The Mindblowing Healing Power Of Nature

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

Being exposed to chronic stress is rewiring brains to favor the types of activities.

That create chronic stress. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Hyman here. Now so many of my patients ask me how I manage to work multiple jobs, travel frequently, well not so much anymore, and spend time with my family and still focus on my health. I know it can seem hard to eat well when you got a lot going on, but the trick is to never let yourself get into a food emergency and to stay stocked up with the right things to support your goals. So recently I discovered Paleo Valley Beef Sticks. I keep these beef sticks at home and at the office so I know that whenever I'm in a food emergency, I have a healthy and delicious option to keep me on track. It's no secret that I have high standards when it comes to what I put in my body and Paleo Valley Beef Sticks checks all the boxes. They're gluten-free, grain-free, dairy free, soy free, and non-GMO. Plus, they use 100% grass-fed and grass finished beef, which not only adds to the flavorful taste, but it also means they're free of any harmful antibiotics or hormones that you'll find in most meat. With grass-fed beef, you'll get more nutrients than you would with beef fed with grains, things like higher levels of omega-3 fats that help reduce inflammation and more B vitamins and other antioxidants to support your body's converting food into energy. and also more of the fat soluble vitamins that are beneficial for a healthy heart. Plus, instead of being processed with chemicals and other questionable ingredients, these beef sticks are naturally fermented so you get gut friendly probiotics with every bite. How cool is that? Right now, Paleo Valley is offering my listeners 15% off your entire first order. Just go to paleovalley.com/steak forward slash Hyman to check out all their clean paleo products and take advantage of this deal. That's paleovalley.com/hyman. I definitely recommend stocking up on the grass-fed beef sticks to keep in your house, in your car, and in your office. It's one of my favorite tricks to staying healthy while on the go. All right, now let's get back to.

This week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, I'm Kaya, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. While much in our modern lives has taken us out of nature, Nature provides the raw materials for creating vibrant and healthy life. And reconnecting with nature can have profound effects on our health and the health of our planet. Dr. Hyman spoke about this with health and science journalist, Max Lugavere.

So you talked about, you know, nature and how that is really, the disconnection from nature is really a source of problems for us.

Major. Today we spend 93% of our time indoors. you know, in big cities. And there's a lot of this research now coming out of Japan on forest bathing. There's actually a Japanese word. I believe it's keroshi or keroshi or I could be butchering it, but essentially there's a very significant portion of the population that gets worked to death in Japan. And there, I mean, 90%, 93% of Japanese people live in cities. So they are far removed from nature. And so this nature bathing line of research has really become a major focus.

Wow.

Yeah. And it's now being studied, you know, increasingly around the world, the relationship that we have with nature, especially as our cities become more and more dense and.

More and more polluted. You're saying we should all move out.

Of cities and become farmers.

More connected to nature.

Yeah.

That would be good.

Yeah.

I mean, there are some things that you can do. So spending more time in nature, I think, is super important, especially if you are at heightened genetic risk for Alzheimer's disease. So if you're an APOE4 allele carrier, you know, making an effort to spend.

More time in nature. And that's a gene that increases your risk. If you have two of those genes, genes like of getting out in the sun.

14.4, yeah. So doing that, also getting out in nature is crucially important because of the exposure to the sun. So exposure to the sun, I think is very important. We were talking all about circadian biology, exposure to bright light, crucially important. Getting bright light in through your eyes in the morning is crucially important for anchoring your body's circadian rhythm, which guides everything from how coordinated we feel, how much focus we're able to have, how much energy we're able to have, how well we digest and metabolize food.

To actually have good sleep, you need to get outside and get sunlight in the morning.

Yeah, yeah. 100% good sleep begins actually the morning of.

Dr. Hyman also spoke with doctors David and Austin Perlmutter.

You know, when you realize that 87% of Americans of our time is spent indoors with another 6% of our time in our cars, it doesn't leave a whole heck of a lot of time for being out in nature, which has some very very powerful health benefits. There's a robust amount of data being generated that's looking at the measurable, the quantifiable benefits of nature exposure. And it may just be like you have behind you a plant in your home or in your place of work or even a photograph of that plant or a natural environment.

We all know chronic stress is a problem in our lives. No one's out there looking for more chronic stress. But now what we understand is that chronic stress disables the prefrontal cortex. When you look at these animal models, you see that the neurons in the prefrontal cortex shrivel up when they're exposed to chronic stress. On the other hand, in the amygdala, they expand. You get more dendritic branches. It creates more connection. So in the amygdala, where you don't want that. So in essence, being exposed to chronic stress is rewiring brains to favor the types of activities that create chronic stress. And again, let me just break this down.

So what you said was, when you're into chronic stress, it kills the brain cells in your adult brain that helps you make good decisions. And it makes the ones grow in the fight or flight part of your brain where you can be angry, divisive, and run or fight.

Right?

Exactly.

So that's not good.

I wish it wasn't that way, but you look at these long-term studies in humans who have undergone chronic stress. and you see that the prefrontal cortex is smaller. You can actually physically see that it is smaller in people who have had these life experiences, this chronic stress over time. Getting outside for 20 minutes a week has been associated with lower levels of stress. It doesn't take that much. We said you can just put a plant in your home. You can even put a picture of nature in your home and be getting these benefits.

Dr. Hyman also spoke to Dr. Zach Bush about nature's ability to create health in their discussion about the challenging problem of glyphosate in our soil and in our food.

I'm just literally blown away in awe because this is such an 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. Glyphosate Roundup, like you said, it's 4 billion, I've heard 6 billion pounds. It's the most abundant agricultural chemical that'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 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 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 I think when you're talking about leaky gut and the gut permeability and tight junctions, I think 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 name it. autoimmune diseases, allergic disorders, and a lot of it has to do with leaky gut. And it's not the only reason, but glyphosate clearly is a factor in driving this and has so many broad reach implications for how we treat our cells. 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, you know, to begin with the mind-blowing part, you know, the, the reason we're going to 60 million year old soil 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 osmalities 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, more biofunctional at those different environments. And so the more biodiverse 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 scaled that globally. And so it's really a 50-year story of chemicals, but interestingly it was over plowing that destroyed the soil infrastructure before the chemicals hit. Yeah, right, tilling. 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, this beautiful array of biophotonic transformations through all of these species interaction and starts breaking the cycles. 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 x. or immune sensitivity to their food or the air they breathe or whatnot. So, that's staggering. That's staggering. 20% of our children by this.

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. 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. 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.

It's epigenetic effects, it's generation three. So, if the grandmother gets exposed, the mother may or may not get sick, but the little grand rat gets sick. Yeah. 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. 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 a massive movement. You're part of it. The Soil Health Academy, Rodale Institute, you've got, you know, policymakers starting to advocate for regenerative agriculture. The, you know, the governor of Pennsylvania, you know, just put for 22 million dollars to help transform all the local farmers into regenerative agriculture who wanted to do it. And so, so there's really movement in this direction. How do you see that getting out there in a meaningful way and, and being capitalized?

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 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, while we need to start to really engineer the new future that we all want. We're putting all of our energy into that new pathway rather than trying to be adversarial conflict with the status quo.

It makes sense. You have to create the new and let the old just die out in a sense and show there's a better way. 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, you know, and the destruction of our environment and climate. You know, I do see this as a hopeful moment where there could be redemption through an embracing understanding of these principles. And essentially, it's 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, yeah. So much so that we've decided that the intelligence of nature is the 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. So starting to surrender ourselves as physicians to realize that microbiology is teaching us something important, which is communications is the heart of healing. And the biology is always striving for biodiversity 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 the human system, 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. There's a great deal of knowledge and.

Healing to be gained from our natural environment, and taking time to reconnect with our natural world can have profound effects on your well-being. If you'd like to learn more about any of the topics you heard in today's episode, I encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full-length conversations with Max Lucado, Dr. David and Austin Perlmutter, and Dr. Zach Bush. If you have people in your life who could benefit from this information, please consider sharing this episode with your community. We need each other to create a healthier us. Until next time, 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.

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