Historical Foundations of Autism Spectrum Disorder and Autoimmune Disorders with Next Steps

Bernie Landes, MBA is President and Founder of Nutritional Products
Consulting Group. He has been a leading innovator in the nutritional products
industry since 1977. Over the years he has consistently been at the forefront
of major growth drivers in both the functional food and dietary supplement
sectors. Landes has researched the cardiovascular, immune and cognitive
function improvements associated with functional foods and botanicals. Today
his global consultancy focuses on growth strategy, clinical research, and
product development. Bernie Landes is currently an elected member of the
American College of Nutrition, a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the
Nutrition Business Journal and the President's Circle of Advisors of the
American Botanical Council. He has authored or co-authored multiple papers in
peer reviewed journals and was recently granted a one-of-a-kind United States
Patent focusing on women's wellness.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Hi, this is Pamela with Hello Health Encourage Your Wellness podcast. And today I have Bernie Landis. Bernie has an incredible background, MBA and founder of Nutritional Products Consulting Group. He has been consistently in the forefront of major growth drivers in both functional food and dietary supplement sectors. He is also editorial advisory board of nutrition business journal and president's circle of advisors for the American Botanical Council. And there's so much more in terms of all the things he's authored or co-authored over the years. And he even has a patent focusing on women's wellness. So thank you, Bernie, for being with us.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

My pleasure, Pamela. I assure you. We know each other a while. It's taken a while for podcasts to become popular and possible. So this is the evolution of what's been a very pleasant relationship that we can now do something about, which is good.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Absolutely. So you're doing a lot, especially around autism spectrum disorder, also known as ASD, around women's health, around underlying factors in terms of inflammation, gut brain access, and so many more things. Where do you want to start?

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Well, it it all starts at the beginning, back in 1977, when I got involved in the nutritional products industry, having spent a couple of years doing early work on virtual reality electronics, which was interesting but not necessarily supportive of a long life at all. So in the late 70s, I had an opportunity serendipitously to create a natural foods training table for the Women's Athletic Department at UCLA. And the premise behind that was that the quality of food based on the idea of getting the most nutrition with the fewest calories was a foundation for people to start pursuing an improved level of wellness. So we gathered all of the leading natural food companies in Southern California, my partner and I, and we fed the women's track team, they were national champions, for six months with the most nutrient-dense, high-quality nutritional foods that were available 50 years ago. They were pretty good. It was the Good Stuffed Bakery, it was Health Valley Foods, it was Albert's organic fruits and vegetables, the raw dairy from uh Altadina. And for six months, that was what the members of the team consumed. And uh it was a sort of a loose uh study, but we determined that all of them surpassed their previous best performance. And I think that nutrition had a lot to do with that. Um and the idea was if you're going to eat, that you want to get the most nutrition that you can from the food as a foundation. Because even then, uh, and more so today, people look at nutrition as being something they incorporate when they have a problem, a situational problem. And so then they take a bunch of supplements and eventually they kind of migrate back to, oh, maybe I better eat uh higher quality foods. Uh, it's always the last thing. We started off feeling it was the first thing. And if you think back, uh I'm older than you, so I get to uh reference history more. But in the late 1970s, nutrition was very simple. You avoided the three white poisons. That was white flour, white sugar, and salt. And if you did that, and whatever you ate came in a brown paper bag with no label, you were doing the right thing. And the uh pioneers of the nutrition industry were those individuals who were uh recommending that as a starting approach, whole foods. Everybody began at the beginning by improving the food. Over the years, everybody migrated to, well, you know, food's not that important because we can find some dietary supplement that's going to fix whatever is broken. Um so that was where I began. Uh after that, um, I had an opportunity again uh accidentally to start identifying those nutrients that were uh unique to humans because of our genetic inability to produce them where other animals did. So I had an opportunity to work and sort of I was always the uh the uh wayward son or the successor to the throne, or you know, the son that the founder uh never had and uh let me do whatever I wanted. So we went to work on vitamin C, which was unique because human beings don't make vitamin C where other animals do. And so when we are under stress where other vertebrates make all they need, human beings don't make anything. We're missing an enzyme. And so when we're under stress, instead of dealing with it and all of the resulting inflammation and problems that come from it, um we simply uh don't have that solution. So for a few years uh I worked on vitamin C. And the product called Emergency was something of a cult product and it evolved into something of a mainstream product. But the people had these remarkable benefits by enhancing their vitamin C status. In the mid-1980s, I went to work uh sort of in evolution with one of the uh providers from the women's uh uh nutritional training table called Health Valley Foods. And Health Valley Foods, and this this all ties together to where we want to go with uh autism. But in the mid-1980s, Health Valley Foods was the largest natural food company in the country. They had 700 different natural products focusing on nothing in particular other than they were natural foods. So I had everything from literally frozen chicken livers to TV dinners. Uh I uh met and got to know a fellow by the name of Robert Kowalski who wrote a book called The Eight-Week Cholesterol Cure, which identified soluble fiber from oat brand as being a unique approach to cardiovascular health. So for several years, soluble fiber and oat brand became the great panacea. This was in the late 1980s. This is before the explosion in autism, not autism related to nutrition and environment. As it turned out, one of the uh advantages of soluble fiber was to enhance gut health and to improve the uh production of these short-chain fatty acids that were part of the body's natural communication system between the gut and the brain. And so there were a lot of people who were now consuming these natural food diets, eating as much of this soluble fiber as they could get their hands on in every imaginable format, from breakfast cereal to uh to chili to uh to just about everything that you could put soluble fiber into. And they were having these remarkable positive outcomes. Uh, very, very rarely did we ever come across. I was sort of, again, the ordained successor to the throne and the son, the founder never had. So I would deal with the consumers. And we wrote uh three different cookbooks, we sold several million cookbooks on this idea of how to incorporate this soluble fiber into a healthy heart program. Never once in all those nine years that I was there did I ever take a call from a parent trying to deal with an autistic child. And we had millions and millions and millions of customers that we communicated with all the time. We had nine registered dietitians taking over a million telephone calls every year. And not once did we come across somebody who had a child who was autistic at that point. Nowadays it's uh on the spectrum. So that evolved uh over the years uh as most panaceas do to a focus on reducing fat in the diet, because eating fat would make you fat. But as it turned out, the types of fat that were in uh commercial foods were the types of fats that uh caused intestinal dysbiosis and inflammation. So again, people were making changes in their foundational diet that had an impact on improving the overall well-being of that gut brain axis, which is a it's a it's a nervous connection between the brain and the gut. Uh, it's a connection between the bacteria, the healthy bacteria in the gut, and the immune system. And when those things get dysfunctional, bad things happen. Well, along the same period of time, we had this massive increase in the consumption of uh psychological drugs, uh antidepressants, things of that sort, uh, a massive increase in the consumption of alcohol, in a change in the childbearing years. Um, and because the general population moved away from this foundation of healthy food and more towards mass-produced food, uh, the nutritional quality of the diet diminished. And as the nutritional quality of the diet diminished, likewise the quality of the gut environment diminished as well. So now you have women who are uh giving birth later in life in general, their uh microbiomes are generally less healthy and dysfunctional. When they give birth to a child through the normal birth canal, that is where the microbiome of the child is initially established. So you have a lower quality of birth microbiome for the children, the mass of children. At the same time, you have an increase in the number of cesarean births where children don't have access to any kind of a microbiome before uh they're born. And all of these things are impacting on the gut health of these children who are more and more over the last 20 or 30 years experiencing their own dysbiosis, which is what you've experienced, where their neurological development is impaired because this gut brain axis is not operating efficiently, they don't have the nutrients that they need, and as a result, uh they are impaired from what you would call normal neurological development. Well, if you put that into the environment of the emergence of social media and the internet and the lack of normal interaction between children that they would have before, and the expansion of the range of conditions that are sort of conglomerated in this spectrum disorder that used to not be a spectrum, it used to be the one thing. Uh, it's created a situation uh where you're seeing not only more children being uh evaluated for these issues, but there are more children being identified as having this spectrum of conditions that are multidimensional. And of course, then you put that together with the environmental challenges, with heavy metals and all kinds of environmental toxins, and it's this toxic soup that children's uh digestive systems and neurological systems are dealt with, and the answer has been to give them drugs. They're hyperactive, slow them down. Um, they have attention deficit, uh, they can't focus. So instead of turning off the computer and allowing them to have normal interactions, they are more highly focused on developing interactions over the computer, playing video games, having a more narrow um experience, all of which come together to make this uh a problem which is expanding almost exponentially. So the challenge is what in the world do you do about it? Um when uh we set up the program at UCLA all those years ago, we created a program called the Undiet. And the Undiet basically said, you know, uh there are no secrets to being healthy. All you have to do is eat healthy food, get a little bit of exercise, and make a decision that eating healthy and getting a little bit of exercise is worth the effort, and you can become healthy. Uh he wrote a bunch of articles that way, but uh until we had the women's uh uh nutrition program, we had this undiet seminar, and everywhere we went, people would ask us why they had invited us in the first place, because clearly we didn't know what we were talking about because we didn't have a diet. Uh so over these years, uh, and as I've had the opportunity, um, I've looked at finding ways to not only enhance the nutritional quality of more traditional foods, but also finding ways to overcome the uh genetically and environmentally and nutritionally uh derived shortfalls uh in humans. Um, and we can do it in a number of different ways. Um we did it with food at Health Valley Foods by creating superfoods. So instead of having a food that just uh, for example, we had fat-free cookies, and people thought fat-free cookies were wonderful, so they did a whole box, and they would go into um uh into a glucose uh I don't know what you would call it. They they they would have a blood sugar catastrophe. So we started amending our cookies with high chromium yeast so that the body would be able to uh to process the sugar. And we told people don't eat the whole box at the same time. Uh when I left there, we were working on creating a product called super raisins. Raisins are nothing more than dried little sugar cubes. So the idea was we would take raisins and we would infuse the raisins with those compounds that make grapes beneficial, like the skins and the seeds. And we would have super raisins. Uh over the years, uh, there were other opportunities to find things that could be put into a mass diet. Uh, in the early 2000s, uh, a colleague and I went down to Brazil because we wanted to investigate what was going on with this berry called asai berries. And it was interesting because the asai berries were one of the most nutritionally dense foods that were ever discovered. And the palm trees lived on the banks of the Amazon, and the root systems fed off of the riverbed that half the year was under the water, feeding off of everything that had deteriorated and washed down the river, the um uh the Amazon River, and half the year it was dried out and exposed to the air. And the root systems of these trees were bright orange. And when we took the um the berries and we analyzed them in the laboratory, we found out that asai berries knew something about survival in a harsh environment that humans could learn from. They would produce these antioxidants, and there's a point to this. Uh they would produce these antioxidants that had never been seen in a food before. So all of a sudden, asai berries became very popular, and juice made with asay became the next big thing, and millions and millions and millions of dollars in revenue were generated, and children were drinking this aai juice. And wouldn't you know it? The call started coming in from parents with autistic children. My God, I gave this juice to my autistic child and they're behaving normally. Well, what was that about? It was about these antioxidants concentrated in that juice dealing with the inflammation that had impacted on their neurological development. Well, over time, the government of Brazil decided that there was a better use for the uh the shores of the Amazon, like to grow uh soybeans. So they started taking down all of those asay trees palms and moved to a different type of asay palm that grew in the dry areas. And wouldn't you know it, the chemicals that were so beneficial in the asay berries that were growing on the riverbank disappeared. So all of a sudden, what used to be this wonderful solution, this hyper uh concentrated nutrition source, diminished and the call stopped coming in. So you see over time that uh the food supply, getting the most nutrients from foods that have unique nutritional characteristics is part of the foundational bedrock of having healthy mothers, certainly healthy fathers, um, but healthy mothers who can give birth to healthy children and impart a healthy immune system and digestive system to their children that are coming along and being born. When that disappears, these problems begin to escalate. Another interesting thing, and pardon me for going on about this because it's it's a sore spot, as the leading companies in the health foods industry have grown uh exponentially, they have also been acquired by mainstream food companies. And the mandate for mainstream food companies is spend more money on advertising to get more people to eat your food. Well, the problem with that is the marketing dollars have to come from somewhere. And invariably they come from the quality of the food. So as more people eat these so-called health foods of diminished quality, the challenge on the nutrient density of the diet has also been impacted, which is why we now have the standard American diet, which we call the SAD diet. Almost every everything that people uh consume uh has gone down in cost and down in nutritional value as more people are encouraged to consume them. That's why the the the school lunch program uh includes candy and soda. Um It's cheap, you know, you you can give kids candy and soda, and what the heck. Um, now there's some hope that this will be uh diminished. But um, at the end of the day, it all goes back to the same foundational issue, which is children are not starting off with a good foundation for their gut and their neurological development and their immune system. And because of that, and because the approach has been to eliminate the systems by increasing the uh uh the reliance on pharmaceuticals, the problem has gotten worse and worse and worse. So, from what, one in a thousand to one in thirty children uh are now impacted by this. And I think the answer is, and on my uh LinkedIn uh page, I have a thing called the nutrition continuum. And it starts on the left with foods that are foundational and evolves to foods that have even greater nutritional density, and then somewhere down the road, there in the middle is some basic foundational dietary supplements to make sure you get the basic uh vitamins and minerals that you need. Unfortunately, most of the supplement companies don't start off in the middle, they start off trying to be more like drug companies, and the drug companies are trying to be more like supplement companies, and so the whole focus has been don't solve the underlying problem, solve the situation, and then if you make the symptom go away, the foundation doesn't matter. Uh, it's like buying furniture for your upstairs bedroom when you haven't poured a foundation for your house. Uh it doesn't work very well. So uh that that's what uh has been obviously the focus of your work. And as um I've been able to um I've uh made it the uh purpose of my work to find ways to get foundational nutrition more into the mainstream. And there are a lot of ways to do this. Um there are certain foods, for example, that have known nutritional value, but you have to eat a lot of them to get the benefit. So um it turns out that the most uh widely consumed food on the planet is rice. Uh over a trillion pounds a year is consumed of white rice. But the the uh brand that gives it all of its nutrition, there's only a few hundred million pounds a year compared to a few trillion pounds of white rice, most of which goes to animal feed or goes to the cosmetic industry. But if you were to be able to stabilize the rice bran, which you can, and consume enough of it to get a benefit, you'd have to eat a whole lot of rice bran, you know, probably 15 to 20 grams a day of rice bran. So you'd have a whole big bowl of rice bran, and that that's not practical. So uh what we've been able to do in a couple of cases is to amend the rice bran with the element of the rice bran that gives it its benefit. It's called gamma rhizinol, and then amend that combination with the micronutrient that the body is designed to use to control inflammation, it's called ergothionine. You put it all together, and now you have super rice bran. And the super rice bran, you can consume a teaspoon a day instead of consuming a bowl of rice bran. So I think that we're going to see that hopefully as the whole uh American diet begins to trend towards a foundational, uh nutrient-dense diet. Uh, and hopefully, as the cost of doing that for the average consumer and the availability of those products improve, uh, we'll see a change in the basic foundation. I'm not that optimistic that the average American is going to move in that direction. We have to make it simple for them, which is why this focus on probiotics has become sort of the next big thing.

SPEAKER_01 26:55

Yeah, and you know, and thank you for providing this really nice holistic way of thinking about how in the world we got here. Um, the MD neurologist that really helped me gain my hands around what the heck am I going to do next, explained to me how you can undo all these symptoms by fixing the gut and helping the body detox.

SPEAKER_00 27:20

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 27:20

But it's hard and it takes time and it takes diligence in what you eat. So starting with getting rid of gluten and sugar for a period of time, like a good six to 12 months, because it takes that long for the bad bacteria in the gut to just calm down, and gluten turns into sugar in the gut. Sugar is obviously sugar. And those two simple things alone, in addition to making sure that you're getting a couple of organic prebiotics, a host of probiotics that are good for the gut brain access, as well as making sure that you've got things that are antioxidant in nature, helping the body detox, because if you can't detox properly, and there's, you know, for people that have autoimmune disorders and are on the spectrum, most of them have uh MTHFR, which means they need methylated vitamins, otherwise, they can't absorb them, they can't detox properly. And so until we really start teaching people about if you can do these three things, you can still go out to dinner, you can still, you know, have that glass of wine, you can still, but in the meantime, you know, and and you and you did the staggering stats about ASD. In addition, one in every five has an autoimmune disorder. And those many times couple with nerve damage, um, neurological symptoms, motor symptoms, vocal symptoms. I mean, this all really ties together. And I was on a call earlier today with a group, and they asked if I would help them because they said we need more people speaking like you because they don't understand the fact that this can be undone. And literally before we know it, everyone is gonna have something and it's gonna be too late. And um, so you know, it's just kind of hitting that alarm bell and thinking to yourself, what can I do for my family? What's reasonable? What doesn't cost a fortune? Um, what symptoms can be undone? What symptoms am I willing to live with? And really, those symptoms are caused by inflammation. So, what is pissing your body off so bad? And you can figure it out through taking a look at your environment at home, um, through your cleaning supplies, through your laundry detergent, through the carpet in your house. Not everybody is sensitive to these things, but some people are. And so it's just kind of taking a look at your own situation and saying, these are the things I can control and these are the things I'm gonna try and change, and let's see if it makes a difference. And then if you really want to get aggressive, you can do certain lab testing and find out if you have certain infections or low-grade inflammation from certain things, and then you can couple that with additional supplementation if you need it or nutrition. And um, my whole point of getting into all this was to help people understand that they can make a difference and they can influence their lives positively. It's just uh it's gonna take a little bit of work.

SPEAKER_00 30:14

It it will. Um the average American only wants to know what time is it. They don't want to know how to build a watch because they they can't understand that. They want to know that who's telling them what time it is is a qualified watchmaker so that they can follow the simple instruction to do this. Inflammation is probably the you know the great demon of human health. It's the dem it's it's an immune response.

SPEAKER_01 30:46

But they don't talk about it. They don't talk about your body's inflamed and what it might be inflamed from. They say, oh, you're having that symptom. They're not saying, oh, that organ is inflamed and that has a name, and we either can treat that symptom or we can understand why it's inflamed.

SPEAKER_00 31:00

So what you did is you made it very simple. The time is stop eating gluten, okay? Stop eating so much sugar. Okay, that's that's not so hard to do. And give your your gut something that it needs to be able to restore itself. It started off with probiotics, that was great. People said eat more yogurt, uh or drink kefir and that that's pretty easy. I can eat so.

SPEAKER_01 31:26

Try and eat the yogurt without all the sugar. If you take a look at a at a Yoglake container, that's uh that's mind-boggling, but that's a whole nother thing.

SPEAKER_00 31:32

You know, that you you can even uh make yogurt uh if you have a coffee strainer into sour cream. Uh simply put your yogurt into the strainer and it comes out the bottom the next morning as sour cream. And you you can do that, and it's it's pretty simple. Um the other things are likewise pretty simple if you do it one at a time. So probiotics was that was the first. Went from eating yogurt to having the bacteria that are beneficial, and people had uh really a rapid and positive response. Then somebody said, Wow, now you're taking those bacteria and things are a little better. What if we fed the bacteria with the probiotics? So it turns out that some of these soluble fibers are very fun food for the intestinal bacteria. So then probiotics came along. And then somebody said, wow, now that you're doing probiotics and prebiotics, what what are those little bacteria producing now that you got them down there? And that became the beginning of postbiotics. So now you got all three of them. It turns out that there's a couple of other steps in this there that eventually would evolve. One is when the bacteria aren't living anymore, does that mean you should just discard their uh their remnants? Turns out there's some really good stuff in those bacterial bodies that you want to have. So they're now deactivated by heat. And eventually there's going to be something evolved called the phageome. And the phageome uh is the population of what's called bacteriophages, which exist in your gut, that are these little viral particles. I call them kamikaze drones, because they exist exactly for the purpose and only for the purpose of finding bad bacteria like E. coli or salmonella or Listeria, going and landing on them, turning them into immediate bacteriophage factories, which they explode and then wash out, they leave. If there are no more bad bacteria, the phages just simply leave through the back door. So nobody really needs to understand that. But the logical evolution is that as more people are uh getting benefit from this expanded range of products, the marketplace is now beginning to offer these expanded products that are very simple to understand. They don't tell people you need to understand how we're building the watch. You just need to buy a Rolex instead of a Timex, because you can throw a Timex off the roof and it'll keep on ticking even though it's taken a licking. But you probably want a Rolex because it'll tell you exactly what time it is, and that's what you want uh for your gut. And then when the communication is restored, and it's simple. I mean, gluten is an inflammatory uh protein. So stop eating gluten. That that's okay. You you can you can do that. Um stop having 150 pounds of sugar every month in ways you can't even imagine. The average American consumes between nine and ten pounds of chemicals added to their food every year. Well, if you have a bucket and you you've got 140 pounds of sugar and nine pounds of uh chemicals, and you start lugging that around, that that's a lot of a lot of weight that your body has to detoxify. So I think as as people begin to understand and become open to these kinds of simple analogies and visual concepts, they're gonna say, okay, fine. Uh the problem is that sometimes when you're replacing sugar with artificial sweeteners, your brain's sitting up there saying, wait a second, I'm sensing sweet, but I'm not getting anything down below, so you better keep eating more. Um, because I'm thinking there's supposed to be something that goes.

SPEAKER_01 35:55

And I'm not sure that those those sweeteners that are not sugar not going to come out later as a problem either. You know, I remember the 80s and 90s, and you know, nowadays we're like, yeah, that probably wasn't a good idea. And yeah, I wonder now if in the future if we might say, you know, that wasn't really great for us either.

SPEAKER_00 36:11

So but there is hope because there are companies, not in the US, but throughout uh the Western Hemisphere, who have figured out that if they grow organic sugarcane and they press the juice and then dry it, they can retain all of the natural uh antioxidants and anti-inflammatories that naturally occur in sugar cane. And the sugar response is only about half what you have with other sugars. So there are ways to diminish these things. And as you know, as the world wakes up to it, thankfully, we have some people in the government now who uh seem to be open to this. They're they're focusing on artificial colors and preservatives. That's part of the nine pounds. Uh they need to focus on the 140 pounds and all the other stuff that doesn't have any value. But I think we're at an optimistic time. And voices like yours, Pamela, uh, that were sort of like um you know, a uh a distant voice in the night have become much more um uh audible and well received. And I think it's it's a good thing. That's why I think your message uh and the the way that you've chosen to communicate it and the persistence, because uh you know innovation usually used to be 25 years between innovation and mass acceptance. Now it's still 10, and maybe it's moving to five. But we've known five years or so. Uh and uh it it's it's taken five years for you to become an overnight sensation. There you go. And you you you know your son, how old is your son now?

SPEAKER_01 38:12

He is uh well, I I try not to, I I have two two boys, 22 and 18. Uh so he's one of those, but he's well beyond uh, he's a straight A student elite athlete, he's doing great.

SPEAKER_00 38:23

So uh and where would he have been not for what you persisted in uh in finding a solution for all those years ago? Yeah, uh he could just be a statistic. So, you know, I I have to say, um, and I don't want to belabor this, but over the years, um, as I've been in the nutrition industry, I've had a chance to see children who were born to parents who followed these high nutrition diets, uh, who consumed and fed their children organic foods and nutrient-dense foods. And the children are just different. You see these kids and they're different. They have uh a healthy glow to them, they have a life force, if you will, that is extraordinary uh compared to their peers. And you know, you just hope that the lessons that you learn and others like that have learned in raising your children carry forward for them so that they can continue to live their lives and spread that message the same way. I'm guessing yes.

SPEAKER_01 39:36

Uh I hope so too. Um, can't believe it's nearly an hour. Um, and so we could go on for so long, and maybe we'll have you on again, and we can dig into so many more things around certain ingredients and certain foods.

SPEAKER_00 39:52

One thing I would suggest in closing is that there are some pretty simple to understand articles and papers that are out there. I've sent them to you. Yes. Um, I I think your ability to um to uh simplify those messages into uh something that's, if you will, digestible and be a continuous voice for the migration from solutions to foundations, um, I I think is going to uh to make your impact all the greater. Um I think your book is going to start seeing some uh significant uh increase, uh, and maybe it will uh follow with a new book. Um there's a lot to say. There's a lot to say, but there's very few people who have a voice to say it. You know, so you do, uh, and that that's why I'm thrilled that you know uh we've kept in touch over the years, uh, and that now it seems like we have an opportunity to uh to collaborate in ways that can support your message in ways that uh will resonate uh and provide solutions that are actually the right kinds of solutions rather than the next great pill. So uh thank you for spending an hour. Your ears will return to their normal configuration shortly, I promise you.

SPEAKER_01 41:29

Thank you so much, Bernie. Love having you on.

SPEAKER_00 41:32

Same here, Pamela. It's great to be here.