Dhru Purohit Show - #245: The Top Toxins That Damage Your Gut with Dr. Zach Bush

Episode Date: October 28, 2021

The Top Toxins That Damage Your Gut  | This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers and Vivobarefoot. Gut health is at the forefront of complaints of Americans. Some 80% of our population now recognizes some disorder within the gastrointestinal tract—everything from reflux, to food allergies, to inflammatory bowel syndrome, and inflammatory bowel diseases—we are a suffering population when it comes to gut health.    In this episode of The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru takes a deep dive into the topic of gut health with Dr. Zach Bush. Dr. Zach 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. In this episode, we dive into:  -The biggest misconception about gut health (6:10)   -What Dr. Zach learned from his mom’s health challenges (13:17)   -How all diseases are the byproduct of miscommunication (21:16)   -Antibiotic use and the susceptibility to depression (27:14)   -The first steps to take to balance the gut (32:12)   -Why glyphosate is ground zero of the chronic disease epidemic (49:43)   -The connection between sleep and gut health (1:05:05)  -How movement impacts the microbiome (1:08:52)   -The power of fermented foods (1:13:05)   -Why Dr. Zach is terrified of fake meats (1:16:10)   For more on Zach Bush you can follow him on Instagram @zachbushmd, on Facebook @zachbushmd, on Twitter @drzachbush, on YouTube @zachbushmd, and through his websites https://zachbushmd.com, https://farmersfootprint.us, and https://intelligenceofnature.com/ This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers and Vivobarefoot. BiOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough contains 7 different forms of magnesium, which all have different functions in the body. Right now, BiOptimizers is offering my community a few special bundles, and for a limited time they are also giving away free bottles of their bestselling products P3OM and Masszymes with select purchases. Head over to magbreakthrough.com/dhru and use code DHRU10.   Vivobarefoot footwear is designed to be wide, thin, and flexible, so you feel as close to barefoot as possible. They promote your foot's natural strength and movement and studies show that foot strength increases by 60% in a matter of months just by walking around in them. Right now they’re offering my community 20% off their first order at vivobarefoot.com/DHRU. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Human life, human biology does not center upon the human cell. In fact, human life is centered upon the micro ecosystem, the microbiome around us, within us, and even inside of our cells in the form of mitochondria. We are teeming with cellular systems that are non-human, and for that, we are healthy or not healthy. Hi, everyone, Drew Brod here. Today's podcast, we're talking with Dr. Zach Bush about a few simple things that anybody can do to radically transform their gut health. Stay tuned.

It's a fascinating podcast. Welcome to the Drew Perraud podcast. Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Dr. Zach Bush. Dr. Bush is a physician specializing in internal medicine, endocrinology, and hospice care. He's an internationally recognized educator and thought leader

on the microbiome as it relates to, to health, disease, and food systems of the planet. His passion for education reaches across many disciplines, including topics such as the role of soil and water ecosystems in human genomics, immunity, and the gut-brain connection. His education has highlighted the need for a radical departure from chemical farming and the traditional 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 the planet. On today's episode, we talk with Dr. Zach Bush about all things gut health and the revolution that's needed both internally and externally to support the planet on its path to true health and wellness. Dr. Zach Bush, welcome to the podcast. It's an honor to have you here. I'm going to jump right in before we get into your story.

I want to talk a little bit about the basics of gut health. Now, I've heard you say when it comes to gut health, there's so much misinformation that's out there. What do you think are one of the top, one or two misconceptions, lies, marketing twists that are out there when it comes to this world of gut health and the microbiome? Okay. Yeah, I think just by maybe market size, we'd have to go, number one, with probiotics is the biggest misperception or misconception or marketing thing that's ever happened in gut health. that's pretty much dominated the whole industry for the last 30 years. And back in the day, it was a huge breakthrough, an important breakthrough in our understanding

of human biology and that we started to embrace the concept in 1970s that led to the probiotic revolution that, you know what, we can't just damn all germs. Some bacteria seem to be good for us. And so that was a major breakthrough for the allopathic Western medicine brain. of course that's what Chinese medicine and anything outside of allopathic medicine has been saying for centuries or millennia but it was a new thought for kind of western civilization to say you know what this whole germ theory probably got a little overblown we need to embrace some bacteria but we should have pretty quickly moved beyond the probiotics and really started to embrace something more holistic

in our definition of gut health because it turns out that the three or seven species in the typical probiotic is just a pixel in the real fabric of a healthy gut. A healthy gut is in the United States defined as about 12,000 species because we're a Western civilization. But when we look at the incredible microdiversity that's coming out of the American gut project in Kenya and other parts of West Africa, we're seeing numbers that are 3x, 4x that much. And so the healthy gut in people that not exposed to the trauma of chlorine water systems, antibiotics in our food systems, antibiotic in our soil systems, herbicides and pesticides in our food, water, and air, all of these things, we're in the 40,000 species range if we're not exposed to that world.

So this vast ecosystem of 40,000 species, and that's just on the bacteria side, doesn't even start to touch our understanding or lack of understanding in the world of fungi, guy, depending on how you want to say it. And the fungi are looking at somewhere 350,000 species, nearly half a million species. And so when you start to say, well, I'm just going to take this probiotic and these three species of bacteria or something to help create gut health, it was really a farce from almost moment one because we knew that there was no way that three species was really going to create a balanced healthy micro ecosystem. The devastating truth of what was going on with the probiotics really came out in 20. 2018 with some of exceptional studies that were published in one of the more rigorous peer review journal was out there called Cell.

And two back-to-back studies that were published in September of 2018 showed that our worst fears were confirmed in that the probiotics being taken, especially after antibiotic exposure, were devastating the biodiversity within the gut. And so we were by overloading the gut with three species, limiting its ability to recover to a full microbiome, especially after two weeks of antibiotics. So much so that in the study, it took over six months before we started to see the microbial diversity start to return towards baseline, but it was still far from normal, even at the six-month conclusion of the study.

In contrast, in the placebo arm, no probiotic given, there was complete recovery of the microbiome within 28 to 30 days, and that was both in the animal study and in the human study. So almost, you know, just days to weeks of recovery with nothing. And then six-month delays in that recovery with probiotics. So we spend currently about $47 billion a year in out-of-pocket consumer dollars going towards probiotic industry at large. And so that's an amazing offshoot or miss on the target there when it starts to define what real gut health is. takes to the beginnings of gut health, and we're going to jump around a little bit. Tell us how I've also heard you share before that the gut actually starts in the nasal cavity.

We don't often think of it that way, but how is that the case? You know, when most people think of the gut, they think about our stomach, our intestines, those other areas. Where does the nasal cavity play a role when it comes to gut health? Yeah. So it turns out that the upper respiratory, system and the nasoferrings, the back of your throat, which of course is the beginning of your GI track with your tongue and salivary system there, kind of starting the digestion process in

your mouth as you put in a bite of food or whatnot, begins this complex interaction and dance with microbiome right there in the mouth. And the nasosinuses are really coding for a lot of that microbiome diversity or the dysfunction or perturbation of that biodiversity as it may be in that upper GI track. And as we age, especially by the time we get above age 40, 45, we tend to under-acidify our stomach, which means we're not killing as many bacteria as we should from that upper tract, which means that the chronic post-nasal drainage that most people have at bedtime and over the course of night drips down the back of their throat and is swallowed

subconsciously during sleep down into the small intestine. And with a poor acidification overnight, you end up with a poor acidification overnight, you end up with an inordinate amount of sinus bacteria overgrowing your small intestines. This is part of the physiology of an epidemic that's going on in children right now called Pandus, P-A-N-D-A-S. Pandas is a phenomenon of mood disorder that's coming in children with anxiety attacks, depressive symptoms, suicidal thoughts, and five-year-olds, six-year-olds because of the translocation of bacteria in their small intestine.

and what we call a small bowel overgrowth or SIBO, then causing these mood disorders. And so the upper respiratory tract, becoming the upper GI tract, becoming the lower GI track, all that phenomenon is starting to affect all ages. And so that is really underlying or perhaps highlighting the importance of things like nasal breathing

and getting away from this mouth breathing phenomenon, snoring, the importance of good oral height. Hygiene, sinus hygiene, all of that before sleep to improve the possibility of good nasal breathing to reduce that post nasal drip, drainage, and dysfunction of the upper gut. I want to tap into your story a little bit and then we'll bring these two worlds together. Well before your training as a doctor, you've shared that really it was being there for a caretaker for your mom that was part of, a little bit of an understanding of knowing the power of showing up and being present for people. Talk to us about what health challenges your mom was dealing with and what you were learning about

from a young age. That's a relatively recent discovery for myself. If you'd asked me a few years ago, what was the first time you got into being aware of, you know, caretaking or health care. It was when I was birthed babies in the Philippines before going to college and doing some work over there with a group of international midwives. And it wasn't until decades later when I was in clinic with a lot of cancer patients that often had brain metastases and high rates of seizure disorder that I started to recall some of these earlier patterns that I had seen as a child. My mother had a seizure disorder that was healed spontaneously.

When I was still pretty young, I was probably around 10 or something like that, or maybe even younger when she was healed. And but the experience of being around people and with seizure during my, you know, clinical care as a medical doctor, harkened back to these moments with my mom. And there's just my mother's one most extraordinary human being. She's just so resilient. She's always on the go. She's always climbing the next mountain quite literally. She's into mountaineering and climbing and cross-country skiing.

And she's constantly outdoors gardening. She's really taught me through life experience, the impact of healthy food and healthy outdoor contact for healthy mental state, healthy spirituality, all of this. She's just really been emblematic of that. And it was her resilience and just complete refusal to let her conditions slower down back in the day that kept me outside more as a child. We bicycled everywhere because you couldn't have a driver's license with the seizure disorder. And so we got to bicycle everywhere. And she took me on such adventures. And I remember my little sister in the bike seat behind my mom on their bike.

And I'd be tearing along on my little banana seat, gold Schwinn bicycle there in the 1970s, cruising along. And it was just like this sense of freedom with my mother. And I think there's a lot that needs to be learned from that for all of us, that when health challenges, come up, the Western civilization, the Western healthcare system wants us to see that as a prison sentence. We are supposed to be losing our freedom, losing this or that. My mother turned it absolutely the other direction into a sense of freedom for us. It's so different to grow to the grocery store with wind in your hair on a bike, cruising down a hill than sitting in the hot backseat of a 1975 station wagon or something like that. It's just a different experience. And so

I think there's an opportunity to learn from her and so many of my patients now who have seen health challenges and an opportunity to fundamentally change lifestyle and reintegrate that lifestyle into natural systems and really start to enjoy a sense of freedom and autonomy that the Western medical system is so eager to take away from us. You mentioned your mom had spontaneous healing, and I'd love to know what sort of placeholder or openness that left you with as your medical journey began, even if you didn't really know about it at the time, as you mentioned, you know, these are some recent discoveries making the connections between everything that you go through, went through in life.

But what sort of placeholder that leave for you as your medical journey started? Yeah, I think it subconsciously planted the seed for me. I definitely came back to it later when I started to see similar phenomenon happening in my patients and had to acknowledge, you know what, actually this happened in my own nuclear family, because it's important that that happened because when you start to see this in patients, when you see spontaneous remissions of stage four metastatic cancer suddenly going away or whatever it is you've witnessed as a doctor, there's this huge part of your brain that wants to shift into multifaceted levels of denial. And you get to the extremity where doctors will see this and be like,

oh, the CT scan must have been wrong initially. I mean, like just random BS denial statements of like, they didn't really have cancer. And therefore, we just, we misdiagnosed or whatever it is. Like there's just all these efforts. And so as I started shifting into, you know, witnessing some of these miraculous, you know, spontaneous healing events, it settled back in that, you know what, I, you know, my mother's life is a living testimony to our ability to spontaneously and instantly change our biology. And we can tap into that and it was not a medical therapy or anything like that.

I was really accessing a spiritual reality that allowed her to do that. And I still to this day don't really know what that looked like. I was too young to be a part of it at the time. I don't think it's any of our business what that journey exactly was for her because it wouldn't be ours. But it shows us something of the opportunity to fundamentally change the fabric of our biologic reality by aligning with psychospiritual systems and a state of resonance and coherence that is going to be much, much maligned, I think, by those around us. When we talk about coming into alignment with a pandemic or coming to alignment with a virus, for example, that freaks people out.

But the fact is, until I come into alignment with not just coronavirus, but the 10 to the 15 viruses that are in my bloodstream right now, 10 to the 15, that's 10 billion viruses in my bloodstream right now. What the heck is going on there? And how am I in coherence with that such that I feel so well today? How am I staying in balance and in this equilibrium with that massive genomic database of viruses within my bloodstream? I have these fundamental mechanisms of being in alignment.

And so if that is true, then what does that look like on the greater level? Why am I in conflict with humans? Why am I conflict in relationship or in with my kids or with my place of work or employees or whatever it is? Why does conflict exist? What is keeping me from a coherent state of flow with all of these systems? And inherently it's a lack of belief that it's possible. We just assume that, you know, the human experience is the reality we live in. But the human experience has been so relegated to this fear and guilt factors that are within us.

We're fearful of what people think. To this moment, I'm always a little bit fearful of what my mother feels like that I share my own journey and includes something of my experience with her. How does she feel about that? Should I feel guilty about that? Should I be afraid for that? So there's ways in which this miraculous healing event, not just in my mother, but in so many ways, miraculous healing events never get shared because we're worried. We're fearful that people will misinterpret it.

We're fearful of this. So I see over and over again miraculous events not being talked about by doctors, not being talked about by the very people that had those experiences happen because they're afraid of upsetting people or setting false expectations for somebody else who has the same disorder. What if they can't heal spontaneously? We have all these doubts that get baked in. And so we live in this fear and guilt kind of reference.

state all of the time to one another, therefore completely debilitating the human potential within us. You know, what you just shared there reminds me this quote that you have and you say, all diseases are the byproduct of miscommunication. And one could look at that as both physical diseases, but almost diseases of society. There's this miscommunication, this misconnection that's happening because we think of things separate or in isolation. And I'd love you to just expand a little bit on that quote when it comes into the context of what are many of the diseases that people are suffering from today in the

category of gut health. So all diseases are the byproduct of miscommunication. How is that true when it comes to so many of the gut disorders that we see today? Yeah, I think we are at the precipice of one of the biggest scientific revolutions and kind of paradigm shifting, understandings that we've ever seen in the history of science. You know, going back to Pythagoras and the ancient Greeks who sorted out the mathematics and the scientific observations that showed us that the world was not flat, was so disruptive to all physical thought, all, you know, paradigms of who we are, where we live, this planet we live on, what does it mean if we're a sphere floating in space?

What does that mean for what is gravity then? Why do we not fall off the planet? but also spiritual and religious beliefs were challenged by it. And then 1,600 years later, we come along and suddenly Galileo with the new telescope, disguised, discovers, oh, my gosh, this sphere is not at the center of the universe. This sun is actually not orbiting around Earth. The stars are not swirling around us. We're actually spiraling through space at some sort of extraordinary rate of speed.

We are circling around a stationary or a more stationary sun that even in itself is hurtling out into space. Like that was once again so challenging to our spiritual and religious belief systems. We're not at the center of the universe. You've got to be kidding me. What does that mean? What does that mean there's other life in the universe? What would that mean for our belief about us being, you know, God's chosen people and all these things that have been told to us in our churches and

synagogues and everywhere else? And then comes along 2010, 2012, where we start to successfully decode the human genome in league with the human microbiome to find out something even far more challenging, which is that human life, human biology, does not center upon the human cell. In fact, human life is centered upon the micro-ecosystem, the microbiome around us, within us, even inside of ourselves in the form of mitochondria. We are teeming with cellular systems that are non-human, and for that, we are healthy or not healthy. And it turns out that that vast shift of believing that the human cell was at the center

of human health to understand the microbiome at the center of human health has revealed to us the ways in which communication happens at the cellular level. It turns out that the microbiome makes a myriad of tiny little carbon metabolites, each species of bacteria or fungi, making their own variation, 10, 15 variants on these carbon molecules and these complex carbon molecules can line up in plasma systems or in lymph or any other liquid state to create what would look like a liquid circuit board down at the biochemistry level to transfer information throughout the grid. And with that transfer of information, we are healing machines. We are so regenerative.

As long as one cell can hear its neighbors and what they need and what resources they have available in case injury happens, the system is so resilient, constantly regenerating, constantly reberting itself. If it's too injured to repair, simply goes into apatosis, programmed cell suicide, and calls in a stem cell to replace it with a brand new, completely new cell, with utter mechanisms of youth within that new cell. And so that's the reality that we live in is this constant state of wireless communication network from the microbiome that keeps us laced into this regenerative youthful capacity. Then we come along with antibiotics in every shape and form, the most ubiquitous one now, four billion. pounds a year being sprayed into our soil and water and air systems is glyphosate, which is the active ingredient roundup and most of the herbicides. The potent antibiotic kills the everything from the bacteria and fungi in the soil, including the mycelial network and the mycorrhizate, which is another

miraculous structure within the food network, all the way to earthworms and nematodes and all the other life within the soil killed by single passes of roundup spraying trucks going through our fields, covering 100 million acres just in the United States every year now with glyphosate spraying. 97% of the Earth's arable lands now severely depleted or depleted of microbiology. And so we have so sterilized our planet that we are starting to see all the signs and symptoms of this next great extinction. And it's for this loss of communication ultimately. You lose the microbes. You lose the wireless communication network.

With the end of communication, you get isolation. An isolation of single human cells is the meta-disease. It is what causes cancer. It's what causes mood disorders. It's what causes sleep disorders. Endocrine disruption. Metabolic dysfunction, all is going to come back to are you in a state of communication or you're in a state of isolation?

At the micro level, this is true. But obviously, what happens at the micro always happens at the macro. And so the polarization of our psycho-spiritual worldviews, polarization of our political worldviews right now, our polarization of our belief of viruses right now is symptomatic, emblematic, and perhaps necessary given the amount of isolation and dysfunctional communication at the cellular level. I really see those going hand in hand. Dysfunction loss of communication at the cellular level.

You're going to have dysfunctional societies and loss of communication at the macro level. So you mentioned about glyphosate and what are some of the other big components that are happening right now that are the primary insults that have contributed to that miscommunication that's there. So glyphosate, a big one, you've sounded the alarm and been sounding alarm for this for years, and we'll dig into it a little bit more. We've done some fantastic episodes on it, but I always appreciate your take and your unique knowledge about it because it adds to those layers that are there. Are there any other couple of major insults that you want to get a chance to highlight that are both contributing to the macro miscommunication and the micro-micum.

miscommunication. Yeah. At the gut level, I think the next one up on the list after herbicides and pesticides is going to end up being the antibiotics in our protein industry. And so the amount of antibiotics that we pour into poultry, the chicken and the turkey being the most extreme offender of an industry there. Second would be the pork industry, much less in the beef industry. But the amount used in just poultry alone is just staggering.

In the United States alone, we use someone. around 35 million pounds, 35 million pounds of antibiotics in our poultry system and the like. And so that is a staggering amount of antibiotic residue and impact on our food system at large. It ends up in our gut. After the poultry and swine, then we're looking at just direct antibiotic exposure from our physicians. In the United States now, 850 or 822 maybe it is, 820, maybe it is, 820, maybe. men, women, and children for every thousand alive are exposed to an antibiotic from their doctor every year. So, 82% of humanity being given an antibiotic by their doctor every single year in the United States on per capita.

It's just a gross number. And so those are just upper respiratory infections or maybe a skin cyst or, you know, a little bit of cellulitis or a utitis or bronchitis or chronic sinus or an ear infection. 82% of Americans being given an antibiotic directly by their physician. One course of antibiotics from your doctor increases your risk of developing a generalized anxiety disorder by 17% in the next 12 months, 24% increase in your major depression rates. Two courses of antibiotics in a year, which is profoundly common, unfortunately, ends up with a 52% increase in your risk of major depression. Just two course of antibiotics in a year. You are depleting your gut in that antimicrobial experience of the very bacteria.

that interact with the interic endocrine cells in your gut that makes serotonin and dopamine. Your gut lining makes 90% of the serotonin that would prevent the depression from happening. So as you kill the workforce, your serotonin is depleted and you end up with depression. It's almost a flip of the coin after two cores of antibiotics, whether you're depressed in the next year or not. It's not being told by physicians that the warning is not being given. And so we need to become aware of the travesty of this constant sterilization of the human gut through our food systems, through our physician offices. And ultimately, the third level below all of that is, unfortunately, our municipal water supplies.

We pump so much chlorine into our bodies through all different mechanisms, from the swimming pools to the showers that we take every morning, are killing the skin microbiome. And the skin microbiome is critical in maintaining the barrier system between the skin and the outside world, between your lymphatics and your myofascial system, which is really where you store memory and emotional intelligence and all that. And so by sterilizing the skin with every shower you take, you are depleting the intelligence of the whole system there on the skin. And so then look at the sinuses as another place.

The amount of obesity is leading to an enormous amount of mouth breathing, a failure to have upper airway patency through the nose. And with the snoring, we screw up the microfluor within the nasal membranes and we get that same leaky gut, leaky nose, leaky skin kind of effect across all three of these systems, skin, sinuses. and gut, our immune system is activated 99% of the time in a fight or flight state, and there's no rest for that weary state, and we end up in these chronic inflammatory milieu, ultimately all tracking back to have failure of the microbiome as we try to sterilize it through all of these different systems. You know, the destruction to the internal microbiome and the external microbiome, because you talk about the importance of the soil and what happens on the outside, happens on the inside,

and those things are so greatly linked. They could feel so pervasive that it's often a little bit frightening, especially when people go down, the YouTube rabbit hole, start looking at a lot of this stuff. It can feel like, where do I even begin to get started? And there's actually a lot that we could get started on that is very straightforward that is at least a step in the right direction. So I want to pick up there, and I want to start off with,

if somebody's beginning to unravel this mess and get their external world and their internal world a little bit more in alignment, what's one of the first steps that they could take that may not seem like an obvious step to people who are traditionally thinking in terms of what immediate probiotic do I have to take or what exact food do I have to eat? There's other suggestions you've given that actually may not have anything to do with food that are a good first step that people can take. Would you share some of those? Yeah, I think it's a general statement.

You know, what you touch is what you are. And so just whatever ecosystems you're in touch within a day is going to code for the microbiome diversity, the intelligence of life within you. And the way in which you touch life is in many different ways, but the most frequent thing that you do some 15 times a minute typically, unless you're in a very good parasympathetic relaxed state and you're meditating, you're down at four or six breaths a minute. But 15 times a minute, the average American is breathing. And every time we breathe in, we're breathing an enormous amount of intelligence from nature. There's 10 to the 31 viruses in the air that we breathe. That's more viruses than our stars in the entire universe.

This is an obscene amount of biomic intelligence that we are breathing in with each breath. With each breath, we take in hundreds of millions of bacteria and spores from the fungal kingdom and all of this. And that ends up interacting with our deeper microbiome. And we've seen with the American Gut Project again, misnamed there because it's being done in Africa. but in that study with Jeff Leach and all his colleagues out there and studying the hunter-gather tribes, we're seeing that their gut microbiome tracks not to anything that we've seen in the American gut or nutritional world,

but actually to what they touch. And so a large percentage of their gut microbiome is actually seems to be directly translocated from the hides of zebra. They hunt zebra, they quarter the zebra, they put a quarter of a zebra on their shoulder, and they walk for two days back to the tribe. And in that time, the skin flora adopts part zebra.

And then that, it then passes through touch and through nurturing of the kids and everything else when they get back home to become part of the sinus flora, the gut flora. And so we find that they are continuous with their environment. And when they are like that, they are so resilient. There was a tragic moment that was predicted and witnessed there when a group of missionaries moved through the area and dropped off boxes and boxes of antibiotics for this. tribe that had never known an infection really. And so this tribe is suddenly given all these antibiotics and they're saying, if you ever get sick, you can take these, you know, some vague thing like that. And that doesn't translate because they don't really see sickness the same way we do.

So instead they sat around the fire that night, opened up all these boxes of these shiny pills and they passed around bottles and the whole tribe literally ate boxes and box of antibiotics that night. The mandate for the science team there was that they were not allowed. to communicate with the tribe or shape the tribe's experience on a day-to-day basis. They had to stay at a distance. They couldn't intervene. So they found themselves in this crisis of do we tell them not to touch these?

Do we, you know, how it does, for whatever reason they decided not to. And they felt like, you know, this deep sadness that they were witnessing the end of the most diverse gut microbiome and humans left on the planet was going to be destroyed that night. They continue to do their science. They would collect its stool samples the next morning. and then throughout the next month, just per protocol, anxiously awaiting the visible impact of this huge antibiotic dose on this whole tribe. And extraordinarily, the data came back that there had not been a single change in the microbiome.

There wasn't a wink of difference in the microbial intelligence within them from overdosing on antibiotics for a night. What it showed us is that if you are constantly breathing fresh air, touching real soil, sleeping on the earth, you're so contiguous with the greater. environment that what happens in your gut is almost minuscule issue compared to what's happening around you. And so it's so cool to see that had we not sheltered our sales away from nature through drywall, you know, enclosed houses and gas sealed windows and, you know, insulation and air conditioning and all the ways we've, now that we have become isolated, suddenly an antibiotic episode

for a human is devastating. We lose our entire ecosystem for a month or if we take a probiotic for six months, we are devastated for the biodiverse because we're simply not touching it in the day. So to begin the journey back in, yes, you're going to change your diet. Yes, you're going to try to limit antibodies. Yes, you're probably going to phase out a lot of meat proteins and things that are carrying so much antibiotic residue. You're going to certainly phase out the way in which you try to scrub your skin clean every day with soaps and chlorine and everything else.

You're going to change all of those. But it really begins at this journey back into nature. And when you integrate back into nature and every breath, every step, every, every, action in the day has the opportunity to re-engage that nature, you're going to become a reinforced microbiome that is much greater than the limitations of your own GI track or whatnot. You're going to start to really live a life of intelligence of nature. And on a practical level for a lot of people that are listening here that are in cities, which deal with their own increasing levels of pollution, air pollution, toxicity, et cetera, what does that look like? When you have patients

at your clinic and they're like, hey, I live in New York. I live in Los Angeles. I live in San Francisco. I live in Chicago. What sort of dosing are you giving to them in terms of getting out? Is that a hike a week? Is that plane in, you know, by the beach for a Saturday? How do we turn that into something practical for folks to walk away with? Well, I begin at trying to be just brutally honest, which is you should move. You should change your entire way of life. If you find yourself in, you know, living in a toxic place and breathing bad air and eating crappy food, you have to radically change your environment at that point to really achieve your optimal health. But steps towards health can be quite simple.

And so realizing they probably aren't going to pull up roots and move that day. But I am amazed that once people start this journey back into nature, the vast majority of them do end up moving, maybe a year later, maybe two years later. But after trying to fight the good fight in the toxic environment that they've now come to realize, they quickly see the chasing out after the wind when they are. challenged every day by every bite of food, every breath they take. And so I think ultimately it is very common for them to radically change their environment. But in stepping towards that, we do see clinically relevant effects on blood sugars or sleep quality and all that by just this, you know, couple times a week touch with nature as far as the deep, you know, hour long, multiple hours long kind of hike or whatever it is. And then short touches to keep up the balance. And so if you can't

get out into deep nature today. If you simply just take off your shoes and stand either on, you know, a stone patio or bricks or concrete, um, asphalt doesn't work at all. But any of the other, the others are silica based kind of things. And you're going to get an electrical charge off of earth for that. So getting literally plugged back into that electrical current on the surface of the earth, I think is a great way to begin this journey back into natural ecosystems, natural resonance, natural coherence. And that's going to improve your immune system. It's going to improve, you know, so many things. And then, you know, as you go into how and who are you going to share that with,

it can actually compound it. And so having hugs turns out to have a huge effect on just that the microbiome diversity and ultimately the immune system function. Nice study recently in the last couple of years showed seven hugs a day correlated with a 35% reduction in flu syndrome. And so there's no vaccine on earth that's ever had a 35% reduction in actual flu rates. And so it's very interesting that we can get these huge impacts of biology through something as simple as a hug. And so integrating with more people.

Pets in the home is a very powerful way to change the microbiome. So if you find yourself city living and the like and you're isolated from that microbiome, having a dog in the home can really be a revolution. Cats are a little less corollary there. But the dog in the home is typically a really great situation, especially that dog's an outdoor dog. digging in the garden, digging in the bushes when you take them for a walk in the day or whatever it is, they're going to transplant that microbiome back into the house as they walk back through and they look you in the face and this constant microbiome updating from the pets can be very helpful.

So the more animals you're in touch with, the more humans you're in touch with, the more nature you're touching, all of these things become powerful avenues back towards a biologic balance. All forms of really increasing our connection with just nature. We're a part of nature and everybody around us and all living beings. And when we're disconnected from those people, we're disconnected from ourselves, which is also disconnected from nature. Take us through the journey. You know, your triple board certified in and you have such an interesting background and intersection. And sometimes you say that, you know, you were jumping around from place to place, kind of looking for truth, looking for the right type of truth to stand on.

Tell us about how that journey stood. When did you know that you wanted to be a doctor? And when did those first insights about disconnection start to come in more of your allopathic training? Yeah, I think that I went in with medicine with a really heady belief system that was programmed into me very quickly on my first day of medical school. The dean of the school of medicine came in. This was in the University of Colorado Health Science Center out in Denver.

and so we had a class of 120 med students and he came in and said you will be the very first generation of doctors to practice personalized medicine your patients will in the near future walk into the exam room and you'll swab their cheek and you'll run their genetics within minutes and you'll tell them exactly what diseases they're going to get and which exactly the medications that are going to treat those diseases effectively you are going to be the most empowered knowledgeable base of physicians ever so i was like holy cow 1992 is a good thing i signed up for medicine as in right now, as I get to be at this tipping point of human biology. So I started my pre-med stuff there in I-2 and then finished medical school and all of that

training in early 2000s and then walked through the subspecialties of internal medicine and actually initially, which was really a lot of hospital-based medicine. So I was in the ICU's and running hospital wards most of time. And it was in that journey, you know, years into clinical practice well after my MD, you know, didactic training that I started to see the cracks in the asphalt or the cracks in the glass ceiling of this pharmaceutical model and was starting to find out that the more I treated the diabetes in my clinic, you know, the more depressed my patients got, the more obese they got, the more insulin resistant they got.

So I was part of the problem of diabetes. Every statin drug we put on patients makes them more insulin resistant over time. So here we are trying to treat heart disease and we're causing diabetes. We then treat the diabetes with medications that cause obesity, which of course caused the diabetes in the first place. And so started seeing myself as part of this very slippery slope, codependent, you know, multifactorial disaster of pharmaceuticalization of health, which is just not possible. And my chemotherapy research that I was involved with in those last couple years of the university, 2008 to 10 kind of time frame at this point when I was starting to make these realizations, I was starting to do clinical trials with a compound that I had proven out at the basic science level

was going to have some significant impact in a new fashion on different endocrine cancers and all this. And so a heady time again, oh my gosh, you were incredible med student and then resident and then chief resident, now you're on faculty, and you're making these breakthroughs in chemotherapy. Like, it was so, so exciting on the, on the ego side that I was able to delude myself for a very long time that I was on the right track. At the soul level, I was suffering.

I was becoming more and more depressed. I was becoming more and more isolated professionally, socially, all of that. I was working my ass off, you know, not unusual to work 80, 100 hour weeks. And I was in that isolation, losing hope because I couldn't find a solution that seemed to actually change the trajectory of disease in a single patient or within the population. And it was one of my patients in my initial clinical trial from my chemo that really, you know,

revealed this to me in a potent way. When the nurse came in all gowned up with mask on and gloves and with these two green pills and walked over as if this thing was like radioactive or something, one of the safest chemotherapies ever been developed really, but the experience for the patient was, oh, my God, this thing must be so toxic. The nurse is afraid to touch it, and yet I'm supposed to swallow these experimental research drugs. And so I sat there for 45 minutes and convinced her to swallow those two green pills. And in the process, I think I broke the spirit of a human being. She intuitively knew she did not need those pills. She intuitively knew this wasn't part of her solution.

And she told me that over and over again, a million small ways. And I kept convincing her that the science and you die of cancer if you don't treat it and blah, blah, blah. And I fearmongered her into taking those pills. And it was altruistic. I literally thought, my God, I came up with a solution to this cancer that had no treatment. And in that moment in hindsight, you know, I felt terrible walking out of there. And I couldn't figure out why. I just finished enrolling and successfully getting the first dose of medication in the very first translational research clinical trial in this drug.

like I should have been elated. And I walked out of there was not my stomach feeling weird and off. And it took me a while to unpack that. But she said one thing in that exchange that I think ended up being the seedling that would change the course of my career. And she said, does the stuff in this pill have anything to do with why I got cancer? And at that moment, I had no answer until finally I kind of ended up just talking. about science instead of what was in the pill and all this and how does cancer happen try to explain it was genetic which isn't even true but i had all these rationales that i tried to play on her

and in the end you know tragically she was right that there is no case of cancer in history that was caused by a lack of chemotherapy and if that's true then there's no case in history of diabetes that was caused by a lack of diabetes drugs there's no heart disease a heart attack that was caused by a lack of statin drugs. And so the belief of the pharmaceutical model suddenly just shattered for me in those months. And so at that point, I kind of had finished a couple of specialties, internal medicine, endocrinology metabolism, cancer research, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I realized I was going to have to walk away from all of that because nutrition

seemed to be the only thing that could maybe offer a way out. And I hadn't been taught any nutrition, but my research had been in vitamin A compounds for killing cancer. And that had gotten me starting to read nutrition. And then there was, you know, great book on diabetes that came out from Neil Barnard around that time. Neil Barnard's program for reversing diabetes. Me and a couple colleagues in the Interkin Department started following Neil's work. And he was basing his stuff on Gabe Merkin from the 1970s and all these guys who had written, you know, whole dossiers of science and clinical experience on reversing heart disease and diabetes through nutrition. So all of that started me down.

on this panel pathway so I left in 2010 and started a nutrition center for reversing chronic disease through food and that was the beginning of my education because I knew nothing and it was really my patients who were patient enough to work with this clueless doctor and help me understand what I had been mistought and a lot of even the old science how it was not applying anymore the work of Colin Campbell and Aselstein out of Cleveland Clinic and all this who had kind have devised the plant-based diet to reverse heart disease. It wasn't working anymore. The plants weren't working the same way. I was putting it into patients an amazing volume and only a third of them were getting better. Two-thirds were continue to decline or at best plateau. And so I was starting

to have to study nutrition from scratch because the old nutrition science wasn't applying anymore. And that's when we kind of found our way into the soil and the story of factory farming that's crushed the medicine within our food over the last 30 years. And we now have food that not only is lacking all of the medicinal elements that we would hope we would have, it's now carrying toxins. And so it's that one-two punch of loss of nutrients, loss of medicine, and that incredible toxin load within kale, Brussels, Brussels, you know, stuff is laced with chemicals that are carcinogens and it's destroying, you know, the ecosystem within.

So for a lot of people who are listening here and more and more an increasing percentage of the world is starting to pay attention to organic, even if they're not eating organic, they're paying attention to it. Talk about organic in the context of what you were just sharing, that we've had a loss of nutrient value. We've had crops that are sprayed. How is organic a step in the right direction, very much so, but may not be completely getting to the root of some of the things that you're chatting about here. Yeah, so I was, you know, starting a study as we started to uncover the story of glyphosate within the food and I started a basic science laboratory and Dr. John Gilday, also having worked with me at the University of Virginia, joined us and we had just an extraordinary

experience of exploring this glyphosate story and being able to show the direct consequences of glyphosate on small intestine, on colon, on kidney cells, you know, blood-brain barrier, devastating. the tight junctions causing leaky gut, leaky brain, leaky kidneys. And so we showed this over and over again, you know, endlessly in our clinic for the last decade nearly now. And in that work, you know,

we started to, you know, track that to the greater system of glyphosate exposures. And I was able to find a series of maps from the NIH and the CDC that overlapped with our glyphosate spraying maps in an extraordinary way that our cancer epidemic that had suddenly emerged between 1996 and 2006 in that 10-year period,

the whole cancer map in the United States flipped. We had always had the highest cancer mortality up in the northeast. Suddenly it was in the deep south. And so in a 10-year period, we reversed the pattern of chronic cancer expression in our environment. And that should be impossible if the former definition of cancer is most common genetic disease. That can't happen if we had the right model of cancer. So it was forcing us to really look deeper and deeper into this story. But to find out that 85, 90 percent of the glyphosate sprayed in the country's collected,

into that single water system that is the great Mississippi River, its largest water system in North America. It collects all of that glyphosate, which is a water-soluble toxin and consolidates it into the last 90 miles of the river, which runs from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. And that area of Louisiana is called Cancer Alley, highest rates of cancer in the entire to develop world. And so a stunning demonstration of this. So we thought, oh, my God, the world needs to know.

So we set out to make a movie about this. and we start we're going to travel from the headwaters up around Minnesota and all the way down to Louisiana along this and interview scientists and doctors as well as farmers we got to our first farm and on that farm they were doing a demonstration of chemically grown soils or in organic soils and devastatingly because i thought i had set out to make a movie on the importance of eating organic oftentimes the organic soil was much worse than even the chemical agricultural soils. And so this is when I started to glimpse the severe limitations that we had on the organic

movement in regards to its impact on soil health and ultimately human health. And so in that moment, I realized if I'm this deep in the soil science and glyphosate and everything else and I thought organic was the solution, we need a revolution of education. And so that's when we started Farmers Footprint and Project Bio. and a 50 and C3 nonprofit to really start changing the way in which consumers and farmers understood the impact of food systems on soil, water, and air systems, and that we need to go far beyond organic checklist of which we can spray and what we can't spray to starting to realize we just can't kill.

It doesn't matter if it's a chemical agent or an organic agent. We need to stop killing the microbiome through overplowing or spraying, and we need to start to embrace soil mechanics and soil new. nutrient cycling and microbiome diversity. And so that is now referred to as regenerative agriculture loosely, poorly defined yet. But really, the point of regenerative agriculture is instead of trying to produce crops, change the farmer's mindset to be a co-creator with soil itself. And their job is to grow healthy soil.

And if all of they do is every morning wake up, try to figure out how can I make my soil healthier, they never have to worry about crop yield. They never have to worry about income streams because they become so much more resilient and profitable within months of making this transition. So regenerative agriculture begins at this kind of change in mindset towards the soil, but immediately has impacts on human capital and social capital as we start to see less abuse and less of this extractive nature of killing farmers who now have to go spray five different chemicals to kill the roundup resistant weeds in the Midwest, 24D, a dicamba, nicotinamize,

glyphosate, liberty, link, my God, then the list just goes on and on and on and of the mix of chemicals these guys have to spray every day and they have to suit up in hazmat suits and they're spraying and there's trucks and they're breathing in their kids are breathing in there and try to keep their kids locked in the home during the growing season because there's so many planes overhead like spraying like it's just like toxic stew and suddenly you just switch all of that and you make that that farmer a steward of soil instead of an agent of death. for microbes and weeds, and their whole world shifts around. They find their own self-worth.

They find their own passion for farming again. Their mental health goes through a radical revolution. And so this is really the steps towards, you know, going after the next revolution is where are we going to start to understand ourselves within the context of nature rather than thinking some sort of organic label is going to fix the problem? You know, you're making these connections between our insides and our inside world and our outside world. You know, one of the things you talk about is inflammation and how chronic inflammation, which is really the root cause of so many of the diseases that we're facing with today.

Is there a similar analogy when it comes to the soil? Like, what's the inflammation of our sort of external world and the soil? Is that just the erosion of the top soil? Is that basically soil with no life form inside of it? What does that look like there? Or is that analogy not useful way to think of it? I think it is. I think it's useful.

We have such an abstract relationship to soil as consumers today. We can go to the grocery store. It's not unusual now to find your vegetables individually plastic wrapped. Plastic wrap mushrooms, plastic rack, cucumber. It's just ludicrous. what we do with packaging these days, which is just emblematic or symptomatic of this bigger disconnect from soil. Everything is so thoroughly washed in the United States. If you go to Europe, they would be so offended to see a clean chicken egg. They want to see the feathers on the

egg. They want to see the chicken poop on the egg to know that it was fresh that day. They're not going to buy something that's like a sterile thing. That's very suspicious for the European consumer. And so we've become diluted that somehow sterility or cleanliness is some sort of proxy for health. And we've certainly done that to soil systems. So if you go to the Midwest or any agricultural system actually throughout Western civilization now, you're going to see fields that have all been plowed completely naked of any life. So there's no weeds growing.

There's no plants growing. They completely plow up these fields into brown dirt, at which point we are devastating the soil microbiology, certainly just the plow itself is a huge disruptor in the fungal kingdom. and tear up all the mycelial networks, you disrupt all the cell cell communication, all the kind of acreage of fiber optic cables that the mycelium have laid down,

destroyed by that plow. Next up, they go and spray so that nothing grows over the next three months until they're ready to plant their roundup resistant corn or whatever you're going to stick in the ground. And with the spraying, they wipe out all of the earthworms, the nematodes, and all of that. And so we're sterilizing the soil,

we're disrupting the fungles, systems, all that. And then it lays naked. all winter. In that, the snow comes or the wind comes and you get silting and destruction of that topsoil and you're wiping away just thousands of pounds of critical resource for that farmer and ultimately for our country. Right now, we're losing about 2,000 pounds to 4,000 pounds of topsoil per acre throughout the entire U.S. agricultural system. So we have 125 million acres under agriculture and now you multiply that by two tons you're you know hundreds and hundreds of tons of soil being washed away which of course is the whole future of your children's health being washed down

river systems silted out into chemical bogs we are losing the most precious thing that nature has given us which is the connection to her nutrient base through soil systems and so we're doing that by putting people in this sterile state of belief whether it be the farmer with the the perfectly groomed field or the consumer looking for that highly washed vegetable. And so we need to get back out in the gardens. We need to get our hands in the dirt. We need to keep soil covered all of the time. Cover cropping is a must. The reason global warming is happening, I strongly believe this has very little to do with the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and has everything to do with the newted soil systems around the world. The soil surface, the dirt surface of a field that has been plowed and

does not have organic material on top of it. In the Midwest, for example, it's very typical that they'll hit 130 degrees, the soil temperature. If you go next door to the Regen Farm that's got cover crop on there, all summer long, the soil system never goes above 76 degrees. 76 degrees versus 130 degrees radiant temperature of 125 million acres in the United States, plus another 40 million acres of lawn, plus another 100 million acres of concrete and all of this, these are resonant heat sinks that are heating the surface of the planet because we killed the cooling system. We killed the whole geothermal cooling matrix of the earth through doing this soil

management system so wrong. And so it's heat. It's a loss of microbiome. It's a loss of, you know, intelligence of nutrient density that would allow for crops to be resistant and resilient against pests or against weeds. And so they are born into the system of food with a weakened immune system, which means they're going to get disease. And so we're having to spray more chemicals on that food en route to your plate. And so that failure of soil, that turning it into dead dirt that's radiating heat and death, is exactly what's being mimicked now at the consumer level,

the explosion of obesity. It's because the body can't even recognize its own caloric intake because none of it's coming in in a biologic form. It's coming in in chemical form, high fruit just corn syrup, processed oils, all of these nutrients coming in in non-biolocin, ways, just like chemicals on the field, the system can't integrate that into a healthy plant. The system can't integrate that into a healthy kidney cell, brain cell, whatever it is.

And so we are killing the soils of the earth. We are killing the soils within us through the same dependence on the chemical industry. You know, part of what opened your eyes up was you had a patient that was willing to ask questions to you and questions that were coming from a very vulnerable place of of just literally wondering, like, what was the cause of her cancer? And I'm sure there was many other moments like that, but that was one that you shared. That was part of it. And when you look at the state of the world that we're in right now and with a lot of

questions that are not being asked, it's not just that, you know, sometimes you could say, okay, well, maybe people are asking the wrong questions. Well, that could be part of it, but there's just not as many questions being asked in general, period, which are more important than sometimes the answers themselves. If you would be looking at what would be components that play a part in a collective perspective shift, how do we get the population or how do we support the population? Because many of these things are, just like you were a well-intentioned doctor who was doing the best they knew, the best they could in that situation, many people find themselves

in a similar place. There are some nefarious actors, and I'm seeing you've been the victim of some of that stuff, hit jobs by the industry, people calling you a quack, whatever it might be to try to shut the conversation down. There'll always be a little bit of that that's out there. We can't deny ourselves and say that there's not some people coming from a completely negative place. But for the folks that are well-intentioned, how do we support the process of asking more

questions to open up our perspective? It's a challenge. It's a challenge. It's tearing apart families right now. It's tearing apart, you know, employment environments, all of this as we start to grapple over and further polarize around these issues of public health. I think that, you know, to begin the discussion is one for me just to spend a little bit of time in nature with people. Taking the discussion outside instead of being in a cubicle or something like that changes the discussion. So if you're going to start this, try to start a dialogue with a loved one or a friend or a colleague and you want to start that space, I would say go to a park together and eat lunch in the park or go and paddle on a kayak for a little bit with your colleague or your friend or your family member.

Get them out in nature and pose the question as to, you know, what does it mean to be human? Do we really have dominion over all of this nature that we're around? Are we really opposed to and against nature as the definition of nature has stated in the Oxford Dictionary. Oxford Dictionary says that we are, you know, nature is all things living in the environment as opposed to humans. And so, like, how did we manage that? How did we write ourselves out of nature? And is that radically wrong? Is that could we see, can we come to agreement that no, we're definitely part of it?

nature. Okay, if we're definitely part of nature, then what should that relationship look like? Does it have to be one of manifest destiny that since we're the most intelligent species on earth that we should kill everything else around us? Does that make sense? No, that probably doesn't make sense. All right. So if that doesn't make sense, then how do we start to reimagine this world around us? So that may be a pathway, but I guarantee it'll be simpler to do it in an outside environment. Nature is a great teacher. Let's use the last part of our conversation here to get a little bit more practical and bring it back to where we started off, which is on the conversation of gut health. There's people out there that are suffering from all the

implications of having a leaky gut, chronic inflammation, you know, a whole host of different names that we give to different diseases. And they're just looking for an answer. They're looking for a step in the right direction to feel. So I'd love to talk about a few classifications. and you could chat about your individual thoughts about how that category, that pillar plays an important role in supporting not just our microbiome, but our overall sort of, you know, gut health. So I'd love to chat about sleep. So what insights and thoughts would you want to put in when it comes to sleep and the connection

to gut health? We mentioned the issues of nasal breathing versus mouth breathing during sleep. critical to gut health, critical to your microbiome diversity and the kind of stability of the neural system throughout your gut. So I'm a big fan of the mouth taping for those that are kind of just mouth breathers, for those that have severe snoring or sleep apnea. I'm a huge fan of working with a biodynamic or a biologic dentist and his team, her team, to work on expanding the palate through natural methods of the tongue exercises.

So there's a little device called an alf, advanced light force wire. It's pioneered for adults by Dr. Jim Bronson. Dr. Bronson and his team out in Virginia have been really influential in training hundreds of dentists all over the world on how to use these alfs to improve nasal breathing, improve airway mechanics, all of that, which has huge impacts on not just the gut microbiome, but neurologic function has implications for the immune system, cancer, heart disease, everything being touched by the quality of sleep by the mechanism or the function of the airway. And so improve airway mechanics.

Mouth tape is really cheap. There's a number of different brands that have pretty comfortable medical tape with a little slit in the middle so that you can't actually breathe through the mouth if needed. But it helps keep the mouth shut during sleep so that you're more induced into that nasal breathing state. And that has an immediate fact on resting heart rate, sympathetic versus parasympathetic, digestion, all kinds of beautiful things. mood disorder, mood stability changes. All of those are really welcome when you go to that nasal breathing. Next up is really respecting the diurnal rhythms of the day. And so trying to pattern your day more closely with sunrise and sunset, go to sleep earlier,

wake up early, waking up just a bit before dawn is a super powerful way to reset your endocrine system, the neuroendocrine system, getting back in league with that, improving the quality of, you know, getting at least. two full but ideally three full cycles of sleep in and improves everything from your deep rest stage four sleep all the way to the REM which is your memory consolidation alike and we find that as you move out of that sympathetic fighter flight state into a parasympathetic rest and digest state there's this constant interplay between rest and digest with good rest you're going to have better digestion you're going to have better function of the microbiome and the translocation of nutrients back up

into your body from the gut environment, all of that. So rest and digest being the catchphrase for the parasympathetic nervous system runs true again and again. The whole gut brain axis is very real and is constantly in play, day and night and all of that. On the endocrine side, you know, quick look at how sleep infects it. A hormone called ghrelin turns on in the morning and regulates our hunger. As soon as we start to eat, leptin turns on and production of leptin from our fat cells

cues us that we're done eating. And when we miss sleep and we get poor sleep hygiene going, we screw up leptin and the ghrelin ratios in our body and we tend to overeat. We tend to ignore the signs of satiety. We tend to go after fat, salt, sugar combinations with a lot more, you know, addictive behavior in that lack of sleep environment. So at every level, the microbiome function at the parasympathetic nervous system, as well as at the endocrine system,

your sleep quality is going to have huge impacts on, on the ways in which your digestive health lays the foundation of this organic garden within you. That was fantastic. Thank you for that breakdown. I want to shift over to movement, which you talked about a little bit earlier. And when it comes to movement and the microbiome, and especially the microbiome connected to our metabolic health or our blood sugar management, any additional insights you want to share with our audience when it comes to the intersection of those two areas. Yeah, a huge fan of nitric oxide. One of the most popular videos I ever put out was a four-minute workout that we devised about eight years ago or something now.

The four-minute workout free on YouTube, if you want to dive a little deeper on this, but it's a mechanism of dumping nitric oxide from your 16 largest muscle groups in just four minutes. And if you do this workout two or three times a day, suddenly 14, 21 times a week, you're getting this massive acceleration to your metabolic function, which, of course, has a direct playback on your microbiome and vice versa. And so by getting this nitric oxide dump through exercise, we can radically improve basal metabolic rate, neurologic function, again, parasympathetic activation downstream, all of that.

So four-minute workout, nitric oxide dump one pathway there. But again, we can tie back to the importance of nasal breathing. So if you're a runner and the like, and you find that you can run or cycle on your peloton if you're doing something like that, when you're cycling or running, practice nasal breathing during exercise. When that air rushes across the nasal membranes, it again releases a huge amount of nitric oxide. And this is nitric oxide that's going to hit the brain almost instantly because there is no real blood-brain barrier between the sinuses and your brain. It's one area where there's great porous nature to that blood-brain environment.

And so that nitric oxide showing up across the nasal membranes is going to hit that brain very quickly inducing a higher metabolic rate there, reversing depression, anxiety and all that, improving sleep quality again, sex drive, all these benefits. So nasal breathing, four-minute workout, nitric oxide dump would be my short-term. answer there. So much attention goes into the topic of food, naturally so, because people are very curious about it. How much weight do you place on adding in the right stuff versus removing things that are potentially harmful? I'd love to get your perspective on that before we drill into just a couple questions about food. So how much weight do you put on one versus the other? And you can answer that in any way that you want to. I think it's a critical question.

I always get excited about what happens in our clinic. We've tapped into the 4,000-year history of Ayurveda, an incredible science that's emerged in the nutrition realm out of India over 4,000 years. And Ayurveda nutrition looks at the balance of your body with the food that you intake, and it simply gives you a quick list of what are the highest, you know, nutrient and energy, you know, systems that you're going to. going to get in your diet daily. How do you go after balancing these four elements within your nutrition?

And so it's a very proactive way instead of coming in and fear mongering around, you know, shouldn't be eating processed foods. You shouldn't be eating, you know, saturated, unsaturated oils, whatever it is. Instead of doing that fear mongering, we love this kind of empowerment pathway. This is exactly the food that your body is going to resonate with. Try that for a week and see how you feel. And so then it's a journey towards, you know, joy rather than, you know, you know, again, inducing the fear response, which typically induces change in the human short term,

but unfortunately it doesn't remove them from the fighter flight mentality that got them to the place they are right now. So it's kind of like throwing the statin drug on somebody with heart disease or the diabetes or the diabetes. The drugs are going to make the condition worse. I really believe that's what happens when we start to add fear to the food. And so for that reason, I've never called my clinic vegan. I've never called myself vegan.

I really try to move towards this concept of plant-based, try to eat plant. up-based all the time, but I don't freak out about it because it's not my identity. Like, I'm not a-vegan. I am Zach, and I am seeking this nutritional relationship of integration into nature, and I find I areveta's clued in a lot of my eating and hydration behavior that makes life worth living for me at my most vibrant state and elevating that energy source. Big component in Arirveda that's there, and then just a lot of traditions across the world is fermented foods. You talked a little about probiotics. Should we feel skeptical about

fermented foods or are you on the fermented food train? I'm on the wild fermented food train for sure. I love wild fermentation. It's hard to find in grocery stores and it's extremely expensive when you do find it. A little package of sourcrow. That's live culture, wild cultured, meaning that it has hundreds and hundreds of species in it, you know, that have been inoculated from the air metabolism during the fermentation versus just the probiotic dumped in there. So most sourcrout on the market is probiotic induced. But if you can get a wild fermented or air fermented in there, it's good. It's usually like 10 bucks or 11 bucks for a little refrigerated packet.

It's always in the refrigerator section. If it's a really good quality ferment, you're not going to find it in a jar on the grocery store shelf. And so you're going to want to find it in the refrigerator section there. but it's typically a 10 bucks for what's literally like 15 cents of cabbage and salt water. And you can do that at home for 15 cents. And so I highly recommend when we talk about fermented foods is get into making your own. It really takes seconds. It's literally make a saltwater brine, dump a spoonful of salt into, you know, eight ounces of water and like,

and then bury in a quarter of a cabbage and let that sit for three days. And you've got that beginning of this incredible process. You can start eating it at three days or you can continue to let it sit longer and wait for a week, two weeks, three weeks, to keep tasting it every day. And you're going to find more and more intelligence within that food system as the microbes continue to do their digestive work. You're going to learn a ton from that. And you're also going to find your perfect palate. I love more than doing the cabbage. I'm a huge fan of beets, which is often called kovas when fermented or turnips, which is called sour rubin when fermented.

Sour rubin is ridiculously good. The sweet turnip when it ferments gets that nice combination of the sweet, salty, spicy, all that going on. So turnips are a huge piece of it for me, and I'm a huge fan of kimchi. Kimchi brings in so many umami flavors. It's an easy way to get the spice in that I love. I'm a huge fan of capsaicin as an anti-inflammatory and all that. So getting the peppers in on a good kimchi is a really great way to improve neurologic function within the whole body, including the gut, all of that. So making your own ferments, I'm a huge fan of.

If you can't find the time to do that in the short run, at least start to set the intention of exploring that at some point. I found that kids really enjoy it. So for years, my son was the one that was fermenting in the house because he found it fascinating and he was always created some of the best kimchi we ever had. So find if you got a young kid or teen in the house that might get passionate about the subject and explore it on their own as a chemistry project. And you might get health benefits from there.

but find somebody in the household interested in pursuing it and it will change your paradigm for sure. Are there any food trends that are happening right now that you are witness of big sort of macro trends that you feel that we might be headed. I can understand the good intention nature of it, but we might be headed in the wrong direction with the sort of hyper focus on one area. Is there any one area that comes to mind? I'm sure you can go into a lot of different stuff. but is there just one thing in particular that you feel present to right now?

I'm terrified of all these fake meats. I'm terrified of beyond meat. I'm terrified of the impact on not just microbiome, but also neurologic function, terrified for the long-term consequences of laboratory-grown meat on liver cell function and detox pathways. We have cracked open a very dangerous precedent by all this rapid USDA adoption of of beyond meat and impossible burger and all these things.

This is not the right path forward. This is not moving us towards a holistic approach to nutrition. This is not moving us towards microbiome diversity. It's not improving neurologic and southern metabolic pathways. And so I'm really concerned because you've got hundreds of billions of dollars now being poured into research and development around these fake meats. And I think it's a real crisis. And they keep greenwashing the head. heck out of it, right, saying, well, cows are bad for the environment and blah, blah, well,

eating cows in excess is a problem. Eating anything in excess is a problem. Yes, we should eat far less cows, but creating some sort of fake meat, highly processed, single mono-peptide, mono, amino acid pathways, genetically engineered ingredients in these compounds and all this, like, no, this can't be the right path. So of all the terrifying things we're doing in the food system right now, that one might rank number one. Would you say that that's even more, you know, has this somebody coming from, you know, who's vegan himself for many years, grew up vegetarian, grew up in like the Hindu and the Jane

community. That was a big part of it. I think some people, not that I identify that by that right now, just a little bit of my past history, some people feel genuinely asking that, okay, you know what, maybe some of these engineered meats are not the best thing or we don't know, but what's worse, that or factory-farmed animals who are going through? And this is a genuine question. I actually have no take on it one way or another. I'd love to get your perspective on it since we're on the topic. Yeah, I think the question is framed for a reductionist failure there. Both pathways are wrong. And so we can't stop and think that those are the two solutions. We have to obviously go to, well, instead of a hamburger, have you tried a lentil burger?

They're ridiculous. They're way more flavorful. They can carry so much more nutrients. You've got chopped carry, it's onions, ginger, black pepper, all crushed into a lentil burger. It's insane. It's way healthier, way more tasty than any of the above and has a tiny fraction of the carbon footprint, chemical footprint, ecosystem damage footprint of either of the other pathways. So, you know, that's the problem that we get into in this food system. We tend to ask these reductionist questions to one another and try to pit these impossible, you know, trues against one another. and expect a rational response. And so it's a perfect question to end on because I think that all of us need to quickly

go back to really looking at what are the tricks that we're using mentally to justify the convenience of eating what we're eating today. Because in the end, that's the only reason we're eating what we're eat today is because it's convenient. Very little of us that goes into us is now traditional ancestral patterns of nutrition. And these are their recipes my grandmother passed on. And so I cook them. nobody's doing that anymore.

Everybody eats exactly what the fast food industry wants them to have this week. And when I say fast food, that includes your, you know, Chipotle and whatever else you've justified as well, this is a healthier version of something or other. Like, no, you've got to start making food again. You've got to get back to a garden. You've got to get volunteering at a CSA or at least shopping at the farmer's market. You've got to get reintegrated into a real food system instead of keeping these abstract arguments and systems of denial going.

So ultimately we got to take responsibility at a higher level than we have been for the last four or five decades. And we need to step back up and start engaging food for real. So we hit sleep. We hit movement. We went on food. I could have you back for a whole topic on just digging into the nuances all around the food.

I do want to come back to extra support. Call it supplementation, something that isn't food. and I know that you have a lot of experience in this because you have some background and also some knowledge base and really cool products that are in the space. But if there are things that we can take to support our gut health, I want to give you a chance to jump in and share a little about your perspective of components. And I don't mean just the products that you're involved in, but how do you think about people bringing in things like polyphenols into their diet

or thinking about other ways to bring in elements of, you know, you can, of course, eat a diversified diet, and that's really the key and the number one thing, kimchi, cheese, fermented foods, all the stuff that you were chatting about earlier. But do supplementation actually work? So we'd love your thoughts on that. I would say in general, the answer has been no for the supplement industry at large because it's taken on the same reductionist approach that the pharmaceutical industry said. And so you go into a health food store and you've got vitamin C and you've got lucine and you've got vitamin E and you've got, you know, this antioxidant over here and this one over here.

And they keep processing out single elements for you to consume and act like this is going to somehow supplant the whole food natural diet with, you know, fermentation and everything else involved. So in general, I think the supplement industry is dismaly effective or dismaly lacks any efficacy. And so when we start looking at supplements, we need to ask the deeper question of like, how does this relate to the root cause of disease? And so that's what we've held ourselves to in our supplement company that we have is, you know, we want to make sure we're right down at the very root cause initiation of dysfunction within the cellular system and then ask, well, how do we start to change the environment? around us. So for our supplements, we've been extracting those carbon molecules of communication, cell cell communication out of fossil soils for almost a decade now. And we're industry leader. We do all of our own processing of those soil compounds within our own facility. We do all of our own quality control, all of our own science, all of this. So rigorous system of conviction over that.

And the reason why we have such conviction that we continue it is that this literally is the point at which we disconnected from nature. It was at the soil level. And we've gone into deep detail on that. But with that, we recognize there's not enough fossil soil on the earth for us to keep extracting this, even if we grow 100x,000 X for the whole planet to restore gut health. So we've been channeling a lot of our funds out of that into root cause solutions throughout other parts of the soil, ecology, energy sectors and the like to come up with

root cause solutions throughout the system. So even if we find a root cause solution and a supplement, we need to recognize that it's still functioning as a Band-Aid and we need to put those resources that we get through something like that into really fixing the relationship between humanity and our nature, whether it means changing our consumer behaviors, changing our consumer product industry, what packaging is available. What we do with plastics is a big piece of what we're doing as a company. We have a whole biofuel company that we're developing transitional technology to get plastics

back into bio-desol, tires, farm waste, all this into biofuels, biochar, all that. So we got to, when we find a supplement that really is at the root cause, it's still a supplement. We need to, I hope over the next 30 years, get rid of the whole concept of supplementation and simply be in a state of abundance all the time every day through our nutrition and otherwise. Great answer. and allow for us to all get a chance to aspire to and co-create because we can create it right now. Zach, it's been a pleasure to have you on the podcast and to chat about so many of these diversity of subjects that you have such expertise and knowledge on. I'd love for you to get a chance to mention, you know, that brand that you're involved in and other ways that people get a chance to keep in touch with you on the incredible amount of content that you're putting out there.

Yeah, the fastest place for all of the educational stuff, Zachbushmd.com. The Global Health Education series has been well received this year. I started at the beginning of COVID, just doing public health education around what are viruses, what is the immune system, what happened last year, what's really going down with heart disease, diabetes, death and dying, infertility. We've tackled a bunch of subjects. So lots of free content over 35 hours of content there, I think, on the Global Health Education Summit now. So dump into that series. It's free at their Z-A-C-H-B-U-S-H-H. Zachbushmd.com for the soil work and all the soil science,

Intelligence of Nature.com, we'll get you all of that. So dive in for soil, sinus, skin, look at all that microbiome, look at the systems we've been talking about. You'll get to see from our laboratory images and the microscope of all those systems and the dysfunction that happens when we isolate and the power of resilience and regeneration that happens when we reconnect information streams.

Intelligence of Nature.com there. If you want to help out on the agricultural side, we invite you to check out project biome.org. It's our 511C3 for a deeper dive on the farming industry. We highly recommend farmers footprint.us. This is where you can meet the farmer stories series exists. You can tap in to the bi-monthly series that we do, many documentaries on farmers all over the country

that are coming up with extraordinary solutions to the health crisis, to the food systems crisis that we're in. There are oftentimes these will signal you, on new sources for you to source nutrients for your family and all that. So the meat, the farmer series can be a powerful way for you to really change your environment and your relationship back to the food system and be a direct to support to the farmers that are making the ingenious and extraordinary difficult transitions to these regenerative systems. So farmers footprint.u.com. Beautiful. Well, we'll have the links for all those in the show

notes. Dr. Zach Bush, a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thank you for coming on here and sharing your knowledge with our audience. Thank you, Drew. Appreciate you having me home.