Use Your Microbiome for Better Mood, Memory, and Dreams with Dr. Jeffrey Bland

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Show me. Welcome back to the Quick Brain Podcast. I am your host and your brain coach, Jim Kwik of Kwik Learning. And here, as always, we're helping you to learn more things quickly. And the question we have for you today is we're going to talk about the role that our microbiome plays in shaping our moods and shaping our memory and also our dreams. And this is going to be a very interesting conversation that's going to be very, very practical. And I'm very honored to have a very special guest on the show today, Dr. Jeffrey Bland. He's the founder of Big Bold Health, which is a company on a mission to transform the way people think about one of nature' greatest innovations, which is the human immune system. Jeff is the author of the Disease Delusion Conquering the Causes of Chronic Illness for a Healthier, Longer and Happier Life, as well as many additional books. Thanks for being on the show, Jeff.

Well, Jim, I can't tell you what a pleasure this is. And of course, quickness is the nature of our life right now. Everything is time compressed. So you've captured light in a bottle. It's really a pleasure to be with you.

Thank you. Now, when we met at this event, we were actually introduced by a mutual friend, Dr. Mark Hyman, and he referred to you when he, when he introduced you as like the godfather of functional medicine. Maybe we could start with functional medicine and we could just give a definition for that and then we'll go into immune health.

Functional medicine is designed to not look downstream at what a person has, but look upstream as to where it came from. It looks for the origin and causes of downstream related health problems. So it's really an upstream focused model that uses what we call systems biology, which is an emerging new kind of way of looking at systems, how things are networked together so you don't look at one organ at a time. You look at how the body's interfacing with the outside environment and what signals are being picked up by the body and converted through the process of cellular function into their function. And their function is physical function, metabolic function, cognitive or mental function, and behavioral function. Those four functions wrap together to Give what we call our health, and that's the focus of the functional medicine model.

And what would be an example of that? If somebody is, let's say, diagnosed with something like Alzheimer's or something, you know, what's the difference between symptoms of something and getting something at more of rude upstream source?

Yeah, you know, I think Alzheimer's is actually a very good example because as we recognize, the pharmaceutical industry has spent literally billions of dollars trying to find the pill to treat Alzheimer's, and it's done so unsuccessfully. And we believe that the reason it's been unsuccessful isn't a consequence of the fact the science they did was wrong. It's the model they're using is wrong. Alzheimer's is a multifactorial condition that's associated with the interface between a person's lifestyle and their genes to give rise to a complex effect that's seen in terms of the hippocampal funct of their brain that leads to what we call Alzheimer's disease. It's multivariate, multifactorial. In order to really understand how to manage it, both prevention and early stage treatment, you need not to look at the downstream effects, but you need to look at the upstream uniqueness that that person has in their lifestyle, how they're treating their genes to create the signals that lead to brain health. And when you start asking those questions, you find out that there are more than 30 variables that really relate to what might ultimately downstream be seen as Alzheimer's disease. The nice, the good news is that all of these 30s are variables that can be modified by a person's lifestyle and dietary intervention, exercise, sleep management, stress reduction and so forth. So it's really looking at the cause and not just the effect.

And what would you say is the role? You mentioned genetics. What role does epigenetics play in brain or even the topic of this conversation, this episode, immune health.

Yeah. So let's just refer to what epigenetics means, because a lot of people, this is a little bit of a mystery term. So our genes are encoded in 23 chapters, which we call, I call our book of life. Those 23 pairs of chromosomes, or 23 chapters, half of which is written by our biological mother, the half by our biological father. Don't tell us who we are or what we'll be, but tell us what we can be. They are not all expressed. All the stories in our book of life are not expressed simultaneously or we'd be a mess. So the question is, what is the story that's read in our Book of life that creates what we call how we look at and feel. And that to me is controlled by things that regulate how our, our genes are actually functioning. And those are things above the genes. The word EPI refers above the genes. These are things that are put on the genes marks that actually regulate how our genes are expressed. And the exciting news is that our lifestyle, our diet, the way we live in the world, the things we're exposed to actually are things that regulate how our genes are expressed. So now we have what I call the science of hope. The science of hope is not just a one way street that we get damaged because of our genes. We didn't got it. You didn't fill out an application card. We just got the luck of draw. And so people think woe is me if I got bad genes. But now we recognize with epigenetics that actually we can modify how our genes are being expressed. It's a two way street. That is the future of what I call the science of hope, which we're really exploring with many, many other people as to how to maximize that in person's hundred years of high level living.

I like that science of hope. And so genetics doesn't predetermine our destination or our destiny, if you will. There's certain factors like lifestyle and so what are some of those things that we could. Let's talk about the role lifestyle and how it impacts our microbiome. And how does our microbiome play a role in things like our mood or our memory?

Yeah, so I think that that question of how our brain works and how it's connected to the rest of the body, it's not cut off at the neck. You know, when I was in medical school, each of the organs were kind of isolated, one to the own, with different medical specialties. So we think of the brain as being the, you know, the owned by the neurologist. But now we start recognizing that actually the brain is connected to all the other organs of the. And one of the most important systems of the body that the brain is connected to happens to be the immune system. And the immune system is connected to the microbiome. So now we're starting to learn that there is this interesting intervention that we can improve brain function through improving immunity, which has to do with improving and stabilizing the health of our microbiome which lives in our intestinal tract. You know, a lot of people say that I want to boost my immune system to try to give me more defense against foreigners or infectious or injury. Boosting the Immune system is not a good idea. Because if you have an imbalanced immune system, by boosting it, you might enhance the imbalance, you might increase the risk to concern. What you want to do is to want to find the ability of the immune system, find its resting place, to find its ability to function, which is natively in our genes. The immune system will find its place if we give it the right materials. And therefore what we are talking about is not boosting immune systems, but rejuvenating immune systems. It does through a process called epigenetics and autophagy. Autophagy is kind of collecting the damaged cells, getting rid of them and replacing them, allowing them to be replaced with new juvenile cells. Most people do not understand that we make about 80,000 new immune systems every second. Now the question is, will those immune cells be the same as those they're replacing? Will they be better than or worse than? And what we started to recognize is the process of immunorejuvenation allows the immune system to cleanse these old damaged cells that have bad memories and are involved with inflammation, and replace them then with cells that have much more ability to respond with balance and not with age. And the effect that that has then on brain function is truly remarkable. With improved sleep, improved clarity, lowered brain fog, better dream states, lower depression. All of those things are interconnected to this process of immunorejuvenation.

When we were speaking in conversation with Dr. Hyman, he credits you as sharing with him this wisdom that food is information, that food is indeed a medicine. What role does food play in the soil in the future of health care, in the future health of our immune system and our mood, memory and more.

We want to stay away from things that are injurious to our immune system. And a lot of food additives, food colorings, synthetic ingredients, oxidized lip, you know, fats, all these things become, become injurious to our immune system. And we want to replace them by things that were close to the soil, growing in organic types of media without carrying a bunch of bad memories. And because those plants that are grown organically actually are found to have higher levels of immune strengthening nutrients than those that are grown under high ag tech kind of food technology. Pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, biocides, these particular plant derived nutrients that are found from foods that are grown in healthy soil, then when consumed by the human, have extraordinary value in immunorejuvenation through both the effect they have in the gut microbiome and through the effect they have directly on the immune cell health.

When you were describing it, I saw like the microbiome is, and you were saying like roots as what you nourish flourishes. And I kind of see the microbiome as the roots and the brain as kind of the fruits there. And what you eat matters especially, especially for your gray matter. Is there such a thing as a perfect diet or is it more, more bio individual? Do you recommend people test themselves, do a microbiome test or where do you start there?

Personalization to me is very, very important. However, there are certain general principles that virtually all people might benefit from. Certain principles of eating a variety of foods, eat the rainbow with natural vegetable products of different colors because they carry different information to our body. Staying away processed shelf stable foods, stay away from high sugar, high glycemic index foods, eating foods that are higher in a variety of prebiotic fibers. But what we have really started to understand, and I think this is the AHA for me over the last few years, is that there are specific nutrients within this phytochemical family that seem to have a very strong positive effect on the immune system through the relationship they have with our microbiome. And these are the members of what we call the polyphenol or flavonoid family that are found in foods like apples and onions and various kind of green leafy vegetables. And they really cut across the fruit and vegetable family. And there are certain members of those families that seem to have a really strong impact upon the relationship between our microbiome and our immune system and our brain function. And these have names like rutin and quercetin, Luteolin, hesperidin, diosmin. They're specific members of the family that seem to work together as buddies, as a team. And, and so what we have learned is that these polyphenols have really important rejuvenating capabilities for both the gut microbiome and our immune system and the subsequent connection it has to brain function. Now where do you find these in foods at high level? These are the foods that have high nutrient density of these immune strengthening phytochemicals. And that led me into a discovery that was serendipitous, I believe. I wasn't actually searching it. It kind of just happenstance in my life through three observations that came together that there was this ancient food, actually a 2,500 year old food that had been lost in America about 200 years ago called Himalayan Tartary buckwheat. And this has been a food that's been consumed in Asian cultures for as I said, 2,500 years. It got then taken on the spice trail into Europe and was used principally in Eastern Europe as a major food and it actually was brought to colonial America on our original colonial ancestors is because it's so hardy, it doesn't require pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer, and it doesn't require irrigation. It's so high in these plant derived phytochemicals that are immune strengthening that bugs don't even like it. And so it's a very, very hardy plant. And it has between 50 and 100 times the level of these immune strengthening phytochemicals, these polyphenols and flavonoids than any other food that has been studied. And we decided we would kind of get it back on track. And so we now have a group of organic farmers that are part of our cooperative, our Himalayan Tertiary buckwheat cooperative that are growing this. We've kind of gone full circle from the theory now to the practice of how do you actually introduce a food into your diet or ingredients that would actually enhance your immunorejuvenation. And that's really been kind of the principal focus of our, of our development research at Big Bold Health over the past couple of years.

And where can people get that nutrient? Can they order it online or presently.

They can either come to our website, which is bigboldhealth. Or they can go to Amazon and look us up under bigbolt health.com we'll.

Put links to everything that Dr. Bland mentioned in the show notes, as we always do@jimquick.com notes so make sure you go there. I have to ask this question. We talked about how microbiome affects mood and memory. And people know that, that the foods that they eat affect how they feel and their level of focus, their ability to recall information, how they manage stress. How does that relate to dreams though?

Oh yeah. Thank you. So, you know, if we think of dreams as kind of our subconscious mind having a chance to explore degrees of freedom, to express its art, express its view of the universe at a subconscious level. So dreams are really provocative and profound as it relates to memories that have been encoded throughout the day, things that are our experiences, things that maybe we're not even wanting to deal with in our cognitive state, that get processed in the dream state. So if your neuronal function is suffering from neuroinflammation as a consequence of an activated brain immune system, the microglia, then it's going to affect your dream state. It's going to, I don't want to necessarily say create bad dreams, but it's going to create complex dreams that are not reflective of when your brain's immune system is at rest and at peace. It's going to be a disturbed set. It may even be blocking out certain things that you really want to deal with by superposing other things on top of it. And so what we have found is the feeling state of people that get their immune system aligned and get it rebalanced and rejuvenated is that they're not only did their sleep quality improve, but their sleep dream state joy improves. They actually have better feeling state of waking, both refreshed, remembering dreams, often vividly that are good dreams, part of their reflective process of processing. So I think this once again, as you said, Jim, is so profound a message as to how we're interconnected, that our body is a system. It's not just the brain working in isolation any more than any one organ works in isolation. And that we can actually improve joy, we can improve rest, we can improve the sense of clarity, we can even improve our creativity by a brain that is not neuro inflamed that the immune system is working as our friend and not as our enemy.

And we know with the brain, your heart's pumping blood to your brain, it's bringing oxygen to the brain, our liver's cleaning that blood out. So everything is connected. And it's so wonderful that you're bringing this information out to our audience and we appreciate connecting with you also. How can people stay connected with you and your work?

Well, thank you. Yeah, I'm very fortunate to have a group of people that have hung with me throughout many years and that's our big bold health team. And it's also connected into our personal lifestyle medicine institute team, both of which we're actively involved with. And we can provide lots of information to people that are interested on our two sites. And that's either the BigBoldHealth.com site or our JeffreyBland.com site that's J F F R E Y Bland B L A N D dot com. You'll find a treasure trove of information there that probably you can dig as deep as and bury yourself in this as deeply as you might. I've been very fortunate to have the interaction with world leaders and all sorts of these discoveries and so we can introduce you to some of their thoughts through these two sites.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. So I recommend, as everyone's listening to visit and stay connected with Dr. Bland and his team. Again, we'll put all the links to his social media, his website, his books@jimquik.com notes Dr. Bland, thank you so much for joining us again for this show.

Oh Jim, thank you. And what you're doing in spreading information and news that people can really use to perform at high level is extraordinarily valuable. I can't tell you how much I appreciate all of your efforts and thank.

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