The #1 SUPERFOOD You Need To Eat To Boost Your IMMUNE SYSTEM! | Dr. Jeffrey Bland & Mark Hyman

so you could have 40 birthdays but you could have an immune system that was like a 70 year old the question is what the heck is going on with our immune system that's creating all these chronic illnesses that affect 6 out of 10 of us now and 4 to 10 have more than one this to me has been such a discovery path for me and i hope i can share this in a way that makes sense to those that haven't spent the hours that i spent getting into this yeah diseases don't exist but they're basically constructs that have been made up by medicine to describe symptoms among groups of people and label them according to those symptoms or lab tests or their exam you know you have rheumatoid arthritis you have depression you have diabetes you have uh asthma whatever and and and all those terms are helpful they help us navigate a little bit they're just the tip of the iceberg and below that is really where functional medicine goes to understand the root causes and the similarities between all these diseases and so that's what i learned from you jeff was that with functional medicine we have a different set of lenses and a different set of perspectives on interpreting the same information so when i see a patient with a particular condition i don't just see them in that specialty i go well someone might have arthritis but it might be coming from the microbiome or they might have dementia but it might be coming from the fact that they tuna fish all their life and have heavy metals or the fact they might have a neurological problem it might be from an absorption issue in their gut they're not absorbing certain nutrients so i basically am able to see the patterns that connect everything together and what we really come to learn is that there are very few basic physiological systems in the body that are all interconnected that are all influenced by our lifestyle and by our environment and by our genes and the expression of the interaction of our genes and environment including an environment meaning what we eat our sleep exercise rest all that stuff that determines what happens in these basic systems and so as a practitioner in functional medicine what i'm focused on is looking at these different systems and how to analyze them and there's just a few there's your immune system we call it defense and repair your gut or your microbiome we call that assimilation your energy system which is how your body makes energy your detox system is how you get rid of waste and environmental toxins your communication systems such as hormones and neurotransmitters your transport system circulation lymphatics and your structural system everything you're made of and all that's influenced by our lifestyle and environment and genes and it and that is really what we focus on and so when we start to look at diseases today we see this tremendous amount of inflammation across the spectrum of diseases in places we really weren't expecting it yes we know that if you have a eczema it's a rash it's inflammation yes we know that if you have allergies or an autoimmune disease that's inflammation but it turns out that seems like everything that we're suffering from today is inflammation even things like depression and autism and cancer and diabetes and heart disease and alzheimer's and i could go on and on and so the question is what the heck is going on with our immune system that's creating all these chronic illnesses that affect six out of ten of us now and four out of ten have more than one what went wrong that led to this explosion of inflammatory diseases because it seems like you know whether you believe we're created by god or just you know basically natural selection or whatever you know you believe somehow our bodies are intelligent so why are they acting so dumb right now so i i think you have opened to me what is the focus of the remainder whatever my professional life is going to be is that question and i want to take a little bit of a heretical concept here and maybe be a little bit controversial because i've come to recognize that this construct that inflammation underlies all diseases is actually partly wrong what i would like to say is imbalanced immune systems are behind virtually all of our chronic illnesses that later take away meaningful years of good living so it's a dysfunctional immune system as opposed to just improving because we have people with allergies it's not inflammation allergies is actually an under active immune system that's imbalanced that is reacting to its lack of what we call innate system proper control so sometimes what we think is inflammation is the body's last mechanism to protect itself against injury because the other stuff that was upstream was not working right it didn't have the right balance between the two basic systems of immune which is the innate this old ancient system and then the adaptive which is the learning system that relates to the antibodies right exactly when you get a vaccine that's you know you're creating antibodies very specific against a particular invader whereas the other kind of immunity is more of a generalized immune response that's not specific that's exactly right so for me uh rather than just focus on inflammation in and of itself which is a downstream effect i'd like to go upstream and say what were the imbalances within that immune system from what we've learned the last 10 or 15 years because the immune system of science is rev is exploding right now so what are the new things that we've been we've learned through this interrogation and of course it's been accelerated uh by sarasova ii virus because so much is now in the immune front piece in our in our mind it's a little bit for me like what happened with hiv i i i was in san francisco at the pauling institute in the early 80s with hiv aids and that was a period of time where everybody wanted to study the immune system and we went through that explosion for 15 years between say 82 and 97 of immune system activity then it kind of got a little bit more quiescent we moved over into cancer with immunotherapies and precision cancer therapy but now we're back to re-exploring the virus connection to the immune system and how it is that some people overreact and some people under equivalent heard about cytokine storms what are those about that's an overreacting immune system because the first part of the immune system was under reacting so now we're starting to reframe our understanding of what i call a immuno balance an immune balance relates to having a young vital a responsive immune system that doesn't under respond but doesn't over respond that's the nature of what we're learning today yeah i mean so clearly there's a lot of things that cause your immune system to go awry yes and and if you just look at the litany of behaviors and exposures that we have in the 21st century it's no wonder right a horribly inflammatory diet is number one two three four five six seven eight nine ten probably on the list and you were the first one that ever um to me expressed this notion of food as medicine and food is information this food is instructions as literally code that programs your biology and relates directly to immune system we're going to get deep into that but the the thing that fascinates me is that the the immune system um is being assaulted by our inflammatory diet by environmental toxins by chronic stress by lack of sleep by social isolation i mean by disconnection from the natural world all these things are driving our immune systems to go awry and they're they're degrading our immune systems and they're putting them out of balance and your philosophy and your perspective now is how do we fix that yeah that's the key to successful um approaches to chronic disease if we don't understand that then we're going to keep failing and by going to keep putting band-aids you know rearranging the vectors night titanic and not really getting the real causes of these problems so talk about this idea that happens of immunosine essence which is a big word but essentially it means senescence means aging so it's the aging of your immune system yeah why does that happen and what is the what is actually happening yes and by the way for all those who listening jeff might say stuff that's a little hard to understand i might stop him and interrupt him i'm not being rude i'm just trying to like recap so you all get it got it so let me go back to first principles real quickly so let's talk about what is the immune system in a broad kind of general perspective because i think everybody uses the term immunity immune system but what does that really mean so there are really three ways that our body 24 7 365 communicates with the outside world and those are the nervous system the gut microbiome and the other microbiomes of say the lungs because we have a microbiome that's on the mucosal surfaces of our lungs every time we breathe that's getting information and the third is our immune system our immune system is sampling what's going on in the inside and outside world all the time continuously now we would say well but the nervous system does that and also the microbiome but the one that most rapidly can change and reconstruct itself is the immune system now why do i say that because it's known that of these cells that we call the immune system cells that flow around in our body that are they're being made in real time in a very rapid rate every 10 seconds we make a million new white cells 20 million new platelets and 30 million new red blood cells okay hold on here you just said that every every 10 seconds your bone marrow stem cells yes produce a million white blood cells yes immune cells and millions of platelets and lots of red blood cells yeah so so now my question and this this is what set me a few years ago on to this journey i i asked myself well okay if if that's happening all the time silently in our body are those new cells that are being formed are they as good as the cells that they're replacing are they worse than the cells that they were replacing or are they better than the cells that we're replacing and once you ask that question good or better then you have to say what does good and better mean and what it means is is that immune cell that's being formed that will go out in our body so that every two months we're replacing our immune system that's what it means every two months you have a new immune system based upon that turnover and that's not when you're ill your immune system is is even more activated when you're ill when you have an immune reaction so let's say every two months you have a new immune system what does it mean that it's as good or worse than it was before what it means is that the immune cells are carrying either injuries into the next generation bad memories things that that make them when they make the next generation less active than the when you were healthy and young so are these mutations or they're just oh you you're jumping ahead hold with me just a second i'm gonna come to that because there are two ways that that might because like stem cells basically are these cells that produce all the baby cells that are your actual cells so they're like the potential stem cells the grandmother or grandfather cells in the bone marrow i think we need to remember the bone marrows the bones are more than just skeletons the bones are there that are generating all of our red white blood cells continuously throughout our life and they are patterned by our genes as to how they're going to do that but they're modulated and modified by the environment we've been living in so we all know that if you um let's let's use exposure to radiation you know that that can produce uh cancers like leukemia how does that occur because it injures the radiation injures the bone marrow cells so that they undergo injury and then they become a different kind of cell that rapidly proliferates it forms a leukemia so what we say is the integrity of these bone marrow cells throughout the course of a living 100 years we want to protect them very carefully so that they don't get injury and we want to also make their products that they come out of our bone marrow go into our bloodstream and all the cells and nutrition is the body we want to make them as young as possible what does everybody say they say when i'm young i could get away with all sorts of things you know i could be immortal it seems like i didn't get sick but now when i'm getting older i'm responding to other things and i'm i'm having allergies and i can't tolerate this and and i get sick easier and i get the flu and cold yes because that immune system is what you said becoming senescent becoming age because it's remembering bad experiences you had in your earlier life and it hasn't gotten rid of them but now we have learned there's a process the body has to reverse that it's always good before you get into how we fix it so what are the kinds of things that screw up your stem cells in your bone marrow radiation environmental toxins yes diet yes stress let's let's talk about michael finnick michael fake uh i followed his work he's a good colleague and friend at csiro the scientific research organization in australia he worked in adelaide had a big lab there he's been studying the impact of nutrients on hemophobic stem cells for 35 years published hundreds of papers and he has found that if you get a diet that's a bit with regard to certain micronutrients vitamins and minerals and other factors that it will increase then the formation of these polynucleated cells they're funny immune cells right and you can actually see them in the microscope with specific staining he's actually developed a lab test that can do that and what he actually has found is that aging of individual and their inflammatory conditions that they experience later in life are related to the number of these damaged cells that are associated with under nutrition for that individual so poor not just portfolio and vitamin b12 but zinc and chromium and magnesium and vitamin b1 vitamin b2 all these things play a role in modulating the integrity of those cells amazing so we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna get into like what happens when these stem cells start producing yeah funky offspring and and the implications for our health but for those listening i want you to understand that we are going to go deep into this topic and we are going to talk about not only how we can reverse our immune age but but specifically what to eat and what to do to fix it so stay with us for the podcast because i want you to get to the end of this because we got some real wonderful take-home things that can dr can drive this uh in the right direction so let's go back to uh this story then we've got all these insults we've created to our bone marrow through the course of living in this modern world with poor diet environmental toxins radiation you name it who knows what's affecting glyphosate does that and so then all of a sudden your stem cells start producing this funky little offspring what are they called what happens to them and what do they do once they get in your bloodstream yeah so there's two ways you already started me down this road so now i'll come back and rejoin the road uh there are two ways that are processes by which these bed sales can carry forward bad messages one you already mentioned the word mutation that's an actual injury to the nuclear material the dna that's in an immune cell that changes the way that it is going to tell its message so that would be a mutational injury and and we carry those mutational injuries in ways that actually again can be analyzed in the laboratory it leads to a very long-limited word and i promise you i'm only going to use it once it's called clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential so that's abbreviated c h i p so these chips this is called chip cells yeah these these chips are debris that form within cells that then have a different personality and the personality the where these injuries occurred in the genes of these immune cells happens to be in regulation of areas that are associated with inflammation particularly a gene called cat trans 11 10 11 translocase and another gene that's related to epigenetic modulation of gene expression that's a lot a lot of words when he goes to epigenetic modulation of gene expression that means that when your genes are getting read by your body we can tag those genes in different spots to turn on or off messages that regulate health and disease so it's a whole new field of understanding how not just our genes can be altered but these post gene sort of products can be modified and actually cause them to be damaged in a way that leads to really bad outcomes for our health absolutely or or good outcomes right and that they're passed on in ways that we didn't really understand that if your grandmother was exposed to a toxin that that toxin can injure the cells in a way that creates an epigenetic mark on those genes and then leads to changes in the grandchildren that have profound impact on their health that's right so now you you like turned on my whole limbic system because this to me has been such a discovery path for me and i hope i can share this in a way that makes sense to those that haven't spent the hours that i spent getting into this yeah so i read a paper in the new england journal medicine several years ago by one of the principal investigators at harvard mass general medical school hospital siddhartha jesus wallace's name and this was a paper of his group's report that they had been looking at patients that have blood-borne cancers like leukemias that then suffer from a precursor to that disease called myelodysplastic syndrome now what does that mean mds um it's a syndrome where the blood cells actually start to change their shape because of undergone injury these mutational injuries and it was thought that myelodysplastic syndrome was only a precursor of blood cancers but his work then found that when they started to study this in more detail way before this person would ever get a blood cancer that those injuries were also associated with incidents of cardiovascular disease and when i read this paper i thought oh my word this is an epic new discovery because what this says is that it's a a route to many different chronic diseases not just a cancer so these chip cells that you're talking about that's right we thought were just maybe causing cancer but you said that they're now maybe causing heart disease and all kinds of other things and since and so i asked dr g as well to come and speak uh to our group the personalized lifestyle medicine instinct group and i knew it was going to be a very high level you know research presentation and a lot of the docs in our group might not get it but what has happened now is i've followed dr gia's wall and many others that are now getting into this field to recognize exactly what i had predicted would occur or i forecast might occur that the more they looked at this the more that they would find these chips were associated with many other diseases diabetes hormonal uh problems in postmenopausal women which has just been reported dementia so knowledge autoimmune disease yes auto thank you auto beam disease and so now we're saying well hold on just a minute this is a fundamental process that precedes way early where a person is going to end up 10 years later when they start getting these increased injuries to their immune system by the way this process falls under the term training the immune system you can train the immune system to be better or it can be trained the immune system to be worse okay so let's just take it back a little so the bone marrow stem cells get injured yes produces these chip cells yes otherwise known as zombie cells well zombie cells are a little different they're closely related they're also mutational but that that's a that's a slightly different story but they they relate to one another so they're connected and then they go into the bloodstream yes a million every 10 seconds yes and they start creating this havoc of a dysregulated immune system that's linked to all these chronic illnesses that's right so so that's like the bad news story and by the way you you use the term here's where we reintroduce the term immunosenescence aging the immune system there's a direct link between the number of these chip cells and the age of your immune system so you can have 40 birthdays but you could have an immune system that was like a 70 year old or you could have your 70 year old and have an immune system like a 40 year old depending on how much of these collected injuries your your immune system is carrying forward and lastly just i can come back to the epigenetics because that's the second mechanism is if you're changing then on your messaging of your genes and your immune system the fb genome this thing that regulates how the immune system is going to function you've got two ways then one mutational injury and the other epigenetic modulation both of which combine to give rise to the biological age of your immune system so now we can actually measure your biological age through telomeres but also through looking at your immune age which is kind of new this is a dna methylation test right yes and and now it's finding uh the extraordinary work that blackburn did in the discovery of the telomeres and with elizabeth bowl and won the nobel prize it's a very very important part of our understanding of the aging process but in terms of the immune system telomere shortening is probably not as important as is this epigenetic and chip formation that i'm describing that then it really is more sensitive to how your immune system is aging than is telomere shortening and now we're able to measure that with a finger stick blood test yes yes you can do at home yeah so now people are starting to actually examine i call this a surrogate marker what does that mean it means that it's not directly looking at the age like your birthday comes up every year it's looking at a marker that tells you about the function of your immune system that's associated with your age stephen horvath at ucla has been studying what he calls the the clock mechanism for assessing your biological age and this is based on these patterns of epigenetic regulation so um if you want to get a test for this how would they get it well there's a number of labs uh true age does a home testing dnh dna ge has a home testing thing that you can mail in with a finger stick of blood yeah and i recommend in terms of this measuring that it would be better to do it with a finger stick of blood than do it with saliva saliva is you're measuring the age of your buccal cells and which are not directly related to your immune cell your your blood is you're measuring ten percent of a blood drop is your white blood cells so you're more measuring your immune cells so this sounds kind of depressing so our bone marrow gets injured it creates all this damage stem cells because all this havoc in our immune system creates all these chronic diseases it sounds like a disaster and and it is for a lot of people and there's a good news story in here which we now understand actually how to reverse this process it's called immunorejuvenation yes and that's what big bold health is all about is the science the immune rejuvenation yes and discovering ways using food as medicine yes to reverse your biological age of your immune system and actually create immune rejuvenation instead of amino senescence that's what we're going to get to at the end of this conversation here but i have a few more steps i want to understand is so so these chip cells get in the bloodstream um what is the mechanism by which they cause all these problems what are they doing yeah so these um injuries these mutations as we talked about uh turn on and alter specific uh genes to function within the immune cells and the genes that are principally seemingly altered are those that control a process called inflammation and i know you've spoken at length about inflammation and this is the one of the mechanisms of inflammation it's a chronic inflammatory state it's like a simmering pot that is always boiling of rhubarb cholerandolar so the chip cells are communicating with your dna well the dna in the chip cells the dna in the chip cells driving in fact is driving this inflammation because what it does is then it regulates the way that our immune cells see themselves they think now that they're in a hostile environment and when they're in hostile environment they do exactly what our body's supposed to do in a hospital fight back yeah and fighting back is inflammation and that's to me why i say don't label inflammation bad inflammation is agnostic it's not bad or good it's all related to balance yeah but if you're in a constant state of inflammation because you've got this chronic inflammation going on now you've got collateral damage yeah and you're paying a price and then inflammation is across the whole spectrum disease so that's sort of the bad news and it seems like the the the people understand exactly what we're talking about what happens your dna basically codes for proteins that's all it does it's got a four-letter code actg and any three-letter group is a is a protein it's a gene a gene that codes for for proteins and and those proteins do stuff in the body and most of your immune function happens through these proteins yeah antibodies are proteins yeah and so so basically you're screwing up your you're screwing up your messages produced by your genes that are turning on all these inflammatory downstream products that get produced okay and it can be different from from cell type to cell type so you're you might have inflammation principally in the liver or you might have it principally in the muscles or you might have it principally in the brain in the astrocytes so there are you know there's a regional specificity to inflammation based upon where the immune system is injured okay so this is a great story so basically we're down this this rabbit hole of our nasty lifestyle environmental chemicals our bad diet causing the aging of our immune system through these chip cells that creates inflammation throughout the body and creates all these secondary diseases that we're treating with all kinds of drugs and procedures that really are missing the boat what what you're seeing is there's also a science not of just amino senescence but an amino rejuvenation a way in which we can work with our biology to help get rid of these chip cells and clean up our blood and end up rejuvenating our immune system so that it works better and we don't end up with all these chronic age-related diseases that are driven by inflammation that is absolutely correct so so tell us about the body's own innate mechanisms for dealing with this because it seems like it's not working very well and that there are other things we can do to really rejuvenate our immune system which we're going to get to in a minute but the body must have some way of handling this kind of injury it's just why is it working okay so so let's let's start the good news here the good news is in every person every person the body is renewing its immune system all the time and that's really good news the problem is particularly for the reasons you've already described that for many people the rate at which the immune system is picking up bad memories exceeds the rate which it is renewing itself yeah so it's not like you have no renewing it's just it can't keep up the pace with the things that are being damaged yeah and so as we learned from dr sydney baker so many years ago in functional medicine there's two things that you do you take the thing away that's causing the problem you add the thing that's missing right that's the basic concept of functional medicine so what you need to take away are all the factors that are enhancing and increasing the mutational injury and the epigenetic modification modification of the immune system while you're giving the things that lead to immune cell house cleaning and that process of immune cell house cleaning won a nobel prize in 2013 for its discovery it has another term that we have put now into our lexicon called autophagy autophagy is self-eating of debris the body has that process it has these magical ways that it can restore itself then and if autophagy is present at the proper rate and balance and it's not exceeded by the rate of injury now what are you doing you're immuno rejuvenating yeah and this is what people are talking about when they talk about time restricted eating intermittent fasting ketogenic diets fast mimicking diets they're all working on this process of activating the body's own garbage disposal system precisely and the cleanup projects that have to happen and when you're eating all the time your body them a chance to rest and renew and repair or immunorejuvenate so can we stop right here just a second i want to take you and i are fast-paced thinkers and talkers but i want to take just a deep cerebral breath here for a moment because what you just said i'm taking a breath as i'm saying it what you just said is a paradigm shift of major magnitude in the way we have been thinking in this field of science and bodies function for the last 200 years this is a threshold we're discrossing that is so dramatically important for us to learn because it puts us back in control we're not just a victim we now have some uh gears that we could some knobs and switches that we can manipulate if we understand who we are individually and what we need to do to exactly what you just said before it was like i'm just the luck of the draw poor me i got a damaged immune system there's nothing i can do about it now we're saying no there are processes that we can hold on to and manipulate for rejuvenation that's powerful that is powerful okay so let's go down the list practically of what are those things that cause immunosine essence that we need to get rid of according to sydney baker yeah and what are those things that we need to add into our life or diet or whatever that will help us rejuvenate our immune system good so what is the first well i think you've done a very good job of putting together the laundry list of the things that we know just to recap okay so let's start with radiation so particularly ionizing radiation uh and that includes even uv exposure because we know that the skin undergoes cellular damage and we get these uh actinic keratosis that's an example of some kind of scrubbing why most of winter depends on how you protect yourself so that's one number two uh as we already mentioned has to do with toxins so toxins could be of a variety of type they could be persistent organic pollutants pops from the chemical industry or they could pesticides chemicals plastics bpa exactly they could also be internal toxins produced by endotoxemia from our own microbiome because if we have funny bugs growing in our bodies gut that can induce then the production of secondary substances that are toxic that our body has to manage so it could be a gut endotoxic problem so basically your gut microbiome when there's bad bugs in there produce nasty chemicals and molecules that leak into your bloodstream and create inflammation throughout your whole body yes so if you're if your gut's not happy your immune system's not happy that's because 60 of your immune system is in your gut that's exactly right and so the third area which um may be a little bit more confusing for the average person but let me try to make it hopefully understandable is a form of body fat accumulation that's called central body fat or body fat that's around the midsection belly fat that's around yeah it's around the organs right it's it's not subcutaneous fat it would be organ fat organ fat turns out to be a very big contributor to this process of inflammation and injury to the immune system and in fact there is a paper a study just done at harvard that's i think really fascinating was done in post-menopausal women looking at their risk the later stage cardiovasculars the heart disease and it found that there was a correlation between chips in their immune system and their post-menopausal heart disease risk if and only if they had a lot of central body fat meaning all the immune cells that are clustered because our fat is an endocrine organ that has a lot of immune cells in it our our central fat and how do we get belly fat by the way yeah exactly eating starch and sugar precisely which is what i've been talking about and you taught me decades ago it's all about insulin resistance which we've talked about a lot in this podcast and this idea that when you eat this diet of starch and sugar that's our diet in america it's about 60 of our calories that it drives this belly fat growth and that is like a fire in the belly literally a little fire in the belly that's driving all this inflammation and that inflammation in turn will cause damage in the bone marrow too absolutely it's not just it's a cyclical crosstalk because if you look microscopically at that that organ fat under the microscope what you're going to see in there are a bunch of immune cells that are right inside the fat cells the adipocyte cells and those immune cells are having conversation with the fat cells and if the fat cells are unhappy and they're saying i'm fed up i'm fed up with what you're doing to me they tell the immune system that they're fed up and the immune system then goes out into the bloodstream and it tells the rest of the body it's fed up the immune cells in the gut are now telling the brain it's fed up wow so this this interconnection as you talked about this web is what we're learning about and what about stress and exercise well you're jumping ahead just a second i'm going to get to that because next you talked about time restricted feeding or about fat intermittent fasting or something like that so what does that do and you already said it beautifully that what what happens to us as humans because of the availability we have of food and celebration around food and often foods that are not so good for us with a lot of uh immune activating substances like sugar that we then find ourselves over doing a good thing and as we overdo a good thing our body as you said it early doesn't have a rest the immune system doesn't have a rest the immune system likes to have a rest just like the brain likes to have a rest when we sleep when we're sleeping and our brain is renewing our immune system so the answer is one of the things that causes damage your immune system is eating all the time yes eating before bed is not giving yourself a break for 12 years a lack of rest yeah rest is a very powerful therapeutic tool that allows rejuvenation right if you're constantly stimulating a friend in with things that could injure the immune system you don't have the activity in the back end to redo it and rejuvenate it effectively so this sleep cycle is connected to the whey and the frequency weed and what we eat it is again a lifestyle pattern it all works together not just like i'm going to do one thing yeah okay so that's now let's go to the big one which is the one that i think has had the biggest controversy but it's also the biggest area for discovery and that is how does the experience in life speak through our immune system to our function of our immune system and you know we used to think that kind of the immune system was over here and our brain was over here and so our bad life experiences they would be over here but our immune system was kind of insulated because of the brain blood-brain barrier no no it's not true at all what we now recognize very clearly is the experiences that we have in life the the harmful post-traumatic stress syndromes let's say lock into our immune system these specific mutational injuries these epigenetic changes in such a way as they can disregulate our immune system so we can months or years later still be carrying that bad memory in our immune system that shifts us over into this inflammatory state so never should we think that the experiences of living the relationships we have the love and appreciation that sense of fulfillment is not a direct important component of our immune system our relationships can be inflammatory our thoughts can be inflammatory you know there's a whole term we used to use called psychoneuroimmunology yes we keep having to change it now psychoneuro endo microbiome exactly toxic globe immunology yeah right and it's like and everything is it's like you know it's all connected like and i think of the word joy right like i'm having joy right now i'm having an emotional joy doing this and having this conversation and it just lights me up so what is it doing to my immune system if i could go with my microscopic eyes and you know and travel through my immune system i'd have lit up excited immune cells that were celebrating i wouldn't have depressed anxious uh injurious immune cells so i i think that this construct that we're describing as a model for living of what's the immune system because it's constantly sampling our environment and feeding back to us what it sees is a good entre entry point for health it's not an abstraction i mean your thoughts and your feelings your emotions your relationships all literally speak to your immune system in real time regulate their function yes for good or bad and i think most of us don't understand that i mean even the field of sociogenomics is so fascinating to me you can be sitting in a room with someone and having a deep heartfelt connection and you will turn off all the inflammatory genes in the body if you're having an argument with somebody or you're not connecting with them it's the opposite that's right so it's not just some big theory it's actually well-documented science and that's that is part of the word that you used earlier of immune rejuvenation if every day you had the greatest part of your day in that state that you just described i guarantee you you'd be rejuvenating your immune system it would be because you'd have less injured cells immunosenescence cells and you'd have more immunorejuvenating cells amazing okay so basically to take to summarize we have to get rid of toxins in our life as best as possible i always go to the environmental working group or ew.org to learn how to avoid most of these toxins i can't avoid all of them obviously we need to make sure we're not eating a diet that's inflammatory that causes visceral fat which is sugar and processed food and eating a whole foods diet we need to make sure we are very conscious of our thoughts and relationships and connections and emotions because they have a big impact on us and practice techniques that can help with that like meditation or yoga or various kinds of practices uh exercise also is important sleep is important not eating all the time is important having a break for 12 14 16 hours a day these are really simple practical things that anybody can do to rejuvenate your immune system yes so that's the good that's the good stuff uh but there's another layer to this right which is what are the things we could do proactively in addition to these avoiding the things that cause immunosine essence to actually cause immunorejuvenation here here and this is this is where the the conversation's gonna get really interesting because what we've discovered is that there are compounds in food that we thought were we call them secondary compounds or i mean this almost sounds like your second cousin like it's not really that important and these compounds in food are not protein fat carbohydrate fiber vitamins minerals or something else which turns out we've evolved with for millennia that are critical if we want to be healthy you don't necessarily get a deficiency disease like scurvy or rickets if you don't have it but you get chronic disease later on in life yeah and so what's really exciting is this world of phytochemicals which is a weird word or phytonutrients phyto not the dog but phytophyto which means plant so plant compounds that are implants that somehow affect our biology in real time and this is what i think you know we mean when we say food is medicine or food is information i mean the macronutrients are information the micronutrients for information but the phytonutrients are also information and it turns out they've been a completely ignored area of medicine that may turn out to be the most important discovery of our time of how to use food to heal chronic disease you're here and i see this all the time in my practice and it's a miracle like i think i mean if literally if i saw this in medical school i would like win the nobel prize because you don't you don't see this but it's now we see it all the time for people who are doing functional medicine with real transformations and i've told these stories over and over i've had guests on the show we talked about the it's just it's tremendous so what you what you helped us understand over 30 years is this field of food is medicine and now we're getting more and more granular about it and one of the exciting areas is how to use food as medicine to rejuvenate your immune system and that's what i want to get into so we're going to talk about a co a bunch of compounds and there's a lot of them there's 25 000 or so of these compounds uh the rockefeller foundation is spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the periodic table of phytochemicals uh we're learning about how they regulate everything in our biology from detoxification to our microbiome to our immune system to our michondra to hormones i mean pretty much everything right and and we don't really even learn about the medical school we don't talk about them and they are probably among the most important things we can do to regulate our biology and we've heard about superfoods well what makes them super it's these phytochemicals right blueberries right we've talked about that we know about you know catechins and green tea or parenthocyanidins and berries or glucosinolates and broccoli maybe you don't know what that is but anyway it's they're all good stuff it's in the food and it turns out that with this immune story there are a bunch of compounds in food some of them recently discovered that have powerful effects to turn the clock back of aging of your immune system and and these compounds uh you've come across through your research so i want you to tell us a story of this product this compound well not a compound but this food called himalayan tartary buckwheat and and there may be other foods that help us rejuvenate immune system but i want to go down the the trail of this buckwheat because this kind of illustrates the the science behind what we're talking about yeah i think this so before you start on you're so powerful so you're starting i want i'm going to tell this story because you you know you know what they say uh chance uh favorite favorite paired mind right so our genius is you know 99 perspiration one percent inspiration and you have been reading the science and you're reading all these weird papers that no one else bothers to read and you know end up you know with three readers but you read this stuff and you came across something in one of these papers it sort of caught your attention about a molecule that you never heard about tell us about that date and the discovery yeah this was uh this was one of those like ahas and one of the reasons i really like the primary literature because often you'll pick up little tidbits and you'll say wow that's interesting i never thought about that so this was an article in the general clinical investigation in 2017 from vanderbilt university and it was describing a new way of managing blood pressure by using the immune system because the immune cells speak to the walls of the blood vessels and they can cause them to relax and lower blood pressure and this compound that they were studying uh had a name scientific name called two hydroxyl benzylamine yeah or everybody has in their kitchen cabinet exactly and hydroxy benzolamine the abbreviation is two hobok hoba so two and um and and i was reading the paper i thought well that's really interesting how the immune system could be connected to blood pressure in ways that i hadn't thought about so then i went to the experimental part of the paper and was reading the fine print and there was a little paragraph saying that there's only one place in nature that this two hova can be found it's in this himalayan tartary buckwheat and i thought well hold on i don't know anything about what's this himalayan tardy bucket i consider myself pretty knowledgeable about food yeah and there aren't any but i never heard about this so i think that you hit on an incredibly important part of this story because at first i thought well this himalayan territory buckwheat this two hoca story is kind of interesting but then as i started to do more research into what was known about himalayan tartar buckwheat i found out that this 60 to 100 times more phytochemicals had to do with over a hundred different phytochemicals not just two hobart it was one of the most immune active nutrient-rich plant foods ever discovered in the world so it's like like the most amazing new superfood we've ever found that's right and then to make it historically interesting i i traced the history and i found out that that particular food had come from asia across the northern europe and then had gotten on the boats to come to colonial america and it was one of the first foods that was used in clinical america because it doesn't require pesticides herbicides irrigation it fights off weeds it's very very a good and different climactic and it likes toxic soils that are rich in aluminum because it has an aluminum detoxifying gene and i thought oh my word why didn't this product stick around if it was already in the american food supply system and i came to the conclusion i don't know this is absolutely for sure but i think it's because new cultivars of higher yielding wheat and other grains because himalayan tartar buckwheat is not a grain it's a seed and these new grains from the cereal family which are genetically entirely different than himalayan tertiary buckwheat that's why himalayan cherry buckwheat has no gluten whereas grains have have gluten yeah yellow's products had higher yields they were much more mild tasting they could be built into different baking products more easily and people like the ability to put different flavors and not have that flavoring of the tartary buckwheat because of all those chemicals and you're simple interesting okay so let's talk about these phytochemicals because here's a plant that was grown in some of the harshest conditions in the world in the himalayas for soils cold weather no water you know just like solar a lot of sun high altitude high altitude lots of sun and what happens to plants when they're stressed like that what happens to them well that's very important if you take a plant that's not used it's genes they're not used to those hostile conditions and you try to plant them they won't survive right yeah but if over the largest experiment of plant development in history which is called natural selection which is millions of years that plant has become capable of being prosperous in that hostile environment it now has the genes that can regulate its response to stress a plant has immune systems this was an aha for me because phytochemicals in a sense are the plant's own defense mechanisms that's exactly right and they are the active principles of the immune system in the plant the plant doesn't have the same kind of immune system we have with circulating white blood cells it has a different set of immune active components much of which related to their phytochemicals that are serving as the immune system in the plant so a hearty immune system in a plant that is resistant to stressful and and hostile conditions when eaten transfers those principles to the human which is amazing so basically we're borrowing the defense mechanisms of plants to help regulate our biology that's right and this is true not just for himalayan buckwheat but for all yes foods that we eat that are real whole foods that have different molecules in them that are not the traditional protein fat carbs and all that and what what's fascinating to me is that the tougher the life of the plant the more powerful these phytochemicals are that's and that's why this himalayan buckwheat that's in the like one of the most difficult conditions on the planet is among the most powerful superfoods and it explains for example why when you eat a wild food like a wild strawberry it might be like the size of a peanut is actually way more tasty than a strawberry you buy conventionally grown this is a jig big red strawberry yes because of these phytochemicals of the phytochemical richness of the food and it turns out that these phytochemicals are ubiquitous in plants that that are are are so important for our development and our growth and our healing and our repair systems but we've basically bred them out of our food supply so the phytochemicals in the modern food supply are so much less than they used to be we see more wild foods we see foods grown in more difficult conditions we used to eat foods that weren't all hybridized for starch and starch and yield and and you know drought and all this that it actually removes those and what we've removed also is flavor i mean you know a tomato that you get a heirloom tomato that you grow in your vine you pick at the end of summer it's like this explosion of flavor in your mouth i mean karen washington was on the podcast talked about the first time you get a tomato like that it blew her mind and led to a whole life of gardening and urban renewal and you know urban community gardens and those vital chemicals are are the things that actually help us stay healthy and they somehow figured out our bodies are lazy basically and so we only make the things that we got to make we don't make vitamin c we don't make a lot of things we get them from our food well we've evolved i call it symbiotic phytoadaptation we've evolved symbiotically with the plants so we borrow their defense mechanisms and it turns out we really need these if we want to really have robust health we need these to create optimal health that's right and and so our whole food supply is basically denuded of these phytochemicals uh it's terrifying and turns out they're way more important than we thought in terms of our health and in particular in terms of our immune health and these second we call them secondary compounds they're what the plants use to help regulate their health and biology and we borrow them for ours and it's just an incredible story of our intricate and intimate relationship with nature absolutely what's even more fascinating is that the the food that we're eating today is so lacking in these compounds it's also flavorless like a flavorless cardboard tomato even even your vegetables that we're eating are not necessarily as nutritious as they were 50 years ago and they and and they are um unfortunately the majority of our diet today and that's why we're seeing all this chronic disease so i have a theory that it's the lack of phytochemicals over a long period of time that's really driving a lot of the chronic disease so i interviewed in in one of my audio magazines years ago a professor at a university in britain and he had just written a series of papers in the british journal of medicine talking about what happened to the health of the british people when they moved away from the agrarian living into urbanized uh city living and this this would be the victorian period and he said you know it was thought that the people before who were living on farms had the really poor health habits and they were not not achieving good nutrition but when he went back and look at the health records because it turns out in england that they have detailed handwritten health records on individuals going back several hundred years they were really good at keeping these records and when he studied these records he found out that actually it was a misnomer that people that reading these traditional diets of these kind of poor people's diets the thick brown bread and the vegetables from the garden they were actually very very healthy and they actually if they didn't die of an injury or infection they actually had a very much longer life expectancy than people who lived in the more modern victorian era that were starting to eat the more processed foods yeah and he attributed this all to what you just said because he did quantitative studies showing the reduction in phytochemicals that had occurred when they moved into this more urbanized eating environment 80 percent loss of phytochemicals based on his calculations yeah so i i think that your point is very well taken because let's let's use the word vitamin everybody knows the word vitamin what is vitamin derived from vite life amine some compound that has an immune structure that promotes life so we have vitamin d one two three six and so forth and what we recognize that those are essential for life because if you don't get them you die of a deficiency disease scurvy berry berry pelago zero thalamia rickets but there's no deficiency disease that you can identify for the lack of these phytochemicals they just then set the tone for age-related disorders like senescence which are much harder to study if they come on 20 years later than something in two months you have scurvy so this is the problem we've had we don't have a good biomarker for people getting nutrient deficiencies of phytochemicals where we have a good biomarker for vitamin c deficiency yeah and i i feel like you know the whole idea of food is pharmacology eat your medicine the name of this podcast is doctors pharmaceutical and f i think the whole idea is that these are medicinal compounds and flavor is what they produce so when you eat really flavorful foods and plants they're rich in phytochemicals and and that is a fascinating observation so flavor and the medicine food are totally connected okay so let's stop just for a moment this is a way station what is flavor connected to taste what is taste connected to taste is connected to a neurosensory mechanism through a variety of different specialized cells that respond to specific tastings sweet bitter salty umami we know about sour these are unique feature sets within our neurological system that they regulate to our brain some sensation saying pleasant or unpleasant now let me take this a step farther what we now recognize is that many of these phytochemicals which have a sensory flavor of bitter that those bitter sensate sensors are not just on the tip of the tongue they are distributed throughout our whole body we have taste receptors in our gut our gut is tasting and what happens if the gut tastes a specific bitter phytochemical it turns on an activity to release into the bloodstream hormones this is called the intro endocrine system that regulate blood sugar and inflammation wow so we have drugs now to treat diabetes don't we and those drugs that treat diabetes are called endocrine active hormonal uh drugs yeah and incretin drugs what those drugs do is mimic bitter taste mechanism well you know it's so funny jeff because in chinese medicine bitter melon which is a melon it's like a melon that's really bitter is really good for diabetes and it's been studied that those phytochemicals activate a specific cell type uh actually in the uh intra-endocrine system of our gut to release what's called uh glp-1 uh glucagon-like peptide one gluca-like peptide one is a hormone that is now being used to activate and treat diabetes amazing you wanna know my secrets for living a long and happy and healthy life well all i have to do is check out my weekly newsletter mark's picks where i share my favorite tips for health longevity well-being and lots more check it out and the link below okay so it was an incredible story and and this himalayan tardy buckwheat is full of over 130 of these phytochemicals some of which are found nowhere else in nature that have powerful properties regulated biology and rejuvenate our immune system so talk about how and again there are many other compounds that that can be beneficial for there's 25 000 as i mentioned and in my whole my book the peak and i talked about the role of these compounds and how powerful they are but the himalayan tartar buckwheat how does it work on these chip cells how does it work to rejuvenate the immune system so that has been a really interesting story that's emerging because generally what scientists will do and you know this very well is they'll they'll look at those hundred different phytochemicals and they'll say which ones are doing the heavyweights yeah yeah yeah so they'll go and they'll find reductionism exactly they'll find a molecule and then they'll study the heck out of that molecule well that's been done with himalayan turkey buckwheat we could go on the list rootin uh quercetin diosmin luteolin visitin hesperidin these are some of the major of the hundred or so phytochemicals in himalayan turner buckwheat along with two hopa and each one of those has been individually studied and has been found individually to have effects on immuno rejuvenation yeah by activating this process of autophagy selective to the immune system and in fact now we have see all sorts of papers being published on quercetin it's the darling right now and quercetin is an important member of this family so i don't want to undersell it but quercetin doesn't work the same when it's working by itself as when it works with 99 other fighters it's a team it's a team effort that's right and so here as we get into fractionalized foods saying well let's just pull one one nutrient out and then we'll make that the nutrient of the month versus saying no it's the combination that makes the orchestration of effects that's causing immune rejuvenation yeah it's a microphone called nutritionism it's the reductionist approach to studying nutrition that's why we have saturated fat and salt and this that instead of looking at the whole composition of the diet so important so so basically what you're saying is these compounds in the himalayan tariq buckwheat help to get rid of all these old cells and rejuvenate our immune system let me say one thing got to loop back to a point you made earlier and you you did so eloquently by the way when you were talking about the fundamental processes that people start having problems with as they get older and get more ill one of those you mentioned was mitochondrial function which is the energy powerhouse of the cell where our energy is produced well it turns out that our mitochondria can within immune cells can undergo injury and when they do so that produces a senescent immune cell so the mitochondria itself can be the seat of the initial injury that then creates the damage to the immune cell to make it senescent now what do you do to get rid of bad mitochondria because the mitochondria can rejuvenate themselves in the absence of the cell rejuvenating the mitochondria has a life of its own within the cell and that process is called mitophagy it's a subset of the big process called autophagy right and it turns out that these chemicals are these phytochemicals that are entirely buckwheat specifically have been found to have mitophagy influences on immune cells so it re-energizes the cell yeah you're you're kind of cleaning up your energy system it's like cleaning your carburetor exactly exactly yeah on the spark plugs or whatever yeah amazing this is an incredible story so you write a lot about immuno rejuvenation and you you talk about a stepwise process to help rejuvenate your immune system can you can it break down a little bit these four steps of you know rejuvenation program that you've developed yeah and by the way all this is on bigmoldhealth.com you can read about it you can listen to podcasts read the articles read the science it's just fascinating yeah i think what's happened you can hear it probably my tone of voice is this has just sucked me in full-on it's like it's like i opened the door and it was a vacuum and it just sucked me right over because there is so much here that i think will help people once we learn how to really apply this in a personalized way this is really personalized immunity and we now recognize that people have different immune identities just like they have different fingerprints they have different immune identities that requires different approaches towards their immune identities to maximize their immune rejuvenation so it starts with some fairly simple things the the simple things are the things we've been going through maybe they're simple to say but not so easy to do that's changing some lifestyle principles so you start looking at things like your sleep you start looking at your activity level you start looking at how much are you eating out of rushed habit patterns of things you know better to eat but it's just convenient to eat them and one of the things that has been very useful for me and i i found when i did a a series of little instagram posts on this are these biometric devices that we wear these wearable devices that give us information and i happen to be uh wearing an aura ring because after being a biohacker and wearing all sorts of different equip pieces of equipment this one i found gives me the most interesting information and what i found is um from a personal experience now i've done really kind of a pilot study and i think it's more general is that our aurav ring is actually a surrogate marker to measure aspects of our immune system yeah because what happens is uh when you're under immune stress it's eating you realize over 50 of your metabolic energy can be eaten up by your immune system when you're under immune stress so what happens is your body temperature goes up your heart rate variability goes down your respiration goes up your heart rate goes up your sleep patterns go down so you know when you see these very low scores in the morning from an oral ring that says well geez what's going on it's probably something that happened to you last night that affected your immune system could be alcohol it could be stayed up too late it could be stress but your immune system is fighting is telling you that it's under it's under demand so these tools to me are useful for supporting your coaching system right because you need to coach yourself through these behavior changes of improving your sleep your activity your diet and you know things that you need to rhythmically figure out about your life that are directly being manifest through your immune system into your function your immune system is directly connected 24 7 to everything you're doing yeah so what are these four steps that you talk about well i just told you the first step is assessment right it's understanding where you are what's the base then from the immunotype that's right it's your immunotype and we have a a questionnaire on the um bible health website that gives a kind of a first uh kind of look-see so we start off with the first thing which really you've you've very well stated and that is finding those patterns of behavior that tie to your immuno immunotype are you an allergic type are you an inflammatory type are you a a type with that tends to get everything that comes along so you have an immunosuppressed state so you understand a little bit about what your own immuno personality is and we have a questionnaire on our website this is called the amino identity questionnaire that gives a little bit of a help for a person identifying their own specific immunotype then we go from there saying well now you have your immunotype what are you going to do to move you from an imbalanced immune state to a balanced immune state that's what we're all hoping for because what we want to do is we don't want to shut off our immune system where we don't want to hyper function it i mean people always say boost your immune system but hold on just a minute if you're already in an inflammatory state you really want to boost your inflammation no you want to rebalance your inflammation and so people say i'm just going to take a bunch of immune system boosting nutrients well no no no that means i actually only exacerbate the problem and make it worse so the second step then is you modulate your immune system based upon what you've learned about your first state are you immunounderactive immuno overactive do you need to bring your immune system down do you need to bring your immune system up and we have a series of ways that that can be employed with diet and lifestyle i would again go back to where you took us earlier and that is make sure when you introduce the program you're using food as a friend and you're using rhythmic eating so that time becomes your friend your circadian rhythms doesn't become your enemy don't over indulge don't too frequently snack i mean used to be oh we want to take seven to eight meals a day those are the days of hypoglycemia that was probably not a good idea with regard to what we've learned about circadian rhythms then the next level the the third step is how can i optimize my immune system by utilizing some of these specific nutrients that we've been describing the the himalayan tartary buckwheat phytochemicals i would also put in into this family there are three families of nutrients that are very important the phytochemicals we've been discussing a lot second are pre and probiotics because the gut plays such an important role in modulating your immune system seventy percent of our immune system is clustered around our gut the so-called gut associated lymphoid tissue so we want the friendly microbiome so pre and probiotics would be step two and then the third are omega-3 fatty acids there are more and more papers coming out to show the important role that omega-3 fatty acids have in balancing the immune system and i might add it's not just omega-3s in and of themselves it's also in concert with vitamin a vitamin d zinc and what are called pro-resolving mediators pro-resolving mediators are part of the omega-3 family that activate the immune regulation process and the inflammation regulation process and we find that some fish oils and marine oils have much higher levels of these pro-resolving mediators these prms than others so we want a high prm omega-3 rich oil we want free in probiotics and we want the proper phytochemicals and i think the point you make you now have created these this fish oil this dutch harbor fish oil which comes from alaska right yeah dutch harbor omega dho and it has the highest level we know of prms of any natural oil so this is some of the beneficial stuff that's in fish oil that reduces inflammation but it is it's it's a separate class of compounds that's just the omega-3s they're called pro-resolving meat-eaters basically your immune system has a way a break a way of resolving the inflammation and these are called pro-resolvents and they they come from these certain sources of omega-3s and you've got those access from alaska and now you have a product that's called dutch harbor omega-3 oil which you can get on bigboldhealth.com right yeah exactly and i might say that the reason that we haven't heard more about these pro-resolving mediators in in these commercial oil sub omega-3 supplements is that when most omega-3 oils are manufactured they're cleaned up through a very complex process that strips out the prms it removes them so people don't talk about them because they're not it's not barracks yeah and so you have to have a very mild process to retain these uh ingredients within fish oils which we've been able to develop so aside from all the lifestyle factors let's just sort of summarize okay that help us to remove the things that are causing damage to our immune system and immunosenescence and age in addition to sort of enhancing our immune system with right sleep and exercise and timing of eating and whole foods diets there's some super hacks right things like phytochemicals from himalayan harvey buckwheat free and probiotics to help our microbiome regulate itself and these pro-resolving mediators that come from special kinds of fish oil yes that's powerful well thank you not let me just say one thing about uh what we've learned because a lot of this people would say it sounds interesting but where is the proof and fortunately now the phytochemical portfolio in himalayan territory buckwheat has been studied clinically now in studies with humans for a number of years so we have an idea how much you need to get in order to produce this and it's equivalent to something like 100 grams a day that would be something like three and a half ounces of himalayan tartary buckwheat flour delivers the level of these phytochemicals that have been found to be associated with improved immune function so people would say well i really don't eat himalayan tertiary buckwheat flour every day well we try to produce other ways of getting it like through a shake mix or through a capsule that's concentrated in these phytochemicals knowing that not everybody's going to so you know like four capsules like a quarter of a pound that's right of the flour which is pretty amazing and by the way i've used this flour made best pancakes chai himalayan buckwheat pancakes from my vegan diet we made we made soba noodles we made dumpling skins like for you know dumplings which are amazing and it tastes so good it's so good and it's and what's fascinating about it is that not only are you developing a product or a series of products that take advantage of these phytochemicals phytonutrients to rejuvenate immune system but it's tied into the bigger ecosystem which we live that it's not like important of what you grow is how you grow it so you could grow this in a way using chemicals and poor soils like that are eroded that don't have organic matter and you wouldn't necessarily get the same product what you're finding is that using practices that we call regenerative agriculture which we've talked a lot on this podcast it's a way of regenerating ecosystems we're generating the soil and building the organic matter in the soil that that you can not only help rejuvenate human health but planetary health that we can address the ravages of using all the industrial agrochemicals the fertilizers the pesticides the herbicides the high amounts of irrigation that deplete our water resources and the depletion of the soil microbiome through these chemicals and tillage and all these practices that have been so destructive and may account for a significant part of climate change and that the soil itself is a sink for carbon and can draw down carbon through the power of these plants that suck carbon in the atmosphere because they breathe carbon dioxide but you can't do it if you don't use regenerative agriculture and the beautiful thing about the himalayan territory buckwheat is that not only are you growing it to produce these phytochemicals for human health but the very way you're growing it is also helping planetary health using regenerative agriculture and there's very few regenerative products out there on the market now and this is one of them uh it's a it's amazing it's gluten-free it's organic it's non-gmo and what's really fascinating about this packaging jeff is and you can buy this now on bigboldhealth.com right is not only you talk about the nutrient contents way higher in protein than most other grains way lower in its impact on blood sugar so very low glycemic index much higher levels of magnesium and zinc and iron and all kinds of nutrients but what's amazing is that on the and i've never seen this it says total polyphenols which are the antioxidant levels these are the phytonutrients which is amazing that we now you know have it's almost like a like a medicine it's almost like you're seeing like a a flower package that has a drug on it which is like so cool except these drugs are phytochemicals well we're we're the i think the first group uh in the flower area to actually be certifying on each patch are phytochemical levels that are these immune active phytonutrients it's so important and i think you know as you've taught us all jeff food is medicine but then that begs the question of well what foods contain the most medicine and how do you grow foods to contain the most medicine and turns out that regenerative agriculture is that method that we've seen a 50 drop in lots of minerals and other nutrients in vegetable crops over the last 50 years so even if you're eating your broccoli it's not as good it used to be and using regenerative methods we finally can actually bring back some of the this and i think you know exploring the role of and this flower is so great because flour i mean you can take the capsules you can make a shake and all that's great and that's kind of an easy way to do it but you know people are are you know wanting to be gluten free they're wanting to eat low starch products they're wanting to you know eat fun stuff too they don't want to give up noodles they don't give up pancakes and you don't have to which is the beautiful thing about this and i i can't tell you how excited i'm in full disclosure everybody i'm an investor in big mold health i'm helping jeff with this project i believe it brings together things that we both have been passionate about for the last you know 50 years for you 30 years for me which is food is medicine and hemorrhaging agriculture restoring ecosystems and it's just it's such a beautiful idea for this moment in time and i'm so excited to see how we're going to build this and grow this and everybody should check it out go to bigboldhealth.com learn about himalayan tarty buckwheat you can get the products you get the flour and you can make the pancakes for my book vegan diet they're really good and you can also get the hdb rejuvenate which is the supplement or the shake so i encourage you to check it out uh there's also the dutch harbor omega there which is great and i i think you know jeff is someone who doesn't need to do one more thing in his life to have a successful career in life and the fact that jeff has gone back at 75 years old to do this because uh it is a key solution to our chronic disease pandemic and our immune dysfunction and aging and i'm just so excited about it i can't even tell your chef so i'd like to just say one last thing that i've learned which i think kind of is a metaphor to everything we talked about and it's actually been captured in our little graphic that we have on the front of the himalayan turtle buckwheat flower that which is a kind of a flowering himalayan tartary buckwheat plant so when i was at the farm for our first harvest with our farmer sam beer who is a former cornell university ag professor researcher and we were walking in the field and the flowers were in bloom uh it was it was pre-harvest and as i looked in the field i saw all these bees bees bees they love himalayan tartary bubble wow and i was then thinking about the interconnection that here we have bees who are then having their community taking this information back to their hives right yeah from the pollen which is rich in all these phytochemicals to bolster the immune defense of the bees wow to be part of this system that we're then creating an ultimate seed that's going to go out to humans to improve their immune system and it just it just really hit me very hard because when you start doing systems thinking as we started this discussion with functional medicine it goes to everything i mean but that's what virginia agriculture is ecosystem agriculture and functional medicine is ecosystem medicine yes it's really that was where it is exactly so we're being ecological doctors both for human and planetary health it's beautiful thank you well jeff what fun this has been well thank you jeff this has been i mean i i want to recap i think it would take an hour to recap but basically the good news is you know even though our immune systems age we can reverse that aging and we can do it through a comprehensive lifestyle issues but also using the power of these phytochemicals and particularly this amazing new superfood himalayan tarty buckwheat jeff thank you for what you do for all of us and for what you do to make the world a better place um if you've been listening to this podcast and you loved it please share with your friends and family on social media subscribe wherever you get your podcast leave a comment how's your musician doing yeah and what can you do to make it better and we'll see you next time on the doctor's pharmacy thank you so so much enjoying this [Music] hey youtube if you like this video you're going to love the next one click on it to check it out today if you are suffering there is a road for most people that recover and functional medicine is the gps system to figure out how to navigate that road and it really is a powerful model it's not the answer to everything but it is a far better map

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 127,613

Keywords: Mark Hyman, Mark Hyman interview, Mark Hyman live longer, Mark Hyman diet, how to live longer, how to age in reverse, nutrition tips, healthy foods, health tips, health theory, fasting tips, how to never get sick again, prevent disease, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, inspiration, motivation

Id: QqpOAeeoBL0

Length: 75min 24sec (4524 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 30 2021