Prevent Chronic Disease TODAY With These Foods & Nutrition Insights w/ Dr. Jeffrey Bland EP 1442

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I'm curious about immune system and immunity. This has obviously been something that people have been thinking about a lot more in the last few years with everything that's happened globally. But I think immunity and the immune system is actually something I've been fascinated by because I don't think actually people understand what it is. I don't think I understand fully what the immune system is. So if we can start with that first, what is the immune system? What is it intended to do for us? How can we own it? And also, is it possible to have full immunity over viruses and diseases?

Oh boy, there's a lot of stuff wrapped up in that, so let's unpack that. Let me start with just a simple concept that I think describes why I'm so interested in the immune system and why I think everyone else should be as well. So it turns out that every minute that we're alive and not sick that we're producing about a million new immune cells. Which means, if you do the math, the total number of immune cells that are in our body, it means that about every three months we've completely reformed our immune system with new cells. Now the question is, those cells that were reforming every three months, are they as good, better or worse than the ones from which they were derived and what has turned out as people have studied this and I'm now speaking about immunologists who are investigating this is over the course of living, for the average person, the cells that replace these old cells are worse off than the ones that they are replacing. They're worse off, meaning they have undergone aging. This is called immunosenescence. And it turns out that that process of immune aging is why we see, for instance, SARS, Covid 2, COVID 19, appearing more seriously in older age people, because their immune system is kind of starting to be worn out. They've undergone what's called immunosenescence. Now, it turns out that that is a biological property that is related a lot to how your immune system is being treated over the course of your living. It's not a locked in. You will have this bad immune system when you're 65, or you'll have this great immune system when you're 25.

So you can control the outcome of your immune system.

That is the lesson of this discussion. Wow. Okay. And we call that. We call that kind of the biological age of your immune system, as differentiated from your number of birthdays, which is your.

Not the chronological.

Right, Exactly. Okay, so.

So you can track the biological age of your immune system.

Yes, and we've been doing that. There are. There are ways now scientifically to do that fairly conveniently, by the way, if you are in the laboratory, which we are, and you do that by actually looking at how the genes in your immune cells are undergoing injury or change. And the way we do it is rather than looking at injury to the DNA, we look at the change on what's called the epigenome. Epi, meaning above the genome. And the actual measurement we use is the number of methyl groups that are stuck onto the genes of the immune system. Now, some of those. That's part of the epigenetic process, some of those processes are related to the adaptation of the immune system to be better off than it was before. But others of those can lead to the immune system aging. And we can measure where those methyl groups are put and how they track with performance of the immune system. So is it possible then to take a person, say 30, take their blood, spin their blood down, take the. The buffy coat of the blood which is spun down, which is where the immune cells reside.

Is that the white part?

Yeah, that's the white part.

Not the red?

Precisely. Yep. Near the red cells are in the red. That's the erythrocytes. But the white part is the buffy immune cells. And you can then subject those to this kind of study. I'm talking about this epigenetic sequencing using gene chip technology. When you do that, you can find out that people that are 30 may have immune system function at the epigenetic level of a 60 year old, or you may find a 60 year old that has the immune system of a 30 year old.

Interesting. What are the main factors that determine a weaker immune system in a 30 year old versus a strong one in a 60 year old? What are they doing differently that causes them to be weak or tall?

Okay, so that is really where the Rosetta stone lies, is the answer to that question. So let me give a best approximation, because I don't believe anyone fully has answered that question, but we have some pretty good, at least first level understanding. So if a person is exposed to a lot of stress, if they don't sleep, if they're a smoker, if they consume excess alcohol, if they don't exercise, they eat extraordinarily ultra processed foods, if they're exposed to xenobotic toxic chemicals, every one of those things that I just mentioned is an agent that modifies how the immune system is marked epigenetically and can contribute to immunosenescence, immune aging. So if you wrap those things together and then lay them on top of a person's genes, because you might say, but Jeff, I know a person that has all those things and they're perfectly healthy and they're 90 years of age and they've never been sick. Well, yes, there are those exceptions certainly related to their genetic luck of the draw. I call it their book of life. 26 chapters, 23 chapters that's encoded in their chromosomes. Those things might have been the luck of the draw that helped them to resist. But for most individuals, what we will find is those characteristics. As you load them up on the immune cells, you will see more and more of the injuries that pertain to aging of the immune system. Wow.

Yeah, there's a lot of damage when you start to stack those challenges exactly. On the immune system over time. Maybe in your early 20s you can handle it, but then as you age each decade, it's probably harder and harder to recover faster from sickness or illness or injury. Right.

I think, Louis, you said it. This is what I call resilience. And you know, resilience is a characteristic that I think we haven't given enough credence for. We did a survey of 15,000 individuals on our website asking, what's your definition of health? And out of those 15,000 individuals, only a few of them said, absence of some disease, I don't want to get cancer, I don't want to Get Alzheimer's. I don't want to get heart disease.

What do most people say?

They said, I want to be able to run a marathon. I want to learn new tasks. I want to be successful at work. I want to have the energy to play with my kids. I want to be able to climb mountains. I want to. I mean, all these variety of human functions that relate to the expression of joy, diversity, performance. It wasn't about the absence of disease. It was the presence of function, the presence of performance. So the immune system gives us that flexibility. It gives us the resilience to be able to jump on a plane and go to Kathmandu or to go to Kilimanjaro and hike the mountain. If you have an immune system that's not properly configured, you end up with more probable acute mountain sickness and other things that happen.

Right now, you're known as the father of functional medicine. Why is the immune system and immunity something that you've dedicated most of your work to understanding?

Yeah. Thank you. So that is a part of my four year learning. So right now, if I was to list the major concerns, health concerns that people have throughout the course of living would be things like dementia, maybe Alzheimer's. It would be cardiovascular disorders would still constitute the number one cause of premature death. It would be autoimmune disorders. There are 88 different diagnoses of different types of autoimmune disease. It would be diabetes, particularly type 2 diabetes. It would be obesity. I could go down the list, but that's a pretty good start. Every one of those conditions that I just mentioned is an immune related dysfunction.

They're connected to the immune system.

Everyone is an imbalanced immune system.

Interesting, really. So when you look at these diseases, you'll see that there was a break or a weakening in the immune system.

That's exactly right.

And that's part of the reason why these diseases were formed or caused, because the immune system wasn't able to fight against whatever forces were coming at them.

Yeah. So let's use an example that probably most people would not be aware of. Let's think of the brain. So people would say, well, these cognitive dysfunctions, early stage dementia, memory loss, foggy brain. That can't be an immune problem, Jeff. The brain is up there all by itself. It's got the bubbling barrier. It's separated from the rest of the body. But it turns out the brain has its own immune system. This is called the microglia. These are cells that are actually in the brain. They were called microglia glias, from the Greek Meaning glue like, because they were just thought to be glue, like cells that glued the neurons of the brain together. But over the last particularly 30 years, it's been found. No, these are actually the brain's immune system and they cross talk with the immune cells that are floating in our blood, which cross talk with the immune cells in our liver, which cross talk to the immune system that's in our gut. Do you realize that 60% of our immune system is clustered around our intestinal tract? Wow. So all of those are crosstalking. This explains why people with gluten neutropathy that can't stand gluten because of their immune problems in their gut. It speaks to their brain and they have higher levels of dementia.

Interesting. So how many immune systems does the body have? Because I'm hearing a brain immune system, there's a gut immune system.

I'm glad you brought that up. This is another probably aha. For some people, the immune system resides in every organ of the body. We have the myokines in the muscles. That's why you get sore chronic muscles. With either over training or under training, you're actually altering the immune system that's producing these inflammatory mediators that are in your muscles. The same thing holds true for the liver. This rising tide of non alcoholic fatty liver disorder that we're now seeing even in kids, that's a consequence of immune system in your liver gone awry.

So why is the liver being affected if someone's not doing alcohol? Is that from processed foods, Sugar, gluten or other things? Or how is the liver being affected to someone in their youth?

Okay, so you're asking superb questions, really fantastic. So here is the operative model of how that occurs. So we would all agree that we've changed our diet considerably over the last hundred years. Even want to say over the last 50 years.

The SAD diet, the standard American diet.

Exactly right. So we have a lot of these ultra processed foods that are very high in blood sugar stimulating effects. And they also bring a lot of other agents into the diet that activate the immune system to say, I don't really think these are friendly to us, they're unfriendly. And when the immune system recognizes a foreigner or a non friend, it has got the principal responsibility of defending us from that. Not just viruses or bacteria. So where does this start? Well, most people eat their food orally and that means it starts in the mouth, you consume, digest into the gut, and now you feed the remnants of that food to your gut microbiota, the so called microbiome the microbiome is composed of literally thousands of different critters, each with a different personality that picks up the information from your food that you've eaten and partially digested. And it then sends signals from its metabolism that are picked up by the intestinal wall where the immune system resides. It's called the gut associated lymphoid tissue, the Galt G A L T. So that immune system that's sitting there in the intestinal tracts, picking up the information from your microbiome, that picks up the information from, from your diet, which is an alarm message because you're reading things that the body doesn't think it should be consuming. And now what does it do? It takes that message into your blood. And where's the first place that that blood goes when it comes out of your intestinal tract? It's the portal blood system that goes right to your liver. So your liver is the drainage organ that takes that information that says, whoa, we're getting a lot of bad pushback here from this diet. We're going to tell our immune cells in our liver that are called the Kupfer cells that they should be aggravated. They then send out a message in the blood that travels to the rest of the body, including to your fat mass. And so now you go from friendly fat to angry fat. And angry fat is where you have a concern about obesity and associated with disease. By, by the way, there is no data that says that being fat will cause a disease. There is a data, strong data saying that those people that have angry fat have fat that's been activated through their immune system imbalance into a state of alarm. They're the one. And of course, that is because of the dice reading. That's the majority of people with increased body mass.

Right, right. You know, fat in itself is not a bad thing, but an overwhelmingly unhealthy.

Amount of fat of the wrong archetype.

Of the wrong archetype.

That's right.

Will potentially be a cause of, you know, type 2 diabetes and other things.

So let me say something that. So for decades, I've run clinical centers, thousands of patients, had many, many research projects we've published over the years. One of my learnings is when a person comes in and they're very worried about their weight and they have elevated blood pressure and they have elevated cholesterol and they have elevated blood sugar. And so they're worried about all sorts of diseases. And they, they say, well, doc, you know, I'm grossly overweight. I know that from the tables, and I've tried to lose weight, but I've been unsuccessful. And if I have to lose 50 pounds, I just am not going to be successful. Well, the data says that you don't need to lose £50. What you need to do is to calm down the immune system that's sitting in that fat that's making it angry. That may be as little as 5 pounds of weight loss, if it's the right type.

Interesting. So getting rid of that bad fat, the angry fat, the unhealthy fat.

That's right, exactly.

Not trying to lose 50 pounds, which is this daunting task. Interesting. Okay, so when did the immune system become something that you wanted to really obsess over with your practice and study and research and just diving into? Was it early in your practice or was it.

Well, you know, when we started the Institute for Functional Medicine, which I'm even saying this I find hard to believe, was 1991. So we're in our 32nd year of that now being codified. We've had several thousand, several hundred thousand people go through its programs over those years. Health practitioners. I was focusing on how these different organs communicate with one another. I was interested in how do we get a disorder, not how we treat it once we have it. I was worried about root cause. I was worried about what's called upstream. And just then, if you recall, that's before the turn of the century. Just then were the new genomic techniques and tools becoming available before we started to decipher the human genome. As we got into then the 21st century and those tools became available, it started to make a lot of what we had been speculating on in the early days of functional medicine look much more well proven. Because now we can actually mechanistically look at how the liver talks to the immune system, how the immune system talks to the brain. And we had tools to actually start examining this from a mechanistic level. Now, let me just finish the story by saying once we had those tools and we were able to start putting the puzzle together into a logical framework, then it allowed us to really go back and say, what are the systems in the body that are the most affected upstream that give rise to this downstream 15,000 diagnoses? And I was very, very fortunate because I've traveled over 6 million miles, believe it or not. I know it's crazy. Who would do that in their life? So that's a whole other story. But. But because of that travel, the benefit it gave me is meeting all sorts of extraordinary, innovative individuals across different disciplines all over the world. And so I started to assemble my list of the people that were really creating this new model. And my wife Susan was very, very insightful one night when I was waxing on and she said, jeff, you know, you've met all these people all over the world, you always speak so highly about them. Why don't we host a meeting? You bring these thought leaders in, it's just a whiteboard to talk about what would the healthcare system look like if it was to be idealized. Take away licensure, take away reimbursement, just talk about the structure of what it would be based on all these people you're talking about. So she hosted, or I guess we hosted, a meeting in Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in Victoria. We brought in about 60 of these thought leaders from different places around the world, different disciplines. And it was really, really an extraordinarily vital three day discussion. Everyone said, hey, this was so much fun, let's do it again. We did it the next year, the second year was when I came up with this concept of calling it functional medicine. And when I went back to talk to the group on that, the last Sunday of the three days, they said, well, uh, we're not sure that that's a good word because in medicine today. Back then, function really referred to two things, either geriatric medicine, dysfunction, physical disability, or psychosomatic medicine. It's all in your mind. It's a functional disorder. And, and that might be really kind of marginalizing what you're saying. But I said, no, you know, I'm reading the literature all the time. And when I'm starting to see articles on functional neurology, functionality, endocrinology, functional cardiology, they're reframing this as an upstream way of looking, using these new tools that will later be downstream pathology, disease. So let's capture that, let's get to where the puck is going, let's capture that as a term. But with some pushback, reticency, the group said, okay, let's give it a whirl. So that then led us into recognizing that there were in group discussions a variety of central processes in the body that were the upstream processes that were imbalanced that gave rise to these downstream collection of diagnoses. And those included such things have. The immune system was obviously one of them. Another was digestive physiology, another was cell communication, another was detoxification, another was intracellular cellular replication and the integrity of how cells replicate themselves into daughter cells without losing their function. So we had these, these six basic functional characteristics that we could measure each one of those physiologically. And so then we started to say, okay, can we prioritize those in terms of how they would go into a clinical management program? Because ultimately we're kind of in this blue sky, ethereal area. We need to translate this for clinicians, how they can deliver this in practice. So we developed a program that was our first kind of clinical tool that I'm very proud of. If someone was to say, Jeff, what is the most the thing is you're most proud of, I think it would be the development of that first program, which we called the 4R program. Those R stood for Remove, Replace, Reinoculate and Repair. We've taught hundreds of thousands of practitioners that program, by the way. Now what does that mean?

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For details it was our gastrointestinal restoration program. We started talking actually about prebiotics, probiotics, endotoxemia in 1985. That was my first seminar for doctors on that topic. And traditional medicine at that point was really calling us way out there. When we finally then codified this program in the early 1990s, the 4R program, it was a way of doctors actually delivering a program to their patients that was easily applied, that people could understand, that would restore proper gastrointestinal, immune and digestive function. So the first R was remove. That was take away bad stuff. That could be exposure to toxins, that could be exposure to bacteria, tainted food, that could be food allergens, things that, you know were alarming your body. That was the first R to remove. The next was replace. And what we found, and it's actually very well known in medicine, is that a great percentage of individuals suffer from digestive insufficiency. So in fact, the cells of our stomach that secrete hydrochloric acid to start a digestive process called the parietal cells. Something like 50% of people over the age of 50 have defective or dysfunctional parietal cells, which means that they're not able to digest a steak dinner as well. And when you talk to people about, oh, gee, I used to be able to eat this heavy meal and it was fine, now I get digestional problems after just a few bites. Well, that's part of the digestive physiology. So we can replace those digestive enzymes as support. That's the second R, is how do you replace them? Well, pancreatic enzymes, like pancreatin, or hydrochloric acid like betaine, hydrochloric.

So taking different enzymes.

That's right, exactly. So that's the second R. The third R then is the reinoculate R. Now, what does that refer to? That is going back and repairing what is now called the microbiome. We didn't know that term when we first started, but now that is what we're talking about. And so that has to do with pre and probiotics, reassembling the proper gastrointestinal physiology with pre and probiotics. That's the third R. What should we.

Be doing with pre and probiotics? Should we be taking them daily? What type should we be taking? How does that work? Because you hear about this a lot now. This yogurt's got good bacteria or prebiotics or probiotics, or take this kombucha or whatever these different things are. Should we be doing these things daily? What does that actually mean?

So as you have advocated with many of your guests that I've heard on your podcast, a diet that takes us back to Dan Buettner and Blue Zones is a diet that, that people have historically eaten that has the capability of nourishing a healthy microbiome.

Right, Like a Mediterranean style diet.

That's exactly right. So you have a high amount of soluble and insoluble fibers because they're not over processed. So these are minimally processed as like a Michael Poland, another person you've interviewed. And those are diets that will deliver the raw materials that are necessary for the body to have a proper microbiome. Now, individuals who are in a treatment regime, because I've been speaking here about doctors applying this to their patients, they need a boost. They may need a therapeutic booster. So then we get into administering a prebiotic and a probiotic supplementation. That's going to get a fire starting to get them going basically in a booster rocket.

Got it. So it's re inoculating, right?

Right. That's what we call it reinoculate. And then the, the last arm is the repair arm and the repair arm is. Are there nutrients that will then restore the damage of the very sensitive one cell thick liner of the gastrointestinal mucosa that separates us from all that toxic junk in our intestinal tract because often that becomes damaged. And that's called dysbiosis is the name that we applied when we started using the term dysbiosis by the way, this was the late 80s again Gastroenterology of the days criticized it said no, that does not exist. And then we talked about endotoxemia, that what happens if you have dysbiosis then leaky stuff goes across because you have a leaky gut that goes into your blood and now you have endotoxemin. And traditional medicine said no, you can't have endotoxemia. You'd have all these people in shock and they'd be in the hospital with toxic conditions. But we said no. We think that there is chronic sub acute endotoxemia that's been proven unequivocally over the last 30 years. Now.

Interesting. Is leaky gut becoming a bigger problem in the world today? And if so, what is the root cause of a leaky gut?

Endotoxemia, which occurs from a dysbiosis, which occurs from a faulty diet and lifestyle.

It's a bad diet and lifestyle causes.

Most and drugs and alcohol. I mean people don't recognize that many of the pharmaceuticals, both OTC and prescription that people are consuming has an adverse effects on their gastrointestinal microbiota which then complicates small bowel overgrowth and all sorts of problems that are associated with inotoxemia.

It seems like you're speaking about drugs.

A little bit there.

It seems like the world is over medicated, over drugged here, here. And I just don't know if the body, again this is my just the view of human nature. I don't think the body is meant to have chemicals outside constantly to, to change the chemistry with inside that much. Now if there's some extreme pain that's going to give some relief or help some, some, some numbing of a pain that until the immune system can heal itself, cool. But what is the difference I guess between modern medicine and natural medicine? And why are we over medicated and how can we start pulling back on.

That medicine, you are asking such great questions. I mean, these are really the fundamental questions of our age. So I want to roll back a little bit to try to get an answer to your question. Years ago, I had the privilege of being invited to China to do a series of lectures, ending up at the Beijing University Medical School and Medical center, the largest medical center and hospital in China. And it was where if a president of the United States was over there, he would be treated. And I was hosted by the chief of staff of the hospital. It was a very prestigious opportunity for me. He then invited his whole senior staff to a seminar I gave on functional medicine, which was kind of staggering, actually. It was obviously translated, my Mandarin isn't that good. And at the end of that presentation, which was a couple of hours, we were giving one another gifts in this ceremony. And I gave him a gift and my translator translated my English. Then he gave me a gift and he started speaking. The translator was going to translate back to English, but he went on and on and on and on. And I was standing there going, in Mandarin? Yes, in Mandarin. And I'm wondering, gee, I wonder what he's saying, because it was really lengthy. And finally I said to my translator, he said, so exactly what is he saying? He said, well, I can summarize it by saying you're the first person he's ever met from the United States who seems to understand traditional Chinese medicine. Now, the reason for that is that if you think about modern pharmacology, how does it work? It works in a specific way. A scientist or some investigator discovers a target in the body. We call it a receptor that is related to some specific disease. So they have made this fundamental scientific discovery that that receptor could be the testosterone receptor or the estrogen receptor. We have thousands of different receptors in the body that some alteration in that receptor, either too active or not active enough, causes this disease or that condition. So then science jumps in and says, oh, then let's go out and screen new to nature molecules, the whole library of molecules, millions of molecules that have been generated in the laboratory from chemist thy memoriam or new ones that we're going to generate. And let's then test them against that receptor. And let's find which of those molecules will most do what we want at that receptor to treat that condition. That is the pharmacological model of our age. And by the way, that's modern medicine, right? It's been very, very successful for, for many things. But you'll notice that it is an acute disease focused model because what you're really trying to do is take all the ambiguity out of a receptor. You're saying, we own you. We're going to put a molecule in your body that is so. Has such an affinity for you that you can't escape from us. Now, that's why we have so many adverse drug side effects, because there's not a lot of wobble once you got that controlled. Now you take the luck of the draw and you may be one of those outliers that doesn't respond as other people respond. So that is a model that's really good if you're in the emergency room, because you don't want a lot of ambiguity. If that person's near death, you want that molecule to go in and do.

Its job, stop it in that moment.

That's right. But now if you take those drugs that were designed really for acute disease management and to extend them into chronic management, so now we'll take a drug that really was designed after two years of study, to go into a person that's going to take it for 20 years for a chronic condition, not an acute condition. Is that the same thing?

No.

And the answer. It's not. It's not. And so now what we start getting is what's called iatrogenic disorders. Right.

What's that mean?

Physician induced or treatment induced disorders that are actually caused by the effects of that molecule. Wow.

Now causing another defect or disease in.

The body which requires another molecule to treat it.

Oh, my gosh.

So now let's go back to my traditional Chinese medicine. How did traditional Chinese medicine develop? They didn't have big chemistry and screening of thousands of new to nature molecules. What they had was nature. And they had empiricism.

They had observation, energy, balance.

That's right.

And what a plant whole system, not just one little part.

And plants have hundreds of bioactive compounds. Now, why do plants have hundreds of bioactive compounds? Because they don't have any. Anything better to do? No, they make those hundreds of bioactive compounds because the plant has evolved to know that that's the symphonic orchestration that's necessary to manage their function. They're not treating the disease, they're managing their function. Now, when we take those molecules out of that plant by extraction, we put them into a tea or whatever, the tincture or whatever. Now we have an orchestra. We don't have just the first violinist. We have an orchestra that speaks to our body and it speaks to our body in what's called an adaptogen. Now, what is an adaptogen? An adaptogen is something that goes to those receptor sites, the same ones I was talking about. The drugs are designed, but it speaks to the receptor site in a different way. If the receptor site is overactive because it's a mellow acting symphony, like a Joukowsky Valse or something, it turns on if it's over, if it's underactive, but it turns off if it's underactive. It's an adaptogen, it's an agonist antagonist. Dual personality. So how does food work? Think of our diets in a natural state. We eat thousands of these nature molecules, we call them plant nutrients or whatever and they come into our body, they're distributed out to our cells. And how do they work? Do they work like drugs? Well, they work on the same body systems that drugs work on, but they have a different personality. They are adaptogens. If we were to eat drugs in our food, think what would happen every time that we ate. We'd be whipsawed around. And so evolution is the biggest scientific study ever done on how to safely manage human health based upon natural intakes of foods and natural products. So I learned a tremendous amount from my visit. I've now taken several visits to China about how the different philosophies translate into a whole different treatment regime. Both of which have benefit depending on when they're used in the right way. In the emergency room and in crisis medicine. We probably want these single molecules in the control of health and function and healthy longevity. We probably want a different set of molecules that are producing this symphonic activity. Now let me give you one last point here and I'll get off my soapbox.

You're good.

Well, the soapbox is this. So because I've thrown this net out in the world of these conversations with the people I've had the fortune of meeting, I had a coincidence. I'm sure you've had this in your life, reading your biography, probably more than once. So within a couple of month period I had three different encounters that you might consider serendipitous or disconnected. But I recognize they were very connected and probably not serendipitous. I first had a conversation with a co investigator at Vanderbilt University Medical School about a new molecule he was studying that was very useful for improving the immune system and lowering blood pressure. I never thought that blood pressure was associated with the immune system, but he was showing me the mechanism by which that relates. And I could go through it, but I won't bore you. So this molecule had a name, 2 hydroxybenzylamine, abbreviated 2 Hova, 2 H O B A. So then I said, well, that's interesting. How did you come on this molecule? He said, well, we didn't do screening. We actually looked at historical consumption of foods and we found that there was only one food that seemed to have this in high level. It's a food called tartary buckwheat. I had never heard of tartary buckwheat before in my life. I said, oh, that's very interesting. So then I go home and I'm invited then by another colleague to go to Harbin, China, northernmost big city, 28 million people, northern China, in between North Korea and Russia for the annual health check center. I was going to speak to 8,000 Chinese doctors about functional medicine. And my host and guide was a Shanghai medical doctor, but PhD in the United States. So he's dual citizen. And so he and I spent this week together. And on the way back from Harbin because there was a typhoon in Shanghai, I said, so Jeff, what about we don't take a plane because the airport's shut? How about if we took the bullet train? Now it's 2,200 miles.

Bullet train?

The bullet train from Harbin to Shanghai. How many miles? 2200. Across the middle of China?

Yeah.

And I said, wow, what an experience that would be. It goes 300 miles an hour. That's crazy. And it's totally vibration free. So it's like China's going by as a diorama and you're sitting in the car, right?

Can't see anything.

It's just like, it's just. And so these, you go through acres and miles and miles of fields and then suddenly a 10,000 or 10 million people city props up and then boom, you're back in the field. So halfway across China, I said to him, I said, I'm going to throw a wild card out here because I know this is a little bit of a strange question, but you know, I've become interested recently. Just before I came on this trip was something called Himalayan tartary buckwheat. And do you know anything about was so amazing. It was like we did a freeze frame. It's like the train stopped and we had freeze frame in time. His eyes got big. He looked at me, goes, you gotta be kidding me. I said, no, why is that? He said, we have been looking for someone in the United States that we could collaborate with. We're the world's expert in the bioactive compounds and Himalayan turtle rebuttal. Wow. My research group is the group in China doing the Most work on this.

Amazing.

And so we developed a partnership. I then came home and this is the third part of this coincidence, and my dear colleague, Trish Urie, who's worked with me for 26 years, but before I left, I told her the tartery buckwheat story. So she, while I was gone, was looking to see where it was growing in the United States. She could find only one person who was a former Cornell University ag professor, retired, and his nurse wife that lived in Angelica, New York, that had a small hobby farm in which they were growing tartary buckwheat. Only people in the United States. Wow. So when I got back, my interest was really piqued. And so I. We made contact. We went out to Angelica Newark. We now own Angelica Farms. And it turns out that he, for a whole series of coincidences, was able to get these artisanal seeds from the USDA that were the original ancient Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat.

That's amazing.

So we now have a Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat organic agriculture with the cooperative farmers. And the reason I'm saying this is it turns out that that problem, the reason I'm so interested in that. That food, by the way, was an American food brought up by our colonial ancestors because it's so hardy, it doesn't need fertilizer, doesn't need any subsidy, doesn't need to be watered. It's tough and hardy because it's grown on the foothills of the Himalayan mountains. But it was lost about 200 years ago in America. I think I know why. But it was no longer in agriculture in the United States. And so I got very interested because the immune activity of the nutrients in Himalayan Tertiary buckwheat, the level of them are 50 to 100 times not percent times higher than any other plant food. Wow. This is like this super food of immune strengthening capability. Wow. So we now have been doing clinical research looking at its effect on immune cells. We've done field trials looking at what happens if we renourish the soil to enhance the phytochemicals in the plant. We're. We're full in. We're the first people in the world, I think, to produce organic Himalayan tartary buckwheat. So it's all part of this immune system story that I've been pulled into over the last few years.

That's a fascinating story. I'm gonna have to ask you how I can get some of that later or.

We're sending you some, so don't worry. It's coming to you.

And I'm also curious, what are the top five foods or superfoods like that to support boosting immune system naturally and really the main things that we should avoid eating that hurt our immune system.

Okay, so can I have a little discussion with you about the word boosting? Sure. I am not a believer in any way, shape or form.

Strengthening.

Well, let me, let me tell you why I'm not for boosting. So during the SARS CoV2 pandemic, what did we see in a lot of people? We saw that their immune systems were racing out of control. They're in a hyperinflammatory state. So if we were to boost their immune system. Does that sound like a good idea? No, it's not. In fact, we were trying to attenuate their immune system.

Interesting.

And so. So strengthen, or I call it balancing. Harmonize. Yes. Because the immune system is intelligent. If you give it the right things, the immune system finds its proper resting point.

Yes.

And so allergies are one. We have now what we call immuno identities. Five different immuno identities that are different archetypes of immunological imbalance. Each one of those represents a different personality as to how people experience the symptoms. And so if you can understand those immunotypes, then you can balance their immune system in ways that that's our whole personalizing of immunity.

What are those identities?

So we have a state that's hyper immune function. That would be a person who is hypersensitive. Inflammation, joint pain, those kind of things. We've got a person that is a variant of that which is pre autoimmune types of disorders, thyroid disorders or joint space disorders. We've got an immune suppressed type where they're susceptible to every cold and flu that comes along. They always get it. And there's a group of individuals that have what we call dormant immune systems. They're not really suppressed, they're just kind of in quiescence. They, they're missing a link to really put them into full activity and full balance.

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And then the fifth one is a balanced immune immune system, which we all want. Which we all we want.

So based on these five immune identities, when we understand what ours is, then we can start to adjust to get more in harmony.

That's what we're doing in big bold health. A little company I decided to focus my energy on because I felt this was a field that hadn't gotten the attention that it really deserved.

So how do we know which identity we have?

We've got a questionnaire. That's the first start. We've got all sorts of tests that we could do that are expensive and sophisticated. But to get started down the road, we have an immune identity questionnaire that's very simple to fill out.

Where do we go to get that?

Where?

Bigbold Health.com Bigbold Health.com Yep. And there'll be a questionnaire.

It's a 30 question questionnaire.

It should give you at least where you think you're at.

Right. It's a broad brush. Right? Right. And I want to emphasize that this immunotype can change. Right. Like it's not just fixed in stone seasonally, yearly. That's right.

Decade, decades, all these different.

Precisely as we age, as we, you know, this whole thing we learned with COVID 19 was pretty powerful, wasn't it? That, that the United States, that we thought was the healthiest nation in the world, had some of the worst outcomes from SARS CoV2 in terms of serious illness and hospitalization and even death from around the world.

Right?

Yeah. We were the worst country in all the developed countries of the world.

Really?

Yes.

Why is that you think?

Well, a lot of people thought it was. Well, it must be because we have more older people. But that wasn't the case. It wasn't solely a consequence of our demographics. It was a consequence of the fact that our immune systems are really compromised in this country. Wow. And that's what really emboldened me to, to get on involved with this. We don't understand that we are all working on this margin without a lot of headspace, we don't have a lot of reserve. Our resilience is compromised and we're, we're living with it because we say, well, I can always go to a drug, I can always go to an antibiotic or equal to anti inflammatory, I can always take an immunosuppressive antirheumatic drug. But all of those have adverse long term health implications. So wouldn't we want to balance our immune system for resiliency rather than try to treat the outcome? That's the whole functional medicine model that is.

Amen to that.

Yeah.

And it's more about performance and balance rather than let's live on margin and then take drugs when we need to, I guess mask the symptoms or feel a little bit better in the meantime. But it's going to create more long term effects is what I'm hearing you say. Negative effects long term to the immune system in the overall system of our bodies.

Very well said. So let's look at endurance athletes. Endurance athletes have a lot of susceptibility to infection and this is well known.

Because they're pushing their immune system that's.

So hard because they're compromising the resilience of their immune system because it's not getting all that it needs. Because remember when you're turning over the immune system more rapidly, it needs more stuff to replenish itself. So if you're on, if you're an athlete and you say, well, as long as you get enough calories, but I'm not concerned about what those calories are, then you end up with potential marginal insufficiencies of various things that are necessary for proper immune function. And one of those families, by the way of nutrients which most people don't put on their list, they think vitamin C or they think zinc or they might think folic acid or vitamin B12, but they probably wouldn't think of flavonoids.

Flavonoids, what are those?

Those are the plant chemicals that I've been speaking about that are part of the Himalayan tartary buckwheat orchestration. We have rediscovered in the field of nutritional biochemistry what we used to consider throwaways in our food. We thought, well, you know, they're not essential nutrients. You can, you won't get a disease like scurvy, Berriberg or Pellagra if you don't have flavonoids. But what you do get is a reduction in your cellular resilience because they are the agents in our diet that tell cells how to communicate with one another through this, this whole process and describing of intracellular communication. Wow. So they have this extraordinarily, you've probably heard about SIRT1 and about AMPK and all the kind of things that are going on now in longevity, nutrition and medicine. Those then tie back to the mechanisms by which these flavonoids actually operate at the cellular level. Resveratrol is a flavonoid?

Yeah, it is a flavonoid.

Yes.

I'm taking a resveratrol supplement.

Yeah. So that's one of. And what we believe is giving the whole orchestration of the symphony because it's the way that our body has learned to operate is by having strings, percussion, brass.

Rhythm, all together, drums, everything. Okay, so back to the foods then.

Let me re.

Ask the question about the right wording. What would you say are the top five foods to harmonize and balance our immune system?

Well, you know, I would start. The reason I'm hedging a little bit is.

And then we can go with supplements too.

Well, the reason I'm hedging is that when I say foods, I could use foods like berries. But people can't live on berries. Right. So berries can be an adjunctive. It's a good immune because it's all of the flavonoids and polyphenols and berries. But if you asked me, would that food sustain life? No, you would have to eat something else. But I would put berries. I would put citrus on that list. But can you live on oranges and tangerines and lemons solely? No, but I would put things like turmeric.

Turmeric, yep.

We know that that has a very powerful effect. I would use. I've used resveratrol as an example with peanuts and peanut skins and grape skins. And there's another thing that has a benefit. I would use garlic and allium family onions. These are very high in immune active nutrients. Let me give you an illustration though. When I say high, I think this is important to put things in perspective. So if I was to ask myself, how many onions would I need to eat to provide the same amount of immune active nutrients found in one serving of tartery buckwheat? Even though onions are called a high flavonoid high quercetin containing food quercetin is one of the members of that of the family. You would have to eat over 10 pounds of onions.

Holy cow.

So most people are not going to eat 10 pounds of onions. Right. So when I say it's a high flavonoid food, it's high relative to other things like lettuce or like meat because meat is hardly any flavonoids. But relative to the supercharged foods, it's still relatively low.

What are the other supercharged foods then besides the. Is the buckwheat?

Well, common buckwheat is also. That would be.

But not as much as the one that you chopped.

Common buckwheat is 50 times lower than tartary buckwheat, but it's still higher than you know, the thing. Most, most all of your whole grains by the way are, are high in immune active vitamins, minerals and. And polyphenols. Now people would say but what about gluten, Jeff? You know, because there's this big.

And the buckwheat or.

Well that's. Buckwheat has no gluten.

No gluten.

I don't know why in the world when it was chosen as a name that they put wheat in the name because it's not related genealogically at all to the grass family, to wheat. Okay, so it is a gluten free product. But if you were to ask me can you name gluten free products that are high immune strengthening products? There are some of the ancient non green, non grain related. I mean oats is a good example. It's a gluten free organic oats are high in these phytochemicals that are immune strengthening. They have what's called beta glucan. Beta glucans stimulates your. There are two major parts of your immune system you probably know. There's the innate immune system which is your first line of defense and there's the adaptive immune system. That's the intelligence. It remembers what you've been exposed to. That's where immunization and being immunized. And again, something comes out of your adaptive immune system. Well, beta glucan and oats activates your first line of defense, which is your. Is your innate immune system. So these would be some examples of things that one could include that would be providing these nutrients.

What would be the top five. I like lists. What would be the top five foods to support you in overcoming illness or chronic disease and helping you live longer? We talk about these as kind of side foods that will support you with your immune system. What do you think of the foods that will support with just overcoming chronic illness and living longer in general?

Okay, so let me start by saying what those foods should not do and then I'm going to say what foods will do the right thing.

Perfect.

You don't want Foods that activate your blood sugar. That is a tenet that connects to virtually every chronic disease when your blood sugar is out of control, not just diabetes.

High blood sugar.

Right, High blood sugar. So that's called the glycemic effect of the food. Glycemic refers to how much it raises their blood sugar glucose. And what we now know is that any food that has the capability of modifying by not elevating your blood sugar after you eat it, is going to have a valuable impact on your overall health and your immune system.

Positive impact.

Yeah, that's right.

What are those foods that keep your blood sugar lower then?

So these are foods, as Michael Poland has said beautifully, that are minimally processed. Because once you start processing a food to simplify it and break it down into its component parts, it then increases its glucose raising effects. So the physical nature of a whole food, even if it has the same nutrients on the label as a processed food, has a very much more beneficial effect upon your health.

So an apple might have a lot.

Of sugar in it versus apple juice.

Yes, right. Which is processed.

Precisely. Or even applesauce. The more processed you get, the more infects adversely your blood sugar after.

Interesting.

Wow.

So I think juice is healthy. It's good. It's juice. Right.

Well, that's one of the problems we're having right now is that parents, I think, are really trying to do a good job with their kids and they're taking away soft drinks, but then they're adding back juices which are very high in sugar. It's natural sugar, but it's still sugar. And it has a high glycemic or a high glucose influence. So I think we're learning a lot of lessons. And you know, unfortunately, the food processing industry sometimes can manipulate consumers into kind of false assumptions or false conclusions. So we have people like you that are truth seekers that are out there giving the real story so that people can make more informed decisions.

And as a nutritional biochemist.

You have.

A lot of farms right around the country. Is that what I read, or you work with a lot of different local farmers?

Our farms that we're producing, the tartery Buckwheat, are all upstate New York.

All in New York. They're all in New York conditions over there for it.

We like the kind of cold winters and we like the buckwheat. The tarbery buckwheat likes to be challenged because it's this hardy plant. So it likes northern climates and likes the kind of soil that kind of duplicates some of its original soil. Sure, sure.

Do you have partnerships with farms or you.

Yeah.

Own the farms or what are they?

Well, we are. We're actively involved in and have been, I think in my case, going back many decades in stewardship of the soil, organic farming. Now we get into sustainable agriculture. How do we get into a. And by the way, this also pertains to the sea. I had an opportunity, now it's seven years ago to do something I never thought in my life I would do. And that's to start with a partner who owns a major fishing company in Alaska to build the first pharmaceutical grade plant in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, in The Aleutians, some 500 miles out on the tail of Alaska into the Bering Sea.

A pharmaceutical grade plant.

A pharmaceutical grade manufacturing plant. A manufacturing plant in which we're able to take the fish from his ships. And his ships are uniquely different because nobody in the crew is on the deck. They are all below deck. The fish are brought in. Fish, one fish at a time on a hook and line. They come in and they're processed on board. They are then frozen to minus 20 within 20 minutes of a live fish, which captures all of their nutritional value. Wow. And that is then brought back to our manufacturing plant in Dutch harbor, off.

The sea in Alaska, as we said.

Exactly. Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska.

So you built a manufacturing plant first.

First ever.

Is it in the sea or is there land that it's on top of all this?

Dutch Harbor Island, I don't know if you know, the Aleutian Archipelago. It's a really interesting chain of islands in Alaska. Right. They go all. It's the tail of Alaska. If you look at the map, that goes all the way down almost to Siberia. Wow. And they're islands. These are volcanic islands. Each island is like a volcano unto itself.

It's like the Hawaii of the north.

Yeah, right. Some people consider Hawaii to be the extension of the Aleutian Islands. Wow. So that island processes a billion dollars worth of fish products a year. One of the major fishing ports in the world. Wow.

Okay, so your plan, what is it designed to do that?

It's designed to be able to take the frozen things that come off the boats, come in and keep them cold, process the oil so that we end up with a fish oil no one else in the world can produce, that retains all of the natural.

Come on, really?

Yeah, yeah. We have the highest levels of proresolving mediators in that oil that are about 100 times more anti inflammatory than normal fish oils. So it's all part of this meeting. This again, my hobby, which is boating and meeting this fisherman some five years ago. And then we've developed this relationship.

My goodness, that's amazing.

It really has been amazing, actually. And we got a grant from the state of Alaska to train young Native Alaskan, young women and men to become chemtechs. We built a whole facility and we now have members of the Native Alaskan Development Group on our board. Because you can't own shoreside land in Alaska unless you have Alaskan partners. Native partners. So we've learned a tremendous amount about native culture. Wow. It's. It's really been quite an education for me. Wow.

So is this where you eat all your fish then? So, yeah, they can ship it anywhere or where's the. How's the shipping work?

Well, we, again, we, we have partnership with a variety of suppliers. We're not into the commercial fish business, but it allows us now to actually build a sustainable. In fact, I'm very proud. We're not only MSC certified, which is Marine Stewardship Council Sustainable fishery, but we're now a higher standard which is only available in the state of Alaska, which not only certifies that the fishery is sustainable, but the shoreside community is sustainable. They audit the communities, the workers, fair wages, health plans on the shore side, so that your culture has to be stable as well as your fishery.

It's like the Michelin star of, you know, fish manufacturing.

Yeah, that's what we think. And we're the first and only oil manufacturer supplement that has that dual certification. So it's, it's this for me, you can see it's just been.

I got to get access. I got to figure out how I can buy some of this fish in the oil.

We're sending you this stuff so you'll, you'll be having a chance to check it out.

And so if. So when they. So they can pack it within 20 minutes, keep it cold and then process it and ship it and still keep this nutritional value.

Yeah, it's.

Even if it's a week later, it's like arrives at someone's door.

In fact, it's better than fresh. Now why is it better than fresh? This is something I've learned, actually. So when we buy fresh fish in the storm, and I learned this by going up to Norway and being in Iceland and being in Alaska on the fishing boats, is that fresh means you've caught it by whatever mechanism. Generally it's net, but it could be other mechanisms seining that fish is brought in on the boat and it is Put in the hold with ice. So it's iced down now.

It may be still alive.

Or is it. No, it's dead.

Okay.

And so now it's on ice for some number of days until that ship gets back to offloading at the processing.

Then it fillets it in the process.

Right? Yeah. And so even at ice temperature, the body of a fish is degrading. Right. Interesting. And so you end up with a different texture, a different flavor, a different nutrient composition slightly. And you can measure this. There are things that we measure call anisidine and. And lipid peroxides in the fish that tell us how much aging it's undergone.

This is amazing. So. So they fillet it within like 20 minutes or an hour or whatever it is when they catch it.

Right? 20, 20 minutes.

They catch it, fillet it, pack goes.

It goes. Oh, I'm. I'm sorry, I'm. You're speaking about the normal process.

Your process, our process.

It goes into deep freezers at minus 20 degrees. Wow. So it's frozen to capture on the boat. On the boat. These are all specially designed filleted skins, deboned.

And then it's.

They're put in separate trays. It's actually beautiful the way he designed. He's a marine architect, my partner, and he designed these ships so that there are racks that go into these deep freeze that then the fish product doesn't sit on top of it. It's all cosmetically laid out so that it's all individual.

That's amazing. Okay. Is that where you get your fish?

Yeah, absolutely.

It shifts to you and it tastes better than like fresh cod, organic fruit, whatever it is. Wild Alaskan that they're selling at the store.

Yeah. So let me give you an example how this works in market dynamics you'd be interested in. So normal fish, either salmon or cod. Cod on traditional methods may have a varying price. But let's take code as an example of probably something like on the wholesale market. $1.15 a pound. Say the fish that are then sold out of this process to high tier restaurants because of its quality, sell for $3 a pound because the difference is.

So perceptible to the consumer taste in it so much.

Wow.

Fascinating.

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Whew.

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Well, most of the fish that people eat is from fish farms, correct? It's like mostly, you know, in a contained water aquarium essentially, that may be out in the ocean, but in like its own container where it's not like a wild fish.

Correct. Yeah, that's a whole nother process. Yeah, that's. I don't know if you've seen the book Salmon wars that was just published that really talks about this whole fish farming controversy, let's put it that way. Obviously, we in Seattle and up in Alaska are very much against fish farming. And Alaska does not allow fish farming. They made a decision as a state that the preservation of their wild fishery is their unique point of entry. And so we don't have any wild. Like we don't have Atlantic salmon in Alaska. Atlantic salmon are the ones that are fish farmed and when they get loose and they populate with the wild, replicate with the wild salmon and change the whole genes.

Really. Wow, this is fascinating. There's so much I need to learn about this stuff. What about the meats, non fish meats? What do you. Are there certain meats that you will only eat? Is there some that are better than others in terms of immune support and health for the body?

Yes. You know, this is another. I, I probably should give a caveat. I'm pretty much a non red meat eater myself. But with that said, for 10 years I was on the board of the first organic meat company certified in the United States, Coleman Natural Meats in Saguache, Colorado. It was really a fascinating experience for me. I was the head of their scientific group that was really measuring the level of pesticides, herbicides or chemicals that were in the meat. Because their animals were raised in the absence of any veterinary medicines, no antibiotics in the feed. They were not said to feed lots. And so their positioning was we have certified, tested, residue free products. And the reason that that company was founded, and this I think you'll find interesting was the. The founders were fifth generation cattle ranchers, the Coleman family. When I met Mel and Polly Coleman, and they had been raising their beef traditionally on their ranch, which was, I think it was the highest elevation cattle ranch in America at the time, something like that, 11,000ft or something on their upper pasture.

Or is this Colorado?

Or is this in Colorado? And so the wife, Polly, who was the quintessential western woman rancher, horse rider, roper, chef, I mean everything, she became allergic to their own beef. And so they go and do these store demos because they felt their meat tasted so good and put them on a toothpick and do store demos. And she got. So every time she would eat some of their meat, she would end up in allergic reaction. So she told her husband Mel that something was going on. Even though they were trying to be very careful when the animals went to the feedlot, they must be getting something that's making this meat so that I can't eat it anymore. So they made a decision, was kind of risky decision at the time. Okay, we're giving up all that kind of commercial beef production that we are in the Cattlemen's association and history and our families, you know well and scotch in this technology, we're giving it up and we're going to a total natural beef production system which was kind of made them expatriates from the cattle ranching community.

Interesting.

And so they then, fortunately, early on met John Mackey at Whole Foods and was able to be picked up at Whole Foods as an alternative natural meat. But they were trying to get a designation with the U.S. department of Agriculture to be a naturally labeled beef.

Okay.

But the Cattlemen's association, as you can imagine, pushed back extraordinarily hard on that because they didn't want a distinguishing different kind of meat that would make theirs appear less, whatever, less desirable. And so that was when they put a scientific advisory group together and they hired me to run that as a consultant to run that group. So we worked with the USDA and all this testing process and for five years fought many battles in court basically. And eventually they were successful in winning the designation of natural meat through the usda. That opened the gateway then for many other companies to start doing that. And we actually certified other ranchers with our process and our group did all the testing. So what I. I guess the input of the story is that then Polly Coleman was once again able to eat her Own product, her allergies went away. Wow.

Now why did they go away? What was the process that switched?

Because no longer were they going into feedlots and getting exposed to chemical processing and antibiotics and medicines. Gotcha.

So that's what was causing it. Gotcha.

And people used to say early on to me, I wrote an op ed for the New York Times on this, early on, and I got heavily criticized saying, no, hold it. There is none of these things that appear in the meat. I mean, it's all excreted out, it's processed. And that's a bunch of. You're sensationalizing and you're making people paranoiac. But it's turned out that, no, we were right. Wow.

Based on what they're eating, it's causing you to have reactions.

That's right.

What they're eating.

That's right. The immune system says, that's a foreigner. Even though it's at levels that are parts per billion levels, our immune system is that sensitive to some of these chemicals.

So it really matters what we eat.

Oh, boy, does it ever. And the immune system is our telltale. It'll tell us. Should we.

I mean, listen, this is like, I guess, a privileged conversation for a lot of people to talk about, but should we be really thinking about eating from local farms?

The.

The most we can, you know, if we can afford those things, or what should we be thinking about? If we're shopping at the grocery store, we're ordering out, you know, we're getting foods out at different places. We're not cooking ourselves versus going to the local farmer's market. What should we be thinking about when we're choosing food?

I think you really hit it right there. You know, the journey of life starts us with single steps, and we're not going to transition this food supply system overnight into something that's regenerative or all organic or take these chemicals out of there. A lot of people are saying, well, hold on. If you did, Jeff, what you're advocating en masse, we'd reduce our food production. We'd produce starvation. And, you know, that's not a good idea. It turns out, however, that's a more complicated story than it might appear at the first level because we have so much food waste in this country. If we just cut food waste down, we could easily change our agricultural systems to meet the demands of individuals. So that's a whole other sidebar question as to why we waste so much food. But let's just stay on point here as it relates to changing our agricultural system. When we first started advocating organic standards and certification as an industry, this became the birthing of the natural foods industry, which is now, I think it's a $65 billion industry. No one believed that that was ever going to happen. Farmers are not going to go for this. It will reduce their profitability. They can't make a living. People don't care. But we were post. Adele Davis, we were post silent. The whole nature of pesticide residues producing difficulties in health and particularly children. So we had a lot of mothers that started to get very active and be proactive in this movement. It's starting to pick up steam. This would have been in the, in the 80s for me. And we started to take groups to D.C. and really start talking to people, put position papers together. Wow. So over time, organic agriculture through the Organic Farming act, was certified by law. And you might say Today, of the 870 million acres of farmland in the United States, what percentage are organically farmed? And it's. It's a very small percentage. It's less than 3%. Less than 3% of the total area of farmland in the United States.

800. How much?

Million. 870 million acres.

870 million acres of farmland where we're growing food.

Yes.

3% is.

Well, just a minute, I need to be cautious. Yes, because we're growing crops, but only 50% of that is a bit food. Because the two major crops, let's see, 100 million acres is corn and 80 million acres is soy. And 50% of that doesn't go to food. It goes to forming ethanol and forming other substances that are not eaten directly by humans. So we've used our land in different ways as an economic driver, but the organic movement still is an agent of positive change that is growing. So when someone says, could we transition agriculture over to sustainability using limited chemical intervention? The answer is, yes, we can do that. That technology does exist. And we talk about, you know, carbon capture and climate change. You know, an acre of organic land will capture about a ton of carbon per acre per season. A non organic farm captures about a half a ton of carbon per acre.

Interesting.

So there's all sorts of things as part of the story that we could go on and on and on. But I believe given all the imperatives that we have for survival, maybe things that we think we thought were not so possible now become more possible.

What has been in the 40 years of your, you know, research and dedication to the immune system, but also understanding nutrition and food and farming and all these different areas of the body and Also just human nature and nature in general. What has been the biggest transformation in the last four decades that you've seen in the. I guess the medical system and the health and wellness space? So that's number one.

Yeah.

And what do you see is going to happen over the next couple of decades that is possible for the medical system and health and wellness? That hasn't happened yet.

So let's both take a deep breath, oxygenate our neurons, because this is the dream state that I'd like to capture this moment. Okay, so I'm going to use a symbol to answer your question, because your question is so omnibus and so important that I want to use something that people might be able to identify. So what is something that we sitting at this table can show as a symbol of a change that no human species in the experience of this planet has ever had that relates directly to their potential health outcome? And I'm going to show you it. This is an Oura ring. This is an Apple watch.

Yeah.

Biometrics. No human culture or human being prior to the last 10 years has been able to measure their biology 24 7, 365. Right now, what happens is when you can do that, you start owning your body at a different level. It's like continuous glucose monitoring that people are putting on their bodies. Now. Let me give you an example of this. Early on with SARS COV2, I've been wearing my Oura ring and my Apple watch time since beginning. I noticed that my Oura ring was telling me that my readiness score in the morning, which was Constant in the 80s or maybe in the low 90s, my readiness score for two days went down. And I thought, well, why is that? Why am I readiness where I'm doing all the same things? Readiness score is a calculated algorithm on this that measures your heart rate while you're sleeping, your body temperature and sleeping, your heart rate variability, Your. I said pulse rate and your oxygen and he was. And your sleep and fitness by steps. And it was going down. Now, my life had not changed, so why would it go down? In fact, it changed so much that it went one day down to 60 where it was normally in the high 80s.

You still had the same routine, went to bed at the same time.

That's right.

The right foods, all that stuff.

Okay. Three days later, I got sick.

Oh, so it prompted you.

My immune system is what I was measuring. Wow. I wrote an article on this. I did a series of blogs. They went viral. And the Oura Ring company now has all sorts of studies going on to use this biometric as a way of starting to assess your immune system if.

It'S weakening, if something is under attack, early warning.

So these tools that we have, and now of course, the apple watch. You can measure your cardiac rhythm, you can measure your oxygen sat. Soon you'll be able to measure your glucose and blood pressure. Once you are able to do that 24 7, you have a laboratory of your body that no one's ever had access to. Wow. Now you can start to tune. You can be your personal coach. Now, the reason that I think that's so powerful is that in the medical world of today, we don't have all the resources that are available to treat each person individually. The best we can do is for people to go to the emergency room when they got a problem and hopefully get the best of care. But the daily tuning up of your body based on your aspirations for good health, we just don't have all the resources capable of doing that. These tools provide us that opportunity. And so now what I'm witnessing is a transformation in which the disease care system is starting to de dock and separate from the health care system. And I've been saying for 40 years that health can't be owned by the disease care system. There are just two different languages. There's nothing wrong. In fact, there is a lot of good things about the disease care system, but you can't have health owned by disease care. Health has to be over here, personalized and accessible with a whole different set of tools.

And also, disease care system, I guess, really has no incentive of you being healthy. Well, there is financial.

Well, there is, there is that as well.

And so there's a conflict of interest because they want you buying something that you need to take so that you're like preventing the disease just enough but not fully curing it so you can keep buying it.

Right. Well, let me give an example that's very, to me, optimistic and is a feel good experience. So when we started the Institute for functional medicine in 1991, there was a lot of pushback from my colleagues saying, jeff, your advocacy is noble, but you're never going to get docs who are already licensed to go back and pick up these textbooks and to study biology and cell function and nutrition and so forth, pathology, immunology, blah, blah, blah. I mean, they've already been through enough school. They're sick and tired of it. They're licensed. They're not going to do that. Well, I'm here to say 32 years later that these individuals, these several hundred thousand People that we've had the privilege of working with demonstrate that's not right. There are impassioned, dedicated people that take time out of their practices at their own financial loss. They go home at night and they study these textbooks that they have a need to know. They come back and they take hard exams to be certified that are as hard as their board certified exams. They are totally dedicated to patient care and to what I call re enchanting themselves to why they went into medicine. Right. The problem that doctors have today often is they had advocacy. And I can say this, having been a medical school professor and seeing the light of excitement in these young people's eyes, that they were going to go out and help the world. Then I see them 30 years later when they're worn out and tired and they've just had that spark just drained out of them because they don't feel like they're really getting people well. They feel like they're a surrogate to the drug company prescribing medicines. So when we can give these people the opportunity to really work with patient centered healthcare and see the results that these things produce in terms of upstream root cause outcomes, they are exalted to go to their books and to dedicate themselves. So I'm very optimistic that we're watching a transformation occur right before our eyes, really.

So that's the biggest thing. Do you feel like everyone should be tracking in some way, whether it's a ring or a watch or something? Do you feel like that's.

Well, I think there are different glucose.

Monitor, you know, all these things.

I'm sure you found this in your people you speak to and your friends and colleagues. There are different levels of geekism.

Yes.

I mean, some people, I'm probably way on the edge of the biohacker and times I was wearing, you know, multiple different kinds of devices. I'm way off the edge. But I think that there will become more and more acceptance of these tools as they become cosmetically attractive. They don't look clunky, they're not bulky, and the information, this is the key, doesn't require them to be expert. It goes to the cloud automatically. It gets AI'd with generative AI. It comes back to them in a usual way that's personalized to their language, their culture, their ethnicity, their desires. And now we truly get a personalized healthcare system.

That's interesting. If you could only use one device consistently, would you use the ring or the, the watch if you had to pick one?

I've had such an intimate relationship with my rings because I got this for the first generation and this, this is a new Apple watch for me. But I probably just for the convenience. Stay with the ring.

Stay with the ring. But the Apple watch gives you a lot of data too.

Well, now, now the Apple watch has your cardiac rhythms on it, which you don't have on your.

Interesting. Lorraine Gotcha.

So different tools for different things. You're interested? Wow.

Okay, this is fascinating. What else do we need to know about balancing and harmonizing our immune system or anything else that you feel like we should be aware of to prepare and optimize performance over these next few years?

Well, you know, you asked me the question and I thought it was a really good leader question and why did I land on immunity? And we've gone around this topic, you know, from different angles. Immunity is, is a way station point of entry. There are many doors into health. It just happened that given all the concerns that people had relative to infectious disease, that immunity was the topic to hear. But it, it's, it's not the only way to get into health. You could get into health fitness and cardiovascular fitness and musculoskeletal fitness. You could get into it through gastrointestinal fitness. You could get in through a neurological fitness. It's my belief that there are four quadrants of function that people aspire to perform at high levels.

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All healthy, happy.

That's right. Yeah. Most of us probably don't experience all those tuned up in the same day all the time. So we're constantly in aspiration. But some people of those fours have more common problems in one of them than the others. And that is maybe where they want to start. And so that's what we've tried to do in this big, bold health model. We've tried to say we want to give you a point of entry into owning your health. And the immune system is a place because the immune system so rapidly responds to what you're doing that you'll get quick feedback. And we all like to get quick feedback. We like to know what we did really made a difference. We don't want to just move a number, we want to move our performance.

Sure.

So that's kind of how we landed on the immune system. But it's not the only gateway into taking charge of our health.

What's your biggest fear and concern at this season of your life? With all the information you have with where you're at personally and professionally and where you see things happening in the Future?

Well, at 77, you know, as I was saying to you, I hope that's a double sevens. That means a lucky double sevens. Yes, but clearly the number of years ahead are less than the years behind. That's a fact. So what's my singular, most important commitment to whatever those days ahead might bring is to do a pay forward. I've had a privileged life. I've traveled 6 million miles. I've met extraordinary people like you, people that are advocating for others to be better, for our society to improve, for culture to be more understanding and tolerant and benevolent, and for people to have joy. And that experience that I've shared with so many people just got passed through my lens because of my background in biosciences and the way that I communicated. But it is really an advocacy that I have the responsibility, because of this fortune, to pay for it. And I pay for it through watching how my grandchildren are responding to their grandfather as kind of a litmus test and how people that are now becoming the leaders, how they're picking up and modifying what I've been trying to advocate for a number of years. And is some of this stuff sticky that I've been doing? And if it's not, why? And can I modify the way I'm languaging it in a way that makes it more sticky? So my thing is all about pay forward. And, you know, I'm in a very privileged place. I don't have to make a living. The college education for my grandchildren are all put away in trust funds.

Amazing.

My wife and I are very fortunate. We have no debts. So if we have bad days, it's our own fault. And so, you know, what do we want to do with those days and how do we want to leverage the fortune that we've had? And that's why to me, Big Wolf Health is more than just a name. Because being bold about your health means you're not apologetic. You state who you are, you're transparent, and you try to advocate for other people to both aspire and achieve that which is given to them to have great lives. Right. Wow.

It's beautiful. So what is Big Bold Health and how can we get involved?

Well, everybody can go to our website. We've got all sorts of podcasts and information there about all sorts of things. I was mentioning to you early on that I was told by one of my colleagues that I was maybe one of the earliest podcasters because in 1979 I started a series of educations called Functional Medicine Update on audio cassette tape that then Transferred over to CD later and later transferred to a Stix later went live cast. I did it for 31 years, never missing a month.

That's amazing.

And I had subscribers to that all 31 years. So long that their kids had become doctors.

Amazing.

And started to subscribe. So I think there are so many ways that we can give and be purposeful and have a life of meaning and still be who we need to.

Be in the world.

Right.

That's beautiful. And there's a program at Big Bold Health as well that we can go through.

Yeah, we have what's called the immunity plus program, which is a 90 day program. We have an app that guides people that has daily lessons introducing a person to ownership of their immune system. And we just finished a very interesting Clinical trial that was Clintrials.gov registered. You can look it up on the Clintrials.gov website. In which we looked at the effect of these Himalayan ternary buckwheat nutrients on the immune age of 50 human beings. And we found people that had aged immune systems. We could reduce their immune age by within 90 days, by six to seven years.

Come on.

Yeah.

So their biological age, you could.

Yes.

Put back in time precisely just from this one ingredient.

Well, it's a combination of all the ingredients within Himalayan tartary buckwheat.

Really? But by taking this. Himalayan tartary buckwheat.

Is that you call it now? Why Tartar?

90 days?

Yes.

You could reverse the biological age of people that had.

Had. Had immune age that was greater than their chronological age. We could reduce it. Oh, wow.

So it was greater than the chronological age. You could reduce it back to their kind of chronological.

In some cases below their chronological.

Oh, my gosh. 90 days. To tell you this. I got to take this. Okay. It's amazing.

Well, this has been.

This has been documented. This is everything.

Yeah, yeah, we are. We're. We're just writing up the paper for publication. And we thought the other thing we did, which you might find interesting, is because we started now to understand the interrelationship between the immune system of the soil to the immune system of plants, to the immune system of animals to the immune system of people who eat those animals. We started to ask the question, what would happen if we renourished the soil of our farms? Now, our farmers, recall, are all organically certified. They've been at least 20 years organic. These are good farmers. And in fact, we have a little video on our website at Harvest. And when you hear the stories from our farmers and our millers, you can't help but be impressed how passionate they are, what they're doing. And so we started. We have a soil scientist, Dr. Emily Reese, at work, Cornell PhD, that works for us on this project. And so we started inoculating the soil with different friendly bugs, like its own microbiome. And then we asked the question at the harvest, did we change the level of these phytochemicals so that we can enhance the level of these nutrients? And lo and behold, we can. By improving the immune system of the soil, we improve the immune system of the plants, which then improve the animals. Right. Wow. So this is a web that we're living in, a web of interaction. We tend to segment things out. We have kind of an anthropocentric view of humans, and then Everything else. But we're all part of this web of interaction and the more we study it, the more we understand how we're interconnected.

This is amazing. I want people to go to your website, Big Bold Health. They can go there and learn more about this. Do you have also a list of farms around the country that is using these processes to enhance the soil and the, the farming system or.

No? That's a really good question. We haven't actually. We've got that list, but we've never actually published and I would be maybe a little bit wary as to how we would do that because we probably offend somebody that we missed.

Gotcha.

You know how it is if you say, well, what about me? And we, well, we didn't know about you.

So every year you can update it. Yeah, every, every quarter you say, hey, okay. You petition to be on this.

Okay.

Interesting. I want to acknowledge you, Dr. Jeff, for, for your 40 plus years of dedication to this cause, this mission of helping people have better performance with their overall health, with their immune system, with looking at their health as this web and not just as a, you know, parts that could have a disease or something, but looking at how everything plays into that. And for your joy for life, your joy for people, your joy for adventure and continual service. I'm really grateful for you on how you show up in the world and I'm so glad we had this conversation. I have a couple final questions for you. This is called the three truths question. So imagine it's your last day, many years away. You get to live many more decades and accomplish what you want to accomplish, live the way you want to live. And for whatever reason, all the things that you've ever published and the conversations and the books has to go away to the next place. But you get to leave behind three lessons with the world. And this is all we would have to remember your content from these three truths. What would be those three truths for you?

Well, you know, this is interesting. I did an exercise when I was in my 40s, I went to a personal development seminar and one of the questions was, what would you like written on your tombstone? And that has not changed actually at all for me over the 37 years since that 40 year birthday. I said I'd like on my tombstone to say he was a teacher. Because I think to be a good teacher, you have to be a good learner, you have to be a good listener. You have to be a person who understands difference of opinions and accepts and incorporates those that really work for you. So that that would be one. But the others would be. I think that. That I would like people to recognize that health resides within all of our genes. And what happens is we get this derailed because we get subliminally seduced, we get marketed. Time becomes compressed. We don't always make the most intelligent choices, and we become casualties of our own lifestyle and environment. And none of us are going to live perfect lives. That's not realistic. But I always believe in the 90% of rules. You know, people say, well, where would you start? I say, give up sugared soft drinks. You know, that is the first step. No one should be drinking them. And then you can go down the list. Right. Of hierarchy. So to me is just people recognizing they're in charge of how their genes are going to express themselves into their function and that we're getting information all the time from how we live in our environment that is translated by our genes into how we look, act, and feel. You know, obesity just doesn't happen magically. It happens because information that our genes are processing have given rise to the collection of calories and for a rainy day that never comes into our fat mass. So all these things tend to weave together about the importance for us being in charge of the most important precious gift that we have ever been given. That makes us the jewel on the facet, on the diamond of life, which is our genome. It's ours, ours alone. It'll never be duplicated unless we're cloned, which. That's a whole other story. Yeah, of course.

Okay, that's number two. What's number three?

Well, number three, I think, is to recognize that health is really determined by our function, not by the absence of disease. And, you know, in 19, I think it was 47 when the health, the World Health Organization was first being formed. It set a mandate as to what health would be. World health. And it was the full expression of physical, physiological and mental and emotional health. It wasn't just they didn't mention absence of disease once in that definition. I think that's what I would aspire for people to understand that absence of disease is not the presence of health. Health is a determinant based on our function.

That's beautiful. Before I ask the final question, I'm curious side question. What was the biggest lesson Coach Wooden taught you while playing at UCLA and winning a championship under him?

I think it was two lessons. It was discipline. He was a master of discipline. And it was respect. Respect for who you are. I'll never forget an occasion at a practice where one of the five stars high school athletes that was recruited onto the team was not behaving within the context of the structure that Wood was advocating.

The ground rules.

That's right. And he was a master of giving warnings. But you could tell they were well stated, clear. And on the second or third time, I can't remember that this incident happened. He called out the player in the middle of practice as Mr. With his last name, showing respect, asked him to leave the court and dismissed him from the team after practice. It was a big media thing because this person was going to be a star. He ended up going to the NBA later for a different school. And I thought I learned a lesson from that example of what respect is all about. Respect for yourself. Because it was that player that was disrespecting himself. He wasn't disrespecting the team or the coach. He was disrespecting himself. And he actually got himself into trouble when he was in the NBA later.

In the NBA.

Yeah.

He never learned the lesson. Or he didn't.

That's right.

Interesting. Wow. So he dismissed him from. After a couple warnings, he dismissed him from practice, then decided, this guy's not good for our culture and our team.

That's correct.

He's not living up to the code that we have, the code of conduct or whatever it was. And so he removed him from the team and then he transferred schools.

Yes.

And then went on to be a star player at another school and went to the NBA.

And it was a big media thing on the LA Times. You know, a lot of people thought this was. Yeah. Bad move, but it was. It was smart because that year.

Wouldn'T.

Won a national championship.

So he won that year.

Yeah.

That was your sophomore year.

Yeah.

So he won. Was that his first national championship or. No, he won the few before.

I think that was the second, actually. I think freshman year was his first.

So he made a tough call to let go of a top. Arguably one of the top athletes on the team. The best players, maybe.

Certainly from his pedigree. Yes.

Right. And said, hey, you're not. Right. You know, you might have a lot of talent, but that talent isn't welcome here if you're going to have this behavior. So I'm going to respectfully ask you to leave.

Yeah.

That's a bold move.

Bearable. And. But that was. He was a man of great integrity. That's why he's still cherished by so many. Wow. The new him. Wow. I had two. Other than my own father, I had two other male important figures wooden being one and and the second or the third was I had the privilege of of taking two sabbatical year leave with Linus Pauling, two time Nobel Prize winning Laureate at an institute at Stanford. And those three men really were very instrumental in forming my view as to what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it as a man.

That's beautiful. This is inspiring. I'm so glad that you're here and sharing everything I've got. The final question is what's your definition.

Of greatness to be respected by those people that you respect? You know, I've been criticized many, many times by many people because I've not always taken a politically kind of middle of the road opinion on certain things. But that's actually only sharpened my focus and allowed because criticism can be a very powerful way of evaluating your own thoughts and principles. But it's how my the people I greatly respect, how they respond that is really to me the truth teller. It's the the way that I evaluate how I'm proceeding.

I hope today's episode inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a rundown of today's show with all the important links and if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me as well as ad free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness plus channel on Apple Podcast. If you enjoyed this, please share it with a friend over on social media or text a friend, leave us a review over on Apple Podcast and let me know what you learned over on our social media channels. Lewishouse I really love hearing the feedback from you and it helps us continue to make the show better. And if you want more inspiration from our world class guests and content to learn how to improve the quality of your life, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over@greatness.com newsletter. And if no one has told you told you today, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.

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