The Dr. Hyman Show - The Mindblowing Healing Power Of Nature

Episode Date: August 20, 2021

The Mindblowing Healing Power Of Nature | This episode is brought to you by Paleovalley While much of our culture and society supports a sedentary lifestyle, primarily spent indoors, there is a ton of scientific evidence that shows how connecting with nature can have profound effects on our health. Just spending small amounts of time connecting with nature—even by looking at a picture or getting a house plant—not only lowers our stress levels, it can lead to better sleep, better decision making, and a range of other health benefits. And nature is not only healing for humans, it also holds the key to healing planetary health as well. In this mini-episode, Dr. Hyman discusses an array of ways that nature is beneficial to human health with guests Max Lugavere and Drs. David and Austin Perlmutter. He also speaks with Dr. Zach Bush about the ways he is working to create a new paradigm of health based on nature’s guidance as it relates to the challenging issues we have with glyphosate in our soils. Max Lugavere is a filmmaker, health, and science journalist and the author of the New York Times bestselling book Genius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life. He is also the host of the #1 iTunes health podcast The Genius Life. Max’s sophomore book is The Genius Life: Heal Your Mind, Strengthen Your Body, and Become Extraordinary, a lifestyle guide to living happily and healthily with proven, research-based lifestyle tactics, which we dig into more throughout this episode.  Dr. David Perlmutter is a Board-Certified Neurologist and four-time New York Times bestselling author. He serves on the Board of Directors and is a Fellow of the American College of Nutrition. He serves as a member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease and has published extensively in peer-reviewed scientific journals including Archives of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and The Journal of Applied Nutrition. His books have been published in 34 languages and include the #1 New York Times bestseller Grain Brain, The Surprising Truth About Wheat, Carbs and Sugar, with over 1 million copies in print. Dr. Perlmutter’s book Brain Wash, co-written with his son Austin Perlmutter, MD, was released last year. Dr. Austin Perlmutter is a board-certified internal medicine physician. He received his medical degree from the University of Miami and completed his internal medicine residency at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland Oregon. His academic focus is on understanding the decision-making process, how it is influenced by internal and external factors, and how it changes our health and illness outcomes. He is also interested in methods of improving burnout and poor mental health in the medical field. He writes for Psychology Today on his blog, The Modern Brain. Dr. Zach Bush 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 non-profit 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 the planet. This episode is brought to you by Paleovalley. Paleovalley is offering 15% off your entire first order. Just go to paleovalley.com/hyman to check out all their clean Paleo products and take advantage of this deal. Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Max Lugavere, “How To Fix Your Brain And Live A Genius Life” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/MaxLugavere   Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Drs. David and Austin Perlmutter, “The Brain Science Behind Social Conflict And Depression” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/DrsDavidAustinPerlmutter Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Dr. Zach Bush, “How To Activate Nature’s Healing Potential” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/ZachBushMD Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Being exposed to chronic stress is rewiring brains to favor the types of activities that create chronic stress. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Hyman here. Now so many of my patients ask me how I manage to work multiple jobs, travel frequently, well not so much anymore, and spend time with my family and still focus on my health. I know it can seem hard to eat well when you got a lot going on, but the trick is to never let yourself get into a food emergency and to stay stocked up with the right things to support your goals. So recently I discovered Paleo Valley Beef Sticks. I keep these beef sticks at

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It's one of my favorite tricks to staying healthy while on the go. All right, now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, I'm Kea, one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. While much in our modern lives has taken us out of nature, nature provides the raw materials for creating vibrant and healthy life. And reconnecting with nature can have profound effects on our health and the health of our planet. Dr. Hyman spoke about this with health and science journalist Max Lugavere. So you talked about, you know, nature and how that is really, the disconnection from nature is really a source of problems for us. Major. Today, we spend 93% of our time indoors, in big cities.

And there's a lot of this research now coming out of Japan on forest bathing. There's actually a Japanese word. I believe it's karoshi or karyoshi. I could be butchering it. But essentially, there's a very significant portion of the population that gets worked to death in Japan. And there, I mean, 90%, 93% of Japanese people live in cities, so they're far removed from nature. And so this nature bathing line of research has really become a major focus. Wow. Yeah. And it's now being studied, you know,

increasingly around the world, the relationship that we have with nature, especially as our cities become more and more dense and more and more polluted. You're saying we should all move out of cities and become farmers? More connected to nature, yeah. That would be good. Yeah. I mean, there are some things that you can do. So spending more time in nature I think is super important, especially if you are at heightened genetic risk for Alzheimer's disease.

So if you're an APOE4 allele carrier, making an effort to spend more time in nature. And that's a gene that increases your risk. If you have two of those genes, like getting Alzheimer's by 75%. So doing that, also getting out in nature is crucially important because of the exposure to the sun. So exposure to the sun, I think is very important. We were talking all about circadian biology.

Exposure to bright light, crucially important. Getting bright light into your eyes in the morning is crucially important for anchoring your body's circadian rhythm, which guides everything from how coordinated we feel, how much focus we're able to have, how much energy we're able to have, how well we digest and metabolize food. To actually have good sleep, you need to get outside and get sunlight in the morning. Yeah, yeah, 100%. Good sleep begins actually the morning of. Dr. Hyman also spoke with Drs. David and Austin Perlmutter. You know, when you realize that 87% of Americans, of our time,

is spent indoors with another 6% of our time in our cars, it doesn't leave a whole heck of a lot of time for being out in nature, which has some very powerful health benefits. There's a robust amount of data being generated that's looking at the measurable, the quantifiable benefits of nature exposure. And it may just be like you have behind you a plant in your home or in your place of work or even a photograph of that plant or natural environment. We all know chronic stress is a problem in our lives. No one's out there looking for more chronic stress. But now what we understand is that chronic stress

disables the prefrontal cortex. When you look at these animal models, you see that the neurons in the prefrontal cortex shrivel up when they're exposed to chronic stress. On the other hand, in the amygdala, they expand. You get more dendritic branches. It creates more connection. So in the amygdala, they expand. You get more dendritic branches. It creates more connection. So in the amygdala where you don't want that. So in essence, being exposed to chronic stress

is rewiring brains to favor the types of activities that create chronic stress. And again, let me just break this down. So what you said was when you're into chronic stress, it kills the brain cells in your adult brain that helps you make good decisions. And it makes the ones grow in the fight or flight part of your brain where you can be angry, divisive and run or fight, right? Exactly. So, so that's not good. I wish it wasn't that way, but you look at these long-term studies in humans who have undergone chronic stress and you see that the prefrontal cortex is smaller. You can actually physically see that it is smaller in people who have had these life

experiences, this chronic stress over time. Getting outside for 20 minutes a week has been associated with lower levels of stress. It doesn't take that much. We said you can just put a plant in your home. You can even put a picture of nature in your home and be getting these benefits. Dr. Hyman also spoke to Dr. Zach Bush about nature's ability to create health in their discussion about the challenging problem of glyphosate in our soil and in our food. I'm just literally blown away in an awe because this is such an untold story that within the soil itself is the answer to the damage that we've done to the soil and ourself through the chemicals we've used in our agricultural system. So glyphosate roundup,

like you said, it's 4 billion, I've heard 6 billion pounds. It's the most abundant agriculture chemical that's been used in the world. It is used on 70% of crops. It's abundant in things that we wouldn't even think of. The top two sources of glyphosate in our diet are hummus, basically garbanzo beans, and lentils, which you think of, oh, that's a health food. That's a plant-based diet. But unless they're grown organically, it's not just the GMO soybeans.

And it has vast effects on the soil, which I want you to get into, including chelating all the minerals, so the plants get the minerals. It destroys the mycorrhizal fungi, which are this network of fungi in the soil that are necessary for the plants to extract the nutrients. It's just so complex. What you're saying is that when you looked at this ancient soil, you were able to extract compounds that then you can use to fix the damage that's done to humans from the glyphosate, which is just mind-blowing when you think about it. And I think when you're talking about leaky gut and the gut permeability and tight junctions, I think this is really the foundation of functional medicine, which is looking at the gut and how the gut has led to so many chronic illnesses.

So when you look at the microbiome, it's linked to everything from depression to cancer to heart disease to diabetes to obesity to Alzheimer's to autism to ADD to, you know, you name it, autoimmune diseases, allergic disorders, and a lot of it has to do with leaky gut. And it's not the only reason, but glyphosate clearly is a factor in driving this and has so many broad implications for how we treat our ourselves. How do we then begin to shift the agricultural system to one that actually gets rid of these chemicals, that actually helps to restore soil, that helps to solve some of these problems at the root, and actually deals with human health problems by fixing the soil? Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, I think, you know, to begin with the mind-blowing part, you know, the reason we're going to 60 million year old soil for our source is because, again, the more biodiversity you have in a bacteria and fungi in a soil system, the more diverse you have of these carbon molecules. and different changing environments throughout your own gut or throughout organ systems as they change, there's different carbon molecules that are going to be more available,

more bioavailable and more biofunctional at those different environments. And so the more biodiversity you can get in that communication network, the more effective you're going to be at lacing all of this together. And the striking thing is just how little soil is left on the planet. We are now calculating that 97% of the world's soils are severely depleted. And, you know, that it's just jaw dropping how much damage we've done in such a short period of time with chemical agriculture as we scaled that globally. And so it's really a, you know, a 50 year story of chemicals, but interestingly, it was over

plowing that destroyed the soil infrastructure before the chemicals. But interestingly, it was over plowing that destroyed the soil infrastructure before the chemicals hit. And then you take Roundup and it functions as an antimicrobial at every level. And so it's been patented as an antibiotic, it's been patented as an antifungal, antiparasite. And so it starts to come into this chemical, this beautiful array of biophotonic transformation through all of these species interaction and starts breaking the cycles. And so this is why I believe we look like we do as a society right now where, you know, recent Medicaid screenings are showing 52% of our children with a chronic disorder or disease by the time they're 16. That's compared to 1.2% in the 1960s, right before we debuted these chemicals. Wait, wait, wait, you just said one

in two kids are a chronic disease? Chronic disorder or disease. So some of them we don't call diseases, but we call it asthma or eczema or immune sensitivity to their food or the air they breathe or whatnot. That's staggering. 52% of our children by this. Staggering. One in two kids.

Yeah. And at first when you say that statistic, you're like, that can't be right. Until you walk into an elementary school and take a look around the room, and you can immediately see kids not only with eczema, you can see kids with full-blown psoriasis in elementary school now. And so the amount of gut disruption that you need to develop an autoimmune condition near psoriasis is devastating. And then you see this explosion of leukemias, you know, near psoriasis is devastating. So, and then you see this, you know, explosion of

leukemias, lymphomas, and weird sarcomas in children that used to appear in 80 year olds are showing up in children under the age of two now. And so we're showing this just decimation of biologic youth or, you know, regenerative capacity within human biology in this most recent generation. The scary thing is right now we're looking at generation number two of roundup babies. In our rodent studies that we just reviewed for the EPA, the third generation is where the devastation really gets out of control. Yeah, I saw that.

We've never seen that generation. It's actually genetic effects. It's generation three. So if the grandmother gets exposed, the mother may or may not get sick, but the grand little grand rat gets sick and they get kidney disease and cancer and all sorts of hormonal disruptions and endocrine things, which is kind of scary and they've never been exposed. So it's these transgenerational effects that actually have consequences and things that we can't even imagine on our children. And I think that, you know, these dots are not getting connected. So this is a lot of stuff that people have to

think about. The connection between their health and the soil health and the chemicals we're using and the need for a new form of agriculture and the sort of broad implications for our society as a whole. But it seems like there is a place of hope right now happening as I see it. There's this massive movement and you're part of it. The Soil Health Academy, Rodale Institute, you've got, you know, policymakers starting to advocate for regenerative agriculture. The, you know, the governor of Pennsylvania, you know, just put forth $22 million to help transform all the local farmers into regenerative agriculture who wanted to do it. And so there's really movement in this direction. How do you see that getting out there in a meaningful way and being catalyzed?

For me and my group, we've decided not to focus any attention or put any energy into conflict with the current status quo. We see the current status quo as self-destructive. It's a totally unsustainable model for agriculture. Same way for allopathic medicine. We have a completely unsustainable model of disease care in this country that's going to bankrupt the nation over the next few years. And so we don't need to fight against that. We don't need to argue with them. My choice is to let them actually be on their happy way and make, you know,

a few more trillion dollars in the journey of their, their demise. Well, we need to start to really engineer the new future that we all want. And so we're putting all of our energy into that new pathway rather than trying to be, you know, adversarial conflict with, with the status quo. It makes sense. You know, you just sort of have to create the new and let the old just die out in a sense and show there's a better way. So despite the fact that it is a really tough time, not just COVID-19, but just the economic disparities, the social inequities, the amounts of disease, the struggles that people have, you know, and the destruction of our environment and climate, you know, I, I do see this as a hopeful moment where, where there could be redemption through an unembracing understanding of these principles. And essentially it's what you're basically saying is let's learn

from nature. Let's adopt nature's principles, both in terms of how the body heals and how the earth heals. And let's just apply those concepts because it works. Yeah. Yeah. So much so that we've decided that the intelligence of nature is, is the, is the brand. You have to completely surrender the idea that as humans, we're going to somehow come up with some technological innovation to get us out of our scenario. The technology that we've developed as humans has taken us away from that intelligence of nature.

And so starting to surrender ourselves as physicians to realize that microbiology is teaching us something important, which is communication is the heart of healing. And the biology is always striving for biodiversity and adaptation. And if we're failing to support communication, biodiversity and adaptation in our microbiome or our human experience at any level, we're going to undermine our state of thrive, our state of capacity for regeneration, whether we're a human system, a soil system, or beyond. And so there's some deep lessons in our socioeconomics, our sociopolitics, around when does communication become the focus again, instead of adversity or adversarial, you know, interactions. And so there's an opportunity here for us to really learn from nature to become co-creative in our relationships as humans and as members of this spectacular nature that we were born into. There's a great deal of knowledge and healing to be gained from our natural environment. And taking time to reconnect with our natural world can have profound effects on your well-being. If you'd like to learn more about any of the topics you heard in today's episode, I encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full-length conversations with Max Luckever, Drs. David and Austin Perlmutter, and Dr. Zach Bush.

If you have people in your life who could benefit from this information, please consider sharing this episode with your community. We need each other to create a healthier us. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other

professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.