place before the boat harbor was built was it on a very good southwest swell, one could catch a wave right at the point. It was obviously a right breaking wave. And you could ride in the blue water of that wave all the way over to what we called the indicator at Doheny, which would be probably, I would guess, more than probably nearly a half a mile.

I was going to say that's not feet. We're talking miles now.

Yeah. And you could be, if you stayed in the curl of the wave, you could drive that, that, that wave all the way over to indicator, which was probably one of the longest blue water rides that you could have in California when the, the waves were just perfect. And so that actually does lead to the answer to your question, because what happened to me is I was going to go to UCLA Medical School. I had graduated from college and got married, this is 1967, and was all set to, you know, continue on my life in Southern California. And then on the summer of 67, I looked up at the cliff on Dana Point and there were a couple people out surfing, one of who was Hobie Alter, whose name is pretty famous in the surfing quarters. And, and I, I'm kind of near sighted. I looked up there and I said, what are those big trucks doing up there? And he looked over at me, said, man, you might. You're not following the news. Don't you know what's going on? This is the last summer we're probably going to be able to ride ways here. They're starting the breakwater. Those are the trucks that are going to be dropping the rocks. And it was such a shock to me. It was like a cultural iconic shift for me, a tectonic shift that I decided on the driving back to our apartment, which was in Newport beach, that I really couldn't stay in California. It was such a powerful thing. Even though I'd grown up there and I graduated from college here and so forth, I was going to go to graduate school, medical school there. I made the decision, no, I need to, to find another place to start my life. And so we ended up, I got late admission at Colorado and Oregon and made the decision to go to Oregon. And that was actually the start for me of kind of, I guess you'd say, Thinking for myself, you know, I think I had been in a fairly lockstep, kind of very disciplined path. And then suddenly now my world was kind of thrown over to a whole other concept. I'm married. I'm going to a place I really don't know anything about. I'm leaving behind my years of living in Southern California, which I really enjoyed, and starting a new adventure. And everything was open for. Of course, it was the 60s, too. So you put all those things together, and it put me on this journey to really start to explore what I wanted to do, to try to fulfill my objective, which had always been to try to help people to understand how to stay well. That was really what my driving force had been really before high school, was to understand why people didn't. Why they didn't feel well, what were the underlying causes of unwellness. And I found when I went on ultimately in the medical school and then into my PhD program, that my, my interest really always was less on what we called it, but more where it came from. And so what were the origins of these conditions? And what was the mechanism by which a body could go from really good health to not so good health? And that, that ultimately led me into the concept of function. Because ultimately, when you start asking a person about what is important for them in terms of their health, and they start describing it, they really start describing something related to function. It could be their physical function, it could be their metabolic function, it could be their cognitive function or their behavioral function. And so I, I kind of latched onto this concept that maybe function is the upscreen, upstream determinant of downstream disease. And if we could deal more with function, maybe we'd have less downstream disease. It was then, later, this would be 1987, 88, that my wife then said, jeff, by that time, I traveled considerably. I was a professor. I'd been doing a lot of research and publishing. I did a lot of medical seminars and had traveled around the world. She said, why don't you invite some of these great friends that you've met over the years and let's have a whiteboard meeting just to discuss what would be the healthcare system if you took away all the things like reimbursement and all the kind of things that become kind of the mechanisms of healthcare. What would healthcare look like if it was idealized? So I. She then set up this meeting in Victoria, British Columbia, on Vancouver island. We invited about 40 of friends that were from different disciplines that I thought were really thought leaders and thinkers from different disciplines. We sat down and we had this three day discussion that led ultimately into another year, the following year, another discussion of the same type. And out of that then was born the concept of maybe we should be focusing on function. And maybe what we should call this is functional medicine. And maybe we should start an institute to explore it. In 1989, 1990, the Institute for Functional Medicine was born out of that meeting.

It's so amazing to be sitting here in 2022 and to know that it was created that long ago. And it's. I mean, thank you for pounding the pavement and really caring about the why. I mean, I don't think people realize having eight years in traditional medicine, cancer and genetics prior to starting this functional nutrition practice for the last decade, the what really drives behavior in physicians. And I don't think people realize that. And you nailed it. You know, you hit the nail on the head there. It is about reimbursement, because when they see a patient, it's the what, the diagnosis, the treatment, the care. Like that is what's reimbursed via a code. So to sit down with a client and to spend two hours with them and really try to get to that why, like what's causing that issue there, there isn't that type of reimbursement structure to where you're incentivized to do that as a physician.

Yeah, I think that you really said something that's very profound. If we asked the question, how did we get to where we are in our supposed health care system today, which is, as we know, a disease care system. How did it actually evolve to be what it is today? I think it's a logical sequence of events. What happened was it's like a triage system. It starts with those individuals that are most sick people who have sores, bumps, broken or injured limbs, or are bleeding. So we start with a crisis situation and. And then from there we go to the next level of people that are disabled. But it's not so obvious that we have to go inside their body to find out. So they'd be like heart disease and diabetes and some of these internal medicine conditions. But we're still focusing on what I call the end of the curve. Those individuals that have worn something out in their body and it's now in a state where it needs to be replaced or repaired. It's very logical to see the evolution of disease care, which we call health care, to proceed along that path. And then of course, to make it efficient, we develop certain procedures and policies and standard of practice which become codified in things like reimbursement structure. And those become, as you indicated, the diagnostic codes, the so called DRGs or the ICDs, the International Classification of Diseases, which we're now on volume 10 or volume 11. And that then leads to a codified ability for a person to be reimbursed for services. And so the more significant the intervention, the more significant you get paid for it. And so it drives everybody to want to know, how can I be most successful? And that is to go after the things that are most severe, for which you'll have the most intervention, for which you'll get paid the most. And so we get into subspecialty medicine as the dominant end product of this kind of disease focused healthcare. What got left in the, in the wings, however, was the question of health. Because now we're saying that the absence of disease must mean the presence of health. And that's really not true. We all know that you can not be disease, but you're not really healthy. All of us have had that experience sometime in our life where we just don't feel right, we feel punk, but we're not. We can't figure out whether we're really diseased. So if you actually look today in our society where something like 75% of the healthcare expenditures are spent, it's not on terminal disease, it's on chronic illness, which is unwellness. That's not easily defined in terms of a diagnostic disease like having a heart attack or having cancer or something. That's much more obvious in terms of its end stage disease. So we have a system that's really set up very beautifully to treat end stage disease. It leads to a lot of things that are going on, starting with kids on up, right? Even pre kids and pre conceptual with things like reproductive medicine now and with infertility and things that we didn't even see happening. Prior to the 70s, there was no discipline called reproductive medicine. People didn't have the frequency of infertility that they're having today, both women and men. So it starts really early on and goes right on up through the whole eight strata of this problem of there is no system to really deal with states of chronic unwellness. And that is I think where we as the functional medicine community are trying to really make a contribution saying no, we don't want to give over and give up disease care, it's still important. And we have made huge progresses in the management of terminal and crisis illness. But now let's go upstream and really start talking about what health is. Because health needs to be de docked or detached from disease. You know, I always find people say, well, I'm part of the healthcare system because I'm doing preventive medicine and I'm doing a risk factor analysis. But you know, when you, when you measure risks in an individual, you're really talking about risk to disease, you're not talking about the presence of wellness. So if you want to really deal with the healthcare issue, you have to have a different language, a whole different focus that's focused on function. Because if you get the function right, what will follow from it is you will not be diseased. So that's the different kind of strategy that I think we've been focused on for the last now 30 plus years.

Well, it is so amazing because when you think about that curve where you're at the end of the curve and you're in that state of really severe disease and you back it up to that low grade chronic lifestyle type diseases, the heart disease, the type 2 diabetes, and you back it up even further to just maybe what we might call preventative, where someone's looking at their, looking at their blood tests and tracking C reactive protein or they're tracking their A1C or something like that. What you're talking about is even further back. It really is like focusing and getting the community to focus on what wellness is, what it means to be well, which I think is even more profound because there hasn't even been a focus for people on wellness. And I think that pendulum is swinging back really far the other direction where people are like self care and they talk about, it's in the language now. But for you, when you talk about wellness and what you coined big bold health, what does that mean for people?

Yeah. Thank you. So I had kind of an epiphany in my own life. I'm 77, so I've had a few years of living under, under my belt and I've been very, very fortunate to have I think really good health. You know, I'm still surfing, not as well obviously as I did 30 years or 40 years ago, but still at it and still, you know, hiking and doing all those kind of things. But what I, what I came to recognize is that if we running, if we really wanted to extend health and to maximize our opportunity because there is health that's locked into all of our genes. We just have to unearth that message and get it expressed properly. And the way that we do that is to try to engage the part of the body that is constantly in communication with our life outside Environment, things like our microbiome and what are those things? There are really only two parts of our body system, I think, that are in concert or in communication 24, 7, 365 with our outside world and how the body should function in response to it. And those two things are the nervous system and the second is the immune system. And by the way, the nervous system and the immune system are directly talking to one another. They're part of a super system, they're communicating. And so if I wanted to really do something to explore how to get a person to be on the track towards better health, I felt that we should address the system that's most able to respond quickly to a change in the way we're treating ourselves, and that's the immune system. Now, this came to me, obviously, well before SARS COV 2. That was kind of a wild card because it was a wake up call for the globe. But when I would come back and talk about this concept with my colleagues, and I'm very fortunate. I've had people working with me now for over 25 years that have gone through several different stages of my own evolution professionally, and they're still working with me. And one of those individuals said to me one day when I was giving my big Monday morning speech after going to a meeting over the weekend, and she said, so, Jeff, you all come back here and you're all always hyped up and talking about these things. And, you know, I know that, you know, you're in a different phase of your life and career, but, you know, you're a fairly big guy in stature and this is a fairly bold idea. You know, maybe you need to have one last bite at the apple and you ought to do big, bold health. And I thought, well, you know, that's a kind of interesting concept. You know, my wife was hoping I was going to kind of go kind of into the sidebar now and have some more relaxation and time, but, you know, I felt, no, I've got all these, these 40 years of experience that I need to hand off to other individuals to take it from here. It would be a little bit selfish of me, maybe even to say I've had this wonderful life, met all these fantastic people, travel 6 million miles, and now I'm just going to collapse into, quote, retirement. So I, I decided that for me, retirement was going to be big, bold health. And it was going to be around the concept that retirement means putting new tread on your tire, you're retiring, so you can run some more miles on those wheels. So that led them to the development of this company, Big Bowl Health. It's really focused on how we personalize immunity, how we make our immune system our friend and not our foe, how we actually can train our immune system to be in sync with optimal function, optimal health. Because if you get your immune system right and you rejuvenate it, it can give you decades of good living because it's your defensive bulwark against all sorts of things. So that's been our focus with Big Bold Health, and it's been really fascinating to watch it evolve. Now over the last three years, we started to kind of refine this whole story. And we've got a program, the Immunity plus program. We've got an app, we've got all sorts of training materials on our website, which is bigboldhealth.com and it's really been exciting for me to see how people are responding to this.

Well, we're all really hungry for immune health information and we're glad you're not going into retirement because 40 years of educating and working with the top doctors in the nation. We need your help spreading that message and continuing to spread that message.

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You know, when you talk about immune health, you talk about balancing it instead of strengthening it and supporting it. How can we do that? And what's, what's the difference?

Yeah, you know, it is interesting if you talk to most individuals about say, nutrition and immunity, they'll, they'll probably talk about, well, I need to boost my immune system. And I got very interested in that term because, because words are pretty important to really understand the origin and what they mean. And as I looked at boosting, which means that if you took a vitamin D or a vitamin C or a zinc or whatever the nutrient du jour was, that you could enhance your immune system function, boost it like you would boost it taking an immunopotentiating drug. And it turns out that if you really look at the science of nutrition and immunity, boosting is, doesn't work. I mean the body doesn't boost. And in fact, it would even be somewhat problematic. Let's say that you were in a state of chronic inflammation and you boost your immune system, you would be boosting your inflammatory potential because your immune system is where your inflammation starts. So the concept of boosting your immunity is really kind of both specious and probably not even a good objective. What is important, I think, and this is scientifically more valid relative to modern science of immunology, is you can balance your immune system by rejuvenating it. And this is a major breakthrough in our understanding just within the last, say, decade, that within our immune system is the capability of old damaged cells. Some people call these zombie cells immune cells that have kind of worn out and held on to bad messages because of bad experiences. And they're kind of just sitting there telling you that they're not friendly. And the way they do that is by producing these inflammatory substances that we've learned about, like you mentioned, crp. But CRP is a downstream mediator that comes from the immune system that produces things like Interleukin 6 and these other inflammatory compounds. And when the immune system is age and has these senescent cells, these aged immune cells that some people are calling zombie cells, those then continually produce a state of chronic inflammation. And that then accelerates the risk to many different health problems, not just arthritis, but cognitive problems like dementia in older age people, or diabetes or the whole family of autoimmune diseases. They're all tied to this, this kind of concept of inflammation, this chronic state of inflammation, like the simmering pot. And it turns out that your immune system has the capability of getting rid of those damaged cells, those aged immune cells. And it can do so through a whole process that's been discovered just recently won the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology just in the last 10 years, called autophagy. And that process, it turns out, can be activated or modulated through the way we live and how we eat and certain substances in our diet. You're not boosting your immune system, you're rejuvenating your immune system. So we've been really focused on how you do that. What are the substances within our lifestyle and diet that can be mobilized to rejuvenate an immune system, turning back these aged kind of zombie cells and restoring them. The flexibility and the function of your immune system to respond with proper balance to experiences that you're going to have in your life. And that has led us into this whole program, we call it the Immunity plus program, that really details in a personalized way the way that one can activate your immune rejuvenation process.

I mean, not only was that a major breakthrough, but I love that creating autophagy in the body and having that die off of old zombie cells or kind of think about it like Ghostbusters, you're going in there and getting rid of them so that your immune system can activate on the right things. It's not over activating, it's not creating these interleukin 6, these inflammatory cytokines. It's really, it really is focused on what the problems are, attacking those and not becoming chronic. Right. So autophagy is this, I mean, amazing process that we're all capable. It's like a soft reset right on our immune system, what you call immuno rejuvenation. So what are some ways that we can, I don't want to say trick the body, but activate Autophagy in our body.

Yeah, yeah. So I think that one of the most fascinating parts of the story, which gives us a handle that we can grab onto for restoring our immune system through this rejuvenation process, is the recognition that what happens to our immune system as it picks up experiences in our lives, some of those can be traumatic experiences. And those, when I say traumatic, they could be like chemical exposure or they could be even psychological trauma, like post traumatic stress syndrome, which imprints our immune system with what are called epigenetic marks. And now I'm getting into highfalutin language. Let me just.

I like it.

So epigenetic marks are things that are attached to our genes, molecules that are attached to our genes that lock a specific message into our genes. They don't change the genetics themselves, so our genes stay our genes, but they lock onto the genes in such a way as they alter the way the genes will be manifest or expressed. And I, I try to get people to understand that our genes are not our destiny. We have, you know, these 23 chapters called our book of life that are 23 pairs of chromosomes, a half of each chapter run by, written by our biological mother, the other half by our biological father. Those stories, however, that are in our genes, in those chapters in our Book of Life are not all read simultaneously or completely. If they were, we would be a mess, because the Book of Life contains the message for every cell type at every age of our body under any circumstance. So if we were reading every part of the book all the time, we'd be chaotic. So the body's only reading a certain portion of the genetic message in a certain cell at a certain time. And what regulates that are various control factors that then tell those genes actually which ones to be silent and which ones to be active. And so what happens when you're in a state of alarm and you have been, your genes have been exposed to something that's traumatic, it can pick up a message that's epigenetic, meaning above the genes, that then puts a tag on those genes to say, you're going to be able to only read these chapters in the book, you're only going to be able to read the tragedy chapters, you're only going to be able to read the inflammation chapters. You can't read the other chapters. We're going to put a stop reading signal on those chapters. Now it turns out that the way we can change these epigenetic marks has been a extraordinary breakthrough in basic science understanding. Just within the last decade, it was thought, prior to that, that you only had your genetic marks, these epigenetic marks put on your genes when you were developing fetus and by the time you moved into the world as an infant and then later child and adolescent and adult, that your epigenetic marks couldn't change because people were saying hold, if they change, we become a mess as we grow older. But it turns out that there now has been discovered that there are out of the 25,000 genes that code for our proteins or that approximate number, that there are maybe 100 or more of those genes that are still capable throughout the course of being an adult to be modified in the way that they can be epigenetically marked. So there's still plasticity in our genes, meaning it still can be modified. So if you have really great experiences and you have wonderful relationships, you're eating a healthy diet, you're exercising regularly, getting good sleep, that you are sending a message to your genes throughout all of your life to epigenetically mark your genes, including your immune system, which is the most rapidly turning over cell types in your body to be friends with you, versus if you lock your genes with messages that have from bad diets, no sleep, toxins, high stress, those kind of things. Now your genes are epigenetically tagged to produce an alarm response because your body's going to fight back against what it considers to be a scary environment that you have to defend yourself against. So the process of autophagy is the process by which some of this alteration then in the cells that have been marked with the bad messages can be replaced by the cells that have kind of naive to those bad messages and can start with greater, younger and more effective response. Now let's talk about diet. What have we learned that controls this process? Here's where the story takes the next step, I think in an aha. And that is it turns out that a family of nutrients that in traditional nutritional science, the training of dietitians and nutrition people for decades was kind of neglected. In fact, when you look at the textbooks that students were trained out of dietetic science, you'll find just maybe a few pages that are describing this family of nutrients in comparison to all the other pages in the textbook. And what is that family? That family is what we're calling phytonutrients, plant derived nutrients, things that are things like flavonoids, polyphenols, this whole array of really 10,000 or more different substances that plants make. They can make them colored, they can have add flavor and taste, they can add characteristics to that plant Food that are unique to that plant for which we have thought in history and nutrition were not that important for human nutrition. We said, well, no, they're not like a vitamin that you got to have them or you'll die of a vitamin deficiency. But now we're recognizing actually that many of those phytochemicals are regulating epigenetically the way that our cells express themselves and are regulating this process of autophagy. And so there are certain members of this family that when we include in our diet, and in fact those are the members that if we look in the blue zones of the world, people that are living to be 100 years of age and still out working in the fields and don't have modern medicine or healthy, those blue zone areas of the world, their diets are consuming very high levels in their natural foods of these phytochemicals, these plant derived agents that epigenetically improve the restoration through autophagy of our immune system. So we've been really studying this whole thing from the soil up. How does this soil microbiome influence the roots of a plant to produce then the secondary phytochemicals that when a person eats that, they have the immunological advantage then of having the plant's immune system then transferred to their immune system to enhance their autophagy. And so that that process is an aha for me because it ties the whole system. It's almost like global immunity. We have to have healthy people and healthy planets with healthy soil and healthy microbiome. In fact, we now recognize that our microbiome of our gut reflects the microbiome of the soil and the bacteria that we're eating out of our diet. So there are all these various remarkable discoveries that we're making that we can now harness in the creation of an immunorejuvenation program. And that is our big, bold health advocacy.

I feel like I have full body chills. I mean, first of all, looking all the way back and thinking that the genes you get are the genes you have, and it's just written in stone. Thank your parents for it, whatever the case may be. So now it's not only a message of hope that we can rewrite these marks that may be traumas, stress, chemical exposures. Not only can we rewrite those and work on lifestyle factors, but there's this empowerment message here around what we can do with phytonutrients. And I am such a big fan of motivation to put on my plate major conversations around autophagy and fasting and being A practitioner working with clients. Fasting can be very difficult for people taking time off, away from food waste if they have young kids or if they have a very stressful job, or if they have a history with an eating disorder or something. You know, there are so many factors where it's awesome. Dr. Longo's work is great. Like, we love. We love fasting, and we love it being something that supports autophagy. But what this is, this is a message of the fiber and greens and colors that you're adding to your plate, playing a role in this amazing process to rejuvenate our immune systems, to share in the health of the planet. Truly.

Well, I think you said it just eloquently, and it's very interesting. You used a word there that is my watchword right now, and that's hope. We're going through a time as a global culture of a lot of distress. And you can see it. People are fearful, they're anxious in some ways. Culturally, maybe we've a little bit lost our way. And there's this sense of despair. And individuals are saying, oh, boy, it's never been worse than this. Having only lived over the last 76, 77 years, I don't know if this is the worst or not, but it's certainly been a challenging time. We recognize that. And families are distressed and kids are having problems in school, and it goes on and on and on. So I think that the word that you use, hope, is the positive attribution that we aspire to. And this science that I'm describing, this epigenetic science, is, I think, the science of hope. And because if in fact, we have the capability of recreating how our genes can go from depression, from despair, from fear, from anger, to enlightenment, to excitement, to joy, to fulfillment, there are all those messages there. And we have the capability of turning off one and turning on the other. By the way we live, think, act, breathe, and move and how we interact with other people. That is a very, very powerful message at a time. That could be the biggest pill we could ever take to recreate this society, to going from the point of despair to the point of opportunity. And I think that there are, you know, there are many paths to enlightenment. For some people, it's exercise. For some people, it's diet. For some people, it's it's meditation. For some people, it's their faith systems. There may be many, many different ways you get there, but all those paths ultimately lead really to recreation of your epigenome and to signaling the bright light of Good health. That's ultimately what we're trying to get to.

Oh, and it's so powerful even to think when you talk about that. The chapters of our book coming half from our mom and half from our dad, we aren't just affecting our own health. We're impacting future generations because our genetics and our epigenetics and how we interact with our world and all those lifestyle factors are imprinting on our leaving marks on our genes that then we'll pass down to our children. So it is not only empowering, but it feels like. And hopeful. It does feel like a responsibility. It really is.

Yeah. I don't want to put a lot of stuff on people's shoulders because we have a lot of things that we're already burdened with. Right. So what I try to say to individuals is we can learn things that are fairly easily implemented if we go back and we review cultures that have enjoyed good health. This is what Dan Buettner did, you know, in his Blue Zones studies and in his book. We were very, I guess you'd call it fortunate. Again, I think there's no coincidences. I believe as you. As you go through life, what happens is you are likely to put yourself in an environment by the way you hang out and the way you see yourself in the world, that you might have something happen that you call a coincidence, but it's actually probably not a coincidence. So for me, that moment was about three years ago. I had three events, all occur within a period of a few months of one another that all sent the same message. And that was I was in Harbin, China, speaking to about 20,000 Chinese medical doctors at their annual health check center. And I was to head back to Shanghai to catch a plane back to the United States. And my guide, who was a Shanghai doctor, and he said, so, hey, there's a typhoon. We can't get on the plane. How'd you like to take the bullet train across China? 2,600 miles from Harbin, the northernmost big city in China, all the way back to Shanghai on the west side. And so it gave me a chance to see it going at 250 miles an hour, silently in this bullet train, China go by me. And we had a great chance for conversation because we're on the train for the better part of, obviously, the day. And I asked him, halfway across China, as we're going through these. These agricultural areas, I said, hey. And I've become very interested in my discussion with a group of investigators at Vanderbilt University Medical School about a substance that They've been studying for the management of blood pressure. That's called 2 hydroxyl benzylamine that is found in only one food in the world, according to their research, and that is, it's found in something called Himalayan tartary buckwheat, which is a, a variant form of buckwheat. There are two major cultivars of buckwheat. One is the common buckwheat that most people are familiar with, and the other is this, this more rare form, tartery buckwheat, which comes from the foothills of the, of the Himalayan mountains, and it's been eaten as a food there for 2,500 years. And I said that that compound, 2 hydroxyl benzylamine, is only really found in those foods. And he said, I can't believe you're asking me that question. Because it turns out my group, my research group is the group that's focused on really studying and researching Himalayan tartary buckwheat. And so from that, that fortuitous moment, it led me, then when I got home, to be introduced to the only farmer in America that was growing this. It had been lost as a crop in America about 200 years ago. It was a farmer in upstate New York that was a retired ag school professor, research professor from Cornell, and his wife was a nurse, and they have a small hobby farm. And for a whole series of unusual reasons, he was growing a Himalayan tartery buckwheat and his wife were milling it and taking it to roadside stands and telling people about it. So what I did is I connected together the group at Vanderbilt with the group in China, and the group and the farmer, which we ultimately ended up buying his farm. And now we have expanded for, I think are producing the first organically grown Himalayan tartary buckwheat in the United States ever. I have a group of cooperative farmers that are organic farmers, regenerative agriculture in upstate New York. And so we are using this to study the effect that it has on this autophagy and this immune rejuvenation process. And it's amazing the results that we're seeing. It's just fascinating to me this, this crop, actually, this, this product has 50 to 100 times the level of immune active phytochemicals of any plant food that we're aware of. And so it's like nature's treasure. In fact, there's an article written in the scientific literature with that title saying, Himalayan tartary buckwheat, nature's treasure. And it, it's just produces this extraordinarily high level of these immune active nutrients. And you might ask, well, why? Well, if you think of where it's growing all these thousands of years in these very hostile environments, bad soil, no fertilizer, no irrigation, very hot temperatures in the summer, very cold temperatures in the winter, it has very fit genes and it has to defend itself and it has a very active immune system. It turns out that that immune system activity is seen with these phytochemicals, then passes on its heritage to humans who eat it. The Blue zone is one of these areas where people are eating this food. All of these stories are extraordinary learning tools for us to figure out what we can do in this 21st century living to maximize our opportunity to resist the things that are trying to take our health away from us.

Definitely. So tell me, do we have access to this Himalayan Tartery Buckwheat?

Yes, actually, if you go to our website again, Big Bull Health, we sell the flour. We're the only people in the world, actually, that have an organically certified Himalayan Tartery Buckwheat. We have, we have it in a shake mix, we have it in concentrated capsule form. But we're basically trying to reintroduce this product into America. It was actually a colonial food. It was brought over by our colonial ancestors because it was so hardy, they could just throw it down in the land and it would grow up. And because it's so high in these phytochemicals, bugs don't like it. It has its own natural insecticides. So unfortunately started off as one of our primary foods several hundred years ago, but then got lost about 200 years ago in America. And we could only find the one farmer still growing a small plot of it.

Wow. Well, I'm so glad you're rejuvenating that not only our immune system, but that whole crop so that we have access to it.

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When we look at other types of foods that are high in phytochemicals or phytonutrients, the Orac scale comes to mind. How do you recommend your clients and your community, people who join your programs or follow along? How should we be looking for and picking the plant based foods that we're eating? And side question, how do you feel about things like anti nutrients?

Yeah, I think that's a. Those are really great questions. We could probably riff on that for quite a while. That's a lot of good things to talk about. Let me give just a simple kind of lesson that I use about how to make this complexity a little bit more simple. And I think you've spoken about this on your podcast, and I know it's part of your body of information, but I summarize it. Eating the rainbow. One of my dear colleagues that worked with me for quite a while, well over a decade, is Dr. Dana Minick. And Diana has done a really tremendous job as a PhD nutritionist and scientist and clinical nutrition as well, in kind of bringing this whole concept of eating the rainbow into a way that we might think metaphorically about how to select foods. And, and in this case, we're talking about natural colored foods, not synthetically dyed foods. So the red orange foods or the blue foods or the green foods or the brown beige foods in their natural state all have different families of phytochemicals. So if you eat the rainbow by this beautiful palette of colored foods, you are naturally already Selecting for the right symphony, orchestration of phytochemicals that modulate many of these processes that we've talked about. The, the autophagy and the immune rejuvenation process. So this is kind of like just a visual metaphor that if you select diet of a variety that is, is eating the rainbow in color. Now that doesn't mean that one has to be a vegetarian. So I don't want to give the wrong impression here that you have to be a vegan. It's all around balance. This whole concept is around balance. So it's eating the right animal protein if you're, if you're eating animal base materials. And you know, obviously I'm living in the Pacific Northwest, I'm digging salmon and fishing and halibut and all that stuff. So I'm, I guess I'm a pescatarian by, by that definition. But it's making the right choice, minimally processed, regenerative, sustainable, and how that fits together in composition. So you have plant and animal foods working together as Mark Hyman talked about. He says, well Jeff, I call that the Pegan diet. And I think he actually even authored a very best selling book with that title. And so these are the kind of tools that we, we try to get across when we're educating people about immunorejuvenation.

No, it's, it's really smart. And actually something that I try to do with my boys, like just going to the grocery store, I'm like, because they, I teach through food. That's because it's my happy places in the kitchen or when we go to the farmer's market or the grocery store. And so we count the berries and we also look for colors. So that's actually how we do a lot of like color teach with my kids is asking them to pick something that they want that's red or jello, green and blue, purple too. Like we pick them all and you know, we're starting small. But I feel like it's almost like if we do it now, even if they, if there's a diversion in high school or college, that they have the foundation that they'll hopefully make their way back to.

And I just think I can actually support what you said because now my grandchildren, my oldest one is, is in college now. So now we're into the next generation. And so my, my kids, my Sons, I have three sons, 53, 50 and 43. And when they were growing up, they tell me now is that they're adults. They said, you know, dad, at times we're kind of embarrassed to bring our friends over to. At our place because, you know, you were always fixing these weird things to bully and falafels and all this other kind of stuff that our friends were not familiar with, and we were kind of embarrassed about it. But, you know, I have. Now that we're older, we recognize, hey, that was really a great start. Now we're raising our kids with a more diverse palette, and we recognize what you were trying to get across. And so for all those moments, we might have wondered why you were cruel and unusually punishing us. Now we recognize, no, that was really good. We got a good start. And so you got to have the patience.

Sometimes I'll happily wait till Sebastian's 50 years old to tell me that, because that is. I mean, that is just so, so important, like all our future generations. Especially because when you think about it, those, you know, whether it's like a chemical assault or our tap water, all the things that I think about my kids coming in contact with that weren't in the water supply, that weren't, you know, sprayed on their my foods as a kid or. I don't know. I mean, I think in my youth, I was born in the 80s. There was a real push for things to be fast and easy for my mom, from like a hamburger helper to like a cream of chicken soup casserole sort of situation to fast food, you know, and they're just trying to make it quick, fast and easy, and there's always a price to pay for that. But I'm really hopeful that. I'm really hopeful that even just like throwing a few plants, veggies, whatever it is on Sebastian and Tasha's plate, that I'm sort of balancing out or combating what I know they're coming in contact with.

Yeah, I. I really want to apply what you just said, Kelly. I think that's really wise because I. I look back at my mother, who is really a pretty strong nutrition advocate, and as was my grandmother, from which my mother learned about nutrit grandmother. Actually, it was in Hollywood, California, back in the 30s, and actually late 20s and 30s and. And she was kind of a. I could see now if she was born later in life, she would have been a woman's liberation champion. She was a force, very powerful force. And so she. She actually, as a young woman went to a nature path in Southern California, which was very rare back in those days, was not well understood at all. And so my mother was very nutrition savvy. And so she raised my sister and I with One really important feature that I think we carried on with our kids and now they are carrying on with their children and that is there should always be a salad at every dinner meal. And the salad doesn't have to be necessarily lettuce with dressing, but it could be some vegetable. And you just think of it as you would think of every meal has to have some vegetable corsets around the salad. And, and that tradition has been passed on. I noticed. My sons do it with their kids and now it's part of their custom. And so if you do that, then it just keeps reminding you. Right, because it's, it's a, it's a pattern of behavior. Like, okay, I have to have a salad. What does that mean? Well, I don't have this, so I have to have something else. Maybe I'm going to cut up some tomatoes and put some olive oil on it, you know. But something that is going to be reminding you you have to have a salad at dinner.

I love that. I'm taking that with me. That is a golden nugget for this one. I mean I always try to think about like protein, fat, fiber, greens. Okay, good. But I love the salads. I grew up with salads too. I mean they were of iceberg variety back when I think back to it. But yeah, just another reminder to just plate up some veggies. And salads are so easy because it's like sliced and exactly what you're saying. Maybe a little salt and olive oil, maybe a splash of vinegar and you're good to go.

Right, I love that.

Well, now I have to know, since you've been doing this for a very long time, you really have been such a thought leader and did an amazing job of gathering so many like minded individuals to really change this industry and provide a space for people to care about health, really focus on wellness. And you have us, you took us from that realm, you know, sick care, back along the curve to focusing on wellness, to getting with a doctor and thinking about optimizing health and being the first biohacker, you know. So where do you see the future of health care? Where are we going in the next 10 years?

Well, I think that where we're going is exactly where you've been taking your supporters and the people that are in your universe. And you said it earlier, I think use the word self care. I think people are getting more well informed as to the fact that if they want to have health as part of their future, that they need to be in part responsible for the most valuable gift they've ever been given, which is their book of life, their genes, and they should not deface it or marginalize or compromise it. It will treat them well. If, if you treat your book of life well, it'll treat you well. And I think that concept that you were talking about in self care is being facilitated now obviously by the Internet with all the health information. You know, your show is another part of that universe of getting health information more accessibly to people and make intelligent choices. But also we're starting to see, as you said, transitioning from the early adopters of wearable devices and the biohacking things into where now we're going to be all having our biometric capabilities of understanding our blood sugar, understanding our pulse rate, understanding our heart rhythms, understanding our sleep cycles, understanding our stress patterns by just the watch that we wear or the device that we have on our finger, or information that will be easily accessible even on our smart devices, our phones that will tell us 24, 7, 365 how we're doing in a different way, not whether we're sick, but how we're functioning. And I'm just amazed to watch how this revolution is slowly now moving itself into more mainstream with people understanding their sleep cycles. Now we have the sleep beds that are really measuring a lot of your biometrics and how that is affecting your health ultimately. And that will transition itself as informatics and cloud based computing and artificial intelligence makes all this kind of much more digestible and easily understood. To the average person who doesn't want to go back to school and do eight years of postgraduate study, they just want to know what the story is for themselves. This is becoming more and more accessible, much, much less expensive and eventually be part of everybody's life who wants to commit themselves to their health. And I think as that occurs, that's going to transform our disease care health care system because it will form a body of knowledge and practitioners that will be principally focused on helping you to stay healthy. And then we will have a body of knowledge and practitioners that are there to treat those inevitable accidents or things of catastrophes that occur that require crisis intervention. So we will really see the development of a health care system that will stand equal to and important as our disease care system.

It's so exciting to think about, I think, you know, whether it's the Oura ring or levels, CGMs or even natural cycles and amazing, you know, temperature and luteinizing hormone app that you, you know, that is as effective as birth control, things of that nature where, you know, oh I don't know if I want to use this tech, but to think about it your way to think, you know, I'm wearing my aura ring right now. It's connected to my natural cycles. I, I use the levels CGM to know that it's going to a body of research, that it's healthy people or maybe more healthy people than have traditionally been looked at in research when it comes to creating diagnostic ranges or that to really see how our lifestyle decisions impact our health and to create what you said that just a full body of research, all of that information to know that's just going to inspire so many young physicians to get into that space, to work in that space and to know that they truly can create health.

Well, thank you. I think there was a huge nugget you just gave the listeners and that is a field of endeavor can only be sticky if it can provide a gainful way of people making a living. Our healthcare approach has not been as capable of generating lively earnings as our disease care system. So the universal attractor has been for bright young women and men to go into disease care because that seemed like a good place to have a job and to have security and make a gainful living. If we not if as we create the opportunity for health care to be equally able to stimulate and give security of occupations and growth and financial success to young women and men as they come out of their training now, we will see this thing grow up. And that's what's happening I think right now is we're seeing develop a whole new field of opportunity. A little bit like what happened if you think back to the 80s with the development of the microcomputer revolution through the silicon chip. You know, there were not, that was not a big industry prior to, you know, Steve Jobs and the development ultimately of home computing and then computers became everywhere and microchips. And now we have a huge mega industry with people can make good livings in that industry and all sorts of different things and storage devices and blah blah, blah. But it didn't exist prior to the 80s and now it exists as a great opportunity for people to make contributions and have a gainful living. I think the same thing is going to happen over the next 20 years in the health care system. And there'll be people who will make a decision do I want to go into the disease care or do I want to go into health care? They have equal opportunities in making contribution. In either of those they can make the selection that best fits their personality.

Thanks to you, Dr. Bland, everyone listening is so hopeful for the future, so hopeful in our ability to really make an impact on our epigenetics and our kids future and knowing that it's not super difficult to add a salad to your plate at dinner, to add veggies to get their hands maybe on some tartary buckwheat flour, and to really know that the future is bright when it comes to a real, true healthcare. Thank you for being the beacon of light, for getting all the functional docs together, inspiring them to follow that path, creating an institute that allows them to be educated in that space so they can really make a true impact on people's health. You are the Godfather and I thank you for your time.

Well Kelly, thank you and thanks for your advocacy and what you're doing. And I know your kids are going to grow up to be the next generation of advocates. So keep up the great work.

Just trying my best. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Be well.

Thank you for listening to.

Be well by Kelly.

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