Ask AI Mark, Eric Toensmeier, and Jonathan Foley discuss how regenerative agriculture and functional medicine both work by restoring balance to broken systems. They argue that farming practices that rebuild soil health create healthier food, which creates healthier people, and that the same principles apply across healthcare, agriculture, and ecosystems.
I always say, if you create health, disease goes away as a side effect. I don't treat disease, I create health. And I often say functional medicine is like being a regenerative farmer. Instead of putting chemicals on the human, like we put chemicals on the plants, we put food and whole nutrients and basic principles of ecosystem science. And it works the same. And I think farmers and doctors and healthcare, systems and agricultural systems need to start to work together to really solve these big issues. Because whether it's the healthcare and chronic disease epidemic we have, the economic consequences of it, the environmental and climate consequences, the food insecurity issues we have, all of it, it's really one problem. And I think that we really haven't come to understand that as a society. And your work is so central to that. And I think, you know, if we, maybe you could figure out a new way to bring farmers and healthcare systems and doctors together to solve this. It would be pretty awesome.
I totally concur with that.
And.
Here'S one of the huge benefits that these farmers are finding. We have conventional scientific wisdom, which is the vast majority of our agricultural research wisdom that we have today. And then we have what I call regenerative agriculture wisdom. And they are actually two very different things. And even as a scientist, I have discovered that and had to come to grips with that within my own way of thinking and doing things. But what we have found is, first of all, when you utilize regenerative practices and you're farming far more in synchrony with nature, you're using the six principles to repair, to rebuild, to revitalize and restore fully functioning ecosystems. then what happens is that we create this incredible resilience. And that's one of the major things that farmers and ranchers are lacking today. They're lacking resilience. Whenever they hit a disease challenge, a pest challenge, or any other type of weather challenge, it really shines a light on the lack of resilience. Their farms fall apart. And so our regenerative farmers have far greater resilience when they're hit with any of these challenges. they're much more able to withstand those challenges.
