An Important Reminder that Food is Information with Dr. Jeffrey Bland

Yeah, I think that when we put all of our thoughts in what we call healthcare, when it's really a disease care centric system, we don't have much energy left over for health. And that's really. When I say energy, what fuels anything is capital. If you don't have capital flowing to the system that's a form of potential energy, then you can't build a sustainable model that is durable foreign.

Hey hey Betties. Welcome back to another episode of better with Dr. Stephanie. It's me, your host, Dr. Stephanie Estima. And today I had the privilege of sitting down with Dr. Jeffrey Blend for a conversation all about immune system function and the interplay between our immunity and our gut microbiome and the implications that that has that broad ranging implications for our health. Dr. Jeffrey Bland, very commonly referred to as the father of functional medicine. His pioneering work has created the personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute as well as the Institute for Functional Medicine which is the global leader in functional medicine education since 1991. Hundreds of thousands of healthcare practitioners have participated in, in both of those programs and these are. This collective knowledge has positively impacted the lives no doubt of patients all over the world. Dr. Bland began his career as a professor of biochemistry and he was hand selected by two time Nobel laureate Dr. Linus Pauling to serve as a director of nutritional research at the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine. If the name Linus Pauling is Familiar to you, Dr. Linus Pauling is very famous for in the 1930s was among the pioneers who used quantum mechanics to understand and describe chemical bonding which is to say the way that atoms join together to form molecules. Dr. Bland is also the author of best selling books and over 120 peer reviewed research publications. Speaks extensively all through the world in the, in our conversation and hear him drop the figure 6 million miles of travel, which is just insane. Dr. Bland's latest project is Big Bold Health which he launched in 2018. He is on a mission to transform the way that people think about our immune system. He's advocating for the power of immuno rejuvenation which he talks about in our conversation and some of the principles around it. So of course what did we talk about today? We talked all about, as you might suspect, some of the practical principles that we can use in everyday life to fight disease. So we talked about fermented foods, we talked about stress plants, we talked about managing blood sugar, polyphenols, probiotics. Food is information. We went through a little im IFM mini course in, in, in the immune system? What's the difference between the innate immune system, the adaptive immune system? What are lymphocytes? What are T cells? What are natural killer cells? Antibodies, the lot? We talked about children and immunity. We talked about glycemic variability. We talked about ancestral wisdom, blending that with modern science. We talked about studying stacks or sirtuin, activating compounds like resveratrol and EGCG and allergic acid and mitochondria and cellular senescence and how we can fight inflammation and aging. Very robust conversation. I think that you will really enjoy it and certainly if you are looking to improve your immune system, not only in the short term, but certainly over the long term, as we age, you will find a lot of of useful information that is very applicable to everyday life. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Jeffrey Bland. If getting a good night's sleep feels like it is a second job, then this is for you. I have been building a simple night ritual with AGZ. This is the melatonin free nighttime drink from AG1 that's designed to support restful restorative sleep so you can actually wake up feeling refreshed. It's an easy mix that you can sip it cold, cold, room temperature, or as I like to do, warm. I like to think of it as cocoa with benefits. What's inside is clinically studied key ingredients like magtene, which is magnesium, L Threonate, saffron, L Theanine, ashwagandha, tart, cherry juice extract and valerian. This is a blended formula to help you wind down in the evening, sleep well and wake up without any grogginess. There's no added sugar and it's NSF certified for sport with third party testing, which I personally love for quality and safety that I'm used to with AG1. Flavor wise, you've got chocolate, you've got chocolate mint and you've got mixed berry. I personally warm up the chocolate mint like a nighttime hot cocoa and it's Chef's kiss. Pair it with your AG1 in the morning and now you've got a morning and evening system that supports the two pillars of health that we're after, nutrition and sleep. Without adding any more complexity to your day. Head to drink ag1.com forward/stephanie to get a free frother with your first purchase of AgZ. That is drink ag1, Stephanie. All right, Dr. Jeffrey Bland, I am just thrilled to welcome you to the Better podcast. Welcome.

Well, Stephanie, what a treat. Now, what a great name for a podcast. I couldn't think of a More positive affirmation. So let's see if we can't be better together.

Awesome. Well, it is a huge honor for me as well. You are often called the father of functional medicine, founder of the Institute of Functional Medicine, involved in supplement companies that I use and I prescribe for patients, Metagenics being a notable one. And I think, you know, just with your, let's see, let's say, pedigree of experience and contribution to health, I think it warrants maybe a trip back a little origin story time in terms of how you found yourself really pioneering a practice that I practice, that I preach on the podcast every single day, in terms of what functional medicine means. So how did you. What is the. What is the origin story for you in terms of how you got here, in terms of your practice, and what were some of the historical events, let's say, in your life, that that led you down this path?

I have a suspicion that although my story is. Is unique to me, I bet there are some similarities to your own story as to how we find ourselves along the road of life. And, you know, I can recall so clearly in high school, I was kind of a science geek, but I was a musician. I was kind of in between. Do I want to pursue my music? I played at Disneyland in a van when I was in high school. I grew up in Southern California. And it was a question as to where I wanted my path to take me. And I think it's a consequence of who we meet that are influential in helping to guide us and we hope to, in our, in our journey of life, to be able to be fortunate, to find people of significance. It really take us aside and provide a role model. And I've had, other than my father, I've had a number of those. I'd have to say the probably a couple that would have been important is I was a basketball player and John Wooden was one of my coaches for basketball, a very famous UCLA basketball coach that kind of helped me ultimately get to University of California, Irvine, where I was in the first basketball team there and graduated, then made a decision as a consequence of opportunity to work with a faculty member that went on to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry, Frank Roland, who was the person who discovered the effect that Freon gases have on the ozone layer in our atmosphere. So my undergraduate thesis, working for him kind of set me forward in asking did I want to be in medicine or did I want to be in basic science. And I think I chose a route that was actually the right route for me that ultimately got Me to be a professor and then ultimately on a sabbatical. In the early 80s I was very fortunate to be asked to join Linus Pauling, two time Nobel prize winner at the Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in Palo Alto at Stanford to spend a couple of years on sabbatical with him. And that was a life changer for me. I gave up my tenure faculty position after that, much to the surprise of my parents. And I had a family and a mortgage and all those things. So I gave up all that security and made the decision that what I was going to do is try to put together an operation that would teach healthcare providers how to do nutritional medicine in their practice. And that was my whole business plan. And when I think back, it was kind of foolish. I had three kids at the time and it was a little bit of a flyer. But fortunately over the years, again my guidance through people that I met that helped me along the path, we grew that up and ultimately then in 1990 formed the Institute for Functional Medicine with my wife who is a co founder. And that gave us a place to really put a lot of our energy. So it was just a really interesting kind of ride forward that kind of was. I was pulled by the ground groundswell, almost like a tsunami of seeing what could be if we could start to look at health from a different perspective. Rather than look at it as a disease centric model, look at it as a functional model, asking how do you get there to the disease and what can we do upstream if we look at the root cause and try to examine that more precisely so that we would redefine what healthcare was, I would say, different than that of disease care. And that was really what ultimately gave rise to the growth of functional medicine. And, and has kept me pretty involved now for the last 40 years.

Yeah. And I remember, you know, I always say like I grew up in the chiropractic community, so trained as a chiropractor and was had the privilege to be mentored by people who had very their philosophical premise in terms of this more vitalistic model that you're talking about, this like healthcare versus sick care model really did shape the way that even though I went to a very, we'll say rigorous and you can maybe even call it mechanistic school where there was a tendency to try to reduce to the ridiculous, in many ways still was able to keep that sort of holistic, you know, chiropractors call it vitalistic, which, you know, we're talking the same language view of the human body and that Innate intelligence that allows for healing in sometimes ways that we are not able to explain. Right. So we always talk about miracles in medicine. We've all heard of someone who is given a prognosis and by far outlived it. And I'm mechanistically trained, so I tend to default to mechanisms and pathways, but I also always leave room for that with which, that je ne sais quoi, that with which we are not able to necessarily explain through a pathway. I would like to see healthcare move towards that. I mean, I think that there's in many ways the healthcare system that we operate in. Whether you're in Canada or the United States. I'm in Canada, but certainly have a very large American audience. I have patients that are, that are in the States. And it like both systems are broken. You know, I think that in Canada we used to sort of have our, you know, it used to be this, you know, the Canadian pride that we had this, you know, healthcare system. And now we see wait times and things along. I mean, we're not going to go down all the political, all the, all the political rabbit holes today, but very much in the States it's very much a billing system. So it's like, how much can you bill for and how often can you bill? And I would say that the same, you know, in Canada, you see a lot of Canadians travel, getting like taking a trip down to Buffalo or taking a trip down to like the closest sort of border town to be able to kind of get care, because the wait times are just extraordinary. Like two, three, four, five years to see a specialist, which is ridiculous.

Yeah. I think that when we put all of our thoughts in what we call health care, when it's really a disease care centric system, we don't have much energy left over for health. And that's really, when I say energy, what fuels anything is capital. If you don't have capital flowing to the system that's a form of potential energy, then you can't build a sustainable model that is durable. And so we don't have a healthcare model. We have a disease care model that's wrapped with a healthcare name attached to it as kind of a false symbol. And so everything then filters down into disease care, which then gets to the model that you were talking about, where we know more and more about less and less until we know everything about nothing. And I think that's the supercilious view of specialty medicine, that we can define things down to the microscopic cellular level. But the question is, where did it come from and how did it relate to the person's life? And well, that's for somebody else to worry about. That's not for the specialist to worry about. So I think that we're, we're into an interesting period of time where the economics alone are telling us we have to have a change because this model, this is not working financially and as a consequence it's giving opportunities for the growth of things like the functional medicine model. It's really focused on root causes and looking upstream before you end up at downstream pathology. And I think that's why we've seen such tremendous growth in these fields over the last few years. You know, the first few decades in this field for me was it was tough sledding because it was really just the wild card individuals that were interested in the field. But now we're starting to see a lot of recruitment as a consequence of disillusionment and dissatisfaction and people being disadvantaged. Now having gone through all that schooling and all that and they think they're really going to go out there and help people and then they find out that they're not really helping people as the way they hope they like you're an advanced drug salesman. So I think that we're seeing these forces actually creating change and people like yourself, the ambassadors of this model are getting people to be informed that there are in fact effective alternatives that you can seek out of highly professionally trained individuals who are just coming from a different perspective. It doesn't mean that disease care is bad, it just means that we need to have an alternative place where people can go for healthcare.

Yeah, we need disease care. People have severe and tragic, in some cases diseases. So we absolutely need that care and we need more of a solutogenic model. We'll say where there's like health promotion is the first tenant of practice for that physician. So yes, agree with everything that you're saying and you're very famous for, well famous to me and all the doctors that follow you and listen to your work around this idea. And I think that this is even sort of spilled into people who are very health conscious, this idea that food is information. So can you talk a little bit about what are. And there's a couple of. In our pre chat we were talking about a couple of different categories of food foods. But what are some foods? When we're thinking from, you know, we're thinking about the solutionic or prophylactic, we'll say model or health promoting model. What are some things that we might consider in our diet that might be that can fight disease, that can help to keep us biological. We'll say biologically younger, so younger than our chronological age. What are some, what are some tenants to consider there when we're thinking about building a plate?

Yeah, thank you. I think that's really a very pointed and important question. So I want to go back just quickly kind of to a time memorial and ask the question, how did animals survive? And they survived as a consequence of their ability to be fed against the environment. And the environment was tough, it was cruel, it wasn't friendly. We didn't have thermostats and we didn't have refrigerators and we didn't have all the kind of niceties that we take for granted now. And so both the plants and animals that were on the surface of the earth in previous times were having to be very fit to survive against the environment. They had to develop resilience. And they did that through the complex nature of their metabolism. Having these fitness capabilities, you might call them anti stress capabilities, things like high and low temperatures or things like sun or dark light and dark cycles. There are things like deprivation or abundance. It wasn't, you can go to the supermarket, just buy anything you wanted.

So sometimes you couldn't uber eats it. You couldn't, as a Neanderthal, you couldn't just uber eat your.

Yeah, exactly. So these, these characteristics of fitness were, were built into our architecture. And the same thing held true for, for plants and animals that we were eating as a human species. They had fitness. And in plants. Find that the original cultivars, before we got into hybridization and trying to maximize the production, making yield is the biggest determinant of agricultural success. Not nutritional quality, but yield per acre. We found that these original cultivars had tremendous fitness capabilities. Anti frost genes, anti drought genes. Living in bad soil with aluminum had aluminum detoxifying genes. But as a consequence of the way we technologically grew up agriculture, both for plants and animals, we started to make the plants and animals very comfortable. We gave them all these fertilizers, pesticides, biocides, made their life very, very easy. And as a consequence, both plants and animals started to lose some of this fitness. And so the foods that we eat today generally don't have the same fitness capabilities as did the foods of our ancestors. And those fitness capabilities. And that's why we talk about food as information. Those are made up of the various molecular things that form food. Not just protein, carbohydrate, fat, but also all this complex thousands of other secondary metabolites in plants we call Phytochemicals, which are, you know, we kind of thought were useless because they were not like vitamins. You don't have to have them to prevent a death like you do vitamin C with scurvy. But now we're starting to find out that actually these things that were in plants that are eaten by animals, that are then concentrated in animals that eat those plants, are actually fitness improving substances. And so when we eat the information that those plants have of fitness preparedness, or let's call it immune strength, that then transmits those characteristics onto the animal that ate that thing, that, that we eat that animal, it goes on to us. And in fact that there are interesting studies that were done and written by a colleague of mine who's a professor at Oxford, who published a number of papers looking at nutrition in the Victorian era in Britain, which is quite interesting because that's the period of time where kind of processed foods started to be developed. And so you have this change in culture from those that were eating the traditional foods like the dark breads that were not processed. They didn't eat white products that were wheat flour type products. If you looked at the phytochemical intake of the people in Britain at that time, it was very, very high based on their natural diets. Then as the Victorian era proceeded, we got more into these processed foods, the phytochemical content went down. And then if you look at the health records, and Britain keeps very, very good health records for centuries, you're able to see that there was a significant decline in the health of the population consistent with the change in the diet patterns. From this diet that was minimally processed, that had these fitness foods, that we're having the information to our genes that we're actually creating our own immunity to these highly processed foods that were absent many of these ingredients and now suddenly the body didn't have the same fitness. So I think this concept that food is information is more than an esoteric concept. It's very real as it relates to how in fact we eat to take in those nutrients that are known to help to support our own body's defense and resilience.

Yeah, beautifully said. And I, and I think, you know, you're describing, you know, my listeners of the podcast will be familiar with what you're. This fitness that I like the word fitness, actually encompasses a whole many different categories of hormesis, which is essentially what you're talking about. When we see like we were talking in the pre chat like EGCG or resveratrol, curcumin sulforaphane, cacao, you know, ellagic acid that you find in berries, like kind of the darker, you know, strawberries and things like that. These have been called sirtuin activating compounds or stacks. And certainly we don't have to get into the, into the mechanistic, you know, how a sirtuin is activated and, you know, Horbath's cloth and the DNA methylone. We don't, you know, we don't need to necessarily go there unless if you would like to. But I think that when we're talking about the fitness of these foods and how they've changed over time. And I have a. We've talked about this on the show before, this idea of getting uncomfortable or being, getting comfortable with being uncomfortable in the same way that we know plants have these, we'll say defense chemicals. Let's say that when, you know, they know that they're being preyed upon, they have these sort of genes that can be turned on. When we consume the, some of the, when we consume some of these or like the, you know, the resveratrol, for example, when, like the berry or like, you know, the, the, the grape is left on, you know, the vine for a long time and it's cold and, you know, you're kind of concentrating some of these compounds in, let's say in the, in the, in the wine or the, you know, the, the end product of the grape. These are going to be benefits, as you mentioned, that are going to be passed on to us. And they can. These stacks or these hormetic, These compounds that have certain, we'll say, fitness or certain components to them will influence our aging. They're going to influence our circadian rhythms, our ability to create new mitochondria, let's say, and inflammation and stress, resilience and gosh, like, you know, energy, alertness, efficiency, senescence of our cells, which are those, you know, of course, I'm preaching to the choir here, but, you know, like these zombie cells that kind of just hang around and don't do anything. So it is very important for us to be considering even just bitter foods. I find, you know, I kind of made the joke while you were talking like the Neanderthal and the, you know, and the Uber eats. Of course that didn't happen. But it does seem that even just the variety of foods that we consume has also very much narrowed. And I have kids, I've worked with moms and their children, and they'll literally eat like just potatoes. And it's only if the potato is prepared a certain way. And it's like, well, ketchup and french fries are. I know that the derivatives are tomatoes and potatoes, but that's not a balanced, diverse diet. And I had Kelly Levesque on. On the show, and we were talking about children and introducing foods and. And she dropped a stat which I thought was really interesting. I think I might get the exact number wrong, but it was something like 25 to 30 times. You have to introduce a food to a child before they accept it. So if you think, like mom, you know, gives baby broccoli, you know, baby throws the broccoli on the floor, then she does it again, baby pushes it away. Then she does it again, baby push it. And then she's like, well, I guess he doesn't like broccoli. It's like, well, you had 23 more times that you had to do that in order for the baby to accept it. But we give up too early. And then the baby doesn't grow up, or the child, the toddler doesn't grow up with these foods in there or develops a palate for them, and then they're reduced to like the tomato and the potato kind of, you know, scenario that I. That I described. Is that something that you observe as well in practice or you've had clinicians tell you is sort of the case in terms of our biodiversity and the selection, let's say, of foods that we eat?

Well, you said so many things that are just very, very dense information nuggets that you just threw out there. Let me, if I can parse through a few of them.

Yes, please, please.

So let's start with taste, because I think taste is a really interesting physiochemical process. So we know we have these five different taste types. Sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. And those various taste processes are mediated through different receptors that we know are sitting on our tongues in different places on our tongues. And so these taste receptors, they have different names, like Task 1, Task 2, Test 3, and they've been studied quite extensively. What is most interesting to me is that these, what we call taste receptors have been now also found to be very abundant within the gi mucosa of our intestinal tract in different regions. One of those reasons, it's really very important, I think, is so called L cells, which are in the distal ileum and the upper part of the small intestine. And these L cells have receptors for. Called bitter, receptors for specific bitter agents in food. So you think of like, bitter melon, for instance, or how many of these plant foods have bitter tastes. And it turns out that people have studied, we're one of them, We've published a number of papers on this, that there are certain bitter foods that activate specific receptors in the mucosa of our intestines that then triggers those cells to release into the blood a series of what are called intra endocrine hormones that have names like glucagon, like peptide 1 and, and gastrointestinal insulotrophic peptide or gift. And these particular hormones, when they go into the blood after consuming those bitter food principles, then activate insulin sensitivity, they lower inflammation, and they improve glucose tolerance. And so if you think about native foods that we may be eaten that we consider to be maybe not sweet and not fat, not salty, but bitter in flavor, they have very unique influences on our blood sugar and our inflammatory status. Now, how does that relate to then patterning? Because we all know that you can teach taste receptivity by patterning. A good example of that obviously would be sugar and salt. If a person consumes a very high sugar and salt diet, their receptivity for sugar and salt is pretty insensitive. They have to go to very high levels of intake of sugar and salt to feel like it's salty or sweet. If you start grading down their salt and sugar intake, and these studies have been published in many different publications over the years, you'll find that you can re pattern their taste sensitivity to sweetened salt. So now what they consider salty could be 10 times lower than the saltiness that was required in their original state when they're reading a high salt diet. Similarly, for sugar, the taste of sweet, you can lower that by a factor of 10 by grading down the amount of sweet in the diet. So now if you gave them the amount of sweet they were eating originally, it's like so sweet. It's not pleasant.

It's an insult. Yeah. Insulting to the palate. Yeah.

So I think that this goes even into bitter foods or sour foods. Can you promote and train a taste perception that then would go from maybe undesirable to desirable? And the answer is certainly yes. I think of older age individuals as we go into where our taste perceptions change as we get older. And now we start really liking red wine, we start liking coffee, we start liking and dark coffee, espresso, which are very bitter. And so our taste for bitter maybe is evolutionarily built in because we need more of those bitter substances to help promote the proper hormonal balance to regulate our blood sugar. So I think all of these things are starting to fit together in Kind of a scientific explanation for what the rules of reasonables tell us about how to eat multiple foods, eat of the rainbow, stay away from processed foods, eat close to the ground, explore new tastes, explore new cuisines. We have the fortune now of having all these different ethnic cuisines available that we didn't in previous time. So seek out different ways of exploring and the adventure of eating. All of these things play into the appropriate signaling of our body to use food as information in a way that promotes resilience.

Don't be fooled by the frigid temperatures. Keeping hydrated in the wintertime is super important. In colder temperatures we sweat more due to a higher metabolic demand of trying to maintain a core body temperature. We lose more fluids and electrolytes through our urine, we lose more water through respiration and just general breathing. And our skin dries out in the wintertime as well. We are a ski family and over this winter we have been using Elementi's Chocolate Medley. The chocolate chai is absolutely incredible with some boiling water, a splash of milk and my kids love the chocolate mint with some hot water. This is our apres ski. We cozy up with Element Hot after hours on our cross country trails. Now for a limited time you too can get the Elemente Chocolate Medley and enjoy them hot as I have been doing with this exclusive insider bundle for you. When you buy three boxes of any flavor, it doesn't have to be the chocolate. It can be any of the flavors that they offer. You are going to get the fourth box free. If you head over to DrinkElement.com Dr. Estima, you'll see that exclusive offer at the bottom of the the page that'S-R-I-N k l M-N-T.com-r e s t I m A and tell me which of the chocolate melody you love the best. As you were saying that how our taste buds change over time. I used to only when I had coffee and maybe this is just my taste buds, let's say being immature when I was in university and when I was in chiropractic school it had to be I had to have some milk, I had to have some sugar. So I went from. So in Canada we say a double double. So it's like double cream, double sugar. So I was like I would always go to the coffee shop and get a double double. So two cream, two sugar. And so now I just love in my old age I love, I love a shot of espresso everywhere. I love to have like I don't have a Lot of coffee. But I usually have some espresso before I go and work out and it's like a shot of coffee, like a shot of espresso and it doesn't. I enjoy the taste. And I've had many clients who have also said the exact same thing that you just described. So when we will, let's say, put them on a ketogenic diet, let's say for a temporary therapeutic intervention, we're trying to get blood glucose under control, maybe we're trying to help with metabolic flexibility. And then they go back, let's say. So after a month we've had them on the ketogenic diet and they go back to trying something because we've been restricting their carbohydrates, let's say for a month they go back to having, you know, they have a cheesecake at a wedding or there's like some family gathering and they will say the same, they'll say, gosh, that cheesecake or that wedding or whatever it was, it just tasted different to me. So it is really exciting. And I think hopefully for someone who, let's say, has grown up eating a certain way, knowing that, you know, maybe their culture or their whatever circumstance they've always had maybe lots of sugar, lots of salt, but you can totally reprogram it. Like it's totally something that's within your control, giving yourself obviously the grace to, you know, allow for that time to happen and for you to acquire the skills in order to be able to be someone who can have less sugar and less salt. But I do think that that's a very empowering message which is yeah, we're totally chemically programmable, like we can change based on the stimulus that we're giving ourselves.

Absolutely. And you know, for me I had a, one of these just aha moments I was invited to speak, this is about three years ago now. I was invited to speak at this very large meeting in Harbin, China. Harbin is one of the, I think it is the largest, northernmost city in China. About 20 plus million people in Harbin. It's in between North Korea and Russia. And my guide was a trained Chinese gentleman that also had a other MD from China. He had a PhD from the United States. So he dual citizenship. And so we had long discussions and he asked me a question about a food that I had become interested in just recently that I didn't know much about. And he said so do you know much about this ancient food in China, 2,500 year old food called Himalayan Tartary, Buckwheat And I said, well, you know, it's interesting. I just heard about this food from a conversation I'd had with a colleague of mine, an investigator colleague of mine from Vanderbilt Medical School, who had been studying one of the ingredients of this form of buckwheat, which was called 2 hydroxybenzylamine that was found to lower blood pressure.

So it's Himalayan. Sorry to interrupt you, Doc. It's Himalayan Tartary buckwheat. Okay.

And. And Tartary is the region, and it's the tartan region in China. That's why it's called Tartary buckwheat.

Okay.

And so I got interested in this because it is a. A supercharged immune strengthening food in that its level of these immune strengthening Polyphenols has over 50 different flavonoids in it, are about between 50 and 100 times higher than common buckwheat. And common buckwheat is already known to be very high in these compounds. So this is like a biochemical factory producing these unique portfolio of these immune strengthening polyphenols and flavonoids. And it's really been interesting for us to get involved now in clinical research, actually looking at its impact when included in the diet on human immune function. And we just finished a large clinical trial study, and it was registered with the FDA on intervention on immune system patterning, showing influence on immune system epigenetics after eating Himalayan Tartary buckwheat. So I think that this concept of food, of medicine, is starting to get some traction. We're using the newest tools and techniques of science to try to look at ancient things that people have been talking about for 2,500 years and saying, hey, you were right. Now we can start to mechanistically understand how this actually works. So this is an example of a bitter food that has hugely beneficial effects on immune activity and immune resilience.

So I have so many questions about the targets and how Himalayan Tartary buckwheat works in the gut. And I think this is really relevant to our conversation because we've been talking about bitter foods and GI receptors in the gut for that. But I think that it might be worth. If we can just for a moment, just some. I know that there's been a lot of focus on immune function in the past couple of years, maybe ad nauseam in some cases. But I think it might be worth maybe defining some of the different arms, let's say, of the immune system. We can talk about T cell and B cell, or we can talk about innate and adaptive let's say immune systems, and then kind of the interplay between both of them. Can we have just some quick definitions of those? And then we can circle back and say, okay, so how does this. How does this. Himalayan tartery buckwheat, let's say, with the polyphenols that it has. What are. What is it influencing? How is it making. Is it influencing macrophage activity? Natural killers, you know, like, what is it exactly doing? So maybe just like a quick ifm, back of the envelope, immunology 101, and then we can talk about how it's influencing immune function.

Yeah, thanks. So I think you said it very beautifully. I'll just reiterate what you've already laid down. If we were to look at the immune system from kind of a macroscopic first level, as you said, there are three arms of the immune system that are defined. One is called the innate immune system, and that's our first line of defense. And you'll find the innate immune system very robust and rich on the barrier surfaces of our body. So that would be the GI mucosa, that would be the lungs and the esophageal mucosa. Anything that's exposed to the outside environment in direct contact. It generally has very high levels of innate immune cell activity. And those cells are things like you've mentioned, macrophages, monocytes, neutrophils, dendritic cells, natural killer cells. Those are our first line of defense. So they are there absolutely to be our first guard for defending and then communicating to the second line of defense, which is our acquired adaptive immune system, which will build then over a few days, its protection by the production through these cells of antibodies that remember the exposure and can be mobilized later upon need. The communicating cells that are kind of the translators, the relay racers. In between the innate and the adaptive immune system are the T lymphocyte system. And so you have these T cells that can be seen in different personalities. And there are many, many different types of T cells. But we could break them down into two forms that people have heard about, T helper cells and T suppressor cells that kind of form a balance between the adaptive and the innate immune system and how it's all orchestrated, because this is really a very complex orchestration of all these players in different tissues at different times having different effects to help provide immune protection for us. And by the way, I think it's important to note this is a fairly simplistic concept, but I think it's important that the immune system does a lot More than just protect us against viruses and bacteria and fungal infection. Those are important roles in the immune system. But the immune system is there as a vigilant system to tell cells how to heal themselves, to tell cells how to turn over and to die when they should and be replaced by new cells. So it has a lot of kind of orchestrating ability to protect us against all sorts of things and maintain our body in a youthful, resilient state. So our immune system is working 24 7, 365. Even if we're not exposed directly to an outside virus or bacterium, it's there doing inside housekeeping to keep our cells rejuvenated and revitalized and protected.

Well, I can appreciate so much about what you're saying because it does. One of the things I was very frustrated by over the last several years is almost a monolithic and myopic focus on the adaptive immune system. It's like if you don't have antibodies, then that's it. And to your point, the innate immune system, this first line of defense, the mucosal lines, the skin inside the nose, the, the lining of the throat, the gut, like all of those, that innate part of our immune system was completely overlooked. I don't think I have yet to hear any high ranking official in the government, irrespective of their degree, to talk about things, to talk about the innate immune system. Things like eating stressed plants, getting some sunshine, what vitamin D might be able to provide in terms of, you know, balancing or, or like health, like promoting the immune system function. Right. So yes, certainly germs can be infectious and that's just what it's all like to be a human, to live on planet Earth. That's just kind of what it's always like. There's always been viruses, pathogens, opportunistic bacteria that have tried to take us out. So what we can do is we can think about all the different branches of the immune system, but also focusing on how we can bump up our innate immune function. And we've talked about the gut, we've talked, I think we've been talking a little bit about the galt, a little bit. Can you provide some maybe actionable strategies that either you yourself have come across, clinicians that you work with in terms of how we might think about over the long term improving that innate immune side of things and not overdoing it? Because the other extreme, of course is autoimmunity. Right. It's like the other extreme is like an overactive immune system. And we also don't want that either. So maybe let's talk about strategies for innate strategies on how we might think about improving gut health, the GALT innate immune system. And then maybe we can move into a conversation around autoimmunity as well.

Yeah, I think that this is really fun because it kind of goes back to where we started. This is back to our initial phase. So if you ask the question on those mucosal surfaces where we have a lot of innate immune activity, what are some of the activators? And it turns out it goes back to our beta receptors. The bitter receptors are most concentrated in the pulmonary system and in the gastrointestinal mucosa and they cross talk to one another. So what happens if we were to be in a situation we're not activating those receptors to produce their endocrine immune active hormones that then we're in a compromised state. So what kind of diets does that mean? Again, it comes back to eating diets that are very rich in these polyphenols and flavonoids and bioactive compounds that are known to enhance immune regulation of these innate immune system rich tissues, which are our barrier defense. When you start getting breakdown in those barriers, we call it leaky tissues or leaky gut or leaky membranes. Now we start to get much greater potential for adherence and penetration of viruses and bacteria. And that leads to all sorts of additional pressure on the adaptive immune system to try to respond. So I think that the we can learn a little bit. Actually, even going Back to the 1918 flu, you recall we had this incredible pandemic, global pandemic that killed probably. We don't know the exact number, but it was hundreds of millions of people that were probably affected adversely by that virus. That was a relative of SARS in 1918. And if you look at the people that were most affected, again it was people that had age or had social determinants of immune system dysfunction. The social determinants could be things like being impoverished or being highly stressed or living in a toxic environment or living in a very stressful situation. Those individuals were the ones that were most frequently seriously ill or died from the 1918 flu. So we see similar kind of projections into the 2020 SARS CoV2 and so we as a population of individuals have the opportunity to have some learnings about how we can without great expense, I might add. Eating good diets and leading low stress lives is not that expensive. We can find paths to do this by the appropriate prioritization of things that really make a difference. We can measure the difference Actually, immunology can now provide the tools to actually measure the difference. I found that in my own life I had been studying the biological age of my immune cells utilizing epigenomic tests. Very educational for me. Because of COVID we all spend a lot more time at home doing zooms and let's travel. I'm a guy that's traveled over 6 million miles in my life, so I've done a lot of travel on planes and I was not traveling at all for two years. So it gave me the opportunity to really concentrate on the things that I feel I've been telling other people they should do. So let's really do that and see what effects it might have. And I consider myself pretty healthy. I'm almost 77 years of age, so I think for a 77 year old, I'm doing well. But I made this decision over those two years to really commit myself to this program and I had no excuses not to. And that would be exercise and sleep and proper diet and stress management and doing all the things that we talk about. And the results were quite amazing to me. When I first started on the program, I was 75 and my immune age was 69. So that I was good. It was younger than my age and birthdays. So then I went on the program, really committed for a period of just about a year and redid that same test. And my immune age was 54. It went from 69 to 54.

Wow. 15 years.

Yeah. In fact, my colleagues at the laboratory said that was the most dramatic change that they'd ever seen. Now of course I have a bigger bandwidth because I'm older. You're not probably going to see a 15 year reduction if you're 30, but I thought that was a pretty amazing result.

So what were you doing? So everyone's listening now. They're like, what did he do? So what was your food? What was your exercise? What was your stress management? What was that?

Yeah. So we, we have called this the immunorejuvenation program. It's a term we've coined because, you know, there's this view that our immune system becomes senescence, becomes old as we have birthdays. So that's, that's the process of immunosenescence. And that is true. Generally our immune system does become senescent and you use the term zombie cells. It collects these damaged cells that have memories of bad experiences. But now we have discovered, and this is really over the last 10 years in basic immunology research, that it's a two way street. And Just as we can senescen immune system, we can rejuvenate an immune system. And there are processes, biological processes that can be activated, selective autophagy and mitology processes that can be activated that actually restore younger potential immune system function. And what's happened to our culture is that we've pushed the pedal of the metal on immunosenescence and we've taken off, maybe put our foot on the brake for immunorejuvenation. So the program that we've really been talking about is a programmatic way of taking your own immune personality, we call it immunotype, and trying to find the program that's the appropriate exercise, appropriate circadian rhythms. I tend to believe very strongly in time restricted feeding. So we introduce time restricted feeding. We do programmatic strength and conditioning. Exercising that doesn't. And we're not training for marathons or training for Ironman, but we're, we're trying to build resilience and fitness. We, and that means about a half an hour a day of mixed types of exercises.

So weightlifting and cardio.

Yes. And flexibility and then eating this, this higher polyphenol diet that now incorporates this inhaling target buckwheat much more routinely into the program. And, and, and then really working on sleep hygiene and how to, you know, prepare yourself for sleep, how to get back into reading good literature, listening to good music before you go to bed. Don't be trying to do complex stress activities.

Don't check your email. That's the one thing I, if I, if I want to have a hypercortisolemic state, it's like right before I go to sleep, that would be me looking, looking in my email. So I shut my emails off at about two or three o'clock in the afternoon and I get to them the next morning when I.

Yes, that's very, very wise.

Yeah. And so the Himalayan tartery buckwheat, you mentioned this as part of the immunorejuvenation program. This is delivered as a supplement.

Well, we have it actually available in several different forms. We have it as flour and we have a whole food lab that produces a whole series of recipes and menu plans that you can get off our website. We also have it as a superfood shake mix that can be used that incorporates it or it also has a concentrate in the supplement form that we call HDB rejuvenate. So we try to provide as many ways of people getting it into their diet as possible.

And so the polyphenols in there are, what's that working to reduce the inflammation, working to reduce the accumulation of senescent cells, those zombie cells that we were talking about. What is the direct. I forgot to ask you this. I'm going to come back to it right now. What is the target effect that the Himalayan tartery buckwheat is having on the body?

Yeah, it's actually. This is a very exciting chapter, I think, in what we're learning about immune rejuvenation, and that is that the family, more than just one flavonoid at a time, but a family, let's call it a portfolio of flavonoids, have multiple targets. This is called network pharmacology, in which they activate the upstream processes associated with selective immune. On top of, you've actually got these processes going on that you're supporting with this variety of flavonoids that are actually hitting multiple points of action in a network pharmacological way, not just one molecule at a time, to then produce an outcome which leads to immune rejuvenation through epigenetic effects and. And getting rid of mutational, injured, kind of what are called clonal hematopoietic cells of indeterminate potential, or chip cells. So this is the mechanism that we feel historically has been probably how biology has worked, that we've only just discovered within the last few years.

Yeah, in many ways, some of these protocols is, you know, we have modern science, but it's almost a return to this ancient wisdom that was practiced and in many cases lost. Dr. Bland, you may or may not know, but I work a lot with women, and we work to. I mean, one of the first things I ask women to do, especially if they're in their reproductive years, is to track their cycle. And this is something that 80 to 90% of women are like, why would I do that? What is the benefit of that? It's like, well, you need to know where you are in your cycle so that you can appropriately respond to your internal environment. Like, your hormonal milieu is changing all the time. And so I think that this is something that, you know, our great grandmothers, great great grandmothers, our foremothers, all really, you know, maybe they. Maybe they didn't have an app. They didn't have the clue app on their phone. But they knew, you know, that they would bleed when it was, you know, full moon or like, they would follow the moon or there was other. There were other ways that they were. Were triangulating where they were in their cycle. Maybe they were just counting. But I do feel that there's a Lot of, you know, just this return to the way that it was, as nostalgic as that might sound. But there was really a lot of wisdom. Like my grandmother, for example, I'll bring her up because she was like my second mom. I remember her cleaning her home. And she would only clean with vinegar. Like, she would clean with vinegar and, like, dilute it, obviously, in some water. Her moisturizer for her, you know, she probably couldn't afford, you know, creams and things like that at the drugstore. So she would just use olive oil. Like, she would just put olive oil on her skin. Like, that's how she would take off her makeup, and that's how she would, you know, she would moisturize her skin after the bath. And I. I do those things too, because I watch those things from her. But of course, when you speak to, say, women who didn't have the opportunity to observe some of these kind of practices, like they're lost. Right?

I think you just said it beautifully. And what you're really speaking to is what has been euphemistically now called rewilding, that we need to find a way to rewild ourselves and our children so that some of these traditional concepts that survive the test of time that we've kind of lost know that we have to relearn. They look new now, but they've actually been around for a long time. Going outside, being in the dirt as kids, playing, having fun, not overly concerned by. We have to sterilize everything because, gee whiz, we might get exposed to a bug that we don't know about. All of these things are part of creating an environment that takes the best of cultural history and translates into the opportunities that we have now. To explain it in ways that are much more precise to allow us to personalize how we're going to lead our lives for optimal function and health and maybe a century more of good living. That's the objective.

I like it. Let's talk a little bit about autoimmunity. We're talking about immune function. There is in the, let's say, Covid. Hopefully we're in this, I'll call it post Covid era now. But I remember a lot of conversation around immune boosting. This and immune boosting diets and immune boosting the supplements and immune. And just everything. Immune boosting. And I. I remember thinking, like, gosh, like, you can. You can also tip, like, maybe there's some individuals that don't have enough. Like, there isn't enough, like, oomph in terms of Maybe their innate immune system or even other verticals that we've been talking about. But for some, you know, you have. I, I again, coming back to women, I see a lot of women with autoimmune disorders. Hashim Hashimoto's thyroiditis, multiple sclerosis, lupus, like we see, I see all of that. And that is really the immune system. Well, I mean, I guess the technical term of it obviously is like aphtos from Greek, meaning self. Right. So the immune system basically turning on the self. So how can we overdo it, let's say with how can we boost the immune system into derangement? Or is that possible?

Well, thank you. I think that's a really very interesting area for exploration. I have a very probably not common opinion on this. So I'll just say this is my opinion. I think boosting the immune system is fallacious. I don't think we boost the immune system. I think that the only way you boost the immune system is to do something synthetically like immunization. That then creates a different architecture for your immune system. If you take vitamin D, vitamin C, whatever the nutrient dura is, you're not boosting. You're providing a nutritional support for the immune system to function as it should. If you boost the immune system, you're pushing it into a state where you're now asking to do something that's not necessarily imbalanced. And I think that's the point you're speaking to. Because the immune system has an orchestrator. We call it the T lymphocytes. But one specific type of T lymphocyte is the T reg cells, the T regulator cells. They are the kind of interesting shot bosses that tell both the innate and adaptive immune systems how to get along and how to properly form the protection both at first level and second level. And those T reg cells are really there to be supported because they're very intelligent. They will find the right place to orchestrate that balance of the immune system. If in fact we give them the right things for them to do their work. And that's where the polyph and other constituents within the diet and staying away from high glycemic diets and so forth that tend to poison Treg cell function. So I think that the native intelligence immune system needs to be supported. We don't need to boost it. We need to allow its intelligence to be properly realized. Now, how does that relate to things like the way we think of nutritional support? I think that the construct of nutritional support is to provide the necessary ingredients that evolutionarily have been there to orchestrate the way that these different cell lines within our immune system can participate as buddies, as a network to provide defense. And one of the things that we learned through our research on the, the cell evaluation using cytology, or what's called flow cytometry, to look at different immune cells after you intervene with different nutritional state inputs, is that the immune system will find a balance point. You call it hormesis, let's call it a regulatory state where it has the adaptability to be resilient and it will not be overreactive, meaning produce autoimmunity or unreacting, meaning susceptible. Susceptible to infection. There is a specific problem, I believe, in the way that we think of this concept of autoimmunity. And again, this is, this is Jeff Land speaking. So I'm not saying that everybody will agree with what I'm saying, but I think when you call a person, when you tell a person to have an autoimmune disease, it suggests to them that they have a defective immune system because suddenly they're attacking themselves. They become allergic to themselves. And that's a pretty scary thing to think about, that suddenly you wake up one morning and your body so dislikes yourself that it starts attacking you. Now, it turns out that if you really study the immune system and autoimmunity in depth, which I tried to do, you'll find that the immune system doesn't really attack itself. It attacks things that used to be us that get converted into non us. Like for instance, let's use an example. Everyone knows about hemoglobin A1C as a marker for blood sugar control. Now, what is hemoglobin A1c? It's called glycohemoglobin. It's where sugar in our blood is chemically reacted with hemoglobin in our blood cells to make this funny hemoglobin called glycohemoglobin. Hemoglobin A1C. Now, is that native hemoglobin to our body? No, it's a funny hemoglobin. And what happens when the immune system, in a person who has a very adept immune system recognizes they have funny hemoglobin or they have funny serum albumin that's been glycosylated in their blood. Now, it recognizes that as a foreign. And what does it do? It does what it's supposed to do. It reacts with it, and now it forms an antibody antigen reaction which produces inflammation. And so now the person says their diagnosis, oh, you have an autoimmune inflammation, suggesting their immune system is defective. When their immune system actually may be super active, they may have a selective poor immune system. Maybe their ancestors actually pass those genes onto them because they were able to survive against an infection. Because of their vigilance of their immune system, they weren't damaged, they were hypervigilant. So this construct that we think of autoimmunity as a condition we're reacting to our cells is fallacious. We're not reacting to ourselves, we're reacting to our body that's been transformed by various processes. Oxidation, phosphorylation, glycosylation, amination. All these processes make us, not us. And all those things, by the way, are modifiable by how we live, think, act and eat. So this concept that we are autoimmune prone should really be described as we are sensitive to environmental and lifestyle changes that are creating a non us from us for which our immune system reacts. The nice thing about that model is that that's reversible. It's reversible. By changing the things that are causing us to be non us us and taking them away, we can become more us. And it allows our immune system to then use our T red cells to properly balance our immune system without overreacting.

I really like that. And as you're talking, I'm like, gosh, that also leaves so much more room for the, you know, for example, I mentioned the ketogenic diet before, which is usually an initial therapeutic intervention that I might take with, not always, but sometimes I'll have someone go through a clamped down, let's say carbohydrate intake because we're trying to improve glycemic variability and blood sugar control and insulin sensitivity and all the things. But what ends up happening to the patient at least, or to the person who's gone through that process is they'll say, gosh, I've been doing this now for two or three months and I feel great, I'm going to continue doing it. And then they sort of ride the maximal benefit. Like they sort of ride that area under the ground curve. And then they sort of get to this point where they start to think, well, carbs are the worst. Carbs are not good for me. I have to avoid carbs IGF1, I have to keep that as low as possible all the time. I have to keep my insulin low as possible all the time. And to your point, in this specific example, kind of running this mental exercise through, of course, insulin and blood sugar is really important for skeletal metabolism, for bone Health to balance that osteoblast to clastic ratio for thyroid function. You know, we were just talking about autoimmunity for essential nervous system health, for hormone regulation, all the things. And then you run, you know, then I, and then I have these women that are like, I've been on keto for four years and I don't have a regular menstrual cycle anymore. And I, and my thought. And I have hypothyroid function and all of these different things and. But what you're talking about allows for, you know, what you're basically saying is that there's been an exogenous, let's say, substrate, so maybe it's excess, you know, with the glycation, it might be excess fructose or excess, you know, glucose or what have you. So we have this end product that's different. And it's not necessarily that the immune system is defunct. It's just identified something else that is other to us. So all we have to do is kind of work upstream again and then just change the substrate, change what we're giving to the patient as a therapeutic intervention and then allow them to ride that curve. But then as they're healing, as they're getting rid of the excess glycation, the excess, you know, what have you, then we can start to reintroduce. I think what you're talking about allows for more flexibility of thought versus what we see now, unfortunately in, in the nutrition space is very. It's almost cult like. It's almost like you're carnivore or you're against us, you're keto or you're against this, you're vegan or you're against this, you know, and you have all of these different individuals who are so set in a certain mindset about what's right for the individual. And maybe there's. I like to look at all of those interventions, whether it's veganism or carnivore or keto or whatever, as a therapeutic, nutritional kind of temporary, transient thing. But then we want to at least. And we've been talking about polyphenols and biodiversity in the gut and the microbiome. And the microbiome and all the things like I believe that those polyphenols and those flavonoids and the soluble and insoluble fiber and all of the stressed, you know, we need to have biodiversity in the plants that we're eating. So I'm not for carnivore long term. There's a lot of bio individuality but that omnivorous type of consumption of, you know, we have some meat products, maybe they're ethically sourced, raised humanely, regenerative agriculture for the win. And then we also have a huge diversity, you know, borrowing from Terry Wahls, you know, like all the nine colors, right? It's like the purples and the reds and the yellows and the greens and the, all the different colors all the way down.

I think you beautifully said it. You know, I'm a strong believer. My good friend and colleague Mark Hyman wrote the book the Pegan Diet and I wrote an article that appeared in the Clinician's Journal on why. I think that's a really good place to start with because if you look at the literature on all the various diet studies that have been done, ranging from the Mediterranean diet to fasting kinds of situations, you'll find that there are some centric points that are represented by starting with the concept of a Pegan diet, which is a paleo vegetarian mix, right? And then personalizing it to the individual's, not only biology, but psychology. Because the best of a diet that a person will not consume on a regular basis doesn't do anybody any good. So you have to build it into their acceptance that this is going to be something they are going to stay on and not just give it a whirl for a week or a month and that's it. So having had now quite a bit of experience clinically in both research and in clinical management, I think the dietary intervention components that provide diversity and provide opportunity for exploration and will lead to compliance and adherence over a long time where the person is the owner of their own diet and it's doing them good and it makes smiling T helper cells and T reg cells. That's a really, really great way of approaching long term health.

So for looking over the arc of our conversation, we've been talking about the importance of gut health and biodiversity, the different aspects of the immune system, eating stressed plants, getting uncomfortable in all the ways. We talked about temperature manipulation. You were talking about your immunoregenerative program where there's, you know, a movement program that's a mix of balance and proprioception, flexibility. It sounds like some cardiovascular work, some resistance training, polyphenols and the Himalayan tartery buckwheat. This has been for me at least such a treat to be able to spend this time with you. I know that you have a special offer for listeners of better. If people want to find you and if they want to work with you, can you tell my listeners where they can find out more about you and what that might look like.

Yeah. Thank you very much. So I think we have a very robust website, which is our BigBoldHealth.com website that has a lot of information that follows up on what I've been talking about in rejuvenation of the immune system and the role of cardiovascular weight and others. For those that are health professionals, we've got a deep dive. It's kind of a secret website that I'll pass on. Www.pro.bigbold health.compro.bigwell health. And there we have literally hundreds of, of articles and podcasts and what we call zoominars that go into these topics in much greater detail. If you're really a geek and want to, want to dig deeply into this.

Oh, we have lots of geeks that listen to this show. This is going to be. Yeah, it's not a secret anymore. Pro.

Yeah, so I think that would be a good place. And for those of you that are listening to the show, we have a special that. Let's see. I think we'll probably have to put it in the show notes because I don't recall what it is off the top of my head, but it is a significant discount if the person wants to try our Himalayan curry buckwheat product.

Beautiful. All right, so we'll make sure that that's clickable in the show notes. Both websites. Both websites for clinicians and professionals, as well as the avid health enthusiast, Dr. Jeffrey Bland. What a treat for me to be able to speak to you for this amount of time and to thank you so much for your knowledge, for your presence today. And I know this is going to be very valuable to my listeners.

Well, I just want to acknowledge you and do a shout out here as we're. We're seeing what 23 is going to look like in which we hopefully reintroduce hope and joy back in the lives of people which have installed over the last couple of years. And, you know, I'm all into the biology of joy and the biology of hope. I think that's, that's what we need to reintroduce into our lives. And, and I think you do that very brilliantly. You have, you have a style in a way that makes us look forward to where we're going and that's where we've been. So thanks for all you do and for the opportunity to share a few thoughts.

Thank you. All right. All right. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and I must give you the obligatory legal and medical disclaimer here. This podcast, Better with Dr. Stephanie, is for general information only and the advice recommendations we discuss do not replace medicine, chiropractic, or any other primary health care provider's advice, treatment or care in the consumption of this podcast. There is no doctor patient relationship that has been formed and the use and implementation of the information discussed are at the sole discretion of the listener. The information and opinions shared on this podcast are not intended to be a substitute for primary care diagnosis or treatment. In other words, guys, be smart about this. Take it with a grain of salt. Take this information to your primary healthcare provider and have have a discussion with him or her to make the best choice that is for you. Remember, I am a doctor, but I am not your doctor and these conversations are meant for educational purposes only.