Rejuvenate Your Immune Health, with Dr. Jeffrey Bland

We now have shown by molecular genetics that these interventions have very, very positive effects on reduction of immune aging. These are probably the best medicine that we'll ever have if we harness the magic of nature.

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Hello and welcome to this episode of the Five Journeys podcast. Live like youe 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 and 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.

So our behavior is 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 impress on our immune system. So we do carry it around, which is a message that is one that I think not enough of us listen to and feel.

So now I'm wondering how Alice can shrug. Right? This is the whole. We're just burdened by all of the things that we've experienced. How do we get those off of our system? And that's immune rejuvenation. Right.

Okay. Fortunately, as is most always the case, if we ask the question right, nature will provide the answer. Nature has this infinite wisdom that often we don't fully tap into. And, you know, when I think of science, what is science really let's specifically talk about health sciences. But it could be related to any kind of science, physical science or social science or biological science. What it's trying to do is understand nature. We're not trying to design or think about something that doesn't already exist. We're trying to understand the complexity of nature. Nature is infinitely wise. And so science is there. It's a tool, right? It's not a religion, it's not a panacea. It is a tool to allow us to interrogate this mysterious infinite wisdom of nature and then to find out parts of the puzzle. We do it a step at a time over human history that we can hopefully mobilize to be more in concert with what nature has that we didn't previously understand. This concept of immunorejuvenation has been there all the time. It's not like suddenly it emerged out of nowhere. We are just having an extraordinary revolution in the understanding of how the immune system works, probably as a consequence of two major events that have influenced global culture. The first I lived through in the 80s when I was at the Pauling Institute, and that was HIV aids. I was in San Francisco at the time. And that's a whole experience that has some similarity actually, to this social pathology that we saw with COVID And then the Post, if you recall, in the early 90s coming out of HIV AIDS in the 80s, was chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, which were like the post, something like we see with Long Haul Syndrome now with COVID And so it led this scar in the immune system. It wasn't just hiv, it was other viruses that were associated with this whole period of time that were associated with people's immune systems that then resulted in a legacy that's been now since the late 80s, early 90s. So now we're talking 30 plus years of what we call chronic fatigue syndrome. And as you recall back early medical experts completely rejected the concept that this was a real condition. They called it a psychosomatic illness that people just were having bad days or something that was causing this chronic fatigue and the Desert Storm syndrome and the multiple chemical sensitivities and all those things were just all in the mind. But over the years, once again, we've recognized, once we understand the infinite wisdom of nature a little bit more, that our immune system was actually modified as a consequence of those exposures, and that there are ways of actually rejuvenating our immune system. What happens to be the same types of things that we now are learning relearning with SARS COV2 and COVID19 long haul that the same type of things are useful for, for this condition, for rejuvenating the immune system. The advantage is, however, now we have the benefit of more than 30 years of immunological research. If you recall, when HIV AIDS started, we didn't even fully understand T helpers and T suppressor cells. So there was just a huge advance in understanding immunology. It wasn't that the immune system was suddenly changing. It was our ability to understand the immune system was starting to completely change its, its position. So now in the 21st century, we have the advantage of genomics and epigenomics, which we did not have in the 20th century, where we start to be able to interrogate with much more precision how our immune system actually carries these factors in its. What is called its epigenetics. And epigenetics means it's modified the way that our genes are expressed into our immune system function is modified by putting marks on the genes. These are the epigenetic marks that come as a consequence of experiences that we've had. Some of these marks are what are called methyl groups. This is methylation of the genes of the immune system. That methylation of the genes of the immune system alters the way the genes then are expressed in those immune cells. And they remember that experience such that they're now in a distressed state. They're in what is called a chronic inflammatory state. It's been actually termed inflammaging, that you're in this chronic simmering inflammation state because your immune system is remembering these bad experiences and it's perpetuating that now, until you do something to take charge, which is immunorejuvenation, which is the other thing that we're learning. So how do you initiate immunorejuvenation? Well, it turns out, once again, as we have learned more about the immune system, we've also learned more about how to modify that balance between an aging immune cell and a younger immune cell. And it turns out that some of the most important things that do that are things in our daily life. Da, da. Big, marvelous discovery. So let's go down the list. This is in, by the way, no necessary order priority. I'm just giving kind of a landscape of things that we've learned, one that we have, I think, learned more and more about. And I think it's a very, very important discovery because it helps us to understand the importance of timing and rhythms. And this comes through the work of people like Dr. Valter Longo at USC and Dr. Sachananda Panda at Salk Institute in California around when we eat, the circadian rhythms of eating, what they have found. I'm going to summarize here and be a little simplistic. So I apologize to Dr. Longo and Dr. Panda. I may be overly simplifying, but what we have learned is that our immune system needs rest from constant exposure to stuff we eat. If we're eating all the time and eating funny things that are not so good for our immune system, and I'll talk about what they are in a half a second, then our immune system never gets a chance to rest and it collects these injuries and it never gets a chance to have the time to activate immunorejuvenation to cleanse those injuries, those epigenetic injuries. What did Longo and Dr. Sandhya tell us? They talked about time restricted feeding, they talked about fasting, mimicking, dieting to give our immune system a rest. So they have shown with really good studies, first in animals and now more recently in humans, that you can actually cleanse your immune marks, your immune injuries, by not eating for a period of at least 12 hours from the last meeting meal you eat in the day until the first food you eat the next day. I like to think 14 hours is actually better. So that has sometimes been called time restricted feeding, or it could be called fasting, mimicking some time of arrest of your immune system that gives it the proper advantage to activate these processes of autophagy that then use up those and clean up those damaged cells in a process of rejuvenation to give room and space for the new naive cells. By the way, most people don't know this, but every second we are making somewhere on the range of 100 or, or 100,000 or more new immune cells. Every second our body is constantly replenishing our immune cell reservoir with naive new cells. The question is, can it replace it faster than it's collecting damaged cells? What happens for a lot of people with an immune system that's not as healthy as it could be, is that they're still collecting damage faster than they're making new. And when that occurs, we're in a net state of immune senescence, inflammaging. So if you can lower the rate of damage by not throwing a bunch of stuff in your body for 12 to 14 hours and increase the rate of cleansing, which is autophagy, during that same period, now you are net neutral. More new immune system and less old immune system, and that's rejuvenation, that's Time restricted, feeding and fasting, mimicking concepts. Next is, okay, so what are you eating? When you are eating, does that have any effect on your immune system? And yes, a huge effect and one that we are learning with greater and greater understanding are foods that activate post eating high blood sugar levels, foods that activate what are called glycemic responses. Now, why is that important? Well, it turns out if you. Again, I'll go back to what we've learned about COVID We learned that there are certain comorbidities or co factors that are associated with an increasing risk to the seriousness of COVID One of those is type 2 diabetes. Another is obesity. Another is inflammation. All of those are related to bad diets that increase blood sugar. So high sugar diets, high comp, refined carbohydrate diets are those that trigger a series of processes that are associated with immune cell aging. I could go through the mechanism a lot that could be discussed here, but let's just simplify it by saying you want to eat a diet that has a low blood sugar response, flattens your blood sugar. Now, most people have heard about A1C. It's being advertised. Now get your A1C low. What is A1C? A1C is a form of hemoglobin, which we all know about. Hemoglobin, which is in our red blood cells that carries iron and oxygen, that a form of hemoglobin that's undergone injury as a consequence of too much sugar in your blood produces A1C. A1C is what we would call a surrogate marker for the mischief that sugar is having in your body. It's not just having it on hemoglobin, it's having it on all your proteins, including the proteins that occupy your immune system. When you have high A1C. That is a surrogate marker for injury to your immune system as well as to other cells in your body. So we want to smooth our blood sugar curves, eat a low glycemic diet, higher fibers, more unprocessed plant based foods. The next thing we've learned is we want to give our body a rest by good sleep. Because not only would we like to be fasting at night, but we would like to be using all the restorative processes that occur when we activate the circadian rhythms of sleep. And so sleep hygiene is a very, very important tool and that ties itself together with, okay, get some activity during the day, because when you have more activity, you're more sleepy and you have more restful sleep. So don't be sedentary You've got to move around, you've got to stand up. Maybe you need to wear one of these biometric devices like a garment or an apple watch or a ring or something that reminds you that you've been sitting too long. You need to get up and move around. Because even routine walking programs of an hour a day have been shown to improve sleep, lower blood sugar, improve immune function. You don't have to be a marathon runner. So, you know, these are some of the things that we have learned. Now let's go to one that I think is kind of an aha. Turns that our gut microbiome, all those lovely intestinal critters that live down in our South 40 that we don't want to think about, of which there are more, more of those cells in our intestinal tract than there are by several orders of magnitude than there are cells in our whole body. And they are all different named organisms over hundreds of different types of microorganisms. They break themselves down into three categories. They can be either friendly, which we call symbiotic, they can be kind of neutral, which we call commensal, and they can be so unfriendly that we call parasitic. Now, in a really healthy microbiome, what you will find is that the vast majority, 90% plus actually more like 98% of those organisms that live in the gut are either friendly or neutral. Only a very small percent are parasitic. By the way, just a little factoid, in one gram of stool there are more bacteria than there are stars in the known universe. You have a lot of personality going on in your intestinal tract. And by the way, that personality of those organisms are directly speaking to your immune system in your intestinal tract. That's sitting right on the mucosal cells of your intestine. Remember I talked about the innate immune. So they're cross talking. So if you have a lot of friendly bacteria, they're sending friendly messages to your immune system. If you have a microbiome that has a lot of the, what I call Class 3 bacteria, the parasitic bacteria, they're producing caustic hostile molecules like lipopolysaccharides and others that we could name that are causing your immune system to be alarmed, saying we better get ready for a fight, and that produces inflammation, that produces immune aging. So your microbiome and what you feed it is really important. So that's again where soluble fibers are really important because they get broken down into short chain fatty acids that are helpful for nourishing the friendly bacteria. We Know that now polyphenols and flavonoids in a plant food diet extraordinarily important for re establishing proper microbiome. And it turns out that there's one family of polyphenols or flavonoids that appear to be very, very valuable. And those are members of the flavanol and flavonoid family, the flavones. These have names like rutin, quercetin, hesperidin, lodeolin, diosmin. There's a whole family of them and they participate in extraordinarily important ways in this immunorejuvenation process. They actually trigger immune on topology of damaged cells and regenerate or renourish proper, naive fresh immune cells. So it's not just eating plants alone, it's eating the right kind of plants that have the right kind of these messenger molecules that are present in them, what so called phytochemicals, phyto, meaning plant derived chemicals that are in these. Look at the data that's been published over the last five years on the Mediterranean diet. It's very, very interesting. We say, oh, the Mediterranean diet, that's really good for lowering your blood sugar and for reducing the risk of type 2 diabetes or pre diabetes. That's true. But go farther into the literature and what you find is that that Mediterranean diet is associated also with improving immune system function. Why? Because the Mediterranean diet is very high in these polyphenols I've been mentioning these flavonoids that are involved with autophagy. And you can boost that effect by putting certain foods into the Mediterranean diet that kind of boost the autophagy process and increase the immune renewal, immune system renewal. And that's what led us just to close out this little soliloquy. I'm going on and on here, I apologize. But the last part of it is that's what led us by a series of serendipity events to discover an ancient food that had been consumed by humans for over 2,500 years, probably as much as 3,3000 years, that came from the foothills of the Himalayan mountains, called Himalayan tartary buckwheat. It turns out that this was a really important food even in colonial America. It was brought over by our colonial ancestors because it's so hardy, doesn't require pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer, it doesn't have to be irrigated. It really likes bad soils, bugs don't like it. And it was a principal food for our colonial ancestors. It somehow got lost about 200 years ago and has not been grown in the United States nor consumed in the United States for a hundred sub years. And we kind of rediscovered it as a consequence of some interesting coincidences. And believe it or not, as my enthusiasm for this grew, I'm now in organic farming of Himalayan tartary buckwheat. We're the first producers. We have farms up in upstate New York and Artisanal Miller in Trumansburg, New York, that we are for the first time producing organic Himalayan tartary buckwheat in America. So this has been all part of this learning how do you implement immunorejuvenation at a level that people can do something about?

That's very cool.

I'm laughing, Jeff, because Ed signed up for some buckwheat bread delivery and I said, what fresh hell are you subjecting us to? I hope it tastes good. And now, coincidentally, you're talking about a different strain. Obviously it's not the same, but, but we were primed to be psyched about buckwheat, or at least you were.

Well, you know this just to quickly tell you that the common buckwheat that we most are familiar with in America, which is escalatum species, is really a good food. And I, I don't want to say anything negative about it because it has very high levels of these immune active phytochemicals. But this, this tarticum strain that we've been working with that came from the Himalayan mountain region, that strain has 50 to 100 times not percent 50 to 100 times higher levels of immune strengthening phytochemicals as does common buckwheat. So it's like a super, super immune active. In fact, I don't know of any plant food that has higher levels of these immune active phytochemicals than the Himalayan Tertiary buckwheat, which is probably why it's such a, it goes all the way back to the yellow handbook in China in traditional Chinese medicine as a medicinal food over 2000 years ago. In fact, just to give you my why I'm confident in saying this, we just finished, I would call it a pilot trial. 50. This was a Clintrials.gov approved clinical intervention tr the trial is now completed. We've just had over a terabyte of data in which we were measuring in these people before and after. These were presumably healthy people. But we know what that means is they have probably some margin that they could improve their health if they got on the right program, meaning they're not diseased. And we all know that health is more than the absence of disease. So we have these 50 individuals, men and women, about 60% women, 40% men in the group, average age about 47, I believe. And they went on to this Himalayan tartary buckwheat polyphenol mixture over the course of three months, just three months. And we measured their immune cell epigenetics using a very interesting, specialized genetic and analytical tool we have that has over 90,000 gene sites on it that we can interrogate. And these are 90,000 what are called CPG sites. What we were able to find is that those individuals that had immune aging to start off with, meaning the age of their immune system was greater than their age and birthdays, in some cases considerably older, more than 15 years older, that when they were put on this program, we were able to demonstrate statistically significant reduction in their immune aging by the alteration in their immune epigenome at those places that led them to have a rejuvenated immune potential. And that was statistically significant at a very high level. So we now have shown by molecular genetics that these interventions with the kind of compounds you find with plant foods that are rich in the Mediterranean diet have very, very positive effects on reduction of immune aging. So that to me is kind of cell biology proof of what we see in the whole organism. And we now have a mechanistic kind of proof of concept that these things that we're doing are not just trivial. These are probably the best medicine that we'll ever have if we harness the magic of nature.

No, that's amazing. Will people actually feel a difference? Or do. Have you seen, anecdotally, without studies like, do people feel a difference when they take it?

Yeah, that's. We've been doing quite a bit of work on what, what's called the feeling state, mental clarity, sleep patency, energy levels, mood. We've gotten some really great responses that it improves mood, it makes people feel more alert, it, it improves sleep, both quality and duration, and it flattens blood sugar curves. We just did a, a continuous glucose monitoring study showing how it actually has a very favorable effect on flattening blood sugar. So even though it has complex carbohydrate in it, because it's not a grain based material, it actually has a lowering effect because of the soluble fiber. It's very high in some unique soluble fibers like two deoxyglucose and some of the interesting fibers that are known to be favorable for the microbiome and lowering.

Blood sugar, should anyone not take it. Is there any contraindication?

I've yet to find a Food that every human being on the planet is tolerate of. There is all this unique difference among individuals, but in people that have a lot of sensitivities, we found very favorable response to this as a carbohydrate source in their diet. So I'm feeling it has a high acceptability. But I wouldn't want to say every human being there probably is always the exception to the rule.

What time do people generally need to take it for until they see an improvement?

About three months. We have this food lab, the so called Bibwell Health Food Lab. And I was so fortunate that the people that elected to stick with me in this project have been working with me for over 20 years. I've got a whole nutrition group that have been part of my group for 20 years that are totally dedicated to this whole developing recipes, menu plans, food guides. You can find that on the website bigbolt health.com we have podcasts, we've got probably more information about than anyone ever wants. But it's all there there. By the way, there are over well over 400 research papers that have been published on, on Himalayan Tartary, Buckwheat. Most of it is from the Asian literature because it's, it's been used as a food and as a medicinal food. Food is medicine for centuries in Asia. So it is. There's a lot of remarkable stuff out there about the important role that it has in human health.

So it's not. First of all, most of us don't have access to it in terms of as a food supplement.

Wait, that's my next question. How do we get access to it?

How do, how do we. Is it only a, is it a supplement? Is it, do we get it as a food?

It's. First of all, let me, let me just say a couple of things, Tartary. The reason that that word is in the title is that it's from the Tartan district of China, which is the, this Himalay Himalayan district. So that's the Tartan district. And this is the northern Tartan district, which is Himalayan, which is the highest of the levels of these polyphenols that I mentioned in flavonoids. And the name Buckwheat is a little bit misleading because when you put wheat in a word, you start thinking it must be a grain, it must be a cereal and it must have gluten. This is not a cereal, it's not a grain, it's a fruit seed and it has no gluten. I don't even know how the word buckwheat Got stuck on these plants. It's like a bad legacy. They're not wheat at all. They have no genetic relationship to grains at all. So now where do you get it? Well, that's why I became a farmer because I recognize that we need to reintroduce this product, the American food supply. And so you can buy it as a, as a flower, you can buy it as a supplement, concentrated. You can buy it as a, as a shake mix. You can buy it as a microbiome rejuvenating substance. That's all part of what we have done with Big Bold Health. And you can find Big World Health on Amazon or you can find Big Bold Health on our website, bigwell health.com this is my advocacy. You know, I didn't need another job, I didn't need another company, but I did need to do something with all of what I've learned over the last 40 years to kind of pass the baton. And so that's, that's what we're trying to do with Big Bold Health.

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 personalized 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.

I would love it. You two are, you're awesome. You're, you're treasure trove. You, you got this down, you've got your stick down very, very well. I love it.

Yeah, well, he's the brains and I'm the joker, so it all works well.

So I, I see that brains and joking go both ways. It's a good, good synergy. Yeah.

So thank you Jeff, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you for being on this episode of the Five Journeys 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 en post a five star review, pay it forward. Thanks Jeff. Have an amazing day.

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

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