Dr. Zach Bush x Mona Sharma - May 6th

Tell me what to do, what to eat, what to take. And the people now, 15 years later doing this, it turns into a spiritual journey. They're really uncovering parts of themselves that cause them to make decisions that are based on suffering and feeling like they're not enough and disconnection. So just to give you a bit of background as we dive into some of the questions so they make some sense today.

Yeah, I love it. Thank you.

We get to go. Have you been to. You've lived on. You've spent time in ashrams before. I'm sure you visited many.

I was actually the de facto doctor for an ashram. When I first moved out of the university. I accidentally set my clinic just a few miles from Sacha de Nanda's offroom in central Virginia. And so I started my clinic and Dr. Sandra McClanahan walked in a couple weeks in, said, who are you? What are you doing? And try to explain what I was doing. Nutrition, plant based stuff, whole health, preventive health. And she's like, great. I've been waiting to retire for years. Didn't know how, who I was going to hand my clinic to. You're now the doctor for all my ashram patients. And so I didn't know that that was my first intro to the yoga world in some ways. Like, I was straight out of chemotherapy, you know, Western medicine, whole thing. And so, yeah, for five years that was my bread and butter there a couple hundred people, people out of that ashram. And then more recently, you know, just. Just spend time with. At Rishikesh there to kind of watch that go down with Swami G. And Sadby who are there, that location and doing. Helping Savvy with her book launch this week and all that. So. But yeah, the ashram environment, I've, you know, I spent a fair amount of time with one in Virginia, then I've been through like day or two at different ashrams in India down near Pondicherry and things like that. A couple of different locations and then good exposure at the. What is Oroville?

In Oroville. Oh, beautiful. It's the only place in the world where I've gone where people look like me because there's such a strong Eastern influence.

Yeah.

All right, let's dive in. All right. I've got this down here too, if you need to take a break. All right. Welcome Dr. Zach Bush to Rooted in Wellness. I'm so grateful to have you here today. This is a long time coming.

Yeah. Thrilled to be with you. Thanks for having me.

Hello to all of Our live listeners who are with us. We're so thrilled. I've got your questions ready and waiting, which we'll get to today before we dive in. Really, this podcast is all about becoming more rooted in ourselves, in our health, in our inner nature, and our knowingness to heal. So to get a little personal, can I ask you, what are some. Some things two or things that help you feel more rooted in your health and who you are?

I think the daily experiences around breathing is a lot of that. Just slowing down the breath is the most simple thing you can possibly do. And when you take a step back and look at the normal biology of an American or a Westerner, in any of our typical economies, we're not breathing correctly, we're not drinking correctly, we're not eating correctly, we're not sleeping correctly, we're not moving correctly, and so wonder that we're alive at all in the end, because we're really not engaging biology as we should. And the thing that you do the most frequently is breathe. And so the first relationship to really correct in a lot of ways is what's your breath rate? And as a medical doc, you write down breath rate, respiratory rate on every single patient. And typical is in, like that, 16 to 20 breaths a minute. And I just thought that was normal for the longest, for 20 years of my career, and then started getting into, you know, whole body care, qigong, tai chi, then eventually yoga. And in that journey found out that normal breath rate is more like four to eight times a minute. And I was just like, I've never seen a single person with that kind of breath rate. And now that I, you know, slowly have learned how to breathe at those really slow rates, it just changes your entire biology. Digestion changes, your mental capacity changes, sleep quality changes, sex drive changes. It just really corrects everything because it's really regulating your moment to moment status between your fight or flight sympathetic versus your rest and digest kind of parasympathetic. And what you find in that rest and digest is you get your creative brain going. And so if you can train yourself to breathe at a normal rate, which is in that kind of six breaths a minute target, and if you're in that six to ten breaths a minute, you're likely to be the most creative person in the room. And so if the. The crap's really hitting the fan and everything's going south and everybody's kind of panicking the room, check in with your breath, make sure you're breathing slower than everybody else. And first it makes you smile because it's so simple. It's like, wow, I just became the superhero in the room because I'm not the one breathing it 21 times a minute. And so that's the quickest way. And then after breath, you know, water intake and what that looks like changing relationship to your liquids and then change your relationship to your food. And those are some quick ways to.

Get in the foundations. I am always surprised whenever I teach a group of people when I say to breathe the amount of exhales that I can hear in the audience and how good that that feels for people, for people. On the flip side, I. You've mentioned a few of the things that we're, we're not doing. A lot of people have these daily practices that we hear are good for us. They could be considered healthy, but they're uprooting them from a sense of feeling their best or from even healing. Do you notice now at this point in your career when you have pract that are really uprooting you, do you notice when you drift?

Yeah, I mean I think that the, the common ones are something like checking email. So whenever you check a to do list, you move yourself out of your creative mode and into this kind of executive male pattern, goal oriented, you know, kind of system. And that's where you're starting to lose track of the big picture. And so it does just takes a few minutes on your WhatsApp feed or your email and suddenly you're back out of your creative system and you're back in some sort of relationship would be a generous term. But slave labor to the system is really what happens quite quickly. And so I'm still a work in progress and figuring out how does that look and what's the art of communication starting to look like? Unfortunately, I think email is largely kind of zoning out of our space and people are getting into more creative ways to be in communication through these different parts platforms we use now, from Slack to your, your kind of comms across something like your Microsoft environment or something like that. There's lots of different systems that have been placed to kind of keep you in more real time with people rather than go do the list. But also it's ironic that there's a lot of things that unground us that have been told to us that are healthy, you know, and I would say supplements and gyms are the number one and two. And so there's nothing like a big handful of supplements to make you feel ungrounded and your body gets thrown off very quickly by a handful of mega dose Synthetic vitamins or megadose, whatever type of vitamin. And the same way you go to the gym and you do your one hour workout three times a week. Those are the spaces where you're really stressing your body and it's unlikely that you're moving out of that space or moving into and out of that space in a state of nurture. And so you're basically stressing the body with this an intent that's not necessarily your biology's intent. Like I want to lose weight. A lot of people will get themselves into traps where they actually gain more unhealthy weight in a gym than they did without the gym. Actually, I think you even mentioned that might be in your story soon. So there's a lot of these things that have been told to us as health interventions that can actually uproot our natural biology's relationship to self.

I love that you brought that up. I've shared before. There was a client that I was working with. I took her off of 67 supplements that she was taking every single day. Appointment with her trainer five days a week. Tons of inflammation, tons of sadness. But her external world was mirroring that. That's what had to be done. Right. So it's a. We need to take that with an air of caution. I know we're going to dive into this today. This morning when I drop my kids off to school, I love that they've got a gardening program, but it's one day a week where they work with someone who comes in for about one hour and they get that opportunity to get their hands dirty. But outside of that, when I walked my son and my daughter in, there's food programs in LA through lausd. And when we walk in we see non fat, non organic milk which is basically sugar water with some pesticides and herbicides. I'm imagining Doritos, Cheerios, coffee cake, and then on the hot bar there are foods that are sitting in plastic overheat for hours and hours by the time the kids get there and start school first thing in the morning. I'm often met just as a mom, I care deeply about these kids and I understand the value of these programs to put food into these children. But I'm also so upset with what we know today and just the history of what we know. Our constitution needs to thrive and the rise of issues that our kids are suffering from. I've never seen so many obese kids on the playground before. So can we maybe use that as a segue to your introduction to soil and how that relates to the disconnection that us as adults, but also children in our schools have to soil today.

So this story really kind of got moving, our momentum building in the 1960s, 70s, and then really took off in the 80s. So following World War II, we changed our relationship to soil deeply. For the first time in human history, we started using chemical inputs as a primary way of growing food. So this was chemical inputs like urea, nitrogen, and the classic one is the NPK fertilizers, Nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, largely from fossil fuel sources that were then being poured as chemical substrates into our farm fields to shortcut good, good soil management. Things like crop rotation and composting that have been used for tens of thousands of years. You'll recall we went into the Dust bowl in the 1920s and 30s because of over plowing. So we over plowed through monoculture crop, crop production in the United States and we destroyed the entire Midwest basically. And so we had whole towns that were being buried in what had been topsoil a couple years ago and was now just fine. Dust in particular, they were choking on, literally. And so we had starvation going in the middle of the United States, which for most people is hard to imagine unless you've been to the Midwest in the last couple of years. You realize we're repeating the pattern. We now have deep starvation in the United States. One in five children in Kansas, which is our most agricultural state. 90% of the land is used for agricultural use. One out of five children in that state go to sleep hungry without enough calories at night. And so with 20% of your children in your most agricultural state not able to find food, you see this big disconnect between soil, whatever is being grown in it, and the human consumer. And those got decoupled severely in the 1960s, 70s, 80s. So it was over plowing, dust bowl, chemical recovery from the Dust bowl instead of good soil management. And so then for 20, 30 years, it looked like a boon. It was like, wow, if we just put poor urea, nitrogen and MPK fertilizers in these soils, everything grows green. It's going to be a boom. We're going to feed the whole world. So that's when we kind of rebranded the Midwest as the breadbaskets of the world. And we were going to feed them, feed the world, end starvation. Because American farmers were the, were the best. By the 1970s, there were stressors in the system. By the 1970s, two decades into this chemical inputs, we were seeing really high rates of invasive pests, you know, insects, weeds, et cetera. Taking over those farm fields. And it turns out that's biology's response to a monoculture, is it starts setting in helpers. Nature doesn't understand monoculture. She doesn't understand 10,000 acres of corn. That doesn't make any sense in any biologic model. That's not a model of resilience, it's not a model of health, it's not a model for survival. At the biologic level. If you don't have biodiversity per cubic centimeter, you lose intelligence, lose repair, lose the immune system function of plants, animals, etc. The solution to that, that nature does is it creates all kinds of biologic checks and balances to make sure that, oh, if there's a monoculture, we're going to send in these insects, we're going to have these seeds pop up from the deep seed bank. And now you're calling them weeds and pests when in fact they're nature's response to monoculture. So our response to that was, well, we now need chemical herbicides and pesticides. So 1950s and 60s with its debut of chemicals like atrazine and the like that still are sprayed on our crops today. But then the real explosion happened in 1976 with the debut of the new chemical and kind of granddaddy of them all, which would be glyphosate, which was the active ingredient in the new pesticide or herbicide round up there. And so that herbicide took over the world quickly because it was so effective. It kills weeds on contact within 24 hours and it kills anything you touch it with. So very effective, you know, non selective killer of green things. It seems like an obvious caution flag, probably should have gone up. What's going to happen? We keep spraying a chemical that kills everything green. And we didn't ask that question and we just kept selling it as safer than water, which was the, the catchphrase that all the agronomists and the salesmen were using for, for Roundup. Even by the late 80s, we were starting to see the consequences of that. And that first consequences of is the symptom that you mentioned, which is obesity. And so when we look at kids today or even the 1980s, there was a sudden change from like 76 to 82. And during the Reagan administration, Nancy Reagan declared the first war on obesity and all of this stuff. Well, the calorie intake per kid hadn't changed from 1978 to 1982. What had changed was the ability to turn those calories into fuel. Humans don't actually run on carbohydrates and fats. Humans only run on sunlight and electricity. And that sunlight, electricity is. Is liberated from glucose and fatty acids, carbohydrates and fats by the mitochondria that live inside of our cells. And so mitochondria take these long chains of carbon, break them apart, release the energy that's sitting inside of there, and then breathe out the CO2. So the single carbons that are broken apart. It turns out that glyphosate is an extremely potent disruptor of mitochondrial membrane potential. And when you disrupt that mitochondrial membrane, it can no longer take calories into fuel. And so the obesity epidemic that began in the 1980s was necessary result of poisoning the workforce inside human cells. So these are tiny little microbes that live inside of human cells. The average human cell has 200 of these guys living in there. If it's a neuron, there's 2,000 mitochondria per. Per cell. We'll get to fertility at some point in the conversation, perhaps, but when you've got 200 mitochondria cruising along in every single human cell and then you suddenly poison those, and they're. They're functioning at 30% lower than they were. 30% of those calories coming into the kid are going to get cycled back out of the cell and go stored in the liver. And once the liver is full of fat, then it will start storing it as visceral fat around the abdomen and then eventually peripheral fat in the limbs, et cetera. So that's 1980s, five years in. You see the diabetes epidemic. So it was really a break between soil, plant and human. And the big disruptor between those was monoculture over plowing and then these chemical inputs that would disrupt mitochondrial membrane potential.

I've lost count of the amount of lawsuits against Monsanto. And you were the first person. Gosh, when I found you years ago, you had created a chart of the onset of autism. Add.