Rejuvenate Your Immune Health, with Dr. Jeffrey Bland

Foreign. Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Five Journeys podcast.

Live.

Like you matter. Our guest today is Dr. Jeffrey Bland.

So it's the Dr. Jeffrey, right?

The father of functional medicine. No pressure, Jeff, but like, no kidding.

Yeah, right.

Dr. Bland 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 Conquering the Causes of Chronic Illnesses Illness for a Healthier, Longer and Happier Life. And he's been 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, don't. 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 worked put together and truthfully, the lives they. I'm 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 listening to your weekly.

What?

I forgot what they were called, but they were. I. I was listening to on CDs Functional Medicine Update. Yes, 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, let's, but let's go back, let's go backward 50 years. You're starting your career. What has you say, I'm going into this branch of unnamed focus because it wasn't named functional medicine. Like what, how'd you do that? What was that moment where you were like, there's something here, I need to pursue this?

Well, I think there's a couple of similar events in my life. You know, I, I think that for all of us, life is what happens in between our plans. And so I was, I was, 50 years ago, I was a professor of chemistry, actually of biochemistry. Obviously I was 27 years old 50 years ago. And my objective was to do a good job teaching and research and have a great family, had a couple of sons, my wife and I at that point and to hopefully be good at what I was doing and helping students to get some knowledge about this field and, and move to the next level in their career aspirations. But what happened was, I think a couple of major events. The principal event was that on a morning that I'll never forget, not to be overly dramatic about this, our new son, who is four months old, so it would have been our third son, died in the night unexpectedly and I was the first person to find him in the morning. And I don't think there's any event that a person can have in their life that's more shape shifting than, than that. And I, I don't want to make it bigger than it is, but it was a life changer to say the least. And I think what happened to me was at that moment I decided that if I could help one set of parents or one child to avoid this outcome, it would be a life well served. So what it did is it opened me up to all sorts of questions that I probably would not have been asking if I would have followed the straight track of my background in training as a, as a biochemist. I started to really search widely for all sorts of things that were not in the curriculum that I had had, nor probably most of my colleagues. And I was very fortunate that I met once I opened my heart and mind to looking at different things that were going on in the area of healthcare to all sorts of remarkable leaders. And I think from then on I was and have continued to be set on an exploration as to how I can best serve other individuals by Collaborating with people to find the best solutions to the underlying cause of dysfunction. And it was not so much in the name of what we call it, the diagnosis, it was in what does, where did it come from? What was the cause? Is there a way that we can move upstream and treat the cause and not just the effect to prevent these downstream things that we consider life threatening diseases? And I think it's very interesting when you use that model and thinking to go up to what we're all experiencing globally with the SARS CoV2 pandemic, because we've learned that in the United States, being this highly developed country with extraordinary medical technology, that actually the seriousness of that SARS CoV2 infection, moving into COVID19 disease and life threatening hospitalization, intubation and even death was more serious in this country than other developed countries. And it begged the question why? Was it because of our genes? No, we're a polygenetic population, so we can't say it's strictly a genetic condition. We have to recognize that it's related to upstream effects, related to our immune system's health and vitality and function, and that we were already suffering from a epidemic of poor quality health as evidenced by an immune system culturally that was not as well off as we thought. And now we laid on top of it as SARS CoV2 and then the results were what we witnessed. So I think this concept of going upstream to ask the question why became a driving force for me for the last 50 years and certainly sent me on a path that ultimately. Now I can't believe when I say this, but I. I've had the privilege, I guess I would say, of traveling over 6 million miles in my last 50 years, visiting with all sorts of leaders around the world. And I think what I am, is I'm. I'm not sure I've ever come up with an original idea of my own, but I think I'm pretty good at assembling and putting together a mosaic, a piece puzzle, kind of architect of all these conversations and people I've been influenced by, including Having worked for two years on sabbatical for two time Nobel Prize winner Dr. Linus Pauling, who gave me the great gift to encourage me to actually leave academia and to start this journey in a new territory I would have never expected, which has ultimately led to the formation of the Institute for functional medicine in 1990. So that's an encapsulation of a lot of stuff over 50 years for me.

Truly life changing.

What do you say to that?

No, what you start with is, I'm so sorry for your loss because I'm sure that there are times when you say, oh, he would have been or so it never leaves you. So of course it's life changing and matters, but it also brought you where you are now.

Yes, my wife and I, and my oldest son thinks that he remembers this experience. He was very young at the time and. But he thinks he remembers we. His name was Kurt and we. We celebrate his birthday every year. And it's. It is still to this day, kind of a living legacy of am I making good on this promise that I committed to, you know, some 50 years ago? So it. Yeah, he actually would be 51 this year. So it's, you know, it's all. It's all part of what I guess you'd say epigenetically marks us into what we become.

Yeah. Yeah.

So.

All right.

So. Yeah, I didn't mean to be heavy here. No, no, no. It's.

It's. It's a heart.

I don't want to step over that.

The heart.

And I'm just.

Well, I'm just. From my point of view, you touched on everything. Everything. But. But you touched on how this country is not quote, unquote well, and how an infection really sent us back way further than a lot of other countries. And everybody. That's my Wendy, myself, anybody in the functional medicine world, were all fighting to the good fight to actually look at how do we 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.

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

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. 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. And 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. And then the third is the immune system. And 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 lining 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 Bold 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 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, and 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. I can even recognize that in my own life and the experience that 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 the myriad of different 100,000 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 cleanse 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. The 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 defenses 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.

All right, we need to unpack this.

And this is the reason why. This is Dr. Jeff Bland, I have to say, and he's WD for us.

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 overall.

He hasn't even talked about how do we fix it yet?

Okay, but did I get the basics?

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

I'm a hundred 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 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. Off of our system? And that's immune rejuvenation.

Right.

All right, so we're waiting with the breath.

Hit me.

Okay. Fortunately, as is most always the case, if we ask the question right, nature will provide the answer. Nature has this instant 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. It's not a religion. It's. 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 have not, we didn't previously understand. And so this concept of immunorejuvenation has been there all the time. I mean, 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 There Was a. 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, 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, well, 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. 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 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. 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 100,000 or more new immune cells every, every second. So 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? And 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. So that's time restricted feeding and fasting, mimicking kind of 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 cofactors 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 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, I think, 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. So 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.

Wow, that's a cool factoid.

Let that sink in for a second. So 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 system. 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, diasmin. There's a whole family of them and they participate in extraordinarily important ways in this immunorejuvenation process. They actually trigger immune optophagy 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, the so called phytochemicals, phyto, meaning plant derived chemicals that are in these plants. 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 2500 years, probably as much as 3,3000 years, that came from the foothills of the Himalayan mountains called Himalayan tartary buckwheat. And 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's 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 100 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. 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.

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 Tatarticum 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 the 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 simulating 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 2,000 years ago.

I'd like to take a step back, Jeff, and just ask, because you were talking about that, 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, then we have these major traumatic moments in our life that. You know, 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 have 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, 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. And what it was determined in these seven people is that they had sustained some kind of 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, 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.

So it is our mother's fault. Basically.

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

Well, I actually I like to give celebration to my mother because I feel my mother gave me a good legacy of energy. So I, I, I hold her in high respect for that. But the, the other two in this study were interestingly different in that they're Fatigue didn't start until they were 40. 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 was 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. I chronicled this years ago in a series of things I did in Function 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 over 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 exposure to a xenobotic chemical 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 Lamond, 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, 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 mitochondriopathy, 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 and 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 occurred over years. 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. So I. I think it's. 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 its 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 immunorejuvenation program we've been. We've been working on. So I want.

Now I want to go back because. Just because your wealth of information, I think I could easily.

I said last night, Jeff, oh, we're interviewing Jeff tomorrow. And that's kind of like that line from Dirty Dancing where it's like an hour with Jeff Bland is like sticking baby in the corner where.

Right.

So we're like, nobody talks to Jeff for just an hour. Like, we're gonna just scratch the surface here.

So not even the skating. So I just want to kind of make sure. Because we're talking about the injury, but I really. Because we're on our. The other side and have limited time, I really want to make sure to emphasize what we can do to reverse it, because I really want to go to that. So we talked about intermittent fasting. We talked about fasting, mimicking diet.

We talked about sleep hygiene.

Sleep hygiene and exercise with that. Obviously, the food is really important, the movement, exercise.

So what I. What I would say is that 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, like, I would say, Himalayan tartery, buckwheat, that kind of boost the autophagy process and increase the immune renewal, immune system renewal. 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 trial. 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 tartery 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. And 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.

So you went exactly where I want to go, which is if you do ingest, I'm gonna say this right. Himalayan, Tartary, Buckwheat. Is that right?

Right.

Okay. I just won't say three times fast. All right, so it's not. First of all, most of us don't have access to it in terms of food supplements.

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

Yeah.

And how do. How do we. Is it only a cat? 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 word is in the title is that it's from the Tartan district of China, which is the. This 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 recognized that we need to re. Reintroduce this. 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 Bold Health on Amazon or you can find Big Bold Health on our website, bigwellhealth.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.

No, it'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'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 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.

I know we have to be done.

But should anyone not take it?

Is there any country we haven't found? Again, I would say that 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, 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 and time to improvement.

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

About three months. And 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. So 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 bigbold health.com we have podcasts we've got probably more information about than anyone ever wants, but it's all there. By the way, there are over well over 400 research papers that have been published on Himalayan tartary buckwheat. Most of it is from the Asian literature because it's been used as a food, as a medicinal food. Food is medic and 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 I have to ask this question because I know you're very sensitive to this kind of thing. But whenever you move a plant from growing a plant in the Himalayas to New York, I'm assuming because of who you are, you've tested and made sure. And it's the same nutrients, the properties.

I am so excited that you asked that question. Thank you. That is so prescient, that question. So we, we were concerned about that. We have a independent lab that's doing the phytochemical profile analysis of every batch that we produce. Every. We're into our third, just finished. Our third season will be our doing our fourth planning come April this year. And we've been able to demonstrate through our phytochemical profiling that we're in actually, we. We actually label it on the bag. We're the only product of its type that actually labels the phytochemical level in our products. But more than that, to address your question, we are so fortunate because we have a soil scientist, Dr. Emily Reese, who got her PhD at Cornell in ag science, who is our soil steward, and she is working on our farms. When I say our farms, I really should say these are farms by organic farmers that have been farming for over 30 years organically. So I, I'm kind of. I'm not a farmer. I'm just a piecemeal involved with this and in trying to help them in ways we can. But she is just completed this last season. What I think is a really interesting study. It's a field trial in which we inoculated different field strips of the same seed. The Himalayan Tertiary Buckwheat seek. Obviously, we have to grow our own seed. You can't buy this at the market. But we inoculated each of the soil types with different mycorrhizal inoculants to see if we could improve the health of the soil and if the health of the soil had anything to do with the level of phytochemicals in the plant. There's a whole story here about that. Plants have their own immune system and soils have their. And they're all interrelated. So to cut to the chase, we were very excited when we did the harvest of the different field trials and then did the analysis that the field strips that we inoculated with a specific blend of mycorrhizae did in fact increase the phytochemical levels in the already high Himalayan Tartary buckwheat. So we have produced a, a super Himalayan tartery buckwheat outcome by attending to the health of the soil, which is a really exciting part of the story. So we are involved with regenerative kind of organic agriculture in the production of. This is a cover crop that on the off, off season, then it's a nitrogen fixing crop, so it produces nitrogen. So it has all these really desirable benefits to the land. This is.

Amazing and I, 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 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.

And I would love it. You two are, you're awesome. You're. You're treasure trove. 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 see brains and joking go both ways. It's a good.

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 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, Sam.