The 3 SUPERFOODS You Need To Eat To Lose Weight & PREVENT DISEASE! | Dr. Jeffrey Bland

the human and the planet Earth get 90 of its calories from 10 of the 20 000 edible plants well that's as it should be or that's a problem that's a problem Dr Jeffrey Bland welcome to the show wow Tom I can't tell you how much I appreciate being part of this opportunity together as the father of functional medicine I cannot be more excited to have you here or to ask the following question what are the three superfoods that people should eat regularly if they want to have Peak weight loss and avoid disease yeah so I I think that that list obviously depending on the day of the week or the time of the year might change but for me right now why would it change so frequently well because for you from an education perspective or for the person from a seasonal perspective yeah so I believe in fresh and uh you know if we're eating strawberries in the winter they're they're not fresh unless we are living in a Southern Climate so if you ask where do you where are you going to get the most nutrient dense products there's some seasonality just like there is in frequency of eating time restricted feeding gives maybe a better outcome of eating than eating seven times a day you know so there are certain things about timing circadian rhythms that I think are important so when you ask me what foods I it really in some way depend upon the season of the year but without a kind of a consideration of circadian potential um I would say that the things that really kind of match the need of our present situation and we ask you know what are we suffering from as a society and then what foods then match up against those things so we're having an immune stress we know that the human population globally is under immune stress and why it's under immune stress because of all the things that have been part of the 21st century living industrialization time compression uh xenobiotics over medicated I mean there's so many things we could do you have to break those down xenobiotics toxic waste products pollutants persistent chemicals these would be foreign molecules okay so um you know if it's there's an abbreviation that's used in the literature called Pops Pops pop stand for persistent organic pollutants these are xenobotics so it could be things like organophosphates or it could be things like organochlorine compounds or polyrominated biphenyls and all these things that have built up by 50 000 new chemical agents coming into our environment and being bioconcident traded through the food chain over the last 70 years since industrialization so we know that we have that burden that previous organisms living in the planet didn't have so then how do we get rid of those we do so through unfortunately a process that was involved in our bodies called detoxification and it turns out that this is a super family of genes that control our detoxification process both of internal chemicals and external exposed chemicals there are foods that contain specific types of ingredients that actually speak to the genes that regulate the ability for our bodies to detoxify that's an aha I want to talk about this idea of speaks to our genes so one of the things so one I want people to understand that you really are considered the father of functional medicine what that means this is like 89.90 if I remember right you're thinking along these lines you bring a bunch of people together and you're like hey I think that the system of dealing with symptoms is probably not the right way to approach it you guys come up with this idea if it's really about the function what's the function why is it breaking down and what do we do about it so putting it in that context now you've got this idea of immunoregeneration so and we'll get into the whole personality of the immune system and all that which is fascinating and despite being as deep as I am in this I've never heard anybody speak to the immune system as having a personality before which I think is really powerful but now we're on this anchoring moment of phytochemicals so there are things that we can consume so by the way this just gave myself the chills here thinking about this and I always tell people oh something that I took from biology which is your phrase that food is information we're going to eat things that actually talk to our immune system is one of the ways I'm sure it's talking to a whole lot of things but uh in researching you this idea of that phytochemicals and if I misspeak anything which I meant but phytochemicals are basically the plant's immune system so they're growing up in a harsh environment but they can't run they can't go to the doctor and so they create these chemicals talk to me about co-evolution though how does it become a communication with our immune system oh my word there is so much uh to unpack and what you did say that was that was a brilliant summary by the way I am literally just stealing all your words no no no thank you all right so I'm gonna I'm gonna answer that if I could by finishing kind of the thought around detoxification because it links back to your question about phytochemicals and evco evolution so there are now discovered certain plants within the family of twenty thousand edible plants of which we get 90 of our calories from 10 plants I want to say that again the human and the planet Earth get 90 of its calories from 10 of the 20 000 edible plants well that's it as it should be or that's a problem that's a problem that's taking the complexity of nature that can speak to our genes in very complex orchestrated ways and narrowing it down just having the brass or percussion session playing the the sweet so it's a whole different way of thinking about it and we know we're losing food diversity at a rapid rate that's another topic let me go back here so I don't get get off topic and talk about what happens when you then select a food for whom the genes of that plant are that to produce a defense in their environment against their offenders and depending on where they grow where they have been genetically uh evolving uh the soil condition the atmospheric conditions they will have different personalities because they have different genes and there are some plants that will produce very high levels of these phytochemicals that have the capability of defending them by their ability to activate their immune system against the pests in that region it could be mold it could be rust it could be bugs and as a consequence they are bacteria or fungi they're they're capable of having that defense and what we have found now when I say we I really should talk about phytochemists I guess I'd consider myself part of that Community have found that some of these plant foods are capable when consumed by humans then of activating the genes in our body particularly in the liver and in the intestinal tract that activate detoxification processes so here is a cross communication of a plant that is defending itself against its foreign Invaders in its environment that then when consumed now what are those Foods well they're principally in the cruciferous vegetable family broccoli cauliflower brussels sprouts cabbage these are foods that have these family of phytochemicals and have the name glucosinolates leukocinolates then when they're eaten in our diet are broken down by our digestive process to release a whole series of bioactive compounds in O3 carbinol and other two hydroxyphenylbutane and all these other things of phenol isociocyanate I hope they do something that's simpler to explain than the names yes so these substances then activate the genes in our liver our liver the human liver to promote the ability to detoxify foreign endogenous and exogenous toxins so out of the blood or out of the uh out of the tissue system so what happens when we eat obviously or breathe ultimately those substances get absorbed into our blood the blood then gets purified by going through the liver the liveries are one of our detoxifying principle detoxifying organisms and in those liver cells called the hepatocytes reside high levels of these specific enzymes that will detoxify and make uh safe those chemicals that get released into our urine feces okay so the food that we eat if we're eating the right foods have this chemical messenger that tells our liver to upregulate these enzymes that are able to detoxify otherwise our liver wouldn't be able to keep up with the toxins the toxins end up in our tissues that's exactly right wow okay so the idea of rejuvenating your immune system I think is pretty important so I want to go back to the very first thing that you said uh to Anchor everybody and we said is we're in this stressed environment our immune systems are stressed tell us how often our immune system cells are being created because I this was shocking to me I didn't realize it was yeah I think it's very interesting you know I do a lot of Education with Healthcare Providers uh different different genres and I'm always amazed that these individuals who have skilled in the art have studied anatomy and physiology extensively to pass their board exams when you get down to some basic questions about the immune system they don't seem to really have had the exposure to things like the immune system is producing every second about 80 000 new immune cells that's so crazy and and so our body is constantly recycling our immune system about every two to three months our whole body's immune cell system turns over to be replaced by new cells and then the question is well they are are they good as good worse or better than the cells they're replacing and that to me is where the the tip of the spear resides for some of our problems and I can look at covid-19 as an example why did some people get more problems with regardless sorry it's going to virus and others why did when they got into why you answer that tell me what it means to be good bad better worse like what what is it yeah so our immune system is very complex if we did still it down in to a kind of sound bite there are three arms in the immune system there is this ancient part of it which we call the innate immune system it's our first line of defense it's principally found in the mucosal tissues of our body the the barriers that defend us from the outside world so that would be the in the guts there always on guard ready that's right the lungs the skin you have a lot of these innate immune cells uh the second is the second line of defense which is called the Adaptive immune system that's the one that most people are familiar with when you get immunized that it builds antibodies that remember that exposure to be able to do battle the second time around and then the third arm is the kind of crosstalk Communicator between those two systems which we call the the lymphocyte system T helper cells deregulatory cells natural killer cells these are all interwoven in this Orchestra called our immune system now it turns out that the person that killer so I get the innate immune system there on guard they're the centuries at the door yes just in case then you've got the people that go okay cool that's a bad guy I'm gonna run around tell everybody we trained to beat that bad guy we now we come into this system but I don't know what the natural killer cells the T cells what do they do yeah so these are cells that have specific personalities to take a direction from what they're learning from the interrogation from the innate cells and the particular family of white blood cells that produce antibodies the so-called B cells and so they are the kind of crosstalk communicators and so if they get the message that we're under alarm we're under hostility we're under siege that Under Siege could either come from the outside world like a virus or a bacteria or a toxin or it could come from the inside world that we actually have built the buildup of toxins in our body that are activating the immune system that gets into the whole definition of autoimmunity are we really allergic to ourselves I don't believe so I think the term is wrong I don't think we have autoimmunity what we have is an immune reaction to our self being converted into non-self whoa and then we ask how do we have that happen uh-huh that was going to be my next question so okay so I know one way that we trigger autoimmunity and tell me if this is what you mean by self and the non-self so I'm eating something let's say gluten and it breaks down the epithelial lining of my gut which for those that haven't heard of that it's a single cell barrier basically and the Junctions break in some people quite rapidly if you're eating the type of gluten found in the U.S we can talk about Italy and stuff later which maybe have better ways of handling it but here in the U.S you get that Junction broken a lot that then allows partially digested or I suppose even not really digested uh proteins to cross that lining and they actually get into the bloodstream so now you have true non-self whereas like yo there's a protein that's not supposed to be here now the bad news becomes when you have something in the body that through biomimicry looks exactly the same so you have gluten that comes in that looks like the hippocampus if I remember right and so it comes in it's like oh word we're going to build uh our not the Adaptive the reactive immune system that was called cool it identifies that protein it's just we've got it we know how to deal with that it then finds it in the hippocampus or whatever in the brain goes this is the same even though it's actually technically not and now it goes on attack because those proteins look identical and now you seem to have become allergic to yourself beautifully stated wow that's a medical school lecture that should be published to all the aspiring Physicians a lot of episodes of Health Theory that's really good there's another part of the story however I want to add on to bolt on to that and that is what happens if you have continually high blood sugar so you're eating a diet that has high glycemic response a hypoxemic load diet you talk a lot about that in your in your work over the years and the people you've interviewed um so you have then we know a case of building up what's called hemoglobin A1c and people that wear continuous glucose monitoring devices now are trying to keep their A1C low and there's all sorts of ads on TV for the new drugs it will lower A1C well what is A1C it is a natural molecule in the body native to us called hemoglobin you find it in your red blood cells and it's at it's that molecule that holds onto iron and makes your blood red so that hemoglobin if it is exposed to a lot of sugar then becomes chemically down to the sugar so that's glycosylated hemoglobin because sugar is sticky that's right when the glucose bumps into a protein when your sugar and your blood is high it doesn't just bump in and bounce off it actually chemically reacts with your protein to make it a different protein now we think of that as being only with A1C but no it's it's doing that to the major protein in your blood which is albumin and so if you look at glycosylated albumin which we've done now for over 30 years it's a more indicator of your risk to diabetes to heart disease to dementia then is A1C because now what does human do albumin is your major blood protein and it's part of your immune system the globular protein to your blood the albumin in your blood are those transport proteins that take things like vitamins fat soluble vitamins they take nutrients they take off waste products it becomes a transport system for your body and if you were to glycosylate your albumin because you have blood sugar it's no longer the native albumin that your your genes would want to make it's a new Foreigner now you've just converted self to non-self yeah you're going to ask me a question let me let me make sure I can follow up on this the question is okay if it becomes a non-self molecule then what's an Adept immune system going to do an Adept immune system is going to say there's a foreigner I need to go out and form a reaction to it using my uh adaptive immune system now you're going to ask me does that mean that people have blood sugar problems and diabetes often have autoimmune disease yes they're comorbidities because they share common mechanisms related to you becoming non-u this is a huge different oppression because a lot of people they feel they get autoimmune disease because it's in their genes there is no strong evidence that any autoimmune disease is linked with a specific Gene they're linked with experiences that our genes are exposed to over the course of living so okay we've got sugar is bumping into things it's chemically altering those things our immune system goes this is no longer self it mounts a defense now going back to this idea of your immune system has a personality but that personality is temporary if you change the environment into which it is created it will be different than it would otherwise be and so when I was researching you the thing that came to mind was okay my immune system cells are coming off at whatever 8 000 per second eighty thousand eighties my brain's like it can't be happening uh 80 000 per second if they're born into trauma then just like a kid born into trauma they're going to grow up with some dysfunction and we'll call that dysfunction overreactive they're just like they're going after everything because they have reason to because of what you just described if they are born into an environment where it's there's no high alert everything's good blood's clear there's not sugar globbing onto everything and changing these things in a foreign I don't have a broken epithelial lining in my gut so there aren't foreign proteins coming into my bloodstream everybody's chill there a kid that grew up in a nice happy healthy family and I think we all know people that have been in both and we understand the emotional reactivity of somebody who grew up in trauma versus somebody who has that emotional resilience when they grew up in a more stable household and so the emotional reaction is somebody that grew up with stability love all that it's in proportion they can encounter something hard difficult and they're able to stay pretty even Keel in fact I will just tell everybody right now if you want to be a successful entrepreneur you have to be good at self-soothing so you need that emotional resilience over here you get somebody who's emotionally reactive that analogy works so well for me in terms of understanding certainly covid which is where you were going so talk to us then about a cytokine storm is that an immune system that came into the world in trauma and now you introduce another trauma and the reaction is just so big so are you familiar with moisture sev's work on the ice babies in uh not by name so moisture Sev um and Mark meeting his colleague at uh the what was really the Han selling a laboratory at McGill University which was the father of stress was hanselier and so their their stress researchers but from a whole different way than we often think about stress researches they've been looking at these uh effects that we go through with our life experiences post-traumatic stress syndrome the unexpected things that happen in our life that can be very traumatic and does that produce a mark on our cells and at the genetic Mark not changing our genes but changing the way that genes are expressing their function into our body and this concept of epigenetic modulation is the currency of the 21st century because it is this science of Hope the science of Hope why is it the science of Hope because there are many people who feel when they're chronically ill they've had bad experiences they may have been subjected to horrible traumatic experiences that it's a one-way Street once it's been occurred you can't erase it it's real it happened and we're just going to live with it and a lot of that has to do even with chronic illness if people are told they go Doctor shopping and eventually they said well you know it's just how it's going to be you have to learn a living it will give you some symptom managing drugs and hope for the best but now we recognize actually that our genes that are regulating all the stuff that we call our phenotype how we look at can feel our modifiable based upon how our genes are getting the signals as to how they're going to express themselves and that is controlled by epigenetic above the gene events that put marks on our genes some are read here marks others are don't read here this section of the book is not to be read and by the way if we didn't have that in our genes remember we all came from a single fertilized egg every of the 100 different cell types we have came from a single fertilized how did that happen it happened by this process of evolutionary embryology differentiation that occurred with putting these groups on the genes so one cell becomes a nerve cell another becomes a cardiac cell and they start to differentiate so you don't want the nerve cell reading the cardiac message but the message is for every cell is in every cell of our bottom body so it has to be very differentiated what we have learned and this is the AHA of the 21st century is that yes most of this this bookkeeping occurs in in fetal development obviously before you're born and you don't want a lot of stuff happening after you're born that your liver cell could become your heart cell but we have now learned that there are a small collection of genes after you are even into your adulthood that are still modifiable through epigenetic marking and it turns out that these uh these what are called metastable Epi alleles these parts of your genes that are still capable of getting messages from your life to make changes in the editing of how your genes are expressed those are in regions of the genome that regulate Downstream effects like inflammation or cell replication or cell repair or energy those principal fundamental processes that regulate how you are going to function as individual are still modifiable based on these epigenetic marks now let's go to the ice storms this discussion of moisture cell so in Canada a number of years ago about 10 years ago now there was a horrible horrible cold snap in Northern Canada that uh was so bad of a freeze that power was out and and of course women were getting pregnant during this period of time and it was extraordinarily stressful uh the temperature is plummeted you know sub Centigrade degrees and and they lived in the dark and it was it was pretty bad so they got the the question I wonder during that period was there any alteration the in the imprinting of the genes as a consequence of that of that trauma what is up my friend Tom bilyu here and I have a big question to ask you how would you rate your level of personal discipline on a scale of one to ten if your answer is anything less than a 10. I've got something cool for you and let me tell you right now discipline by its very nature means compelling yourself to do difficult things that are stressful boring which is what kills most people or possibly scary or even painful now here is the thing achieving huge goals and stretching to reach your potential requires you to do those challenging stressful things and to stick with them even when it gets boring and it will get boring building your levels of personal discipline is not easy but let me tell you it pays off in fact I will tell you you're never going to achieve anything meaningful unless you develop discipline all right I've just released a class from Impact Theory university called how to build Ironclad discipline that teaches you the process of building yourself up in this area so that you can push yourself to do the hard things that greatness is going to require of you right click the link on the screen register for this class right now and let's get to work I will see you inside this Workshop from Impact Theory University until then my friends be legendary peace out and lo and behold they found out that that was true then they talked to a investigator a psychiatrist actually at uh Masonic School of Medicine who had been studying second generation Holocaust victim descendants and finding lo and behold that the methylation epigenetic marks in the in their genes one generation removed this is so freaky yes this is really freaking out remember I said this is the science of hope this doesn't sound hopeful the way well now I'm going to close the loop here the the hopeful part is that what you can put on you can take off that's what we're learning there are these processes that Mark your genes with these events but there are also processes that will take them off and now we're going to go full circle where you and I started one of the ways that that has been discovered and I'm talking about just within the last few years is through certain phytochemicals in your diet that modulate the ability to replace these marks on the genes in such a way as you get off the bad parts of your book of life the alarm Parts the inflammatory parts and re um give the ability to really Express the good parts of your book of life hope you know Joy uh love the goodness that's in your genes so we have that ability this is the currency of 21st century that's why it's a science of hope this is a major transition in school I can tell you through my medical school training through my PhD training which was now a number of decades ago this was thought not to happen at all in fact if you would have brought this up as a student in my era you would have been exturgated from school because at no no the genes don't change their expression once you've got them that's all there it's a one-way street that is not true when I was a kid yeah it's not true okay so we have the ability to take it off the way the marks on the um our genes and you have talked about hey nobody talks about the people talk about RDA for like protein fat sugar but they don't talk about it for the phytochemicals right so what phytochemicals should we be eating and where doth we find them oh yeah and uh I'll I'll tease a punchline I don't take supplements almost ever and in researching you I was like yeah buying a supplement of that so what what are the things we should be eating to get our proper amount of phytochemicals that are going to positively impact the epigenetic expression of our genes yeah wow so this is such an incredible moment in our opportunity as a culture to redefine how we want to see ourselves going forward how we can become more self-dependent on achieving our health outcomes of desired function and uh not depend upon Crisis Care to be the rescue for our eels and what has been learned is that certain foods that are high in flavonoids this is a family of phytochemicals and this has drawn me in like full-on because I you know there are no coincidence that life I've come to recognize we're drawn into thinking things or coincidences because they happen together but we're probably likely to have had them because of the things that we're dealing with and who we're hanging out with and the conversations we're having so what we think is happenstance probably was more designed to to give that right that observation because of experiences that we're having so for me I had three experiences all happen within a couple of months of one another one I met this investigator at vanville University Medical School who is doing this extraordinary work on discovering a new way to manage blood high blood pressure through the immune system and I had never thought about that the immune system had some relationship with uh blood pressure so I got this discussing and looking at his papers and and it turned out that he had found a molecule uh has the scientific name to hydroxyl benzylamine called two hoba that was capable of modulating the relationship between the immune system and the wall of our blood vessels to cause it to relax which lowers blood pressure and so I thought well that's kind of cool where does that where does this immune system is communicating with the walls of our blood vessels oh absolutely because the immune system is going in and out of the vascular epithelium all the time it's it's prospecting it's it's searching for that's where Apple sclerosis and Immunity tie together heart disease and an inflamed immune system so let me just close by saying I asked the question then where is this two Hova located and as I read the paper carefully down in the fine print of the paper he pointed out there's only one source in natural world of this in foods and it's in something called Himalayan tartory buckwheat there it is I knew this was going to be part of the punchline I ordered some yeah well I got some for you and and I and I never heard of Himalayan Georgia buckwheat you know like you you know at first I was like what are you saying you're so used to saying it you say it so fast Himalayan tartare yes it comes from the art whatever yeah it comes from the Himalaya the targen District of China on the on the flanks of the Himalayan Mountains okay it's at 25 and it's not a wheat we should tell people that it's not it's my life it's not a green it's a seed it's a fruit seed it's been consumed for 2500 years as a central food in harsh environments in the blue zones in the himalayans so I got this this aha then the next part of the coincidence was I asked my colleague that's worked with me now she's very patient she's been with me for over 25 years working and so she kind of knows where my strange thoughts go I said are you familiar with uh Himalayan tartery buckwheat at all she's no I've never heard it I said is there where is it grown in the United States she said well Jeff you're going off to this meeting in China in Harbin China so why don't you let me think about this and I'll do some sleuthing and when you come back we can talk about it which he did so I went off to China and was had a a guide host mdphd Shanghai East gentleman that was U.S trained and we went to Harbin and I had a chance to speak to 8 000 Chinese medical doctors and their annual health check about uh health check Center meeting about functional medicine so I got on the train with him and here we go you know for a day trip to uh Shanghai and we get about halfway across China and we're going through these extraordinary agricultural areas you know City would pop out with a million people out of nowhere so I I said you know I said just as a kind of a flyer I wonder if you're familiar with something called Himalayan tartery buckwheat and as if time froze like the like the train stopped his eyes got very big and he said you got to be kidding me and I said no he says we have been looking for someone in the United States for some years that had an interest in Himalayan turtle bucket because my group is the largest research group studying it and it's it's health benefits and Physiology in China so then I got back and was telling my colleague that I had met this person and we were going to form a partnership and she said well you know I found the only person who grows Himalayan attorney book in the United States is a former Cornell University AG research professor and his wife who's a nurse they have a hobby Farm he's retired and he's been growing this now and they they millic themselves and they have little roadside uh stands up in Upstate New York in Angelica New York and so you got to talk with him Sam beer was his name I called him we we now formed a Cooperative Himalayan tartery organic Cooperative doing regenerative agriculture we have a number of farmers up there now we are farming for the first time ever in America what are the phytochemicals in it though that make it so because I know that they have whatever 100 times the amount of phytochemicals in them that whatever the next closest thing has but what exactly is it yeah and what is the message that it's sending to our immune system thank you so it's a portfolio of about 50 different members of the flavonoid and the polyphenol family so you have Rootin you have quercetin you have gluteal and you have diasmine you have the spirit and all in one plant all in one plant it's an orchestra and you know that's one of the problems we have I think with nutritional supplementation in this country and the way we view it is we we often think about green Pharmacy okay we have a drug for such and such now what is the nutrient that we find that mimics that drug that's actually not the way nature Works nature works symphonically it has a whole different mechanism it's Network biology they work together to hormetically is the term hormesis to modulate the functions that then regulate how our body functions it's a different than blocking or inhibiting a specific product like uh does a drug it's really orchestrating the symphonic orchestration of how our body works and so we're looking at how it actually imprints the human immune system with epigenetic marks to regulate how the immune system functions okay so let me start putting some things together so the immune system is communicated to you by the immune system of plants the harsher the environment the plant grows up in the more that the immune system is um developed I'm not sure what the right way to think of that is but they create more phytochemicals phytonutrients maybe it's broader than one simple thing it's the whole Symphony um but given that wind the human immune system grows up in trauma it becomes overreactive why is it so awesome because that's part of what makes Himalayan tartory buckwheats so effective is it grows something like this heinous environment and it doesn't do cross-pollination itself pollinates which I didn't even know it protects its genes yeah so it's this sort of really pure thing that's grown up in this insanely difficult environment um why doesn't that become overreactive and then trigger our immune system really really important question so if you think of our experience of life from really even the moment we're conceived up through whatever age we are we're collecting all these experiences because our immune system is everywhere in the body and has a really good memory so it remembers all these events it remembers the great days it remembers the not so good days it remembers the infections and the colds it remembers the broken arm and the trauma that might have all these events now some of those are so um strong in in the way that they impact epigenetically our immune system that they lock the immune system into a state of feeling it's in under constant siege that leads to this state of chronic inflammation because the immune system constantly feels like it's doing battle even if it's not supposed to be doing battle these cells and they have names like zombie cells that's a pretty descriptive term they're cells that perpetuate the message of alarm and by the way um you know I I have come from an athletic background I was involved with the University sports I played basketball in University level and so the the construct of of athletes who are constantly forcing to the edge and and Trauma is part of their training and part of their experience they're collecting injuries so how do we get them to rejuvenate their cells it's not only the the muscle cells and the joint and cartilage cells it's the immune cells and so what we often find is is people that are involved with athlete competition benefit from this process of immunorejuvenation because all of us are collecting marks some people at a more accelerated level if you've had sarskova2 infection and you're in post covid you probably have marks that we call scars right on your immune system now how do you get rid of them you do so through this process because the body can rejuvenate its immune system by replacing new cells for the old ones getting rid of the old ones by a process that's only recently been discovered in one of Nobel Prize in medicine in 2014 called autophagy autophagy is a self-digestion process to get rid of debris and now give room to replace it with new cells so the combination of rejuvenating through autophagy of your immune system Plus getting rid of epigenetic marks gives the opportunity to roll back the age of your immune system and its function why does that come from the world's most stressed out plant like I would have thought it would come from the world's most chill plant the one they grew up in like the relaxed environment no worries that's the part I don't understand okay so I I think we all know that doing nothing is not the way to be fit um in fact the way you'd be most fit is you have a level of challenge that your body is going to be exposed to it could be out yes like every year going but our own immune system is and and maybe this is what we have to distinguish okay I don't want my immune system to encounter nothing because therefore it will be weak that's right but I obviously don't want it to encounter too much or is it just no no you want it to be assailed by viruses bacteria fungi all of it you want it to just be bombarded but you never wanted to get confused between self and other thank you I think bombarded is probably too strong a word because we know everything can be taken to an extreme the good stuff can become bad if Overexposed we want to rewild our children we don't want them to be in a completely sterile environment but we don't want to purposely expose them to life-threatening organisms either that's probably good advice so what we want to do is find the way to and I use the word hormesis which is a small exposure to produce a large effect so that's what these plants Himalayan Target buckwheat does this hormesis imply a small bad exposure like a pain an injury that's how I've always heard it referred to it's a small bad that creates the big positive it doesn't have to be bad what it has to do is it has to uh put a memory effect on that system that improves its ability to say I'm resilient to that I've seen that I have the capacity I have the headspace if I see it again I can manage it and a balanced immune system as we know provides a capability most of us don't get sick all the time even though every day we're probably exposed to infectious organisms that would make us yeah will you please tell people hopefully they've heard me say this before this is the most shocking thing I've ever heard of where does the vast majority of your immune system live it lives in your gut 60 to 70 percent is in communication with your gut microbiome why and well think of what happens over the course of living over the course of doing an average person will lead somewhere between 10 and 20 pounds of foreign molecules called food unless you're a cannibal you're not eating native molecules you're eating food what your digestive system then has to make a decision are there friend and Foe and so it intimately communicating with that immune system that's clustered around your gut it's not just cosmetically you couldn't find a better place to put it it's there to actually defuse bad messages before they get into your body to create injury do we have a similar amount in our mouth yeah we do it's gonna say that would make you know a completely sterile mouth is not a good thing either right there are friendly bacteria that live in our in the mouth I mean oral pathology oral microbiology the microbiome of the mouth is important when it's the proper one not the streptococcus mutans and some of the uh associated with dirty mouth or plaque or things that can create inflammation so yeah all the barrier surfaces their skin the same thing the the general organs have their own specific kind of friendly microbiome that protects against infection or or injury man that's so interesting okay so uh we need our immune system to get stressed maybe not the perfect word but we need it to have to develop resilience it has to have the Hermetic effect uh it doesn't have to be bad but it needs to be exercised yeah but we do not want it to be over taxed and we don't want it to exist in a chronically alerted state that there's always something bad going on and the way that we give it that there's always something bad going on Signal is through basically a modern diet here's another thing you said that I'd never heard before because so I will vacillate between just not eating vegetables and because ah I feel great if I'm honest I feel fantastic when I just eat meat and when I was researching you uh and you were saying that you have a hypothesis or maybe now you know it's true but that some of the long-term problems that people face heart disease things like that could be a result of not getting the phytonutrients or the phytochemicals that you need I thought oh that makes me want to not do my vegetable it's just out of laziness but my non-vegetable eating uh regimen so is that how you see that that there are just there are either our immune system or our cells or some there's something going on with the way that we have evolved that needs the input from the phytonutrients you know again I want to be very cautious not to sound prescriptive that that I have this Enlightenment that everybody should be doing something because we know that we are varied in the way we respond to the world and we know that we're very adaptive organism however if I try to give thoughts to the general public from that which I've learned over 40 plus years of working this field I think it's clearly obvious that if you ate only animal products you'd be getting no fiber and we know that fiber really is now called prebiotics prebiotics meaning it's it's food if it's the right kind of fiber material it's not an adjustable carbohydrate that's eaten selectively by bacteria in our gut or microbiome so our microbiome diversity and and health is really in part dependent upon certain types of prebiotics that only come through the fibers found in vegetable products you don't find that in animal products and as a consequence if you have that healthy microbiome it'll be producing things that are helpful for you like butyrate and short chain fatty acids that then re-energize your gut immune system the so-called colonocytes and as a consequence there is a benefit to you by having that vegetable-based non-digestible carbohydrate called fibers you would not get if you only ate animal products 100 so that's number one number two is by definition uh animal products have some but not a lot of phytochemicals you know if you eat wild meat you will will find in the in the meat you'll find some phytochemicals if you do the analysis of wild meat well because they're eating a much more complex diet by their the way that they're foraging off nature versus eating corn which you might get some phytochemicals coming from corn zeaxanthin but you're probably not going to get a variety of phytochemicals in your meat I think it's worth a slight detour here for a second it's one of those things that I should have put together maybe subconsciously did put together from all the random factoids that I know about food and all that but when I heard you say that industrial farming becomes a problem because nutrients are stored in the fat and what you eat ends up in the fat and so if you're eating a cow that's only ever eaten corn that's very different than a cow that's out there grazing on a whole bunch or venison or whatever um take us down that detour why is industrial farming potentially problematic yeah uh try to summarize a lot of stuff here quickly um so our plants which ultimately are eaten by animals to become our animal food grow in soil or in Marine environments in the ocean and they depend upon then the Integrity of the nutrients that are present for their growth so let's let's go to terrestrial plants and talk about things that grow in the soil the soil as we know has its own microbiome and that microbiome is as complex and interesting as our own microbiome in our gut so if you are doing industrial farming using a lot of pesticides herbicides fertilizer what you've done is to decondition the soil and you have changed the microbiome of the soil when you change that microbiome of the soil it's like changing the micro Bahama of our intestinal tract it then becomes less able to communicate to the genes of the roots of the germinating seed of the plant that mechanism has now been well discovered I can go into it in great detail but I'll say that that there are chemicals produced by the mycorrhizae the soil fungi and bacteria in a healthy soil that's communicate to the genes of the germinating plant to produce its own outcome right stuff is dizzyingly complicated and so intertwined so let me make it simple for to hopefully give a an endpoint to your question so if we overly use the soil without renourishing it just like we might over utilize our body by using too much antibiotics to kill bugs that kills our microbiome it will then have an impact Upstream of who eats those plants right because those plants will not have the same things in them that a plant that the same gene type that same seed which grown in a rich microbiome-rich soil so we have seen through the development of industrialized agriculture a depletion of ourselves not just mineral depletion but the actual living texture of the complexity of that soil just as we've seen the living texture of our own human microbiomes being compromised so we're seeing diseases come as a consequence of those immunological imbalances so if you were to ask me is it important then to eat animals that had food that came from plants that were grown in soils with complex microbiome I would say absolutely yes so that kind of answers a little bit of your question why is it depend upon where that comes from it doesn't answer just a little bit but it is so famous quote as the island of my knowledge grows so to the shore of my ignorance the more I learn about it like honestly 20 years ago I was so arrogant about diet and how people should eat and you know look I learned how to get lean and it's so simple and you just do this and then my wife had massive dietary issues I mean it was it was a moment so acute that she remembers where she was standing and what happened and the great irony was it was celebrating the success that we had had at Quest we were in living in this big fancy house and we're standing in the pool with the waterfall and we pop a bottle of champagne she takes one Sip and it changed the rest of her life now of course it was a threshold event where it had been building and building a building for years and then maybe more and then just click and it was Nightmare City and as as that all happened all of my thinking that I knew something just fell away so I want to Anchor us back around one of the coolest things that I've heard in like the sphere of diet and that's this idea that I can rejuvenate my immune system okay super powerful I want to marry that to the title of a book that you wrote which is amazing disease delusion and so getting people to understand that the very Paradigm with which we look at our bodies the way that we function is off and so you've been very careful to explain that learning the things we've learned over the you know hundreds of years we've been paying attention to stuff discovering antibiotics and all it's incredibly powerful and the number of lives is saved is insane but we've now you know you talk about it works for a while and then it becomes detrimental we're now sort of coming down the other side the efficiency we've learned in farming amazing but now it's becoming monocrops and about products amazing but now we're taking too many of them and we've developed this sense of there's a pill for every ill so what are those sort of big pieces in your life that you do that are based on what you know about rejuvenating the immune system the realities of soil and animals and fat storage and all that stuff so if you bear with me for about a minute or two I'm down this this is really kind of Unearthed and I'm going to get get real here for a second um so I'm coming up to my 77th birthday congratulations yeah I think it is you're [ __ ] sharp I think it is um and every day is a magic day for us right go when we think forward so how did I actually start down this process of being this Explorer this kind of um Inquisitor and it was from an experience in my life that was irreversible of which it was a one-way Street both for my wife and I and that was as I just had come to my first real job as a professor in Tacoma Washington in 1970 start a birthday that was the that year I was hired as a combination chemistry and environmental science professor we moved into our little condo having just relocated from Oregon where I finished my graduate work and uh four days into it we had our four-month infant son and our two-year-old son I wake up at six o'clock in the morning to find our infants Undead oh [ __ ] whoa I did not know that yeah uh he was in a topic baby uh there he had you know a lot more uh sensitivities than now we've had three other sons that they didn't Express that in their infancy I we still to this day don't fully know all the explanation but I can tell you it set me on a life Pursuit because from that moment uh ever there are certain marks in our life right that um you can manage but you don't get rid of and that's one of them so it set me on a path to say if I can help prevent one set of parents or one child from ever going through this it was a life well served and that opened me to any any new idea as a professor I was you know kind of channeled in my thinking I was a fast learner I was kind of moving quickly I was a full tenured professor in six years and you know so I was I was a high achiever type of guy and so that to do that you got to be very focused and very channeled but suddenly I said to myself I need to be alerting and open to every idea I don't have to accept every idea but I have to listen carefully because there's wisdom out there that I might not be able to understand if I'm just channeled in my own myopia uh that took me then six million miles over the last years traveling all around the world to meet some of the most remarkable people and have conversations that epigenetically marked me I'm a mosaic of all those experiences I'm a universal Seeker to answer exactly the question that you just raised that has been my Pursuit so the answer to that question is I'm still in search I don't think I have all the answers but I think we have made significant progress over the last now 40 plus years in in producing an architecture it allows us to start understanding how to assemble this information to personalize it to the individual need and that's been always my since I worked with Linus Pauling a two-time Nobel Prize in winner at Stanford in my sabbatical years and early 80s I have been a champion for personalization because I think if you don't personalize then you're not treating the uniqueness of each of our facets on the diamond of life with the kind of what I would call a celebration that it deserves if I would have learned it maybe uh you know now it's 47 you're known more than that it was 50 years ago actually that our son Kurt passed away if I would have known what I know today well who knows I think I might have been more effective in in modulating his immune system and and preventing some of the things that we had to deal with so I think these are all the parts of gaining some Mastery some wisdom certainly it's a lifelong process you're never fully realized but it is as striving as you do so well to really open up new opportunities for discovery that can help other people in the process so that's what led us into Himalayan territory buckwheat that's what led me into form big bold Health that's what led us into now owning a a regenerative sustainable oil plant in Dutch Harbor Alaska in the Aleutian Islands all of those things were part of this this uh attempt to try to pull together things that people really could do to rejuvenate and provide more resiliency of their immune system I love the idea of personalization I think that's really important that was something that we learned with Lisa as she was going through everything was just like things they don't bother me but they'll bother her and they'll bother her really substantially and things that make me put on fat don't make her put on fat and so it's like this really weird thing of um you really do have to personalize it I heard you say that this is going to be the age where we go from the age of the average to the age of the individual right I thought that's really important you talked about the future of medicine being the ability to look at the intersection of genetics and the lifestyle and then you you didn't say AI but that was certainly what I took away from it that we're gonna use AI effectively to really look at what is the interaction they're in and being able to carry our own medical records with us decipher all of that now having said all of that we're going to go into this time where we're going to be able to do a lot more than we can do now but what are like the the basics that you advise for people is it eat the rainbow is it don't eat sugar is it plants only no what's not plants only I I think eating close to the ground as much as possible and the ground does that mean it means things that we're alive that didn't get through seven processes of uh of processing to be shelf stable for Millennia um and and we're going now into an epic period as you probably know there's this uh uh this recent book about Silicon Valley now taking over the food supply system through this new food technology doing fermentation technology to produce uh mimics the to animal protein and synthetic milk proteins that come from clone genes from unicellular organisms this is a real Trend you know we see it with the impossible burgers and these meat substitutes so the question is are they the same and the answer is they may taste the same they may even look the same they cook the same but they're not the same I mean nature is complex and the more we study foods that we're growing in soils or foods that were eaten by animals that were grown in soils the more we find out that there are things we didn't ever even know about that are part of this orchestration so my feeling is eat the rainbow but it's not the synthetic rainbow it's it's foods that have their natural colorants because each of those colors is a different phytochemical that has a different principle now let me say something quickly about that because this Loops back to your really I think insightful question about phytochemicals we used to think about phytochemicals as being antioxidants and and so it's just like measuring the phytochemical content in your diet was to use an indication that's on some food labels called orac orac which stands for oxygen reducing capacity oxygen reducing absorbent capacity orac and so it was said well the higher the orac value the the better that food is because it has more antioxidant potential well I'm kind of a early stage antioxidant researcher going back into the 70s so I think I have some pedigree in this area and I've been saying for more than 20 years it's not about antioxidants alone that makes these plant Foods valuable so you just can't substitute one orac for another orac and get the same thing because each of those chemicals that are in those individual plants those phytochemicals has unique signaling properties I'm going back to your original Concepts that they send a signal to the genes that's used unique to them so a glucosinolite phytochemical coming from cruciferous vegetables is different than the polyphenols of Atlantic acid coming from berries they both are antioxidants but they have entirely different physiological mechanisms and therefore what are we really trying to accomplish are we trying to rejuvenate the immune system through the hormetic effects of multiple signals on goal so that we have an offense not just a defense that's producing a younger immune system I I went on our own program our immuno Rejuvenation program him and I consider myself a pretty dedicated healthy person exercise proper sleep blah blah blah so I went on our program and I started measuring my epigenetic programming of my immune system when I started off at the age of 75 I guess is when I started this my immune system Age based upon epigenetic profiling using AI determination of the methylation patterns of my immune cells was I was I was 75 in birthdays but I was 67 in my immunity so he said well that's that's pretty good I'm I'm my immune system is younger than my age and birthdays but then I really dedicated myself to our program and I really said could I really have an effect that would be beyond that of what I've seen and lo and behold another three months in retesting I was 53. whoa yeah I I dropped it another seven years what'd you do I went on to our immuno Rejuvenation program exactly what you and I are talking about I religiously dedicated myself to stay on the program extra exercise sleep Stress Management polyphenols omega-3 fatty acids prebiotics probiotics the whole nature of what we're trying to do in big bold Health was whole food or supplementation it makes whole food with some supplementation because I can't in the way I live my life always every meal prepare it from the way that I would want it to be prepared so you know we try to provide some convenience in the way that can be done but it starts obviously with food can I predict what your diet was sure okay so and I do want to know if I get it wrong but I want to see if I've understood everything you've been saying so uh there's going to be a lot of fatty fish grass fed [Music] um sustainable farming if possible so that the soil is accounted for in the whole equation yep you're going to eat the rainbow but you're going to consider seasonality as well so it's uh is it fresh you mentioned that in the beginning so something that you wouldn't have to get Frozen although I happen to know the punchline about some of the way you guys prepare fish and you do freeze it to preserve the oil so that's probably not a hard and fast rule but the freshness is what you're going for there and I do say that because we do a lot of boating up north that we don't have access always to fresh fruit and vegetables we do do Frozen in our summer trips so yes but would you still try to time the frozen fruit to what would have been seasonal exactly makes sense do you at all account for being northern European in descent yes I think the genomic template upon which we lay our lifestyles is very important to know when people ask me should I get my jeans tested I say yes this is your book of life will you tell the story about your dad I thought that was really eye-opening oh wow that's amazing that you're familiar with that story thank you so uh I I've had I had the great privilege of going through every phase with my father and including him coming out of retirement when we started our first company because he said you know nothing about business which was true and so he and I worked together for a number of years with he kind of being the financial manager and blah blah blah eventually then he did retire and we and my mother went out for his retirement tour around the United States and and I noticed when he came back after a couple of years of of being in this retirement period that he didn't seem quite as sharp and uh and so I started talking with him and he always provided he's a life of the mind he was he was a scholar it was a prodigious reader and I and he said you know I I think I'm starting to lose a little on My Edge so we um we followed very closely then he and my mother decided they would move down to uh to Northern California from Washington State so now I wasn't seeing him as frequently as when they we lived in the same area and I would periodically stop in there and uh and then he started to really slip off the edge and he started getting Parkinson's and early stage dementia and it was it was really His function was deteriorating uh rapidly and and my mother was a big devotee of health and actually the one who probably got me nutrition to begin with my sister and I both um she said you know Jeff uh I don't know exactly what to do I'm really trying to do the best I can but but I really see your dad slipping away and at this point he had been moved into another bedroom because he wasn't sleeping well through the night and so you know then my mother would come in and get him dressed in the morning and so his his fear of influence is very compressed so um she then said uh you got to come down and visit and see what's going on so when I did yeah it was it was pretty dramatic how how quickly he had slipped so I I said well is he seeing a Doctrine and in the local area oh yes it's an MD PhD in the local area he's a hematologist um and internist and I said oh okay well that's that's good um so does he uh what kind of analysis is he doing I mean oh kind of a good analysis routine analysis I said well could I see the medical records I'm sure he could get them from him so I I communicated with him and his analysis was usual in customer it was good but it was nothing that we would do if we were doing a more detailed functional analysis so I recognized that there was one thing that he had not done that I thought being a hematologist I could easily get him to do and that is I asked him do you know what my father's vitamin B12 level is and he said well no he doesn't have any signs of pernicious anemia and I said no no I'm not asking my pernicious anemia I'm not his functional status of vitamin B12 and he said well no I I don't think so but let me take a look so he did a serum vitamin B12 level and he came back and he was feeling proud of himself he said see it's in the normal range and I said well but that's actually not what I really wanted to know and I think you as a unitologists might want to go to the next level the function of the B12 not just it's in its blood but how it's functioning he says well what do you recommend I said you know this this test of measuring in his urine homocysteine and methylmalonic acid or in his in his serum those two chemicals because those are byproducts from the body's ability to use vitamin B12 and folic acid not just how much is in the body but how is it functioning and so he said well I'm not aware of it that test is is used traditionally and I'm thinking well gee what do you see the PHD in MD and but okay he says so do you have any papers on that you never have asked Jeff plan for papers so I uh this back in the days of facts is so I faxed him so many papers that it burned out his fax machine literally because nurse called the next day and said there were papers all over the office floor and so uh if he didn't call me he said oh there's a lot of literature on this isn't there I said yes there is and and he says okay well maybe I had to measure those and I said yeah and he said but I'm not sure Medicare covers them I said look I don't care if Medicare covers it you know we'll pay for it cash just get the and here's the lab you can have it done so we got it all done and alone behold the data came back and it was very high in those metabolites showing how to functional vitamin B12 and folate deficiency so then he said well now what do I do about that now remember I want to say he was a hematologist um and I I said well I think he would treat this like you would consider treating pernicious anemia he's like pre-pregnitious anemia to give it some terminology and so I would give I am intramuscular injections a B12 daily and I would give a high oral dose of 5-methyltetrader folate the absorbable form of folic acid so that happened I waited then up in Washington state with baited breath as them down in California what was going to happen and no news for several days and then one morning this this was an epipheral experience in my life actually one morning my mother called and she's hysterical and I think things have really gone South I am I the worst in suddenly presents itself I think oh my word and I get her calmed down because I was she wasn't being coherent and and she and I said so is Dad really in trouble it's just oh no no no no that's not why I'm telling you what I'm trying to tell you is for the first time in three years he came into my bedroom fully dressed saying let's go on a picnic wow she came in the chills and for the next six years my father went back to his computer which was his favorite thing he liked programming and doing Simple Things on his computer and he was functional wow and if there was ever any need for me to see the validity of this construct that we've been trying to teach other doctors about over the last 40 years that was like uh it made it all real what how did you know that it was going to be related to B12 well because there's a big literature about functional B12 deficiency and encephalopathy and and it's a combination of folic acid and you know and seen then by these Pathways in in neurochemistry that are so dependent upon those nutrients for their metabolic function producing energy mitochondrial activity and so forth so I thought I thought he had a mitochondropathy that could have been B12 and folate dependent and then he probably was a malabsorber of B12 which you know with the lowered hydrochloric acid secretion with age and his atrophic gastritis type B that often happens in older age and so you don't absorb as well your B12 you don't have as much intrinsic factor being produced by urine stomach so this is these are things that average docs are not trained in they might have learned it esoterically but they don't have clinical experience so they don't think about it often when it comes to clinical management okay so as you come at things from a functional perspective what's going wrong what is it that they either have too much of or don't have enough of that's the underlying cause of this if somebody's struggling with something like dementia I mean let's pull a hard one obviously as of right now it feels like uh people knowledgeable in the space would say it's probably preventable but if somebody's already struggling with it is there are we just in protocol mode of trying to slow the decline or is there something that we can do that is the science of Hope to use your earlier phrase yes the science of Hope absolutely if there's anything I want to imprint in this discussion with you to leave as a takeaway is we have to be very mindful the science of Hope is on our threshold and you know I have a good friend and colleague I'm sure you are aware of no human that's Dr Dale pregnancy who is a neurologist neuroscientist um at UCLA and and uh has been looking at the reversibility of early stage Alzheimer's through a multifocal approach using personalized lifestyle medicine intervention all the things that we've been talking about and so he started implementing these constructs that we've been talking about in functional medicine that really are part of this whole big bold Health construct that we can take charge and we can employ the science of Hope in a real way to turn back things because they're rejuvenatable they can be rejuvenated and he just published another on a series of papers a pilot trial I think of 30 patients who had different degrees of early stage Alzheimer's with cognitive deficits and if a gamble shrinkage and so forth showing outcomes after a period of less than a year of improved function with all the standard measuring devices that are used to assess Alzheimer's disease plus increased volume of their hippocampus in their brain increased volume so these constructs that we are hopeless in our thoughts about Alzheimer is that billions of dollars have been spent on drugs to try to treat it unsuccessfully that we have no successful treatments today the successful treatments are in the wisdom of nature it's in the wisdom that we need to go back and relearn that a lot of people have lost because they're looking for the synthetic single Silver Bullet that's going to treat a multifactorial condition Alzheimer's is not a disease it's a complex outcome from the marriage of our genes with our environment with our lifestyle and the ladders the latter of those environmental lifestyle are modifiable that's where we should be spending time and energy we're not spending time and energy and government support for research in that area we have to do it on our own we have to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps we have to create our own science of Hope to demonstrate that the solutions exist they just need to be proven yeah it's interesting so what is it exactly that the modern lifestyle is breaking is it that is it I know it's both but are we suffering more from in taking something that we shouldn't which is my hypothesis or is it that we are not eating something that we need to like if you could only pull one of those levers and I totally understand it's obviously both but just to get a sense of like which is attributing to more of what we're going through so I'm going to use the name Dr Sydney Baker and he has what he calls the tack rules t-a-c-ks Attack rules he says um there are two things that we know if you sit on two tanks and you pull one out you won't get 50 reduction of pain the second part of the tax rules is that the future of health care is all built on what you've just said on getting rid of that which you don't need and adding back that what you do and that is the wisdom that really incorporates itself in personalization because what you take away and you add back is different slightly from person to person there are these guidance principles we're talking about but it really is in the face of personalization that the outcome can be more successful and I often say nutrition is for real people statistical humans are a little interest let me say it again that that's a quote from Dr Roger Williams the father of biochemical individuality I quoted I wrote it down and have memorized it and said it millions of times since 1974 when I first didn't say it nutritionists or let's call it functional medicine is for real people statistical humans are of little interest but medicine that we use today is are built around statistical humans you get a diagnosis and now that is who you are if it's diabetes you suddenly are the diabetic patient but there are as many forms of diabetes as there are as many forms of disease yeah see that's interesting so I heard you say that and you pushed it farther and said as you begin to like peel away all these different things you realize that this is just a cluster of symptoms that people have sort of given a name to could be coming from different things and different people and so do you really have this monolithic thing is there a monolithic thing that seems so true that there's a monolithic thing why do you think that's the wrong model well I don't want to throw away entirely this this monolithic concept like monogenetic diseases like phenylketonuria taste sacks Wilson's uh sickle cell anemia we know that there are many many genetically linked diseases what are called monogenetically linked to a single Gene but what people don't have often understand is that those let's use Down syndrome as an example uh Trisomy 21. as we know from experience if if you look at a whole variety of children that have Down syndrome the severity of that condition with the same genetic diagnosis can be very very different some people are high functioning uh trisomy 21 downs and and they virtually have a normal life and others are really significantly adverse affected and maybe they never even get to adulthood as a consequence of the same genetic characteristics so it's not that genes are unimportant it's not that there are not some kind of Monolithic indicators but even those that are most profound are modifiable into the phenotype into how that person looks and feels based upon the experience in which those genes were expressing themselves let me give another example phenylketonuria that's a really interesting one because it's the most common birth defect that is genetically linked that there is it phenylketon area PKU okay well what is it actually it's a consequence of a genetic abnormality of a single enzyme a gene that controls a single enzyme called phenylalene hydroxylase it converts the amino acid phenylalanine into the amino acid tyrosine and so if you have a defect in that Gene that your body can't convert that amino acid in your food phenylalanine effectively in the tyrosine so now you have an amino acid disturbance you build up high levels of phenylalanine you have too little tyrosine which produces neurotoxicity and what does that manifest as like phenotypically are you retardation retardation these these children if they're untreated generally don't get to adulthood but we learned when I say we that's not me right before me that was learned that if you could for a recently secured period of time in that child's life who had this genetic characteristic if you could [ __ ] the intake in their diet of that amino acid of phenylalanine by using a prescribed diet was containing proteins that were devoid or Limited in phenylalanine you could prevent that retardation whoa and they could grow out of to extend their PKU wow now what I'm saying and I want to emphasize it because people do not understand this that genetics definitely are an important primer but they are not actually the determinant that ultimately determines how we function it's all the other things that modulate the orchestration of our genes we've talked about epigenetics and all these things that have gone back to the beginning of our conversation so even in the most dramatic cases of gin monogenetic diseases we see variance in their expression based upon other variables that are generally tied to the lifestyle environment and and things that that individual has been exposed to even in utero so that takes us even back to pre-pregnancy planning and how the mother and father were the biological mother and father were were held healthy with their egg and sperm and how that combined together we now recognize these epigenetic marks start even preconceptually so it puts a lot of opportunity but also responsibility on us to make into conformed Intelligent Decisions yeah speaking of so I remember the first time that I heard somebody pop off that autism was tied to diet I was like get out of here that seemed ridiculous is it ridiculous or is there actually a possible connection well I think again we have to go Upstream of that discussion because in functional medicine we always try to say okay what's the origin of that question where did it come from and I think it came from what is it that modulates then neuronal function in uh in developing children is it a combination of exposures to maybe xenobiotics we'll come back to these foreign molecules that we now we have a lot of toxins floating around in the universe could that play a role could it play a role that the microbiome was Disturbed and produced then untoward effects that we now are starting to see some suggestion that the microbiome plays a role in autism the the gut immune system so I would not want to say autism is caused by this yeah but I want to say there are many variables that play roles autism didn't this suddenly come about because our genes changed you know I think it's very important if you look at the hockey stick of increasing frequency of autism in the westernized population it was coincident with changes that were occurring in how we lived how we ate how we moved how we how environment which we lived and uh you know some people say well it's because of vaccination you know that's probably a small player in the bigger picture of things that impact the developing nervous system and so I think all these things go together as it relates to why it is it's not just better diagnosis we are actually seeing frequency increase because the genes are being exposed to a different set of collection in the environment yeah man this is like the the number of things that we have changed in a modern lifestyle compared to how we evolved is is crazy now I'm a city bather so for me I know some people really enjoy Forest bathing and being out in nature and it's not that I don't like that but the thing that really lights my candle is going into like Tokyo it's my favorite place in planet Earth it's so incredible it's just this overwhelming cityscape that makes me feel alive and super creative wonderful but it's so abnormal in terms of the way that we came up that I do wonder how much of our modern lifestyle is causing problems so I'll roll through the things that I think whenever somebody asks me like hey I want to be set up for success I want to be my best my sharpest my whatever I'm like you you think I'm going to tell you what book to read but I'm actually going to start way back over here and so my first thing is sleep sleep for me is like the master regulator if you're not getting sleep does your diet can be amazing if you're not sleeping you're going to be toast so you've got to get sleep and I naturally tend to sleep about six hours but I would like to sleep more if I'm completely honest I don't use an alarm I go to bed at nine I try to like be in line with circadian rhythms get sunlight my eyes the whole line but whether it's stress which is my one Vice or natural I don't know but I get about six but I tell people sleep as much as your body will let you uh so sleep would be the first one exercise is going to be huge I don't think a lot about cardio but I do think a lot about being strong putting yourself under weight making sure that you get your heart rate up working out at a cardio Pace lifting weights maybe even a better way okay so you sleep exercise then meditation not necessarily in that order because food is probably more important but meditation so that you're able to calm your nervous system I find most people are not able to do that and then diet because a lot of your mental problems could be tied to your diet the diet is basically what we've been talking about here that's sort of like the big cluster now we can get into mind study stuff but I'll set that aside for now that's sort of the big bundle of things that I worry about with people am I missing any big zones let me say that you have just stepped off I believe exactly where we should be in this point of our conversation exactly because everything you've just described everything is related to your immune system function interesting so remember your brain has an immune system the microglia tell me and when a brain immune system is alarmed you can't sleep so you say get six hours sleep minimum and I would say is it restful sleep and how do you get the Restless sleep because if you have an inflamed brain because your immune system is is overactive you're not sleeping well even if you're in bed for six hours you know I learned a lot from from these Biometrics that we're starting to measure our 24 7 365 function and it's it's a revolutionary thing for me I've been a biohacker for 30 years and to look at my fitness score or my Readiness score as given to you by Aura ring yeah by the ordering which you know I've had like 30 different wearables over the years but but this one is very convenient I like the way that it assembles the information um and by the way I have no Financial relationship with Laura at all uh but the what I've learned from my own personal experience and it's been replicated now I've given oral rings to my family and so we've kind of all have a chance to have discussions um is when my Readiness score which generally is is in the mid to high 80s or low 90s goes below that it's something that I did or didn't do that related to my immune system function I see it in my respiration rate my body temperature my pulse rate I see it in my heart rate variability I see it in my sleep cycling it it and and therefore the aggregate is my Readiness score when I look up in the morning it's like oh geez now it's like in the low 70s what happened but then I can directly see what's gone on either I over trained or I didn't get activity or I ate something I knew better than eating or I had too much alcohol because we were celebrating something and I decided to have one more than I should have or I was eating a food that I would normally not have eaten because I knew it was going to set up some kind of a response and yes it told me the next day because my immune system is the ultimate Arbiter there are only three places in our body that are sampling your outside world 24 7 365. your nervous system your mucosal surfaces and your immune system and your immune system is intervated in inter communicating with your nervous system and your mucosal surfaces all the time is a super system therefore what most rapidly changes upon you stepping out of your program is your immune system function it immediately tells you so what I try to get people to understand is these are surrogate markers for immune function when you do the right things your immune system has been rejuvenated you're an autophagy you are epigenetically marking the brilliant genes of benefits and you're not turning on your alarm genes that's and it takes maybe two to three months to get there because your immune system has to re-pattern itself over the course of several months to really regenerate its function that's why big bold health is focused on the immune system it's the Gateway into all of these things it's an interrogation that gives you immediate feedback what's your thinking on fasting I have a follow-up question but we'll start there well I think fasting in and of itself that would be like juice fasting or water fasting water only is what I mean yeah I think you have to be very cautious to know what you're doing uh you know I've been in in the Nordic countries I've done fasting before in places where it's been historically fasting clinics um and and some people just do unbelievably well I've been in clinics where people have full meaning arthritis and by the time they're through with a three-week regimented controlled fast they're symptoms of arthritis are completely gone wow so there is there is a place for it but it's you've got to be very cautious because metabolism can be brittle in some people and you're you're you're stressing resilience and and some people are not resilient enough to be able to manage that so what happens to their metabolism if they fast and their metabolism is brittle well you can get into cardiovascular problems because of electrolyte disturbances you can get into neurological problems related to kind of psychotic episodes in the extreme case and we've seen that before I mean you're there are people with the uni kind of diversity of different types that are not well adapted at all to the because it is stressful to the body you're changing metabolism remarkably rapidly and if you don't have the capacity and that head space to accommodate that it can produce uh problems that's why I'm much more in time frequency and time restricted eating so keep the window brief 14 hours minimum okay and then what's sort of your maximum where you don't need to sweat it well I get a heck that depends a lot on the person and their their particular disposition but I would say that if you have in me anywhere between a six to eight hour window of eating in a day and so that means the rest of the day you're not eating right then that you're going to be in that in that zone where most people can tolerate it safely and it can be integrating their life and they can comply because if it's no good if you can't stay with it yeah yeah intermittent fasting for me has been a game changer and once I got it took me a while to get metabolically flexible and the first time that I went full-blown ketogenic I did a four to one fat to combine carbohydrate protein that was miserable because I didn't know how to manage my electrolytes not fun but once I was on the other side so I'd struggled with joint pain for 15 years and I was icing my wrists every night I had what looked like permanent burn marks on the back of my wrist because I was just icing them so much and didn't think there was anything I could do about it to be honest I just thought well genetics hey it's just my lot in life not realizing it was of course exactly what I was eating and when I switched it up the joint pain went away and I was like oh my God it was so crazy it was the closest thing to taking a drug I'd ever experienced in my life and through that you did take a drug you took the science of Hope drug yeah you re-pattered your immune system and you know a lot of people marginalize what we talk about saying well that's cute or that's interesting but that's not as powerful as doing real medicine I'm saying this is real medicine oh yeah there is no question about it when you turn on the right jeans and turn off the the the genes that are giving you problems that's real medicine and that's what we do that is what that that's the big bold health concept we're not like any more self-conscious about this I'm not shrinking around saying oh I hope I don't get called out and someone criticizes me no this stuff works yeah no I mean it it food changed my life drugs have not changed my life because I try never to take drugs but food like that really that and that was my first experience where I was like this is so profound so I previous to that I'd used it to lose weight but that always felt like really really hard once I got metabolically flexible and I could go let's say 20 there were times where I'd go 24 hours without food not like oh I didn't even notice but like I could go 20 hours without really even thinking about it the last four is like to hit a goal sure and so now I've been intermittent fasting and I do my average out so I tracked every day for I must attract every day for more than a year and it averaged out to about 17 and a half hours of fasting every day and then my diet is also very clean meaning that it's primarily Whole Foods like almost exclusively Whole Food um I don't eat enough variety that is for sure that would be if I were gonna say I have two vices I am I SP I'm very comfortable in stress so I know that I'm shortening my life uh and then I eat very simplistically so I'll eat the same things over and over and over and over and over and over and over well no not just to say I want to challenge that yeah you know stress is not necessarily A pathology distressing distress maybe a pathology stress is energizing stress is a virtue stress is important speaking my language here yeah absolutely uh you know if you look at individuals that are put in in self-con confinement in which they've been sensory deprived and they have virtually no stress yeah they break mentally yes they get sick very rapidly so this concept of stress is is something we ought to avoid that's that's ridiculous we ought to be seeking out positive stress we ought to be seeking out it's it's a powerful energizing it's when it tips over on the other side and it becomes distress on the curve because we're not properly supporting it and in fact again we come back to will distress have anything to do with your immune system or does your immune system have anything to do with stress of course they're intimately connected because the glucocorticoids are produced by your adrenal glands cortisol for one is an immune active compound so when your immune system is Disturbed you have an immune connection to your your blood pressure and to your stress modulating systems the so-called hpat axis hypothalamus pituitary adrenal thyroid axis so all these are part of this web this is why we think functionally about where the Gateway of Entry the Gateway of Entry is your function of your immune system because if you get that right you're using stress as a power Energizer not as a distress yeah I would say 90 of the time that's true there are definitely times where it's like oops like we have now officially spilled into distress but yeah that's a great point because I really do I am a bit of a an apologist for how much I work in my stress but to be honest I do it because I love it and it makes me feel alive and it's exciting and I love pushing myself all right speaking of pushing oneself where can people follow you well I think bigwoolhealth.com or jeffreybland.com Jeff Rey Bland bland.com either one of those can we got hundreds of videos right you know different kinds of plans programs immunore Rejuvenation whatever they they want they can find on those sites I love it guys functional medicine will change your life if you let it and speaking of things that will change your life if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace average American is eating for 16 hours a day and 60 percent of the food we eat is processed