 Well, hello and welcome to another episode of Resiliency Radio with Dr. Jill. Today, I have a very, very special, beloved guest, Dr. Jeffrey Bland. He is lovingly known in our community as the father of functional medicine and it is absolutely my honor to have him here today. Our topic today is human health and healthy soils and how those two connect. And whether you know it or not, the health of our soils does have a huge impact on the health of our bodies and we're going to dive really deep today and talk more about that connection and why it's so important to understand what we can do, what we can actually do in our communities and our government in our world and even as physicians to impact the health of our soils because truly this is one of our resources that if not taken care of, we're going to lose it. So welcome, Dr. Bland. Thanks so much for your time today. Well, Dr. Jill, first of all, you're one of my most special people in the field and I feel very privileged to be part of your program. Secondly, I think what you illustrated is going to be the topic of our conversation and right at the forefront of one of the present areas that is challenging but is also solvable that connects to so many of our health problems. So it's going to be really fun for us to have a little opportunity to kind of talk about what can people do and why do they need to do it. So exciting. So let me introduce you and then we will dive right into our topic. Dr. Jeffrey Bland is an internationally recognized leader in the nutritional medicine field. He co-founded the Institute of Functional Medicine in 1991 and as I said, he's lovingly known to many of us as the father of functional medicine. Dr. Bland has authored several books about nutritional medicine, both from the health care professional and for the general public. And he's also the principal author of over 120 peer reviewed research papers on nutritional biochemistry and medicine. Dr. Bland has self published a monthly audio journal, functional medicine update for more than 30 years that is distributed to health care practitioners in 36 countries. And just a quick note on that, Dr. Bland, I'm sure you've heard this from so many other docs like myself, but I remember in residency knowing I wanted to do holistic biochemical root cause medicine, but there was no name for it back then. And I remember getting your audio journal and I was, you know, in that small group of the early adopters and I was just literally in residency, not even a full-fledged practicing on my own doctor. And the first few lectures I heard, I was hooked. And again, I know you've heard this before, but your ability to describe the concepts that in my heart, I knew were at the core of a true healer was so profound and so brilliantly stated. It was magnetic and you have really transformed not only my life, but the lives of so, so many other practitioners. So truly, truly the first thing I want to say is just thank you because you changed the trajectory of my life because of the founding of the concept of functional medicine. Let's go back there because before I heard you, you thought through this, you have a wonderful way of reading and taking concepts that are complex and then talking about them in a way that we understand and that anyone who's a physician or healer gets. They really just at a soul level say, yes, that makes sense. Take us back to how did you first get into functional medicine? First of all, I can't thank you enough. That was a very, very gracious and probably a little bit exaggerated review of my accomplishments. But I think I was very, very fortunate on a number of levels to meet some important people that maybe took me under their wing and helped me along my road of development. I was asked to get out of college. I graduated when I was 17 from college. And then fast in the medical school, fast from medical school into a PhD program and fast from that into being a professor by 23. So I had a compressed kind of whole educational history. And I think I was in search probably for an interest that could help guide me and to use whatever energy and skill I was developing in a positive way. And I was very fortunate after about 10 years as an academic to have met Dr. Lyons following 2009 Nobel Prize winner once in chemistry and once in peace. And his wife, Eva Helen, following he was a remarkable power woman of her own reputation and skill. And I think that their impact on me was extraordinarily important and an important kind of juncture in my life. This would have been in my late 30s in which I then took a sabbatical two years to work at the line calling to do science and medicine at Stanford in Cal O Alto and put my professorship on hold for a couple of years. And what I learned from him and his wife, Eva Helen was that if you think about science and you want to talk about where it could take a person that's connected to health sciences, it's all around finding ways to reduce human suffering. And how do you do that? What's a way you could apply your skill and knowledge to reduce human suffering? And that then led me into packing my boxes to go back to my professorship with my young family, getting the car filled up in Cal O Alto to drive back to Oklahoma, Washington. The last thing he said to me is, Jeff, I really appreciated being with you for this last couple of years. I hope we'll be able to continue to collaborate because of a great career ahead of you. But I wanted you to think your classroom is big enough. That was the last question he asked me before I got in the car with my young family to drive home. And then I had 1,200 miles in the car to think about it. And what I finally recognized when I finally got home was that he was challenging me to say maybe this kind of from 35 armed to retirement as an academic was not going to really fulfill all my objectives that I had laid out for what I wanted to accomplish and that maybe I needed to broaden my scope of vision. And what happened at the consequence, I did the crazy. When I think back now, it truly was, I guess, you'd call it an irrational decision. By the time I got home, my parents had been very kind to have moved up to Washington State to watch our houseboards while we were gone for those two years. I came, we were very happy. They were happy to see the grandkids. We had a big solar story moment. And then they said, oh, so you must be really excited, Jeff, to get back into your professorial role at the university. And I said, well, I've actually made a decision. I'm driving up here. I'm going to give up my tenure. And I'm going to start an activity to teach doctors how to do nutritional medicine in their practice. Well, there was such a deathly sign, you could have heard a pin drop, to make the story kind of complete. My father finally recognized it. I was serious. I was going to do this. I was giving up my tenure, security to my college, education for my children would be paid for. I had a very great research program. The university president would have liked me. I could teach first or anything I wanted. But no, I was going to go on this new, unchartered path. And finally he said, if you're really serious about this, but it seems you are, then I think I'm going to have to come out of retirement. He did an aerospace engineering. He said, you know, I am an accountant by training. And you don't know anything about business. So I guess I need to come back and help you. And my mother, father and wife then joined in this enterprise. So later grew up to have over the next 25 years, eventually 2,000 employees who were in 36 countries. And so that transition, which sound in kind of retrospect to be simple was actually a fairly non-linear path with lots of bits and starts and learnings. And it got me to travel 6 million miles over those years meeting all 30 remarkable people. And from that, then ultimately my wife Susan said, Jeff, you know, you've been doing all this travel, you always come home, talk about all these remarkable people. You've met and you're establishing this kind of concept that came out of your years of lying and following. Maybe we need to sponsor a meeting, a whiteboard meeting. You can bring say 40 of your top thought leaders that you have met together and I'll organize a meeting. We'll put it up in Vancouver Island in British Columbia, kind of removed, but a nice thought place. And we can talk about what medicine might be if you took licensure away, reimbursement and just talk theoretically, what would a health-focused healthcare system really look like? So that became a meeting in 1989. It was so successful people decided we had to do it again in 1990, same place a year later. In 1990 is when I had this kind of aha in the middle of the Saturday night before our last Sunday meeting. And I came back and said to the group, you know, it seems to me what we really been talking about is function as a precedence to pathology, the loss of function. And it seemed that function could be categorized in four different areas, physical function, metabolic or physiological function, cognitive function and behavioral function. And so maybe we ought to call this functional medicine. And I had a pretty big pushback from my colleagues and they said, well, we understand why you would say that, but Jeff, you know, in medicine, remember this is 1990, it was a big negative kind of patient as functional as medicine. It was either psychosomatic medicine, it was all in your mind or it was rehabilitated medicine and geriatric medicine for over eight individuals. And I said, well, that is true. That's the historical way it's been thought of. But actually, if you look at the literature today you're starting to see a redefining of function like functional cardiology, functional radiology, functional endocrinology. So we're starting to see a new definition of the term function in medicine. Maybe you ought to escape to where the fuck is going that you use an analogy. And so eventually people said, okay, let's give it a go. So we founded the Institute for Functional Medicine in 1991 to really focus on the precedence of later state pathology upstream or root cause. And we had the fortune at that point, at least with the literature, the medical and scientific literature was starting for the first time to really understand the mechanisms of chronic disease at the cellular level. So we could appropriate that knowledge into this concept of redefining what functional men at an early stage and bringing it into these four patterns of function, physical, metabolic, cognitive and behavioral. And I think we were guided quite honestly. Now, it turns out to finish this story just to show you there's no such thing as a new idea. Several years on five, by this time we started to develop a little bit of momentum in teaching this concept. And my wife, Susan, went to the American Council of Continuing Medical Education and got a continuing medical education credit for the Institute for Functional Medicine. We were the first group to get that from the ACCMA. So we could provide category one accreditation curricula to health professionals, medical doctors. And it turned out that one of our early stage faculty came to me one day and said, so Jeff, you realize that there's a paper called functional notes on functional medicine in the 1847 edition of the Lancet Medical Magazine? I said, no, you gotta be kidding me because I consider myself to be a bibliophile and try to find the literature. But no, I have missed this. There was actually this article that had been written by the Dean of Birmingham University Medical School in England in the Lancet Medical Magazine called Lectures in Functional Medicine. Now it wasn't in the language of its age. So it would be different in stylistically than today. But the concept was very, very similar. The difference was that they didn't have the tools that we had in 1990, the understanding of the cellular biology. But the conceptual framework, actually I can't claim credit to because actually he had kind of laid it out in those lectures on functional medicine. So it's been around and we're advancing in and now we have, I think over 200,000 health professionals have gone through the courses of which all of the 65% are medical doctors. And I'm very proud actually that I think we may be the largest organization having female medical doctors as a member of leaders in our organization. So the Vanguard of Medicine is changing. When I first was a medical school professor, we had 10% of the students were females. Now there are more women medical students in American medical schools than there are men. So we're starting to see a really interesting change all not only in the curriculum, but how medicine has thought about how it's practiced. And I think it's in very much in concert with this concept of functional, up-screen, with health medicine. Wow, now as I hear you, there's some themes that come out that I'm seeing. And then I'd be curious of what you think some of the qualities and characteristics of you as a human being led you to this, but my thoughts are number one vision. You drove back in the car and you had this vision of something that wasn't yet there. And you took the bravery to kind of jump out of what was secure and follow this vision and look obviously where it's led. Not only you, but what I want to keep coming back to is you have influenced hundreds of thousands of lives of physicians like me. So we're all so grateful for that vision. The second thing, I remember when I was writing my book, I remember reading So Deeply Curiosity is one of the hallmarks of genius. And clearly there's this imprint in your heart and soul from birth probably of this curiosity. And I feel like that's what really drives discovery and on the changes in medicine is when we become curious and say, what's working and what's not working? And then follow that through and you clearly have had that curious and brilliant soul. And the last thing, I think maybe the most important and I don't know how many of you have told you this, but you have such a grace and humility about you. I, every time we ever speak together on boards or panels or in any room, you do nothing but lift up all of those around you and you could as the father of functional medicine really, you know, you are such a great influence in our field, but you always come with such grace and humility and that is absolutely beautiful. So thank you for those qualities. And I'd love to know if you think number one, if that resonates, but also is there, was there something even as a child, the curiosity or the intellectual rigor or what was it? What was it that was the motor that drove you in this direction and really to make these discoveries and teach all of us the things that you, you know, put together with functional medicine? Well, again, thank you so much for that acknowledgement. That's probably the highest level of compliment that I can receive. You know, I think I got two very important things from my parents. First of all, my sister and I, I have this one sister, it's a few years younger than I am, but I think we both have acknowledged over the years that we've got some really remarkable things from our parents. I was born in 1946, so it was, you know, that was the first year of the baby boomers coming out of World War II. And I think that my mother was a driving force for energetically pursuing anything that you found interesting and never being deterred from pursuing your curiosity. She was a tremendous stimulator of follow your heart, follow your passion. My father was, I think looking back was an intellectual and he was a deep reader. He was a person of the mind. And he always stimulated me to, like if I would show an interest, let's say it would be electronic. The next thing I would know, he'd be working with me building transistor radios. Wow. Photography, the next thing is he would be building a dark room in our branch so that I could do photography. So, and we'd be studying it and we wouldn't just do it superficially. So I think I got, and my sister, I think feels the same way with photography. There was nothing that we couldn't do if we showed an interest and we would be supported in music. The same thing I showed an interest in music and before I knew about, I had all the opportunities to ultimately be successful playing the band in Disneyland and all sorts of things. So I think that this was very rare. I think that children get that kind of support from different ways from their two parents. Now, I think there's another feature of this and you share this, I know as well. I have great admiration and respect for you and the way that you communicate your past and your experience and bring people into your experience so they can learn and be part of their own life experience is that there's this sense that every human being has some magic in them. There is nobody that is without magic if you can find where it is. And you have to open up the relationship to that opportunity. And the only way that can happen is if you meet people on a level of equanimity. And if you assume that everybody's good and feel proven otherwise, which I try to do in my life. Now, I can be disillusioned at times. There's no question. It may sound a little Pollyanna-ish that you do that but I would prefer to have the disillusionment versus the opposite, which is I assume everybody's out to have an advantage or take advantage or whatever. That kind of construct of meeting people on their own level and trying to explore where their magic lies has opened up for me all sorts of learnings about what I might do better or things that I want to be better at. And so my wandering of the 6 million mile journey I've been on has really been trying to understand what makes this human being as remarkable as it is when it's in its full expression. And so this whole concept of how we express the magic that's in our book of life, our book of life being our 23 pairs of chromosomes that constitutes our genome. How do we get the radiation of the white light of goodness out of it? That to me is with the fundamental construct underlying functional medicine. Wow. Hey everybody, I just stopped by to let you know that my new book, Unexpected, Finding Resilience Through Functional Medicine, Science and Faith is now available for order wherever you purchase books. In this book, I share my own journey of overcoming life-threatening illness and the tools and tips and tricks and hope and resilience I found along the way. This book includes practical advice for things like cancer and Crohn's disease and other autoimmune conditions, infections like Lyme or Epstein Bar and mold and biotoxin-related illness. What I really hope is that as you read this book, you find transformational wisdom for health and healing. If you wanna get your own copy, stop by readunexpected.com. There you can also collect your free bonuses. So grab your copy today and begin your own transformational journey through functional medicine in finding resilience. Wow, that was as always so well put and so profound because it really, I believe so truly in the clinic, the true place where healing starts is completely unconditional loving the person who's in front of you with no judgment, no automotive, no agenda, just literally being there, holding that space and listening to their story. And then of course, as you've taught, story is what drives our diagnosis. So let's go to functional medicine now. Many, many of my listeners know what functional medicine is, but maybe you just do a little overview. What is this thing we call functional medicine and why is it so powerful for the future of our medical field when I feel like there is an epidemic like never before of neurodegenerative diseases, cancer and autoimmunity? Yes, so my mother, I spoke with her in my adult years and asked when did she recognize in me some interest in what later was the path into functional medicine? And her thought was that I started expressing questions about how people got sick when I was in before 10 years of age. Wow. This had been a thought that I'd had. And first I started with really a very strong interest in communicable disease and infectious disease. And that was through middle school and high school and science projects and things of that nature. Then as I kind of got older, I started to recognize that there was this other category of disorders called non-communicable diseases that are non-nationnal infectious in origin and how do they come about? Where do they come from? And then I started to recognize as I got more understanding of that, that actually there's an interconnection between infectious disease and non-infectious disease. They kind of hybridized because they interfaced with the body and its genome. And each individual carries this on their own select book of life. Their response to their environment, lifestyle, diet, stress patterns and exposure to chemicals in a unique way that is related to their genome. And then later we started to recognize how the genome of patterns could become the epigenome by marks that are put on it over the course of living. And so that intellectual development for me ultimately got me to be more and more mindful of what are the events upstream that trigger a downstream change in function that later becomes something we can observe under the microscope or with a CAT scan or some diagnostic profile or produce abnormal lab value which is really based on focusing on what's called pathology. Looking at the outcome where the cells and the tissues in the organs have become so damaged you can pick it out by diagnostic methods. But those started much earlier upstream by changes that could occur at the molecular cellular level that then transmitted different functional changes into the what's called a phenotype meaning how a person looks at and feels. And if we could read those things better maybe we could move upstream to prevent the downstream injuries to cells that then require the surgery, the radiation and the chemotherapy to kind of save a person from the state of pathology. And so that kind of construct has been with me I think going even before high school probably in middle school as a driver. And then I was fortunately guided into these meeting these relationships with people that built from that architecture into how do you actually deliver that concept? And at first, as you know in this field you're considered an outlier. So there were people that were my mentors who thought I needed a brain transplant because I was wasting my education pursuing these sillinesses. I should be staying where I was a fast learner in the standard track and everything would work out fine. And I'm sure it would have worked out fine if I would have just stayed on the standard track. But it just wasn't for me where I wanted the pursuit of this training in this background education that I had take me. And so I think that the transitions led ultimately and I was very fortunate I think to be born when I was because mirroring to my curiosity in this area were new ways of actually examining these things at the cellular level. We got into antibody studies and we got into all sorts of new technologies that could look earlier and earlier as to how cells were behaving and how fishes were behaving ways that we didn't have an understanding of before until really moving into the 21st century. Now these tools would become much more prevalent. So therefore in the development of functional medicine as a model, when I pulled together my colleagues the found national group that would have been 1990s and we started to say what do we know are defining principles that underlie later stage disease. We eventually defined what we call the seven core principles of physiological processes. The physiological processes that regulate our body's response to the outside and inside world. And those seven core principles became the tennis then of functional medicine and then we started to say, well, how do we assess each of those? I'm not just waiting till they're so broken that they're gonna have a diagnosis from an international classification of disease code. But earlier on, how do we actually codify them? That was the first kind of beach head for functional medicine. And then over time, we watched how these things have evolved and become more well understood so that what was criticized at birth has now like, let me use an example. We started using the word dysbiosis in the middle 80s and the concept of leaky gut in the middle 80s. Now we were completely rejected by standard depth of neurology when we said this. They call it specious and they said, oh, hold on, if you had a leaky gut, you would have sepsis. If you have sepsis, you're gonna be in the hospital and die. And we were talking about, no, there could be step functions of degrees of endotoxemia, it's not just the on or off, maybe there are degrees of that. And they said, no, no, they're not degrees. Either have sepsis or you don't. And they were either well or not. And we said, well, I don't think that that's true. Well, over time, I'd have to say we've been proven right. Now there are literally hundreds of papers being published in the theory of medical literature on dysbiosis, leaky gut, endotoxemia, post-prandial endotoxemia after a person eats, how did that influence a toxic load in their blood? And now we, with years we're honest, we started to bring all these various fundamental metabolites and other agents and our bodies exposed to with our unique immune systems that signal to the body alarm and produce things that now become the diseases of our age, which are, people call them diseases, but they're actually responsive to the body to an unfriendly environment. The pre-auto immune disorder is coming across 88 different diagnoses. All of these are part of upbringing relationship between our body to a foreign environment in which our immune system is trying to gain some control over the hospital environment in which it finds itself. And then what do we do with that? That's the functional medicine model. Not just saying, well, let's wait till you're broken. Let's move up to frame and ask out of corrective problem before you become broken. Brilliant. Yeah, the classical training, even in, I was graduated from medical school 2003. So right about four or five years after you started the functional medicine, that's right around the time I started hearing you and took on that training. But we were still taught just a couple of decades ago that your ultimate goal is to get to a ICD nine or 10 code, right? That's the end game. But the thought of the question, the curiosity, the why was never really addressed. So again, what's really neat is so often myself and others, when we get into functional medicine, we get re-energized as to why we went into medicine in the first place, because most people going into medicine really do have a curiosity and a desire. So to me, one of the most beautiful things about functional medicine is it really gives you the joy back of what we kind of all set out to do as far as healers anyway. So let's shift a little to microbiome because microbiome is our stepping stone to the soils and you just kind of set up the lipopolysaccharides, the endotoxins. We often think of this outer world as our toxic load. So we talk about the bucket capacity of toxicity and all these chemicals and really truly it is getting exponentially worse every year. And the synergism of even the hermetic effects of the very, very low levels are very harmful. And many people have no idea that they're swimming in toxic soup. But all having said that, sometimes we forget that inside our body, whether it's metabolites of fungi or metabolites of bacteria or other organisms, we're actually getting sometimes a toxic load as much from within as from without. So you wanna talk just a little bit about that internal and milieu in the gut and the microbiome and then we can transition onto the soils and how that can impact our gut and our health overall as well. Yes. And again, history can be a very good feature and this topic we're now embarking on is a topic that has kind of a rich history if you go back. So I'll go back just not all the way to the beginning but I'll go back to the turn of the last century from the 19th to the 20th century. And this was the age in which bacteriaology and microbiology was being discovered the past year, era, so to speak, folk and Jenner and the infectious disease and trying to look at immunotherapy. It was all kind of coming out of that period of being able to with the development of the microscope and see little critters that were not seen by the human eye but we can see when they were magnified. And so now suddenly we get into questions about, well, what are these microbes all about? What do they do and are they associated with disease? And of course, yes they are, some of them are. And Pasteur Institute and Louis Pasteur himself obviously was considered one of the world's leaders in this transforming concept of infectious disease. Well, it turns out that one of the people that was very important as a colleague of his was Elon Mechnikov, a Russian physiologist who worked with him. And ultimately when Louis Pasteur had died, Mechnikov took over the Pasteur Institute in France. And he actually won a Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology that's mentioned about in 1902. And the prize was given to he and Paul Ehrlich for the discovery of the innate immune system. And the way that he made this discovery was kind of a cute little story as he was on the print seat post and was looking at a low tide probably at the tide pool and picked up a starfish and a sea urchin. Sea urchin has the quills and the starfish and everyone knows what they look like. And he punctured the underbelly of the starfish with the quill of the sea urchin and had his monocle on and he was looking and he could see these little corpuscles coming to the site of the injury on the starfish. And so if his first thought being in the field of microbiology and vectorology, these must be bacteria coming to the site of the injury. But then he said, well, hold on, why can I see these bacteria? I'm not using a microscope. I'm just using a little bit of a magnifying glass from this monocle. These must be much bigger than a microscopic organism. So he went back and said it and of course these were immune cells that were members of what later became innate immune. So it's the macrophages, monocytes, nucleophiles. And so he was credited then with discovering the innate immune system. Wow. It turns out that in 1903, he published a very interesting consumer book which was around the discoveries about the microbes that were living in the human intestinal tract, what we now call the microbiome. And this book was around longevity and it was all, I actually was very fortunate to have the first edition copy of this in my library. I'm very pleased with my treasured book of Medjugodt's first edition. And what he was describing is the treatment of diseases of aging by using installation of lactobacillus vulgaricus enemas to re-inoculate the bowel with friendly bacteria. So this would be like early stage probiotics or people replacement therapy in which he was describing this and the effect it had on health patterns in humans. Now, if you then think of how that was transferred into medicine, into American medical schools like John Hoffman's the first major medical school in American Baltimore, it was at first kind of adopted as a concept. But then as a consequence of some pretty horrendous problems that I won't go into great details in which at the Trenton State Mental Hospital, the largest mental hospital in the United States in New Jersey, turned out that the head of psychiatry there started treating it in this concept by resecting the bowel. So he was just taking people's parts of the GI tract out and there were a huge number of unreported deaths. And when that was later reported to the United States Senate, it completely not only got him defrocked, but it also had a spreading effect of saying, well, anything related to the gut that has to do with mental illness or physical function, we're not teaching that in American medical schools. It's completely foreboding. So if you ever brought that concept up like dysbiosis or endotoxemia in American medical education for a period of 50 years and you were kind of on the outs. And so it wasn't until the body of literature started to re-energize itself by new investigators coming in and studying this. And I would say somewhere around the middle 80s when we started talking about it, when you started to see the literature coming back. Now, as I said, in the 21st century, this is the topic that you're, everyone wants to be involved in this field with a microbiome effect because we now recognize that in more than 50% of the body's immune system is clustered around the intestinal tract and it's speaking directly to those bugs of which there are something like five to six pounds of living organisms in our intestinal tract. And in fact, there are more bugs in a gram of stool than there are stars in the known universe. Think of that. There are more organisms in a gram of stool than there are stars in the known universe. So this has now become much more well appreciated than understood. And it had to go through this period of about 40 to 50 years of being expunged from all medical education, but now it's come back as it should with the proper level of understanding. Fascinating. And we know, so I grew up on a farm in Illinois and realized early on the soils were nourishing and so important. And as farmers in Illinois where they do crops over and over that top, so it was so critical. Now that I really, really understand, they also understand the preciousness of soil and regenerative farming and that do you wanna speak a little bit now that we transitioned about how does, how in the world does a soil connect to the human body and why is it one of our most precious resources and what can we do about it? Let's just dive into soils and soil health and how it connects to the human body. Yeah, thank you. So let's just first start with a newborn. A newborn has a sterile GI tract. Until they've been exposed to some inoculation. Now, if they go down through the birth canal in the normal delivery, they're gonna pick up some of the mother's organisms from the reproductive tract. Then that will be incorporated eventually into their new microbiome. If they have a sterile birth by C-section, they may not be exposed. And therefore now we have more and more, I think it's over 20% of births come by C-section in the United States. If they come to serve at the procedure now in baby delivery, that's a whole different microbiological exposure. So now what are those GI tract like and how are they going to develop their community of organisms? Then it's gonna be through whatever might be in the outside environment, maybe it's in the hospital and it may not be all the kind of good bugs that they might have needed if they were exposed to the mother's bacteria. But maybe the mother, even if it was a normal birth, had dysbiosis because she had challenges with her immune system and her diet and exposure to various things. And then where did her bile come from? It came from what she was eating and what she was exposed to. And where did that come from? That came from the food that she was eating and where did that come from? That came from the ground in which the food was grown. So we start going back and then we say, well, is there a microbiome of the soil then? Yes, there's microbiome of the soil and the microbiome of the soil connects to the microbiome of the plant in the root nodules which connects to the microbiome of the people who eat the plant in the natural state. But if you break that cycle at any one of those levels, you sterilize the soil, you sterilize the plant, you over-process the food, you have over-processed food. Now suddenly you have, you're open to wherever it comes into your digestive tract which may not be a symbiotin and a good friend of your immune system. It may be a foreigner, what we call a parasitic organism and now you've got a different personality going on. Now you have endotoxemia. So this construct of a system in which we're all interconnected, this planetary health view, it's not esoteric, it is very real. And what we have done is to detach ourselves for a variety of reasons from this natural cycle that humans evolved through for millennia and actually agriculture initially grew up before we got into agribusiness and agrochemicals. And I just finished seeing, and maybe you did as well, this extraordinary public service deal on the American Buffalo and Ken Burns. And it's really powerful on public TV. I recommend it to everyone because it gets us to think about system. You know, to think that there were several million Buffalo running around in the ferries of the Central Plains of the United States until 1879, think of it. Wow. 1879 is the year that the Buffalo hunters basically completely changed the grasslands of America, changed farming, changed agriculture, changed culture. That buffalo or bison that had lived for millions and millions of years had been part of an ecology of the grasslands and part of the ecology of the soil and part of the nourishment of the system that gave rise to support for people. And so when you see the American Buffalo special education, you recognize it's much more than just the bison or buffalo. We're really talking about the ecology of how we as human beings live in communion or in distance and separation from nature and the price that we're paying for that separation right now. We've gotten some advantage but we've also paid some significant prices. And when you get to the point of marginal return where the price you're paying is greater than the advantage of benefit, now you have a really difficult time. And that's what some people are now concerned about. That maybe we're tipping that balance between advantage and disadvantage to net disadvantage with the increasing level of a topic to see and disorders in children, allergies, eczema, asthma, all the kind of things we might even see as it relates to ADHD, things that you are so skilled in helping your patients with Dr. Gill, I mean, you're one of the world's experts in this whole area, but it has these come about in problems because of these imbalances that we've been producing at least in the Anthrosine, the era in which human activities are for the first time are changing the compulsion of large cycles in nature. Yes, so true. And one of the things that has come about in my lifetime that's massively affected the farm that I grew up on and then our fruit supply is the use of roundup or glyphosate. And that was originally a mineral chelator. And then they found it had antimicrobial activity because it held onto the minerals that the plants needed to survive the weeds. So it would kill the weeds. But what that did is then when we get that ingestion in our body it actually chelates minerals in our gut as well and preferentially kills things like good bugs like lactobacillus and allows the growth of other things. And I see that happening in the soil as well because as we put on these chemicals like glyphosate or things that kill organisms, all of a sudden we have a microculture or not as a diverse of a culture that's actually creating a rich diverse nutrient dense food crop, right? So what you're saying is this, it's kind of like the soil affects our gut microbiome but the soil then also like you said affects our plants and the quality of our nutrients. And then we radiate the food so that it can transport for two weeks in a refrigerated truck and it won't go bad. But by doing that, the nutrient density of the foods that we're eating now is far, far inferior than that was 10, 15, 20 or 50 years ago. Do you wanna talk just a little about nutrient density about foods and especially about buckwheat and why that's been on your radar for the last several years? Yeah, so thank you. That's a really great, I think example of what you're speaking to. So I kind of got pulled into this. Again, probably as a consequence of what you said earlier, curiosity. I had in one month period, three what might be considered coincidences occur serendipitous events that were all interwoven together. So those three events were that I was reading an article in Journal of Clinical Investigation of work at Vanderbilt University on this new way of treating blood pressure problems by treating the immune system. And I never thought about the immune system could be connected to blood pressure. I didn't know that mechanism existed, but then this work was showing that there was this connection mechanistically and they actually had studied a substance that could modify the immune system in such a way as to lower blood pressure. I read an article and I was intrigued and I said, maybe it was a person. I had to be interviewed for my podcast. It sounds very unique. And I turned out that when I read the paper carefully in the appendix, this substance of which has a scientific name called two hydroxygenzylamine or Tuoba is found in only one food. And that food is a form of buckwheat called tartary buckwheat. Tartary is the tartan district of China. So this is an ancient form of buckwheat that actually has been cultivated for over 4,000 years. So it's one of the oldest foods. And I knew nothing of tartary buckwheat at all. I never even heard of it. I thought, wow, that's kind of interesting. I'm gonna really gotta learn more about that than this interesting ingredient. So then I said to my colleague, Trish Urie who's worked with me now for over 25 years, I said, Trish, I'm gonna be taking a trip to China next week. And while I'm gone, I wonder if you could do because you're really good sleuthers. Could you look in the sea, who's growing tartary buckwheat in the United States? Because I'd like to learn more about this crop. And she said, oh yeah, that's an interesting question. If I'll, while you're gone, I'll take a look. So then I got on the plane, went to Harbin, China, the northernmost big sailing China between Korea, to know between North Korea and Russia, about 28 million people, by the way, in Harbin. And I was speaking to something like 8,000 Chinese medical doctors on this health check annual meeting. And my guide there was a very, very sharp guy. My host was from the United States. But his, and he was from Shanghai. He was Shanghai's dual citizenship. And so we were gonna be coming back from Harbin back to Shanghai. So that's about, I think about 2,200 miles or something like that. So all the way across China. And there was a typhoon in Shanghai, so the airport was closed. And he said, so Jeff, you know, we can either wait for the typhoon to go by or we could take the bullet train, if you're interested, and go all the way across China on the bullet train. You know, it goes about 275 miles an hour. So it would take us like 10 hours or something. So are you interested in doing that? I thought, wow, would that be cool? To go right down the middle of China on this train, with the country just going by at 200 plus miles an hour. And I said, sure, I love that. Well, that gave us plenty of time to talk. So about halfway across China, as we were going through all of these agricultural fields and then suddenly a city would pop out of nowhere that has 5 million people in it. Wow. And then I would, I said to her, I said, so I know this is kind of like a, maybe a little bit of a flyer question, but I really got an interest in this Tartary Buckwheat. You know anything about Tartary Buckwheat? Well, it was so amazing. It was like we freeze-brained and stopped time. It's like the train stopped. And I was riveted on me and he goes, you got to be kidding me. I said, no, he said, I said, you know anything about Tartary Buckwheat? And he said, my research center is the center of excellence in China on Tartary Buckwheat. And we've been looking for someone from the United States who might be interested, not only interested, but have enough knowledge that we could collaborate with. So when I got back then home, Trisha spent the week and looking for a Tartary Buckwheat in the United States. She could find only one person that was growing. She was a former ag research professor from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York that lived in Angelica, New York with his nurse wife. They were both retired and they had a hobby farm in which he had gotten these seeds. This is like Jack and the Beanstalk story. The seeds from the USDA because they wanted to grow something unique in their hobby farm. So they got these seeds. They were just labeled with a number, not even the name. Well, it turns out it was Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat, the wild type of Tartary Buckwheat, the most key seed. And they had been growing it now for several years and they put together an artisanal mill and they were having the flour at roadside stands and his wife was doing recipes. And it was, I think they had 10 acres. So I then cobbled together a relationship between the beers and get Vanderbilt University and my friend in Shanghai to say, let's bring Tartary Buckwheat back to the United States. Now we have Tartary Buckwheat field. I have an organic farming cooperative where regeneratively farming. It turns out it was locked out of the crop in the United States for 200 years. It was a food actually brought by our familial ancestors because it is so hardy. It doesn't require pesticides, herbicide, fertilizer and it has so high a level of immune active phytochemicals that bugs don't like it. So it has a natural insecticide. So it doesn't need any chemicals. And so now we are the first people to bring actually produce organically certified Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat we just finished a clinical trial in the US FDA approved clinical trial with humans looking at the effect on their immune system by using epigenetic sequencing of 850,000 gene sites on a gene chip. And now we see exactly how it's speaking to our genes to improve immune functions. So it's just amazing what curiosity can do. Now, the last part of this is to go to your question. I'm sorry about the long around the get to the meat point but we then wondered, remember these farmers that we have this property with are long-term organic farmers. So they're really stewards of their soil. But we wondered after doing, we have a soil scientist Dr. Emily Reese that is a PhD network with us. She did her degree at Cornell. And so she does soil sampling and we do microbiome analysis of our soil. And we wondered if we were to start inoculating the soil, even though it had been organically farmed for over 20 years, could we increase the health of the soil beyond that of good to maybe optimal? And would that have any impact upon the immune actor phytokinobole in the tertiary buckwheat seed and flower? And so we just finished a field trial which we broke the field in the different districts and we inoculated with different types of bugs either a fungi, bacteria or a combination that had been known to be healthy for re-inoculating the soil. And then we harvested the crops and we did the analysis of the phytochemical and lo and behold, we're the first person to find that we could increase the phytochemicals above that of good to excellent by re-nourishing the soil above good to now supplementing the soil. And now we're inoculating all the fields that we're growing with these bugs that make it super rich for the microbiome. So we've proven them on that actually the soil speaks to the plants, the plants speaks to the food, the food then speaks to our immune system through our clinical trial and enhances its resilience. So this is a pretty exciting chapter in my evolving knowledge. Who knew you're a farmer now? Right, now I can really appreciate the way you grew up and it's really fun to go out there and see what's going on with our farm. Oh, Jeff, I love that so much because it's so funny because I grew up on a farm and I was the one, I went to go to the big city and I wanted to study medicine. I didn't, I literally, there was a few years in there like during college and shortly after where I kind of like denied and like turned my back on the farm life and the farm girl and that like history, I was almost ashamed. Like I'm sad to say that because I have the most beautiful loving family and I grew up in one of the most Norman Rockwell-less places in the world, right? But you know how we go through those times and I remember being like, oh farming it's so like, you know, lame and it's not exciting and it's not intellectual and just like you, I have gone back to like, I have the deepest respect for my dad and brothers who still farm in Illinois and they are one of the few farms in Illinois that is 100% non-GMO and partially organic and you know, corn and soybeans in Illinois, it's not, that's not typical. I'm so proud of them. And now I actually like, I'm talking about farming and soils and it's really neat to see that full circle and to see you in that as well because I think if we think of root root root cause how else could we possibly affect our health of our system more than farming like really, truly giving nourishment to human beings through the soils and growing crops like Tartary buckwheat this is absolutely full circle. Well, thank you. It's been so great for me. You know, Trisha and my other colleague that worked with me for many years in the garden, they challenged me one day and they said, so Jeff, you know I know you're getting, you know down the road here in your life but you know, you're always coming in and you're having all these advocacy and you're always pumped up and you know, you're a fairly big guy in stature and you have this bold personality maybe need one more shot. So we thought this company did well. Yes. And it's really, it's surrounding how we take these concepts and deliver them into the marketplace to kind of turn the cycle away from those to pasteurize to looking at how we can produce foods of high quality that actually are fun to eat have diversity of flavor textures and composition but are really doing our immune system good. So these are gluten-free obviously products that we're talking about. It's been really interesting now because we've got a whole food lab we've got celebrity chefs that are doing recipes and development of new food and compositions. So for me, this is like, it's like going full circle. It really has to me a sense like we've taken the esoterism of cell biology and we've now converted it into an architecture that can be transformative in terms of clustering health. Absolutely amazing. So Big Bold Health and is there a website for that? I wanna be sure and state that here. It's Big Bold Health www.BigBoldHealth.com and we've got a whole bunch of resources there with things you can drill as deeply as we want and you want in terms of understanding it. Actually this year in the PubMed, here we did scientific literature that was going on with Tartary Buckwheat. There were over 275 papers that have been published on clinical aspects and different genotypes, soil health and Tartary Buckwheat. This is a exponentially growing new knowledge area. Interestingly enough, most of it is spring in Asia. And so we're kind of the first translators of this into the United States marketplace. Amazing. Well, as we close here, what is one bit of evidence? What is one bit of advice that you would give to upcoming docs that are either interested in functional medicine or just getting out of medical school? What would you leave to the next generation? Well, I think you said it beautifully earlier in our discussion and that is curiosity, but also patience. You know, what I warn people about when they come in to this door is if they're gonna be at first overwhelmed but they're also gonna feel like, why didn't I know this before? I got really great education. I went to the right universities. I had great teachers, but I never heard of any of this. Why not? And there's a little bit of, what I wanna say, disillusionment about their education. Like, well, I got a bunch of, I wasn't told this, I wasn't with elves. And my answer is no. Knowledge is always evolving. It's always changing. And no one knows everything. So what we try to do is we try to be patient as we're growing up our own knowledge and trying to find answers to the questions that are most important for us. If you are in a situation where you are in the sub-specialty of medicine and your interest and passion is a specific disease or a specific technology and you wanna be the best in the world at that and you don't worry about anything else, then maybe this is not... Oh, I still hear you. Can you hear me? Yep, I can hear you. I just lost, I lost you. Okay. If you can hear me, that's good. There we go. Well, but I think that this construct that I'm talking about is have patients continue to do what you really want to do in the building out of your knowledge and do so by selectively gathering your information from people who are willing to be challenged and have references that you can go and do your homework and have a degree of authenticity. They're not just spouting philosophy. They're rooted in things that have historically sound backgrounds. And I think if you do that, it will lead that person to where they really want one to go in terms of their growth and development. We now recognize that this burden of chronic illness is the number one cost in our healthcare or disease care system. And the majority of those conditions are associated with non-infectious disorders that occur as a consequence of modifiable factors. If we know how to ask the right question, we can find solutions. Your practice is really an example of that. So I think that there are solutions out there. It just depends on being patient and have your curiosity guide you into the right places. Dr. Bland, as always, this was a fountain of wealth of information and thank you for your vision, for your curiosity, for encouraging all of us to continue being curious. And most of all, just your humility and grace. Thank you truly from the bottom of my heart. Well, thank you for you and what all did you do? And all these people that are really trying to forge ahead and finding the solutions to things that are causing people, and I go back to Linus and Abahel on calling, they said, our focus is on reducing human suffering. And there are many, many things. And a friend of mine once said to me, well, Jeff, people are dying to know what you know. And at first I thought he was being humorous. And then I recognized, no, no, there's some very serious implications for that. There are much that we know, if we could spread that out and get people to do it, we'd prevent unnecessary suffering. And that's what our objective is. What a great way to end, just alleviating the suffering of humanity. Well, thank you for your contribution and for your time today. Thank you so much. You're welcome.