The Groundbreaking Science Behind Reprogramming Your Genetics | Dr. Jeffrey Bland

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With this whole concept of making what used to be called soft science really become hard science. That these constructs of how we think about ourselves, how we vision ourselves, how we communicate in internally to ourselves about our identity in the planet, are influencing in real time 247 how our genes are marked and how they will create our function going forward. That is a huge revolution.

Hey, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, and by trade and training, a high performance psychologist. I'm excited to learn from a legend, Dr. Jeffrey Bland. And after spending the last four decades deeply studying the improvements of human health, Jeff has earned his nickname as the founder of functional medicine. To be a founder of anything, especially medicine, is legit. So his pioneer work has created the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute as well as the Institute for Functional Medicine, both recognized as global leaders in functional medicine education. Jeff's latest project, Big Bold Health, is on a Mission to transform the way people think about one of nature's greatest innovations, the immune system. Jeff, I'm really excited to sit with you. How are you?

Well, I can't tell you how pleased and excited I am to have this opportunity to talk with you. What you're doing is right where the tip of the spear resides in terms of people making positive changes that really impact their performance, their health, their wellness, and the ability to give to others. So I'm really very appreciative of the opportunity to have this discussion with you.

That surprised me, and I'll tell you why that surprised me, is because one, honestly, and I feel like I'm bending knee a bit here because of what you've contributed to the field. And then if I took me out of that equation and I just listened to the way that you reframed it, like are. Are you fundamentally optimistic and grateful? Are those. The two. Are those two of the leading kind of character traits that, that you work from?

I'm unbelievably grateful. You know, I've had this, as you mentioned, this four decades of life experience. It has taken me 6 million miles of travel around the world and I've met the most amazing people in those travels. I've seen a lot of hotel rooms too, that I can't say are that exciting. But the people that I the travels were unbelievably stimulating. I'm kind of a composite mosaic of all these experiences I've had with people. I've been pretty good listener, I think, and I've tried to incorporate a lot of the learnings that I've had the privilege of being associated with, both in the people that work with me for me and the people that have been my educators. I've learned from all sorts of individuals and tried to bring those learnings together into kind of a, I guess you'd call it a style that can be delivered to improves people's function. I see function as being encoded in four different categories. One is your physical function. I think all of us want physically to perform throughout the course of 100 years of living or more. Second is our cognitive function, being able to think and act rationally and responsibly and quickly and process, have high processing speed. Third is our metabolic function. My formal training, both through medical school and my PhD was really in the whole aspect of metabolism. And so I think physiological health is a functional importance. And then lastly is our behavioral function, how we interact with this complex socio political, economic, cultural environment that we're living in a world that's really undergoing a transition in how people interact with one another as a consequence of the Internet and social media and so forth. All of these behavioral constitutions are other variables that relate to our function. When aggregated together, then become us in our function as a whole organism.

Okay, so you took the words right out of my mouth is like asking you for a flyover for functional medicine, and you just did it. How do you conceptualize the role in nutrition for functional medicine?

Yeah. Thank you.

So, you know, as I try to simplify the complexity of life, and we all know that there's always more questions to be asked and more answers that to be found. But when I try to look at principles that aggregate human experience together, there are some that I think are reproducible across all human beings that have lived on the planet. And that is, we breathe air, we consume fluids, principally, hopefully water. We eat and we move. Those four characteristics then define shared common human experience. Now, we do those things in different ways, and they impact us in different ways based on how our genes are set up and how we select to utilize those four characteristics in our life. But nutrition, because it constitutes such an important variable that modulates our function, as we probably, maybe most people don't recognize this. Over the course of living, we'll eat between 10 and 20 tons of food. 10 and 20 tons of food. The things that make up those foods are molecules. I come from a molecular background, molecules that are not native to our human body. So our body has to understand how to break down that information that comes from our diet. Because our diet is not just nutrients alone. It's information that speaks to our genes, that tells our body how it's going to perform. That concept is a breakthrough concept of the 21st century. So it's not just preventing nutritional deficiency or satiety and quenching hunger. It's also feeding our genes with information that allows them to perform at their highest level to produce the outcome that we call our life.

Okay, I can't wait to go deeper here, because as it relates to immunity, but also as it relates to epigenetics.

The unlocks that you have here are.

Meaningful and applied unlocks. But before we do that, can you go and say the four. One more time?

Yeah.

The four functions or the fourth characteristics?

The four characteristics, yeah.

So it's breathing air, drinking fluids, principally.

Water.

Eating complex diets, and moving.

Okay.

And then so this is going to go back up to the four functions as well. Is so you hit on thinking in your model for the cognitive function. But I was wondering where you insert or account for the emotional body feelings and emotions. And then I'm also wondering where you put thinking into the four characteristics as well.

Oh, boy.

Thank you.

I put those in the behavioral bucket. But I think the behavioral bucket overlaps in a venn diagram with the cognitive component. We have this spinal tumor that's sitting on top of our spinal column called the brain.

It.

Hold on. Did you call it a tumor?

Well, it is. I mean, it's a big bunch of fat stuck on the top of our spinal column that has a huge amount of organizational capability of processing speed that we're only starting to recognize even with supercomputers. We can't. We can't match the processing speed of the human brain and the ability to encode the forward and backward history of time and to create ideas that were never before thought about or considered. It's an. It's an amazing organ that has its interface, obviously, with the outside world and the immune system, because a lot of people don't understand this. But a cell type that's in our brain called the glial cells, we have the neurons that do a lot of the hard, heavy lifting of the brain, the processing. But there's another cell type called the glial cells, and there's actually a subtype of the glial cells called the microglia. It turns out that the microglia glia comes from the Greek word glue. We used to be thought these cells only just glued together the brain where.

The nervous system function.

They were like glue, like components. But now we recognize they're much more than just architectural glue. They actually are the brain's immune system, and they are derived from the same progenitor cells that our immune cells that float around in our blood is our immune system that sits on our intestinal tract, our immune system that's in our liver. They all share common relationships. So when our gut is eating something funny, our brain's immune system understands that because it is connected directly to that process by a family relationship.

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Here because I I want to unpack LEO cells as it relates to immunity, but I also want to just understand how you're thinking about feelings and emotions for just one more kind of layer here. And the reason I'm I'm asking specifically about it is Damasio Antonio Damasio's work has been.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Significant. And so that's one of the things that he's very clear about, is that it makes us special, you know, from other species is our ability to have feelings. And, well, we don't know if others have feelings, but it makes us special. And so are you layering that into the, the behavioral piece as well? Because emotions are designed to emote, to move, to create motion. Is that why you're putting it in that place?

Yeah.

Thank you.

And the answer is yes, I see this. And you're really the expert here, so I would really defer to your skill, but I see this as a push pill, bi directional situation. The ability to think, to think, therefore I am. That concept is a powerful, powerful mover of all functions of the body. It could be a mover of your physical function, of your emotion, of your cognitive function or your physiological function. They all are interconnected. But just as is seen in human relationships, our body's function in those areas also influences how we think. It's a two way street. So if we eat bad food, it affects the way we think. If we think right, then we eat good foods. It's kind of a bi directional symphony that the people that get it right, that are the really high performers, have found ways to incorporate all of that into their system that makes that a whole. Not like one part over here and.

One part over there.

It creates the system.

It's interesting that you use push, pull, as opposed to what I hear most often, which is top down, bottom up. So top down is kind of the thinking, processing that influences the body. And then bottom up is when there's some sort of stimulus, recognition that takes place and it influences the way that we think.

Well, let me, if I can just.

For the sake of this discussion.

Suggest maybe that top down sets up a hierarchy. Because we normally think of, we think of top as being good and low being bad. What I would think of is the body and its relationship to our experience in life is a holistic orchestration. It's a hologram, right? We're living in a hologram. All of it's interconnected. And our challenge as a human being is to maximize that holographic experience in life, to be the best we can be over the course of our years of living. That's, that's how I see it. So thinking the right thoughts, hanging with the right people, stimulated in the right way, eating the right foods, getting the right amount of activity, all of those signal together to create that which we.

Call ourselves okay, so now let's go into the physical. I don't want to. I. So I so desperately want to pull out and go esoteric with you and talk about the self, but I want to stay physical with you for.

For here.

Because let's pull on that thread and say, like, when those things are optimized or when those activities are compromised, can you pull that thread down into epigenetics?

Yeah, I think I can. So let me get. I'm going to give a personal example that for my life illustrates this. So I was a basketball player in college, and I went on and played basketball in my first couple of years at UCLA and had John Wooden as a coach in my early years. And he had such a powerful effect on me, an epigenetic effect. I was not a star. Obviously, I was never going to be a professional or even a starting basketball player at ucla. But the impact that he had as a lesson plan of life was so powerful for me that when I then transferred to the University of California at Irvine, when it opened up as a new campus in the University of Cal system and played basketball there, I carried the messages not just about basketball, but about life, epigenetically imprinted from what I learned from Coach Wooden that then influenced how I then participated in my life in general. I ultimately went on and got my degree in science and went on ultimately there to medical school and graduate school. Obviously, basketball was something in my past, but it was actually epigenetically hardwired as it relates to the experiences that I had that then guided my decision making, how I thought, how I made career choices from those events. So that, to me, is an example of how a soft thing, which was not soft at all, created a hard thing, which is my epigenetic wiring and how I approached my life thereafter.

Oh, my God. I did not expect that.

Okay.

I love it. All right, so. So let's. For clarity, let's. Can you take a run at defining what we mean by epigenetics?

Yes. So, you know, we all know that we have been born from a single.

Cell that was fertilized by our biological.

Mother and biological father working together to form that us. Whatever was made of that single cell.

Ultimately, as it divided in utero and.

Become a fetus, went into all the other cell types, 100 different cell types, from that same singular fertilized egg. People say, now, hold on just a minute. How does that happen? How do you make nerve cells, heart cells, eye cells, skin cells, intestinal cells, immune cells from that same fertilized egg? You do that in biology, a process called developmental biology or embryology, in which certain portions of your book of life, the 23 pairs of chromosomes that represent the chapters in your book of life get expressed and others do not, as the cells divide to make you a whole organism in utero. That is called the epigenetic process. It's very well known that what is happening during that process is the book of life is having different messages put onto it for different cell types. They all have the same general encyclopedia, but only certain portions in the encyclopedia are read by a nerve cell, and only other sections by the liver cell. That is well known.

No debate about that.

It's been well studied for over a century. What has now become more remarkable, and.

This is, I'm now speaking to the.

Last 20 years, is the recognition that actually, even in adults, this process of epigenetic remodeling still is going on. Not at the same state it's going on when you're a fetus growing all these new cell types, but it's still going on. And there's actually a scientific term called metastable EPI alleles.

But I won't go into that.

Let's just say what's happening is you still have some plastic in your genes, in your book of life that can be marked by your experience, like post traumatic stress, like a chemical exposure, like your exercise program, like how you think about yourself, like social determinants of disease. All those things are marking certain aspects of your genes epigenetically so that it alters how your book of life is being read into either being a story of great love and bliss and joy, or it can be into a story that is read as a Greek tragedy with alarm, with dysfunction, with inflammation, with chronic illness. And it's those events that epigenetically modulate how your genes are expressed that then create your health trajectories as you grow older, both emotional, physical and metabolic health.

Okay, so when I hear that, I go, got, okay, got it in. Although I have no clue how it actually happens. And I don't know if that's beyond the scope of this conversation, but to me, the way that I've always thought about it, because this is not my discipline, is that when I think a certain way, exercise a certain way, if I were to have a traumatic experience, I'm either opening or closing. There's like a gate that's taking place at the genetic level. And if I'm opening something, it's maybe opening me up to disease, opening me up to, I don't know, I'll stop with disease and, or it's closing me off to disease. So I think that that naive, that my naive understanding of what's actually happening might be really wrong.

But can you, can you correct that and then maybe go one level underneath.

If appropriate to say this is actually how it's working?

Yeah, actually you're, you're absolutely on the right track. I'll just add a little bit more color to what you said. It turns out that this process of how your book of life either gets paper clips put on or sticky notes. The paper clips are, don't read these sections. You put a paper clip onto certain portions of your genes so that the liver cell doesn't read the heart cells message. Then the sticky notes are read here, they're read here notes. Now it turns out that those notes that I've just described are those the attachments to your genes are actually now recognized to be some molecular changes in how the genes are influenced by your experiences in life. One of the things that's added to the genes are what are called methyl groups. Methyl groups are a specific process that the body takes a carbon and attaches that to a specific region of the genes. Doesn't change the genes. You're still the same genetic structure, but it's like the difference between your hardware and your software. The hardware stays the same. That's your genetic code. But the software that reads the is read by the hardware then changes when you put these marks on the genes. Now it turns out methyl groups are paperclips. They say don't read. Whereas another group called an acetyl group once placed on the genes is read here. It's like a sticky note. Your experiences in life actually can dictate how those marks get affixed to your genes to read certain chapters in your book of life. So what you want to do obviously in leading a complete life with high performance is you want to stay away from putting a lot of marks on your genes that prevent your full expression of function from being capable and lock you into what is called inflammaging. Inflammation is a new term that relates to people that have had scars on their genes that have marked them in such a way that those residual effects are seen throughout the remainder of their life unless they do something to replace replace them that leads to inflammation or chronic dysfunction. It could be anything from depression to sleep disturbances to gut problems to even more serious health problems.

If somebody has gone through an experience in their life or they've been taught how to think about their future and they're chronically pessimistic or they say things out loud like, you know, what people really suck and you know, what people are really, you know, what are we doing? And it's that type of attitude, right? What's happening at the genetic level when there's a chronic narrative of pessimism, of anxiety, of intolerance.

Oh, you're right on the tip of the spear there. Thank you for saying that. So I, I have been collaborating over the last number of years with people that are involved with what's called behavioral epigenetics. One of the leaders of this field is Moishe Sev and his colleague Mark Meaney who are at McGill University up in Montreal, Canada. They actually have taken over the laboratories that used to be occupied at McGill by Hans Selye, who is the father of stress. The concept of stress was developed by stress and physiology was developed by Hans Selye. They have been studying, starting in animal models, but now moving into humans, these behavioral factors that epigenetically modulate the function they published. An example of this would be what happened up about five years ago in northern Quebec. There was a huge ice storm. That ice storm caused power to be lost and temperatures to plummet down sub zero.

Women at the time, some of them.

Were getting pregnant and it was a really, really rough time. Very, very stressful, it turned out. When these infants were born, the group at McGill wanted to know did the children undergo any kind of epigenetic alteration as a consequence of their mothers having undergone this extraordinary stress during their early pregnancy. What they found was that the ice storm babies, as they're called, actually were epigenetically marked by the experience their mothers had during this pregnancy with the ice storm. This is similar to the work that's being done at Einstein School of Medicine. Rachel Yehuda with second generation Holocaust survivors. In finding that the children of Holocaust survivors have epigenetically marked from their parents experience having been involved with the Holocaust. These are pretty extreme examples I'm talking about of very strong adverse experiences in life, behavioral experiences. But the important thing to recognize is that these experiences are marking their genes to express then an alarm reaction. They're locked into the post traumatic stress physiology. Now the good news is, and this is the science of hope by the way, because everything I've said so far sounds pretty dismal.

And it's like that's a one way street to not so good outcome.

But now what has just been discovered.

And I'm saying just meaning the last.

10 years, is this science of hope that these processes are reversible. This epigenomic patterning can be turned back the other way. For every time you can put something onto a gene to modulate its function, you can take it off and replace it with something else. That reversibility of these epigenetic marks is the domain that all of us that.

Are involved with trying to improve people's.

Performance, help them be and guide them to be optimum in their function and health can use as a resource is the actual ability to re pattern these epigenetic marks by eliminating the marks that were associated with trauma and replacing with.

The marks of hope.

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Say hope in an applied way, are you. Are you suggesting that the applied science of optimism training or gratitude training, or journaling about what's good, to be even more specific, or reframing an experience with another person about yourself or them in a way that invites hope?

Are we being that tactile to say.

Those practices can actually make a significant difference not only in the person's functional health, but also, if I guess, in male or female? I don't know this, but as a parent to the unborn child, even the.

Answer is an absolute, unequivocal yes. And it's only been within the past few years. When I say a few years, it's probably no more than 10 years that we have had the science capability of actually measuring these epigenetic marks that occur with cognitive behavioral therapy, with this whole concept of making what used to be called soft science really become hard science, that these constructs of how we think about ourselves, how we vision ourselves, how we communicate internally to ourselves about our identity and the planet are influencing in real time 24 7, how our genes are marked and how they will create our function going forward. That is a huge revolution.

I mean, think about that. What we say to ourselves is impacting our genetic coding, and we can pass that code on. But more importantly for right now, let's say that somebody is not going to have children or they're outside of the child rearing age, whatever that might be for them. So. So what happens to somebody who is chronically pessimistic, irritated, agitated, frustrated, you know what, what happens to the genetic sequencing.

And then even drill down if we can get into immunity?

And I'd Love for you to talk about how. How large of a number, cell turnover and how frequently cell turnover happens. If you can kind of mash those three elements together, I would love to see how you do that.

Yeah. So I want to make sure everyone understands that. I'm not saying that we're changing our genes. I want to be really clear.

Thank you for that.

What happens is the message that lays on top of our genes. Our software, they call what we call the epigenome, then influences how our genes are expressed. So the genes stay the same, but the way they get messaged change into our. Our being, what's called our phenotype, how we look, act and feel. So with that, then the question becomes, how does that then ultimately influence the. The ability of us to perform as a human being, and what can we do to make that optimal based upon our book of life that has all this potential for greatness that sometimes remains untapped because it's put messages on top of it that keep the bright light of good health dim. The answer to that comes back to what you were really talking about. It is a program of starting to think about what we want in terms of our outcome as it relates to our function over the course of living. I was interested. We did a survey of about 10,000 individuals with a little question about what is health for you? I was assuming that the majority of the people were going to say health means the absence of disease. That was my naive presumption going into this little survey. Well, it turned out that that was not at all. Only a very small percentage of people said health for them was the absence of disease. The majority of people spoke about aspects of health that were related to. They wanted to be fully present, to be successful. They wanted to run marathons. They wanted to take up computer programming. They wanted to be present for their family in ways that would make them proud to be their parent. I mean, there are all sorts of ways that were functionally defined as health by individuals that were beyond the scope.

Of absence of disease.

The construct that health is. This term, like love, that has many different meanings for different individuals is a very, very important thing. Because as a person aspires for what their objectives are, what for them is a healthy outcome, as they image that and as they rehearse that, as they reinforce that, it epigenetically sends that message to their genes to respond favorably to that message. The encoding of that message is then further amplified by other things that person will be doing. How are they eating? How are they moving their bodies? How are they Sleeping. In what environment do they find themselves? Are they downstream from a petrochemical refinery? And they're constantly exposed to chemicals? I mean, all of those variables then weigh together to be the aggregate things that influence how we take our genetic potential and convert it into our performance as a human being.

Okay, so when. When somebody. I can't. I heard all of that, but there's a part here that I want to pull on just one more time, which is if somebody has clarity of. Of the person they want to be.

They have an idea of what health.

Means to them in their mind. They can create images that are aligned with that. That idea of health for them.

Are.

Are you suggesting that just doing that creates a familiarity with the epigenetic processing so that people are more familiar with? No, that's not what you're saying.

No, no, I'm. I'm saying.

I'm saying it actually is a process.

That sends signals to your epigenome to remodel your software. You're actually changing the way that your genes are going to have the capability of expressing themselves because that, in and of itself, that concept of thinking, become your being.

Look at that. Okay, so. So concretely, if I'm thinking about this. Use your word that you were defining, knowing that it's abstract in some respects for people, is love. And if that is important to me.

And then I think about it often.

And I put some shape to that, that. That is shaping the way that my genetic expression is taking place. And when that happens, I'm more, what then what happens? I guess that's where it's kind of a blank for me, because I do not.

I can't. If you start saying, like, the Secret.

Is real, I'm gonna have to, like, turn over my table because. You know the movie the Secret?

Yes, I do.

Okay. Is that.

Tell me you're not saying that, Doc.

No, I. I'm saying a variation on a theme. However, let me. Let me go to your. Your question that you. You asked that I didn't respond to. And that is. Okay, how is this. How are these signals really transferred through the body into the feeling state, into how we.

Okay, very cool. Very cool.

And so the feeling state to me.

Is translated through three ways that our.

Body communicates with the outside world 24 7, 365. And I think there are only three ways. One is obviously the nervous system. The second of which is the mucosal surfaces of our body called the microbiome.

Where all these critters live, like, principally in the gut.

And the third is the immune system and the immune system is communicating all the time to the other two. It's a super system. So the immune system is talking to the nervous system, and the nervous system is talking to the microbiome, and the microbiome speaking to the immune system. It's all a buddy system. Now with that in mind, why am I so interested in the immune system? As a marker for how we are going to perform as a human being and as a marker of our health. It's because the immune system is the most rapidly changeable part of our body's cellular system. In fact, every second, our immune system produces about 80,000 new immune cells. Every second that's in a person that's not sick. When we're sick, we are producing even more. And so if you then were to ask, well, what does that mean over the course of, say, weeks to months? It means about every three months, your.

Immune system cells are completely turning over.

And being replaced by new immune system cells. Now the question is, are those new immune system cells the same as better than or worse than the ones they're replacing? And the answer to that question has to do with how they're genetically marked, epigenetically marked. So if you want to produce a immune cell that's better than that which it came from, then you want to take off the bad marks. These are sometimes called immune scars, and you want to replace them with new opportunities to have new marks that are related to better immune function. That's called immunorejuvenation. The process of immunorejuvenation as a biological process was really just discovered over the last seven years. Now we have this extraordinary tool that we can employ to rejuvenate our immune system, which then translates to every organ, every tissue, every cell of our body to create an outcome that's consistent with our desire for good health.

That's mind blowing, isn't it? I mean, it really is mind blowing. So then if I'm doing a nice job on behavioral, cognitive, emotional, applied practices, there's a chance over three months that my immune system could be completely, will be completely new. There's not a chance it will be completely new over, let's say three months. And it's possible that those rejuvenated, rejuvenated cells are significantly better. Or is it just mildly better if.

I'm really getting after a three month.

Quote, unquote, optimized, healthy love based training system, you know, behavioral, psychologically and emotionally as well?

Well, I, I think you're, you're right at the the, the next nexus of where we are in the. In this body of science. But let me give you a little bit of a glimmer of what I think is happening. New tests have become developed in the field of immunology. I won't go into the technical details of them, but let's just say that.

These are tests that allow us to.

Measure in individual types of immune cells how they've been epigenetically marked. That technology is now available. It's being used in research labs and clinical labs around the world. We've been involved with those kinds of studies. And just to summarize a little snippet, I, because I'm involved with this work, have become a model of our own studies. So when I measured this would be about a year and a half ago, I used one of these new tools to epigenetically measure the aging of my immune system, and it can actually produce an immune age. Now, at that point, I was 75 years of age, and I found that my immune system, based upon this model of epigenetic age determination, was about 69. So that was good. It was a few years younger than my age and birthdays. Well, then I made a decision that I would go on to this program that we're researching, this immunorejuvenation program, and I'd be a candidate of our program, this research that we're doing. We have a Clintrials.gov study that's just completed that we'll have the results of coming up in October. I became a candidate in that study. I have the benefit, obviously, of looking at my own results, which we don't look at for the group results because you want to blind or you want to keep it blinded. But over the course of my being on the program for four months, I went back. Now, by that time, I was 76 years of age. I was a year older chronologically, but my immune age that was previously 69 was 54.

What did you do?

Come on, Doc, what did you do? So, just for fun, Jeff, just for fun, sorry. Because I know you're going to get to this. This answer here, but that's remarkable. And I had. This is like, I want to brag too, if I can, is that I did. I did a biological age test as well. And so, you know, we've been assessed with our chronological age and, you know, we're getting closer to, you know, I don't know, just being sick and frail and fragile. Like, you know, there's. That's a. There's a pervasive Idea somewhere in there. And then so recently, based on some of the commercial grade or, sorry, consumer grade opportunities that. That are present, I had my biological age tested. And so I was. When I tested it, I was 50 and my biological age was 42. And I was like, come on, I love that. So it's close. Yours is better. So what did you do?

Well, I think mine is only better because I have a large. A bigger dynamic range being 76 than you do.

Yeah, that's good. Now, is biological age the same as immune. I think you called it immune age.

Well, they're similar, but they're more specific. When you we started actually measuring biological age determinations. Oh, geez. We were on 48 hours of TV program doing this back in the late 80s. We were early adopters of this technology, but now it has become much more precise because back in the 80s, we didn't know how to measure epigenomics. Now we can actually go into specific cell types, in this case the immune cells, and we can actually measure the epigenetic impact of life on our genes, of our immune system. And that gives us a more precise measurement of a cell type aging. And the reason, as I said, that we chose immunity is that it is the gateway to health for every organ. The immune system is in our brain, it's in our liver, it's in our gut, it's in our muscles. And so it gives us a way of interrogating aspects of age at the biological level. We think very precise.

That's why we chose immune age.

Is immune age available at a consumer grade yet, or is this something that's done, you know, research grade?

It's going to become available within. There are labs that are saying they're doing this for the consumers. But having looked at those, some of those labs, I'm not convinced that they're doing a really quality job. But I think that given the new automation that's occurring and the miniaturization of these technologies, we will, in the very near future. When I say near future, I mean that probably by the time 2023 rolls around, have consumer versions of this testing available direct to consumer.

Okay, and what did you do concretely? How did you change your immune age?

Yeah. Thank you. So with our big Bold health company, we've been really focusing on what are the determinants of aging of the immune system, and what are the levers that you can pull to modulate that process, that epigenetic aging process. So that became the focus of what we call our immunity plus program, which is basically to look at all the variables that we could figure out from the, from the, from the literature, the immune immunology literature and try to put that together into a sequence three month program that, that's what I was going on. So it has to do with sleep hygiene, it has to do with regular exercise, it has to do with circadian rhythms of eating. It's time restricted feeding. It has to do with eating foods that are very high in these immune active phytochemicals. These are plant nutrients that are found in a whole variety of different plant foods. The one that we've landed on that has the highest level that we can find of any plant food is an ancient food that was lost in America about 200 years ago that's been consumed for 2500 years called Himalayan tartary buckwheat. It's a unique cultivar that was on the eaten as a major food, still is in the Himalayan regions of Asia. It has about 50 to 100 times that wasn't percent 50 to 100 times the amount of these immune active phytochemicals of any plant food that we can find. So we've included Himalayan tertiary buckwheat. And I never thought in my life I'd ever become involved with organic agriculture and owning parts of farms. But we brought organic farming to America with Himalayan tartary buckwheat in upstate New York. We, we now have a cooperative group of farmers. We have a small artisanal mill that's producing Himalayan tartary buckwheat flour where we're half a food lab that's making recipes and menu guides to include it. So I've become full on that this is a really important part of a immuno rejuvenating program. And then we also use modulation of the types of fat in the diet. We get away from the high saturated fat diets. We use more of the omega 3 rich fats. And we found it very interesting. Omega 3 rich oil that's very high on these, what are called pro resolving mediators or PRMs that actually have the ability to help promote rejuvenation of the immune system. These are found in only a certain type of minimally processed fish oil type products.

And then is a sardine type type.

Well, sardines are generally not a good source because by the time sardines have been processed in, unless you're eating the whole sardine. If you're eating a whole sardine, the answer is yes. If you're eating sardine oil, it's been heavily processed and a lot of these PRMs are removed.

Yeah, I was talking about the actual fish.

Yes, the fish itself, definitely. So, yes. And, and then lastly is this connection to the gut microbiome. So this whole connection to pre and probiotics and, and renourishing refloristing, so to speak, our gut microbiome and making it our friend. And, and that as you, as we all know, the, the immune system, about.

60% of our immune system is clustered.

Around our intestinal tract. And therefore the relationship our microbiome has with our immune system is very, very intimate and very important. And there are many, many people. I don't want to put a percentage, but it's not uncommon that people walking around in this planet, particularly in the United States, are suffering from what we call dysbiosis where their microbiome is disturbed. They have what we have termed, Starting in the 80s, I started coining this the leaky gut syndrome. And they have this endotoxemia that's chronic and adversely affecting their immune system. So that's the third component of our program is gut restoration of our microbiome coupled with the omega 3 fatty acids and these polyphenols found in various plant foods.

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I, I'm, I've been such a student of prebiotics, probiotics, nutrition as a way to enhance and basically turn on, you know, the best version that I can possibly create, along with thinking strategies, along with other behavioral strategies including sleep. And finally, that feels like what you've done is you've pulled together the three verticals that you just mentioned and are sourcing them and providing some sort of, oh, I don't know, contracting between them to make it easier for consumers. And so where can we go get the buckwheat? Where can we go find, you know, this service that you've provided or that you've created?

Thank you.

Well, you know, I never thought at my age I was going to be involved with another, starting another company. In fact, my wife questioned my Is this number 14?

When I was doing my work, I had no idea that you were founding 14 companies.

Yeah, I didn't know that either until I sat down. Actually, my middle son brought that up with me. Said, dad, do you realize how many companies you've been involved starting over the years? And I think of myself as a researcher, academic, communicator, but actually, I guess I Must be a serial entrepreneur because I have been involved with starting a number of companies. 14 probably is a good number. And I just made the decision that this particular discovery we made with Himalayan tertiary buckwheat and these oil products and the whole process of immune rejuvenation, really, it would be a waste of my years of equity, of experience to not see if we couldn't make this more available to people so that, that became this, this company, Big Bowl Health. So you can go to, you know, our website, www.bigboldhealth.com and you can learn. We've got all sorts of deep drilling into information, research articles, clinical studies. We have a whole history and we got videos of our, of our organic farmers who are incredible people that are preserving the family farm and hopefully making a gainful living out of growing our Himalayan Tartary buckwheat for us. So it's been a really exciting process for me actually.

What is your tolerance for risk?

Very high. Not all those 14 companies were smooth sailing. In fact, I would say the majority of them were not. So you have to go through the times where you're wondering how you're going to make payroll and you wonder how you're going to get over this hurdle. And it's all about problem solving, solutions and having the right people associated with you and then some luck as well. But I think we make a lot of our own luck. I know you speak to that. And how we make our luck is hanging out with the right people that encourage us in the right ways and give us new perspectives and being a good listener to say, hey, I don't have all the answers. Here's maybe a better answer. And being flexible and resilient to, to new information.

If you were to suggest a starting place for folks, is it psychology? Is it community, is it nutrition, is it spiritual framework, is it exercise and movement or whatever other applied, you know, features that I'm missing. But where would you suggest people start? Because we all want to do it all, but there's a starting place that's materially important.

Well, I hope I don't sound Pollyanna here. I don't mean to, but I think it's starting with confidence in yourself that you have talents and skills that are yet to be developed with the right environment that can be fully manifest. And that if you continue to work on those skills in skill development, whatever your identification of your skill set is, and people I've never met, a person that doesn't, when you get to know them better, doesn't have some skill set that you admire. You look at that person, you go, wow, I never knew about that diverse. I wish I knew that. I wish I could do that. So identifying what those skills are, having the confidence that they are scalable in your life, and then finding the right environment to incubate them through your spiritual, psychological, personal, nutritional environment so that they become fully manifest epigenetically and that becomes you over the course of living.

I think when you think about human potential, and you can do that writ large across the planet, or you can think about individuals, wherever you take us is cool. I do, I would like to hear both. But when you think about human potential, where do you go? And I purposely leave this open ended.

Well, I think right now my answer to that question is I observed my grandchildren growing up and I'm very blessed to have extraordinary children. And they have now extraordinary children. So my grandchildren are big learning guides for me to see how this translates through the generations. And I think it's positive affirmations. You know, my grandkids have told me that the thing they like about me, being around me is they always come away feeling better about themselves because I'm affirming their goodness. And I'm not sending them messages about what they aren't. I'm sending them messages about what they are and what they can be. And I've tried to employ that in my own life as effectively as I can. And you know, no, life is completely smooth sailing. We've lost a couple of children over my years of living. Those were very traumatic events that put pretty significant marks on my epigenome. But you then tried to recreate. Yeah, they've been guideposts for me and my family as to how do you make purpose out of these things that are very, very traumatic so that those lives that were lost will become something valuable in how they're creating opportunities for others going forward. I think that that kind of lesson plan has been a guidance principle for me. And so if I was to say, how does that generalize to life at large? I would say we each have a zone of influence. I mean, some people's zone of influence are very large and other people's are smaller. But we all have zone of influence. And that zone of influence, if we think about how we would then utilize it effectively in a reciprocal way, so we're helping someone else. It's in our zone of influence to be the best they can, because in reciprocal it will help us to be the best we can. It's a two way conversation. As we grow up, the size of our impact, then we keep reminding ourselves that that is the central feature of our life principle, is to create as much goodness in others as we possibly can because it will pay dividends back to us in, in goodness in our lives. And I think that's an infective virus that can get in the nervous systems of the general zeitgeist of our population if we could all do that collaboratively.

It really is beautiful, Jeff, the way that you are not only toggling between complicated science, making it available and simple, and then also speaking in, in ways that are deep and intimate about humans being better. And I can feel it and hear it in your voice, especially when you talked about the, the trauma of your children and your family that you've lost and the investment that you've made in creating purpose. And part of that purpose, it sounds like for you, is to invest in others and helping them be their very best. And so it's beautiful. And I, I. The name of this podcast is Finding Mastery. And I don't say this lightly, but I feel like I'm right there witnessing it and feeling it with you. And so, and I do not say that lightly. So very cool. Thank you for creating the space for me to be able to feel that and at the same time be inspired by the way that you have. Even in this conversation, when you know I'd ask a question, you say, oh, that's a very good question. Like, thank you for asking that. There's a graciousness about you that is, I see what your grandchildren are speaking to. I felt it. That being said, what is it like, Jeff, to be your very best? What is that? What does that mean to you?

Oh, well, I think it's waking up in the morning knowing that I've got something that I can do that will have a valuable outcome for not only myself, but others and that I'm still pushing the edge of learning about myself to squeeze out as much of the juice in my genes as possible so that they can be beneficial to those things that are happening. Well, after I've left this planet. You know, I asked back my young years as a professor. I started as a, as a professor in the university in 1970, and I was hired as a dual professor in chemistry and environmental science because it was Earth year that year, the first year, 1970, and they wanted to set up an environmental science program. So they hired me to start the environmental science program and to be a member of the chemistry department. And I recall asking my classes early on and going back that many years ago I was pretty young guy. I asked them, how many of you believe that there's something important called posterity? The majority of the class would raise their hand saying, yes, there's something about posterity. So let's look at this intellectually for a moment. Why would you be worried about posterity when you're not going to be around to observe it? What would that be? What's the motivation? And then that would engage a really interesting conversation because there'd be a lot of different views on that. But my thought in the years over living now is that I believe that there is some kind of a biological imperative that we think beyond ourselves, because that's how organisms survive through time. And as you pointed out, early on, we have this unique ability to do things that other, other organisms can't do. That's we can look forward and backward in time. We can create things through our thought process. We can think we're a cognitive being and we can use that as a power tool. It's a superpower. And if we then use that to ask the question, what's the imperative for my living? My living is to leave something as a mark that creates in this universe of disorder, it creates a little more order because order requires programmed activity. Order doesn't happen naturally. Disorder happens naturally. Things go to hell in a handbasket without trying. We have to try to keep things ordered. And if our life adds into the fabric of civilization a little more order, a little more survivability, a little more sustainability, a little more enlightenment, then we have done our job as an organism living on this planet for a selected century of living. That's how I kind of view it.

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How do you make sense of how, let's say something super concrete like genetic sequencing happens is that this is a not a sneaky way of saying, is it? Do you. Do you fall back to a spiritual framework or do you have another way that you're making sense of that order? So I would of course, correct me, but I would say that there's a beauty in the order of the genetic sequencing that you know, or the genetic coding that takes place. But help me understand the difference between the world is chaotic and disordered as a natural or as the floor, as opposed to that there is order that I see, you know, in the genetic coding that you've dedicated your whole life to.

So this, this is a really fun and brilliant conversation. Thank you. Because that is actually the next step in the conversation that I was alerting, alluding to that I had with my students. Because the next step is to ask exactly what you're asking or you're really talking about. So here's my quick summary and I hope this doesn't get too philosophical. So I asked my students, and I still do this today, even with doctors that I'm lecturing with, what's the density of matter in the known universe? In other words, how much stuff is.

Out there in space?

And it turns out on average, it's about one atom per cubic meter. One atom of matter per cubic meter in space, on average.

Does that include dark non matter? Does that include space?

This would just be an open space, right?

In open space. Okay, gotcha.

All right, so. So with that in mind, then I ask a question. I say, okay, so what is the probability then? If we want to use a scientific argument for life, what's the probability that the atoms that make up the molecules that make up the cells that make up the tissues that make up the organs that make up the organ systems that make up you would all spontaneously coalesce in this time and space to be you? What's the probability? If you do a statistical mechanical calculation on that, you can come to the conclusion that the probability is so low, so many zeros to the right of the decimal point, that we don't exist. But we do exist, because every other suggestion in the universe would be that we should not exist, but we do exist by processes that have allowed for this creation of order against the what is called entropy of the universe, the disordering process of the universe. Now, where that comes from, that's the beauty of our abilities to create our own reality, right? But it does come from somewhere. And however a person believes in that, they ought to lock into it and make it real. Because we don't exist as some epiphenomena. We are real and we have principle. And we're against all other odds in the universe to exist. And we need to make advantage of that opportunity.

How practical and rich. And coming from a systems thinker that is a, you know, a material scientist, a founder, a deep thinker. Okay, that's awesome. Now two non sequiturs. Just quickly to move from. I love, I love philosophy. It's where I spend most of my time. I think. Actually I want to. I wanted to go back to something you slipped in that, that I don't want to miss, which is envisioning. Do you have a practice or have you found material value in using your imagination to see you and. Or future you in the future state? Like, do you use mental imagery as part of a practice for you?

Very powerfully, yes. I started a form of meditation, you know, probably, oh, geez. In the 70s, because I was interacting with groups at the time that were opening my understanding of all the dimensions of human beings. I started to actually was one of the founders, lecturers at a group called Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York that brought all sorts of disciplines of healing together. This is the 70s, it's become quite a large organization now that does courses in their facility in Rhinebeck, New York. But that got me acquainted with Eastern thought, Eastern concepts, both Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine, cultural concepts that got me into really thinking about my life as a being differently than kind of my Western trained model. And I kind of integrated that into my living principles. So a lot of my creative time is spent in that kind of more meditative state. Maybe just before I go to sleep, that's really a great time for me to have 20 minutes of meditation. That kind of takes me into the creative process. And eventually in the sleep, I just carry those memories with me in the sleep. And I have a lot of dreams and a lot of my good thoughts, I think, come out of my dreams. I can remember my dreams. So I think that yes is the answer to your question as it relates to how I personally employed these concepts.

There you go. Is that a single point? Focus meditation, where you're focusing on, let's call it one breath at a time. And then when your mind wanders, you're just noticing without critical, you know, critique or judgment. Or are you using some sort of contemplative approach where you just allow something to surface and then you fault, you purposely follow that?

Yeah, I think it's, I think it's the latter. I used to think of this when I was trying to learn how to be more meditative, that it was a distraction. And then when I finally came to recognize it wasn't a distraction, it was actually where I should allow the process of my deeper subconscious to take me. And so distraction became the focus of the, of my attention.

Yeah. And there's a material difference between thinking, like sitting down for 20 minutes and thinking and let's call it 20 minutes of observing the train of thought, observing the emotional kind of highway, and just watching and observing and being like, oh, look how those are related. That, oh, wow. As opposed to, oh, I'm going to go solve that now. I mean, maybe sometimes there's a note for me like, wow, that keeps coming up. Okay, I'm going to need to write this down and solve that tomorrow.

Yeah.

In deep thought. Yeah, okay. Okay, brilliant. And then if you were to say.

Listen, wherever you are in your life.

Let'S, let's speak to just adults right now. These tests would be materially important on an annual basis or even, you know, every three years. Where do we go? What are those tests? I, I'm doing things like, I'm doing.

A deep dive on heart.

I'm doing nutritional analysis to, to see kind of where my omegas are. And, and, and, and so like, what.

Are some of the.

I've done a full CT body scan just to kind of get a baseline to see what's that, what's there colonoscopy done, you know, like, so what, what are some of the tests that you would recommend? The colonoscopy. Colonoscopy isn't done every year.

But what are some of the tests.

You would recommend for folks to get done annually?

Well, I want to go back a step because this concept and this discussion we're having now can become very exclusionary because not everybody can afford to undergo the exhaustive testing that we might want to run a most high profile kind of testing. So I'm always very cautious because a person might say, well, that's all well and good, but I'm never going to be able to do that. And now they kind of turn off and just become the luck of the Draw person. And the luck of the draw isn't always a good draw. And so I would ask the question, how do we get involved in this without having to worry about your socioeconomic background? We can get a person in easily. And I think the easy thing is you can start looking at the pen and paper kind of questionnaires that allow you to assess certain aspects of your health attributes and your characteristics that tie together at least with probabilities that there are things that you should be concerned about or you should be focusing on. We have a questionnaire on our website that we call the Immuno Identity Questionnaire that kind of does that from an immunity perspective. Gives a broad brush as to what your immune status might be and where you might focus some of your attention. We also are witnessing something that is quite remarkable. I'm wearing one of those wearable devices. I'm a biohacker. I've probably worn 30 or more of these over the last years. But we are starting to see the information that is now available from these devices, like the new Apple Watch and others, Garmin and so forth, are like 247 medical information systems that we've never seen in the history of the human species that give you real time information about how you're performing. Now let me give you an illustration. This one I'm wearing here, I just selected because it's convenient and it measures a lot of the parameters that I find useful in assessing my health status. I have no relationship, by the way, to this company, but this is called an Oura ring.

And for, for disclosure, I do okay.

Yeah.

I'm a investor in their company, just for disclosures. And I love what they're doing as well.

Well, I do as well. And I'm not an investor, nor am I a consultant, but I. I've done studies on the Oura ring and I've published some papers. I actually did a little video blog series about my own Oura ring results at the start of the COVID 19 pandemic. And what I've learned over the years, not only from my own experience, but many other studies we've done, is that these biometrics that are measuring heart rate variability, pulse rate steps, sleep quality and duration, respiration. Right. Respiration rate. Now, body temperature on, sleeping, oxygenation of your blood. Those parameters are more than just a fitness measurement, they're an immune measurement. There are surrogate markers for your immune system. And I can tell you that there's the aggregate score that you get every day called your readiness score. And now that I got My whole family and all my friends wearing auras and they're saying, my word, Jeff, you're right. You know, when I have a bad day or I have a this and that, or I'm coming down with a cold or I'm feeling like I got an inflammation, I can pick it up on that Oura ring with my fitness, my readiness score. So we need to recast some of this information that we're getting from these wearables to be more than just your fitness training. It's your body fitness, it's your whole organism. And your immune system is right at the head of the pack in being influenced by all those things that you're measuring with these biometrics. So I think this is a part of an easier entry for people. Then we can go to the layers of what kind of testing might we want and start layering on more sophisticated information systems.

I love the systems thinking and how you can drill it right down and say, hey, here's some data to pay attention to and the actionable steps to increase your readiness score or, you know, that vitality index, if you will, is. It's not complicated, right? It's like think well. And I'm not saying be intelligent. I'm saying use your mind well to think about yourself, your people and your future. Like, think well, move well. How about it, right? Like have some dynamic movements in your body. Stretch those tight hip flexors, like get your heart rate up, have some resistance in your day, you know, eat well. It's colorful foods. Buckwheat. Now part of my, it's going to be one of my go tos, but it's Himalayan something. Buckwheat. And I miss the middle part.

Yeah, it's Himalayan Tartary. And the reason that that's an unusual word. This was originated in the Tartan district of the Himalayas. It's a northern Chinese district. It's called the Tartan district. So it's, it's Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat. And there's two varieties. There's a northern and a southern variety. The northern, which is the one that we're cultivating, has the highest level of these immune related phytonutrients.

There you go. Okay, I'm going to definitely check it out. And then obviously what I didn't include in there, sleep well, you know, and get that dialed in and all of the, the functions we just mentioned before impact. Sleep, you know, sleep is in many respects downstream. And it's one of the biggest things that we can invest in is getting the upstream elements dialed in to have that downstream, you know, power powerhouse of sleep, you know. Right.

I would love.

Jeff, I would love to send you the. The training course that we built to, to scale the psychology of thinking well, and it's like, what is your purpose? What's your philosophy? And we show you, show folks how to do it, how to, how to do breathing for, you know, downstream regulation, or, I'm sorry, down regulation, as opposed to being able to handle more stress. We walk through the mechanics of confidence and deep focus and, and, and, and I would love to send that over to you in your.

Wow. I promise, I promise if you do, I will put myself through it. That sounds fascinating and I love it.

Awesome.

And as a fellow Seahawk person, even though I don't live there, I live in Los Angeles. That it was born. It was born out of the work that we were doing with the Seahawks for a long time. And so I think that you'll find. Find it interesting on a couple different levels.

Absolutely. Well, this conversation for me has been just nothing short of fantastic. I've really enjoyed it. Ditto.

Okay. I look forward to maybe, maybe a tea, a little polyphenol, you know, maybe.

A tea in Seattle.

What do you think?

At some point, you know, it might even be a hoppy beer, because those hops, they have a lot of immuno rejuvenating capabilities too. So who knows?

Look at that. You're creating space for hops.

Okay.

All right, Doc, I appreciate you.

Thank you for everything and congratulations on a significant body of mastery that you've arrived at and are still leading the way.

So thank you for all of your work. It's been really a deep pleasure for me to be part of this discussion. Thank you.

All the best.

Same to you.

Bye.

Bye.

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