104. Dr. Jeffrey Bland: The Science of Immune Rejuvenation and Aging in Reverse

What if your immune system could actually age backwards? For decades, we've accepted that inflammation, fatigue, and slower recovery are inevitable with age, but new research proves otherwise. Your immune system isn't doomed to decline; it can be retrained to act younger, stronger, and more resilient. In this episode of Extend, I sit down with Dr. Jeffrey Bland, the father of functional medicine, to explore the groundbreaking science of immune rejuvenation. We break down how chronic inflammation accelerates aging, why gut health holds the key to immune balance, and the nutrients that can literally reprogram gene expression. We also discuss how a 90-day nutrition protocol led to a 47% reduction in immune aging, and what that means for your longevity. Dr. Jeffrey Bland is widely recognized as the father of functional medicine, a thought leader who's spent over 40 years redefining how we understand health and disease. He's the founder of the Institute for Functional Medicine and Big Bold Health, where he's pioneering new research on immune rejuvenation and personalized nutrition. We Also Discuss: (00:00) The birth of functional medicine and how it reshaped modern healthcare (08:45) Why traditional medicine overlooks the body's interconnected systems (18:22) How your immune system drives aging, resilience, and recovery (28:09) The gut-immunity connection and why inflammation accelerates aging (38:40) The science behind reversing immune aging and restoring balance (49:33) How diet and polyphenols influence immune gene expression (01:00:18) The epigenetic switch that controls healthy aging (01:11:42) Data, biomarkers, and the rise of personalized health (01:25:30) The future of collective health and community immunity (01:36:39) How to apply immune rejuvenation principles in your daily life Thank You for Our Sponsors: Pendulum: Use code DARSHAN or use the link https://pendulumlife.com/discount/DARSHAN to get 20% off Pendulum membership first orders. Learn more about Dr. Shah: Website: https://www.drshah.com/ Clinic: https://www.next-health.com/ Instagram:@darshanshahmd https://www.instagram.com/darshanshahmd/ Learn more about Dr. Jeff Bland: Instagram: @drjeffreybland https://www.instagram.com/drjeffreybland/Big Bold Health: @bigboldhealth https://www.instagram.com/bigboldhealth/?hl=e Website: https://bigboldhealth.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Welcome to Extend with me, Dr. Darshan Shah, a podcast dedicated to cutting-edge science, research, tools, and protocols designed to help you extend your health span. Having become one of the youngest doctors in the country at the age of 21, and trained and board-certified at the Mayo Clinic, I've accumulated three decades of practice as a board-certified surgeon and longevity expert. Over that time, I've discovered that a mere 20% of health knowledge yields 80% of the results when it comes to your health span. We're living in a new era where we are creating a new healthcare system, no longer focused on disease management, but achieving optimal health and vitality. Join me as I interview world-renowned experts, offering you a step-by-step guide to proactively avoid disease, and most importantly, extend your health span.

• 0:49Dr. Darshan Shah?

  What if the key to reversing chronic disease wasn't found in prescriptions, but in a complete rethinking of how we define medicine itself today? For decades, our healthcare system has chased symptoms instead of solving problems. But what if we could shift from treating illness to cultivating resilience at a cellular level? In this episode, I am deeply honored to sit down with Dr. Jeffrey Bland. He's a legendary biochemist, educator, and the father of functional medicine. We're going to explore how a root-caused systems biology approach is transforming chronic disease care. We're also going to dive into the origin of functional medicine and go all the way to immunorejuvenation, and talk about mitochondria in your immune system, and why mindset actually matters in helping you get better.

• 1:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  We're going to try to get Dr. Bland to share his daily habits and his purpose-driven philosophy that keeps his biological age decades younger than a chronicological one. Dr. Jeffrey Bland is one of the most influential figures in modern healthcare. He's a former professor of biochemistry, and he's a longtime collaborator of the Nobel Prize laureate Linus Pauling. He's the founder of both the Institute of Functional Medicine and the Personal Lifestyle Medicine Institute. Today, through his company called Big Bold Health, he's pioneering the science of immune resilience and longevity. I'm honored to be having this conversation with someone who's actually changed the trajectory of my career with his book, Disease Delusion. This actually launched my personal transformation

• 2:18Dr. Darshan Shah?

  and my new career in functional medicine and next health today. Join me in welcoming Dr. Jeffrey Bland to the Extend Podcast.

• 2:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Dr. Bland, I have chills that you're sitting in this chair right now. I told you earlier, but I want to repeat it for the listeners of this podcast. The reason this podcast exists, the reason Next Health exists, is basically you. You are the foundation of what we've created here. When I read your book 11 years ago, Coming from Allopathic Medicine, it completely changed not just my personal life and my health story, but also invigorated me to change my career into following functional medicine and what you taught me, basically. And if it wasn't for you and Dr. Mark Hyman, none of this would be here right now. So I'm really honored and thankful that you're here, and I have chills that you're here in this chair.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Well, Darshana, I mean, literally, I'm speechless. I mean, to have someone who has had your history, your experience, your depth of commitment to the field of medicine, and the number of patients that you have and will continue to provide service for, it makes everything I've been trying to do the last 40 years make sense. So, thank you so much. Really appreciate your acknowledgement.

• 3:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I really, you know, if it wasn't for functional medicine, the way I look at functional medicine is it's a brand-new thought in how we should be thinking about our health and medicine in general. And you and I have talked about this, you know, we have this allopathic sick care, disease care model that serves this purpose and is doing really, really well at what it was meant to do, but it was never really meant to reverse chronic disease, avoid chronic disease. And what you talk about all the time is feeling great, feeling like we belong in our bodies.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 4:08Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right? It was never meant to do that for us, and so we need something new, a new thought, a new model. And you created it. You've literally, you know, molded this into existence with your books and your teachings. And not only do I want to thank you, but I would love to hear kind of the genesis of the thought in your mind and how this came about, where you started to look at medicine in a different way.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  So I think that this the start for me has been really a consequence like so many of our shared experiences of people we have the privilege to meet, to be mentored by, to be informed by, to be challenged by. And I started off as a medical school professor and I was, you know, my life was going to be dedicated to research and development. And I recognized that a lot of the questions I was really interested in knowing were related to why do people get chronic illness. We'd done a pretty good job in understanding the origin of a communicable disease, infectious disease, but there was a big mystery around, you know, how you got coronary artery disease, how you got diabetes type two, how you got

• 5:11Speaker 01

  autoimmune disease, how you got dementia. And actually, when I started in my academic role in 1970 as a professor, the origin at the mechanistic level of those conditions were not known at all. It was still, believe it or not, the concept of cell biology was still in its infancy. So I felt I was at the right time at the right place because I kept asking that question. And it eventually led me to an opportunity to do a sabbatical experience that I was invited to do with Dr. Linus Pauling, two-time Nobel Prize winner in Palo Alto at Stanford. And Dr. Pauling's stewardship and his mentorship of me, his office was right next to mine, so I had a lot of informal conversations with him. And

• 5:56Speaker 01

  he was so much more than just the vitamin C guy. He was, he and his wife Helen, who was a remarkable force of nature in her own right, were about all sorts of freedom of ideas of, you know, really looking how you democratize information, how you how you look at the body in a different way. And, you know, he developed this, what he called orthomolecular medicine. Right. Utilizing things that were natural to the body that an individual needs to promote help, not just prevent disease. And that got me deeply committed, so committed, I can still remember this moment. So we had spent two years, I moved my family down to Palo Alto. My kids at that point were fairly young, one in junior high school, the other

• 6:36Speaker 01

  than elementary school, and an infant son. And so we had them in the car, I was packing up my books and stuff from my office in the institute with Dr. Pauling. He came up to me and he said, "Well, we really enjoyed the couple of years you've been here, Jeff, and I hope we'll continue to do some collaborative work together." And then as the parting comment, he said, "And Jeff, just one question. Do you think your classroom is big enough?"

• 7:01Dr. Darshan Shah?

  No.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  That was the last question. And then I got in the car to drive 1,100 miles home with my family, thinking about this the whole way. What was this question all about? And by the time I got home, I recognized what he was really asking me was, was there a bigger calling than just my 100 students a year and doing my research? Was there something else that I should do? And so, when I got home, my parents had been transferred from Southern California to watch our house in the two years that were gone. My dad retired as an aerospace engineer. And so, we hugged one another. We're happy to see them. And then we sat down in the living room, I remember, and I said to my parents, I said, "So, I made a decision on the way up, and that is I'm giving up my tenured faculty position.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  And I'm going to start something that is going to focus on how to teach doctors to do nutritional medicine in their practice." And you could have heard a pen drop. My dad said, "You know, you do have a family. Like, you do have a mortgage. You do have the reality, and you know nothing about business whatsoever," which is true. "How you intend on doing this?" And I said, "You know, I really don't know, but I have this extraordinary passion to take the resources that I've been given and see if I can manifest this." And so, that was the start. And from that, you know, that was 1982. So, from 82 on, it was like, "Okay, we're fully in. We burned the boats. There's no going back, so here we go." So, that's how it all kind of occurred.

• 8:28Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That's incredible. From that one comment, it's so amazing to me how one sentence can change a complete trajectory in your life, you know? And so, it's, and coming from some Nobel Prize-winning scientists directly to you, I mean, I could see that transfer of destiny from him to you that occurred there.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's that's really how I felt. I felt I was guided almost like I had been given a responsibility. And, you know, he was such a good mentor, so for thousands of people. I mean, I was just one of many, but but I I think what I saw in my relationship with him, because he had so many people coming from around the world that were luminaries to visit him. And so I had the benefit of meeting many of these people and having conversations with them and kind of looking at the world from a different lens than I I was trained in the pathology model. And I recognized that there was an opportunity here to do something. And then, of course, from eighty two on, then I credit my wife, actually, in eighty seven, saying, Jeff, you know, you're traveling around the world, you're having all these conversations with these luminaries. You know, you're kind of fully engaged in this field.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  You always talk about these remarkable people you're meeting. Maybe we should put a meeting together and you should bring, say, thirty or forty of these people together and talk about what could the healthcare system be if you took away licensure and reimbursement, just in an idealized sense, a whiteboard discussion. So she put the meeting together. It was in Victoria, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island. And about forty of my colleagues we invited from different disciplines to come in. And it was a remarkable three days, and we had such a blast, just free-flowing ideas. And at the end of it, people said, hey, we ought to do this again. So she put the meeting again, the same place the next year. And I had, you know, this kind of concept of a dream on the the night before the last day. And and I was dreaming about what this all meant.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  And and I I came up to the concept that we're talking about function. And then I thought, well, what is function? It's physical, it's metabolic, it's cognitive, it's emotional. Maybe this is where we really should land, is understanding what it is that determines function in individuals. Because when a person talks about health, they're really talking not about the absence of disease, they're talking about the presence of function. So I came back to the group the next morning, the Sunday morning of the last day of the meeting. And I said, hey, I think we ought to, if we're going to do something around this, we ought to call it functional medicine. And everyone said, well, that's a creative idea, Jeff, but I don't think it's a good idea. Because at that point in time, function in medicine had really a negative connotation. It was either geriatric rehabilitative medicine, or it was psychosomatic medicine.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  It's a functional condition, it's all in your mind. And I said, well, that's true historically, but I've been following the literature very carefully. And I see like functional endocrinology, functional cardiology, functional radiology. Maybe we're going to see a redefinition of the term function based on what the new technology is bringing. So I suggest that we skate to where the puck is going, to use an old allegory. So everybody, probably because we sponsored the meeting, everybody said, okay, let's give it a whirl. We'll try function. So that was the birthing of the functional medicine concept. We started the institute in 1990.

• 11:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That's incredible. And you talk about the functions of the human body. It goes beyond just, like you said, muscular skeletal function, but you define like four critical levers of that, which are kind of the basis of everything that's kind of built on top of that. Could you just dive into those concepts a little bit more?

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you. Once we kind of all aggregated around this concept of function and we started to more deep dive in it, we were meeting with a kind of a steering group of the illiterati, I would call them. Every week we would have, this is before internet, and we'd have discussions about what does function mean? And what are the fundamental physiological processes that give rise to function? And what do we learn from the literature? And so we started having stacks of research papers that we could segment and say, okay, these are related to that function. These are related to that function. We ultimately landed on key physiological processes. And we said, well, maybe these are the places that we, if we go upstream and look at root cause, maybe this is where we ought to be talking and doing deep drilling.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Out of that then, and this is probably the thing that I'm most proud of, because we eventually were able to convert those kind of theoretic landscapes into clinical actions in the areas that we thought were able to be intervened and we could teach to those concepts. The first was gastrointestinal restoration, which we developed what we called the 4R program, remove, replace, re-inoculate, repair. And I'm really proud of that algorithm because it's been adopted by literally, I don't know, thousands of different clinicians and millions of people have benefited from that. And so that was our number one. And then number two is I really got interested in how the body manages endo and exotoxins.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  And because we know if we didn't have a way of doing that, we would all be toxic pretty quickly. We'd poison ourselves. So we really did a deep dive into the metabolic detoxification process and really formalized that through understanding the genes of the cytochrome P450 enzyme systems and phase two conjugases and really started to look at hepatic detoxification and gastrointestinal function. And so that led to the second core concept, which was metabolic detoxification. That led me in 1990, I was very, very interested in bioenergetics. And I said, you know, where does the energy of the body derive its function? And that led us into the bailiwick or the milieu of the mitochondria. And I found out that people weren't talking about the mitochondria.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  It was a very esoteric cell biology concept. And I said, no, I think we need to dig deep into the mitochondria. It has its own extranuclear DNA. It has its own information system. Maybe we should really understand how the mitochondria, and this was during the time of post-viral fatigue syndrome, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and we found that those were related to fatigue-related mitochondrial issues. We came up with what was called chronic mitochondropathy, suggesting that maybe this was something you could intervene against. And so that led us then into development of the third kind of concept, which was mitochondrial resuscitation using intervention. And then the fourth, which now it's still in process, and I'm quite excited about is

• 14:38Speaker 01

  kind of maybe the root cause of many of the chronic illnesses, and that's a dysfunction of the immune system. And so we now are in immune rejuvenation is the fourth concept. And you put those together, now we have not only teachable concepts, but clinical practice concepts that people can actually do in their practices.

• 14:56Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's such a different way of thinking, because I feel like when I went to medical school and I learned, went through residency, it was really just kind of getting to the end of these processes and the disease they caused. And then what can we do to kind of patch up the broken items in your anatomy and your biology with pharmaceuticals and surgeries and things like that? And we never really thought about, where does this all kind of originate from at the root cause level? And, you know, to your point, and I've heard you say this many times, is, you know, there's thousands of diseases out there. But they all come down to these root biological

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Causes, right? And so when someone is trying to avoid disease, obviously, or even reverse chronic disease, we can start working on these root biological causes. But I always say the side effect of working on these root causes is that you feel incredible again. You feel like you have your vitality back.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  I think you really said it beautifully there, that the concept of self reinforcing, because people have fairly short patience on intervention. So you have to have something that people can measure in their bodies that's producing positive results in a measurable time. I would say two to three weeks. A person needs to say that whatever they're doing is paying some dividends. So the nice thing about functional medicine interventions is people can really experience in their body what we call the felt state. They feel better, sleep better, more energy, more clear mind, less chronic kind of nagging things that keep their quality of life from being fully expressed. So we really found that this could be, something could be adopted across a full range.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Everything from, I find people doing functional medicine in the emergency room, to care centers, to nutritionists, to, it's applicable across many different theaters.

• 16:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, right. And since you put together some of these original core concepts, have you added more to these core concepts? Or are those still the basis of all of the functional medicine interventions?

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Thank you. That's, that's a really great question. Because now functional medicine, if you think that we founded the institute in 1990, so it's 34 or 5 years old. We really have been looking at, you know, what's the new discoveries telling us? And I'm very proud to say that those seven core physiological processes that we discussed in the 90s are still reigning true today. Now, we've learned a lot more about them and we have subtypes of them. But we haven't expanded the seven core physiological processes. So I'm very proud when I wrote the book, The Disease Delusion, and I talked about those seven core processes. That if I was to write a new chat, a new edition of the book,

• 17:31Speaker 01

  I would still stay with the seven core processes, because that gets a good launching pad.

• 17:35Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, that is amazing. And it just goes to the rigor of your science that you put into this originally, that you really dove deep into the science to come up with those core processes. When I was saying four levers, what I was talking about is the levers that you sometimes talk about between the brain-body connection, et cetera. And so

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. Yeah, I think that one of the things that I think people found maybe attractive, engaging about this functional medicine model is that we introduced the concept of systems biology. And I owe Lee Hood, who was at Caltech and later went to the University of Washington, was wooed away by Gates to form an institute at the University of Washington, and then he broke away from the University of Washington, formed his own institute for systems biology in Seattle. But his contribution to this concept of formalizing systems thinking in medicine, I owe a great amount of appreciation and respect for. And I've been very privileged over the last 20 years to have collegial relationship with

• 18:37Speaker 01

  the Institute for Systems Biology and with Dr. Hood specifically. And the concept of the fact that organs are interconnected, that we don't, you know, the way we study them often in school is one organ at a time, we close the textbook and take a test, and then we move to the next organ, as if they were suddenly, you know, separate one from the other. And anatomically, they may be separate, but physiologically, they're all cross-talking, they're communicating. So you have the gut-brain-immune connection, and you say, oh, hold it just a minute, how does that work? Well, we have all these signaling molecules, and we have these receptors that are in the body that have cross-talk of information across different molecules, like hormones, or peptides, or cytokines, or prostaglandins, or leukotrienes, or I can go down the list of many, many different modulators.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  And each of those are cross-talking to create not just action at one organ, but they're telling the body what to do. And of course, we know that the gut, which has 70% of the immune system clustered around it, is a pretty important part of the signaling system. And one thing we know over the gut is, over the course of living, a person will eat somewhere on the range, probably in the range of 10 tons of food. And that food contains information. It's not just calories. It's information that speaks to the immune system that's sitting in our gut, that then communicates to the whole body. So if a person has gluten sensitivity, for instance, they may have a higher risk of dementia. Why? Because that produces an inflammatory activity of the immune system that signals through the liver,

• 20:06Speaker 01

  that has its own immune system, the cuter cells, and then signals through the macrophages in the blood. This signals through the blood-brain barrier to the brain's immune system, which is the microglia. Now you then produce oxidative injury to the neurons, and now you have dementia. So by looking at these things as web-like interactions, we're able to start to piece together a much more comprehensive treatment program than just treat one organ at a time by itself. I think that's the whole theme of the functional medicine model.

• 20:33Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, and when we look at systems biology, what I find a lot in my patients, and also just in doctors in general, we tend to disconnect all the systems. And the one system we really disconnect from most of our biology is the interaction of our brain with everything that goes on underneath our neck. And people don't realize the amount of connection there is. Probably the most connected system between the brain and our biology through the vagus nerve, through the immune system as well. And so we know through even just recent science that the brain is able to, even just with emotion, modulate our immune system as well. It's super interesting to me.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  Well, I think, again, you said something there that is really profound, and it's kind of deserves a moment of expansion.

• 21:20Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, please.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  So I think for years in biology and medicine, there was a very deep schism between social sciences and the physical and biological sciences. And, you know, having grown up in the biological sciences, I have to say I carry this bias, saying, well, the social sciences are soft science. You know, we have the hard science. We have the molecular science. And we know about the materialization of different molecules and influence different cells in different ways. So we're on the real science side, and those guys are on the kind of soft science side. But now we've completely seen the breakdown of that synthetic differentiation, because we recognize that... These signals that we have in our life, love, attribution,

• 22:05Speaker 01

  a sense of purpose, a sense of togetherness, a feeling of worthiness, or the opposite of that, which is to feel isolated and feel unsupported, that those emotions are as powerful as any materialistic molecules in modulating the receptors that then translate themselves into how our genes perform. And so now there's no differentiation between what we considered previously the soft sciences and the hard sciences of molecules. They transmit themselves through the same exact pathways and the same regulatory systems in the body. So to me, this has opened up the opportunity to do, you know, what some people call holistic care, but it then provides a unified understanding

• 22:48Speaker 01

  of how important it is if we're going to really aspire and achieve health that we need to bring all these components together. We need to live in a world that supports us. We need to be present in a environment that's not exposing us to toxic substances that are causing our body to be in an alarm state. We need to be able to have freedom to provide oxygen to our cells and to gain muscular energy that's necessary for powering up the mitochondria that keeps us alive. We need to eat food that is nourishing and not foods that were sent to us by some high-profit system that is to our demise. All of those things become part of the signaling system that then is picked up by our body and translates into how we physiologically respond.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  And right now, the dominant, I'm just saying what you know and do so well, the dominant conditions we have are inflammatory conditions. And what is inflammation? It's the body's response to danger.

• 23:42Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  And it's the body saying, oh, I'm feeling in hostility. I need to fight back against danger. And danger can come from many different things, from petrochemical, forever chemicals, or it can come from people who are enraged at us, or it can come from lack of love attribution. It can come from lousy diets. All of those can create an alarm response in the body that then the total load effect of those, it's like filling a barrel eventually runs over the top, and now we start getting all these chronic conditions. It can manifest as heart disease, dementia, diabetes, arthritis, all these various complaints.

• 24:15Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, this brings it all together. And so this kind of a unified model, that it seems like the immune system is kind of at the center of this model almost, because it's really communicating with every other piece of the model to translate these signals.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  I think you, again, really appreciate the way you're leading me down this path because that was my aha learning curve. And I sat, I'm 79 years old now and I've been in this field now for 50 years, actually.

• 24:40Dr. Darshan Shah?

  You're not biologically 79.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  No, I'm not. No, fortunately, according to the data, I'm 17 years younger biologically.

• 24:47Dr. Darshan Shah?

  We're gonna learn how you make that happen later in the podcast.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  So, so the, the theme, you know, that has really been through this whole process of learning for me is what is the ultimate root cause of all these conditions that people are suffering from? And there are many variables that play roles in here, but I think they roll up to how the body is sensing the outside world 24/7/365. And there's only two places that the body has the sensing of the outside world continuously, whether asleep or awake, and that is the nervous system and the immune system. The thing about the immune system, which is, I think, fascinating, is the immune system is in every other system in our body. You know, the heart is not in the lungs, the lungs is not in the liver, but the immune system is in every system. So you say, well, why?

• 25:35Speaker 01

  It's because it's the signaling system that's picking up information from the outside world and it's creating a system, even in muscles, there's an immune system in muscles, myokines are the outcome. And so our body is picking up information, translated through the immune system, and you say, well, isn't that true in the nervous system as well? And yes, it is, because the immune system and the nervous system are directly cross talking. But the immune system has a unique personality of turning over very rapidly. And people don't know, but in a healthy individual, like you and I sitting here, presumably both healthy, every second, our body's making 1 million new immune cells, every second. And you say, whoa, gee whiz, okay, so what's that all about?

• 26:17Speaker 01

  It means that 1 million of them are leaving and 1 million of them are coming in. So are the ones that are coming in, are they better, worse, or the same as the one they're replacing? And every three months, if you do the math, we're kind of replacing our whole immune system every three months. So is it better, worse, or the same? And unfortunately, if you look at the data from immunological research... In America, our immune systems get worse over time. And so we're less vital, less, more, more inflammaging.

• 26:45Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  And, and so is that inevitable? Is that like, well, that's the way it is and you can't do anything about it? The answer is no. Immunology, the last seven years, has now discovered that there are these routes and pathways to rejuvenate the immune system, to actually turn back that clock and to create a healthier, younger immune system that is more resilient and capable. So when I start thinking about where would I want to put my attention here at the end of my career, I want to learn more about how we actually can use the immune system to become our friend and not our enemy.

• 27:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  And, and that is this whole nature, really, which is occupying pretty much all of my waking hours, maybe a lot of my sleeping hours, is figuring out how to do that.

• 27:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  We thank you for doing that because, I mean, if we can have methodologies and protocols that we can put into place in our lives to have some control over this immuno-aging process and actually stop it or even reverse it, that could be a massive boost to our health and our longevity. And so, I mean, this is an area of science that my, from my perspective in medicine, the immune system has always been a black box. Like, we only even think about the immune system in two cases. One is fighting infection.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 27:56Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And the other one is autoimmune disease, right? And other than that, you're really not taught much about the immune system at all. But it is, to your point, the most important system. It's everywhere in our body. And not only is it sensing the outside world, but, and what a lot of people don't see or feel is, it's constantly sensing the inside world as well, right?

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right.

• 28:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And translating all those signals.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Well, you know, Darshan, I think what you said there is, again, another drop the mic, uh, drop the mic statement, because I believe even medical doctors don't fully understand the, the pluri-potentiality, the, the magnificent portfolio of effects that the immune system has. And just this week, in Science Magazine, arguably one of the top science journals in the English-speaking world, had a special issue. And it was on the non-traditional immune system. The cover of that issue is dedicated and the article's in it.

• 28:49Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I'm gonna pick this up.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  And, and when I read the, of course, for me, this was like a kid in a candy store, and it was like, oh my word. And as I read it... I recognize they're speaking exactly to where we are focusing our attention because the non-traditional immune system is beyond that of protection against infectious disease. It is actually recycling tissues, it's rebuilding tissues, it's a functional health system, it's not just defending solely against infection. And this is where the action point now is occurring in immunology research is to understand how that works. How does the innate and the adaptive immune system and your T-lymphocyte portfolio, how do they actually work within these organs to rejuvenate them?

• 29:33Speaker 01

  And so we're witnessing a fantastic revolution in how we can harness the immune system. Now, this really, I think, first arrived out of precision cancer therapy. You think of CAR-T therapy and some of the things that are done, these miraculous new treatments using the immune system to treat cancer. And we started to learn that actually you can turn on the immune system to be able to kill a cancer cell. And so it has this capability being turned on and off if you do the right things. Now, if you turn it on too much, it can overtake the body and you can actually die by an overactive immune system. So you want a balanced response of the immune system, but that's what good diet and lifestyle does. It works within the boundaries of rejuvenating the immune system without overly stimulating

• 30:18Speaker 01

  the immune system. So to me, this is where the action point is, personalized immunity and then really intervening so that an individual can roll back the age of their immune system. In fact, the biological age of our immune system has been defined as the principal best predictor of our age of death. And so you want that immune system to be as young as possible for as long as possible. You look at centenarians, people in the blue zones, in their 100-year age that are still healthy, and they have very young immune systems, by the way they've treated themselves.

• 30:48Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah. It's an interesting fact for people to know, and just to double-click on the science here a little bit, is that you said the immune system, we're making a million new cells, is it a day?

• 30:58Speaker 01

  A second.

• 30:59Dr. Darshan Shah?

  A second. A million new cells a second. There is no other cell type in our body that's doing that, right?

• 31:04Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 31:05Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And so it turns over every three to four months as well. So we have the ability to influence the production of these new cells and the cells of our immune system in a way that we have Very little ability in any other cell type in our body.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 31:20Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right?

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 31:21Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And so if we were to able to focus our scientific knowledge and attention on this particular cell, this particular system, we can make much more headway than trying to regenerate new neurons, for example.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Extremely hard to do. And it's just somewhere where, I don't know why, we just haven't spent more attention on this. It's just mind blowing to me. Like, this is where we can have some direct influence with our day-to-day habits, our lifestyle, our inputs that we're putting into our body every single day.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Well, again, I think you're introducing the people that are following this podcast to a concept that we would say seems so obvious, but it's only within the last 10 years that the research scientists in immunology have been able to find the mechanisms by which this occurs. So this is new stuff.

• 32:09Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  And it's really interesting to me when I kind of follow the theme that you're developing there, that if we look at how the immune system rejuvenates itself, the process involves diet at a very significant level.

• 32:24Dr. Darshan Shah?

  True.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Because it turns out, and I'm going to give you the real numbers that best I can say from the literature, 40 to 60% of our immune system patterning, how it gets programmed, comes from our diet.

• 32:36Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That's incredible.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  40 to 60%. So people say, well, the diet is kind of important. Yeah, it's kind of like really important because it's sending signals to our immune system. So you look at autoimmune disease.

• 32:47Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  So first of all, I don't think the term autoimmune disease is an appropriate term because it suggests that a person's immune system on some day woke up to say, we don't like you anymore.

• 32:59Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  And we're going to attack your body. And that never seemed very reasonable to me as to why suddenly a body would so dislike itself that it would start attacking itself, even at the level of its genetic information, it could form antibodies against DNA. And like, the most intimate thing is to be allergic to your DNA. That's like, ooh, that's not a good story. So I started really looking at this pretty intensively over 20 years ago. And what I came to recognize is that the immune system It's not actually reacting to the body itself. It's reacted reacting to the body has been transformed. So it's non-self. Now, how does that happen? Let me give an example. We know that people that have type 2 diabetes or who have diabetes often get autoimmune disease. So why is that?

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Because their body proteins have undergone damage because of the high sugar in their body. The sugar reacts to proteins. And once it reacts with proteins, it forms a new kind of protein. That's not it's a foreigner to the body. And then the immune system says, oh, hold on, you shouldn't be here. I'm going to attack you. So you get an autoimmune response. And those are actually called advanced glycosylation end products or ages. And the receptors are called the receptors of advanced glycosylated end products. So let's look at the acronym. Advanced glycosylating products, AGE, A G E. Exactly. And the receptors are are AGE. So they're enraged. Right. When you have these foreign molecules. So if you have a lot of sugar in your body and it's reacting with your proteins,

• 34:28Speaker 01

  it's forming new, not you, new molecules that your body is now going to, an immune system find, it shouldn't be there and respond to it. So if I go down the list of all the autoimmune diseases and start looking at thyroiditis, what do we know about autoimmune thyroiditis? We know it's very heavily involved with the exposure to toxins. Why? Because you form altered toxin adducts or what are chemical reactions of petrochemical byproducts with the various proteins that are associated with thyroid function. And now your immune system says, oh, we're going to attack those foreign proteins. So it's not you. It's a non-self reaction. So how do you clean that up? You get rid of the bad stuff. Right. And you you you control blood sugar. You control the exposure to toxins.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  You start to improve your detoxification. You clean up your gut. And now, lo and behold, those people that have, quote, autoimmune start having their symptoms go away. Right. We had a patient that was so severely injured. This was a 38-year-old woman. She was a mother of four. And she had this this autoimmune disease called erythromyalgia. It was so severe that she couldn't actually even stand up for more than a few. So when she first came into this research project that she was recruited into, she had three wishes. She wished she could stand at the kitchen counter to form a meal for her kids. She wished she could go out and plant her garden in the spring. And she wished she could go to the mall and go shopping with her kids. Those were her three magic

• 35:57Speaker 01

  wand wishes. She was taking a host of medications that would stop an elephant in full flight. And she was still very, very severely ill. So we got her on this cold concept, this program to take away the bad stuff and give her the good stuff. And over time, she was, first of all, very compliant and stayed on the program very religiously, but she was also a remarkable responder. So I could see as she was coming into the office for her visits that she was improving. And at first, you know, her husband would have to help her in to be mobile enough to get to the waiting room. And then she started being, you know, I could watch. She was having nimble, you know, her step was more nimble. And then she

• 36:40Speaker 01

  basically started with her rheumatologist decreasing her medications and eventually got to where she was on virtually no medications at all. And then the gracious moment that sometimes we're fortunate to have is she came back in about six months later and she wanted to give a kind of an award to the principal docs in our clinic that were servicing her. And when it was unwrapped, it was a framed photograph of her standing at the top of Mount Si, which is this very challenging hike outside of Seattle up to the top of this peak, holding up a sign saying, "Thank you, Dr. Jack, Indiana," who were the therapists

• 37:25Speaker 01

  she had. And she had walked up there by herself.

• 37:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That's incredible.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  So these are the things, you only need a few of those in your life to keep you really motivated. So this is the type of thing that we're talking about of changing the equation.

• 37:37Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah. It goes back to the beginning of the conversation where she got her function back. She could use her body. She could use her brain. It's just mind blowing. It reminds me of, you know, when I was a young surgeon, we would have many patients with autoimmune colitis. This is before the biologics were out. And we did a lot of colectomies and we subjected people to a lot of, it was called stomas, where the end of their colon comes out of their skin. And that's the, I mean, they're basically using a bag for the rest of their life. And I remember thinking like, why is this happening to so many people? And the answer was always, well, it's an autoimmune disease. The body's attacking the colon and we just don't know why.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And the only way to treat this is with steroids or with surgery. And then they added biologics to that equation, which saved a lot of people from surgery. But steroids and biologics just basically are meant to take your immune system out of the equation. And I just think back at the number of people that had to go through that terrible surgery without the knowledge of functional medicine. Because if we had put into our brains in medical school that the overactivation of the immune system was due to not some sort of genetic abnormality, where we are just somehow becoming allergic to ourselves, to use your words. It's actually, our immune system is overactive trying to fight toxins or rages or multiple other factors.

• 39:01Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And if we can eliminate those, we can dampen the immune system, get the immune system back to normal, not dampen it normal, we would have avoided so many unnecessary surgeries.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  I'm so, I have goosebumps just hearing you talk about this because this was really the motivation for me to kind of give up my tenured faculty position and start on this path. And one of the things that I recall in 1985, actually, it just hit me, was the first lecture I ever gave to doctors in a seminar on dysbiosis, leaky gut. And this is before we even had the knowledge of the microbiome that we have today. And we were using simple tools like probiotics and prebiotics and starting to re-nourish the gut microbiome. We didn't call it the microbiome back then, we just called it dysbiosis. And I recall the criticism that we got from gastroenterology saying,

• 39:54Speaker 01

  "Come on, there's no such thing as dysbiosis, there's no such things as leaky gut, there's no such thing as postprandial endotoxemia, that doesn't exist." And now there are thousands of articles in the traditional gastroenterological literature on this very topic. But it took quite a few years to get the paradigm to shift over. And so, some of these things, if we just stay at task and you continue to do the work and you watch people respond, that's the proof of the pudding.

• 40:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Absolutely. I'd love to, since you mentioned it, I'd love to dive into a little bit more about this concept of prospandial endotoxemia and leaky gut. I think it's so important and, you know, I appreciate you saying that this is becoming more mainstream. What I see in clinical practice, when I see patients coming to us because they're just struggling so much with their gut health is unfortunately is not spread as far as we would hope right now. We still have primary care doctors and even gastroenterologists saying, well, that's not a thing. You, all these elimination diets are just woo woo. And unfortunately, like, you know, we're, we have to show them. We have to give them the science and re-educate many physicians. But I'd love for you to just kind of dive into the listeners of this podcast.

• 41:08Dr. Darshan Shah?

  If they're struggling with their gut health, what is prospandial endotoxemia? What is leaky gut? And how can they benefit from your protocol, the four R protocol to fix that? I'd love to take a little quick sidebar here and talk about that because it's so important.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, you know, some things that are so simple can have very profound effects if you just open up your thought process. And this is one of those because the, the concept that we're eating all these foreign molecules, unless you're a cannibal, you're eating foods that are not the same as your body. So your digestive tract has a responsibility for breaking those down into forms that the body sees as friend and not foe. And you're also feeding the literally hundreds of different species of bacteria that are living in your intestinal tract, the so-called microbiome, that have their own personalities and, and they produce their own byproducts from their metabolism.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  And the full weight of all of that then ultimately is on this very thin lining of our intestinal tract, the GI mucosa, which is just millimeters thick, that then has the responsibility for translating the information from friend to foe. And you would say, well, hold it just a minute. You mean that this kind of like membranous lining that's so thin is that really defense against all this toxic stuff gets going on in that 20 some feet of your digestive tract? And the answer is yes. And that is a really important part of, again, your body's functional ability to withstand the changes of travel and diet and all the things that we, we do in our lives. And the

• 42:43Speaker 01

  The way that this has occurred over years is the evolution of these protective barriers, one of which is the immune system itself, as we said, 70% of the immune system being associated with that lining, the so-called mucosal-associated lymphoid tissue, or M A T, yep, and Malt. And then the other is the mucosal barriers. There's two mucous layers that are very important to protect the sensitive lining as well. And what we find is that with erosive diets and erosive lifestyles and too much drugs and too much alcohol, that it breaks down those mucous layers and changes the microbiome,

• 43:26Speaker 01

  the personality, into more toxic forms. And there are three kinds of bacteria that generally live in our gut. They're either symbiotes, commensals, or parasites. And it's interesting to note that in a gram of stool, in a normal person, you have more bacteria in a gram of stool than stars in the known universe.

• 43:46Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Wow, I did not know that.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  10 to the 13th bacteria per gram of stool.

• 43:51Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh my gosh.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  And so the majority of those in a healthy person are symbiotic and commensals, and they're friendly. And then there's only like 10 to the 4th per gram, or 10,000 of the toxic. But in a person with dysbiosis, they may have much higher numbers of the parasitic forms of these bacteria and lower levels of the friendly bacteria. Now, that's what we call dysbiosis. And those bacteria may chew up and cause erosion to our mucosal barriers and cause irritation and then cause holes to be developed in this membranous part of our protective defense system of our gut. And that's what we call leaky gut, paracellular transport, things leak across.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  And when they leak across, now they have full access to the immune system, they get overloaded. And the immune system says, oh my word, you know, foreigners on board, call out the guards. And now we get this inflammatory network being produced. People used to think that was only related to gastrointestinal inflammation, like Crohn's disease. Colitis, inflammatory bowel disease. But no, it actually can be systemic. Because what happens is those signals go through the blood that travels from your gut to your liver, through the portal blood. And now the liver has its own immune system. 10% of the liver is made up of these cells called kupfer cells that pick up that information. And they say, oh, my word, there's foreigners on board. We better tell the whole body about that.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  So they send out the message to the circulating immune cells, the macrophages and neutrophils and so forth. So now you have systemic inflammation possible. And so the construct is that you need to rebuild the barriers of protection. And you start with the friendly bacteria. So there's the pre and probiotics. You start with rehealing the mucosal barrier protection, the two layers of mucus. And by the way, there's only one part I know of the body that has no bacteria. And that is the, what's called the mucin two layer of the mucus in your digestive tract. That is, in a healthy person, that's sterile. It's the only sterile place in your body. There's bacteria in some level, almost everywhere else in the body. But that's the sterile protective barrier.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  And when that breaks down, now it exposes your immune system of your gut to foreigners. So the rebuilding of that mucus system, and we've heard recently about a bacterium called Acromansel mucinophilus, which is a mucus metabolizing bacterium that's friendly, that's associated with good blood sugar and things. Well, how does it do that? It does by protecting the signaling of the messages that come from the gut to the immune system. So it's one of the members of the family that we like to have a proper level of in our gut microbiome. So you rebuild the gut mucus layers. You then re-heal the gut lining so this leakiness doesn't release then stuff into the blood.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  And now you have a reduction of what we call dysbiosis, which then reduces then what is called postprandial, meaning after eating, endotoxemia, meaning the release of toxins into the blood, because your body's barrier system now is healed and you're no longer exposing. By leakiness your body to those substances. So when we first started talking about this, and as I said, I my seminars in 1985 was the first time I started to introduce this concept. It was there was a big pushback saying, well, no, those mechanisms are fully proven. And you know, you're doing a lot of speculation based on animal studies and so forth and so on. That's not true any longer. In in 2025, we can say with a surety, these mechanisms are well understood and it's it's

• 47:29Speaker 01

  actually factually correct.

• 47:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah. And what we notice in our clinics here is we do a lot of blood biomarker testing. And it's incredible to me, the number of people that have markers of inflammation, HSCR P being one of them. And then we always then look to the gut first because most of the time is going to be something in the gut that's causing the inflammation. And the gut starts in your mouth, too. So there's oral cavity as well. Then people maybe have not visited their dentist in a while. But then going on down to the mucin layer and also the dysbiosis. And then what we measure then is what's called a serum zonulin level.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:06Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And we find almost, I would say 80 to 90% of the time, people experiencing inflammation will have a high serum zonulin level. And that level is a marker of the basically the enterocytes, the gut cells separating from each other and causing that leakiness. And we found that to be a really good marker of not just how leaky your gut is, but also your symptoms. Because as we start treating these people with all the protocols you just mentioned, we find the zonulin level starts going down and then their symptoms go away.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:37Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Almost universally. It's mind blowing.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  So we have a great respect for Alasio Fasano.

• 48:45Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  So I first met Dr. Fasano when he was at University of Maryland before he moved over to Harvard. And he was a heretic in his own community because he's the person that discovered zonulin. And he started talking about gluten deropathy and he started talking about erosive factors within our diet that could create these holes in our digestive lining and, and within his own field, he was considered a heretic and was criticized. And then he started looking at psychobehavioral effects in children as it relates to leaky gut and showing that there was effect on brain chemistry as a consequence. And his research was rigorous and it was published in the top journals like the New England Journal of Medicine.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  So he wasn't just a fly by night. He was a very solid scientist, plus a scholar of the first order, a student of Italian opera. He could do all the lyrics of all the various operas. But, but he was one of the guys that we could recognize was fearless to move beyond what was considered comfortable within his own discipline and to move outside what would been considered, well, you don't want to say those things because that can get you in academic trouble. And he birthed this field and we were very excited that we were able to award him with the Linus Pauling Functional Medicine Award about 15 years ago for his pioneering work. And I think now these are the kinds of people.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  And when I look back at the Institute for Functional Medicine at the Linus Pauling Award winners that we've, I think we've now given up 31 of those awards over the years, I am so proud of the quality of the people that, because some of them, Gerald Reven, for instance, who was the developer of the concept of metabolic syndrome and syndrome X, endocrinologist from Stanford, and I could go down the list. These are the people who really have created the heavy lifting, the science that underpins the functional medicine model.

• 50:40Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, it's incredible science and thank God for people that started to look at why we have disease versus how do we just treat the disease.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 50:49Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Is what it all comes down to.

• 50:55Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Dr. Shah here, and I want to take a quick moment to talk to you about metabolism. So you've probably already heard, unfortunately, 88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy. And it's not because of what they're eating. It's actually a lot about what's living in your gut. I'm talking about your microbiome. This is the community of bacteria that controls everything from how you process sugar, to your energy levels, to your mood. There's actually one specific strain in your microbiome called Akkermansia muciniphila. That's absolutely critical for metabolic health. This is a bacteria that strengthens your gut lining. It helps you metabolize carbs more efficiently, and it increases GLP-1 production naturally.

• 51:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  The problem is, almost everybody is completely deficient in it. And until recently, there was no way to get this. But that's why I'm really excited about joining Pendulum. They're the first company in the US to bring live Akkermansia to the market. The company was founded by PhD scientists and doctors with the Mayo Clinic as their first investor. The metabolic daily formula that I take every single day doesn't just contain Akkermansia. It's formulated with multiple next-generation strains. And these all work together to optimize your metabolism from the inside and out. So you can track every macro and calorie if you want. But if your gut microbiome is out of balance, you're going to be fighting an uphill battle.

• 52:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Pendulum is going to give you the tools that you need to fix your gut at its source. Try Pendulum today. Head to my link below and use a discount code. You're going to feel the difference a healthy gut microbiome can make.

• 52:37Dr. Darshan Shah?

  So going back to the gut and inflammation and getting the gut healed to reduce inflammation. We also have the natural cycle of life, which is just, you know, our immune system ages as we get older, right? So you've eliminated, see, you've done everything you can. You've fixed your gut, you've eliminated inflammation, your HSP levels are zero. You're feeling great, but the immune system still ages, right? And so how can someone slow or reverse, slower stop the immune system aging? What are some things that we can do? And this is where you've dedicated kind of like this part of your life now, so defining the science. So maybe you could just kind of give us a quick primer on... Scientifically, what is immunosynesthesia, immune aging, and then how do we affect that process?

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you, thank you. So, what I'm going to speak to in the next few minutes is really new stuff.

• 53:25Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  And as I said, this article on this issue of Science Magazine just last week is really bringing this up to the broader audience. So I'm really going to be speaking about kind of cutting-edge information. So, how is it that the immune system ages? Why is it? You know, is it just like, okay, well, we get older and the immune system gets older? That's how it is. But how? Why? Well, it turns out that the way that it's aging is through the imprinting of immune cell genes with certain messages that alter how the immune system functions. And that's associated with a condition that we often call inflammaging. And inflammatory states of our immune system over age.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  And what would actually cause that to happen? Why would the immune system suddenly start changing its genetic expression? It's because of epigenetic modulation of the immune system. This is an aha, new breakthrough. So, epigenetic means above the genes. So, we have the genetic code, so that would be like the hardware of your computer. And then we have how the hardware is operated by the software, and that's the epigenome. And the epigenome regulates then how your genes are going to be expressed. Well, the immune system, because it's turning over so rapidly, like we talked about earlier, it's one of the most dynamic cell types in our body, it is getting information from

• 54:52Speaker 01

  what we're doing that epigenetically modifies or tags the immune system, starting really at where the immune system ultimately emerges, which is the so-called hematopoietic system, which is in the bone marrow. That's where all of our immune system originally started. And our red blood cells, too, is in the bone marrow. And so, if you are exposed to stuff, and that stuff means things that would cause your body to be in an alarm state, it will change how those cells come out of your bone marrow and go into various places like the thymus gland, which is Where they get processed into various types of immune cells and that puts different marks on them. These are the epigenetic marks and those epigenetic marks in the course of living.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Then change the way that the genes in your immune system, the genes stay the same, but the way they're expressed changes. And it moves it into what we call immunosenescence over time because your body is trying to respond to a less than perfect environment that we're all living in. So, does that mean that everybody's immune system ages at the same rate? Of course not. Some people's immune systems age rather slowly, as I mentioned earlier, like people in the blue zones. When you look at the aging of their immune system, it's much slower. Why? Because it changes the epigenetic marks by the way they've been living. They live with joy, they live with community, they live with some red wine, they live with polyphenol-rich foods, they live with exercise.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  And all of those signals then change the epigenetic modeling of their immune cells. Which are turning over very rapidly like they are in all of us. And so they then don't pick up the signals of alarm. And they don't have immunosenescence, aging in the immune system at the same rate. So what happens if you have a person who has got a lot of things going the wrong way? They're eating ultra-processed foods, they're under extraordinary stress. They feel no love and attribution of their life. They live in a toxic environment, maybe from heavy metals or maybe from a combination of that and petrochemical hydrocarbons or forever chemicals.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  And all of those things then start putting a signal into the immune system that causes its epigenetic modeling to change. And we measured this, by the way, we just finished a clinical trial, we published it last November. It was a small pilot trial in which we were able to show by intervening with the appropriate kind of things that remodel the epigenome of the of the immune system that we were able to slow the rate of immune aging by 47% in 90 days.

• 57:32Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Wow.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  47% reduction in the rate of Immune aging. Forty seven percent. In ninety days. That was published in what we consider a top flight journal last November. By the way, that that study was so encouraging to us that we're now engaged and will have finished by the end of the year, the largest clinical trial, I think, ever been done anywhere in the world on a single foods influence on immune aging. It's eight hundred and fifty people in a double-blind placebo randomized controlled trial. And the result of that trial, I think, is going to be frame shifting in the way people think about diet influencing the immune system. But what we what we have learned now, and I'm very proud to say that we're part of this

• 58:15Speaker 01

  kind of community of nutrition immunologists that are really starting to explore the mechanism by which by intervening with specific types of foods that you can remodel the epigenome of the immune system and roll back, we call it immunorejuvenation, roll back the age of the immune system. And so what are those things in the diet that do that? Well, it turns out that a family of nutrients that people have discounted and marginalized, which are the polyphenols and flavonoids, of which there are thousands of different members of that family in in whole foods. They often are the coloring part of of fruits and vegetables, that those which we have trivialized in nutrition and don't even teach much about them in nutrition education, they have really

• 58:59Speaker 01

  important roles, we have found, in modulating how our immune system is epigenetically tagged. And they they actually change the process, and I could get into the gobbledygook of the enzymology and so forth, I'll just say, they change the enzymatic process, starting right at the bone marrow, all the way through thymus involution, and ultimately, the production of our final immune portfolio of cells, and how they're going to be epigenetically modified in how the genes in those cells are expressed, which means controlling their function. So this this is like relearning, this is back to the future, this study, if I can talk about this, is relearning what cultures have told us for centuries, if we only had learned it earlier. And so that led us then into the serendipity of a discovery, which I never thought in my

• 59:44Speaker 01

  life I would be involved. With uh of an ancient food, thirty-five-hundred-year-old food that I was coincidentally um informed about, which I knew nothing about before learning about it, called Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat.

• 59:58Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  And so Tartary is the Tartan district of China up against the um the Himalayan foothills. And um it turns out that this is a thirty-five-hundred-year-old food, one of the oldest husband-in-foods in the world. And it has a rich history of being associated with immune defense, as in fact, in the Yellow Emperor's Handbook of Chinese Medicine, it is considered a therapeutic medicinal food. And why is it? Because now we have found it has over a hundred and twenty different members of the polyphenol and flavonoid family, all of which have unique effects upon immune epigenetic regulation. It's probably the richest food that we're aware of in immune regulation processes.

• 1:00:43Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That's incredible.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  So we've been studying the mechanism by which that occurs, but it links back to historically what people have known about this food. There are hundreds of studies on this food in the Asian literature.

• 1:00:55Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Wow.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  But for some reason, and I still don't fully understand why, it has not been picked up in the Western world.

• 1:01:01Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  So now we, we got so sucked into this, now we have the first regenerative and organically certified Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat farms in upstate New York. And I've got my hands in the soil, we have soil scientists working for us in regeneration of the soil, we're growing the Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat, and we're bringing it to the United States for the first time. And it was that that we then studied in our pilot trial that was able to reverse then the rate of immune aging by forty-seven percent in people that took a controlled amount of it every day. So I think that we're on to something here.

• 1:01:39Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Incredible.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  We're back to the future, learning how things that were historic work through the science of nutrition and immunology.

• 1:01:46Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Do you have any ideas, Dr. Bland, about just, I'm always so curious about evolutionarily, why things happened, right? Do you have any theories on that? Like, why did we evolve so that certain plant compounds can modify our genetics? I mean, there's no drugs that can do that, right? I mean, you're talking about CRISPR technology, we're just trying to figure this out right now, but now we have plant compounds that can modify our genetics. How did that happen, just in the history of human evolution?

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  So, I think that's a really, really important question. So, I want to make sure that the viewers, listeners, don't mistake what I'm trying to say. We're not changing the genetic code. The code stays the same. What changes is the software that regulates how the code is read in our body, how genes are expressed. And that's the epigenetic process. So, when you ask, well, why would we have these two systems? Why do we have the genetic code and then we have the epigenetic code? It's because I think the genetic code is like the course-tuning knob. It takes millennia to change the genetic code by selective, mutational process of evolution.

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  But we need to have some kind of fine control over what could happen as a consequence of things that occur in a shorter period of time. So, in the intelligence of our body, we have this epigenetic control mechanism, that's the ability to respond quickly to changes. And so, the nice thing about the epigenetic code is it can be put on and taken off. It's reversible. Whereas the genetic code, once it changes, it's pretty much hardwired. So, the question is then, why does our epigenetic code, why is it influenced by our diet? Because plants have their own immune system. They have their own ability to defend against infection, against hostility.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  It's called antibiotic stress, like temperature and drought and toxic chemicals like aluminum in the soil. They have genes that protect them, and so that's their immune system. But their immune system is tied up in making these... These compounds, these plant compounds that serve like white blood cells in the in the plant, they they serve as immune protecting agents.

• 1:04:04Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I see.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  And so when we then eat those plants, which historically that's been part of the human diet going way back, those molecules then send a signal epigenetically to our genes and tell us either good stories or bad stories, depending on what they are. And so we evolved this relationship with our foods depending on the regions in which our genes were nurtured over time. And, you know, it was only more recently that we travel around the world as cultures on jets. But, you know, things were, people were generally more isolated. And so the foods that they had access to then created signals to their genes that then patterned those genes epigenetically to respond to those environments. So you say, well, why are certain people, certain ethnicities more gluten sensitive than others?

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  Why do some people have fava bean sensitivities and others don't? It depended on the cultures that they were raised and how those genes were influenced by their environment. So now we're kind of a sand pile genes. We move around and we have all these different mixtures of our of our epigenetics. And so people might might travel today, be here and and tomorrow they could be in an entirely different country, eating a different set of foods. So what we have is this kind of plasticity of our epigenome that is robustly tied to our microbiome, tied to our immune system functional adaptation and resilience. And what you find with people who have immune problems could be everything from allergies to inflammation,

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  that their immune systems are not resilient to those environments. And so that's why we put them on diets that will relax their immune system, re-epigenetically program it to be more resilient. And now we roll back their age of their immune system to a lower inflammatory state. So that's the the new aha, I think of, that's why we formed the company Big Bull Health. We thought this was a fairly bold idea. It's a kind of a big new concept and that's that's really what we're focusing on.

• 1:05:58Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, it is a big bold idea to use a plant compound to 47% reduction of immune aging. And it's, I can't wait for the study to come out.

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the really important thing, Darshan, for our learning is that our body works as an orchestra. It doesn't work off just one instrument, not just the best first violinist in the orchestra. It needs the full orchestra, the brass percussion, woodwinds and strings, all to play together. So when we eat, we eat an orchestra. We eat, in the case of Himalayan tirry buckwheat, we have found it has over 120 different immune active nutrients. Now, you could say, well, why would the plant go to such trouble to make all those? Does it have nothing better to do? It makes them all because that is the orchestration that plays the sweet of immune protection in the best way.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  It's not just having the best first violinist. So people say, well, don't I just want to take more quercetin? Or don't I just want to take more ludolin? Or don't I just want to take more hisparin? Or don't I want to just take more vitamin C? Well, all of those are important, but it's the sweet that our diet provides us that gives rise to the orchestration of the immune system. And that's what we're learning. And that's why the complex nature of foods and why we're doing this organic agriculture and this regenerative farming, to produce the, and why we're re-nourishing the soil microbiome so that it speaks to the plant in the way to produce the best orchestra of products that when we eat, we get the full advantage.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  And that through line, if you think of, the plant has an immune system, the soil microbiome has an immune system, the plant has an immune system, the animals that eat the plant, and now we who eat those animals, all of those are tied together through this through line.

• 1:07:45Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right. It makes evolutionary sense to me that we all do come from one massive biological system working together since the beginning of time. And it's interesting to me that this plant, Himalayan tirry buckwheat, HDB for short.

• 1:08:02Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Evolved in such a harsh environment. And so to me, that makes sense that it needed to create all these immune defending compounds, right? And so now we get to benefit from that by the same compounds being able to modulate our immune expression through our genetics.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  And I think you've also suggested that when you grow plants in a little bit more hostile environment, their genes will turn on those protective substances. So this is a differentiation between organic foods and foods that are, you know, grown with conventional pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers that don't have to generate any of their protective compounds. And so when you start analyzing the difference of an organic broccoli to a commercially grown broccoli, and you look at the phytochemicals, you'll find they're vastly different. The actual vitamins and minerals are pretty similar. They're not exactly the same, but there's a vast difference in these immune protective compounds when you allow nature to do what it's supposed to do.

• 1:09:02Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, and you you test for these compounds between organic versus non-organic versus regenerative farming. And you can see a difference in the the types of compounds and their levels, the amount?

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, it's I think we're now doing more analytics on every batch of Himalayan turnip buck we grow now gets studied by deep analytics to understand what's the reproducibility of these portfolio of these nutrients. And does it different based on where we grow the soils that we're we're growing it in? The way we inoculate the soils with friendly bacteria and mycorrhiza? How does that all influence the eventual composition? So we're developing a portfolio of information about how nature gives us this gift that I don't believe has been probably fully understood until the work that we're doing now.

• 1:09:54Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Well, hopefully you're publishing some of that as well.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  We are.

• 1:09:56Dr. Darshan Shah?

  So other farmers can learn from that because imagine if everything was grown that way, it could completely change the destiny of our, how nutrition affects us because right now, most of our food comes from over farmed soils, from foods that have been transported hundreds of miles and kept in large storage units, cooling storage units, and the nutrient density of our food is nothing like it used to be.

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And you can feel, you can actually taste it in the flavors of the foods, which you know, flavors are related to the personality of the ingredients within the food. And people would say, well, are, do those flavoring molecules have any influence on, on biological function?

• 1:10:39Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  And the answer is yes. It's, it's all part of the portfolio of information. When we eat, we're eating information.

• 1:10:44Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  We're not just eating calories and nutrients. We're eating information, the patterns, our genes, as to how they're going to perform for us after we eat those foods.

• 1:10:52Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, right. It's such a key point, I think, for every listener of the podcast to understand that what you are putting into your system through the foods you eat, through the toxins you're exposed to, through the amount of exposure to the environment that you get through sunlight, et cetera, it's so critical. And even though it's hard to really see it, we can tell at a genetic level through epigenetics, that it has a massive influence on the destiny, on the destiny of our health, basically.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think for me, when I really got this in full, was this small clinical trial that I mentioned that we published last November, in which we showed that people who had consumed the hemolytic tartary buckwheat flavonoids that had the reduction in their rate of immune aging by 47%, that when we looked at specific genes that were within their immune genome, we found that some of them varied in the way they were expressing by 1,200%.

• 1:11:51Dr. Darshan Shah?

  1,200%.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  We were able to turn on and turn off the gene expression patterns by just eating by 1,200%. So it's like, whoa, our food has a lot more impact on how we look at and feel than we previously understood at the cellular level.

• 1:12:08Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Is HDB also a good form of food or supplement that people can use if they have an autoimmune disease, for example? Would that also be beneficial for them?

• 1:12:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, because of these effects, we're talking about immune function resilience. And so if a person has an imbalanced immune system, we don't want to just boost it because we could boost the imbalance. What we want to do is re-pattern it so that it actually regains its resilience. And so we've had really, really a lot of personal testimonies and clinical responses favorable in people who have kind of pre-clinical autoimmune disease, where they're starting down that pathway to be allergic to themselves, so to speak. And so I think that this concept that we can reconstruct our immune portfolio by sending the right signals epigenetically to our immune cells, starting way back in the bone marrow,

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  the hemopathic stem cells, as they're called, that is, it's part of our options as to how they want to live.

• 1:13:04Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's an incredible new option that we have. And you know, when you say pre-clinical autoimmune disease, I can think back even just last week, seeing the laboratory results of a patient of ours that has anti-thyroid antibodies developing out of nowhere. And it's just, you know, there's so many people that have a little bit of ANA positivity or rheumatoid factor, and you're like, what do we do? Like, do we send them to a rheumatologist now? The rheumatologist is going to say, I have nothing for you except for steroids and some biologics, and this is a brand-new tool in the tool shed, I would think.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you've just said another thing that's again really profound. So I have an association with a rheumatology group up in Seattle, and we've been doing some collaborative work together. And one of the members of that group did a study looking at the effect of the TNF-alpha blocking agents in people with biologics on SLE, systemic lupus erythematosis, and rheumatoid arthritis. And he made a very, very remarkable discovery, and this has been published. He found that the response that people had to those drugs, because as you know, in 100 patients with the proper diagnosis that are treated with the same drug, only about 40%

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  of those patients will have a positive clinical outcome from a biologic. So 60% will not. And so what he found is that the response rate to the drug in people with the diagnosis of autoimmune disease was related to their heart rate variability.

• 1:14:36Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Interesting.

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  Now, what is heart rate variability? It's a surrogate measure for the activity of your parasympathetic nervous system. And where does your parasympathetic nervous system get its messaging? From the vagus nerve. And vagus means the wandering nerve. This long nerve that goes from your cranial area all the way down through your whole digestive system to the lower extremities of your body. So it's picking up all that information. It's picking up information from your gut. It's picking information up from your psychosocial environment, stress. And so if a person has a low HRV, and you know, there are various wearable devices that measure HRV, I'm wearing one of them, actually, I'm wearing two of them, that those HRV measurements, heart rate variability, are surrogate markers for your heart rate variability.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  So if you have a, excuse me, for your parasympathetic tone. So if you have a high HRV, then you have a high parasympathetic tone, which means you're in a relaxing state. A relaxing state then makes that person much more responsive to a TNF-alpha blocking drug.

• 1:15:40Dr. Darshan Shah?

  So interesting.

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  Now, what does it really mean? It means it's tuning up your immune system. It makes the need for a drug lower. And so rather than just think of this as a, as a device to change the dose response to TNF-alpha blocking agents, we think of this meaning that your stress factors and your parasympathetic tone will tell you how your immune system may be responding epigenetically and putting you in a state of inflammation. So all this goes together, as you do so wonderfully in your clinics, to put together this, this picture, this assembly of all these factors that then give rise to personalized intervention to get a person away from the need for pharmaceuticals that are in the terminal state of a condition.

• 1:16:24Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, absolutely. And one of the core treatment modalities that we use is this idea of modulating your HRV through, whether it be breath work, or you know, we have cold-hot contrast therapy, anything that you can do that actually gets you to switch between sympathetic and parasympathetic is going to build up over time to where you'll modulate your immune system and also it has tremendous benefits beyond even that. And so to us, as a core treatment modality and just a core skill that we give people is this ability to switch between parasympathetic and sympathetic.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  So again, I want to just honor you, honor what you're doing.

• 1:17:02Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Thank you.

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  Because this is expanding medicine to where it needs to be. If we're really going to talk about wellness medicine.

• 1:17:07Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  We need to get away from saying, well, just wait till you need a TNF-alpha blocking agent, and then we'll do something. What we're really saying is actually, these things that we do that used to be considered soft are actually hard. They're really important things that are sending the right signals actually to re-pattern your body's processes in this dynamic system, the immune system, that's turning over every 90 days. So let's send the right signals to re-pattern so you rejuvenate your immune system. We can turn back the biological clock. That is really a powerful new concept.

• 1:17:39Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, it really is. And so I want to talk a little bit about that. You have successfully managed to turn back your biological clock by 18 years? Is that what?

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  I think 17, yeah.

• 1:17:48Dr. Darshan Shah?

  17 years? So I'd love to hear from you, Dr. Bland, what are the things that you're doing besides taking HTB? And what are some of your habits that you're using?

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

  Well, I think that, first of all, I would say I have the pleasure of being in a very loving environment.

• 1:18:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Hmm.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  And I have a marvelous family, I've got marvelous grandkids, and I have marvelous friends, you being one of them.

• 1:18:10Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Thank you.

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  And, you know, I would never want to diminish the importance of those signals that are picked up by my body and translate them into my function. So that's number one. Number two is, you know, I've elected to live in a really a tree-huggers paradise. I live on Bainbridge Island, I'm near Seattle, so we're out-of-doors people. You know, we're hikers and we're people that enjoy the out-of-doors. And so I have a rewilding, I live right next to what's called the Grand Forest, which is a first-growth forest that allows really nature to be present just out my back door. So that's a luxury. Number three, I really believe that sleep is a powerful benefit, not just for restoration,

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  but for recreation. I think when I look back over my years as a professional with my 6 million miles of travel and all the planes I've been on, and all the hotels I've stayed in and so forth, that the concept of sleep hygiene has been Really important because my best ideas actually have come up in in sleep. I I think that's my most creative times. So I really now that I'm seventy nine, I really make sure that I'm prioritizing sleep appropriately. And this kind of seven hours target I have of of quality sleep is is a is objective. And next is trying to to do our best job I can to stay away from the inclination to eat by convenience.

• 1:19:38Speaker 01

  Because eat by convenience is very easy because it's we've got all these ways that you can do hand to mouth eating, in particular when you're traveling a lot. And so I've I've learned how to manage through selective time restricted eating. I don't have to eat all the time. And I I try to be very cautious about when I eat, I'm eating things I really want want to send the right signal to my body. Unfortunately, as a consequence of that, that's kind of regulated my blood sugar very well. So I don't go into hypoglycemia, I don't feel like I need to start to eat hand to mouth. It's a little bit like an interesting paradox. The more you eat, the more you can get hungry.

• 1:20:15Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  The more you condition your appetite, the less you feel like you need to eat and the less hungry you are. It's it's a feedback process. So I'm on a time restricted kind of feeding program, trying to not eat anything significantly before noon. And then try to condense my eating into six hours a day from noon to six or seven o'clock at night. And then, of course, there's this old thing, I learned this from my Oura ring. Alcohol is not your best friend. And and so, you know, I'm limited amounts of alcohol in special occasions, but it will really throw your sleep cycling off. So it's so you learn a lot by your feedback. And I wore a lot of CGMs and looking at continuous glucose monitoring.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  I found out those foods that really stabilize my blood sugar and those foods that don't. I think that's very personalized because you can't just say all foods have the same effect on blood sugar in all people. And, you know, some people, a food that you might consider like, oh gee, that's going to cause your blood sugar to rise. And that person that doesn't. And another food that you thought was going to really. Flating your blood sugar might cause big blood sugar spikes. So I've kind of personalized my diet based upon those personal responses. And I recognize I have the advantage of having been in this field for a lot of years. So I can do these studies on myself.

• 1:21:33Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:34Speaker 01

  And then I think lastly is making sure that those nutrients that often we've taken out of the standard American diet, these polyphenols and flavonoids. I like to get, you know, something on the range of 1200 to 1600 milligrams a day. And you can do that by making sure your diets are naturally colored with fruits and vegetables. And I'm not against grains. Unfortunately, I'm not gluten intolerant. So I modest amounts of grains. I try to stay away from gluten containing foods, but basically trying to eat variety in moderation, but making sure that I'm getting my 1200 to 600 milligrams a day. And that one of the things that we found and makes it a little easier for me is that

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  we in our Big Bull Health discoveries, found that we could sprout our Himalayan tartary buckwheat fruit seeds, which are gluten free. And it tripled the level of these immune active nutrients. And so it used to be that in order to get 1200 milligrams, I'd have to eat something like a quarter pound of the flour. Now it's two teaspoons of the sprout powder. Give me about 1000 milligrams of these immune active. So we're really on the bandwagon to say, you know, for people, if they want an easy way to get these immune active rejuvenating compounds, the sprout powder, the Himalayan tartary buckwheat sprout powder is a very simple way because you can put it in smoothies, on salad dressings. You can put it in soups. You can put it on granola.

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  I mean, it can use a million ways and it just takes two teaspoons to deliver about 1000 milligrams. So that's another part of my daily regime.

• 1:23:11Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, no, that's so powerful. I didn't realize the sprout powder is three times more concentrated. That's a great point to know because like you say, you just put a teaspoon on anything.

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 1:23:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  You get your flavonoids in. I love that.

• 1:23:24Speaker 01

  And there's an interesting, you know, nature gives you gifts if you're willing to do the heavy lifting. She will, she will give you her, some of her secrets. And so. We knew that when you put a lot of, when plants make a lot of flavonoids, it imparts a flavoring to it, generally bitter. So we've always said bitter is better. But a lot of people don't like bitter. And so the flower for some people, because it has a slight bitterness to it, is kind of off-putting. And although the pancakes are awfully good, not everybody's a pancake person. So when we worked on this sprouting technology and we tripled the level of these immune-active polyphenols, we thought, oh, this is going to be really bitter

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  because now we've got three times the amount of these bioactive compounds. And so when we tasted it for this first time, it blew us away because it was not bitter at all. It was nutty. And then I said, how in the world did we end up with a non-bitter flavor, something that's two to three times the level of the bittering compounds in it? And I think we discovered why. It turns out that when you sprout this Himalayan tartary buckwheat seed, that you enhance the level of many of the different flavonoids. And one of them that goes up 2,000% is a compound called homoeaureodictyol. Homoeaureodictyol is actually found in the herb, Yerba Santa. It's a traditional medicinal used in the southwest

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  by Native Americans for anti-inflammation. Well, it turns out that homoeaureodictyol has another benefit. It has actually been approved by the FDA under GRASS, generally regarded as safe, to be used as a food additive, as an anti-bittering agent. So when we sprout Himalayan tartary buckwheat, it makes its own anti-bittering compound, which is just like blew me away that how nature will give you these secrets.

• 1:25:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Give from nature, right.

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:25:22Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's almost like nature wanted us to have this.

• 1:25:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's amazing.

• 1:25:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I love it. You know, you mentioned a few times your Oura ring, your watch, and this, you wore the CGM and you were doing these kind of mini experiments on yourself. And I'm a huge believer in N of 1 mini experiments on yourself and using data to really personalize from, everything from the things you eat to your exercise. ...routine to how much you're relaxing and it seems like this is the future to me that we have an incredible amount of data and unfortunately at this moment in time and I think is coming soon we'll have AI being able to take this data from the cloud and tell us what we need to be doing but to me it's really interesting to learn about myself and kind of

• 1:26:06Dr. Darshan Shah?

  change my habits and my routines and my diet and see how that affects my data and I just am still so surprised with the you know in our field we see a massive prevalence of people having things like rings and watches but I would still think about eighty percent of the people out there don't use these devices.

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very surprising to me as well but I recognize and I haven't been in this field now for fifty years that adoption takes a while.

• 1:26:32Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It does, yes.

• 1:26:33Speaker 01

  And I think what you said is really the key point that the information is only as good as the ability of a person to understand it. So now we're getting into cloud-based algorithms and where you can get real-time data information through AI and it can help interpolate for a person who's not a geek like I am, they can get this information back in an intelligible way that they can actually incorporate into their lives, it's not just information for information's sake. And I think we are at a revolutionary point, if you think of the fact that we as a human being are the first generation that has access to twenty-four seven, three sixty-five information about our body, we've never had that, you know, you used to say I'll go to my doctor and maybe

• 1:27:16Speaker 01

  I'll have a blood test one time a year and they'll measure a few things and they'll tell me if I'm sick or not, but we've never had wellness assessing information available real time, all the time. And that now is a cultural shift that will make us all more informed about the most precious thing we own, which is our genes. I call them our book of life. How does our book of life get orchestrated? How does it get read? We'd like our book of life to be a love story, to be full of this joyous life that produces all these remarkable experiences for the century of good living that we might enjoy on this planet. We don't want it to be a Greek tragedy. And so the way that you do that is by taking the information because Because both the Greek tragedy and the love stories enter all of our genes.

• 1:28:00Speaker 01

  Both those stories exist.

• 1:28:02Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Those are both in there, you're right.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  So which ones do we want to read?

• 1:28:04Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:28:04Speaker 01

  And so how do we read them? We understand something about the stories that are there. And we put bookmarks on the parts of the book that we want to read. And then we put do not read marks on the part we don't want to read. That has to do with information, intelligent decisions. And that's what the functional medicine movement is all about. Having the intelligence of understanding as to how you use your gift, your book of life, to get 100 years or more of high level living. And you do that by recognizing your facet on the diamond of life. There's no one that's ever been like you identically, or will be identical to you. It's you. And it's the most precious thing you own, to treat it with respect and to get the maximum benefit out of it.

• 1:28:48Speaker 01

  Because it'll treat you in respect in return.

• 1:28:51Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, this is a beautiful analogy. The book of life and bookmarking it by your habits. Every single day, you're telling your body what to read and what not to read.

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:02Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And it's so powerful. You know, I'm curious. You've been at the tip of the spear of the science of this movement for so long, decades now. And you've curated the best scientists and thought leaders and doctors in rooms many times, every year. I've been to your conferences. I'm curious if you are surprised or you saw all this coming of where we are right now with functional medicine, just health in general, and just the level of how, you know, wearables and technology. Does this surprise you? And what are some things that you are really looking forward to in the future here in the next few years?

• 1:29:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So Ray Kurzweil, you know, this whole concept about paradigm shifting, cultural transformations. And as the population of the world increases, we need more transformative ways of seeing how we can redefine human species to be living in peace and harmony and in health. And the old models where you're all spread out across the large land masses, when you're all densely packed together in major cities, you need different skill sets in order to. Realize the full potential of the human being. So I think we're trying to work that out right now. I think we have a global kind of challenge as to how, when we have industrialized and urbanized our population, that we can still keep the best of humans that are present

• 1:30:29Speaker 01

  within our genes. And I'm optimistic about that. You know, I think the transformation will be, not in my generation, the old dudes, it's going to be in my grandchildren's generation. And we have a big legacy of important opportunity to give them the opportunities to create the new solutions based upon the technologies that we are emerging. Because they're technologies that can maybe scale to make some of the things that were either too expensive or too complicated become more readily available. Until you get it down to the masses, you're only selectively going to be influencing a very small percentage of the population. So I think we're seeing ways to expand and scale these opportunities to greater applicability,

• 1:31:15Speaker 01

  probably in people that most need it. And I'm encouraged that that can happen through these economies. I'm also concerned that these things could be turned in ways that could be manipulative of people and put people against one another. So I think it's for stewardship of these technologies that really will define how we as a global society move into what I hope will be planetary health. And when I say planetary health, I mean it's a healthy planet and healthy animals and people and plants and organisms that live on it. So the theme to me right now is to have enough positive experiences that people have

• 1:31:57Speaker 01

  when they start to gain mastery of their own bodies, that they become ambassadors to others. Because I think the infection of a multiplicative game of 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, you know, that all adage of, you probably know this parable of the pauper that went to the king and said, "I ask only one thing, sir, and that is that..." You double on the each square of a checkerboard. You you you double the amount of seeds of grain that I would be queef. And and the the king said, well, that's a silly request. Of course, that's easily done. But if you do two to the sixty fourth, you end up owning the whole kingdom.

• 1:32:41Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 1:32:41Speaker 01

  And so I think that's what I'm hopeful will happen with this field. As we as we start gaining positive experiences, people speak to one another. They look by the proof of the pudding and say, well, that person is seeming like they're performing really well and having a good life. Maybe I ought to be doing some of that as well. So I I think what you're doing with your next health is absolutely part of the tip of that sphere. Spirit to really create the environment that allows individuals to see the proof of the pudding, which is how do people come out of this once they spend time investing in themselves?

• 1:33:15Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, it's so critical. And one of the things that we see all the time here is people come into one of our clinics and they start feeling better. And then they bring their friends because they can't help but shout from the rooftops how they're feeling better. How not just avoiding disease, because you don't really feel avoidance of disease.

• 1:33:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:33:33Dr. Darshan Shah?

  But you do feel that ability to wake up every single morning wanting to take on the day. And you do feel the ability to keep weight off. You do feel the ability to, you know, win at a sporting event that you never even thought you'd be competing in.

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:33:47Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Those are things you feel. And when you feel that way, you want your friends and your family to come along with you. And people bring their friends in and we develop a kind of a community around just feeling great. And I think that's what's going to really move the needle here for people.

• 1:34:01Speaker 01

  I absolutely do. You know, we call it because of our immune focus, coimmunity.

• 1:34:06Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Ah, I love.

• 1:34:06Speaker 01

  Coimmunity, right? We want everybody to be part of the coimmunity.

• 1:34:10Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right. Exactly. Well, I mean, I personally am so excited that you decided to just get back into it again with Big Bold Health. And really, you know, I look at all the aspects of functional medicine and there's always ways to affect. All the different aspects of functional medicine that you've put out there, the protocols, how do you fix your gut health? How do you improve mitochondrial energy production? But the immune system has always been kind of a black box since I went to medical school to now. And it's just so exciting and so incredibly beneficial for all of us that you decided to double down in this area and give us tools like Himalayan tartary buckwheat, HDB, and some of these other thoughts around slowing the immune system's aging process by 47%.

• 1:34:55Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And that's a massive change that we now can all benefit from.

• 1:34:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:59Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And I really just thank you for putting this together again.

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. I think I've learned a lot because what this has done for me personally is it's got me in touch with farmers and fishermen and people who are every day making their life's purpose to produce a quality product. We, our farmers, have taught me so much. It's just really a privilege to see the reverence they have for their fields and for their crops. And in fact, one of our lead farmers, Tor, who's been an organic farmer for over 30 years, said, Jeff, I love growing tartary buckwheat. I love when it goes into bloom. The field smells so good. I like walking through, seeing the plants. And I can see his reverence for what he's doing.

• 1:35:44Speaker 01

  And you know, we have these, I have a partner who is, we built a very unique fish oil producing company out in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, in the Aleutian Islands. It's actually the first pharmaceutical-grade plant in all of Alaska.

• 1:35:59Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Wow.

• 1:36:00Speaker 01

  That produces, and we have our own boats and we have our own fisher people and they come in with the fish that are from live fish into minus 20 degrees frozen in 15 minutes. And they come to our plant, they never get above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in processing. And that produces a kind of fish oil that has never been produced before. It retains the specialized pro-resolving mediators. And this, these used to be thrown away as waste products. And now we're, we are using them and we, you know, got a grant from the state of Alaska to hire young Alaskan men and women to be trained as. Tex for our, we built a food service and a living quarters and now we are involved with

• 1:36:43Speaker 01

  the fishing industry and we were RFM responsible fish management approved and MSC approved. So both for the concept of seeing the people that are engaged with the stewardship of Alaska has no fish farming, so it's all wild caught fish. And then to see what the farmers are doing, it really teaches me what, what life is all about, where it really starts. And it's a, it's a system that everyone is engaged in to create a different outcome, which is focused on, on health and preservation and sustainability and not just rape and plunder.

• 1:37:15Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, good to see you from the beginning all the way to the product. It's just, it's just beautiful to, to hear. I've been to Alaska a few times and it's mind blowing. I feel like life still really exists in its original form in Alaska.

• 1:37:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:29Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And to be able to be there and feel it, you, you really do feel it.

• 1:37:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:37:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And it's, it's such a beautiful thing. And I'm going to come up and visit you on, one of these days.

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  I hope you will, I hope you will. You know, my wife and I have 35,000 miles together on our boat in Alaska.

• 1:37:44Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:37:44Speaker 01

  So we've done many, many, many trips from Seattle to Alaska on our boat and spent time in the little villages and of course now on the, on the Aleutian Islands, we get up there to our facility in Dutch Harbor. But yeah, it's a, it's a life experience. I'd love to share it with you.

• 1:38:00Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I, I'm going to make it a point to come up.

• 1:38:01Speaker 01

  Good, good.

• 1:38:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Well, Dr. Bland, this has been a true pleasure. I have so much more I want to talk to you about and ask you about, so I'm going to definitely invite you back.

• 1:38:09Speaker 01

  Well, thank you.

• 1:38:10Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And can't wait to have another conversation one of these days. Where can people find more about the products and learn more from you?

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so bigboldhealth.com, simple for our products. And again, I really want to talk about the, the sprout powder because I think this particular material is, you know, two teaspoons a day.

• 1:38:32Dr. Darshan Shah?

  But I'm going to steal that bag from you.

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's yours. And If they want to know more about from kind of the geeky stuff that's a health professional, you can go to JeffreyBland.com. That's J E F F R E Y Bland.com. Or if they want to see what we're doing in the professional education side, they can go to Personalized Lifestyle Medicine, so PLMI.org. So you'll find me, and I would encourage, maybe if people are interested, I have a virtual clone now. I took every bit of information that I've ever either produced, written about, my books, everything, it's converted into a couple of terabytes of data. So you can talk to Jeff Bland now on the JeffreyBland.com website. You can ask him

• 1:39:15Speaker 01

  a question. And this actually freaks out my family because it actually is my voice print, it's an amazing duplication, and the Jeff Bland clone remembers better than I do. It remembers everything that I've ever done or written. So you can ask a question and see what Jeff tells you.

• 1:39:33Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh my gosh, I can't wait to talk to JeffBland.com.

• 1:39:36Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 1:39:37Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That's fantastic. Well, once again, thank you so much. It was a deep honor of mine to have you on the podcast.

• 1:39:43Speaker 01

  It's my honor. Thank you, Dr. Shaw. Really extraordinary conversation.

• 1:39:50Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. Please remember to subscribe if you liked this episode, and give us a good review, and share a link with your friends. It really helps us support all of our efforts. I also want to remind you that the information shared on this podcast is for educational purposes only, and is not intended to replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please consult with your healthcare provider or physician before making any decisions or taking any action based on what you hear today, especially if you have any underlying health conditions or on any medications. Your doctor knows your personal health situation the best, and it's always important to seek their guidance.