This is Everyday Wellness, a podcast dedicated to helping you achieve your health and wellness goals and provide practical strategies that you can use in your real life.

And now here are your host, clinical health psychologist Dr Kelly Donahue and nurse practitioner

Cynthia Thurlow. We are so excited today to have Dr Bland he is known as

the father of functional medicine, a medical approach that

focuses on the personalized prevention and treatment of chronic diseases.

Over the past 35 years, Dr. Bland has traveled more than 6 million miles teaching more than 100,000 health care

practitioners in the United States, Canada, and more than 40 other countries about functional

medicine. He has been a university

biochemistry professor, a research director at the Linus Pauling Institute of

Science and Medicine, the co-founder of the Institute for Functional Medicine in 1991 and the founder and

president of the personalized lifestyle medicine institute. He has authored more than a

hundred scientific publications and 11 books for the health care professional and health consumer.

He lives in Bainbridge, Island, Washington with his wife Susan and near his three sons and their families while pursuing his hobbies of boating, surfing,

scuba diving, and a lifelong passion for learning. Welcome, Jeff.

Well, thank you, Cynthia, so much. What a pleasure to be with you today.

I can't tell you, the first time we met. I could immediately feel your energy and your your social activism and your leadership. It comes across immediately.

Oh, thank you so much and I remember

telling Kelly that I came back from Mindshare and I said you're not going to believe this.

He was sitting at dinner randomly next to Jeff Blaine and we just struck up a

conversation and I was so impressed because our conversation centered around your family.

I was so humbled to be in your presence and to be talking to you and then to recognize that you lead with your love and passion for your family.

That embodies everything that you do and all your decisions and just how brilliant your mind is and how much you have really changed the way that I practice

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