The Rich Roll Podcast - Zach Bush, M.D. On GMO’s, Glyphosate & Healing The Gut

Episode Date: March 12, 2018

What if I told you that a vast number of physical maladies are caused by inflammation, the bodyʼs immune response to a multitude of stressors. The good news? If you lose the stress — hormonal, dietary, environmental, and psychological — you remove the root cause of illness. This is but one of many fascinating ideas proffered by Zach Bush, MD – in my opinion one of the most compelling medical minds currently working to improve our understanding of human health. The founder and current director of M Clinic in Virginia, Dr. Bush was President of his medical school class at the University of Colorado Health and later became Chief Resident for the department of Internal Medicine at the University of Virginia. Among the few physicians in the nation that is triple board certified, he completed training and certification in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism, as well as in Hospice and Palliative care. Dr. Bush has published peer-reviewed articles and book chapters in the areas of infectious disease, endocrinology, and cancer. Through his practice and unique methodology, he has seen significant clinical improvements in patients with everything from Leaky Gut Syndrome, Gluten Intolerance, Autism, Type 2 Diabetes, Autoimmune conditions such as Crohn’s Disease, and Irritable Bowel Syndrome. I met Dr. Bush at the Conscious Capitalism Conference in Austin about six months ago. Over the course of that weekend, we had conversations that left me captivated and desperately wanting to know more. I knew immediately he would be a phenomenal podcast guest. So here we are. This is a wide-ranging, and at times mind-blowing conversation that explores new insights into the mechanisms behind human health and longevity. It's about the massive and misunderstood impact of industrial farming, chemical pesticides, the pharmaceutical industry and even errant Western medical practices have on both human and planetary health. It's a conversation about the difference between the science of disease and the science of health. It's about the microbiome as a critical predictor of and protector against illness. And it's an exploration of autism, epigenetics and the mechanics of intercellular communication. I love everything about this conversation with one caveat: we only scratched the surface of Zach's depth of expertise. I hope to have him back to share more of his copious knowledge. I sincerely hope you enjoy the exchange as much as I did. Watch & Subscribe on YouTube here. Peace + Plants, Rich

Quick announcement before we get into it. I am very excited to announce that Julie and I have a brand new cookbook coming out April 24th. It's called The Plant Power Way Italia. We're very proud of it. If you enjoyed our first book, The Plant Power Way, I think you're going to freak for this one. It's inspired by our retreats in Tuscany and the cuisine of the Italian countryside. It's super next level, incredible photography, 125 entirely new, and of course, delicious plant-based Italian countryside. It's super next level, incredible photography, 125 entirely new, and of course, delicious plant-based Italian recipes. And it's available for pre-order now

from all your favorite online booksellers. You can learn more at richroll.com. Pre-orders are very important to the book's viability. And so it would mean a great deal to us if you reserved your copy today. Thank you so much. I greatly appreciate it. And now on to the show. We've literally built an entire economy of not just the United States, but the entire Western civilization on health care.

And that's been a hidden reality for a long time. But for thousands of years, the real control of populations has been around their food. And we find ourselves in that same, if not amped up version, now that we have 7 billion souls on the planet. That becomes very, very big business when you start to be able to control food. And we see that the ultimate political control is around the food chain and whether it delivers health or not. The politicians are not the solution.

You and I are the solution as consumers. That's Dr. Zach Bush, this week on The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. What if I were to say to you that all of your physical ills, all of them are caused by inflammation, the body's immune response to stress of any kind, and that if you lose the stress, the hormonal stress, the dietary stress, the psychological stress, the environmental stress, that you remove the root cause of illness altogether. Well, that is just one of many fascinating ideas that we traverse today. My name is Rich Roll. I'm your host.

This is my podcast. Welcome to it. And today on deck, I have an amazing conversation with a really compelling figure, Dr. Zach Bush. And it's a discourse that explores all kinds of new insights into the mechanisms behind disease and wellness and longevity, as well as the impact of mega industries like big farming, big pharma, and Western medicine at large. The impact that all of these have on both human and environmental health.

For those unfamiliar, Zach Bush is a pretty remarkable guy. He's one of the few triple board certified physicians in the country with an expertise in not only internal medicine, as well as endocrinology and metabolism, but also in hospice and palliative care. And he's currently the founder and director of Revolution Health in Virginia. I first met Zach at the Conscious Capitalism Conference in Austin. It must have been about six months ago, I think. And we had a couple of pretty extraordinary conversations over the course of that weekend

that left me absolutely captivated. And I knew immediately that I wanted to get him on the show. And now here we are. And I got a couple more things as usual that I want to say about Zach and the conversation before we get into it. But first. Okay, Zach Bush. This one, I'm going to tell you right now now up front it's a bit of a mind blower

this is a conversation that goes deep and gets geeky on a wide variety of specific topics that include let's see what do we talk about the difference between the science of disease and the science of health we get super granular on the deleterious impact of chemical farming on human biology. And I think that that is a discourse that's going to leave a lot of you guys a little bit shocked with what Zach has to say. We talk about the microbiome as a predictor of and protector against disease, as well as an exploration of autism, epigenetics, the mechanics of intercellular communication, and just a ton more. So put on your seatbelt,

break out your pen and paper, and get ready for the great Dr. Zach Bush. All right, man, you ready to go? I'm ready to go. Let's do it. Dive in. So Zach, it's a delight it's a pleasure to finally have you in the studio i've been looking forward to this for a very long time

ever since you blew my mind in austin at the uh conscious capitalism conference we had a couple amazing conversations and i was like dude i gotta you gotta like lay down some truths come by the studio so here we are thank you uh thank you for making the time i'm excited to be here i appreciate the invite yeah i'm trying to think like well first of all also thank you julie has a migraine she's flat on her back and so before we even started the podcast for you guys listening out there zach put her through like an unbelievable treatment and uh i appreciate that thanks oh that's beautiful she's an amazing human being yeah she's cool and she's you know she's been doing everything in her power to try to figure

out like how to get on top of these migraines and she's made a lot of progress but every once in a while like they just they just you know they just rock her world and she's down for the count for like two or maybe even three days i'm sure the timing's not a mistake that it was there when I showed up here because I think a lot of times when we find ourselves in those intractable patterns, one of the things I've seen as a physician now for the last 17 years is that we can never heal ourselves. No matter how much we know, no matter how much we research, we can't heal ourselves.

We're called into community through our ailments. And so her migraine may be calling her into more community with more people, more research for herself. I think that that's a very astute observation. But also balancing that against the fact that on a certain level, part of your message, part of my message is that we do have more power than we allow ourselves to believe when it comes to healing ourselves. So much so. And I think the only thing that civilization has to fear right now is that power because we've literally built an entire economy of not just the United States but the entire Western civilization on health care.

And that's been a hidden reality for a long time. But for thousands of years, the real control of populations has been around their food and we find ourself in that same you know if not amped up version now that we have seven billion souls on the planet that becomes very very big business when you start to be able to control food and we see that the ultimate political control is around the food chain and whether it delivers health or not. Yeah, absolutely. And I feel like you're somebody who's, you know, having this conversation as the hub of this wheel upon which there are many spokes that you speak to that you have some level of expertise on, whether it's, you know, Monsanto and glyphosate and GMOs, the microbiome, you know, gut permeability, inflammation, autism, like all of these, you know, big pharma, big chemical,

and the interplay of all of these. And they seem like they're disparate subjects and issues, but the more I learn about you and how you speak about all of this, clearly all of these things are, they're just part of this very intricate web where they're all interdependent upon each other and contributing in their own various ways. That's exactly it. I've basically found myself in a massively reductionist state of my understanding of the world around us when I had really spent, you know, 20 years of my life studying medicine world around us when I had really spent you know 20 years of my life studying medicine which was the opposite where every year and minute you study in that environment they try to convince you it's more and more complicated that there's a thousand

different diseases that there's 10,000 different drugs to treat those diseases then but in reality what started to deconstruct that world was the realization that the cancer I was studying under the microscope when I was devising chemotherapy happened to be really the exact same process as an ulcer in the ankle of a diabetic patient. Again, sound totally disparate, but the end totally reductionist viewpoint is it's only one thing, which is chronic inflammation. Right. So there was this quest, this idea of like getting to the bottom of like, what is it that's causing disease in general and understanding that the whole kind of foundation of how you learn medicine and practice medicine is premised on the disease model of understanding how diseases function as opposed to studying and understanding how to promote health and the mechanisms that are behind health. Yeah, and it's interesting that even in the public and in the medical world, we've come to almost embrace that in our lexicon, in that we say this is chronic disease management.

That's exactly what Western medicine is. It's trying to manage a disease rather than induce health. And the big tip-off to me in this process, here I am in the labs developing chemotherapy, and it's so buried down the rabbit hole of the pharmaceutical model. But there was a big tip-off starting to happen in the late 1990s and early 2000s that we were seeing diseases in what seemed like completely different organ systems in the population go epidemic simultaneously. Examples of this was certainly autism that you mentioned earlier. We had 1 in 5,000 children with autism in 1975.

Today we have, just three weeks ago, released the most recent data, 1 in 36 children with an autism spectrum disorder. And the big argument for a long time was, well, maybe we're just diagnosing and recognizing autism better, which is kind of laughable if you've ever sat with an autistic child. Here's a 5-year-old who can't speak, can't make eye contact, hits his head on the wall for a few hours a day to try to console his terror. We didn't miss that in 1975. This is not a diagnostic dilemma. But then to further emphasize that the fastest acceleration in that growth pattern of this epidemic has happened between

2012 and today, where we're seeing a doubling time every two to three years in that autism rate at the current rate we'll see one in three children with autism in 2035. that's insane and and similarly i mean this is across the board as well right you look at cancer it's one out of every two people will be diagnosed with some form of cancer before they die not even counting skin cancer that's like solid tumor and bone marrow cancers are at 50% now. And then in 1996, we saw this sudden rise in Alzheimer's dementia in women. Interestingly, the Alzheimer's rates has not changed in males since that time. But at the same time, 1996, we see this uptick and consistent linear growth parallel to that alzheimer's track in women with parkinson's

and males and so we have you know species specific gender specific organ specific diseases in the brain and peripheral cancers all of which took off at the same time in the mid-1990s autoimmune disease unbelievable epidemic starting in the late 1990s. And so this was like the cracks that were starting to form in my worldview that maybe there weren't a thousand different diseases because they all started going epidemic at once, which really begged the question, is there a root cause of the root cause of the root cause of all disease? And that's where we found ourselves back into the food chain. And so you come to this conclusion that inflammation, not acute inflammation,

chronic inflammation is at the root cause or the sort of common denominator consistent across the board when you kind of canvass all of these maladies. So what does that mean? What are the implications of that? What are the causes of that? And like, where do we go from here? Yeah, so the first step is to kind of consider what is inflammation. Inflammation is

actually a normal biologic response to an injury. The immune system lies throughout your body in different shapes and forms, but some 60% of the volume of the immune system and some 80% of the work done by the immune system is done in your gut lining. And the concept of the gut is poorly defined and poorly understood by the consumer as well as doctors. But it really starts in your sinuses. It is your barrier system between the outside world and what you breathe, the outside world and what you drink, eat, etc. This membrane is extremely interesting to look at in its engineering. I have an engineering background.

My son's an engineer. It seems obvious that if I was going to engineer a human being i would have designed it differently right which means i probably would have screwed it up completely but it's such an interesting under engineering event this gut membrane it it is the largest surface area we have exposure to the outside world it's two tennis courts and surface area versus only the 1.8 meters or so of your skin surface area. So you've got this massive surface area. And the only covering of that surface is a cellophane-like layer of epithelial cells of the gut and sinuses and the rest.

That is about 50 microns in diameter. It's like one cell thick, right? One cell thick, which is if you pluck a human hair and cut that in half, that's the thickness of your gut membrane. So you have this half a human hair cellophane layer that protects you from every bite of food you eat, every chemical that comes into your food chain, etc. So it seems like horrible engineering. But on the flip side, it tells us something about what we're engineered for. We need to be inherently in contact with the ecosystem and nature around us. And if we start to tinker and screw with that nature, that membrane is going to become very

vulnerable and start to leak. And our immune system sits right behind that. And so with 70% of your immune system volume, if we have a chronic inflammatory epidemic in the world, which is a better definition than lots of diseases, then we must be overwhelming the immune system of all of the public for some reason at the same time. Sometime between 1982 and 2000, we did something to the environment to totally decimate the protection system of our immune systems. You almost have to be a historian, a sociologist, and an anthropologist to really properly contextualize all of this and understand everything that has come into play to deliver us

to this point. And I watched the, what was it called, GMO's Revealed series. I didn't watch the whole thing, but I watched your segment on it, and you delivered this amazing dissertation on the history of how we kind of arrived to this point in the context of glyphosate and GMOs and monoculture, dating back to the 1920s and the Dust Bowl through World War II and kind of all of these geopolitical and economic events that contributed to the current state that we're in with respect to how we feed the planet. So I think it would be good to kind of canvas that a little bit because I think it will help kind of really contextualize how we dig into the next section, which is talking about the microbiome and these diseases, how they've come to be, and what we can do to kind of avoid them or reverse them. Perfect. In the same way that we've misunderstood the gut and what gut health means, we misunderstood soil for the longest time. And in the early 1900s, really the late 1880s, we started to change the way we farmed. Simple things happened, like we went to steel grinding for wheat instead of stone grinding it which meant we could get more of the fiber out of which

means we created a higher gluten and a higher refined carbohydrate load in our flowers and in our wheat system and everything else so that's one example of a shift but the main thing that happened is we started to disrespect the importance of crop rotation and soil rest, cover cropping, etc. This led to a massive death of the topsoil, which led to the Dust Bowl that ran through the 1920s and 30s. And it's fascinating that here we are only 80 years out from this event where our ancestors, you know, two generations, three generations, were literally starving to death. We had soup lines that went for days, you know, across the entire Midwest,

and houses were literally being buried in dust of dead soil that had died. We're not connected to that history. And yet it's our grandparents. No, we never talk about that. I don't remember the last time that ever came up in the context of politics or food. Yeah. It's sort of a forgotten thing. Yeah.

It's sort of a forgotten thing. And we certainly didn't learn the lesson that that presented, which is like, hey, man, like, maybe, you know, step outside your hubris a little bit. And let's look at how the environment actually functions and serve that rather than continue to try to find these shortcuts or sidesteps around what nature is trying to explain to us. Exactly. And so my grandfather just passed away at 90, and he told amazing stories of his childhood where his family had one hog that they could butcher a year. They lived on a little farm, raised their own chickens and everything else, and that one hog's meat had to feed the whole family for a year. And yet we see a total forgottenness to that kind of connection

to our food chain and yet that's just two generations back and so there's a lot of emphasis these days in the press and in the common literature of like paleo diets and all this stuff we don't have to go back to cavemen to find a healthy diet we need to go back 80 years you know it was that close to our history that we were in touch with raising our own food. During the Dust Bowl, we actually, for the first time, started to outsource our food production because these people lost their local gardens and farms. So we started to rely on importing food for the first time, and we started to outsource that concept. Then World War II hit, and we did something interesting,

which was start a huge marketing campaign for gardens, and they were called the Victory Gardens. And everybody, not just in the U.S., but in the whole alliance through Europe and everything else, were asked to plant gardens in their backyard to help support the troops with food. And by the end of World War II, we were growing 45% of our entire food source in our backyards. So these Victory Gardens.

That's amazing. Like I'd never heard that either i had no idea yeah and in some ways it's interesting so i started my nutrition clinic in 2010 not knowing any of this and i decided to start it in the poorest communities in virginia and so i was in rural virginia total food desert most people ate the majority of their food out of gas stations because there's not even grocery stores to fuel the community so they're literally surviving off of twinkies and and little debbies and then the the hot dogs that rotate on those little rotisseries in a gas station

you always walk in like who eats those and people are living on that as their only staple so i went into this community thinking this is going to be the hardest uphill battle ever to get these people into a plant-based diet. And it turned out to be exactly the right place to start the revolution because these people were only one generation disconnected from that because they were fifth generation poverty. They were subsistence living to this day. And when I said you need to grow- But their grandparents were farming probably. Exactly. And so you say you need to start a garden. They're like, well, grandma's garden is still out back. It wasn't even a challenge for their mind. It's like, oh, yeah, we just need to replant the garden.

And I watched families. There was a great Baptist minister down there, this African-American Southern Baptist minister got this message. He'd had a couple heart attacks, diabetes, et cetera, told him plant-based food was going to be his cure. He said, oh, my gosh, my grandma had the biggest garden by the time i left scottsville this tiny little community some five years later he was feeding 40 families out of his own garden and so it's just you know we're right there now you contrast that with wealth and it becomes challenging

you know ceos fly into my clinic from all over the place thinking you know because they just had a heart attack they hear about a nutrition clinic. They come and you say, you need to grow a garden. They look at you like you've grown another head. It's not going to happen. That's not even part of my reality. So it's interesting how wealth has really been earned and recognized or won through a march away from connection to nature and a march towards convenience living.

And so from our social structure and our building of wealth around it we've divorced ourselves from the ability to be responsible and have an opportunity to engage with our own food and and this weird inverse relationship between uh obesity and actually being nourished right so we have these deserts and these people are all you know completely overweight morbidly obese but tremendously undernourished tremendously calorically replete right and nutritionally deficit total desert and so how does that happen um and it's interesting because it comes down to kind of what started to happen after world war II, which is we had this huge petroleum industry that was revved up bigger than it had ever been in the history

because we had all tanks, jeeps, mechanized warfare for the first time in human history. On this scale, we had planes for the first time. I mean, this was like full-out, totally different thing that had ever happened in history, and it was a world war, much different than World War I in its scope. And so we see this huge petroleum industry that

suddenly grinds to a halt because the war is over. So we have this glut of petroleum and we suddenly realized we can extract nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium out of that oil. And we started making chemical-based fertilizers for the first time. Right. On a chemistry level, they're not that distinct, correct? Like the operative ingredients are essentially the same. With a little engineering, you can take this glut of petroleum and repurpose it for a new commercial enterprise. Yeah. So they found a new marketplace for this oil.

And it was a great message to the farmers who were still suffering with bad dirt in the Midwest. It's like, you don't need to do crop rotation. You don't need to compost. You don't need to go back to thousands of years of farming tradition. Just spray this chemical on there. Yeah, forget about whatever you might have learned during the Dust Bowl. Yeah. That was 40 years ago. That's ancient times.

We're modern now. Yeah. And so these farmers started using it, and it became a revolution for them. And it was actually called the green revolution of the 1960s and so the green revolution was actually use of nitrogen phosphorus potassium or mpk fertilizers and the mpk fertilizer did turn plants green because nitrogen and phosphorus do that but what was lacking in those plants for the first time in history was the nutrients and the medicine that should always have been in that food. And so the plants became weak. Just like a human being who lacks nutrients, their immune system goes down. And when a plant's immune system goes down, it becomes prone to viruses, pests, and it can't excrete the stuff from the root system that would keep weeds at bay.

And so now the plants are getting attacked from the outside, if you will, and the chemical industry says, no problem, here's a new chemical weed killer, here's a pesticide, and so the farmers got themselves locked into this codependent relationship with chemical fertilizers and chemical drugs for the plants to keep them alive despite a failing biology underneath the surface there. Right, akin to taking a drug to deal with the symptoms of some ailment that you have that creates a whole battery of side effects that then require you to take another drug to deal with those.

It's just an environmental version of that. It's exactly the same thing. And in fact, the drugs have been the same in a lot of ways. The main drug is antibiotics. Western medicine really got its first foothold with penicillin our first antibiotic and that happened to be in the 1940s with world war ii and so we developed in the same decade the antibiotics that would kill the bacteria in our body with the antibiotics that would kill the soil and i say antibiotic because these chemicals that we were

using as pesticides are largely uh antibiotic rather what you would think of maybe a weed killer or something. And the most famous of these, of course, has become Roundup, the most single successful chemical warfare that's ever been sold on the planet. We currently sell and use four and a half billion pounds of glyphosate, which is the active ingredient in the chemical, to treat the soils of the earth. 4.5 billion pounds of a single chemical annually. That chemical was never patented as a weed killer. It's only been patented as an antibiotic, and then it was repatented as an antiparasite, antifungal.

Yeah, that was the original purpose of it, correct? Well, it's the mechanism. It's the mechanism they recognized and so the mechanism of glyphosate is to go in and block enzymes in soil bacteria fungi and plants and that enzyme pathway is called the shikimate pathway and it's important because it makes a number of the essential amino acids our bodies are composed of over 200,000 proteins, but we only have 20,000 genes. We have this pathetically dumb genome in the sense that a flea has 30,000 genes. So you're two-thirds as complicated as a flea at the gene level, which I find reassuring if I can't find my keys or I'm

having a bad day. I'm like, hey, I'm two-thirds as complicated as a flea. What are my real expectations here? But the reality is we're very simple at the genetic level, and yet we make over 200,000 proteins from a bunch of amino acids. There's 26 amino acids that will build those 200,000 proteins. Those 26 amino acids are just like the 26 letters of the English alphabet in the sense that the vast majority of those are useful but not critical. But the vowels, these eight vowels in our language, if you subtract one of those vowels, you can affect hundreds of thousands of words.

The vowels in the amino acid vocabulary here are the essential amino acids, which if you start to tweak any of those nine, you're going to start to lose tens of thousands of protein structures in their functionality and in their unique form. And so those essential amino acids, not only are they important like the vows, they also can't be made by the human body. So those nine have to come from your food chain somewhere. And it turns out that they are only made by the bacteria, the fungi, and the plants.

You don't have a shikimate pathway in your human cells. And so these essential amino acids are blocked through the shikimate pathway by Roundup. And so imagine treating a food chain with a chemical that blocks the ability of these plants to make the building blocks for a healthy human body. Forget about a human, it's a dog, a cat, any mammal, any complex multicellular biology is going to depend on these essential amino acids. And we literally, in the last 15 years, subtracted out the ability to build the body because we changed the 26 letters. Yeah, there's so much to talk about just in that alone.

I mean, the fact that, I mean, from my understanding, glyphosate was able to kind of pass muster with the EPA and, you know, avoid sort of being outregulated by virtue of the fact that this shikame pathway was a plant process, not a human process. Well, it doesn't matter. This is the plant thing. And again, the hubris and the kind of like lack of understanding on behalf of human beings, to appreciate just how crucial this shikame pathway is and was at the time and will always be to making the nutrients of these plants bioavailable to us so that we can use them. And I think on a grander scale, it speaks to not only the pitfalls of our reductionist approach to science in general, but also us human beings, always wanting to look for that one solution that's going to solve our problem, like, oh, just eat spinach or kale, and you'll be fine. Well, that's fine, if the soil is the way that we, you know, the way that it should be, and these plants are grown the way that nature

intended them to be. But, you know, we're in a condition and a state right now where glyphosate, to be. But, you know, we're in a condition and a state right now where glyphosate, the use of glyphosate is so profuse that it's almost impossible to avoid this situation altogether. Unfortunately, you're right. You know, and, you know, to go into that just briefly, one of the reasons I think that glyphosate was not put on the market in 1958 when it was discovered is because the Japanese inventor of that chemical recognized that that was a put on the market in 1958 when it was discovered is because the Japanese inventor of that chemical recognized that that was a water-soluble toxin. You do not want to introduce a water-soluble toxin into the environment because you can never get it back, right? In that where if you have a fat-soluble toxin, it'll actually be sequestered by mycelium

in the soil. If it gets into a human or another mammal, it'll be sequestered by mycelium in the soil if it gets into a human or another mammal it'll be sequestered by fat cells so it never hits the brain it'll be protective a water-soluble toxin on the hand can't be subtracted out of the ecosystem because everything on planet Earth including your human body is water and so that means that sorry to interrupt but that means that this chemical can pass through that one cell width of the gut lining and the brain blood barrier as well, right? It's going everywhere. And it's also before it even gets to the human body going everywhere. And so the current statistics is that less than one-tenth of one% of the Roundup used on the planet actually hits a weed.

The other 99.99% gets into the soil and in the water system and washes off. And so we are now seeing the runoff from these farms and in the water table itself. So we have fossil aquifers in the United States here that run from Canada all the way down to historically mexico that is now dried up we've we've turned over a thousand square miles of of texas into desert over just the last 20 years from sucking water out of the ground that fossil aquifer is now contaminated with roundup that's filtered down into this ancient freshwater source for us and then in the same moment, you've got the Mississippi River, which collects over 80% of all the Roundup in the country, and then it's evaporating the whole time,

so it's going into the air that you breathe, and then it goes into the clouds, and then it rains down on us. Recent studies in the air and rainfall in the southern United States is showing 75% of the rain, 75% of the air contaminated with Roundup. So before you even take a bite of food, you're being hit with an antibiotic when you breathe. You're getting hit with an

antibiotic when you experience rainfall. And so you may be growing organic crops, but they're getting rained on. And so we have now locked this water-soluble toxin into our environment. Fortunately, to give you a little bit of breather here from the bad news, is that there are bacteria and fungi that can eventually digest the glyphosate. The downside is we need to stop spraying it so that they can return. We're decimating those very bacteria and fungi by the presence of Roundup to the point where they're not digesting it. Current estimates is if we stop spraying Roundup tomorrow,

it would take about 50 years before our ecosystem saw a drop in the level of Roundup below our toxic levels. And what is the current, you know, I don't know, market cap isn't the right word, but like how profusely, like it's billions of dollars, right? Is there anybody outside of the organic farming community that does not use Roundup or people that are even just weeding their own gardens at home and spraying their lawns?

That's actually where it started. So before we genetically modified crops to be able to be sprayed directly with Roundup in 1996, that occurred. But before that, it was really the homeowner that was contributing most to our toxin load because in the 1980s the epa allowed monsanto to go direct to consumer with their advertising for this chemical and so they created those super bowl commercials of a guy walking out of his suburban garage with a dramatic soundtrack and he had two pistol grips on his side and he came out and and boldly sprayed down the four dandelions that were in his driveway, which happened to be superfood that kill cancer. But anyway, he sprays these four dandelions.

He kills the two things that actually are awesome. He kills the only medicine on his property. And so suddenly it was by far and away the most effective direct-to-consumer advertising ever because suddenly males in the United States realized it could be manly to weed. Right, they're like shooting guns. They're shooting guns. It's easy warfare, you know, whatever it is, instead of having to actually bend over and put on a pair of gloves or whatever it is. And so we started broadcasting this stuff across driveways, sidewalks, patios,

into our own garden spaces and everything else. And now the difference between a homeowner who's going to go through a couple gallons and a farmer who will go through tens of thousands of gallons, the farmer is super careful with the usage because their margins are so low. The homeowner doesn't care. So they're spraying it down. And they might use a quarter of a gallon of glyphosate in an afternoon, whereas a whole farm might treat the entire thousand acres with that same quarter gallon.

afternoon, whereas a whole farm might treat the entire thousand acres with that same quarter gallon. So the smaller the user in some ways, the more dumping of this chemical they were doing. So by the 1980s, we were drinking Roundup out of our municipal water system. Getting into our water system. That's unbelievable. Let's take a moment and just kind of, you know, canvas what the discussion is around glyphosate, because I think, you know, it's worth mentioning that as soon as you bring this up, we start to venture tiptoe

into this world of like, you know, crazy conspiracy theories. And you must be, you know, some, you know, insane hippie person to be bringing this up. And, you know, don't, don't mind him. Like he's just a wacko. He's a whack job. Like he's a marginal character. You know, we know this stuff is safe. It's been around forever. It's been vetted, you know, the EPA they're on it. They know what's, you know, they know what's healthy for us. If it was dangerous, they would have outlawed it. And this has been around for a long time and there's no indication that anybody's getting sick from this. So what are you talking about? Yeah. If the conspiracy theorist was right, then we'd see one in two people with cancer. We'd see

one in 30 kids with autism. We'd see Parkinson's going crazy. They're literally repeating back, if it was toxic, we would see literally what we're seeing. And so the reality is the public health statistics have gotten so grim in the last eight years that nobody can call this a conspiracy theory anymore. But it's almost like, yeah, but that's, where's the direct, where's the smoking gun? The smoking gun is what's been missing. That's what we found in 2012. So in 2012, we found it backwards. I don't think anybody's actually smart enough with the human gray matter that we're given

to actually create a paradigm shift prospectively, right? So every great mind that we look to in the past, Galileo or Ben Franklin or anybody, we said, oh, they discovered something, or Edison. These just came at moments when the evidence got so overwhelming that it became obvious, right? And so in the same way, in 2012, the evidence was getting so overwhelming that we were onto something in the nutrition world. But at the time, I was still thinking cancer, cancer therapy, because my background was in chemotherapy development. And so when I found these molecules in soil that looked similar to the chemotherapy I'd been making, a lot of bells started ringing.

Like, what is that? Where did it come from? How is there medicine in the dirt? Like, where is that coming from? And within a few weeks of that discovery of those molecules, we found out that bacteria and fungi were making these specific shapes of these carbon molecules. And that really closed the loop for me because there had been some papers coming out in the mid-2000s in the cancer world that were starting to say that the bacteria in your gut were predicting which cancers you would get. If you're missing these bacteria, you would get prostate cancer. If you had these bacteria, you would get breast cancer.

That was so radically bizarre and out there for our current model, even to this day, as to how cancer worked. But now you fast forward eight ten years and now there's tens of thousands of articles that are showing that genomically the bacterial genome is way more important in determining cancer than the human genome and and so this reality was hitting and so in 2012 when we discovered these chemicals that look a little like chemotherapy that are made by bacteria and fungi in the soil it suddenly closed closed the loop of, oh my gosh, what if the bacteria in our gut is doing the same thing? What if the bacteria and the fungi are actually our best source of medicine for everything? And so that's the direction we were going. But as soon

as we put this into petri dishes with cancer cells and beyond, we suddenly realized, no, no, no, there's something way deeper happening with this information stream coming out of bacteria and fungi. And it was my chief science officer, Dr. John Gilday, he's a PhD in genetics and cell biology. And he was the first to realize that we had put our finger on the glyphosate toxicity issue, is that this communication network from the bacteria and fungi was actually supporting the protein structure in our gut lining. And so it turns out that the gut is held together as these trillions of cells that make up that cellophane layer by tight junctions. These are Velcro-like proteins that hold one microscopic cell to the next to create this coherent carpet of two tennis courts. And he had recognized before this in a

number of other labs that started to publish that glyphosate seemed to increase the permeability of this membrane and nobody was really sure why yet but we suddenly realized that if this bacterial communication network was in there we we couldn't injure the the membrane it became bulletproof to the glyphosate injury and so in that journey we started to really study glyphosate in its relationship to the human cells, because like you said, Monsanto has been swearing up and down that there is no harm to the human body because the shikimate pathway only exists in bacteria and fungi. Well, that may be true regarding that enzyme target, but the classic thing with any drug is it always has off-target effects, right? And so that's why drugs have side effects, is they don't actually go and do exactly what your doctor says it's going to go do. It's going to hit a bunch of other receptors and do other things. The side effects of glyphosate

that are outside of the shikimate pathway is direct injury to the protein structure that holds your gut lining together. This would be bad news if that was it, but it turns out that every macromembrane in your body, the blood vessels that fuel your entire body with oxygen and nutrients are held together with the same tight junctions. The blood-brain barrier that protects your peripheral nervous system and your brain, same tight junctions. The kidney tubules that are held together to detox your body, same tight junctions. And so what's happened as we've introduced a chemical that's directly toxic to this Velcro-like protein is we turn into leaky sieves on the front end, gut leak and nasal sinus leak.

And so every time we breathe, every time we eat, we're starting to leak and our immune system gets overwhelmed. Then the blood vessels that are supposed to deliver either an immune response from peripheral or get nutrients to some distant space is also leaking. And so we're getting permeability of the blood vessels. Then you get to the blood-brain barrier. This is supposed to be the holy of holies, a peripheral nerve where the brain is supposed to be protected against everything in your blood. Because even glucose, which is the main fuel for your brain, should not get into the brain in an unregulated fashion. It will damage the nerves. And so the holy of holies of the central and

peripheral nervous system is being destroyed. And so if that's true, if glyphosate was really damaging that, then we should see a massive explosion in neurologic injury to children and adults starting in about 1996. And that's exactly when we see this steep increase happening in autism, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, neurodegenerative conditions like MS, autoimmune diseases, and all the rest. That just blows my mind i mean it's unbelievable essentially what you're saying is this compound glyphosate uh undermines the integrity of how your body kind of holds itself together essentially precisely and it's not only the gut that starts leaking all these other systems start to fail because the permeability of those cell linings is compromised, correct?

Correct. And so this creates an enhanced chronic inflammatory response that is also undermined because the delivery of that response is compromised by the permeability of the circulatory system and the gut, the ducts or whatever, right, that are all now leaking as a result of this? Precisely. And there's something more amazing happening even under that surface. So the tight junctions are like these spot welds at the top of this cell membrane. It's hard to picture something that's half the width of a human hair having a top and a bottom,

but under a microscope it actually looks quite large. And at the top of it you have the tight junctions that are welding these cells together. At the midpoint of the cell you have something called gap junctions. These are the most beautiful structures I've ever seen under a microscope. You can actually Google this.

If you Google electron microscopy gap junctions blow your mind here what it's showing you here is now you're down to just a few microns in diameter so you know 20 times thinner or 100 times thinner than a human hair you have these clusters of fiber optic cables that run from one cell to the next and there can 10,000 of these fibers in a single cluster that is just running in a very small space between the cells. And they are perfectly formed tubes at this tiny microscopic level that run from one cell cytoplasm to the next. And at the end points, under higher magnification, you can see that they have a perfect camera lens aperture. The same shape and size that you expect with a camera aperture, with those beautiful spiraling things that spiral in and out to open and close and allow light in,

are at the end of every one of these fiber optic cables. We don't realize it, but we are actually light beings. We don't communicate through hormones as our primary thing. Our primary mechanism of communication is through light, energy, and the trafficking of electrons and light from one cell to the next. The amazing thing that we've seen with my cancer background and now looking into this gap junction phenomenon is that when you start to break those cells apart and you lose not just the tight junctions that regulate the flow of material, but the gap junctions that regulate the communication from one cell to the next, within 15 minutes under the microscope, we can see a normal small intestine or colon cell

start to take on the morphologic features of cancer. So it's the communication between the cells that gets compromised because these tubes are damaged. Yes. Imagine a fiber optic system connecting your office building. Somebody comes along and clips all your fiber optic cables. You've become now an isolated entity as a company. Your company is going to fail very quickly. You can't talk to your customers. You can't talk to your sales support. You start to fail. That's exactly what's happening to the complex company or organization that a cell is. As soon as it gets lonely, it can't receive information, can't figure out what it's supposed to be doing today, and it starts to lose self-identity,

which is exactly what a cancer cell is. A cancer cell is simply the most damaged cell in your body because it's not been able to mobilize repair processes, and it's gotten so isolated that it forgot it's part of you, and it thinks it's the only thing left alive. And so it starts to divide like crazy. It's the only thing it can do. To survive, as opposed to, what is it called?

Apoptosis. Apoptosis, right. Which is when everything's functioning properly, that would take over and it would be kind of performing its own suicide. Exactly. And so apoptosis, or this other concept of autophagy, which is this autophagy or consumption of damaged cells, both of these phenomenon happen when a highly damaged cell is still in communication with its neighbors. It says, oh my gosh, I just had major genetic injury from over sunshine or whatever, the source, or some chemical in the food. All I need to do is kill myself and a stem cell will come and replace me instantaneously. That breaks down when you get isolation and loneliness and you start to

have one opportunity to survive, which is proliferate. And so these tumor cells are by far and away the most damaged and lonely and really weakest cells in the human body. And yet we've built a $480 billion chemotherapy industry to go try to kill the most damaged, weak, vulnerable cells in your body. It's a completely backwards thing. I get that. And I get, you know, the leaky gut and all the kind of autoimmune disorders that would occur as a result of the gut permeability being compromised. But how does this function? Like what is the mechanism with respect to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's? Perfect. So there's, it turns out that, you know, again,

the humbling journey that I've been on is to recognize as a doctor and perhaps just as a human is we are barely human when it comes down to the sheer number of non-human cells we carry within us that we are completely dependent on. We are just a fraction human. To give you a sense of the numbers, we're somewhere around 50 trillion human cells. That sounds like a massive number. It's one of the few numbers you'll hear that's larger than our national debt. It turns out that we have somewhere around one and a half quadrillion bacteria and probably 10 times that in fungi. And so we have 14 quadrillion microbiome elements within our body, and then we have 14 quadrillion mitochondria that live inside ourselves.

The mitochondria look like bacteria, but their DNA actually looks like a virus. It's a little ringed DNA strand. And that organism lives inside our cells. It's about 100 times smaller than a bacteria. And these guys are teeming inside our cells. It's about 100 times smaller than a bacteria. And these guys are teeming in our cells. The average human cell when we're born has 200 mitochondria per cell. If you go and look at any biology textbook, it's going to show you two or three mitochondria inside a cell. Not right.

Yeah, that's what I always thought. I always thought there was just one or two or a couple. Or maybe usually just one. One, yeah. But I knew that you could influence that. Like a lot of endurance training is about increasing that mitochondrial density. Yes, exactly. But I didn't realize 200. 200 per cell.

And it gets crazy when you talk about the brain that you just asked about. A neuron can have 2,000 mitochondria in the axon or in the neural body. And so the brain is the most ATP demanding organ we have. When we're asleep, for example, you think of the 70 trillion cells in our body that are teeming away and working in all the time, 50% of the calories burned at night are entirely burned by the brain. And so it's this incredibly demanding energy suck as the neural environment and so that's going to be the first therefore to show damage to the mitochondria and the hallmark of parkinson's and and all the alzheimer's conditions is that we start to lose mitochondrial shape and form and therefore their productivity of not just

atp which is the fuel we run on but also the metabolites that are burned through those mitochondria that are our communication network that goes through those fiber optic cables that we just talked about. And so in the course of a neurodegenerative process, we lose energy and we lose the healing kind of potential in the intracellular environment because we're losing that communication network. And is that the same mechanism at play with autism when we're talking about this sort of gut-brain injury dynamic? Precisely.

So there's threefold to the autism thing, and they can all map back to exactly what we've talked about. Every autistic child will have a very abnormal microbiome. They have horrible gut issues, typically like green stenchy stools, a lot of them, diarrheal illnesses, you know, a lot of irritable bowel, bloating, constipation, the whole pattern. And then they have leak. And so they're highly permeable across all their systems and they cannot detox. And so if you look at the blood and the hair analysis and bone marrow biopsy, for example, of a child with

autism versus a non-affected sibling in their home, that kid is going to be loaded with mercury and other toxins from the environment that their siblings and family that are eating the same food in the same environment aren't experiencing. So that autism child is the ultimate leaky sieve. And so everything in their environment starts to do it. And one of the troubles of chronic inflammation is once it occurs, it actually accelerates this sponge-like effect for other toxins to follow. And so our children are turning to these sponges for toxin and that autism thing expressing itself. After that leak happens, the mitochondria, of course, are being damaged at a very high rate because they are the front line of all these toxins coming through the food chain. And they're super sensitive to them.

And so they start to lose mitochondrial capacity. We do a study in our clinic that's called a phase angle. It measures the electrical potential across a single cell. And that study shows us that in optimal health, we can run around a level of 10. We die around a level of 3.5. If our electrical charge drops down to 3.5, we lose the ability to traffic water and other nutrients across cell membranes, and we die quickly. And so between 10 and 3.5 is kind of where life can happen.

As we age, that number tends to drop. So we can get a kind of biologic snapshot of a child coming into the clinic based on its phase angle, or an adult for that matter. But it's startling to find that we can find 4-year-old, 5-year-old children with autism that have a phase angle equal to an 85-year-old person. And so what we're seeing with autism is an acceleration of the aging process at the neural environment that is akin to elderly dementia, but at age two. Precipitated by this chronic inflammation.

Precipitated by first the vulnerabilities, then the leak, then the chronic inflammation, then the drop in mitochondrial potential, then the inability to hydrate the inside of the cell. And what kind of studies and research have you done on this? I assume you've published on these issues. Like, what is the status of how you've been sharing this? Yeah, it's been really interesting to watch that. So we've put a ton of science out in the form of white papers, and then we got a couple of peer-reviewed journal articles published in the last two years.

We have clinical trials that are ongoing that will be published in this next year. And so it's been a really fun journey to watch this happen. But in the same time, we've seen massive results at the individual level. And so we now have over 100,000 users of the product consistently for the last five years. And we've seen just miracles after miracles that only take one person to show. You don't need a large clinical trial of 100,000 people to show something dramatic. And so in this journey, our patients have really taught us more than our science lab because you can tell so much by the complexity of a human assay. Our bodies are our ultimate biology kit,

and it's telling us exactly what's happening at 1,000 different levels simultaneously. And so when you see people who have had chronic inflammatory conditions for decades suddenly know decades suddenly reverse that a you know it's not a product that did that the only thing that can reverse you know disorder of that kind of long-standing state is the human body itself you're regaining your own innate capacity to heal which every cell has the capacity to do that we already mentioned apoptosis or programmed cell suicide but long before you get to the suicide stage of the cell you've got tens of thousands of machinery running all the time in the form of enzymes that are correcting DNA damage, doing protein analysis and breaking down damaged proteins,

recycling those, kicking this whole thing in. And so what we have seen with this communication network from bacteria and fungi is it's orchestrating the extracellular matrix environment, which is the first time we've ever had a supplement take care of this environment of the tight junctions the gap junctions and beyond and so it's it makes so much sense in the end when you think about where do bacteria and fungi live in the human body well they live outside of our cells right outside of our cells is a very unprotected space much like the soil in your garden inside your cells we're taking care of

by our mitochondria, and they make oxygen-based redox molecules that are that communication electrical energy that goes to the fiber optic channels. Oxygen redox molecules can't survive outside the protected environment in the inside of the cell. And so it makes sense that the bacteria and fungi that first developed in the soil, perhaps, became adept at communicating across long distances in uncontrolled environments.

And the way in which they did that is this family of molecules that we discovered in 2012. It has a huge carbon backbone that makes it stable in any sort of pH, osmolality, etc. And that stability allows one bacteria to talk to another bacteria at a distant site, or one fungi to pass information on to another. Or in this case, when they touch the human cell surface, to another bacteria at a distant site or one fungi to pass information onto another. Or in this case, when they touch the human cell surface, the microbiome is communicating with the mitochondria. So we've showed direct communication between a sterile product. There's no bacteria and fungi in the product restore.

That product, when it goes in, we see the mitochondria shift within minutes of introduction to something that's sitting on the cell membrane produced by bacteria and fungi and the mitochondria change their behavior. They will tip a damaged cell into apoptosis or programmed cell suicide in a few hours. They will reduce the stress in a healthy cell so that there's less reactive oxygen species and a reduction in metabolic demand by a healthy cell. And this is the first time we've ever seen any family of molecules do the opposite thing in a damaged cell population versus a healthy cell population. So in other words, what it's doing is it's tending to, I'm trying to break this down in the most elementary way to kind of comprehend it.

It's tending to certain physiological processes that have to do with how the gut flora behave and interact with each other as opposed to treating the human cells. And the byproduct of that dance, that interaction, has a positive impact on the human cells that allow them to repair themselves and begin to function the way that they're meant to. Is that accurate enough? Dr. Darrell Bock Precisely. So accurate. This is really what we call this is a liquid circuit board you know and so this is a liquid supplement that's electrical exchange and has electrical

exchange property to it and so picture a liquid circuit board or perhaps even better picture a wireless network and so we're talking about cell communication in the human biology but now picture your cell phone your cell phone has a computer in there that can transmit and receive information called a phone call at any time. And it's not broken when you stop receiving cell signal, right? But if you're more than seven miles from the closest cell phone tower, it suddenly becomes worthless as a communication device. And in its isolation, it will start to fracture, right? So you get fragmenting of the programs on your phone. You'll start to degrade its quality. You can't update your email. You're losing communication. It its quality. You can't update your email. You're losing communication.

It's everything. So in that case, the wireless network is not from the cell phone. It's from these cell phone towers that are outside of the cell phone and producing this invisible electron potential or this frequency resonance potential for the phones to communicate by. Same thing happening at our cell level. Your brain needs to communicate with your liver. Your liver needs to communicate by. Same thing happening at our cell level. Your brain needs to communicate with your liver. Your liver needs to communicate elsewhere. We've always thought in my field of endocrinology and metabolism that was done by hormones.

Well, we now know it's doing much more through these redox and singling molecules with the electricity or through the microRNA from our genome and all these other things that are traveling through space and time in the more atomic physics environment rather than the biology. And so we've got this very interesting reality that we function as wireless networks. And the reality is really getting interesting as we study the micro-RNA and all these communication things between species is that we're starting to realize that we are controlled at the genetic level

by these subtle messages from other species. Currently, as we sit here, some 35% to 40% of the on-off switches and the microRNA that will manipulate the behavior of our genes to make the body we have today are not from you. They're from the bacteria and fungi around you. So the bacteria and fungi are literally changing the body you build today. The sheer numbers of bodies you could build based on our current understanding of the genome and protein synthesis is that you have the opportunity to

build 4 million different bodies today out of your stuck genome. You inherited genes from mom and dad and that seems very static, but because each gene can make over 200 different proteins, you can build yourself 4 million different biologies today. That's insane. And you've done that in your life, didn't you? I mean, you took yourself from kind of a desk job to one of the most elite athletes on the planet. You did that by building a completely different human body.

Yeah, I mean, it's sort of, it explains, but it also kind of takes the study to a next level, that adage of like, well, every seven years you're a different person or every 10 years or whatever it is. Take that down to seven seconds. Seven seconds, yeah. And the idea that you can enhance that and control it and kind of corral it depending upon what you eat, how you behave, what you're inhaling, all of these things that are creating this insanely complex interplay of all of these living entities inside yourself that contribute to health or disease. And what's beautiful about it, like the mechanism and the design is just so

baffling and beautiful because what's true of the microcosm is true of the macrocosm. And, you know, to the extent that you're speaking about what's going on in our gut and the impact that has on our health or whether we're going to be afflicted by a certain disease is equally true when we talk about the dust bowl and how we're growing food and how we're going to be afflicted by a certain disease is equally true when we talk about the dust bowl and how we're growing food and how we're feeding the planet yeah yeah and it is liberating i mean all this has sounded like a lot of bad news but identifying a problem is so much of the solution you know and so now that we identify the problem look we've we've put into our food chain a chemical that deletes the ability to build a healthy human body we've put into our food chain a chemical that deletes the ability to build a healthy human body.

We've put into the food chain a chemical that deletes the medicine out of our food, which we didn't have time to talk about, but that same shikimate pathway makes the alkaloids, which are the medicinal features of our food, is deleted by glyphosate. So we build a diseased body. We build a food chain that doesn't have the medicine in it. And then we take away the most vital thing, which is this microcosm, macrocosm phenomenon you just talked about.

So far I've been describing to you that we are losing the identity between the outside world and our immune system by the breakdown of these membranes. We get leak. That's literally taking away self-identity from the immune system, and so we get autoimmune disease, where we're starting to react to our own body as if it was foreign. In the same way, at the macro level, I believe we're losing our self-identity as human beings as we start to leak. And we start to become

majorly depressed, panic disorder. We start to get lost down these rabbit holes of doubt, insecurity, fear, guilt. We have spiritual crisis. We have relationship crisis that's on an epidemic level equal to cancer and beyond. The ability to stay in human relationship seems to be the most complicated thing that we could possibly endure right now. It's because we are literally losing self-identity at the cell level because we are eating a chemical that breaks our self-identity at the cell level. That is fascinating. But it's true. When you look at the depression statistics,

you look at the mental health statistics, you look at the opiate explosion, all of the indicia are there that we are ailing emotionally and spiritually and mentally as a society as much as we are physically. Yeah, and I think there's exceptions to that. I think you see this in the in the disease process which isn't so interesting uh a sickness happens and it results in an immune reaction in the healing process i think that's what's happening to our society

right now we have a sickness and a disease on the planet of loss of self-identity and human consciousness of our purpose here only to trigger the ultimate healing process which is to realize that we're all one we are all on one mission to find truth in ourselves and through one another and ultimately like we started the conversation with about your wife where we are calling in community we are going to overcome the isolation of our cell phone era we're going to start to touch each other more we're going to overcome the isolation of our cell phone era. We're going to start to touch each other more. We're going to hug each other more because we have to. And that's a beautiful healing process that I already see afoot in the world around me.

And I'm blessed to be able to go and speak all over the world right now. And I'm blessed in that journey to see humans changing their macro consciousness as they change their diet, as they change their nutrition, as they get in touch with their food chain, as they put bacterial and fungal communication networks back into their body. They come back 18 months later to my clinic and they'll say, Doc, I just left my husband. He's been abusing me for 35 years and I finally realized I don't deserve that. And I left.

And so a woman can in an instant suddenly realize as her boundaries go up at the gut and at the blood-brain barrier her macro boundaries if that's not spiritually and psychologically appropriate I am me I am I am important I am loved I don't need that kind of abuse in my life in the same way I'll have somebody walk in and say doc I just quit my job I just started my company that I've been wanting to start for 30 years and wasn't confident enough to start. And I just realized I am ready. And I just did it. And so I have this goosebump experience over and over again, despite some of the, you know, tragedy that's in the talks that I gave and the science that I now know. And I'm constantly seeing this bubbling up of human hope and human healing and consciousness coming on.

And I take great hope in that. I take great excitement that if a few of us can become conscious and aware and awake right now, it has a ripple effect that is so quick. And it has to be quick because one thing we can be certain with, no matter what background we come from scientifically or politically, no matter what background we come from scientifically or politically, we can agree that any society faced with one in three children with autism will collapse under a financial blow that is inescapable. And so we're about 16 years away from a sure, complete collapse of our financial status as a country, and yet we don't hear a single politician talking about it.

Because why? Because the politicians are not the solution. You and I are the solution as consumers, and we are doing it already. The organic food movement, nobody predicted how successful it was going to be. Ten years ago, it was less than 1% of the food sold in the country, and now we're pushing it. We're up to maybe 4% or 5% in a lot of communities. If we can push that to 16%, these are numbers that were apparently leaked from Monsanto. In their marketing analysis, if the American feud chain became 16% organic, Monsanto and chemical farming would lose its financial stability. Is that right? Only 16?

16%. Whoops. Oh, my goodness. I just broke this piece of glass. That was some energy clearing in the room. I know what that's about. That was an hourglass that broke yeah i know so it was already cracked i took it off the table i think i think it was saying that the time space continuum is now over i know it's going well yeah well you're shattering my my blood brain barrier i think or something um i appreciate the optimism you know i think that that it is easy to get um

pessimistic when you look at the statistics and you mine into them. And I'm glad to hear that you're living in the solution. And it is about consciousness. And I think it's very interesting and I think it's unique to hear somebody like yourself, who is such a hardcore scientist with an engineering background, to talk about consciousness and the war for our attention and the imperative of raising the bar when it comes to our consciousness, because that is what it's all about. And my own experience has been one of continually attempting to raise the bar on my own consciousness. And as I do that, I become healthier, and my world and my community expands around me.

And it can seem ephemeral, and you can start to sound like a hippie when you talk about this kind of thing, but it's very real. It's very true in my own life, and I've seen it at work and in so many other people that it's, you know, as far as I'm concerned, it's fact. And this is the conversation that we need to be having. And I find great comfort that somebody from the scientific community is willing to embrace and have a discourse on that level.

And it's interesting. I think if you talk to any physician or healer that's been in the industry for, you know, 40 or 50 years, they're all going to reflect on their career the same way. They're never going to tell you about the science. They're never going to tell you about the drugs. They're going to tell you about a few of the relationships they had with our patients.

I think we don't even know it as physicians, but we are wired for this too. We're wired for human consciousness and relationship. And it's why we go into the field. And then we get that buried in a bunch of science and drugs and fear and insecurity that we've been given a bad toolbox to take care of people. And so we are failing at our ability to help sustain health and improve the quality of health of our patients.

So we get defensive and we get fearful. But in reality, all of us, no matter how scientific or artistic, if it's not relationship, it's not real. And that's true for work. It's true for play. It's true for a relationship, it's not real. And that's true for work. It's true for play. It's true for a relationship, obviously. So I think that once we start to use that as our filter for our success in the day, we'll have a much different definition of success and failure.

What's interesting about your journey is that it all kind of happened organically as a result of you trying to understand health as opposed to the mechanisms of disease that you were taught in medical school. how you speak about when you start treating these patients with healthy food, and many of them are growing their own food, and yet 40% of them or some significant fraction of them still weren't getting better, right? Which was kind of like a lightbulb moment for you. That's exactly right. So we started our nutrition center in 2010, and I'm kind of a go-big-or-go-home kind of personality. And so when I went to start juicing my patients, we went out of control. We were like four pounds of produce a day.

We were really going aggressive. And some 30% of those patients, like you were saying, miraculous, almost instantaneous reversal of chronic disorders and disease. In contrast, there was 30% that would kind of smolder along, maybe get a little better in this area or that. And then there was this third or 40% that were getting worse instantly on health food. We're feeding them the best food on the planet, and yet their inflammation markers are going up, rashes are getting worse,

their arthritic joints are getting worse. They are sick. And it took me a while, two years of that, to start to believe that the patients were doing what I asked. They must be cheating. They must be cheating. They must be drinking soda on the side. And what always solves that misperception or judgment or denial is relationship. And so I finally got into a relationship with these patients long enough where they were like kin to me.

And I started to realize, oh, my gosh, they're trying so hard. And they're doing exactly what I'm asking them to do. And they're getting worse. And so then we started asking, well, I wonder if there's something intrinsically happening in the food. Cause at this point, I didn't know anything about Roundup. I didn't know anything about chemical farming. I was just a doctor trying to learn nutrition. And so I was thinking macronutrients and carbohydrates and fat. I was not thinking about chemical industry at all. And so as we started to ask questions about the food, we started to realize there's good studies right now out showing that a tomato has almost no lycopene left in it

compared to the tomato of the 1950s. Even though it looks super red. It looks better than the tomato of the 1950s, right? In the 1950s, it may have had a couple spots on it and maybe a yellow spot. It wasn't this red orb with no flaw in it because it's grown in a hydroponic garden that never touches the soil. And so they look great, but there's good science now showing that our food has literally been deleted of the nutrients and not just the fuel, but the actual medicines within it. And so in that journey, then we started asking, well, what the heck happened to the tomato that it lost all of its nutrients?

And then obviously the next question was, well, it must get that from the soil. And it was in a 90-page white paper in the soil sciences that I found that molecule that would shift my whole universe in 2012. Yeah, it's crazy. And it really speaks to this, the importance of really considering the macro when it comes to nutrition. Like it's one thing to say like, oh, eat a plant-based diet, get your greens or whatever, or make sure you're getting a lot of fruit and vegetables. But if you don't have an appreciation for how, when, and where those foods were grown and everything that goes into that, then as well-intentioned as you may be,

you very well may be missing the mark exactly and i would actually i think we can circle this right back to this concept of relationship and consciousness what's the difference between a tomato that's grown by your child in the backyard and you guys go out there and tend it every evening and that kid grows up for a summer with this tomato plant and when he can finally eat one of those tomatoes because he asks all the time if you can pick one of those tomatoes and he finally gets to pick that tomato and taste it and before you know you can never get a tomato on your salad because he's sneaking out there and eating the tomatoes off the vine what's that kid's consciousness in

relationship to that plant and that food versus the adult who runs to the store rushed between work and home, pick up four hydroponically grown tomatoes that have never touched the earth. You don't even have a sense of concept of where that thing comes from. It was probably from Chile or Mexico or some far-flung space of the universe. You have no idea the work that went into creating that vegetable at all. In reality, most of the work was probably not done by a human or even the sun. It was probably under fluorescent lighting.

It was probably in an artificial environment start to finish. What's the consciousness of that tomato? In contrast, what's the consciousness of a piece of corn grown in the middle of a one-million-acre corn farm that is growing row after row after row of a genetically modified food that doesn't have the nutrients or medicines that it was made to be what is the purpose of that corn it's gone the corn knows it i think there's a decrease in energy field in that corn and it's weakened and we go and consume that

our beef consuming we consume the beef the beef are nearly dead by the time we eat that cow chickens even more so a third of the flock of the chickens by six weeks are already dead from invasive infection. And then we butcher the surviving animals at six weeks and call them boiler chickens and we put them in a Chick-fil-A sandwich or whatever it is. And suddenly we've got this maelstrom of stress in what we think was just a bite of food. The plants that that animal ate was stressed. The animal itself was on the verge of death when it was finally killed. And then we put that in our mouth and we wonder why an hour later we're having a panic attack. Yeah, I think I'm trying to remember who I was speaking to.

I believe it was on the podcast. Somebody was talking about how they've actually done studies on the impact of the hormonal stress that these animals are experiencing when they're slaughtered and what that does to the human body. This is one of my main areas of interest right now. We've got large-scale cattle trials going on up in Canada right now with a product that we've developed for cow intestines. And we're super excited about it. So it's like Restore for Cows?

It's like Restore for Cows. And next is in the poultry and then the pork we're super excited about it on so many levels number one it reduces the amount of gut stress and methane they produce methane from cows is the number one greenhouse gas produced in north america right now and so we're going to reduce greenhouse gases by successfully implementing something that reduces the stress of the gut of the cow so that's really cool but more importantly it reduces the pain that the cow is in and more importantly perhaps it re-establishes the cell identity self-identity of the cow and this is what you see lacking when you walk through a feedlot i've i've been blessed with

the opportunity to to be on feedlots in the last few years and it's fascinating to be a medical doctor in clinic that's full of a lot of autistic kids and then go on a feedlot. You see the exact same macro traits in a cow on a feedlot as you do as a child with autism. They're skittish. They can't make eye contact. They skitter away from each other. They startle at any sound. They have lost their filter systems just like the autistic child have, and they are prone to respiratory infections they all have acidic guts i mean they just their biology is just like an autistic kid and yet here i live in virginia where we have these bucolic rolling hills with all these grass-fed cows

walking all over and then they're sent just in the last few like you know days or weeks or months of their life to a feedlot for fattening up and And so I know those cows that are around my fields, my daughter's favorite animal is the cow in a lot of ways. And so we'll stop on the roadside and these cows will look at you for an hour, staring into your face, blinking at you. And then you see them a couple months later on a feedlot and they are an autistic behavior. And so we're seeing this collapse of awareness of the animals we're consuming. And not only is it hormonal, it's actually, again, at the genetic level. 99% of the human genome and some similar percent in the other large mammals is actually not making any proteins.

It doesn't make a gene. So 99% of our genome makes what we call junk DNA. Literally, scientists are calling this junk DNA, 99% of the genome. What's the chance that nature put 99% of the genome in junk? Well, it turns out it's not junk at all. It doesn't make a protein, but it makes something called microRNA. These microRNA turn on and change from second to second and tell your genes exactly what the environment's doing. So if you become stressed or you think your life is threatened right now or you're lonely or you're fearful or you don't know where truth is, you start making a totally different population of microRNA that goes into your bloodstream, courses through you, and actually

can secrete out of you in your breath, in your saliva, and all of your secretions. You're putting out microRNA to tell everything in your environment that there is fight or flight going on. There is a war, and you're losing it. That's what the cows are right now putting into their bloodstream, into their meat, right before they die. And so they're now butchered, and it goes into you. And now you eat that. And we already know that 5% of the microRNA in your bloodstream is from your last meal. And so your last meal is literally now going into your genome and telling your genes which genes to turn on and off and which proteins to make from those genes. And so when you start to talk about a stressed food chain, you're literally talking about a stressed consumer.

If all of this is true, then we should see a very close correlation with antibiotic use and mood disorder, anxiety disorder, panic attack, major depression. And it turns out those studies have proven out very well one course of antibiotics increases your rate of depression by about 25% in the following 12 months whoa one course of antibiotics 25% increase in your risk of major depression one course of antibiotics there's a 19% increase in anxiety attack and panic disorder if you have two courses of the disruption of the caliber and quality of the gut flora? Exactly. So you've now wiped out the gut flora with the antibiotic, which means you've now lost the restore-like molecules that are doing that

wireless communication network, which means you're now leaking across the membrane, which means you're now over-inflamed there, and the neurologic system is starting to get hit as the blood-brain barrier fails. And so that's one course of antibiotics. If you now take it up to two courses or above, we can get up to 60% increased likelihood of major depression a year with multiple courses of antibiotics. The rate at which we're prescribing antibiotics as physicians hasn't changed in the last 15 years, which is an interesting statistic. The general perception is we're using more antibiotics all the time as doctors. The reason we haven't gone up in the last 15 years, which is an interesting statistic. The general perception is we're using more antibiotics all the time as doctors. The reason we haven't gone up in the number of antibiotics prescribed per 1,000 persons is because we literally can't write more.

We hit 833 prescriptions per 1,000 man, woman, and child back in the mid-1990s. 833 prescriptions for every 1,000 people. 83% of the population being exposed in any given year to an antibiotic by numbers. Of course, it's probably more like some percentage of the population is getting four or five courses of antibiotics. But nonetheless, it's literally impossible for us to prescribe more antibiotics. So we plateaued in our antibiotic prescription thing. But over the same course, the antibiotics used in our animals has gone way up. And so we're using five times more antibiotic today in our beef, pork, and poultry industries than we are in humans.

And then you'll add on top of that, so to give you numbers in pounds, we've got around 7.7 million pounds of antibiotic used in humans. We have about 30 million pounds of antibiotic used in the animal production in North America. In contrast, we have 4.5 billion pounds of glyphos the animal production in North America. In contrast, we have four and a half billion pounds of glyphosate antibiotic in our food chain. And so again, you know, we can show damage from physician prescriptions, we can show damage from the antibiotics given directly in animals, but nothing touches glyphosate in regard to its sheer capacity to kill the biome. Has Monsanto responded?

I mean, you're out, like you're giving talks like twice a month, right? You're on the road, you're getting up in front of doctors, all different kinds of audiences to speak about these issues. Have they responded to you at all? Like, how is this being received? And what's going on on the regulatory level?

Like, can you get this information in front of the EPA? Who's listening? How do we promulgate this in a way that we can actually provoke change? Yeah, I think Monsanto has been paying attention. They put themselves up for sale. Monsanto just sold themselves to Bayer, the largest pharmaceutical company in the world. Bayer's got a little bit of a riddled past Bayer actually came out with the first patents for heroin in the early 1900s right Bayer created aspirin which is arguably the most damaging there's been more deaths from medical deaths from aspirin than probably any other drug on the planet

is that true yeah and so we've got these this checkered past for a company that now buys up Monsanto. And so I think Monsanto is paying attention, not just to me, but to the American consumer that's increasingly realizing we've got a serious problem. And the problem is interesting that it's really limited to the U.S. right now that we have so many drug-resistant weeds in our country now that glyphosate is failing as an herbicide. And so the number of pounds in the U.S. that's sold every year has actually decreased for the first time in the last couple of years because we have to spray more atrazine and all these other more noxious chemicals because all the weeds have become resistant to Roundup. Yeah, it's this accelerating insane cycle, right? We have to hybridize even further, accelerating insane cycle right we have to hybridize even further create additional gmo and then increase the potency of the glyphosate or whatever you know fertilizers are being used

it's exactly like warfare you know my brother was over in iraq for a number of years and now in afghanistan and other places and and i watched the same thing he's an expert in IED analysis. And he gets to watch an insurgent group create a new technology of IEDs. So then the U.S. comes and says, oh, here's a new technology. So they create a new technology around that and give it to the U.S. government. And then the insurgents see that, and they just engineer around that. So there's this constant evolving thing. And my brother's just always like, this is the most worthless journey ever. But, yeah, the perspective is flawed from the inception of it because we shouldn't be at

war with our environment we should be looking to work in conjunction with it exactly which is the same with the humans right we shouldn't be killing the insurgent we should just go sit down and talk to the insurgents all right but zach we have to feed the planet you know this is gmo is the future there's a lot of smart people very smart people who are telling me people like Bill Gates Look, you want to feed the planet you want to feed everybody we have we're gonna have 10 billion people soon How you gonna do it GMOs how we're gonna do it So get out of the way be part of the solution or you know, and let us do our job That's right. We're starved to death if we don't have GMO

1996 was the rate of starvation on the planet any higher than it is now. No. We have exactly the same distribution of starvation and famine going on in the world as we did in 1996. Many would argue it's actually worse now than it was in 1996 before we had GMO crops. They talk as if it's some distant past that we were relying on normal crops. In 1996, we were just fine. We can scale farming in this country logarithmically by just stopping the subsidies to pay farmers not to grow anything. We have so much farmland that can feed the world,

and the biggest misperception with GMO is that it increases crop yield. You have to be extremely myopic or short-sighted to believe that it increases crop yield. Because if you are killing myopic or short-sighted to believe that it increases crop yield. Because if you are killing the bacteria and fungi in the soil, what's the chance that soil is going to keep growing lots of crop in 10 years? The answer is zero. And so they address that in the short run by more MPK fertilizer, more chemicals to get in there, more chemicals, herbicides, pesticides to deal with the sick crop. But by seven years in, farmers are recognizing drops in their yield. And the fact is, GMO is not going to feed the world because you are killing the soil

in which the plants grow. And so you're not going to survive much beyond five or seven years with your soil if you're constantly spraying the Roundup in there. And you can palliate that for a long time. You now have dead soil that you keep palliating with chemicals. but the reality is you're never going to feed the world on sick and dead soil. So how are we going to feed the world? We're going to do it by the farmers. All we really have to do is give back the part. Farmers are the most resilient, most brilliant problem solvers I've ever worked around. They are so damn smart because they're paying attention to mother nature.

I've ever worked around. They are so damn smart because they're paying attention to Mother Nature. The scary thing, though, is that our farmers are at average age 67 in this country. We don't have a younger generation learning the wisdom of our experienced farmers. But I think there is a generation of millennials who are interested in permaculture and are studying sustainable ecological systems and farming. culture and are studying sustainable ecological systems and farming. Like when I was in college, nobody was going to, you know, go work on farms in, you know, Costa Rica and Hawaii.

And now that's a thing. So I'm actually encouraged by that. I'm absolutely encouraged by that generation. My kids are 20 and 18 and I'm watching their generation. And something like organic food is so cotton-picking obvious to their generation. It's just not even a question in their minds that you should be eating organic. And in the same way, both my kids are highly plant-based, more strict than I am in many ways, not because I taught them to be, because they are looking at the world just being like,

this is completely the only way we can pull this thing off. And so to these younger generations, I agree with you, they are far more conscious of the problem, and they're far more interested in some real meaningful solutions. So my greatest joy is to see exactly what's afoot. We're shooting a documentary film next week on the Mississippi River, recording the glyphosate roundup levels from Minnesota all the way down to Louisiana, Baton Rouge. By the way, at the end of that Mississippi River, the last 90 miles of the Mississippi River that's collected all of the roundup

out of our whole bread belt of our country is the highest rates of cancer in the entire developed world. It's called the Cancer Alley. And we have a lot of people that are suffering their fourth and fifth cancers that live in that territory. And so we're documenting all of this. But one of the coolest teams that we're partnering up with is this group of four very experienced older farmers who are now traveling the country

teaching people how to convert 30,000 100,000 acre farms back to an organic and permaculture type thing this is the revolution I think because it's one thing for us to send out some millennials and grow you know a 10 acre or-acre permaculture garden and fuel. Another thing to teach large-scale farmers to convert back to thousands of years of food tradition to grow on the grand scale enough healthy food. That's happening right now. This is not fiction. And so we hope to be, at least some of the documentaries coming out,

to document that this is stupid easy. We've been doing it for 10,000 years. We just need to keep doing it, which is growing healthy food, respecting the soil, growing healthy soil, and seeing human health come right out of spring, right out of that soil that we were born into. Right, so if you rotate it properly or you tend to the soil in a kind of more holistic fashion,

you don't run into these problems that monoculture was producing. And it's very exciting how fast you can return to that. And you can still get the yields. Higher yields. You can get higher yields. Three or four years in, they're starting to recover the yields that they expected from chemical farming.

So you can get higher yields from cover cropping. Then after three or four years of cover cropping, you'll get better yields than continuous chemical farming. Well, my hope is that as, as the kind of plant-based movement continues to grow, that it will, you know, and meat consumption continues to reduce, that that frees up some of the, you know, the land that we're using to grow feed for these animals is a huge issue and a problem, right?

So to the extent that that can be shifted for human consumption and diversified, I think we're on the path to a better way forward. You're part of it. I mean, this podcast is a critical piece of this. The podcast industry is so exciting to me. I've been on thousands of these shows, and without them, this information wouldn't have gotten out. This information has been known for a long time but it happened now because of this kind of form of media

and communication so we've been talking about so-so communication but ultimately we're in relationship with every one of your listeners right now and i know by what i've seen over the last five years is you can't put this truth in somebody's hands and they can they can't keep it silent no they have to share no intermediary i, I don't know what your relationship has been with mainstream media, but I would imagine it's pretty difficult for a guy like you to end up on Good Morning America or the Today Show when their advertiser base

is the pharmaceutical industry and these big food companies that rely on glyphosate. And basically, these are adjuncts of the Monsanto complex, right? And they've created a situation through their own social media efforts of trying to convince people that anybody that speaks askance of their party line is some kind of crazy conspiracy theorist. So you have that, who's the guy? Ken Folta? He was like their mouthpiece for a while before he kind of sort of got exposed. And we're starting to be able to see through these people. But I think it's important for

everybody to understand that you have to kind of approach this war for the hearts and minds of the populace with some awareness and some consciousness to try to see through the arguments that are being presented to you and really you know take it upon yourself to do the research to mine to mine the truth one of the reasons i think the truth is bulletproof here is that you would have to come up with a better story than i've told you as to why we have an epidemic of every chronic disease known on the planet simultaneously starting in the late 80s, early 90s, they're going to have to come up with a better story than mine. I may not have proved out all the science and all the details yet and everything else,

but they're going to have to. And so that's why they're staying silent with this is they know they don't have a better story. The science has proved it out to the level that we know it. The history is ironclad. The public health data is ironclad the the public health data is ironclad and so they would it's stacked against them and so we see the largest food owner in the world selling themselves for 66 million dollars to bear 66 million dollars is nothing in this world or i'm sorry 66 billion

66 billion dollars is nothing when you're talking about the world food chain that they own 80 percent of so it's this sort of uh union of pharma and chemical right exactly so who would want to own a company that's main product takes the medicinals out of food a company that makes medicine and so that's literally what we do let me give you a little bit of an expose if you don't mind this dragging a little bit longer we can go as long as you want i just want to be conscious of your time but i could talk to you all day so we have to cut it short like you have to please come back because like there's plenty more yeah we got we haven't even touched the surface of all this kind of stuff but go ahead so my background with with

chemotherapy there's one of the most widely used chemotherapies on the planet is called vincristine. Vincristine, it turns out, is a normally occurring, naturally occurring alkaloid, one of these medicines in food, that occurs in a lot of the superfoods that you would think to eat. These alkaloids are made through the shikimate pathway that glyphosate blocks. We've literally subtracted out of our food chain this form of chemotherapy, if you will. We now grow the way in which we produce vincristine. You can't do that in a test tube.

You have to get it from plants. And so the way they do this is they create huge baths of algae that create vincristine, and we extract it from the plant source, and then we purify it down to this single chemical. And we sell it for $28,000 a gram. It's some tenfold more expensive than gold. As like an anti-cancer. As a chemotherapeutic. Chemotherapeutic, wow.

But this is available if you were just eating foods the way that they were naturally designed. You would have a constant, low-grade, non-toxic available vincristine that would be bathing the cells to make sure that if there was cancer there, it would be informed and die off. Wow, that's crazy. All right, so you've painted this sort of dystopian picture of food in America, glyphosates and everything, it's in the rainwater, even if you're growing an organic garden in your backyard, chances are the soil is compromised.

How can we move forward? What are some of the things that we can do to rectify this and to eat as healthy and take care of ourselves as best as we can? Perfect. Concrete next steps for you. If you're listening to this, you're trying to put heads or tails together. Let's keep it simple. Before you even worry about what you're going to put in your mouth, let's start thinking about mechanisms for you to reintroduce the microbiome to your body.

Number one, and my very favorite one, is to breathe as many environments as you can. It turns out we can repopulate our microbiome not just by eating it through fermented foods, which I love, but by breathing the bacteria and fungi in our environment. How do you do that? You simply get out of your house, get out on a hike, get near a waterfall, get to a swamp, get up into the mountains, get into as many macro ecosystems as you can, and breathe there for a few hours. Ferns are a really good sign. If you're out in the woods and you see ferns growing, their nutrient base is the oldest ecosystem on the

planet. A fern's not going to grow unless it has access to the oldest ecosystem on the planet. And so go next to a fern and sit there and read a book for half an hour in the sunshine or in the dappled shade where those ferns are growing sit and read and breathe for a bit you're going to repopulate your microbiome and you're going to have a spiritual experience of sitting under a tree when was the last time you felt grass between your toes or ran down a field of wildflowers we don't do these basic things and so we create these micro ecosystems in our drywall homes and everything else. And the reality is it's so easy as an American to change that environment.

If you're not happy with the body you have, then go pick one of the other $399 million that you can build tomorrow by breathing something different. So get out into as many ecosystems as you can. Make sure that your weekends involve diversity. If you're stuck in an office most of the week, make sure you're getting out not just to spray down roundup weeds, but you're getting out actually to sit beneath a tree and stare up in the sky and stare at a cloud floating over and realize you are a speck on a

speck in a universe that has to describe some greater purpose to you than cranking away on a computer in a cubicle somewhere. You are greater than that. Your mission is much bigger than that. And it has to do with communication with your fellow people. And so get into community with your coworkers, get into community with your neighborhood, get into community. And we see again and again, all the solutions come right out of that. You know, these little farms that are popping up, CSAs, we got neighborhoods that are banding together to create neighborhood gardens again. The solutions are at hand and they are happening. And all you need to do is participate in them by getting out of your drywall box and the plastic infused car that you sit in all day.

Get out of those spaces and re-engage. So number one, macro ecosystem shift. Number two, start about getting fermented foods back in your diet. We ate these through all human history, every people group on the planet until refrigeration hit the 1950s and we stopped fermenting our food. We just started sticking in the fridge instead. So get back to fermenting your own food if you can. If not, then spend the expensive money on getting a wild fermented sauerkraut, sauerrubin, kvass, any of these fermented vegetables back in your diet. It only takes about a tablespoon or two to eat it. You don't want a typical sauerkraut that's just made with a probiotic. Probiotics are chasing after the win, three species or one species of bacteria. You need to make sure.

Even like the VSL3s and the fancy ones and all of that? Yeah. So VSL number three is three species of probiotic that we proved out in one tiny clinical trial to help impact inflammatory bowel disease. That's the only real studies that ever been done on VSL number three. It's three bacteria that don't actually colonize a normal human gut. They are actually colonized from bovine guts. And so 99% of the, well, more than that, 99.9% of the products on the market in the probiotic industry are bacteria that grow in the bovine intestine.

Bovines have rumen guts, not the acidic stomachs that the human has, and so we have a much different microbiome. And so the cows, bacteria that we're now taking the form of, we're selling $3.5 billion of probiotics a year in this country, that's because we're all sick, and it's the only tool we've been handed. And I also think it's something that works with the human mind, because it's sort of like taking a pill. It's like, oh, I don't have to worry about my gut flora because I take a probiotic.

I'm good. Yeah, exactly. And I don't have to think about it anymore. Exactly. As opposed to the real solution, which is diversifying your life experience. Get back out in nature. Basically all the things that you just listed. Right.

That's hard. That takes effort. That takes effort. That takes intention and consciousness and awareness. It takes a shift in lifestyle, which is challenging. It's difficult to change the way we spend the minutes in a day right and so all right so and i would i would presume i'd be shocked if you said differently but like if somebody says well should i buy organic food you should you should of course for multiple reasons number one you change the industry if we can reach 16 percent we'll collapse

bayer and monsanto's and everything else by taking away their financial uh capacity to keep all that expensive chemical people say that look it is it is more expensive there are some organic foods that are better than others but i would imagine you're you're an absolutist right i would i would say not necessarily absolutes is ewg is a great website so ewg has the the clean 15 and the dirty dozen if you just google dirty dozen clean 15 you'll come up with the ewg website and what it shows you is the 12 crops that in the conventional form are the highest in roundup and other pesticides herbicides and the 15 cleanest ones that even grown conventionally have almost no trace chemical on them and so in this way you can if you're really strapped for money, you can go to the grocery store and know, okay, an avocado doesn't

need to be organic. There's hardly any pesticide or herbicide that's detectable in avocado, even if it's conventionally grown. However, it's a strawberry, be absolutist, never put a non-organic strawberry in front of your children. That is a chemical bomb right there. And so those are the ways you can kind of start to tease out where do we have to be absolutist and strict and where can we kind of be a little more lenient ultimately it's really exciting because the demand of of organic crops is dropping the price and that's natural right we're going to get cheaper crops in the long run right when you see the costcos in the wall in the walmarts and all of that becoming the biggest retailers of organic food yeah and it's it's crazy so that is a huge paradigm shift that

speaks well to if you don't know about thrive market do that thrive market online such a brilliant brilliant concept and they're literally passing on wholesale prices of organic food to the consumer and you can order your groceries online they come the next day it's an amazing beautiful model they have they're a sponsor of this show oh ganar is a friend i was i was uh ganar's lawyer in a venture that like back when we were both living differently oh my gosh i go way back with oh he's he's a wonderful guy so he's he's got a great vision and has pulled together something beautiful there well there's a there's an unintentional plug for your for your supporters there so um but yeah i mean so i think the argument that it's more expensive

is is quickly being proven wrong it's not more expensive to grow healthy food it's cheaper because you're not spending all that money on the chemical fertilizer pesticides and everything else it may take a few years for the farmer to realize those profit margins but that's better than being stuck in a completely you know futile state of codependence on a chemical farming industry where you're never going to get out of debt if you're a chemical farmer. What is your opinion on all of these new microbiome tech startups where you can have your gut flora tested and evaluated and then you get this litany of sort of advice about how to proceed? It cracks me up in a large degree. It's like, you know, because what are we really going to learn? We're going to find out that we have leaky

gut, which it always shows, and we're going to find out that we have leaky gut which which it always shows and we're going to find out that we're sensitive to most of the foods we eat because we have leaky gut not because the foods are bad and then we're going to find out that we should eat more fruits and vegetables and so in the end the genomics are never really going to prove out anything other than the obvious because the obvious has has taken us such few decades to. And so the obvious thing is stop spraying chemical fertilizers, stop spraying chemical treatments on top of our crops, start eating real food, and suddenly the microbiome is going to respond. Our microbiome is only challenged because we're drenching it in antibiotics.

But in the meantime, like, should I get a fecal transplant? I would say no. And the reason is because, again, it's a transient fix, right? fecal transplant? I would say no. And the reason is because, again, it's a transient fix, right? So, you know, it can be a great tool for somebody who's dying from C. difficile colitis. You have like a really acute, like, problem, right? Yeah. Intractable autoimmune disease or, you know, your insurance company will only pay for C. difficile colitis. That's the only indication they'll pay for. But out of pocket, there's a lot of places around the country where you can start to pay for fecal transplants. But really, that's just a patch job in the end because the microbiome turns over every three

days so if you're not supporting that microbiome that you just translated into the that recipient with a new diet with a new environment with something that would sustain that microbiome it's going to be gone in three days right and so that's where the the misperception of the of the utility of fecal transplant kind of comes in right and i would imagine that kind of hand in hand with that is some awareness of how we navigate the world uh in terms of like how we over sanitize everything with the purell everywhere and all you know the way that we wash everything and you know what's your position on like just basically antiperspirant and soap and showering a lot and like all of the

kind of you know human behaviors that we've all agreed on are are sort of what we do and the impact that that has on health and gut health yeah it's all i'm not gonna let you go i promise we're all we're all at every one of those levels we're separating ourselves from nature right and so something like an aluminum based deodor, one of the most tragic things for a neuron. You can't do more brain damage, I think, with a topical therapy than an aluminum-based deodorant. So we need to phase those out. They need to be illegal. We've proven that that aluminum gets into the body.

We've proven that aluminum is the most toxic thing to neurons. We've got to stop the use of aluminum based cosmetics. Then you mentioned soap and showering. You know, obviously the place in which we used to get most of our magnesium was from bathing in live streams and ocean water. Well, we don't do that anymore. And so we're all mag deficient. It's very hard to actually replete the human body for magnesium through the gut and through your diet or through taking supplements. It does great coming through the skin and so we we aren't bathing in natural waters anymore i have the advantage of living in virginia where i'm on a 450 foot deep well into these deep aquifers where

i'm getting a ton of mineral content in there and so i think i'm a little better off in a deep well than i would be from a municipal water system in regard to getting some of those nutrients on my skin but on the other hand there's going to be glyphosate in the air as well. It's going to be unclean. So the reality is we need to change the macro system of farming before we really get back to a natural water system that we would bathe in. We weigh over soap. Alcohol sanitizers are really ironic, isn't it?

I mean, every flu season, they start popping up in every grocery store and everything else is wash your hands, wash your hands, wash your hands. Well, the reality is the vast majority of the viruses that are going to cause flu or any other upper respiratory infection are airborne not translated by a hand you don't get flu by shaking somebody's hand you get flu from from breathing the air that they've just exhaled and so washing your hands into oblivion is never going to change that flu flu vulnerability and so i think there's some irony in the sterilization belief because you're not really sterilizing anything by washing your hands.

You simply change the microbiome on your hands. You're going to be more prone to cracking skin and issues of eczema on your hands and everything else rather than anything like a public health event. Awesome, man. All right. Well, I'm going to let you go, but I'm going to leave you with one last question. And I ask this to every doctor that, but I'm going to leave you with one last question. And I ask this to every doctor that I have on the show. If you woke up and found yourself in a parallel universe and you were surgeon general, what's the first order of business? First order of business is absolutely to create a 10-year plan

to eliminate all chemical spraying on our crops. And that's not just glyphosate. We're now spraying all kinds of insane cousins to the Agent Orange compound that we sprayed on the jungles of Vietnam on our crops because they're so diseased. We have to stop spraying and let the ecosystem return. There would be no bigger public health event

than stopping the spraying. We will see human health rebound so quickly if we will stop spraying. And so number one, do that. Number two, I would demand that the government create a new sector, health rebound so quickly if we will stop spraying. And so number one, do that. Number two, I would demand that the government create a new sector, which would be the equivalent of the Peace Corps, and make it the Green Corps. And every kid by the age of 18 has to sign up for work on a farm somewhere in our country. That's a great idea.

Spend one year on a farm, and you will have a different perspective on what you want to do with your life and your connection to Mother Nature. And Israel's done a great job building the best military in the world let's us build the greatest farming in nation in the world let's retrain our children to train us how to grow and grow and grow the greatest food on earth i feel like you could do that like create sort of like a peace corps version of that if something like that doesn't already exist. It needs to happen, yeah. And there's small versions of it, and that's encouraging. There's a nice high school in our community in Charlottesville, Virginia that now has a specialty track for advanced kids

who are kind of gifted and talented program where they can actually opt into this high school from any school district in the area. And they run a greenhouse themselves, and so they'll spend three years with a greenhouse during high school and they come out with directions into botany biology and all kinds of different science fields so it's already starting to happen on micro levels but it would be beautiful to see a surgeon general step up and say we have a new we have a core this is our new belief system we are going to train the best of the best and this is a calling that you have the opportunity to be and i think our children

would jump right in with enthusiasm i don't think it's going to happen with this administration maybe it's just crazy enough to do something like that you know who knows man all bets are off yeah all bets are off i just you know i'm ready for crazy because the old status quo is not working and so you know well there's a few decisions that are being made at the government level that i can tolerate in any shape or form i do have hope of chaos because out of chaos will come new new opportunities perhaps all right man well thanks for uh thanks for taking the time today zach thanks for your time ritual yeah man appreciate it loved it beautiful uh super inspiring i please come back because there's a million other things I could talk to you about.

Yeah, I'm sure I'll be back in the area in the next few months and we'll just line it up again. Right, cool. And if you're digging on Zach, the best way to connect with him is zachbushmd.com, correct? And themclinic.com, which is your clinic in Virginia. And you're seeing patients, I presume? Yep, yep. We've got a busy clinic there. My nurse practitioner, Jude Christian, is amazing. He and get you in if you needed some help there but

the M clinic has rolled out an eight-week intensive program where we pair you with a life coach that's going to help you through this journey of applying a completely new lifestyle that goes way beyond nutrition it gets into exercise physiology breathing meditation all kinds of different levels of human consciousness. And so that's an eight-week program that's available online wherever you live and is cheaper than traveling to Virginia. So we've really rolled this out with the intention of making it cheaper for you to consume a lot of the important data we have for you. And along the way, you have an incredible health coach that's really training you to find the truth that's inside of yourself. Because healing doesn't come from me.

It's going to happen from you. It's the accountability and having a sustainable program with whom you're actively engaged with another human being. Absolutely. For more details on the soil science and all that, the Restore for Life website can get you that story. Restore, the number four, life.com. It'll take you into kind of the details of this wireless communication

network we've discovered and take you through a lot of that story. So if you're curious, there's a lot more digesting to do. Yeah, cool. And I'll have, I'll have links up to all that stuff in the show notes for people that want to go down the Zach rabbit hole.

Yeah, that'll keep you busy. The GMO revealed is a great product that Patrick and tempopo and the Revealed Films team has created. It's a ton of information. If you're really interested in this, it's over 22 hours of content from 16 of the greatest minds in science out there. And so really brilliant people speaking to this issue of soil science and genetically modified foods and the herbicides, pesticides, and their impact on human health. And ultimately, I think you're going to walk away encouraged, not discouraged, that there's an opportunity for us to now, identifying the problem,

move forward quickly to the solutions. Well, I watched episode one, so I think there's eight or nine more of them. Yeah, you've got another nine to go, but hang in there. And it gets GMOs revealed. It's on YouTube, or at least some of them are on YouTube, but I'll put the links up to all that kind of stuff in the show notes. And that's it, man. Thanks so much.

So good. Thanks, Rich. Peace. Let's. What did you guys think? stuff in the show notes. And that's it, man. Thanks so much. So good. Thanks. What'd you guys think? Did we do it? Do we get it done? I really enjoyed that one, but I got to tell you, I left that conversation with this nagging feeling that I really only just scratched the surface with Zach. There were so many things on my notepad and my notebook, all these topic headings and subject matters and questions that I had primed to ask him that I wanted to dig into, and we just ran out of time. So I really hope that I can have Zach on back soon, and I hope you feel the same.

As always, please check out the show notes at richroll.com on the episode page for this episode. We've got plenty of additional links and resources on all the subject matters that we discussed to expand your experience of this conversation beyond the earbuds. We also filmed it. It's available on YouTube. So if you want to put a visual with the audio, go to youtube.com forward slash rich roll. Also, a final reminder, Plant Power Away Italia is now available for preorder. We're super proud of this book. I think you guys are going to really dig it.

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To learn more about that, go to meals.richroll.com or click on meal planner on the top menu at richroll.com. And I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiello for audio engineering production, interstitial music, help with the show notes and the WordPress page. Sean Patterson for help on graphics. Michael Gibson for videoing our podcasts and theme music as always by analemma thanks for the love you guys until then treat yourself right treat others right eat well and be grateful peace plants namaste Thank you.