The Dr. Hyman Show - Why Your Health Depends on the Soil with Dr. Daphne Miller

Episode Date: May 15, 2019

In college, I read a book called The Soil and Health by Albert Howard. Little did I know, that book would forever change the way I viewed the relationship between dirt, food, bacteria, and human health.Emerging research continues to reveal the powerful influence of the microbiome on our health. Our microbiome is comprised of the trillions of bacteria, fungi, and even viruses present within the body. The balance of these microbes can make or break good health, and you won’t be surprised to learn the food we eat, and more specifically how it’s grown, is heavily correlated to our microbial composition. Today’s guest on The Doctor’s Farmacy is Daphne Miller, a doctor bridging the gap between medicine and farming. Dr. Miller is a practicing family physician, Clinical Professor at the University of California San Francisco, and Founder of the Health from the Soil Up Initiative. She is the author of two books: The Jungle Effect: Healthiest Diets from Around the World and Farmacology: Total Health from the Soil Up. A pioneer in the “Healthy Parks, Healthy People” initiative, Miller helped build linkages between our medical system and our park system and writes her patients “park prescriptions” to get outdoors. She also developed a soil learning lab for health professional at Paicines Ranch in Hollister California.

Coming up on this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. So feed, protect, conserve on one level, very simple, really very simple concepts, and yet they really are the underpinning of our health and of soil health and atmospheric health as we're learning. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and that's Pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And today's conversation is with a friend of mine, an extraordinary doctor, a pioneer in thinking about how agriculture and health connect, why the soil matters to our health in ways that most people aren't talking about.

And she has really pioneered these ideas in a way that make them accessible, understandable, and make them important because they are and we don't talk about them, which is pretty stunning to me. She's currently a clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco. She founded Health from the Soil Up initiative, which is a very cool initiative bringing healthcare practitioners to ranches and farms to help them understand what's going on in the earth and how that connects to our health. She's written two books, The Jungle Effect, which I read, which was really cool. It was The Science and Wisdom of Traditional Diets, where she went all over the world looking at

what people ate and came up with some really sensible advice that was pretty important in sort of taking away some of the extremes of what people think about diet. She wrote a book called Pharmacology, which we're going to talk a lot about today, which is about... It's also with an F. Also with an F, right. Pharmacology with an F, right. It's right. In fact, you know, there's now an initiative that I heard about in New York where it's called Farm to Farm, which is PHARM to FARM, where if you go into a pharmacy to get your blood pressure prescription, you can actually get $30 in food stamp kind of

money for the farmer's market, which is a great incentive. She's helped with an award-winning documentary called Search of Balance, which is a very cool discussion of the complexity of everything that is going on in health and in the soil and in nature. She's a contributor to the Washington Post. She's been profiling many newspapers and magazines. She's consulted for many organizations, including the FAO, which is a food and agriculture organization in the United Nations, the indigenous Terra Madre, Slow Food International. And she's created this new idea, which is called a park prescription, where she gives her patients prescriptions to go walk in the park. And they're very specific prescriptions, and it's kind of caught on.

She's graduated from Brown University, Harvard Medical School. She did her family medicine residency in Salinas, California and is doing very cool work in the space of food and health and soil and the earth. Welcome, Daphne. Thank you so much. Thank you. So, you know, I first sort of understood the soil when I read a book when I was still in college called The Soil and Health

by Sir Albert Howard. I'm sure you know the book. I think you've even written about it. And he said something that struck me, and it was a quote that I really held on to, which is that the whole problem of health in the soil, in, he said, man, but humans, animals, and plants is one great subject. So how did you come to understand that that was true and get started in this work? It was a slow process. I mean, it probably, if I were going to say what catapulted me was really my internship in Salinas that you just mentioned. Which is a farming area, Central Valley of California. It is ground zero for the lettuce basket of the U.S.

If you look on Google Maps, you see that Salinas is absolutely surrounded by agriculture. And really is what that area is what's pumping out all the vegetables for the United States. I mean, we wouldn't have cilantro or asparagus or artichokes or strawberries if it were not for the Salinas Valley in that region. And I was doing my internship there in 1993 to date myself. And after spending a couple weeks in the hospital, I suddenly realized that most of the patients that I was treating had been harmed in one way or another by our food system. I was taking care of migrant workers who would come in seizing from organophosphate poisoning or with hand amputations. And sort of on the second level, the degree of poverty among the patients I was treating was clearly a byproduct of an agricultural system that was taking advantage of its workers and not paying them a fair wage.

And on the flip side, treating already diseases like obesity and heart disease and diabetes, which were related, you know, to our food system as well. And that really is what started me thinking that our agricultural system was unbelievably unhealthy. And, you know, seeing it in the fields as I drove into work and, you know, smelling the chemicals that were being used and a lot of the nitrogen fertilizers and so on. And then seeing the patients and there was even, this was never proven, but we were seeing sort of higher rates of fetal malformations. I worked, you know, it was in the obstetrics ward as a family physician. And so all of this came together for me then. And I started to ask questions about, you know, if our farming system can harm us so terribly, can we flip this on its head and actually have a farming system that not only does not harm us,

but keeps us healthy. And I started to ask medical colleagues in the hospital about this, and they kind of all gave me blank stares. And it really started to inform my work from there. And the first step was really trying to understand what is a healthy way to eat, because, you know, in medical school, you're not even taught that. And so that first project that you mentioned, the jungle effect, was really inspired by patients who come from different parts of the world and described having poorer health than their ancestors, their parents and their grandparents, who had lived in one part of the world where there still were very low rates of modern chronic disease, diabetes, you know, the heart disease, depression, certain cancers, and so on.

And trying to understand why that was and realizing that there were a lot of factors and that, you know, diet was not the only one, but it was certainly a very powerful one. So that book was about me traveling back to their traditional ancestral villages and trying to understand what those diets were like and literally bringing those diets back to my patients and having them start to implement them. And as I did that work and started to actually bring it into communities and work with patients around it, it suddenly dawned on me that I was completely, had missed the boat. And that in fact, the diet was only the surface. It's the shiny thing that we look at,

but it was really the whole system that was underlying that diet, the way the foods were produced, what seasons they were produced in, what was the sociocultural milieu that was growing that food, what were the agricultural traditions that were being used to produce those foods? What were the traditional seeds that were being used to grow those specific healthful foods? And what is the soil like? And so I realized I kind of had to do the whole project all over again, but not just look at what ends up on the table, but really understand how those foods are produced and how they link back to our health. And so that's how Pharmacology with an F was born. Amazing. And most of the project happened in the US. But it's really something that's

made me kind of jump professions in a way from medicine to agriculture. And I feel like I have this- Doctor as farmer. Doctor as farmer. I have more colleagues now who grow food than people who prescribe pills. And you give gardening prescriptions. Exactly. Grow your food.

So that is a long-winded explanation for why I'm here. It's fascinating. You know, and you're describing this as sort of broad range of things where you're seeing the harm that our current agricultural production system does to the workers, right? Because of toxic use of chemicals, because of poor working conditions, because of being almost indentured servants and human rights really is a huge issue there. At the same time, we're hurting the soil that we grow our food in. So our soil is depleted, our food is depleted. And then the food we are

growing is commodity products that are turned into processed food like corn, wheat, and soy that end up causing all this chronic disease on the other end of the spectrum. And it's this huge problem and everything's connected. And that is some of the beauty of your work where you actually are connecting the dots between all these things that don't seem connected. Like what is the microbiology of the soil have to do with us? And you talk a lot about this in your work

and I'm fascinated to sort of dig into this because when I get a little bit deep right away about how the microbiome, which is this brand new topic in medicine that didn't even exist when we were in medical school, connects to the microbiome of the soil and why that's important. I mean, for example, you tell people, don't wash your organic vegetables, right? Eat the dirt, right? So talk about how you came to understand that and what the science is behind that and what we need to do to change what's happening. Well, first of all, I want to say that I really appreciate what you said before in terms of

getting the big picture there, because there's actually a lot of people in medicine who still don't, that this really is a story on the unhealthful side of exploitation of workers, exploitation of soil, and then exploitation of our own bodies, we who are the recipients of that food and that system. And I think that's a very important notion to grab onto. So we can't heal communities unless we actually take care of farm workers and take care of soil. But the microbiome is this wonderful way of tracking that connection. It's kind of a nerdy scientific way of telling that story that you just told. Because in fact, what's so unbelievable about doing this work is that it tracks through on many levels, from the microbial of bacteria and fungi, nematodes,

how they are linked to soil is still trying to be understood and told. It's not the sciences, you know, in its infancy. And we know, of course, that our microbiome is a unique microbiome. You know, each one of us has a unique microbiome it's like a fingerprint it's a fingerprint it's not the same microbiome as soil but we know that there is a lot of crosstalk we you know evolved as these single cell creatures out of soil we all grew up in the dirt right hunting and gathering and uh and over millennia what's happened is that different microbes have found their distinct niches, but that they in fact do communicate. And this research is slowly, slowly coming out.

And food is probably one of the really important shuttles that goes back and forth in terms of informing the two microbiomes and influencing them in different ways. But it's not to say that our microbiome is the same as soil microbiome. But there's crosstalk, which is this concept of meta... There is absolutely genetic crosstalk. And that is one of, you know, there is some interesting studies coming out. And in fact, fermented foods, which probably are the most important intermediary, because in fact, what these foods are fermented with is soil bacteria that's on the food. And

then, you know, different forms of usually fungi and yeast that ferment the food. Sort of like controlled food rotting, right? Controlled food rotting. And... Otherwise, it's a sauerkraut. Right. And researchers are showing that it doesn't change our microbiome, but it can temporarily affect it. It's like tourists going through an economy. They improve the economy.

They improve the situation. And Justin Sonnenberg's lab at Stanford is, I think, about to publish a paper. I know that they're in the final parts of the study looking at fermented food and its health of patients with different kinds of bowel symptoms. And I think it's actually IBS that they're looking at. And what they're finding is that they're are more effective than, you know, all the packaged probiotics that people are trying to sell. And it makes sense because these foods actually, you know, they co-evolved with us, unlike things that are invented in a lab. And what's interesting you point out is that kids who grew up on farms or ranches don't

get the same problems with allergies and asthma. Their immune system is developed in different ways that there's less problems with these kids' health. And they don't have ADD because they're out in nature all the time, right? So yeah, there's, you know, people are referring to it as the farm effect. But there's a big multinational collaborative called the Gabriella Collaborative that was started by researchers in Europe, but there's actually research happening in the U.S. now between the Amish and the Hutterite, two different farming communities. And what they're trying to understand is why it is that children who are raised on sustainable farms have much lower rates of asthma and allergy as compared to children who

are more conventional farming systems, where they're using, you know, more chemicals and so on, and children who are raised in urban areas. And the thought is, once again, that it is this microbiome. And, you know, one could argue that the soil is probably the mother microbiome that's inoculating these sustainable farms. But they're finding that even the animals on these farms are probably influencing kids. And dust and the hay and potentially even things that we typically think of as allergens in the city. But for some reason on these kids, they are protective. Kids who grow hay don't get hay fever. There you go.

I mean, this is something that's been noticed all globally, that in developing countries, they don't have as much asthma or allergies or autoimmune disease. All these inflammatory diseases that are rampant in the United States really don't exist there, or at least in the same amounts. And the hypothesis is that we're just too clean, right? The hygiene hypothesis. It's actually a little bit more complicated punchline than that. Yeah, good. Okay.

It really has to do more with diversity. So we're plenty exposed to bacteria and bathed in bacteria and fungi and so on when you read a sample, this room or urban environments in general. But what's happened, it's the same thing. You remember I talked about from the macro to the micro. We're losing diversity on the planet of our animals and our plants. And we are also losing diversity of our microscopic creatures, of our fungi and our bacteria and our nematodes and so on. That's happening in lockstep with the macro loss of diversity. And just to stop, because it's an important point to emphasize, it's happening in the soil, but it's also happening in human microbiomes. Absolutely. And the diversity of our gut bacteria is

dramatically different than it was a hundred or a thousand years ago. Yeah. I mean, it's happening on plant microbiomes, it's happening everywhere. And so, and it's all from the same cause, which is, you know, overexposure to bactericides and antibiotics and basically us growing very few types of crops so that we're just getting too much homogeneity in terms of our plant kingdom and, you know, pollution and, you know, encroaching on wild areas and all of these things, you know. Yes, all the chemicals, the antibiotics, the pesticides, herbicides, and so on. But that is probably more the reason why we're seeing asthma and allergy than just cleanliness per se.

It's loss of diversity. And that's a really important concept for people to have because the way you protect diversity and maintain that health resource is different than just getting dirty. It's really about thinking like an ecologist or a conservationist and trying to think, how do I preserve natural niches? How do I preserve them on farms? How do I preserve them in urban areas? How do we build cities that actually have, you know, places for butterflies and different kinds of insects to flourish and different kinds of plants and different kinds of animals and so on? So it's a bit more of a complicated concept. And the danger of us just talking about hygiene.

Yeah, no, I think you're right. I think that's a very important point. It is the complexity. And, you know, you bring that home also to medicine, right? You're not just a farmer or gardener, you're a doctor. And you treat patients. And the insights that you've had about disease are quite unusual for a physician, which is that you've moved from the reductionist view of disease to a more deeper understanding that disease is really complex, that there's a complexity of biology, that we are a complex, adaptive, dynamic system that's constantly changing, and that things like redundancy and diversity are important for our own health. And it's not something we learn about. How do you kind of hold that in medicine what do you do with that absolutely i mean i i wish that everybody who decided to become

a doctor or a nurse or a nurse practitioner or just you know any kind of healer in health care um spent two years working with ecologists and or farmers or someone who works with natural systems. Because by the way, we are one. Yeah, we are one. And being able to actually see it, you know, sort of display itself, you know, because it's actually hard to understand our natural system. A lot of it's tucked inside of us and quite invisible, and we have to take other people's words for it. But when you're in nature and

understanding how complex those systems are and the trophic levels and unintended consequences and how everything interacts, it gives you an enormous amount of humility and respect for these structures, and makes you realize that the true meaning of first do no harm. So the biology we have is really complex, like you said. And I learned a fact recently that kind of blew my mind, which is we all learn biochemistry and all the pathways. Well, we think we learned all the pathways, but we didn't. There's 37 billion, billion chemical reactions in the body every second. That's 37 with 21 zeros. It's hard to take your word for that. It's hard to fathom. And the complexity of that and everything cross talking to everything else, we're an ecosystem. So in a sense, doctors need to be ecologists is what you're saying. Absolutely. And so when we do these

soil labs for health practitioners, that's exactly what we do. And they start the lab in a soil pit on a farm in the Central Valley in California, which is, by the way, an ecology or an ecological niche where, you know, a lot of our food comes from. And it's a very challenging place. It gets seven inches of rain a year and has that amazing topsoil, which is what generates our food. It's incredibly, you know, thin. And we dig these soil pits so they can see the soil layers and get in there and start to experience like this is this is what's pumping out nutrition not only for the united states but for the world i mean grow so much of you know the almonds and you know other stuff that gets exported to other places uh that's the true nourishment you know not

not just the corn and the soil but california is is really where our nutrient-dense food is grown. And for them to start to understand that this is something that, A, we have to absolutely protect, and that we need to get involved in working with farmers to make sure that we can increase this lifeblood, you know, for our country. Because right now, we're underproducing the amount of, for even with the current population we have in the U.S., we are not producing enough fruits and vegetables. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if this is right, but I heard or read once that if everybody in America ate the five to nine recommended servings of fruits and vegetables a day, that we'd only have enough for 2% of the population. It might not be that low, but we're probably, in terms of just what we're producing in the U.S., we are falling short by about two-thirds just for like the Harvard recommended, yeah, five to seven a day.

And even with imports, we're still falling way short. So we are not nutrient secure as a nation. We're producing tons of sugar in the form of corn and soy and so on. Way more than we need. But not enough of a lot of the macro and micronutrients. Yeah. And by the way, the soil that you talk about is the source of the nutrients in our food. So even if you're eating the best organic food grown on the best organic soil, the nutrient levels in our soil have declined 90% in the last 100 years. And organic is better, and they're more nutrient-dense.

But even still, we're not— I don't know if I agree with that. Where did you get that data? I'll send you the references. You might be referring to a piece that was actually done right here in Austin at University of Texas. And his name is Ronald Davis, I think. But if you read that study, he does not say that it's because of the soil. It's because we've changed our varietals of fruits and vegetables so dramatically.

We are now choosing seeds, basically, for their ability to produce a lot, to be able to travel long distance and to not go bad on the shelves. So the kinds that the varieties of carrot that we're growing are different than they were in the thirties and forties. But I have not seen a lot of evidence that our soil in us has been depleted enough to actually change the nutrient content of our food i would i'll share i'll share with you i'll share i'll share with you to the science i'll share i'll share with you studies because i i literally just gave a talk about this yeah but it might you might need to go back and look at the actual research because it is it is uh i i will be amazed okay i'll share with you there were

scientific papers i'm not making it up i promise, but a lot of people read those studies and they blame it on the soil. And believe me, I would love to. No, no, the studies are of the soil, looking at the soil nutrient content. Uh-huh. Oh, I see. So not translating it into the nutrient content of the food. Well, the food gets its nutrients from the soil, right? Yeah, but they're not the same at all.

Of course they're not the same. So you can actually have a big shift in the nutrient contents of the soil and end up with the exact same nutrient density in the food because these plants are actually unbelievably, you know, microbes in the soil and the plants themselves are really efficient at scavenging nutrients. But isn't the problem that most of our soil in this country has become more sterile? It's become more like dirt instead of soil?

It's hard to say. And we are at a point where that certainly might happen in the future. And there are parts of the world where massive amounts of soil depletion have gone on. But it probably is incorrect to say that we are at that point in the U.S. We still actually have some of the richest soil in the world. And it's more a matter of starting to in the U.S. is not exactly what it is. All right. Well, we'll dig those studies up and share them and we can continue the conversation.

I think that the concept of a doctor being an ecologist is a really kind of new idea, right? And I think that science is sort of catching up with that. I recently got a new textbook called Network Medicine about the body as a network, as an ecosystem, and how we need to rethink science and how we research things and the complexity of the human body and these biological networks that are driving health and disease. We don't think like that as doctors. We think, okay, I'm this specialist and I take care of this disease or this siloed problem instead of really understanding how everything connects together.

Yeah, sadly that is true. I'm finding with a lot of the students and young doctors that I work with that there really is a very different way of thinking. And I'm hopeful for the future of medicine, especially if I can get a lot of them into those soil pits. Yeah, I think that's right. I love the idea of having doctors go out and work on a farm. In fact, I actually took a course in biological agriculture when I was in college and got to grow food and learn about food and learn about ecosystems and learn about sustainability. And, uh, you know, I was kind of a weirdo, but it was, it was a really important part of my education because I began to understand that relationship.

But I think your, your emphasis on the idea that farm is medicine as well as food is medicine, as well as parks are medicine is a really important contribution to our conversation because the average person is not thinking about it, the average doctor is not thinking about it. And then when you follow it down the chain, what are the implications of this, right? How do we change what we're doing so that we actually can get it right on track? And I was very intrigued by what you shared with me before we started the podcast,

which is that you're working on a new book about hopeful stories in food. And I don't know if you could share any of them, but I would love to hear about it. And I want everybody to buy your book when it comes out. It's going to be a while. What's really interesting me is this regenerative food movement, which is still a little bit fringe in the sense, you know, just in the same way that integrative medicine is still, you know, fringe. But it's farmers who really are coming forward and saying there are principles of soil health that are super important, not just for protecting

soil and for protecting the environment, but also for protecting and nourishing humans. And the principles on the surface are actually pretty simple and straightforward. It's kind of the same principles you'd use in terms of protecting your own body. I mean, I always say that's three things. Feed, protect, conserve, which is, you know, basically that you need to give the soil the right kind of nourishment. And it turns out that the best nourishment for soil is a diversity of plants. There's that diversity thing again.

You have to protect soil by keeping it covered all the time. Just like, you know, we have these little fine hairs on our skin and that actually play a really important role in terms of our skin health. And then when you do things like retin-A or whatever, and you know, to try and get rid of wrinkles, you're actually destroying that top layer of skin and eventually is not so good for you. It turns out with soil as well, you need to keep it covered all the time. Which we don't do. We till and till. Even in California, 80, 90% of the soil in the winter when we have our rain is bare and brown.

And you need to have cover crops or just, you know, every day of the year there needs to be something basically growing there. And the reason you need that is because that organic matter growing above the soil is what feeds diversity under the soil. All of those microbes that are very important for processing the organic matter, turning it into soil, also harvesting carbon from the air, which is a whole other reason that we draw down carbon and climate change from the atmospheric carbon and nitrogen, which is probably, you know, way more of an issue in terms of climate change than carbon. So feed, protect, and also another part of protecting is not using chemicals that are going to be destructive to the life in the soil. So, you know, minimizing antibiotics, minimizing pesticides and herbicides.

And the reason I say minimizing is because, you know, as a physician, I know that sometimes you need those things. And the idea is to use them, you know, really as the treatments of last resort. Once you've tried things that are much gentler and much more using your natural ability to heal and using food and so on. And it's the same with the soil. There are times where farmers absolutely need to pull out the big guns when they're having some kind of horrible blight or so on. But one could argue you don't get those blights as often when you're using these systems. So feed, protect. And then the third one is conserving. And, you know, the discussion in regenerative agriculture is really about how do you take all of that organic matter and all the waste from animals and the water and everything else. It's horrible we call it waste because it's

fertilizer. Right. And move it back into the soil. And so that you have these closed regenerative systems. And so feed, protect, conserve on one level, very simple, really very simple concepts. And yet they really are the underpinning of our health and of soil health and atmospheric health as we're learning. Because in fact, agriculture seems to be this very important way to draw down carbon. Yeah. So how does that insight about feeding, protecting, conserving affected your practice of medicine? Because. Oh, I, I talked to my patients about those same three ideas all the time. So how do they apply to like a patient who comes in, let's say with

an autoimmune disease or a digestive problem or. Those are the three ideas I go to first. I mean, we're kind of all pretty terrible at doing that for ourselves, all three of those things, in terms of trying to use, you know, nourishing ourselves. And it turns out that a diversity of foods is probably the best diet for us, just like a diversity is great for the soil. I mean, the best marker, everybody's trying to describe what's a healthy diet? Is it this diet? Is it that diet? Well, I can tell you from traveling all over the world, jungle effect, there's many different ways to eat well. There is not one healthy diet at all.

And with all- But there are unhealthy diets. There are unhealthy diets. But trying to make diet rules is generally not so helpful. But this idea that diversity and trying to eat really a rainbow of plants and grains and potentially even animals and so on. And, you know, having them match what comes from the ground, you know, in terms of being in season and working together and so on. That's probably the best kind of diet. We used to eat 800 species of plants as hunter-gatherers.

So, yeah, we had a big diversity of food. And now we basically eat three plants, corn, soy, and wheat. And a little iceberg lettuce in there. So, yeah, so I work with my patients around those same concepts and the same with protecting. When you, it's so often people want to go, you know, to these treatments that are way too powerful for what their health needs are and not allow room to see how their own immune system and their own resilience might actually get them through something. And yet at the same time, you know, if you have breast cancer or colon cancer or something, like go see the oncologist and get on that chemotherapy.

By the way, most of those chemotherapies, guess where they're from? Plant medicine. From soil. Right. Bleomycin. Yeah, which is one of the most effective tools that we have is from a streptomycin fungus, you know. So our soil is also this incredible reservoir for a lot of our modern medicines. And so we have to protect that diversity in the soil even for that.

See how it all works together in this crazy way? Yeah, it is fascinating. I mean, the complexity, I don't know, I actually exact statistic on this, but I heard that there's like, if you pick up a handful of soil, there's more microbes in there than there are like, you know, galaxies and stars in the universe. It's like some astounding amount of astounding amount. Yeah. Even, even in soil, that's not so good. It's pretty great. Yeah. So great. And, and so in, you know, what, what, you know, if you can share any other stories of people who've inspired you or people are doing things differently or people

who give us hope because, you know, this is on the margin, but, but who can you call out that's doing something that's really shifting the way we do things? Well, I think that there, I was just came here from, uh, new Orleans where they're having're having this massive aquaculture conference. Basically, everybody who's farming fish anywhere in the world was there. Wow. And that's fraught with... There's still problems. There's still problems. There's still problems.

And yet, you know, there's some very hopeful stories coming out in every place from New Orleans and so on of people who are building these kind of interesting aquaponic, you know, closed system fish farms that are growing plants and, you know, producing healthy, actually pretty nutrient dense fish, are not polluting the environment, are using no chemicals at all, and are allowing oceans to regenerate themselves so that they don't, you know, become the place where we need to get all our fish from. So, you know, a lot of the stories that I'm seeing that are hopeful actually do involve technology. And they do, you know, involve a little bit of innovation, but at the same time, respecting how natural systems work and using them.

So it really is this fusion that, you know. So you're hopeful for medicine, you're hopeful for future agricultural? I have kids, so I have to be hopeful, right? But yeah, there's a lot of terrifying, horrible things going on out there. I have to say that the Green New Deal, which is getting a lot of blowback and ridicule and so on, I actually think that there's a lot in there that's so important. And it really is the first time that lawmakers have proposed this idea that, you know, environmental health is intimately linked to public health and our health. And, you know, kind of moving the arrow in the other way and saying that we cannot save the environment unless

we are all thriving and have a minimum wage and have health care and so on. And I think we have to start to think about how those systems interconnect and not just think about conservation and fighting climate change as its own separate little department. No, they're all one problem. But it's all one problem. And I know that, you know, that is not the way that politicians are used to thinking and they sort of set up their platform in one place and it's dangerous to connect the dots too much. I mean, they have the same problem with, you know, segmentation that we have, you know, in siloization that we have in medicine but if we could start to open our minds to the idea that we cannot bring the world along to start to change our practices

and protect the planet unless we all have a minimum a level of health and welfare and so on i think that would be very powerful it is a bit crazy that we're the wealthiest nation on the planet and we see abject poverty and loneliness and just obesity that's driven by poverty and lack of education. I mean, it's just a horrible landscape that we have that makes me in some ways being ashamed to be American. When I go to other countries and I see how they take care of their citizens, I'm like, wow, this is quite different. And I think there's, you know, the conversation starting to happen to connect the dots, which

I think is a good thing. And I think as people like you calling these things out as people who are talking about how do we rethink agriculture, how do we rethink medicine that are going to start to push the envelope and connecting the dots is really how we're going to do it. So you've been a huge advocate for helping to understand complexity. You've even pushed me to not be so simplistic, which I appreciate. And, and I think that, that there's this ongoing conversation that's going to continue to happen that you're part of. And I can't wait to see what your new book's going to share, share with us about all the people who are doing the right things and helping us change the world. So thank you.

Thank you, Daphne. It's a pleasure. Everybody should get her book, Pharmacology. That's with an F. And The Jungle Effect is a fascinating read about food from all over the world. If you're a doctor or healthcare provider, you should definitely check out her work with soil and you should get on a farm, get your hands dirty.

And also, if you like this podcast, please share with your friends and family on Facebook and social media, leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you and hopefully we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy.