The Health of People and The Planet with Dr. Zach Bush
Today, I am speaking with Dr. Zach Bush, on all things gut and planetary health, the current state of our health as a society, and so much more.
Zach Bush MD is a physician specializing in internal medicine, endocrinology and hospice care. He is an internationally recognized educator and thought leader on the microbiome as it relates to health, disease, and food systems. Dr Zach founded *Seraphic Group and the nonprofit Farmer’s Footprint to develop root-cause solutions for human and ecological health. His passion for education reaches across many disciplines, including topics such as the role of soil and water ecosystems in human genomics, immunity, and gut/brain health. His education has highlighted the need for a radical departure from chemical farming and pharmacy, and his ongoing efforts are providing a path for consumers, farmers, and mega-industries to work together for a healthy future for people and planet.
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TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00.090] - Kayla Barnes
Hello, Doctor. So it's such a pleasure to have you here with me today. We're going to talk about a bunch of amazing topics. So thank you for joining.
[00:00:08.140] - Dr. Zach Bush
I'm very glad to be with you. Thank you so much.
[00:00:10.810] - Kayla Barnes
Absolutely. So you have an incredibly impressive medical background. I mean, you're a triple board certified physician, and I would love to hear about where you started, what you learned about the medical system, and how you've kind of really turned that on its head and what you're thinking now about health overall. Can you walk us through that?
[00:00:33.940] - Dr. Zach Bush
Yeah, it's a winding path there. So started actually in engineering when I was going to college, planning to do an engineering at the University of Colorado, and then decided to take a year off at the last minute and went and worked in the Philippines for six months with a group of international midwives birthing babies. And that was a radically new experience for me. I'd never done anything in the healthcare industry before, and that experience very quickly got me so passionate about the literal miracle of life itself that I felt like anything short of being involved in the healthcare industry seemed boring at that point. So I had been going into robotics as a concept, but watching infants move was infinitely more fascinating than any robot I could imagine. So went after the medical career at that point, and it came out of this holistic, midwife free birthing clinic kind of experience to what I could not have imagined having no exposure to the medical system previous to that was this mechanized system of technologies as a solution for human health, and the primary technologies were both in surgery. I had worked a lot with my hands growing up, building houses, building cars, and all kinds of stuff.
[00:01:55.390] - Dr. Zach Bush
And so I thought, I'd go with my hands. I could probably do surgery. I didn't think I was very smart school book smart, so I was thinking I had to do something with my hands to be effective. So I was going down that kind of technology of surgery route, and then as soon as I really got into my third and fourth year of medical school, realized the operating room was actually extremely boring for me, and so kind of shifted gears and decided to do something more in the intellectual space. And medical school has gone actually quite well for me at that point, and I found out I could actually be intellectually intelligent. And so I went after that avenue into interim medicine, which is kind of the foundation for adult general care. It's the foundation for things like cardiology pulmonology, all the sub specialties of medicine. And so I did three year internship and fellowship residency and internal mess. And then I subsequently got really passionate about the endocrine system as kind of the only field that I could find within this kind of, I would say, highly tiered or highly differentiated belief systems. About health.
[00:03:06.220] - Dr. Zach Bush
Cardiology is just looking at the heart. Pulmonology is just looking at the lungs gastroenterology, the gut. And I found endocrinology, which I thought was fascinating because I was looking at the entire body and how all these systems coordinated one another behavior through hormonal communication and feedback loops. And so I got excited about that holistic kind of nature of the field and got into endocrinology. And it has a second half of that, especially called metabolism, which is my entry point into bacteria. The mitochondria live inside of our cells are small little specialized bacteria that thrive and reproduce within the human cell environment. And the typical human cell will have anywhere from 200 to 2000 little mitochondria floating in there, which is much different than a textbook of biology. When you look it up, there's like two or three little mitochondria and they say this is the power plant of the cell, and it's actually not even part of the human cell as the textbook would suggest. It's actually completely different species has its own genome replicates within the human cell, independent of human cell reproduction or duplication. So I got into these little microbes and ended up doing basic science laboratory research and chemotherapy development, focused on these mitochondria as a target for increasing the energetics in cancer.
[00:04:28.630] - Dr. Zach Bush
Cancer is inherently a low energy state, which leads to a slow mechanism of repair, which leads to accumulation of genetic damage that's unrepaired, which leads to the cancer of phenotype. The other feature of a cancer cell is isolation. So as energy drops and you lose connection to the other cells around it, you can't get light energy from one cell to the next, which is typically passage by these fiber optic cables that run between human cells called gap junctions. And so to become a cancer cell, you have to have all the gap junctions cut from all of this under surrounding cells, so that you become isolated. If the gap junctions are intact, then all of the cells share resources. And even a damaged cell can have an energetic repair system fueled from neighboring cells. So you have to have both collapse of the metabolism of your mitochondria and you have isolation in cancer. So that kind of led me down this huge avenue of the microbes. And at this time, late 2000s, we were starting to discover that the microbiome was the root of all chronic disease. So I left university in 2010, started nutrition center, and in that journey on my way into soil science and microbes in the soil, and then started my own basic science laboratory.
[00:05:44.500] - Dr. Zach Bush
In the last twelve years, we've been studying the relationship between microbiome and soil air water systems around us, and the relationship to those microbes within our own gut, as well as the microbes within ourselves and mitochondria. So that's been my journey into environmental health. And to answer your first question, which was how has your perspective changed? I think I really had the perspective that human life was specific to our species as the term would suggest. Now I see human life as being a description of a cooperative ecosystem of thousands of species that are cocreating the environment and energetic detoxification and ultimately the regeneration of a human body.
[00:06:30.790] - Kayla Barnes
I love it and we have a lot to unpack with just that story that you told us. So I want to go back real quick because I never covered this topic but I know a little bit about it. When you talk about cancer being a low energy state, first of all, is there any way to measure our energy? Do we have any idea? Like what if we have low energy but we don't even realize it? And then what are some potential ways that we can improve that?
[00:06:57.260] - Dr. Zach Bush
Yeah, fantastic questions. So there are some mechanisms by this and you don't need to measure it to know it in some ways. So if you have any chronic inflammation of any you have a low energy state. So that's your own laboratory within your body giving a very detailed report as to where you're lacking energetic reserve in your body. And we tend to find energetic reserve depleted in specific areas of the body rather than a complete organ system shut down. And so that energetic pattern where you carry an energetic deficiency tends to correlate very well with thousands of years of Chinese medicine and other areas, other traditional healing practices that studied the effect of emotions on biology. And so this is to say that emotional trauma and stored unprocessed emotion leads to the vulnerability of energetic depletion in specific areas of the body and then that then manifests in biological dysfunction, chronic inflammation, cellular isolation, as mentioned, cancer, things like that. And you develop this mismatch between your rate of repair and your rate of injury. And when that rate of repair drops low, then that daily activity, sunshine, food, contaminated water, all the things we're exposed to on a given day suddenly becomes injurious at a rate that you can't keep up with.
[00:08:25.910] - Dr. Zach Bush
That's your biologic map of where you're having issues. We do use in our clinic over the last decade a camera that was developed in Russia that actually indirectly measures the energy field, very specifically per organ system. And this camera is cooling gas diffusion or distribution velocity camera. And it takes a half second video of a plasma discharge off the tips of each finger. Ten fingers you do it with without filters. You end up with 20 finger maps that then are overlaid with the reflexology map of fingers. So you can actually see the exact organ systems that are being affected by your imprint or your pattern of stress, emotional trauma, et cetera that are depleting the specific organ systems. So it can be powerful to see those images but in the end your biology is probably already telling you the pattern, the advantage of the cameras. Sometimes you can see that pattern a few years before, the biology would manifest into a pain or dysfunction within the organ systems carrying the stress.
[00:09:29.740] - Kayla Barnes
Yeah, I think that's really powerful and another reason to really pay attention to your blood biomarkers, right. If you see your inflammation levels creeping up, it's important to take action. So thank you for describing that. I want to ask you a question, and I've never really asked this before, but in general as a whole, we have such a massive issue with health right now. I mean, you know, I don't think we need to say all the statistics, but people that are metabolically healthy, it's like 12%. Obesity is through the roof, and mental health depression is the number one cause of disability worldwide. So what do you think this is? Why is this happening right now? Do you think it's just the food or you work a lot with the soil? What's your opinion on this?
[00:10:18.940] - Dr. Zach Bush
Yeah, definitely an environmental injury. It's impossible that it's a genetic predisposition just because things have changed so rapidly. So genetic patterns of disease are very stable from generation to generation, whereas environmental injuries can rear their heads within months to years, which is what we've seen happen throughout the entire chronic disease epidemic that began really in spades in the 1990s, but it was already starting to be sensed in the 1980s when, like you said, the metabolic symptoms started to become apparent. We started to develop obesity on levels we had never seen before in the mid 1980s. And then by we had national campaigns against obesity, we were realizing we had a huge crisis on our hands, which of course, was followed by diabetes. And then by the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was obvious we had a cancer epidemic. And we had an epidemic of neurodegeneration Alzheimer's in our women, park, Parkinson's and our males, and in our children, attention deficit hyperactivity disorders and the autism spectrum disorders. All of that occurred between 96 and 2006 with this near j curve algorithmic increase in these conditions within our population. And I was telling again that it had to be an environmental injury because it was across a whole host of genetic background, socioeconomic as well as socioeconomic pathways.
[00:11:46.000] - Dr. Zach Bush
So it was really speaking to a very severe injury. So I got interested in this in 2010 in particular, when we started to uncover the relationship of soil to human health and the microbiome of the soil starting to predict nutrition density and the food medicines based in our foods and all this. So I started looking at the overlap between soil impact and cancer rates in the United States. And remarkably, we saw this complete reversal of our cancer map in the United States between 1996 and 2006. So in that decade, we went from a historic map that had been accurate and consistent for nearly a century of tracking it, which was the vast majority of cancers were happening in the northeast, a brand new England, and there was a pocket also up in the northwest in regards to prostate cancer. But across all the north was always our highest rates of cancer as a population. And then in this decade, between 1996 and 2006, we suddenly created this huge new epicenter of cancer. That cancer actually went up rapidly across the whole country. But the new hotspot that had never been there before was the deep south, louisiana, Mississippi, even out into Atlanta, Georgia, Tennessee, that whole region.
[00:13:18.390] - Dr. Zach Bush
And so we had a huge explosion of cancer in this single region. And the cancer rates were so explosive that it was really put us ahead of Chernobyl or any other major environmental injury that we've seen in the last recorded history. And so this is a rate of cancer that has never been imagined before. Cancer alley, which is a description of the last 90 miles of the Mississippi river between Baton Rouge and Orleans, now by 2006 have the highest rates of cancer in the entire world. And they have continued to go up steadily since 2006. So this is a place where you'll typically find somebody on their fifth cancer. They had colon cancer at a young age, got treated and developed breast cancer, and they got treated, and now they have two skin cancers and they just got diagnosed with breast cancer, whatever it is. So it's just like, it's unbelievable amount of cancer in this region. And so I was working on trying to figure out what was the diabolical event that had happened in soil or microbiome between those two dates. And the obvious thing was Mississippi river being the carrier for this agent, because the Mississippi river seemed to sit right at the epicenter of this cancer epidemic.
[00:14:32.350] - Dr. Zach Bush
And as it turns out, in 1996, we developed genetically modified corn and soybean and number of other crops, and we genetically modified those crops to be roundup ready. Roundup is an herbicide that carries an active green ingredient called glyphosate. And glyphosate is a potent antibiotic in soil systems. It kills both the microbes as well as the macro life like earthworms and nematodes and some of these vital functions there. So you're killing bacteria, you're killing fungi and mycelium, you're killing nematodes and earthworms with every spring. Glyphosate happens to be a water soluble toxin, so it's being carried into the runoff from farms into these river systems, and also into the gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi river. And over that ten years, not only did we see explosion of all chronic disease, especially cancer, we also saw a complete devastation of ecosystems in that region. So we killed fisheries and fish with populations throughout the Mississippi. And ultimately we created a massive dead zone in the gulf of Mexico that's larger than our state of Connecticut now. And the threatened zone that sits around that dead zone is now the size of Texas. And so we have this massive devastating effect there in that dead zone.
[00:15:50.650] - Dr. Zach Bush
Every year, as the farming season reaches its peak in mid summer, we see so much devastation to the microbiome that we get these huge algae blooms that happen throughout the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico. And the algae consumes all oxygen, puts everything into an anaerobic without oxygen state, and this kills even more fish in life. But it's an effort for these algae to clean up toxins and to try to bring balance to nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon resources within the system. So it's an adaptive, detox kind of effort from the algae. The result is death of macro species, coral reefs in the Gulf, all the way through. That algae bloom has gotten larger and larger with every passing year, and I believe it's 2019 or 2020. That Gulf of Mexico algae bloom left the Gulf of Mexico, which had happened a few times, but reached all the way to the coast of Africa for the first time in those years. So we have a devastating dead zone now that is extending way out across the ocean and hitting the west coast of Africa, right near the Ivory Coast. So this is an extraordinary story of devastation of microbiomes through chemical farming, and it has correlated very accurately to the advent of chronic disease.
[00:17:09.910] - Dr. Zach Bush
Our basic science lab has been focused on causation correlation. Is there an obvious with the work that we've done in public health mapping? And so we set out to really show the exact mechanism by which glyphosate causes the cancer epidemic and rest. And we've been able to show that very clearly that it has to do with cutting the tight junctions and cap junctions that I had mentioned earlier and creating cellular isolation across different organ systems.
[00:17:37.240] - Kayla Barnes
Wow, I'm so happy you bring up glyphosate. I was pretty young. I mean, I learned about glyphosate when I was like 18, and I was like, oh, I'm all nongmo. That was kind of the beginning of my journey. But at the time, so many people had seemed to think that I was a little bit odd because they were saying, well, GMOs are going to save the world, and this is something that's acceptable and fast forward, I believe, now in California, right, it has to be labeled. So finally, it seems like everything takes like 30 years. They introduce something, it takes about 30 years. All the people that are saying that it's really harmful are labeled as, like, odd. And that's where we are now. I think I've read some statistics around glyphosate, like urine tested in Americans. Isn't it something like 97% of Americans have unreasonable level, basically, of glyphosate in their urine?
[00:18:32.590] - Dr. Zach Bush
Yes. In fact, we did a clinical trial looking at that. We did a clinical trial with our dietary supplements that kind of function as an antidote to this injury of glyphosate at cell level. And so we were studying glyphosate in different compartments of the body blood, urine, saliva, etc. And in that study, with 44 people enrolled, we couldn't find a single person that didn't test positive for glyphosate and urine. And this was a pool of patients that were educated towards Lysate and were trying to avoid it in their diet. And so it is unfortunately impossible to avoid this chemical. Now. It's because it's a water soluble toxin. So you can imagine 85% of the LifeSave being sprayed in our country is collected by all the tributaries that ultimately become the Mississippi River and that huge pool of glyphosate, which is about £300 million of 300 £0 of where are we at? No, it's right £300 million of glyphosate annually. Globally. We're at about 2 billion kg, or four and a half billion pounds globally of this water soluble chemical. And as it's going through river systems and out into the ocean, everything is obviously transpiring or evaporating.
[00:19:46.480] - Dr. Zach Bush
You get evaporation of water, and so you end up with 85% of the air test of the United States now testing positive for glyphosate. 85% of our rainfall testing positive for glyphosate. So even if you're eating from your backyard garden and practicing purely organic inputs, you're going to find glyphosate in the water table there. And the runoff from the area around you is really devastating, too. If you're watering from your municipal water system, for example, you're going to have a high amount of glyphosate likely there, especially if you live, like, near a golf course or other environments that are extremely high in chemical treatment. So agriculture, golf courses, even, unfortunately, parks and rack and Department of Motor Vehicles all use extremely high levels of glyphosate to kill weeds along fence lines, along power lines, along highway sides. They use many times more concentrations of lifestyle because they're trying to just clear cut an area than farmers do. Farmers know if they ever applied, they kill the soil so thoroughly they can't grow anything there.
[00:20:54.360] - Kayla Barnes
So what can we do? I mean, I live in extremely regimented life. We're chatting briefly. My angle is to have like, a biodynamic farm somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. But it sounds like even at that rate, how can we protect ourselves?
[00:21:11.140] - Dr. Zach Bush
Yeah. Fortunately, nature has a solution to absolutely every crazy things human has done. And nature has this kind of grace that's built into her that allows for an extraordinary amount of regenerative capacity at the cellular level as well as at the environmental level. We developed in 2012 some science and ultimately a product line around these small carbon molecules made by bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and soil systems. And so we began extracting these diverse carbon molecules from fossil soils that data back to the previous extinction, kind of the most burden soils the Earth has ever seen, teamed about 60 million years ago. So we're using fossil soil from 60 million years ago. That's sterile. It doesn't have any bacteria, fungi left in it. Obviously, it's now a fossil but you've got enormous rich deposits of these carbon molecules that function as a liquid circuit board or communication network between human cells. And so that's what we developed in 2012. So we've been studying this impact of diverse ecosystems or diverse biodiversity of microbiomes and their ability to reverse Roundup entry. And it's really exciting. It's not only seen at the human level, but we can now apply these kinds of scientists to huge cropland that's been damaged by glyphosate and other chemicals.
[00:22:30.910] - Dr. Zach Bush
Glyphosate really is just the beginning. Now, in the United States, for example, our EPA and USDA have approved the use of three GMO and five GMO seeds, meaning that a single seed is genetically modified to handle five chemicals at once. It's truly a toxic stew that we're able to apply to our cropland today, and that's things like two 4D, which is Agent Orange, the chemical we spray over all of Vietnam, Cambodia in the 1960s and 70s. That includes atrazine, which is the carcinogen that was a weed killer in the 1970s range 1960s. And Glyphosate, when it debuted as Roundup back in the 1970s, was said to be the less toxic alternative to atrazine. And we've got so much glyphosate sprayed across the United States now that we have Roundup resistant weeds that have now adopted the genetics of our Roundup resistant, genetically modified crops. Keens are never stable gene in a single species. Species are swapping genes all the time. So if you go and put some new gene out there, that creates some new gain of function to survive toxicity, all of the biome, all of your ecosystem is also going to pick up that trait if you keep spreading too much of this chemical toxin.
[00:23:50.670] - Dr. Zach Bush
Nature is a sharing economy, and any gain of function is shared across species because nature has one single primary goal, it seems, which is increase biodiversity in order to create more adaptation. With more adaptation comes the ability to birth more species, diversification, and with more biodiversity comes more intelligence within those species. So it's a really beautiful pattern that nature has showed us. That is how life on Earth has occurred and how we'll continue to progress into more and more beauty, more and more intelligence over time. And we have put ourselves in direct opposition to that fundamental reality of nature through our farming practices, through our medical practices and the like. So we are prescribing antibiotics on farmland. We're prescribing antibiotics in clinics. We're providing steroids and non steroidal, antiinflammatories and alcohol, hand sanitizers. All these compounds, all of them destroy tight junctions. All of them create isolation and leak across our immune system and also devastate the microbiome within our bodies, on the skin, within our gut. The new science of the last ten years, though, has shown that every single organism, even my brain, has a healthy ecosystem within it of bacteria, fungi, yeast.
[00:25:09.190] - Dr. Zach Bush
And it's like so there's a healthy microbiome of the brain, there's a healthy microbiome of the breast of prostate, any organ system you find. Now when we do genetic sequencing we find out there's microbes in there that are helping sustain a healthy status of those organ systems. So when we drench our systems in chemical antibiotic, kind of herbicides, pesticides, antibiotics, all this, we end up with a devastated ecosystem and in the isolation of our species we develop intense disease. So that's the pattern we're in currently.
[00:25:42.490] - Kayla Barnes
Yes, absolutely, I agree. Can we touch on why Glyphosate was maybe introduced in the beginning just to have a bit of a connection here, like one specific question.
[00:25:54.990] - Dr. Zach Bush
Actually, I think I forgot to cross the last t of that last one, which is I mentioned microbiome is the antidote to Glyphosate. This communication network, the bacteria fungi make, reverse the injury of Glyphosate. So in answer to your question, what are we going to do if it's everywhere? The answer is put all of our focus into creating biodiversity at every level. So in 2017, for example, we launched Farmers Footprint, which is nonprofits, really working on advancing awareness, education, innovation and policy around regenerative agriculture which is a major step forward after the organic movement kind of failed us. We're ready for this new reality where we start to reward farmers for regenerating biodiversity within their soils, within their crop systems and also within the nutrients that they're delivering to the consumers. So regenerative agriculture and rewilding much of our nature as we've been pushing everything in our nature towards a monoculture. We got to go back to these diverse genetics, biological systems of life in soil and beyond. So that's where we're going. The reason why Glyphosate was utilized originally was to develop a less toxic weed killer, more effective weed killer than some of the other ones on the market that I had mentioned atrazine and things like that, that were around the 1970s.
[00:27:15.970] - Dr. Zach Bush
That was the primary function. It was created by well, it was patented as such in the agricultural sector by Monsanto. The chemical had been found in the 1950s and had been patented actually as a pipe cleaner. So they were using it to clean big giant municipal sewer systems and pipes that were getting corroded and clogged with biologic buildup. They would put a bunch of glyphosate through there as a pipe cleaner and it would chew up all of the biological matter along the lining of the pipe. So it worked really effectively for that. But unfortunately when it then came out the other end of the sewer line ended up in a holding pond or whatever, it killed everything. It killed the holding pond, all the plants around, everything else. So it never got traction as a chemical for pipe cleaning as the concentrations required were devastating downstream. So then Monsanto got a hold of it and said well, we can use it at much smaller concentrations as a weed killer because it obviously kills all green things in the pipe cleanup industry attempts and so they started they patented as a weed killer. Big shift happened in 1991 when a farmer up in Ireland suddenly was threatened by weather that he might lose his entire wheat crop because we'd have to be fully dry before it's harvested and they were going to get unseasonably early rains and winter setting in Ireland.
[00:28:36.250] - Dr. Zach Bush
And so he had the idea that maybe if I sprayed my entire crop with glyphosate I could dry the crop quicker and I could get this thing out of the ground and harvested before the rain hits. And so he did that, reported it to a few farmers and within a single year Monsanto got a hold of that idea and repackaged this weed killer as a new crop treatment that would be sprayed days before harvest to dry the crop quicker. And this got to play not just a wheat but also to many lagoons that have to be dry things like your chickpeas and soybeans and the like. And so this was a big devastating effect to our health and ecosystems at that point early 1990s because when you put glyphosate and gluten in the same bite of food our laboratory has been able to demonstrate that it has a seismic effect, a synergistic destruction of tight junctions in the gut lining leading to gut permeability. And so we developed leaky gut and as a population increasingly fast over the 1990s as we sprayed more and more acres with glyphosate as a desiccant or drying agent and with that leaky gut came gluten sensitivity and ultimately celiac disease as new conditions of the 1990s of course are household names now because one in two or one in three Americans now have some version of gluten sensitivity and the like.
[00:29:58.540] - Dr. Zach Bush
So we have literally invented a new intolerance to fundamental building block foods that we have had in our human intake for thousands of years. So we don't really have a gluten sensitivity. We have glyphosate sensitivity that we have labeled as gluten sensitivity. And you'll see the chemical companies do this all the time. When there's a chemical spill they blame it on some natural thing, a virus or something else. And so we see this kind of passing of blame frequently when we start to develop environmental toxicity evidence due to overuse of chemicals.
[00:30:39.560] - Kayla Barnes
I agree and I also think the connection between who owns the GMO seed and then who owns the Roundup obviously this is the same company. I think it's very wrong and everyone I'm sure can agree with this, that the same company and now it's been acquired by Bear. So they have the pharmaceuticals, they have the seed and then they have the Roundup and the whole thing. I mean it's just obviously in my opinion not the way things should be.
[00:31:06.560] - Dr. Zach Bush
Yeah, I think when people realize the business plan there it looks pretty dark. It kind of goes beyond monopoly problem and goes into a complete conflict of interest. Ultimately and bears far from the first pharmaceutical company to own Monsanto. Monsanto was originally bought by Pharmacy, one of the largest pharmaceuticals companies in the country back in the 1990s, and then was passed around two or three other companies before it was sold Altima to Bayer in the last couple of years. So there's a lot of flap around the Bayer thing. But ultimately, pharmaceutical companies saw the value of owning a company that owned the food chain that demanded that farmers use more chemical on those lands every year. That would deplete it up the medicine within the food, which is one of the major things that Glyphosate does that chemical blocks something called the chicken made pathway, which is an enzyme pathway in bacteria, fungi and plants that produce the essential amino acids. Tryptophan, tryptophan Tyrosine phenylalanine or three that are made through the chickenmade pathway. And those are three of the nine essential amino acids. There's only 22 amino acid building blocks for your 2000 proteins, or I think it's actually close to 4000 proteins now mapped in the human body.
[00:32:21.240] - Dr. Zach Bush
But those hundreds of thousands of proteins are made out of just 22 building blocks. Kind of like the alphabet building hundreds of thousands of words. And the vowels are those really important letters of the alphabet that are necessary in every single word are really mimicked or mirrored in the essential amino acids, which are critical for nearly every protein that we can think of. But very specifically, those that are responsible for the diseases we see most often, including infertility the major depression and mood disorders, sleep disorders, neurodegenerative conditions, all of those map back to phenomenon. Tyrosine tryptophan very easily. So we block the enzyme pathway in plants and humans cannot make essential amino acids. We make the other 13. But the nine essentials we cannot make in our own bias. We rely on our food system, soil systems to produce those for us. And so when we added lifestyle to everything, we lost this building block for building the protein structures of our body. And you can see how this adds up generation to generation. Like you said, you start playing DDT, for example, in the 1950s to kill all the mosquitoes, and you find out, 1980, holy crap, we are causing so much cancer with that chemical.
[00:33:40.990] - Dr. Zach Bush
But we don't realize it for 30 years because the real epidemic starts in the second generation. One generation biologically is 25 years. And so the second generation shows a much higher toxicity to exposure to these chemicals, even if you stop spraying. So we stopped spraying DDT in the 1970s, but by the 1980s, we realized just how bad we had a problem we had created. And then by 2000, we're seeing the third generation of children coming out of mothers that were grandmothers that were born and exposed to DDT. The grandmothers didn't actually have the big bump of cancer. Their kids had a bump and then their grandkids had this huge spike and it gets worse with each generation out to at least five generations. And around that fourth generation is when the genetic damage that was environmental switches to germline mutation, which means that the injury at the genetic level from DDT is now integrated into the sperm and ovum and that can last for tens of thousands of years in the species. So we are doing these chemical injuries that are going to be recorded in our genetic code ultimately for the next thousands of years.
[00:34:49.980] - Dr. Zach Bush
And so we've really gone down very slippery. And also my short sighted path here that's going to give clinics like yours great job security, I think.
[00:35:01.610] - Kayla Barnes
Yeah, I mean, honestly, I try not to think about it that often, but I'm terrified as to what the future will look like with the chemical burden that we have currently. And even people closer to the sites, like people living right next to agricultural fields, like you said, I mean, these people are receiving the brunt of this exposure just by living there, which is so unfair that we've put them in a position that based on location, they have to endure all of this. So, you know, it's a fulltime job, unfortunately, just trying to reduce a little bit of the toxic burden that we're experiencing. I do everything from air filters, shower, water filters, water filters, ozone saunas for detoxing, regular saunas for detoxing, working out. It's a lot, but it's just what I feel like I need to do to try to protect my health as much as possible. So what would you say the primary pillars of health are, in your opinion? So we have, of course, reducing our exposure to these chemicals and repairing damage from glyphosate. And I completely agree. What are some of the other primary pillars that you think are really important?
[00:36:13.010] - Dr. Zach Bush
Yeah, the key is maximizing biodiversity within your own biology. And the exciting thing is this can happen almost instantaneously. And so if you can start recreating a lifestyle that reconnects you to healthy soil, water and air systems, the healthiest you can find and the most diverse you can find, you immediately see a positive consequence in your own genetics of biodiversity within your gut, skin, et cetera. And so to do that. You're looking at a daily practice where instead of waking up in an air conditioned house. Going to the garage and getting in a plastic off gassing car. Air conditioning with your windows closed. And drive through traffic for an hour and then go to an office that's offgassing plastics from the cubicles and paint and everything else that's in the building. Air conditioning again. And you go and do that a day in and day out. You don't see much microbiome in that lifestyle that dominates most Western civilizations. And so it's really an idea of like, okay, if you're going to have to drive with the windows down, especially if you're going to approach a park or some sort of trees source or tree chi or whatever it is.
[00:37:16.270] - Dr. Zach Bush
Get the energetics and the microbiome of nature back in your day. Maybe it's just stop for five minutes in the backyard barefoot before you jump in the car and sit there and breed next to a tree. Lay down in the grass in the evenings and look up to the leaves of the trees to reprogram the brain and the microbiome by laying on the soil and getting the neurological input through sight of what the sunset looks like through the myriad patterns of a tree branch up against the sky, for example. So getting back in touch with these simple introductions is an incredibly important piece of the puzzle. And then thinking about repurposing your recreational time. Your recreational time can look like making sure you're getting up into a trail system that's higher altitude or go to a waterfall that exposes you to the microbiome ecosystem there on the weekend. Take family trips to ecosystems that you're not exposed to, take high desert trip, take a rainforest trip and all these kinds of things. Those tend to be kind of your upper echelons of financial capacity to do those oftentimes. And so I've worked a lot with my clinic, I actually put in the poorest county in Virginia intentionally to try to find solutions for people without socioeconomic freedom and options as we would hope for.
[00:38:39.790] - Dr. Zach Bush
And it was exciting to see them creating their own solutions. And those solutions most often look like grow your own garden. And so many of these fifth generation poverty families in central Virginia very much remember growing up in the garden of their grandmother that not only fed their family, but fed their entire church community as well during the summer time. So they remember huge gardens feeding many people. And so when I tell them, look, you're going to have to start getting touching the soil and starting growing your own food in order to come off this $500 of pharmaceuticals you're on every month that's consuming your entire income. And when they jump in it's with 2ft because they know that their economic recovery depends on it, so they go and replant that garden. And it's unbelievable what happens to the health of an individual who grows their own food, even if they're only eating out of that for three or four months a year. It is a seismic shift in their metabolism. Their detoxification, weight loss is obvious, but many, many other reductions in inflammation and disease patterns that we see in regrowing those gardens. And so gardening is something that's really accessible to every socioeconomic level.
[00:39:51.090] - Dr. Zach Bush
There's community gardens in a lot of areas where people don't have yards and the like in the urban inner city environments, community gardens are becoming a really commonplace. A great example of it that I hope becomes a template for the whole country is Denver Urban Gardens. A phenomenal group of women that started this extraordinary group, and they now have garden education and a whole host of schools and other community events and all this and really shown how widespread an urban garden program can have impact on children and adults and elders, elderly across a group of urban dwellings. So really positive examples out there of the impact of gardening in urban and rural areas that we see across the country. So get close as you can, for those of you that, you know, have the mindset and economic feasibility to have a supplement to this industry. Then we do produce the whole ion support line, which has ion gut health, ion skin support, and the ion sinus health products that all radically change the reconnection of cells at the tight junctions. Gap junctions reduce inflammation via the improved cellular communication. The ion supplements are really unique in that they are radically different than any other supplements on the market and that they don't intend to do anything directly to the human cell.
[00:41:16.990] - Dr. Zach Bush
There is no genetic stimulus. There's no receptor stimulus. Throughout the experience of taking ion, ion is the communication network between bacteria and fungi that I mentioned earlier, these carbon molecules that create the liquid circuit board or wireless communication between cells. And when one cell can talk to the other, the first thing that happens is it increases its production of gap junctions, type junctions and the like to create more coherent boundaries and communication and protection of the organism. And so the very injury that we're causing by destroying our soils with life state, the antidote is in the soils of the planet 55 million years ago. So it's some sort of extraordinary story of grace that mother nature would so predict or prepare for the destruction of our soils again by planting this extraordinary communication network available to us today. So the ion stands for intelligence, nature and intelligenceo. Nature.com gets you all that science and access to the supplements and things like that if you want further support. But those are the big ones. The revenues that we've made from intelligence and nature has supported the launch of Farmers Footprint in 2017. And we are really hoping to put our own supplement companies out of the business over the next couple of decades as we educate farmers and consumers to come together for a regenerative agricultural future where we start to build this whole nutrient density and communication network of the microbiome back into today's soils rather than some fossil soil record.
[00:42:48.860] - Dr. Zach Bush
We don't think we will survive as a species if we continue to use bandaids. We've got to get this food system right. And so join us at Farmers Footprint if you can support this mission of bringing farmers and CPG companies, consumer product goods, packaged goods, ingredients, supply chains, all of this need to come in line to be a multifaceted and coordinated cooperative effort towards a regenerative future. So at the family level, get outside digestive and it's a shame, but definitely get engaged in making regenerative agriculture. Not an abstract concept, but an engaged social reality for your home.
[00:43:29.210] - Kayla Barnes
Absolutely. I love that. And agree. Do you have any tips on soil? So if someone wants to start like today and put up a garden, what type of soil would you recommend? Because I know that they also have soil with all sorts of additives that probably are not the best for health.
[00:43:46.160] - Dr. Zach Bush
Yeah, I'm a fan of making your own soil, so it's very shocking how fast it is to make a very large amount of soil. And so the easiest way to do this is through partnering up with local farms or whatever to get manure. So you can get cow manure course, manure, whatever you got. You can get sheep manure, so get some manure. And then you can pick up alfalf at your local, like Font coop or Southern States is a big one throughout most of the country that provides garden supply. But any gardens, fly place, selling to farms and rest will have bales of alfalfa that you can get. And so you get bales about balfa, bales of straw and the compost or, I'm sorry, the manure. And you layer those three levels in over and over again in a big bin. Or you can just create a wire basket out of just little wire fencing. And you layer that up, layer that up. And then you turn it two or three times. You want it to be slightly moist, but not wet. So you might water it a couple of times a week to keep it moist.
[00:44:51.690] - Dr. Zach Bush
And you want the temperature, the heat to build as that compost goes. But those three ingredients, the alfalfa, the straw, and the manure, creates a very fast, rich balance of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, as well as an incredible microbiome download. And so you can make yards and yards of dirt for your garden in a matter of months through that technique. And it's far healthier and far more vibrant nutrients than you'll ever find in a bag at Loaves or something like that. So if you're going to go to Lows or go to some places else, you want to make sure there's a compost mix in the soil that you're working with. You want to make sure that there's kind of active living component to the soil that you're working within. So needs to be organic and needs to have some sort of compost mix within the soil amendment if you're going to import soil from bags.
[00:45:47.210] - Kayla Barnes
Wonderful. And this is what I'm going to be doing when I get a place in Montana and start my own farm. So I can't wait. I want to talk about actually, let.
[00:45:56.770] - Dr. Zach Bush
Me just touch on that because most of us probably don't have space to start a giant garden or maybe the time to do it. I really encourage everybody just start one plant in a pot like mint. I guarantee you can grow mint is bulletproof. So start mint on the front stoop, or on the backstopp, or on your patio, or on a porch or on the rooftop, wherever you can find 3ft of space. You can grow a mint plant or a basil plant in a tomato. You'll get a few plants in the ground because just that one plant will fundamentally change your relationship to nature. Your stewardship of that plant will bring you into an awareness of your connectivity, which is just as important as the actual microbiome and everything else. Your remembrance that you are an element of nature and nature is an element within you is a huge step forward to grow one plant even before you get to Montana.
[00:46:48.640] - Kayla Barnes
Okay, I'm going to start very soon, hopefully tomorrow. I want to touch on the microbiome. I know you're an expert on the microbiome, and I'm sure this could be an entire podcast just on its own, but can you give us the general overview? So having diversity is very important, but what else can we do? I feel like we see patients here all the time, and gut health is just so extremely compromised from the food that we're putting into our guts, our stress levels, and I just feel as if it's unprecedented levels of different gut dysbiosis and issues. So what would you say are the key things to look for and then maybe to optimize the gut?
[00:47:28.170] - Dr. Zach Bush
Yeah, so normally we take a look at nutrition. So phasing out all processed sugars is critical. In processed sugars, I would include alcohol, which is a processed sugar. So alcohol and other simple sugars need to be removed. I would remove all of your sugar, alcohols, which are things like Xylitol, which have been billed as prebiotics, not a famiotics favor, a very small percentage of the species that you want in a healthy human gut. And so they ultimately can create a monoculture or decrease biodiversity to eliminate probiotics that are based on the concept of sugar. Alcohols, and then surprisingly, in the nutrition thing, is a nutrient that is overlooked in the entire American diet over and over again, which is fiber. You want a very high fiber, varied fiber diet, because fiber, especially on insoluble fibers that you would find in your leafy vegetables and your cruciferous vegetables, you're going to find that fiber is kind of the coral reef of the microbiome of the colon, which has the highest biodiversity of actually any place on Earth. Is the human colon. More than any other animal species, more than any soil system, the human colon is the quintessential example of biodiversity.
[00:48:49.180] - Dr. Zach Bush
In a weird way, I can go into this maybe on another podcast, but that biodiversity of the colon, I believe, is why human intelligence occurs at the level it does. So long story as to why that correlation and causation is there, but it's fascinating to understand that the more biodiverse your colon, the health is not only the healthier, but the more intelligent your whole system runs. And so the colon is going to rely on that insoluble fiber. So as many of those vegetables in there. If you have a damaged microbiome in the first place, and you try to eat kale or Brussels sprouts or these for surface vegetables, you're likely to get bloating and some other untoward symptoms. You might even see a bump up in inflammation. The key to those damaged guts is make sure that you're fermenting those high fiber veggies initially, and then you can move yourself towards kind of a raw diet ultimately if you want a raw diet input of these high fiber diets. But initially sauerkraut kimchi sourven, which is turnips, these become really great recovery tools for damaged gut microbiome. So root vegetables are one of my favorites.
[00:49:54.810] - Dr. Zach Bush
The turnips, as mentioned, but also beets, which when fermented, it creates cavas as a very traditional food. They're coming out of the Middle East and Israel and the like. So Gavas, sour ribbon, turnips, beets, and then your more cruciferous vegetables, fermented things like cabbage as well, fermented veggies, and then variety, of course, being critical for your complex carbohydrates. So the more color you can get on the plate, the better you're thinking not just salads, but also steamed veggies, baked veggies, all of these are great. So if you were to pick one vegetable that had the highest micronutrient resources, it would actually be a sweet potato eaten with the skin on. And so a sweet potato has just incredible amount of nutrient density because of its skin and its exposure to that. And actually the starches within that potato lead to a really healthy effect on the microbiome as well. I'm a fan of all potatoes, with the exception of the big American white potato with the russet potato. And so the hundreds of species of potatoes that we have down in Peru, which is of course, the origin area of potatoes globally are purple potatoes, yellow potatoes, gold potatoes, orange potatoes.
[00:51:12.450] - Dr. Zach Bush
Like everything color under the sun, and there's always no white potatoes. And so we had to breed potatoes to be these big white chunky potatoes that make good french fries, which was actually why we made the Russian potato. We were genetically hybridizing potato plants to grow long potatoes that we can make long french fries that look really good coming out of a McDonald's container. So in a weird way, we genetically modified through hybridization potatoes to look good rather than be good for you. So we really engineered out all the micronutrients and varieties of the nutrients that you would find in a traditional purple or yellow or gold or sweet potato, orange potato, other ones that are high. Examples of that are things like your carrots and other root vegetables high in color there. So lots to go after. The radishes. I'm a huge fan of even your less known radishes, like your daikon radish and the like are great sources. There I'd go after the greens that are a little bit unusual on the shelf as well. Don't just go after the kale and your iceberg lettuce or whatever. Go after things like bak choy.
[00:52:24.730] - Dr. Zach Bush
Go after things like your dandelion greens, which are superfood that I love to use. And dandelion greens, kale, all those cruciferous, sleepy vegetables. Again, steam those or ferment those, especially if you have a damaged gut, because you want some help digesting some of those fibers before you introduce them to a damaged microbiome. So huge fan of steaming those veggies or baking those veggies down for consumption if you're not going to ferment. So big tools there. And then beyond that, I would say getting out into avoiding the probiotics. So probiotics were billed as kind of the tool for recovering gut health for the last 40 years. But all of us in the microbiome world, as we continue to study deeper and deeper than the human microbiome of the gut, we realize that a healthy human gut has 100 species in the US. Even in our damaged state, healthy guts in more traditional kind of indigenous environments before chemical agriculture introduction or chemical food systems have about four times that diversity. And so if you go over to hunter gatherer tribes in Africa or Australia or down South America, go to traditional communities that are still growing their original food systems, you'll find 400 species of bacteria and fungi alone, not to mention protozoa and other species in there.
[00:53:51.280] - Dr. Zach Bush
So that healthy gut then introduces to probiotics, which are typically three species, sometimes seven species, the most abundant ones in the market, like 25 species, but those species are copied up billions of times. And so in a single day of probiotic, you might find 2 billion or 50 billion copies of a single or a few species. And any time we overwhelm a complex ecosystem with an abnormal or unbalanced input like this overwhelming probiotic, we end up causing harm over time. And so we had concerns throughout the 2000 and 2010 period as we had started down to cover the importance of biodiversity, but the industry kept churning away. And every year, almost exponential growth in probiotics sales because it was the only tool that was built on the market as a gut health supplement. And so probiotics took off. We're now over $50 billion of probiotics and other robotic fermented foods like yogurt and stuff that are all created through a very narrow microbiome instead of air fermented like they used to be. So we're about $50 billion of sales of these things that are all narrowing the human gut microbiome. This was actually really beautifully evidenced in 2018.
[00:55:10.230] - Dr. Zach Bush
It should have been the end of the probiotic era, september of 2018. And instead, since then, we kind of turn a Blight and I and just kept selling more and more of them. Even as clinicians, we find ourselves truly dependent on these old sciences that turned out to not be accurate or effective and in fact are likely harmful. We get stuck in a rut and we feel unable to reach for something else. Even when we not convinced they're really helpful. We say, well, it's at least doing something, it's better than nothing kind of attitude. But those publications in 2018 in the highly regarded and peer reviewed science journal called Cell three back to back studies were published showing that taking Probiotics, especially after antibiotic exposure devastates the recovery of the microbiome. The study showed that if you took a placebo take absolutely nothing there's full recovery of the gut microbiome after an antibiotic within 30 days. If you take a Probiotic instead of the placebo, it suppresses the microbiome at the same level the antibiotic did. And even at six months after exposure you still haven't recovered the microbiome. And so the Probiotics have been a devastating effect, I believe, to public health all the time.
[00:56:22.090] - Dr. Zach Bush
Not intentionally, but just out of our own misperception of what the microbiome is and what Probiotics are. And so eliminate prebiotics, eliminate Probiotics and get as much fiber and crucifix and other complex carbohydrate sources into the diet, emphasize fermentation and then steaming and baking a lot of those tougher to consuming veggies. If you've got a damaged gut, wow.
[00:56:48.040] - Kayla Barnes
That'S extremely important and I hope everyone really absorbed that and listened about what you said about probiotics. So I think that'll be a massive takeaway. I kind of specialize in brain health. So how do you think that the gut is impacting the brain and our mood?
[00:57:03.150] - Dr. Zach Bush
Typically that's like one of my favorite topics. Thanks for asking. So we now know that the brain is the gut and these are inseparable systems. And so even by 20 00 20 10 that decade was called the decade of the brain. That 2010 to 2020 decade was the decade of the gut. And so what we found out over those two decades is that the gut brain axis, as it's been termed, is a continuum of biology. And it's a fascinating continuum. The gut itself has more neural connections and neurons in it than any other part of the body outside of the central nervous system or the brain up in your head. It actually has as many neurons in the gut lining as a dog has in their brain. So it is your second brain, as it's been often called. But as you start to look at the role of the microbiome in the function of those neurons in the gut, you start to realize it might be our first brain. And whatever's happening up here is only a downstream result of what's happening down in the gut. And what I mean by the first brain is that the primary neurotransmitters that make this central nervous system work are things like Serotonin Dopamine, norepinephrine epinephrine.
[00:58:17.490] - Dr. Zach Bush
These neurotransmitters are responsible for relaying chemical neural signal between electrical transit of information in a single neuron. So to get the electrical discharge of a single neuron. To go communicate to another one, you need serotonin dopamine or neurotransmitter communication. It turns out that the serotonin and dopamine necessary for this brain health to occur is not made in the central nervous system. In fact, the vast majority is made in the gut lining in something called enteric endocrine cells that line the gut and interact directly with the afferent nerves in your gut that then take that information essentially to the brain. And so in this extraordinary way, you have cells making 90% of the serotonin in the human body and then the afro nerves that are integrated into those will carry that information back up to the brain. But recently we discovered that the African nerves don't stop looking at the back side of the entertainment of cells. They actually push past the entire denigrate cell and stick their little nerve fibers out into the gut, which is completely opposite of what I was trained. I saw. There was this huge gut, this blood brain barrier that kept all nerves completely separate from your bloodstream, let alone the gut microbiome.
[00:59:38.230] - Dr. Zach Bush
We now know that there's specific bacteria that will line up and communicate directly with those afferent nerves as well as directly to the interact indigenous cells. And you can't make serotonin or dopamine at the interact integral cell or functionally communicated to the African nerve unless those species are present. And so, in an amazing way, if you think about what the brain is, it's simply a central nervous system that is equivalent to a central processing chip in your computer. A CPU chip in your computer cannot create any information, nor can it create an idea. CPU chip in your computer has never written a term paper or a letter to your grandmother. Where does the letter come from? They have to have data input from the keyboard. And the little digital signals coming from the keyboard up to the central chip in your computer allows for the computer to create what looks like a Word profile, Word document that then gets printed into the letter or whatnot. But it's not actually the keyboard that writes the letter or the term paper either. It's the fingers typing on the keyboard that create that, obviously. And so when you start to look at the brain as the CPU chair, the keyboard is the gut lining and the fingers typing on your keyboard is actually the bacteria and fungi in your gut lining.
[01:00:58.680] - Dr. Zach Bush
And so this is where I become pretty convinced that our intelligence as a species relies on biodiverse input from bacteria and fungi to our brains to manifest our capacity for things like pattern recognition, diurnal, hormonal patterns that have come out of the brain. All these things are now seen as critical to be mapped back to the microbiome. You damage the microbiome, you screw up all the upstream neurologic functions. You end up with things like autism, attention deficit, major depression, suicidality, anxiety disorders, sleep. Disorders and ultimately downstream consequences of brain dysfunction such as infertility, hormonal dysregulation, etc. So the first brain in the end, is your microbiome, the gut second, and the keyboard is critical in its health. And so an intact gut lining is the keyboard in which the information is input and then your peripheral nerves ultimately pushing that information up into the nervous system of your brain. And so health and vitality at the brain level comes again from not just a good microbiome, but a very coherent keyboard or lining of the intestines. And we've shown that that communication network between the bacteria and fungi is the root cause of that tight junction coherent membrane that's not only protecting you from the outside world, but also allowing for excellent cell resilience at the interrogator cells.
[01:02:20.770] - Dr. Zach Bush
So you're making more serotonin, dopamine, et cetera, and also keeping a tight lid on what comes in and is exposed to the immune system that sits just deep to that gut membrane. And so it's been a really fun journey to realize that your gut microbiome and the integrity of your gut lining are the beginning of a healthy brain.
[01:02:40.760] - Kayla Barnes
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, it has such a massive impact on our focus, our mood and so many things. And again, we have this connection between food system totally changing, depression spiking out of control, and I don't know exactly what the answer is. I would love to hear your input, like, how do we go back? Kind of because we've done so much damage now. But I think that if people start taking agency over their life to the best of their abilities and doing things like you're talking about getting into the soil, just growing your own food, I think it's going to give you a massive leg up in terms of health and productivity, energy levels, all of that.
[01:03:22.610] - Dr. Zach Bush
Absolutely agree. Yeah. And I think instead of going back to some previous benefit, what we're learning from the soil systems is to go back far enough, you've got to go back 55 million years to get to your full potential, at least as this planet has expressed it. That means we need to go and become cocreators of this future soil system that would start to mimic the intelligence and diversity of those ancient soils rather than consumers of those soils. Right now, every farm in this country is losing about two tons of topsoil per year due to the damage of the mycelium and the bacteria from overspraying of herbicides, pesticides and chemical fertilizers. And so we're losing. Now, if you value that two tons of topsoil, the cost of two tons of topsoil multiplied by 125,000,000 acres of farmland suddenly realized we're losing 11% of our GDP or gross domestic product or about nearly $2 trillion a year in topsoil assets every single year going and getting washed out into streams and out into the ocean. It's going to to do damage and it's no longer on the farm. And so that rate of topsoil loss is completely unsustainable and has already got all the soil scientists telling us that we only have 60 harvests left on the planet.
[01:04:37.330] - Dr. Zach Bush
At the current rate of devastation of soils worldwide we run out of viable farmland within the next 60 years. We're currently at 97% of arable farmland on the planet either depleted or severely depleted of nutrients and viability. So we're seeing widespread desertification, the advent of new deserts all over the world right now. South America, obviously with the Amazon burning and desertifying quickly. But perhaps even more dangerous is what's happening in Central Africa right now and up into South Asia. As China builds these huge dams they've desertified and destroyed water systems below down into South Asia, malaysia, Indonesia, etc. So we have just widespread destruction going on and it's time for us to really understand that there is so much grace and nature built in. But we need to do it now. We need to shift universally to a regenerative mindset where human values, in fact human economics, start to be metric upon our daily consumer impact on soil, water and air. If we're not starting to metric economic value based on these critical commodities we disappear very quickly. So it's a huge opportunity and a huge challenge. But I'm very encouraged that there were 7.8 billion of us that society show up right at this moment of the human experiment to see that we might completely change our self identity, let alone our behavior.
[01:06:04.830] - Dr. Zach Bush
And that selfidentity needs to become a realization that we are a culmination of nature rather than some hierarchical tip of the pyramid of life on Earth. We are not alone at the top of the pyramid. We are in fact right down at the base of the pyramid of the bacteria, fungi and the rest. And we are an expression of an ecosystem rather than some sort of isolated species.
[01:06:28.540] - Kayla Barnes
I couldn't agree more. Is there any way, how can people get involved? Like how can we do more around this?
[01:06:35.530] - Dr. Zach Bush
Yeah, critical to get involved at ground level of your food system. So if you've got an area CSA which stands for Community Service Agriculture or Community Supported Agriculture rather, your CSAs are available. They're kind of adjunct for an add on to your farmers market. So getting engaged with the local farmers market get engaged with a CSA which typically will deliver like a box of produce five months out of the year. Every week they deliver another box of produce as to what's in season. So you're eating not only locally but you're eating seasonally which is really critical for gut health as well. And then get engaged far enough down in those things to know the farmer. So get to know your farmer, get to know the meat processor, the dairy processor. If you're still eating those types of foods you got to know where your food is coming from, how it's been treated. If it is not a sovereign and respected entity within that food system, then there's likely an inherent amount of stress that's being carried by that food. So a chicken that's typically raised in America, one third of the flock, when it's harvested at six weeks of age, we kill our chickens six weeks into life, because if we wait any longer, there's no chickens left, because even by six weeks, one third of the flock has died from invasive E.
[01:07:51.390] - Dr. Zach Bush
Coli and other bacterial infections. And so the health of these blocks are so horrific that we have to harvest them as brilliant as possible. And so we actually increase the stress on those animals intentionally so that they put on weight quicker, just like the obesity epidemic, when you put an organism under stress and you kill their mitochondria, they develop obesity and abnormal metabolics quickly. So you make these chickens as fast as possible, as quick as possible, out of stress, so you can harvest them quickly before they die. That's a typical chicken salad you can get at a grocery store, at a restaurant, or whatnot. This isn't untenable for your healthier family. We got to get you in touch with a farmer that's actually free ranging. Your chicken having some sort of sovereign relationship to the butchering of those chickens and that they're being butchered outside, ideally, rather than in huge factories, all kinds of things. Joel Salatin is a good example of that kind of godfather of the industry, looking at healthier versions and really respected care for animals throughout their life cycle. So chickens, pigs, cows, he does all that on his farm in Central Virginia, Polyface Farms.
[01:09:04.090] - Dr. Zach Bush
But he's just an example of what are now thousands of farms around the world that are starting to practice these kind of indigenous and regenerative practices. If you've heard of biodynamics or permaculture farms, these are massively successful techniques for maximizing microbiome and the health and sovereignty of the plants and animals that are grown in those environments. So there's lots of ways to get involved. Again, grow some food, even one plant. That's a huge starting point that you will never regret. Teach your children to plant one seed that will become a tomato plant. It will change their life in perspective radically. Get some things growing, get engaged with the food system. Farmersfootprint US is the original site. We have hundreds of storytelling features there, both in social media as well as many documentary style that we do called Meet the Farmer, where we show you extraordinary farms that are producing incredible direct consumer goods for your family to connect with in your local and regional areas. And so farmersfootprint us. If you're in Australia, it's Pharmaceutrient.org Au. There's also Farmers Footprint UK and South Africa coming on soon as well. So keep an eye out for Farmers Footprint missions around you and get involved there.
[01:10:20.100] - Dr. Zach Bush
We have a gardening course there, so if you feel completely overwhelmed by the concept of starting your own garden. Farmshop print us as a phenomenal gardening course that is very simple step by step fashion video content for you with farmer Greg does a phenomenal job. We're really teaching you the nuts and bolts on how simple it is to really begin the journey into your own family garden and moving towards some sort of food independence and food sovereignty in your home and reclaiming health at the grassroots level, if you will. And so that's farmers footprint us in the garden community there if you really are struggling with your health. And we have an incredible eight week program that is fed online with one on one coaching throughout the whole experience. We also have group coaching available to make it more affordable if the price point is challenging for you. But both of those eight week programs have an incredible experience in there that have transformed hundreds and hundreds of lives around the world over the recent years. And so you can get engaged with that. It's called journey of intrinsichealth.com. Is the website there? Journeyofintrinsichealth.com. You can see that on my website.
[01:11:27.460] - Dr. Zach Bush
You can pretty much link to all the resources I have on Zackbushmd.com and I'll get you one place or another. So get engaged. We would love to have you part of that that global community. Pharmaceutical can actually have a very vibrant community on my networks. And so we have fun clubs and user groups and interest groups in broad areas of regenerative. It's not just regent of agriculture, we need regent of arts, we need regenerative economies, we need regenerative transportation industries, energy systems and the rest. So regardless of what you do today, try putting the word regenerative in front of it and become part of the solution for regenerative future that we so desperately need.
[01:12:07.910] - Kayla Barnes
Well, on behalf of myself, but I'm sure the world, to be honest, thank you for all the work that you're doing and I want to figure out how I can personally get involved and share with my audience. I mean, everyone on my page has heard me talk about my plan in the near future of moving, starting a garden, doing the whole thing, but there's never a better time than right now to get started, so I'm all in on it. So we'll discuss and figure out how I can help spread the message a little bit more. But Doctor, it's been an absolute pleasure chatting with you today. This could go on forever, but really, thank you for being here.
[01:12:43.990] - Dr. Zach Bush
Really pleased to be with you, Ken. Thank you so much for having me on and I look forward to staying engaged audience there.
[01:12:50.140] - Kayla Barnes
Absolutely, thank you.