137: Father of Functional Medicine + Discussion on Autoimmunity | Dr. Jeffrey Bland

On today's episode of the Real Foodology podcast, when we think of auto immunity, it suggests that people become allergic to themselves somehow one Monday morning they wake up and their body hates themselves. And that's actually not true. What happens is that the body has developed in response to a perception that it's under attack from something that's something maybe even a non-materialistic thing like trauma, post-traumatic stress. So it's not just chemical exposures, it's also psychological exposures, environmental and radiation exposures. All of those can be captured by your immune system to remember them as bad experiences that live longer than the experience. Hi everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Real Foodology podcast. I am so excited that you're here today and today's episode is a really really great one. So I sat down with Dr. Jeffrey Bland, who is frequently referred to as the father of functional medicine. He's also an iconic figure in the establishment and growth of the natural products industry. And his goal is to change the global conversation about immunity and get people thinking about personalization in an entirely new way. It was such an honor for me to have him on the podcast. If you guys have been listening to this podcast for a while or following me on Real Foodology, you know how important I find functional medicine to be. I talk about it on a lot of my episodes. It is a root cause way of looking at our current disease model. We're right now, we are putting band-aids over things, and we're not looking at the root cause and functional medicine. And that's where that comes in, actually looks at the whole body and the way the body works in symbiosis and attempts to get to the root cause and looks at diet lifestyle traumas that you've been through, your emotional state, your social life, all of these things play a role in your overall health. And this is why I find functional medicine so incredibly important. So I brought Dr. Jeffrey Bland on today to talk about functional medicine. We also talk about the immune system a little bit. We talk a little bit about our food industry. We touch on autoimmunity. We talk a lot about epigenetics, actually, which is another really fascinating conversation that I love to talk about. And then he also tells us a little bit about Himalayan tartary buckwheat, which is actually a buckwheat that he discovered, a superfood, and he actually sells it now through his company, Big Bold Health. So with that, let's just get into the episode, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. And if you guys are loving the podcast, please make sure to leave a rating and review. It takes just a couple seconds. And it means more to me and supports the show more than you would know. Thank you so much. I really hope you guys enjoyed the episode. I love Thai food, but I don't always have the time to cook it because there's a lot of ingredients. There's a lot of added spices and everything that goes in there. To be honest, it's a little intimidating for me. And I don't love to do to order takeout because you never know what kind of oils they're using. And there's probably a bunch of preservatives and junk in there. You just never know. So I am so stoked that I found this company called Yai's Thai. They make a ton of ready-to-go convenient marinades and sauces based on the founder's Thai grandmother's recipes. How cool is that? So you know that they're not only legit and they taste really good, but they're also lower in sugar. If you don't have any added preservatives or junk in there, many of them are whole 30 approved. They're vegan, paleo, and keto. So they're crossing off all the boxes of being healthy. And then you know they're delicious because they're from her Thai grandmother's recipes. I have a couple of my pantry right now. I have a Thai coconut curry that is so delicious. I really, really love curries. There's also a yellow Thai coconut curry. There's a panang curry. It doesn't make a pad Thai sauce. I love a pad Thai. And I love that I can make it at home because many of the ones out at restaurants are not gluten-free. So I can do a little gluten-free noodles, add on the pad Thai sauce, add in a couple of vegetables. And then you have a really simple, convenient meal that's so delicious and it's ready really fast. And you know that you're getting clean ingredients. Like you know exactly what's going in there. Yai's Thai has so graciously given me a code to share with you guys. If you use code real foodology, you're going to save 20% on any product or bundle when you go to yai's Thai.com. That is spelled Y-A-I-S-T-H-A-I.com and use code realfoodology. I feel like everyone in the health world right now is talking about the importance of getting enough protein and also the importance of maintaining muscle mass for longevity. And I think this is a really important conversation as we age our muscles naturally deteriorate. So it's incredibly important especially as we age to focus on our muscle mass and make sure that we maintain it because it only gets harder to gain muscle and to maintain it the older we get. But if you start at a younger age and you are constantly working at it and making sure that you're getting good high quality protein and doing strength training, it's only going to be easier as you age, not harder. And something really interesting to note is that did you know our body makes up of 50% amino acids? Amino acids are the building blocks of life and they are the building blocks of protein. Protein is what helps us to not only gain healthy muscle mass but to also maintain it. One of the ways I do this is I take Kion amino acid powder every single morning. They give you a little natural energy boost. They also help to build lean muscle and enhance athletic recovery. And they taste really good. So it's a super simple way to get your amino acids in every day. They're really clean. They don't have any artificial flavors or sweeteners. I'm a huge fan of them. If you guys want to try any of the Kion products today including the amino acids that I talked about, go to getkion.com slash real foodology. That's G-E-T K-I-O-N dot com slash real foodology. And you're going to save 20% on monthly deliveries and 10% on one time purchases. Many people talk about you as the father of functional medicine which is why I was so excited to bring you on because functional medicine is a huge passion of mine and I think it's really it's incredibly important as we move forward and try to fix this mess that we're in with our health care and our food system. So I would love to hear a little bit about or I want my audience to hear a little bit about your story and how you got into functional medicine in the first place. Well you know it's really interesting when I think about that question because Bernie what you're doing is actually with real foodology it's exactly the way that my sister and I were raised in Southern California. We grew up in the San Fernando Valley back in the 50s and my mother was a natural foods devotee. She was an adult Davis person. Her mother was also a natural kind of nutrition person and so you know we never had white bread we never had desserts we never had soft drinks we never had snack foods my mother was all from scratch type of upbringing so it was really a powerful imprint and when I later went on into medical school it was very funny I would come home really excited of what I'd learn and I would sit down and you know kind of bring my mother up to speed as to what I was learning and hoping that she's going to be proud of me right. And she would say well Jeff that's really great what you're learning but are you learning anything about nutrition? And I would say well no I'm actually not getting much in nutrition she says well when you learn something it's important to let me know would you? So that was kind of her girl philosophy. So that obviously imprinted me you know I became a professor I was involved for many years in doing research and I had the opportunity to spend a couple of years on sabbatical with light is falling two time no book prize winner at Stanford and so I was getting my chops kind of over the years and more and more recognizing that there was a gap between the way that I was trained and I think the way that most professional people were trained which is very disease-centric and what we consider health and you know that we would most say all of us that health is more than the absence of disease yet the way I had been trained was really to think of disease at the primary focus of all of our intention and diagnosis and treatment and so it led me into really collaborating with individuals ultimately around the world I started doing research that got some publicity and that then got me under the speaker circuit and got me traveling globally and eventually now I've traveled over six million miles but over the course of all those experiences I was meeting really remarkable people that were thinking about this whole question of health from a different perspective and that ultimately led my wife Susan to say to me you know Jeff you've been doing all this traveling this and then the second in the 80s and you know you speak about all these really remarkable people that have these extraordinary ideas maybe we had a host a meeting I'll put it together you can bring say 40 or 50 of these basically leading individuals in and we'll do a whiteboard discussion about what would be a health care system that would be ideal if it took away licensure and reimbursement just talked about the concept of health and so that led us ultimately to have with her organization this meeting in Vancouver British Columbia on Vancouver Island in Victoria where these about 48 different people representing different disciplines were kind enough to come in and we sat down for three days and had a brainstorming and it was really hugely exciting I think all of us were just feeling like we were touching on all sorts of different topics from emotion well-being psychological physical exercise drafts I mean the whole gamut of different things and that then led us to have the following year that would be 1990 a second at the same place second meeting and it was at that second year that I had this idea in a kind of a green state this is where often we do our most creative thinking I think about the fact that what we were really talking about over those two years was not so much disease as something you'd put a name on but rather function and then I started to say you know maybe it's this function that precedes disease and so how could we think of dysfunction in a different way because it would force us to think upstream to think about root cause because later downstream becomes the broken parts that we call disease that get certain diagnostic codes that we call the international classification of disease or ICDs and that that leads to the ability for doctors to reimburse for services when they get an ICD on a person but they didn't actually ever ask a question how they get there and what happened to their their journey and so that led me to then suggest to my group on that second year that maybe we could think of function in four different quadrants or four different areas and those were physical functioning metabolic functioning and cognitive functioning and behavioral functioning and if you could quantify each of those likely quantify disease if you could find a way to really actually know how to to say how a person was functioning in each of those four areas maybe we would able to define something that we will call health not just disease maybe that's their state of health so I I threw out that idea to the group and we you know jousted about it for several hours and eventually it's decided okay the term functional medicine doesn't sound like a really great term in 1990 because it would it really had two kind of connotations in medicine one was geriatric medicine with polarized people that were disabled and the other was psychosomatic medicine it's all in your mind and I said well yeah those are the way that functional medicine is traditionally nymphata but in reading the literature I'm seeing more and more evidence of like functional radiology and functional endocrinology and functional cardiology maybe it's going to take on a new definition over time and we go out of skate to where the puck is going rather than where it is and so we all have been agreed okay let's let's just put our stake in the ground and we'll talk about this as a systems biology approach to health care with function as our focus and we'll call this the functional medicine well to finish off this long-winning quick question what happened was several years later we did found the incident for functional medicine my wife then went through the American College of Continuing Medical Occasion courses to become a provider of continuing education for health providers and so several years later one of our members came up to me and he said so Jeff you realize that the functional medicine was actually written about in the 1844 issue of the Lancet medical magazine and I said you got to be kidding me and I mean I consider myself a bit of a file I read the medical literature quite extensively and I I would have thought that if it functional medicine had ever been discussed before I would have known about it but lo and behold I did not and he said yeah you get a copy of this article which I was able to get out of the archives and it was written by the dean of medicine of the medical school at Birmingham Medical School in England and he was quite in the steam position and he wrote a series of lectures on functional medicine in which the although it was written in a language it was of the 19th century if you really parsed it out it was very very similar to the functional medicine that we were designing the only difference was we had a lot of tools that they did not have in in the 19th century that we had when we formed functional medicine in terms of assessment tools but really the philosophy was really laid down very nicely in his lecture so I I don't feel like I invented anything coming up with functional medicine we just have taken that concept and embellished it over the last note I can't believe it it's 31 years since we founded the Institute for functional medicine I mean that's incredible and I just want to take a minute to honor you and say thank you so much for all the work that you've done in this field because it's it's absolutely incredible and it every time I have a conversation about functional medicine I'm just blown away that it has taken us so long to get to this place where we've started recognizing that root cause and preventative measures are what we need to be doing when we're talking about our health and the way that we're addressing diseases and etc and especially when you look at I mean even just the last like 50 years the rise of all of these chronic conditions that so many of them are driven by lifestyle and diet choices why have we taken so long to get to this place where we're like oh yeah there's there's got to be a root cause to this and how can we get to the root cause find it and then you know relieve people's suffering it's just crazy me it's taking us this long well yes it is corny but I think there's a reason for it if you think about let's put ourselves in a situation that we were way back when a couple thousand years ago or more and having to design a medical system so what would be the first things that we would do because our skills and our tools were fairly rudimentary you know centuries ago so we might say well the first thing I'm going to do is like a truss system I'm going to find people that are bleeding or people have bumps in their body or people have lesions that have sores or people that are passed out and so I'll do the most remarkable easy things first which are the things that don't require a lot of diagnostic oculment because the person is pretty obviously in distress so you would start off with a medicine that would focus on those conditions then over time you would start to say well but there are some things that are beyond the immediate crises that if we don't do something about it it becomes more severe over time so nice to look at things like what we call today diabetes or you might have forms of mental illness or you might have problems of digestion and you say well if we don't do something about it it will get worse with time so you start feeding people all sorts of different things from plants you see what might help them and then you start cataloging over thousands and thousands of years of history experience which becomes a pharmacopoeia traditional Chinese medicine or Ayurvedic medicine or natural medicine from different cultures to go way back and that becomes in the next step now from there you eventually get to where you start to say well actually if you look at the function of the individual at a deeper level which is what Langis Pauling brought to us with the concept of biochemistry as applied to to health and cellular biology then you start to say well we can use different lenses to explore the upstream problems that even precede the onset of a condition like diabetes but we are going to get the prediabetes and insulin resistance and on it goes so now you develop a library of tools that allow you to ask and answer questions that you could not answer previously and I feel like I was fortunate to be born at the time where that transition was starting to happen in the 1900 late 1900s and now as we move into the genomic and post genomic age now the tools have become so robust that we can answer all sorts of questions but the problem is we're still holding onto a model that's a legacy yes 200 years ago and we're resistant to give it up because it has been pretty incorporated into teaching and into professionalization in the finances in the reimbursement all those things are resisting factors to make change yeah absolutely I mean you brought up a great point we have a lot of there's a lot of uphill battles when it comes to changing this whole system and a lot of it is financial you know you look at insurance insurance doesn't cover a lot of preventative care because they don't even recognize it as like a form of of care in the health care system and then you know there's a lot of money incentives in putting people in medications instead of getting to the root cause because there's a lot more money in just putting a bandaid over it than actually fixing the problem you said this beautiful I've listened to a number of your podcasts and I think you're asking for seeing it's really really powerful because you start asking you've asked this question but I'm going to ask it for your listeners and that is one of the things that we can change that we can gain control over that are in our locus of control that doesn't require some highly trained professional to intervene with some magic something and rescue us from disease and of course a shared home and common human experience is eating I've yet to meet some of them that hasn't eaten some time and we know that eating as with breathing our fundamental factors and influence our function and therefore we start saying well does it make a difference what you eat or is it all just about calories as long as you get enough calories that you will keep your energy stores properly rejuvenated you're going to be fine and we recognize now that no that food is not just nutrients food is information picked up by our genes it's translated into our function let me say that again because I think this is a simple thing that blows off my tongue because I've said so many thousands of times but I think it's a fairly profound recent concept when I say recent I mean within the last say 30 years that food is information for which our genes pick up the information to figure out how they're going to function now if that is a different way of thinking about nutrition and real foodology now we've developed a whole new paradigm a new operating system a new way of thinking of our responsibility towards our eating what we word comes from how it was growing whether it's happy food or angry food and then how that influences our function over time that then later translates into our diseases that model is an entirely different model than I was exposed to when I went to medical school I got my PhD in the 60 that was never discussed once so I think here is a new opportunity you're doing a wonderful job of communicating that to your uh my best I really appreciate that a lot well I know this is a topic of discussion that you are very well versed in and I've heard you talk about this a lot as epigenetics and I think this really ties in with what you were just saying is that food is information and it's one I guess component of the epigenetic conversation that I find so fascinating and I really want to I want to talk about this a little bit I've mentioned it a couple times in in podcast episodes but so when we think about food being information for our genes what is the role that plays in epigenetics and what we've learned recently about how we can turn these genes on and off depending on what we eat lifestyle etc yeah that's that's a magic question you know when I went to again I'm a throwback guy I know so I'm just going to give a little historic perspective we were told without any question when we went through a train that the genes once you get past field development are locked in place and you didn't go on an application card you got whatever you got if you got the good luck of the draw array if you didn't well we're just going to have to find something to help you with medicine and that concept of what I call genetic determinism was a very very powerful concept in and still is resin in medicine today and into something then even in nutrition so with that as a construct it was believed that well the best we could do is fix broken people because they had bad genes but now what we recognize that this concept of genes once they're in place can never be modified in terms of their function is changing and that's the epigenetic revolution it doesn't mean that we're actually changing the genes our architecture what I call our book of life which is encoded in our 23 chapters that are after these chapters written by our biological mother the other half our biological father that genetic code stays the same but what changes is the way that code is read and that's what epigenetics does is that it marks the book with what I call paper clips and sticky notes so the paper clips are things put on our genes that say don't read here this is expregated and the sticky notes say read here now the reason that's I think an important interesting concept is that if you recall that we're all developed from a single fertilized day and that single fertilized egg turns into every cell kep of our body what's there hundreds of different cell type and how does that happen if they all have the same book of life it's because in development in fetal development epigenetics regulates what cells will become a nervous cell what cell will become a heart cell what become in all the different cell lines and that is really the epigenetics so there's been no doubt that epigenetics is very powerful in fetal development what is now more recent and remarkable is that we've seen we see now that even in adults even in older age adults there is still some ability to modify the genetic imprinting these marks the sticky notes and the paper clips to modify how genes are expressed so you might have what you think is the genes for autoimmunacy but actually it turns out there are no specific a gene for autoimmunacy it is a complex array of multiple genes that are expressed as a consequence the experiences in life that we've had that have imprinted our book of life in such a way that it becomes hostile for our environment we're not allergic to ourselves we're allergic to our environment and now we have to see can we reverse that rejuvenated and can we do that specifically on our immune cell because that's where most of autoimmunity resides it's in imprinting epigenetically of our immune system and so the breakthrough that we've seen in the last 20 years particularly accelerating the last decade is that there are ways of turning back these marks that lead cells into feeling that they're in a state of hostility they're in a state of alarm they're in a state of they have to do battle they've been epigenetically programmed to think that they've got to put up their dukes and do battle and what we need to do is make them back into peaceful tranquil blissful cells by changing their epigenetic marks by invading them in a different series of experiments part of which comes with how we eat and the things we eat we don't eat angry food we eat peaceful food and those are things that then reprogram or epigenome to allow our genes to be the white light of good health that we deserve there's nothing more comforting than a warming cup of hot chocolate before bed i know coming for me that may sound a little counterintuitive because you're probably thinking how is hot chocolate healthy for you but i've got a little hack for you and it's called organifies gold chocolate first and foremost the most important thing here it has one gram of total sugar in it so you get the satisfaction of having a comforting cozy little sweet treat after dinner without all the loaded sugar and it's like with this one you get a two for a two for one because you also have the added bonus of things like turmeric lemon balm turkey tail there's also magnesium and there's racy in there so whenever i drink this at night before bed it gets me really sleepy and ready to wind down and it really improved my sleep there's also a blend in there that helps a digestion there's acacia cinnamon ginger black pepper and turmeric so if you have this after dinner it's also going to help with your digestion and it's going to get you ready for bed my favorite thing about organify products outside of them being all organic they're also glyphosate residue free if you have listened to this podcast long enough or paid attention to my instagram you know that glyphosate is a huge huge concern for all of us in this country glyphosate is a known carcinogen that is being sprayed it's an herbicide it's being sprayed on all of our crops that are not organic and it's also being leaked into organic products as well organic foods so this glyphosate residue free stamp is so incredibly important and it's one of my favorite things about organify outside of their actual products which i love if you want to try this hot cocoa from organify or any of their other products that i mentioned today make sure that you go to organify.com slash real foodology and you're going to save 20 percent in your order again that's o-r-g-a-n-i-f-i dot com slash real foodology so when we're talking about auto-immunity i mean we're seeing such a high percentage of people dealing with the with this now what do you think the reasoning is behind that i mean because you had mentioned that it's also the experiences that we've been through in life right so it's obviously diet lifestyle could be traumatic experiences as well what's what's your what's your thinking behind that well i think you just said it you know that was going to be just said because in the past it has been known by rheumatologists doctors who specialize in auto-immunity disease um that there are certain chemicals that will induce auto-immunity disease in some people in fact or even some drugs that have warning labels on them because they can produce auto-immunity as if the body then becomes hostile and the immune system responds by inflammation now how does that happen it happens because our body is continually sensing the outside inside world 24 7 365 there are three systems of the body to do that they're working for us simultaneously and that's the nervous system the mucosal surfaces of our body which are gut mucosa from the mouth down to a southern hemisphere and our respiratory epithelium in our nose all the way through our lungs those are constantly sampling the outside world and sensing whether there is friends or or or hostels available and exposed and if it's hostels then there's a whole very remarkable system to activate a defense mechanism called the immune system so when we think of auto-immunity it it it suggests that people become allergic to themselves somehow one Monday morning they wake up and their body hates themselves and that's actually not true what happens is that the body has developed in response to a perception that it's under attack from something now that something could be the microbiome it could be dysbiosis that something could be chemical they even their food that's something and this is your point that you may that I want to emphasize maybe even a non-materialistic thing like trauma like post-traumatic stress that we now see that those signals are also picked up by this immune system through the nervous system and translate epigenetically to mark your immune cells in such a way that they become scarred they become scarred from that bad experience so it's not just chemical exposure it's also psychological exposures and environmental and radiation exposures all of those can be captured by your immune system epigenetically to remember them as bad experiences that live longer than the experience so they linger with you sometimes for the rest of your life but that uh this is the big news anything in our body that moves one way has been found to have a path that can move the other way there's no such thing as one way streets and so sometimes the other street going back is slow but it still is available so the question is how do we rejuvenate getting those scars out of our immune system getting what is sometimes called zombie cells that's a pretty strong term isn't it that basically point zombie cells that live with us how do we get rid of zombies so that our body rejuvenates the capability to be a youthful resilient immune system and not be at war with it with ourselves and that to me is the frontier of the new field of rheumatology because it's not just the drugs that we've been using that this suppressed the immune system they put a blanket over the immune system that's why the the warning labels on those drugs say by the way this could increase your risk of tuberculosis or this could increase your risk of melanin to uh various forms of cancer because we've suppressed your immune system know what we're trying to say is rejuvenate the immune system so that it has a chance to regain its uh its functional um uh capability yeah that's really fascinating um for people listening that don't know what zombie cells are what are those well it turns out that when immune cells get injured or cells in the body get injured they can collect the injuries as these what are called scars and those are kind of epigenetic and metabolic scars and those then turn that cell because it turns genes on that were previously quiet now they become they have a voice and those cells are called senescent associate secretary phenotypes sasp secretary may there secreting substances outside the cell into the body and they are associated with the outcome of inflammation so now your body moves into a state which has been called uh inflammation that you've got an inflammatory simmering pot of stewing all the time that is associated with accelerated biological aging aging of your immune cells and aging of your skin aging of your liver aging of your whatever organ did your that we're talking about inflammation is part of the zombie cell activating this process to release these secretary associated uh inflammatory uh molecules so that doesn't sound good right people don't want to be a simmering pot of inflammation so how do you reboot how do you reverse inflammation and here is where uh the diet plays a big role lifestyle plays a big role exposure to getting rid of exposure to toxic chemicals plays a big role uh having love and attribution in your life and being in a safe place uh plays a big role all those things nourish you at many levels to rejuvenate the cells that were injured and carry this zombie cell architecture hmm oh I love that and what about um what autophagy be something that would get rid of those are the zombie cells different than like dead cells or would it be through autophagy you also get rid of them yes they're actually not dead cells they're okay they're cells that have this personality of having been converted into an inflammatory state and this autophagy which was only discovered the mechanism within the last uh 20 years it won the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology for discovery in the 2013 so it's a reasonably recent discovery that that process is a cellular garbage collecting that eats up these damaged components and allows renewal of cells that have the full potential and are not carrying these bad messages not carrying these scars and it was really um I'm not speaking to the frontier of a revolution because if you want to take it just to step back with you because I know of your your strong advocacy with real pathology of what's gone on in our food supply system if you look at the corporate capture of the nutrition professional in the United States they the corporate nutrition profession that likes us call it corporate nutrition has really been advocating a form of nutrition that I think most people would say bosters and supports ultra processed foods yeah and ultra processed foods are kind of like uh it's like a four-letter word right it's like really it's uh it's bad yeah it's like putting fuel over the fire that's already raging exactly yeah so when you start looking at ultra processed foods you start seeing that they are heavily involved with snack and convenience foods and with the corporate culture of the food processing industry things aren't changing so I don't want to throw too much babies out with the bathwater but I think that we have seen a history of decades of the concept that good nutrition comes from eating these convenience foods and the way that that nutrition industry has been successful in getting that a message out to the public is not only through public service and advertising messaging but also through kind of co-opting the nutrition professional community particularly what used to be called the um well it's now called and it used to be the dietetics association American dietetics association and by heavy support of that organization they really won over the body politic of nutrition information and they made it look like people who spoke to the contrary like my mother did when when she was raising me were they were weirdos right they didn't really know they didn't have good education they had good education they would be members of the team this is a little bit of what's happening in medicine by the way as well there's a similarity here being a member of the guild right you want to be recognized by your colleagues of not being weird and so now we're starting to see the corporate capture of the nutrition profession changing in which we have people like yourself that have said okay I there are things that I will take away from my education that is very useful but that's not the only thing that I need to know I need to know how foods are alive I need to know how foods were growing and micro-risol and friendly soils and how those food ultimately ended up being converted into a product that people eat and what were they packaged in and and what what other things were put in there to preserve them and and so forth and so on and all of those questions then frame a new dialogue as it relates to food and nutrition and it takes us away from then the ultra processed foods into a new movement which is gaining huge quick response I think and growing popularity which is the food is medicine of crops and it was the you know President Biden had this September Congress conference in Washington DC of the first conference of its type of the federal level since the Montgomery committee hearings back in the 60s on hunger nutrition and health and out of that particular congress conference came something that I would not have believed actually happened at the government national level and that was the group of individuals who were meeting came to the recognition that we need to turn over the way we're thinking about food as just this source of calories and and maintain proper body weight and so forth to think of it as as bioactive ingredients it really influenced the function of our body in remarkable ways so that food is medicine and that term food is medicine was actually coined not calling it was a champion in the the reviews of that meeting even including the New England Journal of Medicine Dr. Darius Musopiriam wrote a brilliant article called the White House Conference on Hunger Nutrition and Health a new national strategy disappeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in the in the November 2nd issue this last year and he was reviewing this concept of food is medicine as a new concept in which it was even suggested at the conference I know this is enough to blow your socks off that maybe we would get to the point where physicians would be prescribing vegetables as a prescription that would be reimbursed for people going to the store and using them in their diets so you know this is the revolutionary different thinking out of the box thinking and so I think we're in a paradigm shifting period that is really really exciting even things that we thought were you know alternatives that were we felt a good step let me use a an example recently something you're very familiar with we received a lot of you know worthy news and that's the recent evidence from Stan Hazen that would be published in Nature Medicine on Arrita Tull oh yeah I just saw that people took sugar out of foods and they started adding sugar substitutes or or non-calaric sweeteners one of those was Arrita Tull this polyol sweetener that's non-metabolic supposedly but now Stan Hazen at the Cleveland Clinic who by the way was already very well established in his research considered quite a luminary scientist he and his colleagues at Cleveland Clinic found that there was an increased risk the cardiovascular disease in people who were consuming arithmetic at significant levels and therefore now we say well something that was put in there to take sugar out actually may have created another problem with its own because it's a synthetic a derivative so I think we're starting to look with much more precise views about how food influences function and what are the array of things that we didn't consider to be important in food but now we think are really important like the phytochemicals in food that we took out in fact I remember reading an article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition back in 2000 and it was talking about the food processing industry is involved with genetic hybridization of foods to remove these bittering needs out of food so we'll be able to make vegetables and various things less bitter or less stringent so that people will like them they'll be more like a mild flavoring well when you take those flavors out of food you're taking out the phytochemicals that are there to help protect the body's function so yes you might make it more tasty sweet salt and fat but you're not making it more healthy so all these things are trends that we're starting to see happening right now that's really exciting yeah that's really fascinating and I wanted to take a little step back because I loved how you brought up the corporate interest in all of this my story was I actually was on the R.D. track to be a registered dietitian and I pulled myself out of the program because I started seeing all the corporate ties and I didn't want to be involved in that in any way at the time I don't know if they're still doing this but I remember they were being there events they had every year were sponsored by General Mills and Coca-Cola and it was just it was mind-blowing to me because I was going into the nutrition field wanting to help people heal their bodies and I had this concept of food as medicine and then here this program was it was teaching my curriculum they were taking money from these highly processed food companies and so my philosophy has always said back to what you said about your mom and and how they were you know trying to say that people like us that that have this notion of food as medicine is it do the opposite of what mainstream says to do be okay being the weirdo because you know what it's way cooler that way because slowly we're all catching up to the fact that you know the people that have been saying this for a long time that food is medicine is actually we're correct we're right and we know this from what you're saying about when we look at the the phytonutrients in foods you know like we think about like blueberries for example fight free radicals in our body and that's just one example of of the multitude of different fruits and vegetables that we have that actually have a real effect on our body and I want to say one more thing that I'm not sure a lot of people know this and I've always found this fact so fascinating most drugs most pharmaceutical drugs that we create are either built off of a plant component that already exists in nature or they're trying to mimic the way that certain plants work and when I found that out I was like wow I mean what are we doing with all these synthetic pharmaceutical drugs why are we not studying more these components in real foods that are actually having similar effects on the body and helping us heal you just said it that needs exclamation with big stars after it because if you look at a interesting topic right now which is this weight loss drugs ozemic and wink wink wink wink wink wink wink wink so they are revolutionizing weight loss clinics all over the country sprouting up with these particular drugs as the treatment of choice so it begs the question yes they do cause weightless so how do they work they work because they are what are called GLP1 agonist what is GLP1 that's glucagon like peptide it's a hormone that is secreted naturally by our gastrointestinal cell in the small intestine that goes into our blood and stimulates insulin and reduces inflammation and that hormone is a natural hormone that's produced but it's stimulated by certain foods in our diet that happen to be bitter foods interesting bitter foods activate GLP1 so now we have these drugs that are mimicking nature and in trying to up the volume by giving therapeutic doses by the way it's very interesting just as an aside that ozemic is a diabetic drug well GLP1 is a weight loss drug they're the same exact act of material so what's the difference the difference is the dose now here's where the interesting difference in consumer manipulation occurs so we're told don't use ozemic because it's a diabetic drug but it's safe use wagobi but it turns out that ozemic is half the dose of agobi wagobi is actually twice as strong yet because it got the approval from the government as a weight loss drug he can be used in teenagers without diabetes whereas ozemic half the dose cannot be used legally because it's only for diabetes you see the paradox that we get involved it's crazy making right yeah but the point i'm trying to make is that natural food so we've been eating historically from a complex diet that's rich and plant foods will activate your GLP1 receptors and produce naturally these materials that have to regulate weight and you know for more than 30 years i've been saying in seminars for doctors that we have been misled thinking that calories are the solution to weight calories are important i don't throw them out calories are a source of potential energy that's what they measure is potential energy but it's how the energy is used that's has or more important than the potential of the energy so if a person can't metabolically use the energy of calories that they're consuming what does their body do it's very intelligent it stores it for a rainy day that never comes called body fat so if you're metabolically impaired you then have a tendency to store calories as fat and in so doing it may be associated with alterations in your blood sugar which then alters your taste perception and makes you feel hungry so now you increase your calorie consumption because your body's thirsting for proper nutrition to feed cells with energy but it's not being made so the body says okay we better eat more so now you get sugar craving you get all these various things that are occurring that really multiply this obesity phenomena that we're observing in our culture so the construct by eating foods that contain the right kind of signaling molecules ascend your genes friendly messages as to how to turn on your metabolism epigenetically that's the solution to the problem it's not just restricting calorie it's not just taking glp one agonist drugs either I have such a problem with this ozempic thing happening right now because I mean I'm just always I always like to err on the side of caution and I like to take a totally different route and look at the person's diet and try to get to the root cause I mean this is what we've been talking about talking about this entire episode and it concerns me that we have so many people that are just so willing to jump on you know the next trend of this drug you know next drug that comes out and and then when you look at how the FDA approves things oftentimes they approve it preemptively and then they go back later and pull it from the shelves after they see the detrimental effects that's had on people and yeah it's really concerning especially when when we know what we know everything we've talked about in this entire episode the importance of food and diet and and exercise and then this great point that you just brought up with the the highly processed foods the reason why they're they're so concerning is that they are essentially empty calories and I think this is where the part of the conversation where calories do matter because when you think about you're essentially just eating high caloric density air that your body is just like well we didn't get any nutrients from that so now we need more and then you know it's as if the calories counted in the way that they shouldn't have counted you know what I mean where it's like you've taken a lot in but then now you don't have any energy to produce from it because your body in a way like this obesity epidemic we're seeing people are starving at a cellular level because they're not getting their nutrient needs met you're absolutely on tariot I totally agree and actually that just to make a segue that's what kind of drew me into this hilly and tardery buckley you know I never thought in my life that I would be in organic farming and owning parts of farms in upstate New York and then archizmo miller and crimson bird New York and it was all drawn to me into asking the question what are the foods that have characteristics that really break this vicious cycle of empty calories that then encourage all these metabolic problems ranging from arthritis to diabetes to dementia to just put on the list product illnesses and I just happen by if there is such thing as serendipity and I'm the older I get the more I'm kind of doubting it but it's serendipity I think we tend to hang out with certain people that are more likely to tell us something we didn't know than just by coincidence but it happened that three different people in three different occasions all in the course of about two to three months introduced me to this concept of Himalayan tardery buckwhew which I found out had been lost as in the food in America 200 years ago when it was an ancestral colonial food that our our ancestors have brought over because it was so hardy and it was so nutritionally dense that people could live on it grow it easily in bad soils without fertilizers pesticide, herbicides and bugs didn't like it it was really this wonderful nutrition product that we had lost entirely and the more we have been studying Himalayan tardery buckwheat which is by the way different than common buckwheat this is so I was just gonna ask you that now the common buckwheat is this has a different genetic structure the seeds look different it is obviously a relative so there are members in genetically of similar families but the the Himalayan tardery buckwheat has 50 to 100 times now I want to emphasize times not percent 50 to 100 times as much vital chemicals that are immune strengthening as common buckwheat so it's like it's like a pumped up immune version of common buckwheat and it is a remarkable product high in protein about 12 to 13 percent protein high in essential amino acids very rich in B vitamins high in minerals like zinc magnesium I mean it's just one of these remarkable foods that we lost in our food supply system I'm still asking the question why I don't think there's probably one answer to that it's probably several answers I think one of the answers is it has flavor and if you want to make a food supply system it's sweet fat and sugar and it's sweet fat and white flour this is probably not the exact thing you want this has its own personality so as we went to personality free foods in our American food processing all the process this is probably not a good example of something to use for someone who really likes flavor texture and composition it's magnificent and now we have a food lab now there we have over a hundred different recipes we put together have chefs around the country playing with it so it's it is revitalizing by the way this this has been a cultivated food for four thousand years can you believe it no it's been consumed by humans in a cultivation situation okay that's so fascinating and actually I had the pleasure of trying some and I also have some in my pantry right now but when we met I tried some I think was it like pancakes that we had I'm trying to remember but I it was it was so good so good it's so fun for me because we we had to develop this agriculture because it didn't exist in the United States so I had to get soil scientists and organic farmers to work with us and eventually we're able to grow enough to get the seeds because you can't go to the seed store and buy it so we had seeds that we can expand the crop now it was this year we are the number one our chiseled flower on Amazon so we're starting to bring it back you know you can see Himalayan Chartery Buck we just starting people are saying let me give it a try let's see what what this is all about yeah it's really awesome can you imagine when you were talking about you were listing off all the health benefits of it can you imagine if we had gone a different route and buckwheat was one of you know the crops that we grew to such extreme levels like we do in America instead of like wheat corn and soy I was like what if we were using this buckwheat turf what is it buckwheat turf Himalayan or Himalayan? Himalayan. Tartury buckwheat. Tartury okay. And the reason tartury is the tartan district is a district in China on the quid holds of the Himalayan Mountains where this was first found. Okay well I'm glad he clarified the difference because that was one of the questions I was going to ask you is what was the difference between that and traditional buckwheat and also for people listening even though it sounds like it is a form of wheat and you and they would have gluten and it's buckwheat is actually gluten-free and a really great gluten-free alternative. Do you have any other interesting question isn't it? How does it get the label as a wheat when it has no relationship genetically to wheat whatsoever it's actually related to doesn't have any relationship to the grass family of the grains what's not even a grain it's a fruit seed so it's always struck me interesting they got labeled as a wheat because then maybe that was good years ago to make it simple but now it's not so good it's just confusing yeah it's very confusing but it's a great it's a great flower I love using it I love I love buckwheat in general I've been a huge fan for a long time so I was excited to try this when I met you. One of the things that that we have also found and we're getting actually a lot of support from the scientific community a lot of research is now being published on chartery buckwheat particularly from from Asia because it's been a hit historic food in in Asian countries Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan and it turns out that it stimulates the release of GLP1 and it lowers glucose levels in the blood it's very favorable for insulin resistance so it's like I was talking about earlier there are foods that are our food is medicine capabilities of managing it actually turns out in brown fat as well so it activates the metabolism of fat in fat cells that are involved with energy production so the more we study the more we say wow how is this not been part of our opportunities in America for 200 years? I know it's really wild so I'm very curious to know what you have to say to this so one of the biggest questions I get all the time is you know there's a lot of confusion about what to eat right and because not only do we have obviously all these hyper processed foods and everyone's confused in that realm but they even when you really dive into nutrition and we have vegan diets we have carnivore diet I mean we have some people saying that plants are going to kill you and then we have other people saying me does going to kill you and where where do you stand and what would you tell someone listening that's just like I'm so confused what do we eat what do we follow what would you what would be your answer to that? Well this is probably in some ways a reflection of my age but I'm a believer in history as being a good teacher and I when I say history I ask the question what is the largest longest scientific study that's ever been done on relationship of food to help and it's called natural selection we it is the million years old right that stuff it's been going on for millions of years so when I then ask the question if I go to regions of the world where people are eating things that are around for lots of years thousands of years in this case of 30 or above 4,000 years what's the health outcome in those populations and this takes me like the Dan Butner's Blue Zones and we start seeing people that are in Sardinia or people in the Belkambama area or people in the Himalayan region who are still out working actively in fields when they're 90 and don't have modern medicines and now there are many variables there so I don't want to put it all on food because they're active they've got community they've got love and attribution their lives maybe are less stressful they don't have cell phones maybe these are all parts of the story but certainly food plays a very very big part of this and so you start saying okay are these people keto or are these people paleo or are these people no plant food people or and the answer is no they eat what's available because the soil is the closest thing they've got to producing food from them they can't go to the supermarket and buy things and so they eat diets that are you know a lot like what Michael Pollan talks about you know 60 70 percent plant foods the rest animal foods if they're so lucky the lean cuts of meat they've been organically raised dairy products if they use it or not treated with BSE and other growth accelerants and things of that nature so they're living close to the land living in an unadulterate environment and they're getting a lot of eating by the rainbow a lot of different colored foods that are seasonal and they get lots of fiber and vitamins and minerals and plant plant proteins can balance themselves legumes and grains we've known that so that that's kind of my watchword I you know I met Francis Malapay in the 70s when I was a professor I had her as a guest professor and she had just come out with a book died for a small planet and a lot of the things that she was talking about dinner are equally valid today and so I just think that some of this is extremism everybody wants to have a new story I reckon is that mean diet books are built around a new story you don't have the best-selling book selling somebody else's old story and but unfortunately the old stories are the ones that really are tried and proven and they have shown value so you start saying well what about food allergens and what about toxins and what are all things like gluten and then we say well is it gluten for sure is it in the way that we've hybridized grains to produce other things in the grains other than just gluten they're causing these allergic type reactions so I think eating principally unadulterated natural foods is a very good place to start I loved that answer so much it's very similar to what I tell people as well because my message is you know real foodology so I always tell people just as close to nature as you possibly can get real food real whole foods that's I feel like you can't go wrong there and also another little rule of mind is if it was once alive and you can apply that to plants and animals then it's fair game in my eyes as long as you know not as long as you don't have personal allergies to stuff because obviously you can't do that but otherwise yeah I feel like if it was once alive it's fair game and just try to follow the principle of whole real foods and you'll be doing a lot better than most people well and there are people now talking about the anti-nutrients that are found in vegetable foods yeah okay okay let's put this in context everything is toxic at some level even air and water even air and water you can kill a person by hyperhydration you can kill them by hyperoxygen nation so it's how much you consume and this concept of pormesis you want to stress your body slightly because that's the way your genes best work when they have a chance to exercise so plant materials these phytochemicals I'm talking about are harmonic substances that activate the best of your gene expression that's very different than saying well if a little is good a whole lot more out of you better we're not talking about boat loads of taking any one ingredient we're talking about the way naturally we have been using them and have grown up with them for millions of years to be in concert with our best physiology yeah yeah it's a really great point well I want to I want to be mindful of your time so is there anything else that you felt like really needed to be heard today before we go well I think only one other area which we know is is getting a tremendous amount of very justified attention and that is this microbiome which we now recognize as the reactor between us and our food so we're not just eating us we're being our microbiome and you know in the early 80s I recall giving talks to doctors actually actually the first one I recall was in 1985 in which I was talking about dysbiosis and leaky gut and endotoxemia and I had gastroenterologist in the audience that were criticizing me saying there is no such thing this is you know I'm making this up and it doesn't really exist and now of course we see this is the news of the day it's like new discovery endotoxemia dysbiosis and grandiol endotoxemia so this concept of beating our gut microbiome is really really important with the proper pre-obiotics and and having the proper probiotic organisms to help us and this is actually one of the things we've really been focusing on in big world health is how does the healing terry buckwheat work along with omega-3 fatty acids and work along with pre-biotic fibers to actually re-nourish the gut we call it the three pillars because when you re-nourish the microbiome it does work for you it signals true immune system at all as well rather than all as alarm and once you get the immune system of the gut which and by the way around the gut of where 60% or more of our immune system is clustered you send the right signal to the rest of the body so that that's another big part of our story and anyone that's interested by the way and more of this we have a whole series of educational tools on big world health.com you can go and find these spouting you know ad nauseum about all these things that we are learning about the microbiome and the important role that nutrition plays in our health. Yeah it's fascinating I would love to have you come back on at some point because there's so much I wanted to talk to you about. Well let's find a time and place it won't bore your listeners and we'll give it another world. Yeah I would love that so much so I want to ask you one more question that I ask all my guests and this is a personal one what are your health non-negotiable so these are things that you do daily weekly to prioritize your own health. Well I think I have one non-negotiable and only one and that is I don't want anyone taking over my health. For whatever I want to be the master of my own destiny doesn't mean that I always make exactly the right decision but I much prefer to make a decision on how I would like to proceed in the regulation of my zone of influence than have someone else do it for me and so that leads me into then being responsible for making decisions for myself that are as well informed as I can make them and that's probably what drowned rooming in this field rather than staying in my traditional kind of medical environment that I was trained. So to me that concept of both self responsibility but taking a charge of how I want my body to be treated I think is a fundamentally important part of how I lead my life and I'm looking at my grandchildren now with that age where that really that legacy situation is very very important and I have these remarkable power women that I call we used to call them my grandchildren they're now my grand young women and I can see that they're going to be entirely different than in the girls in my generation they're taking charge they're they're powerful they're strong in their beliefs and their advocacy and you know they're going to have different kinds of relationships as they go through their life and probably the girls who were in my young women were in my high school class so I think these are all really important parts of making your journey in life as purposeful and meaningful as possible. I think that's one of my favorite answers I've ever gotten seriously because that message right there is so important for people to understand that we as individuals are the only ones that can truly take care take a hold of our health because we're also the only ones that are going to care the most about our health you know in our journey so it's our responsibility to make sure that we do everything we can to take care of ourselves. Well please tell all of my listeners where they can find you and we'll also add links in the in the show notes. Oh yeah sure well like you can find me at bigboldhealth.com or you can find me also at jeffreyblan.com. G-E-F-R-E-Y-P-L-A-N-D.com and you'll find probably more stuff than you ever thought one of those two sites. Yeah no it's really awesome well I just want to say thank you so much for your time I really enjoyed this conversation thank you so much Dr. Bland. Well so I Courtney I think you're doing a magnificent job as I said this the whole position you have for your podcast is couldn't be more topical important so thank you. Thank you I really appreciate that. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of the Real Foodology podcast if you liked the episode please leave a review on your podcast app to let me know. This is a resident media production produced by Drake Peterson and edited by Mike Fry. The theme song is called Heaven by the amazing singer Georgie. Georgie is spelled with a J. For more amazing podcasts produced by my team go to residentmediagroup.com I love you guys so much see you next week. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only it is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and doesn't constitute a provider-patient relationship. I am a nutritionist but I am not your nutritionist as always talk to your doctor or your health team first. 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