Dr. Jeff Bland:
Hey, here we are waiting for Godot. When you stick around in Maui long enough, it’s amazing who you run into. So I just happened to surreptitiously run into Dr. Mark Hyman. That’s a joke – that’s a joke, but we’re so excited to have the chance to share some ideas with you.
So Mark, thanks so much.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Oh, Jeff. Thank you. And I’m so excited to be sharing with all of you a little time with one of my heroes, idols, mentors, the reason that I do what I do, Dr. Jeffrey Bland who—if you’ve never heard of him, it’s too bad, because he’s one of the geniuses of modern medicine who I think should win a Nobel Prize and basically be having an entire medical school named after him more, and more, and more. Because he’s really the guy who’s inspired a whole generation of functional medicine doctors to do what they do, and we’re just so thrilled to be able to have this time to chat about some really cool stuff we’re doing, together!
Dr. Jeff Bland:
We are, we are, and you know, for me, what is life? A collection of experiences, and hopefully those experiences are on the main, good, and they build who you are. You know, our genes are the template upon which we grow, we lay our experiences and the day that I met Mark Hyman—who was at that point just starting into our Applying Functional Medicine in Clinical Practice training program and was immediately within the first 10 minutes my star student—I could tell that Mark Hyman had this extraordinary vertical opportunity for…
Dr. Mark Hyman:
I was the one with all the questions!
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Yes, you were, and they were good questions. And I think we’ve been affiliated for the last 25 plus years ever since. So, I’ve had a number of questions asked to me recently, as to what are you and Dr. Hyman doing, Jeff Bland? I thought maybe Mark and I could tell you a little bit about what it is, because it’s pretty exciting for me personally, I think Mark will share his own thoughts, but it brings together and closes a loop for me ever since my starting as an assistant professor of chemistry and environmental science on Earth Day year of 1970. And you’ll see how that kind of weaves its way together into this relationship today. So, Mark?
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah. You know, it’s true we’ve come a long way together over the last 25 years and developing functional medicine. And you know, a couple of really important themes have developed in that work.
One is the idea of ‘food is medicine,’ and if that’s true then it actually evokes the question “How do you get the best medicine in food?” Which takes us down the other part of the conversation, which is regenerative agriculture.
So the two things that I’m really most passionate about now are how do we get people to understand that food is medicine, not just calories—it’s information, and how do we help you understand that it’s only what you eat, but how it’s grown or raised that matters to determine the quality of the food? And that’s what my Pegan Diet book was about—really about the fact that we should be focusing on quality, that we should be focused on food as medicine, that we should focus on how we change our food system and agricultural system to actually grow the food in a different way.
So, I’m super excited about this conversation, because we’re married together with this new project we’re working on together. These old ideas about how do we rejuvenate our health, how do we rejuvenate our immune system, how do we use food as medicine, how do we take advantage of the magic in nature to regulate our own biology, as well as to help the earth itself heal and repair from all the damage we’ve done from the destructive extractive agriculture practices we have, and create a regenerative system for regenerative health and regenerative medicine, and regenerative agriculture?
Dr. Jeff Bland:
In 1977, I was teaching at the Omega Institute. Dr. Stephan Rechtschaffen had just started this Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, and I did a course on food is medicine, believe it or not, 1977.
So, at the first break an attendee came up to me and he said, “Well, Dr. Bland, I’m pretty discouraged about this program.” He’s going to spend the whole weekend with me in this course, and it had only been two hours into the course, and I said, “So why are you discouraged? What did I do wrong?” He said, “No, it’s not what you did wrong. I thought this was going to be about the vitality of food. I thought this is going to be all about the aliveness of food. I thought this was going to be about how food brings energy from the planet to the individual. And all you’re talking about is chemicals, and that’s not really what I was interested in.”
I’m a learner like everyone else—maybe sometimes not the fastest learner—but I’m a learner. And I think over the years where Mark and I have more and more fun or convergence is the recognition of this system. Everything is interconnected to everything, and it’s understanding this system that gives health at every level. The health of the planet, to the plants, to the animals, and ultimately to the people, so that is a part of this transition that we’re engaging in now in this collaborative effort.
As I told Mark when I wrote a review of his book The Pegan Diet—his most recent book—that that I published in the integrated clinician’s journal, I feel that The Pegan Diet book is, although I’ve loved every one of Dr. Hyman’s books, I thought it brought together so many different features.
I really thought it was chock-filled with news to use and when I evaluated The Pegan Diet—this combination of the paleo diet with the vegetarian diet, this concept that Mark came up with—I thought it was brilliantly able to demythologize so much about food and health, and then it connected into this project that we’re collaborating on that we’re going to talk about.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, so true. And you just mentioned everything’s connected, and it just reminded me of this John Muir quote, which is “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Yes.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
That’s what we found as we sort of go down the rabbit hole of food, and the food system and agriculture in our biology—everything is connected. And so, I think the world is ready for a new way of thinking about health, it’s beyond just the old disease model. It’s about how do we create health? How do we create health within ourselves? How do we create health within our communities and our planet?
It really is about rethinking the production of food and the consumption of food, and the focus on quality. Particularly some of the things that this new project that you’ve got going on called Big Bold Health does, which is it just really nails the idea that we can use food to reset our biology, and we can use food to rejuvenate our immune system.
This whole concept of immune rejuvenation is just so amazing because, especially now during the time of COVID, our immune systems are under assault. A lot of people are getting sick because their immune systems aren’t working well, they’re out of balance, and you’re seeing cytokine storms and deaths and all this. It’s really because we’re so messed up in terms of our lifestyle and our diet.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Yes, and I think that what you have done is laid an incredible track. I think that Doctor’s Farmacy as a podcast really has pioneered this concept of interconnecting these variables together.
For me, I’m going to say something controversial now—so I’d like you to attack it if you feel that is not on spot—but I believe that every person needs an entry point into their own health. They need a door into the room of health. Not a door into the room of disease prevention, but the door into health, which is slightly different than disease prevention.
So when I think of health for me, and here’s where the area probably of controversy might reside, I think of health in the individual not being defined as the absence of disease only, but being defined as what I would call high-level function. Function, to me, resides in four different subcategories: Physical function, to do the things you want with your body, and moving in the planet around. Second is your metabolic function, those things that I spend a lot of time talking about. Third, is your cognitive function, which you’ve done a brilliant job with your various series on brain and brain health. And then fourth is your behavioral function.
When those are combined together at high level, then a person really feels what I would call super health. So rather than focus on, “We’re going to reduce risk factors to disease,” we are going to impart in a person a program for aspiring and achieving functional health at the physical, metabolic, cognitive, and behavioral level—that’s the objective.
So how do you do that? You do that through a system that connects a person, not just into themselves, but the broader picture of health in the community, in the planet. And that’s a teaching that you’ve helped me, and I think all the people that have followed your work, to really understand.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Well, that’s the thing. You’re just going down the rabbit hole, you can see the connection that some of my book Food Fix was about. It was about seeing these connections between all the pieces of our food system and how it relates to our health, to the economy, to the health of our communities, to the climate, environment. The beautiful thing about what you’re talking about Jeff is that we now have the ability to understand how to create health.
When we went to medical school, you were in medical school—you dropped out, which is probably a good thing! I finished it, but I’ve had to relearn everything. What we learned was just this reductionist model of disease where nothing really was connected. You’ve got all the specialists with all their body parts, except that’s not how things work. What’s fascinating about functional medicine is that it really is a science of creating an alpha human.
I always say I don’t treat disease, I never treat disease. I treat the person to create health and optimal function, and then disease goes away as a side effect.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Okay. So now I’m going to take a leap of abstraction here. What is this Big Bold Health, and what are Mark Hyman and Jeff Bland doing?
So, to say it really quickly from a Jeff Bland perspective, I am 75 years of age. Some individuals might say this should be the glide path then, where I can take all the years of opportunity I’ve had and just kind of glide forward in the years remaining. But for me, there’s so much happening in the world today, and so many important things, and there’s such an equity of understanding that people have after 75 years of living, that it would almost be very selfish if you didn’t give back for all those extraordinary opportunities, that certainly I’ve had over my 75 years.
So how do you do that? How do you hand the baton off? For me, it was really trying to understand much more about the immune system, because I felt that that was an entry point for many people into health, was through understanding their immune system and being able to personalize it, and that led in the end into this concept of Big Bold Health.
As you are going to see in a couple of moments—I’m holding this up. This is something I’m quite proud of because it took us two years to get to this. This is the first organically produced regenerative agriculture-supported Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat flour, with the highest phytonutrient immune stimulating or immune active nutrients of any product that I know of.
It became kind of my cause célèbre, because of meeting a farmer in upstate New York, an ex-Cornell University ag professor, and also meeting some people at Vanderbilt University who are doing work on the pharmacology of some of its ingredients.
Then a meeting in China when I was at Harbin, and then taking the bullet train from Harbin to Shanghai, which is a 2,400-mile bullet train ride at 240 miles an hour. And I had a conversation with my host, who was Chinese American, and he asked me a question and I then said, “Do you know anything about Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat?” And boom!
That led to the triangulation of Vanderbilt University, a Cornell University ag professor, Jeff Bland, and now Mark Hyman. So that’s our Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat story that we’re going to tell you a little bit about. I was able to get Mark excited about it because it brought so much back into our focus of this web, this network. So Mark, your perspective?
Dr. Mark Hyman:
You know, Jeff has always been a pioneer and has really been way ahead, decades ahead of everybody else in key concepts that we now all are talking about, like the microbiome, or inflammation, and the idea of food as medicine.
I remember being at Canyon Ranch, God, 20 years ago, and I said, “You know, we really need to change the menu and really think about how we bring food as medicine into the menu to heal people here at a health resort,” and the chefs looked at me and says, “We’re not an effin hospital,” and yelled at me and totally didn’t get it.
But now you’ve got major universities like Tufts University, really advocating for food as medicine. You’ve got academic centers all over the country bringing in food as medicine programs, you’ve got government policy now shifting towards food as medicine. So it’s now a thing which I never heard about it before I met Jeff, and it’s really become the key to understanding how we need to change our food and our food system.
One of the things I’m so excited about is this idea of this Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat because one—it’s really an unusual food product. It’s one of the most powerful superfoods on the planet, if not the most powerful, with over 100 phytochemicals. It has the ability to help your immune system repair, rejuvenate, and get younger, and deal with a lot of the challenges that we’re seeing around inflammatory diseases. And three, it’s grown in a way that regenerates the soil and regenerates ecosystems, and it’s good for the planet, it’s good for you.
In a way, it’s a teachable moment for people to understand why we need to rethink our food. I love the story of Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat as well as what it does, because it takes us back to the most essential concept of functional medicine, which is restoring healthy ecosystems. The healthy ecosystem in your body and your immune system, and the healthy ecosystem of the planet that we live in. By growing the food in a regenerative way, it regenerates the earth, the soil, climate, environment, and it regenerates our own health, which is just so amazing.
It’s kind of the culmination of everything we’ve been talking about working on for decades. Forty years ago, I took a class in biological agriculture and really studied the concepts that are now emerging as regenerative agriculture. But they’re not new! Not for a long time, although they’re put together in some new ways, and now we have the opportunity to really change people’s thinking, and approach what they’re eating, and where they’re getting their food from through the power of self-interest.
Like, “I want to fix my immune system,” but you also are getting your own benefit, and you’re also helping to change our concept of food as medicine, to change our whole food production system.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
So with that, you might ask the question—which I asked—how is something like this, this Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat, sitting after 3,500 years of experience as a food with humans that no one knows about?
Dr. Mark Hyman:
No. Well, it’s from the Himalayas.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
It’s really kind of fascinating that in this age where superfoods are so much in the communication network, that this was just laying for someone to re-find it and to bring it back into kind of…
Dr. Mark Hyman:
You did!
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Well, no—we did, guy! I think that what has been so fun for me is, I was just saying to Mark last year when we did our harvest, and you have to recall that we had to grow the seeds first because you can’t go to the seed store and buy these unique germ seeds. So we did the first year of the seeds, the second year then we actually will get a commercial crop in September of Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat of 2020.
When I was out in the fields and the flowers were out—these are very pretty flowers on this plant—and I watched all these bees on the plants. I was thinking, “Think of these bees. They’re picking up this super pollen, and they’re going back to their hive, they’re imparting immunity to the bees. We’re going to eat the seed later as flour and other products, and we’re going to get the immune function, and the plant itself has the function, and now the soil itself, which is a regenerative cover crop type of product, is also being rejuvenated.”
In fact, we’re very proud to say that we are growing this on certified farms that have the biggest history of regenerative practices of any farm in the upstate New York area. Actually doing carbon sequestration studies, looking at sequestering of carbon. We really feel like we brought all sorts of things together into a system that was sitting there just waiting to make the connections.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, it’s such a magical time, because I think the world is waking up to regenerative agriculture. The world is waking up to food as medicine, and to have a product that you can use and access and get. Because you can buy some regenerative beef and some regenerative products, there’s Dr. Bronner’s regenerative coconut oil, but there’s really not that much out there.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Yes. I think it’s the frontier, and I think we’re seeing it because it’s kind of the capstone, isn’t it? To making the immune system of the planet connected to the immune system of plants, to the immune system of microbes, to the immune system of animals and ultimately to humans. In fact, one of the interesting things that Mark and I were talking about, this takes me in all sorts of ways that I’m learning new skills, the old dog learning new skills, but one of them is about soil regeneration.
It turns out that we have run into some people working in Tartary buckwheat agriculture, in which they have been looking at the actual soil composition of the kinds of community that gives rise to the best healthy roots that speak then to the plant, which speak to the growing seeds. So the construct, and this is to me just blows my mind when I think about it, that you have certain mycorrhizal species, that are in the soil whose genes of those mycorrhizae—that’s the fungi that are living in the soil—are speaking to the genes of the root nodules of the Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat plant as it’s growing. Which then tells those genes how to communicate to the growing plant to produce its leaves and its stems and stalks, and ultimately its fruit, (which are the seeds). And the right mycorrhizal species can induce a higher phytochemical content in the plant. So it’s not just a plant by itself, it’s the full environment that the plant is living in.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, and that’s so important, Jeff, because most of the soil practices that we have today—the fertilizers, the tillage, the lack of cover crops, crop rotations, the lack of using animals to integrate and grow the soil, all that’s led to the death of a lot of these mycorrhizal fungi, which are so critical to actually extracting the nutrients from the soil to get into the plant, so that we can eat them. So it’s really a whole network of organisms that are working together to create this incredible superfood.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Let’s talk for a minute about something that you have been so good at communicating, and it was kind of an idea that was a stream of consciousness for me a number of years ago—this would probably be 30 years ago now—in which I said, “Food is not just calories, it is information for our genes.” When I said it, I thought it was kind of just a concept, but it’s kind of caught hold since then. You’ve been a master of really elaborating what that means, so maybe you could talk about your view of food speaking to our genes?
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, well it speaks to everything, right Jeff? It’s not just our genes. When you think of food as calories that’s great, it’s energy, but there’s all this other stuff in there. The macronutrients composition like protein, fat, and fiber, carbohydrates, the quality of each of those regulates your biology in real-time.
So if you’re eating, for example, a regeneratively raised grass-finished beef steak, or let’s say, even more, let’s say eating a wild animal like a kangaroo or elk, or eating a feedlot steak, ounce for ounce it could be the same amount of protein, but the quality is profoundly different and can have different impacts on your biology.
For example, if you eat the feedlot beef the inflammation marker goes up. If you eat the regeneratively raised beef, or the grass-finished beef, or the wild meat, it goes down.
The same thing with flour—here’s a bag of flour. Now, I always say don’t eat flour, stay away from all flour, but this is a bit different, right? Because traditional white flour, here’s an example of how food is information. If you have a cup of white flour, which is dwarf wheat grown with traditional methods in America versus Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat, the white flour is bred to have a super starch, so it’s way more impactful on your blood sugar than regular wheat or even sugar—it’s actually worse for your blood sugar than table sugar. It’s bred in a way that produces way more gliadin proteins that makes it way more inflammatory, that’s why we see all this gluten sensitivity. It’s often sprayed to dry it out and harvested with glyphosate in some areas of the country. It is preserved with a preservative called calcium propionate, which we know causes behavioral and attention, even autistic behaviors in kids and animal studies—that’s the modern wheat.
Okay. That’s very different than Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat, which is much higher in protein, very low glycemic load, very little impact on your blood sugar, has much higher levels of nutrients like magnesium, zinc, and all these phytonutrients, which are powerful chemicals that regulate your immune system and your biology in real time.
So while one is going to cause you to get sick and die and be inflamed, the other one’s going to cause you to rejuvenate your immune system and live a longer healthier life. Same thing—flour—different information.
So that’s the idea of food as information that is not really understood by most people. That’s why quality matters more than anything. The quality of the information the food depends on the quality of that plant’s life experience, right? If it’s grown in a regenerative way or in a wild plant, in the right soils and the right environment, you’ll have much different flavor and chemistry, and medicinal properties than if it’s, for example, grown in a different way. We now understand how to do that, which is what’s so exciting about this Himalayan buckwheat.
So ‘food as information’ is such a central concept to everything I do, because if it is a drug, if it’s medicine, if it’s instructions, like any drug—then you can literally prescribe different ways of eating or different foods or different plants or medicines in the food for different conditions. It’s not the same for everybody, which is what’s so great about it. That’s why I wrote The Pegan Diet, to create an inclusive approach that talked about food as medicine and about the idea of personalization, and about the idea of regeneration. These are really central concepts to our livelihood as a species, the fact that we’re going to either do what we’re doing and continue this way, we’re going to go extinct, or we’re going to figure it out and make it work.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Yes. Thank you. And one of the things that I want to clarify, because sometimes words can be misinterpreted, so in the title Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat, it’s suggested it’s a wheat. That was, I think, the worst possible name that could have been stuck on—it’s not a wheat. It has no relationship to the wheat family at all. It’s an entirely different genus and species, and it doesn’t relate to the grasses of which the grains, it’s not a grain, it’s a fruit seed. So I just want to dispel any myth that because it has the word wheat in it, it’s a wheat. It’s not.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
It’s not even a grain!
Dr. Jeff Bland:
No, it’s not a grain, it’s a fruit seed. But let me, if I can, come back. This will be fun, cause we’ve never done this question before.
I’ve had some people criticize me when I talk about food as medicine saying, well, “We don’t like medicine, medicine just takes over the body and it doesn’t allow the body to work right, so that’s just really a bad thing to say—food is medicine.”
So let me if I can quickly, hopefully, qualify between pharmaceutical medicine and food as medicine, just so we can get an understanding. So if we were to eat in our diets, drugs that had the same bioactivity as a pharmaceutical drug, think of what would happen every time we ate. Our metabolism would just go all over the place because those molecules that are in these pharmaceutical drugs are designed to be extraordinarily active, and to go and to bind to a specific receptor site in a specific cell, a specific tissue in our body and hold on tightly, and make sure that it doesn’t get away from that drug. It’s designed to have very high affinity, very high activity, so that it doesn’t care what your genes are, it just goes through all of that and it’s fixed on there and it takes over your physiology in that particular step.
Now, if you ate things in your food that were that active, you’d be in real trouble. The food-active materials have a much lower binding activity to how they’re going to modulate the expression of your cell. You might say, “Well, that means they’re not very potent.” Well, sometimes small is beautiful, or less is more. Because if you’re trying to modulate or mediate your activity over time, you want to be able to, at some times, activate, and other times you want to reduce. What’s that called? That’s called an adaptogen. You want your body to adapt…
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So like a thermostat.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
That’s exactly it, and so this thermostatic control is what food nutrients do. They’re not like a drug that so tightly binds that it’s a one-way street. It finds the ability of the body to adapt to its environment, and in the case of these immune-modulating nutrients and Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat, they modulate the way the immune system can adapt either up-regulating or down-regulating its function, depending upon need.
So that is how I distinguish between food as medicine versus drugs as medicine.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
But I would sort of challenge that a little bit, Jeff, because as a doctor, I get to use whatever drugs I want and I would use drugs if I found them the most effective treatment, but they’re really not. Even if they have powerful actions for one pathway for a specific issue, when you use the right approach of using food as a medicine, it’s unbelievable what happens and you see stuff that you just don’t see with traditional medicine. You see autoimmune diseases go away, you see people reversing all sorts of cognitive issues, and memory, and mood, and depression issues. You see the reversal of diabetes. You see the reversal of kidney failure, of heart failure, of liver failure. I mean, stuff you just don’t see, that I never saw in medical school because I didn’t learn what to do.
I began to use food, and it works fast, it’s not like it takes a long time. It literally works in days to weeks, and that’s what’s so striking to me. There’s no drug that I can give you that will reverse diabetes—it just doesn’t exist, right? But food will do it, and I see it every single day.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
I think what you said is very profound and I take it good account of what you said. Because if you think about, I’m going to go back again to Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat as an example but we could use many other foods for the same point, and that is there are over a hundred different bioactive substances in Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat, it’s not just one molecule. They’re in there after centuries of developing the structure of that plant food to do certain things. They’re not just there because the plant doesn’t have anything better to do with its time, so it just makes a bunch of extraneous things. It makes them specifically to be an orchestra to then speak to the audience in a different way than just having a great first violinist or a great first trumpeter. You have to have the conductor orchestrating the whole orchestra for the symphony, and the suite of immune effects to be seen.
And I think that what you’re saying is so powerful because it’s not only the phytochemicals that we’ve discussed, but then you also have D-chiro inositol in here – it’s a prebiotic which has a healthy microbiome. So now the microbiome speaks better to your body.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And that can help with diabetes, PCOS, and infertility, and all kinds of stuff.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
It’s a symphonic suite. In fact, let me give you one other interesting fact that I just learned about Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat. You know, when you look at the seed, the reason it’s survived I think all these many years, is it’s tough—you could probably run a tank over it and it wouldn’t burst the seed because it has an armor-like husk, and that husk is hard to mill. It takes some kind of technology to get the hull off the endosperm, which is the flower, without damaging anything, and I think we’ve developed that thanks to our miller.
But one of the interesting things is when you take the hulls off people have thought of this as just kind of a throwaway. In fact, it’s often been used to fill pillows or to put in mattresses or make a beanbag chair, so people didn’t think it of value. But what we have learned is if you do an extraction and a chemical analysis of the phytochemicals in the hulls, they are actually different than the phytochemicals that are in the endosperm.
There are two principal phytochemicals in the hulls. One is called isoorientin, and the other’s called isoquercetin. It turns out these have a lot of literature showing that they are prebiotic phytochemicals that prevent endotoxemia—they help to heal the gut lining.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
And in English, what does that mean?
Dr. Jeff Bland: T
hey actually help make the microbiome healthier. There’s actually a product that we’re developing, we’re going to call it ‘Microbiome Magic,’ of the hulls that will complement the phytochemicals that are in the flour.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
So basically the throwaway stuff, which is the covering on the seed, is actually full of molecules that feed the good bugs in the gut and reduce inflammation.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
That’s exactly right.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Exactly. So, the concept is waste not, want not. So we’ve gone through regenerative, organic agriculture, we are doing cover crops in the off-season, we’re using all the fetch for specific animal feed, we’re using the seeds by milling both the endosperm and the hulls so everything’s used no waste.
By the way, that concept for me was born out of an experience that I had a few years earlier in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, where I got associated with an Alaskan fisherman who told me that we could reclaim all the waste of the fish that he was catching, if we could find a way to use the fish debris. I said, “Well, what were the fish debris?” And he said, “Well, I don’t know. I’m not a chemist. Just things that we pulverize and we throw it back in the water.” I said, “Well, why don’t you send some of that to me frozen and I’ll see what’s in there because I am a chemist.” When he sent that to me and we had our lab analyze it, I found all sorts of interesting bioactive molecules in what had been thrown away and pulverized for years.
So we formed another company in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, where the Deadliest Catch boats go out of in the Aleutian Islands. That then started to form a new fish oil product that captures the pro-resolving mediators, it captures the vitamin A and D and DHA, DPA, and EPA, and that then became another of our sustainable products!
Dr. Mark Hyman:
All the throwaway stuff becomes actually the medicine.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
So here it is, here’s the throwaway stuff, re-packaged after cleaned up minimally processed as our DHO fish oil. Now what we found that this philosophy of ‘let’s make sure we use nature’s goodness, the symphony of things that have been done, in their purest form possible’ to use this food and medicine concept to help mediate these metabolic problems that we’re seeing in the world.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Hippocrates talked about this years ago, nature is a thing that heals, you know?
Dr. Jeff Bland:
That’s right.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Doctor just kind of stands watch. I think that’s so true when you start to understand how to create health, then we don’t have to worry so much about disease as we begin to incorporate some of these compounds and foods and ways of being in our lifestyle and our diet, we can actually start to shift the whole trajectory of disease and rejuvenate our biology.
Dr. Jeff Bland:
If we were to leave our listeners, colleagues, friends, supporters, a few words of wisdom here, hopefully, we have just a couple of words of wisdom, for me if I could give a kind of a postdoc soundbite it’s we can take charge of our health. We have the ability within our bodies for healing, for regeneration, for rejuvenation. If we exercise some fairly simple principles of how we manage our lives, like we would manage our checkbook or manage our schedule, manage our spreadsheets – if we manage our lives with those things in mind, staying close to nature, staying close to those things that have been proven over the most lengthy study that’s ever been done about health, it’s called natural selection. And we apply those in our bodies in ways that are going to be sustainable, what we will do is not only enrich ourselves, but in the presence of that program will enrich the planet, the plants, and the animals simultaneously. It’s a systemic approach.
So, Mark, I’ll turn it to you for some…
Dr. Mark Hyman:
Yeah, I was just thinking of a quote, one of my favorite quotes from a book called Soil and Health that I read 40 years ago by Sir Albert Howard, who was a father of organic agriculture. And he said “The whole problem of health and soil, plant, animal.” And he said “men,” but humans “is one great subject.” It’s similar to the John Muir quote, where when you pull on anything in the universe, it’s connected to everything else.
If we think like that, and if we understand our relationships to everything around us to our own ecosystem, we really can make a huge impact on our health and the health of the planet and our communities. It’s all connected.
So that’s really what I’m so passionate about. That’s why Jeff and I partnered up to work on Big Bold Health and to get the word out about food as medicine, the word out about regenerative agriculture, to give people practical tools to help upgrade their health. We’re going to be coming out with a whole bunch of food products, pancake mix, soba noodles, dumpling skins, all kinds of stuff. So just stay tuned, it’s going to be yummy!
Dr. Jeff Bland:
Thanks a million, Mark. I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying this and come visit us at bigboldhealth.com. Thanks so much.
Dr. Mark Hyman:
All right, Jeff. Thanks.
