How The Most Important Superfood You've Never Heard About Will Rejuvenate Your Immune System with Dr. Jeffrey Bland

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

You can have 40 birthdays, but you can have an immune system that was like a 70 year old. Or you could have a 70 year old and have an immune system like a 40 year old, depending on how much of these collective injuries your immune.

System is carrying forward. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. We're living in a time unlike anything before and that comes with both pros and cons. We're able to video chat with people we love all across the globe and many of us can work from home thanks to computers and the internet. We can walk into a superstore and buy everything we need anytime, day or night. But all that technology and convenience means we're constantly exposed to artificial light from sources like LEDs, fluorescents, and digital devices. A certain amount of light exposure is good and is good for us, especially when it's from the sun. But overexposure from these man-made sources disrupts our body's highly intelligent systems. And that's because the body is biologically programmed to follow distinct light-dark cycles, which help regulate vital hormones, energy, and sleep. But all this exposure to artificial light, what my friend Dave Asprey calls junk light, can throw those programs out of balance and completely disrupt your sleep. That might not sound like a big deal, but it can lead to headaches, weight gain, depression, insulin resistance, and many other health problems. But there is a solution, and it doesn't mean throwing out all your screens and putting them in the trash. The blue light blocking glasses from TrueDark are designed to help you get just the right amount of light at the right times. TrueDark has a daytime line with clear or yellow lenses called Daylights that allows some blue light to filter through so you can stay awake and focused when you need to. Their Twilights have red lenses to more thoroughly block out blue, green, and violet light at night to optimize melatonin production and promote deep, restful sleep. TrueDark can also work with your prescription to make you a custom pair. Right now, you can get 15% off at TrueDark.com/Heimann with the code DrHeimann15. That's TrueDark.com/Heimann. hyman with the code Dr. Hyman 15. I found using the right glasses at the right times has really improved how my eyes feel during the day and how well I sleep at night. And I hope you check them out, too. Starting the morning off right has a huge effect on the rest of the day. Personally, I love having a super nutrient dense gut healing smoothie for breakfast so I can feel energized, focused and balanced all day long. I like to use a ton of green leafy veggies, healthy fats like avocados, nuts and seeds, a handful of antioxidant-rich berries, and then some good gut foods like prebiotic fibers and collagen peptides. Now you might have noticed that collagen has gotten a lot of hype lately, and I know a lot of nutrition trends come and go without the science to back them up, but collagen is one we can all actually get excited about. It's great for supporting healthy bones, nails, skin and joints. And as we get older, collagen production slows down. So I love using collagen peptides to support connective tissue and and my gut health. But quality is key. My favorite collagen is from Primal Kitchen because it's grass-fed and it doesn't have any fillers, artificial ingredients, dairy, wheat or soy. I get Primal Kitchen collagen peptides at an amazing discount through Thrive. Thrive Market members save an average of $32 on every order when compared to other retailers and they have a huge selection of natural and organic and even regenerative foods. They make it easy to shop by diet type, get frozen bulk grass-fed meats, wild-caught fish, or even skincare products and cleaning products shipped right to your door all at a huge discount. And right now, Thrive is offering all Doctors Pharmacy listeners a great deal. You'll get an extra 25% off your first purchase plus a free gift when you become a Thrive Market member. Anytime you spend more than $49, you'll get free carbon neutral shipping. Just head over to thrivemarket.com/hymen to use the offer. That's thrivemarket.com/hymen. And now let's get back to this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy.

I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's Pharmacy the Natural Place for Conversations that Matter. If you care about your health and your immune system, you better listen up because we're gonna have an incredible conversation today with one of the most extraordinary minds in medicine and science today, Dr. Jeffrey Bland.

Welcome, Jeffrey. Dr. Hyman, thank you. What a treat.

There's lots to talk about on this topic of immunity. So thank you. I know. Yeah, of course. So, well, you know, we're gonna start with your bio, which could be read any one of a thousand ways because you've had a thousand different careers. And you really, as I was saying to you last night, we were driving, just visiting me in Maui, We're talking about his impact on science and medicine. I said, I don't think there's anybody in modern medicine today that's had a greater impact on our thinking and the future of healthcare than you, period. And I don't say that lightly. I know a lot of people, but I think you have through your unique talents and brain, which synthesizes enormous amounts of data and has done so over 30 years. And every time I see you carrying around a big stack of journals like this, I'm like, I don't even know how you read voluminously. and your mind has just connected the dots on stuff that we're just beginning now to see in traditional medicine that we talked about 30 years ago in functional medicine. Things like inflammation and the microbiome and mitochondria and detoxification, these are concepts that now are entering the mainstream of healthcare. You were talking about things like insulin resistance and inflammation decades and decades ago. And you've had quite a varied career. For those who don't know Jeff, he is a nutritional biochemist. He was a student of Linus Pauling. who was a two-time Nobel Prize winner, and really wrote the first paper that set the stage for functional medicine called Orthomolecular Psychiatry in Science Magazine in 1969, which laid out how we use nutrition to change our biochemistry to optimize our health, in this case, mental illness. And you've just taken that to the next level. And now we've trained hundreds of thousands of practitioners around the world. We have a Center for Functional Medicine at Cleveland Clinic. And without you and your vision, none of that would have been possible. And people would be suffering from all sorts of conditions that have solutions, but were not being applied. And so I'm just so grateful to you as my mentor, my teacher, as a leader in functional medicine. And Jeff lately has been up to some new stuff. He's just turned 75 years old, the ripe young age of 75. And he has started a new company, as if he hadn't done enough already. It's called Big Bold Health and it's a tremendous company that its mission is to transform the way people think about one of nature's greatest innovations, the immune system. We all are thinking about the immune system in the time of COVID and particularly in the time of chronic disease where all these diseases are connected to inflammation. Big Bold Health is a place for Jeff to advocate for the power of immunorejuvenation. We're going to get deep into the conversation of what immunorejuvenation is and how we enhance immunity at a global level. We do that through the use of many techniques, but one of them is ancient food crops and superfoods that are powerfully immuno-rejuvenating, which is not something we think about very often. Just building a network of farms and regenerative agricultural operations, which is so exciting, and suppliers throughout the United States that really takes a clear stance on regenerative agriculture, environmental stewardship, and planetary health. We're connecting the dots between food as medicine, and regenerative agriculture and climate health. It's just all the pieces are coming together. It's sort of a logical conclusion that I've come to over the last years as well. It has taught in, I don't know, probably 150 countries, flown six million miles, and has really been the leading edge of thinking in functional medicine over 40 years. He's been for the last bunch of decades just continuing this work at the Institute for Functional Medicine, which we we are both a part of. You were the chairman, I was the chairman now, we're both on the board. And we started that in 1991, we started with your wife, Susan. And it's really the educational arm of functional medicine. And you also started another company called Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute, where you're bringing together incredible thinkers from all over the world to talk about the future of healthcare medicine. And my book of yours, it's my favorite, and it's many of them, it's called the Disease Delusion: Conquering the Causes.

Of Chronic Illness for a Healthier, Longer, and Happier Life. Welcome, Jeff, to the Doctors' Pharmacy. Wow, wow, wow. So Mark, first of all, obviously, thank you, thank you. The years and actually now decades of friendship that we've shared has continued to infuse me with the vision of what the future can be. And I want to acknowledge your contribution to my growth and development through this phase of my life. It's been huge. And I also want to make sure that I make a special shout out to Dr. Linus Pauling and his wife Ava Helen. I had the most remarkable transformative couple of years as a sabbatical professor running one of his research labs at the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in Palo Alto in 1981 through 3. It was absolutely an epic shift in my whole belief. I gave up my tenured professorship. I decided with a fairly young family that I was going to do something to dedicate my life to teach doctors how to do nutritional medicine in their practice and apply the principles of, or the molecular medicine that Dr. Pauling was the developer of. And at the time it seemed like a crazy idea. You know, I had a pretty nice life. I was a well-respected professor. I had a good research group. I had tenure. But then I kind of threw my hat into the ring and said, let's start over again. And it was the best decision that I've ever made. It gave me the opportunity to meet people like you. people that have expanded my belief system, my understanding, my basic concepts as to how people get sick and why some people are so well and have such high vitality. And I've more and more started to recognize that health is a system. It's not a single point. It's not one therapy. It's not just one thing we do. It's relationships, it's thinking, it's the environment, it's our culture, it's our sense of being felt that we have attribution, that we have love and the feeling of support. Plus it's the way we eat, it's the way we move. All of these things are part of this universal connection to our genes, which gives rise to who we are. You and I have been forging ahead through the Institute of Functional Medicine to make systems thinking become a dominant field in concept and medicine. I just want to acknowledge you. You have been a central feature in achieving that objective. There's lots of room and opportunity ahead of us. But literally, I wouldn't even be able to speculate on how many hundreds of thousands of people have benefited from the Mark Hyman contributions and my small part in getting this thing started. It's a movement. So thank you.

Thank you, Jeff. Well, we both have sort of influenced each other, I guess, in different ways. You know, Jeff was talking about, you were talking about the whole idea of systems. What does that mean? And, you know, functional medicine is paradigm shift. big one around our understanding of disease. And that's the title of your book, the Disease Delusion. And often in my lectures I say, you know, diseases don't exist. That they're basically constructs that have been made up by medicine to describe symptoms among groups of people and label them according to those symptoms or lab tests or their exam. You know, you have rheumatoid arthritis, you have depression, you have diabetes, you have asthma, whatever. And while those terms are helpful, they help us navigate a little bit, they're just the tip of the iceberg. And below that is really where functional medicine goes, to understand the root causes and the similarities between all these diseases. And so that's what I learned from you, Jeff, was that with functional medicine we have a different set of lenses and a different set of perspectives on interpreting the same information. so when I see a patient with a particular condition, I don't just see them in that specialty. I go, wow, someone might have arthritis, but it might be coming from the microbiome, or they might have dementia, but it might be coming from the fact that they tuna fish all their life and have heavy metals, or the fact they might have a neurological problem. It might be from an absorption issue in their gut. They're not absorbing certain nutrients. So I basically am able to see the patterns that connect everything together. And what we really come to learn is that there are a very few basic physiological systems in the body that are all interconnected, that are all influenced by our lifestyle and by our environment and by our genes. And the expression of the interaction of our genes and environment, including an environment meaning what we eat, our sleep, exercise, rest, all that stuff, that determines what happens in these basic systems. And so as a practitioner in functional medicine, what I'm focused on is looking at these different systems and how to analyze them. And there's just a few, there's your immune system, we call defense and repair, your gut or your microbiome, we call that assimilation, your energy system, which is how your body makes energy, your detox system is how you get rid of waste and environmental toxins, your communication systems such as hormones and neurotransmitters, your transport system, circulation, lymphatics, and your structural system, everything you're made of. And all that's influenced by our lifestyle.

And environment and genes.

And that is really what we focus on. And so, When we start to look at diseases today, we see this tremendous amount of inflammation across the spectrum of diseases. In places we really weren't expecting it. Yes, we know that if you have eczema, it's a rash, it's inflammation. Yes, we know that if you have allergies or an autoimmune disease, that's inflammation. But it turns out that it seems like everything that we're suffering from today is inflammation. Even things like depression and autism and cancer and diabetes and heart disease and Alzheimer's, and I could go on and on. And so the question is, what the heck is going on with our immune system that's creating all these chronic illnesses that affect six out of 10 of us now and four out of 10 have more than one? What went wrong that led to this explosion of inflammatory diseases? Because it seems like, you know, whether you believe we're created by God or just, you know, basically natural selection or whatever, you know, you believe, somehow our bodies are intelligent. So why are they acting so dumb right now?

So I think you have opened to me what is the focus of the remainder, whatever my professional life is going to be, is that question. And I want to take a little bit of a heretical concept here and maybe be a little bit controversial because I've come to recognize that this construct that inflammation underlies all diseases, is actually partly wrong. What I would like to say is imbalanced immune systems are behind virtually all of our chronic illnesses that later take away meaningful years of good living.

So it's a dysfunctional immune system as opposed to just inflammation.

Right, because we have people with allergies that's not inflammation. Allergies is actually an underactive immune system that's imbalanced that is reacting to its lack of what we call innate system proper control. So sometimes what we think is inflammation is the body's last mechanism to protect itself against injury because the other stuff that was upstream was not working right. It didn't have the right balance between the two basic systems of the immune, which is the innate, this old ancient system, and then the adaptive, which is the learned system that relates to antibodies.

That's the antibodies, right?

Exactly.

When you get a vaccine, that's your creating antibodies. It's very specific against a particular invader. Whereas the other kind of immunity is.

More of a generalized immune response that's not specific. That's exactly right. So for me, rather than just focus on inflammation in and of itself, which is a downstream effect, I like to go upstream and say, what were the imbalances within that immune system from what we've learned the last 10 or 15 years? Because the immune system of science is exploding right now. So what are the new things that we've learned through this interrogation? And of course it's been accelerated by SARS-CoV-2 virus because so much is now in the immune front piece in our mind. It's a little bit for me like what happened with HIV. I was in San Francisco at the Pauling Institute in the early 80s with HIV-AIDS. And that was a period of time where everybody wanted to study the immune system. And we went through that explosion for 15 years between say 82 and 97 of immune system activity. Then it kind of got a little bit more quiescent. We moved over into cancer with immunotherapies and precision cancer therapy. But now we're back to re-exploring the virus connection to the immune system and how it is that some people overreact and some people underreact. Well, heard about cytokine storms. What are those about? That's an overreacting immune system because the first part of the immune system was underreacting. So now we're starting to reframe our understanding of what I call a immunobalance. an immunobalance relates to having a young vital responsive immune system that doesn't under respond but doesn't over respond. That's the nature of what we're learning today.

Yeah, I mean so clearly there's a lot of things that cause your immune system to go awry.

Yes.

And if you just look at the litany of behaviors and exposures that we have in the 21st century, it's no wonder, right? A horribly inflammatory diet is number 1-234-567-8910 probably on the list. And you were the first one one that ever, to me, expressed this notion of food as medicine and food as information, as food as instructions, as literally code that programs your biology and relates directly to your immune system. We're gonna get deep into that. But the thing that fascinates me is that the immune system is being assaulted by our inflammatory diet, by environmental toxins, by chronic stress, by lack of sleep, by social isolation, I mean, by disconnection from the natural world, all these things are driving our immune systems to go awry. And they're degrading our immune systems and they're putting them out of balance. And your philosophy and your perspective now is how do we fix that? That's the key to successful approaches to chronic disease. If we don't understand that, then we're going to keep failing and by putting band-aids are rearranging the dextrose, not Titanic, and not really getting the real cause of these problems. So talk about this idea that happens of immunosenescence, which is a big word, but essentially it means senescence means aging. So it's the aging of your immune system. Why does that happen and what is actually happening?

Yes.

And by the way, for all those who are listening, Jeff might say stuff that's a little hard to understand. I might stop him and interrupt him. I'm not being rude, I'm just trying to recap so you all get it.

So let me go back to first principles real quickly. So let's talk about what is the immune system in a broad kind of general perspective. Because I think everybody uses the term immunity, immune system, but what does that really mean? So there are really three ways that our body, 24/7/365, communicates with the outside world. And those are the nervous system, the gut microbiome and the other microbiomes of, say, the lungs, because we have a microbiome that sits on the mucosal surfaces of our lungs. Every time we breathe, that's getting information. And the third is our immune system. Our immune system is sampling what's going on in the inside and outside world all the time continuously. Now we would say, well, but the nervous system does that and also the microbiome, but the one that most rapidly can change and reconstruct itself is the immune system. Now, why do I say that? Because it's known that of these cells that we call the immune system cells that flow around in our body, that they're being made in real time at a very rapid rate. Every 10 seconds, we make a million new white cells, 20 million new platelets, and 30 million new red blood cells.

Okay, hold on there. You just said that every 10 seconds, your bone marrow stem cells produce a million white blood cells and millions of platelets and lots of red blood cells.

Now my question, and this is what set me a few years ago onto this journey, I asked myself, okay, if that's happening all the time silently in our body, are those new cells that are being formed, are they as good as the cells that they're replacing? Are they worse than the cells that they were replacing? Or are they better than the cells they were replacing? And once you ask that question, good or better, then you have to say, what does good and better mean? And what it means is, is that immune cell that's being formed that will go out in our body so that every two months, we're replacing our immune system, which is what it means. Every two months, you have a new immune system based upon that turnover. And that's not when you're ill. Your immune system is even more activated when you're ill and you have an immune reaction. So let's say every two months, you have if you have a new immune system, what does it mean that it's as good or worse than it was before? What it means is that the immune cells are carrying either injuries into the next generation, bad memories, things that make them, when they make the next generation, less active than when you were healthy and young.

So are these mutations or they're just-.

Oh, you're jumping ahead. Hold with me just a second. I'm going to come to that because there are two ways that that might-.

Because like stem cells basically are these cells that produce all the baby cells that are actual cells.

So they're like the- Pluripotent stem cells. The grandmother or grandfather cells. They're sitting in the bone marrow. I think we need to remember the bone marrows, the bones are more than just skeletons. The bones are there that are generating all of our red and white blood cells continually throughout our life. And they are patterned by our genes as to how they're gonna do that, but they're modulated and modified by the environment we've been living in. So we all know that if you let's use exposure to radiation, you know that that can produce cancers like leukemia. How does that occur? Because it injures, the radiation injures the bone marrow cells so that they undergo injury and then they become a different kind of cell that rapidly proliferates and forms a leukemia. So what we say is the integrity of these bone marrow cells throughout the course of a living 100 years, we want to protect them very carefully so that they don't get injured. and we want to also make their products that come out of our bone marrow go into our bloodstream and all the cells and tissues of the body. We want to make them as young as possible. What does everybody say? They say, when I'm young, I could get away with all sorts of things. You know, I could be immortal. It seems like I didn't get sick. But now when I'm getting older, I'm responding to other things and I'm having allergies and I can't tolerate this and I get sick easier and I get the flu and cold. Yes, because that immune system is what you said, becoming senescent. becoming age because it's remembering bad experiences you had in your earlier life and it hasn't gotten rid of them. But now we have learned there's a process the body has to reverse that. It's always going.

Before you get into how we fix it. So what are the kinds of things that screw up your stem cells in your bone marrow? Radiation, environmental toxins. Yes. Diet.

Yes.

Stress.

Let's talk about Michael Finkel. Michael Finkel, I followed his work. He's a good colleague and friend at CSIRO, the scientific research organization in Australia. He worked in Adelaide at a big lab there. He's been studying the impact of nutrients on hematopoietic stem cells for 35 years, published hundreds of papers. And he has found that if you get a diet that's a bit imbalanced with regard to certain micronutrients, vitamins and minerals and other factors, then it will increase then the formation of these polynucleated cells. They're funny immune cells, right? And you can actually see them in the microscope with specific staining. He's actually developed a lab test that can do that. And what he actually has found is that aging of the individual and their inflammatory conditions that they experience later in life are related to the number of these damaged cells that are associated with under nutrition for that individual. So poor, not just poor folic and vitamin B12, but zinc and chromium. and magnesium and vitamin B1, vitamin B2, all these things play a role in modulating the integrity of those cells.

Amazing. So we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna get into like what happens when these stem cells start producing funky offspring and the implications for our health. But for those listening, I want you to understand that we are going to go deep into this topic and we are going to talk about not only how we can reverse our immune age, but specifically what to eat and what to do to fix it. So stay with us for the podcast because I want you to get to the end of this because we've got some real wonderful take-home things that can drive this in the right direction. So let's go back to this story then where we've got all these insults we've created to our bone marrow through the course of living in this modern world with poor diet, environmental toxins, radiation, you name it, who knows what's affecting glyphosate, this, that. Then all of a sudden, your stem cells start producing these funky little offspring. What are they called? What happens to them? And what do they do once they.

Get in your bloodstream? Yeah. There's two ways. You already started me down this road, so now I'll come back and rejoin the road. There are two ways that are processes by which these bed cells can carry forward bad messages. One, you already mentioned the word mutation. That's an actual injury to the nuclear material, the DNA that's in an immune cell that changes the way that it is going to tell its message. That would be a mutational injury. We carry those mutational injuries in ways that actually, again, can be analyzed in the laboratory. It leads to a very long-winded word, and I promise you I'm only going to use it once. It's called clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential. That's abbreviated CHIP. IP.

So these chips, we just call them chip cells.

Yeah, these chips are debris that form within cells that then have a different personality. And the personality where these injuries occurred in the genes of these immune cells happens to be in regulation of areas that are associated with inflammation, particularly a gene called TET, TET-11, TET-11 translocase and another gene that's related to epigenetic modulation of gene expression. That's a lot of words.

What he does is an epigenetic modulation of gene expression. That means that when your genes are getting read by your body, we can tag those genes in different spots to turn on or off messages that regulate health and disease. So it's a whole new field of understanding how not just our genes can be altered, but these post gene sort of products can be modified and actually cause them to be damaged in a way that leads to really bad outcomes for our health.

Absolutely.

Or good outcomes, right? And that they're passed on in ways that we didn't even really understand. That if your grandmother was exposed to a toxin, that that toxin can injure the cells in a way that creates an epigenetic mark on those genes and then leads to changes in the grandchildren that have profound impact on their health.

That's right. So now you like turned on my whole limbic system because this to me has been such a discovery path for me and I hope I can share this in a way that makes sense to those that haven't spent the hours that I spent getting into this.

Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark. I think this past year has gotten us all thinking about immunity unlike ever before. But COVID aside, I regularly see so many patients who struggle with recurrent infections. Now, one of the most common infections is urinary tract infections. And these are actually the second most common infection in the United States, especially in women, and they result in 10 million visits to the doctor each year. Not only that, but the number of antibiotic resistant UTIs has doubled in the last 10 years. So I was really intrigued to hear about a line of products my team discovered called uKora. They make UTI relief products with non-cranberry urinary tract health supplements and well researched ingredients like D-mannose, vitamin C and probiotics. Now, two of my team members have been using Ucora themselves and have been completely blown away with the results. Ucora also has over 10,000 unfiltered reviews. If you have a UTI, Ucora has a UTI emergency kit with an at-home UTI test strip and pain relief. They can also make several products for proactive urinary tract health that you can get in one comprehensive package in their complete system. This contains their no sugar added target drink mix to flush and cleanse the urinary tract. their control supplement to eliminate biofilm, and their Promote Probiotic to rebalance the vaginal microbiome, which is a crucial component of urinary tract health. If you're looking for a new effective way to tackle UTIs, I highly recommend checking out uqora. Right now, they're offering Doctors Pharmacy listeners 20,000 off when you go to uqora.com/doctor. That's U-Q-O-R-A. That's uqora.com/doctor.

Now let's get back to this week's episode of the Doctors Pharmacy. I read a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine several years ago by one of the principal investigators at Harvard Mass General Medical School and Hospital, Siddhartha Jaiswal is his name. This was a paper of his group's report that they had been looking at patients that have blood-borne cancers like leukemias that then suffer from a precursor to that disease called myelodysplastic syndrome. Now, what does that mean in the US? It's a syndrome where the blood cells actually start to change their shape because of undergone injury, these immunological injuries. And it was thought that myelodysplastic syndrome was only a precursor of blood cancers. But his work then found that when they started to study this in more detail, way before this person would ever get a blood cancer, that those injuries were also associated with incidents of cardiovascular disease. and when I read this paper, I thought, oh my word, this is an epic new discovery. Because what this says is that it's a route to many different chronic diseases, not just to cancer.

So these chipped cells that you're talking about.

That's right.

We thought we're just maybe causing cancer, but you said that they're now maybe causing heart disease and all kinds of other diseases.

And so I asked Dr. Gieswein to come and speak. to our group, the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute group. And I knew it was going to be a very high level, you know, research presentation and a lot of the docs in our group might not get it. But what has happened now is I followed Dr. Geisler-Wall and many others that are now getting into this field to recognize exactly what I had predicted would occur or I forecast might occur, that the more they looked at this, the more that they would find these chips were associated with many other diseases diabetes, hormonal problems in postmenopausal women, which has just been reported, dementia. So now we have- Autoimmune disease. Yes, auto, thank you, autoimmune disease. And so now we're saying, well, hold on just a minute, this is a fundamental process that precedes way early where a person is going to end up 10 years later when they start getting these increased injuries to their immune system. By the way, this process falls under the term training the immune system. You can train the immune system to be better or it can be trained the immune system to be worse.

Okay, so let's just take it back a little. So the bone marrow stem cells get injured. Yes. Produces these chipped cells. Yes. Otherwise known as zombie cells.

Well, zombie cells are a little different. They're closely related. They're also mutational, but that's a slightly different story.

Okay. But they relate to one. so they're connected. And then they go into the bloodstream. Yes. A million every 10 seconds.

Yes.

And they start creating this Havoc of a dysregulated immune system that's linked to.

All these chronic illnesses. That's right. So what is. So that's like the bad news story. And by the way, you, you use the term. Here's where we reintroduced the term immunosenescence, aging the immune system. There's a direct link between the number of these chip cells. and the age of your immune system. So you can have 40 birthdays, but you can have an immune system that was like a 70 year old, or you could have a 70 year old and have an immune system like a 40 year old, depending on how much of these collective injuries your immune system is carrying forward. And lastly, just so I can come back to the epigenetics, because that's the second mechanism, is if you're changing then on your messaging of your genes and your immune system, the epigenome, this thing that regulates how the immune system is going to function, you've got two ways then, one, mutational injury, and the other, epigenetic modulation, both of which combine to give rise to the biological age of your immune system.

So now we can actually measure your biological age through telomeres, but also through looking at your immune age, which is kind of new. This is a DNA methylation test, right?

Yes, and now it's finding the extraordinary work that Blackburn did in the discovery of the telomerase with Elizabeth H. Blackburn and won the Nobel Prize. It's a very, very important part of our understanding of the aging process. But in terms of the immune system, telomere shortening is probably not as important as is this epigenetic and chip formation that I'm describing. That then really is more sensitive to how your immune system is aging than is telomere shortening.

And now we're able to measure that with a finger stick. blood tests, right?

Yes.

You can do it at home. Yeah.

So now people are starting to actually examine, I call this a surrogate marker. What does that mean? It means that it's not directly looking at the age like your birthday comes up every year. It's looking at a marker that tells you about the function of your immune system that's associated with your age. Stephen Horvath at UCLA has been studying what he calls the clock mechanism for assessing your biological age. And this is based on these patterns of epigenetic regulation.

So people want to get a test for this, how would they get it?

Well, there's a number of labs. TrueAge does a home testing DNA, D-N-A-G-E, as a home testing thing that you can mail in with a finger stick of blood. Yeah. And I recommend in terms of this measuring that it'd be better to do it with a finger stick of blood than do it with saliva. Saliva is you're measuring the age of your buccal cells and which are not directly related to your immune cell. Your blood is you're measuring 10% of a blood drop is your white blood cells.

So you're more measuring your immune cells. This sounds kind of depressing. So our bone marrow gets injured, it creates all this damage to stem cells. There's all this havoc in our immune system, creates all these chronic diseases. Sounds like a disaster. And it is for a lot of people. And there's a good news story in here which we now understand actually how to reverse this process. It's called immuno rejuvenation. And that's what Big Bold Health is all about, is the science of immuno rejuvenation and discovering ways using food as medicine to reverse your biological age of your immune system and actually create immuno rejuvenation instead of immuno senescence. That's what we're gonna get to at the end of this conversation. But I have a few more steps I wanna understand. So these chipped cells get in the bloodstream, What is the mechanism by which they cause all these problems? What are they doing?

Yeah, so these injuries, these mutations as we talked about, turn on and alter specific genes to function within the immune cells. And the genes that are principally seemingly altered are those that control a process called inflamming. And I know you've spoken at length about inflamming. And this is one of the mechanisms of inflamming. it's a chronic inflammatory state. It's like a simmering pot that is always boiling of rubor, color, and dolor.

So the chip cells are communicating with your DNA?

Well, the DNA in the chip cells. The DNA in the chip cells is driving inflammation. It's driving this inflammaging. Because what it does is then it regulates the way that our immune cells see themselves. They think now that they're in a hostile environment. And when they're in hostile environment, they do exactly what our body's supposed to do in a hostile environment, fight back. And fighting back is inflammation. And that's, to me, why I say don't label inflammation bad. Inflammation is agnostic. It's not bad or good. It's all related to balance. But if you're in a constant state of inflammation, because you've got this chronic inflammation going on, now you've got collateral.

Damage and you're paying a price. And that inflammation across the whole spectrum disease. that's sort of the bad news. And it seems like the people don't understand exactly what we're talking about. What happens, your DNA basically codes for proteins. That's all it does. It's got a four-letter code, ACTG, and any three-letter group is a protein. It's a gene that codes for proteins. And those proteins do stuff in the body, and most of your immune function happens through these proteins. Yeah.

Antibodies are proteins.

Yeah. And so basically you're screwing up your messages produced by your genes that are turning on all these inflammatory downstream products that get produced in the body.

That's right.

Okay.

And it can be different from cell type to cell type. So you might have inflammation principally in the liver or you might have it principally in the muscles or you might have it principally in the brain. astrocytes. So there are, you know, there's regional specificity to inflammation based upon where the immune system is injured.

Okay, so this is a great story. So basically, we're down this rabbit hole of our nasty lifestyle, environmental chemicals, our bad diet causing the aging of our immune system through these chipped cells. It creates inflammation throughout the body and creates all these secondary diseases that we're treating with all kinds of drugs and procedures that really are missing the boat. What you're seeing is there's also a science, not of just immunosenescence, but of immuno rejuvenation, a way in which we can work with our biology to help get rid of these chipped cells and clean up our blood and end up rejuvenating our immune system so that it works better and we don't end up with all these chronic age-related diseases that are driven by inflammation.

That is absolutely correct.

So tell us about the body's own innate mechanisms for dealing with this. Because it seems like it's not working very well and that there are other things we can do to really rejuvenate our immune system, which we're going to get to in a minute. But the body must have some way of handling this kind of injury. It's just, why is it working?

So let's start the good news here. The good news is that in every person, every person, the body is renewing its immune system. all the time. And that's really good news. The problem is, particularly for the reasons you've already described, that for many people, the rate at which the immune system is picking up bad memories exceeds the rate at which it is renewing itself. So it's not like you have no renewing. It's just that it can't keep up the pace with the things that are being damaged. And so as we learned from Dr. Sydney Baker so many years ago in functional medicine, there's two things that you do, you take the thing away that's causing the problem, you add the thing that's missing. That's the basic concept of functional medicine. So what you need to take away are all the factors that are enhancing and increasing the mutational injury and the epigenetic modification of the immune system while you're giving the things that lead to immune cell house cleaning. And that process of immune cell house cleaning won a Nobel Prize in 2013. for its discovery, it has another term that we have put now into our lexicon called autophagy. Autophagy is self-eating of debris. The body has that process. It has these magical ways that it can restore itself. And if autophagy is present at the proper rate and balance, and it's not exceeded by the rate of injury, now what are you doing? You're immuno-rejuvenated. And this is what people are talking.

About when they talk about time-restricted eating and intermittent fasting. fasting, ketogenic diets, fast mimicking diets. They're all working on this process of activating the body's own garbage disposal system.

Precisely.

And the cleanup projects that have to happen. And when you're eating all the time, your body has them a chance to rest and renew and repair or immunorejuvenate.

So can we stop right there for a second? Yes. I want to take you and I are fast-paced thinkers and talkers, but I want to take just a deep cerebral breath here for a moment. Because what you just said, I'm taking a breath as I'm saying it, what you just said is a paradigm shift of major magnitude in the way we have been thinking in this field of science and bodies function for the last 200 years. This is a threshold where disc crossing that is so dramatically important for us to learn because it puts us back in control. We're not just a victim. We now have some gears that we go or some knobs and switches that we can manipulate if we understand who we are individually and what we need to do to exactly what you just said. Before it was like, I'm just the luck of the draw. Poor me, I got a damaged immune system. There's nothing I can do about it. Now we're saying, no, there are processes that we can hold on to and manipulate for rejuvenation. That's powerful. That is powerful.

Okay, so let's go down the list practically of what are those things that cause immunosenescence that we need to get rid of, according to Sidney Baker. And what are those things that we need to add into our life or diet or whatever that will help us rejuvenate our immune system?

Good.

So what is the first?

Well, I think you've done a very good job of putting together the laundry list of the things that we know.

Just to recap. Okay.

So let's start with radiation. So particularly ionizing radiation. And that includes even UV exposure because we know that the skin undergoes cellular damage and we get these ectinoceratosis, that's an example of.

So I'm kind of screwing why most of the winter.

Depends on how you protect yourself. So that's one. Number two, as we already mentioned, has to do with toxins. So toxins could be of a variety of type. They could be persistent organic pollutants, POPS, from the chemical industry, or they could.

Be pesticides, chemicals, plastics, BPA, all that stuff.

Exactly. They could also be internal toxins produced by endotoxemia from our own microbiome because if we have funny bugs growing in our body's gut, that can induce then the production of secondary substances that are toxic that our body has to manage. So it could be a gut endotoxins problem.

So basically your gut microbiome when there's bad bugs in there produce nasty chemicals and molecules that leak into your bloodstream and create inflammation throughout your whole body. So if your gut's not happy, your immune system's not happy. That's because 60% of your immune system is in your gut.

That's exactly right. And so the third area, which may be a little bit more confusing for the average person, but let me try to make it hopefully understandable, is a form of body fat accumulation that's called central body fat or body fat that's around the midsection.

Belly fat.

That's around, yes, it's around the organs, right? It's not subcutaneous fat. It would be organ fat. Organ fat turns out to be a very big contributor to this process of inflammaging and injury to the immune system. And in fact, there is a paper, a study just done at Harvard that's, I think, really fascinating. It was done in postmenopausal women looking at their risk, the later stage cardiovascular, the heart disease, disease. And it found that there was a correlation between chips in their immune system and their post-menopausal heart disease risk if and only if they had a lot of central body fat, meaning all the immune cells that are clustered because our fat is an endocrine organ that has a lot of immune cells in it, our central fat.

And how do we get belly fat, by the way?

Yeah, exactly.

Eating starch and sugar. precisely, which is what I've been talking about. And you taught me decades ago. It's all about insulin resistance, which we've talked about a lot on this podcast, and this idea that when you eat this diet of starch and sugar, this our diet in America, it's about 60% of our calories, that it drives this belly fat growth. And that is like a fire in the belly, literally a fire in the belly that's driving all this inflammation. And that inflammation in turn will cause damage in the bone marrow, too.

Absolutely. It's a cyclical crosstalk. because if you look microscopically at that organ fat under the microscope, what you're going to see in there are a bunch of immune cells that are right inside the fat cells, the adipocyte cells. And those immune cells are having conversation with the fat cells. And if the fat cells are unhappy and they're saying, I'm fed up, I'm fed up with what you're doing to me, they tell the immune system that they're fed up. and the immune system then goes out into the bloodstream and it tells the rest of the body it's fed up. The immune cells in the gut are now telling the brain it's fed up. So this interconnection that you talked about.

This web, is what we're learning about.

What about stress and exercise? Well, you're jumping ahead. Just a second, I'm going to get to that. Because next you talked about time-restricted feeding or about intermittent fasting or something like that. So what does that do? And you already said it beautifully that what happens to us as humans because of the availability we have of food and celebration around food and often foods that are not so good for us with a lot of immune activating substances like sugar that we then find ourselves overdoing a good thing. And as we overdo a good thing, our body, as you said it early, doesn't have a rest. The immune system doesn't have a rest. The immune system likes to have a rest, just like the brain likes to have a rest when when we're sleeping and our brain is renewing, our immune system is renewing.

So the answer is one of the things that causes damage to your immune system is eating all the time. Yes. Is eating before bed is not giving.

Yourself a break for 12 hours. And lack of rest. Rest is a very powerful therapeutic tool that allows rejuvenation. If you're constantly stimulating the friend in with things that could injure the immune system, you don't have the activity in the back end to rejuvenate it effectively. so this sleep cycle is connected to the way and the frequency we eat and what we eat. It is again a lifestyle pattern that all works together, not just like I'm going to do one thing. Okay, so that's now let's go to the big one, which is the one that I think has had the biggest controversy, but it's also the biggest area for discovery. And that is how does the experience in life speak through our immune system to our function of our immune system. We used to think that the immune system was over here and our brain was over here, and so our bad life experiences, they would be over here, but our immune system was insulated because of the blood-brain barrier. No, it's not true at all. What we now recognize very clearly is the experiences that we have in life, the harmful post-traumatic stress syndromes, let's say, lock into our immune system. these specific mutational injuries, these epigenetic changes, in such a way as they can dysregulate our immune system. So we can months or years later still be carrying that bad memory in our immune system that shifts us over into this inflammatory state. So never should we think that the experiences and living, the relationships we have, the love and appreciation, the sense of fulfillment is not a direct important component of our immune system.

So our relationships can be inflammatory, our thoughts can be inflammatory. You know, there's a whole term we used to use called psychoneuroimmunology. We keep having to change it now. Psychoneuroendo-microbiome, toxic clo immunology. And it's like, and everything is like all, you know, it's all connected.

And I think of the word joy, right? Like I'm having joy right now. I'm having an emotional joy being with my family. and it just lights me up. So what is it doing to my immune system? If I could go with my microscopic eyes and travel through my immune system, I'd have lit up excited immune cells that we're celebrating. I wouldn't have depressed, anxious, injurious immune cells. So I think that this construct that we're describing is a model for living of which the immune system, because it's constantly sampling our environment and feeding back to us what it sees, is a good entry point for health. It's not an abstraction.

I mean, your thoughts and your feelings, your emotions, your relationships all literally speak to your immune system in real time and regulate their function. Yes. For good or bad. And I think most of us don't understand that. I mean, even the field of sociogenomics is so fascinating to me. You can be sitting in a room with someone and having a deep, heartfelt connection and you will turn off all the inflammatory genes in the body. If you're having an argument with somebody or you're not connecting with them, is the opposite. That's right. So it's not just some big theory, it's actually well-documented science.

And that is part of the word that you used earlier, of immuno-rejuvenation. If every day you had the greatest part of your day in that state that you've just described, I guarantee you you'd be rejuvenating your immune system. Because you'd have less injured cells, immunosenescence cells, and you'd have more immuno-rejuvenating cells.

Amazing. Okay, so basically to summarize, we have to get rid of toxins in our life as best as possible. I always go to the Environmental Working Group or ewg.org to learn how to avoid most of these toxins. We can't avoid all of them, obviously. We need to make sure we're not eating a diet that's inflammatory that causes visceral fat, which is starch and sugar and processed food and eating a whole foods diet. We need to make sure we are very conscious of our thoughts and relationships and connections and emotions because they have a big impact on us and practice techniques that can help with that like meditation or yoga various kinds of practices. Exercise also is important. Sleep is important. Not eating all the time is important. Having a break for 12, 14, 16 hours a day. These are really simple practical things that anybody can do to rejuvenate your immune system. Yes. So that's the good stuff. But there's another layer to this, right? Which is what are the things we could do proactively in addition to these avoiding the things that cause immunosenescence to actually cause immunorejuvenation.

Here, here.

And this is where the conversation is gonna get really interesting because what we've discovered is that there are compounds in food that we thought were, we call them secondary compounds or, I mean, this almost sounds like your second cousin, like it's not really that important. And these compounds in food are not protein, fat, carbohydrate, fiber, vitamins, minerals, or something else. which turns out we've evolved with for millennia that are critical if we want to be healthy. You don't necessarily get a deficiency disease like scurvy or rickets if you don't have it, but you get chronic disease later on in life. And so what's really exciting is this world of phytochemicals, which is a weird word, or phytonutrients, phyto, not the dog, but phyto P-H-Y-T-O, which means plant, so plant compounds that are in plants that somehow affect our biology in real time. This is what I think we mean when we say food is medicine or food is information. The macronutrients are information, the micronutrients are information, but the phytonutrients are also information. It turns out they've been a completely ignored area of medicine that may turn out to be the most important discovery of our time of how to use food to heal chronic disease. And I see this all the time in my practice and it's a miracle. Like I think, I mean, literally if I saw this in medical school, I would have like win the Nobel Prize because you don't see this. But it's now we see it all the time for people who are doing functional medicine with real transformations. And I've told these stories over and over. I've had guests on the show. We talked about the, it's just tremendous. So what you helped us understand over 30 years is this field of food as medicine. And now we're getting more and more granular about it. And one of the exciting areas is how to use food as medicine to rejuvenate your immune system. And that's what I want to get into. So we're going to talk about a bunch of compounds. There's a lot of them. There's 25,000 or so of these compounds. The Rockefeller Foundation is spending hundreds of millions of dollars creating the periodic table of phytochemicals. we're learning about how they regulate everything in our biology from detoxification to our microbiome, to our immune system, to our mitochondria, to hormones, I mean pretty much everything, right? And we don't really even learn about them in medical school, we don't talk about them, and they are probably among the most important things we can do to regulate our biology. And we've heard about superfoods. Well, what makes them super? It's these phytochemicals, right? Blueberries, right? We've talked about that. We know about catechins in green tea or polyphenols in berries or glucosinolates and broccoli, maybe you don't know what that is, but anyway, they're all good stuff that's in the food. And it turns out that with this immune story, there are a bunch of compounds in food, some of them recently discovered, that have powerful effects to turn the clock back of aging of your immune system. And these compounds you've come across through your research. So I want you to tell us a story of this product, compounds, well not a compound, but this food called Himalayan Tarty Buckwheat. And there may be other foods that help us rejuvenate our immune system, but I want to go down the trail of this buckwheat because it's kind of illustrates the science behind what we're talking about.

Yeah, I think this is so powerful.

So you start on it. I want to tell the story because you know, what do they say, chance famous paired mind, right? So our genius is 99% inspiration, 1% inspiration. And you have been reading the science and you're reading all these weird papers that no one else bothers to read and end up with three readers. But you read this stuff and you came across something in one of these papers that sort of caught your attention about a molecule that you'd never heard about. Tell us about that day and the discovery.

Yeah, this was one of those like ahas and one of the reasons I really like the primary literature because often you'll pick up little tidbits and you'll say, wow, that's interesting. I never thought about that. So this was an article in the Journal of Clinical Investigation in 2017 from Vanderbilt University. And it was describing a new way of managing blood pressure by using the immune system because the immune cells speak to the walls of the blood vessels and they can cause them to relax and lower lower blood pressure. And this compound that they were studying had a name, scientific name called 2-hydroxybenzylamine. Yeah.

Or 2-hydroxybenzylamine.

Everybody has in their kitchen cabinet. Exactly. And 2-hydroxybenzylamine. The abbreviation is 2-HOBA. H-O-B-A. So, 2-HOBA. And I was reading the paper, I thought, well, that's really interesting how the immune system could be connected to blood pressure in ways that I hadn't thought about. So, then I went to the experimental part of the paper and was reading the fine print. and there was a little paragraph saying that there's only one place in nature that this Tuhobo can be found. It's in this Himalayan tartyry buckwheat. And I thought, well, hold on, I don't know anything about it. What's this Himalayan tartyry buckwheat? I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about food. Yeah, I never heard of it. But I never heard about this. So I think that you hit on an incredibly important part of this story because at first I thought, well, this Himalayan tartyry buckwheat, this Tuhobo story is kind of interesting. But then as I started to do more research, into what was known about Himalayan and Turkey buckwheat, I found out that this 60 to 100 times more phytochemicals had to do with over a hundred different phytochemicals, not just to hoba. It was one of the most immune active, nutrient rich plant foods ever discovered in the world.

So it's like the most amazing new superfood we've ever found.

That's right. And then to make it historically interesting, I traced the history and I found out that that particular food had come from Asia across to Northern Europe and then had gotten on the boats to come to Colonial America. And it was one of the first foods that was used in Colonial America because it doesn't require pesticides, herbicides, irrigation. It fights off weeds. It's very, very good and different climatic, and it likes toxic soils that are rich in aluminum because it has an aluminum detoxifying gene. And I thought, oh my word, why didn't this product stick around if it was already in the American food supply system? And I came to the conclusion, I don't know this is absolutely for sure, but I think it's because new cultivars of higher yielding wheat and other grains, because Himalayan chartered buckwheat is not a grain, it's a seed. And these new grains from the cereal family, which are genetically entirely different than Himalayan Tattari Buckwheat. That's why Himalayan Tattari Buckwheat has no gluten, whereas grains have gluten. Those products had higher yields. They were much more mild tasting. They could be built into different baking products more easily. And people like the ability to put different flavors and not have that flavoring of the Tattari Buckwheat because of all those chemicals.

Interesting. Okay, so let's talk about these phytochemicals. Because here's a plant that was grown in some of the harshest conditions in the world, in the Himalayas, for soils, cold weather, no water, you know, just like...

Solar, a lot of sun, high altitude.

High altitude, lots of sun. And what happens to plants when they're stressed like that? What happens to them?

Well, that's very important. If you take a plant that's not used, its genes are not used to those hostile conditions and you try to plant in there, they won't survive, right? But if over the largest experiment of plant development in history, which is called natural selection, which is millions of years, that plant has become capable of being prosperous in that hostile environment, it now has the genes that can regulate its response to stress. A plant has immune systems. This was an aha for me because.

Phytochemicals, in a sense, are the plant's own defense mechanisms.

That's exactly right. And they are the active principles of the immune system in the plant. The plant doesn't have the same kind of immune system we have with circulating white blood cells. It has a different set of immune active components, much of which related to their phytochemicals that are serving as the immune system in the plant. So a hearty immune system in a plant that is resistant to stressful and hostile conditions when eaten transfers those principles to the human.

Which is amazing. So basically we're borrowing the defense mechanisms of plants to help regulate our biology. That's right. And this is true not just for Himalayan Partiy Buckwheat but for all foods that we eat that are real whole foods that have different molecules in them that are not the traditional protein, fat, carbs and all that. And what's fascinating to me is that the tougher the life of the plant, the more powerful these phytochemicals are. And that's why this Himalayan buckwheat that's in the, like, one of the most difficult conditions on the planet is among the most powerful superfoods. And it explains, for example, why when you eat a wild food, like a wild strawberry, it might be like the size of a peanut, is actually way more tasty than a strawberry you buy commercially grown. This is a big, red strawberry.

Yes.

Because of these phytochemicals. the phytochemical richness of the food. And it turns out that these phytochemicals.

Are.

Ubiquitous in plants that are so important for our development and our growth and our healing and our repair systems. But we basically bred them out of our food supply. So, the phytochemicals in the modern food supply are so much less than they used to be. We see more wild we used to eat foods grown in more difficult conditions. We used to eat foods that weren't all hybridized for starch and yield and drought and all this that actually removes those. And what we've removed also is flavor. I mean, you know a tomato that you get an heirloom tomato that you grow in your vine, you pick at the end of summer, it's like this explosion of flavor in your mouth. I mean, Karen Washington was on the podcast, talked about the first time she had a tomato like that, it blew her mind and led to a whole life of gardening and urban renewal and you know, urban community gardens. And those bio-chemicals are the things that actually help us stay healthy. And they somehow figured out our bodies are lazy, basically. And so we only make the things that we got to make. We don't make vitamin C, we don't make a lot of things. We get them from our food. But we've evolved, I call it symbiotic phyto-adaptation. We've evolved symbiotically with the plants, so we borrow their defense mechanisms. and it turns out we really need these if we want to really have robust health. We need these to create optimal health. And so our whole food supply is basically denuded of these phytochemicals. It's terrifying. And it turns out they're way more important than we thought in terms of our health and particularly in terms of our immune health. And we call them secondary compounds. They're what the plants use to help regulate their health and biology and we borrow them. for ours. And it's just an incredible story of our intricate and intimate relationship with nature. Absolutely. What was even more fascinating is that the food that we're eating today is so lacking in these compounds. It's also flavorless, like a flavorless cardboard tomato. Even your vegetables that we're eating are not necessarily nutritious as they were 50 years ago. And they are, unfortunately, the majority of our diet today. And that's why we're seeing all this chronic disease. So I have a theory that it's the lack of phytochemicals over a long period of time that's really driving a lot of the chronic disease.

So I interviewed in one of my audio magazines years ago, a professor at a university in Britain, and he had just written a series of papers in the British Journal of Medicine talking about what happened to the health of the British people when they moved away from the agrarian living into urbanized city living. And this would be the Victorian period. And he said, you know, it was thought that the people before who were living on farms had the really poor health habits and they were not achieving good nutrition. But when he went back and looked at the health records because it turns out in England that they have detailed, handwritten health records on individuals going back several hundred years. They were really good at keeping these records. And when he studied these records, he found out that actually it was a misnomer that people that reading these traditional diets of these kind of poor people's diets, the thick brown bread and the vegetables from the garden, they were actually very, very healthy. And they actually, if they didn't die of injury or infection, they actually had a very much longer life expectancy than people who lived in the more modern Victorian era that were starting to eat the more processed foods. And he attributed this all to what you just said, because he did quantitative studies showing the reduction in phytochemicals that had occurred when they moved into this more urbanized eating environment. 80% loss of phytochemicals based on his calculations. So I think that your point is very well taken because so let's use the word vitamin. Everybody knows the word vitamin. What is vitamin derived from? Vit, life, amines, some compound that has an amine structure that promotes life. So we have vitamin B1, 2, 3, 6 and so forth. And what we recognize is that those are essential for life because if you don't get them, you die of a deficiency disease. Curvy, berry, berry, pellagra, xerophthalmia, rickets. But there's no deficiency disease that you can identify for the lack of these phytochemicals. They just then set the tone for age-related disorders like senescence, which are much harder to study if they come on 20 years later than something in two months you can have scurvy. So this is the problem we've had. We don't have a good biomarker for people getting nutrient deficiencies of phytochemicals where we have a good biomarker for vitamin C deficiency. Yeah.

And I feel like the whole idea of food is pharmacology, eat your medicine. the name of this podcast is Doctors Pharmacy with an F. I think the whole idea is that these are medicinal compounds and flavor is what they produce. So when you eat really flavorful foods and plants, they're rich in phytochemicals. And that is just a fascinating observation. So flavor and the medicine in the food are totally connected.

Okay, so let's stop just for a moment. This is a way station. What is flavor connected to? Taste. What is taste connected to? Taste is connected to a neurosensory mechanism through a variety of different specialized cells that respond to specific tastants. Sweet, bitter, salty, umami, we know about the sour. These are unique feature sets within our neurological system that then regulate to our brain some sensation saying, pleasant or unpleasant. Now, let me take this a step farther. What we now recognize is that many of these phytochemicals, which have a sensory flavor of bitter, that those bitter sensors are not just on the tip of the tongue. They are distributed throughout our whole body. We have taste receptors in our gut. Our gut is tasting and what happens if the gut tastes a specific bitter phytochemical? it turns on an activity to release into the bloodstream hormones, this is called the intracellular system that regulate blood sugar and inflammation. So we have drugs now to treat diabetes, don't we? And those drugs that treat diabetes are called endocrine active hormonal drugs and incretin drugs. What those drugs do is mimic bitter taste mechanisms.

Well, you know, it's so funny, Jeff, because Chinese medicine, bitter melon.

That's right.

It's like a melon that's really bitter. It's really good for diabetes.

And it's been studied that those phytochemicals activate a specific cell type actually in the intracellular system of our gut to release what's called GLP-1, glucagon-like peptide-1. Glucagon-like peptide-1 is a hormone that is now being used to activate and treat diabetes. Amazing.

Incredible. Okay, so this is an incredible story and this Himalayan taro buckwheat is full of over 130 of these phytochemicals, some of which are found nowhere else in nature, that have powerful properties to regulate our biology and rejuvenate our immune system. So talk about how, and again, there are many other compounds that can be beneficial for health. There's 25,000 as I mentioned, and in my whole book, Pegan and Dr. talked about the role of these compounds and how powerful they are. But the Himalayan yew, how does it work on these chipped cells?

How does it work to rejuvenate your immune system? So that has been a really interesting story that's emerging because generally what scientists will do, and you know this very well, is they'll, they'll look at those hundred different phytochemicals and they'll say, which ones are doing the heavy lifting? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they'll go and they'll find the reductionism. Exactly. They'll find a molecule, and then they'll study the heck out of that molecule. well, that's been done with Himalayan turmeric buckwheat. We could go on the list: rutin, quercetin, diosmin, luteolin, fisetin, hesperidin. These are some of the major of the 100 or so phytochemicals in Himalayan turmeric buckwheat, along with tuhohua. And each one of those has been individually studied and has been found individually to have effects on immunorejuvenation by activating this process of autophagy selective to the immune system. And in fact, now we see all sorts of papers being published on quercetin. It's the darling right now. And quercetin is an important member of this family, so I don't want to undersell it. But quercetin doesn't work the same when it's working by itself as when it works with 99 other phytochemicals.

Yeah, it's a team effort.

That's right. And so here as we get into fractionalized foods saying, well, let's just pull one nutrient out and then we'll make that the nutrient of the month. versus saying, no, it's the combination that.

Makes the orchestration of effects that's causing immunorejuvenation. Yeah, so Michael Pollan called nutritionism is the reductionist approach to studying nutrition. That's why we have saturated fat and salt and this and that. Instead of looking at the whole composition of the diet. So important. So basically what you're saying is these compounds in the Himalayan buckwheat help to.

Get rid of all these old cells and rejuvenate our immune system. Let me say one thing to loop back to a point you made earlier. and you did so eloquently by the way, when you were talking about the fundamental processes that people start having problems with as they get older and get more ill. One of those you mentioned was mitochondrial function, which is the energy powerhouse of the cell where our energy is produced. Well, it turns out that our mitochondria within immune cells can undergo injury. When they do so, that produces a senescent immune cell. so the mitochondria itself can be the seat of the initial injury that then creates the damage to the immune cell to make it senescent. Now, what do you do to get rid of bad mitochondria? Because the mitochondria can rejuvenate themselves in the absence of the cell rejuvenating. The mitochondria has a life of its own within the cell. And that process is called mitophagy. It's a subset of the big process called autophagy.

Right.

And it turns out that these chemicals that are these phytochemicals that are in taro re buckwheat specifically have been found to have mitophagy influences on animal cells.

So it re-energizes the cell. Yeah, you're kind of cleaning up your energy system.

It's like cleaning your carburetor.

Exactly, yeah, and the spark plugs or whatever. Yeah, amazing. This is an incredible story. So you've written a lot about immunorejuvenation and you talk about a stepwise process to help rejuvenate your immune system. Can you break down a little bit these four steps of Immune Rejuvenation Program that you've developed? And by the way, all this is on bigboldhealth.com. you can read about it, you can listen to podcasts, read the articles, read the science.

It's just fascinating. Yeah, I think what's happened, you can hear it probably in my tone of voice, is this has just sucked me in full on. It's like I opened the door and it was a vacuum and it just sucked me right in. It's like a wormhole. There there's so much here that I think will help people once we learn how to really apply this in a personalized way. This is really personalized immunity. And we now recognize that people have different immune identities. Just like they have different fingerprints, they have different immune identities that requires different approaches towards their immune identities to maximize their immune rejuvenation. So it starts with some fairly simple things. The simple things are the things we've been going through. Maybe they're simple to say but not so easy to do. that's changing some lifestyle principles. So you start looking at things like your sleep. You start looking at your activity level. You start looking at how much are you eating out of rushed habit patterns of things you know better than to eat, but it's just convenient to eat them. And one of the things that has been very useful for me, and I found when I did a series of little Instagram posts on this, are these biometric devices that we wear, these wearable devices that give us information. And I happen to be wearing an aura ring because after being a biohacker and wearing all sorts of different pieces of equipment, this one I found gives me the most interesting information. And what I found is from a personal experience now I've done really kind of a pilot study and I think it's more general, is that our aura ring is actually a surrogate marker to measure aspects of our immune system. Because what happens is when you're under immune stress, it's eating, you realize over 50% of your metabolic energy can be eaten up by your immune system when you're under immune stress. So what happens is your body temperature goes up, your heart rate variability goes down, your respiration goes up, your heart rate goes up, your sleep patterns go down. So, you know, when you see these very low scores in the morning from an Oura ring that says, whoa, geez, what's going on? It's probably something that happened to you last night that affected your immune system. Could be alcohol, it could be stayed up too late, it could be stress, but your immune system is telling you that it's under demand. So these tools to me are useful for supporting your coaching system, right? Because you need to coach yourself through these behavior changes of improving your sleep, your activity, your diet, things that you need to rhythmically figure out about your life that are directly being manifest through your immune system into your function. Your immune system is directly connected 24/7 everything you're doing. Yeah.

So what are these four steps that you talk about?

Well, I just told you the first step. It's assessment, right? It's understanding where you are, what's the base. Then from the first.

Your immunotype.

That's right. Your immunotype. And we have a questionnaire on the Bidwell Health website that gives a kind of a first kind of look-see. So we start off with the first thing, which really you very well and that is finding those patterns of behavior that tie to your immunotype. Are you an allergic type? Are you an inflammatory type? Are you a type that tends to get everything that comes along so you have an immunosuppressed state? So you understand a little bit about what your own immunopersonality is and we have a questionnaire on our website that's called the Immuno Identity Questionnaire that gives a little bit of a a help for a person identifying their own specific immunotype. Then we go from there saying, well now you have your immunotype, what are you going to do to move you from an imbalanced immune state to a balanced immune state? That's what we're all hoping for because what we want to do is we want to shut off our immune system where we don't want to hyperfunction it. I mean people always say boost your immune system but hold on just a minute. If you're already in an inflammatory state, you really want to boost your inflammation? No, you want rebalance your inflammation. And so people say, I'm just going to take a bunch of immune system boosting nutrients. Well, no, no, no. That may actually only exacerbate the problem and make it worse. So the second step then is you modulate your immune system based upon what you've learned about your first date. Are you immuno underactive, immuno overactive? Do you need to bring your immune system down? Do you need to bring your immune system up? And we have a series of ways that that can can be employed with diet and lifestyle. I would again go back to where you took us earlier, and that is make sure when you introduce the program, you're using food as a friend and you're using rhythmic eating so that time becomes your friend. Your circadian rhythms doesn't become your enemy. Don't overindulge. Don't too frequently snack. I mean, it used to be, oh, we want to take seven to eight meals a day. Those are of hypoglycemia. That was probably not a good idea with regard to what we've learned about circadian rhythms. Then the next level, the third step, is how can I optimize my immune system by utilizing some of these specific nutrients that we've been describing, the Himalayan Tartere buckwheat phytochemicals. I would also put into this family there are three families of nutrients that are very important. The phytochemicals we've been discussing a lot, Second, our pre in probiotics, because the gut plays such an important role in modulating our immune system, 70% of our immune system is clustered around our gut, the so-called gut-associated lymphoid tissue. So we want the friendly microbiome, so pre in probiotics would be step two. And then the third are omega-3 fatty acids. There are more and more papers coming out to show the important role that omega-3 fatty acids have in balancing the immune system. And I might add, it's not just omega-3s in and of themselves. It's also in concert with vitamin A, vitamin D, zinc, and what are called pro-resolving mediators. Pro-resolving mediators are part of the omega-3 family that activate the immune regulation process and the inflammation regulation process. And we find that some fish oils and marine oils have much higher levels of these pro-resolving mediators it's these PRMs than others. So we want a high PRM, Omega-3 rich oil, we want pre and probiotics, and we want the proper phytochemicals.

And I think the point you made- and you now have created this fish oil, this Dutch Harbor fish oil, which.

Comes from Alaska, right? Yeah, Dutch Harbor Omega, DHO, and it has the highest level we know of.

PRMs of any natural oil. So this is some of the beneficial stuff that's in fish oil that reduces inflammation, but it It's a separate class of compounds, Omega-3s, they're called pro-resolving mediators. Basically, your immune system has a way, a break, a way of resolving the inflammation. And these are called pro-resolvins and they come from these certain sources of Omega-3s and you've got those access from Alaska and now you have a product that's called Dutch Harbor Omega-3 oil, which you can get on bigboldhealth.com, right?

Exactly. And I might say that the reason that we haven't heard more about these pro-resolving mediators in these commercial Omega-3 supplements is that when most Omega-3 oils are manufactured, they're cleaned up through a very complex process that strips out the PRMs, it removes them. So people don't talk about them because they're not in there.

They're not there. Yeah.

And so you have to have a very mild process to retain these ingredients within fish oils which we've been able to develop.

So aside from all the lifestyle factors, let's just sort of summarize, you know, that help us to remove the things that are causing damage to our immune system and immunosenescence and age. In addition to sort of enhancing our immune system with right sleep and exercise and timing of eating and whole foods diets, there's some super hacks, right? Things like phytochemicals from Himalayan pink salt, pre and probiotics to help our microbiome regulate itself. And these pro-resolving mediators that come from special kinds of fish oil. Yes, that's powerful.

Well, thank you. Now let me just say one thing about what we've learned because a lot of this people would say it sounds interesting, but where is the proof? And fortunately now the phytochemical portfolio in Himalayan Tartary buckwheat has been studied clinically now in studies with humans for a number of years. So we have an idea how much you need to get in order to produce this. And it's equivalent to something like 100 grams a day. That would be something like 3.5 ounces of Himalayan tartary buckwheat flour delivers the level of these phytochemicals that have been found to be associated with improved immune function. So people would say, well, I really don't eat Himalayan tartary buckwheat flour every day. Well, we try to produce other ways of getting it, like through a shake mix or through a capsule that's concentrated in these phytochemicals, knowing that not everybody's going to...

So you know, like four capsules a day, it's like a quarter a pound of the flour, which is pretty amazing. And by the way, I've used this flour, made best pancakes, chai Himalayan buckwheat pancakes from my Buck Pea and Diet. We made soba noodles, we made dumpling skins, like for, you know, dumplings. which are amazing. And it tastes so good. It's so good. And what's fascinating about it is that not only are you developing a product or a series of products that take advantage of these phytochemicals, phytonutrients to rejuvenate our immune system, but it's tied into the bigger ecosystem which we live. It's not only important of what you grow, it's how you grow it.

Yeah.

So you could grow this in a way using chemicals and poor soils that are eroded, that don't have organic matter, and you wouldn't necessarily get the same product. What you're finding is that using practices that we call regenerative agriculture, which we've talked a lot on this podcast, it's a way of regenerating ecosystems, regenerating the soil, and building the organic matter in the soil, that you can not only help rejuvenate human health, but planetary health. That we can address the ravages of using all the industrial agrochemicals, the fertilizers, the pesticides, the herbicides, the high amounts of irrigation that deplete our water resources and the depletion of the soil microbiome through these chemicals and tillage and all these practices that have been so destructive and may account for a significant part of climate change. and that the soil itself is a sink for carbon and can draw down carbon through the power of these plants that suck carbon out of the atmosphere because they breathe carbon dioxide. But you can't do it if you don't use regenerative agriculture. And the beautiful thing about the Himalayan Tartary buckwheat is that not only are you growing it to produce these phytochemicals for human health, but the very way you're growing it is also helping planetary health using regenerative agriculture. And there's very few regenerative products out there on the market now. And this is one of them. It's amazing. It's gluten free, it's organic, it's non-GMO. And what's really fascinating about this packaging, Jeff, is, and you can buy this now on BigBaldHealth.com, right? Is not only do you talk about the nutrient content, it's way higher in protein than most other grains, way lower in its impact on blood sugar, so very low glycemic index, much higher levels of magnesium and zinc and iron and all kinds of nutrients. but what's amazing is it on the, and I've never seen this, is it says total polyphenols, which are the antioxidant levels. These are the phytonutrients, which is amazing that we now, you know, have, it's almost like a, like a medicine. It's almost like you're seeing like a flower package that has a drug on it, which is like so cool, except these drugs are phytochemicals.

Well, we're, I think the first group in the flower area to actually be certifying on each patch are phytochemical levels that are these immune active phytonutrients. But Mark, you said something that I think is really important. I want to take a moment because I know we're fast-paced and we say a lot of things really quickly that can fly over people's head. But I think that there is a story here that is very substantive. It's really what's drawn me in at 75 years of age. I mean, my wife has asked me, why in the world would you want to start another company, Jeff? 75. That's ridiculous. But it's not ridiculous.

You're not into golfing?

No, I'm not into golfing. I prefer to be surfing.

For those golfers out there, no offense.

But the reason for me is, and you and I share this in common, I was drawn in 1970 for my first professorial job at the university on Earth Day. I was actually hired with a dual appointment in 1970, which was the first Earth Year, Earth Day, to start an environmental studies program, environmental science program out of the chemistry department. So I was a dual chemistry department and environmental science professor. And I always felt that these things were tied together all these years, as I know you have as well throughout your career in medicine and food and how you got started with environmental stewardship. And now what I've recognized through the immune system, through this interesting path that I got drawn into, into is that the immune system of the planet, the planet has its own immune system. The plants have their own immune system. The microbiome microbes have their own immune system. Microbial communities in soil have their immune system. Animals have immune systems and we as human animals have immune systems and they're all interconnected. They're all speaking to one another. We're part of a bigger ecosystem.

We're not separate. And once I got that, we're not separate from nature. We are nature.

This is like, if you think I started in 1970 and now it's 2020, that's a fifth year learning curve to me to go full circle. And this, this now why we're invested in owning farms and doing regenerative Himalayan ternary buckwheat cooperative farming and, and having a Miller that has got a milling technique that allows us to preserve the phytochemical without injury to heat. and all sorts of things that I'm learning I never thought I would ever do that all feedback on this process.

It's so important and I think, you know, as you've taught us all, Jeff, food is medicine, but then that begets the question of, well, what foods contain the most medicine and how do you grow foods that contain the most medicine? And it turns out that regenerative agriculture is that method. That we've seen a 50% drop in lots of minerals and other nutrients in vegetable crops over the last 50 years. So even if you're eating your broccoli, it's not as good as it used to be. And using regenerative methods, we finally can actually bring back some of this. And I think, you know, exploring the role of, and this flour is so great because flour, I mean, you can take the capsules, you can take a shake and all that's great. And that's kind of an easy way to do it. But, you know, people are, are, you know, wanting to be gluten free. They're wanting to eat low starch products. They're wanting to you know, eat fun stuff too. They don't want to give up noodles. They don't want to give up pancakes. And you don't have to, which is the beautiful thing about this. And I can't tell you how excited I am. And full disclosure, everybody, I'm an investor in Big Bold Health. I'm helping Jeff with this project. I believe it brings together the things that we both have been passionate about for the last, you know, 50 years for you, 30 years for me, which is food is medicine and emmerjana of agriculture and restoring ecosystems. And it's just, it's Such a beautiful idea for this moment in time. And I'm so excited to see how we're gonna build this and grow this. So everybody should check it out. Go to bigboldhealth.com, learn about Himalayan buckwheat. You can get the products, you can get the flour, and you can make the pancakes from my book, Pegan Diet, they're really good. And you can also get the HDB Rejuvenate, which is the supplement or the shake. So I encourage you to check it out. There's also the Dutch Harbor Omega there. which is great. And I think, you know, Jeff is someone who doesn't need to do one more thing in his life to have a successful career in life. And the fact that Jeff has gone back at 75 years old to do this because it is a key solution to our chronic disease pandemic and our immune dysfunction and aging. And I'm just so excited about it. I can't even tell you, Jeff. So thank you.

I'd like to just say one last thing that I've learned. which I think kind of is a metaphor to everything we talked about. And it's actually been captured in our little graphic that we have on the front of the Himalayan Tery Buckwheat Flower, which is a kind of a flowering Himalayan Tery Buckwheat plant. So when I was at the farm for our first harvest with our farmer Sam Beer, who is a former Cornell University Ag Professor, researcher, and we were walking in the field, and the flowers were in bloom. It was pre-harvest. And as I looked in the field, I saw all these bees.

Bees.

Bees. They love Himalayan tarragon. Wow. And I was then thinking about the interconnection, that here we have bees who are then having their community taking this information back to their hives, right?

Yeah.

From the pollen. which is rich in all these phytochemicals to bolster the immune defense of the bees.

Wow.

To be part of this system that we're then creating an ultimate seed that's going to go out to humans to improve their immune system. And it just really hit me very hard. That's right. When you start doing systems thinking, as we started this discussion with functional medicine, it goes to everything.

But that's what regenerative agriculture is. ecosystem agriculture and functional medicine is ecosystem medicine. Yes. It's really that. It is. So we're being ecological doctors, both for.

Human and planetary health. It's beautiful.

Thank you. Well, what fun this has been. Thank you, Jeff. This is. I mean, I, I want to recap, but I think we take an hour to recap. But basically, the good news is, you know, even though our immune systems age, we can reverse that aging and we can do it through a comprehensive lifestyle issues, but also using the power of these phytochemicals and particularly this amazing new food Himalayan tartary buckwheat. Jeff, thank you for what you do for all of us and for what you do to make the world a better place. If you've been listening to this podcast and you loved it, please share with your friends and family on social media, subscribe wherever you get your podcast, leave a comment, how's your immune system doing? And what can you do to make it better? And we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Thank you so much for enjoying this.

Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into the Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you to all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to DrHyman.com/picks to sign up. That's DrHyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health. and get healthier and better and live younger longer. Hi everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner.

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