The Immune-Heart Connection: How Viruses Impact Us with the Father of Functional Medicine, Dr. Jeffrey Bland

Today on the Root Cause Medicine podcast.

Biology is not generally a one way street. Biology generally has two ways in the street. You can travel either towards improving your functional status over time, or you can continually travel on the path towards increasing disability and dysfunction. And there are biological mechanisms available in our body to do either one of those. And so to some extent it depends on what route we want to take. And to take the route of renewal, of immune renewal, of getting rid of these scars and regenerating our immune system function, we have to do things that are probably different than what we did to get us into the problem to begin with.

Hello. Hello. I'm your host, Dr. Carrie Jones. And today I am talking with the one and only godfather of functional medicine himself, Dr. Jeffrey Bland. It was such an absolute honor to have him on as he is one of the founders of the functional medicine movement through the creation of the Institute for Functional Medicine, known as IFM to many of us, and is the founder and president of the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute, or PLMI. He's a best selling author and has over 120 peer reviewed research publications. I have the utmost respect for him and was so glad we could talk about the immune system and, and cardiometabolic health today because that is so important as of late. You're going to geek out and learn a lot. Before we get started though, I want to talk to you about something that comes up pretty often on this podcast and that of course is lab testing. You see, testing is one essential way to understand the root cause of an illness. If you are an integrative or functional medicine practitioner, chances are you're placing a ton of orders with a ton of different labs. The Root Cause Medicine podcast is created by RUPA Health. RUPA is the best way to order, manage and track results from over 30 different labs in one single place for free. Thank goodness. No need to create and log into multiple portals ever again. If you are a practitioner, make sure you go sign up@rupahealth.com to create a free account today. Now let's start the show. Doctor Bland, I am so honored to have you on the Root Cause Medicine podcast. Welcome.

Well, Dr. Kerry Jones, this is like one of the great moments in my week to have the chance to really explore with you topics that we share an interest in as it relates to how we can help people achieve higher levels of health by leaving in the dustbin disease and producing outcomes called high level living. That's what we're up to.

Oh my gosh, I love that. And for people who don't know. Dr. Bland was part of a immune autoimmune boot camp that we did on rupa Health in 2022. So I got to hear him quite a bit discuss new research, new literature, along with a lot of his experience on immune and then listened to him yesterday talking about the state of sick care, unfortunately. And now this year, his goal and mission and passion, which we will talk about all around immune and then first kicking off with a symposium on cardiometabolic health. So this is a lot of topics for people who are maybe gonna make their head spin, but at the same time, our listeners are really passionate about health at lifespan. They wanna get to the end lively and in good shape. And as we hear all the time, I wanna be able to lift up my grandkids, I wanna be able to lift my suitcase up into the overhead bin as I'm traveling the world at 92 years old. And that's what you're about and that's what you teach all the time. So I'm really excited to have you on today.

Well, I'm excited to be here. Let's get at it. There's lots to talk about, there are.

Lots to talk about before we do get started. For those who don't know, Dr. Bland is considered the godfather of functional medicine. So we'll start actually by having people just learn who you are, what you stand for and really how you got into the symposium we mentioned, which is the personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute. And then we'll go on from there.

Yeah, thanks. So just a kind of a cliff notes version of this. 77 years of living that I've had the privilege of experiencing. We started the Institute for functional medicine in 1990. Our first symposium was in 1991. And the formation that organization was really focused on two objectives, one of which was to teach a curriculum that would translate into practice so that practitioners who are interested in root cause medicine could employ these concepts of systems biology in their practice successfully to remediate people's dysfunctions and prevent them from having more serious downstream illnesses. So that I believe we, over the 30 plus years since the institute was founded has been reasonably well accomplished. We got accreditation in our fifth year. That would be back around 1996. 97. From the Continuing Medical Education Accrediting Organization ACCME to be a category one provider. And we have, we have fulfilled those criteria with three reviews by that organization to provide meritorious continuing medical education to practitioners around this concept of systems biology applied to functional health. So that's good. The other objective we had when we founded the organization was to make sure we were always bringing the newest and latest kind of cutting edge concepts into practice so that not the bleeding edge, but hopefully the kind of the leading edge information. And it turns out that those two objectives, as we've learned over the 30 years, are a little bit mutually exclusive because the accrediting body, ECCME or Category 1 accreditation, really wants things to be taught that are standard of practice in the usual and customary mode. So that really to some extent limits our ability at IFM to move out into some of the more exploratory areas that are at the leading edge until they've kind of passed some degree of, I guess you call it standardization. So in order to keep alive the second objective of the ifm, I decided we needed another organization that didn't require ACCME to bring its material to audiences. And that then became the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute. Because we are not height bound by the criteria of ACC and the accreditation, we are capable of bringing anyone that we want from any discipline to talk about new ideas and new breakthrough concepts. And so PLMI has filled that gap for us over the last 10 years since it was founded. And I'm pleased to say that this last year the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute courses had over 35,000 attending. So we are now, I would say, kind of a feeder organization into what ultimately becomes standards of practice within the functional medicine community. I think we're the first kind of prospectors of things that are happening on the frontier. And so it gives me a kind of a dual identity through my connection in with ifm, through the teaching curriculum and accreditation and certification, and then also through the kind of pioneering new concepts that will help drive the continued evolution of the field.

I love that. And for the listeners, ifm, the Institute for Functional Medicine, we've directed many of you who are searching for a functional medicine provider to their search function. If you go to ifm.org if we just search the Institute for Functional Medicine, they have a great search directory for practitioners who do a lot of the things that Dr. Bland and I are going to talk about today. And for practitioners who are listening, we are going to talk about this symposium that's coming up in April at the end of this podcast. But I highly recommend you just go ahead and search PLMI, the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute. I went to all three PLMI last year. There was one in Chicago, one in Denver and one in Seattle. And Dr. Bland is not kidding. It is definitely cutting edge. It is researchers right out of their lab who have flown over to talk about what they're studying. It is a lot of topics that are I love that you said hopefully not bleeding edge, but definitely cutting edge that have you taking a copious amount of notes, making sure you have the slides because I know I learned a lot at all three of the plmi. So we will touch on that at the end for the practitioners who are listening. But let's jump into Immune to start because while I mentioned cardiometabolic, we have to start off the podcast with immune. We have seen major immune changes the last couple of years. You have definitely kept up on post Covid syndrome, the post COVID side effects. And I know that's really concerning, really scary for a lot of people, practitioner and patient alike, where they just don't understand what's happening. So I would like to just sort of jump in open ended with what have you been reading, what have you been seeing, what is your take on this when it comes to our immune system? And then of course overlaying Covid on top of it.

Yeah, thanks very much Kerry. I think this is a very, very important and top of mind subject right now. A lot of people and me included quite honestly are kind of quote tired of COVID and we'd like to leave it in the rearview mirror and move on, but it won't let us do that. It sticks around and has a kind of ghost like effect still on our culture. And it is particularly seen in this long Covid or long haul Covid condition which now, depending on who you want to listen to, what research you want to follow, there is some kind of range of numbers of how many people are affected. But I think conservatively we can say that 10% of individuals who had a COVID positive diagnosis end up with some form with differing degrees of severity, frequency and duration of what's been called long Covid. And long Covid really presents itself with a myriad of different signs and symptoms, but the principal ones are cognitive foggy, brain confusion, sleep disturbances, behavior changes, depression and respiratory related to issues of cardiovascular pulmonary function and then neurologic as it relates to things like smell or evil and taste, which often doesn't come back for many, many months. And then lastly is lassitude, fatigue and chronic pain. Now this constellation of symptoms which is being experienced by millions of people now is kind of a legacy nasty mark that SARS COV2 has left on us. And some people have said, well this represents the effect our immune system was scarred. Use kind of an analogy by the experience that we had with that virus and when People talk about it in that way that's kind of leaving an immune scar. That's a memory effect that will be with us for the rest of our lives. It suggests that this is a one way street. And woe is us if we ended up in this problem, because we're never going to escape from it. I think the other side of the story, which is very exciting because we've seen such tremendous progress and breakthroughs being made in understanding the immune system in some respects as a consequence of all the heightened work that's being done post Covid, is that these conditions, these immune scars, these bad memories from an immune event like a SARS infection, to some extent reversible. We call it immunorejuvenation, whatever term you want to put on it, immune renewal or something. Biology is not generally a one way street. And biology generally has two ways in the street. You can travel either towards improving your functional status over time, or you can continually travel on the path towards increasing disability and dysfunction. And there are biological mechanisms available in our body to do either one of those. And so to some extent it depends on what route we want to take. And to take the route of renewal, of immune renewal, of getting rid of these scars and regenerating our immune system function, we have to do things that are probably different than what we did to get us into the problem to begin with. Because what we have learned, and I think I'm not pointing fingers at anyone, but I'm just recognizing the numbers in terms of the health outcomes from the exposure to SARS CoV2 virus, we as the United States nation did more poorly than virtually any other developed country in the world. And it begs the question, why would that be? We're a country with all this modern medicine and technology and opportunities and food and so forth that other countries don't have, how in the world did we end up in worse shape? Was it bad genes? Well, no, it wasn't bad genes. I mean, we're a society with kind of a sandpile of genes or a conglomerate of all sorts of genes. So was it a fact that we're just older as a population, we're just senile and so we just get these diseases more frequently? No, our demographics don't say that. We're, as a country that much older than many of these other developed countries that I'm describing had much lower prevalence of severity of COVID 19 outcome. So then it begs the question, well, what was the status of our immune system when we started our population immune system? Was our population immune system an optimal resilient state. No, it was not. It was set up to be more vulnerable to the SARS CoV2 virus. That produced then a latent effect that scarred the immune system, led to this bad memory effect for which we now have some people, millions actually, who are still paying the price, even though their Covid was not that serious, that they didn't have to be hospitalized and intubated to end up with long Covid or long haul Covid symptoms. Now many of those symptoms will resolve in three months, but there is a population now and we're still new in this, in this field, obviously with data, but there are some that are still with symptoms two years later after getting over the infection. So this is reminiscent to me of something I've gone through in my past history, having been in this field for over 40 years, which was the HIV AIDS followed by chronic fatigue syndrome period, which was the 80s, moving to the early 90s in which we got through the immediate HIV AIDS issue with development of new medications. But we saw growing up around that this chronic fatigue syndrome that people called post viral fatigue syndrome and myalgic encephalitis or encephalitis. So it had the same presentation of symptoms that we're seeing with long haul of fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, memory loss, foggy brain, chronic pain, fibromyalgia. And at first everyone was claiming that, and I'm now back in the early 90s people were saying, oh it's all in the mind there. This doesn't really exist. It's just people have psychological disturbance. But now over the decades we recognize no, that chronic fatigue syndrome is a real entity. You can measure its effect on adverse influence on the energy producing parts of our body, which are in cells called the mitochondria, which are these little energy powerhouse components of our cells that take food energy and convert it into metabolic energy. And we find that that chronic fatigue syndrome condition resulted in injury to the mitochondria in our cells that lowered our energy producing capability. So all these symptoms are related to kind of energy deficit disorders, fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, immunological disturbance. And what people don't, I think understand is that our immune system is energetically very hungry when it is activated, like it trying to defend us against an infection or we're injured and we have to activate our immune system to help recover from an injury. It can use up to 50% of our metabolic energy. 50%.

It's huge, huge number.

And so what happens if the cells that make up our immune system have defective energy producing machinery because those Cells, those white blood cells are chock filled with these energy powerhouse mitochondria. Now it's not just our muscles are fatigued or our brains are fatigued, our immune system is fatigued, and now our resilience is low. What things contribute to that? Well, now here is where we make the segue into cardiometabolic. Because it turns out that our immune system and its function is directly tied obviously to our metabolism. So this is called immunometabolism because the source of energy for our immune system is metabolism of food in the energy in the immune cells. So now immunometabolism is a field that's growing up to important saying if you got bad metabolism, you have impaired immune function. Now what is it that we know? What are some of the things that we know are clinically related to poor metabolism? Well, at the head of the list is poor blood sugar control, insulin resistance, inability to metabolize carbohydrate, high blood sugar, increased A1C which also comes with number two, chronic inflammation, increased high sensitivity CRP in our blood. This is a process that has been labeled inflammaging, right? That we're in a chronic simmering inflammatory state that's associated with biological aging of all the cells of our body, particularly those cell types that are most energetically intensive, like the immune system. So the question is, well, does that mean that if we had some years in birthdays, let's just choose a number, 40 years of birthdays, that our immune system could be older than our age and birthdays. And the answer is yes. We have been measuring this using a variety of new tools that are used in the laboratory, finding that in some cases people that have long Covid their immune system, although they may be 40 on birthdays, their immune system may be equivalent to a 65 year old. It's already losing a lot of its capability.

And a lot of those people feel it, right? The people say, I know I'm this age, but boy do I feel older some mornings.

Exactly right. Sleep disturbance, cocktailing, cognitive, cognitive dysfunction, foggy brain, just feeling like you don't have that zip and zap you had when you were younger, that feeling of electricity. This is all energetic deficit problem. And so blood sugar regulation and inflammation regulation are two principally important metabolic features of a depreciated immune system. Now the good news is, as we were, as I was talking about earlier, this is not a one way street. We can turn these things around. And that's where the optimism of what you're doing with root cause medicine Podcast leads us into solutions away from fear.

Which is a huge thing because a lot of fear has been happening, of course, the last couple of years. And a lot of people that I've talked to or people who've written it in the comment sections, they're like, I just don't understand why me? Like, why me? And then what can I do about it? Because I've been told, unfortunately, that there's no true medication for this. Maybe here's an antidepressant, maybe here's a pain medication. Depending what their long Covid symptom is, they're getting redirected to some of these medications for better or for worse. But they're like, I still feel like crap. Or I am at the six month mark or the 12 month mark, or in some cases the two year mark, and I'm still experiencing a lot of these symptoms and it's frustrating and I'm sure there's something I can do that, as we said in the very beginning, is much more on the cutting edge. And that's why I love having you on. One, because you're so positive about it, and two, because you really read the research to understand this, how the immune system works, inflammaging inflammation. Even if somebody doesn't fully understand what inflammation is, if I say, do you feel bloated? Do you feel puffy? Do you ever feel pain? Do you get redness? Do you? They're like, oh, yep. They can check the box on some of those things and realize, at least externally, they may understand what inflammatory process is happening, even if they can't see it necessarily on the inside. So I definitely want to go right into the positive. Let's give people hope, let's help the mitochondria. And I do remember I said this to you at the boot camp when the bootcamp. For those who are listening, we did it with Dr. Elroy and Dr. Aristo Vojdani and they had published a paper. Dr. Aristo VojdANI is quite a scientist and had published a paper around SARS CoV2 in the very beginning, and he was showing that it really reacted against the mitochondria. I remember reading this paper and I thought, all right, this is in 2020. If I get Covid. Cause it's right in the beginning. If I get Covid, the first thing I'm going to do is protect my mitochondria because Dr. Vojdani said it's the first thing to get attacked. Let's protect those. And here we are in 2020. Three, talking with you, talking about metabolism, energy, and the mitochondria. And so Dr. Aristo was right. We've got to protect our mitochondria.

As he often has been over the last 40 years.

As he often has been over. Yes, it's a smart dude, but. And I just also want to say, for those listening, you know, viruses are a pain in the ass. Whether it's Epstein Barr, whether it's cytomegalovirus, whether it's HIV, SARS, CoV2, viruses are a pain in the ass, and they're opportunistic. I've long said this to my patients who would go, why me? Why did I get this? Why do I have. Why did it reactivate whatever the virus was? I said, because they're opportunistic bastards. Like, they just swoop right in. They're not polite, they're not thoughtful. Like, they're viruses. And unfortunately, this is what they do. Now we know for millions of people. So let's give hope.

Yeah, I think you're speaking to. For me, an interesting. It's like deja vu all over again, and it wasn't so good the first time.

Yeah.

As I go back to. Really, in my experience from the 80s on, this has been a common objective, is to try to understand better what we can do in these patients that carry this chronic burden, energy deficit throughout decades of their life. It started off for us back in the 90s. This was probably one of the most important moments in the origin of ifm, because we came up with a program that we called the 4R program, which stood for remove, replace. Reinocular repair was a gastrointestinal restoration program. This was 1992 or 3, that we delivered that as a therapeutic approach towards people because we recognize that more than 60% of the immune system was clustered around our intestinal tract. And if we could help people to restore. This is before the microbiome became the big thing, if we could restore the function of their gastrointestinal immune system, that we could eliminate a lot of downstream problems that come as it relates to immune alteration. So that became the first clinical tool that we developed. And we did a number of studies, clinical studies. I had a big clinical research center at that time. We had thousands of patients go through different trials, and that became a standard that many, many clinicians now use in their practice. And I think it has more Rs on it now than four. We started off before. Remove the bad ones, replace the digestive enzymes and pancreatic and stomach acid, reinoculate with pre and probiotics, and then repair the gastrointestinal mucosa with the appropriate nutrients like L glutamine and vitamin E and omega 3, EPA and so forth. The next thing that we did, however, after that was that we recognized that many people sustained injury to their energy producing capability as a consequence of burdens of toxins. And this concept of endo and exotoxicity, things that we take from the environment and even toxins produced by our gut bacteria can poison our metabolism. And so we worked very, very hard in developing a program that we call metabolic detoxification, using certain plant foods that have secondary metabolites that activate our genes to produce more of these detoxifying capabilities. These enzymes, cytochrome P450 and phase two enzymes in our body that detoxify foreign chemicals. And that program then became our kind of our second level in IFM to develop a clinical tool that could be taught to clinicians as to how to do that in practice. And I'm very pleased to say that has become very prominent now in many, many different clinics. Then the third thing which followed from that was In I think, 1996 or 7, was when we started to really dig in deep in understanding mitochondrial bioenergetics. How these little organelles and cells, the mitochondria, these energy furnaces, how they actually produce their energy and how their energy gets interrupted through toxins and immune dysfunction and how you might restore it. So that led to a program that we call mitochondria resuscitation. And we did that with Dr. Paul Cheney, who, MD, PhD, who is one of the world's experts in chronic fatigue syndrome, in his clinic in Georgia. And that led us to do a variety of studies in which we found that there were certain nutrients and a certain dietary approach that we could take towards re energizing mitochondrial capability because the mitochondria in cells can actually reproduce themselves and replace themselves even when the cell doesn't. It has its own ability, has its own DNA, and it's capable of actually reforming a new mitochondria through the process of mitophagy when the cell is not being replaced. So that was another part of renewal of the bioenergetic machinery that we developed. Now, the fourth step, and for me, probably the last of this four different approaches, is what I'm calling immunorejuvenation. Once we activate the gut properly and get the microbiome to be healthy and we have proper detoxification and we focus on rejuvenation, reusitation of mitochondria then let's make sure our immune system is rejuvenating itself. And that's the fourth pillar in this four, I think clinical tools that are used by practitioners in our field, in your field. And I'm very proud of this because these are four things in our field that we have developed. These are clinical tools that can go in medical textbooks, that can be taught to practitioners to do that you will not find in any other traditional textbooks of medicine that are treating disease. They are a product of our own fields innovation and now over decades, clinical proof of concept by actually doing it with people in practice. For me, it's the most, it's my greatest pride to see how this has actually filtered its way into our field successfully.

Oh, successfully 100 times over. I mean, I think for people listening, if they're on social media at all, they will recognize pieces and parts of the four system you were mentioning through Instagram posts and stories and Facebook and TikTok where people have taken pieces of these and they're trying to educate and explain. And now for everyone listening here, they heard it maybe for the first time ever. This is Dr. Bland and ifm in the 1990s. We are in 2023. This is in the 1990s. Some of you might not have even been born yet creating these protocols. And the other thing that I love and I want to really focus on is that in the fourth steps that you talked about, the gut health, the toxins detox, the mitochondrial resuscitation and immune rejuvenation, it might sound head spinning if you're hearing this for the first time or you might think, oh, that's unachievable, I can't do that. I don't know what that means. But I want to assure you as somebody who has been in this field, I've been in this field since 1999. So I was at the tail end of the 90s where I started. It is achievable and it is doable and it is in a lot of cases, it does fit in in the budget. There are definitely. Some of it's expensive and some of it's free, cheap and easy and there's quite the gamut in between. And so I love that it gives people a lot of hope. Whereas even if they listen to this and not sure where to start, there's an entire organization of trained practitioners who know what to do, know where to start. And that this is when you're scrolling through social media when you should be in bed and you come across these posts about gut Health or toxins or the mitochondria or the immune system and inflammation. This is what he's talking about, tying it all together. So I really appreciate one, the history lesson and two, again, the hope where people go, gosh, no one's talked to me about my gut, no one's talked to me about my mitochondria. Like I wasn't offered anything for. Nobody told me about toxins. I didn't realize that those could be a problem. And the thing with mitochondria is I love that you when in the program and I'll say this and then let you talk, there's a method to madness. And mitochondria are like the canary in the coal mine. They're very dramatic. Right. They're like fainting goats. You blow at em and they just faint and fall over. That's your mitochondria. But we need that immediate feedback and they're very reactive to toxins. So instead of trying to resuscitate a mitochondria, first and foremost, the first step is the gut, which plays a big role. Second step is remove the toxins. So it's when we're. If you think of like a funnel effect, it's the greatest impact all the way down to. Okay, now we're getting to the nitty gritty and gut to toxins, the odor is quite important. And then the mitochondria and then immune resuscitation.

Yeah, beautifully stated. I think that this, as you said, I think very well, it sounds very high brow, very sophisticated, maybe very techno speak, but when it delivers down into what that means in a person's daily living, it's not that complicated. The dietary changes, the lifestyle changes, things like time restricted feeding or things like sleep hygiene or things like regular activity or things like eating by the rainbow. These are all things that are sensible when they're put into action. They're only as good as people doing them. But I can assure people that when they are done, they will provide dividends in return. It's amazing. I happened to make a statement in a recent podcast and maybe I overspoke. At the time someone asked me what for me was the most satisfying feedback I've gotten from the years I've been in the field. And I said that for me I've had the, oh boy, it's more than grace, pleasure or gratitude. It's almost overwhelming feeling of gratitude when people have come up to me quite frequently over the years and said, Dr. Biden, we want to thank you for saving my life or my spouse's. Wife or my partner's wife or my sister's wife. And I'm thinking to myself, now, hold it. That's very gracious of them to say that, but that seems like an exaggeration. I've never done surgery. I'm not doing chemotherapy. I'm providing information about people's self regulation and trying to instruct how it could be implemented. But what I come to recognize is that the power that changes people. Life starts with words and it starts with intention. And then it starts into action. It goes into action. And so it was just a couple of weeks ago that I happened to mention that for me, the most gratifying thing that I. I'm not even sure at times that I deserve when people have come up and said that to me, I take that very seriously. So when I said this in this podcast a couple of weeks or a few weeks ago, I then had two people email me back saying, Dr. Blythe, I have been talking for a long time or I haven't seen you, or so forth. But I want you to know that what you said about saving lives is exactly right because again, you saved my life. And they went through their experience. Now what that really tells me is that sometimes what we think is unapproachable because it sounds so sophisticated and so complicated when it's distilled down. For a practitioner such as yourself, the skill in the art that you can communicate it effectively to get a person to understand and to implement it in their lives, the return on investment of time and energy for that person is huge. I won't even talk about, well, it might save you from going to the hospital. Even those are kind of hard to know what you prevented. But we do know how we feel every day when we wake up. That's an immediate value proposition. And the number of people that have, really hundreds of people that have spoken to me saying, you gave back my energy, you gave back my enthusiasm, you gave back my clarity of mind, you gave back my ability to do things that I thought I had lost before. Those are really huge examples of what we're talking about in terms of root cause medical intervention.

Absolutely, absolutely. And I see it again. I'm on social media quite a bit, so I see it in the comments, I see it in the DMs, where people, we don't get great education around basic health, self care, how our bodies work. Really in school we get like the basics around how to get pregnant. So don't do that in middle school. You know, in high school we get the Basics around maybe some the food pyramid and nutrition. And after that it's kind of a disaster. And so to see people's comments and DMs and all sorts of our colleagues posts where they say I didn't know that I didn't know the synthetic fragrance and candles that I have all over my house could be affecting my hormones and as a result I have now gotten rid of them and honest to God my headaches are gone. Like I did not realize that was a problem. I have other people in women health practitioner post say I didn't realize the scent and the dye in let's say tampons was affecting my endometriosis and my cramps. And I switched to a hundred percent natural cotton or maybe a diva cup and it's lessened my cramps, my endometriosis pain 50% which for anyone who's experienced endometriosis cramps 50% is a hail Mary. And I see these things all the time where people just don't know. And to be able to listen to this today, to go, all right, gut health reduce toxins, let's focus on the mitochondria and get that immune system up and going again. That's only four steps, not a problem. I can do that.

Let's segue from that into showing maybe how these upstream approach or this root cause approach has downstream benefits. Because I'd like to talk just for a brief moment about one of the other side effects post Covid, other than the pulmonary effects on respiration and breathing and energy and cognitive dysfunction like brain fog, we also have this cardiac effect. We're starting to see people have problems with heart rhythms and people with ejection fractions that are low lower and coagulation disorders throwing clots. So how does this relate to cardiac function? And here is a really interesting, I think example of again how immune metabolism is connected throughout the body to different organ systems. So when I first started off a lot of years ago that I won't even talk about in this field, it was thought that heart disease was a consequence. It was a cholesterol problem. And it was if you ate a lot of cholesterol and saturated fat, it would clog up your arteries because it would just form gum in the pipes. And that was heart disease. I'm making it a simple story here to make a point, but the cholesterol hypothesis was the dominant hypothesis that kind of ruled the cardiology world. Over time, however, it's become clear that that is only a part of the story and probably not even the principal part of the story, the principal part of the story is that people have heart disease, have inflammatory conditions of their coronary arteries and their vessels that conduct blood and the immune system cells throughout the body. And so it's an inflammatory issue. And what is inflammation? It's your immune system. So it's a connection of the immune system to metabolism, to your heart and your arteries. And so now it's like, whoa, just a minute. That's a whole different thinking. I didn't know that cardiometabolic disease could be related to immune inflammation and the things that are connected to why I'm not breathe right and why I'm low energy and fatigue and all these things have central mechanisms that present themselves into different organs with different symptoms. And so if we start talking about cardiometabolic disease in the age of this 21st century perspective, then we have to bring inflammation, the immune system into the story as well as things that we talked about like glucose and control of blood sugar and control of allergies and infectious things and control of toxins because they play just roles there as they do in these other conditions. So we're very excited that we're going to be doing this meeting big conclave in Chicago on April 21st and 2nd with really 7 of I call key opinion leaders on this topic that bring different perspectives to bear on how cardiometabolic disease needs to be reframed as more than just cholesterol.

Amen to that.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I'm excited. So for all the practitioners that are listening, it is a four practitioners, all practitioners. April 21st and 22nd, the Cardiometabolic Symposium with PLMI, Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute and Orthomolecular. And when Dr. Bland said it is cutting edge key opinion leaders who are speaking, he's not kidding. Like I said, I went to all three last year and it was things you're not typically going to hear maybe in the day to day, or maybe you've been taught before, which I always find really exciting. And I'm thrilled, honestly, because of all the outcomes of COVID and because honestly, it's cardiometabolic syndrome that ultimately is what's the number one killer of humans. Heart disease doesn't matter, male or female. And in fact, I just read a statistic the other day. I believe it was on the CDC website. NIH, no CDC website. I believe that like 20 to 30% of adult Americans have non alcoholic fatty liver disease. Fatty liver disease. I mean, it's just these things are endemic, unfortunately. And it's Important that we educate. You've been at the fort from the very beginning, and especially now around Covid. We have to teach, get on the cutting edge and inspire hope. Because unfortunately, we've seen some really tough cardiometabolic outcomes. People have lost people because of them, unfortunately. Absolutely.

Let me, if I can just take a moment to talk about part of why this word hope, I think is so important. Because a lot of us have become disillusioned, maybe or depressed or filled with anxiety and feeling like we don't have any control. We're just victims. And we. Once you get into a victim space, it's really, really a complicated psychology to be in because you feel like you have no escape. So this concept of hope is really important. And I want to go back. I hope this will bear on some hope. So in my professional lifetime, I was involved in the 1960s. I know that sounds like ancient history. It probably was with the McGovern committee that was dietary go through the United States. And it was trying to determine what kind of diet. Senator McGovern from Lakotas was trying to get us to understand what diet might be best to improve the health of population in the United States. And through that committee ultimately came the Dietary Goals in the United States that were published, I think in 1981, if I'm not mistaken, several years after the committee had fitted its work. And one of the things that they said, one of the principal goals was to reduce fat in the diet, particularly saturated fat. That was a principal takeaway that they said fat was a contributor to killing people due to heart disease. Now, the way that got translated by the food industry was to say, okay, good. If we take expensive fat out of food, then what do we want to replace it with? Because you still have to sum up to 100% of the calories. You got to fill something with those you took out. So let's fill it in with highly refined carbohydrate and high fructose corn syrup sweeteners and sucrose. Let's use sugar and highly processed starch as a filler, by the way, that's really inexpensive. So we like it because it'll make our products even more profitable. So with that government recommendation came a complete change in the American food supply. We never heard about high fructose corn syrup sweeteners until after the McGovern report. Then it suddenly was converting corn fields in Iowa and Nebraska into fructose producing factories. And the foods got filled with those particularly soft drinks that went from an 8 ounce serving to now A serving big enough that you'd hold the Olympic swimming trials in. And so suddenly people were overwhelmed. We own was simple carbohydrate. And what did that do? When I was early on in my, when I was in medical school in the 60s, we didn't even know what metabolic syndrome was because it hadn't been talked about yet. Carol Reben who came up with the concept of syndrome X wasn't until the 70s. And then we suddenly see post the McGovern committee recommendations being implemented by the food industry into simple carbohydrate sugar rich foods that we had reports of more than 27% of the adult population having insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome. And it was an epidemic proportion. It did what it drove people into type 2 diabetes. That went from 3% of the population to nearly 10% of the population over those years. It became a pandemic of its own. And what happened with the drug industry? It flourished on the production of insulin, managing drugs for glucose tolerance problems and diabetes. It build their citadel of new therapeutic high profit tools for the treatment of the dietary outcomes from the perversion of the dietary goals. Then for the first time in my Life in the 1990s, we have reports of juveniles starting to be seen. These are adolescents having non alcoholic fatty liver syndrome. Never before had that ever been seen in medicine because they were the test people in this uncontrolled scientific test of a bad diet high in sugar and fructose, what it would do to the livers of children. And lastly then as we develop the new anti hepatitis drugs, we find that the most singular significant reason for the epidemic for need of liver transplants is due to fatty liver disease. It is the single cause. It's exceeded that of hepatitis as the single cause for the need or the predominant cause for liver transplant. So when you put all this together now you say what's the good news? Because that sounds like a pretty bleak picture. The good news is that we had an awakening within the last 10 years to say holy moly, this experiment we did on people was a tragic mistake and we need to turn this back around. And we don't turn it around by just getting more drugs for treating non alcoholic fatty liver disease or diabetes. We turn it around by the things that you and our field have been talking about since time Memorial. That's how you change the equation. It's not new drugs. It's using the rule of reasonableness of things that we've been trying to get people to understand for decades. That's the good news. We have the tools A friend of mine said to me not too long ago, he said, jeff, people are dying to know what we know. They're dying to know what we know. It's kind of a double meaning, isn't it?

Yeah, it sure is.

I think that's literally. That is correct. That is absolutely correct. It's not just figuratively, it's literally.

Which is why you have been just again, the godfather of functional medicine. One of the main originals with Institute for Functional Medicine starting plmi. And so, so, so much more. For those listening. This past summer, when I was in the Chicago symposium, I happened to be in the back of a car with Dr. Bland and he was just talking about all I thought, someday I hope somebody records your entire story from start to finish with all of the things you had done and the committees you had been a part of and just grand, grand things you have, you have touched and made an impact on. Because it was mind blowing to me. I thought I knew some about you and of course it turned out I know you've just, again, just touched so many wonderful parts of the world to try to make it a better place. And so I'm really deeply honored to have you on the podcast today to talk about this and really to inspire people.

Well, thank you. I think that we are involved in a collective inspiration movement right now. And that's why I think there is hope. Because it's only through the pursuit of goodness in people collectively that we can change this equation. We can look at our present situation and say, woe is us. Or we can look at our present situation and say, look what we've learned and let's help our next generation to take these lessons and not reproduce them and to look at. Because there are solutions. It's not that we say, well, these are all the problems, but we don't know what to do. We actually do know what to do. We just have to start doing it.

Yes, and again, amen to that. And for those listening, Dr. Bland, let everybody know, especially for the practitioners who are interested in the symposium. Where can they go to learn more?

Yes, thank you. I think if they go to our PLMI website, I think it's a really good source. You can see all the speakers, the topics. We actually also have Downloadable content, including Dr. Carrie Jones, of things that we've done in the past that you can find there that are free of charge. So that's. You can either Google PLMI or our specific URL is plminstitute.org plminstitute.org well, again.

Just from the bottom of my heart. Thank you very much for being on the Root Cause Medicine podcast today, inspiring hope and continuing to to educate. Your passion just comes through and I appreciate it.

Well, likewise. I turn the finger right back to you and say thank you for all you're doing. We need people that have taken the baton that will run this race and keep moving towards the finish line. I don't think it's a finish line. It's really turning the evolution of our culture, and you're one of those select people. So thank you.

Thank you. Oh, my goodness. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. I have one quick favor to ask before you go. If you love today's conversation, would you mind leaving us a review on whatever podcast platform you're listening on right now? My whole goal is education, so positive reviews are actually the number one thing that help new people discover the show. You're amazing. I so appreciate it and I'll catch you on the next episode.