Oskar: Jeff, looking back over more than fifty years working at the intersection of nutrition, science and medicine, what is the biggest change you've seen in how we understand human health?

Jeff Bland: I think the biggest change is that we now have actual tools to allow us to interrogate how our body is functioning at levels that when I first started in this field were not even thought to be potentially available. So today we really have the ability to know ourselves at a level that was previously absolutely incapable of of being available. So Now the question is what do we do with that information? The information can power us. So where does that take us?

Oskar: Another open question. Excellent. Welcome to the business of longevity. Today I'm joined by two people who have really shaped how I think about health. The one is Dr. Jeffrey Bland, who's a nutritional, biochemist, author, and educator, if not much more, widely known as the father of functional medicine. He co-founded the Institute for Functional Medicine with his wife Suzanne and has spent decades exploring how nutrition, genetics, and our environment influence health. And alongside him today is Anne Catherine Failman, a clinical dietitian, educator, and co-founder of Nordic Laboratories and DNA Life. She's worked internationally to help practitioners translate nutritional science and lab testing into personalized care and has seen thousands of patients throughout her career. And she also happens to be my mother. This episode is sponsored by Nordic Laboratories and DNA Life, where Anne Catherine and I work. Today we're exploring genetic testing. Jeff's forthcoming book, The Nourished Gene and How Practitioners Can Use Genetic Knowledge in Their Practice, particularly as we learn more about cognitive health. So, and Catherine, welcome on here. You've spent decades working with functional medicine, and I know Jeff has played a significant role in your education and the way you approach health. What has his work meant to you personally and professionally?

Anne Catherine: Jeff has helped me create structure in my clinic with patients. One of the first models that I for sure. Really integrated in my clinic was the 4R protocol, now 5R protocol, in regards to gut health, removing pathogens, removing foods we were reacting to, and creating balance and restoration again. That move that journey kind of moved further into the Institute of Functional Medicines, the the matrix. where we took the his patient history and symptoms, et cetera, and plotted it into a whole matrix. And from that I begin began to understand systems biology in a way that Jeff has also helped me include and made me understand my patients in a completely different way. it's not one symptom, one drug, but a whole web of interactions that we are dealing with in the clinic. So and and I've been to a lot of Jeff's PLMI events and listening to his talks, and I always get inspiration from it, and I get ideas to write a blog or an article or something. He maybe he mentions a new publication or some thinking idea that makes me tick.

Oskar: And Jeff, hearing and Catherine describe that influence that you've had on her career, how does that make you feel and how does it compare with what you perhaps originally hoped to achieve when you set out on the big journey of functional medicine?

Jeff Bland: That's a very good question. I think it's relationships are two-way streets. so there's sending information out and there's receiving information back. And I'd like to think that the best teachers are the best students. And the way that you're a student is you listen very carefully to the way that your information has been absorbed and processed and then fed back to you. And a and Catherine just described exactly why I'm so excited to be in this community with people that are so thoughtful and are willing to test some of these ideas with with real people, with patients. and get real information in terms of feedback. And then that comes back to me. And it's an iterative process. It's a process of refinement of the model. You start off with something that's conjectural or hype maybe even hypothetical. You you start exploring it. You get other people interested in trying that model and then you start improving it over time. And in in this case, as you were mentioning, Oscar, the The journal f journey for me has been more than forty years. Actually, I think I started in the field in seventy three probably would be when I was a professor, would probably be my date that I actually started in this field to to develop the functional medicine model. But I think it it's really people like Ann Catherine that have fueled my continued development and evolution of these ideas.

Oskar: So you talk about that in in in nineteen seventy three when you really started your professional career after having having done your your education. And then you must have gone through a journey because when did you realise that you were helping build a movement that would extend far beyond just your own research and teaching, but that it would spread into these rings in the water, if you could say.

Jeff Bland: Yeah, I think for me it was in nineteen eighty I was very fortunate to have had developed a relationship as o as tens of thousands of other people did with Dr. Linus Pauling and his wife, Eva Helen Pauling. he was a two time Nobel Prize winner, once in chemistry and and once in peace. And you know, he thought that his wife should have gotten his second Nobel Prize in Peace because she was such an advocate. and he worked with Albert Schweitzer and Albert Einstein actually to mobilize sixty thousand scientists around the world to basically put pressure on the international politic of the time to eventually get a prohibition on atmospheric nuclear testing. He was very much against atmosf you know, weapons of mass destruction from the use of atomic chemistry, of which he was a a leader in the discovery of of the nature of atoms and and radioactivity. And so he and Schweitzer and Einstein were very, very successful in mobilizing the scientific community to eventually get a a a treaty passed that prohibited atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. that really resulted in he and his wife being very actively involved in projects around the world that were related to human conditions. and having spent quite a bit of time with them n in my development in the early eighties, eventually, you know, I came to recognize that what they were really working on from multiple perspectives was to reduce human suffering in all sorts of different ways. So they were advocates in many, many social programs around the world and suffrage movements and various people that were you know, underburden. And that was such a motivating image for me that when I left this two-year sabbatical that I had with him and his wife in at their Institute of Science and Medicine in Paleto, California, I made the decision that I was going to give up my academic professorship, my tenure professorship, which I thoroughly enjoyed and I thought was pretty successful at it, to leave academia and to start an institute to teach doctors how to employ nutrition in their practice. It was a very silly idea, I think, when I think back to it, because I had a family, I had a mortgage, I had r you know, responsibilities, and I gave up this very secure tenured faculty position, to start something that I didn't know anything about what whatsoever, which is how am I gonna find my model as I move forward to be supportive. And fortunately at the time my my father had retired early. He was an aerospace engineer. And he thought I was being a little silly in making this decision because he was a guy from the de the depression that was very much into security of jobs. And so when he finally recognized that I was actually going to do this, he said, Okay, if you're gonna do it, you don't know anything about business whatsoever, which was true. And he said, but I am In my former life I was a chartered accountant as well as a electrical engineer. I guess you need some help in business, so I I better come out of retirement. So he became my business manager for the first five years and and my mother became a copy editor and my wife became a corporate development person and away we went to put a company together that ultimately founded the Institute for Functional Medicine in nineteen ninety.

Oskar: That's a pretty incredible story and and you mentioned nineteen ninety because it's also the nineteen nineties where you published genetic nutritioneering, which is quite interesting because when we go on to social media we we read about genetics today, it's quite a norm in this space. But in the nineties it was I'm sure now I wasn't even born then, but I'm sure it it well

Jeff Bland: Don't say that, please. Yeah.

Oskar: But I'm sure it wasn't as popular a theme. What did you understand about the relationship between genes and health at that point? And what were the biggest unanswered questions at that point?

Jeff Bland: Yeah, thank you. That's another really great question. And I think Anne Catherine can some add some color on this as well. So for me, I I actually just came back from this last week for from what personally was kind of an amazing moment. I'm a graduate of the University of California at Irvine, one of the University of California campuses. And it turns out I was in the first graduating class and I was the first chemist biologist graduate from that institution of the double major. And there were only like three hundred people in my class. Now it's a very large school, over forty thousand students and so forth. But back then it was way out there in the middle of nowhere, and we were basically creating the campus from scratch. And as I thought back, because I was getting an award, the founder award actually from A very well known and and remarkable woman, Susan Samuele. She and her husband, Henry Samuelli, he is the founder of Broadcom, very, very successful microcomputer technology company that anyone that has any computer device or any kind of device in the world that ha that shows video has his product, has his product in it, a a broadcast a Broadcom product. So Susan the wife of Henry was an advocate to donate to the state of California, to the University System of California, the largest single grant ever given, to over two hundred million dollars to form a new medical school at Irvine that is the Susan Samueli Center of Integrative and Functional Medicine associated with the med school. And this year I was awarded the Susan Samuelli Founders Award from her for my work in in in functional medicine. And in preparation for my little speech I gave after getting the award, I went back to think about going to that un university in I graduated in nineteen sixty-six. and thinking about my class and what I learned. And I recognized that I started there in sixty five. It was a brand new school in sixty five. I transferred over from another Cal University to Irvine in sixty five. that I took a course in molecular biology, 1965. It was my first exposure to molecular biology, molecular genetics, and the gene, really, at a formal level. I mean, I n obviously knew about genes, but not at the level of Watson and Crick level. And it when I think back now, it it kind of got my attention that in sixty six that was only eleven years after Watson and Crick's paper was published in la in in Nature magazine discussing the tro the double helix. That, you know, it's it was a decade, it was only a decade old. When we w as students and we were thinking as students, how when you're young, everybody is old. And I was thinking, man, this information's been around for every forever, you know. They were just analyzing the triplet code. They were just starting to understand how amino acids were coded by three nucleotides on the genes. And w the the code of life was just being deciphered, Karana and others. And we were learning that in school. But I was thinking at the time, this has been known for eons. I had no historical perspective. But Now I recognize when I was kind of preparing for this talk that I was very privileged to be in that early stage of introduction to this concept. And because I was a chemist and and a biologist, I was in both departments, majoring in both departments, I had the privilege then of kind of seeing how these things fit together, the chemistry side with the biology side. And I think that impacted me such that it changed my whole perspective as it relates to the relationship between genes and function. It took me way beyond Mindel, Gregor Mindel, and you know, receptions and dominance, which we're all familiar with, you know, family traits, characteristics, hair color, eye color, skin colors, and size of your body and so forth that were tied to your genes. So I was I was familiar with, you know, kind of morphological genetics, but now I started to think about the molecular genetics. And how those get expressed into these k these traits and how they regulate function. So I think I had a good running start by the time the Rose Garden came about, with the deciphering of the human genome being broadcast to the world in in the Clinton President Clinton regime, I was already kind of in full r full pace run into that technology and understanding what was going on and and how the genes were being deciphered and so forth. So I think I had a little bit of a head start, particularly because by that time I had kind of transitioned it from my experience with Linus Pauling into how nutrition plays a role. So I started thinking of nutrition and genetics, nutrigenetics. And I I think I was just early on in that in that group group of people that really started to advance the interconnection between nutrition and genetics in the field that's now kind of grown up to be a real discipline, nutrigenomics and neutrogenetics. So I think that's how it how it evolved for me. And then the book was a was kind of a manifestation of that when we started the MTHFR, that was the first gene that seemed to have a nutrigenomic connection. And when I started talking about methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase, you know, eyes would kind of get big and people go, what the heck is he talking about? So it was a start into the into the process.

Oskar: That's

Anne Catherine: Can I comment something? Sorry. So it's just so so basically you were, because I'm just thinking you're it was all like a lot of theory as opposed to knowing. So I'm thinking for years we've been talking about like something as simple as blood sugar levels, but and we could maybe do a one-point blood sugar level. But now we've got this continual, we can we can get the data 24-7. So we you were working a lot with theory and ideas and models, but I what I hear is now you're moving into this now, it's actually more knowing, it's actually more actionable, it's measurable, so it's an amazing transition, but you've really done the groundwork there, is what I'm thinking.

Jeff Bland: Well well thank you, Anne Catherine. I think I think you have contributed to that, with what you've done with with DNA life and with Nordic Labs. It you know, this is all about taking a concept and seeing how it spreads out into application. And then finding places where it can produce value for people so they can know themselves earlier to to make modification and how their trajectory of life is going that's gonna change the endpoint, give them a longer, healthier life. So this is really the start of the longevity movement, if you think about it, the or let's call it the scientific wellness movement. you can't have a scientific wellness movement in the absence of understanding what is the science of the body that regulates our ability to change. And then how do we define it individually? 'Cause we are personally different than anyone else. We're a we're a unique facet on the diamond of life, each one of us. So yeah, I think you are a great contributor to that.

Anne Catherine: We are working hard on it, connecting the right people and the right knowledge, et cetera. So and of course, within the the flute of DNA life tests we've developed, we came from like sports genes and weight management genes and moving into the MCHFR, of course that what that was included in our whole health test. And now we've got grow baby, which is looking into the mother's genes in relation to a healthy pregnancy and a a healthy bone baby at the right time, not too stressed, not too large, not too small, not too early, all that. And and being able to get knowledge like that and help a human being enter the world with the best conditions as possible, but then moving further into understanding the whole like mind and psyche. and resilience, etc. It's it's an amazing journey that we are that we are embarking and it's just continuing growing and what AI will bring to this as well is an amazing yeah world that's gonna open up for us there of course as well.

Jeff Bland: I think that was beautifully stated. I I think that this is an a revolutionary time in which we're getting insight into the incredible complexity and brilliance of mother nature. I've often said Mother Nature doesn't give up her secrets easily, but she will, if you put the time in, she'll give the she'll give you some insights. And we're starting to see that now. And it's not just the insights that tell us about disease, it's the insights that tell us about the function of the individual. because disease is an endpoint of a process where we weren't asking early questions about the function. We just ultimately ended up at an endpoint where we have this disease. And now we have the tools to allow us to start looking much earlier.

Anne Catherine: 'Cause that's what you're t that's exactly the topic you're touching there.

Jeff Bland: Yes, it is. That's amazing you brought that up, 'cause that's that book is fourteen years old now. And I I'm actually very proud of it when I went back recently and re-looked at it because it it does kind of lay out a manifesto for what we're seeing happen right now. I think I was pretty much right on i in trying to say that diseases are kind of useful pneumotic devices there to hold space for specific therapeutics. But we weren't given kind of etched in stone diseases. Those are manifestations of our own mind, and they change over time with new information. And what we used to think of was one disease may turn out to be many conditions that are embedded underneath that name, like diabetes is a good example. Type two diabetes, there are over well, probably over fifteen different types of type two diabetes that come from different sources. They all show a blood sugar problem. But they have different reasons that that blood sugar problem occurred. And so if you treat everybody the same, you're not going to get good results. You want to treat each person unique to their own condition. So these are the the the tools that we're developing, I think, as a consequence of technology, and then translating that through work at that you're doing at DNA Life and Nordic Labs to to make these assessment opportunities available to people and then teaching them how to use them. That's the other thing. You can have a tools, but in the absence of a a algorithm or a a mechanism for why they're useful and how to use them, they're just tools. So I I think that this is a and by the way, there's one other part of the story that I think is important to point out. Any kind of advancing frontier of knowledge, historically and human civilization, will always have during the time of change pushback, because people are used to what is usual and customary. And so if something looks different and unusual or off the beaten path, then it's the first reaction that society generally has is one to reject and to criticize and to find fault. This is just historic across all theaters, not just science. And this field that we're involved with right now is rapidly changing. since I've been in this now for fifty years, it's an it's a accelerating rate of change that we're seeing. And for a lot of people, change is uncomfortable. And so they like to stick where they were yesterday, even though tomorrow is going to be different. And I I think your work at at Nordic and DNA Life is constantly showing people how this field is advancing. And then Providing the tools of understanding and information on how to integrate that. We're not throwing away everything we learned before. We're just adding value and improving our assessment precision so that we can be more successful in improving health outcomes in the individual. But in the in so doing, we're we've got to put up with the fact that we will have finger some people finger pointing and criticizing because they haven't really spent the time necessary to understand. what this technology is all about and where the tools are, where the strengths lie and and how they're to be used appropriately. And and so it's just easier to criticize without having to go to the trouble of really understanding. So I I think this is a a fascinating time for us. And of course someone like me, I mean I'm eighty years old now, so I've got kind of the perspective of of being in the in the firing line for a lot of these things over the over the decades. And the nice thing is that if you hang in there, the truth will out eventually. It it comes through. You just have to be

Anne Catherine: Yeah.

Jeff Bland: tolerant and patient to and and vigilant about what you're saying because you know, we'd what we might say today might have some different nuances tomorrow.

Oskar: And you've actually had the courage to go out there and challenge your your own work at times to say, well, what I knew back in the day is perhaps not what I necessarily know today, or I've built on that knowledge. And that means that three decades later you're now coming out with your new book, The Nourish Gene. And I assume that you've built a lot on the first book that was about genetics. Tell me a little bit about how. The knowledge has changed, the information that we have, how tests that come into play has changed the perception and the knowledge that we have around genes today.

Jeff Bland: Yeah, sorry, I think that's a really insightful question. And and Catherine can add some color to this as well, because it's an area where she has a lot of insight. the way the tests in medicine have been used historically is to determine pathology. Pathology means that you can see if you use the right lens, a microscope, or some diagnostic piece of equipment, you can actually see cells in the body that are damaged and are in a different state. That's what we call pathology. And the pathology of the body gives rise to diagnoses based upon the definition of diseases. And so these are the endpoints. and how did these conditions get analyzed? They got analyzed by looking at the body and looking for things that changed in the body relative to people that were not sick, that didn't have that disease. And so they start examining things in the blood, or things in the saliva, or things in the urine, or tissue biopsies. And they start looking for things that appear different, highly different in those people that have those diseases versus those people that don't. And then they do enough studies on enough thousands of people to develop a statistical understanding of the range of variability among people for these different things, like blood sugar, would be a good example, blood glucose. And then they say, well, the average people that don't have any of these sicknesses, their blood sugar is such and such. It's a range. Say it's in in the units I use, it's something like 70 to 95 milligrams per deciliter, would be a range. And so people with numbers outside that range would be considered, they might have some pathology. They might have a diabetes like condition, particularly if it's elevated. So you say, if it's 150, that's way bigger than 90. So therefore they are an outlier and they have this disease called diabetes. So that's how these numbers that have been used historically when we have our blood analyzed are utilized for determining the presence or absence of disease. Now, does that tell us anything about the presence or absence of health? The answer is no. They were not designed to do that. That's not why they were being put on to a standard blood test. On a standard blood test, those ranges, those normal ranges, are built around not not being sick. It's not necessarily being well. So then we say, okay, well, then what would you measure if you wanted to understand something about wellness, not just sickness? Now you might want to understand how the body is working at a deeper level. This would be things like your immune system or your metabolic system or your nervous system or your liver. You want to know exactly how it's working. Not just is it broken, that's called pathology. And so now tests that we see being developed in the functional space, medicine space, are tests that are really examining the function of the individual before they actually end up with an acute pathology or a disease. So these are not actually what we would call diagnostic tests, they're prognostic tests. You're prognosing, you're looking forward, saying, well, based upon what we see, your trajectory of how your body is functioning tells us that if we don't do something now, you're likely to end up with a disease in the future. And so it's a different kind of strategic approach that we have seen being developed in this functional integrative medical space in the use of things like laboratory testing. And then how that ties to our genes. Because originally it was thought that our genes were immutable, were not changeable. Whatever we got when our biological mother and father got together to form that single egg that was us. There was nothing we could do about it. We didn't fill out an application card. And so sometimes some people got the good luck of the draw, and other times people got the bad luck of the draw. That's the kind of the genetic determinism view that certainly I was schooled in up through really, really up through graduate school, into the into my 1960s period. And after that, however, It was starting to be recognized that, well, just a minute. It is true that our genes can be hardwired to produce these characteristics, like they can make a liver, or they can make a brain, or they can make lungs, but there are other parts of our genes that can be modified in the way they're actually functioning. By the kind of things that we do each day, how we eat, how we live, how we breathe, who we hang out with, what we're exposed to in our environment. And this is called genetic expression, the expression of genes. So the genes in themselves didn't change, but the way they were expressing themselves could change based upon the environment and lifestyle that we were exposed to. Now that was a remarkable concept that was Pretty much rejected in medicine for for a number of years. Was it was considered kind of outside of the theme of genetics. But over the last 25 years, this concept that there are things that can regulate how genes are expressed has now become a dominant new reality in medicine. And this has a term that's been applied to it. It's called something above the genes that controls them, or epigenes, epigenetics. So these are marks that are put on our genes that regulate how they're expressed. It didn't change the genes, it just told them whether they were going to be turned on or turned off or how they were going to actually be functioning. And it turns out that these epigeny genetic marks, which were not even understood until Well, they were understood in development of a fetus, because clearly we came from a single leg and we ended up with two hundred different cell types, so we knew how things occurred in the womb to some extent. But we didn't think this continued out after we were an oxygen breathing person outside the womb and a child and an adult and even a late-age adult, where these genes could still be marked and changed in their expression patterns. Now obviously when I'm speaking to this we would say, well, not all genes must be regulated that way because if any gene could be changed in its expression. you you might be a mess. The liver could become the heart, or the heart could become the kidney. And so you want to maintain your structure, that's true. But there are other things that control and regulate the function of the liver, the kidney, the heart, the brain and so forth that be mo can be modified by epigenetic marks that are placed on the genes. These are regulator processes, transcription factors th and other things that regulate how genes are expressed. So this is a major, major breakthrough in thinking, and and it's a f a shapeshifter for all of medicine. Because medicine has really historically been built around this deterministic view of the gene, that whatever you got is what you gotta work with, and medicine is there to save you from bad genes. Now we start to say, hold it, genes can be regulated and how they're expressed and what use signals you send to them. So maybe we ought to be really more concerned about the signals upstream of them becoming something that would cause a disease. And let me use an example. trisomy 21, that's Down syndrome. Most people are aware of this. So that's a genetic condition. You can screen for it in in utero, as as And it is associated with developmental alteration. So the question is: if you have a person with a trisomy 21 genetic mutation, and they're born that way, will every one of those Down syndrome children be the same? If that's the determination of their condition, will they all be the same in terms of their phenotype or of their how they look, act, and feel? And the answer is absolutely no. We know that that same genetic mutation, trisomy 21, can express itself genetically into the how a child looks, acts, and feels, and grows up to be very, very differently from high-functioning Down syndrome children that, you know, you still say they're downs, but they're really high-functioning, to ones that are really seriously impaired and maybe never make it to adulthood with the same genetic condition. So why? It's because there are many variables that are controlling the expression of that gene, the trisomy 21 characteristic, that regulate how it's going to be expressed. Even in these what are called monogenetic conditions, Taysax, Wilshans, Fabres, sickle cell anemia, all of these are single cell or single genetic mutational conditions that exist in varied forms into the phenotype based upon how the genes are expressed. This is a powerful new concept that gives much more plasticity to what we counsel people and how we help them understand their bodies so that they can be on the right side of how their genes are expressed versus the wrong side. And that's why I titled this next book of mine The Nouris Gene, because one of the major factors that regulates gene expression is what we eat. Well, st actually starts with what our parents ate and then it translates into what we ate, through the fetal development and ultimately into our our development into adulthood. So yeah, important topic.

Oskar: So with with this with this book, The Nourished Gene, and with all this information that is around genetics today, and practitioners now have access to more genetic information than they perhaps have ever had before, with more SNPs being available to them on their their patients. How should they incorporate it in their practice? If I'm sitting as a practitioner, I'm used to doing functional testing with gut. With hormones, with toxicity. And all of a sudden I've realized I've listened to this podcast. I've been following you, Jeff, and I'm going, I want to incorporate genes into my practice. How would you go about doing that?

Jeff Bland: Well, I recommend that every human being have their their genome analyzed. It's it's now come down in cost to the extent that it's not prohibitive financially to do it. And I I call this our book of life. It's the most pressured treasured thing we own is our book of life, which is our human genome. And we should we should know it. Because once we know it, it it's it's not going to change. The expression of the genome might express change, but the genes themselves are not going to change. There might be some mutations, but in in the majority of way majority of them are gonna stay the same. And I think everybody should know that. It's it's a value it's like the most powerful resource we have in our life, and it shouldn't be a mystery today, because we can analyze it and and get that information. So now, once you have that information, then what do you want to know out of it? Well, one of the things you might want to know is are do you carry any kind of unique variation in your genetic code that would give you some increasing concern? not just a monogenetic disease, but some pattern of your genes that might say you're more susceptible to inflammation or you're more susceptible to allergy or you're more susceptible to gluten or something of that nature. And and now we have, and DNA life has done a A beautiful job of advancing this technology, ways of assembling this genetic information to give us kind of insights into patterns of our genes that would say, hey, these are things we would probably want to be familiar with, and to we can engineer our life around this information. Without that information, we were shooting in the dark. With this information, we can start to engineer our life processes much more specifically. So that that's where I would start, and that's why I think DNA Life has done such a good job of bringing this technology. into clinical reality at a price that people can afford with the information systems to allow them to basically have actionable information from which they can take take positive steps forward with their health.

Oskar: And and staying on that topic and Catherine, DNA Life is preparing to launch an upgraded DNA mind test, expanding from thirty-seven to more than a hundred and twenty genetic variants across areas, including mood, cognition, behaviour, sleep, and resilience. Put a few words on that development. What has changed since its launch in twenty eighteen, and what are you trying to help practitioners understand today?

Anne Catherine: Yeah, so a lot of research has happened since then and in the new DNA mind test our team has taken seven thousand different articles and put through a literature literature review in order to find specific genes that impact MOOC regulation and behavior reward and even moving into cognitive decline such as dementia, but also like recovery after after after traumatic brain injury. So we've taken a test that has given us it's it's a little bit like we you have a house with two windows in and now we have a house with 20 windows in and we we can understand the biochemistry in this person a lot better. in and and act on it in regards to food, nutrition, lifestyle, even genes in relation to oxytocin. Do we need long hugs or can we survive with short hugs? Cause you know hugging and gives oxytocin and and and love feeling in the body. So it's it's areas as such that we look into. And of course education is part of this as well. So we've prepared and are still preparing hours of education so that That our practitioners really can learn and understand this amazing powerful tool that they have in regards to supporting people, their mental health, but also supporting longevity so that they have a strong, healthy mind for the rest of their lives. So it's it's gonna be an amazing journey to get the feedback and response for all these practitioners working with this test. And really, it's looking into genes, both now geometry. Jeff was mentioning genes in relation to inflammation, and we're talking inflammation, gut inflammation, immune system, brain function, this web of interactions where understanding the information and the test really brings out many, many tools in the toolbox for practitioners to support people with. And of course, mental disease and mental conditions is a big thing. I mean, during COVID, where where a lot of people experienced being alone and and it was expressed that people need help, they need to feel good. They a lot of people are depressed and they we need tools to to work with this and and the genetic test of course is an amazing tool to to work with that. But even looking at diet and exercise and good sleep and the basic package is important. But this puts it into a completely different perspective when we are working with with people's mental Mm-hmm.

Oskar: And can this because lots of people that do have mental health issues have a struggle to understand why. So what is it that's going on? Can one's genes that you're born with actually come in and explain some of the reasons behind this?

Anne Catherine: Yeah, it can. It's it's the foundation that you are born with and then you layer that with the environment and then you get that interaction between genes and the environment. So if ha you have genes that codes for inflammation and you live in an environment where the food that you are eating is not nourishing enough, there is not enough Dark nutrition matter or what it was it, Jeff, that you were nutritional mat dark nutritional matter. There is simply not enough dark

Jeff Bland: Dar dark matter of nutrition? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Anne Catherine: There's simply not enough nourishment in the food people are eating, then that will drive more inflammation in the body. If there's not enough omega-3, there's not enough vitamin D, there is not enough polyphenols, there is not enough good bacteria in the gut, etc. All that will then layer on top of the genes and creates this expression of the body that then can drive a condition in the wrong way or in the right way if we are. Nourishing our genes the right way.

Oskar: And you just mentioned polyphenols that I find very fascinating right now because we in Functional Future, which is one of a subsidiary of ours, where we're bringing organic foods into into the market, it has to be maximized nutritional value and in that we have a olive oil with one thousand one hundred and seventy four milligrams per kilogram polyphenol levels in it, which is one of the highest possible polyphenol level olive oils you can get on the market that we've really geeked out and spent two years trying to trying to source. And Jeff I know you are talking very highly of polyphenol levels at the moment. What is the reason for this? What why are you so obsessed with polyphenols at the

Jeff Bland: Well first of all, let's just let's do a level set with everybody. So if I asked you where whatever country you live in in the world, where do you find polyphenols on the label of your foods, you know the answer. It doesn't exist on the label of foods.

Oskar: On hours it does, I'll just say that.

Jeff Bland: Well, in some specialty foods, yes, it does. It it does in our Himalayan tertary buckwheat as well. So yes, in some

Oskar: Good.

Jeff Bland: specialty examples, but in general, foods have not listed it. And that's why, as Anne Catherine was saying, we've called this dark matter of nutrition. It's dark because people don't know what the level in their foods are of these very important nutritional agents because they have not been identified by food labeling or nutrition kind of standards to be important enough to get on the label. Now why is that the case? Because there is no specific Nutritional deficiency disease that we can specifically identify with the absence of polyphenols in the diet, like scurvy with vitamin C, or with thymin with berry berry, or with vitamin B3 niocin with pylligra. those are nutritional deficiency diseases that you can produce in people by just with withdrawing those nutrients from the diet. and so they have labels: vitamin D with with bones and osteoporosis. The polyphenols, however, are being found to be extraordinarily important for affecting how our genes express themselves over years of living. So this is long-acting effects on our body. They sh they're shapeshifters of how our genes will express themselves. And this is what I'm just saying there in a sentence or two is actually very, very new information. that's breakaway new discoveries around the the role that these polyphenols have. Food chemists have known that in natural foods, na vegetable plant foods, whole grains and so forth, that there are these polyphenols and they've known that there are thousands of them. probably more like ten thousand different polyphenols in different foods. So it's one of the most rich arrays of of substances in food that are taken out when we process food. Because no one felt these were important, so let's get out of there. Because they impart flavor and color into the food that doesn't allow us then to make all foods sweet, fat, and salty of the same type. So let's get them out of there. And so they're they're removed by processing. And that means that we have been on historically a very low polyphenol diet compared to what our ancestors ate. In fact, if you go to the blue zones of the world, These areas that Dan Butner identified where people live to be 100 years of age and healthy without modern medicine, their polyphenol intake on a daily basis is a couple thousand milligrams a day. The average in America is about 350. So these have really remarkable influences on kind of shape-shifting how our genes are expressed into our what's called our phenotype. That means how we look at and feel. And that's a harder thing to study because you have to study a person over the course of their whole life to understand that. Versus vitamin C absence, you can show scurvy in a couple of months if you take vitamin. Look at our explorers that were suffering from scurvy in the Navy. And you know, it was Robert Lind and and James Cook that found they could prevent this by giving them limees and making them take citrus. So they ended up being able to explore the Western Theater into the Pacific Ocean better than other. navies. So that's an example of a vitamin that produces a direct effect on a single metabolic outcome called scurvy. The polyphenols affect everything. They affect the brain, the liver, the heart, the kidneys by modulating how the genes are expressed. So it's a much more complicated story, but it's very, very important in terms of health outcome.

Oskar: That is very exciting. So if we were to take a practical example here, and about the knowledge that we can gain from all these different tests, I'd like to kind of bring up a a case where you meet someone who has severe brain frog, they aren't sleeping very well, they have difficulty concentrating, but they are eating a good diet, they think. How could we help? a person through that kind of situation and where could genetic information actually help them?

Jeff Bland: Yeah, well, I would follow Anne Catherine's guidance that she's already given us. I would say everyone first starts with a genetic analysis so they they know the topography of their book of life, their genome. And then the next test I would put on is the evaluation of their stool, this digestive analysis to look at the presence and absence of a friendly and unfriendly bacteria, the presence of digestive enzymes, how food is being Processed in the gut and how that speaks to where 70% of our immune system resides, which is around the gut. And so that relationship between the gut and the gut microbiome and our immune system can determine all sorts of things. It explains why people with gluten sensitivity sometimes end up with dementia, because the gut immune system is connected to the brain's immune system. And so by looking at the gut, we get inferential information. About how the brain is functioning. David Perlmutter, Dr. David Perlmutter, just published a brilliant book, just came out two months ago, I guess, on the brain's immune system and how it regulates brain function and how the brain's immune system takes its message from the immune system of the body in general. So, yeah, I would go to from the genes, then I would go to the gut and I would do a comprehensive analysis of the microbiome.

Anne Catherine: And here comes the dietitian in and says, I, of course, would do a a nutritional interview to see where I could impact their diet as much as possible. Ensure they get enough dietary fibers of different types, ensure they get all these polyphenols, ensure they get their basic foundation protein enough and the right calories, etc. And then and that they sleep enough and that they exercise enough and that they don't drink too much and that they don't sit too much in. not solitude, but have have them have have their mind activated by community, etc. But of course my and I I know knowledge motivates. Knowledge is a powerful tool and explaining these genes and the gut and the inter Connection between these two is really what drives my patients' high motivation to make change in their everyday life. But of course, there's always a little thing here and there where people fall back to habits, then their life happens, they're busy, they've got kids. Suddenly it's winter time as it is here, and suddenly we have to deal with jet like just one hour, but still. These small things that that kind of push. The motivation a little bit away, and then people unfortunately often fall back into old habits. And that's my biggest in my clinic is my biggest challenge. I can inform, I can knowledge, I can inspire, I can make plans for people, but There is a challenge there and I'm hoping that the next ten years will bring some light as how do we how do we just do what we want to do and and

Jeff Bland: Yeah.

Anne Catherine: making it easier. All this knowledge that we have that's expanding and growing every day, how do we how do we put it into action from day one is my some of my thinking. Jeff, what are you thinking when I when I feel challenged that way?

Jeff Bland: Well, I think we all are challenged 'cause life is complex and we're being hit with so much information and so many things each moment to make decisions. Our central nervous system is, you know, processing even now in this conversation, there's probably, you know, hundreds of different things that our mind is processing behind the scenes, to maintain function against a changing environment. And, you know, I think that what you're saying is giving a person the permission first of all, to not be perfect. Second, to give them the hopeful outlook that they can make a change that will improve their quality of life. And third, to support them that this change is going with like any change going to require repetition and practice and commitment. And it doesn't come just like taking a aspirin for the fever. You we have to recognize this is a twenty-four-seven, three sixty-five job called life. And we have to send the signals of who we want to be. We can reshape our body. We can reshape the whole way we look at and we can shape the reshape the way we feel. We can reshape the th w our sense of Success as a human being, if we are actively involved in recognizing that it's a value that is worth the change. And we have to make a decision that we're valuable enough as an individual to make that change. Because the other easy route. Is not leading us to where we want to be. It's leading us to s have sleep disturbances, mood swings, low energy, fatigue, depression, cognitive dysfunction. I mean all sorts of things that are are not desirable qualities that steal from us the full magic of being alive. It's a very short thing. We're here only for a century. We don't want to give it away.

Oskar: As we are rounding off here, there's a tradition on this podcast, just to there's three quick questions that I like to go through. And Jeff, what is your number one recommendation for someone building a business in this space or someone who's a practitioner in this space?

Jeff Bland: Well, my number one is the start with the education programs of DNA Life and and Nordic and I would say P L I Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute. You can find us on the web and you know, we have literally now hundreds of different educational programs that you can download. because I think education is power as Ca and Catherine said and y you can see what the opportunities are and how you want to access that information once you understand where the information is and how it affects your life. So I think it starts with education first.

Oskar: What's that one health habit that you never miss, no matter how busy life gets?

Jeff Bland: waking each morning to feel what a luxury it is to be alive one more day.

Oskar: Sounds like a mental thing.

Jeff Bland: It is. Because once once that's established, everything else comes after it. Everything else comes after your your a affirmation that you're worthy to be alive and each day is a gift. And you're gonna make something of that that you didn't expect, because it's a it's a new chapter you're writing or a new page in the chapter of your life that you're writing for the first time today.

Oskar: That was quite beautifully put for someone who's worked so close to science and results and tests and and data and and to have that as your first and most important thing is is important to to pass on to others listening. Where can people learn more about you, Jeff, and your work in pre order the nourished gene?

Jeff Bland: Yeah, thank you. It my colleague Trish Urey that's worked with me now f believe it or not for twenty-nine years. I can't believe anyone would be so patient to be working with me for that period of time. But Trish has just redone my website, jeffreybland.com, J E F F R E Y B L A N D dot com. And it it I think it's a beautifully done website, if I can say so. I mean I know it's my website, but she did such a great

Oskar: Yeah.

Jeff Bland: job of making it user friendly and providing all sorts of news to use that people can can can easily access. And there's also you can pre-order the book on that website as well, but it's Jeffreybland.com is a I think a great place to start.

Oskar: I think I can say why she's been able to work with you for so long, and that's because you truly are one of the kindest people in in this space, and I'm sure it's a huge pleasure to be to be working with you and also getting all that information from you every day. Jeff and then Catherine, thank you both for joining me here on the business of longevity. For listeners interested in genetic testing, including the upgraded DNA mind, we'll include links to Nordic Laboratories and DNA life in the show notes below. with information about ordering and education to any practitioner. And you also find the link to Jeff's forthcoming book, The Nourished Gene. Thank you very much and see you on the next one.

Jeff Bland: Oscar, thank you and Catherine, so appreciate it.

Anne Catherine: Thank you, Jeff. Have a lovely day over there even though it's getting autumn.

Jeff Bland: Yes.