How Your Health Is Connected to Soil Health

Coming up on this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

I wish that everybody who decided to become a doctor or a nurse or a nurse practitioner or just, you know, any kind of healer in healthcare spent two years working with ecologists or farmers or someone who works with natural systems.

Which by the way, we are one.

Yeah, we are one. And it's farmers who really are coming forward and saying, There are principles of soil health that are super important, not just for protecting soil and for protecting the environment, but also for protecting and nourishing humans.

Hi, I'm Kaya Perowne, one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy Podcast. As a functional medicine doctor, Dr. Hyman focuses on treating the body as a system rather than treating the individual symptoms. In this mini episode, Dr. Hyman explores how this application of systems biology extends beyond our body's inner workings to its interaction with the natural environment. Here's Dr. Hyman in conversation with family physician and founder of the Health from the Soil Up initiative, Dr. Daphne Miller.

You're describing this sort of broad range of things where you're seeing the harm that our current agricultural production system does to the workers, right? Because of toxic use of chemicals, because of poor working conditions, because of being almost indentured servants and human rights really is a huge issue there. At the same time, we're hurting the soil that we grow our food in. So our soil is depleted, our food is depleted. And then the food we are growing is commodity products that are turned into processed food like corn, wheat and soy that end up causing all this chronic disease on the other end of the spectrum. And it's this huge problem and everything's connected. And that is some of the beauty of your work where you actually are connecting the dots between all these things that don't seem connected. like, what is the microbiology of the soil have to do with us? And you talk a lot about this in your work and I'm fascinated to sort of dig into this because one again, I get a little bit deep right away about how the microbiome, which is this brand new topic in medicine that didn't even exist when we were in medical school, connects to the microbiome of the soil and why that's important. I mean, for example, you tell people, don't wash your organic vegetables, right? Eat the dirt, right? So talk about how you came to understand that and what the science is behind that and what we need to do to change what's happening.

Well, first of all, I want to say that I really appreciate what you said before in terms of getting the big picture there, because there's actually a lot of people in medicine who still don't, that this really is a story on the unhealthful side of exploitation of workers, exploitation of soil, and then exploitation of our own bodies. We who are the recipients of that food and that system. And I think that's a very important notion to grab onto. So we can't heal communities unless we actually take care of farm workers and take care of soil. But the microbiome is this wonderful way of tracking that connection. It's kind of a nerdy scientific way of telling that story that you just told. Because in fact, what's so unbelievable about doing this work is that it tracks through on many levels from the microbial to the cultural, you know, so micro to macro, you know, from legislative to cellular. And the story of how our internal microbiome, all these, you know, billions of bacteria and fungi nematodes, how they are linked to soil is It's still trying to be understood and told. It's not the science is in its infancy. And we know of course that our microbiome is a unique microbiome. Each one of us has a unique microbiome.

It's like a fingerprint.

It's a fingerprint. It's not the same microbiome as soil, but we know that there is a lot of crosstalk. We evolved as these single cell creatures out of soil.

We all grew up in the dirt, right? Hunting and gathering.

Over millennia, what's happened is that different microbes have found their distinct niches, but that they in fact do communicate. And this research is slowly, slowly coming out. And food is probably one of the really important shuttles that goes back and forth in terms of informing the two microbiomes and influencing them in different ways. But it's not to say that our microbiome is the same as soil microbiome.

But there's crosstalk, There is this concept of meta.

Absolutely genetic crosstalk.

Conventional medicine encourages the diagnosis of disease followed by standardized treatment. However, naming disease becomes increasingly meaningless as we understand our inner workings and biological systems within the context of our entire organism. Dr. Hyman further explored this topic with his mentor and father of functional medicine, Dr. Jeffrey Bland.

Using the lens of functional medicine, the things that you've helped us know and understand really just getting people to sort of do those simple things that make profound difference. So it's changing the information. And that, food is information, everything is information, exercise information, sleep is information, thoughts are information. And these are all communicating with every cell and every system in your body every second. And when you understand that, then it's enormously empowering because then you can do something about it. Precisely. We have now understood, starting to understand, I don't want to say complete understanding, but we're starting to understand that this outside world, the things that we eat that come from the soils and the environment from which nature nurtures, have an inborn communication connection to our body's receptor systems that signals through every DNA molecule that creates our function. Now that is a paradigm shifting concept, that we're connected into the soil, into the air, into the water, into the sun in ways that are directly tied to these biological processes that we call intracellular signal transduction for which we are involved matrices, not disconnected from the world, but an integrated part of the network of the world into our biology. Yeah, I gotta unpack that, 'cause that was deep. So what Dr. Bland is saying, and I've been his official translator for 20 years, is that we are constantly in communication with everything, with the sun, water, the air, the earth, with environmental toxins, with our food, which is the biggest thing that we deal with every day. So this is really information science. Biology has turned into information science and understanding how do we interact with all the information that's around us and in us and all the microbes in us, all the food we eat, and that this is far more relevant than trying to just categorize people into groups around diseases and find the right drug for it. And once we understand that this complete dynamic crosstalk of information is actually driving all the things we see, then we have a whole new way of not only thinking about it, but treating people from these first principles and seeing extraordinary results when we never imagined possible.

Conventional farming practices like pesticide use, heavy tillage, and a failure to add organic matter back into the soil are resulting in many negative outcomes. The soil microbiome with which our microbes co-evolved is being depleted. This is affecting our food, our health, and the health of our soil. By supporting regenerative agriculture practices and avoiding processed foods, which are primarily made from commodity crops, we can help support a healthy ecosystem both in our environment and in our bodies. If there's someone in your life you think would enjoy this mini episode, please consider sharing it with them. Thanks for tuning in. Hi everyone, I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.

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