Dr. Mark Hyman: Coming up on this episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Now people say, but if I took all the flavonase out
Dr. Mark Hyman: of the diet, I wouldn’t get
Dr. Jeff Bland: a deficiency disease. I wouldn’t get scurvy, very, very plaque or 0 family cholesterol and rasmus. So, you know, how do I know that they’re useful? We know they’re useful because of years of lack of consumption you will have a rising tide of all chronic diseases that are associated with inflammation.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Are you ready to prioritize wellness? Maybe you wanna make more informed choices on the latest health trends or simply understand the science. I’m doctor Mark Hyman. I’m a wellness expert, and I wanna welcome you to my podcast health hacks. In every episode, I’ll provide guidance on how to live a longer healthier life.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Helping you way through all the health ads and the sound bites to bring you the science back facts, along with practical tools and insights to make informed decisions. Health hacks is available in audio and video, so you can tune in wherever and however you enjoy your guests. Join me every Tuesday for a new episode. Just search for health hacks where my goal is to empower you to live well. Now before we jump into today’s episode, I’d like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice, there’s simply not enough time for me to do this scale.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And that’s why I’ve been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand. Well, you, if you’re looking for data about your biology, check out function health for real time lab insights. And if you’re in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, well, check out my membership community, Doctor Hyman Plus, And if you’re looking for curated trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website doctor hyman.com for my website store and a summary of favorite and thoroughly tested products. Welcome to doctor’s pharmacy. I’m doctor Mark Hyman, farmers gonna have a place for conversations that matter.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And if you’re worried about your immune system, which we all should be in the aftermath of COVID, we should be very interested in a top called immuno rejuvenation. That’s a topic that is explained by no one better than doctor Jeffrey Bland, who’s my mentor, grandfather of functional medicine, an incredible brilliant genius. I think without him, I would not be alive or who I am. He’s the founder of Big Bolt Health, a company that’s transforming the way people think about the immune system. He advocates through big, both health for the power of something called immunorejuvenation to enhance immunity at a global level by building a network of small farms and suppliers throughout the United States that take a clear stance on regenerative agriculture, environmental stewardship, planetary help.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Now Doctor Bland has an incredible career that spans more than 40 years. I personally think he should win the Nobel Prize for his understanding of the human body and his ability to communicate what he learned from being a hoover for all the real scientific research. You had more scientific papers than anybody I’ve ever met, and he probably ruined the Nobel Prize for coming up with framework of functional medicine. He’s an attritional biochemist by training. He began academia as a university professor has spent 3 decades in the natural products industry.
Dr. Mark Hyman: He and his wife Susan founded the Institute for Functional Medicine, and I’ve been on the board of that for years, was the chairman of the board for many years. In 2012, he founded the personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute. He’s the author of many books, including the disease delusion, conquering the cause of chronic illness for a healthier, longer happier life. I encourage you to read that. Foundational book for functional medicine, and he’s written lots of books and many, many research papers.
Dr. Mark Hyman: So let’s dive right in with Doctor. Jeffrey Bland. What I love about Jeff is that he’s he’s not someone who’s just kind of made a discovery and had a certain perspective and kinda rested on his laurels, He’s constantly learning and growing and understanding things in new ways and hoovering up the scientific literature, assimilating it synthesizing it and then translating it for us, which is amazing. So without Jeff, I wouldn’t have been able to do what I do. I owe my health, my life, and my life’s purpose to Jeff.
Dr. Mark Hyman: So without you, I, I don’t know what I would be doing. I’d probably be like in a nursing home. So, Jeff, welcome to The Doctor’s Farmacy.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Thank you, Mark. Looking forward to this discussion with great enthusiasm.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah. We we’ve we’ve done this before on the podcast. And today, I wanna dive into, a number of topics and have a broad ranging discussion around some of the emerging concepts in the field of of health, nutrition, the immune system, metabolism, and talk about some concepts that really we haven’t talked about before. Things like immunometabolism, which I don’t even know if I haven’t ever heard of before until I started preparing for this podcast And, and, and talk about some of the, you know, big contributions of functional medicine that you highlighted in air talk. Now we’re here at the annual international conference or functional medicine in Las Vegas.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Don’t know why we’re in Las Vegas exactly, except the debtor here. And I think some of us wanted to go to the dead shows. At the sphere. So, you know, in your talk, you you did this beautiful summation of what are the kind of seminal contributions of the thinking of functional medicine to the field of medicine and healing that have been made over the last 30 years. And and I’d like you to just kind of kind of summarize, and actually just talk a little bit about each one of them.
Dr. Mark Hyman: That’s GI restoration, metabolic detox, mitochondrial resuscitation and immuno rejuvenation. These are 4 big things that aren’t taught in medical school. That have profound impact on our health that are now being recognized as fundamental to most diseases, and especially with the 1,000,000,000 of dollars flowing into JEMD research space. We’re seeing scientists now discover what they call the hallmarks of aging. One of the fundamental things that go wrong as we age that aren’t inevitable, but that are identifications of dysfunction that can be modified and reversed.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And so, so can you maybe just sort of start with with the the first one, and which is the GI restoration as a concept. And maybe give a little history of, of sort of how this came to be, because were one of the first people to ever talk about the gut, and we talked about it in functional medicine before there was even a term in the microbiome.
Dr. Jeff Bland: So I think it’s really interesting, isn’t it, to ask where the origin of ideas come from? Because there are very few ideas that came out of nothing. They They were built around other perceptions and and development of, an ideology that some people latched on to, and then they evolved. So when I was sent this cover from a syllabus that I did for a doctor’s seminar in 1985, and reminded that I had done a seminar on inflammation focusing on the gut, dysbiosis, leaky gut, in endotoxinia. Yeah.
Dr. Jeff Bland: I thought to myself, well, I didn’t just come up with that. I mean, that that was around And I just embodied that information into that, that course. And then I took that course around the country, and I introduced it to people that have receptive minds to the concept. That concept that the gut plays a principal role goes way way back to Egyptian medicine to Galonistic medicine. It has been a fundamental, you know, Hippocratic principle disease starts in the gut.
Dr. Jeff Bland: It’s the foundation of natural medicines of many different cultures. And in fact, The winner of the 1901 Nobel Prize in Medicine And Physiology, who was that?
Dr. Mark Hyman: Eli mentioned a copy.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Bingo, he gets the award for that. So, and what I’m
Dr. Mark Hyman: a good student.
Dr. Jeff Bland: What was his discovery? So Eli Metznikoff took over the past year Institute for, Louis past year when he, when he died. And he was obviously a Russian physiologist, and he was imbued heavily in the principle that was, emerging in the late 19th century around microbiology. If we think back you know, that was the age of the microbe was starting to emerge. And so he actually was very, very interested in where the microbe existed in the human.
Dr. Jeff Bland: And in that time, they were doing cultures of stools, and they would find, yeah, there are a lot of microbes in the stools of humans. And so he became very interested in that. Ultimately, then trying to think of this as pre antibiotics, how would you then improve the bacterial poll colonization because remember bacteria at that point were considered kind of dangerous. They were all bad.
Dr. Mark Hyman: But now he’s saying
Dr. Jeff Bland: a whole lot in healthy people, we find these. So there there’s there’s something going on here, about the composition. So then he came to the conclusion that maybe reintroducing bacteria that would be considered healthy bacteria into the guts of the, the distal portion of the intestinal tract would be beneficial. So he propounded this concept of inimas containing like the basilis bulgaricus, a yogurt was basically yogurt inimas, basically. And that became part of a book that was translated from the French into English, which I’m very pleased to say in my book collection, I have an original edition called the prolongation of life, and it was all around anti aging.
Dr. Jeff Bland: And anti aging was to restore the friendly bacteria in the gut, and his treatment was the overindmas. Yeah. Now this is the guy who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of what, the innate immune system. Remember how he did this? He was in the South Seashore He had his monocle.
Dr. Jeff Bland: He had a starfish, and he had a sea urchin. He punctured the starfish with the sea urchin. This is the way the story is told. I don’t know if this is totally true. Then he looked with his magnifying glass, and he saw these corpuscles coming to the site of penetration And he thought, obviously, these must be bacteria because this is the age we see the thing through the lens of our of our experience.
Dr. Jeff Bland: But then when he studied this more, he said, no. You couldn’t culture these. And then from that, he said these must be big floppy cells. Which we now know as white blood cells. So from that was born, the innate immune system.
Dr. Jeff Bland: That was the first discovery. And then he then later then started saying, well, maybe these people that are getting these installations of yogurt, maybe it’s influencing their immune system. This is way before the term microbiome was was coined. But that then rolled forward. So this is like the turn of 19th 20th century.
Dr. Jeff Bland: And then you follow that literature in which in, I don’t know if you are all familiar, but there was a period in American psychiatric medicine at the Trenton Hospital in New Jersey. The largest metal hospital in the country that was the NIH Center of Excellence for psychiatric health. The leader of that particular hospital, of that wing of the psychiatric hospital, soul believed in the concept of endotoxinia as an origin of psychiatric diseases, that he said the only way you can treat this is by surgical resection of the bowel. So they started taking out portions of the bowel in these patients. And it turned out that they were reporting evidence of people recovering from acute psychiatric illness from getting these, surgical treatments.
Dr. Jeff Bland: And the NIH was propounding this and was giving funding for the grants to do this work because of these positive datasets. Well, it turned out it was all fabricated. There was a whistleblower that eventually said this information was wrong, in their repository, in their path lab, where all these organs of dead people, and there were hundreds, I don’t recall the exact number, but let’s just say a lot of deaths that were not reported. And it was basically they were doing everything as a focal side of infection and pulling out teeth. They were, you know, shortening the bowel were doing stomach surgeries and all these things as a psychiatric treatment.
Dr. Jeff Bland: So what happened in the period of 1930 was the construct of endotoxinia became so alien to medical thought that even to raise that was grounds for expulsion. So it was wiped out entirely. They they didn’t wipe out the treatment. They wiped out the concept. And so for the next 50 years, it was for voting.
Dr. Jeff Bland: You could not discuss this in medical school at all. This was not gonna and so I was naive to all of this, right? I hadn’t read the book Man House because it hadn’t been written at that time. Mead House is a fantastic, book that describes this whole period of history written by a medical historian from UCSD. And, that particular story was unknown to me.
Dr. Jeff Bland: So I just went into this kind of naively saying, well, hold up. There’s something here about Mitch Nikoff and look at all this other literature that’s developing around of hepatocellular function. And then later, we landed on before our program for gastrointestinal restoration, saying, oh, this is real. We don’t have to give just, you know, enemas from the south up. Maybe we should give it from northbound.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Maybe we’ll we’ll have gravity work in our favor given in the mouth by giving the things that the person needs to grow back friendly bugs and to restore gastrointestinal mucosal integrity because we now recognize with these paracellular junctions that are becoming leaky in, what are called, middle molecular weight molecules are swimming through by passive diffusion. Into the blood. And now the body’s immune system is activated because these are foreigners, and that’s what the immune system is supposed to do is recognize foreigners So all this became part of this for our program that we emerged in functional medicine, which was removed the bad
Dr. Mark Hyman: stuff. Replaced? That’s not being.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Well, bugs, infectious organisms, food allergies, toxins, Yeah. And then the second r, this is 4 hours. 2nd r is replaced because we recognize there are a lot of atrophic type B hypochlorohydrics, because their parietal cells of the gut are not acidifying the chyme correctly. And once you don’t acidify the chyme, it doesn’t stimulate the endocrine pancreas to secrete enzymes correctly or your gallbladder doesn’t neutralize with alkaline, exutate. So now you have an under digested material ending down.
Dr. Mark Hyman: For everybody listening in English, that means your stomach gas is low. Doesn’t activate your enzymes, and so your digestion’s messed up.
Dr. Jeff Bland: That’s right. Just Thank you. Very good. This is fun. I told
Dr. Mark Hyman: you I’m the, I’m the different
Dr. Jeff Bland: president, but work together well for all these decades. So we started talking about at that point, and this was another interesting part of history. We started talking about pancreatic insufficiency. Mhmm. Now we were heavily criticized heavily criticized.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Yeah. Because the Gastroenterology community said, no. Hold it. If you have extroprine pancreatic insufficiency, You’re gonna have severe steatoeria. You’re gonna have all these malabsorption syndromes.
Dr. Jeff Bland: It’s gonna become very evident, and that a gallbladder and pancreas problem that requires medical intervention. And we said, well, no, we’re not talking about cystic fibrosis in these kinds of very severe issues. We’re talking about chronic insufficiency. And actually, we did a study and published it because I asked the question, how much stomach acid would you have to secrete to acidify one steak dinner? Because steak, high in protein is a very good, buffer of pH because of the amino acids, which are buffering.
Dr. Jeff Bland: So you have to really acidify a protein rich meal to get it to be acid when it goes in the duodenum. And so I asked the question, how much asset we did a calculation of how much would have to be secreted. And then we did the, test and and Doctor. Jones Ramirez I’m sure we we gave the people a little telemetry device where it could measure gastric pH all the distance of the gun. And we studied a person’s GI, and this was with Grace Malky’s diagnostic labs.
Dr. Jeff Bland: So this was back in the eighties. And then we use the telemetry device, and then we calculate amount of acid. And what we found is that you could have chronic pancreatic insufficiency. Which then, if you acidified with betaine hydrochloride and you gave pancreatic enzymes, you could then relieve some of these digestive problems and make that person more compatible. Now we were very, very heavily criticized.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Now what do we hear on radio and TV ads? It’s all about exocrine pancreatic insufficientists. Now exocrine, EPI. Right? So everybody now should ask their fill out a questionnaire as to whether they have EPI.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Well, we’ve been talking about this for since the 1980s.
Dr. Mark Hyman: I mean, it’s true. I mean, you you you you saw stuff coming decades before anybody else saw it. And your associate of mind just looks at the patterns and the data across multiple disciplines and sees these relationships, and no one else is seeing. No one’s talking about it. You’re talking about the microbiome being connected to everything now.
Dr. Mark Hyman: It’s connected to metabolic health, to psychiatric health, to immune health, pretty much everything you can think of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity. And and now it’s mainstream. And and now one of the hallmarks of aging but is the degradation of the microbiome as a as a factor that happens as we ate. So
Dr. Jeff Bland: now Let’s take that a step farther because What happens in this this digestive process? I stopped at the second arm. That’s the, replace arm. The next third arm is, re reenoculate. Which is to give the pre and probiotics to restore the healthy bacteria.
Dr. Jeff Bland: But we know that there’s another part of this system that is very important, which is the liver. And what does the liver do? The liver secretes bile. And where does bile come from? Bile comes from cholesterol that gets, converted by a series of enzymatic steps in the liver that requires vitamin c, by the way, and copper, and, in in in terms of that enzyme.
Dr. Jeff Bland: And then it produces this family of these bile salts. Now I always thought in my early years, this was in these emulsified fats, so they helped to digest and absorb fats. But now we know these are signaling molecules. These bile salts play very important roles in stimulating receptor sites in the surface of our GI tract to release intral endocrine hormones like GLP 1, and to regulate function far beyond just emulsifying fats. And now there are new drugs for the treatment of NASH that are really bile acid mimetic drugs that are affecting the receptor sites that geo that bile acids influence.
Dr. Jeff Bland: With a healthy digestive system, you’re doing that naturally. It it’s not asking for a drug, it’s asking to stimulate those receptors to signal correctly. So gastrointestinal health is much more than just what you take in and what you poop out. It’s all the mid business that occurs by these signaling molecules from a healthy digestive system that are intimately communicating with your microbiome, which then that’s the 3rd r re inoculation, then the 4th r is to repair because you have these wholly mucosa membranes. You wanna repair them.
Dr. Jeff Bland: So you have arginine. You’ve got pantothenic acids. You you know, the whole series of things that we, you know, will make it 3 fatty acids and so forth.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah. And and the 5th hour we added was rest restore, which is dealing with our stress response. And that that that model, Jeff, which is a simple method with very clear steps that can be applied generally and effectively is something that just has not been caught in any medical curriculum. My daughter’s in medical school now. And I’m like, do you learn about this or that micron?
Dr. Mark Hyman: No, nothing. And it’s just astounding to me because it’s such a fundamental part of healing people, as you saw through the case presentations that I did, is really often the place that I start, which is fix the gut, and then everything else sort of tends to get And if it doesn’t, then you go to the next step. And I think, I think the, the insight and the wisdom around bringing the ancient sort of knowledge from 1901 back into current medicine and and taking the the kind of clinical experience we’ve all had with with re repairing the gut and seeing that great profound impact on patients’ health is a real revolution. And what’s interesting to me is there’s all this great research going on in the microbiome and we’re learning so much more, but still the patient of that has not been really well formulated by traditional medicine, even though it’s now recognized. And I think the functional medicine principle of gut restoration is so key, and it’s so simple.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And as these simple steps have removed, replace, you know, re inoculate, repair, and restore, And it’s it’s something we teach in the Institute for Functional Medicine. It’s not that hard to apply. And it’s something that actually the individual can apply out there listening, even without seeing a doctor by just following the base example principles. So it’s, it’s, it’s such an incredible contribution that you’ve made. I don’t think most people know that, you know, if it wasn’t for Jeff Glenn, we wouldn’t be talking about good stuff.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Like Oh, oh, no. We we would, Martin.
Dr. Mark Hyman: I don’t think so. No.
Dr. Jeff Bland: We would. I I I think I was just a compiler of lots of but but let me give
Dr. Mark Hyman: you give me modest, but I don’t I don’t think I think your FOS on this one. And I think that you saw this and you taught it And you without even completely understanding it.
Dr. Jeff Bland: I would say I’m like I’m willing to travel 6,000,000 miles. So let, let, let me give you Talked
Dr. Mark Hyman: a lot of shit. That’s right.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Yeah. It’s right. Let let me give you a quick example of how this is, to me, just, how enlightenment occurs. So I’m invited to University of Copenhagen medical center to give a presentation on this very topic to their whole staff, the interns, residents, and senior staff, and nursing staff. And, for me, this is a big deal, right, because this is a center of excellence and really high high quality medicine there.
Dr. Jeff Bland: And, So I I was invited actually by, the lead nurse who is the surgical nurse to the head of the department who was reputed to be the top gastrointestinal surgeon in Denmark at the time. So it was a big deal. So So I give the first part of my talk. It’s all the the big old amphitheater type surgical presentation, and then we have a break. Can we go into the, foyer And, so the, the woman who’s invited me wants to introduce me to her boss.
Dr. Jeff Bland: And, so I go over there, and she’s very polite introduces me to him. And he’s courteous and says, oh, nice to have you here. And that was a very interesting presentation you gave. It was half the lecture. And, I said thank you.
Dr. Jeff Bland: And he said, but you know, of course, that’s everything you said is experimental. There’s no proof of this. And I said, well, I know this is early on. We’re we’re collecting information for a variety of sources, and that, that is true. But, you know, we’ve seen many people that have employed this concept in their practice and they’re having success with their patients.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Well, I’m sure that’s true anecdotally, but, have to look at all safety and all sorts of other variations and, you know, what are typical and made typical. And, you know, this has to be here as more studies to be done. So I’m I’m listening and being polite, and he’s kind of blowing me off basically. And, so then the woman who’s the nurse is standing there, his nurse. And she says, so doctor, she said, well, I can understand your reluctance, but I need to tell you something.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Remember my doctor, my my daughter, who you treated for Crohn’s disease, Unsuccessfully. And do you remember that She had been your patient, and you had done everything you could. Got the best of the medicine here. And yet she was so seriously affected. She could not leave the house was a go of forevic.
Dr. Jeff Bland: She could not go outside, and her life went and she was short to stature for her age. She hadn’t gone through Mincey’s, and she was fifteen. And she had all these problems. And, I heard this tape from this gentleman, Jeff Bland, and he talked about this program, and I thought, well, she was a doesn’t seem like you do any harm as elemental diet and the kind of things that that I was just describing to everyone. So I decided to try it.
Dr. Jeff Bland: And the doctor serves as looking at her, and he goes, so I’d like to introduce you to my daughter. Who is this beautiful staff chair esque woman that steps over? And she says, yes, when I got on the program, for the first time, I was able to have normal bowel movements. And this last summer, I backpacked with my friends around Europe, and I grew 6 inches. And I have minces, and I attribute it to his program.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah. I mean, yeah, it’s true. I mean, if if this one concept could permeate health care, it would be ground changing for everybody. So, the next, the next big kind of idea you talked about was this concept of metabolic detoxification. And, and then let me dive into that.
Dr. Mark Hyman: I don’t know if you’re referring to detoxification for environmental toxins? Are you talking about insulin resistance? Or are you talking about all of it? What are you what are you talking about when you mean metabolic detoxification?
Dr. Jeff Bland: So, you know, our body produces a variety of things, waste products from our metabolism, that are not necessarily friendly molecules. They are potentially poisonous molecules. I mean, even use that people are probably familiar with lactic acid, lactate. We know what happens when we build up lactic acid in our muscles. They become poison.
Dr. Jeff Bland: They become sore. We have to get rid of lactic acid. If you condition yourself, you don’t produce as much lactic acid, you have better endurance. So there are many, many hundreds of different molecules, actually thousands that our body produces it, it has to get rid of. Some of our molecules that are messenger molecules like hormones, like stress hormone, cortisol, or, a aldosterone to regulate blood pressure, or, we could think about, 6 hormones, testosterone and estrogen.
Dr. Jeff Bland: All of those have to be eliminated from the body. And because they’re fatty substances, they don’t they want to stick around on our body. They want to they want to in the body. So the body has to convert them into a form that it can get rid of them, generally by the urine or the feces. So it has to make them from a fatty substance into a more of a water soluble substance.
Dr. Jeff Bland: So that is a process built into our physiology. It’s it’s gen genetically, conserved over all animals. And, it’s called detoxification or metabolic, conversion.
Dr. Mark Hyman: So it’s pooping, peeing, and sweating.
Dr. Jeff Bland: That’s right. Get get rid of those things. That’s right. And so so the the interesting feature of this process is the principal organ, not the only organ, but a principal organ where this occurs is in the liver. So the liver is a very important organ for taking these things and making them into something else so they can be eliminated.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Now we would just assume that everybody’s livers are able to do this just fine. But, again, having been introduced to 1 of David Jones, medical school faculty from the University of California Davis, who had looked at, what happens with people that have alcoholic, delirium tremens, what happens to many of those individuals is they lose their detoxifying ability because of hepatocellular injury. And they then lose their detoxifying ability. They become endotoxic, and it produces hallucination and psychosis similarly for hepatic encephalitis. Hepatic encephalitis should really be called gastrointestinal hepatic encephalitis where the gut is producing toxins, the liver is impaired, so it can’t detoxify them, And that goes to the brain and produces a toxic relationship.
Dr. Jeff Bland: They become, hallucinating. Can you
Dr. Mark Hyman: stop talking about that? I do wanna translate So, so for those listening, you know, what Doctor. Blaine is talking about is something we, we know really well in medicine. If someone comes in, who’s an alcoholic and has liver failure, they become crazy because of the bacterial toxins that they can’t metabolize. And so the treatment for insanity essentially is an antibiotic and a laxative, right, to clear out the gut.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And the implications for that have not been really understood as it broadly applies to psychiatric health, but it sort of goes back to the story that I mentioned comp and psychiatric illness And we now know that microbiome plays a huge role in mental health. And the inability of the body to metabolize or detoxify those metabolites drives mental illness. As one of the causes.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Exactly right. Thank you. That was good dematholization of what I was trying to say. So in in this case
Dr. Mark Hyman: Not everybody listening out there has a PhD in nutritional Black Care. So
Dr. Jeff Bland: so the the key point of this discussion I think for takeaway value is that studies have been were were done showing that these, processes that detoxify can be modulated by certain constituents of the diet. Certain foods have the ability to communicate to the liver to We call it upregulate or to increase the ability of those detoxification processes to occur. So years ago, this would be now nearly 20 years ago, we invited at the Institute for Functional Medicine, a variety of leaders in this field, in Tallahay, Elizabeth Jeffrey, people who are studying at the fundamental science level of how certain nutrients in foods like the glucocinylates and cruciferous vegetables, for instance, could then influence the detoxifying capability of the liver to do its work. It was told us at that time that this really didn’t play a very important role. This was all just a bunch of intellectual gobbling group because everybody had more than adequate detoxifying ability.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Didn’t really depend on how many crucible they ate in their diet. Actually, we found that that was not true because there are actually studies that have been done showing that people who take OTC meds that the first pass distribution of those meds and metabolism is dependent on whether they had grapefruit juice or they Yeah. Were to have had sauerkraut use. That’s a big one that’s been studied. And so these concepts that diet can influence the ability to detoxify drugs means it can also detoxify other things native to the body.
Dr. Jeff Bland: They could our body doesn’t have one pathway for drugs and one pathway for natural stuff. It’s the same
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Thing that is used, same mechanism. So we started looking then at all this whole array, this this panel portfolio of foods that are rich in these nutrients that enhance the function of this so called phase 1 detoxification and then phase 2, because they’re coupled together. So we get these things out of the body properly. And we started measuring, using caffeine clearance and benzoate conjugation, certain assessment tools in people see if you could really do that. And Annie Broughley and I Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman: I love that test. It disappeared, though.
Dr. Jeff Bland I know it’s unfortunate. It did because Annie Broughley and I actually did this is at Metametrics way back when, did thousands of patients looking at the data and showing, we published a paper in the journal applied nutrition showing that we could determine a person’s, capability of detoxifying based upon these, surrogate tests. Yeah. And and so That then ultimately gave rise to us putting that together into a clinical program, which we call metabolic detoxification. So that is a dietary intervention program would improve or support the, detoxifying abilities of people who are impaired their abilities to get rid of these molecules and would build them up in their body and have side effects.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah. I mean, it’s so important because not only are we dealing with our own metabolic toxins we have to deal But really dealing with a huge load of environmental toxins that are ever more present. It’s probably over 100,000 new to nature molecules since the last turn of last century, and Now we’re discovering microplastic and nanoplastics in our arteries that lead to the progression of heart attacks and strokes. And so we really have to have some method for understanding detox It’s another one of those things we don’t learn about in medical school. We don’t learn about the microbiome and the gut and how to treat that.
Dr. Mark Hyman: We don’t learn about how to deal with metabolic or environmental toxins and how to up regulate those pathways. And so that’s a huge piece. I mean, for me, as as someone who had mercury poisoning and had chronic fatigue from it, I had to learn about detoxification. And I had to learn about what genes I had that impaired my detoxification or they didn’t facilitate it. I had to learn about how to look at my load of environmental toxins and how to upregulate those pathways and doing that with patients is a profoundly effective thing.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And and I think it’s one of the one of the actually real nuggets of functional medicine that that I think is, is sort of underappreciated, but can be, can be widely applied to help people just improve their overall health. The next thing I want to talk about, and I think you left out of your, out of your, you know, 4 big advances, one, which I think we can touch on, at the end, which is in some resistance and metabolic dysfunction. But, so the next big contribution is this idea that our mitochondria matter. Now I, I learned about mitochondria in 1st year medical school. I learned about the credit cycle, biochemistry, but then quickly forgot about it and learned about a few really rare inherited mitochondrial diseases.
Dr. Mark Hyman: But otherwise, it was kind of an irrelevant topic when it came to clinical medicine. And yet, now we’re learning that mitochondria play a role in almost everything, whether it’s cancer or obesity or diabetes or dementia or Parkinson’s or mental illness, Chris Palmer’s work, who’s had who’s been on the podcast, talks about basically mental helping a metabolic mitochondrial disease. Susan, Susan Goe is on the podcast where he’s talked about monoclonal dysfunction in autistic brains and treating that directly. And so you, you are one of the first to bring mitochondrial medicine into the conversation decades ago. And I was like, well, who’s talking about mitochondria?
Dr. Mark Hyman: I don’t wanna remember the Krebs cycle again. Like, this is annoying. It’s like, but it, but actually it’s, it’s one of the most fundamental things. And I actually had to learn about mitochondria, also because I had mitochondrial dysfunction with CPKs of 600, My muscle enzymes were so high. My mitochondria with chronic fatigue were not working.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And I had significant mitochondrial dysfunction And I had to learn about mitochondria in order to actually heal myself and heal my patients. And it’s one of the essential things that we do in functional medicine is is to understand and to treat mitochondrial dysfunction by eliminating the causes and upregulating mitochondrial function. Can you talk about this whole idea? How did it come to be the mitochondrial resuscitation, rejuvenation idea.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Yeah. Thank you. So this is a really a fascinating example, I think, of how we taking information and we started assembling it into a kind of a story. So for me, because I had been going to Atlanta quite a bit, in the early days of this field working with Metametrics and then later great spokeies. I was introduced to This gentleman at in Emery Medical School who is in charge of their inborn error, metabolism, mitochondrial disease unit at the medical school.
Dr. Jeff Bland: And I learned about mitochondrial hypotheses from a genetic perspective that we have because mitochondria have their own DNA, extranuclear DNA. Which comes exclusively from the mother. So these are materially linked, genetic disorders. And things like libra’s optic neuropathy or are are very, very serious conditions for these children to suffer from. And so I was learning about the mitochondria from that kind of pathological perspective.
Dr. Jeff Bland: So then, we were reintroduced early on with functional medicine to doctor Paul Cheney and his, colleagues at incline Village, Nevada, who are the first to report this, infection that they were seeing in their patients that was called chronic fatigue syndrome. This was, during the AIDS, HIV period in the mid-80s. And, and so we developed a relationship with Paul, and, Paul was a PhD in immunology and quantum chemistry or quantum physics, actually, and internist. And so we kind of really geeked out on this whole concept of why did you see people with this condition after they got over what appeared to be the infection, they still were chronically ill for many, many, sometimes years after having this chronic latent condition. A dissimilar to what we see with long COVID now.
Dr. Jeff Bland: And, and so we started really digging into that. And I give a lot of credit to Scott Rignan, who was one of our first medical doctor involved, and he, and Tucson, Arizona had, excuse me, in in Scottsdale, Arizona, had a lot of chronic fatigue patients. And so we started doing a lot of work with his patients, and that led me then ultimately to what I consider like the moment of anahab. I met, Robert Hackman at the University of Oregon, who had been hired to run their nutrition program. He he had gotten his PhD, from a Lucille Hurley at Davis, who was, very, very big in zinc.
Dr. Jeff Bland: And, and immunity. And and so Bob and I got, actually Robert and I got talking about this concept of mitochondrial bioenergetics, the energy powerhouse of the cell, the mitochondria. And he said, yeah, I’m interested in the mitochondria too, and I said, You know, we need to study the mitochondria in human beings to show that there is some different functional state in people to have these fatigue related symptoms. And he said, well, gee whiz, you know, Jeff, maybe you’re we’re lucky because the University of Oregon just got a grant from the Otsuka co corporation in Japan to bring the largest superconducting 5 Tesla magnet to do NMR spectroscopy in whole organisms into this laboratory. We could be the first people to do whole body in MR analysis.
Dr. Jeff Bland: And so we developed a a piece of equipment where the candidate would put their limb of their body, generally with the arm of the leg, into this machine. It was, a goniometer type of instrument within this huge magnet. And then they would exercise, and we would measure the fosters 31 residents Remember that mitochondria power up ATP Yeah. Adenosine triphosphate. One of the isotopes of phosphorus is anisotropic P31 that you can measure with a nuclear and resident spectrometer.
Dr. Mark Hyman: In English, that means for those listening that, when you’re making energy in your mitochondria, it it it’s used as, phosphorus to actually make the ATP, which is the fuel, the gasoline. And through the it makes the MRI machine. You could see this particular phosphorus and whether you’re producing energy or not? Exactly.
Dr. Jeff Bland: And so we could measure the energy depletion and the energy recharge. So we, we measured.
Dr. Mark Hyman: I’ve been doing this my whole life. It’s okay.
Dr. Jeff Bland: I’d be nothing without him, obviously. So what can I say? So,
Dr. Mark Hyman: So I had to hit rewind so many times I might just said tape that, like, this tape would break. So I actually started to understand Jeff Land E’s, but it took me a while, but now I I I blew it.
Dr. Jeff Bland: You got it. Your total fluency. So we took 34 people, practically healthy, in this particular city was all women, and we put them on a program, which we later called the mitochondrial rejuvenation program, or resuscitation program, but it was basically high nutrients that we knew were supportive, like co inside Q10, and vitamin d, excuse me, yeah, vitamin d, vitamin e, omega 3 fatty acids. What else was in that glycoic acid? I think we had, we had an AC in there in acetyl cysteine.
Dr. Jeff Bland: So they were put on this program. And we measured prior to putting them on the program their ATP recharge rate using this technology I just mentioned, before they would exercise to exhaustion in the machine and we see how fast their ATP would go down and how fast it would recover. And, So then we put on this program for 12 weeks, and then we put them back in the machines and testing them again. And lo and behold, we got extraordinarily fast recharge and much slower a loss of energy from their mitochondria. I mean, this was a surrogate measure, but was considered at the time to be the the method of choice.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Now an interesting feature of this, which I learned a bit about. So maybe what you’re
Dr. Mark Hyman: saying is you’ve gave people the basic raw materials to make energy, which are vitamins and nutrient minerals.
Dr. Jeff Bland: That’s right.
Dr. Mark Hyman: It actually can produce the energy from food and oxygen in the mitochondria more effectively. So you get more energy Yep.
Dr. Jeff Bland: And a
Dr. Mark Hyman: lot of people are walking around with low energy and fatigue states that may be related to mitochondrial dysfunction, but it’s also across all the spectrum diseases that we just talked about, like Yes. Mental health, to metabolic health, to cancer, everything else.
Dr. Jeff Bland: And so there symptoms, their felt state across the board of those women improved. They had more energy, more clarity of thought. You know, we measured them with pen and paper psychometric instruments. So we were so excited about that, and we tried to publish it, but nobody would accept that publication because that technology was so new, and they thought we were making this up. L literally, we ended up in a treasury journal finally did publish it.
Dr. Jeff Bland: It took a year and a half of testing all sorts of different journals. We finally found one to accept it. So that work, ironically, became part of something that we were speaking to to doctors. Now I want to emphasize to doctors about mitochondrial resuscitation. Became part of a product and program.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Mhmm. That was picked up by the food and, by the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission. They claimed that an unjustified claim. For mitochondrial resuscitation. We then went to the mat with them, and our attorney finally said, you’re not gonna win this.
Dr. Jeff Bland: There’s there’s no way. They don’t even understand. Their experts don’t even understand nuclear magnetic resonance p31 spectroscopy. And you’re gonna have to educate the whole FTC. That’s not gonna go anywhere.
Dr. Jeff Bland: So we did a summary judgment, which is what ended me on QuackWatch? That was the inter entering into my ex experience with quackwash because now I had a summary judgment of this claim of mitochondrial resuscitation, which that was 30 more than 30 years ago.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah.
Dr. Jeff Bland: And but now it’s kind of come come good over the years, but that’s how things happen.
Dr. Mark Hyman: But now that now that concept of mitochondrial function is so central in medicine, I mean, again, going back to the the new research on the hallmarks of aging, has only been really developed over the last decade or 2 because of the investment of a lot of billionaires who don’t wanna die. And, and so we’re getting all this research they need to feel it was completely ignored. And aside from mitochondria, you know, and the microbiome and you know, the, many of the things we talk about in functional medicine are part of that. In mitochondrial dysfunction is one of the key features of, of rapid aging. And keeping your mitochondrial health is key.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And so it’s one of those key concepts in functional medicine that’s foundational to treating so many diseases. And now it’s emerging with, you know, in, in mental health, I think it is so exciting around Chris Palmer’s work in mitochondrial health. But it’s across, across the spectrum birthing, whether it’s diabetes, ketogenic diets or cancer and ketogenic diets. These are all about mitochondrial function. So I think I think these concepts of gut restoration, of metabolic detoxification of mitochondrial resuscitation.
Dr. Mark Hyman: They’re just so fundamental to treating the chronic diseases that we have. And yet, they’re not something that we learn about in medical school or that’s practice.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Well, can can I can I say something quickly that, Mark? And I think you said a really important point. In medical school, you learn about these as esoteric sidebars of, unusual conditions that you’re probably not likely to see.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah. It’s a grunt work you have to go to to get the stuff.
Dr. Jeff Bland: That’s right. And and so I think probably the most significant contribution that I’ve made is to say that there’s a gradation of effects. At one side, we have pathology, which is where medicine hangs out, that’s our diagnostic codes traditionally over here. And on the other side, we have whatever you want to call wellness. And and we maybe have made the assumption that you go from wellness to disease by one step function.
Dr. Jeff Bland: And let me give you an example of this. I think it’s really important because you talked about insulin resistance. In 1998, the big thing was hypoglycemia. Some of you probably remember that. So there was a Oh, boy.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Let me check the numbers. There was a seminar put on by the University Washington School of Medicine on hypoglycemia with Doctor Ed Beerman as the leader. I studied out of Doctor Beerman’s endocrinology book. He was one of the top endocrinologists. And he invited me to be a presenter.
Dr. Jeff Bland I think I was considered like the fugitive kind of they had to have one weird person on the program. So that that was me. Now remember, this is 1979. That’s a few years ago. And, so I really overprepared.
Dr. Jeff Bland: I mean, I knew this was gonna be my big chance, right, to to say this voice of of, of gradation between normal glycemia and disc dysglycemia. So I really prepared. I had, I thought a really compelling argument, which I gave, and I spoke really quickly back in those days. And so I got my information. I was kind of proud of myself locked out of the stage.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Well, Doctor Beerman was the next presenter. So he went up and he said something like Well, this young man was very enthusiastic, and he had a lot of interesting things to say, but I want you to know there is no such thing as a gradation between normal glycemia and dysglycemia, you either do or don’t have diabetes. There’s no ambiguity. So that kind of threw my whole thing out the back door But I’m very pleased to see that over the years that Yeah. That has been proven for.
Dr. Jeff Bland: One thing
Dr. Mark Hyman: that’s one of the other big contribution to me, Jeff, is helping us understand insulin resistance, very early
Dr. Jeff Bland: on.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And, you know, it’s still, you know, I just was talking to the the folks at QuestLab, and they said probably less than 1% of the tests done that they get are for measuring insulin. It’s still not being checked. It’s not being measured. They have a new test that I mentioned called the insulin resistance score where they look at CPAP TAD and insulin, through Massbeck, and it’s an extremely sensitive way to pick up is resistance. And they’re seeing changes, and and and pathology start with with a hemoglobin A1C as low as 5.1.
Dr. Mark Hyman: So anything over 5 is starting to trend toward a problem, and they’re seeing they’re correlating that with lipid function. So the, the vision you had to see these things coming decades before anybody else said, I’ve been measuring insulin I practice for 25 years. And, and that’s something that every doctor should do. And now with this new insulin resistance score, which is really inexpensive, doctors should be able to actually check whether patients have metabolic dysfunction and insulin resistance, which now affects 93.2% of the population. So last thing, but about 50 minutes left, I want to talk about kind of the work you’re doing now around the immune system.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And you were one of the first people again to talk about inflammation. I remember talking about inflammation, measuring C reactive protein against 25 years ago before it was even part of the conversation before it was even really connected to heart disease, suspected to cancer, diabetes, dementia, I mean, depression, autism, ADD, obviously all the inflammatory disease like autoimmune disease, asthma allergy, gut issues, all of its connected to inflammation is unifying theme that can mess up the gut, that can cause metabolic dysfunction, that can cause, problems with mitochondria, all of its connected inflammation. Again, it’s one of the hallmarks of aging is inflammation. And, you know, we typically think of our immune systems as degrading over time. We become less able to fight cancer or likely to get sick and infections.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And that’s what we saw this sort of global, high rates of death and elderly who had COVID. But you, you kind of introduced this new idea called immuno rejuvenation. Right, which is how do you rejuvenate your immune system? What am I concept? Right?
Dr. Mark Hyman: How do you actually make it work better? How do you bring it back to a more youthful state? And your work around this topic now has been really profound. And then you’ve connected also this concept of amino metabolism. So in the last, you know, 15 minutes or so, I’d love you to sort of unpack It’s called concept of immuno rejuvenation, immuno metabolism, and the work you’re doing using certain vital chemicals like Himalayan Tari Buckwheat to actually help the immune system to restore to a more youthful state?
Dr. Jeff Bland: Yeah. I think that, again, this concept of our immune system is is the revolution of this age. And maybe it was, profoundly accelerated because of SARS CoV-two. You know, we, as a country, had the poorest outcome of any developed country with the greatest expenditure of medical doctor, medical dollars, We had the poorest outcome, intubation, hospitalization, and death. And it wasn’t because we’re an older society.
Dr. Jeff Bland: It was something was with our immune systems that were not as effective as others. And now we’re starting to say it was probably a lot to do with our innate immune system, the 1st line of defense. If that didn’t do a good job, then the then things were really pass on to the adaptive immune system which got overworked. And now people started getting hyper response and hyperinflammation. And so this Let me just
Dr. Mark Hyman: stop you there. So for the people, I think, nature’s immune system is the ancient, kind of, generalized immune system that is conserved among all species. And it’s non specific. And the adaptive immune system is the one that creates antibodies that are like smart bombs to go targeting the particular pathogen or problem we’re
Dr. Jeff Bland: Yeah. And the innate immune system sits on the surfaces of our outer body that’s inside. It sits on our, mucosal surfaces of our gut. It sits on our lungs. So it has the 1st line of defense responsibilities.
Dr. Jeff Bland: It’s enriched in those places that is exposed to the outside world. And so if it’s not working right, then it gives entree into things to get inside and start to act at the second level. So when when I started thinking about this and and looking at what was going on with, research in the immune system, thanks to introductions of people that you introduced me to like David Fuhrman at Stanford and and a variety of others. I recognize that we were starting to learn for the first time, how the immune system actually recovers its function when it’s undergone insole at the innate immune system level. Because before It was always thought the immune system was kind of a primitive system that didn’t learn.
Dr. Jeff Bland: It couldn’t be taught new lessons. You couldn’t reboot. The innate immune system. Well, it turns out that’s wrong. We’ve now learned that the innate immune system can be learned in a different way than the adapt immune system with its antibodies, but it can be taught either bad messages or good messages.
Dr. Jeff Bland: And so the question is how do you do that? And then I started studying all sorts of things about the hematopoietic system looking at where the origin of these cells come from, which is the bone marrow and what are related to kind of, discourages that lead to these immunological problems. And can those things in the bone marrow be rejuvenated because these are primordial stem cells, and they have the ability to to create different outcomes. All this kind of led me into a swirling, study for the last now 5 years that ultimately, if I can distill it down, I can distill it down to, I think, one salient feature. And that is this family of nutrients that we have neglected importance in nutrition for time historic, which Hans, not Hanselle, Saint Georgi, actually brought us to understand, you know, at St.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Georgi
Dr. Mark Hyman: Discovered vitamin c.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Discovered vitamin c, and he got it from what? The the reason he was able to discover vitamin c is he was able to a mass over a pound of crystal and vitamin c. Remember he was Polish or no. He’s a Hungarian. So what does it say?
Dr. Jeff Bland: Food. Paprika? Yes. Paprika has a high school with my name
Dr. Mark Hyman: too. A quiz today.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Yeah. You’re doing well. So Paprika was the food that he choose. He chose to isolate vitamin C. But what people don’t often understand is that when he gave the vitamin C, From Paprika, the crystal and vitamin c, 99% pure, crystal and white vitamin c.
Dr. Jeff Bland: When he gave it to guinea pigs, remember, that’s where we get this whole concept of the guinea pig because it’s a vitamin c requiring animal. It can have scurvy. So that was a test organism for anti sperbutic. That’s how it got its name. A ascorbateic acid ascorbate acid.
Dr. Jeff Bland: So when he gave vitamin c to the guinea pigs
Dr. Mark Hyman: Oh.
Dr. Jeff Bland: They they got better, but they didn’t get completely well. Only when he gave them the impure vitamin c that had residues of the color of the original vegetable. Which he called substance p. He actually called environment p.
Dr. Mark Hyman: For Paprika?
Dr. Jeff Bland: Right. And it turns out that that became then known as the anti permeability factors. So the P played both ways, Paprika, and premiability. So it prevented capillary, fragility, basically, prevented bruising. And it worked with vitamin C.
Dr. Jeff Bland: So his view was you had vitamin P and vitamin C worked together in a whole food. But we then latched on to ascorbic acid as the beola window. Well, then you would say, well, what is in vitamin p? Turns out it’s a mixture of molecules that have color in the flavonoid family. So this kind of got lost over time it was held on to by the nutrition weirdos, of which I’m proud to say I’m one.
Dr. Jeff Bland: And in in the nutrition field, the health food field, St. Georgi’s work still was around. We still talked about flavonoids with vitamin c. No one else talked about it. It was not in traditional nutrition.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Now it’s come big time. Now why does it come big time? There are many, many reasons I could just go out on this. I promise I’ll just call myself.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Stay on stay on the stay on the track.
Dr. Jeff Bland: So it was thought, and I think if I surveyed all of you, you would know, things about flavonoids. Absolutely. Remember the These
Dr. Mark Hyman: are phytochemicals.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Right. They’re phytochemicals found in in colored fruits and vegetables. So that’s why Doctor. Minick says eat the rainbow because you get a lot of these compounds, these nutrients, in your diet of ether rainbow, natural rainbow, not synthetically colored. So it turns out that this array of what we call polyphenols, of which flavonoids are 1, that array has huge benefit we know as an antioxidant.
Dr. Jeff Bland: So everybody talks about the antioxidant effect of flatulence. No one would be surprised in this room, me saying it. And I’ve said it many, many times, as a guy who wrote articles in the seventies on antioxidants, I’ve said it many articles. Well, that’s only a small part of the story because you cannot, in any way, shape or form, correlate the Iraq of flavonoids, meaning their antioxidant capabilities with their biological effect. It doesn’t correlate.
Dr. Jeff Bland: The only thing that correlates is to understand a mechanism of action that is beyond that of their antioxidants. Yes. They are antioxidants. But they’re specific in their cell physiology and they have receptor sites that we’re now discovering as signal transducers. They signal to the cell how the genes are going to be expressed.
Dr. Jeff Bland: They’re the shop bosses that control the genetic architecture of how our genes are expressed. Meaning they’re epigenetic modulators.
Dr. Mark Hyman: So phytochemicals and foods modify our gene expression.
Dr. Jeff Bland: That’s exactly right. Now people say, but If I took all the flavonids out of
Dr. Mark Hyman: the diet, I wouldn’t get a deficiency disease. I wouldn’t get
Dr. Jeff Bland a scurvy, very, very plaque or 0 family rickets, squashed Coramorasmus. So you know, how do I know that they’re useful? We know they’re useful because of years of lack of consumption, you will have a rising side of all chronic diseases that are associated with inflammation?
Dr. Mark Hyman: That’s a profound statement, Jeff. What you’re saying is that we haven’t identified these plant compounds as essential nutrients, like vitamins or minerals. But in fact, they are and that they don’t show up as a, quote, deficiency disease. They show up as a chronic illness later in life.
Dr. Jeff Bland: That’s exactly right. So we just finished a clinical trial. When I say we Doctor. Austin Perlmutter is my, research director for our Little Big World Health. We got a IRB approved study, which I’m I would admit is a pilot pro, studies.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Only fifty people, fifty apparently healthy people. We measured their, immune epigen epigenome prior to intervention with a polyphenol rich diet, which turns out to be this Himalayan tartery buckwheat, crop that we’re extraordinarily interested in because it’s four thousand year old food, and people live in the blue zones eat these polyphenols that are found in Tardere Buckley, So
Dr. Mark Hyman: And immune genome for listening is basically the genes that regulate our immune system.
Dr. Jeff Bland: That’s right. And then
Dr. Mark Hyman: turn on or off different
Dr. Jeff Bland: which control inflammation
Dr. Mark Hyman: that control inflammation or re regulated or or up regulated or down regulated inflammation. So this is a really important concept that we have these foods that can modify our immune genome?
Dr. Jeff Bland: Precisely correct. What I’m sharing with you here I think is the work of my life. I think this is the most important area I’ve had the privilege of working, and I don’t want to say that we’ve discovered There are many other people that are working in this field. But this clinical trial that we did is quite remarkable. I think it’s the only and 1st clinical trial of its type in which we looked at epigenetic modulation of immune cells before and after intervention after 90 days with Himalayan Tartery Buck Week polyphenols.
Dr. Jeff Bland: And we found 223 differentially modulated CPG sites. What’s that mean? It means over 200 and over 200 different genes. That we could see over 90 days change their epigenetic regulation of gene expression, which we could correlate with different subpopulations of immune cells. Were actually changing their immune personality over 90 days.
Dr. Mark Hyman: So you’re saying that basically when you eat these plant compounds like Himalayan Tari Buckwheat, it has these polyphenols. That change gene expression across over 200 genes that modulate inflammation, our immune system, and our immune health?
Dr. Jeff Bland: Yes. And most importantly, And this is the big, we did EOS, epigenetic wide association studies on a terabyte of data So this is a huge amount of information by using AI Machine Learning. We found that there was one one of these low sign that was EpigenA play modified, 25 fold. This is way beyond statistical significance. This is point many, many zeros significant.
Dr. Jeff Bland: It’s Ceramide kinase 1 regulatory pathway, which is a dominant pathway controlling immune senescence. We’re actually able with the polyphenols to regulate 1 of the central switching genetic, controllers of how your immune system ages and transitions itself into, meta inflammation. And to basically being in an alarm state.
Dr. Mark Hyman: And and and aging itself is a state of chronic sterile inflammation.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Right.
Dr. Mark Hyman: So anything that modulates that is a huge discovery. What you’re basically saying is that we can, through looking at these 200 different sites and the epigenetics, which is essentially the regulator of our genes.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Yes.
Dr. Mark Hyman: We can actually modify how those epigenetic regulation pathways work by taking certain plan compounds that then will upregulate our immune health.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Precisely. And I think the other part of this that, to me, is I’m
Dr. Mark Hyman: a pretty good translator.
Dr. Jeff Bland: You’re fantastic. That’s why I I need to take you everywhere. Do you wanna travel 6,000,000 more miles?
Dr. Mark Hyman: I’m good. So Virtually happy to go. So the
Dr. Jeff Bland: the upshot of this to me is as follows. That we know polyphenols have many different names of It’s quercetin, Ludiolin, Diazman. I could go down all the names, but this suffices, say 100 of different compounds are in this family. And we generally have studied nutrition like we study drugs 1 nutrient at a time. So let’s study rootin, then let’s study quercetin, then let’s study at the Gallic, Catacan galley, then, you know, go down the list.
Dr. Jeff Bland: But now what we’re learning is that these work as orchestration of regulating genes epigenetically. It’s not just one gene at a time. It’s not just one molecule against one gene. It is an orchestration. When we get complexity, we have an effect as you would with a, a Czechowsky suite that’s being played by a good orchestra.
Dr. Jeff Bland: You don’t just have the first violinist. It might be the virtuoso of all violinists, but if you don’t have the rest of the brass per percussion and wind wood wings, it’s not gonna be the same Sound. And so we’re finding that this this construct of nutrition, whole nutrition, food is medicine, as it relates to the symbiotic synergistic interrelationship at the genetic regulation level of how our genes express their function. May be the secret sauce that transforms this in all of how we see nutrition.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah. And and when you told me, you’ve done studies using hemalantary buckwheat where it’s extracts to reverse immune age. And, and that
Dr. Jeff Bland: 47% reduction in 90 days.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah.
Dr. Jeff Bland: With people who had elevated immune age to begin with, 47% reduction in 90 days. And]
Dr. Mark Hyman: we’re gonna be able to increasingly measure these biomarkers clinically and show these interventions and track things over time. You know, I just redid my epigenetic age. And then as I got 2 years older by applying a lot concepts. So I’m having to actually take Emily and Terry Buckwheat, among other things, even though I got 2 years chronologically older, I got 4 years biologically younger. Through epigenetic modulation of these pathways that we can influence through our diet and lifestyle and other interventions.
Dr. Mark Hyman: So This is extraordinary work. I, I think, Jeff, you know, you, you keep on learning, growing. You’re seventy years old, and you act like you’re, like, 25 just discovering, you know, someday.
Dr. Jeff Bland: Well, well, let let me just chip in there just quickly. So in 78 as of last March, and I also had my, after all, my own program. Yeah. My Epigenity Community measured.
Dr. Mark Hyman: You said function health,
Dr. Jeff Bland: 56.7. 5056.7. So, you know, we don’t know exactly what that means. But as I as I think, it’s much better to be 50 6.7 to be 90. So, I think And
Dr. Mark Hyman: you can measure that to a function health dot com forward slash mark because you get to use, their biological calculator to see what your biological age is. It’s not subjective. It’s pretty, pretty impressive. I think anybody who really wants to learn more about this should check out Jeff’s work. You can go to bigboldhealth.com, which, really, Jeff has started as a company to bring this deep science and the understanding of how to apply some of these extraordinary phytochemicals to immuno rejuvenation I’m an investor supporter.
Dr. Mark Hyman: In fact, I put in Himalayan Taree buckwheat sprout powder into my smoothie every morning, That’s an easy way to get a good dose of it. It’s yummy and nutty and delicious. And I think if, if we, if we could unlock these these little nuggets of wisdom that, that you kind of unpacked for us from understanding the gut and the microbiome to metabolic detoxification, to insulin resistance, to mitochondrial health, to immunogen preservation, This is a stuff that is the foundational pieces of, of a future of medicine that’s going to help lead us out of this desert of chronic disease that we’ve been wandering in and getting worse for the last, 50 years. So, Jeff, thank you for your work for what you do, for what you’ve taught me. You put out so many millions of people for the six million miles you traveled around the world, and have a lot of road rash around.
Dr. Mark Hyman: I mean, we we all wouldn’t be in for for you. So thank you so much, Jeff, for your contribution to the world. And I think Jeff needs to win the Nobel Prize from
Dr. Jeff Bland: what he’s done. Well, let me just put it this way. I would be nothing without a translator. So that’s it.
Dr. Mark Hyman: Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. Leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And follow me on all social media channels at Doctor Mark Hyman, and we’ll see you next time on The Doctor’s Farmacy. I’m always getting questions about my favorite book podcast, gadgets, supplements, recipes, and lots more.
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Dr. Mark Hyman: This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at Delta Wellness Center and my work at Cleveland Clinic And Function Health, where I’m the chief medical sir. This podcast represents my opinions and my guest opinions, and neither myself nor the podcast endorsements of views or statements of my guests, This podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. Now if you’re looking for your help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical You can come see us at the Ultra Wellness Center in Lenox, Massachusetts. Just go to ultrawellnesscenter.com.
Dr. Mark Hyman: If you’re looking for a functional medicine practitioner near you, you can visit ifn.org a search find a practitioner database. It’s important that you have someone in your corner who is trained, who’s a licensed health care practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.
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