Part I_Jeffrey Bland_Town Hall Seattle_6_2_2008

Good evening and welcome. It's great to see you here today. My name is Joe Pizzoro, I'm the founding president of Bastia University and I have the great pleasure of introducing to you our speaker this evening. And what's particularly ironic about this is that this is the second time in a week and a half that I've got to introduce Jeff. Jeff, I don't know if I've introduced you before, like in the past 10 years and also twice in a row. So Tian Tu's Jeff is actually fairly straightforward. And that is to say that we get the privilege tonight of listening to the person who has done more to change healthcare in the last three decades than I think anybody else in this country, maybe even in the world. And I say that because we realize that there's a sea change now in how we think about healthcare. And if I ask you in the audience, how many of you think nutrition is important to your health, would you please raise your hand? Now, if I had asked an audience that question 35 years ago, how many would have raised their hand? I realize you're probably more aware of the importance of this, but in general, 35 years ago, this whole idea of nutrition, natural healing, supporting the body rather than treat disease was not a concept that was well known. And one of the people, and I think the person most responsible for changing public perception and changing professional perception of this is Dr. Jeffrey Bland. And I can say that with a lot of friendship with Jeff since I've known quite some time and I think back 30 years ago now, when we started Bastard University and when I decided to create science based curriculum for Bastard University, the very first person I went to to ask to join our board of trustees and to guide me on how to create a science based curriculum for natural medicine was Dr. Jeffrey Bland. Back in the mid-1970s, there was a very special thing happening in this area and that is once a month Jeff would gather with only about six, eight of us, how many were there at that time of clinicians who want to relearn the best medicine. And Jeff would walk in with a stack of 20 papers and we'd spend the evening studying those papers. It was our study club and it was incredible because it allowed us to really think deeply about why people are sick and how they become healthy. So in the end, intervening over 30 years now, Jeff has written nine books, five for healthcare professionals, four for consumers. But I think probably more important is that he has, I should say he has a PhD in biochemistry and things like that, but you can read that program Jeff has now educated. I think the number is probably about 100,000 physicians now all over the world, literally all over the world. And not just physicians. He's educated the educators in medical schools, he's talked to legislators, he's talked to leaders, business leaders, etc. About how to think differently about medicine. And out of that over 30 years of experience, he started to realize that he needed to create a structure that everybody could understand that was, you might say, non denominational. So he said, here's a way of thinking about medicine, about good medicine, and we don't want to call it anything that we might offend anybody. So he said, what kind of medicine do we want to create? We want to create medicine that improves people's physiology, improves their function. So that he and Susan Bland started 16 years ago the Institute for Functional Medicine, a non profit whose sole purpose is to educate healthcare professionals of all walks of philosophy and how to think better about their patients. And so I with great, great delight, introduce to you Dr. Jeffrey Blanche.

Thank you, Joe, and thank all of you. This is a great privilege to have a chance to talk to you for a few minutes about an area that's more than just a passing fancy of interest for myself and my wife. It's been pretty much our life, our passion, and that is to ask the question which really was the question. That was the reason that I went and spent two years at the Lance Pauling Institute on sabbatical from the university back in the early 1980s when Dr. Pauling came and visited with Emil Zirka Condo, who at that time was the president of his institute, our clinic out here in Bellevue. This is when I was a professor at the University of Puget sound back in 1980. And he said, jeff, I'd like you to come, if you've got a sabbatical year to come out to Palo Alto and work with us. Because I think you can bring another element to the focus that we have in finding ways to reduce human suffering. And human suffering hits on lots of different levels, an emotional, physical, physiological level. And those were two remarkable years for me. My family and I relocated in Palo Alto and it was a life changing experience having the chance to work with my office right next to Linus Pauling, Tudel Nobel prize winning laureate. And he was much more than the vitamin C guy. He really was the person who had a very, very active mind. He was 88 years of age when I was there and there was never a day that he wasn't conceptualizing ways that we could aspire to make Life better for people. And that was kind of the track that we've been on for the last 20 plus years. As Dr. Pizzarno indicated, in 1978, we had, he and I, the privilege of teaching together at every green state college. I was on another sabbatical year that year. And from that experience and Joe's and Bill Mitchell's and Les Griffith and Sheila Quinn's conceptualization, ultimately Vaster University was born. And it's been an interesting journey now the last 30 years to watch this whole field evolve. With that as a context, let me talk about where we are right now in the year 2008. And you probably saw that the title of my topic is to talk about healthcare change, healthcare reform. This is an election year. It's a year that we're all hoping for the best. We're all hoping that this world will be a better place to leave behind for our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. We're hoping that the problems that have confronted us, that have become socially confounding, will be able to find resolutions in the next four, eight or 12 years. And so health care is a little part of it. So it's a satellite part of it, but it's symbolic, I think, of the general sense of challenge that the human species is having today. Actually, right before I came up for this meeting, I had the privilege of interviewing a gentleman from Duke University Medical School by the name of Randy Jerdel. He's a professor of radiation oncology there. And he, I think, is on the track to win a Nobel prize in medicine and physiology for his discovery that he and his group made in the 2001 year in which they discovered that this little fat mouse called the agouti mouse, that people study in obesity and in heart disease and cancer and diabetes research, and everybody knows in research that this little white mouse is always going to be fat, it's always going to be diabetic, and it's always going to have heart disease and cancer. And hundreds of papers have been published on the agouti mouse. It has a certain mutation that makes this protein called agunid protein, that causes the mouse to be hyper fit, meaning it eats all the time, it gets obese. So it's a great model for western civilization. And the mouse is always white and it's always got a high waist to hip ratio. So what Dr. Gerald and his colleagues did is they, for reasons that I won't go into right now, but they got the idea that they would supplement the pregnant mouse, the agouti mouse, early in her pregnancy with high doses of folic acid and vitamin B12. Now, those are nutrients that in the parlance of me and nutrition, we call methylating nutrients because they work through a cycle called the folate cycle in physiology that delivers through acid and acetyl methionine, methyl groups that then are used in physiology for all sorts of functions. Well, it turns out that some places that these methyl groups go are to stick on your genes. They stick on the promoter regions of genes. These are the regulatory units of your genes until your genetic code, how to operate, how to be expressed. And in fact, you probably know that although we expected at one time there were going to be 100,000 genes in the human genome, it was found after the smokeler and all the discovery was made in the human genome project. There were only about 25,000 genes. And in fact, plants can have up to 50,000 genes. So people say, well, hold on, are we half as sophisticated as a plant, or we have DNA homology 98.9% with a chimpanzee two close for comfort for some people. So how do we differ from these organisms and show this wide diversity in this central nervous system tumor that we call the brain that takes us backward and forward in time and differentiates it from other animals? And the way we do that is not by the actual number of genes in and of themselves, but the way they're expressed as groups of genes. You don't express one gene at a time. You don't express your good behavior gene one day and your bad behavior gene another day. They're expressed as families of genes. So if you ask one.