Transcript of Episode #107 Featuring Dr. Jeffrey Bland! The FATHER of FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE! The birth and future of Functional Medicine, EPIGENETICS, Immune System and metabolism, BIG BOLD HEALTH and more!

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And the point in this is not that I'm something great, is that it made me reflect on my guests. 'Cause they wanna know, who's your best guess? Who are you looking at? And I was looking and I, and I thought, oh, I know exactly what I'm gonna do here and who I'm gonna pick out. And then I got to looking and I'm like, oh my gosh, I interviewed this person, this person, this person, this person. And it was like, whoa, wow, what a reflection.

Yeah.

My point in saying this is Well, I have interviewed some of the most brilliant, most respected, best minds in the world. I was just interviewing Dr. William Li, like I was telling you, and I told him, I said, I've never said this out loud, except to my wife, possibly in conversation, that I have this short bucket list of people that I absolutely have to interview that I want to so bad. And it's very, very short. My point here with this whole story is that My guest today is on that list. So my, my ultimate blessings that always keep coming true, the, the guests keep coming to me. He's here today. So I'm, I'm knocking that list down and I'm, I'm so thankful. So briefly, cuz I, there's, there's no introduction that is good enough for my guest, but I'm gonna do my best. So he's a globally respected thought leader. He spent more than 4 decades advancing human health, widely recognized as the father of functional medicine, which is true. And, you know, doing research under Linus Pauling, which we'll talk about, authored over 120 peer-reviewed publications, bestselling books, The Disease Delusion, co-founded the Institute for Functional Medicine, the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute, and Big Bold Health.

Like I said, no introduction can do you justice. Thank you for coming to see me, and thank you for making my day. I I appreciate you being here, Dr. Jeffrey Bland.

Wow, Dylan. Wow. Wow. Thank you. What a, what a glorious intro and one that I hope I can live up to in this discussion with you. That's incredible.

That is super easy for you, my friend. You are known as the father of functional medicine, which to me, I mean, beyond what that says because of the, the impact that we see that it has now, but on someone like myself who, you know, I didn't know what functional medicine was for many years, never heard of it, but I know what's been in my head and what I've been doing and researching and to know that You have been such a key and integral part of that for so many people. What is, what is that like? Like what made you at the beginning look for this and look for something different and not just accept what was being told to you?

Well, thank you. This is kind of an epic moment for me in my life actually. And that question is really the pivotal question because next week I turn 80. Wow. And just to think about that, 8 decades, it's almost a little bit threatening actually. But then when I look back, I say it's 80 remarkable years in which I have met some of the most incredible people. I've traveled over 6 million miles. That's, that's, I think that's 44 trips around the Earth equivalent. And now that's over 50 years. So it wasn't all in one year, but that averages out to 125,000 miles a year for 50 years. Basically is what that means. It's not just the hotels and the planes. It's the people I've met over that period of time. People that are thought leaders across all sorts of disciplines. And I've been a professor at a medical school for 12 years, was a tenured professor. I started or been involved with 26 companies over my years, which I find it hard to believe. My middle son asked me, he said, Dad, do you think you're a businessman? And I said, no, I'm really a teacher.

I don't really think of myself as a businessman. He said, but you have been involved with 26 companies that you've started across biotech, across nutrition, across health sciences, across, often medical laboratories. And so how does this all weave itself together? And so to answer your question as to how functional medicine came about, I probably have to go back just really quickly to a conversation I had with my, my dear mother who's now deceased and kind of the latter part of her life that we shared together in which she said, you know, Jeff, when I think back to you as a, as a boy, young boy, you were always a thousand-question guy. It was, it was never enough. Time to answer all your questions. And, and it's why your father and I went out and we really couldn't afford it, but we bought this Encyclopedia Britannica so we'd have something that we can answer a lot of these questions. And this is way before the internet, obviously. I was born in '46. And so the thought was for me as to why do people get sick? And it started off with me learning about infectious disease.

So that was probably during high school. But then I recognized that there was a great number of people who got sick that really never had an infection in the traditional sense of a bacteria or a virus. And, and I asked, well, where does that come from? And the answer to that at that time, and I'm now speaking about the '60s, is what's in their genes. It's a genetic characteristic. So if you have a family with heart disease, you get heart disease. If it's breast cancer in women, you get breast cancer, and so forth and so on. And that didn't really just stack up for me because when I started looking at what we were learning about genetics in the '60s, it didn't seem that all these disorders that we're having with heart disease and diabetes and dementia and cancers and arthritis were what we call monogenetic disorders, meaning they were tied to a specific gene. They appear to be much more confusion than a single gene. And then of course, what happened with the deciphering of our book of life, the human genome, in the Rose Garden review of the fact that we now can say what this 23 chapters that make up our book of life, 23 pairs of chromosomes, half of the story is written by our the other half by our biological father, what did they really tell us?

And what they told us not is who we are, but they told us who we could be. And that's a really important differentiation. You couldn't see from the genes, from the book of life, exactly how that person looked, acted, and felt. But you could understand something about what their potential was for how they could look, act, and feel. And there was a lot of different plasticity in the way that could be expressed. And that led me into this whole concept of genetic expression. That what controls genetic expression— not you can't change the genes, but maybe you can change how the genes speak to our body in such a way to create how we look, act, and feel. And that occurred for me somewhere around the time that I had this fortune of being asked by two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling if I would come in on sabbatical. I was a professor at the time and run a research lab down at Palo Alto in his institute in Stanford. And those two years were life-changing for me. I want to set the context. At that point in my life, this was '81 to '83, I had a family, I had children.

My oldest son at that point was in the 8th grade. My middle son was in the 5th grade, and we just had an infant son. And so I had a mortgage, I had a family, I had a house, all those kind of things that people have. And I had tenure, and I was well respected at the university. I was very lucky. The president of the university must have liked me because I could teach in different departments. I had a big research grant. And so forth and so on. But my 2 years at the Linus Pauling Institute and my conversations with Dr. Pauling and his wife, Eva Helen Pauling, who was a remarkable force of nature, led me to recognize that maybe I needed to take my background and, and interest into a different classroom. And so when I got home from driving back with my family to Seattle from Palo Alto, California, I'd made my mind up to give up my tenure faculty position and to start a company to teach doctors how to do nutritional medicine in their practice. I knew nothing about business. I had no business plan. I really would say burning the boats.

That's what happened. I burned the boats. I was now on shore and I had to make, make a life out of it. And so it allowed me to really focus all my energies into how do I take what I've learned from Dr. Pauling and many others and to create something that could be of value that's different than exists. So my wife Susan had a brilliant idea. This was 1987. She said, Jeff, you know, you've talked about all these people you meet around the world, these thought leaders, these innovators. Maybe it would be interesting if we put a meeting on that we've hosted, just an invited meeting of maybe 40 to 50 people that are representing these different people you've seen around the world. Invite them in if they want to come in and spend maybe a weekend with us in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island, up in Canada, and just talk about what the healthcare system could be. Let's take off licensure. Let's take off reimbursement. Let's just talk about what it could be if we were to optimize it. So that turned out to be an unbelievably stimulating. You can imagine when you bring your, your best friends and colleagues in and you sit around with a whiteboard and you just talk about ideas for 2 to 3 days.

At the end of that meeting, people said, this was so enjoyable, let's do it again. So my wife set up the meeting the next year, same place. And that meeting, then I got this idea that what we had been talking about was the dividing or maybe creating of a different kind of healthcare system that was not focused on disease, but was focused on health. And to do that, we have to ask, what is health? And if you go out and ask people at large, how do they perceive health in their lives? It turns out that we've learned that they really talk about function. They talk about physical function. They talk about metabolic function. They talk about cognitive function and they talk about behavioral function. And so I say, where does it get taught in disease care systems? Where does that get learned? How does it get incorporated within the concepts that really guide reimbursement and medical intervention today? And I recognize they didn't. Those concepts were not in, no way to codify those concepts of function that were existing in our system. So I came back and I had this kind of dream at night on a Saturday night, came back to the group the Sunday morning of our last day.

And I said, "Hey, we've been meeting for 2 years and I came up with this idea. Why don't we call this functional medicine?" And everyone looked at me and they were very nice and a little bit patronizing and said, "Jeff, you know, it's not a really good word." Because, you know, function at that point, and I wanna remind, this was 1988, '89. Functional medicine at that point was either two words. One is rehabilitative medicine with geriatrics, people that are broken down and injured, or all in your mind. And psychology meant functional medicine, meaning a functional illness was a psychosomatic illness. It wasn't real. And so they say we're carrying some bad baggage here with that term. And then I said, but that's true, but I've been watching the literature. I'm kind of a bibliophile, to say the least. I follow the medical literature and there are now new reports coming out from really esteemed groups talking about functional radiology, functional cardiology, functional endocrinology. Maybe we ought to be skating to where the puck is going, to use the old hockey metaphor, and pick that term up because it's a term that doesn't carry a lot of bad baggage with it.

And we can define what that means in the years to come. Well, maybe because my wife and I set up the meeting, people said, okay, well, let's give it a whirl. And so we started in 1990 with my wife forming the Institute for Functional Medicine, which, you know, now that I look back some— what is this, 35, 36 years later— I can't believe we've grown up to a couple hundred thousand talks going through the programs and a textbook and approval for continuing medical education in medical school with the Cleveland Clinic Center of Functional Medicine. So It was sticky. It caught somehow a missing link that was, was not there before.

So for one to become a practicing, like, functional practitioner or doctor, do they have to have a doctorate from college, or is that something they can obtain from you, or how does that work?

Yeah, thank you. So we set up two principles when we established the Institute for Functional Medicine. Number one is that we wanted to be agnostic to people who had health science backgrounds or interests. So we were not going to discriminate among different degrees. That was number one. Number two is, but we were going to ask for people willing to reopen textbooks that they may not have liked. Cell biology, biochemistry, nutrition, things that they didn't— they probably had to take, but they didn't really like. We wanted them to reopen it and learn it in a different way. My colleagues in— because I had been an academic medical professor, said to me, Jeff, you're never going to find people to do that. You know, when they get through with this stuff and they go out and they get into the world, they don't want to go back and study that stuff. They didn't like it the first time. But I think we've been proven that wrong, that we've now had several hundred thousand people that are willing to do that. So we're not discriminating against individuals with specific kinds of pedigrees. What we're discriminating are people willing to really step up and, and become experts in this way to think about function.

And then second or thirdly, we established in the functional medicine beginning that the thought that We always wanted to be at the leading edge. We didn't necessarily want to be at the bleeding edge, but we wanted to be at the leading edge. And it turned out that that goal is a little bit more complicated now that I've come 35 years down the road, because to be approved for continuing medical education for physicians, that so-called Category 1 credit, you have to be approved by a group called the ACCME, American College of Continuing Medical Education. In order to get approved by them, your curriculum has to be reviewed, and it has to follow some principles of usual and customary or standards of care. That makes it very difficult to teach at the cutting edge because now you're always balancing how far can we push the envelope to include that material in our curriculum. So that's what led me then to form a second organization called the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute that we started 14 years ago. And that institute, I didn't go after continuing medical education. I said, no, in this case we want to be teaching anything we want.

And that whatever we do there could be a feeder into IFM as it becomes more well adopted. So now I have the the PLMI, the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute, which then is a, is a not-for-credit educational institute. And by the way, we have 85,000 professionals in that now. And then that's a feeder into the Institute for Functional Medicine with their, their curriculum that can be continued and approved.

I see. So if you want to get the, the most education, you go through both. Yep. You take the, basically the prerequisite type of course to then feed into the next.

And then, yeah. And the PLMI, the way I set that up is I said, let's, let's think this is a no-charge course or curriculum. So we set up kind of a different business model there to make it supported. I have a fantastic Nicole Fox who is the manager of that business. And so what we do is we provide 10 to 12 courses a year for, and then we have, which are different experts. I moderate those. And then we have people that are experts in these different fields across a whole range of fields. Those end up on our website that are codified, they're videoed, and they can be and looked at for free and downloaded. It's plminstitute.org, or is our, is our website. And then we do two onsite meetings a year, one in the spring and one in the fall, that are kind of to bring warm fuzzies together so people can get together collaboratively.

So how long does it, would it take one to, to become a functional doctor?

Then they can call themselves a functional doctor as soon as they've gone through what we call the Applying Functional Medicine in Clinical Practice program, which is the basically intro that overviews the whole curriculum in, in 2 to 3 days.

Okay. See, like for me, when you talk about people not wanting to open the books and go back to it, I would be the complete opposite. I would want to know everything. Everybody I talk to, and you know this, I want to know everything.

Exactly.

I'm like, no stone unturned. And I think, I think there's probably more people like that, you know, that do want to know things, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it.

That's right.

Or be interested. I think the people that are the most interested are the most curious and the ones that want the answers and the ones that ask.

You just said it. And that I feel of all the things that have happened in the 35 years of the functional medicine movement, the thing that I am most pleased with is that we've been able to show people are a lot more curious and willing to work hard for clinical skills than they were given credit for. And, you know, I believe that healthcare providers across all disciplines in the main are very dedicated and they're very purpose-driven and they really are concerned about their patients and they do want them to get better. It's not all just a bunch of money-grabbing individuals. And what we want to do is make the system consistent with their goals. When they, when they went into this field, if they felt disillusioned, we want to re-enchant them with being of service to people through healthcare. And that's the, that's the functional medicine model. It's, it's a, that's the whole objective of what we're trying to do.

Do you feel satisfied or gratified or happy with where it's gone now? Do you feel like there's still a lot more work to be done in the teachings, or do you feel very good about how quickly that it's come about? Because I mean, in the past, 5 years, I would say, if not maybe a little bit more, like I would say it's almost exploded.

Yeah.

And it's a, to me, it's a beautiful thing to see people that are willing to ask questions that know that's a good thing to know that there's always things to look for and ways to improve and that nobody knows everything. And instead of A, accepting or B, getting offended by being questioned, it's the consistency and the desire to keep moving, keep learning. And do you feel good about that? Do you feel like you've really made that impact into people's lives?

You You are such a great narrator. I mean, you've captured— that was almost like a drop the mic summary of anything that I could spit back to you. That's the whole raison d'être. It's the whole reason for what we're trying to do. And I think what's happened as a consequence of some remarkable people that have caught the energy of the functional medicine movement and brought their creative energies into it, that we're starting to get stickiness at all levels. And you know, when we started, thanks to Mark Hyman and Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Patrick Hanaway, to actually have a functional medicine clinic in the Cleveland Clinic, one of the world-renowned medical centers, at first everybody was saying, well, never last, it'll never survive. But now it has grown up. It's taken over more space. It's booked out over a year with appointments. It's one of the most active clinics in all of the Cleveland Clinic. And, and so that then kind of stimulates other individuals to get involved. Now we find out that this most recent MAHA Make America Healthy movement has started to embrace the concepts of functional medicine. And there is now in the government money that's been set aside in this next budgetary round several millions of dollars to do functional medicine research.

And so there'll be studies that'll go on in all sorts of different centers that will really codify and support how this is going to improve patient outcomes, lower costs, and lead to improved function, which rather than just treat the symptoms, that we're really going to get to the root cause and get people back functioning high.

This is where I struggle a little bit is I never understand or grasp why people get so down on the that the want to dig and to see and to, to learn to how to prevent this. And they're so accepting of this is it and this is the only way. And I always tell people, I'm not going to say exactly how I say it, but I'm not your effing dad. Like, you do whatever you want to do, right? Do whatever you want to do, but at least know that there's options here and there's other ways and means to do things. Everybody always wants to say there's more than one way to skin a cat, but there's also multitudes of ways to take care of yourself. There's different ways to rehab injuries. There's different ways to treat illnesses and sicknesses. And every single person is wired differently. So some people are allergic to something. Some people don't do well with anything. So why the kickback on looking into different ways or why the kickback into questioning the way that certain studies were being put out when it's right there in front of you that some of these are manipulated?

My simple answer, and I'm sure that this is a much more complicated story than I'm going to make it, but my simple answer to that, having been in this field now for the better part of 50 years, is that we all think that what we've learned is the only thing that we should learn because we are codified. We took exams, we got tested, we had to learn things, we had to work for that knowledge. And so we want to think that what we learned is the only thing that we needed to know because we might be certified or we might have a license or we might be accredited or we might be, have a reputation. And so those things give us an identity and those identities can be really limiting. In terms of how we would see ourselves. And I want to give a personal example of this because I made this transformation myself. So what happened to me when I started off in my professorship in 1970 was my first real job as a professor. I was, I think I would say, was a very, very traditional clinical biochemist in a medical world. And I had been trained all by medical school faculty and gone through that whole trial-by-fire education system.

And, you know, I was a good student, progressed nicely. And so when I got this job, which I considered was really wonderful, then I wanted to behave like I should, usual and customary. But then something happened in my life that opened up my ability to kind of look beyond my own limitations. Some 4 weeks, actually 3 and a half weeks to be true, when my wife and I and our 2 sons, I had a 2-year-old son and an infant son, moved to our first place in this city where we were going to start— I was going to start my career. I really didn't know anybody or anything at that point. We had just moved in. And lo and behold, unfortunately, when I woke up early in the morning, I went out to find that my youngest son, our infant, was dead. Wow. Yeah. So I don't want to overly dramatize this, but I think anybody who hears that story would say, That's a life changer right there. I mean, there's, there's no taking that back. I could go on into more explanation, but I think that's just enough to set that as a point where ultimately to try, try to make any sense of that in my life.

I eventually said, his name was Kurt, that if I can help one set of parents or one individual in the world to prevent this from happening, then it's a life well served. So I have to be open to all new ideas. I have to be open to anything that may sound peculiar at first, but I need, to look at it before I reject it. Because medicine could not give a simple answer to why he had had this sudden death. There was no evidence why. I think over the years we've now got an explanation. This has been, you know, over 50 years now. But it was what changed my whole direction and made me open to learning at levels that I probably would've not been other, other than that stimulation. So I think that for people, they have to get out of their comfort and recognize that there's, there are things on the other side that they may learn that will open up all sorts of vistas for them.

Yeah.

And rather to reject out of hand. They have to say, well, I don't understand that. It doesn't seem to make sense, but I'm going to look into it.

See, and like, I'm a super spiritual guy and I understand the concept of there's things that happen in our lives without explanation that are terrible at the time, but then there's a reason for it. And your reason was clearly to make the impact in the world. And I can say that without exaggeration for the world in what you've done and not to take away from what happened, because that made my stomach sink when you told me that, but then to understand why and to know why, because it was shaping you for what you're doing. And when we figure that out, that also makes us become the best we could ever be, that, that these things, that they happen, but there's ultimately a reason. Then when you look back and see it, you say, wow, you know, wow. I don't want to take away from anything else we're talking about, but that just made me— I want to point that out. And what you've persevered and what you did because of that, and I'm sure still drives you to this day.

Yeah, it does.

I just want to just take a moment to recognize that because I find that perseverance and vigilance are two of the best virtues that a person could ever have and be bestowed with. And I just— such a level of respect and gratitude for you for everything.

Thank you. Yeah, I know I had done— Dylan, really, I've had more than my fair share of remarkable moments in, but one that I wanted to mention because I think it's indicative of what you're saying. So I have 3 sons now. Kelly is 56, Kyle is 53, and Justin is 43, our baby. When Justin was born, he was born with a cerebral bleed.

Wow.

And he ended up having to have a shunt put in, a cerebral shunt, and his Pediatric neurosurgeon told his mother and I that, you know, it was very doubtful he'd go to normal school or he would, you know, maybe not even speak well. So we recognized that we were going to have, you know, a child with special needs probably. Well, I'll just roll forward now. He's now 43. He's just finished his second master's and he graduated magna cum laude in behavioral psychology. And he's just, if you met him, you would think this is one remarkable person. He is well-read. He loves people. He tells me he's an old soul and I think he is. So we look at these miracles and how do they happen? So what happened with he and I that I think is symbolic for anyone about their own life. There's a message here. So I, every year at the Institute for Functional Medicine annual meeting, get a chance to give some talk about the state of the union. What do I think is really happening? So this particular year, this was about 4 years ago, the focus of the meeting was on neurological health and brain plasticity.

So I was thinking about my talk and I was thinking, you know, I ought to have an expert in the field to share this, like a neuroscientist or someone to share the podium with me to talk about what's going on. And who do I know that really knows about neurological plasticity? And then of course I thought, well, hold it, my son probably knows more about this than anybody in the world. He's lived through this and he didn't even see in 3 dimensions until he was 6 years old. He had such bad strabismus, that he was seeing the world in two dimensions. Wow. Now think of that. And he was compensating for it. We didn't even know it until he was tested and we found out that that was a perceptual problem that he had, which, by the way, he was able to be trained— he trained himself out of by going to special courses. So I then asked him if he wanted to share the podium with me at this meeting in front of 1,200 medical people. And he said, yeah, well, that would really be cool. I'd really like to do that. So the night before, we were practicing.

He had his flashcards. And it came about midnight and I said, hey, you know, you got this down. Let's just call it a night now and tomorrow you'll be all ready for the talk. And so then here it is, the meeting starts. By that time he's made friends with a lot of people in the convention. He's really good on names and people, so he's kind of figured out a lot of the important people that were there. And so we start, I do my introduction and they said, I'd like to introduce to my son who's gonna speak about really what this brain plasticity means if you're living in that brain. And with that brain. So he steps up and he gives this really absolutely brilliant talk and it was just so moving. And so then I knew he was coming to the end because we'd practiced the night before. So I started to stand up to take back the podium so we'd make this transition. And he turns to me and he says, so Dad, I'm not done yet. And I said, okay. So I sat down and then he said, so I just want all of you to know out there, you know, we all travel with challenges and issues and And it really comes down to often what is your support?

How do you see yourself through this? How do you define yourself that you can be a victor and not a loser? He said, so I just want to acknowledge that my parents, I never once in my life thought I was going to be a loser. They continually told me that I could be a winner. They continually supported me. They continually brought me into concerts and communication with other people who saw me better than I saw myself. And he said, so I just want to give a thanks to my father and mother because I would not be here. And there was not a dry eye in that whole house.

There's not.

You can imagine. But there's a story there for all of us, right? About acknowledgement, about staying to task, about looking for the good side to how you amplify those things, knowing that we all carry stuff with us, sometimes baggage we need to throw off the back and move on. So yeah, I think to me, all these are parts of when you ask me, How did functional medicine gain in personality? These are my experiences with functional medicine that are incorporated kind of into the, into the zeitgeist.

That's what I love about it because it's, it's remarkable in multitudes of ways. But I think beyond what you just said, in the ability to take on concepts that are, we're told are irreversible or not curable, and to go head on and disagree with that and then prove that a lot of these things are incorrect. And instead of just sitting back and accepting what we're told because it's the easy thing to do— yeah, because I've thought about this and I've thought, why are people— it's not like there's monetary value for just regular old people, so why are they so divisive and angry? And it's because it's so much easier to accept and fall in line as opposed to having to work and think and look and understand that there's other areas And it's so easy and it angers people to think that they needed to do that in their lives.

Yes.

And you have to look at it. See, I used to look at it from the wrong perspective. They're just, they're just this group of people and this is just the attitude, but it's everybody.

Yeah.

It's not just one group of people. It's all kinds of different people that are misprogrammed, misguided, and misled.

Yep.

And that's why I do what I do with people like you is to try to convey the message of no, these people aren't bad and no, nobody's bad and the boogeyman this and that. It's there, there's multitudes of ways and there's people here to help you do it. It's up to you to decide what you want to do, but understand there's a lot of things that we're told that aren't necessarily accurate. And I just love the fact that we have this alternative and people that are willing to talk about it and do it and now have the balls to say, no, no more. You're not shutting me down. You're not stopping me. I just love that. And I think that You are the backbone of that.

Thank you.

Well, you are. I mean, because you've— what you've taught, it gives people hope. What you've uncovered, it gives people that will to look for more and to not give up, you know. And I, and I think that is just beyond commendable. And, and that's— it's just why I personally have so much gratitude and why I'm thankful to be able to present you to people so they know.

Well, thank you. I think that you've said something, Dylan, I want to capture it because I think it's a really important thing, this word hope. As a person in the biological sciences, there are two paradigms or two concepts that are dominant that everybody learns and memorizes and recites on demand as if it were a given truth. And those are Mendelian genetics from the monk Gregor Mendel, that we learned about dominant and recessive genes and that we are a product of our genetic inheritance. And then the other was Charles Darwin, the concept of natural selection, survival of the fittest. Those two principles have guided our society. We have social Darwinism, we have social Mendelianism. It's a way of saying some people are better than others because they got the luck of the better genes, or that they survived at the expense of another person because they're more competitive. Those models are richly built into our whole architecture of our culture and into medicine. And as, as a, as a medical person gone through all these years of training, I recognize that when I was a student of Mendelian genetics and felt that we were already determined by the event of the sperm meeting the egg, and then you put on top of that, those that survive are going to be the most competitive.

Now you've got a system in medicine that is really saying doctors are omniscient. They have information no one else has. They will then give that information to people that are sick, that are coming to them as losers to make them winners. So they will give them the right nostrums or the right tools that they're going to rescue them from bad genes and they will make them more competitive in life. And now, now, and when I say now, I mean since 2003. So that's only 23 years ago, a new concept was born. And when it was born, it is now transforming the whole of healthcare. It hasn't completely saturated it, but it will, I guarantee it. Probably not while I'm still on the planet, but it will soon. And that is the concept of epigenetics. Yes, epigenetics. Now, epigenetics is a powerful frame shifter. Let me just quickly give a primer course, please, in a minute of epigenetics. So if we ask a question How is it that when a sperm and an egg meet together to make one cell, that, that through fetal development will ultimately produce a fully developed female or male that now has hundreds of different cell types in it?

Livers, heart, skin, all these different cell types. Now hold it just a minute. You're telling me one cell is now going to become many trillions of cells of different personality? How can that be? And what we learned from embryology, We're all— we'd study this. The godfather of endurology was a gentleman by the name of Waddington. I studied out of his textbook. And what it says is that as the development of the embryo occurs and it starts to develop the different tissue levels, that only portions of the book of life are going to be expressed in certain cell types as it evolves based upon their environment. So when that next cell develops, it's only going to express information related to the nervous system or to the vascular. And so you say, well, how does that occur? And it was said epigenetics, 'cause it's above the genes. It's something that's causing the genes to be expressed in a different way. Didn't change the genes, it just changed how they're read. Then we said, well, what is epigenetics? And for lots of years it was not a well-understood process. But over the last 20 or 30 years with cell biology evolving, now we see the actual processes, the stuff that is stuck on our genes to change how those genes will express themselves.

Those are the epigenetic modifiers. Now here's the big aha. 2022, '23, an investigator at Duke University and his postdoctoral student, Randy Jirtle is his name, and Robert Waterlund decided they would do an experiment which seemed very maybe trivial at the time. They would take this certain type of mouse that was used in research for diabetes and obesity and cancer called the Agouti mouse. It had a genetic mutant of a gene called the Agouti gene. And what they would do is when the Agouti mother got pregnant, they would fortify her diet with nutrients that were specific to increase epigenetic tagging of the genes. So it's folate, vitamin B12, betaine, and vitamin B6. So they, they put those nutrients in supplemental level in the diet of the pregnant mother early in her pregnancy. And then the baby The offspring were born. People, the people working in the study looked down and they rushed to Jurdahl's office. They said, we don't understand what's happened. You gotta come down and take a look at these offspring, these pups. They did not look at all like the parents. Really? The parents have kind of white-yellow fur and they get very plump and they're characteristic in many, many studies done around the world that everybody knows what an Agouti mouse looks like.

No, these were very slender. And they had what were called pseudoagouti fur. It was a, it was a mottled gray color fur. They lived 35% longer than their parents. They didn't get diabetes and they didn't get obese, and they had the identical same genes.

Wow.

Now, how did that happen? This birthed the field of nutritional epigenetics.

Yeah.

So since that discovery, you talk about hope. Now we say we are reforming our bodies every time we eat, think, act, or be. We're sending information to our genes that repackages how our genes are going to be expressed to give rise of a different outcome. So when we talk about ultra-processed foods and we see its relationship to the obesity epidemic, how is that happening? It's calories, it's vitamins and minerals and proteins, carbohydrate, fat. How does that happening? Because we're sending information to the genes epigenetically that is of a hostile type that the genes perceive as being foreigners. And dangerous. And what does our body do when it's exposed to danger? It does what it's supposed to do. The immune system goes on guard and starts fighting back. That's called inflammation. Yeah. And what are the diseases we have of today? Inflammation. What is obesity? It's an— it's a metabolic inflammatory disease. And so what we are seeing is the epigenetic remodeling of the human population by what we've chosen to feed people, these ultra-processed foods. So what happens if you feed different information? From foods that come from natural sources. Those same genes respond differently because they're imprinted by those messages in an entirely different way.

This has opened up the field of nutrition in a way that now we have food as medicine, which for the first time in the 2026 Dietary Guidelines of the United States, the first new guidelines we've had since 1971, what do they mention? Food is medicine. This is a whole new concept that is going to revolutionize how nutrition is seen, and it's going to call question into the way we've been feeding What I say is we have been engaged for the last 50 years in an uncontrolled experiment called ultra-processed foods. Yeah, we didn't elect to be in that study, but we're in that study. It's not placebo-controlled. And what are the results that we're seeing as they're coming out now? Yeah, exactly. We don't need to do big data analysis to see the results of that experiment. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, arthritis, obesity. These are all the outcomes from that experiment. So our genes are responding to what they see as hostility, producing these effects on our body.

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but the food is the medicine. And it's taken me a long time to, to come to that conclusion myself. And I'm talking somebody that has studied nutrition from the age of 11. Now, granted, that was due to an eating disorder and body dysmorphia, but I've spent my entire life studying food and understanding every single concept from food labels to where they're coming from, to how they're made and what's going on in between and how it's affecting our body. And I am no genius by any stretch of the imagination, but when you put your life's work into something, you see it. And I know exactly what you're saying, and I agree thoroughly. And that's why I, I open up about my own struggles and the changes that I've made once I finally figured it out. And like, I would argue, and I'm curious your thoughts on this, 'cause I like to personalize some of the things that I've done, 'cause I know people struggle with some of the things I've done through, and then we can help them with that. So I would argue my fear of fat, eating fats for, I don't know, three-quarters of my life, even being a nutritionist.

I believe that that gave me— and I'll get into some of the heart conditions I found on myself— I thoroughly believe that that is one of the reasons I had plaque in my arteries, considering I'm an athlete of high level and all the things I've done. And it contributed to several things that thankfully I found early enough. But I think the purpose was so that I could educate people. Yeah. But I would argue that, that things like that and those low-fat foods that are made and stripped of every nutrient and then put God knows what into 'em. I would argue that that is a prevalent problem. And then the things that you brought up from the seed oils, from all of the contaminants in food, the red dyes, the artificial sweeteners, and the keywords are artificial, artificial, artificial. And people, you, the, if you get used to saying these terms and you don't realize what they are, artificial dye, glyphosate, if you break it down, what it actually is, Roundup. Well, I mean, raid or whatever the shit is they're putting in our foods. If you say this stuff and then you sit there and, and you repeat it and you go, we're eating that, but nobody knows, but you gotta say it.

Oh, this is so much fun. I can't tell you how much I'm enjoying this. So I was, I'm around long enough that I was involved as a young man in the McGovern Committee hearings back in the late '60s. Yep. That led to the previous dietary goals in the United States, which were published in 1971. And those of your viewers who are not familiar, what those previous dietary guidelines did is that they chastised fat. And so it basically was a series of guidelines saying we got to remove fat out of the diet, particularly saturated fat, but all calories of that. So what happened with the food industry is they said, okay, these are going to be the new guidelines and we're now going to have these new regulations called the National Food Labeling Act. In LEA. So we've— we, we are going to abide by these regulations, but we need to do this in a way that's very profitable for us so we can make foods that are cheap and charge money to make profit. And so the way we're going to do this is we're going to put a lot of refined carbohydrate and sugar, particularly fructose and high fructose corn syrup sweetener, in to fill those calories because people are saying that sugar is okay, and fat is bad.

Now, what were the results of that experiment on the human population? When I was in school in the '60s, early '60s, there was no such thing as metabolic syndrome. In fact, there was hardly any discussion about type 2 diabetes. It was still an artifact. Diabetes, when you talked about it, was type 1 diabetes, where you lost your insulin-secreting cells in your beta cells of your pancreas. But starting in the '70s and '80s and then really accelerating into the '90s, metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, obesity, dyslipidemia became the principal causes of chronic disease and premature death, for which then the drug industry said, okay, we have a real opportunity here. We're going to find ways to block these processes. So we'll find the drug for that and the drug for this. And we'll just go down the metabolic pathways and we'll find the right things that will interfere with these things. So the person doesn't have high blood sugar or they don't have high blood pressure or they don't have high blood cholesterol. And we'll say we're a winner. And so the food industry produced these foods. And actually, I know this is going to sound probably a little bit specious, but it's the truth.

I was invited in the '80s, probably as a heretic lecturer at the annual meeting of the National Food Processing Association, their annual meeting, their big meeting, which was in Florida. And I know they had invited me because they felt they needed one kind of weirdo on the program. And so to look like they had a balanced program. So they stuck me actually as a speaker on the early morning at 8 o'clock after their big evening banquet with a lot of celebration. So I expected no one was going to be there, but there were people there in the morning when I came in. And so when I was announced, as introduced, I went to the podium and I said, so I want to thank the organizers of this meeting very much for the opportunity to speak. On this topic. I think it's a very important topic. And I also want to say on behalf of the American Pharmaceutical Association, how much they appreciate all the hard work that this industry has done to produce low profit margin foods that you've worked so hard for to generate the business for their high profit margin pharmaceutical drugs. Now you can imagine how that went over.

It was like, I did get people's attention. I think they wanted to hook me off the stage, but I was able to get the talk done. I was being somewhat humorous, but really not. I mean, this, this is part of what we got ourselves into this do loop, which is why I'm so excited about the 2026 dietary guidelines, because throw away the whole inverted food pyramid kind of debate. I think that's— who cares? What we really care about is that we've recognized the food principles that we were using since 1971 to 2026 were misappropriating and causing an epidemic, a pandemic greater than that of it, certainly greater than AIDS. And greater than SARS-CoV-2.

Yeah.

And that was a foodborne pandemic that we're still living through.

I agree.

It's an existential crisis in our society. So to me, what we're witnessing right before us is the convergence of all these new bits of information. Then we can ask— we can put the glyphosate in there. We could put the whole food supply system, the health of our soils, and the difference between regenerative agriculture and commercial agriculture that is based on throughput and yield versus on quality and nutrition. And all these things become part of the equation that we're now dealing with, for which, by the way, I acknowledge there's no simple answer. But the answers will come from asking the right questions and recognizing that what we've been doing is killing a lot of people. It's killing a lot. And people— one said to me, one of my colleagues, and he said it somewhat, I think, humorously, but I think the substance was very serious. He said, Jeff, you know, people are dying to know what we know. People are dying to know what we know. And I've lost friends over the years as a consequence of the fact that they just stayed on track with something you could see was doing them in, but it was easy.

It was customary. It was normative. It was part of their daily behavior. And they eventually wrote their own epitaph. So I think that these are really important questions that we're dealing with. And I want to applaud you for what you're doing in this podcast, because it's all about first being educated. To be awake to the fact that there are these things that we can do something about.

And it's so prevalent in all things. I think food is probably one of the biggest perpetrators. The more that I've understood— granted, there's a lot when it comes to drugs, of course, but I think it's too obvious. And I think that if you dig deep enough, it's really the food is number one. And then the drugs, like you said, create the problem. Wow, there's a problem there. Now we can give you 35 different things. And then you could argue, well, people are living longer than they ever have. Well, what's the quality of life? What is the amount of time spent in the hospital? What's the amount of drug use that you have them on? And then you start looking at that and you do the math and it's like, well, how many years of your life were shitty and how many of them were actually quality? And then when you look at those numbers, it would blow your mind. One of the things that I've changed, and I can, and I speak this so that people understand what we're saying, I was eating like 15 to 20 grams of fat a day if I was lucky.

Now I'm eating 130. And you know, I had plaque in my arteries and all of this and everything, and I've upped my calories 1,000. I was eating no fat of any kind other than peanut butter. And now, like, shit, before I came here, I just had 50 grams of fat and avocados and butter and everything else.

You know what?

I have never been this, like, cognitively just locked in, even when I don't sleep. My blood panels and everything, particle sizes, HDL through the roof. The only thing that went up a little bit was LDL, but of course it did because of the, you know, the certain fats. Is that bad? Yeah, that's another debate, right?

But well, if it's not oxidized, it's not bad.

Exactly.

If it's oxidized, it's bad. And oxidized comes from when you're eating crap that produces oxidation. Yeah.

My LDL small particles were over 6,000. Now they're down to 22. I'd say that's a pretty drastic improvement. But then, then poses the question, like you said, and I love that you brought this up. I'll give you an example. And it was about the acceptance of what you were being told and just dying. So when I found the plaque in my arteries, imagine my shock. Well, then I start— and this is how I discovered Linus Pauling, which I'll get into— was digging into it and finding that I had an extremely elevated Lp(a) and then understanding, okay, this is a different ballgame that we're playing with here. So I mean, when I tell you I studied, boy did I study. And then I said, okay, we're going to go to the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis, which is supposed to be like the end-all be-all for hearts. And you can imagine my disgust upon going up there with my boatload of what I, but I was very respectful. I, you don't want to go in there and piss off a doctor, right? And they, I tell them I want to take a PCSK9 inhibitor. I've already got it laid out.

I want Repatha. I want to take Vascepa, knowing that the pure form that it is of what you would take as fish oil, which is another topic we could get into. And them to tell me it would be bad practice to recommend that and to only use a statin, which I indicated will increase the Lp(a). Caused me more problems than I've ever had. One of the rare times I got into a fight with my— both my mom and my wife was on that ride home, telling me, well, you don't know more than them. And they haven't questioned me since because I— the argument of being able to reverse this and that and seeing my numbers and what's happened in the past 3 years because of my resistance to listen to that shit, you know. So what you said is dead on. If you don't have the know and understanding or the ability to go seek out what you need, you take what they give you and think that you're doing right. And it's not— it is deadly.

So you said so many great things there, Dylan. I mean, each one of those we could get, but let me, let me focus on one that I think so exemplifies what you and I are sharing here. So you talked about Vascepa. So Vascepa is a modified isopentyl derivative of eicosapentaenoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid, the omega-3 fatty acids. Now here is, here is the interesting paradox. So a person who has high blood fats, so-called hypertriglyceridemia, high triglycerides in their blood, you would say, oh, hold it, they've got a lot of fat in their blood. So we need to take fat out of their diet. But if you do that in that kind of person, their blood fats will go up. So then you say, well, what's the solution? The solution is to learn something from the Inuits in Greenland. The Inuits that were studied by a colleague of mine, Dr. Dyerberg, back in the '50s. He's Danish and he and his colleague Dr. Bang went to Greenland and studied the Inuit natives and found that their triglycerides in their blood were extraordinarily low, below 60. Wow. And these are people who were eating 90% of their calories as fat.

Really? 90% of their calories were coming. What was, what was the fat? Marine oils. They're eating seals, they're eating whales. That's their native diet, is they don't have a lot of green vegetables in Greenland. And so they basically were living off a diet that was extraordinarily high in fat, but it was the fat that speaks to the genes in such a way as to regulate how your liver processes fat, right? So they didn't have high blood fats. This is the paradox of when we try to make complex things simple and we just make a rule saying, no fat. Yeah. And then we get into a problem. And so the, the whole construct that you're talking about is, this is why I'm kind of concerned right now about this whole pinching on protein right now. Yeah. Because we categorize food in these big categories, protein, carbohydrate, and fat. But within those three categories are all sorts of difference between different types of protein, different types of carbohydrate, different types of fat. But each has a different physiological personality. And so if we just both put 'em together, you could max out your protein of the wrong type of protein for your body and actually do yourself harm.

That's right.

And so I think this construct of being more intelligent about how we take the message and translate it to our own daily life and our own body and our own habits is really important. That's why your program is so important because it's digging more deeply into these things, not to manipulate people. Because what you end up happening, I just was at the Natural Foods Expo, this 85,000-person extravaganza down in Anaheim, California. I think they have 12,000, no more than that, somewhere around 20,000 booths, I think. And so all these commercial interests. And if you walk around, and these are all supposedly natural foods, some of them are worse than any processed food you'd ever see. The ingredients reads like some kind of a smorgasbord of chemical gobbledygook.

It's like a Cheesecake Factory menu. Exactly.

Exactly. So I think that we are trying to really bring rational intelligence. And again, it comes back to what you were speaking to. If you're close to nature, if you're close to the soil, if you're close to things that the magic of nature was incorporated into that, it's more likely you're gonna end up with something that is closer to your need. Something that's 3 orders of magnitude more processed. And, you know, we learned that, I have a partner now in an official company in Dutch Harbor, Alaska. Up in the Aleutian Islands and, you know, where the deadliest catch boats go out of. And we, we have put together a pharmaceutical-grade plant that takes fish caught line and hook, puts them into our special boats that he actually designed. They're frozen within 20 minutes or 30 minutes of a live fish to -20. They come to our shoreside plant. They never get above 100°F in processing, and we produce an oil then that retains all the natural stuff that was in the original fish. We didn't saponify, winterize, deacidify, all the stuff that goes on with fish oil production today. It produces a chemical product from what was a natural food.

So all these things are part of the learning. That's why we're also with regenerative agriculture with our Himalayan tartare buckwheat. I never thought I'd be in farming. Now we have farms in upstate New York that are for the first time in the history of the United States are growing this 3,500-year-old food, Himalayan tartare buckwheat, which has the highest immune potential of any food we know in the United States. This has never been seen. And now it's regenerative and approved. So these are all, as I learn, I say, I need to go down to the source. Nature is trying to teach us something here. We need to get close to nature.

It's the answer to everything. I, like I said, I'm not a scientist, but I study science and I study all of this and what I, what I know, and I don't, I don't care if I've got any proof of it or not, is that we were given everything here that we need to take care of ourselves no matter what is here. We've also created things that can ruin that.

That's right.

Those are man-made creations. Those are not natural things that are occurring. Whatsoever. And, and I know for certain, if utilized properly, there's everything here we need to correct whatever is there.

That is exactly right. And, you know, this is— so I'm so glad you said that. So now, 6 years ago, I felt that I kind of run the gamut now. You know, I had this company Metagenics that we sold. It was, uh, became the largest nutrition company for health practitioners. And, uh, and then we had the functional medicine, and then we had the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute. And I was coming back from a meeting and railing with my colleagues, as I often do on Monday morning after being gone. And these, these are people that have worked with me now for over 25 years. So they know me pretty well. And so they both said, they said, Jeff, you know, you, I think you still have one more play in you before you call it quits here, you know, because you're kind of big in stature. You've got these really bold ideas. Maybe you need one more kind of way to bite at the apple with a big, bold health. Why don't you start something because what you're saying is, is the root cause of all these problems. It starts with immune problems. They all relate to immune problems.

So maybe you wanna spend the last part of your life really focusing on how do you reeducate the immune system? How do you rejuvenate an immune system that's caught up in inflammation and, and caught up in chronic inflammatory problems? So we started down that path. It's what led me to Himalayan tartare buckwheat, what's led me into this fish oil. So Big Bold Health, Now has become kind of the outcome from now the last 5 years of really understanding how nature is giving us these tools to reprogram our immune systems upstream, root cause, before you go downstream and say, what's the anti-inflammatory I want to take? Do I want to take Boswellia? Do I want to take quercetin? Do I want to take ginkgo? No, upstream is where these foods actually modulate our immune system by epigenetically reimprinting it to be friendly. To be our friends, not our enemies. So that, that's Big Bold Health. That's what we've been doing with that over the last 5 years.

Here's my disappointment with this entire interview. I'll tell you right now, is the lack of time. I've covered like the most minute amount of stuff that I want to get into. I, I've got a couple things, cuz I know we're running down. You must come back and see me, please, by the way. Oh, thank you. Okay. This is something completely off topic. I'm sure you've probably gotten asked, but I want to know and I want everybody else to know. You said you're about to be 80. You have got to be one of the most cognitively enhanced and functional people I've ever met at that— actually, in general, I don't want to say at your age, I mean just in general— with the ability to, on a drop of a dime— because I, I interview everybody, and I can tell you right now, some of the people that everybody thinks are so brilliant, I'm not saying they're not smart because they are, but they start dancing, giving maybe political answers, you could tell when they don't know, you and we've all been there, I get it. But you are so sharp and so quick and you like— what do you do health-wise?

What's like a daily thing or something you would recommend to stay cognitively sharp and just mentally like acute?

Yeah, thank you. So that's been, that's been my, my search, my travel. It's always interesting to personalize things and say, if I'm going to tell other people to do stuff, maybe I should do it myself. Happy to join the club. So And this is what actually led me into this Himalayan turtletree buckwheat and this fish oil story, because I found that those were, along with pre and probiotics, those, that family of nutrients, probably the most important for reprogramming our immune system. So what happened to me was I started to recognize that if I was to go and actually ask the question, where on the planet, what history do we have that tells us what people do that more likely live to be 100 and still be healthy?

Yeah.

And they don't take a lot of supplements. They don't take new enhancers and senolytics. They basically live a lifestyle that has certain habits in it naturally, and they eat a diet that is very rich in certain things that are enhancing of brain health. And so I started doing travels. I, my, my wife and I over the last couple years have been going to all the Mediterranean countries, in Africa, in, in, in Asia, and really trying to understand What are the characteristics that, that weave these things together and that we could give a recipe that I'm taking that ultimately we talk about in Big Bull Health. I got a, I have a book coming out in January of '27 actually that's gonna kind of codify all of this in, into food plans. But to, to make it simple, the proof of all of this has to do with a study that would be large enough with enough people in it so you could say with some assurity that this is a general principle that could cut across many people. So I decided to do something that was told to me was not a good idea, as it would be a waste of time and money, to put together an 850-person double-blind placebo-controlled trial, the largest study ever done anywhere in the world on a single food, looking at brain and cognitive health outcomes coupled with epigenetic changes of their immune system.

We had Illumina build out a special gene chip for us, has 1.2 million epigenetic sites that we can then study in the blood of people before and after, what's being epigenetically tagged and what pathways in their body are being modulated. And then we couple that together with looking at all sorts of behavioral and brain outcome using the NIH instruments for evaluation. That study will be completed in May of this year. We'll have data hopefully analyzed, at least preliminary analyzed, in June. I think we're going to learn something that, you know, nature doesn't give up her secrets easily, but I think she's going to give us some secrets that we can generalize that are incorporated within our— because the food we're using is this Himalayan tartary buckwheat sprout powder that has a higher density of brain-active nutrients than any food that we've ever studied. That is, that's my work right now. I'm totally committed, my research team to that. And, and now I'm recommending to everybody 2 teaspoons of Himalayan turkey buckwheat sprout powder a day keeps the doctor away. Where's the kind of where we're heading?

Does that have any like metabolic benefit or anything?

Yeah. Fat burning wise, or because it's immuno, it, it's immunometabolism. And one of the things that people don't understand is that there is a, a triangle of engagement at a physiological level. The, the immune system and the nervous system are the two systems of our body that are 24/7, 365 speaking to the outside world and translating the inside information and they're crosstalking all the time, the, the nervous and immune system, and they're influencing then metabolism. So this is called immunometabolism. It's the most rapidly growing field right now of study in basic sciences is how the immune system is controlling or communicating is may probably a better word with the, with the metabolism and how metabolism is, is then reciprocally communicating back to the immune system. So now we put the gut microbiome in there because that's where 70% of the immune system is located. Now we put the lungs in there because that's another site where you're taking information from the outside world and you have all these immune sites on your lungs that are sending messages to your whole body. That has to do with the myokines in our muscles that are communicating with our immune system and why people have loss of muscle mass, sarcopenia, with aging because they have this chronic inflammatory condition.

All of these things are starting to be pulled together and it starts with this interconnection between the immune system, the nervous system, and our metabolism.

This is the masterclass on everything that I love. And, and like uncovering some of these things that I was not aware of is just like the biggest blessing today for me. So thank you for that. It, it really is. 'Cause now I can, instead of resting tonight, go home and start looking into all this and do it. 'Cause that's what I do, man. And I get, I get things like this and I can't stop. So I thank you because that now you just gave me a whole load of things to start getting into. And please do share. The results of that study with me and we can maybe even go over 'em together and piece it out a little bit and discuss what you found.

We actually, the reason I think this study is going to prove fruitful is that we did a preliminary trial that we published the results of a year ago, November. That was a smaller trial, only 50 subjects. It was an open-label trial, but again, surprising to my colleagues in the academic world, they said, Jeff, you're never going to get a signal that's strong enough with that small group of people because you're not also putting them on a metabolic ward diet. You're allowing them to eat whatever they want. And you won't get a strong enough signal from just adding this Himalayan turtletree buckwheat. It'll be, it'll be lost in the noise. Well, surprising as it was, the data which has been published in a top-tier journal, we showed that some of these sites that relate to immune cell aging were, were changed by 20-fold.

Wow.

20-fold. Yeah. And we reduced the rate of immune aging by 47% in some of these people. Gotta be. And, and that's within 90 days. So nature has these extraordinary tools that it, if we harness them, can be very, very valuable.

Here's my hope. This is, this is my direct hope, and I mean this. So Dr. Elizabeth, you're like a mentor to me. She's a 3-time guest on here. She's got the record for guests. So I want you to break that record, and I mean that. And that's saying something because she means a great deal to me. And so I— yeah, this was the most fun because of the enlightenment, the interaction, your knowledge base, the way that we got to go back and forth on this and the, the way that you convey the message, because you make it so palatable with such eloquence and understanding and ease, even though it's like in-depth, because a lot of things are so confusing now. And, you know, I don't tend to ever get into comments too much, but I do want to know what's bothering people or what they want. And the main thing, because I see a million comments, that's what I do, right? And The main thing that I see in complaints of everything is what exactly are we supposed to do?

Yeah.

I don't, there's so many things going out there. And one of the things that you said before we wrap the protein thing, I'm not gonna say any names because I respect some of these people, but they're so like, it's all about the protein and you gotta just throw it down and they never explain anything. But, but what types, what's good, what's bad, what, how much? Yeah. Up, you know, and, and yes, more for people that are weightlifting, but not necessarily that much for people that aren't training for something. And there's, there's just not enough. There's so much throwing down the throat and not enough of this.

Let's do more of that sometime. Yeah, I think there's a whole story there that— and I, I like to also talk about the different types of carbohydrate because carbohydrate have gotten a bad reputation, and, and I think we, we need to be a little more balanced in that discussion. And we can learn a lot by looking at the Blue Zones and the people who live to 100 years and what do they eat What is the value? And yeah, you and I have some mileage yet to go.

It, it, it's, it's very hard to be metabolically flexible if you're not eating everything to make you flexible.

Exactly.

Right. So man, I could go on all day. So, okay. One, you're coming back, please.

Oh, I'd love to.

Please. But two, let's tell everybody the best ways to find you, which I will link then. And these beautiful products here that you're gracing me with that my wife hands off. These are mine. She can get her own. But, but tell everybody about all this. I'll link everything for you and then we're gonna get into more detail on this later.

Yeah, thanks. So for the discussion about the Dutch Harbor fish oils that I talked about, yeah, the omega-3s that are like nature, and for the Himalayan turmeric buckwheat products that are the immune active products, that's bigboldhealth.com. And you can find, I have a whole page on there with all sorts of stuff that you can, depending how much you wanna be geeky You can dig deep. If you want information as it relates to me in this broader field, it would be the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute website, which is PLMinstitute.org or just PLMI. You can find it on Google. And lastly, if you want a virtual Jeff, I do have all of my 2 terabytes of data that I've ever published or ever presented that's in a virtual Jeff form on my own website, JeffBland.com. .com. So you can ask Jeff a question. And you know, it's funny, my family's kind of freaked out about this because the virtual Jeff Land remembers better than I do. It doesn't create some of the synthesis that I might create, but it remembers the facts really well.

So yeah, I had one of those created for me, and me and Queenie were looking at it, and I asked it a question. I said, well, shit, he answers that better.

I know, it's really amazing. Yeah. Who are you?

Oh man, dude, this was so great. I am just so sad that it's wrapping here, but I appreciate you coming down and seeing me. I your knowledge, and I really appreciate your life's work, which I fully intend on carrying on as long as I possibly can, and encouraging and, and helping others to do the same for you.

So I, I want to just throw back at you what you're doing to run understanding, to get people to see some light that may have been dim or, or blocked, and to be able to make more intelligent decisions about the most valuable thing that we own, which is our body. There's nothing— there's no better thing that one can they could put their life's work to. So thank you for what you're doing.

Absolutely, man. It's my pleasure and true honor to have been given that task, and I take it very serious, and I always will. So, all right, everybody, thank you so much for listening. I truly hope that you listen to every second of this intently because there is so much here that will change your life. And I can't say thank you enough for coming and seeing me. So that wraps up today. Stay tuned for plenty more to come. Dylan Gemelli and Dr. Jeffrey Bland Signing off.