The Root Cause Medicine Podcast is created by Rupa Health, the best way to order, track & manage results from 30+ lab companies in one place for free. The Root Cause Medicine Podcast is a weekly one-on-one conversation with renowned medical experts, specialists, and pioneers who are influencing the way we look at our health and wellbeing. This week we’re joined by Dr. Jeffrey Bland, aka the “Father of Functional Medicine.” In this episode, Dr. Jeffrey Bland talks about immunometabolism, the long-term effects of COVID-19 on our immune system, chronic fatigue syndrome, your cardiovascular health, and much more. Dr. Bland is an internationally recognized leader in the nutritional and functional medicine field. He co-founded The Institute for Functional Medicine in 1991 and is known to many as the “Father of Functional Medicine.” In the early 1980s, Dr. Bland was hand-selected by two-time Nobel Laureate Dr. Linus Pauling to serve as Director of Nutritional Research at the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine. Dr. Bland has authored several best-selling books about nutritional medicine and over 120 peer-reviewed research publications. He is also the CEO KinDex Pharmaceuticals, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of Bering Select Seafoods Company, and Founder and President of Big Bold Health and the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institue.. Dr. Bland is a fellow of both the American College of Nutrition, where he is a certified nutrition specialist and the Association for Clinical Biochemistry. Key Takeaways: - Understanding immune rejuvenation About ten percent of individuals who experienced COVID ended up with some form of consequences, otherwise called long COVID, which presents itself with a myriad of different signs and symptoms, including foggy brain, sleep disturbances, behavior changes, depression, respiratory-related issues, fatigue, and others. Some people describe it as the immune system being scarred. However, these scars are, to some extent, reversible, and scientists call the process immune rejuvenation. - Weak immune system and COVID-19 In terms of health outcomes, from the exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the United States did more poorly than any other developed country worldwide due to the population's less resilient immune system, which was set up to be more vulnerable to COVID. As a result, many people still experience COVID-related symptoms two years after getting over the infection. - The chronic fatigue syndrome Dr. Bland states that the HIV/AIDS era, followed by the chronic fatigue syndrome era in the eighties and nineties, had the same presentation of symptoms that we're seeing with long COVID. Today, doctors and scientists recognize chronic fatigue syndrome as an illness that results in injury to the mitochondria in our cells, which lowers our energy-producing capabilities. Generally, our immune system is energetically hungry when active and can use up to fifty percent of our metabolic energy. So, when affected, our body resilience gets low. - Post-COVID cardiac effects Other than the pulmonary effects on respiration, breathing, and energy and cognitive dysfunction like brain fog, there are also various cardiac effects. People with heart diseases have inflammatory conditions in their coronary arteries and vessels that conduct blood and immune system cells throughout the body, and this represents an inflammatory issue of their immune systems. So the immune system connects to metabolism, which then connects to your heart.