Protect Your Immune System, with Dr. Jeffrey Bland

The immune system, which we now recognize is in the brain, in the nervous system, it's in the liver, it's in the muscles. In fact, the immune system is everywhere. So I started to think, if we really think about upstream medicine, maybe the most upstream place is to think about the immune system. And how do we modulate the immune system?

If you want to live like you matter, ditch the pills, look great, and feel Freaking amazing. You're in the right place. I'm Dr. Wendy Trubo.

And I'm Dr. Ed Levitan. Welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast.

Where we empower you to live a vibrant and healthy life by optimizing your structural, chemical, emotional, social, and spiritual lives.

Hold on to your hats.

Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. Live like you matter. Our guest today is Dr. Jeffrey Bland.

So it's the Dr. Jeffrey Bland, the.

Father of functional medicine. No pressure, Jeff.

But like, no kidding.

Yeah, right.

Dr. Blaine is a world renowned nutritional medicine expert. He has a career in health that spans more than 40 years. As I alluded to, he's the father of functional medicine. He's the founder of Big Bold Health, a company that's on a mission to transform the way people think about one of nature's greatest innovations, which is the immune system. He's also the author of the Disease Delusion Conquering the Causes of Chronic Illnesses Illness for a Healthier, Longer and Happier Life. And he's been on countless additional books and research papers. So, Jeff, welcome. It's really a privilege for us to have you here.

Well, I. I feel the privilege, and I love the title of your podcast. I think it so defines life as a journey and different steps and different decisions we make along that path and how that can lead to glorious joy and great outcome if we make intelligent decisions as we're marching through time. So this is really a privilege to be part of the program.

No, it's so for our listeners. I really want to kind of take a step for a second because Wendy calls a fanboy. But for Jeff, it's way beyond fanboy.

Fangirl Rolls off the tongue a little bit easier. So he's fangirling as a man.

Well, I actually think it's way, way deeper than that.

You're a man fan.

Thank you. This is what we do, Jeff. This is normal.

This is great. Oh, boy.

So for our listeners, Jeff has literally been the person that started functional medicine, and we can call him the functional medicine father. Functional medicine. That's great. But it really doesn't do justice to the depth that literally the movement started and the research that you have done and the people you've put together and truthfully, the lives they probably at this point, millions if not tens of millions of lives you've affected, it's just profound. And for me it's such a deep gratitude for your work. It's beyond anything even my. I call my mentor an old timer initial mentor and what he did on his days off was listen to your weekly. What. I forgot what they were called, but they were. I. I was listening to on CDs.

Functional medicine update.

Yeah. Yes. So we, we did that. And so just huge depth of gratitude and amazing work that you've done. And the cool we talk about from our perspective, living to be vibrant through 100. And you're huge example of that because you've done so much and you're up to so much, right? And everybody, that's Wendy, myself, anybody in the functional medicine world, we're all fighting to the good fight to actually look at how do we do get people well. So they're actually, well, not unhealthy, not lack of disease, but actually. Well. And obviously you started that, so how do we. How do we.

You've started it, Jeff.

How do we look at the immune system? How do we modulate the immune system so that we actually start getting well and that infections bounce off us versus.

You asking for a cheat sheet like the top five. Is it that simple, Jeff, or is it.

Well, I think in some ways it distills itself down to some. Some fairly simple things. Now, implementing simple is not always simple. The concepts may be simple, but the activity in our lives may not be so simple because we have certain patterns of behavior that maybe we even enjoy that are not always consistent with getting the most out of our genes. But when I look at the immune system, and it's interesting because we started this discovery about a year before SARS CoV2. It was kind of ironic that we started down the path of saying let's spend our time really trying to understand the immune system. And the reason I was interested in that was that over my 50 years of learnings, I've come to recognize that the body speaks 24 7, 365 to the outside world with three interface systems that are constantly sampling how we are doing and where we are and how where we are is influencing our body. Those three systems are obviously the nervous system. The second is the mucosal systems of our body which sit as the linings of our airways and lungs and our skin and our Digestive tract. Those are constantly sampling the outside world every time we breathe or eat or drink. Then the third is the immune system. It turns out that the immune system is the connector between those other two systems, because the immune system resides in the highest levels in those areas of the body that are sampling the outside world, like the respiratory system and the lungs. There's. The immune system is aligning that. We know that from the spike proteins from COVID and how they stick to the epithelia and influence the immune system of our breathing, of our lungs. And we also have high levels of our immune system that's embedded within our intestinal tract for the reason that when we eat or when we drink, we're drinking foreign molecules, and we have to have some translator, which is our immune system, which 60% of it is residing within our digestive system. So when we put those together, I said, you know, the immune system, which we now recognize is in the brain, in the nervous system, it's in the liver, it's in the muscles. In fact, the immune system is everywhere. There are components of the immune system that's everywhere. I started to think maybe if we really think about upstream medicine, maybe the most upstream place is to think about the immune system. And how do we modulate the immune system? That was when we started, just about a year before sars, we started this company, Big Bowl Health, all focused on trying to understand and personalize immunity such that a person could not be a victim of their immune system, but could have some control over their immune system. Own their immune system. And then that obviously distills itself down to the question you asked. Are there some basic principles that we've learned? And the answer is yes. The more you study the immune system, the more you recognize how fascinating it is, but also how much we have yet to learn, because it is complex. But we can distill that complexity down. I always like the word simplexity. Can. Can we make something simple from complex? And when you do that, you have to be careful when you're trying to simplify that. You don't throw away the baby for the bathwater. You make it so simple that you actually lost the importance of what was in the complexity. But I think that there are some basic things that we've learned about the immune system that can be translated with pretty reasonable surety, into how we can improve people's immune system health and function. Number one is that we know that there are these three components of the immune system that have different personalities. They all interact with one another, but they have Three different personalities. One is called the innate immune system. That's our first line of defense. And it is composed of a whole different set of cells. Macrophages, monocytes, neutrophils, dendritic cells. So those particular cells then have the responsibility of being the first in line to detect things that are foreign to our body. And that's not just viruses and bacteria and fungi, but that could be chemicals that could even be toxic. Thoughts, attitudes and beliefs. I want to emphasize this because I think this concept of what we call sociobiology or psychobiology is a very, very important topic. Because I think in the past we've kind of separated what happens in our psychological behavioral world from our chemical cellular world. And so one is thoughts and the other is cellular function. Well, it turns out that these are, as we, most of us probably have learned in this field, are intimately tied together. There is no really separation of mind and body. That in fact, when you have fear, anger, rage, negative emotions, post traumatic stress, those conditions are influencing and imprinting your immune system such that it develops a memory of those experiences. Your immune system is actually cellularly changed as a consequence of imprinting, so called epigenomic imprinting of your immune system from those events. Events like great sorrow or great loss. You know, I can even recognize that in my own life and the experience I've had. And so if you then think of one of the determinants of immune function are these social determinants. Are we loved? Are we appreciated? Are we respected? Do we get support? Do we feel like we have purpose? Are we enjoying every day's living experience? Or do we feel like we're burdened by life? These effects that occur in our psychosocial world have direct impact on our cellular immune system function. And you know, it sounds like I'm painting a picture of despair because gee whiz, we all have bad experiences in our life. No one gets out of life without some traumatic experiences. Does that mean that we're on this one way ticket to bad immune systems? And I think that one of the major breakthroughs in immunological science the last decade, even less than that, is the recognition that it's a two way street, that yes, we can collect these immune scars, I'll just use that word. From both exposure to viruses, bacteria like CMV or hh, herpes simplex virus or EBV or sars, we can collect these injuries to our immune system. Or those injuries can also be from trauma, from emotional injury like traumatic stress, or it could be from chemicals like polychlorinated biphenyls or you know, the myriad of different hundred thousand new chemicals that have been interested in the environment, or toxic metals like lead, cadmium or mercury. All of those can imprint the immune system and lead to a scar. And the question is, is that a forever experience? And what has been discovered in the last 10 years of immunological research is. No, there is. There are also patterns that are in our basic capability of moving the other way of rejuvenating our immune system. It's not just a one way strict treat to immune aging immunosenescence. You can actually enlist things that will kind of cleanse these, these cells that are carrying these bad memories and start with naive cells that can be imprinted with good memories. And that is a major revolutionary breakthrough because it gives us much more recognition that we can be in control of our immune system function by the way we pattern it and how we practice good immune hygiene. And so that to me has been our focus is recognizing both how we influence the innate immune system, this first level of defense, and then the second stage of immunity, which is the one that many people are more familiar with, the adaptive immune system. That's where you have these other kinds of cells that are called the T T cells and B cells then produce a collection of substances called antibodies. These are your memory molecules that remember you've been exposed to something. That's how vaccines work or immunization, is that it activates the production of these immune cells that produce then these antibodies that then will remember you exposed. So if you get re exposed, you can mobilize, you don't have to go through the whole process again. You can activate your defense to those substances by your antibody producing cells that are present from your previous exposure. And so that leads obviously to what we call natural immunity. When people have been sick and gotten well, if their immune systems, their B cells have produced adequate level of antibodies and they last long enough to remember the experience, then you won't go through the whole process the next time, the whole process of sickness. So both the innate immune system and the adaptive immune system and their translators, which are the T lymphocyte systems, another series of immune cell types like T helper T suppressor cells, natural killer cells, T regulatory cells. These are the cell types that kind of interconvert the message between the innate system and the adaptive system. Now the good news, I've said a lot of sophisticated things there, they're probably totally confusing. But let me cut it down to something simple. It turns out that the more people have studied the effect that our basic decisions in life have. How we eat, how we live, how we think, our environment, our sleep patterns, our stress patterns, our exercise patterns, exposure to toxic molecules. The more we have studied that, the more we recognize that we can do something to rejuvenate our immune system and get rid of a lot of these bad memories, these scarred immune cells. And that's a process that has a kind of a sophisticated name. It's immune autophagy. It leads to selective kind of garbage collecting of damaged immune cells and sometimes what are called zombie cells. I think that name in itself kind of gives you the picture. These zombie cells that sit in our bodies from bad experiences and play mischief if we don't get rid of them. But fortunately, we have the processes that can get rid of them. And that's what we've been studying very extensively for the last now three plus years, is how do we activate this immunorejuvenation process to give us a clean slate from which we can then develop good memories in our immune system, not just be burdened by these bad, scarred, bad memories in our immune system.

We need to unpack this.

This is the reason why. This is Dr. Jeff Bland, I have to say, and he's dubbing it down for us.

You talked at IHS a million years ago. And I remember saying to Ed, I'm having a hard time tracking the conversation because you spoke so fast. You've actually slowed down how fast you speak because you used to speak a mile a minute and now you're speaking at a normal rate. But I'm still like struggling to catch up. So, okay, let me distill this and you tell me where I've lost the plot. There's multiple avenues of our immune system, and when you look to see the common thread, there's a common thread between how we eat, how we sleep, our thoughts, our exposures to toxins, our genetics. And when you start to improve on those, you can see the immune system rejuvenating and getting rid of the zombie cells, the senescent cells, and improving our immune system.

Yes, that's exactly. You now made it so that hopefully people can understand what I was trying to say. Thank you. Thank you.

I'm 100 word or less kind of gal, so. So, okay, so we've got that.

Well, and also I want to really impress on like that all our behaviors, not only, not only the things we eat, but really our thoughts and our beliefs really affect the immune system and therefore affect the whole body, but it and press on our immune system. So we do carry it around, which is a message that is one that I think not, not enough of us listen to and feel.

I'd like to take a step back, Jeff, and just ask, because you were talking about that these moments of immune dysregulation occur. Would someone know in the moment that something had happened that was suboptimal or sending them off in a path that was non desirable? Or is it only looking back that one can say, oh, oh, that's where my immune system really took a hit?

I think it's probably a combination of both that we have these chronic insults and then we have these major traumatic moments in our life. I'm recalling an interesting paper that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine a number of years ago. And it was a discussion about just seven patients, seven people that had this serious non remitting fatigue that they couldn't identify. And so they did all these studies on them and they finally were able to determine that the fatigue was traced back to a injury in the energy powerhouse of their cells, which are called the mitochondrion. We probably are all familiar with that. Now these are the energy producing cells and by the way, energy producing organelles that are within cells. By the way, mitochondria are very rich in immune cells because immune cells need a lot of energy to do their work. In fact, when a person is sick, over 50% of their food energy is directed towards mitochondrial activity in your immune cells. That's why you feel so tired when you're sick. You're sucking a lot of energy out into your immune system to mobilize defense against your infection. The mitochondrion are really important for energy producing and particularly for immune system function. What it was determined in these seven people is that they had sustained some mitochondrial injury. Now it turned out as I read the paper carefully, that five of the seven of these fatigue related problems way back into their infancy. And so their mitochondrial problems were probably genetic in origin because the mitochondria has its own DNA. And by the way, that DNA comes from our mother, not our father. So our, metaphorically our energy comes from.

Our mother and it is our mother's fault. Basically.

You can blame your mother. We know, we know.

Well, actually I like to give celebration to my mother because I feel my mother gave me a good legacy of energy. So I hold her in high respect that. But the, the other two in this study were interestingly different in that their fatigue didn't start until they were 40. And so I got asking the question, well, hold on just A minute. Why, why did these people seem to have this later age onset? So I was, I traced down through this, there's a big sleuthing process. And I was able to actually be introduced to one of those two people as a consequence of knowing one of the doctors involved in this research. And so I actually had a conversation with them and I. I chronicled this years ago in a series of things I did in Functional Medicine Update, actually. And he pointed out that his problem, he felt, was associated with a. A road trip he took through the Sacramento Valley when he was driving on a summer day in a convertible car in which he got caught where they were crop dusting. And he was exposed for nearly an hour to things coming from these crop dusting planes that were going over the fields. He thought this was a consequence of some kind of a exposure to a xenobiotic chemical that, that injured his mitochondria. Now, I thought that was an interesting story, but then it became much more real to me when I learned the story of Greg LeMond, the world class bike racer. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Greg LeMond, but he was the first American bike racer to be unbeatable in Tour de France and major endurance bike racing. And he had an episode when he was still at the prime of his racing. This is one of those really remarkable stories in which he was out hunting for. For birds with his brother and somehow his brother shot him with a shotgun. Seriously. And he survived. He got back to bike racing, but they couldn't get all the lead out of his body. And you know, he had so many pellets in him that they just left him. The ones in there that they felt were only not causing organ damage. And then right after that, he suddenly developed unremitting fatigue and had to retire as a bike racer. And his physician, who I also knew, really felt this whole sequelae of events of his mitochondrial injuries. And he developed what was called mitochondripathy, which was a result of being exposed to a toxic metal that poisoned his mitochondria. So if we start thinking, what I'm trying to get across here is that there are many events, some which are chronic in exposure, that could injure our immune cell activity through epigenetic modification of our genetics within our immune cell, or could injure our mitochondrial DNA and the ability of our energy production in immune cells. Or there could be acute episodes that have rapid onset, so it could be a slow accumulation process like many people have in their lives of chronic fatigue and chronic dysfunction. It didn't just come overnight. It occur and they can't examine actually it's hard to remember all the things that happened to us over years. They've been eating less than ideal diets. They've been living a life of burning the candle at both ends. They've not been getting good sleep and just slowly they're starting to erode their resilience as they accumulate these immune scars. I think that was a long winded answer to your question. But I think it's a combination of what I call the total load effect that many people don't understand how they got there. They just know they got there. They wake up, they're tired in the morning, wired and tired. They go through the day kind of dragging themselves, hoping they can make it to the end. They go to try to go to bed but they're not sleeping well. And then it becomes a dog chasing his tail. It becomes worse and worse. But I can say now after 30 years in this field that these are reversible. They require doing different things, practicing different lifestyles, committing yourself to a program. It doesn't happen overnight. It generally takes at least three months to start changing your biochemistry. So you have to stick with it. It's not like taking a pill and getting an immediate like an antibiotic against an infection. You've got to stick with it. And that's our whole immuno rejuvenation program. We've been, we've been working on Amazing.

And I hate to say this but we have to complete just to honor your time and thank you so much.

Is there other than Big Bold Health, are there any other ways that people, you would want people to reach you or look you up?

They can go to jeffreybland.com J F F R A Y B L a n d.com that has all my videos from years past. Or they can go if they're, if they're really interested in digging deep into the more professional side of my life. It's, it's PLM, the letters plminstitute.org that's the personal Life Lifestyle Medicine Institute where we do educational programs every year, virtual programs that are free of charge that we then catalog on that website. There's more news to use about immune rejuvenation there from the experts in the world that we've interviewed than probably anywhere. So those would be the three places you can find. Find me hanging out.

Amazing. Thank you so much. And it's been a true, true privilege and hopefully we'll get you back and talk. Dive deeper, dive even deeper.

Yeah.

So thank you Jeff, from the bottom of our hearts. Thank you for being on this episode of the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast Live like you matter for the listeners. You got to listen to this man and follow him. All of the links will be in the show notes and if you enjoyed this, please post a five star review paid forward. Thanks, Jeff. Have an amazing day.

You too. Both of you. Thanks a million. Bye. Bye.

Don't go it alone.

It's not a social journey until others join.

Share this with your friends.