63: Harness the Power of Your Immune System - with Dr. Jeffrey Bland

Have you ever gotten sick or struggled with your immune system in some way, shape or form? And I mean this, broadly speaking, as anything from being prone to getting the flu, all the way to having a medical condition or even being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. Now, if this describes you, then congratulations. You're a human being living in modern society and your immune system is imbalanced, damaged or broken, and you're going to be prone to getting sickness and disease that. But no one wants that. You should have all the tools you need to heal yourself. And that's what today's episode is all about, your immune system. So if you're a regular human like me, like everybody else, and you've ever been sick or diagnosed with a disease or medical condition of any kind, you're going to want to listen to this episode because I'm interviewing a pioneer in the health and wellness space. Now, his name is Dr. Jeffrey Bland, and he's actually known as the father of functional medicine, which with over four decades, it's longer than I've been alive, four decades spent focusing on the improvement of human health. Now, he created the personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute as well as the Institute for Functional Medicine, which is actually the global leader in functional medicine education, working with many famous doctors you may know, like Dr. Mark Hyman. Now, between his two organizations, literally hundreds of thousands of doctors all over the world have participated in his programs, helping spread the functional medicine ideology, science and principles, which is how helping hundreds of millions of people all around the world to heal from sickness and disease. In fact, this very podcast wouldn't exist without him because his work in pioneering the practice of functional medicine itself is what brought me here to what I do today. And so in this episode, we're going to be talking about the link between your gut and your immune system, how it works, how your layers of immunity work and depend on each other, as well as an amazing new emerging science called immunorejuvenation. Now, in this episode, we'll also discuss why the Western medicine world is thinking about diseases all wrong, how our body is completely interconnected, how our guts connect to everything. We'll dive into inflammation, how it happens, what causes it, and what makes it better or worse. We'll also discuss the difference between boosting and rejuvenating your immune system and so much more. All that coming up on this episode of Reversible. But of course, I do need to remind you that these episodes are for information and educational purposes only, and they're not intended to substitute professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. So let's roll the intro and get right into it. Your health depends on your gut, but getting the right information can be like finding a needle in a haystack. That's why we're going to the source and asking world renowned doctors and professionals about the causes and connections between your gut health and overall health so you can heal yourself the right way. I'm your host, Josh Deck, and this is reversible Dr. Jeffrey Bland. I have to say it is an honor to have you on the show.

Wow. Wow. Thank you, Josh. I feel very privileged to be on the show and I think we're going to have some good stuff to share, hopefully some news to use for the people that are tuning in. So thank you.

Oh, this show's my favorite thing to do because not only do we get to share the message of gut health and wellness and how it all connects, it's stuff I believe should be accessible readily to everyone who wants to listen. That's why I do this show. But there's so much more to it. And so I'm really looking forward to getting to learn from you myself. And so just to anchor this conversation here for my audience, I really want to paint a clear picture, a little bit about you. If you could just kind of share a bit of your experience and what brought you here. And I have so many more questions for you to dive into it after that.

I'll do a very condensed version of 77 years of living here in a few sentences. I think the best way that I could describe my contribution, if any, to this conversation is exemplified by a gift that I got here a few months ago. A doctor who had been coming to my educational events for actually many decades, so many decades actually, that his son is now a doctor and is coming to my educational event. So that gives you a little bit of idea. And he was cleaning out his office because he's retiring. And he found a variety of things that he'd archived and he found this syllabus that was used at a seminar that I wrote this syllabus for a seminar that I gave in 1985 that he attended. And the title of the, of the syllabus for this seminar was Gut Dysbiosis Leaky Gut and the Impact upon Metabolic health. That was 1985. So I think that probably sets the context for this discussion that this has been an area for me, this whole topic of functional health and how people get sick and why some do and others don't, and what's the mechanism of illness and how can we think about the origin of what a person gets, not just what they have and what we call it, but actually where it came from. So we can treat the cause and not just the effect. All those things have been part of my last 50 years probably, I guess would be legitimate. I started as a professor actually in 1970. So that gives a little bit of context as to how long I've been at this process. I've been very fortunate to teach at a number of medical schools. I was very fortunate to have a two year sabbatical actually working as a, a scientist at the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine. My boss was a two time Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Linus Pauling. So I really, what I want to say, I've been very fortunate to have a series of experiences that have made me, I hope, a pretty good listener. I've traveled 6 million miles over the course of my last 40 years. So I've done a lot of visiting with all sorts of interesting people with different ideas. I've been a pretty good sponge to learn from them. And my responsibility, I think, is to find ways of feeding back that information in a way that can make sense to people so they can improve their health outcomes. So that's kind of where I am today. And we started the Institute for functional medicine in 1990. So it's in its 33rd, going on 34th year now, and it's growing up to be much bigger and more substantial than I would have ever believed in 1990. So it's been a great experience for me. I would not have changed my life at all. It's been really just one of those experiences that I feel very blessed to have been participating in.

Well, it's been amazing. I mean, the trickle down effect. And I think that's not only because of how effective it is, but just the sheer logic behind it. You know, dealing with medicine. In conventional Western medicine, we're masking symptoms or giving drugs or simply suppressing things that are reacting. We have people dealing with digestive diseases and other issues or, or autoimmune conditions and we give them drugs to suppress the immune system where it's clearly reacting to something. So let's figure out what it's reacting to. And functional medicine is just so logical. And it's, I mean, like we said in our introduction, it is the seed that has helped hundreds of millions of people recover. And so I know today we're talking about so many things. We're going to get into immunity and food and wellness and nutrients and soil and so Much. But I'd love to ground this whole conversation for our listener listeners just to paint a really clear picture. Can you help us lay this foundation for the conversation by just explaining the connection between our gut and our immune system to start?

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. That's an exciting story because it encompasses a way of thinking that's quite a bit different than the way that I was trained. And I would say probably most people who went into medical school or in the biosciences in period that I did, we were trained to think of each organ kind of as a separate system. And so you would think of the digestive system, and you'd study it. You close the book and you take a test. Then you go to the nervous system, and you study that, and you close a book and take a test, and then you go to the, you know, on and on throughout the different organ systems. So what that led to was this view, in some respects, of the compartmentalization of our body. Like it was just a collection of these organs that all did their work kind of independently. I'm exaggerating to make a point here. And then over time, we started to recognize that actually there's more and more science that illustrates that these organs that make up our body are all interconnected, not just by the blood and nervous system, but the way they communicate with one another and how they form teams. And that led to the development of the term psychoneuroimmunology, one long word, where we tied together psychology with the nervous system, with the immune system. And then people said, well, hold it. That's not. We ought to also connect the endocrine system. Shouldn't it be psychoneuroimmuno endocrinology, because the hormones are connected in there. And then people said, oh, yeah, but what about the metabolism? Shouldn't it be psychoneuroendocrine immunof metabolism? And so what we start to recognize is that our body is a system, and it's all interconnected. It'd be like trying to understand an orchestra just one instrument at a time. And, you know, you might have the world's best violinist playing a Tchaikowski suite, but if you didn't have the other instruments in the orchestra, it wouldn't. Wouldn't be nearly as impactful. It wouldn't sound the same as when you've got all the other instruments playing in the different sections of the orchestra. So our body is the same thing. It's not isolated organs doing their work individually. It's all this interconnection. Then the question is, well, if they're interconnected, who's controlling the interconnection? Is there a master regulator? And that then begs the question how they communicate and who sends the voices to the individual organs as to how they're going to interact with one another. So that has been a very, very big breakthrough in understanding that there are two systems of the body that are 24, 7, 365, sampling the outside and inside world and telling our body how it needs to respond to the changing environment in which we find ourselves. And those two systems are the nervous system and the immune system. And the nervous system and the immune system are interconnected. They don't work independently. They work together as buddies. And in fact, the brain has its own immune system. It has what's called the microglial cells in the brain, which are relatives of the immune system that sits in our liver, that are called the Kupfer cells in our liver. About 10% of our liver is made up of immune cells. And it connects to the gut immune cells that are called the gastrointestinal lymphoid tissue, or Gal G a l T where about 70% of our immune system resides. So that means that the gut is connected to the liver, connected to the brain, but it's also connected to fat, to the muscles, to the pancreas, to the. All organs are interconnected, but the message is coming from this initial signal that is derived from the way the immune and nervous systems are sampling the outside and inside world. Now, when you think of it that way, you might say then that if we lived in a hostile environment in which our body never felt safe, never felt at home, always felt like it was in jeopardy, that what it would do is it would activate the lines of defense, which are the nervous and immune systems to be on guard. That situation that occurs which saves our life. Many times if we are in jeopardy, it activates our immune system, activates our nervous system. That's all well and good and really important. As we know with things like SARS CoV2, we wanted our immune system to jump into action and to protect us. But what happens if that alarm system is on all the time? Our body always feels under jeopardy, always feels at risk. Now what it does is it turns on and keeps on these processes in our immune system and our nervous system that leads to arousal, hypervigilance, sleep disturbances, mood changes, cognitive dysfunction, and chronic inflammation, which is the watchword of our age. We all seem to have inflammation. Inflammation is the immune system's response to a hostile environment. That hostile environment could Be an internal environment, or it could be an external environment, like exposure to toxic chemicals, or it could be exposure to toxic relationships, because toxic relationships send signals to our nervous and immune system that will create alarm as well. Or a toxic bowel situation where our living bacteria that are in our gut, which represent about £3 by the way, so it's one of the larger organs in our body. It's just not connected by the blood supply. That microbiome that sits in our gut has its own personality. It's made up of hundreds of different kinds of organisms that can either work to our benefit or can work to our detriment. So if those microbiome organisms are angry and hostile, it tells the immune system of our gut, by the way, there's foreigners on board, you got a problem. And therefore the immune system signals to the rest of the body to be an alarm. Now we have changes in our mood, our muscles, our joints, our, our gut, and we develop all these symptoms that are part of the living in the 21st century. So that's how I think all this kind of fits together in a broad systems thinking.

Yeah, I mean, that's just pretty staggering. I mean, if you've never looked at it before, looking at it now in this way, like it's all connected always. And I love when you introduce the topic, you know, back when you were in school, they look at the skeletal system, then the digestive system. It's like, yeah, because mouth, stomach, right through intestines, anus, and that's kind of about it. You absorb your food and your colons for water, and that's about all it really was. But as we start to dive into it, and now that we're really realizing, as the science is starting to evolve, we're seeing so much more connectedness to every aspect of our wellness. And it's really interesting. One of the things that I think we'll see down the road, there were some recent rat studies that they have done where they cleaned out all the gut bacteria from these mice as best they could. Antibiotics and, you know, laxatives. And they put them on caloric deficits, for example, and they found that these mice weren't actually losing weight the way that healthy bacteria were or mice with healthy bacteria. And on the other hand, they also found that doing fecal transplants from these healthy, fit active mice to other mice not only promoted weight loss from the bacteria, but they were also showing that they gained other metabolic benefits from the bacteria. So I mean, I could see down the road, super donors giving their stool to the very wealthy do not have to exercise, you know, and just taking these pills of stool to be able to get these health benefits. It's pretty wild, but go ahead.

I was going to say that what you just described, actually, I was very fortunate to have met, a number of years ago, actually several decades ago, a senior investigator at the Leiden University Catholic University in Belgium. And he was studying the impact of the gut microbiome on general health principles. And he had two postdoctoral students in his lab, Patrice Connie and Nathalie Del Zen. They were both wonderkinds and did extraordinary amount of research for him. And ultimately, as he became a professor emeritus, they took over his lab. And they were the group that actually discovered that specific bacteria can lead to improved control of blood sugar and can lead to weight loss. And I was very fortunate to be engaged in that early work with them. This is back in the. In the 1990s. And the results of that work, at first, of course, no one wanted to accept it. They thought it was an artifact that they'd made some kind of a mistake, that, you know, bugs in your gut can't have anything to do with your body weight. That's ridiculous. And then after they found that actually it was reproducible, those studies, other scientists did them and they came with the same results. Then they said, oh, it must be because bugs just eat up calories. So that must mean that they just take away the calories from your food before the body has a chance to make fat out of them. And that was the initial thought. But as more studies were done, it was found that you could not account for the amount of weight loss in humans or in animals that were associated with the effects of the microbiome. There had to be something other than just the bacteria eating the food. And that, of course, has become the story of our age. The actual metabolic influence of how these different organisms, one that was discovered actually by Patrice Connie, which has got a lot of in the news, is called Akkermansia mucinophila. That organism, which is one of the many, many hundreds of different kinds of bacteria in our gut, has been found specifically to have influences not only on improving blood sugar, but on helping for healthy weight management. So. So we are starting to actually witness this process of a system that controls things beyond way beyond what we thought before when we said it was just calories in equals calories out. And weight was just a manifestation of either eating too much or not getting enough exercise. Now we see it's much more than that as it relates to its metabolic control.

I think it could really easily explain the obesity crisis in America that we see today. I mean, was it up to 40% are obese? Something like 70% are considered overweight? We start to take a look at the amount of pesticides in our food. I mean, 17,000 plus different types of pesticides in our food and our products. Everything's artificial, everything's inflammatory. The Sugar consumption is £100 plus per year for the average American. I mean, obviously those are problems, but just the destruction to our gut bacteria could really explain the obesity crisis we're facing today. Where people are what I call weight loss resistant, where they exercise, they diet, but they don't actually lose weight. Would you say it's fair to assume it's coming back to the gut or their many, many other factors that are primarily responsible?

Well, no, I, I think you're hitting on a very important point. Let's, let's take an example of the popularity of these GLP1 agonist drugs now for weight loss, the Ozempic and Wegovy and, and the others that are getting on the market now. How do they work? And I, I think for a lot of people, they don't fully understand that the mechanism by which these or these drugs work is the active ingredients in these drugs actually acts at the gut level. It acts at what are called the GPL GLP receptor sites. This is glucagon, like peptide. It's a hormone that is actually secreted by our gut intestinal cells. And when it's secreted into the blood, it signals to various cells in the body to change their work habits. It causes insulin to become better used. It actually increases energy expenditure so that it starts to influence weight loss and eating, eating up fat, basically. And it also influences the region of our brain that controls appetite, the hypothalamus. And so a gut hormone, it's called an endocrine hormone from the gut, actually is what's regulating so many of these processes. And the release of that hormone is to a great extent dependent in our bodies on the status of our gut microbiome and the food that we're eating. We now recognize that actually the receptor site for GLP1 on the, what are called the L cells of our intestine, which are in the small intestine. The L cells that sit on the surface of our intestine have these receptors, these like antennae that stick up and they pick up the message from the diet, particularly from certain kinds of bitter vegetables. We know about bitter melon and its association historically with improved insulin and weight loss. Well, bitter melon has a series of substances in it, phytochemicals, that stimulate the GLP1 receptor on our intestinal tract naturally, just as the ozembic, or wegovy, to cause the release into the blood of this GLP1 hormone that then regulates blood sugar and weight. So we're starting to really, I think, be much more informed about how important the connection of our diet is to our gut microbiome and to our systemic health across all sorts of different organs.

It's a really interesting topic, and I think it's pretty endless, really. You could spend, like, you have basically a lifetime figuring out gut and leaky gut and microbes. And I think it was still decades and decades away from really discovering the connections. I mean, there's been some really interesting anecdotal situations where you get somebody, you know, mom staying at home, three, four kids, very quiet lifestyle, who gets a heart transplant from a guy who died on a motorcycle. Love that Evil Knievel life. And she starts picking up personality traits. Is it the cells, the signals, the organs? Is it the biome within the heart itself? I mean, we know that your biome influences your personality, how social you want to be. It really is an endless conversation. But I'd love to learn more from you here. So we kind of talked about the connection. We talked about the immune system. I'd love to dive in the rabbit hole here, sort of a chain of events, to talk about our immune systems, really kind of how it works, what we get wrong about immune health and start diving into the gut and food and nutrients from there. So as sort of a jumping off point, can you walk us through what is it we misunderstand so commonly about our gut health? What are people just not doing right about immunity?

Yeah. Well, I think, first of all, there is a misunderstanding as to the role that our immune system plays in our overall health. I believe that most people know that we have an immune system, and it's there to help defend us against infectious diseases like viruses and bacteria. And that's true. So it plays a really important role there. And there are really two phases of that immune system's function. One is what we call innate immunity. That's the first line of defense. Those are cells that do that, that are principally, as you might expect, in the first line, defense around the points of entry into our body. So that would be the gut mucosa inside our mouth, our lungs, our skin. That immunity is the primitive, what people call primitive, although I don't think it's actually primitive. It's ancient, let's put it that way. It's our first line of defense. And we have certain cell types in our immune system that participate in that first line of defense. Macrophages, monocytes, neutrophils, natural killer cells. So if you have Somehow, a defective first line of defense, that part of your immune system is not working well, then it sets you up very, very seriously for whatever that offensive agent is to get to the next line of defense, which is called your adaptive immune system. Now, the adaptive immune system is what most people think about when they think of immunity. Because it's the part of our immune system that has a memory, it produces antibodies. Like when you get a vaccination or immunization, you're activating the adaptive part of your immune system to produce specific antibodies that remember what it's been exposed to. So the next time you expose, you don't have to start from zero. The body already has a memory. But the adaptive immune system, it turns out, cannot work optimally if the first line of defense, the innate immune system, is not working well. So what happened during SARS COV2? As we learned more and more about it, and as we know, people in the United States unfortunately had the worst outcome in terms seriousness of the infection with that organism of any developed nation. We had the poorest outcome. And it wasn't just because we're older. It was across all age groups that we had a poor outcome. And so people have asked the question, why would that be? I mean, we consider ourselves like a really healthy country, but actually it turns out our immune health is not as good as we thought it was. There's a lot of evidence now that our first line of defense, our innate immunity, was not fully capable of doing what it needed to do in the lungs and in the gut, which is the two principal places that people were exposed to the SARS CoV2 virus. And it couldn't really defend us adequately. So it then went to the second level. But the second level couldn't work as well as it needed to because the first level wasn't working really well. And so now we couldn't make the proper level of antibodies quickly enough. And then when it disc finally kicked in, what happened is people got into what they called cytokine, cytokine storms. The immune system over kicked in because it lost its control. And a lot of people who died of COVID died by suffocation or by processes of the body actually overreacting and the immune system lost its brakes, it lost its control mechanisms and the body Went wild trying to defend itself and it didn't have the proper control mechanism because we've broken down the system. We could go into much greater detail on this. I'll try to just stop there with the level of kind of immunological gobbledygook and talk about why it might be that people in the United States didn't seem to have the better response to that virus.

That was my very next question.

And it seems that our innate immune system was just not up to par. Because we had been exposing our innate immune system to so many things that it was worn out, it was not up to par, it was sitting down on the job, so to speak. And the reason for it is some of the things you talked about. High sugar diets, ultra processed foods, too much stress, toxic chemicals, not enough sleep, being already in insulin resistance, so that you have pre diabetes, which is not a situation that's good when your immune system is needing to work optimally. And metabolic obesity, this is the obesity that's associated with increased waist to hip ratio where people have this, the body weight is around the abdomen, it's organ fat weight. All of those things are known to have are associated with lowered first line of defense of our immune system. Now the nice thing about this, you know, what I've said so far sounds like a pretty bad story, but the good part of the story is that every one of those things is modifiable. We can do something for each of those things to unburden our innate immune system to allow it to function as it's natively gifted to function. And so you might ask the question, are there studies that have demonstrated that people who intervene with a specific lifestyle, diet, exercise, sleep management, stress management program, that their innate immune system has improved? And the answer is yes. Many clinical studies have shown that just as we've seen people who are under stress, their innate immune system goes down. And that's why we hear about students taking final exams, getting colds and things like that, because the stress of their finals had an adverse effect on their immune first line of defense. So these are modifiable factors. And in fact it's very interesting to me. Joshua and I started to study this in a little bit more detail. And I was in discussion with Dan Buettner. People probably know him as his extraordinary work on the blue zones and his recent network special and on Netflix about blue Zones. These are regions of the country or the world where people have very long life spans or ex and they, they don't get sick and they don't use A lot of medicine and they get old. Well, and so why. And so he has studied these individuals. The reason it called Blue zones is because he circled his. He and his colleagues circled these regions is like places in Costa Rica, Vilca Bama in the Himalayas, places in the Philippines. Interestingly enough, even a county in a town in Los Angeles county called Loma Linda, California. He is a member of the Blue Zones. And the reason it's blue is he circled these regions with a blue marking pen on a map. So they just said, well, let's call them the Blue Zones. The interesting part of the characteristics that are associated in people that live in these different areas all around the world is not their genes. They have different genes because they live in a very different area of the world. But they're what they expose their genes to, meaning their lifestyles are very similar. They eat foods that are minimally processed. They stay away from, well, they don't have snack or convenience foods as we would know them. They get regular exercise, they work outside. They have commune with nature. They are socially very interconnected as social support systems in communities that. This might explain a little bit of Loma Linda, because Loma Linda, as you know, is a Seventh Day Adventist community within LA County. And so their food and lifestyle habits are different. And so these, these kind of learnings that Dan Buettner found in the Blue Zones lead us then ultimately to ask questions about, well, you know, we can't all live in these virgin areas in the world. We, we live in cities in the United States. You know, what do we do? And the answer to that is you start looking at certain characteristics in their diet and lifestyle that are translatable into the way we live in the United States and so that we can actually access some of this information. And that led me personally into an aha. Discovery that I would have never anticipated. Just to summarize it, when I started thinking about these Blue zone countries, I was introduced to this individual who actually came from the Himalayan region of China. He had asked me, he actually was a medical doctor from Shanghai and He had his PhD in clinical chemistry from the United States. He asked me the question. He said, so do you know about one of the oldest foods in the world that people in the blue zones in China eat? And I said, okay, you're now testing me. I, I'm not sure exactly what food you're talking about. He said, well, it's 4,000 years old. It's, it's been cultivated for 4,000 years. And I said, okay, you stumped me. What is it? And he says it's called Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat. It grows on the foothills of the Himalayan mountains. It's been used as a food, as staple in people's diet. This tartary, the reason it's called tartary, that the Tartan district of China is the Himalayan region. So it's this not normal buckwheat. By the way, buckwheat is not a wheat, I want to emphasize it, it's a gluten free, not a, not a grain, it's a fruit seed. And so he said, what do you know about it? And I said, well, obviously I know nothing, because I didn't even know the word. And he says, well, you ought to really look into it because it's, it's really interesting when you look at the effects that has on people's immune system that have lived in these regions that are associated with the blue zones. So I did quite a bit of work and just to make a long story short, over the next three years, I ultimately then restarted Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat agriculture in America. It had been lost about 200 years ago. We now own Tartery Buckwheat farms that are organic in upstate New York. And we're bringing this crop back. And the interesting thing about it is that it has over 150 different immune active phytochemicals in it. It's probably one of the most densely packed immune strengthening food that we've ever seen. And we actually just did a human clinical trial, this was a Clintrial.gov registered intervention trial where we gave the concentrate of the Himalayan Tertiary buckwheat to people. And we looked at their immune system function over the course of 90 days. And we did this by using a fairly sophisticated technology which was a gene chip that measured 950,000 different loci in the genes that could be modulated by exposure to things in your life. And so we were able to do a kind of a pattern of what impact tartery buckwheat had when they consumed these nutrients on their immune genes and how that translated into their immune function. And lo and behold, we found out that people who started into our trial that had an immune system that was older than their age and birthdays, that at the end of three months we were able to reduce their immunological age at or below their age and birthdays over the course of 90 days, just by changing the information that was coming from their diet and how it was impacting their immune system. So we've obviously become pretty bullish on this Himalayan tartary buckwheat because we feel it's one of the many foods that might be employed to really start turning back some of the immune aging that we experience and the loss of the immunological defense function.

It's really interesting. There's a lot of work by Dr. Davidson Claire, who I'm sure familiar with in the rejuvenation and longevity space. And they did some amazing stuff. I mean, they've gone in basically with CRISPR technology and edited the eyeball of an aging mouse and made it the same age as now a young mouse. Like they are really turning back the clock. So I think it's really a matter of time. But I guess it brings me to the question here for around what we can do on a day to day. Because obviously there's a lot of things that people have done over the years where we're eating garbage food and we can import all these foreign foods, we can import this buckwheat and all these different things and bring them in to give people some benefits. But you talk about something interesting where SARS, COV2 and all these situations, people are sick and we think, well, I better boost my immune system, I better get extra vitamin D, extra vitamin C, extra minerals, extra everything. But you refer to something a bit more important as immuno rejuvenation as opposed to immune boosting. Can you elaborate on that for us?

Yes. Thanks very much, Josh. So to go really quickly back to my story about COVID and I was indicating that people who had imbalanced immune systems, what happened is their immune system overreacted and it became super boosted and it super boosted itself right into problems so serious of problems that people went on respirators. And some people aspired they couldn't survive. They. They drowned in their own fluids, basically. And that particular process is an extreme example of what happens when the immune system gets boosted. So if you have a defective immune system, it's imbalanced. You don't want to boost it because you could be just boosting more problems. What you want to do is regulate it. You want to rejuvenate it. Now, 10 years ago, if I would have used that term in immune research circles of immune rejuvenation, I think I would have been criticized saying, well, there's no evidence that you could actually roll back the age of your immune system by rejuvenating it. That has all changed over the last 10 years. We now have. When I say we, I really mean the collective we. I didn't make these discoveries but many others did. There is a mechanism, it's now understood, as to how the immune system can rejuvenate itself. It does so by a process that was only recently discovered that won a Nobel Prize in Medicine and physiology just about seven years ago, called autophagy. And so you have this selective autophagy of which a damaged cell, some people call these ghost cells or cells that are really maverick in our immune system, that as we grow older, they tend to accumulate. Our body has the ability to actually get rid of them and to rejuvenate the immune system. And so the process of boosting an immune system is really not nearly as important as rejuvenating the immune system and getting rid of these zombie cells and replacing them with new, fresh, naive cells that have the ability to create the proper response to exposure to viruses or bacteria or other injurious substances. So we've been studying this process of immunorejuvenation for the past several years. And as we've done this, we've recognized that the whole field is growing up around us. There are literally tens of research papers being published around immunorejuvenation. And David Sinclair is one of the principal investigators in this whole field that's really emerged that ties together the immune system, obviously, with longevity, because it turns out that an older age immune system is the most connected to how long you'll live of any other thing. We know an aged immune system ties to your longevity, ties to the day you'll die. And so reducing the age of your immune system, I'm talking about the biological age, obviously, the functional age is a principally important thing if you want to live a long, healthy century, long life. And I think that that is what is coming out of this field, that boosting is not where the action is. Immunorejuvenation is where the focus should be put.

I want to take a quick second to tell you about a huge project I've been quietly working on just for you that is finally ready. So as, as you know, I specialize in helping people reverse Crohn's and colitis, which is the worst of the worst when it comes to gut diseases. And just like this podcast, because the tools I use for them are so powerful, that means they can help you at any stage of the gut health too. And today I can finally give you those tools. I've created an online community, Inside School, a new online platform that's a perfect mix between a social media page and a coaching program, just without the bad advice from random strangers on the Internet. This community will help you find the root cause of your digestive issues and walk you through the five Rs of reversing gut disease so you can heal your gut the right way. We've got done for you. Meal plans, supplement recommendations with discount codes, course modules, live events, coaching calls. And with our community growing, we'll even be bringing back some of our famous podcast guests to meet with you inside the group too. It's specifically designed for those who need help reversing Crohn's or colitis, but I do want to extend the invitation to join for those of you who don't yet have these severe diseases, because the gut healing tools we're providing inside will be just as powerful for you too. Now, this course community is everything you need minus everything you don't. And it costs less than your coffee habit because I believe that everyone should have access to the tools that they need to have a healthy gut. If you're like most, you've either been looking or waiting long enough to find a solution and you don't have to wait or put this off anymore, simply click the link in the show notes to learn how to get started. It's interesting because I'd love to live a long healthy life, but not at the rate people are declining. We sort of expect decline after 40, 50. With 60 plus Americans over 50, 60 years old being on two plus medications, it's really scary. So healthspan is definitely where it's at here. And so I got to ask because obviously talk about the tartery buckwheat. Can you talk about, talk about how it really is beneficial in the immune system and rolling back and adding is it nutrients, is it phytonutrients and what is its role? And is that a superfood that people can take and just roll back the immune system or is there a lot more to it? I just want to caution people of course is running to like a super supplement like is often marketed. So can you elaborate a bit more around that relationship?

Yeah. Thank you. Well, I think we all learn as we grow older in the world that there's no one simple solution to complexity. Generally it requires multiple shots on goal to solve complex problems. And that is certainly true as it relates to immunorejuvenation. So we have to attend to the full complement of things that really relate to how the immune system can rejuvenate itself. That includes sleep, hygiene, both duration and quality. That includes regular activity or exercise being patterned both for strength and and endurance type exercises and muscle strength and muscle Amount of muscle versus the amount of fat in your body is very important. We talk about, obviously, stress and the effects that stress has on the vagus nerve and your central nervous system and how that relates to not just adrenaline, cortisol, and the alarm hormones, but how it relates to the whole nature of impact on your immune system. We talk about the effects that exposure to toxic chemicals. Have you already brought that up? We know that many of the 50,000 new chemicals that have been put into our environment have adverse immune effects. And that includes, by the way, pharmaceutical drugs and over the counter medications that may have adverse effects on the immune system. People are over medicated. That plays a role as well in modulating how our immune system functions. And then, of course, there's diet, which plays a very, very important role. The family of nutrients it appears to be most interesting in terms of immunorejuvenation are a family called the polyphenols or flavonoids. And there are several thousand of these. And people would be able to understand them if they think of vegetables and fruits and their colors, because these are often related to the coloring materials found in food. The flavonoids and polyphenols are divided up into a variety of different categories, but they constitute a very, very important role in modulating the immune system through their regulatory effects on how the immune cells function. So we recognize that's probably the connection between Tartary, Buckwheat, our immune system, because it's extraordinarily high in these phytochemicals that we call polyphenols and flavonoids. And they have this orchestrated effect on immune health. So it's all of these things put together. We've been working very hard on what we call the Immunity plus program, which is basically a program a person can apply in their lives. It couples all these things together. They become kind of the guide of their own immune health so that they can become a master of their immune system and not a victim of their immune system. That's really the focus of what we're doing at our company, Big Bold Health.

And I want to definitely dive into more of that because that's a very interesting situation being in the autoimmune space. I mean, like I said, I specialize in Crohn's and colitis, and that's all I do. I see 2, 300 cases a year. And so much of it is so reversible. And unfortunately, the Western world goes, well, it's autoimmune. There's nothing we can do. Take these immunosuppressives and maybe one day we cut out your colon. If you're lucky, you get to keep it, but it'll probably be uncomfortable. And that's sort of what drives these, these treatment options. But on the other hand, if we can figure out the trigger that actually cause the immune system to go off in the first place, and much like what you're talking about, rejuvenate the immune system, these can often be unwound. I mean, 40 plus percent of all US homes have a mold problem. And I see an extraordinary amount of mold and mycotoxins in ibd. I see a lot of fungus and candida and dysbiosis or pharmaceutical or antibiotic induced. So what is the role in your opinion here, your expertise from immuno rejuvenation and autoimmune diseases and conditions, does it work across the board? Is it all going to be very particular or is there something that everybody can do as a general whole to really help relieve the pressure on their immune system to start reversing these, these disease processes?

Well, I want to compliment you. I think what you just said is a little message of gold because I think there is a lot of misunderstanding in the minds of people who have autoimmune disease as to what is their disorder, where did it come from, and what do they need to do about it? And I think you, you threw out a real gem there in the way you, you set this up, the way you teed this discussion up. First of all, as you can probably tell, I'm often a contrarian. I don't do it intentionally, but I often find that the way I see things is different than the standard fare. So as it relates to autoimmunity, I've been asking the question now for 30 years. Do we wake up one day to become allergic to ourselves? Because autoimmunity sounds like suddenly our immune system doesn't like us, that it was getting along with us for some years and then suddenly it just woke up. The same immune system woke up one day saying, you know, we don't really like you today and it's going to get worse over time because you're not our friend. That seemed very illogical to me. I mean, it just didn't seem to really match. And so I started asking the question. In fact, I gave a whole series of seminars for doctors on this topic over several decades in which we deep drilled or dove deeply into this question about are we sure that our body is becoming allergic to itself such that the immune system is fighting the thyroid gland or the adrenal gland or the organ du jour? And what I finally recognized in going through the literature very intensely is that there is no evidence whatsoever to say that the antibodies that our immune system produces go against native tissue. Now people would say, but Jeff, what about the fact that you have double stranded DNA and if you develop an antibody to that, you can have a form of systemic glucose erythematosis? I mean, isn't that an example of the body becoming allergic to the most important thing of all, which is our book of life, which is our DNA? I mean, if you become allergic to your DNA, isn't that like the worst thing that can happen? But then I asked the question, are you sure that it's our native DNA? Or could it be DNA that got chemically modified, transformed by exposure to things that make it not you make it something else? Now I'm asking that question, but I'm telling you I believe that's the answer. I don't believe this is native DNA. I don't believe that we become allergic and immune intolerant to our native tissues. What happens over the course of living is that our native tissues get converted somewhat into foreigners by the exposure to all sorts of things. Let me give an example that every one of your listeners has heard about. We have all heard about A1C, right? A1C is associated with diabetes. Get your A1C low, you don't want it elevated. Now what is A1C? A1C is a measurement of a substance that accumulates in your body when blood sugar glucose chemically reacts with the protein in your body that's found inside blood cells called hemoglobin. So when sugar reacts with hemoglobin, it forms glycosylated hemoglobin, that's G. So A1C is advanced glycosylation. So it's, it's. We're talking about the reaction of your native protein, which is hemoglobin, that your body's used to, to a new protein called glycated protein that your body's not used to. Your immune system doesn't see that as a, as a friend. It seems not a member of your family. It's like a foreigner. And so it starts reacting to it. And so you might ask, is there a more immune reactivity in diabetics than there is in people without diabetes? And the answer is yes. Or you might ask, can you take a person with a high A1C and lower it? And you find that also they're pain of inflammation goes down and their Answer is yes, because these are interrelated to you being a foreigner in yourself. Now, I've given you only one example. I could give you a hundred examples of things that happen to our body that make us not us. All of which are modifiable, by the way. And that's the future of what you're talking about in the management of autoimmune disease. Don't treat it as an autoimmune, treat it as a foreigner molecule that came as a consequence of reactions that might have started in your microbiome. Now, let me close on this because this is. You can see I have some passion for this topic.

You speak my language.

Because I think what happens with people that have diagnosed autoimmunity, by the way, eight out of 10 people that have diagnosed autoimmunity are female. And I could go into the explanation of that related to endocrine function and estrogen and so forth. But let's just say statistically, 80% of autoimmune disorder patients are female. Now, there are 88 different diagnoses of different types of autoimmune disease from the thyroid to the adrenals to the gut to the brain. It's a whole collection of different names, the different docs with different specialties beside different drugs that basically try to suppress the immune system, including dermatology with, with various types of eczema and psoriasis. So when we start then asking the question, how do we not just suppress the immune system with these medications, but allow the immune system to find its normal balance, to rejuvenate itself by not seeing foreigners on board, that is a different approach. And that's the approach that I believe will ultimately prove to be the most important approach for remediating the cost cause, not the effect of what we call autoimmune disease. I think we've been out in early stage understanding of the disorder and only now with the new molecular assessment technologies, actually looking at what happens to these molecules that we think we're allergic to when we, we get them injured. Only now are we able to start really understanding what I call the chemical ideology, the fingerprint of what underlies these disorders. Now, the powerful takeaway from this is you. What you're doing is you're remediating the cause and not the effect. You're taking away the stuff that is injuring and you're giving back the stuff that rejuvenates. That is the logical approach to rebalance the immune system.

Yes, it is. You know, it's funny, we're so on the same page And I love that. I mean, you've been on the same page since before I was born. You actually started IFM 1990, 91. I was born in 92. So it's been around since before I was even a seed. But I came to the same logical conclusion. I looked at the math, I looked at the stats, and I said, well, we know that back in 1990, I just done a lecture on this, actually, for Priority Health Academy, which has just been a pleasure to work with them. And back in 1990, there was one and a half to 3 million cases of inflammatory bowel disease worldwide. As per the CDC, in 2020, it's over 7 million. But we know the USA is less than 5% of the global population. It has more than 50%, arguably up to 63%, of all of those IBD cases. So it can't possibly be genetic because you can't change in three decades that level of genetic factoring. And it can't possibly be idiopathic because of all the changes we've had. But if it really is, we better figure out what's going on pretty freaking fast, because we've got an epidemic on our hands. And I just pull back the layers and very logically, here we are. People are getting better in a couple of weeks or a couple of months after 10, 15 years. So there's so much to it, so much power in what you're doing, and I'd love to dive in a little bit more here on Big Bold Health, because I know I've got you scheduled for an hour. Do you have a hard stop on today?

Yeah, I do, unfortunately. One of those days.

That's okay. I know you're a busy guy, so can you hit me with what you're doing now about Big Bolt Health and this immune work that you've been doing lately?

Yeah. Thank you. So Big Bolt Health was really born out of this whole discussion that we've been having. And it was really my colleague that's been working with me for over 25 years, Trish Urie, who said, jeff, you know, all these things you talk about and your advocacy and your presence, you know, you're a fairly big guy in stature. You've got these bold ideas. Maybe you ought to go one more shot at the. At the go and have this Big Bold Health. You're kind of swan song as it relates to the things you've been doing over the last many decades. So we, we focused on this immunological problem, how to rebalance the immune system. We have been really exploring this immunorejuvenation concept pretty intently. We've come to the recognizing that there are three nutritional components of immunorejuvenation that are fairly well documented now in science, including our own published work. And that is, I mentioned these flavonoids that we find in very high levels in Himalayan tartary buckwheat, but it's also found in many other vegetables and fruits as well, this family of foods. The second are the essential fatty acids, the omega 3 fatty acid family that play important roles and particularly those that contain high levels of these pro resolving mediators, These derivatives of EPA and DHA, the fatty acids, the omega 3 family, that have very high quenching ability for the inflammation process that they're called PRMs or Pro Resolving Mediators. And then the third component is the pre and probiotics that relate to the re establishment of the improper gut microbiome. And we've been exploring lots of different microbes to see which ones have the right personality and what kind of prebiotics. The food that feeds the friendly bacteria that leads to the appropriate postbiotic effects, meaning the substances that are produced by them that are absorbed by our body that has a salutary effect on the immune system. So we call those the three pillars, the bioflavonides and polyphenols coupled with the omega 3s coupled with the pre and probiotics. And the results that we've gotten from that as an immunorejuvenation clinical toolkit has been truly remarkable. We're getting people all sorts of symptoms of getting over chronic fatigue, getting over foggy brain, getting over chronic joint pain, better digestion, you know how it is. You see those people, you know what happens. It's a constellation of things that improve in them. So that has been our focus in big bold health, is to really understand this and then find ways to convert it into usable applications that people can actually employ in their lives.

Now, is that a matter of just taking as many polyphenols and other beneficial nutrients that you possibly can? Does quality matter at all? Are they all made equally? Like, what is the difference there?

No, thank you. That's. That's another. You're asking really great questions. So when you hear the story, flavonoids, if you're a nutrition junkie, you probably come to immediately remind her that these are antioxidants. And that's how they've been defined in the nutrition literature, as these are antioxidants. When we started down this road now about 10 years ago, I questioned whether that was the real explanation for how they work. Because if you look at the antioxidant ability of these different members of the flavonoid family could be hesperidin, rutin, quercetin, fisetin, luteolin, diazomine. I mean, there are thousands of these molecules. They all are antioxidants, but they don't all work in the body the same way. And so maybe their function, I felt, was not just strictly related to their antioxidant ability, it was related to something else beyond their antioxidant ability. And I'm very happy to say that I think I was right. Not only our work, but many, many other investigators around the world have been studying this. And now we find that our body has specific receptors for different members of the flavonoid family that trigger different responses in different cells. So it's much more specific than just an antioxidant effect. It's a cell specific effect that relates to how these different molecules share some commonality in the way they look chemically, but they have different functions in the body. So I think that's one of the things that drew us actually to tartery buckwheat. Because if you think of that plant, that plant has had to grow in an environment that's extraordinarily hostile. The climate on Himalayan mountains is not great. The soil is lousy. You're not sure if you're being scorched in the sun and in drought, or you're freezing in the middle of winter. And so the plant has had to evolve a very, very rigorous and robust immune system to defend itself against the environment. And some people don't know it, but plants have immune systems that have similar components to our immune system. And the plant's immune system, it turns out we've been studying this ties itself to the immune system of the microbiome in the soil. So the soil microbiome has its own immune function that connects to the root nodules of the plant's immune system, which connects to the products that that plant makes in their fruit or seed, which connects to the people that eat those. And their immune system, it's all interconnected. And we've been studying that and amazed at what we can learn from the genius of nature if we use these tools. So they're all interconnected.

It really is amazing. I often talk to people about this biogeochemical cycling, how if you have a farm, you have an apple tree, the apple tre falls into the ground, it decomposes, the grass grows, the cow eats the grass, you eat the cow, like that's. That's nature's cycle and all these things that is so tied in. And the closer we get to nature, the further we get to disease, which is. Or further away we get from disease, which is amazing. Well, Jeff, it's been a pleasure having you here. I do want to respect your time. I know like you mentioned, you have a hard stop here. So can you tell us here what is it you're working on? How can people find you, get help? Like what can they do and engage with you and in whatever capacity is available.

Well, thank you very much. I think there's two places that people might find valuable. First of all, you can go to bigbolt health.com that's a site that has a lot of this immunorejuvenation resource information in the science section of our website. And if people want to trace back what I've been doing for the last 30 years, we've archived many of my presentations. A lot of my things are available for download on jeffreybland.com, so that's j e f dash f r e y b l a n d dot com. Between the two of them, there is probably more information than most people would ever want. But you can find us there.

I promise you I'll want more. I'll be looking there myself. Well, Jeff, it's been a pleasure having you here. I'm going to put all that information in the show notes. Is there anything else you'd like to put in the show notes that we can hyperlink for people or is that all the best places to find you?

I think that's a great place. There probably is a third one for people that are geeks that really want to dive deeply. I have this organization called the Personalized Lifestyle medicine institute. For 12 years we've been sponsoring educational seminars with world leaders on topics of health and nutrition. All of those talks from all of those meetings are archived and available free of charge for people that want to dig down deeply into this topic. And as I said, we have 12 years of meetings with many of the noteworthy people in our field that have been our lecturers. So that's another place people can find information if they are interested.

Well, that's amazing. I'm sure there's enough information on there for somebody to gain a medical degree. So thank you so much. It's been great having you here, Jeff. It's always a pleasure to connect and learn more from you. I just. Hopefully we get to have you back sometime in the future. I'll very much. Look forward to it.

Yeah, absolutely Josh. And thank you. And keep up doing the great work you're doing. It's all about getting people understand that they can be in control. They don't have to be a victim. And I think you're doing a fantastic job. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to the show. Before you leave, I want to encourage you to finally take a step toward repairing your gut and taking control of it so it doesn't control you. Our brand new online community is the ultimate set of tools. Tools to help you reverse Crohn's and Colitis. If you don't have either of these diseases, we're not going to exclude you because the tools we use to help those dealing with the worst can help you at any stage. The Reversing Crohn's and Colitis Naturally community on school is complete with done for you meal plans, supplement guides and discount codes as well as course modules to help you master your gut health. We'll also be doing live events and coaching calls and we're even bringing back some of the famous guests you've heard on the show to meet with you inside. Just click the link in the show notes to get started and if not, my only question is what are you waiting for?