Strengthen Your Immune System For Optimal Health

Ann Shippy, MD

Welcome to another episode of Mycotoxins, Mold, and Chronic Illness Summit. I’m your host, Dr. Ann Shippy, and today we get to speak with one of my all-time heroes. He is Dr. Jeffrey Bland. He began his career as a professor of biochemistry. He’s been involved in numerous academic institutions. He’s the founder of the Institute of Functional Medicine. He’s a prolific writer, speaker, and educator. His current focus is on big, bold help for immunoregulation to enhance immunity. He really is one of the most brilliant and curious people that I’ve ever met. The way he reads and synthesizes information and puts it into language that we can all understand and implement has been such a gift for me and my life. Welcome, Jeff. I’m so happy to have you.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Well, thank you, Ann. Our friendship and collegial relationship go back quite a few years. I can tell you, because of people like you, that I’m still in the field at 77 years of age. Thank you very, very much. It’s a real great privilege to talk with you about a topic that for me actually goes back to the seventies, which is this whole field of clinical mycology, so to speak, from a scientific perspective. I’m anxious to have a little conversation with you.

Ann Shippy, MD

Oh, that’s all so fun. Where would you like to begin?

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Well, let me take the listener viewer back to a few centuries ago and run up from there. I want to talk about February 1692 to May 1693. Now, that’s a little bit of time to go back to those dates because they represent in American history a very interesting issue that has been discussed in probably everybody’s school learning sometime, and that’s the so-called Salem Witch Trials. There was a very interesting discussion that’s gone on now for hundreds of years as to what led 20 women in Salem, Massachusetts, to be convicted of being witches and ultimately to be killed. There is still debate. But one of the interesting possible contributors was that the winter prior to the witch trial was very damp and wet in New England. We know for a fact that individuals at that time would store their grain through the winter in places that were not thermostatically controlled and humidity controlled like we can do today.

Ann Shippy, MD

Even today, it’s still such a problem.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

That’s exactly right. There was a very strong suggestion that potentially there was mold that had been growing on this grain over the winter months, and that led to what’s called ergothioneine poisoning. Now, what is ergothioneine? Ergothioneines are a class of chemicals or within a class of chemicals that we can just call indoles. There are very, very many members of the family who are very psychoactive. In fact, members of this family ultimately went on to develop progressive psychoactive drugs in the 20th and 21st centuries that are derived from the chemical structure of these molecules. These molecules are basically more metabolites because they’re produced by specific types of mold after just being one. That can then result in the accumulation of the secondary metabolites in the grain that’s building. As you said, we’re not free of this problem today. We have it. Even though we have a lot more technology in grain production, we still have problems with maybe lower, but sometimes clinically important, levels of the psychoactive compounds.

Ann Shippy, MD

Especially in some of these periods of time where we’re having heavy rains, flooding, and that kind of thing. I’ve heard people in the food industry say that they wouldn’t touch corn during those seasons because of it, or sometimes if it’s super dried, and they also have a lot of mold.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Yes. I think that this is a really interesting question because if you take very low levels of these molecules and I want to see a little level of them in parts per million, that’s what gives you a feeling as to what I mean by primarily that would be one jigger removed per tank or vodka. That would be a very dry martini.

Ann Shippy, MD

I love the way you put things into context. That’s like you wouldn’t even know it’s there.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

That’s exactly right. Both levels, both in animals and humans, can lead to alterations in brain chemistry and, in certain cases, psychosis, hallucinations, and other things of that nature that can produce chronic symptoms well before you get to that state. There was this debate for many, many years. It still goes on to some extent to determine whether part of the scale on which issues were built around some kind of hallucination, psychoactive compounds, was, I guess, in a male population, principally because they were the ones making the judgments. It is important, I guess, to close out on this debate, which has the mycotoxin connection that it was built at a time when in Europe, particularly Germany, this concept of witches was very socially in the news and in the body politic. There are supposedly over a million women in Europe who were brought to trial over these periods of time for witchcraft.

Ann Shippy, MD

My gosh, I had no idea there were so many people.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Yes. It wasn’t all that; not a million women were executed. But I think there were tens of thousands of women executed in different European countries during this period. There was a kind of psychology going on at the time around witchcraft and nature. I mean, there’s a whole story here about these women who supposedly had demonic principles because they worshiped animals and things in nature and could transform themselves into animals. There’s a whole thing about nature here that comes out of this period, which is quite interesting. The pushback by the church against these concepts and these alien views of spiritualism But that’s a whole other topic.

Ann Shippy, MD

Yes, but it is interesting and applicable to what we’re talking about today and that susceptibility. Some people could eat the grains and not have any psychoactive active effects, just like I think some people today can eat the grains or have the respiratory effects of mold and others can’t.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

That’s a fantastic segway to the next step along my learning curve that I wanted to share. I even had the pleasure; it was actually more than a pleasure. It was really the fortune of being introduced in a meeting to an immunologist from Stanford. This was back in the 1980s, and his name is Vincent Marinkovich. Dr. Marinkovich was a brilliant guy. He actually got a degree in physics from Caltech. But then, like you, when you started engineering, he made a transition from physics into Harvard Medical School, became an immunologist, and was a clinical associate professor of immunology and allergy at Stanford. He had a private practice in Redwood City, California, and he was quite an enigmatic, charismatic guy—very brilliant. He had some very, very discreet problems or discrete issues with his colleagues who didn’t believe that there would be something like mycotoxins that could produce clinical symptoms. In fact, in the eighties, he became known as a mold doctor, and he basically birthed, I think, a lot of interest in our field around more and more metabolites, which many people then picked up on.

I mean, you are an expert in that field, and I was reading just recently a press release that actually came out from the Global Indoor Health Network on Dr. Marinkovich. You can actually find him on the web by googling his name. Talking about his contributions to bringing to much more understanding the concept of mycotoxicity and its relationship to all sorts of symptoms, some of which look like their allergy, and some of which look like their toxicity. Now that is a really important point. I believe in the branching of our understanding about mold and their companion organisms, which are yeast, and that they all have uniquely different personalities. I might personally think about metabolic personalities and bacteria. They produced a whole series of different metabolites because they have different genes that can describe them for different metabolic processes. For instance, yeast can prevent sugar; bacteria can’t. We know that because it can make alcohol and yeast, excuse me, and the fungi make all of this extraordinary portfolio of compounds, some of which we have harnessed because they’re the presenters of all the antibiotics. That’s where antibiotics were developed. Even now, in the anti-aging era, where we hear about mTOR, the mammalian target of Rapamycin, Rapamycin is a drug that’s been used for transplants to prevent rejection.

But now it’s kind of a drug that is receiving a lot of attention. That’s an anti-aging drug because it is being called mTOR. Well, what is rapamycin? It’s a fungal metabolite from Easter Island, a unique fungus that was found there. These are interesting chapters and parts of our understanding. We can’t say that more yeast is all bad. Clearly not. They play a very beneficial role, but they can have a twisted personality depending on what members of the family mold. They can create these twisted molecules, which then have mimicry or effects on our bodies in very different ways. Here is where I think the story is very interesting to me. The question has been for individuals trying to understand the mechanism, because in medicine, as you talk about, I’m sure many times in medicine, for whatever the reason, we don’t believe until we’ve proven a mechanism or proven how it actually works. Now, that’s not always the case, but that is generally the case.

Ann Shippy, MD

Me, as an engineer and you, as a scientist, it’s nice when we understand why things work.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Yes, exactly. How does mold create this whole panoply of symptoms in people that can vary from the central nervous system to immunological to joints-based to gastrointestinal to cutaneous skin? You detail these beautifully in your work, and you deal with those kinds of people all the time. They present with these multiple symptomatologies that are kind of experienced. Well, the reason for that is that the mold metabolites seem to have two effects on the human body, and those effects are interrelated. I don’t want to completely separate them, but they’re actually studied by slightly different fields of science. One is an immune effect. We know that certain of these characteristics of mold can have an effect on immune cells. Even the cell walls of mold are unique in their effect on our immune system. The other effect is the secondary small chemicals that are produced by their metabolism, which are the toxic effects of taking poison. That would be like the mycotoxin effect versus the microimmune effect. But both of those play together, and it’s hard to separate them out because they overlap clinically and because the immune system talks to the nervous system, which talks to the detoxification system. This is like the perfect problem for functional medicine, which tries to look upstream. Well, where do these things come from, whether they’re where they are, and try to treat the causes of the impact? Because if we go upstream, we go to treat the cause, and we got to look at what are the things that are interfacing with the body’s ability to detoxify the gut immune system, the systemic immunity, and the neurological system, all of which are interrelated with the symptoms that the patient has.

I think that the field has been extraordinary in its evolution recently because now, for the first time in science or in cellular biology, these fields are starting to be seen to converge on all of these. What we used to consider in sepsis was immunology, gastroenterology, and hepatology, all of which were separate fields of study. Now suddenly, they’re seeming to converge with shared mechanisms, and that allows us to treat cause and effect. I think that’s a little bit of a run for my history, starting really with what Dr. Marinkovich introduced me to back in the 1980s.

Ann Shippy, MD

I love how you have this ability to really think in systems. I think that’s what’s happened in medicine. It’s gotten so siloed like that. A lot of people really can’t think in systems like you do and put the puzzle pieces together. That was just such a beautiful analogy of how we can’t look at just the heart. We can’t just look at the brain because all of these signals and all of these systems in the body are talking to each other so brilliantly to try to keep us alive.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Yes, well, I think you said something. Also, it’s really important for people to understand that, even in hindsight, we always look back and are kind of judgmental. We say, “Well, why were people so silly before, or why weren’t they understanding their way? Were they dumb? “Then the answer is, of course not. But what happens with the evolution of knowledge is that we start off with trials, particularly in medicine. The first things you worry about are people who are bleeding, falling over, or have big lumps in their bodies or lesions.

Ann Shippy, MD

Say, Now.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

What do we do? We don’t really care how the person got here in the ambulance. We didn’t need to treat them. That’s emergency room medicine. We have actually done a tremendous job of evolving that model over the past couple of hundred years. After you get that, then you start asking questions that are the next level with your questions about the people that are kind of walking wounded or chronic conditions that, at a later stage, become very severe and life-threatening, but that may have a runway of increasing severity. You start to say, “Well, just a minute, that wasn’t so obvious.” It would just have bad genes or that they just had an accident. There’s something else going on here that relates to how their genes and their history are reflected in their experience in writing.That’s a much more complicated story about how people are different from each other. You start getting into the next level of questions, or what you had before asking those questions. You don’t have the tools to be able to answer. That’s really where we were when I started in history. A little over 40 years ago. We had really great questions, and we had some of Plato’s analogies between the myth of the child and the myth of the cave.

On the wall of the cave, we had some shadows, but we didn’t have an actual understanding of the objects that were producing them. But over the last 40 years, extraordinary advances have been made in cellular animal and human biology. I’m reminded of Siddartha Mukherjee’s most recent book, which is a fantastic treatise on cell biology and how biology is actually transforming all of medicine. We’ve gone from a histology and anatomy to a physiological growth level of understanding, where we are now down to cell levels and trying to understand how you affect cells like immune cells that are like the cardiac cell. Then you see how we interrelate with other cells. We’ve made huge amounts of progress in that area, which takes us immediately to systems biology because cells don’t work independently, so they work around their brethren and how they actually cooperate and communicate at a distance. I think that this is a logical evolution of knowledge, and that’s a little bit why I’m so excited about functional medicine because when we started the concept in 1990, we had again some shadows on the wall of the cave, maybe a little bit more clear. But we didn’t have all the mechanistic pieces that had been filled in.

We kind of made some extrapolations. I guess it had hierarchical speculations, but I’m very excited to say that, more than 80%, I think it’s probably far greater than that of the things that we in 1990 built, the architecture of functional medicine around it. That system, the biology approach to health care, has been proven to be substantially correct through more extensive work. I find it now interesting to see how long it’s going to take for the body politics of medicine to start shifting over. Because what we started down the road of functional medicine in Europe was really a funny way of thinking about health. It wasn’t just a series of protocols; it was a way of thinking about how the patient, who lives in their own unique environment with their own diet, lifestyle, and behavior patterns, is influencing their gene expression patterns, and what we can do by interrogating that relationship to produce a personalized approach that is unique to their needs. We’re not treating a condition or an individual. I think all of these things are starting to fit together. I go back to Dr. Marinkovich, who really was speaking about that when we first met in the early 80s.

Ann Shippy, MD

That’s beautiful. You’re making me kind of reflect back to the first time I heard you speak as you’re reflecting back. I had decided to go to medical school in the early nineties, and all I knew was I had gone through a major health crisis. I love my career as an engineer and IBM manager executive, but I got sick and I couldn’t find anybody to really help me get to the root of it. I had to figure it out myself. By the time I did, I just knew I wanted to do medicine differently and I needed an M.D. degree, but I didn’t know the path to get there. It’s just so beautiful that meanwhile, you were developing these techniques that I was going to be looking for ultimately. I heard you speak was right around 2002, and we were in a conference room, I think, in Dallas, and my mind was blown. You did a talk about inflammation and you basically tied inflammation to almost all chronic illnesses that I knew of. It was cerebral vascular disease, cardiovascular diabetes, autoimmune diseases, dementia, osteoporosis, cancer. Just you had all the research to tie the immune system to everything. That was right around the time that then through you found, h my gosh, there’s functional medicine.” Because at that time I had a kid in med school and one in residency, so I had just gone into internal medicine practice, not what I wanted to be doing, but I needed to keep my skills moving forward. Well, and you found functional medicine and got back on my path again for really helping people to heal. It’s interesting to how your career has had this ongoing theme of really getting to the root of what is throwing the body into imbalances.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Well, thank you. You’re the exemplar of what I had hoped when I started down this path with my colleagues—that we were hopeful that we could find a few of you out there. I was told by many of my colleagues from my medical school experience and being a professor that I was being idealistic and that doctors, once they had been certified, trained, and done their board exams and so forth, the last thing they wanted to do was go back and open up books. They didn’t really like that much in the first place—anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, toxicology, and so forth. But I was, I guess, either naive or bold enough to say that I think we’ll find enough to form a group. It’s because people like you have now demonstrated that you can pick that information up and create it into a value proposition in your practice to help people, and because of your leadership, other people have been doing it and are willing to try it themselves. We now have over 200,000 practitioners that have gone through functional medicine training over the last 32 years. 

Ann Shippy, MD

So it’s. extraordinary.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

It really is. It blows me away. Even today, when I talk to my colleagues and I’ll say something like this, they’ll say, “Well, you got to be kidding me.” I said, “No, I’m not kidding you at all. These are extraordinarily dedicated people.” They said, “Well, how do they do that? “I said, “Well, that’s for you to learn.” We have full courses. In fact, very, very quickly, my father was having some fairly severe neurological problems, such as Parkinsonism. A number of years ago. My parents were living in Northern California. I live in Washington State, doing the best I can to help them from a distance. My mom called me in tears one day and said, I just don’t know what to do with your father. His doctor doesn’t seem to be really able to get a handle on this. He’s a combination internist, hematologist, and then Ph.D. I said, “Well, has he tested levels of homocysteine and methylmalonic acid?” because I was wondering whether there was some underlying surrogate to vitamin B12 deficiency that could have been contributing to some of my father’s neurological symptoms. My mom checked, and the answer was, “No, he didn’t.” I found it interesting because he was a hematologist, but he hadn’t considered doing that. I called him up, and we had a conversation, and he said, “Well, if you have. That’s really interesting. I don’t know much about this. Do you have any papers on this? ”

Well, you never want to react. I said, “Yes, I do.” He said, “Well, can you translate something? “I said, “Sure.” Well, his nurse called the next day. I said, “No more papers; you’re burning out the machine.” But then I don’t know if he read the papers or just the sad factor of how many things I sent him. But he then called me back and said, “Well, let’s look; this looks quite interesting.How do you do this with the folic acid and the vitamin B12? “I gave him some very simple stuff, and I gave him some suggestions, and then he taught my mother how to do my own B12 injections without oral contraceptives or folate supplements. He did it unbelievably. In fact, just to kind of tell you the end of the story, I think clinically, it’s very fascinating why my father had to move into the other bedroom away from my mother because he was so restless and I didn’t want to keep her awake. She would come in in the morning and help him get dressed. He was really at the point where his one loving wife was working on his computer.

But he got to the point where writing a line of code on his computer would take him an hour because of his dexterity problem. He was very seriously impaired. My mother, after this treatment, had started about a little over a month, I think something like six weeks. I got a call from my mother one morning, and she was hysterical. I was just very worried because I thought, Oh, something very bad happened. It took me several minutes to get her calmed down. She was crying and just going on and on. I couldn’t even make sense of what she was saying. When finally she calmed down, I said, “How bad is it with Dad? What’s going on? “”No, no, no, no. It’s not Dad. It’s revolutionary. For the first time in a year this morning, I woke up, and there he was standing by the bed, fully dressed. Can we go out on a picnic today? “And for the next four or five years, he returned to his computer. His language skills improved, and he was very high-functioning compared to where he was before. It was a miracle. Then the doctor saw this. This physician and this were pretty impressive for him. He called me. He says, “Well, this stuff really works.” But I say, “Well, it doesn’t have the same result for everyone. I think this is a pretty dramatic example. But yes, we feel there are a lot of people who benefit from these types of thinking, these parts of metabolic functional thinking.” He says, “Well, I’m going to get good at this.” I say, “Oh, that’s great.” He says, “How many courses? “I said, “In the IFM curriculum, it’s starting with the ASMCT. And he says, “Back in those days, ASMCT took so many years ago two to five days of sessions in resonance, and so it took a real commitment by people that came all the way out. It was, I think, in part a two- to five-day session.

Ann Shippy, MD

I think I did my first week right after you switched it to one week.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Oh, you were smarter. .

Ann Shippy, MD

I was just timing. I would have loved to wait.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

There was a little bit of silence on the phone for a second, and he said, “Oh, that’s interesting. Do you have anything I can do on the weekend? “I said, “Well, I don’t think you really can learn this art in a weekend.” I’m sorry. Then he said, “Oh, well, my time was very valuable. I don’t know if I could really afford it. ” Well, the bottom line, just to add a little facetious ending to the story, is that my father changed my mother’s position to another person. A couple of years later, I just happened to pass this previous position to this hematologist. Then to his office. He now had on a shingle that he was an internist, a hematologist, and a functional medicine provider. I thought that was interesting because he never really took a functional course other than the conversations.

Ann Shippy, MD

That might be happening more than we’d like.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Yes, it was a little sobering. Anyway, I had heard there, but I don’t know.

Ann Shippy, MD

It’s actually a perfect thing to bring up because I pretty much check the methylation process in every single patient to know if a diagnostic has a very detailed methylation process, and you can check a lot of the methylation genes. Especially for people with mold illness and chronic disease, I would say at least 90% of my patients have some optimizing to do on that pathway. I love this information for our audience today because if you haven’t checked your methylation pathways, you need to. They need to really take a look at that because it’s so important for detoxification and for repair in so many different systems in the body that depend on B12, folic acid, and some other nutrients to work well. I love that your dad got basically a good four or five years of living.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Yes. That was remarkable. Something here about the methylation pattern is really insightful as well, and that is when we started thinking about the network of our biology and how things are interrelated. We could use, as an example, just the methylation process alone to kind of describe how things are interrelated, so that the methylation process, as you’ve already alluded to, relates to DNA repair, and DNA is the template for everything. If DNA gets injured, It leads to the funny things that cells do. Most often, the body recognizes the injured DNA and starts producing a response to it, which is an antibody produced by our immune system to the injured DNA. Now you have the possibility of an immune-adverse response. We could call it an autoimmune disease, but it comes as a consequence of imperfections in DNA. The other thing is that the formation of proper DNA is in part related to the integrity of our methylation pathways. If we don’t have proper methylation patterns, our DNA is more prone to injury and less able to repair itself. That would be number one. Number two is that the methylation program is also very important, as you suggested or indicated, for one of the principal ways for a molecule to get made with foreign and less toxic substances through the process of detoxification.

 There are several different types of ways things can be toxic, as we talked about, but one of them is through methylation. If you’re not proper in your methylation process, you have a double barrel risk of injured DNA and not repairing it, and the depreciation of your detoxification would set you up to more susceptibility than to things like molds and then chronic infection. I think all of these things fit together in a web of understanding as to how our genes, our lifestyle, and our environment work. I was very interested. There was a paper just published this year, and what journal was it published in? It was published in the Journal of Toxicology. Yes. It may have 2023 in the title of the paper, Mycotoxins in Consumers Awareness of Recent Progress and Future Challenges. I think it’s an interesting review of how we in the consumer world have become much more understanding of these relationships. If you had talked about this years ago, people would have probably thought it would have been a duh! I don’t understand it, but now it’s building syndrome, and with climate change, it’s in warm, moist environments, and people are getting more and more chronic symptoms.

We start looking at black mold and all these types of things, and people now recognize that these little critters, these organisms, can produce these things that our body may respond very adversely to. I think a lot of consumers are teaching their doctors. That’s how it goes, because they’re going to the Web, they’re finding out this information, and they’re bringing it back and saying, Could this be part of my problem? If that practitioner has not had some training, they might say, Well, I don’t know much about that. They seek you out because they’re looking for Ann Shippys in the world who know something about it.

Ann Shippy, MD

Right. Well, and it’s really amazing the number of physicians, chiropractors, and other health care providers that I’ve had seek me out to help them as they’re trying to figure out what’s going on with their own health, too. I mean, it’s just such an epidemic that we’re seeing.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Yes, it really is. I think that the New England Journal of Medicine this past year has particularly recognized their editorial approach to what things are included because they get a huge number of submissions and they have to select what articles they’re going to publish based upon what they think is the most important of their readership, their doctor’s readership. There are more and more articles occurring in the New England Journal of Medicine around climate change and its effects on human health. High temperatures, low temperatures, storms, humidity, and how those interrelate with microorganisms that grow and flourish are different conditions. We are now starting to see environmental medicine become a major part of traditional family practice, whereas before maybe it was kind of a sidebar. I think it’s now becoming a central feature of everything, from pediatrics right up through geriatrics, as far as this is concerned.

Ann Shippy, MD

Yes, I think the gates are starting to open together to get this information out in comparison to 14 years or so ago, when I started to at least recognize it among my patients. I had been missing it for the first couple of years. Hey, you’re just such an expert in so many different areas, and I’d love to delve a little bit more into either the detoxification pathways, the microbiome, or anything else that really inspires you because the way you bring it all together is just extraordinarily well done.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

I think you just said a whole mouthful. Think about it. I mean, that’s a whole textbook lecture just to incorporate what you put in one sentence or when one thought, because we know and recognize that the influence that mold has cuts across disciplinary boundaries, and it stretches us to start making these connections that were previously maybe even disadvantaged in medicine. You weren’t supposed to cross disciplinary boundaries or stay in your lane. I always say that the way that medicine was constantly changing when I was in my education and later in medical school as a professor was that it was one chapter at a time when one organ system called a book to take a test and then opened for the next chapter. It’s like each one of those was separate. We start recognizing, Oh, no, this interrelationship is very, very powerful. The interrelationship that has captured recent attention in medicine is that of the microbiome, the microbe, the viral, all these living critters that reside within our intestinal tract. For me, it’s a little bit like going back to the future or deja vu all over again, because I recognize that the first lecture that I gave for health care practitioners around this topic of endotoxin, the dysbiosis leaky gut, where we started to use those terms the first time was in 1985. The reason I know that is that a physician who was in that meeting that I was doing in 1985 collected all the syllabi from the various to find similarity between two or three years, and he said he was cleaning out his office, he was downsizing, and he sent me the cover of every one of the syllabi from every lecture that he had come to.

Ann Shippy, MD

Oh, my God, I’d love to have that.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

It was so cool because the first one was in 1985. This lecture I gave on inflammation and dysbiosis That was the first one that he came to. I know that I’ve been talking about this for quite a while, and now the first is actually for the first probably, oh, maybe even 20 years, maybe from up to 2005. When we talk about dysbiosis, leaky gut, or all of those concepts, it was our postprandial endotoxemia, which means after eating, your body gets a toxic load of stuff from your gut. Those are totally like the skull and crossbones in traditional medicine. I had a gastroenterologist that would come to my meetings, and he would be collectively impolitely upset with me because I would talk about these things that they thought didn’t exist because they were told that if you have toxemia, you’re in the hospital, and you’re very serious about going into emergency medicine, in critical care. We were told about chronic endotoximia, and they said, Well, it doesn’t exist, either. But now we know that all things have chronic statuses of different severity, not just toxemia. These constructs of the immune system of the gut were some 60% of our immune system that either communicates with the three or four pounds of living organisms that live in our gut, the microbiome, the viral in the microbe, and how that influences the immune system that sends chills out to the whole rest of the body because every organ system in our body has its own immune activity, including the brain, which has its own immune system called the microbiome. Now we have cross-talk about all these things that are connected to what’s going on in the gut and how our immune system is being alerted. These constructs, which are really systems thinking and obviously cut across all these disciplines of protection, are like,I own this body of knowledge; I’m a gastroenterologist; I own this body of knowledge; I’m an immunologist; and so forth.

Ann Shippy, MD

But the problem is they don’t have the time, or you aren’t taking the time to research like you do, right?

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Yes, I think that for me as a career right now, let’s say, I guess I started in 1978 with my first appointment as a professor. That’s 53 years. That’s hard to even say. The driving force for me has always been wondering why. That’s been the driving force. I think that not everybody should be on that horse as heartless as long as I’ve been on it, because I think why has to be converted into what to do and is just as important as why. But we need a few people who are the pioneers of why? So that those who know what to do will know what to do. I think my role has been to continue to ask questions and try to find some answers that they need in clinical applications. If we go back to the microbiome story, it’s a discussion of mycology. Now we go to Orion Truss, another really important medical doctor in the history of our field. Dr. Truss was the person who wrote that he was a physician in Georgia who was the first to really bring up the concept of chronic candidiasis, which is a yeast. A member of the Mycology family.

Ann Shippy, MD

Honestly, the percentage of patients that I’m seeing with this is definitely on a really concerning trajectory.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Yes, it really is. I think that what often happens in our field—this is just a little historical insight from my perspective—is that a physician or a researcher makes an observation, and they go to their colleagues and tell them about it. They say, “Hey, I observe in this case, Dr. Truss, I’ve observed that this chronic candidiasis, particularly started with women with yeast infections, is more than just a general problem.” There are systemic implications of this, and it’s not so serious like you have with a fungal prominent septic infection. But there’s something going on chronically that this person is experiencing, everything from rashes and skin irritation to headaches to adrenals, and low energy. His colleagues started looking at that, and then they started saying, “What’s the safe way of treating it? “They managed them with nystatin, which was a fairly non-absorbable medication that works principally in the gut to kill yeast. They started getting some clinical benefit from nystatin, so that thing resulted in him going out and doing seminars on that.

Then the body politic of medicine, because there were randomized clinically controlled trials and there was not a body of literature that they felt comfortable using mechanistically to prove that this was a chronic condition that was described by Truss that could be associated with chronic yeast overgrowth. Then he started to be criticized. What he did was write a book for the general public, which became a bestseller. Then, once you take it to the general public and it hasn’t yet been endorsed by the Catechism of the Guild, you really put yourself up for a problem because, suddenly, you don’t want to embarrass or make anyone look like they don’t know what they’re talking about. You start to get pushback, and you get all sorts of negative responses. But now, over years, actually over decades, that concept of chronic candidiasis has been proven correct because now we accept there be chronic conditions. It’s not just whether you’re infected or not. There are different degrees of severity with different clinical symptoms depending upon that person’s state of health, their immune system, their genes, their diet, and all sorts of other variables. That is the incubator for functional medicine. That’s where we shine.

Ann Shippy, MD

It really is. When I see these chronic fungal infections, that’s one of my clues to know to go look for mycotoxins since so many of the mycotoxins are immunosuppressants.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Exactly right. Here, I think you said it beautifully. Is microtoxicology a toxic effect or an immunological effect? The answer is yes. That’s why you get these multiple symptoms of differing types and different people with different severity, duration, and intensity, because it can affect these multiple systems in a varied way. I think all of us like a simple answer. So we don’t like complications. We’d love just to say this is gram-negative bacteria, meaning it’s this antibiotic, and that’s all you need to know. Just go through the bacteria and give them that drug. Well, unfortunately, these chronic conditions are not that simplistic..

Ann Shippy, MD

Well, and I feel like that’s really where. No, but some of us who love practicing functional medicine really do. It makes us feel like we’re making contributions every day because we’re having to really use our brains to help our patients and figure things out, put the puzzle pieces together, and not just say, “Oh, what drug am I going to prescribe or am I really looking deeply and collaborating with the patient to? “Because it takes a lot of work on their part to implement the suggestions. It feels really good when you can help people really figure out what’s wrong and not just give them the antibiotic for the gram-negative scenario.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

I forgot I really wanted to compliment you. I reflect back on the real luxury I’ve had over the decades to have these kinds of conversations with. But people are really complicating their lives by asking this question. It’s easier if we don’t ask these questions. In fact, if I could go back to Dr. Marinkovich just for a second, I would have it differently because of the thought about this discussion with you. I decided I would go back and just trace what the Internet has to say about Dr. Marinkovich. I found this citation on the Internet. If you Google Vincent Marinkovich, you’ll get a site, and you’ll get a link. That link turned out to take me back to the 1999 issue of Functional Medicine Update.

Ann Shippy, MD

Oh my gosh. I’m going to be that after reading that.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Audio magazine that I produced for 32 years, never missing a plot. I went in, I listened to me interviewing Dr. Marinkovich, and I was just blown away thinking, “Gee whiz, I could just 24 years ago.” The intelligence that he was bringing in this conversation and how it’s now started over 24 years to be integrated into we don’t know where ideas start. But we hope that when it starts, a good one will get into people’s nervous systems and be transplanted virally. To me, the real look back and I think great sense of privilege is that these people have had the ability to speak to over these many years are individuals that left the idea as a free of charge contact for other people to pick up and to explore whether they can make a difference in the way they were managing patients. If I put all of those people together, it’s like pearls on a necklace. It forms a beautiful piece of jewelry because these are really incredibly interesting thought leaders in the main or not. At the time, they were saying it well received by their colleagues because they were saying something different and it was just. Yes. Lastly, my last point on this is that I looked at function medicine today, and of the 100,000+ individuals that are pictured, of course, 64% of them are female practitioners.

Ann Shippy, MD

Well I didn’t realize that.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

When I started medical school, I was teaching medical students as a faculty member. I recall that we had less than 10% of the class as women. This was 1970, and today there are more women, incoming freshmen, and people in medical school, and there are men in American medical school. We’re changing the complexion of not just the gender, but maybe the tone, the kind of patterns of thinking that are architecting what the future of health care will look like. It’s interesting. I had some; I have three sons, but I now have a granddaughter as well. There’s always been this running question as to whether there is a biological difference between the behavior of girls and boys or if it’s all this learned behavior difference. I think I can say without any question that, speaking to the mothers and fathers of my granddaughter, there’s a biological difference.

Ann Shippy, MD

Having two sons to name one.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Better and one is worse; it’s just different systems in their whole perception. But I think one of the things that is really important for systems thinking is the ability to be collaborative, and collaborative is a relationship; communication skills in the way you approach problem solving I believe that the nervous system of women is really very skilled at communication, collaboration, and interrelationships that lead to a group solving a problem. I think that’s what we need right now. But the other, which is kind of the reductionistic method of taking a watch apart and knowing each piece part and then putting it back together, that’s important too. That reductionistic kind of thinking is very good. But we need a different kind of synthesis now, which is a different kind of collaborative process. I’m very excited that social medicine is being guided by very powerful women. Women like you who have an engineering background and can take that kind of analytic thinking and then apply it in a cooperative process for problem solving We were talking earlier about other prominent women physicians in Continental. One is Sarah Gottfried, who works at MIT in electrical engineering and computer science and then went to Harvard Medical School. We’re starting to see many more ways of bringing these skills together to create solutions to these complex problems.

Ann Shippy, MD

Yes, there’s got to be some pretty sharp curves coming up here, I think, to get some collaborative thinking and some changes going. I know we’re starting to run out of time a little bit, but if you don’t mind, a few more minutes will stop it. I know that one of the things that you’ve really focused on in the last few years is really building stronger, healthier, more robust adaptive immune systems and resilience. Would you mind just spending a couple of minutes talking about building resistance? I think resilience is so important for our audience because a lot of them are really feeling like there’s so much to go on with getting their health back, and any words of wisdom that you have on being hopeful and resilient again.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Well, the big aha for me and what ultimately drove me into doing what my wife Susan was not all that happy about, and that’s for me another company to go down. She said, “Yes, come on, you’re 77 years old; you don’t need to do something.” But I really felt like I did that. I needed to do something. It’s all part of this pain or philosophy that I had—this extraordinary luxury, all the gifts of meaning. These people and being able to do things—I never thought I’d be able to do that. I feel like I need to pay forward. What I learned that led me into big will help as a commune focused company was that the immune system is a lot more regenerative than I fully understood, and a lot of this comes out as a consequence of breakthroughs that have been made in basic immunological sciences, particularly over the last ten years, because we’ve developed technologies to be able to look at a single immune cell one at a time and ask, “What’s their personality, and is it a one-way street for an immune cell that once it’s doing what it’s doing, it’ll never change? “What I came to recognize, and this is from God, I should have known. I mean, I knew this, but probably hadn’t taken into account that every minute of our lives, our bodies are producing bone marrow. It’s literally hundreds of thousands—actually millions—every minute of new immune cells, every second recruiting hundreds of pounds. Every minute, we’re producing millions.

Therefore, our immune system is constantly turning back every three years or less, depending on the state of that person’s health. Their immune system cells will be different than they were the previous time. They’re being reformed now. The question is, and this is the real point of the realm: are the cells that are being formed as good as the ones that are replacing them? Worse than the one we’re replacing? We’re better, and we have the chance to be any one of those three. There is this variability in flexibility depending upon how that body is translating information at the immunological level of information that it’s getting from our diet, lifestyle, behavior patterns, toxic exposures, and all these things are into the reconstruction of our immune system. Now about the birth of a new term, I’m really good at it, and my mother said that if you don’t have a word, you just make it up. I think that’s probably true. I made up a lot of words.

Ann Shippy, MD

I think I’m familiar with some of those terms.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Most people call it blandism. I’ve heard people say, “Have you heard Bland speak? “Here’s a word that I coined that’s now catching up in the literature. I mean, rejuvenation because our immune system can be rejuvenated.

Ann Shippy, MD

It’s so uncovering.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

It really is. I’ve often said that virtually nothing in the body’s a one-way street. Everything has a two-way street component to it. Some of the back streets are not as wide as others, but everything has a back street, even neurological cells that we lose at once and never regain. There is regenerative capacity.

Ann Shippy, MD

You can look at your father, right, with Parkinson’s.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Yes, exactly right. This amino rejuvenation concept has really taken us into some exciting new areas of discovery. We just finished a clinical study listed on the link to the FDA site in which we studied human. The effect that various polyphenols, a family of nutrients in plants, have on the epigenetic rejuvenation of immune cells in humans As far as we know, it’s the first human clinical trial that’s ever been done of that type, in which we actually use a gene chart that we had made for us by Illumina that had 950,000 sites of immune epigenomic activity on the charts. Then we studied people whose immune cells had that gene to see if we could alter the epigenetic profiling by intervention with a polyphenol supplement, and we were very excited to see that when we ran this through informatic testing and we had over a terabyte of data on each subject, there was a huge amount of information and a lot of data.

Ann Shippy, MD

Like I should be able to get some pretty good statistics out of that, right?

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

We did. We’re just running this up for publication. But what we found was that people started off with epigenetically senescent immune cells. In other words, their immune cell age was older than the very converse thing, which is that when they did three months of this polyphenol supplement, they kept the same diet and lifestyle that they had been doing previously. Then, in three months, we were able to significantly reduce their immunity. In other words, the new cells that were formed over those three months regained their rejuvenating capability that they had lost.

Ann Shippy, MD

So groundbreaking.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Yes, it is. It’s an early stage. I don’t want to overblow it because it’s a pilot project and a pilot study, but it opens the door now for not only us but other people to take this and run with it. The exciting thing for us is that people have asked what the family size is and how many people will use it in the family. Probably people who use it in the orchestra, so to speak, were derived from a mixture of polyphenols that were derived from an ancient food that was lost in America about 200 years ago called Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat. It has arisen, which shows that it has some 5–100 times the level of these immune-active polyphenols of any other plant food that we know. It is a supercharged biochemical factory to produce these nutrients that are known to influence the immune system in a favorable way. We use the mixture of those principal flavonoids from the Tartary Buckwheat plant as the therapeutic intervention in this program. It pioneers the opening of the door to where food and medicine interact. We’re big believers in what happened in the September meeting at the Presidential Conference on Hunger, Food, and Health, which kind of brought up to the fore this concept of food as medicine. We think that there are a huge amount of things ahead of us here as to how we both access and utilize specific complex nutrient profiles or goods in a therapeutic fashion. It’s not a drug; it’s functional, like in its ability to improve the function of all cells. We’re focusing on the immune cells because they are turning over all the time and they’re doing work for us across every organ. That’s our gateway to entry.

Ann Shippy, MD

After stem cells. It’s just so exciting. I really think it comes full circle through this medicine and drug poison. With what we’ve experienced in the last few years, I’ve been really seeing people who thought they were helping, figuring out by getting COVID that they really didn’t have the health immune systems that they thought they did. To be able to provide some good solutions for helping people get more resilience and better immune systems is super exciting.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Thank you. It’s my last hurrah. This is what I’m really focusing my energy on for whatever time I’ve got available to put in to do this. I think there’s a huge amount of us to do, to learn, and to apply that will have benefits for those people. Like you said, they were healthy, but then they got exposed to SARS-CoV-2, and they found their immune system wasn’t as resilient as expected. It’s kind of ironic that in America, with the greatest amount of dollars per capita being spent on health care, with what we consider the most sophisticated health care system that we had, the least favorable outcome in terms of disease with COVID to COVID-19 of any other of the developed countries. It begs the question: why? I think it has to do with our general state of health, with ties to our immune system.

Ann Shippy, MD

I really feel that you are such a special person for me and my life, and I’m just feeling the ripple effect of all the people you talk to and who’ve read or heard. You become involved in functional medicine and just the ripple across the world. I know you’ve helped millions of people with that. millions of people. I don’t know anybody else with such a brilliant mind and the drive to help humanity.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Oh, my word, I’m deeply touched. For all of us and you were talking about that earlier, you had a wonderful brunch with your family. The little miscast, I think, is those people that are closest to us. It’s not out there in the Grand Theater of Life. It’s the people closest to us that can give us the most honest and accurate indication of what we’re doing with our lives. They’re not so impressed by stuff that’s out there. It’s like more, well, we are close to our being. I have to say that for me, I looked at my grandma, children, granddaughters, grandsons all the time to see how they are measuring what their grandfather is giving them in the context of the work that I’m still involved with and how I’m still present. The days where I feel like I need to change the pattern of behavior finally so I’m more on target. Those are the good self-correcting things that we get back from our loved ones. I think this is all part of living. The complete experience of being human is being present for all sorts of things, some of which maybe a time they don’t really like, but they’re still important. Important parts of our are being.

Ann Shippy, MD

Yes, we got into the decision about how to solve the immigrant border problem this morning, and it wasn’t a light brunch at all. It was really fascinating to hear my kids, my mother, and my sister all have a real conversation about how we care so deeply about our country and about these people that are being affected and are trying to come up with solutions. We appreciate that our families are just so important for seeing where our minds are.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Thank you. Well, and once again, I just want to reemphasize my deep and authentic appreciation for you, what you represent, and how you manage each of those lives that come up for your service. It’s a great responsibility. But I also know that you measure up to that responsibility very well.

Ann Shippy, MD

Thank you so much. It’s such an honor and a privilege to get to practice medicine the way that I knew that I wanted to. I changed careers in the early nineties, and a lot of it’s because of you, because of all the work you put into functional medicine, and because of your asking why and then teaching us.

Jeffrey S. Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB, CNS

Thank you so much. Let’s have another chat in the future. Let’s not let this go too long.

Ann Shippy, MD

I would love that and I’ll see you soon.