The Link Between Gut Health and Immune Health with Dr. Jeff Bland

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Hey this is JJ Virginia. Welcome and thanks so much for joining me. This is Ask the Health Expert Here. I put the power of health in your hands and give you access to the top people in health and wellness. In each episode I share safe ways to get healthy, lose weight, heal your gut, detox, and lots more. So if you want to get healthy and get off the Dieting for Life merry go round, I'll give you strategies that will help you look and feel better fast. It's always an amazing podcast when I have Dr. Jeff Bland as a guest. You may have heard him on my what to Eat, when to Eat and why Summit or heard another podcast I've done with him. He is one of my favorite all time guests and human beings. He is known as the father of Functional medicine, created ifm, now has founded the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute. But really he is for so many of us practitioners he is the our number one mentor out in the field and he just continues to shape the field of nutrition and metabolic health and functional medicine. And especially now. This was a couple years before the pandemic hit. He started focusing on immune system and immuno rejuvenation and we're going to be talking about this today. Some mind blowing stuff. He's also going to share about his immune quiz that you will want to take@jjvirgin.com Immunequiz See how easy I made this Right now he is the founder of Big Bold Health and he again is really focused on the immune system and this concept of immunof rejuvenation. He's also the author of the Disease Delusion Conquering Causes of Chronic Illness for a Healthier, Longer, Longer and Happier Life. And he also has the podcast Big Bold Immunity. So again I am super excited about this podcast today. I can't think of a more timely thing than to really understand what you need to do to have an immune system that can carry you through after what what we've been through. You know Kind of showing you. Showing you the impact of why we need to focus on our immune system. And it's going to give you some tips that are quick to put into practice. So we will be right back. Stay with me.

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Doctor Jeff Bland, one of my most favorite human beings on the planet. I'm so excited to have you here with me.

Well, jj, Virgin, I think this goes reciprocally. You know, there's certain people who just have whatever that is, that native skill to create alliance and vision and sense of future that that you embody that gives all the rest of us hope that we can get better as we move down this road of life. So thanks. What a privilege to talk with you.

So you have helped a lot of people get better. You've helped a lot of practitioners over the years with all of your training through ifm. And the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Medical Institute. And now you really have taken on the immune system. I mean, what perfect timing, too. Like, do we ever need to be really looking at this, this whole concept, too, of immunorejuvenation, which I know we're going to dig into, but I'd love to just start, you know, here we are on what appears to be the tail end of COVID I will tell you, too, I just got over Covid, like, last week, and I was excited that I did because I needed the new immunity. It's like, perfect timing. What did, like, let's unpack what. What we just went through. Like, what did we learn from all of this? And how. How do we make sure that we don't, you know, we learn from history here.

Yeah. Thank you. I think there's. There are many, many lessons, but probably because I. Through the lens of immunity, that's kind of where my wakings and sleeping hours are spent the last few years is trying to understand this very complex thing that's more complex even than the number of stars in the universe called the immune system. That lens, that perspective, when I look specifically at COVID 19, gives me a sense of opportunity, also a sense of sobriety, because we've gone through a pretty horrendous experience globally here. But I think there is a learning curve out of it that leads us into, hopefully, a better place. Is that. Well, you probably have spoken to your group over the last few months about the fact that the last three to four years, our mean average life expectancy in the United States for the first time in the history of this country, has gone down. And actually, it's gone down almost three and a half years over the last three years. Now, that's been rationalized as a result of two major factors. One is Covid and the deaths of COVID and the other is, unfortunately, the deaths to drug overdose. And so people have kind of said, well, gee, this is just like an epiphenomena. It was just really because of the SARS CoV2 virus, and it'll bounce back. But if you really dig more deeply into the statistics, what you find out that, yes, there is a connection and certainly a contribution that's made to our lower mean average life expectancy from those two events. But beyond that, there is something more that we should be looking at, and that is that the mean average health, the resilience of our population is not what we thought it was. And in fact, if you look at the number of deaths to Covid in the United States, not just in older age people, but across all age groups. What you find is that we actually as a developed country, had more deaths to Covid than on a per population basis than any other of the developed countries. And so it begs the question, you know, why? What was the precedent or the antecedent? And that could lead us to have this more dramatic adverse outcome from the exposure to the SARS CoV2 virus. And when you start to probe deeply and unpack that question, what you come to recognize that we just weren't as healthy as we thought we were. We were kind of as a country thinking that because we had all this modern medicine and we had all this available stuff to our resources, that we had to be the healthiest country. But we were not. We were not healthy at all. Our immune systems were compromised, our resilience was low. We didn't have the headspace to be able to manage a new challenge that was put on our immune system. And that if you start looking at the immune System connections to SARS CoV2, you find out that yes, there undoubtedly are genetic relationships to different prevalences of infection, but it's more than genes. It's actually how our immune system, what its status was as we went into the exposure to this virus. And when you start examining that question and teasing that apart, what you find out that we can do so much more to learn really how to put our immune system back in order. Because even though we might have a certain number of age and birthdays, our age of our immune system seems to be greater than our age of birthdays. And this is particularly true as we've gotten new technologies that allow us to assess immunological age things that are now coming available. The Horvath clock mechanisms for doing immune age determination based upon methylation patterns of the immune genome. When you start looking at immune age, what you find is that our immune age is greater than our chronologic age as a society, and that we are actually in a state of immunosenescence. And what immunosenescence means is an imbalanced immune system. We're into a state of chronic inflammation that we call inflammaging. That's a contracted term that sets us up then to have much less resilience and headspace and response, response to a new offender, be it SARS or any other potential offender. Not just viruses or bacteria alone, but also other things that challenge our immune system. Chemicals, toxic thoughts, traumatic experiences, all these things that travel through or even poor quality diets that travel through our immune system to get translated into our body's function are at a state because of the compromise of our immune system we've been taking out of the bank account and putting nothing back in return. That when we get those events occurring, they become potentially catastrophic. They to much more serious illnesses. Diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's, arthritis, all of those are immunologically related disorders. And if we can say one thing that you have so brilliantly broadcast and communicated, we're seeing just a virtual pandemic of pre autoimmune disease happening in our culture. And where does that pre autoimmune disease come from? We didn't just suddenly get born with autoimmune genes. It's because our genes of our immune system are not able to tolerate the kind of new chemical information that' coming into our bodies. Chemical that comes from all sorts of sources, including our behaviors, thoughts, attitudes, and belief systems, all of which get translated through our immune system into our function. And right now we don't have the, the, the resiliency to be able to manage those additional things that create then the dysfunction that we try to patch together with modern medicine. So that's where I'm spending my time right now. I think there's a solution there that we can learn from the COVID that'll help us in the future.

Yeah, because I look at it and I was talking to our buddy, Dr. Mark Hyman, and pre pandemic, I think it was 2018, they said that our metabolic health, that 6.8% of the population was metabolically healthy. And what they were using to gauge metabolically healthy, I think we'd argue that was like, oh, it's kind of on the edge. Right. With some of these things. And then he said, post pandemic, the new numbers had just come out at 5% and that's a huge shift in a very short amount of time. And now 5% of the population metabolically healthy. As you were talking about that, I'm like, all right, I didn't know there was a test to look at immunological age. Is it similar to what we'd look at for, like when they're looking at your biological versus your chronological age, or is it something different? And I would imagine they all kind of would jive together, just like metabolic health would jive with, with your, how well your immune system functions. But how. What are we looking at when we're looking at your immunological age? What are the biggest factors that are driving it?

Yeah. Thank you. And by the way, you said some really, really important Things in that last statement, because it turns out that metabolic health and immunological health are very tightly wired together. We've only started to learn that in the field of immunology in the last decade that your metabolic status is really closely tied to your immune status and vice versa. It's a push P. Your immune status is tied to your metabolic status. So how do we actually measure this? And I think that's a really interesting question because even a non scientist, I think, can understand the principle. The principle is when we have events that our immune system has to deal with, our immune system is designed to be able to remember those events and to have a pretty good elephant memory about things that it was once exposed to. So traumatic events, be it chemical or behavioral or psychological, all get captured by our immune system so that we'll have a memory of those. So it will be better prepared presumably to respond the next time it's exposed to something like that. The difficulty is that if you're exposed to many, many different things that are all creating a very significant adverse impact upon your immune system function, at least to what are called immune scars, you actually end up with pretty dramatic memory effects that last that then keep your body on guard all the time. You're in a state of hypervigilance, your immune and hypervigilance. And that's a state of inflammation. It's chronic simmering inflammation. And how does that actually occur? I mean, how does the immune system actually have that kind of memory effect? It does so by what you and I and others have spoken a lot about, which is the currency of our age called epigenetics, that you put actually marks on your genes within your immune system genome. Because every immune cell has its own collection of genes that are responding to its own environment. Those marks that go onto genes, those could be methyl groups or they could be acetyl groups, or different ways that the genes can be marked by epigenetic processes. But they then lock those genes into a certain state of function. And that state of function as it comes to trauma that we've been exposing ourselves to, traumas, even things like being in a food desert and only in calorie, empty calorie foods. Those particular events then can be measured by an immunologist or a technologist when you do gene sequencing, because you can actually take immune cells. And just to remind people that if you have your blood taken, generally what, what is done by the laboratories, they'll spin that blood down in a centrifuge and it'll separate it into a liquid Fraction, which is called the plasmid serum, that's kind of of clear. And then there is the packed cells below, the red cells, which are your red blood cells. But there's a kind of a frothy barrier in between the packed cells at the bottom of the tube and the clear liquid above. And that is called the buffy coat. And the buffy coat represents 10% of the volume of your blood. And the buffy coat are your immune cells. There are hundreds of different types of immune cells that are in that buffy coat, in between the plasma of your blood that carries all the proteins and so forth, and your red cells in that buffy code in that white blood cell matrix. Our immune cells that have undergone certain experiences that have been marked. They can either be marked with bliss and joy and a sense of fulfillment and all the love. And those immune cells are celebrating life in a different way than the immune cells that have been marked with hazard and trauma and pain and injury. And those are different epigenetic marked cells that have different memories. And you can actually analyze this chemically if assessment, and you start looking at how these various regions have been marked within the immune system. This is, by the way, fairly new science that I'm talking about. When I say new, I mean within the last 15 years, we have this flow cytometry and these genomic methylation sites being able to be measured in the laboratory. This is not something, by the way, you go to your normal doc and say, I'd like to have my immune system measured. This is more of a research tool.

Okay, Yeah. I was like, please tell me if my buffy coat cells are joyful.

Yes, exact. But I think we're going to have that happen soon because the technology itself is becoming miniaturized and automated such that I think this will become something that can be more routinely incorporated. But presently, I would call this in the spectrum of what I would call functional assessment, because we're not looking for an immune disease. We're looking for the function of the immune system as it relates to the messages and the memories that have. Now, some of those memories lead to cells that have been given a name called zombie cells. The name alone, it says it all. These, these zombie cells are cells that carry bad messages and they perpetuate themselves over time, and they can accumulate with age. And the zombie cells kind of not only take up space, but they also create this. This memory effect that is this hazard response, this inflammatory response. So they produce this state of perpetuating chronic inflammation, which is associated with these pre autoimmune diseases. That we are, we're seeing many, many more people present with and the, the good news and here now this is unlike a one one way street to bad news. But now we're going to talk about good news because this is a cyclical opportunity. You know, I've learned in human physiology over my years of studying it that for everything that goes one way, there's another process that goes the other way. That's the remarkable thing about human physiology. So for every process that leads to immune senescence or aging immune system, there is another process that goes the other way that I'm calling immune rejuvenation. Now, the problem in our society today is that we have too many things happen that are causing immune senescence and not enough things that are activating immune rejuvenation. So the net effect of that is our immune system is aging and our resilience is going down and we're more susceptible to all sorts of things. And by the way, this ties even to things like chronic fatigue syndrome. It couples together with post Covid. It even couples together with post traumatic stress conditions because we now find that the cells in the immune system that are marked by a serious post traumatic event are also carrying these messages of inflammation.

So, well, this could happen, I'd assume in the womb.

Oh yes.

So like I'm listening to all this going, holy smokes. Like this. You look at the impact of trauma. I did this interview with Dr. Amy Apigi and I don't know if you've talked to her yet, and she's just what, her work on trauma is amazing and just what it's doing to our bodies. But you think now of these, you know, kids who were born during COVID the stress the parents were under, what was transferred over to these babies. And then I'm also thinking, Jeff, of as you were talking about this, I'm like, you know, is this why. LAUGHTER Remember when Robin Williams played that doctor in the hospital and was going in and it's a clown. I'm like, is that why that was working so well with these kids? Because of that? Anyway, all right, back over to this because I'm assuming then if you can take it, just like you said, if you can cause these problems, then you could also create solutions, maybe doing the opposite.

That's exactly right. And I'm calling that, and I'm actually, I'm going to give credit for the person who I think coined this term, and that's Randy Jertel, the father of nutritional epigenomics, environmental epigenomics. He calls this the Science of hope. And I think that is so powerful, because if you think of what I've just said about immune senescence and picking up zombie cells and having your body get worse as you grow older, that's not a very optimistic outlook. But if you think of the alternative, the converse of that, which is immune rejuvenation, which is also a process in our body that can be activated now, it's the science of hope. It means we can go the other way. We can reverse, we can improve, we can get rid of damage and replace it with new, more flexible and resilient cells. And that process of immunorejuvenation has really only recently been discovered as it relates to the biological nature of how that works. It's tied to something that you've spoken about, but it's now getting much more detailed, and that's the process of autophagy and mitophagy of how these cells can be repaired, getting rid of damaged cells and allowing the opportunity for new cells to replace them. The fascinating thing about this process, and I think probably one of the reasons that it's captured me 24, is that the ways that you actually can activate your immunorejuvenation process are the things that you and I and our colleagues have been talking about for decades, which are living right, thinking right, acting right, eating right, being right. That those processes actually activate specific regulatory functions at the genetic level that purge the damaged, marked immune cells and allow them the replacement with immune cells that have the chance to form their own memories and their own experiences and more plasticity and much more resilience. Now it turns out to take this one step farther, and here's what led me actually into this thing I thought in my life I'd never be involved with, which is Himalayan Tertiary buckwheat agriculture. How in the world did Jeff Bland end up owning parts of organic farms in upstate New York? The way that that happened, just to summarize it, was that I had three different experiences, all coincidentally happening about the same period of time. One was with an investigator at Vanderbilt who had been studying a molecule that was only found in tartary buckwheat called 2 benzyl 2 hydroxybenzylamine that he found activated the immune system to lower blood pressure. And I thought, wow, that's really interesting. I never heard about the immune system and blood pressure. That's kind of interesting. Then right after that, I met. I was asked to go to China. And I was up in Harbin, China, my host there. And I got talking about. I said just Asked him on the bullet train going from Harbin to Shanghai, I said, said, do you know anything about Himalayan Tertiary buckwheat? And he said, oh my word, Jeff. He said, I can't believe that you brought that up because my research group are the expert group in China on Himalayan Tertiary buckwheat and its effects on health. And we've been looking for someone in the United States to be interested in collaborating with us. So then I get home and my colleague of more than 25 years now, Trish Urie, says to me, jeff, do you know that there's only one farm in America that seems to be growing, growing Himalayan Tardary buckwheat? It's Sam and Lucia Beers Angelica New York hobby farm. He's an ex ag professor researcher from Cornell University. This now has this little retirement farm and they're the only people we can find in the United States that's growing Himalayan territory buckwheat. So that started me down this path of looking at what are these unique features of the unique mixture, that of this crop that's 2,500 years old as a food.

Where did it come from? It's 25. I mean it's the Himalayas, I'm assuming.

Well, yeah, there's two variations. There's a northern Himalay variation and there's a southern. The northern has become the more hostile environment. And those cultivars that come, the seeds that come from the northern Himalayan version have the highest level of these immune strengthening polyphenols. And so you know, these are actually developed by the plant over time to be able to live in the most hostile regions of bad soil. Climate is horrible. You know, no fertilizer, no irrigation. They know obviously biocides. So these plants have evolved over millennium, be extraordinarily frost resistant, live in aluminum toxic soils to basically fend themselves off bugs and mold and rust because they have such high level these immune active phytochemicals. So it's nature's experiment. That's a biochemical factory for us.

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Which groups were using this? You know, because I'm assuming for thousands of years someone found this and was using it.

Yeah. So the reason it's called Tartary is that the Tartans, that's a region in China in the Himalayan mountains, were the first that were recorded to use this. About between 2500 and 3000 years ago, they started to, I guess you would call it cultivate. It's a little bit, probably a misnomer, not like waving fields, but they would start to plant the seeds and start to harvest the seeds and make it into bread and other other products. And so when you think back 2500 years ago, it's really kind of at the crucible of how standing agriculture started to be used rather than just hunting and gathering. And it's just a really remarkable story culturally, but it's also just a remarkable food. Now why is it a remarkable food? Let me just go back to my story about these marks on the immune system. It turns out that as more studies have been done on the process of immune rejuvenation, there are regulatory factors that control how the genes are undergoing this autophagy process and renewing themselves. There is a family of specific polyphenols, flavonoids, within certain food products that are uniquely capable of modulating those cellular processes associated with immune rejuvenation. And they fall into the family of flavanols and flavones, things like rutin, quercet, hesperidin, diasmin, luteolin. They're really actually Himalayan chartered buckwheat. There are over 50 of these different polyphenols at very high level. And when I talk about high level.

That wait, 50 in this, like, is there any other plant that has 50 polyphenol varieties in it? I mean, that seems.

Yes, there are plants that do, but there is no plant that I'm aware of that I can find that's an edible plant that has calories and protein and omega 3 fats, that has the levels that this particular product has. And just to talk about levels, common buckwheat, which, by the way, I need to emphasize, these are not wheats. I don't know how the name wheat ever got stuck on these. They're not related to grains at all. They're fruit seeds and so they're no gluten and they're not really grass related. Common buckwheat has always been thought of as a, as a very strong polyphenol rich, root enriched food. Himalayan tartery buckwheat. Which only shares about 50% of its genome with common buckwheat. So it's 50% difference in its genes. It has 50 to 100 times not percent. 50 to 100 times the level of these phytochemicals. Now think of that. 50 to 100 times. So that means that when you're eating this food, you're actually eating polyphenol therapy. It really is. Food is medicine. And that's probably one of the reasons why this food has been eaten by people that are in the blue zone, one of Dan Buettner's areas. The people have a lot of modern medicine. They don't have drugs and so forth, but they live out very healthy lives, often into their hundred years.

Which blue zone was this? In that these people were eating this?

This is the Himalayan region of the foothills of the Himalayas.

Because it almost sounds like you'd still need some B12, but you could almost live off this.

Oh, you can. And B12 actually is interesting because you probably know that when they did studies on these individuals that really had pretty much vegan diets and they were not suffering from perditious anemia, they found that there was enough insects in their brains because it doesn't take much B12 to prevent having anem. So, yeah, if you eat insects that have B12, you can.

So as long as you have your Himalayan tartery buckwheat with a side of bugs, you're fine.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not advocating.

Good to know.

But I think the important thing, and the thing that for me has just captured my interest, is that when you start looking at. And I recognize I'm a geek, there's no question about. I'm a biohacker geek guy. And I like to know mechanistically at levels that probably most people could care less. But when you start looking at how these flavonoids that are within Himalayan Tertiary buckwheat serve as an orchestration, and I think you said it very well saying, why would they make 50 different compounds? I mean, does a plant have nothing better to do other than just make a bunch of random polyphenols? And the answer is no. It does that specifically to create the orchestration that is occurring that modulates these processes associated with immunorejuvenation. So it's like you could say, what happens if you had only one of those flavonoids and high level. Let's take an example, Quercetin. Well, quercetin has a positive effect. It's not. I don't want to disquatin but if you had the best first violinist, but you didn't have the rest of the orchestra, you still wouldn't have a very nice symphony. So the rest of the orchestra, all those other 49 polyphenols, work together to give rise to the texture that plays the music of immunorejuvenation. So as we study this in much detail, we actually are just finishing up. I'm very excited in the results. I'll keep my fingers crossed. The results of our first ran clinical trial, intervention trial, which we're doing. Complex genetic sequencing of immune cells in people that have been on our program for three months after baseline studies. This is a Clintrial.gov registered trial and we will have produced something like a terabyte of data from this particular study on how these tartary buckwheat flavonoids influence immune system function through epigenetic modulation.

How do you know how long it's gonn. That was my. One of my questions was, okay, what's the dose? What's the length of time? I guess some of it would really depend on where they're starting.

Well, no, but I think your point is very well taken because most people don't recognize it in a person that's not ill. So you don't have an infection. You're making about 80,000 white blood cells a second. 80,000 per second. It's a very, very rapidly turning over.

Yeah. And so then you could do this pretty quickly.

About every three months you turn over your immune system. The cells three months are different than the cell you had before. Now the question is, are they as good as better than or worse than the ones they're replacing? That's always the question. Right. And so what we want is to turn the clock back. We want to make them better than by. By rejuvenating the immune system. And that's what we'll be. We'll be learning when we actually do the sequencing of the immune system's gen. Exactly what were the loci that we're able to replace on their epigenetic modulation through whatever the scars that they had had through their life experiences.

Gosh, wouldn't that be interesting if you could turn the clock back on actual, like trauma, which I know there's so much around trauma work and how to get through trauma and ptsd, but if this could turn that back, that's.

Well, just a second. You're right on it. Because there are three well known investigators now who have been in sequencing the epigenome of immune cells in trauma victims. This includes, as you probably know, the ice storm babies that were born up in Quebec. That Samoa says work includes second generation Holocaust survivors, that looking at the epigenomes of their marks, it includes individuals that were involved with 9, 11. And all of these studies are starting to show that actually there are marks that you can find that are resonant even at second generations. They're transgenerationally transferable, but they can be repatterned by this rejuvenation, autophagy process. So this is, this is the frontier to me of the science of hope. That's what I'm saying. This is the new biology of hope.

Okay, so the big question then, like, so three months total turnover now. Now it's like, well, what would the dose be? What's the minimal dose you need to do. To do to, to affect this? And then once you've done it, I'm assuming you'll need a maintenance dose as well.

Yeah, thank you. Now you're.

Because it's not like things stop happening.

No, exactly right.

I'm never stressed again. It's all life is sunshine and butterflies.

Yeah.

So like, what, how did you decide the type of dose to start with? And a couple other questions around this, because you're only doing on this intervention just Himalayan Tartary buckwheat.

Right, that's it.

I mean, just imagine if like you also did some meditation, little exercise, like, just imagine all like what you could truly do. And this is just one thing. So how did you decide the dose?

Let me jump in there because you're, you're absolutely on target. So we, we asked ourselves the question, do we want to study our Immunity plus program in this intervention trial, which is including all the things you talk about. Sleep, hygiene, stress management, exercise, time, restricted feeding, all those things are part of our Immunity plus program, or do we want to start in our first step studying one thing, that one variable, so people won't ask the question, well, what do you know what works? So we're starting first with the Tartery Buckwheat. But our plans are to build out a whole model based upon this kind of comprehensive immune rejuvenation lifestyle. That's the Immunity plus program. And I think that's where the secret sauce is. You're right. That's where you get synergy among all these various.

And some of these things, like, you know, when they do some of these studies, I'm like, do we really need to do a study that walking, you know, you know, walking after you eat has a positive effect? Like, you know, some of these things, it's just self evident. Um, but boy, if there is that one big needle mover, like, this is holy smokes. Because what it can do is get the nose, the camel in the tent so that all of a sudden people feel better and they start to do all these other things too. Sometimes when you feel so rotten and hopeless, you're just like, forget it. I'm not doing anything. What? For someone listening who's not in the trial, what is. What are you guys using as. As the dose of this and this Himalayan tartery buckwheat? Is it a seed? Is it a. Like, what's it considered to be in the plant family? And I know my son made some muffins or pancakes or something with it. What are the different ways people use it? And how much would you be using on a regular basis?

Yeah, thank you. Those are really great questions. So, fortunately for us, there is a wide body of. Of experience and literature on tardy buckwheat. It's mostly in Asia because this food has been incorporated within Asian China, Japan and Korean cultures, much more obviously than the West. Although it was a colonial food, a lot of people don't realize this. It was brought over by a clinical ancestors because it's. So it was such a fit product and it could grow so easily and. But then it fell out about 200 years ago. It stopped being cultivated in the United States. There are probably reasons for that. I can can suggest as we went into monoculture of just a few grains for fat, sugar and salt, you know.

Yeah, that worked out well.

Exactly. So the Asian literature, and there's many clinical trials on actually the Himalayan turkey buckwheat flour incorporated into cookies or into various cereal products. They're actually not cereals. Into various whole flour products. And it seems that there's a threshold of clinical value when you get up around 100 grams a day of whole Himalayan tartary buckwheat flour. Now, what is 100 grams? That's about a quarter of a pound. And how many milligrams does that mean of the active phytochemicals? Somewhere on the range of 1,000 to 2,000. So I tend to push the envelope and say 2,000. And so that's where we did our clinical trial for us. Then we used four capsules a day of our HTB rejuvenate, which is the concentrated form of the Himalayan tertiary buckwheat flavonoids. So that's about 2,000 milligrams a day, which would be equivalent to somewhere about a Quarter pound of flour a day just to give you some. So if a person is a baker and they love baking, we have a food lab now, and we produce all sorts of recipes. We've had recipe contests. We have a variety of chefs and experimenting with this in different configurations. So he can go to our website@thebigboldhealth.com and they can find all sorts of recipes, or they can take the shake mix, or they can take the capsules, depending on which of the ways there's a shake mix.

So again, is it a. What is it considered to be. Is it considered to be a seed? What is it?

Yeah, it's a fruit seed. And actually, if you look at it under a magnifying glass, these seeds are. They're. They look like little helmets. They're very. That's probably why they're so tough. You can run over these with a Sherman tank and it wouldn't break them.

Is it kind of like a tiger nut? You know what a tiger nut is?

Yeah, yeah. It's like a mini. Mini tiger.

I had to do for. For the nutribullet infomercial. They had me, like, trying to crack tiger nuts with a hammer. I'm like, that's great. That's what I'm gonna get remembered for. So, yeah, and it seems like, you know, I was doing the calculations and I would assume. Assume the dosage, this is for adults because 400, like, that's 400 calories you'd be adding into your diet. It's gotta display something. So it would be so much easier to take pills, you know.

Well, I think for some, you know, it's very, you know, this. You're an expert in this. But we have foodies, fortunately, in our community that are very, very committed and advocates for restoration of complex diets and. And eating by the rainbow. And, you know, I learned recently there are 20,000 edible products of. On the planet Earth today get 90% of the calorie from less than 10 of those products, isn't it?

Well, that's why we have food. And I just came back from Peru with 192 microclimates, and so I've just eaten. You know, they have 3,500 different types of potatoes alone. So it was quite shocking to eat there because the food's so different and so diverse. And not once did my stomach hurt either, I must say. Like, you know, here you are in massive high altitude, and I was like, I can't believe how much better I feel here not eating this food. Even when you're trying to eat healthy United States. But I digress. So we're going over to this stuff. Foodies can incorporate it in, bake with it. You said you have like a shake powder with it, which is really interesting. What's the composition of it? Is it like. Because you said something about the protein in it, like just the composition of the flour or the mix. How much is protein, carbs, fat?

Well, that's, that, that, that's another really exciting thing about why I call this a food and not just kind of a supplement because for a, a seed based product it's about 15% protein which is pretty high for a plant. And it is very high in essential amino acids. It, it's actually a complete protein. It, it fulfills kind of the Francis Bar concept of, you know, essential of both sulfur amino acids and lysine and nitrogen containing amino acids. So it's a complete protein. It's also very high in omega 3 fatty acids. It's very high in prebiotic fiber, one of which is the highest of any food I'm aware of, which is called D Chiro inositol or dci which is a very, very good prebiotic. But it's also been shown clinically to help improve women with pcos, probably helping to normalize their blood sugar and hormones. So it's just one of these magic things that the deeper you. And it's very high in B vitamins, high in magnesium, high in potassium, no sodium. So you know, it's got all these virtues and low glycemic load. We did CGM studies on it. We published a paper on this showing it a complete flat.

Holy smokes. But if you took the pills and you didn't, if you took the product itself, like you're not going to get at some of the, like you definitely would want to also do the actual flour or the shake mix because you're not going to get all that prebiotic, et cetera just in the capsule. Correct. Like what is the correct capsule condensing for?

You're right on the tip of what we have recognized over the last couple of years that we need to have this concentrate form of the polyphenol cells. But we also need to take advantage of the extraordinary other nutrient of qualities, particularly these prebiotic and favorable GI effects. Therefore we are just coming out with our second product which is HDB product that is composed of those ingredients that we're calling microbiome rejuvenate. So it's microbiome rejuvenate and HDB rejuvenate is kind of the companion products for the full spectrum of ingredients.

Yeah, it'd be great to talk a little bit about the gut microbiome and the immune system because we can't really talk about one without the other here. So when I hear prebiotics and I hear, you know, I'm like, definitely want more of that. I think we're just starting to get into prebiotics and talk about them more, which we really need to be incorporating them regularly into the diet.

Well, you know, it's, Isn't it fascinating when we think back to when probiotics started to get some traction. I started speaking about those in my seminars to health professionals in the mid-80s and it took a number of years for this concept of leaky gut and postprandial endotoxemia and dysbiosis and all those things to start to get traction. But now it's like the coin of the realm. Everybody's talking about it. But one of the things that I think has not been fully yet understood is that these effects that we see in the microbiome are pretty species dependent dependent. And therefore just because you give a probiotic doesn't mean one probiotic will be identical in its physiological function to another. Because different species of bacteria have different personalities that impact the gut immune system in different ways based upon their personalities. And when I say personalities I mean they're, they, they secrete different chemicals that influence our immune system in different ways. Things like lipopolysaccharides from the cell walls of gram negative bacteria act, activates the inflammatory process. So that's not so good. Whereas Lactobacillus rhamnosus species of that have the effect to calm the immune system by activating Interleukin 4, which is an immune anti inflammatory. So different probiotics have different effects upon our immune system. And different prebiotics, which are the selective food for the probiotics have different effects on our gut microbiome because of their selective ability to, to influence specific types of bacteria. Like not all bacteria eat the same things. Some are lignin, some are xylo xylose containing probiotics or probiotics. Some are related to fructooligosaccharides. So we have different types of prebiotics that influence different types of probiotics which different effect on our immune system. And I think it's this level of precision and specificity that we're starting to recognize as we get into personalized lifestyle intervention. Let's give the right thing to the Right person for the right need. And we've tried very hard to include that because we now know that these flavonoids that I were discussing, these polyphenols in Himalayan Tertiary buckwheat, also serve as prebiotics. They're also ingested, or let's call it metabolized by gut bacteria, and they produce their own secondary chemicals that then influence the immune system in specific ways. So it's not just the polyphenols in and of themselves. Sometimes it's the influence they have on our microbiome, which then influences our body. It's the combination of the two together that gives the what I call synergistic value of a healthy diet.

And that's what we know at this moment. You look at all this and you just have to keep coming back to when we can do it with food. We should always do it with food. First. I look at this and go, it makes so much sense to me to have this flour incorporate this in. And the insurance policy is taking the supplement, because then you make sure you know, you got those active ingredients, because you're probably not going to eat 400 calories worth of this flour every single day. That's, you know, that would be a big push in your diet, but it's definitely something you could work into your diet. And then you have the insurance policy over here, and then you're doing the things that. As we keep unpacking it more and more and more again, we used to just think, oh, you need probiotics. And we're like, wait, you need the food for the probiotics. Wait, it's different food. As we continue to unpack this, realizing that even I remember, Jeff, it was maybe 15 years ago, like, leaky gut was. We were clearly crazy and this was a silly idea. And no, your body didn't react to foods. That's just an out. I mean, all the stuff that just has happened over the last 10 to 15 years, and we're still at the real beginning phases of this. So, you know, you always come back to Mother Nature had this right. I would love you just to speak for one minute because I feel like there's just been a weird thing around plants. And boy, if this Himalayan tartery buckwheat isn't the perfect example of, you know, when a plant is in an adverse environment, it creates this. It creates a superfood situation of polyphenols of chemicals that can really help your body. But somewhere along the way, we've gotten, like, there's some messaging out there. In the world that, like, plants are bad and they've got scary stuff. And I'm like, you know, the scary stuff to me is Monsanto spraying the plants. That's, you know, it's really not the plants themselves. So let me just talk a little bit about. Because what you said about Himalayan tardy buckwheat is the perfect example. Example of when a plant in an adverse situation, that's where it develops these polyphenols, you know, and trying to protect itself from the environment.

I think you hit an extraordinarily important chapter in this story, and that is you have to actually ask the question, in what environment does that seed that you're trying to germinate into the plant find itself? What is the soil micro. Right. And this is something we've been very, very interested in knowing more about. And we're collaborating with a really interesting company, Solaria Bio. It's an MIT tech transfer company that's doing genomic analysis of microbes from plant foods and looking at what are the. What's the microbiome of plants, and how does the microbiome of a plant influence the germination of the seed that ultimately produces the final product of fruit, or in this case, the fruit seed of Himalayan Tertiary buckwheat? So we've done with our plant scientist, Dr. Emily Reese, up in upstate New York, field trials with different plots where we've inoculated the fields with different mycorrhizae, some bacteria, some fungi, or combinations thereof. And we just harvested that last year and analyzed the phytochemicals. And we found out that the diverse inoculants that we put on the soil, the combination of bacteria and fungi that were unique to that plant plant, led to a significant increase in the polyphenols in the Himalayan tartery buckwheat seed. So we now recognize it is a system. If we talk about regenerative agriculture, if we talk about healthy soils, healthy planet, healthy people, all of these things absolutely are real. And by utilizing the tools of nature, as you've described it, to build a regenerative system, it regenerates human health. While it's regenerating soil health, while it's regenerating plant plant health, it is a immune rejuvenation process for the planet. And this, to me, has been the biggest aha. In my whole professional career, that when you get into the right cycle and you build things with stability in natural cycles, it takes care of itself. You are fulfilling many things simultaneously. And that. That's one of the. For me, the Beauties of what we've learned through the Himalayan turtle buckwheat story over the last four years is if we get the soil right with the, the right seed, that we produce a product that's higher quality and we also produce a soil that is more regenerative and we, we actually, then our carbon footprint goes down, we start sequestering because Himalayan hardy buckwheat is a cover crop. So it then it fixes nitrogen, we start fertilizing the soil naturally. All these things happen by getting in sync with nature.

Wow. Instead of trying to fight it, it's exactly which we've seen how that's worked for us. Crazy. I know you have a quiz because, I mean, obviously I listen to this and go, I want to know my immunological age and it's right now in research project, but tell us about the immune quiz that you've put together. What do people find when they take that? Because we're going to make that available to everybody.

Oh, thank you. Yeah. So when we started down this project, we recognized that probably not everyone was going to have the advantage that we have of doing these complex immune system immune analyses and gene sequencing studies on the epigenetics of our immune system. So we thought, how do we get people at least into an understanding of their own unique immune status? So we started really assembling information about the clinical relationships between alterations in the innate immune system, the adaptive immune system, the T lymphocyte system, and trying to match those up with clinical presentations saying what would a person, how would they look, act and behave if they were imbalanced in one or more of these different components of their immune system that led us eventually then into five buckets of differing immunotypes. Now, these are admittedly gross, so I don't want to overstate that they're so precise that we would call this a PhD immune system in the story. But what we have been able to do now is to introduce to the person a characteristic of one of these immune types that they fall into one of these buckets, which then helps them to understand from a immune balance position perspective where their imbalance might be. And then it leads us into helping them to define their lifestyle, environment, diet and so forth that would be tailored to their own immune type. So we've got immune immuno identities that are related to imbalanced immune types, to inflammatory angry types, to what we call sleepy immunity, which are those that are immune kind of supposed to depressed, to those that are immune naive, and each one of those has a different cluster of symptoms and what we call phenotypes that we can identify from the questionnaire. So that's our first step into personalizing immunity to the individual's need.

Well, what's amazing about all of this is, number one, I love these self assessments because they're so functional. And. Yes. Okay, so is it exactly precise, as if you were doing all the labs? You don't have to spend the money. It makes you aware. You can start taking action right away, and then you can start to connect those dots. So to me, they're the most valuable thing out there. But I also think what's really valuable, especially now, especially after what we've gone through over the last couple years where people were like, okay, what do I need to do for my immune system? And it's like this sniper approach over to things things is to let us really see that, yes, there is a big needle mover right here. I always like the little hinge that swings the big door and that you can start on right now. And, boy, like, have we learned over the last couple years, you want to be doing everything for your immune system, and then you build on it. And what's, of course, awesome about all this is the things that help your immune system rejuvenate, they also help your body. Body rejuvenate. They're also going to improve your metabolic health. Like these. You know, whenever you unpack all these things, it's never like, gee, I think I'll exercise, but that's going to hurt everything else. You know, it's like, you know, the same things that help your immune system are going to help your energy, your focus, your, you know, your body composition, all of it. But I love this fact that you have something that really is a massive needle mover that can help people and especially now more than ever, get on this. So I am now going to work more on the food part of this with the flour because I gave it to my son, Stew. I'm like, I need to pull it back in and have our real chef start to work on this with us, because that is really exciting stuff. So thank you for all the work. I'm going to put the quiz. I'll make it super easy, and I'm going to put it@jjvirgin.com Immunequiz I know, call me crazy. I like to keep things simple. And that's just one you'll definitely want to get started with. We'll make sure we put information, too, about how you can get htb, how you can start using all of this. And again, you send four capsules a day.

Yep.

And then you have the GUT microbiome product too. Love that. So fantastic. Thank you so much for this and for everything that you're doing. And boy, your timing with this whole thing couldn't be better.

Well, jj, it's just such a treat to be involved with this journey together. I think we're doing something that I hope can be transformative to leave this planet in a better place. And we found it as my objective. And you're doing an extraordinary job in being the advocate for these changes. Thank you.

Thank you. All right, so as a conclusion, I'm sure you're going to want to get started on humor, Himalayan tartary buckwheat capsules and mess around with the flour. I did have my sons play around with some of the some of the flour and do some different types of things. He does have a great cookbook too. So we'll get all that that information@jjvirgin.com immunequiz and again, like, talk about the important thing that you need to do for your health right now. And when you do all of the things that help your immune system, guess what? It helps your metabolic health. It helps your body composition, helps your energy, your focus, everything else. So go to it. By the way, if you've not yet hello, subscribe to JJ.com it's so easy. I'll see you next time.

Hello listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger and creator of the podcast what Should I Write? Read next. Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week I check all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change or or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.