Why You Can't Get Away From The Toxin Glyphosate (& What You Can Do About It).

Hey, what's up guys? Let's talk kids. People ask me what things my kids shove into their gaping maws for supplements. And the fact is there's not much that they take. So last year my son Taren started to get a little bit of a tooth cavitation, which I think is just my fancy word for a cavity. And I put him on fermented cod liver oil, vitamin D, vitamin K, remineralizing toothpaste, and then I got him a little reward chart so that he could do coconut oil pulling every day. And he's actually reversing his cavity, which is really cool. That's one thing that both of my kids do, but the other thing that they do is every morning they take a little shot of this liquid stuff called Restore. Because what that does is it completely protects their entire gut lining from glyphosate. I did the same thing. I've been doing it for the past month. I decided to get the doc who invented this stuff on the show. And today you're going to get a chance to hear about how you can protect your own gut from glyphosate. Unless you live in like frickin Europe where they don't spray the crops, in which case you can eat bread to your heart's content. So enjoy that. In the meantime though, speaking of tooth cavities, today's podcast is actually brought to you by this new company called Quip, which is refreshing the way people brush their teeth. No, I'm seriously, it's like this little vibrating electric toothbrush with a built in timer, meaning that it automatically vibrates when you're supposed to switch to a new part of your mouth in case you're that person who can't remember if you already brush the back right side or if you forgot to do this. It's kind of like Apple designed a toothbrush. Meaning that it looks really slick, it doesn't have the price tag of a laptop, but it actually is so cool looking that Time magazine named it one of not the best invention of 2016. I think that would be silly if they named an entire toothbrush as the best invention of 2016. But they did name it as one of Time magazine's best inventions of 2016. It also won the 2016 GQ Grooming Award. Who knew GQ had a grooming award? And it was on Oprah's 2017 New Year's O list. Which is of course something that I personally follow and make all of my own personal care choices based upon. Because if Oprah does it Then I should do it anyways though, this quip actually is pretty cool. It starts at just 25 bucks and it's spelled Q U I P. You get it by going to getquip.com Ben that's getquip.com Ben. And when you go to getquip getquip.com Ben you get your first refill pack because they send you these cool refill packs for free with a quip electric toothbrush. So enjoy your quip. This podcast is also brought to you by Spores. Dun dun dun. Spores are not to be confused with the little aliens from World of Warcraft, a game I used to play all day long. Instead, spores are actually part of mushrooms. And there's this stuff called reishi spores. Now I put a little bit of reishi spores in a cup of tea or a glass of water prior to eating lunch and then I settle down for an afternoon nap after lunch. And what they call the triterpenes in reishi spores do is they balance your endocrine system, which means they act very much like an adaptogenic herb. And they found that reishi mushrooms increase the amount of and enhance the quality of deep slow wave sleep. How cool is that? And you can get reishi spores. You can also get any of my other favorite mushroom products from this company called Four Sigmatic and you get 15% off. Here's how. Go to foursigmatic.com greenfield that's f o u r sigmatic.com greenfield and when you go there, you can use coupon code BenGreenfield for 15% off. So that's4sigmatic.com greenfield and use coupon code BenGreenfield to get 15% off any of their mushrooms. And you gotta try some of these reishi mushrooms mushroom spores before you hit the sack some night. So check it all out. And on to today's podcast with triple board certified physician Zach Bush. Wicked smart dude. You're gonna enjoy this one. In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness show, get out on a hike near the waterfalls, get down into the swamps, get out into the ocean, get into as many different environments as you can and breathe. And that's how you're gonna really repopulate that system. This is perhaps how bacteria are having an impact on human health is that they actually are building some sort of communic that is not just for them. It's actually the interspecies communication network that's helping one cell talk to another cell, whether human or bacterial or otherwise. It almost feels to me when I wake up in the morning that Mother Earth predicted our insanity, predicted the atrocities we would meet on her soil.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer, and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield. Power.

Speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

All the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And my guest on today's show, I do believe is the only what is called triple board certified physicians who I've ever interviewed. As a matter of fact, he's one of the few triple board certified physicians in the country with expertise in internal medicine, endocrinology and metabolism, and hospice and palliative care. I really knew nothing about this dude until my friend and a guy that I really respect, Dr. Joseph Mercola, reached out to me and told me about him. His name is Dr. Zach Bush. Dr. Zach Bush. And in my discussions with him, I've found out that he is, he's brilliant when it comes to especially optimizing gut health using some pretty cutting edge and relatively unknown strategies. And then also kind of fighting the uphill battle that we all face against constant exposure to many of the toxins in our environment, most not notably glyphosate. God bless Monsanto that we breathe in and, and eat in our foods, even if we are trying to live a relatively clean lifestyle. He's got some pretty cool ways to, to mitigate that. Back in 2012, he made a pretty cool discovery that we're going to talk about on this show. When it comes to something called carbon based redox molecules. And if you're scratching your head about what exactly that is, don't worry, I will fill you in on today's show. So basically, Dr. Bush, I believe, are you actually practicing? I know you live in Virginia and by the way, do you mind if I call you Zach?

Go ahead with Zach. And I do live in Virginia and still practice. I've got a clinic at Revolution Health center in Charlottesville, Virginia. And Wave Clinic is our other clinic. That is our technology center and it features a lot of technologies, including one that you've featured recently, which is the Gainswave technology.

Oh, really? You guys do do the. You guys do the. Shocking, huh?

Yeah, we use the same technology for treating tendinitis. And you know, everything from the bunions of the feet to the fat plantar fasciitis to tendonitis. So it's a really non invasive technology for reversing those chronic injuries.

Yeah, I'm sure most of my listeners know about that, that technology by now, which basically involves like these painless high frequency acoustic waves that, you know, in my case I got, I got blasted into my crotch to assist with, with blood flow and, and size and feel and some of those things. But I didn't realize you could use it on bunions too.

Yep. Yeah, the whole gamut. So you're just targeting inflammatory centers with that Pretty exciting technologies.

Interesting.

Yeah, so I get to see patients still and that's definitely a bit of a touchstone for me in my life. I just love the, the contact with patient care. I think I've learned more from my, any medical school ever trained me.

Yeah, interesting. That's pretty cool. You can target your big toe and your genitals. Now.

You'Re a triple certified board physician. What does that actually mean?

Yeah, it means that I took a long time to find my path, I guess. So I went through a lot of training. Internal medicine is general adult training and that's a three year residency program there. And then went on to faculty here at the University of Virginia as a chief resident and teaching that year, and then moved on to a fellowship in endocrinology and metabolism, which is another three year specialty. And I was practicing endocrine, which is kind of hormone medicine, and metabolism, which is kind of the management of fuel in the body. So seeing a lot of obesity and metabolic conditions around that clinically. And then over those same three year period, I was doing basic science in tumor and cancer research.

Okay, got it, got it. So did you have to go to school for an inordinately long period of time to actually do that? Is that something that kind of involves jumping through far more hoops than a physician would normally need to jump through, or how's that work?

Yeah, a lot more clinical experience, a lot more research, a lot more publications. It was a 17 year journey. So that. 17 years of postgraduate work.

Holy cow. That's actually what, what one of the things that kept me from, from getting into medicine because I actually was pretty, pretty keen on becoming a doc back in college and that that timeline was one thing that turned me off a little bit. So that's 17 years. That's crazy. That's a long time.

That's. Don't discourage your listeners. You don't have to be as Crazy as all that. You can become a doctor for a lot less than that.

That's a lot of tuition, just not a triple certified doctor. So anyways, I guess back in 2012 and this was what Dr. Mercola was mentioning to me when he told me I needed to interview you.

Found something I mentioned earlier in the intro. Carbon based redox molecules. But can you go into that story? What were you looking for when you made this discovery that you found back in 2012 and what exactly is it that you found?

Yeah, the journey started in my cancer research at the University of Virginia. I was studying these, as you say, these molecules called redox molecules, which is the contraction of the words reduction, which is any compound that basically can contribute a negative charge, and oxidation, which is any compound that will absorb that negative charge with a net positive. And so the communication network inside your cells, it turns out, are really not made by the human cell itself. The vast majority of this redox communication system is made by these little tiny guys called mitochondria that live inside your cells. And the mitochondria are vital to fuel production, fuel management, resource management at the cell level. But they also really run really critical features of how to turn on and off cell death in the event that the cell is becoming cancerous, or how to do cell repair in the event that large scale damage has been done. All of that relies on these little redox negative charge signaling system. You can actually picture these guys as kind of like dominoes, tiny little domino, but you stock a bunch of them next to each other and you can trigger an event many meters away by tipping these little 1 inch blocks. Same thing with a redox molecule. They're tiny, tiny little molecules with a negative charge that when in a cell might last a millionth of a second, but they trigger these events that can travel across cell systems. So that one, one cell that's now become damaged can communicate with a distant cell that needs to come respond from the immune system, come to repair or clean up mechanisms or send signals down into the nucleus to say, hey, I need more proteins to rebuild this part of the cell or whatever it is. So this is a communication network. And so that redox molecule system was my backdrop to the discovery of 2012 that you refer to. And in 2010, I had left the University of Virginia to start a nutrition clinic. And that was a pretty big departure from designing chemotherapy in 2008 to launching out of the pharmaceutical model and getting into Nutrition in 2010. And the pieces that led to from one piece, one side of that to the other was really my research in cancer again was around vitamin A compounds. And I was starting to realize that vitamin A as a molecule was way more powerful than a lot of other kind of toxins that we try to kill cancer cells with and stuff like that. So it was an exciting realized that nutrition maybe had a lot of secrets to hold. So at the same time there was some very successful movement happening in the plant based food science. And so Dr. Nell Barnard.

Dating all the way back into the 1970s with Gabe Merkin and then Dean Ornish and then more recently here with the work in Virginia, you see this transition of understanding of how plant based diet and eating low on the food chain and getting a lot of nutrients into the body can reverse chronic disease. So that's, that was my transition that was happening under the microscope. Vitamin A and in the clinic, seeing diabetes and other things managed nutritionally very successfully. So I launched out of academia in 2010 and started a nutrition center. And after two years I realized that there were some major limitations that weren't really being talked about in the nutrition industry. And the limitations came around the fact that here we are feeding enormous amounts of health food to our patients. So we're kale, juicing and superfoods all day long and doing all kinds of fantastic things. And there was a significant portion of my patients that were getting sicker, not better. And I had to get over one major hump is that when we see patients behave or their health behave in such a way that we don't understand as doctors or it's going the opposite direction that we would expect, we often blame the patient. And so we say, well, you must not be eating the right things, you must not be as compliant as you say are. But after two years of watching this happen, I finally had to come to terms with it was a lot of my patients and it seemed to be some of my most compliant patients were the ones that were having poor outcomes. And so we started really asking some tough questions about is the food what we expected it to be? Is the food really delivering the science that was reported 20, 30 years ago in the plant based science industry? And so we were looking at the plants and it was starting to become obvious that if you look into kind of the nutrient quality of our food, it's dropped dramatically in the last 30 years. We've really suddenly elapsed in what we're actually eating. A piece of kale or a tomato doesn't have the anti cancer and other effects that these nutrition things used to have. So that was Kind of the next step in the transition of saying, okay, what happened to the food? And then the obvious next step of that pathway, which took me to a place I had never been before, was down into the soil. As physicians, even as pharmaceutically minded as we are trained, it's not outside of the realm of imagination that plants, herbs, et cetera, have a history of health. Health and medicine have been tied into the plant world. Some of the most common diabetes medicines that we used to use, like metformin, these come from roots of plants and things like that. And so it's in the pharmaceutical model to think plants as maybe a source. And so my vitamin A obviously sources from carrots and other colorful vegetables. But this was a whole new paradigm. Let's look past the plant for a second, look down into the soil, and figure out what the heck's going on there. Is that answering the question as to how our plants are changing?

Right.

And that was the 2012 event. So a colleague of mine brought in a soil science white paper, 90 pages long. A typical white paper is often five to 10 pages long. So to see somebody write 90 pages on soil science was startling.

Yeah, that's good bedtime reading.

Yeah, it's riveting. Dirt talk. And so you've got this story unfolding around dirt. And on page 40 of that white paper is this huge molecule with this carbon backbone with this big cluster of oxygen hydrogen molecules that look to have the same redox or negative positive charge potential as I had been using in my chemotherapy effort. And so it was a big stop, reverse paradigm shift kind of thing, where it's like, wait a second, what is down in the soil making that a. And what the heck is it doing in the soil? And that led from one thought to the next, basically. But the interesting thing about the bacteria that make your soil, or perhaps more important to you as a listener, the bacteria that make your gut ecosystem, the organic garden of your gut, that bacterial ecosystem has no mitochondria. It's only multicellular organisms like the human that have these mitochondrial mechanisms to build this communication network. And so suddenly realizing, oh, my gosh, the bacteria, if they're going to build an ecosystem of some 50,000 species, they're going to have to talk. And how would they do that? They would have to build their own kind of redox signaling system. The caveat is that a bacteria sitting out in soil or in the acid of your stomach or in the alkaline environment of your intestine is going to have to have a pretty robust communication system that Is resilient. Depending on its environment, the mitochondria don't have to deal with that. So they basically just make these little oxygen molecules that have different amounts of hydrogen or chloride attached to them.

Okay, so could I interrupt you for just a second on that? So what you're saying is that mitochondria communicate in a way that does not use these redox signaling molecules, or they do communicate in a way that uses redox signaling molecules.

Mitochondria, really? If you read any literature on redox, it's all going to be on mitochondria. The new shift is, oh, my gosh, I wonder if the bacteria would have to make the same kind of family of molecules. And so that was the sudden connection of. Wow. In medicine, we may be missing some massive portion of how cells talk, which is really important, because cellular degeneration, the aging process itself, injury repair, all of that is totally reliant on one cell's ability to talk to another cell and one portion of the cell to talk to the nucleus or other parts of the cell. And so intracellular inside the cell and extracellular outside the cell. Communication is the whole hallmark of peak performance. Anti aging, anti cancer, the whole thing.

Okay, so to interrupt you again, when you say cells talk to each other, I mean, I think a lot of people will think of nerves and how you have a signal traveling along a nerve, and then there's neurotransmitters released, and they cross a synaptic cleft and go on and propagate that signal to another nerve. It sounds to me like what you're discussing is an entirely different form of communication or talking between parts of your body in terms of cells actually sharing communication with one another. So this is a completely different mechanism Than the way nerves might talk to one another, Right?

Yeah. Or my field of endocrinology is hormones, which can talk.

Right, right. So what you're saying, if I understand correctly, is the body uses molecules or the cells use molecules as a way to communicate both between cells or within a cell. And these molecules would fall into categories like reactive oxygen species, for example, or reduced species, or what would generally be called redox signaling molecules. And a redox signaling molecule would be basically how these cells are actually talking to each other. They're releasing these molecules.

Based on reduction and oxidation reactions, and then whatever cascade, whatever physiological or biological cascade that occurs after that is occurring. But ultimately, it comes down to redox signaling molecules being what a cell would release for a cell to talk to one another.

Perfect. And what we could do is just tie this to the, you know, you know.

But I could be a triple certified board physician.

You're 80% of the way there, I can tell. We'll call you a 3/4.

I'll take it.

Physician right now. So you're on target. So let's think about telephones as a good corollary. Like your landline at your house is the nerve. So now you've got a pipeline or a wire that runs just like a nerve to connect one person to another. The redox system is your wireless cell phone. And so we're talking about cellular communication here in the last few minutes. But let's now think of cellular communication by your cell phone. The machine of your cell phone has a computer in there that works all the time. It's always capable of reception and transmission. However, if you're too far away from a cell tower and you're lacking that wireless communication interface, that computer that's totally functional as a machine cannot make any impact on some distant cell phone. And so it loses its capacity for communication. And if you've ever traveled for a long period of time or you have a situation where you don't allow your phone to update, you realize that it starts to degrade the computer system itself, the software within your computer starts to degrade. It develops errors and it's not repairing itself. And so as you pull yourself away from the source of the information and its ability to communicate across systems, the cell starts to degrade, in this case, your cell phone. So what we found in 2012 is really the system by which this wireless communication works. And so it's been a very exciting four years to watch all of this unfold of what happens to cells when you put the wireless communication back into play.

Okay, got it. So when I interrupted you to clarify what a redox signaling molecule actually is or how cells talk to each other, you were saying that human cells basically use redox signaling molecules, and that's how the mitochondria, for example, would communicate with each other. But what you were looking into was whether or not bacteria communicate in the same way.

Yeah. In fact, a little more exciting than that for the listener in the sense that to give you some backdrop again in the literature that I was working at University of Virginia with is that UCLA and UCSD started to come out with some amazing observations in their publications that were 2006 and 2010, starting to show that as they were decoding the genome of the intestinal environment, so the genome of the bacteria themselves, we suddenly realized that patients with prostate cancer or colon cancer or lung cancer. They were missing elements of the genome, so they were missing a few species of bacteria and then they were developing a cancer. There was no connection between how one would correlate with the other at the time, but these correlations were being made. And so when we found this communication system in 2012, it was like, oh my gosh. This is perhaps how bacteria are having an on human health, is that they actually are building some sort of communication network that is not just for them. It's actually the interspecies communication network that's helping one cell talk to another cell, whether human or bacterial or otherwise.

Okay, got it. So these bacteria are communicating with each other. And did you actually discover the mechanism via which the bacteria in the soil were communicating with one another?

Yeah, working on it the last four years. And every time we put these carbon based molecules into play, it changes the way we understand human biology. It's pretty stunning. If you take a look at western medicine. We have built a $3 trillion a year industry just in the United states alone worldwide. $7 trillion or something like that. So we've got this multi trillion dollar industry that's built around science that has always been studied in a sterile environment. So a petri dish by which we do all of our big studies to understand the mechanisms of vascular physiology or cancer physiology or whatever it is. Our understanding of human health has been human cells in isolation. The implications are that now that we start to realize that the ecosystem, the bacteria around us are actually coding for the mechanisms by which repair might happen or the mechanisms by which cell cell communication can happen. If the bacteria are in play and they change everything from the way in which our genes work to the way in which our cells repair, we literally have no idea what optimal performance looks like. We don't actually understand cardiovascular physiology because we've always studied it in a sterile environment without the influence of bacteria.

Okay, got it. So basically, did you find that bacteria communicate using redox signaling molecules in the same way that mitochondria do?

That's what it looks like. The big difference, of course, is that they're in an unprotected space. And so those bacteria have to talk in an environment that can be very adverse, can be very acidic, it can be very alkaline, it can have a lot of different osmolarities, which means the ability to absorb or secrete water or substrate. And so that's where this carbon backbone or this molecule that we found in 2012 becomes, I think, very important because it keeps the redox Element stable despite its adverse environments.

Okay, so, so it's basically like a carbon based redox signaling molecule.

Yeah, it's a redox signaling molecule. It's got a backbone to keep it intact so it can travel through adversity.

Okay, got it. So, so once you find a way for bacteria to communicate like this, what, what do you, what do you do with a molecule like that that you find in the soil? I mean, did you, did you like isolate it or did you, did you figure out a way to start feeding people dirt? Or what exactly do you do based on what you find in the soil? Like, like what's the connection between that and the nutritional deficiencies that you were studying in the first place when you found this redox signaling molecule?

Cool. I answered a couple of, there's a couple questions there. We'll start with how, how did we get them out of the soil? And the answer of course is dirt, like you say. So you got to get some good dirt that has a really complex ecosystem that made a lot of these communication network. And so the more species you have available in that dirt, the better your communication is. Our problem that we have on Earth right now is most of our soil is highly damaged because of the amount of chemical we've dumped into our soil systems through chemical farming of the last 60 years. And so we're lucky to find, you know, 8 to 10 inches of good quality topsoil on Earth right now. There's an occasional farm, especially up in the Midwest where you might find a few feet deep of really rich topsoil. But by and large we are pretty deplete. So what we did, unless you go.

Into my wife's garden where she's got like goat poop and eggshells and she's been friggin composting out there for years. So I'm pretty sure that soil out in the greenfield raised garden beds is pretty good.

I was wondering, you stay so good looking, your wife's taking care of you, she's got a lot of.

That's right, baby. It's basically kale with goat poop particles on it.

Hey, that's as good as life gets right there. And so you've got that environment in your wife's garden that's getting close to hopefully what we had 50 million years ago. But that's how far back we went. So we went back into the fossil record 50 million years by simply digging down in the desert. And so you go down a few feet in the desert and pretty quick you're hitting fossil layers of soil that are 50 million years old. And what we didn't want was bacteria. We didn't want the bacteria themselves. We wanted their communication network. And so when you go into fossil soil now, you're pretty sterile. And we can extract a very high quantity of these carbon molecules out of that fossil layer of soil. And we bring that then to our labs in Virginia. And the inert substance that we pull out of soil doesn't do anything as far as a communication network. It doesn't actually have active redox potential to it. And so we put it through a normal process of getting oxygen hydrogen binding correct. And we do that by, you know, simple mechanical features as well as adding in enough of the mineral amino acid substrate from, from soil sources to get that oxygen hydrogen binding correct. And so the finished product, a dietary supplement that's out on the market now called Restore that dietary supplement, has now got this balanced redox system in play in a liquid supplement. And so that's how.

So what you're saying is you take that redox molecule that you found, that these bacteria in the soil were using this carbon based redox molecule, and you isolated that and turned it into a supplement.

That's right. And the exciting thing is there's not one molecule, each species of bacteria or fungi that's out there in the soil. You can picture all those fungi and mycelium some fiber million species over probably 100,000 species of bacteria. So this massive ecosystem is out there and each species within that macroecosystem is making its own subset of the words within this communication language. And so we're not just isolating one molecule, we're actually pulling and isolating millions of different vocabulary within this incredible language. And so that's the excitement of this situation. Whereas when you go out into your garden, you're getting the bacterial intelligence of maybe a couple thousand species. You go back 50 million years ago, we think you're ten hundred, maybe a thousand fold more complicated and complex in that ecosystem. And so you're getting a bacterial and fungal intelligence out of fossil soil that just simply doesn't exist in human history.

So this is like a liquid that you drink?

Yeah, this is a water based liquid supplement that's just a couple teaspoons a day.

And does it actually have bacteria in it or is it just like this, this molecule that it has in it.

This carbon based molecule, totally sterile, no bacteria in it. And so instead we're really. The excitement about this supplement is that it doesn't do anything, it doesn't fix any damaged Cell, it doesn't fix.

And you know, that's not, that's not a good way to sell a supplement, Zach.

To tell me it doesn't do anything.

Well, what it's going to do is getting put back in the wireless communication. So the question is, does the cell phone tower ever talk to you? No, it doesn't. Your friend is talking to you, and your friend is going to give you the information you need to live life. Well, in this case, we're giving back the wireless communication network. The wireless communication isn't the thing giving you the instructions on what to do. Instead, the cell that's damaged and has that information can now talk to some other distant cell. And that's where things start to become magical, is the fact is the healing is actually intrinsic in you. You are not broken. You just don't have enough communication going on. And so when we throw a communication network back in, all kinds of magic breaks forth because you're not trying to do anything. You're not trying to micromanage a system of 70 trillion cells. And so this is, you know, what we do all the time in medicine, right? We said, well, we'll take vitamin D. Vitamin D looks to be important. And vitamin D hits vitamin D receptors, which then triggers.

The protein synthesis from the DNA on all these different targets. Well, vitamin D is doing something very specific there. And it's doing something that no other vitamin is going to do the same thing of. And if you're vitamin D deficient, vitamin D is only going to do what vitamin D does when you give it back. In contrast, this is the first supplement on the market here where you put something into play that it's gonna affect everything in the body instantaneously because the body knows what it needs to do. It just needs to communicate to its neighbors. And so it's a really profound foundation so that whatever you're doing in your life, whether it's trying to eat healthy, whether it's taking other supplements, whether it's exercising, everything you do is about to become more effective.

Okay? So I usually ignore about 90% of the supplements that I hear about because I get random packages of like white anthrax, like powder sent to my house and weird coffee chocolate bars people have made in their garages and all manner of strange things sent over to me. But when a guy like Dr. Mercola and then Dr. Dan Pompa, who I've also had on my show multiple times before, and he and I just led over 200 people through a three month detoxification protocol, he's a brilliant guy when it comes to healing the body as well. They all told me I had to talk to you and I had to try this liquid. So the bottle of this stuff showed up at my house and I have it here. And there's also like this, this option for like a spray that you just like spray up your nose. And the ingredients do just say here, purified water. And then the other ingredient in it is terahydrite is terrahydrite.

The actual molecule, terahydrate is the family of molecules.

Yeah, so that's like the carbon based redox molecules is terahydride.

You got it.

Is that the name you gave to it or is that like the scientific name for it?

That's the name we gave to it. And the roots are scientific as to where those come from. But okay, we didn't create that name. We're the first supplement on the market to have that.

Underneath where it says terahydrate, it says stabilize lignite extract. What's lignite?

Fossil soil.

Okay, so solignite is the soil. So I'm basically drinking the extract of dirt.

Yeah, you're drinking dirt water.

Okay, got it. I'm drinking dirt. Where's this dirt coming from?

Southwest United States in the desert between Arizona.

Okay, gotcha. So you dig down, you get this dirt, you get these carbon based redox molecules. I drink them. And aside from feeling really good about myself for having drank something that triple certified board physician found, what's happening? Why am I drinking this stuff? I mean, the general message I've gotten so far is that it's helping bacteria within my gut to communicate, or I guess if I'm spraying up my nose, bacteria within my nasal passages to communicate. But.

What'S actually happening? Why would I want them to communicate better?

Perfect. So there's a couple of. So let's start with just the bacteria, then we'll talk about the human cells and the impact. So on the bacterial front, one of the main problems we're having right now as a population is in regard to our ecosystem is we are getting too many of a family of bacteria that are called firmicutes. These are the fermenting bacteria. And we're losing the bacteriodes, which are now kind of reclassed as bacteroides. And those bacteria are kind of the ones that rev up metabolism, really deliver micronutrients, reduce inflammation. And so that family of bacteria diets is underrepresented. And when you put the communication network back in, we have a clinical trial that's about to publish, but the preliminary data is already showing that within just two weeks of putting the communication network into the bacterial environment, you get over 25% of the entire ecosystem of more than 1.4 quadrillion bacteria. You get a quarter of that. So you're looking at 250 trillion bacteria shifting from this firmicute kind of acidic fermentation process to this more Bacteroides big metabolism, burst speed metabolism, improve fuel usage, reduce acidity in the gut, all of that. And so when you put the communication network back, we get this really beneficial shift back towards a beneficial biome much different than a probiotic. A probiotic just keeps adding the same three species or five species. And you're really never going to shift a 30,000 species ecosystem with three species every day. And so instead.

Right, so. So there's 30,000 species in your gut. When I, when I use a probiotic, there's like three.

Yeah, three, five, seven, whatever's listed.

Yeah, I guess so. Whatever's listed on the back of there. Usually I think like a good probiotic, you've got like seven to 10.

Yep. Yeah, there's a couple on the market with 24. But, but one of the things they always brag about is, well, we have 35 or 50 billion copies of those bacteria. Well, if you think about that for a moment, is that really a good thing? And the answer is probably not. You don't want to be taking 50 billion copies of the same species day in and day out because you're going to create a monoculture.

Right, right. That's why, that's why I tell people to switch their probiotic brands that they use and to primarily use fermented foods like kimchi and sauerkraut and even, even like dirt. Like I was joking about goat poop on the kale. But, but really, you know, like I, I even out of my own land, do a lot of like wild plant foraging with my k. Eat stuff without washing it just to make sure we get some of the soil based organisms too.

That's exactly right. And what you, you know, even just walking through your garden, the fact that you're taking your kids out into a garden, you're getting beneficial flora right there before you ever put anything in your mouth. One of the unrecognized truths about the environment is we're breathing more bacteria than we're eating. Well, think about how you start a ferment. So if you're going to make your own sauerkraut at home, you take salt water, you put it in a crock, you throw a towel over the top of it and you let it alone for a few days. Well, the bacteria and fungi that are now going to digest that into a sauerkraut or sour Reuben or whatever you're making what you're going to, all of that's coming from the air. Your literally just breathing in those hundreds of species from the air itself. Well, you're the same way. Every breath you take, you're going to seed your nasal passages, your sinuses, the back of your throat, ultimately your portions of your lung, ultimately down, swallowing those bacteria down into the whole system. You're going to repopulate your gut with the air you breathe. And so one of the first steps when we get people on to restore is, okay, now you have the substrate for communication, now you have the opportunity for balancing an ecosystem. Where are you going to go get those bacteria? Product is sterile by intention. We don't want to micromanage, we don't want to narrow your, your experience by giving you just a few species. Let's blow the doors off and say here's the communication network. Open yourself now up to your environment. So get out on a hike near the waterfalls, get down into the swamps, get out into the ocean, get into as many different environments as you can and breathe. And that's how you're going to really repopulate that system.

Right? Okay, got it.

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So you've got this redox based signaling molecule that you drink that allows the 20,000 to 30,000 different type of bacterial strains that are naturally in our gut to be able to communicate with one another. But what is it that happens in your gut when bacteria are communicating better with one another? I mean, why is it that someone would actually even care about something like that?

That's right. So let's say, let's pretend that this huge shift in the bacterial biome isn't terribly important. So we'll say, okay, well, let's agree that that's cool, that's awesome to shift your biome, but what does it actually do?

When you say shifting your biome, you're talking about like shifting from like pharmacy to bacterioids. Is that what you mentioned earlier? So, so you're basically shifting. And by the way, I've had my, I've had my gut via the Human Gut Project and also via Wellness FX analyzed. And one of the things that you get back is your pharmacy to bacterioid ratio. And there's all sorts of evidence about how imbalances in that ratio are responsible for everything from obesity to chronic disease to neurotransmitter issues, et cetera. So you're saying that it shifts that into balance, but. So that someone might address some of those issues. But what else is going on? What else is it doing?

So the next step that you know, and this is all discovered retrospectively, we, we were nowhere near intelligent enough to, to plan all this out to the eloquence that it turns out to be. But what we found is the antidote to one of the biggest problems we have right now as a population, which is gut permeability. And so gut permeability is supposed to be a very highly regulated situation where your gut is this massive membrane the size of two tennis courts in surface area, and it's one cell layer thick. So you have like this fraction of a sheet of cellophane that covers this huge two tennis court area made out of trillions of tiny little microscopic cells that are all bonded together by like a Velcro like protein called tight junctions. And that Velcro, it turns out, is being weakened by the lack of presence of bacteria. And so as we kill the bacteria in our gut through the use of antibiotics from our doctors, or the use of antibiotics in our food chain, meat production industry is responsible for the biggest quantity of antibiotic usage in the environment, second only to the amount of antibiotic we use on our feet, on our plant crops and so on the plant crops, we use an antibiotic called glyphosate. And you mentioned this early in your show here today. Glyphosate is a single chemical that was initially put into play by Monsanto for their product Roundup. It's the active ingredient not only in Roundup now, but in every weed killer on the market, essentially.

Right.

And that came off patent in 2007. So now China actually makes most of the glyphosate in the world rather than Monsanto. And so we have one chemical that we're dumping into the environment at a quantity of about 2 billion kg. 2 billion kg of this toxin into our soil systems would be a problem. But unfortunately it's a water soluble toxin, which means it gets into our waterways. And so now it can evaporate into our clouds some 70% of the rainfall, 75% of the rainfall in the south southern United States is contaminated with this compound. The air samples that we pull from the United States, 75% contaminated with Roundup. So we're breathing.

Actually, the more I study up on glyphosate, the more kind of pissed off I get because, you know, I, I've got, you know, like, like a nice, deep, pristine well, but, but since I live on a north facing slope, you know, up above me, I've got people who are spraying their crop. So I even have to like filter the hell out of my well water, which, you know, you'd think would be pristine, clean well water so that I'm not getting exposed to the glyphosate. But then, you know, and I'll, and I'll let you finish what you were saying about air. You know, I find out based on all this latest research that when it comes to the tight junctions in my gut or my kid's gut or my wife's gut, I'm still breathing this stuff in when I'm driving past a farmer's field with my windows rolled down or when my neighbors spraying it on their lawn.

Exactly right. Exactly right. At 2 billion kilograms worldwide, you're really hard pressed to get away from this stuff. And so we've put this stuff into play, not really understanding what it did, but one of the most profound things that it does is it disrupts that Velcro system. And so as the Velcro weakens in your gut lining from constant exposure to glyphosate, the Velcro system, by the way.

Being the tight junctions that you're talking.

About, that's it, you have the tight junctions that hold one cell to the next cell to create a cohesive membrane that's a protective membrane from the outside world. And sitting right behind that gut membrane. And when I say gut, we're talking everything from the nasal sinuses all the way to the rectum here. So massive environment. So every time you breathe or every time you eat, that cell layer that should be a cohesive membrane is now at risk because you've got this vulnerability essentially there in the cell system. And sitting right behind that membrane is 80% of your immune system's ability to make antibodies. At least 60% of your total immune system is sitting right behind that membrane doing damage control. And so when you start to get leak and when you start to get this high gut permeability, your immune system is very rapidly overwhelmed. And when we lose the ability for acute inflammation, that's when we start to tip into other problems. And so longevity again and peak performance is really around. Can you maintain that tight junction system so that you have an intelligent barrier that's going to keep the bad stuff out and let the good stuff in? And are you protecting your immune system adequately? And if the answers are no on both of those, and you're starting to leak and you're no longer keeping the bad stuff out and. And you're starting to overwhelm your immune system's ability to maintain this kind of acute inflammatory management system, now you start to accumulate damage. And so that tends. As we look at the science, we're seeing more and more that glyphosate is playing a huge role in this global epidemic that we have of inflammatory shift. And so we've got all of these conditions that are rampant in our children and adults and everything else, and it's all going to tie back somehow some way to these tight junction systems. And the science that we're now teasing out from the bacterial world is, oh my gosh, the bacteria have always been trying to protect us by strengthening these Velcro molecules and by.

So the bacteria are what actually keeps those tight junctions closed.

That's right.

So that's why kids who are born, say, like via C section versus being born via vaginal delivery when they're not getting like all moms kind of gross to think about, but like all her fecal particles and all the bacterial diversity in mom's vaginal canal as they're being born via vaginal delivery. The kids who are born via C section who don't get that part of the reason that those kids have weaker immune systems, I believe until they're like seven years old, is because they're not getting those bacteria. So their tight junctions aren't closed, so their immune systems are more susceptible.

Precisely. And it doesn't even take a C section anymore. Right. You get born into a hospital.

Abnormal bacterial environment, and then you get taken home to a drywall cube that we call a house. And you have no contact with a garden, often in the first year of life. So we're hardly touching the environment anymore. And so we're raised on carpets that are off gassing and we're raised in, in cardboard houses and plastic vinyl siding. And there's just so much weird environment that we've created. And so whether you're C section, I think is a huge disadvantage from an immune system standpoint. But the reality is, I don't know that it matters that much. I think almost nobody is being born into a natural ecosystem anymore.

Yeah, yeah. So you basically figured out a way to introduce.

The support for bacteria that are already into the gut, into the body via these carbon based redox molecules that allow the bacteria to adequately communicate, that allows tight junctions to close, and theoretically, as a result, makes your gut less susceptible to all the effects of glyphosate that we're eating, that we're breathing in, and that we're drinking in our water and via all sorts of other environmental toxin exposures.

Perfect. That's exactly right. And so if we tie back to the concept of here's a dietary supplement that doesn't do anything specific, it simply gives you back the communication network. And so when that tight junction protein system of the extracellular matrix around the cells that are the Velcro protein holding the gut lining together, nasal sinuses all the way to the rectum, when that is threatened by glyphosate, or another compound that we consume frequently that can do the same kind of pattern is the gliadin compound, which is a breakdown product of gluten. So we have this massive rash of gluten sensitivity and that turns out actually being tied right into the glyphosate. Again, we've got a publication coming out shortly as to how glyphosate is sensitizing our guts to gluten. But gluten has the same ability to kind of open up that Velcro system and cause leak. What we're showing though, is if you've got this huge bacterial communication network in play, my gosh, the rate at which you repair is nearly faster than it enters, to the point where minutes after introduction of gluten or glyphosate, if you have enough bacterial communication network, you're actually stronger, not weaker. And so that's a pretty exciting message that, wow, we can put the system right back into this really healthy acute inflammatory response system so that when injury occurs, you actually get stronger, not weaker.

That's interesting what you say, by the way, about gluten, because I believe it was John Douyard who I interviewed, who wrote a book called Eat Wheat and he talks. We talked about two things. Number one, how a weak lymphatic system, poor lymphatic drainage and poor care of lymph fluid is one of the things that makes you really susceptible to an allergic or a deleterious reaction to the consumption of the gluten in wheat. And it's not the gluten itself. But then another thing that he mentioned was if you've got this extremely leaky gut because the gluten that you are eating is safe from wheat that's been sprayed with glyphosate or you've got other glyphosate exposure going on, even if it's something natural that our ancestors could have eaten, like, thousands of years ago. Bread. Our ancestors weren't, like, sucking down copious amounts of glyphosate along with the gluten in their bread.

Spot on. Exactly right. And. And we don't even have to go back that far. I mean, 1980s, we had almost no gluten sensitivity.

Oh, yeah. I guess because Monsanto hadn't really developed glyphosate at that point, huh?

In 1990. So glyphosate came into play in 1976, but it was just a weed killer. We had to be very careful not to put it on crops because it would kill the crop. And then in 1992, Monsanto brought out the concept of desiccation so we could dry wheat quicker if we sprayed it with Roundup before it was ready to harvest. And this helped farmers who, you know, in the northern climates were at risk of losing a crop because snow was coming early or whatever, suddenly they could spray prematurely a crop before it was ready to be harvested, kill it in three days, and then harvest it. And so that started in 1992. And every year since then, we've increased the number of acres worldwide of wheat spray. And so suddenly, we put glyphosate, which can damage that Velcro system, tight junctions, and the gluten in the same bite of food. And what we are showing with this publication that's coming out is that glyphosate, not only is there kind of an additive effect where, yeah, the glyphosate damages the Velcro, the gluten damages the Velcro. What we're showing is that glyphosate actually upregulates this receptor called the CXCR3 receptor. This receptor upregulates as soon as glyphosate touches the gut membrane. And that's the receptor that makes us susceptible to gluten sensitivity. That's the receptor that binds the gluten breakdown products that will then loosen the tight junction. So there's actually a synergy happening where glyphosate moves in, has a direct injury to the tight junction, and upregulates CR3. And so now you have this situation where every bite of gluten is like a triple threat. And it's not because the gluten changed, it's because the glyphosate Became present, upregulated the receptors to gluten, and now things are really damaging.

Okay, so it makes, like, what you're saying kind of makes sense as far as, like, allowing the bacteria to communicate so the tight junctions can close so we can fight off some of these effects of glyphosate and gluten. And that looks, you know, it's one thing to say it on a podcast, but I'm curious, like, when it comes to say, like, glyphosate mediated tight junction issues or gluten mediated tight junction issues, has this stuff actually been studied? I mean, has anybody actually looked at, like, what happens when you drink down, like a carbon based redox signaling molecule? Like, is there actually stuff happening or is this just all theoretical? Like, have you actually studied this?

We've actually studied it. And so you can go to our website and look at this in real time. You can see on the small intestine, we grow up small intestine membranes and then expose them to different environments. And so we can expose it to the amount of glyphosate you get in a typical beet or something like that, a root vegetable, or 10 parts per million of glyphosate. Or you can take a look at the amount of gliadin or gluten breakdown that you would get from a single slice of pizza. And so you can see the effects of that on the tight junctions. And then on the same slide, you can see the effect of if the terahydride is in play, if you've got this bacterial communication network in play, there's no damage. In fact, you get stronger, not weaker there. And so it's a cool story that the body is able to protect itself beautifully as long as it's got enough communication going on. And so it's a very beautiful thing where the bacteria are making this communication network. They are nurse mating our environment by putting into play the communication network that's gonna let the body know, oh, here comes a potential threat from glyphosate or gluten. Let's upregulate the tight junctions. Let's get more of this protein into play. Let's get the Velcro tighter and get ready for this injury. So that's a very cool response relationship that we have to the bacteria that they're putting into play this foundation for health.

Okay, so I'm on your website now. So these studies, like protective effects of lignite, that's the same as this terrahydrate, right? Lignite extract supplement. Okay, Protective effects of lignite extract supplement on intestinal barrier function in glyphosate mediated tight junction injury. And then you got another one here. Protection against gluten mediated tight junction injury with a novel lignite extract supplement. These are actual studies that have been done on this compound, on the communication between bacteria and the protection, repair of the gut from things like glyphosate and gluten.

Precisely. And in those studies, you can read both small intestine and colonial data there and everything else. So very profound effect. And we've done this many, many times, hundreds of times. And we've got a situation now where university laboratories have backed this data up as well. And so we have third parties that have executed the same science. And so it's an exciting reality that these peer reviewed journal articles are starting to bring into the public sector. The reality that if we are in touch with our ecosystem, we've become pretty bulletproof. And it's pretty extraordinary to me, Here we are as humans executing what could be probably the largest genocide of species that's ever happened through the introduction of glyphosate, this potent antibiotic chemical, 2 billion kg a year into soils worldwide. We're annihilating the complexity of our soil. We're annihilating the bacterial and fungal environment. And yet mother earth had the grace to plant an antidote to this toxin in her fossil soils some 50 million years ago. And you almost, you know, I've been in this soil mines for long enough now where it almost feels to me when I wake up in the morning that mother Earth predicted our insanity, predicted the atrocities we would commit on her soils in the future. And she planted this secret in there that was just going to be revealed right when we most needed it.

And now why couldn't you just get the same benefits by like, getting out in nature? And, you know, like, I have a friend, for example. It's kind of crazy, but, but he does this, like, whenever he goes to a different part of the world, he'll like, kind of reach down and like stick his finger in the soil and like lick a little bit of the dirt to start to introduce his gut to that localized microbiome. And, you know, and you know, I was talking earlier about how you can eat dirty plants and wild plants and increase your probiotic diversity by eating kimchi and sauerkraut and things like that. Why can't we just do that? Why do we need to drink a supplement?

Perfect question. And the answer comes down to biodiversity again. And so you can travel the world right now, and you're going to see a fraction of the amount of biodiversity we had 50 million years ago. And the reason is largely because there's been a couple of geologic events or kind of of massive events that have happened globally to dumb down our soil 50 million years ago, you know, 55, 60 million years ago, we're looking at a situation where we had dinosaurs roaming the Earth. And these dinosaurs were massive, and the largest among them just ate plants. And so we had a soil that was growing plant life that was so nutrient dense that a brontosaurus could grow to the size that it would. And so we have really, really rich ecosystem that existed. And then suddenly there was a massive asteroid that hit, and it buried those soils in a layer of dust that I think killed off a large amount of the biodiversity that had been in the soil moments before. And so we've had some catastrophic events that have happened around the world that are naturally occurring. But then you now start to think about the last 60 years of human history, nuclear testing alone, the amount of nuclear bombs that have been blown up in our oceans.

In our deserts, and in our atmosphere up in the stratosphere. We've been blowing up nuclear weapons just for weapons testing. And, you know, that didn't get outlawed until the late 1990s, really. And so we have a situation where we have been annihilating our environment through everything from our weapons development to our farming practices with spraying an antibiotic, which is this glyphosate, spraying an antibiotic all over everything. And so now when we travel the world, I think your friends are doing exactly the right thing. Get as much bacteria as you can. But I am confident that when you back up in the fossil record 50 million years, you're going to get a biodiversity and a communication network out of that soil, that fossil soil 50 million years ago that simply does not exist on Earth today.

Okay, got it. And plus, when you add in like, the glyphosate and the gluten, I would imagine that, that we also, you know, even if we are eating a lot of kimchi and sauerkraut, we're still getting exposed again. Even if we're like, buying organic foods via wind and water and, you know, all sorts of stuff we can't control to pretty high levels of something completely unnatural. I mean, like, that's, that's honestly like, like one of the battles that I fight working on a computer all day, you know, with like a ton of like, like, you know, LED exposure and fluorescent light exposure and, and all these These forms of light that my retina wouldn't have normally been exposed to during the day. You know, people ask me why I do things like blue light blockers and red lights at night and things that our ancestors wouldn't have needed to have done. It's because I'm fighting an uphill battle, right, against, against modern technology. And, you know, our guts are fighting an uphill battle, it seems, against stuff like this glyphosate and gluten. So it makes sense. You mentioned, you mentioned the colon. It was kind of funny because when you sent me this bottle, you told me you can actually, in addition to spraying it up your nose, using this little sinus spray that you sent me instead of just drinking a shot of this stuff before a meal, that you could also use it as an enema. So does it do the same thing like your colonic bacteria when you do it as an enema?

I mean, is that more efficacious than drinking for the large intestines?

It depends on what your situation is. By and large, I think oral is going to be good for 95% of the population. If you really have a situation where the bacterial balance in your colon is extremely off due to antibiotic exposure or other things, then I do have clinics around the world that have used it as a long term enema to help speed up that balancing effect of the bacterial biome. And so, so those are, I'd say, the minority of consumers out there. I think the vast majority of your listeners are gonna have a fantastic result using the sinus and oral approach.

Yeah, well, the reason I asked, by the way, is I interviewed Matt Gallen about his probiotic formula. He does like this really cool bacterial formula called, what's it called? P3OM. And we did a big show on that and he mentioned how a lot of folks will just reverse a lot of large intestine issues and constipation and issues with the colon by, by taking it as an enema. I mean, he, he actually showed me, we talked about on the show, like how you like kind of, you break open the capsules and you put them in coconut water on the counter at room temperature for like four hours. Then you just use like a, like a enema bulb or whatever and you, you put them up your butt. It sounds to me like if, if you were to, to add a little bit of carbon based redox molecules into the mix, you might have an even, even happier colon.

I believe you would. Yeah, I think that that definitely puts to play a whole different spectrum. But the Exciting thing is just oral use has a profound effect on the colon. So we again and again see people really correcting bacterial imbalance and issues of the gut within minutes to hours to days of use. When they've tried every probiotic on the market, they've tried digestive enzymes, they've tried all of the go to, quote, unquote, gut health supplements out there, and they've never seen anything work like this before. And that's because, again, we're not trying to micromanage the gut environment. We're not trying to say, here's some more pancreatic enzymes. Well, human pancreatic enzymes don't do much of anything in the larger scheme of gut digestion. 90%, 95% of the enzymatic work that's done in the gut is done by bacteria, not by human digestive enzymes. And so We've built a $30 billion gut health industry out of probiotics and digestive enzymes, with almost no science behind that. There's, there's only a handful of studies that have ever looked at short term use of probiotics. There's not any studies that have looked at the effects of long term probiotics. So I have a lot of concern that here we are telling consumers to spend thousands of dollars a year on probiotics, when in reality, we may be hard pressed to show that anything other than maybe very short term usage after an antibiotic or after chemotherapy or some gastrointestinal viral infection, and there may be some benefit in the short run of those, but that's even unproven. So really, we've got a bunch of anecdotal evidence that's out there, but this is a good example of where we made an important leap forward in science to start to embrace the possibility that bacteria were good for us. For 100 years, we just thought that bacteria were bad and we tried to kill them every time we saw them. So I think the probiotic industry has played a very important role in the scientific, as well as just the general public dialogue of saying, okay, bacteria are good. Again, we need to start thinking about how we're going to take care of these guys. But now, in contrast to that, you start to look at what we've done with the probiotic industry, and we're definitely just scratching the surface of health if we're inducing health at all.

Now, what happens when you spray it up your nose? Why do you have this nasal spray?

Yeah, so the gut lining starts at the nose and goes all the way to the rectum. And so when you take oral, you're missing the opportunity to affect the bacterial biome of your nasal sinuses, which is one of the most critical environments to work with. And so you really want to be working in that environment to create this constant regenerative effect, because the ecosystem of your sinuses are going to become the ecosystem of your gut. At night we have a lot of post nasal drainage. The bacteria transit from the sinuses down in the back of the throat and start to seed the gut. And so you can take oral and have an immediate effect on the intestinal biome, but you don't want to forget the nasal sinuses up there. There.

Okay, got it. So, you know, a lot of what we've talked about so far has been in relation to gut health, you know, in terms of like healing up the tight junction and allowing bacteria to grow and flourish in the gut or the colon or the nasal cavities more readily when you introduce these carbon based redox signaling molecules into those areas. But I'm curious if there is, there's more to this than just like gut health. Like, let's say I already have a pretty rock solid gut, or let's say I happen to be pretty lucky and I'm not getting exposed to a lot of like, glyphosate or, you know, GMO crops and stuff like that.

Is there anything else that, that this can do? I mean, like, I know, like, like, like Joe Dr. Mercola, like, he's very, very keen on like mitochondrial health and mitochondrial signaling and optimization of mitochondria for things like cancer prevention or sports performance or things of that nature. And he seemed to indicate that he liked this as an option for improving the health or the capability of the mitochondria to flourish as well. Is that true and are there other things that this can do for one, in addition to just gut health?

It is, it's a direct impact on the mitochondria, which is fascinating because the mitochondria are also non human. So we've been talking about the bacterial biome, this incredible ecosystem of non human species of bacteria and fungi and all this, and the human body has somewhere around 70 trillion, for the sake of math, maybe call it 100 trillion human cells. The bacterial biome is 15 times more complicated and is up around 1 1/2 quadrillion, 1 1/2 quadrillion cells. In contrast to the bacteria. At 1.5 quadrillion, there are 15 quadrillion, again, 10 times as many mitochondria as bacteria. And the mitochondria look A lot like bacteria. They're little organisms that live inside your cells instead of outside your cells. And they digest food just like the bacteria do. So the bacteria will break down all of the stuff that you have on your dinner plate. They're going to break it down into some micronutrients that are bioavailable. And then it's going to break it down into fats, fat and sugar combinations. And so the fat is going to be and sugar are going to be burned then, or digested further by the mitochondria. So the bacteria pass macronutrients of fat and sugar into your bloodstream that travels, enters a cell, but the human cell can't use those, so that it has to then enter a mitochondria, which is then going to digest your fat and sugar into the very single fuel that you run on, which is ATP or adenosine triphosphate. And so your entire dinner plate has to be processed by the bacteria, then handed off to the mitochondria and burned twice through the system before you ever get a useful piece of fuel out of that plate of food. And so it's not surprising, perhaps, that what we've now been able to show, and you can see examples of this in some of our publications there on the website, that when the bacteria communication network, when the terahydrite hits the mitochondrial environment, we see an immediate shift in the mitochondria. Mitochondria. And we're used to studying mitochondrial effects of compounds, dietary supplements and otherwise. And what you see, by and large, whether you're looking at something like vitamin C or vitamin A or any of these compounds that we're putting into play, they do the same thing to the mitochondria. No matter what cell you put them into, the mitochondria rev up or they turn off or they do, whatever it is, restore. This terahydride compound is the very first time we've seen something that goes in with such an intelligence that it can actually figure out which cells are challenged and which cells are thriving. And they can actually do the opposite thing. They send an opposite signal to the mitochondria. So that as such, that if you have a very healthy cell that's thriving and it sees terrahydrite, it's going to decrease its production of Ross or the reactive oxygen species. It can take the stress off of that mitochondrial signal. In contrast, if it's a cell that's challenged, it's going to upregulate ROS and call in help, it's going to call in Assistance for more transformation to happen in that cell. And so it's a very exciting compound where we're getting differential effects. And so it takes the stress off your healthy cells, it ramps up the support system for your challenge cells, and you get this really cool yin yang effect. As the bacteria talk to the mitochondria, the mitochondria are becoming more intelligent.

Okay, so basically, this would be a good. For people who are trying to optimize their air, their light, their water, their electricity, this would be something that you could use as yet another way to improve the health of the mitochondria. And we've done a lot of podcasts on how important that is for things like cancer prevention and exercise performance and cognitive performance. And it sounds to me like this would be just something simple that you could throw into the equation for something like that.

Something simple to support this natural communication network between the mitochondria, the human cell, the bacteria, the human cell, bacteria, the mitochondria. You've got these three big populations of cells. You got the bacteria, the mitochondria, and the human cells all talking back and forth now. And with that coordinated signaling, I think you really do reach the potential for optimal performance, optimal longevity and all of that. So very exciting concept of we are not alone as human. As human, you are plugged into an ecosystem of mitochondria and bacteria and fungi. And when all of those are revved up and talking, man, exciting things happen under the microscope and in life itself.

Yeah. Can you take this stuff every day?

Because the bottle you sent me, I just started throwing back a shot every day. But I probably should have asked you, is it a daily deal? Like twice a day? Is it once a week? Or how does it work exactly?

These compounds are very stable. So when I first developed this compound in 2012, I thought, this is exciting. Once a day is going to be plenty. We'll put this into play. It's really going to do its trick. But I was thinking too much about the mechanisms of how I thought this was going to work and all this. I wasn't really thinking about human biology on the grand scheme. And so it was when we started working with our kids who are using this supplement to help support health for gut health with children with autism and other things. When you're supporting gut health in children that have very sensitive intestinal environments, we started to realize, wow, this is very short acting. And then we had to kind of dial back to, why is it so short acting? If the compound is so stable and should be around for Many, many hours. And the answer has to do with the transient nature of the intestines themselves. And so your gut lining, from your nose to your rectum actually turns over completely every three days. So every 72 hours, 100% of the cells and the tight junctions that Velcro that tie those cells together have been completely replaced. So if you take a shot in the morning and then you wait until the next morning before you protect that gut again, you've got at least 25% of the cells of your gut by dinner time that are unprotected. And the tight junctures have never seen the terahydrite. And so we started to see real benefit clinically if we started dosing more frequently or increasing the frequency of usage of the supplement. And so right now, the bottle says three times a day is kind of optimal. Frankly, I'm in the habit of just carrying my little travel bottle around with me. And I spray frequently throughout the day, anywhere from three to probably seven times a day. If I'm going to eat a snack and I'm like, okay, there's probably some glyphosate hidden in there. I'm going to take a squirt right beforehand. I'd rather take a small dose seven times a day than a big dose once a day because of that biology of the human gut always turning over.

Okay, got it. Cool. This is fascinating in terms of getting this stuff. I mean, I'm keeping notes as we're talking about everything that we're discussing. And if you're listening in and you want to go check out Zach's website or more of what he does, as well as look at this restore stuff and how it's used in the different formats in which you can get it, like the nasal spray or this like, like bottle of liquid. And there's like a little travel one, too. I think you sent me one of those. I've got it in the cupboard somewhere. But it's like the TSA friendly version.

Yeah, you get a three ounce bottle that'll go with you on your luggage and all that.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm keeping notes. You can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Restore that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com restore to check this stuff out. And again, there's a lot of people that have vouched for Zach for me, and so I trust him. Plus, he's a pretty smart cookie, as you can hear. So go to BenGreefulFitness.com restore if you want to go straight to Dr. Bush's. Website. Just restore for life. Restore the number four, and then life restoreforlife.com and he set up a code. The code is BEN15. That gets you a 15% discount on the restore. If you want to just grab a bottle of that or the signage spray and try it out for yourselves, you can use code BEN15@restoreforlife.com. zach, this stuff is fascinating. I could probably talk to you for a long time about a lot more when it comes toto glyphosate and mitochondrial health and bacterial balance. But we're running short on time. Anything else that you want to throw in that you didn't get a chance to fill people in on?

Yeah, I'd like to just kind of close the loop because we're talking a lot about eating, unless you. Let's think about drinking for just a second. Everybody's kind of increasingly aware of the need for detox. And when we have high gut permeability and we're leaking all the time, obviously we're getting a lot of toxin in the environment, so we can get a pretty intense kind of toxic buildup that's happening. And the second piece that everybody seems to be very increasingly aware of is the importance of hydration. And it turns out that that's linked directly to your tight junction function. And so as your tight junctions start to weaken and you start to get permeability and leak, you can no longer hold a negative charge, a high electrical charge across that membrane. It's very much like a copper wire of electricity that starts to lose its insulator. You're starting to now have shorts and you're losing electricity. Same thing is happening in your gut lining. As you start to damage the Velcro, you're starting to lose that intense connectivity that's going to allow this insulative effect of the gut to protect this electrical charge. And it turns out that it's that electrical charge across not just your gut membrane, but your blood vessel membranes, your blood brain barrier, all of the membranes of your whole body are tied together with tight junctions. So we've been focused on the gut, but in reality, your blood vessels, the blood brain barrier, your kidney tubules, all of these are relying on that Velcro protein. And so as we're threatened by glyphosate or gluten or whatever it is, all the system starts to leak and we lose negative charge, which means you can't get water across the membrane without the negative charge. You can't pull water across effectively. And so no matter how much you're Drinking. And you all may have experienced this where you feel thirsty all the time, you're drinking all the time, you're peeing clear water, and yet you have a sense of desperate sense of thirst all the time. That sense of thirst is your brain sensing that there's no water getting inside the cell. And it's still trying to say, hey, we need to get hydrated. And.

These two topics of kind of toxification and detox, effort and hydration and the tight junction all now come into the same mix where if you can pull water across the membrane, if you can get the membrane potential up by supporting it with the bacterial communication network, that membrane goes up, you're suddenly going to pull water across the membrane more effectively than you ever have before. This can work so well in the first couple days of use that you might actually find your stools to be kind of dry. It's not unusual for some of my clients to have situation where they're almost passing like kind of pebbly stool because they've been so dehydrated there the last few decades, that as soon as they put tight junctions back into play, as soon as they build that electrical charge, it sucks the colon dry. And you just need to increase the amount of water you're drinking to leave a little bit of water left in the colon. So if you do see that dry stool effect, you just finally hydrated for the first time in decades. And so drink more water. You can use magnesium as well if you want a magnesium supplement to kind of keep the bowels moving during that. That couple days of adjustment. But if you leave them dry, congratulations. You just finally hydrated your body to its full potential for the first time. Now, what does that mean for you? What that means is that you can now detox the cell. There's a lot of detox regimens out on the market, but if you can't get water inside the cell, you're missing your most potent detergent. There's nothing on the planet that scrubs like water. And so water gets inside the cell, and that's going to remove a lot of the natural buildup products that are from cell metabolism, as well as the toxins that are ending up there in a. And the rest. And so we've been talking nutrition, which can't happen without that incredible robust bacterial ecosystem in place. We've been talking nutrition. How do you get the nutrients inside the body across that intelligent gut membrane? Again, depending on the tight junctions. Now, when you breathe, you gotta have a good membrane in touch so that when you're breathing, you're not pulling pollen and other stuff into your immune system. Instead stays on the outside. When you drink water, you gotta have a tight junction system. Not just in the gut, but in the kidney, tubules, in the blood, brain barrier, et cetera. So you can get the water to where it needs to get into the system, get inside the cell, scrub it clean, detox the system for sure. So really you're going to find the more you read on this, the more you study it, the more peer reviewed journal articles or white papers you want to read, you're going to realize, oh my gosh, there's really no cellular function that doesn't begin at this reality of we've got to keep separated at these big micro membrane systems. We got to keep the outside out and the inside in and keep that ratio or that clarity of self identity at the biological level. Toto achieve health.

Okay, so if you're using this, basically make sure that you know that you're going to be adequately hydrating yourself, but you should also be drinking a lot more water. If you switch toto using something like this restore, especially in the first week.

Or two, you're really gonna be sucking water into your cells for the first time in a really effective way.

Gotcha. Okay, cool. And of course the type of water that you use would probably be something you should pay attention to. You don't wanna just drink your local municipal glyphosate induced to water. And honestly what I do when I'm traveling is I just stop off at the grocery store and buy some good Pellegrino or Perrier or Gerald Steiner on my way to my hotel. And then when I'm at home, like I mentioned, even though I get well water, it still goes through a really good filter and then through a structured water filter and then finally winds up in my tap. But even that you need to be careful with. So yeah, that's really interesting and it's good to know too that folks might, might actually find themselves with. I think you talked about this on your website a little bit how you have to, once you start using this, like drink copious amounts of water, at least more water than you're used to, because you may find if you don't, you wind up with a little bit of mild constipation.

Yeah, dry stools more than anything else.

Usually the transit time is similar where you're having a couple bowel movements a day, but you'll just find much drier stools. And that's not everybody. That might be 20 to 30% of those that consume the product. And you just have to amp it up in that first week. It doesn't take a ton of water. You just might find yourself drinking an extra two to three glasses a day.

Okay. Okay, cool. Got it. It's good to know. Wow. Well, I'm gonna. I'm gonna put a link to all this stuff. Like I mentioned@BenGreenfieldFitness.com restore discount code you can use is BEN15. If you want to just, like, grab a bottle and try it. And like I mentioned, I just started using this stuff, and my gut's feeling pretty good. That's the probably, like, the one weak link in my body typically, is my gut or my small intestine or my large intestine. And so I'm constantly looking for ways to optimize that and to kind of fight the uphill battle against all the crap in our food supply and our water supply. And this stuff has got some cool research behind it. And again, a lot of my trusted friends and physicians friends speak very highly of Zach and of this supplement moment. So check it out. I'll link to it over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Restore and Zach, thanks for coming on the show, man.

Ben. So thanks so much. Brilliant conversation.

Awesome. All right, folks, well, thanks for listening in. And until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Dr. Zach Bush signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast.

Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam.