Dr. Jeff Bland:
Well, here we are at this favorite time for me, which is our Big Bold Immunity podcast. And we’ve been so fortunate to have some extraordinary minds, personalities, committed individuals on our podcast, but we’re not going to be failing to accomplish that goal, again, this issue. We have an incredible skilled individual with a vision for immunity that I think you are all going to benefit from, Dr. Heather Moday.
Heather comes with a background as both a board-certified allergist immunologist. I found in reading her book, which will be talking quite a bit about, now being released, The Immunotype Breakthrough, that she actually did lab work early on and got her thinking about medical school with Bruce McEwen at Rockefeller, a good calling and friend, a person I’ve interviewed on a number of podcasts over the last 30 years. And as you probably know, the father of the term allostasis that we’ve talked a lot about in his book, which was written now probably 20 years ago called The End of Stress As We Know It.
And so this experience that Heather had as a lab rat in his research project led her then into stress and immunity, and ultimately on her path to become a board-certified immunologist allergist in private practice in Pennsylvania. And we were just talking about the fact that she’s in transition like so many of us are now with the nature of virtual practices and the way that we’re doing remote evaluations. So she’s in between Pennsylvania and Virginia. So again, she’s a product of our 21st century new society.
So let me just, if I can, formally introduce Dr. Moday to our Big Bold Immunity audience, and just remind you that this is the book for which she is the author. And this book is so impactful that I actually have two copies of it. So I’m very fortunate. I’m sharing one of the copies with my colleagues and the other is mine. And I don’t know, you probably can’t see, but I’ve got this marked extensively because it’s a real news to use book, The Immunotype Breakthrough.
So Dr. Moday, thank you so much for being available for this discussion. And maybe now, in your own words, you’d like to tell us a little bit about your journey that’s led you into this situation you find yourself today.
Dr. Heather Moday:
Yes. Thank you, Jeff. So like many others who come to practice a combination of functional medicine, integrative medicine, however you want to call it, like you said, I was practicing in a conventional allergy practice after doing a fellowship in allergy and immunology after medical school. And it was satisfactory, but I think that I was a lot more curious and a lot more interested in finding out why people get sick. And I felt that I wasn’t really using all the tools in my toolbox and then I needed more tools.
So I started to get curious about the role of things like nutrition. And of course, as you mentioned, I had these glimmers of memory of studying the effect of stress on the immune system. And I didn’t really think that I was applying a lot of what was out there and what needed to be addressed with my patients.
So I took off and did a fellowship with Dr. Andrew Weil at his program in Arizona, and then stumbled across functional medicine and went to the AFMCP meeting back in, gosh, I don’t know, I guess around 2010 or so, and really thought, “Oh, wow, this is” … That blew my mind. And just the combination of the holistic view of things, and then the application of a lot of biochemistry and immunology all together. I knew that that was where I needed to put my efforts. And so that’s how I ended up doing what I’m doing today.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Well, the byline of your book, I think, is a manifesto for everything that we’re trying to do in this age, where the immune system is reigning supreme. Certainly, SARS-COVID-2 has got us all interested in immunity. So the byline is your personalized plan to balance your immune system, optimize health, and build lifelong resilience. Now, that is a powerful manifesto. And so … Maybe even a promise.
So as we dissect and dig a little bit deeper in that, maybe we can talk about how you arrived at the development of this immunotype conceptual framework and how that then gets related in them and communicated to your patients, knowing that their knowledge of the immune system is probably pretty simplistic. So it’s a complex topic with the ability to help them see more about how to own their immune system. So how do you logically take all that you know and get it compartmentalized down where it becomes patient friendly?
Dr. Heather Moday:
Yeah. Well, it is a hard thing to do given that the immune system is extremely complex. And I think for most people, sometimes really confusing. So I think that … I had so many clients, many people have coming in talking about different disease processes or symptoms that were connected to immune dysfunction. So autoimmunity, obviously, at large part of my clienteles, people with autoimmune disease or people who haven’t been diagnosed but have symptoms that sound like autoimmune.
And then of course, chronic GI issues, chronic allergies, people who are just inflamed, right? They have all sorts of cardiovascular disease, other diseases, diabetes, lifestyle problems, obesity. And people would always ask me, “What can I do to make my immune system healthier? What can I do to boost my immune system?”
And so this concept of, obviously, the immune system being at the core of all of the malfunctions made me start to think, “Well, it’s not that simple.” It’s not as simple saying, “Let’s just boost your immune system.” I mean, everyone can take vitamin C, there’s nothing wrong with that. And there’s lots of things that I talk about even in the book that probably apply to most. But I started really thinking about, what is different within these patients that make their immune system work the way they are? What is actually making someone’s immune system or start to attack its own tissues or start to have reactions that are atopic or allergic?
And there’s lots of different things that go into that. We know that inflammation is at the core of most of those things. But we also know, through looking at immunologic reactions, that it’s a lot of what’s going on at the level of the T cells and the B cells and the cytokines. So that’s … What cytokines are doing really starts to give you symptoms, right? What certain T cells are doing and what cells that they are then recruiting, whether it’s macrophages, neutrophils, et cetera, et cetera, is really at the heart of what starts to create this phenotype or personality or what I described as an immunotype. And there is a lot of data looking at how we can dampen cytokine responses, how we can dampen helper T cell reactions.
So that’s what got me going. And I really started to do some research and do a lot more learning. I went back and hit the books myself. Yeah. And so the premise was born.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Well, you’ve, right there, laid down some really important tracks that I want to follow on here. Let’s first talk about this concept or this word that we hear so frequently being used, particularly recently with SARS-COVID-2, and that’s boosting the immune system. And you have some really strong words or strong narrative about the use of the word boost. So maybe you could give us your impression of boosting the immune system because I think that’s an interesting feature set of your … Which I, by the way, totally agree with in terms of the way you described it.
Dr. Heather Moday:
Yeah. I mean, maybe it’s a semantics thing, but for me, when we think of someone who might be already overreactive or overinflamed or their immune system is moving too far in the wrong direction, you don’t really want to boost it any further that way. So really, what you want to do is bring it back to a more of a baseline. You’re almost wanting to calm it down.
For example, in the case of allergies and autoimmune disease, I mean, in conventional medicine, right, we’re just squelching it. We’re giving those diseases steroids and monoclonal antibodies, which, of course, may not be the best option either. But we know that there are ways that you can do that more subtly without hitting people with such a big pharmaceutical bomb that you can bring people back into a balance.
And so I don’t love the idea of boosting. I do sometimes use the word. And then there are certain people who do need a boost, like the people who have maybe a weakened response. They either don’t have great antibody formation, maybe their killer T cells aren’t really very active. Those are the people who might need a little bit more help in that department.
So I wanted people to think of their immune system as being very multidimensional rather than very black and white dichotomy.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Yeah. I think you’ve done that beautifully in the book. It really establishes that domain of understanding. And I think that there is part of that, which ties, again, to one of the “promises” of the book, which is lifelong resilience. Because if you go back to your description of the way immunologists or rheumatologists treat certain autoimmune diseases using these hard-hitting monoclonals, it completely damped out things like tumor necrosis factor alpha activities. That doesn’t build resilience.
Dr. Heather Moday:
Right, right.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
That’s dampening resilience to the expense of trying to crisis intervene on a dysfunction. So that’s very different than what you’re discussing as it relates to resilience in your book. And maybe you want to take it from there again as to how you see resilience being built through the identifying of your four immunotypes and then more personalized intervention.
Dr. Heather Moday:
Right. I think … And I talk a little bit about, right, really dedicate a whole chapter on inflammation, but I think that’s a good place to start is that inflammation is not a bad thing. Inflammation is absolutely necessary and wonderful and life-saving, right? So we don’t want to completely dampen that response. And like you just mentioned, some of the tactics that we use in the modern pharmacy, for example, high-dose steroids or some of the monoclonal antibodies that interfere with cytokines really do that.
And so those patients are often at risk for not being able to respond to certain types of bacteria or maybe have a lessened response to going after cancerous cells. So we don’t want to do that, but we want to maybe be a little bit more subtle in decreasing some of those cytokines so that we can quiet the inflammation.
The other thing is that there are ways to interfere with chronic inflammation. You can still have an acute response, but if you can interfere in terms of clearing out or resolving inflammation, that is a really great thing to concentrate on. And that’s where a lot of nutrients come into shape. So a lot of the things that we use either in supplement form or things that we eat can be really great at decreasing free radical damage, actually healing or accelerating tissue healing. So I think if we think about that, that’s a way of making people over time more resilient, it’s giving them something versus completely dampening their immune response.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Yeah, yeah. I want to make a little bit of a caveat here because I probably overstated something. I don’t want to lead to a false impression. There are certainly places, and I’m sure you would agree, where these pharmaceutical drugs that damp inflammation are desirable in acute …
Dr. Heather Moday:
Oh, absolutely.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
… states of pathology. So I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Dr. Heather Moday:
No, no.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
But I also want to come back to what you’re saying, which I think is really sage, this concept of inflammaging, which is a chronic state of inflammation, which a lot of people don’t understand that if there is inflammation, it’s implying something in the immune system that’s dysregulated. You don’t have inflammation without some dysregulation in the immune system. And I think you’ve done a very good job of describing that in a way that the non-immunologists can grok.
So maybe you want to just give a little bit more depth to this construct of … In fact, you even have a subsection of the book, I think, something like cytokines are your friends, as I recall.
Dr. Heather Moday:
Right.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
What we often think of as our enemies can be our best friends when in need.
Dr. Heather Moday:
Yeah. So I talk about the cytokines as being our communication system, right? So cytokines, as we know, are released from many different kinds of immune cells, B cells, T cells, macrophages, everything. And it’s the way that they’re able to tell each other what to do. I call it the 5G of the immune system because if we didn’t have it, it would be as if all the communication in the world got shut down. I mean, everything would stop. We would screech to a halt.
And so, yes, the immune cells are important, but the cytokines are extremely important. And we do need certain cytokines to go after to signal, say, certain cells to go gobble up virally infected cells to tell neutrophils to come in and swallow things up. We need those. So you don’t want to take them away completely, but at the same time, they’re extremely powerful. And we know just looking at some of the inflammatory diseases or it’s just a septic shock that happens, you can trace that back to very powerful cytokines like Interleukin 6. Obviously, that’s a one that we talk about a lot, the TNF alpha.
So you don’t want to have those go off on a wild spree either. They have to be regulated, but they’re very, very important.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Well, you talked about a number of these cytokines, I think, that are … Because this is a whole family of different molecules that participate in this communication system.
Dr. Heather Moday:
Too numerous to count probably.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Exactly. But one that you bring up, which has lately been in the news. And I think it’s very interesting because it ties into our gut immune system so closely. And that’s IL-17. Maybe you can say a little bit about that emerging story because I think that’s a fascinating connector into some of the things that we’ve been talking about is the gut immune system, systemic community, and so forth.
Dr. Heather Moday:
Yeah. So interleukin 17 is released by a T helper cell. So a subtype of all the T cells and there’s actually more than the ones that I talk about in the book. I just … The big ones, right? So Th1, Th2, T regulatory cells and Th17, there’s a few others. But Th17 is really important for fighting infection. However, it’s very tissue destructive. I’m sorry, the T cells that release the IL-17, it’s very tissue destructive.
So when we’re trying to fight, let’s say, infections in the gut or infections elsewhere, we can get into this cycle of damage by these very destructive cells and cytokines, which then recruits other cells to come in and try to resolve. And it can be this ongoing smoldering inflammation. And what’s interesting with IL-17 is for a long time, we thought or researchers thought that autoimmune disease was primarily driven by the activity of the Th1 helper cell. And actually, they found that not to be true. And actually, it’s something that people still talk about, but it’s really the Th17 and IL-17 is one of the cytokines that’s released from that particular cell.
So it is something that I think is a great target trying to ameliorate in terms of lessening autoimmune destruction.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
So you’ve done a really great job, I think, of laying out that the objective is to try to get a person into resilient immune balance. That seems like the takeaway from … And doing so through rejuvenating the immune system, regenerating the immune system’s full potential or its ability to be resilient. And that then ties to what you’ve identified as these four immunotypes because each one has an individual personality or characteristic. So maybe you can tell us now about your four immunotypes and how they help differentiate the phenotype of the individual.
Dr. Heather Moday:
Sure. Yeah. So looking at both how people present with both diseases or symptoms, and then also what you can often find at the cellular level, although we don’t always have the ability to look into this, I mean, there are some labs out there that you can do this immunophenotyping, but the four types are smoldering. So I consider this to be a person who has a lot of inflammation ongoing, but maybe doesn’t have autoimmune disease or allergies necessarily as it’s predominant, they’re a predominant problem.
Then there’s people who have a misguided, misdirected, but I call it misguided immunotype. And these are people who have autoimmune disease primarily. Their immune system has lost the tolerance of their own cells. And they can have a real mixture because these people can have allergies. They can have some of the activity that you would see in someone with allergies, but their primary issue is this auto destructive activity that’s going on. It is often triggered, though, by underlying infection. So that is important to know as well.
And then there’s the hyperactive. So the difference here is that these people tend to have allergies. They’re atopic, they have asthma. They often have a lot of histamine production because of mass cell degranulation. They have a lot of this Th2 activity going on.
And then there’s the people with the weak immunotype. And these are the people who fall into that category who need boosting. They may not have allergies. They may not have problems with autoimmune disease, but they get everything that comes around. They have trouble clearing infection. They might have had exposure to things that have injured or weakened their immune system in the past. So they are a little bit different. So these are the four immunotypes. And then there’s different things that you can do to support each one.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
So in your book, you, again, do a very nice job of demythologizing a very complex topic of understanding the basic components of the immune system. So we’ve got this innate system, this ancient system that goes way, way back to early organisms. And then we have this adaptive immune system that produces these antibodies. And then we got this T regulatory system that intercommunicates between the two. Maybe you could help us to understand how those different components of the immune system relate to these immunotypes.
Dr. Heather Moday:
Yeah. So in terms of our innate immunity … And that includes even our barrier, right, our skin and our mucus lining and our respiratory tract. And we often don’t think about that. And even some of the antibodies that hang out there.
And there are, as you said, some cells that don’t require necessarily previous knowledge of an invader. They recognize these patterns on the surface of microbes and they don’t have to know specifically really what it is. They just know it’s bad, right? So these are like the bouncers of the immune system. They come in, they’re constantly in surveillance, macrophages, the phagocytic cells, the things that can come in and engulf, that is part of our innate system.
But what happens is when the attacking occurs of microbes or when they’ve identified an inflamed area of tissues, not only do they engulf things and start injecting them with all sorts of trying to kill these microbes, but they will also send up cytokine signals to bring other cells in. They’ll change the physiology. They’ll signal for fluid to come in and things like that, but also they act as go-between. So macrophages and dendritic cells, in particular, are the antigen-presenting cells. And so they link. They’re the link between this innate system and our more adaptive cells.
And so they then, of course, courier to T cells and say, “Hey, this is what we got. This is the problem. What do we do now?” And then more of the mastermind occurs if you go up from there thinking about, “Okay, do we need different kinds of helper T cells? Do we need B cells? Do we need antibodies? What do we do now?” And so it’s really these two main arms, but they’re connected very much so.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
So one of the connectors, only one, it’s not the only one, is the thymus gland. And I know you speak about some of the activities of the thymus gland. You think … It’s connection actually into a neurohormone produced by the pineal gland, which is melatonin. And so how does this work into your immunotype concepts in terms of balance versus imbalance?
Dr. Heather Moday:
I mean, obviously, our thymus gland produces our T cells. I mean, that’s how the T came about, right? Thymic. And melatonin is so interesting because for the longest time, even myself, way back in the day, I thought of melatonin as being a sleep hormone. I knew it was involved in the circadian rhythm and I knew it was definitely suppressed by light and increased with dark. But I didn’t really understand how important it was in terms of how our immune system works because when we sleep, when we go into a sleep cycle or when we’re getting ready for bed, our melatonin starts to increase as our cortisol starts to decrease.
And cortisol is actually very acutely. It’s very anti-inflammatory. So what that allows us to do is as melatonin goes up, it actually allows our immune system or immune cells to become a lot more active. And most people don’t think of their sleep time as a time that their immune system is necessarily active. Everybody just thinks they’re asleep, but it’s actually really important. And this is one of the reasons why sleep is so important, especially when melatonin is at its highest, which is usually in the earlier part of the evening when we have more of the deep sleep cycles. We actually have a lot of activity going on.
We have a lot of cytokine activity going on. We have antibody formation going on. We have a tendency to have fever at night because of this as well. Yeah, I think that connection between our immune system and sleep and melatonin is if people understand that, I think they’d be more likely to make sure they’re getting their sleep.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Well, you do a magnificent job in your book. There’s a chapter on sleep as one of the pillars for immune restoration. And I think you really do a good job in covering that complex topic and circadian rhythms and how routine cycling of our sleep is so important. So I want to compliment you because that is a complicated technical subject, but I think you’ve done a very, very good job in bringing that in.
And I think as I recall, you even refer to psychoneuroimmunology in that particular … Maybe it’s not that specific chapter, but it’s in that region of the book and go back-
Dr. Heather Moday:
I do. I talk about it in the stress chapter.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Yeah. And I go back to Candace Pert and, obviously, to Dr. McEwen as well. So there is this web of knowledge that reminds us that the immune system is everywhere and you do a good job. It’s not just floating around in our bloodstream waiting for viruses or bacteria. It’s 24 omnipresent in all organs and tissues doing all sorts of things. I think that’s what you take away beautifully from your book.
Dr. Heather Moday:
Yeah. And I didn’t really think about the experience I had working in a lab for three years as being very … Because when I went to medical school, I was just, “Oh, I’m in medical school,” and you have to learn anatomy and physiology. But later on, as I was entering functional medicine and talking about stress immune system and everything, I thought, “Oh, this is interesting. This sounds familiar to me.” And of course, it’s because I was in a lab that was at the forefront of really looking at how both acute and chronic stress, which is early in the ’90s, how that affected the activity of our immune cells.
And I talk a lot about Dr. Debar, who was actually a … He was a graduate student when I was there. So we were really like colleagues and he has gone on to continue his work in evaluating the effect of mostly chronic stress, especially long-term lifetime emotional stress on our immune system. So it’s something that we are still trying to figure out. I mean, that is a very complex subject because the effect of stress and cortisol in the system changes, depending on how long it’s been going on, the severity of it. We have literally stages. So, fascinating.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Well, there’s another part of your history that is very interesting. About the same time with Dr. McEwen, maybe a little bit later in chronology, the discovery of leptin from the adipocyte was made.
Dr. Heather Moday:
That happened while I was there, actually. Yes.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
I thought it probably was because that is … We said, “Well, leptin, that’s an appetite-related hormone,” but actually it’s also an immune active hormone.
Dr. Heather Moday:
Yeah.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
So again, it ties together the, how does the fat cell communicate with the brain, which communicates with the immune system and the endocrine organs. It’s the psychoneuroimmunology field is exploded.
Dr. Heather Moday:
It really has. Yeah.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
And so when you talk in your book about obesity, obesity has a very profound influence on immune system function, which may explain why in SARS-COVID-2 comorbidities that obesity is right up there at the head of the list of risk factors.
Dr. Heather Moday:
Yeah. And I know that even recently, there’s been … I think it was a study out of Stanford most recently or it was multiple areas that they’ve looked at how SARS-COVID-2 is able to infect fat cells, which I thought was fascinating, and infect the macrophages inside of those cells and actually evade the immune system slightly by staying within the confines of this adipose tissue. So not only allowing it to maybe replicate and become a bigger problem hiding away. But as you said, the impact of just obesity on someone’s cardiovascular system on their liver, on all of their hormones, makes it harder for their immune system to necessarily mount a great response because it is already distracted dealing with this inflammation.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Well, you said something there that’s very fascinating and that is the concept, can a cell hide away in the body? And the answer is probably no, that there are probably receptors, again, through immune signaling and nervous system signaling that are telling somewhere at a distance, “Hey, by the way, there’s something that’s trying to hide away here, but it’s not supposed to be there.”
Dr. Heather Moday:
Right. Of course.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
And then we get into this problem, as you’re talking about, with immune dysregulation versus acute, right? It’s just like Lyme disease, for instance, or Epstein-Barr infection. The virus is still there. We say, “Well, it’s not really producing a serious … I don’t have something that is visibly a disease, but yet it may be impacting the immune system by its signaling.”
Dr. Heather Moday:
Yeah. And I think that viruses are perfect example of that, especially some of the DNA viruses that we’re used to harboring. Luckily, they don’t mutate very frequently, but we all have herpes viruses that are hanging out if you’ve ever had chicken pox or if you have ever had mono as most people have. But the question is, is what are the circumstances by which those viruses are able to then become stronger to escape their confines and then start causing problems again?
Dr. Jeff Bland:
And that comes back to your book with the immunotypes and improving resilience to build lifelong resilience. So let’s talk a little bit in the remaining time we’ve gotten, thank you for your gracious use of your time here.
Dr. Heather Moday:
Sure, absolutely.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
I’d like to talk a little bit about the interventional approaches without getting into deep in the weeds because people can get your book and read more detail. But maybe you can tell us a little bit, from your experience, how the toolkit looks for individuals with these imbalances in these four immunotypes and what available options are there that you found of value?
Dr. Heather Moday:
Yeah. So one of the things … I mean, obviously, there’s five pillars that I talk about. Nutrition attending to the gut and to the related immune system, and then stress management, sleep, and environmental toxins. And certainly, all of those areas are areas that everybody should probably attend to. However, if I had to pick a few, obviously, you say someone has a lot of inflammation and they fall into this primarily a smoldering immunotype, the first thing that we want to do is remove things that are potentially causing inflammation, but also to use foods, take away toxins, that are causing certain inflammatory mediators to go up.
So for example, I talk about NF kappa B is usually very, very active in people who have chronic inflammation. And we know that, of course, things like curcumin is extremely important in quelling that. We also know that the downstream products of omega-three fatty acids, so these specialized pro-resolving mediators, really important, too, and can help resolve inflammation without actually stopping it from occurring.
So that’s another thing that I really love to use for those people. And people who have a hyperactive immunotype, as I said, they tend to have a lot of this helper Th2 dominance. And so they tend to be very sensitive to toxins in their environment. So I always try to focus on cleaning up their environment first as a good thing to do. And then using things that can quiet that Th2 response. So I’ll use things like quercetin is a great thing.
The people with the misguided immunotype, they are the most complex because they often have many things going on different directions. These are the people I really work on gut health as a very primary thing. I look for food sensitivities. I’m looking for the health of their microbiome, intestinal permeability, and also the presence of something that might continue to be triggering them. So infections, whether it’s viral or bacterial. And definitely making sure those people always do elimination diets. And then there’s a couple of nutrients that I really focus on with those people, too.
And I think that with a weakened immunity, like I said, those are the people that you need to boost a little bit more. So I may tend to use some of the medicinal mushrooms. I love astragalus root for them, but anything that can almost increase some of the pro-inflammatory cytokines because I think they can be really helped by that, too.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Yeah. I recall you also talked about the power of some of these adaptogens that have multiple bioactive components like Withania somnifera, Ashwagandha, Indian ginseng. So what class would that kind of an adaptogen fall in from your experience?
Dr. Heather Moday:
I think almost everybody, although Ashwagandha, it can upregulate Th1 activity. So sometimes you have to be a little careful with it. It depends on the person. If they’re really inflamed, maybe I wouldn’t use that.
And then the other thing is with ginseng, which I love, too. I may not always use that in someone who’s maybe more inflamed. Sometimes some of my autoimmune clients, I wouldn’t use that. But a lot of people can really benefit, for the most part, if they’re very stressed. I find that they do really well with some of the more calming adaptogens. I love lemon balm. I use that a lot. Magnolia, I use that a lot as well. So you have to be a little bit, I don’t want to say careful, but look into the pros and cons of using adaptogens. But for the most part, they are adapting, right? So it’s not like you’re giving someone this really strong compound. And so most people do really well with them.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Yeah. I think you did a really great job of, again, talking about the symphonic orchestration of the immune system using these different modulators of the different immunotypes.
One of the interesting things that I think is emerging is that these polyphenols, the flavonoids you discussed like resveratrol or quercetin or curcumin, there are literally thousands of different members of these families of polyphenols. But we have thought of those historically as antioxidants as if they soak up free radicals and oxygen radical. But I think we’re starting to recognize it’s a very simplistic and probably erroneous way to think about them because, quite honestly, our immune cells need oxidation. That’s how the so-called Klebanoff reaction that is in the macrophages is really related to the release of oxygen radicals in the form of hypochlorite that kills biochemical warfare.
Dr. Heather Moday:
Sure.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
So we want controlled oxidation, but we don’t want bystander injury. And so I think what we’re learning, and you alluded this in your book, is that these polyphenolic compounds from plant foods, these phytonutrients, modulate specific pathways or networks that are regulating gene expression associated with these different pro-inflammatory mediated processes. And so it’s more like targeted network pharmacology than it is just generalized antioxidants. These have different personalities, these flavonoid molecules.
Dr. Heather Moday:
Yes. I think an entire book should be written on polyphenolic compounds and the different ways that you can use them because you’re absolutely right. There’s not enough studies, but we do have some, which is great, especially for some of the more well-known ones like the EGCG and, of course, resveratrol, like you said. So I think … I mean, hopefully, this is going to be a future boom in business and technology is how can we even increase the amount of polyphenols in foods? That would be a great thing, right? How can we make them more potent or how can we get people to just get more of them in their diets on a regular basis? Yeah.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Well, for the sake of just putting a plug in, that’s exactly what Big Bold Health is up to. We’re the first people to bring Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat back to life here in the United States, which is the highest density of immune-modulating phytochemicals of any plant food.
Dr. Heather Moday:
Yes. I’ve been watching your work. It’s been fascinating, really fascinating.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Well, it’s really interesting because we just have completed this growing season a variety of test plots of different mycorrhizal soil inoculants to see what impact that has on gene expression of these phytochemicals. And lo and behold, we now believe that soil health has a lot to do with how many of these phytochemicals are produced in the seed of these Tartary Buckwheat plants. And then how that then interrelates with systems influence on immune cell function. That’s the focus of where we’re going because we think there’s an orchestration of these working as partners, not just one at a time. It’s a synergy that you don’t get by just thinking of these as one molecule working at a time.
So, yeah, as you said, this is a whole robust, rich new future ahead that will give us hopefully new insight and new tools for specifically tailoring immunotype intervention. And I think your book is a leader into that field. It’s the way to introduce this extraordinary new frontier in immunology. And I guess we call it functional immunology.
So Dr. Heather Moday, I can’t tell you how much we appreciate all your work, your fluency …
Dr. Heather Moday:
Thank you.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
… your dedication. And of course, making this accessible to all these readers.
Dr. Heather Moday:
Well, thank you. It was my pleasure. And I really appreciate you having me on because, obviously, hearing from you, you’re such a leader in functional medicine. And I think that the future of immunology does lie in our environments and our food.
I think one of the biggest challenges is going to be, how are human beings going to navigate staying resilient on this planet, whether it’s a bacteria or a virus or a toxin or something. We’re going to have to accelerate our immune resilience and we don’t have thousands and thousands of years to necessarily do that. Yeah, I think it’s going to be really interesting.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
I’ll tell you, yeah, that is an incredible way to finish this discussion between us. That is a look to the future. That’s a mandate for our survival and that’s something that we’re all pulling together to find solutions to. So thank you so, so much. It’s been a real privilege and pleasure to have this chance to share ideas with you.
Dr. Heather Moday:
Thank you, Jeff. I appreciate it.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Okay. Be well.
