The Dr. Hyman Show - The New Science Of Immuno-Rejuvenation with Dr. Jeffrey Bland

Episode Date: April 20, 2020

People have never been more curious about strengthening the immune system than they are right now. The COVID-19 pandemic has got us all thinking seriously about our health and what it means to have immune strength, now and in the future. To get the most out of this trying time, we need to be open to looking at our health in ways we haven’t before. My guest today on The Doctor’s Farmacy, Dr. Jeffrey Bland, is a pro at that, and for this reason and so many others he is considered the father of Functional Medicine. Dr. Bland has been an internationally recognized leader in the nutritional medicine field for over 35 years. He’s authored five books on nutritional medicine for the healthcare professional and six books on nutrition and health. With his wife, Susan, Dr. Bland founded The Institute for Functional Medicine in 1991, a nonprofit organization focused on educating healthcare practitioners on effective approaches to treating and preventing chronic disease by getting to the root cause.  Dr. Bland has always been a major inspiration for me. I was thrilled to have a video-call with him to discuss new ways of looking at optimal health and immunity in the face of this pandemic. In trying to better understand COVID-19, Dr. Bland went back to the basics of the immune system. He breaks down the processes at work, explains what the now often-heard phrase “cytokine storm” means, and talks about using food as medicine to promote immuno-rejuvenation. That means we’re not just supporting the current state of our immune system, we’re reviving it from the ground up. We talk about this and so much more on this week’s valuable episode.  Here are more of the details from our interview:  Acknowledging the psycho-physical effects of COVID-19 and the three zones of learning the disease offers (4:35) Dr. Bland’s article, Reflections on the COVID-19 Pandemic (8:17) The flexibility and adaptability of our immune system (12:21) Research from the HIV/AIDS epidemic showing dramatic effects of giving African women a simple multi-vitamin (16:35) Immuno-rejuvenation and why our focus should not be on supporting our immune system but rejuvenating it (19:31) How phytochemicals in plants impact human immune systems (24:03) Himalayan tartary buckwheat and its immunopotentiating compounds (28:06) How food influences the function of our immune system (40:30) My COVID-19 blog, A Functional Medicine Approach to COVID-19, and what we should be eating now to protect ourselves (48:31) Five significant changes Dr. Bland predicts in how we will see healthcare globally post-COVID-19 (50:59) The interrelatedness of our immune and nervous systems, and our control over the function of these systems (1:00:43) Find information on Dr. Bland online at jeffreybland.com, http://plminstitute.org/, and https://bigboldhealth.com/ Follow Dr. Bland on Facebook @jeffreyblandphd, on Instagram @drjeffreybland, and on Twitter @jeffreyblandphd

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. What we're learning is that we have a lot more control as individuals over the function of both of those systems, both our nervous system and our immune system than we previously understood. We're not just victims. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's Pharm pharmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. And today's conversation matters. If you care about your immune system, if you care about what's happening with COVID-19 and how you can make yourself resilient. And if you care about what's going on in health care and the future of health care, this conversation is going to matter because it's with one of my favorite human beings on the planet, Dr. Jeffrey Bland. He is the reason I do what I do. He's the man who inspired me to study functional medicine,

the founder of the Institute for Functional Medicine, and he's the leader in the field of nutritional medicine for, I guess, 40 years now, Jeff. Is that right? Scary. Yeah. Wow. years now, Jeff, is that right? Gary, yeah, wow. He's an incredible scientist. He synthesizes enormous amounts of data from lots of diverse fields, connecting the dots in ways that most other scientists don't, who work in silos. He's got a degree in biology and chemistry. He completed his PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Oregon, but he actually got his feet wet in this whole field of functional nutritional medicine as the director of nutritional research at the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in the early 1980s, working

with the two-time Nobel laureate, Dr. Linus Pauling, who's his mentor. And I remember meeting Dr. Pauling during the work we were doing as part of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, where he was speaking not about biochemistry, but about the need to address the threat of nuclear war. And he was quite an amazing man. Dr. Bland has authored lots of books. I've read most of them. The Disease Delusion is probably one of the best, conquering the causes of chronic illness for a healthier, longer, happier life, which is essentially a blueprint for what is functional medicine. And I think it's really great. He's written over 120 peer-reviewed research papers

on chemistry and medicine. He's always looking to the future and seeing things that no one sees before anybody has seen them. In fact, in functional medicine, we were talking about the gut and the microbiome. We didn't call it that, but we talked about the gut and dealing with the gut flora and optimizing gut health 30 years ago when nobody was talking about it. And we were talking about insulin resistance and inflammation. I mean, my first book about ultra prevention was written in, I think, 2000. And we talked about inflammation. I only learned about that from you. And now it's sort of the topic of the day. All the diseases of chronic illness are really related to inflammation. Jeff is really a tireless guy. He's traveled

to over 50 countries, training quarter million healthcare providers, and is just an extraordinary guy. And Jeff, thank you so much for joining us today on this podcast. I'm so thrilled to be able to take this time to dig in with you about a few topics, which is what we're going to talk about today, immunorejuvenation. We're going to talk about today, immunorejuvenation. We're going to talk about how to actually make yourself resilient in the face of these diseases of inflammation. And one of them, of course, is COVID-19. And also talk about what is medicine going to look like in the future? How does it look different than it looks now? Jeff, welcome to the doctor's pharmacy. I'm so glad you're here and safe. We're not just in, but we are. We're going to have a great conversation anyway. Well, Mark, I'm so glad you're there. I think you're serving as a beacon

of white light to millions of people who are looking for answers and understanding in this time of a lot of uncertainty and fear. And we need voices of clarity. And yours has been that for many, many years now in bringing health information and, you know, I call it news to use, really implementable, executable concepts that will make a difference in people's lives. My job has been the Jeff Bland translator. Well, no, you've done much more than that. You've made these things take the life to change lives in very positive ways.

I have three sons, and my middle son shared something with me yesterday that he has been exposed to in his workplace. He's working for a biopharmaceutical company, and they're actively involved in immune-related medication development and one of the top leaders in their field. And something that was sent around to their employees in the throes of this COVID-19 was to remember the deep psychophysical effects that this pandemic is having on us. It's not just biomedical effects.

Yeah. It's psychophysiological. And he said that this graphic that was sent out to all their employees was very powerful, that he's spoken with his family and his daughters about. They're all obviously sheltered at home in the state of Washington. Now we're all talking to one another by Zoom, which is a very interesting way that all of our families are now interrelating. But in this little graphic, he pointed out there are really three zones, concentric zones of learning as we're going through this epic time. The first is

the confrontation of our fear. I think for so many people, this precipitous international global pandemic just threw a spectrum of fear into all of our lives, because unknown is always first approached with a kind of an emotion of fear. And then from that level, then hopefully we move to the next level, which is we learn, and this is the learning zone era where we, we start to say, okay, I was fearful, but now I'm starting to understand more about it. I'm starting to understand what the boundaries and the barriers which comes from empowered knowledge, and it comes from self-efficacy, and it comes from people saying, I'm here to serve. I'm here to be purposeful. I'm here to do all I can in my immediate sphere of influence, and I'm here to take charge and be responsible. And that third level is sometimes a difficult one to get to when we have lost our job or, you know, there can be so many covenient variables. in this together. This is the kind of reality that we're a globally compressed world now, and that we're all part of this spaceship that's traveling through space and time that we need to

cooperate. And so that was a really great lesson to get from my son, Kyle. Yeah, I think that's true. I think we're all in a very unique moment where, you know, there's the fear and the terror, and then there's like the recognition that wait a minute you know we're we're this one common you know human beings that are in this shared experience at this moment whether we believe you know in uh being again or whether you're paleo or whether you're republican or democrat or jewish or christian or mus Chinese or American, doesn't matter. We're all in this together. And the cross, you know, global collaboration is really, it's really interesting. I think for me, you know, once the initial shock and, you know, sort of the impact of this was really clear and I got my house in order. You know, my overwhelming feeling now is, you know, what can I do?

Like, what can I do to help solve this problem? What can we do? And I think, you know, in functional medicine, we do have a perspective, which is a little bit different. And you wrote an article called Reflections on the COVID-19 Pandemic that was published in Medium. I'll have a link to it in the show notes for the podcast. But in that article, you talked about the role of the host, not just the idea of this bug that we're a victim of that randomly will get us, but that we have some sense of agency and how we can actually make ourselves, you know, resilient. And you've

talked a lot about this. We were recently at a conference together and you gave a talk about amino rejuvenation, which is sort of a wonderful term. And I wonder if you sort of share, you know, when you begin to think about COVID-19 and its horrible effects on us, you know, how did you think about it differently in the context of immunorejuvenation and immunoresilience? Upon reflection on the start of this pandemic, I was reminded of an experience that I had actually at the Pauling Institute in 1981-82. And we had a very robust seminar program at the Institute at that time. You can imagine Dr. Pauling had this reach into scientists around the world that were very notable, Nobel

Prize winners and the like. And we had this young physician come in from San Francisco, because the Pauling Institute was in Palo Alto, California. And he came down from the University of California, San Francisco medical system as a young internist, emergency room doc, to talk about the first patient that he had diagnosed having this unique form of cancer, Kaposi's scar coma, that was associated with the first examples of HIV AIDS in the country. And in listening to him talk about the pathogenicity and the seriousness of that infection in the course of events, you know, was a life changer for me, because it took this concepts of viral infections from kind of an abstract thing that maybe was in the developing world, and I wouldn't see to this whole new thing where the lethality at that point in young 100% yeah it was it was unbelievable and it was stripping out people unbelievable talents and business leaders artists I mean every every sector of humanity was affected and we had no

treatment and you know it was even the origin the origin of the disease was not fully understood at that time. So over time, obviously, what's happened is that we now... Jeff, I knew that Dr. Paul Volberding, because I was trained at UCSF residency program in Santa Rosa. So I... Oh, my word. ...admitted the AIDS epidemic. And we had probably the number one admitting diagnosis in our hospital was AIDS at the time. And he was our crew that we went to and got support from and education from. So I remember Paul very well. Oh, wow.

Thank you for bringing him. He really made a huge impact. I mean, I got to know him better over the years. And, you know, it was an experience that changed the culture irreversibly. I mean, we've never been the same as a culture. We say, well, we got over AIDS, but we actually didn't get over AIDS. As we know, there's 700,000 deaths to AIDS a year still on this planet, and 13 million people are still affected, even though we have antiretroviral drugs. So there's more to this than just finding a medication or than just finding immunization. There is other social, cultural, political,

economic, and biological factors that lead to these things. And that's when I heard COVID-19, I got thinking about, it's like, what are the other factors beyond the bug itself, which we've seen so many pictures now of this looks like a mine floating in San Francisco Bay or something. So the concept for me was then to go back and ask the question, what is our immune system? And what does it do? And of course, the AIDS explosion led to developments in immunology that we'd never seen before. It accelerated science in immunology. And now we start to recognize in the 21st century that there's something very interesting about the plasticity or about the flexibility or the adaptability of our immune system. And it goes back to where our immune system comes from. It goes back to our bone

marrow. And I don't think a lot of people understand that their immune cells are all derived out of their bone marrow. These are called hemopoietic stem cells. And they are naive cells at that point. They don't have a personality yet. They just sit there waiting to be called upon. And then when they are delivered into the body, they will be produced. They will convert themselves into specific subpopulations of immune defensive cells based upon the environment that the person is under. So if the person has an environment in which they are already depleted,

they can be nutritionally depleted, sleep depleted, overstressed, toxic exposed, that their immune cells, when they come out of their bone marrow are going to be imprinted with the experience that their body is already under, which makes them then programmed to be resilient or not resilient to certain things that they're going to be exposed to. So you start to say... So it's almost like the womb in which the immune cells grow, if they're not well nourished, they don't produce healthy immune cells that can function well to

make you resilient against infection. Yes, I think that's part of the metaphor, but I think the metaphor goes even a little farther than that. It would be almost beyond the womb when those cells start to be delivered into the body, to use the pregnancy analogy, they then further get manipulated by the environment in which they are delivered, like the thymus gland, which sits at the base of our neck, and will tell those cells, hey, you know, we need you to be the following type of cell, because this situation you're under, and therefore we need you to be already a cell that's going to be involved in inflammation, because our body is already in a state of hostility. So you go out and you do battle. So the body is already in this state of altered function. So then when a second wave comes in, a COVID-19, the body has already a pre-saging

way that it's going to respond. And we hear about cytokine storms, what are cytokine storms? They're an immune system that overreacts to a specific offender because it's already poised somehow to produce a heightened sense of response. Now, who do we know that is more likely to have a cytokine storm and bad outcome from a COVID-19 infection? It's a person that has comorbidities. Now, what are those comorbidities? Those are diabetes, hypertension, cardiac disease, obesity, cancer. Now, what are all those disorders share in common? We know in functional medicine, they all share inflammation in common. Of individuals who have an unrest immune system having a bad outcome when

they are exposed to COVID-19, their immune system is already distressed and its headspace, its capacity to be resilient is limited. So it goes into hyperfunction. So what do you do about that? You make your home. A lot of those diseases you've said, you know, we think of some of those diseases of excess, of excess food, of excess calories. But they're also diseases of deficiency. Many of these patients are very nutrient deficient, whether it's vitamin D or zinc and other things that are critically important for regulating immune function, which you talk about in your article. And I think, you know, the way you broke it, it's really fascinating to say, well, what does the resilient immune system need to function? And what does the doctor show about this? Because we can learn a lot from that by looking at what has been done in the past. You mentioned HIV AIDS. And one of the studies you quoted in

that article was from Africa, where they used a simple multivitamin, which had dramatic effects in reducing bad outcomes from HIV-AIDS, which seems like kind of heresy when it comes to regular medicine. But it actually was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. And I remember when that study came out, it was sort of shocking. And we still hear, oh, well, vitamins are a waste of time. They're causing expensive urine. But yet in that study, it was really compelling to see how just such a simple multivitamin, it's probably was so effective in that population because they probably were so nutrient deficient to start with.

Yeah, I think, thank you, Mark. That is a really powerful example of maybe even unexpected consequences. So we were very fortunate in the early days of the Institute for Functional Medicine to have invited the principal investigator, who was a Harvard professor of public health, who had been responsible for that African study, to come and speak to us. And, of course, he gave the data from that trial, as you just mentioned, that showed in women who were HIV infected that their outcome was significantly improved versus the women who were not supplemented with a vitamin mineral supplement. This was not a high-potency formulation, by the way. It was kind of like you might consider a moderate level of vitamins and minerals,

certainly within the nutritionally safe range. And he made a statement at that meeting when we had a chance to visit with him that struck me and stuck with me ever since. And that was, he said, we had really no idea that the impact of something so simple as a few milligrams of these nutrients that we would have presumed people were adequate because they didn't have beriberi, scurvy, pellagra, xerothalmia, rickets. They didn't have the classic nutritional deficiency symptom signs that by adding these back to their formula that A, not only did they not get as sick, but B, they responded to antiretroviral drugs better. And C, their outcomes were significantly improved from that of people that are age-matched

individuals in their countries and sex-matched that were not taking their vitamins. So that's- We're not talking about a common cold here. We're talking about HIV-AIDS, a really serious infection. Exactly. So if you use that as the kind of the edge of the continuum of virus infections, in which we, as you said earlier, there was a more than a 90% lethality initially. And you say, well, then what about conditions that are not quite

as serious? Would you have an effect? Then we started asking all sorts of questions about diet, lifestyle, environment, and its role to play in immuno rejuvenation. And I want to emphasize, you brought up this term, it's a very important term for me. Everyone talks about immune support, but do you really want to support an immune system that's already damaged? Or would you prefer to rejuvenate your immune system so that it regenerates its potential to do its work naively starting from scratch. So break that down. What does it mean over rejuvenation? It's a great term. I love it. I don't think most people would know what it meant, but it's worth explaining.

So what it means is as follows, that each moment, each 10 seconds of our life, we're producing a million new white blood cells, 10 million, no, actually 20 million new red blood cells, and 30 million new platelet cells from our bone marrow. Every day. Each 10 seconds. Each 10 seconds. Each 10 seconds. That's mind-boggling.

Let me say that again. Let me say that again. Let me say that again. Every 10 seconds, the average person produces 1 million white blood cells, immune cells, 20 million red blood cells, and 30 million platelets per 10 seconds. That's called immune rejuvenation. Now, on the other side, you've got older cells floating around your body that have already been imprinted by whatever your life experiences are, right? Some of those are not so happy.

Those are old cells that you probably want to trash and replace with new fresh cells, right, that are going to be rejuvenating the ability of the body to produce an appropriate response to something like a virus. And the balance of how your body is going to work depends upon how many of the new friendly cells, the rejuvenated cells are coming in, and what level of the old pre-conditioned cells leaving. And you want to make sure that you're rejuvenating, not just supporting. Because if you're supporting, you're supporting some things that are not so

happy. So how do you rejuvenate your immune system? Because everybody is right now thinking, wow, you know, we're in the middle of this viral, and we can only do so much with social distancing. It's estimated that 40 to 70% of people on the planet will get COVID-19 before we get a vaccine, before we get enough herd immunity to slow the spread. I hope we come up with something sooner, but that looks like the likely case. What can people do to rejuvenate their immune system? Okay, here we go now. This is where it really gets interesting. So if you want to answer questions that challenge what we know, often you want to go back and ask, what have we learned in the past, right? What ancient

wisdom can we draw forward to understand what we might do in the future? This is the basis of a hypothesis as to how you generate a hypothesis. And as I asked that question to myself, the very question you just asked, how do you rejuvenate your immune system? How do you get these cells to be produced that are fresh and not imprinted with bad messages out of your bone marrow? What I recognize is that there was an advancing field of science that was starting to address this question, and it's called immunophenotyping. Immunophenotyping is a long word that means that people are starting to ask the question, how do specific immune cells get imprinted with specific messages to become what they are? Their phenotype.

The phenotype is a word that describes how a cell works, acts, and looks. And so how do you get those cells to be imprinted with the right messages to be able to defend against viruses more effectively? And the answer to that, in part, goes back to some ancient wisdom, almost going back to the blue zones, to use Dan Buettner's work, of how about people that lived without modern medicine, without a lot of antibiotics and immunization, that didn't have a lot of infection? What kind of things were they doing? Well, they were doing work, they were sleeping well, and they were eating certain diets. And are there any things about those diets that is common related to their immune system? And I think there are, and you've talked about it extensively in your books and in your podcast over the years as part

of your advocacy. It's really talking about eat variety and mostly plants. So these plants contain to, to really look at their composition, some unique things that, that animal products don't have. They're called phytochemicals. And what are the phytochemicals in plants? They're the plant's immune system.

Yeah. Have you ever thought about that? Yeah. The plants mechanisms. Right. Yeah. Have you ever thought about that? Yeah, the plant's immune system. The plant's mechanisms, right, exactly. And so these interesting features of certain plants, not just the vitamins and minerals, proteins, carbohydrates, essential fatty acids, but these unique collection of substances that are made off the genes of plants

that are hardy in their environment under stress, that have had to defend themselves against viruses and bacteria and mold are unique to their ability to transmit to that plant its resistance because it can't go to the doctor and it can't run away. It has to sit there and defend itself. And ironically, or interestingly, these phytochemicals that are unique to the plant's own defense system, the plant's immune system, when eaten by humans, have effects upon immunorejuvenation. This is an aha. This is tying together an interesting global fact of life. Well, Jeff, you would really like this, but I was in a conversation with someone from

the Rockefeller Foundation today about an effort they're doing to the periodic table of plants in the sense of what are the periodic table of the nutrients, these phytonutrients in plants, and what are their different properties, and using massive throughput, mass spectrometry, and artificial intelligence to map out these compounds, which we've barely begun to identify, and then how can they play a role in our health and wellness long term? And they're looking right now, they're thinking, how do we use these to look at properties and things that are going to be helping to regulate our immune system to fight the COVID-19 pandemics?

And it was a really fascinating effort that the Rockefeller Foundation is undergoing. You might be aware of it. It's doing exactly what you're talking about. And I think what you've just stated is this threshold of where we have been with understanding these things, maybe historically, but not being able to explain them. So this is through the lens of modern science, how we're starting to understand the precision as to how these messages that these plant phytochemicals have in instigating effects on our immune system that are very specific to the rejuvenation that lead into immunophenotyping

to defend ourselves against things like viruses. And this, to me, is a fascinating kind of back-to-the-future story. So is there news to use in the sort of things that you know, Jeff, around food? You're such a master of food as medicine. That's where I learned the term food as information. People think I invented it. I didn't. I stole it from Jeff Bland.

But the truth is, you know, are there news to use in the survey of the compounds that you use compounds that we should be thinking about eating more of? Yeah, thanks. So I think you already know that's a leading question. You already know where I've been going here. I've been trying to really study this down into getting my fingers in the soil and trying to really understand what are those things that are being identified to influence the immune system in such a way that they participate in this immunorejuvenation, not just immune support, not just anti-inflammatories, but really regulate how the immune system is functioning at a fundamental level. I call this

the classic example of upstream medicine, right? Trying to work up to where they are not downstream to where they're producing a problem. So one of the things that I've hit upon came about as a consequence of a serendipitous series of experiences, one of which was a train trip on a bullet train from Harbin, the northernmost big city in China, up near North Korea and Russia. I took this bullet train with a colleague, a Chinese-American colleague of mine, all the way down to Shanghai. That's a long trip, about 2,500 miles. But the train does travel at over 200 miles an hour, so you can do it on a train.

And by the way, it does it silently and vibration-free, which was amazing. But as we had this conversation conversation as the landscape of China was zooming past us at 200 miles an hour, I asked him a question, which I had been interested in because I had been talking to a group of investigators at Vanderbilt University Medical School about a discovery they'd made around a specific interesting phytochemical called 2-hydroxybenzalamine or 2-HOVA, which was found in buckwheat. And so I'd been on this collaboration around 2-HOVA for about six or eight months. So I asked my colleague as we were zipping across China, I said,

so do you know anything about Himalayan tartary buckwheat? And he just stopped. It was like we froze the train. And he looked at me and goes, you got to be kidding me. And I said, no, why? Why would you say that? He said, I have been looking for any American that might be interested in Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat, because it is a cultivar that we have been growing in China that's been a major foodstuff for 2,500 years. Wow. And it has 100 times, not 10 times, 100 times the phytochemical density of immune-supportive nutrients of any other plant food. Wow.

And I said, you've got to be kidding me. He says, no, you need to follow this. Your interest in Himalayan tartary buckwheat is right on target. It is a very interesting plant. So I took that when I got back to the States and through a long circuitous series of associations. Now I'm a tartary buckwheat farmer in the United States. I'm collaborating with the only person I could find in the United States. I'm collaborating with the only person I could

find in the United States that was growing the original cultivar of Himalayan tartary buckwheat on his farm in upstate New York. And we are studying it. We're doing both analysis of the phytochemical content, but more interesting, we're looking at the immune potentiating activities that relates to immunorejuvenation. This is an interesting family. I call it a symphony of different phytochemicals that are present in that cultivar at very high levels. The interesting feature of the Himalayan tartary buckwheat versus common buckwheat is that common buckwheat is an interesting plant that, like most plants, requires fertilization from a pollinator, whereas Himalayan tartary buckwheat is a self-pollinator, so it has maintained its germplasm integrity for 2,500 years. It doesn't

change rapidly. Pollinators are very susceptible, obviously, to genetic hybridization from insects carrying pollen from one field to another. But that's not what you see with Himalayan. It's really maintainance. It's rigor over these 2,500 years. Yeah. I mean, the seeds are so lost. We've lost 90% of our edible plant species and half our livestock species.

And we've created this model, which I wrote about in Food Fix that has really led to this massive, I would call it an outbreak or a pandemic of chronic disease that is just this slow moving pandemic. It's not like COVID-19, but it's killing far more people and it's affecting far more people. I mean, 2,300 people die every day from preventable heart disease just in America. And I think we have no clue about how the food we've created or what we call food-like substances that we've created actually are driving so many of our issues. And bringing back these traditional plants like Himalayan tartar buckwheat, bringing back these rich phytochemical compounds into our diet is really essential for long-term survival of our

species and for immunorejuvenation, which is in a sense dealing with the central feature of aging and disease. So it's such an amazing story. I mean, I'm like, I know everybody listening is going, well, where do I buy it? How do I get it? Because as soon as you started talking about it, I actually went online and started Googling it and trying to find it. And I'm like, well, then you say, well, there's this one guy, and he's like 90 years old, two acres in upstate New York, and we're trying to like, I'm like, come on, Josh, you're killing me. Well, first of all, Mark, I just want to say that I think all of your books over the years have been absolutely spectacular and enlightening. I think Food Fix is your quintessential book, at least to date.

You probably will exceed that in future books, but I think this is a mandate for every conscious human being to read that book. It is so well done. It is so well documented and so motivational, I think, for people to see that there's a lot more that they can do in not only their own lives, but in how their lives affect other people's lives and their choices. So I really want to applaud and to support what you're doing. It's a tremendous contribution. That means a lot. So enough about me. Let's talk about this buckwheat stuff. So tell us in detail,

what are the kinds of compounds that you're finding and what are they actually doing to our immune system? How does it work? Like take us down the rabbit hole a little bit. If you use big words, I'll stop you to try to explain them. But I think I am the official jet gland translator, so I actually could do that. You are. There's no question. So, let's talk about the portfolio of phytochemicals that are found in tertiary buccaries. So, this has been explored extensively, actually, for a number of years by phytochemists and people in food science

and many many reports i actually found it very interesting when i got into this that the literature in the scientific realm was a lot richer than i thought several hundred papers that have been published on all sorts of aspects including uh doing the the full throughput genetic sequencing of the genome of the tartar buckwheat plant and comparing it to others and what do its genes do that are different than others. So it's got a lot of data. I won't bore you with all of that, but let's cut to the chase. What we now know is that there are probably over 100 different phytochemicals that the tartary buckwheat plant makes out of its genes. And they are obviously made as defensive substances because the tartary

buckwheat has never had fertilizer. It's never had pesticides, herbicides, or biocides. It had to live in a very hostile environment where drought and freezing temperatures and bad soil conditions. It turns out that the tartary buckwheat has genes that detoxify aluminum from the soil, which I think is interesting. So it has its own detoxification mechanisms built into it. And it's just a rigorous vital plant that's had to survive against pretty extensive stress, all of its 3,000 years of cultivation history. And so the portfolio of these… Can I stop you there, Jeff? Because I just want to make a point. You know, what Jeff's talking about is that wild plants or heirloom plants that evolved in an environment that was stressful have all these mechanisms to protect themselves.

And those compounds, I think we co-evolved with and we use them in our biology to protect ourselves. I call it symbiotic phytoadaptation, which is a term I made up. It doesn't really mean much. But essentially, it's the idea that we actually are co-evolved with these plants to help us stay healthy and revive our immune systems. And when we changed our diets in such a way that we've stripped out all of these compounds, and we just do protein, fat, carbs, vitamins, and minerals, we are missing some of the most important compounds in our diet that are essential for us to thrive and stay healthy. And I like the term that you've

coined. I think that's a really great descriptive term. And if you then ask me the question, okay, this symphony of all these phytochemicals that are uniquely produced by the genes of the tartary buckwheat plant, that's been this plant that's had to live with proverbial stress, so it's produced all these anti-stress immune strengthening nutrients, how do they actually influence the human immune system? That's a very interesting question. This is kind of a story of co-evolution. There's a lot of people who don't like the term co-evolution, that we evolved in concert with our plant and animal kingdoms. But I believe that there is such a thing.

And so what happens… I agree. But, you know, I think this is a great example that people should know. You know, humans and guinea pigs can't synthesize vitamin C because we were able to get it abundantly from the environment. So our bodies are lazy. My view is our bodies are lazy. So why build a biochemical mechanism to create a molecule if we can eat it?

And so now we're not eating these compounds, and that's part of the reason we're so sick. And that's why these traditional diets actually have shown wherever you go, the traditional diets that include these weird foods and strange compounds, they do better, they live longer, they have less chronic disease. And when we've stripped them all out of our food, and ultra-processed food is the epitome of that. It's the epitome of a dead food with no phytochemicals. We're literally

putting ourselves in a situation of threat as a species, I believe. And I think we're seeing the beginning of the end of our species because of what we've done to our diet. And the fact that you've gone to China and you've learned about this compound, you've learned about this plant, and you brought it back here. We need this, but times a hundred, times a thousand to get these compounds back in our diet. So keep going. I just had to sort of put that footnote in there. No, that's more than a footnote. That should be a header because that is the ultimate takeaway. That's the news to use from what I'm really trying to say. We have focused a lot of our energy now on Himalayan Tertiary Buckwheat because it is so unique in the concentration of

these immune active nutrients, phytochemicals, but this plays a role across all of the whole plant kingdom. So I don't want to just say this is like only found in HDB. But what we have found is that this orchestration of these phytochemicals plays a very unique role in how it influences this conversion of the cells that are in our bone marrow into young, vital, healthy cells that will quickly turn into those that are needed to fight infection and to defend against disease. And they do so through a process in part that's related to autophagy. You're probably familiar with that term. It's a big, long-winded term that really means house cleaning of damaged cells. So you eat yourself is what it means. You clean like a little Pac-Man. You clean up your

debris and waste product. Exactly right. So it cleans up the cells in their immune system that are kind of already got a bad message associated with them and setting up inflammation and then it makes room, so to speak, for these new healthier cells. And it also then influences the gene expression of these new progenitor cells, these new immune cells, to be at their full vitality. So it then has an effect to serve, you know, people say, well, it has an antiviral effect. Well, it's not specifically antiviral. What it is is immune rejuvenating to allow the immune system to then do what it's supposed to

do, which is to seek out and destroy viruses and bacteria. So I think... Wait, so what you're saying is that when you eat buckwheat, it affects the development of your immune cells to make them more vital, active, and resilient in order to fight infection better. That's exactly right, precisely. And then you couple that together with the things that you've been talking about, like with vitamin A and with zinc and with folic acid and essential fatty acids, omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin C, and all these work together in concert.

But I think often the missing link has been people have not thought about the important role in how food is information to our genes that's encoded through our phytochemicals and these specific families that influence in very specific ways how our immune system functions. And, you know, we used to say these phytochemicals are antioxidants. Well, that's about the most trivial, naive description that I can imagine. I mean, there's a million things that are antioxidants that have no real direct effect on your immune system. These are really targeted communicators that come from the immune system of the plant to speak to the immune system of our body in very specific ways. And then, you know, you've raised a point in your discussions about COVID-19 that I think bears reminding in this point.

And that is, why is it that we're seeing men have more serious outcome from COVID-19 than women? Why are we seeing more people of black or brown genetic origin have more problems? Is it built into their genes? Well, there may be some genetic connections, but they're very down on the list. The most important features are lifestyle factors that have influenced their immune system. And that's what's coming out, that men generally haven't treated their immune systems as well as women. And black and brown individuals often don't have the access to the quality diets and the quality care. And so we're looking at a, and that's

why I say I think COVID-19 might be a lifestyle disease as much as a viral disease. Yes. Yes. I think that is an important point. I think if you look at who's resilient to COVID-19, it's people who are healthier. And what's scary is the fact that I learned recently that 12% of Americans are metabolically healthy. That means 88% are not. And there's a whole spectrum of metabolic and healthy, but the most unhealthy of that group are the ones who are dying and getting sick and going to the hospital and getting ICU treatment and ventilators. And so I think there's a real imperative right now to recognize that this is exacerbated by crises and that this is a time more than ever to double down on taking care of your health as a personal survival strategy, but also as a public health strategy. You know, we are all in this together. And the more we can do to, you know, rejuvenate ourselves to make us more resilient, the faster we're going to get over this. And I think your article was

really great, Jeff, because you talked about the science behind things like vitamin C, vitamin A, and vitamin D, and also about the microbiome. Very, very data that we do know. It's not like there isn't data out there. And I'm actually seeing this. I was really heartened to some of the clinical trials going on at Cleveland Clinic specifically, because that's where I know it's happening.

Looking at N-acetylcysteine and vitamin C and zinc and melatonin and a lot of other compounds that are being used to actually help see that they can mitigate this disease or to improve outcome. Even traditional medical centers are beginning to recognize this, but what you're talking about is a whole other level of things, right? Not just vitamins and minerals, but a whole other level of compounds that I don't think most people realize exist and that are so essential. You know, you once taught me about something called conditionally essential nutrients. You know, maybe things like CoQ10 or other things that may be conditionally essential in certain circumstances.

Well, I think that phytochemicals are essential compounds for human health. And we have just ignored that fact at our peril and are seeing consequences of that. And what you're talking about and what the Rockefeller Foundation is doing is just the most extraordinary thing. I mean, think about this. The Rockefeller Foundation understands that the treasure trove of phytochemicals out there in the plant world that we consume can have profound effects on human health and human longevity. And they are doing that in a scientific way that we've never had the capacity to do before because one, we didn't have the analytic equipment and two, we didn't have the data crunching power and artificial intelligence to make sense of it all. So,

I think we're in this really powerful moment where the idea of food is information, you know, is a sort of an overarching concept. But the granularity now that we're getting around it is so powerful. And your Himalayan tartary buckwheat story is just an example of that. But there are literally thousands of examples like that, right? That's right. Well, you know, and what you just said, Mark, I think it's very important for people to kind of pause for a moment and think about why is it that we have not given more credence to these phytochemicals? Why don't they have a recommended dietary allowance? But I mean, it should be. Well, let me say why I think they don't.

If you think about those nutrients that have recommended dietary intakes from the federal government, the nutrients whose absence in the diet produces fairly dramatic quick index diseases in their deficiency, like scurvy, like beriberi, like pellagra. These are diseases that you can diagnose under fairly quick times of deprivation, like you can put medical students onto deprived diets for a month and you can start to see the symptoms of these deficiency diseases. Well, that's what happened, right? In the prisons in Europe, they gave people white rice and they gave all the bran to the chickens and the prisoners all got serious illnesses because they were just having nutrient-rich rice. That's right.

So, you know, we always start in any field of discovery with those things, those observations that are most clearly apparent. So we started this whole area of nutrition and setting nutrition standards based upon what level is required to prevent a deficiency disease, like 10 milligrams of vitamin C a day, the minimum daily requirement or something like that. Now we're saying, well, what kind of disorders occur from phytochemical insufficiencies? Yeah. And these are what have been called long latency nutrient deficiencies. What are long latency?

It means it takes a long time to get a disease. And the disease is very complex, like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, arthritis. It doesn't have one single indicator. And so it can get lost in the mass and it may took 20 years or more to get it. So you cannot define the same level of specificity for a phytochemical because it may have had an effect upon your immune system, which sets you at risk to all sorts of diseases. So how do you set then a standard for when your model is built around a disease? Our model should be built around function. And what I'm proposing, and I predict, is that out of COVID-19, what we're going to see is new ways of assessing nutritional need based upon immunological function, not just on deficiency.

And if so doing, then you will say, well, are there ways of assessing immune function? And the answer is yes. It's the fastest growing frontier in all of medicine is understanding the immune system, how to assess its function. And let me throw one last thing in. I asked myself the question, how many people in America, in the United States today, are on immunosuppressive medications? Yeah, a lot.

30 million. 30 million. Think of that. 30 million, wow. So taking immunosuppressive medications by the name, that's not immunorejuvenating. That's the counterpoint. So the point is that we have a variety of different variables that are influencing how our body is prepared for the insult of a new mutant virus that is playing itself out

with this new, more highly infective, and reasonably pathogenic COVID-19. And that's what we're witnessing. It's so true. I wrote a blog, an article about what kinds of foods we should be considering eating. And now I'm home cooking all the time, and I'm always thinking about what am I making. And tonight I made a Moroccan lamb lamb and I used ginger and garlic and onions and spices and cardamom and cumin and all these wonderful spices that have beneficial properties. And I wrote about some of the flavonoids, for example, that we know have antiviral properties

like camphorol, which is a spinach, dill and cabbage, or quercetin, which is in dill and onions and oregano and chili pepper and hesperidetin, which is in dill and onions, and oregano and chili pepper, and hesperidin, which is in oranges and grapefruit and citrus foods, or alluropine, which is in olives and extra virgin olive oil. These are the compounds we're talking about, catechins in green tea, lauric acid in virgin coconut oil and breast milk, although that's kind of hard to get, and all these other spices that I've been using really prolifically in my cooking, ginger, garlic, turmeric, rosemary, chili pepper, oregano. I mean, three of those, actually four of those are in my dinner tonight.

So I think we have to think about actually how we can start to use these compounds on a daily basis in our cooking, in our food. And the great thing is, at the end of the day, you get to eat this amazingly delicious food because ultra-processed food just tastes terrible. When you actually have had real phytochemical-rich food, it's what actually makes things good. It's the flavor that they give to foods. And so, you know, Dan Barber is on a podcast, and created row seven seeds to create taste in food by hybridizing seeds to create the most flavor. But what he's done, I think, inadvertently was to find ways to enhance the phytochemical properties of the food, which makes it more nutrient dense and more phytochemical rich. And that's what gives it flavor. Is that a fair

assumption? Yeah, absolutely. I think one has to be a little bit careful, though, to say flavor because we know that flavor is enhanced by fats and flavor is enhanced by sweeteners. So, I think you would have to ask what flavors. Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't think of those as flavors. Well, those are flavor potentiators. You're right. You're right. It's the addictive stuff that we get pushed on by the food industry. But this is just such an amazing conversation, Jeff.

I think we've covered a lot. I think one of the things I want to touch on is going forward, you know, how is healthcare going to look? How is society going to look through the long lens that you've had of, you know, 40 or 50 years of thinking about these things and going through so much history? You know, what do you see coming in terms of healthcare and just life in general? So I'm going to peer it back, what Dr. Mark Hyman would say if I was to ask you that same question, because I think you may language this a little differently than I, but I think we would both say the same thing. So I think that there are going to be five significant changes post-COVID-19 in how we see healthcare globally. I'd like to just quickly summarize it.

The present system pre-COVID-19, we have separated very seriously community health from interventional medicine. They're both on opposite sides of the coin. One we call public health and the other we call medicine. Clinical medicine, right. Generally, a public health is a stepchild and interventional medicine is where the action is. And I think that that's going to change dramatically post-COVID-19. I think we're going to see precision public health become a major part as important as interventional medicine, and it will help chart future healthcare policy and planning. My second point-

Amen to that. Thank you. Well, I know I'm saying Mark Hyman stuff just in Jeff Bland-esque. I want to come back to that point because that's a very important point. Yeah. Okay. The second point is our pre-COVID-19 has been a disease-focused, diagnosis-focused health care system. So it's really a disease care system.

And prevention, what we call prevention is related to risk factor reduction for chronic diseases. So it's all really disease centric. I think post COVID-19, we're going to see prevention being redefined to include prognostic markers of immunological function. I think we're going to ask who are the people that are at risk based upon the function of their immune systems, not just the presence of markers of disease. That's a big change, I believe, that will occur. My third point is that I think presently, pre-COVID-19, our healthcare system, i.e. disease care system, the reimbursement is based upon in-state and in-state contact between a practitioner and a patient.

And I believe that what we're going to see after this, it's already starting to happen, is health financing will undergo significant change to include across state border telehealth. Yeah. And group health. And I think these are going to be game changers when we really start talking about group participation. And you've talked about this for years. And telehealth and other ways of getting information to people that will empower their self-efficacy, their ability to take charge of their health in different ways by resourcing people that are knowledgeable, that can give them the guidance and the personalized recommendations they need. The next in my list is that presently regulations that oversee healthcare are based upon state and national

perspectives. It's almost entirely centric to this interplay between state and national directives or policies. I think that's going to be changing post-COVID to planetary health, that we become a significant driver of healthcare innovation. We're going to move away from this myopic view of centric views of our local community and our reimbursement systems through insurance companies or Medicare to look at global issues that really, if you think of the impact on our economy or our health of this one COVID-19, it swamps out everything. All the advances we've made in cancer therapy, all the advances that drug companies have made in treatment

of chronic disease, they pale in comparison to the impact of this particular event on global society. So we've got to change our whole philosophy to include planetary health systems. And then lastly, we have seen in our culture pre-COVID-19 that epidemics are viewed as solely vector-caused, and therefore their prevention is related to the development of drugs and immunization. That's been marginally successful. I said we still have 750,000 people dying of AIDS, so it hasn't been completely successful. By the way, Jeff, that is actually the message

that is being pushed out there today, that it's all about the right drug and the right vaccine for COVID-19. Yeah, and I don't want to discount that both of those are important. What I think will happen post-COVID, however, is to recognize that those are not the total solution. Epidemics will be redefined as multi-causal, and the approaches then will have to engage personalized health improvement, not just finding solutions by drugs and immunization. Making the whole population more immunoresilient. This experience that we're all sharing through this COVID-19 pandemic, which has pulled us into our houses and it's made quiet for a while, our industries, has caused us to reflect on what are the real value systems that drive us to have successful outcomes in life? And how do we make health a virtue that's more than just an apparition,

but it really deals with how we live, act, and behave each day, interact as human beings, see our value, have purposeful families, interact with people in meaningful ways, and create a stewardship of the planet that has survivability as a legacy. Those outcomes from this disease will change not only healthcare, but the cultural context by which we all advance ourselves. I think it's right. I think it is a horrible moment and many people are sick and dying and I wish I could stop it right now, but it is going to change the fabric of society. It's

going to change how we think about ourselves, about our families, our communities, our nations, and particularly the driving changes in healthcare you mentioned are really important. I want to come back to the initial point you made about the distinction between clinical medicine and public health. And there's always been a divide. And clinical medicine has been seen as the real medicine and public health is sort of the poor stepchild or the, you know, not as relevant.

But if you look at the history of health and our health gains, most of them have been through public health, whether it's sanitation or clean water or even things. And I think we really have to look at that seriously. And what really struck me a number of years ago when I went to Haiti and saw what was happening there and saw how Paul Farmer addressed TB and AIDS, which are infectious diseases, not by better drugs or surgery, more vaccines, but by dealing with the public health issues that he called structural violence, the social,

the political, economic conditions that drive disease. And we're seeing that here. We're seeing the structural violence devastating populations from COVID-19 that we discussed, the poor populations, Hispanic, African-American populations, people who have chronic illnesses that are caused by our food system. When we really look at how do we have to address this, it's going to be through changing the structural system, the social determinants we call people's ability to access food, to deal with the stresses that they're dealing with. These social determinants are bigger and more relevant determinants of health than any drug or surgery. And then, of course, there's food. The food system itself has to radically change in order for us to address this pandemic of chronic disease and the burden on the healthcare system. So the only way to do that is by dealing with the public health issues was the former head of the National Health Service in the UK. And it was one of those light bulb moments for me when I read the book,

and I was, my God, we have to learn from the developing world how to address our chronic disease epidemics in the developed world, because they don't have a lot of resources. They just have each other. They have community health workers. You know, if I were president or king, I would literally take this moment to train millions of unemployed workers as community health workers and deploy them throughout the country to actually help people do exactly what you're talking about, immunorejuvenation and reclaiming their health, teaching them how to grow gardens. I mean, we had 40% of our food grown in victory gardens during World War II. We had federal extension workers teaching young families how to, you know, cook and take care of their homes. We need to bring those workers back. And I think that if that comes out of this, then I think then it won't be for naught. But I believe you, Jeff, that this is going to be a different world after COVID-19. And while we're all in it, we really need to huddle together and listen carefully to the things you're saying and read that article. We're going to post it in the notes because it's such an important message that we don't have to be passive victims of this virus,

that we can take care of our health and our communities and our families. And that's what's so great about the work you do, Jeff. You empowered me to really focus on the real solutions for chronic disease. And you've helped me help thousands, millions of people around the world. And I'm just so grateful for that and for your wisdom and for your vision of seeing what's coming. So you are my hero. Well, it's reciprocal, Mark. I'd like to leave, if I could, just one thought with your group. And that is, when we explore how we as individuals in our own personal lives interact biologically, socially, physically with the outside world, there are certain processes within our body, I call them an antennae, that are picking up these signals and translating those signals into our body. And the principal one is our immune system, secondary, and maybe not secondary, interrelated to our nervous system.

And as we know, the nervous system and the immune system are exquisitely connected we shouldn't actually teach them as two different systems they're part of one big system and we can control what we're learning is that we have a lot more control as individuals over the function of both of those systems both our nervous system and our immune system than we previously understood. We're not just victims. And if we can develop that understanding that we are the shop boss of how our immune system is going to defend us against foreigners and how our nervous system is going to respond to unexpected events, then we will find a path to health globally,

and it will be connected to health of the planet, because it will mean sane behaviors. And so people's planets and plants will all be interrelated. Thank you, Jeff. That is so wise. And thank you for joining us today on The Doctor's Pharmacy and enlightening us about the power of Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat, among other things. And I know I'm going to be trying to find it, and I know where to get it, but I hope it's made available to many, many people. Thank you for all the work you do. For people who are looking for Jeff Bland's work,

you can go to their website, plmi.org. That's the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute. Check out his book, disease delusion uh look at his article on the covid 19 pandemic on medium and uh you will you will enlighten you probably can't even imagine so thank you jeff for joining us today one last quick thing um i think the best place to get in touch and the resource information we put down over the years is probably jeffreybland.com. That's just J-E-F-F-R-E-Y Bland, B-L-A-N-D.com. That's accesses all these other portals that you might have interest in finding. That's great. jeffreybland.com. And, you know, he's, he's, I can't even tell you the amount

of content information Jeff has put out over the years. It's just staggering. And it's my main source of inspiration. So thank you, Jeff, for joining us on The Doctor's Pharmacy. If you love this podcast, please share with your friends and family on social media. Leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next week on The Doctor's Pharmacy.

Thanks, Mark. Thank you, Jeff. Hi, everyone. It's Dr. Mark Hyman. So two quick things. Number one, thanks so much for listening to this week's podcast. It really means a lot to me. If you love the podcast, I'd really appreciate you sharing with your friends and family. Second, I want to tell you about a brand new newsletter I started called Mark's Picks. Every week, I'm going to send out a list of a few things that I've been using to take my own health to the next level. This could be books, podcasts, research that I found, supplement recommendations, recipes, or even gadgets.

I use a few of those. And if you'd like to get access to this free weekly list, all you have to do is visit drhyman.com forward slash pics. That's drhyman.com forward slash pics. I'll only email you once a week, I promise, and I'll never send you anything else besides my own recommendations. So just go to drhyman.com forward slash PICS, that's P-I-C-K-S, to sign up free today. Hi everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified

medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.