Longevity is easiest to misunderstand when it is treated as a race against time. This conversation with Mark Hyman, MD points toward a steadier frame: healthspan is built by the signals we repeat, the stress we recover from, and the evidence we are willing to respect.
Full transcript with timestamped links back to the original YouTube conversation.
Your chronological age was 79, but your biological age was 62. Your testosterone levels were that of a 30-year - old. What's most contributed to that? It's about how do you maximize the genetic potential that lies within your genome to be the best person you can be? Jeff Bland is the father of functional medicine, a pioneering nutritional biochemist who turned his own body into a lab for longevity. Most doctors don't know how to assess mitochondrial health. Now we're realizing it's connected to so many of the chronic illnesses. If you have impaired mitochondrial function, your immune system is tired. It's worn out. The most effective treatments for everything that I've come across is something we call Welcome back to the Dr. Heyman show, Jeff Bland. It's great to have you again. I can never get enough of you. Well, Dr. Heyman, uh I can't tell you what a privilege this is to once again engage in this narrative with you. I really want to start with your own personal story because you you um been a nutritional biochemist for ever and uh you know you're 79 years young and uh keep getting younger. You you have said to me just earlier you you probably have measured your clinical chemistries, your blood tests uh more than most humans over decades and have seen sort of the effect of lifestyle, diet, food on these biomarkers and have made changes in yourself. Uh and you you shared with me some of your results a little earlier. It was pretty remarkable how good they were for someone who's 79. Your testosterone levels were that of a 30-year - old. I mean you had uh very low levels of inflammation. I mean, no detectable inflammation. You uh your your kidneys, your liver all look great. Your cholesterol was good. I mean, you really it's like if I saw you as a patient, there might be a few little things I might tweak, but you know, overall your health is remarkably good for for someone who's, you know, 45, not less 79. But, you know, your father and your grandfather both died at at 73. Kind of gone past your your
at 73. Kind of gone past your your father and your grandfather in terms of your health and age. And you know at 79 you're basically involved in a startup company called Big Bold Health and most people are golfing. What what what's most contributed to that and and how have you sort of kept going not just like a little bit but like at full speed? You know I think that this thing that we call our life is a really fascinating opportunity isn't it of exploration. We're all kind of the explorers to figure out what our genes might be able to give us in terms of our ability to perform in the years that we call our life. As I've thought about this over the years, it's always been my belief that our genomic potential for most people, and I would include myself in this, is probably greater than that that we're really doing in terms of our phenotype, our how we look, act, and feel. So, how do you maximize the genetic potential that lies within your genome to fully express the humanness that is within you and be the best person you can be? Do you realize that when you are ill and your immune system is activated that 50% of your metabolic energy is being consumed by your immune system? And how is it making its energy? Mitochondrial function. So, if you have impaired mitochondrial function, your immune system is tired. It's worn out. It has amunosineessence. It's producing oxidants. It's creating free radical damage. It's engaged with reduction of longevity. And so mitochondrial health is intimately connected to immunological health. It's another part of that story. So this is why ultimately I landed six years ago on asking what have I learned after 40 years being in this field. If we want to talk about root cause, what is root cause? Where does it start? You know, and as you said, you can keep going up the tree. And I finally landed on the fact that there are only three
on the fact that there are only three places that our body is is communicating with the outside world 25 365 24 / 7. And those are the nervous system, the mucosal surfaces of our body, and our immune system. Those three areas are communicating continuously with the outside world and telling our inside body how to function. And I said, well, now let me think about Sid Baker talked a lot about this. she wrote about this whole idea of these interfaces and and so you got to think about how are we responding to the outside world through signals or through messages and so when I went to that level I said okay so let's look at that you have the gut microbiome you have the nervous system and you have the immune system all of which are intermittently interrelated one with the other and are communicating with the outside and inside world which of those is is most able to change quickly and then I recognize that the immune system turns over every 120 days, our immune system are different cells than they were pre previously. Now, just think of that for a moment. We're making over 2 million new blood, white blood cells, immune cells a minute. We are constantly reproducing our immune system. So, the question is, is it as good as better or worse than the cells that it it's replacing? The answer to most people over life is it's worse. That's immunosciness. Our immune system declines. And so people still so immunosciness means scinessence means getting older. That's right. Aging. So it's the aging of our immune system which can be more rapid than our number of birthdays. And it's why people who are older were more likely to get severe COVID and die. Exactly. Right. And people with chronic disease also were more likely to end up in the hospital and die because their immune systems were not working properly. And so then it begs the question, doesn't it? during SARS KV2 infection. Why did we in the United States do more poorly than any other developed country in terms of intubation, hospitalization, death? And it was not because we're an older society. Yeah. It was because we had the poorest immune state of vigilance. We were immunos as a country and our and
were immunos as a country and our bodies were not able to manage the effective SARS, you know, spike protein. Yeah. As people in other countries that had a more vigilant, resilient immune system. That's right. And shame on us. I mean, we were 4% of the world's population and 16% of the cases and deaths. And and basically, we were pre-inflamed when the virus hit us. And everybody remembers that term cytoine storm. That's what happens when you're pre-inflamed. It's like lighting a match to gasoline. It just blows up. And then that's why we saw such a catastrophic amount of death and suffering in America compared to other countries despite having better medical care, better hospitals, better doctors, better nursing care. I mean, we literally have the best healthare system in some ways, but we also have the worst in other ways because we're we're dealing with problems in ways that aren't getting to the root cause. So, it was absolutely just what you said that caused me to wake up one morning and say, "Maybe I need one more shot at the goal here. Maybe I need to really focus my attention now that we've gone through gastrointestinal restoration, now that we've gone through metabolic detoxification, now that we've gone through mitochondrial resuscitation, maybe we need amunal rejuvenation. Maybe we need to study how to rejuvenate the immune system. It's not boosting the immune system. We don't want to boost immune system that's imbalanced. That only makes it worse. We want to activate resilience and make it more functionally adaptive. And that is immuno rejuvenation. So that cells that we replaced are better than the ones they came from, not worse. And that becomes a whole different strategy. And when I hit on this idea, my colleagues uh Annette Gardi and Trish Yuri who work with me now for 30 years, they said, "Jeff, you know, you're a fairly big guy in stature. This is a pretty bold idea. So maybe you need one more company. Why don't we call it Big Bold Health and let's just go after this concept and see if we can't find a way of approaching how to rejuvenate the immune system." And lo and behold, the last five years, we're learning it. We're learning how to do that. And it's not just us. The whole
do that. And it's not just us. The whole field of immunology is changing. this whole nutriim immunological uh connection is now blossoming. It's it's revolutionary how fast things are changing. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I learned as a young functional medicine doctor was the power of food to regulate inflammation in the body. And one of the tools that we were taught and I think it's probably one of the most effective treatments for everything and anything that I've come across is something we call the elimination diet. But I I don't like that term. It's really more the addition diet. It's it's getting rid of the crap, but it's adding the good stuff. I created a kind of my own adaptation of that diet. Uh I called the 10day detox diet. And now I've had thousands and thousands of people go through it. We've measured their results um through in-depth questionnaers that give people a score about their overall symptoms from all diseases. And I've done this online. I've done it in person. I I do workshops. And in in literally 5 days, we've see people's score drop an average of 70%. There was a guy recently who who was in a workshop I did his score dropped from 132 which is really high to 30 which is you know more normal ideally like to see under 20 but what whatever the symptoms are whether it's migraine headaches or irritable bowel or depression or insomnia or joint pain or nasal congestion or allergies or arthritis I mean the list goes on and on. It doesn't matter what you're suffering from when you reset the diet. It happens like this. It's not a month-long process. It's not even a week-long process. It can happen within 5 days. And it's sort of shocking to me. I'm like, this can't be real. Like this. Like, if I say this, it sounds like heresy. You know, I'm going to give you this magic diet and 70% of symptoms from all diseases in everybody just get better. Uh a 70% reduction in all
better. Uh a 70% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases in 5 days. You know, it sounds like that sounds like snake oil, but the shocking truth is it actually works. And it and and we don't completely know how it works. I don't think I really completely fully understood, but but it's it's modulating pathways that um are are influenced by our food and in a very profound way. So, I' I'd love you to maybe unpack because I I can try to do it, but I think it would be better coming from you. unpack. How does this radically different diet that's anti-inflammatory that supports the microbiome that is full of phyitochemicals actually work so quickly and so fast to change so many diseases? I'm so excited that you asked this question. I'm so excited you brought this up because we're talking about inflammation, the immune system, and what's happening is all these people with all this inflammation get better so fast when you change your diet. I mean, one guy came up to me just as at Kenyan, I'm sorry, Cleveland Clinic when I was first there giving a lecture. He had rheumatoid arthritis. He said, "Dr. Heyman, I did your 10day detox diet and my rheumatoid arthritis went away. Is that possible?" I'm like, "Yeah, it's possible because it went away with you, but it's shocking, you know. So, no one has ever asked me this question, so I'm so excited about us talking about it." So I asked you many years ago if you had become the editor of a journal that I had been writing for alternative medicines and health and healing in which you did a fantastic job as an editor. The first issue of that magazine that journal Yeah. I published a research paper. Yeah. That was on this very topic that you're talking about it. And I'm very proud of this paper because it it was this it was the um stake in the ground around this concept that you're you're describing that you've developed so wonderfully over the the decades. And what we did is we took a group this is our little research center we had in Gig Harbor, Washington at the time. We studied um I think it was 80
time. We studied um I think it was 80 people that we had uh 30 of those people were on a kind of a standard of care. Uh and then um 50 of them were on an intervention program like you've just described. Uh this kind of dietary program that was high in phytochemicals but was low in allergic substances, was free of gluten, uh didn't have sugar, dairy, yeah, all those kind of things. And we followed them and we were the first group I think ever to look at liver detoxification look at gut integrity using lactose manitol test to measure gut permeability. How do you measure leaky gut? Yeah. Exactly. And we looked at caffeine clearance. We looked at benzoate excretion for liver phase one and phase two detoxifications and clinical symptoms over the course of I think it was two months. Yeah. And we saw about a a 60% reduction in symptoms of the treatment group versus the control group. Yeah. And that was published in 1991. That was a foundational statement starting functional medicine at that point. You have taken that and moved it to a much higher state of refinement. But I'm very very proud to say that what we were starting to understand and I would I want to emphasize starting that the gut was connected to the immune system. The immune system was connected to the liver. The liver has its own immune system. 10% of the liver is occupied by what are called cuffer cells. Yeah. That are immune cells. Those cells then speak to the brain. Yeah. Through systemic circulation of messenger substances. All these things were started to be developed out of that early 1990s recognition that this is a system of that patterns the control that ultimately is seen in people with differing ranges of symptoms of different duration uh variety and intensity. And so we were setting the tone I believe in that that early study for what later became the architecture for functional medicine as a
for functional medicine as a systems biology approach towards healthcare. I mean, I would say if I had one quote drug to use as a doctor and I was on a deserted island somewhere and I only had one therapeutic agent, it would be this diet. Yeah, it is. And it's removing a lot of the foods that are driving inflammation, ultrarocessed foods, sugar, gluten, dairy for some people. And not to say that some people can't tolerate gluten or dairy. It's just that you kind of clear the slate. You you get rid of all that and you add in whole foods, a lot of phyitochemically rich foods, lots of fiber, good quality fats, protein, you know, in the tended detox side diet side. I take also out grains and beans as a as an initial step because they they may be problematic for some people with inflammation and you know getting nuts and seeds and berries and really just a whole foods real food diet that has all these incredible benefits. I we have an online program it's called the 10day detox. go to tenddetox. com and you can kind of try it out. But it's it's quite amazing because it it does it it seems to affect so many different pathways all at once. Yes. And it's working through modifying gene expression, hormone regulation. I mean, we've had people come off insulin in three days who are type two diabetic. You know, we have, you know, reversal of heart failure. We have like all kinds of crazy stuff that you would think is heresy when you say it in traditional medicine. They look you crosseyed and say you're you're a quack. And I, you know, that was my uh my my um moment when I realized I finally had made it in the world was when I ended up on Quackbusters cuz Jeff was on there and I was on now I was on there. I was like I finally made it. There are three things that we collaboratively developed that have now stuck as clinical tools that I think are important to acknowledge as we move into this immune question. So let's let's just review quickly. I want to review quickly what what really we have collaboratively developed as clinical therapeutic tools. Number one is gut restoration. Yeah, we originally called it the 4-hour program. Now it's the five
it the 4-hour program. Now it's the five program. We called it remove, replace, reininoculate, repair. It was a way to actually intervene with patients that we could teach docs to understand pretty quickly that once they started doing this with the patients, the response they were getting was like, whoa. Yeah. and it and then it caused them to see the paradigm shift. So that that was our first collaborative development of that algorithm that we called the four program. Remove, replace, reininoculate, repair. The next thing we worked on collaboratively. And by the way, that's important because in your gut is where most of your immune system is and that's where the inflammation starts. And when you have a imbalance in your gut microbiome and you have a leaky gut, it causes the introduction of foreign antigens from food and bacteria that create this havoc. And the kind of manifestations are different in different people, but the cause is the same. And so even though we didn't really even have a word back then for the microbiome, I mean, I think Leo Gallon coined the term dispiosis, which is now in, you know, all the scientific literature, you know, traditional gastronologists talk about it. And I think it's kind of funny when I see that, but it's like we we were kind of treating it even before we fully understood the complexity of it and we just followed these basic principles and they worked which is how you restore gut function precisely. My first lecture I recall in fact a doc sent me the notes from my first lecture on dispiosis and leaky gut 1985. So that was number one. Number two, which we collaborated on, which then also is tied to the immune system, has to do with the liver, and that's metabolic detoxification. So, what happens when stuff comes from the gut to the liver, which is the organ that has to process that? It has these processes that allow it those molecules to be converted into non-toxic byproducts and be excreted that are called the detox pathways. Phase 1, phase 2, phase three, detox. We were the first people to really bring that up as a clinical therapeutic tool. Yeah,
a clinical therapeutic tool. Yeah, metabolic detoxification. So that was another of our contributions to the field which by the way most physicians still still ridicule and laugh at. Detoxification and doing detox is kind of laughed at as a idea but it's so important to treating patients to understand these pathways to understand their body's own built-in detoxification systems and how to optimize those to deal with both internal and external toxins. And that was something that again I learned briefly in medical school how the liver works but nothing about how to regulate it, optimize it, how nutrients are involved, how phytochemicals are involved, how to change your diet, how the microbiome affects it. I mean, none of that was part of our training and and yet it's so critical to understand because we live in a world where we're seeing an increase in the toxic load from environmental chemicals and we're also seeing an increase in the toxic load from our own gut and microbiome and also the waste products of our own metabolism because we're we're not living in ways that actually support optimal health and detoxification. So, it's so important. So this again it's like one of those sort of key ideas that is I think maybe now even starting to emerge as as mainstream. Yeah. I think that that's a probably the thing that's helped it to go mainstream is when we develop the genetic ability to evaluate people's ability to detoxify drugs called pharmaccogenomics or pharmaccogenetics. Suddenly doc said oh that's right I guess different people respond to drugs in different ways because they detoxify them in different ways. That's right. It's the same metabolic pathways that are used to detoxify our foods and our foreign chemicals and xenobiotics. So suddenly now detox is in the main because of pharmaccogenomics when docs have been you know criticizing that this is something species. Well the third thing that we developed which I think is equally important and I take um a pretty reasonable degree of pride in this. The first discussion that we ever had with physicians around bioenergetics and the
physicians around bioenergetics and the energy powerhouse of the cell called the mitochondrian was in 1990. 1990 I introduced the concept of mitochondrial bioenergetics. Yeah. And and that then thanks to you and and your colleagues then people started to say oh maybe this is something related to fatigue. Maybe this is something related to muscle function. Maybe this is related to cognitive function. Gee, what cells are high in mitochondria? Oh, the cardiac cells. 70% of volume is mitochondria, the neurons in the brain. Gee whiz, all these cells that are really important that are working hard for us 24 / 7 are really energy rich mitochondria. What happens if mitochondria gets tired or is not functioning correctly? And so we developed a program called mitochondria resuscitation and we were the first people to start to actually provide a clinical intervention opportunity. Now that's a standard of care. And so this is the third thing that we all well I wish it was a standard of care but again most doctors don't know how to assess mitochondrial health assess function and they don't know how to treat it. They don't understand its role in in chronic disease. There are these kind of rare mitochondrial disorders we learn about in medical school and and there's specialists who deal with that and but we don't in traditional medicine do that. But now now we're realizing it's connected to so many of the chronic illnesses. It's an energy problem. And Chris Palmer from Harvard is one of the key pioneers in in this understanding in psychiatry and how mitochondrial energy deficits lead to psychiatric illnesses, whether it's schizophrenia or bipolar or depression. Suzanne Go um from Harvard and Oxford, incredible pediatric neurologist who's been on the podcast, did a lot of work looking at autism and the brains of autistic kids using very sophisticated MRI technology, looking at mitochondrial energy function in the brain and seen these kids all had energy deficits and then use mitochondrial support nutrients, basically co-actors that help with the pathways of producing energy to help
pathways of producing energy to help treat these kids with autism and actually found improvement in these kids with autism. I mean there's a whole conversation about why they have a deficit in the first place which is again upstream because you know mitochondria are upstream of the diagnosis but what's upstream of the mitochondrial problem and that's kind of what we're taught in in functional medicine is to keep thinking of what's the cause of the cause and keep going until you reach the end of it. That's another area where I think you know we're we're starting to understand it's important in dementia and Parkinson's disease and diabetes and you know obesity and cancer. I mean, it's just it's everything you can think of that we're suffering from in the chronic disease epidemic today in America, whether it's kids or adults, it it's in some ways related to the mitochondria. It was remarkable when I took the concepts that you and and this group of physicians incubated and I started applying them to pay patients. I was just shocked because the things that I thought were immovable in medicine that you could quote manage with medications were going away. Mhm. like autoimmune diseases, like acne, like chronic eczema, like chronic migraine headaches, depression, you know, even more extreme things like autism or Alzheimer's. And I was like, what is going on here? And I just didn't fully understand the science behind it all because there's a lot to know. But I just started following these principles, this new model that make the old one obsolete as Buckminister Fuller said, and it worked. And now we're seeing there's this kind of awakening around this 40 years later like an overnight success that took 40 years and the world is sort of waking up to the importance of of thinking differently about chronic disease and and this new way of thinking is is something that you know came out of your work and you know you mentioned Lionus Pauling and I think I just it's worth talking about he kind of was the father of this concept of orthomolelecular medicine which was first sort of described in a science mag science journal paper which 1968 was
science journal paper which 1968 was talking about orthomolelecular psychiatry. How to use nutrition and different nutrients to change biochemical reactions to drive pathways that were stuck and to unlock them to create a resolution in psychiatric symptoms which is crazy to think about. And now, you know, we have departments of metabolic psychiatry, nutritional psychiatry at Stanford and Harvard and and guys like Chris Palmer talking about mitochondria and energy and and Mayo Clinic now just got a $ 3 million grant to plus to study keto diets and schizophrenia and bipolar disease. This was sort of a total heresy before and and it's taken that was 50 years ago and and you took that little seed and created a movement and now you've literally helped millions and millions of people around the world through your teachings and work and education and the sort of fertilization of all these minds with these ideas including mine. and and that has led to this this incredible shift that we're now seeing in in medicine that there's like I just got invited to Cleveland Clinic uh grand rounds in psychiatry to present on on new ways of addressing mental health because they realized that you know their old model just doesn't work. So I I think we're in this really interesting moment uh you know and it's it's taken like you 50 years of hard work. We've talked a lot about about some of these concepts, but I I kind of want to get into the the role of the immune system in our health and kind of unpack it a little bit because most people kind of go, "Oh yeah, my immune system is good. I don't get sick or my immune system is bad. I get colds a lot or you know, people don't really understand what it is." And I think in in terms of this the stage uh that I want to set, the immune system, it turns out, is is probably one of the most consequential parts of our biology and is responsible for our health at every level. And and almost every single
every level. And and almost every single disease out there today is a disease that that impacting our immune system that's causing inflammation. It's actually the conditions that are are we're suffering from whether it's diabetes or obesity or heart disease or cancer or dementia or depression or autism or else himer is like autoimmune diseases, allergies and the list goes on and on our gut issues. These are all dis dysfunctions of our immune system. So this is sort of this common thread that links all that together. In fact, the aging process itself has been called inflammaging. You know, inflammation with aging. And there's a whole set of things that go on that cause us to have more inflammation as we get older. And and we've never really learned about how to impact our immune system in medicine. It's not something that's part of our training. And we learned about it. You know, we learned about T1 and T2 TH2 and TH1 pathways and how they regulate different parts of our immunity. And we learned about our antibodies and our immune system and our original sort of primitive immune system that predated our ability to fight specific infections or bugs or things with with antibodies. We learned about that, but we didn't really learn about what to do about it. How do you optimize someone's immune system? How do you treat inflammation? It's not just by taking a steroid or an Advil or an aspirin or some chemo drug. It's really a whole new science around im immune system health. Why why is understanding immune health so important today with all these incredibly aggressive chronic diseases that we're facing? I think it's very important to recall that this was only as good as its ability to be taken up by a clinician that could then test this in patients. And you are the quintessential example of a person who saw the utility and the safety effects as it relates to its balance against the therapeutic effects and willingness to try this then with your patients in a very discreet way that and codify that in such a and
way that and codify that in such a and to communicate it. You're a marvelous obviously communicator both in writing and orally and I think that that teamsmanship between the conceptualization and then the execution and the categorization of what works and what doesn't work and then getting other people to feel more comfortable then in trying this allows for the birth of a new discipline. You need all those things working together. You just came back from a Mediterranean research trip, which you know, I would sort of wonder if that was all research or but you went to had some good meals. You went to Greece, Argentina, Morocco, and you know, you went to these places where the diets, you know, have, you know, little long cultural context that they're kind of indigenous to the place. And we talk about the Mediterranean diet. It's kind of a vague term, you know, was it pasta and pizza or is it, you know, olive oil and fish and nuts and like, you know, so what is it exactly? But but I think, you know, when you kind of lean toward the healthier frameworks of what is a Mediterranean diet, it it seems to be one of those diets that everybody, including traditional medicine, agree is beneficial and maybe helpful for many chronic diseases, whether it's mental health or or whether it's cardiovascular health or cancer, dement dementia. when you went on this trip um what what kind of were the insights that you had that you maybe hadn't thought about before when we asked the question what's the siminal clinical study that has been ever done on diet and its relationship the outcome of diabetes cardiovascular disease and and dementia is there any study or studies that we can hold our half our hands up and say this is the study and it would be the prede study which was a Spanish um directed study uh followed uh several thousand people 7, 000 which by the way to do a nutritional study a randomized control trial with 7, 000 people and diet is is so hard to do. It's so expensive. It's such a big study and most studies are done with a couple
and most studies are done with a couple hundred people or 100 people or 50 people. This is 7, 000 people and and tell us more about what what we learned from. Yeah. So I I was at the University of Madrid and was able to kind of talk with some of the original uh investigators in the predime study as well as I was in Portugal and I was um which was one of the companion places where the study was also done. The exacting approach that they took towards be being able to control the variables on people's eating habits which is as you said really a complicated thing to do in people with real lives in not in Americans. That's right. But they overcame many many object uh objections uh and were able to really deliver a study that I think the world scientific community now says this data looks real. It it and and the more that that data is evaluated uh now there literally hundreds of papers that have been written out of the data set from the predimed study. the the more as people kind of dice and slice that data to look at how it connects to different conditions, everything from brain function to muscularkeeletal function to arthritis to diabetes to cardiovascular disease, the more that you start seeing these positive benefits in these different cohorts of individuals. So, it cuts across. It's agnostic to disease. And and just for people to know what that study was, they basically randomized people to either a liter of olive oil a week or basically a big handful of nuts every day compared to a low-fat diet. Well, it was those plus the kind of the composition of the diet, the base diet, which was getting rid of a lot of the stuff that that you have spoken to so eloquently like the sugar, processed foods, you know, highly uh convenient, shelf stable stuff to stuff that looks like it was once grown in the ground. those types of of decision-m which by the way in my on my trip uh of the various countries that I I had the privilege of visiting on this this journey I was amazed to see that um just
journey I was amazed to see that um just as was in Britain at the turn of the 17th to the 18th century the history was that the people that had the lowest incidence of chronic disease happened to be the people that were of the lower socioeconomic because they didn't have access to the white flour and white sugar. That's right. They had these rough breads that had all these peasant food. Exactly. Peasant food. And and their cultural history outcome in terms of their health was much better than the aristocracy of people that had access to these other foods. And that's what I found similarly when I traveled the men is that people who eat those traditional diets and in fact there's a paper just published uh in nature that is fascinating in Africa and Tanzania. They studied um Tanzanians that were eating the traditional African uh diet, which was um things like fermented banana and and uh very high plant-based diet versus people that had been moved in the same country over into the westernized diet. Yeah. And they compared the health outcomes and the effects on the immune system. uh they studied immunological activities of all these subsets of immune cells and just as we would expect the people that transition in Tanzania that then with the same genes transition to the western diet they got the genes of their immune system suddenly expressing inflammation expressing high levels of lipoproteins that are associated with cardiovascular risk with insulin resistance those that stayed on the traditional African diet same genes had these lower incidence of out so this goes across all sorts of genotypes, all across different cultures, but there are certain principles that tie them together, whether you're living in Tanzania or you're living in Sardinia. So, what are those principles? Like what are the things that you kind of learned from going over there that were my take home for people? My my takeaway and maybe it's because of my bias but the thing that has changed the
bias but the thing that has changed the most in our diets is the the addition of simple rapid glycemic index products like starch and and sugar. So that is added and the thing that's been eliminated are the natural coloring agents of foods that come from vegetables across the full range of polyphenols and flavonoids of which there are thousands that we just don't get in the the westernized highly processed diet. you know, we have to put food dyes to make stuff colorful. It's interesting because I think, you know, I just kind of realized this, but part of what attracts people to different foods is the the richness of the color because we've removed the phyitochemicals that provide those colors in our food. Food companies have added all these dyes to make foods pop like Froot Loops or what do they call them? Skittles, you know, M & M's, all these brightly colored things. They're attracted to us because, you know, historically, I think as as humans, we've been attracted to these compounds because they're good for us. Going all the way across the visual spectrum from orange, red to blue, purple. Uh those foods, each those colors are related to the composition of specific types of these polyphenols and flavonoids and and carotenoids. And those phyitochemicals all impart unique structure function specific effects on cell activities specifically on the immune system. I want to emphasize this is not like a class effect. This is a specific structure function relationship. We're eating information that's very defined with a specific language, a specific dialect. And that's why we want to eat a variety of foods. We don't want to just eat carrots. We want to eat a whole variety of foods because these bring different languages to our genes that then creates an outcome that becomes our functional health. That's an amazing breakthrough in understanding because we used to think well just eat fruits and vegetables that's going to be good and it is good. So I'm not not denying that. But there may be specific properties that they have that each individually
that they have that each individually influences our biochemistry, our our genomics in such a way that it in enhances our immune system function. And that's what we're learning. What are those families of specific nutrients across the range of orange red to blue purple products? Uh like you think of delphinian, that's anthrocyanodin that's in berries. it has a different effect than does um poly flavin 3 alls like queretin uh which then influences a different collection of imunological principles. So it's the combination of this portfolio that gives rise to the harmony that we call the orchestra of our biology. So basically the way this works just to kind of high level people understand is that is you're you you have a set of genes that you're born with. They regulate many many different processes in our body and there's a whole set of genes that regulate your immune system function that turn on inflammation or turn off inflammation that suppress cancer that turn on cancer. We really now are unpacking what those genes are and what what we call the epigenetic effects are on these genes. So the genes are kind of fixed. You can't change them like he's on a piano. But the epigenome which like the piano player can play all kinds of different songs on that piano. And so food is communicating to our genes through our epiggenome and modifying their function, right? And so when you have uh different phyitochemicals in food, they're regulating different pathways. Now, we think of vitamins and minerals as essential nutrients, but I I've come to think of these phyitochemicals as this neglected class of compounds that if we don't have in our diet over a long period of time will lead to chronic illness. You're here. It's not a deficiency disease. Yes. Directly, but it's kind of what we call these long latency deficiency diseases that Robert Heene talked about, which is this idea that, you know, gosh, if you're vitamin D is enough so you don't get ricketetts, that's good. That's going to prevent the
that's good. That's going to prevent the short-term deficiency disease, but if it's not high enough over a long period of time, you're going to get osteoporosis or cancer or heart disease or dementia, right? So, how do we I think about these phyitochemicals in that way. And I think can I just say I want to celebrate that for a moment. That's a drop of the mic. What you just said, I hope everybody who's listening to this podcast is is picking up. This is a siminal change in thinking in nutrition. What you've just stated. Bruce Ames, God rest his soul. He just recently passed away, our extraordinary contributor to our field, um had this triage theory. The triage theory is just like what you're saying that there are different levels of insufficiency. Triage is like the worst on the battlefield is the person dying and you immediately need something to keep them alive. Then there is the people that are on the road to dying but still kind of maybe second tier. Then there are the people that are early on that are just maybe suffering minor injuries. That is the way that nutrition can be seen. If depending on where that person's status is, if you want to get to a completely well person, you want to be off the triage system. you know, you you're you you don't often get the credit because you're kind of behind the scenes a little bit unless you're in the space. The average person doesn't know Jeffrey Bland, but they should because, you know, I I honestly think you should win the Nobel Prize for what you've done to get this out there. I mean, from like the little idea that I'm going to quit and teach doctors about nutrition to where we are now is and from your inception of even starting as a faculty member studying nutrition and human health. I mean, it's it's a half a century. You know, my first uh real job was an academic position in 1970 on Earth Day. The University of Puget Sound in in Tacoma, Washington was in search of a chemist that be in their department, but they wanted to start an environmental science department. And so they hired this kid, me uh I was 25 years of age, just finished my posttock. I was to start then an environmental science program as well as being an organic nutritional biochemist. over the years that ultimately got me to meet
years that ultimately got me to meet some extraordinary people because of my speaking in the environmental science side. I was involved with ecology. I was invol involved with soil health. I was involved with uh environmental pollution studies that we were doing on um air pollution related to sulfur oxides and the the largest copper smelter in the Pacific Northwest so-cal smelter which we eventually were able to get uh shut down in Tacoma, Washington. And so all of this together then ultimately got me introduced to a wide variety of different people. And it it reminded me that I need to learn across multiple disciplines if I'm going to be involved in this field. Well, back then nutrition was such an orphan science. I mean, why would you even consider going into that because it was sort of like a less than, you know, black sheep of the scientific uh research field. Like nobody nobody who's a credible scientist would really study nutrition. What happened to me was one of those moments and you've had these in your life. I know a a seismic unexpected event. I had by that time gotten a second job in the night. I was a clinical director of a medical laboratory. I was a part owner of the Bel Redmond medical lab that was serving the only nutrition focused physician in Seattle, Washington, Lee BS. I was in in our laboratory one day in Belleview, Washington. And uh our receptionist came back into the lab and she said uh so Jeff we have a visitor actually two visitors Dr. Lionus Pauling and Dr. Emil Zukerondell who is the director of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in PaloAlto and I it just blew me away. For those of you in the listening don't know who Lionus Pauling is, he's a two-time Nobel Prize winner. He discovered the structure of proteins and won the Nobel Peace Prize for the nuclear test ban treaty to ban above ground testing that happened in the 60s. And he he was also you may have heard the guy who was promoting vitamin C for the cold and was ridiculed and kind of laughed at at the end of his life in his career. But he was on to something. Was he ever orthomolelecular medicine is what he discovered or he founded. Much to my surprise, he said, you know, Jeeoff, I I've listened a couple of your lectures. I've read your research
lectures. I've read your research papers. No, I' I'd really like to uh to maybe have you come and spend a sbatical year uh or two with us at our institute and to run some research uh projects uh down at our our facility near Stanford. That was a life-changing experience. That was 1981. Meeting he and his wife, Eva Helen, really was a life-cher because I recognized that there was much more to this than just the science. These were stewards of the universe. They were broad thinkers. They had friends. You can imagine the dignitaries that came in, artists and politicians and poets and all sorts of people visited the institute that I I had vicarious opportunity to meet. So it changed my whole thing. And so what happened to me at that point and I think this set me on the path and ultimately led into the functional medicine model was on my way home um after I finished my two years my my family was in the car. I had my box with my stuff from my office which was next to his office in the polling institute. And as I was walking out, he said, "So Jeff, do you think your classroom is big enough?" Wow. And I thought, "Wow, what does that mean?" And I got in the car out to drive 1100 miles home and I finally recognized what he was asking me. I went in, my parents had been very kind to look at our house and keep watch over it while we were gone over the two years. We sat down and I said, "So I just have some news that I want to relate to you." And by the way, my father kind of lived vicariously with me as a professor because I think he would always have liked to have been a professor himself. So you kind of like me in that position. I said, "So I've come to a conclusion and that is I'm giving up my tenure faculty position to start a venture to help doctors understand how to apply nutritional medicine in their practice." Crazy. You could have heard a a pin drop and they like you were joining the circus, right? It was like a total silence. Then my my mother broke the silence. He Jeff is very impetuous, but you know, when he makes up his mind, I think he's probably serious. So, my dad then said, "If you're going to do this, uh, it sounds like you are. Then I better come out of
like you are. Then I better come out of retirement because I do have an accounting background. I know something about business. You know nothing about business and you're, you know, you're giving up the security, college education being paid for for your kids, your mortgage, your house, and everything. So, you know, you're going to have to make a living." Yeah. Away we went. My dad was my business manager. My mother was a copy editor. My wife was uh corporate development and we started down the road to have me going out and start to to help docs understand how this all fits together really spreading the news from Linus Pauling orthomolelecular medicine and then ultimately into the functional medicine model. Well, you know, you mentioned Buckminister Fuller earlier and he he said you never change things by fighting the existing reality. Change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. And I would say nothing is more true of functional medicine than that. It's it's a new model for thinking about disease. It started off as nutritional medicine and education, but you know, as you began to sort of encounter different doctors who were experimenting with different approaches, whether it was Sid Baker or Leo Galland or other folks who were kind of the pioneers as the practitioners, the AIM group, which was a which is kind of funny because it was the uh I think it was alternative integrative medicine group. Uh I think that's what it stood for. Yeah. And they they were groups of physicians that met in the northeast in Lennox, Massachusetts, where actually my clinic is, which is wild. And and they would have different experts come, including you, to talk about different topics like, you know, essential fatty acids or magnesium or, you know, the gut or and they basically were the sort of incubator for this application of nutritional medicine, functional medicine, systems medicine to everyday practice. We we now are really understanding this and your work uh with big bold health and with one particular plant called Himalayan tari buckwheat. This is an ancient plant. It's actually a flower not a grain. Even though it's called buckwheat, it's not wheat or no
called buckwheat, it's not wheat or no connection to the genes of of wheat at all. This sort of ancient grain turns out is very high in a lot of these immune regulating phyitochemicals. 3, 500y old food. Can can you imagine in the fertile crescent there were really two a major source of of nutrients the first kind of husband crop was was millet and so millet is in the indo uh regime considered a very very important non gluten grain it's a cereal product that's not gluten containing in the uh Himalayan uh region of the world uh in China you had a similar 3500 year old product that was agriculturally husbanded. That was this uh tartery buckwheat. Tartery stands for the tartan district of China which is up against the Himalayans, northern China, which is now was Tibet China. And and actually the the Tibetan yakurers that and their typical breakfast is something called sampa. Yes. Which is basically roasted buckwheat. Yes. Or barley. They use different compounds and and they actually turn into like a little cookie dough kind of thing they eat for breakfast. In fact, I just was uh in discussion this last week with a farmer of turbine in Bhutan and he was saying how important that food has been in the Bhutanese culture uh and why they have very good health outcomes and of course it's a happy group of people too. So maybe there's lots of things going on there. But he's been very concerned that they're converting uh the tartary buckwheat, which they call black buckwheat, over into other crops now because of um the pressure of getting increased yields. Yeah. And so that people are losing the the nutritional benefit in Bhutan. And he was very worried about maintaining their cultural heritage. And we in the United States, actually, it's interesting. Our colonial ancestors brought over tartarie buckwheat uh because it was such a hearty crop. It didn't need irrigation. It it didn't need fertilizer. And it
It it didn't need fertilizer. And it bugs don't like it because it has such a high level of these phyitochemicals that it's almost like its natural pesticide. Years ago, tartar buckwheat was lost in in North America. people stopped growing it and replaced it with seed and soy wheat and soy corn and so it got lost in this country as well. You know in in some of these countries they actually will will use it in many ways. They make noodles so soba noodles is in Japan but they they also have in Japan this sort of derivative which is this tea which is sort of thick kind of almost like a kind of porridgey thing that's comes as a waste product from the water but it's actually full of a lot of these phyitochemicals and they drink that as a part of their diet. So it's interesting and you look at these cultures, they've incorporated this in as part of their way of eating. But in the sort of marriage of this ancient grain with the modern science of being able to sort of understanding the ways in which our genes are regulated by these foods, we're we're uncovering so many remarkable discoveries that show us how different parts of our immune system are controlled. That's right. So some parts are actually suppressed which you want and for health and some are activated which help you fight different different chronic diseases. Our immune system could be considered divided into two components and that was the part of the immune system that produces antibodies. It gives rise to a a memory effect that we used for immunizing people and that's our B cells. That's soal the adaptive immune system. those cells adapt to the exposure to something and remember that so that the next time you're exposed they will produce something that helps to detoxify it an antibbody. It's kind of like smart bombs against a particular bug or infection. So they're very targeted and people have thought historically uh over decades about immune system is that's where the action really is is in the adaptive immune system. But there's another part of the immune system that's um the first level of the immune system which is called the innate immune system. more ancient and yet goes all the way back. Plants have an innate immune system. So this is
an innate immune system. So this is definitely ancient. It's phoggenetically conserved. It goes through all different insects and into organisms of all types. And it has been said um until recently and when I say recently I mean within the last 10 years that this part of our immune system is is kind of dumb. It doesn't it can't learn anything. Whatever you were given genetically for your innate immune system, that's what you got. And it's the first line of defense. And those cells basically just respond by engulfing foreigners and killing them by certain kinds of biological processes. And you just hope it's working well that because there's not much you can do about it if it's not. And they do it through hydrogen peroxide production, through ozone production in the body. Exactly. Like we literally have like natural antimicrobials, some of the strongest ones ever discovered on the planet that are in our bodies that are being produced in small amounts to help fight these foreign invaders. The macroofage which is a member of those the cell type in the innate immune system has these arms as it's a big floppy job of the hut type cell and it puts its arms around foreign stuff and then it squeezes it and then it releases chemical the clevenoff reaction which as you said are hydrogen peroxide and oxidants that kill it. So it's chemical warfare. It's like Pac-Man. I think of macro like Pac-Man. They just go around, you know, gobbling up the bad stuff. But there's not much we supposedly can do about that. It's either going to work for us or not. Now within the last 10 years, da da new discovery. The innate immune system can be taught and it can learn and it can be trained to be better and it's something that's important because it it helps you to to be more immuno resilient. Let's say why because it turns out if you ask where is the innate immune system concentrated where is it localized in the body in higher levels it's in the mucosal surfaces in your gut and the first place that our body sees foreigner is where you find most of your innate immune system like the gut mucosa the lung epithelia in the nasal passages and
lung epithelia in the nasal passages and so if your innate immune system is kind of not doing the job then it slips through the innate immune system whatever that is and now it has access to the second line of defense. And you talked about this uh situation that we saw with regard to um to uh COVID 19 where people died in their own fluids because their immune system overreacted and they produced all this stuff trying to well that's because the innate immune system never had a chance to kind of do its work the first time and the second set the adaptive immune system now got overwhelmed and it just went wild and went into the cyto cytoine storms what they called it which was a consequence ence of yikes, I'm under siege. I just have to throw all the tools against it and that person actually ends up dying of their own immune system overreacting. The construct that we have an appropriate first line of defense, we teach that immune system, the innate immune system to be vigilant and resilient is but it's not specific. It's just it's not training it to be specific is it like antibodies. It's a different kind of specificity because on the surface of your innate immune system you have what are called tolike receptors and those toll-like receptors pick up information of specific types like gut bacterial lipopolysaccharides and then respond to that by defending you against that message. And uh so it it has a specificity but it's not the memory effect that you have with the the adaptive immune system and antibodies. But I think that what we recognize and this is an important new aha is that you can fairly quickly train the innate immune system to be more resilient. It doesn't take months. And how do you do that? Here is where the polyphenols play a principle role. This may be, as you said earlier, this uh uh list of nutrients that have only gotten a page or two publication in nutrition textbooks because weren't considered to be essential nutrients. this whole
be essential nutrients. this whole flavonoid family of compounds. Now we're seeing they play principal roles in priming the innate immune system and regulating the genes that are associated with immune defense. This is all new discoveries. I'm talking about the last 5 years. So this is like aha stuff that then makes diets become ever more important for how we therapeutically modulate our immune systems. And do we know how um the immune system relates to the development of chronic disease and its dysfunction as we get older? Yes. the so-called immunosciness that you were talking about inflammaging. Yeah. And so now we're starting to recognize it when you get this secretary phenotype of inflammation because the body has started to collect injury to immune cells and other cells. that gets locked into the state of uh being constantly that's that's where the immune system is aged more than your years of birthdays and you have an accelerated series of aging that can appear as a brain dysfunction as a cardiac dysfunction as diabetes it can present itself and by the way we now recognize that um this new class of drugs that we call GLP-1 agonist that are being used for diabetes and for obesity those affect the immune system through the adiposite, the fat cells. So now we're starting to learn that these are all interconnected into another system which is the gut connected to the fat cell connected to the brain connected to the immune system. And so when we're giving GLP-1 agonist drugs, we're also having a therapeutic influence on that system as well, which you can do through diet. Exa Exactly. Right. That's why, you know, the the sort of elimination diet works because it's it's a profoundly anti-inflammatory diet. And I my guess is it's working on both antibbody mediated pathways as well as the innate immune system and how those regulate. And the answer is yes. Those clinical studies have been done and published showing exactly what you said that it has an effect on B cells and has effect on T-regs the thymus
and has effect on T-regs the thymus dependent regulatory cells and and we now know the genes that actually are regulated by specific flavonoids that ultimately affect the personality of those immune cells that then speak to your B cells to change your antibodies. All this is is a giant system that interrelates you to your diet and your lifestyle. And it's interesting, you know, also we're we're seeing new age related biomarkers and there's been a lot of work done by David Ferman who's been on the podcast talking about immune age uh and what is that and how do you measure it and he's documented something called the immunome which is all the different changes in the expression of genes that relate to various parts of your immune system to cytoines to innate immune system and how those are correlated with chronic diseases. And so now through biomarker testing that are now clinically available and we offer these now through function and there was just a major p paper published about PTA 217 which is a biomarker for Alzheimer's that you can detect often even decades before you get any symptoms that then you can intervene with and modify the pathways because at the end of the day Alzheimer's is inflammation of the brain. It's the final common sort of insult that happens in the amaloid which have been targeting for decades and spend billions of dollars and hundreds of studies with no effect because they're just dealing with the downstream co effects of the body trying to deal with the inflammation which is the the development of amaloid plaques in the brain and tow and so so we can now measure through biomarkers a lot of these things that we couldn't measure before and so we're actually able to see the changes and we're seeing this with function health people are modifying their lifestyle we're seeing change over time in these biomarkers, which is pretty amazing. I mean, think about like even the the heresy of saying, gee, there's a blood test for Alzheimer's, you can detect even up to decades before that if you change what you're eating and your lifestyle and your sleep and stress and relationships and everything else and nutrient levels and phyitochemical intake that you can actually change that and reverse it and normalize it. This is like a a whole new
normalize it. This is like a a whole new frontier of of thinking about disease. When does it start and how do you measure it? That's exactly the paradigm shift that I'm so excited that I'm still involved with this field. It has been my wish and dream that I would still be around in this field when this ultimate shift in paradigm would occur. I knew it would ultimately occur. I didn't know when. And we're living it right now. This is like no period of history in changing the whole fundamental paradigm of healthcare. Anybody that's that's practicing from that which it was is an artifact. that which it will be is where we need to be concentrating our attention because these are modifiable. These are executable. These deliver real results. Asking the right questions and getting the right answers. Not just looking for when you get a disease. That is old school thinking. We have to be looking at the prognosis not the diagnosis of where these are going. What's their trajectory? And that is what we're seeing as food as medicine is one of the therapeutic tools. Yeah. Because lo and behold, we're relearning what nature has been trying to tell us. The wisdom of nature that these modulate these functions in our body in real ways, not in decades of living, but in months of living. In months, you can change your genetic expression patterns. And we've seen this, you know, you you you've done studies where you intervene with giving people 90 days of this Himalayan buckwheat as a supplement and have shown reversal in biological age and immune age. And and this is really a critical important part of research because you know if you wait till something happens and this is what's so screwed up in medicine is that we we wait till you're out of range on a biomarker or wait till you know you're you have some symptoms where we wait till you have a disease rather than thinking that there's a way to detect this these problems decades before along the continuum of dysfunction that leads to pathology. because you know you're going to have imbalances that occur way way before you ever get a symptom, right? And and now we're able
symptom, right? And and now we're able to sort of detect these and it's even getting to I think even a a more meta level which is maybe measuring our epiggenome on a regular basis to see the exchanges and expression of our genes that will lead to problems even before they show up as a traditional biomarker. So now we're getting into kind of a a world where medicine really is not practiced in this way, but it will be. And I think these kinds of diagnostics and assessments and and watching what happens not just to how you feel, but actually to your your disease risk biomarkers is is going to change everything about medicine. Well, everything you said, I 100% agree with one variation. You said medicine will practice. medicine is being practiced by enlightened practitioners like sure there's a few of us out there but it's like you know not not when you go to most most uh medical schools I mean my daughter just graduated medical school like there was zero she didn't learn about mitochondria she learned about insulin resistance she didn't learn about the gut she didn't learn about nutrition I mean all the things we just talked about earlier in this podcast that are fundamental to understanding health are not being taught to doctors today you know how long it takes to understand anatomy physiology pathology psychology those are all skills that are really important important to understand what we know about the organizational structure of the body. And it takes quite a while to get competent about those understandings upon which you then build this new enlightened architecture of how we're going to use those things that we've learned that are givens to create a more dynamic process that will take us to health. And having 50 years in my life of measuring my biomarkers on a routine basis and now having the access of function health, it provides many more biomarkers. I can see the important value of layering on top of my traditional background and training of anatomy, physiology, pathology that I probably wouldn't have understood in the absence of understanding the body. So all this fits together and your daughter I know as with many other practitioners as they gain more experience in life and practice will see that there are other things they need to learn. I mean, she's going to orthopedic surgery because she realized that internal medicine and our
realized that internal medicine and our approach to chronic disease through all the specialties is just kind of a big minefield of problems that doesn't really work for the most part. I mean, there's great rescue medicine. That's fine. I've benefited from it. You benefited from it. I mean, it's we need surgeons. We need intervention. We need procedures. But for for basically treating people with chronic illness, we suck. And so, that's why she's going to orthopedic surgery. But she even said to me, "Dad, you know, in orthopedic surgery, we don't really learn about regenerative medicine. It's kind of dismissed as as something that, you know, is not part of their traditional training." And this is another field of really how do we activate the body's own repair, renewal, regenerative systems. That's what you're doing with personalized lifestyle medicine. That's what you're doing with your research in him buckweed is you're actually not treating a disease. You're activating the body's own systems. Yes. to fight disease and to prevent disease and to treat disease. You're activating the body's own innate wisdom, the ancient built-in systems for healing that we have. We're a healing machine. I mean, Andy Wild talked about the spontaneous healing. But he sort of in a way I think brought this idea forward, which was that our bodies have a a natural healing system. If you cut your skin, you don't go, "Hey, stem cells, would you go to my finger where I just cut it and would you recruit also white blood cells and cytoines and healing repair factors and fibroblast?" And we don't think that our body naturally has a system of healing and repair and and a lot of the work you're doing and a lot of the work, you know, in the regenerative medicine space is really about how do we do that in an intelligent way to activate the body's own healing capacity? Because when we did these elimination diets for the 10day detox diet, we weren't I wasn't treating a disease. I just took away the impediments to health and provided some of the ingredients and the body's own healing system did all the work. I think you just said a drop the mic. I mean that is the fundamental raise and detra for functional medicine is finding an operating system that can
is finding an operating system that can deliver on that opportunity because that opportunity is in all of us in our genes. our genes have that potential if we give them half the chance to express it. Yeah. I mean, there's a very famous quote. I I'm kind of gonna butcher it, but it's it's really about how, you know, basically the doctor just kind of has to, you know, let nature take its course to to kind of heal the body that nature does most of the work. We're now able to accentuate nature by providing nature in the form of things like Himalayan, char buckwheat, or other foods that are going to heal and repair the body. This is an amazing conversation. I I kind of want to end by asking you what what are the next frontiers in in this field of personalized longevity medicine? How do they get to the average person? Cuz you know people don't want to wait around for 30 years till science gets turned into medical practice which is often what it takes. I think that what's happening right now and and Mark you you're an exemplar of this is the use of these digital communication tools to be able to accelerate the adoption of these concepts so we don't wait at the roadblock of somebody holding back on the information because they are the gatekeeper and that accessibility of information and truth wills out I believe ultimately I think truth will find its path but you need to have distribution systems to get the information out and And those are now happening. I mean your podcast alone is an exemplar of a distribution system of a different set of principles upon which a person can operate. I think that what I'm very excited about is a combination of AI with the data set analysis now from big uh data banks that start looking at wearable device information in real time coupled with biometrics like what function health is doing and then tying that together with the regenerative agriculture and planetary survival methods. So we think that there is a system that people can participate in that their body is getting healthy as they're helping the planet to maintain its health that we're all part of a system because that feed forwards uh the
system because that feed forwards uh the psychology of wellness and I think there's not let's not dismiss the sociobiology of wellness as a community process. All these things work together to create a shift of the paradigm that can happen I think remarkably quickly. I mean when I think in my life of coming down to the wall between east and west in Germany um what people thought would never happen all these various things can happen remarkably quickly when you get a certain critical mass of individuals who recognize that the alternatives and options are there and available for their action. So really, we're entering a world where we're moving from analog mezan medicine to digital medicine. Yeah. And we're moving from the Norman Rockwell doctor in his office with a notepad taking a history and doing a physical and a few tests to being able to sort of navigate a world where we have massive data sets on individuals. Y where we can look at patterns in that data and create discoveries that really were never known before about what's going on in the body and what to do about it. Precisely. And I think that's really the for me what's most exciting is we're sort of leaprogging over the old model. We're literally like like Buck Mr. Fuller said, you talked at the beginning of the podcast, you know, we we're creating a new system that makes the old one obsolete. That's exactly right. and and it's going to help accelerate the medicine because I think it'll end up creating the AI enabled superdoc where you're still going to need a physician or practitioner, but they will be so much smarter because they'll be enabled by the ability of tech and AI and machine learning to synthesize massive data sets in an individual. you know, whether it's hundreds of biomarkers or thousands of metabolites or the 100, 000 pabytes of data in your microbiome or the, you know, 7 million snips in your genome. I mean, they just the amount like the amount of information is so huge to take that information and turn it into knowledge to turn into kind of nuggets that the average practitioner
nuggets that the average practitioner can then apply clinically to create a true personalized lifestyle medicine is is just staggering. Like I for me, I think this is so exciting and it's happening so fast. Literally from week to week, it's getting better. I totally agree. And you know, it's interesting. I I've been criticized by some for many decades that I had this view that personalization was the future of where we were heading. And everyone said that's not scalable, that's idealistic, that will never happen. You can't have each person treated as individuals. I'm going to stand on this concept as you just stated that with these new tools there will still be the sensient relationship between a provider and the patient but they will have access as the superdoc to all this ability to c categorize and to interpolate this massive amount of data to make it accessible to personalization and that will become then precision personalized healthcare of which nutrition lifestyle will play big important roles as we start to understand how individuals genotypes interact with their worlds in their environments in their their diet. So, we're right on the threshold of that actually becoming real. And I think those who uh who criticized me uh heavily for being overly idealistic about personalization, they may have to change their uh their position. It's it's happening so fast, Jeeoff, and I'm I'm excited that you're helping lead the way and that Function Health is actually providing a kind of a a consumer-based platform for people to own their own health, to have their own data, to compare it to other data sets from other members. We now have over 20 million biomarkers in our data set in 180, 000 people at the time of this recording. And we're we're expanding that literally every single day. What does all that mean? How do we make sense of it? How do we learn from it? what is it going to teach us? It's a pretty exciting moment. I think we're we're at this kind of pivotal f fulcrum in in science and medicine. This this moment has been a long time in coming, but I almost can't keep up. It's just so exciting. And I think in your your work
exciting. And I think in your your work has just sort of led us to a lot of the things that we're all doing now in medicine and a lot of things that are being talked about across a whole series of specialties that are now in academic centers that are now sort of mainstream. Yeah. and I I'm sort of excited to see what you're gonna do in your next 80 years. Well, thank you. I hope we'll share it together. All right, Jeeoff. Well, thanks for this conversation, everybody. Uh stay tuned for the next podcast with Jeff. We're going to dive deep into the immune system into the concept of amino scessence, immuno rejuvenation, immunom metabolism, how food is medicine, what food is medicine, how it regulates, all the things that we really need to think about as we get older and are even not older in this country because most people when they're younger are older biologically. So even the young are now getting cancer and heart disease and diabetes. And so there we're seeing the disease of aging occurring in teenagers and and in 20-year - olds and 30-y olds. So, this is going to be a really interesting thing for people to understand in order to actually deal with this onslaught of inflammation where we have a literally a firestorm like a wildfire moving through us biologically that we have a lot of control over. Not not complete control, but a lot of control over and that's what we're going to get into on the next podcast. So, Jeeoff, thanks for being here and uh being my mentor and teaching me so much and helping me be a better doctor and and uh well um I'm excited for our next conversation. and everybody should tune in for that. Thank you. Really a pleasure to have this conversation. If you loved that last video, you're going to love the next one. Check it out here.
Transcript auto-generated by YouTube. Verbatim — duplicates intentionally preserved.
The central idea in this conversation is simple: the number of birthdays you have had does not fully describe the state of your biology. Biomarkers, inflammation, immune function, metabolic health, and mitochondrial capacity give a more useful picture of how the body is aging.
When those systems are cared for, aging becomes less about decline and more about preserving capacity.
Mitochondria help turn food and oxygen into usable energy. They also communicate with the immune system and influence how the body responds to stress, repair, and inflammation.
Supporting them is not exotic. It starts with food quality, movement, sleep, and recovery practices repeated with patience.
Dr. Bland returns often to the idea that food is more than fuel. Nutrients and phytochemicals speak to gene expression, immune tone, and inflammatory balance.
In plain language, the plate becomes a daily signal. It can ask the body to protect, repair, and adapt.
Immunosenescence describes the aging of the immune system. A resilient immune system responds when needed, resolves when the work is done, and avoids living in a constant state of low-grade activation.
That is why recovery matters. The body needs challenge, but it also needs resolution.
The goal is not to chase youth. It is to keep the systems of repair awake.
Track the signals that reflect function, not just age: metabolic markers, inflammation, strength, energy, and recovery.
Build meals around whole foods and colorful plants so the body receives useful information every day.
Treat recovery as part of the protocol. Sleep, calm, and restoration help immune signals resolve.
