Investing in Your Health with Dr. Jeffrey Bland

Trevor Cates:                         Hi and welcome to the Spa Doctor Podcast. I’m Dr. Trevor Cates. I’m honored to have today’s guest on my podcast today to share how you could invest on your health today, to not just be disease free but also have superior health. That really does show up on your skin as glowing skin, that vibrancy that we all want to have but it helps us on so many different levels.

My guest today is Dr. Jeffrey Bland. Dr. Bland has been an internationally recognized leader in the nutritional medicine field for over 35 years. Dr. Bland has authored five books on nutritional medicine for the healthcare professional and six books on nutrition and health for the general public including The Disease Delusion: Conquering the causes of chronic illness for healthier, longer and happier life which I actually have a signed copy from him. I was just recently in a conference, I sat next to him and I asked him for a signed copy so that I could share that with one of you. I’m going to explain at the end of the podcast how you can win a copy of the signed copy at the time of the release of this podcast.

Dr. Bland was the first member of the board of Bastyr University, the naturopathic medical school in Washington State and with his wife, Susan, Dr. Bland founded the Institute for Functional Medicine in 1991. This is a nonprofit organization focused on educating healthcare practitioners on effective approaches to treating and preventing chronic disease. We’re going to talk more about functional medicine and what it is, how you can find a functional medicine practitioner and if you’re interested in becoming a functional medicine practitioner, you can even find the information about that. We’re going to cover so much more in this podcast.

He has provided lectures and medical education events to more than 250,000 healthcare providers in more than 50 countries. So obviously his message has spread far and wide. I’m so excited to have him as a guest today. In this interview today, Dr. Bland shares what inspired him to found the Institute for Functional Medicine and how functional medicine has come to impact so many people. We also discussed issues with the way that people look at and address disease today including skin problems.

He shares what he thinks the single most important underlying cause behind skin issues is as well as many other diseases. There’s definitely a link there and we’ll be talking about that. We also discussed fad diet and over the years he certainly has seen them come and go. So we’re going to talk about various diets and why they tend to come and go. We even talked about his daily schedule. What he does on a day to day basis for his diet, exercise, his routine. He even shares his age which I was surprised to hear. We covered so much in this interview so I hope you enjoy it.

I know it’s kind of long so if you need to you can take a pause and come back and listen to the rest later. There’s a lot of great information here so I want to make sure you get it all in. I hope you enjoy this interview with Dr. Bland.

Dr. Bland it’s so great to have you my podcast today.

Jeffrey Bland:      Well thank you Dr. Cates. This is really a privilege for me. I can’t tell you how much I look forward to this.

Trevor Cates:                         Yeah absolutely. So you founded the Institute for Functional Medicine and I know this has been a growing institute that you have founded and a lot of doctors have studied and practitioners have studied now functional medicine. Functional medicine has now become sort of like a regular term that people use. It’s so great to see that. So can you tell us a little bit about that journey? What caused you to create the institute and how that’s been since then?

Jeffrey Bland:                        Yeah. It’s very interesting to me to watch how ideas evolve because as they say life is what happens in between your plans. If you were to ask me, did we have specific plans 25 years ago to see functional medicine grow up as it has with over 100,000 practitioners now having gone through its courses, I would have said that would not be possible. So I think the way it started is that … actually I actually give credit to my wife.

That a number of years ago when I was traveling extensively and lecturing to practitioners around the world, she said, “You know Jeff you met so many interesting people, wouldn’t it be interesting if we just hosted a meeting amongst some of the opinion leaders that you’ve met to do a white board discussion about what might medicine look like or healthcare look like in the future if we didn’t have a lot of the other things that confound it like reimbursement and licensure and we just return back to purity what a healthcare system would look like?”

So we hosted these meetings in Vancouver, actually in Victoria British Columbia on Vancouver Island in 1989 and ‘90 and it turned out that we created a model which I felt was very, very important because it was a model that was really looking at more the cause rather than the effect of disease. What is the journey upon which they have been travelling that leads them ultimately disease because disease is kind of an endpoint. It’s not the start. It’s kind of the endpoint.

So when we discussed that, we finally came to the conclusion it all starts really with altering function and that function could be physical function. It could be physiological function. It could be cognitive or emotional function. So we said, “Well maybe we ought to be really focusing on how we assess function rather than how we diagnose disease. Maybe that would be an earlier way of getting to the problem to prevent people from going to the hospital and other more serious interventions.”

So because our group was composed of a variety of interesting different thinkers including medical doctors, PhDs, chiropractors, naturopaths, biometricians, people in epidemiology, we had a variety of different opinions going in with this discussion. We eventually came up with a concept that we would call this functional medicine because from kind of a humorous way we said, “How many practitioners does healthcare would want to be practicing dysfunctional medicine?”

So we said, “Virtually everyone would like to be a functional medicine practitioner.” So we said, “Okay, let’s use a double entendre. Let’s call it functional medicine and let’s see how we can evolve a model around not what we call the endpoint that they get to a disease but how they got there. What is the progress that leads ultimately to disease?”

As we did that, it ultimately led to a very robust development of a model that was teachable and practicable. So we set up a research center, the Functional Medicine Clinical Research Center where we can actually see patients with various types of chronic illness. I had a whole medical staff. We saw about 4000 patients a year from ’95 up through 2009 so about 15 years. We codified patient experiences based upon this model.

We found out that by asking a series of different questions about how people are functioning, it allowed us to differentiate  and to personalize therapies so that we could manage them in a very personal way that improved outcome. So we basically prevented a lot of disease in a serious fashion. We ended up producing a much higher quality of life. We compressed the illness profile into a much shorter period of time and we had by word of mouth the growth of this little concept and now becoming a global concept in which we have over 50 countries in which there’s a functional medicine group.

We’re giving lectures and post graduate continue their medical education courses. We published a medical textbook that’s used in 14 medical schools in America. I think that it has become a foundational principle now in which many, many people in fact the functional medicine so called Institute for Functional Medicine which we founded in 1991, now gets nearly 50,000 independent web hits a week looking for a functional medicine practitioner.

So we know that it’s starting to get some visibility. I believe it’s getting visibility not because we market it or advertise it, because by word of mouth it really is providing solutions to problems that are not readily solvable by just giving a pill for now. It embraces many of the traditional healing methods in ways that are involved in what we consider an operating system and the operating system is called functional medicine. It’s founded on a very hard science of systems biology. So we are training docs how to work collaboratively through this concept of systems biology to improve function so that it doesn’t later become a pathology which we call a disease. That’s the kind of compressed view of the last 25 years of history.

Trevor Cates:                         Wow that’s fantastic. So it’s not just preventing disease though, it’s actually reversing disease also.

Jeffrey Bland:      That’s exactly right. In fact, one of the themes that we often hear about is the concept of biological agent. That people say, “Why have I had 45 birthdays but it seems like I’m 60 or 70?” In other cases, people that are 70, that are performing like 40 year olds. So we’d done a lot to really evaluate the functional capacity of individuals that assesses their biological age, their functional age and what we find is that you can roll back a person’s biologic age. We can cheat on our birthdays but they still do come but we can actually roll back a person’s biological and functional age by giving them the right kind of program that’s individualized to their need.

We have published studies that people performing after six or seven months on a program, 15 or 20 years younger biologically than they were when they started. That can be things like visual acuity, hearing, vibratory sensations, gait, balance, strength, endurance, cardiovascular effect, blood sugar and a whole range of different parameters that measure cognitive function, memory, reaction time. You can start to demonstrate significant improvements in all those functions by putting a person on the appropriate program.

Trevor Cates:       That’s a great thing to talk about, the whole idea of biological age. What have you found to be some of the key things when it comes to affecting impacting biological age in a positive way?

Jeffrey Bland:                        Well we break it down into seven principles. I don’t want to get too down in the weeds here. Those seven principles are the way we teach a practitioner to evaluate their patients. We’re less concerned about what you call it. We’re more concerned about where it come from. So those involve the following principles. Detoxification, gastrointestinal health or function, immune function, musculoskeletal function, what we call basically cell signaling which has to do with things like blood lipids and blood sugar levels, structural relationships to bone, muscle and connective tissue and bioenergetics. It’s related to mitochondrial function, the energy powerhouse of cells.

So we assess the person on the basis of those principles for which each one of those has its own way of looking at how to improve those functions because each one of those is associated with functional age basically or functional capacity.

Trevor Cates:                         So much of aging shows up on the skin. So when you think about skin and aging, what do you think are some of the … which of those do you think are some of the most important?

Jeffrey Bland:                        Yeah thank you. I think that there is … you’re the expert here so I’m almost presumptuous to speak out on this. I would think that from our experience or maybe even my experience, there’s two parts of skin. One is from the outside world effects on the skin like ionizing radiation. The other is the inside world of the body and its effects on actively turning over tissue which is the skin.

As we know the epidermal tissue of the body be it the outside skin or the mucosal membranes of our mouth and our esophagus and our stomach or our lungs, those are turning over very rapidly and they’re being replaced. They’re the more active one we call mitotic tissues throughout the course of our life. So they have to be replaced on regular basis. Like our intestinal cells that align the intestines are turning over about every seven days. So we have to be constantly regenerating new cells and we want them to be regenerating cells that are maintaining youthful functional capability.

So in the skin if we look at the inside characteristics of what controls and regulates skin cell epidermal reformation, it has to do with hormonal signals. It has to do with mitochondrial bioenergetics. It has to do with the obviously certain tropic hormones like insulin so we know that people have hyperinsulinemia and have glucose intolerance meaning pre-diabetes or type two diabetes, have skin problems and get age spots. They get all sorts of different photosensitivities.

We know that the relationship to toxins that are deposited in barrier tissues can play a significant role. So we talk about hepatic detoxification. The liver is very important as an organ that regulates the elimination of potential toxic substances before they have an adverse effect on tissues like the skin. We talk about neural regulation, immune function. The skin is a very immune active organ and if you look at the skin as a complex matrix of different cell types, part of those cell types are related to immune function. Scavenging debris and getting the skin to regenerate.

So what are the things that support proper immune function? How do you lower the immune system seeing the body as a foreigner which produces what we call autoimmunity? I don’t think it’s really so much that the body is allergic to itself as it is the immune system sees something going on that it expresses as a foreigner and it tries to attack it and in so doing, you can get skin damage as a consequence of the underlying cell types of the layer of the skin that’s influencing the architecture of the skin.

So we would have immune system function. We would look at detoxification. We would look at the relationships to oxidants and how that relates to mitochondrial function. In so doing and last time I mentioned insulin so it is insulinism. All of those give rise to a tailored program then to improve the internal function of the person and their skin becomes the reflection of their internal capability. The skin is not like we’re putting stuff on the outside. We’re putting stuff as you so eloquently said in your books putting stuff on the inside that makes the skin capable of being resilient and reforming itself in the spirit of what we call the native cells that are undamaged.

So I think that this construct, it really underlies to a great extent natural medicine. As you probably know, I got a lot of my lineage when I was a professor back in the ‘70s in the medical school by being involved with naturopathic medicine. I was involved with the group in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s and actually formed the first nationally accredited naturopathic school in Seattle Bastyr University. So I got a really big part of my education from the founders of Bastyr and the whole construct of natural medicine, what does it really mean which really has its real origin in what I would call functional science, functional medicine. So all of this kind of weaves together I think in what you probably been speaking to and describing eloquently in your work in natural medicine.

Trevor Cates:       Thank you. I know that a lot because people ask me about finding a practitioner for functional medicine, naturopathic medicine and they don’t always know what the words to use for that. Who should I go see? I know it’s not always easy to find a naturopathic doctor in every state, every part of the world too. So functional medicine doctors I usually tell people that’s another option for people. What do you usually tell people when they’re looking for help wherever they are?

Jeffrey Bland:      that’s a really great question. So in 1991 we formed the Institute for Functional Medicine so it’s just past its 25th anniversary now. over the last few years we recognized we’ve kind of gotten a little bit … now I don’t want to say critical mass but to a number of certified functional medicine practitioners it’s adequate now to start getting coverage in the United States on a referral basis. So the Institute for Functional Medicine website which is functionalmedicine.org then has a finder feature that you can put in your location and it will pull out the certified functional medicine practitioners in a person’s area.

As I mentioned, we’re now seeing on that website more than 50,000 independent searches a week. So clearly there’s a lot of people out there that are asking the question, “Where can I find someone who thinks this way, that I can go see as an aid in developing my own program?”

Trevor Cates:                         Yeah, great. Then there are different levels of practitioners, is that correct? So you’ve got medical doctors doing this. Naturopathic doctors will sometimes even do your program as well or the functional medicine program, right?

Jeffrey Bland:                        Oh absolutely. In fact, when we set up the Institute for Functional Medicine, one of the criteria that the founders established was we didn’t want to discriminate based upon the letters after a person’s name. We want to discriminate only on the basis of pursuit of excellence. So we are providing education, certification for all different types of licensed healthcare providers but we like to think we are getting the best of the best in each of the professions. That’s our mandate basically.

Trevor Cates:                         Great. So people already have some sort of background in healthcare and then they come in and they do the functional medicine program to help go deeper, right?

Jeffrey Bland:      Yes. They must already be a licensed practitioner in their states of practice. So there is a functional medicine coaching academy that can take non degreed individuals and help them become functional medicine coaches so they can work alongside a licensed practitioner to assist in patient management. The certification of a functional medicine provider, they have to be a certified licensed practitioner in the state of their activity.

Trevor Cates:                         That’s great. I so appreciate this opportunity for more people to become practitioners and help spread the word. So I appreciate everything you’ve been doing. I also know you’ve got this book too that is for the disease delusion. I want to talk some about this because it’s talking about the causes behind disease and why people get them. This is a book that you write for the general public because you write some books for practitioners. You have a lot of speaking that you do to practitioners and doctors. Then you also have written this book for the public as well as other books. I know you’ve been busy.

Jeffrey Bland:      Well it takes one to know one so are you. Yeah this was my most recent book to the general public and I would call it a book that’s not an entry level book. It’s not for a person who would read their first book, that they might read on health. It’s more for what I would call the more advanced health conscious consumer. What it really tries to do is to define I’d like to hoping in more lay people’s language what functional medicine is all about. The reason I called it disease delusion is not that we don’t have diseases, it’s that the way that we describe diseases is not like cast in stone. These are relative terms that change in time. There is no such thing as an absolute disease.

Diseases are manifestations of our definition generally to give us a way to aggregate different signs and symptoms together to make it more convenient for reimbursement quite honestly. If we really were to look at a disease let’s say type two diabetes for instance which is an ever increasing problem in our society, and we had 100 type two diabetics and we asked, “How similar are they?” We would find that there’s more difference among those 100 diabetics than you would have on the basis of belief that they all share the same disease.

It’s really 100 different variations on the theme. So in some senses, it’s a delusion to think that we can understand health from giving a name to a disease. So I try to point out that disease is it’s a little bit of a false god for us because it takes us into a place thinking that if we can name something that we have that, we understand it.

Let’s use an example of an autoimmune disease. Systemic lupus erythematosus, abbreviated SLE. So you might have a series of problems rashes and joint pain and maybe some kidney problems. You go to your rheumatologist. They do a series of diagnostic workup techniques and they come back and they say, “You have SLE, systemic lupus erythematosus.” You as the patient say, “Oh thank you doctor.” Now that assumes that when it’s been made that that doctor must understand where it came from and exactly how to treat it and those are not true. Just naming it doesn’t tell you where it came from nor does it tell you exactly how to treat it.

Now there may be a usual and customary treatment for that diagnosis but it doesn’t mean that treatment for you specifically will be successful because your form of activation may be different than another person with the same name disease. That’s why we feel in functional medicine it’s more important to know where it came from in that individual than what you call it. So that’s why I turn the book disease delusion. It’s not that it’s a delusion we have disease, it’s a delusion to think they’re fixed immutable and they’re locked into our genes and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Trevor Cates:                         Well this certainly is good to hear that from your perspective and that definitely is something that I’ve seen a lot of frustration in patients is they’re given a label of a disease but then no answers, no solutions and no really … it can be so confusing. Like, “Why was I given this label when I don’t know where it came from? I don’t know about it. I’m just stuck with it. Maybe my insurance will help me cover visits but it’s not actually I’m not getting any better with the conventional approach.” Of course, not all diseases are that way.

Some disease labels actually do have an origin reason, pathogenesis process and we understand what’s behind it. There also is what’s considered conventional treatment for it. When you look at disease differently like you’re talking about in the book, it gives people a lot more options and also gets people not just disease free but getting to more of a state of optimal health, right?

Jeffrey Bland:                        Yeah. Let’s take an example to your point. I think there’s a really probably very well understood example and that’s cardiovascular disease which is still today the number one cause of mortality in our culture. We were told a number of years ago that one of the major causes of cardiovascular disease is elevated blood cholesterol. That’s a pretty well understood concept that when you have high cholesterol, you’re at risk to heart disease and you need to get it reduced.

So then you say, “How do we reduce cholesterol conveniently?” We say, “Well we use the most common family of drugs that have ever been developed called the statin drugs.” So the doc may recommend then to lower your cholesterol that you’re put on one of the member of this drug family, the statins. It does successfully lower your cholesterol. Now the question is, did it actually treat the disease or did it treat something else other than cholesterol that then influenced the progression towards the disease?

So now the most recent research suggest that it’s not cholesterol in of itself that’s the cause of the disease, it’s the inflammation that occurs on the artery and the coronary vessels in the heart that ultimately leads to the thickening of the vessels and atherosclerotic plaque and it’s a combination therefore of multiple factors only one of which is related to cholesterol in itself. Then you say, “But don’t statins actually have data that shows it reduces the incidence of risk of heart disease?”

Yes there is that data but now they’re showing that statins have another effect beyond lowering cholesterol which is their anti-inflammatories that reduce the injury to the artery walls. So the mechanism that we’ve used all these years to think about heart disease which is cholesterol and statins lower cholesterol has been a small part of the total story.

So then you say, “Well if that’s true, are there other ways of reducing inflammation of the artery other than statins?” Of course it opens up all sorts of natural remedies, exercise, curcumin, high fiber low glycemic diets. The list goes on and on and on. So now it says, “Well maybe that explains why certain blue zones in the world where people don’t have access to a lot of high tech medicine and they don’t take statins, they don’t have heart disease.” Why? Because they think the right way.

They exercise and have high active lifestyles and they eat close to the soil. They’re eating whole foods. Those contain principles that lower inflammation in their arteries and their heart. So now we have a whole different view of how lifestyle influences heart disease and heart disease is not just a result of the statin deficiency.

Trevor Cates:       Absolutely. It certainly isn’t. Then also statins come with side effects as well. So then people are … that oftentimes happens with prescription medications as somebody diagnosed with disease or given a prescription medication and then they develop side effects from those medications and maybe develop another disease or get another diagnosis as a result of that. So then they get put on another medication for those signs and symptoms and disease diagnosis. Then it just keeps going and going and then it gets harder to treat some of the root causes.

When you talk about inflammation, inflammation seems to be such a big root cause for so many diseases and I certainly see that a lot for skin. I even caught skin inflammation because it’s so common. Skin issues that show up on the surface is oftentimes due to internal inflammation.

Jeffrey Bland:                        Yeah I think that’s beautifully said. Here’s where the immune system really plays a good role because the immune system is the seat of our inflammatory response to invaders or to injuries. I think we need to be very cautious and I know you do this when we talk inflammation because it’s an important process of the body. We need to constantly be renewing stuff and getting rid of garbage that the inflammatory process does that.

It’s when inflammation is chronic and it’s like a fire that’s constantly burning and never put out. It has collateral damage as a consequence. So activating the inflammatory system when you need it, like you have an injury or you have an infection is a really good thing. Having inflammation working potentially 24/7 in your body is not a good thing, because now suddenly you have the potential for injury to your host cell, your friendly cells. So you get damage to friendly fire.

So balancing the immune system so that it will only activate inflammation when necessary to protect from sickness, infection or injury but not the overly active in the presence of no necessary for response is really a critical, critical feature of appropriately designing a health promotion program. There are certain places in the body that are most reflective of altered inflammatory balance or immune balance of which the skin is right to the head of the list. So the skin is one of the first places that you start seeing pro-inflammation showing up as redness, erythemas and lesions and poor healing of wounds and things where the inflammatory process is not working correctly.

It’s also interesting isn’t it that skin is also one of the first places you see the nutritional insufficiencies. So you see cracks in the corners of the mouth. You see dermatitis. You see [geophagic 00:30:00] tongue or the tongue becomes lined and fissured. You see certain kinds of hypersensitivities not just to things like gluten which is contact allergens because the skin is when properly nourished, it becomes hypersensitive to all sorts of things. So this immune connection to nutrition and the skin is really an important kind of visual story about how to maintain proper health.

Trevor Cates:                         What do you find are some of the best ways to balance the immune system?

Jeffrey Bland:                        Well I think there’s a number of things. Dr. Sid Baker, who is one of our master teachers in functional medicine and a former Yale medical school professor has said it beautifully. He says that the secret of the immune system is to take away the things that are activating the immune system and causing our body to be at war. Remember the color of inflammation is red, rubor, or red is the god of war, Mars, the color of the planet Mars so this body doing battle is associated with inflammation, redness. So you take away the things that your body seas as foreigners and is doing battle against and then you add back the things that the body is missing to support the immune system.

So it leads into an interrogation of “Okay, what are the things that I should take away? Is it because I’m eating diets that are chemicalized and my body is responding, my immune system sees it as foreigners and is responding adversely? Is it because I am not getting enough sleep and sleep is one of the best regenerative things that helps to support my immune system to re-nourish itself, heal itself and be ready for the next day? Is it because I’m exposed to environment toxins so like lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic? Is it because I’m eating a diet that’s very high in substances that my body feels are foreigners?

Is it because my microbiome, my intestinal microbiological critters are producing toxins, things like lipopolysaccharides that then induce my immune systems to be alarmed?”  So all of those things are things that we ask “Should I take away or improve some of those things?” Simultaneously say, “What does the immune system need for its functioning?” It needs adequate, well balanced protein. It needs proper levels of certain trace minerals zinc, chromium, calcium, magnesium, selenium.

It needs certain levels of vitamins, the whole B vitamin family. It needs unsaturated fatty acids particularly the omega three family, the EPA and DHA, the fish oils. So we start going down the list of things to add back and we throw down the list of things to take away to form the better balance of that inflammatory immune system.

Trevor Cates:                         All right, absolutely. Those are all fantastic points. Thanks for sharing that. Great, great tips for really balancing the immune system to address inflammation. A lot of people are confused today about diet and what to eat.

Jeffrey Bland:                        True. Yes, aren’t we all?

Trevor Cates:                         A lot of conflicting information. Do you feel like there is a good foundational diet that … I know there’s not a one size fits all approach for everyone. Is there a general diet that you think is good for most people in most circumstances?

Jeffrey Bland:                        I’m a strong proponent of Michael Pollan, where the Omnivore’s Dilemma that I think eating more plant foods, staying close to the earth with variety and moderation, as least process as possible is a good way to start. Because once we get into highly processed shelf stable things, we really don’t know all the things that are going in there. We can’t even understand the labels on some of these foods unless we’re a food technologist.

Many of those things which we were told are safe maybe toxicologically safe but actually in certain cases immunologically active. So yes they’re not going to kill us but the question is in certain people, are they producing an inflammatory response in the immune system? So taking away a variety of external chemicals that the body has then evolved to no one is going to be in this diet which means staying close to natural food as much as possible.

When you say, “Well does that mean organic?”  I would say to the extent that one can conveniently get organic in their diet, that’s desirable. I don’t necessarily in my life make it a religion but I certainly gravitate to trying to get as much organic foods in my diet as possible. I try to stay close to the soil. If it looks like that food didn’t come from somehow related to the ground, then I’m probably a little bit suspicious of it.

Then I ask the question, “How much animal product should I add back and what kind of animal products?” My answer to that is I think animal products they provide a whole series of nutrients like iron and various kinds of things you don’t get a lot of in vitamin B12. That you don’t get a lot of in vegetable products. Again, we don’t have to eat huge amounts of animal products. I think people have this view I know there’s this whole Paleolithic group that’s saying that we grew up eating animal products.

We didn’t cultivate vegetables and we didn’t eat a lot of vegetables and grains. I don’t think that’s actually true. if you now look at the more recent paleological evidence that’s been assembled over the past few years, you find out that the Paleolithic human actually had a pretty complex diet and had a lot of vegetable products in their diet. They did have seeds. They did have primitive grains, not the kind of cultivated grains we have today and big wheat fields in North Dakota. They had cereal unprocessed materials in their diets. They have the digestive capability of managing them.

So I believe animal products are luxurious because they’re very energy intensive and they can provide a useful source of protein and other nutrients but I am not a proponent of a Paleolithic diet. In fact, I don’t think there’s any strong evidence to say that that is the way of choice of humans to achieve the best of health because if we look at historical records of cultures that are very healthy, live in the centenarian, like Okinawans and traditional Japanese and Costa Ricans, these blue zones, they’re not Paleolithic in their eating.

They’re eating closer to the ground. So I think sometimes the things that we hear as new ideas are taken to exaggeration and they become fads. Then later we come back and we change our mind. So I stayed on this path for the last 30 years saying, “Let’s heed our historical best records to guide our eating habits.”

Trevor Cates:                         Yeah I hear what you’re saying about the paleo diet and I also feel like that it’s not environmentally sustainable as well. I think that in Paleolithic times they weren’t eating the amounts of meat that people are consuming today because you just didn’t have access to it. It wasn’t that easy. You have to go down and hunt it and catch it and then get it. So there’s that.

At the same time, I think one of the reasons why paleo diet has worked for so many people is a lot of it is getting back to eating whole foods. I think that the animal protein content is kind of overdone with some people but some people following the paleo diet aren’t necessarily overdoing it with the meat and animal protein but they’re just getting back to eating more whole foods and I think that’s why so many people are seeing a benefit with it.

Jeffrey Bland:                        Yeah. I absolutely agree with you on that. You know I’ve been in this field long enough now 40 years to seen many interesting dietary things come and go. Almost all of them work at first and the reason they do is for I believe the way that you’re describing it and say they cause the person to change away from the highly processed stacked food, convenience food, fast food diets and so they have to be more thoughtful about what they’re eating. That alone gives a huge benefit. If you take away all the junk food people eat, no matter what else you would eat if it looks like it’s not junk, it’s going to be better for you.

The question really is, what’s sustainable? Over the course of decades of living, it produces the best health outcome, something that people will stay with. Now we have this whole ketogenic diet craze which is an offshoot from the paleo diet and I think that there is something to the ketogenic diet as therapeutic for epilepsy and maybe certain kinds of cancer. There are certain therapeutic roles for the ketogenic diet but I believe as a standard diet for decades of living, that’s also not been proven safe and effective either.

So sometimes we take short term information and then we try to extrapolate it to the long term of living. I think over the course of life, a diet that is minimally processed, that it looks like it was grown on the ground, that is tasty and colorful in variety, that you will continue to eat throughout the course of your life, that’s … it’s like the hare versus the tortoise. The race will be won by the tortoise that sustains the progress going forward.

Trevor Cates:                         Absolutely. So along those lines we’re talking about diets. There’s some people that are very much following that gluten free diet. How do you feel about gluten?

Jeffrey Bland:                        That’s another very interesting part of our evolving understanding. I am a believer that as we have hybridized grains and we’ve gotten into new kinds of super grains that we have introduced new kinds of materials into the food through the genetic hybridization. This is not GMO. This is traditional genetic hybridization that can induce immune responses so that a person can get an inflammatory response to things that you used to be considered safe.

I use the example of Italy, of the traditional wheat in Italy. There are very few examples on the traditional cultivar of wheat in Italy of people getting pasta sensitivity. As we’ve gone through these new super grains where we have a lot more genetic hybridization, now suddenly in Italy you started to see a lot more grain sensitivity. So I don’t think it’s necessarily the grains in it of itself, I think it’s the way we have modified their genetic architecture over breeding to produce certain desirable characteristics of yield and other things for baking industry and so forth.

So what about gluten specifically? Well gluten is a family of proteins that are part of cereal grains and recall that in the world I think it’s something like 70% of all calories that people that live in the surface of the earth come from cereal grains because rice is a member of that family and rice is the principal source of calories for so much of the world. So with that said, rice doesn’t contain gluten. The other cereal members of that family, the grass family, does contain gluten in varying amounts depending upon the cultivar or the genetic state of that plant.

So the gluten is many different proteins some of which have very low what’s called antigenicity mean they’re tolerant to almost everybody but other members of that family are less tolerant. In fact, in some cases with people with true gluten neuropathy which is a genetic autoimmune disease, it can be life threatening if they’re consuming those proteins in their diet. Then there’s all these shades of gray in between, those people that are completely tolerant and those that are completely intolerant.

Now where the enigma comes for me or the paradox is that you can take gluten out of some of these grains that people have said they’re having adverse responses to so you remove the gluten studies have been. Keep everything else present and you feed those things to individual and they still get what looks like gluten sensitivity.

Now how does that happen? It’s because the sensitivity they’re having is really not coming from gluten. It’s coming from other things that have been made in that plant as a consequence of its genetic hybridization which are not necessarily gluten itself. So we call this non gluten immune intolerance but it relates to cereal grains that have gluten. So we point the finger at gluten but it may be other things that are in that commercialized grain that are actually causing the problem.

So there is a trend as you know now to say, “Let’s go back to the original cultivar origin. Let’s get rid of these hybridized products and let’s use Asian grains because maybe people are tolerant to Asian grains which they weren’t tolerant to these new age grains.” When that’s done, often people can put grains back into the diet in moderation without these responses. So I think the story is much more complex and sometimes we see it to be of just gluten out of your diet and you’re going to be fine.

In fact, there are a lot of people who have been on very rigorous gluten exclusion diets sometimes it brings complications to their life because it’s not easy and have not actually gotten better, have felt worse because they still got these other things in their diet which are causing the immune reactions.

Trevor Cates:                         Again, I don’t think that it’s a one size fits all as that what’s your saying. Everybody is different and some people might actually have a gluten allergy or gluten sensitivity allergy. Some people might be able to have gluten but getting back to the way we find it in nature without it being modified. So much is really the goal is to get back to nature, right?

Jeffrey Bland:                        That’s exactly right. When you look at some of the really extraordinary work that’s ongoing on the relationship between various food principles and immune function, it takes us into then saying, “Well does that also include immune function of the brain?” Because the brain has its own immune function. It’s called the microglia. When you are consuming in your diet something you’re your immune system sees as an invader and your immune system is responding to do war with it, to produce the color red, inflammation, it also can induce the same process in the immune system with your brain.

That’s called neuroinflammation and what do we know is associated with inflammation not just things like headaches but cognitive dysfunction, pre-Alzheimer’s, even possibly with more and more data suggesting forms of autism maybe associated with neuroinflammatory responses of the brain in children. So now we have introduced a whole another component to this story saying when your immune system is aroused and it’s in a hostile environment.

Even your nervous system and your central nervous system, your brain itself, can be involved and it can cause foggy brain syndrome or it can cause cognitive dysfunction that we say, “I’m losing my memory.” Or can produce behavioral problems in children. So I think we’re starting to finally recognize that food has a much more dramatic effect than overall body function than we ever fully recognized.

Trevor Cates:       That’s so true. I’m still fighting this battle a bit with food not … statements made by dermatologists saying “Food doesn’t impact the skin.” It’s the same thing with all different forms of medicine. You’re still going to have those people that are going to tell you “No, it’s not about food. That doesn’t have an impact on our health. It’s really you just need to take this medication or you need to look at this other factor or you need to stop being so stressed out.”

Jeffrey Bland:                        Yeah. Isn’t it interesting that people can make that … who are well trained, well studied and professional compliment but can make that assumption that somehow food which is the composition upon which every cell is made in our body has no relationship to the integrity of that cell? That somehow it’s a magic black box that you eat and you get a puff of smoke and the cells all regenerate automatically when really the conversion of food to both cellular energy and cellular material is a very, very complex process that’s controlled by metabolism and hormones and all these things that’s regulated very carefully for which if you don’t eat the right things, it would be like trying to build a house and all you have are two by fours.

You can only do so much of a house with only two by fours. You say, “Well gee really I can build a frame but I can’t put in the sheet rock on. I can’t put all the electrical and the roofing and the windows. It’s going to be a pretty funny looking house.” That’s what happens when you eat an incomplete diets. You have only certain parts of your house of health being built. So somehow people who are in the medical world, who have not really studied nutrition because they didn’t get any … of any substance in medical schools just don’t understand that concept.

Trevor Cates:                         So true. So before we go I want to ask you something. Would you mind sharing with us what you do in your life? Kind of your day, kind of a day in the life of Dr. Bland of what you eat and what exercise and that sort of thing to help maintain your health in a day to day basis.

Jeffrey Bland:                        Yeah, thank you. That’s where the tire meets the road for all us, doesn’t it? It’s great to talk about stuff but it’s more important to be doing what we’re talking about. So I just had my 71st birthday. So it becomes ever increasingly important to make sure that I’m not just talking about it, that I’m trying to do it. So my wife and I’s life is pretty consistent I think in terms of diet with what I’ve been talking about. Fortunately, I have a group of colleagues in my companies that are all kind of nutritionally knowledgeable.

So we reinforce one another. Some of this is learn the behavior of who you hang out with. If you hang out with people that everyone goes to the fast food places, then you’re attracted to go to fast food places. If, however, you hang with people that go to the organic food store, then you’re more likely to do that. So my colleagues and friends are principally of a similar mindset. So that kind of reinforces what we’re allowed to eat. We go to those restaurants for instance. At home, we have a garden. We have 12 acres in Washington State. So we try to live close to the ground.

We try to preserve nature. I take a series of kind of I guess you call it preventive nutritional supplements. I take fish oil supplements every day. I take multivitamin mineral high potency. I take a protein high vitamin, high nutrient beverage every day which we designed a number of years ago that kind of makes it convenient to fill the gaps. Then I try to get at least 45 minutes of exercise a day which can be anything from riding a bike to jogging, to strength conditioning to even to just going out for a vigorous walk with a dog. We have a golden retriever that’s my coach and she make sure that I’m moving at the appropriate pace.

I wear the old biometrics now, the wearable devices that tell if I’m keeping up with my program. It’s kind of gamifying health. So it’s not that complicated once you get into the rhythm. I think it pays dividends. I think in terms of … I once said to a group of medical doctors, I said, “So many of you say that you’re too busy, your lives are too congested to really deal with these concepts of regular exercise and sorting the right foods. You just don’t have time.”

I said, “So let’s ask a question. If you have a 24 hour day and you’re saying you’re too busy to invest one hour of your day totally into maintenance of your health which is say about 5% of your day, what does that say when you get beyond youth and you start going to your bank account and ask what did you put in your bank account as a reserve? You find that there’s nothing in your balance. You’ve already used it all up. So what are you going to do then? Do you think it might have been worthwhile to allocate 5% of your day as a living life insurance program?” That’s how I see it. It’s a living life insurance. It pays dividends for your health rather than paying a dividend to your descendants after you’ve died. That’s a different way of thinking about life insurance.

Really the life insurance we invest in today is death insurance. Our beneficiaries are going to get the result of us dying. Life insurance is that which keeps you alive and functioning which is this kind of a program. So that’s how I see it 5% of my day is not an unreasonable amount. If I’m too busy for that, then I ask the question, how do I see myself? It sounds like a bad allocation of resources.

Trevor Cates:                         Yeah. That is so well put. Thank you so much for sharing that. I think that should resonate with everyone. Dr. Bland before we go, tell everyone how they can find you, where they can find your book, where they can get more information about you.

Jeffrey Bland:                        Yeah thank you. Obviously my book is available from Amazon or at the normal internet book sellers. I can be found … I have really two places one of which is at the personalized lifestyle medicine institute that we founded so we have a pretty active blog and series and videos of all meetings that we’ve done over the years, to have many opinion later that can speak to all sorts of topics that you can visualize for free.

The website is plminstitute.org. So it stands for personalized lifestyle medicine. So you have plminsittute.org. Then I have my own jeffreybland.com website that has all the resources of seminars that we’ve given and books and articles and so forth. So you can find me and we try to do a few video blogs each week that are really related to topics that are at hand to keep up with what we think are some of the extraordinary things that are going on. So those are the places to find me.

Trevor Cates:                         Okay. Fantastic. We’ll have those links up on my website as well under the podcast.

Jeffrey Bland:                        Thanks a million. I want to really commend you. I think what you’re doing in terms of both your practice and your education as exactly how we bend the curve of health in our culture. We are a disease focused culture. What you’re doing is really helping bend us back into a health focused culture. People are dying to know what you know. Now think of that as a double entendre because it’s not just symbolic. It is real.

People are dying to know exactly what we’ve been talking about and implementing in their lives. It’s not magic. It’s not smoke and mirrors. It really works. It’s just a question of making a decision to do it. It comes back to the question of, how does a person value their own lives? Are they worthy in their own mind to be healthy, to be happy and to be functional for a century? If so, then they need to invest in that because they’re worthy of that investment. That’s how I see this whole thing fitting together.

Trevor Cates:                         Excellent. Well Dr. Bland thank you so much for your interview today and everything that you do to contribute to the future of medicine, the present of medicine now and in the future. Thank you so much for all that you do.

Jeffrey Bland:                        Likewise. Thanks a million. Be well.

Trevor Cates:       I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Dr. Jeffrey Bland. So much information was covered today. So I want to remind you. We do transcribe these podcasts so now is a great time to check that out. You could go to the spadr.com/podcast. Go to the page with this interview and you’ll find the transcriptions there as well as you’ll also see the website links that he mentioned, all that information is on that page. That is the page where I want you to go because of what I’m doing is I’m giving away a signed copy of his book. This is a signed copy of his book Disease Delusion along with a signed copy of my book Clean Skin from Within. I’m going to give this away to one lucky person.

What I want you to do is I want you to comment below the interview, on the website thespadr.com/podcast the one with his interview and comment and explain what you got most out of this interview. One thing that you found to be super inspirational or helpful. I’m going to choose who I think will get the most out of having his book from the comments that people write. So just let me know and I’m going to select a winner within one week of when this podcast is posted. I’m sorry if you’re listening to this podcast later on.

I’m sorry about we only have … I’ll accept one of these so it’s just for one lucky winner. Also, I want to remind you that we have the Spa Doctor Podcast on a regular basis so come back and check out the podcast. You could check it out here or iTunes. Also, it’s on YouTube and join the conversation also on social media. You can join me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. Check back next time for the next podcast. I’ll see you next time.