How To Activate Nature’s Healing Potential | Zach Bush & Mark Hyman

It's interesting that the farmer and the physician have been trained by the same chemical companies. And so we have been indoctrinated into the same pharmaceutical codependents and worldview, whether we be farmer or physician.

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's Farmacy, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And if you ever wondered about why the soil and our own microbiome are both important and connected. And how we need to rethink healthcare and agriculture. Our guest today, Zach Bush, is going to provide a lot of insight about that. And it's worth listening to. Zach is a physician. He's a specialist in many things and even things that he's not specialized in, including internal medicine, endocrinology, and hospice care. He caught my attention because there are very few of us doctors out there who understand the intersection between the soil and the soil health and the microbiome of the soil, the human microbiome and our own health and agriculture and all these intersecting pieces that are really going to determine the future of our species and the future of the planet. So it is probably the central thing that's most important. It seems kind of geeky, but actually is something we're not hearing that much about. And so when I started paying attention to what Zach was doing, I was like, I got to talk to this guy because he somehow connected the dots and I'm connected the dots. And so we've got to connect our dots together. He's a educator and a thought leader. leader on the microbiome as it connects to health, disease, and food systems. He's found this Seraphic Group and the nonprofit Farmer's Footprint to help develop root cause solutions for both human and ecological health. He educates people all over the place. I see him bringing his wisdom everywhere. He's really helping us understand the role of soil and water ecosystems and how that connects to our genetics, our immune system, our gut and brain health. He has really shifted away from chemical medicine and chemical agriculture and pharmacy to understanding a new path for farmers, consumers, and big industries to work together to create a healthier future for us people on the planet and the planet. So welcome, Zach.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it, Mark, to be here with you is a real honor.

So you've really told your story many times and I wanna really dive into the moment when you really began to understand the intersection of the microbiome, the soil, human health, ecological health, planetary health. Because most doctors don't think like that. And you had training in traditional specialties, critical care, hospice, and internal medicine. And you really had a traditional training, but you kind of moved into this new framework. And I'm just curious, what was the epiphany moment for you when you were like, wait a minute, I'm missing something here?

So many of them, you know, fortunately life is not linear and fortunately we cannot write our own lives because it would be very boring in the end, I think. So the nonlinear pathway that I followed, you know, and that kind of beginning of the aha moments came around my chemotherapy development. I was doing research and development for novel chemotherapies at the University of Virginia. And my focus was on mechanisms of apoptosis, which is programmed cell suicide within cancer cells so that we could perhaps develop technologies and medications that would allow us to inspire cancer cells to kill themselves rather than trying to poison them or rather than trying to cut them out or rely on an immune system to go find each one of those last cells. The idea that we could turn on this cell suicide process was exciting new chapter. This was kind of 2005-2010 era. My research was really focused on vitamin A in the end. I was working with vitamin A compounds that were capable of turning on this apoptosis in tumor cells. And it was my aha moment a couple of years into that, that vitamin A is rich in things like carrots. Wow, wait, what if?

It didn't just come in a lab in a pill, right?

That's right. I really thought that in the first couple of years, I was calling them retinoids, and we had all these pharmaceuticalized names that we were using for the compounds, but then the end, they were extracted from vitamin A. And so that was my beginning aha moment. But one of the poignant ones came through. a really challenging evening where I was trying to give one of my patients who had been enrolled in my early clinical trial for this kind of first time retinoid, and every fiber in her body seemed to be telling her not to put this pill in her mouth. And I knew it was safe. I told her it was safe, took her through all the science of why I was safe, why I was going to hurt her. And then that not being effective, I then took her into why her cancer was likely to kill her if we didn't do anything about it, and blah, blah, blah. There's no existing therapies that would work, and blah, blah, blah. used a fear paradigm, and finally after 45 minutes she swallowed that thing. And in the end, you know, I succeeded as a clinical trialist that day, but I failed as a physician that day because I really broke this woman's intuitive will and her intuitive knowingness about what she needed or what would be her best path. And that was a really destructive moment for my paradigm because, you know, in the couple of days that I recovered from that emotional journey, realized that there had never been a case of cancer in the history of mankind that had been caused by a lack of chemotherapy. And so in that moment, suddenly realized that no matter how good I got at doing my trade, no matter how inventive I got my chemotherapy, I was always going to be going down a wrong pathway or a very ineffective pathway that was getting at a symptom rather than a cause of something deeper. And so that was the beginning of my big 180 after 17 years of academic training in medicine and practiced in teaching and chief residency and faculty and all, you know, the indoctrination that happens at all those levels is quite profound. So it's taken me, you know, 12 years since that time to kind of re-engineer all of my learning into a different world view or philosophy around the fact that nature knows how to do this thing that we call health, and we have an opportunity to participate in that as Physicians.

That's powerful. So that was a big Epiphany of really trying to understand that you really couldn't work against nature, that you had to work with nature and this patient in it. And she knew herself intuitively, but given your training and all that we're taught, we kind of can be bullies as doctors sometimes. We know the right way, we're going to tell you what to do and we're going to give you this medicine and it's going to work. But the truth is, most of health doesn't really occur by deficiency of a medication. It occurs because we actually are not providing the right supports for our ecosystem of our health. And I think you're an ecosystem doctor. I become an ecosystem doctor. And I think that's a very rare breed. I think you seem to take that insight that you had and you brought it into connecting somehow to the microbiome and nutrition. And then that led you to the soil. So take us on that journey and how you connected all those dots.

Yeah, I left academia after I spent a year trying to start my clinic in the academic center of the University of Virginia and there were so many bureaucratic barriers and the biggest barrier to starting a nutrition center for reversing chronic disease happened to be the dietitians. The dietitians just could not handle the idea of a plant-based clinic being introduced because they had were so steeped in an understanding in science around the food pyramid and the importance for animal proteins and all of this in the diet. It was really sad to see an inability to have conversation with our dietitians ultimately. One poignant moment, I had the head dietitian who led the whole diabetes education platform, really brilliant. I'd been in academia for 20 years. She was literally crawling over the table screaming at me in my face about this desire to start this clinic. That was the moment where I was just like, I don't think I could do this. And so, went through a short period where I thought maybe I just couldn't do it at all. And then, you know, this was now 2009 and suddenly the bottom fell out of academia. Universities were losing funding rapidly as the recession moved through in this time. And so it became obvious that there was an opportunity to really transition my career out of academia and started a nutrition center in rural Virginia in a food desert in a town of 550 people with the idea that if I could find a nutritional curriculum of education I would be able to really change the disease epidemic, the chronic disease epidemic of the country.

And Virginia is close to ground zero, right?

Central Virginia is the obesity and diabetes rampant. You can definitely meet 40-year-olds with end-stage carpal tunnel disease from diabetes and the metabolic collapse of our food system and everything else. Definitely was in-ground zero and for the first time I was a real physician. I was suddenly thrown 24/7, a lone doctor out in a rural community and I was suddenly doing everything. I was suturing people up, which I hadn't done in years. I was taking care of major depression and psychologic disorders and schizophrenia, stuff that you would never have to see as an endocrinologist in the hospital system was suddenly coming through my door. And so I think I learned how.

To be a physician those first few years in that rural community. I actually spent four years in Idaho in a similar town, an old logging town, four years just really being the family doctor and there were no other doctors and you were it. There was a few other family doctors, but there was a drunk surgeon in us and we had to deal with everything and it really is humbling and you learn a lot about medicine that way.

You do and I think my patients ended up becoming my best faculty. They taught me so much in those years as I started to have the time where my initial visits were two and a half hours long because I didn't have any patients. I was just like, Come on, sit out, let's chat. So, for the first time, I listened to patients for hours at a time and I just learned so much from that journey. I started to really understand the pathophysiology of disease much better because I could start to really ask, well, what was the very first time you felt unwell and now take me to this time where now you have metastatic breast cancer and you see a 20-year journey unfolding and I think I really learned the pathophysiology much more effectively than these snapshots of like lots of scans and tests and everything else. Oh, you have stage four breast cancer, blah, blah, blah. Let me show you what you need. Instead, if you listen long enough, the patient will 95% of the time tell you not only what kind of disease they have, they'll tell you where it came from and how they could change that trajectory by going upstream to some of those catastrophic injuries that began the process. And oftentimes they're not even nutritional, they're emotional. traumas or heartbreaks or abandonment or these catastrophic events that lead to a lack of self-care, that lead to economic collapse or whatever it is that then leads to this cascade of lack of self-care, lack of access to good information and the rest.

Yeah, it's absolutely true. Functional medicine really focused on this timeline. You go back to even pre-birth and what their intrauterine environment was like and what their family history is and you take them all the way through their childhood and you literally can map out a person's story. It's not random how they got to where they are. You can usually trace back to some or multiple various factors or insults or traumas or exposures that actually led them to have what they're having right now. And that's really an important piece that we miss in medicine. We're just so focused on the sort of singular reductionist view of disease. And somehow you were able to shift that and understand this sort of ecosystem model. Tell me about the moment you sort of began to connect to the nutrition piece and then the microbiome, because you really have gone deep into these areas in far more than most physicians.

Yeah, that's actually tied into my cancer research quite a bit. So my research was focused on mitochondria, which are elements within the microbiome. These are archaea. Archaea are the precursor to modern bacteria. So somewhere around four billion years ago, three and a half billion years ago on planet Earth, we see the emergence of the archaea. And then within half a billion years afterwards, we start to see more modern versions of the bacteria that thrive and create most of the biodiversity. But one of those archaea bacteria were absorbed into a more complex methane producing bacteria some billions of years ago, it seems in the fossil record, to create the first mitochondria. And at the moment that we had a functional mitochondria, it changed the way that energy was produced in the cell. And so my research in chemotherapy was around maximizing the signaling system out of mitochondria. So how do these ancient bacteria that live and thrive within our human cells create all of the energy for ourselves and create a network of communication within ourselves, how do they communicate back to something as complex as our genome or our pathways of enzymatic function? So that was my area of research and I didn't think of them as microbiome. I thought of them very much and I think I was really trained to believe that they were part of the human cell. And they were just like this little organelle inside the human cell.

Nobody told me they were microbiome. Nobody told me they were- well, they look like bacteria. If you look at them under a.

Microscope, they look like little bacteria.

And they're actually, they have different DNA actually than your home.

They have their own genome, which isn't taught to us either. We're not taught, maybe I hope that med school students today are, but certainly in my generation of physicians, we were not taught at all the fact that mitochondria have their own genome and that they are archaea makes them very unique. The new stuff around genomics is fascinating around us, but I don't want to go down that rabbit hole, I guess. This was the entry point to when I started a nutrition center and started seeing people not responding to health food regimens that had been proven out for 40 years from the likes of Colin Campbell and Esselstyn at the Cleveland Clinic. I was applying masters level of information that these guys had produced over the years to my patients and seeing them fail. I was seeing them actually get worse, not better, on things like kale. I was trying to figure out why kale could cause an inflammatory reaction. It took me a while to believe that the patient was actually eating the kale. I thought, well, maybe they ran out and ate a Twinkie at the same time. I really blamed the patient for a long time before I developed enough relationship to find out that I really trusted them and actually came to realize they were eating healthier than I was. In that journey, we had to start asking really tough questions about what does kale look like today to find out that it's devoid of alkaloids, the medicine within the food. to find out that it's actually got an abnormal ratio of soluble to insoluble fibers compared to kale 20 years ago, to find out that it's laced with a chemical called glyphosate or Roundup was a big aha moment for me. And so that was the journey into realizing that we were going to have to look deeper than just a nutrition protocol and start asking tough questions about.

The food, which immediately took us into soil. Yeah, wait a minute. That's powerful. I just got to unpack that. So you're basically saying that you realize that your patients were eating what you thought was good food, they weren't responding at it. And so you traced back to what the quality of the food was and what it was missing compared to decades ago when we had better soil and that it had lower levels of fiber and lower levels of nutrients. It had lower levels of other compounds. It even had higher levels of compounds like glyphosate, which I really were going to get into with you about it. So, so you, you just sort of connected the dots. And that is, that is a moment when I guess you realize that you can't just go to the grocery store, you have to go to the farm.

That's right. That's right.

Yeah.

And at that moment, this was like 2012, you know, we were studying those soil. We started studying soil, and we found a family of molecules that are vast and variety. Each species of bacteria and fungi are capable of making 10 to 15 variants of these carbon molecules. And they happen to look a lot like the chemotherapy I used to develop that was disrupting and changing mitochondrial metabolism. and so I suddenly realized that the soil could potentially hold highly intelligent medicinal qualities to it, which that ultimately really proved that not only do we have issues with our farming industry in regards to its productive quality, we had perhaps a deficiency at the soil level of medicines that had never been discovered before. And I'd always had this vision, and I was dealing with plant medicine. I was doing vitamin A extractions and all of that. fast forward in my clinic and I'm trying to use herbal extracts and I was investigating homeopathy, I was investigating herbal medicine and all this stuff. So, I was starting to really welcome in all this stuff only to find out that 4,000 years of looking at the plants for medicine might have missed a deeper story that the microbiome of the soils were capable of producing even a higher level of intelligence within cellular systems of communication, nutrient delivery, and the like. So, that was the closing point of where I really pivoted at that point. and I started a biotech lab at that moment to start studying soil and the possibility of a whole medicinal capacity to soil. And so that's what we do now. We produce out of Virginia soil compounds that carry these carbon molecules.

Okay, this is really a radical idea. I just want to pause and emphasize this because we know about the rainforest and we hear about the medicinal plants and all the medicines that come out of the rainforest. And nobody thinks of dirt or soil being a a reservoir of compounds that have utility in human health. And yet we know there are a lot of things in soil that have produced medicines. A lot of medicines do come from the soil. And what we're finding is that we're driving the extinction of our soil. So we don't think about, oh, the destruction of the rainforest, the destruction of the soil. We're not really talking about that. There are a few people like us, but it's really not out there in people's consciousness that soil is actually so critical for human life on the planet, not just to produce food, but as a reservoir of all these compounds. So take us down that road and tell us what kinds of things specifically you find in the soil that people don't know about that are so beneficial and helpful that we've discovered.

Yeah, we could spend hours on that in a lot of different directions, but to focus it in on these carbon molecules for a moment, because I think it's profound new concept medicine in general. Not only is it a novel source coming from soil, but it totally changed my whole perspective on what we should be doing as physicians or a pharmaceutical industry, which is instead of trying to micromanage a single pathway. So something like NRF2 is commonly talked about. So NRF2 is a pathway that regulates a bunch of our antioxidant relationship to the world around us, and inflammation cascades can be really disrupted when NRF2 is affected and things like this. So we align with that as a pharmaceutical nutraceutical industry and say, okay, we want to find things that upregulate or downregulate NRF2. We try to find man-made chemicals that we can patent and change that pathway. From the nutraceutical world and dietary supplement world, we say, okay, we want to find a bunch of plant things or natural compounds that can affect NRF2. In this way, I think that while we're moving in the right direction, obviously, with functional medicine and integrative medicine, we have a tendency to kick the allopathic medicine mindset off the stool and sit right back up on the same stool and simply offer a different toolbox to do the same reductive kind of effort towards changing biology or micromanaging the Nrf2 pathway with this beet extract instead of with that pharmaceutical drug. But in the end, we're failing to realize that the Nrf2 pathway is perturbed for a reason upstream. And so we tend to be very reductionist in our mindsets and we tend to focus on symptoms as the problem rather than and upstream phenomenon.

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And so these carbon molecules, when I saw them, were very unique because I had studied extensively redox chemistry in mitochondria, which are oxygen-based compounds that allow for the release and exchange of hydrogen and therefore electrons. And so redox chemistry intracellularly is mainly produced by the mitochondria, and they allow for trafficking of information. So it literally works as a liquid circuit board inside your cell system. to coordinate cellular behavior at complex levels. And that redox chemistry is a wireless communication network between the systems, between cells even. They have to go through gap junctions because they can't go into the extracellular space because the extracellular space is too variable in its osmolarity, its pH, all of these different things that can destroy that domino effect of oxygen-based redox chemistry. what I found.

Hold on, hold on, hold on. Before you go to the next thing, I just want to unpack that for people because it was a mouthful. So what you're basically saying is there is inside your cells a balance between antioxidants and things that are free radicals or oxidants. And that balance is critical to health. And when it's out of balance, it changes all the chemical signaling in your body that can lead towards disease. Did I get that right?

Spot on. Yeah. So redox is a, is a reduction of words of reduction and oxidation, so. oxidation is the pulling away of an electron from the environment and reduction is an addition of electron. And so by moving electrons between reductants and oxidants, you can get a stream of electricity. And so to create a wireless network of communication at the cellular level, you want to pass electrons. And the oxygen molecules that are produced by the mitochondria, when they produce a single molecule of ATP, which is kind of the fuel that we're purportedly running on, the ATP production in its byproducts is producing a bunch of 15 different variants of these oxygen compounds. They're things like ozone, hydroperoxide, O2H, which is kind of the opposite of H2O and all of this. It's a very unique oxygen-containing molecules. The issue or the limitations of intracellular mitochondrial-based redox chemistry is that every one of those oxygen-based molecules only lasts for about a millionth of a second. and so they are down in the quantum physics realm of communication. If you try to take that quantum environment outside of the cell into like a soil system or into your gut lining, you lose the capacity of that domino effect or electron potential because you can't maintain a consistent current. So what we found in soil was these large carbon molecules with the right side of the molecule looking a lot like the redox chemistry that I used for my chemotherapy. So the idea that this big carbon backbone would be produced by bacteria and fungi to stabilize redox chemistry in extracellular environments was super exciting. It really, it was this massive goosebump moment when my colleague and I were going through this white paper on dirt. I didn't know anybody knew anything about dirt, let alone a 90-page white paper on soil science. I was blown away paging through this thing. This molecule goosebump moment of not only is there medicine in the soil, it could be so much more stable and deliverable as a medicinal kind of effect than our oxygen compounds and those that would affect it. The exciting thing about redox chemistry again is it resets our concept of a medicinal. Instead of trying to affect a single pathway, in fact, instead of trying to do anything to a human body, for example, all you're trying to do is reconnect the communication system so that the cells can communicate. And when cells have uninterrupted information, they become healing machines. They know how to mobilize stem cells if they're too damaged to repair. They know how to repair themselves at a faster rate. They know which proteins are missing. So that was the excitement. And as we started putting this into cancer cells and neurons and proximal renal tubules in our lab, we were immediately seeing things we had never seen before. And this was a cumulative experience of over 120 years between scientists that were involved in everything else of basic science, looking under microscopes, John Gilder, PhD, UVA, master of microscopy in cell biology. he was seeing things that had never happened before under the microscope. And it was because for the very first time, we were not treating human cells and health and disease as if it was an isolated event. We were bringing in a biologic compound of communication network made by bacteria and fungi and introducing it to a petri dish. For the first time, we were watching biology happen in the context of an ecosystem. And the last 10 years, you know, journey has just been mind-blowing. to find out how powerful we are as healing machines when endowed with the communication network that's sub-chronic.

So how are you using the soil science that you learned and these microbes in the soil that actually regulate these pathways? How is that linked up to human health directly? Yeah, make it a little practical. How do we actually see this in real life?

So the first thing that we did was study gut lining because we had come, John Gildea had done a lot of work around deep reading and understanding of glyphosate, which is the Roundup active compound herbicide, most ubiquitous chemical that we spray in the world, over four billion pounds a year now into our soil systems, water system around the world. This molecule was ever present in his mind, and one of the main things that this molecule was becoming recognized to be capable of was destroying barriers. It could break down the gut barrier, break down the blood-brain barrier. kidney tubules, and this would lead to a leaky sieve event and the chronic inflammation in the population. And so, of course, the debut in 1976 and then the spraying directly of wheat in 1992 and then the GMO crop of Roundup Ready genetic modification in 1996, you can see that the uptick in chronic disease, autoimmune disease, inflammatory conditions of neurologic, degenerative conditions, all of these upticking with every introduction. And the ground zero seemed to be in this protein destruction of the tight junctions.

These are the Velcro-like proteins.

As soon as we put this one-.

That'S what people call leaky gut, right?

Leaky gut, leaky brain, leaky kidneys. And the symptoms tend to be bloating, poor digestion, poor energy level, fatigue after meals, cravings, poor sex drive, poor sleep quality, brain fog, short-term memory loss, and then inflammatory conditions of vascular disease, diabetes, metabolic graphs, OPC. All of that is set up by the breakdown of the single protein, which is so interesting that ground zero is boiled down simply. The Velcro that holds all of those cells together is called tight junctions. And as soon as we put this communication network back in, we saw something extraordinary happening, which was cells knew how to lace themselves back together. So we could destroy a gut membrane, small intestine or colon immediately. Within six minutes of round up, you've got massive leak going on. But if you gave it back a wireless communication network made by the microbiome, those cells would lace themselves right back up into a cohesive, coherent, highly protective barrier. We've subsequently shown this on the blood-brain barrier. We've shown that the relationship between the gut and the brain injury is very interlaced. If you give Roundup and gluten, for example, to the brain barrier directly, it doesn't do much. But if you first give gluten and round up to the gut lining, then the blood barrier blows apart. And so it's so interesting to see how this cascade of putting this chemical Roundup into our food system set us up for this breakdown in these different barrier systems. And it's so beautiful that here is the chemical that we're destroying planet Earth soils with, and yet she planted as an antidote to this chemical, these compounds within her soil 60 million years ago. And that's how we extract these carbon molecules. We go to a fossil layer of soil, in the southwest United States, and we then bring that to our labs, we crush that into nanoparticles, and we go through a multi-stage process to liberate small carbon molecules and get hydrogen to bond to the oxygens again and get a redox effect. And when that system of communication from fossil soils goes back in to a modern human experience, it's unbelievable, you know, what can happen. And again, it's not because the compound's doing anything, it's because the human cell is capable of that. when it's grounded in the intelligence of soil, when it's grounded in the intelligence of nature. And so that's been the journey towards this extraordinary realization that if we don't fix the agricultural industry, we're going to fail. So now our biotech company, with all of its supplements, are channeling all of our profits back into root cost solutions, and one of those being our non-profit, which is an awareness and education effort to allow chemical farmers to realize that they're actually the most potent members of change for the transformation of human health. And this is poignant because they are facing the highest levels of chronic disease in the world. The last 90 miles of the Mississippi River that collects some 80% of the Roundup in our environment is cancer alleys. We see farmers with third time, fifth time cancers of different organ systems. Their children are affected by ADHD and autism and brain defects. And I've seen just the most horrific stories of tragic human health on these farms as we've been filming over the years in these environments. And so you can only imagine how devastating it is to... I give these talks out with PowerPoint presentations literally in farm fields. And so it'll go dark while I'm showing a park. And these farm families are just riveted sitting around on bales of hay listening to this story, realizing that their children's diseases that they're treating and their own cancer is coming from the very chemicals that they have to handle every single day.

Well, you just said so much, and I'm just literally blown away in awe because this is such a untold story that within the soil itself is the answer to the damage that we've done to the soil and ourself through the chemicals we've used in our agricultural system. So glyphosate roundup, like you said, it's four billion, I've heard six billion pounds. It's the most abundant agriculture It's been used in the world. It is used on 70% of crops. It's abundant in things that we wouldn't even think of. The top two sources of glyphosate in our diet are hummus, basically garbanzo beans and lentils, which you think of, oh, that's a healthy, that's a plant-based diet. But unless they're grown organically, it's not just the GMO soybeans. And it has vast effects on the soil, which I want you to get into, including chelating all the minerals so the plants get the minerals. it destroys the mycorrhizal fungi, which are the, this network of fungi in the soil that are necessary for the plants to extract the nutrients. It's just so complex. What you're saying is, is that when you looked at this ancient soil, you were able to extract compounds that then you can use to fix the damage that's done to humans from the glyphosate, which is just mind-blowing when you think about it. And it's my key. And, and, and I think when you're talking about leaky gut and the gut permeability and. tight junctions. I mean, this is really the foundation of functional medicine, which is looking at the gut and how the gut has led to so many chronic illnesses. So when you look at the microbiome, it's linked to everything from depression to cancer to heart disease to diabetes to obesity to Alzheimer's to autism to ADD to, you know, you name it, autoimmune diseases, allergic disorders, and, and, and a lot of it has to do with leaky gut. And, and it's not the only reason, but glyphosate clearly is, is a factor in driving this and, and it has so many broad reach implications for how we treat our cells. And what's so striking is that, and I've heard you talk about this, is that now there's this change that happened around glyphosate where Monsanto was bought by Bayer and now they're trying to shut down glyphosate. They're paying billions of dollars in settlements and they're putting in this new chemical Liberty something I think you talked about that I think is actually maybe worse. How do we then begin to shift the agricultural system to one that actually gets rid of these chemicals that actually helps to restore soil, that helps to solve some of these problems at the root, and actually deals with human health problems by fixing the soil?

Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, I think to begin with the mind-blowing part, the reason we're going to 60 million year old soil for for our source is because again, the more biodiversity you have in the bacteria and fungi in a soil system, the more diverse you have of these carbon molecules. And the importance of that is that in different pHs and different osmolarities and different, you know, changing environments throughout your own gut or throughout organ systems as they change, there's different carbon molecules that are going to be more available, more bioavailable and more biofunctional at those different environments. And so the more biodiversity you can get in that communication network, the more effective you're going to be at lacing all of this together. and the striking thing is just how little soil is left on the planet. We are now calculating that 97% of the world's soils are severely depleted. And, you know, that it's just jaw-dropping how much damage we've done in such a short period of time with chemical agriculture as we scale that globally. And so it's really, you know, a 50-year story of chemicals, but interestingly, it was overplowing that destroyed the soil infrastructure before the tilling.

Yeah, tilling.

The tilling is really damaging to the, you mentioned mycorrhizae, which are totally bizarre structure, but the mycelium is the root system of the fungal world. And then in this bizarre quantum relationship with root fibres, they inspire this totally new structure called the mycorrhizae to appear, and nobody understands what mycorrhizae is. Nobody knows how mycorrhizae knows how to be mycorrhizae. It doesn't exist as an entity if you have lots of mycelium around. It doesn't exist if you have lots of plants around with root fibres. You have to have the combination of the fungal world with the complex multicellular plant world before you can get mycorrhizae to form. And so it's some bizarre like exudate or hyperintelligence between these species systems that will create this new structure that interestingly is a biophotonic structure. And so what's really happening when we talk about plants or soil or humans or, you know, corn, is we're talking about a biophotonic phenomenon where you have solar radiation coming in with all of its energy potential hitting the surface of the Earth and its plant life or microbial life within the soils. And then there's an intelligent process in which that biophotonic energy is transmuted to ATP or in the plant, it's different little things like chlorophyll and all of the phosphorescent plasmids that create energy within the plant. Bio, you know, biotransmuting the biophotonic energy of the sun into soil energy. And the soil energy is picked up by this interesting mix of microbiome between bacteria and fungi that's then passed into this electrophotonic transfer mechanism of the mycorrhizae that will then go into the root system of the plant, take that back into the plant, it will then go into an animal consumer, a human or otherwise. And so that's this beautiful complex system. And then you take Roundup and it functions as an antimicrobial at every level. And so it's been patented as an antibiotic, it's been patented as an antifungal, antiparasite. And so it starts to come into this chemical, you know, this beautiful array of biophotonic transformations through all of these species interactions. and starts breaking the cycles. And so what we've achieved through a very short period of time is a soil that's devoid of the nutrient and energy density, the little biophotonic energy that it would get from the sun because it's lost its workforce. And that workforce can no longer translate that information into something like a plant. And so we grow through petroleum inputs, green plants that are devoid not only nitrogen fertilizers. Nitrogen fertilizers. Yeah, nitrogen is MPK. So it's nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. And so the NPK fertilizer was used to create green plants that grow fast and have high yield, but they're lacking that intelligence of that whole system that we just described. And so not only are our soils depleted, they've lost the mechanisms by passing energy on through from sun to plant to human. And so this is why I believe we look like we do as a society right now, where, you know, recent Medicaid screenings are showing 52% of our children with a chronic disorder or disease by the time they're 16. that's compared to 1.2% in the 1960s right before we debuted these chemicals.

Wait, wait, wait. You just said one in two kids.

Are having chronic disease? Chronic disorder or disease. So someone we don't call diseases, but we call asthma or eczema or immune sensitivity to their food or the air they breathe or whatnot.

So staggering. That's 20% of our children by the way.

Staggering. One in two kids. Yeah. And at first when you say that statistic, you're like, that can't be right. until you walk into an elementary school and take a look around the room and you can immediately see kids not only with eczema, you can see kids with full-blown psoriasis in elementary school now. And so the amount of gut disruption that you need to develop an autoimmune condition near psoriasis is devastating. And then you see this explosion of leukemias, lymphomas, and weird sarcomas in children that used to appear in 80-year-olds are showing up in children under the age of two now. And so, we're showing this decimation of biologic youth or regenerative capacity within human biology in this most recent generation. The scary thing is right now we're looking at generation number two of roundup babies. In our rodent studies that we just reviewed for the EPA, the third generation is where the devastation really gets out of control.

Yeah, I saw that.

We've never seen that generation.

It's epigenetic effects. or it's generation three. So, if the grandmother gets exposed, the mother may or may not get sick, but the grand little grand rat gets sick. Yeah. And, they get kidney disease and cancer and all sorts of hormonal disruptions and endocrine things, which is kind of scary and they've never been exposed. So, it's these transgenerational effects that actually have consequences and things that we can't even imagine on our children. And, I think that, you know, these dots are not getting connected. Why do you think there's so much you know, resistance to actually looking at the science around this because there seems to be ample science. I mean, the EPA has said it's safe. Trump said to the, the makers of Roundup, don't worry, we got your back during these lawsuits. I mean, I think, you know, how do we kind of break through and get people to really understand the, the impact of glyphosate as, as one of the most noxious compounds that's ever been invented? And by the way, it came from the same people that brought you Agent Orange, dioxin, PCBs and DDT. So they're in good company.

Yeah, they've been masters at toxins. They know their industry well. So they're masters of their trade. I think I've given up with the EPA. With this last cycle just in November, me and the team of nonprofit and scientists showed up and we just reviewed 96 scientific studies done in universities and private labs around the world over the last few years showing that extreme toxicity of Roundup. And at the end of that, the director of the EPA panel that we were presenting to stood up and said, everything that you've just presented is irrelevant to us. We're regulators, not scientists. You haven't filled out any forms to suggest how this is relevant to us. And furthermore, we were really hammering on this generational toxicity as the most scary piece of data. out there and she said, and by the way, there was a piece of legislation passed two and a half years ago that makes it illegal for the EPA to consider generational toxicity data. So your argument is irrelevant to us. And so that was the end of that hour and a half of effort of science demonstration. So at that moment I was like, okay, change cannot come through these regulatory environments. It's never going to be fast enough and there's too much special interest mounted against change in this industry that drives billions and billions and billions of dollars. It really pales in comparison to Monsanto sold for $66 billion, and that was pennies on the dollar because they had all this pent up court system taxation that Bayer bought with it. And so Bayer just settled for $6 billion, which was only 10% of the purchase price of Monsanto. And now they own 85-90% of the seed industry for 70% of the land around us and everything else. So it's just an insane amount of ownership that this German company now has over the world. And they're the ones that, of course, put out Liberty Link, as you mentioned. And so Liberty Link is another GMO that was approved by European Union and U.S. and Canadian regulators just a year before they made the move to buy Monsanto. And so they got their own GMO approval. And now you can see the smart business decision, like, okay, we want to get this new thing on the market, but Monsanto has the whole corner on the market. The only thing we can do to really move Liberty Link in in a meaningful way is to buy Monsanto. And yeah, they've got a bad press. Everybody hates Monsanto now. And yeah, they've got all this, you know, 10,000 cases, and now it's over 30,000 cases in the court system that are, you know, trying to sue them for their cancer that they've developed from Roundup. What we'll do is we can buy that up. We can then, you know, sell the hell out of Roundup for the next few years while the court system slogs along. And then we could sweep in as the white hat and say, oh, we're taking glyphosate off the market. You're a stupid American company. hit all this data from you that they knew it was causing cancer and they're just evil people. We're good people. We're gonna pull that off the market. We've brought you Liberty Link. And Liberty Link, unfortunately, is already growing throughout the whole Midwest in the United States. It's already very prevalent GMO crop. And scarily, it's sprayed with a chemical that it's genetically modified to handle, which instead of disrupting the glycine amino acid pathway, that glyphosate does, it disrupts glyphosate and some of these other amino acids that are critical for human reproduction. And so the mix of, you know, having this residual of Roundup in our systems for another 50 years combined with this new toxin getting integrated, we can really start to map out the extinction of human kind over the next few decades.

And then glyphosate lasts for up to 20 years in the soil, right?

Yeah, they vary between, you know, six hours if you live into Monsanto and then out to 50 years. depending on which science you're looking at.

Yeah, I heard a scary fact that, you know, chelates minerals, so it literally binds to minerals and it sticks on them like glue. And so your whole wheat, which has more minerals because it's whole, has 40 times the glyphosate as white flour, which you think you're doing something good for yourself, but you're not. So this is a lot of stuff that people have to think about, the connection between their health and the soil health and the chemicals we're using and the need for a new form of agriculture and the sort of broad implications for our society as a whole. But it seems like there is a place of hope right now happening as I see it. There's this massive movement, you're part of it. The Soil Health Academy, Rodale Institute, you've got policymakers starting to advocate for regenerative agriculture. The governor of Pennsylvania, just put forth $22 million to help transform all the local farmers into regenerative agriculture who wanted to do it. And so there's really movement in this direction. How do you see that getting out there in a meaningful way and being catalyzed? Because it's still fringe, it's still on the margins, but it seems like we're in this almost tipping point moment. So how do you see things happening in the business world? in the science world, in the policy world that are moving us in this direction.

For me and my group, we've decided not to focus any attention or put any energy into conflict with the current status quo. We see the current status quo as self-destructive. It's a totally unsustainable model for agriculture, same way for allopathic medicine. We have a completely unsustainable model of disease care in this country that's going to bankrupt the the nation over the next few years. And so we don't need to fight against that. We don't need to argue with them. My choice is to let them actually be on their happy way and make a few more trillion dollars in the journey of their demise. Well, we need to start to really engineer the new future that we all want. And so we're putting all of our energy into that new pathway rather than trying to be adversarial conflict with with the status quo. And so in that journey, it takes a multifaceted approach. And so everything from big philanthropic funds that we're working with to channel energy and science towards understanding our relationship to viruses in the microbiome so we can change the wasteful trillions of dollars that have been dumped into trying to kill a virus that's not even alive to begin with. All of this kind of misinformation that's shutting down global economies and everything else with this pandemic is just showing the lack of science. everything from kind of re-educating and infusing large capital into science that's being done correctly to show that viruses are a critical part of human biology and their interaction is that of kind of marrying the microbiome to human biology and vice versa through genetic swapping that's critical for, you know, not only biodiversity occur but also adaptation within a species to occur. So, you know, trafficking money through those philanthropic environments and then we're working on the organization of a big, you know, for-profit impact fund as well because we see the need to bring very large capital in. And there's huge rationale for this. We have a $1.7 trillion American agricultural system that's going to pivot over the next 20 years. We know it is. Because the old system is dying, soils are dying so fast now, anybody who's doing chemical farming in 10 years has a non-viable system. And so we just need to make sure that we've invested properly such that universal adoption of these practices when it becomes necessary is easy to do and quick to adopt. We can't stand for an organic, slow linear process of change. We need to capitalize true exponential rates of transformation, which is going to mean investing in land certainly so that we can help speed up the land management practices, but also investment in AgTech where we start to see innovations in hardware and software platforms to allow for a distributed distribution system, a distributed food system. We have too much of a centralized food system. And this is making us vulnerable in these times. So those are some of the broad, broad drugs that we're tackling.

It makes sense. You know, you just have to create the new and let the old just die out in a sense and show there's a better way. Because, you know, we've had many, many people on the podcast who've talked about this, not as just a noble idea that's morally right or scientifically right, but that it's economically the best choice. It's the best choice for our health. It's the best choice for reviving rural communities and helping and supporting farmers and providing a solution to the chronic disease epidemic that we see globally. So this is a sort of a win-win-win-win-win-win solution that, that does disrupt people. I mean, there are people who are going to be losers. I mean, there will be the big seed, nag companies and chem companies and the banks that aren't going to like it, who don't aren't providing little loans to the farmers anymore to buy all those and I think we're going to see some changes. But I do think that there's a moment happening where there's an increasing awareness of the need to change both how we grow food and what food we eat and actually make them both regenerative. And I think that if we can reimagine healthcare to be regenerative healthcare and reimagine agriculture to be regenerative agriculture and understand how they're related and how important and connected they are, then I think we have some hope. And so despite the fact that it is a really tough time, not just COVID-19, but just the economic disparities, the social inequities, the amounts of disease, the struggles that people have, and the destruction of our environment and climate, I do see this as a hopeful moment where there could be redemption through an embracing understanding of these principles. And essentially, What you're basically saying is let's learn from nature. Let's adopt nature's principles, both in terms of how the body heals and how the earth heals, and let's just apply those concepts because it works.

Yeah, so much so that we've decided that the intelligence of nature is the brand. You have to completely surrender the idea that as humans, we're going to somehow come up with some technological innovation to get us out of our scenario. the technology that we've developed as humans has taken us away from that intelligence of nature. And so starting to surrender ourselves as physicians to realize that microbiology is teaching us something important, which is communication is the heart of healing. And the biology is always striving for bio diversity and adaptation. And if we're failing to support communication, biodiversity and adaptation in our microbiome or our human experience at any level, we're going to undermine our state of thrive, our state of capacity for regeneration, whether we're humans and some a soil system or beyond. And so there's some deep lessons in our socioeconomics, our sociopolitics, around when does communication become the focus again instead of adversity or adversarial, you know, interactions. And so there's an opportunity here for us to really learn from nature to become co-creative in our relationships as humans and as members of this spectacular, you know, nature that we were born into. So I hope that we are in that transformative moment. I think the pandemic has given us.

An opportunity Yeah, I feel like, you know, we've got a global timeout that God's given us a timeout, go to our rooms, think about all the crap you've done to screw up the world and sort of come out when you're ready to deal with it. So I feel like that's what's happening in this moment. And I just want to close by having you share a little bit about the work you're doing with Farmers Footprint because it's a really a profound thing. There are a lot of similar things going around Kiss the Ground and the Rodell Institute, but everybody's working towards the same goal. which is to sort of bring light to these issues. And Farmers Footprint is a nonprofit coalition of farmers, educators, doctors, scientists, business leaders that are hoping to expose the harmful effects on humans and the environment of chemical farming and pesticide reliance and chemical agriculture and providing a new direction around regenerative agricultural practices that help build diversity and reverse climate change. So tell us more about how this is being executed and what you actually are doing and just some hopeful stories that we can end with about this sort of re-imagining of healthcare and re-imagining agriculture, sort of like the phoenix rising from the ashes.

Yeah, I mean, the stories that come out of these farms are so exhilarating because what we get to see is that, you know, these families that finally decide because their back is against the ropes, they're about to lose the family farm, they become so desperate that they're willing to make a huge leap in faith towards this as like their last-ditch effort to save the family farm. And so they stopped plowing for the first time in a thousand years, that land. And so they stopped plowing and then they stopped spraying the chemicals or whatnot. And so these are environments like Australia, the US, Europe, ancient history of farming and the plow was invented in 900 AD. So we've been doing the wrong thing since the beginning of civilization, as we call Western civilization. And to see these families transform in a single year their land to a point of verdant capacity that they are now growing crops that have no weed infestation at all because there is such vitality within their soil and plant life diversity and their multi-species cover crops and just this pure biophotonic potential within these plants are pressing out pests and weeds by their own vitality rather than having to be codependent on some sort of pharmaceutical approach to knock back it. It's a huge beautiful lesson to us as humans is if we connect back into soil through a vibrant food system, we're going to become so biotically active that we will press disease out of ourselves and we will become a healthy and resilient people. And really, my greatest hope is for this third generation of Roundup children. Let's not let them be the most diseased human point in history. Let's let them realize the potential for healing that will reverse out of that epigenetic doom that we've set for them. let them find a pathway into a new epigenetic hope through their reconnection to real food, real soils, and a real healthy soil water ecosystem of the planet.

I see you getting to the farmers, and they are clearly at a pain point right now because their incomes are declining, their yields are going down, their farms are struggling, and they're facing increasing climate instability and weather changes that are threatening their farms. and they're desperate and you're, you know, they're in a moment of being ready to change. But how do you change doctors? How do you bring them into the mix? Because Farmer's footprint is also about bringing in doctors and, and people who are in the healthcare profession. So how do you help them understand this? Because they're still pretty tied into the medical industrial complex and the pharmaceutical and, and surgical fields. And, and listen, there, there are places for that. You and I both know that, you know, thank God for modern medicine for so many reasons, but it isn't a solution for chronic disease. And that's what we're trying to do is apply a model of care that was developed for acute illness to chronic.

Illness and it's failing. Yeah, I mean, it's a challenging, you.

Know, journey for sure. But I want to know because I'm.

Trying to do it. And I'm like, do you have any ideas? I want to know what they are. It's certainly a challenge, but I think that, you know, in the end, it's interesting that the farmer and the physician have been trained by the same chemical companies. and so we have been indoctrinated into the same pharmaceutical codependence and worldview, whether we be farmer or physician. So that's important jump. And so whatever you're experiencing as a physician and feeling trapped in your paradigm, know the farmer is experiencing the same sense of failure to communicate, failure to connect to the potential. And the solution for both farmer and physician is the same, which is new community. And so when we start to surround each other by like-minded intention for a new reality, our speed of innovation is dumbfounding. Imagine reapplying the trillions of dollars of medical education that's gone into today's modern medical doctor field to rearrange that into a planet-centric, nature-centric philosophy. The innovations that we will come up with in regards to the way that we think about imaging or therapies or whatnot is going to radically shift. And we are smart, intentional human beings that can, when reorienting our North Star, totally transform the industry nearly overnight. And that's what we see farmers doing for sure on the ground. And I really have seen in my own life, every time I surrender the sense of need for an antidepressant or an antibiotic or whatever the drug is that I'm reaching for, surrender the belief of the need of that and start to look for the root cause solution within my patient, how do I connect them back to nature so that they find that vitality that they are naturally born with the capacity to realize and that's where we're going to find that innovative spark. I can do it as an individual and make these tiny little progresses with my little team, but we're much more excited to engage the entire world of farmer, physician, and the like to generate a rate of change and a rate of innovation that's only spoken to in paradigm shifts. It's only now- you- get the light.

Bulbs go off in the doctors, can you get the light bulbs to go off in the doctors' brains when you're talking about this?

For sure. Because we're all in it, you know, when you're on the front lines, you can see how ineffective it is. I don't care if you're in ER, at ICU, you can see how ineffective our system is. And so the darkness is there. And so turning on a light in the darkness is very powerful. You know, I see this over and over again with when I give a lecture around this stuff or do a podcast, by and large, the two sentiments are, oh my gosh, my mind is blown. And I already knew all of that. So there's this wonderful, like, cross-section of like, why didn't those dots get put together before? And I already knew all of that stuff. And it should be intuitive whether you're a consumer a farmer or a physician, the reality of nature is obvious at every turning point of our experience. And ultimately, if we look to our experiential knowledge instead of our book knowledge, we're going to find out there's a huge disconnect between those two. And what we've been experiencing in the hospital systems and our clinics and in the fields of our farms is not what they taught us in the chemical industries, you know, education, little box. And, you know, it's perhaps not surprising then the same chemical companies teaching the farmer that are teaching us as physicians. And so we just have a very limited world view that when we give each other permission to blow that up, the amount of synergy, the amount of co-creative innovations that we're going to be capable of is going to be astounding.

That's just so amazing, Zach. I mean, you're laid out a vision of healthcare and agriculture in the future that while very depressing at moments is actually very hopeful and connects the dots to things that really few people have connected. And I'm just so grateful for your work and can't wait to see what happens with the farmer's footprint and your biotech company that's bringing the ancient soil medicines to humanity. And listen, if we can figure out a solution for leaky gut, boy, that is just tremendous because it's a lot of work to heal a gut and, and using these ancient soil microorganisms and the compounds they produce to, to solve some of these big crises in health we have now is just such a great vision. So I'm, I'm on your team. I'm excited for what you're doing. I think that, that, you know, more of us out there talking about this is going to make the change. And I, I do think we have to start bringing together Health Care and Agriculture and maybe virtual conferences now because we can't be a person. But we need to start to get Farmers and doctors and Agricultural scientists and, and, and human scientists together to really solve these issues because, because there is a solution. It's not like, oh, shoot, we screwed everything up and there's nothing we can do. They're actually there is a path forward and it's actually pretty hopeful, but you sort of have to look at what's really going on to understand we're in this crisis moment. And, you know, in some moments I go, well, you know, maybe we're just not going to survive. Like, humanity might not survive the planet. It'll be fine. It'll recover, you know? I watched this David Attenborough nature movie one time and there was this great show on Chernobyl. And it showed how all the humans left and nature took over and all the plants came back and all the animals back and it's like, aren't they all radioactive? But somehow nature is just so smart and thriving and we just have to get out of the way. So I just appreciate your work, Zach. For people who want to learn more, they can go to your website, ZachBushMD.com, they can follow you on social media, ZachBushMD, and check out FarmersFootprint.us. I'd encourage you to watch the movie because it's a really short little movie, but it explains a lot about regenerative agriculture, shows real farmers with real issues that have found resolutions and you can learn more about ion Biome at ionstar, whatever that little thing is, that biome.com so I love your work, Zach, keep up the good work and hopefully we'll be able to keep this conversation going and when you make more discoveries and tell the story in a more hopeful way. So if you love this podcast, please share with your friends and family on social media. leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you and please subscribe wherever you get your podcast and we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy.