Natural ways to increase GLP-1 with Dr. Jeff Bland

Hello, my friends, and welcome to perfect practice. Today I have, when I say special, I mean extraordinarily special individual that I'm going to be interviewing today. Somebody who I would consider a mentor. And many times mentors can mentor us from a distance, through books, through, from stages, from podcasts. And many times mentors can influence us directly. And so today I have a very special conversation with Dr. Jeffrey Bland, a man who needs no introduction, who's constantly up leveling and transforming himself to be a greater force for good in the world. And I was actually very blessed recently to spend a few days on his boat with him and get to know him very intimately. And they say, never meet your mentors because you'll be disappointed. And I can reassure each and every one of you I was not disappointed. In fact, I am more in love with him than ever before, and I expressed that to him as well. So without further ado, welcome Dr. Jeffrey Blind.

Well, Sachin, thank you. And by the way, the, the admiration and respect goes both ways. I felt the very same thing about you and your wife at the end of our precious time that we shared together up in the Pacific Northwest. So I hope we'll have other opportunities to do that. It was very, very. I still reflect on it with, with, with warm, fuzzy feelings.

Thank you. Thank you. So there's so many things that you've been up to in your 50 year career. I think today I heard you say you're celebrating 50 years in this space. And so when we talk about longevity, I mean, you're a shining example of that in terms of your focus and determination to help make the world a better place. I'd love for you to share with us what are you up to these days? Like, what really excites you when you wake up in the morning and pulls you out of bed?

Yeah. Thank you. And, and I am excited and I feel very privileged at 78 years of age to still have the same level of excitement and opportunity to work with creative and remarkable people like yourselves in doing something that I hope is positive in terms of leading to order in a world that is somewhat chaos, chaotic and filled with some degree of disorder. And for me, the, the driving force, which I, I think I recognize now about four years ago, is that when I look back over my career, I was very proud, or I am very proud of three things that I think I was principally involved with other, other individuals in putting into the world as concepts and therapeutic tools, so to speak, and those are gastrointestinal restoration, which we called the 4R program way back when in 1990. That has to do with. Now we talk about dysbiosis and leaky gut and all those things. Number two was metabolic detoxification, which was a concept that kind of had been floating around but never really quantified and brought into a formality. And I think that we brought it up to a higher level of understanding as a clinical tool, this whole concept of metabolic detoxification and, and how various nutrients can play a role in that, the phase one, phase two, phase three detox pathways and so forth. And then number three was mitochondrial resuscitation. I'm very proud that I think we were the first groups to talk about mitochondria back in the late 80s. And everyone thought this was so esoteric and so way out there, they wondered why I was talking about this little organelle in cells. But we developed this program. This was during the HIV AIDS and then the chronic fatigue syndrome era. In the 80s, we developed this concept of resuscitating mitochondria using nutrition. And that's grown up to be quite a powerful tool now. So I'm. I'm really very proud of having been involved with those three clinical kind of tools. And what I recognized was that if I was to examine now what I've learned about people not feeling well over my last 50 years in the field, it all kind of ramps up param to a recognition that all of these conditions that we associate with ill health and chronic disease are associated with alterations in immune system function. So I started to say, well, hold on just a minute now. If that's really a central keystone, who has taken on the role of trying to understand how to gain control over our immune system so we don't become a victim, but become ownership of our immune system? And how would we do the same thing with immune system health that we've done with gastrointestinal restoration or with metabolic detoxification or. Or with mitochondrial resuscitation? These are all interrelated, obviously. And so I decided, okay, I'm going to get one more bite of the apple or whatever, and I'm going to focus the remainder years that I have where I can do something productive in trying to understand how to personalize immune health. And, and that has been a really fascinating journey because it turned out that I made that personal commitment before, before COVID 19. And then suddenly here we go with SARS, COV 2 and a global pandemic, and everyone suddenly very interested in the immune system. And then we start learning that in the United States we had the poorest record of outcome of SARS CoV2 infection. Even though we're spending more per capita on healthcare than any other country in the world, we were number one in morbidity, mortality, hospitalization, intubation per capita. And it wasn't because we're an older country and with our, it was because we, our immune health was just not up to speed. And so I started then really becoming even more emboldened and more committed to trying to find ways that we could navigate the increasing understanding of the complexity of the immune system in ways that we could translate that and put it into an executable program for individuals so they could become able to better own their immune systems. And so that, that's what ultimately led me to start Big Bold Health, which I never thought in my life I'd start another company, but it just seemed like a place to really put the last phase of my energy as I, as I pass forward or pay forward for all the decades I've had of extraordinary fortune to work with the people like yourselves that I've been influenced by. Wow.

Now you were reading a book maybe, maybe you finished it now called How Life Works. And I know you're really big into regenerative agriculture and, and systems, how everything is so interconnected, you know, in nature, but also in the body. So can you tell me how what you've discovered with regenerative agriculture and, and how it, it kind of connects some of the dots in your life?

Yeah, thank you. That, that's a powerful question. And you know, I'm going to already admit to the fact that I don't think I can do a complete job of excellence in, in answering it because it has so many multiple components. But I'll try to at least get started in the discussion. So that book that you described, How Life Works, is a profound treatise. It's, it's a scholarship of very high level in, in understanding what we've learned about science of life. And it re states a lot of the things that we have believed as facts in terms of the new knowledge. And I don't want to say it makes the facts wrong, the things that we learned in the past, but it puts new spin, a new understanding on them. And one that is most important, I believe, as a takeaway from that book, is the belief that we all had. I certainly learned it in school early on, probably starting in grammar school, that our genes control everything and that we're a product of our genes. I remember doing my first genetic study on my family when I was in middle School. We had to, you know, assess our relatives on both our mother and father's side to figure out what are characteristics that we would be carrying in our genes. And then we had a questionnaire that we surveyed. It was kind, very interesting. I think I was like 12 years old at the time. And the, the dominant theme was genes control everything. So you just had to be able to decipher your genes and you could know your life, someone. And when in 1990 in the Rose Garden. Excuse me, in 2000 in the Rose garden, when the, the deciphering of the human genome was, was offered up, I think it was believed that we. Okay, we've answered the question. Now we know about the double helix. We know about the way that our code is encoded in our genome. We know the 23 chapters that make us up in our 23 pairs of chromosomes. Now we can just take that information and we can make new drugs. We can do all sorts of things with that information. Assuming that the, the answers are in now, what have we learned since in the 20. Now going on four years since we've learned that that was very naive. That yes, that's important. That is true. Mendel's laws about dominance and recessives are not wrong. They still are there. But they only explain a part of the important story of who we are. Our genes don't tell us who we are. They tell us who we might be. And there are many might bes that reside in our genesis. So what tells us what we are then? If it doesn't tell us, it only tells us what we might be. What tells us what we are? The experiences that we've, we've had probably starting at conception. So in utero experiences, post utero experiences, developmental experiences, adolescence, adulthood, all those experiences and all those interactions, all the, what I call them, signals that we've been exposed to in the world about us have then modulated or affected how this book of life is going to be expressed and how it affects how we look, act and feel. And when I say that, a lot of times people think I'm out in gobbledygook world. I'm out there in esoterism. But I ask a question. Where did we all come from? Every human being that I'm aware of at least came from a single fertilized egg. A single fertilized egg. Now how many cell types are there in a fertilized egg? By definition, there has to be only one in my body and in yours. How many cell types do we have today? Hundreds. How did that happen? If they all came from the same book of life. The same genetic information encodes for every different cell. Liver cell, heart cell, brain cell, skin cell, whatever cell. They're all coming from the same book of life. So how in the world that could that have happened? It happened because only portions of our genetic code are being read at any one time for different cells. So in development, fetal development, hopefully that developing fetus, when it wants to make a liver, only reads the liver message in the genes. And when I want. When it wants to make a brain, it only reads the brain messages. And so we get differentiation into our body. Now, it's been thought until recently that that process kind of stopped once we were born. Okay, answers in. We've got all these different cell types. Now we just go through our life with whatever architecture we have when we're born. And that's been proven wrong within the last 20 years that actually we may not be changing as we did when we were at developing as a fetus, but those changes in the way our genes can be expressed are occurring throughout the course of our life. It's called epigenetics. Above the gene. And the experiences that you and I are sharing right now are signaling to me some message that can influence how the genes of my body today, at this moment, might want to express themselves. They might want to express themselves by releasing the molecules of joy, which I would hope they do. Or if we're having for whatever reason and we're not a experience that we're stressed or feel at ease or not not at ease or feeling at risk, then our genes will express a different message. It could be a message of alarm or a message of upset. And that concept that our book of life has this plasticity in the way it's expressed epigenetically, that we can remodulate, reform, rewire. How our genes actually express us as who we are is a unbelievably powerful concept that only recently science has validated. Before, when I went to medical school, which was the 60s, that concept was considered antithetical to thinking. In fact, if you brought that up as a student, you would either need a brain transplant or be left out of the curriculum, because you didn't even raise that question. It was just known that that did not occur. But it does occur now, admittedly, at my age of 78, it's not occurring as quickly as it did when I was in the fetal development, but it's still available at every chronological age. We're remodeling this genetic architecture and how it expresses itself into how we look, act and feel. Now, to me, this is a extraordinary change in our paradigm of, of health science. Because in the past, if you got your genes, you didn't follow an application card. If you got the bad luck of the draw, woe is you. But we got medicine there to protect you from bad genes by therapy, surgery, whatever it would be. But there's nothing you could do about it now. No, now we have the room that we can actually do something and we can participate in our own process of recreation at every level, physically, metabolically, cognitively, emotionally. We can be a different person. Wow, that is a powerful concept. Now, does that concept have a good place in the disease care system? And I would say no, this is not really the disease care system's ownership. The disease care system is there and it does a good job for treating people that are broken. It doesn't do a really great job and it's really not as focused in trying to find ways of how to maximize human potential out of our genes. That's not the disease care system's responsibility. That's not what reimbursement through diagnostic codes do. That has to be a different system. That's the system that you speak to. That's the system that you're a leader in. It's a health care system, not a disease care system. And it has a different set of tools, a different language, a different relationship, a different empowerment. And it requires a different strategic approach than going to an emergency room or to being diagnosed. It is a proactive, prognostic approach, not a retroactive, responsive diagnostic approach. So that's where I am in my life right now. My full on intention is to do all I can to try to communicate that message to the leaders of tomorrow so that they can carry that baton. Because that's going to create the greatest value proposition for people globally that are losing their potential because we are still trying to manage them with the disease care system that has no healthcare component. That's my position. Thank you.

So well said and articulated as always. You know, as you were speaking, I was writing a few ideas down and you know, you said that our conventional medical system has its time and place and I think everyone can agree to that. It's, you know, in emergency type situations and when people are broken beyond, you know, repair through natural methods, then yes, it's there and can be potentially life saving. But, and I like to think of it like going to an auto body shop where you get banged up and you, your car gets banged up and you take it there and they fix it. However, the auto body shop is different than going to driving school, right? When you go to driving school now, you learn the rules of the road, you learn how the car works, you learn how to take care of the car. Well, in, in some cases, right? So you learn actually vehicle maintenance and those type of things. And so both can coexist. And in fact, they need to coexist. But what happens is now, now people go to the auto body shop expecting to go through driving school. And, and so we're looking for the solutions in the wrong places and in people who have a different set of tools, right? So a mechanic has a different set of tools than a driving instructor. And in fact, when you're going to see the driving instructor, in this case a health coach or a functional medicine practitioner, you're the vehicle. So, you know, you get to understand and unlock your own, you know, kind of genetic potential, your environmental potential, your expression potential, your spiritual potential. I mean, there's so many layers to this amazing life that we can unlock when we work with somebody who's operating out of the same paradigm of the solution that we're looking for.

That's a fantastic metaphor. And I, I totally subscribe to that analogy. And you know, that that's really why recently I've. Last thing I ever thought I would be is involved with organic and regenerative farming. But I've been pulled into that as a consequence of keeping asking the questions, what is root cause? You know, where do we go to start this whole process from which we emerge as who we are? And I came to recognize that the signals that come from our diet are one of the more important things that shapes both the physical body, because that's the material from which we're built, comes from our diet, but also our metabolic function and maybe even our cognitive function to some extent. So if you ask, then if diet plays that role, where does diet come from? Comes from foods. And then where do foods come from? I'm trying to seek out the upstream root cause here. And then foods come from agriculture. And then where does agriculture come from? It comes from relationship with the land. And then where does relationship with the land come from? It comes from how productive and healthy the land is and its mycorrhizae, its microbes, and its interrelationship with the health of the planet. So if we really want to go upstream and understand root cause, we have to start there, and then we start to go down from there, ultimately getting to us. And that's what then led me ultimately to say, okay, where can we go to find those things that ultimately produce, allow us to maximize our immune system resiliency as a human if we were to consume them? And what would be the environment and the soil and the context of planetary health that's necessary to support that? And that ultimately led me to Himalayan tartery, buckwheat and regenerative agriculture. And all these things I would have never, a few years ago thought I would be involved with.

That's amazing. So a couple things that come up for me as you're sharing, that is genetics, epigenetics. And fairly recently Harvard came out and said that obesity is genetic. And I don't know if that's because they want to develop drugs and if we call obesity a disease, then only drugs can treat the disease. So there, there could be some of that at play here. And we'll leave that for a different conversation. But why are, why are experts saying that obesity is linked to genetics? And I feel like it can be very confusing to the average consumer. So what's your take on that?

I'm going to speak with every bit of intention that I can mobilize into the hopeful cognition of the viewer, listener of this program to say obesity is not a genetic problem. There are some people, as there are for anything that may have an outlier situation of a specific single nucleotide polymorphism that in that particular case is a major influencer on the way that they process calories in their diet and how it contributes potentially to obesity. So I'm not denying that. But to think of it as a genetic disease or condition is absolutely fallacious and misplaced, misdirected, and basically makes us a victim of somebody else's solution, which is probably going to be a drug or surgery. It's going to be bariatric surgery, sleeve gastromas, gastrothopy or a GLP1 agonist drug because we can't get away from our genes. That'll be the way that people explain it.

Right.

They've done. Let me just close by saying, the reason I'm saying this so strongly is that they have done extraordinary numbers of GWAS studies. That's. GWAS is gwas that stands for genome Wide Associated studies. That's where you take a huge aggregate of genetic information from thousands of people who have con their lives and conditions that have been measured and you run them through machine learning, high speed computer analysis and you look for, with this analysis, are there characteristics of these genes from this composite pool of thousands of people that associate a specific genetic characteristic with a certain condition, in this case obesity. And if you do that, you will find that you have to analyze hundreds of thousands of people to look at millions of gene variants to pull out any association between genetics and obesity, meaning it's so far on the outside of the curve relative to the things that really control body composition that it's a rounding error. But yet for medicine, if you're a pharmaceutical person, this is maybe probably what you want to hold on to because you might be able to do a study or that individual you selected that has that gene variant showing that your drug had a very positive effect in that person and lowering their body weight. And now you want to generalize that to people that were not in that class because now it becomes a generalized principle. This is what's, what to me is so off putting and so actually dangerous because the regulation of our body weight is under our control. If we just ate the information in our diet that our body is used to, that will create the right outcome. If we eat that information, we don't have to worry about calories. This concept that obesity has too many calories, that's a specious argument. In fact, you cannot correlate the increase in weight in our population with the increase in calories. They, that doesn't match. We gained a lot more weight than we ate increased calories because we ate the wrong information. That's where the problem lies, not in our genes, in our agribusiness regulation into processed foods and our eating habits.

Yeah, and that makes total sense to me. Right. We put, we put junk information in and it's important for people to realize that the food industry, and I can certainly vouch that I've been saying this for years, has reduced food down to calories because that's what they can scientifically and from a processing standpoint, manipulate. Right. We can process the fats out of something. We can add sugar to add more carbs. Right. Or we can add starches, or we can, you know, add more protein. And so we essentially dress the label up. But no, don't necessarily realize or educate the consumer that there is a, perhaps thousands, if not millions of lines of code. Right. And you would never update your, your computer. Right. So Apple just came out with a new operating system. And now if I said, hey, update, here's the file to update your operating system and the original file has billions of lines of code or data points in it and information in it, and I give you half that code or even if even one line is missing, right. You run the risk of the whole system CRASHING so, you know, our bodies are so resilient and that's what makes them so remarkable. And it's kind of the gift and the curse because if we put the wrong information, AKA fuel, into our car, we're going to find out within the first kilometer, right. That we, that something's not quite right. But it can take decades for this kind of misinformation to show up. And now what we're seeing, it might even just take years for it to show up, or even months in children who are born because we're putting so much processed food into them that. And what people have to realize is that processed doesn't just mean mechanically processed, but information is actually missing. And when our body doesn't get that entourage of information, it can't do what it is supposed to do with the constituents of that food. And you know, you were speaking earlier about GLP1 and I'd love to kind of, I think this is a great time to kind of bridge our conversation into helping people understand how, you know, our body makes everything we need it to make when it gets the right information at the right frequency. Right. For the right duration. And once people know that, and they know what action steps to take, then they can unlock a whole new level of health that will never be available to them through a myopic intervention. Right. There's over 7,000 peptides that our body makes. And you know, there's a synergistic system that works, right? And you know, certain peptides are activated and released and then there's enzymes that break down those peptides. So there's a regulatory effect. And when we start giving people supraphysiological doses of a single peptide, we're. I don't think we really know what the long term implications of that are just yet because we're taking a myopic approach. So why don't we, why don't we start at the top and perhaps just. I would love to link to that webinar that you did, if that's possible, so people can go and get a deeper dive there. But maybe we can give people at least a high level understanding of some of these topics and then I'd love to go into how, how people can use nutrition and certain dietary protocols to increase their own GLP1 production. So let's go right to the top. What's a peptide?

Yeah, so a peptide, as you, as you've really described it, is a small chain of amino acids that our body makes that has specific information content. It's not just A random collection of amino acids. It's a specific sequence that carries information with it that generally goes to some kind of a receptor in the body. A receptor then picks up that information. So if you think of insulin, insulin is a polypeptide. It's made up of amino acids. And insulin has a receptor that then when the insulin binds to that receptor on a specific, say, muscle cell, it then triggers a process in that cell to take up energy in the form of glucose and to use that then metabolically. So the concept of a peptide is what is the information content in that sequence of amino acids that is very specific for a specific function. And that's why most of these peptides that are made in our body don't stick around for a long time because the body makes them to do task. And then it says, we don't need that information anymore, let's get rid of it now, and if we need it again, we'll remake it later. So that's one of the concerns I have about the GLP1 agonist drugs, because they're specifically made to deliver a very high level of a specific peptide that's GLP1, and stick around in the body much, much longer than the natural process of the body producing GLP one that only sticks around for minutes. But the new drugs stick around in their body for, well, hours to days. So that means you're driving physiology in the absence of the normal regulatory process that occurs when everything's speaking to one another in a friendly way. Yeah.

You know, and maybe this isn't the right analogy. You can certainly correct me, is like, it's almost like people eating a high carb diet and taking ketones, and that would never occur naturally where your blood sugar is high and your ketone levels are high. So it almost, to me, it feels like there's certain conditions under which GLP1 is released and other peptides are also released under those conditions. Right. And then there's, you know, mechanisms to break those peptides down. But if we're just artificially creating a spike in one of those, you know, enzyme or peptides, then what. What's happening to the other ones? Like, how do we have any understanding of the implications of something like that?

Yes, I, I don't think we do in, in terms of the long term. I mean, these drugs that we're now seeing, these GLP1 agonist drugs, they certainly have clinical trials that have been done and people have been put on and they've looked for adverse effects. But the real test of any drug of this nature that's kind of a sustained, I would call it a lifestyle drug that's maybe going to be taken for, on a regular basis for a long period of time is how does it work over years of time on the body? And we don't know the answer to that question. These drugs are new enough that we don't know what the super physiological levels of sustained GLP1 in the body is until people have an experience of years with them. So I'm a believer that there is native intelligence in human physiology. You know, if it was in the best interest for the body to produce a lot of GLP1 and keep it around for a long time, it would do so. But it doesn't do that because it doesn't need to. If we eat right and live right, our body uses it, gets rid of it until it needs it again. And that's the natural rhythm. And if we're in rhythm with our biology, that's what this new book really talks about. It's not just our genes alone, it's being in rhythm with our lifestyle and environment. It produces the symphonic orchestration of long life and good health. It's not like just jumping in with emergency remedies occasionally to patch a hole in the dike. Yeah.

You know, one thing that's quite fascinating and I can understand why there's a lot of hype about GLP1s is because they, they have a widespread effect on different systems in the body. So let's make at least a use case for optimizing our GLP1 levels and why you feel like it's an important peptide and every peptide has its own function. Right. And GLP1 we've gone deep down this rabbit hole from a scientific perspective to study it because it is solving a current crisis that our countries are facing. Right. Which is obesity, metabolic health challenges, inflammatory issues which if we corrected the root causative factor, right, we wouldn't have this problem and we would naturally make our own GLP1. So let's talk about some of the organ systems that it works on and some of the benefits of increasing GLP1.

Yeah, thank you. And I think you said two things here that are very important for people to understand. First of all, our body doesn't just produce GLP1 when we eat. It produces a whole family of what are called intro endocrine hormones, meaning they're produced within the intestinal tract. That's where GLP1 comes from, is our intestinal cells and in our small intestine there are many others. There are over 20 other intro endocrine hormones that have names like GIP, Vasopressin, Ghrelin, Somatostatin, PYY, Cholecystokinin. All of these then are regulatory substances that are produced after we eat that help to orchestrate the proper conversion of the substance in some foods into metabolic energy that makes us able to do our work effectively. And so if you give only one of those substances at high dose for a long period of time, you're kind of overriding the system. This is not the way that the system would normally work. So if we think about the nature of how these, these substances actually work, there are receptor sites on many, many different organs within our body for these hormones. So we have receptors for GLP1 in the brain, in the heart, in the lungs, in the endocrine pancreas, in the muscles, in the adipocyte cells of our fat. Meaning it's sending signals, it's sending messages to all these various tissues. And if it's done right, it helps to cause those, those tissues and those organs to feel at rest, to feel at home, to not be alarmed. That's why it lowers inflammation, improves insulin sensitivity, it causes cell repair, it improves immunity because all those cells get a message saying, hey, all is friendly here. We're in concert with our diet, we're in concert with living. If you now override that message by giving very, very, very high levels, you can get a therapeutic effect. No question you can drive certain things pharmacologically, but then the question is, over time, how does that then result in imbalances elsewhere that would have normally been processed by this rhythm that has been built into our, our biology? And, and as I said, I don't think we don't yet know the answer to that question. Anybody that says we do is, is facetious. We don't know the answer to question. And my belief is that we did not have an obesity problem in this culture until we started eating diets that were extraordinarily devoid of the agents that are necessary to, to speak to our GLP1 in a way that makes it friendly. Once we took those nutrients out of our food with processing, suddenly we got into an imbalance and now our body feels less safe and store starts to have inflammation and glucose intolerance and all these things that we see as chronic health problems.

So what are some of those vitamins or key ingredients that you would describe that are missing?

Well, I think that the one that's most important that has been recently discovered are, are the called the polyphenols and. Or the flavonoids, those are the often the coloring agents found in food. So, you know, my colleague and friend, Dr. Deanna Min, who's talked about eating the rainbow, she's right on target. This is a really great way of thinking about eating nutrients that speak to our genes in such a way as to regulate these processes that we're talking about, the GLP1 processes. You know, what's one of the things we've been studying with our Himalayan Tertiary buckwheat, is how these, these flavonoids that are found in that product, which are the highest of any food we know, actually signal through these enteroendocrine hormones to normalize blood sugar, to normalize weight, to improve immunity, to lower inflammation. And those mechanisms are starting to be understood much more completely as a consequence of these going back to the future, actually, and discovering why these diets were so useful in blue zones and people living long and not having illnesses.

You know, it's interesting because a lot of people, when they do quote, unquote, calorie restriction, right, they're just potentially eating less of what they were eating instead of adding in foods, that would kind of elicit the response of releasing GLP1. So if somebody's trying to lose weight and they've, let's say, quote, unquote, tried calorie restriction, that may work temporarily just from the law of thermodynamics, but in the long run, it's actually not signaling the body to kind of create this symphony of peptides to support good health and blood sugar regulation and inflammation. So it seems like adding would make more sense than taking away and not just adding, you know, certain types of foods, and we'll certainly talk about that, but adding in, you know, unprocessed foods. So the right foods in their unprocessed natural state, which contain all the information, all the code, so to speak, to speak to the body.

Wow. I should be interviewing you because that was really beautifully stated. And I think you're right on target. I think that is the secret sauce. Historically, we built into our relationship with food certain communication pathways. And if you break those communication pathways, then the body doesn't actually know exactly how to function. And the information pathways are in part related to the food. That's. And as you know, food is more than just nutrients. It, it is information. It speaks to our genes. And so this construct that you're talking about is extraordinarily important. And if you look at historical diets that talk to longevity and talk to lowered incidence of chronic illness. They're all diets that are rich in these information molecules like these flavonoids and polyphenols that signal the right messages to our genes to create the right outcome. And I think you're exactly right that if you have a GLP1 agonist drug which lowers your appetite, you're going to get lower calories, but you're also going to get lower nutrients. And if you were already on a low nutrient diet, you've only made it more low nutrient and now you're in a marginal nutritional insufficiencies. Now you've created a new host of problems. And I think we're going to see that happening over the course of the next years to come. With the use of these GLP1 agonist drugs, people will force themselves more into nutritional insufficiencies. So it's for. It really argues for what you're talking about. Let's eat more nutrient dense foods, foods that are colorful naturally, Fruits and vegetables, whole products that contain adequate levels of these good Messages that stimulate GLP1 and the other hormones that regulate blood sugar, regulate inflammation, regulate immune system function. That's the secret sauce that we're really, I think, learning from this research.

If only people could think of eating like downloading information, right? Like the software, and then they would look at it through a slightly different lens as opposed to just pleasing their senses. Right. I mean, most people eat for that mouth feel and the flavor that they have, which doesn't last very long. And if we could just look at it just through a slightly different lens, I think it could create the shift for the right people. You mentioned something that I thought was really fascinating and I didn't know this, but then once you shared it, it was like a remembering for me as opposed to, you know, learning something that intuitively I felt like I know and I think people will feel the same way. So you talked about the different flavors of our food and we have different, you know, taste receptors on our tongue, but we also have taste receptors in our digestive tract and different organs in our body. So not only does our tongue taste the food, which makes me wonder what happens when we eat artificial flavors. Right? We trick the tongue, but then we can't trick the body. And that was quite fascinating. So we've kind of shifted away from, you know, certain categories of flavors and we've gone more to sugary foods and sa and salty foods, savory foods as an example. So what part of the tongue and what does taste buds are we not stimulating anymore that can have a impact on our overall GLP1 production.

Yeah, I think you again, you're right on target. So you think about sweet as a desirable taste. So what is a synthetic sweetener? A synthetic sweetener stimulates these task one receptors. That's the sweet receptors. And therefore if it's a. It's a mimicking molecule, it. It has an effect upon that that is like sweet but chemically modified. And so we can't. Now we start recognizing that sugar substitutes, artificial sweeteners, so to speak, are not really all as safe as we thought because they are signaling through some of these pathways, but there are kind of convoluted in the way they're signaling. The, the, the taste that has been associated with improved GLP1 happens to be the bitter taste receptors, the task 2 receptors. And that's found in these vegetable products that are colored. It's rich in the Mediterranean diet, It's rich in virgin olive oil, has kind of a bitter taste with the Olapurian. All of those then stimulate the GLP1 receptor agonists naturally. And as we've cut bitter entirely out of our diet, except for coffee or cocoa, by the way, Cacao is a GLP1 stimulant. So as we, as we've made everything sweet and, and made a negative kind of attribution to things that have bitter, we've lowered the ability then to regulate GLP1.

Like bitter guard. Right. Is a. Is a common fruit, if I think it's a fruit that. That is used traditionally in India. People will juice bitter melon and they will, they will drink the juice to help them with diabetes. And I. Until you said bitter stimulates GLP1, I didn't really fully understand the mechanism of it, but now it makes total sense. And as we've removed bitters from our diet and we've processed those flavors out of our foods, you know, that, you know, bitters also, from my understanding, impact liver health and other organ systems in the body. Aside from, you know, just increasing GLP1, you also mentioned how our ovaries have bitter receptors on them. Can you talk about that a little bit? Well, not our ovaries. We don't have ovaries, but women's ovaries.

Well, for those individuals that are gifted with ovaries, there are bitter taste receptors on the ovaries that pick up that information from things like polyphenols and flavonoids from food. And it alters in the hormonal production of the granulosa and the theca Cells that then controls the androgen estrogen balance. So people that women who have polycystic ovary syndrome, we know that if they eat a diet that is more balanced in the Mediterranean style eating, that they have better hormonal balance. And in part that's related to these signals that we're talking about. All of this comes about as a consequence of extraordinary new discoveries that we're making that didn't take us back to the future. They give us explanations for the things that we've observed but maybe didn't understand. So now we understand them mechanistically. We should believe history is a good teacher.

Let's talk a little. Let's unpack the Himalayan tartery buckwheat a little bit more. So it's loaded with so many beneficial constituents. The polyphenols, the flavonoids, helps, as you've mentioned, increases GLP1. It's got the bitter flavor profile to it. It's something that's easy to add into a smoothie. It's something that you can add to your pancakes or soups. I add it actually to my coffee and cacao that I have every morning. So my wife lovingly sprinkles that into my coffee every day. And now I just realized that I'm, I'm massively increasing GLP1s, or not? Not, not massively, but in a, in a balanced way. I'm stimulating the production of, of GLP1 and, and even other, you know, peptides in my gut just by doing that one thing like just stacking something that's so simple into people's lifestyles could be so easy and simple. So tell us, tell, tell me a little bit more about some of the other benefits of the htb.

Yeah, so when we started this, we built off a really rich literature that was principally in the Asian traditional medicine and scientific literature. This, this was not well known in the Western world for whatever reason that There are over 400 scientific publications on unchartery buckwheat talk about its values and virtues that most people in the United States were not aware of because they don't read that literature. But then we found that a lot of people are not bakers or they're not in the kitchen. And it's great for those of us that like playing around in the kitchen. I'm kind of a journeyman kitchen person and like baking things and making things in the kitchen. But a lot of people are not into that. They don't have the time or interest. So what we have more recently found And I'm very excited about this, is that if we sprout the Himalayan ternary buckwheat seed, and by the way, I don't actually even know why the name wheat got applied to this because it's not a member of the wheat family at all. It's gluten free, it's a, it's a fruit seed. It's not a grain, not a cereal. So if we sprout it under certain conditions, we can triple the level of these immune active phytochemicals and the GP GLP1 stimulants. So we formed this sprout powder which is like supercharged. In fact, I think it's like no other food I'm aware of. In fact, two teaspoons of the sprout powder equivalent to a half a cup of the flour, which is about 200 times, that's not percent 200 times higher in these GLP1 active substances than common buckwheat. So two teaspoons a day is almost a therapeutic dose. It's almost like food is medicine. So this makes it a lot more convenient for people that are not bakers in the kitchen to use it because you can stir it in with two teaspoons into virtually anything you can put it on. And interestingly enough, when you sprout tartery buckwheat, much to our surprise, the enzyme activity that produces the sprout breaks down some of the bittering substances so it ends up having a nutty flavor versus the flour that has more of a bitter aftertaste. So for people that are bitter, bitter averse, it kind of reduces that concern. So we, we think this might be the secret food is, is using the tartary buckwheat sprout powder because it's so easily applied and has a, a very neutral flavor and can be put in virtually anything.

I love that. And it's actually quite delicious. So it has that nutty flavor to it. There's a protein powder that you've also created, which we had the blessings to be able to try on the boat and it was quite delicious. I actually craved it every day and, and so my body was very receptive to it as well. So if you have a few more minutes, I'd love to. I, I let people know that I was going to be interviewing you and I crowdsourced a few questions. So do you have a few more minutes?

Do it where we can. Yeah, let's, let's do the questions. I love it.

Okay, cool. And I, I know that these can, some of These can take minutes, you know, maybe even hours to unpack. So maybe we can go high level and rapid fire just to be respectful of your time as well. And, and then, you know, if, if the clouds align or the stars align, maybe we can do a part two or something like that. So I'll get, I'll, I'll go right into it and then I'll let you give your thoughts. So one question that came in was about what natural supplements in GLP1. And I think we covered that. I think we want to start with food first and then we want to supplement with food. Right. And that's what I love about the HDB is that it's an actual food substance as opposed to, you know, adding a synthetic supplement into our protocols. I think people, if we can say so, I think food is always first. I know you're a big believer in that. And then if for whatever reason we can't consume those foods and supplementation would be a, would be second. Any thoughts on that that you want to share?

I think that's really well said. You know, we recognize that for all sorts of different reasons, people, including myself, don't always eat the optimal thing. They would want to eat things come up, travel things and all sorts of other agencies. And so we at Big Bold Health, what we tried to do is say, okay, not everybody's going to use the flower, not everybody's going to use the sprout powder, not everyone's going to use the superfood protein powder. So why don't we concentrate these bioactives and put them in a capsule, we call that htb, rejuvenate. So we try to provide multiple routes of entree so that a person can take advantage of nature's messages. But optimally including these as dietary constituents to me is the best of all. Where to start? Although we did just finish a clinical trial with the results are being published in which we use the HDB capsules and we're able to show every 90 days in humans, they were able to reduce the rate of aging in their immune system by almost 47% in 90 days. So we, we do know that even in a concentrated capsule form that you can, you have a lot of power in sending messages epigenetically to your, to your body.

You know, one thing I want to add there is that, or share with you rather is I know you wear an aura ring. I wear one as well. And we were, we were kind of checking our scores when we were hanging out together. And one thing I wanted to report to you, I haven't shared this with you yet is my. After I started taking the HTB which you so generously gifted us, all my scores went up. So it was really cool to see that my Oura Ring score is improved significantly as a result of taking this product. So again, there's, you know, it's an N of one of course with me, but you know, to me that's all that matters is, is my health moving in the right direction and can I measure it?

Well, Sachin, we, you know, we've had what I want to call is anecdotes, really. Hundreds of people who have commented on, you know, how they felt or their felt state improvements after taking more of these artery buckwheat flavonoids. But one that I think is really interesting came from a Harvard researcher professor who was very skeptical and she's highly published, very well regarded. I have tremendous respect for her research. She's a pediatric immunologist and she said, so I'm going to try this myself and I'm going to take all these tests and I'm going to measure my immune system function before and after. I've taken this for three months and I'll get back to you. But let me tell you, if it doesn't do anything in me, I'm going to be a skeptic. I'm going to be a continued skeptic. I said, well okay, that's a good litmus test. Please do that. So I really credit her because she did get back to me after three months and she said, well, I, I have a true session here with you that after taking this, all of my physiological parameters that I measured as it relates to my immune system have improved and my biological age is measured by an age clock. Determination went down by four and a half years. So she said, I guess I have to believe there's something there. So it is gratifying when you get those, those reports, those anecdotes.

Oh, I love that. I love hearing that. And I don't know if it'll make my hair grow back, but if it helps me, you know, age gracefully, then I'm all for it. Now let's get into, you know, people who are taking GLP1. Some of the questions that are coming in for this and you know, there's a wide use case or there's people that have been prescribing ozempic, if you will, or semaglutide rather in a compounded format. So perhaps reducing the amount that's being injected into people or, you know, being consumed. Can you speak to that a little bit? Any thoughts that you have on that?

Yes, I think this whole microdosing is a very interesting concept, and theoretically introducing a small amount or smaller amount of semaglutide in a pharmaceutical preparation should have some effect on your physiology. I think the answer, however, is we don't know. We don't know if there's a dose response threshold. We don't know, quite honestly, what would be the micro dosing amount that might actually induce a sustaining benefit without overwhelming the regulatory system. I think that's going to be well worthy of clinical trials, and I'm sure that there will be people that will do that. But at this point in time, we don't. We know that some, some substances are really sensitive to hormetic control, meaning small doses can have very significant positive effects, and then other substances don't show that hormetic activity. So I don't know the answer yet as to whether there's a threshold effect or not.

And certainly I think we could all agree that you're still artificially increasing a single peptide without changing the conditions that would increase the other production of the other complementary peptides. Okay, let's see. There's. There's been some case studies of people who are taking GLP1s having thyroid issues. I know that no. GLP1 acts in the hypothalamus, which obviously also regulates thyroid and adrenals. Any thoughts on that or ideas of what the mechanisms might be?

Well, there is some evidence, once again, and I want to emphasize in a small number of people. So this is not a major problem of endocrine kind of issues. Thyroid, endocrine, pancreas, even liver, and obviously some intestinal issues as well that are associated with the continued use of the GLP1 agonist, semaglutide. So it's not outside clinical observation, but again, it's. It's small in percentage, but it does exist in the clinical reporting. And now I think we're getting more and more people, and it's suspected that we could have as many as 30 million people taking these medications in the United States over the next 10 years. We're going to get a lot of data and we're going to learn a lot of things, I think some of which we probably will not like to learn. Hmm.

You know, one thing you said when you were presenting earlier was that if everyone who qualified for taking GLP1 agonists, based on the criteria that they've laid out, would be about 93 million Americans. And the total cost of that would be around $600 billion, which is more than all the. The cost of all the medications that are prescribed. Did I, did I understand that statistics.

That's correct. That's. That's the number. Yeah.

Okay. So, yeah, and by the way, that's.

At, that's at the discounted pricing. That's not at the present pricing. That's assuming that the price of these GLP agonist drugs will go down by 40% at least.

Is there any reason that there's so much more expensive in the United States versus other countries?

I think you can use that. You can ask that question across the full range of the pharmaceuticals. Yeah, that's a whole interesting story. Oh, by the way, I just noted my computer is telling me that I'm running out of battery. So I just wanted to alert you to the fact that I'm, I'm in some jeopardy here.

So we're on the clock. I'll fire off these last few questions and I'll. And I think we'll wrap things up. So one of the things that you talked about also is the difference between wegovy and Ozempic and perhaps you can speak to. One is used for diabetics and the other one is used for weight loss. What's the difference between the two?

Yeah, I think this is something that people don't understand, that it's the same bioactive ingredient, semaglutide. The only difference is that the drug that's used for recommendation of treatment of type 2 diabetes, which is Ozempic, has been approved, is half the dose of the same bioactive molecule that's found in WeGovy. So the weight loss approved drug has twice the bioactive as you find in the diabetes drug. Now, make sense out of that. I'll let, I'll let you ponder on that.

So I think we covered a lot today, Dr. Bland, and thank you so, so much. We talked about the variety of peptides that are produced in the gut. We talked about how specifically bitter foods and a Mediterranean Diet can increase GLP1 levels. We talked about how we have taste receptors in different organ systems in our body, so, you know, natural flavors actually matter. We talked about how food, if viewed as software, would. Would take on a whole different meaning, that calories aren't necessarily the whole story when it comes to food. And our calorie intake over time hasn't matched our obesity rates. Our obesity rates exceed our calorie intake. So it actually calls for us to think a little bit differently about the problem. And we also talked about some of the implications of GLP1 medications. And I think the jury's still out if this is a viable. Well, financially, I don't think it's a viable solution from what the data is showing. But clinically, if it's a viable solution, certainly time will tell. But, but it's important for people to know that there are ways to naturally improve balance in the body. I think every, every time we come across a problem, we want to hit it over the head with a hammer. And, you know, science is great at kind of taking a myopic viewpoint and perspective and saying, hey, if this does this, then a ton of it could do a lot of good for the body. And, and not everything works that way. So thank you for, for sharing such wisdom and knowledge and thank you for being such a beacon of light for all of us practitioners in the world. I love to pass the stage back to you and if there's anything else that you'd like to share or say, I love your closing thoughts.

Well, I just want to reinforce who you are, what you stand for and how you're communicating and how you're, you're being very gracious to gift this wisdom and understanding to people who can improve their quality and, and duration of life as a consequence of its implementation. And I think you're a master in communicating this. And, and I just so appreciate being part of the community that we both share and, and having you as a calling. So thank you so much. Thank you.

That means a lot to me. So much love, so much gratitude and appreciation for our time today. And once again, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We'll be sure to share more information about the Himalayan Tartery, Buckwheat and Big Bolt Health so people can learn more about where they can get these superfoods and add them into their nutrition and health strategy plan. So thank you once again, much love, much light. Bye for now.

Bye bye.