Your Immune System and Nervous System Are Interrelated

What we're learning is that we have a lot more control as individuals over the function of both of those systems, both our nervous system and our immune system than we previously understood. We're not just victims.

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's Pharmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. And today's conversation matters for if you care about your immune system, if you care about what's happening with COVID-19 and how you can make yourself resilient. And if you care about what's going on in healthcare and the future of healthcare, this conversation is going to matter because it's with one of my favorite human beings on the planet, Dr. Jeffrey Bland. He is the reason I do what I do. He's the man who inspired me to study functional medicine. The founder of the Institute for Functional Medicine. and he's the leader in the field of nutritional medicine for, I guess, 40 years now, Jeff, is that right?

Yeah, wow.

He's an incredible scientist. He synthesizes enormous amounts of data from lots of diverse fields, connecting the dots in ways that most other scientists don't who work in silos. He's got a degree in biology and chemistry, He completed his PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Oregon, but he actually got his feet wet in this whole field of functional nutritional medicine as the director of nutritional research at the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in the early 1980s, working with the two-time Nobel laureate Dr. Linus Pauling, who is his mentor. I remember meeting Dr. Pauling during the work we were doing as part of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. where he was speaking not about biochemistry, but about the need to address the threat of nuclear war. And he was quite an amazing man. Dr. Bland has authored lots of books. I've read most of them. Disease Delusion is probably one of the best conquering the causes of chronic illness for a healthier, longer, happier life, which is essentially a blueprint for what is functional medicine. and I think it's really great. He's written over 120 peer-reviewed research papers on chemistry and medicine. He's always looking to the future and seeing things that no one sees before anybody has seen them. In fact, in functional medicine, we were talking about the gut and the microbiome. We didn't call it that, but we talked about the gut and dealing with the gut flora and optimizing gut health 30 years ago when nobody was talking about it. And we were talking about insulin resistance and inflammation. I mean, my first book, UltraPrevention was written in, I think, 2000, and we talked about inflammation. I only learned about that from you, and now it's sort of the topic of the day. All the diseases of chronic illness are really related to inflammation. Dr. Jeffrey a tireless guy. He's traveled to over 50 countries training a quarter million healthcare providers, and is just an extraordinary guy. And, Jeff, thank you so much for joining us today on this podcast. I'm so thrilled to be able to take this time to dig in with you about a few topics, which is what we're going to talk about today, immunorejuvenation. We're going to talk about how to actually make yourself resilient in the face of these diseases of inflammation. And one of them, of course, is COVID-19. And also talk about what is medicine going to look like in the future? How does it look different than it looks now? Jeff, welcome to the Doctors Pharmacy. I'm so glad you're here. and safe. We're not just in, but we are. We're going to have a great conversation anyway.

Well, Mark, I'm so glad you're there. I think you're serving as a beacon of white light to millions of people who are looking for answers and understanding in this time of a lot of uncertainty and fear. And we need voices of clarity. And yours has been that for many, many years now in bringing health information and, you know, I call it news to use, really implementable, executable concepts that will make a difference in people's lives. Yeah, I feel like my job has.

Been the Jeff Bland translator.

Well, no, you've done much more than that. You've made these things take the life to change lives in very positive ways. I have three sons and my middle son shared something with me yesterday that he has been exposed to in his workplace. He's working for a biopharmaceutical company and they're actively involved in immune-related medication development and one of the top leaders in their field. And something that was sent around to their employees in the throes of this COVID-19 was to remember the deep psycho-physical effects that this pandemic pandemic is having on us. It's not just biomedical effects. It's psychophysical physiological. And he said that this graphic that was sent out to all their employees was very powerful that he's spoken with his family and his daughters about. They're all obviously sheltered at home in the state of Washington. Now we're all talking to one another by Zoom, which is a very interesting way that all of our families are now interrelating. But in this little graphic, he pointed out there are really three concentric zones of learning as we're going through this epic time. The first is the confrontation of our fear. I think for so many people, this precipitous international global pandemic just through a spectrum of fear into all of our lives, because unknown is always first approached with a kind of an emotion of fear. And then from that level, then hopefully we move to the next level, which is we learn, and this is the learning zone era where we start to say, okay, I was fearful, but now I'm starting to understand more about it. I'm starting to understand what the boundaries and the barriers and the degrees are and what I might do. And then the last ring outside is the growth zone, which comes from empowered knowledge and it comes from self-efficacy and it comes from people saying, I'm here to serve, I'm here to be purposeful, I'm here to do all I can in my immediate sphere of influence, and I'm here to take charge and be responsible. And that third level is sometimes a difficult one to get to when we've lost our job or there can be so many covening variables. So I think all of us that are trying in our own separate ways to reach out, to provide lifelines, to provide help, to provide service, recognizing that we are all in this together. This is the kind of reality that we're a globally compressed world now and that we're all part of this spaceship that's traveling through space and time that we need to cooperate. And so that was a really great lesson to get from my son, Carl.

Yeah, I think that's true. I think we're all in a very unique moment where, you know, there's the fear and the terror and then there's like the recognition that, wait a minute, you know, Or this one common, you know, human beings that are in this shared experience at this moment, whether we believe, you know, in being again or whether you're paleo or whether you're Republican or Democrat or Jewish or Christian or Muslim, Chinese or American, doesn't matter. We're all in this together.

Upon reflection on the start of this pandemic, I was reminded of an experience that I had actually at the Pauling Institute in 1981-82. And we had a very robust seminar program at the Institute at that time. You can imagine Dr. Pauling had this reach into scientists around the world that were very notable, Nobel Prize winners and the like. And we had this young physician come in from San Francisco, because the Pauling Institute was in Palo Alto, California. And he came down from the University of California, San Francisco medical system as a young internist emergency room doc to talk about the first patient that he had diagnosed having this unique form of cancer, Kaposi's sarcoma, that was associated with the first examples of HIV/AIDS in the country. And in listening to him talk about the pathogenicity and the seriousness of that infection in the course of events, It was a life changer for me because it took this concepts of viral infections from kind of an abstract thing that maybe was in the developing world and I wouldn't see to this whole new thing where the lethality at that point in young- 100%. Yeah, it was. It was unbelievable. It was stripping out people, unbelievable talents and business leaders, artists. I mean, every sector of humanity was affected. and we had no treatment and, you know, it was even the origin of the disease was not fully understood at that time.

So, and I, Jeff, I knew that doctor Paul Volberding, 'cause I was trained at UCSF residency program in Santa Rosa.

So I, how am I worrying?

I hated the AIDS epidemic. And we had probably the number one admitting diagnosis in our hospital was AIDS at the time. And he was our, crew that we went to and got support from an education from. So I remember Paul very well.

Oh, wow. Thank you for bringing. He really made a huge impact. I mean, I got to know him better over the years. And, you know, it was, it was, it was an experience that changed the culture irreversibly. I mean, we've never been the same as a culture. We say, well, we got over AIDS, but we actually didn't get over AIDS. As we know, there's 700, 000 deaths to AIDS a year. still on this planet, and 13 million people are still affected, even though we have antiretroviral drugs. So there is more to this than just finding a medication or than just finding immunization. There is other social, cultural, political, economic and biological factors that lead to these things. And that's when I heard COVID-19, I got thinking about is like, what are the other factors beyond the bug itself, which we've seen so many pictures now of this looks like a mine floating in San Francisco Bay or something. So the concept for me was then to go back and ask the question, what is our immune system and what does it do? And of course, the AIDS explosion led to developments in immunology that we'd never seen before. It accelerated science in immunology. And now we start to recognize in the 21st century, that there's something very interesting about the plasticity or about the flexibility or the adaptability of our immune system. And it goes back to where our immune system comes from. It goes back to our bone marrow. And I don't think a lot of people understand that their immune cells are all derived out of their bone marrow. These are called hematopoietic stem cells. And they are naive cells at that point. They don't have a personality yet. They just sit there waiting to be called upon. And then when they are delivered into the body, they will be produced, they will convert themselves into specific subpopulations of immune defensive cells based upon the environment that the person is under. So if the person has an environment in which they are already depleted. They can be nutritionally depleted, sleep depleted, overstressed, toxic exposed, that their immune cells, when they come out of their bone marrow, are going to be imprinted with the experience that their body is already under, which makes them then programmed to be resilient or not resilient to certain things that they're going to be exposed to. So you start to say, so it's.

Almost like the womb in which the immune cells grow, if they're not well nourished, they don't produce healthy immune cells that can function well to make you resilient against infection.

Yes, I think that's part of the metaphor, but I think the metaphor goes even a little farther than that. It would be almost beyond the womb when those cells start to be delivered into the body, to use the pregnancy analogy, They then further get manipulated by the environment in which they are delivered, like the thymus gland, which sits at the base of our neck, and will tell those cells, Hey, you know, we need you to be the following type of cell because this situation you're under, and therefore we need you to be already a cell that's going to be involved in inflammation because our body is already in a state of hostility. So you go out and you do battle. So the body is already in this state of of altered function. So then when a second wave comes in, a COVID-19, the body has already a pre-staging way that it's going to respond. And we hear about cytokine storms. What are cytokine storms? They're an immune system that overreacts to a specific offender because it's already poised somehow to produce a heightened sense of response. Now, who do we know that is more likely to have a cytokine storm and bad outcome from a COVID-19 infection. It's a person that has comorbidities. Now, what are those comorbidities? Those are diabetes, hypertension, cardiac disease, obesity, cancer. Now, what are all those disorders share in common? We know in functional medicine, they all share inflammation in common of individuals who have an unrest immune system having a bad outcome when they are exposed to COVID-19, their immune system is already distressed and its head space, its capacity to be resilient is limited, so it goes into hyperfunction. What do you do about that? You make your home- A lot of.

Those diseases, you said, we think of some of those diseases of excess, of excess food, of excess calories, but they're also diseases of deficiency. Many of these patients are very nutrient deficient, whether it's vitamin D or zinc. and other things that are critically important for regulating immune function, which you talked about in your article. And I think, you know, the way you broke it is really fascinating to say, well, what does the resilient immune system need to function? And what does the author show about this? Because we can learn a lot from that by looking at what has been done in the past. You mentioned HIVAIDS, and one of the studies you quoted in that article was from Africa, where they used a simple multivitamin, which had dramatic effects in reducing bad outcomes from HIVAIDS, which seems like kind of heresy when it comes to regular medicine. But it actually was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. And I remember when that study came out, it was sort of shocking. But, and we still hear, oh, well, vitamins are a waste of time. They're causing expensive urine. But yet in that study, it was really compelling to see how just such a simple multivitamin, it's probably was so effective in that population because they probably were so nutrient deficient to start with.

Yeah, I think thank you, Mark, that is a really powerful example of maybe even unexpected consequences. So we were very fortunate in the early days of the Institute for Functional Medicine to have invited the principal investigator who was a Harvard Professor of Public Health who had done that, been responsible for that African study, to come and speak to us. And of course he gave the data from that trial, as you just mentioned, that showed in women who were HIV infected that their outcome was significantly improved versus the women who were not supplemented with a vitamin mineral supplement. This was not a high potency formulation, by the way, it was kind of like you a moderate level of vitamins and minerals, certainly within the nutritionally safe range. And he made a statement at that meeting when we had a chance to visit with him that struck me and stuck with me ever since. And that was, he said, we had really no idea that the impact of something so simple as a few milligrams of these nutrients that we would have presumed people were adequate because they didn't have berry, berry, scurvy, pellagra, zero thalassemia rickets, they didn't have the classic nutritional deficiency. symptom signs that by adding these back to their formula that A, not only did they not get as sick, but B, they responded to antiretroviral drugs better, and C, their outcomes were significantly improved from that of people that are their age matched individuals in their countries in sex matches that were not taking the vitamins.

So, we're not talking about a common cold here. We're talking about HIVAIDS. Really serious infection.

Exactly. So if you use that as the kind of the edge of the continuum of virus infections in which we, as you said earlier, there was more than a 90% lethality initially. And you say, well, then what about conditions that are not quite as serious? Would you have an effect? Then we started asking all sorts of questions about diet, lifestyle, environment, and its role to play in immunorejuvenation. And I want to emphasize you brought up this term. It's a very important term for me. Everyone talks about immune support, but do you really want to support an immune system that's already damaged? Or would you prefer to rejuvenate your immune system so that it regenerates its potential to do its work naively starting from scratch?

So break that down. What is, what is Amino Rejuvenation? It's a great term. I love it. I don't think most people would know what it meant. I, I, okay, worth explaining.

So what it means is as follows.

That.

Each moment, each 10 seconds of our life, we're producing a million new white blood cells, 10 million, no, actually 20 million new red blood cells, and 30 million new platelet cells from our bone marrow each day. Each 10 seconds, Each 10 seconds. Each 10 seconds. That's my mind. Let me say that again. Let me say that again. Every 10 seconds, the average person produces 1 million white blood cells, immune cells, 20 million red blood cells, and 30 million platelets per 10 seconds. That's called immune rejuvenation. Now on the other side, you've got older cells floating around your body that have already been imprinted by whatever your life experiences are, right? Some of those are not so happy. Those are old cells that you probably want to trash and replace with new fresh cells, right? That are going to be rejuvenating the ability of the body to produce an appropriate response to something like a virus. And the balance of how your body's going to work depends upon how many of the new friendly cells, the rejuvenated cells are coming in and what level of the old pre-conditioned cells leaving. And you want to make sure that you're rejuvenating, not just supporting, because if you're supporting, you're supporting some things that are not so happy.

So how do you, how do you rejuvenate your immune system? Because everybody is listening right now thinking, wow, you know, we're in the middle of this viral all pandemic and we can only do so much with social distancing. It's estimated that 40 to 70% of people on the planet will get COVID-19 before we get a vaccine, before we get enough herd immunity to slow the spread. I hope we come up with something sooner, but that looks like the likely case. You know, what can people do to rejuvenate their immune system?

Okay, here we go now. This is where it really gets interesting. So if you want to answer questions that challenge what we know, often you want to go back and ask, what have we learned in the past? What ancient wisdom can we draw forward to understand what we might do in the future? This is the basis of a hypothesis as to how you generate a hypothesis. As I asked that question to myself, the very question you just asked, How do you rejuvenate your immune system? How do you get these cells to be produced that are fresh and not imprinted with bad messages out of your bone marrow? What I recognize is that there was an advancing field of science that was starting to address this question, and it's called immunophenotyping. Immunophenotyping is a long word that means that people are starting to ask the question, How do specific immune cells get imprinted with specific messages to become what they are, their phenotype? The phenotype is a word that describes how a cell works, acts and looks. How do you get those cells to be imprinted with the right messages to be able to defend against viruses more effectively? The answer to that in part goes back to some ancient wisdom, almost going back to the blue zones. to use Dan Buettner's work, of how about people that lived without modern medicine, without a lot of antibiotics and immunization that didn't have a lot of infection? What kind of things were they doing? Well, they were doing work, they were sleeping well, and they were eating certain diets. And are there any things about those diets that is common related to their immune system? And I think there are, and you've talked about it extensively, in your books and in your podcast over the years as part of your advocacy. It's really talking about eat variety and mostly plants. So these plants contain to really look at their composition, some unique things that animal products don't have. They're called phytochemicals. And what are the phytochemicals in plants? They're the plant's immune system. Have you ever thought about that?

Yeah, the plants defense mechanisms, right, exactly.

And so these interesting features of certain plants, not just the vitamins and minerals, proteins, carbohydrates, essential fatty acids, but these unique collection of substances that are made off the genes of plants that are hardy in their environment under stress that have had to defend themselves against viruses and bacteria and mold. are unique to their ability to transmit to that plant its resistance, because it can't go to the doctor and it can't run away. It has to sit there and defend itself. And ironically, or interestingly, these phytochemicals that are unique to the plant's own defense system, the plant's immune system, when eaten by humans, have effects upon immunorejuvenation. This is an aha. This is tying together an interesting global fact of life.

Well, Jeff, you wouldn't really like this, but I was in contact with someone from the Rockefeller Foundation today about an effort they're doing to the periodic table of plants in the sense of what are the periodic table of the nutrients, these phytonutrients in plants and what are their different properties and using, you know, massive throughput mass spectrometry and artificial intelligence to map out these compounds, which we've barely begun to identify. And then how can they play a role in our health and Wellness long term. And they are looking right now, they're thinking, how do we use these to look at properties and things that are going to be helping to regulate our immune system to fight the COVID-19 pandemics? I think it's a really fascinating effort that the Rockefeller Foundation is undergoing. You might be aware of it. It's doing exactly what you're talking about.

And I think what you've just stated is this threshold of where we have been with understanding these things, maybe historically, but not being able to explain them. so this is through the lens of modern science, how we're starting to understand the precision as to how these messages that these plant phytochemicals have in instigating effects on our immune system that are very specific to the rejuvenation that lead into immunophenotyping to defend ourselves against things like viruses. And this to me is a fascinating kind of back to the future story.

Those are news to use in the sort of things that you know, Jeff, around food. You're such a master of food as medicine. That's where I learned the term food as information. People think I invented it. I didn't. I stole it from Jeff Blan. But the truth is, are there news to use in the survey of the compounds that you know about that we should be thinking about eating more of?

Yeah, thanks. I think you already know that's a leading question. You already know where I've been going here. I've been trying to really study this down into of getting my fingers in the soil and trying to really understand what are those things that are being identified to influence the immune system in such a way that they participate in this immunorejuvenation, not just immune support, not just anti-inflammatories, but really regulate how the immune system is functioning at a fundamental level. I call this the classic example of upstream medicine, right? Trying to work up to where they're not downstream to where they're producing a problem. One of the things that I've hit upon came about as a consequence of a serendipitous series of experiences, one of which was a train trip on a bullet train from Harbin, the northernmost big city in China up near North Korea and Russia. I took this bullet train with a colleague, a Chinese American colleague of mine, all the way down to Shanghai. That's a long trip, about 2,500 miles. but the train does travel at over 200 miles an hour, so you can do it on a train. By the way, it does it silently and vibration free, which was amazing. But as we had this conversation of the landscape of China was zooming past us at 200 miles an hour, I asked him a question, which I had been interested in because I had been talking to a group of investigators at Vanderbilt University Medical School about a discovery they'd made around a specific interesting phytochemical called 2-hydroxybenzylamine or Tuhoba, which was found in Buckwheat. And so I was, I'd been on this, this collaboration around Tuhoba for about six or eight months. So I asked my colleague as we were zipping across China, I said, so do you know anything about Himalayan Tartyry Buckwheat? And he just stopped like, it was like we froze the train. And he looked at me, he goes, you got to be kidding me. And I said, no, why? Why would you say that? I said, I have been looking for any American that might be interested in Himalayan Tarty Buckwheat because it is a, it is a cultivar that we have been growing in China. It's been a major food stuff for 2500 years.

Wow.

And it has a hundred times, not 10 times, a hundred times the phytochemical density of immune supportive nutrients of any other plant food.

Wow.

And I said, you got to be kidding me. He says, no, you need to follow this. Your interest in Himalayan Tartere buckwheat is right on target. It is a very interesting plant. So I took that when I got back to the States and through a long circuitous series of associations, now I am a Tartere buckwheat farmer in the United States. collaborating with the only person I could find in the United States that was growing the original cultivar of Himalayan Tertre Buckwheat on his farm in upstate New York. And we are studying it. We're doing both analysis of the phytochemical content, but more interesting, we're looking at the immune potentiating activities that relates to immuno rejuvenation. This is an interesting family. I call it a symphony of different phytochemicals that are present in that cultivar at very high levels. The interesting feature of the Himalayan terry buckwheat versus common buckwheat is that common buckwheat is an interesting plant that, like most plants, requires fertilization from a pollinator, whereas Himalayan terry buckwheat is a self-pollinator. So it has maintained its term plasm integrity for 2500 years. It doesn't change rapidly. pollinators are very susceptible obviously to genetic hybridization from insects carrying pollen from one field to another. But that's not what you see with Himalayan. It's really maintain its rigor over these 2500 years.

Yeah. I mean, we, you know, the seeds, you know, are so, we're so lost. We've lost 90% of our edible plant species and half our livestock species. And we've created this model, which I wrote about in food fix, that is really led to this massive, I would call it an outbreak or a pandemic of chronic disease that is just this slow moving pandemic. It's not like COVID-19, but it's killing far more people and it's affecting far more people. I mean, 2300 people die every day from preventable heart disease just in America. And I think we have no clue about how the food we've created or what we call food like substances that we've created actually are driving so many of our issues and bringing back these traditional plants like Himalayan, Tartary buckwheat, bringing back these rich phytochemical compounds into our diet is really essential for long-term survival of our species and for immuno rejuvenation, which is in a sense dealing with the central feature of aging and disease.

Well, first of all, Mark, I just want to say that I think all of your books over the years have been absolutely spectacular and enlightening. I think Food Fix is your quintessential book, at least to date. You probably will exceed that in future books, but I think this is a mandate for every conscious human being to read that book. It is so well done. It is so well documented and so motivational, I think, for people to see that there's a lot more that they can do in not only their own lives, but in how their lives affect other people's lives and their choices. So I really want to applaud. and to support what you're doing. It's a tremendous contribution.

That means a lot to me. So enough about me. Let's talk about this buckwheat stuff. So tell us in detail, what are the kinds of compounds that you're finding and what are they actually doing to our immune system? How does it work? Like take us down the rabbit hole a little bit. If you use big words, I'll stop you to try to explain them. But I think I am the official jet bland translator, so I actually could do that.

You are, there's no question. So let's talk about the portfolio of phytochemicals that are found in tartary buckwheat. So this has been explored extensively actually for a number of years by phytochemists and people in food science and many, many reports. I actually found it very interesting when I got into this, the literature and the scientific realm was a lot richer than I thought. Several hundred papers that had been published on all sorts of aspects, including doing the, the full throughput genetic sequencing of the genome of the Tartery Buckwheat plant and comparing it to others and what do its genes do that are different than other. So it's, it's got a lot of data. I won't, I won't bore you with all of that, but let's, let's cut to the chase. What we now know is that it, there are probably over a hundred different phytochemicals that the Tartery Buckwheat plant makes out of its genes. And they are obviously made as defensive substances because the Tardigrade Buckwheat has never had fertilizer. It's never had pesticides, herbicides or biocides. It had to live in a very hostile environment where drought and freezing temperatures and bad soil conditions. It turns out that the Tardigrade Buckwheat has genes that detoxify aluminum from the soil, which I think is interesting. So it it has its own detoxification mechanisms built into it. And it's just a rigorous vital plant that's had to survive against pretty extensive stress, all of its 3,000 years of cultivation history. And so the portfolio of these plants-.

Can I stop you there, Jeff, because I just wanna make- yeah, please. You know what Jeff's talking about is that wild plants or heirloom plants that evolved in an environment that was stressful, have all these mechanisms to protect themselves. And those compounds, I think we co-evolved with and we use them in our biology to protect ourselves. I call it symbiotic phytoadaptation, which is a term I made up. It doesn't really mean much, but essentially it's the idea that we actually are co-evolved with these plants to help us stay healthy and revive our immune systems. And when we when we've changed our diets in such a way that we've stripped out all of these compounds and we just do protein, fat, carbs, vitamins and minerals, we are missing some of the most important compounds in our diet that are essential for us to thrive and stay healthy.

And I like the term that you've coined. I think that's a really great descriptive term. And if you then ask me the question, okay, this symphony of all these phytochemicals that are uniquely produced by the genes of the tertary buckwheat plant that's been this plant that's had to live with proverbial stress. So it's produced all these anti-stress immune strengthening nutrients. How do they actually influence the human immune system? That's a very interesting question. This is kind of a story of coevolution. There's a lot of people who don't like the term coevolution that we evolved in concert with our plant and animal kingdoms. But I believe that there is such a thing. And so what happens?

I agree. But I think this is a great example that people should know. humans and guinea pigs can't synthesize vitamin C because we were able to get it abundantly from the environment. So our bodies are lazy. My view is our bodies are lazy. So why build a biochemical mechanism to create a molecule if we can eat it? And so, and now we're not eating these compounds. And that's part of the reason we're so sick. And that's why these traditional diets actually have shown what wherever you go, the traditional diets that include these weird foods and strange compounds. they do better, they live longer, they have less chronic disease. And when we've stripped them all out of our food, an ultra processed food is the epitome of that. It's the epitome of a dead food with no phytochemicals. We're literally putting ourselves in a situation of threat as a species, I believe. And I think we're seeing the beginning of the end of our species because of what we've done to our diet and the fact that you've gone to China and you've learned about this compound, you've learned about this plan, and you brought it back here. We need this but times 100, times 1,000 to get these compounds back in our diet. So keep going. I just had to put that footnote in there.

No, that's more than a footnote. That should be a header because that is the ultimate takeaway. That's the news to use from what I'm really trying to say. We have focused a lot of our energy now on on Himalayan tertiary buckwheat because it is so unique in the concentration of these immune active nutrients, phytochemicals. But this plays a role across all of the whole plant kingdom. So I don't want to just say this is like only found in HTB. But what we have found is that this orchestration of these phytochemicals plays a very unique role in how it influences this conversion of the cells that are in our bone marrow into young, vital, healthy cells that will quickly turn into those that are needed to fight infection and to defend against disease. And they do so through a process in part that's related to autophagy. You're probably familiar with that term. It's a big long-winded term that really means house cleaning of damaged cells.

So it- that you eat yourself is what it means. You clean like a little Pac-Man, you clean up your debris and waste product.

Exactly right. So it cleans up the cells in their immune system that are kind of already got a bad message associated with them and setting up inflammation and then it makes room, so to speak, for these new healthier cells. And it also then influences the gene expression of these new progenitor cells, these new immune cells, to be at their full vitality. So it then has an of effect to serve, you know, people say, well, it has an antiviral effect. Well, it's not specifically antiviral. What it is is immune rejuvenating to allow the immune system to then do what it's supposed to do, which is to seek out and destroy viruses and bacteria. So I think.

So what you're saying is that when you buckwheat, it affects the development of your immune cells to make them more vital, active and resilient in order to fight infection better.

That'S exactly right, precisely. And then you couple that together with the things that you've been talking about, like with vitamin A and with zinc and with folic acid and essential fatty acids, omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin C, and all these work together in concert. But I think often the missing link has been people have not thought about the important role in how food is information to our genes that's encoded through our phytochemicals and these specific families. that influence in very specific ways how our immune system functions. And we used to say these phytochemicals are antioxidants. Well, that's about the most trivial, naive description that I can imagine. I mean, there's a million things that are antioxidants that have no real direct effect on your immune system. These are really targeted communicators that come from the immune system of the plant to speak to the immune system of our body in very specific ways.

Yes, I think that is an important point. I think if you look at who's resilient to COVID-19 is people who are healthier and what's scary and, you know, is the fact that I learned recently that 12% of Americans are metabolically healthy. That means 88% are not. And there's a whole spectrum of metabolically unhealthy, but the most unhealthy of that group are the ones who are dying and getting sick and going to the hospital and getting ICU treatment and inventing and so I think there's a real imperative right now to recognize that this is exacerbated by crises and that it is a time more than ever to double down on taking care of your health as a personal survival strategy, but also as a public health strategy. We are all in this together and the more we can do to rejuvenate ourselves, to make us more resilient, the faster we're going to get over this. You're article was really great, Jeff, because you talked about the science behind things like vitamin C, vitamin A and vitamin D, and also about the microbiome, very, very data that we do know. It's not like there isn't data out there. And I'm actually seeing this. I was really heartened to some of the clinical trials going on at Cleveland Clinic specifically, because that's where I know what's happening. We're looking at n-acetylcysteine and vitamin C and zinc and melatonin and a lot of other compounds that are are being used to actually help see that they can mitigate this disease or to improve outcome. Even traditional acupuncture centers and beginning to recognize this. But what you're talking about is a whole another level of things, right? Not just vitamins and minerals, but a whole other level of compounds that I don't think most people realize exist and that are so essential. You once taught me about something called conditionally essential nutrients. maybe things like CoQ10 or other things that may be conditionally essential in certain circumstances. Well, I think that phytochemicals are essential compounds for human health. And we've just ignored that fact at our peril and are seeing consequences of that. And what you're talking about and what the Rockefeller Foundation is doing is just the most extraordinary thing. I mean, think about this. The Rockefeller Foundation understands that the treasure trove of phytochemicals out there in the plant world that we consume can have profound effects on human health and human longevity. And they are, they did that in a scientific way that we've never had the capacity to do before because one, we didn't have the analytic equipment and two, we didn't have the data crunching power and artificial intelligence to make sense of it all. So I think we're in this really powerful moment where the idea of food as information is a sort of an overarching concept, but the granularity now that we're getting around it is so powerful. And your Himalayan Tahrdu Buckwheat story is just an example of that.

Well, and what you just said, Mark, I think is very important for people to kind of pause for a moment and think about. Why is it that we have not given more credence to these phytochemicals? Why don't they have a recommended dietary allowance?

That's what I mean, it should be.

Well, let me say why I think they don't. If you think about those nutrients that have recommended dietary intakes from the federal government, there are the nutrients whose absence in the diet produces fairly dramatic quick index diseases in their deficiency, like scurvy, like berry berry, like pellagra. These are diseases that you can diagnose under fairly quick times of deprivation. like you can put medical students onto deprived diets for a month and you can start to see the symptoms of these deficiency diseases.

Well, that's what happened in the prisons in Europe. They gave people white rice and they gave all the bran to the chickens. And the prisoners all got serious illnesses because they were just having rice.

That's right. So, you know, we always start in any field of discovery with those things that those observations that are most clearly apparent. So we started this whole area of nutrition and setting nutrition standards based upon what level is required to prevent a deficiency disease, like 10 milligrams of vitamin C a day, the minimum daily requirement or something like that. Now we're saying, well, what kind of disorders occur from phytochemical insufficiencies? Yeah. And these are what have been called long-latency nutrient deficiencies. What are long-latency? It means it takes a long time to get a disease, and the disease is very complex, like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, arthritis, it doesn't have one single indicator and so it can get lost in the mass and it may took 20 years or more to get it. So you cannot define the same level of specificity for a phytochemical because it may have had an effect upon your immune system which sets you at risk to all sorts of diseases. So how do you set them a standard for when your model is built around a disease? Our model should be built around function. and what I'm proposing and I predict is that out of COVID-19 what we're going to see is new ways of assessing nutritional need based upon immunological function, not just on deficiency. And if so doing, then you will say, well, are there ways of assessing immune function? And the answer is yes, it's the fastest growing frontier in all of medicine is understanding the immune system and how to assess its function. And let me throw one last thing in. I ask myself the question, how many people in America, in the United States today, are on immunosuppressive medications?

Yeah, a lot.

30 million. 30 million. Think of that.

30 million, wow.

So taking immunosuppressive medications by the name, that's not immunorejuvenating. That's the counterpoint. So, the point is that we have a variety of different variables that are influencing how our body is prepared for the insult of a new mutant virus that is playing itself out with this new, more highly infectious and reasonably pathogenic COVID-19.

It's so true. I wrote a blog, an article about what kinds of foods we should be considering eating. Now I'm home cooking all all the time. And I'm always thinking about what am I making? And tonight I made a Moroccan lamb and I used ginger and garlic and onions and spices and cardamom and cumin and all these wonderful spices that have beneficial properties. And I wrote about some of the flavonoids, for example, that we know have antiviral properties like camphorol, which is in spinach, dill and cabbage or quercetin, which is in dill and onions and oregano and chili and hasperidin, which is an orange is and grapefruit and citrus foods or allerpin, which is an olives and extra virgin olive oil. These are, these are the compounds we're talking about. Catechins and green tea, lauric acid and, in virgin coconut oil and breast milk, although that's kind of hard to get. And all these other spices that I've been using really prolifically in my cooking. Ginger, garlic, turmeric, Rosemary, chili pepper, oregano. I mean, three of the, actually, four of those are in my dinner tonight. So I think, I think we we have to think about actually how we can start to use these compounds on a daily basis in our cooking, in our food. And the great thing is, at the end of the day, you get to eat this amazingly delicious food because ultra processed food just tastes terrible. When you actually have had real phytochemical rich food, it's what actually makes things good. It's the flavor that they give to foods. you know, Dan Barber is on our podcast, and he created row seven seeds to create taste in food by hybridizing seeds to create the most flavor. But what he's done, I think, inadvertently, was to find ways to enhance the phytochemical properties of the food, which makes it more nutrient dense and more phytochemical Rich. And that's what gives it. Is that a fair Assumption?

Yeah, absolutely. I think one has to be a little bit careful though to say flavor because we know that flavor is enhanced by fats and flavor is enhanced by sweeteners. So, I think you would have to ask what flavors.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't think of those as flavors.

Well, those are flavor potential.

You're right. It's the addictive stuff that we get pushed on by the food industry. But this is just such an amazing conversation, Jeff. I think we've covered a lot. I think One of the things I want to touch on is going forward, how is healthcare going to look? How is society going to look through the long lens that you've had of 40 or 50 years of thinking about these things and going through so much history? What do you see coming in terms of healthcare and just life in general?

I'm going to peer it back what Dr. Mark Hyman would say if I was to ask you that same question, because I think you may language this a little differently than I, but I think we would both say the same thing. I think that there are going to be five significant changes post COVID-19 in how we see healthcare globally. I'd like to just quickly summarize them. The present system pre-COVID-19, we have separated very seriously community health from interventional medicine. They are both on opposite sides of the coin. One we call public health and the other we call medicine, clinical medicine. Generally, public health is stepchild and interventional medicine is where the action is. I think that that's going to change dramatically post COVID-19. I think we're going to see precision public health become a major part as important as interventional medicine, and it will help chart future healthcare policy and planning. My second point is, Amen to that. Thank you. Well, I know I'm saying Mark Hyman stuff just in Jeff Blanck's.

I want to come back to that point, because that's a very important point, yeah.

Okay, the second point is that our pre-COVID-19 has been a disease-focused, diagnosis-focused healthcare system. So it's really a disease care system. and prevention, what we call prevention, is related to risk factor reduction for chronic diseases. So it's all really disease centric. I think post COVID-19, we're going to see prevention being redefined to include prognostic markers of immunological function. I think we're going to ask who are the people that are at risk based upon the function of their immune systems, not just the presence of markers of disease. that's a big change. I believe that will occur. My third point is that I think presently pre-COVID-19, our healthcare system, i.e. Disease care system, the reimbursement is based upon in-state and in-state contact between a practitioner and a patient. I believe that what we're going to see after this, it's already starting to happen, is health financing will undergo significant change to include a cross-state border, Telehealth. Yeah. For doctors, screening and group health. Yeah. And I think these are going to be game changers when we really start talking about group participation. And you've talked about this for years and Telehealth and other ways of getting information to people that will Empower their self-efficacy their ability to take charge of their health in different ways by resourcing people that are knowledgeable that can give them the guidance and the, the, the, the personalized recommendations they need. The next in my list is that presently regulations that oversee healthcare are based upon state and national perspectives. It's almost entirely centric to this interplay between state and national directives or policies. I think that's going to be changing post-COVID to planetary health that will become a significant driver of healthcare innovation. We're going to move away from this myopic view of centric views of our local community and our reimbursement systems through insurance companies or Medicare to look at global issues that really, if you think of the impact on our economy or our health of this one COVID-19.

Oh my God.

It swamps out everything. All the advances we've made in cancer therapy, all the advances that drug companies have made in treatment of chronic disease, they pale in comparison to the impact of this particular event on global society. So we've got to change our whole philosophy to include planetary health systems. And then lastly, we have seen in our culture pre-COVID-19 that epidemics are viewed as solely vector caused and therefore their prevention is related to the development of drugs and immunization. That's been marginally successful. I said, I said we still have 750,000 people dying of AIDS. so it hasn't been completely successful.

And by the way, Jeff, that is actually the message that is being pushed out there today that it's all about right drug and the right vaccine for COVID-19.

Yeah, and I don't want to discount that both of those are important. What I think will happen post-COVID, however, is to recognize that those are not the total solution. Epidemics will be redefined as multi-causal, And the approaches then will have to engage personalized health improvement, not just finding solutions by drugs and immunization.

Making the whole population more immuno resilient.

This experience that we're all sharing through this COVID-19 pandemic, which has pulled us into our houses and it's made quiet for a while, our industries, has caused us to reflect on what are the real value systems that drive us to have successful outcomes in life? And how do we make health a virtue that's more than just an apparition, but it really deals with how we live, act and behave each day, interact as human beings, see our value, have purposeful families, interact with people in meaningful ways and create a stewardship of the planet that has survivability as a legacy. Those outcomes from this disease will change not only health care, but the cultural context by which we all advance ourselves.

I think it's right. I think it is a horrible moment and many people are sick and dying and I wish I could stop it right now, but it is going to change the fabric of society. It's going to change how we think about ourselves, about our families, our communities, our nations, and particularly the driving change in health care you mentioned are really important. I want to come back to the initial point you made about the distinction between clinical medicine and public health. And there's always been a divide. And clinical medicine has been seen as the real medicine and public health is sort of the poor stepchild or the, you know, not as relevant. But if you look at the history of health and our health gains, most of them have been through public health, whether it's sanitation or clean water or even things. And I think we really have to look at that seriously. And what really struck me a number of years ago when I went to Haiti and saw what was happening there and saw how Paul Farmer addressed TB and AIDS, which are infectious diseases, not by better drugs or surgery, more vaccines, but by dealing with the public health issues that he called structural violence, the social, the political, economic conditions that drive disease. And we're seeing that here. We're seeing the structural violence devastating populations from COVID-19 that we discussed, the poor populations, Hispanic, African-American populations, people who have chronic illnesses that are caused by our food system. These are real issues that aren't going away. And I think when we really look at how do we have to address this, it's going to be through changing the structural system, the social determinants we call health. people's ability to access food, to deal with the stresses that they're dealing with. These social determinants are bigger and more relevant determinants of health than any drug or surgery. And then of course, there's food. I mean, the food system itself has to radically change in order for us to address this pandemic of chronic disease and the burden on the healthcare system. So the only way to do that is by dealing with the public health issues and the clinical issues together. We can no longer separate them. And there's a book years ago called Turning the World Upside Down by Nigel Crisp, who was the former head of the National Health Service in the UK. And it was one of those light bulb moments for me when I read the book and I was, oh my God, we have to learn from the developing world, how do we address our chronic disease epidemics in the developed world? Because they don't have a lot of resources. They just have each other. They have community health workers. if I were president or king, I would literally take this moment to train millions of unemployed workers as community health workers and deploy them throughout the country to actually help people do exactly what you're talking about, immuno-rejuvenation and reclaiming their health, teaching them how to grow gardens. I mean, we had 40% of our food grown in victory gardens during World War II. We had federal extension workers teaching young families how to cook and take care of their homes. We need to bring those workers back. if that comes out of this, then I think then it won't be for naught. But I believe you, Jeff, that this is going to be a different world effort for COVID-19. And while we're all in it, we really need to huddle together and listen carefully to the things you're saying and read that article we're going to post in the notes because it's such an important message that we don't have to be passive victims of this virus, that we can take care of our health and our communities and our families. And that's what's so great about the work you do, Jeff. empowered me to really focus on the real solutions for chronic disease. And you've helped me help thousands, millions of people around the world. And I'm just so grateful for that and for your wisdom and for your vision of seeing what's coming. So you are my hero.

It's reciprocal, Mark. I'd like to leave, if I could, just one thought with your group. and that is when we explore how we as individuals in our own personal lives interact biologically, socially, physically with the outside world, there are certain processes within our body, I call them an antennae, that are picking up these signals and translating those signals into our body and the principle one is our immune system, secondary and maybe not secondary interrelated to our nervous system. And as we know, the nervous system and the immune system are exquisitely connected. We shouldn't actually teach them as two different systems. They're part of one big system. And we can control what we're learning is that we have a lot more control as individuals over the function of both of those systems. both our nervous system and our immune system than we previously understood. We're not just victims. And if we can develop that understanding that we are the shop boss of how our immune system is going to defend us against foreigners and how our nervous system is going to respond to unexpected events, then we will find a path to health globally and it will be connected to health of the planet.

Thank you, Jeff, for joining us today.

One last quick thing, I think the best place to get in touch and the resource information we put down over the years is probably jeffreyblaine.com that's just j f f r e y blaine b l a n d.com that's great.

Jeffreyblaine.Com and you know he's he's I can't even tell you the amount of content information Jeff has put out over the years it's just staggering and I it's my main source of inspiration so thank you Jeff for joining us on the Doctor's Pharmacy. If you love this podcast, please share with your friends and family on social media. Leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you. Subscribe wherever you get your podcast, and we'll see you next week on the Doctor's Pharmacy.