What If Autoimmune Disease Is Actually Your Body Protecting You? With Dr. Jeffrey Bland

What are the biggest contributors, you know, from your lens have, have really crept in that are dysfunctioning us, I think.

First of all, we know that 40 to 70% of our immune system is patterned, meaning how it behaves is tied to what we eat or what we've been exposed to as we eat. And so that's a pretty big one. Number two is the environment in which we live as it relates to our viruses and bacteria and things that we've gotten as infectious illnesses over the course of our life. They also influence our. I mean, and we know that like long Covid people are experiencing now as a consequence of infection with SARS. CoV2 is a resonant effect.

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Well, thank you, Mona. It's such an honor to sit with you. And I just had the extraordinary gift where you shared some of your personal experience with me, your journey. And it is a remarkable journey that I think so many people are seeking for the same type of outcome that you've achieved through your pursuit. And. But I think this is an important time for us to look within ourselves and then look outside and ask how can we be the best that we can be in this very complex world in which we live? And how do we navigate through all the alternatives that our daily lives bring us and. And find a path that. That meets us, body, mind and soul, in a way that makes our life of a century or more well worth being here?

I love that. That in and of itself just feels like wisdom. And for our listeners. I know everyone knows you, but you are the father of functional medicine and you've brought so many issues to the table. And something that's really been an inspiration to me is the fact that you study systems biology. And I remember when my mom actually found you and we dove deep into your work around immune system. How immune system, her autoimmune disease really just tied into that. But the idea of systems and how that relates to ancient healing practices and Eastern medicine, who have always looked at the body in complete systems that function together. It wasn't in parts. And I'm so curious with your story, like, what was the instigation to move in that direction? Where did you see the downfall or the things that were falling apart in your journey?

Well, I'm going to make a very kind of complicated, circuitous journey. Like all of our lives are. They're not linear paths. They have topographies. We go over mountains and into valleys. Hopefully we don't spend too much time in Death Valley. And we move through all sorts of different domains. So certainly my life is like that. And I have to say, having had now 79 birthdays, I've had a fair share of extraordinary opportunities over those nearly coming up eight decades. But I think there is a kind of a central theme, if I could put it together, that really relates a lot to what each of our, each of us go through. And that is that we, we start to learn a little bit about ourselves. And as we learn about ourselves, we learn that there's certain things that light us up and make us the best we can be. And there are other things that bring us down and make life much more complicated. And so when I started to examine my trajectory and I was in a traditional kind of situation of my education of science geek and going on Into a medical school type education. I recognized there were lots of things that really intellectually turned me on and fired me up and made me want to learn. But there are a lot of things about that system, as I learned more about it, that I felt were constraining and didn't really address some of the questions as to why we get sick. You know, we have this dominant view of infectious disease and we could say, oh, this bug created that disease, pneumonia, creates tuberculosis or whatever it might be. But if we really ask about the dominant conditions, heart disease, dementia, arthritis, diabetes, type 2 diabetes, digestive disorders, depression, we really didn't have a good explanation where those things came from. They just happened. And then we found certain molecules that pharmacology was able to develop to block the symptoms of those conditions, but it really didn't cure these conditions. They continued to be present and we were all willing to live with that because that was the state of affairs of the best we could do. But then as I started to examine, well, is that really the best we can do and say what else goes on in the world? I mean, not everybody studies from the same model. And what I started to recognize, if we went back to traditional Chinese medicine, or Ayurvedic medicine, or traditional Amazonian medicine, or every culture had its own belief system. And therefore what I started to recognize is American medicine, as we were trained in practice, was a metaphor. There was nothing was passed down on the altar saying, this is medicine. It was the way that we interpreted through certain lenses and certain perspectives, how we would translate people that are not well into how we were going to manage them. And we later landed on the term disease, thinking that once we could define the disease, we would know it. And what's happened is, or what did happen over many decades is, yeah, we started to define these diseases in certain kinds of symptom profiles, but we didn't really know where they came from. And so it was like, okay, we classified them like you would classify plants and animals in an environment, but we didn't really know why they were there, what they did. So I started to get very interested in that and ask, are these other healing systems that the world has seen grow up, are they similar in the way that they've codified things to that of western medicine? And I came to the conclusion that in some respects they were similar, but in other respects they were very different. They were really tied much more more tightly to an understanding of the relationship that person had in the environment in which they were living, to nature, to food, to interactions, to Relationships, to weather, to energy, where our system was really much more mechanical and focused on what's called pathophysiology, what the cells look like when they break down, what tissues look like when they're diseased. And so I started to say maybe there was some kind of a meeting in the middle between these two different worldviews as to what is health and where it comes from. And maybe to my fortune I was born at a time, I'm a 1946 birthday. So I was born in a time where over my adult life the body of science started to understand much more mechanistically how things were actually starting to become less healthy and at the cellular level. And we found that a lot of these things were related to things like exposure to toxins or exposure to toxic thoughts or, or to hostile relationships or to bad diets and what we call ultra processed what had been really described phenomenologically in the Eastern model as how people got sick. And so I thought, oh my word, then there is some kind of a system that we could conceive of, a system that tied these all together. So that was really the urgence of the functional medicine model in 1990 was my attempt to find a way of integrating the western concept of, of of pathology with the other healing systems around the world, to find a unifying kind of theory as to how they all tied together. Because I felt if we did that then we might actually find a unified approach to their management. We might actually be able to consider the treatment rather than just the remediation of symptoms. So that's a long winded story. I apologize. Probably more than you wanted.

You're such a great storyteller and that's exactly what I wanted to hear. You painted a really beautiful picture and I can't even imagine back then you as a prominent doctor with your medical background, just speaking about the interconnectedness of everything. And it's funny, we talk about integrative healthcare and I just, I still don't believe that we're there. I think there's still such a great disconnect from. And I think that this is changing because people are understanding the kind of delusions. Speaking to the book behind you, there's a lot of kind of delusions and people are kind of sick and tired of living this way, especially with the rise of chronic disease. So for our listeners there's a disease or. Sorry, there's A book behind Dr. Bland called the disease Delusions. And this is one of the most powerful books that I've ever read. Because it really reframes how we think about chronic illness and it moves away everything that you just talked about, about shifting from symptoms to looking at the source of everything. And what a phenomenal idea for everyone who's been diagnosed with someone or all of us are touched by somebody who has a disease. What if they weren't given a label, right? What if they weren't given that pathology, this one label that instantly caused them to shut down and believe that they were sick, as opposed to maybe removing the label and just understanding that there was something that had to be uncovered in, in order to understand where that imbalance was coming from.

No, I'm, I'm so empowered by what you just said. That was a brilliant. Drop the mic. And you know, I think you talked about autoimmune disease earlier and that, I think autoimmune is really a classic example of what you're speaking to. Because we are led to believe, if you, if you think of the traditional view of autoimmune disease, it's somehow at some age, the immune system of a person makes a decision that the immune system is living in a body that's a foreigner. And therefore they're going to attack that body. And the body becomes their enemy, not their friend or the stimulus, supposedly. And then now suddenly it's our enemy that's starting to attack. A gland. It could be a, or a tissue. It could be the thyroid gland for thyroiditis, or it could be the adrenal gland, or it could be the heart, or it could be the brain, or it could be the pancreas and that, or it could be the joints. And that concept that suddenly our body woke up to think of us as not a friend anymore, there's a, is a powerful kind of metaphor as to what would, why would my body do that? In fact, the diagnosis for autoimmune diseases is often done on a blood test to look at the body's immune system producing reactive substances against your book of life, your DNA. So we have this so called antinuclear DNA. Why would the body so not like itself that it attacks? Actually the most fundamentally important part of our legacy, which is our genetic code of life. And I didn't actually ever believe that model was really very correct. I thought it was a kind of an explanation because we did find these things in the blood and we can analyze them, but the origin of them didn't seem right, that suddenly the body woke up to start to be not fringe with itself. And so what we start to do, I think as you said Very nicely earlier is that if you get that diagnosis, let's say it's systemic lupus erythematosis or rheumatoid arthritis or myasthenia gravis or cystic fibrosis or thyroiditis. The, the, there are 88 different definitions of autoimmune disease that the, the doc who is in charge of helping you understand that disease will give an impression that they can name it now with a certain name and that means they understand it. And suddenly that part of your body is no longer a friend, now it's an enemy. And so it then begs the question why? And are we just like suddenly unworthy to live in our body and we're hostile in our, in ourselves? And the answer now is emerging I believe very clearly to be no. It's much more than that. The body is not just suddenly awaking to not like itself. What's happening is you're having mimicking effects that are occurring in the body that create you yourself into your non self. And when your non self starts to appear, your immune system actually does what it's supposed to do. It's supposed to seek out foreigners and get rid of them. So when your self becomes non self, oh my word, the immune system wakes up. Now you might say, well, hold it. If what you're saying is really correct, then why is it that something like 80% of the people who get autoimmune disease are females? It's 8 out of 10 cases are women across these 80 plus different types of diagnoses. Well, I go to the question of who has the most sophisticated immune systems and it is women, because women are the gender, the sex that is going to have to learn how their immune system deliver the foreigner in their body. Yeah. And, and that foreigner might even be a different sex. I mean, you want to talk about an alien. So the immune system has to be so skilled that it's able to nurture and support a foreigner living for nine months, presumably while still maintaining function for the rest of the woman's body if she gets a cold and flu. So she still has an immune system. So that requires a lot of sophistication. So I think the female immune system. No, I don't think I know that. The female immune system is much more sophisticated in terms of its sensitivity. And therefore they may be more. The low canaries in the coal mine.

Yeah, yeah.

Their immune systems may be the first that start to demonstrate the change consequence of stuff that happens in the way we live. So let's take an example. Let's Take an example of eating high sugar diet. What does a high sugar diet do? Well, one of the things it does is it exposes your body cells to a lot of sugar glucose. And, and glucose is if it's not being able to be used rapidly because it's an overload, it has to find a place to hang out in the body. So one of the places it can hang out is it can chemically react with proteins of your body. One of those proteins that people are familiar with is a major protein floating around in your red blood cells called hemoglobin. Makes your, your blood red. And if a sugar molecule reacts chemically with your hemoglobin, it produces what's called glycohemoglobin. That's hemoglobin A1C. And what do we use hemoglobin A1C for now? To test whether you're diabetic. Diabetic. Why? Because it means you have too much sugar and it starts attaching itself places that it shouldn't be, one of which is your hemoglobin. But that's only one of other many places in your body sugar is attaching itself. So if sugar is attaching itself in those cases, and it's not the same as you what your body originally made, it's a new form of hemoglobin or it's a new form of album, it's a new form of whatever protein because it's now been connected to sugar. Then what's your immune system do? It says, oh, this is a foreigner. I'm going to react and some auto disease and diabetes. You have a higher level of diabetes, of autoimmune dis diabetes, because your immune system is trying to fight back against these new foreign molecules called glycoproteins that are being formed by the consequence of too much sugar in your diet. What about a person that is exposed to a lot of polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, toxic polypollutants, those toxic pollutants react again with their body. And what do they do? They form a new kind of molecule, one that was different because it now chemically transformed due to the exposure of this foreign molecule. And what does our immune system do then? It starts to react as it should, to defend ourselves from foreigners. And what's one of the glands in our body that tends to concentrate these foreign molecules? The thyroid gland. So why do we see so much immune thyroiditis in women now? It's because in fact we are being exposed to things that are making our body different, that get concentrated in the thyroid. So this story goes on and on. Once you start looking at it from this perspective, it changes the way we approach it. Saying it's not that you have a damaged immune system or a defective immune system or you're not worthy of immune help. It's that your immune system is highly sensitive and it's being exposed to things for which it is reacting because your body gets transformed from self to non self. So we want to get rid of non self because you're really good. We want to get rid of those things that are not so good. And then we want to build back up your integrity and in so doing, your system becomes friendly.

Yeah, we're going to get into all the assaults as we dive into this really, really big topic. But I love that reframe moving from self to non self. And this is a complete paradigm shift also because we're still taught that when we get, I mean any listener, if you've ever suffered from, you know, an imbalance in your body, we tend to get angry with our bodies first. Or why is this happening to me? Or you know, the campaign around f cancer and autoimmune disease. When I was in nutrition school, we learned that it was attacking itself. But in the lens of now, your body's actually doing everything that it can do because it loves you so much to protect yourself. And this is your opportunity to tune in. And how you can fix that is so refreshing and a completely different energy that it brings to your body and really healing altogether. So you bring up all these diseases. I would say we're going through this immune system crisis today. Right. And when you're speaking to these systems and how it really connects to disease today, why would you say that there is such a rise in autoimmune disease and chronic inflammatory diseases also? And here's the thing, it's in people that even look healthy from the outside.

Yeah, I think that what Again, we're talking about a whole different model, aren't we? We're talking about a model of health that is less focused on how your body presents itself in damage and more on how your body presents itself in health. And we call this our healthcare system, but really is a very disease centric system. It's really focused on the latter stage of this continuum between optimal health and when we leave the planet. So it's that last stage where we have our system, we call it healthcare, but it's really disease care. What we need to start doing, and you do it very beautifully in your work, is start building the front edge of this, which is the healthcare system which is focused on wellness because the body has inherent, incredible properties for restoration. If we give it the right tools to do so, and if we give it the right tools, then that latter stage, that disease care stage, is very compressed, maybe even non existent. And so I think that the construct now is if we look at traditional healing systems, I look for instance at blue zones around the world where people commonly live to be 100 years of age or older and they don't have often access to modern medicine, they don't have hospitals on every corner, they don't have a pharmacy in every block. But yet these people live out to 100 years of age with high level functioning and they're still working and still integrated within society. So how does that happen? Well, it happens because their whole model of their lives is different as it relates to how they eat, how they think, how they act, their physical activities, their social interactions, their sense of self. And so I'm not arguing here for the myth like we go back to the cave and we give over modern living, but I'm just saying that there are so many ways that we on the front end should be considering how we actually treat our bodies to prevent the back end, which is the disease phase of, of the life, which generally starts, you know, for Most people around 50 years of age now or, or earlier. Which is, is horrible to think that you're going to spend a half of your life in a state of decrement, on a slippery slope because you were constantly feeding the wrong things and thinking the wrong thoughts. It doesn't have to be. These are reducible opportunities for us to do something.

Yeah, things really went wrong. Right. Like when you think about all of the advances that we've had in medicine, in hygiene, in our systems, in our environment, there's really something that has shifted and I would say that a lot of it does go back to our external environment and all the assaults that we've had. I remember reading you would often write about the tsunami of immune dysfunction. And maybe I'll ask you this, what are the biggest contributors that you, you know, from your lens have, have really crept in that are dysfunctioning us?

Oh boy, that's a really good question. That's. I wish, I wish I or anyone had a complete understanding, understanding and answering that question. So I'll give you my best approximation. So I, I think first of all, we know that 40 to 70% of our immune system is patterned as an, our immune system is being shaped and most people don't recognize it 40 to 70% of our immune system's architecture, meaning how it behaves, is tied to what we eat or what we've been exposed to as we eat. And so that's a pretty big one. Number two is the environment in which we live as it relates to our viruses and bacteria and things that we've gotten as infectious illnesses over the course of our life. They also influence our immune system. And we know that, like Long Covid, that people are experiencing now as a consequence of infection with virus COD2, is a resonant effect, a holdover of what happened from that viral infection on the patterns of their immune system. So now the question people would ask, is that irreversible or can there be ways of actually rejuvenating our immune system so that we get rid of those bad memories out of our immune system? And my answer is yes. There are now biological discoveries made in the last 20 years that indicate that our immune system can be rejuvenated. And so these marks that we put on from bad experiences like viruses can be changed out for new, more juvenile cells that don't carry those bad memories. In fact, most people, they don't realize that our immune cells in our body are replaced Turnover about every 120 days, meaning every three to four months. The immune cells that are in our body four months from now are going to be different than the immune cells we have in our body today. In fact, most people don't note that we make about 1 million new immune cells on average per second. Wow. Wow.

Yeah.

Wow.

Per second.

Yes. So the question is, are those immune cells we're making, are they getting a full opportunity to be rejuvenated? And the answer in America today is no, because what is the theme of the American immune system? They get worse as we get older. It's called immunosenescence. Aging of the immune system. And would you be surprised if I told you that the age of your. The biological age of your immune system, And so you want to have a more resilient immune system as a theme, not just for the protection against infectious disease, but but for the whole nature of the protection of your health and wellness throughout the course of the decade, the century or more that you'll live. So when I start thinking about, well, what are the things that rejuvenate immune systems? It takes me back once again to looking at cultures that had been around for a long time that without a lot of modern medicine, live long, healthy lives. And that's what landed me on this discovery, which was an aha for me, about six years ago now of this ancient food, this 3,500-year-old food called Himalayan tartary Buckwheat. Now, I knew about buckwheat, but I had never, shame on me, heard about this. Tartary buckwheat comes from, it's named after the tartan district of on the Himalayas in China. And it turns out to be one of the two or three oldest foods that have been husband and for human consumption, 3,500 years old. And it turns out it has this portfolio of nutrients called phytochemicals that is truly remarkable. About over 120 of them that the plant makes that have very, very powerful immune strengthening activity. Now, why would a plant go to the difficulty of making 120 different things that have immune strengthening activity? Turns out that plants have immune systems. Yes. And their immune systems are somewhat similar to ours, except they don't have white blood cells floating around in the blood system. What they have is SAP that carries immune active substances to the whole plant. And those immune active substances are things that the plant makes that are called these phytochemicals, polyphenols and flavonoids. And those are the things that often give color to foods like the fruits and vegetables. And so these cultures that are associated with long life and health all have that similar principle that eat diets that are very high in these immune active ingredients from foods that are rich in their composition. It turns out that tottery buckwheat Himalayan variety of vegan hives is extraordinarily rich in these nutrients. So we then said, okay, let's study this in humans in the western world. So let's take Himalayan tartary buckwheat and let's then feed it under control conditions to a group of subjects in a study, irb, FDA approved study, and see what effect it has on their immune system. It really affects the age of their immune system. So we did that for 90 days. We used a very specific measuring tool called a gene chip that had over 700,000 gene sites on it that we could actually analyze the effect that the food had on their profile. And lo and behold, we found at the course of the days that the immune age of the group that took the tartary buckwheat polyphenols, food was aging at 47% slower than the people that didn't take almost 50% slower, almost 50%. And so we then started to analyze, well, what does that mean as it relates to immune health? And then it starts show lower levels of inflammation, lower levels of hyperactivity which are all the conditions that a healthy immune system, resilient, can balance. And, and that is how really well this might be defined by an immune system that knows what do when to do it and doesn't overdo it. And so, so we start to recognize that maybe there's a, a quote, Western scientific explanation for what has been known for centuries and centuries in other cultures by the foods that they ate when they used nature's wisdom to their benefit. What happened in the Western world is we started taking all those ingredients out of our food when we, we process them to make high fat sugar, salt foods that we could put flavorings and colorings in. We took those things out. And so we've been, I, what would I want to say? We've been involved in a clinical study, uncontrolled of eating a bunch of food to see what would affect they would have if we took all these substances out. And the results of that study is not too good. It's us, it's the rising tide of chronic illness. So that's, that's what we've been learning recently about, about the immune system. And this whole Tartary Buckwheat story to me has been for me kind of an aha. Opportunity to see the power what nature can provide if we just get ourselves close to, to its messages.

You just said all of my favorite words. We can all just recognize that nature has the wisdom to heal us all. It's incredible. And by the way, the tartery Buckwheat flour is something that I use for my kids pancakes every day and they absolutely love it. So fantastic people in your house, especially if you're gluten free. There are, there's so much to unpack from that. So first of all, let's talk about the fact that your immune system, we think about it so much as just, you know, sickness or not. But now we're hearing immune age. And if we can focus on our immune age. So when we think about, you said immunosenescence, this could be then a stronger predictor of disease risk than chronological age.

Yeah, yeah, it's really quite fascinating. You know, we have seen over the last 10 years the development of Woodrupy's age block algorithms that have been developed recently for now that UCLA professor there. And now it's, it's expanded. But these are ways of actually analyzing the genetic profile of different cells and seeing based on these calculations how biologically aged those cells are, not just their age and birth days, but their age and function. And we can, from these Studies recognize that not all organs in our body age at the same rate. Some people, their brains may faster than their liver. Other people, their hearts eat faster than their muscles. So we can use this technology to start looking at what is aging at the cellular level mean in terms of the loss of function of those cells, of those tissues, of those organs and in the immune system. Because the immune system, okay, so immune.

Cells in every part of the body. You're going into the description of that.

Yes. And so, so the immune cells are then from the. Communicating at the inside functions of, of every cell, in every tissue, of every organ of our body. And that becomes a very, very. A guiding principle then, as to how the rest of the body is going to respond to that information. So if you want a point of attack to get control over your body, a good place to start is the immune system. And then we say, well, where is the immune system located? We know it's floating around in the blood cells, so called white blood cells, but it turns out the immune system is clustered principally around our mucosal tissues, the first lines of defense to the outside world. So 70%, well, 60 to 70% of our immune system is clustered around our digestive tract. So the first thing that happens when you eat is our immune system picks up that information and it translates it to the rest of the body. It tells the body, oh, this is a great meal. You're going to have a really great time. Liver or heart or brain or muscles or it's going to say, oh, there's stuff in this, this meal that person just ate. I'm not so sure about it. Looks a little bit suspicious to me. We ought to call out the guards and we ought to be hypervigilant. And what is hypervigilance? Immune system, that's called inflammation. So we have this inflammatory diet thing that's going on because we're eating foods for which the immune system doesn't see it as friendly. And it all occurs down there in our digestive tract. Now, what else is going on in our digestive tract? We have what's called the microbiome, hundreds of different critters that are also eating our food. This is the microbiome, the bacteria, and they are then producing their own messages as well to the immune system of our body, saying, you know, that last meal, you're not going to like it. Well, immune system, because it has things in that. Why process it? I produce it into foreign chemicals that are going to make you upset. And so that becomes what we call dysbiosis. Altered digestive health that leads to leaky gut. Leaky gut means that the intestinal tract becomes permeable to leak things into the blood which the blood shouldn't be seeing. And once that happens, then the immune system starts get confused. So now we get into this whole thing of the dysbiosis, a dysbiotic situation, that so many people are not acutely ill, but they're chronically ill due to the burden of these messages that are really starting from food, digestive tract, microbiome and immune system.

Let's call it all of those culprits. Right. When you say immune system, I'm automatically thinking gut microbiome. So I'm happy you brought that up for our listeners as well. And when I'm often speaking to my clients around healing their digestion or how that relates to their gut microbiome, there's so many external assaults that some of them you've alluded to. So the biggest culprit, I would say, is food. We've got this horribly inflammatory diet. And even with food marketing, we're seeing foods labeled as being healthy when they're just, they're not at all. Then we've got this chronic stress. I love that you mentioned hypervigilance. This was me. And that's actually when my heart palpitations were at their worst. We've got poor sleep, we've got artificial lights, we've got environmental toxins. We just came through an era of disinfecting everything which I'm sure was detrimental to our gut microbiome. So when we think about this stress over time, and when you're speaking about immunosenescence, can we think about kind of reversing this process and this chronic inflammation that we're experienced today and inflammaging, as you mentioned, can you make the connection on one, it's the symptoms that are left untreated. Right. I can imagine so many people, they're living with this inflammation that they're not aware of it and that leads to low grade disease over time and then maybe we can get into some of the solutions after that. So how can one get this low grade inflammation under control if they're not understanding root cause healing?

Yeah. Thank you. You know, I think you and I are good examples of this. We're, we're symbolic of so many really good people. We're, we're high achievers. We want to get the most out of our lives. We want to be good, we want to be productive. We want everything to fall in line. We want to think we can control our environment, knowing that the world is chaotic. And all of those, what are really attributes, I would call them virtues, like all virtues, can be turned into a negativity because now they put our immune system on overdrive. They create the interrelationship with our vagus nerve, which sits as this long meandering nerve from the cranial nerve all the way down to the end of our diagnosis track. And it's sending back messages to our brain. And our brain is sending messages to our digestive tract and to our microbiome and to our immune system in the gut. And so if we're the high vigilant people that are, I hate to use the word perfectionist because it conjures up maybe some negative things I want to convey, but we have very, very high achievement levels that we expect of ourselves. And we have multiple tasks and responsibilities, somewhat to the point of overload, where we just can't put another chest piece on the board or everything's going to fall off. That, I think, is another driver for our immune system to be in chaos. And when the immune system is speaking to every cell of every tissue of every organ, it speaks to things like the pacemaker cells in our heart. And our heart controls our heart rhythm and our heart rhythm. So you see a lot of people with atrial fibrillation. Where does that come from? I have many, many friends that are highly productive super achiever people that in their 40s, maybe even in their early connection that I'm thinking back, we're ending up with cardiac irregularities. These are high fitness people, not probably too dissimilar to you, Mona, in your life. High achievers, high capable. They could get it done, everything. Give them a task, they could get it done. You always went to them first, no matter what, because they could always do it. And they ended up with cardiac irregularities and ended up with ablation or some type of technology to get their heart to be under normal rhythm. Well, what was driving that? What was driving that is the interconnection of this whole installation through the immune nervous system and how it affected the electrical conduction to their heart and produced these rhythmic pulses of electricity that give rise to our heartbeat. And so these manifestations are symbols of imbalance. So we can be imbalanced in our diet, we can be imbalanced in our relationships, we can be imbalanced in our exercise, not enough, too much. We can be imbalanced. Our exposure to virtually anything without balance. You know, people say you can smother yourself with love. You know, everything needs to be connected to a certain kind of balance point to allow for it to have resilience. And our immune system is kind of governor. It's there to kind of help us to reserve when we need it and to attenuate when we are getting all control. But it also has a point where it starts to move into chaos. And when it moves to chaos is we have all these chronic illnesses we have to mention. Cognitive dysfunction, depression, things of the nervous system. We used to think the brain was separated from the rest of the body. It's not. The brain has its own immune system called the microglia. And so all these things are interconnected. And so when you ask me how does one get a control on this, it's getting back into rhythm. It's eating foods that are foods that look like they once grew in the ground, foods that actually have the right kind of intentionality in their production, that they're designed for health and not just for profit. They're foods that we celebrate from because the eating is more than just putting calories on our guts. It is a. It's an ability to connect to the planet in a very unique way with regenerative and sustainable agriculture. The plants have their immune system, Soil microbiome has its immune system. It's connected to our microbiome, which is connected to our immune system, which is connected to our eating pattern. All these things are part of a zeitgeist of living. And you know, that's if I've learned anything from the ternary buckwheat story. I mean now we farms in upstate New York that are growing tardily buckwheat for the first time in the United States. It's been a really powerful example of me as a, as a biochemist to really understand how this all connects together. When you look at how we as a species, as a human have survived throughout millennia with a lot of pressure, a lot of challenges through infectious disease and without a lot of serious medicine. And how we did that by is learning how to be in compliance with nature in a much more effective way.

It's interesting you're listing off these diseases and whether it's cardiovascular disease, depression, type 2 diabetes, a lot of these things that can be prevented. And we think about stress really being the instigation of it all. And I wonder if doctors are probably trained in acute stress and acute dysfunction. But is there ever talk about following upstream and the symptoms that are caused from stress and how that leads to the breakdown in the gut and then the immune system?

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you I think that is actually the question of our age. So there is a new book that was just published in 25 by a neurologist, Kevin Tracy is his name, called the Long Nerve. It's about the vagus nerve. And I'll just summarize. This is a Cliff Notes version of the book. The takeaway theme is that this nerve that we were discussing, the vagus nerve, the wandering nerve, Vegas, comes from the great. That connects our brain to all these other organs of our body, is really, really patterned by the exposure that we have. The things that are going on that ultimately influence our immune system. And this is really a very powerful scientific discovery of how the immune system and the nervous system are. Are directly connected to the gut and to the gut microbiome. So to illustrate that, I'll go back to my discussion of autoimmune disease for a second. So in the field of rheumatology, they have what is called the International Classification of Rheumatic Diseases. I car and they use that with the scale to determine if a therapeutic drug is effective in reducing or treating the conditions of that autoimmune disease. And they have what? Icar 20, I car 40 and Icar 60. Now, what that means is that a drug can reduce 20% of the symptoms. That's ICAR 20, or can be an ICAR 40. That's 40% reduction, or 60 or 60%. The drugs that we're using for autoimmune disease is so called biologics, the things of the TNF alpha blocking drugs that cost more than $20,000 a year. Those drugs block the signals of the immune system so it does not create the inflammatory response at the tissues. That sounds really good. However, in so doing, it blocks our immune system so that it can't function as effectively because it's put a blank over our immune system. And so what you start seeing are the side effects, which are the black box warning on these drugs. If you look at them, of increased lymphoma incidence with cancer, or increased risk of skin problems, or increased risk of a whole host of immune conditions like pneumonia. And so when you block the immune system to get rid of inflammation, you increase the risk of all the stuff the infl. The immune system supposed to do. Good for you. So when you look at the drugs that we're using and ask, how do they work on this ICR 20, 40 or 60 scale? In other words, rheumatologists who are prescribing these drugs, if you have 100 patients treated with these drugs with the proper diagnosis and the proper drug at the proper level, what percentage of those people get positive outcomes at the ICR 60 level? I think most people will be surprised to know that the statistics say less than 60. In something like nearly half the people that take these medications do not get clinical amelioration of their symptoms and they have, unfortunately, the side effects of immune suppression. So it's like a double barrel problem. So people are now starting to say, and Kevin Tracy in this book starts talking about it, that maybe what we ought to be thinking about in these pulmonological disorders, these autoimmune disorders, is lifestyle intervention. So that if we're on a drug, we're going to maximize its benefit and minimize the amount we need. And so if you're going to use a drug, use it intelligently, don't use it in a way that's probably likely not to be fully successful, but has serious adverse side effects. And you do that using the biology that we now have discovered, which history anxiety is known for millennium, about how to make your immune system better through eating the right foods, eating the being with the right people, thinking the right thoughts and doing the right things. So that's the lesson plan. Yeah.

Last time I checked, there's no medication that knows exactly to go to one specific cell or area in your body without impacting everything else that's in there. Right. And we don't think about that. And that goes for supplements as well. And it's fascinating too, with what we're uncovering about epigenetics, right, showing that our lifestyle interventions can really alter our digestion, our immune function within weeks and as you say, within 120 days of cellular turnover and how that can improve our resilience. And yet it fascinates me just from the nutrition lens, that we are still so obsessed with finding the next red pill or diet or protocol when the research and the evidence is already there. If we really want to change these inflammatory patterns within us, as you said, it goes back to eating from nature, eating foods without ingredient labels, managing our stress, optimizing our sleep, focusing on purpose and love and gratitude and stuff like that. And it's fascinating hearing you of all people speaking speak to this, because I think what is still missing from society, we still are looking for the white lab coat to say, well, go out, go spend some time on gratitude today, or go spend some time with a farmer. And I hope we're not too far from that. But I love the lens that you brought up. And with that comes the question then, epigenetics and our epigenome.

Is it the.

Same research that you've done? Can we see changes within our immune system or gut microbiome so quickly?

Yeah, thank you. That's a really, really great question. And I think that this is, to me, the force multiplier of our age is this new revolution in epigenetics. Because I believe that the average person, even within the medical world who has been exposed to a lot of training and education about physiology and anatomy, even those individuals still believe that our genes are sacrosanct and they give us everything that we are and there's nothing we can do about. We didn't fill out an application card. It was kind of the luck of the draw. And some people may have just got through the, through the lottery, the good genes. And other people weren't so fortunate, got the bad genes. And that model is very limited and actually misdirected because we now recognize that even if you study identical twins, their health trajectories are not the same most commonly. Right. They don't even live to be the same years of life. They often die at very different ages. I'm not about with accidental deaths, I'm talking about natural causes of death. And so how does that happen if we're all just our genes? And what I try to tell people, and this is my. I hope it's an understandable metaphor. So our genes are a book of life. They're the most important thing that we own. They are coded in 23 chapters. Half of each chapter was written by our biological mother and the other half by our biological father. And each of those chapters there are thousands of stories. The thousands of stories are our genes. And in that book of life resides information to direct every cell of every type in our body, every age. And it's the same information. It's the same book of life. Now hold on, you're going to say, just a minute here. You're telling me that the book of life in my brain to make a brain cell is identical to the book of life in my skin, to that, in my liver, to wherever. And the answer is, yeah, it's the same book of life. I mean, there may be the mutational change of those are insignificant. It's the same book of life. Well, then why is it the brain, the brain and the liver. The liver and the skin. The skin. It's because the messages in our book of life got read differently by those cells when they were evolving from their embryonic states, the so called primordial stem cell, when they started to become a differentiated cell. They developed a reading of all you for certain sections of your book of life. They read all the chapters on skin, they didn't read chapters on brain. Well, hold it. Who controls what's read in the book of life? Aha. That's called your epigenome. There are marks that are put on your book of life as your cells are developing that will tell it what chapters are read here versus what chapters are cannot read. Right. Sticky notes and paper clips is what I call them. Those are epigenomes. Now one might ask the question then, is there any relationship between we eat, what we think, who we interact with, toxins that we're exposed to, our gut microbiome, and the marks that are put on our genesis that regulate how our book of life is read in different cells. That is the coin of the realm of this century. Previously we said no, that only occurred in development, in fetal development or in infancy. It had, it stopped after that. And whatever we were, when we were born and started to breathe oxygen, that's what we were going to do. That was our lot in life. Now we, we find out, lo and behold, that's not true, that there are these so called metastable EPI alleles with long winded terminology, where the ability of certain cells in our body to continually sample and be epigenetically modified. So you can put things on and take them off and you can go from the highway lane in your highway of life, in those cells of degeneration and you can take those messages off and you can put on messages that put you back on the lane of the highway of regeneration or rejuvenation. And the immune system does that beautifully. It's given the right opportunities. By the way you think, eat, love, participate, expose all these things, you can rejuvenate your immune system. That is the power of what we've learned the last 15 to 20 years. So those individuals who are in the gloom and doom model need to wake up to the up and out transformative model of rejuvenation. It is possible, but we have to go against the dominant theme today, which tends to keep us in the lane of degeneration. Right? I mean in the lane of degeneration, if each is worse than the one before it, that's not the lame we want to sting.

How fascinating. Like I was saying, that alone is worth celebrating. So many of us who are touched by disease, the awareness that if we simply rejuvenate our system, we take away these assaults or modifications to our DNA, then we're turning off genetic markers that are getting sick. And in a world where we're so focused on doing and strategizing and biohacking our way to longevity, the interventions that you've mentioned today to shift our immunosenescent cells, they're actually quite simple. So for people who are listening, they're in. They really want to reverse this biological age. They want to give youth to their immune system for the future and what's to come, knowing that it's connected to everything else. What would you say are the top two or three drivers of immune strength that most people overlook, but maybe have the biggest return?

Yeah, I think the first thing is to get people to understand the power of the rainbow diet. I have a dear colleague that I've had the privilege and pleasure of working with now for over 25 years, Dr. Deanna Minick. And she was a member of a research group for many years and she worked very hard as part of this collaboration on developing diets that would rejuvenate health, rejuvenate the immune system. And one of the characteristics that we recognized that characterized the foods that were associated with these diets was that they were all colored foods, plants, fruits and vegetables, grains, and everything from red to blue and everything in between. Those colors in natural foods are the bioactive components that power up the rejuvenation of the immune system. So if we just said to ourselves that every day I'm going to eat the rainbow, I'm going to eat at least, you know, three or four different foods, portion sizes that have different colors, not synthetic colors, but natural from their origin. That generally takes us into the plant kingdom because that's where these components reside. So this is almost a little like omnivore's dilemma. We want to make sure we choose the right kind of foods that have these inherent properties for immunorejuvenation. That's one of the powers that we found of Himalayan Turtle Buck with 126 different things that that plant makes to actually regenerate our immune system's immune function. You don't need to eat a lot of it, but you need to have some of it. And you don't find it in white multi fat foods. So that's the thing. Get rid of alcohol, get rid of sugared beverages. You don't have to completely get rid of alcohol, but certainly limited get rid of white flour. Start introducing these colored foods, naturally sourced, and it's amazing the effects will have on your immune resilience.

I love that Deanna, I adore her. And I really do believe the future of healing is going to be about fiber farmers and our fiber. If I could manifest that, I think the two go hand in hand. And what do you say about the impact of what's happening right now with pesticides and apeel and how that could impact our immune system?

Well, I'm kind of optimistic right now. I think we're in a state of flux. So I don't want to get too far over my skis. But our little farms up in New York, which are farmed by extraordinarily skilled, dedicated farmers who have 30 years experience, have taught me what regenerative agriculture is all about and what it means when you put your hand in the soil and how you can see the difference when you have rich soil. It's microbiome. The soil's microbiome is as robust as all these living critters. Positive for the plant's health. Just as our robust, diverse microbiome in our gut is mostly for our body cells and the way we function as an, as a total organism. So I think that we're seeing a rising tide of understanding that dead soil that's treated with chemicals is not the solution to our either our ecology or our human health issues. They're all interrelated and I'm pretty emboldened. We're a member now of this group of companies called the Purpose Blades Group that is going back to rented. What are the principles that we need to be all connected to with regard to the future of food production and food technology and ultimately reprocessing and into what are the things that lead to the sustainability of not only of our health, but planetary health. And once you start thinking that way, you start to recognize these are not achievable objectives. These are not pie in the sky kind of fairy book stories. They can actually be implemented and they will actually be economically viable. It's just breaking old habits. You know, we went through this concept of monoculture where we have these specialized genetically hybridized seeds only take certain types of pesticides and herbicides and chemicals to produce large yield. You produce a large yield of nutrient deprived foods which then starves people and makes some candidates for the pharmaceutical world to treat their health conditions. We need to break that cycle, which we can. It's breakable. Going back to the things that we know are right are the principles that they have to be made up. We already have studied them and we already have them in the textbook. We just have to apply them.

I agree with you. Let's amplify the resilience of our bodies and of our soil and our connection to nature as a source of healing. I'm going to borrow your optimism to make that happen. And I'm on a mission to help make farming really cool so that my kids in the future have a big part of it so that we can see kind of the future of food. Just stick around. And I want to thank you for all the work that you've done and just bringing this to the forefront. And thank you for your time. Gosh, today I think we covered so much more than I anticipated, but shedding light on everything from nutrient deficiencies and toxin exposure and our stress responses all are interacting within us and the interconnectedness between that and disease. Thank you for being such a thought leader in this industry. I always say that you're my person that I go to for source for the truth on healing that everyone needs to hear. So thank you so much for today.

I'm very touched by that. Thank you. That's the most valuable comment that I could receive, so I really appreciate it and I wish you absolute strength and power in your advocacy. What you're doing is so important to spread this news. So we just need to get people to understand there are alternatives that they can elect in their lives that will really increase the value and reduce burden of dysfunction they don't really need to live with.

I'm with you and I'll keep following you and chasing you. Thank you so much, Dr. Bland.

Thank you. Be well.

You too.

Bye. Bye.