Embracing the Connection Between Agriculture and Health with Zach Bush

Hi friends, this is John. Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast. Mostly on this podcast, we focus on solutions that is not coming from a place of necessarily desiring to avoid the problems or avoid having a conversation about the problems, but simply coming from the place that I believe it's much more powerful to be for something than it is to be against something. About a decade ago, I spent a lot of time studying and talking about the challenges of pesticides in our environment. How they were impacting the soil microbiome, how they were impacting human health. Since then, it's not a conversation that I've had very much or one that I've really spent a lot of time talking about or thinking about because again, I believe it's more powerful to be focusing on the solutions. Yet in the last couple of years, actually even in the last couple of months, I've had lots of questions of people trying to understand why is glyphosate really a bad deal. So in this conversation, I'm very honored to have Zach Bush here with us today. We will be starting this discussion by describing some of the challenges that really are happening in our agricultural landscapes with the use of pesticides and with glyphosate in particular. And then we do want to also shift the conversation to focusing on the possibilities, the opportunities, the potential to really shift and change and produce a much different outcome. So, Zach, thank you very much for joining us. I've been looking forward to this conversation. I'd love to hear your perspective, really. Let's start with glyphosate and let's start with pesticides. Why is glyphosate damaging?

Excellent. Happy to be on with you, John. You've been a force to be reckoned with in this whole space, bringing great resources, consulting expertise and real assets in the form of regenerative inputs to the entire community of the US and beyond. So thank you for your hard work over the last decades. And my entry into the glyphosate world was very indirect. My background as a medical doctor was in chemotherapy development, areas of expertise in endocrinology, metabolism, internal medicine, kind of hospital based care, as well as outpatient management of hormone disorders. Got involved in chemotherapy and cancer research as that was where the money was at in academia that could fund my meager salary as an academic teacher there. But it was an interesting timeframe because the world of cancer was changing in that the age old belief that this was a genetic injury and a genetic predisposition was really transforming rapidly in the 2005 kind of time frame where we were starting to get incredible amount of genomic data suggesting that gut microbiome, the bacteria and fungi living within us, were predicting whether or not cancer would occur. In fact, could even predict what type of cancers could occur depending on what types of perturbations were in that microbiome ecosystem. And so that was really disruptive to our understanding and status quo of cancer research and cancer physiology. And in that journey, started working with vitamin A compounds and finding that these nutritional elements were having a huge impact on the ability of cancer cells to remove themselves from the body. And it's called a process called apoptosis or programmed cell suicide. So it was a very exciting time to realize that maybe there was a future for cancer management where we weren't poisoning tumors, but we're actually giving them nutrients that would increase their capacity for cell cell signaling and induction of apoptosis, or program cell suicide to clean up the cancer independent of the human immune system or other elements of human biology. And so it was really an exciting, potential transformative moment. And in that we saw the big recession happen in 2008, and academia really collapsed. Our division of endocrinologists went from 75 faculty down to about 25 over a very short period of time. And pharmaceutical companies grabbed up most of that talent. I ended up departing university at that time and started a nutrition center for reversing chronic disease. And that's how I found my way into this topic of glyphosate that you're asking about. So from that medical standpoint, I was looking at small chemicals as the solution for many, many years. And when we started working with small compounds made by bacteria and fungi in the soil and the gut, it was alarming to find out that these bacteria and fungi could actually make medicine. They could make things that could repair the human body. And in the end, we found that the biggest thing that they were in opposition to was this chemical glyphosate that you mentioned. And glyphosate has now recognized worldwide as being kind of a flashpoint of controversy, with a huge multibillion dollar agricultural system continuing to insist to regulatory bodies around the world that this is a safe compound. Their old catch term was, of course, safer than water. You know, this mentality of this, this can kill weeds, but somehow doesn't kill people, was kind of alchemy. We couldn't figure out in the soil and plant system, how does a plant take these chemicals of herbicides and pesticides that are killing bacteria and fungi and beyond, and then suddenly turn them into benign Compounds. And the way in which that was justified to the world was through suggesting that the mechanism of glyphosate in regards to its weed killing power was through blocking an enzyme pathway called the shikimate pathway. And the unique thing about this is it doesn't exist in humans. It doesn't exist in any animal out there. And so this was told to us as the rationale for why this chemical could kill plants, fungi and bacteria, but wouldn't hurt your livestock or your pet or your children, was because we didn't have this enzyme pathway that was its target. And so that was how I think it was justified through the system. But what we weren't recognizing by that very story was that glyphosate was blocking an enzyme pathway, the shikimate pathway, that was crucial to the health of humanity and animal life that's consuming the plants that have been treated with this chemical. And what it's doing is undermining the ability for bacteria, fungi, and plants to produce the aromatic amino acids. These are a portion of the essential amino acids. Recall that there's 22amino acids that build the human body. And of those 22, there are nine that we call essential amino acids that cannot be manufactured by the human body because we lack the enzyme pathways. And some of those nine are represented in these essential amino acids made through the shikimate pathway. If Monsanto was right, this was the only way that this toxin worked. Perhaps there wasn't a direct target towards human health if that was the limitation of its effect. But there was certainly an indirect effect that would occur if we started growing all of our food under the pressure of a chemical that blocked the ability of that food to make the essential protein building blocks that our body can't produce. And so that was the beginning of a real destructive quality to this thing, as it undermined the building blocks for proteins across all biology and certainly kills weeds quickly for eliminating those essential amino acids. And subsequently, we start to develop deficiencies as human beings in essential amino acids produced by the microbiome of the soils. And ultimately a reduction in our microbiome as just like it does in soil, the residues of glyphosate in our food and water systems are now ingested and killing, acting as an antibiotic to the microbiome of our gut. And so we become deficient. There's. And so we are really undermining the health of soils and gut performance in humans, animals, and all the way down to the earthworm with this disruption of an antibiotic that's now infused into Our system.

You've described this indirect effect of glyphosate limiting the synthesis of these essential amino acids that we require and that animals require. How does glyphosate impact our bodies directly, if at all?

Yeah, so this is what was not told to us by the chemical companies, but our laboratory has been working on it for the last eight years. Is that what is the direct consequences of Roundup in human biology? And it turns out it very rapidly destroys protein structure in the extracellular matrix as well as in the intracellular system. And that has huge consequences for everything from the way in which cells feed themselves, the metabolism of fuel, all the way down to detoxification and repair and regeneration systems within the cell. Specifically the mitochondria within those cells, which are like little bacteria that are capable of producing energy for the human cell. Those are also influenced by the toxicity of this antimicrobial. And so the mitochondria within us and the bacteria and fungi that support human cellular life throughout the whole organ system of the body is now recognized to be a direct target for glyphosate. And so when it starts to denature the proteins in your gut lining, for example, you start to develop a leak. And the proteins function sort of like Velcro holding one epithelial cell boundary cell to the next to create this huge gut barrier that is the largest surface area that exposes you to the outside world. It's two tennis courts in the surface area. And that gut lining made up of billions of epithelial cells that are smaller than about half the width of a human hair. Those little guys now bound together in billions, will cover those two tennis courts and surface area. And it's the Velcro that holds them into that coherent system. When the Velcro is damaged directly by glyphosate, we see leak start to develop across the system. And once you're starting that gut leak, you're now overwhelming the immune system with every glass of water or a bite of food you eat. Not only with the chemicals and heavy metals and other things that are infused into much of our food system today, but also the organic compounds, such as insoluble fiber of kale, which should be one of the best anti cancer compounds in the body, can actually become an inflammatory natus if it sneaks through that gut lining inappropriately. And so that leaky gut becomes the source for chronic inflammation. And now, if you've been keeping up with the human health literature, it's very hard to find one of our chronic diseases that's Gone epidemic over the years, whether we're talking about autism and asthma and allergies in children or or Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and cancer in adults, the whole spectrum has now been mapped back to disruption of the gut and chronic inflammation pursuing. So we see glyphosate now as really the gatekeeper event or this slippery slope into this chronic inflammatory state within the body. And we can show this on very detailed population maps that the higher the concentrations of glyphosate in your environment, the more likely you are to have immune dysfunction and chronic disease in the population they're in. Ultimately high cancer rates in the United States we see that best exemplified in the Mississippi river which collects about 80, 85% of the water soluble residues of Roundup. And the last 90 miles of that Mississippi river running between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana is called Cancer Alley. Highest rates of cancer in the entire developed world. So really terrifying quality to this disruptive nature of not just destroying the microbiome and its support but but then destroying the self identity of the human or animal in that it loses that boundary event, what's inside, what's outside and the like.

You mentioned glyphosate as an antibiotic and the impact that it has on the microbiome. We know that it's patented as an antibiotic, of course. What are the concentrations that are required to have this effect on our microbiome?

Yeah, the concentrations can be quite small. So you're down in the 2 parts per billion to 5 parts per billion levels. And this is what you would typically see in a lot of water systems around the country and the like. At a thousand fold that concentration, you're up in the 2 parts per million to 20 parts per million. That's what you're commonly seeing on root vegetables and other conventionally grown crops out there. You know, beets can be as high as 20 parts per million in the grocery store. And so you're 1,000fold the detectable level of damage once you're at the grocery store. If you get into livestock feed and pet food, you're now often in the 400 parts per million or even thousand parts per million of glyphosate. And so you're up many hundred thousand times that of its lowest threshold for damage. And so certainly functioning as an antibiotic, it doesn't take much to disrupt the ecosystem balance. Functioning as a disruptor of protein structures, you're down in that conventional vegetable range is plenty to create that leaky membrane effect.

The focus for the last few years has really been on glyphosate as a molecule. But I think we also need to ask the question, what about the adjuvants that it is associated with? And not just the adjuvants that glyphosate is associated with, but the broad array of other pesticides that are routinely used in agricultural ecosystems? Why is glyphosate being singled out? Is glyphosate single so much worse than other pesticides? How is it different from others that are in the environment?

I think that's an important question because it's. In this 30 year journey with Roundup and glyphosate, I think we've really had to come to terms with the fact that we were judging toxicity by a very narrow definition. And so roundup came on the scene in the mid-1970s to replace chemicals like atrazine that were known carcinogens very damaging to respiratory systems. There was a sense of, oh, this is the newer safer compound. And so regulatory committees around the world raced to get this thing approved because it worked so effectively and was so much less toxic in our current understanding of that word. The reason why atrazine looks more toxic is because it can do direct cellular damage to membranes, it can do direct damage to DNA and all that kind of stuff. So it kind of fits our more classic model of cancer and carcinogenic features to it. In Contrast, in the 1970s, we had no idea that the microbiome was actually at the real foundation of cancer. We thought it was direct DNA damage that was doing cancer risk. And so we didn't understand at the time that we were really undermining biologic life by switching from an atrazine direct toxin to this indirect antimicrobial disruptor of immuno acid building blocks and all these kind of long term indirect features that we wouldn't really discover until a generation into the journey. And generation is measured by about 23, 25 years. And so by 25 years in that journey, we're hitting year 2000. And we suddenly realized that we were in an epidemic of autoimmune disease that had really kicked up by 1996, 98. We were in an epidemic of neurologic disorder in children, With a huge rise in autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorders, sleeping disorders, mood disorders in children, Anxiety and depression disorders. You know, the whole gamut was going crazy by that one generation in. And we now know from generational mouse studies that there is a cumulative epigenetic effect to this injury, Meaning that if you injure generation one with a Small amount of Roundup injected under the skin, just a little pocket of it. There's no measurable damage to that mouse. They go on to have normal pups. They go on to have a normal lifespan. However, generation two, not exposed to Roundup, but came from mom, who was exposed to Roundup, has significant issues with metabolic disorders, immune dysfunction, and has shortened lifespan. The third generation, again, not exposed directly but indirectly to grandma. Now, that indirect grandmother epigenetic pattern is now manifesting cancers and stillbirths in that third generation. So there's this really terrifying cumulative effect that happens generationally from this exposure to Roundup. And so I'm very concerned that we're heading into the third generation of children under Roundup just in the next five years. And so in the next five years, I think we're going to see the real epidemic declare itself in its full potential as we move from 2025 to 2035. And currently, we're already in an exponential growth of these chronic conditions. And in children. We've gone from an average of 1.5% of children with a chronic disease in the 1960s, before the advent of Roundup, to our current situation, where 52% of children in the United States screened by Medicaid surveys are now with a chronic disease. And so we have this devastating impact on human health in what is certainly the most advanced and most expensive medical system in the world. We are not succeeding in preventing this level of disease within our children. We're literally building entire cities. Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, good example of this. It's, you know, skyscrapers on skyscrapers on skyscrapers, you know, literally tower, tower, tower of children's hospital housing our kids with cancer and severe autoimmune diseases and all these horrible conditions. And so if we're building cities to house our sick children and not getting at the realization of what we've done, we've got a real state of denial. And unfortunately, that's. That's very much what I think we have at the regulatory level.

You've made the comment that we're on track to go extinct as a species in the next 70 years. What was the basis for that comment? Was it additional factors other than just glyphosate, or specifically glyphosate?

I would say glyphosate is public enemy number one in that it's, you know, been our widest spread antibiotic on the planet. We now know that human life is dependent upon a diverse microbiome ecosystem of fungi and bacteria, parasites, protozoa, the whole spectrum we need all of those guys for healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy life. And we've undermined that with this most ubiquitous of chemicals now, where we're somewhere around £4 billion of this chemical used worldwide every year now, the amount used globally has roughly doubled every six years for the last 35 years. And so we've had this explosive and constant rise in this antimicrobial pressure that has devastated the health of our livestock, has devastated the health of our children, and has certainly devastated the health of the planet. The 70 year estimate is actually very specific, not just to the rise of chronic disease, which, you know, to give a sense of it, you know, where we're heading for 2035 right now is that one in three children in the United States will have an autism spectrum disorder. And so if you start to then map that forward, you know, what is the productivity of that, that generation that has one in three children on the spectrum? What is the cost of care to that generation? What is the lost productivity of their parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles that are trying to contribute to daycare and in home care and the cost of institutional care? It just starts to, you realize even with that one condition, we could completely destroy the economy of the United States through just healthcare costs. Then you add in 80% of adults with cancer by 2035, and you realize we've got a completely insoluble state of health. All of that said, that's not really how you map out the prediction of extinction. For extinction, you need to undermine fertility. And that's what we've done simultaneous. So since the advent of glyphosate, and again, as you've said, there's many different chemicals and radiation exposures. Cell phones, cell phone towers, as well as, you know, Bluetooth devices. In this coming 5G era and everything else, like, there's certainly many, many things that are disrupting biologic function. And so we can look at that as a cohesive toxic stew, if you will, and then look at its impact on fertility. And in the United States and other Western countries, we've seen a decline between 52% and 57% in sperm counts in males over that period of time. So since the mid-1970s. And so with a 52 to 57% decline in sperm counts, we now have one in three males in Western countries that are infertile due to a lack of production of sperm. That's an extraordinary statistic. One in three males now infertile. And then you look across to the female biology and you find that it's nearly the identical number. You've got one in four women that are affected with just the condition of polycystic ovarian syndrome. And then you have a whole host of other conditions that contribute to the additional women to reach this kind of 1 in 3 with infertile or poor fertility state. And so those are the numbers that, as you extrapolate them out with the rising curves of toxicity in the soils, and more importantly perhaps for our survival, the toxicity of our oceans and water systems, you start to realize we've got about eight years before we tip off to a crisis level of biology within water and soil systems and expect an acceleration in this already extraordinary decline in fertility. And so the extinction event will happen through an acceleration of chronic disease coupled with this total loss of fertility within the species. And that's not specific to humans. Obviously. We've seen 50% of life wiped off the face of the planet in the last 40 or 50 years. And so there's been many books written on this and everything else. We're in the midst of the sixth great extinction on planet right now, and this time this is from the cataclysmic event that we call a human. Other cataclysmic events that have caused widespread death of species across the world have always tied back to soil and water destruction. Typically, it's an asteroid that covers the Earth with a layer of dust, disrupts the respiratory system of the planet. You end up with CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere, you acidify the oceans, and then you get widespread 87 to 97% wipeout of life on Earth. That's happened five previous times. And so the sixth time, we're now the great destructive force that's destroying our soil systems, causing the accumulation of CO2, methane and other carbon substrates into the atmosphere, which are then acidifying the oceans through the same process. And so we've seen this cycle many times. And so mapping out an extinction event doesn't have to be theoretical. We have a lot of data in the fossil record and a lot of data around what's currently happening over the last 40 years to understand how we're undermining and how this rolls out over the next few decades.

Zach, what resources can you recommend for people who want to learn more? There's obviously resources about the extinction events that you've been describing in the fossil record and so forth, but specifically to this human causation, the impact of pesticides, autism, cancer, rising medical costs, infertility, etc. Has this information been organized and pulled together into one coherent and easy to read analysis anywhere.

I hope not because that's the book I'm writing right now. But honestly, there's a ton of great books out there that touch on this from different perspectives. I think the work that was done with the two books, one is called Sapiens and then the follow up was called Homo Deus. Those two books I think really give a really interesting look at the history of where we've been as a species and where we're heading as a species in regards to our own extinction. Those books do not have any reference to the agricultural chemicals as we've been talking here, but a good understanding of where we stand in the history of mankind and the planet as a whole. In regards to the reading for specific injury of glyphosate on human systems, I think Stephanie Sinef has done some of the best work in the country in publishing a lot of peer reviewed papers on the topic. She's a computer scientist out of MIT. She actually was the director of AI at MIT in the 1980s and 90s. Incredibly brilliant woman. And by 1998 she was starting to pick up mathematical patterns in the epidemics of chronic disease that were pointing to some drastic change in the environment. And she was the first one to really identify glyphosate as that smoking gun to accelerate all of this that we've been talking about. So CNEF is S E n N e F there and Stephanie's got a great spectrum of papers out there if you want to dive deeper into that.

One of the criticisms that I've heard about Stephanie's work and about this general conversation of implicating glyphosate in particular and agricultural chemicals in general. Is the whole conversation about correlation versus causation? What is your response to correlation versus causation?

Super important? Yeah, no, that's exactly super important. So that's what our lab has brought in over the last seven years is really the causation piece. She's been doing phenomenal work understanding the theoretical models as to how glyphosate is disrupting protein structures and all of that. But our lab is the first to really identify how that's being done. And where in the body is that protein disruption happening, Specifically around the gut lining and the like. We've also shown gut brain injury with the blood brain barrier directly damaged by these systems as well. So we've got a bunch of white papers and peer reviewed science that can be found on ionbiome.com I O N B I O M E ionbiome.com thanks.

For sharing Those references. Can you give us a verbal overview in addition to those papers? Can you give us a verbal overview of the work that you've done in your lab and what you've been learning and discovering?

Yeah. So our first work was done looking at the direct influence of glyphosate on those boundaries of the tight junctions, as they're referred to. Tight junctions are those Velcro like proteins, complex structures. There's about 13 different proteins that are involved in a tight junction, anchoring one cell to the next. And they act as intelligent gatekeepers. So they actually allow macromolecules, things like soluble fiber and other large carbohydrates to cross between the epithelial boundary so that they don't have to be transported through the cell. So it's an intelligent gatekeeper system. And we were the first lab to show the direct effects of glyphosate disrupting that Velcro. And we've also shown in those that there's a phenotypic change or a change in the characteristics of those cells. Once they fall apart. They've quickly moved to kind of pre cancerous state. They appear much smaller than they were in the healthy state just moments before they broke apart. They have a characteristic shrinkage of the cytoplasm or fluid within the cell. And that's one of the hallmarks of kind of a pre cancer cancerous cells. Then we see a drop in their capacity to make reactive oxygen species or stress signaling. And we've shown that you're losing that kind of mitochondrial potential at the same time that you're losing that boundary event. We've gone on to show that there's synergy between gluten injury at that gut lining and glyphosate, demonstrating that we really didn't have gluten sensitivity in any significant amount in the population until 1992, when we started spraying wheat directly with glyphosate. And we've shown the mechanism by which glyphosate and gluten synergistically disrupt that tight junction. And so that paper is out there, one of our first publications there, and that synergy between gluten and glyphosate to induce gluten sensitivity. Many people who've experienced gluten sensitivity, or friends do, almost everybody's now, one degree of separation from somebody who's got gluten sensitivity will find that if they go to Europe or another environment where there's no use of glyphosate in the wheat systems, you don't see the same Symptoms that are associated with what we call gluten sensitivity. The conclusion of that is really that we don't really have gluten sensitivity. We have glyphosate toxicity. And when you have glyphosate toxicity, then things like gluten. And even in our clinic, we found even things like kale can become pro inflammatory and cause bloating and pain and inflammation signals and symptoms in human patients that have that leaky gut injury. And so that has been an interesting look at how healthy grains and foods that have been in the diet for thousands of years can suddenly become noxious to us. And same way you can see the effects of children who are now allergic to so many foods and systems. So used to be, when I was growing up, there was one kid in our entire school of 800 kids that had a peanut allergy. And so There was one EpiPen and the nurse's thing with his name on it. Now, if you go into a nurse's office, you've got Many dozens of EpiPens with different, you know, allergies, from everything from pollen to dust mites to cat dander and everything else, all the way down to the foods of avocados and eggs and seeds and all kinds of things that they're deathly allergic to now. And so as we see that erosion of that, we see the rise of that immune dysfunction there. So that's all tied up in that causation effect that you're inquiring about. I'm very excited to see Stephanie's work of 30 years start to really be supported by these causation studies to show that she was indeed right in her modeling.

It is remarkable when you stop to think about the idea, the phrase of food allergy put together as a common phrase, it should give us pause to stop and ask the question, why would people be allergic to food? Why should people be allergic to food? They should not, of course.

Exactly. And I am always dumbfounded by my own career. Like, we are not taught to ask those questions as physicians. It's so bizarre. Like in Deeper Than the Question of why are kids allergic to food? Food. The next or more extreme version of that is why are children unable to breathe? And we've got one in eight children with asthma in the United States, Australia, uk, And so one in eight children can't breathe. You've got one in four children that can't eat or breathe without having an allergic reaction. It's just a totally astounding demonstration of the extreme disruption that we've done to human Biology such that we can't even live on planet Earth anymore without immune dysfunction and rapid aging. And so we are really seeing the destruction of a planet. I think back to those science fiction Star Trek episodes that I would catch at a friend's house when I was a kid or something. And it was like, mind blowing to see these. Think about these other planets and exploring the solar systems and seeing planets that could or could not support life. And some had oxygen, some didn't, some had water, some didn't, you know, this concept. Well, we're about to create a planet that doesn't have water or soil systems that support biologic life and human existence. And so we really are creating a Martian landscape that's inhospitable to our own species. As we continue to destroy the ecosystem around us.

Our biggest agricultural export is topsoil 70 to the tune of 75 billion tons per year. And that is. It gives us like, recall the math correctly, that gives us in the remaining 60 cropping years until the topsoil will be completely gone.

Yep, you're exactly right on that. That 60 years was an astounding number because I just heard that only like three or four years ago from Alan Williams was blown away by that statistic because it maps so darn close to the human expiration date of 70 years, you know, and it just really drew a fine point on the reality that we're not talking about some theoretical human extinction. We're talking about the lack of capacity for the planet to make life happen. And the topsoil is absolutely where that has to occur. That is ground zero. No pun intended. Or maybe pun intended. That is ground zero of our survival state. If we cannot regenerate soils, if we cannot reverse the cycle of soil loss, we do not have life on Earth. It's not just.