Optimize Your Diet for Immunity and Health | Dr. Jeffrey Bland & Lewis Howes

What should we be doing with pre and probiotics? Should we be taking them daily? What type should we be taking? You know, how does that work? Because you hear about this a lot now. This yogurt's got good for, you know, bacteria or prebiotics or probiotics, or take this kombucha or whatever these different things are. Should we be doing these things daily? What does that exactly actually mean? So as you have advocated with many of your guests that I've heard in your podcast, a diet that takes us back to Dan Buechner and Blue Zones is a diet that people have historically eaten that has the capability of nourishing a healthy microbiome. Like a Mediterranean-style diet. That's exactly right. So you have a high amount of soluble and insoluble fibers because they're not over-processed. So these are minimally processed, just like a Michael Pollan, another person you've interviewed. And those are diets that will deliver the raw materials that are necessary for the body to have a proper microbiome. Now, individuals who are in a treatment regime, because I've been speaking here about doctors applying this to their patients, they may need a therapeutic booster. So then we get into administering a prebiotic and a probiotic that's going to be a fire starter to get them going, basically, on a booster rocket. Got it. So that's re-inoculate, right? Right. That's what we call it, re-inoculate. And then the last arm is the repair arm. And the repair arm is, are there nutrients that will then restore the damage of the very sensitive one-cell-fit liner of the gastrointestinal mucosa that separates us from all that toxic junk in our intestinal tract? Because often that becomes damaged. And that's called dysbiosis, is the name that we applied. When we started using the term dysbiosis, by the way, this was the late 80s, again, gastroenterology of the days criticized it, said, no, that does not exist. And then we talked about endotoxemia, that what happens if you have dysbiosis, then the leaky stuff goes across because you have a leaky gut that goes into your blood, and now you'll have endotoxemia. And traditional medicine said, no, you can't have endotoxemia. You'd have all these people in shock and they'd be in the hospital with toxic conditions. But we said, no, we think that there is chronic subacute endotoxemia. That's been proven unequivocally over the last three years now. Is leaky gut becoming a bigger problem in the world today? And if so, what is the root cause of a leaky gut? Endotoxemia, which occurs from a dysbiosis, which occurs from a faulty diet and lifestyle. Some bad diet and lifestyle causes most. And drugs and alcohol. I mean, people don't recognize that many of the pharmaceuticals, both OTC and prescription that people are consuming has an adverse effects on their gastrointestinal microbiota, which then complicates small bowel overgrowth and all sorts of problems that are associated with endotoxemia. It seems like you're speaking about drugs a little bit there. It seems like the world is overmedicated. Hear, hear. Overdrugged. Hear, hear. And I just don't know if the body, again, this is my, uh, just the view of human nature. I don't think the body is meant to have chemicals outside constantly to, to change the chemistry with inside that much. Now, if there's some extreme pain, that's going to give some relief or help some, some numbing of a pain that until the immune system can heal itself. Cool. But what is the difference, I guess, between modern medicine and natural medicine? And why are we overmedicated? And how can we start pulling back on that medicine? You are asking such great questions. I mean, these are really the fundamental questions of our age. Um, so I want to roll back a little bit to try to get an answer to your question. Um, years ago, I had the privilege of being invited to, um, trying to do a series of ending up at the Beijing University Medical School and Medical Center, the largest, uh, medical center and hospital in, uh, China. And it was, uh, where if a president of the United States was over there, he would be treated. And I was hosted by the chief of staff. The hospital is very prestigious opportunity for me. He then invited his whole senior staff to a seminar I gave on functional medicine, which was kind of staggering. Actually, it was obviously translated by Mandarin isn't that good. And at the end of that presentation, which was a couple of hours, uh, we were giving one another gifts in this ceremony. And I gave him a gift and I, my translator translated my English. Then he gave me a gift and he started speaking. The translator was going to translate back to English, but he went on and on and on and on. And I was standing there in Mandarin. Yes. In Mandarin. I'm wondering, gee, I wonder what he's saying because it was really lengthy. And finally I said to my translator, he said, so exactly what is he saying? He said, well, I can summarize it by saying you're the first person he's ever met from the United States who seems to understand traditional Chinese medicine. Now, the reason for that is that if you think about modern pharmacology, how does it work? It works in a specific way. A scientist or some investigator discovers a target in the body. We call it a receptor that is related to some specific disease. So they have made this fundamental scientific discovery that that receptor could be the testosterone receptor or the estrogen receptor. We have thousands of different receptors in the body that some alteration in that receptor, either too active or not active enough causes this disease or that condition. So then science jumps in and says, oh, then let's go out and screen new to nature molecules, the whole library of molecules, millions of molecules that have been generated in the laboratory from chemists time memoriam or new ones that we're going to generate. And let's then test them against that receptor. And let's find which of those molecules will most do what we want at that receptor to treat that condition. That is the pharmacological model of our age. And by the way, that's modern medicine. Right. It's been very, very successful for many things. But you'll notice that it is an acute disease focused model, because what you're really trying to do is take all the ambiguity out of a receptor. You're saying we own you. We're going to put a molecule in your body that has such an affinity for you that you can't escape from us. Now, that's why we have so many adverse drug side effects, because there's not a lot of wobble. Once you've got that controlled, now you take the luck of the draw and you may be one of those outliers that doesn't respond as other people respond. So that is a model that's really good if you're in the emergency room, because you don't want a lot of ambiguity. If that person's near death, you want that molecule to go in and do its job. Stop it in that moment. That's right. But now if you take those drugs that were designed really for acute disease management and to extend them into chronic management. So now we'll take a drug that really was designed after two years of study to go into a person that's going to take it for 20 years for a chronic condition, not an acute condition. Is that the same thing now? And the answer, it's not. It's not. And so now what we start getting is what's called iatrogenic disorders, right? What's that mean? Physician induced or treatment induced disorders that are actually caused by the effects of that molecule. Wow. Now causing another defect or disease in the body requires another molecule to treat it. Oh my gosh. So now let's go back to my traditional Chinese medicine. How did traditional Chinese medicine develop? They didn't have big chemistry and screening of thousands of new-to-nature molecules. What they had was nature. And they had empiricism. They had observation. Energy, balance, nature, the whole system, not just one little part. And plants have hundreds of bioactive compounds. Now why do plants have hundreds of bioactive compounds? Because they don't have anything better to do. No, they make those hundreds of bioactive compounds because the plant has evolved to know that that's the symphonic orchestration that's necessary to manage their function. They're not treating a disease. They're managing their function. Now when we take those molecules out of that plant by extraction, we put them into a tea or whatever, the tincture or whatever, now we have an orchestra. We don't have just the first violinist. We have an orchestra that speaks to our body. And it speaks to our body in what's called an adaptogen. Now what is an adaptogen? An adaptogen is something that goes to those receptor sites, the same ones I was talking about, the drugs are designed, but it speaks to the receptor site in a different way. If the receptor site is overactive because it's a mellow acting symphony, like a Tchaikovsky waltz or something, it turns on if it's underactive, but it turns off if it's underactive. It's an adaptogen. It's an agonist-antagonist dual personality. So how does food work? Think of our diets in a natural state. We eat thousands of these nature molecules. We call them plant nutrients or whatever. And they come into our body. They're distributed out to our cells. And how do they work? Do they work like drugs? Well, they work on the same body systems that drugs work on, but they have a different personality. They are adaptogens. If we were to eat drugs in our food, think what would happen every time that we ate. We'd be whipsawed around. And so evolution is the biggest scientific study ever done on how to safely manage human health based upon natural intakes of foods and natural products. So I learned a tremendous amount from my visit. I'm now taking several visits to China about how the different philosophies translate into a whole different treatment regime, both of which have benefits depending on when they're used in the right way. In the emergency room and in crisis medicine, we probably want these single molecules. In the control of health and function and healthy longevity, we probably want a different set of molecules that are producing this symphonic activity. Now, let me give you one last point here, and I'll get off my soapbox. You're good. Well, the soapbox is this. So because I've thrown this net out in the world of these conversations with the people I've had the fortune of meeting, I had a coincidence. I'm sure you've had this in your life, reading your biography probably more than once. So within a couple of month period, I had three different encounters that you might consider serendipitous or disconnected, but I recognize they were very connected and probably not serendipitous. I first had a conversation with a co-investigator at Vanderbilt University Medical School about a new molecule he was studying that was very useful for improving the immune system and lowering blood pressure. I never thought that blood pressure was associated with the immune system, but he was showing me the mechanism by which that relates, and I could go through it, but I won't bore you. So this molecule had a name, 2-hydroxybenzalamine, abbreviated 2HOBA, 2-H-O-B-A. So then I said, well, that's interesting. How did you come on this molecule? He said, well, we didn't do screening. We actually looked at historical consumption of foods, and we found that there was only one food that seemed to have this in high level. It's a food called tartary buckwheat. I had never heard of tartary buckwheat before in my life. I said, oh, that's very interesting. So then I go home, and I'm invited then by another colleague to go to Harbin, China, northernmost big city, 28 million people, northern China in between North Korea and Russia, for the annual health check center. I was going to speak to 8,000 Chinese doctors about functional medicine, and my host and guide was a Shanghaise medical doctor, but PhD in the United States, so he's dual citizen. And so he and I spent this week together, and on the way back from Harbin, because there was a typhoon in Shanghai, I said, so Jeff, what about we don't take a plane because the airport's shut? How about if we took the bullet train? Now, it's 2,200 miles. Bullet train. The bullet train from Harbin to Shanghai. How many miles? 2,200. Across the middle of China. Yeah. And I said, wow, what an experience that would be. It goes 300 miles an hour. That's crazy. And it's totally vibration-free, so it's like China's going by as a diorama. You're sitting in the car, right? You can't see anything. It's just like... It's just, and so these, you go through acres and miles and miles of fields, and then suddenly a 10,000, 10 million people city crops up, and then boom, you're back in the field. So halfway across China, I said to him, I said, I'm going to throw a wild card out here because I know this is a little bit strange question, but I've become interested recently just before I came on this trip with something called Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat. And do you know anything about it? It was so amazing. It was like we did a freeze frame. It's like the train stopped, and we did a freeze frame in time. His eyes got big. He looked at me and goes, you've got to be kidding me. I said, no, why is that? We have been looking for someone in the United States that we could collaborate with. We're in the world's expert in the bioactive compounds in Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat. My research group is the group in China doing the most work on this. Amazing. And so we developed a partnership. I then came home. This is the third part of the coincidence. And my dear colleague, Trish Urey, who has worked with me for 26 years, but before I I told her the Tartary Buckwheat story. So she, while I was gone, was looking to see where it was grown in the United States. She could find only one person who was a former Cornell University Ag professor, retired, and his nurse wife that lived in Angelica, New York, that had a small hoppy farm in which they were growing Tartary Buckwheat. Only people in the United States. Wow. So when I got back, my interest was really peaked. And so we made contact. We went out to Angelica, New York. We now own Angelica Farms. Amazing. And it turns out that he, for a whole series of coincidences, was able to get these artisanal seeds from the USDA that were the original ancient Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat seeds. That's amazing. So we now have a Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat organic agriculture with a cooperative of farmers. And the reason I'm saying this is it turns out that that product, the reason I'm so interested in that food, by the way, was an American food brought up by our colonial ancestors because it's so hearty. Doesn't need fertilizer. Doesn't need any subsidy. Doesn't need to be watered. It's tough and hearty because it's grown on the foothills of the Himalayan mountains. But it was lost about 200 years ago in America. I think I know why, but it was no longer in agriculture in the United States. And so I got very interested because the immune activity of the nutrients in Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat, the level of them are 50 to 100 times, not percent, times higher than any other plant food. Wow. This is like this super food of immune strengthening capability. So we now have been doing clinical research looking at its effect on immune cells. We've done field trials looking at what happens if we re-nourish the soil to enhance the phytochemicals in the plant. We're full in. We're the first people in the world, I think, to produce organic Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat. So it's all part of this immune story that I've been pulled into over the last few years. That's a fascinating story. I'm going to have to ask you how I can get some of that later. We're sending you some. So don't worry, it's coming to you. And I'm also curious, what are the top five foods or superfoods like that to support boosting immune system naturally? And really the main things that we should avoid eating that hurt our immune system. Okay. So can I have a little discussion with you about the word boosting? Sure. I am not a believer in any way, shape, or form. Strengthening. Well, let me tell you why I'm not for boosting. So during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, what did we see in a lot of people? We saw their immune systems were racing out of control. They were in a hyper-inflammatory state. So if we were to boost their immune system, does that sound like a good idea? No, it's not. In fact, we were trying to attenuate their immune system. And so... So strengthen or would be... Well, I call it balancing. Harmonize. Yes. Because the immune system is intelligent. If you give it the right things, the immune system finds its proper resting point. Yes. And so allergies are one... We have now what we call immuno-identities. Five different immuno-identities that are different archetypes of immunological imbalance. Each one of those represents a different personality as to how people experience the symptoms. And so if you can understand those immuno-types, then you can balance their immune system in ways that... That's our whole personalizing of immunity. What are those identities? So we have a state that's hyper-immune function. That would be a person who is hypersensitive, inflammation, joint pain, those kinds of things. We've got a person that is a variant of that, which is pre-autoimmune types and disorders, thyroid disorders, or joint space disorders. We've got an immune-suppressed type where they're susceptible to every cold and flu that comes along. They always get it. And there's a group of individuals that have what we call dormant immune systems. They're not really suppressed. They're just kind of in quiescence. They're missing a link to really put them into full activity and full balance. And then the fifth one is a balanced immune system. And that's what we all want. Which is what we all want. So based on these five immune identities, when we understand what ours is, then we can start to adjust to get more in harmony. That's the principle. That's what we're doing in BidBowl Health, a little company I decided to focus my energy on. Because I felt this was a field that hadn't gotten the attention that it really deserved. So how do we know which identity we have? We've got a questionnaire that's the first start. You know, we've got all sorts of tests that we could do that are expensive and sophisticated. But to get started down the road, we have an Immune Identity Questionnaire that's very simple to fill out. Where do we go to get that? Is there a link for that? BigBowlHealth.com. And there'll be a questionnaire. It's a 30-question questionnaire. It should give you at least where you think you're at, right? It's a broad brush. And I want to emphasize that this immunotype can change, right? Like it's not just fixed in stone. Seasonally, yearly, decades, all these different things, right? Precisely. As we age, as we... You know, this whole thing we learned with COVID-19 was pretty powerful, wasn't it? That the United States, who we thought was the healthiest nation in the world, had some of the worst outcomes from SARS-CoV-2 in terms of serious illness and hospitalization and even death. From around the world, right? Yeah. We were the worst country in all the developed countries of the world. Really? Yes. Why is that, Ethan? Well, a lot of people thought it was... Well, it must be because we have more older people, but that wasn't the case. It wasn't solely a consequence of our demographics. It was a consequence of the fact that our immune systems are really compromised in this country. Wow. And that's what really emboldened me to get involved with this. We don't understand that we are all working on this margin without a lot of headspace. We don't have a lot of reserve. Our resilience is compromised. And we're living with it because we say, well, I can always go to a drug. I can always go to an antibiotic or I can always go to an anti-inflammatory. I can always take an immunosuppressive anti-rheumatic drug. But all those have adverse long-term health implications. So wouldn't we want to balance our immune system for resiliency rather than try to treat the outcome? That's the whole functional medicine model. That is, amen to that. Yeah. And it's more about performance and balance rather than let's live on margin and then take drugs when we need to, to, I guess, mask the symptoms or feel a little bit better in the meantime. But it's going to create more long-term effects is what I'm hearing you say. Negative effects long-term to the immune system in the overall system of our bodies. Very well said. So let's look at endurance athletes. Endurance athletes have a lot of susceptibility to infection. This is well known. Because they're pushing their immune system so hard. Because they're compromising the resilience of their immune system because it's not getting all that it needs. Because remember, when you're turning over the immune system more rapidly, it needs more stuff to replenish itself. So if you're an athlete and you say, well, as long as you get enough calories, but I'm not concerned about what those calories are, then you end up with potential marginal insufficiencies of various things that are necessary for proper immune function. And one of those families, by the way, of nutrients, which most people don't put on their list, they think vitamin C or they think zinc or they might think folic acid or vitamin B12, but they probably wouldn't think of flavonoids. Flavonoids. What are those? Those are the plant chemicals that I've been speaking about that are part of the Himalayan tartary buckwheat orchestration. We have rediscovered in the field of nutritional biochemistry what we used to consider throwaways in our food. We thought, well, you know, they're not essential nutrients. You won't get a disease like scurvy, very, very, or pellagra if you don't have flavonoids. But what you do get is a reduction in your cellular resilience because they are the agents in our diet that tell cells how to communicate with one another through this whole process I've been describing of intracellular communication. Wow. So they have this extraordinarily, you've probably heard about SIRT1 and about MPK and all the kind of things that are going on now in longevity, nutrition, and medicine. Those then tie back to the mechanisms by which these flavonoids actually operate at the cellular level. Resveratrol is a flavonoid. Yeah, it is a flavonoid. I'm taking a resveratrol supplement. Yeah. So that's one of, and what we believe is giving the whole orchestration of the symphony because it's the way that our body has learned to operate is by having strings, percussion, brass, rhythm all together. Drums, everything. Okay, so back to the foods then. Let me re-ask the question about the right wording. What would you say are the top five foods to harmonize and balance our immune system? Well, you know, I would start... The reason I'm hedging a little bit with your supplements too. Well, the reason I'm hedging is that when I say foods, I could use foods like berries. But people can't live on berries, right? So berries can be an adjunctive. It's a good immune because it's all of the flavonoids and polyphenols and berries. But if you ask me, would that food sustain life? No, you would have to eat something else. But I would put berries. I would put citrus on that list. But can you live on oranges and tangerines and lemons solely? No, but I would put things like turmeric. We know that that has a very powerful effect. I would use resveratrol as an example with peanuts and peanut skins and grape skins. And there's another thing that has a benefit. I would use garlic and allium family onions. These are very high in immune active nutrients. Let me give you an illustration though when I say high. I think this is important to put things in perspective. So if I was to ask myself, how many onions would I need to eat to provide the same amount of immune active nutrients found in one serving of tartary buckwheat? Even though onions are called a high flavonoid, high quercetin-containing food. Quercetin is one of the members of that of the family. You would have to eat over 10 pounds of onions. Holy cow. So most people are not going to eat 10 pounds of onions. So when I say it's a high flavonoid food, it's high relative to other things like lettuce or like meat because meat is hardly any flavonoids. But relative to the supercharged foods, it's still relatively low. What are the other supercharged foods then besides the, is it the buckwheat? Well, common buckwheat is also, that would be... But not as much as the one that you're talking about. Common buckwheat is 50 times lower than tartary buckwheat, but it's still higher than the thing. Most all of your whole grains, by the way, are high in immune active vitamins, minerals, and polyphenols. Now people would say, but what about gluten, Jeff? You know, because there's this big concern. And buckwheat? Or... Well, buckwheat has no gluten. No gluten. I don't know why in the world when it was chosen as a name that they put wheat in the name, because it's not related genealogically at all to the grass family to wheat. Okay. So it is a gluten-free product. But if you were to ask me, can you name gluten-free products that are high immune strengthening products? There are some of the ancient non-grain related. I mean, oats is a good example. Organic oats are high in these phytochemicals that are immune strengthening. They have what's called beta-glucan. Beta-glucans stimulate your... There are two major parts of your immune system. You probably know there's the innate immune system, which is your first line of defense. And there's the adaptive immune system. That's the intelligence that remembers what you've been exposed to. That's where immunization and being immunized against something comes out of your adaptive immune system. Well, beta-glucan in oats activates your first line of defense, which is your innate immune system. So these would be some examples of things that one could include that would be providing these nutrients. We look at the change on what's called the epigenome, epi meaning above the genome. And the actual measurement we use is the number of methyl groups that are stuck on to the genes of the immune system. Now, some of those, that's part of the epigenetic process. Some of those processes are related to the adaptation of the immune system to be better.