Dr. Jeff Bland
Appearances
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
It's about how do you maximize the genetic potential that lies within your genome to be the best person you can be.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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. I asked you many years ago if you would become the editor of a journal that I had been writing for, Alternative Medicines in Health and Healing, in which you did a fantastic job as an editor.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
The first issue of that magazine, that journal, I published a research paper that was on this very topic that you're talking about. And I'm very proud of this paper because it was the stake in the ground around this concept that you're describing, that you've developed so wonderfully over the decades.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 – I think it was 80 people that we had – 30 of those people were on a kind of a standard of care. And then 50 of them were on an intervention program, like you've just described.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
This kind of dietary program that was high in phytochemicals, but was low in allergic substances, was free of gluten, didn't have sugar. Dairy, yeah. 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 lactulose mannitol test to measure gut permeability. How to measure leaky gut. Exactly.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 60% reduction in symptoms of the treatment group versus the control group. And that was published in 1991. That was a foundational statement starting functional medicine at that point.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 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 Kupfer cells that are immune cells.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
Those cells then speak to the brain 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 that patterns the control that ultimately is seen in people with different ranges of symptoms of different duration, variety, and intensity.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
And so we were setting the tone, I believe, in that early study for what later became the architecture for functional medicine as a systems biology approach towards healthcare.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 just review quickly. I want to review quickly what really we have collaboratively developed as clinical therapeutic tools. Number one is gut restoration. We originally call it the four-hour program.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
Now it's the five-hour program. We called it remove, replace, re-inoculate, 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 to the patients, the response they were getting was like, whoa. And then it caused them to see the paradigm shift.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
So that was our first collaborative development of that algorithm that we called the 4-H program. Remove, replace, re-inoculate, repair. The next thing we worked on collaboratively.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
Precisely. My first lecture, I recall, in fact, a doc sent me the notes from my first lecture on dysbiosis 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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 those molecules to be converted into non-toxic byproducts and be excreted that are called the detox pathways, phase one, phase two, phase three detox. We were the first people to really bring that up as a clinical therapeutic tool. Metabolic detoxification.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
So that was another of our contributions to the field.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
Yeah, I think that that's 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, both pharmacogenomics or pharmacogenetics, suddenly docs said, oh, that's right, I guess different people respond to drugs in different ways because they detoxify them in different ways.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 pharmacogenomics when docs have been criticizing that this is something specious.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
Well, the third thing that we developed, which I think is equally important, and I take a pretty reasonable degree of pride in this, the first discussion that we ever had with physicians around bioenergetics and the energy powerhouse of the cell called the mitochondrion was in 1990. 1990, I introduced the concept of mitochondrial bioenergetics.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
And that then, thanks to you 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
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 mitochondrial resuscitation. And we were the first people to start to actually provide a clinical intervention opportunity Now that's a standard affair.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
And so this is the third thing that we all... Well, I wish it was a standard of care.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
discreet way that and codify that in such a way and to communicate it you're a marvelous obviously communicator both in writing and orally and i think that that
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 well you went to had some good meals you went to Greece, Argentina, Morocco and you know you went to these
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
Yeah, so I was at the University of Madrid and was able to kind of talk with some of the original investigators in the PREDIMED study, as well as I was in Portugal, which was one of the companion places where the study was also done.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
The exacting approach that they took towards 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, not in the medical world. Free-living humans. That's right.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
But they overcame many, many objections and were able to really deliver a study that I think the world scientific community now says, this data looks real. And the more that that data is evaluated, now there are literally hundreds of papers that have been written out of the data set from the PREDIMED study.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 musculoskeletal 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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
But 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 convenient shelf-stable stuff to stuff that looks like it was once grown in the ground, those types of decision-making.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
Which, by the way, on my trip of the various countries that I had the privilege of visiting on this journey, I was amazed to see that, just as was in Britain,
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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. They had these rough breads that had all these... Peasant food. Exactly, peasant food.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 Med. is that people who eat those traditional diets. And in fact, there's a paper just published in Nature that is fascinating in Africa and Tanzania.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
They studied Tanzanians that were eating the traditional African diet, which was things like fermented banana, and a very high plant-based diet versus people that have been moved in the same country over into the westernized diet. And they compared the health outcomes and the effects on the immune system. They studied immunological activities of all these subsets of immune cells.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
And just as we would expect, the people that transition in Tanzania, with the same genes, transitioned 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
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
Well, my takeaway, and maybe it's because of my bias, but The thing that has changed the most in our diets is the addition of simple, rapid glycemic index products like starch and sugar. So that is added.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 westernized, highly processed diet.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
Going all the way across the visual spectrum from orange-red to blue-purple, those foods, each, those colors are related to the composition of specific types of these polyphenols and flavonoids and carotenoids. And those phytochemicals all impart unique structure function specific effects on cell activities. It's specifically on the immune system.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 denying that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
But there may be specific properties that they have that each individually influences our biochemistry, our genomics in such a way that it 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, like you think of delphinian, that's an anthocyanin that's in berries.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
It has a different effect than does polyflavin-3-ols like quercetin, which then influences a different collection of immunological principles. So it's the combination of this portfolio that gives rise to the harmony that we call the orchestra of our biology.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
So how do we... I think about these phytochemicals in that way, and I think... Can I just say, I want to celebrate that for a moment. That's a drop the mic. What you just said, I hope everybody who's listening to this podcast is picking up. This is a seminal change in thinking in nutrition, what you just stated. Bruce Ames, God rest his soul, he just recently passed away, our
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
extraordinary contributor to our field, had this triage theory. The triage theory is just like what you're saying, that there are different levels of insufficiency. A 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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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. 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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
You know, my first real job was an academic position in 1970 on Earth Day. The University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, was in search of a chemist that would be in their department, but they wanted to start an environmental science department. And so they hired this kid, me. I was 25 years of age, just finished my postdoc.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
I was to start in an environmental science program as well as being... an organic nutritional biochemist. Over the years, that ultimately got me to meet some extraordinary people.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
Because of my speaking in the environmental science side, I was involved with ecology, I was involved with soil health, I was involved with environmental pollution studies that we were doing on air pollution-related sulfur oxides in the largest copper smelter in the Pacific Northwest, the so-called Osarco smelter, which we eventually were able to get shut down in Tacoma, Washington.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
And so all of this together then ultimately got me introduced to a wide variety of different people. And it reminded me that I need to learn across multiple disciplines if I'm going to be involved in this field.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
What happened to me was one of those moments, and you've had these in your life, I know, 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 Bellevue Redmond Medical Lab that was serving the only nutrition-focused physician in Seattle, Washington, Lee Bowles.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
I was in our laboratory one day in Bellevue, Washington, and our receptionist came back into the lab and she said, so Jeff, we have a visitor, actually two visitors, Dr. Linus Pauling and Dr. Emile Zuckerkandl, who is the director of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in Palo Alto. And it just blew me away.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
Was he ever. Orthomolecular medicine is what he discovered or he founded. Much to my surprise, he said, you know, Jeff, I've listened to a couple of your lectures. I've read your research papers. I'd really like to maybe have you come and spend a sabbatical year or two with us at our institute and to run some research projects. down at our facility near Stanford.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
That was a life-changing experience. That was 1981. Meeting he and his wife, Eva Helen, really was a life changer 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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
You can imagine the dignitaries that came in, artists and politicians and poets and all sorts of people visited the Institute that I had a vicarious opportunity to meet. So it changed my whole thing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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, after I finished my two years, my family was in the car. I had my box with my stuff from my office, which was next to his office in the Pauling Institute. And as I was walking out, he said, so Jeff, do you think your classroom is big enough?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
And I thought, wow, what does that mean? And I got in the car now to drive 1,100 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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 he kind of liked me in that position. I said, so I've come to a conclusion, and that is I'm giving up my tenured faculty position to start an adventure to help doctors understand how to apply nutritional medicine in their practice. Crazy.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
You could have heard a pin drop.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
It was like a total silence. Then my mother broke the silence. She said, Jeff is very impetuous, but when he makes up his mind, I think he's probably serious. So my dad then said, if you're going to do this, it sounds 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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
And, 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. Away we went. My dad was my business manager. My mother was a copy editor. My wife was corporate development. And we started down the road.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
to have me going out and start to help docs understand how this all fits together, really spreading the news from Linus Pauling Orthomolecular Medicine and then ultimately into the functional medicine model.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
3500 year old food. Can you imagine in the Fertile Crescent, there were really two, a major source of nutrients. The first kind of husband and crop was millet. And so millet is in the Indio regime considered a very, very important non-gluten grain. It's a cereal product that's not gluten containing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
In the Himalayan region of the world, in China, you had a similar 3,500-year-old product that was agriculturally husbanded that was this tartary buckwheat. Tartary stands for the tartan district of China, which is up against the Himalayans, northern China.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
In fact, I just was in discussion this last week with a farmer of Tartary Buckwing in Bhutan. And he was saying how important that food has been in the Bhutanese culture 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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
But he's been very concerned that they're converting the tartary buckwheat, which they call black buckwheat, over into other crops now because of the pressure of getting increased yields. And so people are losing the nutritional benefit in Bhutan. And he was very worried about maintaining their cultural heritage.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
And we in the United States, actually, it's interesting, our colonial ancestors brought over Tartary buckwheat, because it was such a hardy crop, it didn't need irrigation, it didn't need fertilizer, and bugs don't like it because it has such a high level of these phytochemicals that it's almost like it's natural pesticide. Years ago, tartary buckwheat was lost in North America.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
people stopped growing it and replaced it with uh seed and soy and 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 also have in japan this
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
If you have impaired mitochondrial function, your immune system is tired. It's worn out. It's engaged with reduction of longevity.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 so-called the adaptive immune system.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 antibody.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
And people have thought historically 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 the first level of the immune system, which is called the innate immune system.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
And yet goes all the way back. Plants have an innate immune system. So this is definitely ancient. It's phylogenetically conserved. It goes through all different insects and into organisms of all types. And it has been said until recently, and when I say recently, I mean within the last 10 years, that this part of our immune system is kind of dumb. It doesn't... it can't learn anything.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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. because there's not much you can do about it if it's not.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
foreign invaders the macrophage which is a member of those 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 klebanoff 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 macrophages like pac-man they just go around but you know gobbling up the bad stuff
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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. 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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 situation that we saw with regard to COVID-19, where people died in their own fluids because their immune system overreacted.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 cytokine storms, what they called it, which was a consequence of
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
It's a different kind of specificity. Because on the surface of your innate immune system, you have what are called toll-like 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
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
So it has a specificity, but it's not the memory effect that you have with 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 principal role.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
This may be, as you said earlier, this list of nutrients that have only gotten a page or two publication in nutrition textbooks because we weren't considered to 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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
I'm talking about the last five years. So this is like aha stuff. that then makes diets become ever more important for how we therapeutically modulate our immune systems.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
Yes, the so-called immunosenescence that you were talking about, inflammation. Yeah. And so now we're starting to recognize that when you get this secretory phenotype of inflammation, because the body has started to collect injury to immune cells and other cells, it gets locked into the state of being constantly, that's where the immune system is aged more than your years of birthdays.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 this new class of drugs that we call GLP-1 agonists that are being used for diabetes and for obesity, those affect the immune system through the adipocyte, the fat cells.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 an effect on Tregs, the thymus-dependent regulatory cells.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
Well, Dr. Hyman, I can't tell you what a privilege this is to once again engage in this narrative with you again.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 a giant system that interrelates you to your diet and your lifestyle.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 health care.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
Anybody 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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
Well, everything you said, I 100% agree with one variation. Please. You said medicine will practice. Medicine is being practiced by enlightened practitioners. Well, sure.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
You know how long it takes to understand anatomy, physiology, pathology, cytology. Those are all skills that are really important to understand what we know about the organizational structure of the body.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 given to create a more dynamic process that will take us to health.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
and having 50 years in my life of measuring my biomarkers on a routine basis, and now having the access of Function Healthy 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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
I think you just said a drop the mic. I mean, that is the fundamental raison d'etre for functional medicine 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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
I think that what's happening right now, and Mark, 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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
Ultimately, I think truth will find its path, but you need to have distribution systems to get the information out. 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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
I think that what I'm very excited about is a combination of AI with the data set analysis now from big 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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 the psychology of wellness. And I think there's no, let's not dismiss the sociobiology of wellness as a community process.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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, which people thought would never happen.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
I totally agree. And, you know, it's interesting. I've been criticized by some for many decades that I had this view that personalization was the future where we were heading. And everyone said, that's not scalable. That's idealistic. That'll never happen. You can't have each person treated as individuals. I'm going to stand on this concept, as you just stated.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
that with these new tools, there will still be the sentient relationship between a provider and the patient, but they will have access as the super doc to all this ability to categorize and to interpolate this massive amount of data to make it accessible to personalization.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
And that will become then precision personalized healthcare, of which nutrition and lifestyle will play big, important roles as we start to understand how individuals' genotypes interact with their worlds and their environments and their diets. So we're right on the threshold of that actually becoming real.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
And I think those who criticized me heavily for being overly idealistic about personalization, they may have to change their position.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
Well, thank you. I hope we'll share it together. All right, Jeff.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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, 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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 immunosenescence. It's producing oxidants. It's creating free radical damage.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
It's engaged with the 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 of being in this field? If we want to talk about root cause, what is root cause? Where does it start?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
And as you said, you can keep going up the tree. And I finally landed on the fact that there are only three places that our body is communicating with the outside world 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.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
And I said, well, now let me think about that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
And so you've 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 intimately interrelated, one with the other, and are communicating with the outside and inside world.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
Which of those is most able to change quickly? And then I recognize that the immune system turns over every 120 days. Every 120 days, our immune system are different cells than they were previously. Now just think of that for a moment. We're making over 2 million new white blood cells, immune cells, A minute. We are constantly reproducing our immune system.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
So the question is, is it as good as, better, or worse than the cells that it's replacing? The answer to most people over life is it's worse. That's immunosenescence. Our immune system declines. So people say, oh, yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
Which can be more rapid than our number of birthdays.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
And so then it begs the question, doesn't it, during SARS-CoV-2 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. It was because we had the poorest immune state of vigilance. We were immunosenesced as a country.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
And on our bodies, we're not able to manage the effective SARS spike protein. Yeah. as people in other countries that had a more vigilant, resilient immune system. And shame on us.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 immunorejuvenation.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 immunorejuvenation. So the cells that we replaced are better than the ones they came from, not worse.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
And that becomes a whole different strategy. And when I hit on this idea, my colleagues, Annette Giardi and Trish Ury, 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?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
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 field of immunology is changing. This whole immunological connection is now blossoming. It's revolutionary how fast things are changing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Jeff Bland Reversed His Biological Age at 79 (Part 1)
I'm so excited that you asked this question. I'm so excited that you brought this up.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Jeff Bland, yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
In 90 days, you reversed your immune health by 47%.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
So essentially in English, that means when you take a sample of blood, the thing that we're measuring to look at your biological age is the DNA in your white blood cells, which is your immune system.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
One of the most impactful steps toward enhancing our health and longevity is incorporating essential nutrients into our daily regimen. Among these, omega-3 fatty acids are always at the top of my list. These healthy fats are crucial for various bodily functions, including supporting heart health, balancing immunity, and promoting brain function.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
However, getting adequate omega-3s through diet alone can be challenging. My favorite omega-3 product that I take every day is Omega-3 Rejuvenate, a premium blend of pure, sustainably sourced fish oils from Alaska. This supplement is minimally processed to retain its natural benefits and is rich in omega-3 fatty acids, including EPA, DHA, and DPA, as well as naturally occurring vitamins A and D.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Call it fire in the belly. It's like the fire in your fat cells in your belly that send a spreading fire across your body.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
So are you saying that the reason for the systemic inflammation throughout our body, the silent killer, this quiet inflammation that is not like the inflammation we learned about in medical school where there's redness and swelling and pain, that it's kind of quiet and you don't notice it, but it's creating this sort of smoldering fire.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And are you saying that most of this is coming from problems with our gut microbiome?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Environmental toxins.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
So it's a total load effect that we've been talking about in our field for... So low-grade infections, like viruses, ticks, who knows what. It could be mold in the environment. Precisely. It could be our diet that's changing our microbiome and creating inflammation, sugar...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And so the question is... It's dealing with a bad set of circumstances.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
I think that's what I've always said for years is that disease is just the body's best ability to deal with a bad set of circumstances. Change the circumstances and the disease goes away. That's right.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Each serving of Omega-3 Rejuvenate delivers essential Omega-3S in their triglyceride form, ensuring optimal absorption and efficacy. Because this oil is minimally processed, it also contains pro-resolving mediators, or PRMs, which further boost the value for immunity and cellular health.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
So this sort of takes us to the next little portal I want to dive into, which is so high level inflammation is basically the root of all evil in terms of chronic disease. We now can measure its effects through blood biomarkers, through epigenetic testing, which measures the control system on our genes and how it's turned on or off based on different influences.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And we can then intervene with lifestyle or different foods or phytochemicals to see how the biomarkers change and how our immune age changes over time.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Yeah, so we've never really, you know, it's one thing to say, okay, I'm going to give you a drug or some food and see if it prevents a heart attack 20 years from now. But what's happening underneath is this chronic low level of inflammation, all these cytokines and inflammatory cells, chronic
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
going awry leading to these chronic diseases, but we're seeing those changes happen far before you might have a symptom.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
I personally incorporate Omega-3 Rejuvenate into my daily supplement routine and it's a staple for patients at my Ultra Wellness Center as a convenient and effective way to keep up with your body's daily Omega-3 needs. To try Omega-3 Rejuvenate, visit BigBoldHealth.com and use code DRMARK25 at checkout for a special discount. Prioritize your health today with this amazing supplement.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Most people don't necessarily have access to full epigenetic testing and deep analysis. And your company, Big Boat Health, which has pioneered a lot of the work around immunorejuvenation, understanding immunosenescence, immunometabolism, which we're going to talk about, has done deep analysis using special chips that look at epigenetics.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
This is not something you can go just get from your regular lab. It's a pretty sophisticated test. But you were sharing with me earlier that there's some surrogate blood biomarkers that you can use that we test regularly to infer what's happening at the epigenetic level. So what are those?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And you can measure that through a stool test or a cheek swab, but also through your blood. Is it as good to measure through your blood?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
That's where you start. And what does that tell you?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And do those go through some algorithm together?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Now, before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And it correlates pretty well with the epigenetic changes in your genome that regulate inflammation. That's what we're finding, yes. So is this sort of a clinical tool that you can do? And at Function Health, we offer this. You can go to functionhealth.com and test all these things and find out what your numbers look like.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
What we have to do is figure out, in order to address this chronic disease epidemic, how do we reset our immune systems? Is there a way to rejuvenate our immune systems? Is there a way to understand the linkages of that to aging and to metabolism and to... All the things that we are struggling with. We're struggling with our metabolism, with the epidemic of obesity.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
We're struggling with degeneration as we age. And the doorway into it just may be our immune system.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, the Hyman Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website at drhyman.com for my website store for a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products. Welcome back, Jeff. It's good to have you again.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Most people don't realize their morning coffee might be doing more harm than good. Sure, it gives you a quick boost, but it can also spike cortisol, disrupt blood sugar, and leave you crashing hours later. That's why I love Nanduka by Peak, a smarter way to energize and support cognitive function with fermented probiotic teas, adaptogens, and functional mushrooms.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
It delivers steady, long-lasting energy with slow-release caffeine from poo or tea and cacao. No jitters, no crashes, but clarity and focus. Plus, it supports gut health, metabolism, and brain function with powerful polyphenols and antioxidants. Ever since I added Nanduka into my routine, I have decreased brain fog and much more mental clarity.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And unlike most mushroom coffees that use grain fillers, Nanduka only uses 100% fruiting body mushrooms for real cognitive and immune support. Plus, it tastes like the most indulgent and delicious spiced hot chocolate. Right now, Peak is offering 20% off for life, plus a free starter kit with a frother and glass beaker. Just go to peaklife.com slash hymen. That's P-I-Q-U-E life.com slash hymen.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Try it risk-free with their 90-day money-back guarantee and feel the difference. I want to talk to you about protein, a critical nutrient that's often misunderstood. Many people don't realize that when we consume protein, our body doesn't use it in its current form.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Instead, it breaks the protein down into amino acids, the building blocks of protein, and then reassembles those amino acids into the specific proteins our body needs. That's why I'm so impressed by Perfect Amino. It contains the precise ratio of essential amino acids your body needs to build new proteins without the excess amino acids that turn into calories. This means you get better results.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Faster lean muscle creation, improved recovery, reduced soreness, stronger bones, and no unwanted fat gain. If you're looking to build or tone lean muscle and recover faster without the caloric impact of breaking a fast, Perfect Amino is a game changer. This is the future of protein supplementation. I recommend you try it for yourself.
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Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Just go to bodyhealth.com and use code HYMAN20 to get 20% off your first order. The air inside your home might not be as safe as you think. Everyday household items like cleaning products, furniture, and even stoves release toxic particles that can linger in the air along with bacteria, viruses, allergens, and mold spores.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
That's why I trust Air Doctor to protect my family and why I have Air Doctors in my home and podcast studio. Air Doctor is the first affordable air purifier that removes virtually 100% of particles as small as 0.003 microns. That's 100 times smaller than standard HEPA filters.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
It also includes a substantial VOC carbon filter that eliminates volatile organic chemicals and dangerous pollutants, thanks to its perfectly sealed system. I've partnered with Air Doctor to give my listeners an exclusive deal. Right now, head to airdoctorpro.com slash drhyman to save up to $300. That's A-I-R-D-O-C-T-O-R-P-R-O dot com slash D-R Hyman.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Breathe cleaner air, feel better, and protect what matters most. So our diet has huge influence. Our exercise has a huge influence. Sleep has a big influence. Dress has a big influence. Relationships, community have a big influence. The presence of nutritional deficiencies and lack of optimal levels of nutrients plays a role. Lack of phytochemicals play a role.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
So there's all these things that are modifiable that we can do something about. And now we can actually measure their impact in ways that we never could before. You know, what's really striking to me with things like COVID is that its consequences are quite striking. Both the disease itself and maybe even the vaccine in acting in ways that suppress our immune system.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Lyme disease and tick-borne infections are another example of microbes that seem to suppress our immune system. One of the ways we diagnose it is by measuring the activity of natural killer cells, which are depressed. And natural killer cells are exactly what they sound like. They're the hunt and destroy cells. They go after cancer. They go after infections and viruses.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And they're part of your innate immune system that are so important in fighting everything. And what seems to have happened is that we've had a suppression.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Because all the things we're doing are causing them to kind of decrease in number. That's right. And that's what Lyme disease, that's what COVID does. I've seen this in certain patients. It's pretty striking to see this. When you see across the spectrum of a population, particularly with long COVID, which is tens of millions of people in America, they're just, things are off.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Their immune system's off. And it's just a form of chronic fatigue syndrome. Like we had with maybe Epstein-Barr and other triggers for chronic fatigue. And it means that these people are less immune resilient and they're likely to have all sorts of symptoms and who knows what kind of diseases they're going to get. There are now therapies that are being looked at that provide natural killer cells.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
It's kind of scary sometimes. But, you know, Jeff, so many people out there are suffering and suffering needlessly. You know, there's certain things we can't control. Given where we are in the evolution of medicine and science, not what's in practice clinically or in academic centers or in hospitals or your doctor's office, but where the science actually is around medicine.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
There are now There's a lot of research going on around, for example, how to take natural killer cells from your body, grow them in a laboratory, inject them back into you as a way of fighting infections or fighting cancer. There's this sort of concept of a bio-shield that Patrick Soon-Shong has talked about.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
He's an incredible physician researcher who's discovered a lot of these ways that we can treat cancer differently or treat infections differently. And so we're kind of in an era where our immune system... In one hand, it's actually now working well, some of the key surveillance mechanisms to deal with infections or deal with certain things we need to address.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And on the other hand, we're seeing an overactive immune system. So we're seeing both these under and overactive immune systems that seem to accelerate inflammation even more.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
We now do understand how to relieve so much needless suffering. And right now we're having so much of that. I'd love you to sort of unpack, to start with, what is the reason we're having this epidemic of chronic disease? Why are we so sick? Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
So what's really exciting is that we're now understanding how to intervene in this.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
You know, you hear people, I want to boost my immune system, or my immune system's not working, or I'm like chronically ill, infections, I have a suppressed immune system. You know, there's something to all that, right? And I think, you know, we understand how the system works now. We understand what influences it, what harms it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And it's the litany of things in modern civilization that are killing us all, right? The diet, the stress, the toxins, all the things we talked about, the increase in certain infections. And now we can intervene. So the question is, how do we start to think about this idea of immunorejuvenation to kind of reset our immune system?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Now, I want to say... So the key to unlocking healthy aging is to understand how to properly interact with our immune system.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And that's really predicted based on epigenetic testing of the expression of your genes and which genes are turned on or off in your immune system. And that's what we're doing now.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Is it true that women who haven't had babies or been pregnant don't have as much immune disease?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
So basically the colorful compounds in foods, what we call phytochemicals, are part of a strategy to rejuvenate your immune system.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And those are plant medicines. They're things that actually the plants use for their own defense, but that we've evolved, co-evolved with, that actually regulate our biology in very specific ways and targeted pathways that we now understand.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
No, I know. He had a famous quote, which discovery consists of seeing what everybody else has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
That's right. And so when we start asking... I think three make up like 60% or something, yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Your taste buds.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
It just tastes different.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
So given that and, you know, given that, you know, we have immune systems that are dysfunctional, given that we need, we are understanding the role of immune system and metabolic health and aging and how to rejuvenate our immune system. I want to sort of dive into a specific plant, which you've come to love. Do I ever? And you've spent, you know, better part of a decade, I think.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
diving into the science around this and doing some extraordinary research. This is a plant that's called Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat. You've developed a company called Big Bolt Health, which I'm an investor and advisor to and very proud to be. It basically has taken this ancient plant, which turns out to have
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
That heart attack in the 1900 was like a rare disease.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
probably more phytochemicals than almost any other plant on the planet that we've discovered to date, has sort of been a neglected plant. And you've taken this plant and subjected it to rigorous clinical trials, studies that have found some pretty extraordinary things with this. And this is a seed, basically, right? A flower seed. It's a fruit seed. Fruit seed, yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
You can't really buy it that easily in the supermarket, but you've basically resurrected it from being kind of almost eliminated from the food supply, created a model of regenerative farming to grow it, which actually compounds the phytochemical richness of the food and increases it because the soil is how the plants grow. get their nutrition.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And if the soil is dead and dirt, not soil, if it's just devoid of organic matter, it can't take out the nutrients. So you've even sprouted it, which even accentuates a lot of these benefits. ES, it's rich in flavonoids like quercetin, which has been studied for longevity and It activates AMPK, which is a key enzyme in Longevity's pathways and many other things.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And diabetes was a super rare type 2 diabetes.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
You found how it affects gut immune system function with its prebiotic fibers. You found how it actually enhances the function of natural killer cells, which are key to fighting infection and cancer.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
how it modulates inflammatory cytokines that drive inflammation in the body, all the chronic sterile inflammation we've been talking about, that's rich in nutrients like zinc and magnesium, that is important for function of your T cells and your natural killer cells, and even has antimicrobial properties that are antiviral.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
So it's high in protein, it's low in starch and sugar, low glycemic load. It's quite an incredible plant that you've kind of resurrected from the mothballs of history. And one of the things you've done with this is you've subjected it to a trial in humans where you've measured through very complicated, sophisticated epigenetic testing. In other words, how this particular plant modifies
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
the expression of our genes and is an immuno rejuvenator. So can you take us down what that study was that you did and how this sort of works at a mechanistic level and what you discovered in terms of its effects on our genome?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
That's right.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Yes, you could. I'll try 121.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
So it has to have 17,000 feet. That's right. You get more sunburn, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And these weren't that common before. No. And in indigenous cultures around the world, these are primarily absent.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And when we see an effect in medicine, we say, oh, it's a 30% decrease in your risk of heart attack if you take a statin. And that's 30%. We're talking about a 2,000% effect.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
So basically taking a supplement with Himalayan tartar buckwheat plant chemicals or other chemicals in 90 days reversed your immune health by 47%.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
That's amazing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Across other foods.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Yeah, this is amazing. And I think, you know, what's so interesting about this particular food is that it has like a multi-tool, like a Swiss army knife of effects in terms of the body. And it doesn't just affect the immune system and inflammation in all the ways I describe it. It also... has incredible effects on metabolism by regulating glucose metabolism.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
The fibers in it help with cholesterol metabolism, improve your HDL and lower your LDL, and helps liver fat, and modulates something called AMPK, which is a critical pathway that a lot of people are studying related to longevity. It's what I call one of the four longevity switches that everybody's studying metformin for, but there may be other ways to do that without having to take a drug.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And it has effects on the microbiome in ways that help blood sugar control. So there's so much going on there, not just the fiber in it, but also the polyphenols, which now are needed for gut microbiome health. So this is such an incredible food, and you've sort of resurrected it from basically the grave.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
I have done a tremendous amount of research on it, and we'll link to all the studies that we talked about. But this is kind of a moment in history when we're finally able to sort of make sense of food as medicine, not in this abstract way,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
high-level framework, but actually in a very specific way with very sophisticated testing that isn't available clinically, but is a research tool to see the impact of These molecules that we can get from our food, you can make, I make pancakes out of it, you know, muffins, but you can get the sprout powder, which sort of enhances its benefit. And I put that every day in my smoothie.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
You can sprinkle it on yogurt or, you know, put it in food. It's kind of like a superfood of the superfood in a sense. Your work in this whole area, I never even heard of the word amino rejuvenation until you said it, right? And never heard of amino metabolism, but now there's published papers on it. There's a whole field of research that's looking at this.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And we're kind of at this historical moment where we actually can, in a granular way, use food as medicine and to actually help many conditions. But it's more importantly to kind of help us deal with the degradation of our immune system as we get older. And to find a way to kind of up level the function of it so that we don't get this enhanced inflammation as we get older.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And that through multiple pathways, and I imagine many of the phytochemicals in this product
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
are are not fully elucidated in terms of their impact on our biology we still we're sort of looking at holistically at what it's doing we don't know what each individual compound is doing but to me it's really fascinating i mean we don't even want to do that because that can sort of a reductionist way of looking at things but to me this is this is sort of a great advance in science and it's something that people can easily do as part of their daily supplement routine or their smoothie routine i've sort of incorporated automatically into my daily life because i i think the literature is so compelling on this and it's why i'm an investor it's why i'm
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
I support the company through my advisory role and just in terms of promoting it, because I think this may sound like a commercial, but it's really not. It's like this is just taking advantage of a tremendous advance in science that help us understand this sort of unique role between
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
us and plants, and our microbiome in plants, and our immune system in plants, and our metabolism in plants, and how all that plays a role in optimizing our health and enhancing function. Because this isn't treating a particular disease, it's just making everything work better so they don't get sick.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Incredible. Incredible. So as you can kind of get from our conversation, you know, we're in a whole new era of understanding food as medicine. Yes. And no one has been an advocate for that more than you, Jeff. I think you might have even coined the term. I don't know. For sure, food is information.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And the information in our foods can help us to rejuvenate our function across a spectrum of different bodily functions. And the most important is our immune system. And it's something that now you've kind of pioneered as this new field of inquiry and also of clinical application. How do we then apply this in therapy? And you're not treating a disease when you
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
take sprout powder, but you're modifying your risk of disease. And you're regulating your immune system in ways that help you stay healthy and end up reducing the rate of aging, which you've demonstrated clinically. So I'm really excited about the further research you're doing. I think we're going to stay tuned for that. I think we're going to keep talking about this for a long time.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And Jeff, I just want to thank you for your life's work. And I don't know how you do it at almost 80 years old with a startup company and doing it all over again. But it's just a testament to your passion and care and interest in kind of continuing to educate all of us about the latest advance in science and medicine and how we can use that to help relieve suffering.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
So thank you, Jeff, for being on the podcast and illuminating this whole field of immunorejuvenation and immunometabolism, which I think is really the future of understanding health and aging and longevity. And it's something we can easily apply to our lives by just incorporating some of these things into our daily routine.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And we're going to put links into all the scientific papers we talked about.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
We're going to put links into how to find more about Big Bold Health and Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat products, including sprout powder, which I think is an essential daily staple, including supplements that are derived from it and things that help your microbiome and many other things that you guys offer, which are really cutting edge in science.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Thank you, Jeff. That means a lot. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to The Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on The Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I am Chief Medical Officer.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Like MS or lupus or Hashimoto's.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at ultrawellnesscenter.com and request to become a patient.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public. So I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Type 1 diabetes. There's a ton of them, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
I know that so many of you, like me, are balancing fitness, work, and family while managing ongoing back pain. After my recent back surgery, finding a recovery solution became more important than ever. That's why I'm grateful to have discovered the Bond Charge Infrared PEMF Collection.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Well, that's an interesting question. Just to jump on a sidetrack here for a minute. Is it true that women who haven't had babies or been pregnant don't have as much immune disease?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
This whole puzzle of chronic disease, why we're seeing this epidemic. Some people say, oh, well, we didn't have it before because we didn't live that long. And everybody died at 40. Baloney. And that's not really not true. A lot of people live to be very old. Baloney. In many, many cultures. I mean, after you were born.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Not when I was in school in the 80s.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
But the idea that these chronic diseases are only occurring because we're getting older and they're sort of a normal part of human development and aging, that they're kind of inevitable.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
It's something I've heard people say, but I think there's a real flaw in that, because when you look at the historical records, like for example, the Native Americans and the Plains, they had this highest number of centenarians of any population at the turn of the last century, and they were living on bison.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
These devices combine infrared heat and pulsed electromagnetic field, PEMF therapy, to target deeper muscle tissues, addressing not only surface tension, but also those hard-to-reach areas that contribute to long-term back pain and stiffness. It's been a huge help as I work on recovery, giving me fast relief right at home. The technology is straightforward.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And yes, you had a lot of maybe death and childbirth, infant mortality, that would affect life expectancy. We have extended life expectancy because of sanitation and hygiene and a lot of reasons, better medical care in some cases.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
But these chronic illnesses of aging, which we've come to expect as normal, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, and even things that we don't think of as diseases of aging like mental health issues, depression, anxiety, bipolar, schizophrenia, ADD, autism, Parkinson's. I mean, these are things that we now are understanding are connected to inflammation.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
I remember back in 1997 when this paper came out in the New England Journal by Paul Reeker, which... Essentially, he was a Harvard professor that showed that people with high levels of inflammation had a higher risk of heart attacks. And there was following studies where they showed that if your cholesterol was high, but your inflammation was low, you had a low risk.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
But if your inflammation was high and your cholesterol was low, you had a high risk. So basically, it was the inflammation that was the problem, not the cholesterol. And pathologists would see in the plaques in arteries back in the 50s, 60s, 70s, they would see macrophages and they'd see T cells in...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Put your part of your immune system in the plaque and they just didn't know what to make of it and they thought it was just a plumbing problem and fat build up in your arteries from eating fat. And that was an overly simplistic model.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And now what's happened since that seminal paper from Paul Ricker at Harvard linking inflammation and heart disease, inflammation is now connected to all the chronic diseases of aging and aging itself.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
And so when we look around us, it seems like the final common link between all these chronic illnesses that we're suffering from in today's society are related to inflammation and some dysregulation of the immune system.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
The infrared heat increases blood flow to reduce inflammation, while the PEMF pulses stimulate cellular repair. Together, they help relieve soreness and tension, making it easier for me to get back to my day, even after intense physical therapy sessions. I just set it up, lay down, and let it work its magic, and I'm noticing the benefits in both my sleep and muscle recovery.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Rancid fat, essentially.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Which is kind of foreign. It's not a normal lipid. Precisely. And so now it's doing... Or microplastics, which are now found in artery walls.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
You just unpacked why we have so much chronic disease. It's our crappy diet, which is full of processed foods, limited amounts of variety of foods, lack of protective nutrients, lack of nutrients and vitamins, minerals, an overload of environmental toxins and chemicals from petrochemical toxins, from... heavy metal toxins from all the things we're exposed to.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
The stress we have, this sleep disruption, this lack of sort of regulation of our circadian rhythm, the lack of connection socially, and so many things that are impacting us. The overuse of certain drugs like antibiotics, the increase in C-section rights, the increase in bottle feeding and lack of breastfeeding. I mean, all these are compounding
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
over generations to have the worst epidemic of chronic disease in human history. And we are the epicenter in the United States. All these issues and all the things we talked about, at the end of the day, come down to a problem with the immune system. And this is really what the sort of amazing discovery is that we're gonna unpack today, which is,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
How does your immune system connect to these diseases? We now sort of understand why it's dysregulated, which means we can do something about it. And we're going to get very specific about how modifying certain things like diet or certain plant chemicals or phytochemicals, for example, like from...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
A Himalayan tartary buckwheat, an ancient food that was used for thousands of years, actually has chemicals in it, phytochemicals that regulate the immune system. And we now know this on a granular level.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
So we're seeing this sort of one, on one hand, this rising understanding of chronic disease being an inflammatory state, aging itself being an inflammatory state if we don't properly understand how to regulate that. And at the same time, we're seeing this rise in
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
our ability to have really granular understanding diagnostically of what's happening at the gene level, at the epigene level, at the immune cell level, and ways that we never did before that are kind of uncovering relationships and connections and things that help us to understand how to modify our lifestyle and our diet
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
and our habits so that we can properly regulate our immune system so it does the right thing, which is to fight foreign invaders when we need it to, but not to do the wrong thing, which is to be overactive in a state of chronic disease or an autoimmune disease or an allergy, right? We don't want that. So how do we sort of start to think about the immune system?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
Sort of take us through sort of a beginner's level, the immune system, from the types of immune systems we have to what they do and to how they... they influence these chronic diseases.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
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The Dr. Hyman Show
Jeff Bland (Part 2): The Science of Immune Aging—and How to Reverse It
What you're saying is we need to move from an inflammatory lifestyle to an anti-inflammatory lifestyle. And we're going to unpack what that is.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
And one of the things that has been very useful for me, and I found when I did a a series of little Instagram posts on this are these biometric devices that we wear, these wearable devices that give us information.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
And I happen to be wearing an Oura ring because after being a biohacker and wearing all sorts of different pieces of equipment, this one I found gives me the most interesting information.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
And what I found is from a personal experience, now I've done really kind of a pilot study, and I think it's more general, is that our aura brain is actually a surrogate marker to measure aspects of our immune system.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Because what happens is when you're under immune stress, it's eating, do you realize over 50% of your metabolic energy can be eaten up by your immune system when you're under immune stress? So what happens is your body temperature goes up, your heart rate variability goes down, your respiration goes up, your heart rate goes up, your sleep patterns go down.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
So, you know, when you see these very low scores in the morning from an aura ring that says, well, geez, what's going on? It's probably something that happened to you last night that affected your immune system. Could be alcohol, it could be you stayed up too late, it could be stress, but your immune system is telling you It's under demand.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
So these tools, to me, are useful for supporting your coaching system, right? Because you need to coach yourself through these behavior changes of improving your sleep, your activity, your diet, things that you need to rhythmically figure out about your life that are directly being manifest through your immune system into your function.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Your immune system is directly connected 24-7 to everything you're doing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Well, I just told you the first step is assessment, right, is understanding where you are, what's the base. Your immunotype, in a way. That's right, it's your immunotype. And we have a questionnaire on the Bidwell Health website that gives kind of a first kind of look-see.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
So we start off with the first thing, which really you've very well stated, and that is finding those patterns of behavior that tie to your immunotype. Are you an allergic type? Are you an inflammatory type? Are you a type that tends to get everything that comes along so you have an immunosuppressed state? So you understand a little bit about what your own immunopersonality is.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
And we have a questionnaire on our website that's called the Immuno Identity Questionnaire that gives a little bit of a help for a person identifying their own specific immunotype. Then we go from there saying, well, now you have your immunotype, what are you going to do to move you from an imbalanced immune state to a balanced immune state. That's what we're all hoping for.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Because what we want to do is we don't want to shut off our immune system, or we don't want to hyper-function it. I mean, people always say, boost your immune system. But hold on just a minute. If you're already in an inflammatory state, do you really want to boost your inflammation? No, you want to rebalance your inflammation.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
And so people say, I'm just going to take a bunch of immune system boosting nutrients. Well, no, no, no. That may actually only exacerbate the problem and make it worse. So the second step then, is you modulate your immune system based upon what you've learned about your first state. Are you immuno-underactive, immuno-overactive? Do you need to bring your immune system down?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Do you need to bring your immune system up? And we have a series of ways that that can be employed with diet and lifestyle. I would again go back to where you took us earlier, and that is make sure when you introduce the program They're using food as a friend. And you're using rhythmic eating so that time becomes your friend. Your circadian rhythms doesn't become your enemy. Don't overindulge.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Don't too frequently snack. I mean, it used to be, oh, we want to take seven to eight meals a day. Those are the days of hypoglycemia. That was probably not a good idea with regard to what we've learned about circadian rhythms.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Then the next level, the third step, is how can I optimize my immune system by utilizing some of these specific nutrients that we've been describing, the Himalayan, Tartary, Buckwheat phytochemicals. I would also put into this family, there are three families of nutrients that are very important. The phytochemicals we've been discussing a lot.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Second are pre and probiotics because the gut plays such an important role in modulating our immune system. 70% of our immune system It's clustered around our gut, the so-called gut-associated lymphoid tissue. So we want the friendly microbiome. So pre and probiotics would be step two. And then the third are omega-3 fatty acids.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
There are more and more papers coming out to show the important role that omega-3 fatty acids have. in balancing the immune system. And I might add, it's not just omega-3s in and of themselves. It's also in concert with vitamin A, vitamin D, zinc, and what are called pro-resolving mediators.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Pro-resolving mediators are part of the omega-3 family that activate the immune regulation process and the inflammation regulation process. And we find that some fish oils and marine oils have much higher levels of... As a doctor, I know how vital sleep is for your health.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
These pro-resolving mediators, these PRMs, than others. So we want a high PRM, omega-3 rich oil. We want free and probiotics, and we want the proper phytochemicals.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Yeah, Dutch Harbor Omega, DHL. And it has the highest level we know of PRMs of any natural oil.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Exactly. And I might say that the reason that we haven't heard more about these pro-resolving mediators in these commercial omega-3 supplements is that when most omega-3 oils are manufactured, they're cleaned up through a very complex process that strips out the PRMs, it removes them. So people don't talk about them because they're not in the barracks.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
And so you have to have a very mild process to retain these ingredients within fish oils, which we've been able to develop.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Yes. That's powerful. Well, thank you. Now, let me just say one thing about what we've learned because a lot of this people would say, it sounds interesting, but where's the proof? And fortunately now the phytochemical portfolio in Himalayan ternary buckwheat has been studied clinically now in studies with humans. for a number of years.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
So we have an idea how much you need to get in order to produce this. And it's equivalent to something like 100 grams a day. That would be something like three and a half ounces of Himalayan Tertiary Buckwheat flour delivers the level of these phytochemicals that have been found to be associated with improved immune function.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
So people would say, well, I really don't eat Himalayan Tertiary Buckwheat Flour every day. Well, we've tried to produce other ways of getting it, like through a shake mix or through a capsule that's concentrated in these phytochemicals, knowing that not everybody's gonna- So you don't have like four capsules eating it, it's like a quarter a pound of- That's right.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Well, we're the, I think the first group in the flour area to actually be certifying on each batch are phytochemical levels that are these immune active phytonutrients.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
How does it work to rejuvenate your immune system? So that has been a really interesting story that's emerging because generally what scientists will do, and you know this very well, is they'll look at those hundred different phytochemicals and they'll say, which ones are doing the heavy lifting?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
So they'll go and they'll find- The reductionism. Yeah, they'll find a molecule. And then they'll study the heck out of that molecule. Well, that's been done with Himalayan turd or buckwheat. We could go on the list, rutin, quercetin, diosmin, luteolin. physitin, hesperidin. These are some of the major of the 100 or so phytochemicals in Himalayan ternary buckwheat along with 2-HOPA.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
And each one of those has been individually studied and has been found
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
individually to have effects on uh immunorejuvenation yeah by activating this process of autophagy selective to the immune system and in fact now we have see all sorts of papers being published on quercetin it's it's the darling right now and quercetin is an important member of this family so i don't want to undersell it but quercetin doesn't work the same when it's working by itself as when it works with 99 other fighters yeah it's a team it's a team effort
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
That's right. And so here, as we get into fractionalized foods, saying, well, let's just pull one nutrient out and then we'll make that the nutrient of the month, versus saying, no, it's the combination that makes the orchestration of the fats that's causing immunorejuvenation.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Let me say one thing to loop back to a point you made earlier, and you did so eloquently, by the way, when you were talking about the fundamental processes that people start having problems with as they get older and get more ill. One of those you mentioned was mitochondrial function, which is the energy powerhouse of the cell where our energy is produced.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Well, it turns out that our mitochondria within immune cells can undergo injury. And when they do so, that produces a senescent immune cell. So the mitochondria itself can be the seat of the initial injury that then creates the damage to the immune cell to make it senescent. Now, what do you do to get rid of bad mitochondria?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
the mitochondria can rejuvenate themselves in the absence of the cell rejuvenating. The mitochondria has a life of its own within the cell. And that process is called mitophagy. It's a subset of the big process called autophagy. And it turns out that these phytochemicals that are in Tyree Buckley specifically have been found to have mitophagy influences on immune cells.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
So it re-energizes the cell.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Exactly. Yeah, and the spark plugs or whatever.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Yeah, I think what's happened, you can hear it probably from my tone of voice, is this has just sucked me in full on. It's like I opened the door and it was a vacuum and it just sucked me right in because there is so much here that I think will help people once we learn how to really apply this in a personalized way. This is really personalized immunity.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
And we now recognize that people have different immune identities. Just like they have different fingerprints, they have different immune identities. That requires different approaches towards their immune identities to maximize their immune rejuvenation. So it starts with some fairly simple things. The simple things are the things we've been going through.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Maybe they're simple to say, but not so easy to do. That is changing some lifestyle principles. So we started... looking at things like your sleep. You start looking at your activity level. You start looking at how much are you eating out of rushed habit patterns of things you know better than to eat, but it's just convenient to eat them.