How to accelerate immune resilience | Dr. Heather Moday on Big Bold Immunity #38

You know, the future of immunology does lie in our environments and our food, you know. You know, I think one of the biggest challenges is going to be how are human beings going to navigate, you know, staying resilient on this planet. And, you know, because whether it's a bacteria or a virus or a toxin or something, you know, we're, we're going to sort of have to accelerate our immune resilience, and we don't have thousands and thousands of years to necessarily do that.

Here we are again, Big Bold Immunity podcast. And as we've established a precedent once again, we've got an incredible opinion leader to help guide us through a portion of this broad story of the immunity, which covers and cuts across so many different topics. But this one is related to personalization of immunity through immunotypes. And we have an expert, Dr. Heather Modet, who will be sharing with us her extraordinary insights as an immunologist, allergist and her new book that talks about this personalization of immunity. So here we go with Dr. Modak. Well, here we are at this favorite time for me, which is our big Bold Immunity podcast. And, you know, we've been so fortunate to have some extraordinary minds, personalities, committed individuals on our podcast, but we're not going to be failing to accomplish that goal. Again, this issue, we have an incredible skilled individual with a vision for immunity that I think you're all going to benefit from. Dr. Heather Modet. Heather comes with a background as both a board certified allergist, immunologist. I found in reading her book, which we'll be talking quite a bit about now being released, the immunotype breakthrough that she actually did lab work early on and kind of got her thinking about medical school with Bruce McEwen at Rockefeller, a good colleague and friend, a person I've interviewed on a number of podcasts over the last 30 years, and as you probably know, the father of the term allostasis that we've talked a lot about, and his book, which was written now probably 20 years ago, called the End of Stress as We Know It. And so this experience that Heather had as a lab rat in his research project led her then into stress and immunity and ultimately on her path to become a board certified immunologist, allergist and in private practice in Pennsylvania. And we were just talking about the fact that she's kind of in transition like so many of us are now, with the nature of virtual practices and the way that we're doing remote evaluations. So she's in between Pennsylvania and Virginia. So Again, she's a product of our 21st century new society. So let me just. If I can formally introduce Dr. Modet to our big, bold immunity audience and just remind you that this is the book for which she is the author. And this book is so impactful that I actually have two copies of it. So, you know, I'm very fortunate. I'm sharing one of the copies with my colleagues and the other is mine. And I don't know, you probably can't see, but I've got this marked extensively because it's a real news to use book, the immunotype breakthrough. So, Dr. Modet, thank you so much for being available for this discussion. And maybe now in your own words, you'd like to tell us a little bit about your journey that's led you into this situation. You find yourself today.

Yes, thank you, Jeff. So, like many others who come to practice a combination of functional medicine, integrative medicine, however you want to sort of call it. Like you said, I was practicing in sort of a conventional allergy practice after doing a fellowship in allergy and immunology after medical school, and it was satisfactory. But I think that I was a lot more curious and a lot more interested in finding out why people get sick. And I felt that I wasn't really using all the, you know, using all the tools in my toolbox. And then I needed more tools. So, you know, I started to get curious about the role of things like nutrition. And of course, as you mentioned, you know, I had this sort of glimmers of memory of studying the effect of stress on the immune system. And, you know, I didn't really think that I was applying a lot of what was out there and what needed to be addressed with my, with my patients. So I sort of took off and did a fellowship with Dr. Andrew Weil at his program in Arizona, and then stumbled across functional medicine, you know, and went to the CP meeting back in, gosh, I don't know, I guess around 2010 or so, and, you know, really thought, oh, wow, this is, you know, that sort of blew my mind. And just, you know, sort of the combination of the holistic view of things and then the application of a lot of biochemistry and, you know, immunology altogether. It just, I knew that I was, that that was where I needed to put my efforts. And so, you know, that's how I sort of ended up what I'm doing, what I'm doing today.

Well, you know, the byline of your book, I think, is a kind of a manifesto for everything that we're trying to do in this age where the immune system is. Is kind of reigning supreme. Certainly SARS Covid 2 has kind of got us all interested in immunity. So the byline is your personalized plan to balance your immune system, optimize health, and build lifelong resilience. Now, that is a powerful manifesto and so maybe even a promise. So as we dissect and kind of dig a little bit deeper in that, maybe we can talk about how you arrived at the development of this immunotype conceptual framework and how that then gets related in them and communicated to your patients, knowing that their knowledge of the immune system is probably pretty simplistic. So it's a complex topic with the ability to help them see more about how to own their immune system. So how do you kind of logically take all that, you know, and get it compartmentalize down where it becomes patient friendly?

Yeah, well, you know, and that it is a hard thing to do given that the immune system is extremely complex. And I think for most people, very sometimes, you know, really confusing. So I think that, you know, I had so many clients, like many people have, coming in, talking about different disease processes or symptoms that were connected to immune dysfunction. So autoimmunity, obviously, a large part of my clientele is people with autoimmune disease or people who haven't been diagnosed but have symptoms that sound like autoimmune. And then, of course, chronic GI issues, chronic allergies, people who are just inflamed. Right. They have all sorts of, you know, cardiovascular disease, other diseases, diabetes, you know, lifestyle problems, obesity. And so, you know, and people would always ask me, what can I do to make my immune system healthier? What can I do to boost my immune system? And so, you know, this concept of obviously the immune system being at the core of all of these sort of malfunctions made me start to think, well, it's not that simple. It's not as simple saying, let's just boost your immune system. You know, everyone can take vitamin C. There's nothing wrong with that. You know, and there's lots of things that I talk about, even in the book, that probably apply to most. But I started really thinking about what is different within these patients that make their immune system work the way they are. What is actually making someone's immune system or start to attack its own tissues or start to have reactions that are atopic or allergic. And there's lots of different things that go into that. We know that inflammation is at, you know, the core of most of those things. But we also know through looking at, you know, immunologic reactions that it's a lot of what's going on at the level of the T cells and the B cells and the cytokines. So that's, you know, what cytokines are doing really starts to give you symptoms. Right. What certain T cells are doing and what cells that they are then recruiting, whether it's macrophages, neutrophils, et cetera, et cetera, is really at the heart of what this like phenotype or personality or what I described as an immunotype. And there is a lot of data looking at how we can dampen cytokine responses, how we can dampen helper T cell reactions. So that's sort of what got me going. And I really started to do some research and do a lot more learning. I went back and hit the books myself and. Yeah, and so the premise was sort of born.

Well, you've right there laid down some really important tracks that I want to follow on here. Let's first talk about this concept or this word that we hear so frequently being used, particularly recently with SARS COV2 and that's boosting the immune system. And you have some really strong words or strong narrative about the use of the word boost. So maybe you could give us your impression of boosting the immune system. Because I think that's an interesting feature set of your. Which I, by the way, totally agree with in terms of the way you described it.

Yeah. And I mean, maybe it's a semantics thing, but for me, when we think of someone who might be already overreactive or over inflamed or their immune system is moving too far in the wrong direction, you don't really want to boost it any further that way. So really what you want to do is bring it back to a more of a baseline. You know, you're almost wanting to calm it down, for example, in the case of, you know, allergies and autoimmune disease. I mean, in conventional medicine, right. We're just squelching it. We're, we're giving it, we're giving those diseases steroids and monoclonal antibodies, which of course may not be the best option either. But we know that there are ways that you can do that more subtly without hitting people with such a big, you know, pharmaceutical bomb that you can sort of bring people back into a balance. And so I don't love the idea of boosting. I do sometimes use the word. And then there are certain people who do need A boost. Like the people who have maybe a weakened response, they either don't have great antibody formation, maybe their killer T cells aren't really very active. Those are the people who might need a little bit more help in that department. So I just said I wanted people to think of their immune system as being very multidimensional rather than this very black and white dichotomy.

Yeah, I think you've done that beautifully in the book. It really establishes that domain of understanding. And I think that there is part of that which ties again to one of the promises of the book, which is lifelong resilience. Because if you go back to your description of the way immunologists or rheumatologists treat certain autoimmune diseases using these hard hitting monoclonals that completely damp out things like tumor necrosis factor alpha activities, that doesn't build resilience, that's dampening resilience to the expense of trying to crisis intervene on a dysfunction. So that's very different than what you're discussing as it relates to resilience in your book. And maybe you want to take it from there as to how you see resilience being built through the identifying of your four immunotypes and then a more personalized intervention.

Right. I think, you know, and I talk a little bit about, I really dedicate a whole chapter on inflammation, but, you know, I think that's a good place to start, is that inflammation is not a bad thing. Inflammation is absolutely necessary and wonderful and life saving. Right. So we don't want to completely dampen that response. And like you just mentioned, some of the tactics that we use in the modern pharmacy, for example, high dose steroids or some of the monoclonal antibodies that interfere with cytokines really do that. And so, you know, those patients are often at risk for not being able to respond to certain types of bacteria or maybe have a lessened response to going after cancerous cells. So we don't want to do that, but we want to maybe be a little bit more subtle in decreasing some of those cytokines so that we can sort of quiet the inflammation. The other thing is that there are ways to sort of interfere with chronic inflammation. You can still have an acute response, but if you can interfere in terms of clearing out or resolving inflammation, that is a really great thing to concentrate on. And that's where a lot of like nutrients come into shape. So a lot of the things that we use either in supplement form or things that we eat can be really great at, you know, Decreasing free radical damage, actually, you know, healing or accelerating tissue healing. So I think if we sort of think about that, that's a way of making people over time more resilient. It's giving them something versus completely dampening their. Their immune response.

Yeah, yeah. I, I want to make a little bit of a caveat here because I probably overstated something. I don't want to lead to a false impression. There are certainly places, and I'm sure you would agree, where these pharmaceutical drugs that damp inflammation are desirable in a state of pathology. So I don't want to throw the baby out with a bathwater.

No.

I also want to come back to what you're saying, which I think is really sage. This concept of inflammaging, which is a chronic state of inflammation, which a lot of people don't understand, that if there is inflammation, it's implying something in the immune system that's dysregulated. You don't have inflammation without some dysregulation in the immune system. And I think you've done a very good job of describing that in a way that the non immunologist can grok. So maybe you want to kind of just give a little bit more depth to this construct. In fact, you even have a subsection of the book, I think, something like cytokines. Your friends, as I recall, what we often think of as our enemies can be our best friends when in need.

Yeah. So I talk about the cytokines as being sort of our communication system. Right. So cytokines, as we know, are released from many different kinds of immune cells, you know, B cells, T cells, macrophages, everything. And it's the way that they're able to tell each other what to do. It's. I call it the 5G of the immune system because if we didn't have it, it would be like. It would be as if all the communication in the world got shut down. I mean, everything would stop. We would, you know, screech to a halt. And so, you know, yes, the immune cells are important, but the cytokines are extremely important. And we do need certain cytokines to go after, to signal, say, certain cells to go gobble up virally infected cells to tell neutrophils to come in and swallow things up. We need those. And so you don't want to take them away completely, but at the same time, they're extremely powerful. And we know just, you know, looking at some of the inflammatory diseases, or, you know, it's just a septic shock that happens you know, you can trace that back to very powerful cytokines like interleukin 6. Obviously, that's a one that we talk about a lot, the TNF alpha, you know, so you don't want to have those go off on a wild spree either. They have to sort of be regulated, but they're very, very important.

Well, you talk about a number of the cytokines, I think, that are. Because this is a whole family of different molecules that participate in this community.

Too numerous to count probably.

Exactly. But one that you bring up, which has lately been in the news. And I think it's very interesting because it ties into our gut immune system so closely, and that's IL17. Maybe you can say a little bit about that emerging story because I think that's a fascinating connector into some of the things that we've been talking about as a the gut immune system, systemic immunity and so forth.

Yeah. So Interleukin 17 is released by a T helper cell. So, you know, sort of a subtype of all the T cells. And there's multiple. There's actually more than the ones that I talk about in the book. I just, you know, the big ones. Right. So TH1, TH2T regulatory cells and TH17, there's a few others. But, you know, TH17 is really important for fighting infection. However, it's very tissue destructive. I'm sorry, the T cells that release the IL17 is very tissue destructive. And, you know, so when we're trying to fight, let's say, infections in the gut or infections elsewhere, we can get into this cycle of damage by these very destructive cells and cytokines, which then recruits other cells to come in and try to resolve. And it can be this sort of ongoing smoldering inflammation. And what's interesting with IL17 is for a long time we thought, or researchers thought that autoimmune disease was primarily Dr. The activity of the TH1 helper cell. And actually they found that not to be true. And it's actually, it's something that people still talk about, but it's really the TH17. And IL17 is one of the cytokines that's released from that particular cell. So it is something that I think is a great target, trying to sort of ameliorate in terms of lessening autoimmune destruction.

So you've done a really great job, I think, of laying out that the objective is to try to get a person into resilient immune balance that it seems like the takeaway from and doing so through kind of rejuvenating the immune system, regenerating the immune system's full pluripotential or its ability to be resilient. And that then ties to what you've identified as these four immunotypes, because each one has an individual personality or characteristic. So maybe you can tell us now about your four immunotypes and how they help differentiate the phenotype of the individual.

Sure, yeah. So, you know, looking at both, how people present with both diseases or symptoms, and then also what you can often find at the cellular level, Although we don't always have the ability to look into this. I mean, there are some. There are some labs out there that you can sort of do this immunophenotyping, but the four types are sort of smoldering. So I consider this to be a person who has a lot of inflammation ongoing, but maybe doesn't have autoimmune disease or allergies necessarily as its predominant, their predominant problem. Then there's people who have a misguided and misdirected, but I call it misguided immunotype. And these are people who have autoimmune disease primarily. You know, they have lost their immune system, has lost the tolerance of their own cells, and they can have a real mixture because these people can have allergies. They can have some of the activity that you would see in someone with allergies. But their primary issue is this autodestructive activity that's going on. It is often triggered, though, by underlying infection. So that is important to know as well. And then there's the hyperactive. So the difference here is that these people tend to have allergies. They're atopic, they have asthma, they often have a lot of histamine production because of mast cell degranulation. They have a lot of this TH2 activity going on. And then there's the people with the weak immunotype. And these are the people who fall into that. That category who need boosting. You know, they may not have allergies, they may not have, you know, problems with autoimmune disease, but they get everything that comes around. They have trouble clearing infection. They might have had exposure to things that have injured or weakened their immune system in the past. So they sort of are a little bit different. So these are sort of the four immunotypes, and then there's different things that you can do to support each one.

So in your book, you again do a very nice job of kind of demythologizing a very complex topic of Understanding the basic components of the immune system. So we've got this innate system, this ancient system that goes way, way back to early organisms. And then we have this adaptive immune system that produces these antibodies and then we got this T regulatory system that kind of intercommunicates between the two. Maybe you could help us to understand how those different components of the immune system relate to these immunotypes.

Yeah. So, you know, in terms of our innate immunity, and that includes even our barrier, right. Our skin and our mucus lining, you know, in our respiratory tract. And we often don't think about that. And even some of the antibodies that hang out there and there are, as you said, some cells that don't require, you know, necessarily previous knowledge of an invader. They recognize these, you know, sort of patterns on the surface of microbes and they don't have to know specifically really what it is, they just know it's bad. Right. So these are like the, you know, like the bouncers of the immune system. They come in, they're constantly in surveillance macrophages, the phagocytic cells, the things that can come in and engulf that is part of our innate system. But what happens is when, you know, the attacking occurs of microbes or when they've identified an inflamed area of tissues, not only do they engulf things and start injecting them with all sorts of, you know, trying to kill these microbes, but they will also send up cytokine signals to bring other cells in. They'll change the physiology. You know, they'll, they'll signal for fluid to come in, you know, and things like that. But also they act as go between, so macrophages and dendritic cells in particular are the antigen presenting cel. So they sort of link, they're like the link between this sort of innate system and our more adaptive cells. And so they then of course courier to T cells and say, hey, this is what we got, this is the problem, what do we do now? And then more of the mastermind occurs. If you go up from there thinking about, okay, do we need different kinds of helper T cells, do we need B cells, do we need antibodies? What do we do now? And so it's really this, you know, two main arms, but they're connected very much so.

So one of the connectors, only one, it's not the only one, is the thymus gland. And I know you speak about some of the activities of the thymus gland. You think its connection actually into a hormone neurohormone produced by the pineal gland, which is melatonin. And so how does this work into your aminotype concepts in terms of balance versus imbalance?

So, you know, I mean, obviously our thymus gland produces our T cells. I mean, that's why, that's how the T, that's how the T came about. Right? Thymic. And melatonin is so interesting because, you know, for the longest time, even myself way back in the day thought of melatonin as being just a sort of a sleep hormone. You know, I knew it was involved in the circadian rhythm and I knew it was, you know, it was definitely suppressed by light and increased with dark, but I didn't really understand how important it was in terms of how our immune system works. Because when we sleep, when we go into a sleep cycle or when we're getting ready for bed, our melatonin starts to increase as our cortisol starts to decrease. And cortisol is actually very acutely, it's very anti inflammatory. So what that allows us to do is it allows, as melatonin goes up, it actually allows our immune system or immune cells to become a lot more active. And most people don't think of their sleep time as a time that their immune system is necessarily active. Everybody just thinks they're asleep, but it's actually really important. And this is one of the reasons why sleep is so important and that, you know, especially when melatonin is at its highest, which is usually in the Latin, the earlier part of the evening when we have more the deep sleep cycles, we actually have a lot of activity going on. We have a lot of cytokine activity going on. We have antibody formation going on. We have a tendency to have fever at night because of this as well. So yeah, I think that connection between our immune system and sleep and melatonin is if people understand that, I think they'd be more likely to make sure they're getting their sleep.

Well, you do a magnificent job in your book. There's a chapter on sleep as one of the pillars for immune restoration. And I think you really do a good job in kind of covering that complex topic and circadian rhythms and how routine cycling of our sleep is so important. So I want to compliment you because that is a complicated technical subject, but I think you've done a very, very good job in bringing that in. And I think, as I recall you even refer to psychoneuroimmunology in that particular. Maybe it's not that specific chapter, but it's in that region of the book.

I do I talk about it in the stress chapter.

Yeah. And I go back to Candace Pert and obviously to Dr. McEwen as well. So there is this web of knowledge that reminds us that the immune system is everywhere and you do a good job. It's not just floating around in our bloodstream waiting for viruses or bacteria. It's. It's 24 hour omnipresent in all organs and tissues doing all sorts of things. I think that's what you take away beautifully from your book.

Yeah. And, you know, I think that I didn't really think about the experience I had working in a lab for three years as being very. Because when I went to medical school, I was just, oh, I'm in medical school and you have to learn anatomy and physiology. But later on, as I was entering functional medicine and you know, talking about stress, immune system and everything, I thought, oh, this is interesting, this sounds familiar to me. And of course it's because I was in a lab that was at the forefront of really looking at how both acute and chronic stress was early, you know, in the 90s, how that affected the activity of our immune cells. And I talk a lot about Dr. Debar, who was actually a, he was a graduate student when I was, when I was there. So we were really sort of like colleagues. And he has gone on to continue his work in evaluating the effect of mostly chronic stress, especially long term lifetime emotional stress on our immune system. So it's something that we are still trying to figure out. I mean, that is a very complex subject because the effect of stress and cortisol in the system changes depending on how long it's been going on, the severity of it. We have, you know, literally stages. So fascinating.

You know, there's another part of your history that is very interesting. About the same time with Dr. McEwen, maybe a little bit later in chronology, the discovery of leptin from the adipocyte was made.

That happened while I was there, actually.

Yes, I thought it probably was because that is also we said, well, leptin, that's an appetite related hormone, but actually it's also an immune active hormone. So again, it ties together the. How does a fat cell communicate with the brain, which communicates with the immune system and the endocrine organs? The psychoneuroimmunology field is exploded as it really has. And so when you talk in your book about obesity, obesity has a very profound influence on immune system function, which may explain why in SARS Covid 2 comorbidities that obesity is right up there at the head of the list of risk factors.

Yeah. And I know that even recently there's been. I think it was a study out of Stanford most recently, or it was multiple areas that they've looked at how SARS CoV2 is able to infect fat cells, which I thought was fascinating, and infect the macrophages inside of those cells and actually evade the immune system slightly by seeing. Staying within the confines of this adipose tissue. So not only allowing it to maybe replicate and become a bigger problem sort of hiding away, but as you said, the impact of just obesity on someone's cardiovascular system, on their liver, on all of their hormones, makes it harder for their immune system to necessarily mount a great response because it is already sort of distracted dealing with this inflammation.

Well, you said something there that's very fascinating and that is the concept, can a cell hide away in the body? And the answer is probably no, that there are probably receptors, again through immune signaling and nervous system signaling that are telling somewhere at a distance. Hey, by the way, there's something that's trying to hide away here, but it's not supposed to be there.

Right.

And then we get into this kind of occult problem that you're talking about with immune dysregulation versus acute. Right. It's just like Lyme disease, for instance, or Epstein Barr infection. The virus is still there. We say, well, it's not really producing a serious. I don't have something that is visibly a disease, but yet it may be impacting the immune system by its signaling.

Yeah. And I think that viruses are perfect example of that, especially, you know, some of the DNA viruses that we're used to harboring. You know, luckily they don't mutate very frequently. But, you know, we all have, you know, herpes viruses that are hanging out if you've ever had chickenpox or if you've ever had mono, as most people have. But the question is, what are the circumstances by which those viruses are able to then become stronger, to sort of escape their confines and then start causing problems again?

And that comes back to your book with the immunotypes and improving resilience to build lifelong resilience. So let's talk a little bit in the remaining time we've got. And thank you for your gracious use of your time here.

Sure, absolutely.

I'd like to talk a little bit about the interventional approaches without getting into deep in the weeds, because people can get your book and read more detail. But maybe you can tell us a little bit from your experience how the Toolkit looks for individuals with these imbalances in these four immunotypes. And what kind of available options are there that you found of value?

Yeah, so one of the things obviously there's sort of five pillars that I talk about. Nutrition, attending to the gut and to the related immune system and then stress management, sleep and environmental toxins. And certainly all of those areas are areas that we really, really need to everybody should probably attend to. However, you know, if I had to sort of pick a few, there are, you know, obviously say someone has a lot of inflammation and you know, they sort of fall into this primarily a smoldering immunotype. The first thing that we want to do is, you know, remove things that are potentially causing inflammation, but also to use foods, take away toxins that are causing certain inflammatory mediators to go up. So for example, I talk about nf Kappa B is usually very, very active in people who have chronic inflammation. And we know that of course things like curcumin is extremely important in sort of quelling that. We also know that the downstream products of omega 3 fatty acids, so these sort of specialized proverbs o mediators really important too and can help, can help resolve inflammation without actually stopping it from occurring. So that's another thing that I really love to use for those people. And you know, people who have sort of a hyperactive immunotype, as I said, they tend to have a lot of this helper th2 dominance. And so they tend to be very sensitive to toxins in their, their environment. So I always try to focus on cleaning up their environment first as like a good thing to do and then using things that can quiet that th2 response. So I'll use things like quercetin is a great thing. The people with a misguided immunotype, they are the most complex because they often have many things going on different directions. These are the people I really work on. Gut health as a very primary thing. I look for food sensitivities. I'm looking for the health of their microbiome, intestinal permeability and also the presence of something that might continue to be triggering them. So int infections, whether it's viral or bacterial and definitely doing, making sure those people always do elimination diets. And then there's a couple of nutrients that I really focus on with those people too. And you know, I think that with a weakened immunity, like I said, you know, those are the people that you need to boost a little bit more. So I may tend to use some of the, the medicinal mushrooms I love astragalus root for them. But anything that can sort of almost increase some of the pro inflammatory cytokines because I think they can be really helped by that too.

Yeah. I recall you also talk about the power of some of these adaptogens that have multiple kind of bioactive components, like with any Santa Fera, Ashwagandha, Indian ginseng. So what class would that kind of an adaptogen fall in from your experience?

You know, I think almost everybody. Although ashwagandha, it can upregulate th one activity. So sometimes you have to be a little careful with it. It depends on the person. If they're really inflamed, maybe I wouldn't use that. And then the other thing is with ginseng, which I love too, I may not always use that in someone who's maybe more inflamed. Sometimes some of my autoimmune clients, I wouldn't use that. But a lot of people can really benefit from for the most part if they're very stressed. I find that they do really well with some of the more calming adaptogens. I love lemon balm. I use that a lot. Magnolia, I use that a lot as well. So there's, you know, you have to be a little bit, you know, I don't want to say careful, but you know, look into the pros and cons of using adaptogens. But for the most part they are adapting. Right. So it's not like you're giving someone like this really strong compound and so most people do really well with them.

Yeah, I think you did a really great job of again, talking about the symphonic orchestration of the immune system using these different kind of modulators of the different immunotypes. One of the interesting things that I think is emerging is that these polyphenols, the flavonoids you discussed, like resveratrol or quercetin or curcumin. There are literally thousands of different members of these families of polyphenols in their foods. But we have thought of those historically as antioxidants, as if they soak up free radicals and oxygen radical. But I think we're starting to recognize that's a very simplistic and probably erroneous way to think about them. Because quite honestly, our immune cells need oxidation. That's how the so called Klebanov reaction that is in the macrophages is really related to the release of oxygen radicals in the form of hypochlorite that kills by chemical warfare.

Sure.

So we want control oxidation. But we don't want bystander injury. And so I think what we're learning, and you kind of allude to this in your book, is that these polyphenolic compounds from plant foods, these phytonutrients, modulate specific pathways or networks that are regulating gene expression associated with these different pro inflammatory mediated processes. And so it's more like targeted network pharmacology than it is just generalized antioxidants. These have different personalities, these flavonoid molecules.

Yes. I think an entire book should be written on polyphenolic compounds and the different ways that you can use them. Because you're absolutely right, there's not enough studies, but we do have some, which is great, especially for some of the more well known ones like the EGCG and of course resveratrol, like you said. So I think, I mean, hopefully this is going to be a future boom in business and technology is how can we even increase the amount of polyphenols in foods? Like that would be a great thing. Right. How can we make them more potent or how can we get people to just get more of them in their diets on a regular basis?

Well, for the sake of just putting a plug in, that's exactly what Big Bolt Health is up to. We're the first people to bring Himalayan tartery buckwheat back to life here in the United States, which is the highest density of immune modulating phytochemicals of any plant food.

Yes. I've been watching your work. It's been fascinating, really fascinating.

It's really, it's really interesting because we just have completed this growing season, a variety of test plots of different mycorrhizal soil inoculants to see what impact that has on gene expression of these phytochemicals. And lo and behold, we now believe that soil health has a lot to do with how many of these phytochemicals are produced in the seed of these hard tartery buckwheat plants and then how that then interrelates with system influence on immune cell function. That's the focus of where we're going because we think there's an orchestration of these working as partners, not just one at a time. It's a synergy that you don't get by just thinking of these as one molecule working at a time. So as you said, this is a whole robust, rich new future ahead that will give us hopefully new insight and new tools for specifically tailoring immunotype intervention. And I think your book is a leader into that field. It's the way to introduce this extraordinary new frontier in immunology, and I guess we call it functional immunology. So, Dr. Heather Modet, I can't tell you how much we appreciate all your work, your fluency. Thank you. Dedication and of course, making this accessible to all these readers.

Well, thank you. It was my pleasure. And I really appreciate you having me on because. Because obviously hearing from you, you're such a leader in functional medicine. And I think that the future of immunology does lie in our environments and our food. I think one of the biggest challenges is going to be how are human beings going to navigate staying resilient on this planet? Because it, whether it's a bacteria or a virus or a toxin or something, you know, we're going to sort of have to accelerate our immune resilience, and we don't have thousands and thousands of years to necessarily do that. So, yeah, I think it's going to be really interesting.

That is an incredible way to finish this discussion between us. That is a look to the future. That's a mandate for our survival, and that's something that we're all pulling together to find solutions to. So thank you so, so much. It's been a real privilege and pleasure to have this chance to share ideas with you.

Thank you, Jeff. I appreciate it.

Okay, be well.

Thank you.

Bye. Bye.

Bye, Sam.