Eat THESE Foods To Boost Immunity & Extend Longevity w/ Dr. Jeffrey Bland | Ep. 224

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What is going on everybody? Guys, welcome back to another amazing, very exciting episode of Superman Life. As always guys, I'm your host Frank Rich and before we dive into today's guest and conversation, I just want to take a moment and remind you hun, we're grateful and thankful we're to have.

You here with us today.

Joining me on the show is none other than Dr. Jeffrey Bland, a world renowned nutritional medicine expert, father of functional medicine and founder of Big Bold Health, a company on a mission to transform the way people think about one of nature's greatest innovations, the immune system. Jeffrey's career in health spans more than 40 years and he's traveled the world many times over in his role as the father of functional medicine. In 1991 he founded the Institute for Functional Medicine. In 2012 he founded another educational non profit called the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute. Jeffrey is also the author of the Disease Delusion Conquering the CR the Causes of Chronic Illness for a Healthier, Longer and Happier Life as well as countless additional books and research papers. Guys, this is a truly beautiful conversation around the importance of managing and controlling our immunity to set us up for a life of purpose, meaning and ultimately living the longest life that we can. In the conversation, Dr. Bland and I explore the impact of a colorful diet on our health and immunity. We talked about Himalayan tartary buckwheat and the stress resistant resistance plants on immune health. Guys, we talked about and discussed the microbiome and gut health and you're going to learn the role of pre and probiotics as well as the power of immuno rejuvenation to enhance immunity and increase longevity. You're also going to uncover the significance of minimally processed omega 3 fatty acid oils and providing anti inflammatory benefits. And we're discuss lifestyle factors as far as programmed exercise, simple activities like walking and the critical role of quality sleep as well as living a purposeful and meaningful life and how these play into our immune health. Guys, this is some really groundbreaking things here with the work that Dr. Jeffrey.

Glenn is bringing to the conversation.

So if you stick around, you're going to get key insights, secrets to healthy immunity and longevity. But before we get into the episode, if you're getting value out of this and you want to continue to support the show, you can support us in one of two ways. First off, if you haven't done so yet, if you're listening on the audio. So, guys, we are so grateful for every single one of you out there, whatever platform you are listening on.

But if you can take a moment.

And leave us a five star rating in written review, it would mean the absolute world to me. But more importantly, if somebody needs to hear this conversation, maybe they're struggling with some of these immune health issues. Maybe they haven't yet uncovered the secrets to longevity. Do us the favor and then the blessing by sharing today's conversation. Without further ado, guys, let's get into Today's episode, episode 234 with Dr. Jeffrey Bland. The secrets to immunity and longevity. God bless you guys and we'll see.

You on the other side. Welcome to the Superhuman Life. I'm your host, Frank Rich, and this is the only podcast in the world that is dedicated to helping men level up in the five key areas of life. Each week we bring you real and raw conversations with the world's leading experts in faith, fitness, finance, family, and freedom to provide you with real, actionable tools to break limiting beliefs, take action, and shatter the glass ceiling on your life's potential. So jump on board and join me on this journey as we dive into today's conversation and unlock the keys to you becoming the man you were born to be in creating your own superhuman life. Doctor Blaine, you are regarded as the father of functional medicine, and I'd love to start us off here today with maybe you having us define or describe what is functional medicine and how does that maybe differ from your traditional western type of medicine?

Yeah. Thank you, Frank. And it's really a privilege to be part of your program. I think you do a fantastic job of bringing really useful information out of your guests. And I, I feel very, very pleased to have this chance to explore some of these topics that have been part of my life here for the last 77 years. So even saying 77 years is a little bit scary to me. I'm almost coming up next month to my 78th birthday, so it's like, wow.

What'S truly inspiring by. By your look, man. So, you know, it gives us all something to. To kind of shoot for, Right?

Well, thank you. I don't know how the things that.

We'Re talking about here today work and. And there are actually some truth behind it, right?

I hope so. So the functional medicine model for me kind of grew up over many, many Years of being influenced by all sorts of extraordinary individuals, probably starting with my father and my mother to an extent as well. Then I was very fortunate to meet mentors that took me under their wings kind of over the years. A couple of Nobel Prize winners that I, I had the privilege of working for one of who was in my undergraduate work at the University of California, Irvine back in the 60s. And then second was Dr. Linus Pauling, two time Nobel Prize winning laureate from Stanford. And I worked under him in the 80s when I was a professor on sabbatical. So these individuals kind of grew my thinking about what I could do with my background in training. And I've always been very interested in the concept of why do people get sick. It's been really the driving force for me. My mother would say, even going back into when I was very little, I was always asking those questions. And I think it's really important to know when a person is sick, but it may be even more important to ask how did they get sick and how do we do something to keep them from getting sick again rather than just treating the effect that maybe we ought to be looking at the cause. And, and so that begs the question, what is the cause? And really there are two different major, well actually probably three different major reasons why people get sick, one of which is a result of injuries. And you know, things that happen. As they say, life is what happens in between our plans. And all of us over the course of living have things happen to us that we just have to deal with. And so injuries can be. One second is something we've all experienced and that's infection. So communicable diseases, infectious disorders, and medicine is pretty good at managing those. Maybe we would say not so good with SARS COV2, but historically we've been pretty good in managing bacterial illnesses, communicable illnesses. We have got a whole range of drugs called antibiotics that treat bacterial and fungal infections. We're not so many drugs for treating viral infections, but, but we've been pretty good in the side of infectious disease, particularly by using sanitation, hygiene, nutrition. And I want to emphasize that it's interesting to note that the major advances in human longevity really have occurred as a consequence of lowering the incidence of life threatening or life extinguishing infectious disease. And people might claim credit that medicine has done this, but medicine really was laid on top of changes that occurred at the turn of the last century when we started introducing public health, sanitation, nutrition and hygiene. Taking the concept that there are bugs that could be in our air Water or food that could create sickness and that we needed to clean things up. And that really is probably the singular most advancing principle in human health and longevity, because we went from a mean average life expectancy of just slightly greater than 40 years at the turn of the last century to our mean average life expectancy being over 70 now. And the major reason for that was sanitation, nutrition, and hygiene improvements in our culture, not medicine. Now, medicine plays a role. So I don't want to discount the fact that we do have hospitals and medical therapies that are advantageous when we need them. Now, the third cause of illness is the one that has really only recently started to gain a lot of traction, and that is what we call metabolic disorders. Conditions that fall under titles like diabetes, dementia, cancer, atherosclerosis or heart disease, arthritis, and other autoimmune diseases. These are not disorders that have been traditionally thought to be caused by an infection or by being exposed to a bug of some type. So the question is, where do they come from? If they're not a consequence of infectious disease, where do they come from? And that's been the question that, for me, has been probably the driving force in my professional, maybe even personal life for the last seven decades. Because it's the understanding the origin of those that leads us to recognize that if we understand their origin more, most of these are, I don't want to say completely preventable, but they're certainly to a great extent preventable, allowing a person to achieve their potential, basically their genetic potential. It's interesting, when we talk about genetic potential, what does that mean? It means that within our genes, this extraordinary legacy we got from our biological parents that tells us not what we are, but tells us what we could be. I want to emphasize that, again, our genes don't tell us what we are. They tell us what we could be. And in our genes are captured the magic of us at our best. Not just us at our worst, but us at our best. So our life principle is to find out how to unleash the us is at our best out of our genes and quiet down the us of our least best so that it doesn't get a voice in who we are. And that is the question that I've been really dealing with, you know, with many, many other people. I'm certainly one of just literally hundreds of thousands of different people that are worried about this question. And the answer to that is that many of the things that we do every day, things we're exposed to, how we live, how we eat, how we interact with other people, our thoughts, our attitudes, our beliefs, our behaviors are those magic things that actually modulate how we're going to be from what our genes give us the potential to be. So do we exercise? What foods do we eat? Do we sleep? Do we have good friends? Are we loved? Do we love? Do we have peace in our heart? Are we avoiding exposure to bad stuff? Bad stuff can be. You know, someone said to me, you can have toxic thoughts just like you can have toxic chemicals. And so all these things then become part of the wellspring of factors that are modifiable and alterable if we understand how they influence our genes to create our health outcomes. And that has been then the conceptual framework for how I think our function as an individual is determined. And I break function down into four categories. Our function can be our physical function, and we all know about that. Musculoskeletal function, flexibility, endurance, you know, the way our muscles are structured relative our ligaments and tendons and bones and all that architecture is related to our function and then how it gets powered up by the energy of our body. So that's physical function. Second is metabolic function. And metabolic function are all the kind of things that a lot of us who are in this field spend a lot of time studying metabolism, how energy is converted into food, how the cells do their energy production process, how cells take energy from where they're produced to where they're needed, how it functions across all these organ systems. So that's our metabolic function, or some people would call it physiological function. The third is our cognitive function. How we think, how we see the world, how we transfer and transmit and process information. And cognitive function is a functional capability that we would say, well, that's all in the brain, isn't it? No, it's not just solely in the brain. Our cognitive function, we would say, resides principally in the brain, but there are many other sites in our body that regulate and transmit and control information. And then the last, the fourth quadrant I call a function, is our behavioral or psychological or spiritual or however you want to see this function, however you want to call that. It's how we incorporate our experience of living into how we see the world and how we address the world and how we perform in the world. That behavioral function. Now all four of those, if we think about them, roll up into our being, into our whole. They're not one separate. Like today we don't just worry about physical function, and tomorrow we're going to worry about metabolic function. We're doing it all the time, all four of these things, they all coincide to become us, to become who we are we. And interestingly enough, all four of those functional characteristics are modifiable. You can just like you can practice to be really good at a sport or good at a musical instrument, or good at being an actor or an artist or whatever it would be, you can become good at each of those four things if you know what to practice. And those four things, what you practice is related to who you individually are in your genes. Not two people are identical. We are each unique facets on the diamond of life. There is never going to be a person exactly like us, and there never was in the past. We are uniqueness in the collection of human beings. And therefore, the expression of our uniqueness at the full expression of all of our value proposition is going to depend on how we unleash these functional characteristics, our physical, metabolic, cognitive and behavioral function. And that's then the basis of functional medicine saying, let's focus less on what we call something. Let's focus more on how we squeeze out the best of our function. Because if we do, we won't worry so much about getting diseased because we will be functioning at a very high level. And the body has its recovery, rehabilitative capabilities that if we give it the full things it needs, it can find a path to achieve very high levels of health. So that's, that's basically the functional medicine model.

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No, I love that. I love that so much, man. And I Think this was one of the reasons why I was so excited about this conversation today, because your view, your perspective on health, on medicine, on life, just runs so intertwined with the things that we believe here and try to, you know, also how I try to live out and walk out my life as well, you know, so I have a background in competitive bodybuilding, and obviously a lot of people think bodybuilding is a physical thing, right? You got to go to the gym, train hard. And it's purely, I guess, maybe this first part of the function. But I can tell you I really saw the greatest success when I really began to integrate all four of these. It's like when I understood the mental side of the game, how to actually, while training, get my mind into these muscles. Obviously, there's still the physical part there as well. But even tying in some of the behavioral side of things, like the need for meditation, mindfulness, relaxation, it's all kind of intertwined. And I think your approach to medicine, your work as well, is so intertwined with the things that we're trying to do here. Summarizing this, like in a. In a single sentence, it sounds like functional medicine is a proactive approach to our health, in our life, whereas a traditional western type medicine is the reaction, right? You wait till you get sick, you seek out the doctor. He sees it through this little lens right here that he's been trained in to only see the world through one way. And he's like, okay, you have this. Here's the solution. Whereas in the functional way, it's like, well, we do our best to try to prevent these things from happening. Would that be kind of inaccurate, just like, single sentence to kind of sum it up?

Yeah, Frank, I think you've hit it. I think there's a part of this that everybody knows, and that is, how do these concepts get executed upon in our society? What are the institutions, the devices, the procedures, the policies, programs by which these concepts, these big concepts that we're describing, get implemented in people's lives? And our model today that we call healthcare, I think we would both, you and I would agree, and probably most of your viewers would agree, is a disease care system. It's a very, very sophisticated and very capable disease care system. So I don't want to paint it as being something bad. It's quite good. But we call it a healthcare system. It's actually not a health care system. It is a disease care system. Now, the assumption has been that if you don't have a disease, you're healthy. So the concept is the Absence of disease is the definition of health. I think any human being that's lived in this planet for a certain number of years and has gone through the experience of life would say no, hold it. Health and the absence of disease are not exactly the same things. I can have days where I am not diseased, but I don't feel healthy, I feel low energy, I feel depressed, I feel sick, I feel incapable of doing what I need to do. Those things are measurements of health at a different standard than just the absence of disease. And by the way, likewise, there are individuals that may have a disease but actually feel quite healthy because they're living a fully expressed life. And you know, they can live with some of this stuff because all the other things are so good. So the construct of health and disease to me needs to be re explored. What we are talking about in functional medicine is a model that really begs the question for each one of us. And that is how do we both aspire and then execute on the principle of health? Health then to me is maximizing the capability in those functional areas, those four functional areas, to be fully capable of doing what we want to over the course of 100 years of living. I just chose 100 years because it's a nice round number. I think the human being is easily capable in its genes of living 100 year of healthy living with the proper practices and the proper procedures that we would execute upon. And you know, you use bodybuilding as an example and I think it is a great example. I have a number of good friends who have been either professional or semi professional individuals in body sculpting, body in competitive weightlifting. And if you know them as you do like yourself, they're very spiritual individuals. They have deep introspective concepts about how their commitment, sometimes many, many hours a day of excruciating work translates to them being feeling as fully human and the capable of that. They have a spiritual belief in the importance of all these things that we do to create who we want to be.

Well, here's the interesting about this, this conversation that we're having here right now, kind of piggybacking off of, you know, you know, people that don't feel any form of disease or sickness, yet they are ill and sick, yet there's also the ones that have the symptoms, yet they're fully healthy. I think the bodybuilding or the fitness industry has done a horrible job in, in some ways of almost glamorizing these as like truly aesthetic, you know, like the dialed in peeled look. I know firsthand, like it is not healthy. In those final weeks leading up to a show, you sacrifice certain things to get there because you're trying to push your body to its genetic potential. But it's not really the healthiest thing for human. A human being yet. I think so many people walking around will see that person that's got the shredded six pack, that's got striations in their shoulders, like that's the model of the health. So it's almost like the message is not being presented in the healthiest way for the consumer. Because if that's healthy, I can never get there. Right. Because I'm not willing to do the necessary things. Maybe I hold a belief that I don't have the genetics to do it, so I'll never be as healthy as that person. When in reality, yes, they are sometimes really spiritual, but also sometimes they're really struggling on the mental side of things. They're really struggling from the physical side of things. What's your thoughts around that?

Yeah, I think that's a really important point. There's this concept that travels through the health literature going way, way back, maybe even to Hippocrates, if we want to go back that far, a couple thousand years. And that is about balance, the term balance, because balance, when we're in balance, and let me use a metaphor that I've used in my own life about what balance means. And this was a gift that I was given when I first started as a junior professor in 1970. That was my first year of starting my professional life as a professor of environmental science and chemistry. And one of my students, who was an art major, actually gave me a book. And that book was entitled Centering. And it was a book supposedly about pottery. And I was interested at that point in learning how to throw pots. And this student said, I think you really enjoy this book because you're a pretty philosophical guy and this is a little bit more than just pottery. So see what you think. Well, to make a long story short, the book was about why it's called Centering is that when you're on a wheel trying to make some piece of ceramics from clay, you better make sure that when you put that clay on the wheel, that it's right in the center of the wheel. Because if you don't put it in the center of the wheel, it will not be perfectly balanced. And if it's not perfectly balanced, you're going to work really, really hard to try to make a final piece of art with that clay as it's spinning around. You're Going to work ten times more hard to make something that would be considered a good work of art versus if you got that same piece of clay centered directly in the proper place on the wheel that's spinning. And so the metaphor for living is, are we centered? Did we lay our clay down on our wheel of life in a place that when we turn that on and we run the 247 life that we're all leaving, that we don't have to work so hard to keep the clay from flying off the wheel. We can then sculpt it into the ornate final picture that's us in ways that would be what our aspiration is without constantly having to work so hard. And that's the concept of balance. That's the concept of resilience. It's not the concept of an adanta's perfection. It's the concept of where we are in our balance. It gives us the greatest resilience against the stuff in life that wants to take us down. And that, to me, is the essence of what true wellness and health really represents.

Yeah, it's so beautifully stated. I want to circle back to one of the things you kind of shared right there at the opening, which was the three major reasons why people get sick. You talked about the. The result of injury. Right. Some of these things are out of our control, you know, especially if you're somebody that really lives, you know, an aggressive kind of life, and you're kind of out there always, you know, pushing, you know, just pushing it to the limits. Right. So that kind of sits out here kind of in this box. But I think maybe the other two are somewhat. Maybe connected, you know, this infectious and then the metabolic disorder. And I think this will kind of get us into the conversation, which I know you're really excited about, which is our immune health. Is there a direct correlation from somebody that. And I think we saw this in, you know, four years back with COVID Right. Is there a direct connection between those that are metabolically disordered? I don't know if that's a proper way to say that. Being more susceptible to infectious diseases.

Oh, boy, that's beautiful. And yes, disordered is a great term, a great word. So now you're on the third. The frontier of where I think biomedical sciences is now going. And maybe it was accelerated as a. Well, I don't. Probably not. Maybe it was accelerated as a consequence of SARS CoV2. Because everyone started to ask the question, why is it that in the United States, we as presumably the healthiest country in the world at least we would like to think we are. We spend twice the amount of, on healthcare per capita of the second country in the world. Twice the amount per capita. Yes. And as a consequence, you would expect that we, when confronted with the virus SARS CoV2 would have the best outcome. It would still create some problems, but we would probably expect to have the best outcome yet. If you look at the developed countries of the world, the United States had the worst outcome. We had the most death, we had the most hospitalization intubation of any country per capita. And it was not a consequence that we're the oldest country in the world. It wasn't just, oh, we're older, so we got more sick. No, that was not the problem. The problem was there was something going on that made us more susceptible, that made us more imbalanced with regard to our defense against that virus. And what is our defense? Our defense is in our immune system. Our immune system works 365, 247 on a search and destroy mechanism for us to protect us against all sorts of things. Viruses, bacteria, protists, fungi, all sorts of critters that might like to take us over because we're a nice warm space with a lot of things that they could live off of. Secondly, our body may have cells within our body that get deformed. Some people call these zombie cells or cells that are carrying bad memories that want to create injury. Normally our body has the ability to get rid of them if our immune system is working well. If our immune system is not working well, then these mutant cells, these injured cells, can have a life and they themselves can become our own peril. We can have innocent bystander injury to our own damaged cells. So our immune system is doing work all the time, whether we know it or not, 24 7. And actually our immune system, which is made up of many hundreds of different types of cells, but we think of it floating around in the bloodstream as our white blood cells. But these, these immune cells actually reside in virtually every organ of our body, have, have function, including the muscles and including the brain. Brain has its own immune system. And so if our immune system is not working appropriately, if it's imbalanced, dysfunctional, then what happens is things can slip through our barriers of defense. And now we can start to become the victim from the things in the outside and inside world. So our immune system and our nervous system are the first two places in our body that are seeking out what's going on outside and inside the body and telling the rest of the body, how to behave. So if we have an immune system that is not quite up to par, we're not getting colds and flu all the time, but it's actually not able to do all the things that's necessary to defend us against the myriad of different types of encounters that we will experience in life. Then what happens? We have unexpected illness Now. I've always going even back to elementary school. When I was in elementary school, I remember coming home about the third grade and asking my, my mother, I said, you know, a lot of kids are out of school now. They're absent because they have the, have a very serious cold or the flu. It's going around. And so the absenteeism in school is very high. But I wonder, why is it some of us are still in school? We are. We were exposed to the same things, and why didn't we get it? Why are we still in school? And, you know, my mother said, well, that's because people have different immunities. That's true. But then the question is, what does that mean? What does it mean, different immunities? Is it all just because you were born with different immunities, or is it because you train different immunities, or does it mean because you're supporting your immune system in different ways? By the way, the answer to that is all three of those. And so the question then becomes today a dominant question. As we know, we're going to be exposed to more pandemics, we're going to be exposed to more funny bugs, we're going to be exposed to more chemicals, we're going to be exposed to more stress. All these things are impinging upon our immune system. And we better have a really robust, resilient, healthy immune system. And we haven't focused on this at all. We just have taken our immune system for granted. Oh, you know, it'll, it'll follow along whenever I need it, it's going to be there. And that model is just not good enough.

Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna dive real, real deep here from this point on. But great, great story there. And there's the early signs, right, of a, of a scientist, you know, turned doctor and, you know, early on in childhood has, you know, set the pathway for, I would assume, all the work that you're doing. Maybe you can't pinpoint it directly to that, but I'm sure that early influence conversation on a young boy's brain and mind definitely began to pique that curiosity that now you've dedicated your life and have helped hundreds of thousands, not millions of people in understanding these things and their company, Big Bold Health, their mission is to transform the way that people think about their immune system. What is it that is broken about the current model in regards to the way we look at immune health?

Yes, I think, Frank, that the current model is a model that's what I call very passive. It just says. I think almost everyone would say, yes, I know I have an immune system, and I know my immune system does something to protect me against getting sick. But I don't really have any control over our immune system. Therefore, I'm a victim of my immune system, rather than saying, I'm in charge of my immune system. Because we can be in charge of our immune systems, but just like any skill that we want to develop in life, we have to work at it. We have to know what to do and then do it and practice it. The same is true for our immune system. Let me give it a little factoid that probably most people are not aware of. Our immune cells that make up our immune system turn over about every three to four months. So the immune system that we will have, let's say, four months from now is not the exact same immune system we have today, because it depends on what those new cells that come from the old cells, what they're going to look like. So those cells could be the same as they could be better than, or they could be worse than in terms of their functional capability. And our immune system collects experiences. So if you've had a very serious viral infection, your immune system remembers you've had that viral infection, and it captures that in your certain type of immune cells called your lymphocytes that remember that. And that's basically how the concept of vaccination works, is it exposes you to something that gives a memory to your immune system. And say, I remember that, and I don't have to go through the process of serious. I can ameliorate the problem before it gets started. So the immune system has that capability. It has the capability to recreate itself. And it actually now, as recent evidence from immunological research has shown, that the immune system actually has the opportunity to rejuvenate itself. That's a term that we've been really kind of promoting recently. Immunorejuvenation, immune rejuvenation. You can turn back the clock, the biological clock on your immune system by allowing your body to undergo the process that gets rid of the damaged. And rather than call them damage, somebody call it the immune cells they're carrying with Them bad messages, bad memories, and replacing them with new immune systems that are younger and more vital, that don't carry those bad memories, that are more capable of being resilient. That concept is called rejuvenation. Immunorejuvenation and the mechanism by which it occurs actually won a Nobel Prize in medicine just a few years ago. So it's a recent discovery in the biomedical sciences to understand how this is a two way street. Yes, we can collect bad information, our immune system, those are the bad memories, but it can also get rid of them. The other lane of the street is to go the other direction and to recreate new, naive, more capable immune cells that don't carry those bad memories. And it turns out, I'll give one last factoid. It turns out that of all the parameters that have been measured by researchers of, of longevity and life expectancy, the most singular, important definition of how long you will live is the age of your immune system. Now you're going to, you're going to say, but Jeff, isn't the age of the immune system the same as the age of your birthdays? And I'm saying no. The age of your immune system can be greater than your age in birthdays or less than your age in birthdays or the same as your age in birthdays. That's called biological age. And there are now ways of measuring scientifically in the laboratory the age of our immune system. And what we have been studying in our research at Big Bold Health is can we affect the age of the immune system by intervening with a functional medicine concept? And I'm happy to report we'll have a scientific article coming out soon. We've got the data from a clinical trial we finished earlier in the year, last year that shows that you can actually roll back the age of your immune system, make it younger by intervening with the right stuff. And the right stuff is the right diet, the right thoughts, the right exercise, the right sleep. These are not magic things. These are things that are accessible to everybody. It's just knowing when and how to do it that is the magic of our age. Rolling back the immune system.

Yeah, you answered what was going to be my follow up question there before I even even got to it. Because when you, when you, when you talked about the immuno rejuvenation and then turning back the biological clock, like this kind of aha went off like there's got to be direct tie here to anti aging, to longevity. And I'm glad we're kind of here right now and talking about how we can kind of be in control of some of these things. You know, you listed off a couple things there. Diet supplements, you know, I'm sure lifestyle plays, plays a big role in this training components. Is there a, I guess, would you call it hierarchy of these levers that we can pull that are going to enable us to go through the process of immuno rejuvenation without having, you know, somebody like yourself and getting into lab and having like. So the average person listening to this right now, what should they be looking at? Is there, is there a hierarchy of these things?

Yeah. Thank you. That, that's exactly the question. And actually the reason why Big Bold Health was for him, because I was asking that question myself. What are the ways that we can translate this high level science down to user friendliness, in ways that people can implement this in their daily lives, in ways that are not overly expensive, that are not putting them to cruel and unusual types of things they would have to do. And that was really the reason that I assembled this group about three years ago, Big Bold Health, to try to really find is there a lesson plan that we can develop that is implementable. And I think we're getting there. I think that this research that we just did which validated that we could make a person's immune system younger over the course of three months, which is a pretty short period of time, was, was very encouraging. Now if you ask me the hard question, have we answered all the questions? Is this irrefutable? Are we going to win a Nobel Prize for this discovery? Or is this like the first steps on a path that will get us to greater and greater abilities to own our immune system? I would say it's probably the latter. We're seeing a breaking down of an old model and a creation of a new opportunity. But I would say we will follow this very closely over the years to come because this is going to be a revolutionary change in the way people manage their bodies. Now let's talk about what we've learned. That's the question is where does the tire meet the road? So we came to the recognition that there are, and this is not just our work, there are literally hundreds of other groups. Scientists have been working on this question as well. Fortunately, our work tended to validate and be consistent with other people's work. So we weren't totally an outlier, but we found that there are what we call three pillars or three categories of things that really make a very big difference on the age of our immune system. Each one of these has some granularity And I could dig deep into them and probably get into geekism here and overwhelm. So I'll try to keep it on a level of first level exposure. So what are the three things in no necessary order priority. I think they're all three are equally important. So the first one is what we call a diet that is rich in colors of the rainbow. Now I'm talking about that's obviously natural colors. I'm not talking about synthetic dyes.

So these are red sevens or yellow fives or any of that stuff.

Exactly. So these are foods that carry natural colorants in them. And these are plant foods, basically. So these would be fruits and vegetables and legumes. And why are these important and what are about them that gives them a characteristic that's associated with immune health? Well, we would say, you know, gee whiz, the colorants in those plants must be related to something in those plants that make them colored. And what are those? We call them phytochemicals, plant derived chemicals. And they fall into a whole variety of different families. I won't go through all the families, but let's just say that the family that has been recently found to be most associated with the age of our immune system are called polyphenols. Polyphenols are members of the polyphenol have names, flavonoids. And people are probably familiar with flavonoids as a nutrient. Now, it turns out that there are literally thousands of different polyphenols in different plant foods. Some plant foods have unique composition of these polyphenols that's very, very high in number and in amount. And these are plants that, interestingly enough, have grown up and historically are found in various stressed environments around the world. Now why would that be? When I say stressed, I mean hot and cold climates, bad soil, exposed to a lot of sun, so they can get easily sunburned. You know, think of a corn plant. If you were a corn plant and you were stuck in the ground in Iowa and had to have your arms stuck out all day 24, seven for the whole growing season, what would you look like? You have no place to hide, no sunshade. No, you would be a disaster. So the plants have to develop all these defensive mechanisms to defend themselves from bugs. And they can't run away and hide, they can't take medicines. So they have developed these defensive substances. And the plants that are most stressed have evolved over millennia to have the highest defensive substances. Now, those defensive substances happen to be the plant's immune system. Yes, plants have immune systems. And in fact, there's an analogy to the way the plant's immune system works to that the way a human immune system works, at least on the first level of defense, called the innate immune system. And this study of plant immunity has gone on, along with discoveries that are being made about human immunity. And the crossover between the two is quite remarkable. So plants that are growing up in very hostile environments are plants that have survived over years of genetic selection to have extraordinarily adept immune systems. And it turns out that their polyphenols and flavonoids are extraordinarily rich and they're specific in composition for the protection of their immune system so that that plant can live in that hostile environment successfully. Now, maybe ironically, I don't think it's ironically, I think it's nature purpose, that when a human eats that plant and takes those nutrients into their body that were defending the plant's immune system, lo and behold, they're the same nutrients to defend the human immune system. Now that's a powerful story if you think about that. Now, interestingly enough, when the food processing industry grew up, this was post World War II, coming off of the rations that our service people were eating during the war because they had to be shelf stable food. So that was the birthing of the processed food industry where the rations used during World War II. And the concept was that these coloring agents in foods, these flavonoids and these polyphenols were kind of like, who needs them? They just were kind of a problem. They had an off taste of the food when it was pasteurized. And so the processing food industry took them, took them out, threw them away, actually made them pet foods. So we ended up with springy, healthy pets and we ended up with people that weren't getting these, these nutrients in their foods because they weren't considered to be important. It was only in the last couple of decades, probably even less than that, where the nutrition science has started to say, now hold it just a minute, you said these weren't important because they're not like vitamins. You can't find scurvy or very, very pellagra in their absence. So you said they're not important, but actually now we're seeing they are important because they're the, the masters that control how the genes of our bodies express the function of our immune system. And so by not putting them in our foods and not allow them to be in our foods by heavy processing, we've taken out one of the really important health insurance policy constituents from our daily diet. So now we're starting to see that these, these, these diets that are minimally processed, that are rich in these polyphenols, and specifically containing foods that are growing in environments where they're a little bit more stressed. And that led us, in Big Bold Health, to a discovery that I never thought in my life I actually would make. It was a serendipitous discovery that there is a ancient food. It's actually one of the two oldest foods that's been husbanded in the world. It's 4,000 years old that it's been husbanded by humans. And it's called tartary buckwheat. And the Tarvy buckwheat grown in the Himalayan regions of, of asia is a 4,000-year-old food that happens to have the highest level of these immune strengthening polyphenols and flavonoids of any known food. And it, apple, actually is a food eaten by people who live in what Dan Buettner called the blue zones. Maybe you're familiar with that. The blue zones are areas of the world where people live to be 100 and are still healthy. And so the, the concept that there are foods that have naturally evolved over long periods of time to have these immune strengthening nutrients at a very, very high level has been a focus of what we've been trying to explore in Big Bold Health. So we became very interesting, interested in this Himalayan tartary buckwheat. By the way, tartary is referring to the tartan region of the Himalayas. It's a region of northern China. And so Himalayan tartery buckwheat, we call it HTB for short, has the highest level of these immune strengthening nutrients. So we started to say or asked the question, who is growing Himalayan tartary buckwheat in the United States? And lo and behold, we found that there was only one person that we could find that was growing Himalayan tardy buckwheat in the United States. And that turned out to be a former ag research professor from Cornell University who had retired. He was in Angelica, New York with his wife, a former nurse. And they had a hobby farm when they kind of retired and they, because of their work on plant genetics, they had found these seeds. It's a little bit like Jack and the Beanstalk story. These seeds that had been given to them by a friend from the U.S. department of Agriculture from their seed bank that when they grew them up, turned out to be only had a number on the seed pack. So they didn't know what they were. But when they finally grew them up. It turned out to be Himalayan tartery buckwheat. And they found it to be a very interesting crop. So they had several acres and eventually expanded it to a small group of acres, about 20 acres. And they were the only people growing it. And then they put a mill together. We're milling it and selling the flour out at roadside stands in the summer. And his wife was making recipes. It was really fun. So we made connection with them over the years. Now Angelica Farms or Angelica Mills now is part of Big Bull Health. We have put the wisdom of the of Salmon Lucia Beer together with with our interest in the immune system. And that was the formation of Big Bold Health. And now we have a group of organic certified farmers that are growing for the first time, organically certified Himalayan Tartary buckwheat. We have an artisanal miller in Trumansburg, New York that was our part of our team. And we have a food lab that's developing recipes and many plans, working with chefs around the country. And we are bringing this crop back to the United States that has been lost for probably 200 years. And we just finished our clinical research showing that we can lower the age of the immune system when people incorporate the polyphenols from Himalayan tartary buckwheat in their daily routine. So this is just an example of how we're pulled sometimes into things just through curiosity and asking questions.

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So the three categories here of the factor of the age immune system. I think we uncover the first one here, the diet of colors of the rainbow. The next two.

So the next one is pre and probiotics. The gut microbiome. I started talking about the gut microbiome to doctors in 1985. I can't believe it. How much time has gone by. My first lecture to doctors on the microbiome was called Dysbiosis and leaky gut. It was 1985 and we started to really develop an understanding of the important role that this living community in our Gut, which by the way weighs three to four pounds. Our gut microbiome, those bugs in our gut are a substantial part of our overall body's chemistry and they produce their own secondary byproducts depending on their composition. There are literally hundreds of different types of bacteria. Some are, are called symbiotic, they do work for us, it's beneficial. Some are called commensals, they take up space and provide a safe environment. And then there is the third category that are called parasitic. And those are the ones that we don't want because they produce a lot of funny mischief in our gut that have adverse impact on our immune system. They cause inflammation, they lead to premature aging, they cause insulin resistance and correlate themselves with obesity. So these particular bugs, not good parasitic. What we want is to have the right balance of the symbiotic and commensal bacteria, a healthy microbiome. And those are fed by their own food, which we call prebiotics. So proper prebiotics, which are non digestible fibers. And that's another interesting part of the Himalayan tartary buckwheat story because it turns out it has a very high level of the proper prebiotic fibers in it that help to functionally restore a healthy microbiome. We actually have a product called Microbiome Rejuvenate that is incorporating those that won the immune product of the year award in 2023. So the second are pre and probiotics, how it relates to a healthy microbiome. And then the last is omega 3 fatty acids. These, these what we, we used to call fish oils. But we can find omega 3s in plant oils as well as alpha linolenic acid. And so those omega 3s that also contain these pro resolving mediators, these very powerful anti inflammatory compounds that are in minimally processed omega 3 oils are our body's arsenal of defense that work as the third pillar along with the pre and probiotics and the plant flavonoids that I mentioned to put together a immune rejuvenation kind of program. And that's what we focus on in our, in our Big Bold Health. You know, people can go to our website, Big Bold Health and, and get all sorts of information about each of these individual components.

Yeah, guys. And we will link down all of Dr. Bland's links, his companies, his socials, everywhere you can connect with him if obviously you want to explore the things that they're doing over there at Big Big Bold Health we opened up at the beginning kind of talking about these five factors or maybe four. So the Physical metabolic. And this was obviously tied to the disease. But I'm curious, outside of some of these nutritional things, you know, we're talking diet here, eating in rainbow colors, the pre probiotics tied to diet, more supplementation, omega 3, you can obviously get them from certain foods, but obviously you can take supplements there as well. Are there certain lifestyle factors that play a role into the health of somebody's immune system?

Yes, there are. And I put it in order of priority. I think first of all, and this is right in your sweet spot, you're a master of this. And that's programmed exercise, strength and endurance and flexibility. I think the exciting part of the story for me is as much as we like all people to really have very high activities and maybe be on training programs, the reality is many people just don't have that interest. And so how do you make it as easy as possible? And as easy as possible starts, I think, with a regular activity program that's as simple as walking. And there are now clinical studies that have been done called the Nurses Health Study, in which the exercise program was a half an hour of walking a day. And it was found that there was a significant improvement in all health outcomes by just introducing a walking program. Now, can you do better than a walking program? Of course you can. But if you wanted to just say, where do I start? It could be a walking program, it could be walking on a treadmill, it could be walking in the mall, it could be walking your dog. It could be any number of things. It doesn't have to be endurance related to pushing you to the max. Now, clearly, the more resistance you have in your exercise and the more you can raise your pulse into your training zone, the more value you'll probably get. But if you want to just get 50% or more of the value, start walking or swimming or a stationary bicycle or anything that allows you to be moving to increase your pulse and to improve your message to your muscles to improve their status. So exercise would be first on my list. Secondly, not fall far after that is sleep and sleep hygiene. Not just sleep duration, but also sleep quality. And so fortunately, now we have a variety of different biometric monitors, wearables that people can use to help to monitor their sleep. And it can be a good instruction. I think the key here is not to get sleep anxiety. A lot of people are so concerned about their sleep that they work themselves up to the point that they can't sleep. The concept is don't do anything of intellectual taxing activities an hour before you go to bed. Start to wind out, don't have a lot of alcohol and food a couple hours before you want to go to bed. Simple things that people know about that. You have to put those rules of reasonableness into action. Because if you can improve your sleep. So you're getting on average around seven hours of sleep, of which the majority of that is high quality sleep. So something like a half an hour a night, at least maybe an hour or more of deep sleep. Your body during that period of time is regenerating. So that's your brain's rejuvenation program. Your brain will rejuvenate itself when it has the opportunity for proper sleep, because that's the garbage collecting time. Your brain is doing garbage collecting during the times of regenerative sleep. So sleep, exercise, nutrition, are kind of the three things that all of us should be putting on our to do list for 2024.

Yeah, I love that. This one may be hard to, hard to answer and it might just be. I don't even know if you'd be able to collect data on something like this. But clearly for you, this work that you do is such a deep rooted passion. I mean, you can hear it in the, the way that you describe these things, your ability to go deep on these. I mean, you've been researching and educating and talking on these subjects longer than I've been on this planet and probably the vast majority of our audience as well. And I'm assuming that plays a role into kind of the youthfulness that, you know, you have about, about life. What role, if any, does a healthy pursuit of a passion or purpose in life play in the health of our immune system?

Well, I think you've answered your own question. That's a fantastically important question. I think purpose and direction and what I would say with purpose, I believe very strongly in the work that was done by the person who's credited with developing the concept of stress. I don't know if you know the name Hans Selye. Hans Selye was a physiological researcher at McGill University. That was the first person to take the term from physics, which was stress, and move it into physiology. And so he started talking about, from all the research he did over many years and published on animals that were subjected to various types of changes that he termed that stress. And he said that the body has an adaptive system for managing stress. That system is what we call the HPA system, the hypothalamus pituitary in the brain, and then the adrenal glands sit on our kidneys that HPA Axis controls or regulates or responds to stress. And then that is connected into the gonadal component. So it's hpatg. So it's hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenaline, thyroid and gonads. So if a person under female or male is under high stress, it alters their sex steroid hormones. So they have different levels of androgens that could be testosterone or progesterone, or in case of estrogens, estrogen, estradiol. So stress hormones alter sex steroid hormones, they alter thyroid hormones. So now we get into a metabolic disturbance. If you start influencing all of those regulatory hormones, your body now is thrown into imbalance. So the construct is, when we start asking about purposeful life, what is it? And so Hans Sele talked about the way to combat stress was to develop a lifestyle that was focused on what he called altruistic egoism. Let me say what, what I think that means altruistic egoism. He said you have to think enough of yourself that you're worthy of being healthy and being totally functional. If you don't feel worthy, then you're never going to be healthy because you never feel you deserve it. You're always feeling like you're an imposter. You're always feeling like you're having to make up ground because you're somehow didn't do right. So first you have to see yourself worthy of being successful, being good, being healthy. Then once you've gotten that, then you need to use that energy of self confidence, of egoism, to put it into your altruistic output to help others. That altruistic egoism allows you have a complete, purposeful life because you take your positive energy. And as you're doing with this podcast, you're creating opportunities for others to experience joy or purpose in their lives or find paths to success. And that makes your life and their lives purposeful. And that is the way that societies grow and evolve with help.

That's so beautiful. And I think it, I think it connects back to one of the things that you opened up when we got into the conversation around the immune system, is that we are not a victim to any of this. We have the ability to take ownership and responsibility, but only through this altruistic egoism can we live that out. Because if we're lacking that, then the responsibility would never like. It's something we'd never be able to take on ourselves. Right? Because we're living outside of this box here and we're a victim to these things that happen. So I love how we started Here at the beginning, open up with this holistic approach. We dove deep into the immune system, how we are in control. We unpack a lot of things here for the audience that kind of have as takeaways and things that they can kind of explore a little bit deeper on. Obviously want to point them to all the work that you're doing. And then we looped it back around here through the conversation. It's like such a beautiful puzzle that we put together here. Right.

Well, you. You put it together. I just had the opportunity to kind of fill in the gap, so thank you.

Yeah, well, I wouldn't have been able to do it without your. Without your work and expertise. Doctor. This has been absolute on in here at the time of the recording. It's. It's early 2024. What does, what does a year look like? Obviously you mentioned a couple things that you guys have coming up with some of the published articles and the research and obviously the big, bold health. What's kind of big on the forefront for you guys over there coming this year?

Well, I think that the biggest thing for me is really kind of an extension of what we've been talking about, and it's. It's under the title Epigenetics above our genes, because I think many people feel they're victims of their genes, that they're. They didn't fill out an application card. Right. They just got whatever they got from their biological mother and father, and they've had to work with it. And it's. What we're starting to learn is that only about 30% of who we are as we grow up is hardwired into our genes. The other 70% is how we send message to our genes that creates how our genes are going to perform. That's called genetic expression. So that 70% is epigenetics. It's beyond the genes. It's something that is above the genes, that's telling the genes how to behave. We didn't change our genes, we just changed how they're going to express themselves into different functional characteristics. To me, this is the secret sauce. This is the magic that will produce a true healthcare system will take us away from a victim mentality to a mentality of advocacy where we're in charge. Once you're in charge of your life, you can do all sorts of magic things. If you're not in charge of your life, then you become a victim. And now all sorts of things happen to you. Unfortunately, rather than being created by you.

Happen to you as opposed to happening for you. And I'm sure we can all, you know, have. Have a point in our life where maybe we've seen some of this, right? You see the family, and there's that one kind of outlier. It's like, well, that's. That guy's part of that same family over there. He maybe knew some of these things. You know, maybe it was the things that he exposed himself to, the people that it was in his network. He may have explored some books, some research, some of these things. And now the science is kind of catching up with what we've all been able to witness, to see it out there in the world. Dr. Blaine, this has been absolutely beautiful and impactful conversation for our audience here. Obviously, we're going to point everybody to Big Bold Health as, as the main link down there. Where can people connect with you? Are you hanging out anywhere socially online here these days? What's the best place for people to find out?

Jeffrey Bland J F F R a y bland bl.com I I have all my stuff that I've been doing for the last year is available. There's. And love to continue the conversation with anyone that's interested. We got a lot of stuff ahead of us that I think is very exciting.

Yeah. Guys, make sure to check out Dr. Jeffrey's work. Big Bold Health as well. Last and final question here. Dr. Bland will be a little bit off topic here, but obviously the title of our show is called the super in Life. Maybe you'll figure out a way to kind of integrate the conversation that we had here into it. But, you know, I spent the last five years obviously interviewing experts and guys like yourself from all over the world. And I've been kind of putting together this belief of what I think living a superman life is. And I think it's coming from the place that we are all here for a purpose. I'm a big believer that we weren't just here by accident. God put us on this earth in order to do something. And I think a lot of people that, that are listening right now hold that belief or hold that worldview. But if we just accept that we're here for, for a reason, for a purpose, and don't do anything about it, we're missing a big part of the, of the puzzle here. I think once we're intentional about getting, gathering this information, elevating ourselves, going above our, you know, potential or reaching for our full potential to bring that purpose, to bring it to the service of others, to make the world a better place, in my opinion, or my definition, that's living a superhuman life. But I love to always get our guests take here. So as we bring today's conversation to a close. Dr. Blaine, how would you define living a superhuman life?

It would be presumptuous of me to do anything after what you've just said because it was absolutely the maxim, the mantra that guides me every day in my life. You're totally on on my target and or I'm on your target. And I couldn't do a better job of saying what you just so eloquently presented.

Well, I appreciate that, Jeff. It's been an absolute honor, man. I look forward to circling back in and doing this again and staying connected and going deeper in some of the work that you guys are doing out there. Guys, make sure to connect with Dr.

Bland.

Make sure to connect with Big bold health. If you got value out of this episode, guys, you can support us in one of two ways. First off, you're listening here on the audio side. Make sure to head over to Apple, head over Spotify, wherever you are consuming, Drop us a rating, drop us a review. But more importantly, somebody that you know in your life needs to hear this conversation. Maybe they struggling with some of these things that we were unpacking here today. Do us a favor and do them a lessing by sharing this episode with them. But for Dr. Bland, a big bold health, your host coach Frank Rich here. We love you guys and we'll see you next week.

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