Join the discussion below
Dr. Terry Wahls is an Institute for Functional Medicine Certified Practitioner and a board-certified internal medicine physician. She also conducts clinical trials testing the efficacy of diet and lifestyle in the setting of multiple sclerosis. In 2018 she was awarded the Institute for Functional Medicine’s Linus Pauling Award for her... Read More
Dr. Jeffrey Bland is a thought leader who has spent more than four decades focused on the improvement of human health. He is known worldwide as the founder of the Functional Medicine movement, which represents his vision for a care model that is grounded in systems biology and informed by... Read More
- Nutrition plays a crucial role in managing MS, with Vitamin D and cod liver oil having significant impacts on immune function
- The food we consume can influence our genes, potentially altering the severity of diseases like MS
- The standards of clinical care are evolving, emphasizing that what we add to our diet is just as important as what we remove
Terry Wahls, MD
Welcome, Jeff. I am so glad that you agreed to be interviewed for the MS and Neuroimmune Summit. Now, what I would like to have you do is very briefly introduce yourself and then we will launch into what I think will be a really interesting conversation.
Dr. Jeffrey Bland
Well, thank you. First of all, it would be remiss if I did not say how fortunate I feel to have you as a colleague and friend and to be part of this monumental summit, which I think is of its time and so important. My background is a little over 40 years in this field. I’m a nutritional biochemist by training, and I went through medical school training at the Oregon Health Sciences University back in the late sixties. I then became an academic, only to then have the opportunity on a sabbatical year to actually two years to work with Dr. Linus Pauling, a three-time Nobel Prize winner, and his institute in Palo Alto, California, which was a life-changing event for me. I came back, gave up my tenured faculty position at the university, and made a decision. The rest of my life was going to stand in trying to help physicians how to apply nutritional medicine in their practice. And that ultimately led me and my wife actually in 1990 to found the Institute for Functional Medicine. That kind of developed the concept of functional medicine as a system biology approach to chronic illness. And the rest is history, of the last 33 years and watching it grow up.
Terry Wahls, MD
Jeff, and I am so grateful that you did because in my journey I had pieced together a lot reading the basic science myself. But when I discovered the Institute for Functional Medicine took that course on neuroprotection I had a longer list of supplements and I loved learning and reinforcing all that mitochondria, biochemistry.
And then I had this big. AHA. And I’m very embarrassed about how long it took. Like, what if I redesigned my paleo diet and incorporated all these things I was taking in supplement form what would happen. And that is when the magic began. So we were talking that you had some exposure to Roy Swank, who was the first guy who had this radical idea that food mattered. Could you tell us a little bit about that?
Dr. Jeffrey Bland
Yes, I think this was a really interesting part of my journey. I came from California. I did my undergraduate work in Oregon to medical school, all the way to Portland in 1967. And I happened to run into Dr. Swank, who was actually born in 1909. So he was in his memoir. What would you say in 1967? He was in his senior year as a faculty member at that point, and he had quite a body of literature, but he had started publishing back in the 1950s, I think 1955 actually was publication on a low-fat diet and multiple sclerosis. And it was as he was actually the first, the head of neurology at the Oregon Health Sciences University. And in his field as an academic and clinical neurologist, I think he thought to be a little bit strange that he would be studying something about diet that was not in the mainstream of what neurologists did or thought about. It probably was not and maybe is not even today, but quite honestly.
But he was quite a heretic. But he published over 177 peer-reviewed articles over the course of his years, not all of them in the diet relationship and a variety of other things he looked at in terms of myelin and synthesis and integrity. But he was quite a force of nature and he did a variety of different clinical trials early on to look at this low-fat diet connection to MS and showed reasonably good statistical increase and improvement in outcome using various metrics in the body politic of the condition and he was a very staunch believer that if you could take saturated fats out of the diet and, and pretty much eliminate them, you would get significant improvement in patients with remitting or symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis. Now, I think there is an interesting feature of that work for me in which your work actually over the decades now has really exemplified. And that is when you take something out, you have to add something back in.
By definition, unless you just remove eating, you are going to feel those calories that you take an hour as saturated fat calories in you. And there are going to be other calories that will fill the gap. So the question is to me often, do we make an assumption that when we take something out and we see a positive effect, that is because we took something out. Or maybe it was because what we took out was replaced by something that we put in that was better. And so we have to turn the converts around and look at the null hypothesis and say, what happens if we replace, not just remove? And I think your particular approach, which has been so brilliant, is an exemplar of what happens when you replace and you start asking about Whole Foods, you ask about your brain, about all the things that you advocate, and then so beautifully, which is not just taking stuff out, it is adding a bunch of things back in.
So that led me then in 1997, by this time, we started the Institute for Functional Medicine in 1990 and we were into our annual meeting. So this would have been our sixth or seventh annual meeting, and I decided that I wanted to do a little mini focus of that meeting. I recall it was in Palm Springs and I invited the three ages, particularly Heaney, Holick, and Hayes. So these were three named people that in the early nineties were doing quite a bit of work on neuromuscular disorders related to one specific thing you put back in with this vitamin D. So, Dr. Heaney, of course, was the head of the American Endocrinology Society and probably hundreds of papers in osteoporosis and vitamin D and calcium was considered kind of was in the Food Nutrition Board. It set the R or the iceberg for vitamin D and was quite a broad thinker. And he had come up with the concept of saying, Why do we focus so much on deficiency when we should maybe thinking about insufficiency? Because maybe under intake of specific things in this case, specifically vitamin D does not believe the rickets, which is the vitamin D deficiency disease. But maybe it leads to other things that precede records that have immunological sequelae like neuromuscular disorders. So he started talking a little bit about, well, let’s not just assume that you have to wait to get rickets before you do not have enough vitamin D. Maybe we want to measure blood, vitamin D levels and see what status that person is in. So he was very early on in that concept.
And then, of course, Michael Holick, renowned as the actual person when he was doing his work in Wisconsin, discovered the 25 hydroxy vitamins D and C metabolite of vitamin D and actually developed a blood test for assessing vitamin D status. Because you measure the 25 hydroxy derivative, it is rather than vitamin B itself. And then he went on to Boston University and became the head of endocrinology there. And it was his MB/PhD and published literally hundreds of papers on the Sun vitamin and the advocacy. And then lastly, is Colleen Hayes. Now, Colleen Hayes, I do not think has gotten quite the notoriety maybe in the press. The medical and research process as did Dr. Holick and Dr. Heaney. But Colleen Hayes was really the first person. She has also been a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin. She did her Ph.D. there, and she stayed on to become quite a renowned faculty member, focusing on the research that she did with Dr. DeLuca, with Vitamin D at Wisconsin.
And of course, he was one of the principal people that developed the Wisconsin Research Foundation. The work that was able to get actually small amounts of money from the dairy industry when they started supplementing with vitamin D, because Wisconsin, through DeLuca, had the patent on vitamin D. So every gallon of milk that was sold, it had vitamin D in the University of Wisconsin got a small royalty on that patent. And so they were able to build quite a large research fund called the WARF, Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation that was funding all sorts of work. And Colleen Hayes then stayed on after finishing her work in postdoc to be a faculty member, working more on Vitamin D and her contribution, this is an AHA and I do not think she has gotten the credit she deserved as being really the first person to talk about the immunological impact of vitamin D, how it includes interferon-gamma on certain types of white blood cells. And she was really the opening of the door. I mean, there were other people in the field, but I give her credit for being the first person to really start publishing back in the eighties about vitamin B impact, not just as a Vitamin of bones, but the impact on the immune system. And she started talking about vitamin D and multiple sclerosis and actually did the first observational studies. And she was not a doctor. She was a clinical scientist, but she did some early-stage kind of preliminary investigative work and published some early papers suggesting that Vitamin D was a missing link in the MS immune story. And so those three people then in 1997 all gave their presentations. And I think when I look back and I may be blowing smoke here, I sort of take this for what it is, but to that point, the vitamin D immune story was not well read at all. I think when we pulled those three people together and we had national media attention at that meeting that fueled the start of vitamin D as the Darling Vitamin that it became over the previous 30 years or 20 years. And before that, no one was really supplementing with vitamin D unless they were an older woman who was worried about osteoporosis. It was not in the top line of supplements. Now as you know, vitamin D is in the top line of supplements. And I think it is because of that early work and later following on with the work that you and others have done showing as part of this importance, it is not the solution by itself, but it is a major part of the immune picture. So then following my story here, it turns out there was another investigator at OSHA that came later after Dr. Huang that I interfaced with as I became a professor later.
And that was William Connor. William Connor was the first person to start studying salmon oil. And again, Pacific Northwest, Oregon, a lot of fish up there. And so he got grants to study the role of unsaturated fatty acids of the omega three family and its relationship initially to cardiovascular disease as contrasted to saturated fat, types of derivatives. But then he went on and expanded the published over 100 papers over the years, looking at the role that omega three fatty acids had on. So a membrane architecture, including cell membranes of nervous system tissues. And so he started to show that you incorporate these things when you eat them. They do not just get broken down in color.
They actually get incorporated within the architecture of your body. And they have a structure and a functional effect on how these cells work. And I think that was another step forward in this whole probing literature and understanding of where MS could be tied in the diet. Because now we’re saying replace saturated with these omega three fats and also alcohol and gas and for vegetable products, if you want to start putting fish, you can also get it from whole other vegetable products. So then that for me took that story on to the next level, which is to then start saying, well, these fatty acids are fat and things like salmon or herring, these cold-water fish, is that the only thing that has an impact upon the immune system and relationship to MS. So that takes us back historically to probably the first nutritional supplement ever used in humans, which is Kamagra.
It goes back 2500 years and Kamagra of course, is very rich, not just in omega three fatty acids but also in vitamin D and vitamin A, both of which have been associated with improved neurological function. So you start asking, well, what happens in Northern latitudes where people do not get exposed to sun and they have low vitamin D in their blood? Do they have increased MS? And the answer is yes, they do. Well, what happens if they are Nordic and they supplement Kamagra? They have lower incidences of MS. So now people started putting some epidemiological evidence together. And then when people said, well, what is in those rose oils, is it just solely omega three fats and vitamins A and D in Covergirl. We probed more recently and I’m talking about for the last ten years it was found that they also contain a unique additional family of bioactive ingredients that are recalled that are Morrisons protections and resolvance under the name pro-resolving mediators. And these pro resolving meters have now been found to have their own impact upon immune systems as it relates to PMS. So it is not just omega three by themselves, it is in its natural state when they are minimally processed, like in Whole Foods, where you get the full benefit of this complement of all these nutrients, working together as an orchestra to help nourish the nervous and immune system. So that then takes us then to the next step, which is, well, what happens when you eat with it? These things always just go directly into your blood as whatever your nutrients are. And of course, no, we know that’s not the case. You have got a lot of things going on in your digestive system. And so now we start to see the emergence of the microbiome and how the microbiome has its influence on MS. With this incredible paper that was just published out of UCSF, looking at that almost perfectly validates your work, by the way, except they were looking at the microbes that are influenced by the whole diet and how they influence the immune and neurological system.
So you have spawned an incredible revolution in thinking and let me just quote this monologue run on here I’m doing. So I have a female physician personally. I have developed a great working relationship with her and a personal friendship. And so she felt comfortable in telling me that after 30 years of being a physician, working principally in a very intense situation in the VA system with a lot of patients with co-morbidity and a lot of complicated patients that she found that she was developing new neurological issues, it was getting neuritis in her hands and feet. She was getting what she considered to be MS-like symptoms. And she recognized that she was probably on a short track for retirement, which was when she was about 58 years of age and that wasn’t something she was looking forward to for many reasons, obviously like your history. So she then did what you did and that is she changed her whole diet.
She got on to The Wahls program. She made a conscious commitment to really clean up her act, so to speak, and she completely resolved the problem. She is back in practice now and she gave up the VA to start a private practice in this kind of more complex lifestyle, dietary intervention, and has a thriving practice up in her area. And she brought in a colleague, another woman who is a Ph.D. in trauma care nurse, who was totally committed to her patients and had really sacrificed her health over the years. And she convinced her colleagues. She said you need to make some changes to it. So this woman lives on in the program. Your program. She lost 137 pounds, and she’s completely well. And she is now in full-time practice together.
Terry Wahls, MD
What has happened is that we have had so many physicians and outsourcers, say other health, other professions who’ve lost their profession because of their health challenges. Discover my work, heal. And then they are like, I can’t go back to practicing medicine the way I used to or practicing nutrition the way I used to, or physical therapy, occupational therapy. And so they come and get certified as a Wahls practitioner and they now practice through that lens. And they help other folks with complex chronic diseases, MS and other neuroimmune diseases recover. It is immensely gratifying to do that.
Dr. Jeffrey Bland
Well, let me, just you are being very humble and very self-effacing. It is gratifying. Yes. But it is also a contribution that very few people in their lives have the opportunity to make, to spread something now that has such an infectious capability of improving the lives of millions of people. And I think the way you have done this is very important for the viewers of this program to understand. There are people, some of whom I just mentioned, who have made observations that you have made and have tried to advocate certain things that would improve. The difference between them and you, I think, is it because of your academic medical background and because of the way that you think about things and how you search for solutions. You have put your stuff to the test.
You have published many research papers. I have a whole bibliography here of your research, which is heavy lifting. It is hard to do that. You are a clinician. But you know, this is the most recent 2023 paper that you just published, which I think is powerful in frontiers in neurology association between improved metabolic risk factors and perceived fatigue during 93 relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis. The secondary analysis of the way trial to me is the type of work that characterizes and distinguishes that then makes people take notice. They can not just marginalize it. And so I want to really acknowledge that that is another part of the portfolio of value that you brought to the transition in this field. And it is very powerful.
Terry Wahls, MD
I tell my post-docs, my medical students, that it is a 30-year journey to change the standard of medical practice. And you have to have peer-reviewed research, and randomized controlled trials, and publish them. The very first study that we tried to publish took us two years to find a journal that would publish it because it was a multi-modal intervention in progressive MS. But now, my lab just published a network meta-analysis in neurology, the highest-impact journal of all. And there was an accompanying editorial that said, You know what? Diet really does matter. We have got great evidence now that diet matters for reducing fatigue, improving quality of life, and everyone who’s diagnosed with MS and Neuroimmune conditions should be referred to a nutrition professional to help improve their diet. And so we’re halfway there. It is now being talked about by other scientists.
You know, Jeff, at the consortium of MS Centers, that is going to be happening in Colorado this year, which is where all of the MS clinicians and the research scientists we go there. When I started going four years ago, my poster was the only one talking about food. Now, in 2023, my labs will be giving six oral presentations. We have four research abstracts that we have submitted. We have another very exciting abstract that we want to submit. Hopefully, there will be a late-breaking opportunity to submit that. And there is now a nutrition track that we have one track that is devoted entirely to 3 hours of nutrition-related research that is being discussed. We are making progress.
Dr. Jeffrey Bland
Oh, huge. Yeah. It just delights me. It gives me goosebumps. This is why I got into this field was to have colleagues like you because I knew that there was truth in what we observed. The question is, how do you make the truth obvious to others that are to people and I think that it is spreading the effect of extraordinary implication. We are pulling all sorts of people in that if they have some modicum of neuronal plasticity still left, they can accept new ideas once they see this. I often say this is like putting a virus in your mind. You can’t escape from it once you get it, it is there. Well, let me just cite a couple of interesting study titles that I have been published. It depends on your work. So I talked about the cod liver oil story. So this is a recent paper on a cod liver oil vitamin D source and vitamin A source in multiple sclerosis risk that shows that those individuals who take vitamin D and A from cod liver oil have a lower statistical incidence of MS.
Here is the more recent paper from Coleen’s page, vitamin D and multiple sclerosis in proceedings, the experimental Biology and Medicine. And a follow-up paper occurs on multiple sclerosis, lipids, lymphocytes, and vitamin D is a neuroimmune substance. Here’s a study of OSHA now recently funded by Omega Three for the treatment of MS Depression, actually looking at a therapeutic intervention. Here is a study on high-dose omega three fatty acids plus vitamin D supplementation affecting clinical symptoms and metabolic status of patients with multiple sclerosis. So this was a randomized clinical controlled trial, published. And lastly, this portfolio of papers, a paper on specialized pro-resolving mediators. These other constituents of natural visuals are emerging as therapeutic candidates for multiple sclerosis. This was just published last year. So you use all sorts of other disciplines to be involved now with looking more seriously at how these things fit together.
And that then leads us in our conversation to something that I have a little personal pride in because in 1993 or maybe it was 94, I was introduced to the Institute for Functional Medicine, as far as I know, the first discussion clinically of the role of mitochondrial apathy. Before that, it was a very esoteric topic, but inborn errors of mitochondria apathy are associated with the liver’s optic neuropathy and various plexus syndromes that were genetic. We started talking about functional mitochondria apathy associated with insufficient mitochondrial bioenergetics. That was 1993 or 94 when we started that. At IFM, I invited some experts to present. It was like Greek or a foreign language. How many people are there in this group? What is this guy talking about? Mitochondria. So since then, that has grown up.
So now we see targeting mitochondria, the regulation of multiple sclerosis, a comprehensive review that was this problem. So, you have talked about this extensively. Now we have a little bit of a mechanistic understanding at the cellular level and Siddartha Mukherjee just authored what I think is one of the most beautiful books that was published this year called The Song of the Cell. And he’s a Pulitzer Prize winner. He wrote The Emperor of All Maladies about Cancer. He’s an ecologist, oncologist, molecular biologist, and wonder kid. But this Song of the Cell is such a powerful book because it describes how medicine has transitioned to understand the importance of cellular biology and how cells are influenced in their personality by the environment in which they find themselves and therefore what we believe the cell end, will determine how that cell functions and what we should be looking at is to how to send the right signals to cells so that their function is optimal relative to their generative potential. And this concept that relates to what you do and how you teach people to take these are sophisticated scientific concepts, but still broken down to the plate and to the garden and to make them very consumer accessible, they do not need to have to know all the things of mitochondrial, oxidative, phosphorylation and all that stuff we can we geeks can get and get really correct. But for the average person, the way you are delivering it, your whole social media, how you use your garden and your lifestyle and your exercise and all these things that exemplify what are signals that we’re sending to our bodies to alter how the genes in individual cells are expressed.
Terry Wahls, MD
One of the things that I have done that at the time was so incredibly radical was I decided that I’m going to do these experiments, I’ll do my clinical trials. I will keep telling the public what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, why I’m designing my research the way I am. I will teach the public and have courses that I teach the public who want to learn these things. And I’ll do social media. At the time, my university was a little nervous about that, so I kept having to have little conferences with my chairman to be sure I was behaving appropriately, disclosing everything, and having all the conflicts of interest managed. And then I started having some patients on the side. I got to have my own little private practice and my patients. So my grateful patients said, I believe in your research. I’d like to support your research.
And I started getting these cold calls for six-figure donations to my research lab, which let me do some very interesting, innovative work. Then I got an appointment with the chair of the Dean of the College of Medicine. What have I done now? And he was like, No, I want to know what you are doing because the university has never had anyone receiving this kind of support for research, cold calls. And then they got, I got somebody from the foundation assigned to me and that helped me fund more of my very interesting research studies. So I still have a hard time getting the NIH to fund my very interesting point of view. But I’m having remarkable success with having private philanthropy fund what I’m doing because I’m transforming lives and people understand the importance of doing the kind of research that I do.
Dr. Jeffrey Bland
Absolutely. I just finished a couple of books when the most recent ones were on long COVID. And the author who has had long COVID, he had chronic fatigue syndrome before that. So he has a history of post-viral type of chronic illnesses. He was describing the fact that these great movements going all the way back to HIV, AIDS, and chronic fatigue syndrome now into long COVID are not being driven by NIH, driven by patient-centered activism. And these groups are like patients like me. And if you go to the Web now, you find these very powerful groups that are really advocating because they know they are not getting the answers that they need from the people who have other kinds of things on their plate of their attention.
Terry Wahls, MD
Correct. You know, and I think that’s part of why I was successful. It was the Wahls Protocol, the tremendous success of that book that drove the MS’s side to become aware that their constituents want to have diet and lifestyle research. And they made that a research priority, which then funnels a significant amount of money into pilot studies in our lab. It was one of those that the MS Society funded, which is why there were 12 dietary studies that we could analyze in that network, meta-analysis. And all of that really was driven by social media and driven by books like The Wahls Protocol that were made apparent to the decision-makers. This is important to our constituents. We should be putting dollars here.
Dr. Jeffrey Bland
Absolutely. As I said, you are genius in your strategic approach to this, as well as your genius in developing the program coupled together is a high impact. That’s what’s really shifting the paradigm.
Terry Wahls, MD
Early on I was and I’m curious, Jeff, if you encode this, I was condemned. There were people who said I was a fraud, that I never had MS. That I was exploitative because I taught classes to people. I had to meet with my university folks several times because extraordinary claims were being laid on me in terms of how to respond to that. Fortunately, I just felt it was morally obligatory to keep doing the research and to keep talking where I was invited to give people hope with very careful disclosure about the limits of what I was talking about. Did you, I assume, Jeff, that you have had similar attacks on your character, and your professionalism for the messages that you have put out?
Dr. Jeffrey Bland
It goes way back for me and to the end of the eighties because I broke from the ranks. I broke from the guild. And once you break through the guild and even Dr. Linus Pauling, ironically this two-time Nobel Prize winning laureate with a record of science, is very few people in the world ever achieved. Even he was considered a heretic, he had actually lost his ability to win his visa to travel, to get his second Nobel Prize in Stockholm, because he was considered to be a communist sympathizer because he was talking about nuclear disarmament. He was talking about Albert Schweitzer and Albert Einstein, they were in 30,000 signatures of scientists to stop atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and even picketing around the White House. And because of that, he was considered a heretic. And, I think, as part of the territory of saying things that are different and are not in the field. The guild will protect itself. But if you step out of the guild, then you become a heretic, and now suddenly you are an alien force. Now, with that said, I want to be cautious saying that just because Galileo had stepped out of convention and started talking about the heliocentric view of the universe, which was not well taken by the church at the time doesn’t mean that we’re all Galileo. I mean, we might have ideas that we think are right, but they are not right. And so we have to put things in balance and recognize that sometimes our critics are good for us because they sharpen the tip of our spear. And I have always looked at it that way in my life. I try to look at what my critics are saying about me to say, okay, I do not accept a great percentage of that, but there are certain things in there that maybe I can sharpen my game by listening.
Terry Wahls, MD
I think my message to my post-doc students is, you do the research, you publish it, and then you do the next experiment. You publish that. And if your ideas are valid and you can build the case for your vision of the future, and as you keep adjusting based on what you are learning and you are going to make mistakes, you will test some hypotheses that turn out to be like, well, that was not the result I was expecting. So what does that mean? What should my next experiment look like?
Dr. Jeffrey Bland
Yeah.
Terry Wahls, MD
But you just keep plodding along. To everyone who is listening, I care about this so deeply because I had years of immense suffering. Now I’m jogging in my neighborhood. And so I have to let you know that there is plenty of reason to have hope, that there is so much that you can do. And while I do not know what will work for you in your case, there is a lot that you can do. And I want to be sure that you understand there is all sorts of reasons to have hope.
Dr. Jeffrey Bland
Can I play off that word? Because I think that is the word of our time. I have been using that word a lot in my daily vocabulary, hope. So, Randy Jirtle, who is arguably the father of nutritional epigenetics, he did the agouti mouse studies showing that you could change the outcome of the mouse into a whole different phenotype, whereas their parents historically were always fat and got certified, got cancer and diabetes that the offspring of the mice when the mothers were nourished with folic acid be probably fed these methylated nutrients said that not only was the birth color different of the offspring, but they did not get fat. They lived about 40% longer than their parents and they did not get diabetes and cancer. And so that was this concept of nutritional epigenomics. And, and so he recently has authored a paper published last year actually called The Biology of Hope around epigenetics, saying that this is not a one-way street disease and the genetic determinants of disease are most often not a one-way street sick of mono genetic diseases, gene diseases that are tied to one gene that are like inborn errors of metabolism. He pointed out that even those that are modified in their severity probably keep it down the list, and based on the way that that child was raised, you can have a very significant difference in the outcome of the child. So the construct of the biology of hope is present. It is a two-way street. It is not a one-way traffic to demise. We can turn things back. But we have been studying. In my group, I could not help myself. I started in another company to explore our immune function called
Big Bold Help. The Big Bold Help is focusing on immuno-rejuvenation. What are the principles that allow us to turn a damaged senescence immune system back into a younger, more resilient immune system? And it turns out that the processes of science has helped us because a Nobel Prize is one for the discovery of one of the processes that does that called autophagy and mitophagy. And we now know that specific diet and lifestyle principles activate the process of that and cleanse our immune system and get rid of damaged, scarred immune cells. So we have really been spending quite a bit of time exploring how this works and how it ties to lifestyle principles. So we just finished the first clinical trial of its type. The results are, I think, quite exciting. We have about a terabyte of data.
We followed 50 subjects, 50 humans that were apparently well, we looked at their immune system epigenomics using a gene chip that was put together for us that have 850,000 CPG sites on these gene sites. So we’re able to look at the methylation patterns before and after intervention with a high polyphenol-containing amino rejuvenation or food formulation. And lo and behold, we have been able to show, we will be publishing this soon. That we are able to alter this supplementation, the actual architecture of the epigenome in these individuals to give their immune systems more resilience. So we turned back the immune aging clock, so to speak, immunosenescence. I think that is what your program does. I think we studied your program using this analytical tool, this ginger tool that we are using. We would see the same thing with.
Terry Wahls, MD
So we will have to collaborate on a clinical trial sometime, Jeff. That would be so much fun. Well, Jeff, this has been so gratifying, so wonderful. I will have to wrap this up because otherwise you and I would talk for another four or 5 hours because it is so much fun. And again, Jeff, how about you give us our website where people could go find you for more information?
Dr. Jeffrey Bland
Yeah, there are two places they can find me. One is Jeffrey jeffreybland.com. And the other is We have quite a portfolio of information available. Either is about what we have been doing over the last 30 years.
Terry Wahls, MD
Wonderful. Thank you so very much, Jeff.
Dr. Jeffrey Bland
Thank you. And keep up the fantastic work. We’re following you. Everything you do.
Downloads