The Soil-Human Health Connection

Well, hello, everybody. I'm Dr. Austin Perlmutter, the managing director here at Big Bold Health. And I have to say, for several months, I've been so excited about what I'm getting to do right now, which is the conversation around this continuum between soil health and plant health and human health, something that I certainly never learned about in medical school. And so today, I am honored to be sharing the virtual stage with four luminaries who each have slightly different, kind of. Well, I'd say pretty significantly different backgrounds. Backgrounds and perspectives on how the connections between soil health, plant health, and human health come together. So I'm super excited to jump right in, and I'm going to be introducing each of our four other people on stage and asking them to answer the first question. So the first person that I have up here is Mary Purdy. So, Mary, could you give us a little bit of background as to who you are and how you became interested in this conversation? And I guess that's a good place to start.

Thank you, Austin. Yes. My name is Mary Purdy. I am what I call an eco dietitian. And I spent about 12 to 13 years in clinical practice seeing patients with a variety of chronic health issues and working with dietary changes and shifts and interventions to help improve their health, you know, prevent disease and optimize what they were going through, and also to hopefully reverse and address issues that they were dealing with. So. So I came from a real clinical background, but had always been very, very interested in the environment and had also just been teaching micronutrients to medical students at Bastyr University in the Seattle area. So when I started to understand the intersection between how the way we grow our food has an impact on the micronutrient status of the food and the plant and how micronutrients play a huge role in human health, I started getting very interested in that intersection there and then also understanding the role that the food system is playing in the degradation of our environment and how that in turn affects human health. And I'll pause there because there's a lot more to say, but that's how I started getting interested in it. And the soil is really the cornerstone of all of those conversations right there.

What I love and what we'll see time and time again in this conversation is the question of how far upstream can you actually go? And certainly, we think about human health. We think about going upstream to the food that we eat, but going beyond that to saying, how is that food produced? What is the quality of the soil in which that food exists? And I think what makes me so excited is to get to pull from the entire spectrum of that advocacy. So next up, I would like to introduce Dr. Emily Reese. And Emily, if you could tell us a little bit about your background and what does this soil to plant to human health continuum mean to you and how did you become interested in it?

Yeah, so I definitely come from the opposite end of the spectrum for Mary in terms of. I have a passing personal interest in nutrition and things like that, but professionally coming at it from the soil side of things. So growing up, I always loved being outside, and ecology and biology was something I was really interested in through college and then ultimately went to graduate school in agriculture, really thinking about that as applied ecology. How do we think about the way nature works and use that information to create a system that is productive for humans? Because that's ultimately what agriculture is, as well as providing some amount of harmony, so to speak, with. With the natural world and the synergies that can go both ways with that. And so my. My PhD work at Cornell, I was focused mostly on cover crops, which are basically any plant that is grown not for a cash crop, but is grown for other reasons for nourishing, providing habitat for pollinators. The list goes on and on, and looking at how diversity within those cover crops can. Can provide potential benefits. But that was really how I got into the world of soil and how critical that is to a healthy agricultural system. And then, like I said, I kind of just have my own personal interest that I've been dabbling in through, you know, in terms of making those choices about what I eat and feed to my family and how that is all connected of that nourishing food. And that nourishment can come in various different ways and is definitely impacted by soil, among other things.

Fantastic. I mean, let's just pause here for a moment. What we have is Mary Purdy, an eco dietitian, looking at patient health and then working down to the soil. And then Dr. Emily Reese, who's a soil scientist now, looking at how her work moves up into human health. So we're already covering a lot of ground, and I want to go next to Dr. Arti Chandra. And Arti, maybe, you know, I feel like you are the entire spectrum of this from human health to soil health. But tell us a little bit about your background and how you became interested in what is becoming maybe the conversation as it relates to health today.

Thank you, Austin. It's great to be here with you all. You know, I. I'd actually start with my Interest in just food and nutrition from my own background growing up in an East Indian family where food and spices were used as medicine regularly, mostly for digestive and respiratory concerns. And you know, so I just had that sort of flavor in me of like food is nutrients and it's also medicine that was there. And as I moved into College in the 80s, I, you know, started getting act in moving into activism and I was always interested in the food and health issues and joined a food co op and I was going to college in the middle of the corn fields and in, in the middle of the country and started learning about alternative agriculture methods and read the Diet for a Small Planet by Francis Moore Lepe and wrote my Rhetoric 101 paper for some reason, I don't know how I chose this, but on the American food system. And the first line of the paper was, you know, if the saying you are what you eat is true, then we as a society are in for some trouble. And then went on to get a master's in public health where my focus was on maternal and child health, which is of course is central to that is nutrition. And really started learning about also food, you know, what we call now food apartheid or food equity issues and what was leading to disease in the lower income populations. And really recognizing that it was lack of access to healthy food as well as, you know, the, the food toxins that were going their bodies and learning more about food marketing. And I did a paper there on the Cambodian refugee population in Chicago and looked at children and how as they came over from an otherwise rural agrarian population, started adop this very low income urban diet and started seeing all sorts of health conditions emerge, including dental caries, oral health issues, weight issues and so forth. And went on to medicine and medical school and focused on a lot on what we weren't learning in med school. I was involved in American Medical Student association and chaired their nutrition and preventive medicine and task force for a couple of years where we did lobbying every other year in D.C. and we educated ourselves, brought in people like Andrew Weil and Norm Shealy and James Gordon back in the day to help enlighten us on true causes of disease. But fast forward, I chose to move into family medicine seeing you know, preconception, prenatal children all the way up to seniors. And as I, you know, was practicing medicine in, in these urban under settings, really started recognizing that this, what we call pill for every ill approach and this name it, blame it, tame it approach that we have in conventional medicine was just not cutting it and I started really kind of losing my ground and recognizing that this isn't working for me as a clinician. This is not truly helping people. And thank goodness for Jeffrey Bland and functional medicine came in and saved my day professionally and. And in that systems biology learning, really recognizing, you know, that we're all connected inside, that very much fit with what I had already learned in public health school and in my also environmental activism, interest and work, you know, that we're all. Everything's connected. We're systems. Our system is connected to the earth system. And. And so, you know, I beautifully was able to then, you know, find some salvation and bring. Bring food as medic, my practice. And then after some years of working in that started moving into.

Right.

Almost the root, the true root cause of the root cause, which is really soil health, which I know we'll get into. And this was happening as I saw these rising rates of chronic disease and our inability to really move the needle on the incidence of these. And so, yeah, I've moved into the. This soil health for human health approach, joining these esteemed colleagues here in this effort to help save our bodies and save the planet.

Wonderful.

Well, what amazing anecdotes. You know, I think if as we look at this system's idea, the idea that we are not somehow isolated from nature and that human health is different from plant health, it's different from soil health, I'm excited to hear how Dr. Jeffrey Bland is going to bring this together. So, Dr. Bland, as many people know, I work with here at Big Bold Health and is maybe one of the preeminent or is one of the preeminent systems thinkers, I'd say, on Earth today. And Jeff, your career has spanned many continents and many topics over the decades, but I'm very interested to hear how you found yourself a farmer of all things. But also maybe more generally, we could start with how do you see yourself at this intersection of soil and plant and human health in the 21st century?

Well, thank you, Austin.

It's.

It's very rarely that I feel that I'm speechless, but I have to say I'm in a kind of a reverent state of awe, of listening to my four colleagues speak about their passion and their advocacy and their background and the point of convergence of those multiple talents into a central theme which I share very deeply. And when I hear these different voices and the different experiences that underlie the voices, it reminds me of the, you know, the road that we travel is never linear. It's a path that has interesting branch points in it and it has different architecture that we look back and we say, wow, that's kind of interesting how I got guided to where I am today. So for me, I was hired during the latter part of the Vietnam War in my first real job as a professor of chemistry and environmental science at a small liberal arts college in Seattle in Tacoma, Washington called the University of Puget Sound. And it was very interesting because I was hired in 1970, which was the first year of Earth Year and Earth Day occurred. That and the reason that my position was hired was that at that point in time there were a lot of universities that felt the obligation, I think to have something in the environmental science area because of the increasing interest and recognition that environment was pretty darn important in overall international and national health, both financially and personally. And so I was asked to put together this program that didn't exist at the University of Puget Sound in an area that I had no formal training other than a strong passion. I, I felt my, my training was really in chemistry, which it was, but I had taken a variety of courses in my undergraduate school, including a course, a year long course in ecology at the University of California at Irvine where I graduated that was taught by a, a team of individuals including two really very, very well known field ecologists, two of whom one of who had actually headed a group, international multifocal group on the Amazon Amazonian rainforest. In trying to get an ecological model of the stability and instability of the, of the Amazon. That's a pretty big topic. And, and I recall the, the textbook of that course was a, was a borrowed book, no student could afford it. It was, it was like an encyclopedia. It was 4,000 pages of research on different disciplines that had been studying the Amazon. And the leader of that group was the, the professor who had really thought of the only way you can understand the Amazon is through a systems thinking. You can't understand it by just understanding each individual species of plant or animal or microbe in isolation. You had to do it together. So this was Howard Odom. Howard Odom is considered, he's now deceased, but he was considered, he and his brother who genotemed him, both were ecologists as being kind of the systems thinker of ecology. And they started to do these systems maps. And I as a undergraduate student got pulled into that concept of how do you develop a systems map of a very complex environment putting all the organisms together from microbes all the way up through, you know, the mammals. And that was a very important part of my education. So when I went on then to get this position at the University of Pieces Sound, I, I probably oversold in my interview the fact that I had this background with just a one year course because I was really a molecular biochemist. I was a molecular biologist. But fortunately I was able to sell them on the fact I could fill this job. And it gave me a laboratory then for 11 years to build out a program at the University of Puget Sound that I was very proud of, that we developed quite a remarkable program in environmental science based upon systems thinking. A number of my students went on to be very successful, including the head of the Department of Ecology of the State of Washington, one of my graduates from that program. So it, it gave me a recognition that all these things are interconnected in ways that we often don't fully take account of. And that if we're going to look at system stability or systems health, we have to find different ways of thinking about things rather than individual piece parts one at a time. And that then traveled right over into medicine because that similar theme can be seen about people and their health or disease patterns and how they're interconnected and how that translates into their organs and organ systems and so forth. So all of that became kind of a, a theme of mine starting in 1970. And I had the fortune because I was the head of this program and I had a, the president of the university liked me, which was, was helpful because I had a budget that I could bring outside speakers in. So I had Francis Lamorla pay come in Die for a small planet. And I had, But I, when I think back, the people, the luminaries that I was able to invite into this small college to speak, that I was learning from that many times stayed in my home. We had meals together while they were there in, in Tacoma. It was, it was all part of 11 year education for me. And hopefully many students, many who went on actually into medical school now, many of who are retired, that's that many years ago have, when I've seen them years later, they thought this was a seminal event in their lives because they went into medical school with a different view of how medicine was connected to the environment than they would have probably other, other under other circumstances. So that's, that's kind of my background as to how it led me into this and then ultimately into functional medicine and, and into now, as you said, being I guess, surrogately connected to organic and hopefully regenerative agriculture.

Amazing. Well, there are a lot of pieces here that I think we could pull out and expound on. But you know, I think One of the themes that you brought up, Jeff, and that has come up in everyone's conversation, is that there are so many individual things that can be looked at in isolation, and yet to actually understand what's really happening around us, it's important to open up the aperture a little bit, let in a little bit more light, and try to appreciate both the complexity and the beauty that is the natural world and how we participate in this. And so maybe let's go back to the soil, because as we sit here talking, I have a bag of soil outside my place where we're potting tomatoes because it's spring up here in the Pacific Northwest. And as you look at this bag of soil, it might talk about the nitrogen in it, it might talk about some of these other nutrients in it that we know are important to plants, that they need these nutrients in various concentrations in order to. To thrive, I suppose. And I think about the parallel here as we look at human health and we think, oh, well, you need to get your fats, your proteins, your carbs, you need your micronutrients, this many vitamins, this many minerals. But I think it's pretty consistent that if you even take a moment to look at the medical literature or the research around plant and soil health, it isn't as straightforward as just optimizing phosphorus and calling it a day. So, Emily, I know that you've more than any of us understood the nuance and complexity that is the soil. And for those of us who are just getting into this world, what would you say is in a cubic foot of dirt and soil beyond just some of these elements that I've described?

Yeah, I mean, I think before I really started studying soil, I totally was like, all soil. Not, not that all soil looks the same, but, you know, you look at soil and, you know, you. You can't see everything that's. That's in it. You can't see all the things that are different about it. Between, you know, even six feet away from, from, you know, where you're standing, it can be different. So certainly the nutrients are, are really important. That's obviously the primary thing we think about when we think about plants and, you know, when you think about Soil 101 class, you know, what. What is. What is soil? You know, it. It is the physical structure that holds up a plant, which, you know, it, and sometimes you think is an irrelevant concept, and sometimes is really, really important. But so it's both of that big building block idea of that physical structure holding it, and then the next thing I usually think about are those primary macronutrients that, you know, that we've gotten pre. At testing for and being able to identify and, and are. Yeah. Even if everything else in the soil is great, if you're, if you don't have that, then that's, you're, you know, you're not going any further. And then again thinking, I like your analogy of like human health, you know, those vitamins, those different, like micronutrients also really important, but really none of this is, has any, you can't connect that back to the plants without the biology that is within soil. Those, those microbes, anything that you can't see, as well as all the other smaller macro invertebrates and other critters that are all crawling around in there. Sometimes if you look closely, you can see them all the way down to the ones you can't see because ultimately those are the ones that are moving those nutrients around. There's very few nutrients that are available just on their own within the soil through inorganic processes. They need to be metabolized and digested and reformulated basically into forms that plants can actually take up. So even though in many ways when you just look at soil, especially from a distance, it really looks incredibly lifeless, it, it is pretty much without fail you will find some, some living organisms within soil where, wherever you are. And I think that is both the ultimate mystery of soil, but also, you know, that's, that's fundamentally the way at this point I think about soil is as a, as a living being that we need to be able to understand and work with beyond the every, all the other nutrients and things. Exactly.

The, the parallel here is, is so clear, right? With human health and the microbiome. And you know, I've said this before, but even when I was in elementary school, we had the posters in the bathroom with all the scary germs, these monsters that would crawl on your skin and lead us to get sick. And the idea is germs are bad, bacteria are germs, so nuke the bacteria and call it a day. And obviously in the last few decades in human health, we've recognized not only that the microbiome is a health enhancer when it's kind of set up in the right way, but practically speaking, we're hugely dependent on the microbes in our own bodies in order to thrive, to reach our health outcomes. And so it sounds like from what you're saying, this is also the case for our soil and for our plant health. And you've been actively involved through big bold health and other groups in researching what happens when different types of bugs are in the soil and what it does to plants, which again, this is such novel science, the idea of inoculating soil or inoculating seeds, changing the outcomes of plants. But here we stand at a time where we know that farming output and farming nutrients are so important to the future of this planet. Do you see that the soil microbiome is going to play a large role in helping us figure out the next steps? Or do you think it's more just kind of a passing interest for people who know their stuff?

Yeah, I mean, I think that once you understand something better, you can, if nothing else, appreciate it more. I think it remains to be seen to some degree how much, you know, especially in our current agricultural system, we're all about tweaking and tinkering. And you know, I, I'm not, I'm not convinced that this is the silver bullet that everyone's, you know, the next, the next roundup ready corner, so to speak. But I think it's all about appreciating what is there by understanding it better. And I think there's just, there's just so much, so much more to learn. I think we've certainly, I don't know, others would be able to speak to this better, but I feel like we've only scratched the surface in really understanding the, the microbiome impact on human health. And to the analogy to soil is, you know, I mean, we're just, we're just starting out in understanding everything. There's a lot of soil microbes that can't be cultured within a lab. Like more than half of all the microbes, you know, we, we can't maintain within a lab and therefore, you know, our means of studying those is, is really limited. So I think like, even just under understanding that, that, you know, we may only ever really be able to glimpse a portion of, of what's going on there is really kind of intimidating and exciting. But I think we also still fundamentally, even now, know what helps maintain that healthy microbiome in the soil. And so I think again, appreciating that and realizing that on a larger scale is only going to, is only going to grow. I, at this point that is, that's kind of no longer controversial in ways that it, it used to be.

Yeah, well, you know, we're going to have all sorts of different people from different backgrounds watching and listening to this interview. And I think I just wanted to draw attention again to the fact that we're talking about the microbiome not of humans, but of soil as being a key aspect of how plants survive and thrive. And, and so I'd like to go over to Dr. Chandra because, Aarthi, you've been involved kind of on both ends of the spectrum, both helping to advocate for regenerative practices, speaking to patients about the microbiome. So could you give listeners maybe your basic take on if somebody was coming into your office, they'd never heard of the microbiome in any way. How would you describe this thing? And then how are you, either personally or with patients, incorporating the pieces of regenerative agriculture as it relates to human health? Because I think that's such an interesting topic.

That's a great question. I spend a lot of time, I mean, many of us know that the word doctor in the Latin roots of it are teacher educator. And so we spend a lot of time in our integrative and functional medicine practices with education. And, you know, I think what, what's been the, one of the most startling statistics for me or the, the, the trends is the parallel curves between the introduction of chemical agriculture into our, you know, system, our food system, as well as chemicals in our food industry, you know, the processed food industry. The parallel curve of the, you know, the increase of that starting in the middle of the last century and when it really hit was, you know, closer to the 70s and 80s with the, in the rise in so many different chronic diseases. Right. So we see parallel curves of diabetes, of obesity, of autism, so many different conditions, cognitive issues. And that, to me, is, is a really important piece to educate my patients on is that, like, we did not have all these conditions prior to that, and, you know, our genetics have not changed, you know, since the 1980s. You know, our, it's our environment that has changed. And that's a nice springboard. And, you know, for patients that are, you know, 40s and above, I can kind of go back and say, like, list, you know, did you have, you know, most of us in a, in a school, in an elementary school may have had one kid in the school with notable food allergies. Right? Now, you walk into every classroom in a school and you have at least three or six or seven kids with often more than one food intolerance, like, what's going on? And either that pathway or the pathway of their own health conditions or symptoms that they're presenting with is a great springboard to talk about what we're, what we're learning about the gut microbiome and the gut, you know, and that without, without gut Health, you almost can't have whole health. And I start from there and I, I let people know that, you know, we are all being educated, just like Emily was referring to. This is new science. We were only scratching the surface so far. But in my, you know, 30 years of practice, I am convinced that all chronic conditions happen, at least in part by way of the microbiome. And I'll share with patients like the roles that these little critters in our bodies play. You know, that they synthesize vitamins, they help detox chemicals and hormones. You know, they metabolize our hormones, they are involved in our immune system in a really big way. They help control inflammation, they help support healthy digestion, they help us absorb nutrients. So many different roles that they play and, and you know, enter in also the phenomenon of intestinal permeability or leaky gut. And you know, that is such a, also prevalent condition in almost all chronic conditions. And so I'll link the two and I'll explain how they are connected and that, you know, you can, you know, you can feed. So, and I'll talk about the hits to the microbiome. You know, what are the many, many hits to the microbiome? They're basically things that we didn't evolve with, right? We didn't evolve with, you know, you know, ibuprofen and you know, different chemical compounds that we're putting into our system every day. All the different medications, chemicals from the foods, you know, preservatives and artificial colors and high fructose corn syrup and things like that. So speaking to those insults and then moving into, you know, our microbiomes are directly connected to the microbiome of the soil and explaining why, right? And I talk about, you know, the, the kind of, the why of gut health, you know, has to do with the agricultural methods that are being used to either induce health, you know, if the soil is handled properly, or contribute to symptoms and disease processes developing. And you know, that I can't think of really one person who doesn't get engaged around that and isn't recognizing that, wow, like things that I'm putting in are, are influencing this little, this organ system of, of the microbial world in US and that, that these compounds are also potentially, you know, damaging the lining of the gul gut, which can then trigger autoimmune processes and so forth. And so speaking, you know, at those levels for people who really are coming in sick and tired of being sick and tired and maybe never getting an expl for why they have what they have, right? Our system tells us that, like, these conditions just drop down from the sky and befall us. Right. And so explaining to people, based on their own timeline, the hits to their body along the way, maybe some of their genomics involved and, you know, lifestyle that is often an eye opener for people enough that they are interested in moving into change. And it's a, it's a wonderful kind of, kind of arena to then speak to the concern for our farming methods and the foods that we choose to buy and where we buy them from, and as best as possible to try to find food grown in healthy soil through farmers markets, through local health food markets and so forth. And that. Yeah, So I can go on and on. I then talk about the farm bill and other things that are contributing to kind of engage patients as consumers of, you know, nutrition and food. So.

But I want to talk for just one moment about how unique it is for you to be a doctor talking to patients about these themes, because we are several steps removed from the idea of the human as an isolated system with isolated problems within said systems. Right. So you have a pulmonary system, a cardiovascular system, a neurological system, and those issues develop within those systems, and so you can target them with a drug or an intervention. We're talking about the human not only as an incredible system comprised of trillions of cells, but rather an integrated system that has dynamic interplay between the trillions of microbes on and in us and our own cells. And that this is being influenced by the larger system, including the microbes we put in on our foods, the quality of how our foods are changed based on the microbes in the soil. So I think there is something that is so often lost in the conversation around health, which is the connection to the whole. And to think about something beyond the immediate. This is what I need in this instant. I mean, you're moving in the right direction in the Maslow's hierarchy to give people a sense of connection to larger picture. I, I want to move now to, to Mary. And so, Mary, you are an eco dietitian, which I think is the first time I've heard that term being used. And I'm very curious, you know, as somebody, again, who kind of straddles both sides of the conversation, the health of our soil, the health of our plants, as well as the health of our planets or the planet in addition to human health, I feel like the easy thing to do is if a person has concerns about their health, about their diet, you. You go through the macros, you go through the micro, maybe discuss some vitamins so how do you introduce the piece of this, which is either an education or with clients, that you need to care about something larger than just the nutrients in your food, the macros and the micros, how your food was grown, and how do you get to a place of a person caring about this larger picture about the planet, sustainability, regenerative agriculture. When I feel that so many people are wrapped up in the immediate piece of just tell me what to do so I can fix X, Y or Z, and it almost necessitates a higher level of thinking. So I'm curious how you approach that.

I think it's not easy because I think we have become so disconnected from our food source that we go to the grocery store, you grab a package of something, you throw it in your cart, and that's the end of it. And so one of my goals is to, number one, to make sure that people feel connected to their environment first. I mean, there's this concept of one health health, right, which is that human health is directly connected to the environment, the health of the environment, the health of animals, the health of plants. And that is obviously connected to the health of the soil. And so I think if we can get people, clients, patients, citizens of the world connected to their environments and to understand the role that environmental health has on their health. People feel better when they are in an environment that is rich with fresh air and fresh soil and fresh plants. So there's that element of just knowing that when the environment is healthy, we are healthy as people. But there's also this notion that when we can support the health of the environment by making different kinds of food choices, that is a sense of empowerment from the personal perspective, that we can feel better when we eat foods that are grown in a way that supports the environment and in fact, that food often tastes better because those more agro ecological techniques of growing food support soil health and support that symbiotic relationship in the soil. And I'm not a soil scientist, so Emily's got expertise here. But from what I've read and what I've devoted, you know, my, my time and energies to this, this wonderful relationship that happens between this mycorrhizal network underground and the plant and the symbiotic relationship between those two and how that develops the nutrient density of those plants. And again, as you mentioned, not just micron and the macronutrients, but those phytochemicals, those protective plant compounds that the plant produces in response to its environment, in response to adverse weather conditions or pests or other Predators and which they produce also in relationship with the fungi underneath the ground and the bacteria underneath the ground, where the bacteria are saying, hey, plant, there's a pest coming around. You might want to produce some immune boosting defenses to help protect yourself. And that plant says, thank you so much, fungi. I appreciate that. And it produces those phytochemicals. And then when we eat those plants, we have access to those plant chemicals which protects our immune system, feeds our gut microbiome. And for me, when we create this sense of connection for people, that food is not just in a box or a package, but it is part of what our environment has been evolved to do for thousands, millions of years, and that we can partake in that and we can experience the joy, the beauty, perhaps even the spiritual connection of what it means to understand where our food comes from and how it makes us feel. And I think when people start to connect that the food they eat makes them feel a certain way, they are so much more likely to make decisions when they have access to those decisions. It's often a privilege to be able to choose foods that are healthier for you. I recognize that big time. But when that is possible, I think people connect so much more deeply to the foods that they are consuming and have a greater understanding of the connection.

To the planet, phenomenal connection to the bigger picture. I really appreciate that, that. So let's do a little bit of a deep dive into some science here. And that'll be you, Jeff. And I'd like for you to help us connect what Mary just described, which are these phytonutrients, phytochemicals, and their influence on plant health and human health. Because I think it's one thing to say, well, there is this group of thousands of molecules that are found in plants, and they do things where I think many people get caught up is this question of, well, well, what do they do? They do something good for us, they do something good in plants. And Mary described some of this, that they act as these defenses. But if you were going to get up on a podium and you had a couple minutes to basically describe this continuum of data transfer, these phytonutrients, these phytochemicals, their role in the plant ecosystem, and what we're now discovering about their role in human health, pathways, biochemical pathways, where would you go to give people a sample of what we're now learning?

So let me take the baton from Mary, who took the baton from Arthur, who took the baton from Emily, and see if I can't keep Running this race of understanding in this very complex area. So my contribution to this dialogue, I think a number of years ago, which I'm very, very privileged to say seem to have caught, was that when we eat, we're eating information that speaks to our genes. We're not just eating calories. And when I first started to talk about that, which is over 20 years ago, it was I think considered like what in the world is Jeff talking about? That our food is speaking to our genes. But now we've started to recognize that these bioactive components of food, not just protein, carbohydrate and, and, and fats, but vitamins and minerals. And now there's literally thousands of other, these secondary plant chemicals that we call phytochemicals are all regulators in part of how our genes respond to our environment. And then that takes me back to this pivotal conversation that I now recognize was so important in my development in 1974. In 1974 I was given the, the, the opportunity to fly up to the Elmendorf Air Force Base in Fairbanks, Alaska and then to get on a conver 990 that was owned by the NOAA to the US Geophysical Research Station that was on the 88th parallel of the North Pole on ice, where we were studying the biosphere of the Arctic. And I had the chance to scuba dive under ice. And you know, it was just a remarkable experience. But I was with the scientists from different disciplines of 14 different countries on the size for, for three weeks. And when I got back was a life change experience for me. It was a fairly young guy obviously in 74. I then went it at, in Fairbanks. I decided I wanted to go over the University of Alaska Fairbanks, which is the major campus in the University of Alaska system. And I sat and I was going to go over to the geophysics department, the environmental science department and just introduced myself as a, this young professor from the University of Puget Sound and, and to develop a relationship. And so I went to this student union to get information as to where I should go. And there was a cafeteria there and it was time for lunch. So I, I put my tray through the system, came out to sit in the student section and there was this older guy there sitting all by himself. So I thought, well I'll, I'll go over and sit. Maybe he's a faculty member, I'll go over and sit next to him. So I sat and I said would you mind if I shared the space? Oh no, I'm happy. And so we, we got in this conversation. He was Extraordinarily brilliant guy and extraordinarily interesting. And I could see immediately that I was having an experience this, this was really a deep experience that I was privileged to be sharing with him. And, and he went on and, and the, the discussion really ended up talking about systems and about the complexity that the more we know, the more we recognize how systems complexity leads to its stability. And then that led me back into the two things that I learned in ecology from the odums in my undergraduate graduate training, which were the two principles ecology that I probably taught a million times since. And that is the more diversity a system, the more stable it is. And secondly, the food of one is the waste of another. Those are my two ecological take takeaways. The food of one is the waste of another. That's the ecological concept of cycle throughput, right where you get recycling and you can, if you can maintain that system, it is a regenerative system. Those are the two principles. Diversity means stability. Food of one is waste of another. Those are two kind of mandates. And as we were talking at this, this lunch, he was talking about all sorts of ways that this plays out, from astrophysics to the health of individuals to health of communities and so forth. Well, it turned out out that he was there for, because he asked me why I was there and I told him I'd been up on the ice and I had this experience, these scientists and so forth. And he said, oh, I'm here, I actually, I'm lecturing this afternoon, I'm here on a visitation. I said, oh, that's, that's exciting. Well, it turned out to be Buckminster Fuller that I was having lunch with. Can you believe it? Which, which led me then to invite him later to speak at the University of Pizza Sound, which he, he did a year later, came and was a guest lecturer for us. But that conversation was so powerful because he was speaking as part of this conversation about Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution and how the Green revolution met so much of the objectives of what agriculture was trying to do by increasing yields and increasing productivity per acre and making non productive areas of agriculture into productive areas. And of course it was built around principles of genetic hybrids, fertilizer, certain accessory agricultural chemicals that would make the system able to produce higher yields. And if yields become your central objective, then that system was considered to be very, very successful. But they also then talked in this conversation. But there's another theme, and that's the theme of William Vaughn lot, that's kind of stability of the system by maintaining its diversity, because when you get to monoculture and you have all this fertilizer and pesticides and specific hybrids, you have a system that's very simple, but it's very unstable. So it needs a huge amount of subsidy to maintain its stability versus a natural system going back to the rainforest. And of course, it took me back to my study with the. On the Brazilian rainforest and. And he then went on to say, it's those stable systems that have long lives and long longevity and can survive through the unexpected, which are things that happen on this globe. So that then took me forward to when Charles Mann's book Wizard and Prophet was published just four years ago, which was a juxtaposition of Norman Berlog versus William Vought, with Norman Verloc being the wizard and Vought being the prophet, that there is a hybridization of those concepts as to how we are as stewards of the planet, being the one organism that seems to, other than maybe microbes, to affect the planet in a global way, that those balance points become extraordinarily important. And then it took me back, back to the concept of learning how complicated issues like how these thousands of different phytochemicals that plants produce are really related to the environment in which they're produced in the plant that's growing, as Mary was saying. So different environments with the same genes of that plant can produce different levels of these biological response modifying substances. And what I recognize is in all of my training in nutrition and, and the biochemistry and nutritional biochemistry, those plant bioactives were really marginalized in terms of their discussion. They didn't even occupy many pages of textbooks of nutrition. You know, they were just kind of like, well, here are things like flavonoids and you know, they're interesting plant secondary metabolites. They produce some things that might be off, producing off taste and making them bitter or something, but they don't really have a principal role in nutrition as it relates to its biological activity. Well, I went back and put all this in my mind together, all this learning I'd had from these different exposures to these thought leaders. And I came to think, well, hold on, that seems to be totally wrong. That it's. It's like saying because we don't understand it, it's unimportant. Rather than saying, because we don't understand it, maybe it's really important and maybe we need to understand it better. And then that I will close this out led me ultimately, when I read Siddhartha Mukherjee's most recent book, Song of the Cell, which is all around cellular biology and how that influences medicine. The parallel to me with agriculture and the complexity of plant biology started to be kind of like shining through so strongly because he went on to say that early in medicine we were just worried about kind of the whole organism. Things like if you had a bump or a lesion or something, or you fell over holding your chest, that that would lead to immediate kind of response. But later we started to recognize more and more where the origin of these pathologies came from. From then we go to organs and then from organs to tissues, and then from. From tissues to cells, and then from cells to subcellular derangements. And the more we understand the complexity, the more we understand origin. The more we understand origin, the more likely that we can treat the cause rather than the effect. And that plays together with agriculture as well as human health and stability of the planet. There is a unifying feature here of all of these things that come together when you start thinking at that systems level. So that's why this is so important to me as we get back into soil health, because it is so analogous to human health or health of the planet. They're all interrelated to this not being put off by complexity, but recognizing that. And I think Emily said it very well. There's so much yet to learn. But even touching the concept opens us up to a whole number sense of reality about if we want to become good stewards of either our body or our culture or our planet, we've got to be thinking in this way. And understanding the complexity just doesn't mean. Well, it's too confusing. It's really important as a fundamental principle, even if we don't know all the piece parts to understand the concept. Phenomenal.

Well, thank you, Jeff, for tying all of that together. So in the last couple of moments here, what I'd love to do is just go around and have everybody mention if there's anything that gets you excited about the future of these topics, whether it's phytochemicals or soil health or plant health or human wellness. Everyone on this call has been involved in some way, shape or form with our initiatives at Big Bold Health, doing research on Himalayan tartery, buckwheat and various other aspects of trying to find ways to pull from nature's wisdom and bring it up to human wellness. So there's a lot to cover here. We obviously weren't able to get to everything. And if people would like to learn more, they can go to bigbold health.com but again, let's just do Thoughts on what comes next and any resources that each of you might have for people who are interested in these topics, if you have them, it's not obligatory. So, Dr. Reese, we will start with you future of these topics and any resources you'd like to share.

Yeah, well, I'm, I'm getting excited just on my own after hearing Jeff talk, talk about all that. I, I think that certainly I feel very similarly in that, you know, the phytochemicals has always been an afterthought in many ways. And in fact, my first exposure to them was in grad school, but in the entomology department because the entomologists knew that when the insects interacted with plants that caused these changes in the plants and that the other plant scientists, you know, they were still focused on these other things that had historically always been so important. And so, yeah, I think, you know, I think for me that's, that's exciting. I think that's one of the reasons I really love this, my work with, with Big bold health and thinking about which is in such. Its infancy, that connection of the soil with those phytonutrients. And we, we haven't had a lot of initiative or impetus to be looking at that connection just in the same way that we are all only just starting to think about the implications of phytonutrients and in human health. And so I think that's really exciting to me to think about where that goes from here.

Wonderful. Thank you so much, Emily. Mary, over to you future and any resources you'd like to share.

Yes, I think we have listed the many ways in our current industrial food and agriculture system is a huge problem to both human health and planetary health. I also see it as a tremendous solution. The choices that we make, the ways that we advocate, the opportunity that we have to change policy, systemic issues that we're seeing is an opportunity for everyone, whether you are a health practitioner or a consumer or a person who eats every single day. So there is a great opportunity to diversify diet, to support local farmers, to support organizations that are working in sustainable agriculture and sustainable food production. And I would say one, I have so many resources, so I don't have time to mention them all. But I really love this paper that came out that's about soil and one health and really connects the dots between soil health and microbial health and microbiome health and gut health and in turn human health. So I love that paper. I think it's out of Nature magazine and I can, I can share the link to that as well.

Perfect. If you could share that, that would be amazing. Thank you so much, Mary Aarthi, we'll go to you. So where do you see the future of these topics going and any resources you're excited to share?

I mean, the future for me, I mean, one of the reasons I think I stepping out of the exam room and into the community is because of the dire situation we are in planetarily as well as with human disease. And, you know, attendant to human disease is human suffering. Attendant to that is loss of productivity, loss of creativity, loss of, you know, educational ability for our children. The, the connection between chronic disease and our agricultural methods and the health of the soil is one that just has these implications related to what is happening with our climate. You know, it's. It's a big. We didn't get into it very much here, but it's a huge contribution to climate change and the warming of the planet, the loss of the soils, the. The inability of the soil to sequester carbon as it's supposed to. And it's, you know, so, so the, the dire need is really something that I want to focus on communicating to patients in the community as well as to other practitioners in health care. And I join Mary Purdy and others in this movement to really, really educate. The soil is, you know, we have a natural relationship with the soil, we play in the soil, we feed from the soil. And to really develop the appreciation for the health of the soil as fundamental to these things that we're all mentioning, I think is just paramount to our individual survival, our collective survival, and the survival of the species and flora and fauna of the planet. I'd say for resources, for those that are newer to this topic, I would encourage. There's a film on. Available on YouTube called the Living Soil, which really speaks to the history of the evolution of conventional farming and what it's done to our soil. And, and the other film that's available on Netflix is called Kiss the Ground. The other book I would really encourage looking at is the Farm Bill A Citizen's Guide by Dan Imhoff and Christina Badoreco. And this is a book that really describes what is controlling our food system. And this is an opportune year for us to be having this conversation because later this year the Farm Bill is up for renewal. It's actually coming up in some months. And so the more we can understand how the Farm Bill controls how food is subsidized, what type of farming gets subsidized, what type of farming doesn't, all of that explains why children have the nutrient poor foods in their schools and why the SNAP and WIC programs offer often nutrient poor foods to our most needy populations. Why organic foods are more expensive than conventionally grown foods. All of that can is. Is well explained in the book the Farm Bill. And there's another book that details the soil called what your food ate. Right. Who knew that our vegetables need those nutrients like Emily and Mary described? Like, like who knew that? I just used to think that a carrot just had the vitamin A and the retinoids that we get, but it's the soil that brings it in. And so really, anyway, I'll stop there too. I can go on and on. Yeah, that's great.

No, you shared a lot of wonderful resources. We'll be sure to keep those and make those available. Dr. Bland, bring us home. Where's the future and any resources you'd like to share with the watchers.

Well, what a. This has been like drinking from a fire hose. Hasn't it been this information, this is the resource that's illustrated by these groups of remarkable people is just. You won't get it anywhere else on the street Corps. This has been amazing for me. How do you take this from the abstract conversation into the application? And I want to just give a shout out to Emily because she took on a very big project for us to do field trials up in our tartery buckwheat crops up in New York, upstate New York to see what would happen if we experimented with some inoculants that would contain either fungi or bacteria or combination thereof and what implication that might have on phytochemicals that are in the final plant, the beneficial immune active phytochemicals. And although the trial was probably out of the scale or scope that could completely answer that. There was certainly a drift in the data that came out of the analysis of the phytochemical profile suggesting that the inoculation with specific types of friendly soil conditioners led to improvement in the phytochemicals. And if you go to the scientific literature and actually look at at saying was this so novel? This is the first N of one discovery, the answer is no. There are many other studies that have really looked at the impact of different soil conditioners on the production of friendly bacteria and mycorrhizal members of the community that speak then to the genes of the plant seeds as they're germinating and ultimately influence in the final production in the plant of its fruit or its seed and its composition. So this is a growing field and now we start to see that there's some very interesting pathways and processes by which this occurs. The shikimic acid or the jasmonic acid pathways, these are chemical substances that are communicators between soil bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi that communicate with seeds, that ultimately communicate with the plant as it germinates. So we start to understand these, these complex trafficking pattern that are only found in complex biospheres. They're not. When you over medicate the land, which is what happens when you give a lot of antibiotics. When I say antibiotics, I really mean pesticides and herbicides to soil, you change the architecture of the mycorrhizae, which then changes its complexity. It makes that system more, more unstable, which is what we know. But it also changes the traffic pattern of these communicating substances that influence then ultimately the these complex micronutrient levels, these phytochemicals in the final plant. So I think we're on the front edge with our Himalayan tartary buckwheat agriculture to kind of have one series of studies where we can actually start looking at this plant because it has a 4000 year history as a food. It has a very unique profile of very high levels of these phytochemicals and therefore the signal that we have to play with is high as it relates to its immune strengthening nutrient profile. So I want to just thank Emily for overseeing this, this field work with our farmers and also to Arthy and Mary for their extraordinary leadership and stewardship in keeping us focused on the right way of translating this ultimately into human health at a time where our immune systems are obviously compromised. We can see that from the results of SARS CoV2 and how we didn't do too well as a country. So all of this fits together in a systems approach that I'm extraordinarily privileged to be part of. And I can't tell you how much I am just enjoying learning from my colleagues.

Wonderful. Well, I think we've covered so much today and there's still so much more to discuss. As Aarti mentioned, we haven't really integrated the climate piece of the this. We haven't necessarily gone through every single pathway, we haven't necessarily isolated each phytochemical and talked about how an individual plant coordinates with the fungi and bacteria in their local rhizosphere. But there's lots more to talk about. So if you've enjoyed this video, please let us know. We'll make this obviously available. And it's been an absolute honor to speak with each person on the panel. So, Jeff, Emily, Mary and Arthy, thank you so much for joining, and we'll talk to you all again very soon.

Thank you.