Transcript
Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:00:00]:
Longevity and good health is within our grass. Our human culture right now is undergoing a lot of stress, it's a lot of turmoil, and we need to turn the goodness of human beings, which is in our nature, into the dominant theme for our future. And that starts with us being healthy.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:00:16]:
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Claudia von Boeselager [00:01:16]:
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Claudia von Boeselager [00:01:49]:
My guest today is Dr. Jeffrey Bland.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:01:52]:
Dr.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:01:52]:
Bland is world renowned nutritional medicine expert and hailed often as the father of functional medicine, such an important area. So I'm really excited for today's conversation. He is highly respected leader in his field who has spent more than four decades focused on the improvement of human health. He is the founder of Big Bold Health, a company on a mission to transform the way people think about one of nature's greatest innovations, the immune system.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:02:19]:
Dr.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:02:19]:
Bland is an advocate of immunorejuvenation globally. He's actively established a network of farms committed to regenerative agriculture and planetary health, also such an important topic. And he's the author of the disease Delusion and numerous other books and research papers. It's such an honor, Jeff, to have you on the longevity and lifestyle podcast today. Welcome on.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:02:41]:
Well, Claudia, it's my honor. I feel very privileged to be able to visit with you, but also to talk about this topic that's on everybody's minds and how to live a long, healthy life.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:02:50]:
Exactly.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:02:52]:
Yes.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:02:53]:
Let's begin. I know, and I'd love to start with your journey and passion for functional medicine. And maybe we can even start with what is functional medicine. I know, I get that question. They're like, what is this functional medicine thing? What are people talking about? So could you expand on for my audience, what that exactly is?

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:03:10]:
Yeah. So this actually all arose out of a collaborative discussion among colleagues that I had had in my inner sanctum, kind of four years I've had the privilege over my life of traveling more than 6 million mile. I know it sounds crazy, in fact, it kind of is crazy when I think about it, but that over 40 some years, traveling around the world to visit with people that are innovators and thought leaders, I've kind of assembled together as a mosaic a lot of these ideas. And so my wife said, this was back in 1989, she said, why don't we invite some of your key friends from around the world to sit down with us for a few days and have a whiteboard discussion about what healthcare might be if it was to be optimized. And let's take away the things about licensure and reimbursement. Let's just talk about what it would look like in the optimal state. So we did that. We had about 45 people in Victoria, British Columbia, on Vancouver island.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:04:08]:
It was such a successful three days that we decided we do it again the next year, 1990. And it was in that year that I kind of had this dream state. You know, how these things happen when our minds are busy at night. And I thought, we've been speaking really about what are the precedents before a person really gets diseased, what precedes a person having a diagnosed disease or being in the hospital or in a tertiary medical care center. And I landed on the thought that we've been talking all these days about really function. And we could break function down into really four different aspects of human function. That would be their physical function, muscles and bones and so forth, and movement. And then there is their metabolic function, all these physiological things that go on.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:04:54]:
And then there was their cognitive function, how they thought and their mind worked. And then there was a behavioral function, which had to do with things like spiritual life, psychology of living behavior, and so forth. And I said, if you were to be able to measure all of those four things and to come to an understanding of how that person was performing and roll them together, that would probably be a description of their health, because now you're really describing not just the absence of disease, but the presence of a vitality, which is really what health is. And so I came back and I talked to the group about that, and I said, so I'm proposing that maybe we would call this idea that we're coming up with, we would call it functional medicine. And there's a significant pushback at that point because people said, well, in the medical world, functional medicine already has some connotations. It either means geriatric medicine with rehabilitation and older age individuals, or it means psychosomatic medicine. It's all in your mind. That's a functional problem.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:05:53]:
And I said, well, that is true. That's historically the way it's been conceived in medicine. But I'm looking at the literature now. I follow the literature fairly closely, and now we're seeing functional radiology, functional cardiology, functional endocrinology. So maybe it's going to be redefined in the years to come to be a more vital term. And so eventually we landed on an agreement. We would call this functional medicine. We set up an institute.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:06:17]:
My wife then kind of got started on that. We went out to then get continuing medical education, approved credit to do category one courses for physicians. And away we went. And now some 30. What is it going on? 34 years. Hard to believe even say that.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:06:36]:
Congratulations.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:06:37]:
Wow. It's actually scary to even say it, but I guess I shouldn't be scared. When I look at my grandchildren, they're all now adults. But anyway, we now have over a quarter million physicians that have gone through our programs globally. And the concept is really to understand the root cause of what is associated with the downstream things that we call disease or illness. We're really good at diagnosing and putting a name on it, but we're not so good at being able to understand where it came from. But fortunately, and I say this very fortunately, over the last, now 34 years since we started this discussion, the science underlying the origin of chronic illness has really evolved tremendously, much different than when I went to school. And so we were lucky because we had the groundswell of all this new science and new information, new understanding coming available, and we were right at the cornerstone of applying that in clinical practice to really let's treat the cause and not just the effect.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:07:38]:
So we think functional medicine is kind of an early warning system for understanding why people have chronic illness. Fatigue, headaches, muscle pain, digestive problems, behavior issues, foggy brain or cognitive dysfunction. All these things that we see low energy kind of symptoms that are postviral in nature. Even now, long Covid, we don't have a good medical understanding of how to treat them as a cause or as a disease, but we should move upstream and understand where they came from and manage their cause. And that's really what functional medicine is all about.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:08:15]:
Well, what a visionary, Jeff, that, you know, putting that together and sitting with it, and obviously, it reflects for me a bit. I spent some time living in Shanghai years ago, and the traditional chinese medicine, or ayurvedic medicine, is also about getting to that root cause. And you might have a headache for three days, which in western society, we don't really want to have.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:08:32]:
Right.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:08:32]:
We want a quick fix, but it's getting to that root cause. And I'm curious, of the collaborators that you had come together, were there many from asian cultures that were embedded in this more eastern medicine?

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:08:44]:
Yes, actually, I'm really glad you brought that up. One of the groups that we were very interested in, we'd have spent quite a bit of time with them, actually. We lived in Hong Kong for six months, was a group of Hong Kong and chinese national positions that were very experienced. One of them is a woman who actually has built probably the most prominent hospital for reproductive medicine in China, using lifestyle to help women who had problems with pregnancy to be successful. And in China at the time, it was one child per family. So this was a really big deal to make sure that women could be successful in carrying a term. And so we found over the course of our discussion with our asian colleagues that what we were doing in the discussion about functional medicine was, as you just mentioned, Claudia, very close to what had been going on for thousands of years with traditional chinese medicine. So to finish the story, they arranged a tour, which I was invited to lead of the research stations in China.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:09:54]:
To go from research station to research station, I would give a seminar. I would interact with the medical scientists there. We'd have a conversation. Obviously, I don't speak Mandarin, so through a translator. And we ultimately ended up in Beijing. And we were very fortunate to have counsel with the chief of staff of, I think, arguably the largest and most prominent hospital in China, the Beijing University Medical center and the hospital that diplomats would go to if they were ill. And so we had this wonderful meeting with the chief of staff, and he said, well, I think you should have a little lecture with our senior staff, which was quite an amazing thing. So I went in there, and I had a three hour lecture, obviously translated, with their senior medical staff.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:10:44]:
So after it was over, we went back to. It was a big gala thing with the media was there. And he gave me a gift. Actually, I gave him a gift first, and I gave a little speech.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:10:55]:
Awesome.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:10:56]:
Then he gave me a gift, and as he gave it to me, he was holding it, and I was holding it, and then he started speaking and he went on and on and on and on for a very long time. And of course, I don't speak Mandarin. So I'm wondering, I'm looking over at my translator. He's looking at me, I'm looking at him, and eventually he finishes this long soliloquy and gives me the gift. And so I look over at my translator. So what did he say? He said, well, basically he said, you're the first american he's ever met that seems to understand traditional chinese medicine. I thought that was a pretty good endorsement for what we were doing with functional medicine. Exactly.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:11:35]:
Wow. Thank you for sharing that as well. Yeah, because I remember hearing about it, I'm like, this kind of reminds me of the eastern medicine practices as well. And what an honor, right? To be able to share with the TCM practicing doctors that you shared the same philosophy and mentality as well. And it makes sense, when we think about it, want to get to upstream, like, what is the underlying cause, what is causing this, and not just the diagnosis, prescription models, which isn't serving people, as we clearly know in our sick care system. Right. So, Jeff, I'd love to dig into the concept of immunity, and how would you define being immune, and what is contributing to having that balanced immune system, and what happens when we're off, and what can we be done about it?

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:12:18]:
Well, thank you. That's another part of my learning over the years. I've been in this field long enough, obviously. I'm having my 70 eigth birthday next month, so it's been a few years. Beautiful. Pretty amazing, actually. Even to say that is once again like, whoa, how did that happen?

Claudia von Boeselager [00:12:35]:
If anything, clearly what you're doing is working.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:12:39]:
Well, thank you. What I've come to recognize over the years, as I've assembled all these experiences and conversations and the research we've done and so forth, is that the gateway to many people's health problems is really through two different doors. But those doors are interconnected, so maybe it's just one superdoor. And these are the first lines of how our body responds to outside information and how it prepares the body for being able to fight off or to defend itself against things. And that is the nervous system and the immune system. And so those are the gateways into messages that our body receives that ultimately become part of our process that leads to pain, energy deficits, all sorts of symptoms that are associated with chronic illness. So when I looked at those two, I thought, well, the immune system is kind of an interesting thing. It's a black box.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:13:42]:
It's so complex. It's like all the stars in the universe. It seems to have all these personalities. But there is something about the immune system that if we knew more about, we could own the functional immune system rather than become a victim of our immune system, that maybe we could turn back the clock functionally on all these issues that are associated with immune dysfunction, not just infectious disease, but chronic pain and brain fog and digestive problems and skin problems. It goes on and on. Virtually every chronic illness is associated with an immune dysfunction. And so when I started thinking about the immune system in that light, then I said, well, hold on just a minute. The immune system is really very dynamic.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:14:25]:
The cells in our body today that are immune cells will be different than the cells we have in our body four months from now. Our immune system turns over about every four to five months. So that means that if we have a different set of cells that are in our body five months from now, are they as good as the one we have today? Are they worse or better? And then when you ask that question, you find, well, hold up. There are processes in our body that can allow those cells that will come in months to come will be better, more able than the cells we have. We need to get rid of the clinker cells. We need to get rid of the ones that carry bad memories. We need to replace them with rejuvenated cells that have better opportunity to make their own decisions about our health. Which sounds maybe a little bit far fetched or like Sci-Fi over the last few years has become more and more well recognized in immunology that our immune system is a two way street.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:15:20]:
It can be injured, but it can also be repaired. So I said, maybe this is a missing link in our whole health program. Maybe someone needs to focus on this concept of what we call immune rejuvenation. One of my colleagues that's worked with me for now 28 years, she's obviously very tolerant for working with me for that number of years. But she said, this is Trashiri. She said, jeff, I've been with you all these years, and this idea you're coming up with, you keep talking about, you're a big guy in stature. It seems like a bold idea. Maybe you need to form a company that really focuses on this and call it big, bold health.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:15:57]:
So that became our big, bold health about three years ago that was really focused on being able to harness our understanding of the immune system in ways that people could start to own their immune system, could rejuvenate their immune system. And it has taken us on a journey that has truly been unbelievable because it just happened. We started this, actually, before SARS Cov two, and we didn't know that suddenly immunity was going to become the topic of everyone. So it's been a very interesting run, and I think we've made some great discoveries and found things that really do help a person to rejuvenate their immune system.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:16:36]:
Can you share? So, thank you. And so it's exciting, and I would love to hear more in depth and details and what you're seeing and also how the role of synolytics play.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:16:46]:
Right.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:16:46]:
So the cellular senescence as well, which I find really fascinating, what I've been looking at, and I know some companies have products that will support that cellular senescence process as well. But can you share what you've been discovering and what you're most excited about?

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:16:59]:
Yeah. Thank you. So let's start with cenolynics here. I think that's a good place to start this discussion about immune rejuvenation. So one of the most significant steps forward in the development of this senolinic concept, meaning agents that will prevent senescence or aging, was a discovery at Mayo and University of Minnesota that a combination of two agents, when given animals, seemed to turn back their aging, made them stronger, made them more fit, made them more vital, improved their blood sugar. I mean, it had all these metabolic beneficial effects. And those two things were kind of an old chemotherapeutic drug called denosib, which had been used in cancer therapy for a long period of time. It was in what's called an antimitotic.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:17:51]:
It causes injured cells to die, basically. And then the other agent, which strengthened and works synergistically with denosibib, was a substance called quercetin. Now, quercetin is a member of the bioflavonoid, the polyphenol family. It's a member of diets that are plant based, that have high levels of these nutrients in them. And so people said, well, this is really kind of interesting. You mean this denosib, working with quercetin, has this ability to roll back the h clock in animals? And so tremendous amount of research has gone on since that discovery. Now, to that end, people started to say, and this is where my interest really starts. What role did this Quercetin have in this? We may be able to understand a little bit of the denosiv because it was found to influence what are called the Yamanaka factors.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:18:50]:
These are the genes that regulate aging to some extent, that won a Nobel Prize for Professor Yamanaka. And so we have a little bit of an understanding as to how the chemotherapeutic drug works. But how about the quercetin? What does it do? And so in studying it, it turns out that if we look at other members of the bioflavonoid family in nutrients that are in plant foods, one of which is fizotin or physitin, which is a close relative of quezotin, we find out that they share personalities that are similar in helping to rejuvenate cells, and they do so through an epigenetic signal that causes cells to undergo apoptosis, that are injured and to be removed and replaced by new, naive cells, friendly cells. And so this was a whole kind of discovery in the nutrition world, because nutritionists historically have not really taken these flavonoids or these polyphenols very highly or important. They just consider them kind of. They come along for the ride with vegetables, but they're not that important. Now, suddenly, people were saying, well, hold on just a minute. Maybe there's a lot more to this polyphenol flavonoid story than we knew before.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:20:10]:
Now, that's where we got introduced, because I had an opportunity to meet the original investigators in the centralitic area, where we kind of put our thinking caps on. And now a serendipity happened for me, and I'm sure you find this in your life as well. What we call serendipitous by chance, really probably is not chance, because we tend to hang out with certain people, and we're more likely to have certain observations. So within two month period, I got three events that probably changed. Well, not probably did change my life event. Number one was I ran into an investigator at Vanderbilt University medical School in Tennessee in the states, who had been working on a new way of treating high blood pressure using a molecule that they had discovered that influenced the immune system to speak to the blood vessels in a way that would relax the blood vessels. So the immune system was part of high blood pressure. I never had thought about that before.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:21:10]:
Wow.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:21:11]:
And so if you can make a more friendly immune system, you make a more friendly blood wall, blood vessels, and that relaxes it, and you lower your blood pressure. That was the concept. And this molecule that he had discovered was called two hydroxyl benzolamine. And it turns out it's all just abbreviated Tuhova hoba. It turns out that that molecule is found in only one food that could be identified. And that food was something I had never heard about before, which is called tartary buckwheat. Tartary comes from the Tartan region of China. So it's an ancient food.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:21:48]:
It's 4000 years old. It's one of the two oldest cultivated foods, the other being millet, in the world. And there's a rich history in chinese medicine of the use of what is called himalayan tartary buckwheat, which is one of the varieties of it for healing. And so I thought, wow, that's kind of interesting. So then, as I happened to be invited to speak in Harbin, China, to about 10,000 chinese medical doctors about functional medicine. So I was going to be leaving to this trip, and I said to my colleague Trish, I said, trish, I'm kind of interested in this concept of tartary buckwheat. Do you think there's anyone growing it in the United States? He said, well, jeff, while you're gone, I'll do some research, see if I can find out who's growing it. So when I was in China, turned out Harbin is the northernmost big city up between North Korea and Russia.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:22:37]:
About 28 million people, by the way, not a small city, full town. Exactly. And so my host was a Shanghai's medical doctor, but he also had a PhD in the United States, spoke very good English. And so when we were to come back to Shanghai from Harbin, there was a typhoon, and so the planes were grounded. And he said, so, jeff, we do have an option, rather than just to wait, we could get on the bullet train and we could travel to Shanghai. And I thought, wow, that would be cool because that's like 2200 miles right across the center of China going at nearly 200 miles an hour on this train. It'silent, it's vibration free. I thought, that's like a kaleidoscope of seeing China.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:23:19]:
So, yeah, he and I got on the train, so we had a lot of hours to talk to one another. So about halfway across China, as we're going through all these agricultural fields, I said to him, so I have kind of a question that might seem a little strange, but I wonder if you have ever heard of himalayan Tartary buckwheat. And it was as if the train had stopped and we were in freeze time. And he looked at me and he goes, I can't believe you're asking me that question. And I said, well, why is that? And he says, my research group is the largest research group in China on himalayan Tartary buckwheat. We've been exploring it, and we've been trying to find someone in the United States that we could partner up with that, knows enough about chemistry and nutrition. And so when I got back, Trish then had been doing her homework, and she said, I can only find one grower of chartery buckwheat in the United States, and that's a gentleman by the name of Sam Beer. He is a former research professor of agriculture at Cornell University, very well known research facility at the university.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:24:24]:
And he retired, and he and his nurse wife have a hobby farm in Angelica, New York, in which they're growing a small amount of this himalayan tartary buckwheat. So, to make a long story kind of complete here, I then put together a cooperative group between the beers. We now actually own the Angelica mills, because he was retiring and they were going to sell their farm. So he became a consultant to our company. And between the Vanderbilt University people and between my colleague in China, we formed a cooperative that became big, bold health to study the immune effects of this extraordinary plant that is associated with kind of nutrients that you see in people who live in blue zones. You probably know Dan Buetner's work and the blue zones. And it turns out one of the features of the blue zone diets across, whether they live in Costa Rica or Bama or even in Loma Linda, California, one of the blue zones is that these people have diets that are very high in these flavonoids, like quercetin and rootin and diasmin and hysteridin and so forth and so on, which are extraordinarily high in himalayan tartary buckwheat. In fact, it's the richest food of all in those immune strengthening nutrients.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:25:38]:
So that was how my senolinic kind of interest converted over, now becoming an organic farmer in upstate New York, growing himalayan tartary buckwheat on regenerative agriculture.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:25:49]:
I'd absolutely love that. Must swing by at some point. I'd be so curious to see it. Absolutely amazing. But tell us, what is your protocol, Jeff, how have you adapted all these amazing learnings into your life? I guess for people listening, they're like, this is so phenomenal, but how does one actually go about adapting? So maybe you can share a little bit with my audience, things that you do that, you know, really move the needle.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:26:12]:
Yeah. Well, again, I'm always hesitant to say what I do is necessarily going to move other people's needle, but I think there are some general principles that we've learned. We've done quite a bit of research. We've published many papers over the years. So I think I'm speaking more broadly than just myself. But there are some things that I think are universally beneficial for everyone in rolling back the age clock. So let's start with number one. Number one has to do with regulation of your blood sugar.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:26:42]:
If your blood sugar is going up and down like the Andes mountains, that's not a good thing. And the way that the traditional standard american diet has been applied causes our blood sugar to go up and down, principally because of all the refined carbohydrate and simple carbohydrate sugar. So my colleagues all are kind of very controlled on carbohydrates. Simple carbohydrate, refined carbohydrate sugar intake in America, the average intake of sugar per capita is something over 100 pounds a year. So if you think of that, that's like a third of a pound of sugar a day. And so that definitely hidden everywhere. Yeah, exactly. And so I think that comes back again to eating foods that are minimally processed, that don't appear in prack package or come out of grease soaked bags and look like they once were alive and lived in the ground.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:27:40]:
That's kind of Michael Poland's concept. Right, exactly.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:27:43]:
Stay on the outside of the perimeter of the supermarket and you're already exactly, quite well.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:27:49]:
So blood sugar control. Second, and as you control blood sugar by eating the right kind of diet, then you're also going to probably be doing another thing which is, I think, really important, and that's increasing dietary fiber, which is both soluble and insoluble dietary fibers. And this is one of the values we found with himalayan tartary buckwheat, is that it's extraordinarily high. These beneficial prebiotic fibers. And when I say prebiotic, what I mean is they help to nourish a healthy microbiome, the intestinal bacteria that are our friends, that live in our gut, the consumption of foods regularly that are high on fiber, and obviously fiber is found in vegetable food. So you've got to increase your vegetable food intake. It's not just one type of vegetables. It can be beans, legumes, it can be also non gluten grains for people who have gluten sensitivity.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:28:46]:
That's another one of the advantages of tartary buckwheat. It's a gluten free. I don't know why it has the name wheat. It's not related to wheat at all. It has no gluten in it. So it's a gluten free seed, actually. And so increasing our fiber to something like 30 to 40 grams a day. And that sounds like a lot.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:29:06]:
But actually, it's very easy to get that amount if you're eating every meal, some vegetable related products, minimally processed. I'm not talking about potato chips or french fries.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:29:18]:
Exactly.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:29:21]:
Then the third rule is, and I think this is a fairly easy one to apply, and that is eat the rainbow. One of my long term colleagues, person I dearly love is Dr. Deanna Minnick, who worked with me for many years. And she's kind of really been the champion for this concept of eat the rainbow. And the reason that eating the rainbow is a very practical way of judging our diet is that when I say the rainbow, I'm talking about natural colors in foods, not synthetic dyes, colorants. And the natural colored foods are basically vegetable, fruits and vegetables. And those colors are really a consequence of the presence of these polyphenols and flavonoids that I've talked about. So the way to actually judge if you're getting these age combating nutrients is to make sure you get colored foods, vegetable and fruit products in your diet, minimally processed.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:30:20]:
And so if you do that and you eat minimally processed foods, and you have your plate that's balanced with vegetable and animal products, stay away from processed meat products. That's more and more being seen, these processed meats. I know there's a big, huge love now for bacon and cured meats, but quite honestly, it's not really good for you.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:30:46]:
Nitrate and everything in it as well.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:30:48]:
Exactly. So if you stay with, we would say, organic meats and free range animal products and organic vegetable and fruit products and minimally processed, you try to encourage as much of that in your diet as possible. And I'm kind of a guy who has flexibility in rules. So it's not that I'm so disciplined that I never have a dessert or I never have a fast food meal, or I try to just make sure that the majority of my eating experience follows those rules. And when you do that, if you do a nutritional analysis of what you consume, you're going to end up on the antiaging diet program. You're going to end up with the research that we've been doing that demonstrates that you can roll back the age of the immune system. In fact, we just finished a clinical trial. This was a clintrill gov approved trial with 50 humans in which we asked them to consume a concentrate of himalayan tartary buckwheat that was very rich in fiber and very rich in the polyphenols that I talked about, and they consumed it for 90 days.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:32:00]:
And so it was very easy to put into their daily regime because we had concentrated it and put it into a capsule form so that they got making it easier to consume. They didn't have to go to the kitchen and bake stuff or make foods. And in so doing, we measured their age of their immune system before they started, and then the age of their immune system after three months. Now, we were told by a lot of people in the field that that was too short a time. We probably would never see any difference. But I chose three months because that's about the time that it takes the immune system to turnover. So I thought, well, maybe one turnover would be good enough to incorporate this new information into the health of the immune system. So the way we measured the age of their immune system was using some new technology that I'm very excited about.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:32:52]:
We had developed a gene chip at a company called Illumina, that on that chip were 850,000 gene sites that were related to the epigenetic regulation of our genetic code. This sounds pretty geeky.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:33:11]:
No, I love it.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:33:14]:
So we had these 850,000 sites embedded on this chip, and then we would put the person's blood on the chip that had their immune cells, and we would see then what of these sites were being occupied or activated by the immune cells. And so we were able to kind of measure the epigenetic age of their immune system using this tool, this analytical tool.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:33:41]:
Amazing.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:33:41]:
So we did it on baseline, and we're able to get each person's signature of how their immune system was being epigenetically, how it looked. Then we did the 90 days where they were taking the himalayan Tartary buckwheat concentrate, and then we measured using the same tool, and we were blown away. We proved a lot of my downing Thomas friends wrong, that we were able to demonstrate that in people who started off with aged immune systems, in which their immune system was older than their age and birthdays, that after 90 days, they had a significant about a 35% reduction in the age of their immune system. We made it.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:34:19]:
The same. The diet remained the same, they were relatively healthy. No other factors were changed, no increase in exercise.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:34:26]:
Purely. Exactly right. Yes. It was an ad lib program and this so called n of one study, where the n of one, meaning each person, was judged against themselves. So where they started and then where they ended up. And obviously, I want to emphasize, this is a pilot set. He was only 50 people, and it was only three months. But it's very encouraging that we could actually show a signal coming from food, because food is information right.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:34:53]:
It's talking to our genes. And in this case, we were able to show that the flavonoids and concentrates in himalayan tartary Buckwee talk to the genes of the immune system in such a way to make them younger.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:35:07]:
Where can I find these capsules, Jeff?

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:35:10]:
Well, it's part of Big Bolt health. It's called HDB. Rejuvenate is the name of the product, and you can actually find it on the big Bolt health website. And we've had a lot of extraordinary responses. We've had this product now for the last couple of years, and I think we're excited when people are taking it. We have a lot of reviews of people saying, wow, it had all these positive effects on energy. I'm thinking more clearly. I'm sleeping better.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:35:39]:
All the things that we think are related to a younger immune system, of course.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:35:42]:
Yeah. Because I've tested my biological age with glycan age.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:35:46]:
That's a good one.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:35:48]:
Yeah. And I'm 26 again. I'm trying to get them to, but if I can lose 30% and drop 30% in 90 days, I'm all over this as well.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:36:01]:
We'll send you some HTB rejuvenate after we get off. If we have an address to send you some, we'll send you some and see what you think. Thanks, Jeff.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:36:08]:
I'd love to. Exactly. I mean, I'm all about figuring it out, and I think that that's the exciting part, that these tools, these modalities are out there, they're available, and that I hope people listening and watching us today can really get excited that there are modalities to do. That said, and this is one of my other podcast guests, it's like, it doesn't mean that you can go out and eat McDonald's the whole time and take this and feel better. So let's keep to the outside of the supermarket and focus on the stuff that is good for us. But this can help to repair the immune system. And as you're saying as well, I mean, even the blood vessels, I find that so fascinating.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:36:42]:
Well, you said something else that I want to just quickly respond to, because I think it's in the topics of today, and we have these two drugs that have received all this attention, ozembic and Wogovi, that are being used for weight loss, that are really antidiabetic drugs that now are being redeployed for weight loss. And the way they work is that they are what are called GLP one stimulators. GLP one stands for glucagon like peptide. Now, we've been studying glucagon like peptide for twelve years, and so I feel like I'm pretty knowledgeable about this topic. And it turns out that this himalayan tartary buckwheat is a GLP one stimulant. Really, people forget about the fact that these things that the drug companies can exploit, like GLP one, are actually things that have been in our bodies. They're not just waiting for drugs. They are working in our body every day to do work.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:37:43]:
Now, the problem is, if you eat a really bad diet, and a bad diet is the sad diet, the standard american diet. Sad what that does is it blunts a lot of your GLP one natural ability to control blood sugar and to control appetite. So if you eat a diet that's rich in foods that are natural, GlP one agonist, meaning they stimulate GLP one naturally, it controls appetite, it lowers body fat deposition, and it's related to slimming. And now that's an explanation why people who eat diets that are rich in these substances, that active h e op one, don't have the same problem of weight gain as people who don't eat those kind of diets. So we're learning all sorts of lessons as we get into deeper understanding of the magic and wizardry that's in nature that surrounds eating a whole foods diet.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:38:39]:
Jeff, we could talk for hours. I find this so exciting, but I know that you have to go on to your next appointment. So before we finish up, I'd love to hear from you. What is your big vision and excitement for the future of medicine and longevity? What's exciting you the most at the moment?

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:38:56]:
Well, I really think we're on the threshold of having the tools available for people to live ten decades with healthy living and to maybe be able to have two or three careers in a life and be active into their hundreds. I think the technology and the science is there. It's now the changing people's perception of how they want to live. What decisions will they make? And these are maybe the most difficult and challenging things because we're so heavily marketed to do things that are not necessarily in our best interest. I would call them kind of anti good health. And as a consequence, we become candidates or victims of some of these very skillful marketing programs to sell us products that are not in our best interest in terms of achieving that 100 year healthy life outcome. I think that's all going to change. I think there is a whole movement about wellness that is occurring now.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:39:57]:
I think that it is more than just a bunch of kind of fringe people, biohackers. I think we're starting to see it spread to many people who really would like to live, to be grandparents, and beyond that are having the chance to get out with their grandkids and do all sorts of things. And so I think we're on the threshold of a revolution in which this market, I'll call it the wellness market, will be a very remarkable new part of our business structure. And it will give health coaches and all the health ancillary devices, wearable devices, things that are monitoring our health, that allow us to have a lot more information about how to live healthily available. And it'll transform culture and make us think better, sleep better, act better, more energy, look better, and enjoy life. That's my big dream here.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:40:43]:
Sounds amazing. We're working on it. So let's see what we can do. It's been such a pleasure to have you on. And where can people follow what you're up to? What website would you like to send them to? Maybe social media.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:40:57]:
Yeah. Thank you. Really. Two places, bigboldhealth.com. That's bigboldhealth.com. And the other, you can find all mygeekism@jeffreybland.com. So that's jeffreybland.com. Those are places you'll find more of me than you probably ever want to.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:41:15]:
But that's what you think.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:41:19]:
Others might disagree with you. Jeff, do you have any final ask or message or parting thoughts for my audience today?

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:41:28]:
I think my parting thought is really to carry the spirit. That's why you have such a remarkable podcast, and that is longevity. And good health is within our grasp. And right now we need to find some safe harbors as a culture. Our human culture right now is undergoing a lot of stress. It's a lot of turmoil. It's a lot of stuff that we wish we didn't have to deal with. And we need to turn the goodness of human beings, which is in our nature, into the dominant theme for our future.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:42:00]:
And that starts with us being healthy. If you're not healthy, then you have all sorts of things that don't give you the fullest opportunity to express your joy and magic of being alive. And so I think that's where we are as a culture. We need to make a decision as to how we want us to be seen, how we want to interact with one another, and how that relates to our both personal and population health. Beautiful.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:42:27]:
Jeff, thank you so much for taking the time to coming on today and sharing your wisdom and amazing experiences. Such a pleasure.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:42:33]:
My great pleasure. Thank you, Claudia, and the best to you and all of your listeners.

Claudia von Boeselager [00:42:37]:
Thanks so much.

Dr Jeffrey Bland [00:42:38]:
We'll be. Thank you. Bye.