Origin of Functional Medicine, Post-CV Immune Resilience, Mast Cells, Inflammaging and Fatty Acids with Dr. Jeffrey Bland, PhD

In this episode of The Less Stressed Life, I'm joined by Dr. Jeffrey Bland for a conversation about the evolution of functional medicine and what we're continuing to learn about immune resilience. We explore why "immune boosting" isn't the goal, how the gut microbiome influences inflammation throughout the body, and why mast cells, the 4R gut restoration protocol, and post-COVID immune changes are important pieces of the immune health puzzle. We also discuss inflammaging (chronic inflammation associated with aging) and how nutrition and lifestyle choices can help support resilience and healthy aging.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:
• Why immune resilience matters more than immune boosting
• How the gut microbiome influences inflammation
• The role of mast cells in immune health
• How the 4R protocol supports gut health
• Understanding inflammaging and healthy aging
• Nutrition and lifestyle strategies to build resilience

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ABOUT GUEST:
Dr. Jeffrey Bland is a world-renowned nutritional medicine expert and is widely considered the "Father of Functional Medicine." A trained biochemist, he has authored more than 120 peer-reviewed publications and the bestselling book The Disease Delusion. He co-founded the Institute for Functional Medicine and the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute and is the founder of Big Bold Health, where his work focuses on immune rejuvenation through nutrition, lifestyle, and regenerative health.

WHERE TO FIND GUEST:
Website: https://jeffreybland.com/
Website: https://bigboldhealth.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drjeffreybland/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/JeffreyBlandPhD

SPONSOR:
Thank you to Jigsaw Health for being such a great sponsor. 😎  Try their Electrolyte Supreme in the crowd-favorite Fruit Punch flavor this summer.🍓🍹Use code LESSSTRESSED10 on every order for 10% off! 

NUTRITION PHILOSOPHY OF LESS STRESSED LIFE:
🍽️ Over restriction is dead
🥑 Whole food is soul food and fed is best
🔄 Sustainable, synergistic nutrition is in (the opposite of whack-a-mole supplementation & supplement graveyards)
🤝 You don’t have to figure it out alone
❤️ Do your best and leave the rest

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Podcast Instagram: @lessstressedlife
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lessstressedlife
More Links + Quizzes: https://www.christabiegler.com/links
Protocols: https://www.christabiegler.com/protocolshop

❓Questions for Christa? Submit them here: https://www.christabiegler.com/questions

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TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Inflammaging is a term that refers to this chronic inflammatory state that people are in. Not acute inflammation, chronic inflammation. It kind of simmers, that is associated with most age-related disorders. And this is a consequence of immunosenescence, the aging of our immune system because it's not being re-educated to keep young and vital.

[00:00:21] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm your host, Christa Biegler, and I'm going to guess we have at least one thing in common, that we're both in pursuit of a less stressed life. On this show, I'll be interviewing experts and sharing clinical pearls from my years of practice to support high-performing, health-savvy women in pursuit of abundance and a less stressed life.

[00:00:49] Christa Biegler, RD: One of my beliefs is that we always have options for getting the results we want, so let's see what's out there together

[00:01:07] Christa Biegler, RD: Today on the Less Stressed Life we are joined by Dr. Jeffrey Bland, world renowned nutritional medicine expert and considered the father of functional medicine. Dr. Bland is a trained biochemist with over 40 years of pioneering work in personalized systems based health

[00:01:22] Christa Biegler, RD: and began his career as a professor of biochemistry and has authored over 120 peer reviewed publications and the bestselling book The Disease Delusion. Dr. Bland co-founded the Institute for Functional Medicine and the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute, helping clinicians and the public translate cutting-edge science into practical strategies for optimal health.

[00:01:40] Christa Biegler, RD: He's also the founder of Big Bold Health, where he focuses on immunorejuvenation, integrating nutrition, lifestyle, and regenerative practices to help the body repair, regenerate, and thrive. And I'm sure there's many other ventures that he's got his hands tucked in. Maybe we'll get into some of those today.

[00:01:56] Christa Biegler, RD: Welcome to the show, Dr. Bland. 

[00:01:57] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Oh, appreciate it. It's gonna be fun. I'm really [00:02:00] looking forward to this conversation very much. Yeah. Thanks for including me. 

[00:02:03] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. You were a big unknown mentor in the beginning of my functional medicine journey because you're the creator of the 4R protocol.

[00:02:10] Christa Biegler, RD: And actually when I met you at the very back of the PLMI Institute, it was really a microbiome labs conference/PLMI. It was 2022 in Denver, and I think I asked you, I don't know, I think I asked you something about what you were most proud of, and you did say it was that 4R protocol, right? What are the steps?

[00:02:32] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Remove, replace, reinoculate, repair 

[00:02:33] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. And so I actually wanna start looking back a little bit. You've been around the block for a while. You've been in the functional medicine space since the origin, obviously, right? And so you've gotten to look back on how one decade, two decades, three decades, I don't really know how long exactly, but you've been watching things for a while.

[00:02:53] Christa Biegler, RD: So if you could look back on this, I just wanted to ask, with this wisdom that you've gained, [00:03:00] as you look back on things, what are some of the highlights over the decades that you've kind of seen? ... 

[00:03:05] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: is starting to be fashioned and be adopted by so many people around the world. It it's fascinating. We actually, my wife and I founded the Institute for Functional Medicine in 1990, so this is the 36th year, which is hard for me to even say. But the founding of it really was around conversations that I had the privilege of having with healthcare developers, innovators, creators, practitioners from my travels around the world.

[00:03:33] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: I've amassed quite a few miles in travel over my years in the field. In fact it's more than 6 million miles. I've traveled more than 44 times around the world, just in terms of distance. And in the course of those years and that travel, I saw a lot of hotels, obviously, and a lot of plane flights, but I also met some just unbelievably remarkable people that- thought out of the box, people that were dedicated, creative kind of savants in different [00:04:00] areas. And I think what it led me into is trying to assemble a system of understanding of how you would make a collage of all these individual contributions that would make some sense, like a network of ideas.

[00:04:14] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And so I'm not sure I ever have come up with an original idea, but I think I've been pretty good at connecting ideas together and to create a system of thinking, which ultimately became then the functional medicine model. And the way that a- actually occurred was my wife set up these meetings in Vancouver, British Columbia.

[00:04:31] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Actually, it was in Victoria, on Vancouver Island. And we invited about 40 of these colleagues that I'd met from around the world and domestically to just sit down and talk on a whiteboard about what would be the healthcare system if you were to try to optimize it, and you took away the worries about- licensure and reimbursement. You just talked about the principles of healthcare, and that discussion was so fruitful that the decision was made, that was 1989, to have a- ... second meeting in 1990. [00:05:00] And it was that year then that I kinda came up with the concept that what we had been talking about was function.

[00:05:07] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And rather than disease or diagnosis or inverse- reimbursement codes or whatever, we were talking about function. And I proposed to the group then that it seemed that there were four categories of, in which function could be defined. Obviously there's physical function, there's metabolic or physiological function, there's cognitive function, and then there's behavioral function.

[00:05:31] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And under behavioral function, you can put things like spiritual growth and communion with one another and love and attribution and li- all those things. So I said, if there are ways that we could quantify all these forms of function and roll them up together, you might have an, a real, a quantifiable number as to what that person's health was.

[00:05:51] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: 'Cause I believe that the more that those things were present, the more likely that person was at a level of health that they were able to [00:06:00] do the things that they really wanted to do on a daily basis. So it would move us away from a disease fear-based model to a proactive function model that would have a whole different psychology, a different language system, and would also have a different way of assessing.

[00:06:14] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: 'Cause we would not be looking for the presence of disease, we'd look for the presence of resilience, the presence of metabolic degrees of freedom. All these kinds of things that were not measured in my training in medical school as traditional variables. So that ultimately led to the group maybe being very kind and saying I'm not sure that's the best term."

[00:06:35] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Because at that point in time, this would be 1990, the term function in medicine really had two kind of pejorative implications. One was geriatric medicine- ... where a person was broken down and not able to move and was dysfunctional at the physical level. And the other was function referred to, it's all in your mind, it's psychosomatic.

[00:06:56] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: It's a functional illness, it's not a real illness. So those were [00:07:00] not really-

[00:07:00] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: applied to functional radiology, functional endocrinology, functional cardiology. So I thought maybe this is where we ought to be going, to where the term is going, not to where it's been." So we ended up saying, "Okay, let's give this a whirl. Let's try out the term function to see if it could be a collecting place for people who really were concerned about what the health of the system was, not just the absence of disease."

[00:07:24] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: The absence of disease really doesn't necessarily equate with the presence of health. So we started down that journey in 1990, and I'd have to say that for me it's extraordinarily gratifying to see the number of very bright, dedicated individuals from all sorts of different medic and health in- disciplines who have found a resting spot in the functional medicine community and started to really grow this thing up to become, I would call it an operating software for the healthcare system.

[00:07:52] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So that's my view on it. 

[00:07:55] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I love the meeting of minds of real practicing [00:08:00] clinicians, because I'm sure as you've found when you get together, there's things that you cannot read in a book, or like you had already mentioned, you just did not learn about in school. But other people are also seeing those same patterns, and so essentially it's a pattern assimilation and how do we create a system from that.

[00:08:16] Christa Biegler, RD: And did you ever find that the more you learned, the more you felt like you didn't know in a way? 

[00:08:23] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Yeah. That's really the the deep, dark tunnel of exploration of knowledge. You get into it- ... and it's a catacomb, and you keep exploring. And the deeper you go, the more you recognize there's more to go.

[00:08:34] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So yeah I absolutely subscribe to that. It's probably what keeps me still actively involved at the level I am now at 80 years of age. It's okay, this is really a raison d'etre for life, is learning, and translating that over to other individuals so they can access things that they may not have known that would make material differences in their life, make life more comfortable, have more joy, more function.

[00:08:57] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So yeah, absolutely what you said is the [00:09:00] driving force. 

[00:09:01] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I actually didn't know your wife was such a driving force in the creation of this, but it makes sense 'cause I often think a great woman is behind a great man. So we should 

[00:09:12] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: give a- I think it's the other way around, quite honestly. I think- Men are really, I think I'm probably overgeneralizing here and I'm gonna get myself in trouble, but I believe that men are really good at piece parts.

[00:09:23] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: They like building and constructing machines. They like dials and knobs and all that kind of stuff, which is, by the way, very important. I'm not saying that's- ... that's not of value. But women are connectors, they're collaborators, they're creators. They're individuals that create a constructed system upon which the dials and knobs and stuff is useful.

[00:09:42] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: I think what we're moving towards, and I'm actually very excited about this. Although I had three sons, I now have daughter-in-laws and granddaughters which I've now lived more vicariously having women in my family. But I have a wife as well. But I think that we're witnessing the emergence of women where the value proposition is exactly what [00:10:00] we need.

[00:10:00] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: We need that kind of cohesive, collaborative, creative energy to help to understand how to take all the other stuff, including AI. And if you look, actually, it's interesting, AI is a metaphor to what I'm saying. The people that end up on the front page of our newspapers, magazines, and our media with the scions of AI are almost all men.

[00:10:20] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So not to say that there are not hugely successful women in coding and in artificial intelligence and in... But the people, if you think of the leaders at these companies they're generally men. But it's, if you look behind the scenes, where the organizational structure that really makes these ideas start to become applicable to population at large are generally, are women who are in that position.

[00:10:42] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So I think that this collaboration between the two, we need both, but I think what we're witnessing in the healthcare system now is a lot stronger voice of women taking the lead and then men filling it in 

[00:10:53] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, I agree that may be the direction it seems we are headed. Although it's biased because I look through my lens, [00:11:00] and that's a lot of the people I'm with.

[00:11:01] Christa Biegler, RD: So the last time I was in any kind of class from PLMI or something where I was learning from you, and it was a couple of years ago, but you were... The main takeaway was we're not talking about boosting the immune system, but we're talking about immune resilience, and you mentioned resilience when you were just speaking a bit ago.

[00:11:22] Christa Biegler, RD: It's one of my favorite underrated terms. Actually, in about 2019 I wanted to start talking about resilience all the time. I was doing a full reset on it, and I think It's funny because the assistant I had at the time said I think you might be ahead of where people think their problem is at the moment," right?

[00:11:41] Christa Biegler, RD: And then after 2020 happened, I feel like that's not the case anymore. I feel like resilience as a whole, as in humanity, really declined overall. And so I wanna talk a little bit about, that's one of the topics that you are talking a lot about now still is immune resilience and different [00:12:00] shoot-offs of that.

[00:12:00] Christa Biegler, RD: Will you talk a little bit about what you mean by immune resilience versus immune boosting and why it was so necessary for you to kinda put a stake in the ground? Because after that COVID time, there was a lot of talk about immune boosting. I see this dropping off now, but it was, for a long time, people would come in on lots of zinc and lots of maybe even quercetin products or just different products that they were, vitamin D hyperdosing or anything like that to boost the immune system, and I'm guessing you saw that a little bit too.

[00:12:30] Christa Biegler, RD: So tell us when you were needing to stick this stake in the sand and recalibrate That's what I felt. It was like, hey, can we just redefine something more correctly? So tell us a little bit about how that all happened. 

[00:12:43] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: First I wanna acknowledge what you just said I think is very prescient, and I think it's right on, on point.

[00:12:49] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And so anything I'm gonna say now subsequently is really just reinforcing your central message. It's interesting for me in that my editor of my books [00:13:00] at Harper I had proposed to her oh, geez, it probably was 10 years ago, something like that, eight to 10 years ago. I proposed to her that I was gonna do a follow-on book to The Disease Delusion, in which resilience was gonna be in the title.

[00:13:15] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And she said exactly what you just said. Yeah. "Oh, that's an interesting word that'll never get stickiness with readers. The- ... that doesn't have any traction." So now we roll forward to COVID. So what did we learn in COVID? We learned a lot of things, so I'm just gonna isolate a couple of factors that I think relate to this question of resilience.

[00:13:34] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So when people started really experiencing the severe of COVID, and they started drowning in their own fluids. I know that sounds fairly dramatic, but that's was the cause of death for the majority of people who died from COVID, is the fact that their pulmonary function and their interrelationship with things like blood coagulation and cardiac function, which were all interrelated started to pull the plug, could no longer function.[00:14:00]

[00:14:00] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And so one asked the question, why would you drown in your own fluids? Where do those fluids come from? And they come from the activation, obviously, of your immune system. And that's when we produce mucus and we produce a lot of salt water that goes to the wound to dilute it.

[00:14:16] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: That's why we get swollen when you have an injury the immune system trying to dilute the injury. And so what happens when you have an acute in- infection like SARS-CoV-2 the immune system does the things that it can do to try to prevent you from dying. And the body has built into it, every human body, this fail-safe mechanism that it'll do everything it can to protect you from dying, at all expense, including putting you in jeopardy.

[00:14:47] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And so that's the interesting bystander outcome when all systems are turned on to try to protect you from dying. And so what happened with COVID was many people, their immune systems were, [00:15:00] certain portions of their immune system were so turned on that they were in a hyper-inflammatory storm.

[00:15:06] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: It was actually called inflammation storm. And they were actually dying as a consequence of the inflammation so acute because their inflammation was so turned on that it became their cause of death. And this happens actually in other disorders like Ebola and other infectious viral disorders can do the same thing, like bird flu, for instance.

[00:15:27] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And so When people started talking about boosting the immune system during COVID, I got very concerned about that because first of all, quite honestly, there has never been a nutrition study ever done that shows that nutrition supplements can boost the immune system to the extent that you can boost it with a specific kinds of drugs.

[00:15:50] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So this concept of boosting with vitamin D, vitamin A, zinc elderberry, w- whatever you wanna choose it's fallacious. What you can do is you [00:16:00] can activate and support the immune system, but to have it boosted as it relates to enhancing inflammatory function the answer is probably not that's gonna be the way that it works.

[00:16:14] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So I think from a both theoretical and a actual health outcome perspective, I was very concerned about this concept of boosting because what people really needed was to make their immune systems more resilient, more capable of being adaptive, more capable of adjusting to the need. And, for every inflammation that started, you need a way of stopping it.

[00:16:36] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So that's the initiation, and that's the termination of inflammation, and that occurs through a regulated immune system that's resilient. It knows when to turn on, and it knows when to turn off. That's the natural gift that we have in the way that our immune system works. If, however, you are in overdrive, the last thing you wanna do is to enhance overdrive.

[00:16:58] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And so this concept of [00:17:00] boosting was of concern to me because it could actually aggravate these problems that were already present as a consequence of a hyperactive immune system, at least portions of the immune system being hyperactive. So that led me really in that period of time to go back to say, "What do we really know about how to improve immune resilience?"

[00:17:21] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Because that seems to be laid along the way of life that we haven't talked much about. So I made a decision that I was gonna put a company together, and that would be its principal focus, was to try and understand how we would make the immune system more resilient, not just to defense against infectious organisms, but to do what the immune system does twenty-four seven, three sixty-five, and that's to rebuild tissues, to rearchitect our organs, to actually participate in real ways in how we look, act, and feel, regardless of whether we have infection.

[00:17:54] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: It is this principal part of our body that is reconstructing us twenty-four seven. And [00:18:00] so I thought, gee, this is a whole kind of advancing understanding about the role of the immune system that message has not really been getting out to people. The immune system is considered by most people just to be protection against infection.

[00:18:11] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So now we have this all important kind of new role of the immune system that we're not trying to boost it, we're trying to make it more resilient. So how would we do that? So that led, as I said, to the start of this Big World Health company that's focused on longevity through immune resilience.

[00:18:28] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: That's our whole focus. And once we made that our central focus, it's amazing what you can learn. 'Cause oftentimes we don't learn certain things 'cause we're not looking for them. The information is there, but we're not looking at it. And it's like the old adage where the guy's looking for his keys under the light, and someone says, "Oh, can I help you?"

[00:18:47] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And he says, "Oh, you won't find them here, they're over there." And he said... and then the guy says why aren't you looking over there?" It's dark over there." This concept that we need to look in the dark sometimes is where you're gonna find the explanation. [00:19:00] So we took that on as one of our principal roles when we started the company six years ago, and it turned out to be just the right thing to do.

[00:19:07] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Because now, probably thanks to COVID, the whole field of immunology has exploded with all these new scientists and people involved in the field. And what was a field that was evolving rather slowly, it's had now exponential increase in understanding over the last five years. So we asked the question then now that we're learning more about how to rejuvenate the immune system and how to make it more resilient, what role does lifestyle, environment, and diet play?

[00:19:39] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Or are they small bit players, or do they really have a significant influence in restructuring, reframing, and remodeling our immune system? And there's where the story for us got very interesting, because now the data is emerging, both from our research and many others, that up to 40% of our [00:20:00] immune system messaging comes from our diet.

[00:20:01] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And it's the diet that's modulated through our gut microbiome. Which then took me back to 1985. I know that sounds like ancient history, but 1985 was the first year that I gave a seminar- four doctors on gut dysbiosis endotoxemia. And we didn't call it the gut microbiome then, we just called it the intestinal bacteria.

[00:20:25] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And so this was pre-microbiome definition. And so we started to really look at that, and that's what ultimately led my group back in the late '80s to come up with this therapeutic program called the 4R program. This remove, replace, reinoculate, repair approach towards renourishing the gut microbiome and the gut immune system, knowing now that there's 70% of our immune system is clustered around our intestinal tract.

[00:20:50] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So all of that is part of the for me, the lineage over the last '85 to 2026. There's a lot of learnings that have occurred over that period of time [00:21:00] that have really, I think, benefited I, I would estimate probably hundreds of thousands of patients who have been treated by functional medicine practitioners using these concepts.

[00:21:10] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Okay, this is perfect because this is one of the areas I wanted to go to. I'm a little bit younger than you, but I first became enamored with the microbiome in about 2005. And at that point it was having a heyday. You were talking over everyone's head probably in 1985, I assume.

[00:21:26] Christa Biegler, RD: So- I 

[00:21:26] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: was. 

[00:21:27] Christa Biegler, RD: One thing, and even then, and we're still to the point where I think most people understand that the gut microbiome is a big deal, but we are almost on a different planet from what's going on in a hospital system gastrointestinal assessment model versus what are opportunities and what we can do.

[00:21:47] Christa Biegler, RD: It's unfortunate because now people know gut health is a big deal, but actually doing something with that, we seem to still be on slightly different planets, in integrative functional medicine spaces and private practices [00:22:00] and other practices versus the conventional model.

[00:22:02] Christa Biegler, RD: So I just wanted to point that out. We don't need to go off on a tangent about that. But as, for as much as we know, it's unfortunate we're not, we haven't, come a little bit closer together. And it is what it is. Something I wanted to ask you about, there's two big concepts I wanna talk about to set the stage for before we get into some of these things that support immune resilience even more.

[00:22:21] Christa Biegler, RD: You've talked a little bit about some things already. The first one that probably goes in best order first is dysbiosis of the gut microbiome creates a hyperactive immune system because of endotoxins, the body trying to support, clear that out, et cetera. This is really the first R.

[00:22:40] Christa Biegler, RD: This is part of the first R of the 4R protocol. What I see over time a common scenario with people, with humans, is that once they, quote-unquote, "take care of something or improve something," they would like to never deal with it again, and that's just not the reality. Relapses happen, and I have lots of opinions about relapses, subclinical thyroid [00:23:00] issues causing slower motility.

[00:23:01] Christa Biegler, RD: I call it the birdbath effect of stuff overgrowing, et cetera. I think even in 1985 when you were talking about dysbiosis, I often also wonder how much... dysbiosis is a very broad word, right? And we started talking about bacteria and then fungal stuff, and now there's more conversation- about biotoxins and mycotoxins, which, can be under the same umbrella. My question really is, what do you think about relapsing dysbiosis and digestive issues, and what are some practical thing... What do you think is happening when people have frequent... And I think this is a little bit of a loaded question, but let's say someone is doing good things, but they find themselves having relapsing dysbiosis.

[00:23:42] Christa Biegler, RD: Again, multiple answers to that, but just wanna hear what you have to say about it. Because I find that it's a skill we must learn, and it just- Yeah ... shows up. And it's was it always a problem before we were aware of it, right? And our awareness is just shifting more and more, or is it more [00:24:00] prevalent, is it more of an issue than it used to be?

[00:24:04] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Yeah I think it is more of an issue than it used to be, I agree. If you look at just, The very four forms of chronic irritable bowel syndrome and the prevalence in American culture. It's said that at any one time... Or let's put it another way, 40% of the population has some form of recurring irritable bowel.

[00:24:22] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Constipation or diarrhea or pain or bloating of different types. And they can come and go. It's oscillating. You don't have necessarily-- You don't have it all the time, although there are obviously acute cases where people are very seriously impaired as a consequence of irritable bowel.

[00:24:37] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And so you asked a question what causes irritable bowel? And both the opportunity, but the challenge to these chronic illnesses is they're generally multifactorial. And it's not so easy as it was with a tuberculous type of bacterium or let's use pneumonia. A pneumonia-causing bacterium for which you then use a single [00:25:00] molecule called an antibiotic to kill that bacteria, which then treats the disease.

[00:25:05] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: That's a very nice, tidy model that is memorizable and replicable, but it doesn't really explain what's going on with these more complex chronic health problems like chronic digestive problems, dysbiosis upper GI issues or lower GI issues that are frequent and recurrent.

[00:25:23] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: In that case, you have to look at multiple causation. It's like the barrel effect, where you start putting rain in the rain barrel and, it, it doesn't spill over until you get it to the top, and then suddenly the next bit of water that goes in there goes on your living room floor. So the construct is, how can we look at the causative agents that could influence the very complex ecosystem of our intestinal tract, which are literally hun- hundreds of different types of species of organisms.

[00:25:57] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: For the average person, about three [00:26:00] pounds of organisms called the microbiome that live in our gut. By the way, in one gram of stool, one small amount of stool, one thirty-second of a pound of stool, are more bacteria than stars in the known universe, just to give you an idea of what we're talking about in terms of the number of critters that are sending out information to our body that, from our gut.

[00:26:20] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So you say what is it regulates all that complexity?" And one of the major breakthroughs was Gershon's book that was, Michael Gershon, that was published, oh, this would've been '94, '95, entitled The Second Brain. And in that book, he really was talking about chronic irritable bowel syndrome and other inflammatory digestive orders.

[00:26:40] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Crohn's or inflammatory bowel disease. And he was talking about the fact that our gut is really an organ that has this immune system, and it has cells that produce hormones and... or let's call it messenger molecules, like serotonin. More than half of the serotonin produced in our body, more like two-thirds of it actually, comes from the [00:27:00] enterochro- chromaffin cells which are lining our intestinal tract.

[00:27:05] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And so our digestive tract has feelings. And those feelings are communicated through these messaging systems back to the brain. And one of the ways that occurs is through this now increasing understanding of this long wandering nerve. The name of the nerve was built after the the Greek word wandering.

[00:27:23] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: It's called the vagus nerve, this cranial nerve that goes from our brain stem all the way down past our digest- detracts into our legs, and that nerve picks up information from the gut, like these hormones or these messenger molecules, and it takes them to the brain. The brain then turns around and it speaks to the gut by sending information down there.

[00:27:43] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And so it's a crosstalk. So if you talk about dysbiosis, is further complicated by the psychosocial environment of the person. We all know that. If you have to give up to give a speech in front of a large body of people and you're not familiar with speech giving, how does your bowel feel at, before you [00:28:00] get up there?

[00:28:00] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: You probably have a lot of rumbling bowels and maybe you have urgency. And so it's the connection between the psychosocial environment that you find yourself and the innervation that triggers these hormones that are neurotransmitters, neuroactive substances that are vasoactive in the gut.

[00:28:16] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And so this crosstalk, when we talk about dysbiosis, is much more complex than just the food we eat or the bugs that are there. It's the environment in which they both find themselves, of which the psychosocial behavioral components play huge roles. So if you want to really deal with issues of upper or lower GI problems that are recurrent, you need to ask broader questions other than just the anatomy and physiology.

[00:28:39] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: You need to look at the psychosocial environment and how that's implicated in the reconstruction of our gut function. 

[00:28:46] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I think we're still at the beginning stages of that becoming as mainstream as it can be. I don't know how that will look. Yeah, from a one perspective, yes, we're talking about vagus nerve [00:29:00] stimulation and talking about free things you can do and things that cost money that you can do, et cetera, but it's much wider than that, as you were just describing.

[00:29:08] Christa Biegler, RD: And so I think one of the most challenging things that I have chewed on for the last several years is our disconnection to the body and our unawareness of stress because essentially cultural norms that have us rushing and doing things quickly and eating quickly and all of the things that kind of contribute to the slow, what you do every day is more important than what you do every once in a while, right?

[00:29:32] Christa Biegler, RD: So it's like what's happening all day in that person's life. Yeah. Let's talk about one other thing that's a really big ... that's changed the landscape. On immune resilience, and has made us probably more serious by slapping us in the face related to immune resilience, and that was the real immune resilience killer, which was COVID.

[00:29:49] Christa Biegler, RD: And, after, as COVID was starting, I don't know when I started seeing this, but essentially there was massive increases in histamine-style [00:30:00] symptoms or mast cell-style symptoms. And I always saw it concurrent with a major stressor. I was definitely seeing a pattern, but at that time I wasn't going to meet with other practitioners at conferences for a couple of years, 'cause they were all canceled for the most part.

[00:30:15] Christa Biegler, RD: And so I actually didn't realize it was ubiquitous, right? That I knew I was seeing it all the time, but I hadn't really discussed it with other people. I said, "Oh, I'm seeing that, people were already hanging on by a thread, and then COVID comes in and it's this super inflammatory bug," is the simplest way I can say it.

[00:30:34] Christa Biegler, RD: Super inflammatory bug that uses up a lot of nutrients, which compromises your resilience, and essentially, like everything falls apart, was how I was justifying it in my head. It's a little more interesting than that but I don't think my explanation is crazy far off from what we were seeing somewhat.

[00:30:53] Christa Biegler, RD: Can you describe some of the mechanisms that happened in the body that have created these [00:31:00] long-standing, six years later, continuous mast cell or these major spikes in mast cell symptoms? 

[00:31:07] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Yeah. Thank you. And I think you did a very nice job of summarizing a lot of stuff in ways that people can understand, get it down to a language that is accessible.

[00:31:16] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: I tend to get pretty geeky on this, so I'll try to keep it on the line of understanding.

[00:31:20] Christa Biegler, RD: Geeky is 

[00:31:20] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: welcome. Okay. Thank you. Let's just quickly talk about the nature of this complexity of our immune system, where it's located, and I said 70% located in the gut. But where in the gut?

[00:31:33] Christa Biegler, RD: It is hot weather season, and there is probably no better time than now to make electrolytes part of your daily routine. Electrolytes help you make energy and help get hydration into the cells, so you aren't just peeing out what you put in. I've been drinking electrolytes for at least five years, and I'm always looking for a great-tasting, high-quality powder just to change up the flavors.

[00:31:54] Christa Biegler, RD: This summer, I'm doing a lot of Electrolyte Supreme from Jigsaw. It's got a great [00:32:00] complementary vitamin and mineral profile beyond the classic electrolyte minerals of potassium, sodium, and magnesium without any sugar or artificial colors. It tastes great, and probably my go-to for my kids, especially the lemon lime flavor as a hydrating lemonade for summer.

[00:32:16] Christa Biegler, RD: You can get 10% off every single order at jigsawhealth.com with the code LESSSTRESSED10. That's LESSSTRESSED10 to take 10% off of all of Jigsaw's incredible products from Electrolyte Supreme to potassium and adrenal cocktails to cod liver oil and beyond. So go get yourself now and start hydrating.

[00:32:39] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: It's located principally in the gut mucosal lining, the so-called, uh, mucosal-associated lymphoid tissue, MALT. And that is chock-filled with immune cells. If you look at it under the microscope and examine those cells, you'll find them, a lot of our immune cells in that tissue.

[00:32:57] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Now, what- Kind of immune cells are they? [00:33:00] That's a really interesting question. They're members principally of the immune family that we call the innate immune system. Now, the immune system is composed of two general arms. There's actually a third arm that interconverts or interrelates the first arm with the second, but the two major arms are the innate immune system, which historically has been thought of this ancient immune system that is passed down through generations, and you just got whatever your genes were for that immune system is what you got.

[00:33:28] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: You couldn't do much about it. It just kinda traveled with you through your life. That is the first line of defense, and those are the cells, those innate immune cells, which include macrophages, neutrophils, monocytes, dendritic cells, and mast cells. They sit on that frontier tissues, not just in your gut, but also in your lungs and your airways.

[00:33:50] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: You think of where COVID attacked, it attacked our pulmonary system, our breathing apparatus, our lungs, and our gut, which then translated into our systemic inflammatory pathways. [00:34:00] So the innate immune system was not prepared in people that got serious infection from SARS-CoV-2 to meet the challenge that particular virus with that spike protein was transmitting to their bodies.

[00:34:14] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And now we start to say why would that be? What was going on?" And here's where the story gets, I think, quite contemporary and current in developing understanding, because it has been thought throughout the last period of time, decades, that the innate immune system was, as I mentioned ancient, and it couldn't learn anything.

[00:34:35] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: It was whatever it was, that's what you had to deal with. And now, within the last 10 to 15 years, it has been revolutionarily changed to recognize that the immune system, the innate immune system is trainable. It can learn. Now that's very important as it relates to the COVID situation.

[00:34:56] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Because what happens when you have a very [00:35:00] serious new infective agent, in this case SARS-CoV-2, that it's calling forth the nature of the plasticity or the learning ability of that immune system to be capable of responding to the new lessons, and that comes down to what's called immune reserve. So if you have an immune reserve that's compromised in those innate immune cells that are sitting on the surface of your intestinal lining in your lungs, then they are not able to discriminate well this new thing, neutralizing its effectiveness, and then they call out the guard.

[00:35:36] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And when they call out the guard, they send, through the activation of what are called toll-like receptors they send out messages that go to the other part of your immune system called the adaptive immune system. And the adaptive immune system is the part of your system, the T cells, the thymus-dependent lymphocytes, and the B cells that produce antibodies.

[00:35:56] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: These are the long-term effects. So what happened with [00:36:00] SARS-CoV-2 is that the virus broached the first line of defense, and it got to the second line of defense, which was the adaptive immune system, which then went hyperbolic, and it started doing everything it could in overdrive, such that eventually, as I mentioned earlier, it produced its own injury to the body, could, in the extreme case, l- leading to death.

[00:36:23] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So this story about the innate immune system in our general population is not a small story. In general, the health and resilience of our population is compromised as it relates to the innate immune system. And so we're functioning okay on a daily basis, it's not like we're walking around with a immune disease.

[00:36:44] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: But our immune resilience, as it's incorporated in the ability of our innate immune system to learn quickly and to accommodate threats, is not what it could be. And, there are many reasons for that. I'll just want... give one reason of [00:37:00] many what about our ancestors?

[00:37:02] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: They didn't have antibiotics, they didn't have all the kind of modern strategies we have for immune problems. How did they survive? 'Cause they, this was , not a hygienic society that our ancestors lived in. They didn't have refrigeration. They ate raw, they ate damaged and contaminated foods and were exposed to toxins.

[00:37:21] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: But somehow if they could get over being killed by accidents they could live. How did that happen? That happened because their immune systems were able to learn because they got exposed to things early on, and they got trained. They got trained to be more resilient. So now let's use a more modern example of that.

[00:37:40] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: What about Amish versus Hutterite children? And these are stories and studies that have been done and published even in the New England Journal of Medicine, in which both of these are groups of people that live very fundamentally pure lives. They eat natural foods. They live off the land. They [00:38:00] don't have the rush-about lifestyles that a lot of us who are not in that group of population do.

[00:38:07] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: But yet there's a very big difference in children between asthma prevalence in the Hutterite versus the Amish kids. Why? If they're all living... Is it because they have different genes? No, not really. These are not genetically homogeneous groups of people. So there's something beyond the genes that's causing a difference in the way the kids ultimately end up with an immune hyperreaction, which is called asthma.

[00:38:33] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And it turns out that the studies have shown that there is a difference in the exposure between the Hutterite and the Amish children to the farm animals, getting in the ground, getting exposed to stuff, getting inoculated with things, and then developing low-grade tolerance and training their innate immune systems.

[00:38:51] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So they become a much more, the Hutterite kids, have more exposure because they don't have the mechanization and some of the separation of the animals from the [00:39:00] kids as does the Amish. They then have much lower prevalence, in fact, fifty percent, I think more than fifty percent lower prevalence of asthma in children because they've gotten a more trained immune system.

[00:39:14] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So now that maybe you say that's an extreme example. I'm probably not gonna go out and just roll around in cow dung." What does this really mean? What it means is that at all age, particularly in children, but at all age, our immune system is being reformed, re-educated, particularly at the innate immune system level.

[00:39:30] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And that is communicating then to our adaptive immune system and telling us how to remember good memories and forget bad memories or To remember bad memories and forget good memories, that can happen as well. And so what we have now in our population is a condition called inflammaging.

[00:39:48] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Inflammaging is a term that refers to this chronic inflammatory state that people are in. Not acute inflammation, chronic inflammation. It kind of simmers, that is associated with most age-related disorders. [00:40:00] And this is a consequence of immunosenescence, the aging of our immune system because it's not being re-educated to keep young and vital.

[00:40:09] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Can you regenerate the immune system by retraining it? That's the currency of today, and the answer is yes. That's what we've been studying. That's what we call immune rejuvenation. You can actually retrain the innate immune system with the way that we eat, the way we live, the way we hang out. How we engage in our lives can be a important, as important, if not more than any drug.

[00:40:32] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Let me tell you why I say that. A study was published this last fall in November that studied 17, over 17,000 people for a number of years, looking at life expectancy versus immune resilience. I won't go into the details how they measured immune resilience, but they used very sophisticated immunological technologies to evaluate immune resilience.

[00:40:54] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And then they classified these individuals into four categories, from the most immune [00:41:00] resilient to the least immune resilient. The difference in longevity between those with the most resilient immune systems versus the least resilient immune systems was 15 and a half years, meaning by improving the capability of your immune system to be resilient, you can add on 15 disease-free years to your life.

[00:41:19] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: If I said I had a pill that could do that, I would probably be a trillionaire. But we can do that by the way we treat our immune system and how we train it. And that's been really the focus of Big World Health, is trying to find out exactly what are the foods, what are the lifestyle principles, what are the things that we can access without becoming weird that would allow that to happen, to retrain our immune system to be more resilient?

[00:41:42] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Is it possible for you to highlight... You already said the way we eat, the way we live, the way we hang out. Is it possible to highlight a couple of those tenets? And I think one of the question that may come up for people is I'll say it like this. I think we find at a certain point that our diet is unique to us, [00:42:00] and we find what works best for us, and I can't think of a...

[00:42:03] Christa Biegler, RD: that's fine. There's no issue related to that. But, people tend to want to gravitate to one specific diet, right? I think we can have some basic principles around that, but there might be some specific nuance. And I have a specific question related to that, so I'll just bake it in now.

[00:42:18] Christa Biegler, RD: I had a client reach out today that has a history of lots of special diet experience. And one of my favorite things is helping people expand their diet so it's not unnecessarily restrictive. So just prefacing that. And this client said, "Oh, I'm interested in this pro-metabolic..." I don't know what it was, but it was Dr.

[00:42:38] Christa Biegler, RD: Ray Peat. I think he's deceased. But it's just like a lovely ancestral diet, but there's one kind of racy detail that this client was wondering about, and it was Dr. Peat's he didn't recommend any omega-3s or 6s. And so there's always this kind of like nuance, and We have a few minutes to talk a little bit about omegas and inflammation related to omegas, et cetera, because you even have a maybe a [00:43:00] special place in your heart for some of that stuff.

[00:43:01] Christa Biegler, RD: But what would be a few of the tenets that you've found at Big Bold Health or some of the things... if think you said you were nearing 80. Did I hear you right when you said that? Yeah. 

[00:43:11] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: I had my 80th birthday on the 21st 

[00:43:13] Christa Biegler, RD: of March. Oh you look great, because I feel with I have parents that are between, 75 to 80, and I feel that this is a challenging decade.

[00:43:22] Christa Biegler, RD: It's in a decade where there's big changes very quickly. So maybe- Yeah ... you can answer that I feel like this is a funny time. I feel like a lot of thought leaders in functional medicine are aging, and so there is a growing interest in longevity medicine and aging.

[00:43:38] Christa Biegler, RD: Yes. So maybe you wanna just tell us some of the things that you are prioritizing more in the last five-plus years. 

[00:43:45] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Yeah, I think I can weave all of these things together- ... to get to your question. So let me give it a whirl and see if I can do that. So I wanna use a little bit of an anthropological approach to your questions.

[00:43:56] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And it's gonna lay, it's gonna interrelate to Dan Buettner's work [00:44:00] with Blue Zones and- 

[00:44:01] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Great ... long-lived populations. So how did we start off when once we became a society probably, say, a million and a half years ago, where we started to group together as tribes, and then later when we started to actually form cities?

[00:44:18] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And the city really only started when we had the availability of producing a reserve of food, which principally came from plants and came from the ability to harvest seeds and then put them in piles and store them. And then we could build a wall around that to defend it against other people who wanna steal it, and that became a city.

[00:44:38] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: The walled cities were the earliest cities that we can find, and this was somewhere, oh, 20, 25 to 30,000 years ago, let's say. Fairly recently in anthropological, theological terms. And then from that- What were the things that we were growing that we would feed to the first husbanded animals that we [00:45:00] would bring in and feed them and make them fat?

[00:45:04] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Those things were the wild cultivars. And the wild cultivars were the wild things that we could find out in the field that we were able to use our grasping thumbs to pick the seeds off the plant, and then we learned how to harvest it and to thresh it. And then these were generally, if we think about it, not the same looking type of seeds and grains that we consume today.

[00:45:30] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: These were beyond artisanal. They were the originals. And what did they look like? They looked like very dark black in color. They were very tough, hard to mill with a millstone. And the reason for it is that our ancient food that we grew in our first farms and made a reserve to make a city, were foods that had to be grown in the-- when they grew up in the wild, had to [00:46:00] defend themselves against the hostilities of nature.

[00:46:03] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: There were no pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, and they lived in really wild places with bad climates and bad water. Soils were lousy. And so they had to evolve to be able to survive in those environments, and they had to have really great immune systems. Yes, plants do have immune systems. And those black colors of those seeds were a result of the concentration in those particular foods of nutrients that were defending against the outside environment.

[00:46:35] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: They were the plant's immune system. And so they were basically things like various members of the polyphenol family. So if you look at the hulls or the husks of these original foods you will find that they were black in color. The original soybean was black soybean. 

[00:46:51] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: It was only through cultivation that we produced this higher yielding version of the yellow soybean, the one that we eat today.

[00:46:57] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Similarly, for [00:47:00] in my case, we spend a lot of time studying buckwheat. The original buckwheat was a very different cultivar called Himalayan Tartary buckwheat. Tartary meaning the distant Tartan district in China where it was originally found. And it's been husbanded for three thousand five hundred years, and it looks entirely different than the buckwheat we buy today, which is yellow color and much more easily milled.

[00:47:19] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So the original cultivars of things that people ate were really rich in these immune-active plant nutrients, things like anthrocyanidins, which is a member of the polyphenol family. And then they fed those to their animals. So the animals got those in their diet, and they put them into their meat, which we ate.

[00:47:37] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Now we roll forward to today, we have a whole different series of high-yield seeds that produce high-yield products on our fields that we feed to animals, like soy and, corn. And those are not the original cultivars. Those are the hybrid forms that give high yield, and they're resistant to herbicides and so forth.

[00:47:58] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And so the animals that eat those, they have a [00:48:00] whole different thing that goes on in their body with the concentration of those nutrients. And then we eat those animal foods, and we're way down on the food chain or up, however you want to look at it. And so we end up with a whole different story.

[00:48:13] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Now, if you then go and you look at the blue zone areas of the world, those people aren't necessarily eating the original cultivars. But what they are eating is the foods that happen to maintain the integrity of these immune-active nutrients, these polyphenols. And how do we know that?

[00:48:31] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Because their diets are very colorful. They have the reds and the blues and the yellows and the oranges and those colors are a conse- the natural colors, not the synthetic colors, are a result of these substances that are the immune defenders for the plant. And when you eat that, you get the immune defense in your body.

[00:48:49] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So that's what we actually started to understand when we took on this Himalayan turnip and buckwheat project, which we're now the only people in the United States who produce now what is [00:49:00] regenerative agriculture-approved Himalayan turnip buckwheat. It's been... It's a three five hundred-year-old food that was never found in the United States recently.

[00:49:07] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So we started asking the question, are we and our immune system the result of the way we've changed the way we husband, the way we grow, and the way we eat? And I think the answer is to some extent yes, because remember I said earlier, 40% of our immune patterning comes from what we eat. 40%. So that's a big component.

[00:49:30] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Now, a lot of other contributors, like how many viral infections do we have in our life? Are we carrying Epstein-Barr or cytomegalovirus? There are many other variables. But one of the big tuning knobs is diet, which is variable. We can change our diet. Now, let's go to the word diet The word diet is a four-letter word to me.

[00:49:49] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: I just used the word diet, shame on me. I try to completely avoid it in my vocabulary because once you use that word, it starts to connote that you have a lesson plan of some prescription that a person should eat [00:50:00] if they wanna be like you or they wanna be healthy. And it's always interesting to me 'cause a lot of people who have their own specific diets are people that themselves are not that healthy.

[00:50:09] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: They're not blue zone people, and they never get healthy with their diet. So it's not the diet, it's the food composition. You said it beautifully. It's the diversity of the personalities of foods that are sending signals to our body to create our resilience. That's a whole different thinking about what we eat.

[00:50:28] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So it's a food plan, it's not a diet. Diets don't stick. People don't stay on diets. I don't care whatever you wanna call the diet du jour, people won't stay on it. It's been proven. What will stick is if people will eat. And what will they eat? How will they make the selections of what they eat? And what we're trying to do with an immune rejuvenation kind of food plan is to teach them what foods they might wanna select to put in their diet that have these capabilities of talking to their genes.

[00:50:55] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: We're not gonna tell them what to gonna eat, we're gonna give them options that will [00:51:00] increase the firepower of their immune capability of being resilient. So I think it's a whole different philosophy, it's a different psychology, and to me, it's consistent with this anthropological history that goes back tens of thousands of years about how people kept healthy when they didn't have antibiotics and they didn't have modern medicine.

[00:51:18] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I agree. And it brings me back to I feel it was Karan Krishnan who maybe had these conversations with the podcast back in 2017. Just the importance of polyphenol-rich foods to feed the gut microbiome, lots of colors, seasonal eating. Those are some of my favorite premises that are aligned with what you were just saying.

[00:51:40] Christa Biegler, RD: It's but we all could use a little bit of a reawakening around that, and It's like how do we refresh ourselves with that every once in a while when we get... and I think there's all kinds of barriers that happen in life where it's like it's okay that some of the best things we can do are the simplest things as well, right?

[00:51:56] Christa Biegler, RD: And there's a lot of beautiful and powerful science behind it. We [00:52:00] are a little over our time, but I don't wanna let you off the hook on this little tiny omega question because quickly there was a story I heard about you at a dinner party on a cruise, I think, and you were talking to a fisherman, and then you asked him what he did he was talking about flash freezing the cod on the boat, and then you asked him what he was doing with the livers, and he was throwing them overboard. And so you said can you send me some liver, some of those livers?" And then you tested it. It was very pure. And so , you have your hand in this other processing company I think, right?

[00:52:31] Christa Biegler, RD: And the reason I know this is because I was talking to one of the provider, someone who uses this in their product. And the reason we got to talking about it was I love a good behind-the-scenes story, and I love this product. I always think "Wow, this is a really high-quality cod liver oil.

[00:52:46] Christa Biegler, RD: It's really fabulous." So I love the behind the scenes. I hope I'm getting this story right. Otherwise- 

[00:52:50] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: You're doing amazing. You're... That's amazingly accurate the 

[00:52:53] Christa Biegler, RD: way 

[00:52:54] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: you described it. Okay. 

[00:52:54] Christa Biegler, RD: All right. Yeah. Perfect. This is one of those, in addition to buckwheat, Dr. Bland has his hand also [00:53:00] in cod liver oil.

[00:53:00] Christa Biegler, RD: And so I guess the only last question I might have here is related to and it feels off on a tangent, but I can't let you off the hook. Talk about what inflammation does to our omega status in the body or fatty acid status in the body and how it affects cellular resilience. 

[00:53:16] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Yeah. Thank you.

[00:53:17] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So I'll try to be a little bit more tidy in my words here. So just to clarify, that cruise you were speaking about was actually my wife and I and our family, our hobby is boating. We live in the Pacific Northwest, and we've done 11 trips from Seattle to Alaska in our boat over the years.

[00:53:31] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Have- I think my wife and I have over 39,000 miles together in our boat. And so we meet a lot of interesting people, and that is what led me into meeting the owner of this fishing company that had these unique boats. And ultimately we became partners, and we developed this facility out in the Aleutian Islands at Dutch Harbor that's-

[00:53:48] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So it produces this interesting product, this fish oil, this omega-3 oil. Now, as it relates to the omega-3 story, what we've learned is that if you actually look at the full portfolio of different fatty acids [00:54:00] that are found in a cold water fish you'll find that it has a lot of omega-3s, not just EPA and DHA.

[00:54:09] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And those all relate to the structural integrity of the animal and its immune system. And so we got very interested in trying to study this in greater detail, and I had the privilege of meeting an individual at Harvard who was Mass General Hospital, who was investigating the inflammatory influence of omega-3s.

[00:54:29] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And he was doing... This is Charles Serhan, is his name. S-E-R-H-A-N. And Dr. Serhan had discovered within our bodies a unique substance, or family of substances actually called mareins, protectins, and resolvins, that were derived out of omega-3 fatty acids. Our body was making them through the immune system.

[00:54:52] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And it turns out that those secondary byproducts of the metabolism by our immune system of omega-3s [00:55:00] had about 1,000 times the inflammation resolving effect A greater than that of EPA and DHA. And at first, when he made this discovery, there was a lot of pushback in the field. People thought it was not true.

[00:55:11] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And I won't go into all the details, just say he got a lot of criticism. But over the years, many other investigators now have gone into the field, and he's continued to publish extensively, and it turns out this is a true story. And that in certain fish oils, when you actually don't overly process them by high heat and distillation and all that stuff, the original oils have pretty good concentrations of these, what are called pro-resolving mediators.

[00:55:38] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: The substances that are these quenching substances for inflammation. They're not anti-inflammatories in that they don't prevent inflammation. What they do is they quench the inflammatory process. They put the brakes on it. 'Cause inflammation is actually good to have. It's important, but it's controlling inflammation.

[00:55:54] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: That's the real challenge. So these pro-resolving mediators are sometimes called specialized [00:56:00] pro-resolving mediators or СПMs, are found in natural oils if they've not been overly processed. So it turns out that when we got involved with th-this Alaska project with my partner, and we started analyzing these native oils that we weren't overly processing that came out of our fish up there, that they were very high in these pro-resolving mediators.

[00:56:20] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And when we started studying them then in clinical trials looking at in-anti-inflammatory potential in people that had metabolic inflammation or inflammaging, we found that we could significantly reduce the inflammation patterns. So things like HSCRP and o-other markers of inflammation like systemic inflammatory index.

[00:56:40] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So we now feel that there's a lot more to the omega family story than just EPA and DHA. And what's happened in our field, obviously I've been in the nutrition products field now for the better part of 50 years, so this is not a new learning for me. But what happens is people get an idea, and then they take it to extreme.

[00:56:58] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So we got this idea [00:57:00] of EPA and DHA from the Greenland Inuit Eskimos, the work of Bang and Dyerberg, and then we started saying, "Oh, it must all be about the amount of EPA and DHA, so let's augment it by concentrating it from the natural oils." And to concentrate it, what you have to do is you have to chemically modify it.

[00:57:15] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: You have to remove it from its natural triglyceride form. You have to form then another ester form, like an ethyl ester form. Then you subject it to distillation at high temperature. Then you do all sorts of other things. I won't go through the whole process. 11 different steps.

[00:57:29] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: And then you get to this highly concentrated EPA and DHA. But that's not what we were eating that led people to have lower inflammation. We don't eat ester forms of highly concentrated chemically produced oils. And in fact, it's interesting. We have this big thing about seed oils now. If you wanna worry about seed oils, you should be worried about fish oils because they're processed by the same kind of processing, of deodorization and distillation and decolorization and winterizing and so forth.

[00:57:56] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: We're kind of excited because we're probably the only company in the world now that, [00:58:00] has this RFM and MSC certified sustainable fishery in Alaska with no fish farming, and we're producing something from the fish to the product that doesn't require all these steps of purification.

[00:58:10] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Awesome. That was great, and we could just keep talking. But we covered a lot. We covered some of these... You defined these new words that most people have not heard of yet, immunorejuvenation, inflammaging. I I sometimes go to Nutridyn conferences, and I think you speak for them, and they're always doing a conference on inflammaging, so I had heard that word before.

[00:58:32] Christa Biegler, RD: We kinda covered a large breadth of things, right? Dysbiosis, the 4R protocol, and of course our mutual favorite word, resilience. 

[00:58:40] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Lastly- Yeah ... I just want to say that people keep saying to me, "Jeff, can you put this all together in kind of a thoughtful, understandable fashion?"

[00:58:48] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So I do have a new book coming out in January '27 called The Nourished Gene- that hopefully incorporates all these ideas. And this time, I was smart enough or intelligent, wise enough [00:59:00] to get a co-writer who really can demythologize, hopefully, Jeff Bland, to make this more accessible- ... to a general reader.

[00:59:06] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: So that book will be coming out in the first of the year. 

[00:59:09] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Beautiful. Until then, where can people find you online or your work online? 

[00:59:15] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: Yeah three places. You can have jeffreybland.com. That's my own website. You can have bigboldhealth.com. That's where you'll learn about all these products I was talking about, the Himalayan cherry bark, krill, and fish oils, and also at the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute, which is plminstitute.org, where we have all of my seminars and education materials free of charge you can download, so any one of those three.

[00:59:37] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on today. 

[00:59:40] Dr. Jeffrey Bland: My great privilege. You're a wonderful interviewer, and you're spreading a really great message. Keep up the great work. 

[00:59:46] Christa Biegler, RD: Oh, thank you.