Dr Jeffrey Bland
Dr. Jeffrey Bland is a nutritional biochemist, educator, and thought leader who has dedicated his career to improving human health. He is known for founding the functional medicine movement and the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute (PLMI).
Listen to the episode on Spotify here or on your favorite podcast platform and check out the Urban Monk Academy here.
Click HERE to check out the Gut Check Action Plan taught by Dr Bland.
HERE is a link to his product line.
Podcast transcript:
Dr Jeff Bland’s Healthy Work View
[00:00:00] Welcome to the urban monk podcast. Dr. Pedram. Shojai here with the godfather, the founder of functional medicine, Dr. Jeff bland himself. One of my favorites. Uh, just such a, a sound sober conversation around what true health is, how to get your hands back in the dirt, how to live your life with meaning and purpose and all the things that are important to talk about within the framework of getting healthy, that I think sometimes is missed with the. Flashy buzzy, you know, do this next, um, Instagram influencer version of health. Uh, this is where the party started.
Folks. Dr. Jeff bland is the guy. Uh, listen to the founder of functional medicine and check his perspective and then check all the, the, you know, the six pack abs Z kind of crap that you’re being told to do against the wisdom of someone who knows what they’re talking about. Enjoy the show.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Dr. Jeff Bland, I’m so excited to have this conversation with you. We have offline conversations about vitalism. Every chance I get to [00:01:00] hang with you and to bring this online, I think is gonna be very special. So thank you for being here.
Dr Jeff Bland: Well, Dr. Pedram Shojai, this is one of those great, great opportunities for me. I think that you are a master, uh, you are a person that, uh, individuals look to for guidance, for insight, uh, for maybe even divine inspiration. So to share this privilege time with you is, is extraordinarily, uh, I, I don’t know.
It’s, it’s one of those great moments for me, so thank you.
Dr Pedram Shojai: thank you. Thank you. I’m really honored. And you know, the, the one skill I might have is translating, um, really smart people’s stuff into colloquial understanding so everyone gets what’s being said. Um, and that’s kind of what I’ve asked all of our, our attendees to do here is say, look, let’s talk real.
Let’s tell it like it is. Um. There’s a lot of people in the health and wellness space that are getting advice from all sorts of folks, right? Um, a lot of folks who have never seen a patient, a lot of folks who’ve never been in [00:02:00] a lab, and there’s disparate advice. People are throwing darts, people are trying things haphazardly. And so we wanna try to set a frame around vitalism, around lifestyle and around health. That is not the whack-a-mole sick care frame, but one that actually increases this thing called health. And so, before we even get into it and set in the table, I’d love to get a definition of vitalism from you. Like what is vitalism to you?
Dr Jeff Bland: Yeah. Thank you. You know, actually I spend a lot of time thinking about that question and I have for many decades. Um, and so my, my answer, uh, probably people like this, a short one sentence answer, but I think I, it’s a little bit longer for me. Uh, so if you bear with me, I’ll do a, a little exposition. I’ll keep it short.
So both of us are sitting here having this conversation, this privileged conversation. Um, from a materialistic perspective, I think [00:03:00] everyone would say, at least in the parlance of 21st century logic we’re built up of molecules. Those molecules stick together in a certain configuration to give rise to our form and function.
And out of that somehow comes our personality. Um, now let me ask a question. If I had a bag of chemicals that was com, you know, comparable to all the stuff we know were made out of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, phosphorus, and the trace elements, and I just randomly dispose those into an organized structure.
Would it be us? And, uh, the answer is a hundred percent no. We all know that you don’t need to be a scientist. In fact, I can go even a step farther if you want to go into geeks and say, what is the, the density of matter in the universe? How much stuff is there in empty space on average? And it turns out it’s about one atom per cubic meter.
So if you can think of a cubic meter of space, the [00:04:00] density of matter in the known universe is averaged about one atom per cubic meter. Now we’re made up of a lot more than one atom in, uh, zillions of atoms. Now if you then ask the question, if the density of matter in the universe. Is one atom per cubic meter.
And we are condensed into this body that has all these atoms stuck together, not just randomly, but in an organized structure based on every principle that we know of in science. What is the probability? Using statistical, mechanical algorithms to define the probability of us being here, having this conversation.
And the answer is, there are so many zeros to the right of the decimal point. Life is impossible. It doesn’t exist. We can’t have this conversation. Statistically, it’s impossible. But we [00:05:00] look at one another right now and we say, well, it must not have been impossible. We’re we’re sitting here. How did this happen?
How did it happen that spontaneously, these atoms collected together to make the molecules, to make the super molecules, to make the cells, to make the tissues, to make the organs, to make the organ systems. But then in the into making something even beyond all that organic gush, which is us, the spiritual sentient being us, that you cannot define solely on the basis of the aggregation of atoms to molecules, to cells, to so forth.
Now, I call that what the French have used for years, Elon Vital. It’s a vital force. I just used the word vital as a form of describing vitalism, because that which you cannot explain. You have to find a word then to make you think you understand it, and so that becomes [00:06:00] vital. It’s like, let me ask the question.
Why do we stick to the earth? Well, you say, well, I know why we stick to the earth because gravity. And I said, okay, well great. What’s gravity? Oh, that’s a force. That’s a force that’s related to the mass of the object that’s related to our mass. And they kind of stick together. Oh, that, that’s a good explanation.
That’s the one over R squared rule. We have physics equations that define that, but now why? What’s the glue that makes the one over R squared rule work? Well, it’s electromagnetic force. Oh, you mean we stick to earth like a magnet? Well, no, no, that’s not exactly right. It’s not really like a magnet. It’s because of Graviton.
Well, what’s a Graviton? Well, it’s a subtonic particle that makes us sticky to the earth. Okay. And what is a graviton? Well, no one’s ever really actually seen a graviton. We actually can’t measure a graviton, [00:07:00] but we know they must exist because we stick to the earth. So one of the most significant events in our lives, which is sticking to the earth, we can’t really explain.
It’s vital,
Track 1: I
Dr Jeff Bland: one of the most significant portions of us being ascension, human being, which is a spontaneous collection of atoms to make molecules and so forth to make our structure and function, and have us ability to think about the future ahead. And behind that, no other organism that we’re aware of.
Maybe there is one, but we haven’t yet identified for sure that they have those abilities to do that through our uniqueness as an organism. That’s all vital. That’s all stuff that we can descriptively, understand and give words to, but we don’t understand mechanistically how they exist. So that’s vitalism in my mind.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I love it. And then you got a guy named Renee Decart, who taught us to start pulling the, the components apart and identifying a liver, [00:08:00] being a liver and a brain being a brain, and all these various parts to a whole, that somehow, um, in our modern, modern, modern medical model. Creates reasons and explanations for things that have been failing, um, with the new science, the microbiome.
And, you know, there’s just a lot more to it. But we have been trying to identify the elephant by, you know, the guy touching the leg, the guy touching the trunk. Um, but the gen se quo that you’re talking about, a vitalism, everyone knows what it is. ’cause you could see it, you could see someone glowing, you could see someone, you’re like, oh, that guy looks really healthy.
Oh, that guy looks terrible. You could see a lack of vitalism and you could see vitality in a baby’s face. Um, but that gen se quo, just ’cause we don’t understand it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Dr Jeff Bland: Well, let, let, let me ask another question of your, your audience, which I think is something that’s been a enigma for me, [00:09:00] and that is, let’s say that organizational structure, making up humans occur spontaneously. Does it require any outside agency? Things just happen naturally. Now, I ask a question to people.
I say, in your life experience, what is the probability that when you take something and place it out in the world, whatever it is, that it will grow more organized and become more complex and more sophisticated in the absence of anything being done to it? Without any energy going into it. I don’t care if it’s a relationship, I don’t care if it’s an organized structure.
I don’t care if it’s a government, I don’t care if it’s a whatever. Will that get better all by itself and become more complexly organized? And the answer is no. Things go to hell in a hand basket free of charge. That’s called entropy. It’s seen in the whole universe. The expanding universe [00:10:00] is entropy. And so the probability that we exist and continue to exist maybe for a century or more, is really prohibitive of all the laws of entropy.
So how does that happen? It has to happen by a motive force that’s generated through energy to keep our organized structure, not only our body, but our thoughts, our attitudes, our beliefs, our love of being alive, our our sense of value. I. All of those are inputs that require energy in order for us to fully express our structure and function throughout the century.
More of living. And if you don’t work on those, you don’t put energy into them, then the universe wins. It does its natural thing. It disorganizes us. It disorganizes relationships, families, people, structures of government, culture, economies, whatever. [00:11:00] Whatever model you want to use, it happens free of charge.
What doesn’t happen, free of charge is organized structure, which is a vital force that you have to bring to the system for it to occur as we have to in our lives. So what is a health program based on your first question? To me, a health program is a life commitment to a practice that maintains your organized structure and function to operate and function at the level that you aspire.
That’s a health program, that’s not a disease prevention program, that’s not a risk reduction program. That is a proactive, functional, uh, resilience program that produces you at your best against all the odds in the universe that you would like to take you apart.
Dr Pedram Shojai: You, you know, when you talk about energy, um. Energy needs fuel, energy needs to combust. And a robust system, I mean, I guess you could compare it to a [00:12:00] business. A business has, uh, money’s coming in, money’s going out, and the monies that remain are the profit margin. And the problem with the healthcare system at large is here, don’t worry about it.
We’ll fix it. This, this, you know, single vector solution is going to solve this problem. Whereas what I’m hearing you saying is the energy input, the discipline of structuring the lifestyle to continually bring order to chaos, bring the entropy down so that this order system can continue to thrive, requires some input, but then the net output allows you to stand against entropy.
Dr Jeff Bland: Yeah. Well, I think you use a really interesting model there. Let’s look at, let’s look at finance just for a second, because finance can be healthy or unhealthy. You can have a diseased economy or you can have a vital, robust, healthy economy. How do we use those terms and how do they apply to this model that we’re describing?
So let’s look at a dollar just as a, as a unit of something. What is a [00:13:00] dollar? A dollar is a unit of energy, by the way. It’s an agnostic unit of energy. It doesn’t have yet a pur purposeful life as energy. So we might think of, and I’m gonna use an example, um, illicit fentanyl drug traffic that generates a lot of dollars.
But are those dollars of positive or negative entropy? Those are dollars I would say are of destructive energy, destructive of lies of culture and so forth. But, but they are dollars and some people have accrued a lot of those dollars. But in so accruing, what does it manifest in them? What does it manifest in the system in which they’ve been involved?
Does it create order? Does it create disorder? What do we see with the cartels? What do we see with people killing one another over that energy that’s disordered on the other side, you could take those same dollars and you could apply ’em to principles of [00:14:00] saving the environment. Or creating, uh, carbon friendly atmosphere or any number of other social causes.
Um, and it would be the same dollar in the way it looked, but it would have a different way that energy was used. ’cause those dollars have potential energy. It would lead to stability, it would lead to constructive outcome. Now in our lives, we can eat either disordered energy or ordered energy.
Disordered energy would eat is in the ultra processed diet. It makes some people dollars. But does that dollars lead into the human being? Who’s consumed it? Order a disorder? Well, maybe you see it leads to order of the pharmaceutical industry ’cause those people get sick. They have to buy products and services, but it doesn’t lead to harmonization of potential.
It leads to destruction of potential by lost years of living. The other is investing in green agriculture, sustainable, uh, products. A healthy environment. Foods that are [00:15:00] rich in nutrients, teaching people how to eat and making it accessible to everyone. Same dollars, but it’s flowing in a different way through the body, into organized structure of health and hopefully happiness.
So these are the ways I see Vitalism participating in our daily life. Yeah.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So good. So the Buddha talked about right livelihood. Just ’cause you make a buck doesn’t mean it’s right. Livelihood and the feeding, you know, creating microgreens in inner cities to feed people and create, you know, economy that makes jobs and dignity is very different than the fentanyl deal. It’s funny there, there’s a metaphor in Chinese medicine that is.
That comes to mind when you, when you speak of this, is the essence, is the, the, the vitalism is the jing, the essence that you get from your, your grandparents. You get it from your, your genetic lineage. Qi is the energy that is the combustion of life. But then shen, or mind or spirit is kind of the glow of life. But the flip of that is the qi in Chinese medicine and [00:16:00] Qigong and this whole, you know, system is the qi is said to follow the sheen. So where the mind goes, the energy flows, and eventually that energy will assemble into a material reality. So your focus determines your reality where your
Dr Jeff Bland: Oh my word. Whew. That you just gave us a whole lesson plan in, uh, a three to 4,000 year old, um, well trade and proven philosophy of living yeah, this ain’t
Dr Pedram Shojai: my stuff, right? This is this, this is
old, old years, uh, old ancient Daoist wisdom. And it’s so funny that it comes full circle into what we’re talking about with the healthcare crisis and people trying to feel well, um, you and I talked about this, you know, mother Teresa said, I wouldn’t go to an anti-war rally, but if you have a pro peace rally, gimme a call.
Right?
And so this idea of vitalism and where you’ve taken a stand with big, bold health and what you, you know, you’re the founder of functional medicine and you’ve taken a very strong stand towards saying, we have to change [00:17:00] the way we think about this stuff. And so if I’m thinking not not disease, and I’m thinking health, how am I thinking differently?
How am I adjusting my days to increase my, my, you know, my resilience, to build my muscle mass, to do the things that actually make me better instead of the things that offset the inevitable entropy.
Dr Jeff Bland: Well, I think again, your wisdom has, uh, come through like a clarity. It’s a beacon of clarity. Um, when we surveyed, uh, over 2,400 different people on, on our website a few years ago asking just one question, what is your definition of health? It seems like a simple question. Now, when we did that, I thought our answers were primarily going to be.
Something like, I don’t want to can cancer, or I don’t wanna get heart disease, or I don’t want to get Alzheimer’s dementia or, but have something related to a disease state prevention of a disease state. Very few [00:18:00] of the responses, less than 10% were that the other 90 plus percent were responses were, I want to do the following.
I wanna be healthy enough to do the following. It could be going to my granddaughter’s high school graduation. It could be graduating from college, it could be running a marathon. It could be, I wanna learn how to play the piano better. Or, I mean, there, there was so many different personal ways that people define health that were related to their own personal view of success in life that were not disease tend tendered or uh.
Constrained, but were really related to their ability to operate in the world, to goals that they had established that would define themselves as successful. It could be helping other people. It could be, uh, I, I want to be able to [00:19:00] know more about world culture. I want to travel. It could be many, many things, but they, they’re far different than just saying, I don’t want to get a disease.
Now maybe it’s implied that if you could, those do those things, you would not get a disease. But that was a second tier objective. So when I codified all these aspirations that were not specifically saying disease prevention is my goal for health, they broke down into four subcategories. Those were functional, uh, categories that were related to physical function.
So I wanted to be able to run a marathon, or I wanted to do certain athletic events or certain things that required my musculoskeletal system to operate at a high level. Uh, I want that to be pro, uh, improved. Second, were related to what I call co uh, metabolic function. Well, I, I wanted to get away from [00:20:00] pain of arthritis, or I want to make sure that I, I don’t, um, uh, get the next sickness that comes around.
Infectious disease. I’d like to have a strong immune system. It could be any number of things. I don’t want to, um, have problems as it relates to, uh, blood sugar, irregularities, or obesity. Those would be physiological functional changes. The third were, I wanna think more clearly. I don’t wanna lose my mind.
I don’t wanna lose my personality. I don’t wanna lose my ability to remember things that were. So important in my, they’re my ta tapestry of my life. So that would be cognitive function. And then the last was, I wanna aspire to be a better human being. I want every day to be more loving, to be more caring, to be more present, to be more thoughtful.
Those are, I would say, uh, behavioral, maybe even fringing on spiritual related. So those four functional, [00:21:00] I call ’em quadrants, um, physical, metabolic, cognitive and emotional, behavioral are aspirations of health that are different than that of I just don’t wanna get a disease. Now, I’m not saying they’re totally un unattached to that, but they’re not the first objective.
And, and we can only have one first objective in life. We can’t, we can’t have 21st objectives. So, uh, my feeling is that was what gave birth to me. I. Coming up with a concept of functional medicine. I said, if, if what I’m just saying is at all true, at least for some, where does that reside in our healthcare system, which is actually a disease care system.
And I said, it doesn’t actually reside anywhere formally. It resides in many different cultures, including traditional Chinese medicine. Ayurveda, uh, you know, many different traditional forms of healing have portions of this, but it’s never been codified. Then my last step [00:22:00] in that was, well, why doesn’t it get codified?
And my answer to that, again, in my own myopia was to say it doesn’t get codified because it’s squishy, it’s not as easily objectified as is a disease. If you have a heart disease or a cancer or an arthritis or something of that nature, you can codify it by certain lab tests or certain diagnostic criteria, and you can put a label on it and you get a name, and now that becomes a real thing.
These other things I’ve described, physical, cognitive, uh, uh, physiological and behavioral, uh, effects are much less able to be quantified. So they become kind of squishy. And what we often think is it’s stuff you can put a quantitative dump, something on it wins when compared with squishiness. However, and this is the good news, I believe for my thoughts, [00:23:00] that over the last, uh, now 35 years since we came up with this concept of functional medicine, what used to be seen quite squishy, is now seen, is seen as being able to be quantified.
These, these behavioral effects, cognitive effects, metabolic effects, physical, uh, functional effects are all able to be quantified. So you could form a new kind of healthcare. It was around the quantifiable aspects of these characteristics, and then you could define therapeutics to them that would be really health focused, not disease focused.
So that’s, that’s been my advocacy obviously, for the last three decades, is trying to get people to both understand this model and to bring their talents to it, because the architecture is there waiting for the ornaments to be put on, and it, it connects itself tightly to traditional Chinese medicine, to Ayurvedic to many of these cultural principles that go back thousands of years.
Dr Pedram Shojai: The, and when you go back thousands of years [00:24:00] with pragmatic cultures. Hundreds of millions of people being the recipients of said medicine and, um, you know, getting better or dying. Um, you know, it’s, it’s a, it’s a pretty good biofeedback loop if you don’t have the data sets in computers yet. So those systems worked out over human history to either evolve or die based on efficacy. And they were squishy because we didn’t know what the scoreboard was. And now that we understand the scoreboard needs to expand, it’s like, oh crap, that works. Right? Oh, you should meditate or you should exercise. Oh, you know, all these miracle drugs are actually things that you could do, you know, run, put on your sneakers to go for a run. Turns out that’s really good for you. Right? Um, but it was squishy before. Um, the flip side of that, and I don’t wanna spend too much time on this because it’s kind of a, a known, but we talked about right livelihood and we talked about the scoreboards, um, and, and how things were being measured. But when you have a sick care system that ends up generating billions of [00:25:00] dollars. Every li it becomes a living organism. It takes on a life of its own. And anything that comes to life has a, a survival instinct. There’s millions of people with salaries and mouths to feed, and, and this, this system becomes a business. And so it’s like coal or anything else, right? It’s like, oh, we know this isn’t good for the planet, but what about the jobs?
Right? And so the business interests oftentimes, uh, drive some of the industry for a while until people say enough’s enough. And at this point now we have functional medicine, we have all these types of summits to help people understand that there’s this whole other world out there. There are choices, there are options, right? You, you mentioned these four areas for 2,400 people. It’s a nice sample size, people giving you the answers of what health is. And it’s fascinating to me, what, what, what the results were there. Um, to me the underlying, the undercurrent of all of it is again. Functional energy systems that can [00:26:00] fuel them to become more mobile, that can fuel them to do the things that they wanna do.
And some of them sounded like, you know, inflammatory pathways that needed to be quelled. Right. So let’s talk about, you’ve been at this for so long. What are the big levers that you see when you are looking at a system that’s that’s flickering in light with vitality? The big levers that can be adjusted that then start to right the wrongs.
Dr Jeff Bland: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. That’s, uh, that’s where the tire meets the road. And, um, I’d have to say that, you know, you’ve done a lot of. Teaching on this in your books and, and presentations. Another person who I believe his work is really seminal in this area. To answer your question, is Dan Butner with his Blue Zones.
I think all of your listeners viewers understand that Blue Zones, it’s called Blue Zones because [00:27:00] when they were looking around the world, at areas where people had unexpectedly long life expectancies, and they would find these certain areas like VBA or like in the Himalayas or Costa Rica, or even Loma Linda California embedded in Los Angeles County, they circled them on the map with a blue marking pin.
And so they became what are known as the blue Zones, and it might be thought that what they were circling are areas of unique genetic resistance to disease. But it turns out that’s not true. Because if you look at these individuals for those different cultures I’ve just mentioned, that move to other places like the United States and adopt the United States lifestyle, their longevity goes away.
They get the same diseases as everybody else that lives around in their ne neighborhood. So let’s go to Loma Linda, California. How is [00:28:00] that? I mean, that’s embedded right off the LA freeways. What’s going on there? Well, it happens to be a s Seventh Day Adventist community. It has a Seventh Day Adventist Medical School, Loma Linda University.
The people have different eating habits. They have different social habits, they have different, uh, consumption of alcohol and all those things. So they, they breathe the same air and drink the same water out of the municipal water supply. But they have all these other habits, which by the way tend to map directly, uh, in alignment with the characteristics that Dan Butin are found in the other Blue Zones.
Even though they were in some places, very primitive cultures relative to the technology that we have in the states, they shared a lot of common themes like community, social purpose, connectiveness, eating diets that were low on the food chain, a lot of plants, fewer animals, um, and moderation in things.
Uh, alcohol coming as red wine, small amounts, uh, regular activities outside, [00:29:00] uh, enjoying nature, being involved with all four seasons. I mean, things that were shared, common experiences among these disparate cultures that you could define as longevity themes. Now, he did a beautiful job in his recent Netflix special on the Blue Zones, I think to, to show these people in their environments and to recognize it wasn’t just like one single pill or what’s the nutritional supplement for longevity.
It was a collection of. Activities that were, um, requiring energy to participate in, to use your term energy again. But it was energy that was going into the energy of organization. Organization, their life, organization, their structure, organization of their routine such that they were on a trajectory towards squeezing the best out of their genes.
’cause our genes really want to be participating on us being healthy. I know this is a debate. Some [00:30:00] people say, uh, the selfish gene is only there for us a replicator. Just until we get over our age of reproduction and then the genes don’t care anymore, we might as well just go away. ’cause they’re only there for replicating the species.
I don’t believe that’s true. There are many scientists that are now finding that the genes have a lot more responsibility than just the next replication reproduction that they have, the stewardship of that culture, of that organism beyond that of its own life expectancy. That’s posterity. And that’s built somehow into our genetic machinery as it relates to quality of life.
Because if it’s not, we’re the only one generation that produces the next generation for which there’s no long-term outcome for survivability. So I think that all these things match together with what you’re talking about, that the energy that goes into our lives. How is it going to be used purposefully to create organizational outcome or just free flowing, chaotic energy that leads to, uh, what we call disease and premature death.
Dr Pedram Shojai: [00:31:00] The breakdown of systems and entropy and this thought that you started us with this. This idea that we now are trying to grasp is, is within a cubic meter of empty space, there’s a single atom and we have gajillions of atoms in this ordered system. So what is it about ordered systems that that need more order to. Push back on the entropy, push back on the chaos. It’s almost as if we have to, you know, the, the Egyptians talk about this. You become a son, right? You, you ignite, you become such a powerful, uh, system unto yourself that you’re emitting light instead of collapsing under the entropy. It’s, it’s almost like you have to turn on your vitality engine in, in what I’m hearing from you, so that entropy doesn’t set in and, and disrupt the system.
Dr Jeff Bland: That’s really beautifully said. So let me use an example, uh, that I think, um, exemplifies what, what you just talked [00:32:00] about. So we got involved with this unusual food that’s a 4,000 year old food that, um, it’s actually one of the two, probably oldest, um, cultivated foods in the world. Uh, the other being, uh, millet, uh, in the Indian sub continent.
And we chose for a whole series of reasons to look at, uh, tart buckwheat, um, a form of grain that’s 4,000. It’s actually not a grain, it’s a seed. Um, it goes back 4,000 years in, in cultivation in humans. And, um, it, I want to first emphasize it. It’s not a wheat, although the name has, has wheat in it. I don’t know how that came about, but it’s not related genetically to wheat at all, to any cereal grain.
And, um, so this particular food product has been consumed and if you ask. Where did it come from? It came from one of the most hostile and unlikely places for food to be grown, which is in the, the, [00:33:00] uh, the Himalayan Mountain, uh, sub alphin regions where the climate is pretty lousy. The soil is not good.
There is no fertilizer, there is no pesticides or herbicides. And over time, and that would be millennia, that plant through its own genetic architecture was involved with the most long-term scientific experiment ever done called evolution. And it eventually formed a, a variant of that early plant to be able to withstand all these hostile environments by this process of natural selection.
Now, how does it do that? It does that by activating its immune system. Yes, plants have immune systems. Well, are those immune systems at all similar to the immune systems in humans? Well, plants don’t have white blood cells like we do, but they do have a [00:34:00] system that has a similar function to that of the human immune system.
They share some similarities. Now, where does the plant derive its information for its immune system? It derives its information from the soil micro rza that it lives in the microbiota of the soil. Yes, the soil has its own microbiome, so the soil microbiome that then incorporates itself within the root nodules of a seed as it’s growing into a plant, then communicates to the genes of the plant telling it how it should do its development process.
And it augments in the production, in the plant of its defensive substances that are in its genes. That are these nutrients in the plant that are the immune strengthening nutrients of the plant that have names like flavonoids and polyphenols. So that’s the plant’s immune system. [00:35:00] Now, the human who eats the immune strength of that plant, that’s incorporated the energy that’s come up through the sun, the earth, into the microbiome of the soil, to the plant, and to the human who eats it.
Now, those characteristics are transmitted to the human’s immune system. And now the human strengthens their immune system through the relationship it has to the planet, the soil, and the plants. So this concept that there can be streams of organizational energy traveling through our system, if we recognize the the extraordinary wizardry of nature.
Nature has these things that it has been perfecting for millions, actually hundreds of millions of years, that we are the legacy of. And rather than trash them, we recognize and preserve them and [00:36:00] celebrate them, and they become part of our resources that we use to maintain our own structure and function.
Now we are winners across the whole system. Let me give one last little spec, um, facetious example. So this is, this is humor. I hope many years ago, probably two decades ago or more, uh, I was invited to be a presenter at the National Food Processing Institute or Association’s annual meeting. At first, I thought, well, why wouldn’t in the world would I wanna speak of the National Food Processors Association annual meeting?
Secondly, if I did want to speak there, why would they invite me? Well, the answer to both those questions was pretty much the same. They wanted to invite me probably ’cause they wanted one token rebel on their program that they could say, see we have a balanced program. We got at least one weirdo on the program to come and speak to our membership.
That would be me. [00:37:00] And for me, I said, yes, I think I’d like to be that weirdo. I’d like to be the person to say a kind of a different message, knowing that it was not gonna be well received, just to put that energy into the system. So I went down to, to Florida for this meeting. Uh, they stuck me at a very odd hour to speak.
I think it was eight o’clock in the morning on the, after the big party, the night before. So people were coming in there with, uh, the memory of their overindulgence the night before. So I started off the talk by saying I wanted to thank the, uh. Leaders of the National Food uh, processing Association for this invitation to speak.
And I particularly wanna also thank them on behalf of the American Pharmaceutical Association because it was acknowledged that they were producing a whole array of products at fairly low profit margin to them to fuel the very, very financially profitable pharmaceutical industry. So your brethren in the [00:38:00] pharmaceutical industry is thanking you for all of your labors to make their lives very successful.
Now, that did wake up the people that were there, I got their attention, I can assure you, but I wasn’t far off the mark in saying that. And that is neg entropy, ver that’s negative energy versus energy of organization because what we’re talking about, a disruptive energy that causes chaos rather than an energy that causes organization.
Dr Pedram Shojai: You know, it brings, it invokes the idea of the matrix and how the biomass of the human species is being parasitically extracted upon for its energy. Eat this food, take these drugs, pay these taxes, watch this tv, and it’s just this blah existence. Whereas the, this pH phenomenal rhizosphere that you were alluding to with the, the buckwheat [00:39:00] and the, you know, the fun fungal kingdom, first kingdom on planet earth broke down the rocks, created the soil, then the plants, then, you know, the photosynthesis energy comes into the system through the sun and is able to actually be on this rock, right?
And then we eat the plants and here we are. But this hundreds of millions of year old system that you are alluding to has communication networks and cellular mediation. Um, and things that have been happening way before we started being able to, you know, do anything. Um, and to jump across and say, in two generations we figured out food and this is food.
Just eat it. And when things go wrong, take this pill. Just take it is literally insane. Yet, this is the world we live in. Right?
And
so, you know, part of the impetus for me to do this , and look, I got plenty of things that I got on my schedule to pull over and take an hour of your time and everyone’s time [00:40:00] to really get into this conversation is, what the hell do we do about this?
When you have the
weight this industry and the media and this brainwashing and all of these things confusing, the good people listening to us right now into analysis paralysis into not being able to know what to do and still be being just these blind consumers of the food and the healthcare system, right? And so would love some insight from you about how to shake this off and, and just start over, right? Like one meal at a time. You start feeling better. Just how would, how would you go about shaking people out of that matrix and saying, wake up, here’s, you know, here’s the blue pill.
Yeah, I just want to call your attention to a new course. I have in the urban monk academy called sanctuary. I created the course because so many of my patients. We’re doing everything right. And we’re trying to scratch our heads and figure out why they’re not getting better and turns out it wasn’t the first skin, uh, which is their body.
It was the second skin, [00:41:00] which was their home, , whether it was the toxic chemicals, whether it was the mold, whether it was the EMS, whether it was the toxic relationship with the spouse, sleeping a couple of feet away. There are a lot of things at home that can be corrected to allow for the body, the mind, the soul, if you will, to feel safe so that it can heal and it can recover.
This course is quite the hit. My students are loving it. They’re making powerful, positive changes in their homes and seeing that downstream reflected in their bodies, in their sleep, in their mental health, check it out, go to the urban monk dot. And you’ll see the sanctuary course. Jump in. It’s a good project to do right now, going into the spring and it will radically transform your life when you feel healthier, happier, and safer at home.
Dr Jeff Bland: Yeah, I think again, what you’re talking about is extraordinarily important and, you [00:42:00] know, I go back to small is beautiful, uh, that, that classic book, um. Often we think we have to do everything simultaneously, and that becomes overwhelming. That often we do nothing because it’s just like, oh geez, I can’t even approach this.
It’s overwhelming. So many years ago, uh, in my, uh, clinical center, I, I was running a research center, uh, in Gig Garber, Washington, and we saw thousands of patients on different clinical studies over the course of the years there. And we were doing a weight loss, uh, program asking what would really motivate people to stick with some kind of a program that would change their eating habits such that they would lose measurable amounts of weight and they would feel good about it.
And they would then come, they would stay on the program because we know there are many, many weight loss programs that are here today, gone tomorrow. People lose some weight, but then it comes right back. So what might really work to make it sustainable? [00:43:00] So we started off. With a very simple idea just to see if would work.
In fact, it was so simple and so silly maybe that all my colleagues said, well, is this really even worth our effort? And I, I said, well, I think if we’re gonna get into this, this ought to be the first step on our journey. Let’s just ask the people to do one thing. Just one thing. Uh, and so then we had a big debate about what would that one thing be?
’cause you could put a pretty big laundry list together as to what the options might be. We eventually landed on one thing that we were going to study first, and that is completely giving up soft drinks. So no beverages that would be other than water, some tea, modest amounts of coffee, no soft drinks, no sweetened beverages of any type, no fruit juices, just those were off.
Everything else was okay. Whatever else you wanted to do, let’s just see. [00:44:00] For six months. A where there were people on average, ’cause we had several hundred people would lose weight, and B, were they willing to stay on that or was it just, um, here today, gone tomorrow? Well, I’m happy to say that this was years ago that we did this, and we had, the data was quite compelling.
In fact, it wa it surprised me quite a bit. We had a material amount of weight. Over 5% of people’s body weight was lost just by giving up sweetened and non calorie sweetened beverages, meaning synthetically sweetened. Now, I could get a whole debate about why calorie or sugar free, and that’s a whole nother story.
But let’s just say the outcome was giving over beverages, whether they were sweetened or synthetically sweetened, uh, the effects were dramatic in their lowering of weight Then. What we found over [00:45:00] years of, because we were in the community, people, we would see them. People said, you know, that was interesting.
I’ve stayed with this for years. I found I didn’t really need those things. It wasn’t a big sacrifice and I have given over, I’m drinking soda water now, or I am just drinking good, good, uh, clean water, or I am drinking herbal teas or, uh, but I don’t really need those soft drinks. So that was a learning example for me.
’cause I recognize that sometimes if you just choose one shared common thing that a person can change, they’re willing to do it. Particularly if in a meaningful you a uh, uh, a significantly short period of time, they’ll see benefits. And that is one that produces a lot of benefits. ’cause I never recognized how much soft drinks we were consuming as, as humans and how important they were.
I mean, people often think, well, it’s just the liquids that doesn’t really have that much effect. It’s not like eating a pizza is it? And the answer is for a lot of people, it’s far more [00:46:00] than calories than eating a pizza on a daily intake. And even if it’s not calories, the effects that those non calorie sweeteners have on the appetite control center and on the way we eat other things and how we process ’em are adversely affecting how we put stuff into fat.
Dr Pedram Shojai: When you stack a habit like that, and I love the, the simplicity of that, and you start stacking habits one by one, is there a sweet spot, say one every three months, one every few weeks? Does it depend on the, the patient? Um, you know, ’cause obviously you go into a functional medicine office anywhere in the world and you know, it’s like, okay, we did all these labs.
Here’s the kitchen sink solution I’m throwing at you right now. And for some people it could be overwhelming because they spent 50, 60 years digging themselves into this mess. Right? And so stacking habits to kind of slowly walk back out in a sustainable fashion, how do you think about that?
Dr Jeff Bland: Well, I think you, again, you said it there, there’s, there’s a brilliance, you know, underlying the question. [00:47:00] Um, one of the characteristics that we have in this field, whatever you want to call it, um, is it to reform biology. So that a sustainable biology that’s related to your health aspirations doesn’t occur overnight.
I’ve often said it takes about three months to reform your, your physiology, your biochemistry, when you do anything good keto diet or fasting, intermittent fasting, um, even exercise programs. It generally takes three months to fully condition in your body to adjust to the new, uh, environment. The, the challenge is that we have a population that’s very used to quick fixes, and so one of the value propositions you have with pharmaceuticals is that they’re generally so hard hitting on your physiology that they give rather rapid results.
So if you take a pain medication. You generally will feel [00:48:00] that effect of reducing pain very rapidly. Or if you take an antibiotic, if it’s the right one, you’ll feel getting rid of that infection pretty rapidly. Or if you have inflammation, you take a anti-inflammatory, uh, or A TNF blocker or something of that nature, you’ll feel the effects pretty rapidly.
So we’ve got this, this view that health comes really quickly just by the absence of symptoms. So if we suppress the symptom, gee, we must have had success not recognizing that the actual problem still resides below the symptom. We just masked over the symptoms by blocking the, the symptom pathways. We didn’t block the cause pathways for the problem.
And so we need people to recognize that these changes that occur with long-term outcome, that lead to, um, to decades of good living are things that come through mastery of daily practice. If meditation is a good example, if you want [00:49:00] to become a really skilled meditator, from my experience, you don’t do it by a one week meditation course and you go home and now you’re an expert.
And I think that these things that are the smooth characteristics, that’s, that shape us, they not only shape us physically, how we look and, and, and act, they, they shape how we feel over years. So it’s not just an immediate gratification, it’s an investment. I’ve often said that the best life insurance, uh, policy we can ever get is us when we invest in life insurance rather than death insurance.
We call it life insurance, but it’s actually death insurance. It’s paying our beneficiaries for our demise. Life insurance is investing in your ability to be resilient and that occurs over time.
Dr Pedram Shojai: You look at some of the statistics of where we would be at in GD. EP if Alzheimer’s wasn’t a thing, if we didn’t face the cognitive decline and the, [00:50:00] the deterioration, if the entropy didn’t get us after the age of 60 and we had functional brain and, uh, were useful to society. And in those best years with the most wisdom, the most experience, uh, we would be major contributors to society and society’s problems.
But that entropy is actually pulling us off the stage. So, to your point, I mean, that is a massive, massive, it’s like libraries burning down. Um, instead of, you know, being there for generations to come. And we’ve seen it in the last couple generations, right? The, you know, people, people go up, get shipped off to play golf and slowly die, right?
Which is also a tragic model.
Dr Jeff Bland: So let’s use an example of what you just said. I’m gonna use a biology example here ’cause of my bias probably. Um, so it’s been recently determined. That one of the best predictors of our longevity as an individual, our life expectancy [00:51:00] is the age, the biological age, not our chronological age of our immune system.
That the immune system seems to be the shop boss that determines how the other organs might be functioning as we grow older. And therefore, if you can measure the biological age of the immune system, you can predict what your longevity or life expectancy is. Now why is that? It’s because as we grow through life, we are exposed to events that, I’m gonna say injure, but maybe it’s better not to say injure, ’cause that’s a value word I’ll say influence our immune system.
They influence the immune system by creating a memory effect. Our immune system that we’ve been experiencing that like post-traumatic stress or like a SARS cov to two virus. Or like a serious, um, wound that we had infection from those, or that we’ve been [00:52:00] exposed to air pollution for 20 years. All those things put marks on our immune systems.
Genes. This is called epigenetics, and they remember that. So over age, we collect these memories on our immune system that cause immune disorder. We can actually measure immune disorder. The immune system is less ordered. It’s like if you had a military and it was all well structured to begin with all the various ranks and files and all the jobs.
But then as you collect injury to that army, over time everybody finds their own occupations and no longer works together. And now it’s chaotic. And that’s what happens to the immune system as we age. And that’s why we say older people have weaker immune systems, that younger people. Now the question is, is that inevitable in a one way street?
And the answer, and this is a new discovery within the last 10 years in the field of immunology that no, it’s not a one-way [00:53:00] street. You can actually roll back and turn back the biological age of your immune system by getting rid of those cells, those so-called zombie cells that are carrying these bad memories.
And you can replace them with fresh, young, naive, vital cells that are much more capable of doing the work for you going forward without carrying forward all those bad memories. And by the way, bad memories in the immune system. What does that do? It’s an immune system that becomes disordered and starts to feel that it’s under attack and that it’s not safe and that the body is under siege.
And what does the immune system do under those cases? It fights back. That’s what it’s supposed to do. And how does the immune system fight back? It produces inflammation. So what are the diseases of today? They’re all inflammatory diseases because we’re not at home with our own bodies. We’ve been experiencing things that mark our immune system and create premature aging.
So if you can roll the immune system back to a younger biological age, it’s not just one [00:54:00] disease you’re preventing, it’s functionally improving every aspect of your body’s performance. ’cause that immune system is communicating to every organ in your body. Every part of your body has an immune system function.
So this, this construct of, I go back to the blue zones of Dan Butner. People that were living those lifestyles in those blue zones were having immuno rejuvenation lifestyles. They were recreating their immune systems in a real time basis to be younger than their age and birthdates. And in fact, there are now studies being published showing that healthy centenarians have immune systems that are younger than their age and birthdays unhealthy.
60 year olds have immune systems that are older than their age and birthdates. And it’s modifiable. It’s not a one-way street, it’s not a death sentence. This is the new health science that we’re dealing with.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So two important questions to follow that. How does one measure the age of their immune system, and how does one go about [00:55:00] rejuvenating their immune cells in the entire system?
Dr Jeff Bland: Yes. So fortunately now, emerging technology is coming out of the research lab to be more consumer accessible for, uh, evaluating, uh, the age of your immune system. It involves taking a, a blood sample, generally, it can even be by a finger stick, blood sample, doesn’t have to be by venipuncture. That blood sample is then, um, analyzed using, I guess you’d call it 21st century, uh, genomic analysis on a, uh, a specialized, uh, gene chip that actually looks at the genes that have been marked by experience of living.
That’s called the epigenetics of your, uh, genes on your immune cells. And it then. Is processed through ai, through machine learning. ’cause we couldn’t do this before until we had big computing power. But now that computing power allows us to analyze hundreds of thousands, actually [00:56:00] millions of data points, and come up with an algorithm that’s called your immune Age.
And it correlates in your age and birthdays to your age of your immune system. Now that test originally was pretty esoteric and pretty expensive. Now they’re, as is always the case with, with more, um, auto automating. Uh, it comes down in price. Now they’re in the, in the $150 price. But there are a number of commercial laboratories that are consumer friendly.
If you, if you, um, if you just Google biological age determination or test, you can find these and um, they allow then a person to track. I. Uh, the biological age of their immune system or of their body at large, their biological age. And, you know, I did this myself, and we’ve actually done a study, a controlled study, uh, that was registered with the clint trials.gov in which we, um, I and others intervene with the, uh, this tary [00:57:00] buckwheat I was talking about earlier, to see what impact it would have on the age of our immune systems.
And we were amazed to find that over three months of intervention. So it’s not a long time, it was 90 days that we could actually demonstrate in people with old immune systems based on their age and birthdays, that we could make them younger over the course of three months by Just a simple thing was in including the, these, uh, immune strengthening nutrients that come from plants that had to grow in these hostile environments.
So, and by the way, Tery refers to the Tartan District of China in the Himalayas. That’s where it got its name. So we’re learning old stuff in new ways. The wisdom of nature is there just for us to learn more about.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Is it the flavonoids, the polyphenols? What is what is tackling the zombie immune cells and pulling them outta circulation?
Dr Jeff Bland: Yeah. Thank you. And we’re really getting into the scientific eism now. So the answer is [00:58:00] yes. It’s a, it turns out in, in, uh, we’ve, we’ve learned, come to, to learn that tar buckwheat has over 150 different members of the orchestra in their artery, buck, wheated, polyphenol, flavonoid family. So it’s a very, very complex array of these, uh.
Immune molecules that were developed in the plant. And they also come along with a variety of other factors like prebiotic fibers and, and interesting other accessory, uh, phytochemicals, like two hydroxyl, benzoyl lamine, or two hova. All of these in the plant were there over natural selection periods to be optimal in regulating the immune system of the plant.
And so you transfer all of those over to a human when you eat complexity, E complexity produces a simple outcome of improved immune health. So I call that complexity.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So you coming full circle and we’re running out of time and I could go. On with, with you for hours, but, um, we’ll be respectful of everyone’s time here. You had mentioned [00:59:00] the, the way we’d originally talked, let me preface this by saying we talked about right livelihood and doing things the right way. And so I know that you got involved at the very foundational supply chain level of this to say, look, I need to be at the farm level so that we could control the soil so that from the soil the outputs are X, y, and z, so that we can get the, the intended benefits. You’d mentioned this ery buckwheat growing up in really tough times, right? Like really tough environments. So is there a play where you have to mimic the soil so that the soil-based bacteria allow for the same polyphenols and output?
Dr Jeff Bland: Oh boy, this is so much fun. I can’t tell you how much fun I’m having with this conversation. So yes, we, we concern ourselves with that. One of the reason, that’s one of the reasons we chose Upstate New York, because it turns out that plant geneticists on tart buckwheat and there’s hundreds of papers on tart buckwheat that are done in scientists around the world.[01:00:00]
But one of the recent, um, bits of science was asking the question, what happens if you cold? Acclimatize the seeds when you plant them in in spring versus planting them in in a warm climate. And it turns out when you plant ’em in cold, it turns on the genes more effectively that produce these phytochemicals.
So we wanted a more northern latitude place to grow. Uh, the, the Himalayan Tar. Buckwheat. Secondly, the question you asked about the soil. We, we did, uh, analysis and we actually, um, were very fortunate to have as a member of our team, Dr. Emily Reese is a soil scientist, PhD from Cornell. And, uh, she was, uh, doing soil samples and we’re measuring soil micro risa, looking at the soil microbiome basically.
And what we found was that, um, it seemed that there were certain characteristics of the living critters in the soil that were associated with the optimal production of these beneficial [01:01:00] immune factors in the plant. So we did a field trial. We inoculated, uh, different strips of the field, several acres and different strips of, um, these different micro eza to see what effect they would have ultimately when we harvest the final plant and did an analysis of the phytochemicals, and we found there was a certain type of bacteria and fungi that when they were combined together and inoculated in the soil would increase by over 20% the level of our phytochemicals.
So now we are inoculating all of our fields with all the seeds, with these friendly organisms and growing them under cold spring conditions. And we feel like we’ve got a kind of moving towards an optimization of using nature as our teacher basically.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I love it. I love it. And leaning into the biomimicry and leaning into the wisdom of millennia. Um, and, you know, just biology optimizing [01:02:00] towards this thing versus trying to invent something in a test tube and spraying, spraying it with glyphosate and saying, here, here you go. Here’s food. Um, I, I love it. I love, uh, everything that you’re up to.
I’m so happy that you’ve thrown your hat into the ring with this. Um, and I’ve gone down to the supply chain level of the, the nutrients that get into our bodies, um, because that’s, I mean, we got, we gotta be that vigilant and you’ll, you know, there’s so many people talking about toxins in the air, toxins in the water. I mean, this is a hormetic stressor, right? It’s a hormetic stressor on
the seeds
and the plants that then
create the strength and the resilience. Um, once you rejuvenate the immunity of. The body, do the cells of the rest of the body, the organs start to go, aha, and then start to kind of march to a new tune and start driving towards a different biological age.
Like is, is that a big lever to pull? Is the
Dr Jeff Bland: Yeah,
Track 1: I.
Dr Jeff Bland: you’re, [01:03:00] you’re right on the frontier actually of what I think immunological science is now working on. Um, you know, we have developed over the last years these technologies that allow the white blood cells in our body, which are our immune cells, to be separated, one from the other in a instrument that counts the different types of white blood cells.
’cause there are many different types of cells in, in the family of our immune cells. And to. Understand how those immune cells were marked in such a way that they would change their function. So this is very, very detailed. And then to analyze what happens after you put a person on what we call an immuno rejuvenation program to those cells and how it influences outcome like cholesterol level or blood sugar levels, or, you know, you can measure all sorts of variables of outcome to measure, uh, for, uh, function across multiple [01:04:00] organs.
And the answer is, the trajectory of all those things in aggregate produces an outcome that we call healthy. That’s a new definition of, of health is your immunological, plasticity or resilience. You don’t want your immune system overactive. You don’t want it underactive, you want it resilient with a lot of headspace that it can respond to change.
’cause the one thing that we all know about our lives, uh, as, as my mother used to say to me, life is what happens in between our plans. So you need an immune system that’s capable of accommodating all those unexpecteds and that is a resilient immune system that’s associated with long, healthy living.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I love it. I love it. Dr. Jeff Bland. Uh, what an honor. , I’m very excited to see the good doctors, the founders of functional medicine, going and getting their hands in the dirt.
We’ve come full circle on this health thing. , and it is what it is. I mean, nature’s brilliant. Why are we trying to [01:05:00] outthink her right?
Dr Jeff Bland: Yes, that’s exactly right. You know, the, the biggest discoveries are learning old things in new ways. Uh, the wisdom of, of nature is, has been there all the time for us to understand. And cultures, as you said, have done that by experience and observation. Uh, now we’re putting kind of this western model of let’s dig deep in the mechanisms and it’s amazing how much we’re relearning the wisdom of nature from a different perspective.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Yeah, and I love the lens. I mean, look, I love peptides. I love a lot of the cool stuff that’s come out. You know, I got an
Dr Pedram Shojai: sauna. I don’t, I don’t mind the gadgets. It’s the operating system and how we think about it that once corrected, I think really sets the stage for true health and I really appreciate your perspective on all this.
Dr Jeff Bland: Thank you. This has been for me, just one of those magic goosebump discussions. Very much appreciate it.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Really appreciate you. Thank you.
So I’ve got a special treat for you, and it comes in the form of a powerful masterclass that Jeff bland himself [01:06:00] hosted for me. Uh, because he’s such a wonderful, gracious guy. It is called the gut check action plan. It is a step-by-step plan for you to heal your gut. To restore the gut lining to take out the foods that bother you. And to restore your health because we know that health starts in the gut.
I will put a link to the course in the show notes of this podcast. Just go to the urban monk.com podcast. Find this podcast. You’ll find it there. Uh, the course is wonderful. I’ll also put links to his tartare book, wheat products right there. And look talk is cheap.
Do the stuff you will feel better once you start feeling better, you’ll have more energy in life. You can think more clearly you can make more money. You could spend more time with your loved ones because you don’t feel like crap all the time. And it becomes an upward spiral towards a better life. Go get it.
I’ll see you in the academy somewhere.
Thanks for watching.www.theurbanmonk.com