The Secret Ingredient In Fish Guts, Immuno-Rejuvenation, & The Magic Of Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat

So we started with a baseline of our 50 individuals before they got into the program. And then for 90 days they supplemented in this case with four of the capsules per day of the HTV rejuvenate. And then we measured every three, every, every month over those 90 days or three months, their response to the, to taking the HTV flavonoids. And it was really very interesting. At the end of the trial, we found those individuals whose immune age were greater than that than their age and birthdays, their chronological age, that they had a very significant reduction in their immune age over the course of 90 days by taking the what would be considered like two portion sizes of Himalayan tartary buckwheat flour through the concentrates. So I think we're the first group to actually demonstrate that we can modulate the epigenetic impact on immune cell aging through the taking of these complex mixture of these polyphenols from Himalayan Tertiary buckwheat.

Well, folks, I met today's podcast guest face to Face at a health event several years ago, kind of like a private health summit. And leading up to that point, I had already read, I think, one of his books, some articles he'd written, and heard a few podcasts with him and was just super pleased to have met him face to face and realized that he's, he's just as cool and, and smart as some of his, his writings and his material has indicated. He's actually known as the father of Functional medicine, which is quite the title considering how, how impactful and respected functional medicine is, is now becoming. He's the founder of the Institute for Functional Medicine. And like I mentioned, he's also an author, best selling author and an educator. He started off as a professor of biochemistry at the University of Puget Sound, did a lot of studying on vitamin E and its effects on cellular aging. And then of course, like I mentioned, he founded the Institute for Functional Medicine along with his, his wife. And they've trained, I believe, something like a hundred thousand different clinicians in terms of scientific advances in the area of things like genomics and epigenetics and nutrition and lifestyle. And he's also the president for a company that kind of intrigued me when he first told me about the cool things they were doing with it like harvesting fish oil super fresh off the Alaskan coast and doing these really crazy things with a form of wheat that I actually wound up talking about my last cookbook as one of the, one of the craziest grains I've ever come across called Himalayan Tartery Buckwheat or also abbreviated htb. And so I've been trying to get him on the show for quite some time. We finally connected and we're going to talk about immunorejuvenation, this concept you might not have heard about and a whole lot more. And his name is Dr. Jeffrey Bland. Dr. Jeffrey Bland. And Jeff, I didn't tell you this yet, but you were top of mind for me about six days ago because I made a beautiful batch of baked blueberry donuts using Himalayan tartery. Buckwheat.

Wow.

Oh, my gosh, dude. Not only were they fantastic, but of course knowing that I was eating my immune system into rejuvenation made me even more happy. So. So, yeah, I wish you. I wish you could have made it over Spokane. I would have fed you a donut.

Well, you've. You've got a date. I'll. I'll take a trip for that any day. That sounds fantastic. Yeah, yeah.

And obviously there's all sorts of things that we could talk about, but since we're on the topic, why don't we just jump right in? What is, what is Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat?

Well, first, let me say what it's not, because I think unfortunately got stigmatized when it was named. And I don't know how this name actually came about putting wheat in the name. And it has no relationship whatsoever to wheat. It's not genetically related to the Pulse family or the cereal grain family. It's not even actually a grain. It's a fruit seed. And so this 4,000 year history that it has as a food cultivated in the Himalayan mountains was because it has this wild personality that allows itself to live in one of the most hostile places on the world with climate and bad soil and weather that's nasty and variable, availability of water and too much sun in the summer and not enough in the winter. So it has developed over the millennia that it has survived these genes that produce these anti stress compounds in the plant that allow it to have the immune system it needs to survive. And when those things are eaten by humans, it turns out that they impart those benefits to humans. It's one of those kind of remarkable stories of something that has been in our food supply as humans for, as I said, 4,000 years. But in America, surprisingly, it was lost as a food item about 200 years ago. It was a colonial food actually brought over by our colonial ancestors because it was so hardy. And a lot of the early colonists depended upon tartery buckwheat for their survival because of its Hardiness. But for whatever the reason, I have some hypothesis as to what happened. But about 200 years ago, it stopped being grown to any extent in the United States. And in fact, when we got interested in it, which was about four years ago, as a consequence of some serendipitous unexpected things in my life of being introduced to this plant, the only person that we could find growing it in the United States was former Cornell University ag professor Sam Beer and his wife Lucia, a nurse who, when he retired from Cornell, wanted to have a hobby farm. And so he was looking for something interesting to grow. So he talked to his friends at the usda and they sent him these seed packets that were dislabeled with a number. And he started growing these. It's almost like Jack and the Beanstalk. He started growing these seeds and they really looked very interesting. He liked the plants, they were very pretty when they, when they germinated and flowers. So he later found out that this was this, this Himalayan Tertiary buckwheat, this unusual plant. And in fact, those seeds that he was given probably shouldn't have been given to him by the usda, because they were the seeds that went back several hundred years in their seed bank without any duplicates. So we got these ancient seeds that have now, we now have brought this, this crop back. We now have a regenerative, organic, cooperative agriculture. We, we actually bought Sam Beer's farm from him. His angelica mill.

Yeah, I was gonna say angelica mills. It was like Upper State New York. Right, Because I remember when you, when you were telling me about it, I think we were at like a cocktail party down in Phoenix at that health event you were telling me about, Buckwheat, and I, I, I went searching for it all over the place because I actually was in the process of writing that first cookbook, the Boundless Cookbook, and I was looking for all these crazy ingredients to include in it that maybe people had never heard of. Took me forever to hunt it down, but yeah, angelica meals. And I think I even had to get on a wait list to get one bag of it.

Well, they weren't producing very much. They only had six acres in cultivation. But it was a hobby for them. Now we have a really remarkable group of cooperative farmers in our group, and we're, we're trying to bring this back as a family farm, profitable crop, because it is self sustaining. People start growing it, they, they really love it. It's a beautiful plant to grow. We have a soil scientist, Emily Reese, who has her PhD in soil science from Cornell, that is our steward of the soil that's done studies on how to actually grow this. What are the mycorrhizae in the soil that produce the best outcome in the plant and produce the most amounts of these immune strengthening phytochemicals? So we're fully engaged now and it's, it's really been a remarkable process for me. Quantum. I never thought that I would be so fortunate to be involved with organic regenerative agriculture, have my hand in the soil, be involved with these families that are now making a gainful living out of selling the product that has been lost for about 200 years now.

Now, could, could I or any of my listeners figure out how to grow this stuff ourselves? Like, is it hard to grow?

Well, like anything, there's a learning curve. But it doesn't require irrigation, it doesn't require pesticides, herbicides or fertilizer. So for that extent.

It'S got a lot of virtues. What it does, however, is it tends to grow very tall. As you probably know, the hybridized grain products are hybridized to be short in stature and stocky. So they can be easily harvested with mechanical harvesting. This plant, however, when it grows up, this beautiful plant, it grows up to be 4 or 5ft tall. And so it can load, it can lean over, and it's kind of hard to harvest. So the seeds are very, very small. So it takes a little bit of art in being able to get the product off the land. One of the things that we recognized early on is that we were very fortunate. We did a complete genomic evaluation of the genes of this, of the seed, and we recognize that we were fortunate to have a seed that is what are what's called wild Himalayan tartery buckwheat, which is the highest level of these phytochemicals that are immune strengthening. There's over 450 different unique phytochemicals in Himalayan tartery buckwheat. And they work together as an orchestra, they work synergistically. So if you said, what's the heavy lifting? I would say the heavy lifting is them working together. The plant doesn't make all these compounds just for. Has nothing better to do. It makes them as a symphony of interacting immune strengthening compounds that give it its unique characteristic of being able to survive all these years in a hostile environment. So we are very, what I want to say, we're very in awe of the seed that we have and we're stewarding its deployment development to prevent hybridization. It's interesting that Himalayan tartery buckwheat as contrasted to common buckwheat. Common buckwheat is Phagopyrum escalatum versus Phagopyrum tartaricum, which is what we're working with. It turns out that the common buckwheat has some genetic similarity to the tartery buckwheat, but the tartary buckwheat has more of its genes that are occupied in the producing of these immune strengthening phytochemicals. And in fact, its level of these compared to common buckwheat are 50 to 100 times higher, not percent higher, 50 to 100 times higher. So this is like a biochemical factory producing these immune strengthening phytochemicals at levels that almost make you think that someone went in there and tinkered with the genes to be able to produce these very, very high levels of outcome. So we're really, we're caught up everything from the basic science of the germ plasm all the way through the final products. We have a food lab. I've got people that have worked with me for the last 20 years that are doing food development and recipe development. We're now into some gourmet chefs. We've got a whole kind of assembly of both production of both savory products and sweet products out of tartery buckwheat. So it's a full on engagement. And I have to say, the more I get into this, the deeper it pulls me in. Because we just produced for the first time ever, as of two weeks ago, something we've been working on for over a year that I'm.

Is it a donut?

It's an ingredient. We are the first group ever, as far as I know, in the world to produce organic Himalayan tartery buckwheat sprout powder. And it turns out when you sprout these seeds, if you do it correctly, with the right duration of sprouting, you will triple the level of phytochemicals in the plant. It supercharges the plant. And so we have found a way now to produce tartery buckwheat sprout powder that is an ingredient that is very nutty in flavor. It's free flowing. It's an amazing ingredient that we're going to be putting in all sorts of food and supplement products and we're the only people that ever have produced it. So I'm, I'm really excited about this next step in our evolution.

Now, now, is it true that it is associated with something that was consumed in some longevity hotspot in China? I think maybe you or somebody else had told me that like, its roots trace back to like a centenarian or a very long lived population in China.

Yeah, that's correct. It's, you know, Dan Buettner wrote the book the Blue Zones and where this is growing on the foothills of the Himalayans is one of those blue zones. These are people that have long lived life expectancies. They're very vigorous and vital, you know, at late age. And they're living in a very hostile environment, high altitude, you know, very challenging climate. But they use this tartary buckwheat. It's one of their major food products and their health is the benefit.

Interesting. Now you, you also mentioned about the, the mechanical harvesting of the wheat and, and how we, we tend to have wheat that is hybridized for higher production and a better yield of the actual wheat. You know, you, you, you hear people talk about how that may somehow concentrate the gluten and how perhaps even when you, I don't know, vacation in like Italy or something like that and you can eat the bread and pasta and maybe not experience as big of an issue from a gut standpoint that that might be one of the reasons is how we actually grow the wheat in the US Is, is there something to that? Like, like, is that actually true that there's higher amounts of gluten based on hybridization of wheat in the U.S. well.

I think you raised an really, really important question. And so let me just take a little sidebar discussion on that. So there is a, there was a book published just a few years ago, two years ago, actually called wizard and the Prophet that describes two central people that have kind of shaped agriculture in the, well, in the world, but certainly in the United States. And that's Norman Borlaug, who is the father of the green revolution, who believes in very strongly in hybridized grains, that hybridized products that take fertilizer and pesticides and herbicides and produce extraordinary high yields. And then there's Robert Voigt. Robert Voigt is considered kind of the architect of American environmentalism and was.

Kind of consistent age to that of, well, the two of them were similar age but had very, very different views. So in this book, the wizard and the Prophet, the wizard is Borlaug, and the Prophet is Robert Voigt. And it discusses this controversy about how do we produce a sustainable agriculture that is friendly to the planet, friendly to people, and meets the needs for people's nutritional requirements. And in the end of the book, they're both coming to their late age and kind of at the end of their professional lives, they've recognized that they're kind of meeting in the middle, that there is some kind of a place where proper breeding of plants is desirable and there's a place where environmental stewardship is, is, is viable, this whole.

Sustainable agriculture movement. And so when we look at tartery buckwheat as an example, it's a very, very interesting example because tartery buckwheat is different than common buckwheat in that it is self pollinating. The common buckwheat, Esculanum is insect pollinated. Now, insect pollination is, is desirable, obviously. But there's something about insect pollination that's interesting if you look at plant agronomics and agrogenetics, and that is that the insect pollinated plant can obviously bring pollen from different places. So you can have different variants that pollinate at a distance because that bee or that insect brought pollen from some distance away. So you start getting genetic changes in insect pollinated crops because of the nature of introducing different genetic pollens from a distance. With self pollinating, as is seen with tartery buckwheat, however, it's a very selfish way of reproducing itself because it's almost incestuous. It's using its own genes from its pollen to create the next generation. It's not going to accept genes from an insect that came from a long distance. So the, the preservation of the unique genes in tartery buckwheat has allowed it to sustain its very, very high levels of nutrients and not change its genetic architecture for millennia. Now, what that means is as going back to your question about what happens when you start hybridizing plant products, do you get different effects as a consequence of the hybridization? And the answer is certainly yes. So this concept of Italian wheat versus.

North Dakota wheat, is there difference in the genetic structure? And the answer is absolutely yes. Because when you start hybridizing, you bring characteristics that are those that you desire to have. So it could be better ability to harvest. It could be higher yield of per acre. It could be better tolerance to chemicals like pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers. And so when you do that, you change more than one variable. When you start hybridizing like that, the genetic structure of the plant over time then picks up these different characteristics and, and it pulls with it things that change its composition. So does that mean that the carbohydrate is the exact same structure in the hybridized plant as it was in the native cultivar? And the answer is no. Does it mean the protein Levels are the same or the same composition? Not necessarily. Does it mean that the vitamin and mineral content are the same or the plant phytochemicals are the same? No. So the farther you get away from the original cultivar, the wild type, by hybridization, the more you introduce the opportunities for changes in all sorts of characteristics of that plant, which means that you're introducing new molecules. And when you introduce new molecules, then the question is, are the immune system of people used to those new molecules or do the immune system of people who are used to specific kinds of characteristics of certain things they eat. You've now introduced new things and now you start to get atypical reaction because those things are considered to be foreigners. And if it's foreigners, the body will try to react with the immune system saying, we're here to defend you against foreigners and we're going to kind of call out the guard and we're going to increase our immune response. And now we get not only allergies, but we get things that are related to inflammaging. We start to see inflammation starting to result as a consequence. So when we ask the question about gluten intolerance in this whole gluten concern, I think it's more than just gluten. I think it's. We're responding to changes in the architecture of the plants as a consequence of years of genetic hybridization that then make people more sensitive to all sorts of different variables within the plant that were not present in the original cultivar like you would have maybe in the primary sources of Italian weed versus the hybridized grains. So I think that's the story that I see emerging.

What kind of stuff besides gluten?

Well, remember, there are all. Gluten are proteins that are members of what are called the prolamine family. And there are all sorts of prolamins that are not gluten that can have potential antigenic or immune related effects. So I think it's more than just gluten in and of itself as a family of, of molecules, high lysine molecules, but it's. Or glutamine containing molecules, but it's. It's other members of both protein and even carbohydrate going to different levels of amylopectin or pectins within the product that have different immunological potentiation.

Interesting. Okay, so I want to get back to this concept of what you called immunorejuvenation. And by the way, that wizard and prophet book sounds fascinating. I'm gonna going to read it. And if anybody's listening in, I'll link to any of the little resources and stuff that Jeff and I talk about. If you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com Dr. Bland. Dr. Bland. BenGreenfieldLife.com Dr. And I'm curious about this concept of rejuvenation, Jeff, but before I forget, related to that whole Angelica Mills farm being one of the few places you could actually find this, this buckwheat. You sent me some of the stuff you were making with the buckwheat and included amongst that, I didn't even open it yet. I actually still have a couple of big brown bags of the flour and the bran from Angelica Meals. But. But you've got this company called Big Bold Health. You sent me a bag and I, I think it was just the flour. But what are you actually making out of the Himalayan Tartery buckwheat right now?

Yeah, so what we did, Sam Beer Angelica mills with his hobby farm. He and his wife put together an artisanal mill. It was built out of equipment that he had gotten that was really antique. Some of it was nearly 100 years old. And so he was milling this in very small batches, his tartery buckwheat that he was growing on a small farm. And it was pretty coarse. We wouldn't be considered kind of.

Baking quality as it relates to some of the better milled products. So we were able to form a relationship with a miller in Trumansburg, New York that is an artisanal miller that has been milling for 30 years organically.

Wait, I gotta interrupt you real quick. What's an artisanal mill?

Artisanal means that he is using traditional methods of milling, using stone milling techniques, not high temperature impeller type mills with stainless steel that can heat things up and create damage to the, to the, to the nutrients. So it's a very, very kind of nutrient friendly process. So we, we started to use the seeds that we were getting from the Himalayan Tertiary buckwheat seeds that we were getting from Sand Beer. We started to have them over at this artisanal miller. Now they are our principal miller as we've now actually Sam Beer and his wife Lucia retired. So we purchased Angelica Mill and now we built that into the system with our other organic farmers. So that, that's all being milled now producing, I think, a really a finer quality product, which is what you have. This Himalayan Tertiary buckwheat flour is milled by our miller in Trumansburg and it's all done in the Hudson Valley northern region. Upstate New York, because we really like the soil there and we like the climactic conditions because the plant likes to be stressed. So we like whether that's cold when it's planted and then we like it to heat up and be hot in the summer. So it produces a high nutrient profile.

Now, the anti stress nutrients that build up in this buckwheat, does this relate to the immune supporting properties that, that you get when you were to consume something like, like the flour, the extracts from the flour?

That's a, that's a great question. So we got very, very interested in whether you can actually measure the effect that eating this tartary buckwheat had on your immune system. And we had already done quite a bit of work in looking at symptom outcomes, so called felt states. People that were sleeping better, better digestion, more energy, more cognitive clearance, it felt like chronic pain were reduced. Things of that nature we'd been observing in people using the Himalayan Tertiary buckwheat. But we really wanted to know, could we quantify, could we measure scientifically the effect that it was having on their immune system? And, and so we eventually landed on what I consider kind of a state of the art way of assessing immune function. I won't hopefully get too geeky here, but let me just give a kind of a thumbnail description. So it turns out that our immune system is actively engaged in protection. 24, 7. The immune system is in every tissue of our body. It's not just the white blood cells floating around in our bloodstream. The immune system is actually there in all of our body's organs and tissues, doing seek and destroy and looking for foreigners or damaged tissue and repairing them. So it's more than just the protection against viruses and bacteria infection. It has the role of really keeping us healthy by this kind of vigilant process of 24, 7, 365 evaluation of what's friend and what's foe. And so if you start asking the question then if the immune system has those properties or those responsibilities.

How fast does it replenish itself? And it turns out that we are making every minute several tens of thousands of new white blood cells, new immune cells. In fact, our immune system cells are replaced about every three months entirely. So we're like a new immune system every two to three months. And the question I started asking is, well, when you replace these immune cells, are they as good, better or worse than the ones that they're replacing? And what is the process that the body uses to decide how it's going to Replace them and in what state they will find themselves. Now, unfortunately, in the United States, one thing that we Learned from SARS CoV2 infection is that our immune systems were not nearly as healthy as we thought they were, and that we had kind of a pandemic within a pandemic. We already had an existing immunological, kind of less than optimal function. And now we introduced into that these, the SARS CoV2 virus, which unfortunately then didn't have optimal immune defense against it. And we in America then as a country became the most.

Poor outcome of any of the developed countries in terms of SARS CoV2 infection. So if you ask, what can we do then to improve our immune system function? And that has to do with taking away damaged immune cells that carry bad memories, that have been injured and carry the legacy of bad experiences. Those bad experiences could be exposure to chemicals, exposure to toxic thoughts and trauma. They could be poor quality diets. They could be as a consequence of previous infections with things like Epstein Barr virus.

All of those air pollution I know is another biggie. The air quality.

Exactly. Small particles, air pollution, all of those things have impacts upon the signals that the immune system picks up and develops a memory to those effects. And those memories can be bad experiences. And they can produce a form of cells that have been given a name, and I think the name alone describes it, called zombie cells. These zombie cells in the immune system or in the body are those that carry these bad memories. And so you don't want to have.

By the way, that that's synonymous with the senescent cell accumulation, right?

That's exactly right. So these are a form of what are called senescence associated secretory phenotypes, or sasp. These are cells that become inflammation prone. And so we, as we grow older or even younger people that have had bad experiences in their life through their immune system have a greater amount of these senescent cells, these aged immune cells. Now the body fortunately has a way of replacing them with friendly, new, more dynamic cells. And so the road of life always has two lanes. The, the one thing we learn about biology of systems is it's not a one way street. Those things that go one way also have a return mechanism going the other way. So we have been on the path of immune aging for some time now. We want to get back on the lane of immune rejuvenation. So immune senescence is aging of the immune system. The converse of that is immune response rejuvenation. And our body has natural processes by which this occurs. By the Way these processes scientifically have just been discovered within the last 10 years. So we're talking about kind of recent advances in our understanding of the immune system and the way that the body does that. You know, this immunorejuvenation is it triggers certain processes that get rid of these damaged.

Aged immune cells. That process has the name autophagy and mitophagy. The actual process that activates the cell suicide of these injured cells to allow the new rejuvenated cells to be replacing them. And by utilizing certain lifestyle principles, we call it the immunorejuvenation program. One can start going down the other way in the street towards immunorejuvenation rather than immunosenescence. And that's what we've been really focusing virtually all of our attention on. Big bold health is really the development of a program that can be applied by people that immunorejuvenate and leave in the dust the immunosenescent process so that we're replacing these damaged cells with new, much more capable cells to protect us against the kind of injuries that people are exposed to.

How different would this be from a lot of these anti senescent cell like formulas or supplements that you see popping up now? Like I, I did an interview a few weeks ago about one that has, you know, things like Kercetin and some flavanols and, and things like that in it all the way down to, I think some people are even using like, like low dose rapamycin as a longevity enhancing strategy that may also have some common impact on these senescent cells. Is your approach different?

I think it's different to the extent that the older I get and the longer I'm in this field, the more I believe is history is a great teacher and we have this kind of pharmacological model of the magic pill. Let's find the pill that we can take that is going to reverse the process of aging. The alternative of that is what you and I were talking about earlier, which is to look at cultures that have successfully been engaged with anti aging by the way that they live by, the signals that their body is exposed to through how they eat, how they move, how they think, how they interact, how they love, how they find their peace in the world, how they stay away from toxins. Those kind of principles which are symphonic orchestration of our genes to produce the goodness of health and lowered aging is what we are really focusing on. I don't believe the solution to this is going to be found by a pill in a Bottle, I think it's going to be found by implementing the things that history teaches us are available like a 4,000 year old crop called tartary buckwheat, or the omega 3 fatty acids that we've been producing up there in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, from a natural process that actually then contributes historically to how people have lived 100 years of living with good health. That to me is I think, the more logical solution.

Yeah, but from what I understand, like you're, you're encapsulating because you sent me a couple bottles, like in addition to the flour, you're encapsulating some of these, these compounds that you're harvesting from the Himalayan buckwheat. And maybe we can talk later on about the fish, but you're not just like sending me flash frozen Alaskan salmon. Like you're also, you know, creating that into a supplement. So isn't that the same as popping a pillow?

Well, I think that's a very good point. And you know, people enter into their self discovery by different mechanisms. And I'm sure you've seen this. I know that you've done a fantastic job of educating and getting people to see that many of the legacy things that we have lost can be reintroduced into our lives that make big differences. And I think that what we think is that if we start down the road to introduce ways of getting people's attention, that they can make changes that actually have meaningful differences by using the complex mixtures and concentrates of things like the Himalayan tartary buckwheat or the omega 3 oils that are rich in these pro resolving mediators that those types of entry points give a person then the reinforcement if they do something, start making changes, it's going to pay big dividends for them. And then it introduces them into eating right, thinking right, living right, being right, having a healthy microbiome by eating the right diets that are rich in prebiotic fibers. So I think there are many strategies that get people's attention to allow them to start down this road to turn back their biological clock.

Yeah, it's kind of funny because right before we hopped on the podcast, somebody texted me a link to these oils. I think they're like citrus flavonoids and some other things that might enhance white fat to brown fat conversion and speed up metabolism and I think uncouple some of the pathways that would be responsible for like burning calories to generate heat. You know, very popular type of, you know, typical weight loss supplements or fat loss supplements. And of course there's also the the central nervous system stimulants that they'll also put into some of those, you know, like caffeine or ephedrine, like compounds, et cetera. And my reply was, well, you know, if you want to spend your money on these, you know, great, you know, you might get an extra, you know, three, five, maybe even 10%. But I think that you should focus on walking 10,000 plus steps a day, exposing yourself to cold on a regular basis to naturally increase that white fat to brown fat conversion, Lift something heavy about three times a week, avoid vegetable oils and alcohol as much as possible, moderate your calorie and your carbohydrate intake, and engage in some form of. Of intermittent fasting. And my, my point to them was to illustrate the fact that the supplement is like just a supplement that should be stacked on top of a healthy lifestyle. So I get what you're saying, but that being said, what are you actually taking, like, because I have, I think, two bottles of my pantry that you sent me that, that are labeled the same as the Big Bold Health. You know, the label on the, on the flower of the Himalayan tartary buckwheat that you sent me. So what are in those two supplements that you said? I think one was like an immune support and one was some kind of a microbiome support.

Yeah. The first product that we produced to kind of get people into this whole concept of Himalayan tardary buckwheat, we called HTV Rejuvenate, and it is a concentrate of the flavonoids found in tartery buckwheat. So that if one ate, took two capsules, there would be equivalent to eating about one portion size of the Himalayan.

Exactly. What I was wondering, like, how much flour I'd have to eat to get what was in one of these capsules.

Yeah, it's about one portion size of the flower of Himalayan tertiary buckwheat. We just finished a clinical trial that was clintrial.gov registered with 50 individuals. That was very exciting. At least it was exciting for us. We went back and used this.

Emerging way of assessing how the immune system ages, which is to actually study the epigenetic modification of the immune system using a specific gene chip that measures over.

90,000. Excuse me, specific loci where the genes of the immune system can be modified by diet or lifestyle or environmental exposures. This is actually measuring the methylation patterns of the human genome. We started with a baseline of our 50 individuals before they got into the program. And then for 90 days, they supplemented, in this case, with four of the capsules per day of the HTV Rejuvenate. And then we measured.

Every month over those 90 days or three months.

Their response to taking the HDB Flavonoids. And it was really very interesting. At the end of the trial we found those individuals whose immune age were greater than that than their age and birthdays or chronological age that they had a very significant reduction in their immune age over the course of 90 days by taking the what would be considered like two portion sizes of Himalayan Tertiary buckwheat flour through the concentrate. So we, I think we're the first group to actually demonstrate that we can modulate the epigenetic impact on immune cell aging through the taking of these complex mixture of these polyphenols from Himalayan Tertiary buckwheat.

That's fascinating. If I want to test my immune age, how would I do that? Do you guys have that test available?

Yeah, we actually partnered up with a company called trudiagnostic, that's in Tennessee.

That's Ryan Smith, right?

Yeah. So Ryan was one of our co collaborators in this study with his group, Dr. Dwarka and that group.

And in fact the reason we got into this initially was I personally started into our Immunity plus program with the HTB and just to see if it had an impact on my immune aging. And it was actually quite amazing to me because at the time I was 75 when I was first tested, my immune age was, was 69. I then went on the program with the Himalayan Tertiary buck weight and, and the time restricted feeding and the 10,000 steps a day. The program you really outlined, I went on and we call it Immunity plus program. And that was three months and I retested and my immune age at the end of retesting went to 54, even though I was a year older. I was 76. My immune age went from 69 to 54. So I became kind of a believer and that's what led us into this whole clinical trial.

Okay, so is that, that's somebody would have to order through their doctor or is it one of those ones you can order to your house?

I think you can order it directly through diagnostic.

Okay, I'll hunt it down and put it in the show notes again. It's going to be BenGreenfieldLife.com Dr. Bland. Dr. Bland. You know, I mentioned it briefly, so I'd be remiss not to just ask you directly about it. What do you think about this whole seeming infatuation in the age reversal industry about low dose rapamycin?

Well, I think There's a lot of exciting things happening on this whole concept of understanding biological aging. And there's been some really great books. David Sloan Claire's book, I think, is a really fantastic kind of review of the contemporary research that's ongoing. I think Mark Hyman's new book is a wonderful read for the general consumer on timeless aging and how one can implement many of these lifestyle characteristics. And some of the research that's going on with things like raptomycin and the niacin riboside and some of the other selenic compounds that are being discussed, meaning breaking the aging of cells. But I think we're still early on in the pharmacology of this, this field. What we're not so early on, as you and I were discussing earlier, is how the things that you can do every day by implementing in your lifestyle fairly simple things that can make dramatic differences. I mean, for me, when I saw that my immune age went from 69 to 54 by implementing and really staying the task, I've always felt that I've been engaged in a healthy lifestyle and, and really, you know, was on the right track. But by really concentrating and tuning it up and the kind of discipline that it takes to make this a daily engagement to see that benefit it, you know, to me it exceeds anything you would get from taking a senolytic at this point. So, and then we look at, you know, we look at that and Denosovib with, with Quercetin, which is the one that's been studied. Well, that's a, an anti cancer drug that has antimitotic activity. So how hard do we want to push our body to squeeze out some extra years, or would we like to do things that are pleasurable, fun and open up to all sorts of new opportunities of higher function, which is living a good lifestyle? Maybe that's the best principle.

Yeah, my take on it is I'd rather eat some sourdough baked bread and donuts at home with the Himalayan tartary flour than take these capsules on the road with me, which is actually what I started doing with the theory that my immune system needs a little bit of extra support when I travel. And I'm not eating a lot of kind of like the high nutrient dense baked goodies and plants and things like that at home when I'm on the road. And, and you know, my last trip I threw that bottle that you sent me into my bag and I was popping a couple every morning. But then I also took that. It's like a small green Capsule, like a microbiome support type of capsule. Is that similar to the Himalayan tartary buckwheat capsule or totally different?

Yeah. Well, thank you. As we've gotten deeper into this, this reminds me of how long does it take to become an expert? So I think We've got our 10,000 hours at least now of trying to understand.

This tartery buckwheat, because one of the things that we discovered is when you mill tartery buckwheat seeds.

That 25% of the seed is the hull or the husk. And when we started analyzing the makeup of the hus, and when I say analyzing, I mean chemically analyzing, we found out that it has some really interesting phytochemicals that are not found in the endosperm in the flower. Things like isoaryntin and vitexin. These are really interesting prebiotic phytochemicals that help nourish the microbiome as well as interesting prebiotic fibers like decarbo inositol, which is very high in the hull fibers as well. So we thought, my word, people have been using the hulls of the tartary buckwheat to put into beanbag chairs and as filling in pillows. It seems to us that these might have really very powerful effects, favorable effects on the microbiome and microbiome health. So we started studying that over the course of the last couple of years and lo and behold, we were able to demonstrate that this thing that was considered a waste product was actually not a waste product. It had very strong positive benefit on the integrity of our microbiome and the right kind of species of our microbiome that give rise to anti inflammation. So we formulated this product, microbiome rejuvenate, to capture that, along with a very interesting probiotic organism, Lactobacillus rhamnosis 1505, that has probably more studies done on human benefit than any single probiotic strain. In fact, it's used in Argentina and school kids programs to improve their digestive function and reduce days of absenteeism from colds and flu. And we also found this single interesting greens, microgreens, this interesting beta glucan from microgreens that has very strong immune potenting activities on the microbiome as well. So that became the.

Ingredients that are found in microbiome rejuvenate, the Probiotic Lactobacillus rhamnosis 1505, the beta glucans from this unicellular microgreens. And then our halls, Himalayan Tertiary buckwheat, the pre symbiotics that give rise to improved microbiome. So two capsules a day of the microbiome rejuvenated are equivalent to about 10 billion organisms. All of these are all based on human clinical trials and positive outcome in microbiome health.

Yeah, that's interesting. I probably should have taken my immune age score before I started taking it. But regardless, let me keep experimenting with it. That's interesting about the decarbonositol. I was looking at a study this week indicating that that may actually also shift the liver in terms of its beta oxidation pathways and potentially result in a lower respiratory exchange ratio in athletes who are exercising, increasing fat utilization, having some kind of a glycogen sparing effect. So that's interesting the second time I've come across it this week. So maybe, maybe God's telling me to keep experimenting with my nose at all. So you know, the other thing that you had mentioned about 10 minutes ago was the idea of these pro resolving mediators which from what I understand are more of something that you would find in some of these marine compounds for the anti inflammatory or the pain blocking effect, et cetera. Tell me about that because you fascinated me I think again at that discussion we were having a few years ago when you describe to me what your fishing operation actually looks like up there in Alaska and what you guys are doing as far as how you're harvesting sustainably and what you're doing with the fish. Can you, can you tell me about that?

Yeah. Thank you. So this story is a little bit reminiscent of my story with the Himalayan Tertiary buckwheat meeting Sam Beer and his wife and, and their little hobby farm and getting totally pulled into the Himalayan turtle buckwheat story. In this case it's a family hobby that pulled us into the story on the oils.

My wife and I have over the last 20 plus years been pretty active in boating up the Pacific coast. We live in the Seattle area so we do a lot of boating up into Alaska. We've done many trips, in fact many times we've been over two weeks not seeing another human plane carved. All we saw were animals out in Anchorages in Alaska. We have about 30, I think about 35,000 miles on our boat over the last several years cruising up there. And so we have had the chance to meet a lot of very interesting people. The people in Alaska are definitely.

Their own cut of personalities, individualistic, rugged.

And so we spent time obviously anchored out and at times come into some of these small marinas where there's a lot of commercial Fishing going on. And so one day we were up in Sitka and I saw this very interesting boat come in that I'd never seen a fishing boat, probably about 100 foot fishing boat. And I went up and talked to the skipper and I said, you know, this is a really interesting design on this boat. I've never seen about with this design. He said, oh, if you're interested in it, you know, the, the person who designed this boat, who's the owner of our fishing company, is going to be flying in here later today. You ought to come over and talk to him. So I came over and met him. Dave Little is his name. And Dave is a really interesting guy. He got a degree from University of Michigan in Marine architecture and then took a kind of sabbatical. He and his wife came out to Seattle just to have fun and do some commercial fishing. And he got really caught up in the fishing industry and ultimately then started his own fishing company and designed his own boats. And these are long line boats in which there are multiple hooks that are deployed. Each one is baited and they fish for.

A lot of bottom fish, halibuts and then cod, as well as also fish, some for salmon as well. And the, the story was that these boats were outfitted to be able to bring the fish in on a, on a hook one at a time as they're reeled into the boat. The crew then takes the fish off the hook and processes that fish on board so that the, the processing, the outcome goes into a deep freeze within 20 minutes from a live fish, it gets frozen to sub zero temperature, which traps all of the goodness in that particular fish.

And by the way, I talked to a lot of companies. I've never heard of any fish oil company that does it that fast.

This is n of 1. Having traveled around the world and visited fish oil companies, Brazil, in Peru, in Norway and in Iceland. There is no other company that I'm aware of that is doing this kind of fishing. And in fact he was. Dave Little was instrumental in getting the fisheries department of the government to control this as a controlled fishery. And it's now MSC certified, Marine Stewardship Council certified. It's also got.

Even a higher level of certification, Responsible fish management. And that's RFM certification that certifies not only that the fish is sustainable, but the shoreside communities, the ecological impact on the shores are sustainable. So our product that is produced out of this process is RFM as well as MSC certified. Wow. So what happened out of this whole process is that when I was speaking with him, he said, you know, we have one problem. Now that we have a sustainable fishery.

We, we can't expand. We can only catch so many fish a year. And so for me it means, you know, the concept of building a bigger market. I really can't build a bigger market because we're kind of quoted now. But we need to use every part of the fish. We should not waste any part. So I found markets for the fins. I've spott markets for the head, but there's one, one part of the fish that I can't sell that I have to grind up and throw back in the water. And I said, well, what's that? He said, it's really the fish guts. So I said, well, what's in the fish guts? And he looked at me, he says, what do you mean, what's in the fish guts? And I said, like, what are the biomolecules that are in the fish guts?

Yeah.

He said, jeff, I'm, I'm a fisherman, not a chemist. I said, well, I'm a chemist. Why don't you send me some of the frozen fish guts? Well, be careful what you ask for because not too long thereafter, DHL truck backed up to our facility and unloaded several hundred pounds of frozen fish guts. I just needed a little. So now truck of fish guts. Well, we did analysis.

Cats in the neighborhood, I bet.

Exactly. And so what we were able to find when we did the analysis where there were some really interesting bioactive molecules that we could develop a process to mildly extract them. And one of those were these pro resolving mediators that are found in the original fish oils that you don't find in most commercially processed fish oils because they're removed by the distillation processing. And so we were able to capture these and capture as well as natural astaxanthin, capture the active vitamin A and D as well as not only EPA and DHA, but DPA and eha, all sorts of different oils that are lost by processing. So we, we produced the first full spectrum natural oils that were from the original fish because of his fish processing system. So the fish are brought in, the guts are frozen on board. Within 15 to 20 minutes, they're brought to our shoreside plant. We actually built a plant. We have native Alaskan partners because you don't own property on shoreside in Alaska unless you have a native Alaskan partner. So we have one of the native Alaskan development groups as our partner. We built this plant that allows us to retain the. Without ever getting above 100 degrees Fahrenheit the natural ingredients in the product that come directly off the ships into the plant. And I think we're producing a fish oil that's like none other in the world as a consequence of this process. And it's very high in these pro resolving mediators.

Yeah, and the pro resolving mediators, correct me if I'm wrong, but they have pretty good data behind them for both inflammation as well as pain management, right?

Yes. Actually these were discovered by an investigator at Harvard Mass General. And at first people in the science of lipids of oils doubted his work because no one had ever seen these before. But he's done extraordinary work over the years, published hundreds of papers, now has a whole international group of investigators looking at these resolvins, protectins and morisons. Those are the three families of these pro resolving mediators that are actually very strong in their ability to quench the inflammatory process. So once you get inflammation started, you want to have a break that can stop it. And these pro resolving mediator compounds are those that put brakes on the inflammatory process and keep it under control. So that's why we feel our oils are very valuable in supporting balanced inflammation because they have these PRMs that put the brake on inflammation.

That's fantastic. You know, I haven't, you know, thank God, been struggling much lately with pain or inflammation, but I've been looking into some of the things you can combine with photobiomodulation or infrared light therapy or sunlight exposure, in the latter case, not only for the UVB and UVA protective effect for the skin and also the enhancement of vision, but also the fact that it appears from what I've looked into, that something like DHA or a DHA rich compound may allow, via process called quantum tunneling, better penetration of light photons, particularly in that, like that 600 to 800 nanometer specter into the cell to produce more ATP via activation of cytochrome C oxidase. And so I've been intentionally trying to up my DHA intake because I do a lot of like infrared sauna and red light exposure and similar compounds would be a lot of your dark green. So I suppose I might be enhancing that a little bit with this greens component of the microbiome product you sent me. And then also shilajit kind of like the dark blacks and then the blues, something like methylene blue. So I've been experimenting with these little like, like stacks, you know, pre infrared therapy, pre photobiomodulation stacks. And you know, the best way I can describe it is it almost feels like my body is photosynthesizing energy like a plant. It's really, it's really interesting to mess around with. I don't know if you've gotten into, you know, from a functional medicine standpoint, any of the research on photobiomodulation, but, you know, being able to stack it with some of these compounds that seem to interact really well you know, with, with the skin and with the photoreceptors is something I've just found intriguing lately.

Well, you're right. You're right on the frontier. I mean, that's one of the reasons that I love following your podcast and what you're doing. You, you've, you're a translator. You're doing a fantastic job of translating this contemporary stuff that is geeky, but it's, it's also valuable if we can just get it translated into ways that people can apply it in their lives. So I want to compliment you and give you a shout out. That's a tremendous contribution you're making to getting people acquainted with these things that can make a very, very big difference. Oh yeah, These pigments like lutein and astaxanthin, they're photomodulators. They pick up light in various wavelengths and they translate them into.

Photonic quantum energy sources. And so they are translators. And I think you use an analogy of like photosynthesis through chlorophyll. Well, these are kind of helping biosynthesis through these specific energetic pathways that modulate.

The electron transport chain.

Yeah. I think I first came across the idea of some of the photocyanins from Guy you might know, Sire G. I think he wrote about it on Green Med Info and later on in his book, which was fantastic. I think his book was called Regenerate or something like that. And since then I've just kind of been looking into. There's another old Russian book, the horrible translation, but it was all on interaction of light photons with particles in the body and gets deep into the science of melanin. And also how some of these dark blues and dark blacks, almost like the fermented type of soil, rich fulvic acid, humic acid, shilajit type compounds might interact with light and it all goes back to nature. Eventually it always comes full circle. Maybe you're getting some soil based microorganisms or bacteria from a diet or a lifestyle close to nature, come out with plenty of sunlight and a wide variety of herbs and spices, and the body's just kind of built to produce energy in response to that kind of lifestyle. Which is just super cool and, you know, I guess maybe related to this concept of, you know, advances in science and what have you at big bold health. Are you guys up to anything else, like any other plants you're researching or any cool things coming down the pipeline you could give me a glimpse into?

Yes. You know, one of the things, this just follows directly from what you just said, that we got extraordinarily interested in the soil architecture and the micro rise of the soil. And, you know, the farms that we have partnered up with are all organic farms for, you know, 20 years. So you'd expect that they would have a really good soil. But when we started doing soil analysis, and that was Dr. Emily Reese, our soil scientist, who kind of led this work, we found that there maybe were ways that we could actually supercharge the health of the soil, because the health of the soil speaks to the health of the plant, which speaks to the health of the individual. So we did some field trials that were. Took us a year, obviously, because when you do field inoculation studies, you've got to go through the whole growing cycle and then do the harvest and then do the analysis. And we were very excited to see that there were specific inoculants that we use. And actually we're now using them on all of the crop that we're planting for 20, 23. That actually could give us a boost in the phytochemical outcome in our Himalayan turtle buckwheat seeds. And we recognize that when we looked at why, it's because these mycorrhiza produce their own chemical messengers, things like shikimic acid, things like salicylic acid. These are compounds that are released into the soil that are picked up by the seed when it's germinating. That speaks to the genes of the seed. And when it speaks to the genes of the seed, it modulates epigenetically the production of the seed of these secondary metabolites that are associated with immune defense in the plant, these phytochemicals. So you end up, when the plant germinates and the seeds are set, you end up with higher levels of the secondary metabolites that have picked up the message from the seed, which has picked up the message from the mycorrhizae that were producing these chemical messaging substances. And interestingly enough, the plant, when it picks up these messages, the roots then send out their own chemicals back to the mycorrhizae to form a community. It's a push pull mechanism in which you're developing over the course of the year of developing this new soil architecture. A community that has a whole different communication as it pertains to its.

Function in stimulating plant growth and plant health.

Oh wow. You know, I was telling you before we started recording that I'm currently prepping my 12 acres that I'm going to move to over in Idaho, particularly regarding the soil and in beginning to do a little bit of soil inoculation and then I'll move on from there to some planting, some cover crop and some rotational grazing. But I want to follow that science of what you're doing with the soil because I might be interested in inoculating my own soil with some of these similar compounds. So feel free to share any of that research with me via email or whatever and I can even post it to the show notes for other people who are doing a little hobby farming or gardening who might be interested in that because that's just absolutely fantastic what you're doing as far as soil transformation.

I will send you the the draft of this paper that we've just written up on our results that talks about our method so you'll have a chance to see what we're doing.

Super cool, super cool. So big Bold Health, if you're listening, they make the flower some of these capsules and supplements that are derived from the flour as well as some of these pro resolving mediator rich compounds from the fish that they're harvesting up in Alaska. Somewhere deep in the depths of my website I have some kind of a discount code or something for you guys and I'll hunt that down so you can save a little bit if you want to go and get some of this stuff and I'll just link to it all over@BenGreenfieldLife.com DrBland BenGreenfieldLife.com Dr. Bland and I tell you what, even if you grab a bag of that, that htb, that Himalayan tartery buckwheat and start using it as a replacement for some of your normal recipes in the kitchen, I guarantee you're going to notice an uptick in your health and maybe if you start testing it your immune age as well. Jeff, it's always just a pleasure to talk with you and I learn a ton. So thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and your wisdom here.

Well Ben, I feel the same thing about you are one of those people that you put talk to action and you make it happen. And I think that's where the tire meets the road is what we do with this information to make people's lives better. So it's really a privilege to have the chance to share these thoughts with you. And one of the things that I'm very excited about, obviously, is this new Himalayan tertiary buckwheat sprout powder that we're going to be able to provide, which has three to four times the level of phytochemicals to that of the flower alone. So I think we've got all sorts of Runway in which we can really introduce the, the value of immune strengthening immunorejuvenation programs into people's lives. Hopefully, not everybody is a baker, not everybody is a chef, but we can find ways of introducing these values into people's lives in, in ways that hopefully they can integrate successfully.

That's right. And if not, just send them some leftover fish guts.

All right. Well, folks, that's about how much time we have, but I want to thank you for listening in and thank Jeff for coming on the show. Again. The Shownotes are going to be@BenGreenfieldLife.com Dr. Bland. BenGreenfieldLife.com Dr. BLand and you can also leave your comments, your questions, your feedback, and I'll provide links to the big bold health website and some of the codes we have for them as well. So until next time, I, Ben Greenfield, along with the father of Functional Medicine, Dr. Jeffrey Bland, signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com have an amazing week.